Work and Days: The Golden West vol 18

the golden west volume 18 part 3 - 1999 october work & days: a lifetime journal project

3rd October

Meretricious. The greasy shine of fresh excrement.

Handsome athletic men and captivating women. Holocaust horrors. Catholicism. Patriotism. I knew the book was rotten when he had Jordan say "I was very wrong, Dad. My hatred of you got in the way. I should've followed the path you set for me. America's a good enough country to die for even when America's wrong. At least, for a boy like me. Raised the way you and Mom raised me." I knew it was rotten when I saw the way he schmalzes up his nature interludes. He starts the book with a woman killing herself and builds it around another woman dying. He sets it up so it's a story in which he gets to keep everything and still kill the women. It gives me the creeps. It's the long best-selling wank of a fat ugly little lump of a man. "#1 The Sensational Bestseller" in raised gold letters on the paperback cover. [Pat Conroy 1995 Beach Music]

Tom gave me the book to tell me about himself, rather than telling me about himself.

It's Sunday morning, a brilliant day, silent. Tom's had his night at LAX and is somewhere on a train. Where am I.

- There the phone rang. Tom at the Starbucks on 4th standing at a payphone in the sun. His relaxed voice.

I started fighting Friday night and was in the thick yesterday morning. What was I saying - I want you to do what's necessary to be able to stay real so you can stay in contact so I am not waiting in an empty life for the next months. We both have to take our next step.

The book said the question was, what are we supposed to learn in the next eight months. It said the answer is: learn to process unconscious indecision about writing.

I said, I am going to do it whether or not you do. I am going to give myself a rich life not an empty life. I don't mean I am going to be unfaithful, but I am going to (I forget what).

What happened is that I came out of hiding and fought. He hung on in hiding, until I was weeping with grief and fatigue, not in front of him, alone in the kitchen holding a photo of Dolores Huerta at 65.

What brought him through? Do I remember the moment when he decided? Did we both come all the way through?

His face was in front of me washed open. A clean face. The face I saw last the day in January when I said goodbye to him for the first time and took a picture of it. Now - not until now - I'm willing to say it was a true picture. His right eye is as demonic as ever, his left as clear. We lay quiet in each other's arms for our last hour together. He slept. I thinned into vision, where I almost never go. I saw a landscape wide and distant, a curve of hill with small structures on it, and then a distinct grotesque head, a boy's face with yellow curls, twisted large red mouth, a kind of thick-mouthed fool. - I don't mean I think those visions meant something. I think they were transient dynamic foci in the shift from one state to another (but come back later to ask what they imply).

I'm feeling how Protestant I am, and what that is, compared to what Tom is.

I'm also making a speech at my father's funeral, saying he was loveless in relation to other people but he did love a few other things. He loved a well-made sentence. He loved good singing. He loved skill in work, when he saw it, although he did not love it well enough to foster it. He loved seeing growth in his fields. He loved coming over the hill to his valley. I think there were times he loved horses. I am trying to distinguish his loves from the identifications that were like boasting. I don't think he loved anything in the sense of being interested to foster its well-being.

Compared to me Tom is more forgiving. He cries listening to Iris Dement. He'd walk for miles, cry and smile, for his momma and daddy, he wants them, to know, he loves them so. He's able to feel that. I'm not. I've left the dead to bury the dead. I rant at him for shutting down and forgetting who I am, and when I do, he says, he sees something childish in the corners of my eyes, a little Mennonite girl, who brings formidable intellectual equipment to her defense. He wants to feel and I want to know. I want justice, I want evil betrayers to stand stripped for all to see. He wants not to lose mummy and daddy and his feeling for them. I believe they are long lost and well lost. They weren't worthy. Tom and Pat Conroy too will glaze their eyes with booze rather than live in the kind of cold decision I maintain. But neither Tom nor Pat Conroy are actually forgiving. What they are is forgetting. In giving up their loyalties to anger they lose the ability to remember.

What does this feel like. Embattled.

You're going to forget who I am, but you'll remember again, I said to Tom.

Is this a hyper state? Is it the hyper state of being left? Roused to be ready to be alone.

Writing opens him up, Tom says. It makes him want a drink and a Marlboro. He can't be a journalist without getting to the places where there is dinner and drinks. When he writes he feels sadness and pain more than he can live with. He wants to stay sober and healthy with his life in order. That's his not unconscious indecision about writing. I want him to write so he'll stay opened up and be able to be with me. I want to write so I'll stay opened up and able to be with me. But when I open up I don't open up in the places where he opens up. I don't have booze drugs and cigarettes waiting for me in all the places where I used to write. Writing is my defense not my helplessness. That makes Tom more of a writer - does it? No.

But I was right about this - until he is doing work he's proud of he can't bear my accomplishment and enjoy me, and I suffer of his inability to afford to delight in me. That has to change. It is what's next. I can't marry him until he's doing his right work. I can't be married to a man who isn't proud enough of himself to be able to stand my gifts. That's basic, basic, basic.

Meantime: I said what I have to do these eight months is get writing established. I have to publish. I have to learn that way of making my living. It is the only solution. What he does can be something else so long as he is proud of it.

Now back home. The story of Rowen. Rowen was here from the 3rd or 4th, almost a month. We said goodbye on Read Monday night when he went up to bed. I had come to sit by him where he was watching TV. I was on the floor. He put his long arms around me and held me for a long time. After a while he came back and did it again. It was a hug given by an equal, maybe a superior. Grievous and stoic. He was thanking me for defending him.

Michael with his few teeth, in a sheepskin hat, walking slightly crouched, happy, full of talk about his farm, not embarrassed about his look, his fat wife or his dirty disordered house. Joyful, I think, joyfully himself. When he had brought his boat to Bold Point and got us and the computers onto it and taken us across, he sat an hour with us on a piece of driftwood smoking a roll-your-own and talking. It was as if he was deccelerating us for the trail. Hank and Rowen were running on the shore.

Lise fatter than ever. Her thirty-sixth birthday. Pig Woman, Tom said, Pig Woman with a spider heart. But she was shrewd about island politics. I liked her firm settled voice when I'd hear her talking to Tom while I sat with Michael on the porch. She was the one who pushed me through indecision Tuesday morning. She did it with a sentence. In the end we had come to terms.

What else haven't I told. The dirty dishes. Tom's night of fever. I woke queasy in the liver and threw up with violence three times.

My new little clock Tom gave me because the old one is giving out. New era, always, when there is a new clock. The old one has been my academic clock, I think. I remember buying it but not exactly when. It replaced the pocket calculator clock that replaced the tall steel clock Maggie gave me.

I want it to be that I die in your arms or you die in mine, Tom said.

The light is a bit excruciating today. Colder, very sharp. In some of the trees the leaves have turned.

Will you tell me about my unconscious indecision the decision you'd need to make is to learn to shatter the structure
Will you say what structure the death of writing under control of childhood
Writing controlled by childhood has to die
I have to be writing controlled by you
I am willing YES
Writing controlled by childhood motives
Revenge and defense
Conroy's writing is controlled by childhood motives

Should I be concentrating on making my living in it
The principle should be just that I try to make my living in it
And don't publish anything controlled by childhood motives
Will you tell me more equality, slow growth, inspiration, deep change
Will you point what you mean by equality (2c) not compulsion
Something about the form of balance
Is that a brain directive YES

Do you want to add anything balance, early love, of beauty, with shattering the structure
Is early love childhood motive no
Because early love is human well-being
What I love in Tom is early love
Love without believing love no
Shatter the structure of loss of faith
When you say childhood motive you only mean defensive motive YES

Le Guin
Shearer
Gordimer
Any more? this is about unconsciousness
The unconscious indecision YES
Unconscious conflict of early love and defensive motive
And the question is how to process it process childhood exclusion by gaining overview
Writing about childhood YES
To sell? no
Is there going to be enough money to cover the rent YES

Is there any more you want to say about Tom's visit you are missing him
Is it alright that I'm trusting him more YES
Anything else his family
We are a family?
I got Michael's blessing
That struck me at the heart

4

I dreamed I was crying, fretting with frustration of not knowing my work. Something about telling my mother. I thought of going to see one of the apartments/studios in the house of work - I mean the building that I've visited many times, that began as Peter Epp's house. One of the doors, on the second floor, in the back, was standing open. The studio seemed to have been vacated. I went on to find more of the apartments empty. Everyone has been given notice, I think, the building is going to be renovated for some new use. I go to the rooms on the south side. One long room behind the façade is being used I suppose temporarily for a lunch hour dance class. There is a woman flopping over a piano. Two of the women dancing are next to each other moving in exactly the same way.

There is a stairwell that has been used as a small room. I look out the window from it onto the formal lines of a public garden. The building's façade is carved stone. It is quite a grand public structure in a European style.

Next to the stairwell room was a man I was curious about. I think he was composing music. I remember this very dimly. He was dark and hairy, I think bent over a table or grand piano. Rock'n'roll not classical. I thought of talking to him but it hadn't happened before I woke.

-

Tom's buzz cut. It was two in the morning at the airport. I'd got out of bed, driven straight up Main Street through the cold. Sikh families, Chinese young people waiting for the Canada 3000 flight from Los Angeles in the quiet of the nearly empty International Arrivals Hall. I was watching the monitor. He was walking well, contained, not picking his nose. Emerges in his good black windbreaker with a military haircut. He looks like a scarred old marine, harrowed by the wars but not corrupt, not fat, not slacking off.

Is the dream significant
The building has been under renovation
Getting ready for a public role
Were those people in it leftovers
They'll have to leave too
Is it going to be government offices
Will you tell me what kind of work will be done there slow growth of processing
You mean the renovation
Will you tell me what kind of work will be done there when it's renovated the department of destruction
Destruction of what competition
That's a good public job YES

Competition between what and what destruction and creation
For instance liberals and conservatives YES
Destruction of ego
And construction of self (magician)
This isn't about public role
Have I always misunderstood Peter Epp's house YES
It is not the house of art YES
It is the house of self YES
So nothing grand is going to happen
I am not going to become a lovely ripe public spokesperson
I am just going to be a larger self YES
Obscure and poor as ever

Well I'm disappointed it is a gain
I believe that but I'm longing to be settled in work and less anxious about money childhood exclusion/poverty and its judgment are good for mourning
The fretting I was telling my mother about
I need them YES
Is it good that I need them YES
Am I supposed to mourn YES
Why process mourning and come through to brilliance and courage
Do I need Joyce for this YES
Will there be the money
Am I going to get the $3000

5th

What's new - Luke in the back room, cold feet, Rowen on the phone. Lise wants Rowen home doing chores in the morning. Cold feet, first night of hot water bottle in bed. Working since 6 this morning, teaching tomorrow. Hungry not full after pushing through review to be ready for then. Rent is paid. The Connect school wrote a cheque immediately, I can pay phone and some of hydro. Louie must be back from her exam. Set the alarm for tomorrow early.

It's only eight. What kind of heart can I find at the end of this day. Let's find out.

9

Scott Mainwaring at Stanford. He's the guy who talks about situativity theory in cog sci, he sez save notion of reps for attunement mediated by explicit symbol system.

I found Tony today [on the net], when I thought to spell Nesbit with one t. His folks in Plymouth still at Wolseley Road.

Saturday night. Heart. Where's heart, unless in the wanting of it.

Want to talk to me about the talk yesterday [graduate students]

Ugliness is misfortune YES
And I take it as crime YES
It would be crime if I were what they are YES
But in them it is misfortune
Those girls' emptiness is misfortune
I don't feel it as such
That's an error of feeling no it's what makes you an artist
Something I should change? work for them
Do you mean individually no
Does my work help them YES, defeated, unconscious, come through, evasion
That's what's wrong with them YES
Defeated bodies YES
Do you mean my body can speak to them YES
And say - come through YES
At the moment what it says is - get off me YES
It needs more consciousness YES
Do you want to say more about this YES act on loss of generosity to exclusion
Come to the point where I give love when I see misfortune YES
Gentleness? no
I was taught lack of generosity

11

What is that drifting in times that are airs.

-

"My lover, my brother, my father, my friend."

Book says to Luke: the question is about feeling anguish about friendship with the betrayer. He was wanting to know whether there's something wrong with the notion of philanthropy. I said it's fantasies of philanthropy not philanthropy. The difficult sorting of the difference between defending oneself from attack, which needs to say 'there's nothing wrong with me,' and taking oneself into therapy, which needs asking what it is that's wrong with me.

Luke is wanting to stay friends with the betrayer - me - and I want him to. But he is likely not going to be able to bite into real work until he finds hatred for the betrayer.

Is that true YES
In therapy Luke has to find rage at me YES
Is he going to get there YES
I'm willing
But am I making it harder by foreseeing it YES
Advice for me? anger along with pleasure in his mother
It needn't be altogether anger YES
Because it wasn't altogether betrayal

Will you talk to me about multitasking
Am I supposed to learn
Does it have to stress me no
Does it have to make my quality worse no
Can I be relaxed in it YES
Will you tell me the secret mixing unbinds what's lost in young intelligence
Multitasking destroyed young intelligence YES
Interfered with growth of YES

Will you tell me what the stress is male, control, action, organization
So can I do it in a way that feels alright YES
Can you tell me how happiness, creation, imagining, overview
Really feel the integration of the project YES
Are all the things in the list necessary YES
Will you tell me what I should be seeing in overview the taming of feeling by being led into honesty/truth
An honest relation to life YES
All the parts of the task
Taking care of business NO
Taking care of being

12

What I did today - got somewhere in sorting the what section - phoned Ottawa about my student loan - took the bus downtown - dealt with student email - got a letter from Tom - wrote Ottawa - entered most of the what/where bibliog - phoned Rowen at school and found he wasn't there (last night phoned Lise's parents) - came home and made supper and remembered the garden meeting was tonight. So I worked on 5 of my 10 areas today.

-

Going to the garden meeting was wonderful. A lot of light reflected from low clouds, yellows of flowers and leaves shown up in the dark. Muggs had set a candle in a can at the foot of each vine walk post. In the house there was a fire down to red embers. Five people at a long table, Hertha in half-glasses writing minutes, Muggs in a bulk of wool working her persuasive tone on and on, Brian remembering the names of all the gay people, depressed Len and a new woman. The naturalness of the way we work together. Inclusion like warm velvet, people say what they have to say. Hertha and Brian play. The light was good and the temperature perfect. Afterwards we stepped out into a garden that is our own and very large, long aisles with black forms leaning into them, the crooks of dewy leaves.

14

Early Thursday, heater blowing, fresh tea, the black silence of 6:30, Luke asleep in the next room. I sit down at the table and there's the spread of notes I left on Tuesday. A jolt: I'm not there any more. Teaching this afternoon. Picking over yesterday's social shocks of a day on the hill, very disordering. What's the feeling - this is something to understand if I have to learn to multitask - I don't like the term - why - it's mechanical.

'I'm not there,' 'getting into it' - but going from place to place is easy - sitting down at the table is construction not motion - is there a fast way to remake it? It's a big project and I need to reconstruct all of it. Something to do with how I physically lay it out. Spoil the room by doing it? I guess. Imagine it before I start? Imagine it physically? A sort of memory palace? Memory table. Like a big floor. If I do that, can I pick up anywhere? Do the same with the ten tasks - review them every day - a way of talking to myself.

15

Rob Boss yesterday, and the 0.16 tutorial boys staying on a quarter hour after the class was over.

Daniel at the book counter talking about Gavin Bryars - not that what he said was good, but the way he held himself beautifully as he spoke, straight and quiet, civil and relaxed. I think Louie would say his chest is open? Something physically fine. Speaking from his pleasure. I am much more gusty, I think.

Teaching, I've felt compact and forceful sometimes. Speaking from my pleasure. Passing on the real news. I tell them to read Neurophilosophy and I draw the sequence of jumping shrew, macaque, human brain on the board. Poor Adam Barkman with his tight hollow cheeks, hanging onto CS Lewis, ridiculed for his faith, as he understands it. Order can't come from chaos, it has to come from reason, he pleads. Definite punchy Kalyna jumping to an A this paper. The impertinent girls in 0.10, Helen Frost. Rob Boss sneering and twitching, all confused about whether he's smart or dumb, so sweetly hapless in his skinless contempt. I won't say what he said to me. I got even, then forgave him, then made him my pet in the next tutorial. I love power. I love it because it gives me action. I got Rob Boss to really smile and show his drawing of a tesseract. I mean he was less isolated, and I, and he, did it. I was less isolated because I could talk more interestingly to his realness. He didn't have a pen for the science paragraph. I lent him mine, "Here's a man who isn't well prepared." "You don't know the half of it," he muttered. "You don't tell that to your teachers," said Christina Fullerton from the row in front of him, not turning to say it.

17

John Clare's journal. He's a gardener. "My Guardian spirit in the shape of a soul stirring beauty." "A young woman with dark and rather disordered hair and eyes who spoke more beauty than earth inherits came up to me in a familiar way and leaning her witching face over my shoulder spoke in a witching voice and cherishing smiles, sentences that I cannot recollect." October 13, 1832. "I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc."

Sunday. Yesterday I worked early; went to the computers in the afternoon, was strolling home through Gastown with the bike when I saw in the window of Spirit Wrestler a living hand - only the hand - draped over the giant forehead of a bronze floor mask. I locked the bike to the railing and went in. A lot of nothing, Inuit bumps and Northwest non-spirit masks, but this thing - a big lump of dark green serpentine carved into caribou, muskox and hunter, one thing with three sharp faces joined at the sides by stone muscles and wings perfectly fitted.

In the basement room little beef-bone forms like Celtic spirals hatched in ivory fishhooks.

I left the gallery and went to the garden, picked apples off the ground in pleasure of color everywhere, sky, earth, fancy forms of leaf and blade wrinkling and rumpling on all sides. Breath paintings overhead, I mean breath as emanation on the spot, painting as pulls and pushes using that finely breathed-out material. Clouds in the west were going a pink internally related to the sky's acidic greeny blue. I was looking around at the bare crab apple, the wild apple behind it hung with red things the starlings attack, the quince distinguishing itself yonder as a green canopy hung with yellow balls like a drawing of a fruit tree. Crows passing one by one, notches in their wings where they have lost feathers. I was looking at it all thinking my body works with this garden to make beauty - the making of always more exquisite color.

The way the skill of that carving sends me into the street seeing the world valued.

And who is this soprano so perfectly singing Schlaff dodo, schlaff? (By Schumann says horrible Howard Dyck.)

-

He - something I didn't get. That makes a dead spot in the conversation. Then he motormouths. That's the dynamic.

He wants me to know he's staying open though there is a temptation. How does he feel the temptation? As above.

This was at the end of a phone conversation I was hoping Luke wasn't hearing. I was pretending to be interested in the Chargers, not inspired to tell him anything in a real way, laughing badly. We were starting to say goodbye. He said, I have been keeping myself open, do you feel that? I grabbed what I could: You sound relaxed, your voice sounds nice. Then he said he felt temptation and I caught the possibility and asked for more. The result was quite an electrified stretched feeling in both of us. We wanted to stop but held it a little longer. What I was feeling in the stretch was pain, which I haven't been feeling in these days at all.

19

The upper pane in the hall window is war glass, or maybe older, and throwing onto the far wall of my room - it is sunset, almost 6 - a woolly panel of light fading very quickly, curly and clumpy with a depth like sheepskin. Mysterious that a transparent sheet can show itself to have so much effective invisible structure. It is fading from bottom to top as the sun sinks below a roofline. The fading bottom edge isn't sharp because structure in the section of the pane that's still lit is throwing light as a fur fuzz into the dark end.

Now there's just a corner very concentrated and bright. Below is a pane of glow laid onto the blue wall. - Ah, the corner slipped away. The subtlety of the blue in the room anytime. (This room is exquisite, said Luke last night.) It's a blue with air in it. Why's that - maybe the white behind it floats in front of it? Something like that.

What is that floating in qualities of times - falling asleep reading an academic paper this afternoon, I was slipping into an air so fresh, young and particular it was as if a memory registered in a sense modality I never notice as such. As if that's what's meant by 'spirit,' because it's always qualities of air that is more than air, something that pervades a perceiving person as their inner atmosphere. The quality of consciousness as if it were a fluid. If I could feel another person would it be like that? Is it the first motion of dreaming, that sets a dream going by making a being for it? Is it a kind of trawling that intercepts other people? Is there a part of the brain doing it? (No.) Is it the state of health of the whole brain? (Yes.) A dynamic state? (Yes.) A condition of sensing not a kind of sensing. But I can compare - I say, this is how I was at another time. No, I can't compare - but I can recognize. I can't remember it later, but I can remember recognizing it.

Is there another question I should be asking? mourning, shared pleasure, overview, womanness
Will you point that what to look for
(Do writers find fictional people by finding those states yes)
Do you want to talk to me about writing write, a quest, for happiness and anxiety
That's the question
Write about Joyce
And pain
That's what I should be writing
Use my notes YES
Start after Rowen is born
Is it a book
It's about you too
It isn't New Agey? NO
New Agey but not stupid

22

I was a big / Man / Yest-er-day [But boy you oughtta see me now].

It's what happened to me when I was a kid YES
From one day to the next
You want to say something more something you don't know
About Tom? no. Something that's true
I was a man YES
And now I'm not
Is that good

In what sense was I a man failure to grow
What am I now connected
Do you want to say more slow growth of creative unconscious for writing
If I'm not a big man what am I fantasy of excluded child
I am the fantasies of an excluded child YES
And that's an improvement YES
Will you give me an example dominance, slow growth, coming through, completion
Dominant fantasy YES
That coming through has stopped YES
It should be going on YES
But there's no emergency driving me an unrecognized emergency

23

"I take just enough estrogen so I can have gentle feelings of empathy but not enough to drive my nervous system into hypersensitivity and anxiety attacks." Temple Grandin

Luke phoned from the street, his first day in his new own place on Davie.

My car is uninsured, parked. I struggled home on the bike with the green bag packed with books. Fell off the sidewalk onto the street. There was a bus coming but I had enough time to flop up onto the curb. My chemistry was off, didn't want to wake up or work. Hotflashing slightly. Daniel had a pile of CDs for me. He said Holst doesn't have much edge. I said he's close to being a marching band. We have conversations we both work at, but willingly.

I'm mad at Tom for no good reason. Because he's not here. Because I can't feel him here. Am I lonely? Luke's been here since Rowen left. It seems to me I'm settled into being resigned. Tom isn't here. I can't make myself be as if he is here. My ways of feeling him before were hype, I don't do that any more. So I'm just where I am, forgetting him, not believing I'm connected to him. But I'll buy a ticket.

24

Louie was here last night, my friend, talking to the cards, etc. It is many years later. She is thicker around the middle, has dyed black hair, yoga teacher clothes. She looks as if she has cut off sex. The marvel is that she can do as much yoga as she does, meditation, pranayama, and it doesn't make as much physical light as one night with Alanis and Steve, which used to give her back the fine cut of face that I believe is the sign of right life.

My own worry is about writing. I was flipping back and forth trying to find something to read her in the journal. It was all dull. As if I've sunk finally into the clouded lower layers where people toil in murk. For what reward - good rewards, I think. Luke is here and is a man and loves his mother and can leave her house for his own, that he has prepared for his own woman. Rowen is able to sit down to computers his mother won for him. Tom wrote a good letter yesterday, calm and kind. And what. The garden is in neglect. When I lie down at night I'm empty as a box. When I'm not working I'm beige plastic, as bad as that. There's no seep of any kind of color from the dark side. None of that dreaming self-pleasure I could write from. Have I worked my way out of soul?

It has been saying it's not because I don't have sex.

But is it because I'm faithful and not free in sex?
Is there a solution persist in acting on indecision about anguish
Indecision about what fighting with men
Anywhere in the world YES
Fighting them will give me what fucking them gave me
For instance fight with Phil no
Fight hegemony no
Fight what bad things
Enslavement
Think of combat as my eros YES

In the time when I could write I had sex, power, creation, combat, newness, freedom and Joyce.

Are any of these more important combat and Joyce
So what am I supposed to fight for writing and excluded child
To get my writing into the world
And to get the child a life
Will you say which child (the sun) liberation

Mary phoned last night. What's the impression I'm almost remembering. A thick loose fabric like mohair but more matted. What she was feeling about Ed having been diagnosed with kidney failure so advanced he needs dialysis. Confusion. An air thick, grey, matted and dully absorbent.

Is he going to die within the year [It was two years, Nov 2002]
Is there anything I need to do about him before he dies deal with the separation
Reconcile YES
What does that mean come through anger by intelligent art
Do you mean with him
He's down, he's defeated YES
Say to him, you're dying, there's no point in holding a grudge
Ask him if there's anything he wants to say
Is there? YES, establish slow improvement of indecision
Is that an instruction

He wants something from me
His indecision YES
Why he wouldn't enjoy his children YES
Why wouldn't he because of what he believed about manliness
What's my horror of reconciling it would be the end of evasion
There's something I evade by means of the stand-off delayed, overview, of completion, of processing

Would I be more free YES
Would I have to touch him YES
That's where it sticks YES
Is that anger YES
He intended me harm YES
He also worked to shelter me YES
Gave his life to it
He didn't wish me well but he did his duty
That's what he feels is not understood YES
He didn't want to stay with his farm and his wife and his kids
He did what I didn't do YES
He didn't wish us well because we were eating him alive
He hated us but he stood by us YES

Is that the simple truth YES
He feels we're thankless
He thinks what he did was enough
It wasn't YES
That's why 'duty' meant 'hate' to us
Have I been a worse parent than he YES
He didn't like us, he didn't want to be with us, but he provided for us

Is there something I owe him no
Something he owes me no
But something it would be good for us to finish YES
Just acknowledge that he did it
"You gave your only life to it"
If he hadn't done it we would have been worse off
He didn't do it because he liked us, but he did it
He was a callow heartless man but he did it
Can you tell me what he held against his father that he curbed him

28

This teaching week over. My crisis with Adam Barkman passed. He didn't arrive to talk to Martin. Instead I found his rewrite on the table when I arrived. I have been liking to look at him, I should say loving to look at him. He seems to have a white light around his head. I see him on the far side of the lecture hall wearing his glasses, writing notes, loving philosophy, looking serious the way no one else does. When I make a point he's there grasping it, visibly catching it with his face, nodding it in with his wide pale forehead. He's twenty years old, small and young, so finished a man, but a man of another century, white stockings, buckled shoes, the light of reason, an eagerness, I mean a love. I was listening to Mozart reading his clearer rewrite, suddenly feeling what it is like to be a human being who believes he will live after he dies - believes it so he has a light around his head.

It isn't true that Adam is hanging by his fingernails. He made me consider him. We were walking toward the steps down to the buses, and he said, You used to believe didn't you. He stated it. I wanted to reward his directness. I said, You mean because people who used to believe fight more (something not exactly that). He said, Yes, people who have lost their faith. I stopped in my tracks, so he had to stop too. This is important: I didn't lose my faith, I found it. He had his dad waiting in the car and did not just then want to know what faith I had found. I heard myself saying that I do believe in something but it is nothing to do with arguments. It hates arguments. I talk to it, it tells me what to do, how to think.

I guess that white light is the white light of conviction.

The way I'm Adam. The papers I wrote for Tietz on Kant. I couldn't do it his way. I did it mine. It is still happening with Phil. I'm not working on his topic this time. He isn't going to back me. It means I won't get an academic job. He has no clue what I'm good for. In his opinion I don't make it into the boat. He has no interest in helping me publish or anything else. He thinks he should be getting drafts he could give me 'input' on. He frowns and looks stern.

And oh what am I good for - am I good teacher? My students get into me. The Chinese girls so delicately conscious they speak in sentences full of hesitation. Alice Fong working two jobs because there are four girls in her family says her grades aren't good this term. She's the far side of girl, very slight, fair-faced, a small pointed oval very symmetrical, none of her motions reaching out of the envelope of her quiet and lovely self.

What else today. Heartache about Rowen. He didn't get anything done this week. Lise kept him home all the mornings. Michael won't phone. I don't have heartaches about Tom any more, but now I have them about Rowen.

Up at five doing thesis work.

"Particularly shocking is the frequency with which eminent individuals have lost a parent in childhood."

31st

The meeting with Phil last Saturday to show him the website. How would you feel about teaching at a (community) college? he said. I think I'd rather kill myself, I said. He threw back his head and laughed very loud. I hope he understood I knew he had derided me. I cringe even reporting the conversation.

I'm at the end of my relation with Phil. What I'm seeing is that he's out of his depth. I didn't court him with this project. He hasn't got generous fostering in him. He isn't going to write good letters. I'm at the end of giving him evidence or asking him for things. Now I'll go over his head if I can. If there's somewhere to go. What I am is disgusted. He had not one speck of interest in helping me publish. He was agog to discover there were 'personal' parts of the website he could go home and read privately. He had nothing to say about the website - not one thing - a staggering miserliness.

What's next.

Today the wind blew the leaves off the street trees. Making tea at dawn I could see the crows playing in the high waves, flapping into them, sideslipping, twisting and falling back. We had a perfect work party. I cut down the philadelphus so there's a view all the way across into the plots. Gailan piled rotten wood down at the bottom of the orchard. Danny was on the orchard ladder picking the last of the apples. Muggs, Bob, Freddy, David, were in the compost area with the chipper growling. Estella's beautiful grandson Miguel did away with the buddleia that has been disordering the middle of the herb garden. Pem and Paula weeded espalier rows. Bell made lunch. Diane managed, with very little sense, to empty the garbage bins. The bearded guy cut off stake tops with my pruning saw. Two two-year-olds in yellow slickers ran the kids' tank channel. The garden house had its narrow sliding door open, red embers in the stove, people all along the window bench eating lunch.

Last night at Louie's table, her mum, Laiwan, Laiwan's mum, Louie and me. A confused event. Mrs Chung was confused. She brought a dinner's worth of food though she was invited as a guest and could not join a conversation about lightning. Louie kept praising the food in a patronizing way. Laiwan kept throwing it all up into the air the way she does. I was mostly oblivious, bashing on insensitively looking for energy, wanting to get Louie's mum into something.

Talking about getting married, a sort of blushing moment where I said what I'd wanted to say, that I'd do my best to be true to myself in it. I said it feeling across the table toward Iris Loots, to see whether she'd - something - change her inner texture or temperature when I said it. I was altogether not hanging back, I guess, paying attention in a way but not in the way I used to.

part 4

the golden west volume 18: 1999 august-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project