| in america 14 part 1 - 2007 october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1 October 2007 Café Bassam - there's a mirror next to me - hair down this morning - cross-legged in the red hoodie - have my back to the window because of the sun - it's shining on silver and dark that looks burnished and interesting - my reflection on windows shows a person just the shape I like - so neat a rump and slender back. That's the first thing to say in this book. Joyful relief. Have thought I should do something about the way I often am not present. I notice it in the way I don't want to write. I should say I notice it sometimes when I wake and think of things I could want to write and haven't thought to. It is as if an interested person returns during sleep and then very quickly is wiped out. For instance the man I bought the jeep from was and wasn't a dwarf. He was maybe 5' tall but he had the dwarf shape of skull, large, with a flat top and thick bone bulging forward over large eyes. A nice smile. Peter MacIlvaine. I arrived at Rancho Mission Drive for my 5:15 appointment with a taxi driver who got involved with the jeep-buying story, advised me to offer a couple of hundred less than asking price, the kind Tom calls a camel trader. As he was leaving he said "I think you gonna buy it" and wished me luck. It turned out there was another buyer coming at 6. I liked the jeep though not really the color; I liked his thick bundle of maintenance records and how immaculate it was underneath; I liked how clean the paint was; it looked cossetted. I knew $3500 was an exceptionally good price given its condition and mileage, which is only 94k. So I wanted to nail down the deal before the next guy came. He said he'd call afterwards. But when I spoke to him from home he said the next buyer had offered 39. I was stricken. Amazingly so. Fetched the string and asked whether I was being played. It said no. I said I'd match it and had first dibs if so, but went away sore at heart, very, as if I'd been betrayed, which I had been, under one understanding of the fact that I'd given him my driver's license to hold as good faith security. Woke at night so distressed from a bad dream that I wondered whether I should call off the deal. The book said no, everything's alright. And next day at noon in the Bank of America parking lot we signed the pink slip and I drove it away. It's so like my old jeep that when I'm driving it I can feel there wasn't an interruption. But I'm anxious in ways I wasn't, my heart is tighter, I don't like to leave it parked at night. Tires and liftgate struts. Fluids. Lojack or the Guardian system if I can find it. Tax. Another $2000. 2 Café Bassam. There I am looking yellow and small-eyed. Folds of skin under my jaw. This guy is an apparatus lover, walks around always in a straw hat because he's bald. Collection of silver flasks, collection of old guns. Collection of public clocks. He shuffles. Collection of ceramic teapots in the shapes of fruit and vegetables on the grand piano. Collection of mirrors. The space is him, his vision of himself. That's why he was offended when I asked if he was getting wireless. He says hello stone-faced, "This is a class-i-cal place, not like Starbucks." There he is smiling at a young woman interested in his walnut muffins baked in French custard cups. First sun on the grey duct overhead, the sun is rising behind the 10-storey pink-beige appartment building across the street. He has set his volume lower since I talked to him about it. The music is still bad. Second packets are in. I read Emilee's with bits of tears. There she was, brilliant and immediate, starved the way brilliant women are. There's the sun putting a polish on my skin. 4 Dreamed about Peter Epp - I noticed his lower lip - woke, realized I had never seen him as a man - slept again and dreamed I was in a large house for his funeral. What it was about this dream was the house, seeing people going upstairs to rooms with large views of gardens. I went up and looked at for instance a room full of white and orange Penguins [books]. On the street afterwards was complaining that no one had spoken about my grandfather. A man next to me said that had happened the day before. In the room with the Penguins was a journal left on the desk. I touched it, thought of opening it, thought no, and started down the stairs. As I was leaving the old woman whose journal it was darted toward it. We'd thought the house was empty. She had been hiding. I like the thought that there is a woman hiding, that the upstairs isn't empty. 9 [list of tasks] Look at that list - I'm slogging this semester - all day email to deal with - finally the last of the letters. 10 Dusan in my dream - I didn't remember his name, just that he was that man from the garden - he was leaving the city and it seemed I was too - had brought goodbye presents, there was a device I don't know the use of, a long thin acrylic box, like a pencil case but thinner and longer, clear but with colored panels and maybe gradations. There were also crystals a dirty amber color that meant something. I finished transcribing the section of Dames rocket before I met T and C this morning. 256 pages. It's the first part of learning Vancouver, getting the house and neighbourhood, friends and lovers. In sequence Paul, Maggie, Nellie. Thinking about how to break it up and how to introduce it. I don't approve of her [me] because she doesn't write well. Yet she was doing anything she could think to do to become someone who could write better. Do I disapprove her affairs. I was hungry and full of social energy as I'm not now. Writing Emilee yesterday saying the isolation of coming to know what other people don't know is worth it because of the satisfaction of no longer being divided against oneself. She's where I was isn't she, longing for her capacity. She's good at her hard job and at home she's somehow stuck with a woman who can't stand her to be large, I mean in herself too. She doesn't want to leave the people she has but she's more than they are. I took that fence when I came to it. Susan doesn't leave them, she goes ahead and overwhelms them. Emilee couldn't do that, she's too scrupulous. That means never having free energy, except in thinking of the fantasy man. - Did I get that right, that the fantasy man mediates free energy and that's his particular function? Drinking allows free energy but with diminished capacity, so it doesn't come across as large. That makes it safe. There's the other fear too, that if one comes across as large one will be stuck in never being able to be small. That's a misunderstanding because being truly and not falsely powerful depends on and can accommodate all the being small there actually is. I mean the early smallness not the held-back smallness. What's my bind now, though, because I don't have free energy. I had a man who mediated mine and now I can't be large or I'll lose him, though he no longer gets me to energy. Margo's letter to the fac yesterday addressing their uncertainties firmly and clearly. She could do it because Lise told her what they were saying, and Lise could do that because I'd spoken first to the fac and then to her and firmed her up. M's letter said one of the things she was being fired for was "a situation that came up with an ADA student" that Sue thought she had mishandled, "endangering the college." That was Millie's mischief. Mark had been asking all the previous deans to fire her and they hadn't done it, and then Sue did and it was partly my fault. I was frightened seeing it. And yet I don't regret what I did with Millie. That work is, the record of it is, still able to inspire people into more freedom and realness. But the thought that I'd got Margo fired is horrifying, because she has been the soul of what's right with the program. She has been backing everything courageous and hopeful. She refused to write me up. But Jane wrote her up. It's fear of being pushed out again by the small minded frightened ass-coverers. Was feeling yesterday how no one, none of the fac, none of the students, even Susan in her testimonial, talk about the gift my radical reframing is to them or the college. Susan talks about "nurturing, intelligent close reading" but the most important thing she got was the reframing that let her think accurately and that is her major cachet and credibility at Kripalu. It's why I'm grieved that she was as attached to Lise and Jim, who gave her so much less. This is the crux of something. I have been thinking it would be a relief to be fired so I would be forced to do something else. 12 We went to In the valley of Elah tonight. Paul Haggis. Tom showed up at quarter past 4 in a yellow farmer cap. We - There I got up and made an appointment to buy tires and am now in Kearny Mesa at Qualberto's Mexican Food while my jeep is on the hoist. An hour and change, he said. Here's Doris Lessing at 88 a little dumpling of an old woman who has finally won the Nobel. [newspaper clipping] - Satisfied tonight because I took care of the tires - bought a beat-up army jerry can for water - a green flannel duvet cover - a sleeping bag to put into it - a folding mattress like the old one - threw out the back seat - beautiful thick green wool blanket, best dark green. Today I did nothing for [the college], I ran around - it has taken me almost two weeks to deal with this packet cycle. Stress. 13 It's the season when my hair falls out scarily and macs [apples] are back on the market. Raining this morning. Adrian this morning floating the thought of a peer-reviewed journal called Embodiment. Should I volunteer for the board? I should. If I guest-edited who would I want to get - Gendlin - Debbie Rose - Juliana? - Churchlands - Susan. It would make me legit at [the college]. It might help with getting Being about published. Argue for art. 15 Woke from a dream where I was briefing two reporters about something I'd found in the La Glace School playground, I don't think it was that when the dream began. A large field. I'd somehow found the coordinates of some underground engineering. I'd backed its program partway - I mean I'd clicked it back through its operating steps to see how it worked. There was also something else about another piece of machinery at the lower (south) end of the field. That's as much as I remember about what it was. At the end of the dream I'd told two reporters I had something to show them. I was going to break the story. Led them to our house, from which I could see the school. Door seemed locked but then it opened. It was dark. I was turning on lights but they were very dim. The reporters were waiting in the kitchen while I looked for my notes. Then I was looking for my slippers because the house was icy cold. One of the reporters came looking for me. I explained I was looking for my slippers and it seemed he was relieved I was mentioning the cold. Woke in Tom's bed in the dark at nearly 6 thinking the dream is about what I was talking to Tom about last night, the crushing depression of not having my work recognized at [the college] and elsewhere. In the middle of the dream Isobel Christensen [*spelling?] guessed something about what I had found. I took her in the other room to tell her about it. Asked her to hold off on telling anyone. A moment of her best brightness. She'd asked how I'd come to find it and I'd said it must be all those girl detective books I'd read. She said very brightly "I know what you were reading." Then I saw there were a lot of children in the room with us and I said "There are a lot of people watching," meaning I can't tell you about it now. So then, the sense was it was a week later, I saw my chance with he reporters, who were in La Glace for something else. - Louie sends me NYT link for Slow dancing, for which a still photographer used a high-def camera with 1000 fps and stretched the footage further to get 10-12 minutes from 5 sec, projected on three 50' screens on the façade of a theatre. Projected in uncompressed high-def. Random choices of three from 43, ballet, tap, flamenco, break, modern, kramping, capoeira, Beijing opera, Javanese court, Indian. Black background, white lighting. Commission from LA Music Center, post-produced on Macs using Shake (optical flow feature) and Final Cut Studio. Lights 200,000 watts filtered through silk. Had to find software to allow uncompressed playback. Yesterday aft watched football with Tom, which made him so happy he kissed my arm up and down. Ladanian Thomlinson made all four touchdowns. I do like the physical drama, players' ways of dancing themselves. It was the first time we've watched a game together that our team won. 16 A Brain and behavior abstract saying genes with maternal expression which engender undergrowth and genes with paternal expression that engender overgrowth. Hypothesizes autism is from underdevelopment of social cognition and psychosis from overdevelopment. (Schizophrenia, bipolar, depression.) 'Diametric phenotypes.' Completely losing these days to [the college] business, reading faculty documents for peer review, uselessly, redundantly, and today scraping together an undated version of mbo docs for the program review. The last time I spent days on them, nothing at all came of it. Kaaba and some unknown external reviewer may see this version. Margo may be more persuaded. If she goes a new person may be equally clueless. 18 The kind of morning I love. I woke after it was light. The sky was clear. Tinted ivory behind the palms and eucalyptus. What should I do before I go to the grim bits of the day, praising two lightless labourers. The people that said "We love you, you're beautiful" were the same people that didn't want me for ten years. I saw that people don't know what's beautiful or talented - they follow. - A model in her fifties.
- Talking to Susan. She was in New York wanting to talk about whether to take $50,000 a year to work full time for Kripalu or jump to NYC and go for private clients. I said I'd do anything for escape velocity. (I said I think she has it. She doesn't need to get better than convection.) What can I do to get to a jump. Where do I want to go. I want to be excited again, smart again. I don't want to be in service work. I want to be an artist doing thrilling work. I want to be well funded for it. I don't want to organize embodiment studies though I do want to publish Being about. I'm committed to finishing Work & days though a lot of it is mediocre. The only thing that can redeem Dames rocket and a lot of Aphrodite's garden is what I should write about the time. I'm not committed to staying with Tom though I'm frightened by saying that.
19 A dream that I missed the boat. It was an ocean liner and I was waiting to leave for 2 when I found it was now 4. I was wailing, and woke. Have transcribed the first 3 vols of Dames rocket. Slogging, it's not a pleasure. Now I want to edit it, get it done. Worried I've regularized it too much, so even the tiny textual interest of accurate illiteracy is no longer there. Want to say how since I looked through the 430 Google finds for 'embodiment studies' I feel disgusted with it and want nothing more to do with it. It's shaping into something much less radical, a fad. I'm also disgusted to think that I might have currency at [the college] because of that flurry, with no one even now having a clue of what I've done. - Puzzle in the DR pages always that they're so mediocre, what makes me so mediocre now, what let me be something better for a while, what can I do - Context. The mediocrity of [the college]. The way I have to discount any praise because everyone praises as a policy. Reading advising letters from Karen and Caryn annoyed by the false modesty. Both declare how much they are always learning from all their students - sickening - as bad in Karen who may actually feel it - sickening assumption that communication has to be false - they don't allow themselves strong writing [in the letters]. They do good work, they work hard, they address student work in detail, but their self-effacing tone perpetuates that tone. Margo telling me to be more humble and diffident. It's vile. I'm dealing with the peer reviews by being brief and breezy. I won't give more time than that. Larissa Lai yesterday writing to say someone wants to buy notes in origin on DVD. I said how much can they get for it. I have to do that. Maybe CFDC will be more proactive than Sylvia. 20 Lovely Saturday morning. There was white mist at dawn but now at 10 it's bright warm day. I'm happy because so far today I've set up the first three volumes of DR. Somehow clicking through it, it seemed more interesting than I'd thought. It seemed lively. Vol 1 is 6 parts, East Van, Luke and Paul. Vol 2 begins with Maggie and goes to the end of 2706 Eton. Vol 3 goes to Nellie, the lesbian community and then at the beginning of part 4 C and T. I decided T and C won't begin a volume, I'll fold them into the lesbian community. It's giving me pleasure to demote them. When I get to Jam I can start a vol maybe, because what I learned from her was real. How does someone hit a new town running - that's the question at the beginning of DR. I arrived Jan 1975 and by July 1977 I was in bed with Jam. There was no one in Vancouver who could have been a better context. T and C traumatized me and that made an impression but haven't they turned out to be nothing more than that? I'll watch this - won't revise falsely but will like it if it's true. 21 Tom's house at 7.05 Sunday morning with white mist at the window. There's Mr Penis-head on the fireplace ledge. Tom has a hideous picture over the blue couch. His dad's painting from the window of the Arlington isn't bad. A huge chrome garbage can next to the stove - things that happened while I was away, but so perfect a house. Quilted denim bedspread I found lately. Out the window the datura 2' tall and holding its large pointed leaves elegantly on curved white legs. Honeysuckle in fall bloom among the pot plants on the steps. Narcissus racing up, 8" in a week. In among those stair plants is the single cricket that sounds on and on every night. Here's Tom back from Ralph's on his new bike, Marin mountain bike, big silver thing, very gear. Tom has so much better stuff than I do, a G3 that has wireless and can handle the complicated pages on the web, this beautiful bike, this marvelous warm bright house, kitchen things I got him, that are stainless steel where mine are junk. The moon lamp, the Swedish desk. The blue couch! The ringed glass bowl. All my plants. This view. The tall palm last thing before whiteness. The sycamore only beginning to lose its leaves, strong rust in pointed definite rags. The chintz orchid-and-palmetto cushions on the bench. There he is pouring coffee beans into the glass jar, banging the garbage can. Scraping coffee beans into the grinder, click of the spoon. The loud fridge hum. 22 Then I stepped out into a hot wind. Tom was polishing his bike inside. I said "There's a Santa Ana." He said "I've been wondering why I was feeling 16 years old." I went home for a while to work on Dames rocket and when Tom came to fetch me at 5 there was smoke in the air. A fire in Malibu he said. We rode to his place through the succulent garden in Balboa Park. Blue plants with a white bloom on them in creamy pink light. Later we were watching continuing coverage, a fire on 94 near Tecate, another that began at Witch Creek and was spreading rapidly toward Ramona and then the San Pasqual Valley. High winds. Long streamers of flame, pine trees writhing in the fire's way. Tom watching beside me in journalist's excitement. The whole town of Ramona evacuated. San Diego's lesbian fire chief at the podium. Buildings in flames with no fire men to be seen. Riding with Tom alongside the zoo parking lot, scents concentrated in the dry air. Something sweet and particular, a dirty bush with dried out white flowers. Eucalyptus. Riding home after supper at Denny's on a sidewalk in North Park, sensing little heat zones with the sides of my face and arm - something still holding day's temperature. While Tom was polishing his bike I was taking apart the agave choked in the green pot, replanting some of its pups. New Cuban oregano. Can I find a film lab today. 23 Tuesday morning. The Union and LA Times with fires on their front page. Beautiful photos. Fire festival. I'm cringing after Lise's email last night about reading the letters to Jimmy for the eval. She began by puffing my intelligence and rigor and then said she couldn't evaluate properly if she didn't see Jimmy's work too, and wondered whether he'd been devastated. - Then I wonder whether I misjudged in wanting her for the evals - who would have been better - Campbell probably - she'll complain to Margo that I'm harsh with students - and unacknowledged under her opinion will be her undeclared sense of my distaste for her mediocrity - what she did, what Susan let her do, to Susan's writing, what she did to the postcard text, the awful cat death piece - her way of schmoozing everyone because she needs to be popular. And then on the other side I need to ask whether the queasiness I now feel about her is a kind of jealousy - I'm saying 'a kind' because it's complicated. At the colloquy I saw that students I'd felt I'd carried into realness were as attached to her and easier with her - now even Favor - students I'd given something extraordinary to, where she gives a gush of flattery and no intellectual incision. Queasy disgust. And I wonder whether it's because I'm lame and discounted, and so everything I am cannot amount to the so much less that she is. It's that long-time structure, from little. She knows she's less and needs to be popular and in control of her population. She does it by means she knows are crooked. She's going to want to defend those crooked means. It's girl politics. What's my question. Is [the college] wrecked for me. Transparency and true hope have been my strengths. Would a much more cynical strategy work? Third packet - horrible Betty - sentimental, right-thinking, why do I want nothing to do with her, want to dispatch her somehow with my eyes shut. She's the little woman, protected, yearning but false, hollow. There I sighed. What is that. I felt like this about Suzanne. Class? Probably class. I don't want to reach her, I want to be rid of her. I should never have been assigned her. 24 "I am still reading the Laura letters, just extraordinary. I love that you quote her so much and don't want to miss a word so it's taking a long time. This time I feel the give and take through and through. Does it get any more exciting than this? Any teaching anywhere? I don't think so." [Lise] This work took me by surprise this packet, and it began with your response, a dream, and a sense of someone I used to know, a me that I had somehow forgotten. There were some things in your response that hit me like a brick, the rightness of it, the good sense of it. Like being whacked on the head with an aha stick, clean on the first pass. You are right that I have found this work, shred by shred, laborious .... It is labor-intensive, but it is very satisfying work. I am very thankful for the matched intensity that you respond with. This is how you do this kind of work. This is how you do this kind of work. I am having a hard time writing that paper because that is not my voice. [Emilee] Wow. 24 A dream that there's a juvenile delinquent boy in bed at the end of a long room and Tom and I are next to each other at this end. Tom gets in bed with me. I don't mind. In the morning I see the delinquent boy in Tom's bed smiling. He's writing postcards. After the conference call - disgusted by Margo pressing a social activism concentration - why - because embodiment studies is better founded conceptually, more prepared, more participated in, more articulated, than the concentrations we have. They don't want it. They marginalize it. They ignore the magazine, the website. They want to envision something conventional that actually has less social significance. Margo's best argument is that such a concentration would attract activist students. I conclude that I should find somewhere else for embodiment studies and just move it, website, magazine, workshops, everything. And then I think but no I don't want to be Miz mbo somewhere, I want to be recognized where I am. - All day trouble with email - Mercury retrograde - or maybe phone lines overloaded, although we managed an hour and a half on the conference call. People emailing because San Diego burning is international news - Jam this morning. 25 I was on a bus squashed into a seat with two men - remarked to the one next to me that I'd never been three in a seat on a bus before. He was telling me about himself and I could only hear bits of his sentences. There was some kind of noise. Driving a truck? He was younger though not young, a regular man. I was trying to feel out a sense of him. He was stroking me as he spoke but when he suddenly stroked my breast I turned my back to him. He went out and came back with coffee. "How do you take your cream?" We were at a dark place that I thought must be the bus station after Dawson Creek. Why isn't there a bus? The driver we were supposed to connect with refused to wait. Something about my journal. I open it to where I think there'll be the next clear page, and there aren't any clean pages. I leaf quickly through page after page of maybe philosophy notes. I'm sitting on the ground with my little boy, still have the man in mind. The ground drops toward the station building. It's very dark. A woman in a Volkswagon Bug is trying to rush up the hill. She can't make it, rolls back, gets out and walks away through a tunnel. There's daylight on the other side of it. Then I see people arriving through another archway on my level. Daylight there too, European city streets. I think the world Avernus. Is it some underworld space. (Sigh.) There are pools below. I want to wash my hands, can I reach the water. They are ornamental garden pools, two of different sizes with water at different levels. Maybe a third. I'm on the mossy wet edge of the nearer one and starting to slip in, am I going to get wet, I in my long skirt. At that point I'm considering whether in this dream I should have the man dipped into the pool, whether it would transform him. Writing the dream many considerations offside. I notice secondary elaboration - something that happens in the dream because the dreamer is puzzled about what's happening - trying to figure it out. Have wondered whether to leave it out of the account and try to keep the significant core, but it's more as if the dream is composed that way, by event, and then response to that event, led along by the dreamer's thoughts, for instance the way when I saw the woman leave by a short tunnel. At the moment I'm refusing to go further into it. What I was thinking when I sighed, above, was something about latent content of daylight events, for instance the way our phone connection was so broken up yesterday. Margo's cell this time and last time was breaking up painfully. I was thinking awareness of that sort of significance is underworld. What I'm thinking now is that if I don't pay attention to that the way I sometimes have because I don't want to get further into where I am. I don't want to be where I am. When I was up north I was where I wanted to be. I don't want to be with [the college] people. The evidence is I don't want to be with Tom. I don't want to be in San Diego. The evidence is I don't want to be with Tom because I don't attend to anything when I'm with him. He doesn't either, with me. I also can't just leave. I've wedged myself into this circumstance by carelessness. That means I'm sentenced to superficiality. Is it getting worse? No, it's holding. In the overlap of times I carried the habit of attention, I could carry it, for some time. But I'm habituated now. Hallowe'en coming up, access. Should I try to force attention to where I am? It says no. 'Art' to me means that attention. Belle's fantasies and escape - her art and the metaphysics she invents to be able to call her art perception rather than fantasy. Belle's life has gone so wrong that she can't afford to know anything.
At Café Bassam today, finished two letters and set up Billy's. On the news just now, a meeting as the shuttle docks at the space station, of two women who are each commander of their mission. Fruit salad: strawberries, purple figs, soaked almonds, grapefruit, cut in pieces and mixed up, morning and night, so good. Editing and formatting parts 3 and 4 today. What Lise did with her eval, what she doesn't mention. She recognizes the Laura letters but not the Jimmy letters - why. What would I want someone to say that I'm disappointed no one will say - that they get the whole picture. - Lay down in the dark and realized I was frightened - was Lise saying something Margo wanted her to say? It says yes. She talked to Margo about it. Do you think I'm too critical? No. Did Lise feel personally condemned by the Jimmy letter? Yes. She saw the weakness of her own writing in it. Will Jim like the Jimmy letter more? Yes. Is her letter going to be used against me? No. Am I irrationally frightened? Yes. I stick my neck out. 29
30 Tuesday morning, tomorrow's the last day of October. It's dark and cold. Formatting Dames rocket. I'm into the beginning of vol 3: Nellie. At Tom's two nights last weekend. I gape at the plants. Buy more. A fern and a lamb's ears. The pink vine geranium has come through the near side of the rail. Tom is taking care of Marko's plants too. Early Monday I woke before dawn. Tom was still asleep. The blind was up. I saw the first pink on an array of little clods. First bird cries. And then through to full flamingo over bright turquoise. Went out in white pyjamas and bare feet to buy the paper for Tom. On Sunday aft he was on his bed reading and I was creeping around the edges of the room with a can of Orange Pledge. 31 Café Bassam. Gypsy violin syrup. Susan for a few minutes this morning bubbling about what it's like coming into the city on the train, which enters underground. It's very noisy and on the many parallel tracks other trains moving at many different speeds carry people in lit spaces silently. (Something like that.) And then a teenage boy talking to another boy about how you need to be in yourself to make girls like you. She was marveling to be hearing such relevant talk and marveling to see his gestures, which were being performed from the same system as his speech, and which were completely unlike the gestures of people in the Berkshires. He was black, his culture was the very latest. This in the context of talking about how we are environments. I was saying we become them. In my six years I became London. Reminds me to write down Luke's story about a night in New York when he was there this September. He was walking, arrived in Times Square at three in the morning. A street person said to him "Pavarotti just died." Luke said "I have him on my phone." They stood and listened together.
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