Work and Days: The Golden West vol 24 - part 3 2002 January-February

the golden west volume 24 part 1 - 2002 january-february work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 17th

This morning the roofs were frosted, plumes of vapour stood among roofs and evergreen trees.

Going to Nora's on the bus on Monday I found a paperback between my seat and the wall. It was a ragged copy of Lord Jim, which I have been rereading since. I found a corner bent on a page that talks about "the spirit that dwells within the land," "a mute friend, judge and inspirer." "Those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience." "Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life." [ch 21]

I don't mean that to seem significant although I noticed it. I was reading in many thoughts, some about what may be the differences between reading it now and in high school - didn't I write a book review in grade nine or ten? "He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct." It's a book about manhood in a particular time, English imperialism. I get bored with the moral ponderings - completely secular, though - of 1900. When he writes light I am nothing but happy. Moonlight, sunset, midday, lightning.

Where am I. In my room, with the house in order. Kitchen and corridor painted new white, the floor in the corridor varethaned, though a slightly wrong color. I am doing nothing today. Shopped, read, saw Louie for twenty minutes. She came in fresh from the cold, in black, with pale blue gloves.

Gabriele's email Tuesday said thank you for not giving up on her. It's a very loving tone, Tom said. I liked that he could see it.

There was a woman I met in the customs line last night. She was in her seventies, with black eyes, no makeup, unpermed hair, and a brown plain intelligent face. She reached her hand to stroke the stone on a column, and moved to see whether the edge was plumb. She had trained in mechanical drawing in Barcelona when she was a young woman. She and her husband moved to Toronto forty years ago. She worked for architects. Fifteen years ago she went with CUSO to Gambia in West Africa, to teach mechanical drawing for two years, her husband having died, I assumed. She bought a house with a hectare of orchard near the ocean and so lives there now, in Africa, during the winters. She grows mangos, starfruit, watermelon, bananas, avocado, lemons and limes, papaya, many kinds of flowers. Labour is cheap, she said. I arrived at the customs officer and that was that. Good luck to you, she said in her slight heaviness of a Spanish accent.

19

Louie yesterday took deep offense at almost nothing. It meant we lost the possibility of a visit on her day off. Now it will be a week, maybe, before she balances. I also suspect her of picking a fight for some reason she doesn't want to know. Either way, I'm dropped.

What happened this time was that she phoned when I was working and said she'd phone later. I was bursting with the news that Rowen was overjoyed with his clothes. I thought it was mutual news, not just my own, so it would be alright to tell it even though we were not going to talk until later. I heard Louie take offence and understood she thought it was her turn. When I phoned back at noon she was holding a grudge. And I had brought her such beautiful candlesticks, silver like pewter, nicely bashed, heavy. She has access to a wise self and doesn't use it, because she wants to hold on to her little angers and hurt feelings. Why? She doesn't want to share her house, it says, because she doesn't want to know she didn't get it by herself. She's feeling king of the castle. She's shutting me out of the beauty I helped her make. She's gloating at her rise in her family, where she is now second only to Lieb the economist. Are Louie's defenses always aggressive? Enough.

Tom's goodbye. He came home at noon on Wednesday in white shirt and tie and we lay quietly together for half an hour. He had hold of my bare arm and kissed it up and down on and on. Our feet were in a patch of sun on the bed.

At the airport he stood outside and watched me in the line at the UA counter. He was moved and charmed he said to see me looking about, cast into responsibility for myself, alert. He came back and leaned against my shoulder. I turned without startling. My body knew it was him, he said.

He went home on the shuttle bus waiting to hit the wall. It didn't happen. He was happy. He lay down and slept though it was very early. When he woke in the dark later, he lay for half an hour feeling perfect wellbeing.

What this quality of goodbye means is that he is out of the wide aura of his mother's death. He has rebuilt love in himself, so there is no longer a demolishing trap he has to evade at any cost. He is safe in love.

I haven't told most of the stories of this visit. Here is the most significant for me. We were traveling to Ocean Beach on the 35 and he was making the inane Johnny Cool public remarks he makes. I was shushing him, more and more enraged at his persistence, wanting to escape out the window and be with plants in gardens. He said, You hate me, you hate me. I admitted it. Yes. Then I was free. That was the beginning of the unwrinkling. I started to look relaxed.

You hate because you're intelligent, he says. It's true. I was hating a woman on that bus for the pitch of her voice.

What I feel about Tom is that it's workable. The stresses are intense but they resolve.

I have just written Louie an email naming what she's up to. Now we'll see. I suspect she'll freeze me out until after I get back from Vermont at least, maybe much longer. She won't cop. That rind of evil ambition in Louie. She has sworn a deep vow to triumph, and she is triumphing, but it's at a cost of deep winning-through.

Why aren't I like that you have an overview of mourning's honest struggle
So the question is, why doesn't she being excluded gave you your child structure
She believes in control because she's always had control
I believe in honest mourning because I was forced into it
Her child structure is that rind of ambition
Will you name what I have that she doesn't have slow growth to completion of research on evasion
What does that give me in the end early love, honesty, coming through, and a husband

I phoned Rowen Thursday evening. The package had been in his room when he got home. The clothes could not be better, he said, everything fit. He was wearing four of the five pieces as we spoke. (Why am I writing so badly.) He was overjoyed. I was overjoyed to have pleased him. He'd noticed the brands. Very right for school, but he's not wearing them to Read Island. And don't say too much about them there, I say. "I got some clothes," he says. Yeah.

It's getting dark, Saturday night. Rained today. I'm slowly going through chapter 7, as long as I can in a day, and then feel the barrenness here. Am back to aching and the rest. The house is better, it's passable now, but it's house arrest. I love the publicity of a hotel. I love coming and going in public. I love the heat in Tom's room. I like being on and off the yellow bicycle all day. I like excursions. I like the library. I like the way street people say, How ya doing? I liked Valentine's solid meals that fueled a whole day and were fresh. I'd long for Tom to go out the door, but now I miss him coming at me all the time, as if really I'm not a solitary after all but somebody who loves to play and spat all day long. My company gives him pleasure, he says. What's funny is that objecting to his company gives me pleasure. He knows it.

20

Should I revise what I said about Louie? She didn't read my email until after she'd invited me. When I rang her bell she came down with a grey face. She sat with her back against a pillar and cried, not from my insults but because crying was what she wanted from me. She'd turn her profile as she spoke and I'd see that it is smaller than it was, finer. She was crying because she does nothing but work. When Louie needs to cry I have learned to be very quiet. I ask questions in a low firm voice. I go into the book probably. She was crying that she has no time to see the birds. I said, Could you feel what you feel when you see the birds when you are teaching? When I said that I sighed. It was a Joyce question. It's the feeling of responsibility not the fact - is that it?

I'll come back to that. We made pie crust on her marble slab table. She gave me Polish sausage I was chewing as I chopped butter into flour with an egg whisk. She was chopping with a spatula in the same bowl. I said, You know an African song probably. Women pounding food is obviously the origin of drumming.

Later we were on the couch together yawning but not stopping. It was raining heavily. Then we heard silence. The rain had stopped. I went to the French doors. No, it was there floating down under the alley streetlight, it had turned to snow. By the time I decided to go home, after midnight, the sky at her windows was intense like a lamp.

One more story from the last trip. The plane from San Diego to San Francisco took off at five in the afternoon and flew over water all the way. I had a seat just in front of the wing on the left side. 11F. There was a new moon riding steadily above and ahead of the wing tip.

As we flew, the sky darkened. At first there was a tinted haze back toward Mexico, a greyish purplish pink. Then, as we left the San Diego marine layer behind, the sky simplified to vivid sunset bands, dark orange at the horizon, lighter orange, gold, pale yellow, bluish-white, pale blue, and then dark blue shading up into the black. The crescent moon and the small wingtip light were brilliant together in the blackness above the brilliant band.

Something wonderful is that I gave Louie Nights below Station Street and she liked it more than anything else in the last month.

21

Beauty. I used to live for beauty and I was beautiful. I was saying that with a pang, awake in my dark bed this morning. The pang is that beauty didn't succeed. The slides, the little constructions, the writing. Beauty gave me such isolation and defeat. Is how it feels. Have I got it wrong? What is it I mean by beauty. A faery self. Something like that, the airy queen, a sensation in the side of the face, a strong internal attention. That time is still to be fulfilled. Should it be? Can it be?

Do you want to comment you have come through, recovering beauty by balancing
Do you mean beauty can be here again
After balancing
Could I be successful with that work now
Are you sure
The slides
The writing
You mean you would help me
The journals
Do you want to say more the illusion of exclusion is over, partly over
Do you want to add anything combat. Process, brilliance and courage, to liberate, patriarchy

Marsh at the mouth of the San Diegito. Tom took me along a trail from which I could see the condo he bought with Rebecca. It was on low ground looking over the marsh. The freeway was roaring continuously not far away. Tom coaxed me up a trail into a tight passage between very soft sandstone cliffs, scarred everywhere by scratched initials and gouged footholds. With the freeway and the scarring it was nature very spoiled. I was nervous there. Tom left me alone, thinking I would like it, and walked back a little distance on the trail. When I followed after a while I found he had climbed to a shallow cave. He couldn't see the footholds to climb down. I stood behind him and said, right foot, straight down, a little further, left foot, to the left, a long way down, further, etc. Am telling this because when I'd gone to bed last night it seemed to me I should.

I haven't said anything about our drive to the Anza-Borrego in the white Chevy Malibu. I like the 94, which is two lanes looping through dry hills that are like piles of rocks with a torn coat of thin soil supporting sparse bushes. Border patrol SUVs. Dry villages under shade trees, smallholdings on the lower flanks of hillsides.

We had to get onto I-8 briefly to rush down the escarpment onto the desert floor. At Ocotillo we took S2 north up the valley. Sunday morning. Not much traffic, motorcycles strung out in threes and fours. High blue sky. Tom was driving at thirty miles an hour for my pleasure. He'd stop when I said stop. I wanted to get out and look at the mountains through his field glasses. They were colored like piles of powdered chalk. Tan, sulfur yellow, rose grey. Tom wandered far out on the desert floor. I watched him through the binocs appearing from behind bushes absorbed looking at the ground. He was wearing his jeans, his green headband and sunglasses. There we were in the wide quiet. Agave, ocotillo not yet flowering but budding, cholla. A very thin layer of earth-things under a great depth of quiet lively air. I was not quite there, I was too edgy in Tom's company to relax, but I can feel it now.

Another tale. When I was kneeling on the floor at the foot of the bed and Tom was poking my bum he said, Say thank you master. I said, I can't say master but I can say thank you. When I did, several times, I felt his dick harden.

Alright, from there to act metaphor and thinking.

22

Dreamed I was at a gathering shouting my rage and sadness that no one reads my philosophy. I began the shouting with my mother.

John Lahr in the New Yorker thinking how Judi Dench succeeds.

trusting the uncon
exhilarating riding the uncertainty of the moment
hating to rationalize
just sort of envisions the scene and colors it in
never ever discuss the work
combination of mighty spirit and nonconfidence
casts the director as father and is devoted
you must decide what you're doing this for
a kind of current flowing in an opposite direction from what she is saying
the great characters in Shakespeare have fantastic speed of thought
pays close attention to her audience
for half an hour before a show, keeps the loudspeakers in her dressing room turned up
providing a focus of attention to an audience that wants to love
her spirit is flowing and it's a decision she's made that it will flow
to be red-hot with passion and at the same time there's this third eye thinking, Am I doing this right?
glamour an artifice of elegant coherence manufactured through a natural sense of containment like a wave suspended
she was successful very young she developed some sort of tactic that stopped people from disliking her

23

Joyce is in the hospital with a blood clot. My eyes stung when Louie told me.

Sandra Semchuck says Presentation House is going to publish Leaving the land. With Mike Hoolboom's book that's two in a year, both after long delays.

What else. It's snowing. Today and tomorrow and then Vermont. Chapter 7 still.

24

Joyce in the hospital. I went with Louie yesterday. Was scared of going. Didn't know how to behave. We came up on a private room on the 7th floor. We could see it was hers because there was a table crammed with flowers. She was propped in a bed with machines on both sides, a monitor and IV on the right, and a TV on a boom on the left.

She had a bolster behind her neck and looked a hundred and twenty years old. Just little bones. Her blood clot is very large. It's in the artery from groin almost to heart. Parts can break off at any moment and then she'd be dead. She talked to her children about her funeral, she said. Not sky burial after all, the bird feeder on their deck is not large enough. Bach. People could talk, and some sort of spiritual something, multicult.

She wanted to talk. She could barely be heard and would gasp if she spoke too long, but she did not shorten her stories. She wanted to tell the long story of how she came to be admitted. Travel stories. The first time she traveled from Jamaica to England when she was a child - the first feel of a wool coat, first taste of an apple, the day on the ship when elevenses turned from sherbet to consommé. The flight to Teipei that crash landed so she had to run from the plane in stocking feet, the only person on the flight who spoke English.

One or the other of us was always holding her hand. I had her walker seat drawn up next to her and she invited Louie to sit on the bed. Her glasses magnified her eyes, pale blue. Her mouth had become a little animal mouth without lips. Bits of white hair pinned up, a scrawny collarbone showing in the neck hole of her night gown. Her hands were very warm.

I asked how she knows how to work. Does she hear a voice? She says no she sees something. She feels how it would be to be the other person. There's always a lot happening and she's very present, so she knows a lot about the person. She sees who they really are and then she sees what comes up that prevents them from being that.

I had said I thank her many times for having gone out searching so she'd find what would work. The search for truth she said. Louie suddenly said, I think your truth is love, and Joyce crumbled. Her face broke up in spasms of pain. Louie was leaning forward with a tear running down from her right eye. She was very pink and looked wonderful. I was abashed to be so outclassed. Joyce crumbled, it says, because that is her working faith, the truth she is responsible for. It isn't the truth I am responsible for, or not exactly.

Joyce said several times she was glad to see us there together. Louie was nervous about that but I knew what Joyce meant was that she was glad to see the friendship alive, because she always believed in it. She was glad to see her work.

When I was bending over her saying goodbye, kissing her hand, she said, You are looking well. I said, I'm happy. She said, It becomes you. I laughed. (I noticed that when she made me laugh I'd turn away, as if not wanting the strong puff of air to hurt her.) What was that, Louie said from across the room. I won't tell you, I said.

What else. The kind of pain it is to see her dying is the mourning pain I don't at all resent. It is like thanks and tribute. You this time, me another time. There is a great security in its quality. It's the security of accepting the worst because it is the price of the aliveness one has loved.

When Joyce was asking what's up with me, and I told her I'm a professor - a professor of what? - a professor of anything - she said, Are you paid in American dollars? I held out my wine-colored arm and said, It's Ralph Lauren. It's not good enough, she said. I was laughing, What should I be wearing? Cashmere. You should have the best.

There was a question I didn't know how to ask. How old were you when you realized life is has so many possibilities? She told a story I couldn't hear - maybe Louie understood it - about someone - was it Fritz Perls? - saying something.

The side of the room was all window and looked down on roofs of the grey town. It was no longer snowing but slushy. Tire tracks written in slush under felted grey air.

I was very awkward no
Louie was better no
Are you in touch with Joyce no
Why did Joyce cry when Louie said her truth was love because it is the action she has learned for community coming through
She cried because it is true
It's the truth she's responsible for
Mind and land
Joyce doesn't know what I do is important no
Do you want to say anything about Joyce she's balancing
Is she sorry to die no
Do you want to comment on how I was no
I have more to learn

Traveling, 25th

Peter Gzowski died yesterday.

Am I withdrawn
Because I'm not wanting to feel something
Will you lead me persist
Denial about Joyce
Potentially feeling something else
What feeling
Grief no
Anger no
Fear no
Love no
I'm stumped fight
Fight to work and be
Fight to get a better job
Fight for the institute
Fight for that kind of presence

Plainfield VT, 27th

I don't have flare this time. I'm at the bottom of the clock, it feels. Melancholy.

Faculty self introduction feel the anguish
During no, before
It's like I want to seem something rather than be it YES
That is a sort of hopelessness

Louie's email yesterday morning. Joyce died Saturday at 4:30. Her heart stopped.

I understood I could tell about her at faculty introductions. The audience was hip enough to laugh at her line about sky burial.

Burlington airport, 4th February

What should I write about later - Margo - William's heart meditation - the first interview with William - the best interview with Logan - Diane in her clothes - Jody - wearing the leopard skin. There was a lot by the end. I worked. Something's different, I consolidated dislikes. Faculty hilarity. Lise. Laiwan. My bed.

Vancouver, 5th

Today to catch up. Three weeks of my own.

Alright, debrief. I said to Margo of my student writers, They don't know how good they are. She said, out of the blue, I don't think you know how good you are. You're a superb teacher. I want to be your advisee.

Other things she said. We were at a back table in the cafeteria lingering after supper on the last night. She said that once when she was driving back to Texas, late at night, six hours from her destination, very tired, Mary's dog came into her mind and stayed there as if it was beaming her home.

She talked about sculling on the River Charles early in the morning, seeing the moon go down in the west and the sun rise in the east, through thin mist on the river surface. It was in fall? I said. Yes.

She was what she is, small in her bigness, a little shy sweet hopeful thing. She doesn't like to give addresses, she said. When she was giving the talk to set the tone for the week, she was feeling a deep quaking throughout her whole body, from feet to head. I know about that, I said. I feel it when I put myself on the line. She loved the video about Jack Wise. She felt it when she saw his hand move, she said. What was it he was saying about attention?

What it was like at faculty introductions when I told about Joyce. I felt very safe and centered. I had something to say. There was one teacher who mattered. I was a hard sell. I trusted her because she laughed, was furious if she thought I was lying, cried when I should have been crying myself but was not. When I said I am not that kind of teacher, Lise laughed behind me, in relief that I wasn't going to be sentimental. But it's the standard I'd like to be held to, I said.

Another moment in advisee group when I put myself on the line without quaking. There was a tedious discussion about race initiated by Charis. I was letting it go on because I thought she needed it. At the end I said that I had kept trying to bring in other categories of disadvantage but they had kept bringing it back to blackness. I said I thought that means blackness is their paradigm of social disadvantage, and that that must be hard for black people to bear. I heard a little pop of comprehension from Logan next to me and kept going. I said that in the community I grew up in there were no black people and I was the paradigm of disadvantage. The way it feels is that I can always tell instantly whether people have dealt with the ways they themselves are disadvantaged, because if they haven't they have a horror of me. (I said that matter-of-factly.) If they have dealt with whatever it is in themselves I feel it as relaxation and am grateful. It was like that even before I was able to relax with it myself. Then there was a long silence around the table.

My question yesterday was, tell us one thing that happened this week that took you beyond your comfort zone. Mike said what shocked him most was seeing naked students in the year photos. William said keeping going making connections long after it was too many. Logan said interacting at all. Kim said talking about death. Ed said the workshop where he was challenged about deliberating his work. Charis said saying opinions in advising group. Corin said speaking in groups. I said the moment in faculty goodbye circle when I refused to make a gracious speech. (There was showing the video in the faculty lounge too, against the intense dislike of the manic hilarity people.)

I knew William would do the right thing for a goodbye. He led us through a heart meditation that invoked love and then asked us to bring into that love whatever worry or fear we had about the semester. I kept sighing. The worry I brought was about being fat and ugly, especially belly fat. I struggled to hold to the exercise because I was afraid that if I love belly fat and ugliness I will not correct them, and that would be intolerable. I didn't finish that, did I. (No.)

We sat in silence afterwards. Mike said, I've been more intimate in this group than I am with my family. None of them are dead yet, are they? I said. He looked at me over his glasses and said, pause, You're right, in his sexy southern voice.

Forgot to say that after the closed-eye part of his exercise William had one more instruction: look each person in the eyes. I looked at Charis first, held it, tried to feel her. I found my eyes filling, nakedly. Am not sure about that. I was showing, more than feeling, I think, showing that it's possible to show? Feeling her youngness, partial loss of realness, is that it? Did I show the larger self looking? Yes. Mike looked away. There was something he didn't like to see? Yes, the true coming through of brilliance and courage in responsibility. Will you tell me why? Because it asks honesty. So he saw challenge? Yes. Kim was the one I faltered with, why? That's where there was most real challenge. Does that mean Kim was the largest person there? Yes. Will you explain? Inner lovers, crisis, betrayal, anger. I have an imperfection of presence. Yes.

If I love fat will I be fatter no
Slimmer no
More beautiful no
More able
Do you want to comment your indecision is an evasion of intimacy
That's why it matters

6th

Dear professor,
Jody here.

The theory is a breathtaking work of cognitive art in its scope and depth and beauty and analytic potential.
Thank you so much for being about it in such sustained finely-grained detail that I can be about it too. It evokes great pleasure.

Read Gayla Reid this morning and it has knocked my own self out of me. Where was I. Faltering in Kim's eyes, wondering why. Told many stories to Louie yesterday afternoon. Some to Tom.

Jody's note knocked my breath out. Neither Louie nor Tom could bear to feel it. There are two things I'd like them to know, that they do not. One is how it has been to do my level of work these years and have no one getting it. The other is how I am with it even now, not able to remember what I've done except when I am actually in the doing of it. Should I be this unaware of it?

Rowen said again last night that things are falling apart at home. Lise is getting a place on Quadra. Mike isn't looking after money. I said I'll give him an allowance. Five months at $200 per, can I afford that? Ask Selina to give him $20 a week and keep the rest for dentist, socks, movies, trips.

Advisor choice sheets were due in an hour, maybe. My sign-up lists were full. A serious little person at my door saying he was assigned to someone he doesn't think is right, will I talk to him. I have Joyce Wells behind me in my office, using my safety pin pendulum. I step out, close the door. Tell me quickly what you're doing. I want to work at creative process, I want to find out what god has for me to do. Who was the advisor you were assigned to? Francis. Okay, I'll fit you in. Just write your name between a couple of others. I tell Tehila I'm not the right person for her. That doesn't take long. Then William comes in. He stares into my eyes. He's fey and earnest. He has a question. What is your experience of transformation? I tell him. We talk about Eva Pierrakos. He says, after ten minutes of this, Well, what do you think? I like you, I say, I want you. I'll put you on my list.

Logan. He's Maggie's friend and she has recommended me. Our real interview is maybe two days later. He has given me two poems. I begin to say I've looked at them. You don't have to say anything about them, he says hurriedly. I was thinking they are quite a bit like some of my writing, I say. I know, he says. He has gone on my web site and looked at everything in the writing section. He is 23 years old. I start to talk to him as an equal. Would he like to do close reading, could we swop work? There's nothing he'd like better, he says. He has tried to explain what writing is for him. It's a space, there's much more in it than the language can do. I'm marveling that the play of the weather has come from long ago to live in this time with a 23-year-old from Baltimore who has white teeth, clean eyes, pink skin, the look of excellent family.

7

More. When I was telling William about Journey to Ladakh he said, Can you just convey it to me? Without words, you mean? I'll try. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the ecstasy in the book. I tried to send him just that. It felt like a column of clear calm light, round, a little wider than my face, solidly established projecting horizontally toward him. He said he saw vivid scenes of mountains. Later when we were looking at his study plan chart and we couldn't think how to document the mystical provisioning component I said that could be our telepathic component. He giggled.

Lise's meditation and writing workshop. Twenty people, mostly young women, on chairs in a circle in Manor Lounge. Lamplight. She said meditate on the breath for twenty minutes, then I'll put on Baroque music and we'll write for twenty minutes.

Three strokes of the gong. I watched to see whether Lise would cut short the faint trailing-off of the sound, which I love to hear all the way into silence. She did.

Pleasure of silence. Breathing, feeling the breath. When she put on the music I did not want to go back to talk. Sat with the music. All heads down. Sound of scribbling. In the slow movement I thought of Ray. I regretted holding off from so lovely a being. I was wanting to move to the music. Began to stroke to the beat with my pencil. Both sound and mark. The marks looked like grass blades. They got larger.

After the writing Lise asked people to read. There was a declaration of life's journey through a forest. That's the only one I remember. The questions Lise asked were, Were there voices you didn't write? What is the story you are telling?

Afterward I went back to Aiken and did not want to join Goldberg's hee-hawing group around the slab coffee table. She had the CD player on in the kitchen at the far end of the room. I wanted to dance. Turned off the light at that end of the room and could see my shadow on the wall. Square shoulders and shaped head, cheek bone slope. Steryl had put on Mary Chapin Carpenter. The song that got me where I wanted to be was I feel lucky. Getting there meant I was taking space with my arms, commandingly.

When I went to my room with the nice neat bed and windows with bare-branch trees, I still felt the unusual pleasure of being with drawing and music, like a relaxing into naturalness that never happens now.

Third day home and still uncrinkling. I think that's it, now. I notice the faculty (keep calling them staff) hardly mattered at this res. Diane Tetrault straight and true in a silver pageboy, black eyebrows, and clothes blue and grey in good cuts and fabrics. She'd occasionally speak a single sentence directly to the point. Alan's head wrinkled like an apple after his live-in woman left. Hazel with fish lips, wet eyes, a splendid body, brimming with anxious self-pity at every turn. Otherwise nothing new. Everyone fatter, with more weathered skin, because it's winter. I wore the leopardskin one day in defiance of dress code to show my elegance where elegance is not the thing.

-

"Don't we have to re-examine all of biology and evolution through the lens of this idea? While what I'm reading seems wholly believable, I can't believe I'm reading it. One doesn't expect to encounter an idea that answers so many questions at once and in so satisfying a way," says Jody today.

9

"Thanks for the chaps. I really should pause before diving in. Since arriving home and reading the intro I've done little else but grapple with your work. My environment is becoming more and more about me, my wake of chaos. Dishes unwashed, floors unswept, mail unopened, chin unshaven. It has the self-evident quality of the finest theories: 'Why didn't I think of that?'"

-

Yesterday I pushed myself through Sewall's book, couldn't stop. Today here I am with the 1971 issue of Agenda open to "News of the universe": Muan-bpo and the Cantos by Jamila Ismail. What I remember is the air, the quality of the ether, the space created when Pound sets Greek gods, troubadour poets, Dante, and the Chinese together in distillation. Turquoise, snow, juniper, spruce, fir, emerald, larix, pinus, salt, copper, coral, white smoke, meadow, mint, pheasant, moon, artemesia, oak.

The Na-khi scene returns us to the China and Greece that form the core of the Canto's stillness, the perspectiveless luminosity that locates kosmos not in a transcendent Otherness but within Itself. 78

"We have about us," Pound wrote in 1916, "the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive."

precincts of stone, water tree

a way of thinking that is organic correlational instead of syllogistic

physical fact is as sacred as moral principle (Agassiz)

Beauty bare. Meaning I loved Jamila for this reason.

Ismail J 1971 "News of the Universe": Muan-Bpo & the Cantos, Agenda 9(2-3):70-87

Sewall L 1999 Sight and sensibility: the ecopsychology of perception Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam

10

Was there a flurry of evasion of something. What scared me in Jody's notes. I've been zonking since I got the first. I was all confused trying to talk to Louie about it last night.

Can you sort this
Is the work actually my own
Am I great
That means I am what other people want to be and are not
Can that be true
Am I going to be treated as if I'm great YES
That feels dangerous
Does it mean I've sold my soul to the devil no
Will I have to die because of it no
Am I a great philosopher
That's totally implausible no
I'm just a girl
A girl from a farm
So it's the dragon story
It seems implausible
It's because of you
Did Joyce experience this no
So I should acknowledge you
Should I say I'm a mouthpiece no
That I work to be in touch with a larger self
Do I feel bewildered because it's you rather than me
Does Mandela feel like that YES
I am ego and ego is never great
So I need to be able to pass it on to the work
Ego's contribution is to be willing
Are you really me
Should I dilate so I feel I'm you no
It's better to have a large uncon
Is there going to be too much of this no
Something you want to say process, happiness, of our communal writing
Instruction
Is it okay for ego to be happy
Is there anything you want to say to Jody ask him to improve it
Treat it as a shared resource
Is there any danger people will steal it
Will they no
Is it important that I should get credit
Does it show in my appearance
Is there anything I need to do no
Do you want to say any more no

Do you have things to say about income complete, disillusionment, withdrawn, persistence
Assume I can get money
Do you know how
Can you tell me prosperous, adventure, opposite, vain regret
In that new age way
Aim to be prosperous no
Aim to be adventurous
Is the institute the way to do it
Do I have to delay it no
Imagine an adventurous period
Something you want to talk about a child
UCSD project
Should I be thinking about it more no, (chariot), process, your, coming through
At UCSD
Do you want to say coming through to what happiness
Will that project limit the effect of my cog work no
Will I be able to use it
Is there anything I need to do
Should I imagine the room of the work
Same studio no
Office at UCSD
Large, second floor, white, overlooking the canyon
Students in it no, nothing but planning
Here is its bulletin/website
Congeneris Institute
Does Tom edit it no, you
Find my own money

Do you want to say more shatter the structure, of anger, in intimacy, end of illusions
Instruction? no, description
I'm going to be able to do it because I'm not mad at people you mean
Is that work finished

11

Here's the semester - until the res in August - house is fixed and clean - have clothes - money maybe just enough for that period - only student loan debt - need another income by summer. Should I move to SD in April? Come back for the defense?

12

Middle of Feb. I don't want to be here, I'm done here. I'm dull here. Have to get through this last stretch. Is there a spell on this house? Yesterday I kept lying down and going to sleep. What's the way. I've been dragging on one little section at the end of ch 7 for the week I'm back. Could I get a last burst for Being about?

13

Janet last night in Sun Sushi in Kerrisdale looked like a white-faced little girl in a Dutch bob. No makeup is what it was. Garnet is drinking. It has to stop being about him, I say. She was thanking me later for being trustworthy. I said I am so grateful for having become reliable. I said it with tears. It's my young self thanking the formed self, I just realized. I see my speech about Joyce differently, then - young self was shining in her completion, praising the sponsor who brought her through. It was a graduation. And Joyce, who had been an external sponsor while my sponsor self was learning, shriveled like a bulb, until she was weightless like wisps of onion skin. Is it coincidence that she died when I was ready? (It says yes.) Another question, is it okay that I take death so lightly? Yes.

A book about dual brain that sez R brain is traumatized younger self. Another that sez <other> side issues voice of moral authority in poetic meter. Let's sort this. Does it have anything to do with other hemisphere? Yes. Segregation is result of trauma? Yes. Are you one hemisphere rather than the other? No. Both? Yes. oracular voice is L hem? Yes. Is that as much as I need to know about this? No.

L hem segregated? judgment, exclusion, feeling, completion
She's right that it's the voice of patriarchal exclusion of feeling
Men are all traumatized

And therefore segregated. That doesn't explain why male poets would feel the oracular voice as other.

Is this related to Ed's bombastic voice
Does it mean they have anomalous dominance
R hem speech no
Two speech centers
Alternate speech organizations on L
Do I have that
Writing self
Which might differ in whether they're connected to R.
The frontal one is imprinted/internalized
So the thing for Ed would be dialogues YES
L frontal speech mimesis YES

A different response to trauma than L-R segregation.

Does it only happen in people who are L-R segregated no

It is a form of L-R segregation that allows back-brain connection. It's a forward-back split. Perception without comprehension.

Anterior corpus callosum
In Ed is R frontal blank
The book is L and R frontal communicating
Isolated L anterior makes a second language center

So do I use the two writing centers
Anterior is elegant, literate
Small, tight
Posterior is sensory, L-R connected
Looser
Jam is L frontal segregated
Yoga hyperconnects
If it hyperconnects can it have true knowledge

14

Three things yesterday. There was a loft in the light of day, it was spring. I gave up slogging at the end of chapter 7 and laid out the introductory chapter for its last review, meaning I'm now going to polish from front to back while hoping for ch 10. It will be faster work, less confined, with more time in the computer lab and library - out. Third, in my last email check before I pulled the plug and went to have supper with Julie Tolmie, there was this note from Gabriele, sent presumably last thing before she went home to make supper for her kids.

Dear Elli,

Good news! I have met with the campus people in charge of landscape projects (the big ones) and I have shared your document. They were VERY excited about it.

How do I feel - galvanized - that strange word - ready to gear up as I wasn't for Being about, which is more important but so out of energy.

Julie last night. We were awkward and flat across from each other eating pho on E Georgia last night, too brutally opposed in too much light. She has a rat's face, narrow, with long eye-teeth, and she somehow looks like me, so that when I saw her alongside my own reflection on the mirrored wall I was confused. In the reflection I was elderly, grey, with the cushioned face of age, and wore an ill-fitting expression of sympathetic concern. We could not get anything going. She's self-absorbed and I was aware of trying to keep her out of complaint stories about many other people. She has so uncomfortable an appearance, long black leather coat, long hair, shoes with blocky heels, black nylons and miniskirt. And bodiless under it. They are power clothes not sexual clothes. It's partly her years in France, and partly attempted disguise of some insufficiency of embodiment. Her work is sublime. Is it important mathematically? I don't know. She's moving into setting a viewer into her structures in VR.

15

What is going on. Let me put it on the line. Something isn't right. I'm in evasion. Two ways. I'm not finishing Being about, I'm dawdling. I'm holding my breath, as if. I'm absent. I don't believe something about the circumstances I hear myself describe. That means self division. What am I feeling. A lack of bottom. What does that mean. It means I'm without direct action, action immediately wanted and called for. I'm nothing but hearsay to myself. Does naming it help? I think so.

There is no direct action to be taken, for now. It's all preparation. Just do it? Yes. Stop and breathe.

Decisions about the introductory chapter.

17

Tom laughing joyfully on the phone. He's happy that he's done nothing to sabotage himself. He's happy he's in good faith with me, he's happy he's writing. It is Casual labor after all, he says.

He's in a state of grace. People are buffing him out at work, Dick is letting him run the show, there's a new guy at the Maryland who's spent two days with his computer, people were in and out of his room all weekend. Lee was in trouble and sat in Tom's chair and Tom listened to him. He felt he had the authority to. Lee cried. Tom woke early on Monday and wrote for half an hour before work. He's been writing every day. He wrote the end of the piece and curried back from there. He thinks it's good enough for the Reader. People have heard I'm going to move down. They are saying, What're you going to do? Are you going to leave? Are you going to get a place?

And I - am happy enough - a lot of manila folders - whisking through so I know what there is to do in and in defense of any chapter - it's chill, grey, wet - the carpenters are closing off my view of the park - the corridor is clean-looking, beautiful in its shapes of color - shining floor, light green baseboards and door frames, red door, blue door, yellow door, Kurdish rug in shades of pink.

That sent me to thinking of Louie's house, my furniture, whether she'd keep it for me, some of it, whether I should sell it to her or someone, how to finish the bedside table she had stripped (I found it two fences east in the alley). There's a frail trickling over there in the toilet tank. It's eight in the morning.

Schiffer's dual-brain non-book. I mean the ideas in it are one page worth and the rest is cellulose filler. A psychologist - psychiatrist? - working on the assumption that each hemisphere is/has a different <mind>/<personality>, his evidence being that he can evoke different organizations by activating hemispheres differentially. My evidence would be that different organizations can be evoked by many means, and there are many more than two. Some might be hemisphere-segregated but some might be ratios or gradients or just global network organizations set up by neurotransmitter values. If trauma is temporally isolated it could set up a network activated by stress. Schiffer hasn't learned the network stuff. State shift. Global operating state. Hemisphere isolation might occur after, as a way to prevent triggering.

Fredric Sschiffer 1998 Of two minds: the revolutionary science of dual-brain psychology

But - it says - Schiffer is also right in positing two side-by-side companions who need to be in married love. Gender quality varies. In men L is male - cultural maleness. Does that imply R is female? Yes, in the sense of here-and-now. Hippy men. In women is L female? Yes. Connected speech. So is R male? No. R is female too. But there's an animus in there somewhere - alternate organization of L. In me L and R are work woman and love woman. Does that mean animus is an alternate of work woman? Yes. Is my work woman unusual? Yes. Structurally unusual? Yes. Child an alternate of love woman. Yes. Are all of these inhibitory of the opposite hem? Yes. Is my L more inhibitory? No, less. The split-brain evidence of speaking hem feeling an inkling when R hem is in a position to know. My R is included in consciousness? Yes.

- This is for ch 10 on intuition and networks, and then on implications.

Can I write that chapter quickly
Do a [college] workshop on two sides

Tarot images, system. Alchemical images. Jung.

Are you the right side? no
The conjunctio

Yoga and hyperconnection. Conjunction and the harrowing of hell. Going into the fire. How it plays out in a marriage, the careful sacrifice of ego.

Tom and I have a blazingly successful marriage
By means of both

Does R have better memory? No. Earlier? Yes. A woman has to teach a man to be with R. Yes. A man has to be reliable to take over for L so a woman can be R, which is a source of beauty, health and joy. Rob and Tony did that. Yes.

Is that the essence of it
Can woman's L allow R in the same way no
Did Jam do that no, she tried but she wasn't reliable
I've done that for Louie
Is Tom able to do it for me not yet
Will he ever be able to
Work woman has to be satisfied both are safe
I don't have work woman sexuality

"Around 1627-28 Rembrandt did indeed drastically alter his manner of painting histories .... The bright hardness of his colors melts away into monochrome bronzes and dusky velvets."

20th

"Warm winds from Africa" and a hidden part he says that doesn't believe time is linear or finite [Luke's letter]. My boy is graceful. There's for me always a tingle in our contact. I say this wondering whether he'll read it when I'm dead. And feeling the vast good fortune there is in being able to say "my boy".

22

Many bitty dreams. In the last one, I am with someone, coming to Lee's house. I begin to see him coming from the back of the house. I see his feet first, up to the knee, with bulging briefcase, travel case, folded raincoat, and more, a disheveled struggling man. He's here and he's going somewhere, I say. Not exactly that.

Woke with an anxious crease in my belly. I know what it is. It's me staggering and flopping under the luggage of chapters 1 and 2, with their barely-understood details of neuroscience, evolution and development: educator bureaucrat.

Something from earlier in the week I forgot to tell until I told it to Louie last night - (there exactly when I was writing Louie I heard her downstairs pushing my zip disk through the door - it's 7:20, she's on her way to teach) - was that when I crossed Pender on the way to the bus Wednesday late afternoon, outside for the first time in the day, walking in pale sunlight for the first time in many days, I saw the mountains much, much larger and much nearer than they usually are. When I was at the bus stop on Hastings looking north across the ratty parking lot of the Astoria Hotel, they had gone back to being small and far.

Someone on the radio telling a story about going to Canadian Tire yesterday, finding all the TVs on, three clerks and ten patrons crowded in front of them watching the Canadian women's hockey team winning gold at the Olympics.

-

Anything you want to talk about
Anxiety no
Health love coming through improves illusion
Something I'm supposed to do
Illusion in relation to something in particular
Will you say in relation to what anger
Am I angry no
My health will improve if I find and release anger
Dating back to Jamila no
Them no
My father YES
Repressed anger YES
The question is how to find it YES
Love suppressed by anger YES
Anger suppressed by wanting to win
This is under my work
If I undid it would I lose my drive no
Does it need to be undone in that order
Find the suppressing anger
Is there a clue for that remember times you've fought
With anyone? YES
Find the anger no, find the love
By love do you mean attachment no
Wanting something
Needing something
Blocks in the body
Brain

23

I'm scared of Logan. I'm jealous of him. Will I be able to get the sort of freedom I had with Maggie. Best truth. Should I let the direction of learning come toward me. Try his device. Is he afraid. Do I know what such a talent should do.

Is he afraid to be other than opaque
Like a beautiful girl who has gotten where she is by being mysterious
Was I doing that YES

Public voice one cannot think in - a voice to think in - he has a voice to think in -

But it's not a prose voice?
Would it be dangerous to him to have consecutive thought no
Is his game kind of random
Generation
Would it be better if it connected
Generate larger structures
Something you want to say about this improve struggle and losses for the sake of happiness
Will I know how to do something about that
Intimacy
Things he does for effect

Q: what does this language do.

Think of it as momentary transcription

"came into a state of mind that had a certain voice"

part 4

the golden west volume 24: 2001-2002 november-may
work & days: a lifetime journal project