| the golden west volume 9 part 4 - 1997 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego 14th February I'm puzzled how to know whether there is a more real self I should be loyal to. As if there is one life being lived by more than one person. Maybe all the persons are equally real. Maybe I will never be able to figure it out. What do I know about this I: I don't like the city. I feel a kind of nausea at how many people there are. I feel all of them are empty, random, miscellaneous. Maybe there are clean real people somewhere but these are soulless people. It is as if I am in hell. There are so many houses one next to the other, soulless, miscellaneous and soulless too. At the library there are shelves on shelves of unbearable empty novels. It is as if I have had it with life - this is scary to say, because I don't want to die but I want to go away from this nauseating place. There's the sky so clean-looking toward the east. Rich clean light on the green leaves. Fauconnier said the Brain and imagining paper was well-written. A few of the photos in neuroscience journals seem beautiful and significant to me. Imagining Tom coming north with me I perk up a little - I just noticed that. I notice that I'm holding back more than I knew. As if I would come alive more if I said: You seduced and abandoned me. You are a trivial person and I find myself trivial because I haven't dropped you. Now I'm saying, You come with me or I am dropping you. That's correct for love woman. But is love woman more real than I am, so I should give up my life so she can live? It's as if that's what I want to know. But what I have always found before is that if I'm in doubt I should leave. I became love woman yesterday by being at the beach with Tom. Love woman is pleasure and attachment and she looks softer. I told the story of driving home last year - the nightmare motels. That was her. I've struggled so much. Oh Joyce what would you say about this deadness? It's mourning dear. This is what mourning is like. The sea of realness recedes. But am I mourning something present or something past? Mourning is mourning. You are mourning. You have been this mourning for a long time. You are the blankness of tidal pools staring upward. You are present in your mourning which has been waiting next to you. Mourn more softly. Don't be worried about mourning, you don't have to fix mourning. Keep your mourning company. Oh alright. 17th Monday Coleridge stole massively, put himself under desperate strain. And there is observation in his notebooks that seems more personal than almost any. Writing and imposture. Writing and strain. 20th Cheryl [Sourkes] on email yesterday said she felt things were moving in me. I wrote her in a rush of gratitude. I started to say it is that Tom is coming with me but then I stopped in my tracks and said I had taken on reading Bowlby and Winnicott and feeling the baby's process from hopeful grief through brief intolerable rage to apathy and inability to attach. I said I had understood that I haven't wanted to know that such a loss is brain damage like lesion or contusion. I said how much I admire myself for surviving as well as I have on a platform of such ruin, and that I am grateful to my brain for doing its best when those responsible for me were not. I said I thanked her for holding her understanding of these things when I wasn't ready to know them, and said that now I am willing to live with someone without being afraid it will ruin me. That what has ruined me before has been resisting attachment while wanting it. Saying all of these feels soft and right. Joyce has been rebuilding my brain. I have trusted her. The book has emerged from the structure she has been building in parts of the brain that are not conscious. Now I feel that if Tom decides not to come I have still reached an agreement with myself that I want to live with someone and belong with them. I want him to come with me but it isn't in my interest to compel him or manage him, although my unconscious structure has been tending to do that. 21st Last night after the long bike ride in evening sky and four hours lying in bed talking we came to a moment where I was seeing Tom's face on the pillow, the boy, clear, present, open, complete and real. I felt merged down the length of my body. "Our auras are ..." "Commingled." I began and he finished. What color? he said. Like a soap bubble - gold and turquoise blue, I said. I was going to say blue and gold, he said. That moment seemed perfect to me. I was feeling, here I am at last, where I most want to be. Let's go on in it. And then he pulled back physically and said he wanted to go to sleep. What is this? Sadness, he said. I was too soft to fight. I shut myself down. And have been awake as he sleeps. He is sleeping in the crack between the beds, but he has his back to me. Saturday night we had the evening to do something with, something cheap. We took the trolley east to the end of the line, the ghetto trolley that goes through the black and Hispanic encampments and then through the mall hells of La Mesa and El Cajon. At Santee looking for country and finding a small patch of scrub bordered by traffic, cut off from the farther-away darkness of the hills by fields of street lighting. There was a rabbit, a ditch, dumped asphalt chunks, real boulders, two trees. Cricket chirrups. Actual darkness though very closely rimmed. Tom was afraid of snakes. We didn't stay. We sat joggling together on the trolley again, enclosed with families. The best part of the expedition was darting off at Encanto to buy food at a Mexican market. That was suddenly really travel, dashing across the road to a string of shops like the stores on old highways in the mountains. And then we caught the next trolley home. Tom fell asleep in a seat across the aisle. I watched the couple across from me, Mexican, a pregnant child and her boyfriend. She was lively and relaxed, talking, grinning a wide grin showing lots of gum. She was charming the young man, who'd listen seriously and then suddenly light up and reply. She was wearing around her neck a cord with an image of Snoopy in a plastic bubble. Once she lifted and dropped this amulet and a snow of glitter dust swirled up around her play saint. Really working these days. Colin [Browne]'s notes on my papers. He notes what happens to him as he reads. That's what I want and no one gives. But he doesn't praise - only some of the quotations. 22nd Gilles Fauconnier does praise. The brain and imagining paper. I am wondering whether he will like the way I've suggested that linguistic effects are like things that happen in perception or in perception in the presence of language. What I'm saying is more radical than what he says. That paper is fertile. I show my independence and the depth of revision I can dare. I show my daring. I'm daring and deep in ways that only someone with his combination of expertise, independence and openness can perceive. That's my guess. I don't know what he'll make of the private beginning and end. I haven't said anything about Gilles. I like his name of course. He is small. He's smaller than I am. He's younger than I am, and looks younger than he is. He's a shapely small body. He doesn't use a chair in the institutional way. He'll prop his knees against the edge of the table and let his feet dangle. His nose is like mine. He's nut brown, eyes, hair and skin. He dresses the way I like a man to dress, loose cotton clothes that hang well off his small square shoulders and his waist. In seminar he has an air of quiet friendly completely comfortable interest; when he puts on his reading glasses he has the look of a plain homey middle-aged mother. One to one in his office he is real enough to allow his shyness to show. When I thanked him for welcoming a stranger he was silent while he thought through what I might mean by that, and how to handle it. He's socially responsible. In his presence I feel that instant up-grade of context that I feel with only the better academics: that they are used to more intelligence in their exchanges than I came prepared to offer. In our sudden brief conversations there's a feeling of accepted lack of join, as if we superimpose our patterns and don't expect them to lock. The seminar yesterday was high linguistics, a master talking about relative clauses in any of the world's languages. The man looked a stock scholar, small eyes behind thick glasses, an oval-shaped body in brown nerd clothes. He lectured as if he were writing on the spot, a perfectly organized discourse, humorous disclaimers, graceful asides, thirty years of lecturing visible in the way he glanced at his watch. In the room with us were at least five senior linguists including the woman who works with local Diegan languages. The topic was something about a difference between English and Japanese in how relative clauses manage to set up the fact that they're about what they were calling the head noun. The terms the question was addressed in are wrong. They are ignoring what Gilles and Langacker know about the fact that a sentence sets up a cognitive structure part of which is perceptual simulation. The head noun has already set up the simulation in a way that makes something the thing we're attending to. Then the relative clause sets something up inside the structure already formed. It's not surprising there should be differences of grammar having the same effect, if grammar is routing habits. Presumably different languages route this particular structuration, within a whole system of structuring habits. So they can do relativization differently because they do other things differently? Could anyone get a feel for the differences of languages as wholes? How could a brain do that? And what should I make of all the <rules> that are the daily meat of linguists? Can something be known about the brain from the facts of grammatic regularity? Linguists discover many differences of detail within similar overall effect. What's common across languages presumably is that they set up simulations structured to be like experiential presence. How they work with abstract fantasy could presumably be quite different depending on which metaphors are used originally. Then there is the different timing of written languages and what years of writing practice set up in a brain. Language produced without the constraint of a listener, language whose listener - the writer - is already set up in relation to what's discussed. The guy yesterday was remarkable in the way he could deliver what in fact was a paper by speaking it rather than reading it. A thing about linguistics, I notice, is that they talk about judgments of grammatical correctness rather than experiences of organizational ease. Does it work? would tell us about the brain. Is it correct? is based on the old-fashioned question of rule. It's incorrect but I understand it is the fact that matters. It can be correct and not work, or correct and not work for me. Those are writer's facts not linguist's facts. Nonetheless grammaticality is something we know, and know by feel. - Yesterday after I woke at night and wrote what I did about Tom running away from the melted state, I fell asleep for an hour and woke from an image I loved. It was more an image than a dream, because it was only seeing one thing and thinking and feeling about it. There was a little baby who woke with the bottle still in its mouth, with milk left in it. I was watching the baby wake and discover it was there and discover there was milk and lie sucking blissfully with sweet little mouth movements and its eyes closed. I was looking at this baby feeling what a living little baby. I tried to tell Tom this picture and what I felt about it, and it was as if what I said dispersed into the air like radio waves no one was picking up. He was stoic the way he is when I complain - "Duh, why woman talkee talkee, woman talk baby, duh ...." (He said.) Sunday 23rd It's nearly five, I haven't left my room since suppertime yesterday. Tom brought his television and a pizza. He was manic about the TV, wired, loud, demanding that I should watch his heroic struggle with the VHF dial and the antenna. I didn't think - Tom is in a manic state after work, I must either calm him or get under the bed. Instead I was in helpless reflex, fighting him. We repeated our wrangle about the media and elitism. His voice was a relentless volley of old saws and clichés. I didn't think - he's in a manic defense loop. I thought, this man is so stupid and so loud, how could I have imagined I could live with him. We were side by side in bed, he a lout, I a witch. I must just go home at the end of this week, I was thinking. By then I had given up talking. He can silence me that way anytime he tries, loud stupid energy that won't stop. He went to sleep. I lay awake hurting because I am that hurt again, I just am, because I can't stand him and must leave and then be in agony. In the morning he was calm. I was pulped. I wanted to cry. I wanted someone to speak to me who knows me. I wanted to be contained so I could cry. I got out the cards. They said, Integrate the defiance of the excluded child. You mean tell him? Yes. I said, I'm going to speak to you as the child for a minute. I am angry and worried. I like to belong with you but sometimes you push me. When you push me I have to say no, but when I say no I am afraid you will go away. I am worried because I feel I have to choose between letting you push me and having you go away. Other things - there was a whole chapter in the Kama Sutra, thirty pages about massaging her anus. I want you to surrender, he says. He works hard. There was still a shadow, we aren't there yet, I was feeling. "You're an innocent, you're too innocent in some ways," he said. I knew to pursue that. "In what way?" He's afraid for the long term, he's afraid he'll lose his autonomy, he's afraid he'll leave. "Why don't you think I'll leave?" "Women don't leave me." "Your mother did." "She didn't leave." "Rebecca left." "I forced her." "Lorie left." "Mm ..., nah." Of course I was thinking, women don't leave? Let me be the first. What if I just go home next week? "I'll have to take your picture down. I'll have to give your letters back. I'll just be here in my 9 by 12 room. So much will be negated." So much will be negated, but then you'd have to do basic work on why you promise to do things you don't want to do. Unless you run away from it. That was where I felt we were at last scratching bottom. And then we were just lying together with our arms around each other. Let's have a sound from you he said. I'm thinking this is cozy. Yes it's cozy. We dipped into sleep with our arms around each other like we used to. What can I conclude. I have been missing him while he's been away shitting bricks about coming up north with me. When he's away I think it's him I can't stand. That happens again and again. Monday 24th In this room with its luminous sheers and raucous F Street, reading Paul Scott noticing that the British Empire survives in the way I respect and am enthralled by his book. "... the only music she knew that sounded conscious of breaking silence and going back into it when it was finished" It said I'm in illusion blaming Tom when I withdraw from happiness. I withdraw from happiness by being angry and not knowing I'm angry. Because I don't know when I am angry I don't notice when something is his fault. Second, I shouldn't threaten to leave. (That's where he has a blindness, I think.) I should offer unconditional love. Be angry if I am, within the generous intelligence of established strength, which is what unconditional love is. It is remarkable how slowly I learn - that means, how totally I am the captive of childishness when it surges. Only pain reminds me to ask the book. 25th Looking down along my arms, legs, and torso this morning, skin yellow and dry, flesh dimpled for instance in the big calf of my left leg. Looking approvingly, affectionately, as I haven't for a long time, looking at leisure while my friend talks, this friend who has been earning my good will with warmth, persistence, energy, inspiration, initiative, daring and generosity. Now he's willing to do what's needed, only now, a year and a half later, when I have proved myself shrewd as well as sweet. That was his condition: know my weaknesses and don't flatter them though I demand it. This morning I said, If I didn't stay and help you, I know you would never make it. I don't take it personally. Why don't you take it personally? Because I know you'd be like that with anyone. Wouldn't you? Yes. This was after we crossed swords last night about his subjecting me to Letterman. He comes off work wired. That's the fact. He wakes real. I had done my work but I wasn't ready to grab his dick. There was palaver. You like arguing with me, he says. I laugh. When I hear myself laugh I know it's over. Yes I like arguing with you. 28th February, Golden West Hotel No woman / No cry is what I'm hearing. The moon is at the waning half. I'm scared, sore and exasperated with riding the bucking horse that I am. Tom gave notice yesterday, he says. "Sir, I have an opportunity to move to Vancouver with a woman who loves me." He came in wanting a cry of joy and pride, Oh Tom are you really coming! But he found me in the book, unresolved, ashamed to be confused, not able to look him in the eye. There is something wrong, I don't know whether it is in me. He might have been lying. When I thought that, I firmed up instantly. I am noticing ways I have been acting like a woman who wants something other than what is true.
Alright, why. What do I need that I am willing to lie to get. Sex, health, energy, company, a man to struggle with, a man to show around. I shouldn't have to be at odds with myself to get those things. This is what I keep asking: I am at odds with myself in this, does it have to be like that? Am I supposed to keep struggling in this enormous labour of reconciliation of incompatibles? Enormous unending labour. Do they have to be incompatible? What, they? I won't say body and soul. Love woman, the liking I have for being her, and something like taste, the love I have for fineness and distaste for what's not fine. Love woman says he should come, taste says he shouldn't, and a choice is being forced. Who should live in Ellie's house? It is not as if a choice can be made, because even if I choose for love woman, I will still be struggling with taste. And if he doesn't come, love woman will not stop driving me. So should he come? Yes. Should he stay? Yes. Did he give notice? Yes. - It's two o'clock on a sublime day. I'm in a small room with sun on the screen. The room is paid for one night. I have $5.50 left. Maybe Frances in Quebec was lying. That may mean there is no money at all. $20 to change the train ticket, $50 phone bill, $35 because I didn't understand that my room at the Maryland was a day overdue. The last 24 hours wiped me out. Now I have a ticket home but not cabfare to the station and not twenty dollars to eat on the train. 2nd March Sunday early. The fan hasn't begun. Yesterday sitting in this room I dimly considered sunlight as white noise. I guess I'm thinking more quietly about what it's going to be like. I want it to happen. I'm thinking about how to think about it. Here is something: last night watching videos on his bed I was feasting on touching him. He felt wonderful. I was thinking that quality of touch could make daily life right. Then when we shut down the video he turned toward me with intention and the quality of touch went wrong. He was pressing his bristles into my cheek without noticing. He was leaning on my hair. His weight was awkward. But mainly what I noticed was the blankness of the touching, as if he was lying with his touch, intending to impress his support on me. It is a misunderstanding about intention, which he feels as equivalent to a vigorous statement of intention. He tries with his body to give me a vigorous statement of intention. The declaration tries to use my body as its material; so what it really communicates is disregard. I want it to happen but my doubt is that my motive is a mad one. I mean a remnant. Then I ask what's the thing to do with a mad motive, or a motive that's partly mad. A motive is energy and decision. Energy in decision. Does that mean thank the energy and use it to be really responsible with T? That sounds good but I wonder whether it is a commitment to slog instead of something freer I could have if I put my time into clearing my mad motive and not indulging it. I've thought of the way I won't have adventures if I'm with Tom. There won't be meetings like the ones I had coming here on the train. With Tom I don't even handle the taxi driver myself. It's like not driving. I must still have my journeys. But being at home - being at home and having someone to push against. Adventure at home where it has been so dull. Is it cheating to say it this way: love woman is getting married and I am as single as I've ever been, but I will have to get used to living with her husband. The question is, how am I to regard him? How am I to behave toward him? Who am I in relation to him, his brother-in-law? 5th Since then it has been happy. I am working five hours a day, taking care to spend less than eight dollars on food, liking this room and its well of light, going out into twilight with the camera, crossing paths with my friend who's struggling in his room, going out together for cheap dinner at 6. Almost another month to be here. What is this. Something that happens physically. It was gone and has come back - dry mouth, ache in muscles and joints, sting in palms, eyeballs, face skin, tiredness, ache in the small of the back as if sore kidneys, feet sore and swollen, brownish pee. [Summary notes on dissociation and metaphor: Damage is interruption and partitioning. Abreacting: when something makes a strong impression allowing oneself to repeat it, imagine it (by writing or speaking it) and then it lets go. Times of creativity can be catastrophic like grief, disorder on the way to another order. Loss of environment is as much a damage as a lesion is. It's loss of ability to be what you are by nature. Any damage is loss of experienced environment. You lose what is still there. Parts of the world disappear. And yet they still have effect. Ghosts. Weak structure that only rarely has enough energy so that we see or imagine by means of it - and yet we feel it. Not going somewhere else to find her, but staying in place and letting her strengthen enough to emerge in common light. A sense of search as staying still and dwelling so that a structure gradually stabilizes. "Each child was in danger of losing track of who it was he was wanting." Being landscape and being ourselves being it are separate structures in the sense that they run off separately, but they involve the same units. There is also evasion: not being the other, not being the self. The hemispheres run off differently; that's the main thing about them. Unification: knowing what's other and self in the same moment. Imagining known as such, clarity of fantasy. Doing and being. The two principles of consciousness are doing and being. The nonconscious brain stands around, behind, them. It is the third in every marriage. Recognition is unconscious knowing set up off some aspect of perceiving. The psyche is infant feeling: it's only the infant's adventures. But it is the root of love and well-being in us. Movements of awareness in the body. Other meanings are overlaid on that. Events are felt symbolically because they are felt with structure already organized that way. Symbolic attitude can read back thru roots to other uses of that structure. Dreams can be true if they are taken to be about psychic state. Errors of attribution that happen because we are doing/being different things at the same time. Synaesthetic attribution of something that is self to object perceived, attribution of something that is object to self because the means by which it is perceived are self. These errors of attribution can also happen with simulated perception. Hinton and Sejnowski skeleton filters. How we are to think of them, embedded nets latent in any structure we are thinking by. The whole net might reconfigure like a flock veering. Attend to a nonsense intrusion and you'll shift. Castenada as psychology. Assemblage point. Fix it or displace it. Fixing it gives coherence. To discipline it, just intend the motion. Theoretical talk is not like talk about doing things in the world. It is imaginary in a deep way - it is imaginary in a structural way. Our talk about 'mental representations' has inevitably structured itself the way our talk about using pictures or sentences is structured. Think of every perception, every moment of thought or speech as widely, widely distributed. Functional dispersal. 'Features' always physically integrated. Maybe they are held together by 'roots' that are among them as differences in strength of connection - 'filters' that are strong connections because they are original. They pre-date finer discriminations learned later. Metaphor is a case of directed or self-organized net dynamic. Phenomenally it can be thought of as one of many ways of directing attention. Theoretical metaphor is just thinking by means of structures that are there already. It takes a long time to learn to use it so it's no longer about only what we're used to it being about. Metaphors are an effect of coactivation within functional dispersal. When there is an action-situational structure set up for theoretical fantasy, the action procedure is performing the thought. The dispersion of the net for unified perception is demonstrated in the way we can set up an ability to see that about A in the presence of B, given a mode that sets up partly ignoring B. In relation to the brain, linguistic questions would be does it work? Not: is it grammatical. That it works though it is judged ungrammatical is a writer's fact. Capacity to bear the tensions until finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more of the claims of both sides.] 6th Phoned M last night. She's in good health but full of death. Aunt Lucy and Aunt Lil are on cholesterol medication. Ed has a broken blood vessel in the retina. Uncle Herman has new tumors but he is still alive. Anne and Lil are on estrogen replacement. Uncle Jake had a quadruple bypass. Was that it? Oh yeah, Uncle George on cholesterol medication too. I'm thinking of Roy Kiyooka dying suddenly at his computer with a cup of tea beside him. He was seventy and walked like a man with wings or a tailwind. When Tom woke me I was dreaming that I was crying telling my mother about smart women who had died. I wondered whether someone was picking them off. 7th I said what I wanted for my birthday was for him to ask me two questions about my life and listen attentively to the answers. His ideas were to bring me breakfast in bed, take me to dinner on the bus. What we actually did was: I worked in my room so he could write, but he didn't write, he tore his room apart. Midafternoon I started talking to the book and got exasperated. We'd said maybe we'd go for a bike ride. He stormed in starving and antsy saying we were going to dinner. What's to think about? Let's go. I froze. I insisted on time to think. We had a fight. He stormed out the 4th Avenue door and I out the G Street door to the bike. Straight up 6th to Balboa Park. Anger was my motor, fuckin' asshole, fuckin' asshole. Sat at the end of the lily pond watching the reflection of a wall, a shadow and a palm tree. [>> 2009] The color of the reflection was more concentrated than the color of the things. As the sun sank the color of both deepened. A white bird flew up across to the roof across the street. Not a pigeon - smaller, all white. I'd never seen a dove. Four Buddhist monks wrapped in beautiful orange above ugly grey socks. A thin old woman with sparse dry hair dyed pale orange sitting straight as the Queen on a backless bench. She was dressed immaculately in a day-glo lime-green suit and sat staring toward two mallards at the center of the pond. When two of the monks sat down near us to have their picture taken, she got up and walked away with her purse hung correctly from her crooked elbow. Her black suede shoes had very high heels. Then the sun went and I was cold in short sleeves and got on the bike and looped home. The park slopes had homeless people with their bedrolls settled at intervals facing generally west. When I passed a gap in the trees I saw the sun a clear circle cut in sky the same color. A molten dazzle of orange. There was a black man standing in the patch of light falling just through that gap in the trees. He was facing the sun formally as if in observance of his religion. When I was down in the city again, I had stopped on a corner to wait for the light when a young black woman came up behind me talking to herself. She felt me listening and began to speak as if also to me. Father Campbell wouldn't help her out with ten dollars. He said he would call the police. He has always helped her out before. He asked her whether she does drugs. He has never done that before. Her transfer has run out. She can't get back to Mesa Linda where she has a room with a Christian lady. The AIDS place closed at four. They said they couldn't help her. Somebody cut her with a razor. Her foot is killing her. She hasn't eaten all day. Her mother was buried on Friday. Do you want a hug? I said. I was straddled across the bike bar. She came into my arms, thin and stiff. When she backed out she started to cry. She stood repeating her line with her face shining with tears. It was a thin hard-fleshed face with bright skin. We crossed the street. Will you come with me? she said. She wanted to go back to Father Campbell. It's at 4th and Cedar, it's just there. I said I would but as I listened I thought, no. He has run out of patience with her, it is always the same story. When we got to 4th I said, I have to go this way. She turned her back and leaned against a lamppost. I left her there. I came back to the hotel and made salad from the vegetables I had in the bottom drawer. It was good. I got by on four dollars yesterday. I am taking thought for the morrow. It is a strait gate, this month. I am wondering whether there is some other, bad, reason I am doing this. I am enjoying the invention but it is as if untrusting. I feel it might be somehow punished, because it's tight. 10th It's noon and hot. I'm on the terrace at the Mekka Java with sweat running down my ribs. There is a tree stirring next to me that has a slim trunk and round canopy but narrow leaves that seem out the corner of the eye to suggest pines. Small cars flowing down the blue strip of the Coronado bridge. It's a happy time. I want to say interval but I won't. I knocked on Tom's door at quarter to seven. I brought you coffee. He was himself, his own strange face on the pillow. Which face. The beautiful one. "Some of the strongest lesbian feminists I know have married the macho-est guys," says Jane Campion. Four train engines sang loudly at the crossing. I came in shy - I came in she - and said awkwardly You are so wonderful to want to come on an adventure with me. The awkwardness is what happens when the assurance I feel in my room meets some reserve in him that I don't understand. It is as if I think he has a secret. He said he woke thinking he'd like to make love; but there was something else. On both his sleeping teeshirt and his grey sweater vest there is a woman's perfume on the left shoulder at the level of the armpit. It might be his deodorant, it might be something else. I'm happy but the book is right, there is a young one in me watching very sharp, where is the lie, this can't be true. And then the fact of doubt worries me. What if it means that I love more than I am loved? The fact of four trees and this sky. I ignore the street and the buildings. Lucy Rees, her horses and Arizona. A love journey. The horses both female. They wanted to travel with horses whose spirits they were saving. It was a journey of four companions, and she describes a shape of journey I believed because it was someways like my trip with Louie. She writes well. But what am I missing in that story? It's the man. She doesn't dare describe him. She doesn't tell the truth about him. Her author photo shows her with her horse not with him. Her face in the author photo is like the pixie faces on bronze artifacts, an odd genetic. I want to say that about Tom too, as if there is an off-world bloodline in him. Oberon. She describes herself as disorganized, when she is being pushed I think. She's afraid her presence kills. Nine miscarriages. A Welsh horsebreaker. What's the word I want - she had the sense I have in free journeys, of being organized from an eye in the sky that knows where everything is and how to time things to the second. That every journey has to have a despair at its apex. When she was eight, she says, she saw Curtis's photos of the Hopi and recognized herself. As if after a while native migrations happened that way, little girls in Christian families looked up out of their places and lost their horizontality. They were recruited, not by means of an eye in the sky, but maybe a reflector. Rees Lucy 1996 The maze: an extraordinary quest for enlightenment in a barren desert Transworld Publishers The story of my journey with Louie ends at the counter of the Golden West. As I'm writing, facing south (another train) there is a man at the next table, eight feet away, facing toward me, smoking and writing. I feel as if he is writing about me. - In my room midafternoon I was looking at Lucy Rees's book again and caught a second of what I think of as a psychic address. It's the feel of a time and place; sometimes, I think, the feel of a social group. It is as if ethos directly instantaneously perceived, or imagined, or remembered, or picked up out of the air. This time I thought of it as the background of a man somehow associated with her book. Other times it has been memory of time/places of my own. Once it was what I thought might be Jam's family's atmosphere when she was in school. I have to be falling asleep to feel it. It isn't possible to remember it well enough to say anything specific about it. I think of it as a very developed perception (it said yes) because it is as if direct perception of qualities of consciousness that are not my own. I don't have that awareness when I read or am with people. If I did, it would be the realest reading or being with. It would make meeting people travel of an exquisite kind. I feel as if I would have to be completely silent to do it. It might appall me - I think the difference would appall me. Maybe only till I got used to it. Reading a letter each from Mac, Vic and Father Joe was too much in something like that way. I wasn't prepared for their common realness - the strength of otherness of their ethos, which is also Tom's and therefore unperceived beside me, something he is alone, while I stay in my own. 12th eldritch OE el as in else, + rich is realm. Someone from an other world. We think that of each other. Here is a question: why do we love language as such, what is that love? Eldritch sets up only what comes with its look and sound, the coincidence of look and sound. It's related to my name. I didn't know that about el. It's an adjective, and the itch is like ish. Eldish. Dritch is a lean hard mean thing, but el makes it someone with smooth black hair. Friday 14th the Cove [La Jolla] Above the many-motioned sea. Pines, palms, eucalyptus, nasturtiums, freesias, this yellow thing - oxalis? - montbretia, wild oats, iceplant, mallow, aloe, barley, honeysuckle. A powder haze. Gulls, hammer strokes, crowbar squeals, something small thrashing. A swimmer. Kayaks, cormorants, a moth, a motor, lemonadebush, faraway cliffs like cuts through piles of sand. An old woman who can't bear the sun. Beaten path moleskinned with dust. 16th Babette Mangolte. I studied her to see myself, maybe a version of myself I'm not going to be. She was four in 1947. A short woman with a big strong head. When she met me at the station she had a towel wrapped towering on her hair. Big loose breasts. A slightly hunched stocky body with an ass as flat as if she'd cut it off. A very tanned lined formed face, big white teeth like a line of chiclets she bars when she smiles. That peculiar habit of speaking with her chin pushed forward and her mouth barred under her fine-cut aquiline nose. Eyes inaccessible behind tinted glasses. I was exhausted when I left. It had gone so heavily, impersonally, humorlessly. She was the only woman director of photography twenty-five years ago. She came to New York in 1970 - there were stories that could animate her - to see Wavelength, because of the way Annette Michaelson described it. She is an old woman. The flesh next to her armpits hangs in withered skin. Her hair is grey at the curly forelock and shades back to red-brown past the middle of her back. The way she doesn't cut her hair is like her peasant grandmother in Alsace - that and the strength of her face. The garden of damaged cactus on her roof. Her room with eight books on Bresson. She could be a mother superior - so abstract she has made herself. Schwitters. She's leathery. There are many tender feelings she has given up. She doesn't care how she is seen. She won't indulge personal curiosity. She had me there and wouldn't find me interesting. She didn't have the curiosity and energy of strong intelligence, but she had something. She has a vein of something. She found my images too beautiful. She needs to be known among people who give up beauty. That wasn't my solution. She's a DP because she has a strong will not strong senses - is that it? She didn't ask me if I had children. She didn't say anything about the text of Dark and bright. On the train coming home, wiped out, I was straining toward Tom's arms. I only wanted to be touching him. 17th "For the first time I knew the leaping of heart, the sudden enlightenment." Jill Ker Conway's anthology of American autobiographies of women. Why do I want my mother to read this book. I'm still wanting to give her what she would have taken for herself if she had wanted it. Why don't I understand that she doesn't want it? I don't know how I can be smart if my family is stupid. But if my family is smart, the life they lead is exile and prison. If it is that, they should want to be released. They don't. There it ends. Comprehension and contact end. But it's not as if I have found a family among people who aren't afraid to be smart. Why is that? Why don't I have energy of connection? Why haven't I persisted where I feel the sudden trust that is my mark of intelligent company? Socially I only thrive when someone carries me. A panic flurry about work. I have built an orientation I can lead from, but no one is following me and no one is able to follow me. Mainly that. I don't have a context when I won't follow. Currie's book on film and mind is analytic philosophy shit and published by Cambridge. I have to fight for my work but in that context there's nothing I can do. I have to back way up. Rethink. I got halted again with this metaphor paper. It's not good. It's not clear. It's got beginnings in it. Write it again. But for whom? I thought Fauconnier, but I guess not. Not Colin, not Phil. I don't know. I'm at a slant from all of them. This matter of work context is crucial, it's my crisis now. I bought time in this program but now I have to get ready to get on the freeway somewhere. My friend knocked and found me distressed this morning. Asked and listened and then fucked me all the way to heaven. 19th I said I feel like there's a log jam and I have to pull out a log. He was asleep in the mess of his room and not glad to see me, and then very annoyed that I'm pushing him about the piece he's had us suspended in for a month. What I did was stupid if what I wanted was what I said I wanted. I picked a fight I guess, cos I feel at loose ends, let's get on to the next part. Let's get something happening. Another ten days. I should be doing something. Been reading this and that, repeating. Tom's performing affectional duties as he thinks they should be performed but I haven't seen his naked eyes for weeks. From a jack / To a king it was singing this morning. 22nd You're a panther, he says. A black one of course. No, a kind of chocolate brown one with rootbeer highlights.. I can move like that. I roll my shoulders deep and slow, padding forward against his chest. Think of a big panther dick up your panther pussy, he says. Oh my goodness. Then, after, he says the moonlight is shining through the filigree onto the forest floor. It's shining into their yellow eyes. They are rolling on their backs waving their paws. Her belly is white. You can see the row of nipples. His belly is freckled. But then he ends his rare lovely riff with a savage description of the PBS anchor begging for money. There was something about the way it happened. He was telling the panthers as a way to manage me into sex and keep me mastered while I was there. I was holding the edge of fainting in a way I haven't. He was letting go into seeing and telling in a way I knew was earlier than the sunglasses man, the style man. And then the way he rounded out into anger was like anger at his own innocence. It was like a father who is jealous of his child's playfulness and cuts it off. Life isn't like that, he says. The dialogue of Go and Stay. Go talks Stay down. Stay has worked two and a half years to get set up. He wants the beach, video music, safe joys. Go is bored, bored, bored. Stay says to Go, "I'll go since you want to, but I'd like you to be more realistic about your limits and put a little energy into helping me take care of us." Both Go and Stay are ranting on. I break in and redirect. What I find myself sighing yes to is when I say it is the actual sensation of fear in his belly that is the meeting place of Go and Stay. Staying with the sensation is what will connect them. My work yesterday with what happened when I saw the beautiful girl at the beach - worry about being/not being beautiful. This is what it said: my weakness in relation to beautiful women is that I've depended on men's interest to transform me. The independent way to be wonderful, it says, is synthesis of opposites, overview and control. I stop myself being magnificent because I'm afraid of men. When they are in love with me it's permitted. Magnificence is fearlessness. I faint when there are beautiful women and in work contexts because I am afraid of feeling not-preferred. I am afraid of what I say to myself. It's as if a man-structure is critical of me as a woman, and a woman-structure is critical of me as a man. Then I thought maybe the man-structure feels unappreciated. It said, yes, for the work on imagining. I said, I've done wonderful work, I've been brave and persistent. I've been astute, well-organized, well-intentioned, generous, original. I am a wonderful man. Then my heart started to tremble with pain. I have so much needed to hear it said. And in the presence of a beautiful woman I abandon myself in oh so mean a way. I don't say: I am .... Here I come to a stop. The opposing voice interrupts. I hear Tom's voice saying the good things and my own saying, You're fat, you're old, you're ugly, you look like your mother. From Cheryl: "I was in Montreal last week and picked up a copy of The tenuous image, and read your lovely and inspiring piece." 24th Packing with Tom - Sunday morning - I concentrate - it's like doing homework with Rowen - I keep his nose pointed in the right direction - set a speed - he doesn't know how to use parts of a physical space to sort functions - things you need this week on hangers out of the way, things you need for Blaine or the train in the bag they're going in, things you're taking but don't have to look at in my room for now, things for storage in my room to get repacked and then downstairs, empty bags under the bed, stuff to give away we'll put in the hall right now. And so on. In the evening I go thru the red barrel. Vic's letters. Let Dee handle the finances, he says. Write every day at the same time. Don't get into debt, no credit cards. It isn't worth getting into fights, rise above them. A card from Rebecca that says let your bright spirit shine through. People have been anxiously trying to maximize him from the beginning. Something to think about. Today he calls me back to his room. Come here, sit here. I'm laughing. "I understand," I say, "you're blasting me with rock music and pushing me down because you're grateful." Cathexis and de-cathexis says Scott Peck. "Dearest Pauline," Vic was writing at eighty-four, "oh Mac, Mac, Mac, what is happening to me?" - The woman who won best actress was wearing a long dress but no makeup, which made her remarkable to see. She said in a loud confident voice that she wished to thank three men. One made her an actress, one made her a woman, one made her a mother. (She named them.) Her husband wrote the screenplay that made her an intrepid little pregnant police chief. Styles of public address. One by one, people whose profession is presenting themselves come and present themselves. We watch how they choose to do it, we're interested to know what works. 25 Last week here. What should I be sure to do - He and I and another couple in Tijuana, going out for a meal, down steps into a basement restaurant. People looking at their plates, atmosphere a bit dull, no music. There's a TV but it isn't on. Maitre d' asks whether he'd like music or the TV on. He wants music but he says it's fine as it is. He sees across the room a big dispenser of Old Granddad whiskey (which he drank in the army), paper cups. He thinks wow but doesn't go for it. Goes to the bathroom which is typical T.J., small, horrible, a towel rather than a toilet, and there's somebody in it anyway. Goes back to the table. He hears a loud murmur of men's voices, Irish brogue, behind the wall. Two men come in, go straight behind the bar, ignoring everyone. Vanish behind the bar. He wakes uneasy. 26 Into the rotten boxes, crucifixes, cigars, embroidered hankies, death cards, insurance policies, silver forks so tarnished they are unpleasant to touch, two ladderback chairs that were in the family since the Civil War, plates wadded in brittle newsprint, birthday cards from everybody to everybody, grade eight graduation certificate, tin soldiers, cap pistol, albums with every news story he ever wrote, Vic's betting system, Father Joe's brass plaque of appreciation from parishioners, congratulation cards when Tom was born, congratulation cards when Matt was born, Dee's high school diploma, his army jacket, his army boots. A sweet bit of a dream last night. A young man touches me with love. He touches my side. The way he touches me has the listening yearning personal quality - can I say that better - it's that when I feel it I realize I miss it. I'm with a man who never touches me that way. It's personal. It's the touch of a love that can see me. I look at him thinking maybe this is the man I should be with. But now, he isn't a man. He's my height and he looks like a boy. He's that kind of man who will always look like a boy. 28 He said the days lying sick in the Maryland were his ring of fire. 2-10 February. It's afterward that I say come or else. He decides on the 15th but we got thru before that - just after I moved to the Maryland - 24th - I was already sick - reading Bowlby - on the 29th I say he is too chaotic to be able to manage himself to be with me. San Diego Self Storage 727 - five floor warehouse, nothing but corridors of closets - there are Tom's towers of boxes behind a door secured with the padlock Our choice of videos last night, one for me, one for him: Ziggy Stardust and Loach's Land and freedom. Why were young girls, babies in their early teens, fainting and howling for a masked skeleton in drag? 1972. What god was that? Dionysus. The answer tells me I asked the right question. "Death is waiting / behind the door" he sings. Orpheus a death singer. "This is the last concert of the tour," he says. "This is the last concert ever. I love you. I love you" he calls into the mic. Two girl fans jump onto the stage to embrace him. He hurls them behind him with a one-armed motion so smooth it has a supernatural air. 29th Should this alarm me: I notice looking past the calla lilies in the window that the house next door is vacant. Maybe I could rent it. It isn't locked. The main floor is empty, except for the plants in the window. I see the basement steps are piled with goods, paper sacks of cement and other things, to make an obstacle to the family stuff still in the basement. I see bicycles. I don't remember anything about the middle floor but have the impression that it was empty. In the top floor an auction is being prepared - is being held. A matron seems to be in charge or even to be the auctioneer. She is holding up a sweater. At the far end of the room a small crowd. When I speak to the woman, who I think is a member of the family I saw in a photograph earlier, she is unfriendly. She thinks I am of no account. I persist. Truthfully, what I want to know is whether I can rent this house, I say. Something like that. It is going to be gutted, she says. It's a good house I say with regret. Her eyes fill with tears. I turn to leave and see from the back window of the top floor how alarmingly high up I am - I wouldn't have thought it was so high. There's something about a door. The doors are heavy? Or stiff? I see coming up the stairs toward me a solid mass of people, coming to the auction I assume. They are solid well-off people in new clothes. Not exactly that. Their mass is old and they are a prosperous uniform kind of person pushing upward in a way that worries me. The matron is a tall person with large eyes, reddish brown color, an impatient unfriendly manner. 30 Here at this second last day I am looking at costs of my connection with this man. It's toward five in the morning, Sunday. I have been noticing things in a way that doesn't feel them - maybe that's what's meant by unconsciously. It's as if I've noted them, said them to myself, in a quiet voice under another kind of more buoyant attitude. For instance: how much time I spend waiting while Tom looks for something he has put down without noticing, or put down in a space already so chaotic there is no place for it. Sexually he comes without waiting for me most of the time. I have to make a fuss. I subsidize him all the time in conversation - he says something so vague there's nothing in it unless I push for more. I'm the one who fights for quality. He pours money into snack food, newspapers, videos, drinks from the machine. In the past weeks, where I've been trying to keep to ten dollars a day, I keep being uneasy feeling I'm careful and he is careless and that means I'm going to be subsidizing him - not only I, but my friends, who are already subsidizing my relation to him, Rob with $3000, Louie with $300 and phone calls. I'm going to be putting the touch on Luke. Rowen gets ignored. - Those things aren't his fault but the effects of my irresponsibility are compounded by his. Other things - the way when he comes into my room he lies down in the middle of the bed taking over the only pillow, or sits with his feet across the space. His body language is always saying he is the only one who counts. The worst is that he lies automatically. I always have to be wrestling him for the sake of the record. I snapped out yesterday because he is still lying to Rebecca - he told her he more or less has the job at the resort - ie he is not able to defend his risk. He told her I'm a professor at SFU - ie he is using me to evade the status cost of his lacks of effort. And he told her he's going to pay maintenance sometime - ie he is not willing to know who he is. I snapped out because he lied about having told Rebecca about me last year. He lied in a way that convinced me, he elaborated. It was in a time when he was lying about other things; he was about to shine me off and was not facing it, the way he wouldn't face the fact that he was shining off the Mr A's review. Here is another thing: his best friend Oscar and I do not like each other. And this: there are open matchbooks in his room. Should I use this last moment to pull out? I don't want to live with a man who lies to me in small or large ways, and to himself in small and large ways. I don't want to live with a man who says "I love you, I respect you" and whose posture in the room continually says Serve me, I'm the one who matters. What should I do. How am I. Nervous. Should I say what I've liked about him - I say it that way because I'm in the other half of my split. Yes, alright. I like that he forgives, makes peace quickly. I like his drive to get out, go somewhere. I like his voice. I like that he can take charge sexually. I sometimes like the way he looks. I like that he doesn't hide his vanity. I like being happy, a happy girl, when he fucks me. I really like the moments of squabbling with him, I like resisting him, I like being able to resist him, being allowed to. I like that he is courteous in principled ways, is never nasty. I like his affection for people. I like his buoyancy, enjoyment. I sometimes like touching him. I like his hands. Often I like the way he dresses. Sometimes, rarely, his spirit steps into the clearing. I like that one wholly. What I work for is to be with that one. But that angel is in everyone. Should I work for it in him at the expense of working for it in other people? Should I work for it in someone who doesn't work for it in himself? Everyone he's been with has been with him because they've had a glimpse of that spirit and wanted to see it again. His corruption uses his angel as bait. Being hooked by it is codependent insanity. When I get to this point I flutter in panic - I'm caught, I'm catchable, I am not looking after myself, I'm had, I'm betrayed, I'm betrayable. I'm playing with my own oppression.
|