| in america 15 part 2 - 2008 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27 March Verbal privilege March 17 2008 The drive to connect. Because it is possible, in the lowest of moods, to post a status message to Facebook in a language that most of my 'social network' does not understand (I have a rule by which I am only allowed to be publicly self-pitying in Turkish, or occasionally in Francais) only to have one of the people who knows my foolish head inside-out see it, and instantly grasp, navigating via an Urdu cognate - perceptively and precisely what I was thinking. And with kindness, write that understanding back to me, in laughter, with love. What would I do without such friends? Language, literature, politics, poetry, cinema, music, food, art, history, hybridity I read her feeling something that might be about class. I compare her discrete grace with my indiscretion: her blog values her connections and doesn't risk them. She's well-placed. She's in New York working for Soros. She was at Oxford. We know she's good-looking although she doesn't show it off. She's international. She runs. She has interesting friends. She cooks. People read her blog - I read her blog - to see into a privileged life. She is the sort of person who would have been welcome where I wasn't, for instance in the cog sci department at UCSD. If I were what she is I wouldn't be marginal. She's young too, a postmodern person, thoroughly conversant. An Obama person. What am I instead. I'm radical. She's social and lovely and I'm not but I'm radical. I can dig up roots and look at them and rearrange them. I've done it in experimental film, philosophy, cog sci, trauma psychology, philosophy of language. I do it for my students all the time. But I still mind knowing she'd dislike the journal project and disapprove of it. Hillary has been messing up badly, confabulating about dodging bullets and then confabulating more trying to make light of it. Yesterday I worked at Dawne. Turned over the soil in the path with a spade, in the hot sun. The ceonothus was in thick bloom, the matilija poppies not yet. The small cistus on either side of the top of the steps have a lot of buds and a few white flowers. Doves nesting in the jasmine. The passiflora has red flowers thick on the fence, threaded among ivy and arced over the gate. The red geraniums at the front of the house have survived though the agapanthus didn't. Afterward I went to Walter Andersons and walked the rose rows. Last year they were afflicted but this year they are glossy and powerful. The nursery full of perfume in the heat. Franklin and Marshall College Lancaster PA. Is that who has been reading my site - he's being published by MIT. Xenophon in the Anabasis "Those I have given offense to now accuse me. But those I have helped, in battle, on the march, in cold, in sickness, none of them speak up. They do not remember." felt the appeal of the tragic knowledge of something immediately wrong in the world a poet's power to see beauty in truth a soul great enough to bear new and intolerable truth pain charged with exaltation a difference between tragic and other pain Nietszche "The reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed." dignity and significance of human life dignity of a soul in agony Large awareness, authentic voice Deena wanting to believe that souls before each incarnation choose the path they will live, and that everything they suffer is their choice. It's a horrendous belief. I can see what she wants from it, can I? She wants to think of herself as a soul on a journey, who can take charge of her fate. She can't pick the bit she's moved by out of its morass. She's refusing clues. - Tom's rented box, a strange large white thing. His adventure starting tomorrow. He came to take me for a drive over the bridge and up the Silver Strand. I had been transcribing and was on edge. Scared of the bridge, thinking what to do if Tom drove off the edge, exacerbated, finding him unbearable, the way he explains too much. Wondered if it was because I'd been transcribing a more sensitive time but then thought it might be my crooked way of being distressed he's going away. I can feel the distress completely without its meaning. Barbara Bonney. From Nozze, Sull'Aria, duet with contessa The high spirit of his time was strong in Aeschylus. He was, first and last, the born fighter to whom the consciousness of being matched against a great adversary suffices and who can dispense with success ... The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. 30 Joseph Tennie Olson son of Mattias Olson who came to Valhalla with his wife and seven children from Ada Minnesota in 1916. October 17 he filed on his own place and proved it in 1925. I wrote about him in 1979. Late 1981. I hadn't realized Jam invited them into her house so soon after I got back into town. November. 1982-1985. Misery going on so long. That I helped move Trudy's furniture. Jam persecuting me about a baby. By now I'm describing scenes, more of the record is there. Jam comes across as monstrous.
31 The fact I keep leaving out is that they're drug addicts. Tom interrupted yesterday, came with his rented car to take me to see what he'd seen coming home the day before, Camp Pendleton slopes yellow with mustard. He came home wired from seeing his buddies, the man he was when he used to know them. I listened but he didn't like the thoughts I was having, which he could feel. I said he'd have those same thoughts in a couple of days and went home. At eleven in the morning he arrived rebalanced. From Camp Pendleton to San Clemente on I-5 the traffic was creeping. It was a fine day, Sunday afternoon. We were not in a hurry. I was talking about what I'd been thinking about, the misery of 1981, what my weakness was. I said I wanted to be more interesting to myself than I was. He said taking a drink was like that. I said That's about not feeling, and I still often don't. He said he knows it about me, for instance the night before my feelings were hurt but I didn't know it. He knows it and he protects me. They knew it and exploited it and you know it and protect it I said. At this moment I'm wanting to be more interesting to myself still and what do I know. Action. I still don't have action. What am I trying to do with this time. How would I do it if I had a context the way there was for the doc, what context would it be. Dames rocket. It's about lesbians, art, Vancouver, the 70s and early 80s (envy, jealousy, ruthlessness, competition), drugs, Strathcona, Jews, reading, writing, sex and gender, culture revision, culture clash. I had ethical ideas they didn't have. I had formation they didn't have, London, hitchhiking, the country, Europe, philosophy, literature. They'd been lesbians longer. They had Kiyooka, art study, Intermedia, a lot of drugs, staying clumped with each other from college on, intense local study the way they did it with photos, tapes, super-8, later video.
I'd like to out them. For that it would need to be published. Who'd be interested in it. Without what it was about them it's a miserable little story. Did I record any of that, really. Is there anything I can make of it. What I made of it already in winter interference. Beautiful losers, what was different about that, it's not the hard scrutiny I want. Injured scrutiny. I'd have to do it with love I learned to withhold, is that it? Not quite.
It's also a story of coming into work. What work was it then. My story is that, theirs isn't mine. Emilee writes: The people that occupy the space where these former structures previously existed are flabbergasted, and rightly so. I turned my whole world upside down in the span of a year. And I am somehow still standing here. I am looking at them and saying, okay. Some of them have tried to hurt me. Some of them have turned away. Some are so perplexed that they have reverted to the coping mechanisms that have helped them navigate all of the challenges they have faced in their life. Some of them are still looking at me. They are making eye contact. They are the good listeners. I am working to create a life in which I can write for them and for anyone else I can find that are like them. I try to love all beings everywhere, but these are the beings I will write for in this lifetime. She also says: completely uncontrollable and perpetually flowing dumb-struck love for the beauty of everything everywhere. She quotes me: "Ah, that's art. He's stepping over the line into the inchoate and making something with the best one is and having no way to know whether it's good or not. Terrifying. It is the condition of the work. It requires dragon power. And generates more." I have learned more about myself as an artist. The conditions I prefer to work under, the kind of stimulus I need, the invoking of or opening to the sources within myself. Today I actively go for refuge. I think I am growing an understanding of the relationship between the meditative techniques and symbolism of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and the analytical technology and symbolism of American neurological science. Dialogue between the living tradition of Tantra and the evolving sciences of neurology, sensory perception, and technology. mind science I am coming to see it as the queen's path different than the hero's journey behind the scenes like tracking something in the forest. You see a broken twig, you get a breath of wind, you narrow your eyes and you go, quietly. What I think when I read her is that the revision of the story I need is to go through it without giving up heart. I can see how compassion is the attitude that protects best. What I couldn't do then maybe I could do now. Another thing I think is that Millie and Susan couldn't go through but she can because along with being as smart as she is she has Buddhist training. She's my second chance. She's the real thing. She'll soon outgrow me and I won't mind because she'll teach me.
Anne Carson 1986 Eros the bittersweet: an essay Princeton Small book, 170 pages. a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for a crisis of human contact wound my two arms around this genuinely miraculous amazing man and lay there all night long [Socrates] a phenomenon whose essence and loveliness is in its ambivalence immortals call him Pteros, because of the wing-growing necessity [in Phaedrus] to read anagignoskein, again to know A mood of knowledge floats out over your life ... It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as ... 3rd April
Florence workshop of the spirit Wealth textile and banking Larger than Paris or London Landed nobility and clergy 1300s education studia humanitatis Petrarch scholar and poet b.1304 promoted Humanism a new approach to the literature of the past ... every opinion was to be read in its proper context Earlier scholars looked for sententiae - authoritative statements to be debated an education, so to speak, in persuasiveness, which focused on Latin authors primarily as models of fine rhetoric and sound argument syllabus taken from Cicero: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, moral philosophy Humanisti trained lawyers, merchants, bankers, orators, statesmen Italian city-states Petrarch: "After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past." Ideas seized on in Florence Venice and Florence only republics to resist rule by single despotic individual or family Envisaged as a polis - ideals of humanism and political exigency Brunelleschi's unified piazza "an image of perfect proportion and measure" "shaped to model an ideal of clarity" 1400s Cosimo de Medici banking family money, competition for commissions Mathematically calculated perspective Florence 1400s Science of optics known for several centuries - Arabs Dominant by later 1400s David 1430 "one of the first free-standing naked statues to have been created since antiquity" > The homosexuality of the pagans First half of the 1400s "a great leap in consciousness," "richer sense of what it might mean to be a human being" Princely patron families of Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino Expected intellectual attainment of their painters, sculptors, architects The artist became a kind of traveling intellectual. Patrons - prince of Urbino "to be on familiar terms with mathematicians and geometricians, moral philosophers and lawyers, poets and theologians alike" Greater value and freedom of artists Late 1400s Lorenzo a humanist court - Ficino the neoplatonist, Pico della Mirandola, Botticelli's Venus Purpose of art not to communicate Christian stories and feeling but to gratify the social and intellectual elite Greater freedom, less universality Da Vinci b.1452 painting "a subtle invention which brings philosophy and subtle speculation to bear on the nature of all forms - sea and land, plants and animals, grasses and flowers, which are enveloped in light and shade." Leonardo's notebooks ed. Irma Richter 1980 Oxford p.195 Youth and apprenticeship in Florence, then Milan Artist and universal knowledge notebook Religious feeling to depicting creation Notebooks 20,000 pages "consequence of his views about what an artist should be" Concerns by no means matched those of the humanists - understanding nature ... share certain habits of thought with them ... attitudes of productive skepticism towards every manuscript ... similarly skeptical approach to the natural world. experience, mother of all certainty (Scientific revolution not until 1600s)
North Europe - persisting tradition of ascetic piety, Grünewald Erasmus calling for spiritual renaissance, meaning philology applied to scripture Wanted to take scripture away from the theologians More availability to ordinary people Anti-materialist, anti-elitist Printing press popularized mid-1400s Germany a mass of independent principalities loosely held in Holy Roman Empire Merchants and bankers gradually penetrated by humanist ideas
Michaelangelo 1475-1564 Sistine ceiling - allusions to classical sculpture Pope raised money by selling indulgences Luther nailed 1517, simple direct faith 1527 French troops pillaged Rome, radical Lutherans Protestant art secular forms portrait, landscape Wars of religion in second half of the 1500s Montaigne reading to discover the multiplicity of human consciousnesses "the diversity of his dogmas and fantasies" Constancy itself is nothing but a languishing and wavering dance. - Quoted in Charles Taylor Sources of the self p.179 Venice "Venetian painters painted sexual desire death the human face landscape, and the fall of light" Unparalleled network of long-distance trade routes A republic
Emerged into Baroque Andrew Graham-Dixon 1999 Renaissance University of California England - 1588 Armada - Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn 1533 French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latin - Protectorate Protestant Her brother Edward IV died after 6 years - Mary Catholic Sound economy, avoidance of bad alliances, settlement of religious schism, sea power, peace with France I am already bound unto a husband, which is the kingdom of England. Literature of the last decades Erasmus visited Oxford humanists She executed her half-sister, her loved Devereaux, Essex.
- Spent the day doing what I used to do - read Graham-Dixon on the Renaissance, nothing else. Made summary notes. Now it's 7:42. Palm treetops stirring black in front of pale indigo in the west. Someone in a window opposite, white shoulders seated above a tabletop. A lampshade slightly higher and to their left - I can't see gender - as there is also here, as seen from that room. It is a rectangle the shape of a 16mm frame, dark gold, complicated, venetian stripes as if I'm seeing through a fine horizontal grid I can only see above and below the lampshade. I don't usually sit at this table. It has been covered with papers. This is better. Dark months of 1981-82. The journal skims. It writes bits in the order I remember them. I'm aware writing that it's a cognitive record, phenomenological notes. There's hardly any punctuation - I've dropped periods, most commas, caps, often use spacing to indicate sentences. There's usually nothing to mark quotations. I often recognize them now, know who was speaking, but sometimes I don't. The language sometimes is characteristic in a way I can recognize. Transcribing it I reconstruct dim shells and edges. Moments I haven't thought of since. (But vividness of lines I used in the winter pieces - decontextualized vividness often.) What's my sense of it as material. Reading Carson I see how to read it as myth. Young woman led by eros into a dark undoing. Nothing could be resolved. What I wrote was all flotsam, whatever blew by. A film frame I have been seeing yesterday and today. The edges of a side of a flower, as if on the scanner, surrounded by a red frame inside the frame. [sketch] A water glass full of orange nasturtiums, another of yellow, picked at Taft as buds. Finished 1981 today, jumping to October 1984 because it's only half a volume. Sick, literal, brief, daily. It's not a mass of abstract notes. There's Mike playing hockey on the creek. 5 Someone yesterday spent 6 hours in Work & days, Calgary. They got the ref from someone in BC. AG9.html, which is sex with Rob. On PBS last night - Supernatural Science - a story about an experiment with subjects wired to monitors being tested on card guessing. Shown series of four cards, asked to say which would be randomly drawn by a machine, they guessed at chance but physiological measures correctly discriminated the card that would be drawn. This morning Louie writes about a show in Strathcona of historical images. Prize draw of Opening doors. She said she knew with calm certainty that her name would be drawn.
Dave says in my year the grade twelve average was 64%.
Look there the palm - what to call it - the fruit-structure, its many hanging plaits - catching light soft and tawny - hung partway down the pole like a hanging basket of chandeliered stems. Behind it on window glass reflection of the drifting fronds that are dropping the subtlest of shadow onto the goldy fringe. It's the window I was looking at last night, almost directly opposite. - Drum scanning - West Coast Imaging $40 each, fluid mounted, color balanced, wide gamut, cleaned at 2:1, scanned to DVD. - A workshop on unconscious and conscious self, 'I' and 'I' Dark knowledge Workshop on the pagan lineage - humanism, Renaissance, science
7 The bachelor - what's the word - tacky, but specifically - he lies continuously - he chooses but he's told who he shouldn't eliminate yet - they tell him they 'care about' him, are falling for him. A meretricious man set up to judge among stupid slick-lipped salacious women willing to be humiliated, crying because they have been rejected in a completely meaningless contest, or else angrily defiant. Hugging at first meeting and kissing at second, as if touch is social performance rather than real being. All of it scandalizes me but what interests me - looking at young persons and clothes. What do I think of that one, what's that one like. 8
Huizinga on the Middle Ages - vengeance, loyalty, display, lawsuits, crimes, assaults and persecutions, fear of hell, sorcerers and devils, insecurity and war, brigandage, scarcity, pestilence, belief in the end of the world, Christian advocacy of renunciation. 10 Today I saw that the red plaid blanket was in shreds. So many years. It goes back to Ken in the blue room. There's a black scribble in my left eye that's like Arabic cursive in black ink. It must be a slump in vitreous humor. It moves when my eyes move. I can't look at it. It's across the whole eyeball. I see it most against the page. Jumped to transcribing the end of DR. - It's fainter and more bitty, as if very wet ink dried and shrank. This morning it was the end of August playing with Michael. Instantly the writing was better. I was there. Moments between when Jam shows up I shrink back to an anxious dot. I was noticing that I'm gregarious but I don't like to be with middle class people, I like the street. I could like the street again now if I could afford a nook in it. I like it for a bad reason and a good one. The good reason is that anyone's more visible and present, I can meet up with them. Would middle class people seem like that too if my position with them were better? I don't know. The energy of the conflict about Michael. It's the same conflict I had about Tom that's gone quiet now, mostly, except maybe in an indirect form? The way the past couple of times I've seen him I've got antsy and wanted to go home. The Home and Garden channel has something to do with it. He wants me to join him in his bliss. The furnishings appall me, the way people talk about them appalls me. Iridescent back-splash tiles, little brackets in the bathroom. Jam vs Michael. I noted it fully. Noticing that now I dislike Jam whenever she comes into the story. It's not that I like Michael more, it's that I see how happy I am with Michael and how shriveled with J. I see the oppression. With Jam it was a dogged increasingly hopeless struggle. With Michael I could see myself shining supernaturally. The bright sleek haunch in the mirror. Jam wasted wasted wasted me, wasted my lovely 30s. Which is to say, I guess, that I did; but I didn't, I made Notes in origin and other beauty, I showed what she didn't see. So should I bear a grudge? Isn't the question; I do, until I don't. I'm at Bassam's about to open the computer. It's a disaffected semester, nobody live, except Deidre probably, just slog on.
[notes on workshops and mbo students] - This morning transcribed Rowen's conception. 15 Sept 1984. 12 Jam said she didn't like to be associated with the way I see people. I want to know whether she thought that because like many she has forbidden herself to see what's wrong with people, or whether she's right, that the way I see is pathological, and as such will be written off when people read it, will make me written off altogether.
Okay they're separate questions. Saturday morning on the roof. It's nine o'clock - getting hot. Little twitter. Sunglasses. I'm transcribing more than ten pages a day because it's a time when I'm feeling the neighbourhood, more is happening. Wondering how it can be that now I have such a distaste for almost any mention of Jam - how does that happen? (Smell of toast drifts probably from Richard's.) I mean, did I feel the disgust and oppression then and not know it? Could I have been that divided? I felt the oppression but not the disgust - what does that mean? It means I was attached. And so was she, I feel sorry for her in that. But objectively - what a horrendous mess. It took another horrendous mess to get me out of it. But then I was out. Though the mess is still there and discredits me to myself. So one of the things I'm wondering about as I transcribe is how to think about that discreditedness. What would be different if I could think well of myself all the way through. Can I answer that? I'm wondering whether there's something to do about it.
That felt like a light blooming in my solar.
14 Sore heart for Tom whose directory crashed, third time his writing has got lost. Tax cheque for $1094, total $2035. 15 On Sunday morning Tom reached to touch me and said Look. The horizon was hot gold, apricot gold, an even band across the east. Santa Ana sunrise. At Tom's house it's honeysuckle season. The scented geraniums are flowering pink. I stayed two nights. Yesterday I took a picture of Tom on the couch reading the paper with the French doors open beyond him. I showed it to him. He said, I'm starting to look like an old man. I'd thought that when I saw him standing in line under the merciless fluorescents at Ralph's. But then at another moment he's fresh pink and silver, a gorgeous man. I said at our age it is always changing. I'm so appreciating him. That's the word. I appreciate his good nature, the way he takes his trials with optimism. His pleasure in life, his good humor with me, the way he enjoys my thorniness and autocracy. He's reading Virginia Woolf. I gave him A room of one's own and now he found The common reader for himself. He says he wants to read everything she has written. We are generous with each other now, we look after each other. I took his computer to the repairman and paid to have him look at it. He buys books he thinks I'll like when he's in thrift shops. He only ever supports my confidence - he doesn't hurt my feelings even if he's annoyed. We play with compromises, I don't want the AC on so I say Okay, I've got the radio, it's in the console, you can have KCRW on. He knows how to do between-time - I have just realized that I'm learning from him. He or I will have bursts of liveliness where we have something to say, and between them we say the same thing many times, we admire the house or the view or the plants, or we remember past times, or we tell about daily tasks, or praise each other. I have thought of that sort of talk as corruption but I am seeing it maintains an emotional texture. It's like air in the room - is that right? With other people the between-time goes neurotic, is my feeling, but Tom isn't neurotic. He's transparent and self-accepting. He will say any little insecurity or irritation. He brings foreign movies from Blockbusters. This time it was Kadak from Mongolia. I think he's going to be impatient because they're slow but he likes them, he takes them in deep.
- Favor, Lisa, Becci, Layla, Anna, Stacey, Kri, Kate, Laura letters, Jeanne, E. Reader, collection of letters, best of semester magazine.
How much control of printing, paper stock
Publicity - interviews - hook - website - payment
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