| in america 9 part 6 - 2005 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
15th December 2005 It's three years since I moved into this little house - what has happened - what have I done - in those years. It was just after Ed died. Long trip last summer, travel with Luke, Baja in spring, graduating speech at [my college], semester magazines, body as spirit lecture, language lectures, cognitive significance of birth, wild research, letters to Favor Layla Anna Anne B Michael D Carolyn Juliana Cynthia Susan Logan Jody Corin Larry, Work & Days design, transcribed all of GW and most of SH, a few scans, La Glace reunion, jeep and maintenance, kept up with teeth and annual exams, basic structure of embodiment studies.
GW volume 6 summary. Very intense psychological work. Have given Tom an ultimatum about drink and drugs. Weak self and true self. Love woman investigation. Addiction to pink fuzz and anxiety. Prevented by enslavements of weak self. Instability in relation to Tom and its meanings. Taking myself on, addiction. Crises in connection. Then the trickier part about being right defending me from loving my mother. And its relation to writing. 18 There have been better dreams and I haven't been noting them. Last night a woman with 2 sets of ears, second ear directly behind the first and protruding more. I thought she was pretty. Some nights ago I was at the top of a long very steep hill on a bike, deciding I'd get off and walk down. I'm quickly getting GW vols 6 and 7 ready to post. 7 is just bookwork. 8 taking Tom to High Bar and writing the Auditory Maps paper. Also still transcribing the summer of 1962. 19 Dreamed Frank gave me a big envelope very stuffed with bulky things. When I opened it later there was a long letter, photos, some pots and pans and a pile of folded fabrics I assumed were saris. The photos were of him and me. They were beautiful. In the photos of him he was standing naked. He had a beard. He didn't look as I remember him, better, a different person. There was a photo of me at a concert, on the floor reaching with a microphone. Others were at a steambath as if he took them when we were there together and I had my eyes closed. I look like myself but they are beautiful photos, black and white, very grainy. I look myself at my best. There's also a clipping of an article by someone else. I can't remember what it was about, but it was something about Frank. There was a background feeling of a place, which was a place I've dreamed Frank before, a dream years ago. That feeling of a tone of a place. The sense of the dream was that it was his final goodbye present. He was giving me everything he'd been protecting from me (sigh) through the years. I mean holding onto. Don't know why I sighed there.
Tragedy is the way people die before they die, it's the spoiling of the beautiful spirit they are when they are young. Downfall. That's what people should be learning to change. That has been my mission that I've hung onto since I was a child. That's what the journal was for. Physical destruction which is psychic destruction. Which occurs for cultural reasons too, cultural corruption. Com + rompere, thoroughly to break. Now I've jumped into thinking of Jim in San Felipe because Luke says he's coming at the end of this week. Tom has not been getting work and isn't shaving because there's no hot water in the tent and is coughing since he slept on the ground to get into the tent. He looks ill and old. Vols 6 and 7 are up! Tues 20th Phoned Mary last night. Luke is arriving Friday morning. Mary said "I didn't know you kept a journal." How could she not have known. It must be a hole in her head, like her not remembering the Janzen house on the yard. I said she is depriving herself of pleasure by not being more interested in what I do. She said she wants me to be interested in her first. I said it's not my job to be interested in her, it's her job to be interested in me and it's my job to be interested in Luke. I said I was grateful to her and Ed for not interfering with me and Frank. She said Louise Block had said, You and Ellie are more like sisters than mother and daughter. - Seeing Tom the other day put me off - still picking him up at a charity gate - grizzled and spewing germs into the air - whipped - apologizing - begging - whining about why they aren't sending him out at work - and now rushing to hang up because I didn't want to send him off with Luke for the day on Saturday. He's angry I won't let him drive the jeep when I'm not with him - he has no means to fix it - I'm fed up with him having no means - but the way I was fed up the other day was something else - when he has no means but is good looking, stud daddy, then I'm satisfied to look at him - what it means is quite chilling. It's been a long time without sex, much of it without contact, even. He hasn't had money for 3 years. I've been faithful, I've waited, I've driven him here and there, taken him to the VA, brought him home to the mission, hoped when he hoped, taken his disappointments. Reading Susan's Sally Mann / Sharon Olds piece last night I let myself feel just a tiny opening, just a tiny slit crack into what it would be like to be with someone I honor - someone who works hard, someone who does what I do, is racked with effort to be what the best are - someone who has built a life in honor - knows other people who do that, isn't a derelict, doesn't sink into disgrace again and again. What I felt was that I'd love such a person even on a day when he was grizzled and ill. I don't mean I think Susan could be that to me, and her essay isn't necessarily so good, but when I found myself reading a text of hers after this long time it was as though I felt a little opening shaped like that [small drawing] in my chest - I imagined what it would be like if she could. I imagined loving someone's spirit. I imagined loving someone's blazing self. And then I think it's not that Tom isn't honorable, though he is not, but that I don't love him. I don't love the spirit he is. I have loved it. I remember loving it, and in those days he wasn't more honorable than now. I think he tricked me into loving him that way, and I've undone the trick. And now I'm living loveless and it's hard on me. I see myself in the gym mirrors so thick-necked and grey. The one in my dream wasn't that one. 21 Susan sends me a piece - she calls it thieves but it's not - the prologue a baby's horror of her mother and sense of the presence of "the light of the real mother." Then the story of Grace. Lust. So well written and yet wrong. So hip and stylish and yet somehow wrong. It thinks it's love and isn't love.
- This morning I finished Jan-Sept of 1962, from Frank's first Christmas to the beginning of Sexsmith. Now all that's left for Still at home is filling in the non-Frank parts from the beginning of Frank July 61 to Dec 61, plus some day entries from March 1961 in the 5-year diary. I've done most or all of the scans. There's more I want to find in relation to the time - find and feel. I guess write commentary. For instance the moment I knew I'd broken with my family is recorded as nothing. "I cried a few gluey tears." - What I have been leading up to is the idea that the maintenance of continuity, a vital connection, between the childhood vision and adult experience is part of the obligation of a moral man. Wendell Berry in The hidden wound. 22nd Thursday. Luke is tomorrow, Eliz's cocktail party tonight. I've pretty much finished transcribing SH. Something like 456 pages. 5 vols plus Frank. I've hardly wanted to do anything else. Disgusted with having to detour into Richard's mess. Keep refusing to do it. Or to start evals. Yesterday there were 15' waves, 20', they said. Tom and many other people went to look. At OB this morning standing on the pier looking over the rail at reduced but still heavy dark grey-green waves. Between sets white foam like Queen Anne's lace, that after a while shrank to connected nets of very fine white lines that held their form quite a long time. Tom was disgruntled because 1) I refused to go to Bud's on Christmas, 2) I said what I did about not wanting him to take Luke out in the jeep, 3) something else, probably that I feel he's a screw-up. I was disgruntled because he's broke and there's no end to it and it means he's trying to get me to leave. - Only when we look at the most elite scientists - members of the National Academy of Sciences - do we find a strong majority of atheists and agnostics. Those who see supernatural beliefs as a cultural anachronism require a new theory of why we are religious - one that draws on research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology. Paul Bloom Is God an accident, Atlantic Monthly Dec 2005 10-112. Distinction between physical and psychological, 6-month-old babies understand physics of objects, social interests of newborns, early psychological understanding, different subnetworks, social more recent. Therefore we are able to imagine 'bodies' distinct from 'x'. "World of goals and desires." Personhood staying as body changes. Children believe in soul survival more than adults do. Hypertrophy of social cognition. We see agency, purpose, intention, design, where it isn't. Stewart Guthrie Faces in the clouds. Sam Harris The end of faith. - Sea mist coming and going today. 23 Little party at Eliz's. I let Rue lick my face. I went to sit on the floor with him and look into his squared-off little face and he put out his tongue and licked my mouth one-two-three-four-five times, a different wipe each time, picking up the tastes of olive dip, shrimp, gorgonzola, garlic jam. It was my first time at Eliz's house since she's been married. There was the fire, there were her little pear paintings, there was the acanthus spotlit next to gravel through the dining room doors. But the room was no longer perfect. The piano is gone, the old couch is gone. There are out-of-period bookshelves dominating the room floor-to-ceiling over the east wall. There's a modern sofa. The round dining room table is replaced by a white 50s thing. But in the midst Eliz happy, softer at the corners of her mouth. It was a nice party. Herbert taking pictures, very dishy; big doctor Eames, Rick's friend; Eliz's thin well-to-do mother, pale little face, pale eyes, a lady; Bill from next door; Eames' brown-eyed wife competing with me; and Rick standing watchful. At the end of the party we were all gathered around the table. I was talking about the journal project, privacy. The unusual sensation of holding all ears. Then the moment leaving, when I opened the front door onto white Point Loma fog spotlit next to a shrub. The brick path with its shrub-smells leading away into the dark. The gate repaired and with a wooden latch - Rick's repair. Oh Eliz's perfect room, where I was sometimes with Tom and the fire. The last time I left it, on the way to Vermont last January, early morning with firelight under the door. 24th Thick mist. Luke asleep under the wet down bag out on the roof. My boy is thin and pale, and when he's eating freezes with pain in two teeth. We're solemn together. He went to bed in black fleece, well dressed even for sleep. His beautiful $400 Asolo boots so well designed they look like something grown not made. Two days before Luke came Louie phoned him. San Felipe, Monday 26th I am in my bed in sun risen over the dune. Warm enough to take off my sweater. There is the little crackle of Luke's cracker package. Yesterday we started packing when it was light and were on 94 driving north by 9. Fog burned off as we got into the beginning of the mountains. Tecate on Christmas morning. We were both silent and morose. The spectacular stretch of ancient mountain was hazed over with smoke from a chaparral fire. In creek bottoms the willow was lovely, autumnal. Further on, after Ensenada, the slopes and passes that had been ravishing with flowers were more or less dull. But then we stopped in Independencia to eat something, sat with two dirt bikers from San Luis Obispo who were going to their house in San Felipe. Eating seemed to have given us our wits back. I put on Cielo y Tierra and we came down into the beautiful Valle la Trinidad in tender light and growing happiness. All the plant zones - the manzanita zone, the barrel cactus zone, the cholla zone, the pass that's agave heaven, and then as we were dropping on the eastern flank, the ocotillo zone. The checkpoint with its dark-faced young Indio soldiers. All sorts of pretentious development along the San Felipe road. Pop's Camp. Here we are. Just enough daylight left to set up camp. I make the beds while Luke puts up the tent. I light my beautiful new candle lantern. By 6 it's black dark. Luke lying on his made bed saying he hasn't seen the Milky Way like this for so long a time. We take the lantern and go up the hill to knock on Jim's door. Pat's gone. It's the first thing I see. His house has turned into a bachelor's den. But there he is talking with energy, his square broken dirty hands on the table, amazing hands in which the short square fingers seem to be bent in different directions. 27th Silent morning. So silent I hear a fly - no it's a very distant beach bike probably. The trees in this wash are the color of sand. Last night we had a hot fire Luke was proud of. He'd made the stone ring and raked up the dried twigs in our tent yard into a heap and found two thick logs of driftwood, and then later went up the hill and brought down an armful of Jim's wood. We sat together on his bed very pleasingly warm staring at the fire and sometimes lying back and looking up at the stars, which had rotated a surprising distance between six and nine. He's relaxing. Kvetching some about how I used to be. Two crows flew over just now, knocking. There's the ocean a blue band so far out now that I can't hear it. I love when it comes in at night and chuckles out of sight. What I loved most yesterday was the way, just after dusk, dewfall brought out the scent of one of these desert trees, an acrid spice, intoxicating. One sharp little cheep. Between 16 and 21 Luke went to the Greek Islands every summer, he says. I should write down all the places he has been. How is he at 35. He's not the stud muffin he was, he's showing wear. There is a fuzz of black hair on his chest, which used to be smooth. He has coasted and it shows. He's thin, none of that lovely muscle pad on his chest. And I - not to spare myself - am wanting to apologize to him for being uglier than I was. I move so badly in sand, staggering beside the tent, pitching about. But this spot is working its magic on my belly fat, which I am peeing away - long pees, surprisingly long. What does it mean about San Diego, that belly needs to pad up there and not here. The temperature at this moment is perfect. A subtle breeze. I'm writing in sunglasses sitting up in my bed. Sleeping in touch with night. I don't have much to say to the stars but like to know they're there. And like the touch of the air. The first night here I was awake a lot and tried looking at my vision, the small marks and motions, and then suddenly formed into a yellow sunset on an ocean I thought of as Greek. I am not able to sustain it. It closes with a jerk when I add attention, try as if to focus on it. 28th Sleeping here, I have a substantial night. Things happen. The air is eventful. It's cooler now. It's somehow warmer. There is a little cut to the stream of new breath in my nose. Orion has traveled west and now Pegasus is hanging over the ocean. That bright one is Sirius. The ocean has come nearer, or it is far away and silent. I am in my bed drinking tea. Luke I think is sitting on this bed drinking tea too. What did I realize at night - how much I am scorning myself for being ugly - for floundering in sand - for having grey dry hair - for having blubber at my waist. When I talk to people like Brad and Lisa I'm watching whether they are repelled. Subtly. And aware that watchfulness might be the real reason they look away at something else. Gulls are making a racket feeding on the ocean - there I get my new binocs - no they're pelicans. 29th What is it with Luke and his business planning. When he talks about it he sounds so cut off, so British. So abstract. He talks about 'information products'. Some kind of intervention. I could try focusing it with him. There I hear the crackle of his bag and see that he has put Focusing down and is opening Tom Clancy. I dreamed - this is the only part I remember - that I was in a public place somewhere - there had been something about Tom and another woman? - and I kissed Michael Duke on the corner of his mouth. He said his doctor had said he would stop being contagious in about 6 months. He said his feeling toward me was changing. I stood against him with my back against his front and stretched upward with my arms. I was stretching my spine. What I feel about it is that it's his beautiful straight spine. Have been wanting to do yoga. Not 'wanting' maybe but feeling toward it instead of the gym. There is a strain about the gym that spoils my sleep. Friday 30th Quiet, quiet. The sea's far out. Luke in his bed reading Tom Clancy. The jeep standing with its hatch open to the sun. A hard night. My shoulders and arms ache at night. Cd not discover why. Lay there. Evening with Brad and Lisa had a cost. Luke was pleasant and impressive. Stood slicing garlic professionally because salsa was what he wanted. I liked the trick of sharpening his knife on the bottom of the mug. He had climbed the mountain, which made him king of the gathering. Everyone was careful not to ask what I do. Brad was surprised to hear Newfoundland and Nova Scotia are in Canada. "I knew they were over there but I didn't know they were in Canada." Lisa was girlishly pleasing. He has an x-ray developing company in San Luis Obispo, and she helps in the office. Her twenty year old daughter is doing well in real estate. Her dad died ten years ago, and Brad's mom died two years ago of Valley Fever. "Passed away." (Valley Fever is a spore in the ground in the interior valley of California. It got into her lungs and became a fungus in her brain.) Now Brad's dad and her mom have got together. She finds it weird. They have a cabin in the Sierras, a Wrangler that stays here, an RV, a half acre of fruit trees. The house is large and ugly. Fine local plaster but small fake-mullioned windows from Home Depot. Crenellations. Hideous kitchen cabinets. A suburban house Luke said. Yes. No sense of light. It could have been a good house for the same amount of money. 4 bathrooms. - Death, anxiety of death. My computer not coming on because the battery is low, because the adapter is broken? I don't know but it scares me when I lift the lid and it does not light up and hum. The way I flounder. The way I was having to stop and rest climbing Jim's front path. The hard ache. The way I lose words - have lost many since Luke has been here. The wicked black nostril hairs. The way my distance eye at this moment isn't seeing distance. The way when I have food in front of me my appetite sinks. The way if I use spit to touch my clit I get a kidney infection. The margin cavities on my gumline. The ridges on my fingernails. Dry eyes. The lack of inner energy, mental energy, feeling energy. The money I owe and expenses coming. Tom's failing into dependency. If I want my hair to be okay I need collagen shampoo and they aren't making it any more. Susan dumping me again. Not wanting to talk to Louie. The roughness of my chest skin. The hideous polyp-thing on my inner thigh. Belly flab. - What's the energy I have for saying these. They're what I have. They're where I am. Dismay that I'm dying. It's the opposite end of the arc isn't it. What I gained at 12-18 I'm losing now. And it will get worse. So much worse. And I don't have a nest prepared. Nowhere. Sore heart. And I can't charm and attract. What do I have left. Kindness I want to say, but best kindness takes energy of attention. 31st Last night when the fire was established, a deep bed of coals and some big logs flaming on them, I said carefully to Luke that when he talks about his large plan he sounds distanced and abstract, and that I thought there is probably someone else [in him] who doesn't like the plan and wants to do something else. He says yes that's probably so but he doesn't know how to find out what it wants. I said, I know four ways to do it, straight off the top, and would he like to try one. Yes. I got off the bed-foam and sat on the sand by the fire so he could have the two ends for a chair dialogue. Let him decide who the two persons are. Thinker and doer he said. I was aware I wasn't quite ready for my role but I just moved from one thing to another as prompted. I said, Begin as thinker and ask doer what it would like to do. Doer says he just wants to do: he's exterior. He wants to just be meeting situations. Doing what he's good at. Thinker says the plan is important. He sounds so cut off, so thinky, dry, remote. When he is in the doer position he reminds me of someone, he's beautiful, open, feeling. I ask doer to look at thinker, say what he sees. He's surprised: he says, You look tired. Thinker says rationally that he will try to accommodate doer's "unique talents" but doer has to get with the mutual program. Doer says unconvincingly that he will. I'm thinking we haven't got to what doer wants to do so I ask him what he's feeling. Sit so you can feel what you're feeling. He sits straighter. He says he feels tight. Where? In his torso. Alright put all your attention there. Breath into it with a breath of small curiosity. He's silent, goes away into it. Did anything happen? It's less tight. Alright just go into what you're feeling and ask whether there's something you're wanting to do. He's there silent on and on eventually I put more logs on the fire. He turns to sit facing the flames. After a while he says, You know, there's a third, too, it's a stone at the bottom of a well, and it has taken the fire with it. It's very black and shiny. When I say something about it being young he says, How did you know it was young? "They generally are." He said it was surprisingly young, an infant. Preverbal? No, not preverbal. Will it talk to you? No it won't talk, it's just peering out of the darkness. It absolutely won't talk. It's cold at the bottom of the well. At this moment there is Luke writing in his red notebook. After a while he lay down next to me, pulled his new red-blue-yellow beach blanket over him and started to breathe as if he was asleep. He said how beautiful the fire felt on his face. When I went to bed and this morning again I was hearing a song. My teacher --- --- ---, carry me home. It's Paul Simon. It was the way I felt Joyce in me. Oh Joyce I am so sorry you aren't still somewhere to talk to. To tell about how it is when I become you. How it was last night was full and sharp. I was feeling this closeness to the core is what I have been missing. This is the full self. I was looking at Luke with such love and longing for the wellbeing of his spirit. It began when I had an impulse I didn't see the use of but went with anyway. I said that when we were driving in April Louie had suddenly said that this January Luke will have a daughter. This January? Yes. He's silent and then says he thinks a lot about that, but it was last January, February. An abortion. Was that the beginning of the end with her? Maybe. He thinks of it surprisingly often. No regrets. He sounds regretful, I say. Alright, yes. Just there a smell of the sea and a small black scotty with tags clinking. Vancouver too many condos and small dogs. He likes Hawaii. I dreamed I was getting back with Greg. I thought happily of his beautiful hard-on. He said I could have other lovers too. Oh heaven. I was careful not to pry about the small black stone at the bottom of the well. Should I track it with him? No. Will he? No. Leave it for a while. Was there a moment? Yes. Two? No. Three? No. Four? Yes. Something bad happened. Yes. Was it something I did? No. Was it in Canada? Yes. When I left him on the bus? Yes. That whole period after we moved. No. Losing Roy. No. One decisive moment? YES. Was it sexual. No. Fear? No. Despair? Yes. I said, What did it feel like in the well. He said ownlie. I feel lownlie without Eillie. That moment? No. The bus? No. Will you tell me about it. The betrayal of happiness; death, missing. What I did to him was really evil. YES. So it was all those bad things. No. A decisive moment. Yes. Surely the moment in Diana's cabin. No, earlier. Can you tell me what moment. Yes. With one card. Yes, (devil). Was I there? No. Was it a dream? No. It's his soul that's at the bottom of the well. Yes. Has he found something this morning. YES. Something else I dreamed. I was going to a hair salon to have the front of my hair bleached white with a few blue strands in it, and the rest of my hair cut to shoulder length. [Opposite pages, Gendlin notes: History and culture only elaborate an animal body that lives interactionally directly in situations and continues to perform vital and noticeable functions in speech and thought. Experiencing ... Its articulation is itself a further experiencing. We can let a ..... come in any spot where we pause, and we can think from it, even if we don't write it. People find that never again are they just unable to speak from this felt sense. The various relations between sensing and speaking have not been well studied until now, because only representation was looked for. once one experiences this "speaking-from," the way it carries the body forward becomes utterly recognizable. We can also let a ..... come at any juncture, and think from it deliberately. We often want to do this, not just to rephrase, but to think further. How can you tell whether someone got your point exactly? You can tell only from how they go on from it. We will move beyond the subject-object distinction if we become able to speak from how we interact bodily in our situations. My ..... is my bodily sense of living (planning, feeling, being about to act ...) in my situation. A ..... is very exact and precise ... To think from it ... you must let new phrases come from it. ..... comes to imply more and more ... an unseparated multiplicity, a single ..... We can employ the ..... to let any theory speak from our being here. Without this return, every theory is destructive. It knows the language, since it understands and rejects the lines that came. So it is not preverbal. Rather, it knows what must be said, and it knows that these lines don't say that. 17 The ..... knows what we want to say. That finer sense of the situation ... We can know whether silencing or maximizing is happening, by sensing how each little step affects the inarticulated experience by which we began. 18 I asked what instances the man had given ... If I heard his instances and especially how he went on from them, I might ... If we enter into the intricacy, we can move in many further ways that do not involve what his general assumption would seem to require ... I want to hear from the much more precise ..... From it we could go on. 19 When we have retroactively filled in the logical steps, we have done very much more than might appear. Each logical interpolation is actually a further development of the whole mesh, and a sequence of them can vastly expand the sense we are making. Now only can we then communicate and build the world. Before that stage, the expansion enables us to sense anything soggy, dishonest, or too easy. We can also sense anything that is still opaque, or merely avoided. The process of thinking has these and many other internal criteria which we employ all the time, and can employ freshly when logical steps expand the sense we made. 20 This mode of language requires that we enter the ..... and constantly check, not for correspondence, but for carrying forward. 20 This mode of language also has major political implications, because it can free people to speak from how they are living, instead of being silenced by the common categories. We cannot present language in terms of the artificial scheme of signifying, symbolizing, reference, denotation, an external relation between words and what they "stand for." ... But we can let how language works and moves tell us about how language works and moves. 21 Speaking from the intricacy carries it forward. In casual speech "when the moves come smoothly" "A great deal functions implicitly ... We encounter some of what it was, if we let a ..... come, but of course that is not how it functioned without one." His example of meeting someone on the street and knowing exactly how to greet them and greeting them appropriately. "You don't need to take the time to lift out this and that." ... "governed by that whole multiplicity" Already integrated, he calls it crossed. He uses "implicit" as the magic word that actually means structural. A ..... is very exact and precise ... To think from it ... you must let new phrases come from it.. . ..... comes to imply more and more ... an unseparated multiplicity, a single ..... experiencing ... that flow of feeling, concretely, to which you can every moment attend inwardly, if you wish the role of felt experiencing in all our conceptual operations are not illegitimate 'biases'. They are natural and proper functions. 5 in intro to E we can't think without felt meanings whenever we feel something, whenever we mean something, whenever we live in a situation, whenever we think E 14 'inward sentient living', 'inward receptivity of a living body' within experiencing lie the mysteries of all that we are 15 our forms of living 'gives so little specifying response and interpersonal communion to our experiencing, so that we must much of the time pretend that we are only what we seem externally, and that our meanings are only the objective reference and the logical meanings of our words. 15-16 we can endlessly differentiate it further. given a sentence or a situation, an observation or a behavior, a person or a moment's speech by a person, or anything, we can focus on our experiencing of it, and we can say what it means in a sentence, in a paragraph, or in a book. 16 When you are focusing well, you are glad about the coming of any feeling. You can take this attitude because, many times before, you have reexperienced feelings like that changing and resolving themselves physically in a very few minutes.]
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