| in america 13 part 5 - 2007 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 August [assembled notes for the next workshop: The period we now live in, the 21st century, is perhaps the only time in human history when common people have held so little knowledge of the sky. Childs 2006 32 the people had tied themselves to points on the horizon and points in the sky 35 confirming the peerless order of the world 40 supernova in AD 1054 as bright as the full moon for almost a month, visible in the middle of the day. At night it bathed the earth in a ghostly ruby-colored light. It was positioned off Orion's shoulder . Over the next six years this light slowly faded 'spirit' - essence - transparency - aspiration - the sky gods - Interdisciplinarity - body as frame - CS psychology of sky, guided reverie; ES physics, astronomy, sky and place; TLA language of sky 'Blueskying' Invisible structure - gravity - communication - First move in visual poetics Bachelard archetype of sky - element-archetypal Spangles in cold air Virgas Gegenschein Lying on one's back Redgrove and atmosphere felt Minnaert and optical phenomena Sky words in Persian zenith and azimuth, nadir What color is the sky? Four last songs, the lark ascending Materiality of transparency Quantum field Silence and sound, the marks of sound Audition Daily sky photo The desert dawn photos of * Alchemical sky Cloud streets - the language of atmosphere, the action of atmosphere - air dynamics - visualizations of - dust, cloud - currents and waves - judder of clouds Openness - open body - Buddhist sky - evocation of great space, great spaciousness Flying dreams Dissolving What a cloud is Optics - straight lines in nature In 4 movements: linguistic S, cosmos physics of atmosphere W, psychological subtle sensing C, breath P To evoke the greatness of life Sky within the body Name horizontal concern Music the art of air The frame of sky - spatial mapping - motion of the Milky Way - "Imagine yourself at the center" - cycles, moonrise and set, sun rise and set - Yeats on moon cycle Imagining blue Daily sky photos, daily sky writing 'Consciousness as sky' Guided reverie the meaning of sky] O'Hare B18. Flight in an hour. Inventing Tenuous body: the sky. Began to think of it when I was turned on up there. What is it, the humming seat. Someone just bent and picked up my NY Times from the floor. It was one of our pilots. The girl in pink sweats and cornrows with bobbles looking at a book called God's little princess, bible stories. Come on people, it takes so little to lose your gut bulges, couple my age, his round and hard, hers soft dough under a higher ridge of breast-dough. Lot of hugging in that black family, is he a minister. The way it'd be fun to have a lot of kids, see who showed up. I like to have hours in Chicago. When the seat vibration was working on me I imagined Mac in - At that moment an announcement from the counter, looking for a passenger willing to fly to Vancouver four hours later in exchange for a return ticket anywhere in the continental states. Two old couples trying to make a connection with a cruise in Vancouver. Happy old thing rushing to give me a hug. Old gent reaching to shake my hand. Where shall I go? Voucher good for a year. Where do I want to go, NYC? That's about it, or SF with films. - I imagined Mac in a green cord shirt and cowboy hat coming in at lunchtime with his crew and pulling me into a nook for a moment. He's thinking about later, maybe because of the stallion he saw. When we take a quilt into the moonlight he's going to say, Are you sure? And I'm going to say, I'm a mare. Big man in a farmer cap munching munching a sausage pizza. In Everywhere Taxi this morning - light rain and grey light - Louis telling me more of the story of losing his kids to Child Protective Services. When we were stopped at the light next to the Montpelier bridge there happened to be a perfect scene next to the road, accidental garden, wet sumac, goldenrod, grass. Meadows had swaths of goldenrod, joe pye weed, loosestrife, Queen Anne's lace. Sometimes on the verge there'd be white and yellow with spots of chicory blue. Soft pines, rock walls. A lot of sweet slopes. After the fac dinner Lise took me a fast detour up Hollister Hill. Ridges, roads along ridges where either side shows openings onto vale after vale. Misted pastures with black cows, a cloud in the west outlined in pink. The soft pink and blue evening with goldenrod a bit jumped up. Hello pretty jarhead. New army boots, velvety. Is there something about time in a departure lounge? It's already almost three. - Onboard organized with 3 pillows and a blanket. 8F. Is that huge side of beef intending - no, he's not. Luggage carts in the rain. They're scanning tags as they load them. Here's somebody buckling in. 19 Vancouver Louie's house. It was raining this morning. I have nothing to do. Jim Smith in the market this morning, his face plumped up. He was stooped, rasping. He's living in the Ukrainian Home. "Are we old enough for that?" "55." He seemed old and ill but soft and sweet. Seeing him was like stepping out of a twenty-year sleep: I'm the same but you are not. Luke's arriving at any moment. Jim Smith in Michael's pink back room, Rowen on his lap eating a peach. Jim in the little house on Hawks before that block was gentrified. Now he's fifty steps away in the old folks' home. He was a spidery person with bad teeth. A witty American. I was happy in Chicago. Was happy in the air thinking of sky and imagining someone poking into me. Then happy my flight was delayed so I could be longer wandering in the wide high covered markets of O'Hare. My flight was about to be boarded when I jumped up to the counter and won a ticket. Then I was happy that I had three more hours in the transition zone. I shopped. I bought silver dolphin earrings at the Red Horse native gallery (wearing one now). People were looking at me because I was happy. As I started the long road from F terminal and was passing a Mexican mopping a section of floor segregated with caution cones he suddenly said good morning although I hadn't been looking at him. On the escalator up to C from B a sad-looking man my age, passing me going down, held my eyes. I was sauntering with my hands in my pockets. I am looking brown and intense. We were flying at 36,000' from Chicago to Vancouver over high even cloud. I napped. About three hours into the flight I could see through to dry land below, and then there ahead was a north-south cliff of blazing cumulous. The pilot was saying fasten your seat belts. One of the highest towers was at eye level and we were going to be passing within twenty feet. It was 20 hard edged-and dazzling, boiling with internal light. Dangerous. We slid past it. We were a small thing slipping past. Where the sentence stopped yesterday Luke arrived. He was here eight hours. We talked straight through. Leslie Freeman at the student-faculty reading lifting her hand without fingers when she says the word 'deformed.' I found her at the dessert counter and said I'd liked her reading and had felt she was speaking for me too. She was looking at me from her scarred white face disliking me, and I could see that was so and continued to speak. I know she has reasons to dislike me and even so think she should know her work reached me. I said I liked that she had said both sides, that she had spoken for beauty. "Beauty is very important" she said in her light voice. She wrote that she has blue eyes, is tall and slender, blond, with high round breasts. She's both more beautiful and more deformed than I am, and that's what's awkward between us. It makes me stare, wanting to see how it is to be that. Patricia says beauty is not appearance. She's wrong. Leslie is more lucid, she's fiercely smart and proud. She holds to companions who are freakishly less than she is, and I understand that. Patricia's strategy has been to reach forward generously and playfully to make herself welcome. Leslie holds a fierce distance, defends her fiercer talent. I've wondered why I don't know much when I'm at the res. It's four days later and I just now have a few things to say. People grateful for the lectures. The fac in their dorm the night of graduation saying Ellie handled introducing Laura well. The advising group never did light up. The only strong moments in half hour interviews were Emilee startling, and telling Justin he shouldn't let Polly have a child of his that he couldn't be with. "You wouldn't want to look at that wrecked person and say, I did that." The soft way he'd say "Polly." He said he should go home and work on not having to be with a woman to forestall what he feels without one. Luke yesterday saying that I'd had a platform at home that let me work. At his house it had been chaos. I had never thought of that, the physical order, Ed's sense of its value, that it had been a gift. Melanie smiling unbearably whenever she speaks. Annie's quirk. I write both of them off. I write David and Billy off. I definitely write Betty off. That leaves Justin, Emilee, one more - Belle. I'm wasted on 5 out of 8. That's unacceptable. 21st Beauty bare: I woke defining aesthetics as studying how to negotiate the powers of beauty. Then thought it could be my second lecture next time. "In India people believe beauty is human's relation to the divine."
Beauty is a crisis. L artis skill - bringing skill to beauty The moment in Speaking bodies III when I said liking is liking to be and Lorraine said Of course! surprised. In here in Louie's beautiful house turned on because I had a week of giving what I make and having it liked. 6 more days including today. [notes on PhD possibilities at [the college]]
Next res:
22nd Pouring money. Dentist is going to be $700 min. There was health insurance, Luke's ticket. Yesterday back and forth to Cineworks on the bike, today Reach Dental and Video In. Miles. Email in the grocery on Commercial this morning. Smart note from Tom, one of his keepers. Mary Daniel on the phone agreeing to let me pull 2 prints of Bright and dark. Note from Rowen saying should he come now. Waiting to hear from Luke about tomorrow. One of the new age mags on Commercial has Eckhart Tolle talking about an 'inner body' in contrast with the 'physical body.' "Out of the body and trapped in the mind." Odd ontology but right recommendations to strengthen body by flushing it with awareness. First parts and then a wave through, then totality as single field. - The spiritual body is this one felt. [Opposite page:
23 At last an open morning. The column of steam extruding messily alongside the shouldered chimney that I'm realizing I used to see from its other side standing like a flat-headed soldier sentinel on the roof. There's the mountain. There's soft 7:43 lying across the east-facing shingled slopes. There's one white gull ferrying alone far away and small. There's the laundry line. 24 With Luke to Mary's yesterday. She was a bent-backed little thing in white, peering up. Luke was a tall lean person walking next to her with his arm around her shoulder. I'd hear him in the next room earnestly cooperating. When we'd got into the car to go home, nightfall, I said Now let's go eat. We were in Abbotsford looking for food and the west was dull gold and pink in the open above the ocean. Should we see this first and eat in town? says Luke. Yes! So we sleeked toward the bridge while the color deepened and the freeway trees stood black against it, forest remnant firs. Mary wanted to give Luke soup so we were there for lunch eating cabbage soup and left over pizza with chopped lettuce to give her the pleasure of posing as a grandmother. After a while Luke mentioned coffee and I said let's go out and we explained Starbucks and Tim Horton's and from there were on the road north of the river. Communities I'd never seen, Dewdney Trunk road. New tract houses in fake old styles tight next to each other in suburbs still being cut out of forest. We stopped at a Starbucks. I'll get you a chai latté, you'll like that, I say to Mary. Medium cappuccino one brown sugar for Luke. He too refuses to use their size names. Decaff latté, small size I say. We're past the new streets into strangely flat land reaching to the base of high mountains, blueberry fields a mile deep, school buses parked in their alleys. Then dyked marsh and Pitt Lake, which I'd never seen. Pitt Marsh a smooth field of water lily to mountain flanks far across, islands of green reed. We eat pie with spoons and then walk the gravelled causeway to the observation tower, which shakes underfoot. Luke is carved on a rail. Earlier I'd fiddled with a cassette in Mary's player and there suddenly I had conjured Opa and Oma, Ed, singing with me and Mary. Ed's bass reaching. I was kneeling behind Mary's chair where I could see Luke but not her. Dead people singing. Then conversation, clinking cups. Jam's voice, I'd forgotten she was there. Everyone is mortal now. I mean I was walking on the causeway with Mary and Luke feeling we'll all be dead, many already are. Mary talking about her memory. She has to write down what she does in a day or it will be gone. Eating with tense shaking fingers. - There's a raccoon creeping on the railing to eat grapes. Striped tail in the living room light falling through the open doors. Quietly pulling branches down. He got past the dog downstairs. There's his masked little face at the window. I feel light next to her, light voiced, light and straight where she's ponderous and bent. I look at her and think, twenty years. Luke whisked us through country he now knows better than I do and I was marveling dimly that here was my boy in the country where Frank and I were young together, competently taking care of us, beautifully, kindly, in his brisk prime having become the man of the line. Quiet night outside this well lit space. One more day and a morning before Louie's back. Traffic's distant and full in the dark. In the West End last night we were having supper at Stepho's at 10 at night, Luke's old neighbourhood. Standing in line with me the West End's hard edge caught him and he demanded officiously why I would pay to have my old films transferred to digital rather than use the money for new work. He needed to dominate me for a moment - what was that. He was hungry.
For the soul something like a secret space, a fourth dimension of its existence den Fernen God is so not a problem to me. So Rilke was about staying in touch with early love? That's what 'poet' meant to him and others? Faust's one voice grown into two:
Rilke on his mother: When I must see this lost, unreal, entirely unrelated woman, who cannot grow old, then I feel that I tried to get away from her even as a child and am deeply afraid that after years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her, that I have somewhere in me inner movements which are the other half of her withered gestures, broken pieces of memory which she carries in her; I am horrified then at her distracted piety, her obstinate faith, all the disfigured and distorted things she clings to, herself empty as a dress, ghostlike and terrible. And that I am yet her child; that some hardly recognizable wallpaper door in this faded wall, which belongs nowhere, was my entrance into the world (if indeed such an entrance can lead into the world). Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé 25th Saturday at the Calabria, marble table in the corner. I'm not going to say anything sentimental. Quite a harsh babble. Wish I were meeting someone. Who. None of these random poor. Someone who smokes. Occasionally. Okay, Susan. She'd be pink and burbling.
26 The shell of an old black car I find on my street when I'm coming home after dark. Doors gone, it's just a metal casing. Inside is a suitcase. I'm investigating. There's fruit in it barely begun spoiling, this man hasn't been gone long. I'm assuming he's dead. A military uniform very splendid. Hold it up against me and see how much too big it is. I'm wondering though whether I can recut the pants to fit. And then it wanders on. The back view of the tunic with a wide fancy belt outlined in red. 27 3:17. Louie went to bed at 8:30 so I did too, and now I'm awake. The trains are working. I'm thinking about the difference between fine and coarse faces, mine in the 1975 book, one of each. Louie's coarse face when she came home yesterday after teaching for 9 days, Susan's most fervent one. And fine and coarse voices. VW in Lighthouse, and how hardly any books since have taken that way. My voice on tape compared with my mother's. Why all of Louie's yoga doesn't run energy in that way - it's about sex but also fervency.
Then I go back to sleep and dream the last bit - that I'm doing therapy with Joyce or someone like her - first in a room - then in a car parked in the alley behind Pender St. Something about a young woman who is being invited by an older man, how old is she, nineteen, say. In the room I'm in a chair set off to the side so she can't see me when the door is open. We are parked in the alley and both she and I are writing our comments in the same book, in the same paragraph. There's another woman with us. Peter (Harcourt) comes and touches the top of my head, I lift my thumb and touch his lip with it very tenderly. I wonder whether that will put her off. A group of people appears in front of the car posturing dramatically. Someone's hands like claws, long fingernails. A car is coming up the alley behind us. I put my hand out the driver's side window to slow it. Some talking about what's been happening in the playground/schoolroom next to the alley. Someone says, your son's attention is more settled. (I understand the grown Luke.) I ask what that means. She says something I wish I could remember because it now seems to be the answer to my questions before I went back to sleep. She says he's less aggressive, but then more. More present and clear. I wake thinking "lighter and freer, Margo" is for instance what I have to say about the fac photo. 28 Pouring money at the dentist. He says implants are $3000, and that I only have 3 that are so completely fillings that they could break. Dames Rocket 1975. What can I say about her. Her interests are not mine. She's 'poetic'. It was partly the times, for instance Dillard, who now reads as trying too hard. I was looking for high feeling, which is alright, but the ways I found it described were vague and as if self aggrandizing - 'mystical'. What do I think about the affair with Paul, and can I see it apart from the opinion I now have of him. It seems trivial, a light entertainment. It would have been better to be digging down into what I was underestimating, which was how hard it was to move to a new place. Paul was a shortcut into having some of what I needed. I could admire how quickly I got someone to talk to and some kind of anchor in the town. But I didn't know I was doing that and I got silly. But was it oxytocin silliness what looks so lovely in the photo? What is it I want to know. What the mediocrity is. What makes that journal not at all worth reading. If I can see that I'll be able to track what I was doing through the breakdown years. That's the story in DR.
- Clarity, confidence, competence, good energy. [Rowen's list of virtues to ask for] Good looks, self commitment, brilliance, money sense [mine] Right livelihood for Rowen:
30th, Starbucks on Howe Rowen was here for a day. Camera, computer. I took a picture I liked, of him in a white space looking down focusing through his lens. The wall behind him has a reflected light-line, a caustic thrown off the surface of his computer, reaching from the upper corner in front of him downward to touch his forehead. Photographer and light. I was there with my $100 Coolpix and he with his $2800 Nikon. He was lovely. Barefoot in jeans and black teeshirt, curve of muscle in his arm where the skin fades from brown to white at the edge of the sleeve. Broader shoulders, less of a droop in the upper back. What I saw most were his eyes, which are now big bright dark eyes as beautiful as when he was a boy. Soft bright red mouth. Pixie hair that suits him. Brown skin. Young Rowen at 22 happy and found. We talked about which 5 virtues he'd choose if he could pick five. He loves that kind of question. Mike in cowboy hat wearing a many-colored striped seater, smelling like skid row. As soon as he came through the door he exclaimed Look at you! He'd noticed. He put out his hand to touch the side of my waist to verify what he saw. He was garrulous, eager, laughing. I showed him the photos of Rowen and him in AG. 31st Blenz at noon on Friday. The computer room is closed, what will I do for the rest of the day.
I was whisking past a construction site on the bike this morning and heard a loud voice saying "Look at that old cougar!" I stopped in my tracks and turned around. Five construction workers on their break sitting on scaffolding at street level. "You talking about me?" The young one fourth in line grinning. I'm grinning too. The old one second in line points with his black finger. "I was looking at that old red Cougar there." Red car moving on as the light changes. In the food court reading newspapers and eating chicken next to one of the exit doors. Small unshaven man, looks like a drinker, says "I love your hair" as he's about to open the door. I look into his eyes to see who he is. He's looking back. A strong second. As I'm rushing toward the escalator, Daniel coming past. "What time's your train?" Turning after him, "Next week." 1st September
Oh Luke. "Can I come to the airport with you?" He agrees that would be right. He's leaving my continent, I say. He's beginning a new stage, he says. Yes. My blessing as much as I can. He's had his root here since he was 20. 20-37, 4-6. 3rd Calabria, Labour Day. Guy in the next table jiggling his knee. Is there anything to tell from Luke yesterday. He came at 4. I'd made curry of a sort. Was thinking of the feast I made to welcome him, one of his visits. He said if we had gone out he would have said curry. At 37 how is he. There's fat under his chin though he's not fat otherwise. His head looks squarer, a bit more brutal in the boss-man way. That's still the film work, I think. We didn't have the kind of conversation we've had at our best, this time at all. I've been wanting to make sure he has anything he needs to go on. There were some things. He said he thought I didn't want him because I wanted a girl. I said I have always thought him the ideal child, which is true, I have never imagined a child I'd like better. He said Sara didn't want him, out of competition with her own kids. Catherine liked him best, Roy liked him best. He said Roy's card to Mary and Ed [when he was born] is one of his treasures, and Andy's photo of him with me. That was good. He has two tokens of orginary love that he's carrying to the next stage. He had tears in his eyes talking about Kim's mother. He'd been loved by a mother in a family. So now he understands Roy, he has seen through Roy. Has he seen through me? I think. And I have too. I said what I could about what was wrong with me in 1975. I wasn't real. I didn't say that having betrayed him gave me the liberty in which I could become the person who can feel remorse for having betrayed him. I said the irony is that if there hadn't been something wrong with me I would never have had a baby with Roy. It wasn't a good way but it's the way that made him and neither he nor I would want him not to be. He's looking at children in the streets. Not wanting to leave his nest, that welcomed him on the many nights when he came in exhausted after 17 hours of work. Nights with Kim on the sheets she gave him. My wish for my kids to be well has come true for now. I think. Jam's reparations, mine. The Drive on a holiday. Lookit the boobs. That perfectly right word, both for the way the lips clamp around it and for the way it has two round o's diagrammed next to each other. 4 of them in a row, sort of. Louie was back from Doug's this morning relaxed so it was easy to be with her. I was giving her love woman instructions. Don't get even, just call him out, firmly and clearly. Say "What are you really feeling?" Say "When you figure out what you're really feeling, call me."
She says she doesn't want to be larger self for both of them. I say it's the baby who doesn't want it, because she thinks it means faking being the larger self, because she often does fake it.
And who are you being now, she thinks to say. The larger larger self, I say. We laugh. She says she can live with calling him instead of getting even, but what if she's not sure. If you're not sure you can ask the book, I say. I make a comical there-you-are face. She cracks up.
Wednesday's Susan's day. I'm going to send her mail.
4 Dorothy and David were at their dining table with big bowls of soup in front of them. I'd come with the bike on skytrain, stood balancing while I could see south from the high rail to the ocean at White Rock, two arms of a bay with silver between them and the spires of the bridge marking the direct road toward it. I so like the way skytrain lets me see the breadth of the valley floor green to the mountains on all sides, the way we glide in a curve over the complete map. I'd biked to the Calabria, then to Broadway Station. Dorothy was in her best state, eager and pretty. She was dressed in a sort of flowered coat, with a pale orange silk neckerchief on. She was listening so eagerly that I spilled eagerly, about Rowen and Luke and then the student stories. We laugh. I was feeling, when have I had so much fun with people and been so natural, their playful attention, both of them. I'd love to look at her face and want to pat her shoulder, touch her hand. It was so much what I'd want from my mother, to be celebrated eagerly, to have her delight in my adventures and admire my skill. We were on the porch looking at the rainy garden, single leaves falling in the mighty tulip tree. Dorothy turned my story about coaching Emilee through the two chairs exercise by asking what my two chairs are and had me on the bench in front of her telling what are the things I need to live better and have more fun. I said 1. I need to have access to country, 2. I need people I can talk to, I need more fun with people, and 3. I need a project I can go all-out in. And then she tackled the question quite persistently. We were tracking. David said mind and land. I said there's a place I'm drawn to. (She'd said, What is fun for you. I said bossing people is the best fun for me. She didn't like that way of saying it, naturally. "Leadership.") Then I started being excited about Santa Ysabel and Mesa Grande. (David had got out a book about eco-communities. I'd said I could imagine ways to get one of my three but not all three together - that's where we started tracking.) She said Indians aren't gardeners. I said oh but they were, they gardened the whole landscape. And so on, we got as far as my saying I should go there and investigate, I should go in the spirit of saying there's something I need, not there's something they need, whoever they might turn out to be. Stone buildings. Have been seeing that for some reason. - On edge today, heart sore under distraction. Luke leaving. Two and a half more days waiting. Then back in what's still going to be lonely and dull, slogging over my poor 8, Margo pressing service hours on the [the college] site. Transcribing dull bad DR volumes on and on. Homelessness. Since he came: my Luke. The hard rational sound he had when he came. Do I want to do this. I don't know what to do with myself in the wait. A bereft feeling. 5
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