the golden west volume 12 part 1 - 1997 september-october

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 29th September 1997 Yawning. Standoff ended. We got this far, should we go on a bit further? he said. Do you agree we have to talk about money? I said. 30th I love the way you come out of anger into forgiveness. Fresh and sudden. I love your voice in those times, new-washed, all done, here I am. 1st October field & field. Typing it into Pagemaker what am I thinking of it. I love it. I want something to happen with it. [old notes from Shah's The Sufis: veiling or incorrect use of a human being in the amplitude of earth why have you fallen asleep in a prison? a science, an art, a knowledge, a way, a tribe tarot cards   knowledge capabilities being built, kinds of subtle perception, understanding of structural errors in thinking self-work is work on commanding self, ie ego science of state: stabilizing into capability; steadiness of self-watching tones of thinking and feeling - you only need a sample, but feel it the notion of having a feel for the qualities of a time, what it's good for the notion of experience as food   methods: 1.concentration 2.interruption, "shut up the mouth against food so that you gain the food of the mouth" 3.integration, sustaining incompatible states simultaneously 4.undertaking difficult tasks to anchor you.   "a worker in gold thread" Coleridge's gold wires heart is considered the main perceptual structure for work, it gets lit up, illuminated, irradiated the Work, the Friend, transformation by means of love "drink the cup of feeling so that you do not know shame" do it because it evokes the child who is the base of growth   errors of state and their corrective: 1.secondary or displaced desire - withhold satisfaction and then use it to work 2.denial, rationalization - practice scrupulous honesty 3.vainglory (using people by fooling them into thinking you are something you only seem) - give up doing it 4.dependence, caring too much for good opinion, not being loyal to yourself - 5.self-absorption, self-importance 6.anxious withdrawal, which gives rise to envy - goes away with confidence, certainty 7.greed, hanging onto good things, not allowing change 8.irresponsibility, wanting what you don't have, being absent from the real - take on patient presence 9.inconstancy, inability to sustain, lack of focus 10.dullness, lack of awareness of needs of a situation - cultivate alertness   Teaching: you can't teach by disagreement; patiently plant what they'll be able to use later; teaching is not telling, it is constructing; method of scatter, do/say it many ways to build the structure to understand it; no stabilization of terms is possible, nothing can be spoken, only spoken from and to; look for the how not the why; construct preparedness to perceive.]   4th October black like December. It's six in the morning, dark and cold, rain's rattle and trickle close space down around the house. I love open space. Now it's going to be six months under a lid. In the hovel, winter - I feel you there, across the border in your bottom bunk, sleeping with all your might. Yesterday I wrote you a letter that confessed I want to marry you. Even here I was going to hedge that sentence but I caught myself. I'll say it, I'll let the chips fall. I have faith in the chips. What else is going on. Yesterday I shit my bed. I woke at night with my pajamas wet. It was a leak - diarrhea - so I'm staying quiet, not eating - which is a way of dealing with flab, the kind of sickness I like, that isn't very sick but sets up an easy fast. Squabbling with Louie yesterday. She had a dozen complaints: I didn't want to hear about her reading; when I listened to her journal from Italy I thought of it as labour; I am nervous when she drives my car; I change the subject when she mentions Laiwan; I don't want to have anything to do with her and Nathalie's disagreement about rent money; I only want to talk about Tom; I don't want her to come with me when I go to Val's house; it's claustrophobic the way I know too many of her people now; I'm absent when I'm with her; I'm not interested in her life; I flatter her instead of being with her when she frets about my leaving - is that it? I have seen her when I didn't really want to; I asked about her reading even though I didn't want to hear. I go away and can't be bothered to process these crankinesses. Louie is doing fine. She is my established friend and she is a brat as well as a fine responsible human being. When she indulges brattiness with me she is clearing herself for yoga ecstasies with one or another of her four lovers, and rising stardom in art contexts she has not paid dues in. She has in fact ridden my knowledge into those contexts. She has nothing to complain of, I say. She's got what she wanted. What else. The UBC job. Nothing to be said about it, just apply. The book says feel it as being welcomed into the world. Alright. The writing - field & field, the play of the weather, in english, winter interference - I need a book, I need books. I need a life for the books but can't imagine where it should be. The thing about that writing is that it doesn't have a world to be welcomed in. I would have to change the world. When I saw that that's what's needed I was willing to do that. I haven't been before. It is as if I have wanted the existing world to fall on it with joy and praise. That's young of me. It's being scared of my dad. I really want this writing to make a world I can live that way in, that pleasure and skill. I want everything I've written published. I want my wants, I want to recover all my defeats, I want to find out what's beyond them. And that's what I'm going to do. Duncan's [McNaughton] books - I like the Wrapped church pieces better, they are more dissolved, but both books are written in the mind I was choosing when I wrote mine - my books. They are what he says, responsible to tasks (not no one else but) only some else (but of the better kind) hope to (and do) understand. Why he feels himself Adonis, who was loved by too complete too powerful a woman, and as a consequence (he thinks) fails to learn to defend himself from predatory male animals and is fatally gored. The goddess turns his blood into a day-flower vulnerable to wind. Coleridge was not Adonis, but Keats was - coughing blood. But, Duncan, you are fifty and alive, an oldish king not a dying boy. You have a kingdom though you seem to think you don't. You say the predators want only to kiss beauty and are forgiven: I am cooking the pig, dear, and the cooking is tasty. You can eat it without fear - I believe - though there is gristle in the stew, more than either of us prefer. Sunday 5th Reading in bed this morning the Dec 1986 journal. It's a book. It's a bright not-nice real book with starvation - sex straight and lesbian - dirt - joy - weather - city politics - a baby - community - sickness - enemies - books - art - misery - therapy - beauty - deep phenomenology. It can have note pages with pictures. It can have the breathing moose on the cover. It slanders lots of the living and praises too. It has pointed two-line book reviews. It would stake me a place in the world. It lives great freedom in all its consequences. It would out me thoroughly. Really I have a high heart thinking of it. I want the next twenty years to be full of publishing speaking and showing. I want out, out, out. - Val gave me $300 for garden design this aft! 100 for bank loan, 80 for car insurance, 70 for Visa bill, 50 over. + 70 left from Louie's car rent = 120. + Tom's 50 = 170 for the month, say 24 days. I can do that. 5 a day plus 50 for this and that. [more notes from The Sufis] - Sunday evening. I'm watching TV, anything, drawing ground plans. I suddenly think to phone Tom, from seeing his face on the slide Val had. Book says don't. Two minutes later the phone rings. He had a few minutes left on the phone card, he thought. The creek is full of salmon leaping. He has never seen anything like it. 7th What happens when I have a garden to imagine. It's the most natural work I ever have. I sat in the movie after I came from Val's, pouring notes onto my clipboard in the dark. It's mania. 8th My song of ambition as I sometimes hear it this week, Let's get digital, digital. Di-gi-tal like the ticking of fingers on plastic keys. 9th In all the world the person considered richest is someone who has been an American boy for thirty years. His games are communications technology and business. He works by expanding boy gang to corporate empire. He is natureless and beautiless. Who's his god. Mercury. Market for him is fierce and handless, no luminous offering of oranges by a brown woman sitting on the ground under a red canopy amid bushes stirring and glittering in bright blue air. No one says this outright: he is a eunuch self-altered the better to win a child's war as a child. He is a child who has given up everything but that war against those who have crossed successfully into adult senses. The present fact is that American culture is on his side in this, as if there is no convincing reason to wish to grow up, or hope that it can be done well. My effort has been different. What an artist offers is evidence of capacity that can only be mature personal capacity - not capacity projected into machines, not capacity a math boy has at ten. What are math, chess, programming, that makes them best done by the least experienced people? As if they are native use of the universal impersonal brain, the hardwiring common to brains successful in many circumstances and therefore most accurately tuned to basic natural law. I answered that question as soon as I asked it, but I don't like the answer. What is it Shakespeare could do that a math boy cannot? What is experience good for? What is long self-creation necessary to? My guess about the math boy skill makes it instinctive, personally low-level, as the evidence seems to be about young grand masters and hackers - though the institutional cultures it is released within are very developed high level cultures. Again, what is maturity good for? Or is what I'm calling a mature ability - for instance my ability now to read across anyone in the history of philosophy of mind, or my ability to take six real photographs a year and make one of them perfect, or my ability to crunch almost any discipline and write a paper like Representing continuity or Brain and imagining, or what I learned with the book over nearly twenty years, or the rapid rumble when I'm suddenly set up with a garden, or the precision with which I can see the changes of a face in front of me, or the efficiency of my unconscious catch of relevant news (turning on the TV the moment Peter Tiesenhausen's boat was being shown). That last one might be native, though. What does Gates make money avoiding? What is it that Duncan defends, what human ethos? What is the better way to think about this? I like best what Gates said about the harm to young minds of not being able to get answers. That's why I'm so angry with the Mennonites. They killed intelligence on principle. It has taken me forty years to get it back. It's true that the Mennonites killed intelligence     YES Patriarchal control     YES Women's exclusion     YES Am I going into the world primarily to fight for women     no For myself     not exactly Is there something?     YES, to pass through difficulties and not withdraw   Do you like Gates     Is he on your side     NO What do you like about him     his luck Is there something I should learn from him     how to surf the unconscious He has great trust in himself     YES Because he has never allowed himself to be defeated?     no because he is responsible to himself That is his luck     YES   Anything else you want to talk about     delay in the application, get through to honesty about unconscious control I am controlling uncon as we speak     And that would influence the application     Okay     unconscious control of a child The child's motive     Does it have something to do with anger     Do you mean be honest about anger, not, be angry?     they are the same thing Is there anything I should be doing     synthesize, vain regret, excluded child, action   I don't understand this at all     YES Do you mean a feeling that they'll reject me because of my leg     YES Will they     no I've never applied for that reason     I've depended on applying in writing     So what is unconscious is the child's fear     Which I have protected     ? Which has protected me     It's true it's the interview I'm (not) thinking of     That's the real reason I haven't taught before     Is that the anger you mean     YES Have I got it now     YES That's why I was thinking of telling them I have kids and a man       Do you want to say more     turn for the better, completion, sexual, disillusion The delusion is I'd have to win them sexually     YES It will go better if I graduate from that delusion     YES I would have tried to present myself sexually     YES Will you lead me     shared pleasure That's the way?     YES Now I'm sobered       What will they think of my leg     they'll think you're an artist Do you want to go on about shared pleasure     YES, imagining Imagine with them     YES Something in particular     YES honesty What it would be like to live in honesty     YES Just honesty     YES   Be candid     no, begin to imagine honesty Don't be it by myself     Start where they are     NO but be aware of their limits Was I being speedy to stay ahead of that     YES 10th Working on the list of integration, imagining myself at UBC, I feel like a huge old woman with astonishing range, instinct, rigor, and grasp - I feel mature and universal - as if I have no intellectual or other quarrels and can thank anyone for their small work in the large task, which is to build free, skilful brains with which to love the world. 11 Saturday morning before dawn, heater fan, yellow light. Hungry. Since the night before last I've had an itch, which has become craving. I'm railing at Tom, you're wasting me, why don't you have any urgency about being with me. This has been happening for two years, exactly this, frustration, which goes to obsession, grief. 12 Waking at night thinking of the as-if interview I put into the computer yesterday, and Mike Hoolboom's interview transcription. When I was making my films I didn't want to talk about them. Their strength was that they were shocks of silence. Does the as-if interview betray them? In the Hoolboom interview I am banal and incoherent. What is the matter, what is the matter - - I go back to sleep and this is what I dream. There is a young woman with me and Tom. (This is after other episodes of lack of privacy, flooding, overheating, being lost.) She's on my left. She keeps putting her hand on my pillow. I move it off. It is a small-boned wrist, weak. She's femme and flakey. I'm irritated. You keep putting your arm on the pillow and taking it off! Tom and I are standing at the window, at the door. She's standing between us. You fucking idiot! I say. Tom is outraged. Tom, I - but I can't speak because I know he's on her side. I walk out and close the door. When I get into this whiney craving reproachful state it always means something. It's more than reproach, it's high tension. I'm desperate to be released from it. Here is what it says. The tension is because of what I don't want to find out about him. The reason I don't want to find it out is that I want him to be other than he is. 13 When I got to that I burst into crying. And then the tension was gone. Woke this morning wanting to say, Oh Tom - I've been alone so much. All the years you were married I was alone. You're unwise, or what is it, not to want my letters, because if you could love me in them, and I could just write you with a simple heart day after day, you would have what I know you want - devotion. You keep thwarting my wish to love you, so it seems. I did speak to you when you got on shift at three. What can I do to inspire you, I say. It's simple. Tell me you love me. I do love you. My solution was that I write my letters here, and then someday maybe read them to you. You said you had a breakthrough, that you should think of me not the way you think of a lover or a woman but the way you think of a friend - ie a male friend. That's a good thought but it makes me smile that I've been your friend for two years before you noticed. Knock, knock. Who's there? Yr mum. Yr mum who? Y'r'mumber me? - The application is due Wednesday, it's Monday. I've been all day shuffling little papers. There is a blindness about this process of writing, I only have to write about a page but I am afraid to just back off from my notes and do it. It is as if I believe I have to make my quality anew for this and any public writing. That's not necessarily wrong. I work in so many berry patches that I have to refresh my bearings whenever I go back to one I've left. Maybe this fiddling is how writing comes out art not mush, by effort that strains the heart very perceptibly. It's only a few paragraphs but it's a summary of (call it) thirty years' work and a plan for the next ten years, that I want to write in a way that is acceptable and interesting to myself, in my own most rigorous and private terms, and at the same time acceptable and impressive to men I don't know looking for someone who can be a member of their group. I couldn't be more capable, rigorous, interesting, etc, but I'm putting myself at the mercy of probably less capable, rigorous and interesting people. What will they need to do with me. This is a lifetime's fear. No, it says. It isn't fear. It's the excitement of mutuality. Mars and Venus are traveling the skies together, my ambitious warrior is fighting at love's side. Isn't it about time. Animal passion, that red lion, marries them, their contradictory potions enlace vividly all up and down the sympathetic nervous system. 14 You phoned last night without a plan. And then you wanted to rush away when you found we had nothing to say. We called it that, but what was it. I wanted to go on hearing your voice say anything. Were you shy? I think. Afraid to find out love wasn't true. - No, I can do better. What is it when I phone him in that state. Inchoate love. Fullness of heart. There's nothing to do with it on the phone, it's too young for the phone. I rush away at those times because I'm disappointed, as if I found the one I love not there and the one who is there unbearable. It's Tuesday morning, a wet grey dawn. Now I have to write the application letter. 15 Whizzy wig. That's the state I'm in ripping through web design books, physical jitter so I have to work to hold steady to write. But it's a magic of efficiency. On the web yesterday after I got my application printed, Jim's page with views out his back door, Muriwai Beach. 16 That was good. He said he was having a day off. I said, I'll come down. He said, I have to wash my hair. I said, Saturday, then. Things to do, he said. What about Sunday, I said. Naw, he said. He's seeing somebody, I thought. The fucker. I was covering a rage. Accidentally yanked the phone plug. Ten minutes later I'm still angry but I'm willing to admit. I find a cautious way to say it. Imagine what it would be like if you ..., etc. He explains some more, If we wait till the 24th he'll have X dollars, we can get a motel room. Why can't we be less worried about having a good time, why can't we just have a hard time if we do, why can't I just come down for 15 minutes if I want to, if we're so great with relationships. Sunday would be wonderful, he says. I want to do that - be overjoyed - be disappointed - trust - crash - report. Paul called he said to report that he has to cut Lina off. Hold on, I say. It's not about her. You have to give up getting her. Your loyalty has to be to your little hope. It's tricky, your little hope wants her and you have to be your little hope, but you also have to be the one who only wants to be loyal to yourself. Colin described a night with two women in a hot springs somewhere in the mountains above Cranbrook. He'd never seen such a sky, except at sea. Something about having been lost for the first month of his life. Someone knocked on his mother's door and handed him in. 17 I'm standing eager. It has been a good holiday away from X. I'm saying, alright, I like the turns and bumps. And now the modeling paper. It's mid-October. I have two months. 18 Well, dear, tomorrow I'll see you. Excited? Yeah. Yeah. Then the phone rings. 20 Monday noon. I'll go away into work soon but I'll bask first. What kind of basking is it. My feet at the window in the kitchen. I want to say something about writing here - as if I don't know how to do it naturally now - I want to say something about the visit yesterday but I'm not sure I have the grip - that grip I've taken for granted - confident memory, confident choice. A word like 'choice' - as if, getting social and ambitious, I'm thinking in bland curves. Driving south yesterday, again the feeling of being asleep. Thinking I'm not going to remember any of this sharp enough to be able to write it. Two things. At the first sight of Baker in the east, from the Knight bridge maybe, I felt something like this: Tom and me in Bellingham under Baker, Judy and I at the pickers' shack when I was twenty. It is as if a mountain is a time-peg: not only the same mountain but the same mountain in the same time. Like looking at it from slightly different points. (Crossing the border is easy now. Purpose of your visit? Breakfast. Okay.) And somewhere in the farmland the sharp orange edge of the sun. I was passing just at the moment when scores of men in orange vests holding rifles were setting off into the wet fields from pickups parked at the edge of the road. I let myself be excited coming downhill into town. There you were on the corner. There's a kind of blankness I'm skirting. I sighed when I said that. We'd had a scare. We were being good. You were being good. I was still in this month's wash of separate energy. We liked driving the streets of little houses together. I have a pang thinking of that. "I'd send you out to turn the ground and then I'd plant lettuce." In the car at the white-clover viewpoint with the apple trees we cuddled in the heat collected behind the windshield. I gave you my letter to read aloud. Lay listening to you read my secrets to me. There was one of those moments when the air goes solid. What is that. I was electrified hearing my own words. You put both hands tight around my skull and said, You're safe. You're safe. The line about making vows being something Irish boys do to hype the moment. "It is something Irish boys do," you said. "I wanted to sweep you off your feet." "You did sweep me off my feet and then you didn't know what to do with me." "- But I didn't drop you." You said that with the alarmed hurry I like. Alright, the blankness. I'm afraid to name it. I'm afraid I'll discover it means I'm fooled. What if there's something I don't know, what if there's another woman. My heart is worried even now. It is as if the blankness is really this fear disregarded - and not, as I always think, a blankness of something I don't know. Is that it? You're paid up. You have money in your wallet. I paid for gas, you paid for breakfast. You have a plan. You haven't ranted since July. You haven't smoked dope for months. You've made the move. You're speaking to the downtown AA noon meeting. You're trusted at the mission. You thought to mention my journal. You realized you have a friend. You have a blanket with tigers on it. I have a VCR. I've lost my flab. I'm wearing my hair down. I've applied for a job. I'm looser with people. I have more energy, I'm stronger. I crash rarely. I have a working car. I don't hate living here. I'm going to be out of debt at the beginning of November. I'm imagining being out. I said the secret word 'marry' to you and so far nothing bad has happened. 21st Year three Tom and Ellie. Faraday, in his mind's eye, saw lines of force traversing all space, where the mathematicians saw centers of force attracting at a distance; Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance; Faraday sought the seat of phenomena in real actions going on in the medium, they were satisfied that they had found it in a power of action at a distance impressed on the electric fluids. Maxwell 286 - M told a story of a woman in Calgary who one evening got a call from her sister. Their mother was dying. She worked late into the night. Around two she was looking out the window and saw a black cat crossing the alley in the dark, cautiously. It consoled her somehow to see. And then the phone rang. 22nd Reading Rosen on encoding systems, a sense that forms apart from my sense of what he's saying. It's a sense about reading itself. I couldn't easily remember what it was, as if it was a parallel consciousness. Rosen R 1991 Life Itself, Columbia Rosen saying, look at how Newtonian explanation is like a logic - structureless particles whose positions are shifted according to recursive procedures. Given these rules you can as if time-jump from one position to a much later one. But notice the role of the recursion rules. They in effect summarize the unnamed presence of the system's environment. - Thursday night. You said the moment you liked was scrambling down the bank holding my hand, standing on the cliff. I asked the book why. It said you weren't withdrawn. I said I woke this morning thinking of Vic, the way he brought you to the bright ocean away from ghosts, family darkness - the remarkable story it was. He was 59 you say. You say, when the phone card has blinked and we're going to stop, I'm very in love with you Ellie. You say it with that solemnity I haven't heard for a while. You're opened up. Is it because I called you on one of the ways you were holding me off and you gave it up - and giving it up takes you to a time before you rebelled - and that's a time when loss is threatening? I'll watch out for you if that's what it is. An email letter from Olivia. What do I want to do with it. I feel what I do for friends who've betrayed me - loathing, disgust. She is a swamp, a grey mound, whose misfortunes seem to issue from something icky in her that contaminates those around her. She's having gynecological surgery, she calls it. Her kid was born with heart defects, she's grossly fat and controls schizophrenia with daily drugs. Her dad died this summer and her mum fifteen years ago. Drugs, disease, madness, divorce, political cults - what I said was that she lives carefully and is surrounded by calamity while I live riskily and am not. What I have against her really is that Don and other men chose her. I was brave and lucid while she was hysterical, chaotic and bratty, and they chose her. That was grievous to me. It didn't make sense, it made so little sense I despaired. I feel as if I was overrun by her in college. She grabbed and smeared. 24 SSHRC check yesterday, I'll go buy DM boots. I'm going to open all the closed doors - yes. I'm going to email Abraham. I'm going to send Colin a note, a tape even. Wherever there is a door closed I'm going to open it. Don in 1967 - "your Achilles heel, the same perhaps as mine, an ontological insecurity, inability to lay your soul on the line I so wish it had been possible for us to have loved one another." It took me nearly thirty years to be able to put my soul on the line - which is, to say to a man I really wanted, I want you. - Today I bought boots, 2 bras, a white undershirt, grapefruit soap, a waxed cotton rain hat, VHS tapes. That's my shopping for the year, I want to say. 25 I'm still full of Olivia. I want to say - Don and I wanted each other from the first moment, we recognized each other. We couldn't act on it. You knew I wanted him, you waded in and took him. I put up with it because I was just, I knew I couldn't handle him. But in those years Don was a radioactive substance to me. I didn't have the confidence to stand by what I wanted. We were people who could strangle ourselves. I had an instinct maybe about not getting tied up before I had a context. Strangling ourselves made us need people like you, who couldn't control themselves. I went on depending on uncontrolled people - Roy, Trudy - who would mediate feeling and energy. I got addicted to addicts because I control feeling. That's a dependency I don't like to remember. In and after the time I was with those people feeling wasn't exactly mine. - I've blown up Olivia's game. It's because I am not too proud to say she took men away from me that I can do it now. What difference will it make not to have held back - who didn't hold back? Love woman. I didn't hold her back. She doesn't care that it's thirty years later. She's defending herself. She won't let high moral posing stop her. Whap with a cougar's paw: you harmed me. Coming home from the computer room I ran into Tony Gordon-Wilson. Oppenheimer Park where black crows had spread white trash under yellow trees. Tony's bright blue jacket and baseball cap. Tony as neat a body as a fifty-five year old can be, my height, standing in jeans with his legs apart. He was looking at me in my leather jacket one scrapper to another. 26 Ask about invasion, I'm saying. - Rob says he's a bit out of sorts. What's going on? I ask. What's going on - he says. Last weekend Sue wanted to go with him to the apple-tasting at UBC. They had her baby in the back seat, sleeping on the way there, but two hours later, going home, crying a little wa-a-a. Rob put his arm back and the baby sucked his finger. The pleasure lasted all week, but now .... You need another hit of baby-sitting? Another hit of baby-sitting, yes. Should I explain why this story is so sweetly sharp? Rob is forty. I don't know whether he has slept with Sue. He's living like a college kid in a house with roommates he hardly knows. A cat. TV. The green flannel sheet and pillowcases I gave him two years ago, duvet from his mom. Yard full of plants: back, front, sides, up the steps. Hair still soft gold. Library books. Monday 27th Tomorrow I'll see you. We have a hard thing to do together. You're in dread of being shamed. I'm in dread of the harsh moment of interrogation. Thursday 30th I took you to the station. I'm quaking because I thought maybe there was a fire in the wall, a small hot spot that will spread in old wood and suddenly run up the dry lathe in the hollow walls to the dry attic. There's a storm wind blowing up, snapping the neighbour's screen door, a crackling sound. I smelled scorched paint. Even now I'm listening for fire. It was only the anglepoise slipped down against the red door in the bedroom - the door that doesn't open but has a space behind it. How young I am when I'm afraid of fire. The wall is cool now. It's raining. Look at this handwriting. It's the simple girl. What do I have to say about the visit. I look up and see a lot of black spots in the silver sky over the bare top branches of the acacia between the roofs. It's water on the window. The question I asked was why couldn't I get there in sex. Reserve and control it says. I'm crestfallen like an impotent man. What's wrong with me. He will have gone home saying, this woman is too much trouble. Neither of us wanted that. In three days there were a lot of kinds of moment. It was his first time here in a year. We nerved ourselves for the border. We took a chance. We crossed the river we couldn't cross for six months. Running Bear and Little White Girl. Made it to my house, but then there was the shock of a stranger in my house. - Look how jaggy rivulets on the glass carry color out of its place, grey carried from the pink house's window down into the wall, pink carried across the white house. I'm at a loss. We have had deep moments together. I've thought of you every day in two years, but we don't know each other. We don't feel known. We praise ourselves for every successful moment because there is nothing we take for granted. We're ends of the earth. We are so strange to each other a good moment is a relief. We've moved and inspired each other but we didn't make it through this time - I didn't make it through. You did I think. You were there. You were strong. Was I overwhelmed? Sometimes I need you to be absorbed somewhere else so I can touch you. Last night I liked a moment holding you around the back. Warm love in the circle between my breasts and my arms. I loved seeing you dance - the relation of your arms and legs. I was seeing a tall young boy's lightness and steadiness of spirit. It was very beautiful to me. This morning you came up from under the blanket with a face like the west wind - I said - a nature spirit's face long-eyed and long-mouthed with clean hair blown sideways, clean bright eyes. A balanced face but not a human face - Oberon, maybe - an elf of an ancient order - a Shakespearian elf. That is to say, not family. Very autonomous. Rain like small stones on the window. I took you to the garden, Rob, Louie, Laiwan. Nathalie chose the moment to bring me a mattress. The you of this time wasn't true. I was pretending to know you. It shocked me to pretend to know you. That's true isn't it. I knew some things to do to give you pleasure. Give you a watch. Take you through the city. Let you buy me dinner in Stanley Park. Show you a bra. "A sensuous treasure, a woman who isn't self conscious about her ass." I showed a true moment this morning, bewildered, falling to pieces, distress about how we kept not finding a position. He kept weighing down on my hand. I was whispering with lostness. When we came home yesterday afternoon there were thousands of starlings on the wires above the alley. The wires were like beaded strings. Black bird shapes each like the next, facing the same way. They were collected above the spot where we were going to park. Twittering. Color in the streets. Small pink trees. Streets like Rob's are a tunnel, roofed and floored and sided wet yellow and black. Watching the gospel music movie together. You were crying in the right places. Those two old people long since the same gender, but protective and gallant toward each other from genders they used to be, singing together in voices passionately old. Wise and deft in the shapes of their lines, though the lines themselves were raveled lines of smoke. Say amen somebody 1983 documentary directed by George Nierenberg 31 "What had broken my heart through the years was feeling that men did not want my bravery, capability, responsibility and lucidity, but they did want your hysteria, chaos and irresponsibility. I couldn't make sense of it. It made me despair." "It would have been much better for me if I had not been too proud to call you on your compulsive picking off of guys you knew I wanted. The fact was that we had weaknesses that made a horrible fit. I controlled by controlling myself and you controlled by controlling people who controlled themselves. I controlled by control and you controlled by uncontrol." "I don't buy your special sensitivity. It's a matter of secondary gain how that sensitivity is managed. I managed it by cutting off and you managed it by acting out and medicating and getting looked after. I'm not impressed by any of these ways. Enough already. Are you still fat? Are you still drinking a lot? Smoking? How many pills do you take in a day? Moreover, I didn't like to say, but I don't believe you are a poet. What I saw had the tone of old armchairs. Virginia Woolf was not that." It creeps me out, Tom said, this is evil. Where she talks about being high-strung. The lines where she savors having been mad, compares herself to Virginia Woolf, condescends about my class, pronounces herself Olivia, the poet. Nathalie said: You're both kind of wild but I think you're heading toward civilization and I'm not sure he is. I passed that on when Tom reported threatening a man who challenged him on the desk. The conversation went wrong. We were trying. I didn't know what to say. He was more unnerved than he admitted. I had no way to know whether he had gone off on some pathetic wreck. Why was he coiled that tight? part 2 the golden west volume 12: 1997-98 september-january work & days: a lifetime journal project