26th December 2003
I've just erased almost a page.
Start again. Boxing Day evening, somewhere say three-quarters through
a life. Most of the day transcribing the last of the complicated bookwork
in that notebook. It was teaching me most of what I'd need to know but couldn't
remember in the next how-many years - five or six.
Editing. Alright, editing. Some of it I know to keep or leave and some
I ask about. If it sez cut I do. What am I editing for - days, weather,
dear ordinary time.
Yes but in the emotional work, am I telling a story and to whom? My guess
is that I am showing myself finding the principles. I don't know how many
times to show that. It's very redundant. Is the dialogue interesting in
itself? There's conscious Ellie as straight person and the - not the,
but some - nonconscious, the teacher, getting most of the interesting
lines. Is the dialogue supposed to be interleaved the way it came? Could
anyone read so much of it? I can't imagine the bulk there is, publishable.
Louie's my only thought for where I could test it.
As it is the Tom story is turning out to be the Sufi ordeal, which is
interesting only as it gives the occasion for restructuring. I can actually
feel something having shifted there - can I - I am not identified with hope
and fear - though I can be taken with the pleasure of the fun. I don't know
whether that has to go. - See I don't even try to answer a question like
that any more. I mean I refer it. Ego knows more about its limits.
-
Hélène Grimaud, b.1969. Her commercial photographer boyfriend
took this photo of her as glorious intelligent love woman. She has silver eyes
with thin black lines around them, very white sclera. She had a CD at 16.
She keeps wolves. "Je m'etais ensauvagée."
It is a glamour shot but there is so much in the eyes. Her beauty looks
to me like an exceptional nervous system.
"You need to be able to play the piano in
your head." "Pendent des années, elle n'a pas possédé
de piano." "Je travaillais par la pensée, par association
d'images, par projections mentales, visions d'architecture, de couleurs.
Je laissais infuser."
"Je voudrais aider les enfants à reconnaitre
cet espace, leur espace, celui que les loups m'ont permis de retrouver,
cette part de soi-même qui possède l'univers, et, avec lui,
le temps par la clé de la musique. L'espace de la santé essentielle."
Le monde Oct 31, 2003
"I made choices based on the idea of being
surrounded by intelligent people."
"Ultimately, we are responsible for who we
choose to become, and it takes a long time to become the person you want
to be."
27
I have wondered sometimes whether time can be borrowed ahead, for instance
whether the time I am spending now, reading earlier years, is time that
I was using up then to support or intensify what needed supporting or intensifying,
for instance balancing with Tom and working out the parts of Being about.
- Else why would I have such vacant times between?
28
What I'm transcribing now making me happy. It's the story of writing
the brain and sound paper. Here's a question. When I'm dealing
with Tom I'm freaked by crashing, when I'm writing papers I crash and am
not freaked by crashing.
The way I've carefully kept amateur status in all my fields - gardening,
philosophy, writing, film, photography. Teaching, too, really. The thought
of being pinned into any of those lives is very unpleasant. The journal,
though, is the underlying work that holds them all. Personal journalism.
Dorothy Richardson. What can I do, what do I do, that takes her forward?
I have a more mobile life. I have more linguistic flex. I don't know yet
whether there's a readable form closer to the raw. That's what I'd like,
to have it the journal but readable in the way I read Richardson.
Sunday. I'm at Diedrich's at a metal table, which is cold though my feet
in the sun are warm. Clear sky. Home? Okay. Flowers and oranges in the car.
29
It's cold.
30
Is it true that doing is protected in me. Yes, reserved. That means it's
intact? Yes.
The real is marked by action.
Something in the light. Yesterday and today have felt wintry like winters
somewhere else. It's the early dark, a half hour in the late afternoon.
It reminds me of places with snow.
I keep not finishing the evaluations. I can't face them. I'm working
through 1996 instead. It has what I need - aliveness - though it's wrong
maybe to get it that way.
What just happened. I thought of how much would have to be different
for me to have what I had then - house, alley, neighbourhood, garden, school,
Louie, my own country, my own city, Joyce. I was established. It took how
many years to get that way, more than I have left-
Here, I think - something to be invented. Something I don't know yet.
Is that right? This is a staging post. It's true that it's nowhere and I
don't want to make it somewhere, and it's true that I'm free.
31st
This journal is so good: Sept-Oct 1996. [GW 8]
Last night a story on NPR. A black girl in the foster system is found
by a white woman who likes her spirit, takes her to the ballet, dinner,
more. Wants to be her foster parent. The system says no, black kids should
be in black homes. It says the connection is harming the girl. The girl
vanishes, doesn't answer letters. It turns out she didn't get them. Now
she's 40, living in San Francisco, has written a book. She looks for the
woman and cannot find her, but meanwhile the woman's friend says to her,
Regina has written a book and she has a website. The woman goes online and
finds an email address. The subject line on the email she sends says Sweetheart,
I'm so proud of you. Regina phones. Sweetheart, is that you?
Regina is telling the story at that point, and she says this line in
a half-whisper. From that point the sound editor intercuts the two voices.
The older woman, who must be fifty-five, has a young light voice with the
sorts of shadings I used to hear in mine. I never hear that sort of voice
on radio, a private voice not a professional voice. Feeling intelligence,
a voice that feels its way, that is used to touch.
The story makes me cry because it's a story in which the mother says
I never stopped loving you. She has tears in her voice when she says
she wanted Regina to grow up well and happy, and she'd stayed away from
her for that reason.
1st January 2004
Something's wrong.
It says I am not cut off but it seems to me that I am, and have been
maybe ever since I originally left Tom in June of 2002. Maybe earlier than
that. I've been lost. I override myself by tiny motions all day long. I'm
not chasing new men, that one's cured, but I am somehow making myself starve.
I'm not making sense of the book. It doesn't seem to take me to being able
to feel. Talking to Louie seems to me to be corrupt, like having the radio
on. It takes off the edge. Alright, the edge. It's that it doesn't shift,
it's just on and on feeling blank and alone. There are so many hours for
it.
What it said is this:
- Feeling is learning to fight for early love
- Judgment, brilliance and courage have come through in relation to the
mother
- You have fought for liberation by processing and coming through
- You are not withdrawn, and growing slowly in relation to loss and heartbreak
- Next year: you will fight to process losing Tom. You will improve balance
of husband and womanliness
- You won't withdraw from losses and will learn not to evade
- Your intelligence will struggle to give its work
- What's wrong is your not missing Tom
- Go on without him but don't cut your losses
- It will be better if your feeling for him persists
I think that with Tom I took the road of discouragement and let myself
shut down inch by inch. I've been proud of being less interested in the
Tom story as I transcribe it, but I should be looking for losses. It's not
the loss of Tom, it's the loss of hope and therefore fight.
And that's already a kind of denial, though it's true - isn't it? It's
not early love, it's second-guessed, corrected love.
When I keep plugging in the modem and trying Mail, who am I waiting
to hear from? Who would satisfy me? Not 'Tom' - ie not the blank and gone
Tom, not the zonked and oblivious Tom, but the come-through, present, connected
Tom - oh yes - oh yes. That's home. That's satisfaction. But in fact I can
hardly remember it.
2
I wonder how much of this discouragement is political, or at least to
do with what I meet where I am. On talk radio a soldier, a captain back
from Iraq, being interviewed about taking Hussein's palace, describes with
such jingoist prurience the backwardness he found, black and white TVs without
remotes, an old microwave, sheets cotton not satin, only uniforms in the
closets. This captain so ignorant, so blustering. They took the palace in
five minutes, he said, because the best Iraqi troops had no technology and
hid behind mattresses. "Our machine guns cut through the mattresses
and we got them."
The fact that this country is headed by a man so ignorant, so stupid,
so unconscious, so unbearably corrupt, and that he is popular. The sound
of his voice saying 'democracy' and 'freedom' while ten thousand Iraqis
are dead, country and cities shot to pieces, a hundred thousand maimed,
a culture trashed. American young men killed or maimed, and all irremediably
brutalized, so they will be the next wave of men killing themselves, and
if not themselves, their wives. And such denial built into daily discourse.
Once the invader departs, there will no doubt
be a civil war, which will accelerate the dismemberment of the nation, giving
rise to a fundamentalist regime, which will make at least some people miss
the era of Saddaam.
As the death toll mounts by the hundreds, the
'bring the boys home' movement will spread like an oil slick across the
United States, and a new, Democratic administration will make the prudent
decision to stop the hemorrhaging when the vital interests of the United
States are not at stake.
It was lured down this rabbit hole by three
magic words, fallacies disguised as self-evident truths: terrorism democracy
weapons of mass destruction
This deliberate blindness, which transforms
the occupied into a video-game target
[from a piece in Harpers December 2003 or January 2004]
3
I'm trying to think about what's wrong with me - it's complicated. The
I that is writing can list central things I've lost, am living without
- at the same time, when I speak them, I hear a buoyant voice saying no,
you haven't lost any of those. At the same time the book says I have not,
but that there are real losses with Tom that I don't feel.
- 1) There are real losses.
- 2) It's my mother's voice of denial I hear.
- 3) I don't allow myself to feel my losses, I say that whatever I've
lost wasn't worth anything. That's invisible habit.
- 4) The book agrees I do that.
- 5) And yet it says I haven't lost what the writing I feels I
have.
- 6) Old structure of believing I'm less than I was
4
What did I do today - it's Sunday - cold - I sat down first thing to
evaluations and mailed the ones I've done. That was all morning. Then the
farmer's market, but without enough money. Oranges, iris, chicken, the LA
Times. When I got back there were semester magazine edits. Then it was
fading afternoon. Balboa Park on the bike. Cold. I like the edge next to
6th, where I can see the little blue mountains across the east. Lysiloma
microphylla, dombeya spectabilis, dombeya rotundifolia.
Sunday crowds in the park. Why do I hate those people. It scares me to
say so. I see a little family coming toward me on the path and feel grim
hate. If they looked a certain way I wouldn't hate them, but mostly, overwhelmingly,
they don't. But why am I taking it personally. It's elderly of me. It's
sad to be like that rather than eager and interested and taking pleasure.
But maybe there are too many.
There was a young man without arms sitting on a folding chair with a
guitar on the ground in front of him. He was playing it with his bare feet
and singing. A crowd had gathered in front of him, families, children.
My heater broke and with this one I am mostly cold. The fan is louder.
After fiddling with the magazine file I went where I wanted to go, transcribing
the easier parts of Oct 1996 - March 1997. I love reading about the house
and neighbourhood and weather, my life in my house. It means more to me
now than the work. As if I'm homesick without knowing it? Sensory openness,
realness. I was love at home in a way I can't be here. Heartsore to say
so. It's not a good space. I'll never have that good a space again. And
yet it was being spoiled even then - what happened to Koo's, and the garage
in the garden next door. That's how the thought unfolds.
5th
Waking at night, lying awake, I'm plain and morose. If I touch my clit
a little I slip into seeing, but then if I notice I'm seeing things I wake.
The hypnagogic edge. It's very narrow in me. I'd love to be looser that
way sometimes.
Oh what will I do with this unrelenting bareness.
6
Before I woke this morning I made a speech about
my gait. Someone, as we were walking together in a group, said to someone
else that I should be told to change my gait. When we arrived at the auditorium
and were sitting, still in the group, in the ends of the first two rows,
I squatted in front of them and delivered a clear and indignant speech saying
that if they want to talk about my gait they need to know what they're talking
about. When I began only the front row was listening. When I finished, the
front three. What it was about this dream was the energy and clarity.
It was only the occasion that was being dreamed; making the speech was awake.
But writing this I'm having a sensation I've had lately, writing here,
a sensation of something missing, some attention in the writing, as if I'm
writing blind. This isn't easy to say. Writing badly, yes, but in a certain
way. A kind of tunnel vision - for instance in the way at the top of this
paragraph I first wrote some version of 'talk' three times in the same sentence
without noticing. I don't have what I've written clear as I write. That's
some kind of neurological failure. When I was younger I would never have
done that. When I was younger I also had verbatim memory for speech.
Yesterday evening I read a novel called The wife in which a Jewish
novelist gets prizes, expands his career. His wife was his student, etc.
The wife was the talented writer but "ashamed of wanting things."
I go from that to Annie Dunne and there am standing on a yard
in Wicklow:
"I love my land." She is standing
on the yard alone at night, an old woman.
It comes upon me like a second breeze, that
strange and useless love. It is the place of Kelsha that o'erwhelms me,
the arrangement of its woods, the offices of the yard, the animals in our
care, the perfection and cleanliness of the very stones, all down to us.
The midden stands in its patch of dock leaves
like an Egyptian pyramid. There is our quiet place behind the walls of the
long outhouse where Sarah and myself make our toilet, wiping our rear ends
with the grasses there perpetually damp ...
Under the starlight I stand, ruminating, a creature
myself, an extra thing in the plenitude of the world. I know I am nothing
... More rooted and lasting will be my crab-apple tree - someday, no doubt,
another heart will give allegiance to it and its bitter fruit, gathering
the tiny apples and crushing them in their season with the same passion
and humour, laughing at the generosity of the tree, its ease and seeming
happiness, its fertility, as I do. It is a mother of a thousand children,
every year, like the offspring of the queen bee. The whole tree buzzes silently
in the autumn with its excited fruit.
Now in the dark shales of the night it stands
with its generous, bitter arms.
This is the happiness allowed to me. 42-3
Although it will be winter soon, the wind of
friendship will blow eternally from the south. And even after we have gone,
something of that friendship will surely linger hereabouts. We will survive
in the creak of the broken gate, the whistle of a bird, the perpetual folding
and unfolding of the blossum of my crab-apple tree, a thousand little scraps
of crinoline fiercely crushed and fiercely released. 227-8
Sebastian Barry 2002 Annie Dunne Viking
I feel such true and almost unbearable suspense in this story about two
sixty year old women and two visiting children and a small farmyard. I want
to read sentence by sentence and when there is plot I have to skip ahead
to know.
Daylight opens the farm wide, the fearful shadows
flee from the damp trees, the pony wakes in his standing, the calves clamber
up in the calf byre. I stand in the yard at the rain barrel, holding the
enamel jug ... Even the cobbles lose their toes of shadows, and the water
at the top of the barrel lies in a loose mirror.
I lift my face to the light and am amazed again
at what great pleasures there are to be had on this earth. 14
What I transcribed this afternoon was the train trip back to San Diego
just before Christmas in 1996. I had just written Brain
and metaphor, which was also the piece for Nicole. I was pressing
amazingly with those papers - first the auditory nets paper, then the metaphor
paper. I was at a strong pitch. (Would I want to go as hard as that again,
that desperate? Yes.)
I like the writing. One of the things I like is that I hardly ever know
what I'm going to say. Another is that I like the stories told in a paragraph
or a few - the girl who shot her stepfather. I like the unpremeditated movement
of a person thinking rather than presenting to a reader. I like the valiant
honesty. I don't mind the egotism though I notice someone else might. I
like the value given mortal moments. I'm generous when I'm interested. I
like the way philosophic synthesis is there in paragraphs among paragraphs
about winter rain and a chance meeting on Commercial St and a stranger's
elegant generosity in propping my bike at the tea merchant's. I like the
simplicity in sex and grief. There's great naturalness. But what?
Post it on the web, with pictures and bookwork separate. Yes, and then
what? I'm discouraged before I even ask. No work I do in these ways will
get me what I'm starved for, access, ease, a true love.
A true love - what's that? Why aren't the people who love me true loves?
Because I have to hold back with them, always, always. They couldn't bear
me, none of them. I want my work to find me someone stronger, someone so
strong I can be true and love and hate and fear and all. That's what I've
lost. That's why in all his badness Tom satisfied me. "All that passion,
so carefully controlled," Joyce said. I'm sobbing.
Well Tom couldn't stand me either but he could stand things no one else
could stand. He could stand my fury, he could stand my sexual kinkiness,
he could stand my hatred, he could stand my plain-spokenness though sometimes
he stood it by not hearing it.
And secondly, access, being part of the world. And thirdly, money enough
for movement and roots into old age, if there will be that.
None of my work has got me those, none of it will ever get me those.
Sucking-up could get me the second two, though not the first. But I can't
do that.
8th
Thursday. Rowen isn't at school yet because there's weather. Snow. Did
she say a foot of snow?
Cory yesterday came upstairs with a pile of Christmas presents - a bike
carrier [basket], a dark green fleece blanket, six oranges from their tree,
suede work gloves, a hummingbird feeder, a succulent in a red glazed pot,
a $20 gift certificate from Mission Hills, a card with a thank you note
from each of them. They thanked me for a love I showed them they could have.
That was worth something. (I got a Trichocereus pachanoii with
the $20.) Shannon said I showed her there was beauty that isn't 'sculpted.'
She means natural beauty, beauty people don't make.
-
Can you tell me why he went away, I said. He missed his unconscious despair,
he missed himself, it said. Be responsible in seeing that you are seeing
from the point of view of the excluded child. Okay, I said.
9
A shock last night getting an email from Lise about the embodiment website.
I went straight into despair, wanted to leave [the college], etc. And then
figured it out and figured out how to say it. What she understands by embodiment
is something like feeling and sensing, something she teaches her students.
She took offence at the words 'cognitive science' and 'evolution.' That's
where I despaired. She wants nothing to do with physical science. I solved
it by saying why doesn't she write up the section for embodied writing.
I said also that it's going to mean something different to everyone, and
will have to be an umbrella.
After reading Wonder book of the air last night I had two nightmares.
In the first Tom said yes, he's homosexual. In the
second he looked at me with Roy's face and said he'd been having an affair
with Eric. Eric had said to him, Don't you want the annulus? Meaning the
ring of marriage. It was Roy's face from the time when he had long curly
hair and would face me smiling after telling me he'd slept with somebody.
These were nightmares in that I woke with my solar a block of fear.
Having an affair with Eric is having an affair with drug madness, now
that I think of it.
I don't know what to say about Cynthia Shearer. This time I was more
taken by the young people in the last third of the book. Field's rage at
Pig Nation, Field and Madeira. "He was so comme il faut." She
doesn't smooth the contradictions. Her people live them out the way I lived
them out with Tom. She is clear in the territory where I was unclear and
struggling to be clear with Tom. Particularly she shows the power women
give men, and how and why they do it. How the women live those contradictions.
Crying all the way through. Oh Tom.
That moment I turn the radio on, Gotta find a way back home.
Cynthia Shearer 1996 The wonder book of the air
Pantheon
11
I woke my starlings with music. One of the speakers is on the heater,
and after I put on Space hotel I heard little chirrups from inside
it.
Lord of the rings last night [Return of the king]. Battle scenes
endless. I got interested really only when two faces were on screen, Aragorn
and Gandalf. Ian McKellen's wise sweet pale face. Aragorn hadn't the heft
to be king, but so beautiful a man. I also liked seeing any elves, my tribe,
except that luminous brimming-with-nothing Arwen.
The odd class difference between Frodo and Sam - Frodo the hero when
Sam was the one who saw it through, and then what was that, Frodo going
off to glory while Sam stays and has kids. The homosexuality of the whole
thing, there are no women in it - luminous gods, a smiling wife, one warrior
girl they interpolated since Tolkien had no such thing - but Frodo cast
to look like a girl and to play the girl against Sam's stalwartness.
Altogether the men at the center were quite soft, the hobbits very free
in feeling, Gandalf too.
What about the mythology. I don't think it was coherent. The ring is
lust for power. Frodo can carry it because he is so femme. It is thrown
in the fire and all the bad things go away. The difficulty of defeating
lust for power without being taken by it. Is that worth the fuss? You carry
it in conflict until you can put it down. Gandhi did it better. Enlisting
the dead - their books, I'd think. Bush is an orc. Is the religious right
lust for power? Gandalf telling Merry there's an other side [after death]
- that was terrible.
Enough.
What else yesterday. In the morning I was transcribing March 1997 [GW9] and came to a section about an Orpheus and the brain video,
something I could do at the Neurosciences Institute. I felt, That's it,
and at the same time I felt a swimmingness and stress like heart failure.
I got up and went to buy water, interrupted it.
In the afternoon when the sun was on the couch I lay down under the new
green blanket and sank, though not all the way to sleep. In the sinking,
what I was feeling was that I should be looking for my best state, the state
of centered interest in being, released interest, freedom, rather than thinking
about Tom. A way to be that with anyone, anywhere.
When I came back from the movie what I talked to the book about was why
I go on being in conflict about Tom. What we said, what we came to, was
the obvious - I am not in conflict about Tom. Tom is unstable. There was
someone he can be, who is my true mate, my true love, the man of my life.
Most of the time he is not that one, he is a brutal punisher or a vacant
fool, a sleazy fool. I want to be with the one, I fought to be with him,
I taught, I worked. I do not want to be with the others. That isn't a conflict.
In the journal I made a careful record of my time with the Tom I wanted
to be with. I wrote our talk, our touch, his look. I summarized my times
with the vile Toms. Is it worth being with the vile Toms to get time with
the true Tom? I felt it was, I hung on. I needed a true mate. I still do.
There are limits, though, of safety and well-being. And he had bludgeoned
the true Tom to death with drugs. It's tragic but should I be feeling it
as tragic? No, it says. Move on. Your quest isn't finished.
So here I am, Sunday morning. Do laundry, go to the farmer's market.
12
I don't ignore what I've seen in the left side of his face. There's
pleasure in bending a will. Someone who's very sure he'll only ever be alone.
An unmet power. What do I know about that man? He's the strongest self-assertion
I have ever been eye-to-eye with, vividly unchristian. So why aren't I afraid
of that one in him? Because of what I find in me to see him with, pure curiosity.
Look at that, it says. Very interested.
Here is the thing I don't understand - that visible raptor
doesn't scare me, it pleases me, but something else scares me. I want to
say that power's defeat, when it happens. Is that right? It says yes. What
is it that defeats it? A misunderstanding of losses. Yes.
I've copied that from 1997 because it shows the best of me with him.
I had something to see and was seeing it. It shows the nature of my own
raptor.
Today - I forced myself to write two more evaluations. Two left.
14
The rapture of my raptor.
Wednesday morning.
What are those little birds, pink heads and breasts, twittery. House
finch. And there's a hawk.
15
I'm going to write a beautiful convocation speech.
Louie was offended at my letter in which I said what I am about popularity
in a straight-out off-hand way. When she spoke to me last she had a particular
sound I think of as social. She was talking about her party and she sounded
stupider than usual. I mean the sound of her voice. I thought it was the
sound of dealing with people as she does. 70 people she said. I said I don't
think normal people are smart enough to like one for the right reasons so
when anyone is popular with normal people it must be by sleazy means, by
flattery. That's what I do think, and I certainly think it in relation to
Louie, the way she talks on the phone. "Have a nice weekend,"
that sort of thing. If she brown-noses she ought to be willing to know it.
I flatter students, in the sense of being more interested in them than
I am. It's professionalism, but it's brown-nosing all the same. I'm popular
with students by a combination of falsity and exceptional truth. I try to
minimize the falsity but I need it to get to be in a position where I can
be true and demonstrate truth. But I think Louie is still in the grip of
her social training in many of the horrid niceties. It keeps her smaller
than she could be. It is a lack of courage. She has to be popular.
This is one of our ongoing fights.
Down a level - how is it going with Louie - not well. She faithfully
stays in touch and is close to being all I've got but our conversations
are quite flat. Coasting. She's working. She sometimes needs me to contain
her and I sometimes do, but she misses her chances to contain me and so
I don't feel her with that primal trust. I can trust her with lots but I
can't trust her to be able to jump into the grown-up's position when I need
to open up. I'm very hedged in by her touchiness. Like now. I had a moment
of candor and she took offence. I miss Tom's size and have nowhere to be
passionate.
Riders of the purple sage. I was twelve probably, or 10 [actually
fourteen]. We were stopping at Kamloops at Uncle George's. Picked up the
book and hadn't finished it when we were going to leave. You can have that,
he said. [No, she said - Aunt Hilda.]
It's a good title. I'd forgotten that it starts with a woman who's rich
and strong and under attack by a religious patriarchy. He is very outright
in his politics - though he casts the oligarchs as Mormons rather than whatever
he himself is - so it was a book I could use to shore my own perception.
The women's liberation is sexual as well - they get faithful sexy men -
and it is on the side of natural beauty always. Hard skilled loyal passionate
life in beautiful surroundings.
You meet now the cold steel of a will as far
from Christlike as the universe is wide. You're to be broken. Your body's
to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into
the world. But your soul? What do they care for your soul?
I am noticing though that there's a strange lack of physicality, no peeing
or shitting or menstruation, or work details, or fatigue. The calves don't
bawl when they're taken out of the herd. There's trauma without the effects
of trauma.
Zane Grey 1912 Riders of the purple sage Grosset
and Dunlap
Jody writing to say he wants to come check out UCSD. He says he's found
nothing that gets ahead of Being about. Is he my bellwether? If he's
here I'd have a pal.
16
Am I wrong to dislike the yoga atmosphere Louie prospers in? It feels
to me like a thick safe piety. Prospering in it, she's too close to her
dad's life as a pastor. It comes naturally. What I heard in her tone was
the stupidity of someone who's been faking all day. I didn't say that. She
recovers. I like the fact that she's skilled and prospering but I don't
like the atmosphere she's doing it in - though I do like the way yoga can
unlock bodies - though I think maybe it's not a method through which they
stay unlocked. I think it's probably better to do it by feeling pain in
the right way.
What I noticed yesterday transcribing 1997 was the way I was still going
into complicated bitter gainsayings when I was disappointed by Tom. Those
are the parts I leave out of the transcription because they are junk. I
heap insult on him as a way to make sure I am recovered from being taken.
I haven't done that for a while.
17th
Denny's on Pacific Highway, busy, Saturday morning. Lots of black people.
I walked out to Pacific Avenue and there were clots of people, and more
further up. Martin Luther King Day parade staging.
18
Lying awake looking up at the bars on my window. My jail house. I feel
I've somehow deeply lost hope - more deeply than I thought I ever could.
Could losing Tom do that to me? I'm not reading, I'm not thinking, I'm not
feeling, I'm not seeing. I had so strong an intent to know. This isn't even
depression, it's just stasis. Could losing my place do this? Could depending
on the book do it? Could being in the US do it?
Consider if my personal drives are gone forever. Then I'd have to rebuild
doing deliberately, just act without desire, out of understanding of what's
needed.
Or else: it's living without sex that always does this to me. If I have
sex I live in conflict but I have energy. The conflict takes most of the
energy it generates. I've done that. Try the first one though it feels like
death.
-
Then I transcribe Ovid notes and find energy. When I have money I can
do that project. The canyon garden though not with students. That's two.
And then if I feel I'm into creation somewhere and can't be trapped, publish
Being about and in english.
I'm further into Nora's garden, that's going to start.
19th
Louie is not speaking to me. I sent her the journal piece where I wrote
about her last party. There were a lot of good things but I insulted her
humor and she will hold it against me. I threw away two of her emails before
I sent this, because I could tell from the first lines that she was going
to be righteous. I feel reckless. Yes she's my only connection left, more
or less, and yes certainly I will risk it.
I'm into the next volume, from October 1998. [GW15]
part 3
- in america volume 4: 2003-04 december- april
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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