the golden west volume 5 part 2 - 1996 april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

1st April Is he jamming my radar? Is the whole play of lies about letters an instinct to cripple me? What I dreamed, a long natural road that penetrated an area of muskeg and bush. I'm thinking it must be volcanic but I don't see a volcano. It is raised like a platform, wide, flat, and seems to be made of gravel. My companion and I when we come to the end of it walk off the side and see under it a long storage room full of stuff - chairs, a piano, a sewing machine. As always I'm looking to see whether there's anything I need, though there's no way I could transport any of this stuff. The road is disconnected at both ends. Is love true? It says yes. Is love false? It says, sometimes. Is there a way to tell the difference? It says yes. Can you tell me what it is? Love fights for the other person's spirit. 3rd I stood my ground last night. That's what it takes. There's still an edge in my solar. I wonder whether it means there's further ground to stand ~ 4th I'm seeing how powerful the present is to change the past. His declarations and my openness hang there by threads. If I forgave him and if he somehow made it here, we could save them. They would be made true. If I cut him off they are made false, he is confirmed a boaster and a liar, and I am confirmed a fool. Having said that I want to say, right, he's a boaster and a liar and I am a fool. Better that than the endless labor it would be to try to keep those beautiful things afloat. - Joyce says he's deeply crippled in his self-esteem. He couldn't write or send the tape because he felt he isn't good enough. He feels he has to be more than he is or I won't accept him. I have a choice of setting a boundary that respects my limits, or else I can choose unconditional love. If I love him unconditionally it doesn't matter how he treats me, it is the loving that makes me happy. Unconditional love is taken care of, it doesn't have to take care of itself. But it is a hard discipline. The people she summoned. Speak to the child, she said. I wept that I hadn't looked after her, I said I tried so hard to see through everything, I did everything I could. The child said, Don't worry about it, I'm fine. I don't need you. I disregard you. Tom? We had fun. Easy come easy go. There are other fish - I said to my parents, You're scum, you're moral vermin, you are ugly little bugs. Because of you I have lived most of my life starved for attachment. I still spend half my time struggling in the impossibility of needing to love and not having the foundation for loving. "Have that superiority talk to heart." "You're a pretty girl but you can't take care of yourself." "Perfect," Joyce says. "Now be heart and speak to that superior one. Really be heart." I was kneeling holding the superior one. Is there time in this life for marriage, I ask. This life is marriage, she says. Okay, but ...? Relationships are about work, she says, you hold the space for me while I bring my junk and then I hold the space for you while you .... And you pick the person according to whether they can do that? Yes. She loved a man who was deeply crippled in that way, she said, that's how she knows. It was alright when she was in unconditional love. You couldn't save him? No. I'm listening to myself hector him, interpret him, second-guess him, punish him, brow-beat him, patronize him, compete with him, scrutinize him. - I suddenly remembered I had to reach Paul Churchland and/or Phil. No answer in Paul's office. I'm looking for Phil's number. The phone rings. Phil says, You haven't got through to Paul yet? Well I have. He's pretty pleased with your paper. Phil's tone was - impressed - kind of coyly impressed. "It's a solid A. He said if we have any more students like you we should send them down. You're an ambassador for the department." What it was about his tone was that he was more impressed than he has known to be before, AND he was taking credit as if I really were working under him. And now the whole department is going to be more impressed and take credit. 9th I've traveled through many stations of false feeling. Anger and revenge, paranoia, desolation and isolation, gossip, bargaining, impatient cutting off, physical processing, sorrowful renunciation, feminist indignation, grief at the death of memory, grief for his aloneness, study to understand, inner dialogue, therapy, sudden action, housecleaning, ritual, the string, righteousness, clear but firm refusal, tough love. Louie was good. She said in the midst of a good weekend she had cried wanting him to have a chance, wanting us to have a chance. When I said I was feeling how much I know about him, how when I put his things into an envelope I grieved that I would forget everything about him, the pictures of him as a child, his voice, his life with Rebecca, all our moments, I broke into an agony so strong I could hardly speak. Oh sweetie, Louie said. That was exactly right. "I am the only person in the world who is holding that for him, there is nobody else." "I am wondering how it would be for him to know how much you feel him," she said. "He can't hold for me enough so I would be able to feel it in his presence," I say. I'm feeling I should stop the journal, the string. - 10th I went to bed with the phone beside me. It was ten past nine. He isn't going to phone. Amazing. What will I do. I'll wait. I lay down in the dark and felt beautiful swarms of energy up my legs and through my sex. I was lying marveling, I'm alright, I'm in no pain at all. I'm peaceful. Much later the phone rang. I turned on the light to see the time. It was 9:50. He had sent me a letter saying he couldn't honorably phone me tonight because he can't come when he said he would. He was walking around in agony not phoning. He was drunk. He is saying he's a month behind in his rent and has personal debts. Dick the boss and Davie Rayo knew his dad: he can't blast out leaving a mess. He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to prove he was worthy, but he can't do it. He'll come in a couple of months. Let's have an amnesty on all promises and declarations I say. You try to force yourself. You're Irish. You sometimes lose contact with the facts, do you think it's safe to say that? "This is a graceful phone call." That was true. - And now in age I bud again After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. O my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night. Herbert, The flower - Yesterday's peace is not today's return of hope. I see that peace is much better than hope. The hope is a flowing-over of wanting to give what I find and am. I mean wanting to write letters, read things on tape, tell him things. The way a child gives. 11 Two moments. One when I was putting his things into the envelope to send back - letters, slides, books, tram tickets, photocopy, poems, photos, sunglasses, John Mayall. The last thing I saw was his face. It was alive. A small face in my hand looking at me with such fearless bright presence I was stopped in my tracks though I kept moving fast. How can I let this person go? I put him in the envelope and taped it shut and taped it around and across and took it to the post office in Chinatown. And then was ready to crack. I needed the death. The other moment was the cracking. I saw it as a burst, as if a small block of time that suddenly gave off a bleat of high energy. Quantum burst. Louie felt the first edge of real grief and supported it. "Oh sweetie." And then I burst not into tears but into a grief so dense and sharp I could only speak one word at a time, gasping. It was like a packet because it began and ended suddenly. When it was over I was in peace that carried me through the rest of that day and the next. What can I know about the descent again into daydream, figuring-out, television, blank eating, anxiety. Off-balance. The good state is quiet - it sits looking - eats and drinks not much at a time - vibrates - is fearless - has no agenda - doesn't write this kind of stuff. - Reading Coleridge notebooks. Intoxication, recklessness, guilt, collapse, shame, despair, bewilderment, self exortation: psychological note-taker of huge driven energy. Coleridge is phenomenal. Coleridge is so close to me and my far ends. a focus of Ferment just above the Navel [26 april 1826] Deep Sky is of all visual impressions the nearest akin to a Feeling / it is more a Feeling than a Sight / or rather it is the melting away and entire union of Feeling & Sight 12 Very unstable in the pureness of sorrow. I start dreaming strategies and they feel so bad, like suicide of heart. What does pure sorrow say? Just goodbye, with tears. Take the next step, what am I saying goodbye to? There isn't an answer I understand. I saw an image of him much younger than he is now, standing the way I saw him stand when he was throwing grapes to the gulls, taller than he actually is, but with that stance the width of his hips gives him. Dark red hair. He is as if standing in the midst of his life with the accomplished whole of it around him. He is standing, not moving. Facing me. It is as if I am saying goodbye to my contact with the whole of that life. It is like a death. - "Jessica Dubroff is dead." A seven year old trying to be the youngest person to fly across the US crashed taking off from Cheyenne, Wyoming in a storm, her father and flying instructor with her. There was a clip of her mother waiting on the east coast very composed. "Jessica was very high on her plan." She seemed to be saying, my daughter took a real chance and I honor her by taking it with her. She fell into her high fate and I with her. 13 "The end" I said on the tape. It took three hours to read. What have been the chapters. The first section I read him was the trip. That was preamble. The next was up to the first crash, assessment. The next was depth, we let go. It overlapped coming back. The section I read last night begins with Jan-Marie's ominous story. It unfolds finding him out. It ends when he was going to arrive. What did I know in the reading and hearing afterward. What a young voice I have at fifty. Light. That it's me who's taken by the waves. I do anchor: the record is my anchor. But I'm on a very long rope. Seeing the chapter outline I actually don't think it is the end. I think what happened in the last chapter had to happen and is another gate, like reading him my first assessment. I think he should come, when he is really squared off, because it is an act of faith that would shift our ground, like the act of faith it will be for me to live with him. It is like putting ourselves not in each other's hands but in the hands of a larger whole that will take us apart and reassemble us. Painfully. Thoroughly. To some good end. I actually believe this. I don't know that we'll make it but I do know this is where we are on the map. Saying so feels centered and what that means is having arrived in peace again. Is that correct     YES Has he come to the same conclusion     YES How is he     intelligent I'm drifting away in fantasy again     Is it a kind of withdrawal     Can you tell me what to do with it     share it Tell him about wanting to get married in the herb garden?!     Hedge it     NO Mark it as fantasy     Everytime I have a fantasy about him, tell him     Is that all there is to say about it     Good idea     it is a way of not withdrawing "Sometimes out of a morass of personal miseries, economics, metaphysics, politics and religion in the notebooks," Coburn on C. Coburn Kathleen 1974 The self-conscious imagination   looking at sky. The eye feels as if it were to look thro' with dim sense of the non resistance II 2346 deep as a deep river, and deep in color, & those two depths so entirely one, as to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet II 2453 the truth is, we stop in the sense of Life just when we are not forced to go on III 3632 in looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro' the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists a word distinctly heard by a thousand men, yet all & entire for each ... the Idea cannot be conveyed; but there are magic sounds & magic combinations of Sounds that have power either to awaken the Idea in congenrous minds / this work is not the Idea, but the ceremonial Rites by which I invoke it, or provoke to it. unpublished notebook, in Coburn 66 "to carry further than Kant the meaning of Reason and to make his own use of it to include imagination" "He preferred method to system." "Setting out from the grimmest realities so as not to end there." Poetry the corolla & fragrance of the austere and many Sciences unpub, Coburn 49 14 Anxiety needs creation maybe beyond the working-out I try to do here. Those lifts of the heavy wave that won't let me do anything else. It sez no, what it needs is pain. There is creation afterward. That's the kind of person you are. Rose-red the little blackhaired girl who is sitting anxious and small in a bed with bars. She is waiting on and on. This bed with bars is a timeless place. Little one you are so alone here. I'll visit you. You can call me. Someone said he would come for you. He doesn't come. But I will. I'll come every day. 15 At Martin and Kathleen's party, Ray says he has been tracing or and if with excitement that has taken him from logic toward wanting brain science. He's seeing what I'm seeing, though we aren't speaking the same language about it. - Reading about tsunamis with my heart in my mouth realizing what it was for you and your mom to wait out the tsunami together on Mount Soledad - the age you were, and why she didn't take anything from the house, and you took your guitar. It is a terrifying story, because you came down safely together but then when the real wave hit, when the wave really hit, it knocked you on the head and threw you far inland, and took her away to oblivion. Oh my dear. - Monday evening. Second time through your tape. I don't hear much the first time through. The second time it knocks me into baffled longing. The package that came on the day I had written in for you to be here - by what significant, mischievous substitution. What you send me. A scarf or handkerchief with a cigarette burn, that I search for your smell. A woven wallet, by what story I don't know. This little image of your girl in a landscape. And a watch like nothing I've seen. "Put a candle in the window" - I'm crying - "long as I can see the light" - "I'll be coming home." This watch is heavy and loose, has its numbers engraved in stainless steel. I can't imagine its era - "No matter what I do / Remember / My love is true" - or its social occasion. There is a very short letter in the buttoned pocket of this wallet. What am I feeling. Gifts from otherness. Let me sit with these things and get used to them. They are artifacts of - "If I were a woman / And you were a man / And you came to bring me / Your heart in your hand" - an unknown. The strangeness of this watch is as if from another planet and you the only ambassador. And your girl of 1902 is looking at the gold light after late storm. "Woman you have given me so much." "Further on / The road babe / You will accompany me." [*girl of 1902] What am I saying - so humbly - I have expected people to give me gifts that were myself - I've said, This isn't me, it's not a gift - but I'm saying now, Is this you? - "Sweet baby / No surrender" - I misheard that - what's this bubbling lonely music. 16 Now I have two papers to write in a month, and no sense of exactly what they are about - it is always like that - I don't know what they're about. Meantime I'm squirrely wanting to fuck, wanting to wade into the water. And if not that, then to moon around in fantasy about that. Is it this music? It's powerful music. Man-woman magicland. I listen feeling how amazing of you to be so hot on that fairyland, which really is so much my own. There! Is that the wavelength you mean? Mutual in one another's love and wrath all renewing 18 This is an April like the one in the Avalon Hotel twenty years ago, it won't let up. Went to MacLeod's with books. "Forty five." He knows desperation. Shopping in Chinatown, for $5 I get a big piece of pork, a rose of garlic, two oranges, an apple, a small sprig of grapes, two carrots. I walk through the crowds noticing people who live carefully this way always. Sacred food. Things I notice on the bike. The maples in dangling green flower. When did I last make that trip to MacLeod's on the bike. This forty-five dollars made me happy. I can eke it. In fact it's a time of exquisite colors. A white gull on a grey sky. Small leaves of sharp green still damp out of the bud. Unnatural frilly blossum on the streets. Space lit with dropping silver. At the garden Apatia says people are dying because we're going through a photon belt, more light. Too fast for some people. Make clear boundaries: construct a bubble, put some blue, some gold, some violet. Her face is taking on a clear aquiline authority. She stood well on an asphalt clod, light square shoulders, light breastless chest, feet together in sneakers. Her kid with his beautiful girly hair had swarmed a balsam poplar. He's short for his age, so pretty, with boy energy like a fireball. They're living in a van. She's going to California. 19 Gliding today. Is there a wise faith and a foolish one? In this mood, I see us a couple of yards apart facing forward but with our heads turned looking at each other, I with a kind of amused challenging zap in my eys and you with pure blissed-out happy-dog self-content that is going to flip its tie any moment. "It doesn't matter what I say" - the antsy stuttery quality of this song - that they then take up a step - Hey Fendler - I am getting this music - gradually - how far out of language it is - the way it's current. 21st Louie in bed with Alanis and Steve. They sat three in a row Saturday morning. Louie in the middle was reading The eternal feminine, Alanis on the left was reading something for her book on blonds, Steve was reading the newspaper. That cracked us up. Somewhere in the middle of the night daddy got into her; in the morning mommy got up to go do her hour of writing. Sunday morning. Sun on the yellow door. A month to write something - I need to remember what this work is for - what is it about sound - it's as if a slow model of vision, I think that's what I'm seeing. It's a plunge into a sense I feel blind in. It's a simpler model of a sense. Tracking it in the brain. Why track a sensing. Because sensing is what's lacking. Sensing is what women must be praised for and supported in. Sensing is the right foundation of right action. Sensing means I am with what is there. It then feels as if what is there is with me. If listening as touch is the earliest consciousness - the little bit of articulated jelly feeling itself quiver through and through and through and through, feeling its own articulation in the ways motion traverses it - how does it get from that simultaneity of touch in all its parts (along with coordinated sharp and special touch in the ear - do we feel hearing in the ear? also?) to knowing something is there, over there? Ontology of hearing. Philosophy of perception, philosophy of hearing. I'm afraid of knowing too much aren't I     Is there a good reason to be     you'll have to act I'm willing     not yet Is there a question about hearing I should be asking     yes ask if it is deceptive Is the answer yes and no     You want me to ask whether all the senses are deceptive     As such     Is it hard to explain     a first principle And yet we love the world they give us     YES Is the idea of senses wrong     no we are such bodies Should we love it     It's the world love gives us     Is there a better world     no The arts are love cultivated       Tom is a lover     no a dreamer Is that bad     can be What is the best use of a dreamer     struggle Struggle against dreaming     YES What is the best use of Tom     honesty Made honest what's his best use     writing   What am I     defeat De feet     What's the best use of defeat     liberation What's the best use of liberation     persistence Is it right I should adore him     it is always withdrawal Into dreaming     Dreaming is the opposite of sensing     YES   The senses give us each the style of our own love     What is my best relation to the deception of the senses     integrate into established strength, win over deception Can you give me this more specifically     graduate Don't love any more     love differently See people as spirit     YES Do you want to say more     slow growth Leave it for now?     don't withdraw 22 Coleridges's last letters are piety intoned. As his lights went out he lost the resistence that had kept that training at bay. The way my mum as her lights are going out becomes pious. And Joyce living with two dozen photos of a Tibetan teacher. I'm asking: is this romance a piety of advancing senility? Always a clue: energy of fantasy. When fantasy takes over it is always compulsion. What correction to compulsion. Maybe remembering freedom. Each time building a bridge from compulsion to freedom. He goes to dope and booze to evade the mechanical assertion in one of his everyday minds. If it's that it's a good reason. But it isn't a bridge, it's blindfold transport. Getting out of a dull job by arranging to be kidnapped. Is it true T isn't curious because he doesn't imagine? He does perceive. He does think about people and come to conclusions. But he doesn't enquire. He can enquire. But he doesn't do what Louie for instance does - build a picture that he is interested in filling in. It isn't just the guy-aphasia about persons. He has it about the world too. He isn't scientific. 'A model.' Think of a model as a very complex evoked structure that plays in itself. A rose retained. Reattained - I'm thinking of Le Guin's story of what she does sublimely - reevoke sensory presence. It's like working with shreds of cloud fibre to build a plant in all its microstructures. The place where you do it has to be windless and Tom I think is never that. But music is cloud fiber running and tearing in a paced wind - music is structure given, and given fast enough to carry a rider. Structured speed. Writing when it's fast is self generated structured speed. The wind and the cloud both self made. I am not ocean enough for a surfer. Though I can throw up a chop. My way is to work oh so thoroughly so comprehensively tying - no not tying, just setting - shred to shred, fiber to fiber, across and across and across - the way a plant does too, working off what is already there - calculating outward - filling in. I'm space, you're time. We'll dance. Let's dance. 23 Who I'm cross-fertilizing with is opposite enough. "I was in love with life, I just wanted to live." I had to be more careful. I had to keep building a platform as I went. I wasn't a flier through fantasmagorias. Weaver! teach the loom! I taught it. This morning Louie said she noticed that when I laughed I came out rebalanced. "It's a chaos." - Rebalanced as if having been out of it for a minute. It's neurological. An attention appears that is simultaneously open to a freer mind and to the perceptions, sensations, emotions that constitute the ordinary self. One feels both separate and engaged in a new and entirely extraordinary way. One experiences 'I am.' This is the soul. The way they talk about spirit conflates I think - light and wind are not the same thing - there is desert, which is dry still clear firm and articulate - timeless - and which is spirit as clarity - forms, order and clear distinctions. Then there is spirit as wind, fire, speed, agression, wind-riding, anger, a dry rush, time. Hillman wants to say soul is a moth, a girl, moonlight, death, lunacy, suffering, drugs, fantasy, a cauldron, memory, dreaming, sex, fear, the bottom of the sea, the sea itself. They want to identify spirit as male and here is where it buckles. Look at my friend who is wind and fire, a wind rider. Dry like a wolf running. Metabolically hot. And is no desert ever - isn't a desert, doesn't make anything stand still, isn't a hawk. Doesn't hover. Is immersed always, is a prow. Something like this: is stillness immersed in motion, not motion riding over stillness. Is it that? 24 There is the dullness of this life. I can't drive anywhere. I can't have coffee in a café. I can't go to a movie. I can't eat out. The only adventure in a day is carefully spending my five dollars on food. It's a crisis of dullness, and has been worse because it's cold and wet. AND I'm fat because mouth has been the only part of me that has touch. 25 The bandmaster told of a man who, living nearer the variations, insisted that they were the real music and it was more beautiful to hear the hymn come sifting through them than the other way around. - Ives 26 The way these composers talk about sound is - should I say visible - I see it but it's as if transparent and ephemeral - very pleasing as seeing - painters don't have as beautiful evoked seeing. banded and woven Klangfarbenmelodie which is at once a melody and a texture northern lights chord eleven-tone tiny transient noises recombine into a flickering, hazy insect music high shimmer harmonics harmonic glissandi blocs of sound coalesce and melt in slow procession, sometimes opening the dense broad-band texture toward an (embedded) polyphony a space that is nondirectional dense pervasive tactile background heard as a rich, rhythmized web ... a kind of composed haziness sound blocks like different kinds of rock, igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary - write this: the girl writing the Venus flight surrounded by a dazzle of light on snow in a little house with her family transported Write it technically to convey it as widely as I can. - What I am with today: three pink tulips with clean green paeony leaves in a glass jar, the yellow window frame, frisky fresh piled clouds and blue sky, all in a white rectangle that is set in the deep blue wall. This room is a wonder of color, many and strong but coherent in unusual ways. Blue white and yellow is the base, orange and blue with the yellow in the rug, dark red on the door, orangey red plaid and dark green white and yellow on the bed. Michael's dark blue picture rail. But grubby. 27 A three minute dip - internal dialogue he says - he's there - I know where he is - "Tom speaking" - his hand on the phone - he is not quenching me anymore - he knows I know he is not what he had to say he was - that was like a spell he was under - we broke it - I broke it by breaking without breaking - I really broke and I didn't break - and then he did too. A woman tied to a pole. The front end of a locomotive. Something tied to the cowcatcher. The locomotive is meant to stop or spring back, but it doesn't. The locomotive crashes into the woman tied to the pole. We don't know what happens to her, but at that moment both clay masks break. He says they are both him and both women. I know I was tied to a pole. He ran me over. What was my mask that broke? I know the moment of breaking, but I don't know just what broke. Did he have a moment in the same way? Do I know what broke in him? Maybe an idea that he has to and can exceed himself. What broke in me was pain: that was what was gone afterward. Are both women him?     no, one is you but he feels you as him. My pain was the pain of the self in him he was trying to exceed     My survival was its survival     What broke in both of us was loss. The breaking is like a dam breaking - it broke into connection     Is there more I should notice?     that he doesn't know whether the other woman survived That's his mom?     There's a sense in which he's not sure I'm alive     Has that always been so     no, now. After the crash Does that mean he'll go away now     Please say     it will get better He'll come back     Where will he go     he'll need to temper In what sense will he go     he'll go away from love woman He will need to discover I'm alive     How     by leaving. He needs to complete the illusion of male betrayal. His illusion that he betrayed her     Locomotive and tsunami     When I left was it as powerful for him as for me     You want to say more     you guys did good Thank you     YOU did good. Your initiative was good. You fought well. You fought truly. You didn't hedge. You didn't cheat I couldn't have done it without you     - A child soprano very clear and new and yet singing at the far front edge of a culture An endless or long pouring and rasping of very small seeds, poppy seeds The clapping of poplars Singing of an airplane alone in the sky and miles away This is one of those moments where heart's hurt is stretch of love. It's quarter past four. Are you writing me? 28 The way Varèse talks about music: planes projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles moving masses penetrating certain opacities dilated in certain rarefactions an idea expanded and split into different shapes or groups constantly changing in shape, direction and speed qualities and character of granite I can see that in these notes from Erickson I have been picking out what might be proprioception/intuition/structural homology. [Was this from Robert Erickson 1977 The structure of music?] I could collect in Coleridge, Varèse, others, instances of imagining imagining. Coleridge (sees) brain shapes in nature (as life process etc). Varèse (describes) brain shapes (as musical structure). Metaphor as misdescription of intuition of brain shape - "verb is true, noun is false" - not that but something like it, misassignment of something there isn't a naming culture for - I'm at the groping beginning of this - means something like: it has to exit somewhere, and has only limited repertoire. A film imagining imagining - I've done that already, the caustic in Trapline. - What is there to say about that phone call last night. I'm still sore - still sore. Dear large one     he loves you You're making me cry     it's not easy for him to love you But I'm easy to love     even if you were I had a glimpse when you said that     expand it He's standing baffled in uncertainty and conflict     yes It's easy for him to hurt me     yes and he lets it be easy for you to hurt him. What was he trying to tell you last night?   The torch came past and he was the one to see it from a distance. He's afraid of his birthday. He tried to say dearest you and follow it but he couldn't. He had an afternoon and evening of serene love. He thought he'd either go to the cove and swim a hundred yards out and float on his back and tell himself he's fifty, or else hide in his room. I'm a good woman and he's fortunate.   Why would any of that hurt my feelings?     what hurt your feelings was that he was lying I haven't spotted the lie     something about his birthday plans Is there another woman     no He plans to get drunk     YES It's a way of being able to feel bad?     yes Is that good?     better than not feeling bad Is he going to go to the Cove?     no get plastered early in the day I've got it now?     yes What should be my relation to this?     understand it I understand why he lied, now do I need to understand why he needs to do it?     yes Because he doesn't have my ways of crashing     YES he needs pain Because it's there?     yes Is there anything I should do     see the conflict He wants to not drink on my account and he wants to drink on his account     yes Unconditional love     yes This time I can do it     YES 30th Waking at night I said, it's the fang. The fang at the heart or the fang at the solar, or at the cunt or throat. Last night crying because there is so much pain and it always comes back. Oh such days on end of pain and sometimes almost only pain. What am I noticing. Sometimes I am happy in the coming-true of life. Sometimes I am happy as if on credit, in relation to something that hasn't happened and may never happen. - I called him nearly helpless with pain though it's his birthday not mine. He said among other things, You're exhausted. I said I'd write this down: "I guess I've bin maybe kinda high wide and handsome about that. I've thought, I'm here, what more do you want," he said. His notion of emotional support. Don't snap out on me, Ellie. I'd really be miserable. I'm not sure my nervous system can take it, I said. He wants love and trust and closeness he said. He has been secretive and deceitful but he's come out in the open, he said. What do I think about that - is the wolf eating out of my hand? Not without biting it. And what about proud spooky love woman - why am I seeing a horse - is she bolting from the hand that feeds her? She's a horse who quivers, whose eyes roll, whose legs are shaking from the strain of controlling the need to run. Sometimes she snaps. Yeah, when she's bitten on the hand. Okay, work. On CBC a Scotch man who plays brass with the Berlin Philharmonic saying that one winter night after a performance of Bruckner he could not go inside his house, sat in a lawn chair in the snow, under the stars. The performance was still happening. He said the discipline is to survive the intensity, like keeping his finger in a socket, not pulling back. A man like that. I know more about quality than I did. Is this related. I got into bed this aft to touch myself and what I did was very slight and very strong. The man I imagined kept saying, Open yourself, stay open. It is something I don't know how to do, it's as if the intention does it, but I have to stay in the intention or I close automatically. I was thinking of you in the midst of that large intensity gathering from such slight motion and I was saying it to you - I was saying it to your genitals - open yourself, stay open, you too. I was sure the inner gesture would be the same. I said to Leah last night - clawing sideways on my chest - we were eating Vietnamese soup that got cold as I told my story - that it was like being stretched at the heart. Maybe I could keep remembering what a birth is like. When I took the bus after parking my car there was a woman on the sideways bench who said to me, You have a nice face, beautiful. What's this tone. I'm not sure I've let it show but there's a kind of slow heavy importance about pain: look how grandly tragic. My accountant - that adventure - that wonderful big chainsmoking gravel-voiced dyke with circles around her eyes at tax time. Wastepaper basket overflowing under her desk. Louie said she acts tough but we took each other's measure very gently. If they accept what she did she has given me fourteen hundred dollars. If I can make it through the summer without borrowing more I will be two thousand up in this installment. part 3 the golden west volume 5: 1996 january-april work & days: a lifetime journal project