| in america 10 part 3 - 2006 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
March 4th 2006 Susan checking the eye candy interview and telling me how she thinks it reads in a social zone I have no clue about. I pulled two photos from her brother's wedding pictures site. It's a step in trust. A year later. Saturday morning. If I wear sunglasses I can sit on the roof in the sun. There's my agave untwisting out of the green glazed pot. The cactus I picked up unloved outside a door downstairs has pushed up 2 inches since, 5-sided little blue-green column. Frank. I've transcribed all of his first 3 months' letters. It was tedious and I don't know how much of it I'll keep. I'm vague. I could just drop everything onto the site and go away. I'm bored with it. I haven't focused and decided what it's for. I'm seeing things about him I hadn't though. I'd seen him romantically, picking out his lyrical passages about weather and nostalgia. He was young. I should see him as a 21 year old who's not well read. He was intense. He was enslaved. He was transparent where I was quite strategic. His transparency is worth a lot in the account. He was vulnerable to a kind of self-contempt I haven't understood. It was my dad too, I think. Look at that cloud. It has the sun round and small in it surrounded by a white blaze I daren't gaze at, pink fibre at some distance from the centre. Remarkably pink and reaching even to the forward edge of the next little cloud over. Waiting for it to be warm again. Come back. Shall I talk to Tom about Susan - to open that separateness. I'm generally in lack of hope about him. His time's consumed by work and weekends aren't long enough to recover. His phone [in the vet tent] is such a racket there's no point trying to talk to him in the evenings. 8 o'clock curfew. He isn't going to figure out how to have a writing life until he retires and then there'll be something else. Being connected with him is feeding the wolf just enough so I don't have to feel it and that's worth quite a lot. I'm working. I have Susan to talk to though I'm careful with the phone. I don't want to get habituated. Why. Good question. I've been assuming Mitch dropped the plan when he saw how much money I'd make. The string has kept saying no, he's still on. I've said, are you sure? It says yes. Yesterday after about a week there was an email from him saying he's waiting for the saw-cut guy. So should I be strategic with Tom, let him keep the wolf from the door until something better comes along? Yes it says, be nice to him and don't fight for more. Tom is making a lot of money now and I'm saying yes, buy a van, live in it, it makes sense. Something of his own. It makes more sense now than spending 800 a month on rent. I see that. I agree to it with a sore heart I'm keeping to myself. He'll be somewhere in his tiny hive still unreachable, still nowhere I can be, and that will go on indefinitely and I'll go on without what I loved in the Maryland, where we were somewhere together in a room. He's often craven with me. He doesn't kiss me when he comes in, but at the end of the visit he begs me to say I love him. He means, are you thinking about leaving me because I'm such a screw-up? I'm agreeing the van is right because his other ideas on where to live when he has to leave the tent are so dumb. He reminded me of my birthday - don't want it, Monday. What have I done this year -
Anything else, something more confident? Settled? 6 From Susan a New Yorker essay by Vicki Hearne about horse training and philosophy. Nice. And then she said I should write things like that. I said people can pluck it out of my journals. She said, But the essay is beautiful. Ow I thought and didn't say. Susan doesn't like the design of my sites and she does not like the journals. Tonight she liked how I was and I didn't like how she was. How was she. Shrill and fast and unwarm though flattering. And then David. And then so horrible a note from Mary. Angry, guilting. Delete. Vicki Hearne Questions about language I - Horses New Yorker August 18, 1986 7 Day is half through. What've I done. Vols 8-10 mostly ready. Got the focusing workshop's 4 parts into html and thereby sort of invented - began to invent - format for workshop pages. Not really good yet. Hours of format concentration. Need to go into my own whole site and clean up stuff like font size, underlines and text wrapping. Why does Susan want to write about the films and not about the journal project. Is the journal project not what I think, or is she less smart than I think? What do I think about the journal project. I think the later years name a lot that isn't named elsewhere. The early years aren't interesting in that way but they can be browsed. Is the lifetime a gimmick, should I just have parts that interest me? What I think of the journal isn't different than what I think of me. Should it be? 8 I tried out the slide scanner today - the new one - because I needed a slide for vol 9. Stripes on the water. From that got a little slice for vol 9. Used the Hellenistic goat for vol 10 because it talks about pagans and landscape. 8-10 almost ready, a bit more transcribing of notes. Email this morning from Russell Mann. Nothing much. Mr Mann died December 24 2001, a year before my dad. He'd had a first stroke the February before. Neither Tom or Jim married, and Russ has no kids. Tom is a local politician in Creston. Wanted to be longer with the journal so I read through vol 11 and pasted it into 4 parts. The Bellingham summer. Bliss and fear, bliss and fear. Bellingham - can I get an image off the web? Yes, Mt Baker. When I woke this morning I was thinking of Paul and when I thought of Peter Epp's bench I couldn't remember what it looked like - a blank. That's the first time I remember losing a visual memory though I've lost names for years. It came back bit by bit. The dark red at its base, the storage compartment under it, worn cream paint on the seat, now the crazing. Somehow I still can't see the arms though I can guess them. (Later - there it is.) [Sketchup 2015 - Peter Epp's bench in the lake house] When I was writing Russ yesterday I looked up Paul's website. It's well designed and tight. On the CV page there's a head shot that jerks from front face to three quarters and back. He has won a lot of awards, been elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, been director and founding partner of a number of businesses, and is full professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. And what is his aspect - angry? He's 57. He's done a lot. He's pushed his way to the top of his field. On Judy's site there's a photo too. She's wearing pale peach silk and dangling earrings, has dyed hair feathered to soften her long face. How does she look, though. Both places her name appears her degree appears too. She looks weakly even passively goodhumored. She isn't exactly that but there's a deadness in the eyes. And then there's Mary. She says love but it's hunger and anger. She says 'relation' but it's hunger and anger. And Rudy stockpiling junk out of sight on the land Mary gave him, mad. What would I say to myself young in affectionate belief in these people: life is a very long test and what these people are isn't visible yet. What I have been saying instead is, these people were themselves when they were young and they aren't now. The test is whether you carry yourself through. What I see in all of them is loss of soul. I don't exist for Mary. I'm a blank onto which she projects hunger and anger. Ed kept soul more than any of them. There was still realness in him when he died. All of this has something to do with the journal project. The Golden West years demonstrate and defend. What did I want to write yesterday morning - something for the philosophy intro of GW. I want to say the journal as a whole is philosophic, a phenomenology like DR's. The impulse is philosophic. I've wanted to understand and explain. So I like the one-paragraph summaries there are of many things. I don't need to write whole essays about these questions. As a philosopher I've insisted on keeping childhood and feeling included. I like it that my formal philosophy is there among notes about gardening and bookwork about Tom. The philosophic accomplishment is a state. It's myself capable of meeting things the way I did in those years. The philosophic accomplishment is a state of the body, an organization that was visible though I didn't see it. I am mostly not in that state now. I had the same feeling about being an artist - it was a different state, the evidence is. More chaotic. 1982 - should I do that - representative volumes rather than filling up sections methodically - "held with extreme effort" Vicki Hearne on training horses. 1. That she wants a coherent account of what a horse is. Philosophy in the sense that it's looking for the right way to talk. 2. That some horses are artists who love to be stretched and perfect. Through the essay I feel the allegory. She's a poet and feels allegorical significance, horse as body. Does she know she's talking about body? She actually trains horses. She insists on anthropologizing. How much of her essay is about horses? Success as a trainer wd be about horses. At that moment a note from Cam saying her daughter tried to kill herself Monday night. I said I was crying for her and that my positive thought was diagnostic. Ally is angry at her. The family needs to do some serious work. Is she willing? She says yes but she doesn't know what she's saying. Ally is 'difficult.' I say that's the wrong word. They need to get things out in the open so Ally doesn't have to kill herself to get even. - Did Hearne know it was about body and use the allegory to talk about something in 1986 that couldn't be talked about head on, the artist's body? The writer's body. My dream of the brown horse and the black horse. Joyce said "It would be better to ride well." Horse and rider, conscious self and body as a whole. But it's not a duality - how to think that. She's wrong about time, I say. No it says. It's about getting to heaven? Yes. The moment of perfect contact. It's not a natural state, it's a trained state. Is she right that the horse exults? Yes. She was right to give herself conversation. Yes. Here I'm imagining that this is what Susan and I should be writing together - this is embodiment pedagogy. Say this well. [Norman] Mailer training when he had a writing project. The way I'd go monastic when I wrote papers. She writes that an artistic horse will get depressed if left in the pasture without work. That's me I said. Say it well. There's the forehead-directed circuiting that isn't self but at times of willed effort is felt as self. That self-feeling isn't split off but it's directing something in the way we'd direct an other, by speaking to it. - Gretchen wanting to talk about neuroscience. I send her the Being about link and light up. Feeling I can give my whole work and not just be wise mom. Have files loading into [a second server account] as I write. I can hear the little spasms of the disc, is it. Will move everything that isn't in pub_html to the new account, which will be a storage closet. $35 a year. Then I can put vols 8-11 up, yay. I'm so pleased when I get things done. Jean-Vi last night showed up in email when she googled herself and found play of the weather notes. She's living in Taos, 21 years sober, she says, and 12 stably partnered. A good letter though play of the weather 6 says
Excited. Excited since this morning. It's Friday. On Monday packets come in again. Rained last night, now there's sun on the table. Vols 8-11 are up, now 12 and then back to Frank. - I got S finally to say what she doesn't like about it.
- Amvets: corduroy jacket, pants that look like worn silk, black cashmere sweater for Tom if he wants one and me if not, pillow. -
12 Am I ready to think about Susan and the journal. Here's what I know. She's appalled to find me interested in myself rather than her, she's appalled that it's not about her. That's her mom's immaturity. She thinks about it as confession, she hasn't thought about it as a history of consciousness. That's a lack of sophistication. She's distressed that she doesn't like it because she feels it means she'll lose me/her mother. She describes this distress as distress about not loving, she goes into a familiar frenzy of self-reproach. Apart from those - About not believing what I say about other people - it's some not all - she feels that eye wd judge her - although she likes it when we see together. Is she distressed that it invokes her het? I think it's not so much dilation of singularity as articulation of the silent self. Controlling unswerving and insistent - that one does bother me - because it's stylistic - it means I'm a mind she doesn't like being - and I don't like being hers either - is that dynamical probably - unswerving is what lets me track - she could never do what I do with her self-conscious branching and diffusing - so I'll accept this one. Flights of grandeur and humiliations - I don't take either of those as seriously as she does - they'd be grandiose if they were inaccurate - I do have flights into illusion but they're usually about my attachments - they're not about my work or perception - humiliations, does she mean crashes? I don't think of crashes as humiliations. I know it's not true that I only see myself. There's a lot of love in them for many kinds of things, even for the comedy of wreckage. But she doesn't see that for some reason. Is this her idealism that's so hard on herself? Her ideal of love that she fails in, she's young in this. She's not as experienced in ambivalence. What kind of enterprise it is to post them. I'm telling hardly anyone they're there, because I consider it in relation to particular people and say, nah. They wouldn't like it. And then the people who know it's there, who I know won't look at it. It's true it's too much of one person. A lot of it isn't entertaining, it's banal. It displays states people don't like in themselves. It doesn't hide the ways I am more than they are, and most people aren't conscious in that soul-competition layer. Critical intelligence is hard for people who've given it up tho' delightful for people who haven't, unless they feel it will turn on them. What's worthwhile in it is: It shows a lovewoman-workwoman conflict many women have, that isn't well described. It shows someone gradually changing, it is an actual history of consciousness. It shows unstable identity in others in a way no one has since The golden notebook. It shows ambivalence in the self in all its fluctuations, it's the opposite of frozen. It records weather and place with love. It shows the mixedness of a life in which there's sex, gardening, therapy, teaching, reading, all the rest. It's developed phenomenology, someone who has been observing for a long time. It shows stages of a significant philosophical breakthrough. It tells other people's stories with love for life adventure. It has a lot of reading tips. 14 Sage Adderley's tiny downscale zine - she printed my interview as was, with 3 little pages of journal excerpts and the Frank photo. Last week the most hits so far - 8. It's Tuesday. Cold and windy. I have got my big debts down to $2200 and $1000. 7 students in. Science Times today, evolutionary biology of pregnancy. Struggle for nutrients, natural selection should favor the child who gets more resources from parents than parents want to give, while favoring parents who raise more offspring. Placenta 'aggressively' sprouts blood vessels that invade the mother's tissues. Pre-eclampsia might be the fetus raising the mother's blood pressure to get more blood into the low-pressure placenta. A protein has been found that interferes with the mother's ability to repair minor damage to blood vessels. It's produced by the fetus. Maternal defense genomic imprinting. Shut down the genes of one of the parents. Mother can shut off a gene that would promote rapid growth. Some of the genes are imprinted in the brain after birth. Maternal genes may favor behaviors that benefit the group. Paternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the individual. "Your mom and dad want different things from your behavior." Researcher suspects that conflict between imprinted brain genes may add to the risk for mental disorders, from autism to depression. Because one copy of these genes is silenced, they may be more vulnerable. - Quantum mysticism industry. Collapsing the waveform - fog of quantum possibilities prescribed by mathematical theory condense into one concrete actuality. Wigner half a century ago suggested consciousness was the key. "Launched a thousand New Age dreams." "At some level our minds are in control of reality." Wigner framed it mathematically. Sunday. Tell about Sunday. I said come at 11 and he came at 11. Wouldn't particularly kiss me. And then remarked that his work clothes were dirty and he wanted to throw them out. I freaked. We had a wrangle. After some of that I said the last time he threw out his laundry he was using. Etc. Eventually I said when he throws away money I feel he doesn't want to be with me. He was irritated but not very and recovered himself fast. It means I love him he says. I agree. So then I show him Susan's insults to my journal site and he's very clear and definite and satisfactory. Then we go see Heart of gold at the Hillcrest and then we go to the tent and get his laundry and do it, and then he buys me dinner at the Greek buffet we discover across the street. It's expensive - $13 each - and it's good - and it's fun being out after dark together with Tom paying. He fades suddenly at 7 and I take him home. A wonderful day. Very earned. He's thin. His ass is just a little handful. Oh I now have such a firm sense of how good times pass. And come again. And Miz Susan is dropping me again for no good reason but a poor one, presumably. Oh well. Working on: Frank's letters, AG transcription, GW12, packet 2. Mbo time estimate I gave Margo today said 270 hrs which wd be $6750 which will not happen. Jonathan Demme dir. 2006 Neil Young: Heart of gold 15 My current favorite clothes, the Tommy Bahama pants I got at Amvets, darkish sage green with cuffs, the Irish linen shirt the same color lighter in a matte and looser texture. In my dream I saw men on a Victorian tenement roof striking large clay tiles with sledgehammers to loosen them. They were salvaging and tearing down. In the drowse before I woke I was dreaming a story about a father putting his little finger into his daughter's vagina. I felt the quality of every stroke and came after not many. Woke with my womb still buzzing. Lisa's process paper describes the particularity of her method - 'muses,' actors whose appearance she uses for a while, music and emotional takeover. 8 pages of technical explication this time. Her clear tough voice. The way her talent is ahead of her thinking and my job mainly to assure her that it knows what it's doing. Stacey very quickly applying her critical intelligence to her community and seeing what makes her want it. 7 stories about shifting, the last one called Anywhere taxi well written as nothing so far had been. Talking about salt, ordinary people and Bessemer, PA. Al writing about anxiety and his system, the Constitution. Overwhelming detailed self-regulation. - Danielle dropping in with CD Wright. We sit on the roof in a breeze. She's enchanting. Fine blond hair, blue eyes, white teeth, peach skin, flat nose, a slight underbite is it? Dark pink sweater, fuzzy white scarf she's playing with as we talk, half inch of skin between the bottom of the sweater and the top of her low-rider jeans. Abrupt voice with a bit of gravel in it. She'd like to go for coffee sometimes she says. She listens. She talks. 16 I was scanning PRC slides last night. The scan quality isn't good although for some of the images the softness works. The pink and white house at twilight with pink glow on its roof. The rock under a barbed wire. For notes in origin slides I'm going to need a proper slide scanner. (Realized I could research slide scanning on Google.) It's something to do evenings. With a better scanner will need to learn to clean slides properly, compressed air, alcohol etc. Will need glasses for fine work. Magnifying glass. Light box wd be good. Transcribing Frank's letters, mornings. How much of that to do. I'm overdoing everything aren't I. 17 Jean-Vi after she looked at my journal wrote back very stiff saying how different she is than me because she's outward and I'm disabled and excluded and that's why I'm so intellectual and abstract. She also wants to know why I went back to men. So she's defending herself against something. That's Susan freaked and Jean-Vi, and is it lesbians freaked by the fucking? Freaked by the philosophy? Do I mind. A little. But I'm interested what will happen when I'm out, who'll be left. I will find out which of my connections were delusionary. As if I'm old enough, have come far enough, so I can afford to be out. 18 Could I have a different kind of summers, go to the PRC and live in Peter's honey warehouse. What's making me want to do that is the Anselm Kiefer piece I bought Arts in America for yesterday, his landscape paintings, so beautiful and strong. The writer goes on about mysticism and German history but what I thought was that those ideas are the stew or matrix Kiefer makes in himself to work out of. How I come to that is from transcribing the Dames rocket journals with their myth materials and dreams and emotional hyping. I could see now that it's a matrix for sensitivity. Given that you had a physically disabling anomaly from a young age that heightened your sense of separateness and unincludedness in peer settings, I am not surprised that you pursued such a rigorous inner focus. The scientific/abstract cast of that focus is very much at odds with my own impulsive and imaginal impetus. So, for instance, on a momentary impulse I blithely remind you of how you hated my writing. Later I realize that I have invited you to continue not seeing or appreciating me as the deeply sensitive, creative and daring person that I really am. I just hoped you would have a longer story to tell of how it is to intelligently, persistently love women/ a woman for years and years. I don't get what happened there. She's impulsive, I'm rigorously focused. Yes. I liked some of her writing but not the particular journalistic piece I said was ingratiating. That seared her. Saying it to her was like saying Paul was mean to his wife - it's not understanding how frail someone is in their self regard. They need me hidden. Yes the journal shows me very massively tracking and yes that massiveness is very alien to her Jiminy Cricket lightness. Wd I appreciate her if I met her now? I wdn't estimate her highly as a writer probably. I'd likely say sensitive, creative and daring but not deeply. So does that mean I have to not know her? No it means she has to not know me. If people have illusions about themselves they have to not know me. - So here ten years later is The celestial jukebox. It's angry, it's well-made. It pulled me through. It's not as good though it's good. Wonder book of the air was more shock of grief, the grief that dilates into joy. Somebody I read in the last two weeks said that sensation is soul. Yes. This one is less grief more contempt. Am I right? That's something I'd need to ask Louie. I wdn't read it twice. Did she decide she'd need to do something more contemporary, as if Wonder book's pure excellence didn't catch enough critical attention from the guys and with this one she decided to pitch to them more? The invention of the jukebox man as if says she's not happy in her marriage? Cynthia Shearer 2006 The celestial jukebox University of Georgia Press Gretchen emailed me something like 8 times in the last 36 hours. She's saying 'we' about the website as if she feels she has joined the club and expects to have a vote. Here comes what I told Margo I'm reluctant for, managing people, having people underfoot all day. She was wanting all of us to revise the web worksite as if it's common property. I'll have to hang onto control of it by being ahead of everyone all the time the way I was at the garden. I was in that 16 hrs a day. Am going to have to make decisions separately from Margo, about how I want it to go. I don't have a Muggs to do the parts I don't want. - Tom this morning looked so beautiful. He was wearing his Doc oxfords and black jeans and grey fleece jacket and his hair is tufty. He looks good in grey. He came in and kissed me four times and I praised him and he looked at his checks and called the dentist in TJ and then I asked him to look at Jean-Vi's angry letter. He willingly spent an hour. He is so loyal, he jumps to defend me. That is delightful to me. Monday 20th What's new. My nice but clear letter to Jean-Vi got a turned-around reply. She inherited money and is living without working in a newly renovated house above Taos. Juliana sent her granting report. Alex is evening out some. Stacey scaring up mom stuff. Gretchen kindly directed by Margo to stick to Jim this semester. Al wanting me to tell him whether his writing is as good as he hopes. Went to a bad movie yesterday with Tom, Sizzler for steak afterward. He's treating. He said, Are you falling in love with me a little bit again? I said he's had his head straight for long enough so that the little doors are opening more, but I'm aware that everything can stop in a moment and I'm keeping enough reserve so that I'll be okay if it does. 21st People one after another who drop me. Russell Mann hasn't replied. Nancy Mellon hasn't. Susan. Damion. Clark, the naturalism guy. Anyone else who has emailed me about the site - the Starns. I'm just making that list to acknowledge something I notice briefly and pass on. The journal and Being about and my life in general don't suit.
22nd Wednesday morning. By now it's light at 6. I open the door and smell fresh damp. Something flowery. I have clicked on the heater and am boiling water. No I lift the lid on my computer first. Kulturflash and a note from Anna. The artists of any kind listed in Kulturflash this time are all male. I didn't watch TV last night. Was reading The jade paeony. Why do I hate it. The scenes and characters are okay and I like picturing them on Pender St - one of the smaller houses on the hill opposite the schoolyard - but I hate his writing voice, the way it lumps along so oldfashionedly with properly subordinated clauses like rows of wooden blocks. That is not right though it's a bit right. I'd have to give an example. Opening at random: "I thought she would begin to tell me one of her stories, a tale of enchantment or wondrous adventure, but she only paused to swallow; her eyes glittered, lost in memory." What's wrong with that. I hardly know, but something about the modifying phrases so tidily put down behind their commas. It's rhythmic, is it? A confined motion? Le Guin has longer lighter storytelling breaths that voyage forth with curls and flourishes into open air. Wayson Choy is stuffy. And then I open to a passage later in the book, one I hadn't read yet, and there's Second Brother listening to Miss Doyle reading to her class at Strathcona School war letters from her brother in London. I am carried along, it's true. Wayson Choy 1998 The jade peony Penguin Chris Gray. He wrote a good paragraph: I exaggerate. I don't want to be Chuck Klosterman or Dave Eggers, or really any other writer whose reputations precede them. I do, though, have an intense desire to be that guy who writes pop music reviews in the New York Times whose name you don't know (Ben Ratliff). I want to have his job and be better at it than him. I want to explain to people, piece by piece, article by article, that there is an endless supply of phenomenal music that is not only artistically bold and interesting but also intensely satisfying to most of the people who get to hear it. If I do develop some sort of career as a writer, I suspect I may end up in such a position, though surely not at the paper of record. Come to think of it, though, I also want something lesser and better. My admiration for the writers at websites such as Pitchfork and Coke Machine Glow is great, is paramount to my admiration for any other writer/artist I follow. These are people that devote their days to considering the same thing I do; sometimes they get paid for it, but they don't seem to get very much. Regardless, they are so devoted to their craft and so knowledgeable about it, that they have in effect created the me that you know. What is it really about Chris. I suspect Eggers and his other guys are attractive to him because they're a neopatriarchal bid. They are building a power base that excludes women by looking only at each other. My instinct is quite aggressive. You're a graceful writer but what do you know about anything. - Wednesday 2 in the aft. Sun has come around the corner of the room, which is warmer and brighter. My letters are done until Amanda and Betsy show up. Ten days. Anna the day after tomorrow. I should wash the jeep. Gardening. And the brighter warmer room of my own work. I'm reading chapters in a recent scholarly book about VW. Haven't read books much lately. There is that slump of gel in my reading eye, that I have to strain to focus through. With the right eye it's as if a burnt surface. 23rd Thursday morning. Here's an open day. All open. I was trying to scan slides last night. Color so bad. Mostly I can't use them. I should try sending to a professional with a $2000 slide scanner. Somebody writing about states of newness/beauty and turning on a synaptogenic gene - neurogenesis and synaptogenesis. Becci: "It's just so godlike to have nothing in your life make sense except for the stuff you intuit and then along comes someone to clarify that this is the real thing. The validity of it the intelligence of it all of that feels like the closest thing to worship or idolization that I've experienced." 25th Anna quoting Carolyn saying, I think Ellie is really onto something. We were at a sidewalk table in front of La Pensione talking about embodiment studies. I'm saying there should be an underground research institute that is affiliated with [our college] but not in [its] pocket. Fundraising and admin should stay creative. Gretchen saying there isn't time in the 2 years for science. I say to Anna that young women need to spend those 2 years on their personal platform and so they need to go on studying after they finish. I should talk to Gabriele - I don't want [the college] to own it. - Stacey is in a knot about getting attached to men who leave her. She 'loves' them and has compassion for them, she says. I say try saying it another way, don't say 'I love,' say 'I want something from,' 'I expect something from.' 'Loving' is how we get someone to look after us when we're little. We go on feeling it's a gift but it's not. It's a crisis of maturity to understand this. How does it feel to say that. When does feeling 'love' mean more? Gratitude, trust. What about the times with Tom when I felt for him? She says she feels compassion. Is it like that? I don't think so. That was always a state I got to through pain and giving up the wish. She's not valiant with pain. I'm wondering whether my cynicism with Mary is skewing me. Mary wrote that when she was 5 in Moscow before they were let out she was sent to isolation in a hospital and didn't see her parents over Christmas. She wants me to be her mother? Should I? She isn't able to be mine. It says no. 26th Stacey confused about the unconscious. I say the unconscious is structure. We'll see whether that makes a difference. If you look for something where you can't get it, it means you are really looking for something else. That's true in her case.
- Phoned Tom, said, I'm bored. He laughed. I went and fetched him for breakfast at Denny's. When we were on the way to the market, stopped with him at the Friendship Hotel. Then when I was buying chard the man said Something must already have happened this morning, you are glowing. 27 Loose ends. I have a week before the next batch and don't know what to do. The state where, any suggestion I make, I say nah ... Susan. I'm not mad at her. She dropped me but when she was with me she was as with me as I've ever been with anyone. Do I miss her? I miss something. It's as if love woman is here and wants not much to do with my dull little tasks.
28 I'm not living well. When I couldn't fall asleep last night I was panicking about how to get out of [my college]. I'm not living well in the way I resort to TV at the end of the day because I don't have anything to do. This morning I was thinking of the way in university - that period - I wasn't feeling what there was to feel, I was eating and starving and writing false letters to my mother and not writing anything bad in my journal, as if going away and living as I had in the hospital was taking me back into blankness. What do I need to live well:
It adds: love woman's losses, adventures and coming through. Soul presence. What has 2002-2006 been good for:
Now I have to set out to change the way I live. First thing is publish Being about. I can do that now. [notes on agents] - Spent the day, the whole day, fixing html in the theory section. About time. It was bad. Only the long one left, Being about. 30th Being about is fixed. Now what. A dream of a house I'm moving into that I now see is missing half the roof, all one side - would say R side. When it rains the water soaks into the better side too. What is the sensation of not wanting to do things? Biz. Task things. The feeling is, not today, not now. LA Times today reports Nature piece yesterday that says very intelligent children's brains develop at a different rate, are thickening more slowly for instance at the forebrain and then pruning/thinning later. Age 7 for normals, 12 or 13 for very smart. 31 Phoned Robert's Automotive and felt my blood pressure go up - just that, phoning a mechanic. And then I paid $793 for new brakes. Left front caliper pin worn out and loose, L front rotor not resurfaceable.
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