| in america 2 part 4 - 2003 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
26 June 2003 Notebook 1999 - 2000. I forget so much of the emotional learning - it's transient structure - I don't maintain it - I don't accumulate it - so is it real work? (Twirls.) You mean not yet? It would be if the story were told. - I intended to go downtown and buy new Converse sneakers. Waited with Pat and Katie for my check. Katie was praising me. Pat had had a rumble with Pearl and won and looked glinty. I folded the envelope and put it in my back pocket and got on the bike and zipped downhill on 5th. As I got close to Tom's new hotel I wondered whether I was cutting it close to his 4 o'clock going-home time. There was his car where I saw it yesterday. There he was in the driver's seat in a grey shirt and grey tie. He saw me and looked away. I stopped, squatting on the sidewalk by his open car door. First day I'm wearing a muscle shirt. Black, black jeans, dirty red sneakers. How are you doing? I was fine 'til a moment ago. I'm almost out of gas but we can go to the ocean, he says. Almost out of gas, I thought. Still that. We're parked on the embarcadero. I see water moving and glinting in frames of the fence, trapezoids. He is in his pressing, selling state. I love you. I think you love me too. I won't do it any more. I go into the thick grieved resistance that can do very little but hold against what I want to trust and do not trust. I have a bit of motion but I'm also careful of his feelings, several ways bound. He said I dumped him because he doesn't fit into my next move. I agreed. Earlier I said he'd attacked my genius from the beginning, always. He denied it. I said he didn't do it intentionally, he was just doing what he needed to do to be more comfortable. He denied it. Those two declarations were where we got real. He had other grievances. He said I changed. I stopped wanting to do what I did before, I am enlisted in Nora's and Eliz's corrupt lives. I said I would think about whether that was true, and that yes I need to get more money and have my own place, but what I really need is to get to what I've been gutless about, publishing. And not doing UCSD is that too. I'm holding back. That's what I have to be alone for. To find how to not hold back. Is that true? It seems to me it is. It's true I dumped him because he doesn't fit in the next thing. Katie said, You did that didn't you, you had to be free. But even now if the book said I should stay and try more, I would. He saw me depending on these women rather than him. That hurt his feelings. I didn't say, But Tom you don't have money for gas, you want to borrow money from me, it has been like that from the beginning, you don't have money, you don't take care. That was his second grievance. He asked to stay with me in this little room and I said no. I didn't say, I refused to let your financial disorder jeopardize my credibility. So does it come down to his financial disorder? It says no. There is something it comes down to. For me it comes down to lack of real love. If I felt real love from him could I stay? Yes. What has held me back is the fight to stay where I'm not loved. It told me to stay 'til I understood that I'm not loved. If he really loved me he'd be financially provident. He would care to arrange a life in which we could be clear together. I can't make him love me because he doesn't have love in him. This afternoon he only cared about losing my help. He has never cared to defend and promote my spirit, or his own either. Or his own either. This is quite basic: Tom's actual love is shown in how he spends his money. That's why I cut off when he wants to sponge off me. He would never agree to this. This is the rind for Tom - it's where he doesn't come through. 27 When I lay down at night I was aching in the cunt - turned on by Tom, I think - I had been sitting with him in the car looking at him with mostly unconscious desire. He took off his silk tie and rolled it, unbuttoned his cuffs and turned them. He looked beautiful, brown and silver. When I was out of the car to go back to my bicycle he was looking up at me with a beautiful look of puzzled hurt. "I can't believe this is the end." What I was saying at night when my solar vibrated with distress at leaving him was that I want him, I've always wanted him, but I have stopped letting my desire get me yelled at, endangered, seduced, pressured, consumed. 28 He phoned yesterday morning, said we weren't done talking. In late afternoon was sitting with me on the roof where in all my time here I've never sat. In part one we were not shifted. He said yes. I said no. He said, We're those two crows. There were two crows on the edge of the Lips Club roof opposite. He followed, she walked away. "Come on Ellie." "No. No. No. No. No." We watched this proceed on a long stretch of the wall. Then he jumped up and flapped away. She turned and walked back the way she'd come, pecking. In part two I said both of us should turn it over. We were sitting inside. He suddenly said he thinks he'll move back to the Quinta. A little house by the beach, $500 a month. Oscar wants him. Telling me shifted him. He stretched his arms and legs, unfolded. I thought, Yes he's taking his life back, going his way. I could visit him there. He could step out his door and see the ocean and sky. He'd be out of my hair. At the end he sat across the room smiling into my eyes. We were saying, Yes it's alright, this is the way, I'm not mad at you any more. When he left he looked young. He was walking differently - was he? He was cut loose but not cut off. He doesn't have to lock down. The one who is leaving hasn't died. She hasn't given in to what he has to say but doesn't believe. He hasn't betrayed her. He has been callous and rough but he hasn't spoiled everything. So that was well done and you did it. And today riding to Lakeside and then Buena Creek, riding, riding, I was sad but not hurt. At Lakeside the first thing I saw was the van Houttei at the corner, full and fair, dark red flowers over the dark green whole. It was next to a loaded peach tree. What else - a dark purple salvia, the giant Burmese honeysuckle on the fence. The surviving callistemon by the pond. The artichoke. Gazanias filled in around the copper New Zealand flax. Cory and Shannon are happy. Everything thrived. Everything's lush and tidy. I taught them to see and lay hands on plants. I said, Give it a shake, let it untangle itself, take out the crossing branches - see, these are the ones the plant is giving up on. Such mild good-humored people. Safe. Everything around them is luxury not necessity. They have dogs and fish not children. Cory plays fifties music and misses his dad. The Dodge Durango rides high and silent in the fast lane passing everything without seeming to speed. It's a long childhood, affectionate and secure. Compare José Luis's house where the rent is often late but the landlord trusts them. Every corner is full of stuff they may need or they may be able to use to make a bit of money. The carpet is dirty because it's second-hand and would cost money to clean. And more than that, there has never been free time in which to feel that one wants clean open space with light. Leo said to his wife as they stood in my small space, Clean, clean. I said, defending her, It's easy to have a clean house when you don't have children. But seeing José Luis's house I realized she's closer to the village than he wants to be. Louie said, What you are describing is very familiar to me, there's disappointment that you are more different than you thought. Leo's beautiful daughters. His wife Blanca Stella with her strong Michochan profile and fine shining hair. Leo is Sinaloan. His brother Jésus sat opposite wearing a clean teeshirt, yellow snakeskin boots and a gold medallion on a chain. We three sat eating together while Blanca Stella did things at the counter and the girls were in and out, Ramón in the high chair. This was in a Latino building with a courtyard on 53rd in Chula Vista. As we sat at the table men would appear at the kitchen window and speak to Leo through the screen. Startling to hear myself called la señora. Leo said after the meal, This is my life. I work for this. I am frustrate I don't do more. I am the one who is hard. The children say, my sister, my brother, my baby, with a naturalness that kept surprising me. In my family we were never that uncomplicated about each other. When Blanca Stella drove me home the three kids were in a row in the back seat, one black-haired girl in pink and white on either side the baby seat with Ramón. The two of them were silent looking at the lights. Their eyelids fell. 29 I said, Here's another way to think of it. The eight years I've been with you have been a detour for me. You needed me and you caught me. I stayed as long as I could. I really fought to be able to stay with you. I couldn't have tried harder. But now I have to go back to my own planet. He was crying, I was crying. I was seeing an eye in a road. The left side was the one I took instead of my own path. But now I've rejoined my own. He said he's been a good dog and I've abandoned him on the center strip of the freeway. T: What has always angered me is my own sense of intelligence and perception. My own intelligence and perception are equal but of a countering form. I've discovered that my intelligence and perception have been misdirected, actually are operating on a lower level than yours. Angered at my own self deception. That I have the capability to be clearer than I am. What else can I expect when I have had an entire life - I've thrown all the selves that I shouldn't be at all in front of the real self to protect it. What do you give up to not be abandoned again? In what area are you not selfish enough? Standing up for my sense of the world. In what ways have you not been standing up for your sense of the world with me? Configure all aspects of my being to fit all the barnacles and concavities of your way of being. You are always trying to obfuscate it with psychology. We'd just be two conglomerations of self-absorbed matter in the void, we wouldn't be beings. I am very memorious. I can remember with certainty my 2nd birthday. In all these memories I have always felt full and complete opposition to everything that has been coming at me. The feeling that I truly have is unconditional love. Every time I have tried to do it I run the risk of being taken advantage of or misjudged. I have been desired. Women have desired me and men have desired me, and I've had to be very careful not to go too far or I'd find myself trapped. My own sense of what it is to be a man. I really want to be gentle and open. I've despaired of a world where that doesn't have to be the case. To allow me just to be that undefended love energy. When it gets hurt or misunderstood, then is where I snap into the ways I have of defending - behind that there is the same unconditional bundle of loving energy. All these things we've trained ourselves to do. We've allowed all our defenses to bring us to a state of exhaustion. If our energy got together that wouldn't deter you from being autonomous. I actually have made that jump. My trueness to you is being demonstrated. E: Writes: What he's saying is total bullshit. [What I didn't yet know is that he had been using meth for 3 years and not telling me.] Says: What matters is going the right way, not getting back together. (Burst of anger.) I know how to resist you now.
Writes: No way am I going to have undefended love for this man again. I'm right in that. Says: I want to turn it over to the best possible option. T: My fear is that I wouldn't have the same degree of attention and affection. I wouldn't have the same degree of value to you that I think I deserve.
E: You are pressuring me. T: You are the one who is walking away from me. I am never going to have the kind of care and attention from you that I've had. You're gone. That devastates me. I was living in paradise and I feel like I'm being kicked out of Eden. I'm wondering whether I deserved that. I'm in despair that I'm ever going to feel that sense of well-being again. I feel that attention dying. I wonder whether I'll survive. I might just remain stagnant at this exact level if I don't have that love and care directed at me. There is huge regret that I wasn't able to do for you what I thought that I was doing or could do. That at the end of all my efforts and hopes, instead of having you happy and joyful you are in this state where you don't trust me. My feelings toward you are the same as they always were. I failed you. I'm wondering if we're not still there. If that can't be the case then I'll turn it over. People aren't rejected unless they've failed. I'm feeling I've been judged and found wanting. It means that I'm not essentially a good person. I certainly have been a good person with you. I am willing to turn it over. I always want to have you as a certainty in my life. The only person in my life who has truly recognized me. Vancouver 2nd of July Louie's orange room. Rowen asleep on the sofa. The mountain is where in other places sky would be. Level gaze stopped at furred grey-blue. There's Louie's voice on the phone, conducting biz. Is there anything wants saying - Eliz's ass. The moment next to Bill's wall in the alley. She was climbing to reach apricots and stuck halfway up. I set my broad strong shoulder under her rump and said, Keep going. There was her round hard bum above me in its fitted khaki slims, and then she handed down luminous live-skinned apricots, coppery-gold, hard at one end, soft on the other. And at the airport there it was as she lifted her arms to Rick Peters - apricot-shaped, heart-shaped, under her little band of skin, as Rick's hand grazed the base of her back, not touching where it ought to, holding back. I've had that fascinated fix on Katie's body too, Katie my fan, who came from around the desk yesterday to hug me goodbye, and said, You look beautiful. I was traveling in the Mali glass beads, turquoise, and was brown from an hour on Pacific Beach the day before. And Rowen is sloping about in broader shoulders with longer limbs, beautiful in the line of his cheek and in the softness of his mouth. Besides glimmering lust is there anything that wants saying - the strange couple sitting behind me at gate 21 in San Francisco. A small German man in glasses, who looked a boy of 15. Jean jacket and suit pants, owl glasses. A large pale-orange cow of a woman, big watered-blue eyes, very thin orange hair pinned into a chignon with no volume, big sloping bosom and big freckled arms, thick body in a thin pale yellow fabric. And the result of their combination, a paste-white little girl with a bullish little face, stomping on her mother's toe repeatedly. You're standing on my toe again! You're doing it on purpose! NO I'M NOT! The man avid to be far away from the two of them, the woman helpless in denial of her victimization. I said, It's hell traveling with kids. She made excuses for her child. "She's normally a wonderful child. She's just being three and a half. She's having an off day." Friday 4th Louie is having a fit about her ambition's next move, which is large. She resents me for not having talked her through it. If I am in a room with her I feel so hateful a vibe that I need to leave. There's a lot of time going into Rowen's math and math prep. Rowen is a slender person in new black jeans and teeshirt and sandals. Yesterday I gave him tea and we worked through two weeks of material. I don't have a car or a bike here. Don't like trudging. It makes my legs ache. Trudging from the bus carrying groceries. Don't have a desk in my room. What I have to do - evals and final letters. Make up two workshops for the res. Intro to the uncon. I have to say this: at Rowen's age I had graduated from grade twelve with an average of 92% in six subjects, I lived by myself, made my own money, set my own plans and had no support or coaching from anyone. Rowen cannot organize to pack his stuff for a journey, he's porridge-brained. He walks around drooped over in his bad clothes though I have bought him new ones. He needs help thinking his way through almost every step in a day. I am exasperated with the labour. Exasperated. 6 I panicked yesterday. This morning the room blazed orange and the roofs stood blue in great open silence. I read my printed sheets of Work and days. Rowen working algebra problems, his bare feet writhing together under the table. Goals we agreed on:
What happened last night. Talking to Louie my panic about Rowen increased as if she was somehow a means of setting up a screaming feedback loop. I couldn't bear it and fled. She held it against me and stood there at the counter this morning putting her spoons and forks into their individual slots in a tight hateful way that sent me back to my room 'til she'd cleared out. 7 There has been so much said I am discouraged with saying. My homelessness and tasklessness won't be resolved by any saying. No one can help. I'm my own fault. What else - hearing Louie on the phone - the sound of social calculation - the sound of it. I don't want to attack her for it, I turn away. Rowen's helplessness in math. I don't understand it. I don't understand what happened to his brain. How can it be that destroyed? It's like cheese, structureless. Those are two things I don't want to feel. What else. Worry about money, car, the blank of the next stretch, an ambition I don't believe and no road connecting me with it. What feels like lostness. It took 30 years to build the life I had. I've cut myself loose from it and am nowhere. Nowhere and without desire. No - bursts of desire that aren't sustained and connected. I can find notes about them, assemble them, but notes of desire never propel me. This isn't right. I'm not living right. I want to say I'm wrong to live loveless, but I'm at the end of throwing myself into love. It's soul dryness. Alright, that tells me what to do. Take care of what should be taken care of, watch and pray. Is that it? Wait on a real self, wait on a real life. I went looking for this disaffection. 11 What is it with Louie - I thought we'd always love each other but we are grimly indifferent. I'm uneasy in my will to use her place as if it's mine - need and uneasy will. She is angry that my use of it doesn't give her power over my affections - is that accurate? I think so. I am here using her beautiful place and I still find her dull and ugly in her chosen life, which funds this place that I'm using parasitically. Is it parasitically? It says no because I make a contribution in a larger way, both to her and to what she values. I need to be careful on that line though. She's dull and ugly because she slogs at yoga I believe for the wrong reason and in the wrong way. If she were doing it in search of her true central value, which is love liberated, she'd be illuminated. She wouldn't tolerate that lump of dyed hair solid on the back of her head. She wouldn't wear teeshirts with logos on them or nylon leggings with little zippers. She wouldn't grease students with well-wishing clichés or file her cutlery in individual slots. Control, control, control slathered over with an obliging manner. Fight. It's your training and your easiest power. Don't consent to let yourself go solid in control. What else - yesterday at the end of the math session Rowen was starting to lose it and I was pushing to go through the flashcards once more. He jumped behind the armchair, the jade plant, the marble-topped counter, and gave his answers in a little Golem voice. "Smigol thinks the answer might be ... fifty-four." Muttering behind the armchair, "Bad hobbitses make question too hard ... is sixty-three, master." Peeping over the top of the counter, clean brown eyes, "... is one hundred forty-four, precioussss ..." 12 Garden work party - Muggs, Brian, Joanne, Hertha, Bell, Kiumi, Rick, Susan, many new people. I was sitting on the path outside the herb garden. Brian came through, and as he passed he said, "devoted focus." He meant me. The word devoted surprised me. I wondered whether he meant more than the weeding, whether he saw something general. Maybe he was stoned, I thought. Later in the afternoon I was weeding the edges of the middle path through the espalier rows to the garden house. A reddish middle-aged man carrying a plant looked at me and said "devoted." Just that. And then when I stared at him, "It doesn't go unnoticed." I was very startled. What world am I in? Rowen in his cap was working with the plant sale people. I worked on my own like always but around me was all the comfortable doing and saying of the garden work party. At four it rained and we were standing under the end of the vinewalk looking at the seafoam next to the kids' area boat and across the way in the wild area edge. The size of the trees. The remaining white pines behind the herb garden reaching their silky arms. The birches and hemlocks at the junction of the orchard and wild area. Firs, cedar, hemlock at the foot of the orchard that a treeplanter set as 5 inch plugs. The snow eucalyptus rising over the wild area edge. The black pines on the berm. The extraordinary cottonwoods, giants posted at main gate, NW corner, SW corner, compost entrance, and wild area north edge. (At Cottonwood Garden eagles hatched a chick in a cottonwood Susan said.) Walking in the rain, soaked, looking at the trees, I was feeling how unfamiliar they made the space and how amazingly rich it is. Three weeks 'til Vermont, two weeks after - five weeks for Rowen. 17 Is there anything to say. Thursday morning. Rowen is late. I've been transcribing parts of May-Nov 2001. The manuscript needed earlier stuff. 18 Silence here. I am not feeling to write. The world is beautiful at the windows but I don't feel it. I feel Rowen, some. I'm sacrificial, which isn't good for me I guess. It empties me. This summer is my gift to Rowen. He does not give back. Rowen does not like me. He likes Louie. He doesn't feel physical attachment to me like he did. He comes in looking lovely in clothes I bought him. I feed him morning and night. Pocket money. Mathematical success. Afternoon - I'm pining for something - as if for Tom - really for attachment itself - this hollow-heartedness. I go from there to the beginning of this volume. Am I going to find out what's wrong with me, why I don't have any fight - or hope - or intention. When I'd written that, Louie came home and we sat in the dark. She listened. I said I'm ashamed that my time is empty. I had a very sore heart. Why, she said. I think it's because I'm wasted, I said. I sighed. It's my fault. I don't fight for my work. This is the waiting on and on. I said I haven't done anything in the almost-year I've been in San Diego. She said, Are you sure? I said [college] students, garden, Tom, are something but they are not relevant. What would be relevant? Writing and publishing. Brain and imagining, Brain and metaphor, Leaving the land were relevant. Writing Being about and putting it on the web were relevant. I do what I do, hold off and put my large work energy into studying myself, and there it stops. 21 Transcribed this book up to leaving SD. It is Sunday afternoon. Rowen this morning did three sections of graphs, three hours straight. Kept going after I said he could stop. I worked alongside him and intervened almost not at all. He likes graphs. He was a serious beautiful boy doing homework at a table in a beautiful house. I was typing on the laptop in the red armchair. There was sun on the floor and burning in the green wall of balcony plants. Typing Tom's soliloquy moved me. There he is bare and clear, the one I adored, longed for, worked for, my mate, my true love, Tom. There he was for a moment. Fauré. The thin floating lines of his voices. These funeral songs. This is what I need to feel. Raw loss. I found him. I lost him again.
I was standing at the sink after transcribing the voice of true Tom and thought, maybe later we'll be together again. There I felt a small return of happiness. Ah - I thought - that's where happiness is. In the bookwork opposite I see love woman turn into work woman, the handwriting tightens.
22 I said to Louie, it isn't power that corrupts you, it is a pre-existing corruption you bring to power. The corruption is your training. 23 Keith Jardine was next to the front door talking to Richard. He said something like, Your ideas are important, and invited me to write a paragraph to give him so he can give it to someone he wants me to meet. I don't really like Keith, he is too universal in his appreciation, but I like his hustle in giving himself a life, and I like his more-than-local scope. Chipping at Atlas shrugged pondering the way it names what was my born ethic, and in that way seems wonderful, and at the same time is such a bodice-ripper. The gloriously handsome man carrying her in his arms up a trail to a cabin, his copper-colored hair and emerald-green eyes, his hard body, and so on. Her and his volcanic lust, the way they are each other's pinnacles of respect, and love each other in confident admiration. I suppose what I wonder is whether she's right in the first and wrong in the second. Ayn Rand 1957 Atlas shrugged Random House I can see I learned from her when I was 18 - for instance Carmichael was my idea of the hero and I was wrong about him, very. Have I ever met an admirable man? That shouldn't be the question though. The question should be whether the desire to love in that way is wrong. It says it's correct. That's the truth of what one wants. Anything else is despair and self division. I do want someone to be magnificent, first for his own reasons and then to be able to win me. In light of that, is unconditional love a kind of truth? Which says, This is what is, which isn't what I want. I love what is because it's that; loving it is being willing to know it. So one has to hold what one wants and hold the fact of what is, equally, with no blurring - is that it? They are reciprocals of each other. What's the challenge in this book - people's hatred of clarity and courage is true - I've experienced it from the beginning - I have also been on strike in some ways - if you won't honour me for what's best in me I won't beg your favor by flattering you - what I ran into with Phil and Kathleen was still that - jealousy and lack of courage. Her vision of intelligence is industrial - it was written before Carson started talking about pollution - her characters are always lighting cigarettes - and her creed disregards child-raising, she has no clue what sort of gifts of time and self there would have to be to make the heroes she describes. Shevek is an Ayn Rand character without these blind spots. Do I have that sense of refusal and looters though? "I went out to become a flame-spotter," "took the lowest jobs they could find ... continued in his real profession sharing nothing" - "profits made by force, by government favors, subsidies, moratoriums, directives" - "a fat, soggy, mindless cripple performing his enjoyment of life by swallowing the gin your life has gone to pay for." "... what greater wealth than to own your life and spend it on growing," "our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence," "lassitude which is not laziness but the frustration of the will to a secret violence that no lesser action can satisfy ... when nothing seems worth the effort it's a screen to hide a wish that's worth too much." What an acid she has for feeling or intuition: "he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard!" "I, who know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one's power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art." All she ignores - the relation of industry and war, for instance. "two tall, straight, slender figures" "her body had become a screen for the direct perception of his" "that rarest of pleasures, admiration" "this struggle through the fog of the pretended and unacknowledged" "never to be at the mercy of the good faith of another person or at the mercy of a promise that can't be enforced" "my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you" "a code that told them to act on the premise of one another's weakness, deceit and stupidity" She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it - they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden - yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it. Louie said, You've wanted to learn, meaning that the reason one doesn't hold the ideal is because one wants to enter worlds of experience rather than not. That intransigent valuing of the possibilities of one's own life - "I will never live for the sake of another man, or ask another man to live for mine." - Natural world as venue for action/intelligence. Is its integrity necessary for intelligence?
What are the implications of the fact that intelligence is evolved in relation to the physical world? Why hasn't this been obvious, why isn't it a universal value? Can preservation and restoration projects be helped by this understanding?
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