the golden west volume 15 part 3 - 1998 october-november

work & days: a lifetime journal project

San Diego 2nd October 8:30 on a Friday morning. Application mailed yesterday. Car at a three day zone. Rent paid for another three weeks. Anxiety smoothed out. Belly fat gone, eyelids again. Free computers figured out at the library. Lamp, cassette player. Beautiful Melita rig for making tea. Tank full, papers brought into my room and sorted into stacks in boxes laid on their sides, 36" deep. UCSD parking figured out. Not afraid of Pat any more. She and Paul will see what I do in the process of writing letters. A month and some before Tom gets here. Tom getting past his organizing dragons one by one. A lot of work done that got me ready to belong here. Emotional work too. Now I can just get at it. After mailing yesterday, going to the beach. Taking off my shoes, putting my feet into warm sockets in the sand. Groups of bodies every twenty feet for miles north and south. bodies from Illinois. A grandmother wriggling into a bathing suit under her teeshirt, not minding that there's a second when she pulls it off and flashes most of a breast she's still proud of. She and her husband the bodies they've built by being what they are for 60 years. A sleek young woman reeking of coconut not reading Kafka, laid out with her eyes closed not exactly knowing what she's feeling. I was there. After a while I rolled up my pants and walked on the firm edge that kept getting wiped clean. There were short strands of sea grass left in beautiful scribbles and wrapping around my ankle. Grains of glitter among the tans and few blacks. The air had a stickiness of salt. Someone in a very short kayak made for playing in waves. I could do that, I was thinking. Learn to swim first. One of those ADD conversations with Tom. He has imagined teaching me to swim and cannot tolerate me having anything to say about it. I stand my ground but with a kind of distaste. He's doing what he can but it's like being fucked for his sake not mine. He's talking to relieve tension, or because tension's all he's got. Yes but it's my fault. He was getting stable in Bellingham. If he was the kind of man who could organize himself without this kind of stress he would also have been too well organized to come after me. So I'm being patient with 32 minutes of talk that can't bear me. At other times there are moments when he relaxes and knows me and they're more wonderful than they would be with the other kind of man. That's what I'm saying. I don't know whether it's true. There's a worse limit I have to keep taking account of - the way in his not listening I am not given the wonderful thing friendship gives, conversations where I'm interesting to myself, the being-drawn-out delight that should be the minimum for love - limit I keep my eye on uneasily. That's the weakness in Tom and me. I'm not my best. I read him my journal so he'll know my best even if he can't support it or invite it or even tolerate it. It is a kind of cheating. It gives me the sensation of being supported in my best, without his having to reply to, or feel, or even hear it. That way I can keep going, but it is a fragile illusion. I say something like - there aren't men who can really draw me out. If they draw me out they aren't men and I'm dissatisfied in the other way. Or: there are smart capable feeling beautiful men who could draw me out, but they are too good for me. Other kinds of women have got them. Not too good for me, but still they want and can get that other kind of woman with a nice body and a smart spirit. The only kind of real man who could draw me out and would want me would be a very unusual man. I'd be lovely company for him but I haven't found him. These are sad notes. I'm saying what has to be said but there's a dejection about it. Do you have anything to say about that     YES, it's subtle I've expressed it well     He is never going to be able to draw me out     YES So it isn't really love     YES So I'm living a lie     no He doesn't love my being     YES Is it wrong to be with a man who doesn't love my spirit     YES Sometimes I love his     YES Am I missing the subtlety     YES Will you explain     you are slowly passing through the difficulties of childhood That's what this is for     YES Is the sadness correct     YES I see that he can't like me but he can't help it     YES So I'm sad rather than defiant     YES Is that better     YES Because it's truer     YES But being sad is weakness     indecisive Is that good     I stay with it long enough to learn     YES Will I ever have a man who does love my spirit     YES I'm not settling, I'm practicing     Is that how I should think of it     Should I be sad with him when he's like that     (twirls) You're correcting my question - should I show the sadness I am when he's like that     YES   I was zonking yesterday     YES I have celebration and self-abuse mixed up     Will you tell me what the question is     where to share pleasure Is there a way I should be sharing it     YES Will you explain     by looking for action, feeling and contemplation Like going to the beach     YES Instead I ate and read     YES Which are the actions of someone in prison     YES Will you say more     and of someone who is greedy and addicted Because I wasn't impeccable I put up with Tom incorrectly     YES I zonked because I didn't have access to correct action     YES Will you give me an example of what would have been correct action     yoga Another     hawking You mean writing beautiful stories like that     YES Okay. I was in the grip of addiction     YES Which costs freedom     no Abuses freedom     Lookit me - I'm wearing the black jeans and black skin-tight jersey and embroidered vest and I'm slim, I'm slender, I'm light. I'm grey-haired but I'm lithe and trim and today I'm going out with a pony tail. Sad and happy. Why am I suddenly slim, though I'm eating more than I have, and ice cream, even. It's the light, it's the lone, it's the me I am in those. Judith Stapleton went to Hawaii and saw Mary Tiles. "I liked her so much I can hardly stand it." The grace and clarity of her writing. The grace and clarity and play of Judith too. "We can wait till the cows come home for men to love us," says radiant Alice Walker; "meantime there are women who already do." 4th Hello Sunday morning. Pandemonium last night. All-demon's Eve. A crazy woman visitor in the next room yelling No, Thomas, and more I don't remember. Three policemen and the security guard. It was midnight. I opened my door a crack because really the soundproofing is good in this hotel. I was holding it open from my bed, two fingers a foot from the floor. One of the cops flashed a light on them, very alert. And all the rest of the night too, voices in the street yell and sometimes sing. One of the street people deep in the night will want to hear himself taking possession of a lot of space. I like that. Downtown is permanent Carnival zone. Last night I rode to Point Loma, to the beautiful house on Kellogg's Beach. Crossed the line just when I got there, a tangled garden with a trickle of water, just the right amount, somewhere in the brush inaccessible behind the wire gate. Wattle trees self-seeded on the shore. That track next to the water. Came home in the dark. I'm strong, eight or ten miles, no trouble. Listening to Rossini on headphones remembering Sarah, wondering why I so seldom am in feeling memory of people I've known. When did I lose that - is there a way I can tell? I saw and heard and felt their quality - now instead I know where in the brain that mainly happens. Faces, colors, forms, and persons at the farthest end, the headland, temporal pole. Sarah was someone she isn't now, I think. I'm not seeing her well, I see her form better than I see her face. She was a fine light body. I guess she was my height, finer of bone, a sardonic turn of the mouth, level eyes, a lovely light autonomy when she was in her late twenties, music and mathematics. A married American professor, ugly, named Alfred, but he was elsewhere. Then she fell in love for real. The answer to when I lost it is, it had to do with Trudy. I don't know. I have a very unclear sense of having been - I want to say - rummaged, but that would be drugs. What I learned with Tom, being hyperalert is not a defense because contact has been made with an unconscious part. They rummaged my unconscious and caused me to work against myself. In them it was vengeance taken against whoever they could reach. Now let me check this - why am I still not sure about this. I haven't liked to say anyone damaged me. I don't like to say I am damaged, is why. Because it is damage no one else had done, not abandonment, not Roy. That was damage but I had brought a loving spirit through. They did damage to my loving spirit. Now I have said it. What follows? Win love back from them. Will you teach me how?     by anger Anger at them?     YES They cut me off from love in my house. Siege. I brought love into my house but they confined it. Trudy campaigned against me evilly. It's true but it's as if I don't feel it. 5 Kirk was stopped at the airport with director and managing producer of a documentary they want to shoot in Los Angeles. Border problems. He read them Leaving the land off his laptop. Nathalie on the phone said, you can't help being brilliant, you've always been like that, from the time you were born you just ----, something like, got outside. I'm irritated with the way Kirk is praising Leaving the land at the expense of Brain and imagining, which he calls opaque because he couldn't read it. There's a little edge of wanting me kept in my place, it feels. (Book says not.) What Kimura says about women using fine manual motor skills for language and men using targeting spatial skills, "more posterior." The female brain hormonally inflected in development, so it holds fast to persons and objects, their detailed qualities. Male brain built to rush around and watch other things rush around, and from this also geometry and physics and their languages. Somehow pleasure attached to these functions. Kimura D 1988 Speech and language Birkhausen Boston Kimura D 1992 Sex differences in the brain, Scientific American Sept 1992:119-125 Kimura D 1993 Neuromotor mechanisms in human communication Oxford 6 I'm fed up with the stress of asking people to praise me. Do you have anything to say to that? Yes, be happy they'll do it. I'm afraid they're doing it grudgingly. Help them with the writing. And just soldier on? Yes; feeling and intelligence. 7 Dealing with support letters, Phil, PC and PC. Avoiding, junking: read a novel all day yesterday. Ate a pint of Haagen Dazs, blanking out the next step. Thinking about asking three people to write nice things about me, arrgghh. Think of it as telling them what you've done, Louie said. Why doesn't that work. Because I don't feel them wanting to hear it. That forces it into lonely strategizing and scheming. I am doing good work, I'm doing wonderful work. Brain and metaphor has so much freedom and invention in it, Brain and imagining is so broad and clear. I've been so clear and essential and bold with inventing my program, why do I have to beg for praise, beg to be let through the gate. I've had to beg at every step, and go in fear of any small mistake, and try to manage myself out of fear and reluctance. "The amount of rejection you have faced," said Joyce. I was complaining how hard it was to make a phone call. - A lot of the rejection has been covert, that has made it harder. I never get used to being thought a cripple. I never know when I am being thought a cripple: that is the strange thing. I don't get used to having to support my brilliance with signals of brilliance. It shames me. Dear larger one - I've been stuck in this confusion right here - this one - is there a way through? No. Is it always going to be like this? Yes. The necessity and reluctance are both true. YES. There'll always be reluctance in them. YES. I'll always have to scheme and beg. YES. I can get used to my process in it. YES. 8th Woke in seven o'clock light and thought of David Birch - his marvels - the way he is radiantly beautiful and decrepit as a corpse, the beauty of his boots, his collapse into abjection when I took him to the birdsong board meeting, his lovingness, the armfuls of white flowers we gathered for my birthday. Now I see by the date that it's the anniversary of my journey here. He was on one end of it and Tom was on the other. When I think of that journey I think of the Sweetwater Pass. The pink light on boulders in the little canyon, the fast green and white stream, fine pale pink sand. Here's morning. The stems and dangling seed cases of the red-brown (is there a friendlier name than - ) pittosporum. All there is in the window, is that red-brown and a paler version of it on the apartment wall that rises through the middle, and the dark and light green leaves in hard scallops, and a white and blue mutually dissolved in the upper corner. 9 Nora. Interested. Not to say imprinted. I'm going to cross into another zone and look around. Kind of a fox spirit maybe. Someone comfortable with money. A narrow not very plastic face, high-bridged narrow nose, thin but quirked mouth. Wide pale eyes. Well cut - very well cut - very well colored - dark red hair. Copper the conductor. White pant suit, loose. A stride crossing the road below the porch. That's her, I said. Enterprising. Someone living in the world, antenna with wide sweep. Swept me. Daring-do. Out there. I liked that. We speeded along together not eating the paella. 10 Here's what I'm thinking, sometimes - let's just see how far I can go, how good I can get. Let me just try it. Let's see what I'd be if I push a bit more, give more care physically, go flat out in a day, deal with what I'm afraid of - as if I were eighteen and full of hope. 11 A particular kind of irritation when I'm reading - is it always a sign of patriarchal motive? Usually it is. Then what about 'representation'? Reading a neuroscientist called Goldberg, very irritated by the way he for instance talks about cells 'reading' and 'interpreting' other cells as 'commanding' and 'requiring'; or space being 'calculated', 'representations' being 'neural equivalents of' the object. It is as if his metaphor is himself. 12 How to think about being someone's gardening artist in residence. How to garden them. How to grow the inner core of love. 13 A guy on the radio who wrote a book saying wherever alphabetic language was established, denigration of both images and women followed. A god you attend to by reading what he's (said to have) said, rather than a goddess whose image you adore. Reading and beta waves, TV and alpha/theta. Writing uses only the right hand. Watching baseball, the cuts to the faces of coach or manager or someone in the dugout. Leonard Shlain 1998 The alphabet versus the goddess: the conflict between word and image Penguin-Putnam What I know about academic work, the focusedness - that it's hard to get to and can't be sustained long in a day, and is physically expensive, but gives me a finer grain neurologically, which is visible. What do I know about images. A lot. They're related to sexual chemicals - sex trance - and give me a different kind of fine grain and a bloom of light. Academic work is like herbicide to that sexual light. - But all this is wrong too, being turned on in work can bring well-being that's from both. Monotheistic religions and bare geometry, landscape designers who don't want to know plants, the wretched slabbed shrubs of Enlightenment gardens. But in England the upper class women learned music and drawing, and thus some of the men too. And now everyone trances out in images they don't make themselves, often in images of people talking. It's never as bad as the emptiness of talk radio. Images do make gods of people who'd be just people. So is a cathedral an image? Yes because it's supranormal. "Notre Dame," he said - all four of the most impressive French Gothic churches. The Protestants wearing black and white reading in black and white, exciting paranoia. He spoke as if emotion is a fluid held in the tank of the right hemisphere and in danger of leaking through the corpus callosum. That's wrong in this way: what is the emotion excited by separated left hemisphere function? Think of French feminist and deconstructionist theory - the emotion is speedy paranoia, anxiety, a kind of staying-on-top-of-it hyperalertness, very unpleasant. Soulless in the sense of loveless, suspicious of early love. But he's also lumping together things that aren't equivalent and don't fall into columns - column fault. Right and left hemisphere function, right and left hemisphere segregation, emotion and literacy. He was also in full sail with the silly linear/spatial dichotomy, as if only written language is sequentially organized, as if looking at images isn't sequential as a process, and as if what's evoked by hearing or reading language isn't always and necessarily spatial. What's the right way to say what he means? Just now in the last sentence I had two formulations, one academic and one younger. "The right way to say" came when I was disliking whatever academic form came first, which I can't recover now. I then thought maybe the faster L hem circuits are 'linear' just in the sense of less filled-in: there's less sensory involvement, there's a correctness of shifts in the bare linguistic abacus. 'A calculus' - but I don't want to call it that because it loses the sense of motion in space that's featureless but still spatial. What I don't know is whether it is felt space in the brain or (also) an imagined space evoked. 7:30 Tuesday morning. Yesterday I was in the grip of Mo's garden. Lost some hours, really lost them, in the library. I went in at 11:30 and only dimly knew I was feverish some time later. I basically have it. Meantime she left a message saying listen to the radio at nine, and also meantime at breakfast reading the paper I'd seen a notice of a lecture by this guy. The alphabet and the goddess. Happy and wanting to shop. Second hand bookstore, book of eucalyptus drawings. Round orange pitcher, very beautiful. San Diego Hardware: clippers and pruning saws. Lester Rowntree, b.1879, lived to be a hundred. She divorced in 1932 at 53, a yearly route camping alone by car, March southern California deserts, seacoast, foothills; July-August High Sierras, then back to Carmel. 14 Pokez. Mexican food for breakfast is what makes sense. There's the jacaranda across the street - fronds tip up like cedar - but soft as fern - flowers in mauve bouquets as if laid down on piles of the fronds - which move in what I'm feeling is a fanciful way. Flouncy, that half-stirred mix of lift, ripple, and what is it? - the way the tips are both newer lighter green, and tip't up - what is it about that tender rising tip - as if it's curious and hunting. Buoyant. The whole canopy stirs most at its surface - mobility increases from center out, but it's not exactly that - it's nonlinear - there's a fulcrum at the lowest point in the curve, it accelerates from there. Now I've got it - the flipping up and mobility at the tip starts quite close to the outside of the tree. Little things to note. Vanessa Redgrave as Ariel, the tape I've been listening to on headphones at night. I listen syllable by syllable to her. She's spirit - so much lighter and more inflected than the people - like the flouncy tips, i could say - systematically related but taken to another order. She is love woman too - promised freedom - meantime accomplishing by fantasy. The Tempest Caedmon Audio 1995 Street meetings. As we waited to get into the library a man came up to me and said he wants to live to be a hundred. He's fifty-four. His upper back curved over his heart's unhelped hurt when his dad died. He was eight. Do you think there's life after death? he asks. What do you think death is like? Do you know what philology is? Psychometry? Theosophy? It was nice to meet you, I say as we surge through the turnstiles. "Thank you, ma'am." Yesterday waiting with the bike to cross the trolley tracks to the second-hand store, a woman who patted my bum. Weathered face, a street woman. Long white hair. "Was that friendly?" I call after her. "Not exactly, I thought you might run over me. I thought maybe you didn't see me." "I saw you." In the library later, there she was next to Arts and Music. Stout, a pleasing face. I patted her flat ass. As I was locking the bike outside the West an old man pushing an old wheelchair. "I'm going to steal that" he says. "I'll steal that," I say. He's thin, shuffling, but has a face like an intelligent old man from my country, a farmer, wearing a farmer cap. He had to stop riding a bike when he was 75, he says. "How old are you now?" "Eighty-eight. It's miserable." "You don't look miserable," I say. And Joe Flores yesterday morning wanting to know where he knows me from. I tell him it's good he doesn't remember, because I offended him. How did you offend me? he asks twice, so I tell him he thought a woman should want to talk when he wanted it. I'm like that, if I'm offended with a woman I'll just walk right past her. I say I'm Tom's girlfriend. He wouldn't mess with Tom, he says. Tom was like him, he wouldn't take anything from anyone. "He liked me. He'd go out of his way for me." There he is on the street when I look out the window, white hair still thick, white shoes, grey tweed overcoat buttoned up, brown face. Tall but stiff and walking slow, carrying himself with as much dignity as when he had a room, and more sweetness, I think. It's a pleasure to see and speak to him. Eighty-something. 15 Spirit servants in Shakespeare - he stood there four hundred years ago so much more secular than most are now - here it says saecculum, observed but once in an age. What does that have to do with present rather than deferred or obedient life? "That bankrupt sleep" - Emily Dickinson took the method. He's like a place, like Trafalgar Square, where I can be certain everyone I admire has stood. 16 The happiness of the Golden West. When the clock beeped at 5:30 I shuffled into my clothes and shoes and came down the stairs with an eye on Big Dave, who was dozing in his chair with his mouth open but called out when he saw me. The English security guard got the side door open. Out into the dark, unlock my bike, night chain through both wheels and around the tree. West on the sidewalk, cross the street kittycorner against the light. There's my car, that I find always with a little blurt of joy. My car! Hook the bike over the prongs of the rack without fastening it. Start the engine, classical music in the dark. Turn on the headlights, sit warming the engine. Roll down the window, look around. California. Zip up the street and into my spot, just behind a pair of brakelights, two pairs of headlights converging as I lift the bike off the rack. Whisk home. There's Joe Flores on the bench, putting on his white shoes. There's the old moon flat on its back high in the black east. Yesterday morning as I rode across an intersection to the library, there was a black street man who said, "How're you doin'?" "I'm doin' great!" "I can see that," he said. In this place it seems once a day someone tells me I'm beautiful. I believe them. But what I'm wondering is, what is different in Vancouver? Why aren't I beautiful there? Is it something about Americans? Or just street folks? Or is this somehow a happy spot. 16 The very black man who keeps asking sits down next to me where I'm watching TV in the lobby and says he has a free pass to the movies, would I like to go? I say that if I went with him there'd be thirty or sixty people in the hotel who'd get the wrong idea and Tom'd have to deal with them. He bursts out with something heartfelt about how people are lonely and still they refuse to connect with each other. I guess he didn't believe me. I like his bravery in pursuing me and I hope not to leave his feelings hurt. I tell him a little more of the story. Half these people sitting around us love Tom and watched us get to know each other. They're alone and it was important to them. It gave them hope, d'you know what I mean? He believes me but he has more to say. He gets a good vibe off me, I'm a mature woman, he thinks. He has fantasized a lot about making love with me. He feels our souls could connect. Maybe there's something other than sex he could get from me. Think about it, I say. I know what it is. He wants to come through. He can see, somehow, that I've done it. I could tell him how, but he's not in a position to hear it. I tell him anyway. You have to go through hell. I've done that, he says. Did you have support? Then he bursts. He tried to talk to his family about what they did to him, they wouldn't listen. His mother pushed him away. He held onto her dress. A couple took him away. It was child abduction. The man threw him to the ground. He still has a scar, here. They told the doctor he fell off a swing. He was four or five when his mother pushed him away. She threw him down too, when he was ten. He has never married. They won't give him a job. He is on SSI and sells wallets on the street. There's a woman with two children, but he only has enough money for himself. When he told me about holding onto his mother's skirt he was holding onto my forearm. He won't have anything to do with black women anymore. He doesn't see his family, his mother. The problem is, when you lose your mother you lose part of yourself, I say. How does one abandoned child spot another? What can be done with the faith and hope left in him, that has made him persist though I say no? "Psychiatrists, no, they give you Prozac." Joyce isn't here and he couldn't afford her. Well, I couldn't afford her either; but he isn't even at the stage where he could think such a process possible. Eliz phones at 7:30 to make an appointment for tomorrow aft. The story she tells me is about the city cutting back a ficus. She read something about making the place in the alley where you put out your trash beautiful, she liked that. Then one day she came home and saw they'd cut back all her cover, without asking. It's not a full tree any more. And then about work: I was feeling toward something this morning but I didn't have grip. That was a sensation like very blurred vision. I know I'm piecing together in a way no one has, but that felt like brainfog. I have to get my brain clearer than that. 18 Susan Oyama! "Adding information to matter and energy is something like speaking of nations exchanging dollars, yen and profits." Oyama S 1985 The Ontogeny of Information, Cambridge Oyama S 1993 The problem of change, in Brain development and cognition: a reader, M Johnson ed, 19-30 Blackwell 19 Reading CNS embryology. Eliz and Eliz's garden and house. Sun in the Gas Haus window, no music, sometimes the wooden clunk of a pool ball. The streets of Laredo. I mean wide low empty in an even blaze of white light, unusual people one at a time. Something I want to say about the journal in the next time. I feel myself beginning to suppress so there won't be trouble with my hosts/clients. A woman called Girling, who is both girl and quite boy. It is a wonderful house, an old-money cottage in open forest. Some of what she has done with it is perfect. The maple floor. Its worn rugs. The tile bathroom. The south-of-France corner in the kitchen yard, with Boston ivy on a stone wall. Some of her furniture - the built-in in the bedroom. She is the sort of girl who is boy by her hoarse direct voice, her dogs and truck, her narrow hips and the depthless pale blue eyes I saw when I wasn't misdirected by the yellow curls. 20 Let's see whether I can find a truer way. My situation isn't simple though I hope I will be, magically. I'm having to be dependent on people. I'm having to put and feel myself to be, in their way. Downtown I'm safe from the discomfort of envy, that's the freedom here. But I'm going to do something harder and I have to really do it. I'm going to be where I am relatively poor, old, badly dressed, deteriorated, deformed and eccentric, and hoping to conceal that I am those things. I'll find stratagems and yet the stratagems themselves will feel suspect, I'll think back on them with uncertainty. I feel I have to hide my journal but what I'll want to hide is not so much my true opinion as my envious anger because I feel inferior. If I feel it and if I don't feel it, either way, it will spoil my freedom where I live, so I can't walk from the bedroom to the bathroom without awareness of danger. I woke from a dream that I was moving into a place with a lot of junk in it already. - I wanted to see Eliz's garden again and did, half a glass of wine in the kitchen yard, birds, sky turning white. Amazing beauty. I'm going to feel envious     Is envy a kind of true perception     no Is praising what I like the answer     YES Will they feel I'm inferior     YES Will I feel it because they do     My fantasies have been of overcoming inferiority     YES partial loss of triumph is the loss you're processing The moment when I appear in church limping     YES I am and am not triumphant     YES Do you have advice     integrate The triumphant and the not triumphant     YES They are separate in me now     YES Does it have to do with remembering triumph in nontriumph     It will give triumph more complexity     YES Is this about more presence     no, more truth Will you advise me look for     anger The anger that is there     no, that isn't Anger when I'm seen as ruined     YES Robert in the lobby dressed in a vivid purple doublebreasted jacket, white shirt with ROB stamped on the right cuff, creased black pants, shined black boots, asks how my day went, says if Tom doesn't show up, will I ...? I say I won't, and some nice things that are true, that his straightforwardness is good, and that I notice he dresses with care. He doesn't have any one to support him emotionally so he has to dress his best, he says. I say I understand. Saying goodbye to the Golden West by sitting with my laundry in one of the mission rockers watching the Padres fall behind in the top of the eighth. Thinking of you watching it in the mission in Bellingham. Every chair full around me, enduring the last at bat, two out, two on base, they only need one to tie it, two balls, two strikes .... Walter with his transistor radio to his ear, shaking his head. Strike three. We get up morose. Email from Louie, deep yoga and a bad dream, she says - a bad dream of the kind I don't have, guilt and fear. Val says hatefully that Louie always wants and takes the best off a plate. She does too, but who hates it, is what puzzles me. You're a guilter too. I'm not a guilter but I'm a shamer. The way I take pleasure in calling myself poor, old, deteriorated, deformed. You would never do that to yourself and neither would she. I never think I'm bad; I think I'm inferior. It must come to the same thing, does it? They're both self-disappointment     They're explanations for being unloved     YES A child's     YES The truth about being unloved is always incapacity in the adult     YES Is that truth unbearable to a child     YES Knowing adult incapacity is too insecure     YES So every time I shame myself I'm saying there is someone who'll look after me     YES Is that it     YES Being ashamed in relation to anyone is a claim on them     YES Being guilty too     YES Is anger the answer     no, simply self-responsibility 22nd, Taft Street, Bird Rock It's seven. There's a lot of twitter. Drinking tea from my blue cup, writing on the wicker lap desk. Across the room on a little chest of drawers is the red cloth with gold stars. A small cat, tabby with an orange glaze, jumped on the book. What's the gist. It's where I am, it's alright, is there anything I need to change? Yesterday waiting on the sofa outside Paul and Pat's doors. I'm a courtier, I said to Paul, when he summoned me to get my envelope. And a very welcome one, he boomed. My note had helped, I could see. ("Philosophy is a synoptic job, do you remember saying that?") He was eager to show me his toy, which in fact is wonderful, a 3D stereoscopic view of their deck on Denman, his mother and daughter, the ocean, the open door, really three-dimensional - two rings of flashlight batteries wired together on rotating poles, a gismo. Pictures taken by twin SLRs wired together, so there must be sets of slides rotating coupled. At sunset at the end of Forward Street there was the first of a new moon, a white line, about to sink into a greypink sludge on the ocean rim. Alright, that's what it was yesterday. It was the farthest dark. Here's day and eagerness. It was forlorn leaving the Golden West. The room was beautiful when it was empty again. I lived facing a wall that was a window that was a tree and many energetic voices. The night before I left I knocked on my neighbour's door to say I was leaving. Thomas the electrician. Small shapely man who looks sick, dirty around the head, unshaven, dark around the eyes. He had a bandaged leg when I came. There were bursts of loud music, Abba, the TV at night. When I met him in the corridor I offered to lend him my headphones. He was contrite. After that we were quiet neighbours. When I knocked on his door he said, There's someone I want you to meet, and opened his door wide to show me the woman who had been hiding behind it. This is my wife who just got out of jail. A blond woman, fat, smoothed over somehow, an appalling woman, so much hatred in her eyes, fixed stupid malice, nothing but that. In the morning when I was loading the dolly he offered to help. He wanted to know about my limp. Was it an accident or by birth? Neither, I had polio when I was little. He spun around. You too!? He was four. Then he had a lot to say. We're tough. You keep that spirit up. The last thing he said as I was vanishing toward the elevator was, We're emotional, we have to be. The Mescalero-Apache cowboy, who actually looks to be black, on the sidewalk as I loaded the car. "You come back and see us and I'll take you out for a lobster dinner." "Wait till my boyfriend gets here and you can take him too." And here you are - I needed the photo because leaving the Golden West was like losing my line to you. I like the way there is that big muscle and foam of water next to your groin and your hand. Yeah. The cascade that starts at the level of your eyes. 25th The clocks are turned back and it's raining. Dirty leaves on the orange tree are getting washed. My car parked at the curb getting washed. It's 4:30, dark, water crackling off the gutter. The little cat caught sight of a moth. There's a tension in the house. Whose. Monty Roberts. His voice on tape reading his own book. I liked his voice, which had the wry flex in it that Frank's had, a certain kind of a country man's I wanted to say irony, but it's softer than irony and it's his entire tone. A moral story, a story of moral invention. His father beat him for not beating horses. It's a complicated story because his father did what had to be done to establish him, sent him around the States on a railway car with four horses, a groom and a teacher - I mean opposed him viciously and supported him with brilliant enterprise, refused to be beaten though his son had overtaken him at ten. I mean that Monty didn't seem to realize what the beatings meant, was still looking for his father to come out with a white flag fifty years after it had happened. Meantime there were horses he could give his entire heart to, because he had not set himself up in bad heart with horsekind. His founding revelation came when he watched the dun mare who was matriarch over a herd of mustangs deal with a wild foal. He watched how she said stand away by facing the foal full on and looking him in the eye. He watched the foal repent by making sucking motions and snaking his head. The mare let him back in by turning somewhat sideways and drifting her eyes backward toward his hips. From this core of primal signal Monty invented what he wouldn't call breaking a horse - he called it starting a horse, and his other technical terms have that right simplicity. Advance and retreat is asking the horse to come nearer and back off, and it's the first move in establishing trust. The trust was, he didn't say, a trust in established communication: you know how to address me. He never figured out how to address his father. It was because he was on his own with what he was convinced of. He felt he needed warrant though what worked was warrant enough. Then he got it from the Queen of England and that had to be sufficient. There was another odd turn where a rich man funded him to build a spectacular farm, and then set him up with an instruction he had to evade, had him arrested on false charges, bribed the police to try to extort a confession. Monty sued and got the farm, thirty million. It was as though his work was being organized by gods more equivocal than he intended to be. You'll get everything you want but it will hurt on the way. As if there is a belt of high wind I have to be willing to step into. Monty Roberts 1997 The man who listens to horses Random House Audiobooks Is there anything I should be understanding about Nora. There's power negotiation going on. I'm aware of it nearly always. It's her house and I'm the poor governess but I am what I am. Her device is to be careful not to pay too much attention to what I am. I notice that in every conversation. I'm willing to feel the force of her beauty - because I do - and she feels it as an advantage, and takes advantage of it. Is that alright? My guess is that it is, but I have my eye on it.   Is it okay to feel her beauty     no, don't There's been too much of that     no, it's irrelevant Look for state     YES Seeing beauty is a way of being alone     YES Is this key     YES Is social life really horse listening     YES Learn the physical signals     YES Don't try to do it all with language     YES Is there a reason why I shift my eyes - seeing beauty is a way of being fixed     YES Hide the journal     no let it be read But then I'll be afraid to say what I think     YES Comment     then be more honest Yes I'm noticing that     YES What else - Paul Churchland said he said in my letter that I'm the only person on the planet who can do this. 26th The Zanzibar in PB. It's Monday morning. Working from 4:30 to 7:30 this morning, down through pages of rep notes. I don't know what I'm doing     Can you help me get into work     balance in the midst of change Will you tell me what balancing would be     shared pleasure Will you explain what you mean by shared     shatter the structure of sharing betrayal Shared contact     no shared being Ways of using capability     Come at it from the direction of sharing     31st A man's voice in the next room, a nice deep voice. He sent her flowers for the anniversary of their meeting, so huge and well chosen a bouquet - so many colors - the room is full of scent. Yellow sunflowers, pink phlox and spiderwort, red roses, goldenrod, purple liatris, orange mums, blue iris. I woke melancholy at night. Love woman is sad here, I was saying, because she is not the young pretty well-dressed one, and in this neighbourhood no one pets or admires or comes after her. She feels a plain old thing, very academic, only academic, the sturdy old housekeeper of the romance, a pewter dullness of surface, no flash and dash, a loneliness there isn't at the Golden West, where there is always personal greeting. My employer does not say you and neither does her child. 4th November Questions I now know to ask - the philosophy of anything. I say that's what I've learned. I ask the book if there's anything it wants to say. Exclusion, it says. You mean I learned that too? No. I learned to look at what's excluded! Yes. Tom got his driver's license this morning. Our phone conversations have been heartless trying on both sides. He tells and tells me how well he's organized his packing. I have been talking to him about baseball and San Diego because when he asks how I am and I tell, he has nothing to add by way of drawing me out. He doesn't want me drawn out for whatever reason. So he goes back to telling me about himself, like a little boy who doesn't expect to concern himself with the personal life of the grownups and who is being indulged by those grownups. Oh, good for you! I say, as if packing and going to the dentist and getting a driver's license are admirable. Well, they're hard for him, it seems. He wants to be praised for them but we both feel the patronage when I give an entire conversation to talking about him doing what I do without comment. Partly he is talking about them because there's nothing else he's feeling able to talk to me about. He's leaving Lin and Pete and the other men, who have been his everyday life, which is what he is. When he's with them, intimacy is his presence and its quality, which lives behind or beside talk and not in it. He has forgotten how to talk to me. I am shut down. I have given up being with him when I'm not with him. I'm here. I love to look at Nora. She looks what she is, which is an excellent kind of human being. I like her color, which is vivid. I like her balance. She gives and shares, and she sets out to get what she wants. She puts on clothes very well chosen and goes out to make deals in the world there is. I'm under her wing, which is this house, working, and then being happy to find things to give her, library books, shrimp plants, flower arrangements, the Eucalypts book for David's birthday, the floor swept. She notices and thanks for everything. It's principled but also it's a kind of love - it looks like love. I mind feeling less young and less goodlooking, but I take her beauty as a gift I didn't expect. It is an aura of love - its quality is that. She is living in beauty and I have beauty to add to that beauty - so it feels. And I am being principled too. I know more than I did about how to preserve good feeling - no little stealing or snooping, meticulous consideration, attention to increases in permission and trust, bravery with gifts, honesty in the matter of shutting the door. Okay, I'm going to sleep. part 4 the golden west volume 15: 1998 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project