in america 11 part 2 - 2006 july-august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

20th July Today: 1. I went to the gym. 2. shopped - green shirt and an orange one, good cut. 3. seniors' discount on a dil. Yesterday I stopped for Tom after work and we went to South Mission Beach. That beach shelves fast and the water was warm. Did I catch a wave? Maybe. Then we sat on the blanket and I unpacked supper. 21st 24 and 25 are up, I'm working on 23, and then there's only 22. Then GW is up and I shd modify its index page not much. And then. I'm worrying less about the bad things I say about people because it seems so unlikely any of them will read it. The conversation I have while I'm formatting is with Eleanor Wachtel. I can hear Tom's hoist clacking behind me - am parked next to the building site waiting for him to come off at 3:45. It's hot. What's the conversation with Wachtel. I've so often loved her conversations with writers, would I be a writer if she interviewed me? Definitely. She'd be interested in the right things. Q. What was the hardest thing about this project? A. As I transcribed and formatted I was continuously feeling its irrelevance to other people, my difference from other people, their dislike of what I am, their dislike of what I like. 22 I blew yesterday. Stopped working at 2, went for Tom's checks, got onto I-5, waited in the parking lot for three-quarters of an hour till Tom came off work. He was full of the saga of Dusty. We crawled in traffic in the heat while he told the story of lying to his boss because he was protecting his little con friend and getting caught because his friend misjudged. Then downtown looking for parking at quarter to five so he could open his two accounts where he cashes his cheques. I parked three blocks away and hurried back to be there if he needed me and it turned out the bank won't give him an account because his last one was overdrawn some small amount - something he avoided dealing with. So there we were after I'd wasted my afternoon, sweltering. I took him home. Parked. He wanted me to come up to his room. I said I was fried and needed to go home. He pressed. He wouldn't get out of the jeep. I don't want to do this now, I kept saying. He kept pressing. So then I popped. I was behind the wheel yelling remarkably. I don't remember what I said except the line that's so true it could be irrevocable, "I'm sick of slaving for such fucking incompetence!" and something about him being too fucking gutless to make a phone call. So then he got out and I came home. What shd I think. What do I feel. A little acid edge of - fear? Insecurity. There I go to the computer and book a flight two weeks from today. 23 All of GW is up. There are little things. Write the philosophy intro. Weed some of the bookwork. A bookwork content intro? 24 Monday morning. The door open on a dazzle. Two weeks. I thought yesterday that Vancouver was the golden west. Luke last night. He was just back from a Witness Program weekend with a new girlfriend who's an activist. [Opposite page, quantum theory notes: What's the difference between a rigorous interpretation and a new age interp? A rigorous interp says these results suggest we're speaking badly. CPR effect - 'information transfer' - superluminal vs principle of local causes. Stapp uses this to say "the fundamental process of Nature lies outside spacetime but generates events that can be located in space-time." - the notion that 'everything is connected' can be imagined as a tossing sea - but the correlated particles is something else - whole universe initially correlated - something contradictory always - the results assume the observer's are uncorrelated - assuming locality to prove nonlocality Tantra means to weave. When Buddhist philos says 'we' live in an illusory 'reality' in which everything is a symbol are they describing the dissociated state? "Telling how you make quanta and how you measure them" "The equation that the wave obeys is a wave equation, but there are no waves running around ... There are no particles running around either. What's running around are quanta, the third alternative." David Finkelstein False idea that wave functions are real things. 'Particles' are actually interactions between fields - happens instantaneously and locally. Dirac quantum field theory. Fields are real and 'matter' is momentary result of interaction of nonsubstantial - 27 What did I dream. I watched someone standing confident being pelted with maybe bullets. I was thinking they were demonstrating a kind of idealism, that the body isn't real. Then as a consequence they in some way went on to a larger life - I don't remember it better than that. So I stepped into place and spread my arms, invited the woman at the end of the room to pelt me. She began. I said, More. It wasn't bullets - something quite soft she was throwing in handfuls. Then I was famous. I'd broken through. Men pointing cameras as I passed between them laughing. For either the first person or me there had been as if a flight into a sky of marvels. It's the day Jam is mysteriously arriving. What would be the best that could happen. She could speak her anger and I could speak mine. She could speak her appreciation and I could. What is my anger - Say appreciation first. I always liked her face when she came up the stairs. She showed me persistence, how to track a question with persistence. She introduced me to Pound. She wrote the beautiful piece on the Na-Khi. We saw light together very extraordinarily. I got field & field in her aura, winter interference. She gave me Hong Kong. Anger - it's not at first anger, it's dismay. Her mentat coldness, her cold eyes. Her infatuation with the mother's image that was blindness to me. So then the way she dropped me by transferring to them, by helping them defeat me. Mental cruelty, great mental cruelty. I felt I'd die. So attached, neglected, abandoned. Her denial of everything that was happening. Her denial throughout. A lot of what I appreciate her for came from my willed openness. I worked hard for it, I went deep into humiliation for it, she didn't give it. But did she contain me - yes. She was a grown-up I could be young with, the way I have been the grown-up Louie can be young with. But the way she left me could not have been more brutal. And then the way I left her could not have been more brutal. It was correct to keep Rowen away from her, but also I saved myself by getting even with her. Does she understand how brutal she was   no Is there more to say about this   no So how will this meeting go   come through, money, organization, partial loss - How is Jam, what is Jam. Small. She's 65. She is thin. Slender the way Chinese women can be when they're older. Spindly arms. I saw her thinness differently when she said she had osteoporosis. She used to be my height and now she's inches shorter. But she looks good. She's not gross or pouchy. Her hair is grey but strong. She's beautiful in her oddness. Heavy male clothes, a heavy denim jacket. What did she say about still being a child? [in her interests] I saw that her headband looks like a Muslim pillbox. She works but she doesn't 'produce' she said. That means she makes notes but doesn't shape them. We were polite. We ate lunch at a sidewalk café, I took her to the military cemetery because I knew it wd be cool. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the grass. Her feet looked shabby - her plump brown feet looked veiny, worn out. She wears sunglasses for the glare, cataracts. She wanted to go look at her room. I think she's here because she wanted a trip, she wanted to be somewhere new. She wants to be in a room she can leave and come back to and be alone in. Frail yes she's frail. She gets confused. She doesn't read anymore, she said. Her body is more like a child's? Quite nice slim thighs. I was feeling her a bit the way I felt my dad, gently and without expecting anything because I knew I couldn't know what she was thinking. She won't have anything for me, I can be nice to her and try to liven it up maybe, but that's all there'll be. The line I liked was when she saw a sign that said Firm believers and asked if it was a gym. Susan on the phone about her piece. What was that like. Cold. Watching her fight for an upper hand in her ruthless little ways. Tom would call it gamey. "You should ..." go see the body show, read xyz. 28th I don't weigh less and am not fewer inches but my pants are looser. Have been formatting Fading [ie In America - this section] 1-5. So far not very faded. It's Friday - a lot of last prep next week. Jam is in a room with the balcony that's above India Street. Working, she says. Drinking beer. I'll go to the gym. - And afterward in Whole Foods walking better, rolling, it seemed. More conscious in the aisles. Relaxed? I think I'd like to go through a complete year with the gym and yoga, see what I cd do. 6 day rotation and one day off. 29 Eliz on Friday night. I'd taken Jam to La Coccina de Miguel. We came out onto the parking lot and Jam was in the market buying beer. I'd heard Eliz shouting my name. Where are you? She appeared in a gauzy top tight over her little breasts, with a glaze of lipstick on her mouth, lovingly excited to see me. Jam appeared in the dark with her paper bag. Then Rick with Rue. Meeting arranged by the eye in the sky because Eliz is moving, the house is standing empty. Rick was holding out a styrofoam cup of water for Rue to drink. Jam was peering interestedly, as she does. He's drinking very neatly, she said in her brown voice. Jam's voice. She was in the coffee bar fussing about how her tea is made. I walked in with Tom, who I'd seen crossing the street. There he was in his military haircut, clean black teeshirt and blue jeans looking clear and lean. Jam this is Tom. We're at a table next to the open window. They labour at finding topics. He blushes at something she says. He doesn't stay long. What a lovely guy, she says when he's out the door. She says she saw his flower and she opened up. I'm not sure I know what she means but I happily agree that he's a lovely guy. That quiet blushing boy with his sexy silver brush of hair is a catch. I like that she saw what she calls his lightness. And then afterwards I meet him on the Goodwill parking lot and he's scowling to have his buying trance interrupted and I'm crestfallen to have lost the lovely guy I'd briefly imagined. Jam is more porous. Her eyes aren't cold. They are slightly milky around the edges of the pupils. She's straight but so little. She's kinder? She has another version of what I was to her, someone keeping her connected. I've sat with the book and now I'm angry. It was years of systematic torture. She tortured me for being what I was, which was female and open. She recruited or was recruited by people who were viciously intent on stopping my success. Not people - just Trudy. I didn't want to lose Jam but I had lost her. I didn't want to know that I had lost her. But then in that vile confusion I used my pregnancy to try to win against them and hold her. That was the worst thing I've done in my life. Or the second worst. The worst things I've done have both been sacrifices of my kids in the context of those people. Giving Rowen to Mike was just and correct. I was sorry to harm Jam but I had to get us out. I got into that whole evil nexus because I was desperate for company. That desperation was true. So I was angry and now I'm grieving for Rowen and Luke, which is correct. (Crying, sobbing.) Rowen I am so sorry. - What happened this aft. We were on the bench above Torrey Pines State Beach, both wearing sunglasses. I fell into paralyzed silence. I couldn't move to think what had happened. I went away and sat on the edge of the cliff where I could see the ocean. I had begun to look at the ocean when I went silent. I took shelter in the glitter. Wanted to stay on and on. Then went back to the jeep. I thought I'd just stay silent to the end if that was how it went. After a while I understood. I said, I think we've just replayed something. I had remembered the silence I'd fallen into with Jam when she just seemed crazy to me. So then we could speak again. She says yes she was wrong in the way she was insisting on something impossible. She backed me into what she feared and needed to experience. I said the only thing I regret is what I've done to my kids. I said 'systematic torture' and 'betrayal.' The best, I think, is when she said, Are you saying I shouldn't have invited them to stay in my house? and I could say, YES you absolutely should not have. She was still doing what she did, going gormless as if truly her torturing was something that couldn't possibly have occurred to her. I wanted her to understand everything and she understood some but not everything. What mattered more is that I said what I have to say. I said her company was a loss to me and that I didn't feel she would miss it. All she cared about was the image of a woman. She said yes after a while she noticed she didn't have that kind of talk anymore. There is something still very sad in that. 1st August I have to be in La Jolla at 8 but I have an hour. I'm not finished thinking about Jam. She wasn't her worst. She wasn't puffed up to be male. She was a very small elderly person of no gender, who still has an interesting mouth. What do I mean by that - a girl's mouth. It gives her a little of the quality of an old beauty like Jeanne Moreau. It's odd I never once noticed her hands. I somewhat liked her until Sunday. She seemed to have understood that she'd been crazy in relation to gender. I stopped liking her when I pushed for the last of it, the way she let Trudy use her to isolate and demolish me. She hadn't thought about it, she went into her old modes. She scolded, pointed her finger, went on about schoolgirls vying to control her, she repeated old speeches in the same scolding tone. That's where I went blank. I pulled out of it because I remembered it's what used to happen when she hid out in her I'm-so-special-I-don't-need-to-understand-these-girly-things pose. That disgusts me now. I knew she'd flipped completely into the past when she started making her old "you and Trudy are such brats" speech. I said firmly that she knows nothing about how I am now. I was ready to dump her at the hotel. I was remembering what it had been like with her, the human loneliness. She was going on about schoolgirls trying to possess her and I said, I can see that is the structure you are using to think about it but you and I had been LOVERS for seven years, I was ATTACHED to you, I was vulnerable, I would never have done that to you. I'd like her to have heard that but she had stopped hearing. And was there any instant where I felt what I used to feel, that her intelligence was giving me something I didn't want to be without? No. Her cut-offness repels me. I was interested looking at her head but since her day I've been a mind of my own in ways she can't imagine. 2nd Wednesday. More days on the site. Luis and José. It's not like projects of my own. Nora decides things and decides wrongly often so that Bellevue won't be right no matter how much I give it. The apron cut out of the space is wrong, cobbling the retaining wall is horrible. The tile pads are random. The cut-outs under the kitchen walkway are wrong. A lot of things in the house are right but with 4 years of time and some astonishing amount of money it could have been beautiful in every way. She has fleur-de-lis on the gutters! And all sorts of fancy lamps and farmhouse allusions. It could have been a Gill house of perfect and free interior light. She kept the worst things about it - the tight corridors and small rooms - and garbled some of what was alright - stripping the rafters. I call it her willfulness. It isn't cuteness in the Taft fashion, it's more stagey, it's self-dramatization? If I take it as demonstrating what she is, what do I know. It demonstrates interior divisions. Farmhouse elements out of place or pumped up and falsified. False simplicities. Isolated natural materials. An unsorted and oddly lit garble of references and curiosities. Yes but she doesn't write. She doesn't have that means to fold her simplicities and acquisitions together. The dining room/office is like a studio where an artist has her heaps of samples and layers of sketches. She is commanding her dozens of tradesmen and each of them is interesting to her. It's her sculpture project and I'd much rather it was mine. It's hers because she has done what it takes to get the money. The money now is mainly getting itself it seems and her real enterprise has been this. 3rd A dream where I began on a walk that I thought would be around the block - the large block of the road allowances around the farm. East then south then west then north then east. When I had set out there was one odd thing after another. A Catholic school isolated in the woods and built so it was one classroom wide and three stories high. I didn't see anyone, only heard children's voices. Then on the track in the woods there was a wild man speaking prophetically or maybe threateningly. I was trying to read his meanings. We came to a place in the woods with some furniture and a fireplace. I realized it was his house. Does the road continue on the other side? I open a door and there is a narrow track. I hope he stays behind. A voice says a red haired girl is going to have a bath. There is a gypsy caravan. Is that the girl? I come to a town, am walking through a library. Someone mentions a city and I see in the distance a clump of highrise towers at the end of a causeway through water. Another woman and I agree we'll go there. We have started out crawling through water, I'm looking closely at water creatures like corals and polyps. Some are said to be poisonous. They are all soft and complex. I'm wondering which sci vis animation they are from. We come to a rest station on the road. I see white cloths like table cloths on a plank. Demonstrate to the other woman how they wd be used to wrap head and shoulders when it's hot. I see my reflection with my dark hair in disorder coming from under it. There's a man with a white teapot and very small handleless cups on a tray. Writing this makes me aware how little of it I can say. remembering it I mostly feel the way it's random and yet visually so detailed. It's picaresque. There are always new circumstances and in them new intentions and interests. Writing it and other things these days I'm self-conscious. That's the journal project. I'm not following a free voice as I was. It's 6:30, a grey morning. There will be the melancholy of getting ready to leave. 5th Saturday morning - this week is over - tonight I'll sleep in the Patricia. I was on Nora's worksite lifting and carrying - not a lot - and have been aching at night - very sore - and will be for more nights - the cost of physical work - which I am easily strong enough for and love to do. Two aspirin at bedtime. Yesterday standing with Nor and Min on the terrace I said, I'm redundant today, and Nor said, Will you just come and look at the steps. So I spent the morning standing with the slope between gate and basking garden. Said there shd be three steps, wide and shallow. Slowly worked it out. Drew it with orange fluorescent spray paint. Nora didn't like it. She said it was too square, she wanted curves. I cdn't see curves working. Tried out a radius scribing tool I made by tying string to a nail, the other end to a pointed stake, pressing the nail into the ground. Found the bottom circle ran into the hedge. Brought Nor to look. She could see why circles wdn't work. So then I handed her the sketch with the big pot drawn in and she turned on a dime. [sketch] That was neat of her, the way she switched. The pot did it I think. And then I pulled the nail out of the ground and handed her the little bundle of nail, twine and stake. She laughed with pleasure. I knew she'd like it. The social enjoyments of the jobsite. The Mexicans I worked with called me Maestra it seemed affectionately. Luis Michochan, José from Mexico City. The masonry foreman whose teeth flashed when I said I know it would have been better to design it sooner as we were halting them from pouring the steps. The plumber, the mason building the fireplace, the carpenter coming and going. The light atmosphere Nora creates among the men. Min padding about watching many details. - Vancouver Hotel Patricia. I think I left my little clock in the taxi - that's the little clock Tom gave me. While I'm gone is he going to screw Jackie from the front desk of the West Park Inn? Why do I think so? Because he can. He's looking good, he's not impotent, he hasn't wanted to touch me for weeks, and there was something blank in the goodbye. Am I scared - yes. Was that $100 a payoff  no He's going to fuck Jackie while I'm gone   He isn't going to tell me   But will I know   Will I know by asking her  no That means I'll leave San Diego   So was he lying when he talked about me dying first  no Does he know he's going to do it     Did he do it tonight  no Tomorrow   Will you tell me how you know   Have I seen this coming  no Did Jam bring it  no He didn't like Jam   If he sleeps with her will he do drugs too  no Will he stay with her  no Okay how do you know  come through, secret, (7p), exclusion He's going to do it because he doesn't need me any more  no Because I've been secretive  no   You connect   Will you point this   (4s) He was making stupid jokes because he was hiding   By slowly examining what's hidden   Do you have the same evidence I do   But you look at it better   Do I want him to leave   When he loses me will he go to drugs again  YES The evidence is physical, it's the way he doesn't want to touch me     Will you lead me  YES One card  perfected work It's over  YES For sure  YES I feel scared in my heart   Lead more  Tom has come through, because of love woman's slow growth You're saying the work is done     But I'm betrayed and abandoned  YES And he's made it a story of exploitation   And you wanted that for me  YES Say more  fight, your judgment, that Tom, has come through You mean my belief that he can be faithful   Do you mean that other little voice   - Did you mean I shd check the other option   Is he going to be faithful   Does he want to be   Was there another reason he didn't want to touch me   Because I'm leaving   Shd I phone him   6 Room 534 above the parking lot. Sun on my feet. Seagulls. The towers of Burnaby distant on the plain. I'm still aching. It was noisy in the parking lot last night and I woke early. In a grey sludge of sore muscles. Cracked lips. I said I wanted to go to the beach the morning we were leaving. The water had a velvet quality. Green waves. Did I see anything on the trip. From Portland there was a propeller I could see through as if it wasn't there. - Wish I had a cup of tea, I'm slow-witted. Luke and Louie and Sylvia to get my films. I'm sad? Not because of Tom, I phoned him. So what is this. It's being ill. The hell souls on Hastings worse than anything I've seen in other cities. Young women who are driven skeletons, scabbed, bruised, grimacing. Love woman ruined. What about the propeller - it was there, four blades? but none of them in place long enough to interrupt structure. Invisible by being faster than what was beyond them. 7 Monday morning. The Patricia bar with tourists eating cornflakes and muffins. Luke yesterday in white linen shorts and a pale blue teeshirt. We sat in the shade on a knoll in Oppenheimer Park and watched the quiet comings and goings of people at the Powell Street festival. Then later with our backs to a log at Crab Beach. There was a remarkable dog playing with a rock. He would toss it into the water and then go in after it, knock it back onto the beach. If it rolled deeper he would walk in with his eyes open under water looking for it. His tail was up and down and sideways showing great pleasure. Muscles still hurt. All the TVs are on, sports, schlock pop. Reunited / and it feels so / good. I was on Carroll yesterday looking for an alarm clock when a small young druggie spoke to me very quietly. Miss if you give me a couple of dollars for food I'll give you this watch. He held out a man's watch with a leather strap. I was looking at him doubtfully. "I don't know where you got it." "Somebody gave it to me I swear to God." I started walking away. He hurled it after me so it shattered on the street corner, went away in the other direction screaming "I'm going to hurt somebody I swear!" Should I have bought him breakfast and taken the watch? Such a small young thing. Meth scabs on his face. What I was wondering as I walked away was whether he felt me looking for a clock, I mean whether something had been arranged and I blew it. Afterwards I was on Pender just arriving at the corner with Main, next to the bank. There was a thin man in a cowboy hat just arriving too. He was wearing red-lens shades and had a white goatee like a little hog-bristle paintbrush, short-sleeved sweater with a stripe across it, jeans rolled. It dawned on me that it was Michael. Young stringy Michael at 52. 7 I showed Sylvia the journal project. It was as if she realized nothing. She asked nothing. She changed the subject! She did slightly gasp when the Frank after front page came on. In bed some nights ago I was thinking dimly that if I want the journal project to reach the smart people who can use it I should edit it savagely - that's the word that came - to that end. Alright please explain Sylvia's blankness   Is she stupid as a post  no Was she envious  no Does she realize she was completely inadequate  no She was appalled  no She thought it was just a vanity project  no The idea of showing her secrets scared her   Was that it mainly  no Is there anything that can be done with Sylvia  no The best thing yesterday was the Coal Harbour development. I was walking in Vancouver as if it was a city I'd never seen. Fairy towers and a long greensward with three separate paths at different distances from the water. Deep flower beds blooming yellow. Sculptures. A water plaza full of kids in their underwear, a terrace with café umbrellas. The most direct possible view of the North Shore. At intervals, quais of the financial district's streets overlooking the space with balustrades and lampposts in stone. Altogether it's futuristic above and grounded in an earlier time, earlier times. A lot of open land, the towers set a long way back. City as beautiful as it can be made. Holding pen at US Customs. Good thing I'm early. 9 Plainfield VT. The cottage. I'm cheerful this time, not withdrawn, not as hateful as sometimes, jumping up heedlessly. There's dark green at the window. 10 Hating this. Having to address student writing, having to sit listening to faculty. Another dumb guilt feast about not having black faculty, a disabilities coordinator telling us what we may not say and what we should say instead. Monica's irritating voice speaking more than it should because she is unwilling to seem inconsequential, which she is. We were alright yesterday but today was dark and cold and we had no mommy-daddy [because Margo was on leave] - does that make a difference? And now the students - the dreary students again - and more - two new TLAs - no hurry to meet them. Susan tomorrow - 'seductive' is what I'm saying - I'm saying to myself that I had never met a seductive student and didn't handle it well - and yet can I regret the sapphire earring and the moment of being deeply gorgeous? Can I regret the shocks of pleasure in so lonely a life? It is saying I should regret them because they weren't good for her and because she was my responsibility. I'm saying, but I needed what she was offering me, I've been deprived without it. Then I'm saying, yes, well, you cdn't be seduced if it wasn't true need. So then I say, you mean I have to refuse what I quite desperately need out of principle? And if I do so will I be rewarded? No, I won't. But did those pleasures give me anything real? In the sense of well-founded. No. I didn't even win good writing for her. 12 Who do I have so far - Ben, the pilgrimage woman, maybe the egg woman who wants to write about bridges, the poet Rebecca. Who I hope I don't have - the pig-faced man from West Colorado who wants to write about the Enlightenment, big dim Marsha writing about Israelis and Palestinians. 13 [student/faculty reading] I read what it said yes to - what you said yes to - harmless bits - I knew no one would be able to hear them and read them anyway - loyal and sad - Patricia said elegant but she's the one who won't work with me because it would be a cripple club - Susan of any of them would be most likely and there she sat schmoozing with Jim having unambiguously betrayed me. Elegant - yes - lonely in elegance - the small sad feeling there has been so long. There's no one. They are pleasers or nothing. And what was I - so held back. I am, now. If I had taken a drug what could I have been. I could have seen how each one as they read were being something about what they were reading. I'm not alone enough, not nearly. I'm too aware of them. I don't enjoy myself enough.   "This is what I am and there's no audience for it." "This is what I love and no one will like it." Audience and intending to please and pleasing. This is really bad. It's bad. Unloved and unloving. 13 What is it about Monica - I can't stand to look at her - she began stammering and twitching about how maybe there could be time jumping and space jumping so we could pull a rose out of thin air. Karen was scowling in her corner. I looked at her instead. Monica throws up her chin and looks down her nose as she speaks and her grey teeth seem to jut and fold - what else is it - greyness, something disordered, frenetic, broken. She wears pancake makeup to hide acne scars - that's part of it. Her hair is very dead and her hands don't have meat on them. The only person worth talking to about any of this I'm not talking to. 14 Can you explain Monica to me   responsibility, quest, exclusion, conflict Conflict   Unconscious   Between withdrawal and responsibility   She forces herself   To take leadership roles she doesn't want   What she said was appalling   Has she done those things   In the sense she imagines   no Her explanation is wrong   An idealist tendency     Shd I soften with Susan   no Is it okay to address her in sessions   Does she miss me   no Does she have better conversations with other people   no Does she know it   Will you explain what that was   aggression toward the mother for having to wait for happiness What she was talking about   Couched it in relation to the witch burnings?!   Loss of knowledge   In the delay   I don't get it   Are you sure of this     Did I do that well   I did Lisa's introduction very well   I can extemporize now   What did I dream - Carolyn and others making a community garden - there are dump trucks dropping a load of topsoil and then one of sand - the spot they've chosen is an open field with standing water in the middle - they have planted flowers at intervals along the edges - I'm saying they are going to have to drain it. Later there's a magazine whose cover has what looks like a fashion shot of four pretty women posed working in the garden. It's a teen girl's glamour magazine Carolyn works for so she could arrange the publicity. 15 Who was there [at the film session] - Karen C very alert - Patricia - Madeleine - Becca - Ben - Jimmy - Tomas - Margo - Lise - Kate - Heather - Ian - Jason - Lybov - Monica. Becca afterward stammering that she sees that way and she felt affirmed. The moth that alit on the cold wall with the flies. [Opposite - res embodiment colloquium notes: Alex, Minna, Heather, Kate, Kri, Annie, Lise, Susan, Arla, Sarah, Vivian, E Lise to Sarah: You were the person who first talked about how after a few days at the residency you began to leave your body. Sarah: I was aware on a visceral level that I was separated from myself. I grew up in a war zone. Jung grounded me in the okayness of ... for the first time I felt I had some sort of frame for what I was. The older I get the more I depend on my dreams to guide me dreamwork, artwork, myth, writing I have moved out of my body for the first time in my life. My body is the deepest source of my spirituality and my relation to the cosmos. My primary grounding is in nature. I began to find language - it was at [this college] that I began to find language for my experience, without being considered nuts. Alex: I always felt like a disembodied head. I had to go back and figure out what happened. You store it all in your body. So it's scary to go there. I thought of dissociation as something just a few people have - but I found out it's systemic. Why is it so foreign? Why does nobody know what's from here now. Kri: I'm going to be studying kinesthetic peacemaking. A ten or fifteen year journey, not having Peter Levine Waking the tiger. I'm no longer in the place where I can't continue on. I'm the fat kid. Now I can't ... Nonfear is the true love: I can just stand here and say come on. How body is an infinite resource for creating peace in the world. To be here and to be supported academically. Minna: I don't know if I know this feeling, that everyone is talking about. Arla: The times we experience the body from the outside in and the times we experience it from the inside out. Sarah: When I experience trauma now, that place of humiliation and shame, it automatically triggers me to be aware of being outside-in. Lise: I watch myself, I had a fantastic experience at an artist's colony. The emptiness of the space and the beauty just made me want to kneel. Something I want to think about, whether my writing practice and my sitting practice come from the same place. Pema Chodren ... how we release ourselves from being hooked by writing. That other thing. Whether it would lead her deeper into writing. Kri: Creative mindful performance. Experiences designed to undo urges toward creative responsibility. Kate: I've been working on how your body can affect your emotions. I had sat up straight and looked as if I was enjoying myself. I was no longer depressed. Susan: I got to do a practicum on embodiment. Steve Buner The secret --- of plants, fractals. If I invested that with complete reality, what would be different. Wave theory. Groups of people in motion. The first thing that happened. Somewhere at the beginning of the flow I noticed this happening, people got entrained. When you get a heart transplant they don't know how to reconnect the nerve. Everyone's faces changed. they began to move together. Something caused them to move very much in the same way. I'm the one who's wading around in the room. After a while I began to begin all my classes in a different way. The answer to the question how am I is sensation. Get them more focused in sensation and then have them entrain. Several people cried. Vietnam vets. People don't focus on each other, they are in themselves. People talk about the body exhibits - siliconized real bodies posed in motion. Vivian: The other side of that, they are saying that it's a disrespect. Susan: I just don't think bodies are vehicles there's something housed in. Arla: The part that disturbed me was the lack of wholeness. What I have been working on is integration. I use art to integrate. Affirmation: I give myself full and unconditional permission to unfreeze my body. I had a vision. The vision was a woman made of ferns. This fibroid tumor the size of a baseball. I read Christian Northrop. My body is an enormous antenna. The heart math people - the electromagnetic field around the heart - the amplitude of the waves is - x greater, the size of the field is -. When you get within 4' of another person. a wave form that you amplify. 20% of the heart cells are neural cells. I did work with 14 year old girls - they got it in such great ways. Sarah: I teach women's studies. My biggest challenge in a 4 month slot is sending my students out with hope - to have Ellie: (about what the contrast actually is). Susan: We talk about body as if it's a static thing. In the last 50 years we are using the front of the body orders of magnitude more than we used to. Baby manifestly about the ... Ellie: Spoon. Sarah: I spend at least an hour each day in the woods. If I spend a day where I don't have a connection with nature I feel like mud. I have that sense of being mirrored by nature. I experience nature as It's about life - the grace and joy that's associated with that aliveness. I go back and forth with images and words. Arla: The images of my book are images of my fusion with nature. I totally get the divinity of nature. You know that saying that we're actually spiritual beings trying to be humans. That fusing reminds me that I am as miraculous as that. Heather: My advisor had me do a little bit about how I was feeling in my body when I was writing. The more I did it the more I could feel it.] 16 Princess Susan sulking, walking narrow and tragic with head bent. She is mad at Lise for something she imagines she said at the lesbian poetry workshop. Lise instead of talking to me after my films jerked away on her stork legs to placate Susan. I wdn't have done that. Princess Susan did not come to my movies, after last time saying she would organize showing them in Montpelier and write about them. She completely unhooked from me and hooked to Lise and Jim. !! That means all of it was an act. What did I see - Becca in front of me such a whole body, swimmer's shoulders, breasts with weight, bare feet in sandals, face very smooth, black eyes, black hair pinned up in a messy way. She has a bit the virginal look of Emily Dickinson, with an athleticism and with that twisty jerky mouth. Her front teeth slant to the left, the left side of her jaw is very much wider. She speaks as if she is speaking from her nonlanguage hemisphere, very hesitantly and in a tense zigzag between brief statement and brief antistatement. Did I like my movies. Less than they did. Current. I wanted them really silent on a big screen. Parrots of Telegraph Hill. The way at movies Susan laughs very loudly at things she knows Jim finds funny. 18 Now she's gone I can feel her - the moment at the cabaret last night when she came past to dip punch and was there with her back to me, narrow like a teenager, sweetly pigeon-toed. No one walks the way she does. I know I don't care about this weekend because she won't be there. I was angry at Lise or Jim whenever they could sit with her. I sat in a vacant chair next to Jim so she couldn't sit with him at the reading - he got up and moved. I asked Lise to debrief me after the screening - she said she had to go talk to Susan. Had no kind of personal fun this res at all - no, last night for a moment smoking in the car as we drove home from dinner, driving through the beautiful fields with Lise and Karen, I said, I'm euphoric suddenly, is that the cigarette? Lise said, It's because you're with girls. I said it was. Now I'm on the edge of crying because of how lonely it has been despite the conversations, my lectures, the screening, the good work, the thanks. None of it was worth Susan saying "The baby is manifestly about the ..." Does she know that? Does she know she messed with me? Does she regret messing with me? I'm worth more than the people she's fawning over. Does she know it? - But see, if it's not her it's nobody. This is later after the evening. I've wrecked trapline, notes in origin and the only copy of bright and dark in that projector. I don't feel any of those people busy feeling each other. I don't want to be here. Juliana does. Carol does. Lise secretly works to take them away from me. Having enemies is a way to stay with people who don't want me isn't it - I've hung onto Susan this week by refusing to talk to her. It kept me in a state of reserve so I didn't really feel anything that happened. 14 What am I going to say to these people - this flock of girls. Is there anything I need to do with this dejection - it says - it's just this band of mediocre girls - nothing will come of it - they can't really use anything I can do at my edges - it could just as well have been just Lise's event. I liked it better at the lectures because there were boys. But why does none of the kind attention please me? Juliana saying this event happened because she wanted to see me again. I don't care. I like Carol's strong eyes and her snap. So far that's all. [Written during a Saturday colloquy session] In this group I can't be a leader and I can't be alone and I can't be met. I really hate this. It will be highjacked. I don't want to be part of something I can't direct. I don't want to be part of something that's only feely women. Sarah has a foggy sound - posing - hard somehow - 'divinity' in the tone of a New England scold. - I phoned Tom and there was his voice and he asked questions and told me a dog story and was dancing from a firm center very charmingly, consolingly. Yes and now I'm going to sleep. 20 I was at the west edge of Grandpa Epp's land looking toward the house. High grass I think. Three Airstream trailers parked end to end west to east under trees. Something about someone with me intending to buy back some of the land, I was thinking at the far end of the creek. Juliana yesterday opposite me in an orange sleeveless top that held tight her little breasts, pink and eager Juliana with starry black eyes. I'm less in despair. They took down a science reading list. But I shd stay in despair probably because not a one of them can read Being about. (Sarah said she did.) I said advising is lab work. It's about discerning what is the core of what's needed and accomplishing it as if with a gesture. People have their stories - "my father died before I was born," "I had a fibroid tumor the size of a baseball," "I'm a naturalist, I have been since I was a very small child." - Sunday afternoon. Now I have 24 hours to mull over what's happened in 12 days. I didn't say goodbye to Carolyn and Juliana because I wd have had to say goodbye to Lise too, and couldn't sincerely. They were all standing gushing together. Girl group sound of social screeching. Thought Campbell would understand. Lise was going on about lesbians and I was irritated and said, Look at the way Carol is sitting. Carol was the image of physical authority. Strong eyes. A charge equally distributed in all her parts. They were talking about bodies and not looking at bodies. I am attracted and repelled always. The het women, but not Carol, sitting nicely on their chairs. Lise did not agree. She wanted it to be what she is, which is not at all that glowing self possession despite tai chi and Zen and lesbian desire. She's a jerky skeleton, in fact, and what she means by 'body' is erotic desire. The piece she read at the student-fac reading, about a week with a young woman who in the end decided she wasn't a lesbian. She watched the woman plunge her hands into a suitcase full of silks. I thought, Lise is projecting her love woman and sublimating her into writing. That's first-level. Juliana is a body goddess. Was there anyone else. Sarah is a little skeleton working working always to present herself as gifted, magical, a priestess of esoteric knowledge, costumed elaborately. Her voice rising into the harsh screeching of a village scold, a bad-tempered raven. Jeanne's long dream bravely told. She feels unseen but doesn't show. Her story that she's unseen. She cries. She IS unseen but there's something else. Horrible Arla was ready to jump in with motherly pity, You've never been seen, etc, because that's what she does, she 'helps' but she herself - what is so horrible about her. Firstly the music soundtrack on her dvd, grossly sentimental. Secondly the long series of slides of pretty nature projected onto her torso. She wore a long gauzy dress all weekend. Thirdly something about her head - she was a pretty woman of the soft appealing kind and she is peddling a story of supernatural powers 'channeled through' her body. She is not smart. She is credulous. She is active, though: she does and shows. If she helps Jeanne make her quilt that will be good. Gretchen - was she a bit of a stump? She was admiring us uncritically, which is hard on her. Beautiful Favor is thickened and lessened and grieving. Was I right that what she needs is to publish? Monica - oh repulsive - her teeth, her bony hands, her skeletal twitching, her administrative poses. A wraith. A look of disease. Karen yesterday crying over little things - what was that? She was feeling left-out. She missed Japan she said. The way she was dancing at the cabaret. She was more all-over integrated than anyone, I was looking at it thinking what I was seeing was high intelligence. The first of my lectures fed her, she said - the map of dualism and kinds of monism and idea of a new humanism. She got that.   part 3 in america volume 11: 2006 january-june work & days: a lifetime journal project