| in america volume 25 part 3 - 2012 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego 13 August Flirting with a young man - we're kissing - it's delicious - later we're definitely going to fuck. I go away for a minute and while I'm away flirt with another young man. I feel beautiful. I come back. He says he has just spent five hundred thousand dollars on a parking lot. It's a poor neighbourhood. I ask whether he thinks it's a good investment. Another man across the room says something he agrees with, that it's a founding investment. To keep the Agreement, every adornment of the tongue spoken, every embroidery of every thread went to feed the Holy in Nature, depending on how the word was spoken, and how the thread was sewn. A living in which every phenomenon of human culture had to have an aspect of beauty, adornment, and deep multivalent meaning whose presence would create a constant prayer-like remembrance in the minds and hearts of these new humans as to the real source of all relevant life: the Divine of Nature. The word for 'feeding' is the same word as 'to cause to remember'. Initiation was a tribal education for the youth to learn how to farm and feed beautifully both the people and the Holy in the Seed, and that's what made a viable tribal adult. The language of the Agreement was encoded in the language of mythology, whose secret was revealed only through initiation. Beautiful farming was at the root of all. the seeds of our Indigenous Souls might possibly begin to regrow the beauty, grace and integrity of real human culture. becoming a human seed from which it is worth descending the veld ... last furrow plowed and left planted for the wild, on the other side of which resides the uncultivated ... it was there that all the rituals were made to feed the Holy in the Wild. weld, welt sheer obligation to the joy of life know the history of things keep a veld put back into the wild twice the area taken out of it Find seeds of the edible plants you love the most. Then find their stories. Then find their scientifically explained origin, then find their real mythological origins. Then with a deep heart ask the seeds if they are willing to die ... Then plant them in your back yard ... Get good at it. You must, no matter how unlikely the conditions, cultivate food plants ... learn to cook beautifully, and feed your neighbours. Invite your fascist neighbours over to feast, get to know their ancestral grief that made them prefer a narrow mind, start gardening together, turn both your griefs into food. To Indigenous people worldwide, plants are the most sentient beings of all. We are allowed our folly, but it must always end in a discovery of our love for what loves us by dying to feed us. Where every article of clothing is a hand-made message to the Holy in which they walk courteous, dignified, capable, permanently ornate with song and the deliciousness of language; in how they move, and not heavy trudging orgreish or armoured but subtle in the way they go about every facet of their food ... the Holy in Nature forgives these kinds of human. Martin Prechtel 2012 The unlikely peace of Cuchumaquic: the parallel lives of people as plants: keeping the seeds alive North Atlantic Books Thinking of Oma Konrad when they were leaving the house on Centennial Street giving me her little paper bags of saved seed. Winter savory which she used for bean soup, Bohnen Suppe. Grandma Konrad, Grandpa Epp. I came into gardening in London when I had a child and the little triangle of back yard on Burghley Road. Late twenties. Mary gardened but she wasn't a gardener. She did what all the farm women did in the way they did it. On Sunday afternoons when we visited other families the women would wander out to the garden together and stand looking at everything. Cornelia Sieburt would give us an armload of sweetpeas to take home. - Before I leave this house should I say how it's been. I fed his plants, repotted some, topped up with compost. They're bright at the open French doors. I tidied after T went to work early. It's Tom's house now, not mine, more little bits of his family on the mantle, on any surface. His house he's happy in, new editor of the University Heights News. I'm a little bit back together with Tom, I told Lise. We were on the couch in the dark last night and he was confiding. His light nice young voice. He's been fond and dear, not backing off, catching himself when he begins to motor. I've been quietly trusting. I've had no objections, except to his idea of successful businessman clothes, horrible collared knit golf shirts. I said rock and roll looks better on him. He came to the baggage area in a yellow golf shirt and looked skimpt the way he sometimes does but kissed me publicly right there and went off to get the jeep so I wouldn't have to walk. It has been a good time ever since, three nights and two days. He watched news but didn't force music. He generously decompressed me after the res. He made me dinner to my taste. He offered a clean bathtub. There's clear sky over the eugenia that have grown back tall enough to sway. Sun on the black and white tiles, on the hardwood floor. A breeze from the window over his bed. It's quiet in his perfect house, house perfectly suited to him, where he's now been for six years, house that has made right things possible for him. It's a good moment in our story. I said last night that we've broken up four times - it's maybe more - and it has never stuck. I have done it by declaration and he has done it by wandering. He agreed he does it by wandering. Mesa Grande 15 August Bit after 7, first morning back. Sun over the broken oak, lot of smoke and it's thickening. Four lightening fires, the largest south of the road I take to Borrego Springs. I'm eating garlic sausage boiled with green beans and courgettes. Hints of frailty and snarl said Asil at five in the morning in Minnesota. I said you are adoring what we both adore when you adore me. Last night in the dark on the stone floor I heard a strange call many times close together, sharp loud whistle hooking upward. If I think of this oak in the Mayan way, its flight is the acorn woodpecker and its animal would have to be the silly ground squirrel. Is it alright in the heat? Seems to be. Still air. Warmth on the side of my bare arm. Will I go to Julian for books? - Coming home I saw the tower of smoke in the northeast. In you I sense the vastness of female possibility and onto my knee I go, with due chivalry and awe. I see a fierce and subtle beauty, married by the mounting integrations of time, who conducts herself with such nuanced discretion that only a few notice her passing. What of what Ellie knows, may I, with grace, learn.
Tom had been reading the beginning of The golden west and talked about how I saw Jim Legg. He said I judged him the way another man would, as if I'd swallowed my father. I don't think there's an essential difference between men and women in the matter of judging, or I could say maybe Tom hasn't known women free enough to judge? And I did judge him sexually too, in my physical descriptions I suppose. I didn't like Tom giving my father what I'd worked to make in myself. Then when we were talking about how we'd kept coming back he talked about my character and I talked about his beautiful nose, the charm of his manliness. I said he doesn't find me deliciously feminine, which I'd like, and he didn't disagree. He'd never said he didn't like me in my docs and plaid shirts. That was our one sore moment. - Just remembering sometime at night a smell I was dimly trying to name - was it an animal cage? Smelling it a bit now at nearly 9, though not all day. 16 Thick blue-ish smoke quite aromatic because it's sage, pines and chaparral is filtering and tinting the light. The sun is lower, reaches almost across the bookshelf now, pinkish pale ivory. Nonconscious is local, conscious is broadly propagated. 'Adaptive unconscious.' Charlie Rose. FB message:
18 What is she and what's my job with her. Is she dangerous to me. She's in the line of Millie, Susan, and Emilee, lesbians who get personal. I was never in danger with Emilee. Am I with Asil. She's given me her online journal 2002-2009, that can warn me of what needs warning of. She's Rowen's age, a month younger.
Being about? It says yes though I'm doubtful.
- I bought a bed, iron bedstead someone dug up behind a cabin at the Eagle Peak Mine. Heavy to drag out of the back of the jeep and awkward to set up by myself. It was for Emilee but now I like it outside. I have set it under the driveway oak and was lying on it in the dark looking at single stars that were like the single notes of Simple lines of enquiry I could hear through the screen door. I haven't had an outside bed since the lake house. Love the sensation of lying there in the open. Bats blur past. The crickets grind away at layered distances. 19 Sunday morning. Slept outside. Am on the bed now, feet in the sun. Have sent a balancing reply. Why was it complicated. 1. she wants to adore for a good reason 2. but adoring for any reason chutes into early love and has to be understood that way 3. she wants to go all-out into loving 4. I don't want claims 5. I think holding distance is correct in transference/advising 6. but I hold off also in my own little slew of fears Woodpeckers playing in the clear sky above the road, four of them, no maybe five, or six, swooping up, diving, fluttering, urking. The white patches on their wings look transparent against the sky. They're excited. They seem to rise to some point and then turn and fall. I've been occupied by Asil more than I like, for instance last night lying in the sleeping bag for hours. It isn't even liking, it's more having been hooked by the notion of being adored, admired, or I could even say seen more than usual though not by an equal. I can tell I'm hooked also by the way I'm impatient for a reply. - If I take my life away, it will be to surrender; to let go, gracefully say: I give up, you win, this time, destruction; may you be the medicine this world needs. I would like to give soul through writing first, though. - Have seen no ants since I'm back, as if they lost interest in the house when I wasn't in it. Very hot mid afternoons. I doze through them sweating on the couch. - It's cooler on the outside bed through the afternoons. 21
Weds 22nd Lawrence Marks 1998 The language of the senses: the dynamics of perception
- End section of Leaves of grass, Sands at seventy. event enough for him Coleridge saying that in perceiving one can't tell the effect of the object from the effect of one's own senses because "we become conscious both of the one and of the other in one and the same way, namely, as modifications of our own Being." Frost at midnight, The eolian harp, This lime-tree bower my prison, The nightingale Coextensiveness of inner and outer - my piece on metaphor. A literal coextension felt in them (x symbolic perception). But then Ruskin, "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in the world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way .... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one. The true Seer always feels as intensely as anyone else; but he does not much describe his feelings." Intensity of visual impression made possible by the longer integrating time. fetch / invigorating thoughts from former years - Is Wordsworth. spatial model of the temporal relationship between early experience and adult consciousness Boy who had been calling owls and listening for replies struck by distant sound of a stream in a surrounding of calm lake ... boy receiving reflections of dark surroundings, afterglow. Coleridge 1795-98 sex, friendship, country, youth, health Thoreau - an echo "in some measure the voice of the wood" A squirrel chipping out in the late afternoon. Why now. Why persistently. Is it devotional. Overhead always the patrol. - What means this tragical change from youth to manhood - from manhood to age. The character of my knowledge from year to year is becoming more distinct and scientific in middle age by the decay of their poetic faculties. 23
- Another of the other kind of repeating dream I have now, where I come back to a house a street or two north of the community garden and find it a communal house with scaffolding around it or a lot of lumber and reconstruction. It's like those two streets north of Venables but poorer and I seem to come through a quite junky alley. The main floor is up a level the way 824's was but it's messier than 824 and the houses tighter together. There's a messy unintelligent hippy feel about it. I don't think I've noted it here before though it's maybe the fourth time.
[sketch of large insect] - There a strange beast bashing itself against the screen has stopped, fixed itself and is still there an hour later. 24 Found out who was reading Being about in Red Deer, Russian Emily Carr painting student who had also been reading a lot of the kind of postmodern theory I hate, disappointed to see.
26 Have I ever dreamed this place. Don't think so. Made a bedroom of the cabin room. Thinking of Emilee. Pinned up the Avalokitsevara. Gold box, gold pillow cases, new cream-colored sheets. Washed the floor and then the windows, buckets of water flung from outside. Need a sheet of plywood for the bed, which sags. Late afternoon blast of sun through the big west window. Tonight posted Miriam again about rereading Richardson. The colors of the Black Canyon Road August photos I posted yesterday hit fast and hard when I opened page 7. 27 These mornings I'm woken by a woodpecker knocking above the window. I've decided to start at the beginning of Going for broke and edit a page a day first thing in the morning to satisfy morning hunger for love. I'm on DR1-4. It works. It's a way of rounding up books too. £1000 sent to L on Friday. He was with Emilee in Notting Hill today, steel band festival. Was the belly tension earthquakes coming - a lot of them yesterday in Brawley. Haven't felt them here. August 28 Yesterday I wanted to post a little piece about dove weed and went out in late golden light and took some photos. Have posted a close-up showing sharp bristles and an out of focus yellow depth underneath. That was after I'd been reading on the couch. Ate a peach, suddenly saw the peach skins on the pewter saucer lit sideways from the window. Went for the camera, I'll try. Then the photos more beautiful than what I'd seen, more colored reflection on the table behind the plate. Posted it and doted on it the rest of the evening. Also put up The air with collected bits about scent, sound, temperature, light, and death. Miriam again the day before, so there's reading and domestic close-ups along with nature rapture. - Am at the pie shop. Linda gave me two pieces to try the difference. Straight rhubarb and rhubarb raspberry. I mean she kind of likes me now. We talked about dove weed. And yesterday I pushed Joaquin and Maria to invite me to lunch on Saturday. - [notes on looking after kittens] Such a baby. Lonesome if I go into the other room and wanting to be next to me when I'm here. Am I going to be allergic - my face is stinging now. One white leg, her front right. White boots on the other three. She likes the little scratching of the pencil. Now that I'm in the room she has lain down and started to blink. She has a 4-pointed white crown between her eyes. Her mother an Egyptian-faced half-Siamese grey stretched on the floor of her little closet suckling the remaining four. You'll miss your mama I said. - Lookit your grey stripes. In the jeep her loud yowls. I stopped to put her back in her box and she was panting in the heat, tiny pink tongue fluttering. - Aw, she purred when I stroked her. The sunflower photo with yellow lines - it satisfies me as a way of showing and liking that lower stretch of Mesa Grande Rd as it is now. It's odd that such a tiny creature feels I'm company. She cried of lonesomeness shut away in the animal room and is alright in this one. Lay with her arm around my arm sleeping. - I've taken her outside and she's not liking it, crying and climbing up onto the back of my neck. Meantime the house woodpeckers are in a frenzy behind me.
- I'm in love with my photos for a couple of days after I post them. 1. This one now, the sunflowers. The complex overcast above them, the way the yellow burns in a tawny light. The wedges either side, the fencelines on the left, road stripes and phone line on the right. All that rumpled flourishing in the center between two simplicities. 2. Then roadside cut bank. It's perfectly balanced and focused. A lot of color, a lot of subtle form in the stone, a couple of white lines, parallel. It has a classic stasis, even a kind of drama, the one green twig at the foot of a darker streak. A dry root emerging out of a hole, feeling its way downward across the wall's rough face. The small heaps of sand that have trickled down. The image has a visual foot in those small heaps and a slice of gritty road. 3. Then oh peach skins like an offering of light rather than food. 4. Ant seeds grain perfectly sorted, grit and dark red buckwheat seeds spread outward from a round ant-door. It's an elegant abstraction. The inner grey form too is a ghostly or fetal little creature with a round black eye. 5. Dove weed isn't anything special as a photo but it does show the plant at its best because of the strong side-lighting. The gold background does it honor. 6. Black Canyon Road shows land where they'd expect sky, and that land is a different kind than in the foreground. The line of a distant road relates itself to the line of the foreground slope. There's a hit of rich mixed color one sees first, and then the fineness of detail of the slopes in the distance. It has been hot today. Clouds building themselves these days always toward the southeast, is it where hot air rises over the steep rim of the desert? At this moment a mile-high pile touched pink at its upper rim and to the left of it the white moon a day or two from full. Some of the mass has softened but there's a whiter column still boiling up hard and tight. I'm relieved to have given back the little cat. I couldn't feel alone anymore, I couldn't diffuse. There's mild lightning in the pile. Such a lot happening and this is like a theatre seat at a wide-screen movie. This morning a young coyote lingering unfrightened on the rock wall next to the house. First cricket behind me in the windbreak. Jays. 30
Was that Roszak? In DR2-1. - I'd had kittens before and what was different now I think was that I was so much more aware of the humanity of the little thing that I couldn't easily be callous toward her distress. I felt how wrong it was to take her from her mother and familiar home when she was too young, how much emotional damage was being done, the brutality altogether. The way when we put her back into her pen she dashed to claw her way out, she'd been harrowed by being penned in the dark in the jeep. - Thunder. Message saying sat is down. I go out to see hills to the southwest erased. Hay scent after fewest drops of rain, then a blast of wind. Come back in, sat box's blue lights are out, power is down. Go out with tea. Storm sky in the east but not much happening here. Thunder traveling north. Light wind from the east. I also felt her unfathomability, how I couldn't understand what I was to her. 31st Clusters of bites on both elbows and now one on my right shin. They itch for a long time. The first bite was on my right elbow on the way to VT. Tom said a spider bite. But spiders don't bite in clusters. When cd I have gotten bedbugs? Or bird mites from woodpeckers in the wall? Mosquito bites don't last that long on me. This batch showed up the morning after I got the cat. Fleas? But I kept her locked in the blue carpet room until morning and then the bites were already there. It sets up skin paranoia so I feel things creeping everywhere. Paul this morning asking whether I'll be home at Christmas! And telling me about my bedstead. When I got back my skin was silky all over. Now after a couple of weeks it's dried out, rough. 1st September Lunch with Joaquin and Maria in an hour. Smell of chocolate, baking brownies to take. Why did I push to get invited. Because Joaquin is lively and liked me. Do I know how to handle myself. Who will they feel I am.
- Attachment styles site: The disorganized pattern arises in the child when there is a desire to be close to the parent as an object of safety conflicting with a drive to detach from a dangerous and confusing care-giver. For the adult this may mean being held emotionally hostage by the conflict of the desire for intimacy as well as the fear of it. Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. 5th September [for L]
This work is about 100% responsibility. 100% of your misery is brought on by ... - Democratic Convention's second day. Michelle's speech yesterday. She was shown mostly from the ribs up behind a podium, sometimes full length from behind. She was wearing a wonderful dress, a sort of shimmering orange, cut deep into the shoulders to show her perfect smooth-skinned strong shining arms. From behind the dress showed a full skirt. It was a party dress. The goldy-orange shimmer reminded me of my graduation dress that I'd designed myself and sewn myself and didn't know was much more beautiful than the other girls' store-bought pastels. I was vivid behind a podium giving the valedictorian address in it, said Bob Windrim's photo that I have never seen again. Anyway, Michelle, another scholarship girl. Her speech has been very praised today but I saw that she was smiling too much, she was cornered in a task she couldn't execute as she would have preferred, with the naturalness she had beside Barack on Oprah for instance. But she stands as a star of the embodiment party. She's tall. She's not thin. Someone on Youtube was sneering that she crosses her legs at the knee not at the ankle like a well-bred Republican woman. Her flaring integrity is body-integrity, as is Barack's. She nearly always shows skin. She hugs. She didn't hesitate to put her arm around the Queen. She advocates for the body arts of gardening, exercise and clean food, which is to say she advocates for human beauty. She wears a lot of color, she understands that as the mother of a nation she has to signal motherly devotion, and she does that with conviction, but at the same time she can stand on any platform and speak without notes for an hour: she's a lawyer. She hasn't had to abandon her family, she has taken them with her. She has the huge fortune of respecting her husband and enjoying him. He is a sexy playful powerful man with a clean conscience, that rarest thing. She's not sure she isn't better than him, which means she lives in a slightly false position, but there's no question that given the time she's in she can do more with him than without him. Is Barack's kiddish lightness of spirit going to defeat all the good he wants to do, when he's up against a ponderous bull of a father? Romney I mean. Bill Clinton speaking. His voice immediately holds. His outline is perfectly coherent and relevant. From it he speaks with easy manly authority. Natural manliness. He's giving facts and figures. He's addressing everything that needs addressing. He signals his points personally. "Are you listening?" His pacing is perfect, he's lucid. He's thin, he's pale, he's wearing out, his heart is going to go one day soon. "Here's what really happened." "You all need to listen to this carefully, it's important." They cheer, he reins them back. "You're having a good time. This is serious, I want you to listen." "Folks this is serious, because it gets worse." "WE CAN'T LET IT HAPPEN." "Now wait a moment." "Here's what really happened." For O it's as if a father steps in with powerful defense, as if god is backing him with omniscient benevolence. 6 It's very, very good theatre in a land of hungry sons. I'm in a tizzy this morning wanting to talk about the election and having no one to talk to. 8 I'm wondering whether it's time to go home to Canada. How. Live in a welfare hotel in Vancouver, maybe the Hotel Europe. Find a lover or several. Build a cabin with Louie.
September 9 A middle-sized animal sitting motionless in the patch of unmown grass where I scatter peelings. Can't see it well. Fetch the binocs. Yes it's a bobcat. Handsome. It gets up and strolls away downhill as if it has felt me staring. Last night a bit before bedtime I went out and got into the sleeping bag, which is flannel-lined and very cozy. Lay on my back in the quiet din of crickets, under black branches and many sharp white points of light. There'd be a momentary blast of breeze, whose preemptory touch I love. I faded sweetly, woke later, when the waning chunk of moon came glaring over the trees to the northeast. Got up and came inside barefoot on the patio stone feeling it had been perfect sleep. Nothing hurt. It was 2:43. This morning have been doing small edits on the later Here texts. Makes this writing selfconscious. I like the writing but it doesn't seem like mine. A slight sensation of oh is that what I'm like now. Saturday morning mild overcast. I'm only halfway through packets, so many long ones. Have a sore heart about Tom having no phone minutes and no money and now no time to visit me. In the Times a piece about epigenetic influence of nutrition, toxins, trauma, and age on gene expression unto several generations, male line as well as female. High end people more likely with young fathers. Offspring of traumatized male rats less courageous and energetic. Wow. Restless, hungry, keep checking email. The matriarch pine, and none of the others, now has under every branch a fringe of dead needles, as it did last fall and not through the summer. The unnervous coyote who ambled past on the road yesterday when I was working on the outside bed had the slightly comic dished long snout of Wily Coyote. Under the restlessness there's anguish of abandonment. Heart and forehead. 10 Monday 8 in the morning. I woke at 4:30 from dreaming I was saying goodbye to Luke, who was going on a sea voyage with a woman like a mother. I had presents for him, two small tin boxes, one longer than the other, and a couple of quite intricate small metal toys. He was young, maybe ten. I wanted to give her a present too but didn't seem to have one. Saw an open package of dates and thought I'd give her that. Woke anxious about him. There was a message from him from earlier, he'd woken shouting from a bad dream. Tried to skype. Tried to phone. Message in the chat box reached him. We talked for a couple of hours. I had turned off the light and unplugged the sat box. Eventually the sky brightened over the mountains. He said he doesn't see a way forward, to have worthy work or children. He was sometimes coughing a bit. I wanted to be able to stroke his chest. I said it was like that for me when I was his age. I was starving. Nel mezzo del cammin della nostra vita. What saved me was Joyce and the community garden and then Muggs lending me the money to go see him. - A free Monday. Finished the six I had last night. Ascetic, ecstatic, austere sez Yeats. In the sky-veins, the ores and the brilliant ground sez Schwerner. Bright unanchoring everywhere. Just see it, perceive it and then abandon it says Trungpa. Clear thinking in radiant context of self-confidence and aloneness says AS. So disgusted with metaphysical speculation anywhere I find it - the millennia of male fantasia - even in Schwerner's Tablets divagations - male fantasies about god or some other ultimate, about poetry reaching for some hidden ultimate - men importantly writing each other discussions of that 'search' - yuck. One wants a big project, yes. I have sometimes tried to feel into what they say for something that could be accurate intuition but there is such a heaping up of flummery it doesn't seem worth paying it mind. Another example a book I called for, about German notions of the uncon in the 100 years, was it, before Freud. I suppose it's the same topic isn't it. Fantasies about the unknownness of one's own body. Ellie does stealth feminism said Lise to her workshop group. And yet Schwerner's gloriously whipped-up lesbian poem. It rained hard for a few minutes, hay smell. Joe the handyman came on his hot Harley so heavy I had to move the jeep so he could turn it around. Bright new faucets, toilet tank chain, washing machine hoses. Cap put back on the vent cover. September 11 Belle comme le jour, someone of Grimaux. Since the rain yesterday there's a scent in the air I keep wanting more of - it's like an edge - it's a spice - I feel it as a sharpness - wet leaves maybe? Rotting wood. What to do in this day - next two weeks. - On the way back from SY I stopped four times to take photos of datura flowers, which are unusually thick along the lower stretch of Mesa Grande Rd just now. The last stop had a fresher fuller plant and I sat down on some prickly weed to get closer with the macro lens. Now I'm doing what I do, gazing at the photo I posted full of satisfaction. I have the flower's quilted circle but also a bud furled like a cigar with pixie curls, a couple of other stages of buds, the one next to the flower a perfect tumescent little penis, and very fine-cut leaves arrayed, all telling the story of how it comes to be. Corners correctly anchored. Focus as it happens just right to set the plant's shapes into deep 3-d. I gaze in marvel because the photo is better than what I saw. The eye goes back and forth between the strange, green-brown, elfish, tight-wound bud-cigar and what it becomes, the soft spread target of the flower, and then around it, too, five other fat pointing little boys. Filtered overcast makes all of it seem quietly and oh so clearly alive. Look at it! Herding a lizard out the door. Two nights ago when it started to rain I had to pile my bedding inside on the floor. When I began to pick it up in the morning a 6" lizard dashed from underneath it across the floor to the fireplace cavity behind the pellet stove. No way to chase it out. Maybe it will go up the chimney. Then did I hear it moving in the room at night? When I got back from SY this morning it was freezing on the sheepskin rug. Dashed under the desk. I went to put things in the fridge, look at email. After a while opened the door and the screen door too and got under the desk and herded it carefully along the walls - the west wall and then the north wall - to the open door. I notice I can't smell the air when the screen door is closed. Am getting fed up with Coral. She demands of herself to be a successful 'beautiful' poet but 1) she doesn't allow herself daycare and on top of that is pregnant again 2) was willing to quit writing because other people didn't like what she wrote, and 3) says her life has been disgustingly ugly. How can she be willing so to slander herself? I don't think I can do anything with that. Years of honest private writing and therapy she can't afford - she has the wrong sort of drive, a kind that is choking her - This morning Louie sent Grimaux and Sol Gabetta, cellist, playing duets, Grimaux b.1969, year older than Luke. Grimaux's chin line at 43 no longer perfectly firm, her face still pretty but no longer crystalline. September 12
To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain but also is part of the female soul - it is the gateway to, and medium of, female self-knowledge. usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive As my lost pelvic sensation slowly returned, my lost states of consciousness also returned. the pelvic nerve ... vagina as a gateway to a woman's happiness and to her creative life a whole set of words, actions and gestures that women cannot do without Vaginal slander bad names. reassuring at the level of the autonomic system that she is sexually safe ... seen as uniquely lovely safe in the sense of knowing you are entering a trance state in the presence of someone who will protect you if necessary at the very least, and, ideally, in the presence of someone who values you and who cherishes you. The review in the New Yorker sneered but I agree with this. I've had something like that twice, Tony and Rob, and I was happy. Would be happy now if I had it. Naomi Wolf 2012 Vagina: a new biography Large fast black spider for a couple of nights zooming across peripheral vision. Last night I lay down outside under a thinly misted sky through which I could just about see brighter stars. The whole of it would sometimes flicker with weak sheet lightening, pink. Fell asleep. When I woke the sky was brilliantly black and clear. There were strong cool blasts of air. I loved lying there beneath it all, loved it in some simple thought-less way, didn't want to stir. - I was working on the bed outside. It was starting to darken. I saw clouds coming from the north, crossing a couple of wires. Went for my camera. This and that until it began to be so dark the shutter opened and didn't close until I'd walked on. I thought to play with that. Sideways motion against the western sky. After quite a few frames I thought to zoom, first one way and then the other. I'd glance at the photo, which wd be slow to come up. I was guessing beginning and ending locations. Finally a frame - tiny - I could instantly see was the one. Clicked the off button and came in. Blue white orange and black. What's to say about it. Twilight tree with white and orange wings flaring in the dark. Is it more than that? 13 Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts expressed in it, or at least similar thoughts. - So it is not a textbook. - Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it. Greg sent it. Tractatus.
Electrical charge. Plants are responsive, which if we understand sensing correctly means they sense.
They respond when they hear lies.
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird 1973 The secret life of plants Harper & Row
led by some form of higher sensory awareness to adjust the lighting conditions to allow these phenomena to be optically recordable.
Fleshy leaves with high water content - phases of activity and inactivity daily, monthly. Sending love to the plant and feeling it coming back. Plant individuality - feel a sensation. A focused state, become aware of energetic relationship. Place their backs to a pine tree. Counter the effects of negative audience member with a deep breath and switch to another image. Charging the plant making it more sensitive. a feeling that I was becoming part of, and filling out, a broad expansive surface impenetrable to any known wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum
knowing that they are their thoughts
Strong response to death of cells, to orgasm. Hair is hard to kill. As Mrs Hashimoto assured the plant that she loved it, there was an instant response from the cactus ... the higher pitched hum of very high-voltage wires heard from a distance, except that it was more like a song. Signals from oak trees captured by live plant tissue in a temperature-controlled bath shielded from interference - can pick up a signal from a mile away. Biosignals apparently reside outside of the known electromagnetic spectrum. Cells giving off very short wave radiation. Increase cell division in other plants depending on experimentor. - Response assumed to be 'consciousness'. They converted an early mineral world. Bean plant in the USSR wired to regulate light and water. Crowfoot was able to repeat a given frequency after a pause as long as 18 hours. Conditioning a plant with shocks.
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