| in america 13 part 1 - 2007 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
25 May 2007 Coming to the end of 6 years at [the college], 5 years in SD.
Lived shut away mostly
- 'ocean as sacred wilderness' (surfing doc) 26 There was a hit in w&d this morning - Singapore - someone who searched 'Babby Tiong' and checked through to the index page of AG16. So I read that page, which was the Christmas I was writing analog/digital. I loved the writing. I was feeling how, since what I'm transcribing in DR, I'd gotten to writing exactly what I'll later want to read. Am transcribing the weeks moving around as a camp attendant. I remember around what I wrote, but what I remember isn't written. What I got to toward the end of AG and in through GW to the first vol of [this section] was right being and writing, both. [The college] is costing me a lot. Quitting and being an artist on a grant isn't the solution. The deadlines and standards [at SFU] made a difference. Writing beside - would that work - after this stretch of DR is transcribed, 1975-1980, whenever I went back to Vancouver - the blindsided stretch 1976-1980 - what wd it be about - lesbians - the stoned credulity era - at the same time the experimental film science reading - at the same time high-hormone early 30s erotic heat - at the same time the land-feeling that was unknown to my companions - where did the myth feeling come from, goddess stuff in feminism - struggle to find or make a platform in art, lost because I was refusing a lot - In that late AG journal there's so much certainty - even in great pain I wasn't unsure. It's a settled self. That self is the accomplishment, it's much more outward. It watches itself, I had learned to do that, but what it notices in that is worth noticing, which in DR often it wasn't. It's so much a work of time. If I had died too soon there'd have been mostly just a mess. I'm at Starbucks at an outside table, writing on my knee, right leg up on the chair. I've whipped through the LA Times and the Union. A soy chai latte. There's a breeze. Blooming jacarandas throwing shadow onto the sidewalk - the morning grey has burned off. I'm wearing my green cord jeans with the shortsleeved black linen shirt. A black collar always suits me. I'm tanned. Have a pink thriving look these days though I'm thick at the waist. Writing in sunglasses because of the glare. Love the bite of sun on my arm. A man reading at the next table. He's holding a small hardback almost at arm's length, breathing slowly as if asleep. A large man in his forties, blue jean shorts and pale blue teeshirt. All the men on this sidewalk, as it happens, are wearing pants cut off at the knee. It's Memorial Day weekend. Tom's working though it's Saturday. I have horrible Darlene's packet to get out of the way, get it over with, to have time next week to start at Dawne. Nora's selling it. We'd never been there together, went yesterday. Nina and Todd's junk gone. There's the hillside full and tall, ceanothus, the matilijas coming into bloom 6' up. Nor stood at the kitchen window looking out at the view, feeling her years in that house, the man, his wrecked death, how far she has taken her rescue, the moment of giving it up after perfecting it first. 27 Jam's copy of Selected Cantos that I somehow still have and didn't get rid of when I dumped Rilke and Roethke - her notes in pencil, a few, written very small - when I see her handwriting I remember, slightly remember, loving her. I like it - tiny tight roundness. It's confident and incisive, has scholarly precision. In what way is it more elegant than mine - it has more dash but that's not all of it. There's conscious style in the way she'll sometimes use * for e. Wife, eyes. She has two kinds of s and two kinds of e. I'm more a plodder. In Dames rocket the two kinds of teacher, no, more than two: Kiyooka's girls for dope mind, Jam for focus, Nellie for swash, Daphne for writing close to the instant, did I learn from Josie? I loved Josie. The way Jam's handwriting says her nervous system is better than mine - and yet she was crazier and meaner, crankier. Alright, yes, I'll let myself recover the way I loved in that time - can I? - abjectly.
It begins with arriving in Vancouver, ends with Michael and the downtown East End. Want to say ends with what will we know but it went on for a while after that. No, ends pregnant and trapped with Jam who is crazier and crankier than she was. But still we see light together sublimely. But she hates me, she despises me for catching her in her weakness. Jam is the one to write - could I? Light metaphysics. I chose well though hard. I picked a phenomenon. The work was done when I'd spent that month with her box of books. And then misery dragged on for another five years.
29 Saturday and Sunday night at Tom's. Packet 5s this morning, Dawne this aft, coming home in the Acura with Aretha cranked, happy. Can't write it tonight. 30 I had stuck the datura under the honeysuckle because it was yellowy, and didn't notice it was going to bloom. Saturday I was watering the pots and there it was with a pink flower and three more in large bud. Took it inside and Sunday evening - only in the evening - it diffused an exquisite scent from the mantle. I was standing under it with my nose up the trumpet and Tom was laughing from his corner. We drove to La Jolla with beautiful Nora who took the long route to entertain us, 52 that treed valley, and then up over Mt Soledad to see Pacific Beach far below, further than seems possible given that Mt Soledad isn't very high. Beautiful Nora in baseball cap, big eyes and redhead's flush and pretty roundnesses below. It's always an occasion when I'm with her. We loaded two shovels and a pick and a rake and then Tom and I went for steaks to Denny's in PB. Memorial Day weekend at the beach. Three drunken louts in muscle shirts, burned red, white skin under the arms, calling to girls walking past to the washroom. Home in the green executive car. Tom was conscious of being seen in it. We stopped at Blockbusters and picked two each. School of rock and what was the other one of Tom's, Babel, that night. We are so comfortable together these days. I'm saying that knowing it won't always be so, although it now feels as if it will. There's Tom not eating fat and losing his pooch, handsome-headed with a good haircut. Saturday night he was going on about writing a Vanishing San Diego piece with me, it was two in the morning. Sunday I went home to deal with my mail and came back with supper. Greek salad and hamburgers, raspberry sherbet. Then my two movies, a doc about New York fifth graders in a ballroom dance competition, Mad hot ballroom, and then Dune, which was over-the-top bad. We are watching movies together very companionably, cuddling and commenting. The best of the weekend was Sunday morning when we got in the car, Tom driving, and cruised slowly up El Cajon and back on University. The ethnic neighborhoods, storefront churches and chiropractors, a warm quiet morning with a cool breeze, streets empty. We got into the gazing trance I like, silent together just looking. Gardens, houses, early summer, jacarandas and palms. Dire straits, Knofler's sharp fine precise soulful touch spinning out his perfect line. Yesterday Statcounter showed someone in New York getting into Work & days through the In America 4 index page. Checked through to that page and read it. It was ravishing. I'm not writing like that now but there it is, I did accomplish it. It's relaxed and intent. In any circumstance it's very readable. Yesterday midafternoon after I'd been reading packets that had come in I drove to Dawne and was in the quiet garden shaping the olive trees, thinning them and pruning up to show their white legs, clearing the steps down, ripping out grass at the bottom of the hill. Loved being there, loved having the garden back, with the junky renters gone. Doves on the wire. The bird that sounds like a gurgle of water. - My bp felt high after I was writing to Darlene this morning and I checked it. 190/105, highest I've seen it. Scared me. It's felt low, silky relaxed, so what is it today. Darlene and then being scared of it. No wonder I hate her. But what is it about her, just her disorderedness? Exercise yesterday?
- At four o'clock after finishing two letters, drove to Tom's to get him. Went to the beach at South Mission. It was quiet after the holiday, ocean green and silver, rolling choppy silver, pelicans turning suddenly straight down, folding at the last moment, a thrilling collapse. 'In India people believe that beauty is humans' relation to the divine.' Mira Nakasima on PBS craft show. The motion of the water was unseeable, unstoppable, but two kinds of glitter though fast can be held somewhat. The moment when the near edge of the wave is rapidly pulling back and the last slick of water on sand glitters between the grains. It's very fleet, a field of minute flashes, the whole field running away leaving smoothness behind. The other is the whole surface to the horizon on the line directly to the sun. I can't remember it to describe it, except to say it's shattered silver in commotion, constant and jittery. Look better next time. In the car Tom said "Hold out your hand. Turn it. Now the other one, closer so I can see it. You're shaky today." "Yes I'm quivery, how did you know." "I felt it." I was scared when he was driving. 31 Used the car to go to Amvets, bought swim trunks for Tom that I left on his bed with summer pj pants and a moss green waffle t. Phoned him when I got home. He loves the shorts. Gurkha-surfer he said. I'm chuffed. Is it driving that is making me happy these days. Fleet sleek pretty car. Dark green. Best shape for a car. Moss green linen short-sleeved shirt for me. Socks, drinking glasses. 1st June
2 Kri irritating me today. Her arguments say men aren't inherently violent, boys aren't inherently combative, it's only when they are crowded, it's only when they are abused, neglected, it's only when resources are tight, there COULD be a peaceful world, a safe world. What do I hate about that. For instance the three of us at home fighting very naturally, fighting and getting along, and again. The naturalness, though the adults yell. My pleasure in being able to fight with Tom. Irritation with people I have to back off from. She has a good question: what would have to change to prevent the kind of warring that destroys intelligence and fine life. Free energy and action.
4 [Ida Rolf notes] collagen myofascial connective tissue can be changed by adding energy fascial connective tissue is the organ of structure relation of the body to the gravitational field rolfers are integrating something Korzybski structure overstressed and shortened, skewed so the joints can't set up verticality As soon as you get balance you get strength. Flow of fluid giving interchange from bloodstream Anything that contributes to really good physiology is properly part of a moral code. 63 a time in the course of - when you see that your [client] is able to align but doesn't want to misunderstanding the way we build a body "top of my head up and back of my waist back" every 15 minutes, just say it Structure gives you a criterion by which to evaluate people. Look at the person in terms of his shoulders, the way his neck sits, and the way his cranium sits on his neck. 190 Fascia on the outside will be so tight ... it will tend to protect the area that's in trouble ... If you are doing the right thing and there isn't some deep pathology, the fascia will let go. A rolfer wants to get it so that individual elements inside that bandage are able to slide and organize and adjust with movement. - Chicken for supper last night, tamari and mustard coated, under the grill 6 minutes per side - better chicken than I've made, ever. Another texture, less dead, wet. Sore muscles these days. I'm feeling a flesh fold at the back of my waist on the right, feels bad. 5 Craig Childs on the Anasazi. It's a book, like his others about walking in the Four Corners lands. He's talking to archeologists learning what they know and learning to see what they see in a landscape, and working to build a sense of the human history of his own childhood place. He's doing it by working on a book. The book lays out what he's learned by telling the physical story of his visits to places - how he held his hands, how he climbed a slope, how he lay with his stepfather in shade at noon. He is sometimes with his baby and wife, and he mentions them or his other companions briefly. Weather, terrain, time of day. The story of traveling. What am I looking to say. Something about what his work is. The secret knowledge of water was about perception - he put himself into extreme need so that he would perceive more and then be able to write about doing so. House of rain is not as solitary, he is meshed into the concerns of archeologists. He is synthesizing archeology, but also integrating it with geography and his own physical experience of terrain. He is a figure in his book: athletic, heroic, intent. "Naturalist, adventurer, desert ecologist" says the back flap. But carefully modest, conscious. He's another kind of writer who both does and writes, and he's not the locked-into-maleness kind of man who would have written about the southwest a generation ago. He's more intact but not less hardy. The old kind of man would have had to drink to feel. This book is less ecstatic, is what it is. What I'm seeing is small tight handwriting - it's not a whole-body book. Something forms by means of it - did form, at moments. I'm not remembering it now. It was earlier in the book, when he was standing in ruins imagining them inhabited. Something about archeology, people giving their lifetimes to imagining an anthropology, creating an understory of time, an underworld of time. Anthropology and the sipapu. What had to happen to make this moment what it is. - There is that, but it's not what I was tracking and what my body said yes to. (Do we have any visualization of that, something like the sipapu?) - It's imagining destruction, imagining death. It's a true vision of evanescence. We have of the past what it has made of us. And of the future what we are making in it. Not 'have' but are. But that's not what I meant to say either. - When I'm camping alone in wild places and see people or a face as I'm falling asleep, what is that? Always only one image a night, always clear and particular. It's Tuesday morning, grey. It'll be hot by evening, I had the window open last night, but it's cold now. I still have Kri's letter to finish, and then 8 evaluations to hustle through this week. This aft have to speak to a man called Alfred about rototilling at Dawne. Paul is up north traveling with Dave Leonard. There were weeks with a lot of hits on all my sites, and this month, so far, almost nothing. Sunday aft Tom and I watched an early Democratic debate. Michael Duke yesterday sane and looking well. He comes back from the brink. 6 The geographic difference of the US - that it has vast regions so different from others, and that Americans have felt these regions as legendary. As if the southwest is the legendary core. - Margo's eval up to the end of the Emily semester. Good: maybe: Margo is back. She was dredging up Emily because she's coming back still clouded administratively and they're watching her - she's in a bind - she believed in what I was doing - she wants souls to win through - But her perceived duty is to rein me in - So she has to be seen to rein me in - so she's saying next semester I must consult about how I work with students, which enrages me. I'd rather go flat than do that.
Question is, how can I work at [the college] without M's confidence in me. M is harrowed, that's why she's starting there.
She's pinning it on packet format and study plan!
I did good work with Kri and Polly and Justin, and they were the most personal.
Justin got through the conference and his love terror, he saw an abandonment kin.
Becci got through. I can see roots and I've done the work.
I thought she was supporting me because she was courageous and principled, but it was more that she is overawed.
7
Art and art therapy - she was studying that. What do I want. To be large-spirited, confident, generous, creative, energized, brilliant, transparent in work.
As opposed to polite, dull, withholding, secretive, mediocre.
"Lighter and freer"
Justin on the phone last night. Polly didn't call when she said she would. He was distraught. I said he's very distressed by suspense and he can work on that insecure attachment, and this one is very insecure. He said he's not feeling anything. I said doesn't he feel something in his chest. All the time, he says. I say that's feeling. He says he means crying, sobbing. I say there's a lot of energy in the stage he's at, and he can choose to use it on working with himself, so that if he loses Polly he will still have the work he's done, which will help him for next time. I hear him catch that. In the middle of the conversation he says he wants to ask something and I needn't answer: are the person I did the work with and I still together. I say yes, twelve years. He's so courtly and honorable. He was in the state where it's hard to speak. Word by word. "Thank you for being with me in this - I wanted to say, in this with me." When he wanted to go he said "I feel a lot of affection for you at this moment." What I have been saying to Margo, thinking to say to Margo, is that I don't think of what I do with students as therapy, I think of it as fellow-feeling. I see them in distress and say to them, In my experience this is how it works. A therapist doesn't tell on herself, I always do. Should I write out another document giving examples of withholding what I know. I can think of this as educating Margo. The point is that I know what's up. She often doesn't. My situation is different because I do know. I feel my heart going tight thinking of the question of her supervising me. I need her to tell me what part of this is her initiative and what, if anything, is required of her. She wants to insist on the phone - because there's no record - and because she can hear honesty and put me on the spot? If so she's not candid, because she says she needs to talk things out. She could talk them out with someone else. I need to keep this going until I get other money.
9 Statcounter is run by an Irishman called Aodhán, I mean run from Ireland, as I found out this morning when I got a note asking me to vote for him as European Entrepreneur under 25. Working with Al Davalos at Dawne yesterday, two hours with dirt and hillside, the lower rectangle clean for the first time, smooth and bare, framed with a good green, looking up at the finished hillside, a landing. There was a wet spot at the base of the hill, very wet. I wondered whether he'd rototilled into a pipe and so put the spade down into a spot that I thought might be the origin. There was water rushing into the hole through what looked like a round pipe on its side. No pipe though, just a firm hole. I excavated back. It took a turn. It was a gopher hole. I had my arm up it feeling its firm round sides out into solid earth. It was draining the hillside from someplace higher up, a riser now swamped by brush. My jeep guy, Bob, at Robert's Automotive yesterday. I was talking to him about buying a Cherokee, marveling the way I always do, at how wonderful a man he is. I go away in a little dazzle of liking. He's good looking, he's a jeep specialist, he's relaxed, he's generous with his time, I never feel he's hurrying away. He has a porous, kind, taking-in quality like the best doctors. It's intelligence. He's settled into life. He's pleased with it. When he was leaving he said "I'm sorry about your jeep" and I felt he had put a gentle finger on my chest; that was what I needed from him and he'd given it. 11 Jia Zhang-ke 2000 Platform, Fenyang Shanxi. Patient long takes. This weekend with Tom. I woke during the night and found my hand above me had curled around his forearm. Later I woke again and found his hand under my pillow. We watched Platform Saturday night and again yesterday. We hadn't figured out that we could turn on the subtitles. Long takes of a sand-colored town among stony mountains the same color, or people in bare rooms seeming to be camping in ruins. Every frame beautiful - my kind of framing. A specific palette, blue and sand often with a speck of red. Inside, the off-green I know from Chinatown rooms. Framing quite formal, not afraid to be gorgeous. Few very intentional camera movements. The actors very natural in their postures. Fiddling with their hair, slouching. Afterward we discovered the subtitle button and watched an interview with the director. Luke's age, a nice face. Someone from deep country showing what he saw when he was a child, showing it to understand it. The other thing that happened was that I downloaded my letter to Margo, that had her letter appended, and Tom sat intent on both with his glasses on for twenty minutes, and then gave his considered summation, compact and lucid of his best. All weekend I was listening to myself laugh, I imagined someone upstairs hearing us laughing together again and again. [M, Your letter is exquisitely careful to be just and generous and hopeful. Nonetheless it was distressing, stressing. More about that below. This is a beautiful statement of dilemma: How can we as a college or a program proceed holistically if we cannot be inclusive of emotional material (or, for that matter, deeply spiritual/transpersonal states, unconscious/dream material) if we are personally uncomfortable with them or even dismissive of them (either by relegating them to journal entries which we will not comment upon, or denying their relevance to the work of the semester, or saying they should be taken away to someone else to deal with-the professional therapist)? What really do we mean by the "being" criteria if we are not inclusive of emotional or unconscious or transpersonal states? But the reality is that both you and I are now being scrutinized and we are having to bend over backwards to avoid an appearance of overstepping or sanctioning overstepping. It's no longer about my best judgment or yours, or about best definitions we can come up with, it is about the amorphous judgments of others. What has happened is a large loss and I'm sad about it, as I'm sure you are. I certainly don't want to get you into any more trouble, and I certainly will do what I can not to. - I wrote those last three paragraphs and then I thought for a couple of days and realized that I need to know whether you are feeling explicit pressure from admin to closely supervise me, or whether it's your own idea. I know you are coming back feeling somewhat under a cloud, but are you having to give someone assurances that you are adequately curbing me? Is someone going to be asking to see evidence? I need to know this because I need to know for sure whether it now is about my best judgment and yours, or whether it IS about satisfying people who have much less idea of how anything works. About packets - I don't remember why I didn't formally ask for your okay to do her semester as email rather than packets but I think it was because in the first half of the semester the decision came after the fact. She began her semester with email the moment she got home and then the work was so thick and fast that by the time the first packet date came around she had already done at least a packet's worth of art and writing by email. After that I think her intention was still to do packets but by each packet date she had piled up a packet's worth of email work and art but not done much of a formal annotation kind. I'm not sure when I first mentioned what was happening with her to you, but I think there was a phone conversation somewhere mid-term. I asked her to compile the emails and artwork for her website partly so that she would see for herself how extraordinary an accomplishment it was, but partly also so that there would be formal work of a packet sort on record. Study plan. I'm wondering whether you're right that she'd have felt more secure naming what she was doing earlier on. Could we have done it sooner? I don't know. Anything that made her feel more secure would have been good, surely. But I think in all of this we do have to keep remembering that she went off her meds without telling anyone. Toward the end of the semester she started to get paranoid. And then she wasn't just paranoid about me, she was paranoid about everybody. This is important, I think. I don't mean I wasn't at fault for not foreseeing that she could fall back into psychosis, but I do mean that given the evidence both you and I had during the semester we weren't wrong to think she was doing well. About the relation of embodiment studies and somatic processing: in my understanding one of the implications of embodiment studies is that people need to understand somatic processing/reintegration work, and they need to do it somewhere, but they don't need to do it at [the college]. When students are interested I am now outlining what I know about how it works and sending them to books and saying they can do it on their own or with a helper of some kind, not necessarily a therapist. a. For better and worse there will never be another MB. I mean none of that will happen again. MB was so volatile and dependent. When she emailed freaking out it didn't occur to me to say, I'm legally barred from talking to you about this. But it would certainly occur to me now. That's kind of horrible isn't it. When she got paranoid we all did. I had a psychotic student this term and I handled her with tongs: I did not engage. b. I have not thought of the more personal transactions I've had with students as therapy because I've thought of them as fellow-feeling. When I have seen them in distress and confusion that I know something about I've said, In my experience this is what it's about, this is what works. I've told on myself. A therapist does not do that. The alternative seems to be to see them in distress and confusion and know what would help and refuse to say it because one is covering one's ass. Committing myself to ass-covering feels shameful. Committing myself to being supervised into ass-covering feels worse than shameful, it's a tightness at the heart, my blood pressure shoots up, I start to feel accident-prone. If you want me to check with you about everything I do, are you also going to check with everybody else? Lise is personal with students too - it's a feminist thing. And are you ever going to say to people, This is too timid, indirect, impersonal, polite? Or are you only going to say to me, This is too courageous, direct, generous, personal? Is it now going to be nothing but regression toward suppression and safety? During my first four years at [the college], I felt winged, and you were the miracle supporting wings. You saw all my letters for a semester, and after that you saw all the bold ones, because I was proud of them and trusted you with them. And you liked them! I was overjoyed to have found a boss who didn't want me to be small. This crisis is like what happens to everyone in early love, I think, and then again and again. There's open-hearted trust, and then there's a disaster, and then there's a choice whether to withdraw from trust into cynicism and concealment, or to find a way, with more complexity, to save open-heartedness so there can be real strength rather than bluff. I know you want the latter, because that's your way. So let's get this to feel right. c. I would like to do anything possible to get you off any hot seat with admin, and if enunciating a policy does that I will certainly help, but we have already put a lot of time into it and it's all been superficial because people are personally so scared of it, and professionally feel so amorphous a threat. - - -
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