the golden west volume 24 part 5 - 2002 april-may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

4th April On Tuesday night while my clothes were in her washer Louie hurt my feelings. A while back she took offense when we put Lang Lang on her CD player and I didn't listen to him. She came up with a theory that her taste in music is more sophisticated than mine. I didn't get excited. I don't know about my taste in music. I mostly don't like anything and give up on music and then I hear something that I unexpectedly like every speck of. I had come home and asked and the book said what it said (above) so Tuesday night I was mildly explaining and Louie was insisting I am judgmental and arrogant. I got the kind of hurt feelings where one feels a child's helpless anguish at an injustice. I was too tired at the end of the day to recover. My heart was very sore. I just wanted to go home to the book, who would recognize truth and explain it to me. Yesterday my work day fell apart. I sat for hours thinking out the bedrooms for the San Diego imaginary garden. I got them solved, finally. The day was so warm I turned off the heat in the house. In the evening I started to work on Logan's second letter. Louie showed up in the evening looking quite beautiful, pink, her refined face, in her many-colored coat. She cried a tear, said she is always depressed. It was as if she wanted to take back the role of the sensitive one, that I had briefly taken over. It's nonsense, that she is always depressed. Louie has just organized the stair-stripping in the hallway of her house. Next she'll have the greenhouse washed and fixed. She's going to put windows into her bedroom. She has momentary crashes because she's been too proud to know her defeats, is all. It took all day. I said to Logan, just fuckin' do it. Made a clear distinction between intrinsic value and social value of the work and said one needs to feel one has social value but maybe it has to come some other way. I said at the end that I'm happy to have his company in these questions. 5 My bedroom is a house in the southwest corner. There are stairs in the west wall that take me by shallow steps onto the roof, which is also for sleeping. The room below gets morning light from across the garden. The bed floats in the room. The top end of the underside of the stairs shows in the high ceiling. There is a fireplace under the lower end. The south side of the room, next to the garden wall, has tall clerestory windows onto vines. Sun comes in all through the middle of the day. There is a storage wall under these windows, across the whole of the south wall. In the nook to the south of the stair is a bathroom with half walls and no door so light travels through. From the bed I can see by a glass door in the bathroom wall to green in the path between house and garden wall. In the cove north of the fireplace is a reading chair. There is a desk angled across the meeting of north and east walls. Both walls open with high double doors. the floor is wood. There are wide flat concrete single steps under these doors. The east doors open centered on the long tank. There's a red gum in the corner. The north door is centered on the studio wall and there is a wandering path through fine grass with California poppies, among small olive trees. Along the garden's east wall there is a raised rim with strawberry guavas that come from alongside the house to the southeast corner's little guesthouse, that has a fireplace on its roof terrace. [version of this house and garden sketchup-modeled in 2014] The garden between olives and the house is dry. Crushed granite paths the color of the soil. Salvias and other perennials. Succulents near the house. The tank is crosswise from east room to west room and the garden wall beyond it is a tableau. The rim of the tank is at a height to sit on, a stone rim. The small houses are white plaster, stone, steel, and wood. My housekeeper's name is Clare. She is an Irish redhead in her forties, funny. She comes at six and goes home by two. She walks through the garden to bring me breakfast on a tray. She comes in without knocking and sets it on the table. When I am sleeping on the roof she brings it there. What's for breakfast. Very good coffee, orange juice, scrambled eggs with parmesan, fresh French bread with sweet butter. She goes back in the house and makes phone calls, takes care of guests, organizes for a lunch meeting at the table among the olives. Should I be ashamed of fantasy     no Will you comment     it shatters the structure of partial loss and subtle despair Childhood     It corrects something     YES Back-engineers a circumstance     It's a sign of damage but also a corrective     It's because I need beauty     no, entitlement 6th Two things I'm interested in yesterday and today - Cheryl - a hard little head, thin mouth with lipstick, cropped dyed red-brown hair - clothes that cover everything, wrist to neck to ankle, no body form, a cut-out effect. We have the same argument every time, she says. She is working on "issues of representation," virtuality, etc. She says culture controls everything - which is the eighties, isn't it? It is self-satisfied despair - she tried reading Abrams and found him 'innocent,' airy. The refusal of innocence is just what I don't like in her, because it is on the side of the exploiters - it is the art scene's sophistication to refuse what innocence wants. It's wrong. Her thing is also that the men are the only ones respected, the men control everything. I hardly feel that now. She means in her. What I realized after I saw her yesterday is that I shouldn't argue with her, I should investigate to know why and how it is in that scene. Second thing - architecture, gardens. My folders full of beauty and creation, just that, the eagerness I feel in that invention. I'm thinner after a month, eating little since my birthday, without hunger or low energy, waist slower to decrease than bum. The belly pad. My back is nicer again. Now must start biking and going to the gym. I'm lighter. But skin has lost its cushion. Gas, oil, battery, Premarin, tea. Anything you want to say about Cheryl     no To me about Cheryl     honestly graduate from regret about her as a lover I haven't yet     Do I need to remember something     YES What I'm afraid to remember     I evade it     You mean in general     The idealistic way I was in love with her     Talk to her about it     no Am I in danger from her     In what sense     not shattering the structure Holding onto a defense     Is there something I should do     Will you lead me     ask for the truth of then I adored her, I opened up mother idealism     It was a beautiful idealism and made me beautiful     She was taken the way the mother was     I was in love with the state     I was not in love with her     I would like to be beautiful like that again     I also wanted her company     Her take     They were the strongest female others I had met     Am I right about the alienation in her work     She is no longer my most suitable friend     Do we have anything vital to talk about     Work     no Death     Edge     This age     Do I have an edge now     no Will I have another     Something in land and mind     Will I ever go back to art     no Stay in philosophy     no Is it alright to be friends with her     Real friends     But I'm kinda blank     Is there anything I want to know     whether there's anything she can teach you Is there     no So it's kinda dead     Did she like me as much as I liked her     7 Was that the music John Suderman conducted at the Clearbrook MB church one Sunday morning in 1962 or maybe 1964. The shepherd's farewell, Berlioz. I heard it on CBC just now and was stabbed with grief for that time. I am somehow closer to myself at 17 than to the selves I was after I went to Queen's. I don't want to remember Olivia or any of the age of learning to be other than I was, but I want to remember myself and Clearbrook, the MB community on Clearbrook Road, Frank at 21. My grandma and grandpa and Frank are dead. There was a moment at a height - the MB community had had long enough in Clearbrook to organize a choir that could sing Belioz in a broad full stream. Opa and Oma had raised their children but were still on the farm. Oma's red maples glittered outside the dining room window. The acacia next to the garage towered and stirred with flowers. I was smooth, brown and glossy. Frank stood on the gravel of the yard next to his red truck. There were garlic dills sliced thin with ham at Sunday late afternoon lunch. I wore a green blue and white gingham dress. I felt the beauty of this pinnacle of time but I was eager for the leap away. I didn't know it was maybe the realest I would ever be. What is it about nostalgia. I don't often fall into emotion and so I was trying to stay in it long enough to trip out. Nostos algos, home pain. I felt it as sinking a well shaft to another time, contacting it. What is it really? A very partial reconstruction, but why painful, in that pleasurable way. If I become that self do I feel a small part of what I would have felt then, if Frank and my grandparents had died? It feels more like grief for the death of a time, the whole time and place. To the lighthouse, a house standing empty. In a dream I saw the surface of a page of my work rubbed like worn fabric so fine gold threads showed in the paper. What more do I need to do here. Not much. Read through ch 9, which doesn't have loose ends. Get any refs I can, make any illustrations I can. Give it to Ray, Barry, Colin. Find out what I can about library dates and specs. Get Paul's possible dates. Fix car well enough so it can get to CA. Box stuff, have a sale. Box stuff for two categories, need now, need eventually. Get laptop working. 9 Something you want to talk about     evasion Something I'm evading     Something good     NO Evading knowing something     Sentence?     crisis about recovering the subtle intelligence of mourning Something I'm refusing to feel     no, do Does it have to do with a manner of living     Will you say mourning of what     your reserve Will you say what I'd be like if I didn't have it     graduated I'm too easily satisfied     Is some part of me in mourning     YES It is in mourning about my current situation     This is interesting but I don't understand     Will you tell me in a sentence     you are holding back feeling of betrayal, anger It is there right now     Can that part of me speak directly     imagine ways patriarchy is making you withdraw from action Actually barring     Think what I'd like to be doing and why I'm not doing it Because of patriarchy     no Internalized patriarchy     Does this have to do with money and power     no Creative action     The men are preventing me as we speak     Internalized patriarchy keeps me from knowing what I'm worth     YES Is that what you mean     no Is there a reason why I'm not getting this     because you're not imagining Is there more you want to say     no I haven't really got it     What was it meaning to say - I should be wanting more - more creative action - I am quite blank contemplating this question - is the question how to release it? - it says yes - none of my friends are friends in this - Joyce was - what should I want - more beauty - more action - more renown - more influence - more help - more hunger - it said yes to that. I just come to a stop thinking how to do this - the men stopped me by failing to acknowledge me - they continue to do that - but the blank is in me - is this something I can do on my own? - it says yes - by finding rather than forcing? - yes - for instance field & field - yes - the photos - yes - who should I measure myself by? - should I stop doing humble things to jack up my opinion of myself - no - have more contact with the best - yes - is hunger already there? - yes - dream work? - yes - will you say more about how - be honest in the crises of the subtle intelligence of aggression/action - have I been dishonest? - no - but if I ask it will come up? - yes. - Well I'm hired by the transdisciplinary MA program. Still in Margo's pod. Tom was wonderful. He praised me for an hour and then spoke for half an hour about the good work he is doing with Steve, Tony, Vince. Tom was showing my website to Tom Mix. It's all over the bookmark list of the computer at work. He said I'm eudaimoneous. Eudaimonic. Which he understands as in the flow. Corin this time sent a web essay of her family story, very painful to do. I am proud of her. She is showing herself bare. 11 Yesterday I wrote Ray, Barry, Colin, and said I need to make a [defense] plan for mid-July. 13 Tibetan monks growling onstage at the Chan Center. What did I think. Not much. First, the Chan Center is very mechanical-looking, wires and struts and some large motor-thing suspended over the stage. Second, there was much drapery-adjusting among the eleven monks crosslegged on facing rugs, putting-on and taking-off and folding and patting of crowns and embroidered shawls. It seemed a guy thing, technical and meant to intimidate: exaggerate the maleness of voices and surround it with saffron and maroon, clashing brass, drums that penetrate the listeners, long braying horns. Say it is a manner of taming a black power that likes human skulls, black crows, black dogs. I did like the overtone when I first heard it. It was very high and bright and did not sound like a human voice but like a whine produced by a metal. I liked the standing mass of sound when it could be sustained. I liked the painting in the foyer a lot. It was a Gordon Smith, I could see immediately, not as wonderful as the one in the VAG, but wonderful. A different scale, more distant. I also liked the glass wall along the west edge of the foyer. It looked onto old-growth cedars and was high enough, leaning outward, so one can see the top of at least one of them. Apart from that, I felt badly dressed and ugly and hated to find Martha, a year older than me, looking more beautiful than ever, sitting ahead of me, preening herself, running her little red hand up into her hair to give it a little toss. - Does Shepard give me a thinking point? He says that in adolescence a hunter-gatherer culture initiates [its boys] into a way of thinking about nature that makes it and not an elsewhere the ground for another kind of thinking, so that it becomes inexhaustible of interest. He says it is by metaphor. Shepard P 1982 Nature and madness Random House Finding a way to feel it inexhaustible of interest is right but metaphor is not. Here I'm on the verge of writing my conclusion. The initiation I would give is to say here is our opportunity in this life: we are physical beings in a physical universe, we are sentient by being just that. Great feats of sentient response and sentient invention become possible to us by construction and reconstruction of our bodies. Initiation into the human enterprise, the stage of adult responsibility, is initiation into knowledge of the ground of our possibilities, and knowledge of the possibilities themselves. Is there a sense in which 'physical ground' is itself metaphoric? An image of order. Could this initiation work for the least talented, the worst parented? Is it necessary to go via the metaphor of physical order? I think so, for now. Myth, he says. The parallel availability of fairy tales to the child who was on Sundays taught bible stories. "Invisible realities" - he hasn't got the sense that they can be visible. "Failure of the adolescent's mentors in the succeeding four or five years to translate his confidence in people and the earth into a more conscious, more cosmic view, in which [he] broadens his buoyant faith to include the universe." 70 Reading Shepard I am thinking of Frank after his life. "By aggravating the tensions of separation from the mother and at the same time spatially isolating the individual from the nonhumanized world, agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had been structured in the course of human existence." 41 "His identity was spread around among things, insufficiently internalized and consolidated. Foremost among them were the products of his labor." "He came to live more and more with his own fabrications as the environment." If I wrote Frank I would be writing my father and thus also the disaffected ground of action in myself. What I mean is that I am beginning to see what the story is. But do I know enough to tell it. Would it take years. I have been how many years, thirteen, in this present task. I'm afraid when I realize that. Calm down - calm down - one thing at a time. Packet 3 letters, five more. Illustrations and refs to be able to hand off the manuscript. Start packing downstairs. Aircare. [more Shepard notes from Nature and madness: Comparing monotheism and polytheism describes an ascetic state, ethical religiosity, striving for purity, bitter, cynical, disengaged, analytic, self-scourging, self-conscious, abstract, interpretive, text-based, art and science become data-making. Themes of alienation, disengagement, unrelatedness. "the only serious world that of the adult male ... It is the function of social customs and rites" to accentuate this fact while enveloping the fact of mothers in fantasy. adolescent's indigenous desire for cosmic understanding and profound devotion What the desert fathers did to the ontogeny of the person, fanatic ideology. Hebrews locked into intense idealism of adolescence. Loss of mother plunging the individual forever into infantile dualism. The dull mentality of competitive, acquisitive, contractual being whose essence is determined by the outcome of situations. Patriarchal societies frustrate the adolescent's transferal of his love of mother to others or to nature. This results in a massively repressed rage toward the father ... both nature destruction and preservation can be interpreted in these terms as an unresolved oedipal problem. Terrorist extreme ideologist acting out their responses to the demands of inner change impossible in an immature society. War for the sake of identity. 151 1.the domesticators 2.the desert fathers 3.the puritans 4.the mechanists Contrast with: developmental process by which "maternal connections are subjectively transferred to the earth," "to offer things worthy of their skill, to tutor their suffering and dreaming." psychological maturity, a view broad and forgiving ... the final phases in which the seasoned individual becomes capable of mentorship and spiritual guidance. loving acceptance of the strangeness of life, the wit to become fully oneself and yet not estranged from the infinite diversity of the Other, the leisured, free openness to self-unfolding instead of clinging to a made world. Crops to cities, 50 centuries, east of the Mediterranean To us, 50 more, wheel, writing Hunter-gatherers before that 3 million years, thirty thousand centuries to beginning of the Pleistocene A different kind of mind, quality of attention, keen looking and listening In nonliterate nomadic people a network of place, network of emotional attachment, mnemonic, the whole of a known range becomes a hierophantic map Juvenile imprinting on terrain Agricultural civilizations, Great Mother, but which mother, ie mother at which stage Lifelong subordination to a mother Anxieties of agriculture, guilt for failure, domesticated plants and animals are not mysterious others, "what is it about the domesticated civilized world that alters [the concept of] self so that it is enhanced by property?" 34 Self a lifelong task of formulating terms with a real other, not controlled; or self as artisan of what has been controlled, possessed rather than encountered The creature created: simpler, more slavish These animals become an image of the nature of life. pet-keeping an abyss of covert and unconscious uses of animals in the service of psychological needs 38 "the child, born to expect subtle and infinite possibilities, was presented with fat hulks, vicious maniacs, and hypertrophied drudges" 39 "creation of a new kind of language, itself made more immature" "the new logic could not provide a world of purpose, lively with spiritual activity, its ceremonial celebrations deserving of deep fidelity" Drift of orthodoxy toward sanity, twelfth century art, naturalism, architecture, poetry, song and love "I puzzled over this ambiguity in American life ... the world's most ferocious destroyers and yet the most fanatic preservers of wilderness parks and endangered species" 89 mechanists "city children ... frustration and inarticulate desire ... a stew of nature so arbitrarily presented that the results of his years of trying to fix it in his heart will only lead to despair ... nature has proved incoherent ... omit the eight to ten years of immersion in nonhuman nature" ] 14 Was at Louie's yesterday night sitting with her on the sofa with blowing rain at the French doors, stroking her sparsely stubbled legs telling her about the fantasy house and garden. Telling made a fine electric quiver in my solar, sometimes reaching to the pubic bone. What was that. Does telling it aloud release something? Yes. Trust? Yes. Is that the point? Yes. Do you want to say anything? Yes, early love. I told fantasies when I was little. Yes. 15 With Louie yesterday buying plant pots. I pick, she pays, it's very pleasant. We pack the car with beauties, which yesterday included a largish, scratched buff pot for her Japanese willow, and a leaf-green pot for her new anemone clematis (cartmanaii Joe). 16 Where am I this dullish morning at eleven. Going to SFU this aft to print copies for Ray, Colin, Barry. Taking Cheryl. About Cheryl. She is making large vinyl composites of digitized images taken from webcams in cities throughout the world. I take it she is commenting on the nowhereness of the everywhereness of digital surveillance. The text she wrote for the show she curated to include these pieces makes the usual claims for 'questioning' and subverting, but I see what she does as acceding rather than fighting. I'm repelled by the nonsensory life implied. She is saying to the art culture (who else), you are only impressed by the mechanical and I wish you to be impressed, so I will spend even the moments closest to myself in the living death of the mechanical. At the same time she is walking around with a back like a board, feeling the world does not want to give her anything, every fight is already lost. It means she will not like Paul Shepard. Here's my own question. I reread my interview in Mike Hoolboom's collection yesterday, thinking of C reading it, and found it strangely young. It will be discounted because it sounds so childish. - Printed all the chapters three times over. Dropped in at Zoe Druick's office in the communications department, Zoe the age I was when I first met her - so young, slight, beautiful, with an open, balanced face, skin like wax. Very polite. She is teaching courses in television and cinema noir. Was a scholarly child with research interests, looks a born academic. 17 William. Is his 'spirituality' total junk? Yes. Is his battle with 'ego' total self-absorption? Yes. Is the spiritual trip meant to hide a starvation that shames him? YES. Is there a core of honest willingness? Yes. He wants to be in bliss sucking the tit all the time. He has no interest in anyone or anything else. Will anyone back his educational scheme? No. He doesn't have the inner platform. What he should do first is plain therapy. But he'll keep trying to vault into magical powers. Is there anything I can do. No. Tell him what I see? NO. He's very driven, he's very early, he will have to exhaust the grandiose fantasies before he goes on. Just keep loving his hunger, because it's what's real in him. Always the weakness? No, but in the crazy ones, the weakness. I need to know more about developmental stages. 18 Atanarjuat the fast runner. It's a culture hero story, has bad people, good people, supernatural events, interesting clothes, snow houses, soapstone bowls, bloody meat, howling dogs, wastes of snow, agitated terns beating their wings small in a large sky, a naked man running through ice melt, women with moon faces and tattoo lines like whiskers on a seal, sheets of purple flowers grown flat to bare ground. Walking home from seeing Cheryl to Diana's house last night, I saw the moon above McLean Park with five planets and several bright stars. There were two sets of two and some single outliers. The formation was striking in a clear black sky, after weeks of rain. What am I feeling. Squirmy-evasive about leaving. Not that I'm going, but that I don't wish to feel it. Nervous about money as my margin shrinks. The car failed Aircare. Have to finish this and that. Hanging back. Do you want to comment     Should I be blasting out     Move before my defense     End of May     Then I have June and half of July and am back     Set a date and buy return ticket     Anything you want to say     overview: writing, decision, fight, to create You want me to decide to be a writer?     Instead of the institute     no Will there be enough money     More?     you have processed to come through search for betrayal I'm through?     YES More?     indecision, Tom, learning, aggression Being with Tom I've come to terms with aggression     So now I'm ready to go live with him     More     departure, exclusion, decision, vain regret If I understand what I'm doing there won't be vain regret     YES I see. Aggression: writing     More     you have improved Tom's mourning and judgment More     end of illusion, quest, vain regret, non-loss Is this about Tom?     he has given up illusions about quest, vain regret and non-loss More     he has graduated to quest for intimacy and judgment More     he has been responsible in understanding exclusion and loss More about him     no More about me?     balanced forces, not evading, creation and action More     you are imagining departure as loss of early love I should imagine it as joining wholeness     YES Should I think of it as joining early love     YES Anything else?     Tom, has come through, struggle, for early love More?     writing, beginning, responsibility, in relation to, loss For instance Frank after his life     Do you mean write about coming through     Write to bring through     yes That's what mind and land is     YES Do you want to say more     improve male withdrawal and defendedness Male in anyone     YES 19 Dreamed Cheryl had wonderful clothes, a pale green sheer blouse, a narrow skirt with zippers and pockets. I was looking at her body with the old kind of longing, both desire and envy. She was being witty with Diana and I dropped into dismay that I am not witty like that. The dream called up how it used to be, and tells me why when I'm with her I hear my voice pitched low and often find my arm tight across my midriff. In actuality Cheryl now shows exhaustion through the very thin flesh under her eyes and is loving and anxious. I often feel I'm talking too much when I'm with her. With Rowen on the phone last night I was working problems in monomial multiplication. We were thinking together lightly and sweetly. I have very little sense of how old he is. I hear an adult tone in his light voice and realize I've been speaking as if to a child. When Cheryl was here Wednesday night after the movie I would sometimes look across the table and see an owl's face, right eye big and bright. Tom flipped when Dick called him crazy, so he is now back on three to eleven. When he calms down he is left in a lifelong consternation, What happened? Am I crazy? I say no, you're fast. You have a trigger. If anyone jumped me you'd have them before you knew they'd done it. It's a warrior circuit. 20th I dreamed three or four variations of the moment a woman doctor or nurse takes hold of a newborn baby and cleans it. Each time I was watching carefully and saw details of how she held the baby, how she wiped its face, how she tugged off the clinging membrane. The attitude of watching came from seeing Atanarjuat again last night with Louie. It's three hours. It was much the same the second time as the first. The music is good. Hearing the language is nice, bumpy, pebbly. Leading man had very close-set eyes and bad teeth and was seen naked for many moments running with his little penis bobbling in a nest of fur. An email this morning from someone called Tevfik Aytekin who is doing an MS in the philosophy department of a technical university in Turkey. He or she has downloaded my analog/digital paper. 21st Logan has straightened out. I didn't chase him, I've answered without flattery or 'support'. I've been quick and detailed, and I said he was the authority in the poems and I wouldn't touch them. So this morning he has sent a patch about what he doesn't want to do in a poem. What we don't know, "like the unknowing of swimming in the ocean, a questioning of presence," "recognizing the motions of the material world as being constant the universe strides over and around Jane and Bob and they don't mean anything more than milkmaid on the slope for the fifth or sixth time." 22nd Logan answered my answer this way, "yes, I am extremely dyslexic, went to a dyslexic kids high school for three years and graduated with only two other students in my grade, so it is a constant wall and a constant bridge." Now we can begin. Logan is a writer who is blind to words. He doesn't see misspellings, but it is more than that. He doesn't remember which prepositions go in which expressions. His word choice can be sublime but it can be uncomfortably, unaccountably off. His wonk gives him a charm in language, but I can see now that he works beauty in his field of struggle and shame. It is as if I were trying to be a dancer. When he tries to write connected prose he spins out tangles and lumps of thought. He is thinking wordlessly in the open spaces of the right hemisphere. Does his left hemisphere have conventional language? Yes, because he speaks like anyone. It is the relation between right and left. Is it a relation of solitary being and social being? Nothing smooth. And yet writing gets him to a state of beauty that is the value he is most loyal to. The question is how to work with him. He needs an editor. He needs detailed work on prepositions. Detailed work with word choice. Most important, drawing out his actual principles in poetics. This will take so much time. Should we work on the phone? 24 Tom dreamed last week he came into a room and saw a standing corpse who turned and looked at him. It was Vic, skeletal, dressed in clothes he used to wear, eyeballs wobbling because they were held by drooping ligaments. He growled in his familiar way, Kid, you gotta drop your shit. We've rippled out. Oscar is back with Susy. Tom passed on one of the ADD books to him. They rode the Rosarito-Ensenada bike marathon together Saturday. Tom felt Susy and the eldest daughter taking special care of him as if they knew he had something to do with Oscar's being back. Susy drove the race route with them in the pickup. After dinner she drove home, the two girls in the front, the two men with the bikes in the back. She drove 100 miles an hour on the toll road. Bright stars above, cold. I'm writing this listening to one of Tom's tapes. It's just before 10. He is starting to wrap his shift. These days I am in the Publab alone with twenty graphics Macs. I work on three at a time. I wore my small jeans today for the first time since last summer. Biking to Harbour Center. The leaves are coming in. When I step onto the back porch for milk in the morning there is cold air scented with leaves and flowers. Filling in - looking down into the neighbour's garden I see it has filled in since yesterday. Ah Tom I love your music. 27 Rowen is here. Rowen, Rowen. 28 When we arrived at my house yesterday afternoon I just wanted to go lie down and I did. I called to Rowen, Come in here and talk to me. He came in and lay down stiffly at the edge of the bed with his back to me. I put my arm under his head. We lay in silence. There were a lot of small twitches in his body. I rolled closer and put my other arm around him. I could see his eye jumping under the skin of his eyelid. We lay for fifteen minutes then got up and went to Louie's. While he slept I was thinking that when Tom was as young as this, so young, and when his mother was my age, she died and he was left alone. I was feeling Rowen's twitchiness as neglect, loneliness, aloneness. And then we went to Louie's and I was out of it, dim, wanting to go home and be alone, wiped out. Louie had to be the one to make the connection later. It's because I'm moving away, I've held this house for him but I'm going to stop doing even that. When he came into the house he kissed the knob on the banister post. He sat on the floor in the bathroom and held the bathtub's little foot. Rowen has borne the cost of my successes     Good I've done for other people does not outweigh it     no Do you want to comment     complete coming through to overview of despair His despair     You want to talk about him     He carries himself very sloppily     That's a lack of core confidence     Does he still have core confidence in him     He needs to balance in responsible honesty     His floppiness is evasion     More?     loss of success comes from defeat of sharing 29th Yesterday as I came up the walk from the alley ahead of Rowen, a Sunday afternoon, there was a cluster of people in the courtyard, my neighbours, and among them Margaret Shore. I stopped to speak to her, she got up to put her arms around me, I kissed her cheek. You aren't Luke? she said to Rowen. "This is my second son, Rowen. This is Margaret Shore." I was looking at her face - sweet, still the mouth with a crook in the right corner, still Margaret Shore, though fuller and softer - and feeling marvel that she should have come just as I am about to leave Vancouver. And then I dreamed last night that I was bent over on my bed imagining Tom fucking me - tugging my nipples, poking with his finger - all as I would if I were awake. My sister got up from her own bed lower down on the floor and placed herself beside me. I was furious that she had spoiled my sexual moment. I got down on the floor with her and attacked her breasts. I grabbed them and pulled viciously. That's primal rage at sexual competition. Seeing Maggie is what brought it. - When I think of taking this house away from Rowen I'm scared. I'm scared at taking it away from me. - I believe it's possible I'll fail     Because I've done it my way     YES Is the thesis bad     NO It's just too unorthodox     no Is this my conviction about my father     He did me a lot of harm     And he meant to     Will you lead me     defiance Under defiance is this caving in     Of doubt     Sagging defeat     Defeat of true initiative     Success of false     It's a floor of hopelessness     It happened with notes in origin     field & field     The slides     A conviction that I will fail     When I work from true self     So I've succeeded where I felt I could     Will you lead me     come through Just realize it?     Recognize the dejection     Recognize the source of the doubt     Anything else you want to talk about     men's slow growth, tempering and recovery That part of the task     loss, because of betrayal, contemplation, brings recovery The kind of loss I had via my father     He had too     Does reactivation only work if there is a container for it     30th The alarm beeped at five. I turned on Rowen's light. We walked out into air full of scent, first light. Even on the platform next to the Greyhound, the air had the scent of cedar. What do I remember. Rowen praised my cutlery and asked why bacon and pork chops are better at my house. On Sunday I took him shopping to Army-Navy. Pale grey-green teeshirt and blue pants with orange zippers at the knees. Then I took him to Commercial and got him green cargos and a new backpack. There was sun. We were parked in the alley between the two halves of the store. In the aft we went to see A beautiful mind, which he chose because he thought I might like to see it. I made pork chops and mashed potatoes and corn for supper. We had chocolate pudding for dessert, in sweet evening light of a day in which the whole city had been gardening. By now Rowen is on the ferry. He'll be in Campbell River for school in the afternoon. He thinks Mike doesn't care as much. He's losing everyone at once. Mike's house is gone, the house on Read is gone, and he's losing this house. There's a girl who's flirting with him but she's into drugs and sleeps around. There's another girl but he's not sure how it is going with her. He wants to find ways to avoid getting hurt. It's Tom's birthday. My web page posting has dog and girl: Tom and Ellie true love in red letters. The dog has such a Tom-like expression, amused, alert, tolerant. Logan and his process paper. What am I doing wrong, I'm doing something wrong. The best of what he's said: attractive rhythm, simple turn-ons, not of this world directly, writing is an emotion. The immaterial personal. May 2nd Russell Kildahl has my laptop. A man ran up the stairs. He was red-bearded, ruddy, wore a green cap, and glowed. I know you, I said, meaning I have seen him in the neighbourhood. I sat him down at the table. I have been meaning to ask you whether you know La Glace, he said. There are bursts of wind driving pink flakes above the roofs. Tom is disorganized by his change of shift. I am having stressed dreams. We are in a choppy band, after months of great peace and pleasure. 3rd Barry and Ray in Barry's office this morning. Barry said it has some ragged edges but it is wonderful, it's a book, it should be published. He gave me a piece of brain coral. Ray looked like Aristotle and let us handle it. 4 Mike sent his packet early. He looked at three Wiseman films and now I'm satisfied with his semester. I got him to see what documentary can be. 6 Tom is reading Critique of pure reason, I discover. He is happy that the young blacks in the hotel have notched him up to OG and T-top, meaning old gangsta and top-Tom, up from Tom Petty. Hey OG k'n I have some money on my phone? Big Zulu Steve, the only black hippy in Texas, has offered an interest in Neil Young. It is sweet to see how much Tom cares to be loved. He's less and less hiding on the job and it means he is more natural with me. 7 Gosh, no wonder she called me darling in her packet 4 note. I've just reread my packet three letter to Corin and it made me cry. 8 My west. My evening west window, high fading color, the so many years of. Street cherries in flower over the pointed roofs. The line of poplars at the bottom of Strath schoolyard is in leaf between two roof-slopes. I am frightened of giving it up, being homeless, being gone forever, being adrift. When I came to the window - I'm waiting to take Louie to the airport - there was a naked little girl in light on a bed at the window across the way. She's the little girl born in that house, the yellow one, a couple of summers ago. The bed under the window is very recent. A month ago there was a crib across the room. In winter, when the lights are on through the evening, the little bathroom window has the mother undressing for the bath, standing at the bathroom door taking off her bra. In the mornings, through the kitchen window on the ground floor, I've seen child, dog, and father's legs against the checkered floor. Rowen phoned as I wrote. Louie is calling when she comes off work. I have a heart ache about death and endings. It's dark now, except for a fading turquoise band across the west. The lightest stretch is quite far north. There is a planet brilliant above it and another high up due west. Tomorrow I am having to phone Paul Churchland about the defense. volume 25 the golden west volume 24: 2001-2002 november-may work & days: a lifetime journal project