Vancouver December 16 1996
Monday early. Tomorrow this time I'll be on the bus. It's six-thirty, I'm in bed drinking tea. I'm in a stripped room. The rugs are put away. Piles on the table: those for the checked bag, those for the shoulder bag. There are my to-wear clothes on the chair. My wonderful suitcase is going to take it all. Iron, lamp, hotplate, cups, saucepan, bowl, can opener, a 10 inch stack of papers.
Other things. Louie liked my paper. Talking to her about it last night, talking to anybody about it for the first time. What was that - a sensation of broaching - that doesn't say it - sudden transport. I think I mean I hadn't realized how private my work has been. It is complete around me and then I'm somewhere else not realizing it is gone and I'm less without it. It was the sensation of stepping into its power in someone's presence, a shy feeling.
David Adams Richards, another television piece last night, For those who hunt the wounded down. He is excruciating. The realness of the uncushioned poor. He is uncushioned enough to be able to write the speech of the people I grew up with - somehow he could be one of them while being what he is.
Tom is racing his engine, as if being at the station to meet me, reserving me a room, borrowing a bike, are feats so difficult they are pushing him to his limit. He collapses gasping but proud: he has looked after me. I'm hearing that I should acknowledge his effort. I say, You've done far more than I ever expected. He lights like a match: You haven't seen anything yet! It is a tone so young, like Rowen when he was four saying he'd fight evil horses for me. It's the necessary road but I'm standing blinking: this is how far back we have to go. Ah, Tom. You're so flamey. Flame in a draft. I love your flameyness, I love the way you waver visibly. You're not a rock. You have to fight, the way a flame fights, to stay on your base and find the vertical again, to not be blown away.
San Diego, 19th
I'm still tired. First cup of tea. I have to get away from the [hotel AC] fan, though the chest of drawers and the chair are good. There's my lamp, there's my hotplate, there's a bird of paradise flower Tom didn't nip from some street display. There are my new red sneakers, too new. There's the fan. Good tea. I am so tired.
An old man hacking across the way. The light is exquisite, exquisite, California gold and silver light.
I knew I wanted to get to that park last night. There was a palm in the center - there. I put my arms around it and became what I am too shocked and suspicious to be with Tom. Melting relief, simple arrival. I'm crying as I say this. Tom could see where I was, I think. He got behind me and pressed up against my back. His impulse was support or sabotage or both, I don't know. The effect was sabotage. His weight was squashing me against the tree. (And there was the way he took my ten dollar bill and tipped the shuttle driver 50% with it.) The fan is unbearable. He's telling me how much trouble he went to. [2005]
-
And now I have dealt with the desk and am moving to 241.
It's so uncomfortable being looked after. I am going to have to stand square. That isn't hard. What's hard is feeling it's his way of loving and I am nipping the bud. The breadbox. Loving detail which doesn't know my taste.
But it's California. There's light in the fire escape room at the end of the corridor.
There's light on green trees. There's light in the light well. I came through the lobby and got welcomed in ways I love. I'm less tired. There's the bird of paradise holding up five arms. Many colors of red. Look at the light on the side of the black bowl.
20th
I'm trembling with fear and sadness this morning though I am on Horton's balcony with idiotic music and the sky is pure clear blue.
What is it, little heart, what is the matter. I'm so lonely. So alone. Very shaky. As if I would like to lie in my bed for a week. It is the way I can walk with Tom for two hours, lie with him, and there is no speck of time in which I feel seen. I say something and stand wondering at the blank that follows it. He doesn't know how to respond, nothing comes to him in relation to me. He has initiatives he can unfold, he has worked those out, they are his sense of what to do. I'm so sad.
It's my dad, is it. I'm in despair. I want to cast myself down with my little bottom in the air. Dejection. There's nothing I can do, it says. I just have to go away, put my bags in a taxi. Then I'll be free to look around, love where I am.
He thought that was better sex. He banged me this way and that way and another way and I did my best to be there. He didn't touch either my breast or my clit - my way or the highway, he was saying. You want something, you'll have to fight for it, I'm not a man who works with my hands. Why am I with a man who thinks generosity is arranging the itinerary. My heart hurts. I want to run. It says stay with it. It's the loneliness of his mother.
I don't know whether he has been with Lorie, I don't know whether he is drinking again, or going to. I have no way to find out. Why did I sleep with him, it weakens me - it said to. It said it's the beginning. The beginning of what. The work I guess. He is collecting himself - the man in the green suit who said to him, Let's get you writing again. If he writes there will be women. If you don't drink with those people you're dead, he said. I saw his weakness, he won't stand against the weakness of his male friends, he never will. What should I do. So many letters, beautiful, he said. Nothing I said ever fetched a reply - that is shocking. I declared and explained and he read without enquiry and knows me no better. What should I do. Don't do anything, Joyce is saying. Alright, that isn't the way through. I miss my mother horribly, someone who knows me. Warm eyes. Someone saying How are you, wanting to know the answer. How was your trip, what did you see, who did you meet. Are you tired from your trip. How do you feel about your paper. What's it like seeing Tom again. What's your paper about. What are you going to do at UCSD, what are you going to say to Churchland. Do you have enough money.
22nd
We went through a year, the expansions and contractions, he said. Creaking metal. You are a focused radiance, he said. That focused radiance is clearing the way for your love.
Who do I see - is this who I saw before?
I'm here where I was but not when I was. "It's a year later" isn't something the nets can know though they can say it.
Nicole [Gingras] has done a brilliant cut on my paper. A pleasure to see how economical she has made it. There she phoned. She is happy. People want theory that supports the working process.
Alan Templeton on the train said I was giving him hope.
It's 7:30 on a Sunday night. Tom is on the desk. It's a wet cold night.
What am I going to say about last night. I've been here Thursday-Friday-Saturday, three days. On my first day we walked out and he was offered a writing job. I've crashed and recovered. He has taken my fear calmly. I've been plain in my states. Last night I went up his spine and he felt electric shocks. After that when I said my beautiful ass is his he jumped into me and came hard. I had a briny smell after that. When we went to bed I said I was a woman who was going to come before I went to sleep and wanted a finger. We took a while finding it. I was gradually realizing I could relax and do what I do, imagine a voice. He lost touch for a while and then got it back. I got to the moment when I could tell it would come through but then when I came I heard myself crying. I wasn't crying but a crying voice was let out of me.
What do I have I need to say. Not very much. There was a man the porter put next to me, big, sixty, greasy black hair with big flakes of dandruff suspended among the strands, brown patches that looked like skin cancer. He'd been a plumbing fittings salesman in through central Oregon. When he got out of the army after the Korean war he ran a little motel in Seaside Oregon. What was it I liked about him. It was as if I knew him. He was physically like Henry Gautier at the garden, and he had that large heavy gentleness of manner. He told me this and that about the country we were passing through. This is the Williamette (Willam'it) River. This part floods right across to where you see the ridge there. We were in pleasant agreement about politics. He saw a lot of small businesses go down when Reagan was in power.
There was Alan Templeton, whose parents are molecular biologists tracking the crystal structure of compounds whose lattice is too small to be imaged, so that it has to be inferred. His father supported his being an artist but his mother needs to see him successful. The dining car steward tucked me into a table where there was a mother with two kids. I asked to have a seat where I could face forward. You just want to sit with the men! Alice Wong in a Santa hat.
I was telling them about brain and perception. The soft, deaf young Christian man annoyed to lose Alan's generous attention to his life with tinnitus, not understanding either its generosity or its real interest. I offered to lend Alan my paper. Alan said maybe later when it's dark. The young man wanting to be in the game said that was a polite evasion. I said, No, he's an artist, he wants to look out the window while it's light. That was a quick save, you darted in and saved him, the young man said. No, I understand him, I said, he paid a lot of money to see the landscape.
We were stopped at a small station in southern Washington (it was lunch). What's to see, said the young man. Well that building is interesting, the windows and the way the false front goes. And this light is quite beautiful, silvery - it's a very blue light, a cold light, surprisingly. Pass the acid, I don't see any of that, said the young man. What about here? - in a tone of triumph, because we were passing scaffolding set up to support construction of a ramp next to the rail line. This is very interesting - it's a film - it's grids, perspective. The way it's moving. You have a gift, said the painter. I know, I said.
Next day when I was in the dining car for dinner there was a young woman opposite me whose voice I liked, a loud hoarse voice. She had black hair, was buxom, wearing overalls. There was a pink young man with her. We were pulling out of San Luis Obispo. She was telling him that down that road was an old man who'd sell you a ten-pound sack of oranges for three dollars. There she sat so energetic and lovely ordering pasta. It's taking too long to write this. She was an investment banker, she said, a trader. She began as a teller at Wells Fargo. After three weeks she said to them, you've got to get me something else. She had no patience with the customers. There was a woman who taught her. You had a mentor, I said. "I've had several."
I was surprisingly keen on her. I kept asking. When I said what I did she said she once wrote a paper on children who kill their parents. She'd researched the stats and gotten an A. There are in some time period two thousand and some parents who kill their kids but only four hundred children who kill their parents. Did you talk to some of them? How do they turn out? Some good, some bad.
By this time I thought I understood, so I said I tended to admire kids who killed their parents because it meant they weren't putting up with what would be very bad for them to put up with. The subject switched - I don't remember who changed it. But I still had it going. The only person I've imagined killing has been my father, I said. I've imagined lying on the crest of a hill with a 30-30 and picking him off. I almost killed my stepfather when I was eight, she said. I missed his heart by that much. I shot him with my mother's 22. That's not big enough, I said. Did you wish you'd killed him, or were you glad you didn't? I wished I'd killed him.
She was a little girl who read the encyclopedia backward and forward. She's just bought a house in the redwoods. It's very quiet. She planted bulbs, daffodils, and something else, corms. Anemones, I said. Yuh.
They were alone with him. He was - what was her term - something like getting at - her little brother. It was an impulse. Her mother's 22 was always in the living room.
She's giving up banking. She's going to do something with computers, a second career, maybe web pages for traders.
The train is long days. I don't like the confinement with people or the passivity, sitting there being dragged through the land. I kept thinking of the action in driving, the way it's all decision and change of motion and things really encountered. A train window is almost television.
There were things I liked though - the tangles of traveler's joy in bare branches in Washington. The mothball fleet seen with Alan Templeton through a mist he said was a different mist than San Francisco mists. The utter black and white clarity of the night sky when they'd turned the lights out. We were in the mountains where the rail goes east to Klamath Falls. Snow, they said. I was sleeping on the floor under the seat and could see up through the window glass, Orion in a meal of lesser stars swerving and joggling. The gentle complex motion of the floor.
I was in transit. The last hard days at home a slavery of details. I was so tired. On Tuesday morning I was awake at 2:30 and woke Louie looking at the clock. We talked until the alarm went at 5. Stood in the alley with our cups of tea waiting for the Yellow Cab at 5:30, Louie in my coat because she'd used hers (the one I found left on my trunk in a parking lot, dirty and soaked, and had cleaned) to put out the grease fire in the Vietnamese restaurant. (I'd burned my thumb. She called Phong, who said toothpaste will draw out the pain, and it did.) So she got out of the cab with me at the station in a coat too big for her, the hem dropping on one side. Under it the silver shirt that was too small for me, that I said might change her life.
What I have left to talk about is Tom. The two cars we had left after LA hauled themselves past a quiet ocean under half a moon. The seaside communities. I recognized Leucadia, places we ate. There was Del Mar. San Diego's downtown towers. I was on my feet as the train stopped and saw Tom on the platform. We smiled through the glass. He'd been in the station for an hour because the train was late. He'd come off work and showered and put on good clothes, his chinos and a wonderful washed-madras padded vest. I walked into his arms. Here's my man meeting me at the train. Who is he? Looking sideways. Who've I got? A man.
I was leaving the taxi to him and noticed he immediately got it wrong. With the shuttle we had to pay for two people, and a taxi would have cost half what we paid. He overtips, wants to look prosperous. He was making too much of what he'd done for me. I understood it's his way of distributing the stress of waiting but I was oppressed by acceding to what seemed to be his demand to have his support supported. When he comes to Vancouver I do what needs to be done to make him comfortable and don't tell him about it.
He partly talks about what he's done because he doesn't talk about what I've done. I was secretly crushed not to be welcomed the way a woman and some men would welcome me, by asking me to tell my journey, so I could arrive from it. He was both bragging about the care he was taking of me and not taking the care I really needed. It took me days to arrive because I got hauled immediately into his terrain. I have to want him to enact love in the way he does, cockroach traps, boric acid, a flower from Ralph's, a basket of pot-pourri from that shop he bought my Christmas present at, the room booked ahead, his lap desk, his battery lamp, a walkman for the bike, a Dire Straits tape. But I also have to hold my sense of actual preference, because that's my health and my ability to work. I have to keep resisting his loutishness while not refusing the loving ardour in it - the way he was so proud of his hard-on yesterday morning that he poked it into me without checking if I was wet. I'm still sore. I want you never to do that again, I said firmly. I meant no harm, I felt it was my lucky day, he said. I know you meant no harm, I said. But in fact it was his demon's revenge for the way I came. He did mean harm, and succeeded, but I don't want him less malicious. I don't want him disarmed. But I have to keep my own bright sword that I've needed a lout for. It's fun. What I should say is that after I crash and recover it's fun.
At this moment he is impressed by Nicole's edit of my pieces, he's having to hold onto himself in the face of a phenomenon he had evaded knowledge of. I'm not going to pad for him the fact of my working connections. And he and I are not yet where we left off in Leucadia last year. January 8th. We're avowing and reassuring. He has to be someone else to be with me; that is mutual.
His pull is between his working accommodation to the men he works with, to be felt one of them, which he has always needed, and the line into creation and thought that I offer. The men feel his connection to me as disloyalty, and he is doing what he can to not draw fire. They also feel it as cachet and he is exploiting that. When I was younger I'd have minded his entrenchment with the men, and I do mind the weakness I see in it, because I am not weak with my peers the way he is and Louie is. That weakness costs them the whole pleasure of their intelligence. But I don't mind his boy gang connections because they support his boyness, which I adore as well as distain. It is interesting.
The moment when he said he thought what I said about missing my mother was a headtrip, and that I don't support him the way a mother does, I went white with anger. My mouth was twitching. I'll stop doing it and then you'll know.
26th
What has happened this week. It has been a week, one week of ten. I'm in 291. A double bed with a green blanket, a table, a chair with a padded seat. Clothes on hangers - red, black, blue, my cowboy boots with shoe trees in them I found in the corridor yesterday. The light well's cream plaster, cream-colored curtains drawn, faded blue-grey window frames. There aren't pigeons in this well. A fan somewhere down the end.
Yoga before breakfast. My friend is happy. We both had a tostada de la rosa for breakfast and then we came back and thought about the week. We'll do three restaurant reviews and we'll do them without stress. We'll figure out how to do them without stress. Escalate gently. What he's already doing right - coming off shift at 11 and going for a night walk so he can downcycle without going to a bar. Taking Kevin with him so Kevin has stayed out of bars too.
I'm very pleased with you, I said. Watched him go pink. I love that. I said he'd been perfect at mediating my crashes, not taking them personally, knowing when to be steady. I can do that because I understand you, I understand your crashes, he said. We've done good, I say. That makes him want to lie down on top of me.
28
Ammar's shining face. Soul not ego, he said. He looks like soul and sounds like ego - wraps his fingers in silver gaffer tape so the silver will pull our eyes after his beautiful North African gestures. He is dressed in a way that alludes to North Africa - a loose cotton jacket striped in shades of burlap, cream, olive. His hair wrapped in a black stretch band towering like a fez. Sudanese, he said. A portfolio of tile designs, india ink on blotter paper, carefully drawn. He was running from a man he'd been in a fight with. What do you want to do, said the cops. You can have four days in jail. Okay, take me, said Ammar. Sketching for me the grace with which he put his hands behind his back.
Now no more of the old friends, he wants to know twenty people who are quality people and can help him. He saw me reading that book and thought I was a doctor. If he didn't see the book he would think I was an artist. He was on the bench next to the hotel and I was sitting on my book on the pavement in front of him. Behind him was a wall with Virginia creeper scribbled over it layers deep. Cursive, Islamic. Some leaves, not many. He gave up on the Muslims, they're like horses with the ... gesturing palms upright beside the temples. When he came three years ago he was a baby. Street life made him, working construction, hardship. He was reading A guide to the I Ching, using the end pages to write in. Two baggage tags stuck in the pages were covered both sides with rough black printing, their wires crooking out of the book like an antenna in some esoteric relation with his flashy silver bandages. A thief, Tom says.
29
He said Why when I look at empty sky does my brain feel full?
A primer of working implications for this vision. Images and say what they are but say it visually.
30
"May the year's end meet us laughing and stronger ... may we sit again in larger numbers." [newspaper explanation of Kwanza]
It's two weeks - there have been flickers - I'm not all the way rested, I fade - I don't have writing drive - start where I am - in a Mission rocker (is it) with a deep dent under the bum - Batman on the dim inaudible screen.
Nicole mailing me a check from Montreal. Fred when he met me in the corridor used an old joke, "It's Mr and Mrs Epp's little girl Ellie." Here beside me is a daddy I like. He is scratching the back of his neck, wearing a tie. He is vain of his watch and his haircut. His back is straighter already. This morning he was lying on my bed with a strange apparatus between his legs, a firm heart-shaped bulb sprouting a blunt-headed stalk. I was leaning against the wall smiling. Mine mine mine I said boldly at the breakfast table. I meant something.
New York State farm boy, Baptist, sweet face, drunk, says "Don't put my name in your diary. Bad things happen, that's all I know." "Someone put your name in her diary?" "Lots of people."
1st January 1997
How I began this year. Tom has been disappointed that things have not been going as he hoped. I didn't like watching Letterman with him. I said Letterman was ugly and evil. I turned my back on the picture. Last night he wanted me to watch the ball dropping in Times Square. Dick Clark's Rocking New Year. "1977 - that was a Freudian slip - 1997." The events of 1996 were Madonna's baby etc.
I wanted to walk to the pier. We've swigged our bottle of sparkling apple juice. He is not touching me. Wants to know whether I lost respect when I saw the way he handled that guy in the lobby.
When I got back from the library with the green bag full of books I sat in the lobby looking at one about adobe. Wearing my skirt. Tom was on the desk looking beautiful in his real cotton white shirt. Football noises from the TV end of the lobby. Big Dave sat on the other bench, a smaller Dave than he was. Tom ordered a pizza. The lobby was busy. I saw women I never see, who seemed to creep downstairs just to make an appearance and then creep away into their rooms with "Do Not Knock" on the doors.
There was a wiry black man dressed very consciously in tan-colored suit and fedora, who was making passes through the lobby gesturing flamboyantly as if toward spirits. Let me go deal with this, said Tom. Threatening to call the police. Take it outside, my friend. The man was being driven out the door like a longhorn steer but he'd keep coming back and confronting Tom. I ain't afraid of you. He had a thin face with eyes that see. I was interested in what he was saying but I couldn't make it out. He was leaving and coming back. Tom was a large pink man getting baited. He felt me watching with uncertain sympathy. Etc.
When it was time to sit in front of the TV being American about New Years my friend couldn't stop. "He was asking to have his ass kicked," etc. He was creating disorder in the lobby Tom is responsible for, etc.
We go out. He's explaining his disappointment about me and TV. We're sitting at the end of the pier. He explains some more about the black guy. We're not seeing the lights on the water. Down the end of the pier we see a father walking hand-in-hand with a little girl in a party dress. As they get closer the man gets taller, the little girl becomes a very short woman who as they arrive at a point where we can see them stops and puts on high heels. They want us to take their picture. I leave it to Tom. She hands him the camera. She is some kind of oriental, red lipstick, glasses, a long dress slit up the back, hair up, four foot six in heels. He's wearing a soft grey suit and is about seven feet tall, a gentle guy who suddenly thinks he should assert himself. He glances back into the dark for something to fasten a command on. "Take it against that ship." She has hopped onto the 18 inch barrier at the end of the pier. They stand with their cheeks pressed together smiling in the white flash. Will you take another, please.
They're kissing as he lifts her down. They walk away hand in hand.
We take up where we left off. Tom is getting into it: I should have taken him outside and knocked him up against the wall a couple of times. I see that frail defiant spook having his head smashed against brick and I get up and walk. There's a moment of silence in the black behind me and then I hear 'Bye. A good tone, humorous.
I'm too warm in my wool jacket, my boots are heavy. I'm thinking he may be following at a distance and I fade left through an apartment court that has a row of wattles in the court lights. I feel like a stumpy oldish woman limping alone through deserted streets. I've missed the streetcar crossing. I end up coming the long way on Broadway. Closer to the hotel I meet women in evening dresses, women in stocking feet carrying their shoes. In the little cappucino bar on 2nd at F, three people are sitting together talking, a man behind the bar on a stool, a man and woman with customer chairs drawn up close to him. It is as if three friends have gone to their business to celebrate.
I stop at Ralph's for lemonade. There's a nail in my shoe - every step is hurting by now. I come limping into the hotel at two. Vince is on the desk.
I go to sleep and dream that dream about a roadblock and shots fired into the air on both sides.
- He takes advantage. Is the second part of the dream a
but?
he's innocent but he's rude
- I should stand up to him no, standing up to him is childish the way Tom is childish with his calculating irresponsible fools
- Stand in the free position is your instruction to both of us YES
- Okay, what should I do when he's sexually rude balance him
- Do you mean something specific
teach him balance
- Is it true that I love him as if he was a dog YES
- Because for the time being he is a dog? no
- It means I love him as if I don't think he's conscious
- It means I don't imagine him conscious
- I'd like to do better
- That would make me less a dog no you are not a dog
- Will you comment something about anger
- Mine
- I'm patronizing NO you just aren't aware of his consciousness
- Is he aware of mine YES
- Is my mum like that with my dad YES
- Yuck it limits enjoyment
- My mum is angry with my dad YES
- Will you teach me to love a human no
- Will he
- Will you give me a hint YES excluded child
- I don't know how to do this because I was that
- I don't feel the being of people
- In my entire childhood nobody felt my being
- Louie feels my being NO
- Does Luke feel my being
- I feel his
- I don't feel Rowen's no you do
- Do I feel Rob's YES
- Do I sometimes feel Tom's YES
- Is it always feeling their consciousness at the moment no
- Is it a perceptual ability I don't have
- Is Tom seeing these people accurately
- But not reacting accurately
- His mother saw him YES
- The reason I was unpopular was that I didn't see people
- Is there anything else you want to say take more time off
- Go biking tomorrow no, something about losses
- Do bookwork tomorrow
- With him YES
- Deal with anger YES
- I should stand up to him no, standing up to him is childish the way Tom is childish with his calculating irresponsible fools
-
In the open: diary of a homeless alcoholic. Donohue. Says that in 1979 he discovered that he was different from everyone he knew. He discovered it with terror. I don't understand the way he describes the difference, though: other people are suffused with Spirit but he is not. He describes god as if he's remembering a resentful mother. (I notice that I'm jealous he got his journal published.) "Why is God tormenting me?" He was 36 in 1990 and has a degree in business. His diction is formal. He writes in libraries. I skipped his economic theory but read his daily accounts as if they were the story of my own vagrancy, hunger, loneliness, dissatisfaction, compulsion, worry, improvidence, thought, discomfort and talent. He was vivid and direct about those things. That he has to prepare himself psychologically when he takes a job - he can't start the same afternoon.
2nd
A dream in which I'm trying to say something to my grandparents and can't move my mouth. What does it remind me of?
At times in the last week there has been as if a taste in my blood - I call it acid though it isn't what I think of as acidic. It has an edge like a metal. The sensations in my mouth when I couldn't move it around the shapes of syllables had something like that quality.
It's 6 in the morning. The streets are wet. My friend is asleep lying on his left side with his hands under the side of his face, the classic sleep position. (They've started the washer - there's its stop and start whine.) I'm rested and I love him to bits. The way he came yesterday and lay on my bed barefoot in his green pants patiently coming to good terms.
Goldstein, The organism, thinking about neural damage. "All damage severs parts from the organism, or to put it more precisely, divides the organism into parts." Encumbrance and retardation of the course of excitation, dedifferentiation in structural organization, defective equalization. Maybe it takes more to make it happen and then it happens slower; the effect may be too strong and go on too long. There may be loss of accuracy, discrimination. A function is isolated. It can be reversed or can vacillate between opposites (like extension and retraction).
Alright - what I mainly take from Goldstein (whose collaborator was Gelb) is the neurological imagining of the other things I think about - emotional damage, talent, difference among people, perceptual invention.
He learned from Goethe and cites him - Urpflanze.
Goldstein Kurt 1963 The organism, 2nd ed Beacon Press
3
Oppressive I said. Sighed.
What's oppressive. Being lain on. Sex that isn't for me. Being asked repeatedly to agree that that sex was wonderful. Having to lever out of him the kind of information that makes information out of things he says, which if I left them as he offers them would tell me nothing at all. Favors done which require so much praise that it would take less energy to do them myself. The effort to phrase my most interesting thoughts in ways that will get them through the screen of Catholic conceptual style. Pressure to exhaust myself for days by long bike rides he has planned out. Mediocre shared sleep. Is that it?
4th
It's 4:30 on Saturday morning. I've been shopping. The aisles at Ralph's obstructed end to end with cardboard boxes, stock boy with a feather duster in his ass pocket, backstage at the opera.
We took a taxi to Anthony's Star of the Sea. I invented an appropriate look by wearing my tight black jersey backward with the gauzy vest and my starry-sky skirt, cowboy boots and leather jacket. Tom looked wolfishly German with his hair gelled back tight to his head. His new leather bomber and Rebecca's shirt are good together, but next time forget the bollo.
We were scared of the place. My friend is making his comeback. We spent a hundred dollars. Through sheet glass we could see the black and white gloss of the bay. A pair of people came in who were California grotesques, an old lizard-man with his neck sunk into his sports jacket and his nurse-wife, a girl of maybe sixty-five, maybe forty, with dead blond hair in an early sixties teased flip. He ordered a head of lettuce and tomatoes no dressing just lemon juice, she ordered lobster. Florida business folks at another table said ooo watching the waiter raise flames and pass his hands over them drizzling spices. Swiftly grating orange peel so its volatile oils dispersed.
Swordfish on baby green beans with butter sauce. That was good. Timbale of ahi tuna. That meant raw tuna, avocado, tomato, cucumber, pressed into a tower with decorative small heaps around it - cornflowers I think, it wasn't possible to see exactly. Tower that crumbled at a touch. Salmon in a mustard seed crust. The mustard seed crust was a good idea. Arugula wilted on top. Fava beans in a bitter burnt-orange-colored sauce was arty. Crème caramel. Breaking through into custard like breaking through ice on a pond. I guess that kind of food is meant to be interesting. "Dining experience" said the man from Florida. I maybe didn't have the energy to be interested enough. At the time I mainly have to deal with being with Tom, the way we are always working around the fact that we aren't natural friends. When he was staring at me on the banquette he suddenly got it: You're so beautiful ... I'm realizing what I like about you is you and my mother have the same nose. Yeah. I'm your mother restored to you, you're my father and this time you love me.
That made what happened yesterday a crisis we had to muster deep valor to meet. For you so much depends on not failing your mother this time. So deep a hope for restitution and entitlement. I am always being asked to say Yes, you're doing it, you're making me happy, you are satisfying me, this time the ugly claw of retribution will not rake you down. For me so much depends on meeting my father's willfulness without shutting up, shutting down. This time he will find me lovely and enjoy my spirit, he will foster me not compete with me, he will not want me to die.
I woke at 2:30 taking notice of the underlying doubt I am beginning to feel in my own ability to stay alive. I feel limits of energy I've never felt before. I feel the energy costs of what I do. That doubt has been increasing and I have been dealing with it by giving up early in a day. Yesterday's bike ride brought me to a halt. I suddenly couldn't cooperate any more, I had to do it my way. And then I had to gather my scraps of energy to deal with his annoyance. I had to risk my primal hope by standing my ground: I'm not what you want me to be. That was so valiant, so hard. I do it with my last gasp. I came back and talked to myself and firmed up, and Tom got nervous and backed down but without understanding. And then I could see my reserve was attaching him, but that's not the satisfaction I need. What I need is to be the river of love again, because that is what will increase my hold on life (I feel), but maybe there has been too much reality for primal hope to strengthen my blood with its drug. Joy and fear in Leucadia. I shouldn't assume that reality is what best keeps life alive. - I wonder if this fading out is menopausal. They say energy comes back.
The wonder book of the air, Cynthia Shearer. Thoroughly vivid by being true.
Darwin's letters, a friendly, loved and fortunate man. "Now that I have had my growl out."
5
[notes from Like color to the blind, Donna Williams:
- An autistic woman's third book (Nobody Nowhere, Somebody Somewhere).
- disappearing
- craving being swept into blankness
- reflection, the other person's face
- relative symmetry to be able to be ourselves without the other being us
- pink streetlight
- hypoglycemia - pancreas - craves sweets and doesn't need them
- buzz state
- compulsive regurgitate
- masks overload triggers them
- name them, describe them
- deliberately mimic them
- go from being alternate persons to deliberate acts
- performing repertoires
- dissociating rather than working out how to change things
- pushing to refine the art of seem
- pushing to be despite demands
- You can do this as yourself!
- craving being swept into blankness
Our defences set about filling our heads with copied possibilities we mislabeled 'wants.'
'acting normal' strategies
only sign that something subliminal was going on strange inner calm about huge impending change
How many programs had we watched that we knew by heart, that bored us, frightened us, confused us, or helped cut us off from self-feeling with incomprehension, fear or monotony.
The more we freed ourselves up, the more we had to think in new, more personal, less defensive ways. The more we freed ourselves up, the more we felt for the lives we had and the more self-love we felt.
My defences had no empathy.
logical, impersonal, defence-driven, stored thoughts
I was terrified of my defense's hatred o...f me
"I'm getting trouble ... my defenses are "
With great relief, we found ourselves again.
The winning of this new round had had us both reaching out to that forever feeling.
Touch between two free-fallers felt like we were swimming in a safe vastness without influence from the past or 'the world'.
the last symbol of the object world over the feeling world
I would go to him and tell on my defenses.
He had to expose to others what he had been doing.
compulsive displays of mock-embarrassment, mock-shame, mock-guilt, mock-fear, mock-anger
Somewhere in the turmoil were two feelings that rose like water in a well in spite of their subtlety ... relief and happiness.
The real reason to have me avoid the things I liked were their well-guarded rejection of my self-expression, self-exposure and ability to be affected.
We were real people, they were stored mental crap.]
7
At Camp Pendleton recruits learn to eat snakes and make fire by looking at weeds intensely - he said.
(Coming through Horton's Plaza after eating pie he said, It's not a building that will take a graceful patois as it ages.)
(I haven't written down yet the wonderful moment on the evening of my first day here, lying in his arms falling asleep among the sounds of the street, so sweet a drift.)
Last night after his shift we were here whispering on my bed after we'd zipped through notes on the Anthony's food. He was wearing his new wire-rims lying back on the pillow with magnified eyes. I was just the distance from his face to see it all, and only it. He looked so clean, so new, so lovely, so loved and at home, so real. We're tuning. His swift invention is daring to show. I'm closer to noticing his evasion when it happens. Here is something else I'm noticing. It would suit his Irishness and my compulsion for me to organize his responsible doings. I'd take it on to make my own surroundings tidy but no no no it's supposed to go the other way. But here's a complication - organizing him is making organizing myself easier. Yoga for instance. Doing it with him means I'm not even tempted to skip. Getting him to the library yesterday got me to La Jolla without struggle, and once there I just knocked on Paul's door.
It's late morning on a Tuesday. This is a happy life, a pot of freesias at the window where sun is glistening in the screen.
Louie's dream. Fires springing up here and there all over the house until the bush in the garden burns. "And then, while I'm looking for the mains, as all the plugs are pulsating with danger, a baby bursts out crying." "'Will the way find me?' 'If you cry enough.' 'Where is my work?' 'In this terror.'"
I see you blossoming out illimitably - he said.
Look at the sun on the screen across the way. An arm raised. Sun in the light well, it's noon. The washing machine's stop and start an exquisite fluctuating C above middle C - I think.
8
It is three in the morning. There's a train whistle and the long-continuing rattle of freight cars.
Waking from a dream worried what it has to do with something I was thinking about in the night. The question I went to bed with was why aren't I wanting sex. I've been here three weeks today, and, since that Sunday morning between Christmas and New Year's I've had no desire, even kisses have been just sentiment. When I was awake at three I opened the journal to the dream I hadn't understood, that I'd killed my father and hidden the body, and thought I understood it.
-
"And do you know what day it is? It's exactly a year since I left last year. It's the 8th of January." "Oh my sweetie sweetie." "Well I like being your sweetie sweetie but what did I do." "It was the look on your face." "And what look was that." "Happiness I hope."
-
"I am deeply interested in everything connected with geographical distribution and the differences between species and varieties." He wrote that long before he wrote his theory.
- the golden west volume 9: 1996-97 october-march
- work & days: a lifetime journal project