the golden west volume 1 part 1 - 1994 july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver 3rd July 1994 Beginning sad and in fear. What is fear like. Small fear. It says, what will become of me now you are really gone. What did I burn. The life of a hope. What can I keep. The life of a grief. The depth of the desire, which is a well into the beginning. A nakedness: I won't bluff again, I'll honour myself. 6 Dear you - (Sigh) Why did I forget that I could talk to you? Why have you remembered now? Questing wider, starting again. Don't drink the rest of that beer. Oh how are we - You know how you are. I want to know which of us was intent and which of us is sad. Here's a thing you didn't realize. You went from ignoring me to trying to use me to win. Tried to drag you onstage. Yes. I thought you wanted him and I had to control and revise myself so you could get him. I don't want to get him. I don't want to love him. I sometimes do. I'm writhing, I can't get it right. What undid me was grief and craving. And competition. I humiliated myself trying to be you, I was false. You were desperate. The last day I was. You were in the grip. You weren't sure you couldn't win. I'm sick of trying to understand, the volumes of trying to understand. I should have known better, I should have been stronger-willed. Oh sweetie you're like him. What did you like about him? That. Then who are you? Quieter, the one whose eyes shine and body melts, the traveler who meets him in the dark. I said I'd find you as a child. And I'll find you as a child. Are we going to be alright, just us? How do you feel saying that? You know my simple feelings - solar, heart, forehead. Look at the buddleia. I'm grief-stricken, I'm distracted, are you really alright? I'm sad but I'm not burdened, you're burdened. What's sad like, to you? A tight heart. I'd like to still be reaching. I failed again and again. You failed together, sweetie, why do you take it all. You failed at making him acknowledge you. He failed to like himself with you. You failed to like yourself with him. Did you fail? I often failed to be there liking both of you. You did too! Where were you! This was your project. I'm confused. I'm not automatic. I'm away mostly. I can't help it. You must learn to keep me by you. I'm a weak ignorant husband. I say that with grief. You're a new husband. You're passionate and hungry. You're jumpy and confused. You're willing, hasty, you bail out in a minute. I really miss him. Me too. 7th What the book says about him is true, how do you feel hearing it? You feel taken in. I wasn't taken in. I was giving you both something. You made me do what I couldn't make him do. You'll never forget saying "I want to marry you." You'll have an inch more patience forever. What did you give him - can I ask that? Generosity reached him sometimes. And did what? Reached his outsideness. I saw him very little in detail. What do you conclude? Is it that there's no time for romance? You're afraid of that. No. Touching him was true generosity. He'll never forget what you said about his body. That there's goodness in it. That it gives. I shouldn't feel sorry for him now. No. He has to decide to change. Or not. 10th Open house absence - Louie - the own-friend laughing with at-homeness of things we could say to each other meeting on a bench. Today I'd meet Rob like that, with ease. I kept noticing the ease as if I'm not used to it, but without the pleasure of pleasure in what we'd have to say. The way at work parties now he comes to find me with food, a piece of watermelon, half a beer. That's something established. And really, the central community of the garden is something established. There is that ease with any of them, Muggs, Ros. I'm so at home. That's what it takes. It's natural. We're doing this. We have our jobs and meet when they are done. It's well done, we don't judge each other's parts. Common concerns. Great common pride. Look at how beautiful this path is since we've mowed the orchard edge. All the way to the top, where there's a faint pink wave from the oregano lapping over the gravel. A clear shape, with the strawberries weeded. We had an intense blue sky with a few white streaks. My eyeballs are burnt. Everywhere there was color and order. The nursery beds clean. When we arrived this morning early there was a man sleeping tucked under a blanket on the brick path between the schools' beds. What a long day, since the first strangers arrived. It's eight-thirty, bright. I'll go back for a bit. 11th From yesterday, still. The best was Steven Dang who stood in the herb garden with such collection and clarity I was with him instantly, so light so well-born so informed so young the experience of meeting him was like being swept into an uncolored crystal. Egoless. Like being dropped suddenly into the center of my own brightness, when I didn't expect it and was pressing valiantly through the opaque dealings I have with tourist couples whose host I am agreeing to be. Will you tell me about going to the funeral tomorrow       it's a meeting with fate Is it true I'm going to show Luke off     no I'm afraid they'll see me as manless     Because of my leg     Is that what they will see     no Then what       hieratic power No kidding       female If I went with K how would they see me       same Does going with Luke make them see me differently     no Are they afraid of me     What's the best I can be there       relaxed I want to feel I can meet them from outside and they'll honour me       only a more conventional fame would do that Will there be something they'll mostly be feeling       full of illusions about afterlife. They'll be in manic unreality because they aren't willing to feel fear of death Will they want something from me       support for their hope There's no really good way to be there     Should I wear the blue necklace     12th Uncle Peter's funeral. I had Luke's beauty beside me. We were two straight dark people in a roomful of puffy beige people. When all heads bowed in prayer we had the room to ourselves. How was that       evasive Is evasion what makes them ugly     no What does       social defeat Am I as ugly as they are     no Why not       less burdened Evading responsibility?       NO living more simply. They're socially defeated in that they buy into norms What's the matter with Uncle Herman       he gave up his masculinity, he needs to be a physical man again. Lack of physicality makes them all ugly. How did they see me       young How did the young ones see me       dominant Was George's touch a sexual touch     Did he know it     no Should I be offended     no. A sort of tribute What did he feel       energetic balance Their bodies look energyless     Do you want to say any more about this     no - A dip into the garden yesterday and I got Ja-min, a helicopter repairman called Jean-Pierre, and Jan-Marie. Jan-Marie has found a love-one, as I thought she would when the film was done. He is the Assistant Sheriff of San Francisco and killed his father. That sounds right. Someone who has done things, I said. Someone I can push against, she said. Oh I know what you mean. 14th A Thursday with the airplane's distant rolling line. When I began to write I also began to hear. A story about reading. I imagined writing the yard, that sense of open space with sounds, and the child reading. People in a place with that relation to the rest of the world. A white bridge bolted together over a brown creek. Standing looking down. The small local sense of where we were, and then too all the other places we were reading ourselves into. Seen in time, that time, with people elsewhere simultaneously in the time we read. He was someone elsewhere, someone I meet briefly much later, who tells me stories both of being elsewhere and of reading elsewhere. She is a girl who writes voyages and loves. She is a traveler and a lover and meets a man who is those too. The woman who was a girl in La Glace listens carefully to the man, who is not a good storyteller. But she is a good reader of the man who will never be a writer. The land of manhood, its weakness and blindness. He read me on the phone what he considers to be the 30 finest poems in English. 16th What is it about Blake and incoherence. I keep saying, Oh I've got it, 'Imagination' is consciousness; 'living in eternity' is somehow bracketing the story of physical causality so everything happens only as consciousness. Conscious states are gods, they create worlds with different qualities. Then he says a person's space is the flat earth they see, sunrise and moonset at its rims. And all of that is in a way true but somehow it goes on seeming to assume the single common world he says is Satan's materialist heresy, ie an unfree state. Why am I thinking of the daylily grower we visited this morning - her world so strong a creation, a woman bulky and quite coarse, showing people a terrifically strong space she's made, she and her husband she says, 900 varieties of daylilies, of which I'd be willing to grow three maybe. Her choices resemble her and mine, me, but I wondered inside her walls at the will that set up high surrounding hedges, trees shrubs paths assorted perennials and fifty mounded bark-mulched beds of too-large too-rounded hemerocallis in colors too off-true. It's a paradise vision and suited her, one acre, very compressed, deeply vulgar, admirably personal, completely controlled. A huge drive, is what I felt, wandering and staring while Rob shopped. A young daughter being brought up in that enclave, composed, leading groups through: at the time I knew I was feeling something about her but not exactly what. It was wonder at the life she lives enclosed with two parents so mutually and materially passionate, who set so intense and so particular a world around her. 17 In Lambeth on the Thames, in each other's arms: In a sweet moony night & silence that they had created With a blue sky spread over with wings and a mild moon   Beautiful thro' our Love's comeliness, beautiful thro' pity. The Veil shone with thy brightness in the eyes of Albion Because it inclos'd pity & love, because we lov'd one-another Reading Blake I see I want something else - I want to be done with symbols' mis-taking, the powers of misdirected feeling, I want to be walking around at home in life. I have said this before - And here is something true, which I'll say and then not dwell on: that moment realizing myself wrapped up with you, wrapped in fur from head to foot, all in contact, in as much contact as bodies can be, that was one of my everlasting ones. I'm touching my cap to you. That's true and it's also true that you're passive-aggressive rudimentary and stupid (I tried to hedge that). In the past couple of weeks I've read The prelude first half, Raines on Blake, Watkins Invisible guests, Lowes Road to Xanadu, Coleridge Notebooks I and II, (dipped into) Biographia Lit, Adair Blake and Yeats. And what've I learned. The earlier community and lines of descent of those saying imagination perceptualizes. What it has to do with reading dreams: where I or Blake are standing when imagining can be translated as the making or feeling of meaning for being as such. Lowes was a really interesting demonstration in detail of sources of both vision and diction, and indirectly of the phenomenon of recognition: what I'm calling recognition. The large energy that went into adoring and its moods now rampaging thru books. This reading mind is speedy and has a labored tone. I like its energy that scours thru a book like a dust devil very pointed and sucking up stuff. Part of what labored means is that it feels it should say what is already there in the image. 18 Looking in a phone book I see entries I recognize immediately as Rhoda's. A word in the column where names are usually, and then in the phone number column two alternative words in two columns separated by a line. The first word can be read in a phrase with either of the second words. It makes a little word play that has the marks I say of Trudy and what-was-her-name. People laugh when I say that. I'll spell out the quality now though I didn't before - a slightness, slenderness, fineness of mind - something that doesn't make a system, just sets down the tip of a finger in some public space to say a lighter mind is possible here. 19 Sleeping beside the sea. The blankets a man had brought me while I slept. I'm thinking two things at once. From reading about the key in Faust, remembering the sight of his penis that last morning - long and thin - as if it was the first time I'd seen it, a stalk, an exciting sight, so visibly a boy's excitement - oh - And from this weekend's reading, seeing that when Imagining means developed structure [cognitive structure], then it is present in perception, in imagining, and in mythology/intuiting, all in the same way. It is a tradition that says finely accurately structured experience, that is how erotic learning, mythological learning, observant science and artificing skill are the same thing, so that all these things, and not mechanist science, are knowing: knowing is cognitive virtue, which is from fine accurate partitioning. Coleridge on Shakespeare as if a superior spirit more intuitive than the Parties themselves not only of every Motion, Look & Act but of every subtile thought & feeling, the whole flux and reflux of the Mind, were placing the whole before our view, yet himself all the while unparticipating in the passions & actuated only by that pleasurable excitement and emotion which is connected with the successful activity, the energetic fervour, of his own Spirit as vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately & profoundly contemplated. Notebooks III 4115 f26 A joy in Coleridge like the joy in Rebecca West. Energy and accuracy. Physical joy, like driving. - his loins inwove with silken fires So hot this week a heat radiating from the solar plex night and day. 20 Impulse to buy Omni when I'm shopping for food. A man with a sprite's face whose name is Story, who flies space ships and is sixty years old. Look at his eyes - look at the marriage in his face. He is a man who refutes Blake, mental traveler tho a scientist. He lies in the night of the edge of the ocean, he says, and looks over his left shoulder at the space ship, 'the vehicle.' He imagines he is lying in the airlock cuddled by the arms of an empty spacesuit, and can feel he is stepping off a mountain. The physiology of zero gravity adds sensation to what he's made by imagining. "You can fall forever and it is one of the most delicious things." He "creates a fall" is what he calls it. "Unless you evoke it it won't happen." Or evoke a down anywhere you want. "I've come down on Earth and, imagining I was in space, tipped places over." Shooting stars go underneath you. "I've flown dinosaur bones." Imagining is both this mental traveling, and the work of rehearsing, putting together what he learns with the simulators because what he is going to do has to be perfectly done. A surgeon. Gardener. He keeps getting more graduate degrees. Keeps journals. Blake did not see that if imagining is everything then the dreams of Newton can also open into his huge airs of vision. Story Musgrave the astronaut 1994 saying he sees his roots in Wordsworth Coleridge Shelley Blake Byron Emerson Thoreau Whitman Melville. 1757. As if outer space proves a sort of idealism - materialism so thinned out in the interdistances. I want to write about imagining so this beautiful guy and others like him will read eagerly. I will never have a beautiful man in this life and I want one terribly, but if the deal is that I can't have one but I can touch one, at a distance but in his nearest, then ... Do the fairies give me this choice more than once? I am what he is, "If they came for me, unconditionally, I'd go." His wife and children will read that. In me it is myself who reads it in agony at being left behind. 21st The moon is round and there it is in the sea of space, so near and so huge. Beyond that is there anything to say about it. Longing and regret, the straight line between it and the sun is running through me and I feel the pull. It's the heat that cures me for the year. I don't have to eat. My skin gets silky. The oven in the solar plex is burning up the year's rinds. Why is it that a cold foot is unbearable and this great heat is not hard. 22nd "a close, naked, natural way of speaking" A sensation of living the freedom of the present, in language, that comes when I'm reading in the history of ideas of imagining at the same time as sitting up in my bed at 6:30 drinking tea and feeling the light on the wall, the cool body of the air. On the way home from the lantern festival at Trout Lake Rowen falls asleep strapped into the seatbelt. His beautiful neck droops. There's a long clean edge on the side of his face. A brown lanky boy with long hard feet, hair close-cut to his lovely skull, clean eyes, jug ears. It's Sunday. The house next door partied till six. There was Luke with a cigarette dancing on the porch. --- There are times when I'm shocked into a dream. I wake the other way around and can know I was there by the way I am following myself, not leading. There is a small reverb in my action, a space between inside and outside where I am alert in twilight. Is that it? I saw a lamination. I'm aware of registering without understanding and of following an impulse not exactly my own: I think that means I am 'in' the unconscious. Are only the events around certain projected figures dreams? Those are the events I find myself wanting to tell. Telling is trying to know what they are as dreams. "the medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air, but the common aetherical element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves" Richards quotes Coleridge quoting Schelling. 25 Assuming dreams, fantasies, art, will give pictures of brain processes. Yesterday looking up a very high bare tree trunk to a brush or nest of sticks thick-woven like a conifer's branches. 26 Louie at first sight kind of dumpy - heavier. And then across the table the fall of her hair around her neck, the occult blue of her eyelids and the color in the corners of her mouth, intimate small beauties that have often held me grazing near her skin. When the plane came over Labrador, in the eight-hour late afternoon of the flight from London, she asked to go into the cockpit and there saw the curve of the earth, Labrador's thousands of small lakes flashing gold, each once, and each tipping when it had flashed, and all seen thru depths of wisps of vapour that rush by without tearing. The pilots, one on either side, were gazing with her, all feeling, she said, what an extraordinary life it is to have such work. The new world, I said, meaning more than I knew. What the moment could be an image of, and that it can be an image. 27th An image of a beautiful naked woman with powerful glowing eyes swimming or sinking downward and shooting out of the water. The image has been turned, I'm thinking. 30th Axe and bucket $50, maps 40, film 50, propane 10, stove 35 31st When I wake at night with anguish in the solar I will sometimes let myself see his hands, smell his hair, feel the slightness of his belly, be with him, talk to him, let myself imagine that he knocks on my door in his eager self and says - how would he say it? - in a gruff rush - Will you marry me? And I say, Why do you want me to? And he says, Because you're brave and beautiful and strong and weak and passionate and brilliant and sweet and mean and interesting and honest and full of love and I adore you. That sentence I can't imagine in his voice. But I say it to myself. Then pain can move from solar up to heart and be that much nearer to me. This background of depression I must not lose sight of in my sparky coping. But there is also the presence in me that quietly says, never stops saying, What is it like to be? What is it like to live? What is it like to be a one in the world. In the deep I don't know whether I can trust myself. I throw things away suddenly, maybe I will throw myself away suddenly too - I am able to cut people off in a second swift and final and maybe I will do that to myself. If I don't love my own existence very deep - if the love of my own existence isn't the stream that runs in the dark - then will won't help. Does my darkness want to keep me safe?     part 2 the golden west volume 1: 1994 july-december work & days: a lifetime journal project