in america volume 18 part 1 - 2009 june - july

work & days: a lifetime journal project

20 June 2009 Saturday morning in Curio. Trying to get CBC. Downloading. It's not working. A spitting rain at ten o'clock. At the lotus there was a soft but extreme clarity of vision. I wanted to be able to film it just that way. Clarity in continuous slight motion that makes the unreflected real look frozen. I wanted to be living in that soft precision. When I stopped on the edge of 6th on the way home I was sweating a bit. I thought of body's message of dew on a leaf and said something like, Are you pleased darlin'? Big sigh yes. It's about re-set too. The TV is going, it's on the roof being rained on and later is going to the goodwill. - I walked again and it wasn't as light, but I had brought the camera and there on the big monitor is some of what I wanted to see, an opening lotus and its bud suspended in slightly fibrous silver, leaves next to it reflected translucent so they show green veins and tissue, laid on light and showing through to light. The shapes of lotus and bud are slightly deformed by motion of water that itself is invisible. The leaves have a cut-out look but there are little signs of 3-d space. I have it up at 66% and the grain is perfect - not grain, a diffusion of some of the edges into their surrounding sky. What else I have imagined is a sound recorder picking up single voices, few. A wedding party stood to have its picture taken in front of the tank. There were maybe twelve bridesmaids in brown and green and the same number of best men in brown suits, four little girls in white, the groom in a white suit and the bride in cheap complicated lace. Nearly all the women were fat, squashed into strapless satin. One of the men had tight braids to his waist and another had his shorter hair worked into a quite intricate maze. It was an assembly of amazingly coarse-looking people, even the little girls. I was staring through the camera on and on, hearing two girls of maybe eleven. What is she taking a picture of? I don't know. Loud voice next to me, Excuse me, what are you taking a picture of? I'm on my belly and look up into her eyes. I'm taking a picture of the reflection of the leaves. She looks. A little getting-it sound, she's fast. They're pretty, she says in a decided tone. Yes they're very pretty. Yesterday voices speaking French saying Is it a lotus, I think it's a lotus. I look up and see a couple of African Blacks, a woman of 50 and a young man. Is it a lotus? she says. We're just having a little meeting. - People still in love. In love means dopamine - ventral tegmentum. Oxytocin spray, less conflict, less stress. Later also serotonin, vasopressin. Female animals stressed by being isolated, oxytocin drops. Was it harder today because I'm heavier   no Do you understand why   yes Because I was stiffer   no The l-carnatine and CoQ10 were okay   Keep doing that   And walking two miles a day   Will that continue to get harder   no Later should I try walking in the docs   no Do you like the pictures   Do it again tomorrow   Walk every day   no 5 days a week   Will that take care of the stinging hands   Am I better because the mold is gone   no Is that smell mold   YES Should I buy the Nikon 90   no A real camcorder   no A sound recorder   no Sell the Beaulieu   no Use it   no Give it to UCSD in exchange for being able to use a video camera   21 Across the room a white koi as if above a surface that has pale plaster wall, single window, green tree, pale sky. Now I do like that camera. 22 Photos today from Maya and Anya in the clothes I sent. I keep wanting to look at them again, such a satisfaction those lovely spirits in something I could give, Anya in pale pink holding her little chenille poodle tight. 23 Do you think the camera would be safe in the bag   Will I get there safely   Will I come home safely   Tuesday night, almost everything done, worked all day, monitor and MacBook put away, paint bought, laundry, little things brought to Tom's, made him supper, cuddled on the blue couch looking at his birds with him, drinking from the turtle ashtray he had in his family's yard on Maple Avenue. I was needing just to lie quietly against him. As I was doing that he made a not-hyped speech about how his feelings for me are deeper and he's more willing to know me. I wasn't saying anything but I liked just sitting with him for a little while these afternoons. He's asked how I'm doing and I've loved that, I warm to that. [Left side notes on insulin resistance, balancing carbs, microvascular circulation disturbances, paresthesias, erythromelalgia] 24 It's the day. Not six yet, quiet. Richard's roof vent turning slowly. There's my suitcase open on the table. Laughable how much stuff I'm taking now. Used to be one little shoulder bag, clock, hairbrush, toothbrush, pencils, one shirt, one pair of jeans, journal, maybe a book. Now I need to take my special shampoo, various supps, computer, five shirts, four pairs of pants, blood pressure monitor, slippers, pyjamas, tape measure, different bras for different shirts, extra shoes, cup, dish, can opener (for custard!), mouthwash, more, a big heavy casefull. Moisturizer, two kinds. Lying in bed last night aching all over, intensely, especially the soles of my feet. 25 35,000', two hours to destination, outside air temperature -52F, ground speed 502 mph, distance to destination 879 miles, headwind 31 mph. It's white below, a fresh light on the wing. There were a few hours of night over Quebec, lightning. It was every ten seconds for a while, huge light explosions to the east. The clouds are more formed now, layers below with a different fine structure. Lumps, a flow of crescents. Now it's as if open below, blue, but I can't see ocean. - It's an hour and a half. Luke will be getting ready to leave for Heathrow. Engine noise got louder and then faded down again. Tingle of vibration through my soles on the floor. - Map shows almost at Ireland. Old woman with dyed ash blond hair done up in curls, rhinestones on her glasses. Big lesbian gym teacher traveling with schoolchildren, tiny mouth. Crying 3-year-old. - We're over land. - 111 Ramsey Hall. West window onto a lot of traffic. 26 Two in the morning. 26 days. The sky had cleared when we were cruising lower toward Heathrow. I saw land disposed differently, manor houses with long lanes of trees, little cows. Came through the exit after customs and stood looking for Luke, and there he came, light short-sleeved shirt in blue and white plaid, face padded so he's not stunningly handsome as he was. He looks young and more ordinary, there isn't a look of will or distinction. He isn't fighting. He's fighting less than he was on the job in Van. We were sitting in my room and he was looking at Paul's little book of photos of Ed. The coffin photo made him cry. He got up and went into the corridor to look for some tissue. When the [tube] train came out of the ground there was a grassy verge with wildflowers - poppies. Tottenham Court Road looking for lunch, crowds, phone shops, camera shops, a bustle there never was along that stretch. I bought cream and a Time Out in Marks and Spencers, fruit on the street from a man who called me love, and then could not go out again. Sore. Lying looking at the tree I can see from my bed, and superimposed over it northern reflected clouds. A pub on the corner, motors growling at the crosswalk. - Went out toward 3 after a nap - Warren St Station to Embankment - walked across, it's not the old bridge - walked a long way along the south bank to the Tate Modern - later walked across the winged Millennium Bridge that sights St Pauls at its north end - bus to Trafalgar Square - 24 bus to Hampstead - walked to Parliament Hill Fields - St Alban's Road to touch the door of Heath Lodge, which had a passiflora vine - 214 to Camden Town - 134 to Warren Street Station - straight into a deep hot bath - and then it was 10 o'clock. Was thinking I'm going to ache anyway, might as well walk more. What happened in St Martin-in-the-Fields when I heard Vivaldi through the closed doors. I started to cry. I didn't understand why. Do you   YES Isn't it odd that I didn't know   NO Will you explain   subtle child, oppressed, generous and mourning The music touched that?   YES And I didn't feel it   no you did The child didn't have words   YES   Did you like this day   YES Did you like any of the art more than I did   no Any of it less   no I saw a lot of art and was interested in little of it, not even the famous people. I liked the building, its plain wood floors and beautiful gridded iron air grates set flush. I liked the milky clerestory panels high over the 5th floor galleries. The stairs, stair rails carved into black planks that also were lit. The long slit windows one of which looked straight down the Millennium Bridge to St Paul's. I liked the big dining room with smart-looking servers all in black and view down onto the river. Mushy peas with mint to dip the pommes frites. The famous art is old, there's nothing to see. A lot of it is random positing, I did this unusual thing. Mainly that: I found this unusual thing to do and it is my bid to be notable. I was thinking of better work I've seen at the VAG, for instance Gordon Smith and Aganeta Dyck's beeswax pieces. From the bus, along the strand the extraordinary architectural jumble, one kind of thing stuck onto the side of another. The 29 route through odd tight little streets I've never seen. Buddleia self-seeded everywhere at eye level of the upper deck. Parliament Hill Fields with evening clouds. Where there was a simple edge onto the road at Swain's Lane, now all sorts of amenities, tennis, lawn bowling, a little bandstand. The crest of trees taller, grass left long. The bus passed the end of Burghley Rd. The convent school I've dreamed is called Sainte Union. The row of houses set back from the street, where Ken Loach lived. Delicious soup on Tottenham Court Road this morning. Caffé latté at the Caffé Nero with chairs and tables on a bit of waste ground. Stationers where I bought a little notebook with a blue elastic that holds pencil and postcards tight. Am I mortally sick   no Can you explain why I feel I'm dying   you are coming through, partial loss, (Qp), into isolation Can you point Qp   family Losing connections   Losing the sense of being cared about   In the sort of guises it used to come   For example from strangers   The sense of being interesting to people   So it's reactivation   no Biological   Death of the young self   yes Death of my era   Am I going to get better physically   NO Much worse   no I'll be in pain from now on   no   Do you want me to do tragic work   Is Orpheus that     Is there something honorable I can be, though old   love, in writing, to gain, turn for the better A stripped worker   Work for the world   Anything else you want to talk about   crisis, processing, responsible, shared pleasure How to get shared pleasure now   YES!   Used to be liveliness and beauty, how to do it now   Selfless generosity   no Is that corrupt   Even with students   no Want to tell me   be successful in quest of intimate friendship Do you mean like Jean   YES None of those people really want to see me   Anything else you want to talk about   love woman, child, honest, oppression Need to be   For instance with Tom   And I oppress them   Do you want to say more   no   Do you understand why they're so unresponsive   YES Is it about class   no Some kind of intimidation   no Something I'm giving off   no Dull-wittedness   no Something in my tone   YES Do my stories seem phony   no Superior   no Too articulate   no Do I seem changed to them   no, same Are they just undone by death   no Do they find me striking   But   no They're just preoccupied   no They're unintelligent   yes You didn't want me to ask that   no You mean, a bit   yes Do I have a bubble around me   no With Margaret was it Peter's warning   no They're such contracted minds   YES Even Andy   YES Did Jane feel that was successful   YES Did Margaret     I shouldn't drink alcohol   I should stop eating bread   no Do you like the CoQ10   Do you like the l-carnatine   YES   I was more easily satisfied   no We had a shared context   [from the small notebook] 26 June 2009 This instead of a new Challenge duplicate. 7th floor of the Tate Modern, window table more or less eye to eye with St Paul's. I walked from Embankment Station, crossed Charing Cross Bridge, new version, came along the south bank, dirty brown Thames that has a clear skin and underneath it structured cells of blooming cloud. The waiters here are smart-looking people all in black with black aprons almost to the floor. Down below flowing lines of small birch tips, a people's lawn quite threadbare. I'm walking around jealous of young skin and hair, nostalgic for the easy walk I used to have, staying conscious of my sore right foot that will trip me on these pavements everywhere uneven. Maybe there's something I can do for it. Churches with gold at their tips. The way low building laws leave the spires visible. White stone in very pale grey light. Kiefer room - dark grey and red earth with cream, room with 4x3 glassed panels, painting with cracked earth, grit, looks like watercolor, poster paint let to run and dry, twigs. Mixture of natural and artifactual, striking by color first, would I know why any one of these was one way rather than another - that broken ladder one, a sort of crystal in the grit, a salt bloom on the surface, as if. Sand streaks in S[an] D[iego] gold and black, grain - let water move grain. Fishline hung from the ceiling, columns in a square, lit by many spotlights from the high ceiling, makes a perspective cube of fine streaks of light, turns dark lower. You should be able to walk around it. Cornelia Parker 30 pieces of silver Should be in a black room Spotlights could fade off and on It is hung from wire squares about 2x2 Lights should be recessed   Matta Black Virtue 1943 David Siquieros 1936 Anish Kapoor's egg very striking Ishi's light 2003 Joan Mitchell #12 has a feel of Pompei Winged footbridge toward St Paul's. [email to Tom] 26 June friday morning, settling in has meant running around getting an ethernet cable, figuring out how to recharge my phone, now soon going out to find breakfast. i'm really here. my room has a west-facing window onto a a tree, little side street with a lot of that dark rumble of cab motors at the corner, a pub across the way where office workers drink quiet pints after work. window opens wide and there's a ledge to sit on. people look more intelligent than in california luke was at the airport, carried my heavy bag up long flights of subway stairs, cried when he saw ed in the coffin, ran around with me to get a sim card, took me to lunch, is depressed i think, looks a bit defeated. my british phone # is 011 44 777 516 6744 the residence is big and my corridors empty. streets nearby very bustling. i lay in bed listening to your radio, someone on BBC interviewing judy collins who sang some of her old songs oh so badly, drifted away very nicely. news full of michael jackson. it's nearly eleven, you will be sleeping deep and round. about three this aft you'll be waking and putting out crumbs. 27 I don't want to write about aching but it's what I have. Was awake until 2 and then woke at 4. Still hurt this morning. Filtered sun at Caffé Nero, Saturday morning. Will I go look at Greeks today and Mozart tonight. Ackroyd London: a biography London is cultural depth. London is investigated cultural depth. People glance at me here. I don't know what they see but they look. In SD I am invisible. I feel I'm hanging onto life with difficulty, then see the many shambling wrecks still walking around and think life must be sturdier than I feel it. People being beautiful make me cry. A tenor in the back row, a type, an egg-shaped bare head, glasses, small round mouth, singing with melted devotion. One of two women soloists standing quiet with a long neck and then singing with modest accurate splendour. A blond in red dress and red lipstick, a cockney tart look, who plays the harpsicord. Now everyone's gone to drink booze, that strange ritual [intermission]. It was hot in the British Museum, thick with tourists, and the Greece and Rome displays were a lot of little things massed in cases. The big white rotunda there now is. The temple of intelligence is wiped out in favor of a shop and two canteens. There used to be a core zone for best people at the centre of areas for milling nations. The way it felt to show my card to guards and pass into the wise forehead of Britain with its echoes of rustles. [email] 27 it's 4:30 sunday morning, saturday evening where you are - i don't seem to sleep at night here - sleep in the daytime - going to dinner at luke's tonight, meet his woman, indra the german banker - chances are we will not like each other, but we'll be nice - before that am going to a pub, coffee house, something, where my old friend andy does sunday afternoon gigs, roots music - have a bus pass, good for all public transport - swipe a card - there's a little heat wave going - yesterday late aft in trafalgar square on the steps of st-martin-in-the-fields, big raindrops, people running up the steps to get under cover, the smell of wet pavement, which here is ancient slate paving. evening concert in the church, mozart requiem in candlelight, a whole building full of people being quite beautiful, made me cry.   city of deep, deep time, city of intelligence hard won through twenty centuries of greed and brawling, says the book i'm reading. 28 London is more Parisian - the sidewalk cafés on this stretch - baguettes with breakfast, better coffee, Sunday noon under graceful planes. Pigeons with their red feet, summer dust in the air, a milder light. The choir's voice was a texture that filled the nave. One of the basses twice stood out in it for a bar, like a loop of wool. It was an accidental effect that could be used. I remembered that when I've been here before I was better looking and my muscles didn't ache but I was sometimes in agony about love. The planes are benevolent, with their relaxed green spread. - Cat's Café - Andy is thicker - I'd imagined him a thin old thing. [email] 29 well, it wasn't a pub, it was a thai restaurant, and a drop-in group of musicians besides andy's group assembled and were tolerated kindly though andy and his other two were the real musicians. andy is it seems thriving, writing songs, some of which i heard, not bad. the female singer was wonderful. i asked for "she moved through the fair" and she sang it a capella so rivettingly my scalp tingled. good people in a music community they have made and maintain. luke's other mom was there, sara, who is maybe my age but has had 1. a stroke, 2. breast cancer, 3. a heart attack - indicators that living with roy was not good for her health - and has survived them all with energetic bluster you would approve.   dinner at luke's with luke barbecuing impressively. the girlfriend is a shy scrap of a thing, and luke seemed, looked, more corrupt than i like to see. i don't think she gives him enough guff. she's supporting him and looks at him adoringly, not good. i was as nice to her as i could be. luke had wisely invited another couple of people, a school friend and his new wife, who smoothened things out so it wasn't just about me and her.   this aft met another old friend in a pub for a couple of hours, portobello road, the duke of wellington. there's a heat wave and the tube and buses were crawling and sweltering with crowds of people of every nation, women completely veiled even, which annoys me. this was a friend i hadn't seen in 25 years and i had no idea who would show up but he turned out to be a fit 65 year old still with bright eyes and an up to date interest in art. i'll likely have dinner with him and his wife and one of his kids next week. it was a relief that he hadn't gone wrong.   paris tomorrow, then margaret from nottingham on thursday, then jane at canary wharf friday afternoon, then a barbecue with luke's brothers on saturday, then the tuesday after that i'll take a swift train to birmingham to meet my friend cheryl from toronto who is staying with her english sweetie in manchester so we'll both come halfway.   it's almost seven in the evening, going home traffic still on the street, must go do laundry for tomorrow and scrounge up some supper and then try hard to sleep to be able to get up early enough to be on the paris train by 6.55. 30 On Eurostar, before 7 in the morning. Outside Warren Street Station this morning waiting for a bus, summer mist, a young man sweeping butts and bits of paper steadily with a pushbroom. Early buses. A black driver on the 390. Yes he stops at St Pancras. Here we go. I didn't sleep. Look at the buddleia springing everywhere in the gravel bed. Such a smooth ride. Tony is beautiful. I was looking at him gratefully. He is a fit-looking person with thin legs. No moustache anymore, still his bruised grape eyes and flat lion nose and soft mouth I was feeling with love in my own mouth. Rimless specs, short hair, I said a clerical look, like a wise witty vicar of the old kind. He sat across the table from me and leaned forward the whole time. He said, So what are you doing in London in so warm a tone it did something to me, what, it was like a hidden revival of heart. Then when I mentioned neuroscience he said he had been reading some, and complexity theory and quantum electrodynamics. Thinking of seeing him I'd remembered a lot of things to tell him, I noticed that I have more to say to him than anyone. When he left a phone message he was awkward as if he didn't know me but the moment we were on the phone together I was telling him about my monitor. Then there he was, a good man, a loving father, a responsible husband, a man who has worked carefully at an honorable craft, been generous in his housing co-op, bought and built a beach house on a cliff near Plymouth, who can say he's lonely and uncertain, who doesn't bluff I mean. - We're in France, I think, without ever leaving land. It became France in St Pancras when a woman stamped my passport. Poppies in the field! Goldenrod, fireweed, willows, poplars, evening primrose. - We had lunch, we sat on the paved edge of the river under a poplar tree. Louie was wearing red and looked lively, with a bit of pretty cleavage at her red neckline. Her platte is on the right, mine on the left, both shiny brown with silver at the forehead. Louie was looking at the bridges. We counted seven from where we sat. It was cool next to the water but the taxi driver showed me his outside thermomenter reading 38 degrees C as we were squeezing through lanes one car wide. [Paris notebook] The golden stone. A white dove on a ledge above the Hotel des Maronniers terrace where we drank an abricot and sparkling water over ice. Eurostar departure lounge, a caffé latté in a little Dixie cup. Air conditioning. - The train on the English side doesn't allow much seeing, tunnels, concrete walls, blurred banks. On the French side it's less moled under, wide fields, tiled village roofs, roads marked with large old trees. Will I sleep tonight, I'm sleepy now, don't go under, save it for wicked night. [email] July 1 yesterday. had the alarm set for 5:30, needed to be at the station by 6:30 for the 7:55 to paris. hadn't slept. at all. it was okay. standing waiting for my bus, looking south on tottenham court road past ancient london plane trees into midsummer early haze. heat wave days. it was still cool. there was a young man in a county uniform sweeping the pavement, ie the sidewalk, steadily with a big pushbroom. people getting off buses. i was waiting for a double decker and there it came. have a look at st pancras international station. it's a victorian brick palace, immense, a fanciful cliff, now retrofitted with a new steel and glass roof very very high above. one goes through customs for the international trains the way one does in an airport. they segregate the international passengers onto an upper level, which is still very far below the roof. i had booked and chosen my window seat as you know long ago and so when i arrived at 35 in car 18 and found a managerial class wife sitting in it across from her british empire moustached and wisp-goateed husband in a white panama hat i was not unsure of myself. "i have the window seat, i'm sorry." she said sharply, "and we know that how?" i pointed to the little diagram of a window next to the number 35 above the seats. she got up. but there i was penned in across from the husband. she got out her breakfast provisions and fed them both. he was reading a newspaper and then the economist. she was reading a novel on a sony kindle, which i was interested to have a look at. the train started. utterly smooth. a lot of tunnels getting out of town. then countryside flashing past too rapidly to see except further into the distance. sheep. poppies in the wheatfields, actually poppies in the wheatfield! goldenrod, fireweed, which here is called rosemary willow herb.   there is only one stop before the train gets to paris. the train was packed, every seat in 18 long cars. there never was a glimpse of the sea. i saw some hills, on one of which was a sort of figure showing through to white chalk, so i thought we must be nearly at the coast. and then there was a tunnel, not a long one, and then more of the same kind of fields and poplars, willows, hedgerows, but now the farmhouses were a bit different. we were in france. three or four times the train flashed past a compact small cemetery with either crosses or tablets in tight rows. i realized this territory must have been the hard-fought initial territory after d-day.   in the gare du nord, which isn't as grand as st pancras but still a palace, floods of people headed to the taxi stand. i was traveling with just my notebook (passport inside it) so i wandered away to find a different taxi stand, and did find one, but stood waiting a while next to a sidewalk cafe, being in paris. the taxi driver i caught was a goer, darted in and out of side alleys one car wide, beeped, pushed, was delightfully proactive. very narrow one-car street. there it is, hotel millesime, louie's hotel. i'm speaking french now, this is working. and here's louie and her little room she is paying $200 a night for.   we're hungry. we go out and find a sidewalk cafe on a boulevard across from the seine embankment. eat french bread and cheese and pate and salad. then go sit on the stone-paved edge of the river under a big old poplar tree. we count seven bridges from where we are sitting. there's a japanese man sitting further up playing a bamboo flute. occasionally someone walking. it's cool. across from us the golden stone of the louvre, and further on there is notre dame.   paris is made of that golden stone, not really golden, more cream-colored, but gives off a goldy glow. the row housing is taller than in london, rises six or seven stories, every french window with a wrought iron balcony, very beautiful. each of those massive buildings has a central court, and walking past one sees a glimpse of a tree, a potted geranium. at shop level there is wood painted glossy black or dark green, with big windows. we were on the left bank near the beaux arts so many of the windows were galleries or bookshops. and all these narrow streets stone-paved, hand-crafted.   when we got up after a while and wandered into these streets the heat got us. it was too hot to be in a gallery. we found a hotel courtyard and drank mineral water on ice. little courtyard with a stone fountain, high ivy-covered walls, a white dove and a classic courtesan in tight white dress and backless gold sandals, no underwear, like a woman out of fellini, drinking mineral water and reading a book. when we were looking at the dove she smiled at me.   so that was the visit and it was time to go home. another taxi, a tunisian driver who did the trip with less hustle for 7 euros more, which is quite a lot. he showed me the thermometer reading on his dash: 38 degrees. and back through evening light on the willows, the poplars, the sheep, the cemeteries, the distant villages each with their tall church. and came home and had a bath and went to bed and slept nine hours, first night of good sleep here.   like to imagine you making whiteness in my little room 1st July O a day. - It was until she asked if she could sit down. Let's see if I can expand as if she wasn't there. As if she was at another table. I feel well. Slept last night. Woke often but didn't hurt and drifted back. It was eight when I really woke. So now I'm at Pret seeing red buses in London's mild light, shaded under these gracious planes. Paris yesterday. Was with Louie at an outside table on the Embankment and we saw a beautiful woman. Her head was turned speaking to her friend. She was tall, had her hair up, thirties, intelligent, animated, natural. Other glimpses: sideways into courtyards. A small tree next to a staircase. Red flowers. - Now she's talking on the phone, I must be better prepared to say no. She has put her bag on the seat next to me, she has spread herself out. There was the Hotel Maronnier courtyard where we drank mineral water, a perfect ... - There I have a rumble with her, I spot a table and point it out to her and we have a spat which is making my left hand tremble. But she is gone. She said I was uncivil. I said she was insensitive. Classical courtyard with high walls, thick ivy, a stone fountain at its end, two chestnut trees. There was a woman at the table next to ours who was like a courtesan in an Italian movie. She was wearing a very constructed tight white dress, strapless, and backless gold high heeled sandals. Forties. Her back above the tight line of the dress a bit slack. She was drinking a mineral water and reading a book. Louie was watching an old man at a table under an umbrella. He was bald, ruddy, kindly, and he was listening personably to the man with his back to us. A white dove had landed on a narrow ledge above the garden. The woman in the white dress was looking at it too. When Louie went to ask for ice she smiled at me. We watched her walk away on her gold high heels, the horizontal panels of her dress holding her tight, her hips moving as if independently from her waist. What else, from Eurostar on the way home, the tight formations of the little military cemeteries, evening light on the trees. Mild Europe. Churched Europe. There's nothing I need to do today, phone Margaret tonight is all. I'll get on a bus and go to Heath Lodge and take its picture, and then to Burghley Rd and then somewhere else. - Burghley Rd, here it is. A curved street, my back faced southwest-ish. The row is brown brick with red brick and cream-painted stone and wood. 6 pots on the chimneys. It's not particularly gentrified. The trees aren't much. They planted little hawthorns (I think) when I was here, but is it only one of them survived. I see this and that. My privet hedge is gone and so is the coal hole in the sidewalk. The railway bridge is behind me at the end of Ingestre Road. Maybe Dr Mackintosh still lives on the other side of it but probably he's retired to someplace lovely in the country. I looked at Konstamm Nursery, which still is that. I took pictures through the bars of Highgate Cemetery. I walked my block of Makepeace Avenue but didn't recognize Sheila and Roodal's place. I took pictures of the gate at Holly Village. I bought figs at the fruiterer of Swain's Lane. - Ladybird landed on my neck, hello little ghost did I kill you. Cockney voices. The ground floor at 52 had wooden shades, which means one thing in terms of class, and the first floor had acrylic lace, which means another. Decreasing size of the windows. There's a train. Red pillar box on this corner. Soft overcast and a breeze. "Looks skanky, even through." Black Cockney. The so-lovely streets of Parliament Hill, I think I'd hardly noticed. An elder bush waggling its tips in a leisurely stir. Here comes Ellie on her bike, wide hair, long skirt, baby on the back, leans the bike against a low wall, unstraps the kid and carries him inside. She has a direct keen eye, a lively one though she's in pain about some guy. The phone will ring and it will be Sarah, who is now somewhere unfindable forever I guess. Black taxi. They're not what they were. More snubbed. But the sound is the same. A swift above the roofs. One white butterfly. Maple overhead, I'm leaned against a black, what is it, a sort of street bollard to stop cars crashing into the wall at the end of the street. Quiet Wednesday midday, working class neighbourhood, kids, a young man on a scaffold sanding paint off a window surround. Clack clack a woman in flip-flops. I've been here one week of my four. The shiny little cars. A Vauxall. Tom is in my little house carefully painting, listening to KCRW. Writing emails. When I came home yesterday I found the computer overheated, fan roaring. It had turned itself on. The screen was dark. I didn't panic. I force-closed it and let it cool. Turned it on. It was okay. Now Tufnell Park. - Where there was a literary café called *, that had a garden where I read the new Time Out, saw there was a film in a gallery on Picadilly. The American room. A technical idea. People in a room - the room we were viewing in - frozen as if in still photographs but the camera was moving, there was movement perspective with all the heads in rows. It was a bit like what I felt at the Mozart - wow look at the blue shadows of my writing hand - I'm drinking cider - a clear blue shadow, a lavender shadow - the way people look listening to music - but the music was not worth looking like that for - it was a conceit but the faces were worth looking at - room full of people frozen in a moment and the camera moving freely among them - good cider on ice - Strongbow Jacques, I'm tipsy. I've loved this day. - Look up there at the top stories of that brick dorm, the warmth of the brick in evening light. I liked taking pictures through the Highgate Cemetery fence, into pathless edges of stones lost in ivy and self-sprung trees. I liked sitting at the top of Burghley Road, on the curb, seeing the actual street, my street. I like at this moment sitting on a bench I see from my window, there, lit on the first floor. I like getting on any bus or train and touching my plastic folder against the yellow pad. I love that there are three weeks more. An opera next Monday night. Ha's it gon, he says. 2 Margaret. She's nearly 70. Hair glossy brown down her back in a queue. Two stories she told. Meeting her mother, an old woman who looked like her, Irish Catholic, pregnant at 18. Her boy came back to marry her, but she wanted to go south with him and they left the baby with a couple someone knew. There were visits odd times for two years, and then the new father said, Either you take her back or we adopt her now. Eleven years later there was another daughter born, who is a magistrate and was given Margaret's middle name. The mother sat in a cottage holding Margaret's hand telling her the story. "He would get so angry." The other her story about Peter. She was new in London, worked in the BFI library. She took a course Peter was giving. He wrote something appreciative at the bottom of her paper. She would visit them, have Sunday dinner, stay over, babysit their children. He came to her room with a rose. She thought, this is how sophisticated people do it. In the morning she thought, now what, but went down and had breakfast and everything was normal. It went on like that, familial. One New Years night he went to Joan's room not hers. She got up at dawn and went home, and did not go back to the family house, although she continued to sleep with Peter. He said she liberated him sexually. She says it was just that she was so new, all open. She was creased and wide and beginning to be bent, and I didn't like the way if I began a topic I was strong in, she would begin again with something about herself. Her topics are family and relationships, and though I liked the construction of her little book I didn't like the writing, and had to work around that awkward fact. - Andy took me into Lincoln's Inn, Bell Yard, Middle Temple Inn, Inner Temple Garden, a pub called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese for supper, steps on the Embankment, Fountain Court where Henry VI part 1! 3 Euston forecourt eating a baguette and butter. The day until about noon. The leaves, the leaves. [email] July 3 you are always my champion in a brawl. where anyone else i know wd be scandalized you egg me on. two mornings ago sitting at a cafe table under the spreading planes on tottenham court road, peacefully, blissfully, writing. the tables are full. a young redhead, french accent, asks if she can sit with me. i ungraciously say yes. she sits down. she's in my bubble, i hate it. i try to continue to write. she takes out her cell phone, inflicts on me a conversation with her boyfriend. i'm getting into a rage. a table opens up behind her. i point it out to her. she doesn't want to move. i say i find it hard to concentrate when she is talking on the phone. she says but now she is no longer talking on the phone. she says i am uncivil. i say she is tactless. she gets up to move but then she changes her mind, comes back, puts her coffee down again. i seize it. i'm not sure what i'm going to do with it. i want to fling it in her face but i'm not going to. i put it down again. she says i am grumpy. i say she is insensitive. she says she is sorry. i say i am not. she goes.   there followed a wonderful day. i got on the 214, my old home bus, and rode to what used to be the end of the line at parliament hill fields. had my camera with me, wanted to take a picture of heath lodge, where i lived with roy and baby luke. then wandered on into blooming streets, was looking for luke's old daycare, and there it was still operating but now walled in with wire fencing, security lights and a buzzer door. could hear a nursery worker's patient lovely voice, 'where is your belly? show me where your belly is.'   across from the nursery is famous highgate cemetery where i used to go with luke to steal flowers. it's vast, has many pathless edges. took some pictures through the fence. wandered on, happy having nothing to do. up the streets to 52 burghley road, where i lived for the years after i left roy's place. took pictures of the house, then sat on a curb at the top of the street and watched its present life. peaceful july mid-day. a man on a scaffold sanding paint on stonework. black kids ambling through from the community center. a police car, twice. an ambulance not in a hurry. it's still a working class street, row houses, as you see, classic brick victorian. a half street over is a rail line with a bridge over it, that luke and i would linger on, when he was a nipper buttoned up in a winnie-the-pooh duffle coat, waiting to see a train, which was his great delight, along with any other form of transport.   and then i wandered on to tufnell park, the 5-way junction a block away, tube stop, ethnic shopping of at least a dozen kinds, greek, italian, indian, iranian, chinese, boots chemist, your choice of funerals, estate agent, builders' merchant, and something there never used to be, a literary cafe, where they pointed me to a garden, where i drank caffe latte and scoured time out, the weekly that details everything going on in london.   saw a film exhibit reviewed, a gallery in picadilly, got on the tube and was whisked away. the underground sweltering in the heat, and then the grand stone avenue thick with buses and taxis and tourists. the gallery in one of those stone palaces. etc. then the top of a double decker home to the dorm, stopping at the goodge street cockney fruit stand.   yesterday i met margaret, old friend who is now almost seventy, a creased little biddy. we lay on the dry grass in bloomsbury square and told each other stories. and then i met andy as he was coming off work in his law office, and he took me through marvelous narrow alleyways into the hidden gardens of legal london, lincolns inn fields, the inner temple, fountain court, to the thames embankment, where we sat on steps that vanished under the murky thames, something lovely about that, steps going into the water. had supper in ye olde cheshire cheese, a 17th century alehouse with sawdust on the floors, and took our separate buses home.   and this aft i'm going to canary wharf to meet jane downey, but first have to draft workshop descriptions for [the res].   andy who is married to a philadelphia irish/french woman wants to know what part of philadelphia your row house was in.   [email] July 3   you are incorrigible with your sheep joke that you have already told me at least thrice. i laughed not at your terrible joke but at your relentless need to tell it. fondly. did look covetously at rudyard and millicent tally-ho's breakfast.   you are right about the dove ... i felt it but didn't remember it, the courtesan and her white dress and her smile at me when we looked together at the white dove, there was a dim glimmer of something about it   mon dieu and entre nous how your french improved in speaking about a bush   4 Jane was like Margaret, worse, not able to give herself to anything I could say. Blank, and then saying something banal about herself, sunk always in her own little pond of family. The window sills and mantles in her house thick with family photos. A horrible house, narrow dark corridors, tight stairs, photos and furniture making it tighter still. I liked her smile and her laugh, though. Her voice broad Halifax still, after all the years in London. Halli-fax. Lohn-don. And Canary Wharf a hell of levels of shops, swarmed corridors, unreadable maps. While I was with these women I was in nearly continuous distress wondering what I could do to make the contact come to life. I tried this and that. I listened to exhaustion. This morning I woke with an instruction to find the early love in them. I suppose catching up is what doesn't work? I have wonderful stories, and don't they? Or they can't tell them? I'm still puzzled. When I left her at Mile End, Regent Canal stop, I got on the 205 that took me home through ancient names, Finsbury Circle, London Wall, Moorfield Eye Hospital, Aldgate, Old Street, Bishop's Gate, Pentonville Road. The top deck of the 205 was hot and I was dazzled by low sun and my feet hurt remarkably but last evening's journey from the East End to my central corridor was a mythic bewilderment of London time. Exquisite churches everywhere squashed between business buildings of all dirty vintages, the ground floor one thing, a present day street face, and all the upper storeys still their time of building, Georgian, Victorian, Tudor, cut stone, formed brick. The pubs fantasy manors with their emblems and beautiful names, at going-home time yesterday their crowds standing together on the pavement, men with their jackets off, everyone holding an amber glass. The Golden Eagle. Jane drove me past 62 White Horse Road where I hid out in her squat in misery. Stepney. The East End wretched in a way Kentish Town is not, Andy saying 52 Burghley Road was a power spot and the house protested their leaving by sparking its wiring the night before they left. That as we were sitting on the Embankment steps, quite low down, watching the brown Thames slapping at steps that continued under it who knows how deep. - Over the city 20' of made earth, Roman mosaic floors and bathhouses. - [left side notes for metaphor lecture] The World's End, the Grand Union, the Eaglet, the Black Stock, the Four Seasons, the Queen's Elm, the Spotted Horse (Clydesdale), the Slug and Lettuce (modern), the Butcher's Hook, the Black Bull Oak, chestnut, lime, acacia, cherry, walnut, maple, holly, golden rain, lilac, cypress, mountain ash - Jed, Josh, Zack, Nathalie, Mashonda, Sean, Matt, Gerard What did I notice - Luke is generous in talk, plays with what people give him - drinks steadily - is not the best looking of the brothers now - stayed out of it quite a bit. Nathalie's beautiful cold legs. Jake's same unusual selfness, pompous and then when he'd drunk a few quite zingy, a musician. Josh the father of the gathering, remote. Jed just a lad. Mashonda rescued me, Zambian American mama-beauty, told me I was beautiful and serene and was I North American Indian and asked how long I was with Roy. When I mentioned the women's movement we were sitting on the grass and she shifted suddenly to put herself more opposite me. I couldn't tell whether she was hiding me from her man or all turned on. [email] July 5 fresh sunday morning coming in the window. i keep them shut all night so i can sleep - it's taxi motors all night long - and then the pleasure of air in this little room when i jump up and open it on daylight.   where you are it's one in the morning.   what have i done. social things since paris but this aft i'm going to the opera, mozart, cosi fan tutte, in the ancient theatre district at leichester square, and tomorrow night i'm going to a modern opera of orpheus and eurydice on the south bank of the thames, then tuesday i'm going to birmingham to meet my toronto friend cheryl, who will come down from manchester. then after that there will still be two lovely weeks.   friday i met a woman who used to sublet a room from me. we had been sisterly, we'd worn each others' clothes. she's broad yorkshire, a good soul, but it was depressing. she was like margaret earlier in the week sunk in the little pond of her own family relations, incurious. i don't understand how it's been with these two women, it's as if they can't bear to hear anything from me, i'll listen to their tales and then if i begin one of my own they change the subject back to some banal thing about them. incapable of otherness. disappointing.   she met me at canary wharf, which you may have heard of, an immense dockland development where london has indulged the sort of high rise capitalism it hasn't allowed in the ancient streets. underworld layers of shopping mall, swarming with young capitalists, circles of hell.   after i saw her i took a double decker bus home, upper level, front seat, sun going down dazzling into the window as i rode west across town looking at architecture, the bus surging and swerving through narrow crooked streets with mythical names: old street, aldgate, bishopsgate, london wall, pentonville road. exquisite churches everywhere crammed wall to wall with business buildings. pubs with after-work crowds standing in shirt sleeves filling the pavement and overflowing into the street. pubs like fantasy manors, the golden eagle with a gilded eagle at the apex of its roof. commercial palaces in gorgeously cut stone or victorian wedding cake brick. sometimes a tudor wood and plaster. everywhere in the old villages rowhouses with street level renovated into contemporary business frontages of every tacky kind, but the hand-crafted old centuries showing unchanged though grimy above. everywhere the london plane trees thriving broad and green in the dirty air.   yesterday luke had a back yard barbecue so i could meet his brothers, whom i'd last seen as little boys. that was just family stuff, i won't bore you with it except to say that luke is alert and gracious and downs a lot of wine, and his girl so passive i haven't so far been able to like her. 5 Prêt à Manger caffé latté and baguette with butter, which is utterly good, fresh, perfectly crisp. What sh'll I do until the opera. St Martins? National Gallery? Friendship of the solid black Zambian woman with the coltish English suburban girl. Both let their men support them. Both took up with men ten years younger, who have done well. The women hang back in these gatherings. The men indulge the little boy, include him. On the 29 going to Crouch End a Cockney girl sat opposite. She was wearing tight, very short white shorts and a sheer tight undershirt that showed through to a pink bra with bows on the straps. Round breasts very compressed. Black hair cut to an asymmetrical point down one side of her jaw, big heart-shaped silver earrings dangling, and big mirror shades over a clean well-cut little mouth and chin. She was remarkably put together. Seventeen, maybe younger. I turned myself on by imagining slipping a finger into her bra, just very slightly, setting her on my lap, touching her little wet nub. She was a gift, a magic package willfully given. Luke's street a hill slope with an elaborate Victorian schoolyard, a canal, a narrow slate-paved passageway. A horrible thing in this new London is the woman's voice announcing the obvious everywhere. In the elevator, "Doh opening," "fust floh," "doh closing," and on the bus every stop, and between them constantly repeating the route number and destination. Luke says street cameras everywhere that can recognize faces and when not faces, walks. - City of artistry - whoever carved those leaves for the band of stone above the first floor windows. City of buddleia. City without jaywalking laws. The Green Man at Putney Heath, King's Keep, Farrier's Walk Thistle Grove, Bartok's house (blue plaque) V Brain & B Gamble & Sons Funeral Directors People do back-up U-turns mid-block. Buses with insect antenna mirrors. [email] 6 July i invited luke to tea yesterday on the seventh floor of the tate modern, which is on the south bank of the thames and overlooks both the river and the long sweep of the north bank including st pauls directly across. i hadn't realized why i wanted to meet him there but we had a fine conversation, sitting for hours with tea and noshes, while it rained heavily or lightly or the sun came out. an overview conversation. it began when i said carefully that i wonder whether indra is strong enough for him and he said without hesitating that she is not. he asked bitterly why i had had a baby with roy, he couldn't put it together. he is despising roy at the moment. i knew it was important to him so i told him carefully in a way that wasn't ungenerous to either roy or me. he felt better after, walked me along the embankment to my evening event at the queen elizabeth theatre fifteen minutes further west, stood on a parapet talking about flying airplanes after i'd picked up my ticket, his favorite kind of conversation i think. he has some of the epp men's tendency to be morose and bitter and i want to nip it in its insidious bud if i can, a life can go to waste with that. long hug when we said goodbye, true heart hug.   the cultural event was pretentious and bombastic. i went because it was a version of the orpheus story. it's a big theatre, and was full, and the people there didn't look as stupid as the people at the opera on sunday, but yikes what a dissociated screeching and howling and posing. the composer was afterwards led on stage, a pig-eyed big-bellied old thing. such a man i thought is interested in the orpheus story because it's a story of loss of something in himself, but that level was not acknowledged or understood, the evidence of the music was. people were enthusiastically applauding but i didn't find it hard not to.   and then walked over the hungerford bridge to charing cross, a breezy dark, looking at the lights, and bought a cornish pasty in the station, and cut across the corner of trafalgar square eating it warm from its bag, and then took a bus up tottenham court road. a red-nosed old guy with an east european conversation was on the hunt for women to talk to, had sat himself down next to a woman at the bus stop, who was monosyllabic in a syrian accent, and sat down next to me on the bus and when i wouldn't reply grazed on over across the aisle where he had more luck with an uglier woman with a greek accent.   it's grey and cool this morning. i have to do a quick construction sketch for scott, if my software will do it, then will be all over the country before this day is over. 6 Robert de Chazal saw me on TV talking about film, sent a note. The opera. When it began I thought of leaving. It was sung in English, that was bad, and the broad acting. The audience had not looked good, old things in conventional clothes, tourists with stupid faces. Mozart fashionably cynical, a dumb story. I had nowhere to go and stayed for Susan Gritton. Then along came Suave sia il viento almost as it should be but stupid in English. 7th Luke yesterday in the Tate Modern tearoom looking across the Thames. We were there for hours. Sometimes the air went thick with rain. He is despising Roy, why would I have a baby with him, he couldn't make sense of it. I said I would tell him how it seemed to me at the time. Then I told him what Joyce had said, that I was in despair about men. I had wanted a good thing, I hadn't known how to attach better. It's as if Luke is saying, why didn't you give me a better father, which is a question that bites its own head. Dear Luke he was my way to you though I had to be wrong in many ways to get you. Roy who is now going to a Methodist church with his Kleinian therapist wife that all his children hate and blame, who makes bad food! [email] July 8 thursday morning. your email came while i was sleeping, something i like about this time mis-match. it's cool early morning on the facade across the way. leaves oscillating very mildly. a lorry motor at the corner. i backed out of my appointment today, needed a day with nothing to do, that lovely thing. went to galleries yesterday with my old friend tony, found a dry bench in the park - ie a bench under a tree. walked a lot. he's getting deaf but he's been reading. some later i'll get up and walk a block east to tottenham court road and have a decaffe latte and a little bagette with butter at an outside table watching the working classes go to work. then maybe wander somewhere with my camera. 8th Tony at noon at the Haunch of Venison. After Cosi fan tutte I wandered into St Martins, where they were in the midst of a salt and light tazé service, whatever that is. It happened again. I found myself in tears. But then the talk of our Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father sent me out again. Birmingham yesterday, the airless train that made me ill, though there were sheep and fields and bridges over a canal with barges. The near blur from high speed trains is hard to take. The seats are very tight. Cheryl ageless in dyed hair, dressed as always, black jeans and jean jacket buttoned tight. Wider at the hip, blue veins on the backs of her hands. A lot of shows. A lot of curation, a lot of travel, a lot of acquaintance. A sweetie satisfactory enough. A little somehow wider in her face, is that Oil of Olay, some skin plumping thing? We sat in Starbucks and talked the way we do, short hours. Next to her I am out of it, retired, romantic, and a bit decrepit probably, although I thought I looked nice in my new black teeshirt and the cashmere hoodie and silver leaf. Trim. We're not interested in each other's work. She's making it in the market and I am somewhere else working for another time. - The Pret on Picadilly at Green Park. With Tony from noon until now. The Haunch of Venison, Bill Viola and Tony's guy. Sat in the forecourt of the Royal Academy. Walked across to the Mall, bad show at the ICA. Across the street into St James Park. On a bench under trees. Walked up through an avenue of Green Park. Tired. 9 Who is Tony now. He's quite deaf, can't hear me if he can't see me. We were sitting at the edge of the Royal Academy forecourt talking. I hadn't known he'd lived in Malta when he was a child. He was talking about being Catholic there, guilty about sex. I said, You were the best lover I ever had, you've still got the record. He went red, choked on his sandwich, kept laughing. He liked Damasio and The road. Remembered trying to film the three flies but remembered it the wrong way round, that he'd been the one filming. Told a story about coming home drunk one time, wanting to get into bed with John and Elana, went upstairs naked in his hat, found them asleep in each other's arms, got in on Elana's side, went to sleep. Woke in the morning to her amused eye, and then an arm, John's, came across and pushed him out of bed. He got up, put on his hat and left. He works maybe half time, he says. Can make £4000 a month when he does. It's how he can read and make art. - Whitechapel. Andy Harper Feast of skulls 2008 oil on linen. St Just Cornwall and London, b.71, Royal College MA. Lectures at Goldsmiths in MAFA. Earlier paintings relied on the repetition of a single and simple brush stroke to yield a mono-cultural field of grass. Over the past two years this simple process has diversified. [email] 10 July saturday morning, white sky like june gloom. i think rain is forecast. yesterday was sun and shade alternating fast all day. in the aft luke and i took a picnic to regent's park, large park a bit north of where i am, across the marylebone road, that he often walks in on his own. we sat in the rose garden and talked for hours, and then he took me to an exquisite secret garden in another corner of the park, classical english garden with yew hedge and perennial borders and mermaid fountain and pleached limes and a massive grape arbour, and then we walked up past the duck collection or i should say wild fowl collection because it also has coots and geese, and on to camden town where he took the tube north and i a bus south. it was just right. we'd had the big conversation and now it was just natural hanging out, which he does well, a communicative boy.   he told me a marvelous story i somehow had never heard. it was from a time when he was in his twenties in vancouver. he had a chinese girlfriend called angela, beautiful (i met her) and the daughter of a hong kong tong member. he was at the railway club with her one night - railway club is the main live music venue - when she excused herself to go to the washroom. while she was gone she stepped out to go to an atm on the street, and there a somalian guy came up behind her and put a knife to her neck. she fought back, the knife slipped and cut her under her eye. he grabbed her bag and ran away. someone luke didn't know came to him in the club and told him his girlfriend had been rushed to emergency.   she had two black eyes and they were stitching her up when he arrived. she looked bad and was scared. he took her home and looked after her. a couple of days later he coaxed her to go out with him. they were living near english bay in the west end, and so they ended on the beach. she saw her attacker sitting on a log with three other men.   it's him. are you sure? yes, it's him. the guy saw them looking and took off. the other men didn't follow. luke sent angela to call the cops (this was before cell phones), and chased after the guy across the beach. when luke started to gain on him the man stopped and took out his knife. luke whipped off his belt and kept coming, so the guy took off again, through the parking lot of the sylvia hotel. it was a cul de sac and the only place he could have gone was through the back door of the hotel, so luke dodged in after him. checked the doors he could see for motion. there was none so he concluded the guy was still in the hotel. dashed up to the check-in counter and said you have to call the police, there's trouble. we can't do that sir, beginning to hand the phone to luke. luke swept all the brochures off the counter, violent sudden motion, if he causes a disturbance they will call on their own behalf. dashes into the dining room, which is straight ahead.   there at a table in the corner is the somalian, hiding behind a menu. he sees that luke has seen him. luke is cutting off the exit so he gets out his knife again. luke thinks oh rats now we're into it and grabs a chair. a table goes over. etc. suddenly cops swarm in from every side. both of them on the floor with their hands twisted behind their backs. angela arrives behind the cops. that one's the murderer, that one's my boyfriend. oh well done, we've been looking for this guy, he got three more women since this one.   i say it's a story with a lot of quick thinking in it. luke says everything was slowed down, there was a lot of time. we also talked about the museum of london, where i went thursday, and looked at a stretch of roman wall, minutely detailed models of roman london and the thames valley before there was a city, wattle and daub huts, blue flint arrowheads. luke's a london-lover and roamer, showed me photos on his camera. a good photographer.   less than two weeks left, alas. at liberty today. maybe i'll go to the british library, up the street, where i now have a reader's ticket. 10 What it was about Andy Harper was the way he paints a plant stem so his mark is one direct stroke whose little ridges are the stem's small structure - vascular bundles I suppose. Twists of the brush off the stem the structures of what look like acanthus petals. All kinds of that. The painting overall is aimed at the art writers, who can say the plants are ominous etc, but the painted skill is better than fashion. Brought home an Art forum, found it a midden of junk innovation written up by cut-off heads searching consciencelessly for anything to say. It's a desperate milieu where success seems impossible and disgusting. I want a life in good making with good makers, and the life defined as that is hideous, unhinged, corrupt. Tony saying he's looking for something underneath, he wants to analyze art, seeing is not enough. I'm Romantic, he says. By that he means trivial. And yet the defense not just of the body but of happy earthed body is central and current surely. Bill Viola's high def slo-mo piece with bright-lit water spraying off young bodies. That one has something but it butters the market by being high tech and by drenching an adolescent girl. I did like the sharpness of the lighting and focus. Tony's story of watching Jessie born by Caesarian. He was in a tiled Victorian operating theatre with ranks of benches for students. Christine was behind a drape. He'd been holding her hand but when they said they were ready he said See you later and went around into the stands. The surgeon lifted his blade and cut once down, once across. Christine's belly opened like a flower. Out popped the baby, liver-colored. There was pink water on the tile around his feet. He hadn't wanted a child, Christine said either she was having a baby or she was leaving. He said okay, and maybe he'd stay around for a year. When they put the bundle into his arms that was it. He was capering in the corridor. The buddleia on the pediment of the pub across the street, purple-flowered, throwing its shadow on the dark purple paint below. Buddleias on the railway embankment, in any waste ground. Sometimes a white one. - It's dancing on its high platform. Yesterday I got on a 25 looking for the Museum of London. Hours blasted by crowds, stalled in traffic. When I saw myself in the café mirror in the Whitechapel Gallery I looked bloodless, dark under the eyes. Went around the prehistory of the Thames Valley and the minutely detailed models of Londinium feeling I might die. Heart-weak. Liked the wattle and daub house, a bed, a bench, a central fire pit, a chest, pegs next to the door flap. Straw roof. Blue flint arrowheads. Then in Londinium streets, quais, three-story commercial buildings, gutters, ramps, a lumberyard, a brickyard, washing pools in the backyards, sheep pens, two men carrying amphorae on a pole. - Going through Work lately, two things, one was Alice Notley, the other a clairvoyant I think quoted in Mayer Extraordinary knowledge. - Wandering in Regent's Park with Luke, meantime Martin Ware writing a letter explaining why he dropped me. A good reason. I said so and sent the Porthmeor photo, so it's alright on both sides I think. Walked and walked with my tall son. The rose garden, where he likes to go, for hours, and then St John's Lodge secret gardens. To me it seemed that, given a basic sympathy of mind, proper affection could easily overflow. Such a courtly sentence, and thinking himself Caradoc, the only knight faithful to his lady. But then my last sentence about the Cornwall coast being wilder, that is, I am. You're living well, it's not for me to disturb the equipoise of a man who goes to church. Luke and I looked at the colors of roses, looked at a yew hedge, at a wall of pleached limes, at fuzzy ducklings, at a pigeon stealing bread from another. At the colours of johnny-jump-ups. [Repeated story deleted.] Luke had been to the Museum of London, knew the little models.   part 2 in america volume 18: 2009 june - october work & days: a lifetime journal project