Vancouver 1st September
Now I have to think about money. I don't have the rent.
A fall morning, mist before sunrise, clean chilly dew. I've been reading the 1987 journal with affection and admiration - look at the little writing it tuned me to.
I was more sexual, more mythological, more indirect in the way I was looking for instruction in reading, more complicated I think. The personal life sections are light, lively and interesting. I like them as writing.
Ideas on children in the last war, women a bit younger than my mother telling holocaust stories. Beautiful radio, voices so audible, I want to say, set into silence so that everything about the speaking moment is clear. I can hear the person. These people speaking from the state where they are and aren't in the midst of disaster. I'm squirming somehow - I loved hearing these women, I found their bearing beautiful - and because they're Jewish I feel accused - though my own relatives were persecuted - and though what happened to me was what happens to children in war. I feel accused because I often don't like Jewishness - I don't like Mennoniteness either - or Chineseness. I feel racial irritation whenever there's what feels like too much of some group. But the Chinese aren't telling harrowing stories. Alright, so it has to do with whether my group - European non-Jews - has done harm, and if so whether I owe something personally to the whole group intimidated by that harm.
2nd
So being irritated with Jews is normal but conflicts with the sense of debt.
I'm waking this morning missing my euphoria. In Language and space I find the orthodoxy is faculties, representational codes, modules, interface modules, and whatever implausible machinery is needed to keep this medieval fantasy going. I'm scandalized. I understand why I was overwhelmed. There are so many points where I'm at odds with the orthodox. I'm longing to talk to Joyce about what to do. I'd rather be a joyfully included worker, but I am a harried outsider, and don't see how I'll be anything else. I am where I was when I got drummed out of the university before, I mean the Slade, when semiotic theory came in and I knew it was wrong but couldn't say why and couldn't imagine standing up to the stampede of wrongness and so exitted into experimental film, which was itself killed by that stampede.
Well, no, I am not where I was, because I have spent thirty years learning what my intuition needs to know to defend itself. But I still don't defend it, because nobody understands or wants to understand. So do I exit again, or do I somehow find an institutional spot and stand there saying things a few graduate students hear? Or maybe only undergrads who go off into art or engineering? Or I get drummed out again.
Or I hold onto euphoria and harass the clerics with cap and bells? Unshakably. Knowing the worst. Sustained by the joy of coherence creating more coherence. I'd be the motley fool with pictures, stories, movies, color, beauty, candor, subtlety, simplicity, emotional nakedness, and also with cunning. I'd be what I've been but I'd be it more energetically and boldly. Completely a warrior, is that it? A style of outsideness that doesn't withdraw.
That means I have to finance myself from outside.
Does it mean I mock the modules, take it on directly?
5
What do I want in the language and space book. There's what I want and what my project wants. My project wants: a description of deixis, sense of what it means in linguistics, Buhler's sense of deixis am phantasma, support for my sense of language running off simulation, ie support for the parts I know already.
What I want is the part I don't have already, a sense of how simulation connects across to sentence-making. A sense of what I haven't dealt with, that fogginess around the notions of abstraction, concepts, categories, parsing. What happens while the running-off is in progress, what part of a simulation is engaged, whether it's a matter of depth.
Always I have a sense that I could know quite a bit by noticing how it is to think for speaking, and for instance paying attention to the structure of dreaming.
I'm still in the bind of having to deal with the field as it is insanely dominated by the modularity people who are taking the description for the domain. I'm not in a position to do anything about that. I want to ignore them and just build in other terms.
-
Violet Lane Thompson died, Louie said, six months ago. Born probably 1914. It was just less than a year ago that I met her, 12th September.
Louie was on Cannon Beach walking at sunset and saw jellyfish small as half an egg deposited here and there on the washed sand, lit by sun on the seaward horizon and casting color around them like lamps.
8
Living like normal people driven through the day cooking three times, cleaning up, washing dishes, picking up, meantime organizing Rowen through four hours of school. Reading manuals, learning to assemble the computer, washing clothes, phone calls, meantime worrying about how to get money, meantime Rowen phoning, arranging, being driven here and there, running to Jim's, running back. Rent isn't paid, Sprint threatening disconnection. Have run out of soap, shampoo, tea, honey, butter, milk, oil. No staples because of having been away. Car insurance and Aircare run out mid-October, G&F payments come up every 1st, had to borrow 250 from Louie for Rowen's deposits, 100 for food, but she needs it back. There'll be the trip to Read Island with the computer. I get paid Friday but only enough to feed Rowen and eat for two weeks. Then a check that will just cover the rent maybe. Aiee.
9
It's more and more complicated. I tried to set up a dial-in connection to SFU so Rowen can practice being online. Was led into the dreary inorganic entrails of system setup detail till after midnight. Still didn't get it. This morning starting the paper courses, having to learn the routine for grade 8 English, art and PE, which was crazing us both with its obvious slog. Trying to get through to Vancouver tech support to figure out the modem (he says bring it in tomorrow) and to North Island tech support to find out who their internet provider is (that one takes all day). Organizing Rowen through his daily blocs of eight 20 minute periods with ten minute breaks. Getting lunch set up during breaks, to be ready for the lunch half hour. Now Rowen has rushed out and I'm here feeling the stress at the heart that has to do with being pushed through a day, and something else too. I'll come back to that.
When the North Island tech guy called back late in the day he had the North Island principal with him, who said Rowen could get a computer after all if he signed up with them. He'd have an ISP and tech backup and supervising visits. Now I have to decide whether to switch.
The something else is fear, in the bewilderment of this technical and official and scheduling and housekeeping stuff, that I am destroying my beautiful edge, sacrificing it. I'm very scared of that, anguished. I don't want to sacrifice it, I don't want to die for Rowen. Is this mistaken fear or is it true?
- Will you help me YES
- I am destroying myself for Rowen no
- I feel like I am (crying)
- I'm destroying the organization of my brain no
- Is it a mistaken fear
- Is it what I think of mothers, that they are destroyed
- Do I feel that I destroyed mine YES
- Is that the stress part of it
- Is that why I want to phone Mary
- Should I ask her to help
- Do you want to lead me no
- Is that as much of a crash as I need
- Will I still be as smart and special and wonderful if I take responsibility with Rowen
- Have I come to the end of my road of specialness no
- Have I sacrificed the thesis for Rowen no
- This is going to be endless organizing
- Will I ever finish my thesis no
- I won't finish my thesis but I'll get my PhD, will you explain you'll change the structure
- I'll finish a thesis YES
- Will I lose Tom if I have to organize Rowen so much no
- Is there going to be money for all this YES
- Will some of it come soon
- Is there anything else I should know
there is going to be a crisis
- Are you saying this is crucial YES
- For Rowen no
- For me YES
- Do you mean good YES
- Something will be different
- Do you want to tell me what no
- Well, I'm doing it, but please help me with money
- I am destroying myself for Rowen no
10
- Hello the structure is going to be shattered
- Tom's mania
- Is it anger no
- Fear no, child's anger at loss of pleasure
- Frustration
- Is it reactivation no
- Child's frustration at inferiority
- Knowing and being able to articulate are disjunct
- Any human has to learn interface competence
- The way I had to learn to talk about my films
- Tom has a child's incompetence because he hasn't done the work
- Is it as simple as that no, unconscious intuition grows slowly by means of processing
- Should we think of L hem as interface YES
- R hem knows
- Is it nagual and tonal no
- Those are state shifts
- Is interface masculine YES
- Is R hem fem no
- Interface is masculine because culture is YES
- A female interface is being constructed YES
- L hem is a bottleneck
- R hem is perception
- Sometimes thought of as fem because of the contrast
- The lovers
- When Tom monitors himself is that R hem
- The angel is integration
- R hem needs use of interface skills
- Even for itself
- Is (the devil) a picture of disconnection
- It's interface that gets stoned YES
- L hem is built by our parents
- R hem is built by the world
- We have the task of rebuilding L hem
- L hem is narrow focus hem
- Tom's mania
11
There is money in the bank, the first pay period backdated, looks like.
We had a good day yesterday. I'm hearing a crow. It's fall. I can tell by the light and the temperature, cold on the porch when I went for the milk. The sun isn't up at 6:40. Cold luminescence in the sky above the mountains.
What was good yesterday: Rowen did an hour and a half of English yesterday morning, straight through, on his own. We drove to London Drugs and bought Worms Armageddon with his $35. Came home with groceries. He carries the heaviest things. He sat down after good lunch (ham and cheese sandwiches) and did another four blocs. Then Jim came and sat next to him drawing bugs while Rowen played his computer game for five hours. We planned his work for today and went to bed. I lay in the dark listening to Ross somebody on CBC interviewing Diana Krall, who is not the great thing he said she was but had a slow smoky speaking voice better than most.
The only kind of singing I can listen to is where it's the fine cut of the line, like edges in skating. Sarah MacLachlan's Arms of the angels. Or harmonies of course. That's the same rapt visual watching, but of unspooling interval not cut.
It's 7:06. There's the sun, on the north face of the brick chimney I can see from the bed.
Here Rowen wakes up, comes out in my plaid pajama bottoms and blue waffle teeshirt. I love to see how cared-for he looks in those clothes and the haircut Louie bought him. He's taller than I am. Thin. Folds beautifully in the green chair. Long narrow hands and feet.
15
The tiny person in her motorized cart: she's the size of a doll or an eighteen-month-old, perched on a high shelf of the machine that is relative to her the size of a Narboni or a large forklift. She wears a tiny dress with her tiny thin legs poking out from under the hem. Her hair is permed. She's a young woman. I once heard her speak, a voice thinner and higher than any child's. She's a student, I don't know in what department.
What about her. Curiosity I can't satisfy by asking. What is it like to be so far from human alikeness. She is not a dwarf; she is much smaller than that. She will likely never read or see an account of anyone like herself.
How can a body so unable to defend itself set up order in a brain made for other conditions? How can a person so inept be intelligent? Is she a sort of demonstration of body/mind separability? Does she think on the basis of structure hard-wired into a brain that is insignificantly different from other people's?
In email a piece about G factor, a biological factor, highest-order common factor, found by correlation analysis. Highly correlated with intelligence are: working memory, reaction times, perceptual speed, heritability, evoked potentials, conduction velocity, glucose metabolic rate. Seems to say intelligence is a cellular quality - which would make it visible in the whole of a body.
16
I've dealt with the wolves closest to the sleigh. The rent, the Connect deposit, the Sprint bill, food until my next cheque in a week, a few clothes for Rowen, the decision about whether Tom should come, the first classes, getting the computer up, getting a beginning of Rowen's courses, understanding how they work, feeding us both and keeping the house going and doing laundry and looking after the car and looking after good clothes for teaching and meeting with Phil, getting the emergency loan, starting on maybe a Doctoral Women grant.
I'm $850 more in debt.
What's next is more classes this aft, feeding and supervising Row for another 10 days, packing the computer, picking up Tom at the airport at 2AM on Sunday a week from now, getting to the ferry by 8:30 on Sunday, driving to Read all day, shopping for food to bring them, sleeping in the cold, organizing Lise? to get us to Surge School, getting the computer up and connected, getting Rowen started, negotiating with Michael about the art course and getting stuff mailed, driving back on Tuesday, stopping in Comox to deliver stuff there's a deposit on, marking the quizzes over the weekend, being at SFU at 7:30 on Wednesday morning to teach until 3:30, then coming back tired to try to connect with Tom, being back at school for 1:30 Thursday until 4:30, meantime checking in with Rowen by email and phone, then having only Friday and Saturday until about 4 with Tom alone before he goes and I don't see him again until Christmas at soonest.
Meantime my pay on the 24th will have to go for the trip and G&F loan, with rent, telephone and hydro still outstanding. I mean my pay won't cover the rent or any bills. I have no clue how to cover the rent and it will be due the week I'm back. I'm basically a month behind and have the emergency loan to repay in 6 weeks. If the student loan people find out about my old delinquency I won't get the doc grant $3000 and will be hit up to repay. I will have to park the car when the Aircare temp extension expires. It is going to be another unrelenting wet winter. I should look for another part time job. My teeth are in danger if I don't fix them right now. I'll have no emotional reality from Tom from two weeks after he leaves. He doesn't stay open longer than that and has no clue that he should find a way to do so. I'll have no love or touch or company for the months of winter when I'm slogging at TAing and trying without leisure to work on the thesis. I have nothing at all to look forward to except maybe, if I can set it up, Christmas in San Diego. I can't see Joyce and I'm shut down in slog and responsibility and I have the privations of faithfulness without the support of a lover. I owe David $500, Louie $350, Rob $280, SFU $500, G&F $2000, Visa $1500, and bills about $700. I have to skimp constantly. There's no fun I can afford. I don't have my doc.
I do have a job until April. So far the aching unwellness hasn't come back. I have a house and peace with Brian [downstairs]. I have garden meetings. If I exercise I don't have to get fat this winter. I'll sometimes be able to work on the web. TAing is a kind of company. I have a radio and CD player. The department will feel better with Bjorn as head. Louie will have a little more time after her exams. But for the rest, it looks like death by emotional starvation and money emergency.
-
This day turned all the way around. There was meeting Bjorn's wife Michael in the department. But then what there really was, was the teaching, two hours full strength standing and delivering. I'm very easy in it. Strong, strong. On the way home shopped to bring back a big box of food for me and Rowen. Ro was here with Jim. They found the sound at the back of the computer. Ro had worked his two hours after I went to school. He looked nice in the black fleece Benetton top I got 'im. I'm done for the week. He started Dune and likes it. Tom is coming. Ate steak and mashed potatoes and Greek salad, which Rowen liked. I'm feeding him. But here was the best. Sharif phoned. I said, Have you talked to Luke? He said, Fifteen minutes ago. I said, Rowen, phone Luke. He invited him to come play Worms Armageddon. I want to talk to him, I call from my room. Then there he is, oh Luke. It's like stepping suddenly into real love. There's nothing like it. There's no one like that. It's mutual. He is mutual. Warm mind native to me, more kin than any kin I have. I tell him about Erin coming to scam me for money and then weeks later at the door asking whether my offer of a ride to rehab is still good. "I said, what about right now. - Did you know about him being addicted to crack?" There is a choking sound and then a silence. Luke is crying. He lets me hear him crying. I flood full of love that he is feeling for his friend.
17
There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than a man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.
The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.
I'm at the fulcrum. I cannot give without taking and I cannot take without ...
Rereading Dune because I have it for Rowen, remembering reading it in the granary north of Sexsmith in 1978 - or 1977, I think. Still impressed. (I wonder whether the man sitting looking at me with Paul Kinsella on a bar stool in Port Townsend in 1974 was Frank Herbert - an enjoying look.) He was at the fulcrum, though he has Paul Maud'dib say it. He was man enough to take the poison drug of empathy and go on living as a man. And did he look where the reverent mother dared not? Where would that be? For instance, is there something Herbert can do that Le Guin can't? She knows oppression but not blood-thirst. He can't do lyrics though. His attempts at songs are nothing at all. Hers strike to the core. His notion of Bene Gesserit as female high politics is interesting. He needs to have his Paul best the witches, but then he invents Alia the all-knowing girl baby: he balances it again.
-
- Tom is refusing to read YES
- And he is refusing to know why YES
- Are those two things related in him YES
- Is it the same fear YES
- It's a fear of growing
- Which is a fear of knowing he's incomplete YES
- Am I like that YES
- He saw it for a moment in the truck YES
- A fear of feeling incomplete
- That's the dark place YES
- From which we can grow YES
- Do you want to say more about this he is withdrawn from shattering the structure and responsibly coming through
- He is much more interested in feeling competent than in being competent
- Why? genetic indolence
- He's not made of the right stuff YES
- He's a spiritual parasite YES
- Am I? YES
- Should I give up on him no
- Why not because he's your husband
- It means I can't have a full life with him
- It means I must have a full life on my own
- Then what does it mean to say he's my husband it means you're serving him
- And I should be willing YES
- I don't need a husband YES
- But he needs a wife YES
- In what sense am I a spiritual parasite judgment
- I'm a parasite on you
- Is that good
- So I'm just a means for him to get to you
- The woman in me has to depend on you rather than on him
- Though she wants to depend on him
- He's okay for carrying stuff
- He can help with money
- What else betrayal, laziness, wifeness, rest
- He gives me to have to deal with betrayal and laziness
- And wifeness I need to learn
- And real rest
- I haven't earned a better husband
- Is that the crux YES
- He's the one I have
- Do you want me to introduce him to people
- Why? you will have to show your addiction
- Wouldn't it be better to be without a husband
- Will you tell me about being without a husband you'd have to deal directly with unconscious feeling for your mother
- Is that what I'm doing with Tom YES
- It's not about my dad
- Though that's a spice in it
- I should stick with the husband I have until I'm not in danger of trying to find another one
- But I do not have to spend my old age with this parasite YES
- I want from him what I should feel myself wanting from my mother
- Arms YES
- Wanting YES
- Anger
- Grief
- Was it more direct with Louie no
- Because she wasn't bigger
- The effort to get what I need
- Hope and fear
- Absence!
- Do you want to add anything partial loss of child's balance, courage and brilliance
- And hope of getting it back
- In his presence YES
- That's the crux, huh
- Is that true of all falling in love
- Temporary restoration
- Is it possible to get it back by direct means YES
- That's what I should go for
- What I was in love tells me what I'm going for
- And should go for YES
- Marriage is either partnership or infancy
- Am I stronger as a teacher YES
- With Rowen YES
- Tom is pretty much irrelevant YES
- Will you help me go directly YES
- Do you want to say anything before I stop you will come through
- And he is refusing to know why YES
19
An acid of anger and cynicism.
What's happening. Something is up.
I notice I'm mad at Tom. I was working with the book this morning and said next September I'm moving to San Diego. I'll defend in summer. Get money together for a grubstake. I have a year to do it. Publish. Do the garden project and write freelance.
I said all that and wasn't mad any more. I phoned him to tell him. He said, Am I the first person you've told? I could tell he didn't know what to say. Found myself saying it didn't depend on him, thinking it was worry about being responsible for me. Backed out of the conversation fast. He knew I knew and wanted time to fix it. No.
So what do I think. I think he's using and he wasn't overjoyed because he wants to go on using. I think it's the reason there hasn't been any life in our connection since about two weeks after I left. When he started speeding that marked it, I think.
The book said, stop using him to feel what you should feel yourself wanting from your mother. Arms, wanting, anger, grief, hope and fear, absence, I say. Partial loss of child's balance, courage and brilliance, it says; hope of getting it back. Hope to get it back by direct means and not by the temporary restoration in his presence. You're angry that you're not more realized.
20
"Ellie's starting to spin," he says to himself. "You spin too. You're spinning when you get manic." "I get manic to cover my one deep spin."
I was in the tub talking in the dark, Rowen round the corner reading Dune in the kitchen. The plumped half moon was just right of south. I said "Can you see it?" He moved to the foot end of his bed. Stretched the phone cord. We triangulated. I said "It's higher in the sky where you are." I liked something I didn't have time to think through, the moon's reflection on the water moving over my groin. A triangle with a little bounce on my end.
Yesterday I met David's Karen. I was impressed. She is a tall lean light-boned woman with narrow square shoulders and a very physical way of standing with her hips forward. Hanks of thick coarse greying hair, big eyes and a startling high-bridged hawk nose. She was uneasy meeting me but got easier sniffing artemisias in the herb garden. I hope I meet you again, I said when we were saying goodbye. She took it directly. I'm trying to persuade her to come back, David said. When I'm here I never want to leave, but there has been a lot of hurt, she said. I think David's craziness can be fixed, I said, I want you guys to be on Salt Spring so I can bring you plants. We'll see, she said.
I didn't report this conversation as accurately as I'd like. I don't remember well enough.
23
It's Thursday. Tom early Sunday. Teaching done for this week.
Here I'm stopping and milling, wondering whether I can write anything tonight, and then wondering why I'm more diffident than I was.
- Am I harming my confidence by censoring stuff about Tom
- Should I rather give up reading it to him
- But that feels like I'm giving up hope
- But reading it to him was too destructive
- Does he have to recite every detail of his plans
- Because he's afraid he'll lose them
- It feels abusive, but it's not YES
- It shows the difficulty of the enterprise for him
- I would never inflict that sort of
- Any more you want to say brilliance and courage, writing, women, deep change
- About me? you in relation to Tom
- Writing about him should change deeply YES
- Don't stop writing about him but take it deeper YES
- Writing and womanness
- Should I rather give up reading it to him
I had wonderful teaching today, two sessions. I stood and played with them around the story of the woman with a transporter copy. Boys in the back row started talking. The quiet Chinese man talked. The girls in the front row talked. They were starting to see how people were meaning different things by a term like 'the same.' The less articulate students were talking. I was keeping it fast and digging always for principle. We laid out the suggested criteria for identity and saw how they handled my three invented cases. People stayed overtime. I liked best the opening up of the distrustful back row: the withheld back row. The science fiction story was a friend to their loneliness. The front row girls are already supported by my ease in authority. They step right up. There was that very clear forward girl in 0.15. In 0.16 it was the hesitant boy who looks like Ken Olin. Action, what I've been starved for.
24
Here's something else. With Phil at the Special Arrangements lunch, which we went to for the lunch. We had to stand up in that room full of miscellaneous people and say who we were and what we do. I couldn't do it. I mean I was frightened and couldn't fake it, said the least I could. The fear was instant and automatic, and all my teaching ease made no difference. What can I understand about losing my presence of mind that way. I could have said, "I'm Ellie Epp and I'm wondering why after all my years of teaching I still get frightened when I have to say my name among strangers." After that I would have been able to say anything.
I thought yesterday maybe I should go to clown school. I also thought maybe I could go to swing dance classes.
- Will you tell me about that fear it's because
of hostility
- My set toward them is hostile
- Theirs too
- They were faking
- Is there anything I should do come through, shattering the structure, intimacy, beauty and fertility
- Could I be in crowds of strangers and not hostile YES
- And not faking benevolence YES
- I'm a long way from that YES
- My set toward them is hostile
25th
There's Rowen at my table stuck in front of his English assignment. He drives his eraser over the desk like a little truck. Write about what you hate about the assignment, I say. He has spent days stuck in front of those paragraph-writing assignments.
Tired and cranky. Sore throat. Have cleaned the house, done the laundry, dragged Rowen through his day's school, got him packed, got my own clothes organized. Marking for next week is done, but I have to prep Wednesday's early tutorials. There is money in the bank. None of this slaving is for me, none, none. I'm setting up a holiday for Tom. I've fed and fed and fed Rowen, hung back and worked to figure out how to get all this to work for him. It's all called sacrifice. I don't like it. I'm not that kind.
Going to the airport at 1:30 this night. Tom will be exhausted, manic, needy and oblivious to what I've had to do. It will be entirely about what he has had to do. We'll come home. He'll zonk out, I'll have trouble sleeping. Tomorrow I'll be the one to be responsible to get us up, get us fed, get us out the door, get the car to the ferry, get the ferry paid for. Tom won't have Canadian money so I'll pay, otherwise he'll get a bad rate. On the ferry he'll be happy because he's in the glamorous Pacific Northwest. I will be bored. I'll send him off with Rowen. On the Island he can drive I guess but I'll be responsible for phoning Michael and getting us to Bold Point. And then the computer to wrestle up and down trails. He and Rowen can carry. Oh yes and buying groceries to take to Read, figuring out what to buy. Meanwhile I will have heard every detail of his ordeal and will have been too well bred to bore him with every detail of mine.
What I will not get is what I need, which is sex, listening, someone delighting in me. The part of what I need that I will get is being able to touch him and, eventually, being able to be truthfully irritated with him. We might come through at the last moment, as usual.
I will deliver Rowen to a process I'm not confident will hold. I have got some procedure into him and some technical acquaintance, not nearly enough. He has learned to spell decide every other day for two weeks and still tries diside. He's been working on the first section of English every day, an hour and a half per day, for three weeks, and hasn't got to the mail-in section yet. They haven't sent his math disk. We haven't been able to find out whether he can do it.
He has been good natured and floppy. He escapes to Jim's. He escapes to Worms Armageddon. He can work at what he can work at. He's calling me Mumsie, which must mean he's feeling more mothered, but he's another of those male parasites who have no interest in the person of me. What floppy Rowen and manic Tom have in common is that I have to do the work. They are born drones. Tom fights for control without mutual responsibility. Rowen will take direction but he can't remember what he's doing.
- Talk to me reverses
- Am I sick because of this shutting down YES
- I'm shut down
- Is it Tom's fault
- He won't do what's necessary to keep me open
- He won't even think about it
- He can't remember it
- Can you open me up
- Will you do it now
he's a fool
- I'm shut down because I haven't complained enough YES
- To open up I'd have to complain to him
- Am I sick because of this shutting down YES
You don't write me. You don't read me. You don't want to fuck me. You don't pay attention. You expect to be babied. You bore me. You don't have a clue about supporting me. You're a thorough asshole. A parasite. You're ugly.
- I can go on and on
- Alright I'm angry no
- So tell me what I am in crisis
- Will you tell me about the crisis you are judging, overview, coming through, your mother
- This is all about my mother? YES
- I'm in crisis because I want her to get me but I'm mad at her
- I want him to come but I'm mad at him
- That's a crisis
- So is there something I should do feel it as that
- Anything else being private about your conflict will improve your strength in reserve
- Don't tell him about it
- But I have to be some way with him not an excluded child
- Just take care of him
- Then I'll resent the way he doesn't take care of me yes but realize it isn't about him
- Oh so long to learn no
- You think this isn't long
- You think I'm learning YES
- Is my object to climb out of love with him
- If I do will I be free
- More free than I've ever been
- Humor him
- Because he's not my parent
- And if I'm free will I be ugly no
- Can I be as beautiful free as I am with him
- Do you want to say anything about this no
- Alright I'm angry no
29
Something that needed to be done and I did get it done. I did it in the midst of everything else I have to do, not badly. I was sick, broke, sleepless, overwhelmed, and effective. I helped Mike and Lise come to terms with what I'm setting up for Rowen. I got the computer to the Island. I balanced money so I had ferry fare. I drugged my cold. I slept and didn't sleep squashed with Tom in a bed 4' wide and 5' long. I endured the anxiety of disconnection from Tom in the processes of battle and decision. I sat quiet and came through to my one statement so he could come through to his. I lay awake listening internally for what needed to be done next day. When next day came I took Lise's information and went to talk to the bosses. I knew how to speak directly and how to ask questions. I knew the weapon I had and used it kindly.
North Island wanted the money badly. I want enough computer time for Rowen. We got two computers for the Secondary Distance Ed kids, and at least notice of the need for supervision. I got the numbers clear: $5000 per student to the school board, $3500 contracted to Connect, $1500 therefore left for the school board to supply supervision and premises. I made a fine ally who told me what I needed to know and liked me. The principal did not like me but got what he wanted by giving me what I wanted. He couldn't believe what I'd done - that I had actually got Rowen registered in Vancouver and was proposing to have him stay registered there if necessary. In the end Rowen will have the program, I will get the deposit back, Lise and Michael are indirectly the agents of benefit to the Surge Community, Rowen does not have to be the only one connected, he can teach the other kids how it works, I saw the school setup and how things are done at home. It cost a lot of money and stress and it isn't over yet, but it is started as well as it can be.
Meantime, Tom, who was tight on Monday, droning sententiously, was looser by Tuesday after he'd worked with Michael and I had got feeling focused. Driving home there was a fight about money. I was saying - hating to say and feeling I shouldn't have to say - that if he's changing $200 US he'd have $300 Canadian and should pay half the expenses of the trip. It hadn't occurred to him and he was in buried rage at having, as he felt it, his play money tapped. Out popped a sheep-fucking joke, and guess what else, he terrorized me by driving too fast. I knew it was revenge but by then we'd been sleeping much too little for three nights and it was not the time to press the point. I was watching, though, saying this is exactly the sort of thing I need to know.
And do I think it's fair for him to pay half the trip expenses, when it wasn't his enterprise? Would I pay it if it were his not mine?
There was the moment on Bold Point Road when he was backing the car and didn't see a bump I saw. Scraped the muffler with a horrible grating sound. I insisted I do the backing from that point. Quickly decided not to take the car down. I was at a pitch of distress that was partly about having to take control away from him. It was one of those moments that come again and again: I vote for my own judgment but it costs. Beside the stove in the cabin I was feeling how tight my heart was clenched in the agony of that crisis. I named it. And then he was released to say sentences that had 'you' in them and were helpful to me.
- the golden west volume 18: 1999 august-december
- work & days: a lifetime journal project