Vancouver 4th July 1997
Six in the morning. Sore and sun-damaged. Busy. Have been running corner to corner supervising twenty-five people, seven-hour days. Coming home and doing hours of homework for Lee's literacy garden thing. Feeding Row at both ends of the day. Whirring. Fast and friendly, completely public. Lee sez he'll give me maybe $3000 if it works out.
5th
What do I know so far. I'm in my fourth day working for Lee.
Bothered by the way he won't go through points with me, just wants to brainstorm.
Tom today saw a notice for an editing/reporting job on a paper for the San Juan Islands. "Why didn't you tell me right away?" "I wanted to hear what you had to say first." "You mean you're getting trained." We laugh. "No, it's love."
I was walking out of the store on Union yesterday and Josie walked in. The first year with Wes was very hard, she said, I was crying all the time. Now we don't fight any more. Her young man has grey hair. He's the same age as she is now, no longer shy.
7th
Minsky. One of those names with ancient aura. He comes up the stairs with his deep loud voice that suggests a barrel chest, leading with his very strong eyes. I put him in the green armchair and sit looking down at him. He's bald, shaggy, has a big square face. We stare at each other for the fun of it. I wince to remember that I smiled. He's sixty-five and I didn't know him yet. But that was a glitch. Mostly I was feeling how much I like being with a big strong direct mind - the way my big strong directness feels at home. It doesn't with Lee, who is whitish - skin, hair, moustache, clothes - and doesn't think straight out from a center.
When I said "business nursery" they both jumped up.
9th
Got $500. I am enmeshed with a man who calls me at six in the morning to talk. He runs around all day having conversations with people and reporting them to other people. He wants confabs with Minsky because of the kind of more powerful male he is, but he also wants to be backed up when he goes there. Have I got that? Yes. It isn't clear what I'm hired to do. A document for the colleges, he says. No, for everybody, he says. He wants to hide his association with me, he says. No, he'll announce it, he says. He wants to do something with agriculture and community development, he says, but he doesn't want to know how the garden works. Anything else?
What do you feel, it says. I want to go see Tom, I want a bunch of money so I can stop feeling scared of my debt and so I can have a car and not be so scrimping as I have been. But what do I feel in the work. I like being in motion again, doing something. I feel unliked. He is such a cold white grub. I feel impatient with his Jewish style, is that what it is? Why don't you calm down and say the thing straight, I'm thinking. Often what I feel is sullen, there's nothing to this but I need the money. I'll put up with it, it won't be for long.
-
Rowen's joy about painting little figures. Luke gave him technical secrets and Rowen came home hugging himself very sweetly, a weightless childy joy. Persisting, so that I dragged my heavy feet to Metrotown and spent fifty-two dollars on a paint set and a figure set. Rowen you fine soul.
Hey - this week I made writing deadlines and suped mighty work at the garden and was only cranky briefly and limitedly with Rowen. SSHRC check still isn't here.
10th
Tom in Bellingham working in the rain, five dollars an hour, with a cold. Coming home to a bunk in a room with fifty other men. Mission food for three months. His feet breaking into sores and hurting all the time. I had my ordeal and this is yours. You're bearing it with faith and valor, the way I bore mine. It seems to me we are doing well.
11th
Friday morning. There's sun. Today a wedding in the herb garden. The bride is being piped up the vinewalk.
I put on Tom's second tape last night. By the middle of the second side I was hearing - as if - Tom in landscapes of feeling consciousness so dark so beautiful so unknown to me - so much the airs of traveling I haven't done - drug atmospheres - beautiful extreme coherences. I was back in the edges of where I never am, these days: the gales.
Your clarity, he says. Your flying balances, I say.
These flights through storms of color that make a life beside the world - life in the unformed - where forming is our own - I forget - you are my hero there.
Heart brings you back / On this you can rely.
You're the love of my life, he said. Maybe, I thought.
Its roar is his accomplice. A little girl holding back, holding back.
Rowen last night imagined a boy exactly like himself who doesn't hold back. He was so energized he actually bounced off walls - floor - bed. He doesn't have parents and he has money to buy equipment, mountain climbing, spelunking. Rowen saw his moves - drew them in the air.
The SSHRC check came today.
Crowds in the garden. The garden house with its windows unplasticked open onto light burning through vine leaves. The wires up on the espalier edge that finishes the west end of the nursery corner finally. New brick paths. When I stand at the wild area edge I see the espalier in clean edges new-mulched with leaves, the garden house roof with its dormer silver above the apple rows. So well designed. I did that. I thought it, I placed it, I framed it, I found Sharif, I made an atmosphere where women could dare build it.
12th
For the open house I have to make a speech about the garden house.
13th
The open house a confused long day. Rowen this morning - oh - we sat on the grass waiting for Helen - Rowen left waving from the middle of the back seat.
I went and washed the garden house windows. Susan's environmental technology young women.
There was Ken Sallett at the vine walk corner. Sylvia's here, I say, she's with a black-haired guy with a camera. That's her latest. He's very nice. He's a hairdresser. He's too nice, says Ken maliciously. My one isn't nice at all. He's a brawler. And he's bigger than you. But he isn't here, I say. Where is he? In jail? (Departing.)
I loved that conversation. He fled.
But when I made my speech he was standing in a good spot and he was the one who grinned to see my hwuff of breath when it was over.
Yeah and Dave and Francie came with their baby, later, to see the house. And Rob. Louie's the one I miss. I want to ask her whether I'm imagining something has happened in the garden.
14
It's 3:30 and I'm awake wanting to talk. There is a cat screeching in the alley. I woke melancholy about - it seemed - the falling into wreckage of things. When I gave up my plot Muggs passed it to the RayCam After School group who have laid bricks over the gravel path, and in a way that doesn't notice which side is up. (It's not that I am not looking good. I looked nice yesterday. I was wearing the black shirt with the green airplanes.) I was feeling the struggle it is to maintain what is created.
Ken looked good. I liked that. He wins it by his months of physical battle on the slopes. I didn't take account of that in my first sight of him - it isn't accidental beauty, it's tree-planter's beauty of will and stress. The way my fine easy speech of two years ago was won by the labour I had been putting into writing the Dennett paper, probably. I didn't take account of that, thinking of my much less fine speech yesterday. I'm just sore that it wasn't good. Though there was a man with a beard who said it was. He said he didn't like speeches but he liked that one. What did you like about it? I could tell you're educated. You summarized the main things that happened.
The day's meetings. Joan had been making garlands out of bindweed and vetch, and there were people passing who looked tipsy with wilting hay around their heads. There was a feeble-minded man with a garland around a very small head who stood in the vinewalk fixing me with his unnerving eyes talking about the fundraising potential of juice bars out of a little mouth with four front teeth seemingly welded into one, bound together with a brace - a mouth also smeared with chocolate icing as if he had been devouring small animals raw.
Who else. A distinguished older woman dressed in white standing in the shade of the vinewalk, a dark woman. I saw she must be Sharif's mother. I said I was nervous about my speech. She said, Ask God to help you. I said, Do you like Sharif's building? Knowing she is an architect too. I like it, she said, inscrutably.
And there was a tiny very dark-skinned East Indian woman of great dignity and presence, with glowing large black eyes. Last week I gave her a pot of jasmine and she had come to the open house to thank me. She said she had given the jasmine to the temple. Turned so I could smell the flowers poked singly into the edge of her bun - a different kind of jasmine, the color of old wedding satin.
The kids' area has never looked so good. This year the plants were right for the first time. Ocean spray blooming in a sheet behind the boat, pink saponaria springing from under the prow. Comfrey in fresh waves, tansy and a bright bit of lychnis chalcedonica next to the square pool. Brian had floated flowers on the tank, daylilies. Others on the herb garden tank. Rick had cleared grass around the trees in the orchard so that for the first time some of those trees showed as good shapes with half-grown apples nearly the colors of the leaves pulling the branches into weighted curves.
It's that beauty is not wrecked but has moved on, I guess. Appearing elsewhere. The vinewalk seen through the new windows, an angle we haven't had. Campanula and the twists of the vines on the posts. Kiwi tendrils hunting in their poised way.
Nicole was queen of the herb garden wandering under a magenta umbrella that cast a strong pink onto her shoulders and orange hair.
The sky is lighter now at 4:30. I hear a gull.
Eventful - it was - though at the time I am overwhelmed and feel it's dragging.
Bell the plant sale cashier in a baseball cap with a cigarette popped into the stained corner of her creased old brown smoker's mouth. One-oh-seven-six eight-oh, she says over her shoulder, taking a wad of money to hide in her room.
Rowen. We packed last night and then he came and lay down with me and wanted stories. I was telling him about this house, where we may never be together again. He got up to go to bed, came back and hugged me from the other side. Got as far as the door and circled back and changed his mind and went to bed. That was charming, as it would have been if he were a grown man. When I got home yesterday he had put the little Gund bear in my bed. We said I would find a good home for his transport truck but keep his bear for him until he has someone to give it to.
This morning he got up and wanted to draw something. He has had three days of concentrated creation. There was one day he didn't get dressed and go out until evening.
Maxine [Gadd] showed up at the garden after almost everyone was gone. I heard you were the best reader at the Pat Lowther reading, I said. I'm always the best reader, for all the good it does me, she said, with her long-time throw-away melancholy.
I have something of that feeling about my part in the garden, as if there's beauty made with long learning and energy and it matters to almost no one. Or say it another way, almost no one knows it matters to them and everyone. When I leave it will be less and they won't mind.
Now make the motion that clears the table and opens the air.
It's Monday, mid-July. I'll see Tom a week from today.
-
Val and Sue at the garden taking rose cuttings this aft. Sue says she feels the coherence of the garden. There might be only three places like it in Canada.
Muggs came by talking about having made nearly 1100 dollars, and next year we can make more if we have more people. What I realized hearing her with Val and Sue was that she's driving toward a kind of mainstream. Making money by complicated effort - rather than finding it - is lots of people's game.
15
I paid bills, $5800. Bought new Converse hi-tops and pants, $100. Went to the movie Rowen recommended, explosions and aliens. Came home and couldn't do philosophy but could do agricultural consulting three hours straight.
16
The car at Koo's with its hood up, beautiful red car. Got my license replacement and managed the towing. Am tight and frightened by that doing - why?
17
Eco-agriculture organizing. Alternative culture bureaucracy. I saw them at Farm Folk/City Folk this aft. Not a spark of kin. They are pale dull people I want to call deformed. I mean something like a distortion that shows their lack of feeling for beauty. As if I think pleasure in beauty makes beautiful. I was there three hours ripping through newsletters - and it is good they are there, with all their files - but it was only when I was on the way home passing the new playhouse that a dark woman on the curb looked at me with interest. Nowhere in any of the ministries does anyone say make it beautiful - food, community development, a valued position, paid work - no one says make inspiring beauty with those who haven't advantaged themselves. I'm growling with annoyance. Why are the beauty-makers in ghettos, or arranging the much too much of the rich?
18
"The children in you, who are your talent, no longer tyrannize you."
"Your responsibility to tell the truth in all the things you are."
19
My car is on the hoist having an engine transplant. When I rode by Koo's shop yesterday I saw the new engine in the middle of the floor with the pulley still attached. Is that mine? Koo's sister and I standing looking at it. It came from the parts dealer with small writing in white grease pencil here and there, cryptic.
Strong moon.
20th near Blaine
Two in the afternoon, a breezy place where the air feels salty on the skin. There's Baker faded in a white haze. The nearby swaying tansy suits its blue - solid yellow, incandescent green. Over there on the other side of the gravel it's Queen Anne's lace, and it bobs. The hayfield sheltered by this dyke has running crests, dun-colored. That's probably an Indian car. I think it's owls who fly with that slow flap. The bay seems alive and the backwaters, not, though there are little sounds.
The road I followed into Bellingham came in past the mission. Did you feel me pass at eleven? And then again at twelve. I'm thinking of you with springs of joy.
The sound of the wind. Clicks and cheeps. The first time I found this place I hunted for hours. This time, coming from the other direction, I hunted for hours again, through the Lummis' Road Closed signs. If I stick to the shore I'll have to come to it, I thought, but I didn't. Is it a place they'll only let me find if I'm in pain?
-
Moved my camp across the dyke road. I'm in a meadow. Earlier, when I sat down on the roadside to write, an airplane's shadow ran across my hand. It was a small thing. I remembered it just now seeing the owl across this small bay hunting against wind with its shadow jumping level on the grass underneath it. There are martins catching evening bugs, stiff starry points blown sideways. I see they're assembled on that one dead tree.
It suits yarrow to grow this way in clumps with looser lighter grasses. There is an elegant grass with long neat heads just the weight to curve round at the tips - a patch of those is very pretty catching light on their hard plaits, wobbling all in the same way at the same angle.
The sound of tires on gravel. Pass by, whoever you are. I'm just a pilgrim. Though I'm trespassing and mean to spend the night.
The water of this very shallow bay runs onto a shore that's grass to the edge - there's the hawk low to the water flying a long way out - why? The wind is less and the light is yellower. - Ah, there's the last one, the truck. I'm sketching. Are they stopping? No.
21st, Gateway Motel, Port Angeles
Sleeping beside the nodding yarrow heads I dreamed I woke suddenly with people standing looking down at me. A thin blond young man was the one I noticed. I said I had the feeling of someone lying in a grave, so far down. Later his mother spoke to me, a large woman with brown hair. She was a woman with authority. She sang a phrase of beautiful music. She said Mary had sung it because it needed to be sung by an alto close to tenor. - But what are these feet? she said. As in poetic feet.
The second dream was about Tom, someone I thought of as Tom, who took a drag off a hookah. I let it go for a while and then came around - is that what happened? (He's got baseball on, I can't remember.) I said I was stopping. You want dope, you're always going to want dope, I don't want that. I walked away. When I woke (in the dream) I could see him walking toward my cabin. He was bringing back a little pile of my clothes I'd left at his place.
I woke from that into daylight, the yarrow heads bobbing. What does this mean? I've been so blank. Does it mean I'm supposed to stop feeling safe? Is feeling safe the new danger I'm unfamiliar with?
Writing on a green arborite table.
23rd
I was very jangled. I was lost. I couldn't figure out why I was lost. I was not clear enough to be able to feel Tom, see him, touch him, anything. I was close to autistic, occupied with the way especially his speech distressed me. Trying to find a bearable attitude. Felt everything he'd say to me as missing, missing, missing the point. I'd keep trying, keep explaining, keep asking, but nothing was working. I felt I was with a mind whose quality I can't bear. And I couldn't get above it, I was locked into as if a belief that we are peers and lovers. At the same time I would hear myself dumbing down in the way I'd say things.
I was lying on the floor of the Gateway Motel with my feet on the bed laughing hysterically saying Love is so uncomfortable.
Today I found out there really was a postcard from Lorri although that probably was not what I saw in his wallet. It was a card that invited him back. We were sitting on the rocks above the mudflats in Bellingham. I was thinking, this man is so alien to me I would be grateful if Lorri took him back.
He said he didn't go back to her because Rebecca would cut him off from Mathew. (Vic's Towing, said the yellow '50s dumptruck in the backyard.) Because he doesn't trust her. Did he start smoking dope again after he heard from her, I asked. No relation, he said.
The texture of his brain was worse this time - was it? I was so tired I couldn't tell.
I'm a gull flying flying with him far past land. I've flown steadily through storms and lightning and now the sky is clear, but I feel so tired I want to die, just to be able to stop flying. Gulls can float like ducks, he said. Oh I want to just sit on the glassy sea, I want to just stop. Would you feel abandoned if I just stop for a while?
His best moment that I was too tired fully to like was when he told the story of being my loving dog - that was one of his beautiful whole pictures, very natural.
24th
$1138. A lotta money says Koo.
Where am I. I'm not going to tell the story of that trip. I'm out of love. I'm out of energy. I wasn't interested. I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't get through to the book. We drove and spent money. It was all irrelevant to me. I had a sore throat. Slept badly. Was sexually uninterested. Didn't care enough to fight. Was worried about losing myself not about losing him. So bored with his talk. His face was too much. His weight, his grabbing, his exhausting need to finish a train whose drift I got in the first half of the first sentence. The lack of return with what I'd say. His mindless spending on stuff that isn't good value - plastic drinks containers on the ferry. The few practical urgencies he has, he hasn't looked after - his teeth, the flat tire on his bike, going to Seattle for more calomine bandages to keep his feet well, paying the storage on his stuff in San Diego and his stuff in Bellingham, paying what he owes me. His haplessness.
You're afraid of being dominated, he said. No, it's closer to the bone than that, I'm afraid of your incompetence, I said.
He didn't tell me about Lorri's postcard, he didn't tell me when he was smoking dope again.
25
Should I try to think about it?
A park in Bellingham, Victorian grass and trees. He was sleeping. I could look at him. his wonderful fine hair, silver and rust, his living skin reddening in the sun. When he woke and was lying on his back his face somehow fell into innocence. Two green eyes with a fur of lashes, wonky double-pointed chin, a cleanness of the skin, and what moves me most, the set of the corners of this mouth.
I keep seeing the grains of sebum being squeezed out of the big pores on his temples. Has anyone else done this with you? Rebecca. Did you like it? Yes.
- It's turning into a story about having been conned
no
- A story in which I took on my weakness no
- What a story in which you took on your unconscious
- I gave it power YES
- And worked with it
- And now what you have come through
- Should I tell him it's over because he didn't tell me those things
- But he told them to me now no you had to find them
- Please talk to me he is withdrawn
- You mean unconscious YES
- He feels I'm on my way out YES
- Does he think I'm going to say it's over YES
- Does he want me to no
- You're saying it will help him if I do YES
- What he wants most is a sound system
- Tom is still lathering me like mad YES
- I love you, you're so beautiful he really feels those
- Do you want to comment be with your family
- Do you mean Luke and Rowen YES
- Because it matters to them YES
- Okay it will be a struggle
- You mean not to go back to romance YES
- Because of my addiction YES
- But romance makes me look nice no
- What has been making me look nice your child
- A story in which I took on my weakness no
-
Minsky a pugilist owl, tuft over each ear. He wanted to say he's the radical and I'm not. Last time he wanted to say I'm more radical than him. He trips out on the few things he has to say. His sense of what 'vision' means, was, it turns out, something about empowering the common man. My sense of 'vision' is more like 'plan' = how can this be done, how should the land be laid out? What should be the structure of the group? Etc.
Did he mean to do me out of a job? What shall we have Ellie do next, says Lee. I'm going to do this and this, says Minsky, taking up all the work there was to do. I let it go.
26
Talking to Nathalie last night in what was Louie's place. Her strong small body carefully dressed. Her house also. Hip and conscious. New orange suede shoes. What she said about Tom: 1) I can demand he go be diagnosed. 2) Whenever we lose borders it's always possession by the child. Borders has something to do with remembering the limitations of the connection. 3) Inward separation in speech always has to do with not feeling safe.
27
"Love had struggled toward definition, grown out of confusion, knowledge, misery and necessity."
"Loyal intelligent care."
The best of last night's party was seeing Martin with his baby. He was on a chair with one ankle propped on his knee, and that male pose made a wide triangular lap in which Mika slept in the shaped hammock of his big hairy hands. She slept facing him, with her little feet against his abdomen. His loud voice surrounded her, his face was there in front of her if she woke. He was carrying her, asleep or awake, most of the evening. Andrew wanted to hold her, and that was the other picture - the comfy maternal pleasure shown. Both the actual mothers stayed out of it.
The question I had going most of the evening was why are Norman and Gary social duds, so that everyone drifts into another room when they talk? And how do the stars do it, Judith racing along intelligently and Jill making everyone laugh loud with her? And am I really one of the duds? Cos I wasn't one of the stars.
The stars are responsible, is the way to think it. They are energized in responsibility. The duds are dull in self-preoccupation and irresponsibility. The way I could be responsible, though, wouldn't be Jill's or Judith's way, which was my way as a TA, that forced push into social doing.
In the garden I do it by caring, my concerns speak up. At the party my concerns don't at all speak up. My concerns are with the physical person in front of me. To Norman: why are you so ugly and dully self-involved? To his wife: how can you sleep with him? To Paul Wong: what has happened to make your face suddenly swell up? To Kathy: you look nice but faded and worn, are you alright? To Phil: you are fatter and fatter. To Martin: you are softer, I haven't got used to that yet. To Fiona: I like the way you look. I love your thin legs. You have that thin worn look a bit though. To that red-headed guy with a collection of heavy rings in both ears: what are you wanting to make with this grotesque shape of wooly side whiskers and earrings bunching together on the sides of your face? To the girl going to Berkeley: are you as duh bland blond as you look? To Andrew: you seem prospering, fuller and realer, but you aren't interested in me now, is it something about the way I look, do I look depressed? To the San Diego guy: how can so loutish an energy work intelligently with the questions I work at? To Tomás: how is it you are physically so immature, and what is your extreme unmanliness feeling here? To the miscellaneous grad students: why is the department admitting so mediocre a crew of similar young men?
- Hello excluded child
- You want to say something about it imagine, victory, carrying, excluded child
- Do you mean a true and good winning YES
- If she got what she needs YES
- Apology no
- Being seen YES
- Every moment YES
- What I do with Tom is irrelevant, what matters is that YES
- Is everybody like that YES
- You want to say something about it imagine, victory, carrying, excluded child
What I could make of Freud - he spent years on the anatomy of the CNS, wrote papers on neurological failure, cerebral palsies, aphasia. About fifteen years. Announced his psychology in neurological terms. His language is very interesting to me. I can read it in my preferred structure.
The amazing passage where he sez bridge is penis also because it is "thanks to the male organ that we are able to come into the world at all, out of the amniotic fluid." However so? - A covered bridge, a romance of. It seems to say that in <bridge> penis and vagina are the same thing.
My woman is milking my dick! said Tom in a triumphant tone I noticed but didn't understand.
28
When you're cut off use writing to engage love woman in struggle in the world, it says.
I want to find the people who want my work.
29
The way I come to nothing long before the day is over.
30
Louie in Delhi laughing about Lee coming up my stairs with checks.
31st
Small pond - brain's electrics intricately rippled - pelvis as felt - the pool we were tadpoles in - a place we're large enough in to be known - smol pond is bilateral symmetry - warm life - Thoreau - two hemispheres.
I got it to print. I persisted. Two staff people trying this and that for hours. I looked in the book and fiddled, switched from something to normal. Saw the number of bytes was high enough. Waited five or ten minutes with the light blinking.
I say, Dear you, Dear me. Impossible to say what the pictures say. Look at him. Look at her. Such sweethearts. Putting them together on a page is faith. Which I have been losing.
[*small pond image]
Is this right - it happens that girls become, or don't, the body they are in love with. Got that from watching a TV ad, a woman stroking her leg. It explains why women aren't loyal to the bodies they are.
I made my own picture bigger than yours.
3rd August
Dillard's book about Bellingham - yes there is something about the way she describes people. "Who seemed to shift from place to place by pouring himself." She exercises us with seeing them and then she kills them in macabre ways she seems to laugh telling. "Her shoes poked out of her skirts at a wide interval." "Their dark backs were bumpy with what looked like mosquito bites." She's got the dry fantasy sometimes of country wit, same as where I come from, but there's another streak. Virginia Woolf. "As if his tongue were not a muscle but a petal." "She had not been burned at all, but only smoked like a fish." She calls the book The living and it's as if a catalog of deaths. She has McMurtry's dryness about slaughter but then she tells us the cinnamon buns are tight packed and the pan is hot.
Leaving Tom in the parking lot outside his room, stopping at crossroads stores being given complicated directions, buying a map, driving flat delta land with a long long rim of blue mountains small in outline across the north. A sixties song I'd never heard, more wonderful, artful, subtle and complex than those of its kind I know well, Babula's wedding. It was like Tom coming with me on the drive home through long yellow light. I could see and be glad, I was real again. I loved the silver poplars, or what are they - like small-leafed cottonwoods in shape, windward half a pinned-back silver sheet, so bright, as if the wind's touch lights them up.
[Babalu's Wedding Day by New York Doo Wap group The Eternals, 1959]
I liked the way he stood at his door in his cocoa-pink teeshirt and said "I'm going to go and write you a letter. I have a lot to tell you."
Our green motel, a leaf roof, bug-bitten alder leaves, fine-cut native blackberry, floor a graveled track. My pee flowing forward glinting among the pebbles like a stream over rocks. There were stars ignored as we tried and tried and failed. Pink fluffs at dawn we saw in separate waking moments. At four in the afternoon the sun came round the corner and straight down. Time to go. I folded, he carried.
So when it becomes arduous and it no longer seems fun and yet we are far from saying fuck it, then what is it - exactly what are we doing that we know is good? We are saving each other from the worst in ourselves each in the other addressing that part of us which is wounded, egoistic, autistic and hateful. If nothing else - at both the very least and most - we should love each other for accepting and understanding such an effort.
So, from my point of view - not only are you perhaps willfully out of fear & its defenses missing out on pleasure, you are rejecting not only me (because of all the former prior above) but also the urge & desire all the rejected former prior above creates in me to make you happy in areas where you have not been happy before as in OK my gorgeous, beautiful, shy little elf come play.
- Will we always have to go through those thickets of alienation
YES
- Will we always come through YES
- Do you want to say anything about that visit you held a strong reserve
- Will you say more adventure
- Do you mean the way I called him no the way you persisted
- I autisticked-out but rebounded YES
- I defended my truth YES
- I didn't get hurt YES
- When I start confiding I know I'm through YES
- Do you want to say anything else happiness
- Something about it?
- it's sexual
- Is that good YES
- Do you mean the way he came YES
- He's trusting more YES
- Anything else something about writing
- His? both
- Do you want a sentence complete recovery / departure of withdrawal
- Will you specify illusion
- I have an illusion about his relation to writing YES
- My illusion is that it's good YES
- Writing is good for him YES
- It focuses him YES
- Clears him emotionally YES
- But it's bad
- Do you mean the writing is bad YES
- I'm getting sentimental YES
- Be happy he's writing but look for better YES
- His recovery of writing
- When he recovers from unconsciousness
- And mine? your case is different
- Our dissociations are in different places YES
- He thinks it's either lying or violence
- And rejection
- So he lies in writing
- What I said about rising a level is true
- I believe it's either lying or being isolated
- And I choose isolation
- His task is to learn to tell the truth and be accepted YES
- Mine is the same YES
- It's called intelligence YES
- The opposite of despair is not hope but intelligence YES
- We really learned something about his mania YES
- I go autistic YES
- I broke the spell
- Will you teach us ways to handle his mania no
- Will you teach me ways to handle myself when he's manic
- The other thing I said right is that he plays dumb YES
- And that it's pointless
- Is that an example of strength in reserve YES
- Will we always come through YES
4th
It was Saturday but seemed Sunday because there had already been a day of holiday. We were on either side of a picnic table on the bay, dipping french fries in tartar sauce. It was six in the afternoon of a clear fine day. We were both wearing sunglasses. A dog came around the table. Tom rubbed its big head. Did you see that? He came right to me.
We had come through to our proper home. The man across the table was the man I left in San Diego nineteen months ago and haven't seen since. Steady and beautiful, clear, true, wild and wise. Look at you, I said. Look at you, he said. We had taken our sunglasses off and laid them together on the table. We had made our lists for the week. Are you having one of those moments you're afraid will end? I said. He laughed and gathered his things.
I wanted perfection to go on but yesterday when he phoned I could tell we were already out of register and trying. What should I say about that. I have noticed that I've sometimes found myself thinking difficulties and resistances are the very materials of well-being. The way a necessary job is a great gift.
What it is about Dillard is that she keeps telling herself death, death to amp up the strength of the light. She wants dazzle. She's a dazzle junkie, who in this book earns her fixes with hard labour of historical research.
In the forest room he asked a question and I talked - that's what happened. I confided confidently like a loved child.
How patiently patiently persistently carefully and skillfully I have worked building for us both the structures - concepts, terms, practices, vocabulary - of connection and reconnection.
5
Tom and I are bushwhacking, again and again creating paths from our disconnected to our tuned state.
Day by day a kind of system was taking shape in me ... a private method which had evolved itself from my observations, from my refusals, from niceties and analogies I had followed, from my real needs, from my strength and my weakness. Valéry in Necessity of poetry
- the golden west volume 11: 1997 may-september
- work & days: a lifetime journal project