| the golden west volume 2 part 2 - 1995 march- | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 12 March This material is so rich I feel I'm cracking whenever I get near it. I have the sensation of being tight, holding myself in. Should I talk about David Birch - a sore gentle man who is courting me - I seem to believe him now - with some grace. That is, he helped weed without asking what to do, and he knew to understay his tea welcome. Had a good question and listened to the answer, I mean listened so well that I told it well. Is still understating his interest in Louie. I notice I'm smelling danger. This is one to keep at arm's length because he's not impossible but he's wrong. He listens at his own expense, and he'll hold that against whoever he listens to. But he answered my ad, and was the only one who answered it. (The Strait cover picture, I mean.) He walks out his door when I park in his parking lot behind Sweet Cherubim. 14 Let me be less impervious. It's Tuesday night after two meetings, and school tomorrow. What happened today is that I felt the force of romantic hope. What if a man really likes me, really wants to know me. What if he's a good man. What if he's generous, brave, loving, presentable, what if he's present and sees and feels. What if he wanted to know me for the best reasons, what if he cares about heart and spirit and courage and experience, what if his desire follows these qualities. What if he is large enough to be able to cross his agonies as he comes to them, what if he has the right kind of hands, what if he knows what he's doing, what if he knows how to read my resistance, what if he takes pleasure in me, what if it would give him pleasure to make me happy, what if my being could make him happy, what if my presence would give him joy forever, what if I could see that joy, what if I could count on it in him, what if he could count on it and does, what if he knows how to go on steadily and win me, what if that's what he intends, what if he has skill and balance, what if he knows what I'm thinking. What if I'd like the face under the beard. Saying this I notice what I'm leaving out: sex, mind and accomplishment. Not necessarily sex, since I found myself aching when I named the other possibilities. But mind and accomplishment. Could he be what he might be, if he had done anything? I am right to look at this hope, it is for something so normal, an equal. Such a modest hope, that has been unmentionable. I need it out in the open, to be able to measure the limits of the real against it. I am willing to know every shred of his value and his limitation. I'm willing to know he lies and doesn't know what he's doing and is too destroyed to act for himself in the world. I'm willing to know he is seeing me wrongly, or that he is courting every woman he meets. I don't know whether he is inviting me to a delusion, methodically. I will find out. 16th What there is to say about Louie. Hours of wrangling. I don't tell her various things she would like to know. She moans whines and protests. After that we have stories to tell each other. We talk 'til after midnight. I hang up feeling how terrorized I am. More: I go fetch David B for a visit. I am sitting with him in Circling Dawn while Louie is knocking on my door. She's coming from Marshall who is telling her straight that what she is up to is murder or suicide. I'm relieved. She collapses into her baby voice of self pity. I hear it, I hear the intention to deceive: I'm just a helpless little baby, I don't want to murder you. David: an interesting dip. What did I learn. He has a beautiful affronted look when he draws his neck back and glares with his faded blue eyes, a fierce creased faded ragged look. Two, he dresses well, that black goat's-hair sweater and very beautiful boots. Those may be china teeth. He has short palms and long fingers, a weak chill handshake. He'll take a dare but he's more conventional than I am. How do I know. I did something unusual on the street and I saw his eye dart sideways. But he's outrageous in private. Do you say whatever comes into your head, is that your thing? I say sternly. That was about buying a house in Ashcroft. (He said to Louie that he'd have misgivings about moving to South Africa.) Well - it was both our fantasy. I'd want you not to overspeak your truth, I say. That's where he pulled back his head and said he has less and less interest in overspeaking his truth. He also said: I've done this hundreds of times, it doesn't bother me any more. I'll bet you have, I say, reminding myself to be cynical. I'm not going to take your word for anything, I'm going to watch closely, I say. Good, you'll pace me, he says, I'll pace you too. I don't need pacing, but you do, I say. We laugh. And then he is sucky - what a nice visit, etc. But as I'm crossing the street and he's going home I look back and see him raise his arm straight up and touch the parking sign he's walking under. It's the gesture of a tall seventeen-year-old pleased with himself in a shy light way, a lovely gesture. And a last thing - where he lives - in a stable, a workshop - a small tight corridor in the unconscious - spotlights with many objects. Here is a thing I don't want to think about: as soon as Louie finds out I am seeing him will she be after him with new enticements. 18th Looking for the hospital. It's night. I'm struggling through the streets with one shoe. This dream is vague and scrambled, I'm only writing it because the book said to talk about it. I can't find the wing I was in, where I left my things a year ago. - I haven't described Jim at Once were warriors. He had on red patent shoes, a gold chain. Dressed up to meet me at the Capital 6. How did I know you'd want to go to MacDonald's after, I say. This story brief to tell: the Y chromosome, he says, is more dynamic, it gates more energy, that's why women are back-ups. I lose it. I mean I forget not to take it personally. I put on my jacket and walk out without a word. Go find my car and drive home in the rain. First angry and then sore. I know he's pleased he hurt me, a self-spiting glee. Alright, boy, you've won against your wish. Good for you. Jake the Muss left gibbering on the parking lot of the Royal Pub. There you go. I hope you don't have bus fare. 19th I was in suspense yesterday. The string said it was to be called making a decision. I thought of it as a decision I couldn't make because of what I don't know. But it was a decision I could make because of what I do know, that x will hurt me, will lie, cheat, will betray. That I will waste time in speculation, waiting, obsession, fighting with myself, wrangling, discussing. That it will not be sexual joy (here I notice is the little voice of illusion wanting to say, you don't know that , but I do know I can know that), and that I am saying yes because - this is hard to say - I am so empty in my time off work, I don't know how to be full of everything there is to be full with, I fall into nothing, I'm waiting - I am not free - this is sore to say - I have to be tormented and fooled because the alternative is vacancy and hunger. 21st It's five-thirty, still dark. The Orford String Quartet, gentle Catherine Duncan, the quiet, the lamp, the rug, the floor - the knife edge of life, that I could have cancer and be dead in six months. I've crossed into the death-zone and am picking my way across a grid of knives. Saying more than that is saying too much. A visit with Louie yesterday. She was parking her little truck as I came from the store with two vanilla puddings. (I can see the hemlock now, with its arm outflung and drooping plumes. It is dancing in a way no person dances, peripherally. Its fringes are waving and swaying in agitated bursts. The window pane shuddered suddenly. Yesterday was windy and this morning the clouds are driving north. Blue daylight has come while I described the tree.) What do I want to say about that visit. She wrote my phone message after the electronics concert into her journal and read it to me. There are things I can't say about how her face grows sometimes into a large lopsided authoritative thing, or compacts into a pretty woman with a fine-cut mouth. When the pretty face is there I'm hung on it like a suction cup; when the large crooked face is there I hang onto myself, I hold myself tight and peep at it as if from behind a fence. I didn't know I was going to write about this, which is the life of the silent half of the conversation. What about it - that it's there, that it's silent beyond being unspoken. It is silent in the sense that it doesn't occur to it to speak. Somebody else is speaking and that sort of seeing doesn't expect to be anything but alone. What else. I watch the proportions of her willingness and unwillingness. I see her wanting to go on making me responsible for her slavery, and refusing to know how murderous she is in that hatred. I say what Pierrakos says: making me responsible is what is enslaving you. She keeps wanting to find me as enslaved, and I keep saying my enslavement is somewhere else. This: I think I am only enslaved when I am involved with someone, but my enslavement goes on betweentimes too, it is like an electronic implant. It is an electronic implant. Most of the day restless, craving, wanting to eat, in the afternoon trying to work, not concentrating, aching in my sex. I feel it is disturbance because I forget the other kinds of disturbance it is when it isn't this one. Now I wonder if I can go back to an old craving to escape from a new one. The reason I have to escape from a new one is that if I feel it I will lose my ability to draw the other person. But I think the opposite of him - that he draws me by feeling it. I don't like to give up the relation's little porch, where I can feel powerfully free. It is a critical moment, when uneasiness sets in. I think I have to contain myself, but that may not be the only way. I must have learned something about abandon that doesn't get me enslaved. 22nd The moment in a morning when I realize the sky is open. 23 He said, May I touch you? I put my hand out toward him on the table. He covered it for a moment with a length of skin so chill and damp I think I must have held my breath with shock - what does this mean - thinking of the deep consolation of Rob's or Kenneth's heat. I look at this man's utterly living face. My relation to it is wonder. I see it in a way that gives me a picture I can't carry away. I keep having to look at it again. He was haggard this morning and then became a light - is it the beard? I keep thinking I can't see. Uncle Neil. A Civil War soldier, he could be that. I look at him thinking, am I as old as that? And seeing the kid. We might have seen each other in the raspberry rows in Yarrow, or at Danny's Drive-In, he says. I imagine it with him. It's possible. His father said never touch a woman first, let her touch you. He thought of that when he put out his hand to shake mine last time, because he felt me pull back. I would like to talk to him lying down, not getting up to go home. Yes. He is intimate. But sex is not going to work. There is the temperature of his hand, and then there is the way his eye traveled absorbed as he spoke and I followed his gaze and saw a young man standing with his back turned, leather jacket, narrow hips, legs apart. Lightning. Soft lightning. The sky is pink. What would I be if I were not this. I'm caught. I don't know by what. Sex. A fog. A hope. 24 Sitting on the floor in the sun, awkwardly. He didn't know how much space to take up. I was looking at him considering what he'd be in a legend. An Irish fiddler, a stretched imp. But that's underreporting the patriarch: a ferocious eye and quite a harsh sensual cut of mouth. What I said - I didn't know how to tell it, I didn't know why I was telling it - I wasn't comfortable in the telling until a certain point (when I said, no, what it was is that I discovered there were two people in me)(and at that point he began to listen in an easier way) - what I said was, "I thought about whether I would marry someone who was impotent, and in the end I said I would. It wasn't that, it was something else." "What was it? Is it possible to say?" "It was love, it is easy to say. I lost the defenses I had had with men. I became quite helpless. I fell through to ..." - he was watching my right hand fall like a hammer - " ... the time before I started to be mad at my father." "It sounds wonderful," he says. "It was wonderful," I say. 25th Harrowed. A harrowed man. A wolverine not a wolf, not the alert rationality of the wolf. A creased harrowed long-toothed rust-red cat-mask I saw in the night. Saturday morning. My corner in the Calabria. I'm falling asleep. Close to tears. There is that business filmmaker looking at me. Look at this day. There are buds on the lime tree. 26th Sunday I said "trembling aspen, brome grass, ... salmonberry, ... and Indian plum." And then he jumped and shone in his chair. "Oh I just love you Ellie Epp!" In his cave with table drawn up to two chairs, the chairs facing each other not the table. Light that isn't candles but like candles. I have been looking at photos while he cooks quinoa and tempeh on a camping stove, he in his light and I in mine across the room. I'm going to sleep though there is more to say. 27 Here it is Monday. Just now I looked behind me at the curved glass of the cafeteria windows and saw the way my whole right leg hangs wasted from the hip. I was on the berm hacking at roots with a pickaxe and I'd see him carrying a huge hayfork load of dead broom above his head down toward the wild area. A haymaking allusion, I knew, beautiful to see. He was carrying his loads not on the path but down along the wild edge, because of twigs dropping, I thought, but then he'd come up that way too, a straight man with light straight shoulders. The helpfulness of fantasy, the way my helping self immediately thinks out plans and possibilities. He could be a farmer, I could come and go. I could give him a connection to people who make and write, he could give me a connection to land. It's hot - feel that - half an hour before I see Joyce - she will say to me, it doesn't last - I will say Joyce I of all people know that, what I need is to be told it does last sometimes, not everyone disappears overnight. Really, I have a full heart. Is there anything I need from Joyce? Do I need to say, should I mistrust this? I'm quiet. - And then: I told it to her in such a way that she said, maybe you should consider him. And I said, I'm considering. I told what I wanted to tell. "When I see the ... range in his face ... from fear to joy ... and all the other things between, I like his catastrophe because of what he has made of it. And then I think someone could like mine for the same reason." "You're seeing the value," she says. "Not only that - it's somebody else seeing it. The world has seemed so blind." I'm cracking. "Breathe, Ellie," she says. I laugh. I go on and breathe. She keeps quiet. I breathe more. My breath catches. It jerks. My torso jerks. I know how to do it so it keeps going. She knows how to keep quiet. I think I should put my arms out. I put them higher. That makes me cry. My eyes are itching. I wipe my nose on my shoulder. I lower my arms. In there I was quite dizzy, stunned. I don't remember much. When I come out I turn my chair to face her. She has her hand over her chin. She looks a very nice granny, but she's not at ease. She says shy. I say so I should be. Yes she says. So you should be, I say. No, she thinks she should be perfect like Buddha. Ten minutes. Time to tell her two dreams. She says the place to look is at the point where the woman comes and wakes me by sticking her implement into the fire. Then the beautiful dream of touching bottom and being taken through the wide garden. Then I want to talk to David and make the long trip on the bus. I'm on foot, I feel I'm on foot for the first time, coming down the steep slope to the ramp. Will the door be open. It is. I'll creep up the ramp, creak up it. Stand in the doorway. He appears from the side. I still don't know what he looks like. He appears to my surprise. So narrow. "Ellie Epp" he says as if he's wanted me to come. "Ellie Love Woman Epp." He takes a mat and we sit in the sun in a corner of curb beside the community center. It is a narrow mat. We are side by side with our shoulders touching. I feel him turn his head. He kisses my jaw. I turn my head. I'll do this. A kiss on the way past. Turn it the other way. These are nice kisses, very nice. Three. I've moved the chair this afternoon, it's in the summer position across from the window, and the table where I can work looking out. I will say also that when we were talking sitting on the curb after those kisses I was thinking, this man is going to be too slow-witted for me. Like Michael. I am going along with a future plan I don't know I'd be able to bear. I will learn what it means when someone is slow-witted, first, before I panic. I try to tell him my thankfulness. I don't do it well. He isn't listening well. He's distracted, I suppose. I say what my catastrophe was. He says what they all should say: "Oh sweetheart. Why did they do that? ... You don't know. I wish I could have been there." "You are there," I say. When I leave him I walk north toward the second bus stop. There is a second-hand furniture shop with an old green armchair on the sidewalk. I sit in it in the sun. The proprietor is talking to a young couple about a table. I sit and gaze. I'm quiet, on and on. I don't realize the proprietor has gone into the store until he comes back out and stands over me. "Oh, sorry, I forgot I was here." Is he looking annoyed? Doubtful. "It's a nice chair. Good price." I look under the cushion. "I can't afford it but I'll remember it fondly." He laughs. We laugh, looking each other in the eye. 31st Things to think about. We went from night to night together, morning sun on the left, evening sun on the right, naked in bed. Got up at five and had a red and green and orange meal at the table. Lay folded together in the now-green chair as night spread its soft black dots throughout. I had a little dream - I saw a mirror, like the inside surface of a sunglass lens or the right rearview of a pickup truck, set against green plants and reflecting the living stir of grass. The whole picture had the sheen of mirror silver. He had a little dream too, that he was pouring cream over my mouth. I saw a cream-colored porcelain pitcher and that's what it was. There were moments eye to eye on the pillow - shining - a young lion smile, lip, teeth, blue eyes, red cheeks, whiskers all the fox colors feathered together. "I want to fuck you again, Ellie Epp" says the shining boy. Moments when my womb and legs are humming with subtle light and my lips are fattened up. "Oh indeed, I see you do." The other kind of moment when I see his old bones, his scrawn, the old hang of his scrotum, the starved creases on the sides of his cheeks. His blank replies: "I hear you," "that's great," "wonderful," he says, disregarding himself, ingratiating. He knows how to listen to a story but he doesn't know how to tell one, is inarticulate, blank, bare, lacking that willingness to hold power. Then again: when we were first lying together he took my small foot in his hands and felt it all over, pinching the skin. I endured it wracked with an alloy of anguish and physical pain, I couldn't tell which was which. It was in my foot and in my face. Afterward I was alright. I admired his tact. At times his face was too strange. I felt: I can't endure this intensity of difference. From what, I don't know. A racial core, maybe. He looked a high-strung laird, or brother of a laird, bludgeoning foes on a heathered slope. Fanatical. The island of --- off Mull. Be-ach, a birch. - Phoning tonight to ask about the storyteller tomorrow. His voice when he hears it's me, "Hi-i-i-ie ," a sound like pure love. 2nd April The little girl I'm with in a roadhouse has been at the end of a room where a large man has been talking to her. She dips her hand into a bag and brings out her wallet or passport, something with a photo. She looks distressed and valiant, it was an effort for her to go back to where that man is. I take her to confront him. He's obtuse and belligerent. What did he do, he demands, all he did was tell her she had beautiful blue eyes. I say it's different now, children are trained to be cautious. I am calm and persistent, I back him to the wall. She is behind me watching. 3rd April Oh sorry night David, so close so fine so closer than ever, your Fraser Valley boy's voice on my pillow. You were showing yourself thinking, you were showing your tone of thought and I was listening, and my body was lying stunned with abandonment and failure, this man's manness doesn't love me tho' he does. It does not love me and never will, if I go on lying close with him we will come again and again to this lostness of trying to please because we aren't pleased. Be less polite: his horrible laugh like spasms of choked wheezing. His ponderous hippy philosophy, Ten keys to happiness by Deepak Chopra M.D. His body like a white corpse, starved, his weak little penis whose wanting is taken away to serve elsewhere. His apologies. His appalling wish to call me darling - "Goodnight, darling." His automatic conversational obedience, "I hear you," "I get your point." His eagerness to please every least one he meets. Is there anything else? His hypochondria. The way he takes ten minutes to floss his teeth. His bravery, his search, his willingness to adore, his mercy, his responsible thought, his shining, his steadiness, his close reading of my tone, his closeness last night, so close to every word. The way he said, "I could be your third hand. You want to take care of it yourself, and that's understandable, but I'd like to take care of it for you, and I think I could." (But then he didn't do it.) "To some extent I'm at your mercy," he said. That was principled, I recognized: the Alexander technique, 'letting be.' But I was at his mercy and he didn't recognize it. I was helpless, love woman overwhelmed me. He had seemed to invite her but he didn't want her, didn't know what to do with her, took his opportunity to torture her, used her to punish me. This is the fact we are stopped at. He doesn't know he was doing that. - Again. What's happening. There is a man, a stranger to me, who is after me, wanting me, wanting something. His presence is too much for me, I see so much, I see and hear him so particularly, that I am cut, I'm sliced. Today I'm sore as if I'm cut to ribbons. As if I'm beaten up. My forehead stings. His narrowness hurts me, his starvedness hurts me, his laugh, everything I think I judge in him is something that somehow hurts me. His list of ten ways to be happy is a wish to tell me how not to hurt him. I'm hurt by hurting him. I'm hurt by the irrelevance to me of his items: parents, cousins, quotations, 'relationships,' objects, clothes, events. A fantastic labour of observation, working to know him, to know what involvement is right, to assess him, to tell whether I have to second-guess him or can take his word, or when. To tell whether it's worth our work to be together. 4th Dennett's Consciousness explained. There is a sense that forms, in it - that almost forms, that is present - I can try this - behind/within some of my reading, some of my understanding - that eludes statement. I can't look at it [the sense]. He says that way of speaking can't be right. My guess is he's saying or should be saying we can't look at consciousness if we think of it as diaphanous substance. But we can - and I think he thinks he has to try to deny this - set up a simulation and talk about it in the way we talk about objects - although it isn't an object - in terms of seeing, examining. This is a misdescription and yet there is an analogical sense that isn't wrong, ie if what we mean is the fact that there is that link between perception system and description system which is part of what usually is involved in being with objects. [pages of Dennett notes] 5th I have half an hour. Clean skin inside my clothes. A cup of tea on the chair next to me breathing off coils of vapour. It's eight in the morning and I'm able to sit here in the green chair with the window propped hearing twitters and caws and motors and feeling the soft grey air I see. There are tassels on the maples, pale greeny-yellow. It is the time when the street cherry next to them is the magenta pink that matches their creamed-acid off-shade. I'm remembering writing that last year. These days I read and reread this journal as if needing to be in my descriptions. Is that it? Comforted. What I'm doing is sudden and complicated. I am thinking morosely about David Birch. It isn't going to work. He is too light-weight dumb and nervous for me, two million dollars or not. I want a big warm rational self-possessed physical man with a real hard-on, who can hold me steady from the ground up. A warm earth. Where will I find such a man, and would he like me. Just being attached to anybody, though, is helping me work - I notice. 6th So sore, so harrowed you are, anguish for anyone to see. And then if I touch you and play with you you transform to amaze me. Last night with our chairs pulled together, your candles from the side, I was telling you the changes as they came. The Victorian philosopher with deep eyelids and tragic responsibility. That makes you smile a smile no Victorian philosopher could. 11th Woke thinking that there is the looseness between language and what's described because language floats, I mean in the brain: I saw as if a cloud shape floating. Maybe it is brighter than what's around it; that's what I see. But what I actually meant is that there is such an unhardwiredness about the relation of the account to what happens. I precipitate a version. The event, the event I saw, and what I will say to myself or someone else, are hanging together by threads, the kind of fibre I see on the edge of a cloud when I am eye to eye with it in a plane. I was with Louie terrorized last night. She was lying on the bed pleading - trying to persuade - neither of those are right. She was directing a stream of force toward me, trying to compel me. I had one of those moments where I suddenly drop out of the conversation and see how hard she is working to try to force me in some way. I see her intent and the face she is wearing to try to enforce it - friendly eagerness as she feels it - and an extraordinary will to control, which I feel as the force of a stream of pressure the width of her face. I had my head up against the wall holding myself against the pressure by seeing it. Terrorized. I woke this morning with my solar screeching. What I am saying now is, Louie I will kill you if you interfere with me and David. - Something about that. I wrote his name and erased it and wrote it again. It seemed unreal. Maybe it is the wrong name. But the first part of the sentence is right: Louie I will wreak such vengeance on you that you will - Saying that, the solar opens, the heart is sharp. It is the first thing to say. What follows? 12th It is a morning greyed over - I don't want to describe - I was with D yesterday in his pullman bunk under the floor of La Quena - thinking now of the way I feel slapped sometimes when he says "You're wonderful Ellie-Epp." The way it throws me back to be suddenly flattered, as if I'm being told I was asking for that. It is part of the close-up fabric of these meetings, he's right there and then suddenly he's staving me off with something repulsively sucky. If I think of him in Dickens he's almost a hand-wringer, so obsequious he is, taking comfort in knowing the other person is weak too. And he has trouble with women because he tells them what they want to hear and then is caught out in inconsistencies. And he is not a worker. He doesn't start projects and finish them, he accumulates. What he does is sit for large parts of his day in social fantasy, writing people notes, thinking of little gifts and loans. Appeasing, I suppose, a sense of crime. Secret crime. That sense of secret crime shows in him, in his anxiety and anorexia. And yet it vanishes; there he is shining, teeth touching his round lower lip, bright red cheeks like Santa Claus, a radiant boy who collects blue plates, cast iron, graniteware, glass, old wood. And loves to be near. But oh, sex. There isn't going to be. I lie beside him in a sweet ache and fall sad. He likes kissing but my other sexual parts don't interest him. He likes to smell me. And I get something sexual from him, I don't have hot flashes since I see him every day. I've wanted to see him every day, a sip. A quarter hour on his lap touching cheeks and talking. But there's an anxiety, a glue-iness, dependence, because we don't satisfy ourselves like grown-ups. And yet, I imagine living with him. When you have your kitchen set up with all your things, invite me to see it, I said. He winked. He knew what I meant. Then I went leafing back in this book wanting to type out the story of David, and then seeing Jim's story and wanting to type it too. 13th What to say. It's over I guess. "Your head is lying, your body is telling the truth, and it puts people in a panic, it keeps them in a panic." I can't write it tonight. 14 Morning, sun on the red plaid, on the carpet, falling across the room. There's the hot water pipe brumming, Candace [downstairs neighbour] is up. It's a transition day. I'll clean house, wash my hair. - See how easy it will be, since my book-keeping is so up-to-date. There's the sigh that says yes. D who has spent the night with Jet, reclaiming one of his spares. And I'll give him a copy of the record, which will fall on him with lots of kinds of barbs. I am wondering whether I am as sleazy as he is - the string says yes - and if I am, why I'm chopping him for duplicity. And is that why I'm chopping him? I think so. Let me see whether I can get to what I think about this. What did he do? I don't know whether to think of him as cynical. He is as if cynical but really helpless. He lost his honour and is no one: he becomes the woman he's with, gets entrained by her unconscious, says anything she wants to hear, seems to feel anything she wants him to feel. "You're wonderful Ellie Epp." "I just love you Ellie Epp." An extraordinary mockery: he says what we most need to hear but turns it to tin. This is what I want to know, is the desire to hear it as cheap as he makes it? I wanted someone to see that picture on the Strait cover, I wanted someone to say "That is the woman I want, that pain and valor. I want to live the rest of my life with that woman." I don't think I'm wrong to want that. Here's the stake through the heart: to hear it but from someone who can't back it up. It is a demonic twist. It is as if the gods are sneering. Is there something to add, an 'and yet ... '? I want to be careful not to participate in the rape of young heart by taking pleasure in the writing of the story. And yet I do that. It is that habit of taking pleasure in my own betrayal that let David Beech get to me. The wolverine is a scavenger not a killer. He can feed where there is already a bad smell. What to conclude. Enough. 15 Haven't had a taste for reporting. Cleaned house today. When I woke at 6:30 drove to leave D's things on his ramp. A brilliant day. Walked in the garden on the way home. He phoned when he had read Another man who loves trees [collection of journal about him so far]. I thought he had a right to reply. He said quietly this and that. High school girls trade off boyfriends. He was waiting for the hammer to fall with news I was taking up with Travis. He didn't spend the night with Jet. His seminal vesicles damaged riding on the bike, he was drinking Ayurvedic tea for it. Louie drove past three times and waved. He doesn't want to be friends because I'll say things about him like I say about Rob. He's fine, because I believe a lot of wrong things about him. He was glad to know I had felt for him. If I have nothing I want to say, he'll go now. I encapsulated midway. "Ellie are you there? Ellie?" 16 What else I'm saying to him: it is irresponsible to make the kinds of claim you do, because they engage the most vulnerable part of a person. It is a crime to say them lightly - I know you didn't think you were saying them lightly, but if you say them without knowing yourself or without being free to say them or without having a good reason to think you will be strong enough to back them, it is as if you are lying. I want to say, I will help you. I feel you used a trick to try to get me to help you, and your trick has collapsed. So now I can help you, but only on condition that you retire your tricks, really retire them, stop trying to catch me. There are things you can do for me in exchange. They would have to be things you would find yourself willing to do. - Pining. The little arms of the heart holding themselves out toward the one who made me welcome. Sore. Maybe he is feeling it too. I am keeping myself away and so is he. The dust has to settle. Missing has to settle and then I have to look and feel whether I made a mistake. 1. I can't bear that he doesn't love my body. 2. It would have been a sign of possibility if he had liked the turn of phrase that tries to mash him. I like having been able to give him the record. Does he see I am honest at my own expense too, does that make him forgive it? What I see in the story is my rage at being sexually - dropped? - ignored? - spited? - what was it? It says he was generous to go into his zone of distress and I was pushy. The one moment I do want to have again, is the one in the early morning where I am saying how bad I feel about not having sex. I'm saying it's like being mocked. What I remember is holding his head and he saying, "That feels so bad I can hardly bear it." It is the sensation of his head in my arms as he says that, in the dawn light, as if the head is all of him there is. 17th I had something still to do, things to say to him. Too frightened to go say them. Wrote them. Felt fine. Drove down, strode up the ramp. There he is in his plaid skirt. And then it's fine. We are not romantic any more. He says this letter is sensible. He doesn't deny things. He swears about Karen cleaning his room and losing things. I say after what he did to her ..." - And the second time!" he says. He's laughing, he's admitting. And we're not clinging, he has the letter to his folks to write. "You're a good writer" he says. "I was hoping you'd think so," I say. He has weathered hearing what I saw, it means. 18th There's something I'm not feeling - what is it? Something I do feel - his nature - his rumpled wrinkled tender wise weak realness - we could be really good friends, he said. And we're not ready for the other thing, I say. We're eating dinner in his cave. He has on his ragged denim jacket, stands in the light beside his stove. Sits with me at the little table in candlelight. We'll go on knowing one another. I won't lose sight of his face. He is evading some of my questions, still. He is not wanting yet to show the whole of his unreliability. But I am safer because I've told really the whole of my disappointment and rage that he's not the one I'm waiting for and yet seems to claim to be. His eyes have tears. What are you thinking? That I do love you. I love you too. We sit and look at each other. 20th I saw something about perception yesterday. I had spent the morning, seven to twelve, going through the first notes I had on imagining. Just before David was to arrive at noon I saw something, and then there were a few moments when I was collecting myself to know that I had seen it. And then I felt it. At the heart. What? Fright & joy, but dimly. A pressure of feeling. What I saw was why there is confusion about perception. The terms - representation, information, even presentation - are mediation terms, x presents y to z, or y is presented to z by means of x. Perception is mediated - light, space, eye - by various things between object and brain. The physical story is a story of how mediation works. But perception terms - see, hear, feel - are not mediational. X sees y. The seeing body is made so it disregards the medium, doesn't see it, ignores it, sees through it. Some of the media might be seeable, if we look at them, but then we're looking at them. When we look at x seeing y, we don't see the medium then either. So it isn't a first-person/third-person difficulty. It is something about how to talk about transparent mediation. (Opaque mediation is when we see the medium. Pictures. And we look at pictures with the habits of looking at things, so we half-transparentize the medium even when the medium is opaque. That confuses us. Pictures are halfway between, experienced ambiguously, experientially ambiguous.) Perception is seeing that there. It happens in the body. I, here, see that there. That makes it direct. It is direct in that there is nothing interposed, there is no perceptible medium. As perception it is direct. It's not indirect. Perception is what 'direct' means. Touch is direct. Physical contact. Touching the blanket with the pencil tip. You feel the blanket. Touching the chair with the eyes. Motion transmitted by something that isn't the body, which the body ignores. Transparency is the presence of light by which vision can touch. So mediated. Mediation does not make it indirect. Looking in a mirror - is that indirect? In this sense of it, no, although people think of mirror images as pictures not as redirected light. It is more indirect because it is not seeing that there, where it is. Gibson is right. Detecting by means of invariants. But there is still a puzzle. The transparent medium affects the way it looks: evening light. The medium, the media, always affect the way it looks. The invisible media make us see it this way rather than other ways. Move the light. We are still seeing it directly, mediatedly, in the way we are made to see. 22nd Hardly wanting to speak. The magic materials in my notes had no pull - sex and romance do, my love stories. Can't want to phone Louie. Elated this morning - restless - zooming up Broadway - couldn't imagine anything big enough to do. Ten minutes with David. Who? Don't know. The one I said the worst to, who is still beaming - the one I'm not sleeping with - the soft edge of a beard - who wrapped his arms around me from behind and bent his knees around me too. 23rd Oh what was wrong with me today - a day I wasted - it's like being famished - craving something - do I know this kind of day? Restless - don't want to do any of what I could do, the little settled life. Yesterday it was as if there was nothing in the city that could satisfy me. I spent money stupidly. I'm stuffing things into my mouth. It's not pain it's pressure. Is it what they call tension? Does it have anything to do with sex? When I was young it did. If it goes on like this I don't know what I'll do, it's as if I'd accept anybody, to bring the tension down. I want to knock myself out. - Does it have to do with work? Is it planets pulling different ways? Is it something happening I don't know about? 25th Throw it all out - out - everything I know - outer space - in all directions nothing - lie down - nothing throughout - except this clench at the solar - saying I can make it, I can do what I have to - let it go - hopeless, defeated, depressed, I need something I can't get, what should I do, somehow stop needing it, somehow get it - what's the feeling - that there'll be no end of the tension - go more into the feeling, maybe if you get to the core, to the heart of the emotion you are evading, you will find that it is empty. That's therapy. I want to go lie in bed. Weds 26th I was glad to see Louie last night. We lay on the bed in the dark & talked about Rebecca West and other things. I came alive when I talked about the process of working. That made me feel I have been unconscious in what I'm doing, because there has been no one to talk to about it. I thought my strike has been about work - as if I need to take on an ambition, feel it, intend something. I have been at the department feeling what I felt at school, that I'm nothing, that the persons who are feeling me as nothing are not of any consequence, and yet I am concurring with their opinion, at the same time as invisibly proving myself in circles I haven't appeared in yet. Enduring at half size. Just enduring. I'm fifty and I'm at school repeating myself, as if I'm twenty-four. I should be far into my skill, I should be skilled in myself, knowing how to work with myself, established. Then I look the other way and see my parents, who know nothing, who have done nothing, who came into the world and hardly looked around. And then I think I can't expect to get very far. In working I have been feeling how far I have gotten, that I have been able to go into philosophy and feel my way - that I can feel what I don't know how to explain - a large error and something about the fact of mind that creates it. I have oriented myself by feel and come out into an understanding that is the beginning of an ability to do something else, I don't know what. I think probably I have to work differently now. I have to assume authority and not feel myself such a child. I have to stop being impressed by everyone. I have to be willing to feel I'm standing in front of people alone, not hidden in the ranks. I would like to be able to do it without bluffing. Why don't I talk about this. Why do I only talk about men. That's childish too. What could I intend, what could I be doing? I could write what I think about Dennett. I could slog less. But in the larger way - what can I really want? - Two things I need to say about David yesterday - there's a reason why it's these things I need to say - he was sitting across the room, and I was seeing that shape as if it was a young man's shape, elegant. He had on a clean checked shirt with an open collar. I could see the teenage boy, a moon boy, bike riding boy. And then also, as he's sitting with his knees apart, it's as if his crotch is blank, as if it's erased to the bone. Distressing and attracting, at different moments. Neither of these are aesthetic feelings exactly. They are ways of seeing what I'm feeling. But they are blind observations in the way his observations of me are blind too. What aren't they seeing? 27 A place I'm living in. I walk through it looking at the rooms. That room has someone sleeping in it. A big bare room beyond it, something like the quality of the bare attic rooms in the Valhalla house. I left the TV on. It's hard to see in the daylight. A big new screen. As I leave the room I see another smaller set facing it at the other end of the bed. I'm driving, being driven, neither of those but moving quickly & looking backward, down the road away from that place, north and downhill. I am looking at a barn with an interesting shape. Why haven't I walked this way? I should do that, and look at it. I'm quite far down the road & now I'll walk back. Putting on boots I recognize. This one has a long black leather lace that's new - I should use it for my other boots (the Docs). The right boot doesn't have a lace. I set out through the snow. It's going to be quite a long way. Will I be able to see, if it gets dark? The snow will be featureless. I come to a place in the sidewalk where the snow is deep. Up ahead I see the tracks plunging through snow chest-deep. I'll walk on the road. I come to steps that have been partly cleared around a pool or fountain. There is a covered walkway over on the right, like a passage under a building. I feel I should take it but it is long and I can't see the end. I pass two women talking at the mouth. It seems risky to go on because I don't know whether this passage has anything to do with the place I'm heading for, which is more toward the left and still a long way away. I come to a wooden staircase and take it one flight up. I find myself in a household and am standing looking around. A child, a boy, opens a door & shows me a causeway like a narrow boardwalk that points southeast toward the place I want to go back to, over a very broad chasm like a river valley. He says I must pull the puck. He must mean this rubber puck hanging by a line. I hang onto it trying to figure out whether I should pull it now or later when I'm over the river. Will I be able to balance, just holding onto it? It might be windy further out. I am moving as if I'm on a moving platform like a ferry and yet the boardwalk isn't moving. Up above, the wire is crossing through wash lines hung with bright print shorts I think of as panties. The lines' logic shouldn't let me pass through them, since they cross, but I am moving. I have the feeling I also had walking through the snow, that I can't see very much at a time. There's an emerald green wave of grass with plumes like froth, just a single line, below in a field. But there ahead is a huge panorama of the far hillside, terraces. Now I'm zooming above the river, very high above it, standing on a narrow strip holding onto just a wire. There's a stone on the hillside I'm approaching. That must be to mark the place where I should step off. As I'm just about to get off a tiny child runs up, bare rump, very bright. "Oh, shall I hold it, do you want to ride it back?" I look after him marveling that this tiny thing will ride it confidently out over that vast drop. 28th Writing without depth perception, a patch over my eye. Brushing out blackberries with David yesterday. I am diffident or dumb or simple or absent. Staying close to my bed. The phone has rung often. Once I was thinking of the Gulf & Fraser meeting tomorrow and when the phone rang it was Donna about that meeting. Then I thought of having to inform Muggs, and next it was her. And now - just now, halfway through the last sentence - Sharif, also about that meeting. What I'd like is a mum or daddy to come and hold me - mums do it with words, dads with warm big bodies. Having only one blurry eye makes me witless - I notice that any sensation seems thinner, maybe - taste, the sound of my thoughts. Just on the sill of May, first roses, the rugosas, the single yellow, buds on the others. Hot perfect days with a melancholy of absence; it's there but I'm not. As if I daren't spread myself out into a day where I am failed at love again. You're getting rid of me, said David, you have gotten rid of me.. I didn't say no. I've seen a head on him I would never be able to ... take home to my family. That's the way I say it though it is not exactly that - the test Louie & Jam passed & none of the men I could get. When Dr Jay was patching my eye this morning there was a second when I could ask myself if this is how it feels to be touched by a man who is acceptable, not mentally, morally, physically, emotionally so evidently inadequate that I cringe to think of presenting them as my - I don't know what word to use - my intimate. I study David's face the way I used to study Rob's, is there any possibility that he'll do? No, I can't stretch these moments in which I have been able to transform him to cover this other moment when I see the head he is, riding he thinks unobserved: more than sleazy, verkommen - what is it in English - derelict. I need touch with a man. The truth is that what I need I could get from many, no need to be fussy. The truth is, no acceptable men approach me. I will presumably go on touching men I won't settle with. I'll presumably go on being frightened of my compromises. What would it be like to have accepted that? (Hadn't I accepted it before Kenneth? No. I knew how to seem to accept it while the great hungry desire to be married was making me stare at Rob as if sometime I might discover he was alright after all -) What I imagine is depression. I'd be depressed. I still protest - I'm good enough for an acceptable man to want me. I've imagined therapy could make me that. Therapy can only lead me to feel whatever I am not able to feel. And that is quite a lot, because it lets me be in my losses without completely losing myself. And I want that, I've wanted that. Beyond that is there anything to say? I'm sick I think. Some. 29th Hello. Oh I'm feeble. A faint sun a faint wind. I don't know how to move one thought after another. Waiting to go to the board meeting, where I will be speaking smoothly, humorously, blindly, to good-enough effect. What, what? I want someone to speak to me & for me, explain me. I want a whole family of fictions like Rebecca's. People she made to be company. The one she didn't give herself until later, & then very faintly, was the one she wanted most. [Max in Sunflower] What is David McAra wearing today? Black jeans and a black teeshirt. He is older than he was. He's a lean fifty year old with grey in his hair that he still wears back in a plait. He's like Iain MacIntosh last time I saw him. Lean eye corners. Good teeth. Brown skin pink over the cheeks. He's stringier than he was, but he's not tight. He's still straight and loose. He has his specs on, sitting reading in a deck chair in his roof garden. What is he reading? There is a pencil behind his ear. I come up the stairs. He puts down the book. Looks at me smiling with his mouth shut. His eyes are investigating swiftly: how am I. He never asks that. I go sit on the deck near him. Look at the book. He goes on looking at me. When I came through the doorway I had the sense I always have when I see him again, the rightness of his face. I take a breath to meet the challenge. He comes to SFU to learn granular synthesis. We neither of us ever have a moment of uncertainty. Uncertainty isn't the adventure - the adventure is keeping close to the certainty one isn't used to. 30th There is a he, orange, vivid, wearing a good slate-blue teeshirt, his washed cotton shirt, jeans - a lanky triangle shape on the pool edge with me. Oo, what is it with me, I say. Horny. Like Elizabeth Taylor on hands and knees purring, he says. That was my story from the weekend Sun. She'd be furious, he imagines. No, it's good advertising that she can still get young men at sixty, I say. He whips across the path, What's this? Iceland poppy, I say. It is a sour moment. It was nice at the river yesterday. We had a simple stretch of dusk, water reflecting dusty rose and a line of northern black poplars. There was a wash and the pink and satin-grey separated into bands that rolled toward us. We saw two herons flapping ungracefully. Buttonhole ducks. We were on a flat rock, he was behind me with his arms around me. I had asked him about Jet and that had eased something. We had picked cranberries, been in his places. Met a dog together, looked at an old car. And then went on & ate at the Rubina. So kissing in the car at his door was slipping on his lip, his wide cushiony wise-enough nice lip. So today I was happy to see him standing with the work party eating lunch. He said he likes women with brains and has bought their time with sex. It's Neil. He won't have real sex until he lets himself fancy Uncle Neil. He'll be someone else when he does that. 2nd May Trying. It was an ultimatum I put into his padlock last night. He woke me this morning. Talked. I listened. We both had hurt feelings. He'd misheard something. He came over - this is the way people write diaries - I haven't the energy tonight to do better - and we were in bed all day. It ended this way: I was sobbing patting my head holding myself by the shoulders. He put his arms around me and I stopped crying. I said, "There is nothing I can do, there is no way I can be, that will make you like me. You're a fake. I want you to go away and never come back." I was breathing very loudly and didn't hear him get up. I heard his belt buckle, I could hardly hear his step but I heard the downstairs door open. My entire body was rushing, arms, legs, trunk. Went on breathing, lying on the pillow. When I stopped I could feel particles in my head, confetti in front of my closed eyes. My hearing was changed. Something that might have been a sound in my head or might have been water in the pipes, quite a wonderful loud fibrous tone. I wasn't angry, I wasn't hurt. I'd said "You're a fake" in a factual way, speaking for myself, as I felt it. It felt like something I should do for myself to defend the body who had been crying & who I had been stroking and patting. I wasn't hurt or worried that he was gone. I was interested in the rushing, how hallucinogenic it was. I wondered whether it was something unlocking or just hyperventilation along with parts of sexing that had been going on all day. He doesn't know how to open his field. The only time it happened was when I talked to him carefully & sweetly about Uncle Neil. Then I felt his penis bumping my thigh & my breast tips kissing him. I put my mouth over him - a nice round lip like his lip, but so unhard no matter what I do. He got into me finally at the end of the afternoon, insecurely. He wasn't breathing. He was interrupting himself, not concentrating. I was worried, oh please don't cut yourself off. He melted out. That was when I just nakedly cried, I'd come so far, done so much, been so willing. 3rd Day after. I am aching all over. It's illness. Something. But I'm almost peaceful. Working. Not driven toward anything, not driven to make up with Dave Beech who left a note under my mat that looks angry and says he's embarrassed, which doesn't make sense. Leave it. "I deserve someone who's beautiful to me," he said. 5th The sight of people my parents' age, who were twenty when I was born, celebrating VE day, Dutch women singing Bridge over troubled water, veterans in berets, farmer caps. Young men went away and came back having done something they can think of as a life's work. People certain they have a story, living in it again. 6 I was born into a time of relief and elation, and also probably social uneasiness, since my father had no part in winning manhood in the war. Manhood took the stage in a way no one could resist. Women born since haven't had the same reason to be impressed or grateful. Does my intransigence about demanding a he be hard in me have anything to do with wanting to know he can defend me? A biological relation. Then what would such a he require of me? Children & sexual loyalty. I blew it, biologically. I had children with men who couldn't defend me. I still want to be defended but I have nothing to exchange. So I can't have a biological relation, but I want a sexual relation. His body would need to believe there'd be children. Is that it? Should I say David's biology and his psychology were at odds? And mine too. 7 Dennett's difference is that he admits the introspecter is not separate from the introspected. The introspecting is not a person looking at an object, but we report it as if it were. It is: a standing together of a questioning and something evoked. There is no fact of the matter of experience. There is a fact of the matter of neural configuration in sequence. We could say later: you forgot this. Dennett is creative in ways the academic sloggers aren't, and that's why I like him and why I can understand him - but that hasn't said anything. It means something precisely about introspective tuning, I think: he is more aware of the texture of his own process, he is less separated from something. - I am peaceful since I said what I did to David. Strangely. I have been sick, aching, but peaceful. Last night sitting with my back against a tree above Britannia's playing field seeing the city, the shape of the city, against a wash of evening orange and blue. Hearing a cat's tags jingling as it runs across the street. Further down the hill seeing just the shapes of two children playing on the sidewalk, a one year old staggering always on the edge of falling, a seven year old in a dress running toward her bent forward with her arms out. They were half a block away across the street, on a slope in front of a hedge. I was watching two people walk uphill toward me, under trees, on the sidewalk that ran past me, a tall man and a short woman with sturdy legs holding his hand. I had watched them come into view in the half-dark, listening to the quality of their voices. When they were close enough to see me looking I turned my face away but I stayed with them, listening to their footsteps. "Good evening," the woman said. I was as if caught out but also as if approved. And then the man, when they were past and upslope, turned back to say I'd found a good place to view the city, and I said yes isn't it in the acquiescent unwitty way I do when I am giving my attention to something else, usually to scanning the person. I think he was doing that too. A more thorough and personal look between me and her man, checking each other out. One of the edges - I see an outlined border, a frilly edge - of this peacefulness is I'm scanning for a man - at the movie yesterday, on the street. Remembering the sensation of scanning and also the wonderful lie of the city when I turned back to look from my car parked on Cambie - clean air, open sky tinted, the city simple and complex, shades of grey blue with pricks of light, the feel of air for miles lying so lightly, not lying at all, floating translucent and still over the city submerged, a shaped copse of towers magicked in color. 8th Wanting to see the archival stuff not the old people, looking for beautiful young men as if I want to find a lover among the men in uniform. The old men all look the same to me, among the young men I'm looking for Kenneth, but it goes further back, someone I was looking for in Ken - someone he was looking for himself - what is it? - hunger for a mythic man, and why is he a Scot - Sitting with young women in the herb garden this morning talking about designing something that defends - I didn't call it this - love woman. With Nathalie getting signed into the Center for Experimental Mathematics to be able to have a home page and ask for tapes. Silicon Graphics machines, beautiful screens. I said, tell me how to list videos. She said I'll make you little icons, you can click and get animated clips. 10th Muggs said David wrote her a letter and resigned his plot. Then I was sad for the first time, as if I'll never see him again, what he knows, the names of birds, his boyness and nice clothes, his interestingness and eyes. Monday 15th It's 4:30, dark. Why don't I have anything to say these days. There's nothing new, except the moments deep in the texture of working, which I am writing as I work. Does that ability to see into the thread of philosophy depend on living a life whose frame is familiar even in its pleasures? The first roses in glass jars next to the radio, sleeping with Rob yesterday afternoon, going to a movie with Louie, plant sale at UBC, pangs about Ken Sallett, who I can still remember how to miss. None of that needs telling. I'm puzzled how David can vanish without a ripple. I'm stymied by Louie's hatefulness, our talk is so policed it's dull. The roses are nice but there is something too sorted about the colors in the garden. My muscles hurt as if there are acidic juices standing enfolded in them. Falling asleep holding Rob - that was interesting, it was a drift onto, and off, and onto again, a shoal, a sandbar, with water shallow above it, cool and showing its tint. There is one bird. There is light in the sky, a smell of the coast. Cedar mills. There is country air I could find a way to.
|