the golden west volume 8 part 1 - 1996 september-october

work & days: a lifetime journal project

17 September Joyce this morning, Louie after. I'm on the road. I'm in Blaine [WA]. There is that small vanishing wish to die, fear I will die by accident. I said to Joyce, When I outdo them at being men I can get what I want from them but when I want to be a woman they are gone. It's too close to the bone, she said. They want fathers too. There is no such thing as a father! There are no men! I say. She agrees, there are no men. I am in Blaine thinking of when I believed he would live here to be with me, could hear my journal, love my letters. I have been dying back in relation to him. I am desolate as I give up all hope. I won't send the letter. I won't send the angry postcard. I won't send John Grey underlined. I won't send the note. I give up. I put his stuff in the basket downstairs, clear out all signs. I don't know what to think. What is implied by loss of hope. I was crying in Louie's armchair. Agony at the heart. That is love woman, I said. Do you want her with you? Louie said. Not if she is unending pain, I said. When I said that, she went. That's her, said Louie. Touchy. Now I'm going camping with her. Yes, dear, I am, though you aren't with me yet. I don't want her abandoned in that dark back room, but I am afraid the pain will be endless. The world is here. I don't know the answer, Joyce said, but my experience is that you can always take refuge in the moment. Yes I know the moment is always there. But when she was offering a goodbye hug I was running to the door to get away before she could touch me, angry that time was up and she had not fixed me. But Louie could touch me. I let Louie touch me. She put her fingers onto the tight fibres of the spine behind the heart, the place that hurt so much yesterday. My neck was okay when I left. This is feeble talk. I am unspooling this feeble mind, I think. I'm going to go somewhere and lie still. I'm tired. I must give up trying to make him support my girl heart. That is not his wish. He gives no damn at all for my girl heart. He has a contrary urgency. I don't know what. To find evidence for a good opinion of himself without taking on the ordeals that would supply it. Alright that's your wish, that's your limit. It's nothing to do with me. I can't help. You are nothing to do with me though I cry to say so. Why. Because I think I am saying goodbye to myself. Is it true? I don't know. Grey says it is a perfect fit - he needs to be appreciated to be competent. I need to be held safe to be emotionally real. If I am emotionally real he will find real need of his real competence and real appreciation. If he is competent I can be real. But the exchange is interrupted in two places. He is in too much pain to be competent. I am in too much pain to be real. So instead he is real and I am competent and we are floundering and giving up. I have been with just one man who was competent with my girl heart. 18 I am somewhere in a marsh. Tell about the night. I was awake a lot. I saw Cassiopeia and the Swan turn more than 90 degrees. There was a very faint sound as if of a breath of water on a shore, though there aren't waves. It's a salt marsh. When I turned onto this road I said yes this is the one. I came onto a gravel road between marsh grasses. A hawk. An owl. Yes. A sudden lift of the road onto a dyke. Rocks and lines of piles. This place was something it isn't now. A two-story concrete warehouse shell. Rubbish dumped off the side of the road. Rubbish in me. Reproaches. What would it take / To make you love me. Sports fishin' with you. Once more / To the limit. Odds and ends from Jake's progress. It has clouded over and is cold. There is Baker grey blue and white the same colors as the clouds. That was a hawk coasting over the water. I heard two large plops as if fish jumped. For sound like that our hearing doesn't resolve well - we don't resolve it well, I realized. It's like blurred vision, we just know something's there. The plop had detail I didn't know I was missing. Yellow flower of the burr. A salt weed finely interspersed dark pink. It may rain. Should I pack the bed. When my heart hurt at night I said, you are welcome my friend. I thought to try to hold pain and the sky both together. Not be with the sky instead of the pain. A man in a little car, setting up a camera on a tripod. I am thinking this, or at least need to say this: if my reason for trying to cling where there is neither sex nor talk is the deluded hope of getting what my father wouldn't give me, then I will always be frustrated, trying to change him. If he could learn to listen either in talk or in sex, he would. I'm up against deep refusal. I've been dreaming. I can see why it was a strong hope and I can see why it won't work. What follows is that I give up, see I cannot be satisfied there. I can pour my time into trying, but I can't succeed. Can I succeed emotionally some other way? My heart starts to shake when I say that. I could get over him in a year, less if I go somewhere and don't have contact with him. But how would I keep from doing the same thing somewhere else? I'd have to engage that part of me in something else - what? How? Why are we wired to want something that doesn't exist? Joyce says she thinks it exists inside us. I don't know what it means to say a state exists when it is not active, I say. He gave me access to it. I don't know how to get to it otherwise. My heart is in agony, agony, agony. - And then it's not. It's September 1996. Since September 1991 ? I have been in this particular madness. Dave Carter, Ken Sallit, David Beech, Tom Fendler. More alive, more depressed, Joyce said. That's wrong. More depressed. I am mad at myself for being like this. I don't want to go back to any more variations of that. I'm giving up. I've fought for something and my heart is failing. Something like that. It is as if failure in instinct drove me into religion, as it does many. It was hope fuelled the religion. I don't know. 19 Four in the morning in a motel in Blaine. I'm wanting to say I'll stop seeing Joyce, I'll stop the bookwork, I'll stop with Tom. I'll pull the plug on the phone. I'll maybe stop with Louie. I'll keep on with the garden and with school. I'll catch up with money. Live somewhere else for a while. Wait to find another sort of emotional life, I don't know what kind. 20th Dennis Potter must have died because they are showing elegaic stuff, a long BBC interview. He said he was fifty-eight. He and his doctor had worked out a dosage of painkillers that let him write ten pages a day, flat out. The hands I saw lifted into the frame with a cigarette or glass of wine were in spasm with the fingers pressed against the palm - closed hands. Karaoke begins with Why must I be a teenager in love, which when sung by a middle-aged male drunk says just about everything: he pretends to complain of a condition he adores. In the play there are middle-aged men, young men and young women. The young women are helpers or hookers. The hookers are numinous. Both old and young men come in pairs: the creative lout and the sane agent/editor. There is one old woman, the agent's mother, who is an ancient harpy, a mad old thing who plants something horrible in his breakfast egg. He lives with his mother and has a neurological condition that turns words around. There is a recurring vision of a whore-angel on hands and knees jerking as she is fucked from behind, having a necktie slipped around her neck, being strangled. Potter himself had the look of a little blond boy being sweet on the potty. When he said fuck and bugger he said them as if it was the thing to do. It hurt him that very intelligent women said he was a misogynist, he said. The man chosen to play him in Karaoke was bigger and more male. I took notice of Potter in 1972 because of a play on my TV in the basement bedroom on Burghley Road. I was there sitting alone at night and it struck something about loneliness - I think. Arthritic psoriasis, his hands. So this is about striking depths because of being turned off the path when I was two. Why must I be a teenager in love. But I wondered if he was really asking - it was as if he had decided not to know, because he was making a good living. Tom phoned just there, in the middle of the last paragraph. He'd had a bad night. The frustration of not being able to walk around the corner and be with me. Thinking of me sitting in the marsh by myself - that shocked him. The slough of despond. He takes marsh psychologically. That he'd gone against his own fine code of not bringing back what was said in battle. He doesn't go into despair, he just gets seriously bummed out. We laughed. When you feel like you're going to drink, call your sponsor. Why didn't you call me? I did, I felt like I was doing that the last three weeks and it wasn't working. I say it was about the John Grey chapter. I felt jeered at. He says he doesn't jeer. It's true. Furthermore he didn't realize it was a cry from the heart. He thought it was an intellectual discussion. In this conversation and yesterday I so much liked the energy in his voice. At the marsh there was a new moon reflected in the water. - What I have been feeling today is our interest in each other. The way I am interested to find the courtesy he bears me, the sense of fitness that forbids him to mention what I said in anger. Other careful habits, his version of a gentleman's code. That, with what I feel to be great conversational discourtesy at other times. He was saying we should live shoulder to shoulder. I'm charmed by the thought. His first reason I know is to get his private life out of the hotel. I'd have to be always putting salt on his tail, which being out of town two nights in a row amounted to. In a natural state I can do that without trying, it is self-extortion that prevents - the one where I say he'll be the right dad if I'm good. It says this: when you feel romantic hope be responsible - every time. 21st In the night: for metaphor: something is happening out of sight. The metaphor has come from there. It is the sensation of knowing, being knowing not saying knowing. I've been mindless. I haven't been holding more than the single thrown-into-it sense of things - also I am holding back love - holding back love is holding back power - I don't know the difference between holding back love and whatever I'm supposed to do with romantic hope. Romantic hope - let's say this is the test - is useless to him. Just now I began to write a letter by imagining him in the lobby, imagining the lobby, the hotel, wanting him to write it, wanting him to write. Finding why he doesn't. It's what no one could tell me when I raged and cried about writing. A conflict between exclusion and illusion. Give up illusion and find exclusion. Fight exclusion where it is. Then your judgment will have confidence in itself. It's moral in that way. 22nd David Birch in the parking lot. Several months ago he felt so bad about his family that he was thinking about suicide, he said. 23rd What I meant to say was what I can't say, the way he came onto the parking lot vivid in his way, he had his hair back in an elastic, it was as if he came in a bright wind. I was standing by the car brushing my hair and braiding it and he came up uncontained offering himself. "Beautiful," he says. I take it as my due and am instantly founded in comfort. It is not that he shouldn't do that. But when he talks about his parents he drops, dissolves, darkens, turns old in front of my eyes. That somehow is what he shouldn't do but there must be a relation. The true saying and the false saying as if two speakers I am hearing as I write. The one is careless and habitual. The other is natural. When Louie phoned late in the afternoon I told her David might live here when I go away. She spun out. I watched her name any reason but the true one. The fact that she lost a competition to her mother is still so appalling to her that she'll live unfree to save whatever pride is. I'm saying that with my own pride in having won, that time. But also seeing the power of the structure I opened when I surrendered at the kitchen table. She is saving her pride again with Alanis and not seeing that she is losing a gate. In work when I am close I am seeing, almost seeing, beginning to see, how speech is a tissue of fantasy. I mean not the sensory memory as much as the abstract and theoretical stuff. I feel Buddhist description confirmed. Jam eleven years later is having trouble, feeling trouble, with me. It is as if women go crazy out of pride. They can't bear to be defeated, and their pride takes the form of pretending they weren't competing. They stick with the mother but at the cost of being sexually unknown to themselves. What is required of the two year old is a harrowing moral decision. It is moral because it founds her ability to be adequate to the real. Are intelligent girls more likely to fail, because they are able to use fantasy to derail desire? Jam and I lost our mother's support totally for a time, and that defeated us. But Louie shows it in the normal form, and it is still harrowing. Thinking this watching The piano on TV last night. The little girl is there demonstrating what happens. She's kept out of it and turns against it. Feeling that doesn't speak is unconscious. The piano body standing at the edge of the sea. She stopped speaking when she was six. There is a patriarchal husband, a patriarchal ego, who does not want so childish a feeling body. He will have her only on his terms, and the piano not at all. The wilder husband gives patriarchal ego what it wants - 80 acres - in exchange for possession of what will draw feeling to him. He wins her by wanting her. What is the wilder husband - high intuition. A knowing/ego that is not patriarchal. The piano loses a key, she loses a finger: the little girl is distraught. Feeling speaks into the patriarchal mind, says let me go with the mind of art. Boards over the mud. The decision. He has made a metal finger. What is it that is taken from her?     early love Loss of early love is the true castration?     It is regained as speech?     The first time Tom and I were together in a car he said he loved Wings of desire and I said I loved The piano. We were telling each other what we wanted as genders - he wanted to be invited to earth by a woman who speaks, I wanted to be won away from control by a man who wants me. Hello heart. There is natural symbolism, natural symbolization. We have to take account of it. It disorders our factual relations and at the same time it is true speech. It is natural and must be discovered, like facts about butterflies. I have learned it very slowly as well as speaking it from the first. I didn't want gender to be symbolic and yet it is. There is the double effort to not identify with symbolic value and to understand symbolic value where it is being expressed. But what is it that is expressed in that way? I am the whole story, man woman child landscape house minor characters paraphernalia. But I figure as woman to Tom, articulate feeling, feeling no longer dumb, feeling that knows itself intelligent and can lead him. He figures as man to me if I am a figure to myself - is that it? Am I a figure to myself? He is the wilder husband than I have lately been to myself. But something - what am I when he is that? No, neither of us are figures, but our images figure, are used to tell. That's it. How else could it tell, if language is wired up to circumvent true telling? It circumvents the telling language can do? Always I am tempted to overstate, I'm noticing. But what kind of symbolization is it if I dream Tom in feeling him. How can I know when I am dream-telling myself something, awake? It is complicated. I haven't said the question yet: what makes me, as a brain, present a man as figure to say action or knowing, and a woman to say feeling? "Archetypal." No idea what that means. Images are made - I'll mean by that the digests that present themselves, some center of weight space for something. Some average? Statistical. Maybe that. The prototypical is the short form, what it falls into with least effort. That's symbol, somehow. Not far-fetched. But metaphor is something else. It can be symbolic or not. - It is a morning in California. Winter morning. Reading in a bagel café that's open onto the street, cold and bright. Wastin' away / In Margaritaville. A young man at the counter in Tom's young body, a column the same width shoulders to hips. Long legs, shoulders sloped, fine chestnut hair. Not a smart-looking guy and he doesn't have sore wolfy eyes. What I feel is lust. Does that count as romantic fantasy? Ha, now he's writing. He's not the right energy, though, passive. Oh my friend I want to be where you are, I want it with a heart sharply sore. 24 Dreamed I gave Rowen a cutlery box with my collection of pieces. At this end it's a fork and a knife with strange proportions. I look at each piece. As I work toward the left edge the pieces are more and more fantastic. There's something that has a volute like a sail or seashell or wing as if blown up from the foot where it is joined to something you drink from. It has the air of a fairy. I say they are all solid silver. Rowen can't interest himself in them or in any of the other objects I'm giving him, like this pink marble or coral bead that is sliced vertically into sheets with intricate internal carving. I'm thinking they are too complex for him to be able to see. And they are also too unprecedented. When I wake I think the objects in my dream are like dreams that I don't look at because of the patience it takes. When I think of dreams like that, as intricate artifacts being offered, life seems full of interest, and the puzzle is why anyone lives away from abundance in the greasy hovels of concern. Luke and I yesterday on a rock at Lighthouse Park looking down onto the silver track of sun reflections on choppy water. He told me a dream where a young woman had been worried about a stalker and he had searched through the house with her and found in the attic a man with yellow hair raying out from his head, teeth filed to points, and wonderful orange eyes that multiplied like fly's eyes and filled the dream. There was music with a sound like heavy metal but the music itself rather operatic, quite beautiful. I asked what Luke thought the man was feeling. He said with a fine discrimination I liked, that it would be wrong to say he was feeling anything; rather, he was consumed by feeling. That would seem to be the right way to describe him as a symbol - a feeling's description. Furii. Luke looks different. He has brown curly hair and less the distant handsome look, more a bumpy friendly look. He said he'd been in the other room overhearing Tanya telling Mag stories of my outrageous deeds. I said sly snakey Tanya had intended him to hear. Beyond politics what do I feel about the way I am, in this neighbourhood, now, a legendary woman? The young men seem to like me; the women are scandalized. It gives me privacy. I do write those women off, I feel there is nothing in them, I feel they are conforming cows. But more than that, I have accumulated about three stories my grandchildren will be told about me - the story of peeing on Trudy, the story of throwing rocks at Rhoda and Trudy in the herb garden, the story of giving Suzanne Angela's phone number. Is that it? No, stories of letting water run over in the bathroom sink. Candice probably thinks I let the toilet run over onto her dishes on purpose. 25 I delight in discovering your scruples, because they are the rules that were particular to you, native. Something I like about myself too, the fine-grained never-spoken morality intended to protect my capability from the habits of people stupider than I am. I wouldn't repeat a story. I wouldn't wear a tee-shirt with words or pictures on it. There are words I won't write even as examples of words I won't write. The plod of these sentences comes from Valéry who died in 1945 and describes discoveries I've thought I made. As for you - on the phone last night - saying it was a year ago you met me. "I was so lonely." "Are you still?" "No I'm not lonely at all." His voice is firm, steady, eager, American, so much a man. We're people secretly thrilled by each other's voices. "I love you Ellie." He was in bed just waking up. He said it in his best way of saying it, as if I've surprised him by my nearness. "I love it that you love me but tell me why." He isn't used to being asked. He's not ready to tell. Is there something I should tell or ask, is it alright to have my heart full of you? Is there some reason I shouldn't? I don't mean, am I safe. I mean, am I wrong? It's a stretched heart. It is painful but I think it's real. It's almost heat. It's like a joy of realness. You really exist. I really found you and you really recognized me. We have come through every time. You admitted you're powerless over money. I showed myself turned to a seagull. I mean I showed myself saying much much too much. 26 I've just erased two paragraphs. All afternoon I was picking up sheets of paper - keep or throw. The deadness of writing about Roy, Jam. I throw it raging at the waste of feeling and time. I like reading about the Khanka. I'm interested to notice that fifteen years ago I remembered details of my childhood I've lost now. There were two sheets of a story I began to write about hitchhiking to Avignon when I was pregnant - I think I had a project once of writing hitchhiking stories. The story stopped halfway. I came to the end of what I'd written and burst out crying. I was crying with the heartbreak of the time but also because I had lost faith and never finished the story, which was good. I wanted to have gone on writing that way, because then I would have had my story written. I was so gripped by people's appearance. I thought being gripped that way was affection. 27 Waking anxious this way. He's never going to want me sexually, I've been dodging that, the happy times in my life have been when I've got a lover, my journal is interesting then, I'm doing all this work and it will just be a thesis, I'm this old and I'm still sidelining myself, I'm not going to have the money to be with Tom, it will fall apart. I have never taken on the facts of writing - saying that with anguish. As if I am in a narrow passage. I have never considered the technologies of any form. I've tried to make writers out of other people. I've put decades of my life to useless effort with people, without settling, without finding a way. I live a life that is half-empty every day, there is nothing but a blank where my gift for intimacy should live. I see no way to change that. I slog away every day and am starving. I'm five thousand in debt and haven't nearly enough to get through the next eight months. I don't know how to think about money, even. I'm cracking today, I'm desperate. - What do I want to say about Bright and dark? [Bright and dark notes] - Around sundown today, like a blow to the heart, knocked breathless with pain. It has to do with Tom. The book says he's drinking. What am I going to do. He wants to hold onto me and I am letting him, but he isn't able to support connection. He can't stay in touch by writing and he can't save money to come to see me, he can't organize email. He can't even organize real phone calls, I have to pay for the ones he takes in his room. I am a woman on a string held by a man who keeps getting drunk and dropping it. What am I going to do. What am I being punished for. How long will this last. What's happening. I was writing and went to find Mechtilde's dates that I thought were in the last journal. Just looking at it I got shot through the heart. It isn't pain with a lot of content - a kind of stunned breathless agony. Can he kill me at a distance? It's a very fine vibration if I pay attention to it. Love woman is it you so sore in me     (silent) Is it you saying maybe there is someone else     (silent) Oh sweetheart I'd do something for you if I knew what to do     (silent) Heart is so sore, do you know why     YES Why, honey?     because you're holding back Holding you back     yes What would you do if I wasn't holding you back     fantasy You'd tell yourself a lie     yes What lie would you tell yourself     a lie about anger, an angry lie What would it be about     men Would you say men don't want you     YES And then you'd feel better     YES Do you know what the truth is     yes Will you tell it to me Please do     yes. they try to help, struggle to help Is that the truth about men     yes How do you feel when you hear that     contemplative Is there something I can do for you     yes help me come through   Is she still unconscious     YES Is she asking to be conscious     YES Did you like that writing     so-so, it needs work   Is the pain you     no If I invite you to be in me will you come     YES   Will she come right this minute     YES   Dear one please be in me, please be with me, please please stay with me, will you?     (sigh)   What's the hitch I feel in the back     losses   Is there anything you want to say     about crisis: when you're in crisis join the sides   Is there anything you want to say     balance   Is pain imbalance       LW do you want to talk about anything else     YES, about decision A particular decision     YES, withdrawal The decision that made you withdraw     YES Will you tell me which one that was     yes, complete slow growth by integrating anger   Decision love woman wants me to make     YES   Are you angry     no But anger's there beside you     YES Are you still telling me why you withdrew     yes Because I was angry with men     YES Roy for example     YES Withdrew back then     constantly Do you need to be with men     (silent) A man     (silent) Do you want me to say that differently     YES I need to be in touch   Is that why I rail at Tom     YES   Do you literally need touch     no You need me to touch you     yes Can I touch you now     YES 29th Work day in the garden. A perfect day, I want to say. There was beautiful light. Bell was ebullient giving away honey. Brian is in love and doing a lot. Pem and Danny consult solemnly among the apples hour after hour. Muggs and a big-bellied man weeded paths. A new woman was cleaning the long path edge. Nicole sat on the gravel weeding herb garden beds with me; everywhere she has been plunked down, the gravel is left in ridges. She was telling me stories about full-moon meetings with her Sufi group. During Zikr something happened to her that scared her, a powerful energy came down around her, pressed her hard. It came to eye level. She was afraid that if it crossed the line to her brain she'd go mad. She felt every cell in her body vibrating. Next day she was flawlessly focused at work. She's getting more psychic. Louie was nearby brushing out the aisle between the herb garden and the espaliered pears. There was a mood of joyful cooperation, light and zingy. Louie and I at the art gallery last night not liking the new stuff we were there to see, finding Shadbolt and Jock MacDonald on the top floor, leaning over the rail looking down on people we knew. There was a self-conscious young man striking poses in front of pictures. We were cracking up. Louie pink with laughing. We came home and I made her cocoa. We fell asleep listening to the wonderful Hildegard von Bingen. Jongleur New Age. Sounds you've never heard. Two women overlapped at finely newly-judged angles. We were talking until 1:30. We haven't been in a bed together for two years. Has the moon let up? Is it a lull in the heart-stretching cycles? I'll say yes. I phoned. I listened. He had a hard week. He fell out with Vince. He's pissed off with Oscar pushing him to drink. He hurt both hands slipping on rocks. A guy kicked out the elevator door this afternoon. Three double shifts. But you know what kept me going? The Padres won three straight in Los Angeles. And something about the Chargers. I was listening with equanimity. He had a bad week. This is the kind of guy he is. 30 Remember this: the hell crashes are dips that are followed by rises. They may go on to the end of my days but they aren't continuous. Don't fight them. Live them the way you have lived your births. Stick with people who get you there. - Is that right? Yes. I had a sense yesterday of the way the facts of his character and our story are in suspension. Different states have their own facts, which are the facts that state would bring about if it continued. Something odd. I can't find my car documents since that trip to the States. They're not in the car. Another thing - I lost my box of prescription antibiotic on the first day of that trip. 1st Oct Is there something I should talk to Joyce about     YES, merging Merging with Tom     YES I don't know what you mean     (silence) What is the question     anger Do you mean I am merged     Does that mean identified     In a female way caring too much about his interests     YES Do I want to be merged     part of you Which part     the part that doesn't fight Should all the parts fight     I merge because I don't have anger     YES I don't have anger because Ed trained me out of it     YES I went blank     no you closed up How am I going to get anger back     by deciding to I said the book's been saying I should find unconscious anger. She said, That's exactly right. I said, When I go into pain, anger isn't what I find. She mentioned god. I was irritated. She said - There, that's anger. You think you're alone. I said when I'm in that state I think I'm alone. She said when you're in that state, trust that something will help you. Or don't even trust. I said, You mean, next time I'm in the state where I'm alone I shouldn't make myself responsible for getting out of it? That's it. There was a glow in my heart when I said that. A poem of Rumi's about going into the fire. People who try to walk into the water of pleasure find themselves coming up in the fire. Get to the heart of it, she says. Pride, resistance. We are angry at ourselves for having abandoned ourselves. Is she right about anger about god     She doesn't mean stop being angry about god     no, she does That stiffness of the back     How I resisted my father's anger     YES Pride     no it isn't pride, it's resistance The anger you're talking about is a posture of resistance     Whenever I'm in pain is that what it is     YES Trusting in the pain undoes the resistance     'Trusting god' just means trusting     YES Have I got a basic confusion here     YES You mean see the anger     YES Not become angry     YES The anger keeps me from myself and that's why I merge     I resisted myself with men     you resisted men For fear of betrayal     YES Subtle loss of intelligence, security, emotional fearlessness     YES I was withdrawn in La Glace     YES I'm supposed to notice the anger     YES   [addressing the child] Will you talk to me? I'd like you to talk to me     alright How are you doing     oppressed By something in particular     YES Will you tell me what     the shattering of my ability to act Is there something you'd like to do     YES Will you tell me what it is     (silent) I miss you     yes I'd like you to tell me what you want to do     stand in a high place Do you really want to stand in a high place     yes Climb a mountain     yes Do you want to be famous     YES Something you want to be famous for     honesty You want to be more honest than other people     yes Have you wanted this for a long time     YES Is there a reason     YES Will you tell me what it is     yes, revenge You want to tell people what they did     yes after a while You want to tell the people themselves     yes Someone in particular     YES Who?     all the people who caused me losses What did you lose, honey     my work What should your work have been honey     the catastrophe Do you mean when you were little     YES Will you forgive me for not following you very well     yes Is there something you want to say     a structure is leaving, your foolishness Do you know why I feel sore     no Do you feel sore too     no Will you talk to me some more tomorrow     yes I love you but I'm not understanding you today     you're beginning to 2nd I'm thinking today I have to get out. It's not that I'm alone and have to leave my entire life. I have to leave him. He is too unsteady. I like his energy. I'm thrilled by his maleness. I'm interested in his contradictions. I love the love he can inspire in me. I'm moved by his loneliness. But I am not willing to go on living in confusion and agony. He is not doing anything to back up what he says. He doesn't act like a man who wants to know me. He has not found therapy. He hasn't found money. He doesn't ask for letters. He stopped writing when he got me hooked again. He started backing off when I said I was coming for Christmas. He does whatever he has to to keep me on a string but he doesn't do more. He has backed off. This is absolutely clear. I have to stop. I don't want to give up being love     But I want to give up being dependent on him     Can I have the blazing heart of love without him     YES Do you want me to give him up     Alright I'm willing     YES Will you help me get through the pain     YES Please comment     something about men What     your story with them is over I won't have to go through this any more     YES What will I have instead (crying)     conflict Why are you putting me through this     for the sake of beauty I hate you! I hate you!     go on You are just torturing me week after week     the child is speaking Please speak to the child     you are angry Yes I am so angry, you are torturing me on and on     let's finish it Can you lead me to a finish     YES Please do     YES Can you lead me there now     no, something about Tom What     creation I don't understand     the balance of your feeling will improve when he comes Are you now saying he's going to come     Are you playing with me     Is there something you want from me now     no You wanted that burst of anger     Were you showing me what men protect me from     So there is no way I can live in truth if I am with a man     YES The truth is hatred of life     no The truth is hatred of my parents     And anyone who takes me to that depth     YES What I want from Tom is to get behind the time of hate     YES What is happening to me     you are What now     what do you feel Is there any more you want to say     it's the structure of waiting I'm being reactivated     YES Are these reactivations doing any work     YES 3rd I was preparing my winter here. I cleaned the workroom, moved in the red armchair, filed papers, taped up pictures of beautiful Rowen. Tom phoned to say he is coming in two weeks for five days. This morning I'm thinking we should give ourselves the project of collaborating on a piece on the Golden West. I'll take pictures. part 3 the golden west volume 8: 1996 september-october work & days: a lifetime journal project