the golden west volume 8 part 1 - 1996 september

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 2 September 1996 I said, Do you have any idea how distinguished your children are? He said, Do you have any idea how distinguished your parents are? We are very well accepted here, and we were in Sexsmith. Louie said, How did people talk about your family, "the family who ..."? My mum said, "the family with the smart girls." He said someone mailed them a clipping from an Ontario paper. Two sisters got the same medal. "Epps are apt" was the headline, Mary said. We were at the lunch table until 3. He said he was just being strict, he was getting us ready for the hard things that would happen in the world. I said no, that wasn't discipline. Sometimes it was just irritability and pressure. Paul wasn't a rebellious boy. He didn't need strictness. "You tried to break our spirits. That made me lose respect. You were doing it in the name of religion. That made me lose respect for religion." I said that terrorizing children is not good preparation for hardship, what they need is their courage. He said maybe Rudy would have turned out better if they'd been stricter. I said, I can't believe you think Rudy has problems because you didn't beat him enough! He said Paul's son is spoiled rotten, he gets everything he wants. I said, I think you are jealous when you see children getting what they want. He said the world is a mess because of the hippies. Hippies are all committing suicide. Pierre Trudeau was a hippie. There were kids on the beach in Mexico who lived like animals. I said drugs are a very bad problem and sometimes I think the new ways are better for strong people than for weak people, but we are addicted too. There was a story I liked. He said when I was a baby he was putting me to bed and I didn't want to stay. He would push me down and every time his hand rose I rose with it. He gave up because he didn't want to sin against me. I liked the spirit rising as soon as oppression lifted, and Louie liked it too. His point was not quite taken, though. I didn't understand what sinning against would be. He wanted to whine about what he's had to live down, my sexual freedom he means. That man. Rasheed, I say. "We knew what you were up to, we just didn't know ---." Something. But he doesn't know what I was up to, which was, as I reconstruct it with glee, something that needed him to know I was fucking not only a man but a brown man and a Mohammedan, under his nose. That man helping himself to the sixteen year old too. He wanted to whine about how he never gets the credit. He had no new whines. He did good things and no one ever acknowledges them. I say we have to get the bad things off our chests first, that's the way it is. I tried to tell him things years ago and he wouldn't listen. If he had listened then he would have heard good things sooner. He said after a while that he didn't think of it that way but if he terrorized us he was sorry. I kind of didn't quite stop to accept that. I guess I thought I'd take it away and look at it later. How are you guys doing, I said. When Mary talked I wanted to stop listening, I had heard it all before, except for her story of Herman [her brother when he was dying] in his garden listening carefully to the birds. It was restful to all of them, she said. He told a classic story. They were parked on the Gulf of Mexico in their camper. The camper next to them had Saskatchewan license plates. He overheard the couple telling their neighbours on the other side that they hadn't eaten all day, they were tired, and they had nothing to eat. Father said to M that she should give them their leftover hamburgers. After they'd eaten he asked where they were from in Saskatchewan. Roseholm. "Do you know a man called DB Wiens?" my dad says. "He's my brother." "We are cousins," my father says. The man doesn't believe him. I'll tell you two stories, my dad says. When he was a little boy, still in Russia, my father's family visited this man's grandmother, who was the sister of my father's grandmother. There was a very old woman who held up her finger and said she heard footsteps going up and down the cellar steps. At lunchtime it was found that all the buns were gone. The boys had gone up and down and eaten them. The man in the next camper had been one of those boys. The second story was about a loaf of bread. A woman set it down in front of a man and said, Cut it. There were nine people in a row. The last man had to cut it. I liked the way these events are the kind that would impress a little boy, for instance Rowen. Here is an odd thing. In the bathroom there was a bowl of little soaps and lotions, arranged the way such things are arranged in show houses and hotels, and also guest towels rolled and packed about a dozen in a basket the way I see it done in bathrooms in Architectural Digest. But these towels are basically rags. Can I stop now. This morning after M phoned I asked the book how it should go. Fight against exclusion it said. I fought. Came out with my neck sore from the base to the top of the head. 3 When I lay down the tight place in my solar started to stream. It's something to do with energy of mind. When I say that I think I am a rocket, I'm going to be a rocket. Tom won't want me when I am a rocket. He wants me to follow the Chargers' season with him. But if I am a rocket I won't mind that he doesn't want me. If I deal with my dad in the place of my dad will I have a use for Tom? This morning my solar is tight again. It's six in the dark. I'm going to work. - Weeding in the herb garden, early evening. It began to rain, a few large drops plonk into the tank. Then it was hail. Later it was hail that was more hurled than falling. Thunder and lightning. As I stood under the tarp in the clubhouse worksite I saw the pumpkins less covered, leaves falling in the vinewalk, a white floor on the herb garden step. Rode home on the bike after a half hour of that, soaked with ice water, bike tires pressing through a crunching layer of white pebbles. Today I say aloud, when I have that sort of thought, "He's gone". "He's gone." What it's like. 4 Now I'm supposed to say, "He loves me but he's gone". What's the difference. I'm thinking of desires with sadness. I thought I was going to have that and that. A man writing from his life toward me, so I'd know him. A stubborn man willing to learn to listen, for me. A lover - oh a man's body near me. I cry for all of these. He loves me but he's gone. I don't know why. He loves me but he's gone. Who else is there? Now can I have a lover? It says no. You can ache and long but you can't have a lover. You can have a day. You can have two children. You can have a friend. You can have just enough money, a garden, good health, a right amount of fame, an invitation to write. Keys to a digital music lab, a brain that can get up near the front of the crowd, a car, a chance to learn in ways hardly anyone has been able to learn, three films and an essay and a couple of poems, a lot of time, enough courage. Safety. Oh alright. But I still want it. 5 When I think of him I say, He loves me but he's gone, and nearly every time my body sighs. 6 I am saying, He loves me but he isn't here. It's a way to ease out of hanging onto fantasy presence without giving myself the harsh safety of rejection. I'm loved and alone. I'm safe and loved and alone. Each time I think of him I say it and sigh in relief. I'm here not there. I'm here. - "These watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God." "When I was 42 years a burning light of tremendous brightness poured into my entire mind." Mechtilde 1098-1179. - It's winter. Dark early, wet. Lonesome. Work starts so early, 5:30. I go out at 10:30 for breakfast and then don't know what to do. Want to eat all day. 9th Tom on the phone last night shitting bricks: If this correspondence should stop now I'd be left in mid-air. It's in your hands, I say. I know that he says with haste to cut me off before I can think I know something he doesn't. Hey boy, I like that about you. The way you reared up over John Grey. I love the way you get excited, I said. But when he was wanting a last pat I suddenly couldn't remember his name. "Yeah that was good, - what's your name? Tom." 10 When I touch into the work I've got started I suddenly feel I can't lose time, this has to be done and there is a lot of it. It is my contribution, I should think of myself as ready to take cultural authority in this, it's important. It's exciting. It's generative into twenty different fields; I am founded to talk in any of them, I could aim and go. This morning feeling Tom with love. I phone him. He answers on the first ring. He's hoarse and loose. I say he sounds asleep. He says he's reading - he reads so physically it roughens his voice. He's reading Pathways of transformation, the relationship chapter. I say I know that chapter. He says there is a thirties motel court called Two palms, cabins, on the old highway. We could .... I can see bicycles on those streets. I can see those streets. He said Two palms knowing the power of the phrase. - Calabria, Tuesday morning. Floating gladness cos the sun is back. I had to come buy tea. There is a tree. Long muscles in its trunk. Wide leaves held like hands and hands of cards. Metaphor, I'm thinking, is many more than one thing. There's a way to see it as related to giving an example. Illustration. Talk about that. How does it come about. I'm looking at the tree: that's reminding me of something, that's minding me of something. (An occasional minding - it has happened before but not with every tree.) I find what it minds me of and then I find how to say it (by saying it). When you read it you see a tree of that kind. You've seen it before. There are many more things being done by a sentence than we have noticed theoretically. (We have noticed when we are in our sentences, I mean being our sentences.) Metaphor is not a category but a cross-section through a lot of kinds of things. The first thing to say about metaphor is that there is no such thing. But by attempting to see metaphor as if it were one thing I find the manyness of the kinds. How difficult it is in philosophy to find an example that doesn't raise a doubt, because examples are so easily turned against you. The cat is on the mat. Is there more to that example? The example is what convinces. The on is between the cat and the mat, where it is in the sentence. The world, Wittgenstein's, where the lability of sentence function is felt. Instead of an embarrassment, the illusiveness of the sentence is seen to exemplify, in a theory of language that makes it a standing lacework. Lacemakers, women crocheting, knitting, weaving, making rugs, the textile image, mind's standing foam. See it that way, and what are some of the things an illustration does in a text? (Find a 3-D illustration of wide net like eddy-rose fading off its ends of threads - shudders through the color ridges - like a cloud made of wire.) What does an illustration do in a conversation. Start there. Two people are talking. Always start with people speaking in the presence of things. "That tree looks like a leg." The other one looks. "Muscles." "Yeah." That's the essence of cross-categorical comparison. Separate these things: 1) someone seeing x about y, 2) getting someone else to see x about y. The first part maybe comes to this: we see x about y because we already see x about z. Something is touched off, turned on. It suggests what parts there are in perceiving. Yes that, but this doesn't begin to say it. Modular isn't it: fibrous. The neuropile. The long muscles can be seen without the leg. Something in the shading. How we imagine abstraction. Imagine cutting out a part of the picture, imagine something like a mathematical function (but how to imagine a mathematical function). We know we aren't imagining it yet. Provisional visualization. When we imagine it right we'll know how to imagine a mathematical function. (The name of the function also tells you what to do, it's an instruction, you can realize it into different materials and it will there be the form named - but that material will <have> other forms that can be named otherwise.) Take other names as if function names - automated. Doesn't tell us what to do - does it - does it in the context of what else is happening - but imagine the function as realized in a brain shape - that brain shape can be named differently according as - what? How to talk about the parts of perceiving - more, how to imagine it. Imagine it as constitutive along a scale that shades down to atoms, imagine it as constitutive all the way down. And all the grain not visible but vision. At the base people are made of identical elements, are they? If so, then the grain of their perceiving is similar though the largerness is different. Tom and Ellie = flying heart. 12th My talent as a philosopher. Wonder whether what's wrong with my early journals and letters should be described as moral - what I would see if I searched them with that question. Why are they trivial? The writing is the writing of someone who doesn't seem to realize how uneasy she is. She's straining. She's writing about the things that make her uneasy. Often she is writing to the people with whom she is uneasy, but she is not saying she is uneasy. She's at sea trying to assemble a raft. I read myself grieving that there was no one who could teach me. I haven't taken account of what was taught, and I will. But first I owe myself this grief for waste. - When Louie visits she says she feels I have something to tell her. I say no. Maybe something I don't know yet. We visit in the car parked beside the park. She reads a dream about sets of three: her sister a man and herself. Love woman, a quieter animus. I say I am angry at my culture. She says that is the right thing to be angry at. I say I feel compassion for the self I was, who was so freaked and didn't know it. She says: that means love woman is with you now. I was impersonating her because I didn't have a clue, I say. This is what you wanted to tell me! she says. Your secret is that you don't have a secret any more. Here is a note from more than twenty years ago, reading in Warnock that Coleridge said taste is virtue and bad writing bad feeling. I called that moral anxiety and was wrong. I am feeling also that I misunderstood my art. I have been very sure-footed in philosophy, I pick my way by tracks barely possible and come out right. My tracks are converging. I know my friends on sight and am beginning to know there aren't any foes. The talent I have is specifically a talent for ignoring the going concerns of the community, trusting my nose, working slowly from many directions, organizing deeply, and then articulating simply. As I work something in different ways I come to be able to use everything - I use my puzzlement to find a principle. I am a theorist with technical interest in theorizing - that's what makes it an art. I'm the sort of artist Coleridge was. (Oh my wolf.) My tunnels are coming up beside people like him. IA Richards. I'm sorry I'm not a writer like Le Guin, I tried so hard to learn to write in a way that catches the sails in an instant. That sense of clean wind. Charm. I never had it. I didn't know I was studying something else. 13th I ask if he knows Gendlin. He's read it a couple of times. Hasn't forgotten the chapter on listening. I say guess what, John Grey was his PhD student, maybe we could give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's not do that, sez Tom. I say I adore him. It's a mistake. How do I know. Can't say. It fell flat. That means something specific. As if he didn't receive it. That means he feels he doesn't deserve it. That means he's lying I guess. That's not the end of the story though. 14th Schools: Buffalo Lake, Big Horn, La Glace, Northfield, Chatham, Canor, Odin, Meadowville, Many Springs, Old Post People: Alstad, Angen, Axelson, Bakstad, Bangen, Bekkerus, Benterud, Bohn, Chene, Carney, Dahl, Denard, Dool, Dommer, Edgar, Eide, Elverum, Elvestad, Farnsworth, Floen, Forseth, Foshaug, Fowler, Fredland, Friberg, Haakstad, Hagen, Haugseth, Haukedal, Heiken, Hoflin, Horneland, Jeremiason, Kildal, Kilgour, Liland, Lima, Livelton, Lowe, Lunde, Moe, Moen, Moodie, Nash, Nepstad, Nergaard, Ney, Nordstrom, Novelesky, Palser, Reaume, Rix, Rosvold, Rude, Sandboe, Sheehan, Slette, Soderquist, Soiseth, Sorgaard, Tveter, Vekved, Velve, Waldren Westad. It's 5 on a Saturday - been away - among the names. I was born in 1945 so that when I started school in 1951 the district had been settled forty years. My mum had been there since 1929, twenty of those forty, my dad more like fifteen. He was maybe 14 when he moved there. I haven't before written down the names of the people I knew, the names I heard my father speak. Pure names: Dool, Elverum, Floen, Hoflin, Livelton, Moe, Rix, Velve. My heart aches thinking of that place, why. Is it aching so sharply because aching is what happened there? I often ached among those names. I feel the space all around our place as having names in various directions. There are six directions around the center that is a core including La Glace and the area a bit south. There's straight south, south east, south west, straight north, north east, north west. The Sexsmith-Valhalla road is the line. The La Glace-Wembley road is the right hand edge - yes it is a body and the core is the heart. 15 Yesterday with the La Glace book all day and then dinner at Phil's, drinking Dubonnet Amber. Is there anything to say about that. The people there. Kathy in a soft white sweater. The two of them intimate about arrangements. Moments when they'd whisper together. I'm on the other side of him and after one of his outbursts he was lying in his chair with his legs stretched toward me, blatantly liking me. I was saying what I think and it was being taken as witty. That is fun and yet not as fun as it would be to not have to defend such self-evident positions as that many questions in philosophy are misrecognized because people have not understood them slowly enough. Damn she's good. Another thing is the way Phil won't ask me how it's going with Tom but is all ears when Jill does. He has a heart-disease pot and high cholesterol and shovels food into his mouth and swills wine. - Here's what I remembered when I followed the sharp heart pain around to its stop in the solar (something related in the back, its release into anger only felt as a band at the forehead): I am two. I'm in the truck with my parents. We are leaving Grande Prairie or some other town on our way to BC. We have stopped to visit people with a daughter older than me. My mother when we are some way out of town looks in my little purse and sees that I have carried away money from the other girl's room. She says we must turn around and take the money back. It says this is a screen memory. The little purse is my little girlness. In this incident my mother shows her concern with competition. My feelings, watching her, are mixed. I hold myself apart from her with an effort that is inscribed in my body. One shoulder up. Not crying, not angry, not speaking, holding those responses back: solar, throat, forehead. Seeing the import of this moment I see the import of others I felt as betrayal to social concern. She was jealous that moment in Dr Rostrup's office, and she was jealous when she found me pregnant with Rowen. I had to find what I felt watching her freaking. I tried to steady it and ask. I got a picture of my expression as if in a photo from the time. I couldn't quite get it. I had found this memory before but not recently. It says I am feeling contempt but also it is the moment I give up my father. I stand my ground, but an independence that is forced is not the same as an independence that is supported. God was a bad father if he set up their self-forced independence. Let's correct him. 16 Wake with my solar tight and say to Tom, you are holding something back. I am backing off and letting you work it out. I am using it to try to find every shred of my own structure. But your holding back is taking a toll on me physically. Midday. Working for hours. I like the work but the solar goes on as if in an emergency. I worked with it when I woke - it shifts to back and is very intense there. Sore neck. It says solar is always child excluded. I'm fed up. I don't know whether something is happening with him or whether it's processing or somehow even something purely physical but it's a bell that hasn't stopped ringing all day and has rung off and on for weeks. [solar plex hurts] He is away     YES It hurts     YES (pain shifts to back) Is there something I should do     say, I'm betrayed I'm betrayed, but I can take it     YES (shifts to back of the head) Just keep going?     (pressure on the top of the head) Don't grow?     Will you comment on that sequence     inventory of losses Solar plex keeps coming back on     to exclude the child Every sigh marks a shift     YES I am less addicted     YES The losses are: "I can take it" feels like stiffness, disengagement contempt feels like lightness anger feels like little bullet, compactness don't grow pushing down Others I missed?     enough for now I kind of infer the emotion     YES I'm working in a zone where focusing doesn't work very well     YES I get the shifts but not yet the emotions     YES I'm understanding these mechanisms     YES Do you want to say anything else before I stop     indecision is over Something made me able to decide     YES What     the excluded child She trusts me     no, she wants to graduate She didn't want it before     Why does she want it now     the Work She trusts the work     YES Is that it for now     no, something about persistence What to persist in?     the anger that follows betrayal That's what to work with     NO, that's what's left Is this the solar plex you're talking about     YES - Something to say?     look at your indecision about him Is my indecision about whether I want to be with him     no Which indecision do you mean     indecision about being skillful with him He has indecision about whether to be skillful with me     YES For similar reasons     YES He doesn't want to give me what I need     Because of anger and pain     YES Eva gives the grand theory but John Grey applies it     YES He really doesn't want to give me what I need     YES That's because of his mom     YES Emotional sabotage     YES On both sides     YES He is subtly unfriendly to my woman     YES I suspect that men want to kill me     YES Does he suspect women want to kill him     no he suspects they want to emasculate him And do I     YES Because I feel the man wants to kill me     YES Charming     especially when he's angry Because of the emasculation     YES Do I want to kill him     YES Because he wants to effeminate me     YES I had no support for my gender     YES And he does not support it     YES And I want him to     YES Did his mother support his gender     NO Should we expect that from each other     no Then what     feeling and understanding temper each other So I'm wrong to want him to read John Grey     NO But I should understand that it won't work     YES Because he isn't ready to want to support my gender     YES Because he's mad at his mother for not supporting his     and other crimes Okay what's next     you can learn Learn what     to be complete To support my own gender     no to not be in conflict about your own gender What is the conflict     between loneliness and excluded child Loneliness makes me want to be with a man, excluded child makes me fear it     YES How is that conflict resolved     in love woman I don't understand     your man can bring her through exclusion by missing her You mean if I miss her     Because they don't     NO until they can So I have to just miss myself     no, persist with yourself Support what she feels     listen to what she feels Is that all for now     no, don't go away, there's more about the conflict What I want to talk about     what it does to initiative For instance ability to ask for what I want     I assume I'll be betrayed     Is that what you mean     YES I fear it's hopeless     YES I have to support love woman by asking for what she wants     NO support her to ask for what she wants What does that mean in this instance     ask her Is love woman really an autonomous separate part     YES Is that a pathology     no - [to love woman] Will you talk to me     yes How are you doing     beginning I'm sorry I don't know how to talk to you     yes I don't know how I should talk to you     yes Is there something you would like from me     yes Will you tell me what it is     YES, I'd like to be successful Will you explain what success is for you     yes, the reverse of what it is for you Success for me is to understand philosophy     yes Does success for you have anything to do with Tom     YES Do you want to be with him     no success for me is to be complete This is painful for me because I don't understand     yes Is there something I can do for you now     help me with catastrophe, separation Are you like Euridice in the land of the dead     YES Do you want to come out and live with me     no, regret You want me to be sorry     yes Have I done something bad to you     YES you decided not to persist I gave up on you     YES   Is this true     NO Is it excluded child saying this       Honey I haven't given up on you     yes I often just don't know what to do     YES I want to be with you     YES I'm very sad when I'm not with you     no You mean when I'm working     yes I don't know how to be with you when I'm working     yes   Do you want to say anything about this     she's heartbroken and angry trying to process catastrophe I'm fading     no, blocking   Are you heartbroken and angry     yes I am so sorry     YES I am so sorry and confused     YES I want you to be happy and I don't know how to help     yes Will you help me know how to help you     yes   What is this blocking     illusion About her     That she's mad at me     NO, about the catastrophe About which catastrophe     YES I'm on tetherhooks not understanding     YES Okay what's next     coming through   Alright love woman, I'm here     what are you imagining Do you mean Julian     yes Something I felt there     YES Something I felt when I was sitting on the step     YES When I was looking at the newspaper     YES   Larger one is this important     NO   But she feels it is     Was it the last time I trusted her     YES Is it that you want me to let you lead me     YES Is that what this is about     YES I like that too     yes I have to go now, is that okay     don't be tyrannical   Do you want to say anything about that     she just wants not to be separated from you Okay to go now     no love woman wants to say something   Okay     I want a decision What decision     that you'll work to persist in giving me willingness to learn   She wants me to trust spooky instinct     yes What should I say     say you'll do it But should I do it     be judicious   Alright sweetie I want you to be with me a lot     yes   Can I stop     part 2 the golden west volume 8: 1996 september-october work & days: a lifetime journal project