Work and Days: The Golden West vol 20

the golden west volume 20 part 1 - 2000 april-may work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver 13 April 2000

I'll begin this book in a dim welter. What is it, the way I don't want to work. I read newspapers, talked to the book, lay in bed looking at the light on the ceiling, read the last Castenada, ate a cookie, ate ice cream, ate breakfast at the Havana, browsed shops on Commercial. Clinging to any kind of light rather than die into work, is how it feels - shamed but rebellious - but I willingly die out of the light when I read newspapers, so it isn't that. I throw myself into shameful emptiness rather than - what? Rather than what? What exactly is it I hide from? The struggle. But what is the struggle. The body doesn't like it. It takes a toll. But I willingly do for instance garden work, which also takes a toll. Could I understand this? Does it have to do with who I become when I work? But who I become when I avoid work is worse.

I am willing to die into newspapers but not into work. If I had real life would I be willing to work? If I could write something of my own would I be willing to switch, take up where I stopped when I stopped typing?

The sensation of killing time waiting for my mother who doesn't come. I used to be able to shut if off but now it is weakening me. Can I work if I feel it? Is that going to be my condition of life from now on?

14

There was an image of a woman who called herself Praximander? - Prax-something - in her oracular function. It was an image of a woman's head and shoulders on the right, and a man whose shoulder overlapped hers transparently on her left. The two heads were joined by maybe five strings made of green (I think) light. Her face was a clock face, and the spoken caption said it is valuable to tell people what time it is.

Is it the answer to a question? I have a question. I don't know whether it is an answer to that one. My question is about writing.

There was a part of the dream where I was looking at a series of photos, a series showing a bank in the forest that had been cleared by fire. It was shown becoming more formed. There was some regrowth but the way it was becoming more formed was subtler than I expected. There was also erosion that showed rocks in the soil and had carved shapes. Another series showed the face of a young man with long hair who was looking at something out of the frame. I thought he was a scientist, he was so absorbed.

Series are variations. We look at pictures and the brain snaps from one configuration to another. It learns that visual abruptness, which there never was in precultural time. And photos that stretch the dynamic range by showing views that aren't dynamically simple.

In the next ten years I have to get all of that writing out, published. I have to put the PRC material out on CD, finish the garden video, promote the academic work. Will there be time for new work too? And the other worry, immediately, that being with Tom isn't a good context for what I need to do. He involves me in so much irrelevancy and he doesn't value what I am and like in writing. What else. The journals.

Lyrical work. I was a young woman with short hair who put on the Syrian dress and sat at a typewriter in front of the delicately green wood of a wall she had assembled. In front of her were images. Across the corner of the table a mirror. There was light all around her, the light that comes into a north room on summer evenings. The scent of phlox. She had written her way into beautiful vision. She was beautiful, in the light bright way she wanted to be. She could feel antlers breaking through the bone at the sides of her head. They were there to read what was invisible in the air. What I'm feeling about those years is the lightness and clarity of the air. I had become myself for the first time. It had to do with vision in both senses. Lightly incisive judgment.

Just before I woke there were two European professors, beards, accents. Old men. One was saying, "We are of the egg." I looked across to Louie and said, "He's admitting it." He meant even old male professors begin from the organization of the egg.

The way I miss wildness. Tonight I remembered what wildness was like, a fear of being lost. The beauty of the young woman who felt that fear. Her bursts of visionary feeling. She had lost the ability to think long thoughts. She needed someone else to judge what she had written. She could form something but she couldn't tell if it was good. There's more to know about her, she wanted the beauty of feeling but she didn't want to have killed her clarity to get it. Her subtle judgment that needs so wide and steady a platform across the worlds. I said I didn't begin to exist until then, 32, and really I hardly care about any time before it. Think about that.

15

In the past days I've had mysterious trouble with computers. What I wrote yesterday vanished off both my hard drive and the floppy. There's a Cap A virus my virus program doesn't pick up. There's all sorts of junk written on the floppy. Unerase can't find files. Crashes on the Publab computers. A printer failure. I was lying awake at 2 AM tight at the solar thinking of myself as a computer. Metaphoric fear of being erased, infected with self-destructive programs. That has already happened many times. Reboot.

17 pages of bibliography merged, sorted, proofread. Scanned 3 illustrations and text-scanned their long captions.

I entered my name in Lycos search and there were 30 entries. 2 course syllabi, my own front page with its pink hand, Jim Brigg's reading list, Andrew's student pages, Arts Council of Great Britain list, Pleasure Dome, Dazibao, Songbird Project, Arthur and Corinne's notes, Moving Images, CFDC and Canyon, my CV, the SFU review of bright and dark, a notice of Barry's piece. I liked finding there are traces.

16

Sitting down at the table and for some reason I am inventing clothes - beautiful power clothes - clothes for the fine house - which has already got me to take care of my teeth and buy things for my skin.

I have today, tomorrow, Tuesday morning to finish the rest of the neural stuff before I go. Bite down, friend.

17

Have begun to go around saying I have written 150 pages of my thesis and have another hundred to go.

Five more days on the ground. Talking to Tom on the phone, lying in the green chair yesterday, I found I had unbuttoned my shirt and opened my zipper and was stroking my skin all over as I listened to his voice. It annoys me to feel I'm alone in the stir of innocent hope. When I was in bed later I found I was having supper - bacon and eggs - in the beautiful house, with moonlight pouring into the center, and a fire behind the table. I was with a man whose face I didn't see, who used soft scarves to tie my arms behind my back so my breasts jutted. He had blindfolded me. I could hear him stroking oil onto his hard-on.

-

What I did today - wrote sloppily about core dynamics. Went downtown to try to recover the four pages. Found I've lost everything else on that floppy. All the grades on the spreadsheet.

Working with scanner accidents in Photoshop, hours. What did I make. There's a square wave filter I applied to an apricot-colored cloud. It made a paradoxical picture of squares of spaces hung at different distances. The edges made them seem in front of and behind each other; the difference of the color made them seem squares of air. Then I picked the most intermediate of the colors and put a few lines of text across the picture. It would melt into the parts of the image that were its color: a lovely look for text's edges. I did it on the clouds themselves, in tiny letters.

Another kind of thing from the same base image - a filter called blur edges, which doesn't blur but takes white lines from contrast differences, so it's like Cy Twomblies, white on black scratchy line drawings of bird gods and a person running in the rain with a small unicorn.

I burn my eyes with this computer stuff or is it the retinol or the heater or something else.

18

Louie's photo of the rumpled red blanket on the sex chair is on the cover of Lydia's novel which is just out - stone-faced Lydia does not know that sly Louie is getting revenge.

19

The meeting with the Indians. Hertha, Muggs, Joann and I opened the garden house at seven. When we wound up the shutters there were the espalier rows flowering white, with grape hyacinth and other bulbs in spring colors on the ground.

Our invited Indian consultant turned out to be a big New Age woman who said she was Mohawk but looked white, had dyed orange hair and wore a flowing print shirt around a bulk of gut. The gardeners and Maquilla were sitting with the fire in its little box present as one of the stations in the circle, when Rodney and Dave and an unknown woman who turned out to be Rodney's wife Kat, showed up. Rodney is some kind of cross between Indian and settler, I would say. He is as dark as an Indian but his greased hair falls in curls and he dresses like a rancher, cowboy boots, big belt buckle with stomach in a nylon plaid shirt straining over it. Beaded cowhide vest for the occasion. What is the name of the look he has - he's a shit-disturber, Maquilla said. He looked different at the beginning of the meeting than at the end. A nasty aggressive look. Dave we know from other meetings: a thin man with a hound's face, whose eyes I often found fixed on me during the meeting. It was as if he was the reader of their group, an ancillary person, in fact the unconscious. He speaks very officially, does a lot of formal thanking. I don't respect him I suppose for the sense of hanger-on there is about him. He is quite stupid, I think. And yet he has that look of reading. He is non-native and has taken Tom and Rodney as his elders. But he isn't white - he is a strange pale bronze color with strings of pale orange hair. From an unguessable tribe.

The meeting was chaired by the youngest and whitest person there, Simcoe from the Youth Alliance, with Susan in the chair next to her there as her mentor. Simcoe has the smoothness of the privileged white - sleek blond hair sliding around her head in layers as she turns her head, fine-grained white skin, well-cut big mild eyes. She had the confident ditziness of the well-born, neither reading the room well nor holding a firm line. She's in training, I guessed. But also she was I suppose disarming in her pretty youngness.

Rodney launched his story at full energy - a group of people charged him, he saw them and said, Oh geez, here they come. Five hundred years of history.

The circle was mostly women and they were thinking this would-be boss-man was going to want to control the meeting. There was a little milling over procedure. Simcoe did the right thing and asked everyone to speak in turn. Joann with her voice of placid good sense said what would perfectly ease his fantasy of being charged by land grabbers: she said we never think we have the city in our pocket, they evicted us before and they can evict us again. And then Muggs who had been visibly struggling with feeling, and was sitting cross-legged on her chair in her meditation group pose, let herself slowly into her actual passion about the wild area and her responsible concern for the downtown East Side. She was magnificent. Maquilla in the chair opposite lifted both hands in the gesture of acknowledgment when she finished.

Hertha didn't want to speak. I said I agreed with Joann and Muggs. Susan said the experience of the EYA is that things can be worked out. And then Bell, who had crept in late, began. We were holding our breaths, because Bell is fascist and racist and unconsidered in her speech. But she was good - she was her little, old, self, wrinkled brown like a seed potato, telling what it's like in her flat next to the garden, awake at night hearing the frogs or crickets or whatever they are stop sounding in the pond. It takes fifteen minutes. It goes on all night.

Maquilla when it was her turn said, Here is this woman - what was your name - Bell - do you mind saying how old you are? (Bell minded but she was witty: I'm sixty-six but don't tell anyone.) Here is this woman working all day raising food for the homeless and she has to keep running down to chase the hookers and the junkies.

Maquilla was laying it on from very limited information. She said she was a bundle carrier and had been dancing and sweating twenty years, and that she's a seer and has been since she was a little girl. Having bad energy like that in the sweat lodge is very dangerous to the participants, and it is making anger between the gardeners and the natives.

Then there was the one male gardener, who is new and has a name that suits him, Derrick. And then Kat, sitting solid with both feet planted, bronze colored, with a rim of round flesh around her jaw so she had the look of a moon or a fish, glasses, pure-blood Salish, visibly. She recited her entitlement. She belongs to one of the three main families of the coast. Her uncle up the valley is the whatever.

She dealt with Maquilla without rancor but thoroughly. They always purify the lodge. Many people have sweated in that lodge and no one has come to harm.

Then we had come all the way around the circle, milled around for a while. What do we do next. Rodney saying he was willing to do this and that, he'd been willing when he came, he talked to Muggs at Carnegie, and so on. I wanted to get to practical matters. I said there were six points that needed dealing with and that I thought we could get to at this meeting.

Somewhere in there Tom De Wolf came in the door, that nice-looking man with braids, glasses. Susan and Simcoe were suddenly concerned, something procedural. He's supposed to join the circle. He does, uneasily. He says a piece. Rodney and Kat are his elders, he'll never be where they are. He just wants to pray. If people want to pray he lets them.

When he's done I want to go back to where we were. I say maybe we could start with the question of smoke. If the firewood is wet or green it will smoke but if it's dry it doesn't. Should we have some kind of covering for the wood? Susan presses in behind me, unwisely and unnecessarily, could the sweats be early in the morning or later at night?

At that point Tom gets up to leave. There are bad things happening here. "If I stay I will do something I'll regret. Rules and regulations." He's out the door. Consternation. The protocol people seem to believe something has happened that means the meeting is over. "What am I, chopped liver?" says Rodney. Those of us who don't understand the point of protocol move on. I go back to the six points: the wood, closing the gap in the blackberries, the water line into the area, the entrance from the garden and should we make it less visible, planting the cedars and willows, and how shall we go about making a written agreement. We deal with them easily. Rodney by now is relaxed, affable, saying he understands he was playing a movie and he had got it wrong. The meeting is over.

Maquilla has a concluding trick in her bag. Seven leaders of world religions have lit candles before the new year and she has a candle that was lit from a candle that was lit by a candle that was lit, etc. She has brought us a candle, blue for healing, which she will light from her candle. And if we have individual candles we can light them from that candle. Muggs scratches around in the cupboard and finds all of us candles. Maquilla tells us what the colors of our candles mean. Naturally I am not taking this seriously since the leaders of seven world religions including the Dalai Lama, who is the only one with enough glamour to be mentioned by name, have no credit with me. Joann bemused to be told that peach is for renewal of love in her life. My little stub was white for purification, which I'm muttering to Hertha is a word that always worries me since I don't know what it is that's being cleaned out, and it might be something I don't consider dirt.

I think the general feeling was that candles are nice and the hocus pocus was harmless, except for Ros who wouldn't have a candle because, she said, her family's religion makes significant use of candles. I didn't understand the danger but I was interested that Ros who I think of as lightless, though she's intelligent, refused even this lovely small affirmation of soul presence in a circle of participation. Jewish or Catholic candles are never that - they are lit in the places of ideology and signify something like abnegation of individual self in support of some idea - the platform in front of a saint or the branched candelabra of an intellectual hierarchy.

And there we all were in the garden house.

I've scratched this down on two mornings, aware how interesting it was as an event and how well it could be written with much more care.

San Diego, 25th

What's the question. I'm not properly connected. I don't have any eagerness to tell. It's maybe the flatness of established connections. But there's a dull ache at heart. I'm not very interested to be here. Small true discouragements I'm not connecting. There's a disappointment and it's glossed. What is it really. He's covering and trying. On the airplane coming down I was sitting frozen with an ache at heart I didn't have a reason for. Are you (I can't remember, I come to a halt) lonely? It sighed yes. Something else. Something about work. It has been an ordeal. Yes, it said.

After I'd said yes to those two words I looked out at the wing motionless shining high above the shining clouds and felt a wide shining peace very alive in its small small motions.

I loved it in the park in Mexico when Tom said, To be honest with you I'm so bored, I'm either at the edge of a great depression or I'm going into something new, I'm bored with sobriety.

I, me, I'm bored without the hype of romantic fear. San Diego now is just a city. Tom is just a man. I'm bored without myself, romantic fear gives me myself interested. I want to say life isn't worth living without emotional energy.

What else. I'm still suspended about the work. This is just holding it off.

28

I've tried not to think rebellious thoughts because they are only that. Truth, please come to me, I try to remember to say.

It's 9. Check-out is at 12. I have to decide what to do.

We watched a movie that had a rich blond beaten by the Sardinian deckhand, never showing a mark, and finding her true self in then being fucked by him. Tom said, as he often has, I've never hit a woman. I said, lightly, I know you've hit a woman, you're lying. And then watched him - didn't watch him - amazed - tap dance. How do you know that, it's my business. Watched him try to pervert my spirit in order to go on hiding. I packed fast. He was trying to bar me but he wouldn't give it up.

What's the question I should ask. He has hit all his women. It was worse than I thought. He needs a woman for his very life, he feels - maybe rightly, I don't know - but he also feels he has disqualified himself.

That's what it is for him. What is it for me. I have not been seeing him. I've been cozying with him without seeing him. I have seen him looking almost like a certain kind of man it would be a cachet to have. I've seen him trying too hard as if he is making up for something. I've wanted to forget who he is. I'm going to see my sweetie, I say to people, proud to have a sweetie.

Why am I with him. Because we have always come through. That means I am afraid we won't. I am never fooled but I am afraid I can be fooled.

Is it true that I'm never fooled?

What about the other part, wanting to be free? That part does pick pretexts to get me out the door. I'd like an open future. I'd like that feeling of open possibilities. I'd like when my thesis is done to have no liens. It's awkward having to work around Tom. I feel the spirit can't move me if I've got one of my corners pegged. On the other hand I'd like to be someone who's past beginning, who makes it past beginning and belongs responsibly.

-

Next from Pokez. I'm so tired. Slow and silent.

Process Tom's addiction and deception, it says.

Am I to agree to his dope no
Am I to leave on its account no
My heart with a stake through it, my heart is crucified no, it is open
Is it my own pain no, his
If he smokes dope it will be lingering death
You want me to accept the lingering death
Why it will give you strength, justice, pleasure and reserve
Are you sure
You want me to be a martyr
Is it for me
So I will know the consequences, so I won't evade them
Am I supposed to be alone with you in this relation no

My heart is less sore when I say this. I'm not the victim when I'm larger. Let him slip. Don't try to hold him up. Don't want anything but the truth. Don't imagine your father can love you. Accept your sadness at being betrayed and neglected and used. Don't run, because if you run you will be drawn again to someone who will betray, neglect and deceive you. Don't save yourself. Save yourself only by seeing. See the face in front of you. See who it is, see it's a face without affection, a mineral face, an imp changeling. When he persuades and flatters listen more carefully.

Oh my darling little one you are so drained by sadness, so drained. What can I do but hold you.

2 May

Dropping into the falling waters. Knowing there are people for whom betrayal is a fascinating game. People who don't have a better game. I wanted to say it was feeling every stroke of a dick that put me into danger, but it depends whose dick it is. A brother or sister's dick is not a danger, a mother's or a father's is.

I'm afraid mainly of being deceived. What happened when I left the other night was that I saw he's willing to lie to me - anytime - the kind of person he is. What I heard when he was on the phone with Rebecca and Mathew is how much he needs to be liked. His panic afterwards was that his son may not think well of him. I heard him on the phone with me - always the last motion is a hook. Hey - Mathew - I love you. Hey - Rebecca - thank you.

Kureishi's book. That kind of man, who doesn't care about the well-being of other people's souls.

The question is how to go on from here decide to control pleasure for improvement
You mean don't sleep with him no
Decide not to control pleasure
Go further into the fire YES
That's advice I like YES
Feel the danger and turn it into pleasure YES

Hanif Kureishi 1999 Intimacy Scribner's

3

Is there nothing to say or is there a welter?

A white sky today, white air between the buildings.

Am I out of my depth or nowhere.

That loveliest kind of palm on one thin leg with its plumes stirring.

At UCSD very muddled. I'm good enough to be hired here. I'm not in this league. They wouldn't want me. I was a good teacher. I can't read the way I used to, I'm finished maybe. Why am I always unsettled. I'll be a writer. I'll freelance. I'll be an academic. I'll do something with my film reputation. I always wreck it with people. I'll never fix that, I still don't have a clue. People who are making it can see there's something wrong with me. Not when I'm teaching. No one wants to read my papers. What really happened with Phil. I never know what it is that happens with people. I'm very talented. I must be deluding myself because if I were what I think I am I would be established in a place like this. I've done what I could with what happened to me. I'm one of those talented wrecks like Tony Gordon-Wilson or Jim Briggs. Crazy. I tried with Nora. I thought I was doing well. Maybe as long as I concentrated. I wasn't concentrating. I can't afford to see Joyce long enough to get anywhere with this.

Tom calming me with the dog story last night. I was in anguish I couldn't understand. He made me laugh like an anxious little girl with a nice dad. The night before he was in a panic after talking to Mathew. I said, You've got sober, that's enough.

I'm on the edge of crying, so sorry I haven't made it. Too diffident to try.

Is it simply true somehow that for whatever reason I do not have confidence to be an academic. I'm not good enough. Oh so sore a heart. What is this. Agony. It's the dark of the moon. I don't know how to make my living. I don't know where to go on to.

4

Tom says negativity is an addiction. Just say no. I say, but negative feelings are information. You can't just smother them all. And yes, I have feasts of pain instead of acting.

Take the next indicated step, he says. I know what that is. What can I do toward it.

What shatter the structure, graduate from, Tom's mourning
This pain is Tom's
He's getting satisfaction and relief from my feeling it YES
Is there something I should be feeling on my own behalf something about the father
Is it true about the rings of fear around love
Am I burning through them YES

Is he NO
He's pretending to
He will go on smoking dope because he doesn't want to go all the way
Because he's afraid of the responsibility
So I do not have the marriage of my dreams
But I do have the marriage in which I can grow

Anything else lovers, act, to organize, happiness
You want to talk about that YES, come through into intuition by slow growth in this work
Just go on doing this work NO
Something will come of this work
And that will take me to the next thing YES
Do you want to say anything about the thesis a child persists in its judgment and observation
Is that good no, success by processing and slow growth of loss

What I'm feeling is that the world has closed its doors to me for no reason I understand.

5

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning, five days. It was better when I talked about the anguish of fear about how to make a living after I finish and squabbled about the hysteria of American television. I survived bad feelings. I said them and acted them and Tom did not turn me out. While I'm in them these intense fears and pains seem as if they will go on forever unbearably.

Over there is a body so much like yours - wide hips, long legs, narrow shoulders, a cab horse curve of the upper spine, a long flat wrist with a black wrist watch strap: grounded, powerful and easy below the waist, weak from the heart up.

I am remarkably afraid of attachment: that is the ground tone. Accept it. More: that sense of the world shutting its doors to me somehow belongs to the same fear. Isn't it so? What's common: personal risk. I've been able to take impersonal risks. Personal risk lays me open to pain that disables me. But I'm at the point where there needs to be personal risk. What would make that possible?

7

Do you want to talk to us
There is a feeling of falling apart, is it necessary no
Is it wise no
Can Tom go back into newspaper work and stay sober
If Tom takes on the newspaper does it mean he and I are completed no
Can Tom smoke dope and stay out of booze
Is it possible to say what would be best for me overall
Is it possible to say what would be best for Tom over all
Is it the same thing
What is it come through, father, love woman, passage from difficulties
Is it an instruction
Do you mean the best thing for both of us is to come through something
Coming through something about fathers in general
Do we need to come through in the same way in relation to fathers
Does it mean we're supposed to stop being lovers no
We're supposed to come through something about love woman
Will you say what the way she sees

[Tom:]

The voice I listen to tells me to end.

There's so much slog.

There's not enough sex.

We have to work to get it to the level where it's wonderful.

You're into your own ego system, and I'm about to hop into my own ego system effort and there's distance.

It seems like a lot of time it's been a slog.

I don't necessarily think that voice is wrong.

I'm saying to myself that's the voice I've always listened to so far.

I've achieved a form of clarity in so many different areas.

I don't believe I'll achieve clarity if I listen to the voice I've always listened to before.

I have hopes of us being together.

I have hopes of us pleasing each other sexually.

My disaffection comes in because of all the difficulties I see ahead of us.

I have a feeling for your character - you're honest and intelligent and have my best interests at heart.

There is a real sexual kick.

The other voice in my head says the best thing to do is continue, because the result has been worth it.

And now the ante has been upped.

I don't want to use ----- as an excuse to let you go but I'm definitely not happy with the situation.

It really boils down to honesty, openness and willingness.

I think the results are going to be worth the effort.

We're under emotional pressure. The closer we get the more wrenching the separation is going to be.

The stuff about the fathers is good.

The voice of bad Vic, the voice that tells me women should be a certain way, says "This woman is not docile enough. That's what I was able to do with your mother. If you have a woman this is the way you're supposed to be. This is the attitude you're supposed to strike."

I think when we find each other clearly we're still going to look at each other and say the other is not the one we're supposed to be with.

When we are not getting along is when we want to break up because it provides the opportunity to reinvent ourselves.

We have to give each other the space to reinvent ourselves. The freedom to reinvent ourselves within unconditional commitment.

Unconditional commitment is what is called for.

I feel that's the best part of me talking.

I don't need to take you as an emotional hostage.

I have one more thing to say. I liked what you said the other day about connectivity of mind states in drinking and dope. Being stoned induces a lot of paranoia. Being stoned rockets me up to a certain kind of acuity but I get very tired and fuzzed out at the end of the high. There's a toxicity about it. It can knock you off consensual reality. But somewhere down the line when everything builds up, when I don't have to interact with a work reality .... I want to leave that door open. That's a long journey from the person I used to be.

Does Tom actually care about writing
He pays no attention to it
Nothing in this room is about writing
Is he really more interested in something else YES
Will you say what childish things
Because he was forced

I work myself into a state where I feel I just don't have the intellect to be a telling poet. You're not quite smart enough to do an original take. The voice tells me they are second rate. I see glaring immaturity. The voice says they are no good. The voice comes back and says, Yes but you can be a good journalist. You have the insight. Unless I'm connected to a paper it's impossible to be a journalist. Freelancing is onerous. You have no entry.

Does Tom want to stop becoming more intelligent
Does Tom want to become more intelligent
Tom believes he's smart enough

I'm excruciatingly perceptive but I also have a lot of sabotaging behaviors. I often see the correct thing to do and choose not to do it. I try to keep it all hid. My intelligence needs room to move. Intelligence implies total autonomy. Subservience is the order of the day. Then I get bored with subservience and instead of going toward autonomy I have a tendency to go toward rebellion.

Why does Tom not do the correct thing he is coming through anger by processing foolishness
Because he was forced
And he's doing it well YES
The alternatives as Tom sees them are subservience and intelligence
Subservience means love YES
Intelligence means isolation
An alternative outcome for intelligence? intelligence
What does intelligence do when subservience seems to be indicated overview of partial loss, persistence in not withdrawing
Subservience means hiding
Keeping it all hid is a form of subservience
Intelligence accepts partial losses no

If my intelligence is disrespected I go into a rage, so I have to be careful. My point is that the only way I could achieve this is, I'll create an environment where I have my toys. I'll have a lot of little interests I pursue.

Was Tom the best choice for me to work with my father
Is Tom still the best choice for me to go on with
So has he finished his work with me no
Love woman is supposed to work with her father
Inner voice of father
What does the inner voice of the father say to love woman he tells her to be rational
And she should be something else? yes, she should be love woman, feeling and imagining

8

Monday in Clayton's Pies. We had our last weekend. Do I have the energy to tell it. Sunday we talk to the book. He wants to poke me. I won't say much, but it was the one where he fed me. (He said he saw a hunger. What did it look like? An intelligent succubus.) I stayed quiet like a baby, let myself float. Then we jumped up and packed elaborately - oranges, binoculars, cheese, avocado, bathing suits, towels, sweaters, hats, hairbrush - and took the bikes on the ferry to Coronado. Had breakfast at the Night and Day Café. Took the bike path south onto the Silver Strand. Played with the waves. When it was windy later found a spot on the bay side. Rode home. Were in bed sunburned and sore by eight.

There was a moment I didn't see very well. The sun was shining into his left eye. It was emerald green. He looked perfectly beautiful, clear, calm, young, a steady spirit anchored in goodness.

Talk about his looks on this trip: I am not seeing the way I used to. I'm vaguer. But I see the small shifty face sometimes. Other times the impressive space commander with beautiful silver bristles and clear bright skin. I haven't seen the massive statesman. I win the happy husband's blushing smile. The rapacious reptile briefly.

Why don't I have the energy of seeing and writing that I used to. I've hardly felt San Diego this trip. I've been in acute pain but it hasn't made me see.

10

Is there something more I need to know [Lorie] no
Would he tell me no
Is there anything you want to tell me crisis, anger, friendship, slow growth
My anger no, his
Is that the important thing
He could be himself with her
Was that the point

Have I got to a true feeling yet. I read it with my heart knocking. It wasn't much more than I already knew, but I was hearing it straight and simple. We met in October 95. In Jan 96 I drove home. In Dec 96 I came back. In Dec 96 she sent him a Christmas card. In April we left together. Just before we left he had a postcard from her. That summer he was longing to be back with her. He had already known me a year and a half. We were together in Bellingham Christmas 97. In the spring of 97 I found Joseph. Something was wrong over that summer. In fall 98 I came back here and he arrived later. He was in an evil temper over the spring of 99. We broke up. He got a rash. We got back together.

I am not sure there haven't been and aren't other women. I am not sure I don't want there to be.

How has it been this time. I came out into the airport in my Rodeo Drive clothes. There he was. Back in his room, presents I didn't want - odds that he happened upon. I felt sorry not to want them and sorry they weren't real presents. Next did we have a blank poke, Sunday morning? I think so. He came without waiting for me. We drove to TJ and on to Enseñada. The moment in the park when he said he was bored. Monday I went to Nora's. Worked Tues and Weds. Hurt my back. Thurs night escaped to the motel. Back Friday. Sunday was his birthday. We were at the beach up past OB. Friday evening we took the trolley with the Padres fans. Beautiful children sat across from us. We came back and watched the game. Saturday? Nora stood me up. I was anxious about her. Tuesday I thought Tom was maybe having an affair with her. Saturday I think also was the beautiful fuck where I felt every stroke. Kureishi's novel made me paranoid. He read it. Went to UCSD muddled and anxious on Wednesday I think. Confessed. Tom's wonderful dog story. Mathew and Rebecca phoned him maybe Tuesday night. I talked about being afraid about money. Laker's game. His body is bliss when he's happy so I was willing to watch it, but afterwards he wouldn't watch My beautiful launderette. Sunday we talked to the book. Then the feeding fuck. To Coronado and into the water. Monday exhausted. Tuesday UCSD. But what did we do Saturday, watched a video. I wouldn't watch Pulp fiction because he wouldn't watch, etc.

Do you want to say anything about that? make the transition from deception and early love into writing
Is that an instruction to both of us
We should think of it as the time when we become writers YES
Should we look ahead gladly to going on

I endure great stress of uncertainty and vulnerability because if it is true it is something wonderful. It means something. It is a real thing made with two people's realness. I take a risk. And don't beg for pity. But sometimes I don't want to feel the risk. And then I don't feel anything. He cheats by taking less risk than I do. That I don't like. He should honor the risk I take, and he knows it. So then he showers me with weak reparations. We both try to lessen the risk.

part 2

the golden west volume 20: 2000 april-september
work & days: a lifetime journal project