24th February
What's my floor of love in this work? What's my floor of love at all, when have I lived well - in grade twelve in Sexsmith, the last years in London, in the red and white house in Valhalla, the Rob and Louie years in the garden, writing the Dennett paper, the first journey to San Diego and the first months with Tom.
What do they all have - freedom, stretch, place - sometimes alone and sometimes social. Some of them have color, weather, days and skies. They all have newness, either I'm in a new place or I'm moving into a new capacity, or both.
-
Start again, not so stiff -
What's up with this work.
Why am I reading about the brain - to support what I have to say about mind.
Why do I need to support it, why do I need to say it? Because there are wrong, bad, oppressive, impossible ways of thinking and they keep people from living well.
So my passion is in liberation and clarity and contact. But the way I'm doing this work at the moment has no liberation, clarity or contact. Is that it?
Eliz says she's had two days without pain and it is thanks to me.
Fully charged, is what those times were. What does full charge need. Exercise, yoga. A task. A place. Self-forced stretch.
So what is my task really. - Getting the doc ought to be incidental to it. I'm not clear about the task. Who do I want this work to reach?
- Is this how I should be proceeding YES
- I want it to reach the same people Consciousness explained reached YES
- Smart lay people YES
- Will you tell me some more synthesists
- Is it a book for Paul and Gilles no
- It's not academic
- I want it to reach the same people Consciousness explained reached YES
1. Perceiving is contact, 2. imagining is 'perceiving', 3. thinking is a wide net, 4. rep use is evocation of it, 5. metaphor is using structure made for action/perceiving.
- My basic plan is still okay
- But I don't have neural detail
- I communicate my excitement about this way of thinking YES
- I show what it opens up
- I write a personal introduction
- I design for the web YES
- But I don't have neural detail
The psychological literature is just nonsense. Lesion studies are opaque as porridge, single-cell studies almost so. What I am able to use is certain minds who put together a grand vision. It seems to me all those minds fit together - I'm able to fit them together. I cannot be responsible to the smaller minds because I can't make sense of what they say. I think my only option is to put together what I already have.
What have I wanted to know, what have I found? What were and are my real questions, what have I learned about them? What did I find? I assembled a community for the questions, sorted a community, learned how to read a community.
Examples of questions - the sorts of questions that are fuel. Dreaming wide landscapes or kinds of motion. Music, the spatial feeling of electronic music. Landscape. Gardens and houses. Writing, the spatial feel of linguistic registers. Intellectual organizing using table surfaces. Stories about math geniuses who use landscape. Being stoned, actual altered sense of distance, very heightened sense of perspective motion, the jerkiness of clouds. Bringing up different color in the field. Meaning of house dreams, levels. Trapline. PLACE.
25
Coming up to speed - solar plex starting to stream - I noticed this morning when I woke in the dark - what I had taken for anxiety is preparation.
Looking in the art pile to find my bearings.
Imagining space: cognitive theory and working intuition.
I want it to be well written. Lucid and objective, not egotistic. Light. The lightest cleanest voice I've found.
I want it to set together what I've found in these ten years, which worked from the intuitions I built in the twenty years before. I want to be an artist in its company. I'm writing it for other artists and to be ready to go on.
It will name the questions that aren't answered.
Should there be a fictional effect in the examples? Should the examples, set together, make up a picture of an artist's real life? Should there be an entirely fictional story in the examples? And write something about examples.
26
It's 5:30. I woke from a dream where I was in bed with an old man's head and another woman pushed her way between us. I didn't want to be separated from his face though he was old and cranky. In the morning there were two children I was talking to.
He's awake. When he woke it woke me [at a distance of five miles].
What did he say when I asked why there's so much BS. That when he's real there's too much of the incredible lightness of being, there's death. I said death isn't all there is. But I understood that's where it stopped for him. The photo Vic took of the young man sitting on a chair. He's seventeen but he's tall, he's grown. He's still real in that photo. His mother died horribly. His father had bailed out. I'd like to see that photo again, the way he is looking out of it, but I never will.
An email from Phil yesterday. He left Kathy for Jill MacIntosh. Now he and Jill can be a power couple in philosophy. Good move. And Kathy on the sill of menopause is left to dry up alone. He was so freaked he signed his email, Your supervisor, Phil.
-
The story Tom told about a philosophy professor he took an evening course with. The professor took an interest in him, liked him. Years later Tom went back to interview him. He was stoned when he went. The professor was wincing as Tom spoke, and couldn't wait to get away. I remembered that with a blurt of pain at the heart. He will go back to the stupefied facetious bragging lying self.
Let me just tell it. Yesterday was Thursday. I was trying to find my trail for the next stage. I came to the end of being able to do it. Went to Nora's to put in her plants. Sat on the beach reading a newspaper. After three, drove downtown to see if I could find Tom. He'd taken the bike out. I stood with my nasturtiums in my hand talking to Pat Kelly on the sidewalk. Drove home. The work stuff seemed dead. No, I want to see Tom. Tell him about Eliz's desk. Phoned. He's not back yet. Drive down watching for bikes on the sidewalk. Go to the library and do email until dark. Phone up from the lobby. He hesitates for the split of a second. Well, come right up! He has the door on the latch. There he is standing between the bed and the bathroom wall, where he stands to say hello. I kiss him. You taste like smoke, I say. There's his nest prepared on the floor. He's going to listen to music. Want to join me?
I'm stunned remembering the taste of the kiss. Kiss me again, I say. He does. Those are business kisses. I'm making sure. I'm measuring against the wall and he is asking about the desk, but I am speaking over a yawning silence. I'm having to deal with the fact that you've been smoking marijuana, I say. Somebody passed me some bud, he said. Something like that. As if it had been done to him by someone else. I move very fast. It's over Tom, there's no discussion. I was afraid he'd start to lie and make excuses. I rushed out the door and was standing at the elevator. He came out with my green bag. I don't mean to hold this hostage but why don't you come back inside. I take the bag. "I'm going." I get in the elevator and unlock my bike and ride away to my car.
How am I. Living hour by hour for now. I stood in the sun waiting to cross the street. I tried to have a key made at Mailboxes Etc, feeling that the light looked different, or the feel of space was different - more like it was when I was first in San Diego. I have so little memory of the months since I've been here. It's as if I've been asleep. Or we.
Now what do I have to do to be ready to write.
-
I hear the dogs bark. He's there untangling his headphone wire from the back wheel spokes. He's in defiant and belligerent addictive denial. I've got it licked, he says. If there were an AA meeting listening to this conversation what would they be saying? They'd be rolling on the floor laughing, fuck them. Everything I've done in three and a half years doesn't count? I lived in a mission for a year and a half for you. That bites; he did. Everything both of us did counts, I say.
You're losing a good man, he says.
You are losing a good man I say.
I had good plans, he says. If you are going to act on those plans you are going to need to be clear, I say.
You are going to miss me. I am going to miss you excruciatingly, I say.
Yesterday someone passed him a little plastic bag over the counter at work. That was all it took.
As I spoke I kept sighing confirmation.
I'm watching something out of the corner of my eye, a hard person who is triumphing at escaping from him. Now I'm rid of everything I didn't like in him.
Alright, speak. What are you glad to be free of. He's come so far. He keeps his room in beautiful order. He's better with money. He doesn't tell bad jokes. He's often clear. He feeds himself better. He was starting to show anger. He's not dressing like a teenager. He's sometimes recognizing something about himself as ADD. He asks how I am, how my day was. He was straight about what he's up against. He lost weight. He takes care of his feet. He didn't pound Jorge. He doesn't overwhelm me with music.
I'm glad to get away from the way he says he's going to do something grand and doesn't take the first step. His habit of BS. He does look things in the eye but he doesn't say what he knows. It has been endless. The way he can't let himself down into touch. He hardly ever just strokes me. We can never go slowly into touch. We've been so close to the real thing sometimes but he shies away. The way he wants to be praised for tying his shoes in the morning. The way he wants to watch TV or videos instead of talk. - But he's talking more than he used to. His violence and racism in speech. The way he sucks up to supervisors at his own expense, his overcorrectness about clothes or crawling under fences. - But he has been more able to trust himself to say bad things about people, for instance my father and the pale browns of their horrible house.
It was interesting. I'm going to miss how interesting it was.
I'm going to have to learn how to go places alone and feel them the way I felt them when I was in love and with him.
The way he took me prisoner by very dishonorable means. I made it good for me by being honorable but I'm glad to be out of it. I got myself unhooked.
The way he still and constantly doesn't take responsibility for the quality of our contact. Wants me to keep moral records for him.
His ADD inability to organize his ADD. The way it takes him five minutes to lock and unlock his bicycle. Twenty minutes to iron a shirt, and he had to buy an ironing board. He hasn't got it together to check his email since before Christmas, I think. He doesn't put money aside in one two-week pay period so he'll have something left in the rent period.
He did live in Bellingham to be with me, he worked from 7 in the morning to 11 at night and lived in a dorm. That was heroic.
Last Sunday he said he'd get another job to support me if I don't get the postdoc, he wanted to, he said.
There I phone Sean to look at my mail. [He says] I don't have the SSHRC.
I'll have no money after sometime in May. Visa and G&F debts about 200 a month. I could TA in September if nothing else. I don't want to go back to the house, but I don't want to be homeless either.
As to this piece of writing, can I do something? I don't know. My birthday a week from tomorrow. I hope I'll be born.
I'm pretty much leveled.
27
When I am outside I feel amputated.
28
Here is something I didn't write down. When we were driving back from Laguna Beach - we were on 5 - I asked what he had been feeling when he opened his arms to me over the ocean at the Self-Realization Fellowship gardens. He said he knew we were going to go on a long journey together and he was welcoming me.
I spoke to Louie for an hour and a half. I asked what I can do to have grief roll through me like a river and not be stopped at the solar plex. She said something right, that I should time it, work, be with myself lying down, and not spend all day or even half days doing either work or book or grief. At the same time I was instructing myself. There is a panting about grief, that's why the solar is tight. I breathed and she said something about being with the child and I burst out, It's not just the child, it's the young woman too, she has lost her mate. It was the kind of sentence that came out in small pieces. I sobbed and sobbed and stopped sobbing.
- It is my critical spirit that's done him in
YES
- Please lead me the wait
- I'm mad at him for making me wait YES
- That's what the criticism was about YES
- It meant I couldn't relax and thank him YES
- How is he now death
- He's feeling it's over YES
- Is he okay
- He knows what I was saying was true YES
- The clear depth of truth there is in death YES
- So now I stand really accused YES
- I was righteous and now I'm not righteous YES
- And yet I mustn't put up with dope YES
- I did appreciate him no
- I gave him my time, my great patience, my naked childish heart, my forgiveness very often, my deep willingness to come through, extraordinary hard work, an extraordinary quality of attention YES
- But not appreciation YES
- And appreciation is what would have made the difference YES
- I thought what I was doing was appreciation enough
- And what I should have done was lie no, really feel it
- I kept forgetting what a man is YES
- Extraordinary fragility YES
- Please lead me the wait
-
This is better. I've done the right thing and now I've done it right, and he has too, so far. He came again on the bike.
I said I want to go all the way to broke, I don't want to go halfway to broke.
I said he's on the threshold, he's where he got stopped before.
The book said he should meditate if he doesn't trust therapy. Something about love. He can do it the church's way if he wants.
Deal with the child's illusions about family losses. He needs to find his unconscious anger in relation to women.
I said, what should be my condition about seeing him again? It said, wait until he has brought himself to strength about the loss of his mother. I said do you want to know what I think it means? (Getting permission carefully. He gave it. I had the kind of quivering I get when I'm with the book.) I said when he loses me is when he has a chance to find what he felt when it happened. He said he feels lonely and he doesn't want to feel lonely, there's no need to feel lonely, it's not the most exciting thing in the world.
I said the most exciting thing in the world would be to go over his threshold. - At that moment he suddenly seemed to get it and agree. For an instant. He kept testing me. You'll miss me. You're hemming and hawing. Hemming and hawing? The book said no.
I've drawn my line on the sand. It has to be more than good intentions. I love you and I don't believe you. You don't believe yourself. The only thing you'll believe is action.
I really was not saying any of it to get him back. I really have let him go.
Earlier - that he was going to not tell me about smoking. He thought it would be harmless if I didn't know. I said things he covers are poisonous to me. He doesn't understand that. When he covers something it is being unfaithful to me. He said then there are degrees of unfaithfulness. I think that's when I said I want to go all the way to broke.
He brought his misconceptions and laid them out. That sex has been bad because I was afraid of VD. No it's been bad because we haven't had open hearts with each other.
He said, Do you mean everything I've done has been worthless. No! Everything you've done is what has got you the great privilege of being at this threshold.
-
Sea grass green, blue sea and sky, foam white running on the rim of the world.
A rock to be married rightly, this time not to a secret hope. I do baptize me in the name of no ghosts. This one? No, it belongs here. Blue glass, suddenly - this one? And this green one with it? I consult. No. Wave 'bye to them. It sighs. When I'm leaving, a flat square gritty one, four-square. Yes, this one. Sigh. It's a little crooked, has a bash on the back. Square for aligned, correct, willing, and free in the way I am when I am those.
1st March
I'm standing in a food line, someone comes up behind me and presses against my back, a familiar body - Jam. She's very thin. She doesn't say much. I just look at her. She leaves. [dream]
You've written me off, he said.
As a husband, yes. He was meant to be that and he preferred his ease. His fear, I mean.
Just go be with her sometimes the way you would be with a young person in your house who was grieving, Louie said.
I'm so alright. Tidying papers and washing windows this morning. Driving down to take my bike to Felipe and pick up stuff from the hotel and see whether Janet had emailed me back. Walking a long way, up and down the footpath from Garden Street to the cliff, back through the school. I'm strong.
-
Phone rings. It's Rowen. The moon where I am is white in a white mist between branches of the Monterray cypress. Where he is, blindingly bright in clear dark blue. He was getting a crick because he had to scrunch over the phone so's not to accidentally pull the plug. The cats followed him from the house. His voice is deeper and has gone oddly nasal. He wants to read about medieval history and Japanese history, not do correspondence social studies. There's a supplementary book for English that has exercises he likes, film scripts for instance. A lamb born last night. They have three ewes but none of them are having twins because they didn't flush them. What? He explains.
What is it about being attached. I mean what is it that's so better about being unattached. My attachments gave me treasures I still have - Michael, Louie, Rob, even David Birch and Dave Carter. This must be how Louie feels about people - here's someone like no one else, and I know them because I have learned them. - But it's unattachment that lets me feel them as treasures. I've been in a tunnel. Narcotic.
2
"Don't write me any letters, I don't want that shit."
What were the wolves I named: anger, sex, social ambition, financial ambition.
Digging Eliz's back alley bed this morning, thinking of Phil Hoffman as if on his farm in Ontario. A white sea mist blowing inland through the trees. Is it the anniversary of Marion's death, maybe.
Tom said he's not handling it well.
I didn't understand until after he left that what I'm supposed to do is see his mourning.
It said what he was feeling as he left was early love. Thankfulness and concern. It has been wonderful, he said. That is what he came to.
He begins with argument. Haven't I been happy, hasn't he made me happy? Well, it's a tricky question. I did a harder thing with him than I've done with anybody, and a lot of the time it wasn't happy. I stuck it out because I thought it was right to. There has been a lot of sacrifice of ego and childishness, and I did it so I would be able to say what I'm saying to him now. Intelligence is not just pain. Intelligence can come through pain.
3
The women in Afghanistan. There is email being forwarded everywhere but signing a screen doesn't seem helpful. Liberal Muslims should be taking it on and non-Muslims should be standing behind them and taking directions.
Dreaming I lost a sandal sitting in an armchair at John's house. I was looking all around the chair and could not find it. I did pull out shoes from other times, a red Converse, a red cotton strap slipper. By the end of the dream I was sobbing with frustration.
- In dreams one never finds what is lost, because only real objects stay where they are put. The searching persists because it's sprung in a different part of the brain, in a different way. The place is more stable than the object, which is only transiently connected to the place. Shoe? Shoe? It comes up with shoes. Then the question is, if I can remember what shoe I'm looking for (though maybe it did change too) why can't I find it? Isn't remembering the same as dreaming? So I should say it another way. The dream doesn't come up with the finding to match the searching. Searching is an energized persistence. Finding is just a moment's relief.
Driving to San Marcos on 15, flying through dry hills, feeling a small ache at the heart because you and I are not going to drive together any more.
"I'm a dishonest person." You said that the way you'd say, "I'm an untidy person."
4
Lying awake dealing with it, trying to. When it's barred at the solar it's thinky; when I get it to simple feeling it's not a bar but a kind of a stab at the heart. Then I talk to myself kindly and it answers with sighs when I guess right. Betrayal. Sigh. But it keeps going back to the bar at the solar. At 6:30 very sharp at the heart - Tom waking up realizing he's alone. I told myself it may disconnect, it isn't required any more to keep watch with him. It sighed.
I've lost his voice and his arms, and his smell, the manliness I was there for. No - something else too - a levelness we had at times, eye to eye as company. He was too weak for me but he wasn't too small for me. He wasn't backed up by me. - Oh alright, he was too weak for me and too small for me, but he wasn't afraid of me. Though he's very afraid of himself.
-
I picked up [from the Maryland] the blue plates and red cloth with stars.
This has been a hard day. Working with Eliz in the aft, unloading compost, beginning to plant, but stove in. I'm thinking how to say this: a floor of confidence is gone. I had a floor under me, well-being, and no longer do.
I can't imagine getting into the sheets of work on the table. They belong to the self with the floor under her.
5th, Friday
- A shaky heart.
- And a kind of fog.
6th
There's a fancier lamp than I've ever had, the only table lamp, lamp with a shade, which I have instead of Tom. What else. Plaid pajama bottoms and $150, scented candles from Eliz. We ate cheese fondu and looked at my films on video. They were destroyed things. I'm fifty-four.
7
I'm angry at Tom in a way that's wondering how I put up with him as long as I did. His will to use was always plain. I needed to love a rotten man and I did. When the time came I turned on a dime.
At the same time I am remembering times in Bellingham which I am free to love for their own sake, though my hope was part of them. There was the Christmas Eve at the Shangri-la. We had a fight, I took him back to the mission, he changed his mind, we came back to the room with the Christmas tree and made love and my labia were colored wings.
The weekend camped by the marsh on the res. We sat watching sunset on the dike, fucked by moonlight, woke to white mist on a mirror, stood talking in the sun with the mountains all around but far across plains of land and water. Looked at my poems in the burning heat. As we packed the car he remembered packing after holidays in Jersey with his mother, and was young. We held hands driving the rutted road out. He had found music on the radio.
There was the first night in the Evergreen Motel, after he'd lost the fight with the black guy. We had a big bed, the room was warm, large and full of gold light, there was the sound of the stream through the open window and we looked together at the photos in his copies of Double Take. My heart opened to the size of the room, it felt.
There was the afternoon under the pine trees at the lookout park above Bellingham Bay, when he told me about Okinawa.
There was the morning we biked to his hideaway place in the woods. He had been manic and bossy and I suddenly, from looking at the water, saw he wanted only to give me something, and I went and put my arms around him and thanked him.
There was the early time when he was new to the Lighthouse, my first visit, when I stayed overnight at the mission and we sat together in chapel. He had tears in his eyes when I sang harmony to Will the circle be unbroken. He was there so resourceless and displaced and humiliated because I wanted him near me.
There was a moment standing on the steep-sloping sidewalk next to the car. I don't remember any more about it. I was probably feeling I had a man I belonged with, on a Sunday morning when we'd been out for breakfast.
There was the moment waiting for him in the car outside Northwest Industries, reading. I looked up and there he was with a wonderful haircut, in dockers, looking clear and beautiful at first sight, as not often. Always his kiss hello. Such good kisses even at the worst times. He never didn't want a kiss.
There was maybe the first time he came across the border. It snowed. We had our all-day transportation day. Rode in the front of the train. He was funny about greeter worms.
Last summer the afternoon with Luke and Paul in my kitchen. The way I found him looking left-out in the bedroom and said, Come in the other room, I want you to.
Riding through flowering meadows at Silver Lake, that horrible weekend.
Seeing him walking with Rowen to Videomatica.
8
Then I looked at the journal from last summer and saw it wasn't as empty a time as I thought - why do I remember almost nothing good - he had a very clear patch - we were back and forth but realer often.
I'm feeling for myself though, what an unsafe struggling time I've had, how much contradiction and instability there always was. There would be sweetness and clarity and then suddenly fear and confusion again, over and over I'd find and lose.
9
Mary Ward's house on Sheridan. I came in and said, this is the real thing. A spot on the window seat cushion faded orange where the sun has been sitting many days over ninety years. The room very dark apart from that spot of light. Curtains on rings. What was it about them. Integrated perfection, the window frames, the shapes of the panes, the curtain rods, the quite large rings that would rattle nicely.
I had seen through the French doors - with their panels of very fine screen - into the inner court with its furred unpainted slat bench and armchair - and was standing in the living room realizing I wanted to cry. I encouraged myself to. It was partly because I was going to have to leave, partly because it was perfect. It was my house. It was the house of a woman scholar who had loved the house so accurately she'd been willing to pay five hundred dollars a set to restore the door hardware. Even the garden was perfect. There was a pergola over the gate and a sort of vine-platform running along the top of the fence that continued down the side of the house and made up one of the sides of the inner court.
The other good house was the little Gill house at the top of Robinson Mews. Two gay men living plainly in a house built for a single working man, who was given a south window for his little table, a deep square raised fireplace beautifully shaped in brick, a brick court looking steeply down the jumble of eucalyptus on the canyon slope, a goat shed below with beaten copper shingles, a cistern tower, and a one foot strip against the alley wall for a very old beavertail cactus.
That's my lamp. The shade's deep claret-russet when it's lit. The lamp stand is light and tall. It bears itself with beautiful distinctness.
I dressed up for the house tour, my dress herringbones and black jersey and embroidered vest. I felt like that standing with an earned tear on my distinguished oldish cheek in the beautiful house. Bright and dark. Broadshouldered, and curvy too. A lively round ass.
It's 6:20, Maxfield Parrish tinted clouds in soft blue patchy sky. A hummingbird a foot above the ground poking its bill between planter stones.
10
Starting the last stage - going through the notes from the beginning. What do I have to say about perceiving. What's most interesting to me is the expansion from touch to hearing to vision, one; and two, the way structure in an ambient medium can sort from simple bottleneck to many kinds of patterns for different purposes.
11
Oh, me - the times in a day when I feel heartache. When I wake at night. When I see the downtown skyline from one of these roads. When I drive home from reading my email, having shipped his letters unread to elfepp. He's lonely. He thinks letters will get me back. The subject lines are clever, trying. He isn't taking it straight up.
It says pay attention to what you miss. The sense of being backed. It says that feeling of a platform vanishes when we're born.
I'm walking. I'm climbing hillslope paths.
Being in love and the happiness of restored backup.
12
This morning I'm crying about not getting the postdoc. I'm looking at these piles and piles of folders knowing I've done good work, deep work, but I'm probably not going to get to stand with it in the forum. Nothing has changed economically because of it. I could come out of it living hand to mouth, as before. So I have lost my platform in my work too - I've lost the feeling that it will succeed. I will pour my days and strain my heart to write whatever this will be, and nothing nothing nothing will come of it.
The kind of day this has been. I was working by 5 but at seven was trying to call Louie in sharp pain about not getting the postdoc and being overwhelmed in the piles of folders. By midday lying flat in bed as if with a stake through the heart, pinned down. I was focusing in it, asking to know what it was, and faded out long enough to see a sapling or branch dashed to the ground. I'm dashed down, I said. Sighed. Briefly the pain wasn't there and I felt as if I were a king with a crown - energy in peaks over my head, not very distinct, and a feeling of being a man. I wondered whether the work would make me a man, whether I'd have to give up looking like a woman and be ponderous and thick.
In the afternoon, when I'd come from shopping downtown, again pain more intense than it has been so far, very motionless, like being crucified. I lay there and stayed with it, noticed how it shut down at the solar when I heard Eliz outside, and thought I must often have done that, because solar pain can be hidden but heart pain is naked. I am wondering why it is so intense today, but that's the way I am. It's chemical, isn't it. In the first two weeks it's as if my body still acts as if it's connected.
My eyes are fuzzing, I notice. They have been so amazingly good. I'm worried that my body will give up if I don't have a man. In the past two days that faint wish to die that says, walk into the ocean, have a car accident.
13
It's four thirty on a Saturday. I have a beautiful lamp but no kisses. I'm saying there was so little affection in him, just that - I held onto the little spots of it. I was like a little girl bewildered without the affection she is used to. And I was a calm warrior quite coldly stick-fighting with a confused undisciplined opponent who believed against all evidence that he was my match. And I was sometimes a young woman overjoyed to be looking into the beautiful face of her mate promised by god and found at last.
Sometimes I towered up impersonally stern because he was a sweet clear boy and has become a crooked man who does not choose to be redeemed. Sometimes my heart broke into tragic knowledge. We are what we are, seagulls alike, beating across an ocean that will have no perch when we fall exhausted.
It has been the deepest widest heart adventure of my life. I've had most scope in it, I've been most inspired, I've had most call for size. It was the rumble I always wanted. A great shambles, never settling, twisting up new scaly coils like a great sea-serpent. And it's over? The answer always comes back yes, it's over. Fare well, old dragon.
Could it have gone on if he'd wanted it to? Yes. He doesn't want to be a great man. He wants to hide from what he is.
-
I rode to Cabrillo Park in the beautiful noon, came home and was antsy, wanted something in my mouth, wanted to go read Tom's email letters. Like addictive craving - know better than to go downtown, because it's Saturday. Sit down with Netscape at Point Loma library. Try to guess the password for couldbe@mailcity. Fail. Go into excite.com to read the letters I filed without reading. There were four this week. Two before he straightened out. The third one copped. Said he gave up my trust and does not have the character to get it back. Fourth talked about the downtown library and heartbreak. "We are heartbroken." I read them, felt them, filed them. Said I should go back to telnet because there'd be a new one. There was. No more mawkishness, what we had is lost. Quotes a poem he may or may not feel. I reply to that one. I say I'll call him on his birthday.
I'm stirred up - oh - by having him speak to me. Now I want to talk back. I want to say I'm sorry we won't travel in the Baja together. Will I ever be completely happy alone, again. Will it ever be what it was when there were two.
14
I was in a forgiving mood this morning and it is telling me there were women. It says the way we weren't coming through was evidence of lying. I'd like to know for sure, could I know for sure? What would be different if I did? I'd be relieved.
Let me go carefully with this. I'd be relieved because I've been in suspense. He said he was faithful but his record says he can't be that. If he's lied about women I'm not in danger of taking him back. A particular hope is safely put away. Would I be shattered? No, firmer at the heart: that's that. Then I'd have childish moments feeling he didn't want me, etc. But mostly I would be standing in the clear. I'd want to see why I hadn't known, I'd be annoyed that I let myself be fooled. Gerry and Louise - he's a bad man and she was after a sexual kink. Everything else was emotional manipulation. How does it feel to say that? Narrow. Where I was yesterday was better. I used to get there with Roy - he is what he is but I am equal to it, I can rise to loving my adventure. It wasn't one thing, it was many contradictory things.
When I'm blocked at the solar it always means I'm lying. When I feel at the heart I'm telling the truth.
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I have half an hour. Try to start. What was this about. Was it about nothing at all. Trying to show I'm smarter than the fathers. Was it about trying to find a loving father who'd back me. Was it about writing - struggling into the larger self who was joy to be. Was it about making money in a way that would still give me open days. Was it about tracking material I recognized, and wanting to build inside it like a colonist of a vision, wanting to join the best in building somewhere else for people to live and work.
So what this is is my effort to say, here is a beautiful land, here is what I've noticed about it, here is what might help you find it, here are some mistakes you might not need to make.
- Is this true no
- Here is my effort to live in the land there is YES
- Which is beautiful among other things YES
- Here is the right way to think about it YES
- This is what works YES
- Talking about what a human being is YES
- Here is my effort to live in the land there is YES
Driving through La Jolla saying, the stakes were large, I wanted to save your soul, your soul goes away from you when you lie, our soul together went away when you lie -
In La Jolla I've been with you even when I've been alone, I realized. You've never not been in me when I've driven through La Jolla. I felt a flat cut on some edge, my right side, like a tree limb cut close to the trunk.
Planting with Mo and then Nora's garden. Look at the salvias. I have to weed, but they are beautiful. The pineapple sage is blooming red. There's a deep blue one [cacaliifolia], a maroon one [splendens Van Houttei]. When I made the hole for the rose there were earthworms fat and large, lots of them. Three months of compost have done that. Shirley poppies have come up thick in front of the window.
- the golden west volume 16: 1998-1999 december-april
- work & days: a lifetime journal project