the golden west volume 23 part 2 - 2001 june-july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

9 Saturday morning, sun for the moment, the long-familiar sound of water in the pipes, Dennis alive downstairs. Cheeps and distant dark dense caws as if below them. Very faint a band of evened-out motor background. 10 Leah. Leah's house. Here's the question. Leah's la-la land dwelling in Jungian and other mythological clouds. What I think is that Leah should junk therapy. She does not have the ballast to be able to do other than float when she gets into those ethers. Meantime there around her is the space she created, the way French doors are standing open onto a little balcony where grape leaves are glowing back-lit above a garden. The way she has placed the sofa so you have the room opening out to the bank of windows. In the bathroom a geranium, true red, with just a few red leaves among the green, standing on the sill between two strips of white gauze curtain. Her consultation room at the back a deep burnt orange with those white gauze strips and a big round-leafed cissus pressing against the glass on one side of the three-pane bow window. She has her pretensions and sentimentalities, but like her food her places always have true magic. When she talked about working with her space she had a big column of energy sweeping into her head. When she talks about therapy she looks wavery, anxious and sad. Junk therapy and live in your talent, I say - nicely. She's working with senile dementias, harrowing and useless penance, I believe. 11 Monday. Two weeks. Finish application, get it sent. Connect Louie with Leah. Can I finish ch 5? Janet on Wednesday. Clean out car. Clothes. Pay bills. Polish CV. Clean floppies of work so far. Mind and land ducks [to put in a row]. Last night David B in my green chair hearing the worst. I made a list of his questions, then put down the questions he wasn't asking: do his parents care about him, do they care about the land. No and no. His face changed. He looked solider, more a man. He spends his days in a fog of hope which is a fog of denial. He plans to explain, to persuade, to change himself with bodywork or diet or new kinds of thoughts. Meantime he does not make a living and is grateful if his mom gives him an extra ten when he has bought groceries for her. Luke phones in the early afternoon, eleven his time. He gets up in the morning and drives to the café and has hot chocolate before he goes to work. Subscribes to e-zines to keep up with technologies, has a new best bud called Eddie Visser, has fast fun with a fifth year medical school girl who's smart and busy, takes twenty minutes through the day to answer email, read things. Nested this weekend, a new duvet, flannel sheets. If he takes over from his boss he'll exercise the options written into his package. There was something he wanted to say before he hung up, he hesitated but he didn't say it. His empire-designing state was very familiar to me, thinking about the parts of a plan, the arms and levels and fit of the thing. New parts arrive. I'm here in the dark silver late afternoon, moony and pang-y about Luke. He's where I most feel the precariousness of life. He's still alive, he's alright. Hearing his stories about work it is as if I am watching him on a tightrope very high above the ground, alone in his life, balancing a very long pole. But it's not the job, it's aliveness at all. I feel the knife edge for me only when I'm on long road trips. I always feel it for him. I feel it for no one else. Peril. His spirit is very beautiful to me. It is as if I and my whole unwise love for Roy and Roy's lightness are in perfect solution in him. So I feel it, in his intelligence, love and humor. His kind of intelligence, love and humor. His language and the space of attention around it. Really I feel something like that for my mother too (but don't go there). I'm interested in what he makes of himself, and want to see it as long as I can. I want him to have time to complete himself well. It has nothing to do with genes. I don't care if he never has children. I want his lovely being to find its best way. My parents have no such sense, and I have it in the self born with him. Is that it? There are mysteries. The person I leapt to make, who became a self in me, added his being to mine. We are confluent. There's more. Genetic alchemy. My father's beauty, his sex, his business imagination, are brought through into Luke without the malice and meanness. My mother's social observation is there without her heaviness and ignorance. Roy's humor is there without his psychopathy. Roy's love for him, and mine, are in him. The freedoms we took in our era are taken to polish in him. He had all our music and more. He's much further into the world than I have gone. With heart. That completion is what is in peril. I don't mean he's the end of the line or more than I am, but he is a person I chose to make in a height of intuition, at great cost, and brilliantly, I believe. People don't speak this way about making children but in this power we are gods and should be willing to know it. 12 Flagging in the technicalities of chapter 5. I want it done before I go. Take ch 6 with me. August for ch 7. 13 I came into a house where I knew the woman had written a book since I was there last. Did she call me Elfreda? She thought of me as a German painter. She brought out three little paintings she said I'd done. I knew the titles as she showed them. I was impressed. Two colors, an orangey-pink is what I remember - sunset cloud color - and a dark color, maybe dim charcoal. One was a field rising up a hill, with a sort of spume off the top. Another had a wave on rocks, also with a blown sheet of motion. Last night I rampaged through Spretnak's Resurgence of the real. It is a pulp book, not a book, not written, not smart, a watery bibliography really, but it gave me a flyover of the deconstruction-ecology males. I'm wanting to know whether what I propose is happening already. There's bioregionalism, which is fine, and there are three-quarters world economic re-analysis efforts, there's her review of what she calls modernism. I can see a new age right-think being built, which will be a ubiquity of the hiking gear people on Commercial Drive, purple all-weather anoraks. I want what I've always wanted, high mind high heart high perception especially, very high art. There can't be what they call spirituality without challenge. Find the conflicting impulses and up the level. First, is modernism the right word? I think of Woolf and Richardson and a beautiful style of architecture as modernist. She's using the term so there can be post-modernist, and there will certainly be post-something, but post-modernism (she says this) is a continuity of styles of disaffection she calls modernism. Body as machine, cosmos as mechanism, economy as machine, empire as machine - it's been a flame-through of a kind of masculinity finding its power - and it's not over - Luke is in the midst of it and I wish him well and see no possibilities for him elsewhere. The word she needs is mechanist not modernist, mechanist-dualist, machine and whatever is left over being the duals. Post-mechanist organicism is what's going to grow, but it will grow out of mechanism brought to a finer grain. Where's my spot in the process. Organic high intelligence. Make sure it isn't left out of what's making on the left, because if it is, what's making will be a piety. - Application is mailed and gone and I'm fretting. Two days of Pagemaker to make it look good. Janet this aft lit up when I talked about the mind and land project. It was partly the effect of tiny squares of green reflected in her glasses. Her nice left-sided smile. She said she'd always wanted to run a foundation. She said I should be starting to make book proposals to publishers. She was wanting to work for the foundation. There's research, she said. She's such a pro, so smart in academic politics. The price is that she doesn't like her thesis. But she has many publications and conference appearances, and a job waiting. Lots of contacts she's been charming to. Two interviews to prepare. 14 I finally looked up Char Davies yesterday - four hundred acres of forest and apple trees on the side of a mountain in southern Quebec, she says. A lecture at Cambridge, and in many other places. She's on a spectacular wave, the mechanic and the organic pushing from two sides to make a towering crest. She began painting, went to 3D computer graphics and took photos, then to VR, which she wants to call immersive virtual space. The impulse behind this project has been to communicate intensified experience of being embodied in the space-time of the living world ... the sensation and emotions of being conscious, embodied and mortal remind people of their connection to the natural (rather than man-made) environment not only biologically, but spiritually and psychologically, as regenerative source and mythological ground. A sense of space in which ambiguous intermingling of varying voluminous luminosities and hues ... the body feels space ... a body immersed in the sea ... experience of the intermingling of interior self and external world ... body and earth Semi-transparent textured 3D forms and flowing particles VR by default carries Cartesian values, she says, "enactment of Cartesian ontology", "liberation sought from the body and earth by becoming the machine." "Will virtual environments proliferate at the inverse rate of the disappearance of the real." Using the medium as a "countering philosophical tool." Counter-environments. She's doing a doc in Wales and a residency in Berkeley. The doc is about interactive media. Would she like Being about     Could she use it     Organic intelligence mind and land symposium. - Tom is not glad I'm coming     He is not going to welcome me     That will disappoint me and put me into shock     Is there an attitude I should take     act to process Tom's judgment Act on him     no There should be joy     Will you tell me what there is instead     withdrawal Me being happy to see him is not the answer     YES Is there joy that's withdrawn     YES Is it better if I act withdrawn     no, act in knowledge of his state Will you tell me why he's withdrawn     balanced forces processing betrayal and early love Heavy plans is part of the withdrawing     He always withdraws when I'm about to come     Early love and betrayal are both evoked and he withdraws from them     He feels guilty about going flat     Is what happens to me really him     He has to feel the threat of loss     YES Because he's holding it at bay     YES Don't guilt him     Work with him later but work with me first     Does he understand any of this     YES   Will you work with me on fear of looking for work     Fear of discovering I can't compete and win     Fear of the moment of failure     YES Because of what happens at that moment     YES   I've had a row of failures. There have been successes I didn't ask for. It hasn't been working when I ask for it     I've lost confidence     no it was always like that Asking my father     YES My mother shouldn't have done that     YES Can I learn to relax about it     no It will always be hard     YES Will you comment     men can come through to generosity from withdrawal So these two parts are related     I don't like to feel hope of that kind     Because it brings heavy psychic punishment     Asking for things for the garden didn't evoke it     So it has to do with my value     There's something I haven't got yet     YES I'm afraid of what I feel when I ask and when I'm turned down     Stress     Which I feel when I ask     So it's the asking not the being turned down     no Are these two different parts of it     no Is it shame     At having to ask those who don't wish me well     YES It's like being backed into a corner     Should I keep tracking     no At some point it's irreducible     Does being turned down have some bad effect on me     no Being afraid to ask has worse effects     I'm stuck     NO I just have to be willing again and again to do this harrowing thing     Because I harm myself by not       Suggest to Tom he take a risk and be overjoyed to see me     Say if he will I will     15 I've given myself two days of absorption transcribing and ordering the mind and land stuff. As I work in it I am convinced, happy. Then something says: I think it's a mad hope, I think it can't be done, I can't do it, it won't work. Bertolucci with Wachtel sitting in an apartment in Rome. He said his father was a poet who was taken by his grandparents, who were farmers, to Venice, when he was fourteen. He came out of a bookstore with a first edition copy of A la recherche du temps perdu. Bertolucci's voice became its warmest and firmest when he was saying his father was someone in whom culture bloomed very naturally, he was knowledgeable about poetry, and about art history, but he was simple about them, though sophisticated. 16 Oliver Shore of Restless Urban Primitive on CBC talking about working with his unconscious. He asks it questions and it comes back with something. What would be the sound of love? It produces one. He calls it a language. It works the other way too, he'll play something and ask what it is and get a phrase. He plays no-longer-Celtic fiddle. 17 Sunday. I'm slow starting today. The green outside. Ten days more. Yesterday a day over the moon, I tore into ch 5 and in the aft put on the purple Tibetan shirt and my high tech cargo pants and cruised the Drive in four o'clock heat with the window down blasting R&B. Cherry season. 18 False starts with ch 5. I got lost in the prefrontal. Back out. I need it for something - what exactly - attention - priming and inhibition - what to say about attention - the whole body part that's orienting and its central organization in premotor-parietal. That's eyes, head, hands: anterior system. Does this much of the system loop back for neg and pos priming? That much is needed for conscious perceiving / automatic acting. Prefrontal is for bringing consciousness to acting? It hypes premotor? It's the main site of act metaphor. Is there a front-back split in many people? Acting deliberately sets up automatic consequences. - I've got it now. Deliberate looking and skilled action. Focus. Being about my doing. I haven't got prefrontal clear, am rushing it. Through-lines built on top of through-lines, concentric loops starting and ending at the same place. Some of the lower level ones are relatively unconscious. Some of the higher level ones have to do with sustaining attention to particular things long enough for a complicated process of overriding, or overriding some and selecting some. The point about prefrontal is it goes both ways - it's releasing and inhibiting motor - and hyping and inhibiting sensory - and organizing action for purposes of going on sensing. It does it in presence, and it does it in imagining, and it does it in delays, which are intermediate between presence and imagining. IPL is second level for SPL?     TE is second level for IT     Premotor is second level for motor     Prefrontal is third level for all of them     By being third level for motor       IPL and prefrontal are alike in being convergence zones. Language uses IPL for the sensory part, prefrontal for the action part. The motor triangle is the eye triangle     Eye movement is essential to thinking     YES Does prefrontal direct imagining by directing eye movement     no Does prefrontal use eye movements for shifts     no Does imagining drive eye movement and not vice versa     The imagining system is the attention system     YES In deliberate imagining it's directed from prefrontal     In language and dreaming it is directed from the IPL     YES So the IPL is the prefrontal of posterior cortex     It demonstrates where representation comes in as external control     YES In inaction     YES Neurally language is very akin to dreaming     YES Is it intention that uses eye movements     YES Prefrontal is the center of environmental resistance     YES Will is built around the ability of the prefrontal to direct the eyes     YES That's how prefrontal evolves     So the relation of prefrontal and sim is act metaphor. Seeming to look, seeming to listen, seeming to do. So the emphasis for prefrontal is conscious intentional doing. The muscular feel of will. Sensing radiates in from the occipital, doing radiates in from the prefrontal, deliberate sensing is the former directed from the latter. What's the prefrontal directed from the occipital? Perception-guided doing. - Is there something you recommend     the work on withdrawn happiness and love His     Mine     The happiness and love are there     Suppressed     no, withdrawn This is about electrical field     Heart     He thinks it has to do with ass-fucking, does it     no Is he right to be afraid of an open body     no Vic closed it     He is afraid of having it open because of what it was like to be made to close it     I resent the closedness of his body     Can it be opened     Easily     Is it my job to do that     no Does it harm me to fuck a closed body     Can Tom feel when other bodies are open or closed     no Ask him to do it at the airport     Is the closedness of his body what stuns me when I see him     Open the inner arms     Does he actually want to do this     Can I work when my body's open     no So be able to close it at will     20 Louie back from sex camp - I mean poetry retreat with Olga Broumas - looking different. She's thin, her teenage girl body. She has that slippery shine about the lips. She's wrong about her new apartment and I am not in a position to say so. The windows are beautiful but they look onto a paved alley and warehouse walls. There's a fan in one of the warehouses. That alley light a constant orange at night. Kitchen wrecked by huge mismatched appliances. The landlord a control freak and has painted the ceilings battleship grey. - Prefrontal and sequence constants. Prefrontal and self-other monitoring. Two different places     21 I was lying down after work listening to the radio and thought, what if Tom really has got his big sexual energy back. I was asking myself and the answer came back swift and certain. I went into a little giddy tizzy. I quivered and giggled and went all-over joyful and had a hot flash. Second question. On the street, the last days, I've noticed a platform of hatred or anger at strangers. A cranky intolerance, ugly. What is it? Is it work woman     no Is it related to the work state     no Was it always there     no Will you name it     isolation Will you say more     turn for the better, happiness, slow growth in isolation Become happier in isolation     Absolutely don't fake it     YES Will you say how     male, graduation, exclusion, defeat Somebody in me excluded and defeated     YES The anger is correct     YES Will you say angry at who     come through male death It is a man in me who is angry     He has had to be dead     Whenever I feel that, it's him     YES Action and leadership     My maleness must graduate from exclusion and defeat     YES But I must grow in isolation     no, HE He must grow in isolation     Will you say how     bring through his subtle withdrawn quest The land and mind project     no It's a subtle quest     The land and mind project is a project of the whole     YES Can you tell me in one card     graduation He wants to graduate, meaning, not be unconscious     He wants to be felt     YES Is he something to do with the prefrontal     NO In the moments of anger for instance     YES The way I felt Ken Sallett     YES I should feel him as a specific maleness     YES Is he always there     Does Louie have a man in her     no Was he always in me     YES Is there any more you want to say about this     no Love woman, work woman, little one, and this man     YES Are there more     no Is he something to do with the feeling I have about Luke     YES - Then I was in the bathroom running water to rinse clothes. In among this and that I thought of Michael, wondering whether he got the envelope of drawings I sent him. That very instant the phone rang. Rowen thinking he's phoning Jim. We have a sweet conversation. I'm naked on the floor scrambling through newspapers looking for a web address in the evening light. He tells me about a web game he's joined, called Graal. His avatar name is Gemineye. Other than that, he's working at the oyster farm. Is he going to work with Michael, I ask? No, he's taking the boat on his own. He has a dark farmer's tan from the light off the water. I can hear Michael in his voice in a way I never have. A soft quirk. It's the solstice. Tinted sky like solstice evenings at home. 22 Tonight I took Louie to Leah's house. [874 E.Georgia St] She's going to buy it I think. She'll have a place with sky. A garden with a cat. A bedroom with rooftops, mountains, and a hemlock drooping its tip. The orange room with a green plant. She'll walk in the door and be overjoyed every time. 23 What I'm learning in frontal cortex. Some of the invisible but feelable stuff - the sensations of decision - which are like muscular holding and releasing - turning this way and that way - the rarefied muscularity of thinking. I might be able to feel the difference between premotor and prefrontal. I think I have it set up now. I did posterior counterflow organization, now frontal counterflow. Prefrontal overrides and releases motor routines, including those that have to do with action for purposes of perception. At the same time it is inhibiting and releasing sensory structure, the flow in. I should say it differently, it is coming to agreement with sensory flow, aiding the set. There's more to know about how the prefrontal itself is organized but I think I won't go there this time. With this section I feel I've crossed the continental divide. 24 The woman in Houston, five kids under seven, homeschooler, who drowned the kids one by one in the bathtub. She had to chase the seven year old through the house. I drop a clipping about the Nature Trust at David's. On his windowsill there is a white bakelite stove knob, weathered, with a weathered pale green indicator strip. There is also a small black stone very polished, an irregular piece of rust quite coarse, a tiny piece of paper purple faded to silver, a small block of wood, a white seal ring. Laid across this collection a child's toothbrush, weathered pale green plastic, with its name in worn-off gold letters: Delicate Action. Nora phoned this morning. You're so psychic, I said. She has bought an office building a block from Balboa Park. She's employing twenty people. There is a patio that could have plants in pots. Her back garden's all undone. Louie tonight wearing black close to the body, black hair with white streak, sky blue silk shirttail billowing behind her as she jets up the alley to her car, carrying a black briefcase. 25 Complicated dreaming. I'll say the last part first. I'm dreaming inside the dream, and think it may be someone else's dream, a young girl who has been on the table. I'm seeing from a river in flood, floating smoothly down the center of choppy water very broadly spread, marveling at the light, which is luminous white over the pale green I see where the water heaps into peaks. Also marveling at the perspective transformations as I move with the water, large houses in pastel colors rotating with perfect evenness, even the piles of rubble and a strange glass house. I'm watching the dream's complex perfection with absorption. There are the peaks of the waves the girl modeled with paper, peaks with white clumps between them for mist. The young man, her uncle, called them meringue. As I go on watching the motion starts to break up. The perfection could only sustain itself so long. I'm back in the place with the tables looking around for the girl. There's a small hatch in the wall, that's open. I look in. It's like a ventilator shaft. The girl crawls out. I say I think I might have seen her dream. I describe the green waves and white air. She says yes, it's hers. We had put the young woman on the table because she was in a state I can't describe. I was made responsible for her. She was in danger of wandering off, like a child. We were suggesting she make a nest with pillows. Instead she made a wide paper landscape. There has been a smooth perfection of the last days. The way I have arranged Louie's house, Nora phoning, even the writing has been happening without a fight. I like the way I took David's pale green for the dream. The ventilator part is just the size of the opening into Leah's attic. 26 Charles Sorbie [orthopedic surgeon who fixed my hip socket when I was 24] was on CBC last night talking about his hands. He said he grew up on a farm in the northeast of Scotland, fixing machinery. He can take a clock apart and hold the little parts in place when he reassembles it. Surgery is like that. He went on to say you have to be able to go from the vertical x-ray to the horizontal patient and understand the structures in three dimensions. He was talking about spatial imagining as if it was the same thing as skill with the hands. Really it is not the hand but the relation of hand and eye. So the surgeon has strong life in the silent hinterland of the parietal. Let me think about that. The hand rotates and the fingers in the hand have all the degrees of freedom they do, and the arm moves the hand through large areas of the space around the body. And then there is the fact that two hands work together, or separately on different objects. Both parietals integrate all those degrees of freedom in relation to the line of sight. That's extraordinary. And then the fact that hands are sensors too, and the two kinds of sensing are integrated so they supplement each other. When a hand is working on what's around back out of sight, does the eye hold to an axis with the place where it is? I would think so. Sailing away into fantasy about Charles Sorbie - come back. The parietal integrates all that - and what else is there to ask - the development of IPL and the development of lateral prefrontal are coordinate - tertiary association - both are about hand-eye skill - prefrontal is about decision, IPL is about the places of decision, is that it? It distributes into SPL and IT. Is tertiary always convergence zone     High level convergence, act constants, object category constants, place constants     Which are interdefined as well as independent     When I reach behind me for something I can't see, that knowing is imagining, but not visual. It's kinematic but integrated with visual - structural-visual. Is IPL kinematic, having to do with motion, rather than visual-structural     Kinematic-visual     Kinematic-visual structural is what mechanics and surgeons have. Tactile-visual is what I have. A motion/action-related visuality vs a texture-related visuality. They are both high forms. People have both but develop one or the other? I am utterly exasperated by mechanical tasks. Even fitting the key to my stupid complicated new bicycle lock. My deftness with plants is something else. Substances. Texturelessness, the look of mechanical parts, says what sort of sensing it is. Outlines. That guy thing. Something else I've just remembered. The sensation I sometimes have with Louie, of coming to in a conversation. I have it nowhere else. It's that sensation of sitting up, coming into focus. It happens further on in an evening. It's like a click. I find myself talking from a different self, a further-back self. Last time she was here sitting on my bed, for example, when I found myself able to talk about work. It's a sensation of relief, oh, I can speak from myself. It is also like standing in a free position, it's centered. This morning on the radio I heard a song about the book: For you / And I / Have a special / Angel / On high / With nothing / To do / But to give / To you / And to give / To me / Love / Forever / True. Funny to realize. There was a run of fifties songs smart in that fifties way. Or maybe it was my state as I woke. I'd never have heard their intelligence. Love on the rocks. The man in a hat who says, say .... his ironical heart, much purer than they are now. Frank had that quality, some. It's not rock'n'roll. It's a guy in his thirties, privacy. 27 At Leah's, the night I took Louie there, as we were returning up the corridor from having looked at the orange room, I found myself bursting out, I love it when people are brilliant. I meant Leah. It was a free burst I could have in the presence of those two, who find me brilliant, and like to. Louie said later there was hope beauty and friendship in the room, remarkable. Louie's beautiful house is coming true. The light there will be. 28 Louie also said, and why am I shy to say, You looked so beautiful. San Diego, 29th I'm here. Do I have the energy to say anything. Maybe not yet. Louie loves me     Tom does not     Tom is attached     Has Tom ever loved anybody     no Have I     Will Tom ever love anybody     no It's not a moral flaw     It's a kind of person     So is there a reason I'm with somebody who doesn't love me     Is it a good reason     acting and struggling to process maleness It's stunning me that he doesn't love me     He's learning to fake it     Because of his attachment     He does what's needed to keep me     YES Is it bad for him    no So do you have advice     love woman's indecision is a vehicle for coming through Ambivalence     Track the ambivalence     YES Sexual interest and dismay at being unloved     That summarizes it     YES That's love woman's particular circumstance in this life     YES She doesn't come into her own until she goes to meet it     Will you tell me what coming into her own implies     YES temper happiness with disillusion and defeat A tempered happiness     YES She has illusion biologically inscribed     More?     research and get overview of losses of male rule I'm with Tom to learn to understand how to take back the planet     YES That sounds cold, do you mean it that way     no Am I sposed to love him     YES And desire him     If I expect to be loved it weakens me     Do you have more to say about this     visit process partial loss and delayed loss There's a loss I don't know about     Mine     no His     Of what     something unknown There's more to know     YES San Diego 1st July Something from the journey. I was early at the airport and sat on a chair in the departure zone looking at people. It was a bar chair I turned to face outward. What was I wearing. Formal clothes, a style I was trying. Black linen pants and a pink-brown short-sleeved jacket fitted so it sits in close to the haunch as far as the waist. It's rayon, looks like silk. I mean I was feeling out whether I could look interesting even though I am grey in the forelock and strangely widened in the middle - I mean my hip bones have moved. I did look interesting on account of self-consciousness probably but also I liked the loose good cut of the clothes. The look of good fabric. Etc. But I want to tell about a woman I was watching. She was a young mother waiting with her husband and little daughter for the New York flight. She had short dark hair, a boy's cut. She looked Jewish. Her husband must have been Israeli, I thought, because he was a physical man, her height, jeans, belt, shirt. He was walking the little girl around the room between his knees. The little one was less than a year, not walking on her own but plowing forward holding his hands. The young woman was slim but broad shouldered, and she was standing at the center of the space laughing, watching another very little girl learning to walk, staggering ahead of her tall blond father, widelegged, committed, falling, getting up. The young woman was graceful. Now I'm thinking of it I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone else who is. Her shoulders moved with her knees. It was about feeling. She was wearing navy slacks, a sweater. She wasn't selling herself. She was sound. She was safe. She was whole. She was seeing. Their flight was called and they went lightly together through the gate. Was there anything else in the day. The holding pen in the commuter terminal at LAX. People alone, performing into cell phones, oblivious. A very small thin old Chinese man in grey pants and white shirt, suspenders, sitting upright, symmetrical, concentrating on breathing. A show business guy in showoff yellow plastic shoes, making deals or wanting to seem to, on his cell, signaling to his companions. Two highly got-up black people, he in cornrows close to the head, she in bleached felt reading a black prophet in gold-stamped hardback. Los Angeles to the horizon under a deep gauze of yellow-grey. Corrupt. The plastic surgery ads because in this land it's not sex but money. I'm dopey still, the noise at night, Tom waking me early when he goes to type the sheets. 2nd How should it go. Dreaming is from the center to the sides like a fountain. 3rd What's goin' on my brother - did something spook you? A white sky edge to edge, like a lamp bowl. The black man who said his name was Soulful was hitting on me and melted away when I said my boyfriend lives upstairs. What I'm seeing on TV is economic desperation. What do I need to crispen up my spirit. The sea, maybe. The [college] phone interview. 6th He said I've done wonderful things and my CV kept coming to the top of the pile. They'll speak to me early next week for 45 minutes and let me know quickly. How do I feel. Frightened. What is it. Am I afraid of something that has already happened. Yes. School peers. I'm afraid of hatred. What's the reply to hatred. Give swiftly and shatter the structure with truth. The truth is that I want something and find it hard to want something. I'm so scared of competition. It's my own hatred I'm afraid of? Yes. Consider what I really want to know     whether you'll have to be hidden Would I     But less     9 I have nothing to say. The plants help me. I look to the powerful complicated succulents at the window. How is it going? Yesterday the ocean. Black rocks radiating heat. Meeting the waves. Seeing the OB working people in their Sunday afternoon. A little girl called Oceana with her surfer daddy. Tom asleep in his sunglasses with his head propped on a rock. New blue trunks with yellow lining in the pockets. Something making him anxious when we were first there. He had his shriveled look. When we got home he was himself again, thanking his feet. On Saturday at Mission Hills Nursery a half hour of anguish as he followed me around. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to see anything, and he would want plants I hate [birthday]. I wasn't able to see anything but we did find plants we both like. I settled for that and we biked home through streets with houses and gardens. I am quite ugly, bags under my eyes, water fat. Nice poking isn't helping. We haven't crossed the line. We're both being cautious and considerate so nothing blows up. He had a little fit about biking pants and biking gloves and sunglasses. If he is wearing biking pants and gloves he will look cheap for not buying me some. If he wears sunglasses and I don't he feels hidden and that's uncivil. So therefore he must persuade me but I refuse. We get through that one by patient explaining. Maybe I should make myself write here even when I'm not wanting to. Keep saying the worst. Would it give energy. Is it the way it was with Rob and Louie, after some number of years I don't want to tell the story, I don't have enough energy in the meeting to register things that need to be told. Newness is magic medicine. Is there another way? We don't want to abandon each other but we're bored     act to process losses and shatter the structure The dullness is losses     Losses in this relation     no Early love     When there isn't intensity I don't know how     Intensity brings the losses     Will you tell me how to redeem losses that don't come up     What Joyce said about dullness being interesting     you and Tom look for generosity He's doing that     Will you tell me what he needs     something sexual The chore of reassuring. The chore of hearing stories twice and more. The chore of hearing remarks. Acceding to or resisting gestures. I'm way too tired to deal with another person. The chore of being grateful. 11th On the beach in Coronado last evening - clouds reflected on the slick of the sand - a band of gritty fast flicker where the sea was draining back under the advance - a dim peach glow across the chop at the farthest reach. What do I really think about the interview. Moments when I was at a loss, searching. Moments I inspired them to a burst of laughter or liking. It's done. Now the next thing. I only have two more weeks. I should try to talk to Gabriele. I should get into that frame. I don't look good, I don't feel good, I'm dim, I ache. - Seymour Butt's series of porn videos, Tom said. 17 Black Canyon Road. Sunrise Highway. The job. Tom day by day. Land and mind. Louie's house. I have no impulse to say anything. Ticket booked to Vermont. Why am I in silence. I must put a root down the middle of my chest. What's there. A sore heart. What is it? Pressure. I don't have enough space around me to feel what I'm feeling. 18 Louie signed papers last night. This means pack up 824 soon. 19 Where am I. 21 I'm with Tom and there are a lot of moths in the room. I put out my hand and catch one. He says it's a luna moth. It is green. It's large, velvety, fresh. I open my hand to see it and then close it again to catch it. The sky begins at one's feet. The earth is the record of what has happened. Stars are the things themselves, constellations are not. Nancy Holt. "New observational structures." James Turrell Military-industrial-academic complex. "Often the names led only to a sense of the land as real estate, a businessman's landscape." Names that were knowledge of the place. A steady loss of names. The purpose of the place to produce good minds, good thoughts. Richard Misrach 2000 The sky book, text by Rebecca Solnit Arena Editions Richard Misrach 1996 Crimes and splendors: the desert cantos of Richard Misrach Bullfinch Press I can't be my best with Tom     But I can have an open heart     That puzzles me     It's not his fault that I can't be my best     YES I can't be my best because of the male thing     Like he can't be his best in the culture thing     And it's not my fault     I try to import other times when I've been myself, and it doesn't work     Will you tell me how to have an open heart     inner lovers, come through, anger, by decision I'm my best self now, by talking to you     Is that the decision you mean     23 Tom dreamed he and I were in a department store. I was somewhere intently looking at something. He was wandering as he waited. He found the department store ugly and offensive. The goods for sale were poor and the advertising stupid and exclamatory. Big signs saying FOOD. Junk shoes that were like Chinese slippers. But from the many windows he could see dogs playing on a beach. Each window was another view onto a delightful scene. The dogs were splashing in the surf or playing at fighting over fish. Playing at fighting over fish because there was enough for all. He came upon a small room with a bottle of Dasani water, a small bottle, 8 oz, and a basket of chips. He was wondering whether they were complimentary, he assumed they must be, and drank some water and ate a chip. Suddenly two security cops appeared. One was a big butch lesbian in full cop uniform, the other an older man in a blue blazer. The lesbian was accusing him of stealing while the older man looked on passively. Tom protests that he would have been glad to pay for the water but there was no price marked and no way to pay. He brings out two dollar bills that are so beaten up they are almost unrecognizable. He's afraid she won't accept them, but she does. She writes out a receipt or ticket. The writing goes on and on. That was Saturday morning of our last weekend. In the afternoon I said to him, You don't have to love me, I'll still be here. It hit him like an arrow. He went red and tears came to his eyes. Sunday I positioned myself opposite and said like the angel of god, You don't love me, you don't love anyone, you have never loved anyone or anything. He said he would agree for the sake of the argument. Later I found I had come through. Maybe it was we, but I had heart for him for the first time. Was I speaking to the man in me     That connects me with my heart     He allowed himself to carry the accusation     Animus is heartless because my dad is     Is animus supposed to have heart     Will you tell me about the kind of heart animus is supposed to have     a heart that shares, is honest, teaches and is decisive Is disaffection in me always animus     YES I try to have a sexual relation with animus     YES part 3 the golden west volume 23: 2001 may-november work & days: a lifetime journal project