| in america 7 part 2 - 2004 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
26 December 2004 Chilly and overcast. Sunday morning. We didn't go to the hills yesterday. There was smoke from under the jeep, oil dripping out of something running back toward the muffler. So we went home slowly through La Jolla Village. Why don't we stop at Wind and Sea I said. Naw, he said. When we came to the street that leads to the ocean he turned down it. There we were. We sat all day on the orange blanket in our sunglasses. Late in the afternoon I brought down the Coleman and we heated the spaghetti left from Christmas Eve. There was good surf, three breaks, waves overhead often. Oldtimers out for Christmas Day. Tom showed me how to spot longboarders, sitting higher than the others, or else by the way you can see their feet on the board. They don't work the wave with skateboard moves, they stand royally balanced by unusual shifts of for instance a section of their mid-back. As they come in toward shore - when they feel the weight of the wave on the back of the board, Tom said - they step forward. When they want to stop they step backward so the nose rises and the back of the board sets them down into the water. Above us at the edge of the parking lot was an artificial tree decorated with silver beer cans. Just at the north end of the lot was a table at which someone was carving a turkey. There was another whole turkey next to him. Is that it for yesterday? I'm living poorly. I don't see and feel. I'm soul-less, except for regretting that I'm so. I don't look at Tom, I don't see and feel him. I touch him, I'm always touching him, but blindly. It's just for the warmth. In the photos Tom takes I look so bad I wonder whether I've sold my soul. I felt Michael a couple of times during the summer, but Michael is a dead end. Michael has ruined himself. Michael reads newspapers all day long. But even now I feel a little thing in relation to him - what - heart, sore heart, regret that he did not make something better of such beauty. - Luke phoned this aft because he was talking to his other family. It's awkward. I try to find something to talk about. What was the best present you bought? We fall silent. I can't help saying mmmm ... It happens three times, I can't control it. It's a helplessness. Then he says he has to go, he's been hogging the phone. He doesn't remember which book arrived before he left. He wants to tell me he bought a silver bracelet for Kim's mother, and I say, You found a family. I mean, fair enough, I haven't done it. There are other things I can do, maybe you'll hear about them at my funeral. Tom said, as we were sitting on the rocks together at Wind and Sea, You say things, and they are true, but you say them with no conception of what it means to people to hear them, and then you don't know why you never hear from them again. 27 Images of cars - There was a tsunami in the Indian Ocean but one of the biggest stories [on TV news] is about returning gifts after Christmas. 28 It's raining. Woke at 4:30 from dreaming that I and someone else were in a vast snowy landscape, vast like a map, looking for a bear site. Not bears themselves, but bear spots. I was feeling I'd always been able to find them when I was on my own. I would be able to just go to them. We should be looking on this side (west) of the Rockies, I say. We come to a place with a small cairn of rocks and some feathers, Indian people. This is a bear place, I think. We copy the motion of flicking bits of something toward the spot (the gesture Michael showed me with pinches of tobacco). I'm speaking to the Indian people. Then I'm in an underground room carrying a baby. I'm seeing a shake in the ceiling. It's going to come down. I'll be able to take the baby out. When I'm awake I'm lying there feeling that the central fact of my lostness is that I don't fight for my work. That's all I should be thinking about. It's a mushy spot in my clear brain, like the mushy spot about weak men. Yesterday, after I threw out my tree, I was cleaning up newspaper around the recycling box and found a feather with quite a lot of white fluff and a sharp black tip. I took it to Starbucks to ask Michael what it was. He said it was from a feather duster, see, they dye the tip, even a raven's feather is not that black, and they split the shaft to attach it. 29 There was a moment last night - Tom was here having supper, messing with the internet, watching TV - I was next to him on the couch, listening to him eat like a piggy, disgusted, alienated - when he turned his eye on me, unexpectedly bright, and said You have a look on your face that is sad, pissed, bored, what's going on? Then we had a little rumble about whether to watch TV New Years Eve. He said I'm demanding. I said, Tom, you should get this straight, I am not demanding, I am what I am and you take it as demanding. And so on. I was satisfied with my statement. Pinned, I said (meaning he was). The moment I'm referring to, a bit later, was like a little gap in the present showing through to a Christmas holiday moment on his bed some evening in the Maryland. A lit moment is my feeling of it, lit into wholeness of being together. The real thing. I'm willing to know it was illusion, was it illusion? Because if it is not illusion it is the thing to hold onto. Then at the end of the evening as he was going to go out the door into the rain I was saying he always leaves people setting a hook. I watch him doing it with me and with everyone, he says something meant to keep them attached to him. He said no he says something to leave them feeling good. Maybe also that, I said. It was dawning on me that I might have got it wrong. Pinned, he said. It rained hard during the night. The sky has cleared this morning. Do I have anything to say about Cousin Rosamund third reading? Fairytale. Pleasure as she always is. Oliver defines moral intelligence as knowing how to keep people from harm. There's quite a lot of considering how to do that in her books, but Rebecca herself seems often to have found it necessary to do harm. There's also the way she makes supernatural heroes of Richard and Rosamund, who foresee that there'll be need of a grand sacrifice further down the way. She was working something out, but what? She wanted her beloveds to be pure and she wanted them not to be really dead. I'd like her to have written the way DR wrote, telling her own real story with that tenacity of pleasure and desire and moral analysis. She wanted to be rich, she was such a gourmand that she wanted everything good. DR wanted something else. DR was defending something, what she said she was defending, the value of being at all. Rebecca is more fashionable but she was also more old-fashioned: she was Victorian in wanting a moral framework, wanting 'life' to mean something. Dorothy said the modern thing, that consciousness is what means something. But Rebecca was more inclusive, she wanted the countryside in her work, the way she anchors this book to the seasons on the river, and, in the city, to the pleasures of Rose's household. Whenever I fly to Chicago and see the towers on the lakeshore I think of her Christmas in the hotel, snow flurries against the window above the river of headlights flowing both ways. She's like Louie in wanting always to go on loving her mama and papa. HG Wells didn't capture Dorothy but he captured her.
Here's my task for today: what to say about Amanda. I'm at Starbucks having to keep moving my table to keep sun on my legs. Susan Sontag died yesterday at 71. 1933-2004 Amanda gives, and wants to give, something real. I like to throw out student work but I don't like to throw out all of hers. She gives something I need and she finds it in agony. That's the real moral work. She lets herself know how crappy people are and she wants to save something from the ruin of meaning that is American culture. She's responsible. That's the fact. She's also inexperienced in looking after herself. Wanting to make sure she knows the worst she sometimes accuses herself too much. She risks herself. We need to keep her alive long enough for her to find a balance that doesn't sell out. 31
1st January 2005 Point Loma, Eliz's house. Tom's here sleeping on the couch. I'm in the old corner of the patio that is the only place that gets sun now that the ficus is four times its size. We have had bacon and eggs, we've lain with the week's New York Times on the couch, we've fallen asleep together. Last night we lit a fire and wrangled. It's not the worst it has been. It's the first time we've been in the same house overnight (since 2002). Tom put on Nora Jones' Come away with me and remembered what he felt listening to it alone, when everyone was gone. I talked about feeling soulless. He hesitated and hedged and said he's worried about me - the book, and the way I don't do anything, and the way I cover my mirrors and say I'm ugly though in fact I'm beautiful. I wanted him to be wise and contain me but he was clueless and defensive and I couldn't unfold very far. He said I'm not there. I said that's true, it's why my journal is bad now. I said when I got home from the hospital I was shut down and I stayed shut down until I was in my thirties. When I said it, I sighed. Tom said, but he didn't abandon me. I said he has a hole in his head about that. And here it is, a new number and a breeze in the ficus leaves and sun on the stone chimney and curvy leaves fallen on the brick and sun like a spotlight on the mountain marigold and the bay tree standing quivering. The sun is in a pewter haze above the Monterey pine in the next block, not a haze - some other word - nimbus? Oh more tea. So what do I know. If I leave him I'm bereft. His conversation appalls me and that isn't going to change. I think he's mostly too old for sex. Just being connected to me again has improved him, he's losing his pot and he's able to get up from a chair without wincing. He's making money. I like touching him. I need to walk into a whole new life and it can't happen if I'm holding onto him. I'd like to be an open heart again but, but. My questions are: Should I keep my reserve but go on keeping company because it's better than nothing, should I go cold turkey because it's the only way anything new can happen, should I commit myself to the truth of the best moments and fight to have an open-hearted life with him, should I keep waiting as is, in grey night of soullessness. It seemed to say yes to the latter. The tips of the Monterey cyprus are quite pointed up there, hunting. Boston ivy's quirky threads on the open gate. Shadows of, I should say. - Then it happens that we have a conversation. I start by saying I'm going to tell him what happens to women when they're with him. This only applies to women who are in love with him, I say. The first thing is, there is nothing they want more than to stay in love with him. But there are some number of things that happen. The first is rage. They get hit by massive unjust anger. If they are not in love with him they can handle it but if they're in love with him they're open and they get blasted. If they don't want to get blasted they have to shut down. Second is promises. He makes a lot of promises, promises on all sorts of scales. His record of keeping his promises is about 12%. That may be too high. His guy friends can say, that's just Fendler, but a woman who is in love with him will want to believe him. If she starts to say, that's just Tom, she is shutting down. Third, sex. If a woman isn't in love she can have good sex, but if she is in love she won't be able to have sex unless she's feeling connected. She won't be able to have cold sex. He has been very unskilled about sex, he has had a lot of drunk sex, a lot of sex with strangers. A lot of sex he was paying for. He knows very little about sex. That means a woman has to shut down sexually when she's with him. Fourth is lies. This one is related to promises. There are two possibilities with lies. There are the ones she knows about and the ones she doesn't. The ones she knows about make her feel like a fool and the ones she doesn't know about make the relation go dead. She's just bewildered, she doesn't know why the relation has gone dead. There's another one, what is it - money. If he doesn't take care of business there's too much insecurity. People shut down when they are insecure. That's a summary, I said all of it with more explanation. I noticed I was speaking in a strong voice, articulate. He was defensive etc and I was insisting that none of it is about judgment. I'm telling him what happens to a woman who's in love with him, he forces her to shut down. It's information. I said, does he do that on purpose or in ignorance? He said he only does what he has to. To remain himself. I said I know that's how it seems to him but he's blind to the effect it's having on women he's with. He needs women and thrives with women but doesn't have a sense of skill in making them able to keep an open heart with him. He doesn't have a sense of skill because he doesn't look to the effects of what he does. He closes his eyes. He's so afraid he will have to give up being himself. He went back to various protests I don't remember and then said I talk about him as if he's deeply flawed but he's not. Then I laugh quite a lot. I say firmly he's very deeply flawed. In what way, he asks. Sure you want to know? I say. Alright, you're deeply flawed in relation to love. That's the one I was just talking about, and even more deeply flawed in relation to work. His flaw is that he didn't commit himself to his talent. At some point, I don't know where, he let go of it. The result is that he doesn't have a life. He doesn't have a body of work he can look at. His self-esteem is always fragile for that reason. He has to care too much how people see him because he hasn't had a life with his talent. I deliver this with such confidence and clarity that it seems the final word. I am saying it without a sense that it will make a difference either to him or to me. It's the truth, is all. In fact I'm not sure he isn't right when he says he's been what he wants to be and there's nothing wrong with him. But if I say that it's as if my depth shuts its door, and my time with Tom turns into nothing. If I accept the authority of that knowledge my life, not only with Tom, but altogether, wakes up saying, let's go, now we're moving ahead again, now it makes sense, the whole story does. As if it's far beyond sentiment of love, I'm a spirit who has accepted to go into abeyance when Tom isn't moving ahead, a sort of vow that has led to long sacrifice. Is that true? It says yes. Am I willing? I'm not alive when I'm not doing it. Is that how it's been for Louie with me? No she wanted something for herself it says. And I'm selfless in this? Yes. And that's what you want me to be? Yes. Sacrificial. Yes. Will I die of sacrificing for Tom? No. It's grown up. Yes. That's why you don't want me to have sex. Yes. After a while I took it further. I said, I think maybe all the things you do to a woman that make her shut down and stop loving you are the same things that you do to your talent. 3rd It's raining on Eliz's country cottage. Morning of the Monday after the Christmas gap - the ten days out of time. Long long ago I was holding Tom after he gave me a TV set and I decided to give him a Christmas Eve at home. What did I dream - a poplar leaf I wanted to be an envelope for a message to someone, maybe Louie. Moving through a city. An alley corner with people sleeping under snow. Empty streets in a downtown area. I was talking to someone about city planning and what looked to be a derelict young man spoke up after we'd passed to explain something about the planner's intentions. What happened yesterday when we worked with the cards before he had to go back to the mission. They seemed to me to be talking about what he has to do about writing. I'm just supposed to work with him on writing. He could have had a life with his talent. He chose against the possibilities that opened up for us. He didn't see them the way I did. So it's a tragic love story. He didn't fall in love with me the way I did with him. It's as if this tragic story is the basement of my time here, and I've been living without depth because I haven't kept it open under me. It's his trajectory. I'm feeling this as a dimension in any life. It's the dimension of soul because it's where whole life choices are made. It's choice of what kind of being to be. It's not made before birth or in another life, it is made in this life, unconsciously.
5 This week I'm sticking close to the fire. Walking around looking at the house and garden. Weeding some when the sky's clear. Eating bread. Eating bread again for some reason. Did the embod docs. Wasting time. Looking at décor magazines. A bit of linguistics. 6
7th
Saturday 8th The fire-leaves at the windows. Complex perfume of night air. Stone walls. Good lattice. Maple floors. Worn rugs. Tiles. Built-in cupboards and drawers. Reading room. 100-year-old trees. Wet oak bark. Corridor lined with windows onto the garden. An exquisite, intelligent house. The firebox is deep. Somehow the temperature stays even, unlike my little box on the roof, which gets violently cold. The brushy shrubs are so well established they never need any sort of care. In the shade garden the ferns and acanthus stand against darkness in their gleaming and glowing shapes. Eliz's intelligence everywhere, a perfect understanding of the house. Is there anything to say about being in it. I'm spending a lot of money on firelogs. I wake glum the way I do on 5th. There can be open senses here, a background love. It's that. It's a house that is as if a loving person. Grounded love of stone, plants and wood, which is also love of air and light. The garden in rain darkness is walls of texture, a fairyland of subtlety. The house is civilized in the right way, it looks at its mother in gratitude. It's not humble but it's quiet. It's also as if an old person's house. Eliz has been living here with the liking she has for a cultivated old aunt, but she has many more houses in her. Today Tom will show up probably. I should work on the language lectures. More weeding if it dries. A walk. What's the central thing I want to say about language. - Tom hasn't come and I tried what it would be like to feel what I was feeling as if it was my mother. Mama wo bist du. Sore heart. Fear. Unbearable waiting. Pricking my ear if there is a sound. Looking toward the road. Restlessness. Is there anything to be said about the way belonging was in one language and not belonging was in another, and that's the language I still speak and write? Did I feel something like that when I read that English used to be German, ie it was Old German before it was Old English. As if I migrated swiftly through time between not quite three and three? - Here I realize that it's January. Should I say the birthday of this self.
9 January The man who meets me on the plane wants to take care of me - he phones his Mexican foreman as we're landing - we have talked all the way from Chicago - he speaks in Spanish to say we're down - takes my bag and his own to the curb - they'll drop me at my place - he carries my bag upstairs so he'll know where I live - he goes home and looks around and then spends a couple of days on my website - he could email but he comes back into town and knocks on my door - he takes me to dinner at Balboa Park, he says he wants to talk about a project. Next day I show him my gardens. He says: Want to see it now? and drives me to his place in the country. He wants a vegetable garden and a pleasure garden. He also wants to write a book. He understands everything. He's very balanced. He feels me understanding that he understands. He says he has to be away for 6 months on a project in India, do I want to live in his house and get a feel for the site. He will tell his foreman to organize whatever I need. He gives me an advance. I live on his land, walk it, talk to people who know the area. The foreman coaxes me to ride a horse. Mac and I write emails. He writes about India, I write about his land and my work. He comes home unexpectedly. His foreman comes to fetch him without telling me. He comes home late at night and in the morning finds me in his garden. We sit together looking at it. He says please will I continue to live in his guesthouse, he wants my company and will I help him with his book. We have 6 months that way, he writes and makes me find a publisher for Being about. He acts as my agent, it's easy for him. When I have to go to Vermont he takes me to the airport and picks me up. We're always glad to see each other's faces. We light up. What about the tension? We play with it, we stretch it out, there's an understanding. He has a last long assignment away. I say I'll pick him up. I need to get some plants, I say. He comes in at night. We drive back in the moonlight. We go to the garden. We eat together. We don't go to our separate houses. We stay all night under the oaks. What we've sorted out is that he will be the financial planner for the Congeneris Institute for mind and land. I'll be the director. We'll do it together. When we're ready to do that is when he says now and holds out his arms to me. We live among the oaks and golden grass and the horses and we intervene for mind and land. I write and he writes and we invite fine people to his ranch and our relations with anyone are full of generosity and joy. We never stop finding new stories to tell one another. I look at this vision with heartache. It's what I'm capable of and will never have, I'll never have it because there are no such men, or there are such men and they won't want me because I'm deformed, although I'm also many other things. I look at this vision with heartache and I feel myself hedging. I don't want to be stuck wanting something I can't have. I don't want to live the rest of my days in tragic hunger, starvation, arrest. It's a crucifixion without end. I psychologize it, I say it's what I was when I was little, I'm not that now. I was stuck wanting something I couldn't have, it's a structure. It is that too, but it's also true. I'm alone and didn't use to feel it and now I feel it. When I close my eyes to sense the quality of the heart pain I feel the finest of vibration as if within or behind the squeezedness. Then there's a shift to the tight band around the forehead. The process didn't complete but the pain is less. Something I was feeling as I wrote was that the journal project would make that love story impossible. It is too what? That kind of man wouldn't love me if he read my journal, there have been too many other men and I've been too compromised with them. There's something else too - like a shift of viewpoint. Who I am in that story is not who I am in the journal, is that what I mean? The journal tells the story of living my starvation with energy. I can be proud of that but in the story I am not starved. I'm so many ways unsettled. Where to live. If I were in Vancouver I'd have healthcare, Louie, Luke, Rowen, David, Rob, the garden, the beautiful city. But the rain wd make me ill in winter.
Another little voice is saying, if you just let go and loved Tom no matter what, you'd have a home. Do I have that option, I ask. No, it says, Tom doesn't give you that option. What work to give myself to. [The college] can use so little of me and gives me no community and pays me $13,000 a year with no benefits. I am going into old age with no savings, no pension, no health care or dental if I stay in the US. Twenty years of poverty if I live that long, poverty that means I can't afford to do anything or go anywhere. There's a bit of Handel I keep hearing: Sometime let gorgeous tragedy / In sceptered pall come sweeping by.
- Scott is writing impatiently. What do I have to do before next Saturday. - And then:
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10
My eyes find architecture across the room. It needs to be a place with actual smart people. A place with country beauty. Arizona? Northern Arizona. 11th I guess that was a shift yesterday. Tom showed up when work was cancelled. We had a day. Cuddled, listened to Clapton, watched TV, drove to Cabrillo Point and looked at the damp scented scrub in fresh leaf - black sage and wild cucumber flowering, a few yellow brittlebush, a few California poppies, a white small vetch (?) and something with tiny purple flowers. The sea was celadon, purple, silver under banded storm clouds. He talked about writing. The nun when he was 12 who said, Mr Fendler this is very good, you should consider writing as a profession. Finding On the road was discovering writing could be contemporary after the heavy otherworldliness of classical literature. I said I'm waiting for the universe to call on me. He looked good in his new haircut. You're looking rather cute, I said. It's what I do, he said. Took him home as the 10 o'clock news came on. Saying goodbye till after I get back. He asked whether I'd be ashamed of him in the company of doctors. I said I've always been loyal and not hedged and when people in Vancouver asked what my boyfriend does I've said he's a desk clerk in a welfare hotel. But yes it costs me something. I don't want him to write for status though. I think there's still despair in his relation to writing, he doesn't feel he can talk about what matters to him. Is there anything he loves enough to want to tell about it? His opinion, he said. And what am I feeling today? A kind of joy, I think it is. Reading Eliz's copy of Under the Tuscan sun. A right kind of life that exists almost nowhere. Old stone buildings in farmland, a town with long-established people at walking distance. Enough money to buy casually all day long. A love who's a muscular poet and 6'2. Enough personal charm to connect with anyone pleasingly. Enough youth to be able to eat anything without getting fat. Sunrise at the shutter at 5 in the morning. The Milky Way overhead in black silence at night. People everywhere speaking a foreign language. Some reputation as a poet. Easy publication in venues that pay a lot. Most important a landscape that's rightly inhabited and has great human depth in time so there are always discoveries of gifts from other people in the long and recent past. I was looking at Tom's hands yesterday, feeling the intelligence that shows in the wiry spread at the base of his palm. The book says I am not foolish but mistaken to be happy. 13 Yesterday I was so stressed by having errands I was driving toward 5th Avenue saying I'm so stressed. A tight heart. And then cleaning up my little house I was in anguish missing it, not wanting to leave it. There was so much carrying - garbage, compost, recycling box, UCSD books, public library books, suitcase. Then I saw my bike is gone. Someone went to the trouble of sawing off the chain. Was it Michael? Dragging out the Christmas tree and fastening it on the roofrack. Worried about the transmission, can't fix it yet. Downtown to buy tea, ate at Valentines. Then Horton's Plaza to look at professor clothes. Tired. I find cargos marked down to $25 from $55 at the Levi's store. Upstairs a black cashmere hoodie $75 from $150. What I saw in the harsh light of the changing booth was a substantial woman strangely old, a wrinkle on her chin, creases on her neck, intensely sad. My eyes were red. Something is irritating my right eye. Anxiety about the jeep, my house, teeth, eyes, and something else, the way I have cognitive lapses. I saw a common word on a sign, don't remember which, and didn't recognize it. I thought, when I saw it, it's misspelled, and looked at it some more: no that's the way it is spelled. The way I feel the cost of all exertion and don't do things because they will take too much energy. Then I think, I'm only 60 - 59 - and I shouldn't be this old. Then I also think there will be so much falling off that I will have to start getting into the habit of remembering what I have left. Oh the gym will be essential. - At UCSD driving in and out of dead ends, Tom suddenly said, I feel the warthog coming on, give him some strokes quick. A signal moment because Mr Tom had the presence of mind to catch himself - My new cargos and cashmere hoodie and raspberry shell. I looked nice. 14 Friday. Tom's inspiration was that rage could be fixed by praise, cooperatively. I'm wound up in this getting ready to leave. Why do small duties stress me. That's an important question because avoiding them costs me a lot. - A car cutting in front of me last night when I was taking Tom home. I had to slam the brakes. On the way home smoke rising from under the car at stoplights. Heart went into a spasm of fear, which I am feeling now at the thought of my language lecture. What's up? I'm in a sensitive state. Why - because of leaving home in January? I used to be unconscious in this? Fear, fear. A cold spasm. Or else I'm getting to be like Grandma Epp, a nervous person when I'm older. So much little futzing, cleaning the house, packing. Now it's five, twilight. It's done, I guess. Suitcase at the door, cab booked, most of the stuff for the jeep taken out. All of it is effort as if I'm having to be more deliberate than I was, much more. It's as if I'm ready to be taken care of, either that or reduce everything to extreme simplicity. I've lit a fire and can just hear or feel a gentle flapping of the air behind me, warm. It's like having company in the room. At that front window the broad trunk of the oak cracked into small squares, ivy and oak leaves, black oak, is it, small hard oak leaves, round-ended bent straps of the agapanthus. I can't say what's beautiful about it, the disposition of the different shapes of leaf around that marked-up trunk. The language talks are hard - there's so much to say - talking to Tom about them told me the students can make something very odd of what I say. I feel unprepared and yet there isn't nearly time for what I do have prepared.
15 The stress is about all the little doing. Now that I'm ready there's none - it's 4:02 and the taxi is coming at 5 - I went to bed at 9 because I made myself get up at 5 yesterday - and woke at 3, had slept enough, and am sitting with a last fire in a house all in order, with little gifts here and there. Dark French roast in the cupboard, olives in the cleaned fridge, a stalk of scented clematis armandii on the marble tabletop. I look nice in this cashmere hoodie. The sleeves fit tight and it stops at the right place on my rump. And this raspberry shell is a soft fine knit that makes me look as if I have a proper swelling bosom. My style is skateboard matron. Levi's Silvertab - Tom explained that to me - and Charter Club. The look of new clothes. These pants are very loose and constructed. Velcro on the sidepocket flaps, grommets Tom said are to let sand run out if you're at the beach. What I started to say is that, everything done, I'm excited.
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