| in america 15 part 4 - 2008 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 May So beautiful a Saturday morning. Out. I went shopping. Horton Plaza, intoxication going downtown at 8 in the morning. What did I spend - J.Jill socks $21, Body Shop grapefruit soap, passionfruit oil, night cream and body butter $80. Banana Republic dark green linen shirt $70. Façonnable shirt $54. Gap dark olive pants $48. It's a year since I shopped. I was seeing myself in fitting room mirrors looking quite sparky and trim. Washed jeans, fitted orange shirt, pale blue sneakers, orange and blue bracelet, bright brown face. Transcribing the last of 1983-84 December-May. Grandma K dies and I write a bit about Clearbrook Road. Surprised to see that in 1984 I remembered things I don't now - the To a Wild Rose powder in the dresser drawer, the rattling nuts in cloth sacks in the hall closet, the colors of the chenille bathrobes. My memory has been eroding. The light from the chicken barns on the bedroom walls. That it was Aunt Lucy who asked if I wanted to get saved. That Oma's buns were thinner-skinned and yellower than my mom's. I wrote so little in that way, I didn't know I wouldn't always have it. I didn't know I would need those things later. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC - I looked her up, she's a Rhodes scholar, D.Phil in political science from Oxford. She's 35. I looked her up when I woke because I'd dreamed something about her. Her dark warm eyes and sexy calm. I think of Susan when I look at her - have been thinking lovingly of Susan probably because KC read about her. What I dreamed was that I should look more like her, like lesbians. - So then I woke and went shopping on this basking summer day. These nights am sitting at the glass-topped desk looking west at sunset, now a brown smudge still lit above the ocean, palms cut black against white-blue darkening swiftly upward. It's quarter past 8, a summer night. When I phoned him Tom was talking about the moon. He could see it through one of his open kitchen doors. He had been writing and had a lot to say about the structure of Casual labor. He was saying in his lifetime with the people he's known he has been the witness. People have thought of him as that. There have been good people who have done good things no one knows about. 18 Mahler's dying word was "Mozart," Chopin's "Play Mozart." Now the password lock is up I'm uploading all of Fading again, which I like, I can feel I'm making it, but at the same time sorry nothing will come to me from it, not even alarm. 19 Last three vols of DR transcribed, began at both ends, have begun to chip at 1982 and 1983. This morning was reading Fading 5, small fixes. In the bed under the window at Tom's last night, window open, I'd wake and there'd be perfumed air flowing past my head. It was more than honeysuckle, a datura flower had opened during the night. When we had got into bed Tom was saying he was tired, wanted to sleep. I asked him a question and he talked on and I faded sweetly away. It was a question about whether he ever has the state where everything is only consciousness. He talked about how when he was tweaking he'd imagine going to always finer grain, to the spaces between molecules, where he'd find himself continuous with the rest of the field. Then he'd feel a small area of yellow in front of him, lemon yellow, and he'd say, I wonder if I could go into the yellow, see from it. Then suddenly he'd be there. He'd think, I wonder if I could go over in the corner, or into the corridor. Then he'd be there. "It was imagination." 20 Early Tuesday, grey after three days of Santa Ana golden sunrises. I woke too early and full of bits of rag - social thoughts. Want something - beauty, feeling, newness, something happening.
21 Went to Taft and worked through the hours tirelessly. Four garbage bins full of prunings. The water had been off for seven weeks and there was no harm. Afterward sat with Sylvia and George at their counter, George 81 and dark-faced as if his illness darkens his head, Sylvia 70, small straight body, sun-wrinkled, back from swimming the Cove. Eager. Across from the counter stools a window where doves were landing at the feeder. George said when his mother was 15 in Mexico City Garcia Villa's revolution was happening around her. Mozart arias Barbara Hendricks. [Airs sacrés, Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, EMI Classics] A couple of days before the last burst. I should be writing three workshop blurbs. [notes on house workshop] 1756-1791 Wolfgang was small, thin, pale in color, and entirely lacking in any pretensions as to physiognomy and bodily appearance. In the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance for which we hope with confidence - Schubert He would think out a kingdom for himself as we traveled from one place to another, and this he called das Konigreich Rücken ... our servant, who could draw a little, had to make a chart of it, and he would dictate the names of the cities, market towns and villages to him. That he was traveling through Europe from the age of 7 to 17 being trained to compose in the style of every region. He was constantly being tested by the best in composition, improvisation, accompaniment and performance. Green thought otherwise, calling Shakespeare "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers." 24 It rained yesterday, this morning cumulus piles. Transcribing Dec-Jan of 1982-83, a desolate time. Page after page of reading notes, just scraps of own life and they bloodless and anxious. My new shirt on the back of the chair. I've left it there to go on looking at it. It's pure pleasure, both in itself and as a thought. A narrow exact cut, smooth fine cotton, very reflective, fine subtle stripes, an exceptional effect, red, dark green, pale green, pale red and maroon on a lot of white. It's very bright. I've never liked a striped shirt but this one is so clean and prosperous I don't want to wear it, don't want it to get old. - There the sun comes on, that moment, as I was across the room pouring tea. It's dazzling on the misted pane. I'm pent, desperate in a smothered empty way. What is it. Heartsore. It's being tied to students isn't it, there'll be almost nothing but them for two weeks. The relentless year, the way it is pegged in advance. Susan's teaching in NYC. Susan Maier-Moul. World Yoga Center. Monthly newsletter with links to current stuff. Starved for play and contact, Susan was the only being I could feel a flicker toward because she was excited around me, excited about me, exciting, generative - oh smart. I want to be that, energized, and I would be if I had an arena.
Several filmmakers continue to explore space and landscape in film ... Ellie Epp's Trapline (1975) is the most cooly beautiful of all: filmed in the [Silchester Road] Baths, London, it sets a sequence of geometrically organized shots, outwardly but gently alive with light changes, ripples and reflections, within the continuous, distantly reverberant sound space of the entire building. Tony Reif 1980 West Coast Filmmaking in Self Portrait: Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas ed Piers Handling and Pierre Véronneau, Canadian Film Institute p.138.
26 Sunday evening I thumped Tom's back when he had roast pork stuck in his throat. This morning taking compost sacks to the garbage garage I smelled smoke - sniffed among the blue and black bins and found a recycling bin smoldering. Dragged it to the curb and went for water. Tom and I put it out. Otherwise morose and picking at Tom internally and sometimes aloud, for being fat, for draining coffee grounds on the counter, for singing and jabbering inanely as we were driving around looking at houses. He is wanting to grow his hair and it is sticking out in clumps. His belly is big because he willfully gobbles a pint of ice cream every night and doesn't get around to fixing his bike. Anything else to say about Memorial Day weekend. I liked working with the plants while Tom was gone to mail his unemployment. Repotted the fig tree into a big clay pot, had just enough compost to do that. Moved the aloe from the bowl it was rising out of like a soufflé into the round maroon pot the blue agave died in because its drain hole was plugged. Moved the red geranium to a bigger pot. Otherwise moved pots around and swept. It's pretty with the honeysuckle draped over and through, and the fine-fringed little acacia rising at the centre. Tom hears the Cal-Prop agent bringing people down to see it. 29 It cost $62 to fill the tank. Heard Nora (downstairs) saying she had an open house at 6 - out the door to get there before she did. Matilijas blooming and passiflora over the gate, red-sided apricots dropping off the tree. Jaes in packet 5 opens the worst of her story. [Details deleted.] Reading her story I understand the way our family was a good family, there was a platform of secure order that let us open our edges. Mary laid herself down for that and Ed did something too. I'm grateful now for the order of the week, the fresh bread on Saturday nights, the waxed linoleum, the Sunday dresses, the intelligence that was our common air.
30 Next week and then 8 weeks open up. Things I have to do - over. Fast but not as long. Bike. Stairmaster. Yoga. Shop more. Phoned M at 9, said Are you in the middle of anything? She laughed, said she was reading Frank after his life. She did what she does, wanted to talk about why she isn't like me. I barreled ahead and didn't accommodate her, had some topics to push. 31 And then I couldn't sleep. It felt like high blood pressure. Was it because of talking to M, I think. She said You were attached to me more as a caregiver than a mother. I said, I never attached to you again, when I was away from you even when I was seven I never missed you, I was friendly but I wasn't attached. She wanted to talk about what a loss that was for her. I kept going. I also told her how sadistic Jam was, how I couldn't leave. She said she didn't understand why. I said she should imagine if she had ever had someone she could talk to, how she would not have wanted to give it up. I said the genius part of me needed Jam but the human part was desperate. I said I knew she had never understood why I had Rowen but I felt as if I'd die if I didn't do that. I said when I got to Vancouver I knew my writing was mediocre and I leveled myself to try to remake it. I was demolished and lost. - So I told her the story she'd had no clue about and didn't listen when she wanted to lament the things of her own she goes on lamenting. She was surprised to see the thoughts Frank and I had, what we'd talked about. She'd never had those kinds of thoughts, she said. She was having to feel her rudimentariness. This began when I sent her Jim's peer review earlier this week. I wanted her to know what I've made myself. And did she? I don't think so. I tell her Trapline is in the Canadian Encyclopedia and I don't feel her grasp it. I didn't feel her grasping anything I was saying; I didn't feel her feel it. What always comes up like a screen is some thought about how she isn't like that. So why was I aufgerecht - while I was talking to her I was neutral, I wasn't bothered. But something was freaked. I said things she'll be hearing today. She won't know how to handle them. If she had responded better would it have been different? Yes. Telling her felt solitary and valiant: I'll tell you for my own reasons though I know you can't take it in. That abandonedness is why I couldn't sleep. Is she reading Frank out of prurience? It says no, to see into him. She hasn't seen into people she knows. [opposite page: clipping from the LA Times, Mary McNamara on the last Grey's Anatomy episode of the season, photo of Erica and Callie kissing] Afternoon. I reread Margo's eval note this morning and then wondered whether she would have thought I'd gone into therapy with any of my students this semester. Scanned Deidre and then Jaes with that in mind but then got interested in a better question, something like, what do I do with these students and how do I work? What happens, how do I order it? I found a literary talent in Jaes, who is so wooden in her academic writing. Her talent is deep and rare and specific: she comes on images that summarize a psychological circumstance brilliantly. It's something Colette does, for instance. She usually doesn't understand the meaning of what she has found, for example her story of riding an oak tree during a lightning storm, or Judy standing in the lake biting into a sparkling fish, or her rescue of sections R-Z in a record store after a fire. Sometimes she doesn't understand them because she takes them into religion. Her feel for moments that speak from/to the uncon is what makes her a ritualist but her framework ideology is dumb, it's pious and unexamined. - I see the way she came into her first residency last summer walking carefully in her big tracker's hat. A Mormon outlaw, it turned out, quiet, with something in the eyes. I told her her story struck awe. A gnostic tale of falling into an underworld, uncontrollable by the time she was 13 [details deleted]. Deidre much savvier. Not at all wooden in her academic writing, easy and swift. She gets the point of a book, sums it up, writes about it personally, is centred in her quest, which is for a framework. I worked with her on framework all semester and it looks like therapy because of the nature of the framework I can offer. She would say what she had been worried about and I would lay out how that corner of it works. She'd get it and then we'd do more. Patriarchy, objectivity, art, dualism, addiction, dissociation, women's intelligence, social fear. [opposite page: notes for house workshop] Ellie, I can't even begin to express to you how instrumental you have been in making this semester at [the college] so incredible. You are one of the most amazing people I have ever met. With love, Deidre I have come to realize that my interests are the result of something deeper than mere intellectual pursuit .... I have become aware that the roots lie in a sense of fragmentation within myself. As a result, I would change my overall goal to this: "To become a person who can articulate and consistently practice a way of life that presents an alternative to dualistic, patriarchal thinking. For the purpose of transformation and meaningful connection with both the vast, invisible, and unconscious self and the vast, exterior, visible world. My goal is to be able to teach and inspire others to do the same. As fate interceded, I ended up with Ellie as my advisor. Ellie Epp, who is an exceptionally perceptive, intelligent, and compassionate woman, drew my attention inward. More specifically, she drew my attention to the fact that I had some personal issues that needed addressing. Even more specifically, she recognized the signs of a person in distress, and as a result, allowed me to move forward, despite a fairly vague study plan, with the single request that I seriously deal with my alcohol dependency. Personal introspection and evaluation became the foundation for this semester's work. I drew on all of the fields and disciplines that intrigued me but with the goal and purpose of discovering and addressing the reasons for my own sense of fragmentation. Having made a commitment to address those issues I also discovered a flood of emotion and energy that led to an outpouring of personal writing ... I had the sense that I was given an outlet without any strings attached, to explore my internal self and respond accordingly. Cynicism had become a way of life for me but at the same time, I knew that it was more of a defense mechanism than a deep-seated commitment. Packet one having made a commitment packet two used this period to focus intensely on the reasons and remedies for addiction ... started looking into embodiment because it seems to be a convergent point for the fields I am interested in, as well as offering a solution to the dilemma of dualism and fragmentation. ... packet three focus more on what I want to do, somehow bringing together the visible and the invisible, the imaginal and the real ... packet 4 an outline survey of readings this semester, summarizing what I had done so far ... a lot of sorting and organizing ... packet 5 reading books that emulated what I believe are the essence of what I was investigating The approach I used in identifying sources was a combination of asking for suggestions and following an internal and intuitive response to the material suggested .... I found that each book I encountered that inspired me, also led me to a question that almost naturally led me to the next book I encountered. This method of following my intuition did not lead me off-course. In contrast, I was always led to the next logical step in my progress. In approaching my research in this way, I have discovered that the goals I have set are consistent with my methods. It has strengthened my underlying conviction that one does not need a formula in place: that, in fact, pre-conceived formulas (or pre-determined paths) often lead to missing the unexpected but potentially life-changing possibilities. My advisor, Ellie, gave me an incredible compliment when she wrote, "I keep being amazed by how swift and clear a summary you can give of what you read," and "it wasn't until I started teaching that I discovered it was rare. Academically it is gold. I'm telling you this in case you don't already know that you have it and yes it can carry you through a PhD if you support it with the right kind of discipline and intent. What's more, it is important to get more of that voice into the academic community." This semester has been incredible. By far, the most growth I have experienced has been in the personal realm. Coming to [the college], I had the belief that I was a perceptive, creative and intelligent being. However, I was also a person in crisis. I sensed that I was disconnected both from myself and the world around me. I was disillusioned by what I saw as failures in my society, and extremely cynical about any possibility of change. By following, as Ellie put it, "the line of my love," I have discovered that there are alternatives to the fragmented life that we in the West are taught to accept as normal. The ideas that I have been exposed to are life-altering in the way I approach every day. I have been given tools that are practical and accessible. Focusing, yoga, mindful breathing, dream journaling have become part of my repertoire of daily activities that I draw upon. My goal of someday teaching at a university level has been furthered simply because I have committed to becoming the kind of person who is not merely a spokesperson for a vision that holds promise for the future, but one who lives it consistently. I have worked hard at maintaining my sobriety, revisiting past trauma, and reconnecting to my own being. June 3 Deidre's self evaluation is a model document in relation to the discussion Margo wanted us to have. Margo lost her nerve, instead of fighting vigorously for the principle of it she slunk away. If she had fought vigorously on principles of progressive ed she wouldn't have been fired. That's my disaffection with M. She supported the best work up to a point but she didn't blaze up against the fear and stupidity of her bosses. We could have marshaled or generaled a case and taken it to the board. We could have said: look at this and this and this, this is what we do. This is why we do it. This is how it works. - At that point I sent it to M with Deidre's frame outline and a note. We'll see whether she says something slick and goofy. [She didn't reply at all.] - An odd thing - the embodiment web worksite hasn't had any hits in a week - I tried it and it showed up 404 not found - the pages are there - other pages in the directory are still reachable - Wild research and magazines - which makes me wonder whether someone has ordered it shut down - for instance Francis in cahoots with someone in admin - I sent a question to Chris Riddell and then with quite a bit of iron in my jaw shipped a copy of the whole site into the elfreda2 account, where Google will start picking it up as soon as the crawler finds it. - Then I figured out what has gone wrong - it's the shortcut in the url, that maybe went down with the server. 5 Louie is 51 today. Brought home a book from the library called American poets in the 21st century: the new poetics. [2007 Wesleyan] Am scared of it. Scared in it. Interference, when I write here now I hesitate in the wrong way. It's the composition mind not the private mind. It's Thursday morning. I have 9 evaluations to write, don't want to drag on. These mornings have been grey but today there's high bright cloud. Have been wanting to remember to say it's the time of purple trees. What would I be like if I were a poet now instead of whatever this is. This closed authority held so bare and efficient. Transcribing 1982 I see the mass of nothing, the useless dream records, the reading notes, the anxious gnawing, the psychological noting, and in them rarely a line or passage I took for field & field. I'm too efficient now to be a matrix like that, is what I'm thinking as I transcribe. I slog at all the useless typing, I feel I'm better than her, and then come to a line that feels engraved because it now has another context. That younger woman writing all her junk was also the one who could see what was good and collect it into another place. What I'm dimly wondering as I type and notice this is whether I could just start in that other place and live there, use writing in another way, as what I say when I am being that. The dictionary writing was that wasn't it. When I am skirting a book like this one I'm afraid I'll see that what I found to like to be is old fashioned. Other people who have lived their whole time in their time, which I haven't, will be doing something different, and will be able to see each other doing it. A dream that Luke was in New York and died. Something about reaching him by phone. - Afternoon - once in a while I send a burst of ultrasound, infrasound, across the world to Susan - a flare - because she is that - and no one else - a flare of will and self permission - effort - am I that to her - no - but I could be. Having her story posted on Fading was a way of saying I'm this, I'm not what you wanted to assume. 7 Ubu Film. Found out this morning there's a site with avant garde films, with good descriptions. The term 'avant garde' preserved one essential concept of the Leninism that had intoxicated their generation of intellectuals in the thirties: the vanguard, whose alienated, conspiratorial happy-few solidarity is an earnest of revolutionary rectitude. [Peter Schjeldahl on Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum New Yorker May 26 2009 p.84] Abstract Expressionism named 1946. Rosenberg 1952 action painting, existentialism, artist heroes, de Kooning, lyrically impulsive 1959 The tradition of the new Greenberg character of art media, Pollock, visual acuity, 1961 Art and culture New York as new world capital of progressive culture post war about 250 artists and a couple of dozen critics, curators, dealers, and collectors ... hamlet-sized population concentrated in the blocks northeast of Washington Square Previous decade "all the major styles of abstract expressionism coalesced amid poverty and obscurity" Dodged evals most of the day yesterday, slogged some, in the early aft, and then at 4:30 had what I sometimes now have - afternoon tea. Chai roibos with half a tsp of black tea brewed very briefly. It locks me into work for hours, a miracle. I sat down to Emilee's paper on embodiment in consciousness studies and wasn't flagging at 8:30, when I was done and had said what I thought both about her paper and about CS. Saw Cheryl in a dream last night. She was at a party talking gracefully to anyone. I stopped at her chair and was marveling how young she looked. Her smooth back and pink face. The so many references in the Dames rocket journals. I stayed out of the local social present, didn't want to be cornered in it. I mean I chose my company from a lot of times. 9 Sent Emilee a note this morning and she sent Francis's note flunking her. On Statcounter there's Lawrence Kansas clicking straight through to Fading (locked) this morning and that has made me wonder whether Francis is politicking to have me fired. Campbell will have told him about the site, and he and Goldberg are allies. The fact that Margo hasn't replied is not a good sign. They may be afraid of the union and a ruckus though. I've not seemed so mild they'd like to risk it. I have never trusted Francis and Goldberg - have had a physical aversion to both - distaste that I assume means something - I suspect both of them of politicking to get Margo fired and they both have something to gain from getting me axed. I am a constant challenge to the intellectual emptiness of Francis's version of consciousness studies, and people who arrive wanting to be in TLA have sometimes been taken with mbo, for which Goldberg has no personal theory.
[opposite page: notes on prefab garden sheds] Cheryl says Diana [Kemble] is in a hospice dying. 9 Writing her a note I found what I wanted to say. I knew it was right by the squeeze at heart. You are living a moment I have often imagined. Tremendous. I'm sure you are living it well. It's a way of saying you today, me another day. It is saying she is considerable, I know her to be considerable. [notes on a possible PhD at my college] Finished second volume of 1982 this aft. There was a while, August, early September, when I was rushing - I wrote charm, value at the same time as I was writing what will we know and the lovely last section of notes in origin interspersed in bits in a lot of nothing much.
- Three weeks I've been doing this before I go to bed - night cream face and neck to the collar bone, grapefruit body butter arms and legs. I've never done that. Do I like it. I love the texture of the grapefruit butter because it's such a tenuous solid, so fine between fingertips. Waiting to discover whether to believe in the night cream. What I do believe in is the dry oil - it's called dry I guess because it's so light. When I put it on my cheeks I look happier. Can that be true? It's the right kind of shine. Even a smudge on the bone under the eyebrow. I'm shy saying this, as if it's beneath me to care about my skin. But at the same time I am overjoyed to have a shirt that looks blazingly new. Susan's in this - a hope to be more comme il faut. The scale in her bathroom and night cream every night since she was a kid. I scorn the labour and now I want the result. [opposite pages publishing and book design notes] 10 8:30 Wednesday morning. Is the daylight this white because it is reflecting somehow off the marine layer that is still present though pulling back over the ocean. An unusual light I've seen in the last couple of days. It's hot on the roof. I wouldn't be able to write here without sunglasses. Woke this morning and sat transcribing February 1982 in bed. It's the time when Jam has R and T living in her house. What's the evidence. Mixed. Things opened with Jam and then she'd choose them over me. She was enslaved by Rhoda's likeness to her mother, I'm supposing. She humiliated me amazingly. The question now is, did I fatally shut down on account of it - not immediately, because the writing came that summer. That tree opening and stirring in the breeze. It's there above and amid grey roofs, this grey factory zone of roofs and roof machines - one of them just started behind me, loud, a high rasp over a dark low hum. Street noise the same machine world. The tree has all-over small tips of red new growth, eucalyptus, must be. It sways in large masses and at the same time its branchlets are moving separately, internal squirm. This is my first completely free day - I have to ship evals and touch up the last one, and then 54 days all my own. [to do list] Emilee writes that she's accepted the fail and that M said "I understand you were in touch with Ellie this semester." My heart is stressed. Squeezed. What is it afraid of. What's it saying. (There I sit and feel the pressure mid-chest, that goes to the forehead, both more left-side than center.) It's pain to be in trouble for doing the right thing. Being suspect for the good work of the semester, the best work. Jaes, Deidre, Emilee: I support their groundedness in themselves, which makes intelligence possible. The fan - it stopped a while ago but I'm hearing virtual white noise, a hissing as if the atoms of the walls were rung into motion they are still giving off. It has happened and I can hardly believe it can have happened. I heard it last night for the first time when I went to stand outside at night. It's a huge new aluminum thing like a jet engine. It is going to be running 5-10 every day except Sunday, which will be 9-10. During those hours it will never go off. 14 Zeruneith Keld 2007 The wooden horse: The liberation of the western mind, from Odysseus to Socrates Overlook Heroic world - hero culture Athene metis What's his contrast - intelligence/stratagem and control of passions and needs called "mental judgment independent of the body" Composure Paideia education 'Homer' comprehensive consciousness, compositional awareness Hesiod in Works and days analysis of decadence Came into existence in written form 700s BC Arete highest human virtue and morality Etymology same as aristoi A proud view of self, being good at something, and brave Loss of honor Inner authority that doesn't need always to be seen The precision and distance of the bow Self-control seen as 'separation of mind and body' "Socrates/Plato in whom we can finally say that the body and soul are completely separate." In Homer soma is dead body, psyche/pneuma is breath that leaves it, goes to Hades as eidolon appearance. I'm suspicious of this guy - he wants to tell a tale of masculinity/culture liberating itself from the mother/body/primitivity to establish a peaceful society. Olympian gods he said 850-700 BC Homer and Hesiod 'Earlier stages' sun, moon, earth, fire, water, winds Fertility cults and rites Demeter and Dionysos Chthonic: earth/mother/underworld "The Olympian gods are associated with aristocracy as an institution" "within the framework of the Ionian enlightenment." The intention was evidently to establish a belief system on a patriarchal foundation with clear social definitions in order to curb the fertility rites of nature religions and the maternal privilege associated with them. 87 He equates development of patriarchy with development of self consciousness - in what sense would that be so for men. 16 Two hours at Scott's this aft. Its high moment. The apricot tree is loaded. Giant Burmese honeysuckle blooming and twining. Graham Thomas roses under the window, propped on the red-eyed cistus. Mountain marigold recovered. Silver acacia a tall slender tree next to the bench with cistus my height. The silk tree thick in flower above the fence, wide-winged. Pink flowers on the abutilon nearest the gate. Canopy of branches over the driveway. The hydrangeas outrageous, a spill of foam, a foaming wall, acanthus, climbing hydrangea, remarkable success, Jose-Luis thigh-deep in the trench prepping that bed. In the new section the three daturas large, filled out, green. Slate path. Ivy growing fast. I liked the two new small trees, the strange ones that were stressed two months ago strong and clean. Lattice thick with lapped leaves. I love what I've made. I walk around gazing. Picked apricots and ate them. They were red-freckled, firm, perfectly ripe, had layers of tastes. I do small things and it takes care of itself. I look after details of shape. A beautiful weekend. Tom had been at home reading most of the week, writing some. Sunday afternoon I made us tea and asked questions about his years in the army. He talked. We were on the blue couch with the French doors open onto the honeysuckle and the plants in pots. 18 Got airport on my G3 today. H & R Block yesterday to refile taxes with business expenses. 19 Starbucks in a huge loose mall off Fenton Parkway at Friars Road, early afternoon. It's hot. What can I think about for an hour. Lot of fake boobs here - three sets walked past in five minutes, the Barbie shape, long and tight below the waist. Retired men, that one just said he was ex-navy. There's the 4th. Proud racks. A colonnade of palms trimmed high so they're thin crowns of stiff-moving feathers. Decaf latté, light ice. Anxious about TN and taxes. Louie had Rowen asleep in her house this morning. He got in after she'd had to go to work last night and went straight to Carnegie to find dinner. There was Michael. He's moved closer to his work at Woodwards. The crane could pick him up at his window, he said. Five and six. Stripped hillside above the roof, pylons. The ex-navy man is wearing gold trousers, an embroidered gold short-sleeved shirt, mustard-colored socks and toffee-colored tasseled loafers. He's talking to a young woman who was reading a newspaper near him, keeps touching her arm. She's interesting, has a long pointed chin and black-rimmed pale blue eyes, what is it I like about her smile, it is set a long way forward, it's a bit of a moon-chin. - And then I went to Geena at H&R Block and worked up a tax refund of $1567 which with the $600 rebate is $2000 for digitizing and publishing. Last night I wanted to transcribe what I had open on the desk, 2006-07, because I was missing Susan. The vol begins when Tom and I are beginning to keep house in 3663 a year and a half ago. The writing is so simple-headed, six word sentences. "Yesterday was a good day." No tensile snap, just a soft plod. Snap isn't it - I'm seeing the tough curves of a vine. I have the sensation - had - but couldn't match it. It was maybe the sensation of a stretch of the vine from the inside. Tension, torsion, the way a long sentence can be tight from end to end, held tight between periods. Taut curves.
What's my worry - I worked hugely to make myself able to write and now I have squandered that work somehow. Exchanged it for something worth less.
[opposite page: notes in origin DVD jacket] - Sent notes to five people with manuscripts and ten others. Favor instantly back saying yes. Couple of hours inventing a website. Thought about a teaching letters book. It would have to wait until I wasn't working at G probably. What's the stress - being or feeling embattled at [the college] - M not replying to my last two emails - Pam not having replied about my visa yet - the paranoia about embodiment studies. Paranoia about my best work. Francis, Justin and Lexi in the past year. 25 West Coast Imaging - could I get files big enough to make prints - and sell them - imagining moving and feeling in the grain - figure out how many to send - proofs. Anyone and everyone PBS. 27 Yesterday phoned West Coast Imaging to talk about drum scanning. Was elated after, thinking of getting in among the grain. Leaving Santee on the tram with Tom last night I had a fit about dancing. I don't know what to say about it except that it was true and necessary. I said I wanted Tom to work with me so I could learn to jive. He started making suggestions and I went into a fury of disappointment. I wanted something in particular. We were riding through stations we'd seen earlier in daylight, now with fading pink on the horizon. I said I was born to be the sort of person who would dance from the beginning to the end of concerts like the ones we'd been to. I said when I was 12 we'd put 45s on our little record player at recess and noon hour and people would dance, and I would always be having to watch. I would be feeling I was inferior to them and that was a horrible feeling. When I said 'inferior' I sighed. Tom would say this or that and I was cutting him off and hissing and swearing. I wanted him to understand me. I didn't want to have to explain. I wanted him to be thinking fast and getting it right. I wanted what I've never had in this spot, except with Trudy probably. I wanted accurate subtle empathy. He would start to say something about how I'm not crippled and I would cut him off, "That's not the point," or he would start on how he was in a hole with this and I was hissing "Why don't you just fucking listen." I said I was feeling something in my solar and it was fear. He reached over and poked it a couple of times, which was so stupid as a form of touch I was hard-jawed over again. I was feeling alone. So then I thought, it's hopeless, I won't get it from him, I'll have to do it myself. Closed my eyes, felt into the solar. The dark pressure soon shifted to the forehead, concentrated there, then let go, that slipping-up sensation, followed by light energy from the forehead up.
There were two things I loved to see at that Santee train station concert. One was a mother jiving with her eleven year old daughter, who had the moves perfectly. The other was a family group doing the stroll across the way, a couple of older women, a couple of younger women, a couple of kids, and a man holding a little girl. They were stepping, turning, forward, sideways, backward, in perfect rehearsed unison. It was complex and light.
Worked hard - sorted all the slides - set them up with matching numbers for copies - looked at all the seconds and numbered/listed them too - then looked at all the junk slides I haven't seen in years - some of them took me straight to the place in a way the ones I know don't. I remembered being there when I was taking it - the feel of the air. So what should I do with the photos. A slide show reel - wholes. 28 Susan got married and has health insurance benefits - lives on the 20th floor with a view of the East River and a public library card - Margot is supporting her and helping her organize her papers - she wants to write about embodiment - I said collect the slash writing - she has a keel now - I felt slow with her, was watching my words come out one at a time. SOS I QUIT 888 SKY TYPE [saw that upside down and backwards in the sky, being written by 5 tiny silver dots lined up in parallel] Dragon as archetype
|
