| in america 14 part 4 - 2007-2008 december-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
19 December Warmer and raining. It took me three days to recover. Yesterday dangling, all day wanting to put something in my mouth. Back to transcribing. This morning the beginning with Jam. I'm noticing Jam's intervention has worked, I'm not sickened at the thought of her anymore. More disgusted by Cheryl when I see how mean she was and how anguished I was. A couple of lively stories, the visit to Opa and Oma's. Janeen's tales. Discovered highway cams yesterday for outside Beaverlodge and near Demmitt. - Checking one of them every 20 minutes between 4:10 and 5:50, I felt as if I was present there, in the bluing snow dusk. 20 Sat down to transcribe when I woke. The early days with Jam are thinky. I don't say what happens or what I see. There's not much to piece together. I was about to lose Luke and didn't know it. Jam wanted him, I lost him, and eight years later just before I left her another son was born. That's a mess and yet if Luke hadn't been away I wouldn't have had the red and white house and all it was, and if he had been with me I would have had all of Jam's family irrelevantly to deal with for years, irrelevant also for him. So should I not have been with Jam - she was right for the time - she was better than going on starved and humiliated with T and C, but more than that we had all those years of interested talk, anywhere, walking through the tunnel to the seabus, the two of us intent together. I loved her company. I loved being interested. I loved seeing her smart interesting face come up the stairs. That was well done.
I see it as a band of static, black and white.
Physics and esoteric studies in 1977. 21st Haven't drunk tea for months now, when I do, a drive of mental energy that carries me far past my stopping point, for instance in transcribing. Remarkable in the early Jam time how little sensory record there is. A lot of reading notes.
This morning I wanted more marvel and went to the blue notebook where I assembled from all the journals, I think just before I went into the MA. Beautiful physics notes. I'm going to go to the grain book too. It's a way of beginning the film/writing work. I will want to work from and transmit that state.
Note: the phytoestrogen cream with black cohosh that makes me come in minutes, never fails. Am putting it on my face too, now. The evidence is that it was a huge strain beginning with Jam. I wanted more than she did and I was working to hold her. She didn't actually like me though she was magicked by the mother structure. She wasn't grateful. She was spoiled by attention given the rich. I wasn't aware of that, unearned confidence. Much later she had more sense of what she was being given. I didn't have better options. The other thing was struggling to integrate what I was learning about state. I'd seen that state is labile and that some states are better than others. I felt responsible to maintain a best state. That was partly a mistake. It's verbal ego that tries. The conscious willed trying wasn't right, I now know. It's more a matter of feeling. I needed a teacher. It didn't start to come better until the country, like the handless maiden's years in the forest. Earlier I felt a lot but that wasn't enough. Why wasn't it enough? Because you sayed out of anger. Yes. Bought Tom another lamp - alabaster and stainless steel, a sconce for above his bed. It's real alabaster. 22 One of those interesting dreams that turn to nothing when they're written. A house in my neighbourhood (Strathcona). I'm there with Louie. I'd seen For sale signs hidden under the vines on the porch. Louie and I are looking through the window into a room whose floor is below the level of the sidewalk. Lamplight and walls of books. Shabby but wood-panelled. We're inside looking around. Louie is somewhere else and I'm on the upper balcony noticing that the rails are loose, the whole balcony probably isn't safe. I start down a stairway that ends halfway. Louie seems to be considering buying it. I want to leave but she stops in one of the rooms talking to people. I find myself in another, with a couple of men and a woman. One of the men starts to sing a familiar tune, too familiar but I'm singing along. Notice old books in the bookcase next to me. Take one down and am leafing through it. The binding is so loose it's just a pile of pages. I'm looking at black and white photos one after the other - don't remember them but there were many, I was thinking as I paged that that seeing would have been new when the photos were made - textures and close-ups - though it wasn't now. We go to look at the back yard, a grassy hill with a locomotive in it. Lupins - are they lupins? I was thinking - on the slope. Playground structures. I kept wondering how there could be so much space in the back yard of a house on that street in my neighbourhood. In future someone will model dreaming. Within any circumstance or scene, possibilities come into being because attention evokes them. I look at a slope and see lupins, then looking at them brings more. Also an interruptor - I start down the stairs and it stops. A strange inflector - I'm looking in the living room window and see floor level not where it usually is. The most interesting to me are the picture book dreams. They are virtuoso dreaming, one scene after another, formed and right. 26 Weekend in Joshua Tree. Drove there Sunday, took four-wheel drive roads on the 24th, came back yesterday. The Rancho Dolores Motel in 29 Palms Sunday, the High Desert Motel in Joshua Tree Monday. In the latter king size bed with the full moon rising to its highest apex of the year we had a little soft-cocked poke. On the way home we had had enough driving and blasted up I-15, were here by 2. 530 miles. $90 gas. I'm writing on Tom's blue couch at 5:40 in the morning. He was just out the door to work after his 4 days off, wearing his beanie in the cold. It's very quiet. I can see one bright star in the second-highest pane of the door. Now I have a month of my own, though the evals are still to write. What did I like. Stepping out the motel door yesterday into a cold wind, seeing the rim of naked mountain - not a high rim but bare harsh rock in clean early light - with the little town scattered in its flat-bottomed basin. I liked the weathered coral of the motel doors and the shadow cast by small bare trees. There was the jeep in its stall, with light scratches on its side where Tom ran alongside thorn bushes. Fine dust on its tailgate from the sand roads in the park. La Contenta Road and the geography tour. It's not the kind of desert I like best. Let's go to the Sonoran when it gets warmer. I liked the piles of boulders. The way they are heaps but show order, are visibly fragments of one mass that has come apart vertically and horizontally piece by piece, the pieces falling a bit sideways, and some rolling down, but the whole heap keeping a look of coherence in its shatteredness. Pink-brown-orange with deep blue sky above, sand roads bulldozed in curves with rims. Gambel's quail, a few, zipping along with their little legs twinkling. [binoculars] [jeep owner] Birds starting - there's light on the eastern rim. Pale turquoise, white turquoise, with the bare branches of the sycamore showing against it. I was just beginning to be able to see as we were on the way back to the motel on Monday afternoon. There were pale lavendar grey, silvery, bundles of leafless twig that were starting to catch me. The intricacy of weave. Now a tinge of yellow diffusing up into the pale blue. What else I liked. Coming into the park from Mecca, a two-lane blacktop carrying us up into the boulder piles. Tom liked stopping for a mile-long freight train on the way into Mecca, and yesterday the wind farm on the road down into Palm Springs. I love Palm Springs, the way it's a sea of palm heads up against an interesting bare mountain. The boulevards are planted with natives. Acacias. Trees I don't know, a garden city. A rich city with good houses. Writing any of this haunted by a sense of lost being. I've come away from this weekend with so little to say, so little remembered. Tom and I were getting along, friendly, but did I once feel him or see him? An easy trip, enough money. - Last night was that a moment of reality, when I said no to televison and no to his collection of crime novels and was lying in bed refusing everything and Tom said I was being impossible and I said yes I was and he said he was the only person I'd be able to get away with that with and I burst into hysterical laughter. What was that?
I'm afraid of two things. One is memory loss. I'm wondering whether the reason I have nothing to tell is that my brain isn't taking impressions the way it did, so I have them steady and clear when I'm writing. The other is that I've wandered into comfort and am stuck where I will never again have a strong feeling. Work is what I need. I need something hard and rich the way Being about was hard and rich. The Golden West was my apex, I was doing my two hardest things at the same time. What's my hardest thing now?
Last week - I forgot to say - there was someone on a social bookmarking site saying The analogue/digital distinction in the philosophy of mind was the essay he had been looking for though it's old. - Went to the grain book and copied onto four sheets: language, vision, sound, principle. [I was] Intent, on. I know which bits I want and don't, an impersonal abstract lyricism very exacting as to sound and register. 27 Saw on Statcounter that someone in New West was in Work & days yesterday. Worried that it was David and he'd be mad at me so checked the volume's he's in. The passages about him are loving, interesting, a good portrait, acute. I'm going to begin putting [this section] back. Work scared of being so at outs with the fac. I'm disgusted with all of them [for not supporting Margo] except Jim. KC is telling students it's hopeless, both she and Lise are saying one thing in private and another in public. CG is looking out for her program first - all the concentration coordinators are. If we fought together we could be proud of each other even if we lost. Why don't they understand that - is it class? I'm longing for Muggs.
- Benazir Bhutto assassinated. - Bassam's on Thursday morning. R & B, that deep sway sideways from the knees. Worked through the rest of the grain book. What next. Fine bright day in Christmas week, which is like time out of time. Fond of Tom, now that I'm working I'm grateful. He has become the companion I used to glimpse for just a second. He took the pictures this trip. He doesn't mind that I look my age in his photo on Eureka Peak - he likes it. We're always more natural. We got back to his house Sunday and unpacked and prepared without discussion. He wanted ZZ Tops in the Imperial Valley and said afterward that now I could have silence in exchange. He looked beautiful in his Carhart and work boots and short haircut. - The barber last Saturday. He took me to Ernesto's cave on Broadway with him. I sat and stared around while his hair fell in soft clumps. Ernesto is a gay man with longish orange hair and a brown face, slight, gentle, much himself in a shrine to young male beauty. Sun glowed in through dirty glass to a 5' mother-in-law's-tongue strapped to the wall and every surface covered to the ceiling with faces at different sizes. Many blue-eyed models. Several charts of haircuts showing a fade, an oval cut, a trim, and all the rest. Two posters of the presidents of the United States. On a dark back wall, above the fridge, a shrine to JFK, the Pope and a young sailor who may have been Ernesto himself. A many years' unchanged nook. (Pat Kelley told Tom about it - Pat died last year a week after his 100th birthday, Tom said.) Loving, I thought - a quiet loving air. Ernesto gave me a sharp glance when I came in but I looked at the albums behind his waiting chairs, and saw him in them with pleasure (cherubs, Bill Clinton, pinup women, men with babies), and I think he felt that because his brown eyes were warm when he said come again. When he was unbuttoning the white cloth from Tom's neck he said to me "Here he is, made a young man again." Now I have to go to an eval, don't I. Tom was just right when I was scared of sex - what was that - it's inarticulate reluctance, skittish dread. I don't want to go there, it feels irrelevant and excessive although driving silently in the flats beside the Salton Sea I was daydreaming an imaginary man. The way he was just right was he stroked my tummy quietly and held my head so I could skittishly slide into it. He's a tolerant spirit, generous. 29 My own semester self eval: Wonderful work with Melanie - I rapidly got her into her best own project and more than that I saw what was brilliant in her odd poems - I loved finding what she was doing with sound and naming it, I loved figuring it out, seeing how sophisticated it was, finding out I knew how to see that and take such rich pleasure in it - nobody else in the program would have been able to do that. Wonderful work with Emilee - being bold and accurate enough to draw her into confidence in her own spectacular flair. A lot of detailed explication with Justin, that didn't work for him but interested me. Pedestrian, minimal, effective intervention with Billy, Anne, Betty. A lot of ineffective wrestling with Belle and then the little jump of inspiration that let her find out she could show her real venture unhidden. Finished new magazine. Peaceful life with Tom. Losing 15 pounds! Blood pressure down! Energy, body pleasure again. Good clothes. Seeing Luke and Row, good visit with M and Luke. New jeep paid for and fixed up. New vols of Fading and Dames rocket. Good visits with Jam and Louie. $1000 of teeth care. PRC contact through Dave. Berlin screening of notes in o. Worse relation with fac. Good evals from Jim and Margo. Didn't digitize films. But got Bright and dark print. Didn't digitize slides or sound. Began to learn DVD technology. Various unknown web contacts for all my sites. - Is that it? Mary Frank 1933. Mary Frank: encounters Neuberger Museum 2000 triptychs. What color lament 1981-93 acrylic and oil on board, orange-red reminiscent of Italian Renaissance masters. "Viewers identify with Mary Frank's imaginary figures, landscapes and creatures on emotional, philosophical, and psychological levels." 1990 Hayden Herrera Mary Frank N6537.F735 A4. - Orpheus - derivation most probably connected with dark, was known by 530 BC.
Just sent out proof version of the magazine. 30 This Sunday morning beginning in the Orpheus pages and quickly overwhelmed. I don't know what to do with them. Many lines and clumps I like. What to make of them. The accidental contacts among them that there are in their unsorted state evoke many small thoughts. I should sort them but if I sort them too much what's touched off will be tamer. There are two registers I can easily tell apart, explanatory and the other - lyric? I know the explanatory is meant to be behind the scenes, and there I have a doubt - here I sit up straighter, which tells me that doubt is important. I have a strong working knowledge of the theoretical terrain - I work from it all the time with my students - I've used it to organize embodiment stuides. But I don't know whether it can or should order this work. I've got a frame already worked out, but ordering elements into it isn't simple because they belong in several at once. I was imagining a book.
- Helen Mirren, last episode of Prime Suspect. Evals - was it alright in Melanie's eval to finish with what I wrote about her poem - it was her flair and mine too, what I liked best in the letters. Something that hasn't happened before. 1st January 2008 What is it just now - anxious, acidic. Earlier this aft it was about Al's double-cross at Scott's, now it's about having to deal with Lise on the brochure edit. Why does that stress me - I told Lise her list needed to be in grammatical parallel and she wrote to Margo to say, does it really - it bothers me because M asked me to do the brochure and now Lise is running to Mummy over my head. Lise also tried to muscle into the testimonials I was editing. - That on top of the way her editing made Susan's thesis unreadable, but before that the debacle of the embodiment colloquoy. For her I think it was the moment when I refused to talk to her about what happened with Millie. I didn't trust her. She shafted me with her peer review. She's two-faced, she's not intellectually strong and I'm ecological pressure in her niche, which is the writer girls. Last night we were in Leucadia at the Pacific Surf. On Moonlight Beach in the dark staring out toward the surfline together because just the first instant of the wave break, the instant of most energy when the wave smashes and the foam rises, the whole broad foam band would glow white-blue, luminescent. There was a smell of wood smoke, families at the fire rings higher up the beach. Orion tilted above. This morning we were parked above Beacons - Pilgrim's beach - watching old surfers gathering, walking down the steps with their boards. We were there before eight, tender silvery light on the foam. Waves glassed off, green. A lot of physical bodies, good men. A beautiful boy, maybe thirteen, standing in a wetsuit at the top of the steps with his dad, who was him thirty years older. He was leggy and thin, had straight black brows and hair short to his head, a deep back of his neck. Tom and I were there a couple of hours gazing and murmuring. A mean-mouthed man wearing a jacket with an image of soldiers in helmets and the logo Soldier for the Lord - enlisted for life on the back stood for a long time in front of us and then sat down. I didn't like him. After a while I said "I'm going to get rid of him." Tom looked alarmed. "What are you going to do?" "Something subtle." I took the binocs and got out and stood just a little too close to him and slightly behind him, looking out toward the waves. I could feel something like a pressure of will. Stood there. Gradually turned the binocs just a little toward him on my right, maybe five degrees. He got up and left. I heard a motor start across the road. - I was showing off - entertaining Tom and impressing him - but I have a doubt, I didn't but I do - I liked knowing how to do that and proving that I did - but something about motive, it was gratuitous, he wasn't doing anything, though he was something. Earlier Tom saw what he thought was a seal and then no, a dolphin. I got out to look for it and saw there were two dolphins cruising south together just behind the farthest groups of surfers. [Tom at Beacons][E same morning] Dec 18 - Jan 4 2009 Career, ambitions, status, parenting Luck conditional on relationships Celebration, fun, entertainment You could enter one of the most important social circles of your life, a group that will benefit you for at least a decade ... new vistas of understanding that never leave ... your friendships intermingle with higher learning, religion, philosophy, media projects, cultural events, international travel, publishing or legal processes.
3 Went to sleep too early and woke embattled at 3. It was about the journal project, what to do about Fading [ie In AmericaI I'm not satisfied leaving it down. Got up and wrote a short paragraph about the impasse to tack onto the end of the edit section of the index page. Linked it to a page with my letters to CG. Then reposted the front pages of 1-9 and added the front pages of 10 and 11. They say too much about Susan - they say Margo doesn't have a framework for progressive ed - what else. Embattled also about the despicable faculty timidity about Margo - how I'm going to face the crew who won't fight. And about Al muscling in with Scott. There hasn't been this kind of social embattlement for a while. It has been peaceful without it. It goes back a long way, grade 1 probably.
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Thought-out practices for health and energy. Dealing with different registers - explanation and simplicity. Something moral - learning to process what happens with people to be able to reset to unspoiled - because otherwise I thicken my time too much. Learning to move on lightly. I hold grudges and it's too costly. A very large synthesis. A tonality something like Blake. Is explanation a parallel writing. The relation of giving an account of Dames rocket journal time and this explanation. I was looking for a psychology. Some artists just make. What I make has to include psychology. The way I learned was so indirect, by recognition and collection of bits. Working that way is laborious.
- Anomalous knowing. Elizabeth Mayer 2007 Extraordinary knowledge: science, skepticism and the inexplicable powers of the human mind Bantam Dell a sensation of light - clear, soft light, as though light was filling my bones, as though light and air were infusing each bone. I saw it - light penetrating those bones, right through to the marrow. She assumes it's mind-matter interaction. She assumes it's outside rationality. "Both worlds." "Transactions that take place between <the realm of> unconscious mental processing ... <the realm of> <intangible> physical dynamics" "It may be possible to develop an awareness that might result in a subjectively felt state of profound connectedness to other human beings and to <every aspect of> the <material> world around us." He waits for a distinctive white light to appear around each patient's head. <thoughts transferred from one mind to another> What started happening was I literally became those cells and those lesions while I ran. And once that happened, the lesions started getting smaller. I became the lesions resolving. I watched them resolving and I was them resolving.
Helen Palmer - has a school. I follow my abdominal breath until thoughts and feelings recede. The emptiness feels very nourishing, very soft and intimate. You lose awareness of the room, your body, your face. That all goes, but there's a separate awareness that stays. Once you're internalized, you establish a focal object, not trying for anything ... You focus, then wait. You doubt and you stay there anyway. You just keep shifting attention back to the focal object, until it starts to capture your attention. Then you're ready ... You just keep allowing the object to enhance in your imagination until it stops fluctuating. I maintain concentration by imagining the object as beautiful until the <picture in my mind> becomes so vivid and believable that it starts to play itself out. I don't try for content or information. I just lose a sense of separation from the impression and take in whatever it shows. I think that focused imagination connects ordinary consciousness with a greater reality, so if you keep oscillating between enhancing focus and receiving what it shows, a close relationship forms between the observer and the observed. You know them from the inside because you've stopped being separate. Then the thing is to track how you yourself get in the way. You have to make sure your placements of attention are precise so you're not projecting. That's why my teaching is so focused on knowing yourself and what you're likely to project into a reading; that's the only way to get reliable with intuition. I realized the amazing thing was to be so located. My clairvoyance could locate people at a distance or at different points in time, so any accuracy on my part automatically located us both in a greater reality that people need to know is kindly and real. Clairvoyance isn't a mind-to-mind thing, like reading people's thoughts. It lets us see a much larger pattern of existence.
You seem to be removed. You can enjoy yourself doing it and watch yourself doing it at the same time. Posterior superior parietal went dark. Freud "preserving the secret long enough in the maternal womb."
She didn't just fear for her mental stability. She feared for the stability of the world around her. They had to work their way through times of terrific fear. <"We haven't begun to understand how consciousness interacts with the physical world.">
Bohm was asking, since everything in the world is interconnected, howcome everything looks so separate? It looked like there was a smooth curve between the apparently anomalous perceptions we were getting and other nonconscious, nonanomalous perception. <"Each of us has two natures; there's the physical body, and the spirit or soul that infuses it. Intuition is a function of the spirit part of a person, not the body part."> I actually forget the things I see - I mean, I'll forget in my regular life. You cannot engage in both kinds of knowing at the same time. You learn to shift back and forth, you learn to trust it. incapacity to see both ways at once <"There's just no mind-body mechanism that can explain these results."> Here's what I mean by faith - lack of resistance to what you hope is possible. You free the receptive state from its armouring by the ego. You learn to live close to receptivity. Most people don't know how to get their subconscious mind talkin' to 'em. It's just intuition, that's all .... Your subconscious mind knows dowsing's in your body as much as in your brain and maybe that's what's good about the rods. You're holding 'em and feeling 'em and that puts you real focused on your body. The rods let your body tell you what your subconscious mind knows. The rods free you up that way. They give you a way to stop your brain from stopping all the rest of you from knowing. But master dowsers, they've learned how to contact the knowing real directly. Harold McCoy in Fayetteville Arkansas. Ozark Research Institute, www.ozarkresearch.org.
Lloyd Silverman 1982 The search for oneness International Universities Press Lloyd Silverman 1985 Mommy and I are one American Psychologist 40(12):1296-1308 Autonomic nervous system (electrical skin response) wired to perceive events 3-5 sec into the future. Response before the stimulus had been selected by the computer. Entrainment without evident means of communication. Capacity to alter what machines do. A model where mind/matter each have two categories - a 4-part interaction! [sketch] This is a maddening diagram until I see that as a diagram it may be describing something else.
Locality and causality, Bell's Theorem entanglement, nonlocality. - "Built-in memory detector has detected a problem. Please contact a service technician." [message came up on my PowerBook G3] Will I be able to transfer. 4 Raining. Sweaters drying. Cold feet, transcribing 1977, notes scribbled while I was sitting in front of the tent. Vol 6 finished yesterday. Today looking at dope notes wondering whether some of those random abstract realizations prepared something I used later - they're disconnected, out of nowhere, isolated realizations, they seem useless - but are they evidence of something connecting, like little clicks? And that more-connected structure later was what was able to work through philosophy with so much clarity? In those days I thought momentary state was the only value but the evidence is that that's wrong. There is a work of time, capable structure is built over time. Over different states. I was a purist, it worked then. It worked because I needed to get out of the minds I'd been formed in. Something else I was doing then was noting phenomenology, not what happened but what mind did with what happened. It makes boring reading but it was training I use now without thinking about it. I notice the qualities of what's happening and I notice some of what's silent response to it. Evaluative silent response I act on. Every so often I say something acute, though most of it is trash. A lot of it is a few words noting a train of thought I don't remember. It's a big shift. It's interesting and hard to see. I could trance out in writing good papers, but I couldn't talk in class. I couldn't write personal experience well. I could take photos and film but I couldn't sound like an artist - that's dissociation, right? Personal and cultural. So was the struggle in those years effective? It's grotesque to see, but was it working?
Saturday afternoon.
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