| volume 21 of in america: 2010 june-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Part 1, at the end of the semester get back to book design. Parts 1 and 2 in Vancouver for a book design workshop at SFU and preparing a workshop of my own about wave structure physics. Still injured, still morose. Part 2 a college residency and many personal history scans. Part 3 autumn in San Diego. Part 4 I refind an important old friend. Part 5 continuing to format Dames rocket. Notes: SFU book design intensive, Mad men, Thirty something, Nussbaum The fragility of goodness, Theroux Sir Vidia's shadow, Milo Wolff Schrodinger's universe: Einstein, waves and the origin of the natural laws, Carver Mead Collective electrodynamics, interview with Carver Mead in the American Spectator, Olds "Fish oil" in The unswept room, Andrew Harvey Hidden journey, Alastair Macaulay on Kistler in the Times, Peter Constantine et al The Greek poets, Jung in Aion, Guy Clark To live is to fly, Le Carré on Eleanor Wachtel, Esther Harding, Wilhelm Kempff playing Beethoven sonatas, Bocelli with Terfel singing the Pearl Fishers' duet, Angela Hewitt lecturing on how to play Bach, Moby Dick, Galileo, Robert Thurman and Tod Wise Circling the sacred mountain, Trapline, Oliver Morton "Not-so-lonely planet" in the Times, Carol Gilligan, Foster WB Yeats: a life 1. The apprentice mage and 2. The arch-poet, Ann Saddlemyer Becoming George: the life of Mrs WB Yeats, Grimaud playing Brahms, Kenner The Pound era, Don Carmichael Democracy today and the challenge of religious-spiritual aspiration, Jam Ismail, muscle aging. Menioned: Barbara Meter, Luke, Rowen, Tom Fendler, Louie, Tia, Dr Severs, Dr Ranger, Sobell, Emilee Baum Trucks, Dave Leonard, Mafalda Reis Moore, Margo MacLeod, Kat Harrison, Sheila Spremulli, David and Dorothy Beach, Ben Robins, Frank Caropreso, Martin Ware, Michel de Salaberry, Norman MacLeod, Jonathan Louie, Greg Morrison, Jim Legg, Thy at Shui Chiropractic. West Boulevard in Shaunessey, 824 E Pender St, Strathcona Community Garden, Bean Brothers coffee shop, Woodbine Hotel, Sinclair Building, Tabor Court in Abbotsford, Global Shipping, Reach Dental, West Point Cycles, Union Street Market, Mountain View Cemetery, alley between Hastings and W.Georgia at Burrard, Wall St in East Vancouver, Royal Tandoori in New Westminster, Caffé Calabria, Value Village, the MCC thrift store, Salvation Army in Kerrisdale, Pilgrim's Market, Cineworks on Alexander St, Dairyland Ice Cream in Abbotsford, Banfield Park in Victoria, C4 in O'Hare, Executive Hotel Pacific in Seattle, King St Station Seattle, Amtrak Pacific Starlight, Sacramento, Santa Barbara Bay, Union Station LA, Barrio Star Restaurant in San Diego, the Firehouse in PB, St Paul's Episcopal, San Diego Zoo, Whole Foods in Hillcrest, lawn bowling court in Balboa Park, Crywolf Mac repair on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, Apple store in Fashion Valley, the Naval Hospital, Coronado Bridge, Starbucks on Fifth Ave, Amvets, Walter Anderson's Nursery, Denny's on Pacific Highway, Seaport Village, La Glace Alberta, Seven Lakes Motel in Hythe Alberta, Queen's University in Kingston, University College Hospital in London. Ant Bear Books, the Globe and Mail, Elizabeth Jolley, Equifax, TD Bank, Gulf and Fraser Credit Union, Vancity Credit Union, the Oracle, Video In, Society for Creative Anachronism, My name is Joe, Jennifer Annison in Bounty hunter, Lauren Bacall, Anna Karenina, Gianfranco Foschino, Fauré Cantique de Jean Racine and Libera me Domine, Albinoni Adagio in G minor, Banana Republic, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole singing Somewhere over the rainbow, Yellow Cab, Laura Marks, CBC National, Tunefan, Lovatt It's a simple song, National Geographic photo of the day, iPage, Gerry Brown, Gram Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris Love hurts, Brothers and sisters, Private practice, Gossip girl, Vogue Hommes, midterm US elections, Grey's Anatomy, Barbara Boxer, Intergate, KCRW, linksys wireless, Being about, PageMill, GoLive, John Heilemann and Mark Halprin Game change, Sister act, Korphe School, Times magazine women's empowerment issue, Cosmo Girl, NBC, Jackson Browne, Daichi Saito, Dorothy Pound, Lily Yeats, Walter Ong, McLuhan, Pablo de Ocampo, Craig Mullaney The unforgiving moment. December Nights in Balboa Park, Bon Temps Social Club. |
27 June 2010 Waking at 3:30 from one of the dreams in which I end sobbing, sobbing. I was talking to someone in London who said my son's friend Josh had committed suicide. By Josh I understood his childhood friend. Waking I'm not sad but worried for Luke, because he's in a gap time after he breaks up with somebody. - Spoke to him for an hour. I so love when he laughs at me. Barbara Meter's movies last night. I was loving her for them. There was also an interview she said not to look at, a shockingly old woman, thought of as my age - she's six years older - but speaking such ready warm English and so my kind of person. She demonstrated her optical printer and said how she likes to get into the frame. Beautiful images, brought up and down out of the light, wonderful sound - sound like I'd imagine for Orpheus, murmers, bits of music, all at the right, low level, clear and recessive. I wrote her before I went to bed and she'd replied when I got up in the morning. 28 June Have been fixing the hyphens in Raw forming, going through fast. Marveling how impressionable I was, how intense an imprint of persons I took. It now seems inefficient to feel so much about irrelevant people. I'm supposing it was hormonal, like frisking in puppies. I was at the age to make my life ties, except that I wasn't making life ties, I was spilling capacity on anyone and then writing the impression to erase it. The intensity made me loveable, so there could always be new people, and erasing made me mobile so I could speed from adventure to adventure always agape. Now I'm the opposite of that, efficient in my impressions like an old dog lifting my head briefly and setting it down again. I'm not loveable except to those I have good reasons to love. But still I like reading myself in those excited times. I like the stories I found, Fredi and Darinka, Ferdinand, Madame Matter, the old woman on San Giovanni in Laterano, even the hitchhiking tales, the survey of what lives are. Bill. Mademoiselle Ziechelmeyer. Got my 10 ISBNs! Ant Bear Press. Vancouver July 1 West Boulevard. A wet dark bank holiday when I couldn't do anything I'd intended. The lost feeling of a house that isn't mine. Sniffles and sore throat. Eating and reading junk, watching TV. Louie's bike crashes out of its gear. The course tomorrow. A month ahead without structure. At the garden they've built a greenhouse at an angle at the west end of the herb garden, which is a neglected mess, now unreclaimable. Stopped at 824 and found a family in my place, kitchen opened to the middle room, paint on the balcony door slathered over with a muddy turquoise, the quiet logic of the house wrecked after all the years it had endured. Basement suite. Someone is making 12,000 a month with hardly any repairs. Kids' bikes in the garden. 2 July Dreaming a renovation to the house. I don't live there now but I'm distressed. It's a mindless hodgepodge. Crude bamboo posts for the upstairs balcony railing. I'm standing in the upstairs corridor saying the light used to flow through the rooms - from there, and there, and there. Why people don't have a sense of whole spaces. This place of Janet's full of bits, some irrelevant little thing everywhere; what they've done with the garden, made it in their own image. 3 July I have a sure hand putting a slide on a page he says, but don't have a feel for text or text with pictures. That includes layouts I thought were good. 4 July I'm at the publishing course in ugly shoes walking badly and find myself bitter. There are 6 women and 2 men, and the women are dumb lumps. One of them sits there working at a piece called Obedience to God's Plan for the Catholic Register. Peter has spent hours showing us hideous covers he's made for Douglas & Mackintyre potboilers and telling us how he made them. The rest of the time we're supposed to sit there working on our own thing. There's a lot of distraction, his voice, yesterday kids in the hall. I get snagged on technology and am soon at a halt. Then he comes by and does sit talking about what I'm showing him, making suggestions, but he's rigid in his own style, just tells me to do it his way. So what has the course been good for. It pops my set. Puts options into the air. 6 July Hello. Sun on the roses that come pressing onto the long window. Tuesday eight o'clock. Ry Cooder singing Across the borderline, not as well as Willie Nelson who sings it with aching simplicity. Mad Men marathon last night, '50s men in their entitled boorishness, '50s women in their elaborately outfitted slavishness. Thirty something from the same milieu but thirty years later, Michael and Hope realer, Melissa possible, anguish more mentioned. No one in the Mad Men era could have written Mad Men. 8 July I woke thinking of 824 before I left, its beautiful order, the life I had going - the doc, Louie, the garden, Tom, the book, California and Strathcona - its level my furthest - that I got to by building in place through 26 years - now knowing I will not be able to build to anything like that level again - I don't have time - I'll go on having meager marginal years in a reduced space. - What's up with Louie. She left me feeling abandoned - what happens when she insists on being a baby, I realized today, is that I feel alone. I get disgusted and stoical: alright I'm on my own. Louie's demands what they always were, unsorted, indirect, projecting. It's the same feeling as Lise's demands this semester, icky, somehow terrorizing, unclean. It's not straight anger or accurate calling out, it is vile crooked irresponsible amorphous guilting. I feel like a man with it, inwardly stunned into blank defense while trying awkwardly to give her what she wants. What a poisonous little spirit that is, the way it shocks the day.
14 July Closed the G&F account yesterday after how many years, moved into that neighbourhood when I was 31? The young woman asked why I was closing the account and I held back tears. Then on the street with an official check for $3983 looking at that corner on Hastings wishing never to see it again, grey dereliction, the Woodbine Hotel's scabby pediment opposite the bus stop where I'd stood so many years. [notes from Nussbaum The fragility of goodness: an excellent life
Joy, too, strains to track down eyes that it can trust, "eyes on whose understanding, good will and truthfulness he can rely." the way lies can make the world rotten the special beauty of the contingent and the mutable that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong. in fact in the natural history of human beings most people, when asked to generalize make claims that are false to the complexity and the content of their actual beliefs. They need to learn what they actually think. They do not understand that it is by being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself.
our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description.
It will frequently be difficult for a single human being to honor simultaneously the claims of gods as different as, for example, Artemis and Aphrodite, and yet each human being is obliged to honor all of the gods. I have a central doubt in this book, and it's the notion of human goodness. She lets it slide between a sense of social duty and a sense of personal efficacy, "a good life," and where I doubt is something about standards? I don't expect myself to honor all the gods. It seems to me that humans are of many kinds and each kind honors the god of its kind - division of labor. However, when she talks about tragic conflict I have my strong example, what it was like to leave Jamila, knowing I was giving up sublime companionship, a level I'd never find again. The whole maelstrom of Dames rocket. There was also leaving Frank, and in another way the whole time with Tom, in which I did for a long stretch manage a description that was a solution. Work within a network of more concrete and informal distinctions rather than with this dichotomy. The doing of irreparable harm to another person, violation of antecedent commitment involving major values a whole tragic drama is capable of tracing the history of a complex pattern of deliberation, showing its roots in a way of life and looking forward to its consequences in that life. people who wish to live together and share a conception of value Stylistic choices - the selection of certain meters, certain patterns of image and vocabulary - are taken to be closely bound up with a conception of the good. ataurotos not-bulled, ritual term designating virginity consistency in conflict bought at the price of self deception reared in a mythology of autochthony that suppresses the biological role of the female "The good agent" - in that phrase I can feel a sense of good organism - a well-structured organism that decides optimally - and her point in understanding emotion as praise- or blame-worthy. It's excellence of body, as excellence of tree or car. In this feeling-out of it, assessment is not like Christian assessment, toward that characteristic moralistic sensation of 'goodness' or 'badness' - it needs to be said better than that, it's a freer more neutral assessment of quality. I judge students that way - Todd is an excellent being, is ambitious, responsible, alert, sensitive etc - and Andy is not an excellent being, he cuts corners, he's unclear and chaotic, he doesn't address what needs to be addressed. There's pleasure and distaste in these judgments. appreciation of the complexity of the claims upon us where suffering is the appropriate acknowledgment An old-fashioned notion of praise and blame linked to notions of will and control. Passion, imagination, sensitivity are not thought to be controllable by will so the agent isn't 'responsible' for them. And yet having or not having will is itself not controllable by will. She's writing in defense of feeling as an aspect of excellence of decision; it needed more saying in 1986 and in the context of philosophy, but - what? Is she cutting it short? In philosophy the notion of commitments to principles thought of as rule-statements, and an effort to make the whole set consistent. 16 July This book [Milo Wolff] is bad, a lot of typos, it repeats in a sloppy way, many times, its language isn't thought-through, he keeps talking about particles after he's said there aren't particles, his mind isn't the best but he has to be approximately right. I can believe the mass of quantum physicists are wrong because their mistake is like the mistake of the representation theorists in phil of mind who don't imagine propagated alteration of structure in a material, and are caught in a metaphor. In both instances it's a metaphor that makes them imagine an object, 'a particle,' 'a representation,' 'an image.' In both cases spatial imagining is what makes a difference. Instead of 'particle,' wave-center, space resonance. Instead of quantum say subatomic. Space density instead of curved space. Wave optics. "This is how waves behave." 17 July I need to complain. Have I really been here 19 days. It has been deterioration. I shd not stay in other people's places. I look grey and exhausted and I ache. I don't like this neighbourhood at all. I hate the bland blank Globe and Mail. Have to go see the anxious remains of my mother. Elizabeth Jolley was gripping but bleak. She got down the way I am now, calling the gone loves and places, cycling through them in the same way year after year. 18 July Is there a name for this sensation, jaundiced? Discouraged, disgusted. "I wish Ellie had a little more hope and faith in humanity. I think she wd like this, and I think it wd help her bring her love to the foreground." I am disgusted by humanity and the disgust is bad for me though it's accurate. What do I mean by humanity. The people on TV. The ranks of new novels in the bookstore. I'm grateful to see quality anywhere, and where I see it I have to know it is quality of a moment not of a whole life or being. It will lapse. And oh I hate knowing this crummy health will get more and more permanent, till there's pain always. I don't want to be everywhere an unloveable old woman, feeling ugly.
Olds Fish oil in 2007 The unswept room Knopf I read two poems about her husband and burst into sobs. Mary's institution like a motel for people in walkers. 20 July My stars are in a mess. 23 July The lectures are still unformed. What am I wanting to learn. How to imagine materiality, how to visualize it. What is wrong with the physics we're taught. What is alternative to it. Is there something right about intuitions of immateriality.
29 July Notes from Andrew Harvey Hidden journey: I felt the whale feeling my terror and sending toward me these great warm healing waves of energy ... sending me through the sunlit water wave after wave of what I can only call love, a silent, strong, immense, impersonal love. Look at your hatred ... find the humiliation that nourishes it, the fear that continually feeds it, the self-hatred it masks. that sea, and a wave of it, and all the other waves too pouring light into us ... different lights for different needs a clear, crystalline sea of soft fire I watched the sea rearing and falling and listened to that great deep sound of creation and destruction each thing was made of the same substance, was moving and breathing and shining and emerging in and from the same vast, quiet, Body. I don't like the word divine. What I feel when he describes light given off is factuality. Calling it divine seems his desire for specialness, a greed to be superhuman. It is better, when someone says "I love you" knowing all the doubt still within them. Then it means something, then love can grow. This mind sees and does not think, knows and does not have opinions.
- Is it the first thing I've liked since I got here, Mountain View Cemetery tonight, driving the narrow lanes with a smell of hay, last light on the tops of a rank of narrow beeches and waves of crows beating across from the west. Long, far northern wall of blue mountains, the city in its dish below and across. A few large monuments each with its mythic names. The open acres, here and there a dense old heavy juniper or yew, dry grass shaved close. A limber odd old couple walking fast, he with a white beard and knee-length shorts, she with a long flowered peasant skirt. 30 July Missing Tom, missing myself in times of hope with Tom - don't think there's anything new to say or do about that, and yet I'm hanging out with the mention of it. Anything I want to say about Louie. Mainly just her tight pretty small body moving in the room, her thick swinging ponytail. We're not tense. She sits with straight back at phone and computer conducting business. I work a bit, the rest of the time am idle. Now I won't see her for a month. The most successful private yoga studio in Canada someone told her. The detail she has to track, unending. - The truth is grief. I've sat watching My name is Joe in bits on Youtube, crying at the end.
I want to be in a different phase of my life and I'm in this one, frail, dry, nostalgic, competent, hopeless of many things. 1st August Emilee has sent a beautiful cover design. 3rd August Somewhere above farmland hazed over, bored with flying to Chicago. There was a movie I watched, didn't listen to, because Jennifer Annison was in it. What is it about her. She's a good frame, she moves with perfect neatness in a tight black dress and heels. Speaks her lines with a lot of little hair flicks and head tosses. Compare her to Lauren Bacall young - it's another era of acting, more cognitively exact. Her little movements are thought movements, whereas Bacall though I watch her every second the way I do Annison, has lines float out of her mouth without being produced by a body. Rowen at Louie's last night, couple of hours before we had to get up at 6 to take a taxi. I sent him to bring up a box: his pin cushion from grade one, his quilt from Mike's mom, and the little Gund bear I bought when he was newborn. He stood leaning his head against mine, had an arm around me. I didn't know whether he was feeling it or being nice to me. Then I unfolded the Kurdish rug and showed him the embroidered people and animals. Made him a bed on top of Louie's. He showed me heraldry blazoning on his iPad. This morning murmuring together in the Yellow Cab back seat behind a Sikh driver listening to a religious service at low volume as we drove through 6:30 quiet. That was the best of the visit. He was a brown bony profile on my right, big pack in the trunk, red rug rolled and duct taped. We were murmuring about college - looked at course offerings last night. Plainfield 4th August Have I livened enough to tell two stories about the trip. One is from Chicago, the tight rows of waiting area seats at C4. I'd already had an hour and a half there and more to go. It was a time between flights and the seats were empty enough so I could lie down in a two-seat space with my head on my shoulder bag and knees bent up, one arm behind me and the other hand on my belly. I closed my eyes and went into slow breathing to the point where I could feel the head pressure, and then faded out, or maybe not all the way out. The seats around me began to fill. A German group arrived and settled opposite me and in the seats beyond my head. I didn't open my eyes. Something about the loud, dark German voices, people I knew believed I couldn't understand them. I was there and not there, quite blissful. Then in 3D in the smaller plane, in the last half hour coming toward Burlington. It was falling dusk over layered clouds, some of which were lit pink only at their bases as if rooted in embers. The upper layers were faded grey-blues in many textures. A few large heaps, a near one very sharply defined and still bulging, that one throwing a long cone of blue shadow away from us. Other flatter layers some of which had areas of smudge like moving water shot in long exposure. There were places I could see down in and under to other layers at other depths, as if shelves of them. Sometimes a small fine flat webby bit that was closer and so seemed to be moving quickly in the direction opposite to ours, like a spacecraft of an alien race whose substance is only partly visible to us. Those were ten sublime minutes in a trip where I hadn't seen much and was no longer hoping for anything. - Why am I so turned off marketing discussion - because none of the marketing is or will ever be toward the kinds of students I'd like to have. All of it is toward students who will waste me. I'm such an outlier, it's never going to be my institution, I've done what I can do well when I can, but over all my decisions wd change the structure so it wdn't work for the people who are here. When Margo was here did I feel less alien. Because I was intoxicated with being able to do personal work as part of academic work. Am I bored with that. I'm bored with the students I'm getting. I'm bored with the fac, withdrawn with the fac. Margo made me favored child and that helped. These long conversations seem not to ever end in anything, as if they are indirect exercising of denied anxieties - something like that. 5th August I don't like this hive mind, the way it has needed to pick on Lucinda and Mark, the malicious buzzing and two-faced dealing. 9 August
13 August Particle model of the self. Shioban and --- salsa dancing last night, forward, backward, shaking their shoulders. Neely's narrow white-skinned waist in the belly dance, Amber's exquisite person in the right cut of fitted dress walking toward the door. Katie on stage last night on a chair with her accordion on her lap saying, I can't cross my legs when I have an accordion on my lap so unless you're into that sort of thing, eyes here. And then playing what she composed when she had no one to talk to about Anna Karenina, Russian ache. The way her small pointed face flushes pink on her long neck. Her light girl body dancing last night in a fitted blue dress. The room full for the physics workshop, Gianfranco's movie behind me. Deidre in the clear, purple hair, goth jewelry, short skirts, a live sexy ready bold bright turned-on girl. Vancouver 14th August While I was gone I had Cantique de Jean Racine in my head. [Fauré on Youtube] Came in last night half past midnight lifting the suitcase one step at a time. - Now it's evening on the porch. Green grapes in thin bunches, pink-ivory sky in the south. That familiar traffic surf constant. Saturday night mid August, here but when, heresay of past years, it's still just me. Drinking tea from the silver cup, cards in their little box next to me. Thinking of Amber and Katie, Amber's exquisite precision, Katie's diffident girly brilliance, the way she speaks one word at a time, idiosyncratic, lilting. Her swift thin hard hug goodbye, bare flat little ribs in my arms. I feel large and old with these women, slow, solid like a thick tree trunk, very plain. 16 August Towering days. So hot in the afternoon that I swelter sleeping on the couch. Last evening took the bike east on Cordova, ended on Wall St. Jam's house with all its windows open, blue paint weathered. Glimpses of freighters on the river, superb high summer evening. There's a half moon some west of south, clear bright cheese yellow. I'm on the porch amid electric light and see it under grape leaves that are hanging lit from above, a valence. Rustle in the vine, little raccoon face looking down. 17 August Libera me Domine is what is singing in my head these days. 22 August A cold Sunday, grape leaves shaking in a west wind, grey sky. With David and Dorothy in the Royal Tandoori last night, telling stories. Dorothy's merry little face next to me in the booth, how can she be so pretty. Her spine is so crooked forward that her face is near her plate but there it is pink and winsome as an eight year old's. The two of them play and I drop into playing with them as if their air is native to me, a light grace I like so much. Afterward she in her deep red chair and David in Russell's and I where I was the point of their triangle telling [college] stories. Mary on Friday a grey little bullet, tight grey pantsuit, hair cut too short, new thin-skinned blue under her eyes. I sat going through her albums looking for photos I want to scan and she beside me was naming people I wdn't linger to look at. She did what she does, complained that Ed had sent all of us so far away. It has been her constant old song she repeats with no variation; her hands fly up when she says away. I said she could be proud of how far we'd gone, that she has no idea how far I've gone. I was pressing, I said I've gone farther in philosophy than most of the men in the field. Then she clamped her arms across her chest. She didn't believe me but more than that I could see that she didn't want to believe me. I was disbelieving it myself as I saw her but I hung onto remembering what I'd known at other times. She didn't want to believe me for competitive reasons - she said she'd gone as far in her circumstances as we have in ours, which is untrue, people in her circumstances have gone much further than she has - and also for philosophical reasons. She said in an angry burst, But why did you have to get rid of God? I said I hadn't got rid of god but think of it differently. And then said Let's go for a drive and took her to a place she knew on the river, where she and Ed used to pick blackberries. She was happy to be walking and liked sitting by the wide river where it sent spangles through the willows. What I should notice firmly is the pressure she still exerts to make me smaller than I am and to make me believe I am smaller than I am. She doesn't wish me well. She cannot wish me well. Is her disbelief what keeps me from showing that I know? It says yes. Was what I said true? YES. Is it the fundamental reason? Yes. - Caffé Calabria Sunday early aft. Am I restored enough to risk the mirror - white shirt, chalcedony earrings, grey hair off the forehead, mouth held in, looking majorly mature. Alright, mature but not flabby. Kind of tough. This is my tough side. Moved tables so I'm head on. Not much better. Hair's nice, tail down to the first button. If I lengthen my neck I can look distinguished but that's not love woman. Small eyes. Alright, Calabria thoughts. Coffee so good. Anything I want to imagine? No pressure at all. Beginning to think about a light workshop - light, vision and imagining. What is light in wave structure physics. How does a body see. - There are some nice-looking people in this neighbourhood. In Strathcona there seem now to be crowds of slobs, fat women with tattoos and ugly babies. 25 August Watching Mad men, all of season 2 and then back into the season 1 episodes I didn't see at Jan's. It is brilliant. It's a brilliant concept to look at the years of the turn. Marilyn's death, Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy's election. The outrageous entitlement of the men. Constant buttoning and unbuttoning of jackets. Everyone smoking and drinking all day long, while they're pregnant too. The New York glamour I studied in magazines when I was on that beaten-earth farmyard 300 miles from a city. Women's unexercised bodies encased in bras and girdles designed by men to make them look like rockets or trophies. Their compliance and yearning. The men's total dependency. Dialogue always sharp though occasionally anachronistic. Beautiful mise-en-scene, never a shot too long. The continuous interest of background detail - what's in their houses, what are they wearing, what is a doctor's office like in the '60s, a railway car. They don't spare expense with extras, it's a huge undertaking. The ad campaigns, watching them come up with something. Don Draper's impassive Cary Grant masculinity, not my type but he's well written as a man who fascinates by being remote. The writing is good on the subtleties of gender politics. "As of the third season, seven of the nine writers for the show are women." "Women from their early 20s to their 50s." Season 1 March 1960, 2, Feb-Oct 1962. 3, spring-December 1963. 4, 1964. Jack Daniels a sponsor. Frank O'Hara poem. 26 August Driving with David and Dorothy on a day when the air was clean enough to see Baker white and godly always larger as we neared Abbotsford. Hay fields, hay in windrows, scent of hay. We jeered at monster mansions, praised old farmhouses, Dorothy always noticing. On the way home lost north of the highway wandering west, south, north, through farmland none of us had seen, the north rim of mountains solid blue and craggy alongside us as we streaked up two-lane blacktop in the little truck, David's warm shoulder and his decisive manly driving. The ice cream parlour in Abbotsford, Dairyland Ice Cream, where bent-over Dorothy on a red leather stool between us ate maple-walnut from a paper cup, remembering stopping in Abbotsford for ice cream when she was a girl 90 years ago. David drawing out the ice cream vendor with stories and questions, admiring the copper kettle and marble slab. Mary on a bad day truculent and hideous, complaining in all her rote old ways, explosive hideous gestures, grotesque false tones, bizarre grimaces. She's furious at the life she's had, she's furious to find herself old. She's outraged to see herself in the old persons around her, some of whom she doesn't realize are quite a lot sharper than she is. She's going down gracelessly because she didn't fight for herself when she still had energy. I was hating her for how gracelessly she's doing what she now has to do, it sickens me to see it. I was feeling, Die already. Meantime she doesn't like her wonderful south window that looks up a neighbourhood street toward many trees and Baker on a clear day. I kept trying to get a blessing out of her, some out of control and ugly too. She said I had respected Ed for his strength. I exclaimed that I did not respect Ed or find him strong, that I found him weak, that when I was seventeen I wrote in my journal that I was stronger than he was. I wanted her to say Yes you were and are wonderfully strong. You shouldn't have had to be so strong but I'm proud you looked after yourself. She did not say that, or anything like it. She wanted to lament and regret about herself. Something about the way I brag these days. I didn't do that when I was younger, it's a falling-off. When I need to hear something from someone else and they don't say it I say it myself, to hear it said. - I put the bike on the 20 bus to go get a T2126 from the tax office. Got off where it turns south and rode up the alley between Hastings and W.Georgia. Where I crossed Burrard a man was playing the violin part of a piece he had on a cassette player. I passed him into the alley beyond him. Man with a moustache, forty-something, a cap. It was music I knew, though I didn't remember the name. When I'd got halfway down the alley I turned and went back because the music had made me cry. It was the same sort of crying as when I heard music in London churches, sudden and sharp. I leaned the bike against a wall and sat on it to listen to him more but he was finishing the piece. As I came to put money into his basket he was squatting putting his violin into a case with another violin. He snatched the basket back away from me, You're too late, I won't take anything from you, this city has no soul. I could see his feelings were hurt and kept steady, stayed with him, said You made me cry, put two two-dollar coins onto the ground in front of his case. This city has no soul, he said again. He was confused because there'd been a sudden turn. I said, I do, put my hand on my chest, looked at him. Now he looked back. After I'd pushed off into the alley he called thank you after me. Coming into the tax office the name of the piece came back to me, it was the Albinoni adagio. I was still feeling the grief, was it his, I wondered. - Best moment was sitting on Rowen's [houseboat] roof together with the late summer bay around us, listening to Somewhere over the rainbow on his iPad (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole), Rowen singing along quietly.
He was on a footpath in Banfield Park and saw a small For sale sign in its window a long way across the water. Stood around for ten minutes trying to get a photo that wd enlarge the phone # enough to read. Went home and googled it. The Craigslist ad came up. Young pilot on the way back said to the passengers climbing the stairs, You're welcome to sit in the copilot seat. I said, You're kidding and unbuckled my seatbelt, pushed through to the front, put the headphones on. The whole spread of islands and mountains. We happened to fly past the Saturna bay where my cabin used to be. Could see the neat green corduroy of grape rows where orchard and pasture were. Farmhouse still there under the blond escarpment. [Saturna 1984] [Opposite page: shopping list and to-do list for Rowen's boat] 29 August When Row and I were walking on the esplanade above the seaplane dock a man came toward us who was my age maybe and stunningly right. Broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, confident, alive in his eyes, completely physical. We looked into each other's faces as we passed. I was thinking all women look at this man the way I am looking at him, and so we should - something like that. Hello there, stud daddy. 1st September King St Station Seattle. When was the last time I did this - what's different - I have enough money to stay in a hotel instead of taking the grim 5:30 bus. Fine old room, white duvet, big window throwing leaf shadows, light on when I opened the door, hot deep bath, good pillows, moss green velvet carpets in the corridor, light-spirited Asian boy on the desk last night, handsome big black man whistling for a taxi this morning. Wordless soft atmosphere. I'm nostalgic for being 14 or 16 or 18 and interesting to everyone, interested in everyone. A bit dejected expecting a journey where no one talks to me. There was one day in the last two months when I liked to see myself in the mirror. It was the day after I took David and Dorothy to dinner - had on the black shirt. My face looked longer and lighter. Was it because I'd laughed with David and been a bit adored? That one - I want to be that one, not this squared-off grim old head. 2nd September California. Ridge of velvet hills with patches of oak. Dry grass by the roadbed, sun. Spanish in the lounge car. Wayside bushes with smaller harder leaves that glitter. Tall dry weeds standing intricate in ranks. Fennel with flat yellow bloom at its tips thick along the tracks. Perky old thing at the breakfast table, smudged blue eye shadow, big red-rimmed glasses, tanned parchment skin, said, I'm not happy till I see the bare hills with live oaks. Oh oaks. Eucalyptus grove. - Santa Barbara Bay with a fog bank some way off, blue in sun an hour above the horizon. Thin weeds perpendicular to shadows three times their length. The amorphous task of finding how to live now. The eighty year old woman who was in advertising in the '50s said, And you're an artist. I said What made you think so? She said, Well, everything. She was lazy in conversation, I had no way to know what she meant. It's the time of evening when whites begin to glow. Three egrets in a tree, I think egrets. A man in a white teeshirt standing by a marsh. Sink anchor into an art. - A superb girl - I saw her striding through Union Station and she arrived later in the seat across the aisle - tanned all over, short yellow string-strap dress in thin cotton, flat-heeled ankle boots. She was laughing with the high school boy in the window seat, calling up songs on his computer, singing along, nattering about college water polo coaches and practice. Had long athlete's hands with interesting crooks in their poses, shining knees, a smooth envelope of muscle. Talk full of quick play, a delighted quiet laugh, stood up in the aisle to demonstrate the stanky-leg dance. Told him half Irish, half Sioux. A well-raised competent girl, a charming physical girl not trying hard at all. - This between LA and Irvine. Friday 3rd September I wrote her down because I wanted to go on seeing her. Was there anyone else on the train I wanted to see. A throwback hippie family, small tight-bodied quite young man with Jesus hair. He was wearing a white shirt open to the 3rd button and Salvation Army dress pants. She was a broad-faced blond in hippie layers, draggling skirts, bandana, scarf tied around her hips. There were two tousle-haired kids, very small, with unwashed faces, barefoot. The littlest girl lay tugging on her mother's empty breast in the lounge car. In the dining car he made a fuss about his eggs being cold. "Do you have a complaints form?" They'd brought in their own coffee press full of some green liquid and own large jar of honey. Last sight of them staggering down the ramp in Union Station, the two kids in carriers, one on his back, one on his chest. A lot of miscellaneous bundles dangling from a peeled stick between them, he carrying the front end, she the back. Making a statement I supposed. He was bent double with the weight. An eighty-seven year old man in a seat next to me in the station who had a good lower lip and a quick answer. Bulky older black woman redcap who swished her cart around corners with strong-minded verve. - My house - my house - big sigh. It seems I don't like to be away from it. - There jumped up and moved the phone plug, orange-oiled the floor. It's ten Saturday morning, Labor Day weekend. Needed to make my house loveable, and now have been at my desk seeing the sky fade over the ocean, window open, only one lamp so the room can see what's outside it. 6 September
- Just now - just this moment: I wanted to say hi, because I've been reading your journal. Deep and authentic, dark and repetitive, generous and beautiful. I'm at a milestone, January 1974, when I was born. The Wales poem motivated me to send a link to my friends on Facebook, and so it's also a good time to say hi. "I want to flash through your flashing leaves" is how I felt the other day watching a windy Kingston sunset. Thanks for sharing this life. Ben - The other home story - on Friday morning when I looked over the back stairs rail there were some homeless person's bundles piled, and bits of things left on the table, a rug between the trees in pots. When I came through after dark a small man doing something on the opposite stairs. Next morning, Saturday, with the business buildings empty, I came through on the way to the jeep and saw him better, a small man, very small and thin with meth sores on his face. I said good morning, he mumbled, didn't look at me. In the afternoon he was raging, a woman came by and cursed at him. He was on the carpet under my window all day, talking to himself, weaving his hands and head. I saw him lying in his sleeping bag. Sunday morning I heard him smashing glass, banging a metal sheet on the ground. Called 911. "This isn't an emergency. I'm not sure it's even a crime." She dispatched an officer. I heard him asking for name, social insurance number. "You can't live here. You should go back to your brother in Florida." When the officer was gone he picked up some of his stuff but then he smashed glass again. Parking after the farmers' market I saw two policemen talking to a street man on the edge of the park, went across to see whether they'd come deal with him. They called the original officer instead, who showed up downstairs to talk to me. He knows the man, he says. Meth addiction but there's more, some kind of mental health problem and he's HIV positive. "He's going down fast." The officer was good looking, a silver brushcut, and he was speaking with something like love. Frank Caropreso. I said the man was angry. He said, Do you know what he's angry about? People keep stealing his CD player. He said it's the third one he's bought. I said he needs to hide it better." This morning his bed was gone and so was he but a lot of his bits were still piled or spread. Someone had swept up the glass. There was shit against the wall. I cleaned up the back corridor, assembled all his bits under the stairs. A pillow without a case, a large velvet cushion, a waffle iron, a packet of sugar, his faded carpet, plastic boxes of little things, a hat, a basin. On the table he'd left a centerpiece of two black aeonium rosettes [from the Barrio Star garden] set up like flowers, a power steering fluid container, a cup, a candle in glass. If he didn't come back for his bits within a couple of days I was going to dump them but this aft I see someone has already done that. The reason I am telling this long story is, I want and don't want to say, remorse. Not that I think I shouldn't have acted to get him gone, but that his efforts to furnish a home, which were like mine three stories above him, had to fail. The sight of his pale mean little face covered with sores. He's sinking into death cast out and bewildered. 7 September Alastair Macaulay's brutal wonderful account of a ballerina's decline - Times June 29 C5 - I clipped it and am rereading it now. To find such a combination of sweep and sweetness was startling. She had fearlessness, wit, delicacy, expansiveness and an irrepressible love of dancing. My memory is that by 1992, her dancing had become scaled down, polite and musically safe. Since then her career has been a long, slow fade. My life was changed by the 56-year-old Margot Fonteyn, but there were people who could not bear to see her dancing anymore, just because it had once meant so much to them. I cannot see that since 1992 she has been a good role model for the young. Often her mane of hair has been a mere schtick. Her solo dancing in the Stravinsky ballets was wretched, flicking lightly at steps that require a rigor she lost long ago. - What I feel in it is his bravery in forecasting his own decline as a writer, I thank him for the precision he cares to have in his chosen work of seeing and naming even that. - The dejection Kistler would have to feel, reading that "the light still falls beautifully on the planes of her face" and "her sweetness of manner made its old impression" but "she never danced with the same attack again." Only the best one has done matters and all the doing since then has been deluded waste. It's the harsh fact of a life in art. 18 September Reading through In America 12 marveling at how crazy I am in attachment even when it's going well. I don't have latitude. I'm in cautious trust for a day and then something happens and I fly into panic, it's remarkable to watch. 23 September CBC National images of a storm in Newfoundland, thick brown streams rampaging, "an old man swept out to sea" Martin writes. Have been drivenly working through In America vols since 2007. Couldn't stop for the garden work this week. Ivory sunrise on the St Paul's façade this morning. Since I've been back the mornings have been closed, and now this one is opening as a winter morning, winter opal. Two crows lighting on the seed bundles of the palm, what are they finding to eat - now another. The air over the harbour is showing milky. Grey-blue shadow on the white face of the law building at the bus stop on 4th, where sunlight is showing the freshest pink tint. Such compounding of time, I'm in 2010 working with 2008 which itself is working with 1963-1968. 24 September What I'm noticing in general is that I expect time not to have lulls, but there always are lulls even in the journal where I'm picking moments. 26 September On the roof, sun about to rise due east over the cathedral, moon high and white in the west. Hot cup of tea, one crow barking from the highest point of the cathedral roof. Fan palms on Maple tall enough to have caught sun. Twitter increasing. 27 September Santa Ana so hot that oven gusts have come in the west window. What do I want in the next time. Lyrical work, lyrical achievement, wise felt presence. Influence. Intention. 29 September Come to a time in the day when there should be people and there are none. Then I scrounge for TV online. The craving sensation. What it's like, heart, forehead, indistinct - things I do, check email, taste in my mouth, used to be read all day, sleep. 1st October On Wednesday Tom sent me by Tunefan a link to a Guy Clark song called To live is to fly, country ache, lyrics I didn't know how to take. Next day an email, subject line, "Should have paused at 'send' / I don't want you to worry if it will happen again." Yesterday I reply, subject line "Wasn't worried but wondered whether / you were having a bad day too." Tonight, from him, same subject line, "too." When he does something graceful like that I wonder why I don't just love this man and have faith in him and stay with him and have a life instead of this suspension nowhere.
What he's given me in our years - Springsteen, Lovatt singing It's a simple song, a night the mockingbird sang through all the hours, a night of hawk moths in the honeysuckle, moments of total broken-hearted transcendent love. I say, Shouldn't I? It says no. Because it's done? Yes. 5 October Biked around my circuit this morning, locked up at the zoo entrance and walked through into that long-hidden place, which is complicated, miscellaneous, a lot of kinds of shabby plants, fake rock walls, here a tight dark pen with some depressed bird, here a wire room with some bare poles laid at random and a little mammal asleep on a platform. I kept trying to see landmarks outside the walls, it seemed too large an expanse to fit where it is. I was heading for the elephants, a long way. There they are standing unmoving up against concrete towers simulating trees. They aren't doing anything, have nothing to do all day. Further on a large man pulling nice-looking heads of romaine apart and throwing them into the enclosure where after a while one large female 46 years old he says picks them up leaf by leaf off the ground. It's another desperate day. I went to the zoo in desperation. Of all the animals I saw only the pigs seemed to be doing anything. Some of the tropical creatures in those tight small wire pens had bar heaters on. The one honest place I found, more honest, was a narrow staircase up through a densely planted tight stream-slot. What was honest about it was the stone construction of its retaining walls. It was left from a much earlier design. The fern walk. Slave animals, "our animal ambassadors" the brochure calls them. Our sacrificial animals, whose captivity exists to make stupid people perhaps somewhat less dangerous to the whole animal kingdom. The fifty year old female elephant he called Cookie, "Cookie, come! Or not," rocking like an autistic child, swaying without moving her feet. The small animals in those grim little wire pens have really no function, no one looks at them, why are they there, so the zoo can put them on a species list? 6 October
Why do I need to list things I do in a day - because I don't talk to anyone - because there's a tension until I do. 7 October
Two big packets of letters to Tom, still in their envelopes - unfolded a few - they're slender, slight, graceful. And my heart reading them is a solid block of darkness - what is the darkness called - sorrow - but why - because I loved as if I had someone to love - I loved alone. The masses of paper in the journal feel like that to me - pathetic, desolate, and I keep making more. 11 October Through DR1 to DR3-3: before them [Trudy and Cheryl] the worry about being female, then afterward again with Jam. So much worry about what I am. This is a different worry. It's more direct, it's worry about whether this crushing isolation will ever end. - Funny that I didn't feel it this way until now, it's almost a year later. It's faintly suicidal, sore heart and a dim suggestion. - There I lay down and tried to feel back into it, and saw a scene from Brothers and sisters I'd seen earlier today, Rebecca with her mother, who is brain damaged and doesn't recognize her. That's where I sighed and tears came, my mother no longer knows me. incomparably rich material about the ambiguity of love We write because we're restless ... taking myself into the labyrinth without a map. - Le Carré at 79 on Wachtel - Asked Louie why loneliness didn't come until now - she said it took that long for relief to wear off. Yes. That's what happened to him too. And the fact, now I'm realizing, that autumn was when we'd return to each other all these years.
13 October
- Your relationship to her is going to be built on two things. She has to trust you. And only when she trusts you will she respect you. And only when she trusts you and respects you will she really love you. And only when she loves you will she truly honor you. Be trustworthy in the smallest things, the tiniest details. Because if you ever plant in the mind of your partner that you may not be trustworthy, then suspicion dominates the relationship. - Someone online, a minister Wilhelm Kempff playing Beethoven sonatas - I've collected as many as I can find onto my piano playlist - shabby-haired poker-faced old man with his mouth a downturned line, his hands far away at the ends of his arms singing rapturously. - Then I have time with nothing I can do and transcribe some Tom letters and it's exhausting - what do I know - I don't feel the love, I feel the waste - I was working so hard and it was useless - there's no connection in them - sometimes I'm more anxious and sometimes more balanced but either way there's no connection, only trying. 15 October Bocelli with Terfel singing the Pearl Fishers' duet - a moment when they're both singing full blast and he suddenly turns to Terfel for an instant, sings at him, then turns quickly away again as if correcting himself. Near the end of the song he reaches his arm to hold Terfel's shoulder. Terfel is awkward, doesn't know how to respond. These moments make us imagine what it is like to be a blind body everyone can see, so that he always seems to be singing his vulnerability, where his partner in the duet is singing protected by eyes. Bocelli as if inside himself. 17 October In Dames rocket 4 when I cut my hair I plunge into abjection. Everything I am vanishes when I'm with people who don't see me, isn't that remarkable? It's the node in the time, letting go of my hair, seductive self. It was dangerous, the seductive self gave me well-being. It was connected to early love, I have energy when people find me glamorous. The abject self happened irrevocably. Stunned with strange people. Blanked. I wanted to let that blanked self speak. It did. So it was brave, it was correct, and it was unfinished. 23 October Angela Hewitt on DVD lecturing on how to play Bach. She's a master of something difficult, and she presents herself in a way that makes me wince at every moment. Red mouth, face paint that doesn't cover the wear under her eyes, high heels and black stockings, her slick red mouth moving oddly when she speaks, her t's much too pronounced. Professional deformation trying to look like what she is not at all - she is grotesque at the same time as being wonderful in what she does best. Couldn't she show herself as what she is now, a worn professional with lifelong sensitive discipline that has cost her all her natural ease. No makeup, comfortable clothes, grey hair and wonky passion, hasn't she earned that? Bought the Vogue Hommes issue featuring older men because I wanted images of how I could look as an old master of something. - Working from the separate acid page in DR5, April 1977, must have been written later but close enough to have the rhythm. I was halfway down and began to read aloud, was in its free speed, really in it, a delighted self. Laughing. Now wondering whether I could use remembering that state to find decisions that would organize me to live there. 24 October A good Sunday. There was sun after weeks and it was mild sweet sun. I was riding from Whole Foods to take my Balboa Park loop from the north and went to stare at the house covered ground-to-eaves with succulents. Took off my sunglasses and they stayed off. Rode the streets closest to the canyon and took the steps down. It was so quiet. There were a few birds jumping on the ground. Smell of mud, grass bent where water had recently been. A path, a slope, three Cleveland sage shrubs, an oak tree, eucalyptus leaves under the tire. And then I didn't climb the asphalt slope past the bridge, but took the bridle path I'd never tried and came up a long switchback that emerged at the lawn bowling court, where I sat on a bench reading the Times magazine women's empowerment issue. And then went home to my couch in the 3 o'clock sun, window wide open, and slept. And then I found Greg - began to - note in the Brockville Recorder and Times that he volunteers in IT at the Augusta Township Public Library. Looking at the map reading old Ontario names, Smiths Falls, Napanee, Belleville, Trenton, Perth, Picton, Cornwall, names Ban Righ 3 girls came from, and then later the accreting sense of them as Upper Canada landscape. 25 October Accreting sense of them as Upper Canada landscape doesn't at all say what I had in my head, which was unsayable - what I felt standing on campus eighteen years old in the fall of 1963, the golden light among thick-trunked trees and old stone buildings. Solidity. And then later the rocky farms and in town the poorer streets with their decrepit hovels whose floors slope. The east Ontario feel. The smell of Cooke's oiled floor and its high ceiling. Presence of the 1700s. Greg is still living amid all of that. Thinking of it I marvel somehow, but at what. It's very obscure, it's wondering at people living at home in that richness - something like that, as if the air in the west is thin and that thinness is normal to me so that rich air seems overwhelming. It's raining again today.
27 October My new friend Herman Melville. I'm listening to Moby Dick in bed. Last night disk 4 of 20. Glad it's a long book. Ishmael a good narrator, thoughtful, friendly and curious in the way I know. He studies Queequeg from bed, fascinated and repelled, and by morning finds himself embraced by his strong arm checkered like the counterpane. A flexible young man, and Melville only ten years older the overmind who sets together self and unconscious body joined for a journey to come. It's not perfectly read, the reader is not as sensitive in rhythm as he should be, but it's vividly particular in New England about 1840. A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment on account of your understanding the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb. Ineffable sociabilities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling - no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content - that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. To Hawthorne a few days after publication, probably 17 Nov 1851. He was 32. - The warm, kind air tonight after dark. Out on the bike because I hadn't been earlier. It's exercise I want - that's new, did I ever want exercise before. Stretching is a chore but the bike isn't, I love the uphill effort and the free sailing both. - Ahab - "This lovely light, it lights not me." 29 October I'm worried about the election - looking at last night's Grey's Anatomy, an ad for Boxer by Obama, pang of anguish, the stupid are resurging. 30 October A nice moment in a dream. I'm inside a ground floor window and see a tall nice-looking man with snow on his hair passing the corner. The woman with him catches my eye and we smile at each other. Something earlier about looking up and across to an attic window lit gold-red, the only window lit, this in an old part of town like Gastown, narrow streets near the harbour. - Called Intergate again about what's wrong with web access. Long conversation, nothing worked etc. Slept. Was getting frantic, needing to do something, lonely. Nothing relevant to do. Went to the laundromat, glared at little children, on the edge of crying. Now I'm ftp-downloading, it is, pub_html, hours of it, on linksys wireless which happened to be there - 31st October Hallowe'en night, four years since Tom moved into Georgia St, 15 years since he and I saw the ewe of god outside her fence and I stood joyful on the hillside in the dark while he smoked beside the Virgin. Checked whether it wd be alright to phone him. How about next Sunday he said, changed his mind, how about now. I took the bike. Sat on his walkway and weeded the pots. A little white china cat he's using as a doorstop, that has in marker on its base, Mac 1907 baby cat. She was born 1905. The ghost who turned my car lights off as we were driving back that night. Yes Mac I did look after your boy. You did right to catch me for him and now you're saying, Okay dear, it's alright to go. The photo I made of him with his mother in the back seat behind him.
"I'm respectable" he said.
Opening the visual work drawer, right away excited but halted. I don't know what it's for or where to enter it. It has to begin technically? With something made, and then many things tried? I want it to take me immediately into a zone of recognized eminence of a different kind. I want it to use my large store of beautiful materials, I don't want to die and have them trashed without being realized. I want an essence in visual/sound creation like I found in theory. I want it to be authoritative, not recessive the way I have been. I want to move out with it the way Gianfranco does, in love and trust rapidly. I want working on it to create stable presence in me. I want it to be mind and world firmly and freely united. I want it recognized in art contexts without conforming to art topics. I want to be able to defend it, speak from it, with recognizable grounded mastery. I want it to defend early love and best abstract intuition in people. Something about lit edges, using the brain knowledgably, finding and building capabilities of the body in relation to the universe. Competence and flair, flare. Slightness of means, that elegance. Cleanness. The sort of moment that has happened with Louie, when attention catches, like the jeep gearing down: this is worth focus. A sensation of grip. The bit of writing Emilee felt it in, a jump in register, electrifying, something speaking through. Like the caustic gearing down in Trapline. 1st November At more than four billion years old, it stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter's night are younger than the planet beneath your feet. For almost 90 percent of its history the planet has been inhabited and shaped by life. The biological mechanisms that first operated in the dawn of life animate the creatures of the Earth to this day, forming an unbroken chain at least 3.8 billion years long. Life has watched continents crash together and tear themselves apart; skies glowing like bright coals; tropical seas frozen into stillness: it has endured. An unending spate of pure luminous energy pours from the Sun in all directions. Eight minutes downstream at the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent. Most is absorbed; this is the energy that drives the winds, makes the waves and currents flow, heats the rocks and warms the sky. A very small fraction of this energy is caught, not by rock and wind and water, but by life. It is this sunlight, endlessly refreshed, that flows through your coffee, your veins. The Earth is open to the sky. Energy from elsewhere floods through it shot through with the light of a continuous creation. Oliver Morton NY Times "Not-so-lonely planet" One looks a gypsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship. 1907 Our work after all is our true Soul. To please the folk of few books is one's great aim. Why do I write all this? I suppose that I may learn at last to keep to my own in that thing which is to life what style is to letters: moral radiance, a personal quality of universal meaning in action and in thought. RF Foster 1997 WB Yeats: a life 7 November Brahms still and again, all day and now at night, Grimaud moving like
a natural thing, like the shadow of a leafy branch in wind, against the
orchestra. I don't get enough of maybe half a dozen moments in the concerto,
and then these hysterical male crescendos I hate, what was that, the priests
and armament bankers having to be flattered, it's a provincialism. Brahms
when he wrote this heavenly sideways leafy scumble was just starting, early
20s. Listening to Kempe on my piano playlist, isn't he the best, so limber and clear, fond, is it - round, somehow. 13 November Long letter from Greg about ethics of w & d. Beautiful bright days with luminous dusks, sliver of blue-silver water under incandescent orange. 16 November There was fog at the window last night, bottom edge of the moon a glow under the top edge of the window. I always lie down gladly, my nice dear bed, hoping to have beautiful thoughts, but I never do have beautiful thoughts or images. I think I'll go to fantasies but even that hardly happens. I just lie there. Sometimes a while when various parts ache. I've learned to feel them attentively and then they clear, as if there's a job the body has to do clearing itself when it is shutting down. This morning slightly hazy sun. Winter weather. It's 8:30, quiet except for street noise and the dim digesting grumble of the fridge in the closet. Tea in bed before a student day. I've cleaned up to the end of London. Was gripped for a lovely week. The notion of voice is very complex ... there's not a voice, there are voices, and which voice comes forward is very contingent on the kinds of resonance that voice finds, whether it can in fact be heard and understood; and in the absence of resonance voice tends to go into silence, it goes into the body .... When a voice is traumatized it goes out of relationship and into silence .... When one person experiences his or her voice as ineffective, as overwhelmed, there's a tendency to take on the voice of the more powerful person, that is the voice of the aggressor, and to come to hear it as one's own voice ... underneath that is a voice that is carrying the truth . You can't argue your way out of dissociation ... the only way is through association ... a brilliant but costly way ... psychological logic of an act ... a third term ... this behavior has a rationale ... it's a wonderful moment of bringing together Both Bridie and Karyn, I read their packets and felt I had nothing to say to them, felt it was useless to say anything to them. Then a couple of days later wrote easily and with some little key. How does that work? I come in jibbing at their wrongness, loathing it, not wanting to touch it, and then maybe just a day later begin at the top and work through it one paragraph after the other, with something like friendly hope, that later may be confirmed. With Katie I didn't need time; is it initially being stopped by feeling they can't understand, and then something adjusts, like journal work, that makes me not feel their not understanding? 18 November Lying in the dark remembering a dream, which is gone now, and then morose about the journal project, that it's trivial (compared to Yeats's enterprise) to show the life of someone who has come only this far, and then that Being about was something large, and then sad wondering at how the men at my defense didn't see what I'd done, how I sat at the margins of my own celebration dinner - how I'm getting what seems exaggerated praise for my shabby films and none for that deep radical frame - how because of that blindness I continue uncertain at the same time as I am certain - child's valiant aloneness on and on - and in the years with Tom - wanting to read him the journal so he would know the valor it took to be with him - and he hearing only that I was insulting him. Friday 19 November Getting toward the end of the thick George Yeats book, which was described as dull in the NYT (and isn't) probably because it is interested in women's things. The biographer picks detail out of letters that I would pick too, children's conversation, houses and gardens, peoples' appearance, weather, clothes, moods, furniture. I skip the politics and anything about the Abbey Theatre. I'm reading it not for the mystical-magical, ignore the poems, but for the company, and in this one the sense of how a philosophical woman lived then as if she was vowed to be a helper. The advantages of a great man's slipstream, a size of life he gave her, and the talents needed. Ann Saddlemyer 2002 Becoming George: the life of Mrs WB Yeats Oxford - This end of my life, watching failure, so different from the Raw forming years when I never doubted my brain. I can be stopped at a light and see a young person walking and feel, they're still in the midst of it, where their body is undoubted natural easy self; I was that. At the same time, because I was wearing the black turtleneck with the chalcedony earrings today, with jeans and the green sneakers, and my hair was smooth and shiny, and clean off the forehead now, I felt young and distinguishedly pretty, and drove fast when I could between the lights. 20 November What to think of his vast armature of theory and crank opinion. What matters is his ear. He could judge by eye but he didn't at all write by eye. He could devise tight little cognitive dances. Does the philosophy matter at all? It gave him standing, it mattered practically. His face at the end was a credit to him, a good whole person carried through from childhood. He was remarkably responsible, in detail with his family and friends and then also with his people the Anglo-Irish and the poets. He promoted and defended hugely, and some of his crank opinion was in the service of them. Was he right about eugenics, lower orders breeding too much? I watch Grey's anatomy, Private practice, Brothers and sisters, even Gossip girl, to see perfect bodies. I need to see them. The standard of acting is very high, the standard of directing is very high, standards taken for granted as industry norm. By that I mean the perfect bodies are skilled bodies too, and live in an elite circumstance that is not of aristocratic lineage but of wide miscegenation, economic scrum. The even larger responsibility of wanting to show as a noble life. He did that for me. When I was in my twenties I had his picture up. [the Sergeant 1908] Insisting on sex in his seventies. Young women he didn't lie to his wife about. Further more he eats a whole herring without gratitude a dignified natural house for intellectual people The gale tears down the winding staircase of the Tower so that when I go out of my room my hair is rushed inside out. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all that into a phrase I say "Man can embody the truth but he cannot find it." I must embody it in the completion of my life. - 1939 I think, a letter. Foster II. The arch-poet 21 November Looking at The Pound era again thinking of a skinny Indo-Chinese girl from Hong Kong on scholarship in Edmonton Alberta poring over a catalogue of Anglo-American literary scraps, educating herself to be a man of the early twentieth century. Sitting for years with this so-foreign material not able to do what Kenner had done, off her rocker, but coming to something of a form for her own displacement. Something she could show. A binding, a having-to-do-with, that joins in likeness, in difference and in modulation all the poem's materials, through which interactive web the syntactic movement flows, abandoning nothing: that is the deepest, the most persistent Provencal intuition. I copied that in 1980 and what more do I know now. The motz el son section is the one I remember (motz y sons). The way I understood language in Being about, as a standing network being accumulated.
- such transitions from diction to diction devices learned from James a mode of thought habitual with him: the steady generosity of response to things happening its pauses, its run of sounds, its tautly paced disclosure running through seven overlapping words setting like beside almost like, to delineate losses and gains, new delicacies, lost intensities
What was he responding to when he read Greek? To rhythms and dictions. an aesthetic of glimpses a change in characteristic sensibility ... sense of diction a renaissance of attention the crystal body of air polyphonic rhyme There are subject-rhymes ... sensibilities may rhyme ... culture rhymes ... a visual rhyme The perception of the intellect is given by a word, that of the emotions in the cadence. certain passionate simplicities That was the quality so many minds in the previous century had toiled after, relating and sorting out languages to disengage it from. whole poems existing as systems of linguistic interaction The force that produced verbal integrities lay potent in the absorption of minds with perceived realities. Minds so absorbed write with pith and concision. Such qualities, engendered by intercourse with a subject, persist in the writing even when we do not know what its subject was. Idiosyncrasy of language derives from attention. Kenner 166 a style energized by perception Natural sciences formed on minute attention produced in the 19th century a new order of descriptive exactness, obligated by the fact that there was no accurate way to reproduce a picture. 167 the poetic energy was discernible in the unstated connections between them rethink the nature of an English poem maximizing three criteria at once ... the vers-libre principle, that the single line is the unit of composition; that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind's eye by naming them; and the lyrical principle, that words or names, being ordered in time, are bound together and recalled into each other's presence by recurrent sounds. held together from within by so many filaments, syntactic, sonoric, imagistic, that any change will be change for the worse 26 November The way Pound fits the network vision I came to, prepared me to see it, and the way both of us had that intuition from being with physical nature. The way his body stands in the photo. Kenner's vortex doesn't quite get it, it's what I describe as writing from a standing net. The 'meaning' is there before (but being modified by, as they come) the words. Translate from that, is what he meant when he said don't bother with the words, translate the meaning. "What matters in art" like "water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion." Also an evolutionary vision, form mutating. And a sentic vision, "the artist's business to find her own virtú," meaning an energetic tone then present in the work to be transmitted. A hundred years ago in art and science and we're still working out of it. Network neuroscience and computers are. All the workings-through in particular there still is to do and against still-strong resistance. - My pay came in with a big refund, and the streets were bright and quiet. Cold. I went to Denny's with the Times for breakfast, steak, and then was there on the esplanade in silent light off quiet water. It had warmed as I was eating. I walked. Carefully. Then parked next to Seaport Village and went along the seawall feeling something unnameable in the wide space above the glazed-off water. I felt it without grasping it, like a faint ecstasy, not mine, wide crystalline quiet invisibly intense? Was walking there feeling I don't go anywhere because I think I won't settle into enjoying it without Tom, I'll feel restless and unconnected, nothing will happen. And it was like that but still it was a remarkable morning. Greg tonight writing to say he'd google-earthed La Glace. 28 November Hither, & thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to & fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty Leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. Moby D 2 December Had an appointment with Thy to ask about the atlas being offside. She said it's to the right and the one below to the left. She pulled on my head so my neck would stretch, which felt good somehow. She was exclaiming quietly as she did it, and afterward said it was because when she began she could only feel the pulse on the left side but then afterward it came on strong on the right. When the session was finished she was telling me I should walk and I was saying why I don't like to, it feels so heavy. But then I kept going past my usual reserve, I was watching myself tell, watching tears and the pressure to hold them back. I said when I was younger I limped but didn't feel myself limping, but now I feel it, and I see my shadow limping and I don't like it. She said I shouldn't talk to myself like that and I said but I love beauty. She didn't understand that it's a loss worth grieving and that I was needing to do it. I didn't completely let myself; it was escaping from me more than I had consented to. And then I blurted that I love to look at her, "You're so right." Is that abject? Is it more abject to show humiliation than to hide it? I don't think so though to her it will have seemed so. We like each other, we work well together, but she is young and only middling smart and she didn't know what to do with my sadness. I let her off the hook and changed the subject, but I am understanding that a semiconscious grief presses in me more than I know.
Insofar as the writer's work is exact "it maintains the precision and clarity of thought ... the health of thought outside literary circles." It is one sinuous suspended sentence, feeling its way and never fumbling. Its gestures raise anticipatory tensions, its economy dislodges nothing. Such a poem fulfills a syntactic undertaking, purely in a verbal field Each phrase reaches forward We are drawn past unit after unit of attention by the promise of ... a waiting for the structure initiated by ... to declare itself carried through by essentially narrative devices to answer tastes a long time forming and still hardly articulate 4 December Saturday morning. I've almost finished Dames rocket but I haven't come to a good account of its - what shd I call it - formal work? Visual intuiton? I was going through looking for the psychological work and power struggle but skipping the 'art' as mistaken or not mine. But I was sensitive in visual ideas then in ways I am not now. For instance something about transparent form that Pound has too. "As glass seen under water," "the waves taking form as crystal," "the crystal body." 5 December That Pound's Seven Lakes canto is his lyric "still point at the heart of the work" and that living in the lake house I used to go to the Seven Lakes Motel to eat lunch.
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