Vancouver, 1st February 1998
How should I do this land and relation paper. Today I'm just sitting blinking, blinking in dull wonder at the heap of invisible stuff around me. I'm like someone with newspapers to the ceilings. I mean projects I haven't shipped out or given up on.
What did I get done in the last eight months. Five Kantian stories, further with Tom and found Joey, put my little books into the computer, learned Photoshop and Pagemaker, got car going, studied ADD for Tom, fixed the middle room, fixed the interview for Mike, read history of pictorial skill, threw out quite a lot of imagining notes, paid off $4000 in debt, brought Rowen to visit, ended solar plex pain.
2nd
What do I want to say about Tango lesson. There is Sally at 45, very thin, dancing with a thirty year old, wearing high heels and long earrings. Katherine Monk in the Sun said she hated to see an older woman throw herself at a young man. She didn't get it. Sally is showing herself as an older woman, dry and sad, in a cold brave film about failing to be feminine. I am you and you are me, she sings. There is a very awkward kiss at the end, a false kiss. It is false because she shuffled love woman out of sight in trying to replace her. So it is a cold, brave and also a false film inasmuch as she isn't always I think realizing that she is failing. It could have been a better film. The best dancing in the film was the young man's dance in the kitchen - and that is Sally's bravura. She is an egotistical young man who invents motion no one has seen, too egotistical to be a good tango dancer, too much of a baby to be a lover, too sleazy to go to the bottom of the well. There is no little girl in the film. Sally was willful. She has a thin mouth. She learned the tango because she wanted to learn to be led, but her failure was in her choice of the man. When she danced with old men, any old man, in tango ballrooms, she closed her eyes and let go. That was the truth. As for Pablo, that's what it takes, she thinks, to make a movie.
- Sally's movie is accurate in its way
- It tells us who she is
- But she is not in control of it
- So much control but a failure of self knowledge
- Does she think that kiss with Pablo is true union
- Has Sally ever been really intimate no
- Formality is control
- It's the feeling that one is dangerous
- Pablo's dance alone is a true moment
- Sally's thin shoulders at the window
- It tells us who she is
-
"I will not put a gloss on my lack of love, courage and responsibility." To the last moment you were fighting those lacks. Aw fuck it, you were saying. You persisted. You knew I was watching. The grace of your persistence in willingness to want a woman to love you has carried you through two years of moral battle. I'm proud of your sentence. The grace in my persistence in wanting to love a man.
Evening. Now this is your journal too. So I'll say you went to court today and let yourself be fined for doing something you admit you shouldn't have done. You didn't weasel out. You plea-bargained. No more dragons to hide from. Maybe a few cougars, you say. You sound happy.
4
Leaving the land: perception and fantasy.
"I have been waiting for this day for so long that I don't know what to say," writes Joe. I phone Tom, who's on the desk while the desk man's at supper, and read him the note, Joe's first response to his letter. "Read it again," says Tom.
-
I'm having a fit about how fat I suddenly am. The misery of shopping at Value Village for pants. Mirrors in change booths whose doors stop eighteen inches from the floor. It happened to be Half Price Tuesday. Now I have three good pairs of stunningly large pants for nine dollars.
5
It's four in the morning and I'm awake seething about how poor I am, how uncomfortable I am, how skimpt and confined. I'm cold all day, I'm miserable without touch and company. I eat and drink tea and watch TV because my days are empty. Either I'm writing and so stressed I feel I'm killing myself, or else I'm at loose ends and craving.
- Am I reliving times no, feeling them for
the first time
- All my years of living alone were this desperate but I didn't know it YES
- What do I need to be able to come through you need to get out of school
- All my years of living alone were this desperate but I didn't know it YES
-
Hey, I worked tonight, read four papers on film rep, testing my take.
What was it Nathalie said, the difference it makes whether theory is built on trauma or not. That was in relation to analytic philosophy.
8th
Sunday night. Back from Bellingham. Hey Tom. What can I say. That was vivid. I come home imprinted even when it isn't seeming vivid at the time. I was frightened at the border and when I pulled up at the mission there you were, though I was a half hour early. You're a tired man, you're coming off three shifts with five hours sleep. You want a shower. You're on the edge of manic, plans to get to forty thousand in one step. I understand. I'm still scared from the border. I don't like 110 at the Evergreen Motel, cigarette smell, brown couch, tight little room and there's a big guy in a damp towel saying how much he does like it, maybe he'll live here. I let it run. Then he's pulling toward the bed. I'm lying staring at him. Do I resist what I'm being pushed toward and at this moment can't imagine desiring. I thought, no, I don't resist. I have been through this estrangement so many times I will give you my gloves. You'll do what needs to be done to get us through the first stage. I'm freaked by having been separated, maybe it's that. You know me better than I know myself, I say. What do you mean, you say.
This is a dangerous thing I'm doing: why am I casting myself into the rushing creek? I'm guessing - because I'm navigating blind in this matter - but it seems to me the record says I'm stiff with you, like this, until we make love, because of the way I don't know how much I miss your body. I am finding this tricky to say. Did I sell myself out, did I trust correctly? In what follows you were doing what always puzzles me, that thing you do where you put your mouth to my ear and say you love me, you cherish me, you honor me - that hypnotic routine, which I think must be somehow for you because it doesn't work for me, it distances me always. I go blank suspending belief while it goes on. Many things about us are dubious like that.
9
And yet what a rich mix. It's four in the morning, Monday. I've lain awake an hour thinking about land and our one-day dip. You and I in the university library, there's you in your glasses at the computer, beret, long silver hair, staring at the screen, leading with your nose, composing your second note to Joe. There's me in dark blue pajama jacket with red airplane buttons, black pants, red sneakers, lit up from having been in bed with you.
What else we did. It was warm in the car, in the sun. We jump-started an old Mercedes and then sat in the parking lot and I read you my journal. Sunday morning breakfast at the Fountain Café. Waking in the motel room when it was really morning - you kept waking at night excited about your boner and I kept saying later - you got under the covers and adored my ass with energy and enterprise. Sweetly. You wake fast and I wake slow. What is it I'm feeling so delighted about. Your you-ness, how energetically you are yourself. How unshakably you love yourself, how unshakably you fear for yourself, fear yourself, guard yourself. How vivid you are to yourself. You are a marvelous old thing, so full of lived life, hanging on to simple wisdom by a thread, as you feel it - I think - yes, reminding yourself, talking to yourself like a man gentling a horse whose eyes are rolling. At the mission you were a derelict among derelicts, that incompetent look of the men in the lobby. In the library you were a distinguished lively older man. In my bed you were a clear-eyed boy of twenty with a lazy rake in your right eye. The platform of love you have in you, Vic and Mac's boy Tom, the center of the world, watched with eager care, sorrow and pride - their perfect boy - all your calamities and waywardness have been adventures of that security, your strength to be unstrong.
About demons, yours is manipulative and careless but it's playful, you said. Mine is angry, an angry demon. I perked right up when you said you'd seen my demon. That's what I'm afraid of, that I'll be drained of my demon if I'm with a man. Even now sitting in bed at 5 AM with the heater bar a wavy orange light across the room I am all happy thinking yes I have a powerful demon. I have a powerful demon I can let out. That is to say, I have personal power, I can scare people. I can rise up and overthrow oppression. But you're wrong about play, my demon plays, only it doesn't always know it's playing. You think throwing the cup into the sea wasn't play? You think finding Joey for you wasn't both demonic and playful? You think our demons haven't been playing all along? Boldly. There's brave, which we sometimes are, and then there's bold, which we have been individually, and have been careful of together. Money in the bank, we have some bold in reserve. I perked up when you said demon because it reminded me there is that.
What else. Black Angus. You spent forty-five dollars on dinner and were so intoxicated with the fact that you were buying that you ordered me another splash with an offhand preemptoriness that had the waiter looking to see how I was taking it. How was I taking it. I notice I'm hedging. I don't want to say I was defeated. But there was something about that dinner. I made the visit without money. You seized your chance. That moment of patronage was telling what at that moment I was too unclear to read, though clear enough to take dim note of. You thought the dinner was fun because you were dominating me. No wonder I didn't like the way I looked reflected in the glass, or the way I sounded.
Then you sat in a chair by the lamp and read Joe's letter. We lay on the couch together. You ranted about not having a family. You were rebalancing I knew. There was something we were both feeling out, though you weren't ready to take it head on. No, you were taking it head on, but neither of us were quite getting it. I was trying to take it head on but from another angle. We were both shying off it but in different ways. It felt something like this: you give yourself room to manoeuver by overstating yourself with women, you declare your lines some miles ahead of where they are and then you have those miles for extravagance of feeling. You can surge and secretly recede. You're my woman, I'm committed to you, you say. Meantime you're considering other options, maybe I'll go back to San Diego and work for Oscar, maybe I'll have an affair with this married woman at the shop - am I right? What you said: there is a cost, because there has to be a balance. There are these moments with flags on them and that was one: you didn't want me saying nice things about you. I was a little out of it, and why was that. It's because I haven't got the whole recent story, there is something you're still not telling. That is chickenshit of you, wanting secret room to manoeuver. I don't do that. I did, but I always gave it to you later.
So that was the dynamic on the couch after dinner, Tom is awash in his currents, he has been hiding out in some chickenshit ways, as is his lazy ADD habit, and then she ups the ante and gives him something real to deal with.
Is it that? Something like that. I don't know exactly what. I don't want to do what I do, which is pretend I know the worst. I don't know. I know there's something in your responses which does not jibe with the fantasies of safety you press on me and I doubtfully fall in with. That tone you must be so familiar with, a woman's doubtful acquiescence as she hears what she wants to hear.
Your demon is corrupt you say. You are corrupt because you can be. Women have always wanted to be seduced. Here's my puzzle. You don't have to seduce me, I'm perfectly willing. But you needed to seduce me and that required that I be made unwilling. You had to create the unwillingness so you could create a willingness against it. You create the unwillingness by being evasive and seductive in a completely cornball way. And then I, who've been made unwilling though I'm perfectly willing, override my unwillingness. Then it's as if I'm doing it not because I want it but because you want it. This is interesting. I've never exactly seen it before.
In the morning you do what you often do, steal an orgasm, steal home plate. You're not a disciplined or craftsman lover. You have your moments and you reckon they'll do. I get your hot palms on my breasts and achingly effective tugs and tweaks on my nipples. I talk and you watch. Then there's morning candour and company. Once more we have made it to real friendship. Let's just go for being as real as we can be, I say. Then it's time to go.
Something else - this thing of my own - driving through farmland on the way home - the twigs, the colors of twigs - pink, orange, tan, grey, maroon, so many scribbles, chalk pastels - thickets, wickers, willow, cottonwood, alder, beige grass with folded blades. This is the branch and twig season. I drive on slowly through beauty beauty beauty, dimly thwarted. I can't get to it. I need a reason to walk away into it. I need to do something more to be really with it.
-
Monday night. Here's the far end of this day. Oh - is it okay to miss you now? It depends, it says. Depends on what? Depends on whether I think I'm abandoned. I'm supposed to realize I'm not? Yes. Is there a kind of missing that's okay? No, loving. When I'm afraid he's unfaithful I shd love him? Yes. Is that all? No, there's more. Will you tell me what? No.
10
In the academic community there is the difference between staff and academics. It is a difference of language on for instance email. And then there is a difference of academic type. There are the real people and the hacks. I haven't taken account of that difference, which is a language difference among other things. Some of the nice people are not among the real people, who are real in virtue of not being able to buy into the going dogma, analytic philosophy for instance.
-
"That was a great letter. The words touched me, made me think, and gave me hope," Joe writes.
-
I saw two squirrels fighting on a telephone pole. I think it was the grey one chasing the white one out of his territory. I was lying on a sort of sleeping balcony watching. I spread my arm or a blanket on my right side and one of the squirrels used it in an escaping leap. A sharptoothed small furry animal flying at my face. I wake in fear.
This morning intense fear of betrayal. He's lying to me, he's cheating on me, I'm undefended, I'm conned, is what it says. It finds what might be evidence. I was asleep, I have been asleep thinking I'm safe, it says.
And then in relation to the talk I'm giving in ten days' time another fear, which I now see has a similar form: I'm naïve, I will be shown up as naïve in a theoretical community that knows things I don't. I'll be seen to be out of it, out of the circuit, simple. I will betray myself into humiliation.
In both circumstances I begin to be sure of my value. Naturally Tom won't risk our connection. Naturally what I have to say about land will be interesting and admired. When I collapse into fear it is fear of unaccountable defeat, defeat I can't explain, a falling in of the floor: I'm wrong - my trust is blind - I'm somehow blind - or they are - I don't know which it is. These people want something I don't understand and don't like.
- Fear of defeat I don't understand, is that what has stopped
me in almost every way?
- Is that what I have to stare at and feel out?
- I learned to evade the fear by being in control
- Will you lead me vigilance
- I have been hypervigilant
- And at the same time I'm not vigilant enough YES
- I don't know any more what to watch for
- So I am truly not well defended YES
- Which is reason to fear NO there is no reason to fear
- Can I work this through
- When I'm afraid I must realize the time in which I am afraid
- It is as if I remembered myself last time YES
- The confident child YES
- Is that the confidence to build on
- Was I frightened at the border because I had fear rising YES
- Is the fear of physical damage and the fear of car crash the same fear YES
- Is there anything I should be doing about the fear just feel it
- Was the fear a result of what I did with Joyce YES
- Am I ready to leave it for now
- Is that what I have to stare at and feel out?
11
With Joyce. I'm supposed to ask the child what she needs when something happens like Tom not phoning, she says. I'm shy, or something. I find it hard to start. There's electrical stuff happening in my body. It might be that I'm afraid of her. Joyce says tell her that. I gather myself and say, When Tom doesn't phone for two days, what would you like from me?
I go sit in her chair. I'm wriggling around. I don't need anything, I say. I don't care about him. I'm looking around the room, yellow tulips, pictures, cushions. The wriggling is conscious but pleasing. I'm free. There's an edge of something else - the front edge there is when everything's under control. Joyce asks how old I am. I'm looking at the painting over the sofa, streaks of color. I'm three, I say, one, two, three, drawing the streaks in the air. The tulips look nice, I say. People don't look very nice. Most of them. What about Tom, says Joyce, does he look nice? He looks a lot of ways. Sometimes he looks very nice. But even then his right eye looks tricky, I don't trust his right eye, I say. So she needs you to look after her! says Joyce, You'll tell her what's what. She should trust you. She could trust me to lead her away from everybody, says the little girl. She doesn't want that, so she isn't trusting me, so she's confused. She doesn't know how to look after herself. What about Ellie, how does she look? says Joyce. There's nobody there, says the little girl, looking at the couch. I don't see anybody.
Joyce says move back to the sofa and talk to her. I look at the wriggly spunky sparky little thing. You like her, Joyce says. I do like her, she's very feisty, she's the little girl I always wanted, I say. Tell her, says Joyce. I like you a lot, I say. You're so sparky and spunky. And brave, says Joyce. Yes, brave.
I say to Joyce, I read Bowlby, do you know Bowlby? He writes about children who lose their parents, the stages they go through, and when I read that I admired myself, I was strong to come out as well as I did.
Tell her you won't abandon her, Joyce says. We can't be separated, it's impossible for us to be separated, I say. Joyce says, No, she needs to understand that you don't want to leave her. Other people have wanted not to leave her, but they've still left, she needs to hear I can't leave her, I say. But I also get it. I have sometimes left you, I say, but it wasn't because I wanted to. I didn't know better but now I do. I'm working hard to learn to not leave you. I'm here for that reason.
That's good, says Joyce. Now go sit over there. Do you believe her, Joyce says to the little girl.
She's lying back in the chair kicking her feet looking at me on the couch. She smiles and wriggles. She's nodding. She believes but she isn't going to dwell on it.
I say something about this being what my interest in Joey and Tom is about. Joyce misunderstands and thinks I'm cutting off. We have a couple of confused minutes. We sort it out. I catch her up on events, that they're corresponding, how brave Joe is being about saying he has been waiting for this day. She has tears in her eyes, as everyone does who hears the story.
Then I have to leave. She's blowing me a kiss. Good work, she says. You too, I say.
And then she runs after me with an ee cummings poem on a bookmark with a picture of a baby's face. Something about hillsides and eternity. The reference to eternity puts me off. Oh, alright, she says.
-
Louie's dream that she's in China and for the New Year's celebration there is a carpet being rolled out over the many hills as far as she can see. A black carpet with gold marks like writing is how I saw it.
It was yesterday I woke with the dream of being rushed by a squirrel. When I looked at my email yesterday there was a note from Barbara Martineau/Sara Halprin answering my note to her. Today in her answer to my answer she wrote about a dream of being a little girl in a cinema who is rushed by the MGM lion. "A woman with Leo energy who is shy about it," said her therapist.
The Winter Olympics in Nagano. I'm even dipping into curling - four women from Regina, exactly Canadian Prairie women, young moms with jobs, short hair, glasses, friendly soap-and-water unglamorous wives, standing on the ice in Japan watched by farm women all over the snowy miles at home. And young women hockey players. All day long, commentators talking about concentration, judgment, commitment, endurance, courage, strategy. That's something.
-
Dear you, you like your son. He likes you back. It's a circumstance so new our nets have not reorganized to really know it. When they have, we will be different people.
Today Colin's beautiful support letter. I could love to live up to it. If it is already true, there is a way my nets are not structured to know it.
13
Early Saturday. What's this. Misgiving. Look at that word. What is it I'm giving wrongly. Patience, for one thing. It is very bad for me to let myself be overridden. I let Judith override me in the TA meeting. I've been letting Tom override me on the phone.
It wasn't a good week at school. I don't know what happened in the second tutorial. The first was good, but the second was my stars, a gang of bright boys who know each other. I had set up the argument and we were looking at what was wrong with the premises. I froze. I suddenly couldn't understand anything. How did it happen. Something Ray said. I didn't get it, and I didn't get why I didn't get it. Suddenly I entirely lost confidence. I panicked. I rushed ahead and covered myself. Luckily we were out of time. But what was that? I haven't dared look at it. It was partly that it's men and there is one in particular who sets up, I'm now seeing, a constant atmosphere of daring, which I have liked, because it has made it a good class. But the time before this, I am now remembering, just at the end of the tutorial, a couple of the students turned to Ray Lik with a question. Ray is my age and has read philosophy though he isn't trained. I suddenly felt the possibility that the men were going to shut me out. I jumped in immediately, and took notice that I was doing it, but then I forgot it and so I wasn't ready for what happened on Thursday.
14
Reading Rush's book Mating. So much funny squabbling in it. I was all excited about squabbling with you. I phone to say so, and why do I fall flat. I misjudged. Sigh. I said I wanted to have fun. You said biking and movies. I said arguing, and tried to raise some on the spot.
Norman Rush 1992 Mating: a novel Vintage
Are you watching the Olympics? you say. Yeah, I say enthusiastically, the Canadian women have been great. I have to go, you say. Checked. If I had said the American men have been great you would have galloped for ten minutes. If you had said X and Y (some American men, not so named) have been great, you would have galloped for ten minutes.
There is something I shouldn't have done, which is zoom to you from being pleased by a storybook couple. Zapped. There is something you shouldn't have done, which is hang on to me if I said I had nothing much to say.
Now I'm aggravated. You're back to overbearing, I'm back to wanting to bail out because what I want is someone who can enjoy my energy not just my angelic care. Otherwise I am going to get fat and ail in your company. Are you big enough for me or not. If not, find another nice woman, it will make me sick to be confined to that.
The celerity with which people recognize something is spilt milk is a main measure of their rationality. We were both very quick this way.
So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover that someone, however smart, is - he has neglected to mention - a Thomist or in Bahai, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.
One of the great unalloyed solitary joys of life - being up at first light and setting out on empty roads to go someplace difficult and significant
I also argued that there was an aesthetic involved in the self-conscious use of clichés, which was the case in my case.
He would say only slightly facetiously that the main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.
One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The golden notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the Black Lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.
So far everything I was saying hinged on the penis in some way or another. I am such a fool, but I was also gratified at his lovely laugh.
Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing. I'm talking about being comedically proactive. I don't know why being funny for someone was such a new idea for me. It had never occurred to me in connection with any other male I had been serious about. I was surprised at how pleased I felt to get such deep, easy, thorough laughter out of him.
... was because I believed academic disciplines did what they said they were doing rather than being hotbeds of dominance behavior where disagreeing on the simplest point gets you into a Götterdämmerung with somebody or his disciples.
We all want a passionate man. This may be the man, I thought. I realized you never see a man in a state of public joy except in connection with professional sports, stupidly enough.
A quirk of his seized me that I felt would destroy me. It was an unconscious thing of some kind, a tic. I couldn't stand him to do it. I knew it would be insane to say anything on such short acquaintance, but there was no way not to.
This worked out to be a genius thing to say, evidently. He was relieved. We held hands across the table. Sail away, I thought.
And the first thing to be proved is that nobody is lying, nobody lying, nobody wanting to lie, nobody lying - my utopia and good luck to me.
I had to reduce everything about Denoon to writing, classify it, so I could learn Denoon the same way I ever learned any subject decently. This did not seem bizarre to me in any way.
That might have stopped him. Being classified was one of the few things that ever did.
... the Frenchman who could see ships around the curvature of the earth. One of Nelson's major qualities, all of which I was appreciating strongly in my present state, was that if he knew something you didn't know, he would tell you all there was, and there was no part of it he would shade or leave out because it fit badly into his own belief system.
I'd like you to read this book but I can see you won't. I'd like you to be able to enjoy it but we are not there. It's about the daily play of the kind of people we would be if we were released. In it a man constructs the point of view of a woman he enjoys. He constructs her as looking at him, telling his story, which is a good device because it lets him tell his own story without boring. Her interest in him, her whole feeling for him, is in my sense of it perfectly true. He's giving his wife the gift of his interest in her at the same time as indulging his interest in himself. He looks like Paul Churchland and Dan Dennett and Stan Brakhage. It seems he is not afraid to know anything about her thoughts. He is so released into his own powers he can afford to be feminist in curiosity.
This is a thing I mind about you - that you are not released enough to be curious, investigative. I keep believing it is a woman writing, and when I remember it is Norman Rush having learned these things from delighting in his wife I am so happy I laugh out loud at her/his jokes. The woman tackles him. She does. He has the spirit of my interest in you exactly. And prehension.
This is the best nearly the only novel I've read in a year. The last one was Cynthia Shearer. I'm leaving out The Raj Quartet. Love, again doesn't count. These years I skim unless it's as good as this. Maybe in five or ten years you'll be ready to read this book. I want somebody to read it. About you - I think you've got that freedom in you. I think your inside is rich. I wish I could write a book like this, with so much of my knowledge in it.
Compare it to Barbara/Sara's book. Oh! Psychoflab. Psycho-cellulose. Think of Dineson or Gordimer, a writer has to be very boiled-down, pathologically so. No white space.
And yet I don't like Rush's voice when I hear it in me. It's speedy and facetious.
-
Sunday night. What am I going to do with these three days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then plunge into teaching, then Friday afternoon. Then talk for a half hour. Pull it out of the true place.
But Sunday night, marking done, tip the B-'s into C+'s to make the numbers come out. Too bad kids, sorry. It's almost the end of this day. Lonely. Motown on TV.
Nicole tonight telling me the story of Manon's dad. She loves the story as such, her own defiance and invention. She was in Montreal, twenty-seven, when she wanted a baby. This will arrange itself, she said. She was with her sister in a bistro one night. Robert asked her to dance, sat with her at a table, a guy like a French policeman, tall, big moustache, a salesman for a lighting firm. Nicole, I sense there's something you want from me, he said. Thick southern French accent. There is, she said. Do you want to have coffee next week?
She put it to him. That's easily arranged, he said, brumming sonorously, as she mimes it. She checked out his family background. Alright, meet me at my place at such and such a date and time.
He arrives. He's late. Takes off his clothes. He's 6'4 but his penis is very small. Two inches erect, she says. They do it. Did you come? I don't think so, he says. She's sure it's done. Go home now. He goes. In a couple of weeks she gives herself a pregnancy test. She has one more meeting with him to tell him the news. He paces. She realizes he's worried she wants money. Je ne veux de toi, she says. He's free to go. He goes. She sees him in Manon, her chin, her flat feet. Manon has sometimes asked, but she isn't asking now.
16
"Vast theist penumbra"
Here's a thing I haven't said, that sometimes, with you, when I am close to coming, it is as if I see and feel in me - see while feeling in me - my father's penis. I can tell it's his by a particular shine of feeling. That's the closest I can get to saying it. The word 'land' has some of that same shine. The way I feel 'numinous' to be a particular kind of luminous, which is the god-shine. L lumbus, loin. OE lum, chimney. Lumbricus, worm. OE lim. L limbus, edge. F limon, shaft. Limus, mud. Gk limne, lake. Gk leimon, meadow.
Venerari. Venereus. Venire, to come. Venari, to hunt. OF fendre, to cleave. L findere, to split. Vent, a small hole. Ventre, the womb, belly.
Assignment: revise your style to clear your way to eager engagement.
17
Touching into my notes this morning I feel the person of my best work - a person - the elf queen - the reserved upright very fine-grained intuitive one - not the gusty sturdy one I imagine I am, the one I hear on tape and have sometimes seen on film - the one with the long slope.
I wish I had another one to love and help that one. She is so gifted but so remote from the manners of the market. I can see what it is about Rhoda, she is the one most like her. I was envious of Rhoda because I didn't know I was that. Then who is Trudy? She's the child, and they are a diagram. Is that true? Yes.
- the golden west volume 13: 1998 february - april
- work & days: a lifetime journal project