| in america volume 27 part 3 - september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
10 September Borrego Springs Pioneer species, climax species, creating a stable ecosystem in decades or centuries succession a series of species replacements succession is slow and subtle in deserts primary succession on open ground that has never been vegetated before, for instance a new dune on the lee of a rock, or debris that tumbles from a mountain slope secondary succession begins with a soil denuded by disturbance but still having nutrients and a seed bank a century or more is required for creosote bush and California barrel cactus to produce their original cover and abundance perturbations that have no ancient history in a particular ecosystem pulse-reserve model - weak storms only allow perennial plants to maintain themselves, strong storms activate carbohydrate and mineral reserves previously stored in stems, roots, and seeds, triggering a pulse of plant growth and reproduction as well as a pulse of storage in most other terrestrial ecosystems biological activity seldom rests with a single, over-riding environmental factor a rain pulse in the desert patch-mosaic model - a patch is a piece of earth where a particular process is operating at a given moment in time - usually repeats itself over a bajada or entire watershed - landscapes are composed of dissimilar patches that form a regional mosaic Through time, lupine patches in the same mosaic disappear as the enriched soil becomes dominated by long-lived creosote bush shrubs. Animals often create patches - burrowing and seed collecting species - ant colony patches like stepping stones across the desert - Mesozoic era of reptiles conifers and tropical climates Cenozoic era of mammals, flowering plants, less predictable temperate and arctic climates - divided into Tertiary (65 to 2 million years) and Quaternary (last 2 million) - Tertiary progressive climate changes, wide oscillations between frigid wet climates and hot dry climates over the planet's mid- and high latitudes. Many desert lineages arose during the Tertiary and subsequently diversified, but desert ecosystems are somewhat younger than their species - originating in the late Tertiary and developing their modern form and operation during the Quaternary (includes Pleistocene and then Holocene) 25 million years ago, prior to the rise of the Cascade-Sierra-Peninsular chain western North America was a low, undulating plain dominated by conifer/hardwood forests. The ancient Pacific Ocean lapped a continental edge along the east side of what is now the Central Valley. Rainfall was abundant, reliable, and evenly distributed across the continental interior. To the south, the influence of subtropical climates created oak and palm forests, pine and juniper woodlands, and thorny shrublands with exposure to seasonal drought and high temperatures in which ancestors of modern pinyon pine, cacti, ocotillo, acacia, palo verde, grasses, sunflowers, tortoise, small reptiles were establishing lineages Crystalline batholith lifting and rupturing old sedimentary layers - elevation accelerating sometime after 11 million years began to block Pacific storms, summer drought intensified. Forests confined to higher elevations or along rivers. Sonoran Desert plants derived from the thorny shrublands, protodesert, probably spread north and west bringing fan palms and iguanas. Early Quaternary cooling, beginning of Pleistocene, early ancestors of desert mammals, rabbit, sheep at least four intervals of glacier building and advance transition to arid and hot Holocene, 11,000 to now, extinction of large-bodied mammals - Pleistocene megafauna, giant ground sloth, camel - and arrival of people. geological remnants of the Pleistocene: U-shaped mountain valleys, moraines below the mouths of canyons, ancient lakeshores high on the slopes of now-dry basins. Biological remnants: fossils, pollen deposits, isolated live populations of plants and animals. Late Pleistocene wetter and cooler. Large-bodied mammals, lowland forests, woodlands and grasslands, extensive river and lake systems, productive wetlands, prosperous indigenous human cultures. From South America giant anteaters, ground sloths, capybara when sea level was 400 feet lower. Camels, llamas, tapirs, horses, sabre-toothed cats already here. from the north, mammoth, mastodon, hyena, wolf, jaguar. Packrat middens may be 20' tall, layers radiocarbon-dated Into this cool wet Pleistocene landscape of large mammals, rich woodlands, extensive lakes and productive wetands humans first wandered. Their generations survived passage among continental ice sheets and beneath mountain glaciers, over tundra and through boreal forests. Rapidly spreading in all directions into the Great Plains once the ice had passed, their 5" spearheads still imbedded between the ribs of mammoths and other animals. In California artifacts from 11,400 years ago. Then the lush Pleistocene gave way to the sparse Holocene and modern deserts. Drought-tolerant plants that had been only on south-facing shallow-soiled sites migrated and were eaten by still-existent megafauna. Technologies for grinding seeds and making baskets had their desert origins around 10,000 years BP. Climate change accelerated during the mid-Holocene. 8000-5500 years BP the antithermal, warmer and drier than now, dessicating entire lake and river systems. Junipers retreated higher than we find them today. Lakebeds were transformed into playas, as slurries of mud and evaporite minerals hardened into thick, crystalline polygons. Vast quantities of fine sand exposed, lofted. Reductions in human activity. Frequent movements among ecosystems became the way of life. New tool technologies. Progression from spearheads toward arrowheads marked shift to small swift prey. Toward the south, shrubs we now associate with the driest bajadas of the Mojave and Sonoran regions finally arrived in abundance. These included the two most dominant and characteristic warm-desert species of today, creosote bush and burrobush. Extreme drought ended about 5,500 years BP, beginning of late Holocene. Montane treelines descended, juniper woodlands expanded, lakes refilled, marshes reestablished, grasses returned. After 2000 years BP oscillation drier again. Then Little Ice Age 350 years BP. Europeans arrived. Garcés. Groups foraged over vast areas, for pinyon, agave root, mesquite beans, ricegrass seeds. Wide foraging brought contact and trade, new basket and pottery technologies from the southwest. Irrigation agriculture. Maize, beans, squash, melons, seeds from southern/Arizona tribes. - Ancestral species arrived in the late Tertiary and were exposed to unprecedented oscillations in climate and landscape. carry forward a biased fraction of their genetic inheritance. In this way, one evolutionary lineage became several, each with a unique gene pool exposed to new, subtly different conditions during natural selection. Drought-tolerant plants such as creosote bush expanded from lowland strongholds in Arizona and Mexico that were barely affected by the glacial epoch. Relicts: among the great mysteries of biology, species that didn't go extinct when extreme changes occurred, or migrate, "ancient, unyielding, and often the only remnant of an evolutionary lineage or long-gone ecosystem to make it into the modern world". Sum of biota product of diversification, extinction, migration and persistence of relicts. Species richness number. Many desert species are endemics, either evolved here or were marooned as relicts. evolutionary, structural, physiological or behavioral response to a minimum and uncertain supply of water measurable but biologically impotent rainfall Drought-susceptible species, tissue dehydration: - fan palms must be rooted in permanently wet soil, are relicts of an ancient tropical past, found only where ground water is forced to the surface by faults or an impermeable rock layer, often at the base of hills or within a canyon or arroyo, it regulates temp by transpiration, like sweating, shaded fronds quickly replaced by fully illuminated ones, dead fronds protect the stem from ground fires - mesquite sends a few roots deep into the water table near arroyos or streambeds, up to 160-200', and many shallow roots in the top three feet to get recent rain, fast growth in spring and early summer - structure varies - where there is constant water a single trunk and large leafy canopy, where less reliable water a highly branched shrub form that devotes more resources to reproduction. - pinyon jay must visit water nearly every day, evaporation. Bighorn sheep in summer susceptible to heat stress, spend up to 7 hours of the day resting in shade and relatively tethered to reliable water. Have to be careful of terrain on account of coyotes and lions. - Lummis: "The horrors of death by thirst ... hunger is in a way its own anaesthetic but thirst is torture - madness - illusion - delirium." The Indians during the end of the Pleistocene lived in relatively permanent villages on the edges of marsh systems with shoots, waterfowl eggs, fish, summertime hunting in adjacent mountains. Drought tolerators - cacti can remain green and harvest light while completely shut off from soil and atmosphere to conserve water. Maintain slow metabolic idle. Drought avoiders - dormancy mechanisms adjust cells to progressively lower levels of hydration. Annuals with soft tissues need water when they emerge from seeds during winter and early spring. Droughted soils bind water too tightly for the roots to suck it up. Therefore strict control of germination in long-lived, deeply dormant seeds. Chemicals inhibiting the embryo must sometimes be leached from seed coats by successive percolating fronts of soil water during a cool rainy season. Or thick waxy coat that resists taking up scant water after summer or winter weak few storms. An inch or more of rain between September and January makes the coat expand and rupture. Only wind abrasion, microbe attack, or passage thru a gut weakens coats. In years with barely sufficient rainfall a small fraction of each species, perhaps the oldest, most worn down seeds, will still germinate, grow to a small size, produce 2 or 3 flowers and a dozen seeds instead of thousands. Consequently the seed bank is composed not only of seeds of many species, but also of many generations of each species, generations that experienced different environmental conditions during growth and different mates during reproduction. A square yard of soil may hold 25,000 or more live seeds from 20 different species of annual herbs. Summer annuals germinate when soils still hold winter water (March) or are wetted by strong summer storms, and then grow and flower from June-September. Ocotillo goes dormant but uses even weak storms of less than half an inch of rain, achieves high rates of photosynthesis. Relict species from a relict family with subtropical origins during the Miocene (24-5 million years BP). Seed germinates with summer rain. Seedlings rarely survive drought, frost, jackrabbits etc. Spines are remnants of first leaves. Younger bare stems can photosynthesize after leaves fall, usually in short bursts morning and evening. Young roots as well as leaves are shed to prevent water loss. With a bit of rain, old roots produce new shallow roots, water uptake begins, new meristem points at the base of each spine, short shoots that produce new green tissues within 3 or 4 days after rain. Leaves are paper thin, soft and very leaky, without wax. They can remain active only as long as water uptake continues. Cheap to produce and drop. No expectation these soft root and leaf tissues will be used for more than a few weeks. Then life recedes into the persistent woody skeleton. Desert tortoises hibernate, emerge from burrows in early spring - Feb to April/May grazes annuals, then dead leaves and stems into summer, conserve water by staying in burrow except early morning and evening. Burrows 20-30 degrees cooler and humidity 3-4 times higher. In a harsh summer, summer hibernation. 11
Luminous eastern sky when I opened the door at 6:30, really gold like goldleaf on a painting. I think there were bells. The rooster in my northern neighbour's Wirtschaft crowing still. That word turned up for the sort of spread he has, backyard with various enterprises in it, tall cactus in pots, outbuildings, orange trees. Kate in San Fran. I have Goddard daughters. How many? [list] - The photo of Wittgenstein fades slowly in and out in the midst of something - Swansea 1947, he's 58, taken by Ben Richards. Orphic Hymns - Athanassakis. They're evocations - formulae - begin with family connections, go on to a list of responsibilities, end with request. The past four months in San Francisco have been wild! Full of surviving, failing, and thriving. The erotic element of relationship is a thousand times better accepted and integrated into relationships within the blues/fusion dance community here, as compared with the east coast. I've been able to experiment freely with my sexuality and with various levels of erotic expression in lots of friendships with dancers. I am learning to 'switch' during dances. To switch is to exchange the role of leader/follower throughout any given dance. I'm being taught by a friend who I've been sleeping with, and the lesson is carrying over into sexuality. The switching across both erotic spaces is a wild experience for me in re-structuring how I react to male bodies on a daily basis. So cool! Got a scholarship to spend a week in the woods outside Sacramento at an event called Blues Recess. Over a hundred dancers built an intentional community there and taught workshops and skill-shares to one another. I met my swans at this camp! I met people whose eyes were glowing with consciousness/pleasure - people who were making their living at the intersection of theater/dance/nature connection. We played music and danced inside a candlelit school bus. My inner gypsy was shaken and inspired in a way that radically restructured how I think about the work/direction I feel myself capable of. Consciousness and dialogue about gender issues at Recess was 50 years ahead of dominant culture! I taught my first dance workshop integrating fusion and breath awareness! People loved it. So hot. I've been in classes for almost two weeks. I'm one of the smartest! This is a first and feels amazing. You prepared me extremely well. I challenged my human development teacher about the white-male-heavy syllabus and he showed up to the first day of class with lots of resources to add about gender, race, and class. I'm growing to like him a lot. My cohort is full of bright, compassionate, spunky spirits. The faculty are mostly great, but their styles are not as articulate and visionary as yours. 14 Bike basket, bedside filing cabinet. Bike ride at sunrise across vacant land toward Di Giorgio Rd. Later went back and saw the pale scrappy golf course in its oasis palms. Art Institute, good space full of junk. Crisp note to Tom after awful long phone call yesterday. Have been proofing Again [In America] volumes before Mesa Grande to maybe find my present work, one vol a day, extracting not much, some, liking to read the skyshack life now - like it as an existence, even, lots of grumbling but days and nights and love for the place's times. Yesterday torpid like a kangaroo rat in a burrow. There was another down-scale trailer park on Di Giorgio. A lot of people spread over a lot of space, always more clumps of habitation. "It's not a town, it's a place" says someone online. Gnats glom onto lights after dark. Pillowcase next to me because it's reflecting. 16 Small butterflies whirling across the road like small dried leaves, on an upper stretch of Montezuma Grade. When I stopped at that stretch of road on the way back I saw them better. They didn't seem in a hurry. They'd light on a rabbitbrush leaf or a pair would dance alongside for an instant. There's a moment after the high dry incoherent Ranchita plain - 4000' it says - where the road passes through two heaps of rock like massive gateposts. The road crests exactly there and beyond it the extreme drop ahead shows suddenly visible. So dramatic a road, such folds, such roadcuts, such wraps and falls. What 4000' looks like, the tininess of everything in the flats below, all the tiny messy human structures. 17 I'd told myself I'd stop and start to take photos of rocks on the way home and eventually did, but aware the whole time that I had no grip and was hardly trying, making random grabs. And then looking at them after, clueless still, saving them all. I'll look again now and ask whether there's anything to see. I want to sit with someone who knows rocks who'll tell me what they see. The rock seems old, far into decomposition, splintered, or is that word too hard - crumbled, becoming crumb. The complicated order of something crumbling in place. It's all in bits but the bits keep standing together because they're stone, heavy. At any point it's visible that what's there in bits used to be one mass. - I like this one, complicated wall, a few scruffy plants and their shadows. A wall like this with light moving through a day? Lo que no es - Does it balance? No, it squashes on the R. 2nd version, does it balance better? No. high hawk - tried different frames, the best keeps the dark triangle hole below connected by a line to the pointing agaves. Odd outbreak of black and white marble. 3 versions. - There I heard the chickens and went to look. Falcon on the wire, either a merlin or a peregrine juvenile. - I like the one with marble and plants best, why. Soil next to it on the L, fine delicate lines of dry something. Balancing young rabbitbrush. Teddybear-like face, well framed like a spirit being in the stone. There's a line above it showing a boundary where marble has formed in a streaked sheet under something else. mountain postcard. The gritty smoothness of the road. It's the right distance. The curve is right. Not well enough framed. Is digital wrong for the detailed granularity, it looks too digitized as if badly sharpened. pale sandy wall closer, 2 versions. It's a sculpture. Fine shades of similar color, color related to angle of cut as well as angle of light. It's hard to see which is better. There are main masses with their edges containing broken bits. - Think about how the seeing is done? 18 disaggregation among crystal interfaces All rocks that were once buried deep in the earth's crust are cracked to some extent by the stresses imposed during formation and deformation. The stresses imposed on rocks buried at great depths in the earth strain the rock along intercrystalline boundaries. A movie of lights making their way down the hill - find a vantage. What to do. Can I dive into sincerity. It's time to have work. I've been through Again vols [second part of In America], 4 years. What did I notice. They're all over. I study but at random. I use what I study for workshops, students, Here. Learned to be miscellaneous at school, can do that, but don't like to see what a jumble it's been. What do I want to do. What's worth doing. What do I have the means to do. - What if I throw all of it up into the air.
So they passed into a state of gingerly evaluation - which he knew well and could only hope she did - full of small pleasant surprises, half-sardonic signals, a welling-up of impudent hopes, and a fateful sort of kindness. - Munro in Carried away 21 Saturday early. There's world at the door, a small palm, a blue-powdered mountain, an early chill, two lines of wires, a rooster's voice, a woman's, a long slant of shadow on grit. Ways this place is sterile. There's no flower shop, no Chinese food, Vietnamese, Thai. But two liquor stores and maybe 6 bars if you include the country clubs? The desert land between lots has mostly only two kinds of plants, creosote and that dry scratchy little silver brown thing. When it's hot there's nothing to do but go to the store and the post office and the library. There's nothing to eat. I walk around the market not wanting anything but the romaine lettuce and passionfruit juice. The fruit and vegetables seem dead things. The good Mexican café has closed. At the cool ends of the days I can bike but there are few roads with not a lot to see. Dry minimalism. There's a lot of open time in a day and not enough mental strength to fill it. There are few birds. Poor fiction at the library. - I'm saying these things cheerfully enough. Wonderful cactus garden at 3068 Broken Arrow. At night when I'm sitting under a light moths flood in, scores of them, little brown things, and bumble against my head. When I put up mountain postcard on FB eleven people registered noticing it but when I posted the text about earth's age in the universe only three. - Sometimes wanting to write about my mom's life. 22 At 5:30 this Sunday morning I was outside in the dark about to go fetch the blanket off the lamppost. Heard light footsteps, two people walking west along the empty and dark street. They came past, an Indio Mexican couple, small, he slender and white haired. We looked at each other. - She had the same name as Jesus' mother and she was the same age as the Queen. She was nice-looking, a small, sturdy person with a pleasant face. One Sunday afternoon when we had company, three other couples sitting around in the living room with my parents, some of us kids were peeping around the door comparing our mothers' breasts. We agreed that my mother's were the nicest. I liked to see her strong round calves below the hem of her housedress when she was standing at the stove and we at the dinner table behind her. She was a good person. People felt that about her immediately. "Your mother is wonderful" my friends would say. She had a sympathetic interest in anyone. It was native to her intelligence always to think what would be good for the spirit of whoever she was with. She felt for children, any children - would notice them when no one else was noticing them, and speak to them, and make them feel her liking for them. She would never say anything bad about anyone. She was sane and judicious: she didn't speak lightly. She could seem to lack a sense of humor; we kids would razz her for explaining jokes. I always liked to see the handwriting in her letters. It seemed to me to look like her: it was firm, compact, clear, and harmoniously round, it looked feelingly but undemonstratively smart. She was a good person who had a hard life. It was bad luck to be the eldest in her large family. She was bright and loved school but came into her teens when her parents hadn't yet established themselves in their new country, as they soon would. Her younger brothers and sisters went to high school, went to college, married wisely, made lives that suited their gifts. She had to leave school at fourteen to help at home. To escape that servitude she married before she had good sense and paid for that mistake the rest of her life. She finished high school and went to college at forty, and those years were the happiest and the most important to her, but by that time it was in some ways too late. She didn't escape, didn't leave her miserable husband or the strictures of her community, didn't make a life among the sorts of people she had loved and been loved by in her college years. I remember a summer evening before she had learned to drive, when she was determined to go to some event at church and our dad for some reason was not going, seeing her set off walking sturdily down the dirt track wearing her good grey suit in the long evening light. That sight impressed me because it was one of the few moments I saw her in determined independence. Her husband made the large decisions about where and how they would live and she went along with them partly because he would rage if she didn't and partly because it had always been like that - it had been like that at home, it was like that in church, it was like that in all public life: men decided and women did what they could to influence decisions without seeming to do so. In my dad's family the males were handsome and lively when they were young but sank into untreated depression as they aged. His two brothers became completely reclusive and my dad would have been that too if my mom hadn't taken his brunt and kept him going. In his thirties, when he was in financial trouble, he was tight, mean, contemptuous, malicious, angry. He'd suddenly explode over nothing. She'd do what she could to make sure it was at her rather than the kids. He depended on my mother sexually and emotionally but he didn't honor her, wasn't interested in her, didn't care about her well-being. He rarely gave her a gift, and when he did it would be something he'd wanted for himself. He'd make lascivious remarks about the looks of other women. He'd refuse to reply to what she said as if it was worthless. He'd spend on what he wanted - this and that, a quarter horse, a Stetson hat - but give her no money for herself. He was spiteful with friends and neighbours, and when they stayed out of his way as a consequence she was isolated too. She was desperate in those years, at mid-day I'd find her on her knees in her bedroom praying for strength to bear him. She said later that she had died then, she had stopped crying because that was something she could refuse him. Later on, when the kids were out of the house and she had some money of her own so that he knew she could leave if she decided to, he was more careful, but he still decided where and how they'd live. She went on the trips he wanted. She lived in his choice of house. His decisions still didn't consider her, she never had a nice place to live until after he'd died, and then she didn't know how to enjoy it. She never felt free to spend money on herself. She was born January 28 1924 in a Mennonite village in Siberia. Her earliest memories were of a prosperous household full of relatives and servants but also uneasy under escalating threat of political violence. In the autumn of 1929, when she was five, her parents and their young children left this village as refugees. They arrived in northern Alberta in the spring of 1930 when she had turned six. Her father took homestead land and struggled to keep his family fed and clothed. By 1935 her mother had ten children. There was humiliating poverty and unending insecurity and sudden calamity when her older sister died. She married in 1943 when she was nineteen. She said later that her groom had misrepresented his plans when he courted her; he had given her poems of his own and she had believed he wanted to leave farming, but in the end she was a farm wife until she retired. She was pregnant seven times; because she was Rh negative three of her later pregnancies were miscarriages or stillbirths. She was lonely most of her life. Some of her photos catch her with a cynical shut-down look as if she is feeling that it's no good to want anything for herself because she will not get it, in any case, ever. She was a good mother of young children. She was interested in us, took pleasure in us as if she had kept a young child alive in herself to meet us with. She was even-tempered, fair; she was on our side. She took good physical care of us. She sewed beautiful little Sunday dresses for her two daughters, and little Sunday suits for her two sons. She made beautiful pies. Saskatoon pies, rhubarb pies. Her steadfast loving care then gave us a platform that is still in us. She wasn't a good mother of adult children though. Her neediness scared us and she couldn't be interested in our doings anymore. They were too far out of her own experience, so that she would dodge back into herself when we tried to tell her about them. That was sad for her and for us too. She lost us and we her. She'd hoped to be more free when her husband died but there was more bad luck to come. When she moved into assisted housing in her eighties she could no longer manage sympathetic interest in other people and could no longer make friends. Her hands trembled so she could no longer write letters. She couldn't remember how to send email. She could read but she could no longer recall what she'd read. She sank into anger and complaint. She was done being strong and cheerful: she simply hated being old. She had always liked to write. After she retired, and before she lost her ability to type or hold a pen, she wrote down many of her lifetime's stories and sent them to her children or to a sister who was a writer. Some of these stories have been published as family records and in them there she still is as she was at her best, a generous, faithful spirit giving life her best though it did not at all give her its best in return.
I was her friend when I was still at home, I was thinking of her in my valedictorian speech when I said there were a few people I admired enough to want to be like them. And then what happened. I'd come home from college and hate her marriage and be so afraid of her hunger that I'd just scold her. It took me a long time to notice that she didn't like me anymore. Rightly, because I couldn't stand her, although there was still always an immediate shift into confident understanding when we spoke. By the time she visited in London I had understood that it exhausted me to be with her. We had some good times when I was living up north to make Notes in origin. I had my own place and could make short visits out of my own adventure. She was only in her mid-fifties and had some of her own money, had her own friends and was less under Ed's thumb. We played then. I was probably still preaching at her but we had other things in common, our mutual lives in that country, days, weather, seasons, tasks. I got out Anne's book to look for her year of birth and there is so much detail from my childhood in her stories about northern Alberta and Clearbrook. We overlapped, she was only twelve years older than I. - Then the contrasting story of Greg's mom [Jean Morrison], who had it in her to seize work and status for herself before there was any support for that seizing, and who undermined Greg on its account - who did undermine him, he looks so unfree in his child photos - the way I undermined my kids too. 23 The other night I was sitting on the edge of the concrete at the front of the house looking at stars. There was wind. A car came past on Weather Vane, stopped, backed up, made a three-point turn just past my gate. Its headlights caught the palm's broad crown from behind. For an instant its many spikes were lit up blowing and dazzling in white light. 24 Letters from Zach, letter from Jody, yesterday from Lauren and Leslie. [sketch of interior of 760 Weather Vane with measurements] 25 I waste time and then am ashamed. I don't have anything to think or feel so I do something just to occupy myself - read something I have no wish or reason to read, usually. Keep checking email because I'm lonely. Look at news sites I'm not interested in. As I do these things I feel an inward sagging. San Diego 27 Starbucks in PB, 10 in the morning, forecourt. I have to wait all day for the jeep to be smogged. There's a beautiful boy - at that moment he came to my table to ask for a pen - barefoot, with a Rasta band around his hair and a dog on a leash. He's colored - I mean has mixed race beauty, hair a thick frizz but not black, strong straight eyebrows. He has the best of broad-shouldered flat-chested long-legged young male grace. He's writing with the pencil I gave him, pondering with his hand on his forehead. Meantime at another table a woman in a tennis visor and pink teeshirt studiously applying iridescent pink polish to her nails, jiggling her feet. Friday morning, Paul's birthday. Smell of frying onions. Moving truck having trouble with the corner. The day's business. Firetruck panting at its bay across the intersection. He's gotten up to smoke a few more puffs of the cigarette he pinched out earlier. His pants are too long and the bottoms are ragged and dirty. He has a broad white smile. There are sparrows on the pavement looking for crumbs. A man in a Bud Light cap speaking Quebec French. Oh the odd parade. Firefighter walking back to the station with grocery bags from Ralph's. He has a phone - walking in circles talking. A row of drying-out palms. Just a few live fans at their crests. 29 Sunday at Tom's house. Coronado Beach yesterday. 30
Things I hated this weekend: Hauling myself through deep sand seeing myself a staggering cripple in our shadow. When we were talking about Paul, he saying that when he took Paul to the coast walk above the Cove Paul was unimpressed and his daughter was snooty too - I cringed imagining Tom at his blowhard worst and Paul thinking I'm with that man - Paul who now has won fine company and a central place.
October 2 Borrego Springs Pravda. Tom wanted me to read it. The reasons he gave weren't the real reasons, which are that it describes the confusion of a young man whose mother dies, the self-speech of a liar who has to fuck, the guilt of a married man who also needs to be with another woman, the shamed morass of drug addiction, the compromised intelligence of someone who despises common culture but makes his living at it, and more of what Tom has been but hasn't written. An hour with Louie on the phone yesterday morning, easy and natural, laughing. Her accomplished level, Chopin played by a young woman she admired, Francois' fourth novel he'd sent her. Jupiter is in Gemini. The butterflies in Culp Valley are California patch (1-2") and they are brought out by the desert sunflower which is blooming with pink stalks of it says amaranth. Fringe amaranth, amaranthus fimbriatus. Deserts after summer rain. 3 Cinchweed, Chinchweed, foetid marigold pectis papposa, asteraceae. Flavoring, perfume, smells like mountain marigold. Sand dweller, C-4 photosynthesis, clone-colonization, sold in Mexico. Chewed flowers before dancing. Thinking I should maybe do several tumblrs because Desert is austere and I want something that can pull in daily writing and being more, because it's a help to happiness. [letter to Greg]
4 Butterflies at Culp - I'll try it this morning. Steak first. - Talking to Greg revisits those concepts from the '50s-'60s he still uses and I have never taken up for reasons I never thought about. [letter to Greg]
> The notion of 'settling' probably needs some examination. .... Might one think of a 'negotiated settlement' with one's neurotic tendencies?
I've spent since 1989 in conceptual revision, first in foundations and then in the twelve years with students by meeting anything they brought up in detail. It's useful work. It's what I understand philosophy to be, conceptual trouble-shooting: you'll be able to think better if you say it this way. Philosopher at large. Writers do that. Philosopher/writer/artist/teacher/psychologist/gardener. I've wanted to sort, straighten out, clean up, make beautiful spaces. I've worked harder than most people do - I see that when I see Greg satisfied to think the thoughts he thought when he was 25 and anxiously complacent in the limits he has settled for. He doesn't want to know there's a way out. I did, I do. But say the rest. I've done the work but I haven't given it. I haven't made it count.
5 The frame I found for butterflies is eye level with the asphalt because that's where they were - one sharp plane of focus faded out before and behind - they flap in and out of existence it seems - I'll have to match sound - the camera quivers a bit - do I see heat waves - sound peaks of cars passing. californiapatch.mov. - Friday morning. Look at my new venetians, their slenderness and whiteness. Sweet soft dawn pink on the window frames at 7 o'clock. I'm writing on the small laptop rather than in the journal for the first time. Smell of smoke. The white air I wondered about this morning is probably from the Banning fire 60 miles away to the northwest. 7 Carlos has opened his café again. Camarones al ajo. 8 At sunrise it got colder. There are quail roosting in the brushy palo verde behind the foundation pad over across Frying Pan.
9 During the night a wind that rattled the open windows and the screen door and sounded as if it might be rain. I went out to close the jeep's window and saw the sky black overhead with stars large and single, blazing white. This morning dark grey coming over the ridge wall to the west, a storm from Alaska says my weather reporter Tom. 10 Gordimer 1991, Lessing 2007, Munro 2013, 4 others in those years. 11
Amazingly difficult to make editing decisions - I have set up the butterfly piece with 8 tracks of audio clips that can look like sync - have to decide
Have had to relearn audio editing and text animation in Motion 4. 12 Higgs field. E-books with sound. 1. hr exercise - yoga, bike, weights, walking 2. hr writing 3. hr tech study - cameras, FCP, STP, Motion, marantz 4. hr film - by the lotus, california patch, pale hill, july rain, sea 1 and sea 2 5. hr of sound - tracks for those 6. hr of photog - houses and gardens, hills in NE 7. hr of books - In English, In English with sound, M&L edit decisions, Favor 8. 2 hrs of fame and money - Ant Bear plan - wiki I easily get overwhelmed, stuck, technical ignorance. For instance is footage playing back in a jumpy way because of Mac Pro speed limits or did I record it at too slow a shutter speed. 14 pale hill - what have I tried -
- What is this place called - Carlos' place [El Borrego] - pescado al ajo - a splendid mesquite - long light branches raying from a center, like a nosegay - leaf feathers that hang and drift like fringe - no, they're fine like fringe but they hold themselves angled to the sun - those on the sun side do, maybe. Meantime the mountain painted with pale oxblood veneer except where there are landslide scars, grey. Wind rippling the page. Monday noon. 16 Fr. 1989: film of what will we know - sand sedimentation one shot 15 min - stretch - back. 17 Proofing AG10 and AG11 thinking maybe the whole journal should be called General knowledge. 18 The moment of apricot intensity is short. Now maybe quarter past 6. More traffic, more birds - a few more. 19 Saturday morning - Kendall's - anything? Gary and Vickie, Gary a large-faced thick man who turned in his chair at the next table and asked a question, and then asked more through a conversation that lasted the breakfasts out. A pilot, bush pilot first, then commercial, international Air America by the end, flying San Francisco - Tokyo the day after 9/11 in a sky completely empty until half an hour off Japan, except for two fighter jets patrolling above the Golden Gate Bridge. His wife competing with long stories I didn't want to hear. 20 I was waiting for the moon. Had been there an hour, had recorded sound, was set up. Didn't know exactly where it would appear. Kept looking east to see whether there was a brightening in the sky somewhere. Then saw a faint but definite orange glow around a little peak north of where I'd thought to look, as if there were a fire behind it. The peak was like a little volcano. I had turned on the camera and was watching the time counter. The orange glow got stronger. A brilliant edge appeared, fire orange. What is it about writing here, now. I never used to labor at it, doubting my words. I don't wake with things I want to say. About working here, I've thought I need to make sure I'm aware of what's happening on every particular day: time of sunrise and sunset, time of St Barnabas bells, angle of sunrise and sunset, wind conditions. I need to have found vantages. What else did I see last night, standing with the jeep on the creosote plain. A hawk flew slowly west over my head. An airport tower flashed red at the foot of Coyote Mountain, a lot of headlights on Di Georgio due east. Through the headphones I heard cattle, dogs, bells faintly and quite long, constant growl and rumble of motors like a thickness in the air, like dark fibre. What would I do if I knew I would be here, in this other life, for twelve years. I mean this bare lone life in which so much will depend on my will, because beneficent love doesn't swarm up against my windows the way it did in MG. I do like the heat, I like what I become in it, five pounds lighter and velvet-skinned. I like biking. I'm already stronger on the bike. I haven't driven out from here yet. I don't know the place, I'm aware of touching in weakly, ignorantly. It's like that with photos. I can frame some part of mountains that I dimly like but know my framing doesn't know what it's seeing. In 12 years I'll be 80. Being here is emblematic of my own desertification. Plants have to work hard to thrive here and I will have to work hard to thrive in my gradual death. The light will stay, world will stay. Reading is going - I have no patience with most novels. My reading eye is hard to focus sometimes. Memory is going. I forgot I'd worked with Sonja's draft in August, and that was only two months ago. I am often lost for nouns, not just names. Feeling is going. Proofing AG I marvel how much pain and pleasure there were, how full a life. Sex isn't all the way gone but I have so much written off my looks that I don't hope for it anywhere. I'm not saying any of this with sorrow, really. Is sorrow gone too? Sunday morning at my table. Beyond the venetians the palm and that comical thing standing in horizontal light. The southern mountains, which are like dust piles, soft, are blue. What is wrong with the D800's settings, that makes its images so ashen. I have to figure that camera out. Someone online saying it took him a year to understand the 80-400. 21 Teaching letters.
Parts: What the structure made possible - one-to-one, advising groups, low overhead
What I brought to it - phil of mind, fem, art, place, writing, Joyce, phil training Working out embodiment studies - curric Working with young women Somatic process Pedagogical philosophy - end of Being about The writers - writing and self formation Science and humanities Place and env't, 'nature writing' New Age and 'spirit,' cons studies
- Ironwood, elephant tree, burrobush, indigo bush, cheesebush. You find there's a common thread in a lot of astronauts like that. A lot of them come from the farm. 22 At times like this, there is no one far enough out to check with. Beauty is the final discipline. My topic is not art, it is beauty. their technical intensity [in zero G] when the pulse goes out you are able to see the entire limb, all the way out through the elbow, the wrist and fingers, extend. night passes ... night viewings of the earth in darkness, with the cabin lights turned out low light phenomena ... you see this fire start creeping and crawling over the spaceship. The ions are re-combining there the way an aurora does. There are so many stars you can barely find your own constellations. I get through the sky by following the Milky Way, which is just like a wall of light; I find out where in the Milky Way the Scorpion is - that's looking toward the center of the galaxy. This pink and this green mist starts moving and it comes from nowhere; it doesn't have to get transported. It pops out of the place like fog, like a wonderful mist. ... it does not have to move the air, so it can occur at any speed. the most spectacular lightning ... the purple-pink lightning that goes horizontal for hundreds of miles The meteorites come in between you and earth, they're just streaking in. ... especially on a mission where you're flying higher up into the magnetosphere. You have the cosmic rays piling through the eyeball ... little white bursts of light. So when you get dark adapted or when you close your eyes going off to sleep and you pass through the South Atlantic Anomaly in the southern hemisphere where we pass through intense radiation, it's going through the liquid part of your eye. You're falling through the aurora, you're falling
through the stars, but not toward it and not away from it.
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