| in america 5 part 2 - 2004 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
25th May Wiped out today - was it pressing through Rhonda 'til late last night, or not sleeping well - or salty chicken sausage - Yesterday a Visa bill showing $2000 in charges that aren't mine. - Tuesday night. I burned through Rhonda yesterday and Kate today. Now it's 8 and I can't transcribe more and there's nothing to do. Bites again after three days without. I've had a fit of missing and wanting Tom and feeling we should go on. Then today I transcribed the worst of May-June 2002 when he was unbearable and I didn't know he'd gone back to drugs and I gave up in disgust. So for now I'm cured of missing him but did I like myself better when I missed him? No, that's not the way to say it. I still miss the him I missed, I just don't feel hope. Of course I like hope better. And then there's no more to say about that, or anything else. Empty, lonely, heartsore in that flapping-unattached way. Days working for these young women, days given to editing what doesn't matter - I quailed, saying that. Yes I'm grieved at the work too. This isn't a good semester. Carolyn, yes, I've stood behind Carolyn's best. -
26 Bush's ratings have been dropping so now they are raising threats of attack this summer. What happened last night - when I came to the end of working I talked to the book in the feeling of emptiness and loneliness. It said something that I didn't understand and when I asked it to lead me it took me to listing what I miss in intimacy and that took me to a sore heart. I sat feeling into it and it rapidly shifted to forehead and especially a stuck point just inside the bridge of the nose over the right eye. That was muscle rather than central pain, and I was basically clear. Somebody on the web saying that what happens to us before we're five builds itself into us as muscle memory / emotion complexes, and what happens later is remembered (I'm paraphrasing to my own taste) more linguistically. A couple of things about that - he may without knowing it have been talking about what Gilligan says happens to boys at five, the cutting-off. His drift was that the muscle-memory complexes can be undone by feeling them consciously. I agree that there are wordless locked states - I know the wordlessness. So, about birth [workshop prep] - let's do that today, real work. But Corin first. Oh Corin. Corin came through. [sleep.less] hypermedia fiction. Corin made herself an artist. She told it true, mother and alcohol, father and leaving, lover gone, lonely touch, wan morning light. She could do it because she trusted me. 28 Goldberg says she and I should talk to the rest of the fac about working with poems, students complain that people don't. I was in the grip of the question trying to fall asleep and woke from it too, and have to process it to be rid of it. First, I'm ferocious about poems. I'm extremely fierce. I hate almost every published poem I see. Student's poems come in two kinds, professional and non. The non are competent pleasant ways to talk about some point of relationship anxiety usually. There's nothing else to say about them. I talk about those in terms of content. Professional - what do I do with those - I extract whatever lines work for me. Often by those means I give them a version. I praise bits. I criticize diction by saying what that word does to me. My highest praise is 'clean.' I talk about spacing and punctuation by demonstrating. I weed. With Logan I didn't touch his poems except to fix typos. They were flawless as far as I could tell - I mean they were his own making and flawless in those terms, so with him it would be a matter of fixing the person not the poem. For him fixing the person was prose. With Favor I said, don't be miserable just to be able to be a poet. With Michael I've said, look at Artaud, he has the freedom you want and yet there is a feeling I in what he does. What it is about poems is that one is afraid of not understanding them, or showing that one doesn't understand them. The real poets are often lost in their material, that's why a version is helpful. They see it cleaned up. Goldberg said talk about images you like, line breaks. That's how an educator talks. This stuff is so obvious to me. My sensation is of something like karate, swift decisive chopping. Judgment in poetry is first judgment of state - writing is an emotion, Logan said - that's how I write off polished poetry, as either too fancy-language heady/schooled pretentious, or as too sociable/anxious unfree. I want something so simple that what counts is the achievement of emotional clarity. That's judgment of the person's achievement of best self - whether they've known to and been willing to. That goes for both personal and impersonal. It is striking me I've said this in charm, value, ethic, tactic and gender in writing. I can also go through a bad poem and just say exactly what the effect is of every mistake. Saturday late aft - which now means 6:30, sun hot from the west. What's the best possibility for Tom, I mean his not showing up. What's the best it could be. The worst is he's back in some kind of drug, but I don't think so. The best would be he's using the clarity he made in many times with me, and he's doing the work, and he knows he needs to be on his own to do more, and one day in clarity he'll want to let me know. And me. Transcribing fall of 2002 I'm surprised how addicted I still sounded. What's happening now - as if the smallest relaxing of something. Though my blood pressure is up because I'm not exercising. And then in Feb 2003 (I start in the back if I'm tired) I find a discussion of what the journal project is. It amazes me how good it is. [In America vol 1] No new bites today. I bought my train ticket on the web. June 8 - July 6. 30th The man who sold me kale told me the small farmers are being wiped out by rodents coming in from the burnt areas - squirrels, he thought, ate off the carrot tops. A Mexican man who sells a small collection of roses he grows in a greenhouse in San Marcos said I should smell the purple one. He sells them a dollar a stem. Walking into the farmers' market it took me a couple of dozen paces to realize where I was. I came from transcribing and the jeep radio, and stepped into a pen full of people, full, and everything personal, and the pleasure of fruit and vegetables. Two pounds of cherries from a stand where a Mexican man stood holding out samples, a bunch of carrots from a small old woman who said they were biodynamic, the kale from a young back-to-the-land man, a yellow baby squash from John, who said the neighbours disregard the light laws and kill his golden weasels, a watermelon from a Mexican boy who didn't speak English, red-skinned nectarines from a stand that had plates of samples of four kinds of summer fruit - how can I say the aspect of that, wet color, orange, purple, yellow. The samples everywhere are part of the aura of gift. There's also the way for instance John says, That's a dollar, making very light of it. It's happiness that has seemed to last all day. 31st Memorial Day Monday, as if a tinted second Sunday. What is up this morning - two packets there when I opened the computer's lid. Mary phoned. We spoke last time about Greg. Tonight she asked about him as if we'd never had that conversation. She said she's disappointed her children don't share their lives with her. I think that is a memory; she doesn't ask. On the airplane she spoke to the man sitting next to her, who was clean-cut, she said, a cargo pilot. 1st June This morning I have Carolyn on one hand and Jeanne on the other, the fresh girl raring to be real and brilliant, the adapted woman holding up a community and hiding her thoughts. I am holding them both in mind, and while I sweep the floor I am thinking more about putting my journal on line, the consequences of saying what one thinks. I would lose my job if I said what I thought about students and fac. I won't lose my job for saying Tom fucked my ass and it was less mystical than pussy, but I would lose it for unflattering true observations of particular persons. What is the cost to everyone of the social padding enforced? 2nd And then Carol got it - what did she get - well, first, she decided I was a "wonderful, wonderful mentor." But that was because she put her parts together - that's what she got, that her social services mandate is about ecstasy, which she thought was on the other side of the line. And that was what I knew from the first letter. I wrote her good letters. 3rd When I woke in the dark - it is never dark in this room, the neighbour's yard light shines onto the ceiling - I thought I would start at the beginning of my life and remember happiness. Then I went blank. I remember happiness when I was about to leave home. Before that what I remember is a sort of neutral anguish - it feels neutral but is anguish, tight at the forehead. A lot of happiness in my 40s and 50s - sexual joy with Rob, creation joy in the garden, friendship happiness with Louie, comprehension happiness in work, coming-through joy with the book, contentment and joy with Tom. In my 30s there was sometimes talk happiness with Jam, there was delight at the lake house and in all the seasons up north, there was sometimes great happiness in reading, for instance in Dorothy Richardson and Le Guin. There was the joyful moment meeting Cheryl. There was the moment seeing the stars. Seeing myself in the mirror in the back room at the writing table in the summer morning light in 824. In my 20s sex and friendship with Tony and the morning in his bed, friendship with Sarah, Luke's birth and the morning after he was conceived. The women's meetings, finding DR, being with Greg, moments hitchhiking in Europe. In my teens being friends with Jan, being with Frank, being in my own room in Sexsmith knowing I was going to leave. Before that - having pudding for breakfast once.
- A study on men and lying. 1) They think women want to hear they're interested in a serious relationship so they say they are. 2) Then they find themselves further in than they want to be so they lie to get time away. 3) Then they lie about affairs and other escapes. I look at that description feeling a gape of astonishment. Even now I'm agog. It's so simple a story. How do I feel telling it to myself. Schumann's A Minor is on the radio - I am seeing myself on the black glass - it's flattering - I like my hair - I liked the handsome tragic look on my face, it's something else now - the A Minor is me and Frank in the living room holding each other with M and my dad in bed - could they have been sleeping through the racket? This is not Van Cliburn, it's less the torrent of grand sadness. Oh Frank nowhere, dying in disgrace with yourself, and Ellie oh throwing yourself into deepest love with a sleazing fool. I say those as if in a way I don't mean them, though they are undoubtedly true. What I say is that it is not a story whose end determines all.
Ellie and Frank holding each other before they said goodbye is as true as the moment he stepped off the ladder. Ellie's good faith is as true as Tom's bad faith.
4th The piece on lying said most people will admit to lying ten times a day. Women lie to avoid hurting people's feelings, ie to avoid trouble. Men lie to make themselves more impressive and get what they want. There are a few people it said who don't lie, but they have no or difficult social lives. What I feel about lying is its costs, for instance the way one has to discount almost everything anyone says, so the whole of the exchange floats in a fog. We can't commit ourselves to feeling anything about any of it because it is all in question. And if I'm right about unconscious structure recognizing lies then lies believed split us, put the two parts at odds on how to respond. 5th Booked into the Hotel Patricia for the week starting when I get into town next Weds midnight. It's Canadian dollars and there I will be on Hastings at Main. For some reason this elates me. I will still have evals and workshop prep to slog at in my room, but I'll be traveling rather than shut away in Louie's house far from the real streets. I'll be walking to Harbour Center and the library, and people can visit me in my room - Cheryl and Luke, Louie if she isn't holding out. Then ten days when I get back. Went shopping - for $137 I have two pairs of pants, sage cargo pants and some heavy baggy olive drabs, new red Chuck E's, a Levi's singlet with fine yellow blue green white stripes in the straps and piping, a red muscle shirt. So now I have 5 prs of pants. It's still not enough for a 10-day stretch. - I love these new clothes. I'm wearing the cargo pants and the orange camisole, oh new clothes - Meantime have I forgotten Mr Tom? No - I'm going to leave without seeing him or knowing whether I'll ever see him again. 6th Michael has discovered Huidobro and so I am looking to see what I can make of this impulse in poetry. There are photos in this book of Gris, Huidobro, Lipchitz with their wives. I am revolted by these pictures because the women in them are 'the wives.' Their faces are the faces that interest me, the men's not at all. And yet it's only the men's faces that are counted in the company that constellated this notion of poetry. That's the first thing I know. Born 1893 into a wealthy family, died 1948 in his mid-fifties, Chile, Paris, Spain. Rhetoric about the poet being a god in quest of 'the infinite,' that puff of air. The slogan was that the poet would no longer "imitate the details of things but the constructive laws that form their essence" and thus create "new worlds," "not subservient to the imitation or reproduction of nature" - the use of the word subservient feels like male rupture, fear of subsumption in the real. "We haven't believed that we, too, can create realities in a world of our own, in a world awaiting its own flora and fauna." The poems of course are full of words like 'butterfly' and 'sea' which take their power from real butterflies and seas. The poet of this kind seems to think that using them in unexpected ways creates - what? What do they actually create? In me an unpleasant sensation of inflation -
This translator's introduction seems to buy their hype: "the possibility of ecstasy and the infinite." And yet some of Michael's lines are beautiful - And what do I want instead - that poem Logan had in his process paper, the placed human personal rather than the nowhere-everywhere impersonal posing of these egotistical chimaeras. The Berrigan sonnet. Ted Berrigan Sonnet LXXXVIII in Postmodern American Poetry, ed Paul Hoover Norton Cold Sunday morning. Rowen is in Vancouver. "We fucked until seven. She's late for work." Why do I like that line, Berrigan letter I found on the web. 7 What I did today - I'm at a halt - so many little things - mailing things - going to the bank and checking the balance - laundry - library - Amvets to buy a sleeping bag that isn't down, two prs of pants, black linen, green cotton - Scott's to do a bit of tidying - Clairemont to check the garden and plant two bits that were here in pots - finished three letters this morning before starting any of this - cleaned the bathroom. Now what's left when I'm ready to stir - ironing - pouring shampoo into smaller bottles to take - hiding journals - thinking what I need to take to work on. - It's done - I'm ready to spring up at 5 and be out the door dragging the heavy suitcase on wheels - laptop in my shoulder bag - the packing, putting away, emptying the fridge, handing over the plants, all that, is sore. I'm leaving my - something - long pause - own surroundings are like a daily beloved, it's a pang that maybe I'll die and never come back to claim it all again. Something about Tom too - he's given up on me, he's dropped me - he's gone away where I can't find him - the book says don't look for him - don't tell him you're going. 8 These pants are a mistake - they smell like the person who owned them last - stale smoke - but everything else is packed. It's 5:13. I should leave any minute. Coast Starlight train, 9th Early morning, Dunsmuir CA - the way Americans are so gauche in conversation - complain about something, the train is late, etc - or make long explanations of family relations. I'm campaigning against Bush every chance I get, or announcing that I'm a professor. We're gliding toward Klamath summit. The little river next to us is getting smaller. Early sun on the pines, firs, hemlocks, cedars. There's still madrone. I left SD in anguish about Tom. That stopped at San Luis Obispo. Good farm buildings make me happy, barns and sheds. Mt Shasta appeared with its breath a small pile at the summit perfused with light. I'm in the corner of the lounge car where I spread my sleeping bag. I like the look of these little towns, Mt Shasta Herald office, a main street with a view of the peak. Sagebrush growing in the gravel next to the tracks, as if the seeds have been transported from drier country. That Carolina good ol' boy is talkin' about his guns. Thirty aught six. Family party, four couples and a big bachelor nephew called Leroy who specializes in knowing facts. The men make jokes and play pranks at high energy continuously. The women grin and pass the digital camera. Their cell phones go off. "I'm on the train." Heaps of volcanic clinker. Hollow-heartedness. It feels like needing a man - sort of. Having one would fix it. I can't have one. I'll never have one again. Why. Because I'm ugly. That's it, I think, a core. I comfort myself imagining a beautiful girl. I could describe her now and be happy. I start with her legs. The man she lives with teaches her to dance, to drive, to write, to fuck. He gives her money. She's in high school but she's confident and clear. Supported. The hollow-heartedness is deprivation. It's a teenager with a two-year-old behind her. This hollow-heartedness was behind my various addictions. Now I have it instead. It isn't an improvement. 'Wanting a man' is not strong or convinced but losing it leaves a hopelessness. Transcribing has held it off. Teaching will hold it off. I feel it with the journal. Writing flab and not liking it but just doing it because that's all there is. Tom kept it off, both happy and unhappy. Hopelessness is physically dangerous. I have no doubt it's basic structure. A state of confident well-being that's basic structure too.
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