| the golden west volume 22 part 2 - 2001 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 February
It was more of the same. I should time it. He's lecturing me, discharging. He tells me everything about his charged events, every line of dialogue. I hold the phone away and hear the little voice emphatic and defeated. How long will this go on.
20 Can I be the way I am with soft attention even when I am with hard attention? Could I have an open heart with hard attention? Complete imagining early love for the mother. It's not what he gives you, it's what you gain for yourself in it. Decide illusion of strength is foolish, become really strong. Stay to gain combat, passage from difficulties, integration. Alright, the question is how to imagine early love for the mother. Live it in relation to anyone, the whole community, it says. Live in innocence, as if I were stoned on acid. Just keep returning to that state. - Late in the morning I felt the thing relax. Am just scarified from talking to Ellen Guenther who I may last have seen when I was eight. She talks about people 'passing away' and delights in her relationship with the Lord. She decorates her townhouse and gave up teaching piano for work at the Surrey Credit Union. Since her father passed away she likes to make contact with relatives. Her father's late-married second wife did not make claims on the estate, her family are good money managers, etc. Maybe I can matchmake her with my mom. - And then! From the other end of the world, email from Julie Tolmie, who has a ravishing toroid visualizing the rational numbers, and is a dark-faced dark-eyed dark-haired person with a high forehead. Has just got her doc submitting a CD so black and sharp and well designed I'm gasping for joy. Look at this - [glued image] It happened that when I had finally finished ch 3/4 this late aft and sat at my table in low sun from the west horizon with a big enamel cup of tea, I saw that elegance of line for true. Steam reeling off the rim of the cup and surface of the tea was cutting just such curves and swerves and twisted ribbons as it streamed and chased and shied and fled. Sharp, sharp in gradients of grain. Then I went out in the light to the bus to post the chapter on the site, and found Julie's note and links to her page. Now I have Tom's today's cassette on and it's time to bring out the quilt and turn off the light. Oh life you darling proceeding on. Louie made up the fight this morning, too, I should say. She had time, lying with the flu in bed. 21 A charming dream about Cheryl and Trudy. They were young small bodies stopping in a public place to do a mirror dance. They stood facing one another not quite opposite swinging their arms and shifting their bodies perfectly in register. Neither was leading. It was just something they could do. Two things about it. Seeing it was an opening into visual wonder, again, like then. The other that seeing the steam as fine and momentary as I did, I was in mirror dance, just something I can do. I don't mean seeing-structure in me looked like steam. The stars clicked over yesterday about ten thirty in the morning. We're in a different zone. Lying in the dark listening to the tape, last night, I was feeling for Frank. I was feeling the death of his body most. That surprises me. I feel it I suppose as the death of a lover. But in those days I wasn't aware of feeling his body as such. Hardly ever. His wrist. My cohort dying. Frank and Janeen. I thought of the stream of bubbles blown from a wire loop, all perfect, all reflecting, all journeying forth, some larger, some blown further forward in the initiating puff, some wandering up, some sinking to the grass, some sailing confidently across the road, each popping suddenly out of existence, some much sooner, and the whole cohort quickly gone. I felt Janeen's death differently. I felt the death of her voice. Her wonderful gusts and lulls. I hear it now. Feeling for Frank, it was as if I was holding him, sorrowing for his young self. I notice I am not afraid to know death is. I have done my work with it. I am sorry I will die, because there is much more to learn, but I can know it. And about learning, I am feeling how much I have done to become myself. When I was in my twenties, that awful transition, I was pent tight with inchoate capacity like an egg. I had to do a lot of differentiating and dividing. It took the whole of my thirties and forties, a long time. - Here is the technical question, how did I dream that mirror dance? The motion separate from the bodies - motion generating vision. One net for two bodies, one body seen in two places. From the back and from the front? Coordinated parts of one thing? Parallel projection? From prefrontal mirror cells? Generated from motor pattern? It's not so much language generating dreams as motor pattern? Motor rehearsal like the rat running mazes in its sleep. Last chapter as a list of questions? 22 Something for the last chapter. How a brain is formed not with scientific evidence but the sort of evidence I have used - the range - Paracelsus, Castenada, self-help books, subtle body books, work with Joyce. The natural sense of it was a <finding and keeping and using to make>. What I read had to structure me or I would not have understood it, but only a few <bits, points, things><stuck>. I recognized them. This is very messy but it has to be made clear. What is <the relation between> building oneself as a knower and <finding things> in books. Something like confirming, which is maybe a kind of firming. The moment of recognizing is a moment where something in one's own structure is energized. And that energizing connects it more widely. Or say a structure is made which is more widely connected. Recognition must be a dynamical event of some unusual force. The event of finding is also the event of making, yes? All the crackpots on the radio have gone through some process of such finding and firming. The difference between them and me, one of the differences, is that I have gone through it not in one place but in very many. Every event of finding has had to test for fit, or dynamic effect, in a whole structure that has already tested for fit in many such events. The test really is a test both of the recognizing moment and the existing structure. So recognizing maybe is not really recognizing - it may be building something that works and feeling the fit. The recognizing moments do get tagged with their source often. I'll remember the writer or the moment, like remembering sitting on the ground in the sun, in the yard of an asphalt shingle factory in central France while the camioneur I was hitching with loaded his truck, reading Gestalt therapy with joy. For the metaphor chapter, signal the metaphors that are structuring what's happening then and there. Flaky recognizing has to be mentioned. - Yesterday I lay down in the aft because I was feeling all-over inwardly tight - pressure. It was like being crushed by myself, the way a planet is. I kept attention in it and talked to it, asked questions. When I said Are you unconscious fear of death? there was an explosion of a sigh. Afterwards only the head was tight. As I got into twilight sleep I had a couple of, I thought, maybe, telepathic contacts, which I don't remember. Afterwards I went to the computer and easily wrote the introduction to chapter 4, action aboutness. And then I took the bus to the computers downtown and posted a different title page. 23 Tom last night pouring his wishes to be mutual. He came out of a month of fear and depression. He saw blood on his shit and thought he was going to die. He didn't tell me that, or his 3rd of February anniversary of going into the army. He said he has been afraid to feel my power, sexually or in other ways, because he was uncertain of his own. Now, he says, he wants nothing more. He wants to surrender to me. He wants me to strap on a dildo and fuck him in the ass, if I want to. He has tried to dominate me and I have refused to be dominated. He fucked other women in ways he never even tried to fuck me. He has been taking sexual inventory. He thought he had to be top-dog because he's a man. What I am thinking is that everyone wants to surrender sexually. Men hate women who surrender because they are jealous of that surrender. I know it because I felt it with Louie. Tony at work said to him, How do you do it, man? Why don't you go down to TJ and get a blow job? I woke from a dream that I was in a gathering of some kind, Janeen was on my right, Tom on my left. They were across the room from each other. I sat and looked from one to the other. They were locking eyes. She was sucking a big lollipop, pulling it out of her mouth slowly, running her tongue around the tip. She held up her finger. I knew it was code and they'd be together. He was mouthing words. Neither of them looked at me once. When the gathering was breaking up I told her off. I woke and said good thing she's dead. I was blaming her not him.
He wants to be fucked by a goddess. I have been talking about surrendered sex for six years. He hasn't been able to consider it. When he says these things he pours and stammers. He talked for three hours. I was happy. Here is this to say. When we get into those times when I can't abide the sound of his voice I should say, What's the matter? It is always denial of depression, fear, pain, that shuts him down. 24 I zonked yesterday afternoon until 2 AM and now this morning until 11. I'm suppressing something, what? Something about Tom. The dream said, fear he'll get picked off if he's in the state he's in - is that it? Will he? No. It's something I have in me, being sidelined watching a man ignore me, enthralled with another woman. Primaeval trauma. I have it from a time before I even knew I needed to be fucked. I do mean trauma. It's felt as threat to life. High school, college, Roy, always, with men. It is harrowing, harrowing.
24th South of Seattle on the Starlight Express, not going to California. Julie Tolmie. To tell you the truth, when I look at you I see myself, I said in a rush. Same for me, when I got in the car I was thinking, who is this? She has strange knobby hands, as if worked to the bone. Long dead hair, gullies under her eyes. She was dressed for interviews, black leather raincoat, black pantihose, a knitted black dress with a skeleton under it. She has been homeless for years, was sleeping on lab floors. She fired her advisor. He didn't believe she could do it. Her mum has been funding her. She went to Paris but she had forgotten too much of her French. She couldn't talk nicely to powerful men. A kind of rat face. like an Epp around the eyes. She gave up everything. Her clothes were worn out. She's the way I am when I respect someone: outright. I couldn't talk to her about my work. I could talk about the process but not the work. I showed her I'd pasted the print-out of her torus on my journal. Do you want to see it move, she said, and brought an Apple Powerbook out of her briefcase. It was wrapped in a flowered shawl, maroon. She showed me a kind of progression through the fractions up to thirty that had accelerated twists self-segregating, opening a space when it hits low integer fractions - if I understood it. She showed me a version that dives through the torus like a funnel. Parallel rings accelerating gold as they come around the curve. You must feel like you're god, I said, Do you ever feel like you are doing physics? Because it was like seeing the universe come into being. Tacoma Narrows. She had a big directory, and pointed to a section maybe two-fifths down. In there was her thesis which is 3 kilos of paper in the print version. There was a section further on about the Ballet Russe. A dull day on Puget Sound. The alders are showing faintly pink, but it's grey and dull green under low cloud. Madrone trees. Young firs very perky. Orange tips on the willows, the top foot. We're coming into the valley with apples on top branches. Skagit. Why am I unpersuaded when I 1) talk about my work, and 2) talk about the other project. I was always persuaded when I talked about the garden. What am I supposed to be doing at this conference? A green stream, a clear-cut ridge. A forensic pathologist from Poway, seventy, dry, white-haired, a fine thin face, gold-rimmed glasses, New York accent. His wife plump, dyed black hair, red lipstick, red nails, large pores with pancake makeup layered over them, and a big diamond ring surrounded by crusts of smaller diamonds. He was a clean dry age, an expert of something. She was painted, blubbery and in my sense of it had no honor and is no one. Her jewelry says her husband makes money, is all. Gliding through work yards, back yards, of a small town, in the sun, in the observation car, to music. Good R & B. Eugene, 25th What is this. A motel with a fir tree. Sun on a fir tree. Somewhere nearby a train track, traffic on Broadway but it's quiet. Sunday morning. What am I doing here? I'm afraid to ask.
27 Sex drugs and rock'n'roll said the scruffy little Brit with the working class accent. Mary O'Brien did an eco-calamity rant and got a standing ovation, which I joined without having thought it out - well, no, I thought it was good to give it to someone (in a conference of academics) who acts. The scruffy Brit was sitting back in his seat with his arms folded across his chest. He had been saying to let the Mississippi cut another channel and abandon New Orleans. There was a bald black woman with a voice like an ambulance siren talking biological control in Australia. There was, oh pretty Natasha, talking high academic phenomenology and showing pictures of the gestures of developing plants. There was Dr Ramprasad who invented and runs a project near Bangalore that teaches village women to save local landraces of food plants. There was a raw-looking Indian woman who read a paper about teaching Indian women ovulation awareness. There was a woman with thick grey hair down her back speaking articulate prose about Aboriginal Australia. There was the eager seed-business guy who writes papers quoting Rorty. There was the thick, thick-bearded city Jew who said 'nature' is an incoherent idea. I ran after him in the corridor. There is Lorraine Code with professor's cap of white hair, an eminence coming into sessions with fans. Nancy Tuana large-eyed and tall like a queen, wearing a little tiara to hold back her hair. A lot of long bushy grey hair in the room, horrible on men or women. Me in my leopard-trimmed jacket Phyllis Rooney gawked at with alarm. She couldn't see that it's fake. There was the young man who got it before I said it, when I said culture is a nested subset of women. How was I - I've been bold and actually funny, myself - too much so? Don't know. I've been deeply to the point, yes, and when I saw Andrew Pickering on the podium I thought it should be me. It's my arena. I'm already on the hill they're going to have to get to, I said to Sherry Clough. That's been clear for a while, she said, but she says it about many things. They have Harroway in the honor spot, concluding. Am I going to challenge her? Cyborg is catchy, it has caught on, and it is horrible. It plays into something. It's a male fantasy of being born of a machine. They will make it true. Keep the machines outside us. Fine-tune the machines. Michael Benedikt isn't here. No architects, engineers. Those Omni cyborg women were self portraits of the people who ran the magazine, Guccione, I think. A feeling self turned to metal. What should be the image of our feeling selves. Marilyn Monroe. Beauty, vulnerability. No living woman should be that, or carry it, but we are that. - Discouraged today - in me and them both. A young woman with a thin mouth trashing Julia Butterfly Hill. A panel of five women all of whom were someway repulsive. Pretty Natasha jumped to sit next to me, and when a man winked at her not me I resented it. Not wearing the magic leopard skin - dull khaki jacket - I not only resented it but let her feel my resentment so the connection was lost. Lorraine Code was across the aisle feeling me not liking the speakers. It all seemed useless. Ecofeminism and activism and dualisms and women who don't feel. I'm miserable because nobody has decided I'm wonderful. Instead of talking to the book I've watched TV morning and evening. What is it really - I'm ready to go home defeated, by simple social difficulties other people handle. Have I wasted $500 and a week - because of TV - because of incourtesy and social inexperience. Here is another way to ask it. Do I like these people? Do I want a life among them? No I don't like them and I don't want a life among them.
Donna Harroway. A face like an Afghan hound. Grey hair. Dangling earrings. A thin body in pants and mirror vest. A teeshirt that says alpha bitch. Marxist. She barked vociferously for an hour and a half, a very hard-toned discourse. She is a cyborg of a common kind. She doesn't do her own fucking. What I'm asking is what is the dog trial story an image of - what, in her? An animal nature at the level of the dog. That means sensing. Social feeling. Was anyone there an image of a human animal? Even the artists weren't sensing, they were making statements. Social art. [Various conference notes: Val Plumwood on hyperseparated dualizations Proliferating stories about two, we don't see only two things but we continuously think in terms of two things. "deconstructing that dualism entirely" "dividing the world up" in a dichotomy, one is always taken as ground Column fault equating terms in the same column Figure-ground flexibility, not a fixed figure and ground but a world in which many things can become figure. What is it about theoretical behavior that brings up that structure? Is there an answer to that? Twoness of the body, many sets of two. Somehow the structure by means of which we see figures and the structures by means of which we see ground are convolved in the ambient array and maybe in the brain]
2 March What more do I know about my work, after that event. 1. Perception. No one talked about it. Mind and land, what is made in copresence, green epistemology, everything is based on it, a speech self turned to metal, a feeling self made trained animal. 2. Clarifying the deep meaning of choices of power and profit over life, and of the discourses fantasizing around it. about it, from it. There is conflict at the base of it, a mammal conflict about the vulnerabilities of early love. Interest in perception, possibilities for perception, are shut down when early love is shut down, people cannot bear to have this conflict re-evoked. The land is our mother, our mother is the land written in twigs on two sides of the door in the hippy café across the street from the station at Eugene. About women in this question. The image of a woman acts as a trigger for feeling and <means> early love. We can know that without confusing image function with essence of actual women. Academics are people specialized in a particular style of defense, they like to hear a sadistic woman who has killed love woman. Another style holds onto it but in a fantasy form, for instance religion. Harroway blames early love for something. The pure of heart long for purity of heart, a state. Pain longs for better-protected boundaries. Defense longs for maintained defense, sterilization of deviance.
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4th It's late Sunday morning, sunny. I'm sitting in bed with sinuses about to sting as cold medication dries them. Listening to Tom's last tape, feeling him, feeling the lighter air of the world I've lived in with him. I felt California in Oregon. There was a California oak, a softness of the night air, the light in the motel courtyard. I'm hanging back from Being about, work-woman's isolation. Should I tell the bus trip out of Portland. A woman I'd seen at the baggage counter chose to sit next to me although the bus was empty when she got on. She had sharp brown eyes, finely lined skin, small turquoise and silver earrings, the look of a small town school teacher, tart and responsible. Well-dressed. We talked on the way out of Portland and then she read and I turned my face to the window and closed my eyes. She grew up on a farm in Wing, North Dakota, the ninth of twelve children. She had nine brothers. During the war she was in nursing school. She married in '46, a bachelor twelve years older. What was the best time in her long years, I asked. There were two. The first was when, six years into their marriage, their children showed up, the second fourteen months after the first. The other best time was the two and a half years she had with her second husband. He was demonstrative, lots of hugs and cuddles. She misses that. Her name was Mary. She was heading for the big 0, she said. When I turned my face to the window, for some reason, I began to imagine sexing with Tom. I never fantasize about him, but I was at liberty, entertaining myself. Something about relaxing and moving through the countryside. I worked with what he gave me last time he went into it. You can have my cherry, he said. He did me. I did him. The moment when he turns me on my tummy. He was talking to my little pussy hole so it wouldn't feel left out. It was very hot. Later when I opened my eyes I saw the window thick-steamed to the top around the clear spot where my face had been. He said later that when he got home from work that day he'd had a curlicue boner and he'd lain down and worked with it. Maybe we had telesex. The Seattle bus was empty and had the lights turned off. I sat in the back and got into my pants, kept it going as long as I could, through the mobile home demonstration yards and storage courts and factory outlet malls and car lots. "We shall only know the blessing / Of our father's sweet caressing / When they ring the golden bells / For you and me." [Iris Dement] The poignancy of that song is that it is sung out of a life in which the longing for rightness is the only form of rightness possible. Okay, quickly, the shape of the journey. Picking Julie up at the waterfront station. She opens her powerbook on my kitchen table and shows me beauty bare. Wake at 5:12. The alarm hasn't gone. I'm in the taxi in about ten minutes. Have forgotten driver's license and Visa card. Bus with only women, a black border guard who is nice. The woman with a big nose and a lovely straight back says she is going to the conference too. Our paths cross at the ATM in Seattle, the coffee place. We see each other in the train. Beautiful afternoon in the sun in the observation car gliding through the Skagit Valley. Happy. At the station in Eugene Kim finds out we can walk to Motel 66. She has checked prices. Motel evening. I phone Tom. Watch TV. In the morning walk to the campus wearing black linen pants and leopard-trimmed jacket. The moment a blond professor looks askance at the leopard skin sets me up. I register my institutional affiliation as Congeny Foundation, but don't wear a nametag. In the evening, the reception. I talk to Shepard Ogden and Lorraine Code. Walk back with Kim who is a forester with a cabin outside Hinton, on her way home from Peru. Thinks how it feels to be a tree in a storm, the pull on the roots all round. Next day is Monday. I meet Natasha and Dr Ramprasad and speak to Ivan Ivakhic in the morning session. Andrew Pickering speaks. Walk home with Kim after Mary O'Brien's standing ovation. Tuesday. Depressed at the ecofeminism session, the hardness of the women. Get my balance after. See Dr Chi's slides of Taiwan's mountain people. Debbie Rose invites me to have dinner with them. Harroway's show-off keynote. Kim avoids me after. Wednesday morning I pack and go to Starbucks to work through the abstract. Walk to the station. When I arrive at the ticket counter the woman is reading her screen, a 7.0 earthquake in Seattle. All afternoon until 7:30 waiting to leave. Ask for a room in Portland. The man at the counter gives me a taxi chit, a twenty dollar bill and a room form. The Cypress Motel is shabby but sits on a ridge over the city. In the morning I phone Tom. He-llo, he says. He had taken over Tom Mix's office when he heard about the earthquake, gone through the Amtrack hierarchy until he found someone who could tell him the train he thought I was on was safe and no one injured. At noon I'm on the bus from Portland to Seattle, and at six from Seattle to Vancouver. The building across from the coffee place I go back to in Seattle is the one they have been showing on the news, bricks tumbled off the cornice. In Vancouver buy milk at the MacDonalds in the CN station and take a city bus home. Julie hasn't been in my place. That was Thursday night. Friday, Saturday, milling. Worked a little yesterday. Another moment in the station at Eugene. I am sitting in one of the hard plastic seats I've chosen because it is in the sun. A girlish woman with big eyes and a brown bob is conferring with a stocky man who is handling the luggage. I move over so he can sit next to her but he's too manly to take a seat from a woman and strides off to make decisions. The woman gazes at me with her Bambi eyes and says in a girlish soft voice, Are you cold? Because I have my jacket zipped. She wants to talk. Behind me in another row of seats is a very fat woman dressed in shades of blue. I smell roses. The girlish woman is from Salt Lake City. She and her husband were on their way to Seattle, but they are going to turn around and go home. She is so soft and breathy I'm thinking she's a Mormon. They were in a sleeper. You're not on your honeymoon, are you? I ask. How did you know? Because of the sleeper, I say. Meaning that people like them travel coach unless it's a honeymoon. In these confidences there is such a free nice feeling I ask the fat woman about the roses. She brings a little bottle of hand lotion out of her pocket and offers it to me. I rub some into my cuticles and notice the grime that has shown in my skin. 5 There was also the 60 year old cowboy with a big belt buckle, a canvas coat, and sexy eyes, who sat waiting to go south to Klamath Falls with his 35 year old childish blond. We looked at each other with some animal interest. What is lingering into the fifth day is the working class people waiting together in Eugene station through the afternoon of the day of the earthquake. Yesterday I lay all day listening to Tom's tape, side after side after side. I gradually begin to be able to hear it. The shapes of lines. It's a collection of as-if paintings, visual styles. Orders of wholes. Tom's sense of music is Vic's sense of painting, maybe. I'm the first person in his life he can trust not to lie, he says.
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