the golden west volume 24 part 4 - 2002 february-april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

24 February 2002 How can it be only three weeks since I was in Vermont - On the rug with Louie in front of the fire last night talking about Logan's page - the room around us - its shadowed corners - we said the questions of liking a line and trusting it are separate - field & field It's absolutely beautiful. It has what Logan needs, coherence broad learning heart simplicity commitment thought utter reliability Would Sue know who to send it to I'm no longer helpless in relation to it It has so much the visual quality of my pictures It's twenty years ago! - I'm happy. There's a ringing blue sky. Sunday. White tulips in the Chinese pickle jar on the table, on the red cloth. I'm in the big chair, that has the green blanket on it, its beautiful old wool shredding. I left a message on Tom's machine that said, My little country just whomped your great big country in hockey - gold medals - women and men! Louie took me shopping on Commercial this morning. She was a coherent small person in tight black jeans, black fleece jacket, Australian boots, black pony tail. (I grabbed her bum.) We bought shopping bags full of produce at Norman's and meat at the supermarket and East End Coop. Then I said I was going to buy her flowers. We stood in front of the tulips. I said, Pick. She backed up next to the parking meter and said she'd let me decide. I considered: orange parrots, sharp yellows, small creams, pink stripes, fives in pots claret and white, and more. I was floating, undecided. What room should they be for? Orange for the orange room? But it's warm, they'd be finished within a day. White for the little table? Yellow? Not red. Not yellow. Louie was behind my back. I had the orange in my hand. No, it should be the white in the pot. Alright, two pots of white. I turn around with them. Louie says her book said I'd pick the white in pots. When I picked up the orange she said to the book, See, you're not real. Then I put the orange back. Both of us asked our books this morning whether Canada would win this aft. Both said yes. I'm not working today. I looked at field & field this morning and came home with bags of groceries to put away and then dithered and then looked at the play of the weather. play of the weather has a lot of charm and play but is it as good as field & field? I gelled between them. play of the weather doesn't have overall shape. My tulips are standing in a box of light that crosses the table at a diagonal and draws a rectangle of glow on the wall. Saying goodbye to Louie, to my house, to the beautiful city we saw from the alley behind Britannia School this morning, nest of towers in a shallow basin in the azure mountains. "All kinds of humor, all kinds of softness, all kinds of ease." Hugh Brody in London talking to Eleanor Wachtel about being with hunter-gatherer peoples. Why farmers are not attached to land and hunter-gatherers are. The curses of the expulsion in Genesis are about agriculture. Why hunger-gatherer languages have been suppressed and agricultural languages not - he said because hunter-gatherers claim land rights through their language. But maybe not that - maybe the nature of those languages. In Inuktitut there are no words for seal, bird, fish. Many names for particulars: baby ring seal, old ring seal, adult female ring seal. The language is suppressed because it does not cut off? - I don't know cut off what, whatever agricultural languages cut off. Is Old English more nomadic than Latin? No, but. My writing is very simple in its vocab. That says, does it, that I write listening to the young-language hemisphere. Brody H 2001 The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers and the shaping of the world North Point Press 25th Mike's first packet. He writes about manatees, [the college], animal contact, reading Barry Lopez, technical stuff about writing and editing. I know how to proceed. He's not blocked, just inexperienced. He was a working class boy who was moving too fast to be reading books. That book stuff is for another kind of person, he thought. Barry Lopez. Wow. Use manatees to work on researching a critical paper. Still camera to get a feel for light. Ken Burns for cuts and sound, log a short section, say effect of cut, placement of sound. Anything you didn't hear or see at first? How do you take notes? One hard book a packet. 26 Nearly everybody in - not William - have to do a day before I can go down and unzip the zipped files. Should I call them junk dreams - these nights. 27 I write the date and wish for something to say, so I could have company for a half hour before I go to chapter 2 and then the rest of the day crammed 'til night with student letters. Was that my second cup of tea or my first. I've brought the tulips in from their night spot on top of the fridge outside. Turned the computer on and found an email from Ed awake late in NYC. He had been looking at my site during the day. - Is there such a thing as an astral body     Does it live apart from physical bodies    no Electromagnetic body     Can it physically extend a long way     It's a sensing body     An acting body?    no Can one travel in it    no Do people share astral bodies     no Do they contact dead people     no They die with the body     They imagine traveling     Is it the means of telepathy     Does my astral body extend to Maine    no Could it     no But it could pick up pattern emanating from there     Like radio reception     Do I have a choice who I pick up     Do people have to think of me for me to pick them up     no Neurotransmitter based     Does trauma make sensitivity     no What I see in Ed is that trauma makes indirection     Which can be beautiful       Can you explain why you know so much more than me     balance of forces, shared pleasure, comes from, partial loss You're an unconscious state of the brain     And I am within you     Am I going to be able to get this     Because of my partial loss     Shared pleasure meaning communication     Imbalance of communication     Anything you want to add     improve truth by imagining balance Will you give me an image     a rainbow of vortices Wait for you to suggest     1st March Woke from a night struggling with William's floods of beige froth. What to call that unholy religiosity of tone. The writing in spiritual counterculture magazines. Why is it so bad? Why are the graphics so bad? Does the thing that makes them 'spiritual' make them stupid? Or is it the other way around? They are stupid, profoundly, profoundly stupid. The thing that makes them stupid makes them spiritual. Denial? Yes. In William it is dyslexia compounded by protest, an unmanly body compounded by protest. Protest in his case takes the form of grandiosity. He's very loveable but profoundly loveless. He's loveable in the way his sort of body can be, by playing up his quirkiness. He's in exile because in England they would be onto him. He's loveless because he's angry. He's pitched his tent in god's-love-land so he has to try to seem loving, which makes him sign his letters Blessings, William as if he were a bishop, and press my hand between the two of his. These complications make him chaotic. There's a passage just at the end of his sheets where he goes into the song of himself. Because BECAUSE BECAUSE! BECAUSE I WANT! I WANT! I WANT! I light on that like a bird. Here's the place to start. - Three done. To William I say get real, to Kim I say get mad. What to do about Ed - oh Ed's chaos. What he writes is an extraordinary garble of knowing and not-knowing. His dreams and his slips are direct speech, that his thinking self is mishearing, misinterpreting, sometimes more than others. I don't know how to proceed. Should I stop for today? Do I need to sleep on it? What's Ed's urgent need. To finish feeling what he didn't feel. It would be much worse than what I had to do. Can he do it? Should he be asked to? Until he does, no explanation will help. He has in him a universe of monsters. He has in him a wise self speaking in beautiful images, trying to twist his phrase so it will be true. He has what is spoken in him as a woman, and this being does not appear in person. Growing limbs would be painful, says the doctor. 4th Night before last I dreamed Joyce had moved her office into my house before she died. What else - Margo is smart to quote me in her note. She learned from me. I had tears in my eyes because she said she had tears in her eyes. I'm flagging with Ed - tired. Have written from early 'til late, 'til ten at night, in the last five days. I am getting dizzy at the computer, need to clean my house, do laundry, see Louie, get back to my endnotes before it starts again in another two weeks. 5th Ed picked up the point, "It seems that if I know what a person is, I will know what damage is and what unusual capability is. I will know the difference." [Paul Shepard notes: Why do whole cultures of people destroy their habitats Human institutions express in implicit philosophy of nature change to a more hostile stance between five and ten thousand years ago a kind of failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence resentment of unbearable burden of monotheism a kind of fury in the whole of christendom turning everything into something human-made and human-used seed of normal ontogeny present in all of us shape of all otherness grows out of maternal relationship its second ground, while in its mother's arms The outdoors is also in some sense another inside, a kind of enlivenment of the fetal landscape 26 going on to mimic joyfully the important animals. Being them for a moment and then not being them He will graduate not out of that world but into its significance 30 ceremonies of adolescent initiation that affirm the metaphoric, mysterious, and poetic quality of nature "It is to those environments - small group, leisured, foraging, immersed in natural surroundings - that we are adapted." 30 programmed for the slow development toward sagacity the roles of authority filled increasingly with incomplete individuals who would select and coach others flawed in the same way pragmatic success ... culture feeling its way to support itself by perversions of development ... manipulating anxiety in the child in a hundred ways 31 the transitory and normally healthful features of adolescent narcissism. Oedipal fears and loyalties, ambivalence and inconstancy, playing with words, the gang connection, might in time be pathologically extended into adulthood, where it would be honored in patriotic idiom and philosophical axiom. The primary impulses of infancy would be made to seem essential to belief and to moral superiority, their repressive nature masked by the psychological defenses of repression and projection. Over the centuries major institutions and metaphysics might finally celebrate attitudes and ideas originating in the normal context of immaturity, the speculative throes of adolescence, the Freudian psychosexual phases, or even earlier neonatal or prenatal stages. 31 ontogenetic crippling a suckling's symbiosis with mother as a social or religious ideal changing the world becomes an unconscious, desperate substitute for changing the self. We then find animal protectionism, wild-area (as opposed to the rest of the planet) preservation, escapist naturism, and beautification, all of which maintain two worlds, hating compromise and confusing complicated ecological issues with good and evil in people. 32 To what extent does the technological/urban society work because its members are ontogenetically stuck? The culture of urban technicity works out its own deformities of ontogenesis. Some of these are legacies, while others are innovative shifts in the selective perpetuation of infantile and juvenile concerns. 33 the city is shaped by identity cripples Its members cling to childhood, for their own did not serve its purpose. To those for whom adult life is admixed with decrepit childhood, the unfulfilled promise cannot be abandoned. To wish to remain childlike, to foster the nostalgia for childhood, is to grieve for our own lost maturity because then it was still possible to move, epigenetically, toward maturity. 33-4 With poor initial mother symbiosis, with an inadequate or lackluster place-and-creature naturalizing, or without the crucial adolescent religious initiation that uses the symbiotic, literal world as a prefigured cosmos, the adult cannot choose the forest and the owl. 34 In our society those who would choose the owl are not more mature. 34 Erikson stage of trust/mistrust child perceives poor nurturing as hostility - a perception that is either denied and repressed (as in idealists) or transferred in its source so as to be seen as coming from the natural world instead of from the parents (as among cynics) - there arises an opposition that is itself an extension of infantile duality. Fear and hatred of the organic on one hand, the desire to merge with it on the other; the impulse to control and subordinate on one hand, to worship the nonhuman on the other; over differentiation on one hand, fears of separation on the other - all are two sides of a coin. 34-5 American enabled by the colossal richness of an unexploited continent to play out the wrenching alienation that began five to ten thousand years ago, with the advent of agricultural practices. Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating enemies, having everything now and new, despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, being swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent: all are familiar images of American society. 35 But the private cost is massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that exhibit this callow ineptitude at every level, and, perhaps worse of all, a readiness to strike back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us. 35 [city-world] wants are pursued as though the environment were an amnion and technology a placenta. Unlike the cultures of submissive obedience, those of willful, proud disengagement, or those obsessed with guilt and pollution, this made world is the home to dreams of omnipotence and immediate satisfaction. 35 Characteristic of the schizoid features of this immature difficulty differentiating among fantasy, dream, and reality. Even the semantics of using 'fantasy' as synonymous with creative imagination and 'dream' with inspiration travesties of the valid adolescent karma that expresses the religious necessity of transcendence. much of the unconscious life of the individual is rooted in interaction with otherness that goes beyond our own kind, interacting with it very early in personal growth, not as an alternative to human socialization, but as an adjunct to it. The fetus is suspended in water, tuned to the mother's chemistry and the biological rhythms that are keyed to the day and seasonal cycles. The respiratory interface between the newborn and the air imprints a connection between consciousness (or wisdom) and breath. Gravity sets the tone of all muscle and becomes a counterplayer in all movement. Identity formation grows from the subjective separation of self from non-self, living from non-living, human from non-human. It proceeds in speech to employ plant and animal taxonomy as a means of conceptual thought and as a model of relatedness. Games and stories involving animals serve as projections for the discovery of the plurality of the self. The environment of play, the juvenile home range, is the gestalt and creative focus of the face or matrix of nature. Initiatory ordeals in wilderness solitude and ecological messages conveyed by myth are instruments in the maturing of the whole person. only in the success of this extraordinary calendar does the adult come to love the world as the ground of [his] being. For the child, immersed in a series of maternal/ecological matrices, there are inevitable normal anxieties, distorted perceptions, gaps in experience filled with fantasy, emotional storms full of topical matter, frightening dreams and illusions, groundless fears, and the scars of accident, occasional nurturing error, adult negligence, and cruelty. The risk in epigenesis is that the nurturers and caretakers do not move forward in their role in keeping with the child's emerging stages. If such deprivations are severe enough, the normal fears and fantasies can become enduring elements of the personality. The individual continues to act from some crucial moment of the immense concerns of immaturity: separation, otherness, and limitation. Wrestling with them in juvenile and primary modes, even the adult cannot possibly see them holistically. Some of these omissions and impairments enhance the individual's conformity to certain cultures, and the culture acts to reward them, to produce them by interceding in the nurturing process, and so to put a hold on development. In this way, juvenile fantasies and primary thought are articulated not only in the monosyllables of the land scalper, but in philosophical argument and pontifical doctrine. Traditional feelings may be escalated into high-sounding reason when thrown up against a seemingly hostile and unfulfilling natural world. The West is a vast testimony to childhood botched to serve its own purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity. 36-7 domesticated world deflects adolescent initiation and rigidifies the personality into clinging to the collective loyalties, feats of bravery, and verbal idealism of pubertal youth. the era of Puritans and machines fixated on childhood anxiety about the body and its products. the urban/industrial age keyed on infantile identity diffusions, separations fears, and fantasies of magic power. progressive amputation 38 subsequent efforts to recover a mature perspective without giving up the centralization of power made possible by unleashed fecundity and urban huddling. psychology of self-actualization, group dynamics and personal therapy antagonistic to the modern state, which needs fearful followers Thus, the culture counters these identity therapies, and the philosophical realism of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated kind that could result from them, with prior wounds - damage to the fetus and neonate in hospital birth, through the anxieties of the distraught mother; asphyxiation; anaesthetics; premedication; the overwhelming shock of bright lights, noisy surroundings, and rough handling; impairment of delivery by the mother's physical condition and delivery posture; and separation of the infant from the mother - all corroding the psychogenic roots of a satisfactory life in a meaningful world. 38 The ecologically harmonious sense of self and world is latent in the organism, in the interaction of the genome and early experience. 39 Perhaps we do not need new religious, economic, technological, ideological, aesthetic or philosophical revolutions .... The civilized ways inconsistent with human maturity will themselves wither in a world where children move normally through their ontogeny. 39 life in a small human group in a spacious world difficult to recover - though not impossible for the critical period in the individual passage. Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the discipline of natural history, play at being animals, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as product, the cultivation of the metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. 39 Shepard P 1982/1999 Nature and madness in Ecopsychology, T Roszak, M Gomes, A Kanner eds, 21-40 Sierra Club Books - Was professor of human ecology at Pitzer College, Claremont. He cites K Kenniston in R Lifton ed Explorations in psychohistory 1974. 11 Reading Monika Langer on Merleau-Ponty. First, she is or was at UVic and I've never heard of her. Second, she was realizing he was founding a philosophy for ecology. That was in 1989. She quotes a para that reminded me I've wanted to write about Dorothy Richardson as philosopher: Phenomenological or existential philosophy is largely an expression of surprise at this inherence of the self in the world and in others an attempt to make us see the bond between subject and world, between subject and others, rather than to explain it. Merleau-Ponty, 1964, Sense and non-sense, 58 Langer Monika 1989 Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception Macmillan Press Finishing the scan of ch 3, refs to get, but it's combed. With Louie last night at Monsoon wedding. A man in Halifax phoned to tell me the name of the Mozart motet I heard at 5:50 Friday morning. He had a rich French Canadian radio voice and did not listen well. His name was Bernard. His program is called Carpe Diem. I couldn't sleep and was lying in the dark with my thumb on the dial. In the middle of the FM sweep where I expect nothing was a voice singing Baroque glides and shudders with ecstatic precision. That noon I went looking for a CD player and found one in the fourth pawnshop on Hastings. It is a small silver box, very elegant in its small clever controls. Its digital rectangle and the curved edge of the CD light up indigo blue. Karina Gauvin is singing Mozart as I write. Exultate, jubilate Karina Gauvin, soprano, CBC Radio Orchestra CBC Records Another thing I did this weekend was write Mary a long email. I told her about visiting Joyce and telling the students about her. I said I often regret that I can't tell her [Mary] how wonderful I find life, I mean the value to me of what she gave me. She didn't call on my birthday, which was unlike her. The card she sent did not have a stamp. This music is making me feel her slow dying. I look at her with a pang. Is it my betrayal or hers? I look back at her as if I have left her in the underworld, treading the upward slope, young, bereft, steady, alone, alone. I am on the other side. Feeling it that way, I am feeling I was the one who left her. Two years old, I took my pillow and went away to find the world. Seventeen, I read Brave new world and understood that I was on a road away from them. Thirty-two, taking drugs to find true feeling, what I found was grief that if I knew the much more I could learn to know I would leave my mother irrevocably. But on this road there have been other mothers. This road is a beautiful road, a road with a strong curve to great satisfaction and completion. I can feel it the other way. She betrayed a small child, who saw her back and found herself alone and held herself together with the courage that made Joyce weep. She betrayed me again, many times, by dodging the truth I brought her. She let me carry it alone. She turned her back the many times I called. I am understanding now why Tom came back when he saw me in the airport line. He saw me gathering myself to be alone. Is this Mozart's mother-music? It is as if in the last few years I've moved into the wide atmosphere of a death planet. For many years no one died. Now many are dying - I mean many of my few - Frank, Janeen, Joyce. I feel I could die myself, but at the same time I feel I'm coming into strength that could go on for twenty years more. 13 Peter Kubelka is at the Cinemateque tonight. [more Paul Shepard notes] 14 Going to Dave Rimmer's to have an evening with Kubelka. What do I need, to be clear in it. He was in front of a young audience last night being slow, something like loving, simple, as if a holy fool. His simpleton priestliness was winning them. Is it an act? In a way. It was as if he was showing them a way of being, and that was the lecture. Like Gertrude Stein in her time. I was vaguely interested in whether his teaching technique worked. Will the men compete? Is there something I can bring to the evening? What he said about perceiving and thoughts - he's the kind of man presumably who doesn't listen. Sarah will be the live one in the room. Is he capable of seeing me? No. Would there be anything to be gained from his seeing me? No. Have I liked anything in film, in years? David's piece. My long pan over curly kale. - I like film to show me what I almost can't see. Any hints for the evening?     no There's nothing more to find in film, didn't I decide that years ago? There's more about other things to use film to find. Working with film did its work for me. 15 Sarah's twin brother was trapped under their mother's ribs and she had the lower berth with more room in it. He was born second, weighing four pounds. She was twice as heavy as he was. He didn't come home for three months, and had learning disabilities, word blindness. Sarah told another story about a woman who had a fall and smashed her face. It was surgically reconstructed, but it was no longer a face that had anything to do with her. Then Peter said that, when he was seventeen, he had been at a party, he had maybe drunk a little, which he usually didn't, and he saw himself in a mirror. He didn't like what he saw. He went on to say we shouldn't live with mirrors because it disturbs the primary loyalty to ourselves that we need to thrive. In fact Peter now looks good - he has a pink smooth face though nearly seventy, a complete head of short white hair, brown eyes with clear whites. His portliness is normal to his age. The only odd things are his long narrow front teeth, twice as long as the teeth next to them, and his tic of wiping the right side of his mouth with his tongue. Everyone at the table was comfortable. We ate crab with garlic butter, French bread, good green salad. There were two bottles of a BC red wine with bite. Both the local filmmakers present had young second wives. I was sitting next to Peter. Near the end of the meal I announced that I was writing about art as a form of biological being. I had the table shyly for a minute, but I could feel Peter resisting. I was in agreement with him but had taken it further. He wanted to go on being the senior philosopher. He was the guest and the great founder of structural film and I in his eyes was just some local woman who would do if I supported his thoughts like a mother, with encouraging murmurs and insightful questions. The youngest person at the table was Chris's new wife, a butter-cheeked woman in her twenties, from Winnipeg, well-spoken, juicy, very juicy, with bursting bosom and luminous eyes. She had no accomplishment but she could hold the table by the goddess powers of her sexual naturalness. Sarah is very thin from nursing her indulged boy to the age of four. She does the cooking and childcare. She also does all the social labour, because David will not stir to ask a question. Being competent in those ways gives her more spark, though, rather than less. She's there and quite sure of herself. Should I be satisfied with having shown my hand just briefly? Should I have been more forward? Yes. In some particular way? Nonaggressive competition. Will you explain? Integrate dismay and anger by processing. On the spot? Yes. Less blank. Yes. 16 Tom is reading Wilson's Consilience, excitedly, putting his guy Teillard together with what he hears from me, revising his education in dualism. He stammers sweetly, praising what I give him and am to him. I come away adoring his young spirit for its willingness to adore. Am some thinner from my chicken soup, orange juice, tea, yogurt and candy diet. This aft, when I'd gone downtown to print a copy of ch 5, I also got copies of the parts of field & field and have been formatting them. Is it as beautiful as I think it is? Publishing it would be more wonderful to me than any other accomplishment I could have. 17 Sunday morning. I wanted heart, put on the soprano, read a story in the Oxford book of modern women's stories. Eudora Welty's spectacular story of a deaf twelve year old orphan in Natchez in the winter of 1807. Spectacularly visual. I am feeling the great gorgeous depth of my connection with Tom, that hasn't diminished though we name it. I partly mean that our history is beautiful to me - the story. The moments of realization that have turned out to be true. I felt it this morning when I was clicking through stations on the new radio and came on the Eagles' Once more to the limit. When I hear it, there is my hearing it on the car radio driving to Bellingham, and Tom hearing it at his desk in a newspaper office where he was alone at night, and our hearing it with our feet on shovels in Nora's front yard, and the way in all these times it drives to the core of each of us. There is also the moment in the Pacific Surf kissing him while he cried and the next morning's brave frightened vows in our bed. The moment in my bed alone, back at home, writing him the two gulls flying out over the sea and falling, first one and then the other. We have both driven through our limits in this connection and there is now so much joy and coming-true that it seems I will have to die. That's fear of happiness. It is a limit I have not passed through, is it? Can I be happier still, fuller? It says yes. Time now to go to work? There is sun today after a week of very dirty weather that left the mountains deep in snow, whiter from top to bottom than they have been this winter, or maybe ever. I don't remember seeing them pillowed before. I feel so much for Tom that I could burst. Is that okay? It says yes. Will it bring loss? No. Pressing Tom to give up dope was a three-year fight. Resolving it has brought him writing back. And from that everything good has followed. We are in perfection now. Look at this handwriting. Love woman. 18 Mary finally replied to my note. I was happy to see her name in the inbox. Her note was a rant of rage concealed. She has no clue. She understands nothing. She doesn't know I asked for bread, she doesn't know she gave me a stone. - Well, I wrote her back something like that and feel cheerful, is it? Relieved. I said I am always sorry she is in pain, but as long as she has no sense of her part in that pain I do not know what there is to be done about it. I can see something about the stubborn lock there is between us, head-lock. She demands I become the daughter of her dreams, 'respectful' and 'loving.' I demand she leave the toxic dump of her religion. She can't enjoy me while she has to guard denial. (She said my relation with Joyce sounded 'special.') I can't enjoy her while she needs to haze out anything I tell her in love and faith. Is there a further step I should take? Stop fighting, it says. Stop fighting and - ? See that the structure has shattered. Something knows what I mean, but I don't, will you say which structure? Early love. I have early love that I don't need her for? Yes. She does not, so it's what she needs me for. I was her place of early love through my years at home. She didn't dare have it for Ed. Our whole relation is poisoned by that. So if I say she has abandoned me it is correct for her. Yes. She doesn't even dare have early love for god. If I see it that way it makes a difference. Will she die with her heart locked? Yes. She can only envy my freer heart. What I told her about Joyce told her what heart is like. She wants to think I am unloving and don't respect. She didn't like to see it isn't that. Do you want to say more? Be responsible in not-evading, bringing through brilliance and courage. She has always been locked. When I was younger she used me as her external source of brilliance and courage. Am I reliable in my view of this? Yes. Is there any good council where she is? YES. Does she use it? No. So it isn't her religion, it is her decision to shut down. Yes. Is there anything I can do for her? No. 19 Harvesting packets yesterday and today. It snowed heavily yesterday, big flakes I saw falling as I lay in the night with my eyes closed. 20 I woke from dream-thinking on and on about my simulation chapter, what to do to make it less dry. Today a note from M I could accept. 21st The phone rang yesterday late afternoon. I love you, said Tom in a beautiful voice. His heart was full. At that moment I opened this journal idly to the front end and read He hasn't taken care of the core. He has, since, and is a glowing heart of gratitude. It's Thursday. Second packet is not the huge effort first packet is. My women students are all sane, Mike too, but the other three of my guys are stuck, each in his fashion. Lying, each in his fashion. They are capable, accomplished, more accomplished than the women - much. Is there some relation between their competence and their madness? Their feeling selves are vats boiling in darkness, giving off molecules that intoxicate their thinking selves into driven, fantastic billowings of theory. Each in his way is blind. I want to say, What's your simple feeling here? Keep your accounts, or all you do will be only the blind speech of what you have suppressed. 22 This morning I sat down at the computer and wrote my mom a religious letter. I asked what to say to her and it said tell her to feel the true mourning for her early love for her mother. Yo, larger self - did you like the line about being a vast light supporting me from below? 25 Mary's reply yesterday was another for delete. I'm dropping the correspondence. She didn't engage anything that needed engaging. She went back to asking me to know. She went blank again. What else. Yesterday was a wonderful Sunday. There was sun. I sat down immediately to draw the plan for Louie's garden. Louie arrived at nine, unlocking the door with her key, to have tea. At ten we were at her house to receive the chairs I gave her, that she had had stripped, beautiful wood kitchen chairs, maple. We put the soprano on the CD player and opened her French doors. She made mixed grill, organic chicken sausage, salmon, eggs, tomatoes. There was orange juice, Ecco il Pane bread, dark French roast coffee. I arranged things, found the spot in the orange room for the smallest chair. Repotted her orange tree. Made a sketch for her work room. The other maple chair is against the long white wall. The orange and green papaya looked beautiful with a lime and an orange in the green bowl. I had dressed up to come to her house, silk pants, Ralph Lauren short sleeved tee in that brown-burgundy color. I'm thinner. The line from waist to bum is nice. We were both giddy in free time. I didn't work all day. Came home and cleaned my house on the energy of that breakfast. (Beautiful clean house around me.) Ninety minutes with Tom on a phone card. Okay, what's up. The house stuff has a greedy speedy edge. Not feeling something? Yes it says. Bad feeling? No. Good feeling. Yes. Will you comment. Completion of coming through withdrawal about Tom. We're in the open? Yes. My happiness is quieter? Yes. Is there more that needs to be said. Yes. Deception, speediness, aggression, fantasy. The aggression and speediness are coming from a fantasy that he will betray me? Yes. I want to be ready when he does? Yes. Should I excavate this? Yes. It's an unconscious fantasy? Yes. Is it a certainty? Yes. That he'll dump me when he begins to do well. Yes. It's a conviction that no one can be trusted. Yes. Can he be trusted? Yes. Because he knows he has come to the good. Yes. So what I must do is feel the mistrust? Yes. Now? No. All day? Yes. 26 Students done for now. Didn't do much else this week. No star paragraphs carried me away this time. What was the most fun - Mike and his horse, "my mind went numb with pleasure," that line. Corin's Sally Mann piece, Charis's meditation pieces. Logan's night song. I can smell clematis armandii and/or blue hyacinth. Now - it's 5:30 - I can take off my pyjamas and go out. - Tom found two of my letters in a book he bought when he was in Bellingham. I said, Read one. They were from June 1997, when we had known each other a year and a half. He read it, not getting its music, but even so I was feeling its grace. He described how it was for him to read it in Bellingham in his bunk. He could not take pleasure in anything in it. I was making something from the best I was and it was poured into a void. Hearing him describe how he read it I was sore at heart for the woman I was. It seemed for the letter itself. You lovely thing, you are so wasted here. I write letters now, all day. They are adjusted to the reader, they are not from me except insofar as I can be suited to my role. Those letters to Tom were young heart, and they were my last love letters, real love letters, and I was pouring them into the wind. No one received them. Worse. Someone received them who read them like a moron moving a dirty finger under the lines. What have I done to myself. Why don't I take better care of myself than that. - Rowen tonight was happy. He'd improvved a science project and gotten 90%. Improvved it at the blackboard. He'd visited advanced theatre class and met a grade twelve boy called Moss who's his clone. He got 3D Max installed. I'm sending more money. My conversation with Tom tonight was scrappy. It hasn't been that way. I felt he was cutting me off. Nothing I said had any space around it. It was because of the letters, wasn't it. They set my quality in front of him. I was fighting to be with him and not cut myself down. I lost the fight didn't I. I got battered down. We're happy now because he does not have my writing in front of him. It's true isn't it     Do you want to comment     you are denied sharing but your quest is improved Do I lose my quality if no one receives it     no If I had someone who loved my writing would I write better     no It means I need to be a public writer     The fact that I grieve means that     Am I taking poor care of myself     no Can you specify 'quest'?     other sorts of completion Tom will never see what's best in me     He sees me very crudely     So am I with him for his good     no It's sacrificial     NO Functional     Why?     to shatter the structure 27 There has been a twist in the wind, from happiness to this melancholy. I want the melancholy. I want the heart there is in those letters. I want the girl in them. Now I am massive wise and kind. Then I was a slip of a thing, a river riding the river. I was so in love. I was an orchid sending fragrance onto a planet with no other orchids, blooming my heart out, out, out, crying into the endless air that brings no message back. I am describing a child alone in a hospital bed in a city in a vast nowhere without relation to the only where there was. Let me be faithful to this loneliness which is my contribution to the world. What am I seeing, what was I seeing as I hesitated between sentences. What it might mean to say it is my contribution to the world. It's a contribution I haven't made yet. How would it be made. By writing about how that circumstance makes a person, how that structure goes on making a life. Should I do that? 28 It is daylight at 6:30. What. I'm pondering in my bed with one foot under the cover. Birds saying squeak squeak. Pondering an Alice Munro story about a poet at the turn of the century. I have read the story before but yesterday I read it better. There was a town and countryside in it. A yard had petunias in a box on a stump. There was a field fenced along the road with big tree stumps pulled out of that field. The poet took laudanum in her tea after a bad night and left a footprint in grape jelly juice on the stair. She had her period. A man she was somewhat interested ran salt wells on his land. She found a woman drunk against her fence in the morning after a brawl, lying with her skirt rucked up and a large bruise on her thigh. These days when I write I often leave out a word. It's neurological. There are people - I will pick this up again - not many - who would have loved to get my letters, who would have been inspired to sit with the pages and write pages back. When I was living at Sunnyside in Kingston I found a letter in a box in the attic. It was from a man to a woman who had worked there. I was nineteen or twenty. The letter seemed to me so intimate, so literate, I wanted someone to write to me that way. I stole the letter. I read it a few years ago and threw it out. It no longer seemed intimate. I mean that I have worked continuously to be able, if not to get then at least to write, intimate letters. My present sweetie can talk like a writer but intimacy in writing was not his care. Back to the moment hearing Tom read my letter. I feel myself shut down in anger when I think that he doesn't bother to make them out when he finds the pencil hard to read. Well, they weren't to him. They were from me but not to him. What to conclude from that. The letters set us in a plainness of our mismatch. But on the phone he is able to do what I can do in letters. He is himself and imagines himself received as he wishes. He needn't know. We're not mismatched, it says. It means the mismatch forces us to know. Oh well, but what's left over. He's writing, writing. I won't like what he's writing but other people will. I must write, write, too and other people will like what I write. But shouldn't I be with someone who likes what I write? No, it says. Because I was alone I must remain alone? There are different aspects of being alone, you mean. Yes. Writing is the place to be alone. Yes. I have made myself alone, there. I want it both ways. I want to head for the edge and then I want a welcoming group to meet me there. I can have company in other ways but should not expect it where I try to outrun it. Okay. That's it. That helps. So I should think of publishing as setting up invisible billboards that change the landscape - no one can see them but they alter what can be seen. Do you know where I should send field & field? The way I was with my mum did not prepare me for the differences in people. I'd thought of contact as all or nothing. Compared to the young ones with their fears and refusals this state seems to have a very fertile world. Tom is just an asshole     The reason he doesn't like letters is that he isn't in them     The letters are the best of me and he doesn't like it     That's just a fact     What matters is if I can still be that     Does it matter if I can't be that with him     no I love being liked     It's good for me     Does he like me     Is it good for me     He just doesn't like the best of me     Does anyone     no Do you     29 Friday morning. Just now I was reading back here and there. I like how plain-spoken I am, at the same time as innovative. It is my taste in any medium, simple taken into smart. The smart is not shown by signifiers of smart but by shades and tones and inventions, grasp and motion. I love the phenomena of being and want to write them. I am about witness not assertion. Tom is about assertion not witness. It means his beautiful book called The Golden West will never be written. A man called Mr Grabecki, eighty-five years old, took to sitting on his window sill, rocking and singing. His room was an inside room on the third floor. On Tuesday about eleven, a crazy man in 199 on the second floor phoned down. He said someone had fallen past his window. Is he dead, said Tom. No, he's sitting up. Tom ran upstairs and found Mr Grabecki on the gravel of the light well speaking aloud. I'm in Phoenix Arizona. No, I'm in Albuquerque New Mexico. What does it matter, I have seven hundred dollars. He took out his wallet and counted his money. He needed stitches to his knees and hands. When the paramedics came they strapped him to a gurney and Tom took them down the freight elevator. Hearing Jesu joy of man's desiring with its wringing sawing violin line I was feeling Christian culture at its height, as if the Ming dynasty or some other high civilization no longer in existence. If I were sure it was dead I could admire it. I fight with the remnants of a culture in deep decay. 31 A woman 86 years old, whose name is Grace. She wants to go, she says, because she can't do anything any more. Five years ago she was still golfing. She can't read. She watches sports on TV. As she speaks a tiny dog is running about, a Yorkshire terrier, old, dirty, spindly, stupid as a little mop head. This pitiful beast genetically engineered to appeal to the pitiable in people was spoken of and to all evening as if he were the heart companion of a human life. On Christmas Eve this year Grace was at the Mills' house with the little dog. Quite late in the evening Flurry was let out for a piddle. He disappeared. The boys were out on foot and in cars calling all over the neighbourhood. Flurry was not found. It turned out that he had run two blocks to the doorstep of a house with five Yorkshire terriers. He had barked and been let in and had spent the night as a guest. I was by the fireplace most of the evening with Rob, who will be forty five in two weeks. He looks the way he did when I was forty five twelve years ago. He was wearing a teeshirt tucked into jeans and was a graceful stringbean with his hair down on his shoulders. I felt a smooshy familiar mild warm lust. He was on his back on the floor with his feet in socks on the stone above the fireplace. Nice feet. Sunday morning. I can see in the skin of my forearms the effect of having drunk a martini last night, just one. Tom's phone call woke me at eight. There was an electric flutter in my liver. He was at ease at home looking at the room in which he has been happier than any room of his adult life. He had been reading Marx on alienation. As we were speaking three small birds came to his window sill. One was in the green pot with its long plant strands, pecking at something. Those three flew away and several moments later there came a robin, also pecking at the green strands. I could hear his small clear cheeps behind Tom's voice. When Tom asked whether I flirt with Rob I said No, I tell him I'm married. It is approximately true that I don't flirt and completely true that I say I'm married. Tom had a flood of love, he said, when he heard it. We had a sweet phone call, partly because he was on his weekend and partly because I'd done something and had stories to tell. And now, and now, I will go work toward being ready to leave sometime soon. 2nd April Is Louie more sophisticated musically than I am     no Is my lack of interest a form of sophistication     Does she have a stronger nervous system    no Are my interests narrower     I mostly care about quality of the line     'Purity'     Does that mean something     YES Am I arrogant     no Definite     Can you say what it means     no Is my taste in writing, pictures, music, design, the same     Is that true for everybody    no Clarity, simplicity, color, subtlety     Is my philosophical taste the same     Are those the qualities of cortical organization overall     Is it an organization that works for me but would not work for other people     YES Am I wrong to arrange things in her house     NO Does Tom write from the same taste as his music taste     no 'Taste' means order     Are all the yogas about order     Cortical order specifically     Do they create the same quality of order     Different ways of achieving the same quality of order     Asanas, devotion, wisdom     Are asanas a lesser way     Is greater integration always greater competence     YES Yoga = cortical integration     Is hyperactivation a result of integration     Do drugs integrate     no But hyperactivate     Integrate means over time as well as over space     Is Louie's taste integrated     no Is interior décor a yoga    no I want physical motion to flow from central order     YES Not vice versa     Talk to Louie about imaginary yoga     Would it work     Should 'yoga' be translated as cortical integration     The Gestaltists     Merleau-Ponty is right about embodiment     Wrong about realism/empiricism/neuroscience     But right about its mechanist/representationalist forms     Right about phenomenology       Louie still has a bee in her bonnet about music     Does she suspect her taste might be inferior     Is her enjoyment of music related to her enjoyment of personality     Is that the difference between us     no My enjoyment in music is for a quality of motion     I am a better dancer than she is     It's the cut of the line in music, the edges     She has less sense of music in speech and yet her touch is fine     Do my qualities of taste make more difficulty for me in relation to persons     I am right     And unpopular     And so it must be     Tom has my kind of ear     This is why I felt for the dancer she hated     Is there a way Louie's taste is superior in music     Can you name it     the lovers The way her sexuality is freer     She can let herself go powerfully     It's a kind of psychic security     I can be with more precision, she can be with more security/freedom     She has more range than I     no, variety Are you my range     Responsive freedom and power     It is not a matter of sophistication     She wants my music taste to be unlike my other taste because if it is like it will be sophisticated     She is determined in this instance to make me wrong     Is this the same issue that made her furious when I praised the Ashtanga woman     There is something she doesn't want to know     Is her mobility of self a talent as valuable as my taste     YES I hew to quality     She hews to what is there     DR did both     Sophistication is the wrong word     Brilliance, we're equal in     Does taste come from insecurity     YES I didn't want you to say that     Is it nonetheless valuable     Is taste just preference    no A true form of perception     I truly perceive quality     Louie doesn't care about quality     no But she doesn't see it as clearly     I am willing to perceive only quality     She is willing to perceive/value/be many more kinds of things     So I shut myself out of a lot    no I open up a lot     My feelings were hurt last night     I dimly felt there was an injustice     I just wanted to come home to you     Does she want to make me smaller in this respect     no She wants not to feel smaller     That's not my task but she feels it is     She hasn't thought it through     She's as brilliant as I am and smarter in some ways     There's something familial going on     But she values my brilliance more than hers     Secretly     Do you know why     YES, something about persistence Something to do with me     no Is she bothered when people who come to her house praise my stuff     no Will you explain     action She values mine more because she doesn't persist and act out of hers     She hasn't taken it as far as it will go     Teaching is acting out of it     She's getting rich out of acting from it     Do you mean theatre acting     She values mine more because she failed at acting     Did she fail because she lacked what I have     She wanted to be an artist and is a yoga teacher and so does not value her brilliance     Can you say what is the best expression of the brilliance     she has success giving searchers slow growth Yoga teacher is the best use of her brilliance but she can expand it more     The reason she isn't an artist is that she isn't narrow enough     Now the question: do I do her an injustice she is right to complain about     no Am I wrong to speak as if my taste is better     no Should I allow more space for her brilliance     NO It's her thing     I just have to understand that people don't like it       Is what Tom is writing any good     Will I like it     Did he tell the truth about the girl     Can he resist women     Will he be faithful     Should I feel safe     Does he wait 'til women feel safe and then shaft them     no He did that to Rebecca     no Did Rebecca ever feel safe     no part 5 the golden west volume 24: 2001-2002 november-may work & days: a lifetime journal project