| in america volume 25 part 2 - 2012 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
July 2
A kind of burgeoning this morning after seeing a reference to Fillmore's deixis lectures and following it up with a slew of book requests. Wanting to work - why do I often not want to? and feeling how little time there is left to do so much. from here to there and in a complete cube
- There are the turkey children with their blue-headed mothers, fewer of the babies, I'm counting 14. Some are sitting down. I hear one burbling, purring, behind me. Footsteps crackling in the straw. Don't want to turn my head and scare them. - Treading through the periwinkle, where grasshoppers are spraying up. - And moving on all outlined in light. The mothers stop and stretch their necks to listen. Some of them have stopped to rest on the mound under the stone pine. One had jumped up onto a low branch of a cedar. The difference when I look at the hills through binocs, how steep and abrupt the country becomes. Taking a drug and seeing the distance to the far side of the room change. - Phoning around about the pink hawk, nobody knows. - Then pinned a turkey feather to drawing paper and photographed it with its shadow, and there it is posted, a lovely subtle thing. - Someone writing about DR as flaneuse quotes VW: "Today, bearing KM in mind, I refused to do Dorothy Richardson for the Supt. The truth is that when I looked at it, I felt myself looking for flaws. And they would have bent my pen, I know. There must be an instinct of self-preservation. If she's good then I'm not." [28 Nov 1919, quoted by Pilar Hidalgo] Met Benjamin Grad in 1896 in Endsleigh St. He married Veronica Leslie-Jones eleven years later. They divorced but visit DR together in her last year. Her mother "cutting her throat with a kitchen knife while on a short holiday with her daughter in Hastings". 3 When I come out of any of my four doors there's always a scuttle of some creature - always. When I come through the periwinkle down the path always something I can't see rustling away under the bent stems. There's hammering up at the cabin today, generator going. Watching a glossy little brown head jerking in and out of a hole in the ground. Rummages in the dry leaves at the entrance, is nibbling at something. Out and back many times, starting and freezing, hasn't yet come all the way forward. Seizes a bit of green and snatches it backward into the hole. What a nervous secretive little life. Now I know what all those little holes are, it's the first I've seen anything use them. Now it's gone, presumably down there eating what it seized. Tom joyful leaping into his chance with the University Heights paper. Happy seeing him gearing up for what he more than knows how to do. My feather photo and Soave sia il viento showing up the something lacking in G - something abstract in how he meets beauty. Is it an armoured chest? It says yes. 4 G says "Well, a studio shot, as it were, against a white background. The needle and the shadow make the picture, I'd say." Louie:
- I'm under the oak listening to Near the cross on YouTube. I finished transcribing up to here this morning, including those four lines written out last week, then pulled up my email. Note from Tom with a link to the very song, which he and I have never spoken of. Fannie Crosby November 20, 1850 I thought of Ed living all his life in this kind of feeling and felt a sharp sudden ache. He was that ache in a way Mary isn't though she was brought up in that music too. Was wide awake at 4 after having dreamed a man walking through the room bare-assed but wearing the top half of a brown suit. He sits down next to me and asks if I like what he's wearing, which is now the whole suit. I put my hand on his hard thigh and say, I think you're totally gorgeous. Next thing we're standing facing each other, he with his knees a bit bent. He straightens them and straight up he's in. Oo. There's a husband I'm worried about. Story goes into third person. They have an affair, meet during the day purportedly to run. I lie in the moonlight wondering whether my hands are sore because they're starved to touch a body. Often wake with my arms tight around a pillow. Yesterday's brief emails with Tom - the song was good, but then the crushing small disappointments of the way he shines me on with casual flattery or poor wit. 6
7 He told the paramedic he was overbearing. She said, "What?" He repeated it. He meant he had been bearing too much. He was on the bench beside me, a lot of very red blood on his forearm and his shorts, a deep clot across his wrist. He'd come to the open door calling to me to phone for an ambulance. Two sheriffs in big SUVs, an ambulance, a fire truck, Linda and Gary in their golf cart. Now it's next morning and I'm still rehearsing. A couple of things. One is feeling for their misfortune, which is that they are not adequate to themselves. They were trying, they were doing their best, but there was having to move, all those trips with a little trailer, and then the car running out of gas, and not having a phone, and her paranoia coming back so that she suddenly quit her nursing job because she thought someone said something bad about her kid, and being out of money, and the check not in the mailbox yesterday, and the fact that he'd asked his family to send him a ticket and she found out about it, and all their stuff still lined up along the driveway, and her 30 years with the Mormons, and a rape sometime back then, and a West African husband who had that kind of attitude to women, and moving from Oregon to California, and for him having been in jail nine years ago, his brothers and sisters all successful back east, and a couple of pit bulls to feed, and eight puppies, and those two beautiful little girls. - Here's the sheriff who came to check on her this morning. A sheriff and the minister there until nearly ten last night calming her down, I suppose, and assessing. He wanted to escape and found a way to do it that lets him off the hook for abandoning her. Wrote a note, went into the bathroom and broke a razor blade in half. Fell asleep, he says, and when he came to ran down the hill to me. "I need help." "You're a kind lady." The other way is going over how I was in it. I went out barefoot among the neighbours and firemen and sheriffs. It didn't seem important to hide my foot. When the 911 dispatcher was asking her list of questions there were a couple of things I didn't want Nick to hear me saying. She asked, "What color is his hair?" I hesitated and then said "There isn't much of that." "He's bald?" "Yes." She asked "Is he black, white, Asian, or Hispanic?" I said "I don't think that question is appropriate to answer." She asked "What color shirt is he wearing?" He wasn't wearing a shirt but I didn't want to say that either. I said "It will be obvious" and she let it go and passed me through to the EMT people to give them directions. When the sheriff wanted to take my statement he said "Let's go inside," which was tactful because Nick was still on the bench. I said "Sit down," I meant in the one chair, and he did, so he was taking notes at my desk while I was standing in front of him. I liked him. He had a humane smart-enough look. Then later when he wanted to finish taking my statement in front of Gary and Linda I said "Let's go inside." I didn't want it to be the gang of sane people standing around talking about the mad people. It did become that later though, and I could understand the good in it, people needing to know what's going on in their neighbourhood because they are the sort of people who look after things. At the same time the unpleasantness of bonding by means of saying things about other people. I'm on the bench in sunglasses. There's a rabbit snooping all around, who came close, I thought because he couldn't see my eyes. His face with his long ears up reminded me of a deer and at the same time he seemed a little rodent. He was edging toward the least spikey haworthia, which he has nibbled before. 8 Evals done finally. 3 weeks wasted, 3 ahead. Sunday evening. The dog story is over, the neighbour story not yet. Fine hot 5:30, mountain showing thick white air. What I'm understanding more about living in this country is why people are nervous about anyone they don't know. One unstable or ignorant person can bring disaster onto everyone. For instance Nick saying he could like to make a bonfire -. Linda telling about the woman who liked to jog down to the mailboxes until she saw a mountain lion crossing the road just there, and about the deer she saw gutted by a lion on her yard. She watches for vultures. One year it was two of Norman's calves. The pullets are looking more like turkeys, longer paler jerkier necks. There are still the same number of them - the mothers have taken good care. 9 Hello Monday. Sweet clear Monday 7:30. I slept right through and woke in daylight hearing turkeys chuckling and purring under the window. Letter from G last night saying he was taken aback by Misery and meaning he thinks it's inappropriate to the project to stick in anything so confessional. I looked at it just now and liked it a lot. It's interesting and quite balanced-feeling. I wrote back about ways a life in art is hard. G is too frightened of emotional pain, it limits him. When I was in high school and college I worked like mad because I loved succeeding: there was a framework for unambiguous and immediate success that I still believed in. Art is not like that. Best work often succeeds unobviously or after a long delay or not at all. It's a hard way to live. a meditation, a perilously intimate one, on personhood, which is, sometimes, though not always, contiguous with selfhood constant, elusive, and very personal conundrum of embodiment ... a vision of the simultaneity of multiple selves This exercise has turned religion on its head, as the material ultimately argues against much of what is stated in standard textbooks Countless narrative passages describe extreme anger, love, anxiety, concern or faith in terms of possession porousness of the self and fluidity of personhood category distinguished by extreme multivocality, involving fundamental issues of emotion, aesthetics, language, and personal identity As is often the case with an action or phenomenon that is inherently uncertain or difficult to identify, possession as experienced or thought about in India suffered the discomfort of certainty and confidence arising from linguistic identification. Frederick M Smith 2006 The self possessed: deity and spirit possession in South Asian literature and civilization Columbia By separating the knower from the known, writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set. Ong. to enter in; to seize; to inhabit; to touch Christian self an "inner, unchanging, stable, and ultimately detachable core at the center of an integrated if not always balanced wholeness" South Asia - fluidity, divisibility, and penetrability features of personhood dissociation and fragmentation ... alienness rendered the self Other Person made "closer to the world and its vicissitudes." Self as prior to person except in Buddhism. - I wanted that book to be something it's not - I wanted it to be a reframing of talk about what possession is, not an exhaustive description of everything a collection of texts says about possession. 10 Sue from Sprague Realty calling to say Linda was yelling at her and she's calling Animal Control [about the pit bulls]. She wants to know what I know. She's grateful I'm not mad at her. Drove from Julian and stopped to open the gate in 100 degrees in the shade. I came up the lane waving my whole arm out the window reveling in the bath of hot air. Tom's basic training videos - they're sexy, young men being physical together - very young men in good shape - being expertly trained by older men who are better at manly things than they are. Obama videos - his clean joyful beauty and then the vile ignorant illiterate hating comments below, that make me worry he'll be killed. He knew how to do it. You have to cut diagonally. If you cut straight across, you can lose consciousness and the wound closes up. Who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand. - Deadlock 1st October 1900 to mid-year 1901. Revolving lights long walk home on Friday night in July of 1903. 11 the grey-eyed maiden, goddess of war and its arts Hot wind coming in through the south windows at 11:20. Last night when I picked up my bedroll from the floor in the sunroom there was a dead mouse splayed flat underneath it. That it had crept under my bedroll to die seemed a reproach. He is a weapon .... The best the gods have ever made. the sea throwing off great sheets of light I felt sorry for other kings who had to fight for their authority or wore it poorly .... For Achilles it was graceful as a blessing, and the men lifted their faces to it. - Tom sending copies of his emails back and forth with his newsletter committee. I notice he's lied, "I had out-of-town company on the weekend." It sickens me. A squirrel on his back legs on the gatepost rock staring toward the north end of the cedar windbreak chipping. I see its little mouth opening and closing as regularly as if it were a little automaton. A single note very high and as loud as a whistle. I can have no idea what it's about. Trying sitting outside after the sun's gone west behind a white screen. There's no breeze. Mosquitoes, biting ants, flies. I'll have to go in. Kind of day it's been, I didn't make my bed, sat on it reading Patroclus until the phone started ringing with student appointments. Well under 1% of US population have a PhD. Of them, twice as many are men. 12 Another kind of day, high grey and variable wind. Early on there was one strong blast, and since then I hear it rise a bit, skitter of leaves at the screen door, cool air across my feet. There's been so much light and heat that it's a rest. Thinking of David Mann and Doris in their tent on the banks of a green river, he 25 and she five months pregnant. "I would go to the river which was about 50 feet from us and catch enough trout for our supper." She wanted cremation and we decided that should the necessity arise, the Maligne River in Jasper would be the final resting place for the ashes. We chose the Maligne I suppose because of its wild turbulent yet alive nature and because we had spent such good and wonderful years together on its banks. - Draw a lot of blood - incubate it - centrifuge - blood cells produce proteins that reduce inflammation and stimulate cell growth - sometimes add anti-inflamm proteins - reinject - Dusseldorf - Regenokine - treat inflammation as a cause of tissue damage - "It's like somebody just put oil all over your body. It lubes you up, and you're able to move more freely, especially pain free." Wehling The end of pain. - Barbara on the road as I'm driving by. She's more guarded than she has been, stiff. Afterward I remember the last conversation I had with her. The news was on behind her when she phoned and she went to turn it off. She said "I don't want to listen to him." "Who?" "Obama. My friend and I say there should be a separate channel for him and Michelle." "Why is that?" "So we never have to hear them." I was calculating, will I? Said "I'm quite fond of him myself." She said "Well that's all right" with Mary's sort of resentful dreariness. Sore conversation with T. I say I want my man to be a straight arrow, "I'm honorable and I deserve that." He says he's unrepentant, what he did is standard business practice. It is, and that doesn't excuse it.
I'm thrown into my never-ending dilemma that I've found no way to solve in all these years. -
13 Clovis people, Paisley people - Oregon caves, spearheads 13,000 years old. Three waves of migration from Siberia, genetic and language group evidence. - Black Canyon Road two months later, very changed but still an hour of rapturous color. The road almost white and always turning. Banks and slopes grey, rust, taffy-colored, with gardens of cream-colored buckwheat flowers hung from dark granite or fox-red sand banks. The taffy color is parched mustard stalks or grass, the grey is some other dried thing that at a distance covers the slopes with mauve patches. Closer up, rosy long fronds of white sage seed stalks or the littler mauve flower stalks of dudleya. Everywhere spalted rock faces in endless variations of color. This afternoon there was a dark sky ahead to the north, with once a ray of sun on the white road where it came around a corner miles, miles, ahead. I was steering with my right arm, a lot of steering, window down, seatbelt undone, third gear, never faster than 15 mph, often no gas just touches of the brakes, looking everwhere perfectly absorbed. At the top end there began to be a smell of wet hay or heated grain. I hadn't seen it on the dirt road but on the asphalt it was obvious that it had rained. Puddles at the gate and when I was coming up the lane enough of a pelt so I had to turn on the wipers. Loud run-off onto the terrace rock. Came in and opened all the doors to the hay scent, which is reaching me on the couch as I'm drinking Louie's organic Himalyan tea. My lovely Ramona excursion also brought home cherries, nectarines, strawberries, melon, raspberry kefir, feta, Irish white cheddar, avocadoes, radishes, small cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, green beans, fish, steak, cranberry essence, and a dark blue fitted sheet from the goodwill. 14 Wood louse, sow bug. Armadillidium vulgare the common pill bug "can invade homes en masse in search of moisture." Crustaceans, detritivores feeding on dead plant matter. What are they doing on the living room rug? Toiling laboriously. - Thin and lame fox on the yard looking for mice probably. - Pleasure of householding - washing the floor in the kitchen and mudroom - laundry, washing towels and sheets - cooking apricots and old plums and peaches, beautiful red and yellow jars - sweeping the doorway - putting away emptied plant pots. 15 Talking to Louie this morning early about the shame I feel when Tom is sleazy. I say, If I'm with someone who is sleazy does that mean I'm sleazy? I would never show Tom at my college or at a screening and I feel inordinate relief when he has taken care of himself and looks good. She said it does not show that I'm sleazy, I'm not sleazy, it shows that I'm injured. So then I get it. There's my visible injury and then there is this other visible injury, and the second matters because of the first. Warm south wind and race cars roaring, whole fleets of them. Dreamed I was plodding through a vast muddy field at night. Came to the back doors of some lit shops. I ask a young French woman whose shop has nice bowls, white, whether I can go through her shop to get to the street. She is offering me dry clothes. She hands me a white bra with big padded cups, wide lace straps, and an elaborate lacey long lower band or skirt. She says something like, This is what you should wear, as an older woman. I try it on over my smaller black bra. Besides being ridiculous it is too big. She also hands me a tweed gym slip with a label from an expensive shop that I'm supposing is in France. I've been happy in the house, for instance loving the air at the open front door and the clean mat at the kitchen door. Clean floor in the mudroom. At the same time have had fantasies that if a mountain lion attacked me I would let it have me. - Had one just now, in the midst of this beautiful day, this air and light I love. I don't think I've had this steady underlying wish for death before. It's not the suicide voice of acute pain, it's just quietly there. A hawk's shadow runs quietly over the grass. Am I letting my early self down, should I be fighting more, for the sake of her story. Something like that is what I feel about what I've said above. Solutions offered to the vast muddy dark field of being an older woman are another ridiculous false effort at sexual glamour or a prestigious school uniformity. Sex and intellect.
- Fluttering triangle of light on the ceiling, what is it. It's water in the plant saucer I've set below the window to draw away the ants, ruffled by wind.
As I was speaking to Louie this morning, from the couch gazing down across the field, a wide flock of birds, two hundred birds, was skimming through the cows grazing on the slope, back and forth many times, always low to the ground, swooping along the curve of the hill. 16 Singing at the computer - Mozart - thinking of Mary at the sink or the stove with her back to the room singing as she worked. Cotton housedress, apron, sturdy bare calves. It's as if the house before it was moved is the only true home and everything after that not worth remembering. There I think of a moment that was worth remembering. When the house had been moved to the west place it was rotated so our bedroom window faced east rather than west. I remember waking in sun one morning at the end of the grade 12 school year and lying in bed in a blaze of joy that I would soon be leaving for the summer and then university. I was there, I was on my way. Radishes were the first fresh thing out of the garden every summer. Ed liked them sliced in vinegar, which would be stained pink. We would eat lettuce dressed with cream and sugar. I feel a pressure in the center of my chest when I think of that house with my parents young. Why is it. The naturalness of surrounded belonging. There were things to fear and be dissatisfied about but the framework itself hadn't yet been disrupted. The house and yard and surrounding land and the family were all one thing, which I was. Within that one thing I didn't know I was I had struggles and pleasures I thought of as myself. The Still at home journal isn't worth much because it identifies itself only with those struggles and pleasures and ignores the whole. When the house was moved we no longer coincided with ourselves. After that it was one disintegration after another. Ed and Mary moved again, and then again, and then again. Opa and Oma moved, and then again, and then again. The floor blurred, is that the way to say it. - Advisor evals - Jody says "so thankful", Sam says "I feel like she genuinely wants me to do my best", Lee says "I truly enjoyed", Lori says "such an amazing woman", and Kari that rigid little fantasist tries to get even with me for challenging her mad beliefs by declaring I'm ignorant of the humanities. - Certain animals see perfume and electricity. Any radiation is bounced off, around and variously within all the <matter> of the world, altering its character and effect as it does. A rain-cloud full of organic molecules transduces in many ways the radiation that plays upon it from the sun, and it is possible that it not only amplifies into a coherent pulse a particular component of the radiation it receives, but that as it alters its dimensions it becomes for a while a resonant chamber which by internal reflection amplifies this pulse further. It is already known that a cloud will pick up audio subsonics generated by storm-action far out at sea, and act as a kind of satellite echo-chmaber retransmitting them This resonance and echoing is taking place with all substances at all times. An electrical storm may make rocks buzz. In outer space there are electromagnetic waves so low frequency and so long that when they hit the earth they can be heard and are called whistlers. Wherever there is a fragrance there is likely to be a subvisible radiance charging the light with its underglow. Description of universe as a cathedral in which an organ is played, "the organ here standing for the sun, moon, planets and stars as sources of different tones of direct and reflected radiation." And then of a cathedral as such: The audible compression waves, pulsed by the echoing, focusing nave, the vibrations of the music, will also light up with minute electric currents, and consequently broadcast the piezoelectric stones of which the cathedral is built. The energy of the organ pulse and the singing will also accumulate in the free-floating masers of incense and candle-flame, human breath and perspiration, until they can hold it no longer, when it will discharge in a flickering subvisible fluorescence, also pumped up by the strong infra-red radiated by the human metabolism. All is penetrated and immersed in the wave-complex of visible and invisible light. What we see is determined as much by the invisible as the visible, for the quality of the visible light cannot be separated from invisible radiation, or the look of the place from its sound, or the smell of it from the look. [Peter Redgrove The black goddess and the unseen real] 17 It's cold this morning. 18 At my age, the more alive you are, the more you're aware of death. Samuel Menashe. - I didn't leave Kari's eval unanswered. I was going to, but it was rankling. I had to think how to frame it so she'd actually read it, and then back her down point by point. She handled it by ignoring everything in it and saying many times over that she wanted to be evaluated according to disciplinary standards, by which she means, I think, take religion at its own valuation. I didn't, and shouldn't have, but she was right in what she could have said if she were more experienced, which is that there was a power battle going on I wasn't going to let her think she was winning. No, young pup, you do not know as much as you think you do. Pedagogically, would there have been a better way?
19 Luke this morning telling about being in a roofless doorless Land Rover in South Africa staring into the eyes of a lion at 15', who growled. "My heart stopped." We had been talking about mountain lions. I said they are the color of the grass. He said the tracker told him he'd need to scan from right to left, which is counter habit, to see lions in the grass. It was a little after six in the morning. We were on skype. Turkeys went past and I jumped up and took a photo for him. He kidded me into sending it via skype. -
Lynx genus - 4 species - Greek from the root leuk meaning light, brightness. Felidae - Felinae - Lynx - Eurasian, Canadian, Iberian, bobcat. Bobcats are Lynx rufus. Bobcats pointed ears, in desert have light coats. Cougar larger of the small cats Felinae believed to have originated in Asia 11 million years ago, Bering land bridge 8-5 million years ago. Horizontal leap 20-40', vertical 18' max, ambush predators. Leap onto the back and suffocate by neck bite. In general live 8-10 years. Secretive and crepuscular. Do not generally recognize humans as prey, most frequent attacks in late spring and summer when juveniles leave their mother. CA a dozen since 1986, by neck bite into the spinal cord. Fight back with intense eye contact, loud calm shouting, sticks and rocks, even bare hands. Almost all fatalities are children. Danger signs are daylight activity, lack of fear, stalking humans. Cougars whistle. Spitting - threat. Hiss - unsure, attack or retreat. Growl - willing to attack. Snarl - defensive. 20
Rabbits are eating straw - desperate enough to chew spiked succulents. The toyon has been blooming beautifully white. Lot of book decisions. I have it roughed out for 160 pages - two good days - how it's a different kind of book - want it to show how all my work has had a same feel as well as all being about land and mind -
Photo format - sRGB and what size - Either a poisonous hobo spider or a relatively harmless giant house spider. Male can be seen wandering around houses during the late summer and early autumn looking for a mate. Hobo bodies not more than about .6" long, giant house spider .7", longer legs. Or grass spider, "rarely indoors". 21 I'd see George Whalley on campus a face like no face I'd seen, austere, intellectual, patrician. His voice was like that too, an actor's voice with a British accent though he was Canadian. His wife when I'd see her arriving at a concert with him was surprisingly dowdy, no makeup and her hair in a queue. She looked spiritless. The rumor was that he had affairs. In third year I signed up for his seminar on the Romantics and went to a couple of sessions, sat at the end of a long table opposite him, never spoke in class, didn't understand anything he was saying. Something about movements in psychic space. I couldn't afford to have a bad grade so I dropped the course. A while after, I was reading on Olivia's bed when the phone rang. I remember bending over the side of the bed to pick it up though I don't remember any other conversations on that Division Street phone. It was Whalley angry that I'd dropped his course. I was astonished, baffled, why was this great man taking it so personally that he'd phone a student to berate her.
- The sun is starting to appear on the front edge of the window bookcase. - 1915-1983 (68). Scholar, naval officer, intelligence agent, CBC broadcaster, musician, biographer, translator. English at Queen's 1950 (35) - 1980. Rhodes scholar. PhD King's College London 1950, Coleridge. When he was born his dad was dean of St George's Cathedral Anglican, taught him Latin and Greek. Piano at 4 or 5. I didn't study with him in 1965 when he was 50. not a study of Coleridge's sources and 'influences,' but of his findings, soundings, and transformations British Museum Library "that most glorious of all libraries" I consider myself fortunate to have come upon Coleridge's mind. He was integrated to the extent that he operated from a single worthy core, and all his efforts contributed to evolving that core. His lectures are not just about literature, they are about the workings of the mind in conjunction with other minds. Religious! He was austere and private, devoted to long study toward purity in a manner that was indeed of a former age ... ideal of classicism a powerful elegance, formal yet simple, ... consistency and devotion. origins in Christian and Greek traditions innocence of intent vision of God is reserved for the initiate in the discipline of humility, patience and wholeness Ondaatje: "taught me how to shape a book ... how to build up the emotion of a book" suffering and tragedy The fullest reality is accessible only to those who have a wide range and depth of awareness: capable of organizing complex responses. 44 The event of reality constructs the person; it makes the person integral. to discover how one may constantly change without loss of integrity [I was looking at Poetic process 1953 and then at John Ferns' essays online] - So he wrote poetry through the war and then wrote this ponderous tome jousting with all the men who seemed important to him, aesthetic philosophers etc, but in Studies in literature and the humanities published after he died in 1983 he was saying what I was wanting to say and saying it very beautifully. - personal and demonstrative pronouns, certain adverbs, aspects of tense and modality, referring expressions and anaphora under certain conditions Anaphora - referring terms, expressions that bind parts of a text. Someone called Emmott speaking of priming and focusing functions, assuming a standing web but talking in terms of 'consciousness' - There could be a simple film with written sentences and then images that fulfill them. The Cuyamacas in the southeast ____ is like ____. (Something with motion.) If I look further south ____ ____ the furthest mountain I see _____ _____ [zoom] is in Mexico. Because it is summer the crickets are loud at night [play triangle]. Yesterday it rained, and there was water crashing from the roof [play triangle] onto the stone terrace ____ in front of the house ____. Later sometimes the written voice, sometimes the real voice. Something simple that has a beautiful shape in prose, by itself a small story. Then adding variances that make it subtle, a play with the viewer. 22 I was naked in bed with a man. He couldn't get very far in. I said it was because of menopause. I said he should go ahead anyway. After a while he said would I do something to help. I grabbed his ass hard. It was a meaty nice ass. He came quietly. We seemed to have been in public under the covers. A neighbour man and his two little boys had glanced over. When we were lying enwrapped after I saw just for a second the wrinkled sour face of what I thought might be his ex-wife looking down at us. I said to him, May I, and put my hand over his penis and scrotum the way I'd put it over my own sex, as a warm cover. Then on the middle bar of the window I saw as if a little brass plate saying twin boys would be born. - I've been working these days, all day. It gets very hot in the afternoon. I'm at the desk in loose cotton singlet and loose cotton pyjama pants, keep glasses of water in the fridge so the whole glass will be cold. Don't want to eat very much. Have the whole door open to the day. Yesterday I read through the intro chapter of Being about to make sure I want to include it. I admired it. Then I read through Being Being about and liked it too, didn't want to leave any of it out. Added four poems from Short poems or should I call it In English. Have too many pages, about 6 too many. That's what I'll think about today, and the BA conclusion, which I shd maybe shorten. What it was like before, when I couldn't work: intention just faded away at the thought. What it's like now: intention doesn't come into it, I just do it. Overnight ants pulled soil out of the bottom of two plant pots, one on the kitchen sill and one on this sill. There's a tissue next to this one that I'd blown my nose in before I went to sleep. It's swarming with tiny ants. A folded little brown bat on the ceiling - figure out how to make it easier for it to find the open door - it misses on half a dozen passes - try turning off the radio - stand at the window end of the room waving a broom - beautiful swoop into the open black. The nineteen year old Australian hurdler who has had 11 million views of the video of her warm-up and race - it's called sexiness but it's blazing body confidence. I wanted Dorothy Richardson to see it, wanted to send the sight of her to all the corners of the world where women are shamed, all the wicked centuries. Sexy is where I got to this aft on the couch. After a while a pudding sensation, soft and open like that, staying almost there on and on and then bright little spangles flowing outward all the way to my chin. The G4 is flickering, and worse, the screen is striping. I backed it up and then backed up the MacBook Pro too. It's slow and the fan is rattling or buzzing. Meantime Tom was given a computer that has Word. 26 When I was twelve what it was like beginning to be noticed sexually by men my father's age - riding in the truck with Ed, some man on the way to Dawson Creek [weigh station on the border, probably] who kidded me, or him, about wanting to keep me, which was the standard line. I had sparkle. I'm writing this down because I'm missing that power of sparkle, I'm looking at the backs of my hands and they aren't bright anymore, are starting to have the under-surface bruised look of old women. Dull skin on my once beautiful forearms. And yet I'm in summer health, not hurting. Have lots of work stamina. In Google searching for someone's first name for the bibliog. and the second thing that comes up is a book by Kerry McSweeney, The language of the senses: sensory perceptual dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman and Dickinson. Retired from McGill. kerry.mcsweeney@mcgill.ca. George Eliot: a literary life. 27 flagrant exertion the luxury of talent The top of the show, see, is a kind of welcoming, and you're getting everyone comfortable and challenging them at the same time as you're setting out your theme. saw need of exciting people and exciting yourself into some higher state ... for a lot of people it's a dangerous job. Bruce Springsteen at sixty-two David Remnick New Yorker July 30 2012 - Got ravenous for photos this morning and went through hundreds, on Tumblr and Flickr, collecting some I liked into a page called Light curation because Light collection was gone. Was wanting to measure my eye against the best and scout who to show mine to, and to look for what else I'd want to do. At the same time I was vaguely thinking what I'd look for if I were going to set out to find someone whose company I could really like. Hours making minute changes on the book, deciding on heading style, cleaning up pages. It's sketched in, when I get back I'll be able to see things that are wrong with the layout. - Clichés rolling out of the invisible back room today, what is it - keep having to erase. Windows open, a loud single cricket sounding to me like a dotted line. 30 San Diego Lestat's a bit after noon. Was at the Special Cases Building by 7:30 this morning. It's done [work visa] for another three years. Chicago 1st August On long distances I'm walking like a fat person. I lumber, I labour. It feels like stiffness in hip and ankle. I hate the feeling. I avoid it by not walking. Around the house is easy, natural, though. Plane to Dulles loading. I so hate the look of most human beings. Occasionally some kind of good one. Three kids with a Japanese mother and a loose Anglo dad, beautiful nine year old with long pigtail down her back, wide skirt, cardigan, long slim legs, coltish alert joy. Yesterday three French Canadian brothers sitting in a row, dark olive skin, pale blue eyes, big baseball caps, brown legs, slender smart faces, talking naturally together. Yesterday a flight attendent I lit up to see because she looked like an Epp, dark and pointed. - Yawning. Got into the mediocre voucher hotel at midnight. No pyjamas, no mouthwash, no dinner, bad TV. Two aspirin, slept in my clothes, woke at 5:30, paper cup of tea. Writing in the lobby with a dozen other travelers reading a free copy of US Today. Beautiful dark-skinned young East Indian man reading an old hardback next to me. Maybe he'll be a writer. When we're in line outside I ask what he was reading. He names someone, I say I don't know that one. "It's a thriller" he says carefully. I write him off. Thin older woman sits next to me, but she has a pretty mouth so I ask how she slept. She lives east of Sacramento in the foothills. I say there's an upside to the delay, which is that I'll miss a whole day of faculty meetings. She laughs. Anything from the weekend with Tom. Maybe later. [Dulles - Burlington flight, phone photos: silver - pile - pile2 - moon] 2nd Plainfield Wednesday morning at a table, fourteen people listening to someone talk about marketing. Green leaves opposite, many shapes of leaves all the same color. Where wd I rather be - will that work - making a garden making a house making a new friend taking a trip fixing every scary symptom being liked for something I've made opening a mind of work in film and writing living the way I lived last week working all day - What do I want
What do I need to do for these to happen - T said, Can I ask you something, do you know I love you. I said, I think you love me but I don't think loving is very important to you. Loving isn't very important to me either, in some ways. The fight we had was about Oscar. It was short and it ended well. He worries that I will control his friendships. I said that every time he's lost his sobriety it's been because a friend invited him and he didn't want to look like a wimp. It scares me that he doesn't see the danger. I said his situation is different now, he has more to lose, but he's weak in relation to male friends. I went into my tough clear grounded voice, which impresses me when it happens. The word craggy kept coming into my head when I looked at him. When I arrived he had a look he sometimes has, what to call it - faded? disordered? shifty, a schuft. Later on he looked manly. Firm-mouthed, craggy, none of that exactly but different. In his first look, it's as if his center is outside himself? A bit in front of his face? A deformation. The later look is strongly centered in his idiosyncrasy. In one of the moments sitting next to him, him talking, I felt my own relative dimness with him and wondered whether I was decentered myself. What do I mean. Dimness - the way I carry away little memory of how he looks or what we say. What do I remember, the laundromat, Sunday morning Lestat's. Clean bedspreads after six years. Tom saying the place has to be clean when he's writing, he can't write when it isn't. - Wrote all that during meetings today - What does interest me in a meeting like that - Van Hoy's pretty boobs. Anything else? The leaves across the room. Sometimes Lise chirruping up. Jim's steady interventions. 3 My eight lying on the floor with their eyes closed. Two older women whose bellies rise like hills above their limbs. Three sturdy physical women. Two narrow slender girls. Josh wide-shouldered and short legged now his beef is gone. Nobody writhing or twitching. Adelaide couldn't hear me, which is what happened when we spoke afterward too. Lori's lovely introduction, the art of heart. Eyes - faces now quite blurred across the distance of the Haybarn. Can't read phonebook entries or the tiny print on pill bottles. That's all new since last res and it's both eyes at their different ranges. Close-up eye is not as close up, distance eye is not as distant. A sticky feeling on the surface of the cornea. Returning students - Katie holding herself with splendid confidence; Lori gold-shouldered in a sundress, natural; Jody about to sign divorce papers; Lee polished in make-up and showing breasts in a black slip-dress; Sam without her teenage boy. Kari not there, having given herself a man's haircut and a new name, staying out of my way and I hers. Anthony not there either. Katie's presentation - that was my doing - she stood in front of a packed room in cut-offs and a plaid shirt over black lace. Slender little thing with a long neck and serious pointed face. She was a vivid demonstration of her thesis, the way she moved about in front of us - leaned forward on the podium sometimes to confide joyfully, or would stop unselfconsciously to ponder her outline - so free and focused. "You stayed in touch with yourself the whole time, you stayed in touch with your audience," Lise said. The way she handled questions. The way she was clear and direct the whole way through. "The democratic voice is the voice of the whole body." - I gave her the framework that let her make that of herself. I defended her ardent joyful generous spirit, I gave her a defense against what wants to erase her. I coached her. I coached her in detail: be careful how you say it. I started her with Gilligan and she blazed into recognition. It was easy for her to understand that wanting to learn something and wanting to become something are the same thing. Her semester with Campbell crushed her - Campbell couldn't stand her girlness. She came out of that semester lost, sobbing. She was honorable in distress. She persisted in confusion, she trusted me with her questions. She knew I was on her side. [Her thesis was called] The release and integration of feminine-associated ways of knowing, feeling and being in a patriarchal, androcratic society. 6 "As a teacher I'm in awe of what you just did" Linda said after Speaking bodies I. I galloped them through the evolution of nervous systems and cortex specifically. Tomorrow will need to do it again with deixis, metaphor, prepositions. 8 A woman I can want to be like, she says and I meet it square. Yes I know about that I say. There was just one woman who knew anything, I say. She has died. 10 If you ever need help, she said, I'm young and strong. I want to carry your suitcase. That was the little seed of realness of this res, one person who could see that the four performances of work I gave are strong and exceptional gifts. I could teach the evolution of the cortex in a way I was never taught it, that gives them the essence. I demonstrated the strong exceptional thing a human can be and told them how to make themselves that too. I set up for them a conversation that let them show themselves and see each other well. I was great-hearted in my wishes for them and said so directly when it seemed to matter. I gave them many clues. I said I'd done the last exercise too, looking at myself from the all-seeing point of love. That being had seen all the little things I don't like about how I look but had also seen my great-heartedness. I give up on the two older women. They are what they are, they seem finished, they have their wound-up messages and they will go on announcing them. They are nothing to do with me. I endure them. I think you're smokin' hot. Sam burst out with that thing I most need to hear - is it the most? Jody getting up from breakfast said quietly I love you. I said I love you too. Kirsten's luminous eyes and sturdy unashamed body showing itself onstage last night. Coral padding herself in motherhood and not willing to know she's doing that. Josh with his elegant iPod and on it his elegant wiki. Exquisite Sonja, who impressed me less when I knew she was coming from money. Skinny scrappy Sam who smiles when she's in pain. Recent dot doc. It's 7:30. I've just read through it and liked it. 11 The unspeakable side-lit badlands, all below. Smooth land bitten by water. Now dark circles three sizes, some halves. River wrinkles. Luminous cloud some wisped, some in firm curds, some smeared. Creases like moment's drain-lines on a beach. Ineffable underlighting. It's very like fine sand. Sharp ridges like backbones, fins catching horizontal sun. the complicated blue white grey, land of another gravity. Layered land, all islets. This morning the laminated rock standing on end along the road. Luminous spaces below a bit tinted, rosy. The plane is riding steadily now, and I'm somehow revived. It's a long wing, sharp. Such a depth of fiber. Red land lit pink showing between. 6:41 where I'm going. Jody yesterday standing in front of me, so I was seeing her head to foot for a long time, a remarkable shape taller than I thought, remarkably broad-shouldered, burly, deep chested and then quite narrow hipped, standing poised for a long time in almost third position. - That one's a pile of whipped cream. There's one with a skirt that looks like a reflection on ice. Asil at the picnic table outside the cafeteria waiting to intercept maybe me. Her two last years of high school in a fine arts magnet school where they wrote all morning every morning. She'd looked up my journal from when I was her age. I was in Wales with Luke and we'd found a dead hedgehog. I said better not to look at it while she's working with me, she shouldn't have all my junk in her head. It should be about her. Sometimes a broad interruption, where a flood has spread a table top of silt.
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