| in america 2 part 2 - 2003 march-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27th March 2003 Eliz yesterday, plant shopping and sushi. Deep white-skinned eyelids over clear eyes the palest possible blue - irises completely transparent like water barely tinted. She is intimate and present. Next to her at the sushi counter I was watching her mouth. The white skin around it. She was enjoying her food. At Walter Anderson's we stood by the salvia row entranced rubbing magenta bee-fuzz salvia flowers on our upper lips. When we talk she keeps her eyes on my face. She reminds me of things I've said. When she walks into my house she is reading the titles of my books. She will suddenly give a voice to the Cherokee rose, the Iceland poppy on the truck floor: "Is this where I'm going to live? When you bought me I thought you were taking me to a nice new home but this plastic is horrible." She laughs. She makes me laugh. 28 I'm in my college dorm. I find my journal ripped in half. The first pages are blank. Further on I find small notes in a stupid handwriting commenting on my psychology. Men flying large kites. They ride on the strings. I see one sliding down with his feet pointed and set together around the line. One has a platform with a baby sitting looking into the air. 30 In Lakeside early morning. These days when I think of Tom I feel depressed, shut down. Why did I sigh - was that waiting to be said? I'm reluctant to see him. It will be unpleasant. My little house is too small and blind for the two of us. His hellhole in the Golden West is unendurable, full of junk. He is stressed and dumbed down by his job and too reckless with money ever to be able to afford to leave it. He makes plans and doesn't follow through. He's loud, he's always so loud. When I got back from Vermont there was that spell of vilification. I haven't recovered from it. He likes to do chores for me, scraping my windows, cleaning my car, and I understand those gifts are meant to support me. The clean windows are a good gift, but my heart stays tight. At that point I come to a stop. I don't know whether it's because he slams me every time it opens, or whether it's what happened with my dad and was inevitable. I was in love and not carefully welcomed and fought to stay in love but gradually shut down. Here I'm wondering about thanking Ed, whether Ed suffered of not being thanked for his work. What's the way to say this - if Mary had known how to bring us to understand that he was working for us? - But there I don't believe he was working for us. I think he was always only working for himself. We were dependents he had no choice about. And yet, if we had thanked him for the work we hardly knew benefited us, he might have had more pleasure in it. Meantime the other depressing fact, discouraged fact, that I have been here seven months and done nothing. I've followed little enthusiasms, read, gardened. Am not counting work with students. I think sometimes I feel my homelessness in some almost unconscious way. Am not anxious to settle though. Am not anxious to be other than new here. Do not feel this is or will be my home. Heart sore when I say that. Not looking for friends. Don't want to be in Vancouver either. Should I go back to the Peace River Country? No, back to the depressing fact. I have not done one thing about Being about, or one other thing about getting a position with enough money to fund land or travel. 31st Tom and I cuddling in the heat in his room Sunday afternoon looking onto the corner of 4th and G. 2 April Woke at 4 anxious and sad. I hardly want to write in my journal these days. I don't have that central loving wish to tell. I am in regular disrespect of Tom for his drift and waver. I don't like him. He sometimes gets a charming riff going but he can't hold an intention. He stopped writing. Erased it all. He keeps giving himself deadlines to leave the Golden West and doesn't follow through. I can't be anything with him. I'm him or in resistance to him, those are my options. He's always broke. The worst is that I'm milling. I have no project. I don't care about anyone, anything. I have no interest in the land and mind project. I'm about to take on more students so there'll be more money, but I don't want any students. They are miscellaneous and unable. They don't respond.
I'm crying - not crying, feeling the pressure behind the eyes. It's sorrow for Pound who was beauty and contempt, because he fought hard and was whipped down. It's agony at having to give the day to Sharon's hopeless incoherence instead of my own best. It's agony that I haven't earned the loyalty he earned, that brought him help no matter how wrong he was. I wish before I die I could make strong beauty of my own - live in strong beauty - give strong beauty where it can matter - Then I burst into real sobs. As I sob I notice a young quite buoyant self - I felt her tone - thinking that the sobbing is good, it will open a way to something. It's the first time I've felt the balanced watcher as a child. 4 A dream that I am somewhere in a park and get a bundle of papers. Some of them are Rhoda's. There's an essay she got a B+ on. Some notes I can't read. They are in shorthand. This much is a summary of quite a long part. Then I'm on a couch sitting next to her. Eventually I decide to hand over the papers that are hers. She says she was wanting to travel to -----, somewhere in Africa or Asia. She asks when my birthday is. Surprising she doesn't know. The same day as Trudy I say. She comes and sits on my lap. I warily put my hands on her rib cage. So spindly, small. We talk about the difference between dreams people have in London and here, here being Vancouver probably. In the bundle of paper there also was a pale blue notebook of the kind I used in high school. It had doodles on the cover and was a journal I assumed. Her notes were in a similar scribbler. Her handwriting had seemed quite weak to me. The significant thing seemed to be that I was speaking to her. At the time, 1977 to 1985, she was taboo. I had access to two out of three. Trudy stomped me when I first noticed her, then I rumbled with her over territory, then Jam got into it when Cheryl left, and I was convinced she and Jam were the real thing. She was the inaccessible mistrusted adored. She had Ed's pride covering weakness. There's some unknown truth. She's transcendent beauty that's a real value. She seemed to be valiant integrity. She's also inexperienced and fantastical. She's the best dancer and singer. She has great silvery lightness. Something that seems to be greatness. I pulled up what she planted in the courtyard. She's a stoner. So what is she to me? She had a great hunger to be great but she does nothing. Her father died when she was in her teens. There's the holocaust in her family.
I used to call her Harpy.
- Michael wrote "I loved your last response. You left me with a lot of white space and I found much in the vastness." And then instead of his floods he sent a long sequence, 31 poems in short lines. It's called at once. 50 pages, a manuscript. It's good. It's almost faultless. - What it is at night is the fact of dying, both the gradual and the final. April 7 Yesterday, Sunday, I had finished most of Sharon's revision by the time Tom got here. He had done the Rosarito-Ensenada 50 mile bike race Saturday. He said there had been flowers in the back country, a remarkable year. Would I come with him? He wanted to show me. I put on my red long-sleeved jersey and went. Even before the border, alongside I5, the roadsides were blooming yellow, bloomed-out catkins on the willows, green grass. We got off the toll road at Rosarito and followed the race route up into the hills. At the beginning it was high red cliffs, crumbling old rock, with the silver agave [or duddlea?] dotting slopes and declivities with the right angle to the light. Flowers on the verges, tall mustard waving, goldfields I think, lower, something pale that mixes with goldfields, purple lupins, and where it opened for a long stretch on a plateau, what looked like phlox and smelled like phlox but had fine black veins on white or pale lilac, like veins on a butterfly wing. Sometimes cardinal-red sage spikes. Small blue flowers in masses like forget-me-nots, purple alliums. Tom had tranced out on his bike he said, the breeze, the mustard waving, the sound of the tires. On the touring bike Felipe found him Tom took all the hills without cramping. His legs yesterday weren't tired he said. We stopped for a while on a verge. There was a cricket. Wild oats were headed but still green, flying their little banners. It was silent as Saskatchewan. Vancouver, 10 April Yesterday I zonked all day - read Pat Barker in my pyjamas and nibbled food. In Louie's bathroom mirror I looked nice, pink and young with long dark hair. Why was I zonking. The shock of being back here. Being carried into the sky and rocketed into a familiar place I am disowning without owning any other. Louie has short hair. It is a good haircut as hair goes, the hair looks nice, but it is the wrong hair for Louie. This hair ties her to the masses of medium-range people she cultivates for economic and nostalgic reasons. It is as if I see them when I see her. And she is what a friend is - she gave me the connection between what happens to me in creation - the way I start strong and then drop the project and then forget it - and what happened to me. I hadn't seen that. She delighted in giving me a bed with new pillows and new duvet. She listened with me to Eva and Te Kanawa, every grain of the line. 15 David Adams Richards, The coming of winter. He wrote it when he was 23. On the front cover a photo of beer bottles in the snow. Do I have anything to say about it - it's closer to the people I left in La Glace than any writing I've seen. He wrote his friends and his family. His town and land, season, as well. These barely sheltered beings. There they are in their haplessness and there he is in his clarity. Nothing in this book bends the light, it comes direct. No one is redeemed. No hope is intended. No one is blamed or praised. There is scrupulous comprehension, none of it given as explanation. The authority is all in perception not abstraction. He's a god of perception. Compassion is not the word. Grey. A steady grey. A strong air holding all. 18 A woman seen from the back, naked, with a horse's tail. That's what I remember first. Then what was next to her, a huge wet red-brown flaccid penis on a mass I registered but didn't understand, and outside the dream immediately thought is a flesh tank. There was a woman much smaller than the penis bedded somewhere in the middle of the mass, just her head visible. A man who might have been Roy, coming through a field next to a building. He calls up to a business on the second floor. We're inside the building. I get the idea it's his drug dealer. He has been using. I am ahead of him and duck into a doorway. "Can I hide here, there's a man I want to get away from." But he follows me in. He's two feet high. We're in the corridor again. I say I want my key back. He hands me one that might be the car key, but he says, I'm keeping the A key. There were two, then. I make a grab and take the other. On the key chain there are plastic chips that have to do with drugs and porn. That's when I see the penis tank and woman horse. Earlier parts had old cars and going to church. In those it was Tom I think. Yesterday evening Tom phoned me from my cabin. He was sitting on the step with the door open looking at fluffy clouds. As he was painting he found one of my long hairs on his brush. He held it to the light and got a love boner, he said. He has been taking paint off the molding that joins floor and wall, and off the fittings. He laughed joyously telling me that having had love boners thinking of me means he must be in love. And that the incredible lightness of being was the lightness of being uncommitted, he had realized. 20
21 Woke cheerful because of a dream in which I happened to meet Ken Sallett. We met warmly. He had a beautiful long hard-on. We got into each other's arms and fucked with passionate friendliness. I didn't know whether I'd see him again. Thought that if I did I would certainly fuck him again. But was worried about Tom. Maybe it was the gin in the martini, or passing along Napier where those wonderful trees, I think of them as Russian, are in white-green bud all down both sides of the street. A kind of rowan. Visited Leah who is in a small apartment building that looks south across an alley. Her hair isn't dyed now. She is less José's bourgeois wife, more the hippy pilgrim again. She made exquisite food. Flew into anguish about her son, fluttering, and solid pride in Tara, who is playing in Chekov at the Shaw Festival. Where the evening turned, surprisingly, was when I began to tell her about Being about. Her mind came on. It was as if she sat three inches taller. I felt strength in her grip. San Diego, 22 April Tom was at the airport in white shirt and tie, unshaven, showing a little pot belly. He'd been working on my place at night, he said. He'd lost my red towel and stainless steel cooking pot, used them to clean his car, left them on the curb. The painting wasn't done because he'd thought I was coming in on Sunday, though I printed the schedule for him. He wanted me to let him give the walls another coat. In the car as we parked in front of Dawes Marketing he went into a rage when I said I didn't want to live with fumes, and had work plans for the week. I came upstairs with my heart knocking. "I'll ask the book." He waited, I crouched in the bathroom. It said, in effect, Say no, he's bullying you. He slammed my bag down on the floor, slammed the door. On the bathroom sink a half-smoked joint. Painting reminded him of dope. When he started smoking other things got out of hand. He lost my stuff. He didn't get finished. He wanted to be praised for what he did but he could feel my shock at losing the stainless steel pot, which has been with me in so many places, a good pot. When he screws up he is anguished. He gets abusive. Before I left we were getting closer to trust. If he blew it now it means he doesn't want to go further into clear. There's a crisis of self-opinion he doesn't want to broach. How am I? I lay awake a lot, partly feeling the new latex stinging my skin and settled into my muscles. I felt dismayed heart the way I used to feel my dad's attacks, I guess. I was feeling it in child's silence before I made up defensive thinking. That's okay, it's good work. - I'm looking with dismay at the dullness and aloneness of my life in the little shack, such wastes of time. I'll be unclaimed, just here heart aching on and on. I liked seeing the green waves below me yesterday. But I am suspended here without a home and without a mission and without a sweetie. Money reserves gone. Will be without a car. 23 My dream turned out to be true and about him. He held back the A key, drugs and porn. The flaccid penis a war machine that contains a buried woman. Sexual woman seen with the part of the brain that hunted animals. He shrank to a little man. Heart pain that feels like being disabled. I wrote two sheets of the bad things about being with Tom and the good things. I can't ask to have this crucifixion taken from me because it is true. It has been a very painful affair with some good. I think I can remember the good of him, but - for instance with Jam - it all goes. It's sudden abandonment and I'm going to take it, not defend against it. 24 I've woken at four feeling my years with Tom were a journey in the underworld. I had in mind an imagined journey and there was a real one - there was betrayal at the end of it - at the beginning of it, at the moment when he came north with me. It has ended with a wet butt on the sink. He faded back at the exit. And why am I satisfied that it is so? Did I perform the labours? - ah but she didn't either, the ants helped her. She performed the one necessary thing, she went after him. I'm satisfied because it means I'll be rid of him. Should I be? It has been a long ordeal. I don't know where to stand to be in truth. I don't want to be complacent. What happened - what do I know for sure - he took on the painting but didn't organize it well - he didn't sleep enough or eat well enough - he has been getting into dope more and so he did that without thinking - he screwed up with the pot and towel and when to meet me - when he met me on Monday he was unshaven, meaning he had been late for work. He was wearing a white shirt with his too-short black jeans and a strange tie, kind of a loud 50s tie in orange-browns. When I put my arms around him he lifted me high off my feet. He was out of it. In the parking lot he wandered trying to find the car. He didn't find it. I found it. In the car he wanted a kiss. We were not connected but I gave him one and another. One more, he said. He was looking at me in quite a cold assessing way, and I him, and then I put my lips onto his. Coming across the bridge to the parking lot he had been getting angry that I minded about the cooking pot. He suggested going to see the sunset. I wanted to get to my house and see what was up. Then he began about wanting to give it one more coat, the doors and ceiling are perfect but a professional painter would know the walls weren't finished. I was worried about fumes. "I guarantee you there won't be fumes, or I'll put you up for a night at the Golden West." He was starting to rage. He couldn't listen to my considerations. My heart was struck with shock. Could I have my keys. I started to get out. He came with me and carried my suitcase. I said the job was beautiful etc. He was insisting about wanting to do more. I said I'd ask the book. It said, Say no. I said, He'll freak. I was in dread. He did freak. He slammed out. I locked the gate. He didn't phone to apologize. Next day he came for his painting tools when I was in the library. The book also insists he lost it sexually with a woman at the hotel. I can't easily believe that because on Thursday he was in joyful confidence and on Friday and Saturday he would have been painting. He had a very strong need to make it perfect, and he was at wit's end with lack of sleep, but was that enough to take him over his edge into final refusal? He's thinking he did so much for me and I wouldn't even give him what he needed to be able to be proud of his work. The car won't start - tomorrow it will have to be towed. I don't have a shower or wash water 'til next week. Mercury retrograde. Local credit card accidentally confiscated. US advantage card stopped. What else. Teeth subtly hurting. The dry flesh ailment. Waking early. E-filed my Canadian taxes. Sorted my drawers. Thought to send Tom Paul Case for his birthday, the right sort of goodbye present if it's that. Heart is easier for some reason I saw my work in the files, I think. 25 Am I rebalanced? Before he baled he put love into the walls of my house. Before he slammed the door he lifted my heavy bag inside. He slammed it down but he brought it inside. He cleaned the bathroom and stripped the paint off the windows. He puttied. He gave me CDs. He gave me a bracelet. He watered my plants. He moved my car and cleaned it. He polished my filing cabinet, I notice. I defended the best in him very unfailingly. I was courageous in abuse and excruciating pain. I was faithful even in my dreams. I didn't run when I needed to run. I worked and worked to be able to be clear. I made myself a strong heart - did I? What I prayed for. I made a heart that isn't weakened by flattery or abandonment - did I? I made a heart that isn't angry at me. I am not a sexual opportunist any more. I want to know the story, as if there is a story. As always, as I always do, I failed to imagine him. Just then I think to read his emails. There they are, all forgotten. So much love can't become nothing. Since last summer his writing was often clean. Not posing. Feeling and seeing. Affectionate, trusting. Generous. 26 I hang onto this book like a mother's hand. Woke at 5 in the dark, intense stress in the solar, a hot block of pain. It's because I felt the love lost before I slept. I've been dimmed-down this while, since the upstairs room in Bellevue. Maybe it was from holding back with Tom. Maybe I will feel this place more. Maybe I will have more space around me, to feel for what's here and what's next. 27 I dreamed a deluge. The water around my feet was warm. I was capering. Then there was more urgency. The waters were piled up on either side of a parting. They were saying a great flood was coming. A stream of cars leaving. I was some way into the flood zone, in a house or on a terrace on a hillside. Tom was trying to talk me into staying. I rushed away ahead of him and made it to the level of the streets. A woman was showing me and Louie how to make rafts from bamboo poles with fabric stretched across. She showed her piles of expensive fabrics and said we could take any. I could see other people with other devices, women on jet-skis. Then either I went back for Tom or else an alternative story unfolded. I was back on the plateau with flood waters coming. Where's Tom, I asked someone. They pointed to a beach far below. He was charging the water for some reason. I couldn't get to him. He was going to be lost. I want to leave him. I want to rescue him. Rescuing him endangers me. Leaving him causes me excruciating pain. I would be better without him. He would not be better without me. The best would be if we could transition him to someone else and me out of the cage without setting the birds to shrieking. 28 Here are questions. He came back on Saturday, five days later. Why did I believe and feel he was gone forever? Why did the book say so, and say he'd slept with somebody? I was pining miserably for him and when he came back I didn't like him. I am and nearly always have been split down the middle about him. He is pressing to 'define' - says he wants us to be together more, do things, etc. I have been evading all along. I haven't wanted to lose him but I want to confine him to small bits of time with long spaces between. I haven't said the city is blooming extraordinarily. The freeway verges and hillsides are sheeted with yellow and with pink iceplant. There are nasturtiums up wire fences. In the streets leafless jacaranda blooming thick purple. 30 If I could get a post-doc to work anywhere what would I want to do - I'm asking that before six in the morning. The sky is lightening over the palms north of the cathedral. A bird is twittering, whistling. My own bird in the heater is scratching and twitching. A bus goes by on 5th. Across the room in the cupboard shelves the steady burn of color - that is not the way to say it - of live flowers, pink ivy geraniums, dark orange nasturtiums, California poppies, a red salvia, purple verbena. On the table yellow ranunculus and oranges in the Moroccan tray. These living things seem to give off more than color, and they seem to give it off with a very strong constant push. The room without them would be quite blank. 1st May Yesterday was Tom's birthday. He came at four hollow-eyed and tight. We went to Ocean Beach. I said I'd buy him dinner. We put the clothes in the laundry, ate kebab, went out into the street market on Newport. A band was playing Marvin Gay. A get-down singer with a thick neck, a drummer and a guy on electric guitar. We sat down on the curb. Tom was wearing sunglasses, green cargo shorts and teeshirt. I could see my Doc Martin foot in front of me with a bit of orange sock showing below my jeans. The singer was good. A grizzled hippy dad with hairy legs and a bushy pony tail was dancing and clapping. His large small daughter was sometimes dancing with him, sometimes kicking out awkwardly on her own. Another little girl posing and pulling faces. Pedestrians were crossing from one side of the street to the other, young women with pushchairs. Across from us a woman in sandals, a gauze skirt, a sand-colored suit jacket cut long, and a string of turquoise beads. We folded laundry in a hurry and drove north. He would let the car decide, Tom said. We found ourselves in Crown Point, on the east side of Soledad. Kate Sessions Park, and down into La Jolla. Tom was playing one of his new tapes, Jackson Browne Running on empty. The hill across from the Cove was blooming thick with a small white daisy and sea lavender. On the way home Tom stayed on whatever street was closest to the ocean. At PB he started to creep up the Strandway. By now it was dark. We rolled past garages and small houses, looking up into lighted windows. I slid down my window to be able to hear. Where lanes intersect the Strandway we could glimpse the seawall in orange light and hear the ocean. After we'd skirted the roller coaster we were in Mission Beach and in Tom's territory. Tom all this time was silent. It's night, I said. Beach night, all God's children are safe in their beds, he said. He said it with the warmth, depth and quickness I love when I can get it. Then zipped up 8 to 163 and the University exit. Clean clothes out of the trunk, kiss goodnight. Dreamed Louie told me that while I was gone he'd received a druggy letter. That made me remember he'd got one at my house too, a pink envelope with disordered handwriting. 2nd May Preemptive loss. He admitted that when he's happy he does that. Nor bought me a digital camera. I am reading the manual remembering my Nikon - its strong mechanical body. This little electronic thing has tiny controls with ugly symbols, and its look says nothing about what it does. This one is a Nikon too, but it's called Coolpix. 3 La Jolla garden tour. Taft is better designed than anything we saw. Nothing anywhere was well placed. No one saw color. 4th Philippe Petit. In 1974 - when he was 24 and I was shooting Trapline in London - strung a cable between the twin towers and walked it. Do I remember it happening? Barely. In 2002 he wrote a book. Here it is. For his walk he assembled half a dozen people. For the book, the same. When he walked back off the roof after his hour on the wire he had won his way and he ditched his girlfriend. Shall I tell the truth? I send Annie back to France. I don't want anything to dull the splendor of my newfound fame, to slow the unrestrained and joyous tempo of my new beginning.
He becomes artist in residence at a cathedral. He has a daughter. She dies when she's nine and a half. Philippe Petit 2002 To reach the clouds: my high wire walk between the Twin Towers North Point Press 5 A little girl I'm speaking to dives into a pool. It isn't the large pool I was expecting. It is a small pool behind a wire mesh fence. She jumps in with her clothes on but is naked as she swims. There are many things in the water with her - water weeds or other kinds of things. She's very free and quick in the water, up to the surface and under. Tom appeared at the end of Sunday handsome in new Goodwill clothes, pale linen pants, a long sleeved black sweater, chenille-checked loose black vest, black suede shoes. Silver hair grown out into a long brushcut. He smelled oddly of patchouli. I was feeling a smooshy crotch buzz for the first time in is it almost a year? Why is that - is it having had the abandonment dive? We zipped to Ocean Beach in his nifty car with its high, tight butt and walked to the end of the pier. A crescent moon cast its pale blue roadway on the water. At the horizon, in the space of sky between it and the moon on its back, the darkness thickened into a darker mass, like the Rosicrucian pyramid, Tom said, but fluid, dissolving and reforming, a quite powerfully but dimly suggestive illusion. Inside the arm of the T of the pier the water was black and showing in a welter, too far out to start to break, moving it seemed chaotically in patches, up and down and in all directions. The movement was diagrammed in the network of orange light from the sodium vapor lamps on the pier. Sinister, Tom said. He was imagining the helplessness of a swimmer in its disorganizing cross-motion.
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