the golden west volume 14 part 1 - 1998 april-may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

April 25th I heard a song that seemed to me a new kind of music. It was music I could see, extraordinary music. Two women singing an open vowel at an interval that made their two voices one broad grainy band I saw as chrome. There were touches of instruments as if behind or to the sides, marks with small dark hooked shapes as if Arabic letters. The melodic line of the band of human texture being laid down would curve smoothly and familiarly but then narrow and flex into angles I didn't expect, smaller angles, like quarter tones. The line would thin out and stop suspended in an unresolved-feeling way. It was like hearing music of a civilization of the future. It had a distinct, developed quality. It was like futurist Art Deco. And yet it was perfectly pleasing, as if the people who worked somewhere to create it belong to a culture that would suit me if I could find them. It was very intelligent simple music. I waited to hear what it was, but it was in one of those pop trains that segued into something I didn't want to hear. I learned something just now. What does it imply. I knew I was short-sighted with one eye (L), long-sighted with the other, but I didn't know I could focus at different distances at the same time. Just now reading Brand's book on MIT I let my focus drift and was seeing the print from the right edge of the page floated very crisp and black over the chair and blue wall across the room. I was looking at the words, wondering why the page didn't shift with the print, thinking it was like screen superpositions - though not really, because the print was visibly floating, very sharp-edged and black. The print as I see it on the page is duller and slightly smaller. What I'm wondering is whether I've isolated reading/writing as a separate mind, from the eye back. This is why my eyes are looking so unmatched. 26th Dear you. That's what I want to say, the beginning of what I want to say. I was in the garden most of the day. It was overcast. A work party. I was just silently working in the south-east corner of the herb garden. Carol Moisevich came and worked on the paths, wanting to be near me I think. (Brian is coordinating, I'm dropping back. That's the way it should be. The guys are doing construction, the women are working with seeds. I did look across at Danny and Keith eagerly spading sand into the espalier edges, the crowds potting up in the nursery beds, and think - yeah but you're all working in my design, a woman made the frame you're eager in. I designed not only the space but the functions, though it took till now to get the nursery beds and greenhouse going.) There was sun late in the day. I went back just to look. The garden's filling up, coloring up. Birds hopping on stems in the willows. Flowers on the orchard trees, pink things on the quince the size of condiment dishes. In many places there's too much, we put trees in four feet apart. Sitting among the willows I was feeling just that heart-ache of own life. I could speak something from it, though it isn't about it - I could say a life naturally makes itself, I mean the concentrates of itself that aren't made by writing. The summer of Louie and Rowen and I in the garden. Tony and the morning the clock stopped and the room filled with light from the top down. Kissing Tom in Leucadia. Midsummer first light when Rowen was newborn. Frank and I by the haystack the Christmas Day we broke up. My mum and I talking, she washing the floor, I lying on my stomach on the table. My dad and I silent in the grain truck. I was imagining what I'd want to remember if I knew I was dying. Then coming home looking at the neighourhood. That friend of Candace sitting in the park with his back against a lime tree, playing the accordion. People's pleasure in being outside cos it's green and warm. You phoned last night though it had only been a day. Lonely lonely lonely lonely, you said. But your feet are better. You walk miles and they don't hurt. At all. That's since Joseph, you know. You're not footless anymore. - Michaux, "ashamed of what surrounds him, of everything that surrounds him, of everything that has surrounded him since he came into the world, ashamed of himself, of being only what he is, scorn for himself and for everything he has known up to now." When he heard his heart beat he was ashamed of the sound. But he lived to eighty-five. 27 Here is another question [I'd want to be] asked at my comps: Has your writing survived academic writing? Have you lost the moment-presence you gave so much to learn? Is this the most important question?     no What is     did you get to the bottom of your questions I did     YES Should I get out of academic life after the doc     Be a writer     Are you sure I shouldn't be an academic     YES Sentence?     teach your esoteric judgment Do you want to say that differently     no Write academically too     But don't sign on at a university     This is very helpful     YES Is this the time?     you've always been a writer Is it time to publish     YES I will make more sense to academics if I'm a writer     YES 28 This aft talking to Nathalie about a name for her company - Moth, she said (mothe) - Moth- something. Fractal dust. Now, the first evening I have the window open to night sounds, I come back from the phone and there is something on the sheet (a yellow sheet clean today). A feather? A moth. Not moving, just where my bum indents the mattress. Intact. New, that means. Brown, grey, white, black, colors very beautifully grown in zigzag threads the width of both wings and across the thorax. (Then I saw on the blue wall a green lacewing.) This moth is not attracted to the lights. If I dreamed this moth (it says), what? Very complex symmetrical spread? YES. 29 Hours of bookwork. Here's what happened. No phone call Monday when he said. Or yesterday. No reply to my two notes. Long letter to Joseph sent last night ends like this: Your mother was very beautiful. Knife in the heart. I saw her standing in the party, high heels and cocktail dress, everyone's goddess, the blond girl I can never win against. My dad's weakness, blindness, lovelessness, indifference. That's it. I've suddenly lost again. Remembering her he forgets I'm reading what he's saying to his son, he forgets who I am. It's worse. He does this to me the night before my comps. He does it instead of calling to wish me well, or sending a note. Here's what I have to do. Feel what is true neglect and heedlessness. Feel what is weak in me and not his fault. I felt the true neglect by feeling false competition. It is not because of the angel girls that my father is indifferent, loveless, careless, self-absorbed, self-perverted, sadistic. It's not their fault he is too weak to love a real girl rather than a picture. It is a shame he is only what he is. It's a sore thing that I have him to love and not a father who can love me well. More than sore, consequential. It has done me harm. I didn't deserve it. There was no good reason for it. It's what I got. Is there anything you want to say to me    he is coming through quickly and slowly to excluded child Is there a part of him that wants to sacrifice me     Would sacrificing me help     Can you explain to me how     sacrificing you would help him fight the tyranny of the unconscious What does he have to hide     a feeling Something he's feeling about me     YES Can you explain it     his unconscious tyrant wants to evade early love Leave aside everything that is charm, seduction. Leave aside everything in me that will settle for curiosity, risk, entertainment, glamour. If I were interviewing fathers would I pick you for my wonderful little girl? Clearly no. Have I been a good mother to your boy? Yes, very. Have I hoped I could turn a bad father into a good one by raising the boy well?     Yes. Should I choose a mate who is a good father to me     no Then how     someone who is constructive With me     So should I break up with Tom     no Why not     because you haven't found anger yet Anger at him     YES He has used me     YES He is as indifferent as ever     YES Do you want to add anything before I quit     YES: love (Crying) do you mean mine     anger, vehicle, integrate, feeling with thinking The anger is true     But it isn't final     It doesn't mean I can't love him     YES It doesn't mean I shouldn't     YES Should I phone him and blast him     But now I'm not angry any more     no   Is this heartache a true emotion     Is it true of my present circumstance     I would love a man who took better care of me     no you loved a man who didn't And still do     Am I still emotionally fixed to my father     I don't want to be     NO I am willing to give it up     YES (tears) Oh please will you help me to give it up (crying)     YES Can I give it up right this minute     no Will you tell me how come through     by means of the work on illusion by means of truth Do you mean by working with Tom     NO Illusions in relation to my father     YES By working with my father     YES Do I only love Tom because of illusions about my father     NO Is it truths about my father I need to know     NO truths about your relation to him I am willing to know them     Will you teach me now     no I know the truth of sexual attraction     Are there others     Are they truths I don't know     no, you know them But I still have illusions     YES, of feeling Dependence, for instance     YES My illusions are all emotional     YES Inappropriate feelings     NO false feelings Are there true feelings I can find     YES Notably anger     no Do these false feelings interfere at work     YES Was independence a false feeling     YES Have I just replaced one set of false feelings with another     YES But working toward the true ones     YES Is it mainly one true feeling I falsify     YES aggression Active engagement     YES He forbade it     you withheld it He would have beaten me     YES I shut down on it     YES When I go there to see them now, I engage     YES But I still withhold at the university     YES Ask what the false feelings are that replace it?     YES - dependence, independence, adoration, contempt, sexual passivity, sexual interest Do you want to add some others     love, combat, childishness, loss All of these came because engagement was refused     YES I refused engagement because I couldn't win     YES I don't refuse engagement with Tom     But my feelings are still false because of habit     Can I make my feelings true     (silence) Can my feelings become true     Will you tell me how     no Will you tell me how to find out     find out by coming through into understanding of excluded child Contact her     Is there more you want to say about this     no Her emotion is conscious but her thinking isn't     So I can use emotion to find her     YES A good fight. I didn't have my ducks in a row. I was annoyed without having a good leg to stand on. I mean I risked being angry without certain reason. I risked being at sea. I made it up as I went. I got to wrestle some, without being mean. He was good when he saw I wasn't going to insist on blame. He did try to phone last night. He said this is what happens when I get effusive. I said when he does it, it isn't effusive, it's intense. I said when I open up I get hurt and that's inconvenient to you, is that it? I should shut down? Or are you strong enough to handle it? And then of course he scrambled and was. He needs to be able to say, he says. Yes, but maybe when it happens I could rush into your arms. That was satisfying, so bold and new. At the end he invented another device. I knew it from the other side. Who loves you? Who loves you? I'm silent. What's hard in this, I'm wondering. I'm watching him do what I did, push. Say it. You, I say shyly, like a child. A knife in the heart with remorse, he says. It's okay, it's okay, I say, overjoyed that he minds hurting me. I go into these fights sure he'll have no patience. 30 The stress of Tanya's defiance. Seven hours yesterday of robotic thudding through the floor. She goes out at ten and leaves the music on. I'm very embattled. I don't fall asleep, and then when I do she wakes me coming home shouting with her friends. Should I declare war? I'm hot flashing. I wake at three and can't fall asleep again. My eyes are hazing over. - What's the thing I think I see in these last couple of papers. 1) At MIT they're synthesizing violin sound by digitizing bowing variables and sound variables, and doing some sort of correlation analysis that gives them a model they can use to generate sound. I imagined they used a net to do the correlation, though they don't say so. 2) A paper on sound localization in cat cortex says a net model does it using count and pattern, but coarsely or globally - all the neurons respond to all the positions, ie it isn't place, it's global activity. Is that right? No. It is place, but place is always global. Focal place has to be a location differentially marked in space kept live all over. That's what's particular about space and it's space perception that's used for time. And that's what space-time means. This is what's wrong with imagining space as coordinates. It imagines background as dead. The pattern that reports some particular perception, like color, also keeps the other possibilities alive. Color space. A keeps not-A alive. In the context of the entire brain, neurons participate differentially in maps, and maps participate differentially in other maps, and all of this IS the binding. What activation anywhere says is that this is happening in the context of all, all this. - It's your birthday. A hot evening, white-yellow incandescent behind the lime leaves, new soft things, thin glove leather, in floppy canopies outside Dave and Francie's yellow porch. What it's like to drop into a family. Jacob on a little box holding onto the window sill squeaking, brumming, speaking and seeing as if in the same convulsive little acts. People, dogs, gold light on the grass bank under the green leaves. Standing on his little tiptoes, one foot wound around the other. I was coming from Bell in the garden. Bell's scared, she's bruises all over, she's grey, she's old, maybe she's dying, but there she is in the garden lifting her glasses and rubbing away tears with her little fist. If she has one puff of a cigarette she could keel right over, she says her doctor says. She has known how to keep talking. Her way to hang on is to hold anyone with a line of talk crafted to have no exit points. Bell, I'm going, I say, across the start of a new sentence. She smiles back. She knew what she was doing. 2 The last weeks of April have been so hot. Spring jumped onto summer. Here is Louie's voice reading on Co-op Radio, pieces she read me yesterday sitting on a café terrace by False Creek. Noticing how differently she is reading for the public, more 'expressive,' more South African. By the second piece she's less the radio performer. "She finally finds that those voices are her other self which is helping her to melt." And then the section of Moving ice where she gets to it uncovered. Ah. There you're not being high-toned, you're speaking not from suspension but from home. 3rd of May, Evergreen Motel A cedar, a willow, a holly, a lilac, firs, alders, poplars, a hemlock, an apple, curly willow. When I step into the room I hear water and leaves. Hello     be impeccable He's speeding     And I'm paralyzed     It's a while since it's been as bad as this     Are we going to make it through     YES We have so little time and we're not connecting, it's grievous     I'm the one who notices we're not connecting     no he notices He thinks that if he just speeds along     He thinks it's my fault     Making plans for 2 people is too complicated     no I am making a phase transition     YES Is he too     YES There is quite a long way to go before we're through     5th Blaine I was going to write bad things about you and imagine breaking up, to try to be less soggy, but coffee and breakfast and looking at ads for apartments has made me feel better. What was it about that sad visit. Sex for one. Fatigue for another. Blankness on my side. I wasn't ready to meet whoever it'd be: it was the man who looks like your mother, has small eyes sunk back and a flat hungry line of cheek and jaw. Hound man. That one is speedy and automatic; if I start a topic he can't stop till he's flogged me stupid. What he needs is sex and listening. If he gets it he transforms to a man with big eyes out front, quieter and more able to respond. He transformed, I didn't. I start out a tight grim woman and end a blissy girl, when it goes right and we get to heart. We didn't. I don't like the way I've been, edgy, dim, dependent, confused. We watched the Sonics game. That made him happy. I paid attention and got the point. I sat through a two-hour meeting of worthy citizens because he asked me to. That was a mistake. What's wrong is in me - is it? The emptiness, or whatever it is, that I live in my room at home and brought with me. Now I'm going home to get ready for Friday. It's May. Hello     excluded child Something about?     structure, integration, childhood exclusion, succeeding Excluded child is being integrated     Because Tom is accepting her     YES What was being integrated yesterday was sadness and restlessness     Are you saying everything is okay     YES I should stop being childish with Tom     or be childish explicitly Anything you want to say about all that     losses What about them     lost ground Both of us     Was there a reason     something about honesty Will you explain     the mooning love woman was doing, you lost consciousness That's why it got worse     YES The way I was effusive     But you said it was okay     That's how the child gets integrated     YES When he has that look does it mean he's closed     What does it mean when he's like that     he's unconscious So what does he need when he's like that     to discover his conflict It was too much for me     no When I feel it's too much what does it mean     it's too fast - You phoned at suppertime. You'd had time to think. I get very heavy, you say, but I have credit for many, many, many down days. I think you made it but I didn't, I say. You say you learned things. Whatever else, we have lived out deeply experimental adventurous friendship. What am I feeling or imagining when I say that. The way you spoke on the phone - carefully. A way you couldn't have spoken three years ago. The way I have gone on faithfully through intense hardship of difference. You're still lying though. You said you had a headache instead of a toothache. You did it so you wouldn't have to be ashamed of not having gone to the dentist. 6 I've woken discouraged. It's a setback. It's in question the way it hasn't been for a while. As if my level has dropped. I'm not keeping up. I have been cooperating with oppression because there's something I want so much I'm pretending I've got it. I'm discouraged I'm still doing that. With a man like this you have to be very clear, you have to be impeccable, you have to be able to maintain yourself without ever losing your sense of how to look after yourself. It's as if I've got tired. I'm starting to give over. I let the fantasies murmur without challenge. I've got a wonderful love, I say. What do I really have. Here's the moment where I balance myself by saying the worst it might be. I won't give myself that motion. I'll try to be steady. I'm a codependent struggling with a chaotic companion. What did I do last week. I let myself be taken by music, I gave myself over to the first journal, I wanted rapture. I don't have the kind of sex I want. I can hardly remember that kind of sex. I'm settling for the kind of sex I can get with Tom. I'm letting myself be hypnotized and degraded to force myself to feel where my body doesn't open in safety. I'm letting myself speak stupidly and dwindle because there is no reply. The fight is going out of me, is it? I'm compromising. I'm segregating, I'm maintaining him in a separate life because that way I don't have to know the social cost of being with him - the wrongness of being at that cinema meeting for example, getting embarrassed at the Shangri-La. There are times that are real love. There's real feeling for how hard his struggle is. I was crying listening to him tell what it's like to want weed, telling himself he'll control it. A chasm always drawing, the alternative just plodding drudgery. I was crying because I saw that a life which isn't the slide of drugs or the plod of menial work is created by a lifetime of care, effort, detailed struggle. It isn't possible to stop drinking and have it there. It is created from the beginning. I haven't taken account of the difficulty of what he calls redemption. I don't know whether there can be such a thing, it is so difficult. He doesn't have the elementary disciplines that build a creative life - automatic truth-telling for instance. Self truth for instance. I am seeing that a free creative life is a sustained construction of great detail and great patient energy. For myself I see that I have lacked the ability to build an aspect of such a life. I have built part of it. I'm trailing a weak leg, I haven't built support for my human self. Because I didn't build it over a lifetime, I tried to pick it up magically in a hotel on skid row. Although I haven't cut corners since, I didn't choose, I went along with being chosen. I've poured energy into someone else's life. I keep letting myself get talked into further subsidy. I'm in a quandary. If I quit I'll be slipping into my own drug, which is abandoning connection, the part of myself that wants to be connected. If I go on I stay in trouble, I stay where I'm weak and can be lied to, milked, casually neglected, overwhelmed. I'd like to remember love woman, myself as sweetness and perception, not hated, not conquered, taught, not mistrusted, given to grow wise amid a social world rushing with the hope of new ways to defeat her. I am so frightened for that in myself and in other women. I'm frightened for a kind of intelligence that is trying to build itself but needs to be slow in natural surroundings. What else does it need. Sex with heart. Adventure. Unstressed relations with people it doesn't know very well. Recognition. It needs to feel pretty, to look at beauty without mistrust. - Oh, see, I fear it means, I seem to see it means, alone. That makes me cry. Does it mean alone     no it means something to be learned Learn something specific     no learn how to defend those things And still have currency     YES Buddhist notes: You can see what happens to anyone you harm, even accidentally. You see that you've dulled their eye, made their skin lose luster, made their head bow. People when they are not stressed are absolutely beautiful. When you're aware of heart there is vision of these effects. A commitment: nothing is worth the heart being closed even for a moment. He had discovered a diamond brilliance of mind and sat guard to notice anything that would destroy it. Our power to heal another human Generosity that gives what you would have wanted The exercise - if I had a year to live - what makes life livable and what devalues it? Chakras - structures that create primary field - flow of electrons through perineural cells - feelable by hand - hear, feel, see (by speeding up vision) - they don't open or close, they produce more or less energy - they interact - you can work on all by working on one. - I've suddenly seen that I could make a website rather than a video. Kantian stories prepublishing. If it gets good reviews a publisher will want it. (Then there could be a Dorothy Richardson site, a notes in origin site, a we made this site.) I could use it to test the material as a course. It could make my name ahead of me. It would use pictures and get me resources. It would be a way I could lead without shmoozing and from anywhere. It would be my community garden. I'd have something to offer people. I could guest-teach. Park the airstream. Tom phoned after I understood this. He called to say the moment he liked most was when he woke Tuesday morning and we were breathing together - facing each other - "like a bellows." But also to say Pilgrim had left a lot of messages saying he was organizing people to phone Jim and tell him to get off junk. Tom was the last one. Hey man, you've got a house, you've got a car, you're a teacher. The language of those men friends. Thick dialect. Amazing to watch him drop into it - energized - not to say speedy. Silence below. I kept phoning Tanya and hanging up, to say You're harming me. You're still harming me. You're stubborn and you're still harming me. Now it's those pitiful people with their dog. The helpless yelling at dogs there is in this neighbourhood. PAUL! Heel, Paul. PAUL! 7 "I'm puttin' out a steady beam for you." Tom being supportive. 9th, Saturday morning How it went yesterday. We were crowded close around a small round table in the pub. Philosophy on my left, art on my right, Barry across from me: technological, full professor, a whiz, recordings and articles by the bushel, international acquaintanceship, scotty dogs, a lover who cooks. I mean that Barry is the one who best understands not only my impulse but actually my accomplishment and my talent and temperament. I talked about employment. Film department? the philosopher suggested. Art schools aren't rigorous enough, I say, and even at SFU (looking at Colin) postmodernist theory is just junk, I don't have anything to say to that. And philosophers (turning toward Phil but dropping my eyes so it won't necessarily mean him, though it does) are too narrow in their experience, much too narrow. Then Barry suggests something I don't remember, but I'm looking at him when I say what would work would be something like the lab for experimental philosophy that Ray and Nathalie are proposing. I came out of it with agreement that I'll come up with a publishable book, workshop it on the web, not have to do a video too, since a book is harder than a thesis. Colin says, But I wanted to see .... Barry sweeps him out of the way, We'd all like to see Ellie doing ... but it would get unmanageable. Colin's face shining when I was telling them about the web pages. Barry is bearded and doesn't shine. I thought I could see some lighting up around the eyes, maybe. Phil I was hardly bothering to look at. Deadpan, so unconversant with either video or web pages that he's going to ride it out and see what the others say. Later he tells me he was thinking what a risk it was to use the event to propose a large change of plan I had thought of only the day before - not realizing that it was strategic in relation to him, since the other two were going to like it. Alright, so now I have a plan and it has lots of action in it. Dreamed Laiwan breastfeeding a baby, a smart little boy. 10 "... the young witch. She was bright and dark as coals." "science as a synonym for art" She quotes Jung, forward to The stars below, Bantam 1976: ego-consciousness as being surrounded by a multitude of little luminosities the state of the unconscious the star-strewn heavens, stars reflected in dark water, nuggets of gold or golden sand scattered in black earth. 200 Her many stories about being exceptional among stupid people. I keep wondering where she felt that. Her family was smart. There were intellectuals always visiting her father. Then there's the way her direct addresses to readers take a surprisingly dumb tone as if she's wanting to reassure the worst of them that she is just like them, though her stories are better than they can be. There's the story about a brickmaker and a weaver who don't go along with the general certainty that it's the end of the world and all must be destroyed. I understand that, I think. The culture of art afraid to hope to build. The brickmaker finds a hidden way to build toward another kind of culture, although he can't build very far. A causeway under water, that draws the attention of people who have learned to sail. These are stories from/about building herself out toward capability. But the tone of these forwards comes after The dispossessed, as if she hasn't realized who she is, now. Ursula Le Guin 1975 The wind's twelve quarters Harper and Row - Look at this table: a man in New Westminster got the proportions right. Cedar. [bought a work table I saw at an antique store on Commercial] - Alright, now I have to take stock of what I said I'd do. A book means better writing. 11 But more and a different kind of explanation too. 14th The house is one wince on account of noise. I'm recurringly all day subvocally arguing with Tanya, rehearsing backwards and forwards, walking around unnaturally even outside quiet hours. Mr Choy came with our contracts saying something I'm anxious not understanding, "We are not children. Now we understand. Now it is all legal." - It says it's because of my legal threat, which I forgot because I'm not interested in getting them, and only wanted them to put teeth into Tanya. Which they have. So the contract is okay. I've exchanged frozen mornings and some effort with shoes - and nervousness when I have company, Tom or Rowen - for quiet at night and no thumping. So far. It's one of the times when I feel embattled almost everywhere. Tanya's trying to bully the Choys into getting rid of me by a pretext. My reach at the garden is very nibbled back. Judy and Paul and my parents are as if already dead. There are dislikes and avoidances all over this tight neighbourhood, where Trudy has introduced a virus whose penetration could be nearly everywhere. What happens is that something distresses me and then the next thing is that I'm seen as a monster. In my sense of it, I defend myself under wicked provocation. I don't think I've been the aggressor in any of these stories - but I somehow end looking like the aggressor, named the aggressor. Is it the famous trashing that happens when you gain size? Spite and envy. It's after eleven and she has some guy stomping around. Voices. Does it just have to go on like this     no Do you just want to leave me in this without help     no, friendship Notice I don't want to be friends with her     YES Is that what it's about     YES Is that what it's about everywhere     YES Not liking people     Is not wanting to have them in me     YES Is there a good reason I don't want them in me     no A bad reason     YES There are people I like to have in me     Is it the same reason as when I was a kid     no They are painful to me     YES Do you mean I am feeling their pain     YES Do I feel their pain if they're not feeling it themselves     YES And if they are     Being in the same house is like being in the same envelope     YES It's each other's pain we can't stand     And we increase it with defiance     YES So should I talk to her     no, she won't understand When I'm distressed they feel a blast of pain so strong they feel attacked?     YES Is that what she really meant about meanness     YES Are cement walls shields against emotional pain     YES That's why the Golden West felt good     YES So the house feels better when she's asleep     And she feels better when people are asleep     Am I on the right track with this     YES Music has been invasion of feeling     People hurt in my presence purely because I'm me     no People hurt in my presence because I hurt in theirs     And I hurt in theirs because I pick up what's wrong with them     16 Days after heavy rain, unusual wind, clean air very blue, invisibly reverberating. Trees shipped full of leaves, as full as they'll be, every leaf immaculate. It's the cleanest day of the year. Greens by the yard, flopped off the bolt. Such structures. Why do I think of Steven Davis as having a mouse-mouth. There's fur around it. Short fur. He wears grey things with a fuzzy nap. A gently rounded middle. Shy black eyes. We were at the Havana leaning against the rail in the Saturday afternoon stream. He said his father had an eagle tattooed on his forearm. In orthodox Judaism you cannot be buried in the Jewish cemetery if there is a tattoo on your body. An Orthodox boy in the Bronx ran away at 16, worked on oilrigs in Texas. But no, he wasn't a brave man. There I felt one of those gaps there is in people. Can I say this - a space that is holding its breath in disappointment. Why is Steven disappointed in his father? What did he say he was working on in philosophy of language, that when a child is learning to speak, he accepts a correction. Something normative. (I was immediately more interested in the way a child can use a word idiosyncratically and be understood.) When he was a boy, he said, he would perceive the song standing out from the bird. His third wife is a famous columnist in Montreal. He owns a house in the south of France, an apartment in Paris, a place in Montreal, and his house in Vancouver. At conferences he is the host, introducing and enquiring. Nathalie says she's seen him savage with a rival. What I'm meaning to say is that he has that sadness I know - of a life spent so far from its origin that those who were there at the beginning can't see you where you are now. You feel they've died. I'm trying something socially - I'm being nicer - should I call it sucking up? Yes because it's with a thought of gain. And no, too, because the effect is good. The tone warms. There's more trust. Like talking to Wallace yesterday, I wasn't lying but I was saying the good things I actually think, because I need their good will. It doesn't seem to matter what my motive is. I came out of the conversation very calm. Would you call what I was doing with Steven sucking up     Is it bad     no Will it spoil my looks     YES I'll look like other people     no I'll look like someone who sucks up     YES So I shouldn't do it     NO I should do it for better reasons     Pure generosity     Would it still spoil my looks     no I see less if I'm sucking up     YES Would I see more in generosity     - "Some are in search of the philosopher's stone, but I have discovered the philosopher's butt." [sez Tom]     part 2 the golden west volume 14: 1998 april-july work & days: a lifetime journal project