in america volume 20 part 3 - 2010 april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

13 April At the party late night in a brick walled high ceilinged loft, young persons in low chairs around a coffee table with empty wine glasses and crumbs of cheese, Chris on the floor with his long light frame wrapped around his woman. They were the hosts and the party was in its late night glide, their work was done, some of the guests gone, a friendly core gathered sitting, some of them from out of town - who were they, Daichi Saito from Montreal, Kate Mackay my projectionist, the archivist Ross Lipman from LA, Nicky Hamlyn from Brighton, Michael Zryd from York U, Kika Thorne, Adam Rosen, was Scott Berry still there, a grey-haired man whose name I don't remember. A packed small room [the Gladstone screening], woman called Alison next to me. Paul next to Cheryl frowning dubiously, why are they making such a fuss about that, he was thinking. Faces in the room, Mike and Tess directly in front of me, Mike's broad smart face. Lauren in the front row, bright-face Chris at the back, Nicky, someone prominent called Chris [Gehman] who said he's seen them before and they're always fresh, Kate in the back standing on a chair, Dave and Franci, Pablo looking a rumpled black bear. 14 Paul is quite ugly now, small eyes, a fleshy face and worried forehead. I say that assuming I'm ugly too. What else is he, measured. With him I was making sentences like his, sentences that stand like separate objects in the air. - Am an hour or more into the Denver leg, have finished The Molly fire. He dumped my bag onto the belt. It fell hard. I hoped the glass thing I put into my shoe didn't break. I bought it at Miss Behavin' on Queen St, where two nearly naked girls danced in the windows on Saturday afternoon, their white ass cheeks a bit dimpled and pitiful in cold daylight gyrating dutifully. Anyway: it is a glass dil, a slender transparent wand snubbed at one end, with a round knob at the other for a handle. What else I bought that afternoon, a couple of doors further on at the Tibet Shop: leaf green raw cotton drawstring pants, a good fit and quite wide legged; silk pants a similar cut but narrow at the ankles, wine red; a black raw silk kung fu jacket with Tibetan brass buttons; silver earrings with a milky pale blue stone, from Nepal; and a large brilliant calendar of Tibetan mandalas. The clothes will be too fancy for any of my possible occasions but I needed them, and I love the translucent blue stone though the earrings don't quite suit me. [chalcedony] We're over Constable clouds, bluegrey and white. Earlier it was lovely squares and rectangles gridded by white roads and each framing some variation of dark forked marks on lighter and darker tan grounds. Often the forked drain lines seemed surface marks, mineral water marks, rather than ravines. Sometimes there'd be rounded rectangular cultivation strips. Subtle simple abstract paintings, many and many. I'm imprinted by Michael Mitchell's book, which is a good book by being concrete, visual, loving, and some exaggerated for the sake of the story. The way he moved around in time worked. It's artful. The device of the little bumper paragraphs of his dad rowing - no. The bare true portraits of his parents old, yes. His mother the artist, his technical vocabulary for cars and boats. Certainly his placement, his establishment, the Canadian Britishness, the good houses, cabin on Hudson's Bay, Toronto success in photography, adventurer's yarns of Indian temples, portrait of a man who gets around. But also of a teenage boy who stayed up at night writing in a journal. Parents who loved each other, that sweet wealth. Beautiful visual detail in the stories, interpolated but worth the faking. David saying over my pho and his pork chop that he'd liked listening to my talking between movies. What about it. The way for instance when someone asked what camera I used I said Sally Potter's Beaulieu, she wasn't famous yet, and told a story. I was benign, Paul said. True. I was friendly to the audience, relaxed, simple. Yesterday talking to Paul I realized there were no old guys in the audience, a lot of men but none as old as me. Cheryl and I figured out part of the audience's warmth was about my age. The senior men have thinned out and I am a community elder. The young ones are not competing with me and they want my blessing, and so I have a place and can be generous. Nicky Hamlyn. I'd seen him at the conference looking a gentle singular creature, head shaved like a lightbulb, pale eyelashes, a sexy lower lip in a sadsack big pale face. I liked him right away, he seemed a bit helpless on account of realness. We sat next to each other at Terroni's talking about London and he gave me a generous lucid description of Trapline, the best I've heard. I like his slowness, his English voice. 56, has a 26 year old son, Felix, is still with that son's mother, who has just become a judge. Said Annabel is in the north of Scotland, can't stand the noise in London. [Opposite page: 'meaningful work' and 'self reliance.' Both ideals are tied to a struggle for individual agency. The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. modern personality reorganized on a predicate of consumption Trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professionals, too, are subject to routinization and degradation .... The cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, then handed back to a new class of workers - clerks - who replace the professionals ... Genuine knowledge work is not growing but actually shrinking ... concentrated in an ever-smaller elite. centralization of thinking that is the hallmark of industrial capitalism It is characteristic of the spirited <man> that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff - he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly <his>, while he is using them - and he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands. He may seethe silently, succumbing to that self-division between inner and outer that is the mark of the defeated. Basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our making. These limits need not be physical, the important thing is rather that they are external to the self.] David in the pub after the show saying, You're famous, I didn't know you were famous, and then next day grinning, saying people who have known him as just Franci's husband were wanting to talk to him because I'd rushed up and hugged him. I'd found his website earlier in the day, there was his photo ten years older with his partner in Van Elslander Carter. He wasn't beautiful especially, had become a mannish man, taller, consequential, fatter, a bit, plainer. Next day across the table there were his strong black eyebrows still, and his square-cut lower lip, and his fond unusual grainy voice, which I can hear now, still quite thrilling. Just as he was about to drive me to Terroni's saying he's been reading the Greeks, began with Homer but has gone on to Aristotle, Heroditus, more. At the Gladstone, the room nearly full, I looked up and saw him at the door with Franci beside him - saw someone with his eyebrows and not quite his face. I got up and rushed to put my arms around him - I did that without a speck of hesitation, it was a clean rush of joy. A second when we were seeing each other down the length of the room, the changed faces we are: is it? - yes it is. Paul's dreams. He used to have nightmares that Ed was after him but in these later years he may offer gentle advice. Another kind of nightmare he says he always has when he's with Mary. He dreams he's in water, he can't swim but he's managing to stay afloat. Then Mary is with him, wants him to help her, carries him down. The day I arrived he had just found out he has heart disease. Is his guilty kindness killing him? Institutional politics. Last three Christmases three different Asian women Anne said, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. This one barely speaks English. 6:30 Gilman Drive Visual Arts Facility Performance Space Barbara's A horse is not a metaphor. [Barbara Hammer] When Ruth with her fish-swollen jaw and thick middle says "The earth has cancer the earth has cancer so bad" I'm thinking she isn't taking care of herself, she's full of heavy water. Barbara getting and surviving ovarian cancer and having the skills ready to make a film about it. Her film loves dogs and horses and there she stands, a trim supple body at 70. She transgressed body in some ways and endured its crucifixion in medical cure and went into the water to renew herself and then wrote her life story. She has been generous and spry, has wanted to help anyone be freer and happier. I recognized her joyful good humor, it was what I felt in front of the audience this week. It was self-liking after a relatively uncompromised lifetime that's being recognized. She isn't exceptionally smart but she has devotion, good energy. Last night an invitation from Windsor to be a juror at the festival in May [Media City]. This morning taking an invoice for $525 to Sean. $225 from the Gladstone. Tim said money this week and the total is about a thousand. - I look up and there's a new moon lying on its back in one of the black panes. I feel disgust for Rani   Who is a worthy creature   So is it her disgust   no Is it because she doesn't have an ear in writing   no It's something central wrong with her   Is it molestation   no But some kind of dissociation   Tell her to read Gilligan   YES It's dissociated anger   It's disgust of the heart   As if she's somehow vile   YES What she is, is smothered   She needs to find her dad   Is it mainly that   YES Get the story out of her mother   Anything else you want to say   balance strength and betrayal for better judgment 17 Saturday at the Brown Bag. Blasting through packets today. 19 Caught up with students, one week before they're back, what do I have this week: [work list]. The rest of the semester is going to be very packed. Packet 3 with the long manuscripts, then one week, then packet 4 week, then Windsor week, the three finishers week, then packet 5. Then evals, then one week cleaning up, then Van and the design course, then only 4 weeks for res workshops and monograph and what else - move website. Have nothing to say. Nothing brims. I said to Rani, find your father. To Andy, you're making a mess. To Todd can I remember? To Ann, what's a sick child or a sick woman in dreams. To Todd it's not perfectionism, it's dissociation. Today lovely Zach's intelligence with adolescents, I only praise and marvel and stand by. - Why when my time opens don't I want to do anything on my list. Because I want to widen out. I want creation. The sky inside a stone. How matter knows. Dynamically granular, a sea of substanceless action. The grain footage Crystals The dove's sound 20 Hungry for ontology, something like that, space, grain, fabric of the universe, images of. Altered being - philosophy, effort. I looked at this journal yesterday and marveled at the way it is full of nothing but personal junk. Is there a reason I've been junk   inspiration, subtle intelligence, completion of passage from difficulties Reason coming out of it   Integration   Subtle intelligence was isolated   Okay   YES TSK Do you like this book   YES Do you agree with all of it   Should I tackle it   A space is a quality of a mind   Is it talking about experience from body wholeness   Related to acid   Is it idealist   Is it ontological   no Attentional   YES I sort of reached it then   YES It's a way of living a body   YES But it doesn't mean there is no real world   YES So is it a religious delusion   YES So I shdn't do it   There's a but   YES It's an effective technique   Is it possible to switch back and forth     Is the contrast of subject and object bogus  Subject as imagined   no Not experienced as differentiated   It means wholeness of experiencing   experience as a continuous source the richness that is being forever there but never as a thing Gianfranco's movie is correct   The brimming       Can I be more energized in being   'Consolidation and defense of ego' - am I still doing that   appreciation of the natural presence and flow of communication being is nourishing appreciative capacity built on the broadest possible base space a serene explosion 20 Up 5 and 56 to Evergreen on Carmel Valley Rd to buy an acacia aneura, a very tall robinia idahoensis with a lot of mauve flowers, a 6' Italian cypress and a pink/orange bougainvillea on a tall green trellise. - Everywhere the mustard high and thick because of the rains - I have to go back to Borrego - next week - work there. Lush grass, verges thick with mustard floating above that other shorter denser yellow thing. Nasturtiums from the 4th Ave canyon under my brilliant tankha. Spits of rain even tonight. Two new plants in the collection around my chair since Sunday, a small porcelain jar the color of its little beady thing that I hope will come thick and spill over, a plump mauve-pink thing in the dark blue bowl. Haven't said how as I drove in from the airport last week I felt I was coming home. On the freeway thinking of learning to freeway-drive saying Tom was California to me. I learned him as learning the place. Said it thanking him. Walking in the UGGs, my California boots. Barrio Star coconut flan. Yesterday in dusk on my route through the park seeing pictures, a string of small lights curved across pink sky. The lotus beginning to show leaves. Read Mike's [Hoolboom] interviews, recent, this morning. Kind of films he makes, his aliveness and generosity - a lot of films, long films, a lot to say. He's so opposite, lets himself in for so much that isn't him. Works for a constantly creative life, works hard. Wants his language to be interesting, doesn't level down by teaching. Stood in front of us in an adolescent body at must be 50-some, physically committed to speaking well, his right hand throwing out his thoughts, winding rapidly, throwing out. He's energized. - person an experiencing body - When I think to start working in the way I think is mine - I can't name it, it's that mind - I dither, don't know how to begin - it's something I have to learn from a beginning. 21 Gianfranco's movie, the boiling and brimming, the constant coming-forward of structure, the strong eruptions and surgings-across of rapt silver. Gianfranco himself, his simple lovingness, what I could learn from him about moving in art contexts, the ways he disarms by being sweet-hearted and self accepting. When I woke in the dark this morning I was worried that I was too much the teacher at the screening, not smart like Mike, too friendly and simple. But really the doctorate takes care of that, doesn't it - His website opens on the chickens scratching in the yard, runs the whole movie, full screen. Silent films, "Movies are about movement." I want to know how to do that streaming video. Trying to read TSK feeling it is not written well for me, it's written for someone who begins somewhere else - I have to keep trying to read through it to something simple behind it, that is being explained with far too much labour. It seems to say there's another way to be, one that already is - As if there's a part of experiencing that's right and another that's wrong   And they go on at the same time   And meditation could notice it   And is the wrong part linguistic   no 'Ego'   Which means self imagined as an object   What I was trying to describe in those days   Meditation's attitude of watching the whole of experiencing as foreground, all together - is that what it means?   Like in acid   Not thought of as either inside or outside   Takes huge energy   no Am I doing it already   NO He's suggesting experiencing it as creating itself in the moment   What had been thought of as 'me' and 'it' but neither, just brimming is   So isn't the whole book a reification of meditation   no Exercises   But the explanation is   no Because it evokes the state   Have I ever known anyone in that state   no The language is very compromised still   'Consciousness' as a term depends on the dichotomy   This state is not a monism because that concept derives from the dichotomy   Being is primally one   In this view I don't have access to my body-based explanations   Or any   state that experiences constant coming into being It's talking about a state not an entity   no Can you explain   no 'Non-dualism'   Instructions: don't experience static objects, histanai to stand don't experience insides vs outsides don't experience causal sources It's teaching a state: try this. If I were in that state wd I be more beautiful (twirls)   no That concept doesn't come into it   Does the state have a physical base (ie in physics)   no But can be envisioned there   Grain film motion without motion   Says 'here' is too tied with there or then availability and primary grounding character Incomplete relaxing is what disorients - for instance let go into more unified experiencing but keep sense of it being self in the old sense doing it. We don't imagine 'mind' or 'body' as source of any of being. no-foundation being - The way it constantly undermines what it says by talking to and about 'us' as agents who change our state/focus/attitude/opening/allowing. It's partly about the mind-body contrast being imaginary, and I don't do that  I don't imagine 'mine' at all But still there are degrees of tightness Of state Felt as body I already know 'self' as imagined as objects are - that thoughts about self have that cast   YES And that experiencing isn't the same thing as the imagined self 22 Thursday morning, second day of rain, hard showers blow through. I'm lonely, melancholy. Mary phoned last night to say she's moving, numb dumb old thing, even that miserable brown way-station will be gone. Paul wants to hustle on with selling the condo. It's a pre-death. What else, it's back to nothing happening, no one writing, hardly anyone on my sites, the little breeze of notice has blown on. No touch anywhere ever again, no evening cuddles, no sweet eyes. Trees later today for that fuss-budget Sean. Could like to go to Borrego but not till next week. - The gorgeous robinia idahoensis Purple Robe raising pink bouquets against the blue, staked, with two bubblers, the little cypress standing sentry by the gate, acacia aneura like a maiden willow in the corner, flame-shaped silver, pink bougainvillea with dark green leaves squared onto dark green lattice. We had an exciting morning. The truck from Evergreen. Art came with Justino and a dolly to help the Evergreen men drag the 24" boxes into the yard. Phoned Mario and his brother to come help plant them. True-hearted Mario I love to get into a job with, he's so right-there thinking all the time. The best moment when we were planting the bougainvillea and I threw myself flat on the dirt to dig two legs of the trellise out of the rootball so we could move them closer to the fence. He saw what I was doing and there were our two pairs of hands scrabbling and thinking together in the hole. At noon all our corner anchors placed and the garden begun in its new nature, not the drear lumpen fortress it was. Shd I translate 'knowingness' as 'aboutness'   Within the view that gives me body in world, I have to say world can only be known as this body knows, I can only be about in this body's way. Is Being about wrong  YES It's better than what's out there but still wrong   So I've been perverting my students   Can I get it right   Something keeps feeling off - it's his descriptions of what ordinary being is like, as if he's speaking from an inaccurate imagining of what it's like - I've noticed that with other Buddhists - there's accuracy of a kind I can just barely see - "Everything is forced into conformity with a certain implicit logic of how knowing occurs and of how the known world is structured." That happens but it's as if I have seen it in other people rather than myself. I dislike the 'our,' it tries to rope me in. Dim grasp again and again As if simply about relaxed presence Is there a 'discrete and solid world'   There's a but   YES But it shouldn't be met as that   YES   They will, as fictions, undergo a progressive deterioration. Is Mary deteriorating only as a fiction?   The Valhalla house   As space and time they are just qualities?   YES Second by second mindfulness must be maintained. the 'world' as a function of mindfulness recognize that we are part of a brilliant and vigorous reality Our aboutness is "fresh, sharp and spontaneous." Being younger is a very specific state of high organization. Consolidating tendency, emphasis on knowing Labeling and trying to get a nugget "The self draws apart" when there are strong energies. Being taken as flowing gift rather than achieved possession - Like placenta rather than breast   YES Translate knowingness as being  24 A sagging that happens these days, not wanting to do anything, wanting to slump into unconsciousness to get away. Look for something to put into my mouth. - How to imagine materiality. The former view of it is desacralized - "psyche and matter (psychology and physics)" What would synchronicity be in nondualistic language - does mystery drop out of it? Coincidences. Overall quality of a time. 25 Looking for books on the concept of matter the many photos of old male scientists. I don't like their faces, those shut-tight old patriarchs. This morning imagining there might be a time when scientists look different, when the patriarchal era looks to anyone as it does to me, like visible deformity of being. In the Jung-Pauli book, exasperated at the elaborate mess that comes of obfuscating body. Here what I mean is the way they talk about 'the unconscious' as if it is nonphysical somehow, 'the psyche,' while at the same time they are looking for a common ground of matter and psyche. The common ground is matter but not matter as it was imagined by those who had blanked it in themselves. The TSK book is correct in saying don't think of it in the terms that are downstream from the dichotomized conception. The notion of archetypes is screwed from its beginning in that immaterial notion of uncon. The uncon is the whole of the material/only universe, and as such is structured but not mechanical   'Uncon' just means I personally am not being it at this moment   The universe itself is what he means by Great Space, Time, Knowledge   Those three names are wrong   Its name is Being   Undivided     I've come to the end of Fading   Was Tom a mistake   no Purgatory   Will you give me a name for the new era (Qw) Ellie Epp (laughing)   You mean, at last   YES   It's a mistake to try to be an artist again   It's a mistake to go to Windsor   YES If I'd asked wd you have told me no   no So I'm going   YES Will I come back safe   I need to understand what I'm doing there   YES It's a platform for philosophy   YES Be an artist but understand that   YES Save people from dualism/dissociation   YES Will you comment   slow growth, overview, subtle intelligence, losses Mine   no theirs Did I do well talking about it at the show     There's indeterminacy in matter   In the texture of matter   Is that what Tulku means by a tendency   YES The laws being a statistical description   No-foundational   YES   I never believe I've done what I'm credited for, when it's seen, because 'I' didn't do it   Is it correct to keep 'I' this simple   Is larger self losing memory too     By matter I mean universe   Which is immaterial   It's immaterial but it's not 'consciousness'   It's physical   Meaning it has space-time structure   But it's immaterial   And has no foundation   Humans are bodies   But bodies are immaterial   YES Space-time structures that are about other space-time structures     Can something that is immaterial have a past   sort of Not as it is imagined   YES   Is he right about the perfectness   no A body is a space-time patternedness that is somewhat isolated   YES Aboutness just means influenced   There is no uncon   But a space-time pattern can be tight   Is this how he imagines it     There are deformed patterns   Can it be tight in relation to itself   There are no archetypes   But bodies are structured to have strong themes   It's hard to imagine structure without solid matter   But helpful to do so?   Is it a perversion   no It's the nature of space-time being to see solid   'Solid' means temporal continuity     Is evolution true  It's space-time pattern evolution   Always see metaphysical contrasts as discourse territories reified? "Mind, body and spirit" psychology, physics/biol, theology. Dorn the unus mundus. "Missing was the irrational influence of the unconscious" ie in science, says Pauli. But no: missing is the dissociated openness to their mothers. The Unbewust is not irrational. Indeterminacy in physics is not irrational. They keep trying to reconcile a real thing and an imaginary thing. How 'the uncon' is imagined. Limited being about, constricted structure. It is constricted structure that produces what's taken as evidence of structure elsewhere? endurance of the tension of opposites Faraday's field concept James likened the uncon to a magnetic field around "our centre of energy." Good picture?   Remembering a dream alters it as well as the conscious net, is that correct?   Jung in Mysterium coniunctionis, "The common background of microphysics and depth psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental." CW14 para 768 Do you agree with that   no It's dualistic   YES But not clueless   'Psychic' needs to be understood as physical   And physical as immaterial   YES And not transcendental   YES Seeing that is the gift of TSK   And Being about   YES   Am I going to have friends in this new phase   Real friends     A field is a space-time structure   Which is not solid   Not 'transcendental' means direct contact     At the atomic level granularity Magnitude of quantum related to frequency of radiation Causeless effects changes of quantum state unpredictable Whether observed as wave or particle depends on observation made - Somebody in Crna Gora Montenegro google-searched Ellie Epp. It must be the Croation who's on the jury with me. Kotor is in Montenegro. Dubrovnic is Croatia. Mostar in Bosnia-Hercegovina, bridge destroyed 1993 reconstructed 2003. - Apeiron journal Space possesses physical properties even where it is devoid of ordinary matter ... permittivity, permeability, and the ability to transmit electromagnetic waves ... Casimir Effect and a significant amount of energy. Ether - physical vacuum - plenum - cosmic substratum Is an electron an extended structure, a compound object made up of subparticles, or is it a point-like elementary particle, which does not consist of any subparticles? Range of models corpuscular vs wave classical vs quantum point vs extended structureless vs structured x quantum field theory, probabilistic Copenhagen interpretation, quantum mechanics - Bernard Pullman 1998 The atom in the history of human thought Oxford atoms, which means essentially vacuum, even though the modern vacuum is not nearly as empty as it once was thought to be Greece - nature imagined as a self-organizing whole. 5th and 6th c BC. Pre-Socratic Milesians in Ionia, Asia Minor (Homer too) kosmos-gonia kosmos-logia Hebrews vs pagans, authority of the book matter L materia stuff, matrix L womb, mater, matris mother substance L substantia substare to be present, under to stand stuff L stuppa tow (OE) coarse short hemp or flax fibre for spinning 1. raw material 2. originating cause 3. principle principium a beginning primordial ordiri to begin a web Aristotle: "While the state of substance can change, the substance itself remains." L elementum first principle Anaximander apeiron an invisible fabric, by dissociation and interaction of opposites Apeira plural unlimitable, indefinite Arché In Hesiod's myth, chaos a-byssos a dark void In some Near Eastern stories a watery darkness By Empedocles 4 root kinds which intermix - "nearly two millennia" - Aristotle and Plato - "spatial extent and matter two concepts still poorly differentiated then." Being and nothingness - Democritus The atomists then propose atoms and void, "separation of matter and space" From early "opposition of contrasts" as driving organization Dot specks in light, motions "attest to the underlying motion of matter" Simulacra - fine and thin - one atom deep emanations off the surfaces of bodies - Lucretius Myriad simulacra of all different sorts roam about in all directions, on all sides, tenuous images which when they come together, fuse effortlessly in the air one onto another like spiderweb or gold foils. They are of a much finer texture than the simulacra that strike the eyes and elicit vision when they penetrate through the pores of the body to stir the subtle substance of the spirit, which they excite .... All manner of simulacra are carried here and there, some forming spontaneously in the air itself, some escaping from different objects, some, likewise, coming into being by the fusion of those of which I just spoke. Epicurus a material soul pervading the body, most subtle and motile of atoms Plato a mad fabulist Aristotle - knowing is through senses, form as well as matter Anti-atomists - matter is indefinitely divisible. One of the Brahministic systems imagined 9 primary substances: the 4 elements, ether, space, time, souls, and manas (mind). metaphysics of dust Bachelard Les intuitions atomistiques 1975 - Iliad trans Robert Fagles 1990 Penguin darkness engulfed his eyes Achaeans Come friend, you too must die says Achilles Heroes "That there are some human beings who can deny the imperatives which others obey in order to live. And sooner or later, in suffering, in disaster, they come to realize their limits, accept their mortality and establish (or reestablish) a human relationship with their fellowmen." Helen of Sparta, Paris son of Priam, Hector the splendour running in the blood Loyalty to a private ideal of conduct Day after day he ground his heart out, waiting there. [Opposite: plant list after scouting at Walter Anderson's] 26 Rowen writes Universities have such a wonderful feeling about them, like some other strange faerie world. Dreamed I had my hair cut short and saw in the mirror that she'd left a plume from the back of the head that lifted when I moved. I remember my old hairstyle with distaste, it was so prim. Another dream about Greg, in his parents' house thinking I could go back to him, he's a good man. Later walking beside a thin eccentric Jewish man, I'm having an outing with him but am not considering him, I'm saying to myself. We visit his mother in a poor shabby top floor flat. When a service man is in the room she speaks to me in Yiddish. Her son asks her what kind of wine she wants and she says reddish white. - Room 17 Hacienda del Sol. Packed the duffle, watered the kumquats and the midfloor, mailed Rowen's money, got on I-8, stopped at the KRC in Ramona, ate walking around the jeep in Santa Ysabel, came on through the wide empty miles and am here in my blue and white pyjamas. Gave away 5 hours, twilight, moonrise, to Zach's draft. Parked by the library, closed but lit, to check for other packet 3s. Drove north in moonlight on empty asphalt. The mountains seemed remote and milky. Sat in a field, the rich man's park, Goletta Meadows, on sand, buffeted gently by warm wind. Goodness still with me. Two tiny rattling insects in the bushes. It's a goodness like after ocean. 27 Today more hours, resented, to credulous Mo, dug-down dutiful Rani, shut-down cynical Nan. Can't do anything for them, they're already determined in their minimizing routes. Zach is my only smart one. He was back asking and thanking the moment he got his reply. These others are wasting my hours, though I'll find something honorable to say. I don't sleaze out but I'm so wanting to escape their hundreds of dull sentences. Haven't been here today though now that it's 6 I'm by the pool seeing yellow branches so feathery light swaying in evening valley breeze. Birds all day long on these acres. I love it here but am not here. Feeling how soon I'll have to leave. The desert is there across the road from the motel. The mountains bare and subtle all day long. The creosote blooming all over, yellow flowers and round fuzzy pods. Ocotillo red on every tip. Little rabbits, very little. 28 Doves continuous, the whacky roadrunner on the pavement, mesquite in new green waving. In the long dozing this morning I was at a dinner table with people and saw through the window a jetliner coming in very low at ninety degrees. There's a plane that's going to crash I said, went to stand by the doorway. Waited longer than I expected and then saw a flash down in the city. Low-grade melancholy, kind of disgust with myself, that I'm a slowly dying carcass, sore and dull and lonely with nothing to say. In a land of mad venality, human ruin. - This morning in Glorietta Canyon, where the wind blew hard through the ocotillo's teeth and bashed at me where I sat on a painted rock above my little velvet cove. There was the spot where I buried my earrings - I knew it for certain by the chuparosa's cracked stone - and there my earrings were not. I felt the gift had been accepted. Drove very slowly back out the long white road and stopped to see agave flower pads held up brilliant bristling yellow next to blue and white. Ocotillos' red shreds everywhere amid yellowgreen and against faraway tan, not photographable. Was that a young smoke tree so impressively purple. This morning too I went back to the orange grove and got windfalls. It's almost two months later and there weren't many left. I thought they'd be the same - where did they go? There was the nervousness of stealing but also something ritual, like taking for myself a potent local medicine that's not for sale. Finished one letter afterward and checked gap junctions and walked to the corner of Cloudy Moon and Verbena via the back acre and am about to put on pyjamas and lie here reading with twilight pale beyond the asphalt and the flag's clip clinking on the post.   part 4 in america volume 20: 2009 june - october work & days: a lifetime journal project