the golden west volume 13 part 2 - 1998 february-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

18 February Waking the way I often do. Mostly do. Not eager to come back to anything there is in the life I've given myself. I am jealous of Louie. She's looking beautiful, she's pink and bright-eyed and very trim and energetic. She's making a lot of money and owns her apartment. She's having yogically mysterious and splendid sex, though with soggy Lydia. She had a trip to South Africa where her large family all adored her. She's a popular teacher, she's getting to be a very good teacher, her writing is being published in good magazines, and this is writing she produces in an offhand way once a week. I love to look at her face. She's all honed and alive and sexy. She's only forty, not fifty-three as I will be in two weeks. Except for the last, she earns all of it by constant energized effort, she never sags, she doesn't waste time the way I do. She doesn't work in the lonely wastes. She's used to being prosperous and well thought of. - Wednesday morning I was depressed. Should be angry it said. Wednesday night he was callous and hateful. I was stunned and scattered. His macho reluctance. What does he feel it would cost him? His own completeness. It's a misunderstanding. Stay out of Tom's way when I'm work woman? No, just don't allow yourself to be dominated. That kills her. Work woman just separates herself from men because she is not supported by them. Eight Wednesday evening. That conversation stunned me. I was working, I was in it, where I'd struggled to be all day. I got concentration. I had no guard when I spoke to you. I'm shocked at the heart. You said in a voice like a recorded message, This is Tom. I'm here to listen. What I knew before I knew it: he's saying he has to be a robot to do it. When I talked anyway you cut across me with the story of your boner. Slap me on the thigh with it a couple of times. Your callous hateful side I hardly ever see, but there it was. You didn't like my tone, which is work woman's tone, 'intellectual.' What I need to get this organization clear. I pulled myself up with extreme effort. "We're in incompatible states, I should just go back to work." That was just, but you were angry. It will have to shake down. This is important. I cannot be dominated, must not, when I'm on my way to stand in front of people, not talking about the wonderful garden, but claiming entitlement to talk about something central. I don't have the fathers' good will in this claim. This time I'm going to be standing and speaking, not writing. I very badly need to win this place on the stage - not just economically - I need to make a public place because if I don't I'll go on silenced, which has been excruciating, and is wrong. If I had my own father's good will in my public successes I wouldn't be feeling the gutlessness of Phil's letter to UBC or the macho reluctance of Tom. I guess it was macho reluctance with my dad. What do they feel it would cost them? Their own completeness, it says. It is a misunderstanding. Their own completeness will only come when they can afford to be generous. But there is no way to get it from them just because I need it. It's useless to resent anyone who can't give it. It's wrong to refuse to give support to anyone because they can't give it, because giving it belongs to my completeness. Can I do this without it     YES Is it true what I said about claiming a space     YES I haven't claimed my public size, I have to do it     YES Is it work woman who has to do it     YES Men hate work woman     YES Because she isn't susceptible to them     YES And yet it is work woman who went out with Tom the first time     It would be better for me to stay work woman     no Will you comment     the way work woman is retarded Work woman just separates herself from men because she isn't supported by them     So she's separated from health     NO Should I just stay out of Tom's way when I'm work woman     no Please comment     just don't allow yourself to be dominated Does love woman like to be dominated     no but it doesn't harm her It kills work woman     YES That's useful to know     YES She succeeds by cutting off     YES 20th It's the last day before the talk. Six in the morning. Before I start into the papers I want to say something from this loving glow. You said you feel depression leaving you. I read you one of Joe's four letters. You laughed happily. "I'm feeling love and kinship with a stranger," you say. You're both saying that. And both of us women are saying, How can you say stranger, you know this person very intimately. It's fun to see you in a miracle. - It's the night before my talk and you phone me with bad news. You hang me up for long minutes of explanation I can see are meant to get me ready for this bad news. The bad news is that for six weeks you don't have time to be with me. Your plans and your schedule do not permit. You could have Sunday evenings after you've done a shift, Monday nights after a day at the factory. That's it. There's not a minute where you'd be rested and yourself. I am sore at heart. I'll go away and deal with it. There's nothing I could call you back and say. You've done either a stupid or a malicious thing and tonight I don't want a wrangle. I don't see a way out. I start thinking hard thoughts. 21st I wake from a hard night with this dream. I am in a concentration camp crouched stirring soup made with human flesh. There is a camp guard behind me pressing his penis against my hip. I am trying to ignore him. I have to break up the lumps of meat with my spoon. He keeps shifting his weight so he will keep his boner against me. It has a feeling of utter oppression. I get up and walk into the street. I'm saying help me, help me. What I remember now is that Dee tried to commit suicide. That's the part he doesn't want to tell Joe, and will have to. What else I'm thinking is that I have Joyce booked for next week and for the next months. And yesterday when I got Men and the waters of life from the library for Tom I also got Why men hate women. I am sorry I will have to do this talk covering grief - or I guess I have the option of not covering. I would like to have gone on stage feeling loved. Alright it's seven. In an hour and a half I have to leave. It's raining. Hello     be impeccable Is Tom torturing and oppressing me     no But what he did last night was evil     So what is impeccability     look after yourself Can I still do the talk well     no Is there any way I can still do the talk well     no Because I'm oppressed     Please comment     be responsible Take responsibility     YES Because I was enslaved to him my talk is wrecked     YES Is there anything I can do to save it     - Saturday night. I'm not going to tell it tonight. I've pulled the plug on the phone. Louie phoned this morning as I was pulling myself out of the slime of the night. Louie, then Jan-Marie and Sandra, backed me. It was okay. I don't know what to do about you. Tonight I don't need to decide. 22 Did I do well     Do you want to say anything     too nostalgic but good about exclusion I did put myself out     no, in Did people like the slide     YES Should I write it up     YES And publish it with that picture and others     Should I look at that dream     YES Stirring soup made of human flesh, is that getting ready for the talk     'Concentration camp'     There is oppression in the task     YES Was the hummingbird who died me     YES Tom is killing my spirit     YES Stirring the soup is correct     That dream summed up the worst of him     YES It was very clear     YES Does this mean I should break up with him     NO I am very repelled     YES Is there a reason why I shouldn't break up with him     for the sake of your woman But it is she who is oppressed     NO Did I look nice     He takes what should be an instrument of pleasure and makes it an instrument of oppression     Is he willing to give up oppressing     no And I'm supposed to stay and be oppressed     YES Why     to learn to not withdraw under oppression I'm undoing my father's work     YES To be able to fight in the world     YES My father did it out of rivalry     And Tom is doing it out of rivalry     no it's just habit Sandra controlled the order of speakers and so she had Daisy speak first, a solid woman in her sixties, small feet and hands, quite bulky, dyed hair, silver earrings and bracelets, black pants and sweater and a ceremonial vest, red with black cut-outs. Coast Salish of some kind, Alert Bay. She spoke slowly, weightily and predictably: native people are stewards of the land. Then a ruddy American with a moustache, a tall man who spoke for an hour, very rapidly, without once hesitating, about a male Indian man's artwork and two Victorian males' park designs and seven or eight male photographers. And then Sandra's boss at ECCIAD, the guy who writes about media and simulation. He's getting consulting money from UNESCO. A man wearing tight pants, small shoes. Long hair, a broad bulged bald forehead, small eyes, wrinkles gathered around the mouth as if his skin had slumped, a mean, dissipated look. I disliked him on sight. He also spoke for an hour without pausing. Attachment to a locality is out of date, we will have to revise what we mean by intimacy, the land never was pristine, it is a Romantic myth to say it was. Just what a man who looks like him, desiccated, would say. He's the devil. Then we had lunch. I go back into the empty theatre and square the screen to the projector. There's my slide. I've never seen it projected. It's beautiful for its order - scales of order. It says what I have to say. But also I see something I haven't seen before, two people walking through a bush, one following the other, both carrying their heads in ways I think of as Greek but really, looking again, it is a look of Dante following Beatrice. They are very straight-backed and wearing long gowns. It is the best photo I have ever taken. I took it the September I was in Alberta with Louie. It was the only good picture I took that trip. The figures remind me of the two women I dreamed when we were sleeping in the stone wheel. Sandra's James spoke first after lunch. A wild man, not tall, dark-faced, joking. Unfinished. He began with an invocation in Cree, claiming the powers, Sandra said later. Compared to the white guys he was playful, present, abrupt, experimental. He cleared his throat many times, a loud harsh sound. There is a word in Cree for a small stand of tamarack growing on just this kind of a slope. He pronounced it a couple of times. On the prairies in autumn there's a time when the sky is blue and the leaves are yellow. There's a word in Cree for the way that makes you feel. Yes, I was thinking, if you are in one place for 11,000 years you'll have words for things about that place. But then James got tempted by the fact that he was standing behind a pulpit and he started preaching about the end of the world. I followed him. I was wearing black and a red vest too, as it happens, but I took off the vest. I also had on my docs and purple socks. The green airplane buttons. I had understood that I was frightened by the presence of the fast-talking men and I was not going to be able to start strongly, so I gave myself some room to be what I was by saying I was going to start from childhood and was not going to be able to speak quickly or fluently, that I wanted to speak from a part of myself that is not the talking part. Having said that, I could hear the fear in my voice, and I could hesitate for words, and I could start in the place where it started. There's a hill over there, a slough down there. A poplar bluff in the east and, in the north, trees all the way up. A little girl sitting in church watching the lit-up dust rise above the window sill. Saying, this guy is not entitled to preach at me, because he can't see me, he doesn't want to see me. And he's telling lies. It is not a heavenly father who creates and sustains us, it is we who suffer. It is our mother who bleeds. It is the land that creates and sustains us. What I realized later, I say, is that it was a community constituted around a fantasy. There were reasons for that. The three of us walking home from school with our faces in storybooks. There was a woman in the second row I thought must be a prairie woman, because she was looking very bright and amused. Small sixty-five year old, glasses, perm, a small dry bright look of an elementary school teacher. Marion Penner Bancroft in the far left corner of the front row. The technodevil with his arms crossed. That Hegelian woman with the ascetic face, a rival, looking stiff. Daisy on the far right looking straight ahead, as she did with all the speakers. Two young women in the second row, far left, laughing loud, very responsive. Jan-Marie listening carefully, smiling. A lot of other people, mostly young, scattered up into the bleachers. I went on about the community there is, people engaged in learning the invisible art of perception. Some of them are artists, but what they are engaged in has more to do with learning to perceive, I said. The creation story I like is the one that says we evolve. What I like about it is that it says the land creates itself and it creates us along with it. That means perception is the complement of the land. And then I said seven things, very compressed evidently, about what's good in the new theory of perception. The ways perception is virtuosic. That we are a very early civilization, very primitive - that in our tradition we are still living in the vast penumbra of a hideous philosophy that misdescribes us and has not begun to discover the resources of perception. That I can safely measure my eyes against the land. If I'm in a good state it will be more than beautiful, there will be a sense of love and bliss, and if I am not in a good state I'll notice that I'm not there. That's it. Thank you Sandra, thank you Karen and Maria. Then there was the endless boring audience discussion. I was on a couch with the devil, not looking at him. Irritated with him. At one point he was saying we give the plants existence, we name them. I said when I was growing up there were twenty kinds of flowers we didn't have names for, it has nothing to do with naming. But we see them, we give them meaning, he said. We don't give them meaning, that is so lordly, I said. The blond woman in the second row laughed. Many people in the audience were feeling a little too empowered by the event and they felt free to speak at length without distinction. Oh well. I fidgeted. We were sitting on chairs and sofas belonging to the stage set for a play that's put on in the evenings, I forgot to say. The men of the party told long stories. Rod noticed Ron had had his bud nipped by me and was uncharacteristically silent, so he helped him out with an appreciative mention and then he was on full gallop again. Well, maybe not full. I was tired. I wanted to quit. Finally Sandra judged it was her moment to sum up. She had something to read, and then she turned to me and reprised what I had said about community failure, the earliness of our culture in relation to perception of individuals, the primitivity of our technologies of care. And you can't say nothing is pristine, she said. Think of newborn babies. Think of a plant when it first comes up. And then there was the milling, and individuals come up. There was a woman called Dorothy who works on watersheds and liked that I said we perceive with our whole bodies. A black-haired girl who goes to an Indian village in the north and wants to make a film. Rod wanted perception bibliography. I gave him my papers. Marian wanted to tell me about going on a Mennonite village tour in the Ukraine. Mennonites not knowing where they are. Jan-Marie saying it was crystalline and she felt safe. Jan-Marie, Sandra and I and the two responsive young women went out to dinner to a seafood place near the north end of the bridge. We played with the waiter. Nancy asked to look at the apple pie. It was passed around, sniffed. Nancy told some stories I want to write down, but now it's time to go to the work party. Is there more I should say - the way Sandra came in behind me and synthesized was very splendid. - "I think I'm listening to a crazy lady," says Tom just now. I am furious. My heart is banging. Why men hate women is the name of this book. 23 Here it is Monday morning. Lying in the dark. I have been clamped at the womb, at the solar, at the heart. I am saying I will do what is right and true but what I want for sure is to take stock. If we are going to stop, this is a practical moment for it. The reason I would have for stopping is if defending myself from his unceasing denied need to dominate me is taking too much, or if I am not succeeding. The reason I would have for not stopping is if we are going to get to the end of that need to dominate. Real trust and intimacy. The ways he still controls and bullies me are: pushing or dragging me physically; coming without waiting for me; sticking to sex without vulnerability; manic talking, insisting on talking; not responding to things I say or write; not getting his license or his truck so I end up serving him; waiting until I make an issue before giving up bullying behavior; that hypnotic talking in my ear. There are things he's stopped doing after I've fought him but the situation he has enforced is that he offends and I am pleased to be not too weak in defense of myself. Is there anything you want to add to that     search Search for what     strength, partial loss, withdrawal, illusion Is this a list     Strength    in relation to catastrophe Partial loss of what     passage from difficulties Withdrawal     ways you've been withdrawn Illusion     passage from difficulties We were in process of a passage     Will you say more about passage from difficulties     friendship It was an illusion that that was happening     no I am quite strong     no What am I then     not facing loss I'm afraid that if I feel loss I'll make the wrong kind of terms     So the strength I should look for is to face loss     NO, work woman, persistence, approaching, freedom/abundance Is this about the work I did at Presentation House     YES Which was integration of love woman and work woman     YES Tell me how I seemed to the audience     how you seemed to yourself Should I just drop the thing with Tom for a while     Work in abundance     YES - My central thesis is that men exist in a state of perpetual enmity towards women which they express overtly and covertly, by controlling and dominating them. Maleness is permission. Misogyny, the hatred of women, is an inescapable element in the development of masculinity. the decision never again to allow a woman such power over him Even normal heterosexual relations are characterized more by sadism inflicted by men on women than by love. men's capacities to blind themselves to the real intent of their behavior. Single women live longer than married. For most men the struggle to preserve love becomes one of reining in one's active sadistic impulses. what Freud called narcissistic supplies - to provide the affection, flattery, praise, and so on. Though they describe themselves as loving their partners, they do not want to share anything with them. Men forestall abandonment by enforcing dependency and ensuring continued servicing in the attempt to avoid the encapsulated psychosis. He can see all around him that approval by men is what matters if he is to be a man. maturity, ascendancy of loving feelings for both parents as individuals and as a couple, over hateful, destructive feelings derived from the original experiences at the hands of the witch what alternative that relatively disempowers them but does so without castrating them root of these difficulties the inability to be intimate with a free woman because of the unresolved childhood dependency issues arising from the relationship with bad feeling associated with the mother afraid of being loved because their original experience of it with their mother was that it meant they had to adapt to her need of them: don't be you, be me. "I love you" can come to represent the most overwhelming demand for him not to be himself ... adult male's characteristic indifference to a woman's love her wishes to penetrate and possess ... renouncing her sexually active wishes in order to develop passive wishes for her father ... the acceptance of self as object rather than subject pleasures of hurt feelings reassures that something worse has been contained - someone else is strong enough to contain it depressive anxiety about turning him bad, which would leave her without a good one to love the active, exciting father who has access to the public world, who treats others as objects her worry about any kind of achievement that surpasses the mother abuse - pushing, grabbing, intimidation, interrupting, changing the subject, not listening, not responding, believing you are contributing financially when you are not, lying, not keeping agreements suppressed and accumulated resentment about a woman not doing what the man expects and wants her to do these acts give all men greater access to jobs, positions of influence or mobility conversational politics, body space and politics the ability to tolerate differences is hugely lacking - listening and asking questions - the ability to sustain conflict attempt to negotiate a non-deviant identity anger letting her know she is overstepping constantly reestablishing trust and abusing it again encapsulated psychosis the main aim of patriarchy - of men - and its ideology, sexism, is not the induction of little boys into manhood (although this is fundamental) but the separation of little girls from their mothers, in order that they might be available to men I do not believe than men are good for women, or good to them help them to understand men and lead to more fulfilling and separate lives which are not dependent on the goodwill of men Abusiveness shares many of the characteristics of alcoholism, every day has to begin with a commitment not to exercise power over women Adam Jukes 1993 Why men hate women Free Association Books In truth I am broken-hearted at the misogyny of men, I am broken-hearted that no amount of heart soul beauty skill or inspiration has been able to win me the consequence they give each other. I am furious that my options with men are tolerance of domination, or isolation and starvation. - Anjana pleased me very much when she told me how I gave her the jasmine last year. She said I shone, and also that it was like a gardener. She herself is a small face true and real, not corrupt or weak, vivid, big Indian eyes and wisps of hair. She is fifty-nine, has two grown daughters and a grown son, has been here thirty years, escaped her marriage by running to one of the first women's shelters with her three children. She's living in the lesbian house around the corner - so poor, an activist all her life, daughter of a nationalist. Tamil is older than Sanskrit, she says. It was her hands that seemed most unusual. I was afraid to look at them, I was afraid I would find them monkey-like, wrapped around her tea mug very small, dark and as if with very smooth skin on the insides of the fingers. It wasn't that I was afraid of denigrating her, though I was very aware that I couldn't know very much about her. I was finding her face twice as human as most, which is what I liked in her instantly - a tiny person of great vividness and dignity asking for a jasmine plant, met standing under the leaves of the vine walk. It is affecting that she is living with the rough and poor lesbians of that patchy house - so distinguished to be so poor and so displaced. Her room was very clean but not visual, a baby bath with seven pots of Indian jasmine in it, set under the south window as if to soak them in sun. I am feeling how women are worth so much more than men - the way they are valiant, embattled and generous where men are spoilt, indolent, and empty. I mean you. I am very angry that you can't be bothered to love me. I am angry at myself that I put so much of myself into trying. 24 The sky is open - six on a Tuesday - I'm vibrating at the womb or solar the way I did in the years when I was breaking up with Jam. I have something to say to you. It is about your disconnection, in other words deep fear, unconsciousness of fear, and unwillingness to know. I don't think you are ready to hear this but I am ready to say it. I have been working around the half dozen ways you have been enforcing dominance. I know them for what they are by their effect on me. I have been consenting to work around them because it seemed to me I could withstand them, because I was interested to know what they have to do with sex, and because I could see you getting realer. I am going to name the behaviors. You will dispute that some of them are dominance behaviors. I am not going to argue. Either you have good will or you don't. Another way I know these behaviors as dominance behaviors is that I have used them myself on other people, except for the stupid hypnotic thing. What you did to me last week was in another category. It was past dominance behavior into malice. There has been an angry undertone in you for a while. Maybe it has something to do with the way I forced your hand with Joe, which you would rightly hate even if it was to good ends. Could work woman live with him     NO Does love woman have to have a life     YES Work woman would die in his atmosphere of dominance     YES Love woman works around it     Does love woman like his dominance     no Do you agree that his dominance has to stop     NO Work woman doesn't give a damn about him     no she's interested in him Curious in a cold sort of way     NO the opposite Curious in a hot sort of way     YES Is work woman more truly me than love woman     NO Is love woman     no Someone else?     they are both deceptions Is there someone who isn't deception     yes, non-ego Is work woman a form of ego     YES That elf-woman     YES Will you tell me what non-ego is like     a quest Was I wrong to be pissed-off with that ECCIAD guy     NO 25 Reading philosophy of perception stuff - I wonder if I can say this - there's a turn that's happening more than once. I criticize some metaphoric terminology. I think what would be better to say. Then I see that the original terminology is a way of saying the corrected thing. I've changed my understanding of it so it's fresh and apt. This needs an example. I read in Gombrich that for sticklebacks red stands for danger. I don't like 'stands for' because it suggests the red is seen and separately read as meaning danger - something mentalistic. Say instead, the red prompts response to danger, I say. Then suddenly 'stands for' gets a fresh feel. But I can't recatch it now. Later. This is hard to say. It was like understanding what 'stands for' has always really meant - something standing there triggering what something else would trigger. - Coming from Joyce. My center room is just about ready, satin over gloss urethane this morning. There's a thing about Joe I understand. He likes to be square with his circumstances. He likes to know. 26 "You should look at certain walls stained with damp ... In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may hear every named word ..." Mistake to call it projection. It is dynamical completion. Gombrich understands conventional schemata as seed structures for such completion. This notion works for writing also. 28th DR's letters, finally out, 1995. "Myself, just upon 80, I still feel astonishment ..." Dorothy Richardson 1995 Windows on Modernism: Selected Letters of Dorothy Richardson, ed. Gloria Fromm University of Georgia Press I went to a Friday colloquium at the department yesterday. There were twenty people, twenty from the pinched right end of the bell curve, sitting along a probably teak table in a carpeted library with windows onto the most perfect mountain view in North America, Burnaby Mountain holding the university on a shelf high over the Sound, with alder brush screening every last street or house. At the head of the table sat a man brought from San Diego for the purpose of addressing us. Healthy, well kept, brown hair just beginning to grey, good sweater, thick wedding ring, a nice-looking man who jogs, offering us his apparently cutting-edge remarks on Socrates and Aristotle on love and friendship. He was replying to a paper by another such man, more famous than he. Is loving our friend for himself consistent with loving and fostering virtue in him? was the question. Brink has found a way to say it so the answer comes out yes. Vlastos said no. This went on for an hour. I didn't stay for the discussion. I was seething. Sitting there with my arms around my knees I was thinking how little it would take to violate such an event. If I lay down under the table for instance. I've thought something similar during David's Phil 100 lectures. There is a piano at the front of that lecture hall. Imagine sitting down to it during one of his idiotic complacent analytic philosophy lectures and playing Mozart, or rock'n'roll. He would have to try to reason with me. That reminds me, Phil yesterday in eager consternation, looking both ways when he comes into a corridor. He is being stalked and harassed, he says. A young woman is putting letters under his door, "increasingly personal." He was telling me this midway down the third floor corridor, where I met him on his way to consult the campus shrink. He stopped in midflow. He had to run. She had just appeared at the far end of the hall. I was going that way. She backed into the stairwell as I got to the elevator. I followed her and had a look. A pretty young woman, good jacket, day pack, who looked angry. I'm thinking Phil's fear, and his pleasure in the self importance of the fear, is something like his helplessness with [his daughter] Adrienne. There's something fishy about it. He's somehow guilty about young women     YES He doesn't give women their due     YES Can you get this through to me     something about his mother "She's going to have to be confronted"     : feeling 'She' just means feeling     YES Okay that makes sense     That's what it was about that whole roomful of people     1st March Woke remembering one of the scruples I've had in writing, that I shouldn't name anything that I think shouldn't exist - name it in any way or for any reason, even in metaphor. My example was funeral parlours. Tom on the phone yesterday said "I'm never going to leave you. I told you in the car. As long as you want me, I'll be there." That was when I came clean about feeling that he won't need me now he has Joe. His saying that satisfied me. It brought me back into the fold I've been out of for a week. But I noticed too the way he has said, twice, that I have become the woman who restored his son to him, meaning now he'll have to remember me. He has had a careful mechanism for not remembering women. His wives, Lorie and his first lay are inscribed. The rest I don't hear about. It was odd to learn I have just now made it into their category, and then only on account of finding Joe. I don't mean odd in the sense of unlikely. In a life like yours, where there has been such self-created but unbearable transience, it is fair enough not to start remembering a woman until she's proved she knows how to stay, or until you have proved you know how to keep her with you. What's odd is the conjunction of that true caution with the recklessness of your declarations, which have been saying forever from the start, as if saying has just no connection with doing. To me that is stunningly odd. 2nd "I will write you tomorrow," he said. Didn't.     part 3 the golden west volume 13: 1998 february - april work & days: a lifetime journal project