| in america 3 part 1 - 2003 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver July 25th 2003 At 5:20 the gold light of the north, the sharp-cut even blue of the mountains. 26 Berger on a drawing: "everywhere, all over it, you see the touch of a loving hand." - With a certain hysterical tone she starts to hear it as about them. All that I was taught at home or in school was colored by denial ... p.3 I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. 8 'strategic bombing,' ie civilians For deep in the mind we know everything. And wish to have everything be told, to have our images and our words reflect the truth. 16 There are events in our lives that we cannot understand because we keep a part of what we know away from understanding. War is one of those events. And there are other, private events which mystify us, as if there were no explanation for them except nature itself. That we are mystified becomes a habit passed from one generation to the next. 32 Before the laboratory announced its mistake I felt a moment of rage, and then a certain exhaustion seemed to penetrate even my heart. The task of garnering proof seemed too large. I gave up, and in my giving up, everything around me seemed to dull. 44 photographs of Rita Hayworth pasted on first nuclear weapons detonated over Bikini Atoll in 1946. 76 I have committed small suicides daily. Not going to the heart of all I feel, I have erased my real presence, sexuality, intelligence from language and expression. 93 Susan Griffin 1992 A chorus of stones: the private life of war Doubleday 27 What is this deadening. I'm seeing, feeling and thinking so little. I have nothing to say. There's nothing I wish for. It says, stay closer to her loss and anger. Her loss of Tom? Yes. And anger at him. I'm feeling no inkling of that - nothing. At that moment I do feel an inkling. It's resentment. Faint. The moments when I was holding myself together under his blasts of rage. The moments holding myself together in fear when he was driving. Child turning herself to stone. I stopped fighting and started waiting to escape, lying low. Moments seeing him come to the door ugly, shut tight, needing to spew his day of war. The many moments starting to speak, wanting to speak, and being shut down. Punished incessantly. I thrived as long as I fought. Was there a moment I stopped fighting? Little by little. I lost myself by those inches. So was Tom the ruin of me? No, Ed was. Intimidation. So now I'm back where I started? Can I undo the loss by inches? By writing him letters again. Alright, they start this way: Asshole, you said you were my man, you said you loved my spirit. You hated my spirit. You tried to destroy it. You punished it. You ignored it, resented it, raged at it. Intimidated it, silenced it. You couldn't bear to see that you had so ruined your own spirit. Allowed it to be so ruined. I wrote letters full of love. You didn't read them. You hated them. You didn't answer them. I waited on and on for letters you said you had sent. That you would do that to a heart you had tapped. You began with a lie - you did it for no reason but to disempower me. You did it in an area I wouldn't question because it was banal. You established yourself with lies because you knew it would disable me. You always used that one on women. You didn't tell me you'd been married twice, you didn't tell me you were born in Philadelphia. I should have dumped you right there. I didn't see the reason for the lie about where you were born until this moment. It was gratuitous, since there were others. Yes there was a man in you who was my true mate but there was also a really evil man. A violent malicious man, a man calculating spirit murder. I ignored him, I kept speaking to the other one. The evil man needed me. He had brought himself to ruin. He didn't know how to carry himself away from failure and death. He needed an intelligence to carry him up out of the hole on its back. He got the use of my intelligence by seducing what was ignorant in me, untapped. - Why did I switch from you to he - you are the evil man. You intended to use me and you used me. You had no intention to do anything but use me. You said, I'll cover what I am and hitch a ride on this woman. I'll seduce this woman. I'll watch this woman fall into my orbit and I'll monitor her closely. I'll apply whatever force I need to keep her where I want her. Sex, tenderness, flattery, crude devices and subtle devices, whatever I have at hand. She thinks she's smart but she has her head up her ass. She's an innocent. I'll get her easily. You're an evil man. I'll say more. You brutalized Dee. You betrayed Rebecca. You abandoned your children. You dealt drugs. You fucked Asian women for $5. You betrayed your mentor at the Ramona Sentinel. Joseph was right to drop you. I'm glad I gave him the chance. You're an evil man and an ugly man. You're a flatterer. That's corrupt. You brown-nose your superiors. You lie as a first resort, it doesn't occur to you not to. You are a weak man, very weak. You've wasted and destroyed your own spirit and talent, and are ashamed of yourself, and desperate not to feel that shame. You punished me whenever you felt shame, because you aren't brave enough to feel it honestly. I loathe and despise you. You are loveless, cynical, opportunistic, ruinous. You have no care at all for the spirits of those you need to use. You are a casual killer. I heard all your stories. There are no more. I was your confessor. You interested me. What does this feel like - hard. Hardened. Is that hardness true? It says no. Let hardness speak, is all? Yes. So hardness has spoken, now what? Defeat, it says. Yes, I defeated you, asshole. You wanted to steal everything from me - you wanted to take from me what I'd preserved and you'd destroyed. I didn't let you, I didn't give it to you, I survived you, asshole. I dumped you. I got away. I dumped you, I blind-sided you, I did not die. I defeated you. I showed you every weakness, every weak delusion. I shamed you daily. I said, you want to kill me, boy, you need to do better than that. In the end I just shut the door on you. I said, I'm bored now. You aren't worth my time. I've seen through every shred of you. Enough. I was thorough. I did it without cutting corners. I did it without cheap tricks. I did it with class. You know you earned it. You can go be a little hotel manager now, choosing your ties with care, reading thrillers and listening to golden oldies. Blazing contempt.
I defeated hope. I defeated trust. I defeated great, brave love and desire. I hoped for heart companion. I hoped you were my true mate. I hoped you loved my spirit. I hoped you loved my bravery as no one anywhere had done. I hoped you loved my beauty. I hoped you were the bold true man who would want to adventure with me. I hoped you wanted to know the worst and could take on anything that's true. I hoped we would always come through. I hoped you would always come through. I hoped you'd read and write with me and for yourself. I hoped you'd want to know all my adventures. I hoped we'd travel together. I hoped we'd fuck. I hoped we'd explore fucking. I hoped to be able to adore you wholly. I hoped the boy who wrote the poem would come alive and continue, live his interrupted life. I hoped you'd become brave to tell the truth anywhere, to anyone. I hoped we'd look at each other with confidence and trust. I hoped we'd live together. I hoped our happiness would continue. I hoped we'd keep each other young and beautiful. I hoped my hope and confidence were true. I hope we'll be back together and all this will be so. (I say that against resistance.) I hope to love you with all my heart. I hope your love is true now, though it was not at first. I hope I have won you out of your hopelessness and loss. - This one is so beautiful a world, so round - so airy - so native-feeling to both of us, I think. I hope you are who I think you are. I hope you are my man. I hope I can write you letters from my heart and days, and you'll answer from yours, with pleasure in my telling. I hope this is a love story that ends well. I hope you want me so much that you win every battle with yourself for my sake. You find a way to write, you have money, you love and enjoy what you are. I hope you can see me in naked desire and meet me from your own. I hope neither of us stop fighting until we win.
28 This week the month will drag to an end - this months-long month so empty and resented. Rowen has flopped about beautifully in it. He can sit at a table, now, working quietly through a whole exam. His dusty-rose teeshirt and beige cargo pants. - Pent and dissatisfied. It was a hard morning with Rowen. He began by forgetting a minus times a minus is a plus. He kept wandering away. I was irritated then and am irritated now, to be spending my time in servitude to his dunderheadedness. And then have spent the next four hours doing nothing, wanting to get away from myself. I'm getting uglier the longer I do this, eating too much, sulking and resenting. And now I have a bellyache from eating lychees. I want to put my head under a pillow. What is this? Have a bunch of [college] bits to do - don't want to do them - the mission statement - hiding from it - I feel this state can go on 'til I die, blank - heels dug in. I do not want to live this life - but what do I want - sex - deep sex - bottom-of-the-well center-of-the-earth sex - once a week without claims - nobody blowing up at me - no possession. Am I ever going to have that again - no it says - that's like being sentenced to endless misery and pointlessness - will I ever love my life again - yes - it says - will my days be full as they should be - YES - is there something I can do - no.
I was happy going to school - and making the garden - and now I don't know what to do - I'm lost - letting go of Tom has made it worse - I don't know what to do! I don't have Joyce any more - I make plans that are much too big - I don't believe them - I can't sustain them - they don't hold me - on a day like today it's like a disgusting fantasy - is there something else I could do?
29
30 It released - whatever it was - I started moving again - sent the statement to Keith - started writing the left-over student evals - cleaned Louie's house. What - anything? It's basking summer. That steeple is like a steeple on a church in an Indian village in the interior. Behind it the BC raincoast mountains very milky in this early morning with valley air pollution. It's 6:30. One crow grating blackly against an even flow of transparent traffic noise. On the tall rose bushes across the street a few large pink roses and many beige dried remnants. Oak leaves stirring, some in a bath of horizontal light. Oh Tom - all there's been - the mass of time was struggle and pain - and then those moments at long intervals, but many, taken together, when it buttoned through to joy and realness. I am missing intellectual challenge. I look at journals for the last stretch of the thesis and see how engaged I was - one of the weaknesses of m & l [mind and land] as a project is that it doesn't have that challenge. It doesn't have a community scraping away at a hard question. I solved all my Being about questions, is there more to do? I'm a philosopher, that's the art I've made myself for. It says the question now is personal and I should take it with as much energy as I gave philosophy of mind. The question is practical: recovering action.
1st August Worried about two things - one is that I am seeing/feeling very little these days, house, city, Rowen, Louie. The other is Rowen's gormlessness. He missed a work day because he slept through the alarm. He missed an appointment dog-sitting because he lost track of time. I'm thinking he may lose all his opportunities and be left with a scraped-together life. I'm worried I'll be bailing him out indefinitely as a cost of misconceiving him. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday - four days until I go to Vermont - have to try to settle Rowen into trig - finish letters for Jody, Joy - plan uncon workshops. Rowen's poor back and chest, dented, twisted, drooped. 2nd It's seven in the morning. There's Louie 'meditating' in the living room, wrapped in a white blanket. Why does the sight enrage me. There's her lump of hair. There's the fact that what she's doing is rigidly controlling herself so there will be more outbursts of self-pity down the road. There's the general piety of the posture - the fact that she's obedient to religious instruction by Hindus or anyone else. The bookshelf in this room is end-to-end religion. Geez Louie. Then there is the fact that she could fix Rowen's skeleton. She knows how. I have been cranky with Rowen these last days. Raging with frustration when he drifts off. Furious at having to deal with Louie about him, first her jealousy and then her exasperation at having him around. Still have Jody and Joy to write and not much done on the uncon - that's for today. - Why is this such intense stress - I've solved part of it - hugely stressed about Louie - she doesn't want to deal with Rowen while I'm gone, she doesn't want to deal with not wanting it. I suggest ways to keep him off her; she says no. Other stuff today - got Anne, Michael, Joy sent - letter to Dr Ramprasad for Kate - internet research on the uncon. I blasted Louie this morning, deflected it as much as I could by trying to seem mad at Rowen rather than her but really I was boiling with hatred for her. It is a kind of hatred I have for no one else. It feels like my blood pressure has shot up - huge pent pressure. I worried I'd have a heart attack. The states I get into with Tom don't have that quality. They are either fear and shock or else quite a clean sharp anger. I suspect with Louie that there's a loop through the uncon, I mean hers and mine both. I get into that state when she's angry and hiding it. She's trying not to be mean. At the same time she doesn't want Rowen to see anything impatient in her. She doesn't want to stop feeling he likes her more. Do I imagine that? No, it says. 3rd What else do I hate about Louie. I hate a lot of her clothes. She wears patterned things, shiny things. She has two thick-filled racks of that stuff. I hate a lot of her household appurtenances, spoon holder on the stove, marble mortar and pestle - two of them - tile with Einstein's head on it. Patterned cut-glass drinking glasses. The old grinder she has as sculpture. I hate the way she puts yogourt in salad so the colors are coated over, I hate the way she pours oil into food. I hate her liking for delicatessen stuff, the amount of it in the fridge. I hate her fridge magnets and pictures. I hate the purple cushion with a Chinese button on it. I keep turning it face down. I hate the gold- and silver-patterned cushions and shawl on the couch. I hate the spiky plant on the floor in the corridor, underfoot. I hate the way she puts her knives and forks into slots. I hate the way there's too much stuff in the kitchen cupboards, so it's a struggle to put anything away. I hate it, basically, that this is her place not mine. - There I thought of the moment when I was a child, when I found myself thinking dreamily that if my mother died the embroidered cloths in the drawer would be mine. Having said all these hates I feel pleased with myself. I feel happy, humorous. There on the window sill is a CD refracting brilliant streaks of orange, yellow, purple, turquoise. It is an object like nothing else in the room. And there's the ficus so dark green, long leaves the shape of bamboo. The cissus in its gracious layers and groping paws, radiantly alive. It's 7:30. There's still sun in the orange corner. Ms Louie is quietly clanking in the kitchen. I have my door shut. Plainfield VT 6th Yesterday flying between two layers of cloud. That was the best of the journey. Coming down into Burlington, the spaces of fiber, so much to see, the miles across, the spaces between shapes, the hard edges of cumulous alongside like buildings seen from a doubledecker bus, flowing past. In Vancouver, in the lineup at the American immigration office, a man in a striped teeshirt and a straw hat who said he was on his way to the Catholic University at Washington DC. A pale ascetic face. Said he was studying philosophy. He thought of what I do as determinism, eliminative materialism. He thought of philosophy as reason. Speaking to him was like dancing with a post. At the other end of the day riding from the airport in the front seat of a cab talking to the driver, who had an MBA and gave up running his mother's lobbying firm when his doctor said his blood pressure would kill him. He cured it with transcendental meditation and lives in a cabin on a lake. We drove quietly through the rain. I loved the journey. Sat in peace. Do not much like these people. Any so far. Loved hearing the rain from my clean bed. What is it about this woman - her voice is very tense - breathless - my sense of having to conceal with her - listen to this eagerness about Jewishness - I hate intensity about national and religious identity - let it go, folks - there's also her greed for attention - wanting to grab people - I want never to look at or hear her - this morning sitting next to her I felt I'd pass out - got up and walked around - as if she's a vampire - it seems brutal to refuse to look at her but I also am dug down - there's a reason for this repulsion, I feel - she's deeply formulaic and conventional in her thinking - listen to her preach - it is in defense of what needs to be lost - suffocating village culture - patriarchal - I still feel patriarchy in her - how - the lack of relaxation - is that it - the anxiety in speaking - such another era - she wrote her lecture on the noteboard and now is delivering it - her tone is the overemphasized tone of the teacher - I hate that tone - she's so pleased to be in everyone's attention - the pressure in her voice - is it anger - I suspect rage - I'm not the only gentile bored by her - it's so false a tone - "struggle and pain" - guilted into keeping the culture going because of the history as it is told. 8 I'm worried that breaking up with Tom is making me flat - last time I had surprising charisma - this time somehow not - it is partly that Katt is back and holding positions I then can't occupy. What else. Melba and her Jewish schtick being featured. Last time Margo invited me to talk about embodiment at the start. I've lost my tan. But more - the battle with Tom meant I was energized in the black half maybe and that's an edge among helper folk. My black half now is energized mainly in my hates. For instance for the body Barr-Cohen is - her bulk of belly, the way she is always putting something into her mouth, her bug eyes, the jerky way she crosses her legs, the way she dresses in bad prints and ugly trainers. It's morning at an open window. The light cast into the room is brownish - a strip of trees and understory shrubs - cedar and sumac - midsummer's even green. The air is fresh and damp. 9 Second day with students beginning. I won't be able to say anything interesting. There is too much plain accounting to do. I asked Cynthia what she would be ecstatic to do for the next four months and she said building a straw bale house. From one moment to the next she took form. So it felt. The moment with Astro was another kind. I could see him starting to gallop away with my job. He was probing and suggesting. As I was thinking this and he was doing it I involuntarily shot him a glance - I didn't know I was going to - and it felt like a shot, rapid and pointed. I saw it hit. He is forthright but not exactly what he seems, I think - he's a tight manly little body with fey gestures - fights to be seen as small men must - but there's a steady observing intelligence? I think. The speed with which he understood that glance - I think. Student introductions [of fac]. I asked Scott. He said, Hard sell? I said, No, precise sell, say what will bring the right kind of student. What he said was, Ellie's about risk. Vancouver 16 When I got home last night Rowen was here, talking on the phone. He came to the door and looked beautiful and glad. Beginning to write I am noticing something I don't remember feeling with the journal. It's a sensation of catching myself back, realizing I'm not focused. Then I go to wondering whether Barr-Cohen harmed me when she was telling the story of her father's death and quoted him saying Do you recognize me? staring into my eyes. I knew it was double speech. She was intending it toward me with great energy. I was thinking that I do recognize her but also that she wasn't meaning it the way I was taking it. I saw a lurking frog-demon extremely visible but seemingly invisible to the rest. She wants to gobble up the world. I guess this is where I have to begin the story of the res. My horror of her. There's also my horror of Melba but she's mostly just a smiling bulk to get past in the corridor. Barr-Cohen wants a kingdom. She's building it relentlessly. She has brilliant black eyes and a lump of a body, sits down in a chair and jerks one ankle up onto her knee, feet always in unconsidered running shoes. She's glossy and familial. Her voice has a squashed quality. She says "my b'dy," making something blank of the word. She was talking about Amy in her advising group, and said "I was keeping a tight rein on my motor mouth." Margo next to me on the couch said "Ellie thought you were talking about yourself." She'd felt me startle. When she said Do you recognize me? she meant, do you grant me the authority I want. She may imagine she can get me for her program when it splits off. She was lying to the group. She's lying to Margo when she says she doesn't intend to leave. She showed her hand in another conversation when she said of a student that she's waiting for the moment to get her back. "I won't hurt her but I'll ..." Did she think I'd be impressed by her paper on poetics? It was a heap of miscellaneous metaphor. "Poetry is where I feel ice in my spine." Margo is a little blind in her positive thinking? But oh Margo is clean and bright. Friday in her periwinkle pants. Peri-winkle. Didn't think of that but felt it. The sensation when I say something and I hear an echo. It's not an echo, it's as if a dark small bar - I see-feel the echo. What's that? is the feeling. We were on the couch drinking small amounts of wine after work. Margo said she must go home. I said, We don't want you to go home, we want you to stay here and live with us. I said it in sweet childish love. She did stay on for another hour. 17 Ways Margo promotes me. She had me tell about the semester magazine. She talked about my letter-heading that lists materials received. She told the story of the elegance of my letter for Logan. She said wwwk at the student/faculty reading was magnificent. She said elegant again in another context. When I was at the door on the way to the shuttle she stood beaming and said in her sweet way, Now I know one of the three, amused and forgiving me for disliking. - What did she say she was good at? After lunch when we were having our last-minute confab. "I do that really well." What else. Elizabeth in the background, her stork legs and point-cornered mouth, her look of a philosopher. Julianna the brown-eyed Colombian professor of English sitting on the floor gazing with devotion. Her short skirt, stocky legs, big rump and little tits, her lovely feeling thinking mouth. Lise at times a vision of a greyhound intellectual, thin-faced, grey-eyed, suffering and beautiful. I imagined a pencil skirt, white shirt with collar raised, high heels and a cigarette, at a table looking down at a page. A distinguished woman writer. She speaks out fearlessly but she also overpraises. I discount her praise because I hear her praising everyone for anything. Logan's note. When is that great big brain, body brain, hemorrhage heart, gonna let some of the big guys publish that massive collection of cerebral footprints. I'm serious Ellie. I mean, I've been reading you a lot lately and it always feels like it's just beginning. Its maddening. As a collection of film, science, land, poetry (I'm laughing as I make this list, because you have written the book of gravity!), for heaven's sake, its all encompassing. It's as if, literally, moving in all directions. But seriously, I wander that website of yours when I forget who I should be saying "then stay away" to, and then I remember. What the hell is this ABOUT that everyone is demanding? I don't have to write "about" to write about (everything is everywhere). The seventh question can at least be listened to. The answer is not in a foreign language. So frightened of it are so many. Yes. And the whole family went out and sat there, picnicked all evening. And everything was lovely again. There was English for everyone. So I was trying to say that In English is lovely and I could sleep in it. Pieces of eight, Note from Louie in the same batch:
My cranky taxi driver from the airport. He asked where I'd been and what I'd been doing. When I told him he said flatly and with animus that all of medical science is useless. It was as if he suddenly punched me in the solar. He was a tall thin curly haired brown man with an intense face, educated vocabulary, Canadian accent. I got into the seat behind him and he asked me to move to the other side. It was ten at night. As we drove I couldn't see his face in the mirror. My feelings were hurt. Later on I said that when people get into his cab he's the host and what he did was not hospitable. He said he understood that and wanted to make amends and just take me home. But by then we'd wrangled too much to mend the air. I said that he's dogmatic and if he were my student I would tell him he is missing opportunities to learn. In fact we were feeling each other out with quite a bit of interest. I said I thought maybe he just doesn't like women to be educated. He said maybe I'm racist. What was that really about. He said if we have a cut on our hand medical science doesn't heal it, it just heals by itself the way it does on an animal. I said if his hand is cut off, they can reattach it, and that's medical science. He said yes surgery is worth something, vascular surgery. He wanted me to know he knew the term. I said maybe he resents opportunities he didn't have, he has a chip on his shoulder. We drove in silence and then would start again. I asked whether he believes what he believes because he's religious. He said several times that it was common sense. - Maybe that's it for this res. The quarry at seven in the morning. Wide air bright with cricket chirr and scent of white clover. Mist gliding over the mirror face of the water. Small chicory. Queen Anne's lace. Mullein's velvet wands. Rough brown cobbles. Goldenrod. Devora in her brilliant shirts, a serious head pointed top and bottom. Orange linen, red linen. From Burlington not much to see, mist spread over the countryside, but once I looked up and gasped. There next to the window was a blindingly brilliant and perfectly definite cumulous tower resplendent in tints and curves. Was I too egotistic in advising group and workshops? The moment in the embodiment panel when Mercy brought up the question of death. She said "If body is all there is, what happens after death? I believe we will still go on." I said I thought that when we die we're gone. And then Karen Campbell abruptly went back to an earlier topic, something about what is a practice. Later even Lise said she thinks something survives. - Is that an indicator of the mediocrity of my institution?
18 Luke isn't beautiful just now. He's a beefy giant with too much tallow in his face. He looked at me with an embarrassed smile. He is angry with me. When he hugs me he bends far down. He holds me quietly in that awkward position. Warm. He is dreaming of money. He speaks the language of 'the consumer,' 'content,' 'values.' He buys books about marketing. There is still a tenderness in him. He's dreaming of 100 million. He has a plan. He's angry that I was only ever as available as was needed, he said. I said I knew that if he was in therapy he would find that he's mad at me. - I don't like anyone's company on and on, including my children's.
20 David missed the lane change at Venables, drove on to Hastings and turned up Campbell. At E.Georgia I said would he drop me on the corner and I'd walk up Union to buy a paper. He said he could drive by the store. Naw, I said. Was walking west looking at the sidewalk. A man on a bike, wearing a helmet, seemed to be circling around into the parking space next to me. Oh. It's you. Ken Sallit. Grey under the back of his helmet, grey on his chest. He's not heavier. It's eight years. More, nine. Sharp snout. He still doesn't ask questions. Watching Shania on TV. Her audience singing - they're all singing. She is wearing a tight yellow spandex bike shirt that shows a bit of belly, yellow boots, black satin cargo pants. She strides. Her motion is wonderful. She came back after the intermission in spangles and is singing From this moment. Couples in the audience slow dancing. Her songs say, It happened, it's forever. She's tiny. She looks tall. Running into Ken made me miss Tom. When Ken said goodbye he grabbed a kiss. It was that, a grab, a pushy lip. I had been stroking my hair, oh yes, for what it's worth. Afternoon with David at Iona Beach. David looked shabby, disordered. He's living with his mum. Little girls know all the words. - It was a goddess show, vast audiences, fireworks, cliff of stage lights, her face on two huge monitors. Her devices were transparent - she praised their city, had a fan proposing to a woman on stage, brought little girls up to sing a chorus, hugged guys with SHA and NIA on their bare chests. Went into the audience and sang holding a woman's hand. "I'm very at home onstage." It's not her speech but it's her motion - her musical line and her stride, the flow of her hair. Little girls are right to want her freedom of motion. The story she gives them is a story of love woman free, acute, playful and absolutely sure of her love. A man in Nashville, a producer, heard that quality in her and married her. 21 Zoe the little scholar. I was afraid of the evening with her. I was worried we'd be stiff. I was nervous about the food, would it be clean enough. I wanted Louie to be there to be the middle-class medium and loosen us up. We were stiff. We drank two glasses of wine and were drunk so that we babbled away, but under the blur we were still not feeling real. I told her how I fell for her mother. "She was fierce then." Zoe's cut off from early love and wears stiff flat clothes like shields. It was a warm evening and she had on courtier shoes and black knee socks. She read a book that said lie low until you get tenure and then do what you want.
This visit has been terrible. Lonely depression in this house, misery. I put something in my mouth. Do it again. I'm boxed into it. I lie down every afternoon without hope and fade out of life. Nobody can help. I don't hope for anything from anyone. This is the depression romantic hope and fear concealed in all these years. Does that mean I'm in better shape though I seem worse? Yes it says. Am I going to go on in this depression 'til I die? No. Am I supposed to just steep in it? Yes. Just steep in it. YES. 22 I'd like sex with somebody who isn't selfish and clumsy - somebody with a strong warm field. I'd like free sex not sex bound into caretaking. Adventurous sex. Somebody young enough to get really hard. Every two weeks. What else would I like - to be sort of sporty - physical - with energy. And? Do I want a place? Not yet. A connection to place - up there - yes - up, up there. Mesa Grande. So a car and camping stuff. I want to have core security so I can be camping alone and happy. Freeway car. Camera. And? Book. Books. Being about and in english. And writing to publish articles. Could I publish photos. 23 I was at the pho restaurant with Luke and Rowen seeing myself in the wall mirror behind them an old woman - it's painful - I'm confused - have I been looking like that and not knowing it? If I look like that I don't want to go anywhere - I haven't the courage to make moves - I'm struck and withered. 25 Rowen's exam today. It's eight in the morning. I'm not drinking tea. Can I still write. There's Louie's alarm. We lay on Iona Beach yesterday afternoon. The tide slunk in over hundreds of yards of mud. Pleasant smell of seaweed. We giggled at a man sitting too near us because there was an Asian woman he wanted to pick up. She was sitting on a log reading a letter. She wore a brown sleeveless shirt the color of her skin. When we came onto the parking lot we could see Mount Baker. From last week - David's dashboard - its collection of little things - a wafer of driftwood showing rings like salmon flesh - a black pebble veined with white - seedhead fluffs - over the whole heap a dried sprig of weed. We ate at a buffet in Indiatown. He told me about the time just after his sister died. She had been twenty. He was thirty-two. He went to India because he needed to change his life. He was in Delhi without money, waiting for a ticket, and thought he could live cheaper out of town. He looked at the map and chose a route through the mountains. On the train he met mountaineers who told him he would need boots for that road. He had birkenstocks. He tried to buy boots in the town before the pass. There were none in his size. He took the pass with the men he had met. His shoes slipped on ice. One of the men unbound his turban and used it as a rope to pull him along. He tells his stories so flatly I don't realize them as he is telling them. - Macdonald's at 41st and Fraser. Rowen is in a high school cafeteria writing his exam. On the opposite corner the MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] thrift store where old men and women speak with my grandparents' accents. Two Sikh men in turbans. An old man in a hat, whiskered, whistling, who looks like Michael in old age. Slovaks, maybe, next to me. Maple trees. Overhead wires. The Sun's front page a story about the Kelowna fire. Rowen is leaving. He has beautiful shoes, blue suede Converse with white stars, the best shoes he's had, he says. A new Coast Mountain backpack. Black jeans. He's lanky and soft, brown-skinned. He has a soft sweet mouth and high cheekbones. He's pretty, I can see Uncle Willy's hollow-cheeked Epp face ahead for him. He was oddly excited last night telling the plot of a game he, Jim and Jason had invented. - Now it's the new time, what do I want - tone up first. Tone up first - work for energy and shine - new car. Freeway car, camping car. 26
|
