the golden west volume 19 part 3 - 2000 february-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

10th February 2000 Thursday night. Tom is turning to gold. He's living in love. He loves his room. He loves work. He loves McCain on TV. He loves reading five newspapers a day. He loves that he's exercising and losing flab. He loves his boy Joseph who's holding off. He loves earning me with faithfulness and constancy. He loves the effect of ginseng and ginko biloba. He loves going to the library at 6 o'clock and writing email. He loves his papyrus. He loves going to the social science section and looking in the indexes for Teillard de Chardin. He offered to write a web piece for the beautiful cupboard. Me I am not loving my life though I am sorry not to. I marked logic. I toured very young planners from a UBC conference with Susan and Sharif. When I woke this morning I read a paper on global ambient arrays for 3 hours. My house is dirty. I feel flattened. I feel there's nothing but grey plastic. Model-plane thin brittle plastic, battleship grey. I used to be a soul. It's living without touch. 11 I'm still far from organized. Why am I still not clear. I know it's too big, but it's what I've done. I want to say it. The parts of it keep being confirmed in the newest work. The difficulty keeps being that I need to separate topics but they keep refolding in amongst each other. It's the effect of what I'm saying, integration. Is there something I could do to get it clear. Organization is usually easy for me. Is it because the topics themselves are in revision, I mean half in the old way of speaking - my sense of topic. 12 A kind of craving. The garden and house file. Sat on the floor looking at it with David, drinking tea from the California pot. I was wanting a very big office in a highrise, big tables so I could order all the notes, a research assistant, an armchair, a computer, a beautiful carpet. Will you tell me what it's for     for what you've lost Feeling     no Joy     That fullness of contact     Thereness     Do you know why I've lost it     because of waiting The life of confinement     Is there an easy way to just arrive     refuse to allow the feeling of waiting Have some successes     YES Think what makes me happy     YES 13 It has to start with contact because it starts with structured intentionality. Organisms are about where they are, are ways of being about where they are. It tells briefly about what that aboutness is, neurally, at any moment. Perceiving as we know it is a subset of structured aboutness. Imagining and all that follows. Metaphor. [Graduate seminar] Should I think about what I am and conduct myself with more dignity     My weakness is wanting to feel like a student     no A kind of indolence     YES I'm indolent in not being more conscious     I need to talk to myself more     YES Talking self dekes out     YES This is something that has happened to me socially     YES Are you eager to have me understand this     YES I go into these events alone     YES Like a child     YES Think what is my responsibility to myself in those situations     And keep myself company     YES As if I'd taken a drug that gives me more time     YES   Do you want to comment     no About anything else?     graduation In this?     you should be teaching early love, exclusion, strength The relation of those     YES On the basis of who I am     YES I still pretend to be other     The principle     YES That strength is recovered     YES Did I say more important things than she did     But in a manner that     Doesn't claim enough space     YES   Anything else     you are making the passage Toward work     Toward authority     I'm kind of young in some ways     Is it charming     no I'm mad at Gillian for outshining me     no Mad at myself for being outshone     YES I'm still confused socially     YES   Am I going toward teaching     So I'm going toward humiliation     (tears) I'm always going to be awkward     The worst danger is pretending I'm not     Is the question, if I were socially clear what would I be?     If I weren't evading my weakness     YES 14 Yesterday I bought a computer, $250, at Press Gang's going out of business sale. 18 I was at Joyce's parking lot before time, sat in the car in the sun starting to work. What was there - a fretty whiney confined bored dull feeling - veering right - veering into panic - panic thoughts. Closed my eyes and stayed with it. Sore heart. Talked to it trying different things. Nothing it's about. Go on patiently. "I feel my spirit has died," I say. That's a squirt of more feeling. When Joyce has me in front of her I tell her how far I got and we go on from there. I close my eyes and find the ache. "Breathe" she says. I'm by myself in a blankness. Resist talk that wants to come in from the right. She says presence has come into the room. There was a little shift, yes, something in the space on the left. I look at her. There she is, a little old woman bony in a long coffee-colored skirt. But the ache is still there. She says it's wonderful I am aware of the mind wanting explanations. I say I don't want to call it the mind, it is all the mind. She wants me to want the emptiness, "like stepping out of the world," like the space between breaths. I say I know that space and it's nice, but the sore heart is still there. Alright, we'll go to the sore heart. Put the heart of your hand onto it and breathe into it. Immediately I feel energy moving in the left side of my body. She wants to know what's happening. I say it's like a big strong dark person in my left side. I think of the big faceless man from last fall. Here I have to go back. I told her what the days are like, nothing to do after nine, that I don't like to be alone any more. She said write to Tom, no, the Tom in you, because there's a Tom in you too. It's about touch, she was saying. I don't have this in order. What does that allow you to be that you can't be when you're alone? Being the big strong man. She said, look at the other one over there. Just a little thing. I don't see much. A thin light little thing. My thin leg. The light transparent feeling on my right side. From the filling-in of energy on the left, the sore heart was gone. I had relaxed, leaned back. The big strong dense dark male one looks at the other one and can't see much, almost nothing. Just that feeling of slightness. A kind of blank bemusedness trying to look at her. I sit on the other side. Who do you see? I don't see anyone, but I do have something to say (remembering that big guy). I say I feel sorry for him because he's so strong and big and competent and he is unemployed. I go sit in the big helpless man's chair. She saw you, how did that feel? I know the hour is going to end any minute. How did it feel. I don't know except for that helpless sad feeling. She says ask if the other one knows what I should do. I ask her. In the other seat, I don't know. But I agree that he's disengaged. After nine I go off and leave him, Joyce says. We agreed they would have to find out together what to do, and that I don't know what that means. She said when he feels seen by you he would start to feel hope. I agree he feels hopeless. He's disengaged because he's hopeless. He's disengaged and she is disembodied, disenfranchized, Joyce says. It was all interesting, every minute, and it all made sense, and I don't have that fretty dull feeling. I was working very clearly with her, and she was working with me with her old fast intuition. I'm calm. It's interesting to think that there is something I've done for or with Tom I could do with myself, or whoever that big sad man is, who sees me as small, maybe the way Tom does. His silence. The big man in black clothes. [August 1999] His hopelessness. He sits with his forearms on his thighs and his big hands dropped between his knees. I'll sit with him. I see his depression. He doesn't see it himself, his dejection. I want to take his big hand and hold it. Will you tell me your name?     hanged man You hang your head     Is there anything you want?     YES Will you tell me what it is     Ellie, withdrawn, established strength, regret You want me to feel you     YES The way you miss being part of established strength     YES Are you left out because you wanted to be?     no The left-out man     YES I do feel for you     yes I didn't understand you are so helpless     I do feel for you, and I'd like you to have your place. But does this mean I'd have to give up my place and be just a woman     YES Is he all the real men in the world?     YES Who can only be happy if the women are confined?     NO Does this man need me to sacrifice myself for him     Does he need to sacrifice for me?     YES You want me to feel for you, and I do. But I'm afraid you want me to die so you can have all the power. Do you want me to die?     no Can you see me at all?     yes If I felt you, is there something you'd like to do? Reverse the process of exclusion, decide to. You'd like to belong. YES. Do you want me to help you belong? Yes. Will you tell me what you'd like to belong to? A struggle. Are you a fighter? YES. Is there a cause you want to fight for? Tempering. Are you a warrior? YES. You don't care what the cause is. YES. I see why she said engagement. Is there something he should be fighting for? He should be fighting for / getting through the thesis. But he's not. YES. Is there a reason why you don't? Because Tom is your dream of improvement and success. Are you jealous of Tom? No. I help Tom and not you? No. Do you want me to give up Tom? NO. But something about the way I am with him? YES. Because I neglect you. YES. Which is to say I neglect myself. No. I neglect my aggression? Yes. Will you sort this out for me? The wife in Ellie doesn't want to be in conflict. You'd be in conflict with Tom? YES. I'm smothering you to be happy with Tom. YES. It's true. Yes. The unemployed warrior and the wife. YES. Does that mean I have to give Tom up? No. Dear larger one, is there a solution to this? Yes. Will you tell me what it is? YES, imagining. Imagine aggressively? YES. Something in particular? Community leadership. Will you point that? Transitions. Transitions to responsibility? Yes. That was last August. I don't have as vivid a sense of him now. More like this: my aggression disconnects. When have I had it: at the end of high school, the way I just organized myself to get on. Making the garden, I just did it, the physical labor, the social finagling, the planning, the phoning. Then I go to the job notebook and it's true I get excited but it's froth. It doesn't connect with anything I already am. I think, I could put up photos of California hills and good clothes, in the kitchen maybe, so I'd always see them. But that's not it. - Measuring myself in Dewdney's Last flesh. His bibliography is all men, except for Sherry Turkle. He stood with his bulging forehead, his transhuman forehead, holding a beer bottle among the other men holding beers at the Kootenay School event, reading his more accessible pieces so they would like him. This book ends imagining the omega point. Popular culture, media, genetic engineering, cryogenics, immortality. Two things. My guy isn't like that. And what's different in my work is philosophical meticulousness. I am in a better position to talk about the effects of media because I have been carefully clear. But I will not be liked by the men standing around with beers. Christopher Dewdney Last flesh: life in the transhuman era - I'm going to talk about perceiving, imagining, and thinking, and about the ways representing artifacts and practices are used to support and extend those more basic kinds of cognition. These topics have had a long history in philosophy of mind, and a history among the empirical cognitive sciences that is so brief and recent that they are still being thought primarily in the forms they were being thought when almost nothing was known about how they were done. Where it is unrevised, this inherited manner of speaking about mind actually disrupts our ability to imagine cognitive processes as they are being discovered in the cognitive sciences. We are in an uncomfortable transition, which is also full of interest because we are talking about mind by means of the very same structures and processes being investigated. Rightly understood, rightly imagined, what we learn about how cognition works will have immediate implications. What we learn about how we use written language, for instance, will suggest how theory should be written. What we learn about how we use pictures in the presence of text may suggest how this text should be illustrated. What we learn about metaphorical uses of language or pictures will make us more careful with the cognitive effects of inherited metaphor. 19 Dearest you, It's Saturday morning, a bright morning, cold. Erasing, erasing. What is it I want. I want to want. I like seeing the crows these days. Do you feel discouraged when you see men like Dewdney? You're not a technological man, you're a physical man. And yet you are not a simple man. You feel no one can see you. I love your strength and beauty and your desire to live honestly. 20th What's different. I did start writing - then I started cleaning too - it is a more meticulous state that wants to order everything in the house. It started this morning by washing the work table. Tonight it cleaned the stove. The I-don't-want-to sullenness began to go. In the writing state I go for walks. I am not all the way there yet, but I have a week and a day. Tonight I lit a yellow candle, whose light is flapping on the blue wall. The all-out all-day work writing is, somehow earns pleasure. Thankfulness. I'm playing my own tape, the one with Suave sia il viento, the Bulgarian women, Frontenac waltz, Barry's Wings of Nike, Spem in allium. There Tom phones. He is sitting in the dark in his room with the window open on a strong west wind. He had a beautiful Sunday. He walked into the wind, which was a sea wind, not warm, not cool, salty. Because he was walking not riding the bike he crossed through the new subtropicals in front of the County Building. He was wanting to tell me that he sees plants now. He was walking in the wind repenting of having hurt my feelings by calling my inner man an oaf. Repenting, he imagined a wild boar skittering through the litter of last year's oak leaves, turning its head a little left and right to be able to see. There's no such thing as love, opposites attract, deal with it, he said he was thinking as he walked. Were you thinking it in a rueful spirit? Not at all. I adore your spirit, he also said. In that case, I'll keep you posted, I said. He was under his black and yellow plaid sleeping bag looking at white and amber panels of light on his walls, thrown from street and parking lot lamps half a block away. The shadow of his papyrus jumping. I was on my red plaid blanket in the shaded light of the lamp on the work table, looking at one bare foot and one foot with a big blue slipper on it. He's going to eat and go to sleep. We're starting to say goodbye. How about a kiss, he says. Okay! 21st What was it today. Not a good sleep, a house sown thick with mouse turds, mouse turds in my mouth. Pairs of thick awkward lesbians dressed identically in clown costumes. Some of them have a man in drag as one of the pair. I'm writing in a foggier state than I'm used to. I don't know whether it is because I am saying something I haven't thought through. I don't know how I can 'have an idea' without understanding it. I know my outlines aren't falling into place the way they used to. This first section is what sets up everything else, and yet it is or seems to be the last thing I've learned. And yet it was implicit in what else I found. I haven't been able to write any section of it without starting to write other sections. I am not able to see the order of the points and then hold to them as I write. Is it somehow because of the depth of the idea? I'm seeing a sort of clot with many arms - am I tracking toward or away? Anywhere, I find myself tracking along another. Maybe I should write a two-line précis of each section. If I knew what the sections were. I'm basically still finding the idea, I'm still testing it, although I'm sure of it. I'm testing the particulars. For instance I know I want to call it aboutness but today I had to spend a lot of the day discovering why that's the word I want, what to make of it, what it is I mean by it. Surroundedness: the world is all around. Kinds of motion: throughout, in amongst, alongside. The impulse in the sense of the motion and in the sense of the need that is its motive. The world is there, the living thing moves into it, its motion is directed, selective. It is directed because it needs something. Its whole state of needing and going for in a world that is there around it, is its aboutness. Something I like about this way of starting to talk about intentionality, is that the aboutness of the world - it stands about the organism - stands, moves, flies, swims - is there along with the organism being about it. The organism is about it by going toward it. About can name all three poles of the motion - the organism and what it's doing, and the spatial array of things it is doing it toward. The motion and its goal and the location it traverses, orients itself within. Do we have any other words that can, in this way, evoke the whole scene of relatedness: the organism, the object it wants or wants to avoid, and the background location that holds them related to each other? - Was that tension the tension of being held down     Do I run into it when I'm trying to do something     YES Have I locked the left side because it has that memory of being held down     My left-hand man doesn't try to hold me down but I keep energy from him because I'm afraid of that     And I struggle to do what I should be able to do easily     Do you want to say any more     no Here was another thing today: this morning I lay down while my food was cooking, to get a feel of how I was. I was clenched all down my body, as if I was straining against something holding me down. I thought of my dad's story of trying to hold me down. I tried revising it. Imagined him talking to the little one, saying he was glad he found out how strong I was and glad I found out how strong I was, but sorry he did it. It was wrong to try to force me down, it harmed me even though I resisted it. When I imagined him saying he was sorry I could feel myself up and down more relaxed. I felt energy mainly in my right side, where I could feel it again as I remembered it just now. 22nd Have I come to a halt? It feels like it. Today I've been foggy. This morning I was full of delight thinking it's going well and will be finished. When I stopped for a break I shouldn't have gone to the herb garden, because someone had pruned the rugosa in the corner and I was freaked feeling some enemy has grabbed control and will ruin it. And then I checked the rot on my front tooth, which is opening a line along the gum. What if it breaks off? And I shouldn't have read the newspaper. The night wasn't strong enough to repair me. Should I buy a chocolate bar? I need the computer so I could enter bibliog, etc, when I can't write. The table is set up for it. 23rd What can I surmise about evolution of nervous systems. I've said organisms as a whole are about where they are. What I've said isn't clear yet because I'm not clear what I mean by aboutness, but will get more clear as I go, I think. [long section on neural aboutness] 24 Janeen died Feb 22, 2000. What to bring her. Willow branches. They are leafless but had earliest small pussies. Rose whips with scalloped very small tufts of new leaves. Lavender, rosemary. Bay leaves for California. Fir instead of spruce. There should be poplar. I started to feel sad as I was hemming pants for tomorrow. That's how loss feels, it's a bemused feeling, Tom said. Here's the photo that's how she was. She'd have her mouth open. The most enduringly same thing about her was her way of speaking. I wouldn't be able to do it but I can hear her. It was part of her unusual naturalness. She was funny. She had a kind of flat ironic delivery with swerves and rushes. Her native humor was incredulity at absurdity. She was kind but she liked to name the thing. That must have been what happened the moment I first noticed her, which was when I was in grade seven and she was in grade eight, and we were standing around in a group at recess. I said something into the general air. She answered it in the direct way she had. We looked at each other and were friends. I haven't thought of it before but my life at school stopped being miserable after that. She was everyone's goddess but she was my first friend. I also remember the moment we discovered we felt the same thing about the bush. I was overnight at her house. We were on her bed reading each other's journals. Later she'd confide things she felt about sex, and by then she was too loose I thought, and I was writing Frank instead of her. When I was sixteen and she was seventeen she was gone to Sexsmith and later to Calvin College. I saw her when she was home for Christmas when I was seventeen and she was eighteen. She'd taken on American polish, lost a few pounds off her big round rump, lightened her hair and left it straight. She was less the bouncing farm girl but she still had that swift laconic voice. The next time I saw her was in New York. She was married to Gary and teaching art. They drove me to Kennedy Airport when I flew to Europe on Loftleidir, a late evening flight. Then I didn't see her for maybe twelve years, from twenty to thirty two. I phoned her and asked her to my show at Rhoda's. She and Gary had been in Santa Barbara but now they'd bought a place up the [Fraser] valley. There was the time I hitchhiked to Yarrow and she gave me cream of asparagus soup like velvet. We drank wine in the garden. Her dad had died. Then there was the time I ran into her in La Glace store when we both happened to be visiting. I invited her to the Peace River country show and she brought Gordon. When I was with Michael I'd think of her, because he had her Dutch nose and sideways jokes. When I went to Yarrow with Louie Ben phoned her at work and she brought home a bottle of wine. Gary had Kirsten with him, but Ben was still at home going to high school. After that there was the time she phoned me because she'd run across the herb garden in Country Living. She brought Kirsten and Ben to see it, Kirsten a married woman with a surprising low voice. Afterward we had lunch in the Chinese restaurant with her kids. It was a celebration. She was proud of me. Ben liked me. A man at another table was looking at her, I noticed. She phoned afterwards. That was a while ago - three years? Four? Then maybe two years ago a phone call that woke me. She was drunk and distraught. Gordon had left and she was scared of her drinking. I was saying what I thought Tom would say about AA. She said, I love you Ellie. I said the right thing. I knew what it was. I said, We've always loved each other. That phone call was almost the last. A few months later I phoned her to check in. I said I thought Gordon must have come back. She said he had. She was brief and busy. Maybe a year later M said she'd seen her in Abbotsford hospital. She'd had a stroke. Eight very difficult months, Gordon said. Okay, here it is from the other end: I said to myself, now the coast is clear, and sighed deep. I got ready today to look good at her funeral. I outlasted her. The men all wanted her, not me, but she's gone and I'm still here and in not bad shape in my spectacularly cut jacket. She was beautiful and good at sports and popular and easy and funny and had stunningly beautiful breasts and could draw and write and got as good grades as I did, and I had to manage anguish of insufficiency on her account, agony I was voiceless and valiant in. It's true having her as my friend made high school socially alright, where grade school had been miserable. I liked her company but I also had a hollowness of shame that I was so much less desired than she. I desired her myself, intensely, and was ashamed to desire in shame. [Oct 1958] As we lived longer I wanted her to feel that her desiredness had not given her what my undesiredness gave me. When she phoned me drunk and desperate I had a moment standing higher on the hill. What I said was true, we loved each other, but I hated my crampedness compared to her. Tomorrow I'm going to wear a bra that shows my tits. I'll still be lame, I'll still be somehow tighter and harsher. I know I'm less desired not because I'm lame but because I'm less vulnerable. She had the Marilyn quality, candour of feeling. She let herself down into pleasure. She wasn't deep but she was original and she was real. I know being candid as love woman has costs I haven't been willing for. She did get something for free, the confidence she had in candour was given to her by men she lived with, her dad and his brothers. But later she couldn't make a living on it, she had casual jobs. She had the house and garden Gary gave her. Her art stayed narcissistic. There was a reason she drank. Maybe she just liked the way it made her more herself. Is that duet the way it's supposed to be with the left hand man [dream]     She is the strong innovative voice, he's the support for it     Is singing energy flow     no, feeling He is supposed to support feeling?     no the work it wants to do Am I anywhere near correct feeling     no The attitude toward love woman of being dazzled by her     She had it toward herself     It was harmful to her     25 I brought home some of her wine from the community center in a margarine container. She was dying for eight months. Her face swelled. She was in the hospital, had surgery, chemo, had that lying minister visiting her reading scripture, couldn't speak connectedly, was frightened, was in pain. Had a second stroke a month ago, died. There were La Glace people I knew, La Glace people I didn't know. People who still call me Elfreda. Pauline, Jan's mum, who sat with her legs like parallel posts under the table. My mum was there in good clothes, a black straight skirt and black and white checked short coat, good nearly flat shoes. She had on earrings. Her upper back curves forward. She's seventy-six. Between the funeral and the community hall, when they were at the cemetery, Mary and I sat in the A&W talking. As I was driving home it was raining hard on the Trans-Canada. It got dark, it was hard to see the road. I was afraid of the driving, it was too much like being asleep, I wasn't sure I could trust myself to see what I needed to see. Especially on the bridge, I'm always afraid of the right edge. One thing I liked in the event was, it was fine to walk around looking grim. 26 When the congregation bows their heads I look to see who else isn't bowed. I want to stand witness. I want to strengthen them. I was defending myself by saying to myself things like, this is horrible, which I was feeling in an unformed way, or not even quite feeling. There would be a deep sigh, yes, the companion I wanted. The minister, a well-made youngish man who read scripture with no felt meaning, a power-coldness in his eyes, said Janeen's death and the mourners' pain were acceptable because god suffered more when his own son died. The audience is asked to bow their heads at the beginning of the service to prepare them to accept insanities, which shore up the system of father mythology that lets that cold-eyed man walk important in a submissive community. How should it be. The service there was for Pat Smith, where we sang Bread and roses and people told stories about her strong spirit and free inventions and work in her community. People should gather to bring together the story of the person who lived. We should have sat together and listened to the tape of Jan's story being read on CBC, her mother should have told us about her birth, I should have told how we became friends in a moment, there should have been a slide show of her drawings from small. The people of her community are too unformed to be able to do it. Talking to Tom about it, trying to, hasn't been good. He tried, he asked gently what my mum was wearing, but he hasn't put time into a community that can do it. He doesn't have my sick disgust at religion. I think actually he lets himself believe in an afterlife. That's damning, so damning I don't want to feel how much I don't like it. I want to be a fighting spirit and I want companions at arms. I dreamed - now I'm remembering - that Tom had spent the night broadcasting music - his music or his choice of music. It was a proud achievement but it was too much for him. He was drunk in the morning. It's the blur and drunkenness of religion. He hasn't really given it up, he hasn't seen what it is. He wants the circle to be unbroken, but it's broken. It's good to want it but we have to know we haven't got it. My weakness is the other one. I partly give up wanting it. I want it with less strength than I could. Than I do, maybe. I didn't like the way Gordon sat in the pew peering up at the minister, or the way when he saw the yearbook picture he said Marilyn Monroe, as if after all what he'd wanted in Janeen was her image. A life of passion and creation together, Ben said from the pulpit, defending in church the fact that his mother cheated on his father and then went on for years with the lover she didn't marry. I love Gordon, he said. He wore ordinary clothes, not a suit. At the community hall he put his arms straight around me. Both her kids are real. Kirsten has that straight clean don't mess with me quality. It's 9:30 Saturday. I have Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Can I think of the thesis as work toward making people who can live better     YES Do I need to feel the necessity more strongly     YES Can it go beyond the academic community     I wanted to see David and did, and discovered I'd needed something. I'd needed to be safe to feel. I came to his door and said I needed a hug because my friend died. I was in tears the way I couldn't be last night. What is it David does, that my mum doesn't, Louie doesn't, Tom doesn't. Joyce does. It's as if he gives himself to be the amplifier. I see him feeling what I'm telling him. He absorbs. I told him what Jan had to go through before she died. He said, She was thrashed. Yes, she was thrashed. I'm aware that what he does is partly technique, he knows how, he is in a way not whole enough to stand behind what he offers. It would melt if he were tested, and yet I'll take it with gratitude. Really the hardness of stoic hearts does harm. 27 It's 9:30 on Sunday. I got up at 4 and worked. Now it's as if my day is over. I sit down to that stuff feeling - whatever, hack it out - it's dead language - such dead language. I haven't got the computer yet and haven't revised what I've got so far, don't have the continuity with its following-through impetus. I'm writing a little section on neural epigenesis and know hardly anything about neural epigenesis. I want to say nervous systems develop in organisms that are already partly formed and are starting to move as they are being built, so the nervous system forms in the process of interaction. [*long section on epigenesis] This feels so sloppy it's not worth doing, but I am also too muzzy to do better. What should I do, stop or keep going. 1st March Faintly quivering on Wednesday morning. Teaching in four hours. In the next room, in the far corner, two points of light, one on the power bar, the other on the monitor. An awkward pile of beige plastic, a mess of cables. What's there to say. I go on thinking of Janeen. M sent me a birthday card with a note that was uneasily polite. Did I stun her with brutality, beating her off? I've been more brutal to her than anyone in her life. Was it necessary? I feel it was. But that time is over. I should tell her I'm sorry I harmed her. No, it says, she harmed you inexpressibly. So will it be necessary for Luke to harm me? Yes. And will he? Yes. I would want him to have redress if he needs it. She prays for us. Does praying make any difference? No, it says. I had a vision of the empty praying of the women, pouring themselves into nothing, a pitiable effort of vacuum. Watching is praying: watch and do. Tom last night was a torrent of mediocrity about Bush and McCain. I stopped him and asked why. He was in stress and remorse about my birthday present because he had promised marvels and not come up with anything and the day has come very close while he waited for payday. He was spinning in self-scolding. I patted him down some and he was a contrite little boy and I was his kind mum but when I hung up I thought, no - this is wrong - that's not how it is - this is the man whose energy and boldness and imagination and vision and trueheartedness have given me what nobody has been able to give me. There is no gift lacking. I haven't written about talking to Louie [on the phone] on Saturday evening. I wanted to talk about Janeen but by then there wasn't much to be said. She was talking about how she is with the best people she's attached to; she hasn't given the attachment credit. I said she's like that with the book too, which led us to ask to talk to it. She said, I don't know whether it will talk to me since I'm stuffed with chicken. A pause. Shout of laughter. It's very witty, she said: it says it's stuffed with chicken too. Talking to the book, at first about Janeen and then about feeling other people's difference, Louie started seeing her room as beautiful, and later I also started looking especially at the light lines thrown on the wall by the glass cullet, from two small candles set together in front of it. I was seeing a face bent forward, at first I thought Rowen and then I was thinking a woman with a veil, a darkness from her forehead flowing forward around the top of the lit area. She was looking into the source of the projection, a bit like looking into a little fire. Writing about it now I feel the trance state. It was a beautiful hour together, not what I expected, the zone of new being, not relationshipland. Access as if to the softness of embryogenesis, creation. I had asked whether it's possible to as-if look into anyone, and whether it's safe. It said it's safe and it is possible in this way: there's a door whose handle is in the abdomen. You don't go into them, you meet them in the doorway. Your field reads their field     Is this happening already     Is there an advantage to doing it consciously     Will you tell me what the advantage is     it would be done better More energized     For reasons of service     no For reasons of fun     Meeting in the doorway means one is oneself and perceives them     But perceives them by partly being them     But that is true of all perception     YES That's why beauty is     YES 2nd That conversation was dead from end to end. I thought it was me, eaten up by the ten hours straight in neural evolution and embryology, but now I'm wondering. When I started to speak I often got cut off. He was overriding me. I had that feeling of shame at emptiness, that I never have with Louie. It was not that I had nothing to say. I had nothing to say you wanted to hear. If I had been speaking to someone who likes me I would have had lots to tell. For instance yesterday the way it was in my office talking to Darko, who was asking me questions. I was something like dazed by his beauty. He was in an unusual state because he got a big fellowship to the States. His eyes are symmetrical, pale blue, he has a straight Greek nose and Greek lips, black curls. He has that fall of a sweater off his shoulders down a flat torso. He speaks very fast accented smart English. Looking at each other as he spoke or I spoke, a feeling of daring only a peek and carrying it away to go on seeing it. It wasn't personal the way it was with Dave Carter. It was objective, seeing that a stunning beauty was there, and being afraid of it. In lecture something I never feel - the Chinese boy in front of me pulled his girlfriend toward him and I felt lust. I looked across the aisle and saw a student with a ring in his upper ear and a short sleeved teeshirt. I was looking around to see who else I could feel it for, that one? That one? 3rd What's this like. Icky. It's morning, it's grey, it's cold outside this closed room. The day is going to be dull struggle, nothing else. I don't want to start. I'd rather listen to Dr Laura having fun. I'm ashamed of that poverty of spirit - a bit - but more, I want to go on escaping. Do you have anything you want to say about that     no It's just how it is?     Go to the table and do it         part 4 the golden west volume 19: 1999-2000 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project