| in america 6 part 6 - 2004 november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7 November 2004
- What if - into this opening of nothing - I bring back Orpheus - what I'd need - it's technical, I'd need access to a camera, edit software. 8
Yesterday Tom showed up in the morning. I took him shopping and then we lay on the couch and listened to Prairie Home Companion. He repented. I don't have the energy to say more. His big lout face. Thin greasy hair.
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Orpheus. I wrote that and started holding my breath. My Orpheus pages. I say that and freeze. I imagine a video and maybe it's writing. It is writing anyway. Looking at those pages I'm in beauty - a beauty realm I assembled, my own - I can hardly realize I am allowed it - there are phrases I love to read - it feels like seeing a gate open into heaven and being too shy to walk through - it's not mine - I have to live in the dull self - but it must be mine, I made it, I collected it. Is it mine? Yes. But it's only imaginary, it's wrong to live there. No. Stressed heart. Pain guards it. 10 When I was working on Orpheus this morning I saw that I have understood the structure more since I touched it last (and the book told me to put it away, I think). It said a 4 part structure and that's what I see now. 1. early completeness 2. division/withdrawal 3. consequences of unstable division, addiction/creation/therapy 4. skilled completeness. [Opposite: notes on Walter Anderson 1903-1965 Lived on an island alone, kept logs. "Realizations," "primal self," sense of "becoming one with," mingling by means of heart Regarded painting as his ecological function, to help nature realize itself Art changing the artist's relation to other things Painting as gratitude At night he read, drawing rapidly as he read - the book to his left and a dip pen in his right hand. The finished drawings fell to the floor around the dining room table, to be collected the next morning by Sissy. 199-120 Animaliers may be some of the worst family men. The possum's face is his face. See notes on Biloxi potter The art of Walter Anderson ed Patricia Pinson University Press of Mississippi Unitive:
11 Am I beginning to know what this plainness is for, this plain time. I'm saying that after waking at 4:30 and working on the Orpheus pages. And starting to look at notes from before I went back to school. Does it have to be a very plain bare time to be able to go back to what I left unused, as resolved as I could get it, but unused. I did a lot of sorting and summarizing at the end, and here it is. I don't know what to do with Orpheus. The mythic feeling and analytic/sorting aren't yet agreed on a form or manner and yet they are both interested. Should I say that differently. I disapprove, the sorting self disapproves, of the metaphor and is ravished by its beauty. And then here in the pile of notes my shreds of visual physics that ravish too. Is it important to reconnect with this material
12 I like the way the last part of the search section is conversation. I love the conversations I find. I like the dialectical structure, something is lost and in the search for it something else is made, so that when what was lost is found it is joined to the larger structure made by searching, and the result is mature completeness rather than the young completeness of the beginning. I like the way art is included as one of the groping not-yet-effective forms of search along with addiction. I don't know what to do with the way addiction's materials are so beautiful. Intellection. So it is turning out to be an autobiography in verse. Romance, intellection, art and then therapy which I call conversation. So it is a companion to Work & days. The digest. But it's not called Orpheus, because that's just one of the stories, the art story. Do they each have a myth? It has to also be thinking about myth, because it is. The feeling in myth, the bare naked beauty. 13 This week has been a mess of waiting for students. I am being definite about their final deadlines, fierce. Charlie is pressing me to give him credit for the semester though he is sending me this and that only at the last moment. Dear Amanda wiped herself out with heroin after a funeral and her 25th birthday. That's the end of her brain for the semester. Favor and I are both tired, her revisions aren't as good as what she was writing midsemester but I am letting them go. Enough for now. I gave four days to Astro, trying for the real thing, something head-on. Tomás isn't saying what he thinks, he didn't want to be bothered. Anne has Caryn working on organization. She was the right person for that manuscript, professional. What else. Now Anna is excited about her semester and thinking to write up her 3 semesters as the story of a principle in progressive ed. She has used everything I've given her, amazingly. 14 David B phoned me last night as I had fallen asleep listening to Art Bell talking to a physicist. Lovely David playing. He said last week Tuesday or Wednesday he was out walking and plucked some balsam poplar buds. Which day was it I started to wear his balsam poplar salve on my wrists and think of him. It is Sunday morning. I'm amid my plants, smelling the Cleveland sage. The brandegei smells like pine. The manzanita glauca has bright new leaves since I bought it. [Opposite: notes from Tony Packer's website: It is clear as sunshine in a bright blue sky that there is no extra meaning to life - that life, just the way it is, changing from moment to moment in unexpected ways, does not point to any meaning beyond itself. Every moment is the result of the [infinite] past and at the same time new, fresh and free. There is wanting and fearing and suffering the instant ... [our thinking] resists and fights what is here right now, and longs for what is not. Right action does not flow out of reaction of any kind. This stillness has room for everything happening on earth ... the inexhaustible love that is all. How could anyone be worried that truth might not reveal itself entirely on its own at any moment. If there is complete openness in listening, attending to the whole thing vulnerably, innocently, then what you are saying does not become the cause of an effect. If it becomes clear that right now we're the result of everything that's ever happened, why pick out one thing and say that is the cause of this? The instant of seeing is the timeless teacher The function of the [-] is "to allow the total situation, as it is manifesting right now in us and everywhere around us, to reveal itself as it is, and, if questioned, to point out clearly what is actually going on." the complete entering into what is happening Let it all become transparent and express itself in words that arise freely ... awaken to the joy of wholeness endless fears of separation and death It's not necessary to continue with the involvement in story and emotion Can there be a simple shift from story and entanglement to open listening, this moment? conditioned and unconditioned bodies the clarity, the wholeness of it all. And the sharpness of the senses, functioning as one whole perception blocked functioning, self-enclosing thoughts and emotions, habitual tensions the me-network mobilized definitely something to this energy gathering low in the body that allows the head to be light, free, open, unencumbered. And therefore naturally intelligent. Entering into silence a natural shift of energy to the foundation of this body-mind - an enlivening of the entire organism. All it takes is one scary thought ... thought has an uncanny ability to trigger physical processes that originally were not meant to react to thought. The aware body does not feel that anything is outside of it. Not knowing, the body is at ease. Love is intrinsic to the openness of being. - It's nearly 5, Sunday sunset. I'm bothered. Margo has written to Tomás to say his letters to Astro were brilliant and then she turns to me and thanks me for putting so much time and thought into mine. Tomás is lazy not brilliant, lazy and complacent. So either she is smoothing his feathers at my expense, and is willing to butter him, and therefore may have been buttering me all along, or else she can't tell the difference. Both of those are bad. I would hate to stop trusting Margo. Another thing is, I liked being with Tom today. He asked and listened and carried things and enjoyed the roof and Bamboo's tea garden and KCRW. I liked sitting with him on the sofa. He left before I was wanting him to go. Walked toward the stairs putting on his shades. He was happy. He worked last week for the staging company and made time and overtime. There were young men to work with. He saw new things. He's losing bulk and his back isn't as tight. He had it in his head to move to Austin. 15 Anna beautifully thinking and showing herself thinking. Charlie being pleasant and asking me about the weather in California because he wants me to pass him. Amanda's last package had little work in it but she talked about the real thing - paralyzing fear and shame, fear of fear and shame. Postmodern thoughts. Layla thinking too. Nothing defensive in this packet. She figures things out. - Faculty conference call. They leapt up saying my list of Goddard degree criteria was brilliant - it was just a sparky bit of play - and no one mentioned the first letter (Lise did) which really was brilliant. Jim wanted to be sticky about the term 'disabled' and when we cross swords I let it fall. I am not going to insist with him. 17 Luke phoned last night. He called from a bus stop. It was an empty call. He was thanking me for the books that arrived this week. Why empty. He is working as production manager making commercials, I'm pouring time into nothing but students. He's going to be 34, I'm going to be 60. We both don't have a context. At 824 I'd built a context that was rich and it meant I was fuller of being that he could feel. What's the solution to that. He was silent when I said I was cautiously connected with Tom, as if he thinks it will end badly - was it? (Some thinking intervenes.) It's clear that a big project is the only hope I have. I have to get these other suspended projects somehow established and then I have to do something out there. Large. I need a university, I need really smart people, and I need a place of my own.
- The photo I pulled off the Sorry everybody website, a beautiful serious boy holding up a sign saying "Please forgive us. I am a Mennonite (Christian) in Indiana." (Telling Tom about it just now I cried.) When I wrote Suzanne Ehst to say I'd like her Abrams annotation I attached it. She wrote back almost immediately and said he has been her student. 18 Louie on the phone describing Lang-Lang playing in a way that took the macho out of the music and left it gossamer. A beautiful review I wish I could retrieve. She flew to dry country and walked, and wrote that the world still exists. Was on the new sofa with the fireplace on and water hitting the glass. Last leaves hanging on the grape. "Hélas, boom!" Michael walking away. His beautiful walk. That's the shape humans should be. I'm at Starbucks. I chased him probably. He begged 10 cents on Monday and I took such offense I haven't spoken to him since. Let him sit there cultivating other people he can put the touch on. I'm not giving up this ground. I'll freeze him out. But keep his image nonetheless. A very beautiful skeleton: wide square shoulders, long arm and legs, that soft traveling stride. The beautiful bones of his face. And what happened yesterday with Tom. He was nice. Came with me to Bird Rock. He got nasty when he was mad at himself for something he said to Danielle. We sat at the end of Forward and figured it out. "When you're guilty you punish me." Then we sat on a bench at his other little park and saw a century-plant stalk rising with palm and fennel and a hummingbird. He said he thinks of me in my little house and feels he isn't doing enough. I said yes, my life is isolated and grim and meager. It used to be quite rich. I jumped and I haven't landed yet. But it isn't his fault and it isn't for him to fix. I have to stay in the grimness until I find where to land. That was good, I liked being able to say it. But then on the way home in the dark there was a sudden turn. He was talking about his job. Maybe he'll be able to go on the road with a band! I said that would be dangerous. He spun into denial so vehement I could see he won't be able to stay sober. He isn't able to refuse drugs from men he wants respect from, and if he doesn't know he has to stay out of that kind of scene, there's no hope. He lacks judgment, even sober and even still. I do want him back and I cannot let myself take him back because it would be self neglect.
- Well - here's how it stands. Tom writes that if that's what I think of him I won't see him again. Meantime, I had just opened the mail and saw his name. A knock on the door I thought was his. Michael with a bouquet of plants in a Starbucks cup. Aloe and something else he saw in a canyon, ephedra. I said I cannot bear him asking me for money, ever. And so on. He talked a lot about cochineal bugs and Bosch's wing detail of both male and female ----, the different kinds of sandpiper, who wash themselves a lot because they don't oil their feathers, chaparral ferns, grass and skippers, and much more. He did ask this and that about me and sat on the arm of my chair and saw what he said was the snow macaque on my website. Etc. And at the end of the visit he asked me for tea. I said no. Then he asked for the socks I said I'd give him. But then he offered to help me dig. And then, at the jeep, getting the socks, he asked if I could spare some band-aids. But he did look at and talk about my plants. Suzanne and I are corresponding. She wants to give me a book of poems by Mennonites some of whom are former. I sent her my notes for Larry. Louie this morning laughing at my latest tale of coincidence. 20th I was lying on the floor near a giraffe who was also lying on the floor. There was music coming from outside, through the window beyond him. I saw that his neck was swaying. He put out his long foreleg and touched me with it, so soft a touch. A velvet touch. We could lie down on the bed together for the rest of the afternoon. When I lay down last night I said, as a request, I want to live in love. There was quite a lot more about having my picture taken with a soccer team I was on for some reason. I was afraid of how I'd look, as I am. When I woke I thought the long-necked benign being is the book. When Michael put his arms around me on the roof the other afternoon, he said, You're just a little thing. I said, The way you are is the way human beings are supposed to be. Meaning tall and light. Adrienne Rich:
- Anna writes "She replied to my packets with her own plunging lucidity." Layla's last essay pulled together all the difficult things I said to her. 22nd Larry: I loved working with Ellie Epp this semester. After spending a semester with her I realize what frightened me was her authenticity. She is real and extremely perceptive. She gently nudged me into areas of my studies I had not been willing to travel. It was in these areas I had the greatest growth.
Eliz says will I visit her in Marfa and work on her native garden, and do I want to stay in her house. I do, I will. 24th A theoretical burst. Karen is sending postmodern cultural construction writing, Lise is advocating modernist and place writers, Margo is guarding death denial and ineffability fantasies and Ellie is cutting them all down with her peerless philosophy. I'm a warrior-philosopher. Amanda said Thanks, you. That was good. "I got her as my advisor. She tethered me in a fucking huge pasture with an incredibly long length of rope. I could wander about and feed where I wanted for weeks and return to the barn to be nurtured." "Exciting dialogues with my advisor." Okay, what did I do this semester: 1. got Amanda to feel how cut-off her theory is and notice how habitually she doesn't trust herself or back herself, and gave her tastes of doing it better 2. was the kind of correspondent to allow Anna to let out her brilliance and feel herself thinking 3. pushed and supported Larry the hospice chaplain to feel his own memories of actual deaths and connect his feelings for nature with religion 4. gave Layla permission and support and a framework to trust her softer and less defensive states, demonstrated a more rigorous poetics, showed her how to be personally intelligent 5. got Favor to integrate con and uncon, hauled her into success and happiness as a writer, kept her safe while she looked at the worst so she could speak the truth clearly. She's out. She wouldn't have done it without me 6. Sean, Charlie, Pamela I couldn't do anything for 7. Astro we'll see, intervened so he couldn't fudge 8. wrote a good pedagogy statement, wrote a good religion statement, wrote an embod curric Finished transcribing The Golden West and more of Frank. Revised writing pages and got Michael and Logan to read them. Brakhage's tribute. - Why am I bothering to talk to fac about pedagogy or embod. They don't get anything I say. Though the students do. - Evening. I put on Te Kanawa singing Mozart and am looking at pictures in my butterfly book and find myself with my lips swelling. It's Michael. The butterflies and the way he himself is a butterfly. His soft stubborn rectitude of selfness. Opening the door onto him holding a bouquet of ephedra and aloe cuttings. His long thin wrists. The figure he cuts from behind. The way he never slouches, but reads newspaper with a beautiful straight back. The pain in his smile. The music is opening my heart to him. Someone who has given his time to knowing what is in the world, grey hairstreak, so beautiful in form, Lorquin's admiral, California sister, northern cloudywing, fiery skipper. The way, the first time I touched his arm, he said, You have a very light touch. His loneliness. His privacy. His very soft intolerance. "I told you." The way butterflies are extremely beautiful but have nasty little faces - This morning he was wearing a plaid shirt and waiting for Lisa. I said I'd go sit somewhere else and did. When he had phoned her and found her in Oakland he brought his paper and came to sit next to me. It was a sweet gesture. Since I've said I can't afford to take him out of town he's silent, though. Not trying. It is as if, when two people who are both themselves are getting to know each other the course of acquaintance is very inhibited and reticent. When I was younger I would have gone to bed with him and learned him fast, and since I can't do that it's as if I can do nothing. I can't get at him. But I know something else, which is that this is a kind of desire that can't be satisfied anyway, because it is a desire to be him. I suppose that is greed. And it is wrong too because I don't want to be a beautiful body whose lymph nodes are cancerous and whose children are dead. So what can I do with him. The great mystery brought us together like the fingers of two hands. I said to him, What is it for? He said it wasn't for anything. I don't think that can be so. I want to learn but I'm very nervous about being taught. I'm nervous about Tom too. I don't want Michael to ever have to deal with Tom's heavy energy. And I don't want Tom's heavy energy about him. What is it I feel about Michael's being. Offended. He's an offended boy. It's born gentleness. He has an immense true gentleness. Why do tears come to my eyes when I say that? It is as if life is walking a knife edge in him. - At that moment I go again to the computer and there is what I could say I have been waiting for (I sighed when I thought it before I wrote it), a letter from Logan. ellie, so, my number is light in me today and all is swell. i taught field & field 9 to two classes in the discussion of linebreak and the idea that the break is itself diction as you know some were terrified on sight of your piece and others deeply madly in awe, in hope, in lust without any sort of trust for language and those are my hopeful people. one class was freshmen and the others a more senior class of poets at Colorado State U. i think people either write out of a deep trust for language or a deep distrust, a kind of embracing of the enemy. i for one have little if any trust and that is itself trustful. i want to send you some stuff if it is cool? your stuff went over wonderfully, really awesome being able to make students aware of the work I find important and putting the works in the same house so they can interact, i learn so much from that, understand the personality of language, or not understand, but witness. 25th I wrote to Logan that I'm so autistic it's impressive I'm a good teacher, but it's not being somewhere. Being able to be again who I was when I wrote field 9 would be being somewhere. What did it depend on. An addressee. An address. Someone to address. I intended them toward Jam and Rhoda. When they did not want them I sent them to Robert Duncan, who didn't reply. Then years later I sent them to Duncan Mcnaughton. He did not mention them when he replied. Twenty some years later it's Logan. Maybe he was being born as I was writing them. Maybe as he was being born he took an imprint of what I was feeling too. Maybe he's my son with Jam. Spirit children. The way Michael is my son with Frank. And so whose spirit child am I? And is there a spirit child who's Tom's and mine? Fall of 95.
- Directional heat on the roof. I feel it most on my forehead. Sitting with my plants. Agaves are a slow garden. I can't tell whether they've moved. At 10 Tom is coming for his American holiday. 26th Friday morning. Eliz later. What's in the air. Ideological war with Tomás and Karen. Margo foolishly took up Tomas's stupid idea of a business model of studying competency. No way will I allow Tomás leadership. Karen instead of replying to my curric document has sent a piece of postmodern education and body writing quoting Butler on gender etc inscribed socially. 1. Karen is gender-ambiguous but that doesn't mean sex/gender is nothing but culturally inscribed. 2. The body's origin in its millions of years of adaptation is ignored by these people. 3. There is an idealist bent about their take that ignores the limitedness of conscious function and the effects of noncon structure. 4. They are very cut off, many visibly so, though Karen is not. 5. The deeper principle is that culture is a subcategory of nature. Do away with imaginary opposition. Encultured body is an inflection of natural body. That way of thinking it is very fruitful. The spiritual is an inflection of the physical. Here I have a thought - I mean, I have it again more seriously - that I could talk to Mark about mind and land - I'm thinking that because of the way Mark pays attention when I talk and does not when Lise talks - meaning that he can recognize the difference between deeply and shallowly founded speech. I am wanting to go over Margo's head because she and her whole fac don't get anything I'm saying - I need another venue - I will keep saying it where they don't hear it and then later I'll be able to say it to people who do hear it - But [my college] is not high end enough - Congeneris Institute for Mind and Land - organic intelligence in contact with world - dissociated bodies rule the world. They hate, fear, and oppress bodies that aren't dissociated. They cannot use and they neglect the gifts of those who aren't dissociated. I want a way to promote the giftedness of those who are in contact and love the world. My job is to bring heaven to earth. I am earth's warrior. Left-hand man speaking.
I was with Eliz this morning looking at picture of Texas. She got into her truck this summer and drove and camped for two months making little paintings and bought a house from one day to the next without asking anyone. It's a big corner garden. Chihuahuan desert, dry cool winters, hot May and June, rainstorms July, August, September, growing season to the end of October. Adobe house, simple. Long ramada. Afterwards I zipped up the hill and down the hill to OB and bought a Bauer bowl very pale celadon ringed like my dark brown one, $60. I meant to pierce it but maybe not. I'm still speeding. Margo writes that she thinks reincarnation has to be so. It's her explanatory frame. That discourages me. I'm ignoring evaluations. Yesterday. Japatul Road with Tom. He didn't know the country south of 8. We walked down the Pine Creek trail and sat silent for maybe 20 minutes. After I had lain listening I came to and could see. Until then not. It was very quiet. Cheep cheep cheep cheep one bird at a distance regular as a digital alarm. One caw of a crow. The very loud zooming lines of a fly. Tom was driving and drove carefully until a stretch of mountain curves where he had a local on his tail. He was taking those curves too fast and I had to say something, which put him into a rage that he caught back admirably. We were friends again not too far the other side of Alpine. What I was noticing before that happened was the remarkable feeling of peacefulness I had last time after the oak meadow. Why I'm discouraged about Margo is I won't be able to get her to see any of the metaphysics/epistemology of it. She has no background. I wrote a whole book about it. Paul Churchland didn't get it.
It's a kind of crisis. It means I can't really set up that program. I can't do it in such a way that M wd be anything but fake-supporting it.
27 So then I patiently wrote Margo and said, basically, You are never going to get it and neither are any of the rest of you so we'll just do what we can. (If you really wanted to know you'd read my book, which I know you are not going to do.) No clue what you're missing while you imagine souls reincarnating and forget about werewolves and reptile aliens and all the rest of the discarnate paraphernalia people want to believe in because they're too idle for science. Okay, evals. It's covered over today, chilly. I met an ugly man yesterday, Rodolfo from Chihuahua, wide frog mouth, works for the county, fleet maintenance. Drinker. Why am I telling that. It felt like a measure of my social lostness that I would have coffee with such a person. Logan 29 Sept 1978 = 26. No he wasn't being born when I was writing field. He was about three. Editing the semester magazine. I've used Juliana's husband's beautiful sheep and am slotting new pieces into my excellent template with its rosy cream ground and red and blue lettering. It was a cold day, overcast. At Starbucks they are playing Christmas carols. Michael is looking miserable and unwell, cold. Wrote Charlie's eval and that was the end of my brain's willingness. What else did I do. Keep feeling it's Tuesday as if Thursday was Sunday. The Bauer bowl is a Deco beauty. Pale grey-green with mangos in it. I wrote Logan that it can take a lot of years for people to become contemporaries. Sunday I'm nervous. Tom is half an hour late. But what else. I cannot look at evaluations, and am not done until I do. There is the faculty phone call on the 2nd. Do not want to be in it. Struggling with Margo. I'm bereft tonight. Heartsore. It's as if I'm lonely. I'm lonely. It's not my deaths, it's something that came on me I think in relation to the faculty. I feel an outsider in a way I didn't. It's like the kids at school. They're not my kind. There's no one who's my kind. I don't feel Tom. I'm sorry for him, that he's here and I don't give him that. I look at him in public and wonder whether I could be proud of him. It means I'm not accepting him. Maybe there could be someone else I wouldn't have to be in doubt about.
This soreness is heart. 30 It's a Tuesday nightfall, five o'clock. I'm hanging back from the last 6 evaluations. Want them done and don't want to do them and don't feel free to do anything else. Michael came to this morning. He has been silent every day and this morning was warmed up by Lisa who is happy to accept instruction, so I took my chance and said, There is something I want to say. Then I sighed. You approve, I thought. I said my feelings were hurt because he always changes the subject back to himself and never says, Say more. I said I understand there is something overwhelming to men about women and they can't bear to feel their existence. He said no he sometimes goes away and thinks about something I've said hours later. I asked him whether he's offended when he doesn't speak. He said not at all, he's just not wanting to talk. He said when he was in grade school they were asked to draw a picture of what they wanted to do when they grew up. He drew a mountain with himself on top of it, a little house, an eagle, a lot of animals. He wanted to be a hermit. What about us? said his family. You can visit, he said. It's very cold when the sun goes down. Desert sunset behind the apartment building, orange gold pale green-blue behind the palm trees. - So now I'm happy again. Some hours on the Golden West site. Testing fonts. I can't tell anything about which one to use. Need a printer. M told me another story about grade school, which was that he decided to sit out the pledge of allegiance and was sent to the hall along with the Jehovah's Witness girl who wouldn't recite the pledge for religious reasons. He was taller than anyone else except a couple of the girls and grew his hair long. And what about it. A stubborn lanky child with a straight back, frowning, who brings into school a snake as long as he is. And what about it - I'm going to turn off the light and make love to that truculent spirit.
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