| in america volume 28 part 1 - 2014 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
2nd March 2014 Borrego Springs While I'm here: 6 months
- It was the end of the month. I sent Tom a note about the new bits on Here2014. He wrote 2 lines back. When I saw them I felt an instant little girlish flush. What, I thought - do I still want this man? Then he followed up with a long miscellaneous playlist. My heart sank in its familiar way. Then another note about the site, this one stiff with unearned cultural reference, turgidly pretentious. "Edward Grieg." It sank all the way into disgust. I've been like Leslie F marrying her hideous trans dwarf pleading to be thought pretty, because I'm disqualified from marrying my match. It's an unfixable tangle in my emotional life. And despite it what I've done, what I am.
4 CD I'm playing these days - Via Crucis - growing on me - bought it for Jaroussky singing Ninna Nanna. Glorietta Canyon yesterday morning wandering with Karin's group counting kinds of plant - that group because Frank Harris was in it. Felt yesterday that men were liking me. Mac was looking at me when he explained things. There was the sweet way Mike put out his hands to take my camera, sunglasses, loupe when I wanted to look through the scope. Best, Frank Harris looking at me across a circle - I think. Any moment in his company, which I will always choose when I can. I'm needing gentleness from men. When I say that, tears. The protective sweetness I hadn't realized I could evoke, that I've so done without.
5 This is the kind of work I was born for. And him - oh him - he sees the world with his heart, and sometimes he speaks it so I can see it too. He tells stories. He cries for the right things. He says I'm studying law for the same reason he did: to help people. "- Isn't my aesthetic what it always was, to make things that give people a sense of human life as worth something." I wish you could meet him. I love him like I love you, he's that amazing. [Jody] [pages of Palm Springs research] - Palm Springs! Starbucks on Palm Canyon Drive, KFC across the road, 76 station across the road, shouts from a car wash, Rocky's Pawn Shop, steady traffic, bus stop, small town main street at the very base of a loose brown heap of rock and dust. Bougainvillea and Natal plum clipped into crooked columns, palm and agave - small town in southern California. I was driving north speaking the names of ditches and washes into the Marantz feeling oh California I'll miss your interestingness. I've been almost an American, driver's license, social security number and check every month, address in the 92000s, American boyfriend's stories engraved deep as any, experience of 3 national elections, 4 city houses, 1 country house, 1 small town in the desert, something like 150 American students whose minds I've known well, one well-intentioned pathetic little educational institution, 6 gardens made - that - knowledge of sources, materials, conditions, clients, helpers, own hands on the pick. Three times through all 7 seasons of The West Wing. Three times through Friday night lights. What kind of day it is - warm - just right in the shade of the umbrella. She'll call my cell when the room is ready. Now I'm starting to be happy. I'm here. I was slogging up 111, endless pink mall hulks. Had I somehow shot through Palm Springs without realizing? Little black convertible with its windows down in the left lane stopped at the light. Hello? Hello? Have I passed Palm Springs or is it still ahead? Tight-looking dyke in her fifties says it's still ahead. Light changes. At the next light she catches up. You're passing through Cat City now, after that it's Palm Springs. March 6 2014, room 206 Caliente Tropics, 7:43am. It's a good room because I went back and asked to change - big window onto the mountain's brown flank - across the pool - bed with good pillows - thin legs of two palms - distant swoosh of traffic on East Palm Canyon - I have all day. - It's the parking lot of 7 I was driving home after the museum - it was dark, there was slow traffic because of the street fair. I suddenly wanted cake, chocolate cake for my birthday. I drove back up Indian Canyon looking for somewhere that might have it, then south again on Palm Canyon Drive. I was almost home. There was a last restaurant before the motel, a Lyons English Grille behind a large parking lot just where Palm Canyon makes an elbow. I don't like that sort of tacky baronial barn but I'll try it. Walked in, man behind the bar chatting up a tourist couple. "Can I help you?" "Maybe." He had to go call the waitress to tell me what they had for dessert. She was a small thin elderly person with a harried look. I said I'd have the crème brulée and vanilla ice cream. She hesitated when I asked could I have them outside, but yes. I said I'd be no trouble. On one side of the door there had been two women at a table with drinks. On the other was a brown man with headphones on, singing quietly by an empty glass on a pink table cloth. He had a quiet potato face, was maybe in his late fifties? Sixties? I stood deciding where I'd sit, at the one empty table by the middle-aged women or on the right side of the door at the one empty pink-tablecloth table beyond the singing man. I liked something about him and went to sit by him. When he began to look up a bit later I said hello. I'm still carrying the look he gave me then. So soft a face. The parking lot was not pretty, old asphalt to the edge of the street where lights were passing intermittently, but I liked sitting there gazing into a pool of warm peaceful dark air. That was when I opened the journal and wrote the beginning of a sentence. The man said isn't it a beautiful evening. I said it was. Asked who he was listening to. Nat King Cole. Then how did it go. The waitress brought my two desserts. I had been telling everyone it was my birthday and told her too. The man looked up. Asked, If it's your birthday, where are your friends? All over the world, and my kids too. He said it was like that for him as well. He has six kids. He said marriages don't work out when people aren't in synch with their higher purpose. Then a story about a vision that came to him when he was in his twenties, a being that had instructed him. The waitress came back to bring me my check. She stood for a moment looking out at the night with us. She was feeling its charm. I asked had it been colder. She said yes, this night was the first warm night. A spring night, I suggested. Yes, a spring night. The man got up and stood in front of me, said he would sing me a song for my birthday, the one he had been given by the being of light. He was looking into space above my head so I could watch his face.
He sang earnestly. He was singing me his story I thought. A boy in British Guyana, Dutch grandfather, Ethiopian African mother, father Carib Indian and something else. He has a 6-month contract at Lyons this year, is friends with the owner. It's where Nat King Cole used to sing. Sometimes it's Vegas. He's thinking Atlantic City next. What's hard is going back to his studio apartment alone after he has been singing all evening, making people happy, he said. When he had sung for me I said sit down with me. He said he would for a moment, he had to go in and sing at seven. I asked about his vision. He was in a Greyhound bus traveling to Venezuela. A light entered the bus at the door and came down the aisle to him and then resolved into a being in front of him. He couldn't tell what color the being was, because of the amber light, and he thought that was part of the message. The being told him how to live. He talks to it still, and it leads him. He stood up to go in, said he wished I'd come hear him sing. I said I already had and it had been perfect. I held out my hand. His was quite soft, a fine narrow-fingered long hand. He walked away beautifully, taller than I thought, in his evening clothes, lightly straight-backed. When I was driving away I saw that above Lyons on the lighted panel it says established since 1945, when I was born. And then came back here and saw the pool lit up like turquoise glass and got into my bathing suit to go lie under Orion in the black sky with high tiki torch flames reflected on the water. Yesterday there was Moortens too, twisty tangles of snake cactus and a fossil tree in chunks on the ground, and Thai for lunch, and Deborah Butterfield's horse in the art gallery, and Terry Masters' gallery with good desert paintings, and Terry himself coming after me on the street to give me an invitation to his event on Saturday.
So yes it has been a happy day, since such things can still happen. 8 Ben Robbins, Jane, Favor, Emilee, Jody, Janet, Tia, Martin, Kate, Franci, Jim Mann, Tony, Cheryl, Mafalda, Tom, Louie, David, Greg, Sam/Cleo, Jerry, Lauren, [Louise later]. in February 1830 he obtained a reader's card to the British Museum One of the recurring words in his correspondence now is 'flare,' a term which he uses variously to describe an appearance in print, a party, an argument, and any kind of concerted or violent activity. But the real meaning is clear enough: to brighten, to erupt, to come alive at last. They were walking together through Hungerford Market "where we followed a coal-heaver, who carried his little rosy but grimy child looking over his shoulder; and CD bought a half penny worth of cherries and, as we went along, he gave them one by one to the little fellow without the knowledge of the father. Ackroyd's Dickens. 9 Sunday morning. Do I want to say more about Palm Springs. The motel room was just right - I chose it online for the color of the beds - morning light on the mountain - at night the pool transilluminated like an uncut aquamarine, something about that light-holding color, so I felt stepping into it had high powers of restoration. Friday morning driving the streets looking at houses, stepping out with my camera. The moment I looked up from the camera and saw across the intersection a palo verde in full bloom surrounded by open space and plastered walls. The perfect shape of it and its perfect flourishing where it was standing alone after its buildings had been hauled away. An arched doorway behind it leading to more vacant land. Three arched doorways in three directions but the northern wall gone so its plaza could seem a stage where the tree was making its solo appearance. Two empty bottles lying on their sides where homeless drinkers had been. Old bare concrete. This in the midst of prosperous streets where the street name plates say The movie colony. 10 Dickens described as scanning whoever is in front of him. the "English disease," a combination of respectability and timidity that was ingrained in the political and social habits of the nation - Is that Annabel and Jill not liking my slides? I'm up to 1847, when he's beginning to write David Copperfield, thinking of the small red book that had been in the house all along, it seemed. Did my mom mention it, so I picked it up? I'm seeing summer's brightness in the kitchen, open windows maybe. I was reading on the old couch in the corner. What I remember in it is the beach in Yarmouth, Peggoty and the house made from a boat. That might have been around 1954. I was aware the book was thought to be special in a certain way. I didn't know the word 'classic' but I knew it belonged to a category of greatness our other books didn't. It was probably the only classic and the only Everyman edition we owned. I also remember Ed lying on the couch in the living room laughing his miserable laugh as Mary read us A Christmas carol. Afternoon on a Sunday in December, brilliant sun glaring in off the snow, we kids sitting on the floor. the strange words of those who have failed, the kindness of those who have retired from the fight, the eccentricities of those who have had to defend themselves from the world, what is David Copperfield's success to all that? 11 He could not bear profusion without order. 14 "In this brief life of ours," he said, "it is sad to do almost anything for the last time. Ladies and gentlemen, I beg most earnestly, most gratefully, and most affectionately, to bid you, each and all, farewell." 15 Jerry was here. I finished Dickens, 1080 pages. Badly edited, enthralling. Remembered bus freight, won't have to drag a U-haul up I-5. Dickens 1812-70. Eliot 1819-1880. All she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against her - sex and health and convention - she sought more knowledge and more freedom. VW She was an intellectual, he was an entertainer. Things that were exasperating about Jerry - his slovenly conventionality - he had to close the blinds in his room and keep them closed so it became a messy dark hole with his large heap of unneeded clothes on the floor - the way he didn't think to leave the light off when he went to the bathroom at night, so he woke me three times - the way he had to use a glass rather than a tin cup for water to have by his bed and then broke it - one of my few pretty ones, that I've used as a vase - that he wanted to have a 'picnic' and brought chairs and a blanket for that purpose - brought wine in his padded cooler but no corkscrew - fell asleep twice with the light on and his door open, once in the middle of the night so I had to get out of bed and go turn it off - the way he couldn't make his bed straight, disrespected the room by not noticing how I'd made it nice for him - the way it took him a couple of tries to consider we could have lettuce rather than bread for our sandwiches - worst of all that he's let himself bloat up his belly to three times the size it was a year ago. Over all, anxious complacent passivity, a desire to be looked after, systemic self-pity, complacent in the sense that he knows he is those things but doesn't fight them. Watching TV is "easier". On the other hand: the way he watched the birds when we were sitting at the table, the way when we walked up the wash he saw animals in the rocks, a turtle's face, an elephant lying down. His honesty when challenged. His willingness to hear my stories, although that wasn't necessarily good, since I was entertaining him believing there was nothing he would say to interest me. He said a good thing about last light, though, "You know it's happening but you can't see it happening". Watching it with him I thought it was about death. What is it about the Dickens book. Ackroyd's endlessly repeated prosy speculations about Dickens' relation to childhood experience irritated me and yet I kept going. Dickens himself, his blazing friendships, his sheer, driven efficacy in the world, his projects, his long walks, his emotionality, as if energized me to keep reading. I liked too the many bits of contemporary description Ackroyd collected, many people noticed D, studied him; he was a strongly observed person at a time when people observed each other well. That made a kind of fullness or realness about him, we hear the gossip that surrounds him. 16 I had two small brown rocks in my hands, saw I could add one to the other to make a sculpture. It was as if a little mother and baby, but only abstractly suggested. Looking at it I was thinking I could be a sculptor now, my new art form. I could set up a sculpture in the herb garden that could be visited in studio tours. Then was in the herb garden looking toward the north gate where I had left the little rock figure. The gate had been pushed open showing a bit of lit space full of people. A party going on. My little piece was no longer where I'd left it. I was looking for it all around, not finding it, weeping. Kate's dream of the wise black woman who bites a vampire to save the little girl, so becoming a vampire, losing her soul.
17 "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?" - That's Emily Dickinson. 18 Hungry-lonely today, restless in it. Read a book on boys that made me cry about Luke, needed to. At the same time a bit about the continuously repeated disappointment with Tom. He couldn't get himself together to phone me for my birthday - sent an email with one sentence promising to be my best friend forever, two sentences thanking me for his house, and then nine very long sentences about him. Meanwhile Greg willing to see and comment on Palm Springs pictures and stories. I didn't tell him the birthday night angel though; it's a story that wd need to be felt. - There I post a whole Palm Springs tumblr page. I think it's correct, as a page, the ruby-steeped palms, then the brilliant white house with palms too. Then the blazing tree called a solo performer, far and close, then the title Being of light. It has the relation of tree and angel-man I felt. The beyondness of the doorway too. Is it as good as I can make it? Don't know yet. 19 Her George Henry Lewes seems to have got to the same place as Being about, from Shelley and Goethe and the physiology and evolutionary theory of the time. "Learn to know Adrienne, and you will understand how, if a man did love her, he would love her with the devotion of his life." - He wrote that in a novel before he'd met her. They had 24 years. They worked on Goethe and Spinoza together. an astonishing course of self-education in art, music, theatre, philosophy, social theory, and science youthful letters with their layers of biblical quotation and their inclination to turn to other texts to express her own thoughts [notes on Spences Bridge] [recipe for cheese soufflé] I want to spend some time with you on your gallant adventure. It's lovely. Rat-racing today and tomorrow. I'll email you again Friday with consideration. 'Gallant' and 'lovely' - when he comes up with that sort of deft sweet language my heart squeezes itself in yearning regret. Meantime G. "I'm wondering if it might be sensible to put your larger ambitions on hold for the time being, to, as it were, reduce the self-imposed pressure you are feeling." Everything worst about him in that sentence: ponderous timidity. I reared up and smacked him though I know he's speaking for himself not me - because he's speaking for himself and it's not at this moment my job to feel sorry for him. Why does anyone want to be more impressed by my distress than by my gallantry. They do. It's blind blank self-pity in them. Sonja: "Just to say I smiled blissfully reading Being of light." I keep rereading it, does it carry the heart glow the meeting gave me. Diffuse gold in my chest.
- I keep stroking my hair. It's a new era with my hair. 20, equinox Reading through 'Here' tonight, all the way, I smell the desert and let myself linger there, experiencing it through you. I hear your exquisite voice so clearly tonight. 'Here,' where I am, in my existential indolence, your courage and clarity astonish me. -Jan - New era with my hair because I want a turn like the one when I cut my bangs after Saturna. Shoulder length and a new shampoo that makes it silky. I wanted to meet him because I loved a book he had written. I had seen in it that when he was funny, as he often was, it was not because he was trying to entertain but because he himself was enchanted by the comedy in the incident he was describing. Getting this incident, these people, this quirk of human behaviour down, and getting it down right - that was what he had been enjoying, rather than 'expressing himself'; and while books written in this way are not necessarily great books, this is the way the great books I love best are written. Athill After a funeral. He lied to make things more like they ought to be. Didi had charm, and charm is not a trivial quality. He was unable to discover in other people any constant reason to attend to them. He was certain at too deep a level that he was unworthy of love. This record has been written for him, and for people who are going to have children. It was not intolerable that he had killed himself. It was intolerable that he had been right to do so - . It was intolerable that a man should be so crippled by things done to him in his defenceless childhood that he had been made, literally and precisely, unbearable to himself. He had tried to change. His intelligence, his gifts - useless to him. Other people's patience, kindness, affection, understanding - useless to him. Love? Too late, and equally useless. I read that in fear for Luke.
21st Yellow freesia, lemon flower and sweetpea on my bedside shelf. I hardly want to breathe out. 22 Rumble with Greg. What do I know about it that I haven't said to him. I can see him trying to defend his opinion of himself by giving me advice and I won't have it. The fact that he doesn't see himself doing it is reason enough. I'm like that with Louie too. It's like blocking the passing lane: no, you haven't earned that.
- Tim Rowan - immediate hit of his pieces - quality of stone and my rusted roadkill bits - rusted machines - b.1967 ie 3 years older than Luke, 47 - kiln and studio in NY State, 48 acres, unprocessed native clay. Lost his father when young, studied in Japan in one of the old pottery towns, ancient kilns of Japan. tim@timrowan.com. [pdf] Layers built over days and weeks, carved, fired 7 days and nights in wood-fueled, no glaze. Surface is clay, kiln placement, fly ash, coals, fire. Fired bluestone. "I wrap clay around stone and let it partly explode." The page that comes up in Google Images is a startlingly full catalog of beautiful pieces, hundreds, all perfectly good. Strong. Unignorable. Have I ever done anything with that immediate authority. what will we know. The herb garden in June. I'd have thought the PRC slides but it seems not. Trapline for some. The work with Millie, that I can't show (now). - Spotty. What he has is a round whole: trajectory, means, steady variation, expansive development, existential stance. Narrative. He has come to firing stone. I love the thought of 48 acres with a purpose-built studio and kiln. What's my version of what he does, I mean what could be my version of it. 24 I had to get to the far side of a city I thought of as Grande Prairie, to find the highway to hitchhike home after I'd missed the school bus. There were layers of freeway piled up in the way. Someone came along the the street. I'll stop him and ask. It's a man with two high wagons - very high, maybe 10' - pulled by four extremely tall thin horses. He says he'll take me through town. I'm up on a wagon and we're floating through the air. The man is accompanied by beings, I don't know whether lovers or servants or just companions, who also are beautifully long and light, as if a kind of angel, naked, 8 or 9 feet tall, long-boned as if male. There is one lying in my arms and I'm stroking its small breasts. 25 Nyingma research work? I dreamed something about a sound piece - page of the same sentence repeated - the look of it on the page - how to make that in sound.
Olivia on Youtube reading a poem, a grey bulk with dead eyes - the fact that I looked at her feeling triumph says she did me damage - it's odd that revenge is all that's left of that years-long love - it means that damage to my womanly confidence is deadly serious - I can try hedging it with efforts to be fair but I'm set like stone in relation to her - though I don't like the thought of wishing anyone ill. It's betrayal rather than rivalry isn't it, betrayal I've thought of as rivalry. The other night I was remembering Don, lying in bed listening to music in the dark with the door open - I don't often have that sort of vivid memory of someone's physical presence. His body was so vivid to me then, head to toe like no one else, electric. But then I go online and find him giving talks at a philosophy café, 2012. He looks alright but I don't like what he says or the way he says it. It's the old rubbery mentalistic selfconscious charm that doesn't get the thing clear. Is it Catholic? Tom saying in email today - we're talking about what I said about traveling alone - "it's as if the 'awareness' we project 'outward' is - for many reasons (not the least because it is recognized by others and related to by them) - an 'almost' individual and self-contained 'personality' that reports back to our 'inward' awareness which we recognize as our 'actual' personality and creates a 'dialogue' that allows us to feel less alone and more aware of both the world and our 'self', as you define it. At least that's how 'I' as an only child avoided loneliness." - What do I think he's saying - does he mean what Jody meant about translating everything people say to her - no, other way around - he just means popular-boy bullshit he has come to believe while he's saying it. But then what's the dialogue and is it different from what I do here. Does that mean he ruminates the way I do? Does he mean John Cool is his imaginary friend? - Where I started is that both Tom and Don are strenuously camouflaged in ordinary exchange. Tom's vulnerability is closer under the skin, it shows in his eyes and it's his appeal. Don's blather was more impermeable, his eyes were more armoured. All the women at the botany course seeming to want a bite out of Frank Harris not just because he was younger but because he was just right - just right at first sight and on - I just liked being near him. Steady easy presence. Warm round male energy. - That's what I want next to me now. 26 I sent Ben Vanden Berg a note - he hasn't replied. I'll forget if I don't note it. The real art is to end up not a disgusting human being, it's the life as a whole. Don's question about the good life, that he's been frivolously academic about. Wanting to be admirable rather than popular. A good life is visible as such. A life sums up in a body, last judgment. Except that bodies are volatile, and old bodies much more so. When I was younger I bet on the wrong people - I'm dimly feeling that - but who would have been the right ones. I wasn't in a position to find them. Who have I known personally who's a right sum. Ray Jennings. Martyn Estall. Louie? My brother Paul, it turns out. Maybe Judie too, for all I know. Jody's on the way to it? Zach is too? It's 5:30 in the dark, slight fluctuating hiss in my left ear, white box of a room, black at the door, deep long black all around. It's still cold at night. The winter people have already begun to go home. Tom has a stronger sense than I do of the difference between what he presents and what he is that he doesn't present because he lies? Does he mean lying gives him a sense of having inner company? YES. Really? Yes. I would think lying makes anyone feel more alone, like living in Plato's cave. Does any of this have to do with what I was talking about, the sense there can be of magical leading when I'm alone and unlocked from routine. No, he's talking about something else. In this conversation I feel his unknowable otherness, which I suppose is the private self he means, the unknowability he hides with persiflage. It's quite inchoate and sore and is it what Joyce meant by integrity. I'm noticing something else on the periphery of this, a way I'm wanting to have, own, a man rather than be in passing company with. It's subtle and peripheral because at the same time I know I don't want to be locked in with anyone. I'm aware of it because I have to tell myself that owning, attachment, isn't something I can get now, while at the same time thinking about what kind of man would be right. Does any of this matter, except to notice I want something I can't have, and/or don't want in any of the forms I might have it.
- Sent Here links to the women landscape photographers site in the UK. Figured out why I dislike all those male photos of motion-blurred water, they're rivers and oceans of semen gushing. - Louie saying she's noticed that most teachers hold back key information. They do it unconsciously. So they can stay ahead? Yes. A good teacher like Gabriella gives it all away, and the other thing she does is tell stories about her own pain in coming to know. 27 A night like deeply rutted gumbo mud. Rereading A complicated kindness, when I looked at my last letter to Greg afterward it seemed funnier. - Rowen! Sane sweet light-spirited Rowen working a job he loves, living in his boss's basement with the boss's 19 year old daughter. Freya. Kerberos. When I said the D800 is underexposing he said his hands were wanting to fix it. Oculus. Crytek. Boy of his time. Who gives me news of it. Hardly anything I know is relevant to him. - I don't build a house without predicting the end of a social order. Ken Burns on Frank Lloyd Wright - his ruthlessness in getting scope for his talent - his size - his mother gave him that, looked at photos of great cathedrals before he was born and put them up in his room after - he had permission from the root - when he was 92 still such a straight spine - dressed beautifully - the drawings so pretty, I mean the lettering and the lightness of the lines - architecture profs speaking so warmly of Fallingwater - it makes me want to stop and be born again and take another run with more ambition - when I said at 18 that I wanted to be just a little bit famous I didn't understand that it's not about fame it's about scope. I haven't won scope and without it nothing matters. Joyce saying fight, fight! Do anything you need to do to get into the game. - Think about that. 30 I looked out the back door at the sky and there was a black kite soaring and swerving above the house next door. I walked out onto the road and found its string tied to a creosote stem just off the verge. The Mexican next door was standing on his wall watching it. I went back and sat on the wall next to him, Providencio, who came from - I think he said - Guanajuato in 1980 and works as a landscaper for the county. Cometa. 31 Posted orange juice and a better version of the cometa story. Inventing a house most of the day. The garden tour was so bad I came home wanting to make something better. 1st April Asked Cheryl to publish her 1980s photos with Ant Bear. BBC The hollow crown last night. Henry V exquisite, turns out to have been directed by Thea Sharrock. Maybe something about the way she looks at Tom Hiddleston. Walled 300' x 300', symmetrical, lot of open walkway. First part I filled in was the library. Big studio. Shaded/sheltered fruit and vegetable plots. Citrus forest. 4 guest rooms. Caretaker's cabin. Botany room. Sickening brush-off letter from the women landscape photography group. What else: Jacob Korczynski asked for information about the notes in origin show and when I had sent it said he'd reply next week. Hasn't been back. 2 Clear morning with the roof dripping. 3 There's a two-note songbird I haven't heard before. Rabbit nibbling under the palm. Light slanting on the gravel. Palo verde across the street almost bloomed out. House finch on the upper perch. They and the chickadees can go through 6 feeder inches in an hour. The male house finch's wash of orange seems unearned on such a pedestrian greedy little bird. The little round-knobbed cactus has a flower. I transcribed the last of IA27 because I wanted to see when I stopped working on films. It was at New Years, after Tom left. There was a month of bad flaring. I took a run at In English but got stopped fast. Maybe the botany course did me in too? January through March. It's cold these mornings and still too cold at night to sit outside. Anyway: April-May-June-July-August. What do I need to get done:
6 The Fellowship: the untold story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship 2006 What it took to be Frank Lloyd Wright, the chicanery, the theft and tyranny, the self deception, the ruinous disregard. Much trouble with Pale hill. The right sound in the right place makes it visible - amazingly so - I have the right kind of sound and have sometimes accidentally lined it up right but the problems I still have are
I need more patience with it than I've given it so far.
Haven't simplified my process enough yet. Am still getting lost in the bits. Run into cognitive exhaustion early. It's such a delicate lovely thing - could be - I don't know what to do. - Prairie House, Robie House - ground floor work, 2nd living, 3rd sleeping. Always a modular rhythm, often 4' square. Subfloor heat, built-ins, window walls, sliding glass, living terrace. John Lloyd Wright - 2nd son 1912 age 20 untrained Working Man's Hotel [ie the Golden West], also worked for Irving Gill's office. 7 I so easily lose my grip in work. Something comes up and my sense of it dissolves away. It's a large amorphous management challenge that I've made ineffective dabs at -
If I had a very large house I'd have a room for each project. Am thinking to set up a memory palace studio the way I did for Being about, in Sketchup and in my head before sleep. My little movies aren't nothing but they're more of the same in a same small circle. The Here's are quite lovely but nobody cares. Ant Bear will make me a publisher, which is a service job. My own books will be fine but unneeded. The mbo site with all its provisions goes on visited from everywhere but does nothing for me personally, and it's done. My only chance and deepest actual hope is the Orpheus material, which I continually lose sight of because it's so far out of daily mind. I have the time and place to get there but
- G has dropped me and that's probably good because I was giving too much energy to that too-middling voice, but what should I be doing with empty time and human loneliness, that doesn't distract me from my one main chance? I should do things to get more energy - exercise, yoga and meditation But that still leaves hours, hours.
8 Beautiful photos of Louie yesterday. Jane Fulton Alt's photos of sheets blowing. Louie's photos of magnolia blossoms when she got home from the airport. Partly solved Pale hill - it can begin with soft wind - but I need the airplane and it is still hissy - low pass filter took too much. Still quivery. Using overlay - check to see whether body needs wind under for high frequencies. 4 tracks -
- Looking at a New Age book about plant perception impatient with the way it's written - first, it's full of quotations - I want to say just tell me what you know - second I can't stand the crudeness of his explanatory terms. It's exasperating because I know there are things in the book I want - direct perception for diagnosis, direct perception of large other. 9 The subtle dissociation still showing in his language about coherence or wholeness: 'encoded' ' 'information', 'interpretation'. They all imply a Cartesian self that receives rather than is. Emotion as sensing, yes, heart/heart field as important in that, okay - I don't like the way he talks about his contrasting state either - 'linear' is the cliché - what he means is a whole state - something like a hardness I think - he says attention to world is a slow heartbeat, parasympathetic, pupil dilation. Autonomic: sympathetic, parasympathetic, enteric. Sympathetic he says is fight or flight. In young, healthy people heartbeat is highly irregular. Loss of heart rate variability in aging. Strongest with touch and up to 18" but measurable at 5'. Phloem of the vascular bundle conducting/propagating. specifically to work with the electromagnetic spectrum the plant and animal appearing as a multiform unity in the single ocean of being - Such an impure self-contradicting book. I as if cringe back from most of the writing. I notice he mentions and quotes almost no women. There's something wrong with him. And yet there are spots of realness. - So I look him up on Youtube to see how he is - first, he wears a very sloping one-side beret to cover his baldness. Second in a panel on Youtube he reads his reply rather than speaking it, and quotes his standard authorities. And third when he's speaking he indulges himself with amusing self description rather than going directly into his topic. Lynn Margulis by contrast talks about biota with excited love, engages the audience and other panelists, in fact does what he recommends and instead of falling in with his unthought derogation of intellect says we have to have both. The imaginal - is it a word for using simulated sensing to actually perceive/know/understand? Real perception in a simulational mode. - They want to talk about it as a sort of parallel realm. I think that's wrong. I think it's a function useable in the one actual realm.
Mundus imaginalis is mystificatory. It's a nice word though. It's not about collective consciousness, it's about being immersed and interpenetrated in the one fabric of the universe.
Something I want - to feel immersed and actively sensing as I sometimes have
He says heart but it's not really heart, it's whole body. - It's 94 degrees these afternoons, 89 degrees inside.
(I skipped lines.) Kabir's Sufi tone.
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