the golden west volume 11 part 2 - 1997 may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

2nd May 1997 Bellingham. There is the last edge of the moon white and high in the fibrous white early morning sky. Were we at our lowest ebb together? I got off the train freaked by being shaken down at the border. I needed to be listened-out and smoothed down. It happened the way it happened when I arrived in San Diego too - he has no sense of how to make me welcome. He's full of preconstructed speeches about the place and himself, the phrases he has been using to contain himself in his own ordeal. He was spewing. Each of my hopeful beginnings of telling came to nothing. I begin to say to myself, this man does not love me, I am going to drop him. That makes me even younger, isolated in unconsoled pain, alone forever. I try to imagine better options. I'll go back to Rob. Rob really loves me. I'll go back to Louie. Then I think of what was impossible with each of them. There is no hope anywhere, I say. All this going on while he got me to the Shangri-la Motel. I was weak and aching. When I'd stepped off the train there he was with an ugly baseball cap rising narrow from his narrow temples, an unintelligent sleazy looking man with small eyes. We're in the motel. It's dark and cold. The trip is costing me two weeks worth of money. He is talking on and on about how well he's doing, how wonderful Bellingham is, how on top of things he is. He is telling me things he has told me before. There is no moment of what I'd like, which is to be looked at with loving eyes. I'm aching. I go sit in hot water in the tub. He takes it I am offended. I try to say that what I am is sad. I say there's something about the arrival of this sadness that is a good sign. He hasn't a clue what I mean. I can feel him despising my psychological way. He doesn't want to talk about it. He quickly gets to the point where he says he just wants to have a good time, he doesn't want psychodrama. I feel more and more contempted. I am leaking tears out the corners of my eyes. He goes to sleep the way he can. He switches off. I can't sleep. My heart hurts. In the early morning he wakes rested, the way he does. He wants to poke me. I want to sleep. When we wake again I am still crying. It is raining. We'll have to leave the motel at check-out time and there is nowhere to go. We don't have any money. I have to choose between a two o'clock bus and a bus at eleven at night that will have me sitting exhausted at the bus station from six o'clock on, and arriving in Vancouver at one in the morning. He wants to go to the Bagelry where he sits every morning. He wants to sit in the spot where he sits every morning. I buy him breakfast. When we have eaten we are strong enough to get to something. He says something happened already on the bus, he must have said something. I say no it was because of what happened at customs. I needed to be listened to. So I talk then. I go on for half an hour being indignant. Now that's better. We can go on. But I very soon have to go if I'm taking the two o'clock bus. Alright I'll stay, somehow. Now what. Will you come with me while I drop off this stuff at the mission? We walk out into the rain. I put my coat over my head but I'm getting wet. We cross the creek and there's a stand of poplars, trembling aspens. My tree of home. The smell of their leaves. I try to tell about them. There's little satisfaction in telling him things at the best of times. I speak with a sense of speaking into a void. And I can't even speak as well as I could if I were speaking only to myself, because the way I say it is pitched toward the listener even when that listener doesn't listen. As we climb the slope through the salmon hatchery it occurs to me that I could stay at the mission and take the train in the morning. That's the solution. Tom prepares his speech and delivers it twice. They agree. Alright, now I can set my bag down behind the piano in the chapel. We have 'til supper at 4:30. I put my coat over my head and we go to the library and sit separated in library armchairs. We have nothing to talk about but how wonderful Bellingham is. It stops raining. Let's go back to a café. We find a sofa in a room displaying amateur paintings of Mount Baker. He can put his feet up - oh his poor feet - large raw patches and an oozing ulcer. I introduce him to chai, which he likes. We need to be lying down on a bed together. I am aching. I am friendly now and am carrying on with good grace but I can't help noticing he says nothing, ever, that really interests me, or in a way that interests me. When it's time we go back to the mission. There is a huge imaginary portrait of Jesus in the lobby - sensitive small mouth, long brown hair, large eyes with a European and not at all Jewish glassiness. He has a beard but he's very feminine. He's staring at his thoughts, not looking at us. He has something of the quality of a well-born Victorian child of either gender, idealized, asexual and without aggression. Whose ideal is that, and why? At supper, where we are sitting by the corner table Tom always sits at, his buddy Pete joins us and sits across the table from Tom. He tells a very funny story about standing on the street with a letter in his hand, looking both ways for a post box, and a mail van coming by and stopping and the driver saying, Do you want me to take that for you? Peter is a tall man with short hair, wire rims, a lean pitted face and a sardonic humour. I saw Tom looking at him with a beautiful intelligent shape to his mouth. I was thinking, why have I never seen him look at me with that shape of mouth? I would like him if he did. That is a real look, his real look. When I don't like his look it's because of the way he is looking at me - and as always I take it as his quality and not the quality for some reason of his presence, nonpresence, with me. I watch him hobble across the floor to the coffee urn. What kind of man is he, among all these men in a homeless shelter? Tall. He's a tall narrow body, well-proportioned. Even his curved back doesn't spoil that quality of his physical presence. And yet there are many good-enough male bodies in the room. He's tall and has so-fine nervy hands, wonderful high-strung well-wired hands. He does not love me. There's no question about that. He doesn't like me either, though he thinks I'm beautiful. I think there has never been a woman he does like. He was sexually driven. Young pussy, or maybe older pussy he could find in a bar. A sexual drive like his anger with territorial rivals. What is a man, I'm asking, with fear in the pit of the solar. It is a kind of drivenness I have no clue of, that he is now so frightened of himself that he has become more strait, more nice-thinking, than I need to be. He's afraid he'll go ape and punch a toilet seat through a bathroom window like he did with Dee. He will cut himself off from something he is desperate for, he fears. He'll blow it again. And indeed he will, because holding back blows it too. I am saying what I think and what I couldn't quite think at the time, because I owe myself that. And at the same time I am feeling that the fact that I think what I do will blow it for me too. He believes he can't afford his own candour. That makes mine intolerable. Now say what is fair to say in the other way. He has willingly stepped off the path into unsafety. He is living in a mission. His feet if he continues not to be able to take care of them will quickly get worse until he can't walk or work. He goes to bed in a room with fifty-eight men. He has to answer roll-call twice a day and sign out like a child. It is cold and wet. He has fifteen dollars. He is stoical in all of this, he doesn't whine. He's not drinking, he's not smoking. I have worked very hard with him, with myself with him. I've struggled again and again from initial dislike, uncontact, hurt, to find someone in him that I love. At first his feeling carried me. Then my willingness to work carried him. Now it is as if I am stopping. Alright I will give up. There is a real boy in you I adore. I do not like the man you have made him. I don't like you as you are. I don't understand the way you don't enjoy the use of your intelligence. I don't respect the way you haven't fought your way out of your training. Those are the facts. I can imagine you happy, calm and real with a male lover your height, but you haven't the courage or clarity ever to get to that. That's the reason I kept saying of the bloodless geek pastor that he's foisting himself on a woman on false pretenses. You are not bloodless, not at all, but you don't like women. - And on. I don't know. It says give something up. All or part? 3rd I wrote and wrote, just spilling the worries of that visit. When I woke this morning I had been dreaming I got into a channel in a building in my clothes, and swam relaxed long strokes one after the other and around the corner. I was leaving the meeting and going home. There had been a man showing his gymnastic skill to my sister. He was not a beautiful gymnast but a genius eccentric whose body moved like a rubber strap. He'd twist and float just off the ground. Then he jumped on a forklift and zoomed back to her. Does he know where the brake is? Yeah. He knows engines too, I guess. I go out a side door which seems to be a police door. Parking lot. But beyond it the city on slopes downhill over the sea. I see a path on a slope over the freeway. I'll strike across this sand slope to it. I'm moving the way I moved when I was swimming, long easy almost unconscious steps. It dawns on me that I'm heading toward trouble. I'm sliding. I am not able to see whether the slope ends in a cliff over the freeway. I'll have to go back. I struggle uphill. There is a long serrated gash in the red sand. I walk up between its sides, which are shoulder height. The edges are interesting. Perfect sharp pleats that match those on the opposite side, so I can see it's a crack newly opened. I touch the sharp edges. The crack closes on me. A weight of sand. Will I be able to struggle out? I do. I keep going. I tumble off the slope over the roof of a car that is about to drive off. Lower down I come to a scene I know, though the tide is higher than I've seen it. There's a house I have visited. I come in through the back. A sofa in the corridor with a baby asleep. It is morning, quite early. I see a woman and say, I'm sorry, I had to come through. They are building market stalls where there used to be a stable. And so on. At the mission I dreamed a black man, tall, broadshouldered, narrow hipped, naked, took me on his back and carried me. 4th As I was writing that, Nicole [Audette] phoned. She - and Nathalie last week - talked about attention deficit disorder. I went to the library. There he was - manic, chaotic, losing his glasses, messing his room, not finishing the Mr Anthony's review, not listening to me, not able to organize himself to sort and pack, freaking at interruptions to his plans, thriving on speed and cocaine, constantly in the principal's office, jumping into fights, zonking on TV and music, unable to write a letter, craving the softness of dope, in agony about the ways he has messed up though his intentions are good, wearing his heart on his sleeve, seeing into who is in front of him, not able to remember me past about a month, not remembering what I like or need no matter how clearly I've told him, bluffing and lying because his record so badly misrepresents and disqualifies him, saying he'll leave San Diego for me before we knew each other, not following through, over-courteous because he's afraid of the consequences of his impulsiveness, relatively thriving at the Golden West where he had to respond to what comes up rather than steer something through stages of concentration, wanting praise and praising himself for things that seem elementary, intellectually inferior because he has not been able to think anything through, hypnotizing himself with old saws because they keep him in some kind of pattern, not able to respond to what I've said because he couldn't really attend to it, heading for alcohol in his teens, unable to hold a decision, craving acceptance and giving it, flying into annoyance, not holding a grudge, unable to be read to. He inherited from Vic presumably, and Vic from the Irishman whose wife kicked him out for drink and philandering. What it means is that all the ways he stymies me, doesn't see me, doesn't love me, can't want what I want to give him in my own ways of loving him, are not personal. He wants to love somebody, he wants to be able to. The fact is that he can't. I have been grieving that for a year and a half in bewilderment. Now that I have a name for it I still grieve it. I have a way now to stop browbeating him. I can steer him toward a way to understand himself for the first time in his life. I can stop expecting what isn't happening. But I don't have a lover or a companion. I don't have the illusion that I have one. I can feel for him and see him through to his next thing, but I don't think I will accept the life of deprivation and servitude I'd have with him. Is this correct     no What's wrong with it     it leaves out the work The work wants me to have a life of deprivation and servitude     NO The analysis of his brain deficit is correct     YES Are you saying it can be fixed    YES He won't be able to find the way to fix it     YES So I would have to     YES Can you teach me what to do     YES Do you want us to be together     no What do you want     perfected work You want me to fix him and then lose him     YES What about me     you will have a chance to do the work I need love and safe attachment to prosper     the work will give you that, responsibility will give you that What will I lose him to     improvement of fortune If he's fixed he won't want me     NO Do you mean improvement of my fortune     - After I deal with that, postpolio symptoms. That is unquestionably why I am aching and lying low. It's green at the garden, blooming white. Cold. It's pretty winter, the wettest year they said today. I'm camped in my room with the electric heater, table up against the bed, radio and TV and many papers. Louie is fantasizing about Rhoda. I'm romantic about Tom again. Reading about landscape in Greek and Hebrew writing. I read about the Hebrews with detestation - this is the culture that colonized us [in La Glace] where we lived as European bodies in North American reaches of land and sky. What is this ranting authoritarian moralistic craftless grandiose phantasmagorical presenceless ideology doing there? How did it perpetuate itself? What was it good for? I have never understood that Christianity was a Jewish plot. Was it the first purely ideological imperialism? It was like a brain virus spread by language: mad cow disease. They took the book and ate it and it was in their mouth (somehow) sweet as honey and in their brain it destroyed their ability to love and notice where they were. The Greeks perpetuated themselves too - I guess - if that was them in the Free Press poetry page and in LM Montgomery and in Barney Hamm's studies of ducks - and in nursery rhymes and fairytales - and in the encyclopedia - and in just about everything taught in school. It was an opposition that never named itself as an opposition, even in church itself - Silent night, holy night - It came upon a midnight clear. Alright, the pagans were everywhere. The Hebrews were three hours a week confined behind the pulpit and my dad in his pretentious moments. So why do I hate them. A sensation I have never had before, writing. It's a sensation of frivolity, lack of care. Want to say something about Luke yesterday. It was a wet afternoon. I didn't know the door was unlocked. He walked up the stairs. Later we shopped and cooked: he peeled potatoes and turned on the radio. I was at the table cutting rhubarb leaves and ends. We were making stew without having to discuss it. Luke is admitting he is worried about himself. I said it feels worse but it's better. My heart hurt intensely when I said that, as if I were feeling confirmation. That sensation of the book or something correct herding us gently. As if he is getting closer to himself partly because I have been working to be willing to feel. The sensation of faith. 7th Why do I like this: builders into the 1600s worked without plans. They would make a floor and draw, for instance, a square on it. Then they would draw other figures in that square - another square rotated within the first to bisect the edges, for instance. From these chords, arcs, etc, they would take proportionate lengths for heights of walls and all the other architectural features. They'd transfer the measurement with string or templates. Or they would similarly use tracing walls. 'Ground plan.' 8th Golden Horse Café. Tom in his phone box, this time in sun, says his foot is infected and throbbing. Oh poor creature, scared and broke, lay in his bed last night and saw a large tree squirming full of birds. I am broke again. The book says I am supposed to feel what's on the way for me, weakness, pain and inability. I rebel. I'll feel it when I have to, I say. You are losing the use of parts of yourself, it says. There's a child who thinks it is happening again, everything will desert you. You are shutting down in anticipation. Not feeling losses is further loss - that's how it happens. Alright, but I blank. I don't know how to go on. What I seem to see is that the thought about the question is itself the feeling I'm supposed to search for. 9 Dave and Francie on the Drive (and Leah and Laiwan: I was at the Havana with Louie who drank two Cuba libres and held my hand) - talking to Francie staring fascinated at what has happened to her face with pregnancy. The two sides of her face have separated. And something odd is happening to Dave too. It was as if his mouth and eyes had pulled together toward the center of his face. Their corners puckered. Tom's young heart - they said at the clinic. New moon. A yen, a yearn. 10th I dream I'm lying on my stomach feeling my back at the small of the waist, how tight it is. I'm happy it's not loose, but it is too tight. There's a cord like stretched elastic. I try to relax it. I notice a hand feeling the shape of my bum - two hard round bumps. It's my dad, sitting on the bed in the dark. I pretend I'm asleep. I won't do it but I'm aching to. Later my mum has found two grey hairs under her bed and is nagging me for having been in it with Tom. I haven't. And she says we've been seen at night. I'm so exasperated with her I want to throw a plate through the glass door. I try. My hand won't release the plate. I try again. It's a strange sensation the way my hand just hangs onto the plate at the end of its swing. Then I do it, though with great effort. - I want to say something about the garden, its moment. It's young again. The leaves are so many and still perfect, willow leaves bright and sharp, rose leaves, flocks and tribes of soapwort, tall and small. There is the herb garden so beautifully fitted against the vine walk entrance and the garden house. It's me who did that. My intransigence in defense of what no one else cares enough about to be unpopular for. I know I'm seen as overbearing. I fight for design. There have been times Muggs or Joanne have begun to say they have taste too, or that something is a matter of taste. I don't say no, but what I do say implies no. If they had had their way visually a wonderful thing wouldn't exist. I wouldn't work for the garden if I couldn't make wonderful pleasure. This morning at the meeting I was alone saying we should care about the finish of the floor. I had to fight. I fought. I held my ground. I do that where I have to but it is always difficult, as if I'm too young or too much of a girl to be doing what I'm doing. A frail valor that defends absolute certainty. I fought Mike Kaiser for levels in the herb garden. I fought Sharif for the shape of the house. Now there is that completion of the herb garden's concentric shapes set perfectly against the windowless shape of the wall. The step down into the vine walk is perfect. The gravel walks with the shapes of the beds is perfect. Seeing the cottonwoods blowing at the bottom of the garden from the herb garden bench was perfect. The fluid translation on the pool surface was something too. Sitting with Susan and Rachel in front of the house yesterday talking about the landscaping was very level and even - those intrepid competent pretty young women. But they looked at each other when they thought I was talking about symbolism. 12 These days I'm reading histories of landscape in painting and writing, wanting to know how it happened that in the early Christian centuries people seem to have fallen into a trough of oblivion that went on, though shallowing gradually, until - in my family though not in the cultured urbans - my generation. The Greeks had it right. How could that rightness have been lost for a millennium and a half? I keep wanting to know whether there is something essential the detour was needed for, some capability that needed seven hundred and fifty generations to build itself into cultural commonplace, cognitive stability. This I that pops its head up in this time and place will never know whether humans are herding themselves toward another long dirty ditch of orthodox blindness. Do we know how to live at home in our moment and yet give ourselves its mysteriously situated depth in history and physical space? Imagining the real. Which is so shocking. There are nights when the upper air is windless and the stars in heaven stand out in their full splendor round the bright moon; when every mountaintop and headland and ravine starts into sight, as the infinite depths of the sky are torn open to the very firmament; when every star is seen, and the shepherd rejoices. Such and so many were the Trojan's fires. Iliad As a flickering light from water, flung back by the sun or the moon's glittering form, flits far and wide o'er all things, and now mounts high and smites the fretted ceiling of the roof aloft. Virgil 17th Louie wakes crying, she says. She walks out the door in the morning not looking at the day, saying to it, in grief, I can't have you. She comes out of work ashamed that she doesn't have it. I say, I have heard you say this many times. I think and don't say, you have the day more than most. I say, very gently, I think it is a structure. She is starting to crumble, saying it's no use, she must just ignore it, she has to work. I say does she want to look and find out what it is that is lost? I have already heard my own guess - or was it her answer - Hansi. She gets to it. I'm afraid it was really love, and that would mean I'm wrecked, she says. I say, Tell yourself what you want now, and then tell yourself the truth of what it was then. You're afraid the two are self-contradictory, so you must say them both. I am marveling meantime that a girl so well-supported can crash so radically when she loses her first love. She didn't know what she felt for him and so she didn't act on it, and then she couldn't know she was mourning when he married, and then she 'broke down' in shame that her mother knew. A failure to be able to be willing to acknowledge herself, that faultline so evidently set in the little girl who wouldn't give up her mother for her father because she'd seen she couldn't have him anyway. She decided to cut her losses. She had no way to know she was disabling her ability to know who she wanted. It happens again: Louie does not trust knowing. And simultaneously she feels she's rotten at the core and no one sees through her, she's getting away with too much. 18 Next day she phones and says the phrase that helped her was what I said about mourning, that she is in mourning even if it happened twenty years ago, and that she should think of herself as someone whose mother or father has died but she has to work. She said it let her understand that she doesn't have to cut off. 19 Victoria Day Monday, armchair pulled to the window so there will be sun on my feet. I have been reading the history of Christianity, going to the garden in the afternoons, seeing ecstatic days, grass in the orchard floated with buttercups, vinewalk and herb garden flaming with order, swimming in scent. Sometime in a day, sometimes twice, I go to the hillside with the Star Man and see the country spread in moonlight. He's careful when he teaches me to know his mind, he shows it to me first as a way to show me how I seem to someone who desires me. He teaches me to ask to know the minds of people who don't like me, as a way of understanding the otherness of their whole vision. He feels me wanting him to touch me and shows that he feels it, so that I'll understand his initiative and not deny my wish. He makes it useless to hide and delightful to be naked. I ask for touch in the way I ask to know other things. He can raise a semblance of anyone I've been afraid to love, and show me how they would have been to me if they had not been lying. I can have what I want in the semblance and so be done with it. This story is a better version of my erotic stories. I come intensely. Hesperis matronalis in the house. And yet there is an unsatisfied edge. Look at the chestnuts' flowering towers. The moon is in second quarter. These days I'm not drunk on Tom but I am sometimes wishing I were, which is a weak form of it. The little edge of a pagan god, a Celt, a Celtish monk, some legend, so I can feel the marvel that's desire in fantasy. I'm working on the picture. That's a form of it too, reading about Jesuits, reading Nussbaum on love. I tried to find love moments in the last journal. There wasn't much of what I wanted, moments concrete enough to repeat. Stress at the heart as I say this. I want the surprise and disruption. "There is no reason, only a great power." "The mystery and excitement of a body animated by a unique spirit, pointing to nothing but itself and the bed upon which it rests." - I know this state. I want to crack. I want rock to flow. 20 What Christianity was for - its bait was resurrection, its political work was the organization of Europe, its cognitive work was the extension of learning outside an elite. Greek intelligence vanished because it was spreading so immensely thin. Maybe it takes a millennium for ordinary brains to be able to do what Aristotle could do. Maybe they had to be led into ability to speak to themselves by centuries of training in analogy: think of dependence as the props of vines, think of stedfastness as a path that does not dash itself from side to side the way a stream does, think of mind as a huge man set above the world. I am seeing the immense slowness of intellectual change. Some bit of cultural debris picked up in 200 AD dropped gently with the melting slush in our church in La Glace in 1956. 22nd A sore heart. I'm lonely and at loose ends. Waiting for the SSHRC check, knowing it is spent before it gets here. I want to be in love and don't dare. Haven't had a deadline in work and feel lost. I look good, brown and rested. Achy but less so when it's bright. - What is this truth I don't know. You love me, he said this morning on the phone - is that it? 23 As if it is a crisis of trust. I have stopped imagining Tom other than he is. I am feeling as well as knowing his limits. And now I feel lost. There is no one I can love childishly, which is to say there is nowhere I can love. That is despair. Is that correct     Will you talk to me     about losses About what I've lost     no About how to live with losses     no Okay tell me     about liberation: childish success is delay and illusion But despair is to be without energy     NO Tom can't love me     YES Which means I have to withhold love from him     YES Which means I don't know how to flow     The answer is to flow somewhere else     no Is there an answer     NO So will you tell me about liberation     shared pleasure You mean whenever it happens     YES I can't have that total open heart     YES I'm grieving that it's gone     YES This is why people go to religion     YES If I can't have that total open heart he seems useless to me     YES It makes me angry at him     YES I want to go away from him     YES Please comment     childish failure is illusion too My heart is sore     ask about shared pleasure, complete coming through processing excluded child And then there will be shared pleasure     I need Joyce for this     not really Does it have to be slow     NO You keep telling me to do it and I keep not doing it     YES I feel it as not knowing how     YES What is the truth     love woman doesn't want you to Female instinct     YES Because excluded child is her root     YES What will happen to her if I do the work with excluded child     she will lose her form of happiness I will be a woman but without a woman's form of happiness     NO with a woman's responsibility Is there something I should ask her for     a turn for the better Ask her to allow us to find a better way     YES She is afraid of losing all hope of happiness     YES 24 An empty, hungry state. So empty I have nothing to say but that. I'm wanting to phone Tom but know he can't help. Men are edging away from me because they can feel I'm hungry. I'm hateful to women as if they have something I'm starved for. I'm angry in a way that doesn't know it's anger until someone speaks to me. I feel people disrespect me at the garden. I want to lie down and go unconscious until whatever this is is over. I don't want to do anything but smell a man and drive a car and fuck my way to bliss. I want to drink gin and tonics, lots and fast. As soon as I say these things I feel better. I'm not drooping, I'm eager. I phone Tom on the desk and say I want to lick his armpits. He groans and that's what I want to hear. More of that. I say my mouth is swelling. I say I want to get wild. He says it's Memorial Day weekend where he is and there's music in the town on the hill. He walked through music. 25 Nathalie's birthday at the Wazubee - little skinny Nathalie whom fashion has taken from vampire punk to polyester retro - and there was her hunk, a short man with a fine small face and a body so bulky he shambles. Polite, slow, manfully responsible for the drinks. I couldn't keep my eyes off his upper arms that swelled round and huge out of his sleeves, finegrained brown skin, smooth and fascinating like breasts. On the other side of the table was Loki's elf-head, nervous, quick, hip, and rationalistic, a digital pixie. I didn't expect Tom to see through my state yesterday. An extreme reaching out he said. "How did you know that?" "It was so out of character. Nothing I couldn't sort out in half an hour face to face." I guess you know about going into a manic state because your heart is sore. "We've both had to work so hard, we're getting our breaths and now it's time for the next stage." How did that happen? How did he suddenly turn into a wise calm man who was containing me? A savage man, descended from people who lived on the seaward edges, so far away it was not worth the cost to conquer them. They had local peace enough to develop an artisan lineage. Some of their work endures because it is metal. Other endures because it was immaterial, a use of mind in stories. They were not conquered but later they married themselves to a new form of empire, which both infected and instructed, an invasion of the brain. As barbarians, this is what the men liked: fighting, drinking, ornament and the intoxication of rhythmic speech. They had a gift for fantasy and in Ireland between the 400s BC and the 800s AD (the Vikings) and then again to the 1100s (Anglo-Normans) they were left alone to elaborate their skill. They were already subtle. They left political unification alone and passed around their stories. They were, it is said, the first pagans to take to the new intellectual organization. They took it their own way, however. They took it monastically and artistically. A man would give his passion to very small very intricate images. "Illuminating one book may have been a lifetime's work." They remembered poems by ear. By the 800s they were the only scholars still able to read Greek. When they were ready they invaded the continent in the way they had been invaded. But then they were invaded in the old way, by the other, wilder sea-people more northern even than they. Dublin was founded as a Viking market. The lines of Irish art say there was contact earlier, but the tension and fineness of Irish interlace is like attention following simultaneous lines of music, music with swirls and eddies like the whorls behind an oar. As Christians, this is what the men liked: fighting, drinking, ornament, the intoxication of emotional music, impulse, fantasy, escape from women and children, rhythmic speech. I'm pagan but you're barbarian. Why do I have no interest in my own kind. I don't know who they are. There were Celtic missionaries to the Frisian coast in the 700s. I noted that as if it makes sense to think I'm somehow Irish. I think of my mum and dad as different races. But neither of them is that. He's something, though, like that - Irish crossed with a raven, green eyes, fine hands, lust, violence, anger, arrogance. He gets away from himself and is frightened of himself. Has the eye. Is too proud to submit himself to books, is more interested in seeming to know than in learning. Isn't a family man. 26 Here is a question: if I were going to be with Tom for years, if he were going to go on as he is, not able to love me in the ways that make me feel loved, strengthened and happy, what could I do to live well? I feel my air is murky. I'm not coming through. I'm not understanding the book.   Dear larger one, please will you speak to me     your heart is sore: I can give you to feel it I'm suspended not knowing what to do, am I going to go live with a man who ... here I get stuck, my heart hurts is what I know     an immature chaotic man I'm frightened     my dear tell me the heart of your fear You see I'm not finding it     ask the feeling I'm afraid I'll be the child I was with my dad, suppressed suppressed suppressed     and that child is this ache Young, worried, contained, sad, silent     back her It's a big broad solid feeling with the little feeling squeezed tight at the solar, a strong broad back, is that what you wanted me to notice?     YES Is there something else that would be better to do? That being is too solid     like a rock Can you tell me what to do with the rock     breathe Now I'm closed and strong     speak to the child She's gone     the compression of the solar is what's left of her I can't shift it     just feel it I went to sleep     too bad   volume 11 the golden west volume 10: 1997 april-may work & days: a lifetime journal project