the golden west volume 24 part 2 - 2001-2002 december-january

work & days: a lifetime journal project

San Diego, 23rd I need a day in a room by myself, just being. The night before I left I was in my bed trying to sleep, going into the studio of my other house. There were the tables each with a chapter, and now each table was lit by a candle. I could so clearly see the candlelight in the big room. It was an image of my pleasure in what I've achieved. At the airport Tom and I put our arms around each other and hugged long and long. I had come around the corner in a purple sweater and the new pea-coat. The trip. Clouds below, all the way to San Fran. The hell of circling above San Francisco waiting to be let down. Cloud almost to the ground as we came in over the grey water. Then at gate 76 waiting for the delayed flight to SD, I picked a spot along the wall. A young soldier had command of the center of it. I said, I think there's room in this stretch for two and sat down next to him. He wouldn't shiff over so we sat there next to each other. I looked at everyone who came past. The soldier had his legs stretched out so people had to take care not to trip over them. At the ends of them were some striking boots, new, pointed, with fringed tongues and slanted heels in colored layers. Then the soldier turned his camouflage bag sideways for a pillow and lay down along the wall, crossed his arms over his chest, turned his face away from the room and went to sleep with his head next to me. I watched women coming into the women's washroom looking at him. He had a bare lumpy skull but had fresh bright color in his face. There were women who looked maternally, and women who looked with greed. In the center of the space was a line-up waiting for the check-in counter. It didn't move for an hour. There was a man with dark hair cut very short, jug ears, standing in a black leather coat with the interlining drooping. He had a baby with him, strapped into a car seat on the floor. There I sat, there they stood, and many other people washed back and forth in the corridor between us. Two tall grey-haired lesbians with dead energy fields, a fat mother and thin daughter, a tall old man with his pants belted high. In the line there also was an old cowboy, a drinker, standing in line behind a young woman who was reading as she stood. He moved unsteadily on his thin legs, thin all the way to the hip, to look over her shoulder to see what she was reading. After a moment, when he had stepped back, she gave him a swift assaying glance. - In the San Diego plane I found myself next to the man with the baby, who from the side looked so much like Luke that I kept staring. He was a simpler man, though, nice with the baby, who was a wiry little person in a one-piece sleeper suit. As we waited on the tarmac I invited the baby onto my lap, where he sat very poised. The young man was halfway through seven years at Camp Pendleton, which we saw as we flew. When I had the baby I talked to him the way I used to talk to Luke. I held the back of his little goldy skull in my palm. 24 I went out yesterday for some hours to find myself here. On Newport Avenue I did what I always do, found a perfect lamp. This one is brass, with a heavy round base and a stem I cannot describe, which is perfectly proportioned in the matter of flex and non-flex. It has a glass bowl the color of alabaster, which when lit is like a lambent moon, both white and yellow. It both directs light and diffuses it. It's for Tom, I knew. I didn't see it but something did. I was carrying a glass bowl I thought was for me. A nice bowl, but toward the end of the aisle, one of the center aisles, in which I have never found anything, I felt I should put it back. I considered the sensation. It was not about the bowl one way or another, I knew, only that for some reasons I was not supposed to buy it. I turned and took two steps and saw the lamp, which now is standing on Tom's bedside table (which is not by his bed but in the center of the north wall) looking elegant next to his mother-in-law's-tongue. Look at this day. Sun at a slant into the window. It was a basking golden sunrise that I saw from the first brightening over the mountains. The most beautiful thing I saw yesterday was from the bus when it was stopped at a light. It was a very tall date palm close in to the front door of a house. The fronds were shipping a small wind with greatest flowing grace, rippling like grass, like seaweed, glinting and streaming. A cloud of pigeons circling beyond the Arlington. Tom said, A rough-neck wouldn't have a lamp like that, I guess I'm not a rough-neck any more. My last dream this morning was that I was guarding a woman they wanted to shoot. I was guarding her by staying in front of her, or near her. There were men with rifles pointed at her from many sides. I realized the rifles were so high-powered they were afraid of ricochets. I could guard her by staying just close enough. But they were watching for a moment when we were careless. Who is guarding, who is being guarded. I thought love woman is guarding, the femmy voice I am hearing when I speak to Tom. Who is being targeted - the one who spoke the first night I was here, the intelligent one. As we were lying in bed I tried to tell Tom about seeing the studio with candles on the table. I began to tell him what a memory palace is. He cut me off. Will you lead me     improvement Okay     practical, judgment, ask, distress I need to be alone     no Everything is not my timing     no I don't have my own practical judgment     no Ask why I'm distressed     A reason I don't know?     deep change, (9p), gain, skill I want to be working     no I don't understand     A deep change is needed     Will you gloss (9p)    opposite Noncompletion     yes Deep change, incomplete, gain, skill     In relation to work    no Tom     I need to break up with him    no Do you have any suggestion for what we should do today     wait For what     your wife Wait for my wife     YES I have no clue what that means     There's no depth to this     I was living with discipline     This is all just insignificant junk     I want newness     I want to be gripped by interest     I am bored stupid     By wife do you mean someone in me who accepts it     no Can transform it     no I want my own room     no Will you lead me     come through I want to be working     no Will you lead me through     integration I'm clueless     Will you lead me     flow, decision, delay, excluded child I don't understand     I'm panicky     So many demands    no Keep leading me     YES One card     (HP) Something wants to come through     About what    your judgment About what     excluded child Do you mean a memory     A feeling of misery     Memory of isolation among strangers     Hospital memory     That feeling is the memory     Battered by irrelevancy     27 Where am I - Clayton's Pies - there was a sunrise I saw from my bed - Tom was lying beside me pinching my nipples and I was feeling I wanted to get away - ineffectual uncertain thoughts - even now I am not very definite - he woke and was sailing through the universe seeing people fuck at sunrise all over the world - not thinking sunrise is not happening in Japan when it happens here - but floating and sailing in pleasure - a cosmic energy field that loves him so much it has presented him with this beautiful pussy, which is the pussy of the energy field. I left him lying in bed looking beautiful stroking his soft dick. Alright let me dig - what is it I am resisting? What I feel is he's putting the make on me in the wrong way, is it that? As if from the front of him. But maybe it's not that, maybe I'm just up against my habit, my lifelong safety of confining feeling. What do I imagine I'd want. Steady silent rock-solid private something, not this froth of fantasy and will. It is saying yes to that, but I'm at the same time noticing I want to escape as if there's a campaign on to reduce me. Is it now or was it then. The person in me who worries and thinks goes fretty and doesn't want to die. I was saying I don't want sex to get to be daily junk, I've kept it beautiful all this lifetime by not getting used to it. I'm fighting with something, am I? See, I'm dim this morning, doubtful. Does that mean sex is bad for me? Does it mean I am unclear and divided about sex? What am I scared of. Losing my quality, being leveled. Being taken over by a mind less than my own. Getting lost. Being at the disposal of someone else's desire. Being disabled. In my fantasies I am always both the seducer and the seduced. That's very safe. Something about safety. I was safe with Rob and Tony because they had practical intelligence. I could let them think for me. What I'm wanting to know is whether the danger I sense is real. I am absolutely not safe letting Tom think for me. He has put my life in danger more than once. He has been witless about my spirit well-being. He has lied, concealed, sleazed out, in multiple ways. He does not manage money. (He would be protesting all this.) But here is the question. Letting go in sex is temporary. It happens usually in a bed in a locked room. Does it matter that I am not safe in the ways I am not safe? If I let go in sex am I compromised in any way when I am not in sex? Is there some mechanism that would turn itself on to make him head of the household? Is it really about safety? When I was first with Tom I did let go and he was much more unreliable then. I experienced agonies of unsafety. I cut back to the amount of trust it's rational to feel. I am not experiencing any agonies, only dissatisfactions. Should I leave it there for now. I need the book for those questions. What do I have to do. Three weeks more. - Chapter 10. Start with chapter 1, where I begin. A question from one community brought into another. Where I was as an artist, what I'd want to defend. Then say here is an example of what I mean, a brain formed by nature and culture. Is chapter 10 Leaving the land? Chapter 10 speaks about starting where I began and going on to where I end. Should I write about how philosophy is different from art, and say how it is to do philosophy as if it were art? As I read over the whole, make the links, make the visuals, set up a powerpoint show, be thinking and making notes for ch 10. Or is it the next book, high perceiving? Ch 10 can be about the sort of evidence I have. Standing in a field of grass, seeing and 'seeing.' It is the chapter that gives the sort of evidence they don't have and says, Look at this in the light of what I have described in the whole of this work. I am going to stand at my defense so in command of my holdings. Moskvitin's book. testimonies of other people. In chapter 9 I do it for the official ways. In chapter 10 I let loose and do it in bits and flow, the true loves and wonder. Say what I think I have, an epistemology for art, an epistemology for environmentalism. An epistemology for dreaming, mysticism, craziness, for all the religions to the extent that they know anything. Epistemology, account of aboutness not 'knowledge.' What I've gained among other things is an ability to let my terms float. I don't peg them. I don't believe they can be pegged. The whole of an organization matters. A sentence has potency but it does not have truth except in a manner of speaking. The question is sanity, well-foundedness. Cultures easily construct tissues of insanity. What are the sorts of questions one asks about quality in art. Introduction - tell the story of Gordon Smith's painting - say where it is, size, who made by, who seen by, how it is made, how the painter became able to make it, how the viewer became able to see it. This kind of painting does not have the self evidence of 'representational' work, and yet it works by the same means. I've tested people with this work. I like it for that. Question: bring it through from the introduction to the conclusion. How does the middle of the book make it possible to think the sorts of knowing that make the painting possible, that make my comprehension possible? What does this way of understanding knowing give that other kinds of theory doesn't - unconscious knowing, how ability to know can develop, not knowing, recognition as fit, pleasure, how the painting is about, how art is like magic, drugs and knowing, magic and not being about (exploiting limits). List of questions it doesn't answer. List the rules of thumb for philosophic reading. Jurij Moskvitin 1974 Essay on the origin of thought Ohio University Press 28 Bin here a week. Le Guin's new book is very slight but the last story is about a young woman with a drunk father, a woman on a farm, who goes to the island of the mages and when she is turned away because she is a woman, becomes a dragon and flies west. For mage school, read university. I'm remembering something maybe from the first train trip to Queen's. It was a stop at night, a long stop, Winnipeg, likely. I was talking with two men on the platform. I was excited and confident, as I was then, engaging them, flirting probably. They were from a university - I'm not sure - but they were sophisticated, I thought, observant, articulate. They were looking at each other and one of them said I must have a good mother - was it that? I understood that he meant I must have someone who loved me wisely, because I was so confident and forward in spite of being lame. The parable of the girl who discovers she is a dragon ended with the dragon rising glittering and smoking above the heads of the magi males, one of whom, a pretender, a dead-in-life, she has just turned into old bones huddled with a broken stick. Tom said yesterday that when he drank he would turn into a dragon. He doesn't like to see crocodiles on the nature channel because they are too much what he feels he is. The lightning strike. When he was a dragon he was fueled with high octane white gas. I said I've seen the dragon. I go on seeing a reptile in the width of his mouth and in his huge nostrils. At times I look at him and want to close my eyes. I feel I've died and gone to Mars. But the point about the men on the platform is that they may have been partly right but they also were not seeing that I am a dragon. At the time I registered what was there to register but I didn't know they were wanting to diminish me. I took it with an inner firming and went on. Le Guin's girl from the farm is simple and honest. Ursula Le Guin 2001 "Dragonfly" in Tales from Earthsea Harcourt [The story is also in 2001 The other wind.] 29 She defeats the cabal by demanding to meet them in the grove where things only are what they are. Was he in some kind of regression     Was it the movie     Was it a dry drunk     Belligerence     Ignorance     Is it the state denying its ignorance     Is he still going to be in that state when he gets back     Stay in it all day     no Do I have a fault in it     Will you tell me what     you don't graduate him Is it my responsibility     Will you tell me how to do it    Ellie process completion of despair Mine     no, his Did he go defensive about movies after I told him what movies I liked     Do I also want him to stay ignorant     Is he shutting down because he's going back to work     Do you want to name his despair     it asks anxiously to know how to be complete Was it a low blow     Tries to be proud of ignorance     Because being ashamed of it is a strain     YES I am not paying much attention     Should I pay more     Deliberately     Do I have the energy     He needs to feel it as despair     30 Here is Sunday. I bought a bowl yesterday, green glaze, banded mixing bowl, thrown wonky. I'm bored out of my skull, will you comment     oppression, integration, the work, fertility Is this an instruction     Integrate oppression by means of the work, for fertility     Boredom is the opposite of fertility     Boredom is a kind of oppression     Suppressing myself in his presence     Will you advise     creation My boredom is a measure of my destruction     Be creative     It doesn't occur to me     Will you tell me why     action, indecision, structure, illusion I don't act because I don't feel     no I don't feel because I don't act     Do you desire Tom     Do you love Tom     Do you have creative ideas     My indecision about action is structured by illusion, will you tell me what the illusion is     that men, are defeated, if they do not evade, feeling Will you tell me the truth     success/integration, betrayal, love, passage from difficulty Integrate betrayal of love for passage from difficulty     Will you tell me how     fertility from acting generously from the abandoned child The blank abandoned child will return to life by acting generously     Tom is doing that     Is there more I need to know     I do not know where to get the energy     YES, liberation, persistence, recovery, from betrayal Will the blankness go away by itself     no Let the child act generously     Leave it for now     31st Today I have the room to myself all day. Milling. Don't want to tell my stories. At loose ends, loose, loose. What do I need. Focus. I'm sitting with two crazy people in Clayton's. The sun barely heating my back. You look familiar, she says. No I don't, I say. She was wearing purple and had very thick lips. Ah there's the whole sun. It's New Years Eve I guess. Did you know about that     Is he doing it a lot    no Should I let it go     no Should I break up with him     no Should I leave     no I'm frightened     no He would have concealed it     I was waiting to bust him     Do you want to comment     something about loneliness His     no, yours, lack of, persistence, power, delay A concealed thing     Is it wrong for him     Very wrong     It shows he doesn't understand the principle     Is it bad for me to be with such a person     no Was this the first time he did it since I was here     Lack of persistence, delayed power - his?     no, yours Are you saying it's my fault     no The man I'm with indicates the man I am     no It's none of my business     no Will you lead me     overview: struggle, father, persist, processing Accept that he is weak and wants to stay stuck     He's afraid of coming through     It is better to know     This leads me to shut down even more     no Tell me why my heart hurts     because he's holding back If his will is weak in one area it will be weak in others     Is there more you want to say     conflict Between what and what     dealing with betrayal and evading Is betrayal coming up       Does he understand on any level     no Do you want both of us to be more marvelous     Do we have equally strong resistance     Could Tom help me     He thinks it's about keeping me     Say what is that about     Could he shift to doing it for himself    It's about his mother     It's not self-will, it's a kind of defense     Against anguish     no against anger Anger at abandonment     Anger at his parents     At me     no He needs to discover what zonking is about     Does zonking disable the uncon     He needs to center and feel feeling     Is it true that he doesn't like to think     no He doesn't like what he finds     Is that enough about him     Now me     I need to stay unconfluent     Does that mean no sex     no I have to faithfully write down bad things     When I don't it means I'm confluent     When I'm bored does it mean I'm confluent     Do you want to comment    no Did I do okay this morning     Should I go away for a few days     no Should I live closer to you     YES Do you want me to work on ch 10       Anything you want to talk about     research - share knowledge of Tom's early love Pay more attention to it     Find out what little boys love     In relation to land     Throwing a stone at the bulldozer     Getting into a pit     Should he write that     What's lost when the woods are lost     Is there a reason we aren't supposed to rent a car     something about fantasy Keep fantasy going     Get out of here and let him write     Invent a nun who teaches him well     Sister Patience     Take the trolley to the marsh     1st January 2002 I milled some more yesterday, waiting for 12, when Tom would have gone back to work if he'd been in the room at lunch. When I opened the door there was Tom and a smell of marijuana. Fan going on the windowsill. I'm busted, he said and went to work. Here are my stages so far. Fear. Loneliness. Clarity. Hope. I took the 30 to Bird Rock and looked at Nora's garden. When I got home I had to find a corner to talk to myself. My hand was shaking in fear that I would lose contact with whatever it is that lets me know what's true. It's when I am in confluence with Tom, I saw, that I'm in danger if he lies, and if he lies in the other way of refusing to look for what's what. I begged the wiser one to stay with me. It said it would. That let me go to the next level, where I am no longer frightened and wanting to bolt, but am holding myself separate and waiting to know what to do. After the night lying with gold mist at the window, drunks shouting, I did know what to say, which is what I've said up to here. He says he is holding an option. I say, No you are refusing options. I say, Look at the implications of the fact that I caught you. You aren't going for broke. where is my spirit i'm no where near it Reading over the whole of this book seeing that I come to the front of the wave and fall back from it. Love failure by working for it. Make your judgment more responsible to creation by bringing back hope the child gave up. Build hope, deal with resistance to hope. You curbed yourself when you did not have permission to flow. Come through deep change in points of indecision, about whatever you vacillate in. Gain freedom and energy. Anger is a sort of denial of loss. Her aloneness and hardness, when she could have been bright, soft and gifted. 2nd Mr Tom came home yesterday and said it was time to give up dope one day at a time, "I've been dicking around with it". He had read Adrienne Rich at work, the essay on lying, and I had been in Starbucks getting centered by reading the journal up to here. Now we're after the holiday. I have two weeks. We're sleeping enough. Among the Yurok, doctors were women. Her powers were thought to come from an ancestor not another sort of spirit. No malevolence was feared from these doctors. Evidence before puberty, older doctors would train. In early adulthood she would receive a 'pain' that would be a danger. She was carefully watched until she was able to control it, acquired stronger pains in later dreams. 3rd The question I'm having is about human weakness for mad theory - weakness in fantasy - religion - how humans will believe anything - people are sane in practical things, often, but insane at any distance from base - beliefs the oddest mixtures of mnemonics, social control, art & play, wish to understand how it all works, dream & hallucination, propagated accident, personal madness, ritual fear-relievers. Culture as in cults. Oral tradition, practical technologies that must be transmitted, having been so long to find. Material culture. Surely part of the rage of Europeans against other peoples is the rage against noticing the irrationality of their own beliefs when they begin to see that beliefs can differ. The energy of conversion must be that. What are the implications for a new way of undertaking mind and land. 4th Last few days - Kumeyaay - the kind of gardening done by people who range over a landscape - burning and seed scattering, damming, breaking bulbs and replanting, tip pruning. Indians herded into missions as land was already being degraded. Florence Connolly Shipek 1991 Delfina Cuero: her autobiography: an account of her last years and her ethnobotanical contributions Ballena Press, Anthropological papers #38 Well-being. Sitting in the sun to work. Sleeping warm. No stiffness. Eating at Valentine's on an outside table. Caffé latté from Clayton's. Library books on gardens and the Kumeyaay. A poke that went deep, I could feel him swelling in the dark. George Thoroughgood One bourbon, one whiskey, one beer, dancing to R&B on the bed, meeting Tom's hand on my back. Sleeping shallowly but enough. Playing with Tom. Showering at the end of the hall. 7th Pepper Canyon. A cut-off, undrained pocket, sloping to a forked swampy south end from a lane opening at the north end. Asphalt and plywood sheets to allow vehicles, south end a thicket. Iceplant, pepper trees, acacia/mimosa, grass. Tops heavily treed with red gums mostly. Slopes have some chaparral. No paths down. There's a concrete floor and two low walls, west and north. Space interrupted with eucalyptus saplings. Waterfall from a culvert high on the east slope. Many birds singing. It's not dry. Spots where you can't see anything if you look up the bank. One palm tree, non-native. Very junky with fallen eucalyptus branches, other branchy and weedy trash. (I wanted to burn it.) Willows, oaks. Put in a track with a streambed. Make that concrete floor a dancing floor with a well. There's a track along the west side a third of the way down. Up from that track the slopes could be gardened. It's microclimates. Not exposed. Kumeyaay garden. Slopes could be wildflowers. I'm coming to the principles. A technology. Culture, what human memory and rep practices make of nature. Form the institute for the arroyo project. Cleanup and Kumeyaay demo garden. Then extend it to the upper garden, get Nancy Power on the board - or extend it first for event series? - Congeneris Institute for Mind and Land - Here: a journal for land and mind. Tell her I want an office and address and will self-fund. Incorporate. Pepper Canyon to ground the college. 9 On Sunday Tom fucked my bum. It is more robust, less mystical than pussy. Since then he has been pouring, telling me every thought - every verbal thought. He talks to himself vigorously and childishly. A moment I liked was when we were lying together in the evening. I had missed him when he got off the bus and went back for the bag he left at the bus stop. I put my head on his shoulder and said nice master. It was only eight but I fell asleep. Last night I fucked his bum. He spread his legs and moaned to let me know how it felt. Truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet. (32) The unconscious wants truth, as the body does An honorable human relationship is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. (33) We have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. that these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us. (39-40) Adrienne Rich, 2001, "Women and honor: some notes on lying," in Arts of the possible: essays and conversations, 30-40. 10 Yesterday I shopped - there's my beautiful moss-green zippered sweater with a hood lying over the back of Tom's chair. It's Thursday. Sun on the bed, going-to-work traffic at the window. Caffé latté. Did I pick a fight last night to get a little distance? It's getting clearer that when I'm bored and irritated it's by Tom's ways of riding over anxiety. It helps to name it. He said this morning that I'm a sponge soaking up his love and when I leave I'm going to be able to give myself a squeeze and Tom's love will run out of me. I saw myself at [the college] sleek and happy filled up with Tom. It's true in a way. But here I want to defend my lone self. When I wake I want to be able to come to slowly and feel what's left of my dreams and write down a work thought, not be filled up with Tom's love. A second thought reminds that there's some of my going-vacant that is self-suppression and not necessary. I liked coming home after shopping and knowing I could show what I bought for Rowen and have Tom enjoy and appreciate it piece by piece. I love Tom's warthog fantasias and dog stories. I love baiting him and battling him. I love his quick sudden fetches. I love his generosity and ardency. I want to live here and go into the back country all the time. This morning I want an east-facing room on the 5th or 6th floor. But I beat him off. I want him to back off and shut up and let me get around to chasing him. I can't stand the way it's I love you all day long, meaning, Tell me you love me. 11 Tom has figured out how to deal with me. We were on our bikes last night and he was doing what he does, diving across intersections leaving me stranded when the light changes. I feel pathetic left behind while he waits complacently on the far side. It kept happening. I was storming-over by the time we got to the Upstart Crow. You hate me, he said in his child voice. Yes. I hate you, I said. Then I immediately felt better. I'm laughing now. I'm a powerful hater. It is a dreary burden trying to suppress hate all the time. Later last night we were looking at the candles on the TV. I said, This little light of mine. Should have known better. He then had to sing the whole song. I was scowling. You hate me, he said. Yes, I said. I was busted. I am busted as a hater. There was a desert sunrise this morning, pure yellow. Tom was telling me about Rebecca bodysurfing. She was a natural. The second wave she caught, she shot past him in perfect form. They were living at the trailer park and they would walk down the cliffs to the beach. Pilgrim and Whiteman were around. They'd recognize each other's towels. Rebecca had long hair that would crest when it was wet. She had a perfect figure. That was before he met Lorie so it was pure. Later she got into being an executive at the Y. Then it was awards banquets and couples' retreats with Y people. If she hated, she was too nice of a person to show it. She cut her hair like that figure skater's. He is thinking we will buy a dil so I can really fuck his ass. He will come into the store wearing a paper bag on his head. He watches me when he suggests it. He sees that I get gleeful. It is an aggressive but playful glee. Look at that tree. I'm at Clayton's looking through plate glass. It is standing in lovely balance in clean cool light. Pittisporum. It's nine in the morning, the light is strong at 30 degrees from the horizon. Morning traffic has quietened down. I'm going to Mission Hills Nursery later. 14 Monday. Why Gabriele hasn't emailed. There's manzanita in a jar on the speaker across the room. Even in a jar it looks shapely. What is to say today - I have today, tomorrow, Wednesday morning. Am worried about not having worked. I said, Will you comment. It said it's complete. The UCSD project feels like it's not going to happen. Land and mind feels like it's not going to happen. No. I'm out of touch with it. Do you want to talk to me about work     Talk about the dream first     A blackened mummified skeleton wearing a bonnet under layers of pink sheets, in a hospital bed with a sheet metal roof and roses growing on its right side. I see a blackened claw, the ball of a left foot. When I pull, the entire skeleton comes out from under the pink sheets. Is the point a dead woman in my bed     Access through the left foot     Was this woman murdered?     no, died of natural causes In a hospital bed     I found her when I was sweeping under it     This is a woman who died when I was a child     Is there a reason I found her now     combat, integrated, father-completion   The woman who says I hate?     That's the most important thing this visit     The woman who can hate and still love     Hospital bed a flower bed     My hatreds are childish         YES It's not a child's skeleton, it is a woman's     So she's dead     no, exhumed Does that mean coming to life     Will you tell me what's next     separation, process, imagining, brilliance and courage Is this a list     Do you have a name for this woman     withdrawal Does she have another name if she comes alive     liberation So there's more to do     And working with Tom is the way to do it       Am I ready to talk about work     Do you want a card     imagining Something about imagining     Is this about Being about     no Mind and land     Do you mean fantasy     Think about fantasy     Human propensity     Think of it in dynamic terms     Madness     Is this for chapter 10     Anything else you want to say     fantasy/illusion is in conflict with graduating and coming through You mean in general     Sane and insane function     Do you want to teach me something here that I don't already know     honest overview of male function Alright     feeling love completes maleness/Tom Did my father feel love     no Men think it's antithetical but it completes maleness     Is there a kind of crucifixion to be undergone by men     Crucifixion of their defenses     You mean real love     YES The coming through of men is different than the coming-through of women     The coming through of women is into honest aggression     The coming through of men is into honorable love     Both can be done dishonestly     YES Being wise in these areas has to do with careful discernment     More     children graduate by struggling with notions of masculinity Fathers are the finishing school     They can't deal with masculinity without dealing with the mother     More     Ellie's mourning, heartbreak and struggle Okay     partial loss, loss of aggressive feeling This is where it connects to the dream     Another sentence     completion by regaining anger in heartbreak This is the core     In heartbreak I lost anger, you mean     Is there something I should be angry about now     At something present     no What     exclusion Parents     They wanted to get rid of me because I was damaged     Is this true     no It seemed so     Do you want to say more about this     no His crux has to do with bending over backwards and being self divided     YES I should have been furious YES And instead was withdrawn     Because if I was furious I would love them again     That's the whole of it     YES That's the anger Tom feels     YES So that black skeleton woman is anger woman     16 The sun, the sun. It's my last morning in an armchair in Clayton's. I am much more in love with the sun than with Tom. Here is one way to say it: a book I found under his bed says people cope in either of two ways, by denying/avoiding or by hypervigilance. Tom offers me kindness by floating me in flattery, denial, distraction. That stresses because it forces me to step up vigilance. I offer Tom kindness by being hypervigilant for him. It stresses him so he lays on more denial. This is a thoroughly well-meant cross-purpose. I relax when I'm with someone vigilant and exact. He relaxes when he's with an avoider. Yet he loves my rigor and I'm enchanted by his recklessness and flow. Two examples. Yesterday morning he stood naked at the ironing board, his penis bobbling in a nest of grey hair, ironing and re-ironing his white shirt sleeves as he told me about sleeping in his mother's bed when he was little, turning and pressing his face into her ass crack. When he was twelve he would put a gym sock over his dick and rub the little ridge on its underside very surreptitiously until he came. In the morning he would sit on the wet sock when she brought him breakfast. She was a rager like him. She was always on his side. She'd light into anyone who gave him grief. When he brought twigs and leaves from the woods she would look up their names and mount them in scrapbooks. His friends liked her. In his twenties and thirties when he was picking up women in bars, about every five women he'd choose an older woman. He'd walk up and say, May a gentleman buy a lady a drink? They liked that. She'd say, I already have a drink, and he'd say, May I sit with you to drink mine? And then when she'd finished hers he'd lift his finger to the bartender. When the bar closed he'd say, Would you like to go for breakfast somewhere? If she offered to make him breakfast he'd know he was home. Didn't he feel he was fucking death when he fucked an old body? Not at all, not at all. What was the oldest woman he ever fucked? Sixty-five, sixty-eight maybe. He fucked her in the back of a car. After he'd spent the night with a woman he wouldn't go back to that bar for six months. He was gentle with old women. He'd put a desensitizing cream on his dick sometimes, wear two rubbers so he'd last. He tells these stories in a sweet young tone. Here's a moment: when I was at Nora's Saturday and Tom came through the gate wearing sunglasses, I saw appalling corruption in his face. This visit I often don't like to look him in the face. I like to cozy with him, hold his hand, kiss him hello and goodbye, look at his long body in little plaid boxer shorts, standing, walking in the small room, lying with his feet crossed at the ankles. part 3 the golden west volume 24: 2001-2002 november-may work & days: a lifetime journal project