in america volume 18 part 4 - 2009 september - october

work & days: a lifetime journal project

San Diego 12 September Saturday morning. I went to bed at 9:30 last night because I had nothing to do, left Coast to coast on and kept waking all night hearing the voices of the paranormal geeks. I was dreaming I couldn't shut off the old radio I used to have. I tried all the knobs and nothing happened. Unplugged it. It went on. Took out a whole column of batteries. Last dream before I woke at 6 I was on a couch with a turtle and some kind of larger reptile. I let it crawl over my hand, a delicious sensation. Put my hand out to feel it again. Ray Jennings was in the room and I had the corner of my eye on him, wondering what the animal was, a lizard? How many legs does it have? Turned it on its back, there seem only to be four. I scratch the fur in the hollow pit of its back leg. I guess it's a cat. I go upstairs. Ray's in a smaller room. I want to make a contact with him. I say, How's the department? It's alright. Anyone retired? No. That was our hope, I say. He doesn't want to talk to me. I leave. I'm wondering, as I do, why he doesn't want to be friends. I look in the mirror. I'm wearing a short white nightgown, like the one I got in Paris when I was pregnant. Maybe he thought I was trying to seduce him. - Looking at The glass essay again. It is so much the answer. It and some of Alice Notley. It's where to begin to go on.   It's fiction. Her mother doesn't live on a moor and there wasn't a man called Law. But she does what I do less artfully in the journal. She anchors in the day, and lives simultaneously in other times. Work and days. She goes along simply. Her sophistication tells by inflections of simplicity. She's riveting in the best possible way. There's land and two minds, hers and someone else's. Has she [now] abandoned her best style? Being a poet by being a being.   She's more able than I am   no More specialized. But is that where I should go now   It's 1991. b. 1950 classics and compl lit (graphic arts) translations PhD 1981 Odi et amo ergo sum diss Eros the bittersweet 1986 Beauty of the husband 2001 Wonderwater collaboration with Roni Horn 2004 She got a MacArthur in 2000 'Burst onto' 1987, Kinds of water Pressured her publisher to remove promotional blurbs Sontag, Munro Father a banker, small town in Ontario Classics is a kind of cult Taught at Princeton for 6 years I struggle in the dark with my Greeks KCRW interview 1997, Bookworm Youtube video reading at the Geffen, black, dried out I imagined her looking like Anne Bancroft - I lift the Mac Book Pro and see the battery has warped, that was after, just for a moment, I got online with my beautiful monitor. The landline jack on the G4 has corroded. I've sometimes got it to work by cleaning it with film cleaner, scraping at it with a toothbrush, dipping it in water, pressing it down or sideways waiting to see whether I'll hear the right row of noises. Trying again and again, watching the little box on the menu bar. - Aware that in a couple of years this paragraph will be obsolete. My sleek silver machine with an excrescence on its belly. The moment of blank looking at it. Another evening after I've worked all day and there's nothing to do. Working on Karen, Tasha, Mary. Karen's primal struggle, shame built on shame. Tasha writing wooden stories, wooden in their mechanics, but truer somewhere she can find. Mary odd in a way I haven't understood yet. There's her dancing and her wonderful drawings, but then there's the fact that she likes the hideously cut-off sound of second-rank psychoanalytic writing and didn't like Henderson. Her trip to Bali described somehow soullessly although the place itself has soul and some of it showed. The way in advising group she described her project in jargon she didn't think to translate, as if she didn't know who she was speaking to. Do you understand Mary   She doesn't have much perception   YES She doesn't actually have much you   YES Wands and swords   Has she ever felt sexual flow   no Does she think well of herself   no Can I work with her on language   Is there anything you want to tell me about her   conflict between success and creative pleasure Management   Executive   Love woman and work woman   YES Segregated   Her drawings are L hem  Dance is R hem   She segregates those two   Her weakness as a choreographer was dispassion   Is affect theory pathological   Is Gestalt   no Am I like her   no She's physically repulsive somehow   A kind of artificiality   Training   Is there something about women who wear their very long hair down   Can you tell me what it is   YES It fakes something   A feeling of being disqualified as a woman   It's about mastering feeling   Is her eagerness about that   Does it have value   no It's not about cataloguing them, it's about feeling them   The heart of it is that mechanical analogy   Which is simply wrong   The nervous system does change its structure   Is it true there's a small set of emotional primitives   Structural adjustments   That can be recognized   But that's boring   YES Is there more you want to tell me   male, completion, to succeed, partial loss She's gone male   She misunderstands therapy   But I was wrong about Millie   no She wants to be a therapist   But she doesn't have empathy   Is there something she should be instead   integrate, conflict, success, withdrawal She bluffs   Is that what you mean   YES Should I understand her more than I do   YES Wasn't paying attention right   Complacency   YES I am more complacent   YES Was Metaphor good   She doesn't have presence   I give people things to read to test them   Is that fair   YES Is Deidre okay   no Is Jaes   Is Zach   Was it my fault Laura died   no Her semester with me gave her completion   Is there anything else you want to talk about   no   My serenity is blankness   no I go silent so as not to interfere with the uncon's take   YES It's ego that goes silent   So it's silent capability   Did it use to be like that   I used drugs to actually build ego   YES That's sad   I really am more integrated   YES And the silent part is you   Should I ask you if there's anything you'd like to do   Is there anything you'd like to do now   no Did you love Susan as much as I did   no   The most interesting thing in Tasha is the take on horror films   Is Karen coming through   YES There was nothing interesting in Erin   YES A dad theme in this batch - Tash didn't know hers till she was 18, Erin doesn't have one, Mary's [is] hospitalized with depression, Karen's dumped his family for another woman and child. 14 Is high bp always anger   I'm chronically angry   I'm a week into this packet period and still have 4 letters to go. Don't like that. It's not because I haven't been working. Tasha - what do I know about what to give her. Her dual voices aren't it - idealized goddess - confusion. Then I go into the letter, which I'd already pared down, and keep on until I've woven its many parts into one thing. Mary is hard because I have to resolve affect theory without enough time or evidence, and no information about what she sees in it. She seems to have just dutifully munched up all those dreary papers and answered the study questions like a good girl, and I don't know why any smart person would be willing to. I don't know what she wants it for and I don't know what she does already. Emilee is hard because what she's writing now is not as good as what she wrote in her first semester when she was flying in love and I flew with her. I don't know how to support something less. Then all I had to do was permit and praise her boldness. I don't know what to do with this trudging she's doing to please the mediocre. I'm disappointed that she's chosen it over my ticket to jump to the front. It's Susan again, her graduating project is going to be timid. I'm angry at failing to carry that beautiful thing through to a good end. And Deidre too, her husband screwing up her rise, so she's thin, hurt and holding herself, who was standing rosy and full after our semester. 15 On Sunday morning at Starbucks where I went for wireless but also bought the Sunday Times, I was sitting in the armchair by the window when from the side of my eye I saw a man dithering about whether he was going to sit in the other chair. Dithering isn't exact but I didn't see him exactly. There was some indecisive jerking motion. He did sit down and when he laid his Union Tribune on the table next to my NYT he said "City girl and country boy." I looked at him and went on looking with pleasure because he was unusually clean and fine-grained. He had small hands and feet and a narrow thin-fleshed lively face with thinning fine white hair, very good white teeth I decided were his own. He was wearing a clean crisp pale blue cotton shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow. We went on talking fast for an hour. I said in fact I was a farm girl and he looked like he was from New York, meaning I could see he was Jewish. Philadelphia and Boston, he said, but he'd been living in Miami. When I said what my degrees are - he asked - he said he has a cat that's partly wild cat that he walks on a leash. It growled at strollers when there were two of them. I liked him but I got exhausted and felt I was dying by the second, had to go. He held out his hand and said his name was Larry. He has my email tag but hasn't emailed, probably because I was so abrupt in leaving. I'd like him as my gay buddy to talk about movies and life stories, he was jumpy but interested. His last story was about his cousin who lives with his parents in LA at sixty, who is watching his own fading like someone holding a stone and feeling it cool. A smooth palm-sized black stone I thought. - Genius Bar appointment with my MacBook's exploded battery - a young woman cheerfully replaced it - then I wandered through Bloomingdales looking at young men's superb clothes, $500 for a jacket, $300 for a sweater - [in womens' departments] women's grotesque ornate junk, and every twenty feet someone asking me how I am. Just time to take the computer home and go to Scott's to meet Art, who was on time and brought the list. And then hanging about not wanting to work on packets until I sat down with tea at 6 and finished Mary just now at 9:30. That leaves just Emilee tomorrow. - For Colleen I went line for line through her quite good long poem. That was right. I think I've gotten uglier since beginning packets. Happy the computer's alright again. Pulsing slow as a star over there on its dark glass. I'll go turn it off. 16 When I lie down at night realizations arrive about Scott's project, organizing thoughts. So I should do that earlier in the day. Returning books to University Heights Library on Sunday morning I saw donations at the locked door and have brought home Prairy Erth, Least Heat Moon, about Chase County in Kansas. Reading it a couple of short chapters at a time, delighting. It's driven by perception in the way I like. - I'm not well today, dim head, kidneys (is it) aching, feverish but not hot. Aching last night. Gut explosion because of fruit I think, and nuts probably. Someone in Kingston went straight to Raw forming 8 again, it could be Joan, I'm nervous about being sued though it wdn't be in anyone's interest. In the half century since I was born, this hill has moved at about the rate a fingernail grows, some four feet further west - He is so lively in his information. I keep saying, I couldn't have done that. - Phoned Mary, talked about working with students, she wasn't unbearable. She said what she does in the morning she has forgotten by evening. Then telephoned Row who is working bankers' hours downstairs in Loupe Imagine, moving out of Bob's place. Liking responsibility, pleased with himself, has his own room. 17 These dreams tell her what to do   Is the man-ness important   no Her choice is - Amitaba - the Buddha of desire It's the choice she has made and is living out   Lotus fountain is enlightenment   Am I enlightened   no Could I be   no Is there such a thing   no Cup love   Is the fountain in the brain   Is the water in the brain   Do you understand the Dick and Jane   process, exclusion, integration, meditation I don't understand that at all   YES The blue is the brain, uncon   Point this with one card   judgment Should she just write about these dreams   no Are the dreams the way in   Her weakness is she lets people influence her   no That she doesn't believe herself   Can she step out of the burka   YES Dick and Jane are figure and ground   Dream about cognition   Text and pictures   Am I going to get this   Do you understand rabbit   [to-do lists for Scott's garden and DR formating] 18 I looked for William Least Heat Moon yesterday and found a man who didn't look as Indian as I hoped but is perfectly beautiful. Through the day I'm reading a chapter or two recurringly for his lovely gift of accomplished interest. If any of us goes back just twenty-five generations, say to the time of Chaucer, standing behind us are two parents and 67-million-and-some grandparents. Short essays - 6 pages, 41 lines x 12 words = 3000 words. He calls memory / history / the penumbra of other-time around/in this one, dreamtime. "The extent of cherishing." "Wants to take away from us what we have endured to learn." 19 a cultic construction ran due east-west the far-world the threshold of Persephone the world itself, the vast temple of all the gods after Homer but before Plato a period when the philosophers healed taught, sang, chanted wrote and recited rhythmic incantatory poetry, used sacred ritual, meditated, used any technique they knew to carry the seeker to the [source of reality] Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Pythagoras Contact with the Egyptians The way when we are born we come into extraordinary light. Geeks of the paranormal keep going on about incubation in places of darkness and then 'out of body' journeys into light. Men enchanted with these ideas, and devoting lives to elaborating theories about them. Movie last night, Religulous, polemic about religious madness. thousand-mile-an-hour spinning of the planet Saturday nearly noon. 9 or 10 days before packets again, am I ready to start into DR   YES Get ready to buy camera and recorder   Is it okay to leave London for now   Luke's beautiful help   20 Do you have an opinion of her   She's quite awful [self of Dames rocket]   no, balance, overview, crisis, unconscious She was struggling to balance and find an overview in crisis and unconsciousness   Moving was a stress   I was courageous in it   I was mean to Luke   no You mean because I tried to be equal   And I was honest   [halts] Was I inappropriately sexy with him   no Was that lyricism false   no It was love   YES I'm so much less loving now   no More effectively   Was Paul a waste of time   no He helped me recover from Roy   Am I right to be scandalized by her   Brutality   YES Lust?   no Was the sexual playing out okay   I was relatively weak   Trying to be artistic   Am I going to be able to get this right   Do you have a summarizing word   not withdrawn A lot of effort   Was looking everywhere for beauty wrong   YES Do you want to comment   child, improvement, held back, by lack of community Child wound needed community   Which I found in a dangerous form   But it was the only form I could get it   They and Joyce were the only form I ever found it   Desperately needed someone who could see me   Is there more you want to say   improvement, of love woman, by completion, of childhood Yes that's right   More?   no Thank you   I'll keep working with you on this project   YES - Do you mean it's about DR   no Into creation honestly     Juliana rejected me   no Juliana has never actually known me   She's a buzz junky   She has been flattering but blind   Should I write her off   no She's wrong about telling too much   She believes in mystification   What I said was important   South American literature has that hysterical quality   YES Is this related to the fat on her thighs   Which is a block of some kind   A division at the waist   Her legs are strong but her arms are weak   21 A horrible dream. I'm in a room I haven't been in before, listening to something move. I see a rabbit and catch it. Stroke its fur. It's scared but it calms down, rolls onto its back. I'm pleased I'm taming it. Stroking its back. See a worm starting to appear out of its fur. Then others. There's a whole patch of them in lumps like warble fly maggots. They are creeping out of the rabbit's back, migrating into the room, where I know they will wait to creep into any other living thing including me. I'm trying to catch them but there are a lot and they are moving fast. I shout to Greg to bring me a bag from the bottom drawer. Bottom drawer. He isn't understanding. I'm sweeping the floor with a brown fluid like iodine, squashing maggot worms with the broom. They've gone to every corner, I know I won't get them all. Should I tell Judy. Sweeping this far corner I've come to a patch of rug thick with dust. Is it about cancer   no Is it an important dream   no Are my dreams important   Is it about illness   no About disgust   no About taming nature   That it isn't benevolent   That it has plans for us   Are Republicans less evolved   Do they understand something important we don't   no Do I have cancer   YES Under my arm   no In my stomach   no Metastatizing   no Skin   no Is it dangerous   no Is it going to kill me   no Should I look for medical attention   no Is there something wrong with my solar   no Liver   no Stomach   no Is that dream from Tom's kitchen   no Will you comment on saying I have cancer   crisis, come through, creation, honestly There is a crisis about coming through creation honestly   YES Am I dishonest   no Unaware   NO There's a crisis going on I don't know about   no Do you want me to be working when I wake in the middle of the night   NO Is that a summary of that time   NO Of this time   - Is it a waste of time corresponding with M   YES I'm desperate   He's only into me if he thinks I'm 19   Should I drop him   Drop him   YES Can I find the real thing   I'm desperate for excited friendship   For someone to be interested in me   No one is   But I'm interesting   YES Is there anything I can do   balance isolation and withdrawal with action Am I still going to have new friends ever   Martin wrote and I'm sad at the leap of interest I feel, as if he could be a curious friend, where the evidence says he's not. Weds 23 Yesterday toward 6 I went to Babycakes to work online, had a chocolate cupcake and sat with young persons also on laptops, and then into the evening the back filling with gay men after work, warm light, contented space. News that makes me nervous, Alzheimers is being linked to 1. anaethesia in childhood and 2. herpes simplex, which I've had since 12. Also Dr Vosloos saying she felt a lumpiness in my left armpit. I don't feel it but my left arm has those two odd knots and sometimes my left breast has a sore spot when I lie on it. The two bad dreams, the eaten-out horse and the rabbit maggots. But I feel well and look good, am pleased when I see myself. Am not so tight about eating. Wrote a piece for Juliana about why I like The glass essay, liked finding what I knew about it. Fascia, connective tissue, an elastic body stocking that holds a shape habitually. - I find it courageous and clean and extraordinarily skilled. I like the love in it, written as it is from a position of interestedness that generates so many kinds of precision. There's something maybe Canadian about her, a plainness inflected in subtle ways; and the inflected plainness is something she has learned from her Greeks too. The poem isn't necessarily autobiographical. Carson's mother doesn't live in England, and I doubt Emily Bronte is her favorite author. I like that the writing isn't hysterical, though the character has moments when she is. I like the way Carson positions her character between the banality she grew up with and the soul-intensity she has found in reading and in loss. The structure interests me every moment as I read: a woman probably suffering of unfinished passion writing about a woman suffering of unfinished passion reading what another woman wrote about unfinished passion long ago, and I as reader reading all of them. The structure is complex and she makes it coherent. There isn't much fiction about reading, which has puzzled me because it is so interesting. I like the character's love for Bronte: But in between the neighbour who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face "lit up by a divine light"   and the sister who tells us Emily never made a friend in her life, is a space where the little raw soul   slips through. It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel, out of sight. I like that there's landscape and weather in the poem, and that her descriptions of them are exquisitely accurate. "She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather." I get bored when writing has nothing but people in it. I need people to be seen in a context of world to be interested in them. On the edge of the moor our pines dip and coast in breezes from somewhere else. "Dip and coast" is exact and unusually said. She does that a lot. my knees were cold inside my clothes. A chill fragment of moon rose.   *   At this time of year there is no sunset just some movements inside the light and then a sinking away.   *   But by now the day is wide open and a strange young April light is filling the moor with gold milk. I have reached the middle   where the ground goes down into a depression and fills with swampy water. It is frozen. A solid black pane of moor life caught in its own night attitudes.   Certain wild gold arrangements of weed are visible deep in the black.   *   I reach up and switch on the bedside lamp. Night springs   out the window and is gone over the moor.   I've seen those and I like coming upon them written.   I also love the way observations of natural time and place are there in the midst of banal human time and place:   Is that you dear? Yes Ma. Why don't you turn on a light in there?   Out the kitchen window I watch the steely April sun jab its last cold yellow streaks across a dirty silver sky. Okay Ma. What's for supper? I like the way she doesn't gloss over bodily fact or paraphrase it: that one moment when I found myself   thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me. The tiny instants when a dull conversation has something personal, unusual, in it, a family's intimacy startling to see. with his collar up, one eyebrow at an angle. The shadowless light makes him look immortal,   for all the world like someone who will not weep again. He is still staring into my face. Flaps down! I cry. His black grin flares once and goes out like a match. This character thinks, is a body often thinking, here thinking about a woman who has been dead a long time, working for that woman because she honours her: It is a shock to realize that this low, slow collusion of master and victim within one voice is a rationale   for the most awful loneliness of the poet's hour. She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou not as a display of power   but to force out of herself some pity for this soul trapped in glass, which is her true creation. By the end a bravura display of scope, the way she can so economically comprehend material and imaginal, the kitchen clock, sublime creative vision of the fact of death. I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.   It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached, but as I came closer I saw it was a human body   trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind   was cleansing the bones. They stood forth silver and necessary. It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all. It walked out of the light. - Writing this I've wondered whether my years with journals and the journal project have tutored me to see the sorts of things she's able to do in this piece - something about the phenomenology of mixture in journals, the way there's weather and daily company and reading and anxiety and thought all together and making a texture of realism in which all can be more alive than when they're sorted? Work & days. - Waiting for a salesman to call me back, the almost unbearable stress of waiting, at all, for anything. - Olivia Kachman - note from - I am so grateful that you told me that I was on a quest. That completely shifted my perspective and energy toward my work. It has evolved into such a universal subject on connection with both the Earth and ourselves, that I know it will have influence on people's lives beyond the gallery setting someday. Life has been filled with joy and synchronicity. I know I am on the right path. Happy that something good came of that visit to GP, which otherwise I remember very doubtfully. Tony wrote a formal note about Portugal, the sea, and sent 3 photos. Scott is pressing and I don't like it. The day that didn't find much because I was waiting to hear from Art and then back and forth with Scott, phoning about ugly furniture, and then having to go out and email, none of the unnerving openness of time that sometimes will allow an impulse. 26 Saturday morning, light sea fog at 7 o'clock. Trashed yesterday by transplanting strawberries in the heat, don't know why, it's not heavy work. Arms still aching. Day before, crawled under the hedge weeding, and then Tom and I went to Mission Beach. Dense white mist on the far side of the second bridge so we arrived at a beach simplified to just a few figures and the sea wall. When we left our clothes on the sand we couldn't see past the sand slick. Went down into water that seemed unusually strong, even in the first foot of depth, pulling backward and then forward. Out at waist deep we were in a scene that seemed somehow Japanese, grey-green and white, peaked piles of water moving forward at slight angles to each other, on each other's heels. I am seeing as if a photograph, now, one instant of it, closed into the near, elegantly simply uniformly grey-green slopes with white foam, but at the time it was relentless aggression, always an assault to be watched and met. Sometimes I'd be pulled off my feet and knocked around feeling bottom until I struggled up looking back for the next one. As I struggled out there was a brown-faced woman under a straw hat taking a photograph of a younger brown-faced woman who looked at my leg. The older woman said, You're brave. She was wearing turquoise jewelry and was from New Mexico, probably Navajo, very solid. When I'd got my towel wrapped around my waist I went back and talked to her. Felt my hair dripping down my face as if I were a strong athlete. Went on the rest of the evening euphoric, skin relaxed the way it is after salt water massage. Loved walking barefoot across the parking lot with sand on my feet. We stopped at Ralph's and I got olive bread for toast, pastrami, romaine lettuce, a red pepper, sharp cheddar. We ate on the blue couch, which is grimy now, with the doors open, airplanes' bright stars on the flight path. Forgot to say that as we left Belmont Park it was dark and the neon was glowing in mist. I was euphoric also because of the meeting with Art and Scott to look at the estimate for the Mediterranean garden. I liked throwing myself into it with unchecked authority, friendly unchecked authority, as they did too. 27 At Tom's last night. Last weekend I loomed up and said that it's my kitchen too and if I'm going to cook in it, it should be clean. This weekend he had spent Saturday afternoon cleaning, behind the sofa even, the corners. He had a certain look, too, somehow clear-eyed and bedroom-eyed in ways he can be but lately often isn't. I liked looking at his strong wicked face, though he was wincing around like a rickety old buffalo. We watched City of god about Brazilian slum gangs and then Jesus camp in which a fat woman pastor worked pre-adolescent children into a religious froth of tears and remorse. A robot-girl testifying to strangers on the street, a sensitive-looking boy preaching in phrases he has taken from the ugly adults - one of them was Ted Haggard - who had been pressuring him, working to make America safe for the stupid, a grievous haunting film made by women. - [shame notes for Mary's work] 28 Things a child is taught to be distressed at: curiosity cooperation and helping self-injury joy noise identification staring shyness fear anger [more affect theory notes] 30 Emilee's work came in last evening as I was checking mail at Starbucks after seven. She sent journal and said she didn't want to explain anything. Good, Emilee. Starbucks closed and I went home and sat up reading through her 48 pages, oh happy it was alive and Emilee again. When I'd read the last dream I put my hand on the screen as if that could thank and bless her, felt the fine electric buzz. This morning was dreaming about Robert MacLean. He was standing naked with one foot on a bathtub edge, rubbing his neck with a wash cloth. He was beautiful all over. I lay down on a high bed near him. Had my back to him but was feeling him there. He came and lay next to me. He was wearing a light-colored shirt and I was trying to massage the tight cords joining his neck to his shoulders. Then we were lying together on the ground, on a pattern I noticed was the large head of a snake. I was touching his back. He seemed to be thinking we were going to be together. Had been writing Erin about her dream in which a man gives her an upright bass she plays with unpracticed skill, and then says he's sick and needs her to be with him a lot, working on music. Emilee's struggle with guilt and fear and uncertainty. Damn, damn, damn, Ellie. You find me too. I knew you would. 1st October My head has been singing This gun's for hire and maybe it means the packet reply writing I'm now necessarily given away to. Since first packet I haven't touched InDesign, I can see it is lost for the semester. I've poked at Dames rocket's easy beginning work, formatting. I'm launched into Scott's new garden. I'm cultivating friends because I must. And that's it. Having to decide whether to flunk Rose. She's a ruined head, I think. Not only scrambled in the way she writes but maybe somehow ethically. I think she lies. I'm not sure, but the way I've written her off suggests that. It's always something, she has migraines, she has the flu, she has computer problems, she has scanner problems, she has anxiety attacks, she has problems reaching her tutor. Does she drink? Something isn't square. She wants to prove herself something she is not. She's desperate to remake herself but I don't think she can. Then I go to Ricki, who is writing a bad novel, but can summarize a book coherently in a page. She does not love grammar and her prose lumps along. She hasn't been sensitive enough to linguistic texture to pick up the use of the past subjunctive - is that what I mean. Her characters aren't interesting. Her locale is unimagined. Beyond that, her sense of what she's interested in is dim, diffuse and careless. Uncommitted. She lazes around watching movies. After twelve hour shifts waitressing, but - Mary sent a book based on Korzybski - in London almost 40 years ago I found a copy of Science and sanity and knew to pick it up and keep it with me, but since then had never run into another human who had heard of it. Big dark blue book tight-printed with cover boards worn to thread at their edges. Did I put it out into the alley when I left Van - It's Thursday morning, softly bright. The last two nights have been cold, I've had to bring out the quilt stored all summer in the closet. A meeting later with Art. Ellie writes and writes, questions, oppositions, suggestions. Writes many words describing some of her understanding of body-emotion-human-being-ness. Last night I was completely interested and at ease with these books and articles, tonight each time I approach one I hear Ellie's voice of what? Doubt? Disinterest? Disapproval? - Tonight suddenly it was so hot I had to open the window wide. The Santa Ana has arrived. Am I right to be repelled by affect theory   no Is it accurate   no It feels robotic to me   YES Will she be happy with that letter     Will she know it's patronizing   no Was the basement dream about what I was trying to give her     Will she get it round about   no Her theory describes herself   Which is why I shdn't be repelled by it   I feel pinched in it   I don't want to think that way   Should I spend minimal time reading it   Did I prune correctly   Is she in love with this theory because of the men   no Is she berserk because of not having babies   Is there anything you want to tell me about her   work woman, conflict, isolation, recovery Her theoretical self is made of a conflict between isolation and recovery   She's intellectually sealed   Is that what you mean by isolation   She strives to recover   But persists in isolation   Is she a kind of grotesque reflection   YES Is there anything I should do about that   no - Shame - notice the moments of it - notice the moves that defend against it. Withdrawal, avoidance, attack other, attack self (shyness, deference). Sexual fantasy to repair earlier humiliation. [Opposite: many pages of InDesign notes] 3 A train whistle repeatedly this morning, why is it sounding all down the tracks at 3 in the morning. I'm awake with my arms aching from the shoulders down. Full moon blue at the foot of the bed before I turned on the light. There in the black staring down in the second pane from the top, right side of the frame, I'm giving up sleep and making tea. the California Current, a cold mass of water some 400 miles wide, moving southward at .2 to .6 miles per hour. As ocean currents go, this is not a tremendous one, moving only about one tenth as much water as the great Gulf Stream of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, it moves a lot of water - more than 200 times as much as the Mississippi river, or about 3 times as much as all the earth's rivers combined. A zone of complex and variable water movements is found between the shore and the near edge of the California Current. During the winter, for instance, this area has a north-flowing current with a speed of as much as one and a half miles an hour. And at times there is instead a vast eddy, often more than 100 miles in diameter, rotating counterclockwise at a rate of one revolution in 20 to 40 days. Factors such as these have a direct bearing upon the distribution of such creatures as sardines ... In any movement of a large mass, such as the water in a current, the rotation of the earth imports what appears to be a deflective force to the right. This means that in our main southbound current, there is an element of movement tending toward the west, away from the shore. The water in this current is mainly near the surface, and as it veers away from the shore it is replaced by water welling up from below; close to shore, therefore, there is frequently an upwelling of cold bottom water. This is particularly obvious to the swimmer during some of the Santa Ana periods, when a hot, dry wind blows from the east and hastens the surface flow away from the shore. Warm air mass goes several miles out to sea - lower part cooled and soaks up moisture to saturation - sea breeze brings air inland - meets colder water near shore - cooled - fog. This is the occasion of the spectacular sharp walls of fog that move on to the coast on so many winter afternoons. This equilibrium of salts is surprising in the light of the facts that new salts are continually being brought to the sea in rivers, that the proportion of salts in river water is very different from those in the sea, and that the salts remain in the sea when the water evaporates and is recycled. Mollusks concentrate copper; radiolarians, strontium; jellyfishes, tin, lead and zinc; while certain sponges and seaweeds take up iodine. The whole process of life in the sea - or anywhere else - may be viewed as a cycling of these trace elements, used in such a way as to distribute a finite quantity of energy among the living things that use it. Sam Hinton Seashore life of southern California U of Cal Press - When I couldn't sleep I was lying breathing and thinking, trying to watch the faint eyelid smudge-lights, and then would be seeing something quite finely focused though not bright, and then I'd notice what was there and snap out of seeing, have to start again. What I see is more visual and more focused than dreaming. Often when I wake at night I'm hearing writing, reject it as junk. Once last week I was seeing a moonlit beach and hearing a line I liked and wanted to keep. It was about the sound of gravel rattling down after the withdrawing wave. Dave yesterday sent an email that said there'd been a big fire in Sexsmith and it was on YouTube. I watched a church steeple flaming up. 4 Canyon Pottery looking at jars for an overflow fountain - should I use the black small mouth or the turquoise one with a wider rougher lip - [sketch] Have to think about pots for the patio - for that wait for the furniture. Tom and I this weekend had three spats and a good movie. The first spat was when he wanted to go on playing me his radio stations and I said I wanted to hear Andy's CD with him. He was refusing flatly, and I was in the bathroom putting on my pj's calling him prejudiced (griping about English folk music). He suddenly folded and lay next to me listening with attention. At the 4th song, probably it was Martin's beautiful guitar picking, he pulled the notes out of the sleeve. He had begun to notice there were two guitars each playing lead and intertwined in a highly musical way. Then he had a summary of each. Andy Wyman, Martin Bloom, Kerry Bloom A sailor's life Shambolica Ten minutes later he was back to looking for a track on another of his radio stations and I was online in the kitchen. I clicked on a track of Shambolica and when he heard the mandolin he went into a little fit about how he wished I liked his music and I'd just been tolerating his station. I said yes I had but was laughing and said it was his fault for not interviewing me about my musical tastes from the beginning. I said he'd been careless. Do you like Neil Young? he should have asked, he said. [many more pages of InDesign notes, HD cam notes, bp notes, tax expenses] Then today we were going to Canyon Pottery. I looked up Mapquest, which said we should take the Kearny Villa Road exit off 805. He said he knew how to get there off 163 and insisted he was going to go that way, but then suddenly changed his mind and went up 805. We didn't see an exit for Kearny Villa Road and overshot and ended in Clairemont, which he hates. I got out the Thomas Guide but then my plan didn't work and we were lost somewhere else. We were both stressing. He kept saying he should have gone 163. Then from one moment to the other he took hold and stopped whining and we back-tracked and found Kearny Villa and Morley Field and Aero Drive and were there. Then we had one of our times when we are happy with ourselves for getting through a strong chop successfully together. When I said we have begun to enjoy being irritated by each other, though, he was not agreeing. I said it's better than being irritated by being irritated. The movie was Turkish-German, The edge of heaven. It was good and he had picked it at the library. This morning there were sweet small clouds from the west. We sat for a while on the bench together as I groomed succulents, pinched out tichondra and small grass, dead bits. Went to OB to the pier for breakfast. There was a surfing contest, spectators along the rail, storm surge very messy but beautiful. I like seeing the waves from the back. Beautiful in that there were small sun patches on the water, a lot of differences in color, something in the light above the breaking zone, like a yawning wide as if there were more space in the space. In Newport Antiques I found what I need, a small table. It's a French folding table with brass straps on the underside, very light and a good height for this bed. I can fold it and store it behind the desk. So that was our fine first Sunday of October and a free zone coming up, just Tasha and the rest of Rose and Colleen this week, garden things. How did we begin talking about Celtic fairies, driving to OB - it was Enya on his CD. I was talking about the hill I thought of as a fairy hill, and then about Robert MacLean and Siubne and being Titania in Jim Campbell's photo at Christmas. He was liking to hear. This morning he massaged my neck.   volume 19 in america volume 18: 2009 june - october work & days: a lifetime journal project