the golden west volume 11 part 3 - 1997 august-september

work & days: a lifetime journal project

10 August "You know, Ellie, there are always bad weekends" said Janet [Atkinson-Grosjean]. 11 Monday. Confused. Dejected. Disillusioned, sad. We were in beautiful places not connecting. I thought we always come through but we didn't come through. We parted exhausted and disaffected. I hardly have the energy even next morning to describe it. The alarm woke me Saturday at six. Oh, leave before the traffic starts. Okay, I'm going. Top third of a cup of tea, don't stay to finish it. Wonderful sweeping up empty streets, empty highway to the border. What's your nationality? Canadian. Purpose of your trip? Camping. Thank you. I find him at the farmers' market setting up. He's wearing shorts and shades. I don't like the look of him, though somebody else might. It's his face I don't like. He isn't glad to see me either. Waggles his fingers. He has plans. We can go for a bike ride. There's a rock concert. He has found a perfect place for us to camp. We're at the counter in the bagel shop. Have you got a letter for me, I ask, certain of the answer. He said he was writing me. No, he says. He had a hard week. I'm stunned. No more letters and the list didn't work. We took a step forward and then collapsed all the way back. All weekend I kept inviting him to show his hand, give up the game. He wouldn't. We were under a pine tree amid apple trees, Queen Anne's lace, sweet clover blooming white. We were under a flight path and next to the railroad track beyond which the cliff dropped off into Bellingham Bay. I said, Tell me a story, tell me a story about yourself as a young man. What came to him was stepping off the plane in Okinawa. The smell of feces. He was twenty-one. In Okinawa you could get a whore for two dollars, five, if you count her fake whiskey. Hey, GI, you big, strong man, I likie. You want fuckie-fuckie? He got laid every night. Some nights he fucked his way from bar to bar. Then he discovered the whorehouses. For fifty dollars you could buy a girl for the night. You'd buy her dinner. Then she'd take you back to her place, special favor. Make you breakfast. He'd do that once a month. He was in Okinawa eighteen months. Didn't want to go home to his wife. When he did go home of course he couldn't tell her where he'd been. He was unfaithful almost immediately. She left. Then it was free love in Santa Cruz. He went for it. Headlong into journalism. Yeah, fine. What did I feel about that. 1) The distaste I feel for the fact that women will fuck men for money. 2) The dislike I feel for the fact that American men could do pretty much anything they wanted in a country far enough away from their women, given the fact that that was what they wanted. 3) Satisfaction at having asked the question. 4) A kind of chagrin, feeling outclassed. I've been a safe careful woman, I haven't the nerve or skill to go remotely that far into license. I haven't the drive or edge. I faltered at marijuana and sex with two Jewish girls. 5) Annoyance at his begging for reassurance after he'd told me. You had your fun, now stand by it and don't ask me to bless it. It was not fun in my interest. Was that it? I didn't feel any of it as clearly as I am saying it now. 6) I was glad to understand what it is I see in his face. I was confirmed and informed. 7) I was interested, the way I was interested when he explained why that Mexican man in a good car drove twice around us in the parking lot. This is what life is like. There's a lot I don't know. 8) I was also somewhere grieved that the man I am trying to sleep with is so brutalized sexually. No wonder we don't get there when we're in soul. We don't have the option of sex as home, the way I did with Rob whose innocence is whole. 9) Something else is that I knew I wasn't feeling it correctly in the farther sense, I was casting around trying to see whether somewhere I could locate love's feeling for his lostness, the way Joyce or the book would feel it, the kind of love that could want to mend it. But I didn't feel a particle of compassion. I was taking him at his word: it was fun. Expensive fun but he doesn't regret it. It's who he is. It seemed evident that there are no better possibilities I should wish for him. I'm saying that with tears. Nobody got hurt, he says. That's the lie I should have named. Dee got hurt, Joey I assume is hurting still. Is that the fact of the matter? Yes. Yes. That he should find Joey is a better possibility I could wish for him. Did I remember that to answer the question I was asking next, which was - what about hunger? I am offering myself a more vigilant famine. That isn't food, though I have often tried to feed myself with it. Did Dee try to kill herself because she could feel what he had done and didn't know it     Is Dee alright now     no Did he wreck her life     not by himself Did I wreck Luke's life     Can I make amends     no Did my parents wreck my life     YES Did Tom's parents wreck his     Can anything be repaired     not really The worst of what Tom has done to himself is that he can't afford knowledge     He can't be a writer because he can't afford knowledge     YES I keep believing he can afford knowledge     I thought when he quit booze he could afford knowledge     He's so lost it doesn't matter whether he drinks     He doesn't have a chance any more     I cannot save him     no I can?     Can souls be saved     YES What does that mean     their hearts are broken Can hearts be mended     YES What does saved mean     restored to innocence People can be saved for a moment     YES People can only be saved for moments     Innocence is uninjured function     Innocence is paradise     Sometimes innocence is restored by innocence and sometimes by wisdom       Please talk to me, I'm lost     you're processing Please help me     give up illusion Do you want to say anything else     your judgment is improving, you're more honest I'm also alone     12th At five it is still dark. Souls can be saved into innocence at moments only. Give up defending yourself from abandonment by organization. Give up your whole way of life. It says. So will you tell me where I'm at     waiting For what     to deal with addiction I've needed to see him a certain way     YES When I can see him that way I'm happy     YES If he isn't that there's no point being intimate with him     no If he is that I'm inspired     If he isn't I'm angry     This is the pivot my relation with him turns on     YES I'm like that whenever I have a lover     Is that the mother     YES Do you want to say more     it is work woman who can't see him that way Because she sees accurately     YES This is how it's about addiction     YES But the stoned state is better for the body     YES Love eyes     YES There is a kind of love that isn't stoned     13 Can you explain that not-connecting     hidden panic Do you mean unconscious     It's because he's lying     Every time I think he's stupid I should think he's lying     YES Every time I think he's ugly I should think he's frightened     YES What I keep seeing is lack of integrity     NO It's fear     YES Is there something we should do when that happens     work with me I can't do it if I'm lost     YES Should I promise him I won't drop him     YES Do you mean ever     YES But that means I'm giving up ever having a man     no Is there a knack to working with you when we're both stupid?     address his unconscious fear of abandonment The one in him who fears abandonment is a teenager     YES Booze, sex, rocknroll, boy buddies, biking     YES He's stuck at 16 years old     YES What should I say to his unconscious fear of abandonment     say act Will you explain with a sentence     act out his fear Like I do with Joyce     YES So he can have a relation to it     YES Do you want to say more     that is processing - feeling and intelligence More?     that restructures it The unconscious self is the real self     YES The conscious self is the imitative social self     YES His demon is 16 years old     YES My unconscious is 2 years old     YES He was ADD before that     no his ADD is traumatic What should be my relation to that 16 year old     inspire him Is that 16 year old the source of his physical energy     So if Tom grew up would he get old     no Is Luke traumatized     no just messed up 15 Saturday. Getting ready to go back to Bellingham. Dread and sorrow, indecision. I'm saying: be vigilant, be separate, see him for what he is. Don't let him seduce you. I'm also saying being seduced is what gets me to joy which is my young real self. And further, being deeply enough seduced and then betrayed, if I do the work, is what gets me to transcendent compassion and real detachment. Vigilance gets me only an exit. Saying it that way, I think, go for it, let him hurt you, ride the river. But then I think it isn't skilful to let him get away with seduction. Childish love is no use to him, it's not love. But see, I'm taken by every moment's eddy in this. If I look back at the paragraph I copied from his letter, I say, - I'm right to go crying through my time with him - where is that man I found, who really is my man? Why are you here instead? What can I do to turn you back into him. Will we always have to go through these thickets of alienation? Yes. This is the way I should think of it: The beast does not stay prince but reverts constantly. I do not stay beauty but revert constantly.   The opposite of despair is not hope but intelligence. Last week I cycled into bitterness. I've often done that.   Are fairytales true     YES The pagan bible     Subversive of patriarchal delusion     Should we ask what kind of work we could be our best selves in     work that lets you come through He needs much less stress     YES Will you tell me what should be my relation to all his kinds of beasts     hunt them with a falcon That hunter is love woman     YES The falcon is swift vision     YES How should I understand the falcon     a vigil What it was in that story of love girl, work woman and the falcon     YES Cuts shapes of decision     YES Is it significant that it's the left hand     'Call a hawk'     YES 'Send one'     Hunting means tracking and killing     YES Beasts are ego states     (moon card) Those are the beasts?     Dog, wolf and lobster     no, dog, hyena and lobster Affectionate trained animal, bloody savage animal     And lobster is a position in the brain?     Is lobster the autistic state?     YES Dog is the compliant state     YES Hyena is the hurtful state     YES The first thing the falcon has to do is identify which state it's hunting     YES The falcon is basically skill     YES After it has identified it is there something it does?     it tells the truth Says what it sees     YES Is falcon alternative to those states     YES Something else it does?     persists I did that last time, why didn't it work     you weren't honest I thought I was, what wasn't I honest about     tyrant Will you explain this with a sentence     complete processing of unexpected reversals I wasn't honest in the sense that I didn't deal with     For instance the way he looked     The minute I saw him I could have seen he was in lobster state     YES What is the proper response     hope to inspire him How can I inspire a lobster     recognize his reserve Will you explain this     recognize the skill in it There was a reason he went into lobster state     YES What reason     child's Stonewalling     YES Because I pushed him with the list     18th Is there something to say about our weekend? He liked you're not a flower you're grass. I haven't ever had anyone enjoy the way it's a series of little overlapped hinges. He wants us to read at Stuart's some Monday night. Seen with him my dope pieces look dully incoherent. Today I've gone to my piles of envelopes and thrown out some of the worst. I'll put the rest onto disk and set them up as manuscripts. And then what? What I'd like is to get rid of the old stuff and go up some levels and find completely new work. Loose, precise, strange, true. Independent. Objective. I wasn't hyperconscious watching him. He started out bossing me - park there, turn there. I knew what to do. I complied too much and made him laugh. That was the end of it. I loved that. There was good sex in the moonlight on Lummi marsh. I can't remember it to describe it. We came together almost. He knew what he was doing. He underlined the paragraph in de Castillo that says that later on a woman has learned that if a man finds her body he cannot fail to find her soul. I didn't object to his radio. When we woke we stayed in bed until the dew had warmed up. He liked the mist on the lagoon (or whatever that dyked nontidal pool is called). There was a hawk very low behind us. I liked it better with him than alone. The truth is I feel safer and stronger, healthier. I said I lock onto his energy. He said he feels it. When we drive he often shuts up and looks. This weekend I wasn't doting. I was kind of settled, taking moments to be alone with the place. I like the way he enjoys places. He's very forgiving, shakes off insults. Doesn't carp. He appreciates what's given to him. It might take him a year but he does learn. He doesn't get mean under provocation. Resists suggestions but gets around to them later. He isn't afraid to adore and admire. Doesn't bluff about what alarms him, isn't too proud to ask to be reassured. He really isn't hateful. He loves to be loved. 19 Something I should notice more - I read him very harsh things about wrecking Joey and losing his soul, and he neither fought them nor took the blow. What I see as I say that is a man dematerializing so he will not be there when the fact is named. I'm like that about wrecking Luke and about having lived in illusion. I don't know how to take what it said about giving up all the forms of organization that control the missing and abandonment it says are there. 21st What Janet picked up out of my paper: entrained by your art I recognize a poem when I see one.   there are people we like being: we could say that's what liking means.   mediated invasion - representational objects are social objects after all.   metaphors are spots of licensed wildness in a discourse. they can tell you what else is going on.   on a loom of fancy we set up a sentence that walks like a bear.   we become what we see, the whole co-present weave.   a word does not flow from brain to lips like a packet ejected with its meaning inside it. like a gesture, it is not transferred but enabled. 22nd What kind of intelligence is it that I am? Am I smarter than I think? In the blind way? How would I live if I assumed that? A brilliant unconscious. I already assume it. But - something. I don't assume it in every context. What else I was thinking. Looking at my biographical writing, finding it junk. As if that way of telling is irrelevant to this other, more real and much more interesting but still and maybe forever untold story of intuition and its search for the means to know what it knows. - Friday night. As if it is a high day of the calendar, as if a door is standing open to a night with wind. Tom on the phone wanted to tell me he woke in the marsh realizing he was seeing it with as much reality as if he were stoned. That it is happening often when he's on the bike. "I'm getting an aesthetic edge from breathing in and breathing out." Laughing. Realizing I am thinking something I would want to hide from him. I imagined we were in front of everyone we know, getting married, at the point of saying vows. I say hold onto your seatbelt, I'm not going to hold back, and I let show the whole blaze of my joy. He has the young look he sometimes gets when I light up. I say, Let yours out too. He does. People seeing us from a little distance see our heads facing each other bright as lamps. 28 What will I find to say about those two days. The country was beautiful, silver, rust, old old gold, tarnishing green. Willows blown inside out. Tom sat on the bench overlooking Bellingham Bay and watched a gull riding motionless as if it were sitting on a shelf. Apple trees hung everywhere with hard red and yellow apples. Historical trees. No one needs the apples or knows how to use them. I remember looking at Tom once or twice with as if a tiny inner gasp that says I can't - I can't - this is too much for me. I can't know or feel this person. Trying to go into sex I was feeling something I've rarely felt, soullessness, as if it could be sex and feel like sex and be worse than nothing because something encompassing wasn't there. A moment I liked was when he was talking about Sleeping Beauty's sexual autism and the Prince's kiss. It has to be easy for the prince, he said, because he's Prince Charming, not Prince Persistent. 29 Half an hour after I woke it came to me - Louie's coming back today. Dinner with Paul [Kinsella], who showed me three of Michael's napkin drawings and has a photo in his bookshelf of me at twenty-four. When I had told him about my bookwork he picked up the plates suddenly and went into the kitchen. I heard him say as if about the dishwashing, I'm so behind. A Korean twenty-six year old played music in a copse and it hooked him. She's a jet-set girl, a brat. He's thin and looks less false than he has in maybe fifteen years. All the men who have wanted to be women with me. Tom is one. (I say that sagging.) When men want it but resist it is when I catch fire. I have burned out     NO you have burned down What comes next     liberation Is liberation good to have (crying)     What's good about it     it's good for the world Please say more     you have come through But I'm sad and discouraged     NO you have to make a decision Is it a decision about Tom     NO about waiting Will you explain     winning, intelligence, husband, cycle I'm resisting this     YES The dull sad feeling     I'm sad and discouraged because I'm resisting a decision     YES What do you mean by husband     conflict about My conflict about husband     I have to win intelligence in it     YES I've tried     NO I have to be willing to be more intelligent than my husband     YES Do you mean the way things go better when I stay smarter than Tom     YES And worse when I try to assume him equal     YES You mean accepting loneliness     YES I'm baffled and frustrated     YES Please help me     losses He's not who I wish he was     YES He's very weak     I'm disappointed     YES Disappointed means an energy sag     YES Will you comment     delay I'm waiting for him     And he isn't getting it together     no He is but it's taking him a long time     YES 30th Here is what just happened. It's four on Saturday aft. I was on my bed with my heart hurting, trying to figure it out. He's doing something, I said. Deep sigh. Should I cut the cord? Yes, it said. So I imagined him on one end - somewhere in the mission - of an immaterial blue umbilicus. I hold it on the end close to me and say kindly that I am in pain and want to be able to do other things and am going to cut the cord for now. I'm tucking my end into the belly. The phone rings. He says he had an overwhelming urge to phone. - Nine in the evening, it's reported that Diana has died in Paris with an Egyptian millionaire in a fast car crashed against a wall in a tunnel. It's five or six in the morning there. The accident happened midnight their time. She was pronounced dead at 4. Her kids presumably have been woken with the news. Union Jack flowing slow mo - God save the Queen. Before the news came on I went downstairs and brought up two old journals. One was for 1981. It has been 16 years in which there has been amazing attention to the fact of a young woman's beauty. What it means to be a goddess. One after another dull men in suits making official comment. No one is asking, Did she know she was dying? What is the meaning of beauty? What makes beauty? Was she beautiful because she was and somehow remained vulnerable? She was the image of love woman, but was she that because publicity made her that? I mean in some energetic way. Is saint- or goddess-hood a participation with too many people, who feed her what they are and don't live out? Did she feel she was going to die when she sold her dresses? Was she murdered for interfering with land mines or El Fayed family politics? Charles will now be able to marry the woman his size. The two sons will feel themselves half-gods whose divine connection has been cut - "the rather plain dull women who surrounded her," says the historian. 31st Reading February-May 1971 marveling at the difference between that record and my present version of Roy and me. I was soft to the touch of every moment. I wasn't watching to see it coming. I hadn't settled into contempt. I hadn't anchored in grey webs. 1st September And - I want to say but am not sure - I was foolish to tolerate Roy's abuse. I kept bobbing up again. I didn't take pain seriously. He was giving me a wild ride. I'd been buttoned down into schoolwork and he was giving me swoops and dashes. No it wasn't foolish, it was admirable. I was taking good care of Luke and I wrote the Slade diploma thesis in the midst of his uncontrolled hateful acting-out, which it was. I was lucid and feeling. 2nd No, I was feeling but not lucid in feeling. Feeling wasn't looking after me. It wasn't on my side. - Earlier dream of a wave that occasionally comes far inland. I watch it from a window with people who live there. Rides past over the field. Does it make your water salty? 5th Yesterday Tom was angry that I don't stop hurting, doubting, judging, when he has been there and is there, loving. What is it with this woman? When is the settling down and being happy going to start? I have been hard on him but I have never enjoyed being hard on him, I say. He brightens, that's true. He is sweetly willing to give up being angry. I am here today thinking yes, my heart hurts when I close it. I have a deep deep belief that it is withholding confidence in an attachment that prevents betrayal. There is a way with Tom that I don't withhold confidence and that means I am always frightened and giving up trust in the more immediate ways. That is the law of alternation: trust scares me more than betrayal does. Trust is the giving up of what I believe is my control of betrayal. Is that right? Yes. - Mother Teresa died today! Since two days ago the estimate of the number of people who will be in the streets of London for the funeral has gone up from one to six million people. William and Harry were sent into the street to touch people. The Queen had hurt eyes reading a speech it is said she wrote herself. It is as if it hurt her to read it. She said I not we as if she hoped to make amends. Oh look at the bright drops blinking off shingle points all over the roof. Fluffed bird series on two wires. I saw almost a bow, moved my head and found the primary. Copying poems into the pages of in english. 6th Beautiful young men carrying the coffin on arms stretched across to another man's arm have the sides of their faces sad against its side. Send her victorious / Happy and glorious they sing as the procession up the aisle begins. Five men in suits walk behind her - brother, sons, ex-husband, ex-father-in-law. Again she's surrounded by nothing but men. It's such national-cultural accumulation: the hymns, the dragons on the standard, the cathedral itself, the city. We are gathered to give thanks for the life of .... Yes but they are giving thanks to him not her. Verdi's harrowing burst. They keep zooming up from the catafalque to show the implacable checkering of the floor. It's a relief that Tony Blair is there. It seems to me / That you lived your life / Like a candle in the wind. When Elton is singing they cut to crowds outside - the people's music - but he's singing it as if he's in church. "Compassion, duty, style and beauty" an amazing list. "Your greatest gift was your intuition ... your instinctive feel for what was really important ... genuine goodness is threatening ... a girl given the name of a goddess of hunting was the most hunted ." Her brother did well. He told the truth and cried doing so. He publicly vowed to her family to rescue her sons. What does the descant mean, the fact that it's the kids' voices that take flight, always in the last verse. There's a sentimental meaning, but is there a real one? Choir boys - archbishop - in the streets it's men and women in equal numbers, but in the enclave it's ranks of males. They had the two sisters read short poems. It was only in the Requiem that a woman's voice screamed out in authority. In a thousand years will the services in this place still be praising only the father, even when it is a woman's death that is being marked. Father, son and holy spirit, he's saying. We'll imagine they're too chicken-shit to say mother and daughter and so they say 'holy spirit' in euphemism, veiling the fact they can't handle, which is that this ritual visibly evokes the womb and the birth passage, down which the death is now being bourn in a standing sound of heightened sensation. That shot down into the nave where the floor takes the shape of a woman in a white gown: they held it throughout the moment of silence. The crowds have known to do this right - clap when the hearse passes. Where do they get all those policemen? The monarchy took direction from people in the street as selected by television journalists! People are throwing flowers onto the slow hearse as it's passing through North London, as if the car had been held up behind a hay wagon. After Charles Spencer had spoken it was the crowd outside the cathedral that began the clapping. Official guests inside the grand stone walls heard it and took it up, so that the royals in their core of protection found themselves challenged by an approaching wave of democratic sound, which easily passed through intimidating arrangements of ancestral stone. part 4 the golden west volume 11: 1997 may-september work & days: a lifetime journal project