| in america 6 part 1 - 2004 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego 8 July 2004 What will make the difference in this new kind of time is my will. I think I've changed my unconscious so it doesn't give me what it used to give. If I'm not more intentional now nothing will happen. Here's what I need: to look better, more energy, more action and risk, more feeling, to get ready to quit [the college], a livelihood plan, more money, more variety, less dead time. [sky 8-7] 9th [sky 9-7] 10th I'm transcribing the journal for the summer of 1961, hoping I can use it for frank after his life. It is so uncomfortable. I wrote a lot of detail, it's a full picture of who I was, what I was interested in. I was doing what I should be doing at sixteen, studying sex and social effect, but I'm ashamed of myself for the mediocrity of my being. Being ashamed of it is part of my mediocrity. I have a sore heart for myself and him. The culture that made me mediocre killed him. Made my mother grotesque with her grandsons.
- I woke from a nap in the late afternoon, found the sun in panes on the velvet curtain. It brought out the classic beauty of this little room, what I think of as its 30s polish, the craft of its little cupboard, its golden floor. I jumped up and took pictures. It's eight on a Saturday evening. The sun on the curtain was coming through the north rather than the west window, setting northwest of any angle I've seen here. I've put on Space Hotel. Am feeling the happiness possible in this house. Bought a gym membership today. [sky 10-7] 11 Eugene McCabe Heaven lies about us. Strong writing. [sky 11-7] 13 Transcribing the time with David Beach. This journal is dull but at least I'm not doing what I was doing then, massive useless cogitating. - I go to the ocean and take off my pants and wade into the shore break. First time without Mr Tom.
Then put on Gram Parsons, a collection from the library, and sit transcribing 1961. Frank and I parking under the flashing neon CAFÉ sign. Cut 19 in Parsons is Love hurts, with Emmy Lou. I think of Tom and Lorrie when I hear it, that ache of the real thing. A couple of cuts later, Frank and Ellie are sitting at the counter inside the café. He goes to the jukebox. The song that comes on is Love hurts. I'm astonished. I go on the web: Everly Brothers 1960. Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars, any heart not tough or strong enough, to take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain. Some fools rave on happiness, blissfulness, togetherness. Some fools fool themselves I guess, but they're not fooling me. I know it isn't true, know it isn't true, love is just a lie, made to make you blue. Love hurts. OOO-oo love hurts. [sky 13-7] 14 Wednesday morning, grey. Gym. Already 39 floors up from 33. Steady sweat from the stationary bike, minute longer each time. Liked the feeling of coming onto the sidewalk into first dark. Traffic lights' gumdrop glow. 15 I went into the waves at PB. Early afternoon, warm green waves, kids with boogie boards. I was up to my chest, and after a while I was dog paddling. I went under a breaking wave and then couldn't find bottom. I thought maybe I'd been pulled out a bit so I took a breath and stroked for shore. I still couldn't touch bottom. I could dog paddle and keep my head above water. I looked around. There were girls with a boogie board level with me but a little further south. Quite a few other people further out, where the waves were. I shouted. The girls were looking at me but I didn't think anyone could hear me. Help! Help! Then I thought I should swim south instead of toward shore. I'm not sure exactly how it went but I think I found my feet at about the same time a girl with the boogie board passed it to me to lean on, and a lifeguard arrived. I hadn't seen him coming. He was standing waist deep and at that point so was I. "Could you see I was in trouble? I was in a hole and I couldn't touch bottom." At Dawne after a month. There's a bit of the hillside that's perfect - ceanothus, California poppy, Cleveland sage. More of that. 16 [sky 16-7] 17 I've been back a bit more than a week and here's what I've done. Gym and yoga, every day one or the other. Committed to reconstructing at Taft and new planting at Dawne, ie digging. Got in the water twice. Transcribed a lot of the first Frank journal and some of 1995 before Tom. Went through the mind and land notes. Skywords photos most days. Margo has offered me $1000 to do embod stuff for Goddard. Starbucks, iced vanilla latté, on the street in my orange singlet. It's hot. Oh the bodies. So many folded spines. At the beach I was wondering about the young men, why they seemed structurally wrong although they were lean. The men's bathing suits are so modest and the women's so immodest - what is that? Even the little boys wearing flapping knee-length skirt-like trunks that don't dry. - What form for Frank after his life - I have the story of his death - his letters - my journal - some photos - There's a lot of silliness in the letters and journal - There isn't really a story, nothing is understood. He wanted a good life and seems mostly to have had a poor one. We had a power battle and I won. We were also quite careful friends.
18 Cyndi sends me an email with her big news. Her diagnosis has expanded - besides being dissociative and having borderline personality disorder she now thinks she also has adult attachment disorder, of which there are two kinds, avoidant and anxious-ambivalent. Avoidant: anger - hostility, criticism - lack of empathy - sensitive to blame - views other as untrustworthy, undependable - self as unlovable or too good for others - relationships feel threatening to one's control, not worth the effort - compulsive self reliance - passive withdrawal - low levels of perceived support - difficulty with coworkers - work excuse to avoid - fear of closeness - self critical depression. Anxious/ambivalent - overinvolved - breakups - idealizing - needs recip - wants a lot - sees relation as unbalanced - preoccupied - sees partner as desirable but unreliable - main way to feel secure - extreme emotions - mood swings - dependent depression - suicide attempts. 'Disorganized attachments' - developmental - I'm wondering why my parents weren't more anxious about how involved I was with Frank - the way it looks is that everyone was lifted by it - I was more accepted by everyone because I had a boyfriend - we were more accepted in the community because I had a boyfriend, is that true too? Yes. [sky 18-7] 19 I bought a scanner on the web. Researched it and then bought it for less than store price. Emily Van: "The letters felt like they were written by an older wiser me. They usually made me cry." Michael D: "Ellie has a way of constructing the universe which makes breathing a gorgeous enterprise." Sally: "If Ellie were a character she'd be that quiet, wise grandma who nods as we tell our stories and then we wait, expectant for her thoughts. She only says what needs to be said. I knew that she would appreciate courage." [sky 19-7] 20 Quiet wise grandma! I dreamed I was poking in my little garden, pulled out some white bulbs there were a lot of. Then Rhoda came with her hands full of colchinums in bloom, two kinds. It was a nightmare of having lost control of the garden since they bought East Pender. My exercise program is making me stiff and sore at night. I wake with my hands and teeth and small of my back sore, as if tight-swollen, that symptom of I don't know what. Because my right foot doesn't lift I have fallen in the street twice in three days. I stumble on the smallest unevenness. When I woke in the night anxious from the dream and sore and stiff, I thought of what I wrote to Louie about finding myself in the hole in the ocean, "the experience of dropping down to find the floor and there being none, and something about being among people and close to shore and in an invisible death-hole." What I was feeling was that aging is like that, what I do doesn't take effect in the way it used to. I write but not so well. I exercise but it seems I might be harming myself too much. I notice uncertainly that I've forgotten things that have happened very recently. What's different though, from before I went away, is that I'm happier, I go out more, I take pleasure more. Last night I went out to find a steak sandwich and found one in the Crest Café where the waiter brought magazines as I waited. I peered into other pubs and cafes in the search. Came home up an alley, feeling the touch of the air. When I exercise in the early evening I come out of the gym damp, liking the sensation of wet cold in the beautiful mixed light. These white roses smell like nasturtiums. 21 Louie is on her family camping trip, not answering. My bare arms are good - I'm okay sleeveless now. - How did I do that - putting field & field into html - somehow get the spacing - I did it once and then spent the afternoon trying to do it again. Jonesing for Tom, I notice. Was okay for almost two weeks. - There I lay down and felt into it. What is it. Anguish at Rhoda and Trudy buying my place, frantic anguish, like casting myself from side to side. Anxiety at physical aging. Missing Vancouver, beautiful Vancouver. Being shut out by Barr-Cohen's grab of faculty attention by having her daughter always present. 21 I dream a visit with Dave and Francie. They're in the apartment next to me or above me. I'm telling Francie as she's sitting next to Dave that their life seems nothing but struggle and it's because they are making foundations. I am praising the connectedness they're establishing - these words aren't right. Francie says she loves me. She touches my head. I notice I'm naked. I've been naked the whole visit without noticing. Dave says it was startling at first (not that word). I was crying when I talked about the connections they have. Francie got up and gave me a kleenex. She was crying too. I went home and came into my downstairs and noticed dampness. Someone has been here. Footsteps upstairs. I go up and find two louts standing by the bookcase. They have added large old books. You thought no one lived here? I throw them down the stairs. They'll be back. They are on the stairs. I throw one down by throwing his bicycle down. There are more, four altogether. One of them is holding a kerosene lamp base. He's thinking of fire. A café in the city, that has a magical opening straight into the country. Lying awake at night I thought I must do two things with my aloneness, feel it, and leave it by going through that kind of gate. I don't want what I saw in Rob and feel in my own face, that bleak grim hard look of being settled into isolation. It's a kind of anger. How to live in this phase, over sixty. Options: religious devotion, younger man, grandchildren, dog. I laugh when I say the last one. Live in the country, yes, but even there I'll want some person with whom to be heart.
- I want to say that today I got field & field into acceptable html to publish. How long has it taken. Longer than Rowen, twenty years. Now I could fix the spacing in my other books too. - And then I started with winter interference. I've thought of it as not good but it has such beautiful stuff in it that I'm fluttered remembering that beautiful self and hoping for the writing. 24th
Laboriously html-editing play of the weather today. Mostly finished transcribing Frank 1961, some detailed unfixing - it's about 120 pages. Hillcrest Kinko's full of people who look like artists. 25 Worked on and on the last few days, and today, getting three folders added to the writing page, making index pages for winter and field. More to do to clean up the spacing on the short poems, writing index page. It's natural work, I don't flag, don't want to do anything else. It was Sunday - LA Times, farmer's market, Starbucks, cactus lot, yellow pot and blue senecio, and then working till 10 at night. 26 Ten tonight and I'm done reorganizing the writing section. Have put up my immature pieces - remarkable how immature they look tho' I like things about them - green mambas, woman with a hole in her head, antlers. I was seeing why Michael thinks I construct the universe so breathing is gorgeous - in my thirties I was very rhythmic and fantasmagorical - the later pieces aren't immature because they aren't foggy - opening their files and finding them on the page, blue lines in sets, was like coming upon blue steel rails. Now it's all reformatted - title pages, what will we know, charm, value - every small poem - all three of these liddle books. I lost her letters it seems but still think they'll show up. It's very satisfying to have done this. It's work I've raced at. I'm saying that still surprised, when have I last had that kind of drive. These days when it's hot I'm working in my orange singlet. I stink. 27 Three weeks of gym and yoga. There's definition in my belly. The pad has moved away from the sides to the middle, because there's muscle indenting on either side. 28 Coming back to that journal liking it so much. It's rich and natural. Now that I'm past the fretting about David Beach, which is embarrassing. Have sent word about the writing site to Logan, Michael, and Maggie. 29 Mary phoned last night. She's trotting off to the Peace to see Rudy and then Toronto to see Paul. She does what I do, she sits at her computer transcribing stuff from livelier times. She'd like to take up where she left off I think, now that Ed is out of the way. A tragic life she said. I think she got that line from me. Juliana writes that she dreamed I was in bed with her and Juan Carlos. I told her about the writing site. Michael sez the stuff I posted is if anything too readable. The Democratic convention is on. Edwards last night disgusting. The Dems are playing to the same people the Republicans are playing to - this great America, supporting the troops, promising wildly: medicare, increased salaries, huge credits. Leading a chant about hope. Oh it's evil. 'Middle America' the assumed, and seemingly confirmed, blind, ignorant voting pubic. Democracies the inherent fascism of the stupid. A timid woman at the farmer's market wanting people to sign for Nader. I argued that this is not the moment, the war is too dangerous. She shifted her eyes when I said that, as if in despair. I wonder whether it was because she knew what I am seeing about the Democrats. [Later: realized she likely was a Republican trying to split the left.] The best people are weeded out because the parties assume Middle America won't vote for them. Clinton was the exception, because his remarkable intelligence came across as charm. Clinton was like an artist, creative. Both Edwards and Kerry are preachers, tight and false. Weasel-head Bush is looking realer than they do. Starting The Golden West where I leave for the Fraser, come back and start the doc. It's a year before I meet Tom. Began editing at that point. I transcribed only 55 pages out of probably 100 in that book and now have to go back and check what I left out. 30 Oh! Michael D has written about field and field: I love the line breaks so, so much. I love the people the hearts the songs I love dialogue where it embraces the moment the very air it is uttered within I love how you broke things up I think your power is in your skin I feel when you are seeing the dust, the fiber, the gossamer of a moment so tangible but oneiric - Doesn't like the big philosophical moments: geometry, gender these terms feel like steel There's something erotic about the whole text and these terms seem to be against love and lust and intimacy What do I think about that. He likes the singing and not the thinking. I come to a stop there. I know what it is, men hating work woman. Does he follow the thinking? Does he get the comprehensions I note? In other words is it readable, actually, to him? No. I like it that he likes the songs and especially the line breaks in them. He's right that there's simple love being constantly checked. He's wrong about skin, it's something somatic. More like imagined whole body motion? A phenomenology of thinking 31 Bonjour, moi - My literary projects. Thinking about field & field. Transcribing journal for Frank after his life, starting to edit The Golden West. Three weeks more. 1st Aug The Christmas Frank and I broke up, what's striking me is my narcissism. Let me think if it's actually that. I'm very impressed by my clothes. It's partly that I love their shapes and colors. They are the only things in the family and community that are my own. I made many of them. They are the only objects I see that are to my own taste. And at the same time I seem to stick very close to them. I describe very little of what's around me. I'm looking at Frank but no one else, it seems. - No, I do describe other people when I don't know them, but I'm not interested in their state, I'm interested in them as sculptures. Reading the descriptions of Christmas 1962, which was my last Christmas at home, I'm trying to peer into the background to see the house, the yard, my family. In the writing I'm preoccupied by the love story, and working to feel it as just that, a story in which I am the heroine. A lot of it is tedious for that reason. I like that I transcribed what Frank said so I have him verbatim. I don't like myself very much in those conversations. I'm shallow and self absorbed. I'm the big shot of the family, because I'm the one showing the world that we're more than we seemed. I'm rising. It's a responsibility and I'm taking it valiantly. I'm not doing it for them, and they didn't ask me to, but they're deferring to me, and it's making me disregard them as if I've already left them. Frank impresses me. He's right there when something needs to be done. Emotionally too, he does it. He takes care of me. He's given himself to love without reserve. My reserve allows him to do that, I know, but still, I'd never seen a man let go. He's ardent, he's candid. - Logan sends a note. He says Maggie loves me. Fort Collins CO. He has a piece in Conjunctions. 2nd I was at the beach yesterday. In three weeks I've made my body so I like it. It's firm. My arms are firm. The skin on my chest and shoulders looks nice when I wear a singlet. My thighs are firm. But now I can't sleep. I was sleeping remarkably well but now - last four nights - I lie there feeling somehow tight. It is showing under my eyes. The beach was Ocean Beach. The sea was dirty, full of seaweed and seagrass. Punchy - a lot of waves close together. From a distance it looked muddy, but when I was standing in it, it could be seen to be holding gold flecks at every level. It was a soup. I have edited the journals for 1994 and 1995 to the week I left for CA. The stories of Jim and David, the Dennett paper, the Fraser trip. I took out this and that if the book told me to. The psychological story and the philosophy are kept. The first year of the doc. The last of the garden. Now I could design a temporary frame. The scanner will be up next week probably. I have temporarily forgotten Tom, though when I went downtown last week, standing on G Street looking into the neighbourhood of the Golden West, I couldn't believe that time is gone. My blood pressure is down to 143/74. Own copy of Italian Duets - the gorgeous moment in Sikora's when I was in Van, listening to it with the clerk - he cranked it up - we were petrified together. The new contract is giving me $600 more this semester. That is about what it cost me to stay in the Patricia this summer. 3rd Have just posted a draft front page of Work & days. Took a couple of days off exercise, slept so well - I think the tightness was 8# weights on chest muscle - and today am frisky, the feeling I wanted. Elated about designing w&d. Margo has $1000 for embod studies devel. Am thinking about how to do it w/o boring myself, inventively somehow. - Then the phone rings. Louie says Rowen left a message that Jim [Rowen's best friend since babyhood] was with his dad at a falls near Whistler. Jim and Zoolia were higher up. Jim slipped and his dad saw him go over. He hasn't been found. They have searched the stream and the banks for twenty miles, power boats, helicopters. The police were at Mavis and John's house this aft asking for a hair sample, something they can use for DNA tests. Rowen spent the night with them last night. Such a hand-reared boy, 18. These children of parents so devoted they do almost nothing but rear them. - Rowen on the phone says Jim's drawings kept developing, every time he came into town they'd have gotten better. He didn't want to put them on the web because they weren't good enough yet, he said. When they were younger they'd slide a sheet of red acetate over red drawings to make them disappear and reappear. Rowen says he's callous, but that image is a little marker of his feeling. I said he's not callous he's coping, it's there and when the time is right he can feel it. 4th I dreamed last night that Logan walked back to where I was and kissed me, and I put my arms up around his neck and kissed him back. It was not the kind of kissing I like. It was his kind, hard-mouthed. 5th Working on the site. Have taken blue lines from a baseball site, rotated them, and they are now these notebook lines, background gif. Saw journal text in that format for the first time. How it reads will so much depend on the design. In type it seems dull, so far. I got another idea from the baseball site, put volume intros on a page with a right-hand bar with linked pullouts. Maybe thread-linked. This is a huge work. - Louie last night said she invited Row to dinner. He arrived while she was in the bath. She came out and found him in the big chair in his black coat looking absolutely beautiful, "like a movie star," by the realness of what's happening to him. - During the night when I woke I had a fantasy - that is not the right word, and 'image' isn't either - a sensation - of being up to my neck in the ocean, unable to feel bottom and too far out to be able to reach the shore, done for. The ocean is death. - Another question about bookwork - there's so much of it, am I supposed to look at it in detail even if I don't transcribe it? - For purposes of writing about the bookwork for instance. It goes on saying the same thing for years. This aft I drove to Taft and looked at the garden, need to spend days on it. Yesterday was weeding at Dawne, jpgs I sent Nor of the pumpkins. At Bellevue the grading is tricky. It's easier to see with the beautiful terrace in place - it really is beautiful. A couple of hours to do at Scott's. 6 "I felt for the first time with him that he was saying yesterday exactly what he thinks not what he thought people wanted to hear." Louie of Rowen. An icy fast river north of Squamish, the Ashnell. Have started to meditate at night - love would bring the systolic number down but without love maybe that sort of love: feeling the body.
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