| the golden west volume 4 part 1 - 1995-96 november-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego, Golden West Hotel, 11th November 1995 What's the beauty of neural photos - they are air earth fire water plant animal in one tissue - they are space and shape, veils, indicated unreal positions, flower fields, creatures reaching their arms - threads of sound, sounds spun and stretched - gold wires, bits of gold wire growing - flecks such as there are in silty water. By these means I am, this is where I am immersed and the same - a weave, a net - a sand, a silt, a mist - a drift, a sift, a seep. 2nd December "I will protect you from harm. I will protect you from insult. Those are the social protections. In the personal I will protect you from head trips, and I will protect you from ...." A conversation he began on the beach. I was in rebellion and would not begin it myself. "You're still safe aren't you" he said. He laid out what I might be thinking. I said it was not so much thinking as having crashed in bad sex and being in a weak hopeless state. Cystitis, a kidney infection. I talked about sex. I said I'd been impotent all my life and want to make an honest woman of myself. He said - we were lying on the sand with our faces near each other - after a while - You haven't ever told any other guy these things, have you. He said that confident of himself in a way I liked. Last night we were back in my room lying holding each other. I said I have not been willing to be in public in a bathing suit for many years. When I was young I would do it because it was a point of honour with me, but lately I've thought it's too much aggro, I've refused. The last time I was in the ocean I went in in all my clothes. I wasn't willing to be in a bathing suit with the people I was with.
"I'm strong. I'm dependable. I'm loyal." [T] "Here's the other way it can go. I'm willing to move to Vancouver. I wouldn't come until spring. I'd want to get things cleared away here. You're living in a place you've been in twenty years. I'd have to get my own place. There must be hotels in Vancouver. It's never been that I go into a city and can't find my way." I say there are already writers in Vancouver. "Not as good as me," he says. "Better," I say. No more subsidy. If it's for long not for short I can't afford it. "I think we're in the fortunate position that it isn't going to work unless it's true." [E] I was refusing. I had my foot to the floor. I put on my bathing suit with my jeans over it. I lay down. No. Took off my jeans and walked across the wide beach to the water. Stood there. A seagull stood looking at me. I walked up to where the thin edge of the water ran in past my ankles. Watched it running back moving sand with it. The grains rushing. A moment just before it stops when the rush of the whole field of grain away is overpowering. Dizzying. Watch the whole cycle again. Cold froth, the rush away, two grey plumes from my feet, the last moment of complete instability, and then the streaks black and tan lain newly sorted. He has come up behind me. If I'm going in he wants to come with me, he says. He's telling me what to do. I'm not going to do it. I was going in probably but in my own time. Now I'm driven in by not being driven in. No, not quite that. Pushing back at him is supporting me into going in faster. I see the challenge of the waves. The ocean keeps coming at me with new shapes of force. The water's warmer. I get past the break line for the farthest rank of waves, deep enough so there's a green swell that lifts me and sets me down - that was my favorite of its motions, the smooth wide strong gentle glass-green lift. Further out there is sometimes a really large wave I have to watch and judge. Go under, he says. I was going to anyway, so I do. That one was going to break on me. Midway there was a moment when he grabbed me. He had something in mind. I fought. Don't freak out he said. I'm not freaking out I'm rebelling. Don't rebel, I was going to do something really nice, I wanted to cradle your head and lift you and ... We come out together and then we talk. There have been guys walking around without suits so we take ours off. On the way home I ask to see where he grew up. Mission Beach. The little condo where the house was. We sat on the wall. There's the jetty. North Jetty Raiders, "an affront to common decency." Over the line. The day there was a tsunami warning and he and his mom went up Mount Soledad and waited. He was proud she wouldn't take anything from the house. The bar where he had his first legal drink. They'd wear white jeans and two teeshirts, jeans and wingtips. When he was in Okinawa he was homesick. When he woke to go back to his room I was dreaming he was hard and I was pulling his hand. We were in this room. "I'm much smarter than I seem. I'm intuitive." "I'll never do anything to make you ashamed of me. I'll do some things to make you proud of me." Throwing grapes into the air trying to get the gulls to wheel. There was the boy, the first time I've seen him. Long legs and narrow shoulders, the line of his throw up from his left foot through his fine-cut right wrist and hand. This has been note-making. I've done it against the sense that I shouldn't. What's wrong with it. I wouldn't like him to see it. Why wouldn't I? It would be like people's journals I've seen. What's unwholesome about reporting what I already know? I'm writing what comes back, what's still there. Lying down holding him on my bed. He feels so good. I see a wave. He's hungry. I sit with him in his hamburger place. There is a Kino monitor with numbers being drawn. He buys a card, bets his numbers: 4, 11, 19, 30, "me, Mathew, and my dad," all born in April. I hate the way he and other people are sitting gaping at an ugly screen hoping for fifty dollars. He is betting on his line and that is touching, but the look on all these faces is horrible. I say what I think. 3rd Two thirty in the morning. We'd come in from a movie. He'd been silent the way he gets. It's as if I have to tap him. Then he pours. We were there with his music and the cockroach poison smell, under his sheets. A candle. I was going to go home to my room but I wanted him, I'd got there. I was safe. I started to tell him and then told more. I can't get enough of your smell. I can't get enough of the heat in your hands. I can't get enough of having my arms around you. I can't get enough of looking at your hands. My breasts adore you. My pussy adores you. - When I said that he something-like gasped. I got my wish. He climbed into me. He kept saying I love you with every slow stroke. I was shocked and then I took it as true and right. I'm your man, he says. Will you promise to fuck me every day? I say. We were over the line into pillow trust. Perfect. Slow fucking and murmuring. We fell asleep in each other's arms the way we do - we drop straight out and we are gone for two hours. He wakes and turns. Then I'm awake and go home. I woke still in that deep trust, still talking. I wanted to talk to his penis. I loved you from the moment you first showed up at the desk, he says, "a magnificent animal with regal beauty." "I loved last night seeing you come out of your shell." I'm accepting, I say. I want you. I'll have you. That on the bench up at the top of 5th Ave today before he went to work. "I feel I'm diving into you. And it's clean." I am saying across the year to Ken, Everything wrong with you is that you don't let yourself love the way this man does. Here is a note: how antsy my friend was when I asked about his dad - how afraid of something whose face he doesn't want to see. And with that evasion something about work, a loss of faith in his best hope for work. Now he's saying anything will do. 4th Flickering cluster - theory of water - unstable dynamic random substrate of oxygen and hydrogen atoms whose bonds form and unform. Orgasm is in the brain - not cortex, limbic, septum spread to amygdala and thalamic nuclei, spikes and slow waves of high amplitude and rapid oscillations, resemble epileptic waves. Releases oxytocin by pituitary into bloodstream.
He is broken-hearted. Imagine him mended. Find his loss. - July and August 1963 [Tom's poems from 16]
- A kind of sorrow I don't know how to touch - a face so abashed - oh - And how's Ellie There's my hard balance I could take. My cunt aches, not getting there. He started it and couldn't get hard. Also the way he doesn't talk. I pry and then I get something so heavy I don't know how to take it. A man very satisfying to hold. He doesn't know how to talk. "You are the only person who has ever listened to me." I asked a question about football to send him back to his own ground, I so much didn't know what to do with him at that moment. Paul felt crumpled up and lonely. His mother had really supported his life. He had loved her; they two had, in fact, faced the world together. Now she was gone, and forever behind him was the gap in life, the tear in the veil, through which his life seemed to drift slowly, as if he were drawn towards death. He wanted someone of their own free initiative to help him. The lesser things he began to let go from him, for fear of this big thing, the lapse toward death, following in the wake of his beloved. Clara could not stand for him to hold on it. She wanted him, but not to understand him. He felt she wanted the man on top, not the real him that was in trouble. That would be too much trouble to her; he dared not give it to her. She could not cope with him. It made him ashamed so, secretly ashamed that he was in such a mess, because his own hold on life was so unsure, because nobody held him, feeling unsubstantial, shadowy, as if he did not count for much in this concrete world. He drew himself together smaller and smaller. He did not want to die, he would not give in. But he was not afraid of death. If nobody would help, he would go on alone. Little stars shone high up; little stars spread far away in the floodwaters, a firmament below. Everywhere the vastness and terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no Time, only Space. Who could say his mother had lived and did not live? Now she was gone abroad into the night, and he was with her still. She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her. [from Sons and lovers] When we drove back from the Anza Borrego, the new moon with its dark zone bright-lit. He was driving the tight turns up the mountain looking along his shoulder at it. "I know I can make you happy." The other night he'd been kissing my right foot and had his head next to it. I put my head there alongside his to talk with him. - What should I be looking at. What's the loyalty that's beginning to make me watch my words. I don't want to say anything cold about him and yet I know I'm being told what I want to hear. I'm working to prop his image. I seem to have something to lose. I'm in a fog about what I might be giving myself into - I imagine T and R seeing him at my house - seeing how defeated his eyes are, just that - seeing what I settle for. When the childish wonder has passed for both of us, the separate lives we'd have again. He'd watch football smoke two packs a day have tapes piled everywhere drink coffee, work at something that stuns him. The worst would be if he was in Vancouver and wrote bad stuff. If we were fucking in the way that makes the woman proud, it would be okay. If we went on breaking through emotionally it would be okay. But for friend's talk and household life I don't see how it could be okay, and those lacks unless we do something unusual will empty the goods there are. "I want you to give me everything you've got. I can handle it." Is he giving up too much, is he brave or is he desperate. Am I a ladder out of the crash. The reversal of fortune. Is that why he's kissing a deformed foot and not getting it up. What quality of my own should I be fighting for. Am I giving up too much. 5th The paper. What's my frame for it - a picture - very general - of what thinking is. They are doing it wrong and I am doing it right. I'm using their wrong ways to study them as systems, and so to study systems. I need to write those findings as well. I am doing philosophy as it isn't done. I'm going to go ever further. I'm going to talk about metaphor and texture. I'm going to lose Phil but Colin is going to be able to follow. I'm going to get more complicated, a field that is forming in a lot of places. How are you going to handle that? It is a very specifically designed life. Here are the parts. A philosophy of how to talk about imagining. Choose its friends. It generalizes to how to talk about what art is and is for. It generalizes to making images. You will have to put a root into your very best to keep steady. It will generalize into teaching. I'll make the context I can speak in. It is a life with weeks of stress that crack me - 6th It's full moon today. I'm wondering whether I've blown it. I'll say this carefully. My way is to say I've blown it and it had to be blown, and at the same time feel maybe it'll come through, maybe it'll shift us one down into a wider field. There is this: I don't see how he'll trust me with his open heart again, and if he doesn't, we're done. He knows my risk was in a spirit of wanting to trust more. I didn't intend to do it but when I began I went on. But I started it yesterday. This is how it's going to be with my work. Can you thrive with that? Think about it. That was on the trolley. Second moment at a table in TJ, rainbow blankets on the tables: I showed him my full freakout about not being desired as a woman. Praying in the cathedral. Third, in the park where a flock of pigeons would suddenly burst upward, I caught him in an idiotic lie and called it. I said if he ever lied to me like he did to Rebecca I would find creative revenge. Fourth, in a taco house a couple of steps down from the street, watching people pass, I said Tijuana is hell. Did I shock you? Yes. Where he sees triumph of the human spirit I see a hell of corruption and insufficiency. We were sitting facing the same way. Tell me what you see, I said. There's one, he said. Two. Three. A tough man. A bad man. A bad man. A bad woman and a weak man. A very bad woman (the couple comes down into the taco house), an okay man, he revises, seeing him smile. What was interesting was that when he counted the survivors and I struggled to see which he was choosing out of the crowd, I began to see his way, I saw survivors. Fifth, at the trolley depot in the dark I said, I find the way you use the word evil very naïve. He had been talking about the men in the zona roja who are wiped out with drink. "Pure shadow," I said. He agreed fast and then I saw him trip when he realized I mean Jung. I went on preaching about how evil doesn't have boundaries, it's not only interleaved like fat in meat, it is actually interdependent - the kinds of purity that can only exist because of evil. And then sixth - in my room in lamplight, he with his leg on the bureau - he read and then I read. Seventh. Do you think your dad ever had an affair? He didn't. How do you know? I just know. He had dared himself to take me though the zona roja: I'll take you in and I'll get you out safely. - Okay when we turn right here we'll be in hell. There were barrows selling tools, TVs and food narrowing the sidewalk, electric lights in the afternoon. I wasn't seeing faces any worse than I'd seen on the shopping streets but there were women standing in rows, women of very similar shapes, most of them wearing thin elastic pants like long-leg girdles that pull tight against their sexes. Tom walked me through them. We took the middle of the street, a tall American with his American woman holding his arm. A truck came up behind us. I pulled him aside. He pulled me back into the center of the street. I was looking and not looking at the faces and bodies of the women. The men were almost invisible to me. The women's bodies were pig-bodies, thick-waisted. Their faces had all the same look of armed stupidity. Alright, tell me about that. Tom as a kid coming down into the bars, bringing his friends, inviting trouble, looking for trouble in the place named trouble to get away from the trouble not named trouble at home. His mom at home dying while his dad lived and worked in another town and left Tom to look after her. Her lower spine was fusing. She had to wear weights. It was his job to put them on and take them off, go shopping, look after the house. He rebelled and resented. He was sixteen, he was the kid who wrote "In the night, in the dark, in the time-lost blackness." It was too much, you weren't old enough for that. You were left alone with it with no backup, I say. You stayed ahead of it for twenty years and then it caught up with you. Now in those times when we stare at each other he's beautiful, he's steady. Afterward [I read him my journal up to here] he has things to say. You've pissed me off. You have no idea what a man is. You wouldn't know a real man if he came and bit you in the ass. I was fuckin' nineteen years old and I was in charge of a fuckin' platoon of forty Vietnam vets. They had combat experience and I didn't and I had to fuckin' make them respect me. I had to fuckin' keep order. I fuckin' did it. Of course my face is fuckin' plated. I am pleased he's spouting though I'm giggling stupidly as he tells me off. I'm pleased he knows an insult without having to think about it for weeks. I'm pleased at his tone which is not polite. I'm not pleased that he says it's because he's tired when he goes to his room. I'm not pleased he kisses me twice when what he means is, I'm going to go away and fuckin' think about whether I fuckin' ever want to fuckin' see your face again. There is the way he says his job is to protect me. You're a gorgeous creature and you're a fragile creature. When the shit comes down I'll kick ass for you. (Something like that.) I love to hear that - oh the many things he says I love to hear, am starved to hear, am weak weak weak with wanting to hear - but I am fighting for my life and I'm fighting my need to hear. I'm fifty years old and I've got this far on my own. What do I need protection from? I say. The fact is he doesn't know the answer. There is something vague and inflated in his notion of protection. I won't buy it 'til I know he knows what protection means for me. But he was right about the other thing. All the guys you've been with have weaseled out on you emotionally. How do you know that? If they hadn't you'd still be with them. Yes, I say vaguely surveying, they were a pack of weasels. He knew it. He has a second thought. But were they smart guys? Not even. Okay that's it. Tom and Ellie in Tijuana. Make or break. - Not so fast. You sound like you're so tough. Have you talked yourself into it? Who have you talked yourself out of? In fact I woke this morning terrified in my solar. I woke from a dream that I was one of four women living in an apartment that's too small. Two of the women had small children. One had red luggage piled outside her room and outside the apartment door in the corridor. I went to them to suggest putting our money into a larger place, a house. I found they'd been complaining to each other, agreeing with each other about Ellie's singing. It's very beautiful but it's intrusive, it takes over the whole space. There was a man who'd been around, a man from the art community, dark hair, smart. I had just begun to notice he was interested in me. Some sort of winding around passing through complicated public spaces I might be losing him in. 7th I'll say I'm frightened. Today the machine said insufficient funds. I knew that would happen soon. Rob will help but I've had to calculate just how much I'll need, and it scares me to know how much I'll be in debt by the end of March. And then Tom. Maybe I'll stop mentioning him, huh. That wasn't good last night [at the Gas Haus]. The place is always good, the calm young at home. Tom's moment, mine too, when the boy from the hotel came to give tribute. A full-moon lunatic comes raging into the lobby. He's throwing ashtrays, knocked someone's cap off. The boy is making a phone call, wants to stay out of the way. Grey-haired man in grandfather clothes - really an old guy, man - strolls into the zone. Lands the rager a kick in the chest. He goes down. Textbook. Don't get up, man. Tom's warned him. He tries to get up. Tom punches him in the head. Throws him out the door. The lobby watching. Just doin' my job, man. There's Tom beside me with the side of his left hand swollen. The kid from the hotel introduces himself. You really landed some. Draws a punch in the air. Later when Tom goes to look for the washroom I watch the boy, who's at a table with his friends, to see whether he'll look after him. He does. He watches him out of sight. Now I understand the stroll. I see what it is intended to say, and how deliberately it is intended. The payoff is what he gets from the lobby, I'm the man. Here I imagined a faculty party, and what I saw is how it's done there. There Ray's the man, and he does it without breaking his hand. And what if anything do women have to do with any of it. What I see when I ask that is a kind of free agency. They are structured into hierarchies but we can dance around. We can dance in and sting the man, but that doesn't make us the man. I can dance in and get under their philosophy but they won't notice I've done it because I'm not in the running. We're a shadow economy. We have a kind of explosive power but it's under the table. Depth charge. When the women got even they dropped him to his knees. Thus he liked showing me the line of women for sale. Calling it evil was his way of covering the pleasure it gives him to risk and survive taking the center of that street, twice victorious, American and male. I rightly said naïve but it is worse: complacent and complicit. The thing is that a repentance that calls to god is calling to the man. Alright. But I like his brawling, I like his stroll. That I don't like his repentance very much has to do with its form - it doesn't become intelligent, it thinks abasement goes far enough. Abasement is evasion of repentance, it's superstition. Again - I want to know its cost, I say, touching his face. It hasn't cost me much, he says. It costs the guys with briefcases who play office politics all day. Mm. I had a great childhood, I've had a good life, my parents were in love. Yeah. Here's the clue: anything you tell me with that quality of energy is not true. Again - I liked seeing him the way the kid saw him, earned respect. I don't want him dropped, I don't like to see those women's damage in his eyes. I love it that he's the knight warrior of the lobby, who loves and protects the old men in his care. I love that he has thought out his daily language to defend his constituency from the sharks of business and university. I love his working assessment, I love his body's integrity. I believe he is willing to learn he has cards up his sleeve that he didn't put there. Okay - go work. "I laughed too. I've never met a woman who could sit there like that, calmly reading that stuff. That's a woman to go down the river with." 8th I've got somewhere on the question of how to talk about brains, language and what it's like to be. Philosophers are discourse trouble shooters. Coming in under the systems. I feel I've been working back and forth with these guys and forming intuition. I'm not going to change how they talk about anything. They are not even going to be able to see what I mean. Where can I use what I know? It should be a book that demonstrates and doesn't argue. I do want to say something about natural language, what it is, how it works with brains. I want to say something about the basic structure of rationalism, what its intuition is and what its mistake is. I want to say something about how to work with dichotomies and dichotomizers. Imagining as a kind of physical state-splitting. The ability to imagine is entwined with abilities to perceive - they interdepend. The choice of that term among all the mental terms - that term as a thread to pull. Needs something said about how theoretical terms float. Look for the work that has most energy - for me it's poetics - something like that. This paper - what brain science can suggest about how to talk about imagining - what the useful questions could be - what imagining a brain doing it suggests. The primary fact that the means of perceiving/simulating aren't perceived - a seething sea of vortices, some stable like the great spot of Jupiter for longish times. We don't see seeing, we see what seeing sees. The transition being fought out these years, to being able to imagine a brain doing it. The insight that makes most difference to how we talk about mind is this one - imagining is like seeing in the fact that the means are not perceived - or rather we could say that with both the means may also be perceived, felt. The ongoing interest of what, when the discourse is corrected and sorted, is being revealed about the historical process of theory making. Philosophy as lab of conceptual tools, a sort of art, a soup in which the real products are being spun off emergently from the artist's dwelling in confusion. 9th
- Oh here's morning - I am not caught - here's morning -
Here's part of how it is. I can strengthen myself by that firm motion I've learned here: tell both. Tell melted love, tell hard judgment, tell them exactly. The grace of your telling lets you travel safe in the extremes of your imbalance. What could be better. Read it again and you are safe again. What could be better. I know the answer. What could be better is to know there is no romance anymore. There is to be effort, for as long as it takes to learn to remember someone is there, not behind appearance, although it will seem that way to me. Appearance will be part of the someone who is more there. I am imagining it as more of a brain in touch, more shapes of standing waves, more action running off those shapes of waves. That's what I want. 10th He came into my room and lay down. I lay next to him. I read him the passage from Andrew Harvey. Hey Fendler. I love you. Those two things together made him hard. "We could do something with that." "In a little while." We were lying together in the dark. I'm in his arms. I am holding his arms with my hands. They are sublimely good, as arms go, such good arms. It is natural to be with you. It has always been natural to be with you. I gave up my separatedness. You've been wise with me, you've led me. I've taken hold of everything in you that I can reach. You're looking at me now with eyes that don't hurt. "The next morning Adilakshmi came down and said 'Mr Reddy always wanted you to be the one who wrote the book on her.'" - That was a knife, so sudden, so sharp. Yes miles in love. I'm walking a plank that is wide enough to walk easily. Only it is very high up, as high as if it's from roof to roof on a skyline. I'm safe if I believe I am. Looking at your face this morning in your room I saw you are perfectly the man for me. I'll say that and not hedge it. You're the one no one has been. You were at work yesterday feeling there's someone you belong to now. I wonder if I can feel that. I felt it with the one in me who teaches me. I don't think I dare feel it yet with you. But I feel my teacher has us both in her sight. I feel she has been leading me through ordeals to make me ready, and I feel she knew where you were and brought me to find you. We've both dreamed melt-down on the horizon. I have been showing you your enemy. The one who always kills your hope. It was not a sentimental love - I saw through it what I had seen before - the greed in my students' faces, their fear of work or effort or suffering, their spoiled consumerist idleness - but I saw it without fear, and I saw behind it the faces of their souls. [Anthony Harvey passages from Hidden journey 1991] I see why it keeps saying to me, look at your fear of the mother. He was in me three times last night and this morning. Each time he got further in. It's a kind of sex I don't know. He isn't letting me do it my way. I can't find it in my old fantasies. What he does is stay close, stay in love, but scour me ungently, like a dog, 'til really it is as if I feel the lower shaft of his penis red hot and myself sucked onto it, the rest of me gone. Alright, I was complaining but what you are doing is right. I was slowly learning what I could be doing there - and oh! you can tell the difference - some positioning of my yes, in there. Now I close my eyes and feel my mouth as your mouth - the slanted line, the ridge of your lip, that beautiful experienced shape gathered up firm and crooked in all your years. Your bumpy two-cornered chin beneath it. You said I had a light around me and you were saying, Who is that woman. Somewhere, far away in his fury and self pity Kenneth whose sting made me do the work to be ready: you didn't mean to do good but I made good of you. I'm looking far far and close across at you and saying, this is what you will have to do too. You'll have to surrender your separation. I blessed all the humiliations I had suffered. I held them up to the bliss-fire I was and burned them away there, slowly, with a great love toward each one of them. immersed in a clear, crystalline sea of soft fire I often love to be simple with your breath. I feel it expand in my arms. I breathe it in, to taste it. I shift my own to be with you. If you stop breathing I stop and wait with you. The things you've had to do to earn yourself. Drunk in an old black Chev on Okinawa you knock over a traffic policeman. He thumps you with his stick. You are so drunk you seize the stick and beat him back. You're in front of the police station. The military police haul you out from under. There are men who love you all along the line. They know what to do. A moment where you have to choose, stay or walk. You walk, you make it. as fine and transparent as diamond shavings or the dust of opals You are so strong and hot that when I am with you I can begin to feel myself what I am, a supple person, light and small the way women are, dark and apt and full of tensile intelligence, lightly sure of myself, the woman I have seen and heard on tape and not known from inside. b. April 30 1946 You are a magic Christian, I say. You are the one who has kept your heart alive, he says. I called the light my lion. It could, at any moment, unsheathe its radiance and spring. It is better when someone says I love you knowing all the doubt still within them. Then it means something. Then love can grow. Everything you think or do you must dedicate to the world in love. 11th My father at the table says something critical. I launch myself: "You are being rude. You are rude to your children." He is as he would be, he doesn't reply. I go on bravely but then at the end I feel the underfeeling of what I say, and it is the indignation of a child. How was your day? I've been like a rag soaked in oil. Mother mysticism and sex that doesn't come. I stewed it together and now I'll evaluate it. Imagine everyone is talking about the same world. Imagine people have different metaphors/procedures/shapes/narrative shapes they use to process thinking about thinking. Imagine that philosophical differences are themselves evidence of just what mind is/is like/likes. Imagine I could sort out the differences and set out the picture that falls where disjoining views could coincide. Imagine what I learned in studying by myself could be proofed in this arena. 12 "The philosophical regard no longer wants to see a child's fear and trembling, but it is upon this fear that philosophy's power is constituted." Annie Leclerc in In other words, ed Marie Cardinale, 181 - [I put the paragraph about breathing with him under his door. Later in the day I see him at the desk.] "If you go on giving me notes like that you'll take all my breath away." "I'll give it back," quick as a flash. 13 The day after a very hard time. Okay, what's the mix. Here is a plan. It's the 13th, Wednesday. My rent is up next Wednesday. Can I write this paper in a week? Or at least do the research. Then I could drive up to San Felipe for two weeks. Then I could go home. I could tell Tom I need this week to write. I could gradually move my stuff out so there isn't a conspicuous exit. I could go when he's on shift and leave a note under his door. I could do it well. I could leave him a Christmas present. Some books, Rumi and Dennett. Leave at night. I could stay in a Mexican motel and go to the beach in the daytimes. I could write. I could be there. I could have my time opened up again, not the drag of oppression up ahead of me. I could enjoy the flit. I could work this week and field my grief as it comes. He has taken advantage of an abandoned child and he deserves to be ditched. It will set him back but it won't set him back past the point where he was when I met him. I'll abandon him. It's a bad thing to do. I've tried to get him to a lucid agreement and he won't risk it. I tried last night. He is lying for his own reasons. He doesn't want me to leave him. It will hit him a week after I'm gone, he says. But he's cheating. He's pretending he's able to give me what I want, which is true desire. It's as if I don't care whether he loves me - it's an emotion without enough content in the details. His lists of declarations: I love you, I respect you, I honour you, etc. Why does it need so much declaring? What does it mean? I don't know. It's a blank to me - it always feels like a kind of dark blank state. (When I say that I feel curious. What is it? Could I find out?) What I care about is whether he feels about me the way he has felt for real women, crazy for pussy, crazy for tits, etc. Is that it? I do want that. When he declares lists of what he loves about me there's never anything below the neck, not even my skin, which is easy to like. That hurts me so I'm inconsolable. Even now, saying it to myself, my solar cracks with pain. My heart hurts when his penis doesn't want me. This is the truth. I'd go to meet all my demons with him, for him, if I knew he loved to fuck me. But the real demon is that he doesn't. Am I sure? I'm sure. Then it compounds because I grieve and he denies. He doesn't want me to leave him. There has been too much of that. He's had sex, he says to himself. Now he'll settle for the love of a good woman, etc. He'll be a good man for a good woman, his best self. But aspiration is not truth and trust, it gallops in the opposite direction from truth and trust. What can I do with his aspiration? The home I want is a home for the body. For my heart, yes, but my heart is the heart of my body. Its so touching delirious joy when it thinks I have found that home for the body, its despair, like today's, when it realizes it has not. This is unworkable. I can't thrive where I am uncertain my body is wanted. There will be no end to misery and lostness. We do not have the necessary base. Now having said all that I have to try to get under it. I'm kind of stunned. Physically stunned the way I am on the days after sexual failure. It takes me a day to get my focus back when I'm so wrecked. There's another fact - he has no sense of craft, he doesn't ask what works, he doesn't do research in the library, he doesn't study the signs, he doesn't take my hints. In fact when I ask for something he always refuses. In his way he sabotages me sexually. I won't try to guess why. Sometimes he does something wonderful but there's a sense it has to be on his terms. - I write it out for him. I take it to him. I sit on his floor. He commands me to come sit next to him on the bed. I stay where I am. He begins to pull me. I resist. He comes and sits on the floor. We both look wrecked. We stare at each other. "This is a hard moment." We both have our hands at our heads. "We'll come out of it together," he says. The truth is always workable, I say. What isn't true can never work. I am begging him to give me what his body says and he refuses to say. A light would come on in me if he did. "I'm backed up right into my furthest corner here." "If it's this bad this far into the game it doesn't look good for the long run, is that what you're saying?" "That's what I'm saying." I didn't say what it was like to see the album Rebecca put together for him. Tom and the baby sleeping next to each other. Tom's sleepy hair when he wakes. A picture that hurts: Tom with his bare legs smiling at the baby laid along his knees, bruises already visible on the sides of his feet. Tom on a hiking trail with the baby in a backpack. He is an ordinary good-looking husband in his late thirties. He loves the baby, he loves Rebecca. Her love for him is bare naked in the photos she took. That loving husband was also cheating on her at the very time those loving photos were taken, with a pretty twenty-four year old at work. This is painful to tell. Dreams don't come true, it says. More - I'm going to call you on this. You're setting me up in an intolerable position. Your sweet little penis is a better weapon sheathed than up. If you have an uncertain erection and if I suffer this much in frustration I will begin to do anything that works. I'll let you get yourself off early in the morning, since that's when you're hard. I'll protect your vanity if that's what it takes. The last time, our three times, you came three times and didn't even try to get me there. You're interested in controlling me. You are interested in frustrating me. Your solemn declarations of love respect honour etc are what they sound, blank shams. The man who says he has his cards on the table is concealing even the game he intends to play. Demands I agree not to get it elsewhere, so I'll be completely dependent. Holds all the power sexually, by pretending to be powerless. Will not listen to what I suggest that will make it possible for me. I've found the kernel here. This is the dizziness I couldn't see through. He will not be friendly, cooperative, practical in it. Tries to enforce silence, solemnity, romance, which paralyze me so I don't challenge him. Now say it so it doesn't blame. He doesn't know he's doing it. He doesn't know how it is that what he has to be to prevent humiliation among the men prevents trust among the women. He's homeless without a woman. He has been offering me everything he can. He isn't mean. His shadow man is opportunistic with me - that's true - that's what the declarations are meant to cover. His opportunism is unconscious. Idle thugs who prostitute their woman. My shadow woman was this starved longing to be wanted by a manly man.
(imagine a brain forming a shape and being conscious as it)
14th Since that last little period I have hot flashes again and vision blur at a couple of feet. Dear universe, here we are. We're in over our heads. This pain tells us we are doing something wrong and should do something else. But we don't know what it is. We are willing to be taught what is the better way. Please make us clear so we know what it is. Please make us strong so we can do it. - We have half an hour on the bench outside. He's pushy. I have to fight him to get to talk. Then what I say about being afraid of the way I have no power at all in the way he is sexually makes such immediate sense to him that he settles down. He has a plan - he has found a way to think of it so he isn't being dumped - we'll ease off, I'll leave next week, we'll stay in touch. We'll be friends all our lives, he'll still visit me in Vancouver. What I feel is - he's going to get away with never saying that that's what he wanted all along, a smart deep generous friend to see him, to mend him. Giving me the poem about sex wasn't wise if that was it. I gave him Theory's practice with its heart-rending directness.
15th, Friday Today I'm recovered. I work. In the late afternoon I walk west on Broadway to the UCSD bookstore downtown. Looking for an ATM I find the black granite water slip in the Drillbit lobby - the One America Plaza lobby. Water whose flow rate against polished marble is judged to form as a rippled skin slipping smooth until surface tension in the lower half of the panel gets enough of a grip to hold back against it a series of slipping changing wrinkles whose broad first lines protect smaller, more, and even slower wrinklets that seem almost to hover like Buddhist clouds against the unending arrive of flowing change. I thought there might be a way to film it as gold light for my sixth sense movie, which also has hands and chests, midriffs. Then at the bookstore I see the Book of J which translates an early version of the Old Testament and describes it as the work of a female ironist. Seriously, I think. When I cap my pens at six, Tom phones. He had a hard evening. Is going on about Springsteen and Harrison Ford. I know to ask a question. He's grateful, he says, for the quality of my attention: I pried him open like a tin can, dragged things out and put them back. I say I am grateful too not so much for his attention, which is often given on his own terms, but for his energy. There is no one else in San Diego who would have been up for it like you were. We are affectionate and separate. I don't want to touch him. I'm respectful and fair, as he is too. I notice again that he is a little hunched. I want to push his spine forward so his neck moves back and there's more distance between his jaw and his breast bone. He doesn't want me to be alone in grief, he says. I say I am not. I say I am also sometimes stopping and holding up my finger to see whether I can tell if he's alright. I say I trust he'll be coming to his wiseness.
16th I phone Luke. I phone Mary. The second I hang up the phone, Tom rings. Luke and Charmaine split up. "It was going nowhere." He was ill for a month with pneumonia - his weak chest when he is sad. He misses me, he didn't say. He's twenty-five. Everyone phoned him today instead of tomorrow, because we think he'll be out. I hadn't thought much before I phoned. I was undeep: what was he? Melancholy, kind. He was happy telling his visit with Ed and Mary, because they had been "interested in me personally." Ed had smiled and talked. They'd both been grounded. - One of these last days I'd thought I'd go see them when I got back. It was maybe the day I was on my knees on the carpet thanking for the rightness of Tom. I felt that the thing that has been withheld from me had been given and I was complete, so I could go anywhere without resentment. How was Mary - cautious. She said she remembered the white shoes I mentioned on my postcard, that she thought of finding them on the shore of the Salton Sea, that we'd happened to stop just there and that they were my size. She remembers a lot of things about us when we were smaller, she said. As if her own childhood, I thought. "Do you still have adventures?" she asks. "Are you kidding - more than ever. Much more than ever." Tom fell asleep after his shift because he was lying awake last night. He felt my reserve, it means. (Which was more tonight. I was seeing his dereliction, his rough red face. Maybe it was his crestfallenness that I was getting away.) He's going to learn to give better attention he says. "Why?" - I'll test him. "Because I'm missing a lot. I'm burning daylight if I don't pay attention when I'm with you." 17th Chico's been very sick these last days, coughing. He leaves his door open for the heat. I see him curled asleep with his head faced away from the door, or half-sitting, spitting into his wastepaper bucket. One of the nights Tom was in my bed we were lying wrapped together in the dark hearing coughing not by way of the door but faintly by way of the light well and the window. "That must be Chico." We were speaking almost under our breaths because it was after visiting hours. I remember something about Tom's tone, a to-himself sound I liked, intimate as if it was the sound of his thinking. "He's a very sick puppy."
I saw Tom for a moment when I went downstairs to buy chicken soup. He was on the corner across the street waiting for his order from the Moon Café. My thought was I'd just light on him for a moment, like bringing him coffee yesterday morning. But I think this work makes me stupid with people. I was looking at him thinking quite coldly, does he have that red face because he has a heart condition? "The Chargers won," he said. "I should care?" I have never said anything that nasty to him. It shocked him and startled me. I had forgotten about his bet. I shouldn't care about either Chargers or bets, but he's the person whose breath I was holding in my arms seven days ago, and whose being I was on my knees thanking the universe for. Something is wrong with dissociating and associating like that. - Yet the work is good, as far as its arena goes. I am something like empathetic with the minds I work with, Jackendoff for instance, a functionalist description I find very awkward and yet I was finding what it could mean in relation to systems that make more sense. It is work that's nonpareil. I've never seen it described or watched it done. I do it with the certainty of a helicopter pilot assessing and landing. I do not doubt my judgment ever; I'm right. Then Tom tells me the Chargers won. This is the self Michael despised. And it is probably the existence of this great stone head that gives love woman the look they find beautiful when she comes on. I was stupid with Luke too, unpresent. A book to set against Andrew Harvey's. Blood orchid, Charles Bowden. Political torture in Vietnam, Argentina, poisoned landscapes and cancers the consequences of political decisions, endless booze and women with big breasts. Whenever a woman doesn't wear makeup he mentions it disapprovingly. "That I can never be forgiven and should not look for such cheap salves." "Until things are changed so her life is really a life." "A desperate need to act," to drive, speed. "We are takers, to a man and to a woman and to a child. And we have conquered this ground." "The priests have never, not once, understood what flows through us and makes us alive and makes us create life around us." "Especially the speed, to write in the cold hours before dawn and have the words out on the street before lunch." "I cannot imagine a life without act or an act without the support of belief." "Only in drink can I find a place for the feelings within me. I need to violate myself." "Ruled by a young and beautiful woman ... now we cannot find the woman ... I think she is still out there ... this is my miracle ... there is no surrender in her eyes, and more remarkably, no hatred. Anger, yes, she's got some of that ... so I will not cut my throat ... she glides through the green world I seek." This with a story of a male wasp who fucks an orchid because he can't tell the difference and so perpetuates a saprophyte. "We've been in a long war and we've lost that war and the war has poisoned us and our ground." "constructed so that we see what we wish to see - a woman lush and lying on silk with her legs spread and that beckoning smile on her smooth face ... the man armed, grim-looking, a carbine in his hands ... we become dependent ... we turn our eyes away from the land..." "She will be gentle with me the first few times and then I will remember who I am and my body will sing and I will go forward ... there will be work ... she whispers to me that I can see everything just as clearly as she can, that I can see everything just as clearly as she can, that all I must learn to do is look, and feel." -
18 Bowden is as if more relevant than Harvey to what I want to understand. The books are a set. Passionate men saying a (brown) woman has to save them - it puts another light on the way I break down when Tom fakes desire with me (is that what it is? and the brutalizing of the senses there was in the evening of AM radio voices, cigarette smoke, cockroach poison) - has to save them by integrity in her own nature. That's Marianne Williamson. As if the instruction is this: find a wild enough true enough guy and ride it out with all the truth and strategy you can muster. Something will come of it. 19 When I lay down yesterday afternoon there was one of those half hours I love, that hardly ever come. I was drifting in deep recall - I was remembering Vancouver, the feeling of my neighbourhood, early ways of feeling it, Jamila when she was younger, how I felt her when I was loving her. Really it was memory of feeling, a drift through spaces or tones or lights of feeling so there was a sense of surveying relations of times. I said I'd stay for Christmas, which is next Monday. I have a week for this paper, it means. The transom trapdoor is down. I hear people in the corridor. A woman's voice. "He was married ... he has a kid ... head over heels in love ..." Did I hear Tom's name? A stroke of fear direct to the heart: I can be completely wrong: I can be completely fooled. I am so damaged in this part that my judgment is like a child's. That's what I am saying to Joyce these days. Here I am struck suddenly into grief, because I was floating today. Because I wanted to float. Louie on email said her book said, If she's doing it in the air she shouldn't look down, but she can do it on the ground if she wants. How is it on the ground? What is this sudden grief? I said I thought doing it on the ground was knowing no one is special, everyone just needs to care and to be seen. I don't know if that was a depressed vision. I guess.
- At times I feel hungry to go look at the green waves. I have fallen in love with the waves - the power with which they hoist their enormous mass, their moment of translucent green, so brief I stand waiting on and on to see it again. The abandon with which they shatter. Their white ruin racing on. The sleekness of the sand when they withdraw. There was more surf today than I've seen. Off La Jolla many boys in wetsuits. Young. Boy bodies in their perfection. Kid faces. Hair worn long in the water. Are they a different kind of men later, if they have lived every day in the power of green waves? Rhythm and violent encounter.
20 "Noise is a weapon and music is the use of this weapon to simulate murder." [Attali The art of noise] Or - sound is touch and music is the use of this touch to love. He makes murder primary and love-touch sacrifice. It is the other way around, murder is sacrifice of touch. Listen to the baby singing in her little bed in early morning light while her mother in her own bed holds her breath with pleasure at the sound. I'm going to want to talk a lot about sound - the quality of sound sometimes when I am falling asleep in the afternoon. The chanting at the end of the Zen retreat, that was inside my chest so that my own voice floated on it. People's voices at Nyingma resonating in my thorax, the motors on the street passing through me in granular dark ripples. The sound and sensation of the pulse in my ear one sensation. Three concerts - Dollar Brand, [Barry's] Wave edge, the Scottish landscape piece [Ghost of Ereboll, Peter Manning].
Other sorts of music are less sound than emotion, an emotional line. They are more muscular? Like imagined motion. Voice lines. Visual. Spatial. Spem in allium, the voice lines arcing out. Two lines moving together the way two dolphins do in Fare thee well, love [Rankin Family]. Laschia qu'io piango [as sung by Streisand]. The Petite Messe Solonelle. Emotional leading - music that forms me more freely than I can myself. The lark in Strauss's death song [Te Kanewa]. Mozart's duets. Emotional experience we do not have the circumstance for. Words and music. It's real emotion in unreal circumstance. What does it do for us. What is the relation of pop music and the horrible sound of disk jockeys. Sitting beside Lottie on the piano bench while she played me Beethoven. We were sixteen. It was on Stuart Road. -
Is this sore and tentative heart the heart that goes with what I'm doing? Can I get smarter about this time? There is the worry of camera machines beginning if I'm shooting Friday. Standing in front of the slipping water today realizing I hadn't been seeing it technically. The technical problems there'll be - Don't know whether I shd use it for this film even. It seems to me to need what I saw in the stream on the way, much finer lines, much sharper closer lighter more standing shapes. I have three minutes of voices. The shapes can slip between. It can be optical printed. I don't know whether to have the shadow bodies at all. Could I have the flowing slipping light inside black body shapes only suggested sometimes. As if it needs more expertise than I have. The voices so there's room in silence to pin and tuck. A soft light around the bodies, white light around the bodies, gold light slipping. No bodies. Bodies only imagined. It should be shadows moving over quite indistinctly, almost just a priming, just a layering. A man's arms. A woman's breast. A boy's hand. A woman's hand. A kiss to begin. It's called bright and dark. Should the footage be upside down? If it's double-perf it could be. Will this get clearer? How the voices should sound. Also - I keep erasing, I don't even know what to say about it - a decision about how to leave, whether I should open love woman again. I guess that was her in the lobby with him, because I was sharp hurt at being out of touch, looking at him in a way that found him wonderful. Do I know what happened that night? Is it love woman who gets hurt? Was it simply that when he said he loved various things there was nothing below the neck? What it comes to maybe is that he can hurt me. I'd have to decide to be willing. I'd need support. There's a way I'm off my rocker 'til I do this, but if I do it I'll be off my rocker a lot, until I get more safe. It's very scary. What's the risk. Humiliation. Think it through. That I let myself be derogated. This is the place to look. That agony, he doesn't want me. That's the place it will continually come to. And when it does I'll flip, and when I flip I'll threaten, I'll be contemptuous, I'll be cold. It will be very rough for a while. I'll be either helpless or I'll be shut off. Somewhere I have to try it. If he could go on wanting me through the crashing of the green waves, if he knew how to hold onto the thrashing baby 'til she settles down, I think I could come through. But it will be so rough, I'll be so hard to hold, and he isn't as steady as he claims - is my guess. He'll be wild and moody too. Would I have something he went on wanting enough to go through what it would take? Maybe. I love and defend a young person in him. It's a true love, a thread of true love amid other less true things. Will he give up when he finds out how rough it can get? I don't know. He would say no if I asked, but I don't know whether he can estimate himself or counts on bossing himself into anything he says. The evidence is that he does get overconfident. When I write about this uncertainty there's hype I have to keep clearing away - why does it go straight to such mindless dull stuff. The pour of happiness I now mistrust wasn't stupid this way. - There he phoned - business voice - unconnected voice - he needed to - it's long, this work suspense. When I began to say I saw the waves at La Jolla he ignored me - he was in control mode - I would begin to know his modes and what they need - this one needs to talk - I can't listen for another three days.
Friday 22nd Friday of three writing days I have to finish the paper in. What do I want to say. Where was I working this semester? I read people who were trying for general theories of mind based on hypotheses and results in the brain sciences. I was looking at how they talk about imagining, which earlier traditions handled by assigning it a separate faculty of the soul. This tradition survives in current psychologies which speak about 'the imagination,' a locution that when we try to translate it into brain terms seems to suggest a special region, a specialized mechanism, or at least 'a function' that is responsible for imagining. 'The imagination' no longer shows up in new attempts at brain-based theories of mind, and 'mental images' or 'image processing' are described as forms of more general capabilities of animal nervous systems. Why do I want a brain-based understanding of imagining? I want a better theory of imaging. I also want a better theory of perceiving, thinking, speech, writing, emotion, gender, sex, reading - vitally interesting areas for which our theories are not nearly helpful enough, in which the artists have given us accumulating observation, in which many have some wealth of working intuition, and in which artists go on stockpiling instances and observations. Why do I want a brain-based understanding of imagining? Because I want a better theory of imagining, one that can order the many sorts of things I know about many kinds of imagining - both in my own experience and from other people's stories. I also want a better theory of, for instance, perception, thinking, speech, music, reading and writing, visual representation, love, grief, fear, sex and gender - all areas in which we have some working intuition, and in which artists go on proliferating instances and observations, and in which the theories we have hardly touch the puzzles we have. These puzzles are daily, they are vital, and they are all at bottom puzzles about how nervous systems work. So I want a brain-based theory of imagining because among other things I want to know what I'm doing, how to work better with my own capabilities. Philosophically, a brain-based theory of mind can be seen as part of a long - so many centuries long - project of slowly working our way into an understanding of ourselves as physical creatures in inalienable contact with the physical universe that forms us - of learning to be intelligently at home where we are. 24th Is there a question - oh - does not feel good - days writing badly. That isn't how I should write. There's another way when I'm feeling the partitions - when I'm suspended among the parts in a way I've only lately learned. Sad. There he is. I don't like him. He tells me Mathew phoned and I'm pleased along with him. I tell him I can't reach Rowen. He gets up and walks away. It's a thing he will do again and again, not hear what I say, stroll away with his hands in his pockets and a curve high up in his back that I don't understand and want to unlatch. What am I doing here. This often happened didn't it. He walked away. Whenever that happens I will know I'm too young. My neck is sore, writing without a desk. I'm saying this to myself: emotionally I am a crazy person, my feelings are not coherent with my circumstances. They mislead me. I am for instance frightened and very sore. I want to hide. I am not going to be able to look after myself because of the way I feel. I am looking lovingly at the green and white - lemon leaf - so green, firm green leather under the lamp, and small carnations, four on a stalk, such fresh things, fresh as skin, a lot of surface opened as if to touch. A young man with a very high voice wrapped the one stalk, $1.25, nicely in clear plastic. Baby's breath. White, white and green. I hear people in the corridor saying Merry Christmas. I hate that. Tom called Heather singing twenty carols one after the other in the lobby a triumph of the human spirit. I didn't think so. Ernesto, a hundred years old, stood near her on the carpet leaning on his cane, weeping, Tom said. I didn't see that. When I met Ernesto at the elevator a few days ago he seemed to be offering me ten dollars to go to his room with him. Persistently. Por que no? It's very quiet. Nearly midnight. What's the worst that can happen? The fear in my midriff thinks it is something really bad, but how bad can it be? I wonder if I'm afraid I'm going to be angry. 25th He wanted my cards on the table. I said I would have to speak for three different people. One who is very easily hurt and wants to run away. One who judges hard and likes to wake up alone. One who gets seduced easy and will give you anything you ask for. I wanted him to say something to that. He kept his thoughts to himself. "I'm your man. You know that, don't you." "Well okay, you're my man if anybody is, but what do I want a man at all for? They don't listen." - I say to Louie, a warm hand is my god. Nicole programmed her video and said she was jealous of the writing. Talking an hour and wondering what it is that feels wrong after - as if I shouldn't talk to her about myself now. - "Your complete love and affection" 26 Yesterday arguing with Tom about Blood orchid. He said, The guy's a whiner, and pulled out his bibles, Mailer and Hunter Thompson. What I heard made me like Charles what-was-his-name better. I said he demonstrates himself honestly, he shows how infantile he is. T said his guys fight for a manhood of another kind than the suits'. I said the style guys in my neighbourhood are useless at anything but talk, and in fact Charles Bowden tracked himself down in that book. Mailer and Thompson defend the man against that honesty - in fact they are, I was trying to say, in the same camp as the suits. The hipsters are an attempt to get back the body sacrificed by the suits while still cheating on the body - the hope to keep power and body both is what makes a hipster a hero. The play of hipster against suit is the mutual fascination of guys who are each other, on fields of battle where they get to see the world as they want it with no women anywhere in view. An hour later I was sighting down my naked thigh at Tom's face slick around the muzzle, my war veteran beautiful with lover's eyes and lover's mouth. I can handle your action, he says. 27 It's the last half mile when he's walking across the island that is most vivid to me. He meets the old man carrying something, was it oars? The bodies are flying out the door. She says Thank god I can stop weaving, let's go have some fun. They lie down in the olive wood bed. She says, Where have you been? He doesn't tell her all at once. The stories are coming out for years. She writes them down. There was a goddess. He couldn't have done it without her. He was her pet.
- A lot happened yesterday. We were settled and debriefing. Something like that. Horton's has classical music this morning. Für Elise. Rachmaninoff. It's hot on the balcony. There were two warnings I'm going to look at carefully. You're big and hot and bossy and you have spite in you. And I'm safe with it and I can play with it. It's the making of me. It's what I had to find. I know that. I won it. And I won being worth winning. It took me thirty years. But don't you also just feel astonished? All the time. You just feel astonished and keep going? Like surfing? - That was in the car when we got back to it after watching water falling falling climbing falling. We have our foreheads together and our eyes closed. Are you seeing waves? I want to have that smell on my pecker for the rest of my life. We'd been at the Star Bar. He talked. Smell how beautiful this is. Smell how beautiful. We walked through chaparral to the cliffs above Torrey Pines, a narrow trail through scrub the height of our shoulders. It was like cowpaths through the willows at home. After the sun had set we were walking back to the car in a space dark on the ground and quickly fading red along the horizon. I stopped to stand and look at the shapes of twigs fine-drawn along the top edge of the scrub against the light. I was taking ten minutes alone. My lord had tromped on not noticing I wasn't behind him. I had the scrub silent all around me. I widened out and heard and saw and was red and black and myself. I didn't forget he was some distance ahead discovering I wasn't there. He got even on the freeway, muscled into the right lane off the onramp, nearly tripped over the slow car in the next lane over, hustled into the fast lane and stayed there. Don't touch me now said his profile. That's how it's done, he says. That's one of the ways, say I. I liked feeling my car the match of anything there. I liked - yes I did like - the way he body-checked that blue-silver Mercury Sable when he wanted on. I liked the way he tripped up against the brake lights of that red car. I liked the slow car in the fast lane that wouldn't let him by. I liked seeing the city spangles. I liked knowing what to say when we dropped off the shelf onto Front Street. That sense when you drop off the freeway of holding a long silent breath. Are you back? Yeah I'm back. Did you enjoy that? Yeah I enjoyed it. This is embarrassing to say. Say it. I'm going to ... All the guys I've been with in the last twenty years, twenty-five, since Roy, I haven't been willing to have my father meet. My mother I didn't mind, for some reason. But not my father. But I would take you to meet him. Do you understand that? I understand it. Do you? It was shame. My mum won't know what to make of you but my father will understand you. What kind of cake are you going to make for my birthday? Walking through scrub we came to an eye in the path. It split for six paces and rejoined. Bread and butter, he said and took the other side. I knew instantly that that was the furthest back moment I'd known him in. "Your mom said that." "Yeah." Here's a strange thing, the way he changes physically when he's with me. He's twice as big when he takes his clothes off, older and more of a bull. In street clothes he's thin, he has a thin lone-wolfy face. The other man has a big bull head, a heavy head, a general's worldly old head. A substantial old thing. With his smile - how is it I always feel it - like a crack in time, a wedge shape that opens into some very other time, a time so painful I want to spare him and at the same time want to hold that narrow triangle open so something can be released into the great freedom of the present. We came back last evening and both had naps in our rooms and then he came and lay down with me. We were holding one another very perfectly, then speaking perfectly too. I said there are miles of freedoms still to be taken. He of his first moment with me at the desk - that moment I was so absent in I almost don't remember it. "I saw you, I saw the real you. I was worried about my job. I wanted to put down my pen and say Let's get out of the hotel and go somewhere and get to know each other." As if I am understanding ancestor worship suddenly. As if I would like there to be photographs of his dead mother and father that I could bow toward with a stick of incense. I mean that I am doing it already, I am acknowledging their presence, thanking them and buying them off, great powers that they are in our present fortune. Now - those other powers - two small brown men in one evening who took my hero prisoner by force of guilt he hasn't taken on. Pablo. Boracho, amigo, corazon, numero uno, the King. Fernando, Pablo, boracho, amigo, etc. He reaches his small cold hand and joins our two strong warm hands that are willing to be joined. He has brought us drinks and thereby bought our time until we do him the violence of getting up and leaving. I am not going to finish my one glass of wine and certainly I am not going to drink his. Tom drinks it. We are in a bar with twinkling lights above four small Asian women who move respectably and skillfully back and forth in front of a long wall of bottles. Above them, along the canopy that runs the length of the counter, are backlit images of beer goddesses in swimsuits. We are on stools at a red leather table with a padded edge. Tom is instructing me. The bar sign above the door is written casually in small white Christmas bulbs, a string for each letter so there is a little swarm of lights for each of S-T-A-R. Pablo owes Tom on account of a story involving the cops. Tom owes Pablo on account of a story involving centuries of American imperialism. It is a tedious conversation. The exchange on the street is worse, more personal, as if since we didn't get the point the first time it will be pointed more. A small black man with a gold tooth drops into step next to Tom. We're a fine-looking couple, he says. He intends to sing and once again it's up to T, and I can either be there or not. I've got / sunshine / on a cloudy da - ay. Tom picks up the songs and sings along. The man sings well and we sing badly. Hey, you're pretty good, he says to Tom. At the corner, where it is understood we'll separate, he is saying his little boy, 'bout so high, has no presents for Christmas, no presents for Christmas. Tom has a dollar bill ready in his pocket. I wouldn't have done it that way. We go have meatball sandwiches at the Sub Shop and then come back to my room. Two strange patches of thready lines of blood on the sheet this morning. I'd never seen anything like them. Oh - that was my knees. I got rug burns. He's blushing in the lobby. I say to Louie on email - I am very careful what I say to her - I am staggered by the emotional courage of this man. The gods have got me. Even if something unforeseen happens he will have given me something for all time. Last: I was at the library putting my paper on disk today. I think it is the worst academic writing I have ever done. I thought I should start again. I also said to Louie, who says she wants to talk about work, that I would rather talk about her bookwork - that she has never been willing to know who it is who is with her. 28th This morning an hour in the eyrie above Horton's four levels of shopping plaza movie sets, with Tom in the sweatshirt from his boy in Iowa. Look at this guy - look what an eager spirit I found - blissed out - see? - so willing to be. 29th I didn't like this day - at the computers entering bibliography - stuck when the printer wouldn't work - toxic ache I get when I work with computers - don't know what I'm doing - the cost of not concentrating this term - and not concentrating now - come back and get a headache working on the bed - bored because I'm not in it - having to think how to fake it - worried by the way I don't work when I love - don't love when I work - dislike the hot flashes because I thought they were gone - have to leave the sun pretty soon - am going back to a pile of deadlines for the end of January - same routines - won't have finished the paper in time to go to the Baja - have to come to terms with not having connected with the university here - if I'd done bookwork and concentrated - what? - can't imagine anything would have come of it - looking forward to being by myself to see whether I get smarter - is this going-away shut-down? No. Burn-out? No. It's the paper. I'm out of touch with myself, I am not up to speed, I am not in my own rhythm enough - have to decide whether to leave early Wednesday. If I do, then I've only got Sunday night, Monday and Tuesday, and only tomorrow and Sunday to write it. 30th This morning I want to switch supervisors. Phil doesn't see what's good in that paper, which is my best, and I am at a loss how to go on from it. There are things I want to learn to say and Churchland is not the person to say them to - he is both too simple and too stressed. What can I do to make this paper real?
1st January 1996
You are so strong and so delicate. I don't know how you've made it this far. I decided it has to be courage. You are the most maudlin person I have ever met.
Many many gifts. There is a card on the back of his door with a list of virtues on it. Optimism, trust, confidence, courage, loyalty, strength, and so on. I was ready to sneer when I saw such a thing but then I understood that they are all true of him. Now I'm going to start understanding there isn't time to waste. He said as we were eating breakfast, Don't ever let me take you for granted. I'm thinking about that. Taking for granted is letting your intelligence drop in relation to something. "I work my side of the street." That's my responsibility. We are doing too much relationship talking, we both know. It is kind of stupid and yet I think necessary. For me - I have to hear myself say those kinds of things once. We'll shift through. I can't get over his quality. His eagerness and faith. He keeps going on ahead and clearing the way for me emotionally. I am so impressed I keep being surprised when I find him sentimental the way he is and I am not, about occasions, rites, gifts, stuff, pop star heroes, writers from too long ago in his life, champagne at midnight. I go along with any of it to know him in it, but I don't understand and forget to enquire. Here's something to notice - that his writing seems better to me than it did when I first read it. I haven't seen how exactly. I was hostile. But more. The way we're fucking now, stormily. He storms me. I'm there with my leg against the side of his neck. He keeps moving around. Jumps away, jumps back, grabs my ass, tries this and that. There's too much doing and I don't get to set up my fine electric structure, but I am interested in what will come of being stormed, finding my way into ways to meet his storm. This morning when I went back and woke him - a loud knock - there he was red-faced and boiling hot with his hair up in clumps - sun on the foot of his bed - his soft furry tummy and stained ace bandage - he opens his blanket and wraps up close close with his knee up along my ribs - I meant to say - later - I kept my eyes open too and stayed with him through it - and after it was feeling to forgive my enemies. I said truce to the world and started laughing. It was after I purred into his chest. It was something released, like a laughter orgasm. And then told him the story of Rabbit the cat's first broken purr. He saw a tear had pooled at the outside corner of my right eye while I told it. Something I felt about his mother and father - this is hard to find - as if I felt their realness as persons - young persons - and as if with feeling it in them I felt it in other people, anyone - or as if I felt what it would be like to feel it as someone else does? It was as if a quality of inner crispness. It is not what I have felt in anyone, I think. Not exactly. It was feeling people as alive. That's what reminded me - Tom saying he has boxes with pictures of ancestors he didn't know, people he is the only inheritor from. The moment a century from now when he'll be that for someone - that is so extraordinary. The crispness of life passing down through people. We don't have to have kids, I said. We have kids. I wonder whether in fact his parents still had that crispness when he was born. They were forty. I am feeling them younger - under twenty. I am stretched I think. I am moving very fast and am ahead of myself. Is this happening, I'm saying, frisking through the corridor to bring him my tape while he's still on shift. There he is. I go up boldly to the counter and look at him as if I know him. Way way ahead of myself. Oh hotel. Soon I will leave you. This amazing time will not be. As if I think I will go back to the time there was in that space at home. I will go back to getting ready for a completely other time. 2nd In the corridor with a clump of towels waiting for the bathroom door to open. It's seven of the evening of a writing day. I ate soup on the steps next to Horton's top parking platform. The western sky was bright yellow. I never thought I'd know a man named Tom. There were two sections of water the right silver-blue for that yellow. Dots of light flowing on the Coronado more-than-bridge. A woman behind the bathroom door who is singing or crying in the tub, desperately, a girl mad fool. Problem child, says Fred Jameson on his security round. And there is the small woman with a beige wig and a wart at the tip of her nose. A little hunch in her back - a little tart woman who wears a gift ribbon on her wig ironically. Enough already, mad girl. There she is - not the one I thought - smelling of baby powder. Truly beautiful, he said my movies were. What's this 'truly'? All day today the carnations at the window, small red and a sort of pink that flushes deep red at their centers. They are there with dark green lemon leaf in glass. Beauty so clean and intense it is like an elsewhere - Persia. What is such a thing in the brain? There were tangerines next to it this morning. Tom when he lay here holding me for ten minutes felt something I think they gave the room. He sighed the way I did just now when I asked what they are in the brain. A clean use. What was that? Contentment.
I was contented too. He liked the films, which belong to those colors. Something else I like is my plaid jacket on a hanger black and cream and blue with the black gauze skirt under it. The eucalyptus-bark angel. [Brain and imagining sections 15-23] 4th It's full moon. 5th The last morning in this room. I got up before six and moved the car. Don't want this time to be over. There's my pot of water starting to brumm on the hotplate just its size. There's my teapot warming in the sink with hot water in it. Here's my lamp set on the bed to shine on the page. The paper is finished and on the floppy though it needs this and that, footnotes. I was frightened last night reading what you like, frightened to be enrolling in such difference from me - that you are in love with the way men speed around killing each other - that you didn't like Le Guin. Then you come off shift and put your head in my lap and I feel how any moment of your real otherness is gold to me. I'm feeling that sensation they call incredulity but what is it really. Some powerful rising up of hope and fear so dense it almost blinds me. A question, is it possible in the world that such deep good could come to me? What if it were? The answer to that is not dense at all, it is a singing in the chest so light it's like a curvy breeze.
You have - you have - you have - an eager heart. Fred Jameson, Pat Kelly, Vince, Lyle, Chico, Joe, Big Dave.
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