| in america 1 part 1 - 2002 september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego 12 September 2002 It's 8, blue sky, sun on the pepper tree leaves. Last night I walked two blocks south on Taft and then back on Bellevue. Individual crickets were sounding in many of the yards. There are streetlights only on the corners, so that the blocks were masses of dark trees and bushes, a watered forest with house lights peeping from within it. What should I be doing. Garden in evenings. Set up the computer somewhere. Student packets Monday, in five days. Some house cleaning. Contact Gabriele. When I catch myself in mirrors I have a dark heavy look I don't like.
Reading Le Guin and crying. Mostly it is my left eye that is crying. Why. Because I wanted to be married. I still want to be married. But to a hero who loves to know me, not a vain lazy buffoon who disregards me. - And then when I go to the table, my notes on the institute seem intellectual and are distasteful. I can make better shapes in the garden, and begin to feel Tom in a legendary way and so feel doubtful hope, but I am repelled by the thought of discourse about contact instead of contact. I invented that structure when I was away from contact, and it was a substitute for contact, and a fantasy of a kingdom of action and currency invented by someone poor, isolated and locked away from action.
- Gulfs of air and the colors of morning moving in the sky The left side of her face was smooth copper-rose, a dark bright eye under an arched eyebrow. The right side had been destroyed and was ridged, slabby scar, eyeless. Her right hand was like a raven's curled claw. Dragons chase wildness and freedom, and mankind chose wealth and power. She looked at him, alert and luminous. their wild wrath and jealousy We die to rejoin the undying world gave up their knowledge of the Language of the Making, and in exchange received all skill and craft of hand, and ownership of all that hands can make They caught the Language of the Making in their craft "I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be ... I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet." "The joy of making, shaping, our mastery." "And our greed, our weakness, our fear." A white wind had erased the unmeaning stars. He straightened up and looked at her coming to him, that hawk look, frowning. "Ah," he said. "Oh my dear," she said. She hurried, the last few steps, as he came to her. Ursula Le Guin 2001 The other wind Harcourt - What we do not know remains boundless ... what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. the great energy of the power that originates in imbalance whenever the little bushbirds or the squirrels chipped and tsked I think of my mother in her beauty by that fire, on the edge of the years of sorrow. It is like watching a fire burning in the rain. Ursula Le Guin 1985 Always coming home Harper and Row - At that point I felt unwell and lay down. I dreamed that I was given a scholarship to honor my dissertation work. I saw that it was for $24,000, two years' expenses. My father had been there when I opened the envelope. I turned to him determined and said the scholarship was for $24,000. It's too much, he said. I began to shout the many things I have to say to him. He didn't stay to hear them, he went away. I was left telling my mother what he is. I was breathless with sobbing, watching myself release the truth of his ill-will. 13 I am soul-less, in except that I am sad to be soulless. Melancholy, transitional, lonely. An empty house, not my own. Dirty. Spoiled by cheap and bad renovations probably done to increase the selling price. Oak veneer floors over warm golden fir. The most wrong and insipid plants possible, philodendron and impatiens. A kitchen fitted out in dark wood like a Swiss chalet. Wrought iron affectations and ugly angled corners. And other beautiful facts, the wide empty upper terrace with sunset view of the ocean through the white limbs of the trees. These casement windows, though they have false panes. Downstairs dark broken pretentious furniture stands wrapped tight in clear plastic sheeting. In the entertainment room the bar is like a gothic pulpit, expensive wood carved and polished. What is that bird - a black head and a blue back - in the pepper tree - a white-breasted nuthatch. Are these things an image of me, of my state? Gracious morning in Bird Rock, leaves stirring, birds looping between trees. 14 I dreamed the landlord was building Rhoda a new place. It is the second floor of a two-storey building. We rise in an elevator in its center to see it very briefly. It is white with wood floors, one room, well made, four sides around the square of the elevator well. Later in the dream I am walking on a hillside with others. I see a pink scarf hanging above the grass and weeds. There is a black jacket under it. I am looking at the cut of the jacket. I take it down. I will try it on. It is lined with fur. I turn it so it is a fur jacket and look at myself wearing it. I am doubtful. Trudy says wearing fur is entertaining. I agree. Louie doesn't like me in it and walks away. I find with the jacket a small purse that falls open. There are some coins in it, some quarters, a dollar coin. I understand it is a dead woman's purse. When I am lying awake in the dark after this dream I am thinking several things, that the larger self knows more but has larger purposes, and that the local self knows what it needs to preserve itself. That this is the first dream about Trudy and Rhoda in this new life, and that they impressed themselves on my dreaming more than anyone. Tom is a spiritual lightweight. He doesn't fight for his best self. It is still the artists that matter, those who do what it takes to be real. 16 White melancholy, Logan said. He wrote in sympathy. I was at a conference that interested me. There were several older women, distinguished and accomplished. I saw that for their public appearances they were wearing beautiful makeup, smooth turquoise and purple mottling like markings on a lizard. The scent of nasturtiums.
In his thirties my father was very beautiful. He was beautiful of form and of face. There was a fineness in the quality of his beauty, something taut and proud. He had a high-bridged nose, a long slope from cheekbone to jaw, and a conscious mouth. His hands were the most beautiful I have seen. Among the Mennonites beauty is not mentioned. Its power is thus denied but increases in secret. I didn't wonder whether anyone else felt it. Beauty in humans was my painful pleasure. Beauty elsewhere was pleasure without pain. I taught myself not to love my father because I saw that he would not love me back. He did not have love in him. He was vicious, wrathful, spiteful, malicious. He never had a kindly impulse. He was self-absorbed. His attitude toward women he saw in public was angry or casual lust, arrogant connaisseurship. 17 I wrote those three paragraphs in Le Guin's voice. I have been rereading Always coming home noticing how much I've taken from her. Her question is always how to live well, culturally and personally. She is love woman as philosopher, because she makes the question of how to live well a question of how to live intimately. Let me summarize what Tom said yesterday. He said his true self does not like sports, is not identified with rock'n roll or Catholicism, is not trying to salvage something by way of the Jesuits or Teillard de Chardin. It says I hate you, you fucked me up, to Vic. It is quiet, likes fresh air, likes to be active, likes to read, likes to bop along, is happy. He did not say this exactly but his true self also does not want to be with me romantically. His true self is a boy. He said he had hit alcoholic bottom earlier, but this summer he hit his nonalcoholic bottom. He said being faithful has to go. When we sat on the crumbling spit of cliff at Torrey Pines he listened carefully to the story of my defense. He talked in his convoluted Catholic way about Being about, and I drew a diagram in the soft dust. Then we went back up hill and sat for a while by the tide near Bird Rock. I said, as we were talking in the car in the parking lot, You were desperate, you wanted me to rescue you, and if you deny it I am not going to like you. "I was desperate. I wanted you to rescue me. You did rescue me." I am not remembering this exactly, but it was important: he said, I seduced you. I said, I knew that you wanted me to rescue you but I didn't know that my knowing it couldn't protect my woman self. She was seduced. You brought her alive, so it didn't matter that it wasn't real, I said. It did matter, he said, and then I saw it did. Yes it mattered. It would have been better if it had been true, but now I need to find her in a way that doesn't depend on you. I had another line I liked. He was fulminating because I was protesting that he wasn't listening. That was before the parking lot. When we were stopped in the car he apologized. I said, If we are only going to be able to talk when you can be the expert on something, we are not going to be talking very often, because I already know quite a lot about many things. Coming back through La Jolla village I was telling him about Logan saying white melancholy. He said, You don't need to be lonely. I said No, I need to be lonely. - Home safe and coming to a stop. I drove Nora's Acura to Encinitas on I5 to look at stone, very frightened of speed and not knowing the car. There was also the bewilderment of thinking about stone. Quartzite gold-green and golden ray, 12x12, 16x16, 18x18, Tuscan travertine, flagstone, hearthstone, ledge stone. A man called Lopez first ignored me and then when I yelled Is someone going to talk to me? came and showed things nicely and asked to be forgiven. "I should have acknowledged you." "Yes you should have." Gave me his card. And then computer problems all day so that I have seen and started on no student work and do not know how I will manage to. And I don't have a bike. Nicole [Gingras] wrote that she read the last chapter on my site and wondered that I could preserve fragility in that work. She said it was what my program has always been, and that it is for art and philosophy.
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