| in america 10 part 4 - 2006 april-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
April 1st 2006 I used to read - I'm saying that thinking of sources of pleasure - I used to be enthralled with my dreams - I used to be in love with somebody or other - I used to be looking at vision - I used to be interested in fairy realms of images and language - I used to be in touch with a neighbourhood - the journal records so many lives of interest - I used to be interested in design - I used to be interested in clothes! - I used to be interested in plants.
- I am left with plant matter absorbing sunlight, making sugar, and exploiting this success. The plant interferes not only with the passage of light but the flow of water and the creep of other things about it .... It evolves and comes to pervade the environment to the utmost possibility; it reproduces excessively in forms that inherit its increasing powers; and in the shadow of its reality we were brought forth. Land plants are understood as seaweeds selected from the great multiplicity of thalassiophytes, ... died off on the surface, waxed against evaporation, rooted, piped for water flow, built up with transparent bricks made from the excess of sugars, yet still reproduced by seaways. Plant life is integrated with its surroundings ... its form becomes the manner of obstructing or intercepting the goings-on. Every intercept makes new events. Thus the three main scenes of the earth, which are the sea, the coast and the land, define with their increasing complexity three main arenas of plant evolution in clarity far exceeding the pervasive course of the free animal. A plant is a living thing that absorbs in microscopic amounts over its surface what it needs for growth. It spreads therefore an exterior, whereas the animal develops, through its mouth, an interior. Corner's book on plants. He is one of the people who are interested in something in the right way, the people I'm grateful to and delight in. Corner, Minnaert, Ong. I should make a list. Not finding it easy to say why. Love. Reading them I'm delight and love. They understand in the way I like to, somehow in color and in clear bright wholes.
- Transcribing spring of 1994. I was applying for the Orpheus pilot. That's 12 years ago. There was a conversation with something lovely. I was alert in process. Smelling hyacinth. There's one in a glass across the room dark purple next to maximally intense oranges in the Bauer bowl. I raged at Tom this morning. I slammed the door hard twice. He started his mollifying-a-woman routines and I kept stopping him, I don't want to talk to him until he cops. To what? What it comes down to is not wanting me. No use to complain of that. Wanting me minimally. Not acting to be with me. It's inarguable. He wants me attached but he doesn't want to be with me. It's been like that since I met him. Periodically I blow up. I have a cold side that says, so much the better, makes it easier to leave, means I don't have demands on my time. Keeps the wolf away as is, good balance, no agony, I get the benefits without the costs. It's not personal, he's like that with any woman. It's his only-child thing. He gets his emotional juice from the men he works with. It doesn't occur to him to want more. I'm always going to starve with him. Do I need more than that to thrive? No it says. I have to make friends in work. What I said is completely true. He's emotionally homosexual but not sexually. Most men are.
3rd Tom has a room. Sigh, big sigh. Tom has a room. Centre City Rooms 4th and Beech, room 200. It has wide windows looking east. Tom's new adventure, a desk, a throne, a fridge. A single bed with a new mattress. From the pillow palm fronds flowing and birds streaking down the glass across the street. High ceilings. It's a well, a cell. It's quiet. The desk is a writer's desk. I'll wash his tiger blanket and find new stuffings for his blue cushions. I'm happy for you Mr Tom. We came through once again. 7th 1.8 GHz iMac with upgraded 1 GB of RAM, superdrive, upgraded 250 GB HD, airport card and warranty. Final Cut Pro Studio, 20", $1599. I should buy that. It says no, buy it when I know more and can afford it. Could start learning Final Cut Pro and Protools. Do I want to do this? What's changed is:
I'm transcribing London 1987 seeing how it's not readable as a narrative and it's too many notes but I was doing something else then. I was doing something right because look how I looked but something wrong because I was for instance angry at Luke because he was becoming a man. I was reading and researching so wide, looking for attracting shreds, being-instruction, art ideas. I began very narrative, for instance telling the Frank story, and then in the GW I'm very narrative again, but in 1987 - I'm transcribing London Sept-Oct 1987 - I'm silent and elliptical, sometimes have no clue what that was about. The reading notes are too many but I keep winnowing them. Was more visual then. What if I now had a visual art I actually could practice. 9th Mitch suddenly writing to say the excavation is happening today. Stacy's three reply letters about Pixie and fairytales. Al feels loved and it scares him but he can handle it. He sent me a fantasy about bashing someone's head into a flush lever etc and I sent him Artaud and said look at Genet. Tom is very thin. He's eating now but he's not catching up because he's working so hard. He's letting me help figure out money. We had dinner at Denny's Friday night and went for breakfast yesterday. After a couple of hours he needs to go back to his room. When I stopped at Whole Foods he fell asleep in the jeep. I made him a housewarming bag full of coffee, milk, honey, bread, cheese, natchos, salsa. Good kinds. We agreed something about getting married, very casually in the jeep while we were driving back from North Park. I said we could maybe do it at the end of our lives when the marriage had already been accomplished. He liked that. It could be like a graduation certificate. His letting me into the money questions is a large sign of trust. Ten years later. 10 Transcribing 1987 and editing 1999. In 1999 in March when I break up with Tom and don't get the SSHRC postdoc, in grief, I break into a fine voice. This morning I woke from a dream that I'm somewhere away from home in a hostel and the maids move my bed twice. First my bag and then my camera too are stolen. My credit cards. I have nothing. I look through my drawers. There are a few rolls of film in their heavy cans. I'm weeping and shouting until my throat hurts. So I woke glum saying what I am often saying but only briefly: Tom is a dead end, I shouldn't be hanging on with him. My body is showing that I'm not living well. Teaching isn't good for me. I used to be a living spirit and now I'm empty. I don't believe my dreams are significant. I'm mostly not talking to the book. I have no current life, only the life in other times. Am I only real when I'm in grief? I don't think grief can be sustained, it comes as a high moment but they can't all be that. Does it mean I should leave Tom so I'd be in grief again? Would that do it? Wouldn't I be driven into crushes again if I did? 11 Next res I should do a 3-part series on embeddedness and dissociation. Evolution. Perception-action circuits as the basis for mind. Emotion and embeddedness. Dissociation and cultural dissociation. Right science: felt science, science and love. 12 Transcribing 1988, not long before I went back to school. Notes on optics and acoustics, electromagnetism. Notes in orgin. Current. I was fighting for the garden, just starting with Rob. There - that realm of my gift, abstract intuition. The wordless. Many notes, anything personal very brief. I was immersed in the universe. Now I'm the boy in the bubble. Experimental film is the realest life I found. That wing of it, the people who were interested in seeing and the universe. I'm so isolated. I went to Vancouver to that. Love. Am I the only woman who has that spatial/abstract feel. It's not math or logic: though it's geometrical. Oh - I had to rummage written history for it. It would give me hope to feel I could live there again. Embodiment studies is just a girl thing, people and feelings, body as emotion and sex, not body as finest intelligence. The two of them who could go there were both lesbians and they both bailed on me for sexual/emotional reasons. I need boys - do I? Mind and cosmos not mind and land. I've been holding off on everything because this central love isn't in them. [My college] is not the place. I wish Brakhage were still alive and holding a court. Where are those artists who live in the cosmos? I could belong to a community now, I'm not afraid of men. I should go where that love is, only there. But the community I want no longer exists - right? Who would know, Marilyn Brakhage? Transcribing Aphrodite's garden and earlier I'll have a lot of notes I need and can compile them and use them. 61. Ten years, say. Maybe 63 by the time I get started. What am I feeling. Pain at heart. Missing myself. It's not too late. Embeddedness and cultural dissociation. The boy in the bubble. He was mortal. He and his mother touched for the first time when he was on his way to die. SCID. The black gloves. The toys. Anxiety. A therapist came and they fantasized adventures in which he protected her. Nightmares about King Germ. One two three four / I can't take it anymore. Sitting and rocking. The suit. 2006 The boy in the bubble PBS American Experience series - Then I went to Mexico with shooting pains at the top of my head. Dr Felix was away but his young partner was there on his own. When I walked in he came out of the washroom looking startled, "Que pasa?" "I have an appointment." Etc. I was in the chair and he was getting something and he said from across the room, "Do you meditate?" "Why do you ask?" He was reluctant to say, or not sure what he meant. "There's something." I encouraged. He wondered whether I have healing powers. I said people say I'm calm and that they can feel something from my hands. He said he's at the third level of reiki. When he'd levered up my molar he said he could stop bleeding with his hand. I thought he meant by pressing gauze on the excavation, but he put one hand on the left side of my jaw and the other 5" from the side of my face with the hole. I could feel heat radiating into whatever wasn't so numbed it didn't feel anything. A nice heat, yellow and sunny. His name is Guillermo Tello de Meneses Leal. 13 Thursday afternoon. Two clear weeks before packet 4. Oh gracious antibiotic has mostly ended the shooting pain. Here's my brown hand against the page. A good shape. I was thinking as I walked home from Starbucks how bad design - the shapes of cars or armchairs - distresses because it demonstrates the wrongness of the bodies that will be pandered to by those. 14 A note on slow death. This Friday morning on the deck in a perfect temperature, waiting for my beans and peas to cool. Very short term memory. I'm often unable to carry something for the time it takes to go from one page to another. For instance remembering which pill is the antibiotic and which the anti-inflammatory. And longer kinds of memory like losing Luke's girlfriend's name. And the time I couldn't remember where I parked. Now I as if press any unusual location into my head as I'm leaving the jeep. The humiliating way I said the same things to the auto service guy who drove me home, probably in the same tone. It may have been the third time. There are more little creases on my face, the fine ones, all over. The way things that used to interest me now don't, my dreams for instance, plants on the side of the road. I go out expecting that I'm seen as negligible and ugly. I used to have that fine subtle intuition looking for something everywhere. That strong-rooted molar gone forever. 15 I'm angry at people because they don't care about beauty. Reading the Chaos notes in 1988 I ramp into joy and interest. How could I live in that again. I need a university. Childhood of the philosopher - is it an extract from the journal when it's up. How to find the next income. From March 8 2000: What I'd do if I had money. Go back to my pagan studies and make films. I would make films for the far future, immaculate states of beauty. I'd have a big light workroom and fine equipment and helpers. A tech pagan. I'd go to New York and stay in a hotel. Work would be all I'd need. What is the fight. To make people better by making them able to love the world and their own being. 16 Tom wanting me to get up at 8 in the morning and drive to his skid row room and sit there on his single bed and watch TV while he provides snacks. I would rather stay in my own room reading about times when we were in the Maryland Hotel together and had fucked the night before and were in a bed seeing sunrise at the window. Or else what. That's the question that makes me even consider such a thing. There's a grey batten over the sky, not a day to go to Mexico.
17 Yesterday driving 94 and then the Sunrise Highway with Tom I was seething in misery. He carried on cheerfully. I was talking to myself about suicide knowing I won't do it but feeling the wish. I said I was feeling everything is behind me. What specifically. All the kinds of times when I was fully in and with and interested. I think of it as if it is something about the time, but it's the state. I was at the site of Tom's hippy cabin on the Banner Grade feeling heart strain walking up even a small slope. I'm weak. When I'm carrying groceries I have to breathe harder just to climb the two flights of stairs. I'm scared of heart disease. I have a big soft hole in my jaw and it is breeding bacteria that are making my throat hurt. I don't like the dark cold wet weather. On the Banner Grade I was lying on my back under an oak praying to the universe, upward into the tree, for help to know where to go, begging for another life, as if begging something to come and take me away, take me somewhere, take me into life again. Memory, isn't it. It's memory and it's also true that I need to live differently than this. What did I see yesterday. A young lesbian border patrol officer in a green uniform wearing a gun getting out of a Wrangler. She had a stern young head and was beautiful. I saw oaks in bloom looking like another kind of tree, softened with goldy-green tassels in bunches all over the canopy. Would I be better alone now? Would I be more present wherever I am? I believe in the journal project but it isn't going to work - is it? Should I go camping to Utah for the whole month of May?
18 Yesterday I went with Eliz up 15 to San Marcos, the hilly back country, to Tom Piergrossi's nursery. It was bright and warm and she drives the white truck like a rocket. She does me good. She laughs. The nursery was interesting. It turned out to be the headwaters of the salvias. Andy Maycen says he has 230 kinds. There were shining heaps of salvia leaf everywhere along the garden margins. Oaks left where they've been. A long bird dormitory, each pen with a tree grown into it and a central corridor roofed over with wire. Cooing down the way. Plants this against that accidentally. Winding paths. Steep hillsides covered over with trees and gardens looking down onto their forecourt. A couple of burly gay men in their forties. Eliz brought me back to La Jolla and I was driving back through Bird Rock in the late afternoon light feeling something I hadn't felt [for a long time] - that California lift. 19
- Across the room orange nasturtiums and scarlet salvia in a water glass. Above them on the next shelf jasmine and small white pelargonium in the silver bowl. It was a superb day at Taft. I worked. I could work. I was steady and inexhaustible, I loved my motion weeding trimming sweeping turning stepping placing. The front garden was burgeoning in heat after rain. Pink salvia up into the hardenbergia along the roof. A small red one. The large white cistus blooming and budding. The mountain marigold spread wide. Brought home oranges and flowers. From the library on Cass, music and books. A new Gordimer. Question: how to live from now on without being afraid of bad things. While doing whatever I could to look after what shd be looked after. 20 Posted the index and first page of Frank today. -
23rd I woke not long after midnight. It's raining. Not much. Palm fronds are blown all to one side. Didn't want to stay overnight with Tom in his room it seems. When he came wanting more money from his envelope after swearing he would never do that I was sore at heart - so sore. Frightened. Then there is a big wrangle because he doesn't want to know that I have reason to be scared. He may be buying drugs. How did he go through $1200 in one week? He left the jeep in gear with me in it, was that telling me something? He's very thin. I saw him at the counter of the Chinese food place on Broadway last night a bony old thing with his jeans hanging off his rump. Since June 2002 how has it gone with us. He moved into that vile room in the Golden West. It was on the men's floor and I couldn't stay there. Bedbugs. Then he flipped out on meth and we didn't see each other for a year and I pined. Then he was in the mission and I couldn't even phone him. Then he was in the vile room in the Reiss. Then he was back in the mission. Then he was homeless and sleeping on the roof. Then he was in the vet tent. And now he's in a room and I'm happy for him that he has a room and he loves his room but it still is not a room I can be in. It's a welfare hotel. It's not a good space like the West or the Maryland. He has to pay $20 to let me stay the night. It's a single bed. He has his mad routine. We have to have corn chips and something sweet to drink. He didn't get coffee filters. I stepped into Rite Aid to buy some. He was whining about wanting to buy them at the 99 cent store. I said I'd buy them and did. When he stopped at the garbage Chinese food place he left the bag on the floor and someone took it. I marched back to the jeep and came home and went to bed and have woken thinking of the many things that are smashed. This is a period of ruin. The east place, the red and white house, 824 East Pender not maintained and falling apart, the Maryland gutted, Frank and Janeen and Joyce dead, Ed gone, Tom bumping along amid the incapable trash of skid row. He is what he is. Buoyant. He loves his room. The men at work like him. He has stuck by me, what more do I want. Alright what more do I want. Trust, so I can take off my clothes with someone again. Trust, confidence. What a series of losers it's been. Either that's all I can get or I have been hanging out in the wrong places. If it's the former this is the time to ask whether I still need to be with anyone. If it's the latter I should slip back into the stream. I'm still going to be a lame woman wherever I am. Another thing that's smashed - the garden. Things have their moment. As long as I hang on with him nothing can be new again. I'm just squatting in the ruins. My life with Tom is used up. The journal project is stupid isn't it. Should I stick with it anyway? I know I'm going to. Am I done with embodiment at [my college]? Seems like I'm handing it to Carolyn and Juliana. Will I find a way to make movies now? Will I do that? When I have a pension. If I'm going to live somehow as an artist again I will need to be close to myself and immediate again. Being with Tom I adapt the wrong way, toward closedness. Bitter. If this time has a title Teaching letters isn't it. Ruination. Vacancy. DR has a volume called Deadlock. Teaching letters is if anything a spin-off. Dullness. Death? Living with death. Wreckage. The wreck. Can I live well in the tragic end? Kindly. Honestly. As beautifully as possible. Strategically. - Then I lay there not sleeping and watching a star move west, against and then behind a bar in the window. I thought plants yes are always new again, and the stars are being wrecked so slowly I won't see it happen. 25 I've moved the 5 volumes from Sept 2002 into the next section so now there are only 25 in GW. The new section [was] called Fading and this vol wd be vol 10. Set up vol 1 yesterday and today. Ed dies and I move to SD. Tom gets vile. Fading index page has the melted shadow. It's clear now that that's the correct break though I liked the earlier last line - Good morning said a woman with thick grey hair, amused. Reading Final Cut Pro books. It'll cost me about $2000 to get set up. 26 Weeding at Dawne this aft. 27 When I'm gardening I bring home nasturtium buds and they open immediately in a water glass, orange nasturtiums, purple verbena, blue ceanothus. The orange is in another world, cuts itself out of the background so sharply at its edges, glows up so ecstatically in this grey light. I'm transcribing Fading volumes. So far don't seem very faded. They're candid about teaching. What should I do - I think maybe a concealed link? In the Haida girl's right eye it seems to be saying. And then I can post it openly when I stop teaching. Post a cleaned up Teaching letters version maybe. Do I know the answer to my question? 29 Bought Tom a $200 bicycle yesterday from Felipe. Finally went to Rite Aid and checked my blood pressure. 138/78. Without the gym. That's a better systolic than there has ever been and the diastolic went down the second time I tried and was probably still a bit alarmed. I forgot that in 2004 July-Nov when I was so bleak and dull the book said 1. it would get better in 2006. and 2. I should do Orpheus now. It said the dullness was leveling out of addiction. I thought maybe the section should be called Plain time not Fading. I'll wait to decide. The original break in 2004 was where I got duller and sometimes better grounded in tragedy. Have taken out places where I'm mean about students. There'd be more to erase if I were going to post them now. 30 Tom's 60th. We took the bikes down a trail I didn't know. There was Tom in black jeans and teeshirt riding ahead and sometimes behind, knock-kneed in his way, like a boy. 2nd May
For Fading the edit's still unclear. At the point where I had the original break it isn't fading yet. That happens vol 6. But then it gets so bland it's not worth reading mostly. Haven't resolved what to do about the teaching notes. GW was about Tom and Being about. Fading so far is about teaching and death. For the Work and days index page maybe a para that tells which sections are worth reading and why. AG was about sex and power. DR was about intuition and beauty and artists' life. Queens-London I think is one section. Forming. Still at home was about ambition? I think Fading is not the last section. One more.
Forming begins with Queens and ends with the women's movement and experimental film in London. Dames rocket begins with moving to Vancouver. Drugs, film, photography, writing, lesbians, up north. Ends with getting pregnant with Rowen. 7 One of those good days. Stayed in Tom's room last night. He wanted me to see his room at night and watch CNN with him in the morning. This morning he woke suddenly and jumped into bed with me. Hand down my pyjama pants and squeezing my butt. Presses up close. His breathing changes. I monitor. Allow enough to get touch, stop him from tweaking the too-direct bits. We cooperatively wash the coffee maker that was last fired up in the Reiss. Watch Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Tom looks beautiful. I take his picture and pictures of his room and the El Cortez [from his window]. I'm anxious about whether he'll override me, he's anxious that I'll be dissatisfied and want to leave him. At the same time we're comfortable. He takes as much size as he can in his natural way, I tell him when I don't want him to talk about something. I turn off the TV. He asks me if I'm happy. I marvel at the way his chin can be gone one day and so handsomely back today. Then we go to the farmers' market. He wants to go look for CDs and I say I'll meet him back in the market. I sit on the curb opposite the buskers watching people pass. Tom comes sits with me. We comment on anyone in front of us. We are having a wonderful time, very equal and lively. 8 That handwriting is remarkably dumb. What else I wanted to say about Tom was that when he's in his bed listening to cars pass he sees colored eddies around them, colors like neon. That's in the five minutes before he's asleep. The eddies vary with the kind of car. -
dynamic system - physical system - dynamis power - systems evolve - one state to another - describable - dynamical systems theory - describing motion, change - eg planets
9 Tuesday. I had pulled the plastic off the heater thinking that after more than a year with no birds the bird mites would be gone. I don't know how it's possible but after I got home Sunday, through yesterday morning when I replasticked it, invisible mites swarmed out and covered my arms with bites. Benadryl and hydrocortisone have calmed them down. I can taste the benadryl in my mouth. My scalp is itching just thinking of it. NY Times reports men have higher salivary testosterone when they have been playing with guns, and they're more likely to want to harm others. White blood cells from mice with an immunity to cancer, if injected in other mice, will kill tumors. Many animal parents will cull some of their children or allow litter mates to do it. Sharks hatch babies internally but don't have a means to feed them so they devour each other in their gestation sac and only one is born. 10 I dreamed saying to someone that we can know about other things but we fail to understand humans because we're hard-wired to have delusions about them. The sensation with Verna and the other girls at church of pain at the stupidity of their speech. The moments when I was a child of looking at adults and saying to myself They have forgotten, you must remember. Philosophy is about finding mistakes in thinking. 11 May-grey all this week. It clears sometimes late in the afternoon. Tap on the door this morning. Michael in his black hat and leather jacket, pink infections on his hands, a front tooth missing. He's manic. Wants to show me poems in his Leonard Cohen book. I give him a glass of chocolate milk and shoo him onto the roof where his loud voice won't reach Nora in her meeting downstairs. We sit on the deck chairs. He seizes on anything he sees and talks about it full speed. I endure for a while and then say I'm going in. He follows me to the door still talking. He says he knows he's manic, they have him on low-dose meds. I say I can't be with him when he's that way, could we visit sometime when he's balanced out. He says, when he's depressed? I say yes, if he's honest. He says I've meant more to him than anyone these two years. His eyes have filled with tears. He's standing so tall above me ravaged and dirty, ill and spinning, bereft and bereft, Michael Duke in his only life. A hug at least, he says. Yes. He holds me tight. He's still pulling things out to show me, a leather change purse with beading, Mr Ranier Park souvenir from the 50s, when I shut the door on him. - This is amazing. I was listening to Orfeo ed Eurydice and remembering Robert MacLean. I tracked something unlikely on Google and found him a professor at Ritsumeikan University, which lists his publications in [a university journal called] Transaction, Hans Christian Anderson's "The steadfast tin soldier": variations upon silence and love; 2001 Theodore Roethke's "Praise to the end"; 2001 James Wright's "The branch will not break": poems of pure attention. So Robert are you still that blasted starved being? Though professor in Kyoto for 20 years. 12 Note: I have lied to Tom twice, both times about the same thing - ie about interfering when he protects his image at other people's expense. I told him I wrote Rebecca asking if she knew where he was, but when he asked if I'd told her any more I said no. In fact I told her he'd been on crystal. And when I was scouting for bikes at Felipe's and Felipe was talking about Oscar looking for Tom, I told Felipe Oscar supplies Tom with drugs. I told Tom I'd told Felipe he had his own reasons to avoid Oscar and when Tom asked if I'd said any more I said no. I think I was right to interfere and am right to lie but also there is a cost. Rebecca needed to know and Tom needs to stay away from Oscar. Tom should tell people these things himself but he's still somehow evading. So what is the cost. The cost of his evasion is pervasive. Is there an extra cost of my lying? It says no. Is Tom's uncon feeling it? If it does, does it also know there is a correct reason? Can the uncon approve? Can certain lies make more confidence between people? Was there a better solution? It says no. Was there something else about Tom - he has about $5000 saved. Writing to Alex about self-cannibalism and retroflexive fantasy. Luke phoned last night talking about a project for fixing the world. He has ideas and they're always huge and amorphous and he doesn't act on them. I can see a philosophical drive, he wants to understand how the world works, but he doesn't have traction, he doesn't have a method. He gets very heady. He has broken up with Kim again. 13 Email from Stacy saying she's spirit as well as body. Body is suffering, spirit is lightness and sweetness. She's afraid I'll disapprove that she wants 'spirit' again. So I ask, do I abuse teaching to get students to suffer for me? Do I have an uncon desire to torture? That I inflict on the vulnerable by means of an ideology about reactivation and completion? I think Stacy is saying she wants to cut off something, float up, and the idea of spirit is that for her. I do feel angry with her for that: alright, deke out. One more zombie in the world. I'm happy when students come through, though, that well-founded joy. Asking this after spending yesterday rereading Millie. Am I discovering people are too weak to be able to use this? Then what? Millie quit because I didn't continue propping her. I'm feeling this about all these girls - they are interested in mbo only to the extent that it gets them maternal attention. It's the weak ones. I'm thinking triage - don't waste time on the weak and crazy ones because they won't carry it through. Books would be better, like Estes, because the seed is broadcast so far that though it falls among rocks mostly, the occasional bit takes, somewhere. Even Susan was a waste.
14 1. When Tom squeezed my ass he got a hard-on. I wasn't sure he could still do that. 2. Not long after we turned out the light I started feeling bites. 3. The TV event of the morning was Louis Farrukan in a fine brown suit very clearly spoken and convincing explaining how by torturing the strongest slave males in front of their women, slaveholders convinced black women that they could not rely on their men. 300 years later black women are strong and teach their daughters to be strong while teaching their boys to be weak. The Nation of Islam wants to restore the god-ordained hegemony of the men. Tom and I watched that with equal and similar interest, cuddled up on the tiger blanket Sunday morning with a covered sky at the window. Leafless jacarandas coming purple on the streets. I'm home later with itchy arms and legs. Nation of Islam, the Teamsters, and a Latino mob recruiting at the mission, he says. A button man is someone who pops people with a pistol. Transcribing the vol that begins Dec 2004. Bad. Lumps along in daily junk. That doesn't say it. It's a dull brain. Tom making and saving money and buying me dinner, paying for gas. 16 Tuesday morning in the grey. It's so grey. My finishers' manuscripts this week. Now I'm into 3 weeks straight of [college] and then it'll be June. What there is to do: [list]. Angry and disgusted today. Transcribing 1993 I'm disgusted at my flailing and waste about Kenneth. Thinking of [the college] I'm angry they are holding off embodiment studies, and I'm angry that the gathering after the res will be just girls emoting. I'm angry that I'm wasting my time on students. I'm angry that the journal project can't be loveable without being dishonest. I'm fed up that Susan dropped me the way she did. I went to [the college] in such good faith and with such brilliance but now I'm disappointed. What to do - I don't want a job, I want work. I want to be with smart people. I want to be working at my best. I want exciting times. 17th Transcribing the fall of 1993, Ken Sallitt, avid moments and then obsession tedious and pitiable on and on. In 1994 it gets better until 2002. Since then it's been wrong. In 2002 I left the university, I left my house and neighbourhood, I moved into this little cell. Now it is coming up to 4 years of isolation. I have never lived in such isolation. I want to do the journal project but it's not going to bring me anything. I have put a lot of time into [the college] and have not built anything worth anything, it has been a rest. I know I need to jump but I have no clue. What wd I do if I had money. What do I still care about. I care about epistemology. I care about beauty. I need to be more tuned and open. I want to have more influence with better people. I want to be more engaged and real. I'm stable with Tom finally and don't know whether holding onto him is keeping everything else locked.
- Then went to Scott's and found it in ravishing bloom - the giant Burmese honeysuckle, two kinds of pink roses, the abutilon thriving, the small cistus. The silk tree is leafed out and the little apricot is radiant. The passiflora thick with pink flowers, no monarchs this year. The little front room is delectable, green and white and silver and yellow and pink. All but that brown concrete fountain. I was wrestling dead rose whips, working hard. Pleasure. The success of things I've done, the way the Burmese honeysuckle is looping down over the table, the abutilon in pots, the white lattice against white, the steps. The silk tree spread wide and fine above the top of the fence. The froth and color of the front room, and oh at the moment the shade bed right of the door has towers of flowers, the acanthus, the angelica, the oakleaf hydrangea. Interesting shapes all heaped. Dark green. 18 Grey again. Something bit me last night, meaning there is a bedbug imported with my pillows, meaning I'll wash all bedding and pillows today and drag the futon outside and wash the bedframe with soap and throw away the cushion. I guess. And that may not do it. Michael Duke at the door last night abject and hobbling, dirty and distraught. His arm is swollen and there are infected patches on his fingers. He wanted a cup of tea and to be taken to UCSD Emergency. There was a story about being picked up by police and dropped off in National City, his prescription meds confiscated. Something about his sleeping place being stripped I think. He asked for some of my supper. I knew it was mothering he wanted. Left his eagle feather with me because the police at the hospital could charge him for it. Said he found it on the doorstep at St Vincents. "I've lost so much." Wanted to put me down as his next of kin. While I'm talking about bad things: saw on television last night the ad I have been hearing them working on downstairs. Three young women, stupid looking, rushing smiling into a casino to the tune of Viva Las Vegas. Viva Viejas. Dreamed my car had been towed, the Fairmont. I was rushing over streets being flooded as I watched. It's the era of vile George Bush. Where is the Clinton who can turn it. Stacy has been confused, giving things up, wanting to talk to me on the phone. Many emails. I've been writing her off. Today she got it. This is the phase she's working in her dance program. It's called chaos. So now she'll finish that. Relieved. And me - is this the 4th-packet disgust with students? Global. Something I'm noting about Tom is what good grace he is showing about getting old. Muscle has been vanishing off his bones. His chest is a narrow cage. I squeezed his bum and it was like water. He said, I think it may never come back. He laughs. He imagines himself doddering. I can't be funny about being stupid but Tom is affectionate to the unbearable thought. 19 Looking at the photos I took of Scott's yesterday in love with that garden. Especially the patio. 22 It's Rowen's birthday. I was watching a cataclysm movie last night and I dreamed I was with Tom looking at a flood of water rushing toward us. There'd be rogue waves every few moments, coming in with a lot of force. Their force seemed to be less, though, and we thought of wading up through the water to a building on the ridge. Tom was doing what he does, wanting to pull me with him. I thought I'd do better more on the edge where the force was less. Tom was heading straight for the center. I went my way and let him go his. I was wading forward waiting for the wave but it didn't come. I reached the long building and went looking for Tom. There was a Jewish woman saying she wanted to have beds prepared in all the rooms. I open a door upstairs. The room is dim, the air is warmer. A quilt on a mat on the floor - that sensation of warmth. Step outside and look down at the water. Run into people who know Tom and say they have seen him. The last one says he went up that little hill behind the building to look for a place to sleep. From the hill I can see a plain with our city beyond it. The water is gone. Tom will have done what I now want to do, walk back to the city. When I get there it is all old timey, horse-drawn trolleys etc. Later there was something about Paul and Pat Churchland. As I was falling asleep I was trying to remember a moment of contact in the weekend, some moment that sank into me. On Saturday we drove around looking for a place for Tom, the four segments of Guy Street in Oldtown and the ex-military complex high on the hill, like a huge motel, and the Gill building under the flight path. Early Gill. Then rushing up 8 to Santee to the drive-in to see The Da Vinci code and yesterday after the market rushing up 8 again to the off-road area I know and rushing back. A lot of highway. A lot of bad music. Two things: one, I notice I'm reluctant to write about any of this since I'm not writing well, because I don't want to have to transcribe it later. Two, something about how it is with Tom these days, comfortable, more comfortable than we have ever been. Well, no - sometimes on happy days in the Maryland. Two nice things he said. One was Saturday night leaning in the driver's side door saying goodnight. He said, I want to tell you that sometimes when you're happy you are so drop-dead gorgeous it makes my heart expand. The other was that small breasts, my breasts, are like sports cars - GT cars I said - yes GT cars (because they're fast off the mark). But what did I see this weekend. The oaks in bloom, everywhere in the Lake Morena area the dark somber oaks full of what can look like light: thick polleny tassels in greenish gold or brownish gold or even, one I saw, a dark pink. At the drive-in the sky next to the screen that had its back to the sunset a luminous dark blue with one star. The contrast of the flat near screen catching projected light and the openness and realness and sheer distance of the western sky. That was worth writing because I didn't fully realize what I was seeing as I was seeing it. It rained during the night. 23 Dreamed I was naked in bed with Robert MacLean kissing and cuddling. 24 Wednesday. This week the sky has cleared. I'm waking at six, early morning in summer. Airy quiet, birds twittering. Across the room in a glass Indian paintbrush from the country, with a purplish blue flower that has high eyebrows. Packet 5 this week. Odd ends. Get them out of the way and have two and a half months this time securely paid every two weeks. What'll I want to do with them. No more TV. Gym, camp on my own, zoo, bike carrier, finish transcribing 8 vol of AG, invent Body and cosmos, learn to swim? Nora's garden? Transcribing 1993 yesterday. Not enough work or days, a lot of grinding. But a note from Michael Meade about needing permission. I don't know why that is so but the evidence is I don't have permission - I've worked without permission and so I don't publicize. I do it but I need and don't have permission to show it. If that's correct, permission would make the difference. [In those days] I was staggering from thought to thought learning to accommodate a new necessity. Shouldn't call it obsession. It took more than 10 years but it's done, that's what being comfortable with Tom means. So now what - 1. domestic life 2. theoretical life 3. rapturous beauty 4. action. It's the last one I'm hesitating over. 25 May Tom had a ride home last night and showed up at 5:30 wanting to go play. We ended at H and M Landing parked looking over Mission Bay toward the yellow sky after sunset. Tom had walked me around the Islandia dining room where he was a busboy when he was 16. He could see his house from the lawn. When he'd get home after work his mother would say she'd seen his bus crossing the bridge. Did she kiss you when you got home? Or I'd kiss her. On the mouth? - I asked that because of the way he's sweet about hello and goodbye. Would she ask you about your day at work? She'd debrief me. He wanted to listen to a Nancy Griffith CD he found at the goodwill. I was behind the steering wheel and he had his head on my shoulder. I didn't want the music but I held off saying so because he was in a lonesome-bliss state. What I liked but could not get very far into was the water which kept a bluesilver light as land and sky went charcoal grey. It was flowing without waves and kept smooth areas of surface that didn't shift. I was feeling dimly that it was an image for part I An ordered sea of light. We were looking across the water toward the notch in the skyline where Tom's house used to be. 26 [sketch] Moosehead blue flower The thing that happens when I'm falling asleep at night, never when I fall asleep in the daytime. It happens after I fall asleep and wakes me. What wakes me is that my heart is beating fast. I have faded into a zone of anguish about dying. Fear of damnation. Is there more to say about it? It seems not. When I fall asleep in the afternoon usually I'm reading and I fade into wonderful times and places, vanishing presences I like so much and cannot hold. Writing isn't what it was. I have less confidence. The voice that leads me falters - is it that? I'm more dubious, less energized. I say to myself, but I had it, years of it. I said to Daphne after Jam, Now I can write anything. It was energy in silent perception, I was registering and afterwards could discover what I knew. Now I'm not registering. I say to myself, is it teaching? Is it Tom? Is it living in this little jail? It says no, it's not feeling. And there I stop. It's not having Joyce. My mother's blankness. I sent her photos of Scott's garden and she wrote back "It invites me to relax and enjoy." Nothing. Years ago a moment in Kits with Paul K, looking at a couple of his friends who were having a self improvement anxiety talk, thinking, that's a mind to stay out of. The lean brown person I was then. Louie can't get me there though she could enjoy me when I'm there. How it is with Tom is I'm appreciating his qualities. He's not doing anything to make me guard myself. I'm seeing his weak mindedness in planning but also his good nature and sweet-heartedness and feelingness and loyalty. I look healthy though I'm fat. It's a covered dawn. There have been open mornings but this isn't one. On Wednesday night when I'd got back there was a news report on TV of a surfer at the cliffs at Nazarene College who'd been caught by a high tide and hadn't been able to get out and had drowned, and then a history of surfing on public television. Mennonite factuality Tom said. 28th Sunday morning. Open sky. dazzle of sun on the roof. I had the door open and have closed it because strong light through my lapsed vitreus matter hurts and makes me see, what are they, shadow wrinkles in my visual field. Have transcribed the day's ten pages of 1993. May in my house and the garden. The year between the MA and the doc, editing We made this. 29 Memorial Day Monday. Listening to NPR, a piece about death notification during this war. "Marine culture. What we try to do for each other when we fall." If it were a just war the beauty of loyalty would not be shameful. But they have to be loyal to more than their brothers. They have to be loyal to their imagined enemies or it is no good. Tom came on Friday night in the one of his selves that's fox-faced, narrow and sharp. Motoring. I wondered whether he's using just a bit sometimes, once or twice a weekend. Saying this for the record. The string says he's not. We were lying together on the couch yesterday, my idea. I was buzzing a bit. He was antsy. What are you feeling in your body? Had to pull it out of him. Something in the belly. What's it about? He said the work week he had. Wayne is tweaking him. Why are they so aware of each other? It feels erotic to me. Wayne's stance, legs apart, spitting. Needling. There's always somebody wherever he works. The way he doesn't like to be seen in Hillcrest. I was talking to him yesterday about the homosexual-cure people wanting to get into high schools and tell gay kids they can be fixed. I said why don't these people think about the women who'd be married to these guys? It's 4 years since Tom has fucked me. Yesterday as we were crossing the street to the gas station to pump up my tires he was saying I'm his friend, brother, lover ... I said, We're not lovers. What I want to say is how disaffected and sloppy I am with students now. I don't want to engage. I run overtime, I resent and cut corners. I don't have confidence in Margo. It's coming up to 5 years. I was remarkably pure at heart and I've lost that. Because Margo wanted to have Ralph and Francis involved in embodiment studies, it says. If what I was giving didn't win me more than that, the child heart shuts down. 30 Don't explain yourself to students. They misunderstand and it gets worse. Don't be equal with people who aren't equal. 1. Home life 2. theoretical life 3. rapturous beauty 4. action and enterprise. Considering this list thinking how it would be to accept the classification. For instance that home life and rapturous beauty are in different zones. I like something about action and enterprise being a separate zone because they have been, they haven't followed from the others. Theoretical life and rapturous beauty are productive and aspiring but not promotive. That's the vacant zone. So what would be the task of that zone. To get me access, respect, conversation, money, and influence. Promotion maybe is the word. No not only that. Proactivity. - Two things: One, bedbugs. I saw one zipping over my shoulder. Two. Bike ride this evening. Tom came straight here after work. Over the Laurel St bridge, noodling through the rose garden, up Park to University, looking for supper, café next to the Embassy Hotel, Guam reggae, sun going down. On the way home I recognize the street that leads to the bridge he showed me a month ago. He zooms down into the chasm. Steep. Jacaranda blooming above 40' cliffs of plumbago, scented geranium. It is the moment of pink afterglow on squirrel-tail grass. Plunging and climbing, and below the bridge the river of lights and sound. Coming home through that gash was perfect, the timing was perfect. Tom was happy. When I took him home he leaned his head back to be kissed like a girl. Trust. And I was happy because the moment in the gash was a real whole moment, we were in motion in beauty. 31 Jacaranda shadows on the sidewalk now. It has been overcast as the flowers came out, and then today walking home from Starbucks there they were one after the other like large Chinese cut-outs. The canopies are open enough so the whole twisty branch structure shows, black with rounder lighter grey clumps at their ends. Elegant. 1st June Thursday morning, not seven yet. Still have evaluations to write but the semester has faded out. I open the computer and don't have anyone to talk to. A short story that has made me imagine writing stories. An old woman - somewhere near 70 by the evidence of the story but my mom's age in her qualities - coming through the tunnel between terminals in the Detroit airport (that I remembered from the last flight from Vermont). The walls surging with color that moved alongside the moving walkway and rushed ahead. Very steep escalators at either end. She is on that walkway and a woman passes her with a little boy who looks at her. She's remembering her dead husband and thinking of her mother and her daughters. An opinionated older daughter. It's a good story, the ends well tucked in. It remembers Woolf. There's the way I used to be with Mary about Ed, the flaming contempt when I was 17. The way she didn't cry for her husband but understood him, the way she felt the little boy. I wanted to send it to Mary but she wouldn't like it. It's too sophisticated for her. She feels some of what the woman feels but it's inarticulate in her. She'd be uncomfortable. When Megan wet the bed, she would come half-asleep to her parents' room, pull off the wet gown, and get between them in her mother's chemise, a little white sardine still fragrant with briny pee. That's a lovely sentence but my mom isn't loose or sensory enough to like it. Mary Gaitskill "The little boy" Harpers June 2006 78-84 2nd Francis is politicking against me which is fair because I am certainly politicking against him - very snarky little note - Lyubov has 'expertise in science,' ie I don't - our views of science are conventional, ie his isn't? He doesn't know what our students need. Their views of quantum science are okay. Etc. Margo asking whether my plans will change if Lyubov comes. I said without thinking No we'd be complementary. I'd better think what she might have been prepped to do. - Tantra non-dualist body-positive. Branches. Hindu tantra c/f Patanjali's classical, Kashmir Shaivism, Kaul school body for liberation, Shakta traditions the feminine, neo-tantra left-handed ie sex. Vajrayana Buddhism asana, pranayama, mantra, pujas, krijas (cleaning), mudras (seals), mandalas, yantras, visualization. Develop awareness of the subtle body and balance it, refining, balancing and enlivening the energy field. Alignment. Shiva Rea vibration/pulsation, thawing poses, allowing organic movement and breath, trance dance. Feel the energetic pulsation within a thought rather than suppress thoughts. - Beautiful Heinz Pagels 1982 writes "I often dream of falling ... In cold terror I fall into the abyss ... A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody cannot be destroyed ... As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness." Summer of 1988, "He had fallen 100 feet, hit hard, and died - . After impact, his body had tumbled 2,000 feet further down the mountain, where we found him on a shelf of rock." [Written by the physicist who was climbing with him.] 3 [on the radio] Meryl Streep and another woman singing a hymn in the late afternoon light. It wasn't much until Garrison Kiellor came in with a bass line. He was just sketching it in. I was seeing dark smudges in a stepped row. It took me to such a sharp memory of a Sunday afternoon at home, summer, green on the hill. Everyone there a brightness. A particular age, maybe 12 with Judy 9 and Paul 8. Mary and Ed were young still, 33 and 35. June. The yard was there as it always had been, house and barn and garage and oilhouse and corrals and pumphouse and pigbarn and the old Jansen house, the grey track beaten flat with trampled camomile and foxtail grass. The yard. Just that. No one visible. Looking east. What was the song - it was one of the Moody hymns. When I survey the wondrous cross. It was Kiellor's voice, his way of just brushing the underside of the tune with a dark hum, that opened the bright abiding moment of the yard. I guess it was Ed. - Quakers. Simplicity, remembering to check in, a focusing practice. Gendlin says he sat in meeting in Pendle Hill when he was a young man. "Focusing arises within a deep tradition that Quakers presence in the world." 4
Going into the murk of quantum theory because it is the locus of so much fantasy. Philosophy. 1. male blind spots, male rupture, worries about 'significance' of humans in the universe 2. death denial 3. traumatic dissociation of other kinds 4. metaphor unexamined 5. 'role of the observer' 6. worries about determinism A way of imagining the universe. A way of imagining ourselves. An ordered whole. The One. "Nature is impersonal, devoid of life, meaning and value." OR various marvels. Male disaffection: Descartes, Kant. Solution of false problem. "Our role has nothing to do with the place of our bodies in the physical universe." Embeddedness. If I go into quantum discourse I have the whole labour of diagnosing its fantasies and mistakes. Our earliness, "concept of a galaxy less than a century old." "a living universe" universe as computer paradigm experiments 1. Michelson-Morley speed of light unaffected by the movement of its source relative to the ether 2. calculations of amount of radiation emitted from hot, glowing objects yielded infinity as an answer "did away with the Newtonian conception of matter" They're right to want to revise Descartes and wrong in their motives and means. "clockwork" "hidden reality" "predetermined by the laws of nature" 1543 Copernicus De revolutionibus orbium coelestium 1687 Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg 1920s Whitehead Einstein - local realism - realism "objects exist from their own side" - locality, event in one place can affect an event in another only if there is time for propagation Bell 1964, nature violates local realism Bohr - framework of complementarity "To completely describe a quantum system one needs not one model but two. An electron, for example, is modeled as a wave and also as a particle. Such models are complementary rather than contradictory because they apply to different conditions." Plank 1900 light is emitted and absorbed in discrete packets of energy called quanta, photons Heisenberg new quantum mechanics 1924-5 The language is so bad! Operational meanings. Quantum mechanics as idealism. What it has to do with notions of god. Materialism - Lucretius - "nothing exists that is distinct both from body and from vacuity" 55 BC. Middle Ages thinks it heresy. Newton. Notion of field - action at a distance - it feels the immediate presence of the earth's gravitational field right where it is. Maxwell relations of electrical and magnetic fields. Electrical field "potentiality to influence the motion of a charged particle." An order of the universe exists and can be known. Counterculture as revolt against science. Andromeda the only galaxy out of millions that can be seen by the unaided eye. Astronomical order Scientific 'laws' 1. describe an invariance 2. universality 3. simplicity 4. intention to completeness 5. experimentation, controlled observation 6. tractable to mathematical description - is where quantum comes in, a limitation of mathematical describability 5 Put the last parts of Frank after up just now, to be able to collect the $450 for devel money. It ends well. "What did you need." 7 Nor wants me to prune her 70 feet of 15 foot tall eugenia hedge next week. Wants it hand pruned not power-sheared. It is 2100 square feet counting both sides! Dirty, full of insects, stuff dropping into my eyes when I'm struggling with a 10' pruner at full arm's length or wobbling on a ladder. Now she's annoyed that I don't want to - it's a whimsy of the rich. I've offered her an alternative but she's going to say she doesn't want it, so then I am going to end up doing it because I owe her. 5 min later it's solved, she likes my solution, she speaks to me herself when I phone Min. Laurie at Precision Landscaping, hourly rate and a man with 19 years experience. I'll be onsite.
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