| in america 10 part 2 - 2006 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
3rd February 2006 I was on the way to Starbucks yesterday and almost at the lights I saw Tom, black jacket and pale orange teeshirt. He was coming to tell me he's working today and Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, and then for 2 months at a gate in Point Loma, and then maybe for 18 months as lift man on a site at UCSD at $30 an hour. He was happy and was that why he looked the way he looked? Stunningly coherent and sexy. Beautiful. I'm nervous when he looks like that, as if he's suddenly out of my league and will drop me. The other thing too, he's suddenly all about money, the man who has time to read and write and be with me will be a man again who works 10-hour days 6 days a week and is full of other men all day and night and still cannot travel with me. Susan writing about our night. We consider it together, its calm happiness. "The floor in Studies." It's the correspondence I've never had, someone whose language delights me, who likes to reply to what I say. So is it Tom for a warm large hand and Susan for writing? And Louie somewhere left behind? And what's today - -
Sunday morning. It's spring, there's jasmine opening across the room, the vine next to the stairs is blooming yellow. It's a white morning, cool. Tom's coming in an hour. What's up. Susan on email yesterday asked to talk to me on the phone. That scared me. Scared me, isn't it odd? I didn't answer. This morning a beautiful note describing what she was feeling lying on the floor watching the snow melt. I'm having to polish up the new initiative notes so Margo can give them to Sue Flemming [the academic dean]. What do I think about that. First, I'm irritated at having to pitch it in the style of a pitch because Margo doesn't know better. Second I don't want a flood of embodiment students so I have to be a functionary, I just want to go on doing what I'm doing, which is fill in the platform. Third I don't believe [the college] will market it correctly. Fourth I'm pissed off feeling no one is capable of understanding how good I am. Fifth if I do become more of a functionary it should be somewhere with more money and intellectual support. Sixth, two kinds of copyright concerns. If I post things on [the college] site [it] can say it owns them, and if I post the lecture notes people elsewhere can just help themselves to them, people being paid twice or five times what I get. I'd like an assistant but it would have to be someone who 1. got it, and 2. was controlled by me in many matters such as language and style. From the point of view of the college,
The last point is my real concern. I've had blank-cheque support from Margo but I have no intellectual support. That means ultimately I shd do it somewhere else. That means it shdn't be a concentration. If Sue gets it there's a hope. If I can talk directly to Sue. Manage to talk to Sue on my own. - What Susan wrote yesterday: last night just as I was going to sleep I had a very full-being memory of you holding me in bed when we went to bed and what it was like being me in your arms and you being right there where I could put my arm around you really you and spoon into your back and breathe into your neck glad for your existence there being nothing murky and everything just what it is and I do think we are remarkable together and it was remarkable and it was like a great peace away from the world remembering lying on the floor watching the snow melt while you napped - returning again and again to everything, from nothing to everything, just doing that with my own presence listening to you breathe I felt like you were this magnificent being at the center of The World and that your sleeping was making the snow fall and your breath was melting it from the roof tops and your dreams were turning the world and I had come to your cave at the center of time to lie on the floor at your feet and just get all of this about being at the same time it was completely you just ellie you and just susan me and I was grateful to rest with you having my own thoughts and letting them go again again as you sighed and turned in bed as though we had taken a very long journey and had at last found a shelter to rest in 6th The phone was plugged in because I'd been talking to Tom and so Susan caught me as I was sitting down with the computer to transcribe that. Where it became interesting was when I said that dope scares me when I'm with people because I feel a black wind of shamanic competition, intent to steal or murder souls. She wanted to know more about that. Why don't I have energy for telling about her? Because I try to fill in too much and don't stick to the point, maybe. She described seeing me stand above the bed with the camera many different ages on my face simultaneously and so transcendently beautiful that she was wanting to gaze on and on but shy to look. I can't imagine what she was seeing, though I know I was feeling happy and natural and liked what I was wearing. That, and the rest of what she described - what should I make of it. Either she's turned on and sensing real things about me and our company, or she's turned on and tripping; either I'm blank and at the same time expansive in some nonconscious part, or I'm minimized to fit the real. She said when she felt the pressing at the third eye she at first tried to resist it and then decided to give in to it, and then afterward that sense of largeness opened. I had been pressing on a very sore place between my eyebrows - what was I feeling then? It was when I was bringing myself to tell about being angry seeing her needing to capture everyone and especially her advisors. I was in the corner next to the register and she was across the room. I was interested to notice that the stop was so high up, not at the solar or heart. I was pressing my attention into it and somewhere in there I was jerking and quaking. It shifted to the sides of my head the way it does and I did feel it briefly open the top of my head. I don't remember the sequence well. I had said what I had to say and she wasn't replying. After a while I got up and sat at the desk and talked to the string. She still wasn't saying anything and I didn't know what to say to her. That was when it occurred to me to lie down in bed and then I turned my head sideways and fell asleep. So was more happening than I knew? Or was it just what I do know, that I felt what I was feeling, anguish at betrayal - that's what I was saying, now I remember, that I felt duped. Then I was explaining duped - that I'd felt she liked me most and then I saw her like that with her next advisors. And then later, having said all I had to say, I could very gently tell her what I see about her needing to capture. And then she felt it and despaired as she needs to do and then we were through.
Monday. What I did today was edit the 5 pages of journal for the summer of 1961. There's still too much probably. I know the first stretch was wide open and then I stopped down. I'm not sure I have the story right, yet. I did a lot of small fixing so the format is okay mostly. For Frank's letters shd I use a different font. His turquoise ink. The love story is gripping at first but after it gets stopped down it's quite banal. I'll look at that. I'm not asking the right questions as I edit.
Becci saw me coming downstairs to go to the first focusing session after I'd been sitting with the pressure in my solar (was it? or forehead) and said, You look different when you're going to lecture. How? You're taller and your face is longer. Now I want to understand that. It's a long mystery.
What I'm saying to Sue is that it's a parallel women's culture I'm working for. There is so much not accounted for. Nancy Mellon says "your so brilliant chapter 3." Someone called Sage at eye candy zine writing to say she wants to interview me. 8th Starbucks Weds morning. I'd like something real today. Waz working on [this section] from 5 to 8 - here's the day - air! light! open, open - out, but where - so I'm on the street - many bodies demonstrating things about their attitudes to themselves and their histories. That little man with a high right shoulder, wearing a gold brocade foulard. Car slipping into a parking slot. Brief cloud of smoke left floating where a jaywalker was crossing the street to his truck. Woman emphasizing her bulky gut with a huge Mexican belt slung below it. "Past conniption fits and well on their way to panic attacks hee hee hee" in a voice too high-pitched for the sensible woman she looked to be. The stream of custom steady at this hour. I'm wearing my cargos and a black tee, the black cashmere hoodie. Nice body, dog face, a woman of maybe fifty, still has a waist, black top cut to show nicely round muscle in the band above the breasts, Latina, hair too black, eyebrows drawn in crayon. She's not wearing a bra because that blouse is backless, but she's anorexic, a look of distress in the mingey little butt. Silver convertible, very pretty, a Mercedes with windshield slanted back over the driver's head. Nice little body round at rump and boob, Oriental girl in a baseball cap, yum. Ludicrous vehicle, what is it, Chev, an SUV with a little truck box set into the rear, overscaled robot. Oh my, freckled man with a narrow little moustache, what does that say, shrinking fastidiousness. Ms baseball cap driving away with a cigarette poking straight ahead, they're silicon probably. Pregnant waddle in high heels, what is it, the tops of her thighs are pushed apart, there's an odd-looking space. People can make coffee at home but they're here for what I'm here for, a hit of city. Oh people, deal with these jelly bellies. Poor creature, stopping to read the headlines, Irish, stiff high shoulders, drinker's flush, wedding ring but he's gay, bare skeleton frozen with suffering. Bizarre little animal 6" legs wide-set, tongue quivering, some human invented this portrait of his little self. Lardy large man in tiny gold-yellow sunglasses. Posting that amount of writing is grotesque. Hey birdy poking on my other chair. Enough? 9th Looking at Frank project notes, starting to transcribe July 2004, first vol of Fading. 10 Dream a few mornings ago. I was on a highway somewhere in a forest and saw fog banks just over there. Then was in one, sensation of abruptly being in black daylight dark. 11 As I woke in the dark I was as if on the yard of the east place at a moment when it was still intact but already abandoned. There's a sense of grey bareness in the packed earth, the isolated buildings. Grey open space. Over there the Jansen house, here the garage, there the barn - something like that. What I was feeling was that that moment of imagined memory - is that what I mean - was the brief description I would give of something - I can't remember what. Of this period? There I sighed. I'm feeling what Gendlin describes, the expansion of the cloud network of meaning as I write. This sensation of being in the midst of thought is rare these days. Being without it is the bareness I feel in the journal, where I have nothing to say. What I was feeling in that sensation of the yard was my real self, my near self. As I write I'm thinking of Susan and why I don't want her phoning me. The way she overruns me with her speedy social charm - and other things, the way she's letting Lise edit her. The way Susan's pleasure in being curried by Lise and Jim discredits her admiration for me. I haven't described Lise pleading with me to take down the line where I say one of the commitments of embodiment studies is that when we die we die. She said I should at least say it more ambiguously because some students would be turned off by it. I was looking at her appalled. I can hardly believe I'm at a college where people are so mush-brained they want their studies to support life after death. And yet it's also the college where Carolyn, Layla and Anna could do the personal work that brought them to stand in front of us so clear, confident and grounded in what they had done - superbly accomplished and prepared. All three of them also worked with Lise and she was good with them. Susan said, You're developing faculty. Oh, okay, I said. Black Mountain, she said. They had secretaries and cooks I said. I like her vision of all that but I want her doing what she so beautifully does, registering women's intelligence, the live complex present of women's intelligence, not organizing my institution. Confluent - Susan is highly confluent. Should I make use of that, is that the idea here? Can I do that in an honest way? She needs me for the large plan. Is there a reason she wants to write about the films rather than the journal project? Because that's where I'm famous? It would make more sense to write about the journal project. Working on the semester mag. Looking at my mail just now. Gallery notice for Peter T. I'm developing the large versions for his wonderful paintings. Free energy. Peter the career you're having! David Denby on wide-screen high-def video - sharp and sharp deep into the shot, under minimal light conditions. "Digital imagery doesn't breathe the way film does." Characters planted in the middle distance surrounded by the things of their life. "When the material world has this kind of clarity and weight, the people trapped in it become more interesting and sympathetic." - What I did today - the magazine - finished the magazine after weeks. 13 What I did yesterday. Used the Golden West template to redesign the embod web worksite. It looks nice - it has a tiny surfer at the edge of an expanse of blue. Dark blue, light blue, white, red, turquoise. I went through my files looking for little squares - that was fast and fun. Break the pages into smaller ones. Liked feeling what the images could say, wanted them odd. Amanda's eye. Helmer's grave. It's amazing how terrifying this simple idea is turning out to be - I mean the idea that people should feel their bodies rather than not. The academic as dissociative defense. Alex writing about self-loathing, that strange delusion. - Then I went out and sat in a corner of Kung Food before it opened and talked to a man who came around watering. He said Would you help us and I said Sure and am meeting him tomorrow morning. Mitch. And then went to Scott's and said Shall I plant the abutilon and he said okay so I zipped to Walter Anderson's and got 3 pink and 2 white and pulled out what was in the pots and placed them - they look nice - and planted the ivy elsewhere and moved the furniture around - and have come home sweaty and tired hoping I'll be able to pay $2000 on my credit cards and buy a printer. 15 What do I need to do this week - jeep - set up Mitch's project - finish at Scott's - talk to Buena Creek about eugenia - continue to redesign web worksite - mail receipts - eye candy interview Thurs. What else is going on. Alex - tell her to do the intellectual stuff about dissociation. Stacey - get her intellectual part realer. Lisa, Gwen - are okay probably. Al - I told him theories are crazy, he may be offended. Amanda - Susan gave her the essay about holding off writer. Becci - ? Chris, Betsy - will just do what they do. Can I get all 9 done in a week - triage - work most with those who can use it. And how am I. Stressed at heart somehow. What is it. Margo isn't replying. There's something going on between her and admin, she won't say what. There's a tension with Betsy, shd I deal with her or leave it be. Susan is demanding I shd stay in touch though she is away writing her packet, wanting me to phone her, wanting a mother - but I won't be in touch when she isn't mothering me. What wd be the point. And she has let Lise edit thieves. And Lise now has Trivia back so my semester magazine is outranked. And Tom is gone. The close and real Tom is gone indefinitely because he's on a job where he's making $30 an hour, he has to leave at five in the morning and in the evenings he's in tent curfew from 8 on. 6 days a week and that's the end of Casual labour and reading. He doesn't even glance backwards, all he talks about is money. He can't sustain a writing project because he doesn't have intent. I don't really want the Kung Food project - Mitch is not a smart man and his food is bad. But will try to make $1000 for my Visa bills. Have sent off the estimate with Ranchos Cuccina photos. 16 My face was blazing. Margo wants to convene a committee of Ralph, Francis and Caryn to fix my embodiment studies documents before they are sent to Sue. What I want instead is to just deal with Sue directly. Am I going to have to resign? The old guys have nothing to say about any of it - young people do - students do. She had no idea how humiliating this would be. It would take the joy out of it. Margo doesn't know what an artist is does she. What do I know. M sez there is always resistance to new initiatives at [the college]. She wants other fac to be able to explain and defend it, she says, but the whole idea of committees and input is bizarre to me. Can I go up a level on this. I create stuff - I don't just create one kind of stuff. I get inventive with anything I do. I invent procedures. Some of the others are creative in their areas but most of them not even. That makes me mostly incomprehensible to them. J'y suis habituée maintenant. I work deeper and bolder than they do. With this and that of my work it's happened that ten or twenty years later someone discovers it. It's futile to try to sell it before then. It's worse than futile to try to sell it by watering it down, mediocritize it to get it accepted. The correct strategy is to let the students discover it. When lots of students start coming to the program because they want to do mbo then the dean will be convinced. Nobody in admin is going to be convinced for philosophical reasons, no amount of sanitizing the text will do it. What will do it will be if it keeps its integrity and students find it. 19 Sunday early. 5:30. It rained during the night. Drops on the black panes. I dreamed I was taking a stove apart and cleaning it. A layer of dirty water. Had some of my books stored under it. Someone pointed to an upper corner of the room where huge cockroaches were swarming. Are dirtiness and cleaning dreams about health? It says yes but not in an obvious way. What do I have to tell. My perception is so low-grade these days that nothing I've seen is worth telling. When Susan was describing her packet writing I was falling into - what is that state - it's silent and it's confused - it might be shame but there's yearning in it. It was because she was writing the way I used to write here. Delighted to be so interesting to myself. What's up in general. A party at Scott's yesterday. He invites his maid. He had a caterer parked outside, a staff of three, little mountains of food on maroon table clothes, one with a fountain lit at the apex. Many women in high heels, dirty jeans and crimped blond hair. Implants and teeth unnaturally white. Meantime from next to the fireplace I could look up at a patch of bare sun on the landing, a lovely effect arranged by his architect, who also made him a bedroom like a glass cube at the top of the house, and meantime there were the vines on the white lattice and the jasmine thick in bloom and his little yellow and white front garden I made him basking in its hedges, the cistus in large bloom next to the little silver tree. Eliz sat with me on the bench in the front garden and told about her miscarriage, Rue anxious and licking her leg. - The mbo site redesign is up - a lot of pages - 24? - a lot of hours - 30? - and 10 on the magazine. I pressed. Slog. Small stuff. It's mostly link-tested. It's nice. Nicer. My liddle images? Are they cool? Are they enough unlike ad images? 4 skies, Amanda's eye, Juliana's eye, little girl with bush, Tom driving, Rowen's elves, forearm, Tom's hand, Helmer's grave with plastic flower, Mennonite boy, orange nipple, Rowen and clothes, surfer is the best, two stones tombstones, copal, Grimaud, Juliana's moth, Laing. Which didn't I use - other orange, one of the cloud skies, blue flowers and wire, messed lily, pale pink cloud, red velvet. I cd keep changing the little pictures. Is there anything to think about. The way at the party yesterday I was automatically teaching people things they already knew - not good - so not good. Two women I liked. I explained it was a giant Burmese honeysuckle and she had one in her yard. And what did I do to Molly. I instructed her to keep a journal and went on about how I work with my young women. Tom was going to come at noon and spend the aft and go to a movie. He showed up stressed at 9 and said he wanted to rest all day at the tent. He looked at my new pages and praised my focusing notes but there wasn't what I always want, physical buzz. He was stressed and exhausted. We had a better time yesterday, did laundry and ate at Baja Fresh. He was proud of his new black boots that look like docs. - What I did today. Shipped the magazine finally - with a link to the web worksite - 40 hrs last week. Students have begun to come in. It was Presidents' Day. Wrote Susan. Began drafting a reply to Margo. 21 No one wrote today about the magazine or the redesign. I know Margo will still want to smother the worksite. I'm challenging her strategy. I'm challenging her handling of me, which is showing its weaknesses. She isn't leading her maverick well. 22 Wake thinking of skaters. Sasha Cohen, who is love woman gliding. Big eyes, very slight, 5'2. Perfect in her lines, stunning in her lines. An elf princess. Her coach is called John Nicks and is at least seventy, a wrinkled small old thing who looks like a boxer's coach. "How do you work with each other?" says the interviewer. "Carefully" he says with smiling irony. Smart. Both are. She's well spoken. She's 21. After she came 4th in 2002 she left him and trained other places and then came back to him. "When she left she was a little girl and when she came back she was a young lady." What she has had to learn was focus, steadiness. It's the part of the story I like. Love woman in all her glamour and fragility gradually learning to carry herself without fear. Not faking it, not becoming a boy to keep from falling, not thickening. I was thinking of myself in the Still at home journals. I had coaches at first but there wasn't a structure where I knew what to aim for - a scholarship, but after that the coaching stopped. Estall behind the scenes. Peter [Harcourt], yes, but he would have had me end where he did. And I kept being chaotically in training for something I didn't know. I began to have anti-coaches, men who ignored or tried to stop me. And women - there were none! Jean Royce. None of the coaches coached me, what they gave was just that they believed I was worth something. I scraped all my coaching together out of books. The beloved community of the question, the storyteller said. The kids I'm coaching. Al should be doing a blog about his self improvement project, which is interesting to anyone - his passage on toilet paper. Stacey has already done a lot. She's a little Sasha. Pixie is wrong. Elf queen would be good. Alexandra should be belly dancing, shd she? And on the other side thinking theoretically, building a hard-minded work woman to coach her love woman. - Did a lot today. 3 letters and prepped Chris and prepped Alex. Sent off to Margo and got a reply that settled me. She explained finally. Amazing sensation of relief and groundedness. I pressed and she came through. I pressed repeatedly. Now it's 5 and that's it for the day. Enough. What shd I do. Sunny and cold, it's been. Went to the drugstore to get Thera Tears. Dusk. Out. Standing in line with 6 cans of soup and a little box in my arms. There was a Mexican grandfather in the line ahead of me. Tall, silver-haired, a kind, rumpled face. He looked at me thinking whether he should offer me to go ahead. Decided against. There we stood. Then he changed his mind, turned around, said Please go ahead. A moment of calculation. Silent, looking into his face. I'll do it for him, okay. Thank you. He steps out of my way, I step ahead. As I pass he touches my arm. Sorry I touched you, he says. It's alright, I say. He wants to talk about how Americans say Don't touch me. Even with their cars, Don't touch my car. I say This sweater is very nice to touch. He laughs. (My cashmere.) I dump my tins on the counter and pay. Look into his face and say goodbye, not in a hurry. Walk out to the jeep. I'm happy these days. He liked that about me. He noticed it. Came home and phoned Susan and she called me back. When we were stopping and I did what I do, said 'bye and was about to exit, she said You don't have much runway on either end do you. And then told a story about Navy pilots landing close to the terminal. Just set it down. She was on a business trip and an associate said to her, That's a Navy pilot. 24 Trying to sleep last night a sensation of being tight and solid. It was still there in the morning. It was maybe from watching the women's figure skating finals last night. Or from letters from Susan? I don't watch most of the skaters because I can see immediately that there's nothing about them. But it sometimes happens that someone of the four commentators will say something about the skaters that is coming from inside knowledge. I'm watching something they are watching too, and when it's interesting they just shut up and watch. When it's dull one of them will explain something that needs explaining. What I liked was when the woman who'd been an Olympic skater herself would comment as if to herself. "She's very stiff." "She's tired, her legs are heavy." When the camera was showing Sasha Cohen standing at the edge of the rink a while before her own program, she said "Sasha is just having a peek at the rink. When you first come to it the lights seem very bright." That was a good moment because Cohen's face is so naked and sensitive we could see her feeling that. There was a lot to see. The woman who won, Arakawa, was a tall Japanese woman with a flat reserved face. She was as if the opposite of Cohen, feeling nothing rather than feeling everything. When she saw - she was the last to realize it - that she had won gold, her mouth fell open into almost agony. Her coaches were hugging her. It was as if they had drugged her to get her through, so she was in effect their puppet. They woke her when it was over, it was not her own. Cohen fell on the jumps in her warm-up and the commentator was watching her eyes. "They are completely different from the way they were. There's doubt." Then when she fell on two jumps, "She knows she's lost it. Now she's fighting to stay on the podium." As she waved and bowed afterwards, "Her sad, sad eyes." Slutskya and Cohen on the podium flanking Arakawa, neither faking it, Slutskya crying, Cohen a poised soft sad spirit, so remarkably beautiful in her realness. A sport where the love woman / work woman crisis is demonstrated. The costumes are events in themselves, sometimes so foreign in their taste. Slutskya's sheer beaded black jumpsuit a lovely invention. The dramas of destiny. Winning gold is like stepping onto a platform where gods and goddesses mingle in open air. Anything less means staying cramped under a ceiling. Nothing you have done counts and you are doomed to feel your failure every moment for the rest of your life. Your body is infused with subtle ash. In these contests we are looking to see what kind of person is best to be. There were women in the top ten who will never make it through because there is something visibly inferior about them. The two Italians. They step on the ice and we think, no, never. They don't have heroic fibre. And now about my hero friend Susan. She has the fibre. Will she need to eat me up. Two letters yesterday night, one the beginning of the story of our night.
Can it be gotten at to want to say - when you walk / it's leading first with a lean and oh how I feel when the lean begins and then the sweep of your right foot forward how it matches a certain distraction in your face as you move - and wanting to match that with the feeling of it inside being the body who watches you - Margo wants me to be more circumspect, less as if I'm doing therapy. I am doing therapy. I'm not going to stop doing therapy. The way we educate at [this college] there is no difference between education and therapy. Admin is nervous for two reasons. One is Millie. And that one is fear of getting sued and then fired for lack of oversight. The other is fear of what's lurking unfelt in their own bodies. Sue the dean is coming to our graduations now and that means she is listening to our and our students' graduating speeches for signs of therapy. I call Joyce my teacher. Joyce was my teacher. Margo says, When you work with dreams you shouldn't say what something means, you should ask the student what she thinks it means. I say I disagree. I say I want my students to be able to trust that I am saying what I actually think, not sliming it over. I say I'm modeling a manner of speaking that doesn't say, I may be wrong but I kind of think maybe it's ... I say I don't want us to be like national security about Millie, trying to prevent something that has already happened by wrecking everything that's going well. I am not going to work differently but I'll only send Margo my safest letters and I will make public speeches in a way that's playfully I hope aware of their fear. She said I should take the word 'intimacy' off the website where I describe how advisors work. I said that feels paranoid. What matters is to go on working the way it has been with Layla, Anna, Carolyn, Juliana, Carol D'Ag. Margo doesn't know about the students who trust me because I'm not saying it slant. She says she's always conscious how much she doesn't know. She's wrong to think that's the way it should be. - Alright what do I think about the way Susan is writing about herself at the res, kind of winding herself up about me? She needs to write early love, the way I used to. I wanted something else, what she can do with psychological moments, the way she is so swift - it's Blake I'm thinking of - something about opening a moment of space. I thought we could write our night together as we had begun to do, but she is so much more impassioned and significant in it, I just say what happened. What she does in imagining herself is what I used to do with for instance Cheryl - I imagined gods - as recently as Tom - I don't do that with Miz You. She's intoxicating herself about me. I don't want to be hard on her about it. I feel for her loneliness and longing. I'm not taking it personally now and I'm not scared of - There she phones. 25 She said I was worried about something in the writing. I said I'm worried I'll be dull. She said if I'm dull why wd she think I'm brilliant. I said I'm very accomplished but I'm dull in my presence, I don't have much presence these days and my journal is dull. I'm not doing the addictive things anymore that used to give me speed. I'm not in enough pain. She said maybe I'm repressing. I said I've pretty much known when I'm in pain. I don't have things to be in pain about now. She said, What am I chopped liver. I said I'm not in pain about her. She said maybe it's a deeper kind of pain, catatonic paralytic. Yes maybe. Somewhere in there I also said I'm willing to find out what this phase is for. Maybe when I've lived longer without addiction something else will have built itself. Being in presence isn't my priority. Shd it be? It says yes. Can I unlock things with her? Yes. Is she the most interesting thing that's happening to me at the moment? Yes. Shd I let go more? No. What I'm realizing just now is that Sue [the dean] told Margo to fire me and Margo said, She's the best I've got, I'll rope her in, and now she has to be seen to be doing that. I don't know why I haven't realized that before. So now I understand what her push is and why she was grilling me about Betsy. Wow. Millie has cursed me through the whole institution not just with Margo. Margo's been sheltering me. She's worried about Francis and Ralph saying bad things about me. The journal project will not be helpful to that. [This journal section] will definitely not be helpful. And yet the teaching letters are more important than keeping my job. I shouldn't hold back in style or content. Progressive education is liberatory.
26 I liked that version because it had Margo protecting me but she says it didn't happen. Two things yesterday. Tom was here briefly. I said Tell me your week and he told the story of being non-union on a union site, the men carrying pipe up flights of stairs rather than use the hoist with its nonunion operator. They call him Operator. He describes their economy of movement, everything they do, wheelbarrow, forklift. He told the story with gestures and motor noises, very energized and virtuosic. He was there. He was standing around in the hoist and he took the motion around him into his body. Fully. He didn't just say rrhhm. He said all the directions and qualities of rrhhm there were in a 5-storey site where men are proud of themselves and completely focused and have assembled marvelous machines that creep or swivel or grind or dart or rise slightly tottering first one floor and then another. He showed me the way a union man moves a wheelbarrow, dm-dm-dm-dm-dum and done. Ironworkers speaking across the space in hand signals. He showed me the signals and the elegance they have taken on in these burly men in their union hard hats, standing on a beam as it's lowered, giving it a tap to turn it. And then the riveter comes in. (Series of growling grunts.) Tom at his best, focused physicality. The world for male attention. Michael acting his animals. Spectacular. The great dance. Full body imitation and language and technical intelligence. On the street, That's a Mitsubishi about 1990, Tom will say, and will tell me the story of that car's reception. Then in the evening I call Mary [my mom]. Her voice with its strange mannered lag. Heavy. I fight her. I've done that but I'm doing it in one way more generously. I tell her I need things from her. When I say something about myself and she immediately takes it to herself I say, No, we're talking about me now. She keeps taking it away and I keep stopping her. I say she isn't curious and interested and she says I'm not interested in her either. I say No, I'm not your mother. You need a mother and you don't have a mother, but that isn't my fault. So then after a while she says there was a moment she decided to die. She has said before that she decided to die but she hasn't said there was a moment. When was it? "It was in that horrible time when Ed was so depressed and out of control. He was so cruel to me. I had no options, the only thing I could do was die, so he wouldn't be able to see me cry again." She hasn't cried since. "That can't help but make an impact. As far as I know I have worked with that to let go of that. The feeling of being powerless and a victim. I did not really learn to take power. They said I was very alive. I don't remember ever feeling very alive and free." She thinks often of this moment. She'd like to come alive again. Could she find a therapist in Christian Abbotsford? Could she find the will? Imagine her soft and real not blank and hungry. A feeling creature not a stoic beast. March 1st Al this morning wrote me a note that said: You seem to be a person who is super kind. If I'm correct, my next question is: Why are you so kind? It's almost like I feel sometimes like I can't trust you because it eludes me that there are genuinely kind people out there. Everyone around me seems selfish. And so my brain says you must be too. But I'm starting to realize you're not. Why are you so kind? I want to be really kind but ALSO selfish. I said being generous is more fun, "skillful and pleasurable," and that I'm not generous at my own expense. 2nd 5 blue iris and 7 white stocks across the room. The stocks had wilted by the time I got them home, and it took them two days to undroop their tips, three or four to begin to release their scent. Last night it was wonderful. A sharp edge in it I want to call a spice. The flowers are very white and the centers, the base of the petals, green. Leaves short and velvety. Clean things. The eye candy zine interview. I sent answers and she wrote back suggesting pictures and writing too. So I'll do that, and send her the url for the magazine. Thursday morning. What more to tell. Susan's Grace is back. I say to myself, get ready, now she'll be gone. Eight letters done and Amanda floating. 12 free days. Get Frank after done so I can collect $450. Get workshops onto the mbo site, work on the reader. Transcribe. I seem to be doing [this section] first. Get a couple more vols of GW up. Get more space on [my server]. Taft, Dawne and Belleview, Scott. Go to Mesa Grande? Yeah and she is gone too. 3rd Roy Orbison's sound and Frank's time. Oh time. I'm transcribing more of his letters. KD in a skirt twisting in the backup row, young. I feel rock'n'roll could have saved him. The lineup of guitarists jamming to Pretty woman. Springsteen, Costello, Browne, other people I don't know. So gorgeous. Roy Orbison and friends: a black and white night 1988 Cinemax, seen on PBS
Juan Ramón Jiménez, from Stacey's email. 1881-1958 Stacey's on the road. Permission for critical intelligence. Is a lot of that self contempt when people don't allow themselves critical judgment? It's a form of dissociation. Allow it only retroflexively and then it has a different character of rage which is also rage at being judged? So I don't have self contempt because I maintained judgment? YES. Boulder a madhouse of would-be shamans - her relation with people she loves will change if she's clearer, she says. Oh yes!
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