| in america 17 part 3 - 2009 may - june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
28 May Peter in a seniors residence in Ottawa, says he can hardly walk, peripheral neuropathy. His voice was rough, blurry. Joan in Kingston an editor for Queen's-McGill Press, since the 70s with a history professor who lives on a farm. Loves her work. Had lung cancer but they cut it out. John is marrying at 50, a German lawyer who's a darling. Jenny lost all her hair - there's a name for that condition - so she's a recluse. They support her. Alopecia. It looks like Mukashi is shutting down. The evil fan. [Margaret's email address] Here's a photo of Margaret. She's hefty. She has a website. She's an artist since 2003. Felt books. How it was talking to Joan. I was covertly assuming that I used to be wonderful and she would notice I am not wonderful in that way now. It made me nervous. I made mistakes. I said wow too often. How it was talking to Peter. I suddenly found myself telling him I have my journal online. I had decided I wouldn't because there are sexual insults. Will he look them up. Maybe not. He was laughing about how the women he loves always are involved in some kind of art. I went silent hearing that, wondering why loving women has always needed saying. 29 Yesterday morning I woke from a dream with a polka dot kitten who whispered when I held her in my arms. Black with small white dots. What time is it in England - 7:30 here - it's mid-afternoon - just had a reply from Margaret. - What's the best way to go with the monograph. 30 I've found Tony - hours this morning poking and trying and being led into blind corners that want money, and then in one of them being given a tease list from 2002 poll records showing Anthony C Nesbit, Jessie Nesbit, Samuel Nesbit, Christine Parlane in a household together - there it is - won't give me an address but after a while I think to google her and she's on Facebook and after a while I get there and she has Jessie and Sam as friends - I click on the boy's little square and there is Tony's light sweet spirit shining up from a pub table with a Guiness in front of him and a fag on his lip - a squirt of joy. Bin realizing this morning that London is about starting film again, going where it started to start again. Feeling how there's a biological window for friend-making, college age, twenties, and after that people are sealed in their cohorts. I messed that up, in my 30s I threw away my 20s friends and in my 40s I threw away my 30s friends. Since I was 50 it's been just Tom, I threw away my 40s friends. So now I want some friends, and I'm going to see my 20s friends, who won't still be my friends. So that won't be rightly centred, and I know it won't, but can I make something of it.
The friend window in the 20s isn't undiscriminating but it's people's unformedness that makes it possible. People I've loved in my 20s didn't become people I would love now. Can people I wouldn't have loved in my 20s become people I would love now? Friendship has been so random. Who we come across. 31
- An hour later Kaleil replies with Mafalda's email. She's having a baby in a week or two. I send her 10 photos of Mafalda and her when she was born. Have emailed Mafalda. - Couple of hours later Mafalda writes - she works at Cornell and is called Mafalda Moore - a lot of iron grey hair - she has had Fringe film in Canada out of the libe for 2 years she says - she works in the library - it's in Ithaca - I've sent her the url for 1970. Not a good photo, thin mouth. - My bp is up, and maybe 6 pounds? Can I do that in 3 weeks. 1st June A dream I liked, that I don't remember - Janeen and I with a boy like Al standing somehow in an open space - night - something subtle happened - I don't recall what it was - Janeen read what she had written about it afterwards - I liked how she had written it, lightly balanced. This doesn't say the kernel of it, which was the quality of whatever had happened. Something about transparency across space? The transparent dark air. Mafalda Reis was a good name. Mafalda Moore is broad and bland. Reis has a spike in it, the king's lance, her sharp will, royal excellence, why would she give it up. The journal bits Margaret sent weren't visual praise the way mine were. I didn't like the tone, which was interpretive. An afternoon where I flirted with her boyfriend. She was daunted by the website I think, its intellectuality. All of them will be. They didn't know that about me, I passed with them. Thinking this morning of the gypsy woman who said, You have to keep changing. That hasn't been true of them. Margaret remembering things I don't remember. Funny how since I'm booked for London I like Tom fine though nothing else has changed.
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2 Tony wrote back this morning, Susan saying she's relieved to be in NY, a big enough context. Zach yesterday a hissy fit about the way I've been trying to get him to be nice to what's blocking him. Sent me 'a model' saying though in mentalist language that education is about making good structure. I hauled up and said in effect, you want to stay in your head and fancy yourself a psychological mathematician, do it right, and sent him a long cognitive linguistics bib, Fauconnier, Langacker, etc. I'm at the point where I give up because I don't see him willing to know. He has been using the dialogue to evade. Should I conclude that young men who want letters between packets aren't going to get down to it, just want a mother supporting their evasive formulations? I've engaged them because I'm lonely and like the debate, should have somewhere else to do that. It worked better with Cam, I kept backing him to the wall when he was grandiose. Might have exhausted his stock? [Left side: print mongraph steps
Touching embodiment. I like it when he's talking about what happens in somatic meditation but am bored and disbelieving when he talks about disembodied states. His descriptions there seem conventional and unobserved. I don't like the 'we.' He also lets himself say various of the dubious claims of Buddhism by saying it's what the Buddhist texts say. He's conventionally mean about ego. The way he makes 'I' or 'me' mean ego. Ray R 2008 Touching embodiment: finding realization in the body Sounds true Inc -
[Left side notes on Ray:
His examples of what we are like are never what I'm like, they're cartoonish, addressed to whom? An imagined general person. He's also still a dualist of the old kind, body communicates with 'us'. He's judging conceptualizing mind, which he has in his writing. Limited awareness, something about self concept, manages. It's actually an organization that sets up self-other. There's something wrong with the idea of ego, self, as he talks about it. He talks about it as if it's a thing. I've wondered too what Buddhists mean by ego, I've thought it may mean, not the self, but the Cartesian self - the idea people have that consciousness is what they are: identification with the conscious self of the moment, and trying to make that solid. I've wondered whether grasping wouldn't be better translated as anxiety. Ego is anxious self. It's not that ego is anxious, it's that anxious is what they mean by ego. [note to Emilee] His examples of what people think they are don't name me but there must be other inaccurate things I believe about myself and defend and maybe I should say am troubled about evidence that I'm not - being beautiful is the first one. -
- Somatic meditation, tantra Awareness to interior of body Use of breath "intensely exploratory and creative days of the later 1960s and 1970s" He says Tibetan cultural forms have been transmitted as if it. The body is now, I believe, our forest. In this, I am speaking not of the body we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of self image.
Subtle tension of withdrawing from experience of any kind
Anywhere in there, an open field to explore Finding them already aware Attending as if to periphery of focus Find the breath arriving there rather than putting it there BEING it is what they mean by non-dual more primary experience of the toe, that it is actually a vibrating, scintillating field of energy What do I actually think of Lise - I haven't even asked that up to now - writing her peer review - she's very intent on being popular with girls - when I began the semester mag she restarted Trivia - she has collected my pet students into her summer workshops - I resent that - okay, beyond that - there's something about how thin she is, something hollow in her jaw - is that ambition? - it's as if she was popular in high school and she's still needing to be that all the time - she does good work with women students, she wants them to find their strength, she's a good one-on-one feminist. She's a writer - she's published - she's always succeeded - she works hard - and yet I never want to read her writing, I don't want to read Trivia, ever, it's conventional feminist literary stuff - the way her graduating address was a conventional graduating address - the terrible thing she did to Susan's writing - her workshops are sloppy because she doesn't find conceptual structure - she talks about embodiment but what she means by it is emotion, if I mention anything from science she gets a certain look. What is that, frightened blank? At residencies she's my ally and confidant but I would hardly notice if I never saw her again. She's conscientious - I see her being ethical with fac and students, checking her preconceptions, mending ruptures. She is the one who brings up difficult questions in meetings, she's admirable in that. Why don't I like her more than I do. Because I feel the popular girl drive in her, I don't trust her, she needs to be popular with everyone and that means she's two-faced, it also means she hasn't gone far enough in style or theory to interest me. She has needed to stay where she's accessible.
[Left side list of 16 books, Facebook exercise:
4 Mafalda is looking at Work & days but not writing back. The last couple of days I've hurt all over, acid ache in the muscles. I stagger sometimes. The hiss has been back.
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They can colonize! Friday morning greyed over. I hurt from yesterday's mighty effort, scrubbing the window frames, wall, floor, lamps, which took until nearly dark, then hauling four coverlids/comforters, and all my pillows, and other laundry, and bleach and detergent, down to the jeep, and waiting in the laundromat, and then hauling them up again, heavier because damp, and getting into a damp bed having taken two aspirin hoping for the best, which did happen. Cleaning the mold meant N95 facemask, neopyrene gloves, bleach, scrub brush, toothbrush, hours of detail. There's more today, bathroom later. The laundromat on 1st Ave at night was a living room for three drinking Indians who came after the manager went home to sit in a row watching TV. Next door the Cherry Bomb Bar blasted rock and roll, whack of pool strikes in a black grotto, blowsy girls sitting on the curb smoking. Across the road an Iranian market lit in neon, storm sky behind it, seen through the laundromat's big picture window. Two massive washers $6.75 each in quarters and then many more quarters than I expected into the driers. As I'm writing this I'm thinking I'll tell Tom, he likes cityscapes. When I came home to get more money I brought out the G4, which had been put out of harm in the underwear and sweater drawer, and there was a long letter from Mafalda. She still feels for Roy, she didn't shut it down. She read the bit of Still at home where I'm meeting Gary in the trailer park! And had found Luke on Facebook. 5 Is Rahm Emmanuel the sexiest man in the world. He has that big-eyed Dr Seuss irascible smart realness I could look at all day. I took all the bedding onto the roof today and finished drying it so now I'm in a deep, bleached, airdried clean bed. The window frames are clean - the bare wood is clean. I don't like that every day what I've cleaned is getting dirty again, there's such a physical cost of cleaning. 6 Awake before the first bird, so that I notice when it begins. Dreamed I was in the old building where I used to live with Luke, remembering that I used to live there with Luke. The building had been saved, was inhabited by artists. I was on the middle floor with other people, looking at decrepit spaces whose boundaries with other people's spaces weren't clear. Debris, junk. My grandfather's wooden couch. I was looking to clear a space, looking for a spot where there'd be sun. In that building which is always different in its layout, I do always know which way is south. Writing this knowing there's no reason to write it, writing it just to dwell on it. Scott's new garden when I get back next fall. Scott's old garden. Hadn't seen it in months and showed up in June so it's over the top - outside the fence indescribable pile of dark green and color - dark pink, bright pink, brilliant orange, up and up past the second floor. The shade room with white datura hung high over the bluestone. Scatter of bougainvillea petals on the sideyard. 7 Sunday. Sea breeze in the palms. I'm holding off gearing up and cleaning mold out of the bathroom. Ached last night, will surely ache again tonight. Dreamed last night that I was in a bus held up without any reason I knew. Got out and started slipping backward up the road, a sort of backwards moonwalking but covering ground quickly. The bus was dwindling fast. Then there were steep winding corridors. I thought I'd try another kind of motion, like blading long sweeps. Then I'm in a city, trying to speak French asking directions for the station. Couldn't remember the name of the city I wanted to get to. Then I realized I couldn't remember the name of the city I was in either. Etc. Don't remember dreaming the sensation of not remembering before. Email from Paul. When I wake I sit at the computer craving. I want something before I do things. I feel lonely. Yesterday I wrote everyone in my answer file, hungry.
9 Waking again and again with my hands stinging - that's after the pleasure of using them at Scott's to measure, weed, prune, and Sunday to scrub the bathroom. [work list] Here's my guess - a form of peripheral vascular disease that is from motor neuron fatigue not atherosclerosis. I'll try acetyl-l-carnitine, improving mitochondrial energy, combined with CoQ10 with meal, fats, flaxseed. Decreases lactic acid. 10 So bad a night. I ached all over. Took aspirin and fell asleep but would wake again, hurting. It's the stinging disorder but much worse. Even now, after I'm up for an hour and a half my left arm aches from the shoulder down, and the left side of my head. My heart feels weak. I don't know whether some of that is fear. I'm quite trashed from sleeping so badly. 13
Last night I was lying feeling into myself and said to body, Please let me know what you need. I wasn't paying strong attention but realized I'd seen a leaf with dew on it. It was saying it needs to sweat? And then a slight sensation of suffocation. You need more air? Big sigh.
(Try unsuccessfully.)
- Why exactly was it that we are harmed by lies ... she decided it was nothing to do with trust, or pride. It was something to do with the moral value of things as they really were. Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world. And if we lied about something, we disrupted ... a lie was wrong simply because it was that which was not. McCall Smith Comforts of a muddy Sunday - It's not a really good quote, but something in it. Truth is the world, and the world is the moral value. [Left side painting supplies list] In the letter I sent Mandy this time were two examples of writing about women choosing love not falling into it. One was Mary Renault's Hippolyta coming out of the forest to Theseus, as I wrote her in the hospital when I was 23. The other was the scene in The dispossessed where Shevek and Takver get together. (I found it by googling moonthorn.) I've just read it through again, bitten hard as the first time, tears. "I want the bond, the real one." "If I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need." I was crying because what I needed was the wrong thing. I did need what I took, but I needed it because I was wrong. I wanted real marriage with Roy but I was wrong to want it with him. I wanted real marriage with Tom but I was wrong to want it with a man who lies. Maybe I did what I could because I couldn't get the real thing, but I don't think so. I think if I hadn't been bent at the root I could have got the real thing eventually, even lame. So I have been mistaken in my wanting because I'm bent at the root, and that is a matter for sorrow but not for disapproval. I've been honorable in my mistake with Tom, I couldn't have been less bent in the consequence of my wrongness. But all that honorable effort doesn't make it come out right. It is not the real bond. I never will have the real bond. Now I have what I have, or nothing. What I have goes on being a punishment for the wrongness I didn't choose to be. Is that how life is supposed to be? It says yes. Because the world is truth. I don't want the world to be bent to make me seem unbent. That's the larger way I can be unbent although in love I have been bent from little. I cry when I say that. What would Joyce say to this. She'd say, That is exactly right. Then what would she say about how it is with Tom going on. There is a strong self, I feel the force in her spine, who says, If it isn't the real bond, leave him. There is a slumping self who says, I promised him, I'll have to see it through although I starve and fade with him. Both of them are wrong I think. What she'd say I think is unconditional love. You cannot make him better than he is but you can love him in his wrongness, knowing it's wrong. Don't I betray the best if I do that? No, it says.
Le Guin 2008 Lavinia Harcourt Lavinia says of her son, He would be a handsome man at twenty-five, but an absolutely beautiful one at fifty. And then a page later, He was, as I had thought he would be, a splendid man at fifty, straight and strong-bodied, dark-eyed, with graying hair. I sobbed because my Luke will not be beautiful at fifty, because I have bent him at the root. early Rome, the dark, plain Republic, a forum not of marble but of wood and brick, an austere people with a strong sense of duty, order, and justice: farmers who spent half the year in the army, women who ran the farm meanwhile, extended families whose worship was of the fire in their hearth, the food in their granary, the local spring, the spirits of place and earth. Women were not set apart as chattel ... slaves of the household, the familia, sat at table with the free. half our language, most of our concept of law and perhaps also certain homely but delicate virtues, such as the loyalty, modesty, and responsibility implicit in Virgil's idea of a hero. foothills and lowlands of Latium in the 8th century BC a vast forest of oak and pine cut by steep river gullies running down to swampy grasslands and dune marshes near the coast. Pagans were people who lived on the pagus, the Roman farm. - Here Louie emails mentioning Virgil, who I had just gone into the closet to find. And then on her heels Mafalda saying the afternoon before last Kaliel's little boy was born. 14 I woke thinking of O and found her on Facebook. Sent her the url for Raw forming. It's a loving portrait of her, is why. I wouldn't love her now, but she can have the love of that time. Looking for an email address for her I find October 1997, how generously I loved Tom. It was the bond, the real one, as long as I could stay open-hearted. I kept balancing in it. Now I don't. Outside Starbucks, reading the Sunday Times. A tiny white-haired woman comes past wearing 8-hole docs, over her shoulder a pair of maroon maybe 14-holes, the long ones. I smiled at her. She grimaced hesitantly. I realized after that I had had my shades on. Using the Starbucks glass doors to look at myself. I'm slender at 140 but I stagger. That's new. Day 4, have been wobbly every morning. It feels like a weak heart. - O replied, not a letter I want to follow up, just wanted her to have herself young. What would I have liked, her to talk about the project and the writing, if she could've jumped there. Was at Tom's tonight watching Amandla, the Netflix doc about South African music through the resistance. After it I told him a little about Ros, Joe Slovo, Ruth, the party, meeting Louie at Sean Slovo's movie, meeting Ros through Roy, who knew her through David Cooper. Coming to her house when Roy was there and briskly leaving Luke with him, "I have to go to school." I tell these stories knowing Tom can't be interested in them. Then he wanted me to tell Luke he's important to me. He can't be interested in the stories because he isn't in them. I went away without kissing him. - Aft - a bit of chicken stock because it's the fifth day of feeling heart-weak. Then two things: enough energy to research microcirculation online, and some return of prickling in hands and feet. 16 I'm slender in clothes, though there's still podge, naked. Folds at the back of my waist.
How the fast is going, day 6. I don't ache as much, though some, hands have not been waking me at night. The feeble-heart sensation is scary. Bp is still high, heart rate too. What I learned about the relation of microcirculation and bp - destruction of small vessels making blood back up - if it's erythromelgia then low-dose aspirin every day should help. If it's post-polio, more to learn. - Re: your journal entries I've finished browsing through your journal and it is something I'm not interested in. Good luck.
After orange juice I don't feel wobbly but my feet have swollen and I ache. Elbow skin, hands. I think someone with balance could read a journal of that kind, that remembers her places and some of her lines, and sometimes misdescribes her, and sometimes not, but is full of energy and affection, with pleasure, for what it is - I'll be surprised over and over, will I, that what I think is a gift isn't. - It looks as if she didn't stay with Raw forming, was looking at the Fading index at 6.05, from there googled, then W&D index through writing index, then wrote the note at 10.01, then was back at index and W&D index at 11.14. 17 Before I started this I looked well - smooth, rosy - but suddenly felt rotten. Now I'm 10 lb down, main symptoms are less, don't ache all over, am not waking at night with aching arms - but am dark under the eys and sagging over the eyelids. Just beginning to think of food. Put myself to sleep with [imagining] a steak, baked potato, green salad with sharp vinaigrette. Paul sent a little memorial album for Ed. There's one of him in his teens smiling a big sweet happy smile, his beautiful hand loose at his chest. That clean happiness is nothing I ever saw, later he had an often malicious grin. There's one of him squatting in the snow with his buddies holding a hand over his cold ear. That one could be Luke. One by a street photographer who caught him in a pinstripe suit with waistcoat and bow tie and fedora. A dignified one I think in his sixties, hair thin, a lot of structure in his face, hawk nose, cheekbones, eyelids down talking. Then the last two pages. In the first he's standing in a white linen jacket with a rose on his lapel, 60th anniversary probably, stringtie, clutching his hands in front of him, very thin and liver spotted, face dark as a Mexican's, white moustache, a look of anguish. And then the last one, what I didn't see in person, he's in a coffin on the ground, a mask face, quite beautiful, wheat stalks in his left hand, which is crossed over his right, his Stetson on his chest. He seems to be wearing a plaid shirt and belted tan pants. What I'm thinking about Olivia's notes is that one should, I should, be careful of revising the past. She wanted to say this and that denying the realness of our friendship at the time, and I have denied realness of it too at other times, but the evidence is that we were what we were and denial comes from a wrong wish to make our past self congruent with this one, or not even that, to make our past self other than it was so it can forestall the betrayals that came after. I'm thinking now that one should never deny love no matter what betrayals came of it. The fact that the person has changed doesn't matter to the fact of the past. It is as if we are hanging onto a wrong sense of identity and sacrificing vitality to trying to be continuous with ourselves. I don't like what O has become - more than that I'm horrified by it - but nothing about that changes that I then loved what she was then, and I-then in me still does, and should. Lying in bed last night I wanted to write that death has been hovering. When I was camping with Tom I was considering how it would be to find a little cove of rock when the time comes and stop eating. The aches have been a strong presage of end, and the staggers too. If I live to 82 it would be 18 more years, but at the rate I'm undoing, I wonder. Went up the street to Curio this morning and had two eggs over easy on two slices of brown toast. Ate slowly and chewed every bite to a lovely pulp. All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to ever be fascinated by the mere supernatural which is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. - Joseph Conrad, author's note to The shadow-line. Burgess shale - 570 million years ago - limestone - Cambrian explosion - 1909 - most of the surviving modern animals have their origins in - has soft anatomy - "the contingency of the survival of the little vertebrate from which we descend" 700 regions of human genome where genes have been reshaped within the past 5000-15,000 years. "Sense of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function." Chris Hitchens 2007 God is not great: how religion poisons everything Hachette There's something wrong with his tone though his arguments and instances often are my friends. He takes cheap shots he wouldn't need to take, he jeers. I understand the irritation but doesn't there have to be more a sad puzzlement, what makes them like this. "But what is Je-sus in them?" I've been steadfast. Even at [the college] I have to be the child who holds back from her group because they're being stupid. I mean religious. 18 Because I ate yesterday, sore arms this morning. What is that? Still 137. I went to Babycakes and asked if any of their cupcakes were fresh that day. The sweet-looking young man said some raspberry chocolate had just come in. I took away my little box to Whole Foods. Wanted exactly that unstiffened chocolate crumb. Only ate a third. Balanced it with some teriaki salmon, although it was too solid and I didn't really want it. Loved the lettuce and sprouts with vinaigrette, though. Then bought some Ranier cherries and romaine lettuce and came home and tried not to eat all the cherries at once. The moment one bites into the tight tasteless skin and there's a bright burst, I want to keep doing it on and on just for that. It's Thursday, 5 days including today. Correspondence these days. Shirley/Tia Gonzales writes "I'm glad that you have someone who please you and love that he's not afraid of you - I love that you're living and creating and finding pleasure in life and I'm happy to have an adult with some life left to talk to!" And later "Read a metaphor for life somewhere I totally related to - 'Like a Persian carpet, fine but aging and shedding a thousand stories as she unravels.'" Mafalda just now writes about Lee Bontecou, video, loss, and coming to see me when she's in LA. There's a lot of you in her, very warm and still all alive. 19 I did a lot today - went out and bought a DVD, burned the swan photo onto it, went back and mailed it. Threw out more paper from desk folders, went through 6 months of receipts to sort into [college] and film etc. Mid-day I got very weak at the heart, high blood pressure, worse when I moved around, scared, decided to go for a walk rather than die inside - oh forgot I dreamed this morning that I'd sent Martin Ware a note asking if he's okay, so I did that too - walked across 6th into the park - it felt nice - was breathing 4 in, 8 out, deep breaths, walking walking steadily as I haven't for years? easily, lightly, it seemed, over the grass, looking sideways at the peach trees, over the bridge, until I came to the long pool, and there were two lotus heaps with pink flowers just beginning, mostly in pointed bud. I sat down and kept sitting until I began to see the mottling of the surface mirror, the band of reflection at the bottom edge of the lotus, where fine green stalks mixed with reflected green stalks among the bent round edges of reflected leaves in which I saw, just once, just fractionally, a bit of the pale flank of a koi slipping deep into the thicket. Over the whole of this reflection a fine continuous shallow flutter. I watched an upside down palm, a pale high wall with one rectangular window, above it a hanging eucalyptus. Two cream-colored koi a foot long passed in the open area below - I mean the little well in front of me not skinned solid silver, showing into water that was soft and warm, perfect to the touch. Sitting there that way I was wanting a cine camera. It was Trapline but softer and subtler, outside, in what looked to be a paradise. The name of the film was By the lotus. It was open-overcast of 5 o'clock. People kept coming to stand looking. I was watching their reflections ripple in stacked colored lines. They would take a picture and go away. Voices from other countries. Then I walked as far as the fountain, circled it, came home walking easily, breathing deep, started looking up HD cameras and kept doing that until now - it's after midnight. Called Rowen in the midst. Don't know how I can be both so well and so unwell.
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