in america volume 18 part 2 - 2009 july - august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

London 11 July Saturday mid-day. I'd like to see into that careful life, and still want what I wanted, a friend who'd like to read me. "Given a basic sympathy of mind." It wasn't quite that. Given a basic sympathy of mind was o Susan. But given a man founded in goodness, loving, innocent and reticent. And then reading Work now, the journal compilation of time since 3663 Georgia, seeing the way over time even my boredom and doubt with Tom are interested, interesting. But the years going by and little done. - Moskvitin An essay on the origin of thought. It's in ch IV Observations, 49-59. - In the Reading Room, one of the humanities rooms. It's parallel rows, old men and pretty things, it's quiet but not the fine old silence murmuring to the sky. An air vent blasting, a lamp buzzing. There seem to be no books I want. [email] July 12 it's bedtime here. went to andy's sunday aft musical gathering, moments you'd have liked i think, beautiful folk banjo, that was andy, and an 18-year old fiddler, and more musicians of different levels. later walked many streets, not satisfied to get onto a bus until i'd crossed my old paths some more, the reason's dim, a groping magic of standing in that place not at that time, dimly wondering what that can be. 12 Updike My father's tears and other stories. He died at 77 and in this one I'm interested in what he's noticing about being old, which suddenly I feel I am, though there are a lot of reprieves, like walking with Luke in Regent's Park. I watch my unconstant symptoms, which don't tell me anything for sure. When I came I felt I was dying, that heart-weak, and then the nights aching, and now I sleep and don't ache when I lie down, but sometimes when I wake. And the hand-tingling is better probably on account of CoQ10 and l-carnatine, but toward morning it was there a bit. I'm forgetting words a lot, and double-check instructions. I'm sometimes stiff getting up and wobbly in first movement after. Can't eat as much - never used to feel full but yesterday at the British Library I left a lot of beef on my plate. What else do I notice. Being lonely. Coming out of email not having got what I want. Which is what - what would satisfy me. Naked personal liking. Tom's one satisfying email, where he noticed and praised specific things I'd said. Sky deep blue, white clouds from the west. Courtyard of Ramsay Hall waiting for laundry to dry. 13 Updike says in My father's tears, Sylvia, knowing me in my old age, recognizes that I have never left Pennsylvania, that is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition. He was still writing about anything in his childhood place - his grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, the house, the yard, the streets of the town, his to tell, his to save as long as he could, as well as he could, with the perishing thing he was. Childhood and "one body delighting in another." (I can't find the passage.) The first time I slept with the woman who got me nearly arrested in Passaic, I purred ... "Listen to this," I said, and laid my cheek against hers, and let her listen to the lightly rattling sound of animal contentment my throat was producing. I had been a dutiful, religious child, but there and then I realized that the haven where life was rounded beyond the need for further explanation had been opened up, and I experienced a peace that has never quite left me. I agree it's often about looking for where the self I value is stored, the passages in the journal it gives me pleasure to read. At Andy's Sunday music yesterday there was a man I didn't know, tall, leather jacket, a consequential look. It was Sweeney. Asked Andy to bring me to his house after, sat with Janine in his good kitchen, afterward walked to Tufnell Park and on to Burghley Road, and then across the bridge and through the estate, along College Lane, up Highgate Road to a 214 stop. I needed to stand where I'd stood, as if there's an esoteric efficacy in it. A dim sense that I should touch the door of 52. I didn't, because a man across the street was talking on his cell where he could see me. Dimly dissatisfied, I should have done that. [Taking Sara home in Andy's car] we drove past Roy's van. Aardvark Landscaping. A sore heart, what is it really. Am I wrong about it. Rongé. A gnawing. What does it say. Misery that this writing is dull, that I'm stupid and energyless. Misery that I'm ugly. The friends I'm talking to here are a falling back, from before I made friends in art, I'm not satisfied with what I can be with them. I'm afraid to contact Sal and Lis, and only have a week left, panic at the thought of trying to find them, I'm not current enough. The trip will be a failure if it's meant to be about finding my way in art, though it's not a failure with Luke. So now work has to come out of desperation rather than fullness that will come no other way? I hesitated with the question mark. This is Anne Carson. Decreation 2006 Jonathan Cape. Humanities 2, a good corner. Other people like it too. Good air. Good light, good faces closed into their own elsewheres. Ranks of laptop screens. Each slot a brass plate with a number, two electric outlets, a small square that lights up to say Please contact issue desk. 14 Priorities: physical quality enlivenedness completing love Luke and Row essence large project   research exercise electric flow praise, currency finish and publish structure organization sift journals for best video camera   Unfinished: monograph ant bear and Favor digitize films mbo site work & days   V&A Constable oil sketches room 88 Oil on paper Cloud sketches, a yard in Hampstead I was moaning with wanting to see them better. They were in the dark and half of them were set too high. This Victorian cathedral of science. Is there a word for that sound. It's like a volume full of floating bits of gravel, a lot of them but loosely packed and moving. It's voices but seems clumpy. Dark grey. 15 Tony yesterday. The best was when we were in the room with the slice of oak tree on the ceiling and I lay down on a bench to look at it and he lay down next to me and we were two mid-sixties people talking side by side in a public bed, looking at something together. The worst was when we were in Diana's circle by the Serpentine, looking at teenage girls on the grass, and he said the word 'nubile' in a squashed lascivious tone and then told a hideously violent misogynous joke. Did I laugh? I might have. He could only think of Diana in political terms, couldn't imagine what I meant by saying she was Aphrodite to people, and that was good in them. - At this moment a truck pulls up outside Pret with a loud squeal and on its white side in red and blue letters it says 3663. Was about to say that he prides himself on a dried-outness that makes him always unsatisfied with himself in his work. He loves his mother. Describes sitting with her the three days she was dying holding her hand, singing her old songs to her. Cole Porter I've got you under my skin. He will sometimes now sing those songs. "I suppose that's grieving." She was wandering but sometimes there was a slight smile. He lately had an email from a cousin who had found a mention of his dad in an account of the Battle of the Bismarck. "Scouse Nesbit" being the smallest man had had to crawl into a hot boiler wrapped in wet blankets to make a repair to his ship, the SS *. His mother one of 13 in a Catholic family in Liverpool, his father also one of many, left school early to go to work. His mother wasn't intelligent, he said, but she was gentle, always put herself second. A leave baby. He had his mother mostly to himself. His first memory may have been in a prefab with a lot of sun seeing a figure looming against the light outfitted in military hat and braid. When I said Christine has looked after him well he said sharply that he has looked after her well. Contradictions somehow. He was soft as shit but doesn't allow himelf that in work, the man-realm. He doesn't quite want to grant me what I've earned, I think. Carson The glass essay 1992 on Emily Bronte. "She has a vast habitat" someone says of her. The Red Rose, the Black Cap, the Twelve Pins, the Castle Finsbury Park with dark skies. A willow tree. Dark aisles. 16 Yesterday Annie Liebowitz's photos of Susan Sontag naked, ill, old, ordinary. Foyles 2nd floor, the expanse, the window over a church roof made of lapped red clay scales amid leaves. I sat on the floor looking at Richard Long's book. Handprint paintings very beautiful. Then the reading room, Anne Carson, a good one, not the later indulgent junk. Then a double decker bus to Crouch End, an unusual # from Euston Station - 253? through streets I hadn't seen before, seeing into Finsbury Park under moody skies as I passed. Dark skies, wet pavements. Getting off the bus at the foot of Mattison looking around for a bread shop and finding a big Cypriot bakeshop with racks full of round loaves of Greek bread, the kind I used to buy in Tufnell Park. I bought one with sesame seeds, walked uphill, took the South Harringay Passage across to Luke's street. He made tea and toast, told me two more hero stories. The garden was lit up at the end of his good kitchen. The toast was exquisite, with a thin slice of ham folded on it. The cat miewed sharply. It was midafternoon. I said I wouldn't stay long. He was climbing Table Mountain one hot day, had seen no one else, was on a track circling the mountain halfway up, heard a voice. Looked around. Above him he could see just a white arm. It was partway down a sheer face. He called the rescue team and then could see them start up toward the moutain, red vehicles. It was hard to give them exact directions because it was hard to see where the person was. They said he should go stay with whoever it was, they'd likely be dehydrated. He had to climb to the track above him and then work down a draw. He found an elderly woman on a ledge above a 60 meter drop. She and her husband had taken the cable car up and then decided to walk down. She was overweight, they had no water, and she wasn't wearing a hat. When she couldn't go futher the husband went for help and had got lost. Luke found her beginning to be out of it. He wedged her against the rock face and held her there with his back while he stayed in touch with the rescue team he could see unloading their gear at the highest point they could reach by road. They couldn't see him though he tried flashing his binocs at them. When the helicopter arrived it hooked onto a line that carried up two men with a body board. They strapped him and the woman to the board and plucked them up into the air. Set them down. You're alright? Yes. They gave him some water and he went on and climbed the mountain. The other time when he was seventeen traveling with Paul, fishermen had said there was an easy trail from Nice to Toulon along the coast. They were carrying heavy backpacks. The track was difficult and much longer than they'd thought. Paul got dehydrated and exhausted. Luke was fine but had to keep Paul going. They went back over a mountain looking for a road. Luke laid Paul face-down on the ground so he wouldn't choke on vomit and flagged down a car. They got as far as a phone box at an unoccupied camp. Somebody was using the phone. Luke was gesturing, I really need to use the phone NOW. The kid didn't speak French, he was German. They sorted it out, he spoke English, he was talking to his dad who was on a yacht on ship-to-shore radio phone. Here, talk to my dad. The father thought it would be best to get Paul onto the boat and have an ambulance meet them at the wharf in Toulon. It happened that way. They packed Paul in ice and took him to the hospital. Meantime Luke couldn't find a place to stay and was invited onto the yacht, where he remained until Paul was out two days later. Went diving with the father who was an underwater photographer. His first dives. Luke was cleaning up the kitchen and seemed restless so I thought it was time to go. He made up for his discourtesy carefully by phoning the express train to Heathrow and getting times and cost for me, and showing me photos on his computer. Moonrise on Mars, its beautiful light, a NASA photo. Then I took Harringay Passage as far as it went (it ended at a tall chimney) and found my way into Finsbury Park, where the long aisles under trees were dark - I want to be able to say this. Under these moody slate-grey skies the enormous park trees were so thick-leaved the avenues under them are very dark. There's something about these long receding tunnels of leaves, and the strength of the trees, the darkness of their green masses, their avidity, even. Luke had said go diagonally to get to Finsbury Park Station. It was an englamoured passage. Fine gritty paths. I remember a willow tree, lighter, and spread in perfection beside the path, not a weeping willow, a very large silvery-leaved ancient thing with a gracious perfect form. City of massive flourishing trees. City of buddleia fountains everywhere. City of endlessly varied fantasy facades. I was sitting on a bench and asked a man passing where the path went. He replied in an Irish accent. He was a tall man in his forties. There was something about the meeting, just the fact of stopping a stranger to ask a question and hear his voice. He looked at me. He wasn't blind. He was alert. I've loved asking directions. When the bus I climbed onto on Seven Sisters Road (the seven sisters were elms, the sign said) got to Kings Cross there was evening light in the sky to the west so I got onto another bus that was going to cross the river at Blackfriars Bridge. A lot of black Africans got on. I sat next to one in the front seat who was reading a Bible story. Others looked quite wild, criminal maybe. Went as far as Brixton. Got on another double decker bus that took me back over Westminster Bridge past the Parliament Buildings and Westminster Abbey. In Trafalgar Square a crowd was watching a Mozart opera on a large screen. None of them could hear well in the din. Forgot to say that on the bus to Mattison Avenue I sat next to two Rom boys, 16 or 17. The one across the aisle from me was wearing four or five bracelets on each arm, two feathered earrings in each ear, and a lot of necklaces, a cap. He was holding but not playing a cheap guitar. He and his friend were sometimes singing. They seemed to be speaking Spanish. When the one next to me talked on his cell phone his voice was remarkably loud, and more than loud, it had a hard authority unlike any voice I've heard. - Thursday morning at Pret. Fast clouds in the gap between wall and plane leaf edge. - I learned to write in a clear and natural way ... I was able to drop down into a vein of truth and passion at my core ... she has a passion for the work she does ... I would wish for her good health and stamina to remain as on fire with the work as I found her to be. My two semesters with Ellie have been life changing. I used G2-3 with her as well as I possibly could to accomplish the best I was capable of. Ellie's responses helped me to uncover, articulate and refine some of my most basic views and patterns in life. Her help was that significant. Careful, considerate thought. Philosophical training. Open-mindedness. She captures the spirit of the lure to [the college] as a place with depth, social responsibility, and fearlessness to engage very personal explorations of the world. Ellie has an admirable way of pushing students to places they might be unwilling to go, reserving her warmth and pride for the moments they most need it. She had critiqued my writing and way of being in the world closely, noting the undercurrents of guilt and distance that held back my work. And when I let go, into writing that felt particularly vulnerable, she cradled me and praised the work I had done, allowing me to flood with pride. Ellie understood me, responded directly to me, and was extremely helpful. ... compassion, immediacy, directness, honesty, clarity, organization, patience, responsiveness .... I had the most wonderful semester. Thank you Ellie. Jaes, Cam, Mandy, Zach in that order. I'm proud of how well they speak for themselves. 17 Tom's letters have deteriorated to links to songs or news stories, which makes me lonely. He will spend hours on music sites but hasn't the energy to stay in heart touch. - There has been nothing personal in any of my contacts here, except Luke. Luke is the one who matters, but the blankness makes me feel unloveable, an under-sadness. Reading Gilligan's new book that I bought at Foyles the other morning, sexual repression and voicelessness. Andy's voice on his phone message, the patriarch's pompous lawyer-voice. Luke on the phone to train information, a heavy hard upper class male. Tony's voice not at all that, but has an odd slurred sound as if he were drunk. Andy's double chin and pouched eyes. We did find something wonderful together. A church he hadn't entered before, an inner courtyard and then music, a choir rehearsing. We sat listening. The organ was above us and the choir director in white shirt and suspenders kept looking around to cue the organist. The music was exquisite. I seemed to know it, though I hadn't heard it so alive. Fauré's Requiem. The church was St Alban the Martyr Holborn. Earlier we'd been in Grey's Inn, where around a sundial there were semi-circles of lavender and big floppy yellow single roses. A tree Andy liked, that I found monstrous. Didn't say so. It was a weeping beech with its descending branches, that were hidden under a dark green mop of leaves, a bent-back intergrafted tangled heap, botanical plaque. A couple of parks that had been cemeteries. Fish and chips at Archway. Cup of tea. When we came out it was dark and had begun to rain hard. From the upstairs front window of the bus, the running golds and reds of light on the black street. [left side notes on Constable's oil sketches: June 11 1776 East Bergholt in Suffolk. The Londoners, with all their ingenuity as artists, know nothing of the feelings of a country life, the essence of landscape. 1829 moved to Hampstead. died very suddenly on April 1, 1837 and was buried in the churchyard of Hampstead. At 60. light, dews, breezes, bloom, and freshness painting much deep shade Says it's an elm tree. Constable's sketches in oil and water colours James Linton Constable oil sketches 1966 Barrie and Rockliff Spirit colors of paper Paper sized, less absorbent. No linseed oil. Toning working surface in advance. V&A collection, Mellon's in Virginia. Painting is with me but another word for feeling I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavor to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing scenes that may employ me. There is little or nothing in the exhibition worth looking up to. There is room enough for a natural painting. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. He was married in St Martin-in-the-Fields 2nd Oct 1816. Lived at 63 Charlotte Street, 1 Keppel St off Russell Square. "I got my children and my fame in that house." 2 Lower Terrace Hampstead. 35 Charlotte St. I have made about fifty careful studies of skies. 1822. Notations on the back tell time of day, weather, direction of wind. You have long lain under a mistake. Men do not purchase pictures because they admire them, but because others covet them. Said Fisher. He said that the superiority of his fields lay in the fact that they were composed of a multitude of different greens. The failure of the common run of landscape painters to give intensity and life to their greenery results from their making it one uniform color. Delacroix the art of seeing Nature (which Sir Joshua Reymolds calls painting) Called his wife Fish. The soft clear light of Brighton. 40 Well Walk Hampstead 1827. She died in 1828 and he didn't sketch from nature after that. CR Leslie Memoirs of the life of John Constable, edited letters. Landscape and double rainbow 1812 28 July Landscape: the trees and cottages under a lowering sky 1812 Study of a cart and horses, with a carter and a dog 1812 like Roman painting Weymouth Bay 1816? Rough sea, Weymouth 1816? View in a garden, with a shed on the left, Hampstead 1821? Study of cirrus clouds 1822 probably August or September Study of clouds 1822 Sept 5 Looking SE noon. Wind very brisk, & effect bright & fresh. Clouds moving very fast with occasional very bright openings to the blue. There is also a child's pencil drawing of a home on the back John Charles who would have been four years old. A sluice on the Stour V&A Linton's # III Landscape with water (boat) VI A study of trees and sky X View at Hampstead Heath ILIV Study of the stem of an elm tree XXVI Study of sky and trees XXXIII] About 1972 Andy was coming back from the continent on a ferry. He was broke, had no idea what to do next. The ferry was pitching, people were throwing up. He saw a tall gangly man with a guitar, suggested getting some music going. The man was Sweeney, who invited Andy back to his squat. They worked together at this and that, Sweeney was ingenious. That squat and the next were in North London, where Andy has now lived for 37 years. His parents were in South Wales. He was his mother's last chance and she sent him to Jewish boarding school at 8. That school closed and then there were three more. He didn't belong anywhere. Now there's a swath of North London between Archway and Holborn that he knows well. He sometimes walks the four and a half miles home from work. We stopped at a pub where we were across the street from what had been a court where he had been duty solicitor for years. He pulled out of his backpack a book Emily had given him. To Papa the best father in the world. I'm reading this Gilligan dubiously. She is saying patriarchy, institutionalized rule of elite fathers, enforces suppression of 'love'/sex and instigates violence. This is a London where love and sex were very alive in me and in my friends, and now are not. They have died in my lovers and friends through faithfulness to mates and children, unwillingness to harm, hormonal die-out. - I don't know whether Susan was a real chance, but she was a blaze and I said no at first out of faithfulness. - My computer has somehow stopped recognizing the DSL cable. I have to go out for wireless. Was in Cilantro ten minutes ago looking up a SAT map of Marquis Road, which I now see parallels York Way. Market Road runs between York Way and the Caledonian Road, and Brewery Road is between them too. I could see the old cattle market tower - not the tower, but its long shadow. Lauren Harris of CFMDC saying she's sending me another $500 and then that Notes in origin was one of her "all time favorites." She wrote a paper about it for Colin at SFU. I've stayed at home today starting to work on the London intro, first combing for facts. Pleasure and pain, many intersecting paths, wide spectrum energized cultural revision, a kind of sweetness, readiness to enjoy. There was a change between 1969 and 1975, finding visual art, deepening into silent visual art, but also picking up threads of a psychology of body. There's what was in the air and what I had to go looking for. 18 Dream of an encounter with a man on the street, who is loutish, dangerous? I talk to him in an interested friendly way. He stands up and I see he's about 3' tall. Saturday morning. Four days. Ackroyd. After the bombings, "in Broad Street and Milk Street bloomed ragwort, lilies of the valley, white and mauve lilac". Quiet lanes lead to patches of wild flower and undergrowth not seen in these parts since the days of Henry VIII. June of 44 doodlebug, buzzbombs. Bombings ended March 45 when the launching sites were captured. 1969 was 24 years after the war ended. A generation. by the mid-1960s it was suggested that 40 percent of the general population were under 25. Affluent, real earnings had risen by approximately 70 percent in the twenty years since the war. But docks went out of business. Trade with Commonwealth decreasing. music, fashion, magazine publishing, photography, advertising, modeling, broadcasting and film-making. unprecedented rise in crime, which tripled in the 12 years after 1955 and showed no signs of diminishing in the late 1960s. 1965 GLC over 32 boroughs and "some 610 square miles of territory." A bust in the mid-70s, punk London, dirty streets. Thatcher. Boswell suggested that 'the intellectual man is struck with London as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.' It is the vision which was imparted to him as he was driven along the Haymarket in the early days of 1763: 'I was full of rich imagination of London such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity.' It is the fullness of London which prompts his happiness, the congregation of people, of all races, of all talents, of all fortunes, releases a massive air of expectancy and exhilaration. 722 London manifests all the possibilities of humankind, and thus becomes a vision of the world itself. 773 The prodigious city said Mirbeau. So Broadgate, in the early evening, contained many times, like currents of air invisibly mingling. 778 - That was depressing   YES I'm somehow unnerved with Luke   no There's a reason it happens with him   He puts me down   no I hated being outshone by him   no I hated that no one was interested in me   no I grieved that   Am I truly that uninteresting   Because I'm egotistical   no Because I'm old   And ugly   no Because I'm not interested in them   no It's going to be just as bad tomorrow   NO Is there anything you want to say about this   no Do you know why it happens with him   yes, your balance is affected by dishonesty in relation I lose my balance when I'm being dishonest   YES Honesty wd be naked distress   no So was that more honest   NO 19 Evening that ended in misery, walking with Luke to the bus, falling, picking myself up angrily humiliated. It's only us, he said. It's not only you, it's especially you, I would rather fall in front of strangers. Why, he says mildly. I don't want you to have that picture of me in your head. I'm walking beside a tall graceful man tanned in a good blue-striped shirt open at the neck. He doesn't have to be a grey small woman who keeps falling in the street. At the dinner table he was the easy centre of everyone's interest and I was not. I was miserable losing the competition to him, baffled at how to be in that, not fighting it, silenced, sinking. And there trotting beside him a tiny woman whose voice on the other side of him was so quiet I couldn't hear what she said, tiny thin hands with long oval fingernails. Andy murdered Hickory wind and had no sense he was doing it. He sings in a stiff declaring voice, his lawyer voice, and in that voice he can only sing rousing ballads. His head is stiff with fat, I mean the face and neck seem a continuous inflexible post. He has worked in a rough world and he's stiff as old leather. There's something unconscious rattling me when I walk with Luke   no I haven't fallen when I walk with Andy or Tony     Some kind of neural disarrangement   Being dominated   no You said dishonesty   Not feeling what I'm feeling   no Not saying what I'm feeling   Holding back   For good reasons   Inhibition   Self-sacrifice   Am I mistaken in that   no Self-sacrifice scrambles me   Should I be more out-front with him   no Is there anything you want to say to me   no I was wearing my syrup-colored satin shirt and the tighter jeans and thought I looked nice, but get no sense of being noticed as a body. Life stripped of erotic play and possibility is very bare, I am very bare away from that power. I had such living times with these men, and could enliven them, and as a courteous visitor to their solid families I feel I'm nothing, and then have no stories worth telling here and write whatever junk has come up but in misery at its dullness and my death into dullness. - Local caff after going to church, around the corner from Leather Lane. Do I know more about why I cry in church. It's the slow dying I mind, I mind. Was thinking during the service what are the real stations of the cross, the cross being mortality. 1. womb life 2. infant simplicity 3. beginning to talk 4. open realness of childhood 5. selfconsciousness in adolescence 6. erotic liveness and struggle 7. developing honest needed work, raising kids, which is sacrificial 8. leadership 9. and then what is this stage, I was asking, conscious dissolution? Tragic witness? Just disassembly? Looking at the church and ritual with an eye on its being a homosexual institution. Smiling at all the penises there were in large, the Gothic arches on either side, the long tall apse ahead of us painted with mostly male bodies, god a head and shoulders with arms raised in command, Jesus in front of him skeletal above the diaphragm, voluminously draped below, a small dove to the side, hard to see. I could see only about twenty parishioners in the benches, most of them older single men I was assuming were gay. At the altar were three altarmen, not boys, there were no children or families, and three hierophants in brocaded pinafores who when they had entered in procession sat in a row of thrones facing us. Piccolo minimesse Mozart Ave verum corpus Mozart Fuga alla Giga Bach How does such a small congregation sustain a professional choir, three or four priests and a massive church kept very clean? The sermon exhorted us to be good shepherds. I said to the universe I am a good shepherd, I have loved in good action, but please help me find a way with more felt love and fullness. More of something for me too. Wondering what would be a more honest worship service in that space. A beautiful naked woman up the aisle, sitting in a red velvet armchair on an altar, opening her legs. Communion would be everyone coming to face her, touch humbly into her, be smiled on in radiant erotic personal acceptance, and so be made physically complete as they once were. A true renewing which would be so right it wouldn't need architecture, incense or Bach. Though Bach could certainly be there. 20 Tony's wonderful kitchen. Ceilings maybe 14' up, a huge window facing east onto a high brick wall covered thick with Virginia creeper. Tony used to say to Jessie from the kitchen table, What color is the sky? His studio in the garden, things he's trying to work out, how to make a color dot painted onto for instance a chair and the floor seem to be on the photo of the sculpture rather than on the objects, when photographed at the right angle. A big piece with a patchwork of small squares sliced from a larger piece. He said it was about chaotic dynamics but I didn't like the piece mainly for the quality of the drawing of the ocean, the lines were too round, it was making it look more like pudding. The other drawing was just brush marks, black paint wiped across paper with grain enough so the last thinning catch of the brush mark had a lot of coherent change of scale and was exquisite. He seemed to me to be too much about art, but that's what artists do, now. I came into a sitting room with grey sofas and a TV, two people in late middle age, fine-looking, prosperous, a strangely conventional plaster pot holding dried branches, and some good books on the coffee table, Damasio. I liked their marriage, her steady candour, the friendly way she'll watch sports with him. 21 Luke yesterday, two in the afternoon until nearly 7. I waited for him on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, watching the walks of passers. He took me through the lane at Charing Cross to a river boat for lunch, and we sat talking at our table on deck through the mid-afternoon, and then caught the second-last ferry to Greenwich. - I'll have to wake up more before I can tell this right, but the long grey hours on the brown Thames, which curves more than I realized, so that landmarks were often seeming to be placed in the wrong direction. - It's a wet morning, my last day. Bacon and egg on baguette back in my room. I'll soon bring the big suitcase down from the closet shelf and reverse the unpacking I did with Luke in this chair when I'd just arrived. Luke on my left side on the bench on deck, a bit yellow and blotchy under his tan, but beautiful again, the boy he was. He was talking about how scathing he is with himself, says he doesn't tell anyone that. I said he must never say anything bad about himself. The one who is scathing isn't him, self-loathing doesn't make sense biologically. He got that. Then I said he could make a protector to defend the young self from the scathing one. I said he could imagine directing anger at its real target. He said that would be too dangerous, he can't let it out even in imagining. He once put someone into the hospital. Male rage is too big. On the river the Cockney guides, illustrating history. - Is Tony trying to cut me down with all this talk of Steven Rose   no Is he getting anything new from Being about   no Will he if he keeps going   no He seemed to be competing   Is he   Can he   no Does he know it   no 22nd On UA 923 packed in over the baggage hatch. Month later. San Diego 23rd Went to bed at 10, which was London time - 4am Weds to 6am Thurs = 26 hours awake. Woke at 3 and got up, organized my place, washed hair, wrote email, [college] business, was on the phone with Art by a bit after 7. On site with him a bit after 9. Talking to Scott, measuring, figuring, until noon. Watered and cleaned up downstairs. Bronze shirt to dry cleaner, check to bank, library to find gravel garden books, Tom's place, he not home, Whole Foods, back here going through books and making supper. Many details. Now it's 8:30 and I should stay awake until 10 or 11 if I can. Sore legs. What it was like arriving yesterday. Tom wasn't there. I walked around looking for him. There he is, looks wrecked, missing more teeth, hasn't been eating well obviously. He says he has locked the keys in the jeep. I have to get into a taxi and go to my house and get the spare. Leave him to wait for my bag because I want to get away from him. I'm disgusted. I will have to pay for the taxi because he has no money. I won't slag him but I'm in hidden contempt. We get to the jeep and drive to my house. He's proud of the job he did at my place but he has screwed that up some, too, didn't clean spots off the floor and hasn't shown his usual care with handles. He overstepped in decidng the bathroom without talking to me. He has put too many coats on the semi-gloss, it's still tacky. The white is good, though, and he carefully chipped the sloppy paint off the bathroom light fixture. He spent 7 days wanting to make it a perfect job for me and at the same time sabotaged in several ways. We went to his house, I had to buy and make supper because he's only got wieners and bread. Waiting for laundry to finish, I was talking about Scott and Tom said, You should tell him ... I snapped, didn't know I was going to, Don't tell me what to say. I had been a month talking to people of a different kind and I flicked him with my natural contempt. Luke and I Tuesday uncomfortably perched under an awning together looking at a wet street, cold, about to say goodbye. Tuesday night not long before I went to bed, phone rang and it was Tony. I'm going to miss you Ellie. He'd had a couple of glasses of wine I think. I said I was already gone. He said, I know. Sunday night he and Christine at the kitchen table, the high window dark, talking happily, naturally, mended after the morning's misery. They stood on the steps above me saying goodbye against the hall light. Stay in touch. I will. He'd given me a long hard hug. Had made tuna salad and baked potatoes for supper, lemon tart for dessert. There was white wine. Richmond Park in the afternoon, a lot of walking. There was long grass moving, paths through deep bracken, a stag alone, a school of half-grown fauns. The wind blew. In the middle of the pond a big willow clump. I had picked up a swan's down feather and let it go, watched it skip through the air, skim the water, almost caught but lasting until it reached the silvery blown island. 24 Aching hard last night and woke to it too. Aspirin. Vancouver 29th 435 in the Patricia, bed alongside the window. I can see a red freighter moving up the Second Narrows, an orange crane, blue and green pipes and tanks over the concrete grain elevators, a cream of smog against the mountains. With Louie last evening at Jericho Beach, the farthest end. The last of a classic beach day. The pacificist who went to war NFB. [left side notes about anger as basis for pain: tinnitus emotionally induced symptoms - substitution pain circulatory disorders post-polio   abnormal rage autonomic reduction of circulation oxygen deprivation muscle pain, tingling, tendon pain   high blood pressure - suppressed emotion conditioned response repudiate the structural diagnosis acknowledge psychological basis talk to self - tell it to increase blood flow Raynaud's syndrome - people's extremities react excessively to cold hyperactivity of autonomic list pressures resume activity after pain diminishes   narcissistic injury activate power] 30 They remember me at the Calabria. There I am in the mirror. Orange shirt quite washed out. I don't look bad. Growing out my bangs, does that work. A bit more commanding. Folds in my neck. Good shoulders I'll always have. Silver at the forehead. Keep a long neck if possible. I feel well, walking light with my jeans hung on my hips, that feeling I like so much. It's too hot for socks, I'm in my blue chucks barefoot. The desk clerk likes me because he's in chucks too, leopardskin. They're charging $3.50 for a small latté. Anything to tell. Here I am. Happy not to be ugly. To be so easy with money I've paid airfare, a month in London, six days in a hotel with no debt. Can buy Rowen a couple of nights in the Patricia if he likes. - What do I have to do today. Leave messages for Leah, deal with taxes, call Row tonight, work on metaphor somewhere cool, write Mafalda about her art. Why else am I happy. At liberty in the hot city. I'm eating anything and not fat. The pop music here. Being a member of this city still. Moving around a lot? Having done teeth and dr. The little classical tree is no longer that. There's Jonathan walking nose foreward on his toes, as he does. Capilano Gorge with David yesterday. The moment I liked best was when we saw what looked like a large iron spring buried crossing the road and he knew it was a wire-wrapped wooden conduit, an old logging-days device. Night before with Louie at Jericho Beach needing to touch the water. Standing in it unsteady on cobbles, the cool lively touch of it. The way the water was a few simple colours in moving complicated bits - mauve, silver blue, turquoise, yellow, black, delicious smells of rotting wood, burnt raspberry jam. The BC fairyland I could see from the orange room's bed. Incandescent evening sky seen from Louie's porch after we cut back the grape, chased from window to window and always more. Louie at the airport glamorous in long hair and aquamarine earrings. In the hotel a young Brit sitting on the stairs with his laptop, the router doesn't reach into the rooms. Early Hastings blank and heating, drugged-up hooker passing. Bus stop in front of the First United, monster-looking drugged Indians hanging out on the steps, one of them shoves the other, helpers with nametags rush in kindly. The two blocks south of the Carnegie thick with the utterly lost. Wrecked women dressing as if they are desired, scabbed, scrawny in halters and cut-offs, sometimes platform heels. Men belligerant and cursing. 1 August At River Drive last night when we had eaten we three were sitting in a row on the porch surrounded by leaves in the dark, grape leaves at the far end of the verandah, wisteria vines at our end, the three apple trees ahead of us backed by the three-stemmed * towering out of sight. David was kidding Dorothy and we were laughing together. He was barefoot in knee-length jeans and sat with his feet on the chair and his arms draped over his knees. He looked like a teenager in the dark and we were having a perfect moment. Dorothy was complaining about his dinner and I was defending it, and then she was munching happily at the hot chocolate he'd made her like the sweet daddy he is. He drove me to the 22nd Street station in his pale yellow pickup and we sat for a while talking as buses pulled up and left again. On the skytrain I was in the last car and went and leaned on the back window for the whole trip. The rails shot backwards, sharp lines of light, and the cheese-yellow half moon zoomed upward above them, rising without rising. I loved some strangeness in the city spaces seen from above and swiftly falling backward. A dark store on a street corner, tall young trees, lit rooms in highrise condos next to the track. The flat bare rail a high curve we were streaking away from. The city's moment shown in lights. On the #20 Victoria earlier I'd pushed through to the back of the long twin-body and was almost at Broadway when I saw Rob had got on at the front, Rob 52 not 30, and his hair was cut. Moonstruck on TV this morning. I don't get tired of it. Cher is a perfect beauty. Get in my bed says Nicholas Cage. Anch'io te amo says Cosmo. Better shape up Cos I need a man And my heart is set on you   You're the one that I want Uh uh uh 3 Rowen's thin fine dark face, bright black eyes, curly dark hair, flat cap like an Italian boy of the 40s. He ambles. Good wine-coloured shirt, backpack. This morning in the New Town Bakery he ordered two cocoanut buns and an apple tart and told me the plot of an anime he liked, a fish who became a little girl, whose fish-sisters became massive waves she ran along. As we left the hotel he was eager to tell a long dream about post-apocalyptic travel. Last night with Louie we were on the sand as it got dark and the moon two days from full was rising over condo towers. Louie was sitting broadside to the water, Rowen was lying next to me and I had my hand very lightly on his head behind his ear. Saturday night we lay on my bed talking by lamplight. He described being so anguished by having someone try to teach him closing-down accounting procedures that he had to resign. It was grade ten again. I said it was reactivation. More of that. He turned and put his arms around me. "You're always trying to get me to be angry with you." Yesterday at Mary's having to get out of her dark rooms full of distressing junk anyone gives her. She has moved out of the bedroom. She looked alright, good cotton church clothes. The worst moment her broad mechanical leer coyly flirting with Rowen, oh poor grotesque old thing, was that expression ever winning? Rowen told a story on the beach about how he learned to swim. He met a girl called Rose Celeste Clark he liked tremendously. He saw her home one night and she kissed him. He went home to an apartment with a swimming pool. It was the middle of the night and he was elated. He jumped in and found he could swim. Buoyancy said Louie. Yes buoyancy he said excitedly. 4 Seven on Tuesday, I'm in the lobby with my tea. There's my suitcase parked next to the sofa. On the seawall last night, past the bridge in the rock wall section, I passed a single plant of dames rocket. Stopped and went back. August is late for it, and there were just a few flowers on the tips of long stalks gone to seed. A shock of scent. After I left Rowen at the Carnegie corner - slight man walking away with a long roll of leather strapped to his backpack, flat black cap of another era - I spent the day zonking in a novel I found in the lobby. When I finished it I took the bike back to Louie's, but when I had locked it to her fence unlocked it again and crossed Hastings to Alexander Street and rode along the tracks to Stanley Park. It was a small tour of times. Candy's place on Alexander, Dave Rimmer's, Nathalie's, and when I was on my way back, Jam's by the park. I didn't run into Tony Gordon-Wilson. The bike path is a circuit of perspectives, first the wonderful wide grove of silver-blue condo towers, then Second Narrows opening back to the far little bridge, then the North Shore, and then after passing under Lion's Gate Bridge, with its strong pulse of thrumming cars overhead, the water choppier and a blast of sun coming off it, open ocean and rising granite at the flank of a narrower path. Occasionally steps down from the rock wall. Then, past Siwash Rock, First Beach, and the pool at Second Beach. Then the path cuts across through gardens back to the condo shore and at the end of it a new elevator to street level. It was a brilliant summer evening in full celebration, bodies on the beaches, families in nooks between cedars, water glossy, sky open, scents of seaweed, cigar and charcoal. I'm feeling how elderly my writer is, disgusted and keeping going. Leaving, leaving. I've done what I should, my tasks. Phone with Laiwan last night, her pleasing voice going on about doctoring and self management as I longed to get away.   part 3 in america volume 18: 2009 june - october work & days: a lifetime journal project