| the golden west volume 7 part 3 - 1996 august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
19 August Was awake at five and saw the earliest light from my bed. There was a quality of soft air that was in me too. I was thinking of dawn in Australia and other places. It was the access to other times that I feel as young. Then I went to sleep again, lying propped on my pillow. I dreamed I was wearing the little cotton pyjamas I had when I was forty, that made me feel like a girl. I was in a bed under a window. I had my head on the windowsill and (I was dreaming that) I was making up a fantasy about a man coming into my room in the morning and fucking me where I was in that position under the window. I've come out of the paper and found it's the middle of August. I had the summer only as a background. There hasn't been any kissing. I have been thinking of Tony [Nesbit] because he was the man who made me happy without trying, by the way he was a man. I trusted in his competence with women. I've never had that again. Jam tried to fake it. Rob has moments of it, amused and handling me. What about Tom. I'm reading Mars and Venus together forever imagining he could learn. But what is my doubt. I doubt his sexual ground, I don't know whether correctly. If he can't get from me what he really wants he can't want to give me what I really want. 20 Yesterday I looked again at the five pages I wrote listening to his tape - weeks ago - before the paper - when I'd had the letter where his chest opened. I thought the book said it was drunkenness and was willing to put it down. It was in the workroom stuck into Codependent no more. Yesterday I saw I would send it. It perfectly shows me holding back and then giving out and then giving out more - flying with the music - "waiting to face you sun to sun unstopped" - "these songs are journey songs" - "i am as strong as this - and stronger - come and get me." "you stopped - oh tom you stopped and you will stop again ... you turned back, i milled in confusion, i cried out in confusion - where is my friend with the steady beat of his wings ... is he afraid of the wildness of the sea" It is what I am, joined to him. "i like about you your self - that's what, your inner realness i love about you - do i have that, do i show it?" "my friend when you are ready to feel love like a sun made of turning knives of light will you let me know - will you let me know"
- Laiwan's beautiful voice on the phone: I want to tell you I appreciate your rigor. I said, Do you want to talk to the cards? 20 What is this: reading Ricoeur yesterday, very absorbed, behind it feeling the presence of Leucadia. Today, again, the presence of some other place. What I am seeing: my interest in metaphor is in the way it is not split reference but split speaker - the smaller self takes as metaphor what the larger self is saying literally, for instance about itself. This is the same thing as taking pictures whose structure I don't see, or being fascinated by the motion of snow on the road. The literal meaning is hidden in plain sight = invisibility of the means by which we are being. It has to do with feeling-knowledge. Feeling the motion of the snake. Being able to produce it in another form in the sound of lines of a poem. The motion of.
21st Working from 7 to 10, 2 to 5. Ricoeur. Fast. Then what. Want personal, something in my mouth. TV, Dr Laura, novel. 22nd Stone butch blues. What can I say. The butch life, outside the exemptions given to women, more, without the safeties of life among the educated or religious. Cops worse than civilians. I forget that I've never lived outside the bubble. I didn't feel for her as a woman, though, I felt for her the way I would for Tom, his butch life, booze, inarticulation, violence, the felt quality of other men, women hungered for and unseen. She was a man who lived in a particularly violent society and wasn't big enough to keep from getting raped. A disarmed man, but so are many. After that it's a writer's story. How she came to be able to say it cleanly as she did. She lived a man's life but she wasn't bullshitting the way he has. She's testifying and it only needs to be done once. He hasn't got a story that hasn't been told yet. Or, no, he does, but he hasn't come far enough to see it. 'Each step of my strangely beautiful journey.' Feinberg Leslie Stone butch blues: a novel Consortium
23rd I woke at one thirty thinking the way I only do as I am coming out of sleep. It seems precise. It was something about Nathalie, that she is organized to perceive from and at a certain distance. It was as if I was seeing a hinge in the air maybe twenty yards away from her. It was as if her nervous system is set to see things exactly that far away from her, but there was something about a return from that distance toward her, too. As if something sees her from that distance. I was lying in the dark wondering what time it was, thinking I should wake and investigate that message. My solar plex was tight. When I went back to the thought, tried to find its mode, so different from the slow thicker air of this spelling-out, my solar began to stream. Hyperdrive. When I am willing to work with the book for instance with Nathalie, and feel it take effect - that people might actually be freer with my intervention - my substance thins out, reluctance and fear, or more an unreality: this can't be true. I don't want this power. Life cannot be this way. I cannot be in the clear. It is about identity - I am not who I was, my texture is changed, the air of myself that has been with me through so many changes of place is altered. I faint, somewhat. The motion I learn with the book is patient tracking, persistence in action. I haven't had that with people. I feel it as a great stretch of faith. It is fine-scale valor. Concentration in doing what needs to be done next, in knowing it. Like driving on a mountain, like teaching. Inner work. Speaking to Tom last night when I had phoned back. He noticed that he had been the way he gets, riding over me, actually not stopping when I'd say something. I was a sad small girl. Saying goodbye sad and resigned. We went back to it. He said the telephone is a rough road. I said, There's a gate and you go through it into a pasture and sit under a tree. I turn into a horse and gallop around the field and sometimes come and have my nose stroked and you have nothing to do but observe the horse and say What a beautiful horse, what an intelligent horse, look what the horse is doing now. That's what I mean by holding a space. I was satisfied with that. He had held the space for that gallop and I'd enjoyed it. Now what would you like me to do, I say. Would you like me to turn you into a horse and ride you? I'm thinking now that it comes to the same thing. He said he likes to be top dog and talks to hold that position, and the talk is a screen he's behind, feeling out who is in front of him. That is interesting. I can't do that if I'm really talking, because then my silence is being consulted in the talk and needs to answer. He can only do it if he's running tapes. I'm looking for adoptive parents. Remembering at the Fraser my big friend not knowing how to talk to a kid - "'cos you've got a stupid fuckin' daddy, that's why." That was good, better than the daddy I had. This one isn't righteous. I would offer to be an adoptive parent too. I'll be - what? - effective. I'll care about the right thing and have credibility. 26 Louie at 7 this morning. I admitted smugness. She had her heels down yesterday. I don't want to tell the whole story, only how it came out. I was saying, What are you preferring to freedom? She had a nasty edge, 'cruel' she called it. No, cynical, I said. Often the work is correction of a description. I was saying it doesn't matter whether I am smug or whether I am not perfect, why aren't you going for it? She doesn't like 'freedom,' sounds like religion. Are you preferring your hatred of religion? She thought of asking the cards for another word. Well-being. She accepts that. The line of the work, with diversion, went like this. What's going on? Louie's child's exclusion. It's at the level of early love. What does Louie do to shut down early love. Revenge. What is Louie's form of revenge. Fairness. Say more. Holds back anger on pretext of fairness. Then she goes into worry about her large intelligence of fairness, that all her good qualities are bad - that absolutist motion. No, if you use a good quality for a defense that does not make it a bad quality. We came out maybe a couple of hours later, from full resistance to contentment. She came through. We have made that passage many times. Then I said there was something I'd like. I'd woken with anxiety in the solar for the first time since Tom was here, and it might be x, y, or z. She said what it was and then she said, put your hands straight up over your head, now turn the palms outward and lower them slowly. My back opened and the solar was released, but there was a cramp in my forehead. She said now do that in your forehead. It was a remarkable sensation. Sides of the head really opened, something standing peaked at the top of the head. My face was rearranging itself. Eyes wanted to blink. I was laughing with pleasure. The sensation in the face was like parts slipping. - Is a lot happening, or very little? I'm not Virginia Woolf anymore. I'm something like married? Attached? Interested? That's a thought that makes me dizzy. I'm writing theory from work I hadn't done two years ago. I was the same person for a long time and now I am shifted without having the earlier people. Yes that must be right, but it's dim. Laiwan, Nathalie, Louie, Tom. I work with a system I can't account for, and announce a faith that isn't exactly mine. Acting from two foundations. I can do it and then there are moments when I feel my body is too old to change and feel familiar. I don't know. I'd like to ask. I've been the one who knows. I'd like to go into someone's arms tonight. I work hard. I have gone systematically and fearlessly and passed many. A standing start. I don't know what world this is. I'm willing to keep going but at times it is hearsay. 28th What happens on the phone is that I feel immediately how unequipped he is to be interested in me, and how uninterested I am in him. Yesterday I wrote him the story of my father and felt how irresolution is what made me take on a man I don't enjoy in ways I have enjoyed other people, feeling my heart didn't choose them. That is at the moment a sad thought, but I am saying I'm willing to give up both the stand-off and its sexual hope and fascination. 29 Daisy Bates in the desert. Two women, one who lived and one who understood that life but not how to live as recklessly herself. I could say more about either Daisy Bates or Julia Blackburn but I will say something else. I'm aching this morning. and further, I'm not sure it is true. What I feel is undecided as if something bad has happened, that I feel but otherwise don't know. Or maybe nothing bad has happened. I don't want to mention Tom but his letters for a month and a half have been streams of joy, clean rushing creeks, and now he is stupid again. After I wrote the paragraph at the beginning of this book, in that stretched fragile state, I phoned him back and couldn't be anything with him. He had no attention. I was like a photographic negative needing to held in a bath of strong presence so I could become something I was, know something I knew, feel something I feel. There I phoned him and wrestled for forty minutes. We came out satisfied. That's better, I say. It's good, not better, he says; It's better, and that's good. He stretched his sentence to include my sentence - that was good. What did it take to be satisfied. He was angry. He's fed up with the psychological intensity. He's a loner. We never do anything but interpersonal struggle. He's not used to it. He feels I'm judging him. Will you name a judgment? Implicitly if not explicitly. I think he's insensitive. I say if there were an impartial observer who counted the number of times each of us says you, the number of minutes each of us talks about ourselves rather than the other person, what would they conclude? He says he rejects this impartial observer - it's quality not quantity. He's on my side. In quality and effect he gives me as much as I give him. I say there is something I'm trying to get across and it isn't something I can say. It is more like giving him a drug, a way of using his brain that would be the farthest stretch he could make. If he learned it he could make any woman happy and keep her happy. It's the only issue I have with him, it's always the same one. I'm trying to give him a key. If he learned it all the psychologizing would stop. It has to do with listening. He does listen! he says. No, see, that was an example. If you were listening, you would be saying What is the difference between what she means by listening and what I mean by listening, so that I think I'm listening and she says I'm not. I tell him the story of the photographic negative. He's hearing it. I say this is wonderful and there are tears in my eyes that he's willing to listen. He says he heard me say in a gentle polite way what he used to feel with Vic when he'd try to talk to him and Vic wouldn't listen and he'd go off in a rage. I'm seeing that he didn't get all of what I said but it's enough for today. He didn't ask what is this key, tell me how to do it, but he'll go away and think about it. I also said, abt the psychological intensity, that we are like two people doing a freeway merge, who are also driving for the first time. It's not surprising if we have to think a lot about how to drive. Leah dreamed her sister was in a trailer with a man she detests. This man is a potter, quite a good one, but he uses women. Her sister comes out of the trailer victorious - she teased him, she didn't let him use her. He is so enraged that a cold wave comes into the warm sea from the direction of the land. I say to the book - do you want to say anything first? Yes - it's about judgment. When I asked if it wanted to speak to her it said yes if she is willing to see it thru. She said she was but she was afraid to find out that years of her life were a sham. I said should we talk about the love woman - animus dream? Yes. Should we just head straight for the central issue? Yes. Are those the same? Yes. I start with the trailer. It's a mobile home. Alright, what's next. She should talk to him. She's saying she doesn't like him but her posture is so cowed. She's saying in a polite submissive voice that she envies and hates him, thinks he's without morality, conscience, or decency. Then that she's jealous he chose her and not Leah. She just wants to --- tear him to pieces and put him out to dry. I give her the cushion. I say That's him - my leather jacket. She attacks the leather jacket with the cushion. Ends up throwing the jacket on the floor, stamps on it and then spits on it. I crack up. Ooops. She comes out tearful. We're not done but I don't quite know what's next. (She's saying it's no good, he never hears her. I remember Louie and the magic drug. I say it has wafted into the window and he can hear her now.) I say, Okay, he's heard you. Be him and say you heard her. I have to prompt. He's sneering. I say, Is this true? What do you really feel? He says he does love her and does want her. I give him a line - Ask her what you can do for her. Now she's supposed to say, but she dodges. I see the dodge. Tell him what he can do. She says, still with her cowed posture, that she wants him to teach her to trust her judgment. I say, Can I suggest a change? Tell him you want him to trust your judgment. She twigs. I twig when I see her twigging. She is paralyzed trying to be both these people at once. It isn't necessary to be both at once. We still aren't done. I check. Is there more? Yes. I say there's the issue of housing. Where will they park this trailer, since there is no possibility of divorce? Ask each to say. She says a flowery meadow by the sea. He says the mountains, low maintenance, a view. I say Is there a way both of you can be happy? She says she doesn't want him to live in this trailer. I say, You've been living in the trailer all these years because you can't decide where to live. He'll agree to a house but he still wants the mountains. Alright, are there places where mountains and meadows and ocean come together? Yes in the islands there are lots of places like that. Rugged, adventurous, and open, the way a woman is open to every breeze. They're satisfied. Joyce would be proud, she says. No, Joyce would rap my knuckles for practicing without a license. I check, would she? Yes. It was true I started to make a bad mistake at the beginning when I was discounting José. Then Nathalie phones. When I tell her about the line in the air, being imprinted by being observed from a distance, she says she thinks she knows what it was, a voyeur. She also says the piece in the Front was the best thing she's read about that stuff, very clear, I'm saying what she thinks. She has a picture for me. We should talk about philosophy of language. I didn't say that this aft I had that sensation of pressure at the temples again, very strong, not pain but pressure as if a wooden vise. The book said anger. What should I do? Exclusion. I imagined a baby sobbing with rage. I had the breath and motion but not the emotion or the sound. The pressure shifted to the forehead and crown. I remembered that pressure has been there for days. A 'headache.' Last time it melted through very beautifully. This time I could not get it to melt. It was so intense I was afraid of dying. I didn't know what it was. I thought maybe a diabetic sugar reaction. Kept checking the rest of my body but except for a flutter at the heart it was obviously fine. Now it's clear. Full moon. Hot flashes. The night was a struggle. Carpenter women bare-breasted in the garden. Big Britt saying she's totally interested in listening to people talk about love. Leah said Tom in his photo looked like a piece of silk rippling. - At ten the phone rings and Tom wants to say he wasn't awake this morning - he means that he was irritated and said so though in the gentlest least assuming manner - I love I love the love and least assuming manner - I love I love the love and care in you - I want to stop judging you - 29 I wake at four thirty and know two things. Something about the way I
am intervening with people, that it's philosophy not therapy. I could do
it with less of the manner of therapy. The way I am everywhere seeing the
wrongness in people could find that to do. The other, which I felt earlier
but knew later, is that my solar is still shouting alarm.
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