in america volume 22 part 2 - 2011 january-february

work & days: a lifetime journal project

7 January 2011 Reading stories. Thought of them at the fountain yesterday. 5 years old still in the first little house, supper table, my dad gets the idea to teach me to read, puts the Family Herald in front of me. He's impatient. I don't get it. 6 years old in a lumbercamp, evening in kerosene lamplight. I'm sitting on a lower bunk in a small cabin with a book in my lap. I suddenly get it. I'm sounding out words one after another, the whole story opens ahead of me. 7 years old in a reading circle in Clearbrook Elementary School grade 2. We're reading The boxcar children. I love the thought of four children living on their own in a boxcar in the woods next to a stream. My classmates are reading in turn around the circle and I am pages ahead of them reading silently. Grade 3, new classroom with shelves full of new books. I find a fairytale collection and then more. Sit in my desk at noon hours reading through all of them, intent. Later grades, for instance grade 5. There's a cot in the hall next to the principal's office and the teachers' room, where kids can lie till the school buses come if they're sick. At the foot of the cot is a cabinet with glass doors, inside it a collection of books for teachers to borrow. When the hall is empty during classes I go and pick a book, hide it with my lunch pail. Later put it back and borrow another. My mother eventually sees that I'm reading a novel in which a gypsy woman fucks someone under a tree. She complains to the teachers, the cabinet is locked. The books were for instance Thomas B Costain The robe, A tree grows in Brooklyn, something about a Scottish doctor, AJ Cronin The keys of the kingdom, bestsellers. Elizabeth Goodge Green Dolphin Street. The smell of '40s books with slightly ragged edges on quite porous paper. I loved being taken to other places. I loved the houses and streets and furniture. Armchairs, curtains, rugs, chintz. Words for what the world is like elsewhere. 8 Grade 9. Mr Dyck is lecturing about something. I have a story book I'm reading in my lap under the desk. Mr Dyck stops, asks me a question to catch me out. I answer it correctly. He grins. For many years walking with Judy and Paul from the schoolbus stop through quiet country, I'm carrying my storybook open in front of me, reading as I walk. I remember the first passages of Kim with what was around me as I walked: the grove of older poplars on the fenceline on the left in yellow leaf, four o'clock on an early September afternoon, the dirt road, Judy and Paul up ahead with their lunch pails. Our first visit to the Grande Prairie public library, winter evening in a large old room with a high ceiling. I'm sitting on the floor next to the lowest shelf in the children's section. I've opened Emily of New Moon and I'm ravished with pleasure and recognition. My mother subscribes to the Reader's Digest book club. We're sent Readers' Digest condensed books for free. On Sunday late afternoons when they don't have visitors she may read aloud to us. I remember a book about building a house on the Virgin Islands. At these times our dad lies on the couch next to us pleased and companionable. - At the science museum a little video of a young roundworm next to one of an old roundworm, the young sleek and frisky, the old lumpy and almost motionless. Two boxes yesterday with my audio equipment: headphones, recorder, mic, mic stand. I've sent for a dead kitten. [Opposite page, notes for movie night at res: The world without us Tosca's kiss Jung: The world within Dinner with Brakhage Brahms and the little singing girls Woman as protagonist: the art of Nancy Spero Distant voices, still lives The long day closes Of time and the city Burden of dreams] 9 Sunday I sat down to Dave's book and finished line editing it, then went out to laundry and the weekend Times, then came home and cleaned hard in case it makes a difference to the bad ache these last days. 11 Light lectures - I came upon a whole cache of materials I assembled years ago when I was trying for a grant. Looking at it now I go into a tizzy. I should finish it. Is it a book? - Have a lot of other things to do. 1. finish w&d 2. finish learning publishing and get books out ([the college] stuff) 3. learn HDV and work on Orpheus which is poems too 4. keep body going best as possible 5. mind and land book (garden stuff tapering off) 6. housetruck 7. seeing and 'seeing' 8. my kids - means going to London and Victoria 9. notes in origin DVD Less time on [the college] stuff   Round up as much money as possible   Think of the book as chapters   How many     4   1. light 2. body 3. simulation 4. love   Is that it? YES Can I keep focus on these   Do much more in a day     YES Paradisal marveling - I mean a certain state of enmarveled pleasure in the world's richness, for instance in reading a dictionary, or reading certain books about plants or light. What's it like, joy, but as if a bit stunned? "So much is given to be found." Fluctuations are typical of a neural system that has sustained damage Fusiform face area active also in birders and car experts Autostereograms - stereoscopic illusions 12 Do you understand light   Is there such a thing   Our language is wrong   Do you think you can explain it to me   Light is a condition of space   Does light travel     no Were the light metaphysicians right   Is light god     no Is there a god     no Is light the whole of the universe     no Is there really space   But something propagates through space   Potential   Forming potential  Re-forming potential   Is this important   Light doesn't really exist as a substance   We think of it as a substance   Is there something you want to say     graduate, from love woman's withdrawal and exclusion Deal with that first?   The little intrusion about Tom   Can't I just go on with light     no I run into Paul Churchland at a conference or some large meeting. We're going to find seats but are stopped in a little side corridor. My shirt is off. He's running his hands over my skin. I'm nervously feeing he's after my right breast. He rubs his hand up and down over it. I say someone's going to see us and put my shirt back on. He goes to sit near the front and I head toward the back. Am sitting with a group of younger women students, some of whom I know. He comes and sits on my right. I try to introduce him to the women around us. One of them wonders what's going on. I say it's that someone famous has sat down with us and ripples are spreading outward. This morning a little yen for the early time with Tom, when I used to fall asleep in his arms in his room - what I am feeling when I say that is his arms as they were then, his strong arms, his beautiful solid bulge of bicep. Then I am angry that he didn't take care of himself for me. - That's obviously father stuff, is there any more to know about it? And Paul is the philosopher, so is there more I should see about the dream     YES What I'm withdrawn from is child's longing   I'm just supposed to feel it   That the philosopher has child's longing   And that distorts     no Longing is part of light   Reaching     YES Light is a reaching condition of space   Reaching doesn't arrive it's a tension-toward   Light is a tense condition of space     YES A tensed condition     YES Tension moves     YES Attention   Binds the sky together     YES Action at a distance?     no Does all space co-operate in making 'light'   Are you saying nothing travels     Will you lead me   'Light' is the simultaneous influence of everything on everything   Local-I being about star-there   Our sun is an extended locality     This is too big for my lecture     no Should it be about vision     no Seeing   Three parts   Was hoping you'd say 2   The last one is images     YES Second is bodies in light     YES First is light - I'm not going to be ready     no Am I going to be able to get a book out   Are you sure   Light is not particles   But is conceived as   But light is waves   Quanta means stepped effect   Like digitization   The quantization depends on the receiver   You're saying tension propagates   A tensed condition propagates   But no substance propagates   But is there a medium for the propagation of tension   Space   The substanceless medium   Is propagation of tension 'time'     no 'Energy' is tension     Is 'energy' always about destabilizing structure?  Structure is stable tension     YES Destabilizing a structure of tensions   Bodies need destabilizing to hold complex structure   Always maintained with work   A body can never rest     YES Its complex structure has a will to maintain itself   And that will is the substructure of DNA   In concert with surroundings     Is trying to see it at this level correct   Can I do more today     no [Opposite page audio notes: coat over camera for sound NTG-3 shotgun mic for reducing background scooping is when you mic from below voiceovers - VO overhead large diaphragm condenser mic - NT2A, NT2000 warm rich tone, clarity of high 12" natural - pop filter sound blankets to absorb reverb, furniture pads podcast - the Broadcaster $420 internal pop filter - close to mic blow test distance when you blow on your hand you start to not feel it change position when it pops cut across the mic - speak a bit across it when you're alone beware monitor whine use XLR gear so it isn't noisy windsock is a dead kitten, fits over a zeppelin x cuts out some high frequency if it's velvety rather than furry, less] Note from Daichi. They want me to show Pictures on pink paper. I'm excited. I'll bone up. 4 nights in a b&b a block from his studio. N2-3 edit today. There are how many Up north pages? At a day a page and then more checking and linking and maybe even transcribing. Scanning, and then re-edit the edits. Maybe after Edged out is done. Some of what I've edited out because I don't now recognize it, I might later remember? I don't understand light, I've opened it too deep, can't understand it without re-understanding the whole of physics. What do I know in experience. I often feel it as love. It is what reveals space. Space is experienced expansion as well as something assumed when not experienced. Free motion in space given by light is pleasure. Good light gives place as love. For instance if I turned off one of these three lamps the room would be less comforting. It isn't experienced as minute vibration, it is experienced as a standing condition on surfaces. In its theory we're far from experience. And yet shadows say it is thrown from a source. What do the wave structure people say, exactly. When spherical standing waves influence each other's frequency, one gaining and the other losing <'exchange energy'><'energy seems to be transported'> the exchange appears to travel with the speed of the in-waves of the receiving resonance, which is c. when single exchanges occur we see 'photons' as discrete interactions illusion of the photon particle. particle effect Resonant modulation rather than transport. Milo Wolff underlying unity of substance. Space the one ground, the one thing, a continuousness of spherical wave structures. [Times photo of Obama grinning at Clinton at Holbrooke's funeral, with Kofi Annan looking on] At Scott's this morning laying out a hose, starting to imagine the path's line and the planting. He said yes to opening the space. I walked around Walter Anderson's and bought two hellebores, two hibiscus tiliacareus, two matilijas. Finally have the spot for the matilijas. Find an Aphrodite to put among them. Under the windows - how much room do I have - michelia? Icebergs. Salvia Wendy's Wish, magenta velvet. Sky pencil, myrtle. Other cerise colors. Michelia alba. Corner of the pad: icebergs and one cypress sempervirens Tiny Tower, or birdbath. [Back corner] is my big question - what to do with that beautiful triangle. Giant strelitzia, with ferns, periwinkle. 14 New Garneau slippers. Another morning looking at plants. Rowen failed philosophy, C+ in English, C in anthropology, B in logic. His dinghy was wrecked. He's paying rent. He's finding Michael awkward. This semester logic, two blocks of Mandarin, experimental psych. I was telling him about Michael when I first knew him, how funny he was, his stories about being a farm kid, his heart, the way he fell in love with his baby and was completely given to him. We both livened up, hearing it. [Sketch of Scott's back yard, plant lists] Is there something I can do for Rowen   He's afraid to find out his limits   Is he correct in that     no Will he do the counselor   Okay tell me what I can do for him     intimate, power struggle, withdrawal, from anger In intimate power struggle he withdraws from anger   Withdrawing from anger is tamping his will     YES As long as he doesn't succeed he doesn't like himself   He learned it from Michael     YES I kept anger with Ed   That was the making of me   It's harder when your parents are pathetic   He needs to find his steel, I WILL NOT fail   He has it in him     YES Is he afraid of anger     no Should he do martial arts   Persistence in opposition   Imagining strategy and ferocity   He's afraid he'll find out he's not as good as he believes, so he flunks himself   Is it stress management     no A quest   To find his warrior   Get him Michael Meade   He needs to be willing to find his limits   With the intention of surpassing them   Was the boat a bad idea     no Is there more you want to say     no 2011 is the most significant turning point in your life. It brings your true power, talent and personality to the fore - forever! You've held something back in the last 15 years. Not any longer, be ambitious all year . Take risks, bet on your talents, Pisces. Dissolve restrictive ties. Best money from gov't, institutions. First five months of 2011 earning luck. Unexpected events loom in money March onward - for eight years. Do you agree with that   I held back something in particular   process, triumph, anger, exclusion Self promotion     no I'll make a video     YES My journal will be discovered   ?     YES Is that it?     no Being about will be discovered     YES The mbo site     YES Ant bear   What will we know     YES   If I do it will it help Rowen do it     no Is it worth spending the time on Up north   Do I have to do something to make them discovered   Anything else you want to say     the Work, balance, instead of withdrawal, in losses Focus on it     YES I worked on Tom instead   I've worked on students instead     YES   Do I actually want to be more successful     YES It's despair about other people   I'm settled into despair about other people   I'm power that doesn't radiate   It needs to be a general quest     Can I figure out more about light     YES I should do a lecture I've already done   16 Woke thinking I'd finally get to Ant Bear today. Answered Greg's overnight letters, cleaned my house, including washing the floor and scrubbing the kitchen stones. Watered plants, cooked lunch. Finally I opened an Ant Bear file, uncomfortable in the chair, can I move this file to the other computer, it's not noon yet, I'll go to the farmers' market. Buy yellow earrings, and dried fruit, which I shdn't eat, come home, try to look at the Ant Bear file, three minutes of notes, have a nap, wake sore, eat dried fruit and almonds since I'm sore anyway, no more Ant Bear today, go to N2-4 and there am with Luke and Ed and Mary and Judie and Helmer while we were all still young enough to be together, not knowing we were not going to go on together. I crashed then looking ahead to losing Jam and now that isn't the loss I care about. I care about what was my own and she was not. 17 A horrible call from Mary Saturday morning. quite a loud coarse voice, "I didn't get any of the guys so ...," meaning she was desperate to talk to anyone and I'm a ways down on the list. I said I don't want her to phone so often, it jars me. Then that loud black voice, "You want me to look after m'self, alright, I will!" She seemed deranged, it was such a hard stupid voice. I felt it as monstrous. And at the same time was quailing at having to deny her. Wondering whether that call was why I slid into binging Saturday and dried fruit yesterday. I was freaked. Monday morning, a day like summer. There were doves standing in their dish waiting for their morning gift. I'll go to Scott's later, but what am I doing now. Three weeks and a bit. 19 At Bread & Cie, dusk. I've come from the jobsite where they've poured a fine concrete curb. This morning bought a small dark magnolia and the giant strelitzia. Saw a michelia doltsopa in large white flower that will go between the windows. - Still thinking about the planting. Almost finished the N2 edit. Bits I can fill out and bits I can't at all. Have to say something about why I was writing that way. Wanted to transcribe the way memory came to me, and wanted to note interiority, what the little silent voice was saying while things happen. Does it work for me, as my own reader. Often not, but sometimes it does give me what it was like monitoring, monitoring, uncertain of so much. Not knowing what little thing would be decisive or a clue. Jam and I worked on the assumption that we were in telepathic contact, not only with each other, and likely we were, but the uncertainty would make us foolish, worries about influence. We were so unstable in our moods, and tweaked each other brutally on the assumption that any secret would close our contact. Those are factual questions I could decide now, but then everything stayed in suspension, I was in constant suspension, in the midst of it, though, so tender in affection and humiliation. Could I have been like that if I'd been writing connected prose? Wd writing more solidly have shut me down? Was the close monitoring necessary to connect something? Was it brain damage I couldn't help? I think of it as intentional and a method, but was it self-harm? Has the time's work succeeded enough so I can decide it was worth something? A matrix in which new things could form out of chaotic flux. I was constantly going for broke, looking for essence, willing to ask. Jam and I in that effort so strained and crushed, and yet she went along with it amazingly. We connected in spite of such a degree of personal strain, it seems heroic and hysterical. Do I get physically younger when I read that 34-year-old? When I read her I do feel the sappy springy pretty young-woman body of then. I feel my short hair and I'm lighter. I go out feeling that and people look at me with more liking. - You may remember that, on both our spring driving trips down South, we stopped late at night at an enormous truck stop out in the middle of nowhere. The first time, you found a great book to buy for us: William Gass's novel "Omensetter's Luck." And the next year, defying all odds of finding literature twice on a truck stop paperback book rack, we purchased Vladimir Nabokov's memoir, "Speak, Memory." In fact, I have my copy of the Nabokov in front of me now. (It is inscribed by you, as follows: "Greg Morrison, Gulf Truck Stop near Ashland, Virginia, May 17, 1968, by tradition.") - in a note about Obama's speech. 20 CFMDC curator's show, Rimmer, Daichi, Kerr, Notes in O. It'll screen at LA Film Forum and Cal Arts in mid-March. Earlier in San Fran and later in Toronto. I'm low energy, tired these last days, it's hurting to walk, don't want to bike or stretch. - Someone yesterday looking at Frank after his life, the 1961 journal. Then the 2001 intro, which is modest and clean. I'd like it read more. Were we picking up other people telepathically   Was it true that any secret wd close our contact   With ourseves too   Wd writing connected prose have closed me     no Could I have     no There was stylistic influence     that wasn't it Drugs     YES Was the close monitoring necessary     no Did I gain something in writing     YES 'Depth'?   no Honesty   Could I have gained it w/o the close monitoring   no Was it self-harmful     no But it made me lose touch with action   Was the matrix of vulnerability necessary to the work I did   Is it my best work     no Do I get temporarily younger     no   Is Being about my best work   In art is Trapline     no Work & days   Which is to say the whole life   Is it going to be recognized before I die     Jam was the only companion I cd have had in that time   She was crazy enough to come with me   Wd I have been better alone     no She didn't mind my leg   She was very stretched     YES Floundering   I didn't realize how stretched   Did she want the stretch     no Did she buy the principles     YES In principles she was closer to me than they   I coerced her     YES Didn't expect you to say yes to that     struggle, mourning, overview of losses I forced her to do that   Wd she have been a poet without that     no Jam didn't mind my leg     YES Neither wd have had me even if they'd been free     no Cheryl wdn't   Trudy wd?     Go to LA in March   Will anything come of that   - Is this the solution - don't lecture this time, show pictures - sci vis - I so am not wanting to make up one of my strenuous lectures. 5 minute window of accident-proneness this late morning. I put my Starbucks cup on the console while I was collecting tea jar and newspaper to climb out of the jeep where I'd parked on 6th. Saw it was precarious but thought it wd hold. It didn't, slid and splashed into the passenger well. Then I was on the sidewalk with the door open mopping up attentively when the jeep jerked hard and loud. A little red car had backed into it. The car door had banged the top of my head where I can still feel it. An old man walked back to check - a churchgoer, was my impression, a nice man, the English quality of quiet integrity though he was American. - It's a bit after nine. A little burst of fullness. Brahms with Grimaud, a fresh white candle, the cyclamen with four pink flowers held high above the leaves, the orchid with 3 new blooming stalks, the rabbitsfoot fern explosive, Padmasambhava every day in his spotlight pink red and orange. Scott emailed at eight wondering what's happening, I explained the concrete curb, which is beautifully done - tight and precise and implicitly anchored in the right way - I'm proud of the curve. He's written back saying he likes it. It was a risk, because it's dramatic. There was that, and a note from Greg, earlier a note from Tom about Patti Smith. And I'm still in the atmosphere of the first summer with Frank, the bright playful adored girl with her natural friend, recording her exciting days with easy narrative grace, wasn't it? I had sparkle   Did I ever have sparkle with Tom     no I'm at my best when I'm adored   I had sparkle with Louie and Rob   I've been too long without it   Is it necessary to alternate   To learn     YES Margo sort of adored me     YES Today I planted: matilija x2, passiflora x2, myrtle x2, magnolia, raphiolepsis, giant strelitzia, cistus. Tomorrow 4 icebergs, 2 artichokes, 2 salvia Wendy's, 2 Japanese pencils, 1 pittosporum, 2 hellebores, 2 ficus, 2 raphiolepsis, 1 cistus, michelia doltsopa, Cleveland sage x2. Need hard holes: distictis, one iceberg. Also: strawberry trees x2, hibiscus on the front porch. Use? Hydrangea x1, daylily x2, fern, agapanthus. Reiner today found me online to ask about my mom. The planting is almost done, two days changing the shape of Scott's back yard so it will have classical magic. The mulch loose black and hot, laid thick on planted beds. The clean curb just the right width. 22 What Susan's up to. Her magazine is doing what. Margot has a food column. She reviews books and interviews authors, with links to Amazon. The magazine is cumulative, she adds new stuff when she likes. She gets to write about funny religious instruction mentioning her childhood. She gets to design a magazine with lots of insignificant images. She gets to chat up New York and other personalities. She sponsors Goldberg's column! "Tens of thousands of passionate readers." She links to a speech by Tom Robbins, that manic baboon. She quotes Lise telling her to write prose instead of poems and uses it as an example of not feeling she has time - so specious - the poems were brilliant but wdn't give her "tens of thousands of passionate readers," only half a dozen very fine ones. So I'm angry at her, and she'll be at the res being a star and I'll be cramped needing to avoid her and minding that I'm not a star particularly. - Saturday morning. I sneaked into Scott's back yard to see how it looks finished. It's exquisite. Exquisite, exquisite. I wasn't sure about the strawberry trees but their brightness in the corners is the perfect finish. The stepping stones look just right with the gravel and curb around them. The curb forced the right reshape to the lawn. The giant strelitzia makes best use of the peaked wall. It was one of my deft easy mammoth acts of talent. I like that Scott says "your vision" because it is vision. - Is he going to use it for pandering to biotech clients with drugs and swinging? I suspect. Drunk women in high heels stumbling from the kitchen to the pool room with its pornographic pictures. I won't say nonetheless. 23 Sunday evening, terrace of the Upstart Crow. I've thought of the kitsch galleries of Seaport Village for Scott's Aphrodite, and after the libe this aft I wandered directly into one and was shown a striking naked girl who might be just right for a niche witih matilija poppies and butterflies - $8000, we'll see if he likes her that much. I liked saying "I'm a garden designer" and having two people liking to imagine the niche with me, imagining her floating in it. I'm excited to be out. Between the trees the sky over Coronado pale orange over pale silver blue with a dark band between them, a few street lights, are they, in the other direction three half grown Monterray pines on a little hill, who have been together long enough to have one shape of open-textured grace, a star in a notch at their crown, darkening night blue around them. - She came out just now and turned on the terrace lights. Will I stroll. Earlier I went through N4 fast because it was away from the lake house and I wasn't making an edit version. Now N5 will be long, 6 parts and maybe the best. I'm seeing the constant quite global work of noting and refining notes, going through choosing again and often again. It's a kind of work I've seen no one do and I was doing it knowing not much about what it was for, but with refining and finding certainty always. Making myself a world much wider than I was being given anywhere, so beautiful and boundless. 24 Anglophone speech fellowship Prestige varieties of a language 25 Jeans fitting so nice. I feel happy when they are loose at the waist. Wonderful spring days. Street pears white in the park, a little nest in a bare palo verde, not high overhead. Hummingbird tail sticking out. These days I never want to cook - want to go to Whole Foods and spend $10 on a pile of bright clean salad that somehow lasts me till bedtime. Luke this morning wrote "4th day at the British, love it. And who knew there wd be SO many great looking brainy women." My plot to have excellent grandchildren. 26 Wednesday morning, have just finished going through N5, which is the coming-through volume, after a summer alone in the lake house. Mended, more than mended, humming. A beautiful time with Ed and Mary, balanced, and in the complex uncertainties of work. There's more to do in Up north, jpgs and other links, but it'll be ready to be my resource. Except for money I was living perfectly - the beautiful house, the beautiful world and weather, yoga, good dreaming, the right kind of contacts simple and loved, wonderful books, more emotional independence, an art network but at enough distance. Physics lit up by poetics: maximized sight and maximized sound. Is it worth paying attention to dreams     no Was it ever   Were the dreams better then     no I don't need the same thing   Did you like that time   Shd I always live like that     no Is the work as good as I think   Is it recognizable now   In poetry contexts   Have I edited correctly   Is GW better     no In the social mode   Is N the place to go on from     Greg is now a plodding know-it-all   Was he always     no 27 Along the lower trail in Balboa Park luscious green grass and yellow oxalis. Sent my invoice and before and after photos. These days two-ways restless, don't want to be inside, garden pleasure got me, and my bum and thigh muscles burn when I sit, even on the couch. Hands too. 28 Only two weeks to Montreal and I have to get two workshops ready without any strong impulse. Don't want to lecture. Don't want to be in my confident professor self. So make it images and make it improv response to - But what if anything do I want to be learning now? I loved Kenner again, that's been the best thing this sem. My eye rises to the foot of the bed where in gold letters it says The Complete Works. Greece, the Renaissance, a green thing, a clock, a phone, a lamp and Padmasambhava in the best of colors, and a bit of bark from the day after the last long fast, when I found the carp and lotus. - Scott and I standing on his new bluestone platform this morning looking down at the path. I say "If it weren't for drunk ladies in high heels we wdn't need the stepping stones." Scott says "If it weren't for them life would not be worth living," touching my shoulder quickly to say don't hold it against me. This day steady coverage of the uprising in Egypt. I'm sore and restless, shd be working on lectures or Ant Bear and don't have traction, am flapping, sleep, try to read, scrounge for something to watch on computer-TV, Netflix. 29 It was a bucket of warm water, and it was slowly poured over the top of my head. It went down over me, except it didn't just go down over me; I felt it go through me. It went all the way to my feet and went out the heels of my feet. I realized the pain was gone. I can't explain that washing. All I can tell you was it went through me and I felt it go. I. intro - the beautiful land of life II. light - it is light that does the making III. light's creatures - beings coevolved with light IV. comprehensive seeing - a culture for knowing by seeing V. loved states of light - art photographs and film VI. bib - the community of the question - I'm proud of two things this moment - no, three. I have a new fridge, a little silver one replacing the hideous brown clunker that's been here since Brenda carried it up the steps in her high heels. I've placed it a bit higher in the shelves - cd do more probably. It was at the Goodwill on the way to the laundromat for $30 and it's new. I gave the charitable ladies a deposit to borrow their dolly and after Michael tapped me for $2 in the parking lot I tapped him back to help me get it upstairs, and there it is now where I actually have left the closet door open to see it. It's a light little low energy-use thing that costs $85 online. Secondarily proud to have thought to ask online how to get the sticker glue off it. Eucalyptus oil. #2 proud is my fiscal summary as of this morning. Pd off the sound equipment debt and now have nothing on any of my cards, and will have 6500 owed me by my birthday, which will mean, counting what I have on hand, I'm clear of the debt to Rowen with about 3500 toward enterprises. #3 is having washed the sheets and the floor, Saturday work. #4 could be two of the section titles this morning. #5 definitely Scott's path and the joyfulness of the work for everyone. "I come back here and it's instant serenity" said Scott. Fading end of the afternoon of another basking day, cloud in the west. Mary's 87th yesterday. She says she was depressed and isn't now. Pleased that the cyclamen is finally used to its pot and has a whole flock of hovering blooms. The orchid has kept putting out new stalks. #6 that my waist is firm now - really - on all sides but the pooch. 30 #7 bp was okay yesterday morning. - Was in Horton Plaza this morning buying grapefruit body butter and grapefruit soap at Body Shop and socks at Macy's. A lot of socks. In the mirror when I was trying on a jacket I saw that my time for tight jeans is over, though I'm trim. I'm too small now, a small woman with a large old lion's head. I don't look like a nice motherly woman, I look like a massive-minded estimable, craggy in spite of earrings and turtleneck. How should that person dress? If somebody loved me would I look better     (twirls) no Did you like how I look   It's so gigantic   So unpretty     YES Wd you say I earned that look     YES Is there anything I can do to improve it     no It's so unloveable     no But who wd love it     come through, lovers, friendship, unconscious Someone who has come through into conscious love and friendship?   Someone who can see the life that made the head   31 Haunting dream of a dehydrated baby. We were digging for it in a pile of compost and branches, I remembered it was already born, went around the pile and found it in a little basket looking quite dried out. We had forgotten it for days. The young man was going for the car but I ran bathwater and got into the tub with it. It plumped up but was tiny, three tiny babies in my palm. Regret and remorse. 1 February American Veda. Why am I reading this book. To get a sequence for some of my influences, to track the body/pagan strand in it. Vedas - Vedic era 2nd and 1st millennia BCE East of the Indus River Collection of the world's oldest 'sacred' texts Buddhism a revision of it Rick Fields How the swans came to the lake Tantra and Sikhs also derive Main influence the philosophy of the Vedanta = Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, Brahma sutras And the practices of yoga Compatible with mbo: 1. Ultimate is one 2. self is part of it 3. 'ego' is restrictive, dissoc 4. ways of dissoc and integration He says karma and reincarnation not necessarily included. Emerson b.1803-1882 abolition and sufferage, natives, x commerce and dogma. Boston freethinkers science, love of nature, experience of intuitive knowing. Access to the Upanishads Hegel, etc - in England Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake - lectured to Thoreau in 1837. Journal of the Bhagavad Gita It was as if an empire spoke to us ... large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence the wise silence, the universal beauty ... the eternal One Under this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of Being. ... the whole. The Dial was a Transcendentalist journal, Margaret Fuller. Whitman's devotional songs. Krishnamrti 1895-1986 lived at Ojai near Santa Barbara. - asked, as St Fancis had done, to be placed upon the bare ground to die HV Morton 1969 A traveler in Southern Italy Methuen Am I going to be this sore for the rest of the week   Rest of the whole of February     YES Am I ever again going to be not sore     no Is life worth living that way     yes Is there anything I can do     no Will there be reprieves   Is it this place     no Lovelessness     no Estrogen     no Food allergy     no Postpolio   Dust allergy     no Mold allergy     no Candida     no Bad digestion     no Are supps useless     no Does slow breathing help   Does stretching help     no Does stretching make it worse     no Does biking make it worse     no The garden work made it worse     YES 3 Tom knocked yesterday, said the wind had blown him across the park - a cold Santa Ana blowing the palm fronds south - he is willing to ask and I had lots to eagerly tell and show, as to an old friend. How was he. Not eating well, thin-faced with a high round pot of organ fat - working steady, he says - he showed me a woman singer he's yearning over - didn't call it that, but was transfixed showing her to me - a right pick, womanly and feeling, not a babe. Had a good present for me, Red Cross emergency kit for the jeep. I gave him all the books I was done with. Sitting across from him eating breakfast at Maria's in North Park, told him about seeing myself in the three-way mirror at Macy's. "I'm not feminine anymore, no one will love me." He said something about clean radiance which didn't exactly disagree. He approves of the new jacket and hates the old one. I asked. Summary: we're alright. Dreamed last night I was looking at a stepped stone wall in front of Paul K's house. When I turned there was Laiwan at a table next to a small house across the street. I walked toward her and a Chinese mythical beast lifted into the air from her driveway. I saw as it flew past that it was a future transportation device, a sort of minibus carrying passengers. - Haven't found an image of it. Body of a horse, long neck, head with pointed ears standing upright - a bit like an Assyrian leopard's head? But no, more Chinese. Another dream that I'm flying around a very high central pole on a long tether, maybe half a mile long. Also another house renovation. Last night scanned tree planting slides for N6. - Two notes from Jaes, one before and one after she went to see the woman she loved when she was 15. "All the cobwebs of the past washing away related to the breakthrough I made while with you in the cave of memory." - Whole day on N5 and other links - more to do. 4 Load all of Up north though there's more detail throughout. Reading those months I keep being surprised in love for Ed and Mary, their company, the quality of the time we had together then. I feel nothing of that for those I was so anxious about then - it is as though the crazed exogamy of young adulthood has evaporated and I simply want to be with my own people - isn't it odd. - Which isn't to say that I want Mary phoning me. I want them then, when they were part of my country and I could decide to fly up the road to see them and then go home to my own self there. And Helmer and even Bernice are part of the feeling though they are not family, because they claimed me. There's an ache of something like regret that I can't thank them. I found a paperback copy of The road at the Episcopal goodwill on 5th and am rereading it. I'm feeling that it's related to what I said above - the man's situation like anyone's traveling on with death certain though not yet, in company with a child to be kept alive through ordeals, in a world that can't be restored. He was 2006-1933=73 when it was published. Won't use semicolons he says, but isn't scrupulous about lexicon - bloomery, hydroptic. Saturday Feb 5 The show in Montreal billed as Erotics of attention: films of Ellie Epp. Looking at close-ups of slides today. Meeting has to be 100%. Red trunks best at 25% or seen small. Ditch best at 16%. The notice for Erotics has gone up, 17 clicks into the index page, mostly in QP. Granular synthesis stereo texture. Can I use the software. - I worked today - Emilee's letter was there first thing and I replied which left me off the hook and a film maker suddenly. Building a cosmological imagination The film tells a human's being as such Whispers it I'm preparing my film self for the event. Then I'll take the film self to [the college] and see if that works. not a biography, a tonality a tone of time and place to speak with the unspeaking selves in them a reach in love My eye keeps going to the cross-legged figure in her concentric circles, with her palm held forward - it looks like a woman to me. 6 Looking at grain notes feeling that what I want to do in film has been thought about in other arts for many years and yet wd be new in film - 'abstraction' - new as synoptic, the enterprise is boundless. Synesthetic effect. Thinking I'll need to be ready to talk about it. Can I do something with these     yes And language   Something intelligent     YES And beautiful   A certain distance   Space from scale     YES Something about seeing     YES Something engineering attention     YES Something about framing     YES Something from my language collection   Using a voice that isn't mine   Tom's?   Laiwan's   Mine sometimes   Learn from Lis     YES Solid system   Natural complexity     YES Perceptual situation - world, world mediums, body, rep mediums, and again Is this the commissioned movie?     Selection frame dotted and moving Different colors Track very slowly across while there's language Pulse Swarm Slow pan Slow zoom Overlay of still of whole or detail at diff size   part 3 in america volume 22: 2010-2011 december-may work & days: a lifetime journal project