the golden west volume 19 part 1 - 1999-2000 december-january

work & days: a lifetime journal project

San Diego, 22nd December 1999 Breathing through my mouth. Pencil line soft too. Is there anything I need to say - here I am - it's hot - I don't want to work - every day I don't want to work - I don't want to write down anything about Tom - I have enough money to go out but I am sticking inside - have been blowing my nose for a week, not better yet - I'm fuzzy, not feeling - should I be worried? Am worried about not wanting to work - worried about being turned off - but not very worried - I don't have that crisp feeling of adventure, of being in my own hotel room working. Mostly uneasy about work, is there something there, is it too ambitious, will I ever finish it, should I just give up on it for this stretch, should I keep trying, is there any way I could get into writing flow without open time alone, if the work is so hard for me does it mean I shouldn't be doing it, am I shut down because I shouldn't be doing this, is being shut down what they call 'adjusting,' are we both not ourselves anymore, have I lost too much intelligence because of menopause to be able to finish what I planned, was Phil somehow right to be doubtful, is it that I can't write without crashing and I can't crash because I'm not alone, is it okay to settle emotionally and not swerve with everything, just keep going, is it that the testing is done, is the fuzziness on account of illusion. That's a matrix of dull feeling that doesn't resolve. Will I go on being dull until there's an agony? Have I seen anything well enough to want to write it? I'm censoring. I am censoring. I'm censoring small things. Do they matter? We haven't come through and I'm not pushing to. It's as if now it's me who wants to coast. It's as if I'm in hiding. But mainly from writing. I don't know why I don't look forward to it as joyful discovery, doing something only I can do, making myself as I'm meant to be made. Why don't I feel that? I have sometimes. How do I feel when I think of going to write. Like I am forcing myself, dragging myself away. This is a good question. How do I feel when I sit down with the notes. Dull. Where was I. I'm supposed to be writing about this now. I don't know anything about this. I don't have the whole outline alive in me, here's this little question which is much too big. I'll try to start. It always takes a day to write the first paragraph. After that it will come. But it doesn't. I've kept on at the same paragraph or tried to start somewhere else. Mainly I feel there's no end I can see. 23 And this - always having to start the day away from the day, going away from the light. Having to do the work before I've eaten or felt anything or sat in a café, because I can only do it with my freshest brain. The way it demands the best of the day and so really all of the day. What I'd like is to get pretty and go out on my bike and look around or maybe go see Leslie's garden, or go to Anderson's nursery, or go stand beside the ocean. Hello     you will come through It's as if I don't want to     Will you give me a sentence     turn for the better if you feel the child's oppression You mean as such     That's what this dullness is     Automatic oppression in the presence of the father     Which I feel by inner grumble     If I watch the way I oppress him     Those are the ways I am being oppressed     So I love it when he gives me an opportunity to rebel     Which he is doing very little     We're both very withheld       Will you tell me what's the best way for me to conduct this visit     Tom, come through, addiction, structure Help Tom come through an addiction     YES Of structure     YES Will you point this     YES separation Get him ready to separate     Find out what will help him detach from me     Will you tell me what     childish, gain, truth, (Knc) Will you gloss (Knc)     Ellie What his child gains by my departure     YES Would gain     What would he gain     his childishness   What should I want instead of being grandpa and grandma together     fighting, partial loss, winning, search I should be ready to metamorphose into ugly woman     YES Stop trying to be pretty     YES Go for strong and effective     YES Do you want to say anything about this     excluded child, losses, writing, temperance Is this a list     25 Okay. Where am I. Two things have made me cry. The last one was when I said It's my friend who's behind the cloud. What was the first one - when Tom said he loved me and I said, I don't know what it means, I know the moment of open heart and I know long responsible care, but the part I don't feel is being liked, known. I don't feel we know each other or like each other. These two moments are the same. It's the friend who's behind the cloud I can like and be liked by. That's the feeling. Either I'm right or I'm wrong, either there is that person and realness, or I've imagined it. 26 Yesterday we took the bus to Enseñada. Mexican roadsides dry, strewn with paper and plastic, unfinished buildings standing without windows or roofs. I felt it was a landscape in the charge of people who don't see it, don't love it, don't love themselves seeing it. We rode through it side by side and unconnected. Christmas Eve I said I wanted to get real. Christmas morning Tom woke with a tightly connected paragraph: You want honest? He doesn't want to open up because he doesn't know when we are going to be together. The next stretch is going to be very long. It will be more of the phoning. He's settled. I never tell him he's wonderful and he's my hero. He does everything to make me happy but I'm not happy. I keep wanting him to read things that are a click too hard for him. I keep trying to improve him. My plaints are always the same. They sink down under the surface sometimes but they always rise like Atlantis. They are the same plaints from the beginning. He has a lot of energy and he has poured it into me. I am never satisfied. He is exhausted from fighting those plaints. He's not going to argue against them any more. He's always gotten to a wall with women. He's reached it several times with me but he's kept going. Women have been the bane and blessing of his existence. Is Tom as real as he wants to be     no   I need to get negative to shift state     YES He hasn't understood anything I've said     YES He wants to keep an even keel     YES I want wide swings     YES Is all of this relevant     YES Does it mean it's over     YES Will you say why     childhood exclusion, has come through, missing, your father Is he ready to let me go too     I will miss having a sweetie     YES I will miss him     YES It's the end of my sexual life     YES It's the end of my life as a woman     YES It's the end of my affectional life     YES Yes?!     So is it the start of something else     YES Will you say what     fighting in the world to construct recovery Recovery of the world?     yes, improvement of brilliance and courage, gain in organization You want me to work for the world and love the world     Instead of Tom     27 You're on thin ice, boy. You'll do anything, you say, but not right now. Later, when the pre-game chit-chat is over. Later, when I'm not falling asleep. I saved this whole pile of things for you to read but I couldn't be bothered to tear out the pages or even think about whether they were worth your time to read. I'm not sure what they were, now. I started making a bunch of tapes for you, see, they are labeled 'tape for Ellie.' This one - and this one - and this one - I made them for you but I didn't finish them. There's a book I really want you to read. I'll read your yab-yum book, I'll get to it. I'd like to live the life of the mind, I really would, but I have to make a living. I've been following Dan Merino since long before I met you, I want you to watch this with me so you'll understand me. I know all about you already. There is nothing more to learn. I can talk my way out of anything. I'm lazy and careless but I'm loveable. - Try to say something about this without being moralistic. This is the person you have in front of you. He doesn't want you to leave him. He thinks what he'd need to say to keep you, but he doesn't remember to follow through. Everything recent happened last night. It's not his fault that he doesn't have a strong record of plans and promises. He doesn't even have a clear sense of why he feels guilty. It has to do with the unbearable lightness of being, which means he loses things, loses people, doesn't remember to stay in touch with them. He's bewildered by the way it happens. It just happens. 28 Tuesday. I don't know what to say. I don't know whether to try to say. Do I know anything? The quality of our company isn't good. The quality of my own company hasn't been good either. It will be painful to stop. There'll be relief in stopping. I'm always compelled to stop in January. The thesis is taking too long and is cutting me off. I always hang onto the bad. There's something about sex I haven't been willing to get to. I'm a blamer. We don't have it together practically and are both bad at that. He thinks about me when I'm not here, I'm the imaginary friend, and when I get here he just shovels his past loneliness onto me, which means we don't have anything new together. There have been beautiful times, amazing times. But I have been shut down since a year ago. I haven't wanted sex since then, I've dodged it. I don't like the pressure to praise and be happy. He is good-natured when he isn't bullying me. I think if it doesn't work with him there is no man it will work with, because anyone else would be more critical and neurotic. So am I ready to be alone from now on? I know I'm not willing to be bored and shut down from now on. I like sharing books and writing and conversation with a sweetie. Etc. Nothing I didn't know three years ago. I don't need a dramatic break. I'm shut down, is what it is. 29th And then somehow we're through. We have an hour together, the first morning we've had together he says. He tells me how he sees me, he tells me how he sees two of his new plants. His mind has relaxed. I relaxed when I held him last night and said how much I like his love of his room. Now I wonder what was the difficulty. There he is. It's as if in our separatednesses something in each of us, unknown to ourselves, winds tight. It's automatic. It's an animal response to aloneness. When we get together we hang onto our coping ways, we don't realize we're together. When we relax it's okay to go on together. To get to that relaxedness we have to go into feeling separation, the love, fear and relief. We have to feel and say all of those. It's completely about relaxing. - "It has something to do with First Corinthians 13, what I need to remember is that I must be truly my best and most personal self with you as more importantly I have to remember that when I am open and honest I have always been dealing with somebody who has been honest and open with me. Our love for each other has always been at its highest when we both possess that trust and confidence. And finally my last thought is that we should never fall prey to the initial sense of despair because with our best and clearest selves we made a commitment that always works when we return to our best and clearest selves. It can't even be recognized or remembered when we're not those selves. So my promise to you is never to fall prey to that initial despair. I can see I'm the person that has to chill out and get on the wavelength." "I always expect you to be a bitch. I tap dance around it." We need to be able to say every bad thing we're thinking, about separation, freedom, etc. Despair needs to be able to speak but action on despair needs to be delayed. - Is it okay for him to do the new daddy thing     no Is it bad for me     It gets me there     It's what I want     I got to the bottom of the beast     I really like it     And you're saying I shouldn't do it     Do you want to comment     change by taking responsibility for the child's slow growth My sexuality is stopped there     I'm keeping it stopped there       Will you tell me how it's supposed to be     improve child's quest for betrayal The child is looking for betrayal     The child should be looking for responsible care     Being given deep pleasure feels like responsible care     That comes from younger     Is there a way deep sex is supposed to be     unconscious anger at exclusion and evasion That's what blocks it     Are the consequences as bad when I do it as fantasy     Something else?     early love resurrects search for illusions Sets up wanting them     no researching them Use it for that     30 [Tom plays bluegrass all evening.] What can be so painful about that music. I have no home. He's insisting I listen. He can want me to listen, but he's confining me with it when I have nowhere to go . He's insisting it's his space. I'm tired. What it was about the music. It's monotonous, repetitive, predictable, sentimental. I wouldn't have listened to any one of those cuts by choice. I've said give them to me one at a time and just the best ones. I knew he'd want to go on to the second side. Are they stoned picks? He's listening to them in two times and wants me with him in the time he made them. It's unclean music, very dirty mediocre music. At this moment I'm being hated for not liking it. That doesn't matter. He's insulted I won't listen to his tape after he was willing to take me where he took me last night so generously and wisely. All he knows is I hate his music so I don't understand him. I'm overloading aren't I. I needed to be alone tonight. When I'm overloaded I need to be alone. When he's overloaded he needs to wipe out in music. Leucadia, 31st Anne Lamott on TV saying write every day, write a little bit, expect your first draft to be bad, notice (it isn't voices, it's a voice) what is being said against what you weakly want to do (it's the same voice that says what to write). 2nd Jan 2000 Yesterday morning in room 20 of the Pacific Surf snuggled in a high bed contented with talking and poking. On the way home in the dark waiting at a bus shelter for the 34, talking to a Pentecostal assistant pastor with shining patent shoes. Writing has never been as chaotic as this. I am wondering whether I've had a stroke that has damaged my brain. I kind of dab away at it. My outline is so organized I expected I knew what I was saying but the writing self has a different job than the outline self. The outline self was an extreme self, very concentrated and sparse, creative, not very verbal. The writing self has to make transitions and explanations and in trying to do that writes generalizations that are seen to be false, and then erases and thinks and tries more. This is not how it used to be. Moreover I hardly know why I'm writing this stuff. It's as if I'm working from a reorientation that's deep and correct but finds the habits of language carrying it off the track. Could I work from this structure if I didn't write it? It would help to have talked from it. Suzi Gablik in Utne Reader writing that in 1984 there was a movement against the isolation and corruption of modernism. That was me going to the community garden. I didn't know modernism went too. So has it gone from community to deep theory also? Is it gonna be ready for me? Do you want to talk about perception     YES It's worth developing perception for its own sake     Perception starts in readiness to act     Consciousness is a by-product of extreme readiness     YES I've mined my traumatic structure     Is consciousness worth developing for its own sake     no Is there a sake anything should be developed for     the end of anger Being able to appreciate the world     Am I on the right track     Perception as structural change     Control by the object     Readiness to act     Isolated control by the object       Aboutness is action and readiness to act     Sentient structure is only part of it     Developed perception is recreational     Addictive?     Sentience starts with dwelling on the mother     Perception shades into unconscious readiness     Immediate change of structure shades into past change of structure     Have I got the basics now     YES See perception as a subcategory of both adaptation of structure and readiness     It's change of structure that's immediate     Hyped hormonally     And sentience belongs to certain parts of the brain more than others     Hyperconnected to the amygdala     The what system     Estrogen     Causally there's a temporal span even for immediate perception       More directives     something about being stuck I'm not going to get this     you need it to complete Something about the way perception reconfigures     YES It organizes us     It's like food in the sense that it organizes     Not invasion: external organization       Is this what you meant     sort of Being controlled from outside, but in ways that suit us     Art is being able to generate organization     YES Perception is surrender     YES Men will be paranoid about this theory     And art is imposition?     NO Is art surrender too     Surrender in the process of making     I don't do enough of that     YES 5 It's morning in the big glass-walled room that was the Gas Haus and is Clayton's Pies, 8:30 on the brisk street. Garlic bagels with cream cheese. Thinking about Nora's garden, where I built steps with her New Orleans cobbles. Ten kinds of salvias blooming intense sparse color - coral pink, magenta, cerise, purple, black, aquamarine, baby blue, mauve. Intense complicated scent. Leo Anguiano drove me to La Jolla. 6th Don't want to work. I'm here now. Last night me and Tom had supper on the balcony at Nordstrom's, in the cold, with powder evening bluing under the bridge. Walked to the park, walked to the Upstart Crow and had delicious cocoa but were embarrassed across the small table, walked on to the end of the park, walked and walked home. Were interrupted by a train so we stood near its rush. In the last stretch Tom got to riffing about the incomprehensibilities of having me in his room. Why is the tiny little spoon never on the ceramic spoon holder, why is the green print napkin folded and hidden under the cushion? We went up in the elevator with two black men, one young, one old, both tall thin things with small heads. Is he in love with you? the old one said to me. I think so, I said. The young one poked his head forward. Look at each other, he said. Are you the captain of this elevator and are you going to marry us? Tom said. Walking on the street, when Tom said something hoggish I fell back half a step and touched my red left toe to his back pocket unexpectedly expertly. As he began to lay out blankets on the floor I stretched myself to the four corners of the bed and said Thank you for giving me your bed, and broke into cackles of laughter. What I mean is a joyful ease came over us. 8 These dawns from the bed, orange at the hills, fading up through gold to almost white, darkening up to royal night blue with bright Venus alone. It has its best moment when Tom in his underpants brings coffee. Yesterday at Black's Beach. We rode miles on the sky-reflecting sand next to the water. When the flattest creep of a wave caught me I felt it pulling sand out from under the wheel. It was interesting beach with lots of kinds of detail, endless to see. Colors of stones: rust, robin's egg, mustard, oxblood, oatmeal, slate, jade. A fine-grained sage green showing tiny flecks of red only when wet. Grain coarse as chopped meat. Bird's egg ovals. A luminous pearl-grey moon. As I was peering and collecting Tom was peering and collecting in the other direction. There were our two towels, red and green, and our two bikes hung with wet socks. Down a ways naked children and children in white underpants running running over the slopes, uncountable, with a naked man and another in white shorts. When it clouded later five children, dressed now, trouped up the beach toward the trail, ages maybe eight to three, a lovely sight in their tribal comfort and independence that did not look back to where the grownups were slowly assembling two backpacks and a baby. What else there was to see on the beach. The delicate suture-lines, fontanelle lines, raised on the sand by the last wave at that height of the slope. Black strings of seaweed and their shadows. Series and pouches of hard strong ridges, sorted grey and black, black on the height of the ridge I think, gouged and packed by backwash around rocks and even around small single stones. Overhead a similar packing of white cloud. The ocean was lying back, more grey than green. Military helicopters, fighter jets, the Fujichrome blimp circling. The smallest of the beach kids came from his camp to ours, stood around for a while, examined this and that, a pretty sight in his shorts and socks and fringed moccasins. Tom was standing watching him and said, He thinks very well of himself and he is showing us how wonderful he is. He did come closer and ask if we had come on the bikes and where we lived and what I was eating. He was maybe four. When Tom and I were having breakfast together earlier in La Cochina de Maria on Broadway I realized the black man theme has changed - the way it was when we met was that black men appeared with us and enraged Tom and showed up his weakness. Our black man this time is a good spirit who blesses us. Yesterday he met us in Super Junior's as we were shopping for picnic food. Is he giving you any trouble? I put my arm around Tom, Only the best kind. Congratulations, he says to Tom. Whenever he addresses me I look at him very carefully and he looks back out of a wide interested freedom. Amtrack 9th I slept through the evening. Here I am in the night train alone in the observation car, thinking am I ready to ask where I was. The night before I was going to leave at 6 in the morning - last night - something happened. I think. We'd had a beautiful two weeks, since just before New Years. My face changed. I was light in my clothes. We were in confidence together. He was making me laugh every time we turned around. He'd take care of some things and I'd take care of others. He looked brighter too. Both of our bachelor routines were loosened. I wasn't jumping up at dawn to try to work. He wasn't having to have Chopper 8 in the morning. I was eating with him. We'd got through his needing to pile things onto me from his lonely months. He'd gotten to be able to tolerate me choosing bike routes at times. I'd been willing to go through his little park. We'd had the beautiful hour together every morning. I'd spent money without counting and not paid half scrupulously when he bought too much. Things started to go wrong - that's a stupid sentence but I'm leaving it - Saturday afternoon. He asked to borrow 20 dollars, or more if I wanted to give it to him. I won't lend him money because it sets me up to wait to get it back, so I give it and remember he gives me money too. But I had a sudden pang that I'd given him a Christmas present and he hadn't given me one. And I'd paid for the motel at New Years. He bought the desk, but it's his. He sort of bought the bike, meaning he put twenty five dollars on it and I paid the rest because he didn't have it. I bought him plants and plant pots and socks - the strange realm of Nordstrom's men's wear, sheer long business socks on little hangers - so when he asked for money I had a pang of neglectedness, I'm loving him more than he loves me, which for me has often come with loving at all. I didn't know whether my heart was hurting really because I was leaving. So I didn't say I minded giving him $20. I also minded refusing to give him more, but I know he pisses it away buying coffee all day, and doughnuts, which add to his belly flab. And then I offered to buy dinner at Denny's but minded him ordering steak and dessert, so he put twelve dollars into the tab, which left him thirty two until Friday. And then back in the room we both got our feelings hurt. He said I don't hold back with him intellectually. I said of course I do. I got into my letter grief. He said he loves my letters and rereads them. I said he was lying. He admitted it. But he found one. Here's the kind of thing I love, he said, and read aloud a paragraph I wrote when the garden was supervising a casino night. He read it contemptuously, jumping over words he couldn't make out. I was stabbed at the heart. It was like seeing a true contempt there is under the salesman's pitch of flattery he maintains to hold onto what he needs, the way he is maintaining flattery with his boss. He doesn't like books I want him to read. They are descriptive. He wants things to move along. I'll leave it there and lie down on the floor. Klamath Falls, 10th First call for breakfast in the dining car. Rocks and pines lightly white. Willows, grass, sagebrush, black water, few colors: black and brown duo-toned. On a long train ride I'd rather be a pretty girl than a grey-haired old thing. There's a buzz around that one and none around me, for all that Tom says I'm Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn and Isabel Rossellini. Indian people live in those little homes and raise horses, says our volunteer tour guide. Now it's snowing, the lodgepole pines are thick and thickly clotted, white and grey. What is it about color, always? In theory, work from two sides. Say that another way. (Though maybe that's the way to say it.) Work with color, say what it's like to work with it. Say what's known about the means by which we work with color. The one will suggest things in the other. That is not reduction, it's theoretical amplification. That's my advantage, if I have one. Mine my discomforts. It's the way theory works with practice in other domains. How is daily mind applied science. Engineering working with properties of materials. Working with materials isn't thought of as reducible - properties of materials are described in ways that are reducible. A person who likes to work with color has this sort of brain. Tom's brain is different from mine in this way. It flows, it's much busier than mine, more deliberate, socially more involved, evasive. I live in a lot of silence. It's a silence that lets me go deep when I try to. He has to have ways of controlling his flux by avoiding triggers. I'm solid and so efficient I go dead when nothing is new. I bore easier and easier. Tom goes on eager. He goes on having zest for every little thing in his room. But he comes home and stays in, goes to bed at eight or nine, watches TV. Reads the Herald Tribune, the LA Times, the NY Times, USA Today. Is gobbling doughnuts and ice cream. Staying faithful and keeping order, keeping his job, but it's at the expense of his liveliness. And me - so grey and dumpty and grim and old - forgetting words. Last term there were students I never did recognize even after three months. We're out of the snow in wet fir and cedar. What am I going to do to liven up. The coffee stall attendant and a chatty older man discussing whether that woman the night before was a man: the older man says, "She was reading a book by Isabel Allende. No man, transvestite, whatever, would be reading a book by a powerful woman like that." Here's the Columbia River estuary. This day was all twilight. It's almost dark now, leaving Portland, but it seems no time since first light in the grassy plateau above Klamath Falls. "I cannot believe how fast this day went," the woman across the aisle is saying. Do I have any sense of you? Merino won yesterday. If I try to remember what it was like with you, heartache starts. Vancouver 11th Feeling and resisting a pull to phone. Is there something I should wait to feel through. Something like this - was I okay in that happiness or was I weak. Did I give up too much for it or did I relax into it. The way we said goodbye - he walked away, I stood at the train door and looked after him - wasn't good. There the phone rings. Tom dreamed, Sunday night, that he was walking with a group of young men toward a house where I was. When he came to the house he was alone. Louie and I were in a room together. I looked at him with a stone cold face of anger. Louie was ironing, looking on. He tried to talk to me. I wouldn't answer. He started to leave. I looked at him with even more anger. He popped his head back into the room to say he'd seen the look. As he walked away he was with the group of young men again. He didn't see them but heard their voices. They were saying Did you see her face? She really hates you. Do I really hate him     Does he really hate me     He doesn't always notice my hatred     His young selves were telling him     YES Hatred we built through years of being thwarted     YES Was his dream about the stoniness of my leaving     YES He has been growing in love more than I have     YES Do you want to say more     complete secret withdrawal and delay Find the hidden hatred     Love woman looks on while the stone person doesn't respond     My stoniness in partings is hatred     Did he really cry on Broadway     YES Confess hatred and say I'm willing to give it up     YES I took the letters to give myself some power back     YES "I'll take back that love because you don't want it"     YES "I don't think you can handle it"     Is it true that I have to manage him by withholding     no But I fall back on that     YES Then I blame him for making me withhold     YES All the way home on the train I was hunkered in hatred     YES That's why people didn't like me     no When why     because you were blind and sharp Am I blind and sharp because I'm withdrawn     YES I look at them with dislike       part 2 the golden west volume 19: 1999-2000 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project