in america volume 19 part 3 - 2009 december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

11 December Working from the back, have done the index pages for 24, 23, 22, now am into the desperate dreary years 1981-1983. There was a writing burst though. I keep being surprised to see there were sweet times with Jam. It seems I have come down on one edge of an ambivalence that I was enduring whole. I'm feeling, now, I've decided Jam was a sadistic tyrant - and she was, I see her stonewalling, sneering, patronizing. And then I'm surprised to see her crying. We both cry a lot. I see that but my feeling doesn't change, I stay disgusted, sickened - I feel that under all she was bent on defeating me. When I say that I feel a sensation in the forehead, determined subtle malice, her mentat lovelessness. It wasn't personal, she was defeating herself in me, and when I put it that way I don't blame, it's back to me, why was I enduring it so long. - For a good reason, I knew I wd never have conversation like that again. I didn't know there would be other things worth more. For instance: the moments writing Being about, coming through with the book, in bed with Rob, writing about Tom. - Interesting to see it was that, with Tom. Making the garden. Playing with Susan momentarily. When I take this kind of survey I see that other things, years of them, have been connective tissue, the years of the journal project have been. The story of writing in those years, I'll need to collect that, that's the core story of DR. It won't be quick to find. As for whatever I have next, it will mean I don't have what I've had before - any of those. What do I think of Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being. The argument is tediously long. It matters to him more than the writing does. Why wd a poet need to write 500 pages trying to prove that Shakespeare was or did something or other - to be seen mastering the master I suppose - which an argument does not do. And second, he tries to base the plot pattern he sees on historical myths when in fact both myth and plots are based on male psychology, which wd have been briefer to explain but too direct for the literary. He wants Shakespeare to be about the Reformation, but the Reformation was about male psychology too. Catholicism wasn't the goddess loved, though the Puritans were certainly females hated. Catholicism is obviously dodgy about women too, though it doesn't wipe the whole memory of the mother. Redgrove is more honest. It's a good title. Shakespeare is something about complete being and completeness is something about not locking down numinous infant origins, divinity in other words. Sean's back garden is going to be hideous   It doesn't matter what we do   And is that why you said I shdn't take it on   Prep it and let him plant whatever he wants   Take $300 and leave it at that   Tell him so   Take him shopping a couple of places   Walter Andersons and Miramar   12 When I was working through the aft cutting brush at Taft I had the Laudate in my head. Then next morning it was Dank sei dir Herr. Is it praising or pleading. Du hast dein Volk / mit dir geführt Dein ist nun das Land - When did Ed die? 3 November. - I was working on DR21, a month missing between it and 22. I drag out the suitcases to look for it and find a couple of Strasbourg letters I was missing - the story of visiting Hamit and Darinka and the story of Jean-Jacques staying with me Christmas Eve. Slog through typing them and then see there's blue page writing about the time in the hotel, and I like it. It has detail I don't even remember remembering. Finding the story is the gift to the day. Mafalda coming a week from tomorrow. We figured it out, I booked the Pacific Surf Inn and will meet her on the Solana Beach platform a bit before noon. 13 The black cashmere sweater I bought for Tom before we quit - it's mine now and it inspired me to 1. put on the blue glass earrings and 2. buy the sequined dark blue scarf. I had on the Levis that are tight since I've been eating Gold Bites, and my reflection in windows along 5th looked straight-backed and quite willful and fine. I felt strong and was wanting to be a splendid old beauty, whatever it takes. It seemed possible. Hélène Grimaux - is she a perfect human being - perfectly lucky to be who she is - she performs in pants w/o makeup, bounds onto the stage like a boy, plays by memory, never drinks alcohol, performs without having to learn to perform and has identified herself with the most intelligent of animals. 14 Carb-rampaging. What is that? The scale is up to 150 from 139 when I got back here in August and I keep going with what feels like willfulness. It's rebellion against eating discipline and will to mouth pleasure. Whole wedge of brie, dried apricots and cherries yesterday, cake at Starbucks sometimes, sandwiches, yougourt with walnuts and agave, another bowl. I feel fine and am strong but here's ridiculous blubber over my jeans waistband. It's been playing the edge, how far can I go, how much freer can I be than I was. Do you have anything to say about that   you've lost your husband, gain your exclusion You mean feel the loss   If I do I'll weaken and take him back   That's a bad idea   no Do you mean all the way back   sort of Sexually   I want newness   YES I want to be splendid   I want to be free   YES I want new friends   YES He bores me   YES He's bored with me   YES He's crude   And stupid   I want to go on alone   If we're together it will just go on stuck forever   no I want him to die   no Am I eating because I'm not feeling   Can I stop it   Fast?   no Go to strict no carb   no Mild no carb   With carb meals   Can that bring it down by res   I don't want Tom back, will you comment   happiness, indecision, exclusion, caution Are you saying it's better to be conflicted   I'm only letting myself feel half of it   It feels as if the other half is gone   Is it   no Where is it?   balance, in partial loss and exclusion for a turn for the better I'm supposed to miss him   no I do miss him   no I miss something   no I want something   What I don't have with him anymore   Hormones   Excitement, interest, sex, discovery, challenge, fear and coming through, do you want to add something   anger Anything else?   shared pleasure, caution, love woman, disillusion Pleasure is cautious, love woman is disillusioned   Love woman is disillusioned   Love woman herself and not I for her   YES Has she ever been disillusioned before   no I held her back before   So then what   responsible, withdrawal, to assertive, friendship That's what she has left   That's what she's done with Tom   NO She dropped out   She's disillusioned with Tom   Now she thinks he's not worth bothering   And I / work woman have never liked him   She bought a scarf yesterday   YES Is she the one eating   no I need to find her   YES I'm dropping Tom because I want her   Can you tell me what to do   improve your subtle judgment It used to be better   Is the voice I hear her   no Does it have to do with noticing the voices   Anything else   no Going through DR19 for the index - excruciating - I'm not doing it well because I want to get out of there - Will you talk to me about those years   YES Could I have published that writing   Would it have been liked   yes You mean by some   YES Would anyone have understood it   no Wd it have made me friends   no A reputation   Would it still   It was a mistake to try to get anything from any of them for it   Their motives were too mixed   With them I wd always in some way be discounted because of my leg   It wd have been better if I'd been clear about that   I wanted to hope it wasn't so   YES It was possible with Jam until they -   no Because she was crazy   YES So I was 8-9 years tortured because I refused to know the worst   YES Could I have done better work if I hadn't done that   no Did I get good work out of it   YES Could I have got as good work if I were lucid   no Nine years of massive mistake   YES Expensive   YES 31-40, prime years   YES It cost me Luke   This is the part I need to explain to Luke   Something you want to say   writing, the work, (fool), anger I thought my writing would bring me level   It couldn't   My grief was displaced   The three of them talked about it   no Did they understand it   no I couldn't feel the exclusion correctly because I hadn't felt it   The writing work concealed anger   YES Could I have had a good lover with whom I was equal   no That's simply the condition of my life   This is ground truth   YES So should I have done without lovers   no Done what I could with inferiors   Pen pals   Stayed alone like now   I would have been dry and bitter   NO What then   (empress), community, practical, unconscious Will you slant empress   successfully practical in community, not anxious about betrayal The way I am at [the college]   My relation with everyone in that time was wrong   YES Given who I was it had to happen that way   Do I have to be a sad cripple from now on   YES My heart hurts   Will you lead me   your power struggles will be balanced and prepared But do I have to feel inferior   no I have to feel that I'm seen as inferior   no I seem someone alert, dry and alone   I'm afraid I'll hold back too much   NO I'm afraid I'll be always depressed   no There are students who don't work with me because of it   YES I thought that would be no   no And yet I'm popular   I have to work harder   They forget it in letters   YES Do I need a social life   It means I should give myself more success   YES And beauty   To make up for what doesn't happen one to one   I can't afford to be as noble as I hoped I was   Can I be successful   Large success   YES With work I've done already   With new work     Was my revenge justified   no Do you want to say more   honesty, processing, delayed, mourning Tom was a mistake too   no My motive was dishonest but I worked honestly with it   Lately I haven't been   I was correct with Susan   For instance when I'm working with   Anything I should do right now   no Is the mad eating going to stop now   But what to do with loneliness that doesn't end - all day I go back to the mail - I begin to send messages to people who don't want to hear from me - I talk to cashiers longer than I should - I spend hours in Youtube looking for something that moves, just music isn't enough - I click through my bookmark bar to see whether Grey's or Gossip have new episodes up, where I can see beautiful people move and speak. 15 I woke in the dark this morning thinking about the DR time - that it's a matrix, a crucible, a mess - Dames rocket is the wrong name - I was remembering it too glamourously - also realizing that I'm into this work now, the deep of it, and it's needed to be done, and the time can change if I do it. In this time the journal stopped being story-telling and became a record of process. It's not for a reader - often can't be read, now even by me. I dropped bombs into my brain and catalogued the wreck. The bombs were drugs and deranged attachment. Lost search. I read, made notes, made notes on my notes. Someone like Susan Sontag read within her range, which for her was prestige literature, but I read all over the place - read and studied - in the Saturna winter, the physics of tides, history of English, Emily Dickenson, Lacan and Kristeva, Cherry Ames, a biography of Florence Nightingale, and it's there all disordered in the journal, all isolated, never spoken about to anyone, never formed in review writing, torn through, with bits recorded. Something I want to explain about what's written - often I am not speaking for or as the moment writing, I'm describing another moment of experience - I'm trying for a close phenomenology of the consciousness of moments experienced earlier. Now I've been doing something different, writing to realize what was latent, not conscious, in those moments. I think that is better because it has silence in it. I had a mistaken idea about consciousness in those days, that I should be as conscious as possible. Later I let unconscious processes do their work and floated on them, let consciousness be unoccupied enough to catch instructions and follow them. I dissolved myself into the morass with philosophical training and a lot of psychological reading, and I watched myself suffer with interest in its meanings and qualities. The constant faithful optimism of curiosity. A shattered mirror with an unbroken mirror behind it - did Jam say that? What was I working on. We were working - a lot of people were working - on gender, cultural subservience and derogation of women, in ourselves too. A deep investigation that for instance Kristeva was taking into Melanie Klein's object attachment theory. I took it into discoveries of unrecognized prenatal and perinatal preoccupations in male texts. The realization was crucial to me, it gave me confidence that as a woman I could stand beyond the masters and see what they could not. In my own circle, though, I was alone in knowing what I had seen; having seen it, and seeing that they wouldn't see me seeing it, took me beyond those I wanted to love me. It had happened before. What else, the agony about writing. It was related. When I began this time my writing was 'natural,' loving, sensory. The community I walked into was a writing community of a time and place. Poetics influenced by Olson/Duncan/Creeley, the famous [Tish] conference before my time, Robin Blaser. Jam was a Pound scholar, Daphne was part of Tish. In that context my style looked and was too female, too emotional, too embodied, not stoned/mental enough. Naïve, lacking prestige. I was ambitious and I was out of synch. I loved Dorothy Richardson, my friends wouldn't read her. Jam read her but didn't find her important. I knew no one who admired her and that told me I'd be isolated if I did what I admired - that I could not succeed socially even if I succeeded artistically by my own standards. That was an agony I think was partly displaced from my more unthinkable circumstance, which was that I could never be fully accepted into any group where I was physically visible, because I was and am marked as deformed. I wanted my writing to make up for my deformity and it didn't; instead, in my circle, it was marked by my deformity. I thought its markedness was its femaleness, the cultural deformity of femaleness, and that I could overcome it by working to salvage femaleness through into mastery. Instead I went on stunned and grieved that my writing wasn't succeeding in my circle, no one loved me in it, no one accepted me on account of it, no one wanted to join me in it. I had done something marvelous in their terms, I thought, and I was still the outsider, more the outsider while Jam was being pulled in, replacing me in their interest while they replaced me in hers. Jam was poison. Her self-incongruency was poison. I was constantly off balance with her because she wasn't what she said she was. I want to get to the bottom of Jam's poisonous effect, I haven't yet. I don't feel that with Trudy, she was often clear with me. She could see me, she would ground me kindly, though she was also ruthlessly self-promoting in quite childish, unexamined ways. I kept my distance from Rhoda, I adored her beauty, its steely rigor, but she wasn't for me, she couldn't see into me and I couldn't see into her. The fact that Jam and I were on wrong terms from the beginning, wrong from the foundations up. It's appalling to see how wrong, and the suffering and confusion that came of the wrongness. The wrongness was mine first. I loved Cheryl and Trudy in right ways, I loved who they were. They locked me out for their own reasons and I gamely looked around for other possibilities and there was Jam showing interest. I didn't love who she was but I could get her - it was like that. She didn't love who I was either, she had no clue who I was, but she was triggered by my femme quality and I could use that to attach her. - That's one way of seeing it, and if it had actually been that cynical I wouldn't have later been so confused. I also went in in good faith, I thought here's someone with whom I can do the work to earn the intimacy those others have. I can work with her. And I did work with her, and I brought her a long way forward, but when she had come forward the foundational lovelessness between us was still there, and she didn't bring me forward in turn, but took her now more present, open self to people she liked more, who could now be more interested in her. There was a justice in it, and also an injustice. It ended very badly, but ended, and that wretchedness at last was done. I like the balance and succinctness of that description but I want to say more about how she was poison. [In order] for people to come through together they need to cop to their hold-out defenses. Jam wouldn't cop to her misogyny, which was the other side of her weakness for feminine women. She also wouldn't cop to her competitiveness in relation to writing, that made her vicious in relation to mine. She also was quite crazy, she lacked common sense, she would shut down into a pompous little professor without knowing she was doing it. She had wrong ideas about herself that I took as given until I learned otherwise. With Roy I began to see people as unstable. Jam was an extreme example, she would claim she was a man, and I sometimes saw a man, but that man was the worst of her, a shut-down pompous fat faced hyperthyroidal little person, more Chinese maybe, google-eyed oblivious person lost in a fantasy identity, impersonating maybe her father. A stuffy voice. The best of her was sharp and objective, quite beautiful, lightly freckled, more Arabic, slight-shouldered, balanced, light and swift, not warm but amused, clear. There were two kinds of time when she was with me and I wasn't seeing [looking at] her. One was in sex, where she could be a skillful lover, mythical, accurate. The other was when we'd get into talk and race along together on a topic like light metaphysics, full companions in bodiless air. Neither of those selves was anything to do with me. A years-long laboratory in human not companionship but intersection. What is a person, what can people be together. She also wouldn't come clean about her preference for them. It was obvious to me, it was in the topology, the logic, of the group, she would prefer them because I preferred them, because they were preferable, but she wouldn't own up to it, why, because to keep their interest she couldn't be all theirs. She sacrificed me to them in that way. She kept me on a string and I let myself be kept there, though screaming, because I didn't want it to be true. Is that it? Yes. I didn't want to be finally defeated. But I was finally defeated, and then desperate, and then once more ingenious and launched into another mistake, one I could be certain to be powerful in. - At Scott's this morning weeding bits of grass and clover waiting to see Mario put stepping stones back [after drainage work]. He said with his worried forehead that the first time had been just right but this time not quite. His helper was picking up bits of dirt carefully. I said Gracias por la cuidad. There were a lot of Calif poppies up and I saw one lupine. A couple of what look like borage. The plants except for the couple trampled when the tenants moved look radiant. The acacia artemesioides is blooming in its corner and had a bee. The blue salvia in its honour spot under the palo verde is - what is the word - expansive, it looks confident, resplendent. I was somehow less withheld in the conference call, a bit noisy. The girls were forward today, Lise, Katt and I. Directly after, bike to Dr Marquez to get a prescription renewal. He had the beautiful-human doctor look at its best, a tall relaxed grey-haired intelligent man who liked me. "You look healthy" he said, though in Macy's mirrors my face had the crude look it gets when I'm 9 pounds over, foolish person who now has to undo the Gold Bites and walnuts and pizza and oh delicious bread. Or maybe its only 6. Maybe not foolish. I feel a lot of spring in my cells. I didn't like that padded face but still I feel zingy. Grimaud rehearsing Schumann sonata for piano and violin op 105. "The wolf-chick explains the musicality." 17 I waited until 8:30 and phoned Luke to find him at home alone - the most natural thing, Luke's voice talking about anything, Luke on his bed with the cat four feet away, looking toward the window, where he could see snow falling in the dark of late afternoon while I watched house finches at the feeder. An hour and a half later he said we should talk more often, "I sometimes have things I want to tell, and no one to talk to." He said that last year had been maybe the worst in his life, back pain from his neck to his testacles, a pinched nerve. The pain wore him down. - He hadn't told me. Happy this morning transcribing daily journal from the fall of 1979, the lake house, had somehow missed it. It's just days where I love to be, now coming into the time when I start to write the play of the weather. At Walter Anderson's buying two long-leaf ficus and two oakleaf hydrangeas for Scott's pots. A beautiful guy come to fix the irrigation, Justino, 44 he said, had been working for Art for 22 years, helped me carry plants, blew out the spill after. The naturalness of working with him, his bright eyes, he pulling up dirt with his hands in one pot, I pulling up dirt into one of the emptied 5 gallons in another. New York Times tonight, I realized I could spend my fee with Scott on an African school for girls, he could donate in Mary's name. 18 Sent Susan the Youtube of Grimaud rehearsing at midnight her time because it's her birthday, thought she'd see it the way she saw herself on video, a body thinking. She replied so politely water jumped into my eye, it was as if the one I knew had killed herself. 19 Pacific Surf Inn watching TV. - Is it the same room, maybe. I'm not nostalgic. I'm not nostalgic! I was on the street - somewhere - and I thought I could change what Facebook says to 'single.' 21 What has become of Mafalda - she had a pretty body and now is a sort of little owl-granny who has a round tummy that begins under her breasts and no lips anymore. Her chin is a little blip with a bigger blip under it, a sack of fat. I don't seem to forgive people for fat under their chin. She is an artist but she drove past a lot of beautiful sea without looking at it. I didn't get any sort of technical conversation started with her. She's fastened to persons and that's what we talked about, female talk. Did she say anything that interested me. Did I. I began to sound like her and didn't like it. She is 'interested,' asks questions, and in that way is better than many. The early story is interesting. I'm not going to write it now, but it's picaresque. The last years have been too settled probably, since about 40. I don't think she thinks about art, it is more a way of being busy. The way she shot video on the beach, just waving the camcorder around. The sea. We sat on a rock together and the sea changed. Silver, silver, pure silver on the covered sun's path, on the foam, on the broad flat strand. 22 "I had a son." We were lying on her bed and had been looking at Manuel's book. Lamplight in the motel room. When she was 42 a little boy born blind, many other things wrong, who lived three months, slept between them, and one morning simply died in her arms. She holds her baby grandson and goes into a trance, she says. Her grandparents on both sides wealthy members of Lisbon's elite, who had lost their money in the 1930s crash but still had their connections and their knowledge of fine things. Her parents lived in a rented mansion with servants, a large garden, a gardener - the house I saw, invited to dinner - the royal staircase that awed me. Seven children, Mafalda one of the youngest. Her mother had paid no attention to any of them. There was a governess. Her father kindly but away making money. She learned to read at 4, and would be brought before guests to read Salazar's speeches. They weren't rich but all the kids went to private schools, Mafalda to a convent school where learning was rote. Her eldest brother had been to England on a work vacation and had met a young Englishman he brought back to the family to tutor Mafalda and Manuel. He seduced Mafalda by teaching her. Slept with her when she was 15. Some of this was happening in the family chapel. When she was 16 he asked her father to marry her. Her father said, Mafalda is very young, you have to wait until she is 18. When she was 18 they did marry and he took her to England. A year later there was a family event in Portugal. She took the ship and he would fly in later. On the ship she met a Portuguese sculptor. She had never been very attracted to her husband, but this man she felt with her whole body. They didn't make love but by the time the boat arrived she knew her marriage was over. Back in London she now had to make her own living. She looked in the paper and found a job as an au pair for a man who happened to be a Beatles photographer. She was at parties with them, there to take the coats. After 3 or 4 months there was another job. She met Terry at a little Buddhist center next to a photography studio where she worked developing prints. He was her great love and killed himself after two years. Roy came around to console her. They were together a couple of months and then I arrived to look at the room. He was excited, she said. "She's all there." She went to America that summer and stayed with us briefly when she came back, slept with David Cooper. Got a waitress job and a room nearby. We would work side by side in the living room [of 4 St Albans]. Roy was jealous and threw her painting out the window. She met Will in the restaurant where she worked, went to Yellow Springs where he was at Antioch. Had Kaliel and then Maya not much more than a year later. By then she had her green card by marrying Will. She and Will were breaking up just as Maya was being born so she was on her own in America with two small children. She went on welfare and made art, was on her own for 13 years and then met Kent, who had a son. He had been an art professor at Cornell, was denied tenure and quit, was an architecture assistant for a while, now delivers Meals on Wheels. They own a very large house he tinkers at. They have a common life she can't imagine giving up. She works full time in the university library, orders books. At home there are always long to-do lists. Meantime Will, who got into film school on the strength of my photos [my slides of Mafalda], had moved to Hollywood, made his name with a film about men, made one more film and then crashed, is now an alcoholic doing odd jobs in Maui. She asked why we had liked each other and I said we had been working in opposite directions. She began with culture - she says in her library there are a thousand Portuguese books and many of them are by people she knows - and I had to go find it. And what did I begin with, freedom, independence. She is back locked up in family now, though a new world family, Maya a graphic designer for a good firm in Portland and Kaliel IT in San Francisco, Theron a design professor in LA. - They were sharing an exuberant spread of knowledge. Jenny Uglow 2002 The lunar men Farrer, Straus and Giroux I am liking my room, where at this moment, sunlight is lying white on the white sheet and the north wall, and across the furze of the green blanket. There is an orchid with its three flowering arms. Mozart sonatas quietly, finches at the glass, the pepper tree laced with passiflora vines tossing under the window. Driven cloud masses from the west. I am in bed reading about the enterprise of canal-makers and industrial inventors. I hurt in my left hip, left knee, sometimes left ankle, even left wrist and jaw at this moment. It has been as if my muscles are solid slabs of hard leather, so it has felt, though now I feel hurt strings in my left calf. 23 Tom got his biopsy results, doesn't have the bad thing. [Opposite pages notes about Melanie Klein] 24 Christmas night - black at the window - a candle - thinking of what matters to me now - fixing body systems Luke and Row well W & d finished real films with writing universe love living in NYC writing well Secondary - Ant Bear monograph magazine lectures mbo site worksite penpals 25 Reading The lunar men liking male friendship, whose medium here was botany, industry, geology, canal-building, patents, money, all of which sustained intensive affectionate exchange over lifetimes. This chapter on mineralogy is reminding me of how on the beach last Sunday I was rapt in its collection of smooth rocks of so many colors and mixtures of colors. How can so many origins gather in this one place - samples of so many origins? I collected colors into groups - greens - mauves - oranges - and wanted to know more - sea stones - they're stones not rocks - palm-sized and smaller - a film - stones and light - something inventive - stones and phrases and light - for that I need close-up HD - I'll have maybe $4000 - experimentation - scholarly and rapturous. Sedimentary - carbonates/limestones - marbles/metamorphosed 27 Boredom, coldness, anger, taking advantage of another, any 'sin' leads to a sense, sometimes very small, of alienation and dullness. That's what the devil really is: the part of us that wants to be lonely, that is too proud to accept some people, that wants power, or indulges in the sweet temptations of resentment, anger, melancholy, etc. Dreams this morning. I'm walking with Terry, his arm on my shoulder. I say, This is probably the moment to tell you I'm not going to have boyfriends anymore. I say I've done that enough, etc, trying to remember who I did it with. It doesn't come to me. I'm walking east in a city, see a shortcut I could take through to the next block. It's a narrow very dark passage storeys high, roofed. I think I see a door ajar at the far end so I take it. The floor is paved with stone, different kinds of paving in uneven sections. They're very old. Black and white gleam like a Bill Brandt photo. Then passing through a corridor in a Chinatown building - I remember this very dimly - small objects with esoteric powers. Earlier something sweet with a young man - I don't have it - I have a ghost of it - was I lying with him, waiting for him? - Ten pages of daily record from November-December 1979, January 1980, when I lived with Jam quite well, waking early and working in my room before going out through the rain to construction labour at Laiwan's mom's future house. Surprised liking moments with Jam in her house before she spoiled it, surprised liking her, not then in a crazy time. When I think of those winter mornings I think of the bread we made with sunflower seeds in it - how good it was toasted with a lot of butter, and tea in a bowl I liked, a Japanese bowl of Jam's, was it, or one of mine? Table in lamplight, her bed in the beautiful next room with glass book cabinets. Is it going to be that I like reading almost any of my times because I'm younger in them? Yesterday and today setting up evals, reading the letters to Mary and Erin feeling how wasted they were on them. Mary was plugging along learning a complicated obsolete system and having no clue that I was giving her a clear direct forward edge, ie that the woman assigned to her could be better than the dead man she'd waited years to read. Erin similar, she had me giving her simple clarity and she needed to sign up with a male authority who is less clear and less rigorous. I did something for both of them and I didn't dumb down to meet them - that was for me - but also what I gave was not remotely seen. What should I think about that. Philosophical letters. Should I evaluate my semester. Ricki came in vacuously general and got more focused because I forced it. Tasha came up against her alcoholism and quit. I suggested to Karen that she ride a bike; she did and broke her arm and quit. Colleen was insulted by Goldberg and dropped TLA and then spent most of her semester writing harrowing stories [detail deleted]]. At the end of the semester she broke her wrist, I passed her but she thinks maybe she won't come back and finish. Rose didn't pass her extension, I could have given her that but I was fed up with her ineptitude and procrastination. Mary was pleased with herself but disappointed not to have more 'support.' Erin is a buoyant adventurous young thing who had fun, floated among suggested identities. She'll be something else next semester. Emilee - is Emilee's piece the one thing in the semester? I pushed for it and got it and it's good, and she knows it. It's not what I do, but what I do gave me to be able to defend it. David writes that T and R are moving to Montreal, the building's sold. Do I want to move back to Van? 6 months a year? May-Oct. Somewhere else Nov-April. The oceans will be gone in 2 billion years; in 5 the sun will pulse and sterilize the earth. Red giant expanding to the orbit of Mars. As universe keeps expanding atoms themselves pull apart. Wood 2008 How fiction works Farrer, Straus and Giroux I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid and deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level. - Why did I want to copy that - something I felt, that it doesn't say - felt vaguely - a little transparent shape in the air - something about coherence in the novel because in the reader - there I stopped and thought about what that would mean - I often refuse a phrase - stop and ask for a better one made somewhere else in my head - coherence would have to come from that somewhere else. Now: stop and ask why this is so uncomfortable. What mind has Wood made in me. Self-conscious, technical, self-doubting. - It's not coherence, it's state - whether the novel is made from a good state, makes a good state. Strong thoughts. Woods isn't giving strong thoughts. I'm not agreeing with his premises. He rightly sneers at a bad paragraph of late Updike, but then he gives as an example of "exaggeration of the noticing eye" this sentence about rain on a window: Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain. Of the farm 1961 If Woods doesn't like that sentence, he is not the visual sort of person I am. It declares another sort of sensorium, and sensorium is what I like or dislike in a writer. What I love about the rain sentence is that it names something I've seen, and I've liked the mood that seeing happens in. I like being brought there again. In Shakespeare "a strategic opacity." What matters to the bible writer is not the state of David's mind, but the whole story, the entirety of the arc of David's life. The self is driven mad by being so scrutinized. the art form to interest the reader in the fate of the individual essential juvenility of plot Explore characterological relativity - Dostoesky, Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf Ressentiment - hate that is sick love, impotent dependence, instability, pride holding back abasement. They behave scandalously because they want to be known, understood by people better than themselves. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for historical associations ... attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals the sentence .... That one not at all a good example. "Really interesting writing" - different registers metaphor that hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character's world commercial realism The true writer must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped. 248 He wrote about the books he had to hand in his study, he said, 9 women, 62 men. Lately I more often haven't had to count. Was he making an effort with these? Kept his last lovely quotation for Cather. 6:30 Monday evening. There was a yellow band in the sky. It's gone. Next week I'll have been alone here for two months. More alone, being hobbled now. 3 more evals, 2 partly done. soft calcareous hard granite or gneiss phenocrysts stylolites zigzag lines class and matrix fragments cemented together in sedimentary metamorphic heat and pressure - recrystallized, altered, layered, cleavage, foliation - low to high grade different effects shearing - stretching non-clastic sedimentary - alabaster, travertine - materials form as sediment igneus silica - plutonic/intrusive - extrusive/volcanic pyraclastic ash and other volcanic sed streak, streak plate minerals 1. color 2. transparency 3. luster 4. crystal habit 5. hardness 6. cleavage 7. acid/carbonate lemon or vinegar fizzes 29 These mornings I've been hearing what I knew was Mozart and suspected was the Garanca/Netrebko duet that Deutsche Grammaphone has taken down - Ah perdona il primo affeto - So I look it up in other versions and here's Garanca in trousers running her hand over Barbara Bonney's boob. Tears in my eyes! 30 Hello Wednesday. Yesterday went shopping and listened to opera all day - watched opera all day - loving to see bodies sing - Garanca's grace of lightness - I can't stand either to see or hear the old warhorses, Sutherland, Callas, etc - these modern bodies are more natural in emotion, they glide into it, don't push themselves into it. As steals the morn upon the night And melts the shades away, So truth does fancy's charm dissolve, And melts the shades away. The fumes that did the mind involve, Restoring intellectual day. And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason Tempest Act 5 scene 1, Handel 1740 Should I stop this gorging on music? It says yes. - I went out this morning in little dolphin earrings, periwinkle cashmere with white collar showing, docs to make me taller - showing effort - wondering about mascara - and looked nice - and felt entitled - and so it seemed to be worth it - thought as I was walking back to the jeep, that maybe at this end of my life I should be as I was when I was 12, more intent on presenting - Envelope in my cabinet - $2500. Talked to Paul and now feel bad - as if I wanted something - he'll have noticed I'm lonely and he's not - feeling it more probably because it's a week later and my ankle is feeling like broken glass - is it going to be like that for the rest of my life? And something in my wrists. 31 I'm in DR17 and stuck not knowing how to extract, Should I try to find the philosophy in the time   Does it matter   YES Is solipsism right   Everything I see is me   There is no one else   no Should I be that inward again   no It was a creative time   Do you mean if I want to be more creative I have to be solipsistic   no Do you mean it's true I was solipsistic   New Years Eve - hammering at Richard's, sun, Tia's email asking where I was New Year's Eve 2000 - which sent me to GW19-1, where a paragraph about being with Tom in his room made me laugh, and having seen us together in love and faith makes my heart sore. Don't go there. A decade ago, a decade! It's very sharp   YES Will you lead me   adjustment, unconscious, heartbreak, come through I will never have that again   I will never be in love with a man again   I will never have intimacy and play again   no I will never have an open heart again   ?   I'll be nothing but guarded   no Why have we gone dead on each other   in crisis you chose friendship rather than early love Both did   If we'd chosen early love wd we still be together   By friendship you mean restraint   Was that better   NO   We did it because we want independence   no We did it because it's easier   Hopelessness   We had a chance   And blew it   Should we have lived together   no Fought more   Fucked more     Do you have advice now   act to graduate from friendship into quest (fool) Say more about quest   unconscious, mourning, illusion, of organization Be willing to mourn   no Go looking for the mourning   I do in the music   Clarissa Pinkola Estes 1990 Warming the stone child: myths and stories about abandonment and the unmothered child Sounds True Stones the ancient symbol of the real - the earth - the archetypal mother The flame within to burn very brightly A mother source within you that holds the heat continuously The soft way she says 'child' So I'm grieving now - what - I haven't been lonely and is that what this is - more like sad for failure in the chance there was - we had true something - I won't say love - we had true hunger for each other - and we didn't follow through - he was lazy, which means he didn't have enough faith or hope, he took shortcuts, sacrificed us to make things easy. I was guarded almost always, I expected to be betrayed and reserved what I felt could help me when that happened, a list of everything that makes him unworthy of me, plans for when I'm somewhere else. I fought and at some moment I stopped fighting, I decided I was alone. It wasn't something he did, the good moments in GW were when I balanced in ambivalence. I miss the strength I could have when I both loved him and couldn't trust him. The stab I felt when I saw the face he posted on Facebook, an old rocker with shades on, each lens covered over with a glitzy pattern. I felt - he's asserting the worst of himself, his willed self-blinding in the image of the badboy rocker, who can't see me and doesn't stay true-hearted with me. Evades. I can deflect the stab by thinking of his hunched back and poor withered rump - and other things - many - but what to do tonight. There's been so much grieving already, wasn't it enough? Why not?   child balancing in isolation and withdrawal The balance I've been feeling is pathological   no But mourn when it's there   I'm afraid it will make me weaken   Will it   no We'll stay separated until he has a job   And then I'll tell him it's permanent   And let him go with love   And years from now I'll be able to read GW with relief not anguish   Are you sure   part 4 in america volume 19: 2009-2010 october-february work & days: a lifetime journal project