in america volume 19 part 2 - 2009 november-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

5 November Cashmere sale at Macy's - heather green low v-neck that looks good on me, black turtleneck and a Christmas present for Tom, a black crewneck XL. Also a green and white striped shirt - smooth bright cotton. And NYT story about Webster Residence for Women. $1000/mo includes breakfast and dinner, 34th St and 10th Ave, which is the right place. 6 Immigration question. Do you know what I should do. Tell Scott I can't accept payment   no Will you advise   turn for the better, 4s, come through, organization 4s meditate   There's a way to spin it   no Understand it   - Vaga luna, che inargenti / queste rive e questi fiori Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul in September 12, EXIS Festival, Images - presented by Scott Miller Berry - I think it was Bright and dark. Saturday afternoon - don't know what to do with this day - I've done as much DR as I can - packets Monday or sooner but no email though I keep looking - going to Tom's for Saturday night but we'll watch a documentary and I'll be bored - these new pyjamas are thick flannel but not wonderful. The health insurance bill going through congress today. - Was there something substantial behind that   His callousness about Kucher   While at the same time he's mooching off me   Was it just to say I won't see him until he has an income   It will make him defiant   no He'll think it's just   Is it the beginning of the end for us   YES Can I find a better life   Can he   no One he's more suited to   no I feel lonely and unseen   Later will I despise him the way I do Jam   no She was sadistic   He's not   He just lacks interest in me   Doesn't have the clicks in his head   Should we think of ourselves as separated from now on   no You want me to choose a better word   'Free'?   NO Independent   no But we need to go back to our separate lives   no Not back     Is Richard dying   Within a year     Just think of ourselves as not together   8 Do you want to talk to me   no Is the despair true   I'm not able to be happy in relation   no Please advise me   YES, act, to process, child's, heartbreak I've processed and just gotten blanker   What should I be aiming for   to come through, exclusion, judgment, (Kp) Come through feeling abandoned     Am I depressed because I watch TV   no Because there isn't enough for me   I'm lonely today, I'm crashing with loneliness - I don't know why it's now - is it because of Mary phoning - blank and self-absorbed - she talked about forgetting, cataract surgery, no one phoning - she did not ask about Tom or my students or my spirit - I was sitting on the floor shutting down as she spoke, going silent - I will never do that to my kids, I will never not understand that they need me to be interested in them - I'm crying - have been eating and eating. This morning at Tom's house - seeing he's hoping I will buy him breakfast - he was toothless for a year and now he is not getting a haircut so his hair is either water-slicked back or in messy tufts - he said after he got his teeth he'd look for a job - the same compromises for so many years - is it weariness - there's so much shutting down - I shut down when he explains - when he says he's going to do something - when he pumps me - when he says movies are good - or books - looking at the food he drops when he eats - when he gets into my bed - when I feel my body's ugly - when I'm frail and he's cold - I'm not mad at him, I know my loneliness with him is his with me - I'm hungry-hearted longing to be liked, and he is too - he's been trying but we don't like each other most of the time - I have moments of being charmed and I'm attached as a child but I don't like him - I find him sleazy, sloppy, lazy, parasitic, basically crooked - I don't admire him - I've been desperately in love with him but when I'm not I despise him. He finds me tight, judgmental, unloving, and other things he has considerately hidden - he has been kind - maybe ugly, unsexy - he doesn't tell himself I'm not interesting but he's not interested - I haven't been this far along into a connection - this many years - and I've been feeling that I don't know what to do with attached contempt - Driving home alone from PB I was feeling something I haven't felt for a while - despair about attachedness. It's when I think of leaving Tom and the next thought is that it would be as bad with anyone else, that I am not able. And how would I be with no one ever to tell any daily thing. The next thought then is that I would speak to people I meet, I'd be hungry and make connections I don't make now. This is the structure of a bind. 9 What happened yesterday - a moment blew up - we were driving to PB to Denny's, Sunday morning after we'd read the Times in his kitchen - he saw the shape of my hand in the centre console and said I was stressed - I hadn't realized it but yes I was buying him breakfast again, his not having money must stress me - I sagged into it a bit, yes, it does stress me and it has been almost a year - and then something I don't remember, then a silence in which I was thinking maybe we shouldn't see each other until he has money - then more I've forgotten - then he says he's thinking maybe we shouldn't see each other until he has an income - and I'm shot into pain - and then he's on the hunt - and now I'm hurt not stressed - I mean to make myself feel better and change the subject, say it's something that a physiotherapist in Italy can have inklings about mind being body and go online and find my site and feel confirmed - he launches into something about Teillard de Chardin and I protest that I did it, it's something I did, I was wanting to feel better. He says coldly that he pumps me all the time and carries on about Teillard, I go silent. Now he's saying, You know what, let's just turn around and go home, which puts me into abandonment fear - I suppose it is - a grey panic in the solar, that I contain blindly. Writing this I'm noticing how it gets chaotic, I lose my bearings, I'm tossing in distress and not seeing myself or him. Even now, writing it, my solar is frightened. I had a bad night. Couldn't fall asleep, the hot water bottle leaked, big wet patch I had to work around, the room was cold. A feeble droopy feeling. Uncertainty, when we separate he's where he is but I'm cut loose, I don't know where to live, I don't have a place, which really I don't anyway. And then always remembering that it's going to get worse ahead, I will get sicker and uglier and even lonelier, and poorer again, and I will never be young again or have that sort of rapid hopeful opening-out. When I say that I think, alright, marshall yourself, what do I have, what can I make of it. I have a jeep! And can go camping alone. My health has been good for a month, not aching, eating anything. I've made a garden and can make another, and as soon as I thought of it now began seeing what I can do. Plants will always make me happy. My films are still screened in Canada. The journal project will soon be done and will bring a little this and that when it's refined. I love Luke and he doesn't hate me. Louie stays in touch. I've accomplished Being about, which was huge. The mbo site is used. I do good work with students and they know it. I'm in California though isolated here. Have beautiful slides. Have provided myself computers and software. Will soon have pension bits if I want them. Will have healthcare if I move back to Canada. May have almost another 20 years though with decreasing power. Have an amazing record of my years. Have this quiet room for now. Enough money for now. Have real silence sometimes. 10 What's happened today - I was writing Erin about missing our mothers and not feeling it, and whether that has something to do with not being able to write. An email titled Nightmare came in from Jaes distressed about Lise, saying she hasn't been able to write with her, doesn't trust her. I write back carefully. Went back to Erin. An email came from Tia/Shirley in Toronto asking how I am. I say not great, stuck, but doing good work with students, defending the right things in them, that no one else is defending. Go back to Erin. Reply from Jaes saying more about why she's distressed. I write back carefully. Go back to Erin. Reply from Tia saying this: I sense you're giving to others what you desire for yourself ... I swear if you give it, you learn it and it will come to you. I reply: I am I am giving to others what I want for myself. I'm crying. I see my students better than anyone has ever seen them. I feel so unseen my own writing has died. I'm all in grief about that, not having my own company anymore. I used to. Then later more emails from Jaes. In the end she tells the story she has been holding back. It begins this way: Yes, you understand, I'm crying as I write this. In there also an email from Tom saying he thinks we should stay in communication. He meant he needs help because he's out of his depth having offered to do gardening in exchange for rent. I'm not replying. Chasin' the light, the truckers call a long haul going north at midsummer. - Crying watching this episode of Grey's - smart beautiful massively skilled authoritative people, the women not a speck less so and yet crying freely, loved as women, lovely. The evidence is - I am so lonely. I so need to be truly somewhere in good company heart to heart. Arizona the peds doctor. The episode ends with a woman's voice from black screen saying I love you to another. 13 Only Emilee left this cycle. It's Friday. Sun and a breeze in the silky pepper tree. Later in the day I go to Miramar and look to pick two orphans to give homes - it felt like that standing in the rows talking to cassia bicapularis, rhus lancea in 5 gal pots, and then the young things I tagged, another strawberry tree and a multistemmed pepper tree to stand at the base of the steps in a dark blue Chinese pot drooping its maiden fronds. Was zooming up 163 to Aero Drive, tromping in the aisles of pots, finding the way west to Genesee hungry for world. I need more work outside, action, movement. I'm seeing I could learn classical Greek online - Fooled with Youtube and then googled Roy Chisholm. Near the top of the second page after miscellaneous Roy Chisholms there's the shock of Work & days, a link to London 3, the photo of Luke newborn large on a white page. I read L4 and then L1, top to bottom. Type improves the writing I think. There's a light balance, there's particularity. A light unthought boldness. 14 Dave wrote about reading the first two Queens volumes. Rasheed. "On 26 July 1968 you said screw." I'm grateful he's reading it. Wrote him. Then wrote Martin. Then Tony. This morning tried to distribute letters correctly into DR9 and 10. An odd night. I was wide awake at 1 a.m. And lay there. Got up after a while to take an aspirin. Was in the dark trying to take just one of the three in my hand, something happened - did something happen? Did I just inhale an aspirin? Thinnest edge of aspirin taste in my throat, slight cough. So then I had to turn on the light and research accidental aspirin inhalation. Shd I go to emergency? Is that a pain in my bronchi? Etc, so that I was awake until almost 4. Sent myself away touching myself, came sweetly as I do these days. And then woke at 7. A bright day, feeling out how to have a weekend on my own. 16 I cleaned yesterday morning, bought star lilies in bud and put them in the glass rectangle, looked at the room with pleasure. The west window was open wide, there was the black work corner, glass surface, wood cabinet, monitor, silver machines. The couch in its own corner, dark green blanket, big red cushion set to look out the window. The arrangement is so much more sophisticated than it was, and cleaner with the walls white. I wanted to say that before I talk about the thing I have been shelving except for moments as I walk around or lie in the dark, the question of whether to use this separation to separate from Tom. I have been holding it off because I know thinking won't resolve it, but all the same I feel a pressure to make lists. When it's like this, endurance without heart, I forget that it can ever be different and then I hang suspended, starved to be more alive, scared of abandonment pain and bleak years with no one to touch, no one to tell daily things. What are my complaints - He doesn't desire me / I don't desire his crooked old carcass either He's a blow-hard, his opinion talk makes my brain turn off instantly in self defense / he sometimes now can ask about students and work He isn't interested in me, I'm not interesting with him / except for the bratty moments I've enjoyed so much, but they are few There's so much of the same, the same / neither of us have anything new going on He's been willing to mouch off me for a year, he talks about finding a job and doesn't do it, he's let his looks run down, eats badly, doesn't get a haircut, and I had to see him without teeth. For almost a year I've had to give him busfare like a child. I bought him paper towels because without them he didn't clean his house. He says he's writing and maybe he is, though mostly I think he's just getting ready to write, multiplying folders with notes. Here's a central thing - he's morally sloppy, so I have to discount so much of what he says - so much of that discounting in the texture of our time - I'm weary in it. I don't want to move yet - I don't have anywhere to go - can I go on living here and be separated from Tom? I've done it before. I grieved the whole time, but did I do the grieving then so I don't have to do it now? That's the sort of sentence coming into my head when I'm not busy with something. It's been fourteen years. Don't I need to be new again, can I still do that? Where would I like to be? Untethered, what could come to me to do? And then I say finish Work & days first. Now there's the monitor too, huge thing not easy to pack in the jeep. Should I start cleaning out drawers and boxes? I could go somewhere for January - well no, there's Scott's garden? No, I could go somewhere if it was cheap. New Mexico? 17 How did I do that - I went to bed at one? after hours of Thirty something on Youtube, and the phone, my little quiet ring, woke me at eight. Greg saying the guys are onsite. "I'll be right there." A strawberry tree to balance the other end, the pepper tree, the two pots. 18 We worked for an hour and then I was happy into the afternoon. Wd I go to see the meteor shower or stay working on DR, where I'm cleaning up 13, the last autumn when I was there and working alone. I'm noticing two things, that I was feeling about Jam what I'm feeling now about Tom, and that the journal rarefied into exquisite creation. Where am I now. Shaky. I'm scared when I think of leaving Tom, I mean 'my body' is, and I'm scared of my fear, will it kill me, it feels like it will. Shall I go to the country, I don't know where to go. It gets dark before 5. That's a long night. My room is nice, sun now at 1:52 onto the green blanket, pink lilies opening, the twin palms languidly turning their arms, haze over the Point Loma ridge, silver glare on the horizon. Divine quiet. Hello   Tom, delayed, losses, defeat Tom has been delayed by losses and defeat   More?   subtle intelligence, (knp), writing, conflict Is that still about him   no Conflict because I have to be alone to get to the subtle writing   And it's true that I do   NO I did then   YES And Tom is obstructing me   Should I say let's make it a separation for a year   YES It's so painful!   YES Do I really have to go through that again   Does the pain harm my body   YES Will you lead me   love woman, excluded, turn for the better, writing Torturing love woman improves the writing   no Feeling her exclusion does   She's excluded with Tom but I don't feel it   Tom doesn't want her   YES 19 Cowboy Cabin, Julian Santa Ysabel, at the Dudley's jewelry counter I bought Lester Rowntree, a geology of the Anza Borrego, a map, and a red-veined stone carved into a heart. When I had done roaming and looking it was exactly 3 and I could come up this hill to the cabin where now a fire is clinking in the stove, and I am here - somewhere - at last. It's new moon, was new moon, now black and bright, sunset was a flattened slice of cherry pink above five layers of blue hills milkier to the horizon. Black oaks bare or nearly, live oaks darkly full, radiant manzanita. The little bird that zips down and says ---. When I looked up from locking the door on 5th Ave a large hawk was turning not far away. Are you an omen? I said. Coming down into Santa Ysabel a hawk's shadow crossed the road in front of me. Drove with a doped not-all-thereness, it seemed dangerous. But I wasn't as frightened as usual. The stone heart is a dark buckwheat orange and has fine black vein-cracks. I'm saying it means heart both ways, bp I need to fix and feeling realness. Are they related? I want to close the loop. It's 14 years later, the first 7 weren't lost time. But in the last 7 have I been under a spell? A daddy spell? Last night I thought I must tell Tom the two lies I've told him. I will think about what they were for, first. I also thought about the way he has punished me by not having money, not fixing his teeth, not cutting his hair, letting himself get fat - for what - heartlessness, my constant dissatisfaction probably. I haven't called him out of it because I've been hopeless, not fighting because I feel I've seen final limits. I'm not mad at him. I'm mostly not grieving him. I'm not blustering or bluffing, I think. What I was thinking last night was that if I look after my heart more, we'll soon know whether he can be with me or not. That's what will decide it. The wrong way I spoke to Shirley this aft, and other people. Brutal formula and bragging, that feels it is being the way people are, but is wrong in that intention/perception. - At the same time is vaguely aware that it's being stupid. 20 Got up at 5:30, made fire and tea, formatted DR14 1 and 2. By then it was 9 and warm. Up the hill with the camera and trekking pole. Now I have to leave in an hour. Cooking lunch, sitting at the kitchen table, checked tablecloth, sun in the windows, a black oak with large yellow leaves. Was that an Englemann, bigger leaves and long thin acorns. Distance blond hills with russet patches, buckwheat. There will be again a feeling of having left the real for the unreal. a world of sudden days moments when you are drenched in gloom. Intense heat, severe cold, attacks of loneliness, the limited diet, all carry with them times of intense misery. A small portable desk she used in the field When she was 70 fires destroyed her seed collections, hundreds of plants in pots, field notes, journals, photographs, a manuscript on trees. In her eighties in an isolated house surrounded by Joshua Tree National Park - 29 Palms. At 89 she failed a driving test, bad eyes, bad driving. She'd will herself to die and crawl into the chaparral, but lived another 10 years. Series of strokes in last two years. A woman out collecting alone. Rosemary Levenson oral history "a study in aging" Perfect temperature on the hillside. Soft patches of horse prints. Stones everywhere catching my eye. No end of firewood. Surely the best time of year in this place. Reading the winter in Jam's house when I was writing in the mornings before going out in the rain to construction work, feeling it's a book, liking it as a book about reading, writing and the best of me and Jam. Wanting to live like this much more. Hoping I'll never need to be attached again. When I was lying on the hillside with my eyes closed I thought of cutting the cord to Tom. Feeling for it. Said, surprised, It's not there. Big sigh. Was thinking that if I lived quietly alone like this I could feel into how conscious self can be related to larger self, find how that relation should be, not directive, not abdicated - how? I could do what I was trying to do then but with better understanding. 21st William Heise County Park - it was black dark by 5, sat by the fire - folded towel on the ice chest - flashlight batteries faded out - improvise a candle lantern - two hot water bottles in the bed - get under the covers and it isn't 7 yet - take an aspirin - lie awake until after 1, probably - go through the farm and house on Clearbrook Road - the bed is warm after a couple of hours but then it's too warm - what to do with my left shoulder - what to do with my hands - I'm aching all over, why - mouth is cracking from the dry air so I have to keep it covered with the sheet - and so on - couple of times I start seeing but am pulled back - then there's a big ruckus of birds, it's morning, just - in daylight the tent's big windows that at night showed big fuzzy stars are showing fine shapes of oak - a big black branch reaching into its cloud of bit leaves - crows' loud flying and bossy squawks - the small birds excited. As I was assembling the fire a rustle and then a file of turkeys, visible individuals, larger and smaller, milder and more excitable. In the meadows as I was driving out, four deer, not whitetails, smaller, sleek grey-brown things, dark silver somehow. The fuzzy sweater I take to bed to wrap my cold foot - I was thinking during the night that it's that foot's little blankie - that I feel that foot as a child. 22nd Sunday morning. The tent is packed, everything but the dirty dishes. As it was growing light I saw a glass marble. I was dopey and didn't pay attention. Then I saw two glass marbles. I got it - it was telling me to look. I was still dopey and didn't sit up but from my pillow a bit later I saw first sun in the oak framed by my big south window. It was lighting just one tuft on the far side of the canopy. And then I watched as more tufts, different depths into the cloud, lit up pink. It was like seeing an image come up in the tray, a swift bloom. Later two herds of turkeys. I hear them coming. Deliberate slow steps cracking in oak leaves. Nineteen or twenty in the first group. Passing on either side of the tent. Blue faces. The exaggerated back and forward jerk of their small heads. Feather coats very detailed in shades of brown with irridescence. - There a crow on a hawk's tail, cakking. The hawk doesn't seem bothered. It was a quiet morning. Small birds, a few. I've saved enough firewood for tea water. Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve yesterday. I learned Engelmann oaks - blue flat leaves and rounder acorns. Trunks silvery and very broken into rectangle-bits. On the slope they are the blue, smaller ones. They live to be 200. Coast live oaks are the boat-leafed ones, taller, more lengthwise fissured. Can live to be 250. Black oaks are these deciduous ones with more finely broken bark. Canyon oaks I haven't figured out yet. They said they're fuller. The sky is open, open. There are more kinds, I think - what's this small-leafed one with tiny round acorns. How to tell scrub oak from juveniles of other kinds. - [buckwheat roadside] - Cowboy Cabin, Sunday night. What do I like about this cabin. 23 What did I dream - there was something I wanted to remember - oh - it was that - first that someone came into my bed at night, it was Tom wanting to make up - then I was sitting with the two wives from Thirty something. I said to them, It's strange to be with people who are two people, meaning the actor and the character both. 7:30, bright, a cold wind. Read Little men, old red book. Grossly sentimental and false but drawing tears again and again which tell me I feel homeless, am homeless. Her admiration for character, her culture's - bravery, loyalty, steadiness, truthfulness, independence, resolution. [sketch of cabin layout] - I've hid out today, I'm sick, reading in the dark cabin. DR14-5 and -6, the last of the lake house. An hour outside, under the bare oak above the cabin hearing how many surfaces are feeling the wind. I'd been morose. A few dry rags yellow on the scoured branches, beyond them blue, lightened me. A live oak through a kitchen window - it's a long time since I've written at a kitchen table - check tablecloth and two captain's chairs - it must the the most beautiful of tree forms by the thickness of bough together with the smallness of leaf. The cabin creaks and I can hear the fire. The return of the native in a green Modern Library volume. Preface dated 1895. It's unusually auditory. The sound of wind. Gusts in innumerable series followed each other from the north-west, and when each one of them raced past the sound of its progress resolved into three ... the general ricochet of the whole over pits and prominences ... the baritone buzz of the holly tree above them in pitch, a dwindling voice ... peculiar local sound a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by touch ... the mummied heath-bells of the past summer... One inwardly saw the infinity of those combined multitudes; and perceived that each of the tiny trumpets was seized on, entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind... When the scratchings of the furze against their leggings had fainted upon the ear - The scene where he has the sound of wind draw the landscape - can't now find it. And the way he does light. Occasionally, it is true, a more vigorous flare than usual from their faggots sent darting lights down the inclines to some distant bush, pool, or patch of white sand, kindling these to replies of the same colour, until all was lost in the darkness again. The scene with the bonfires in all directions - Attentive observation of their brightness, colour and length of existence would have revealed the quality of the material burnt, and through that, to some extent, the natural produce of the district in which each bonfire was situate. The clear, kingly effulgence that had characterized the majority expressed a heath and furze country like their own, the rapid flares and extinctions at other points of the compass showed the lightest of fuel - straw, beanstocks, and the usual waste from arable land. The most enduring of all signified wood, such as hazel branches, thorn-faggots, and stout billets. And movement: A bramble caught hold of her skirt, and checked her progress. When she began to extricate herself it was by turning round and round, and so unwinding the prickly switch. 24 But the melodrama and sermonizing. I wasn't interested in any of his people. Have formatted to the end of 1981, DR16, though I've read not much of it. Will read for the excerpts next time and then maybe once more, working through. The half year back from Alberta I was balancing well but then Jam made her evil move, that T and R consented to. Did she do that out of competition   That she never acknowledged   Did she feel my writing was getting ahead of her   no Catching up   She couldn't stand that   YES And couldn't know it   YES And so she defeated my writing   Did anyone else understand that   So can I complete it now   YES And that's what I have to do   It's the story of a defeat   YES Did Jam gain anything important by winning   no She ran a scam   If you win by scamming it's not helpful   I got revenge   Was that necessary   I was demolished until I did   YES They knew the import of it and went along with it   Question is why I fought ineffectively   Because I also wanted to be rid of her   I'm going to write about it   YES   Am I dropping Tom because I'm bored   no But I am dropping Tom   no Is he dropping me   no We're letting each other go   no Am I feeling what I'm feeling   Which is not much   YES Is there anything you want to say   slaying, betrayal, processing, practical I've stopped caring   Is that correct   Does it mean I'm more loveless than ever   no Does he understand that we're separating   no Are we separating   no Something happened that summer   no He had an affair   no He went back to drugs   no But he's been lying about something   YES Many things   And I've been corrupt   Should I tell him those two lies   no Are they what kept us apart   no Something has done us in   Can you tell me what   anger Mine   no His   yes There's been a loss of hope   For him too   Gradual   no For both of us at the same time   no For me first   no For him first   Did he ever truly have hope with me   no But I did   He's been trying to be nice to me   no He has been nice to me   But that's not good enough   Will you tell me what I have to go on to   friendship, improvement, coming through, defeat In work   Can I find a way to live better   Here   Give up TV   no Can I bring my bp down   With exercise, enough   Anything else you want to say   no 26 Uric acid and hypertension - it blocks NO, that keeps it low - fructose increases uric acid. [notes from a video on rightist paranoia] [notes on Mafalda's film From a distance] 27 Took the bike to Felipe - walked around Horton's Plaza - thought to go into the Golden West and ask about a room for January - it's 14 years and feels like no time - I sat in the sun eating, feeling into myself for a sensation of freedom - am I released? I say tentatively, maybe I am - no pain herding me back. 28 Rain this morning. Snow in the mountains, couldn't have gone this weekend rather than last. New green chucks and gel inserts. Formatted to the end of DR18, out of 25 or 26. And then I'll have to go through for the index pages and links. Birds found the feeder - house finches. Dave being prurient about the Rasheed story. Shadow fascination. He held fast against the 60s and is left staring through the fence though inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence. 30 Dreamed I was standing at a window above a narrow beach and saw hundreds of large birds flying toward us. They're owls, I realize. Three schoolgirls on a sharp pinnacle of rock to see them. That's a very steep rock. Watching their schoolgirl legs climbing down. Last week in an alphabetical list of Canadian artists I saw this and it gave me pleasure: Epp, Ellie b.1945 Epp, Paul b.1949 Formatted DR20 and 21 today, of 24. 1 December Eliz and Rue today. I wore my green sweater. She noticed. Brian the chiropractor [next door downstairs]. 2 The NASA site, astronomy picture of the day Ancient layered hills on Mars Zodiacal light over Laguna Verde Blue sun bristling Ah! And today the Sibley guide to trees came, with spectacular pages on all the North American oaks. It's going to be 4 weeks next weekend. There are thoughts I shut down. It's not the way it used to be, nostalgic agony. When I'm walking or on the bike there's morose grumbling but I don't want to write it out, elaborate it. I test what it's like to be free, carefully. Rehearse what to say to him if it comes up. Am warmer with other people maybe. 3 I will write more fully in a week or two. My breath is almost taken away by your choice of books. All three have a close association, closer than you can imagine, to mine and my family's life, and to some of my principle preoccupations. - Coleridge biog, Well at the world's end, Holmes Age of wonder. Zachary invites me to Googlewave. A wave is a hosted communication. Drag and drop photos. Collaborative album. Can drag into a site - embed the whole Robots can be as if a participant - translator app. For Ant Bear? Urls, other waves, videos Wave panel, search panel, blips 4 Shirley/Tia writes I don't really know you Ellie but I have a feeling about you - I think maybe you came so far, an Epp from Horse Lake (and me a Lunden from Valhalla) and exceeded what you even dreamed was possible in those days and now you can't settle for mediocrity, you want an exceptional life and you don't feel exceptional right now. Maybe you're settling for less than you think you're worth, and that makes it impossible for the heart to be inflamed and the soul enchanted - These evenings about 4 I take the bike out and want to work - something joyful these days alone. "One of the best little tunes in opera," someone of Soave. 5 Emily Wyman had her defense Thursday and I watched Facebook for news. Yesterday morning: Made it. Then after that the messages. DR EMCHEN!!!! says one. "Fein, schlaue Em! Aber das is ja nix neues." I was participating as if it were also my event, which when it happened didn't have a web community - Laudate dominum / omnes gentes / laudate eum, onmes populii / quniam confirmata est / super nos misericordia ejus / et veritas domini manet in aeternum / gloria patri et filio et spiritui sancto / sicut erat in principio, et nune, et semper / et in saecula saeculorum. - Phoning Luke, finding him in a pub after being a monitor for The Wave, which the Independent online is saying had 40,000 marchers. "Environmental campaigners, aid agencies, wildlife charities, religious groups and trade unions." Grovenor Square to circle House of Parl. 6 The delight it gives me to look down at what I'm wearing - new dark green chucks whose whites are still white - worn blue jeans - white shirt with green stripes under a heather green cashmere sweater, shirttails, cuffs and collar showing. New, bright and fine. Also to record, how rebellious I am about food these days. I jump out of my disciplines and am almost getting away with it. Two Gold Bites today, for instance. Or will go for pizza at lunch, a slice of quatro fromagi and Caesar salad. Two big bowls of yougourt with agave and walnuts at night. Something insisting on pleasure and willful adventure. Beautiful Blake Lively - I watch a bad soap to see her legs. 7 Raining in California. Hard gusts. Scott's strawberry trees went over. The jeep parked in front of Fort Stockton wdn't start. Mobile mechanic said bad connections. I had my laptop with me, all my phone numbers on it, and a cell phone - worked on Ricki's edit on Sean's couch waiting for the guy to call to say he was there, while Sean took a conference call in his office, meantime googling needed stats and facts ... how we do it in this sleek afterlife. As I write this KCRW streaming via the MacBook. Now I'm going to lower the vol and go to DR23 index page construction for some hours, with hot water bottle at feet. 8 2" of rain at Lindbergh yesterday. Amazon has samples I can link for Four last songs and maybe others. Karajan Tristan. Handel, Mozart, Strauss 9 Last night I kept rewatching Terry Wey singing Schubert's Ständchen with the Vienna boys. His phlegmatic fish face, eyes sliding sideways away from the camera, thirteen years old, singing what must be the cleanest version ever of an orgiastic song about sex. Boys' faces behind him, the full German Kinderchor sound backing his lift through Schubert's thrilling key changes. Softly, softly we insist At the beloved's bedroom door   But now rising, Swelling, swelling, lifting 10 Dreamed I was in something like a museum, looking down on large bones. I arranged them in the form of a man, liked the arrangement. Is this the arm, the elbow joint still working. Then something disarranged them, he may have come to life for a moment. Afterward I couldn't rearrange them, the way in dreams one can never put things back the way they were - something about different kinds of stability in different parts of the brain, wanting and intending are more stable than perception, as they should be. A separation of remembering and seeing, though - sort of remembering how they were doesn't put them back although both are simulation. - Well, that's how it is, remembering doesn't disarrange seeing, they must stabilize separately. This morning, making tea, I remembered when I was maybe ten burning my hand, how much it hurt. I was walking with the kerosene lamp. The chimney tottered and started to fall. I caught it by reflex. My whole palm was burned. I was in bed crying. My mother brought a saucepan of cool water I could hold my hand in. - I remembered this because when I was filling the hot water bottle I spilled a bit of boiling water on my hand and it hardly hurt. Have thought before that when I remember moments from childhood I should write them. When I'm formatting memories I wrote in DR I notice there are details I've forgotten - I don't know how much I'm forgetting. In this moment to say how I'm deliberately forgetting Tom. I'm stopping myself thinking about him, I'm averting. Not having to try hard, compared to the way it used to be, he's gone. I didn't like Louie being pleased about that, though - she doesn't want me to have what she doesn't have, and that hardens me in relation to her. Physically often a buoyancy these days, as if my cells are burning better. Something else about the kind of time it is now, I mean these years, is the way it feels to have so many dead. I will sometimes just go through the list. Frank, Ed, Janeen, Joyce, those closest, and then the others I could list though I haven't, Diana, Catherine, Mr Mann, Roy Kiyooka. These deaths make the living less real, I guess I mean I put less reality into anyone from my old life because there'll be a moment when they're dead too. I think of my mother as mostly dead. - More willing now to care about people who are younger than I am. It's 6:30 Monday morning, I was hoping it would rain so I could get out of cutting buddleia at Taft, but the rain's been pushed back a day. I'll go in the afternoon. - The Christmas weeks. Is there somewhere I can go on my own. [Opposite: notes on Hughes Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being]   part 3 in america volume 19: 2009-2010 october-february work & days: a lifetime journal project