| the golden west volume 3 part 3 - 1995 october-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego, Monday October 16th I'm not much spirit. Yesterday working on Damasio, reading this journal to here, bringing in my file box, looking at Kitcher on Kant to know who I'll be speaking to today. I sat with my file of letters unsent/unanswered feeling the fineness of people who've offered to know me. I've ignored them. Today I learned a campus, I learned the way to it, I found the layout of the department and filled in a form, I bought a semester's parking, sat in the bookstore and took the gist of PC's new book, tried to organize computing, uselessly for a long time and then suddenly very easily, scouted the cog sci dept, then found the way home by roads other than the freeway, and, last, found a mechanic. And then got a parking spot. 18th Time is still very broken up, I need five or six straight hours in the morning (and I need two deep cups of tea). It's parking that is unsolved. For that I need a grey curb Monday Wednesday and Friday nights. Some other grey curb Sunday Tuesday and Thursday nights. Otherwise I have to move the car at midnight when the traffic clears and then try for a free spot at 6 when the street sweepers leave. Or stay here and put a dollar an hour in the meter and still have to move after two hours. Or go to the $3 lot in the afternoon and leave it there overnight but only till 9. Or park at a yellow curb overnight but move it by 7. The grey curb without a meter is the only solution. I keep missing it by seconds. And I don't have a way to make tea. And tomorrow I have to go early to have the mechanic check the car. Paul, enormous Paul, Churchland. Loud, speedy, pedagogical. Out of breath, cardiac. A sold soul, public. Very pressured. Heavy. I felt sorry for him. I was nodding and smiling to help him. But pressing nonetheless to register in his information space. 19 Look at this beautiful lamp. I have a perfect lamp. Today I bought a hotplate, a little Silex, chrome, a smooth round thing the size of a saucepan floor. And in the same store a teapot I don't know why I like - cream-colored, a handle on the lid like a little pike and a squared spout. These three things, lamp, hotplate, and teapot, are beautiful adaptations to living in this 8x10 room. Library books: Lopez Field notes, Lessing The real thing. A phone. This fresh hot cup of tea. A couple of people in the lobby who say hello. The antique store in Ocean Beach was like an anthropology museum, aisles with furniture arranged into bays that held small things like the teapot and the lamp. Jewelry, books, baby shoes, dishes, sometimes clothes. Nothing that hadn't belonged to a life - a museum of American abundance, spill and overspill of shapes of personal love: you made it intact through some original life, now come and be in mine. I was walking around addressing the pieces the way I do plants. Liking this teapot is David in me - his feeling for the love in things. I take the objects for their shapes, for the way they satisfy me from many angles. See - there - my plaid jacket black and white with just a line of turquoise blue. That jacket - and the shirt next to it - was in a life before me too. What I'm saying is a commonplace, the mystery of objects and so on - but I haven't said it yet. Something about their coherence, each little thing, and the larger pieces like the kitchen chair - the love, and the kind of love - that made them, in their different times and styles, is also a love of seeing and touching, both in the maker and in those who wanted to live with the thing. I am often exhilarated here. It is sheer being to wake at four-thirty in a building with many quiet sounds of other people awake. (The walls are poured concrete, the desk clerk said, so the radio in the next room is just a stir.) The security guard, who is a fat out-of-breath black man in a uniform strained at the shirt buttons, walks the corridors every now and again. The lobby is always awake. The long inner corridors are nearly always empty. Many doors, all alike. Cream-colored paint over everything. Every door with a latched transom screened on the outside, for a crossbreeze when it's hot and to let in warmed air if it's cold, since the only rads are in the corridor. The tall drinker I met in the elevator is Lyle from Colorado who was a machinist in Seattle and other places. I tell him I've never been married and then I tell him I have kids. "Are you a lover?" he says. "A lover of what?" "A lover of men." I'm not sure just how he means that. It could be a euphemism in some culture I don't know, or it could be a very delicate expression of some male sweetness of privacy. I choose to take it literally. "Well, yes, I am, but I'm picky." I wait a moment. I'll clear this up. "Don't worry, I'm not hitting on you," I say. "I'm not hitting on you either" he says and puts out his hand palm up. It's a nice long hand. I see him from behind walking with the man he has been waiting for. He is a tall thin body, very stiff, high-shouldered, frozen at the hips. He will have been a lovely boy. He has the look now of a man on the skids, stale-smelling polyester clothes, false teeth. He introduces his friend. "This is Gentry." Gentry is the dish-faced small black man who watched anxiously while I was parallel parking at midnight outside the hotel. The two of them go off together to Lyle's room. I am in the lobby waiting for my laundry to dry. The desk clerk sits down with me, Tom. There is something about his eyes. They are pale, the color of his grey hair. It gives them a look of reflecting rather than absorbing, as if he were blind. He is personal the way the first desk clerk was too. He has a sense of care for his people, I can see. He likes the hotel. But he is lonely and failed too, he knows he has hidden from his challenges. He was a hippy in a commune partway down the Banner Grade past Julian into the Anza Borrego. He put his young bets on a life that got washed out from under him - it's that. 21st Now it is Saturday morning. My rent is paid for a month. My car is at a grey curb where it is safe till 3 o'clock Monday morning. I'm going to work. I'm free till Wednesday. Last night I lay falling asleep at eight hearing the building around me. The quality of the sound is very beautiful. It has a grey furry quality, which may be given by the standing panels of concrete walls. Not like the sharp sound in my house at home. This sound is like grey velvet. Its sources are distinct, radios, televisions, taped music, telephones, voices, nose-blowing and coughing that come from the light well. Voices, rarely, through the door; the sounds of other doors. Annie on the other side of the wall talking about praying for this and that, or when she is alone shifting into a nasal southern voice that is like a cartoon person who may be an alter to the pious soul she otherwise affects. There is a young black woman with midriff bulk and thin pointed legs who walks everywhere speaking aloud, being a radio keeping herself safely in the company of her choice. I lay sinking very sweetly into this velvet texture of the building's presence and the street's, where there are car alarms and shouts. Ironed white sheets with light blankets make me a child in the hospital, a girl in the dorm at Ban Righ. There is a reason I could feel that sinking-in as bliss. But then my phone rang and it was Tom inviting me to dinner, as if he had been there at the desk feeling me open my edges to the building with him in it. [Castenada notes] 22nd Did he say, If you don't jump off the bridge you'll never make it to the pool? I was the pool and he did not jump. He did think out the options for dinner. When I invited him to, he brought me to places he loves. But talked and smoked and talked, keeping as far away as he could from the leap into asking who I am. The most excited he got was when he talked about how the men dress in Wings of desire. He lives in the hotel because his father lived here. He works here because he misses his father. His ex-wife has taken their son to Iowa and has remarried. He was in the army, in journalism, edited a neighbourhood newspaper. He has lost battles he should have won, love and war, and is a chip in an eddy, quiet here, coming to rest where nothing is demanded. He has a room over 4th Avenue, drawers of tapes. There is a tree where birds arrive and depart. One of the panes in his window is original glass so that colored light from the marquee fans out rose and gold on his ceiling. The valves in the veins of his legs are shot. That means they do not recirculate blood from his feet. He must wear support socks and elastic bandages and sleep with his feet up. I couldn't see the boy in him. I couldn't see him. I saw very straight hair folded straight back. Tom Fangel, who said umlaut like a person who speaks German. A bar he liked in the hotel in La Jolla: "You can drink like a gentleman." "You can drink, and feel like a gentleman," I say. I want to advise meditation and stopping smoking. That he is come to rest in affection is already good, but from that quiet, in it, there's a next thing. Of course I was thinking of David who asks and shines. But what did I see. First I heard breakers below in the dark. Then I saw quite far off a green and white wave rushing forward in a powerful white spotlight. It's something rich people with shore property do, here. It is very beautiful though the impulse is proprietary. Out in the black that foaming green advance always renewed from behind. There were small lights floating offshore. Tom said they are snorkelers' markers that warn boats and orient them underwater. There were moving red lights too and when we were sitting on the sugary sand of the Cove I saw one of them emerge on the back of a diver staggering out of the water black and monstrous with gear. We came off the cliffs around the corner into a street with shops. The first of them was a shell shop. We looked in through the window. "Do you see the sign that says low ceiling? There was a German man who had this store, who spent fifty years digging a tunnel down to the cave. When he finished he was seventy-eight. He lived for another ten years. It was just for him. He would go down and hang out. That was in the twenties." It was Saturday night in La Jolla. A double-stretched limo is at the curb waiting for a dozen little girls capering on the grass. "Let's go, come on now let's go," shouts a bearded man in shirt sleeves. They ignore him. They ignore him. He stands beside the open back seat door. I don't know whether he is father or chauffeur. They come running. "Wipe your feet, wipe your feet" they shout to each other. In a roofed shelter beside the path a family is collecting paper plates by light of a Coleman lantern they have hung from the ceiling. There are many date couples walking, kids standing kissing. What I liked best was a group of Hispanic kids of different ages standing on the sidewalk so we had to walk around them, seriously and skillfully, quietly, singing, in Spanish, something with intricate harmony lines. And back through all the miles, roads that come to junctions and become other roads, a very unrectangular net laid to pass between humpy hills and piecemeal shore. 24th Tuesday night. Working and blowing my nose for two days. Sitting in deep hot baths sweating. I am quite sleek - my skin is fine and clear and my belly pad is gone. My eyelids are back. I'm choosing to take this cold as tissue cleaning. Working but not feeling. Staying close to home, lying low. Very very simple. When David phoned last night I was suddenly sweetly fluttered. I don't think of myself as missing him but then there was his voice, his light, near, quirky, fond boy-voice, that will accept anything I am going to say. I wanted to hear it without the things he was saying. 25 Balboa Park. It is early. This very bland city is lying miscellaneous under a climbing light. The trees haven't interested me. Why's that? They seem banal - fifties trees, soulless trees. But maybe it is my lack of seeing-soul. I'm processing text but I'm not dreaming and I'm not feeling. I'm not in love. I'm not attached. Is this the shallowness of a kid in a cage not breathing? Who gets head colds ever after. More of the puzzle of David. His letter yesterday dull empty servile and using scarequotes in the dumb unlettered way. Then an email message that was fast light and true. "Silver northwest." He said what happened to Lara is that she was crushed. Such a good word. The opposite of abandoned, he said. But does it have the same effect of making people vacant so they have to pretend to exist? - Tom has shyly given me poems on hotel stationary which are not as I feared meant to impress me but to show something he felt that he thought was worth feeling. closures in eternity / where circumstances arise each passenger the all / in itself alert - That is him at the desk welcoming gently the spirits he knows to be all in themselves. "They have made a couple of missteps, and I include myself in that. But they are not in denial any more and there is quite a lot of thinking going on." There are three poems. One is the best of him, a recognition he's remembered, of himself and the rest. One is a complicated play of invitation and denial. The last is some kind of metaphysical poem that's either technically wrong or fake. He said, looking straight ahead, "I can write beautiful sentences." I've noticed I must sit turned somewhat away from him so he'll unfold his arms. Is there a name for this kind of structure, that evokes what it sez doesn't exist? Structural oxymoron: "there is no meter for passion's resolve, its secret flood." Denying asserts: "fountains / in closed rooms," luminescent shafts dissolving, adamantine tension, pulsed singing - what is a poem if not invitation? 26th The slant of morning light falling nearly parallel to the page shows me that the pencil cut down into the page. Why do I like that? Here I stop and read two things, my 1990 paper on connectionist simulation, my last spring's assembly of the story of writing the long history of imagining paper. I was reading both imagining giving them to Churchland. Giving the story to Tom or Phil. I come to the last page. It is heart-rending. I see that what I must do is publish it. It is called Theory's practice. My heart is shaking as I say this. Theory's practice will be to know I am advertising for a man who can meet that and wants to. 27 Many checked thoughts - I'm making small dashes caught in a searchlight - write your way out of it - sigh - it begins this way, it will do you no good to advertise - no amount of written soul - you keep being caught trying to catch his eye - the only thing that caught his eye was tits - how many times have you come to this moment - you say, put it away, it won't work, it is pitiful to show yourself deluded - he says, What is a poem but sublimation - you say, you are pleased to have found it to say, What is a poem but invitation? Each your own way. Is there an original moment in this giving up? I'm ready to cry this morning. Is it an oscillation. I do something else. Hope grows when I'm not looking. I trust a little venture. I am checked. I lose confidence in forward motion. I dash myself back and forth in a small space. I stop. What was the little check? I said, What is a poem but invitation? The check was very small, as the invitation was small, but now there is a spot in the hotel I am not looking at, the spot behind the desk where he is sitting. That feeble strategy - make him feel you not looking at him. Rather than look fast and close and see how he is. And what was the check - that he said "That was very special" about my notes on his poems. He knows the code and I do too. "Very special" is a brush-off. I want to say, but you started it, you gave me that poem about luminous shafts dissolving, was I supposed to play dumb? Am I being naïve maybe - I said to him, as if, You say you're sublimating but you're inviting. I noticed. You are now in position to make a next move. He said - I have to wait till I get paid. Today my sickness is almost gone but I have crashed. I'm not willing to work. I'm hiding. I don't know what to say about myself. My confidence is dashed. I want to get under my covers again and lie inert. 29th I was alright today until in the bookshop looking at Men are from Mars I was struck into tears feeling - it seemed - that if I had known those things I would have been able to be with Ken. I come back to my room feeling emotional aloneness that is hopeless. I could learn those things, to accept, back off, not to improve or advise, to give the admiration there is, but such a person - a person so unknown to me - could never learn to be my home. There is no one. There can be no one. I don't know what this hopelessness requires of me. What am I supposed to conclude? That I should remember not to fall into hope? But I don't even know when I am in hope. There is buoyancy that just feels like myself. I feel safe, I feel everything's alright, nothing special. Then my viability stands up and I'm dumped out of her lap. Not viable any more, and not viable especially because my feelings are hurt. What did I do? I was too frisky. I was too confident. I showed a little edge. More than that. How did I get suckered? Can anyone who shows any interest hurt me? Should I always say no? It seems I can't afford to play. I can't trust myself to keep my balance or know when it's going to tip. 31st Soberly: I plant myself in the lobby. He finds me. Are we still on for tomorrow? If you like. Okay here's what we'll do. He has planned it out. Roads, avocados, lake, bakery, lunch, dinner. The plan is fine but going along with it is like taking on a large lonely task: getting real about the helplessness of men. The loneliness I would sign on to if I took one on. Giving him what he needs and not what I need him to need would be a discipline at the core, a discipline where I would most want to be looked after. If it's true that I've used men to keep me from missing my mother, then these very tears are tears of missing my mother. Would there be any reason then for looking after a man? There would be nothing to hope for. See? There it is again, I wouldn't be given back my mother's nearness. I would be a mother, I would be giving someone what they aren't giving me. Alright, I agree, the question of men will sort itself out one way or another after I let myself miss my mother. I can't foresee it. When I see their helplessness I will be seeing their goodness, and seeing it is something in itself. I'm thinking of Rebecca West marrying Rosamunde to a repulsive man for some reason of high moral struggle and sacrifice. [Cousin Rosamund, 1986, Viking] But thinking of all this - I notice - has a draggy depressed feeling, which means it must be wrong. It's as if - what I imagine is - my heart would choose someone just because he was there - nothing special - I'd be moved by the boy in him and love him by learning to give him what he needs - he'd love me for that wiseness, he'd be at home - but his ways of giving me that love would always be wrong, they'd always be as if requests for more. I was in a field in the mist. It was falling dark. I stood looking at cropped yellow grass, blond and grey tufts of sage, grey earth. There were contours nearby, some trees, the slope, a mission wall with a yardlight shining down it. I would hear a bird slice down through the thick air. A small round animal tumbled into its burrow just ahead of my foot. I was in the sheep pasture. The old lame ewe was outside it. Tom was somewhere smoking a cigarette out of sight in the mist. I was looking at the simple field with love and wonder. It was as if pushing on my heart. I knew that was all I was going to have of country, now there'd be dark and Tom's choice of dinner and Tom's voice that cannot say you, and roads again. We had driven on through exquisite things I couldn't look at, a moment of open ivory on a farm, weeds individual above the road bank in the nearest few feet of the cloud of light. Is there more I want to say about that? Two sights of his face: disarmed looking ahead next to me, a man without a trace of boy, a senator's look, a look of state, something solid and complex I can't describe further. And then the look of his eyes across the table - strange eyes, stranger eyes that I feel I haven't seen because they are so sore my look would hurt them. I am in company with him in a careful generous exploratory spirit - what is a man my age, I'm asking. Incredulous at what I find - that insistence, that defining insistence on a leadership he cannot begin to earn. What it amounts to is that he bears himself in ways that demand I give him the illusion of it. I'm going along with it cautiously. Here's a person so frightened, so encultured that he can only enjoy the names of things. 'Kids on Hallowe'en,' 'a real old mom and pop place.' The fog's presence was less than the mountain's absence. The wincing in his eyes is his not wanting to see. His mom died when he was sixteen. "Maybe ten vague memories." There's no one left in his family but him, and Mathew who's in Iowa in a more competent man's family. "I love booze." "That must mean it's worth more than the things you've lost on account of it." "It is." The golden light, the bars. Men together. And the daily work to make up a philosophy in which this laying-waste of time is alright, is admirable. "You give people at the desk a good welcome." Yes he takes care of the hotel's collection of the disconnected. He does that. I was trying to remember Eric's category for men like him, the Army of Men. Is the hope for a woman in a red dress who'll lay it on him so remote he doesn't feel it when he looks at me? When he said what he said about booze, that woman in me turned away. That settles it, she said. There was silence in the car. I was saying to Joyce, I understand now. People like us can't be fixed. It is something else we can do - minimize the unreality that comes of believing we can, we will. 2nd A beautiful man, brown, dressed in faded black, has been lying on the sidewalk trying to put a condom on his unhard penis. His eyes are showing a lot of white. He is a small lovely body. A white policewoman, tall blond with plucked eyebrows and a tight uniform, arrives. "Turn around with your hands behind your back." She is walking along the street with him, strolling toward jail, with her left hand loosely draped over his two hands cuffed behind his back. It's Thursday morning. There is sun on the street again. The woman standing on the sidewalk is maybe my age, trim, a bundle of little braids sprung off the back of her head, a pushed-forward pushy mouth. A guy in very neat clothes, an important little Latino, has been standing next to his car staring this way. She yells at him, "What are you doing? What are you doing? That's harassment you know." When she's gone he comes complaining. "Nobody talked to me like that." "You were staring at her," I say. "I wasn't staring at her. She's ugly. I wouldn't talk to a woman like that." Later in the day this street has many more of the other kind of people in it, Horton's shoppers. I sat for an hour last night waiting for a parking spot. Groups of people going either way, two, three, complacent, too meaty, dressed and shaped and moving in ways that say they've killed their senses. It is hell where they are. I watched the man whose parking space I was waiting for make trips out of the hotel to load his car. He was a fat man in his sixties who walked toes-out with his legs wide apart. He waddled. He waddled staggering as if there were a huge wet diaper between his legs. He had on a polo shirt and polyester pants a bit too short. White hair damp from the shower. He brought down load after load, but at intervals that suggested organizing labour and maybe a cigarette in one of the street-side rooms upstairs. Would have had to be a room big enough for all those hangers of clothes. I watch him in the mirror carefully stowing objects in the trunk, back seat, passenger seat. I know that stowing work. He's packing his burro, getting ready to drive back to Florida. He's some kind of salesman, the bottom layer in the back seat is small white boxes. All those hangers of clothes suggest he has a social life, takes widows to dinner or tries for young men he doesn't have to pay. I had come from a day at school, the magnetic ordeal of the library, the freeway home. I just sat. I was ready to just sit. It was plain night, night in hell, night in a purely miscellaneous city, miscellaneous night outside hell's guesthouse where if I looked sideways I could see Tom in his work clothes, grandfather clothes, tie, white shirt and grey sleeveless pullover, behind the desk's barricade, feeling my eyes without seeing them, turning to look back. It was raining yesterday morning. I emerged onto the freeway where every car was surrounded by a spitting cloud of white spray that moved with it and in which its two red taillights were almost the whole weight of danger shooting forward in ranks between dotted white lines. It was a muffled dreamy scene so automated I had to push myself to remember to take care. Oh poor people, poor wrongly made things, so many of you, each gone wrong in so visible and individual a way. There's a tree across the street that's like a tree in Giotto, bitty small leaves light green and dark green, a small tree lit in bits and shaded in bits, little and mythical. I'm feeling a kind of immensity of creative freedom. Look, there, across the street, the way a white curtain is hanging in purple folds inside the geometry of a double window, a classical sight to go with the classical tree. It is as if when I say hell I am saying heaven, not because these millions of wrong people are alright as they are - they are not - but because one touch of a bare sheep field - at that moment Charles McDaniel presents himself. "You still here? You some kind of a writer? What you writin' about? I love people. I'm a heart man - everything." A very clean light green teeshirt and gold-rimmed glasses. The way Paul Churchland yesterday sat down and rested when a girl with a quiet voice and large breasts asked a question that supported him. She grew bolder and told something she knew. He went on resting, encouraging her. At that the other young woman in the room said something too. The young men had looks on their faces - and I did too - that said, How did she do that? They don't love you in ways you want them to, they love you in ways they can. - The phone rang. Tom was offering me a broken hummingbird. "Look how beautiful" said the brightfaced old guy who found him - they called it him - stunned on the sidewalk. It is passed into my hand. It is not very beautiful. A day-glow orange on its head and day-glow green on its back. Its little body is seized by a deep slow spasm - "Did you feel it?" I say and pass it into Tom's hand, which I am looking at as I transact what we both are noticing is a touch. He calls Fred to look. Fred looks dubious. It is as if we are fraudulently involving other people in a pretext. Tom wanted to see me. He wanted to put some part of his spirit into my hands. I wanted to accept. Beyond that there was a bird either stunned or dying in my hand, with its neck pulled back so its beak was pointing up. I'm carrying it around in the lobby like a kid. It struggles weakly. I take it outside to the petunia box under the hotel marquee. There is a tiny vibration against my palm. I do not realize it until later but I think that is when it died. I know this is a dishonorable story. I am allowing myself to be enlisted. By someone's pain, it says. It was dishonorable but there was an honorable core. Not generosity but survival. It has to do with power? Opportunism. You mean there were times? Yes, when it was necessary to draw strangers. Take the anguish. That's how to complete it. The way men - the way he, downstairs - takes for granted I'll want to hear him talk about himself - and the way it does not occur to him to imagine me or ask about me - the way he is complacently promising to show me writing and photographs - the way nothing occurs to him to ask - the way even having seen my quality he is satisfied to have my intelligence when we are in company do nothing but serve him - makes him and all the other men I meet here seem morally subnormal. Split-brained. Boys aren't like that. A fourteen year old can look at someone with eyes that can say you. I'm remembering the way Jean said men like to explain their ideas and have you respond to them. I feel familiar incredulity at that. How could anyone get used to it. What could make it worth doing. 4th Did you not know, then, that joy is, in reality, a terror whose outcome we don't fear? We go through terror from beginning to end, and that precisely is joy. A terror in which you have confidence. [Rilke Selected works I, prose translation Houston] Walking around very physically - buoyed - a feeling in the corridors of wanting to turn cartwheels - singing at the desk on the landing where I work with the lobby on either side, television sounds, strangers passing up or down the stairs. It is like a sexual impatience - come and get me. I like feeling myself light in my clothes. I feel like the queen of the hotel coming downstairs with my neck long and my tits as far forward as they'll go. And then at the desk I feel how smart I am. What's gone to my head? The sort of field of men it is? 5th Dear journal - I am going away from you for a while. [two-week break when I don't write] - - - - 17th Friday [summary of bookwork up to here: If you're honest and courageous about childhood exclusion you will understand generosity. You will understand it because you understand rescue. You will be able to share pain. By domination your father set up a structure in your brain that makes you ill. Do the work to support slow growth of truth. The wings of desire are the wings of contradiction. Where there aren't opposites there are no wings. Strong desire makes strong wings. See how you have built the closed woman who is the structure of your being alone. Confidence and then a brush-off. Then I stop looking at that spot. You feel it as revenge but if you are brushed off there is no revenge. Competition belongs to revenge. You think if you win you will undo the brush-off. Undoing the brushoff would be restoring confidence. That is what is impossible. The weak are that because they haven't seen confidence can't be restored, they are denying damage. You must feel your real damage. You are damaged in your confidence, in your relation to people. You are damaged in your art. You want to preserve a hope. You do not publish because you do not want to know. Your hope is that the woman in you is not damaged. Fight. Decide to be perfect as a damaged woman. Decide to act to come through. There is help if you see you are bound. You are looking for a man who will teach your father. The crux is a child afraid for her life. Beside her a woman who thinks sex will save her, beside her a woman who thinks she can't get sex and is depressed. It is betrayal that activates the sequence. Ask to be in a perfect state - ask every day. Becoming responsible in loss is slow work. Early love is winning through by means of conflict and struggle. A struggle to feel that you've wiped your mother out of your brain. If you felt her you'd feel what good fortune is like. The little girl is furious with her mother, so she doesn't think about her. That leaves the men. When men fail it's a failure of defense against the mother. Your work is to find the mother. Remove the men and she is there. She is there in the form of missing, missing and refusing to miss. It cancels. You need to win acknowledgment of appeal. He needs to win acknowledgment of competence. The child needs to be what it isn't yet: the structure remains. You kill your allies. You need exclusion because you are exclusion. You kill the conflict between exclusion and adventure by saying exclusion is adventure. The opposite of exclusion is completeness. Adventure is responsibility. You're avoiding happiness. You think that to be happy you have to be alone. You have only been happy alone, because of the inner effort to prove he is wrong. Depression is in that way a relief. Do something to relax your compulsion to share. There is a relation between needing to prove and needing to share. Write in ways that don't try to prove you're attractive and don't try to share your time. Write about your childhood. Write about how you've gone on missing. Recover what's unconscious. Recover early love. 18 A Saturday morning in the light well. He said the light in winter is a talc. We were walking west on G. I was holding my palms to the light the way I sometimes do on that street. He can say you and he can say I. His male I isn't broken. His idea of a good movie for us to be is Moonstruck. I approve of that. He noticed I was being gentle with him. He'll never stop smoking and drinking, nor should. "People on the edge of the picture" he was saying of hotel people we saw on the street. "But you are strolling straight down the middle of the picture," I say, "the way you stroll, like an American in Paris." He told me what was on the track. I said style is a trap, anything you have to go on insisting you are. He wouldn't hear it. But his style isn't big enough for the thick-necked man I have sometimes seen ruminating next to me. Whose poems are heavy things. She was a lifeguard at the Y. She was twenty-two. "I spun her around. She spun me around too." He was twenty-seven, they got married from one moment to the next. They had been living together for a year and a half. After the ceremony they went and played the slots. He put in a silver dollar and got twenty-five. Rebecca kept them. They were happy for a long time. They lived in a little trailer park. They broke up after nearly sixteen years. He was sixteen when his mom died. He hasn't noticed that. Her labour was an hour and a half. She said it didn't hurt. Mathew was eight pounds. He cut the cord. He was in his mid-thirties, had editing jobs, was pulling down forty-eight thousand a year. Company car. They bought a condo. He turned the Ramona paper around. One thing after another. A new owner on the paper, he couldn't get along with him. He was fooling around. When she found out is when she pressed the eject button. He lost another job. Unemployed in Santa Cruz. Rebecca was back in San Diego with Mathew. He moved back and got jobs and did the dad thing. But then Rebecca said she wanted to go back to Iowa, she'd had it with southern California. She wanted to remarry. Her sister lent her the money. It knocked him back. He went to live in Mexico. He was there five years. He didn't see his dad sometimes for years. Once they were rolling around on the floor. "Who're your favorite writers," his dad said. "Mailer, Agee, Durrell." "They're fucking shit." "What do you want to do?" "I want to be a writer." "You're no fucking writer." When he and Rebecca were living in Encinitas his dad lived with them for a year and a half. He sat in his room smoking. That was hard on Rebecca. He died last year in a nursing home. He died like a man. How is that? Not complaining. He'd been a painter. Went to Paris when he was seventeen. Tom's mom went over to join him. They were together from the time she was sixteen. They didn't have children, then Tom was born when she was forty. She died at fifty-six, congestive heart failure. They'd lived in MB in a white plaster house on the beach. He was sent to a Catholic boy's school. Popular. Two soc. clubs. Surfer. Twist, frug, hitchhiker. Read a lot, Chekov, Dostoevsky, Gogol. Went to college in LA. Got drafted. Enlisted. Basic training in the desert. Early mornings waking in a tent. It was quiet. Wasn't sent to Vietnam. Quiet tour in Okinawa. Dropped in and out of journalism. Fought some battles. Wanted to be a hero. Carried around those bedroom eyes. For years all he saw was pussy on legs. He was cutting edge for a long time (did he say sixteen years?). What does that mean? That he kept up with music. There's a notion of significant style I don't have, though thought of in relation to Moonstruck and the twist I can see it. Something about refusing self pity which it's true is horrible in for instance David - his shelves of potions and careful eating. Alright - there's something to this guy. I'm giving him writing. He says strength of character and delicacy. He says "You're an exquisite woman. You're the most exquisite woman I've ever met." His smile is hard to look at. As if it is broken. 19 The harbour was white. The sun a white round thing. We were at the end of the jetty waiting for the Coronado ferry. I was seeing the way the water was moving everywhere and all over as if it were standing sparkles in the brain. Toward the end of his shift they'd found a guy who committed suicide in the hotel. He checked in for that purpose. Pictures of his kids set out on the bureau, his stuff bundled, a note. It looked at first as if he had shot himself, because there was blood on the walls, but he had taken poison. When I came down at four Dave the night clerk was explaining to someone how to get out of the elevator if it gets stuck. I was halfway down the stairs. Tom was standing beyond Dave in the lobby. Dave's eyes drew a distinct line from me to Tom. Dave looks like a fat old baby. He was there with a strip of fat showing between his teeshirt and his belt. That eye line was elegantly drawn. Tom is in a community of love with these men of the hotel. When we got home to the lobby there was Vince at the coffee machine. "Where'd you go?" We're looking at each other. Other people converge, Carl, the old woman. I want to say, Tom how can you not be writing this place? How can you not be coming to your room at night hungering to say it? How can you not want to stretch your skill to be equal to it? I know you are stretching your skill to be equal to the place itself. Maybe it's you who are the love in the lobby, the responsible gentleness. Maybe you support it in these others, Vince, Fred, Davie, Frank. Something to deal with quickly. Here is something both right and wrong that I have to sort. I stare at Tom. He squirms and twitches. "You hate being told you're beautiful because you were considered good-looking all your life and you got away with things you shouldn't have on account of it." "Yeah." Then I'm angry. I'm doing like all the fools. "You're not beautiful like that any more, you're beautiful in a different way" I say. "I know how I look" he says. But what are the facts. It's not exactly true that he isn't beautiful like that any more - his eyes hurt, his smile is broken, he has flab all over his torso, I've been scared to look at his penis. He has to sleep with his legs up for the rest of his life. But still the very most important fact about him, to me, is that he's an acceptable man, he's tall enough, he walks well, he has beautiful hands, he looks like a man. He looks like a man who was a beautiful man. That thrills me about him - being beside a man. Some part of that has to stop. There are other ways he's beautiful, though: with his glasses on staring into the white light of the juke box. The heavy head he gets when he's pondering next to me. And even the sort of beauty he has on the street - has for me, I don't see anyone else noticing - is something to do with heart and presence. There's something else he wants to be adored for. He instructs me in his accomplishments. We are at odds there - I only care about his accomplishments because they have been his ways of staying in life as the man I see he still is. What's the solution. Understand him. Don't dote. Earn it by feeling him. Remember your discipline. Do your own work, both kinds. 20th
23rd American Thanksgiving. We went out after his shift and found a coffee house with an armchair we could curl up in. They played us fifties music, the one-hit bands. Tom knew them as they came up. It was midnight, an oasis. High-ceilinged storefront with old sofas. A young crowd. Quiet. Two kids playing cards. The right lighting. We were where we could see into the room and onto the street. Two pittisporum trees with firm round heads. Groups passing. An Italian girl and boy playing pool beside us. The beautiful young. A calm glow in everyone, it seemed. We hung till it closed at two, wrapped together. Tom was talking about AA. "My sponsor said, You're on a snowy slope and there is a snowball rolling behind you. The longer you run the bigger it will get. You have to stop and let it hit you. I stopped and let it hit me." His dad the rager, Vic who was a pressman. "A powerful guy," I say. "I'm a powerful guy too," says Tom. We spent his day off in his room, twelve hours on his bed listening to tapes. He got it into me and came, an event more significant than sexual. Had his finger in me moving it little enough to get my attention. I'm being careful what I say about him - the balance to go for is not lying about what's dubious and not building a platform in opposition. I couldn't be happier. Maybe I could have more reason to be happy: I'll keep my honour about that. I think I have fallen into good arms. He is unreserved, he's just about fearless. He has plunged and burned and sinned and repented. His crashes seem to me to do him credit. He's street smart, he's cool on the ground. What I have to take account of is how young he is in high culture, how much younger than I am. His poems at seventeen were skilled but just about as false as mine at thirteen. By the time I was fourteen I was writing real. He still is not writing real, he has a notion of high that has not met low, his high culture is isolated, uninformed, unworked, pretentious, stiff, laboured, and I want to say primitive. He actually used the word 'ebon' in a poem. The question is why. The answer is his mother died. Oh honey that's it. No, it says, this is where you're tempted to cook the books. The answer is he isn't as smart as you. He used to be but he's taken the edge off. Out of impatience, not knowing how to live with it, wanting to fit in. Popularity is his weakness. You are always going to have to pull your punches about his writing. "I'll tell you what it is about electric guitar" he says. (I asked.) "All those amps. Unlimited intensity right through the body. You see the guy moving onstage and you know he's feeling that." Beatles Anthology on the lobby TV. Tom's on the desk and has charge of the remote. There's this tall fifty year old notching up the volume, blasting the lobby like it or not. And here Charles McDaniel appears. Admires himself in the window as he reels me his line. "Could you love and respect an old black man like me? 'Telligent, traveled a lot?" "Leave the girls alone," Joe mutters, strolling past. "Hey Joe, how you doin'. You know him? Ex-boxer?" A man in a wheelchair comes along, not a fat man but a man with a deep sack of fat under his chin. "Can I give you a chuckle? Why was the snake disheartened? He didn't have a pit to hiss in." He tells me a story. This happened in backcountry Tennessee. He had a lot to do with church work at the time, singing in choirs. There was a young man, a Vietnam vet, who approached him one day. He had spiritual problems and thought he saw something in Bob. Bob said, "I don't know much about the Bible but let's just kneel down and say the Lord's Prayer together and I'll take it from there." So they kneeled down, each beside his chair. They said the Lord's Prayer together. Then Bob said, "O Lord if it is possible could you give us some sign of your presence?" He was suddenly filled with an amazing sensation. Men have sensation in sex and women can have it all the time, but this was more than that. It was like water, water flowing. It went on for a couple of minutes, very pleasurable. Afterwards he asked the other man whether he'd felt anything. He said he was overwhelmed. "Family dinner." Us two at his corner table in the Moon Café. (Turkey dinner, with pie, $4.15.) I saw him feel that. After, we went and necked in Horton Plaza which had sun, a breeze in the palm trees' grassy skirts, and no one there. Last episode of the Beatles Anthology. He asks me to see him by seeing what he loves. "You'll love this," he says. Sometimes I do and sometimes I absolutely don't. I asked why men don't ask women questions. He thought carefully. "In the best case, if he's attracted to her, he thinks she's everything he wants." "Oh. He doesn't ask questions because he thinks he already knows everything." "Something like that." "My intentions are pure," he says solemnly. The way he is solemn when he decides to speak. The most blurted thing he said - the only thing he's said that squirted out of that solemn lonely face he gets if he lets himself stare back - was "You are the most ... exquisitely ... beautiful ... woman." I feel I shouldn't write that. I feel I shouldn't write anything about this time and him, as if it indicates lack of trust, and lack of trust will cost. But I want to say - as if simply - I am amazingly happy. I'm overjoyed. It is a time that's complete. I am welcome and welcoming in it. I could see what it is for him about the Beatles. They released manhood, they did it together, they did it in public, they won at it, they did it with such clean intent that they won a long way through. And when they married they did that with the same willingness. Sweet men the world opened up for. 25th Saw an edge of the Anza Borrego. A tense day. I'd been working before we left and was not in love. Coming home, I took the keys back at Ramona. Cut through an old spiel with a question. He went so deep into telling about his mom that we found ourselves lost at the end of some road. "My mom was pure Irish." The summer before his senior year she had her third collapse. His father came out of the hospital room crying. He went in and she was dead. Her face was blue and yellow. Her eyes were open, her tongue was kind of ... out. He'd said a thousand hail Mary's and that was when he lost his faith. "My mom and I were tight. She was the one who taught me to play chess." "What did she look like?" "She looked like an old woman. Her hair was silver." "What we'd do is, my dad would go to work at ten and when he'd gone I'd get up and my mom and I would watch TV, all the old shows, the Andy Griffith show, early Johnny Carson. We'd play hearts. She taught me all the card games there are, except poker." In my bed tonight he said "I'm desperate today." I said I'd make a deal. When it's his turn he can do anything he wants, as fast as he wants. That was for me. I want it uncut. "Do you like me? If you do, how much? Do you want to go for broke and kick in the slats?" I said I would let the dust settle. This morning dressed up to do the laundry I stopped at the cage and asked for paper. Wrote him a note. I had talked to my book and thought it was a proposal in right terms. Stories in the arroyo. "What's this scar?" Above his eyebrow. Bar-room brawls. Getting jumped by three chollos coming off the flood control bridge in TJ. "Motherfucker I'm gonna kick your ass." "Fuck you, motherfucker!" "Fuck you!" "When you've traded that back and forth for a while you have to ..." "Wade in?" "... wade in, or it gets ..." "Embarrassing?" "If I pick a fight I can't win it. I don't have the moral confidence." When we were talking about his mom on the freeway the headlights suddenly went off. I braked. He was so far away he didn't notice. "My lights are gone" I say. "Don't brake. You should never brake on the freeway." "But what should I do?" "Keep driving, stay in your lane, keep up your speed." I'm dubious but I do it. The lights come back on. They go off again. He's wanting to go on talking about his mom. "This is really scary" I say. "There's lots of light" he says. "I know I can see but I feel like I'm invisible." "They can see you, they've got headlights." Etc. What happened is that we went into instant teamwork. We have our own positions fully understood: I'm driving and I need both to be directed in something I don't know, and to process my fear. I do my part, which is to report swiftly and exactly. He does his part, which is to direct and calm. The light comes on again. Goes off again. Steady sixty miles an hour in the through lane. Half a mile later it comes on and stays on the rest of the way into town. Naked he's big, he's flabby, grizzled. We sleep well. There are many things he does I have to take as foreplay. What I loved was when I was touching myself and he was moving his hot hand over me. The most annoying thing he did was get his big palm where it was cramping what I was doing. I'd give it a push but he wouldn't get out of the way. Then he got under and around and ate me all over, a big soft busy wet doing I don't know how to take. I had the feeling of being behind my times. I haven't realized yet that I can slow down and get it right. Do what I do alone, say to myself 'chocolate pudding' or anything else that works. That inner motion of pulling it to center. 26th Sunday "Crying out in the darkness for a mind." 27th "Oh mind where are you - over here, mind." His heaviness was annoying me. That was coming home on 4th in the golden fog with ice creams. In our cuddle throne in the Gas Haus he was needing to know again, "What do you think of me?" I credit him for asking but I wasn't in love at that moment. I started somewhere and got into it. I said things I've said here. I was as if speaking for someone else. "You're a true guy. I adore you." He seemed overwhelmed, pushed his forehead hard against my temple, held it here for minutes. "I said the right thing, I gather." He wouldn't lighten. He doesn't have that ability to float up. What is it about his face. It's as if it's plated. He can be happy but his face doesn't shine out, it's as if his feeling is dammed behind it and that's his heaviness. I have been teaching him to look back at me, and his face when he is looking is hard to see. His eyes wince. What is that? I'd guess it's his mom. But then there's a brawler's life - how many times has he been punched in the face. "I'm your man" he says. I'm your man to rescue. I am going to register this: he needs to think of himself as looking after me but he doesn't look after me. He gets into some thought and lets me trail behind him through a crowd of thugs in the street. This is the Queen of Swords speaking - work woman who is slicing through Dennett and Churchland to try to see what's under their difference. When I was working yesterday there'd go on being love woman's thoughts about her him. I thought to speak to her - I said, I love you, I promise I'll come back to your life, we'll have the life you need, I'll help you. I have to do this work now. Will you help me do it? You can stay beside me the way Yoko stayed next to John. A wide sigh. She agreed. I felt I was holding her. Gold love shining in my chest and through it. 29
I wrote that out early this morning, a long time ago. [Lyle Lovett] The new music I'm in, taking in. Listening for his words in the songs on his tape - Nothing will harm you, nothing will stand in your way - What is the common texture they have - do they? - I don't want to talk about love now ... Can't you hear the voice in my heart, It's always been a quiet voice ... I could not be any closer to you, no 30th "Two smart brave people." Who didn't have much presence of mind. Oh the thumping around and poking. Confused. Is this it - that he got scared off being too true and thought he'd better be loving, which gives it a feeling of trying? When he gets in he whispers "I love you Ellie. I love you." What's this, I'm thinking, what can this mean? Oh I'm in a mood to talk about his wink-twitch, the hard routine chopping gesture he makes with his left hand, the hideously lazy and robotic way he slots yadda-yadda-yadda into a sentence. What other signs of his worst. The way he slings me around in bed, doesn't settle and concentrate. The way he is always needing to smoke. The way his head against the window at night is an old man's, joined chin to chest in a straight line. An old man-woman, like Golda Meir. Is this the work of undeluding love woman? No - the opposite. Undeluded she takes love as work. She does not fall in with his or any intention. And then love floods where truth has cut. That's the way it is. If there is no flood of love a cut has been missed. She will grieve he isn't better, but she'll grieve it for him, because he wanted to be. The question is - and here I must be that with her - Oh honey, why are you wanting to want him better - younger, clearer, truer, smarter? There's a question of being seen with, you want to have arrived at being a certified woman, who can get a man men respect and women envy. You haven't had that. If there's justice you'll never have it till you don't need it: who says that? Justice doesn't enter into it. Track it. Something else - here the heart opens in a little bleat - if he were - this is her talking - if he weren't in these ways not okay - and is he or isn't he? - then I'd stay in love, I'd flow without having to hoke it up. I'd coincide, love and judgment. Joyce wants to reserve that word but I'll accept it. It's your word. Love with judgment. Call it something else. Responsibility. That word that wants to make me cry. Here's an argument - look at the people I've escaped, if what you say is true it doesn't matter who. Louie, Rob, Jim, David, write them off. Jam. All of these people wouldn't budge, they'd got as far as they were willing to go, I'd have been stuck with them in their limit. Keep moving and there'll always be a burst of freedom before we stall, a burst of joy. And then this sadness when judgment says to love, oh honey you are dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Love says - I'm the animal that saves your life. Judgment says - I'm the animal who makes your living. Tom says, intelligence that's beautiful. Beauty that's intelligent, Tom - more of that, or I'll be ashamed. I am today. I'm crying with shame. It's chemical, isn't it, the day after bad sex.
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