| the golden west volume 9 part 3 - 1997 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego 9 January 1997 Driving with Luke through the night - north on the Wembley road - we pass a bicycle rolling upright unridden north on the left side of the road. Later I'm driving north on this road with a woman I don't know well. It is just dawn, pink clouds around the break of light in the dark grey sky. There is just enough light to begin to see color. I'm amazed at the color in a patch of flowers beyond the ditch. These are wildflowers that have burst out uncharacteristically. The weather has been unusual. It's August but it's like winter. - Nicole [Gingras] on the phone this morning. Her rectitude when it opens is a fresh fineness like flower structures. Did I say what I meant? Quality. Like Laiwan has, a quality of the voice, a living grain like petal tissue. She and the translator working the text in ways the writer doesn't. The translator has to lend herself to the other's vocabulary, she said. I was thinking, yes, she has to be the same wide net and then word from it. Translation is wrongly thought a relation of two visible things, where one is substituted for another. A French thing for an English thing. It would be better thought a kind of writing mediated by having read, so as much as possible of the writer's multiplicity of structure is rebuilt in the translator and then used to write from. Going north - the uncon - toward home. A different relation of truck and bike, like a phantom rider. Something's dawning - a patch of feeling. I'm going along that road in a less primitive way, with the young man. My mother and I were carrying it, but now the young man and I are bypassing it. Love woman and I a kind of equivalence. I'm just beginning to see unusual flowering. The uncon is lightening. The work I've been doing with underground quest notes I understand now in a simpler more direct way. The flowering is well-being and completion. Night in dreams always means the unconscious. Unconscious writing has effect even when it isn't consciously understood. It says that is something about the bicycle. Bicycle and intuition, it's a vehicle but I've bypassed it. This better judgment is effected by allowing early love of men. Indecision about that line - "inner gender and rescue" - why I'm indecisive - still don't want to give maleness its due? Yes it says. Did he rescue her? YES searching and bravery, persistence, risk. Fighting enemies. That patch of dawn the unconscious decision. Patch of light like in the photo. A focus. Would you like to tell me what's next? Yes, making. Now am I going to be less tired? YES. - Why have I been wanting to buy glass. This morning a crystal candle holder and two small cups, their clear glass so thin it's almost weightless. Handles that show the shape of melt. They're hand-made. I thought of the dream about love woman's pink glass cups. 12th Hello. Sunday. I want something. Dear larger one, what do I want? Feeling. Is it because I'm not feeling I am? Did you answer that in the making of the question? Yes. It is as if I want to cross into fantasy, creation, a drug, I want ... will you tell me? Feeling. - When I am in agony and longing there is a sense of rightness like the rightness in being overjoyed. But this is a day I haven't found. I want focus again, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I want an unknown part of myself to burst into life. -
13 It is asking a lot of people to know they'll die. Is it waste and desolation and foreign darkness? No it says. But it killed his mother. It is murderous. Does this mean love and an illusion of love? Not exactly. It's the difference between father and mother. Did he love his father more? Yes. Was that a secret from himself? Yes. The sense of love was for his mother. Guilt, pity, obligation. This is an interesting discovery. She was already ugly, oppressed, dependent. With me is it sense of love rather than love? Yes. I thought he had the foundation for true love of a woman but he doesn't. To be on the side of truth with him I would have to be his brother. Is that something I should be willing to be? Yes. Does that mean the end of sex for us? Yes. Thomas and I are not lovers? No you are lovers without sex. Do you mean I'm talking about myself? Yes. Did I love my father more? No. I didn't love either of them. At nineteen I didn't feel their deaths or my own. When you love someone you feel their death, is that it? Yes. What I feel for him is sense of love too. YES. True love is deep respect. Yes. Do I have that for anyone? No. Do you mean that in the sense of earned? No. Respect for possibility? Yes. Respect in principle. It's what you give when you're autonomous. You're respecting the possibility not the actuality. Is the possible real? No. Then respect works to change conditions. Yes. What is the proper attitude toward the universe that kills us? The Work. Work to be what we can in it? Yes. Earn a good opinion of ourselves? Yes. Weakness is preferring something to the truth? It's one kind. Tom prefers looking good. No, he prefers truth, his weakness is a different kind that has to do with conflict. Between love and sense of love? YES. Do people have to choose between their parents? NO they have to differentiate. Does that mean tell the truth to and about each? YES, fearlessly. He hasn't done that? Hasn't finished doing it. Do I have a ruling weakness? Yes unbalance. His is evasion and mine is imbalance? YES. What is the right foot? (the devil). I serve the devil? YES. Does he? No. What devil do I serve? You fail to fight. It's not that I serve but that I fail to fight? Yes. Do you mean in the world? YES you don't back yourself. The devil is oppression? YES. Right foot in me represents oppression? YES. Right foot is the one I step into the social world with? YES. Left foot is the one I step into the physical world with. Yes. That is imbalance. Yes. His mother didn't fight. YES. He is carrying her burden. Yes. Can he set it down? YES. Is there something else I should be asking? Yes about conflict. Why I don't back myself? YES. The answer is, because you're still a child. You don't realize you can. Tempering will get you there. Tempering is ordeal? Yes. Will you explain the two principles to me? Green life and fire, flower and fire. Nature and (Kw). Is this psychological? Yes. Are you going to be able to get this through to me? Yes. Materiality and life. Materiality and perception? Yes. Perception/daylight? Yes. Nonvisual being and doing? Yes. Plants are our growth? Yes. 14 I've been here almost four weeks and now I have to think what I should be doing. But first last night. My friend is away writing in his room. He's in the furnace. I see him at the desk and when he comes to do yoga and stands stroking his belly in front of my mirror. I have a bag full of things to tell him and am squirming around trying to find a comfortable position to miss him in. At eleven last night I had my light out but he knocked anyway. Came in clanking and clicking with bits of gear - key, glasses, headphones - in the dark. Lay down beside me, sweater smelling like cigarettes, stiff, speeding, holding his own hand tight. I was lying there with my head on his shoulder inclined to sulk, or not so much sulk as be resigned and sad because I felt I shouldn't disorder his net that has cost him so much to set up. But there was a sudden gust of good humor. I put my arms around him. I'll talk about his albums a bit. What I learned Sunday night about Vic's intolerable pushing and the suck from all sides, like gravity when you're buried a mile down, of people wanting an emotional piece of this only child. "I saw why it's complicated for you to have your picture taken and why it's complicated when somebody wants you to write." (There is a photo where he's less than a year old lying across his mother's lap. On the back Vic wrote, "This was the happiest time of our lives." Yes I'm jealous too.) Talking about him got his interest - and mine too - and then we were together, whispering at midnight with yellow light in the windows across the well. He's saying his brain's like the Cascades. Big squares of clearcut he means. Thirty years of damage relentlessly self-inflicted. "I was too smart. It was too painful." That's not quite right, but it wasn't the time to say it wasn't intelligence that was painful. I did say, You could get more pleasure out of your intelligence. And then I said it again into his ear, You could get more pleasure ..., meaning, reclaim yourself from your dad's double-binding drive to exploit you and defeat you. He made intelligence so self-canceling a fact that you had to get stupid to have fun, but that's not the way it's going to have to be. What I learned also from his albums is the benefit I had from my folks' non-interference. I was acknowledged my own authority, all my gains were my own, I walked out of the Reformation on my own feet and kept walking till I got to the front edge of my own time. And now I'm some distance past that, though not as far as the footsteps go. And I see you are one who can be there with me, if I work with energy and proper generosity. 17th What should I think about what happened yesterday. A fax with my text rewritten. I went straight into a rage, sat down with it and restored it. Phrase by phrase I discovered why I had written it the way I did. I didn't find out how to explain what the revision had ruined until I spoke to Nicole. The proofreader changed it, she said. It seemed to her to read better. There were places she had to read a paragraph three times. She asked Suzanne whether Daniel's version was faithful to my meaning and Suzanne said yes. I agreed. Mostly he had the drift but what he took out in his conventionalizing and smoothing was - I realized - the body of the writing. The rhythm, changes in speed, long rounding-up snake breaths and short here-I-stand breaths. The gestural drama of punctuation. The ways sentences do what they say. The precision I demonstrate by modulating a verb. And something else I do with my diction. I'm colloquial, a simple mind. I don't say it in a schooled way. The marks of sophistication I set up are more sophisticated than that. Look at Coleridge: I supply a prototype. A young tone with electrifying precision of word choice. What he and I understand is that the grey sludges of the schooled voice cannot see through. There's more to know about this. Tom does something like it with his street voice. The schooled voice is a bachelor. This is what Daniel would have done with the paragraph I just wrote: I construct indicators of sophistication which are more sophisticated than that. Consider Coleridge: his writing is an example of the qualities I wish to emulate. He creates a youthful tone while choosing words whose precision of meaning is exciting. I, like Coleridge, understand that the ponderousness of scholarly diction cannot penetrate to the heart of the matter. There is more to be known about this question. Incidentally, Tom is able to achieve a similar effect by employing street-based idioms. Diction which betrays its educational background is like an unmarried person, in the sense that it lacks the effective presence of nonverbal (and thus 'nonphysical') aspects of meaning. It's a translation, huh. Do I feel better? I still feel savage. It's as though I was hoping someone would find me by recognizing me, my quality, in the text. When Daniel got done with it the people who should find me would not know it was me. Something like that. I don't so much mind what happens in the English-French translation because I will not be in it anyway. But that my English should be messed with is appalling to me as if I feel it is my only hope. I don't quite understand it, but reared up to defend my very self. Not that I think it is so brilliant, but there is something about the way I can be with myself in writing. I'm seeing that the presence together of selves is what I want from writing. Why should I care to make statements to strangers. If they aren't able to use the network I set up, they will use something else. Only the people like me need me, and people who don't yet know they are like me. The love I have for the people who've given me what I can use, and for the people who can use what I give. But only in these corners where we are few. I don't love people who love the herb garden. I am defending something unusual my brain can do. - What just happened. "I don't want to be afraid to say I look at you and I'm not turned on." He said. 18 Woke the way I don't, here, solar in a spasm. It was from a dream about a woman who had been an artist lying in a hospital bed. She's dying, I think. She was a fine being. I am tucking an afghan around her, at the shoulder, at the foot, tenderly, to say I am grateful for her quality. There are two screw heads with white paint on them. Two names. As I wake I translate them: Luke and Rowen. I wake with my solar a block of fear. I don't know what happened yesterday. It was destruction I didn't see coming. I was paralyzed. I was so weak I could only hope to be saved from an unconscious desire to destroy. - I started to say what happened and then Tom came in. I liked his summary more than I'd expect to. He said I decided to open it up and then there was no going back. I agreed I was out of control but trying. He said he could see that. That was good but why did he jump on me and stick his tongue deep in my mouth. He keeps acting as if he thinks overwhelming me is the trick. He can't really think that, so whatever is he up to? Does he think he has to reestablish that he's the one with what he calls the dick? It feels as if sex is secondary to something and keeps getting sacrificed. He says sex follows love but love has never followed sex, that he knows of. That is the opposite of what I know. 19 The dust is settling some. Talking to Louie last night, being at home. I needed to talk about what Nicole did - why she did it - I trusted her because she has been perfectly reliable - but she gave my text to a man with unconscious motives she either knows or doesn't. She allowed him to rewrite it and then she failed to send me a copy until she could say there wasn't time to change it. Is she playing something out? Why hasn't she sent me the translation? 20 Went to Oceanside. Martin Luther King day. I couldn't look at the waves until I'd lain with my face to the sun and dipped unconscious, just dipped. I had a sensation maybe four times today that people were hovering wanting to talk to me. What was that? First there was a young woman with blond hair who walked past slowly, staring, and then came back. Then a nice-looking ordinary woman who got caught by the same suddenly deeper wavelet seemed to be circling with intent. Then a teenage boy loitering nearby when I was reading on the beach. And I think there was a different black-haired young man. 21st Wednesday Oh my friend when I crack you handle it so well. Your day for coming through. Coming back. I missed you so much I got in despair. It was two weeks I couldn't talk to you. You were making your comeback without cigarettes. When you got home I said, I think we have to break up. You sat tight and said what you say: I think we love each other. I think we're in love. You hold on to the stiff little baby until she softens. There was the moment when I got out from behind the table and came and sat next to you. Then we went out and ate. Sat in your park, on the causeway where yellow stone and falling water make a microclimate of light - just at that spot under the palm tree fountains it is light of a different day. The face you've had since you've been writing, a young triangle I can see is related to the Irish boy in the middle of the Little League team. What other faces. There is the strange angel, the thin bull, the elf-demon, the happy husband. A contracted composing face. 24th Maryland Hotel Hoo - can I move my brain today? In the Gas Haus drinking tea, gently sick. What happened yesterday. The hinge was the moment I was lying under the cover in my new room with a pot of tulips in the window, looking at him looking at me from a chair at the foot of the bed. "I feel like I'm being visited in the hospital" I said without thinking. He jumped up and lay on top of me. "Don't die!" "I hadn't realized that works from both sides" I said. "Do you know what I mean?" "I know what you mean." I don't have the energy to tell it all. The moment in my room when I started packing, not convinced, just doing it. Do it without withdrawing, the book said. Chico and Patrick see me out. I'm distressed but I'm not vindictive. I'm taking the care I can not to embarrass Tom though the fact is I'm moving out without telling him. The taxi driver was a lost immigrant, Iranian I thought, young. Grumbling at the weight of my bag as he jerked it into the trunk of the blue cab. He had a soft clueless air as if the job is too much for him. Three blocks to the Maryland. Light rain. I go to the lobby and bring back a trolley. He lifts my pot of pink tulips out of the trunk. He's looking at it with a pang of loneliness it seems. Persia, I'm thinking. "You have those where you come from." "Many," he says. In my new room I open the curtains, get the venetians out of the way. It is a deep-set, high, wide window over the city wastes south to Coronado Bridge. I wash my hair and go to bed. When the phone rings hours later is when I cry for the first time. What's your room number, I'm coming up. What's goin' on? I snapped out. I couldn't take the waiting. I waited for a year and then I waited two weeks and then I waited three days for your days off and when they came you took a job. Two sweet people who keep hoping the other will be interested in what we want them to be interested in. I keep having to disappoint you. That's hard. The book says be his friend without wanting anything. I burst into tears. The man who doesn't want to let a woman get away, will you ask him to step out for a moment? He does. I like the man who speaks then. He's in the calm of relief felt when I was saying, for the book, that we should be true friends and stop trying to force ourselves to be a couple. But then he says thoughtfully what hadn't occurred to me, Maybe it is the relief of getting away from the stretch. He has taken calm charge. He has energy and willingness. That's what I needed because I had come to a halt. I tell him enough to orient himself. He thinks what he'd do if he was star man. Nothing scares him. Is Mummy watching? He guessed right. When I got halted he knew how to keep going. How old are you? Eleven. I was valiant too. I told the fact. "It's about being taken care of by a grown-up. Somebody is taking care of me completely so I don't have to take care of myself even in my thoughts. I don't have to understand anything. He understands me better than I do. He knows what I want. There is an atmosphere of innocence." Later can I be something for you? I ask. "Mommy." "Really!" I'm amazed he has made it explicit. "Yes but very young." Then we went out to eat. I was so frail two blocks were too much. Crab salad at the Subway. Came back and flickered out. Woke with diarrhea, weak, weak. Now I'm lying in the loveseat in the Gas Haus window baking in the sun. My friend's at the magazine. Have eyes today. Some of the paintings look good to me. Last night in my room the shadows on the wall: two squares of light, one brilliant, one dim and orange. Three tall tulips, a naked man moving across. Buffalo body. My own body, waist and haunch, hair. Am I overloaded? I see him so exactly, I make him out with a complexity that follows his moment with such precision that there must be large energy cost. Do people run themselves into the ground with seeing? I'm fine but I'm run into the ground. Look at the shadows of glass laid across each other grey on the carpeted grey floor. A plant jittering. A bird shooting through. 25th Sunday. I paid his guest fee and left the receipt in my box at the desk. Went up and closed my eyes in bed. Woke at midnight when he walked in talking loud and fast, unpacking tape player and tapes. Didn't ask permission. Played frenetic music loud. Sat staring out the window talking hard. Hoo, boy. You don't hesitate to take over the space and time of a woman too stunned with sleep to fight. When we got to it hours later I demanded the position I wanted and he actually gave it to me for a while before he hauled out and got on top. And then I was there - surprised how there I was. Ah. Ah. Ah. But there was more struggle to come. When he was done I said would he take me through. Set myself up where he could reach without getting in my way. Goin' good, but then he stopped. So I stopped. I was sulking. His wrists hurt and he was drifting off, he said. We're going to finish what we started, I said. I couldn't tell whether there was anything happening, he said. I insist we're going to try again. You could imagine something, I'm imagining something, I said. Then he got inspired. This time you're twenty-four. It's about four o'clock in the afternoon. You've been out lying in the sun, a bit sunburned, just pleasantly. I come in the room. I'm just going to play with you now, and then later I'm going to fuck you. And then he talked me through what his finger was finding. I was in a secure heaven where my sex when he twisted his finger from front to back seemed a lapped, layered, roiled, exaggerated form like a twisted limb-scar on a tree trunk. "The little brain on the end of my finger is looking for a spot," he says. It's five when we go to sleep. We wake at nine. He's hard and proud, holding himself with thumb on the front of his dick and three fingers on the back, stroking the muscle underneath the skin. The solid round head skinless like an emergence of what's covered on the shaft, the live animal, the fresh shoot. When he has it he wants to use it. I slither into place to catch him sideways. I know he's soon going to need to climb on top but I'm getting him used to this way. It's when he gets behind me so I can have my hand in place that I turn into a fuck-pit. There's the way I like, where the mouth of my cunt is wide open and the deep end is gripping tight. I reach my arm up to brace myself against the wall and give him a planted ass to butt against. "If your ass was on the altar of Our Lady of Guadaloupe I would crawl up the aisle on hands and knees just to plant a buss on one cheek." What else. Yesterday I insisted upon organizing a schedule for his next reviews, so I could know there'd be time for me. This morning I made him help me make the bed. He set the coffee pot on the dresser and scarred the paint. We squabble about how much music I'm going to put up with. "An opinionated power-hippy chick from Vancouver" is what he first thought, he says. Then I started saying things that interested him. Like what? Male rupture. 28th Gas Haus, evening. I'll write a little report on work. Reading Bowlby after Goldstein, revising both in the direction of my vague connectionism. Goldstein says an organism that suffers damage is disorganized and reestablishes whatever organization it can. It may have to do this by restricting what it perceives and behaves toward. What we think of as symptoms can be thought of as the forms of order the organism now finds possible. Bowlby says attachment is a basic fact of human function. Our organization assumes it - we're evolved to be attached and to recover attachment when we lose it. We don't handle real loss well. (In evolution's time we didn't survive early childhood loss.) Any loss of attachment is a major disorganization. Goldstein calls such disorganization catastrophe. Attachment catastrophe is a physical disruption the way a stroke or contusion is. It's an injury to the brain. Net organization that worked isn't working any more. The brain has shaped itself to be with this place, this person. It is not multipurpose - the young brain is customized and becomes more flexible by developing work-arounds and alternate mode-shifts, among other things. What attachment is I don't know. In small children it becomes more specific as the brain becomes more organized. Keeping a sense of the parent's presence when she isn't visible, so the child knows how to look for her, takes a complex coordination of perceiving/imagining, acting/not acting, talking/not talking. This complexity is keyed to the recurring sensory presence of the parent - smell, taste, sound, sight, touch, rhythms. When the primary parent is lost that recurring external organizer fails. Attachment figures go on being a way people retain organization. Bowlby says, look at what bereaved adults go through. At first they go blank, they coast on their organization as it is. They "don't believe it." Then there start to be intrusive effects which presumably are organization trying to maintain itself in the absence of external feed: there is runaway simulation, perceptual structure is hyperactivated, it's searching, it's primed to the point of illusion and sometimes hallucination. There's hyperarousal, searching, calling. There's pain, but what is pain in this vision? What it is when nerves are cut or burnt - nerve damage, structural damage. It's referred to parts of the body. "Heart." When crying and searching and trying don't work, on and on, these behaviors stop. Or if they are suppressed because adults threaten or instruct, they may be reduced to imagined or partial behaviors by means of work-arounds that take a lot of energy to maintain. When searching doesn't work, organization collapses for a time and then there is reorganization. The best conditions are if there is someone else who can take over the attachment and supply external feed and other explanatory correction and order. Those who don't reestablish order by going through dying back can go into chronic or unfinished organizational threat. One way is unstable detachment where work-arounds keep original structure going at the cost of selective perceptual filtering. You act as if nothing has changed but you have to act in a changed way to do it - there is the energy cost of maintaining isolation. You're liable to crashing. You can't maintain attachments; you're blind to other people and anxious in their presence. Another way is you stay angry, generally and at yourself. You keep high energy going. It's a form of search hyperarousal. You stay stressed, you stay disorganized. If I understood correctly both these forms of uncompletion keep stress chemistry circulating, you don't excrete, as you do when you engage perceptually and deal with the fact. 29 A note from Nicole today saying I will have gathered she isn't going to send me the translation. I'm angry. I suspect she is bending the translation so she will not seem to be backing a heretic in her own community. I said she had robbed me of responsibility for my work and I didn't believe it was necessary. I don't know what to make of how tactless and unreliable she has been in this. Tom came in raving last night hyped from ten hours rewriting at City magazine and then five hours on shift. I was asleep. It was midnight. He brought food, tapes. I'd been working most of the day and was looking at him with a chill eye. I'm not going to tell the whole story but toward three o'clock we were interwoven on the bed in a way we both liked and I was telling him that he might want to know that the nation of women is looking at guys with its jaw dropped inwardly, because of the way they talk and expect to be listened to, and don't admit they are demanding to be serviced. A bit later he was raving about America, how it saves the world's bacon and gets no thanks. Vietnam was a bit of a mistake maybe. I say maybe the old men were sending the young men out to get them killed, think about it. He says he needs to go to sleep now. I say, relentless, You are going to sleep because you don't like what I'm saying. Otherwise you'd never go to sleep, it's not like you. In the morning I am brisk and he's nosing around for whether an apology is needed. I get didactic about love man, war man, and his wonderful energy. Hours later, with the sun straight into the room, we're love-fucking. He lets me teach him and then I let him be the star man who takes hold of me with authority. And then he's beautiful and young, his tissues bathed. He wants to surrender his body to me, he says: he is surrendering it. "The recklessness, stoicism and solitude of American manhood" says the jacket of Cruising paradise. Research: Cynthia Shearer, Sam Shepard, Barry Lopez in his high culture way, McMurtry, that other guy, the black orchid guy, Charles Bowden. Ondaatje. More than recklessness: the disorder, dissociation, craziness of the drinking man. For instance I know this about Tom, he's with me and interested and intimate, and he's clearer and realer with me and knows it, but he is not going to be able to organize himself to go on being with me. He will not be able to plan either time or money or his own emotional presence. We're rapidly making trust, but he won't be able to remember it when I'm absent. The sentence he saw when he opened Donna Williams, where she said she used Ian's sleeping time to model for herself: the way I'm always working to get his brain tuned to me. 30th What am I meant to be doing. So wonderful a day. Winter's over, Tom says. There are street trees shaped like something in the apple family, that are blooming white among leaves that never fall. Then later the day goes wrong in a way I don't understand. I'm remembering being on the bike coming miles down some road through chaparral. Tom races ahead across feeder roads bringing traffic onto the freeway. I'm there frightened and bewildered with traffic rushing past. Later I'm grouchy, out of control. I'm fixing to blow it. He's keeping his good humor but I am pushing toward catastrophe. We're in my room. The sound of his voice on and on. I'm holding myself tight. I'm getting catatonic. Finally I talk about what I was reading in Bowlby. He's impatient. He's inattentive. I ask him to go home. He says he's not coming back. Alright, I'm thinking, that's the way it is. I can't sustain this. I will miss it but it's too much. I don't know what to say. Fear and pain haven't hit yet but I assume they will. It was a beautiful, baking dawn behind the palm trees. I didn't attend to it. A violent night. Loud motors and men yelling until three. Talking to myself in a baffled useless unstoppable mutter. What happened, what happened. We went into a spin. I would sometimes begin to get a grasp but I'd make suggestions in a quiet voice and he'd override them, or I'd have an idea but I would feel too unsupported to speak it. He was talking fast and loud about living in the present and working it out, but he didn't look at me long enough to see the way I was holding myself. His notion of touching me was to grab my leg and pull it or to try to haul me over toward him, a touch I feel as coercion and resist with all my tiny might. Whoever he is at that moment has no idea what's going on. I don't like him and feel lonely and hopeless with him. - Half past midnight. Louie with Rowen sleeping in her house happy because he made a friend. She was opening my envelopes. I was so relieved to be talking to her. Her marvels of rich responsible life. 1st February For instance she and Lydia not stopping themselves. She writes a story about a girl who sees a vision of three deer who look toward her when she notices them. She finds an essay where ---- says, The body is all I care about. She has no criticism of Lydia. Louie is completely accepting Louie, I say. Rowen and Kian met with a joy of recognition. She's stroking Rowen's feet as she speaks to me. It's a way we're all together, and we all like it. Who is your dragon master, Kian asked. "My brother," Rowen said. What am I proud of here. That given my really extreme damage there is yet a way I have been able to bring my children together. That I have had to use third persons to do it doesn't mean I haven't done it. And here too. Tom went to his fountain field and sat as straight as he could and went through the AA program. I admit I'm powerless. I accept that everything is unfolding as it should. I submit myself to the will of a higher power. He decided he would just love me unconditionally. I was in bed touching down the way I do during the day, half-hour zonk-out. As I was coming back I suddenly saw his head more clearly than I ever have, his usual face looking at me plainly. None of the fantasy-lover look. I looked back steadily. Here he is, beyond my wishes. Maybe three minutes later the phone rang. He was phoning from a booth in the water park. What seems clear is that I find his manic false self a huge strain and I spend vitality unwisely by fighting it as if it were real. I look forward to a life with that man and feel I'll die the way his mother died with his manic father. It has to be made clear to both of us that I must not be available to be blasted by his fear discharge. I don't know whether it needs to be discharged or something else. But I must also start to remember that the self who tries to figure him out and fix him and organize him so he doesn't disturb my safeties is also a false self. And also I must remember that the self who'd live instead of that self would enjoy herself more and work better and be in better health. And further, that the same way I know his or Louie's falseness by the discomfort I feel with it, he will have his ways of knowing I'm gone when I don't know it myself. 2 Last night we went to the grotto in the sky, and then this morning, looking around for what to wear to go out for coffee, I was offering him my teeshirt, my patterned black shirt, my blue sweater, my kung fu jacket, and he was trying them on. Then I thought to try on his white shirt from last night. Then the tie. He came into the bathroom with me and stood behind me and tied it for me, talking about Prince Charles and the Half Windsor. Then I put on his tight trousers and belt. He instructed me about how to use the zipper opening to tug down the shirt tails. The outside edge of the belt buckle lines up with the edge of the fly and the shirt's opening edge. The back of the tie must never show, it's like having your slip show. The trouser cuffs must end three-quarters of an inch from ---. "I usually use the second button on the shirt cuffs. This is an expensive shirt, a good quality shirt, because it has this extra button." Then I put on his loafers and thought about posture. Hand in pocket? Never the trouser pocket. You can put one hand in the jacket pocket, usually the --- hand. (I struck a casual pose.) That's it. Or this way - sitting back against the dresser with my hands supporting me, left leg crossed over the right at the ankle. I thought of Jam and Phil and went to sit in the chair with my knees wide displaying my balls. "No, that's terrible! I never sit that way." "The professors do," I say. "Yes academics do, but it's terrible, it's like a woman doing this" (he lies back with his legs crooked up). Meantime I feel the heat, hardness, and airlessness of layers of polyester around my trunk. A suffocation of the skin. "Is there anything else you'd like me to do before I take this off? Oh, this." I push him backwards and thunk down on top of him. He's egging me on. I try to get my hands under his bum in his acquisitive way. Pull at his knees and get them over my shoulders and then do my best to pump like a dog. He's purple in the face cracking up. We had an interesting talk when we woke. At Mr A's I was rigid with disapproval of his care to look right and of the way he seemed to keep trying to corral me into "having a good time." My idea of fun would have been to put our heads together the way I do with Louie pushing each other to say bad things. I was sitting there with my arms over my chest being sardonic and he would sometimes top me for a moment. A funeral parlour, he said. Yes! There's an urn. It's got Nixon in it. Etc. But then he'd go back to, "This is nice. I'm having fun. Are you having fun? This is delicious." That and wanting me to be proud of him in clothes I find terrible on anyone. So this morning I was saying to my book, I'm cold hearted. No, it said, you're in conflict. What I think I understood when we had our better brains this morning is that we are in very different relations to ourselves in that sort of scene. He has no fear that he'll lose his feeling relation to the scene. He's afraid he'll lose control of his rage with the men in the scene. He's trying to avoid doing anything that will lead them to insult him, because he is at all times so intensely aware of their attitude to him - bartenders, waiters, the men at a table across the room. I keep thinking, why doesn't he just take the upper air and be so interested in his own thoughts that he doesn't notice how they regard him? He talks to himself, This is nice, I'm having fun, to calm himself so he won't cross the line. Meantime my worry is not loss of control but control itself. I'm worrying that I will stop feeling/knowing. But curiously, now that I think of it, I am also worried about loss of control. But what I'm worried about is shame and depression rather than anger. I keep up a kind of hatred that is not rage and is no danger to me, and that controls, but also is, depression, i.e. rigid fear of natural presence. In that scene I was extending the hatred to Tom as well. "You look like Billy Graham." 4th Second day of fever. Feeble. Thinking back nostalgically to a time when I was powerful and healthy - why did I think that wasn't good enough? I'm hot dry and empty. 6th Still sick. Tom feverish in the other bed. I've eaten almost nothing in four days. Noticing my senses are a little changed. Taking a dump this morning was a sensation shockingly intense. 10th Monday. Wanting to say what the aftertone of this flu is like. A nausea like poison in the well, a very small amount of a substance so unpleasant all water is undrinkable. Any food is unpleasant. My enthusiasms are drained. The world looks the way it always did, though. This is a peculiar fact. I have so little energy I'd have thought perception, which is so complex, would fade some. But the world is solid. It's as if seeing has nothing to do with physical energy. The other thing that's unaffected is reading: I can read and I can see. What I can't do is feel urgency, reality or pleasure. It's a soullessness, whatever that is. I can't do my work, I can't do bookwork. I feel no attachment to Tom or anyone else. I can't imagine ever needing anything from anyone. I can't imagine ever wanting sex. I can't imagine ever feeling beauty.
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