| volume 1 of in america: 2002-03 september-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Begin to invent embodiment studies at my college and at the end of this volume start to think about the journal project. Part 1 living temporarily in Nora's empty new house in Bird Rock. Part 3 my dad is dying, I'm back in Vancouver. Part 4 Tom is evicted from the Maryland Hotel. Part 5 I move to the caretaker's studio above Nora's offices on 5th Ave. Notes: Le Guin The other wind, Always coming home, The left hand of darkness and The telling, the Olson-Creeley correspondence, Wallace Berry Remembering, David McNeill Hand and mind: what gestures reveal about thought, Jeremiah Abrams The shadow in America, Peter Redgrove The black goddess and the unseen real, Eudora Welty interview, Charles Bowden The Sonoran desert, Coetzee Boyhood. Mentioned: Tom Fendler, Louie E, Ed Epp, Mary Epp, Paul Epp, Rudy Epp, Judie Bopp, Abe Sieburt, Justin Webb, Rowen Epp, Gabriele Weinhausen, Logan Burns, Danielle Boutet, Nicole Gingras, Ed Dalpe, Karen Campbell, Josie Cooke, Margo MacLeod, Michael Deragon, Leslie D, Louise G, David Beach. 5571 Bellevue in Bird Rock, Encinitas, Pannikin's and DG Wills Books in La Jolla, Mission Hills Nursery, Starbucks, Maryland Hotel room 324, 5133 Dawne Street in Clairemont, the Amvets Goodwill, Golden West Hotel, Abbotsford Municipal Hospital, the Fraser Valley, Clearbrook Mennonite Brethern Church, Peace River Bible Institute, Walter Anderson's Nursery, Cafe Roma at UCSD, 2720 Fifth Avenue in Banker's Hill, Balboa Park, David's Coffeehouse in Hillcrest, the Zanzibar in Pacific Beach, Amtrak Coast Starlight, 3743 Charles Street and Dupont Street in Point Loma, Nazarene College, the Greek's Cafe in Ocean Beach, 5562 Taft Avenue in La Jolla, Plainfield VT, Spring Valley. Karina Gauvin, XLNC in Tijuana, Powerbook G3, Abbotsford Male Choir, COPE in Vancouver, Cielo y Tierra Heaven and earth, Willa Cather O Pioneers, San Diego Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, The sexual life of Catherine M, Victor Enns at rhubarb magazine, David Adams Richards Mercy among the children, Nadine Gordimer The pickup, Richard Holmes Coleridge: early visions and Coleridge: darker reflections 1804-1834, Mozart Te Kanawa Ruhe sanft mein holdes leben, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris Gulf coast highway, Aristotle, Doris Lessing The sweetest dream, Mark Spragg Where rivers change directions, David Masumoto Epitaph for a peach, Sharon Butala Wild stone heart, Leonardo, Valerie Trueblood on John Haines, Dorothy Richardson, Carlos Casteneda. |
14 September 2002 It is still the artists that matter, those who do what it takes to be real. 16 September 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 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 was vicious, wrathful, spiteful, malicious. Self-absorbed. His attitude toward women he saw in public was angry or casual lust, arrogant connoisseurship. 18 September I am struggling for a version of what really happened in the seven-year story of Tom. It is as if there are parallel lines of true story. In one a predatory man who has driven his luck farther than it will reach catches sight of a lame woman who will have a vulnerability he can use. He succeeds in capturing her, lies to her, says anything he thinks she will want to hear. There are many inconsistencies but he finesses them. She is kept near enough to hope so she continues as long as he needs her. When he is in the clear he stops making an effort and has no more time for her. He dumps her. This story is a story of ruthless betrayal. In another story that woman is working carefully among the inconsistencies of his story and her own, and is made able to guide them both in a slow process of deeper rescue than the man had had in mind. This story is a story of spiritual bravery. 20th September There is sand in my bed. I stood yesterday afternoon looking at the waves. The day was sunless and the air powdery. The waves were celadon green and white, minimal. There is always the instant one waits for, when they lift to stretched translucence before they break. The instant is always gone as soon as it arrives. October 3rd Rereading Left hand of darkness aware sometimes that I am noticing different things than I noticed when I was thirty-two, was it, early on in 820A East Pender. I was interested in ambisexuality, bespeaking and sexual tension. Now what am I interested in - Le Guin herself, what I can pick up of what she is thinking about her own powers. She had a massive expansion in Dispossessed and Always coming home. The photo on this jacket, 1969, has her forty, proud, guarded, angry maybe, sitting back in a photographer's chair with right hand gripped tight on left wrist. In the more recent picture she is sixty, smiling, leaning forward, deeply and warmly confident, hands loosely clasped. Fine black hair gone fine silver hair, cut in the same neuter cap. Same full fish-mouth. Farfetching is what she does. The fact that she fell in love with her half brother and goes on writing from that love though she has been married to Charles Le Guin since she was twenty-two. She is Joyce's age and Joyce's kind. Only five years younger than my mother. In her stories incestuous lovers bear children. I'm sure she hasn't known what she was doing, always, but she has believed her sense of the whole. Looking at the Creeley-Olson correspondence seeing that though they were making and supporting something right, they were also posing and bluffing more than my lineage has done - in the order I used them, Montgomery, de Beauvoir, Lessing, Richardson, Le Guin, Gordimer, Woolf. Apart from de Beauvoir they are sensory philosophers. What I believe is that I have had to learn my resources by studying as instances women whose generations themselves learned, at first, from men, and then found themselves building in another way. Le Guin is my base as a philosopher. I'm seeing it more, now, than I have. In 1969 we weren't sure we could do what men could do. In 2002 we are sure we can do it better, but only if we do it our way. I'll take that as the meaning of Le Guin's relaxed shining eyes in the later picture. 23 October The women on the train. On the afternoon of the second day, swaying through Oregon, I listened to a woman one seat forward on the opposite side of the aisle talk to three different women in the seat ahead of me. I heard three versions of her story. Thirty-five years married to a hydro engineer with a PhD, six children, a recent MA in theology it took her 8 years to get. "I'm an empty-nester," she said three times. Mrs Pleasant. She had a soft ingratiating voice and said not one thing all afternoon that had any kind of bite. At the same time, although she responded 'supportively' to anything said, she could sustain response for one sentence at most before she went back to telling something about herself. The longest conversation was the last, with a somewhat younger community college councilor. They traded I sentences for hours without hearing themselves say anything they haven't already subscribed to. The saddest were about their dogs and cats. My dog will sit on a chair by the window and wait for me to come home. When I'm away my dog won't sleep unless my husband lets him under the covers on my side of the bed. My cat hugs me. My cat will touch my face with her paw. There had been a Chicano boy in the seat across from me all the way from LA. I saw him at the station in San Diego. I noticed him for the ingenious way he had taped a cardboard box to a small bag with a strap, so he could carry them together. He was carefully dressed in immaculate white trainers, very baggy pants low at the hip, short sleeved shirt with small checks, white socks, white undershirt. He stayed in his seat listening to a headset, kept his space in good order. His destination slip said TAK so I knew I'd have to talk to him before Tacoma if at all. I'd given him the sports pages from the USA Today I bought in Portland. His name was Gilbert. He had grown up in Chula Vista, was going to live with his aunt to get away from the gangs and finish senior year. He turned seventeen in September. His mom is high up in a company that sells crystal. Her picture is on the cover of a book about sales. She'll get him a car if he graduates. When we were half an hour from Tacoma he excused himself, got up to go downstairs to brush his teeth. Two hours before he had put on cologne, sprayed his hair with something scented. As soon as he was off the train both women ahead of me jumped up gushing. That was a very frightened young man, you really helped him. That was wonderful, you really drew him out. You're so nonjudgmental. I'm very judgmental, I said. We all are, said the red lipstick smiling, smiling, smiling guidance councilor. This went on for a bit and then something else happened. The empty nester was standing up talking about dealing with her sons when they were teenagers. She said she hadn't know how to handle them. She had never talked back to her parents. You are a different generation, said the guidance councilor supportively. I talked back to my mother once and she slapped my face, I never did it again. The empty nester was standing by her seat actually shouting. Both women were called Karen. By the time we got to Seattle Karen empty nest was saying the meeting had been meant. "There is much more to life than we know." In fact the meeting was veiled competition from end to end, my conversation with Gilbert included. The shadow in America. Karen councilor tried several times to recoup by jumping up and offering advice on web teaching programs I could learn. She tried to break into the conversation with Gilbert too by popping her head up and talking about community college. She trumped poor Karen empty nest decisively at the end by giving her some sort of professional evaluation sheet just as we were pulling into Seattle. I found myself organizing people with baggage difficulties. Young man - young man in the blue hat - would you help this woman carry one of her bags? 25th October A bodies concentration, embodiment concentration? Is that where to go instead of social action / peace and justice? Shelley wanting queer studies, make it unusual bodies studies, way to talk about nature/culture at the same time, integrated as structure. What is it about the social sciences and social improvement talk that I can't stand. It's all imaginary. It's ungrounded. Danielle wants to talk about epistemology but she means being analytical and self-critical about knowledge systems, which is fine but I want that more grounded too, how is knowing done? - What did I see - not a lot - I stood looking at him - he said, You're Ellie aren't you, I didn't recognize you. I just looked and he looked back and then he started sobbing and turned his head away. I sit by the bed and put my elbows on the bar. How is it? How is it? Well it is quite hard. Later I say, The farm was hard for you, but it was good for us. I don't know how to take that, he says. I mean it was hard work for you and good for us to be there. You can take it as thank you. His arms are very thin, bruises on the backs of his hands that he rubs down over his face. That gesture, and the way he says, well ..., have been there all along. A lot to think about a lot to think about a lot to think about, he says, as if he has stuck there. It's maybe seven thirty in a room with two beds. The man in the other bed has gangrene in his right foot. At the moment his wife is praying aloud before she goes home for the night. Ed has his eyes closed. There are two small lights at the foot of his bed, one blinking. Before I came I fired a note to Victor Enns at rhubarb magazine. I said it was interesting that he needed to soften what was after all my sentence. "I am not 'at odds' with the nastiness of Mennonite patriarchy but at war with it, actively opposed. I am not a pacifist and neither were the Mennonite patriarchs who were at war with the spontaneity and potency of the children and women." He is wearing a blue print nightgown and has one hand under his chin. There is the busy silence of a corridor with squeaking footprints. When Rudy and Mary are here they seem to be speaking too loud. There's a fan on at all times. - All night in the pale yellow room. Ed was sleeping under a yellow blanket, a long but very slight form from small old skull to the distant peak of one foot crossed over the other at the ankles. He lay very quietly. Around one o'clock I couldn't see breathing and went to sit next to him. He hiccupped. 28th I didn't understand his state. He would cry whenever Mary said my name, it seemed. He would wipe his hand down over his face. I wasn't impressed with the significance of the death-bed scene, though there was that aura about it. I mean that a deathbed declaration doesn't seem to have much reach, especially from someone already confused. What I was feeling was in fact that nothing happening on the deathbed could make any difference to me, and it wasn't clear either what kind of difference it could make to him. The sort of thing I did like was a moment before I left when I said, looking at the yellow blanket over his almost flat form, Where are your hands, and he raised his left index finger at a point over his chest. It tented the blanket like a little penis. I gave it a quick squeeze. There were also two times giving him water when I held the back of his head in my left hand like a baby's. It is a small light head like a hazelnut shell. He didn't lean back into my palm, so it wasn't really a supporting gesture. It became a sort of erotic touch, which is true. While he slept I could stare at him. A shabby old head very familiar, pleasing in its form, aquiline nose and sharp cheeks, temple hollows, moustache, shabby grey fuzz on his head. He looked like his father. It was not safe to love him while he was alive. If I made a move in that direction he would crush it. The standoff was necessary I think, but our actual relation was like a countercurrent to the relation there seemed to be. The standoff was a relation, quite intense and private. I don't understand his crying His quality when doctors or nurses talked to him was stoic, quiet, a nice tone. He would consider their questions and do his best. 31st There was frost last night, they say. Cold and clear. In the hospital parking lot a strong smell of cedar from a remnant first growth stand that has dropped needles onto the asphalt. Looking north from the TV room at dawn this morning, a serrated wall of mountain, solid blue on pink. I slept crunched into two chairs, slept and woke. Ed was sometimes in pain. His toothless face would jerk. Oh boy, he'd say, that his strongest protest even in extremity. He could no longer answer, mostly. During the night I heard a nurse ask, Mr Epp, would you like a drink? I've never had one, I don't want to start, he said. It's an old joke. Yesterday sitting near him, watching his face in anxiety and pain, I was feeling something like, it was so short a time ago you were that young man, the young man before I was born. It's dehydration in kidney failure. He is dying of thirst. 3rd November Rudy phoned at about 3:50 this morning. He sounded drunk. D-day, he said. So Ed died on an early Sunday morning late in fall. Rudy had been at the pub with Paul and Dave Doerksen and was still drunk when he took the call. He sat for several hours smoking in that depressing living room, sobering up enough to be able to make phone calls. When Mary woke he said to her, Mary, it's all over. 7th November I have thought for years what I would say at Ed's funeral, but in the event I had no impulse to say anything. I have wanted to say various things at various times - I have wanted to sing in broken-heartedness at the life he could have lived and failed to find. I have wanted to speak for all the wives and children terrorized by Mennonite men, for all the intelligence crippled by religious and family lies. Yesterday there seemed no one to say these things to, everyone there already too destroyed to be willing to hear. - No, it wasn't that, although that was mostly so, I think. What was it really? I lacked motive. They were things I wanted to say to him, not to them. That's it, isn't it. My dialogue with him is over. I still have things to say to her, but she won't hear them and so is gone out of my life. His harm remains, his subtlety is gone. The need to refuse lies will remain as long as Mary is alive, so we will send her into the ground rejoicing too. 9th November Amtrack. In Oregon, dark at the window. It was a day of beauty I can't describe. Wet, a grey light. Three weeks ago this countryside was nothing special. Now, in November, the leaves were not only colored, so that each tree and bush shows its individual shape, but also thinned, so that it's possible to see into the whole three-dimensionality of that shape. There were bushes a pale coral, cottonwoods that are shaped like feathers with large loose leaves high in the tree and thicker smaller leaves in the lower third. The most inarticulably wonderful were the willows, passing always too quickly so I couldn't satisfy myself with seeing them. What color is that? I couldn't tell. Can I see it now? Brown-silver, the whole of the tree drawn in thin flexed lines of leaf brown on one side, silver on the other As I look into the dark from the light on the page I seem to see ghosted the day's colored volumes, larger, smaller, high, low, shaped in luminous bits. Years ago when I cried in front of my father I didn't know he would one day cry in front of me. When it was happening I could only half-feel it. It was so unexpected. The long gaze was right, though. Simple. 16th November Meantime, after heavy destruction of countryside in Afghanistan, bin Laden is still sending taped messages. Bush waged that war to win seats. It is in his interest to have bin Laden still at large, and to have new threats uncovered every week. These are surely the worst times I've seen, politically, in my lifetime. If better times recur, these will be seen as infamous. Will better times recur? Will we have seen the end of the golden age of confidence and liberality, in relation to gender, race, international relations, sexuality, intelligence, cultivation? There's a feeling of timidity and hopelessness in opposition - I mean I notice myself feeling that. I'm longing for the intelligence, pragmatism and sanity of Bill and Hillary, who also had charm enough to carry a country safely. Writing Steve this afternoon I realized something I hadn't really understood at the time, that my misery and isolation of the first half of the '80s had to do with being starved out by the grasping and reactionary times, that had no use for what I was. I've thought of it as Jam/Trudy/Rhoda, but it was more that all of us were being sidelined out of the funded and active places we'd had in the first half of the '70s. Vermont, January 24 2003 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. February 11 "At once physical and made of spirit" Butala said. I would say it differently. How the 'spirit' people should be read if we assume we see and imagine by means of bodies. Before I went back to school in 1989 the book I wanted to write was Seeing and 'seeing', subtitled perception and visionary knowledge. Modes of knowing that are really knowing but use seeming to perceive. I have done the prep for this work. Understanding mysticism. Clairvoyance, stories of visionary wonders. Finding the stance: it can be really knowing; it isn't evidence for the stuff it's been taken to be evidence for; it is evidence of possibilities of human being. It's a careful balance between credulity and closedness. Unusual sensing. Unusual knowing by means of imagining. Childhood of a philosopher. Metaphoric knowing. The Romantics. Drugs, physical disciplines. A feeling of pleasure and wonder at open capabilities. Recognition. Paravisual perception, Garrett and Hayward. The specific instance - what is seen is being seen in terms of what is seeing. 'The mythical' - something present that sees it that way. February 14 Reading the fall 1998 notebook, I come to the Castenada notes and immediately feel the Tom story in a different way. The way I feel it is more accommodating of the whole than the attitudes I normally take. It sees a story of two large spirits battling as if in play, battling for their own amusement. In this play Tom is more flexible, he is a spirit who likes to change. He is in some ways cleverer because he makes me his straight giant, a stable pillar he can whisk around. But I am in some ways larger. I am battling him with one hand while I conduct other enterprises. Still the story seen in this way is a story about engagement. The question of breaking it off on this level isn't the question, as it is I want to say on the ground. I've often started transcribing from journals. What do I get stuck on. The journal has one tone and if I edit and fill, as I'd have to, it happens in another less good tone. I like the journal form but it's at odds with a story telling form. Cross-connected significance is there for me but can't easily be set up for a reader because it needs material that doesn't fit into the story. There are different threads of story and a best version would be able to use them all, but they are winding-out as stories over different rates of time. Is it that I haven't recognized what the story really is, so I'd know what's relevant? Will there ever be a way to use this writing? Is it a mistaken enterprise to try? Also that showing how something happens is very long and laborious. What I write in the journal is brief. Also the fact of writing is also part of the story, and I treat it as if it is only telling the story. February 15 It said: connecting the child's feeling will make it clear. You are wanting the wrong thing in it, recognition. What you should want is to demonstrate the subtle thing that is your unique interest. It is a story about a study. Your question was, how much can I know. The story is about this question in a particular time. What is characteristic of the era is the amount of written testimony you have had to learn from. What is characteristic of this moment of your era is the amount of written testimony specifically by women. The subtle thing that is your unique interest is, what can be known by women. What are the possibilities of women's intelligence. So it is a story about observing and reading to find female intelligence. It is a story that can only be written by a little girl who becomes a philosopher. So I want to demonstrate what can be known - the knowing - the study that finds it, the resources used. Is that it? Dorothy Richardson did it already - she found the very first moment where it could be done - the autobiography of a question - Woolf was an artist, DR was a philosopher - is there something for me to add? - it says yes, integration of partially lost feeling to come through. 24 How it was with Tom. He came in thuggish, hair cut almost to the scalp. Came for a kiss and I backed off. I'd been writing a letter and was there focused and remote with Japanese music of the most exquisite. Instantly in shock from Tom's loutish self absorption. He instantly in shock from my protests. This is unbearable, each of us saying to ourselves, I can't stand this person. Chaotic transition. He's my heartbreaking mean dad. I'm the oppressive unloving woman. His voice goes on unstoppably unbearably beating my brow with mediocre language. I go hopeless and silent, squashed into silence. It broke two ways, separately for each. I made him laugh. I startled him. He went young. When he stopped talking I could track the crushed feeling at the heart. It went up to throat and forehead. Then I could feel an agony-knot in the back. I said, Will you put your hand on that. Sobbed in two bursts, not so much tears as spasms. Then laid my head down next to his lap. It started to go through when I said what I was feeling, that it is harder now to go on than it is to separate, but I'm willing. I don't see how it can come through, I said. From that point I suppose ego gave up. Is there more to say about it. God's grace, I want to say. Life generous and just. And then Tom's thuggish look became a look of naked self in balanced force.
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