| in america 1 part 5 - 2002-03 december-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5th Ave, 18th December 2002 Locked in for the night, sore. The hotplate is too feeble to undo all the chill. There's grime. The room doesn't sound music well. I'm still not safe from Brenda, who will come stomping in, though less, oh less. Hope the car is okay at its grey curb. Bike tied to a signpost downstairs. Sat on the floor trying to figure out the filing cabinet, which is in its spot now, papers put away in their categories - poetics, [college], institute, gardens, misc. Will I have working energy tomorrow, be warm and dry enough? I took the driving manual to Tom, zipped downhill on 4th, which brings me to the Golden West in minutes. He was behind the desk in his green terry pullover jacket, hair slicked back, antique tie. I expected nothing and meant to dash but he came to the counter, held both my hands and looked into my eyes, instant and ready in his new way. 20 It's raining on my asphalt shingle beach. Closed-in with two lamps, the hotplate, B Minor Mass. I can see palms through the dirty window. Yesterday I found my bike with the front wheel gone and another, with a flat tire, leaned against it. I had happened to see a bike rack in Nora's pile for Amvets and had it in the car, so I took bike and wheel to Felipe next to the Golden West. When I was putting it back on the rack I realized that it was so low to the ground it would strike on bumps, and then that I had wedged it into the rack so I couldn't get it off. And then a man arrived, crazy, offering to help. He was on a bike, loaded with a bulging briefcase and other bags. He had very small features, a red rash on his face. He introduced himself - four names - so rapidly I caught only Jones. A bicycle man will know how this bike rack is meant to go, I thought. He stepped in and took over. I let him, provisionally. He was talking crazy and so fast I got only bits of what he said. "I'm your archangel at your service." He worked in a way that was both smart and lost. He pulled off my bike lock cord, wrapped it in circles, took off my seat, and set the coil onto the post, to start with. Then after a time took the rack off the car with the bike attached to it and ran at a tree until he had knocked the bike off it. Then he set to putting the rack back on the car. He had it turned the other way around from the way I'd had it. Something about the brand plate being the face that faces my face. I wasn't seeing how it was going to hold the bike. He moved the latches by the spring, shortened the straps from the top of the trunk. He was putting pressure on the rusted edge of the trunk opening, as if he didn't see that it was crumpling. At this point he seemed to be stalled, repeating. He had been talking the whole time, going into a falsetto voice. He wondered if I had a cigarette. Would I go and get him a Pepsi. I knew I was not leaving him with the bike and car. I said that if we got it to work I'd give him ten dollars. He was saying I had had a hard life but I was fuckin' sexy. Was I with someone? I asked him how old he was. Forty. Where did he grow up? San Diego. What part? Clairemont. Alcohol, and pot was nice. He had taken off his jacket, was working in a white longsleeved shirt over a white undershirt. Michael something David Jones. I was seeing a small pleasant-looking Welshman, slightly roly-poly like Colin, but berserk on speed. He was poeticizing constantly but I missed most of what he said. At some point I realized I should step in. I said I wanted it this way and not that. A tall pale fifty year old redheaded man had stopped and was offering the same advice, handed Michael Jones a cigarette as if he knew him. We set the bike on and it was good. I handed over the ten dollar bill I had in my pocket. Gave Michael a handful of dried cherries, the other man too. Said, I'm going now. Michael had hold of the straps again. It's going to fishtail. I'll drive slow, I said and started the car. As I was stopped at the light Michael was still beside me fiddling with the straps. When I got home to Banker's Hill, the front tube was completely flat and the tire flapping off. It had blown. Still don't have a phone or internet. Pouring money. If I keep the hotplate on and sit under my quilt with a hot water bottle it is warm enough. Tom got his driver's license yesterday, second dentist appointment tomorrow. New buzz cut. 22nd It is Sunday morning. I want to complain. Here I am in my next stage and alone in a room on and on like in the last stage. It is wet and cold like Vancouver. I don't even have a large deep project I'm dedicated to. Tom is an old man now, he just wants to lie low in his room. We are bored with each other. I ache. I am living in a room with business boxes stacked so I am confined to its edges. I've been either doing [college] or else slack. From this blankness I step into the first pages of the May-September 2002 journal and there am a soul at once. 23 Tom here in this tight little den yesterday 'til six this morning. The mix, the contradictions. When he got here he sat on the couch and looked at me with those level wolfy eyes. I liked that and also as always do not feel I know him in it. He launched a bit of silver tongue, I love you, you are so beautiful, you are so wonderful. When that happens I get wary or frightened, feel at sea, don't know what is going on. That and his stupefying repetitive relationship talk. I feel more and more excluded by it, as if he is talking to hear himself. In the midst of that I also feel no sexual interest. He brags how horny he is but doesn't get hard. What he means is how horny he is in relation to fantasy. There wasn't much contact, except when he was nonsexually feeling the tense and open parts of my body. It's true I'm heady and cut off but his bluffing makes it worse. And then there was sitting briefly in his new room at the Golden West as he washed his shirt. I felt such dismay and had to cover it. He's done what he can but oh such a dark little hole, with his worst knick-knacks proudly displayed. Looking at the room I feel it as him - that's what he is. My heart shrinks when I feel that. Shrinks how - with pity, with fear. Any more? No, that's how it is for now. And how does it feel? Sore heart, which I wasn't feeling. 26 Very hard two days. It broke this morning when I said with passion that 1) some of my funks are when I am feeling what he is suppressing, and 2) if he wants love and trust and gratitude and loyalty from me he will need to learn to allow me to be the baby sometimes. After two days turning everything I said to mush he finally heard me, but that was also after he had unloaded on and on. I feel pulped. While it is going on I'm thinking only that one day I'll be away from him for good, it will be over. His descriptions of what I am, what I do, his quotations of what I've said, are so wrong, so crude, so obtuse, so ugly, that I withdraw, I get silent, I take refuge in aiming to be gone. I feel more and more alone, until it is an agony. 27 Dreamed I came into a public room, like a gallery foyer, full of people. Across the room I saw my mother catch sight of me. Her face looked like mine. Coming toward me was Uncle Willie in a lambskin cap. He looked radiantly happy. Someone was saying it was a spiritual happiness, he had found something. My mother's recognition on my left, the theorist's blazing happiness on my right, is it that? 28 The way my various projects are the same project:
- They sweep down from the foothills and the higher plains, from the country of the oaks and grassland. They move as a family, helping each other, communicating with each other, their bodies flowing over the land, a culture sharing the chore of training up the young ... When we come into this country we call them wolves and we slay them. We use machines to comfort us We do not know why we like deserts We are probably the first generation since prehistoric times to see and feel the world as a whole. The earth's real food, the amount of energy captured by plants through sunlight ... our consumption at forty percent of all the production of photosynthesis ... either through direct consumption or through disturbance A group of human beings who stood before him with thousands of years of the desert housed in their flesh, their bones, and their minds. This is one of the few places on earth where I have heard the stars, a low humming as they swing from horizon to horizon. tinaja tank Europe seemed to hate nature. By the time of the Doomsday Book in England in 1086 less than two percent of the virgin forest remained. Before I was born I would sometimes steal out of my mother's womb while she was sleeping, but it was dark and I did not go far. Every good doctor begins to understand before he is born. [Yuma] He knew the only thing of value to be found here was the honest glimmer of an understanding about just what the word place might mean. Something that we do not conquer, something that does not care about us, something that might fill the emptiness that has driven us for so very long ... We seem to want a world where there is a master plan and this plan states that our behavior will not be punished, our appetites will not be curbed, our present will not determine our future. We will be exempt from death, from hunger, from pain, from everything but love. And love will not be earned but freely given like that of a parent to a child. We say that such a world is our due, is our right, is part of the master plan ... The desert will not sustain our lies but instead offers a taste of life. And out on the ground there is no master and there is no plan but there is death and hunger and pain. Because, as we always suspected, the desert does not care. And finally, love becomes a possibility. Now we make studies of it before we kill it. Now we write stories protesting its death. 800 years ... a boojum, el cirio, 100 million years its kind, there First we must learn to love something that does not love us ... Secondly, we must learn to live in a place we can never stay. Third, we must accept the fact that we can change very little here. Saying that we, too, belong. And we say it with the very evidence that proves our distance, that asserts our exclusion. Do you really believe that in the true beginning was the word? 108 Come here. Now taste. Charles Bowden 1992 The Sonoran desert HN Abrams Sunday 29th Point Loma Sitting up in bed in Eliz's room, camellias at the west window, an afternoon with running sky at the south. That sensation - waiting alone, slightly or faintly panicked. Empty time. I couldn't bear Tom yesterday. Took him back to the hotel. What was the sensation, intense intolerance, exhaustion. I read Lessing, 300 pages, last night and this morning. The sweetest dream, 2002. She's 83. There's not much in this one, but it is effortless interest. None of her analytic fetches, people understanding one another. Almost nothing but humans imagined out of people she has known. She's comforting her loneliness with scenes of food and company. There's no structure in the book. Young people becoming old people. She has seen that, what became of people and their enthusiasms over time, whole lives. - Is there anything I could know about this state - should I call it depression. I like light. I can look at these four half-stripped door panels and the green wall next to the window and be the honey-butter joy of the light. I seem to be more and more like that, dependent on beauty to keep me alive. I don't want to do anything. Tom was here with me Monday night, Christmas Eve, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday until I took him home at 4. Christmas Eve I was complaining that we weren't in contact. I was lonely. Christmas Day I zonked out and Christmas night I was in agony. It broke when I asked Tom how he was feeling, and then, after a hard night, broke all the way when I made the speech Thursday morning. Tom said we had to keep going, so I went for him again Thursday night. Friday morning we woke early and he did something surprising to my nipples. Etc. But came before I could. Friday night wanted to borrow twenty dollars. Saturday slept most of the day, which I liked because I needed to be alone. He wants to buy a trailer in Kingman AZ and live there with me. I feel trapped in a life that will never have realness in it again. Will enterprise do? - Except that I feel no ambition. 2002, the beautiful number. Joyce died, I defended Being about, there were the exquisite mornings in Bellevue, Ed died, I had two months completely away from Tom. Left 824 E Pender. The long task is over but its empty shell is not. Went out shopping late in the afternoon and then to look at the sea at Nazarene College. The scrub is dead grey with minute seedlings green at its feet, a barren trodden slope. The sea was in shore break, curly, creamy, creeping, slow scallops spreading into lace. The sun was a gold disc just over the horizon line. I was staring in its face and there was no direct light on me - that was odd - it was there but as if already gone. Only the clouds overhead were lit. Three pelicans were coasting in line, sideslipping in a stiff breeze. There was yellow on the backs of wavelets - I could see it only further out.
Have been listening to Mozart's sprung rhythms on those lines - that isn't the term - what I mean is the way he stretches vowels or shortens them in unexpected ways so the body listening winds tight and lets go in tendrils like a squash vine. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Kiri Te Kanawa with the London Symphony Orchetra conducted by Colin Davis Philips 1982 31
What else - Tom in his bullying way punishes it, takes it personally, is enraged that I should be depressed when I have him. Is stuck with a dull unresponsive woman. There have already been years of this depression. When I was working on the book it seemed the cost of great effort. While I was in the rain in Vancouver I longed for California and the effort to be over. While I was in 824 for 27 years I longed to be away from the press of Rhoda and Trudy and the neighbourhood. All along it was depression. Since the years of the garden it has been depression. Joyce liberated me into depression. Depression is isolation, lack of energy for action, disappointment with people, lack of hope. It is familial, genetic I mean. Joyce got me out of it into the garden, seventeen years ago. I went back into it when I went back to school. I snap out of it when I'm teaching. Power snaps me out of it. Extreme fear, as when I was first with Tom, can take me out of it. Paradoxically, attachment loss gets me out of it. Sharp agony. Instinctive medications: romance, risk, fear, beauty. Instinctive evasions: novels, food. It says: be concerned with getting to your reserves - improvement of love woman, slow growth of Ellie - act to come through - graduate from compulsion to aloneness - persist in missing and coming through to anger - graduate from missing and depression, which are illusions. All of this makes sense. - Quarter past 8 in Ocean Beach [the Greek's café]. Slatted sun in a booth. Radio. A warm room. Regulars who feel it's home, old men. Out there a big bunch of grass atop a pole - palm tree - glittering. A pretty waitress pouring syrup into plastic bottles. Blue sky, a pink plaster wall. January 2003 At twilight tonight I walked out into the pink and blue and found the alley I have been looking for (Dupont St). The quail garden has been fenced, the eucalyptus topped or removed. The alley, though, had a strong feel of something. It is an earth track and has odd structures built against it, odd views into nooks. It itemizes strange forms of life. It is uncanny. I stepped onto a horizontal 2x4 to see over the fence, which is grapestake. There was the house, remodeled, and a large garden, quite conventional. Was that a mesquite in the corner by the garage, which is where I recently began to feel my bedroom built? I came around the end of the block to see the house from the front, and as I stood looking at it - professionally and blandly landscaped - a slim small old car drove up next to me. I was feeling it as a Rover, probably. It was nearly dark and I did not want to look at the person driving, but I felt him as a thin man with dark hair. I smiled with the side of my mouth and limped away. I felt he was Iain Mackintosh. I felt that he has moved here from London, and that he either found the house because I had found it, or else that I found it because he had been going to live there. I felt that if I had not been afraid to look at him, I would have seen that it was him and I would have crossed permanently into fairyland. I felt that my intense connection with the house as I imagined it rebuilt was in some way following the progress of its actual renovation. I wondered whether the garage on the alley was built later, and whether I began to imagine the bedroom in the SW corner when it was built. What can I take from this liminal wish? Iain Mac is love woman's counterpart - that mirroring fineness. He's not my father, he's my male self, which David Carter also was. He's my fairy king, Kc, David Mac, a man who has my gifts and tastes, and in whom I could see and love them, or who in seeing and loving them in me would make me feel myself them.
One thing I dreamed last night is that I was with Josie and saw extraordinary beautiful creations floating and billowing above us, for instance a large construction like a panel of black and white sails made of sheets of gusting sheer fabric - it was like a huge kite or the layered rigging of a many-masted sailing ship. I said to Josie, It must be sky-hung, meaning this isn't supported from below.
3rd The last three days it's been Aristotle for Marianne, ousia/entity/'substance', the arguments for the principle of noncontradiction and A on the origin of courage. Aristotle and Aristotle scholars. The way it's always a puzzle fitting his terms to a translation, like trying to discover a single value for x in a bunch of equations that aren't - or may be - related. The way he seems a lucid empiricist standing interested in the real world, and then up pops some line that seems to imply the old offstage noumena. The way he sets out conceptual analyses, notices the polysemy of terms, makes something of it. I imagine him with a noble forehead and large eyes. I want him to be my clear-eyed ally speaking as I would before obscurantist Christians brought in their billowing mists to try to save the noumena - substance and essence and accident and so on. Marianne is infected with that version and unintelligible mostly. She's coming from Heidegger. She's not a really good student, she doesn't have the digging-down clarity of a philosopher. I can get her clearer than she is. Give her a B-. Say I think it is a C but I'm going to give her the benefit of her difficulties. Still, it's a doctorate. She should be spending four months on Aristotle, not five weeks. A doc means she'd be prepared to teach it. Still, she's at the beginning, and what has to develop is her approach, not acquaintance with facts, so it's too soon to tell. Many people get docs who aren't talented the way I want her to be. Is she as talented as they? Maybe. 7th Marianne says she's quitting. It was nice yesterday at the sky shack, balmy, door open, Ethiopian pop music, Bad boy, come with me, come with me. Tom was scrubbing calcium off the shower tile, I was cutting open the windows, prying nails and staples out of the floor. We worked without talking. The sun shone on the rooftops. Earlier he kept me company as I pruned the ficuses on the mall floor. I had a love light in my eyes, he said. We came back to Eliz's and did not succeed in making much of it. He went to sleep at 6:30. I was awake most of the night. Then at dawn we drove over the crest of Point Loma ridge and saw the city in a pool of mist. The water was clear, there was powdery mist among the towers only, just their height. As I drove home again from dropping him off, the sun was rising in wide gold, gold fluid, the goldest gold, alive. Today I'm gardening all day at Taft. 'Bye. - The difference my clearings make. Yesterday the back garden. The pines at the bottom of the space, periwinkle at their feet, pine needles heaped. Bare earth and cascading plants on the raised bed. Brick and concrete steps swept. Bare earth at the foot of the bird of paradise, so its shape shows. Orange tree with fluffed ground in its square, so it's a whole with its floor, canopy and snake-skin stems. It was nothing when I began and exquisite when I finished. 8 "Done in wispy threads of black and red chalk ... sfumato is what it's called. In Leonardo's own notes he says it is to blend your shadows seamlessly, in the manner of smoke." S. karwinskii is blooming at Taft, eight feet tall, tips vivid lipstick pink. The white jasmine and purple hardenbergia are in full flower together on the fence. 9 At Eliz's, the night before I go to Vermont - a little ache about leaving - I've cleaned house, dragging, and am waiting for the last laundry tossing in the dryer. Te Kanawa singing Mozart, the CD repeating all evening, these many evenings. It has been a house. Fireplace, kitchen, windows onto trees and skies, washer and dryer, subtle shining floors, carpets. I am going back to my tiny lock-up tonight and then into the sky tomorrow. The ache is for the house where I have been quiet with beauty near, and scrappy with Mr Tom who comes pressing his thighs tight against my bum. Last night he felt the space of thighs and ass turn into a fluid of goldy atoms. When he put one hand on my breast it intensified, he said. We have had these drives in the dawn, taking him to work. Last night we managed peace on the sofa with the fire. Vacuuming this aft I was finding his big flakes of ankle skin here and there on carpets. He has been ardent, I mean emotionally. When he is awake at night he is sometimes clutching his head, saying What is this woman doing with me?! We got to real kisses by the end of this week, for the first time since I am here, I think. Trusting kisses on both sides. Kisses trusting on both sides. 12th From the plane, Philadelphia, in snow twilight, a graphic sheet in five colors, white, black, grey, a slightly brown-grey, and a slightly dark-green black. On the rocky escarpments evergreens in dark clots and deciduous trees in light webs were sorted by some principle I wasn't sure of, maybe the evergreens were following declivities. Creeks were strong perfectly black wriggles, local roads broken-up grids laid over the ups and downs of valley bottoms, and freeways were lines of intention, not on the grid, not accommodated to topography, shooting across places without noticing them. There were beautiful markings around farms, trees on fencelines cutting rectangles or parts of rectangles in the white, parallel rows of dots that were orchards or Christmas tree farms. Among the fields the roads themselves were white. Two sets of headlights, another color, yellow, one chasing the other toward a farm in fields. From San Diego to Philadelphia the woman in the seat next to me was an associate professor of engineering, a hydrodynamicist who works with rivers and bridges. She was in her mid-forties, an American-sweetheart blond, natural, reserved, traveling in jeans with a back-pack. Here I am in a very pale green cell in Vermont, snow falling, not falling really, zigzagging like insects playing among the molecules. I am not very inspired to be among my cohort faculty. I'm depressed by not looking wonderful. 16 I dreamed a garden where a row of glazed jars was lined up against a wall. Their sides were leaned against each other. Some were upside down. I noticed that some, I think two, were closed at both ends. I was struck by the way their sides fitted together in one solid row. 17 Rowen is sick, at loose ends, depressed. Oh Rowen. He flunked math again. Played the super-nerd in the musical, had to sing in a nerdy voice. Liked the cast party, drank a lot. Michael is in town building dinghies. Thursday night. Do I want to do BAs too, Bobby asks. Long email from Louie in SA. Writes about Luke, "is full of his own relief that he has come through some period of despair and I understand that he is also telling you about his success how much he has learnt how he is valued," "market talk rolls out of him." "Performing tired popular responsible" I said [of myself], she quoted. 18 Here are some questions. The advising group is nothing special, can I fix it. The room defeats it, it's full of junk. I'm not well enough organized. They feel at home. The authentics are bored, but not only bored; the inauthenics cling as they do everywhere. I play to put them at ease, and keep an eye out for clues, but am coasting. It's been because of the theory course, but that's over now. I'm doing study plans individually in office hours. Today's the last group 'til Sunday. In advising group I felt myself an old tiger in a dirty cell in a zoo, pacing and twitching my tail, pent, bleary, exacerbated. I invented an exercise. Think of one thing you don't want anyone to know about you. Write it on a piece of paper. Give the papers to the middle of the room. Everybody pick a piece and read it as if it was your own.
20th John Haines took an inspired course, in which the way he undertook to live made room for, tested, and determined his art. His mild coldness towards the public, his unwillingness, despite years of teaching, to speak campus lingo or praise the faint new stars, his avoidance of the prevailing irony, have set him outside a widely shared mental landscape. If you pick up Haines after a few of these it is hard to make the switch. His direct statement and lament and even his spirit-filled landscapes with their beasts, hardships, owls and winds are not current. Haines conveys the same sense as the Spanish poets of being on foot, outdoors, trading the inner for the outer atmosphere with every breath, unsociable yet aware that there are others out there and they are men and women like himself.
And yet my sense of things tells me that the relative security of our society cannot hold, and that a debt remains to be paid to this century out of the safety we have so far contrived. [Haines] In fact a seer's confidence co-exists with an absence of vanity. Valerie Trueblood The poems of John Haines Poets and Writers vol 32 no 1, January/February 2003 - Ivanna who was Dennis Maracle, thin-shanked, coquettish in pancake and mascara, Lee Maracle's ex-husband. "The most published aboriginal woman writer in Canada." This is his way of getting a fame of his own, is my guess. Emphasized femininity, the appearance of gender rather than embodied gender. Looking at Marilyn Monroe adoring, yearning. What is that? It seems to be, but isn't, yearning to touch. It seems to be, but isn't, yearning to be that myself. The fact is that nothing would satisfy that desire. It isn't really desire. Is that right? It's a kind of god-presence. It isn't really desire because it is memory. So when I feel it for a boy-girl like Jen is it memory too? Is it always memory of feeling for a parent? My eyes are strong. People were looking to have me hold them steady when they spoke. I can easily do that. When Richie spoke at the keynote he was anchoring himself in two places and would look back and forth between them. It must be that I was taking responsibility, I thought, so I went on doing whatever it was. My eyes say, I'm hearing you. The moment in the last advising group when the students were complaining about the food and dirty dorms. I was writing notes but out of the corner of my eye saw Kate looking miserable. Kate are you...? Yes, she said instantly. She got up and walked out of the room. I was looking after her admiringly. She is smart, reserved, clear, scrupulous. I was aware her trust would be hardest to earn. She couldn't bear the blank, spoiled Americans whining that it was potatoes bacon and eggs for breakfast every day. Kate is also physically the best-knit of the group, an Iowa blond, broad-shouldered, gold-skinned, soft-lipped, diffident, quick. Next time we meet we'll know each other much better than we do now, I said straight off the top. Lynne was at the goodbye circle with husband and little dog. Souls come here wanting to be completed, and when they are being completed they start to work to complete other souls, I said. I was thinking of her very newly arrived soul with chirpy presence and obscure indirect inklings. Anne. She said in her study plan that her question about care for the mentally ill is really about her brother. I sighed. Now we are on the ground. 23rd [After-res multi-program faculty retreat] I don't like it so much when it's nothing but faculty, don't want to perpetuate their memory by writing about them. How am I feeling it - a herd of grey bodies in dull colors of wool. There are moments, Lise, Danielle, and I a few nights ago talking about how we find ourselves again after a res, how we live at home. I am afraid of Danielle because she is beautiful. She's - At that moment she sat down opposite. She has a long narrow face, pale, immaculate. She's black-eyed, lined, light-boned, light altogether, flaneur, well-dressed. She's boy-girl perfectly, a girlish boy. The way she stands against the wall with one foot crossed over the other and one arm across her chest supporting the elbow of the arm holding the cigarette. She's not American. I'm dwelling because it gives me pleasure and relief to see and think of her, and it bores and distresses me to hear and see most of the rest. She keeps herself cognitively clean in some way they don't. She is pondered, scrupulous, in ways I am not, maybe. Facing her across a table I'm shy, this time. I feel less well bred, or did. Today she told me her dad was a school inspector in small towns in Quebec province, one of twelve children in a widow's family in Quebec City, educated to be a brother. I told her the Rockies were a tiny sawtooth on the horizon when a chinook was on the way from the west. 24 It was worth being here for the moment walking toward the cafeteria from the dorm, head down, thinking, when I looked up just at the door and saw Danielle in her smoking spot, smiling into my eyes. On a lesser level, worth being here for the conversation around the table last night, Margo, Karen, Lise, Sara. We gave our motives for wanting an embodiment concentration and in doing that laid out the range of the program. What I can do with the program is very limited because nobody else knows or is going to know the framework I have found. They will all go on saying 'the body' when they mean movement and certain kinds of feeling, and 'the mind' when they mean self-repression and segregation. That is symptomatic - 'the body' is what belongs with early love, 'the mind' what belongs with defenses. That is, the dichotomizing manners of speaking are accurate, and what I am about cannot be done by fixing the language. I said in the introduction circle - Lucinda, the new president, Shelley - why can't I remember this - Tomás - that I love intelligence and hate what harms it. Tomás jumped up afterward and said, You know yourself, it is true, you do hate what harms intelligence. Now I understand you better. When Danielle goes home, she said, she talks to her friend for four hours. Then it's done. "The Americans don't leave any thoughts unspoken," Francis said righteously. It's Friday morning, white sky at the window, car motor running, large pine opposite. I'll pack. Two days of faculty meetings wiped me - I fell twice walking in snow, twice when I was dragging my suitcase into the airport. I'm full of detestation. It seemed Danielle and Keith were the only artists who could see their own clothes. 26th Mark Spragg writing a male life with horses. His memory is full and precise. His writing is extraordinarily earned. He has had a life of focused, skilled interaction with a place he could know very thoroughly. I would want it to be that writers are considered fortunate if they have, have had, a concrete life. Mark Spragg 2000 Where rivers change direction Riverhead Books 27 First, Mary sounded off the rails with her phone message. "This is the Epp residence." "God loves you." Second, I haven't been able to write here since I'm back. That means I didn't do the transition well. Tom's rage at the airport cost me three days. Tom's rage was a stunning withering blast into an exhausted open-hearted child. I seemed to recover but didn't. His rage was a control mechanism. By blasting me when I was arriving from being a popular professor he turned me into a silenced child. Silenced, I've listened, gone along with his plans. Third, the fall into dismay when Louie said she was disappointed I'm back with Tom. Fourth, a dream just now - it was four in the morning - that I was buttoning a white shirt over my pregnant belly, and then I had two daughters rather than one, the first a little larger and more definite than the other. I was trying to think whether I should give the second to someone else. Will you explain. Pay attention to your judgment. I was thinking they had always been together and shouldn't be separated, but also that I couldn't manage two at a time. Will you tell me what the two babies are? Slow growth and success. Do you mean the kind of success I have at [the college]? Yes. I've held off success because I wanted to grow. Yes. People often do stop growing when they're successful. YES. These babies belong together. Yes. 31 It is Friday, I'm back a week. Sick, that horrible woman coughing next to me in 14C gave me what she had though I tried to ward it by glaring. I sweated through the night and today am not feverish but too weak to get up and move around. It is balmy at the door, a warm, still day. I have not spoken to anyone for days, except Mary yesterday on the phone. The small of my back hurts. I'm clammy. I'm remembering with a nostalgic pang the times, the many times, the years unbroken, when I came to my journal and wrote eagerly, interestedly, like a happy child telling all to a fond mother. I am without intellectual energy or urgency. Is it because I'm penned up with Tom, I'm wondering, turned off sex because he's a limp little wiener, but loyally struggling on? Say it a different way: I'm without energy because I'm turned off true heart and early love. It is going to say I can be true heart and early love without my old way of getting it by romantic starvation and transient feasting. But, but, that's religious illusion isn't it? Keep early love for an imaginary being who doesn't disappoint. Is that what you want me to do? No. Is there another way? Maybe it's age, energy dying away. No. Will you tell me? In disappointment and loss look for your young self. Do you mean feel as a young self? Yes. Is this about honesty? No. Give up self suppression. Yes. It means being bare. Yes. Drugs? No. Can I get honest feeling without? Yes. Do you want to say more. No. Mary is okay. She wants to travel. She has put laminated wood in her corridor. She is translating again. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Your teaching work: process, withdrawal, search for, defeat. Do you mean [the college]? No. You mean the larger project. Yes. Look for what defeats me. YES. 1st February Penumbra of illness. I don't have mental energy, can't work, can't read, am lonely. There is a lovely day at the door. 2nd
3rd Global withdrawal. 4th Alright, now I can settle, now I'm here. There has been a long zone of dislocation, three and a half months since I left the upstairs room at Nora's to go to Ed's death. It's almost 7 on a Tuesday morning. The day is brightening gradually around this roof. Weak light on the palms. My heater starlings chipping and cheeping on close-by wires. Miserable Sunday night with Tom. Miserable not strong enough a word. In bed I settled to trying to speak from myself at last. He listened for a while and then went into an explanation of San Diego that was irrelevant and long. I cut him off. It was my turn to talk. He exploded. There followed the grievances of whatever period it has been since his last explosion. Fuckin' bitch tight-assed cunt. What happened was that my focusing took him down and there he found his rage ignored over the many slights and jabs of the interim, and with it a collection of grievances from other times. "You always ...You never ..." Ignoring it is what makes him unintelligent. The explosion itself is tediously stupid because it's young. His speechifying is a way of trying to ward the explosion. In the melee I said a couple of things too. My throat was sore and I listened to myself saying them with double interest. I sounded like a husky tom-boy, definite and clear. For years he hasn't been very hard. He tries to fuck when he can and it's when I'm cold. When he is able, he doesn't wait for me to come. And then he doesn't take care of me, I have to bring myself. He thinks he's wonderful now, because there's sometimes a bit of foreplay, but that is just basic, it's standard. I used to be really hot for him but my body has lost hope, it has given up. When someone is reliable and considerate I'm full of trust and gratitude. He is used to fucking on booze. To say these things is harsh and it's deadly, probably. I haven't wanted to say them, but I am fed up with taking the hit. The second, which was earlier, and made me cry I noticed, was that he doesn't like me and did not really want me romantically. He wanted a different quality in me. He seduced me to get it. He got what he wants and he is okay now. He could still go back, maybe, but he is alright. He doesn't owe me anything because I made sure I did everything in a way so it was useful to me too. He should just say yes, I did get what I want, thank you. But he feels obligated now. This speech is more questionable.
It isn't obligation holding him back, it is fear of the abyss of loss. It is that fear that makes him go overboard propitiating. Root of addiction. His stupidity is always denial-stupidity. He is terribly in need of affection and attachment because he is still young. The question for him is what can he do that will let him work through this stuff without me. His dependence is part of what makes him rage. Is there anything? 5 He looked like an old man with a hangover when he arrived at the door in white shirt and pants. He lounged on the couch across from me, tie flopped, feet crossed at the ankle, and talked two hours. Stupid talk. He felt entitled. He felt I was interested. He said he came to apologize and denied he came to be let off the fear of losing me, which is fear of larger catastrophe. I wrote down what he said and after the three hours of loud talk turned on the lamp and talked to the book, which made us both laugh. Then I spoke from the balance of the book and we were in peace enough though I didn't want to touch him and am, this morning, still disgusted. I said what he wants from me is really to come through. He said he doesn't want a guru. I said yes he does, it's sleazy not to admit it. Tom: I should give all this love If it isn't coming back to me I start to get angry and feel foolish I haven't done it consciously The only way I could logically say I was loving was if I was honest, remained faithful I have to tear away all of the barroom masculinity Try and think of you as a person, spirit When you correct me that's like the well of gasoline the matches are being thrown on What scares me is I knew I wasn't fighting fair when I was doing it I don't want to live that way Having to apologize and make amends and feel bad and have the fear that I would do it again and deal with the consequences of what I've done Letting one third of my personality make two thirds of my personality mad at me Reactivation - yeah this was like me again - there's a lot of things alcoholics have a watchful eye on Drinking allows you to act as if I want you to lower it down about two clicks I got tied up with a very smart woman That level works very good on jobs, the Army. Take things at face value, deal with how to move the pieces around That's the level I go cruising into a discussion with you Behind that is the true Tom Fendler I expect them to be a mind reader (Give me an example.) Oscar, Tony, Jim White, Lorie Because you don't understand it I'm double-binded Speak from behind a persona I'll spend 15 minutes saying something that's correct but I haven't been educated in it, I don't know what's been established and what hasn't, I have to start from the genesis of the thought Let's see how a slightly smarter street kid would say this I don't have the background to say it in your earnest way I am completely out of the world that I chose to live in since I was about 14 years old. In the Golden West I have the PhD in reality. I can be in that world and I don't have to drink I have really popped up. The realities that we're coming from are really different. My conceit is that I can truly encompass both realities because I'm super bitchin'. When I'm not there I'm like urgh. That's where my pettiness comes in. I should have a doctorate with four oak leaves. All your students are bullshit Some of the things I've said to you are quite brilliant and I don't get anything for it. You get so deeply into them. I get angry because we don't have conversations like that. It grinds a little bit. And then I get angry because I have to go do what I do and I don't have time to think and be creative and ponder the nuances. When I do come to you I'm not prepared for you. I came here to say I'm sorry, I'll never call you a bitch again, I want to unarmour myself. I'm trying to be serene. I am serene. I've got a week's worth of 24-hour conditioning If I had the opportunity to see you every other day for an hour or two, then I would have an other reality, then we would have continuity A mutual reality that was unfettered Ellie you're so far out there, you need to get back in your body You have a very precise pronunciation and it's not the way you speak normally On Sunday - as if you were curling your tongue around - professional mode - a little bit academic It's not hatred We have an opportunity to do something that's fulfilling If it was love why did it go to betrayal
I recognized a strong spirit - all of those things have not added up to a woman I could consistently like - hard to be with if I'm not my best self
I came into it as an autonomous being who wasn't being looked into.
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