| in america volume 24 part 4 - 2012 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Mesa Grande 1st March 2012 Thursday morning - the sky is closed in to the nearest hills, 6:55, grey light, small spots of snow, wet ground pale green. The nearest oak looks thinned, less pretty. Snow-pruned. Large branches fallen all around the house. Two and a half weeks, aren't there stories to tell. Bob at Robert's Automotive showing me the deep soft mouse nest on the engine. Telling me how to get into 4-wheel drive on the fly. Remedies for mice - the smell of bleach. How was it with Tom. I flew in Saturday night, was sitting on the edge of one baggage carrousel waiting for my bag to arrive on another, when Tom showed up in work clothes after his day. He'd come from University Town Center and was carrying food. First sight: his hair's cut very short and his head looks small. But glad he's there. He'd made my bed and turned the electric blanket on in his so we could cuddle and watch TV. He got better looking. He wanted me to see the newscasters he likes. Sunday morning early I said I'd take him for breakfast, Denny's in North Park, all the while telling him residency stories, making him laugh. We had to get back for 9 o'clock TV. Afterward went for a walk down into the canyon, I with my stick. Came back with pink-flowering eucalyptus and hung it from a vase on the mantle. Sunday night more TV, looking for Oscar dresses on channels that weren't showing them. I kept falling asleep on his shoulder. Monday I ran around, mail, H&R Block for hours, it rained hard. Monday night he thought we'd leave the TV off, listen to music, talk. What was it he got angry about - he was telling me he hadn't filed taxes for years, wd go to H&R Block and ask them about it when he has $25. I said he could phone the IRS and ask them for free without giving them his social security number. When he got angry I moved into my own bed and was done with him for the time being. As always I get disgusted when he's stupid about money. He sat down heavily on my bed, crushed my hip and tried to make up. I said I was out of energy. Tuesday the Robert's appointment; mailing Luke $1000 in the post office close to the DMV that I hadn't known about; stopping to look at Scott's garden; then packing up swiftly and onto the road. What I wanted to tell about being with Tom, though, was a mixed sensation. I was fond and playful, buoyant, hearing my voice gone flirtatious, girly. The tone seemed false to me, and I had my eye on it. It's also that Tom's place is small and junks up quickly when beds are unmade, and sometimes cold because he hasn't dealt with getting his heater fixed. I felt I had to get home so I could be myself again. I could see snow on the mountains from the freeway, a long way down on slopes across the east, but it wasn't down to the road until maybe ten miles past Ramona. Then lovely black and white on all sides. From the brow of the hill above Santa Ysabel the whole valley and its far slopes beautiful, altered. Stepping out of the jeep at Don's Market the air like Alberta in a thaw, a soft wet chill in such clean light. Was wondering about Mesa Grande Rd but the afternoon had been warm and there wasn't ice, only sheets of running meltwater dark on the asphalt. Mailbox stuffed with flyers, a thick Vogue magazine, a New Yorker. The lane looked clear from the gate, further up sometimes deep slush with tracks through it. Where there were overhanging oaks, fallen branches dragged off the road, mats of fallen leaves green on white. At my fork no more tracks. Deep slush where I had backed up to the garage. Large fallen branches. Snow covering the little iris reticulata I'd seen next to the driveway as I was packing up to leave. And am I more myself again? Not yesterday, zonked all day. Told Luke I'd sent him USD 1000. Was happy he could be excited about working on his new place. He's moved in with nothing but books and computers and clothes. Is sleeping on the floor on the blanket he bought when he was in Mexico with me. Has no cups, even. $2500 into an IRA, $1000 to Luke, what's my total down to - $8000 in both accounts as of Friday. Two weeks till packets, what - [work list] Have been so weak-willed, as yesterday, reading and eating or surfing miscellaneously. Comes a moment in early evening when I say yes I've given up on the day. Worried about being so sore. I asked Thy Do you know any old people who aren't stiff? She said Yes but they work harder at it than you do. Also worried about being so stupid in writing. I looked at the writing in Here when I was away and was distressed to see how it lumps along and the voice here so conventional now.
And maybe four and a half months 'til I have to leave again. Semester end June 25, next res Aug 1-14. Go to Van mid-July? Gone for a month, fly straight here. Get passport renewed beginning of June. Or else go to Van in May and be back for June-July = month off. Either way enough time to get into film/writing, clean up boxes of papers, keep cleaning up W&D, Anna's book. - Happy to have posted fog bushes after in a field in the mist. And then linked it from FB with a question. And then Luke in the small box awake at 4 in the morning, on the floor of his house, old neighbour downstairs. 2 Delphine Galou singing Erbarme dich as if her throat is made of bronze. Luke and I were listening to Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder last night, I at 8pm, he at 4am, sleepless. Said there was a strong wind in it. Found this version also from St Mathew after, emailed it to him. This morning he says It knocks me over.
1727, called it his best work. Ozawa "greatest composition in Western ..." - Another hard day - woke twice in hard pain, whole arms and the band of back between them, face, hands. All sorts of sore this morning, took a Tylenol but then a twitching neuralgic branch up behind my R ear the Tylenol doesn't touch, all over sore again now, at 6. Whole head and neck aching dully. R kidney (is it) hurting off and on, and sometimes L too. I'm 5 lb fatter after the res so even these green pants are tight. Is this pain punishment for the greedy way I ate at the res? Or a cost of the flight. Or of the aspirins for sleep. Or something else I have no way to know. Dragging a few of the oak branches slowly, feeling so frail, afraid of hurting myself more. Helplessly dull-headed, worried that I'm wasting so much time. Should I just say I'm sick and take some days off - I mean expect nothing.
That's Friday-Friday + 3 = 10
[sketch of a small house plan] 3 Does Haines know anything about what I was doing or could be doing with place work. Happiness is the fulfillment of a childhood wish (Freud) It seems to me that I was able, for the space of a few years, to integrate life and poetry. a vision of animals as legendary, heraldic figures possessing tremendous power Williams and Pound "as if they were the Bible" I do tend to see a poem as an object ... some graspability and solidity. a long preparation simply waiting I had to break off writing every spring and begin all over again in fall. what has been for me holy ground ... homeland ... a place that could be mine as no other could be an expression of their human dimension Northness I felt it keenly myself in northern Scotland strengthened by the presence of so much historical evidence of human occupation. the Interior - a very mysterious land a certain time-sense, a scale of vision - past, present and possible future dialogue between what is natural and what is achieved and necessary as culture the real criticism is a criticism of values A thing is either good or it isn't, and that which makes it good or indifferent is some quality of affection that has never changed. the lamplight striking our faces in that way I have so loved at times For a long time I kept a sound in my head, the sound made by telephone wires, resonating in the wood of the poles ... common after a change in the weather from cloudiness to clearing and with a steady drop in the temperature. One evening when the sound was particularly loud, I went to the pole below the house and put my hands to it. When digging my root cellar some years before, deep in that hole I had such a strange sensation of standing in an other-worldly kind of light, seeing the flakes of mica in the soil, and bits of broken schist. a poem that will include our time and the history of its horrors
made finally of deep loyalties 4 Sunday. Trying the new outside table. Is it too low. Is it warm enough to work outside. I'm in an island of periwinkle blooming here and there. The cleaned-up manzanita in front of me with a few iris clumps among its rocks. Hummingbird posed for a split second. I can hear it elsewhere sometimes now. Grass pale green in its curves, hills pale blue. A coolish breeze. A fly's curved line. Robin drops from a branch. Hot sun. I'd like to go do a hard day's yard work and don't, afraid of the physical cost. Look how complicatedly scabby these old oak trunks are. Lot of twitter, and jays in the draw somewhere. Sitting at this table makes it the first day of summer to come. Broad privacy, warm and breezy. Not a good chair though. Tablecloth for wine glasses if I have company. - There I used the jeep with a long rope to haul the heaviest fallen branches to a heap by the road. It was hot. Now I'm back with my feet on the table in the evening quiet. Is that what it's called, this softening of the light. 5 "The products suck!" he shouted. "There's no sex in them anymore." Every once in a while I find myself in the presence of purity - purity of spirit and love - and I always cry. I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea, and I still cry when I think about it. had defined himself, and by extension Apple, as a child of the counterculture To be truly simple you have to go really deep. Jony Ive A players like to work with A players. how everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button He made Ma promise to play at his funeral. I'd never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one. He told me that when he feels really bad, he just concentrates on the pain, goes into the pain, and that seems to dissipate it. The autobiography of a yogi once a year ever since 6 [opposite page a photo of Jobs that was a cover on People mag] Steve Jobs biog - fierce taste and absolute self-permission. His biographer thinks of Jobs as brutal because he doesn't understand the scope of responsibility he takes on. He stays beautiful as a moral imperative. He refuses orange juice that isn't fresh because he can taste that it's wrong and somebody should say so. He believes he will have a short life, he lives in a modest house but asks for a Gulfstream because commercial air travel is vile. Look at the right side of his face, it's a raptor's eye. There's a lot he doesn't know. He's conventional in his music and for instance in his anniversary letter to his wife - in his wife at all, probably. And yet he fought for the value of the best. He fought for me most of the days of his life, more than I do. He fought for the value of intelligence and world. Signs in lower case. Died Oct 5 2011, 56. I was waiting to hear about this place, brought the photo with me the first time I came with the truck. It's 6 in the morning. Pale dawn over the mountains. I'm 67. Tom and Louie phoned yesterday. Louie said what are you going to do and I said being here is enough. - But it isn't. The day has turned steely, I've been sore for most of it so far, sinking to pie and ice cream at the pie shop because I hadn't thought of a better adventure. Lot of black birds in the upper boughs of the parking lot sycamore all facing the same way, into the wind. What do I want - to be strong again, not hurting. To have people like me and want to know me again, to feel people kindle in ways I used to take for granted. To be all-out in work that's right and wanted. To be stronger-willed again and have energy. To have a community again, agency and liking. To feel springs of pleasure, love, invention, mystery again. To not be wasted. To take right care of myself. 7
First thing I saw from my bed was a handful of dry snow flung up past the window frame by a gust. Dusting of white overnight. There are bright buds on the willows, flowers on the manzanita, pale new cones on the Coulter, and one little thing flowering orange on the sandstone bank above the road. Dreamed among many other things an old maybe four-storey barn, cladded with bare dried-out brown boards. I was seeing a lot of detail, the lengths of the cladding boards, the way there'd be shorter boards under the windows, the smallness of the windows quite high up. Last week a dream vision I liked, Leslie in a white petticoat, very full like our old 50-yard crinolines, sitting barelegged in it, very pretty. - LC 12 hours ago: I was thinking of you yesterday, but was cold and grumpy, without much to say. What did you do? EE 11 hours ago: was cold and grumpy too. the day went steely grey and icy, and I felt wasted, by my own fault in not getting anything significant going, and as if old age is zooming up physically and it is all going to get rapidly worse. highlight was rhubarb pie with ice cream in santa ysabel. lot better today. LC 3 hours ago: I do love you EE 2 hours ago: ( ) - Posted new bits on Here, oak savannah, the blue oak photo, Engelmann oaks before the iron chair; mountain and rockpile photo, Peninsular Range, rockpile closer photo, stone, painted skins photo, common crusts in lovely arrangements, ruffles photo before the shaman. 5 photos, 5 bits of writing. 8 What I wrote then emerged with difficulty, from a kind of spell, one that I was reluctant to break, knowing that once I did, nothing would ever be quite the same. Haines 1993 The owl in the mask of the dreamer: collected poems Grey Wolf Press
Trapline with Snow, Sternberg, Rimmer, Grenier, guest program Media City: This is then now and here, 5 films from the collection of the CFMDC, representing some of Canada's best-known filmmakers. Sat 24th March Courtisane Festival Ghent. C.1983 part 1 Presentation House Feb-March 2012. - Not long ago such material would have signaled righteous social criticism. Here it channels a spirit of audacious curiosity, neither parading nor protesting psychic wounds but coaxing poetry out of them. Schjedahl New Yorker March 12 p.72 The eccentricities of these artists call out to whatever is particular about you, me, or anybody. Come as you are. A lot of the work is unprepossessingly mild but there's hardly a false note. Friday 9th I liked the Jobs biog but noticed it wasn't telling me what I was most interested in, what it was about acid and India. Talking to Rowen I understood that it was about qualities of consciousness. Jobs realized he was making minds, went about it that way. I didn't like Haines' poems though I had liked the idea of them. They begin with a place but then try to force something priestly. They are portentous and they lack ear. For instance the way he broke up
It needs to be a long line for the long reach of the moon left to right. Toward Asia is nice because it makes one feel the visible breadth of earth and sky as extending all the way across the Bering Sea. Something too about the tone of the line, Japanese poems. I hang onto Greg's company because it's the only company I have but it's not the company I'm looking for. When he comments on the journal he comments on facts not on art. I want company in the writing and photos, and not only admiration though it wd be better than nothing. Artist company, why don't I have it. Because as art it isn't interesting enough is my first thought. It says no.
- There I emailed Sandra Semchuk. Steadfast devotion. Listening to something about Rumi irritated by the god talk.
I've sometimes thought I should work at imagining the universe as unsolid transparent wave structure, seamless pattern.
The sea. - Luke's bitter anger. It comes across as impotence. Do something to mend something that is wrong and don't give your only life to bitterness. - Trying to take photos of plants on the side of the road in this morning's brightness, stinging lupin, Indian paintbrush, salvia apiana. Haven't succeeded. The translucent radiance of young salvia tufts. There was pale ceanothus blooming too. 10th Sandra is linking to Here for her online course but she didn't say anything about it. - a complicated troubled breathing man, with ruffled hair and an erection The person she was recognized fiercely and absolutely the person he was, and respected him. [about Frederica with her son 1968] Bede's image of the sparrow, flying from the dark into the lighted room, and out again into the night. Zyzygy - siz'e-je one of opposite points in the orbit of a celestial body when it is in conjunction with or in opposition to the sun. Gk zyon yoke, syzygos paired. And there, walking, dancing, on the Green between castle and cathedral, under a dark indigo bowl of space full of moonlight, were hundreds and thousands of creatures made of light, men, women, winged things and swimming things, like sea-serpents or sinuous fish, all dripping with brilliance as though they were phosphorescence rising from the deep, as though they were made of scaly coats of brilliance that shone in moony colours, green, blue, silver, violet. They swarmed up and down towards the moon, in great dancing columns like gnats on a river-surface, like clouds of starlings drained of black and made of brightness, like sparks from a fire. He walked home barefoot over the cobbles, which had rills of light and puddles of silver, eddying and flowing over them, as though they were the bed of a river. The thing about the late comedies - the thing is - that what they do, the effect they have, isn't anything to do with fobbing you off with a happy ending when you know you witnessed a tragedy, it's about art, it's about the necessity of art. The human need to be mocked with art - you can have a happy ending, precisely because you know in life they don't happen; when you are old, you have a right to the irony of a happy ending - because you don't believe it. - My new Apple cord is coming from Shenzhen China and is now on Lantau Island! says the tracking number. - What I liked best in The whistling woman were bits about Frederica's father and her relation with her 10 year old son, knowing her own father was a novelist and her own son died at ten. "He was killed the week of his eleventh birthday." "My mother liked Maggie much better. They could fight and scream, and slam doors at each other. I just froze. She wanted to outdo not only my mother, but me. I set a very high standard, and she did." They are 75 and 72 now, ugly in opposite ways, Byatt a puffed fish-mouth, Drabble a tight-necked scrawn. 13 Barbara on the hill, 86, Kansas-born, a widow since 1999, French vanilla creamer, ginger snap cookies and a bible study page open on the table. I kept seeing my mother in her hands and her slow mouth - short fingers with long oval fingernails she can't see to clean. Her husband was a company supervisor in Plaster City, east of El Centro, for 37 years. I didn't let her talk much about her grandchildren.
1908 A lume spento 14 The moon wakes me. The sun is higher so it doesn't crowd me off the bed at noon anymore,but the moon is lower so it slams in under the eaves. The season is between. It doesn't have autumn's beauties of light or color. I'm hung up not working, will-less, lonely. But ceanothus blooming all up the rocky bank above Santa Ysabel, on the Julian road. A scent of flowers when I stepped onto the driveway yesterday, was it the many very small pink things flat to the ground. [filaree?] my problem to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets I took away the impression of an agile lynx energy and industry on behalf of others nothing Pound did now was praised an astonishing ear for rhythmic movement He had also been developing a bad temper. the Pisan cantos ... hopes abandoned, and failure understood I can't bring two sides of an idea together but can live on memory if someone BRINGS it. the shock of no longer feeling oneself in the center of something Silence captured me
Ackroyd 1980 Ezra Pound I'm waiting for summer when the house can be open all day and night and I won't be tethered to my bed nights and mornings. - Then worked all day on the web monograph which is now nearly ready. I'm joyful when I've worked. Shut down email for the day and lifted the bed into a couch. 15 shopping for nice kitchen things which I thank you for ... Tuesday I got a lot done at home working in the beautifully sunny living room as the builders gutted the kitchen ... it's exciting, am feeling at home, learning the neighbourhood, already have found some great places, and even greek bread! I love having helped Luke get good kitchen things, so happy he has a home. Bad dream this morning that I woke from into 6am half moon due south. Luke was a little boy, the age he was when we moved to Vancouver. We were homeless. I was explaining that we couldn't pay the next month's rent on our place. I was looking around for a hotel or a welfare office. He had run ahead and I couldn't see him. Had he gone into this large daycare with many children. Someone says he was taken somewhere. To be washed, to be put to bed? I yell frantically Luke! Luke! Luke! Luke! And wake. - Pdf of Ellie Epp! It looks beautiful. 92MB. Download 4 hrs it says. 16 the red island of Eday, the dark green island of Egilsay with its tower, the blue-black hills of Rousay One teacher, Miss Annan, did not use the strap at all. She had a cheerful, impudent, devoted class who only needed her presence to become inspired. She opened our eyes; we felt we were a sort of aristocracy, for what we did for her we did freely. She must have been a remarkable woman. She seemed to have endless charm, vitality, and patience. She filled us with confidence and a kind of goodness which was quite unlike the goodness asked from us by the other teachers. Yet she never put us on our honour; she simply took us as we were and by some power changed us. It was a fine summer, every evening calm and radiant. - Export to compatibility4, file>export>general. Above 4 is live transparency - unflattened. - Thinking of the photos in the web monograph, the way it starts with the Tofteland house, and the rest of the images from Notes in origin, why the book designer said they were art photos not photography photos, the fairytale quality. Compare the Mesa Grande photos, especially my favorite the two bushes. It's a photography photo, radiant but colder, less childlike. The Notes in origin photos have a beautiful uncon, like the Ryder-Waite pack.
17 hears the first music of England in the fine patter of rain on the oak leaves oak, Oake, Oke, OE ac, OE aecern, of the beech family Peter Ackroyd 2002 Albion: the origins of the English imagination Chatto and Windham The great oak itself descended into the other world. We may identify here a sense of belonging which has more to do with location and with territory. In an old English carol Jesus talks to a tree while still in his mother's womb.
- The dream of the rood tree measure of continuity and ownership beyond the memory of anyone now living ... that sense of place, of literal rootedness, which is one of the great themes of the English imagination Hardy "from the quality of the wind's murmer through a bough" locals could name its species. The Oaks of Albion is Blake. A cave in Cheddar Gorge. "Here was found the skeleton of a man who had expired [in] the Middle Stone Age; his mitochondrial DNA close match found with a history teacher residing in the late twentieth-century Cheddar village." 11,000 years. Celtic tribes all over England for over 1000 years, only evidence in words. 5th and 6th c Anglo-Saxon invasions, Frisians, Danes, Franks, Swedes, the Geat of southern Sweden. Spirals Celtic and Neolithic. Augustine xtianity 597. Arnold on Celts "passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against fact" vs Anglo-Saxon "field of plain sense." violence and intensity of Celtic work with the formality and fluency of Old English When a girl recalls our meeting her eye moistens. the provenance of different kingdoms - Mercia, Northumbria charted the movements of the English Sea and of the English seasons Caedmon now shall we praise the [making] of the heavenly kingdom, 600s. He falls asleep over a book, which then lingers within his dream, as if there were some deep connection between silent reading and sleeping. 50
Is Milton. the degeneration of a trackway power and continuity of English prose for more than a thousand years the two facts that England is the world's oldest continually functioning state, and that English is now its most widely spoken language Often some piece of technique thus learned really unchains one's own daimon quite suddenly. - Auden on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry. The way I get turned on by historical writing about English. Reading this Ackroyd I imagine going back to school and studying that. A sort of leaping eagerness. Had been reading Edwin Muir's An autobiography on Haines' recommendation, disappointed as soon as he'd left Scotland and made friends with writers. He's scrupulous about writing his depressions and fears but I lost respect when he said he'd gone back to believing the soul is immortal; he said that if he hadn't that belief he saw humans as disgusting animals. b.1887 I think, with Dorothy [in 1873]. VW published him but he didn't make it all the way out of Puritan body-hate. Greg's first response to the monograph is to correct the dates in the CV. I'm watching him not want to see my actual size. He doesn't know he's doing it and if I mentioned it wd deny it. I'm not going to mention it. A wonderful phone call with Tom Thursday. He said he'd called to tell me his phone will go dark until next Friday but then he started talking about Here. He said he always checks it when he's at a computer. That this country is his soul country too. He liked that the ewe of god had got into it. He said the photos are spectacular on any monitor. He said it will become a record in ages to come, the way he'd go into the attic at the Ramona Sentinel and read chronicles of earlier times. He said "I love your writing." I said that's a sentence I like a lot. We laughed. His voice was young and he was in bubbling eagerness. I hung up loving him for his still-eager spirit that hasn't spoiled itself by being kind. String Quartet k.465. 18 such wordes as we lerneden of our dames tongue The standard of writing became that of London heavily influenced by the central Midlands. Courage must be the firmer, heart the bolder, spirit must be the greater, as our strength grows less. - Battle of Maldon old stone aelven or ylfes The price of such poetic longevity was a long and very deliberate self-remaking. - Kenner on Yeats - Posted two of today's photos on Here. [snow field] [snow cedars] Looking at them there I thought to add the first paragraphs of Snow country. The snow photos on the white page, with that text, feel so cold. The Here page makes the photos what they don't seem on my monitor, immaculate. Kawabata's text immaculate too. Woke lying on my stomach facing north so whiteness at the window was the first thing I saw. White! Hello! 19 Greg's crit of the format of the monograph. I seethe, reading it, though I asked him for it and know what he's like. Why do I seethe, because he battens on feeling himself overtopping me, which he can only do by ignoring what's beyond him in it. His Presbyterian long-nosedness is just right for the jobs I give him and I remind myself of that but I've warned him off having opinions of the photos. He'll have them,but he may not exercise them on me, he's an amateur.
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- Yesterday driving to SY seeing that lush green was there on all the lower slopes when the snow melted. - The Here site has got more sophisticated since I changed the head and foot to simple text with a dark green line. The last image up is winter sill because since I've started making up the couch in the morning I've seen those radiant succulents in mid-morning sill spotlight. Winter sill. I love the sound of it, keep saying it to myself. 22 Ackroyd on Medieval England as Catholic the old imagination Catholic culture of 1500 years Their imaginative competence was deemed to be within the sphere of affective piety. - I began to have a nap yesterday afternoon and when I'd faded not very deep I saw bright and clear my jeep driving. Saw it from the passenger side, two seconds. Woke suddenly, is it being stolen. No it was there. Was it a message. No. Seven packets stacked up and I don't want to have anything to do with them.
23 Hood propped up by a sign saying in green painted on white card, both found in the garage.
3 letters done, hair wash, laundry. Now what in the rest of the day. 24 It isn't that Prada undervalues beauty's power ... But the old radical, you suspect, resents it as an unearned asset of the one percent, and the brainy feminist wants you to understand its pathos as a love charm doomed to expire. You shouldn't need it if you love yourself. - Thurman in the New Yorker 25 The only thing worse than growing old is not to grow old. - Youtube poster - Autonomous complexes
What do I know in this - My mom reports I had imaginary sisters The Venus voyage and queenship/marriage of 4 Fiction with Janeen, Lorraine and Myrtle The pink-floored house, Mac's houses, Mac My sex-fantasy avatar the beautiful girl
26 It's white up to the fenceposts, still. 7:17, heater blowing hard. Monday. The oak in its thinned shape with broken limb hanging. Four packets left, the stragglers. No email, just an ad from Zappos. Two pounds less after yesterday's strict eating. Slight ache, lower back and palms now that I notice. Room for rent, Palm Springs?
93 miles, 2 hrs. 79 for 35 miles to Aguanga, 20 miles on 371, 24 on 74, 8 miles on 111 takes you in. LA two hours on 10. Phoenix 4 hrs. Lease up 15 Aug, notice 15 July. Next res Aug 1-10. Will lose on sat and propane. Storage July-Sept, 4 months? Why am I done here - monotonous bad food - no way to exercise - the cost leaves me without an edge - it's not photogenic in this season - no gardens - too much dead time in a day - the way I'm stuck in bed at night because of the heater - nobody interested in me or will be - out of hope and newness.
Someone called Begley in the Times writing an op-ed piece about aging: I see nothing good awaits me at the end of the road. It has taken me until now, at age 78, to feel in full measure the bitterness and anguish of my mother's solitude, and that of other old people who end their lives without a companion. 27
A dark blow to the heart. I was looking forward in sweet innocence - I'll tell him about Palm Springs - I'll give him the New Yorkers I've saved - he can bring my cup, maybe he can bring some yuzu marmalade for Angelo - I can tell him Luke said he is proud of me - I can hug him on Dudley's forecourt - we can cuddle Friday morning when we wake - I'll be not so fat by then, I'll wear my jeans and the green Uggs - I'll show him Emilee's book - we can go for a walk together - I could make bacon and eggs for breakfast and maybe steak for supper. I'll have company. I'd been fond of him, hopeful.
Then opened Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound and cried a tear that I've loved and been hurt by so unworthy a man. It's a sense of misfortune that is true but that I most often evade. I've spent ten years shelved because of that mistake and now I'm so far into isolation I can't imagine how to be included anywhere again, where I could be included again. 28 Mach-e dich dein Herz-e rein, it is singing in me since before I got up to make fire and tea. Last night as I was standing in the dark running the bath I was pure-hearted finally saying the ground of it and not my retinue of angry postures. There was no clench anywhere, just sorrow, soft. I was saying, How have I come to be worth so little. I knew that was the floor of it, the child. Then I got into the water and could feel my heart tightened again, insulting him, protesting, making up sentences. I didn't sleep well. The Olga Rudge book had slighted Dorothy completely, implying she was reserved, cold, and toward morning I was reading her journal, which was loving and lively, and sounded like him the way Olga's does, but better written. Ezra was Olga's hero and I envy her having a hero, although I don't like the way she gave up her own gift and fame to take care of his. As is, I have to be my own Ezra but I am not, I'm deeply convinced of being unwantable, not unworthy - very worthy - but unfathomably unwantable. After Ezra died Olga lived to be 101, spry and bright, much honored, cared for by her daughter, whose husband had gone to pains to get a title, and loved by her grandchildren and great grandchildren, all of whom were socially set up through Ezra's lifetime of valor. And here's Jam's copy of Selected cantos with her beautiful handwriting. I saw the mountain in pale dawn and thought Taishan. It's
Highest peak of the Apennine range overlooking the plain of Pisa from the east, so named by Pound in honor of the Great Mountain in Confucius's native Shantung Province, traditionally sacred to the Chinese because believed to control man's fate on earth. Represents the immanent domain of Nature. -
Milton Erickson - paralytic polio and post-polio syndrome at 50 Recalling body memories of muscle action Chronic pain - muscle and joint difficulties Pressing larynx against back of chair Conceptualizing the uncon as highly separate from the con, with its own awareness, interests, responses, and learnings Taught that it was creative, solution-generating, and often positive always listening ... indirect suggestions I go into trances so that I will be more sensitive to the intonations and inflections ... hear better, see better common experiences of wonderment, engrossment and confusion used by holy men 30 Conference call yesterday. I was lying on the couch with my eyes closed, receiver at my left ear, noon sun at the window, captive and bored. Started watching my breath at the right nostril, breathing consciously through the right nostril. Came into a sense of the day - I am not going to be able to say this - a sense of the essence of the air of the day - spring lightness, a molecular fineness, or electromagnetic, a remarkable tenuous air within the air. After the call packed myself up and drove to Ramona to shop. The pasture slopes below the mesa were sheeny emerald velvet with a glaze of flower color beginning to show here and there, white on the field to the north and blue among the cattle in the pasture to the south. Along the twists of the Ramona road California poppies orange not yellow. When I'd shopped and was in the KFC parking lot eating chicken I saw two crows flying into the high crowns of two eucalyptus trees on Main Street and had something like that same spring-essence sense again. I was missing being able to tell Tom about it, he's been my atmospheres companion, he is so tuned to moment in a place, he so likes to be. I also want to tell the banging there's been above my head in the evening. It sounds like a bear in the attic. Yesterday a crash so loud the room jumped. Then others less loud. When I lay down to sleep at 3 I felt the sort of pulsing there used to be in 824 when a train was passing. I can't see any hole into the attic big enough to let in anything larger than a mouse. Unless something is using the hollow walls as a ladder I don't know how it could get up there. I'd thought it was branches falling maybe, but I don't see any. I went through all the rooms turning on lights. Double-locked the door. A black and white woodpecker has been lighting on the pointed bit of eaves I can see from my bed. Sun on its red cap.
I sometimes these days will come to a stop, often when I park the jeep or sometimes on the couch. I'm just halted. Don't want to move. Pergolesi Stabat mater Vivica Genaux last night. Stabat mater stands the mother. 13th century Latin hymn of 20 couplets.
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