the golden west volume 16 part 1 - 1998 december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Bird Rock, La Jolla 7 Dec 1998 The huge labour of going through my notes. I don't have a table, can't spread my folders. Sleep has been disorganized so I don't have the early time to work. It's cold. Five months to finish it. I come on outlines that say I've already done this work but it's lost. Have done nothing but work with notes since I got here. Can't read books. Willie Nelson singing on and on. Feeling my father's death. As if getting ready to speak after his funeral. A song would be better. That feeling of regret, his beauty and the waste of his life. A sore heart for him - Many's the time I've been mistaken And many times confused Yes and I've often felt forsaken And certainly misused Oh but I'm all right, I'm all right I'm just weary to my bones Still, you can't expect to be Bright and bon vivant So far away from home So far away from home   Willie Nelson 1993 Across the borderline Sony Music   Don't know a soul who's not been battered Don't have a friend who feels at ease Don't know a dream that's not been shattered Or driven to its knees Oh but it's all right, it's all right We've lived so well so long Still, when I think of the road We've been traveling on I wonder what went wrong I can't help it, I wonder what went wrong   Paul Simon American tune, 1973   When you reach the broken promise land Every dream slips through your hand And you know it's too late to change your mind 'Cause you paid the price to come this far Just to end up where you are And you're still just across The borderline   Ry Cooder The borderline 1982   Is this about my dad     no Sorrow that not everyone makes it     yes 10th The Gas Haus. It's good here. Why. Rhythm and blues, pigeons, sun, heat, it's downtown, it's space. I'm going to stop being - what is it - fake, bored, nice - I'm not going to contradict every fuzzy statement either. We have a place now, let's get real. If I don't like what's goin' down do something else. - At that moment Tom and Tom Russell come for the key. Oh downtown. The doors standing open. A kid dancing with his cue saying hello to someone on the street. Grey dots run along the top edge of the Coronado Bridge, the speed of drops on a pane. UPS truck lightly armoured, unnaturally brown. Ficus on the corner stirring stirring. Sky so clean - is it the Santa Ana? Planted Nor's first rose yesterday, Altissimo holding up a red bud at the end of a right arm. The pink rose in the compost bed with silver-streaked lamium. I'm warm, I'm well. 12 Take a breath. Where was I. Thursday night, crashed. He doesn't need me anymore. You're not the woman for me. I guess he crashed too. In the bleak midwinter. Moon at breaking of strength. We don't have common interests. In despair. What was that. Miasma. Physically so strange to me. Maybe the overload. I can't say it in order. Flat in bed all day yesterday. Without energy. He decided at some moment that he wanted to keep going, and was taking charge to that end. I was dazed. Something about sex, because I couldn't want it but getting it took me out of the worst. Is it some kind of a threshold? I'm still thick-headed. Yesterday morning feeling into the body - there's that claw-cramp at the back of the neck, like being held down and resisting. The book said complete the feeling. I asked him to hold me down, and then struggled. He was nervous doing it. I was thinking it's a good idea to make him conscious he's trying to hold me down. (He didn't like the way my face looked, ugly, swollen, kind of crazy.) It was merge chaos. The way I feel his conversation, I said, a murk, wading through slime. My zingers, criticism, attack, he said. He plays dumb I said much later. Yes he puts out a cloud of vagueness. It gives him a chance to feel out the other person. What I meant was the way he says any unconsidered slop. I correct him. I don't learn not to. Oie. What I was feeling in despair was how it's much too complicated. I sat and read my journal to be in myself for a while. You listen to your tapes. So much music, so many times. His face so extreme, like flesh gargoyles. I don't want to be dragged back into the stupid sixties. It is toxic to me. And I don't want to go on in the defensive always. I want that granular chrome music, clean. I want to stop explaining. I don't want to live in a welter. And yet I want to be close to you. I want to be close to you. I want not to close down on the clean bare bright beautiful wholeness I've learned to be. I want to be it more. You live a different way. You live somehow immersed, you have your way. You live horizontally, emotionally. All day you find your way face to face with miscellaneous people. You feel them. It's a thing I keep to a minimum. I like the fact of difference but I fight not to be you. It is so extreme a difference, there is so deep to learn. You like it too. We emptied the closet, I said. You will be having thoughts. I'd like to debrief with you. Really I would like to live with you daily so we don't have to keep going through the shock. But I have to be able to work. 13 I'm not going to have the energy to write very much about that, but here's how it went. Saturday after he gets off at three we come back here, I read about the brain and vision for an hour, he sleeps on my bed. We go to the Christmas parade at OB, eat fried rice at the Greek's, drive home to the Maryland and flip through channels together, Bruce Springsteen, a wild pony whose vulva is shown winking, and then the stallion's long hose shown snaking up like an elephant's trunk finding her hole without looking for it. Tom gets funny. We've got there, I know it means. When I say I don't want to watch even a moment of the Stones he says he's learned something from The wild bunch, that if I say I don't want to watch something there is a good reason. The sun came up I say and kiss him happily. We fall asleep in each other's arms. Wake Sunday morning seeing the sky apricot jam, incandescent yellow over the Mexican hills. He suggests a poke. We are moving and touching like lovers, instigating and replying more than ever I think. He tries the position I've always wanted. When he's done and I'm not I call him back to bed. He says I'm pressuring him, I say he's always pressuring me. He says I have a point and takes off his clothes. Forgot to say - he was going to go out in the early light and get us coffee at T's. I said I'd come. We walked down 4th and up 5th. I had a conversation with a Mexican woman waiting for the doors to open at a restaurant where she is the cook. He was playing too many tapes. We went for a ride looking for Adams Avenue and then found the garden in University Heights, Meade and Park Boulevard. Ate on the sidewalk outside a Mexican take-out in Hillcrest. Visited Lady Sue. He went to work, I came home. Email from Paul, Mary, Louie. Louie phoned. We each saw things as we spoke. Going to sleep now. Santa Ana happy day. 14 Monday This too. Saturday riding back from the parade - actually it began on the way to OB when we were crawling in traffic with the engine smoking, evening sky over us - he was able to listen to a bit of what I'd been reading about the brain and vision. He went back to it on the way home, and kept at it after we'd flipped channels. "Got it: there's nowhere memory is stored. If you can't see color you can't remember it, and if you can't remember it you can't imagine it. It's radical." He wanted to know what it has to do with philosophy, which he thinks of as being about wisdom and honor and death and so on. I said it is about human capability in relation to life. On Thursday we were squalling about noosphere. He was raving about intelligence having an agenda of its own, and how computers will take over and run with it. I was disgusted. Why are men so eager to hand off intelligence before they have remotely got to their own capabilities. I feel and think in more and more detail the human cost of the kinks in male mentality - deep mistakes that steal from life in being unwilling to know their own circumstance. I am fighting it through intimately with Tom. Being willing to know my own circumstance will be what gets me to a grounded adversarial position - I mean not malicious but determined. 16 Color has to do with reflectance of surfaces, ie what ratio of incident light do they absorb and reflect. Yet I delight in thinking of light as colored. Why? Being able to see a color of light is visual sophistication. What's meant is that, at dusk, say, I do see surfaces colored pink, differences in the color of white or pink flowers. The sky, which isn't a surface - is depths of microscopic surfaces - has a tint - yes, it does. Land's theory doesn't account for it but it's like being able to hear the quality of the air - wet, cold, etc. This light is reddish. Incident light can be taken as white, ie absolute, and surfaces taken as colored, or selected surfaces can be taken as white and light colored. Is there a reason that should be taken as green     predominance But why it should be taken as green     Can you explain it     no It has to do with what I am, physically     Is there a physics of sensory quality     YES At the molecular level     no, atomic Do you want to say more     temperance A motion at the atomic level     Magnetic field     YES Induced current     YES - What internalize the oppressor means - women seeing each other in relation to men's sexual kinks and power preferences - instead of what? - those women's own well-being. 19 Saturday. We're harmonious. Thursday he shopped for Mathew and I hung around until the car was fixed. Got to the Maryland at 4:30 and found him watching green night vision footage of Baghdad being bombed. Reggae through the speakers. We cuddled and flipped channels. He went out and bought food. My pee hole hurting. He gave me an antibiotic left over from toothache in Bellingham. No poking this time. Fell asleep early. Friday's the Christmas party for Golden West and Maryland staff. I work for an hour and a half at the table in the mezzanine. Tom addresses Christmas cards. We dress up. I wear the neuroscience conference outfit - the herringbone pants, tight black long sleeved jersey, black embroidered chiffon vest, my docs. It's classy on account of the materials and sexy on account of the fit, especially at the small of the back. The boss couple are playing their part, come over and shake hands and say something gracious. Tom is more deferential than he has to be: sir and ma'am and tone of voice. It's like Windsor knots, done in a spirit of success at correctness rather than success at invention. We're glad to have you back, says Mr Platt, and even gladder to see you with so lovely a lady. I'm there for the food and to give Tom just that. These people run hotels I like but they pay minimum wage. Giving their staff a Christmas bonus and lunch once a year does not cancel the cockroaches and the garbage and the junk elevator. I don't like to hear Tom call that hard bleached blond ma'am. Then a fast run to Tijuana to buy drugs. Premarin and erythromycin. The day has been white all day, low white sky. Through the flat hells of South San Diego on the trolley. We turn around and come straight home. Tom is interested to notice he has changed. The poverty, people selling rubbish, bother him now. When he notices an impulse to buy or get in a taxi, he says to himself, that's ADD. We stop at the library and pick up videos. Tom's tired. When have I ever known him to be tired. We flip channels, watch To have and to have not, eat chicken out of his fridge. I say tell me a story. He starts with the entire layout of Mount Ephraim and Haddon Heights and Camden and Philadelphia, which I don't require myself to follow, and then he tells about the exhibits he saw in the Philadelphia Museum of Art on his way to classes in the basement every Saturday. A show comparing Italian modern design with Renaissance objects. Full body armour set up to hold banners along the steps. I perk up when it's about him. The museum cafeteria. His feeling walking in, well-dressed as he was, of sophisticated appreciation of what he was seeing. And then stories about Sacred Heart grammar school. A minute before the end of recess a nun would come out and ring a bell and they would have to freeze in their places, the boys on one side of a painted line, the girls on the other. Protestant kids would be looking down laughing at the Catholic kids frozen like dummies and then filing away two by two in a line. In seventh grade he got voted bicycle safety patrol lieutenant. It was a popularity contest. Surprised him, he didn't know he was popular. And he had to be altar boy for high masses, which meant funerals too. There'd be six o'clock mass and then children's mass at nine and sometimes stations of the cross and benedictions, which could go on for two hours total, and then high mass at twelve. Low masses could be over in twenty minutes, forty with a slow priest, but high masses, where there's singing and all the incense swinging, takes an hour and twenty minutes. There was the time he and Roddy somebody rode to Atlantic City on their bikes. It was such a long way they took the Greyhound back and didn't get home till nine. There was trouble at home. Mr ---- had to drive in and get the bikes next day. Vic paid for the gas. Now it's nine and there's a break of silver in the white sky, silver light on the asphalt. What do I have to say. A lot has changed. You are picking up your room. You stayed yourself this week, you haven't been talking garbage. You have a young man look. You picked out tapes ahead. You're keeping levels down. We are not fighting about TV. You're admitting you're ADD. You're glad you have a room, a driver's license, a library card, email. What else - a good conscience. You're funny again. Okay, but me. How am I. Nervous about work. I should be doing nothing but work and I am designing and building gardens and growing big love with Tom. I'm working about an hour and a half a day. Here's something - I've been falling back on saving energy. Ask to make energy. I've been saying, like I did with the Platt's yesterday, what can I withhold from people. See what happens if I say, what can I give them. It's what Tom and Louie and Nora do. 20 Do you want to talk to Tom     YES. If you recover anger, responsibility improves Anger at who     child's anger T: I was angry at everyone, my grandmother He doesn't want to recover anger     no, he does T: I miss anger, I feel like an empty shell without it. I've spent the last ten years of my life working away from it. Will you say what you mean by 'recover'     improve judgment by writing about the child Do you mean improve judgment about what to direct the anger at     YES (To Tom) Do you see what this has to do with judgment? Yes. What? (Contemptuous spiel.) T: I sense the despair in it. E: It's like the despair is protecting something, it's very expensive to be angry at everything. There is a specific anger he is protecting     Do you want me to let him change the subject     no Do you want him to find the specific anger     Tom: I used to be angry at authority or oppression and I believed I knew what the antidote was. I believed I found the method, which was journalism. In the process of doing that I was able to see the façade. The territory behind the façade became my familiar ground. I saw that everyone's motives are more base than not. There is a systematic tendency toward manipulation. I had so much anger to spare that I could get drunk every night, do battle with city managers. It seemed to me toward the end that it was all the same story. There's a sensibility that goes into exposé writing that is as fictional as the situations it wishes to expose. It began to seem useless. What is not useless? That is the journey I've been on for the last ten years. I don't have complete good faith with myself in relation to what I'm doing. A reformulation of what journalism can be. I go into despair again. All that shit. The internet. That's kinda where I'm heading. In the meantime I'm enjoying doing conventional good. I also feel it's laziness, it's just being a power dog and not pissing on the underdog. There's a lot of baseness in the enjoyment of that. I've been so warped and stressed I can't handle stress as well as I used to. I'm beginning to feel vulnerabilities all up and down the line. The truth sequence     YES Do you mean take it through the sequence in relation to child's anger     YES Is it enough for now     I tell the story of The gillies of Gilly Wood. He tells the story of the guy in Santa Cruz who had a heart attack. 22nd It's 5:30. Very black at the glass. Is there a real thing I have to say. A worry about creative power. Call it that. I don't so often have that old worry that I'm not what I was, but I'm leveled out aren't I. I'm building Tom but no one's building me. I lack exactly power in my writing. Lying in the dark I could feel what it is I don't have, something straight and blazing. When I was there, writing, why didn't I keep on. Now I'm not alone enough. No, it's none of that. It's that I'm not writing. I'm not fighting myself over the line. That part is coming again. Alright. Silence in this one lit cell in all the blank expanse of this good neighbourhood. Sealed houses. A Nazi woman provoking her dog in the alley, the tyrant guy next door, the overbearing woman in the house built to dominate. I kept thinking I should explore the streets but there was nothing to see. Good trees, the Brazilian pepper across the road, a Monterray cypress, palms. The blue eucalyptus they half butchered because of a property line. But the yards and facades only understand correctness, which is to say they are maintained without being seen, as if it has to do with agreeing to hide the fact of death. Materials shouldn't show wear. Which is why the man next door threatened to have my car towed. - But what does this correctness of common denial have to do with commanding money? Downtown the street people are alive in their dying. Money is being commanded all around them, and the people commanding it come home at night to places like this. Something to do with private lives. Street people have only one life, public/private. I don't mean to say the quality of the life in those lives is good. Is there something obvious I am not getting? Do people have to be cut off to make money? Yes, it says: losses resulting from evasions of male consciousness. Ie these are patriarchal homes. They could be visible as male apprehension. 23rd Then I did what I've never done here, slipped out the back gate and walked up and down streets. It was cold. The sun was just below the horizon. Light on the tops of trees. A lot of rustle in the tallest palms. I looked at houses and yards and saw them the way I usually see them. But I loved the fact that I was walking. I haven't had the strength. In Ocean Beach in the afternoon combing through the antique stores for Tom's household. "Your taste," he said. Christmas music. My taste: two dot glasses, why do I like them, a deco glass bowl, a 30s orange plate, Pacific pottery, a pyrex dish for Tom's microwave, a really old small mixing bowl for his cactus. What is the delight of small household objects. As if they are seen with the part of the brain that easily refines and elaborates, like face perception, pet perception and plant perception. There were shelves of kinds of pottery that merge plant perception and dish perception. Superior temporal lobe. 26 For a couple of miles on the Enseñada toll road there were oxblood-red rocky escarpments with pale dots sprinkled over them all the way to the top. The dots were a kind of small silver agave rosette [or dudleyas?], always less than a foot across. It was an exquisite effect in diffused sea dusk. We came over the mountains from Tecate - the mountains I see from Tom's bed - on old Mexican Highway 3. Tom was driving. Sometimes I was over on his side to be able to feel the happiness of his body - or whatever that serene ecstatic glow is - as we flew in curves along the summits of gentle ancient piles of crumbled rock. Hundreds of miles of those mountains, rocks, very small bushes, small trees in the gulches. Sometimes horses and a two-roomed house among shade trees. In the valleys a beautiful corduroy of olives or grapes. There was a particular part of the road where I noticed a heavy somnolence, a thickness of the air. The Mexican sleepiness, I thought. I didn't mention it until later, so I don't know whether what Tom noticed was the same. He said he'd felt something hard to explain, like a spirit of the land, an animus under the ground. A few miles further on, when we came to coastal mesquite country, it was gone. We were talking about it in bed before we went to sleep at the end of our Christmas Day. I was lying at his back cuddling him. Let's have a real conversation before we go to sleep, I say. I'm takin' on water fast, if you want a real conversation you'll have to hook me. This is how it came about. I'm getting restless in this room, let's go for a drive. Mount Laguna, Tom said. No, let's go there, I was thinking - those mountains in the east that look as if they are in a different zone of time. The 94 toward Tecate. Once on the road it seemed we could have breakfast in Mexico. And once there, Tom was feeling the old pull to Enseñada. This is what you said would happen, I said. He laughed. But when the pull came back, I said go for it. Our full tank of supreme. There's more to say but the meter will start ticking at 8. Saturday morning. Tom's at the desk in the West with his nametag on. - Charles Street. Eliz's guesthouse, Point Loma. In this little house am I going to ache all the time? The ache of cold, dust, mold. 27 Slow growth of completion of compulsion, toward brilliance and courage. It said is the task for now. It's a cabin, so quiet. We sat up in bed in Tom's hot roost above the town and said it's the end of the first phase, what's the next one. He's giving up TV and rock'n'roll, he says. There isn't time for that any more. He'd like to start writing again, get a job that's a step up. What do I want. I'm feeling hardly any want, though I have intentions. I'd like to finish my book in two months, and then write other things. Could I do that? I'd like writing discipline. 28 Waking at three and saying more things I want. I'd like to make life more livable for real souls. I was thinking of the woman I saw on Denman in Vancouver when I was walking with Louie one evening. She was standing next to a café window under an awning. I saw her because she was looking at us: it was because she knew Louie, but I didn't know that. I saw how real she was and smiled at her. Months later I happened to tell Louie about her. She said the woman had killed herself. And I also mean Jane Howell who died of breast cancer at fifty, and the boy at Emily Carr whose painting I saw when I was visiting Josie in the painting studio. A painting exceptionally real. She said he committed suicide. People who are real can die because they aren't seen. I mean myself too. Those people are my constituency - the people whose realness I can recognize. What about everybody else? The people whose realness has died or never came, or who are some form of real repulsive to me. Other people work for them. Now I'm speaking as someone I used to be. What do you say - if you make something properly connected, anyone can be real in its presence, is that the answer? No. It's a child's lie that you understand early love. Those people died because they got early love wrong. Making Trapline isn't helpful to them Were they beautiful because they were feeling pain     no, because they were feeling Joyce's patience     So can you explain to me what my work really is     balancing in change and loss, building reserves of strength for spirit In that card (Star) the pour is no longer internal, it is being given to land and water     So the work is building ability to give     - Your lazy eyes. What about them. They aren't your sad eyes. I notice I'm afraid of them. They don't need me. - A monkey trained to pull the left lever when shown pictures of lions, monkeys and ducks, and the right lever for pictures of parrots, cows and salamanders. 29 Coming awake in my cave. A stone heaviness of dark, cold, damp. Snap on the light, is it morning? 5:30. Turn on the heater, make tea. The pages on my desk have to do with very uncertain knowledge of parts of the brain I haven't much geography for - what exactly is the spatial relation of superior and inferior parietal. Which of these lines on the Brodmann drawing is the intraparietal sulcus. I don't want to follow the psychophysical experiments. Monkeys made to bite down on bars and fixate some point of light on a computer screen to be able to pull a lever for a unit of reward. Experimenters unknowing artists picturing their own condition, Michael Snow said at the color conference. What am I doing. I'm going to rely on Ungerleider but I need to know what his opposition has. It's the technical chapter, it's the boiler room. I don't know whether Kantian stories is based on something accurate. It says not. But pursue the where path. Find out the structure of one part of the brain, go deeper into the physiology - alas. But write about it this way in the mornings. Morning pages first. What is known about the where. What the implications are. Any more you want to say about it     talk about its ability to grow Refine     When Nor walked in the door yesterday, there she was but I didn't know her yet. I knew her with the first thing I said to her, which was - I'm not going. My freedom surprises me. The lightness of her spirit, her responsive responsible work in relation, altogether her intelligence both in talk and in the language of gift we established. For instance I leave the purple candle next to the purple orchid where she'll find it later. The way she brought me 4711 from Vancouver. I cut up palm fronds dropped into her yard for kindling. She remembers to mention how they burned. Her womanly little ass waggling at me when she's kneeling at the hearth blowing embers. Dried cranberries I contributed to the champagne party at Hallowe'en. Primroses and blue violas I put into one of the 2 inch hotel jam jars for her to find when she got home Christmas Eve. Her loan of the laptop. The salvia book from the library. The wonder book of the air and her pleasure in it. She'd notice to thank me if I swept the floor. The Willie Nelson tape she put on while I was getting the fire going, which I afterward would put on myself. She bought dinner at our first meeting. I had the sense to make it paella for two. I made dinner for her mum and Cassidy when I knew she'd be coming in late from work. She took me to the train station at six in the morning when I went to the neuroscience convention. I've ended up describing our two months together, which were remarkable and cured me of the years of Trudy and Tanya in my house at home, but what I wanted to say was the fineness of daily relation she and I could make. She was a skinny freckled girl in Calgary, smart but not bookish. Big wide-set blue eyes, a redhead with white skin. She learned the stock market and car engines because she could. She's love woman as advertising exec, has two closets full of business clothes. Is ready to get onto a plane with ten minutes of prep time. Camps. She's also filling her house with distressed furniture, and she writes copy that's ... But her conversation is neat clear and free. Her household also had a beautiful young girl - Cassidy perfectly beautiful in color and shape - and an exquisite little cat whose serious little face is Nora herself. The garden. I supported bold change, a summerfallow field and open sky. I taught uses of materials: compost the turf and daily sweepings, use dry stuff, dead bouquets for instance, to start fires, don't throw rocks in the trash, mulch with free materials from the landfill site at Miramar, feed soil with mushroom compost. You need comfortable seats in places where there is something to see. Concrete is alright, polish it if you want to. Feed the orange tree. This isn't a good place for the roses, move them. 31st The effort it takes to get from a vague notion to a more exact one. I'm thinking of the vague understanding I had of the what and where paths, and the way I have gradually had to know what the psychophysical experiments were, options for statistical correlations of PET data, retrograde and anterograde labeling dyes for path-tracing, the historical course of Ungerleider's papers, changes in anatomical naming practices over the last 15 years, differences in nomenclature and anatomy in monkey and human cortex. I can work here. I can spread my papers. I can work anytime of day. I can work and go for a walk and come back to the table. I'm going to work 6 hours a day, not one and a half. I was struggling pitifully at Nora's. - Gas Haus. This is the kind of panic I feel when someone is lying. I can't get through this with him because he's not there - reptile man is there - he said Animal house was a good movie - who is that? - booze man maybe, he's in reactivation because it's New Years - the way he ordered me to park - maybe I'm tired - I'm tired - what'll I do - Oh larger one, what's up. You're shocked, you miss your friend. When I left him, my friend was there. Tom can't remember him. No he can't. I don't have the energy for this, should I go home? Be here for a while. part 2 the golden west volume 16: 1998-1999 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project