| in america volume 27 part 4 - october-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
23 October House arrest, desperation. On days like these I keep checking into gmail, don't want to do anything else, just halted waiting for someone to come for me. Used to be I felt it toward someone in particular, now it's anyone, anyone, but not that different.
- Yesterday I thought a bit about Teaching letters, organized a folder, etc, but then am halted not knowing how to make anything of it. 24 There was an amazing light. I was antsy after talking to myself about email - mind very jumpy, cornered. Got on the bike and went to the labyrinth. Stepped over the white lines, sat cross-legged in the center, closed my eyes. Felt the jumpiness, tracked. The dark hold was in the forehead. When I held there the right side opened. What was left was a sharp patch at the inner end of the left eyebrow. I stayed with it. It shifted to a spot toward the back of the crown and stayed. There might have been a line to mid-back. The bells had rung just after I sat down, it was five o'clock. I opened my eyes. The sun was low and almost directly behind me. There were unusual clouds above, a finely ordered array of small cells that spanned the whole sky. The small palm directly ahead of me was throwing a shadow on the white wall. The light on the palm, the wall, the trees standing around the circle seemed over the edge into supernatural. Pellucid. Intense and rapturously clear. I went home and made supper, and when I was sitting on the front porch step looked down startled into a stunningly beautiful bowl of salad. Looked again. Felt I'd never seen anything so vivid. - Bird walk. It was already 8 when I remembered but I thought I'd go anyway. What did I learn. David Lashley. Lance the botanist. What was her name, the great-grandmother with the vertical nostrils, Katie. Saltbush is the beige knobby one. Burrobush is the yarrow-leafed one. Small white flowers and long stems was a young tumbleweed. Flat feather leaf with a pink flower was filaree. Wild mesquites are thorny thickets full of a small-leafed mistletoe. Phainopeplas like the seeds. There are no crows here, only ravens. Ravens are more macho looking, thicker necked. Have goiters. Mockingbirds flash white on their wings. The water sound is them. Say's phoebe has beautiful erect posture and a reddish dust on its lower belly. Big woman badly dressed who looked as if she already has all sorts of skin cancer knew most about birds. Lance said get the 7x loupe not the 10x - also had a tiny 20x. David bemused that I only use one eye on the binocs. There was a native grass with sideways things [sketch], another stiff one with horizontal leaves that was blooming. Very beautiful purple beavertail in someone's yard. Two long-legged very alert black great danes. I picked up and ate something that had fallen out of a palm. (It was a date.) Saw the phoebe with David's scope. It's a flycatcher but you won't find it under flycatcher. - De Anza clubhouse, 'luncheon', the sort of faces in society page photos, lot of jewelry, manicures, sparkly tops. People showing off what they call art. Woman on my right asked "Are you an artist?" French accent, pale hair, brown eyes. I liked her. We liked each other. She tore a strip off a deposit slip and wrote her email address on it. Riding around looking for the clubhouse I found a street I hadn't seen. It seemed an interior street, very green, gardens that are marvels - it seemed somewhere else, maybe a street in LA. 25 T and I sat in the lit yard at El Borrego and then I took him along Church Road in the dark. We stopped at St Richard's - I thought, take my Catholic boy to his roots. Liked the Virgin of Guadaloupe shrine. Then sat by the labyrinth with open sky above. We could hear a bamboo flute somewhere to the south. This morning were on the stoop drinking tea with the sun rising behind a palm trunk. What I liked best though was showing him pale hill.mov. He saw it, felt it. He felt the pathos of the little car and the anachronistic humor of the blue truck. The use of the airplane'sound. 26
- Can have different versions for different purposes. More con for computer screens. The low contrast version is more tactile, background motion is subtler. 27 Anne Leneham 2004 Story: the way of water. So bad a book - I have to say that because I'm embarrassed to mention its title here. Self-published, it seems, no editor, a hagiography rather than a study, though a huge labor. But what about Story himself. I suppose the book is like him. Did he commission it? What did I want to know. How he does it. "Story has more degrees than a thermometer." BS in math and statistics. Masters in operations analysis and computer programming (1959). BA in chemistry. PhD medicine, surgical internship, post-doc aerospace medicine and physiology. Post-doc cardiovasc and exercise physiology. MS in physiology and biophysics. - These by 31. MA in literature. Meantime: older brother killed in an accident, younger brother commits suicide, father commits suicide, mother commits suicide, son commits suicide. Ex-wife and one of his daughters turn to Jesus. Do those imply vampirism? Selected an astronaut-scientist at 32, military jet training. Spacewalk specialist at Skylab. 6 space flights including Hubble repair. Continued to fly jets and do surgery throughout. DH Lawrence, Saint-Exupéry, Whitman. Religious ecstatics. Emerson. 'Feminist aesthetic'. Dewey Art as experience. Varieties of religious experience. "You have to fly a Whitman, you have to fly a Wordsworth." He mentions DR! De Chardin. The pragmatists. Arctic dreams. Gombrich. "People who are best at what they do." Cirque de Soleil. Torvil and Dean, Secretariat. "The people who have a calling ... who live things, are very important to me." I'm the same person as I was at the age of three. I have an incredible determination to go forward, so in a way I am just spectacularly hard. You bear the pain for the rest of your life - it is unremitting. It is not that death doesn't hurt you, it's essential. Childhood - that boy got me here - now what am I going to do with it? Loyalty to Story, what he fought for, what he did to get here. Able to define <identity> by interacting with their own past work rather than by interacting with other people. My interaction happens to be with the person I was as a child. I had an incredibly harsh, malicious father ... she didn't stand up to him. I know the planets personally ... I know what kind of moon I'm going to have. So I have a geometric view of all this: where I am on earth, and where these things are and where they're going to be. Story - love of the sand! Love of the black velvet is like one's love of the desert. Desert, space: empty, full of spirit. I liked him in the Omni interview in GW1-1, July 1994:
[photo 1983, ie he was 48.] Storymusgrave@hotmail.com. 28 Queso fresco. Proofing AG14, the trip with Louie - that passionate chaotic brilliantly perceptive person - I mean me - it's the end of Dames rocket some years later, a curve brought round. I was enduring the barely endurable in myself by making notes. Louie was graduating, accessing her book, that has carried her to assured accomplishment since. Et moi. The doc and Tom, embodiment studies, and teaching, are those assured accomplishments? Yes and no. I'm done forever with wildly emotional brilliance. Does that mean I can't be an artist anymore? It says no but I'm not sure it isn't the only right way to live. I was 48 ramping up to menopause, which can't happen again. What's my question, then. Whether I've died. Is this the right kind of maturity for me?
I'll be 80 in 2025. 29 La Glace latitude 55.4 degrees N - Borrego 33.25, 22 degrees out of 90. the bright, dry heat mingled exaltation and respect The silence makes itself heard as a sort of subliminal humming from deep within the rocks and hills. I amuse myself by imagining that what I hear is the fabric of the universe making the tiny molecular adjustments that knit the whole shebang together. It is then radiantly clear to me that I too have persevered, thus far most happily, and I am surprised by a surging wave of joy so intense that I laugh aloud. Harry Daniel 1982 In summer cumulo-nimbus clouds rise as high as ten miles over the mountains. the western barrier sinks or basins that often have no drainage outlets every particle of the deep layers forcibly torn from the mountains of the western barrier bajada larger complex of alluvial fans Cactus gardens grow where certain angles of slope and orientation combine with ideal elevation and rainfall. South-facing, steep Basins - structural troughs or grabens Their mud/clay bottoms ... water can't penetrate but many plants surrounding Borrego sink - mesquite forest, original spring More than 70' down Badlands - ancient sediments chronicles of warm saline inlets, river deltas, and geologic catastrophe wrinkled mudhills, braided gullies and exposed shell reefs random exposure of thousands of sedimentary layers a shallow sea that extended hundreds of miles further east than the present coast receding shallows almost 10 million years ago vultures with wings 17' from tip to tip a giant zebra, camel species nearly 18' tall Plioscene and Pleistocene 31 Realizing that if I learn color correction I'll be able to salvage some of we made this, maybe - the murky greens. The 16mm too maybe. - Also that the D800 images are requiring it by design probably. audio mixing stage, grading theatre, control surfaces Digital images almost never have optimal exposure or color balance. Deliberately record blacks that aren't quite at zero to avoid crushing of shadow detail. slightly overexposing the shadows and underexposing the highlights to minimize crushing and clipping. Digital projector Deep rich blacks and bright pure whites Noise unpleasantly exaggerated after large corrections Veiling reflections Visual system - luminance separate from color? Gamma correction or encoding - an algorithm for compression and expansion - compensates for human sensitivity - nonlinear Digital cameras respond linearly - gamma compression - a curve that converts to subjectively equal steps in brightness Black and white points pinned - curves - a nonlinear adjustment Black adjustment first When you raise the mids, watch out for what happens at the ends. S-curve stretches contrast within a midrange. With white text on black watch out for spikes. Crushing = moving lighter areas of shadow down. Rim-lighting Bounce card, fill light HDSLR í H.264 formats discard a lot of color data, hard to recover underexposed without noise, blocking of colors For noise, look for a low fuzzy trace along the bottom of the graph, which you may crush out. Telecine - request retransfer - pull shot list - if overexp - because film often has more detail in the highlights. If you're lowering highlights that are overexposed you can add a bit of saturation. Harsh areas of overexposure in video. - In component Y'CbCr-encoded video Cb and Cr are color difference chroma channels, Y is luma - 4.2.2 etc 4 is luma. RGB adjustments in luma affect chroma saturation. Hue and saturation on the vectorscope - hue around edge, angle, saturation length. Parade scopes always RGB. Auto/eyedropper balancing, then manual. Color cast correction - bottoms of three color waveforms align. Can desaturate shadows to get deeper blacks, more con. Can get rid of color tints in shadows and highlights caused by other adjustments. Images may look better with less saturation in the dark end and in the highlights, increasing in midtones. OR can increase saturation of just one hue for more color contrast. - Mattes and keys for hue, saturation and contrast. November 1 Farmer's market finally - persimmons, lychees, yellow cherry tomatoes, Mediterranean cucumbers. Olives pickled with garlic, pink grapefruit, free range eggs. Small shitake mushrooms. 2 Art Pape 1942-2012. Stopped being married to Maxine in 1995. Jada's a painter in Vancouver. In AG16 writing the MA thesis. I like reading my house and Vancouver, and especially the dedicated life I can have when there's a specific project. I know how to do that in school but not out of school, in art, 3 [Bill] Viola: I've learned to think of everything as a form of time. The Eastern way, generally speaking, has been to go through the body. You do something to them that puts them in that state. This is about Being, not appearance. Not whether you understood the text, but whether you were transformed. That puts a whole other dimension into the practice of making art. When I alter time in the editing room .... It's an altered state, basically. Whether it's film or video, you're working with an instrument which reveals unconscious behavior to us by making that behavior conscious. So whether you're aware of it or not, your main work as a film/videomaker lies in working with the unconscious areas of our lives. ... an awareness amplifier. A vast underground river that moves in darkness and silence below the surface ... a deep natural spring that I draw from over and over in my life now. - [Letter to Greg about James Wood on Updike] Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain. - Of the farm 1961
> I'm not so taken by the 'amoebic decision' part
> I wonder if the virtuoso aspect is what eventually puts people off Updike? At a certain point, does the reader become surfeited
> Oscar Peterson, one of the most brilliant pianists ever, in terms of speed, precision, attack ... Art Tatum, widely regarded as the having unequalled pianistic technique ... you also have players like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, who could wipe out other sax players technically, but whose emotional intensity, unique musical personality and stream of ideas sweep away any doubts.
> Can one consider the enough-ness of beauty in terms of actual people? Did you tend to feel that that quality was sufficient (in some way or another)?
5 New estimate: 20% of sun-like stars have a habitable earth-sized planet. Sez NASA. Almost done AG18. So much language. So much useless figuring-out. Is it all junk: Louie, Rob, K, Dave, Joyce, even. Minute record of frantic wheel-spinning. I mostly don't do that now but this white vacancy isn't better. 6 There's been a time change and it's colder at night - 38 degrees this morning. I'll get out the winter duvet. Sunrise has been a narrow wide band, orange and then gold. That dimmed and now there's hotter local orange in the sun's direction. Chosen emergency. I've been lost, feeble. I don't know what to do all day. I'm lonely. Dull company, wanting to hide out all day in novels. Relieved when it's night and I can allow myself to watch movies. Relieved to go to sleep. Sorry to wake. Don't get email since there aren't students. Not grabbed by work thoughts. Not driven by love. Flat horizon. Told Tom I'm a limp flag waiting for a wind. Don't have a context for work. Don't have a current aesthetic. Don't know what needs doing. No one wants to know me at this plain age. Meetings don't lead to anything. Correspondents drop me. I'm not saying those things in despair, I'm laying out the new circumstance I have to work with. I've leapt into vacancy because I want a last best enterprise. It's completely bootstrapped though, and I don't have the energy I did for long focus. I'll work for an hour and then fade. So much depends on will, now, and will itself depends on energy. Meantime this good house. I'm at the window with my feet on the table. Sun through the bedside venetians straight onto the fern, which is waving in the heater's breeze. Now sun broadside through the front window where the blinds are up for solar heat. Queso fresco in the blue bowl for breakfast with cucumber, yellow pear tomatoes, red pepper, capers. The refrigerator humming. Something has lifted, I think. - Isn't my aesthetic what it always was, to make things that give people a sense of human life as worth something. Process: have to stick with something. 7 The moon's shadow was moving at some 8,000 miles per hour across the Atlantic Ocean. 8 Last night Tom had a bad businessman's haircut and a round soft jelly belly mounding up between teeshirt and pyjama bottom. I didn't want to look at him. This morning he was rumpled and lovely and got under my cover in the dark and cuddled up tight in the sweet-hearted way he does. Victory at sea - he wanted me to see what he'd been enthralled by in front of the TV cabinet when he was 6. It's the season honey bees drop dead on the floor. The roof cracks hard at night. This morning at the gas pump I forgot my ZIP code. Writing Catherine I forgot my phone number. Talking to Tom I couldn't remember 'Death Valley', just had a wordless as-if pointer toward a rudimentary concept. Still couldn't remember it just now. Three lemon flowers in a tight knot scenting the bed corner. - First whiffs from the trees out back, this week. Lemons and limes can bloom up to 4 times a year it says, and take 2 months to ripen. Oranges and grapefruit can take 12-18 months. 9 Farewell the banner, Frances Winwar 1938. She's canny about their power maneuverings I think. Southey sidelined Coleridge into a marriage he didn't want, reneged on the emigration plan he'd enlisted C in, and sailed on to great success. Wordsworth dissed The ancient mariner and C's other fantasy poems so that C by 28 believed he was not a poet and went on into public life as a talker. The rivalries would have stayed unconscious I suppose. And Dorothy, out of the race, giving them both all she had. I like that Winwar/Vinciguerra gives physical descriptions. smallness and slightness of Dorothy's body with its stooping shoulders and almost boyish lines. From the startling glances of her eyes in her face of gypsy brown to the swift motions of her hands, she was a highly sensitized machine, reacting to the least allusion, the faintest suggestion on the intellectual wind. "A perfect electrometer." Coleridge described her extraordinary responsiveness, "It bends, protrudes, and draws in at the subtlest beauties and most recondite faults." She had a way of uttering her words rapidly, impulsively, and then, as if ashamed or afraid of having expressed herself, checking them in sudden silence. At the time Coleridge met her she was twentyfive years old. In the Going for broke years and then with Louie I was rummaging myself to learn unconscious structure. I wanted to know what humans are, because it's there to be known and irresponsible not to know. Dangerous not to know - Coleridge hid away in opium, didn't seem to see his rivals as such, lived in hardly relenting pain to keep that primal level of illusion. They lived in grand thoughts and didn't see the murder in their friends. And yet, having seen it, does one survive, I mean, do I? 10 I have to work differently with film. I have to clean up impeccably - no files at loose - and I have to make notes about exactly where I am on any project. I shelve things and then can't figure out where I left off. I forgot california patch completely. 11 turkeys - 4 min - full vol - as is. What's it called? by the lotus - vol down - start a bit in. pale hill - start more than midway - full vol - bad end. summer rain - soundtrack thunder. wild oats - sound. california patch - sound - choose length. sea 1 - sound. sea 2 - sound - and layers? 12 What was it on the walk yesterday. Two local women who knew something, two skinny women with skin crisped like deep-fried chicken skin, a dark haired woman with red lipstick and blazing white teeth, and a couple from San Diego, he white-moustached and wearing a straw hat with a conical brim. We were in Glorietta Canyon wandering from bush to bush on a route unrecognizable after the flood. Everyone was chatting as we went but it seemed to me that every time I'd say something people wd turn away as if they hadn't heard it. I was baffled.
I was fed up by the time we were going to turn back, wanted to get away from the women's random natter and wanted to go fast so I blasted ahead downhill on firm sand swinging my stick. Heard a voice piped up behind me, "Is it a bad knee or a bad hip?"
Their freakishness is like the deformation of trees twisted by wind and riddled with beetles. It demonstrates their inadequacy to their circumstances, which is a genetic inadequacy but also an inadequacy of the circumstances. - I was thinking about Obama last night, watching Obama's America 2016. De Souza begins by comparing himself with Obama - same age, both brown-skinned, etc - but argues that he is trying to save America's greatness while Obama wants to sabotage it. He's unattractive on camera, pudgy and awkward. His footage of Obama testifies against him; he is freakish and Obama is not. Obama's body testifies of adequacy to his circumstances, whatever they've been. It supports hope not so much of change but of right being. Meantime De Souza has made his name and millions of dollars by telling conservatives and Christians that they're not racist, that colonialism is good for colonized nations, that feminists disrespect women, that Islamists are attacking the West because of western cultures' licentiousness, and even that there is an afterlife. Meantime he's caught with a younger woman in a conference hotel. He describes her to reporters as his fiancée though he is still married. - looked at her again for a minute in silence, with an intellectual, impersonal, real tenderness All that ninth day passed in a trance of light. The boat moved slowly. The river, now clear as the wind, rushed by so silently that the boat seemed to float above it, between two airs. [Le Guin The telling, second time through] I'd made a drawing in a small square notebook and was looking at it marveling at its precision and fullness. It seemed to me I'd made it in a flash and as if unconsciously. It showed a bit of ground or wall or floor, faded brick red, with bits of stone and other little things I can't see now. In the dream I later on wanted to show it to someone but was leafing through the little square pages, which now had come loose, not finding it - the instability of dreamed objects. - Catherine asked about the storm movie, meaning on here2014 the photo of clouds with a thunder clip underneath it. I'm noticing that mistakes I make now are mistakes of simultaneous sequencing. For instance I will miswrite a word or walk into a room forgetting what I was going to get because I'm already thinking of something else. I used to be good at that. Someone's description of the complex simultaneous sequencing of a sentence. Last night I was working on finishing the turkey movie, which I am going to call here because of the way, after the turkeys have left I relax into the sound and zipping golden flies and the dripping tap. Video album. - To go with a teacher to the Lap of Silong is the dream of his life. He wants to be a maz. - She does that with a sentence, strikes a hot spike into my eyes. 15 not only did Alma have these potent and clever parents 16 The moment Uncle Willie got up in church and sang a solo. I think it was the only time I saw him in our church. It must have been before he married Auntie Alice. I think I was quite young, hearing him from the girls' bench on the right side of the room. I remember his voice, its quality of firmly flexed assertion. He was a stranger to us and yet he belonged to us, and there he was invited onto the platform as if a person of importance - was that why I remember it? Was his voice unusual? He was unusual. Opinionated, impervious, not brassy but some sort of metal. He was a tight wiry man, two years older than our father, not as tall and not dark, silvery rather. His face had the same long planes down from his cheekbones and the same sharp nose ridge but he had the more muscular more willful mouth of a manic talker. He had been further into the world than our dad: he'd been a missionary in Montreal working to convert Catholics, he had studied at a non-Mennonite bible school. Later he married a non-Mennonite too, a large, plain, sensible Swede. He told us to get rid of aluminum pots. There was something about cures effected through drops of blood at a distance. His salary as an Alliance minister was small so our dad would sometimes hire him to help out during harvest. I remember one September seeing him on the wide slope of the eastern field stooking alone through an afternoon, tiny against the yellow stubble beyond him. There was another moment when he was still at the midday dinner table and I was at the counter with my back to the room washing dishes. This was later, I was thirteen or fourteen, tall enough to see him in the mirror hung above the sink. He was announcing that women should not ride bicycles - I assumed because it would be sexually stimulating to them - and I was looking at him in the mirror with disgust. - Elizabeth Gilbert born the year before Luke - Christmas tree farm in Connecticut, father a chemical engineer. 2013 The signature of all things Viking 512 pages. Who did I think of, Byatt for scope, Peter Carey for tone at least in the beginning. 18 I scrubbed my spoons - my two teaspoons - when Catherine was going to come to lunch and I saw they had years' worth of tea stain on them. Now when I wash especially the prettiest of them I love its soft shine of real silver plating worn off on its narrow edges. Washing it this morning I was thinking of Jean Waite, in particular of sitting at her lunch table with my back to the open door, and she talking about her old silver spoons. Tall bosomy Jean with her white cowlick and loose print housedresses and her mirror hidden on the back of the cupboard door and her moss green frontroom floor, her willed careful courtesy and her love for many things - the three colors of hyssop along her path, the chopping block with a basin of water for birds set where she could see it from her chair at the kitchen table. The calendar prints of Remington cowboys her husband the stockman must have liked. I was thinking that remembering her in her so-right way of life is one of my treasures. When I'd got back to Vancouver I went to an antique shop on Main near the Western Front and rummaged through its cutlery tray to find the teaspoons I still have. It was the first place I looked. I haven't seen those classical simple old silver teaspoons in any secondhand store since. A Goddard flood these last days. Ref letter for Kao to UC Berkeley, refs for Jody's law school app. Sonja. Emilee. This morning Lauren. And now Lise. I haven't said it's the season crickets have been creeping in under the doors and starting to sing a bit after I've turned out the main lights to watch DVDs on my bed. - When she asks to collaborate - "We could put our heads together" - she's asking me to give her what I know and she doesn't, without being willing to know that is what she's doing, because she wants to believe she's better than I am. "Ellie will put us on the map." That's what I've been furious about isn't it. - Though I'm not furious now, because I declared myself. I also know 'friend' isn't the word for the fun we had. Avaaz note today about Kenyan girls raped by men with AIDS. Canadian lawyers, women, helped them sue the police. I sent them $300. 19 This day started with a beautiful rooster. It was early, daylight but not yet sunrise. I heard a chicken outside its yard, somewhere near. When I opened the back door a small-seeming coyote was running east past the washhouse with something black in its mouth. What did I do - I thought That's it (for the chicken) and closed the door? When I looked again the coyote was next to the hedge peering under it with no chicken. Then when I opened the door again the coyote was running west with the chicken in its jaws. It saw me, dropped the chicken, dashed away looking guilty. There lay the beautiful black rooster. Was it dead. No, but not getting up. So beautiful, glossy, very black with long plumes, a bright red comb, white bars on its wings. I got a gardening glove to pick it up by its feet and take it to its home next door. Came into the yard carefully, hearing my own footsteps on the gravel. Shades still down, are they asleep? Stood there hesitating at the edge of the back yard. I was holding the rooster by its long legs. It had struggled weakly, opened its wings. I heard a small sound somewhere behind me. Said, Hello? Hello? Turned and saw a Mexican woman silent at her back door. Smooth very brown face. Handed her the rooster's legs, pointed across the fence, "A coyote took it. Coyote." I could see she didn't have much English. Later on meeting Ginger at the pottery studio under the blue tarp next to the high school's swimming pool. Do I want to keep doing that. I don't think so. I'd like to be young in Mrs Hattori's class again, milky tea and current buns with Sarah in the cafeteria, but if I were going to make pots it would have to be a full commitment not a dabble. It would have to be my art and I'd have to go all out. Do the crickets like me? I could hear one - it's been like that every evening - near the front door after I turn out the lights. There it is again. Is it outside or inside? I'd just herded it out. It's in the little gap between the front door and the screen door. Ahoy poloi and ass over tincups, Tom yesterday on the phone. When he pleases me with language that way is when I feel he's the one for me. Wanted to say too how much scents have been pleasing me. Small whiff of lilies from across the room. Slightest little rag of grapefruit from the bowl in the kitchen. Drying petals on the car seat after I'd stripped them from a lavender rose in the Casa del Zorro courtyard. Lemon flowers when I open the passenger-side door of the jeep. With the rooster it was the moment seeing him laid out on his side in all his beautiful gloss and color, helpless, done probably, but still so perfectly intact and glamorous. My new neighbour's TV, too bad. 20 She's over there 20' away visible at her computer opposite where I'm visible with mine. She's a worthy but mingy little thing, not a mirror reflection I like. - Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd 2013 Good prose: the art of nonfiction Random House Was reading 2003 letters to Michael Deragon this morning, imagining again publishing them, and commenting to myself about teaching, what I was doing and what I was thinking about how to do it. Narrative of revelation? It's about daring to offer to teach and daring to ask to be taught. It's about writing. Judgments about how much I and how much you. Intimacy in guarded privacy, not phoning to be able to stay out of social mind. Knowingly wearing projections I don't try socially. Embodiment studies is and isn't a different topic. Format - the heading set it into formality, showed I was keeping account, responsibility. Margo saying I write in their style, the exercise in that. Just presenting the writing itself because it's good, it's my writing. Telling a story about teaching. Goddard's structure - what it could support - sheltered workshop - access with privacy - lab. Telling a story about writing. About maintaining integrity in an institution. Zach and Emilee. My evals.
"I was a good teacher." The age it was, 12 years from 2001 to 2013, 56 to 68. Late middle age. It was, I think, a moral problem and a technical problem. Failures to understand - by my own standards - I failed to rescue Mix of ambition, vanity, curiosity, lovingkindness, wish to unlock them - wish to be good at what I do Treading consequentially, intervening, handling power Most other fac were more backed off, timid or scrupulous, principled. Role self-defined. Sense I had of: this is what I have in front of me. I was supervised - every letter for a year, student evals. A correspondent - stranger. The dangers of it - most students were not as smart as I am, not as articulate, younger, not as experienced. Something about mothers The big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose: the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love, instead of the part that just wants to be loved. - Quoting David Foster Wallace The mother thing can go either way, a student wanting to be sweet with a mother may work eagerly with suggestions - oh tone - it's Kidder - Sonja read everything I suggested, extracted and summarized beautifully, but is her judgment stronger in the end or will she repeat with someone else - Using dislike - offside work - sorting Noticing what they are actually interested in, seeing through them - first packet Giving permission Being in love with myself Kidder had an interest quite unusual for a writer, an interest in virtue. A bright thread of goodness runs through his subsequent books. Everyone can sense when someone is looking for the good within them, and it opens people to questioning in a way that reveals the good and everything else as well. Skills too large for their material. Amusing myself: you won't work at this but I will. A weakness in relation to structure, inexperience with finishing and presenting Strong with heart and line edits the logic or the dramatic logic The best thing an editor can do is to help the writer to think. 23 I wasn't paying attention last week. Doris Lessing died on the 17th, last Sunday. 94. All the people I meet now, they're like radios that only get two or three stations. [Andrea Barrett 1996 The Marburg sisters in Ship fever] 24 3:40am. Woke with a tight solar from dreaming that I was putting Luke to bed on the floor in a high-ceilinged basement room. He was a little boy. I was checking the double doors to the garden to make sure they were locked. They had dark blue curtains hung over them, that only reached to about knee height, to keep intruders from seeing a reason to break in. As I was checking them I saw there was a second set of double doors beyond them. I was putting another cover over Luke, the dark blue little duvet he used to have, that I haven't thought of in decades. I was anxious, needed him to go to sleep. - Basement fear about Luke that I don't want awake. It can undermine my days and is no use to him. 25 I should have died on Thursday, a four car wreck on the highway threw me and my little car end over end twice at 60 miles an hour. Ass over tea kettle, a concrete bar stopped me and I walked away dazed. When the state trooper told me I rode 50 feet on my windshield I didn't know I'd even been upside down. [Emilee] - Some people are naturally monocular, meaning that they can read with one eye and see in the distance with the other, thereby obviating the need for glasses. However, this only works if you have no eye strain symptoms and do not have to close one eye to get comfortable vision. Along with the loss of elasticity of the eye's lens is decrease in the power of the lens itself as one ages. Thus the long-sighted aging eye tends to be more long-sighted with age. Aging eyes with low level short-sightedness tend to change towards long-sightedness. As we age, there is also a predisposition for some eyes - whether long-sighted or short-sighted- to change toward short-sightedness due to the development of cloudiness in the middle of the eye's lens (cataract). Another casualty of aging vis-à-vis vision is the decrease in the amount of light reaching the back of the eye. Optometrists and vision scientists have estimated that the average amount of light reaching the retina of a 60yr old is only about a third of that of a 20yr old. This explains why even with the most current reading glasses, older people will still require more lighting to be able to read without straining. 28 Pain flare last few days. Acid ache / black arms. Continuous. A night and day worst it's been. - Zach: "I think now and again of the book I would really like to write for you." Jody: "He's energetic, he's obsessive, he's methodical, he's consistent, he's so so quick, he's authentic, he accepts questions, he delivers complete answers, he's SO articulate, and were he a ditchdigger I'd be enthusing to you about kinds and purposes and relative merits of ditches. What I got from him today is the exact essential vitamin I'm deficient in from working at Sterling. I couldn't stop smiling. I feasted. 29 Kieslowski on Kieslowski 1993. Once again I'm tortured by the thought that I'm doing an insignificant job. Greg's about to read L1 so I looked at the first two pages. There's Peter's damning description of me after he'd read my journal, which evidence has said is a description of him at the time, but it has made me think again about what he probably thought was the most damning, which was my cold eye on how people look. It's what would make me most hated and yet it's also an essence of my talent. I was uneducated in that talent, it was so covert and forbidden in general that only art could teach me in it, and even that not well. It also carries anger I hadn't resolved so it can have a hateful edge. And yet it could be - I don't know whether I should say could have been - developed into something like compassionate lucidity. It stops too soon, in me. Still, I think. What would compassionate lucidity be like. I've said this before. It would see a person's moment rather than a Dickens statue of permanent character to be admired or written off. If, for example, Ken Loach were to ask me, then I'd willingly make him coffee. I saw Kes at film school and I knew then that I'd willingly make coffee for him - I'd just make coffee so I could see how he does it all. - That spiked my eyes because I've never before heard anyone say what I felt about Kes. "I haven't got a great talent for films." He says that because he thinks he isn't Orson Wells. "A genius immediately finds his place. But I'll need to work all my life to get there and I never will." 30 It might be a maxim for teaching. Never say something yourself when one of your students can say it just as well. I think most students, even the very good ones, find it more engaging to listen to one another than to one of us. There is a kind of magnetism there, an added element of plot or suspense, whenever they are listening to a peer. The room feels good - the group is thinking together now. 1 December Vivian Maer, 1926-2009, my mom's generation. She's being mythologized because she was secretive, 150,000 photos she hadn't shown anyone. What is it about that. People feel their own aloneness in it? - The moments I've seen, that no one else has seen. That they're street photographs gives them that sort of cred, world as is, not selected, and the photos they are, taken with ambition that doesn't seem to have been social, gives her immediate authority. It's as if she got through with full integrity, fame in the end, but the right kind of fame, that will have strong influence without touching her. - Even the fact that her work was discovered by accident and by the kind of young man who'd want to make his own career out of boosting it. Someone has had to be unclean but it wasn't her. Something else, too, about her story coming out now - exactly now - as if it marks women having come forward past a threshold, as if women's genius can now be seen, will no longer be unprinted negatives in boxes no one wants to do anything with. -
2nd Something about a film I liked the thought of - it was a sci vis image with small scintillating bits in a grid on a dark background. Yesterday I drove through corners of three counties. What if anything was that worth. I liked that ditches we were crossing on 86 had names on little boards. I wanted to remember them but don't. I was boxed in on the inside lane by immense RVs and toy-haulers and RVs pulling toy-haulers, marveling at the money spent and supposing all those men with money listen to Rush Limbaugh and would want to rise up to form the Republic of Gilead if they weren't diverted into rushing around the desert on off-road vehicles carried around the country in hugh white vehicles called Weekend Warrior. It was a bit startling to be in 2013 inland SoCal again - in La Quinta, Indio, Coachella - box stores in malls packed tight along 111, degraded desert, roadsides thick with dried-out non-native weeds. Then, coming home, S22 winding lumpily through badland gashes with RV encampments, and then the broad - the sublimely broad - reach of Clark Valley up between the Santa Rosas and Coyote Mountain. Then the orange groves of Henderson Canyon Road, many oranges I could see from the road scarred or blighted with black rot at one end. Then back to the little town where people over 65 are living in 1956. Here in front of me is Opuntia Ruby with its oval pads set at angles to each other to grow out of each other's way, celadon blue-green with furry old-gold polka dots and skin salt-marked so beautifully I brought it home. She said it would bloom red in spring. 4 Mandela died today, 95. Hadn't noticed he was born almost exactly contemporaneous with Lessing. Finished by the lotus or at least a complete first try at it. Plunged into Gwen & Sel - so much motion so little focus - is the solution slow mo - there's Gwen's sharpness and humor but what sound - I love my voice in the interview with Leslie and other places. It's clear and light, dances through many slants and slopes of feeling and thought. I'm feeling what a deep editing exercise we made this is, make something elegant of this very patchy amateurish footage, with no rules except needing to hold attention and not be ugly. I worked all day today, longer than I have. 7th Jam impatiently taught me the patience of focus. Tom: still thinking about the old folks. and the more I think about them the more sublime that sequence becomes. Silence gives it the poignancy and distance of old photos, motion vivifies the poignancy, making it immediate, concretely ectoplasmic and haunting. Sunday 8th Annual chili evening at ABDNHA last night. There I stood in 5 o'clock light rain with my styrofoam cup of tinned chile looking for somewhere to sit down and talk to people, at a loss, seeing no one I'd want to meet or who'd want to meet me. They seemed all one kind, dull grey people in ugly clothes talking about their renovations and the weather in Portland. Afterward woke at four from a long dream story about a string of murders first observed from hiding and then committed in self defense, on the run. 9 About Teaching letters and the teaching memos I wrote for the fac, seeing how much I had to say and how well I was saying it - how much I've written, how much I've needed to write - and how unreceived it's all been. How misfired altogether. I've needed to do it and I've done it but no one has noticed.
- I started to say it was like standing on a blank plain with no humans on it, pouring forth beautiful speech to no one at all.
Oct 29-30 research group Feminist fiction theory and the (non)narrative image, Gallery TPW Toronto. 15 Luise Braun [my Konrad grandmother] learned to crochet in 1908 in Rückenau. I have one of her crocheted runners under the pedestal of my monitor. Peter Konrad 1890-1989, same birthday as Frank, b. Schöntal, lived in the Crimea till 7, then Spät till 12, then on the land nearby at Kazanshi till he was 20 - then his family moved to Siberia but he went into the Forestry Service and then Red Cross work back in the Crimea and the Turkish front - his parents meantime in the steppes at Piketnoi near Omsk - he returned after armistice 1918 - moved to Maslianovka to be further from the railway. Great-grandparents:
Great-great-grandparents, Konrad side:
Great-great-grandparents, Braun side:
Luise Braun 1894-1983 Gorchokovo in Ufa Province, Rückenau, high school in Dovlekanova - teaching in Felsenburg near the Dnieper - fled to Siberia - married in Maslianovka 1920. She was ordered to carry a lamp for a band of ruffian men wanting to see the barn. In the sheepfold she was told to undress, but dropping the lamp to extinguish the light, she escaped by crawling under the sheep. Her father took her to Siberia at 25 to escape bandits. He left Gorchokovo for Canada in 1924 with Ben, Henry and Nick through Ellis Island to Steinbach. Peter Konrad in 1929. In 1941 she visited BC, her three brothers and stepmother, from Alberta. The Ukraine demolished in the civil war 1918-1921. Siberia not as bad then but collectivization and anti-religion measures led to jail, exile, excecution. In 1946 the Pete Konrads invited my parents to come to BC with them but Ed refused. - Binging on my mom's ancestors yesterday and today. Marveling at how hardy, canny and lucky they were. Both the Konrads and the Brauns kept starting over. Opa: Ukraine - Siberia - Alberta - BC. He was 52 the last time. Oma: Ufa - then teaching in the Ukraine - then Siberia. Always took their culture with them. Noticing that Anne was a bumper generation who absorbed the Old Country lore. She knew what her people were good for. We kids knew almost none of what she tells us so I'm assuming Mary, and Ed too, were cut off from that knowledge and had to start over in a more culturally barren way, stranded in Alberta without much background, so we didn't have much background either. Paul has researched it, Judy has dumped it, Rudy's altogether lost, and I have incompletely grafted myself into another lineage - too incompletely to be able to pass it on. I can see how religion helped them survive and often to prosper, and how the sorts of curbing I refused were necessary to keep their communities viable in unstable times. I don't know how they managed actually to believe the things they believed but I can see that believing there was a god they - and not other people - were right about, who loved them and would intervene if they asked, could help them endure their appalling calamities. Then in our stable era with few calamities the curbs failed. Rudy and I had kids without marrying, Paul divorced twice, Judy had an abortion before she married. None of us is Christian though Judy is religious. I should say the sexual curbs failed but we work hard, which I think is a pleasure rather than a curb. - Why am I saying these things. Because I'm such an outlier and I'm wondering whether that's a good thing to be. I was strongly propelled. My parents didn't know anything useful to how I was going to live. English culture had centuries of relative stability and had science, literature, European philosophy, all sorts of permission for idiosyncracy. I went English though not far enough to be accepted by the English. 16
- Milosz
- Kunitz - California patch is done. 17 Was on the phone four hours last night with Luke - he at one in the morning on his birthday - he had good reports of himself, he's in touch with Roy, Sara, Jilly, he's having Christmas with his brothers, he's involved in a kind of local activism, he's sleeping better. He didn't sound angry or crazy, though I could hear alcohol in his voice when he'd just come in from an evening with Natalie and Josh. And yet I woke this morning dully depressed as if I've lost something heart-core dear to me. I say that and tears come. What happened. I don't know. There I sigh. I really don't. My first thought was that the way he cut me off spoiled the best love I had in me, made it scared, made it careful, made it stop, made it go away. My second thought was of the satisfaction in his voice when he said Jill had been scared to say something to him. He scared me and needed to scare me and is needing to win his manhood by defeating women who are his betters in accomplishment. That's called bullying. That makes me want to go away and shut the door quietly behind me: if your well-being depends on having an upper hand over me we're at an end. I want you well but I won't sacrifice myself. - This is reminding me of how it was with Judy and Michael. Judy needs to feel she's winning. If I go away she can have that without actually defeating me. - Under that a conviction that my strength and talent are bad for people, defeat their spirit. - Along with that a conviction that no one anywhere can afford to see and enjoy them. - Along with that a lonely feeling that since Joyce has died no one understands me - meaning that no one understands my conditions, what I have had to contend with in myself and the rest of the world - and no one wants to, and absolutely not the three people who believe they love me, Louie, Luke, Tom. And not my mother even before she was crazy. When I was teaching for 12 years I could feel my strength and talent were good for people and strengthened their spirits and that they were grateful but it was a role I was paid for, I knew it wasn't personal. Luke said he always felt what he called conditionality with me. I said yes I'd blow hot and cold, I'd adore him and then ignore or feel critical of him. I said I'm like that with everyone, it's a pathology of attachment, I can talk to myself about it but it doesn't change. When I was saying that my heart was hurting in a soft sad way. Did that mean I was letting him hurt me? Did it mean I was sacrificing defenses that ought to be sacrificed? I didn't know.
I have a contrary little voice that says they're gone if I let them go, if I don't fight for them.
I can't fight for them if I'm not good for them. I'm thinking of Ronan Farrow - his mom is my age - who had his BA at 15, graduated Yale Law School, is a Rhodes Scholar, has worked for Obama, Holbrooke, Clinton, has written a book and will have a talk show. He's 25. Is that the kind of son who'd be able to stand me?
It's weak damaged men who need to seduce, intimidate, neglect.
19 Knallen - at 3:30 in the morning the wind thumping on the house in bright moonlight - that word from childhood. I was dreaming I had to connect two sorts of electric circuit, one the regular kind and one a heavier 3-prong kind. I wasn't sure they'd join right and not blow up. It did seem to be alright but there was a blue flame at loose around a seam that must be leaking gas. - We were on a train coming back to London from Cambridge, on the right side of the coach, I facing forward and he across from me. I said, I've always been in love with you. It felt risky and exactly true. 20
Seal together in a book / love that gave and love that took
Dec 20 2013 - October 21 1995, still only 18 years. December 25 2013
- In the late afternoon today we drove to Glorietta Canyon and walked up the draw where I gave the gods my earrings. I had the little stone heart Tom had found on the gravel in my pocket. We walked as far as the path went before it was blocked with stones, chose a boulder above the wash, labored up the sandy slope, dug a hole under the boulder with the point of my stick. I held out my palm with the stone on it, Tom covered it with his, I reached it under the overhang and covered it. We'd sat alongside each other on a rock just below the boulder. Tom had his thin hound face. He said he was remembering our wonderful times, "so many memories". He was sitting a bit ahead of me so I could see just the long side of his face. He was crying.
26 Tom asks:
- Do I want to say more about yesterday. We'd had good hours and hard stress. I was holding back from the beginning, wouldn't kiss him when he arrived in the dark penniless and Nazi-faced with his hair tight to his head. I didn't want to look at him, but took him home to a warm lit house with the smell of meatloaf in the oven. I was still full of misery about Luke and wanting to talk about it. He was intending to be a good boyfriend and listen. We sat in bed after supper - this was Thursday the 19th, he'd come a day before he was expecting to - and I told my little tale. He lectured me hard and loud for an hour with AA slogans. What he said was more or less correct but he wasn't feeling me in it. I suddenly said I was noticing we'd only heard one voice in the past hour. He said he'd been trying to help. I said no he hadn't. He blazed into wrath and got up and went to bed. I sat up and watched a couple of hours of Friday night lights. I thought he'd wake up over it. He woke still angry, said would I give him $5 so he could leave on the 7:46 bus. Wouldn't let me reply to anything. Went into his room to pack. I was hit by burning fear in the solar but collected myself to bear it, as I always do. Counted out five dollars in dimes for him. He put on his pack and his tight beanie cap and walked out the front door - why the front door, I wondered, since we usually come in through the back. It was maybe 5:30. So there I sat in my bed stricken but starting to calculate the advantages of an open horizon. An hour passed. Daylight came. I saw Tom on the street with his heavy pack heading for the wrong gate, the next one down. He'd sat on the bus bench in the dark with two hours to wait and his fare in dimes and changed his mind. Farmer's market, Catherine, shopping, library. In the afternoon I took him to Clark Valley and drove up Rockhouse Canyon Road and then the four miles of sand to Font's Point. I liked his company, it was helping me do what I have been somehow not wanting to do alone. On the way home took Henderson Canyon Road and showed him the De Anza Club. I showed him the new edit of Gwen & Sel. He watched it twice. Then Kale. He made his own dinner. Afterward he didn't want to watch Friday night lights with me but when I'd talked him into it he liked it and we were happily interested together. Saturday. I'd been teaching him how to use the French press and making him toast with eggs and bacon. We drove up to Ram's Hill and sneaked in through the gate after someone who'd had an electronic key. There were palo verdes along the entrance, that made a sudden dazzle of golden light between them. Looked at houses and their gardens and views. In the afternoon did I sit at the monitor while he read in his room? Was it Sunday he painted my door in the morning? And then we drove up and down the streets east of here and up Tilting T to look around at Carlos and Irma's trailor park. Monday worked on wild oats in the morning, set him up with the 17" on my bed, then drove with him to the Visitor's Center, walked partway down the long concrete path, took him through the campground, took him to the Palms at Indian Head, walked with him through the lobby there, saw the pool. By then I was starting to not be able to stand his remarks. Tuesday, Christmas Eve, I worked on wild oats, he wrote, then he was going to scrape the adhesive off my jeep door. We parked by the long dragon in the sun. I'd started to help him scrape but he was going on making inane remarks that I couldn't stand. When I asked to not talk he got angry. I went away and lay with my head in the shade between two creosote bushes growing on a mound. Was tight at the forehead but focused in it and after a while felt the tension in my whole face suddenly let go. We came home to supper, got dressed up for mass at St Richards. Afterwards two episodes of Friday night lights and ice cream. (We hadn't been able to agree on ice cream so got two pints though he was almost broke.) - I used to be able to remember sequences better than this patchy inaccurated record. Yesterday morning, Christmas morning, I made him bacon and egg sandwiches and we ate on the front steps in the sun. Judy and Chui drove past and waved. We were talking about how we want to live out the rest of our lives. He said he wants to be in the water every day, be a tanned old gentleman living near the Cove, maybe have a van he can park there, but still have his place on Georgia too. I liked how he was sounding, clear and happy. I said I want to live in the country in a little house with land I own, so I can make a garden that is my own, not too far from an airport so I can go somewhere and be famous very briefly once in a while. Then I said we're holding each other up from our next stages, we should go on and just be friends, shouldn't we? He agreed in an instant, he had his real reluctance ready, he's too old to move to Bellingham and start over, and he doesn't want to go back to having a job so he has the money to make a move. - So then when we were going to Glorietta Canyon in midafternoon I knew how to seal our agreement with a ritual. I think something hit him when he saw me pick up the little stone heart to take with us. He was silent on the way up the pale dust road, staring ahead. The canyon was already in shadow when we got there after 3. We parked next to the Virgin's shrine rocks and there was the wash - I think the wash - I'd chosen before, a beautiful sand path winding up between rising banks, a garden with agave, desert lavender, barrel cactus, catclaw, ocotillo, beavertail, cholla, chuparosa already beginning to bloom, brittlebush too. We both struggled to climb the bank. We're so much older than we were. I was using the stick, staggering and hauling up with my arms, and he was worried about falling into a cactus. We sat looking down the valley, which was still in golden evening light, and then crawled down and left the wash. I said the stone heart might still be there a million years from now. We drove very slowly back down the road in 4 wheel drive and the lowest gear, the road now partly wrecked by last summer's flash floods. We met a young man who stood aside to let us pass. When I was alongside him he looked in my eyes through the open window and said very quietly Hi. Tom said he was a good omen. I was thinking, oh Tom is in ritual time. Then when we were on the last long stretch toward the highway I saw an animal on the road ahead of us. A coyote? A dog? It faded into the desert to the left. When we came even with it, there it was, a dog it seemed, because it had on a yellow collar, a handsome dog turning his head looking at us. Tom said, It's me. He followed it a little way, stood in the desert looking after it, a tall narrow man with silver hair. I was being careful all week not to see or feel him too much. I wouldn't kiss him or cuddle or hold his hand. It was playful at first, he had a good joke about hugging without arms, tipping up to me like a penguin. There was a moment after he'd come back when we were across from each other at the table and I said My preference is always to love you. I want you to hear that, my preference has always been to love you. I saw him then, he was bare naked with tears in his eyes. But there was another moment too where I was talking about how his lying has been hard on me and he said he won't lie any more from now on but he doesn't want me to question him about things in the past. I was feeling that was a crux, that I couldn't go on with doubts about his lies in the past, for instance about whether he drank with Oscar after the bicycle race, or whether he has cheated on me in these past many years, and I can't ask him about them because he never will make those last confessions. We'd rolled so slowly down that last incline that the light was gone by the time we got to the highway, strapped on our seat belts, put it back into two wheel drive. Other moments. We were lying on his bed seeing the sun slanted on the wall. He said it reminded him of his room in Okinawa. He'd had his own room because he was an NCO, a room half the width of this one, with slats in the windows. He'd lie there on weekends, twenty years old, hung over, watching a gekko climb the wall. At mass we were both feeling a woman at the far end of the bench ahead of us, feeling her the same way I think. She was a slight Scandinavian-looking woman, fine-featured, with slim legs under her skirt and her blond hair pulled back in a knot. She was holding a large child on her lap, a long-haired boy with eyes half asleep and head on her shoulder. He looked heavy but she kept holding him in her arms with his head on her shoulder even when we had to stand for a long time. She was there without a husband and I imagined she was alone with the child and lonesome for her community of childhood, stranded in this desert town in exile. There she was patiently sadly enduring that bumbling Filipino priest and disjoined demystified ugly populist mass, a Madonna in the real. - Something like that. When I think of him as my man I get to seething with refused hope and anger that the man I have is so incompetent, such a grabber and bullshitter, cursing, dropping his g's, so tight-looking, with hair plastered down, belly fat spreading in his pyjama gap, leaving a mess wherever he eats, perception eternally tied up in old movie references, always clamouring to be praised, flying into unjust intemperate rage. Etc. When I let him go I'm touched at heart the way I used to be, by his long lonely story, his long faith in me, his riffs, his company in adventure, his energy and eagerness, his love for his own moments, his willingness to be happy wherever he is, his realness in tears, his affection, the adventures we've had through all these years. By how hard it is to be him, especially in the always-dissolving fluidity of intention in him, he so controlled by his moment that he can't form a plan and follow it through and feel a strong bridge from past to future. It has made me feel unloved, unwanted, that he doesn't do what he could do to have money, that he doesn't finish To the buoy, that he doesn't write the family history he keeps saying he will write, that he doesn't get his driver's license. But it hasn't been that, it's just Tom, his unbearable lightness of being, the way he dissolves out from under himself. Could I have decided I'd work with that in him, organize him so we could go on? It didn't seem that I should, although I did, sometimes, for instance getting him his place, helping him move three times, finding Joseph, getting Vic scattered, clearing out his storage space. It didn't seem I should for moralistic reasons that can't have been correct - "he's an adult" etc - but is there another reason, a better reason? That I have to look after my own tasks properly, yes. When we were sitting together in church I prayed to resolve this long suspension in self conflict and in a way that doesn't harm us. Next morning a moment came. Work friends for as long as he can remember to be. A soft transition. There was one more thing, what was it. The half hour we had sitting beside the AA desert clubhouse liking it together, its small simple '40s design with schoolhouse windows to the east, pale green paint under the long eaves, nicely lettered address numbers on red boards, fine sand parking lot, tamarisks and palms, concrete pad with picnic tables, barbecue stove. I've been family to him, I've been his next of kin, I've heard his stories, I've known him through time that has reached to long before we met. Can he hold onto that? Will I want to? Can there really be something next? So now it's 1:15. He's at home feeling what he needs to feel. I've cleaned my house and told the story. - I left Frank at Christmas too. Did I set a cycle? I have moments when I think I've never liked him and then when I lose him - whenever I've lost him, the many times - I see and feel again the pilgrim soul I've always adored. The tall narrow man standing with his back to me in the desert, alone looking after a dog running west. 27 "I want to live peacefully." Something else I'm noticing again is that we both keep needing to veer into calamitous loss because that's who we actually are. Wild oats the single stalk angularly dancing in the blue clean air. The eye keeps waiting for instants when it throws out its arms to their whole extent. The silvery clashing sound brings it alive. There's the way it keeps turning from blunt silver to sharp finer-focused black awns. The rectangle fills and empties. Bird songs rarely, their sound like the shape of the [?]. Playback is strobing a bit - is that better? The eye tries to hold certain poses, that's a good tension. It changes its character instantly again and again, protean. Two other little characters out of focus and messing up its purity. Random freeze moments? I have 2:16. It turns to silver wire instantaneously. Insect goes through at the end - slow that. The far and less far clips first? Far is 3 minutes, best is up to 5. - I'm realizing this means both of us will stop being interested in many things we've been interested in for each other. I'm realizing it because things occur to me to tell him, show him. We've made common references, for instance I'm watching Jarhead. We'll have to rebuild our brains again, I don't know who I'll be. I don't know who you'll be when you don't have me in you anymore. 28 I was in the Valhalla house after I'd been away for a long time. it was strewn full of junk, old clothes. I lit and was tending a fire in the cookstove to boil water for tea. Three people arrive, I think three, who were the new owners. A man was saying he'd rent it to me for a large sum. Was he intending to renovate it? When I mentioned the pump I saw the surroundings were very changed, a circle of tall evergreens with trunks bare a long way up where the pump had been. A little girl was there. I said she could have any of the clothes she wanted. A large double bed along the south wall, or southeast, seemed clean and carefully made. I assumed a male couple of hobos was using it. The house was larger than it had been. When I woke I understood the dream more or less. I was also thinking of two other moments. One was Joyce saying, after I showed her some of the Valhalla slides, Your family is in awe of you. The other was me saying to Mary that I was leaving the dead to bury the dead. But Jesus said unto him, Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead. Mathew 8:29. Slender bristle-like appendage found on the spikelets of many grasses - ME awne, OE agen ear of grain, related to Old Norse ögn chaff, Gk akon javelin. - I think it's an autonomic neurovascular dysfunction. Another flare began the night before Tom left. It's mid-morning and my arms have burned continuously. Skin capillary regulation. Aspirin hasn't helped. -
29 Catherine's cabinet des merveilles. Small brown-eyed short-chinned woman of sixty who carries with her when she moves hundreds of images large and small, some good, some not, scores of hundreds of tiny objects, concrete tables made to look like branches, coral chandeliers, hundreds of coffee table books, a library of design magazines, box-mounts of butterflies, stick insects, cicadas, glued heaps of shells. There is a garden I'm immediately having designs on. A pool. Palo verdes. A beautiful ironwood tree. 31st Last light.mov. I like the track - it's moonrise distant traffic stripped of everything above 600 and offset a bit on R and L tracks so it becomes the sound of the mountains, dark dense standing and surging air with a song in it, a suspended chord embedded in its fiber. I like the way intensity shifts from side to side to make a surrounding. An acceleration at the end. The whole piece is 7 min - slowly fading - may not have the rate of fade yet. - Why I can't live the way Catherine does - why I have to have a simple house - I was thinking about it when I dipped into current sci vis yesterday and quickly was overwhelmed, and why I'm quickly overwhelmed when I go into my own notes - because creation is in unordered material but collection and curation is just recognizing order someone else has already made. And yet the way I'm going into my material now, with quite a lot of speed in decision, for instance cutting high frequencies of the Last light audio and setting the two tracks out of synch was fast and confident, and I like it a lot. On the other hand I fooled with its video some, trying it two ways faster, trying a lot of color correction options, before I went back to the full 7 minutes just fading some. Writing Sonja's grad report seeing my work and hers such a good collaboration.
She had time and energy and the money to do what she wanted, I had the framework,
a superb bibliography, a style of articulation to hand on. I was wise and
she was willing and able.
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