| in america volume 25 part 1 - 2012 may-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 May 2012 San Francisco - Tomokazu in the airport. A small woman sat next to me at gate 15, dressed like a Chinese immigrant, flowered shirt and black pants, hair parted down the middle and pulled back. I liked her fine-featured plain worn look. I was putting on my chalcedony earrings, can get the left in by feel but wasn't finding the hole for the right one. Asked her if I were anywhere near. She put down her Sub sandwich and set it in for me. I asked her if she was going to San Francisco. And so on for the next hour and a half through a long delay. Cantonese from Vietnam, married an American soldier, "I was pretty," came with him in 1968, had one daughter. She still has his name though he died twenty-two years ago. She lives with another man now but she hasn't married him. "We're companions. We look after each other." She sponsored her mother but her sister had to pay gold to escape in a boat to an Indonesian island. She'd recently bought a house and wants to renovate it, "a French house" with pillars and a lot of glass. "My mom teach me. Invest. Always save and invest." 19th, Vancouver Caffé Calabria Saturday morning, there I am, what do I think. So many versions. Passport photo tight old face with a thin mouth. Louie's bathroom mirror, swollen dull old face. This mirror: lot of neck droop, lot of neck droop, shape of hair not bad with chalcedony earrings, definitely old, capable of a sharp look. Wd eye makeup help. Skin gloss and more tan. Mouth has thinned a lot. Good clothes and a good wide-shouldered shape in them. Black tee under the cashmere hoodie, jeans, yellow Chucks, compact. There are angles - lifted chin with a turned head. She's lived, has thoughts. Sunny Saturday morning on the Drive such a celebration, Italian men talking loud and fast. Young mods with kids. There's Frank looking good in jeans and a white shirt. Old man going past with a bike, bike shorts. How're things. I got things done yesterday - passport application and lab requests with sweetheart Dr Lee - but made foolish remarks as if I'm out of practice talking to people. Louie is kind but not interested, which I feel as being about ugliness. It was conviction of ugliness that was skewing my comments yesterday, embarrassment and hunger to be liked while being convinced I won't be. Conversation with Tom in the jeep as we were driving to the airport. He said Maybe we've made a clean break, meaning he's willing to say it. "I'm very happy," with his house and not working all the time and writing and being loved at the seniors' center. He wants to hear I'm happy in the country and was maybe hoping I'd done it with Jerry so he'd be off the hook. If I were off the hook what would be different, a young man to play with wd be good for me now, I'm looking at young men everywhere. Or a smart lesbian, or both at once, or a film-maker with wildish energy, something new. Or true love -. There I sigh, true love for the last ten years, open body. Alright. Go get something to eat. 22 Rowen's birthday 27 years later. I was with him here at Blenz telling him about the mornings after he was born, the light at 4:30 in the morning reverberating in the room with the white floor. The scent of dames rocket. Today's meeting was heavy and in some way absent - I kept feeling there was no grip between us, not even enough to figure out what was wrong. It was better two nights ago when we were lying with our feet toward Louie's fireplace until midnight talking about what he knows about his generation and I don't. He was beautiful - rosy and smart, laughing. This morning he looked frail, a bit yellow, unshaven. I said, Did you lose interest in photography? He thought a long time, then said there's the easy level, and then there's another level far above it, that he looks toward and feels intimidated. I said he doesn't have hope that he can reach it. He said after another long pause that that's a fair description. I said because his fucking parents didn't help him in school. He said probably yes. I said let's go to the library and look at photography books. I said he looks sad when he talks about vocation. He said he's running out of time. I said work you love is the platform for everything else. He said that's what he means. I said A girlfriend and kids? He said Something like that. 23 Bloodwork all good. L knee doesn't have hammar-tap reflex and is weak particularly in pushing down. [First phone photos, rain outside Britannia Library: grey 1 - grey 2 - grey 5 - grey 8 - grey 10] 24 Felt an old woman on the street, walking slowly, setting feet down flat afraid to slip, looking for a handrail when there are steps. - But teeth good. Thursday morning. Bin here a week. Passport, checkup, x-rays, teeth, Rowen, Leah, Laiwan, cheerful, efficient, sleeping, couple of packets done, five more this weekend - I can do it. Shop for clothes. Paul next weekend I guess. Val, Paul K, Paul E. Scans to Paul. Shingles vac. David. David R? - I don't want to do anything for the rest of the day. Blasted my hips and spine with x-rays, ordeal of teeth-cleaning, bent faded Michelle hosing my face accidentally as I'm lying back in sunglasses with a paper bib. With Rowen beside the photography books yesterday, and then on tall benches in a pizza nook. I'm saying I want to support him but not try to direct him into the sorts of things I know how to do, he saying he thinks of it as finding things to do together that interest us both. 25 [list of new clothes with their cost] 27 Sunday morning. Silent house at almost 9, Louie still asleep. Paul K yesterday sitting with me on the orange couch. What did I see. I'd been shy ahead of time because he knew me when I was better looking. Up the stairs came a man in a big hat, carrying a shoulder bag. When the hat came off there was a man not so much older as seemingly narrower across his temples. Small eyes, an anxious look. He talked fast, with energy as always but without rallentandos, pressured. He's a wage slave, $80,000 a year at BCIT, 5 courses, no markers, email all day long, hanging on till he maxes his CPP. His woman living in Japan so he sees her once a year or once every two. But a burgeoning younger generation in Ireland, that he likes to know. He's 63. 28 In all these meetings with old friends there's a quality of hearsay. This isn't the person I knew but I'll go along with the fiction that it is. 30 New jacket - in the zipped breast pocket this elegant technical wafer - steel back, glass front - iPod Touch. 31 There Rowen arrived, across from me at the table in the bus station MacDonald's. A lot happened. I bought my Amtrak ticket, bus journey, [my brother] Paul at the Abbotsford station, breakfast in the IHop with Paul and Row. Finding M at midmorning coffee downstairs. Paul goes to negotiate with the management, then Paul and I talking to each other while Row entertains her. We go to lunch on the way to taking Row to the bus. Paul and I take her to the river and sit talking for an hour. When we get back to her place I crash with exhaustion. Paul goes to deal with the pharmacy and I lie down and close my eyes. He takes a long time, says he'll take me back to Van but we should wait till it's time for her to go to supper. Drive back on Zero Avenue. It starts to rain. I bring him upstairs and make tea. Louie comes home. We go to the Sylvia and have dinner. Drive back on wet neon streets. I go to bed. In all that, terrible images, bizarre stories, Paul's good company, Louie pretty across the table, the wet countryside. Terrible stories Paul tells about M's displays with him. M is mad, has been going mad for years. Her pale little face obstinate, belligerent, confused. Red-rimmed little pale blue eyes. The sight of her hand shaking violently as she's lifting a soup spoon to her mouth, chalky face, orange soup, her chin near the plate. Pity and terror. I won't write the worst of what Paul told me. The way in retrospect her eccentric tones and gestures have been early signs, even thirty years ago her insisting on [greeting] cards. Ed presumably knew it. She's worst when she's trying to make conversation. She has a stock of questions she thinks to ask and asks them many times. "How is Luke? What is he doing now?" "How is Conrad? What is he doing now?" She doesn't remember the answers and soon asks them again. She's not really interested. What's always pressing in her is angry protest. I'M LONELY. GETTING OLD IS NO FUN. THERE IS NO ONE I CAN TALK TO. She says the last often, has said it most of her life, but now it doesn't mean much because she no longer has observations and thoughts. I DON'T RE-MEM-BER THE WAY I DID. I have so little record of her better days, took them for granted. Maybe her letters are that record. An alert, interested person. None of that can say her. A dark steady person. What do I mean by dark. Something heavy and compressed in her head, but with a reliable interested goodwill, surprisingly quick sometimes but literal, humorless. Without charm but liked everywhere for her kind intelligent interest. It was better by the river, wide flat surface rapidly flowing west. Taste of balsam poplar in my mouth, Mary and I holding Nootka roses for their scent, we two sitting on a rock, Paul standing, a robin scratching noisily in the leaves. I was happy to be with Paul remembering things like sucking pussy willows and the balsam poplar scent along the road next to the creek, our mother or father calling us to eat by honking the Mercury's horn, headlights at night and listening to the truck shift down at the corner. Mary was there with us then it seemed. We were kidding her. She asked what had been the worst she'd done to us. Paul laughed and told the story of the time she washed his mouth with soap. We agreed there'd been hardly anything bad. An old woman lying naked on her stomach on the bed, legs spread, 'staged'. An old woman coming to the door naked when he knocked, with a look that might have been mischievous. Something like that nearly every time. The church wanting her not to come anymore because she'd take men by the arm and press her breasts against them - can that be accurate? Her youngest sister somehow getting her to sign a blank check, later filled out for $5000 by another hand. Paul saw it in the bank statement, phoned the sister. She denied there'd been such a check. He said he'd seen it. She said it had never been filled in. He said he had seen it. She said it had never been cashed. He said it was on the bank statement. Our cousin Ruth, who is a bank manager in a Mennonite community, said it happens often in such Christian places that relatives will steal from someone in dementia. The plants I gave Mary last summer vanished away. Other long-outdated gossip. The hired man, John Fast, taking out his thing in the truck when Paul was a little boy and suggesting Paul should suck it. Paul thinking it funny. John said don't tell anyone. Harold Sieburt known as a peeper, who spied not only on Judie but all around the neighbourhood, even at his aunt's window in La Glace. How did Paul know this? Boys talk he said. And can it be true that Harold bragged of doing his little sister? 1st June Waiting for Rowen, waiting to go to the train. Horrible waiting, tight stress until the journey is safe. The best thing yesterday Leah Wiebe and her house and garden up the street. Her dimples and ringed silver-blue eyes and eager spirit. The way she arrived just as David and I were standing at her gate and took us through to her banked garden beds and brick paving and orange rhododendron and beautiful house bootlegged into the back shed - her smart inventions and she among them so bright and lovely, generous and bold. The long table I laid out my thesis chapters on. My kitchen chair with yellow paint in its creases, a fireplace insert like piled glowing coals. Two armchairs in her upstairs bedroom. The good narrow stairs. Then David shooting down the old river road in the little yellow truck that next time will be gone. David depressed or angry. Dorothy just turned 99, sitting reading a book with a large magnifying glass, reading the first paragraph of the chapter aloud twice because she had forgotten she'd read it, hoping to live to be 106. Twelve years so far of David's slavery. I laboured to enliven them or at least myself with descriptions of Mesa Grande, but soon after dinner said take me to the skytrain please. There was the old house swamped in leaves as always, and the soft air heaven-scented, and silver light on the river, but this time the magic didn't take. Dorothy couldn't be interested. From the skytrain clumps of dames rocket here and there in many corners of waste ground, blackberries yards deep. - I'm tired, want to be sitting on the train moving slowly through wet grass. - And now am in the terminal, an hour till we start lining up for customs. Silver hard-sided bag, black sleeping bag and pillow in tomorrow's carry-on, green shoulder bag with everything I need tonight in the hotel, jacket with American money in the pocket, walking stick because it doesn't fit in either of the bags. Rowen came late and in a dwalm about a girl. I gave him Tim's advice and said we might as well go. 2nd, Seattle train station. Taxi driver, $5 fare. I give him $10. "I have two ones," he says. "I have four ones," I say. He jumps out and asks another driver for change. I give him a dollar tip. Dark damp day. - Amtrak Coast Starlight Queen Anne's lace, vine maple, hemlock, black poplar, some low yellow flower thick in patches, elder, willow, mustard, horsetail, nettle, blackberry, bulrush. Sumner Wash. rhubarb capital of North America. Gorse, daisies. Saturday morning. Water standing on fields, geese, buttercups, yellow iris, alder, salmonberry, brown creek with tall saplings fallen across, locust. Tacoma, railcars in the yard, complicated fading graffiti, flowing American flag. Paul still calls her Mom. I never do. Gravel on the railbed shades of grey and rust, facets sharply separated by shadow. Chinese container ship called the Good Luck. Buddleia along the tracks. Sun. Northern Fish Co. Long tunnel and then here's Tacoma Narrows. Geese on the beach bending their necks to sip fresh water rippling through the sand. Paul said, "We were all proud of you." He remembered a song. It was I come to the garden alone and Louie sang along in Afrikaans. And the joy we share / as we tarry there / none other / has ever / known. Divers stumping toward the water's edge carrying tanks. Pierce County Ferry. I come to the garden alone / while the dew is still on the roses, teenage girl assigned to sing the solo, we never put it together. Seven drunks with a loud phone. Two really old women opposite. Wide stretch of patterned mud, winding little channels. Two-lane blacktop below grade, double yellow line, car keeping pace. I remember that sleek green river. Fir, foxglove, water lilies, ferns. Oh bulkers how do you let it pile on like that. She brought up a packet of doughnut holes. TV in the hotel room this morning smiling people selling smooth skin, tight muscles, redemption, baby fawns. Twenty square miles of mysterious mounds. Rowen and I on the couch before he comes with me to the station lays his head on my shoulder. He's all awash. Loose. Paul said Conrad is too. Gorse in ugly lumps. Three people at my dining table going to a cat show. - Salem. Sun on the west side of the train. NAR train when I was seven, overnight from Edmonton. I was traveling alone. Seat on the right side of the train, wooden windowsill, waxed paper cup of water had black dust settle on it overnight. Mighty Mouse comic, the man walking the aisle selling pop - Orange Crush in a brown bottle - and comics - rented out pillows too and let me have one. In the morning I was worried that I wouldn't know when to get off. I think I recognized the yellow house where the La Glace road crossed the track, that I thought looked like another kind of house, adobe. Paul saying that during sermons he studied the way the church was made. Tie rods across, lamps on long chains. - Eugene. Paul says Judie's hair is pure white, she's stopped coloring it. The time Paul was with other boys at a dugout and they were going to teach him to swim. They towed him out but then abandoned him. He sank. He realized it wasn't far to the edge and just walked out along the bottom. We asked if that had been his first drink. It was in high school. He was out with friends. They took off his pants and threw them on a roof. He was afraid worse would follow but they brought back his pants and gave him a beer. "Sense is not common" says the bar car attendant. Starting to climb into the Klamath range. Mai-lin's Kian, born when Rowen was, on his way to a PhD in philosophy at Oxford. The number of massive people on this train, I suppose because they don't like to fly. This one with a great round sack of fat bumping the tops of her thighs. Pale horizontal sun. Miriam Henderson walking home at midnight from a meeting. I'm reading her this time seeing how young she is. [Dorothy Richardson 1923 Revolving lights] Then I'm saying I now have nothing to say or feel about anything. Then I think of the difference when I have something to do in writing, my letters to Lauren for instance, how much I know, how easily, about how to center her. Purple vetch, California poppies. How was it with Louie. Her thick swinging hair. The ways she'd get bored when I was partway through a story. She was kind and impersonal. I felt I should mind my ways. We had easy friendly times. I felt I'd lost my power with her because I'm uglier. She'll own her own studio. Calls in her brother the architect and her brother the engineer, is more involved with her family. When Paul K was going to visit she spent her morning ordering the flat so he'd be impressed. She was good company with Paul in the Sylvia pub. Her swinging walk in short leather jacket. - What did he say, "I'm five eight," taking off his cap and stroking his thick grey hair. "I used to be six one. I shrunk five inches. My dick shrunk two inches. My liver shrunk." His name is Eric. He's sick, he says. He has the seat next to me but went off to the bar car. Green pants held up with suspenders, beard, scraggles of dirty hair behind his ear. Retired welder. Small farm in Michigan, his dad had four sons when he married his mom. Parkinson's. "It's in the blood." He's vociferous, yells that Canada is pacifist, the Chinese will take over. I say calm down. He says it's the Parkinson's. Long smears of colored cloud across the west. Mountain peaks under them. We've been in sandy pine country for hours. "You're silver grey" he said. He was looking at the reflection on the glass beside me, "Double jeopardy." He had big eyes held wide, was a loud talker, five months younger than me. He was in an end care facility three months ago. Lives in a trailer on the Rim in Arizona. I was giving those two Christian girls the evil eye but the music is probably not from them. Moon a couple of days from full. What's this vast flat plateau. I've seen it in snow haven't I. The propane tanks along the tracks he said are for heating switches. 3 Good morning Sacramento. Apricot sunrise. Old wild man Eric on the platform below the window arranging his roll-on. Looks like a clean shirt. He left me both seats overnight, "Do what you need to," took his pillow and jacket to the next car. How he told me about the stars on the Rim, both hands over his head zooming them down. Clear sky. Put up my head and saw a palm tree. - Diablo Mountains. Strawberry fields at Salinas, Queen Anne's lace thick, fennel, egrets in the marsh. Mustard and Queen Anne's lace. Artichokes. Sometime during the drifty night a sweet swift little come. I've been seeing marine layer in the west. Perfect evenness of rows of crops. Large camp under an overpass. Poverty of this record, poverty of my noticing and feeling. Rowen wearing the orange teeshirt I gave him to his date. Proud of the pants he wears every day, his $200 pants guaranteed to last a lifetime. My new jacket with its high zipped collar and windbreaker pockets. Green rain boots for snow days. Expensive blue linen cargos. Sunday midday. Flat valley of green strips, at the distant rim rumpled hills burnt grass to a fog line is it? Santa Lucia Range. Man well kitted-out in cowboy boots, new jeans, clean blue plaid shirt with rolled sleeves, silver earring, very tanned, smooth white hair in a ponytail. High cheekbones, white eyebrows. He's in good shape but his face isn't smart. First time I took this train I was wearing work boots spray-painted silver and had a little boy who'd flown to England. Completely bare hills worn to chalk. I only caught half Eric's talk but didn't he say "You're real"? Now we're coming into the best country. One o'clock seating. Oaks. Cottonwoods and willows either side of a dry crik. We're rising. Camp Roberts, vast base. Satiny glow on those hills, is it wild oats. Swaths drying. Golden stacks of bales. I only gave that electrical engineer ten minutes because he didn't listen. Serpentine outcrops. Live oaks' best dark green. What happened to Uncle Walter is that he had a ski injury, got hooked on painkillers he prescribed himself, was caught, had his dentistry license pulled. Doesn't answer the phone, Mary says. People put up with tinny crashing sound from their digital devices that makes my ear canal feel scraped. Long stop in San Luis Obispo. - At dinner a mild-faced woman with orange plastic false-fingernail claws. Probation worker in Martinez. 5 Los Angeles. Louie and Emilee today [birthdays]. Jerry's back deck. Furry dog at my feet under the table. Santa Monica sun high at 9:30. Quiet. I look around and think what I'd get rid of, how I'd move walls, paint everything white, make a cottage garden of the front yard. Waking at night cringing at the photos of his parents, his dad thick-set, pug-faced, grinning with a cigar and a glass of whiskey, his mom a long-legged girl with a good bosom, who married that Hollywood caricature for some reason of her own and then aspired to be a caricature glamorous wife, red lipstick, dyed red hair, red fingernails, off-the-shoulder gown at a club table. Jerry, long-chinned like her and not looking at all like his dad, became the slow-spoken thoughtful man I met [in Rome in 1965]. His dad from a family of Rumanian Jews arrived here alone when he was a teenager. He had drive, made and lost fortunes, nights liked to shut down a club. When I look at the older face Jerry now has, thick beard, scimitar nose, I see an Old World man with eyes like _____, steady and a bit suffering or haunted. - Amtrak, 3 o'clock train. A beautiful black woman in the next seat in the E Track waiting area talking about being a hypnotherapist for her third career. Santa Ana, scrap metal yards, pipes, tires. Pre-owned auto mall. Irvine. Corn fields, strawberry fields. Warehouse walls. Young black man sits down next to the older white man in front of me. "You goin' to San Diego?" "I'm going down to buy my daughter a car." Car talk follows. The black guy is telling the white guy what to buy. White guy has a slow laid-back voice. He doesn't mind. It's arm-wrestling but the white guy doesn't need to win. Dying orange orchard, a few of the trees still bearing. San Juan Capistrano, "This is going to be a very brief station stop." Brilliant-leafed plum tree. Jacaranda. Matilija poppy clumps in high flower. Bougainvillea on the wire fence, San Diego Red. River bed in concrete sleeve. Piles of chopped wood, shaped dirt. - Here's the sea. Brilliant green, blue band along the horizon. Beach houses on tight lots. Foam. O lifting green glass. Reed fields. In the car this morning I was smothering in dog smell and my face was stinging. They wouldn't let us into the Getty parking lot because of the dog. We drove away let down, the day was failing. A floppy-footed soft needy dog I didn't like. Was awkwardly having to conceal that and the fact that I didn't like most of J's decorative objects. Praised what I could. Liked watching Galapagos tortoises on the Nature Channel with him, BBC News Asia at 5:30. "It's cocktail hour for me," two whiskies on ice, a cheap single malt. A paper sack full of old photos he hadn't looked at. Oceanside. This morning his professional portfolio, brochures, newsletters, ads. What could I say about them. He wanted me to say they were beautiful but what they were was professional. Verbena along the tracks. I had said much more about them than he had said about my photos. Power plant. "When I was young I hated old people. Now I wonder how they did it." Leucadia, Pacific Surf Inn! Looked up just in time. "I'm passive. If somebody wanted to get married I'd say sure." Self-realization Fellowship golden dome. Cars parked along 101. There are the San D towers, or La Jolla, probably. Solana Beach, plumbago cascades. Sea lavender. Eroded sand bank. Buckwheat in flower. Lagoon, two young girls in bikinis waving both arms. Homeless, arriving a couple of places that aren't home. The jeep will be. Maybe a last home later, or I'll keep moving and the journal will still be home. Talking to Jerry about what it's like to be starting to be old. He sometimes can't swallow. I walked across the wide tar pit lots very heavily. Used the redcap in Union Station. Loved the smell of tar when we got out of the car. Spots on the tarry surface where something was bubbling up from primeval depths into the center of a vast complicated city. Ocean, ocean below. Tom's purple-flowering banks. Lone walker on the washed sand. San Elijo where we parked. Gridlock on 101. Channels through bright green weed in the marsh. Rose Canyon ahead. Willows. Sorrento Valley. Wet canal. Dried-out mustard stalks. Dried thistles. Lemonadeberry. Sand cliffs. Blooming elder. Scrub oak. Queen Anne's lace. San Diego 7
Mesa Grande June 9 Tom and I saw a turkey hen moving circumspectly in the corner of long grass I've left for compost. Then one by one fuzzy pullets, was it six, or ten, coming after her in little leaps. I've been back two days. Am in the chair in quite a cool breeze looking out onto hills where the grass is almost completely dry. A lot of haze both toward the desert and toward the coast. Pine scent, new definite growth tips like bows or knots at the ends of pine branches. Woodpecker knocking behind me. Here's my shorn lawn. Different relation to the ground knowing a rattlesnake could be anywhere. Lizard bigger than they were two weeks ago - so long ago - skittering on the mudroom floor. Eyes stinging in the dry air. Gunshot down the hill, the wind is from the east, a cool Santa Ana. Small yellow butterfly, brighter than a sulphur. Milkweed risen out of the wild oat froth below the fence. Many little hoppers in criss-crossed flight ahead of my feet. Am I back with Tom? I'm not wanting to ask. I told him I'd had his photo next to my bed in Vancouver and his heart opened wide, he said. I was lying in my own bed at his house feeling something like desire and when his massage got down to the lower halves of my bum cheeks and he said he should stop or he'd transgress. I said, Oh, transgress. Next day drove back with me looking fine in his new jeans and black summer shirt. We had a short sharp fight on Black Canyon Road. I wanted to drive. He took it straight to insult, stared at me - we were stopped on the road - and said You know what, fuck you. What did I say, something completely disarming he said later, like Nevertheless .... I seethed, then spoke up and he saw my reason, "You're making points now," and I got to drive, which made me happy. So then we arrived and the house was alright, ate chicken and salad under the oaks, he drinking tamarindo he was delighted to find at the Albertson's in Ramona. Autonomy, sex, and what was the third thing - Santa Monica, Belair, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Silver Lake, Westwood, Beverley Hills - just to note where we drove. I liked hearing Tom talking about writing and about his newsletter committee and his dream when he was little, of rising with his bed and floating over Philadelphia. I'm in a quandary now about writing about Tom here. I've used the journal to write hard judgments. He has explosions but he doesn't formulate judgment in private, in fact he seems to do the opposite. "I've kept a candle in the window for you." I like how he has got himself together now. He's using the senior center well, he's writing and reading, he smiles, he's clear. He's so energized a sixty-six year old. He lept into love the moment he got a signal. - So should I give up sequestering? What wd I do with everything that irritates me if I don't mention it. 10 Turkey mother coming swiftly past the bathroom window with chicks moving too fast to count. Now she's in the long grass beyond the fence. It's almost 6, pale cold quiet dawn, rabbits scattered among the fallen cones on the slope under the Aleppo pine (is it)[no]. Dream night before last that Janeen was now a tall thin woman with short dark hair. I was missing her soft glamorous beauty. "I ached for the girl with the perfect heart who used to be me." Looking at work lists - I have 3 weeks to get my hard copy of M&L done and paid for and any other publishing expenses up to $407. At the same time packet 5's and evals. 11 I thought of writing bad things as a way of keeping myself safe among them, so I wdn't have to avoid connections where I'm ambivalent, which seem to be the only kind there are. It also has the effect though of reinforcing the no, which is what actually keeps me on the shelf. Commitment would be deciding to reinforce only the yes? And deal with the bad things otherwise, as they come? But also: I like the zingers as writing, I enjoy them in other people. They are rare and brave. Plagues of mice, flies and ants. So many small flies come around my head that I can't sit on the bench outside. Processions of small ants climbing into the plant pots on the sill looking for water. Dead mouse on the mudroom floor this morning. Sore eyes from the dryness. Tech notes: last night figured out how to use Bluetooth to get photos off the Blackberry onto the MacBook, quite lovely images of wet pavement I took in front of Britannia waiting for Laiwan. Yesterday went through the web monograph what may be one last time, fixing what struck me and some of G's and Jerry's catches. House ants - linepithema humile - feed on dead and living insects - shallow nests in soil under stones, wood, debris, in wall voids, around water pipes and heaters. In hot, dry weather they often search your home for water. Supercolony along the coast, One colony of Argentine ants is believed to extend almost the complete length of California, stretching from San Diego to Ukiah, 100 miles north of San Francisco. [notes on how to deal with them] Capuleti et Montecchi at Beyerische Staadtsoper, teenage Romeo and Juliet are Kasarova and Netrebko as thickened middle-aged women, singing wonderfully but I resent their loss of beauty. Alas the shabby bodies that go on through most of a life. 13 Jumped into hardcover ML book design - Blurb education - color spaces - resolution - the Blurb template for two sizes - decision about whether to make it big and $50 or modest and $20 - neither size is good - lot I have to learn to get max brightness and res - meantime working on packet 5's and evals at the same time. Eyes a bit sore still - but otherwise moving as if normally - washing the jeep, not hurting - 14 "I've been reading and so enjoying The agency of bliss. It's a wonderful book, and Emilee Baum Trucks is a fine writer." - from Val. Hand stencils in the El Castillo Cave in Spain dated to earlier than 37,300 years ago oldest cave paintings in Europe. Fossils Homo sapiens in England 41,500 - 44,200 years ago Italy 43-45,000 flutes in Germany 42,000 Altamira over 20,000 span. Neanderthals in Asia and Europe at least 250,000, extinct about 30,000. 15 Sent reprint requests to Quandt, Bart, Felix, I hope. - How did I do that - took the concrete road up the hill and was within sight of the interesting modernist house up top when the owner drove up, 7pm Friday. I had already rehearsed. Beautiful man, forties, tall, Hispanic, trimmed beard, professional shirt and tie, "I'm David." Is he an architect? [No, general manager at the casino.] 16 Did a Santa Ana wake me. Blowing this morning from the east. I was woken by dryness maybe - eyes, sinuses up into my forehead, skin of my lips. Have been feeling how the house shelters me - from flies, ants, dryness, the snake, even mountain lions, which I'd wonder about if I were sleeping out. Last night talking with Luke two and a half hours on Skype - there was a green dot next to his name and I pressed the call button, woke him at 4 in the morning. We laughed. There I was with the bright rectangle of my 17" screen speaking toward a static one inch image of Luke's face. Our voices were cutting into each other a bit: the satellite's 23,000 mile delay. Gymnopypos californicus - condor - a New World vulture - they used to be here, a mention from 1900 - 9-10' wingspan. Was it a condor I saw the day I was on the shaman's hill, cruising so high I wasn't sure it wasn't a plane. 17 Dreamed I was looking through a black and white book of photos of me as a filmmaker, text with typos but I look beautiful in most of them. Later the book, by a man I don't know, seems to be of a French woman, photos of her in Paris. Many of the photos were of me with large cameras. Young woman with short wavy hair. - Two o'clock, 90 degrees, the hottest it's been. Sunday afternoon. The fridge shudders off. Bit of a breeze hissing through the hard oak leaves, comes in with a scent of hot pine. The front of the house faces oat-colored savannah. The back faces oak forest. A few yellow leaves already on the locusts. Airplane's singing growl. A moth like a floating leaf crosses bright in front of the shaded side of the pine. Two squirrels bounding on one of their paths. When was that short-haired woman. I don't think there's a photo of her but I keep as if seeing her. Lean shoulders in the army jacket, white Indian cotton shirt, green corduroy pants, maybe, or jeans. Moccasins. She was light. 18 When I wrote my impact letter for her I said I would go to AA meetings with her, and I am so thankful that I explored that deeper with you this semester, as now perhaps coming to those meetings with her I can use them in a way that will work with my worldview. Looking at this semester as a whole I am so pleased with the ways in which I am growing as a person and an academic. I can't thank you enough for this semester. You demonstrated the most beautiful balance of consciousness and compassion in your responses, and I feel so loved by you. Sincerely, I am in gratitude for all the time and energy you spent helping me navigate G1 and showing me the spaces that I can grow in myself. Email from Jim Maxwell going on about "our Jewish masters." Struggling with Anthony's paper on whether emotion as defined by ---- is epiphenomenal. Plunging into the hardcover design - more at stake - pleasure of being in the midst of invention and decision - each decision setting up structure for the rest of the book - text fox red, blue, white. TOC sometimes full bleed detail. 20 Three turkeys resting in the second oak's shade at nine in the morning as I'm listening to Genaux singing Handel. Two had squatted, one was standing bent over. Rabbit nearby also standing still. Wednesday morning. Thrilled to get a note from James Quandt in Madrid. I said what he wrote had sustained me. He said he was moved to hear it, doesn't expect what he writes to be read. The Facebook notice gathered Favor, Jody, Margo, Mafalda. Now its tiny cycle is over. How would my actual evals go: Anthony has a kind of technical intelligence but doesn't bear down on his topics honestly and with sense because he wants to succeed in his father's kind of arena. Kari wants to stay in fantasies about religion and magic, though she is smart, because she doesn't want to leave her parents. Beautiful writing though about religious experience. - Same bent kinds of minds, the two of them, bent in not really wanting to know. Katie has a lot of heart and good instincts, and she worked hard and honorably from her true questions, though she's clumsy in theoretical writing and took a lot of coaching to understand science. But she's brilliant at writing about love moments. Sam is swamped in family drama and used social media to try to work around her disorganization and vacillation. She gave up poultry but didn't find a better plan. Bette does what she has to do, but why did she utterly bore me - she seems energetically so thinned-down, like blue milk, I didn't like to have anything to do with her polite conventional substanceless sentences. Lori had muscle and fight and she twigged on what she was given but she is so easily blown sideways, I won't forecast that the semester has made a difference. Jody - Jody did a lot in her personal life but not much in her semester. It's alright if she didn't, though, because she's getting her platform squared up and her teaching is taking care of the theoretical stuff. Et moi: since February, anything? A few Here bits. Good wrestles with Kari that she didn't use. Deep wrestles with Anthony's mainline mad theory. Personal acuity and good reformulation with Lori. Good deep work with Katie but most of it not this semester. Moral support for Jody's sturdy intelligence. Got the web monograph done finally. Stayed 5 pounds fat but am healthier I think. This afternoon the cattle are bawling continuously down beyond the hill, did Norman ship calves. 21 At the player's cue, the fabric of the game-world suddenly warped and shifted so that the landmass seemed to be refabricating itself from the inside out. "That's the fourth dimension," ten Bosch said. Sometimes very briefly imagining the world as locked and moving patterns of invisible non-substance - how that would look, a visualization. Locked out when I got back from the library, going around the side of the house with a ladder, seeing a snake laid lengthwise on the dry leaves next to the treeroom steps, so still I'm wondering if it's dead. Four feet long, brown bands. I move sideways but pause. Don't see rattles. When I've got in through the kitchen window I go back with the camera. It's gone. Am thinking now it's a gopher snake hunting and maybe living under the house. Schlange - that word from long before I'd seen a snake, a Sunday school word. 22 I like the moments before the sun is over the horizon, when the hills glow evenly bright. Dreamed I was looking for a camping spot with Greg. We turned up a side road. I began setting out blankets. He noticed the car was gone. Went off to look for it, I assumed. Meantime a lot was happening by the spot I'd picked. It seemed to be a parking garage. People walking through in groups. Water seeping. An old mattress on end sheltering the blankets. I was on the other side of it sitting on a couch with young girls for a while. When I come back the blankets aren't there. Sheriff had taken them. Someone helping me climb through a window pushes from below. My arms are almost not strong enough to haul me over the sill. The sheriff says the blankets are gone. I lament. He softens, he'll take me to find them. I wake lying on my back hugging a pillow hard, ears hissing. It's 5:30, that early light beyond the window's wide frame. When I was climbing over the window sill yesterday and earlier when I was trying to jump onto the counter to be able to open the window that sensation of quiet surprise that my arms don't pull me up the way they did and that I'm so awkward getting down again. What I mean is there's a childish silence in it, it's dimly conscious. Is it because it has happened before? Something like it when I'm writing. When I read over an email I'll notice I've left out a word or miswritten one. Writing here I erase more and ponder more, there isn't elastic drive. In my left ear a high hiss, in my right dark motor sound. See, there, I left out the a. Phoned Tom yesterday. Joyful stories. Someone at the senior's center who took notice of him. Asked him what he'd done. Wants him to write for the University Heights newspaper, so he was working on his neighbourhood piece, describing his house and yard. I appear in that piece, for the first time in his writing, "E found me this place." [Got edited out again.] Inevitably lapsing down a level, to where other people have always lived, is that how I should think of where I am? Coyote running east on the cowpath just beyond the fence, cut-out form. Monograph posted on Frameworks via Pip via Mike, "Mike Hoolboom's new online book." - Nearly 7. Four turkey hens coming up from the pasture with maybe two dozen quail-sized pullets. They have a route under the pine down into the stream-cleft west of the house. Could hear a lot of rustle as they made their way. I love the smell of cooking apricots - I've posted Black Canyon Rd, yes! And Mouse, Snake, Early summer, and Condor, Locust trees, Crane fly, Oak trunk. 23 And then Camping in August including Michael Duke. Got eager, liking to be making something. The unnative pine is probably Italian stone pine not Aleppo. If I'd picked up the cones earlier there'd have been pine nuts. Five orange flowers on one of the cacti. - Thinking whether Mind & land needs an introduction, I had a look at Leaving the land, which Mike said made him cry. It's wonderful, it's a beautiful round living discourse, it's so much what I want to say, it's on a perfect point of balance between La Glace and the doctorate. It should be widespread, and so should What will we know. My audience then didn't get it and neither do most of the people who've seen it since. I'm astoundingly unrecognized. A good soul in the Santa Ysabel art gallery this aft, Annie Rowley. I went to SY just to be going somewhere. Barbara in the pie shop was overrun with bikers so I couldn't talk to her, but at the cash register I told her I had turkey stories for another time. Annie used to live on Mesa Grande, up on Davis Ranch. She said Nancy Wilson had seen three lions walking on her road - mountain lions she meant. She's a sore stiff skeleton, very parched. Her grey teeth startled me at first but I liked her. She said if we drank two glasses of wine we'd see condors. 24 Wifi does reach all the way out here to the chair. There's a wind today, southeast, strong enough to keep off the flies. Sunday afternoon, sun very nearly overhead, so the oak's shadow is thrown straight down. Warm scented dry air, soft buffet on the face's skin. Grasshoppers flowing like blown leaves off the stone pine's edge. Motorcycles growling down on Mesa Grande. Smell of strawberries on my fingers - warm strawberries, that long-ago smell. Isn't it the best possible air, warm lit upland air - clair et beau said Luke, who found the poem in the old Vancouver library and wrote it in his journal. Luke who likes his name. The long breaths of the three pines in the corner where the hawk settled on a middle branch just now. There goes his shadow on the grass. Suddenly saw that I shd dedicate it to Frank and Janeen. Just their names. The pines diffuse medicine into warm air. Oak trunks bright even under the canopy because the ground is. Wind in the oak canopy scrapes dryly, in the stone pine is a dark soft roar. Tiny ticks, grasshoppers landing. The air is extraordinarily spiced, different than yesterday. White four-day moon whose bow points almost straight up. Definition of frailty in people 65 or over unintended weight loss of 10 lb, exhaustion, weak grip, slow walk, low activity. 26 What was that conference of birds, a dozen raptors circling over Angel Mountain, different kinds - one must've been a bald eagle, white head and tail. One was pale pink, was that a ferruginous hawk? Turkey vultures. I saw them from the driveway as I was going to back up toward Angelo's to get a couple of flat rocks for my steps. I worked all morning, boots, gloves, cap, workshirt, moving stone with the heavy iron wheelbarrow, hacking at hard ground with pick and the flat-sided shovel I went up to the cabin to borrow. At first I was stopping every couple of minutes to let my heartbeat settle but then I used breath to shift gears and had the kind of hours I love, steady work with stone. Placement isn't right, I'll refine in a couple of days, but I'm proud to have stone steps instead of the messy ramp I was slipping on. Brought over the old sawhorse from the tractor shed too, have it next to the chair for my teacup. Its tool shelf can hold pencils and a sharpener, binocs. 27 I woke in daylight but fell asleep again and dreamed there was a package in the mail, in it a diary written in a loose spidery hand that was hard to read. I saw my name and realized it was from Susan. She'd sent me the diary of the time when she was feeling about me. She was wanting to give it to me to be rid of it? Then I was in the midst of her life now. She was director of a yoga foundation somewhere exotic, but I saw her getting ready to go to work in the morning, a little boy on her hip, talking to the babysitter. She didn't look like herself, more ordinary. People with other small children were arriving. I was crying. - From the chair at nine in the morning the view has a ripe look, a blue plum bloom on the hills. Susan - what about her - brilliant bad Susan settling for the yoga journal, wholesome recipes and editorials by Ruth and Goldberg. That's me with Tom and Here. Take up your bed and follow me. She said, and I didn't trust her. For good reasons I didn't trust her, and yet what she turned on was the right thing. I could publish her without permission, maybe I will, but that's not the point, the point is to live where I was reminded to live by her. Thou'rt neither, neither thy capacity. What needs to be finished. The death I've been wanting is that death. What needs to be finished first. In the meantime this glistening small hayfield running with birds, this jiggling canopy, this air.
That came into my head - what Christians used to know about intensity, what we sang. There a little yellow-legged grasshopper lit on the page. Its small grip on my fingertips, the strong kick as it leapt away. Cattle crying in the hollow. I go to look for the Magazine of yoga site. Her dad died last September. For a week I had nightmares every night. In one I stepped out of a house into twilight. The world was engulfed in a meteor stream and I could see rocks falling from the sky, plunging into the river in front of me. His face changed in subtle ways as I sat with him on the last day of his life. I knew where we were. I knew what was happening; we both did. We both knew I wasn't there to help him or to give him medication, to get right with him or tell him something before he died. I wasn't even there to say goodbye. I just wanted to be with him. When my father was dying his face had all his ages in it all the ages he had ever been, all at once and with a kind of transparent clarity that seared away my anxiety and dread. I could feel myself resist his beauty because it changed everything to accept it. It made talking about loss, for example, a figure of speech: convenient more than accurate, convenient because how would I ever describe what was really happening. She quotes Frederick Smith on 'consciousness': because of the abuse, confusion, and ambiguity of this word revealed in contemporary discursive practice, I have avoided it wherever possible. She says "I was in constant good company as I read". What is sought after through development of the body "is 'altered states' but not 'of consciousness' but of the body." What possession states reveal is an embodiment dominated by intentionality, emotion, desire, aversion, physical need, subtle essences, a tendency to action, an cyclical or ritual modes of functioning. She quotes someone, "Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter." So she was writing - two kinds of writing - and she was giving herself a place to publish and be read - and when she had got to the limits of that she dropped it? I assume because she is onto something better, that came to her by way of it. She jumped. Or else what? Or else she dropped it. Because she does that. She exaggerates things to be able to give them her whole energy, and then she collapses them because they were never what she made of them. It's a fault of impatience, which one loves because it's hunger to be.
Five old bachelor turkeys resting in the shade at three o'clock. A doe steps onto the yard with her ears up listening hard. 28 Obama's health care law upheld by the Supreme Court this morning. Tom phoned right away. 29 What sort of visit it was. Many kinds of moment that somehow as I drove away alone from the bus summarized as love. He was what he is, loud, but he'd catch himself and ask me something. He lay on the couch with a round hairy belly peeking between his shirt corners but he smacked it later and said he must work on it this summer. I had disaffected moments but I didn't exactly hate him. When he'd been telling me much too much about why Pilgrim is mad at him and I hauled him short he said It's because I want you to know everything about me. So then I had one hand lightly on his ribs and one lightly on his brushcut making a circuit of brief perfect liking. We were lying in my bed in the dark. He takes my stops and crotchets so forgivingly. 30 So far today - cooling at nearly five - a lot of Deadlock. Thoughts I can have about it while I'm being her. Thoughts she can have about her work in the form and time of me. In Deadlock she's still very young - she's 25 and Shatov is 22. Published 1921 when she's 48, 6 years after Pointed roofs. First edition selling for £105 at abe.uk. What I notice more than I did forty years ago, the shapedness of her books and the ways she's remembering young uncertainty and provinciality. When I read it first I was sunk into the pleasure of intelligence described from inside, so many thoughts voiced I'd had silent. There's something I'm more conscious of now, that comes from her method? That it's meta-conscious and so situates itself behind the language self to include nonlanguage, what I'd now want to call the whole body. Meta-consciousness is an idealist stance it seems, like acid. She describes changes in light and space that are actually changes in herself so that the room she's in expands and contracts, dims, brightens, wavers. July 1st Her friendship with Shatov is a marvelous story, conversations told in detail, Shatov so really discovered. The way he plays straight man to her ignorant excesses but then also leads her along, she marveling at being led. Their young open-heartedness with each other. The way she is embarrassed to be seen with him but constantly finding him beautiful. She's funny, the interior way she shows Miriam getting tipsy on her first glass of beer. She passed, talking emphatically, out into the wide dimly-lit sky-filled East End street, and walked, unconscious of fatigue, carrying Mr Shatov along at his swiftest plunge, mile after mile, in a straight line westward along the opening avenue of her new permanent freedom from occasions. It's a story in which she discovers she's a writer. The early sentences were forgotten and unfamiliar. Re-read now, they surprised her. How had she thought of them? She had not thought of them. She had been closely following something and they had come .... They were alive, gravely, after the manner of her graver self. It was a curious marvel, a revelation irrevocably put down reflecting a certain sort of character more oneself than anything that could be done socially ... and not oneself at all, but something mysterious, drawn uncalculatingly from some fund of common consent, part of a separate impersonal life she had now unconsciously confessed herself as sharing. ... this something would continue, it was herself, independently. It was as if there were someone with her in the room, peopling her solitude and bringing close to her all her past solitudes .... Never again, so long as she could sit at work and lose herself to wake with the season forgotten and all the circumstances of her life coming back, as if narrated from the fascinating life of someone else, would they puzzle or reproach her. ... Those strange unconsciously noticed things, living on in one, coming together at the right moment, part of a reality. It starts as she's running upstairs after her first meeting with Shatov. She has found Mrs Bailey and a younger man oddly connected in the drawing room. Looks at the sky from her own door, and then sees how the meeting with Michael has been. It ends with decision against him. In my immersed reading I've never thought of her narrative designs. I haven't thought of the books or sections as such. "Philosophy had come, the strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels." "For that moment they had been students together." - In there a grasshopper lights on my forefinger: its perfectly marked little back seems a gentleman's tweed in the context. I'm reading what she wrote in London in 1920 nearly 100 years later in a place where there are open miles instead of thoughts. Breeze from the southeast swaying the canopy. Chair facing blue Mount Cuyamaca with its much-dotted foothills. Fields now the color of wheat. Woodpeckers when they fly draw a white band around themselves. She's interested in mistakes. Miriam gets something wrong, as when she's playing the piano and assumes Shatov has come into the room, proceeds as if he's there but it's someone else - that sort of moment recognizable and never mentioned by anyone before. No it's not mistakes she's interested in, it's those sorts of unspokenness. In under a spotlight now. The sun directly overhead, even a bit north of directly overhead, shining white on the page through a hole in the roof. - I won't always be here in this air, with a pink hawk circling somewhere above, in an unimaginedly right chair under a blue oak above golden slopes. There won't always be this long branch reaching forward over my head lit from below by stubble all alive with dry-grass-colored grasshoppers.
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