| in america volume 27 part 5 - january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1 January 2014 It's a number I like better. 3
- Kate says DCP or ProRes QT422 with 24-bit, KiPro deck - In their agitation they had managed to cross the track without seeing it, and once they were on it again the whole landscape fell into place, direction was obvious, and the great lagoon lay where it ought to lie in relation to the rest. They woke to the sweetest dawn - day in the east, still night in the west and a sky between them varying by imperceptible degrees from violet to the purest aquamarine. Dew had fallen and the still air was full of scents unknown to the rest of the world. The horses moved companionably about, smelling gently of horse; the ass was still asleep. Smoke rising straight: the smell of coffee. 'Have you ever known a more blessed day?' asked Martin. 'I have not,' said Stephen. O'Brian The Nutmeg of Consolation Although the long table, ablaze with silver, was laid for eight, and they spread wide apart, there was still a great deal of space on every hand, a space filled with the sun reflected from the wake and the dancing sea, vivid and full of life, flooding in through the stern sash-lights, a fourth and inwardly slanting wall of bright glass panes that made the cabin the most beautiful room in the world. The Truelove - Jody: News on LSAT: I got the scores yesterday. 160 and 80th percentile. I thought these seemed pretty Ok, so I sent them to Lawyer, and this morning (a) I overheard him telling intern, "She's going to be dangerous!", (b) he told me my score was better than his own, and (c) he texted his stepfather (the former AG of Vermont and still lawyer to the Governor) who said I hit a higher percentile than HE did, and that I would certainly get aid if I wanted to apply to a school. My insides went all still and thoughtful. 4
5 Every day still - not heavily - dwelling on what it was about with Tom - how I could stay confused for 18 years - I who am so settled of opinion in other matters - O'Brian saying in me - I've been flaring all day, woke in it at 4 and it stayed - eye surfaces, face, arms, palms, especially inner arms, legs, especially inner legs, now soles of feet - a dark dull ache of the scalp and forehead - in spite of magnesium and premarin - it's gone when I'm driving around - I ignore it when I'm working. All day looking at the pearly sea - variations in speed and overlay - like best music - I don't know yet what to make.
- In all of these the end is too fast. 7 I told David I have a skin disorder because of trauma of touch starvation when I was little.
In the days after Tom left I was remembering that when I was first with Frank I wrote The touching is something I need, and then that Joyce said You don't need touch. I was sure she was wrong. I have been in some ways ruled by needing touch, the question now is what kind of need it's been, would I still need touch if it weren't a child structure in me. I think human mammals need touch to the end.
- There the phone rang. I said to Louie, I want you to buy me a house. She laughed but it's not out of the question. 9 Steven Nadler 2013 Spinosa: a life Cambridge Nov 24, 1632. Also Vermeer, Van Leewenhoek, Rembrandt painting in the neighbourhood. His mother died when he was 6, stepmother at 8. There was a Jew, Uriel da Costa, in Amsterdam who'd had a Christian education, converted to Judaism, spoke against everything in Judaism that wasn't Mosaic (the Talmud) and denied immortality of the soul, which is part of the body. He was banned but went further, said Moses didn't give the law. He tried to go back on his declaration, 'confessed' in synagogue, was whipped, went home, wrote his autobiography, Exemplar humanae vitae, and shot himself. 1640. In the 3 years before he turned 21, Spinoza's father, stepmother and sister all died and he had inherited debt. He was a merchant with connections among the Dutch, including "members of dissenting Protestant sects, such as the Mennonites ... groups of freethinkers that proliferated in 17th c Amsterdam." Franciscus Van Den Enden his Latin teacher an intellectual in an artistic and musical household, "a man of no religion", educated his daughters, democratic and egalitarian, hanged in Paris in old age. Relgious belief personal, love. Spinoza loved his daughter Clara Maria "though she was rather feeble and misshapen in body," "taken by her sharp mind and excellent learning." humanistic education that was used generally by Latin masters of the time to improve their students' fluency in grammar, syntax, and, above all, style. ... ancient classics of poetry, drama, and philosophy ... neoclassical works of the Renaissance ... recent developments in natural science ... Bacon, Galileo, Bruno ... Descartes' work in physics, physiology, geometry, meteorology, cosmology. Flemmish Mennonites - Balling, Jellesz, Riewertsz, Devries. Collegiant meetings disaffected Mennonites, Remonstrants, Quakers - biweekly Sunday meetings called colleges - egalitarian, anti-authoritarian. When he was 24, "By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God .... Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up, cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in." 1656 a cherem. God is simply the infinite substance, and as such is identical with Nature. There is nothing objectionable in believing that God is a body. Souls die with their bodies. Collegiants - true Christianity nonconfessional, consisted of evangelical love for one's fellow human beings and for God and obedience to original words of Christ, not theological commentary. Salvation by heartfelt personal faith, "anticlerical to the core". Baptism for freely consenting adults only. Ecumenical. I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me. First writings maybe 1660 when he was 28. Moved to the country near Leiden, which had a university. Holland in the 17th century the one country where there was freedom of speculation. Highly cosmopolitan on account of world trade. Huygens, Leeuwenhoek. During the 17th century the Dutch Republic became more and more England's publishing house. Merchants rather than aristocrats were patrons. Leader in developing still life, seascape and landscape, portraiture, genre paintings of everyday life. Golden age roughly spanned the 1600s - trade, science, military and art. Cutting edge: microscopes, telescopes, physics of light, astonomy. Glass dust and early death Feb 21 1677. Had his writing desk and contents sent to Mennonite publisher Rieuwertsz, who immediately published a bunch Conception of a good life as the imperishing love of (nature), in the sense of whatever is immutable in it. Being in a state of accord within nature, "knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature". Requires knowing Nature and human nature. Need for method. - Distinguishing 'intellect', though, from 'imagination' and 'the senses'. - 'Why, Stephen,' he said, looking up, 'I was so sorry to dash your spirits about the foetid swamp; but I dare say the miasma would have done you as much harm as an ordinary unlearned cove.' 'Not at all, my dear,' said Stephen, 'I contemplated on the delights of the Sinon, the river that comes down by Philip's Island. I reflected upon the variety of vegetables and animals, of the very real possibility of a potto, and soon recovered my native ebullience.' 'What is a potto?' 'It is a little furry creature that sleeps all day curled up in a ball with its head between its legs and then walks about very, very slowly all night, high in the trees, slowly eating leaves and creeping up on birds as they roost and eating them too. It has immense eyes, which is but reasonable. Some call it the sluggard; some the slow lemur; some the sloth, but quite erroneously, for the two have nothing in common but their modest demeanour, their inoffensive lives.' The commodore. Just as he was well into his cot and swinging easy, some dreadful voice from the depths said 'Maturin, Maturin, you had already bored poor Jack Aubrey cruelly with your tedious account of Michel Adanson years ago, prating away in the same earnest even enthusiastic moral improving fashion for half an hour on end and he sitting there smiling and nodding politely saying 'Oh, indeed?' and 'Heavens above' oh for shame. He could not recall the longitude or latitude in which he had done this, nor even in what ocean; but he could hear the sound of his own zealous voice going on and on and on, and Jack's civil replies. 'Do I often do this?' he asked in the darkness. 'Is it habitual, God forbid, or only advancing age? He is a dear, well-bred man, the creature; but will my heart ever forgive him this moral advantage?' He slept at last, but the recollection was with him, strong and fresh, when he woke. ... Stephen digested this for a while, and then he said, 'Jack, last night it suddenly came to me that I had told you all about Adanson before, and at great length - his assiduity, his countless books, his misfortune. I beg your pardon. There is nothing more profoundly boring, more deeply saddening, than a repeated tale.' 'I am sure you are right in general. But I do assure you, Stephen, that in this case I never noticed it. To tell the truth, I was so much taken up with my D string, which kept slipping, that I was afraid you might think my inattention uncivil. Yet I tell you what it is, Stephen: I have been talking with Whewell, and I have decided upon my plan of campaign. Should you like to hear it?' Today all day reading Spinoza: a life on my bed, door open to the sun, speeding along happy to know more about Spinoza's context. His Mennonites are not mine - they have Flemish names and are wealthy merchants - but they are distinguished antecedents at least in name, and they were true friends to Spinoza who stepped into his freedom three hundred years before I stepped into mine. I was remembering the day I drew a divided rectangle on the board and showed my Phil 100 class the 4th metaphysical position they had not been given in the lectures and named it as Spinoza's (dualism, idealist monism, physicalist monism, and Spinoza's other). -
OB pier 5 - 3 movements. Fast slow fast, 8 minutes. 13 Monday morning still in the dark, heater motor, strong tea. After someone has been here I'm not ready to write about them - about being with them - until next morning. Oh Emilee what is wrong with you, you're puffed out like a grub. Your face is, it's the first thing that hits me, and your belly is. You're taller than I think but the top of your back is rounded forward. You have far too much hair and you wear it in a big ugly lump on top of your head. You dress horribly in mouse greys and browns, pants too long for you shredded at the heel. You give your whole great talent to schlepping about on airplanes, speaking in a soft pleasant (in the pay of advertisers) voice to paid respondents. You work for Republicans for far too little money. You need your weak mother to love you. You're dependent on diet Mountain Dew - Mountain Dew! - with its dyes and poisonous false sugars. How is it that you don't notice what's making you ill? How is it that the brilliant 15 year old fighter you were has died out of all her great daring? I'm appalled by what you do to yourself. What do I do with that appalled perception when I'm with you. I rattle on telling stories about my own steadfast daring. I draft on your passivity. I drive around with you. The dragon, Glorietta Canyon, Font's Point, the Visitor's Center, the labyrinth, El Borrego, Kendall's. I give you what you want, I think, an example, but aware that it's an example you are going to be too weak to use, which makes me careless in the giving. For myself I take what I can get, which is just company in this place and in my stories. - Then I'm crying because Anne liked my piece about Mary. Your piece about your mother is wonderful and every word sounds true. I read it to Harvey and it brought tears to his eyes. As I read I wanted to hug that youthful dreamy Mary who got caught in a lonely, unsuitable marriage and stumbled on never telling her parents but trying to remain curious, generous and kind. And often covering for her husband, writing letters and stories later that made her life sound so much better, excluding the moments on her knees. I never thought of Mary as "sturdy," but you saw her on the farm and that most likely is what she had to be there, working as a farm hand. I write on the evening after the news that Neil Friesen, Lucy's husband, died. - Glorietta Canyon. I wanted to visit the rock our little heart is buried under. My landmark is the Virgin's outcropping. We walked up the wash that's like a clean new path. New green plants on the edge violent water had scoured. Where the path closed I took a photo of what I thought was the boulder. There was a glare from the sun directly behind it. I noticed a similar boulder higher up. I'd probably photographed the wrong one. I scrambled up to make sure. I'd placed a little pink cube of quartz over the spot and it was there under the higher boulder, that has an ocotillo spouting up at its base. We trailed up another wash afterward, found rocks to sit on, on its shaded side. There was a beautiful complete silence. Emilee sat looking at a perfectly formed desert lavender bush full of honey bees. I lay on the sand with my feet in the sun. I was asking the place and time to mend me. Directly overhead was a small cloud like an angelic body in motion. It had a bright intensity at the head. [sketch] I was feeling that it was instructing me - not it, but it in me, its formation in me. We stayed there in silence for a long time. As we were leaving I noticed a cool, light sensation as if under my skin, all over. I said I felt very rested. Emilee said she did too, refreshed. 14 ... tracing the history of his long connection with Diana Villiers, a relationship made up of a wide variety of miseries interspersed with rare intervals of shining happiness, but one that he had hoped, until tonight, to bring to a successful end. In a brief flare of rebellion, anger and frustration he thought of his enormous expense of spirit these last few weeks, of the mounting hope that he had indulged and fostered in spite of his judgment and of their frequently violent disagreements; but the flame died, leaving not so much an active sorrow as a black and wordless desolation.
People in the botany class - elderly people - I'm noticing are vague, absent companions. I try to get something going with questions but they don't remember the names of books they've liked. They don't ask questions back. They look at me dubiously (I do that too with the many older short-haired women) wondering whether they've met me before. The windows on my jeep give me a good-looking reflection especially when I'm wearing my moonstones and a black turtleneck and I've given myself dominance with the camera so I go in feeling bright and flirtatious, but the effect of brightness and flirtation is very damped, nobody wants to play. Merrill did, a bit, and she's younger, but she can look a bit suppressed maybe by things in her home life I don't know about. I should say too - this is the other side of it - that in Emilee's photos I'm a short-necked broad heavy old thing whose image I've immediately erased from the Font's Point picture. It's a look I've earned by mental work probably, dark compaction, the look of a lot of guns - I'm a 74-gun ship of the line - but I don't like to see it, am distressed seeing it.
Oh well.
- I've thought that about the amount of cognitive effort it has taken for us to stay together. O'Brian's wonderful reach and grace. He seems to have been ashamed of his own story - he was brutal to the wife and children he abandoned and it seems abandoned the truth about his young self too - but built so much truth and loving loyalty into his books, built himself able to flow out so honorably in truthful observation and love for all of earth, that his debts were paid - not to the victims, no, but at large - more than fully, and long before he died. He made himself, durch sich selbst, and what kind of story is how he did it. I read him always feeling him: what mind can do this, what mind can know so much. He paused and fixed Jack's eye with his own: they both nodded: he brought the bow down and the 'cello broke into its deep noble song, followed instantly by the piercing violin, dead true to the note. The music filled the great cabin, the one speaking to the other, both twining into one, the fiddle soaring alone; they were the very heart of intricate sound, the close, lovely reasoning. He has indeed read a certain amount, more than most of his kind, but late reading, useless as a foundation. It seems to me that she is a woman to whom these sports are of no great consequence, but may be indulged for pleasure, for friendship or kindness, and even, where a minimum of liking is present, for interest. In this case I do not find it affects my liking. 15 All done with Goddard, last of the evals shipped.
I love a man who can bite, if vexed. A friend's bastardy, divorce or deformity was so often the earliest point of description, the earliest sacrifice to the candour of intimacy. - That sort of social observation. 16 Unhappy dream of struggling with Rowen who had been influenced by Mike and Lise to despise me. I wanted to cut my losses, leave him to them, and I wanted to fight for him. Woke at 3 and lay in the dark feeling the grand shambles of life lived, the opportunity it gives for being equal to it or not, which is the grandness, and the shambles of for instance my relations with Rowen and Luke and Tom. Mary's wreck. Those together with Maturin, with whom I've spent two days corner to corner, or is it three, Maturin's skill and haplessness, his love for Diana's straight back and Jack's bulky innocent dash, behind them Patrick O'Brian being equal to the shambles in his greatly sinning way. 'Put those pistols down at once,' he said coldly. 'Do not you know it is very rude to point a pistol at a person you do not mean to kill? For shame, Villiers. Where were you brought up?' - The way he uses her last name. Paul K does that, calls me Epp. It was an ill-regulated mind and if it were not carefully watched it would mourn Diana's death, or at least the death of his infinitely cherished myth; a dark, bitter, monotonous grieving. Yet the mourning was not pure - it no longer invaded him entirely, perhaps because often and often, in the most unexpected ways, the old myth and the new reality tended to coincide. Perhaps, he reflected, this had a certain relationship to marriage: they had been together a very long time and although they might essentially be strangers they were inextricably entwined. Diana Villiers: he stared into the declining fire, and Cuvier receded, faded. - Then I skipped a lot of political intrigue and came to the last paragraph [of The surgeon's mate]: 'I now pronounce you man and wife,' said Babbington, closing the book; and still with the same gravity, but with great happiness showing through it, 'Mrs Maturin, dear Doctor, I give you all the joy in the world.' 17 By now, he spoke, to some extent, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Catalan and Irish and had a good background in Latin and Greek. - Here's the scan and I like the cover except for text color. 18 Alright: I'm going to finish laying out In English now that I have the cover. 19 8 hours focused work today, hardly looked up. Layout and notes. Smitten by play of the weather. winter is another kind of place, leaner, less spatial-tactile, more social. field & field is two fields, loving present and rounding-up thought/realization. Its title is exact.
20 I was in the botany course today ashamed to be there. Was counting up all the ways I've been ashamed for years and will list them but before that I will say why I loathed being instructed by Kate Harper. First it's the way she dresses: skin tight leggings that show off her perfect long legs and thighs. Second her astounding large bosom on a thin frame, which she dresses in another thin fabric that shows her nipples. Then the hideously ingratiating way she gushes over anyone's little contribution, right or wrong. Then the little teaching devices that unconsciously invite everyone to imagine her naked - for instance saying how passionate she is and explaining leaf orientation by telling a story about herself in high school lying flat on the ground in a bathing suit. Then the way standing next to Judy - when some joker said "the long and the short of it" - the way she said "Remember, we are not our envelopes. We are not our envelopes" - that lie from so blatant a body profiteer. I was muttering "Yes you are". Then the way when she was saying ironwood uses a drought endurance strategy and I piped up to say it uses a drought avoidance strategy because it grows in washes, and showed it to her listed that way on the Natural history of California handout, she tried to get away with her mistake by saying different people classify these things different. (Frank's eye caught mine from the circle at that moment.) And finally just the hours of being spoken to like small children. I grant her that her method was working for the slowest of the old dears, and that was another reason to be ashamed of being there.
It says I should be proud of not being too proud to use the ways that are available to me. I can go ahead and be ashamed of Mike and Ken but not Tom. I can be ashamed of being not-young and lame because I am them, they are not my envelope.
Pre-print of Juliana's and my translation piece arrived tonight. It looks nice. I like the clarity of what I said. 21 The Living Desert. Mountain lion. Rosy boas. Cozy badger. Turkey vulture, roadrunners, grackle. Peccary. Livescan. Supermarket. Apple store. Sprouts. Gas on the way home. 22 The badger was lying flat as a little fur rug on the warm dirt breathing peacefully, dozing. After a while it stretched forth two black hands with sharp claws, laid its head down between them. There was a young woman standing next to me against the wall who said He's my favorite, he has a lot of personality. What she meant was that he seemed happy and easy, a darling little being. The rosy boas weren't pink, they were lengthwise-striped pale copper and silver. One was coiled loosely over the crotch of a dead branch asleep. Most of the other's length lay along the sandy floor but its upper quarter was held upright supporting its small diamond-shaped head so it could lie against the other's long shoulder. The two small heads motionless close together seemed loving, like Tom and me in our head-joined beds. In the big tent-peaked aviary a roadrunner with a bad foot fluffed himself up and stood still near the man with the barrel belly who brings them food. He had a turquoise bar next to his eye. The other one was running the way they do, beak sharply forward like someone intent to know. Meantime a sad-looking turkey vulture with a broken right wing was hopping clumsily onto a log. The peccary had coarse long black hair like a porcupine, trotted on little pointed feet carrying forward what seemed a very large serious face. I've intended to go there for years because of photos in plant books but the plants were neglected-looking, ratty. Irrelevant plaques commemorating dead people everywhere. I kept liking the paths though, sandy tracks pleasing underfoot and seen winding into groves. I liked that there were ethnographic zones, Cahuilla, Yunan, Vizcaino, and desert zones, Mojave, Upper Colorado, Sonoran, Chihuahuan, but they were crowded and random so I couldn't see shapes. I came home on S22 in the dark, Handel blasting, switching onto high beams when I could, cutting a lit swath ahead of me through the Gothic blackness of dips and curves feeling the strangeness of there being somewhere on the earth's surface I was going to with so much trouble. I mean the arbitrariness of these homes where no one is waiting for me I suppose. I was sore and lonely this morning - thought what can I do - house plan - got out the house files - graph paper - remembered SketchUp - got the big monitor online - pulled in the application - found Youtube tutorials - and then was well and eager till 8:30 at night learning it. Meantime: 1. Margo asking to be FB friends 2. Katie sending a wonderful letter about her therapist 3. Emilee sending a video about a program that lets people as if feel themselves each other 4. On FB via Nina via Laiwan an African man singing the worst of a crash with pure true pain 5. Found my index page had got somehow replaced by the mbo index page - still haven't figure out how to fix it. 27
28 M is 90 today. It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna nor honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God - a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God. - David Brooks quoting Augustine in a column about a Catholic song writer. He links to a song called I shall not want. My heart sank hearing it because not wanting seems the essence. Giving up on wanting because one will not get. (I liked "soul is floodlit" because I imagined light pouring into an empty room.) (Space does not contain light in any case). So Augustine is talking about virtuality - "of my innerness" - fantasy experience - which isn't 'in' space or time though it is accomplished by space-time means. I'm disappointed that anyone glorifies that. It's a weak dodge. Yet I understand the need and the use in self management. For instance this week the surge of energy working on an imagined house because I haven't the means to build an actual house - or might but not to build a grand beautiful house. And my sex fantasies because I haven't the means to have beautiful sex with any real person. - So is fantasy always for lying about one's actual size and value. No because it gives the body states of being it needs for balance? And yet short-circuits effort that would win more of that balance in ways knitted into the real world. People who are encysted little knots in the fabric and not flowing locations.
What am I seeing - some old diagram of a tiny encysted disease organism that splits and pours replicas of itself into the bloodstream (was it), so yes the harm to others of fantasies broadcast. Isn't fantasy the main moral dilemma and existential crux?
30 George W Bush understood stupid people well. They were not dumb . They had chosen to be stupid because that offered its own kind of power. To win a great many small contests of will, they needed only to ignore all evidence. I'm worried that my disease is getting so much worse. Now it wakes me after a couple of hours and doesn't stop, can go on burning all day. Palms, face, eyes, skin of the insides of my arms, ribs on the R, down the insides of my legs. - Julie's garage with 5 women holding up little objects saying Oh my lord, isn't this darling, this is so cute. I'm almost frozen among them. No one knows or guesses or cares to know what I'm good for. I'd like to know what they are good for but if I ask it will seem I'm setting up an opening to tell them I have a PhD, which is also true, because if they don't know I'm better than them they assume I'm worse, and I feel them assuming it, and I mind. 31
February 1 Dreamed I was sitting on a wall at Ursula Le Guin's house, not invited, just there. Maxine was visiting her; she exclaimed You haven't said a true thing since I've been here! Le Guin stormed off. I noticed her large bare hairy feet like Hobbit feet. I was thinking Oh she wrote that honest man because she's a liar. Later still in the same space, which seemed to be a tourist spot, there was a room full of plant pots, a couple of women working at a long table. We were in low-ceilinged rooms built inside the towering nave of a brick abbey - really towering, like the tallest cathedrals. I stepped sideways out of one of the low-ceilinged rooms and could see up and up. Quite shabby brick. I saw something like that in the Seattle train station when they were renovating. I'd heard someone say "drawing from life." Later I was telling someone I'd made a song. I sang it, five lines including "drawing from life." She said it wasn't a song. "Three more verses?" "Or four." The other night among many other things I dreamed a wide alcove someone had faced with yellow Moroccan carpets. I'm saying that ineffectually just to say the dream made something vivid and complex that impressed me. The song too though I agreed I wouldn't go on and develop more verses. Looking at the pink lilies on the table and the iris on the modem's table just now I was remembering hospital corridors at night with flowers set on the floor outside the doors. They don't do that now, it's something people may not even remember. The dim gleam of the terrazzo floors, a bulky Ukrainian janitor pushing a large round polisher trailing a long cord, its motor's roar. Yesterday I was working on SketchUp again, all day fervid. I modeled this house and then I made up an improved version of it. I furnished it. Installed a gas fireplace, a fridge, a wall oven, a toilet, a sink, glass doors on the washer-drier compartment. Put a plumb line here, pull up a guideline, always specify your axis, rectangles are better than lines. The pleasure of pulling up a wall: draw its footprint, select it as a face, choose the push-pull tool, begin to pull up, type a distance value, return, the wall zips upward to its ceiling height. When I stopped yesterday to talk on the phone or go down to the botany society's junk sale I was seeing geometrically as if I were modeling. This house felt different when I stopped last night because I'd built an alternate space in it. I was enraptured with the guest room, where I'd built the Mesa Grande window bookshelves and put a writing table under the west window, painted it black, brought in a quite lovely chair. - Classification in botany. 2 Phytoplankton - diatoms - cell wall and photosynthesis. Animal plankton - mobile and naked to ingest materials. Life in the surface of the sea diverges into animal and plant but signs are mixed, eg flagellate reproductive stage of some phytoplankton. Ocean cells are free-living and immortal. Shore seaweed cells stick together, become multicellular, return to single cell plankton to reproduce, and die. a true regression to the simplest state of their protoplasm 4 'Metaphysically motivated" - about Redgrove. Trashed by my weeks of bad nights and then the days fleeing out of pain into all-day computer work. Cut my hair yesterday so I can brush it hard and wear it down. I was disgusted by the thinness of the braid. 5 The later pages of In English - [page of notes on moving companies] 6 [Juliana's student] 7 The later pages of In English - I've sometimes known what little thing to do with a text that's been hung up for is it now almost 40 years but I often feel the mediocrity of the mind making the whole piece, that it can't be fixed. At the same time I remember people who have felt something about those pieces - and I have - so I decide to let them stand as the work of a younger person. I keep having such opposite feelings about the whole project, that the work is exquisite, that the work is nothing. going forward with it is like closing my eyes and throwing it into outer space. I'm wanting to say too that I don't like living here. I like this little house but I don't like what's at the door, it's a monotonous plane of dust with too many neighbours too close by. I don't like the dull elderly past-it mediocrity of the people who live here because it is cheap and not cold. It's so barren that it's a good place to get over California. I'm starting to want to go home to BC, to Louie and Rowen and bizarre old M - I could take her for walks - and to leaves and gardening and actual art. I will have been gone 12 years. So I must make best use of this time because it's going to be over, and then I must find the right kind of place to go next. - or so it seems at the moment, as my fire dies to a twist of smoke and a heap of rubies That's Abbey. various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism strange wild unholy light of the moment 9 Sunday noon, Glorietta Canyon. Wind. A dry spring, brittlebush bright and fresh, chuparosa bits of orange on smooth blue stems. Desert lavender silvery all over, blowing, blowing. A tiny phacelia plant, just one. I lay on the warm sand with my head toward the wind and begged the place to mend my disorder, that was mended for the moment but is stinging all over now as I write. 11 1994. I'm proofing the last vol of AG. It's after the MA in 1993. I'm cleaning houses, talking to Joyce, in pain about K, having sweet nights with Rob. The herb garden is beautiful and mine. Louie's away. Luke visits. I get a grant at CISR, plan out the doc. AG19 was blind emotional work but then AG20 opens into such fullness. When I think of going back to Van I think of going back to that. - It's exactly 20 years later. I'm 68 not 48. Joyce is long dead, Rob wd not want my old bod, Luke is far away, my house is gone, and yet I feel it would be going back to that less isolated self. People wd say where have you been, I wd say in purgatory, I was paying for my earlier sins, I was in debts I paid by teaching for 12 years and by whatever I've given myself and Tom by sticking that out. The 12 years here will be enclosed in a balloon with its end pinched shut. That feels like freedom. 12 Tax refund calculated, with it and the 2nd readerships I'm 500 down from my total when I quit - that's after moving and all film equipment costs. 600 in reserve as deposit, so I'm about even but everything over income from now on will be sheer drain unless I find sources. 14 I open this book against the edge of the café table, sound of traffic, taste of coffee holding in my mouth, shade of the umbrella, warm breeze, and instantly a sense there wasn't before, of travel and sweet leisure. There's my dusty jeep parked nose-up to the fudge shop's platform. Friday morning. It's a young feeling, I mean a familiar one, normal, but uncommon for a while. So many palm trees, a lot of traffic and motion in a surrounding quiet. It's Borrego's high season and the beginning of a long weekend. I have the feeling I used to have in the oak tree's chair at Mesa Grande, of resting in a vast warm bath of perfect peace. Something has turned. I think I know what but I'm not going to say. - [To film moonrise] Camera mode full manual, ISO 200 on a Nikon, auto ISO off, f11, 1/250, focus manual at infinity. 17 Posted a lot of bits yesterday - 3 new photos I like - one of a little lump of rock on the desert floor. There was good light soft from the west, sun behind a thick sheet of haze that was luminous as a panel not a point. Chips of rock scattered on coarse sand each so particular and lovely in that light. What I like in the photo is that there's a narrow plane of sharp focus, narrower than the lump of rock itself, something tactile, sharp grain on the curve of its back and on the translucent milky bit just at its base. - Haven't said it. Two from the waste ground west of Hoberg Road. The air was so milky it faded the base of mountain. In both photos I've made sky of that. Sky with faint volumes. The D50 made something subtlely lovely of the color in both. It's a lyrical machine, it pushes colors toward pink and orange and saturates them a bit. It's embodying a prettiness algorithm. I don't approve of that, it flatters me, it gives me more than I saw, and yet I like that the photos look like love. I like them on the Here2014 site. They made me interested in the site again. - The Palms at Indian Head. Noticing what this new shirt and my hair shorter feel like. Sunglasses. I feel like a local, I mean a California person. Lighter. Glamorous. Palms' ancient legs. A lot of conversation behind me so I can hardly hear their dry quiet ... what? ... as if pale fine lines in the air, a faint streaking. When the breeze comes up, more of a rattle. So dry. I like this ledge above the valley. 5 steps above the pool deck, and then a row of palms, and then pale desert, and then a green strip, De Anza? And then on slightly rising ground citrus farms, and then the Coyote Mountain ridge, brown, and behind it the higher bluer more hazed further ridge beyond Clark Valley. The sky today has a frail tissue of cloud, I mean thin and organically formed with a faint spine and cellular dabs, exquisite like tissue in an x-ray. What kind of day is it. Not a summer day though the sun is hot on the side of my head. Why. The sun's angle isn't high. It's a shabby place. Flaked paint on the edge of the roof. The palms need water. A sweet relaxed sense of place, strong sense of architectural place, which is era too. Someone's intelligence a long time ago still holding. Orange tree behind the hedge. They don't pick the oranges. 19 Lying awake at night noticing that I block thinking of Luke or Tom. requirement to use every film experience as a raw material for the production of verbal discourse Scott MacDonald 2001 The garden in the machine: a field guide to independent films about place. 20 Second day not succeeding with the D800 but hours in desert goodness. Wide space, open silence. Bite of my footsteps on firm sand. Chuparosa blooming, here and there shreds of the same orange on the tips of dead ocotillo arms. New cholla limbs shining almost white. Barrel cactus in fresh pink, most not in bloom, a few in green circlet of bud. Desert lavender loose and foamy swaying its bitty tips against the breeze. I'm in El Borrego at noon. What a lot of gut buckets. What a good smell. Why are these people eating hamburgers. - The sound of insects, Peter Liechti Switzerland 2009. Super 8 and video, DV printed on 35. cinema... I mean the big screen and the film as a collective experience the initial contact with the material, the immersion ... the fine tuning ... right at the end the sound design and the work with musicians to shoot a feature length movie based on a few square meters of forest 21 A Japanese man in his 40s walked for an hour carrying various supplies to a place he remembered from an excursion when he was a student. There he used branches and plastic to make a room in the forest. He had a radio, some books, a notepad. On August 7 lay down on a bed of dry grass to starve to death. It took 62 days. He was found, with the notebook, by a hunter, some months later, not decomposed, dried to a mummy. A Japanese novelist used the notebook, which Tokyo police had as part of their report. Theatre people made a CD with music. A Swiss filmmaker who heard the CD took on making it a movie. Peter Liechti was born in 1951 and the film was made in 2009 when he was about 58. I found the movie last night when I was tracking a documentary about a sound recordist. Happened to be signed up for a month of access to Netflix, which happened to have it. Sat with it on the big monitor for an hour and a half elated. I could see it fulfilled the years of experimental work in film and sound; he had those experiments as options in telling a story rarely worth telling. There was forest, slight camera motion finding beautiful frames. Pattern on the plastic that got dirtier, was rained on. There was the text's long steady interest in what it's like to die. There was beautiful sound design, complex. Interposed super 8 material in black andd white exquisitely telecined to show grain, which I thought must have been drawn from footage Liechti had collected over years. Meantime: I don't understand my 80-400. Will keep working at it. - Glorietta isn't a good name. Dull overcast makes it a lot of tan. I'm tired today, a bad waking that's gone on bad. Tiny high-pitched hiss in my L ear. What's up in general. Does aloneness matter, does leaving Tom matter. I don't know. Can I find work worth doing. That's the one body said yes to. I've been saying I want land and a little house but lately now I've been imagining floating - I could be in London for a summer, I could be in the PRC for a summer, I have portable money if I don't pay rent. There are better schools where I could teach for a semester - Concordia, even Emily Carr. Maybe there could be a man who finds me lovely, which wd make me so. To do what Liechti did I'd need a story worth as much and I'd need his resources, which I will never have. I do have resources, I mean my backlog. What can I use them for? A 93-year-old in the New Yorker describing his many dead "all entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day" - 22 Someone said, how do you want to feel with a familiar/lover; feel that way to find them. Is it a different question than how do you want to be? It's a different question than how do you want to feel with a guy. The answer to that is desiring and desired. I think just that. I've done the harder thing I needed to do. I want to feel lovely with someone who's lovely. So no it's not the same question as how do I want to be. The answer to that is I want to be doing good work. I want to round out my days properly. 23
25 Some little things. Jacob somebody in Toronto on email, programmer. Emilee saying she'll read In English. Sonja. People at class yesterday friendly as if something changed when I wasn't there. Merrill inviting me to look at her garden. - Renaissance 2011-2026 true birthing of your most Piscean qualities: ability to see and use nuance in art personal relations organization, bureaucracy, and policy-setting. Every February/March a renewed wave washes over you from the ocean of soul, of psychic sight, of mass consciousness and the subconscious. This year the empowering wave washes over you this Sunday [24th]. Don't act immediately - start nothing before Friday. But on this day, February 28, charge forward. Start important projects, make contacts, be ambitious, make love and/or make career. Do whatever you would do, if given a chance, to make your life a huge, resounding success - this day is the chance. Saturday too, more mildly. But don't chase money, nor grow possessive .
So far I can't imagine anything that could make my life a resounding success, what would that feel like? Wittgenstein's was and I doubt it felt like that to him in the end. Le Guin's is, Gordimer's is. What it feels like to them is how it's felt [for them] for many years already, included in the world, busy, wanted, satisfied that there have been high tides though they do not come again now. - So I suppose if I were wanted, busy, included on account of Being about and Work & days? 27 Dreamed a chimney fire at the Valhalla house. I was there traveling through? A man standing next to me saw that a joint in the pipe was glowing red. I went outside and saw flames shooting sideways out of the horizontal pipe. The house burned down only partly, it seemed, because afterward I was still standing where I had stood before. Then more about a side room off the kitchen in an old house. it was a high-ceilinged pale grey space; its walls were flaking but there was a clean impression as if it had been sealed off for some long time. Then more about going out to look for my journal in the car, where a couple of my fellow travelers were playful. They were singing a song that included a line about chess on Sundays. This morning statcounter showed someone in London had been to L7-7 so I clicked through and found one of the full happy included times, which have been:
[Opposite: notes on the D800]
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