the golden west volume 5 part 1 - 1996 january-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 21st January 1996 As if today is New Year's Day. Because there's snow. Because I'm back. And what else is this. Ah - I see. That spoke as a pressure at the heart and then sighed when I saw it. A mis-giving. A giving-away. [anniversary of being sent away at age two] The quiet in the house when there is snow is like the quiet around a house in the fields. Not really. Now I'm smiling, because of the flat tire on my car - the right front tire. Last night the television hour in which young women intervened to give me a voice with the men in their community. That was something. And Tom who when he phones often seems to need not to hear me but to assert himself to silence me. That will go on. 23rd It's Tuesday night. I haven't worked at all today. Wanted emotion. Working with Tom's letter to try to understand what his false notes mean. When he phoned and I said I'd been with him all day he said he knew. How do you know? When I get out of my own way I can feel your presence. There is something wrong, a kind of shock in him. Something. 24 Brain and imagining done, something for Laiwan tomorrow, Mary Daniel calling to ask for word about the film, bank gave me two and a half thousand, readings for tomorrow. 27 Saturday morning on the Drive - sun on the street - the mountains are white all the way down - I could say I haven't been here all these months and am here differently - should I be here at all - it's Mozart's birthday - and my mum's I think. Oh my feet are cold. Reading Orality and literacy, what was exciting? Thinking how the brain developed different habits when it worked with books. How slowly the habits of orality changed. The way Latin was school language and taught a particular male structure, ie there was a sex-linked language for about fourteen hundred years, and it was oratorical, agonistic, formulaic, concerned with action. Latin made literacy possible but held orality because it held Classical texts. Thinking of ways T is more oral than I am - his graphic turns, his formulae, speed. I'm literate in my worked style, which is much too slow for oratory. Literacy avoids formula and builds subordinative structure. The aims of speech changing when writing took some of its mnemonic work. I liked the book because it puts me into the midst of the way it feels to go on working into literacy, the way I do more than many because of the way I am literate with personal memory. What is different about a life written the way this one is? Ong W 1982 Orality and literacy Methuen "I saw something I wanted at any price" Tom said. 29 My feelings are so hurt with this envelope today. He sent my photos back, pages of newspaper clippings and three lines of letter. He sent back those photos without saying anything about them. What does it mean? The woman I met at the coffee stall - my student, but I don't remember her name [Judith Stapleton] - a pink flush when she smiles - talking to her a feeling of settling into intelligence - that is the only way to say it - calm, pleasure, confidence. "I met somebody" I say, "he's going to move here." "That IS meeting somebody," she says. "I saw I will have to set up support," I say. She says "You have to have a woman friend you can tell everything to. She says it's worth it, it makes everything else you do worth it. It was love at first sight, they have been married fifteen years, there have been times they lost it all, he was the one who found the energy, she says. "We're still in love." Oh but look at this woman: what a clear spirit she is. Yes but I am willing to learn, I will learn. But tonight it's as if I'm calling calling to him, Oh where are you. It's heartache. What's Tom? sez Louie when she sees me looking at his picture. Taurus, I say. Oh, that's alright. 30 Luke yesterday across the table, a little boy, very large. He crashed the day before, the way I know crashes, mad gestures, fear of suicide, speechlessness, inviability. I'm listening to Tom's tape in my own house for the first time. The emotion he lives in is making me cry. I feel as if I am on strong wings beating south. What is this - sore today - so sore - I don't know what it is - it is the way I feel when a lover is unfaithful or gone or going or threatening to go. It has taken a lot of the day. What is it like. Sharp at the heart or cut off at the solar and sharp there, bewildered, searching, not smart, wanting help, wanting to understand, wanting to stop, worried. At that moment I go take down all my shrine stuff and put it in a drawer. I know this motion, fed up with pain. Resolve and revolt. I act against myself and feel the two things at once, the firmness of revolt, the weakness of protest. I am going to be free, I say. I am going to be at ease in my time. No one is going to make me small. It is like a mother acting in anger and a baby watching in helpless tears. This time I know I don't mean it and am doing it to see how it will be. But I would like to be out of pain. I'd like to be out of suspense. I'd like to be out of worrying whether he'll drop me or run roughshod over me or bore me. It has been unrelenting for four months, couldn't I drop it and just be alone for a while. His letters have been so constipated - that's the word isn't it - and phone calls mighty uneasy. Saying so hurts me. There's something wrong. I know there's something wrong. When I get back the photos [from the developer] tomorrow I'll feel the spell again, where we went together. You don't want me to ache and tremble and be in fear and doubt, and crack, but that's what it costs me to take you at your word. 1st February Rowen on Read Island was being sent to bed. My mum's on TV! he said. After Tuesday's distress I got a letter that was a letter and satisfied me. He spilled for eighteen pages, stuff I've heard, his formed stuff, and then he arrived at the simple nub. "I am afraid you will not see me. I am afraid of not allowing you to see me. Ultimately, I have confidence in the honesty and purity of our vision. I'm going to let you see me sweat because I love you. I know when I get nearer to myself I am nearer to you. I've made the decision. It's scary. The decision has to be re-made continually, moment to moment, immediately. The situation, momentarily, is difficult. I'm not used to personal address." 3rd Aiming for the moment he steps off the bus, he says. I spent the day reading to him on tape. The sun shone. That was all I saw and was. I've hardly seen or felt the places I am, for almost a month. 5th "Golden West Hotel, Tom speaking. What can I do for you?" His voice is easier when I catch him than when he has responsibility for the call. This call was just joy. Jan-Marie's story last night. She looked beautiful and was coming apart. "When Michael and I began I could never have guessed it would end this way." A man she would watch basketball and boxing with. He liked gangster movies. He was happiest when he was off somewhere by himself. He kept up with social justice issues everywhere. He'd read a lot. "He liked to give presents, and he gave good presents. My slippers, my favorite sweater." "He was a wonderful lover. I've never known such physical longing and pain." When Immigration refused him he was ready with another woman. She hasn't spoken to him since Christmas. She's only a month into pain that will go on for two years. Chris at Barry's class. What a strange little marmoset, a thick head of strong grey hair around a tiny withered face. stiff thin little body that walks as if it doesn't feel the ground. She sits with a passive curved pack and pulls her eyelids down like yellowed old blinds. She was a horse trainer and is writing about whale myths and concepts of power. She has a sort of arrogance along with a childish hiddenness. She's a repellant little thing but she has that idiosyncrasy and focus of us middle-aged woman scholars. Blindsided. Louie's book said, he's already standing next to you. When you feel the line at the solar, zoom closer, see the inside of the inside of its texture. Spread that through your whole body, even past its edges. Here is a man whose mother died so long ago that he has a lot saved to tell her. Here is a woman who has not been able to give anything to her father since she was two: she has a lot to tell him, a lot to show him. Both of these people know how far they can fall. They know they can be felled. They can fall apart. They are children who can't help laying open their hearts. They are not sure grief won't kill them if they are betrayed. They are in a terrific balance together. Neither is providing the safety of refusing. The word 'courage' means that they are going together toward always deeper risk that can never be other than individual. It can happen that either of them will come to a moment where it seems they must choose between dying and betraying. At that moment they may find help, or they may not. It could be accidental. They could fail at the same time and then one would have to be betrayer and the other betrayed. Or the one being betrayed could save the betrayer just in time. It could be that there are points of danger that can be passed. Or it could be that failure is written into their structures, each set for its own time, its own limit of capability, so no blame should come to the one whose limit arrives first. Or these are two people whose longing to give and show and tell is so great that once released and once accepted it will carry them through every fear. There's no way to tell. 8th Working with Laiwan yesterday and today laying out Brain and imagining. Laiwan is gleeful because she finds it scandalous. It's bold and simple. The best is what happens to the photo in negative - it becomes light fibre - it looks just the way I imagine wide nets. [*link photo] What should I think about this outing into the arts scene. My rivals will be annoyed. Laiwan may have intended that. Otherwise I don't know. Having it published anywhere might make academic contexts more used to it? Loud knock at nine o'clock. Prosperous Peter Tiessenhausen with his Greek nose and bright blood. I say, You're a man of my country. He says, You showed me what was possible. He's international, getting more so, Germany and New York, and has his land and will always have it. Somehow fortune loves him. And yet - what is it I feel is lacking. 9th When there was no letter today - hasn't been for ten days - I crashed. Was at the colour conference in pain. Introduced myself to Michael Snow who looked blurred, whose look was blurred. I'm happy to meet you, he said. Are you? I said, surprised. 10th How it was today. Bought a battery and had to hover exerting gentle pressure to get the guy to install it right. He broke the screw on the battery mount, which was corroded. Was going to hold down the new battery with a bungee cord. I could see he hadn't the concentration to work it out. I just kept coming in and gently making suggestions. What 'impatient' means - they are afraid to get into it for some reason. I just stand my ground without pushing. How do I do that. Keep up a quiet interest in the problem. Maybe I could hold this for you. Could you knock it through? Etc. Then there I have the mount in my hand, a sort of clamp with the broken screw rusted tight. "Go across the street and get a new one," he says. I walk into an ABC Brake and Muffler shop, twenty mechanics, cars on hoists, cars on rails over pits, shop's full. Ask in the parts shop, they say. In the parts shop it's the same. I have to concentrate. He says no they don't have that part. I stand my ground, looking quite nice with my black fringes drizzling down the unbuttoned top of my shirt that's showing an inch of black silk. Maybe we could ...? Etc. He bellows for one of his mechanics. He is a short middle- or near-Eastern guy, the mechanic a large Chinese man. The mechanic isn't fazed. Yes I can get that out. I'll have to heat it. He drags in a large welding rig, clamps my tiny piece in a vise, snaps his bic at the welding end and starts a big jet of flame. Directs this large fire at my bit of battery mount, winds out the corroded broken-off screw, finds a new bolt to fit, gets it moving with a dab of pink gunk, gives it to me. I go back to the parts man in his little office. How much do I owe you? Give me money! he says. I reach out my ten dollar bill. Go away! he says. I smile warmly, genuinely, because we have had a turn together, a pleasing play. We have understood each other. I take my bit over to the antsy battery salesman, he installs it, it works. He instructs me to service my battery; I understand that he's sleazing out of admitting he was incompetent. I don't hold it against him because I can't be bothered. Friendly goodbyes. There was sun that had a different quality. I was asking what it was, coming down off the hill yesterday. Is there more colour in the twigs? Is the light stronger? I feel we've turned the corner. 11th Sen Campbell at the colour conference told a story about moving to Brazil when he was seven. They told him everything would be different. He assumed he would be different. But when they got there he was still himself. A kind of human being he is - Teillard de Chardin when he was seventeen. He thinks the being who is being me is the same being who is being him, that consciousness joins us in a substrate. One of the reasons he thinks this is that when he was a child he looked at the stars and said to his father, What is behind them? His father said he didn't have to worry about what was behind them because they are so far away. Steven said to himself, No, there is something behind them and it is the same thing as what I am. It was a moment that marked him, he said. What I thought was that he was feeling his brain feeling the stars. 12th Bobby Wong, Jan-Marie said, is sick and has dropped out. Judith Stapleton came to find me after Barry's course. There are two separate things, she said (showing her philosophy training), one is that you want him to stay mad about you, the other is that you want him to learn what he has to learn to be able to live with you. 14 Long phone call last night. There's something I have to figure out, what to do when he's in that overriding insisting formulaic state, which most of the time on the phone he is. What happens to me is I feel I'm being shut down, shut up, held down. I hear myself sound girlish trying to break in on it. I heard myself silly last night. I go away and talk to Louie or Rob and hear myself warm and smart expanding in the space they hold open for me, and then there's Tom, who says he's my man, not holding even a crack of space open for me, in fact thrusting at me with sentences so hard and fast with so little present in them - they are so long prepared - that I feel battered. I go away lonely. You are insisting because for some reason you have to. What is your reason? - My heart warms this way as soon as I place myself on your side. When my heart warms I'm not lonely. This is a key. When I notice the way you're desperate and I'm not seeing it, the wind comes suddenly from another direction. In this one thing I don't learn fast. I have to learn the same thing again and again. But every time I learn it shining love comes into me. 15 As if I'm asking, what kind of life will it be? In that one central thing that I won't name I'm satisfied. Complete, central, cat-got-the-cream satisfaction. That is the thing I've been holding out for. It's also the thing that lays me open to threats from other women. So that's one thing about the kind of life it will be. I could say this. It is practically certain that he will eventually ditch me for another woman. How should I live in relation to that? Not holding back on account of it. I can survive that day. I can survive it without shutting down. I'll go to meet it having tasted every morsel of the cream of satisfaction. I won't hold back even to keep it. I'm vowing this and it's crucial. It's his way too. I'm elated when I say things like that, and then when there's no letter and it is already Thursday, I go into heartache I don't know how to live with. Dear larger one - dear largeness - I don't know how to live this     just live it I don't know what it is     you crash when you open yourself to abandonment Will I always be like that     yes it is what you were made So this is where courage starts     yes If I am with this man I will be hitting the rocks about once a week     maybe twice Do you recommend this     yes Why     you'll learn balance I'll learn to balance when I crash     yes Should I keep these crashes to myself     it depends on your intention My intention is to not shut down     you're brilliant and courageous He hides his crashes, does that shut him down     yes Does he know it shuts him down     no That part isn't my business     right So will you teach me balance     YES 17 "I wanted you to be what you are meant to be" says the mouse to the blind wolf. 18 Sunday morning. It's raining. First cup of tea in bed. I'll go make another. I'd like your hard-on in my mouth. Sex got shocked out of me when I left you but now it's coming back. On hold. Call waiting. It's waiting down there, a soft pointed oval. Last night Tom Fendler wrote me his first letter, and I had the wit to phone him this morning just as he was waking and hear it immediately. He was writing straight from his right hemisphere through to his left, unpleating what was folded there, shaking out the surfaces that had been close-packed. Rapid. That's right for him. Rapid and running. In the Gas Haus smoking and drinking coffee, happy in the music. Space to zip around. In the armchair in his specs. The hours pass. He's off his leash. "Let's do everything we've already done. Let's do everything we haven't done yet." My leg is his, he says. He can fuck but he can't be fucked, he sez. Both those passages had my heart stopped. I loved reading it to you, he sez. What made the difference, I ask the book. Love woman spoke to him in her simplicity, it says. 20 What I don't want to lose - what I want to make sure I don't lose - is the freedom, whatever it takes, to write the way I was writing last summer. That was total. What it took was immersion, Dennett day after day for months and then a crackup. I was undivided and I had complete privacy. I want to know also what that state has to do with the photo Louie has from that time. It scared me, I looked so massive and - I can't find the word - bizarre - like a legendary animal, a gorgon - a massive strange old animal. There is something we aren't used to, don't name, almost don't notice, about the way some of us are shape-shifters. That I can shift into that black thicknecked gorgon-philosopher is a power I've worked for, only, as always was, I worry if I move too far away from love woman. That's who I want to look like, that's who I look like in states of body love. Gorgon philosopher doesn't care what she looks like. She's satisfied with the precision of her fine control over a landscape of ultraviolet detail. So here it is: how do I get ready to move back and forth, daily maybe, between the twenty-five year old woman hotly in love with a man who's delicious, abrupt and bossy, and the helicopter empress-monster who is in complete liberty. 22nd Antsy - tense - hungry - junking out - bored - pressured - fed up with the discomfort of dirty winter, fed up with the empty ends of the days, eating for the contact with a taste in my mouth - pressed by obligations all of the same touchless heady kind - feeling ugly, heavy - on a weekly treadmill of readings that aren't my choice, and seminar meetings that break up my struggle to get to real work - starved for the realness that comes with love and touch - this is a life of straw - hating this town, hating this life I'm done with - anxious about money - spending money I don't have - dry and sour like earth under a porch - whiney - fretful. 24 With Louie yesterday finding Little No. I told her that yesterday, walking toward the library seeing the snowfall, I thought of driving downhill and skidding off the road. I noticed that there had been a tone in the fantasy of not caring if I died, of wanting to die. What I called it to Louie was a little sensation of wanting to die. She said, Can you speak to the little sensation? I addressed it. It didn't reply but I saw or felt the one refusing to reply, a small dark scowling force, a scowling gnome. I said to Louie, It doesn't want to speak but I'll act it out. I scowl. I mutter no. I go on muttering no. I'm small clenched and projected forward no, no NO growling and jerking my fists. Then I crack up. There's a river with boulders beside it, she says, How do you walk there? With difficulty, I stumble, I don't want to walk there, there's nowhere to go. The river with yellow light of sunset on it, a yellow west. I'll just sit here. I'll die. Etc. She says she felt I should hold Little No. I say I can't grab Little No but I can maybe just stoke her hair a bit. I stroke her hair. I stroke her little shoulders. I am sitting behind her. I stroke her little tummy. I'm murmuring to her, little tummy, oh your little little feet. I'm holding your little feet your little legs. Little No goes to sleep. I'm holding and rocking her and pulling her into my front. When I begin to do that I wonder whether I should hand her to the man to hold. I don't know whether I should ignore him while I look after her, or trust him to know how to hold her too. Earlier when I was beginning to hold Little No I thought of holding his form of her, as if that presented itself as something I could do instead. I saw that I do do it instead, and that I am confused in both ways, not knowing when they are substitutions, and when they are the thing to be done. I said also that the wanting to die is wanting to be the one who did die, the running girl. - Saturday midnight. I was at Paul Wong's party in such another spirit - lightly - as if I was there with someone. That was wonderful. At liberty meeting whoever was there. I wasn't miserable. I wasn't unfound. Paul's band was playing and I was clapping. That hollow-faced grad student started inserting beats between my claps or clapping my beats between two of his so there was something happening I didn't understand but trusted. I mean I couldn't perceive it but I could do it. He was concentrating so intently that it was as if I was learning inside his concentration, a kind of temporal curve-fitting. I know how many I have to fit into this interval, but I am not counting either the beats or any unit of the interval. Directly knowing time. It was also as if we were playing a kind of keyed tag back and forth - I can't say it - a play of hitting and just missing that drove itself to a limit. Watching Paul play electric guitar - the shape of motion it is - the body with one arm held outward on a plane with the torso and the other bent inward so the hand is over the belly doing something supernatural - the face says - the look on his face a divine coincidence of skill sex and religion - as he calls up a brightness and spins it out into a line - tensile - stretched and twisted in ways that say it's made of steel absorbed into electricity. I saw also the way that sharp attenuating line with its steep banked curves was the voice of Paul's midriff. The look on his face said he was on it, riding it, reaching with it. - In the new Le Guin, the historians on Hain. A boy who leaves local culture and learns the ways of people who know the ways are local. "What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything," he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. "What you build up your world from is nothing less than everything." He slept well, and woke early in the warm, bright morning, full of anticipation. He walked out to begin to know the city, his city. the soft, rushing, waterlike music with its infinitely delicate shifting rhythm, the touch and brush of palm against palm, a barely voiced, barely varied, long line of melody He looked through it for a few minutes. His face was curiously tender as he did so. I could not help watching him. It was like watching a woman with a baby, a constant, changing play of attention and response. 25 Work party today. Open sky, blue light, people pruning, weeding strawberries, planting new apples and tying them onto wires. Brian clearing the vine walk, Marushka with a weedeater chopping blackberries, Louie carrying away branches. I was among willows next to water clipping dead brambles into lengths and dragging live ones hand over hand out of rose thickets and treetops. A space along the shore. A shore. What I really wanted to remember was just working - the weave of light but stiff dead brambles, green and elastic live ones, brittle dead broom, live and dead willow, zigzag spurs and smooth whips of the rose, grown up through each other. I was sorting. And then Mary Pratt at the art gallery - oh my. Cod fillets on foil, a cantaloupe half in glass on china, a baby being bathed in a hand basin, the foot of a bed with chenille and sheets thrown back, two plucked chickens, Donna in a wicker chair, Donna in blue bathwater, three eggshells in an egg carton. The scent in the room where Aganetha Dyck had her honeycomb pieces. 26th Monday at the end of February, open sky, open day, six weeks to the middle of April. Today I have to figure out the printer score for my film. Here's a wonderful thing. bright and dark will be a film whose only images are those baked into it where it sat in its taped film can day after day in the trunk in the parking lot on G Street. It wasn't any particular hot midday, it was all of them. Das fliessende Licht - the flowing sibilants of medieval German. On the last day we will not ascend from the place of the world, but will remain as in our own country, and go home into another world, into another principle of another quality ... this earth will be like a crystalline sea, where all the wonders of the world will be seen, all entirely transparent, and the radiance of God will be the light within it. [*Vaughn?] 28 Given photos of faces expressing sad and happy emotions in males and females, women easily discriminated but men were so unable to recognize that a woman's face was sad, that they were like people with lesions (said the researcher). 1st March You must be happy in Leucadia, I feel you so joyfully present as I work. It's 3 in the afternoon. - Yeah! I was right. Here's a question - if excitement and love come through this distance so confidently and clearly, then are the miserable states something coming through too? 2nd Saturday - oh clear day. - A couple of hours in the garden, moving the current bushes, fencing the raspberries on Muggs's side, hauling four barrows of compost, shaking quack grass off the fork in the southwest edge, mounding up the low bed with warm wormy stuff. Working in my plots I'm rehearsing sharing them - I put a flat stone where you might sit to feel our vegetables around you - would you want to look at your own vegetables? - I have no idea - but you'll sit on the bench under the willow. The reason I like to see you smoking, I thought as I came up the wild area path with the wheelbarrow, is that a fire in your hand is a magic coincidence of you and your emblem. So you'll sit smoking looking at the pond, and I'll be in my plots seeing you through the multiflora whips and against the water's glitter. You'll be surveying what's there in a spirit I can predict exactly - but can I say it. You have a way of being pleased that is particular to you. It's quiet. It's complete satisfaction. You sit back. It's quiet but it's quiet in a way that's something else banked. "I was a happy dog." It's satisfaction but it's beyond satisfaction into joy - but it's too quiet to be joy - calling up each of these words to scrutinize its emotional tone. There's no one word for what you particularly are - but you've always been that, you've always come back to being that - you've been that since you were a baby. It's your way of feeling fortune smile on you. I was lying among the willows looking up at different kinds of twigs - willow, cottonwood, bird cherry, multiflora rose - against the blue - and began to see that the colors I was seeing were being toned by other relations among the things I was seeing. For instance there was a red line along the edge of the twigs that was contrast. More, and this is where I saw it first, where the twigs overhead were closer together, the blue between them was blacker. I was seeing the difference there'd be between painting well and painting as if we thought of the sky as blue. 3rd Crashing. See how predictable. I spread out in love and then I crash. Alright, large one, teach me - Sit still and kiss where it hurts, as if it is his sore heart not mine - then go scrub the bathroom - leave soft rock on all afternoon - scrub the bench - the ceiling - the mirror - the walls - I washed parts that haven't been washed since I painted it twenty years ago - I was washing it because before you get here I have to wash the whole house - the bathroom was for this week - I washed the rug - oh buckets of grime. 5th Got up at 4, a strip of moonlight under the west window. I could do my voice track. It's so quiet. I want to do it at a mic distance like a mouth to an ear on a pillow. Two and a half minutes of breaths. Run the voice across light-breaths scored for the voiced breaths? That, I think. Ask Mary to get into Protools early. (She phones and offers.) "Stunned interiority," "exquisite thoughts diagrammatically envisioned," "a somehow autistic malfunction," "attempts at love for women who dulled out at the borderline of felicity," "just to touch the flaming dove," "killer sublimated to knight," "I have been reckless in every area of my life, I have been captured by and escaped from many addictions and compulsions." [Tom writes] I saw an awful thing among us. And that was passion could twist around and choose someone else just like that. That in one minute I knew Nora loved me and then, whatever I did from a certain day on, her eyes were hunting Pickett's mouth and silence. There was nothing I could do. Pickett could just stand there and he had her heart balanced on his tongue. And then with Robin and me - Jaelin stood there far more intelligent and sensitive and loving and pained and it did nothing to her, she had swerved to me like a mad compass, aimed east east east, ignoring everything else. Galloway taught me not craft but to play a mood of sound I would recognize and remember drawn to opposites. In terror we lean in the direction that is most unlike us. Running past your own character into pain. Ondaatje Michael 1996 Coming through slaughter Vintage "Will you be clear with me? Be clear." You say. What angel comes when I crash, a shining black angel with black iridescence. Not a mean angel, an angel that looks into my eyes with nothing but compassion, the angel Agony who says, Be clear. Not for him. For another reason. Accept the stake through the heart. Don't run. Stand in your place which is just precisely this one, where you let yourself hear what the youngest one in you gave up on. Feel it as if it's true - feel it. Be as unsafe as that. Know it is false. See who is saying it and why. Don't run. You can't know what you are building. 6th Dear large one, this is an awful, awful day     in what way? Pain, anxiety, despair, misery     what would you like? I'd like to be somewhere else, I'd like to be free. I'd like to be in California in a clean little house with doors and windows open. I'd like to be alone. I'd like it to be summer. I'd like to have enough money. I'd like to be working the way I worked on the Dennett paper, my own way     what about love, sex, attachment? There is so much anxiety in that, I'd be better alone. wouldn't I? please tell me the truth     you have to love Couldn't I just love the place?     no I can't love when I'm so anxious     you can Is it blocking love that makes me anxious?     yes What could I love?     love your anxiety, unite with it Aren't I united with it?     no, you'd have to get slower Just do nothing?     YES Then there's that awful conversation - an awful conversation. He forgot my birthday. He says he's working on his wardrobe and his haircut. And then a second bad conversation, Mary. She says, How's Tom? and I'm startled. I say he's fine but I'm having second thoughts. She says I seemed more feminine. I said, What does that mean? I knew what she meant, the way I spoke about working with him. I say I experienced my father as so hateful I do not have the security to be able to do that. I put my toe in and experience such overwhelming anxiety. I feel I will be contempted. She says, The christian faith .... I say I have a faith and help, probably more than she does, but maybe some things can't be fixed. The inner strength and beauty of what women do ... serving, she says. There is a tone I almost hear, something pinched. I was speaking in thick despair and couldn't register just what it was. I was giving up my pride with her, I was saying you have to take account of what you made me, I am disabled in this thing you want me to be to be like you. I am in despair - that is the name of it - I'm in despair not in pride - my heart is trembling. I am not strong enough. I am panting with pain. He is not able to support me to support him. The life of a woman with a man is unbearable to me and it has also been unbearable to me to be without it. I don't trust him. He is asking me to give him unearned trust so he can feel he's trustworthy. I don't trust him. That's the fact. I'm in unbearable insecurity. 7 Feel the confidence and the agony at the same time. What's beyond them is anger. Find the pain as early love. Struggle with your anger at him, observe it carefully. The ways of feeling you used to survive your mother's betrayal, betray him. Control is lonely. Manhood is a feeling that you are a bad thing you must control. I am scared of how much illusion there is in him. Tell him you don't depend on him, the Work looks after you. I can't tell the difference between dependence and openness. Fight your own structure 1) of dependence, 2) of needing to cut off. Suspended attachment. Don't stop writing him, write how bad you feel. He is lying about his capabilities. We can't do it. Love woman's catastrophe will bring you true search. If brilliance and courage win, love woman will come through. You're in crisis. Happiness requires that you balance in catastrophe, change of place, heartbreak. Realize how young you are. Learn to stay open without crashing. See through it, see what it has to do with your father. He doesn't act like a man who loves me, he acts like a man who needs to think he loves me. Something about love woman and responsibility. Trust has to be completed in time though it begins in risk. His need for true responsibility in the world. He didn't make it in the world. Unlived mourning dished him. He was afraid his badness would win. He has been afraid of himself.   In relation see yourself as already complete and ready to give. See the limits of your capacity to love unconditionally. When you are not at peace see where you are holding love at bay. Someone's weakness will be brought to you to be released. Give your life as whole-hearted response to love. Honor the process of growth. Is this right     YES I have to disappear     no you have to become active If I take him on it will be a life of sacrifice     In relation to him I have to only think of him     Can I do this?     no, I can I would have to step out of the way     Is this what you want me to do     And then he will betray me     not necessarily Can I do this and still work     no If I want to marry him I have to give up everything else     no you will be beautiful and fertile He doesn't love me but needs to say he does, that is very hard     Why am I in agony so much of the time     because you are surrendering your devices     You're telling them [other people] for the wrong reason, to prove you are a woman who can get a man.   Things to observe about early love: it crashes; it's absolute - total safety or total rejection; it turns on small things; withdrawal is its only defense. You have to learn to be proactive. He has to learn he's not alone. The Work is with him and loves him unconditionally. When you crash it's the pain the connection was protecting you from. You have a compulsion to decide he ditched you, because the pain is there as if he had.   Love woman isn't careful. He's dominating excluded child. You're hurt about stopping love woman.   Shadow man in you - when you deal with him you'll have the tool.   Bond-saw for cutting to be able to have bonds, cut withdrawing. Go on filling up with love. She was giving me responsibility, fighting patriarchy and shattering the structure of exclusion. It's for cutting what binds me and what binds him, that's your job. Love woman is stern at times. When you pray, pray that he doesn't withdraw.   He is certain to drop you for another woman. Love him with no holds barred knowing that is so. It will liberate love woman's creativity to give up on success. What you should be doing is stopping feeling excluded. Say - Tom, take a breath. Say - Be with me.   You're sick of not flowing, not loving. Your responsibility is to love woman, to live her pain. Pain is her only true state but if you don't live her she is unconscious. 8th Five in the morning. What I knew when I woke - that the solution is interpersonal - that I am in his hands. "We are on the wire together," he said. "And you dropped me." "I know I did." "And I got a broken leg, what were you doing?" "Woolgathering." "I think I'll just sit on the ground for a while." That I am so fine-tuned I go off the scale if he is careless, he said. Careless is not what he is, he zonks out and loses track, is what he is; he is fine-tuned too but disrespects himself for the sake of manhood ideas: "I pump confidence, my father taught me that." There were two days of extreme pain. I worked with Roger in the sound room and that began to be better but then when Tom phoned later and said he had sent something and had heard me after the conversation and had heard that it was a heart cry and wanted to mend me - then it was finally over. 8 Monday - such quiet - how does it stop like that? 9 The overall shape of his life shows an amazing drive to be real - I think of booze cigarettes weed music and infidelity as sleazing out but the evidence is that he's used them to stay real - even disrespecting me is a way of staying real. Is this where I'm confused - yes - two kinds of being real - reality of own energy OR seeing the other in reality - here's the root contradiction. What to conclude: in a coupled system the two kinds of realness have to be built together or they both fail. We can't afford hardening, punishment, blanking or other ways of copping out. We have to be true in the ways that make consequence clear, ie the true consequences: when you do this, this is what happens to me. That's all. "He should see how you live first, otherwise he will make horrible mistakes," Jan-Marie says. "I told him," I say. "Did he hear you?" she asks. Shrewd Jan-Marie. "No," I say. "He has no idea who you are," she says. What I like about this conversation is that I know she knows why I don't disqualify him for that. David Birch's voice on the phone. At least we can talk, he says. At most, I say. We laugh. 11 Driving down the hill through flowering trees - that and the light. The hill is two layers of color, cherry-pink fuzz of alder, below it burnished-syrup salmonberry stalks. The salmonberry is gorgeous drawing, gorgeous arcs. 13 Did you come in late last night? It was maybe two in the morning. My heart turned on. Rowen on the phone last night, depressed, bushed, he said, wants to come to town. 14 It's seven-thirty, bright sky, Thursday. I've done two tremendous jobs of cleaning, bathroom and workroom. Scrubbed everything - chairs in the tub, table surface with Mr Clean and the brush. The pink rug is drying on the stair rail. I'm doing this work in a spirit of faith and hope. 17 It was a day so beautiful. White sky when I opened my eyes. I saw it by a shadow next to the door, a softness of its edges. In early afternoon there was uncertain sun. Cheryl and I on the bench - we brought the bench and placed it - Tom's bench under the willow. The ducks were in a tizzy, two sets of two pairs. It would hit this set but not that one. They were skidding on the surface, all suddenly shooting under water, rising vertical and flapping. There was a redwing blackbird. There were bright bits, bright green. Louie's offended and it is complicated - she's offended that I was outing her - it's true it was an unfriendly instinct - I'm annoyed she's annoyed - she's annoyed I am not concluding what she is concluding - I don't care - she doesn't care - 18 The structure of my connection with Louie, how it's like gender structure. She's 'caring' and moralistic and I'm careless and annoyed at being guilted. She's articulate and righteous in complaint and I have a dim smothered sensation that she's doing as bad or worse to me but I can't get a line on what it is. bright and dark what do I have it's sort of starling black with color it's the life of the body but it isn't magnetic touch, it's active ether what I am in the picture is the screen 22nd That was two days not so much of pain as of work. I was praying yesterday afternoon. I was at wit's end. Then got up and phoned him and said, The wire is jumping a little, are you having a hard day? Feeling guilty about not holding up his end of the conversation, he said. Tom is not a bad boy, I say, and go peacefully to work in the garden. At nine when he phoned he spilled for half an hour. Fearing what he should be fearing as much as he should be fearing it. The string says he'll bail out and recover. I wrote a letter this morning, feeling it out as Rowen was working with me on spelling. Wrote it in a slow large hand. I should ask whose. It's not this one. I said his wanting me to love him is enough to start with. That is my true conclusion. He is strong enough to want that and show it and that has been my saving grace. It's what I know for sure. I've sorted that. Last night a lifetime's perfect half hour, Rowen Luke and I on the floor playing boules with marbles on the blue blanket. I'd fed them toast, Luke had a good day and brought me money he owes, the San Diego lamp shone beautifully on the beautiful floor. We were all winning. I knew Tom was phoning at nine, Cheryl walked in during the call, Louie phoned later. This morning I insisted Rowen do his two hours. I taught him strategies for learning to spell. He was right there. "You did good work!" I said, "We did good work." He shone. That's what he wants. - What it's like to be a human being: insecurity and conflict you're walking on a wire you're going to fall off I'm so wise today - I'm saying I've got it now - it's not about reducing conflict it is about bearing greater and stronger stress. - With Louie in her borrowed red car, eating ice cream behind the International Gelato factory. Louie is overwhelmed by her contradictions. I kiss her hand and say, It is hard to be Louie. She cries. We are somehow properly sorted. She is in her own life with women her own age. She's getting what she used to demand. 25th Monday Unnerved today - what do I want - to be living with you - I want it so bad I am cracking. Yesterday I worked - yesterday was wonderful. Rowen slept at Jim's, it was Sunday. I started working and just kept on into the afternoon, a light precise grip. She says [Karen Kain, i think]: ... the great ballerina roles that are full of dancing that is about opening up, not just of the body, but of the entire being, to love ... It has been a real ambition of mine, thwarting other ambitions, coming between me and all other goals: to be a woman in love. In love lies the possibility not only of fulfillment but of adventure and risk, and for once I was not afraid - either to suffer or to make suffer - And then a story about watches. He describes them in detail. It is as if there's been a switch. The man I've been pining for got replaced by a manic consumer - who worked up a whole story about getting one for him and then getting one for me, and they're worth X dollars. 27 Today I'll finally see Joyce. It's five in the morning. I'm wanting to read you the last two months. My string says not to. It's an indulgence. It costs too much, it closes you down. But I want to - I'm afraid I will be left out of this connection. I am afraid you'll leave me out. It will be just you and what you are assuming. The shut-out feeling I have when you insist you're giving me a watch and go on for months ignoring what I want, which is letters. I want you to want to write letters! No good. I'll get a lady's sports watch instead: black face, radium lettering etc. I'm laughing. 28 Reconnaissance in Tom Clancy, what's this man's fantasy and why. High government, spies, high commerce, high armed forces, a large cast of people almost completely reduced (as characters) to their job titles. Characterization I'm noticing is a paragraph of background for each new name. Far more names of aircraft than of women. A hyped feel. Short sections every one of which features a man with some kind of power. Inside knowledge. Is there a name for the tone of this circle of hell - it's colorless - it is sense-less - there's a sort of high blood pressure speed. Japanese, Russians and Americans are indistinguishable, so indistinguishable they can play each other and nobody notices. Then page 250 of 750 there is a young woman raped murdered photographed and described lying with a wet patch between her legs. 29 It's loveless. There has been - first 400 pages - not a single note of love of any kind for anything. Something else: "We're people who think in a certain way, who believe that they can do the things they want to do. Everything follows from that. It's confidence, optimism, the one thing the other countries find so strange about us. If you take that away, hell, we're no different from anybody else." I understood something at night, what was it. That they [men] go into this sort of fantasy to exercise a capability they have no place for, and women reading Gothic romance are the same. I mean they are wired to fight and we are wired to be overwhelmed and both these motives are deep-end stupidities that are there as counterweights not as guidance systems - something like that. It's 6 in the morning. I am not overwhelmed. Taking Rowen to the airport and then going to school. Then work begins again. - Rowen is home and I'll talk about him. Rowen is beautiful. Physical brightness as if his cells are perfectly clean. A bright tight boy-body. Clean brown eyes, bright pink cheeks. He's clear and confident: says what he has to say. A kind of business boy. He thinks out his course of action, gets on the phone and sets it up. He has his eye on the possibilities but he's not greedy - generous, rather. I've never seen a speck of malice in him. He has Luke's concern to not hurt anyone's feelings. There was a jump in his intelligence this time. He thinks about presenting himself well. I said this is the house of concentration cos the queen of concentration lives here. Next thing he was using the line on Lise on the phone. I'll stop and say this is feeling odd because I am hanging between writing a letter and writing journal. That's not good. That there should be a difference is not good but worse is if I lose the journal. I am not lying but I am presenting and that makes me stupider. Alright, letter: I want to tell you about going to Blaine with Rowen. First, about seeing Joyce. I gave her the Brain and imagining piece. This is wonderful, this is wonderful, she says. She looks as though her ego has dissolved so much that she is making herself sick. She is old and overwhelmed. It's worrying but she is sharp. I give her a small pile of slides and the viewer. "I can't see this. It's two people, there's an arm .... Oh it's you! Who is the man?" I say she'll see. "He's lovely" she says. "I'm so glad you like him." I show the ten year old and the two year old and the hotel. "So you're in love" she says. "I'm something" I say, "I don't want to say I'm in love because you always say it goes away." "It changes, it gets deeper," she says. "But every other guy I've talked about you've said it's unreal," I say. She says the way I was about them was unreal: "This one is here" she says. "Yes he's here" I say. That's what I think too, but I have to check this out. I've got the photo of Roy turned upside down in the folder. I'm hesitating. Why do I want to show it to her. "This is where I left off" I say and give it to her. She recoils. "Who is this?!" She says the look on his face is so sinister she doesn't like to look at it. I'm amazed. I have never seen it that way. She says he looks as if malice is heading toward downright evil. I have always seen it as a kind of vulnerable appeal. She gives it back to me. For a split second I see what she sees: it is so hateful a look I turn the picture over on my knee. "Can I see it again," she says. She studies it. Gives it back. I have gone back to seeing it as intense but vulnerable appeal. The way she is seeing it is correct: Roy is a psychopath. But why do I have this blindness. "You see why I don't trust my judgment," I say. I'm still amazed. I have no doubt that she's seeing it right but what is this telling me about my vision. She doesn't see that in Tom she says. She sees that he wants me to love him. He is projecting. There will be trouble about his mother. He will be possessive. I can encourage his feeling self - gently, she says. He is also telling me what I want to hear. But most of the crashing has nothing to do with him, is her guess. It's my system working itself into what it wants to feel from other times. I should do what I can to help him find work, it would be a kindness to him and it would ground me, she says. I go home and get Rowen and we fly south up Main and west on Marine Drive and then take the Seattle road through sun to the border. The American border guard says "Purpose of your trip?" "To buy a newspaper." We walk around Blaine looking for newspapers, mailbox companies, motel offices, City Hall, the Banner office. Asking around. Rowen is hungry. We'll soon eat I say. The motel woman says drive around to the Semi-ah-moo across the water. We ride south through alder woods. Spring sun. The mudflats are brown and shining. We find the hotel. We talk to the girl at the desk, the girl in the health club office. We take away an application form. We are driving away. First café we come to, we'll stop, I say. What can we talk about? says Rowen from the back seat. Can I talk to you a bit about Tom, so you'll know why we're doing all this? I say that when I was twenty-five, Luke's age, I was with Luke's dad and he was a mean person who used to get drunk and bash me on the head and say he was going to kill me and lie to me and sleep with my friends, and that after that I kind of went into a shell and wasn't very nice to any of the men I knew, including Michael, but then things started to get better and Louie was nice to me, and Michael was nice to me and other people were nice to me, and now Tom was nice to me and I was coming out of my shell a little bit more all the time. Rowen took it in seriously and interestedly and pondered and then said, So today did you come all the way out of your shell? I saw a little eggshell left on the floor in Joyce's office and said I thought yes. Then we stopped at a diner with old electric guitars, fifties music, James Dean and Marilyn Munroe posters, and had a mushroom burger and two cokes and came home. It was the first time Rowen had been in any foreign country. Rowen dropped my teapot lid into the toilet yesterday morning. 'Is it broken?' I'm calling. Silence. 'Is it broken, Rowen?' 'Just a minute, I have to get a plastic bag,' he says. I fish it out barehanded from under his squished turd. The knob has broken off (but it has broken clean and I'll glue it). What else. Something in my typewriter went boing and that's the end of it. One more thing that's maybe worst, nothing you say you have mailed has arrived. I'm beginning to think that you haven't in fact mailed anything and are just saying you have, and if that's true the implications are deep. 30th The notion of honor [Clancy]: "Everyone in this room wanted all the others to look and see a person worthy of respect and trust, and honor." Something odd there. I know women who are hugely honorable and they don't think about honor at all. For them it is like having a clean house, they do what is necessary to stay real with themselves and other people because they don't want to spoil the quality of their consciousness. Okay, here it is. Honor trust and respect are more of an issue to them because - not because it is harder for them - women are dishonorable too - but because of the way they have to deal with the way it is hard for them. They have to talk to themselves about it. An honorable woman does not; it is just part of her intelligence. They have to build a work-around. If we don't defend that principle, we don't defend anything. And nobody will trust us, and nobody will respect us ... if we turn our back on them, then we are not the people we say we are, and everything we have ever done is a lie They are not the people they say they are, whether or not they defend principles. And yet it makes a difference whether they do or don't. "My honor as a man." As if a man thinks he is split down the middle half white and half black so that the white half makes promises which are in fact promises to defeat the black half. That's my quandary with Tom - it's as if he promises to protect me from the half I'd like to go to bed with. My position is very tricky. I want the whole man. When I was kissing him it was his left side I started with. But as long as he is divided there will be sabotage. It's the division that funds masculinity/America, etc. There's a subtheme in Clancy - the dangers of disarmament. Something else. Tom thinks his black side is a bad man but in fact it is a woman kept in the dark. That is why he likes it when I say I am a warrior woman not a helpless princess. What is it you like about him? Joyce asks. I like the way he walks, I say. - Nine o'clock. I skipped through the combat section, which was the last 200 pages. And now I'm laughing. He blows up the White House. Horatio Alger gets to be president. Talk about Oedipal triumph. He kills their guys and then he kills his guys. Fendler - I know you laughed. But when he made his speech about America being a dream you put your hand over your heart. Didn't you. - I go say so. It's Saturday morning and I know where you are. But I didn't know you were talking to Rebecca. When you quote yourself talking to her I hear so much in your tone. The way you say her name. The tone of your marriage. It's familiar and it's intimate. You were friends. I like the sound. There's more in it than I can say. There's no bluff in it. It's light and fond and sexy and has the nicest balance of irony. It's charming. I wouldn't want anyone saying no to me in that voice. 31st At Barry's last night a woman with tunnel vision. She sees quite well in a little sector at the upper left of her left eye's field of vision. She had a strong voice and a very clear face, a very clean pointed oval chin. She liked my films because the images stayed still long enough for her to find them. Two gay men and two prize-winning female Scottish terriers. Good food and brown patterns everywhere. Show ribbons. In the gender spectrum they are between girlfriends and boyfriends - they are two the same, not polar, like a lesbian couple who are butch to the same degree. When I said I wanted to understand the structure of straight guys Barry got nervous. "I have only one thing to say to the baritone: I see a woman in your eyes." He said it twice and changed the subject. - That famished feeling today - it's like an edge - I'm desperate for something.   part 2 the golden west volume 5: 1996 january-april work & days: a lifetime journal project