in america volume 21 part 4 - 2010 september-november

work & days: a lifetime journal project

15 September 2010 Pay deposit, $400 straight to jeep insurance, $280 to Visa Green, $150 to iPage, $100 to David for Mary's plants. What's the matter with my online access - sites that don't load, more hitch, same in both Safari and Firefox - playlist and soaps stutter - playlist doubles - Bocelli with Terfel singing the Pearl Fishers' duet - a moment when they're both singing full blast and he suddenly turns to Terfel for an instant, sings at him, then turns quickly away again as if correcting himself. Near the end of the song he reaches his arm to hold Terfel's shoulder. Terfel is awkward, doesn't know how to respond. These moments make us imagine what it is like to be a blind body everyone can see, so that he always seems to be singing his vulnerability, where his partner in the duet is singing protected by eyes. Bocelli as if inside himself. 16 Consolation of shopping - library closed on Saturday now - Goodwill - new plaid shirt because the green one has gone through the elbow - this one is blue - green cotton workshirt to replace the faded linen one, this one the blue-ish green of the roadrunner cap - a radio to listen to in bed - a lidless stainless steel pot - that my glass lid just fits. Tea jar refilled. 17 I and others approaching the East Place from the west. I say to Judie, look at that, the way the poplars on the hill are retreeing the prairie, slowly, in pretty order, moving down the slope. There's a little house. We've come because we've heard it's for sale. Wire fence with at least 6 strands, like a buffalo fence, but there's someone at the open door. Is this house for sale? Can't tell whether the answer is yes or no but we're let in when the senior man, a little wrinkly bald one, comes to ask. It's one large room, white plaster. A lot of faded embroidered rugs like the one I had in Luke's room and saw on slides last night. Beds in the corners. It's like a peasant house in Russia? Very simple and plain, deep sills on small windows. We're going upstairs. Why is there an upstairs if the beds are down here? Upstairs is a large open plaza with many people in Bohemian costume - Russian? - gathered for a celebration. I'm into C and T in DR4. When I cut my hair I plunge into abjection. They cut me off - I don't know which happens first. I go to London to strengthen myself. Take photos of a kind influenced by them. Sarah, JoAnn, Tony, Sal, Rose English. Take Trapline to the Arts Council. The lyricism takes care of itself but the abjection still needs me - everything I am vanishes when I'm with people who don't see me, isn't that remarkable? It's the node in the time, letting go of my hair, seductive self. It was dangerous, the seductive self gave me well-being. It was connected to early love, I have energy when people find me glamorous. The abject self happened irrevocably. Stunned with strange people. Blanked. I wanted to let that blanked self speak. It did. So it was brave, it was correct, and it was unfinished. - I was always doing so much more than anyone in that group knew, I was working in so many discourses. I had so many frames I kept active. Cheryl was most like that, which was why I needed her. She wasn't as broad, she was more adapted, but was she doing something similar? She was ambitious, she was looking for a breakthrough. Her node was the harsh mother. Do you approve of her success?    no She stopped short   Went back   I did too   If she hadn't stopped short she'd work in early love   If I hadn't stopped short I'd work in early love?     no I'd have myself with strangers    YES This really is the kernel    YES I tried to work on it with Tom    no That was something else   So now there's this last shift    YES   Trudy's is controlling the mother    YES To hold preference   She has never let go of that     The dream is about family of origin in me   Integrated on the ground floor   Cultural above that   Intellectually   I don't have myself with strangers because I went alone   Later I learned to make people be my mother by seducing them   I don't do that anymore    YES But I haven't worked through abjection    YES Free speed is acid self   That's what I was looking for    YES What happened in the end with Tom was stranger-blank   Stranger-blank is what has kept me from money   Is there anything you want to say    no The s word is about flow     Is there something beautiful I can make of this   Is it worth doing    YES Is it more important than Alberta    no Is it Orpheus   That visuality   A film    no A book    no A DVD   Writing and images   Voices   Can you imagine a form   Can I   HD   Wd it take 10 years    no Less    no More   Do I have time     YES Do you want me to do this    YES   She: Lady: was that you    YES I started to call you then   Before I met them, wasn't it    YES Did you bring them   Are you Artemis observing air   20 I was getting ready to leave my apartment. There were two cats, black cats, curled asleep on the refrigerator. I left them some cubed raw steak as a goodbye present. The question was whether I would leave an open window when I went away. I was assuming they were going to die, but should I give them a chance. Then I was packing, only as many things as could fit into a large basket. I was going away to my own death, and had the same question for myself, was it possible that I'd go on living. There had been some kind of plan to meet Tom, but I noticed I wasn't contacting him. Does the dream signify danger     no Does my body want to die     no Can I die of loneliness     no Is my will to live low    no - Then an invitation from Daichi - Montreal next winter - who wd I show alongside - Chantal? Lis? Brakhage autopsy? Rimmer? Phil's River? Attention to - 30 min Brigit Riley 21 Lagging, don't want to do Diedre - not working, refusing - went to Whole Foods for chocolate cake, which was perfect - 22 Anguished Bridie who insists she's a woman, is a eunuch, and can't know herself for fear of crushing depression. [sketch of Korphe School] 23 Angela Hewitt on DVD lecturing on how to play Bach. She's a master of something difficult, and she presents herself in a way that makes me wince at every moment. Red mouth, face paint that doesn't cover the wear under her eyes, high heels and black stockings, her slick red mouth moving oddly when she speaks, her t's much too pronounced. Professional deformation trying to look like what she is not at all - she is grotesque at the same time as being wonderful in what she does best. Couldn't she show herself as what she is now, a worn professional with lifelong sensitive discipline that has cost her all her natural ease. No makeup, comfortable clothes, grey hair and wonky passion, hasn't she earned that? Bought the Vogue Hommes issue featuring older men because I wanted images of how I could look as an old master of something. - Working from the separate acid page in DR5, April 1977, must have been written later but close enough to have the rhythm. I was halfway down and began to read aloud, was in its free speed, really in it, a delighted self. Laughing. Now wondering whether I could use remembering that state to find decisions that would organize me to live there. You like it    YES Could I    YES Could I live there    YES Wd it be living as you    no Can I do it when I'm working on students    no Could I do it and still have loved ones like Luke    YES Is it my real self    YES Is it my mother's real self    no Anyone    YES Trudy   Should I see her when I'm in Montreal    no It's the state that should evaluate the journal   As junk    no Can I go in and out of it    YES Shd I bring the glass thing here    YES Can I get the housetruck within 3 years    no 5 Will I still be able at 70    YES   Was eating that much bread harmful    no Helpful   Physically    no Playfully    YES Do you think the sketchbook is a good idea    YES Suggestions?    honest, search, perceptual, readiness/alertness Yes    YES Anywhere?    no Things I actually want to see better    no Where I wd normally read a newspaper    no 24 A good Sunday. There was sun after weeks and it was mild sweet sun. I was riding from Whole Foods to take my Balboa Park loop from the north and went to stare at the house covered ground to eaves with succulents. Took off my sunglasses and they stayed off. Rode the streets closest to the canyon and took the steps down. It was so quiet. There were a few birds jumping on the ground. Smell of mud, grass bent where water had recently been. A path, a slope, three Cleveland sage shrubs, an oak tree, eucalyptus leaves under the tire. And then I didn't climb the asphalt slope past the bridge, but took the bridle path I'd never tried and came up a long switchback that emerged at the lawn bowling court, where I sat on a bench reading the Times magazine women's empowerment issue. Young American woman in rural Nepal using her college savings to build a shelter for orphans: But now Cosmo Girl was on the phone, telling her that she had won a $20,000 prize for her work, financed by Maybelline. Doyne could now pay to add second and third floors to her shelter and bring in more homeless orphans. "It gets even better!" the woman on the phone went on excitedly. "We're going to whisk you away to New York for a Maybelline makeover!" And then went home to my couch in the 3 o'clock sun, window wide open, and slept. Began long ago working on the acid page. - Thought to check Michel de Salaberry just now and found him in a Radio Canada interview talking about Canadian relations with the Middle East - former Canadian ambassador to. And then I found Greg - began to - note in the Brockville Recorder and Times that he volunteers in IT at the Augusta Township Public Library. Looking at the map reading old Ontario names, Smith Falls, Napanee, Belleville, Trenton, Perth, Picton, Cornwall, names Ban Righ 3 girls came from, and then later the accreting sense of them as Upper Canada landscape. Then I wonder about Norman MacLeod and marvel at the way friends in that period drop out of sight and I don't ask where they went. He was at the University of Beirut the semester I went to Europe and after that, when he didn't come back I never thought of him again? 25 Accreting sense of them as Upper Canada landscape doesn't at all say what I had in my head, which was unsayable - what I felt standing on campus eighteen years old in the fall of 1963, the golden light among thick-trunked trees and old stone buildings. Solidity. And then later the rocky farms and in town the poorer streets with their decrepit hovels whose floors slope. The east Ontario feel. The smell of Cooke's oiled floor and its high ceiling. Presence of the 1700s. Greg still living amid all of that. Thinking of it I marvel somehow, but at what. It's very obscure, it's wondering at people living at home in that richness - something like that, as if the air in the west is thin and that thinness is normal to me so that rich air seems overwhelming. Faculty eval from R this morning written so poorly, showing so unformed a mind. She pastes chunks of what's in front of her and doesn't have judgment of relative importance or any eagerness of her own. If she were a student I'd be all over her. And she teaches writing at a community college -. Having her for program director is another loneliness. It's raining again today. A dream with something about the slant of numbers. | \ / | \ | / | \ | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 - What shd I do about Kristyn. She's so weak. Does she have to be that weak?   She needs therapy   Is there anything I can do for her    no Is there anything you want to tell her    no She's a baby    YES 26 Strong letter to the G&F board - sent it to a secretary who said she will distribute it. Had it written on the weekend but remembered to send it this morning after a long talk with Louie, for instance about Rowen. I came to understand something, that it's correct for him not to thank me. And at the same time that if he screws up the boat I should send the rest of the money to Nepalese orphans. Have been feeling he has a hook in me and hating the feeling - I mean because he's been so cavalier about the boat, says he'll phone and doesn't, isn't using it. That came up when we were talking about teaching, the lonely desire to make a student be like us so we'll have company. And then discouragement when they become like someone else. And Rowen, I'm trying to fix him so I don't have to be ashamed of making him. I suppose other parents feel that shame which comes with the too-much power of making children. Shame I have to go on with. For Rowen it is now his best bet at revenge he doesn't want to know he needs. So if I don't want him sabotaging himself to get even with me I should back off altogether. It's too late to 'support' him now. Is it? 27 Long tattered nights that used to be short and solid. A lot of dreaming. Somewhere in a country like Mexico going through neat small back yards toward a market, stopping to look at a construction like a wide center-pivoting gate swinging a bit and holding trained vines I decided must be peas. Arriving in the market looking at enamel teapots, I pick one up to buy it, see it has holes all over. Flower pot? Later on a many-storied house I've visited before, showing it to a young couple. It's a house that has a lot of books. In this bookcase on the second floor the books have all been re-covered since I was here last. The young man opens a door into a room I assumed wd be empty and there's a man working at a table facing the door. I won't go up the stairs to the interesting third floor this time but tell them to go up. Earlier I'm cleaning up a piece of land that has garbage dumped on it. A woman helping me is driving off with very little on the truck, and what she has not sorted. My idea was to load the old tins separately so they could be recycled. - Writing this junk just as a way of recalling it, seeing whether I can recall it. Is it completely junk? The facts are; some of the images maybe not. A door opening unexpectedly on a man at a table with many books and papers, who looks up when the door is opened. He's late middle-aged like me and wearing glasses. It's a neutral look from someone working. Familiarity in dreams. The sense of remembering that house from other dreams very definite but there's no way to be sure unless I've written them, and this one I know I haven't. Something about David, as if it was an old family's old house full of remnants of many times; and in other dreams - more than one I think - I've looked into chests and cupboards and read book titles. A particular aura, wonder in a deep of time. My new friend Herman Melville. I'm listening to Moby Dick in bed. Last night disk 4 of 20. Glad it's a long book. Ishmael a perfect narrator, thoughtful, friendly and curious in the way I know. He studies Queequeg from bed, fascinated and repelled, and by morning finds himself embraced by his strong arm checkered like the counterpane. A flexible young man, and Melville only ten years older the overmind who sets together self and unconscious body joined for a journey to come. It's not perfectly read, the reader is not as sensitive in rhythm as he should be, but it's vividly particular in New England about 1840. - M had read an account before he shipped on a whaler 1841-42. A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment on account of your understanding the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb. Ineffable sociabilities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling - no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content - that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. To Hawthorne a few days after publication, probably 17 Nov 1851. He was 32. Boston establishment, father died when he was 12, poor, studied classics. 18 months on the whaler when he was 22. Deserted in the Marquesas. Vehement opposition to missionaries in Hawaii. Married at 28, 4 children, farmed in Mass. Hawthorne lived nearby. "An intellectual loner for most of his life." At 44 moved to NY, customs inspector for 19 years. Alcoholic, beat his wife, two sons died badly. Buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Miserably unappreciated after Moby Dick. "Outran his readers." Billy Budd posthumous. Ahab is the whale. "What's his leg now but a cane." The cut-off bull patriarch. - The warm, kind air tonight after dark. Out on the bike because I hadn't been earlier. It's exercise I want - that's new, did I ever want exercise before. Stretching is a chore but the bike isn't, I love the uphill effort and the free sailing both. - Money worries. Had car insurance this pay period and other debts to cards, and ran out. I need to get ahead enough to be able to afford to go to Borrego. Am going to need to fix the G4 whose battery is gone and maybe worse. There's more tax being skimmed than before, and some going into the 301, is that what it's called, RA, every month. Result: I'm making nearly $2000 every four weeks and netting $500 less. It costs me 4x200 to eat, 60 for gas, 130 utilities, 30 for laundry, 110 for papers and coffee, 50 or maybe more for vitamins, which leaves about 300. The pension she said could take a full year, meaning there'll be 6240 when it does arrive? I can worry about Rowen then. Shd send some to VanCity every month, am paying interest, say $100/month. It means I'd have to save to go to Borrego or for digital transfers or clothes - can't go to London next summer. Ahab - "This lovely light, it lights not me." "I am madness." Oh God to sail with such a heathen crew. Oh life t'is now I feel the latent horror in thee. 29 Payday - I went on computer journeys, freeway lane changes at 70 mph, intrepidly, is that the word for the way I throw myself into the stream of missiles whose deadliness I ignore in almost a drowse, remarkably unalert. The transition is too sudden. 163 to Crywolf to buy a battery, then Fashion Valley to the Genius Bar to find out why there are so many sites I can't get to on the Mac Book, then home to back up the drive before they run a disk test. Then back to Crywolf on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard to buy a better adaptor, I thought, but now it's in the shop having its loose in-board fixed. Then Fashion Valley Apple store again to have them check the DSL function. It's fine on their cable, so now I was on the phone with a woman at Intergate who didn't know anything. It's going to cost $430 to fix this little G4 so I can finish W&D on it. I can get [some] toward it from [the college]. I'm worried about the election - looking at last night's Grey's Anatomy, an ad for Boxer by Obama, pang of anguish, the stupid are resurging. 30 A nice moment in a dream. I'm inside a ground floor window and see a tall nice-looking man with snow on his hair passing the corner. The woman with him catches my eye and we smile at each other. Something earlier about looking up and across to an attic window lit gold-red, the only window lit, this in an old part of town like Gastown, narrow streets near the harbour. - It was a good day when it started. I woke at 4 and went out on the bike before daybreak. Walked through the desert garden and went on to the park buildings above the Naval Hospital, found a beautiful garden, and a vista of the whole arc of the Coronado Bridge. It started to rain. My black turtleneck had a dew of rain all over it. Starbucks hot chocolate and the Times. And then back home not knowing what to do, because the G4 is still in the shop and I can't do PageMill on this one. Called Intergate again about what's wrong with web access. Long conversation, nothing worked etc. Slept. Was getting frantic, needing to do something, lonely. Nothing relevant to do. Went to the laundromat, glared at little children, on the edge of crying. Now I'm ftp-downloading, it is, pub_html, hours of it, on linksys wireless which happened to be there - Will you talk to me   pain courageous child, acting, to recover, from betrayal Staying with the loneliness you mean   I'm so isolated   There's no one who cares about me   There's no task that needs me   I feel like walking into danger and dying   I feel it will never end   I feel I've run out of life   I have no more will or interest   Do you want me to kill myself   Literally    no Will you explain    partial loss, (Kc), conflict, betrayal Is that about Tom    no Something about Art    no Will you explain (Kc)     slow growth, search, for action, and organization It's correct to have left Tom   He was a mistake    no But now there's nothing   I'm going to be this isolated until I die!   Shd I have done this instead of have Rowen   Does Rowen hate me     YES Does he know it    no Shd I drop him     no I want to, he's hurting me   I'm going to be this isolated until I die    YES It's punishment   For harming my kids     no For being faithful to my gift    no Self inflicted     no Are you punishing me    no I'm being punished for helping Tom (sobbing)    YES I'm at a complete dead end    yes I've worked hard with students   I've done my best for them   They're all too mediocre to use it   I took a wrong turn     no If I hadn't I wd not be pouring my work into vacuum   No one is using Being about   But it's good    YES No one is using Work & days   It's not good    YES But it's a good gift   Is this happening to me because I'm mediocre    no Because I'm smart     no It's a kind of accident     no It's happening because of my leg    no Because I'm old    no So is there a reason    NO There's no reason but it's not an accident     Will you lead me     partial loss, foolish, mother, balance My mother    no Description?   I don't understand   I'm always going to be this isolated   But something is going to get better   How    by acting with child's, illusion, and indecision Am I doing that   If I do that what will be better    overview, happiness, early love, child [Opposite: White light and creature eyes 'travels' - propagated change, a movement at a universal constant transverse not longitudinal 'immaterial' Should they think of light as substance? Newton "globular bodies" moving in ether, corpuscles Spectacle shop in Italy 1286 Telescope 1590 Galileo "I betook myself to observations of the heavenly bodies with incredible delight." The 17th century turned out to be tremendous in the history of light. 31st Hallowe'en night, four years since Tom moved into Georgia St, 15 years since he and I saw the ewe of god outside her fence and I stood joyful on the hillside in the dark while he smoked beside the Virgin. I was listening to KCRW in winter's better summer afternoon. Checked whether it wd be alright to phone Tom. How about next Sunday he said. Changed his mind, how about now. I took the bike. Sat on his walkway and weeded the pots. He needed to talk about the election. I still liked his voice and his hands but I asked questions and he didn't, and he needed to cut me off. I got up, said it was getting cold. He found me a sweater, said he'd walk me part way. We walked to the middle of the bridge - furthest I've walked in a year - and stood talking above the two-lane stream of southbound lights. He was doing what he does, selling. He was loud. He said he was more alive with me because I saw him in a way he always wanted to be seen. I said I believed that. He said he wants to be who I wanted him to be. I said I don't think so. I told him how it felt to look at the letters. We were telling different stories about how we were and how it is. My legs hurt, I gave him his sweater and got on the bike and rushed home. Made jokes with people on the sidewalk, happier even so. His worst moment he said when Bill commiserated with him. Did I tell Bill for just that moment of revenge, probably. Did he go home and realize he was selling and selling shuts me down    YES A little white china cat he's using as a doorstop, that has in marker on its base, Mac 1907 baby cat. She was born 1905. The ghost who turned my car lights off as we were driving back that night. Yes Mac I did look after your boy. You did right to catch me for him and now you're saying, Okay dear, it's alright to go. The photo I made of him with his mother in the back seat behind him. I did your work    YES You think he's okay now?    YES "I'm respectable" he said. He's okay now    YES And you are saying it's okay to go    YES You have other plans for him     Do you care about me    YES Do you have plans for me     no Not your job   Somebody else does    YES 1st Nov What is a mind? 1. Mind's root - body perceiving, adoring and acting 2. Mind's bloom - body imagining, inventing Mind's root animal minds tethered by world's coherence - interactional nervous system layout base level excellence of knowing Mind's bloom imagining representing body in art and science perilous invention - ideology, religion Something between clairvoyance self is body - Opening the visual work drawer, right away excited but halted. I don't know what it's for or where to enter it. It has to begin technically? With something made, and then many things tried? I want it to take me immediately into a zone of recognized eminence of a different kind. I want it to use my large store of beautiful materials, I don't want to die and have them trashed without being realized. I want an essence in visual/sound creation like I found in theory. I want it to be authoritative, not recessive the way I have been. I want to move out with it the way Gianfranco does, in love and trust rapidly. I want working on it to create stable presence in me. I want it to be mind and world firmly and freely united. I want it recognized in art contexts without conforming to art topics. I want to be able to defend it, speak from it, with recognizable grounded mastery. I want it to defend early love and best abstract intuition in people. Something about lit edges, using the brain knowledgably, finding and building capabilities of the body in relation to the universe. Competence and flair, flare. Slightness of means, that elegance. Cleanness. The sort of moment that has happened with Louie, when attention catches, like the jeep gearing down: this is intelligent, it's worth focus. A sensation of grip. The bit of writing Emilee felt it in, a jump in register, electrifying, something speaking through. Like the caustic gearing down in Trapline. Can I do that   Will you help me   Is it worth doing    no But it means bringing you through    YES Do you want me to do that   Can it be done visually too   Can you teach me how to do that     YES Now     no Am I right that I need to set up the technology first   Use Rowen's money when I can   Buy a camera    YES SLR   And tripod   But pay off the debt first   Learn FCP    YES In relation to the slides   [Opposite page] At more than four billion years old, it stretches a third of the way across the history of the universe, a third of the way back to the Big Bang itself. Many of the stars you can see on a clear winter's night are younger than the planet beneath your feet. For almost 90 percent of its history the planet has been inhabited and shaped by life. The biological mechanisms that first operated in the dawn of life animate the creatures of the Earth to this day, forming an unbroken chain at least 3.8 billion years long. Life has watched continents crash together and tear themselves apart; skeies glowing like bright coals; tropical seas frozen into stillness: it has endured. An unending spate of pure luminous energy pours from the Sun in all directions. Eight minutes downstream at the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent. Most is absorbed; this is the energy that drives the winds, makes the waves and currents flow, heats the rocks and warms the sky. A very small fraction of this energy is caught, not by rock and wind and water, but by life. It is this sunlight, endlessly refreshed, that flows through your coffee, your veins. The Earth is open to the sky. Energy from elsewhere floods through it shot through with the light of a continuous creation. Oliver Morton NY Times "Not-so-lonely planet" 2 After Tom thinking about the way I assume the worst about his motives with me - often others' too - and the way that has isolated me. I didn't do it when I was young, so how did I become that. By talking to myself one way rather than another. I love Tom and don't let myself love him because I'll be punished for it. The result has been that I have come to a stop since I've been here. I truly don't know whether I was correct or mistaken to stop myself. I hang onto criticisms to keep myself safe. - I can see that in a Buddhist way, as a mistaken unfreedom, but it goes back further than defense, to something wrong in the love. And there I'm muddled. He stops me, I stop myself, if I was in the free position I wd love him without wanting him and then I couldn't be punished. So I've taken it back to greed, but can I be love without desire? It says no. What scares me in loving (Tom)(anyone) I'm afraid of being fooled, lied to Of being despised for being ugly as a woman Of being refused sexually I'm afraid I'll be degraded mentally, made stupider Of losing my talent Of losing my way Of being bullied, attacked by rage Of being seduced for use Being despised for being a woman Being confused intentionally Being cheated on, abandoned, betrayed Being left to do all the processing work alone Of not being seen Not being heard Not being enjoyed, delighted in Not being welcomed Not being considered   Those are all reasonable fears. They all happened. Whether I loved him or not. Wd they have happened less if I'd loved him (freely)   So I was mistaken to stop myself    YES   So shd we try again    NO [Opposite: Robert Thurman and Tod Wise 1999 Circling the sacred mountain Bantam I don't and don't want to believe in reincarnation. I find the gods and rituals offensively elaborated, a junky fantasmagoria. At the same time the plain ethical core as I understand it seems what I've always thought. Reincarnation is false   But it's true that it's a privilege to be born human   It's better for us if we can regard all humans in early love as if they were our mother   It's good to be able to balance in contradiction   "Appreciative love of all beings," "a surge of joyful giving toward all beings" I wd want to die well just for its own sake. A life itself the highest art form. Tantric vows to never perceive anything as ordinary Doing what is good for all beings is the inherent ethic of an intelligent child. Critical wisdom and blissful compassion Yes desiring enlightenment for all beings What nonduality means, oneness and allness? "Present everywhere." And liberated by the everywhereness We can actually feel that we are all things, simultaneous with being normally present in the most helpful, positive way ... This is the central way. I don't understand what seems to be the equation of interdependency with unreality. I don't agree with the diagnosis as he describes it - something about ego-habit, defense, dissociation, yes, but the preachy names for it - it sounds like the scolding of a stupid parent The ineffectual praying 'Always' and 'never' - they aren't true descriptions - 'we' - no. Genuinely acknowledge the evil things, repenting, resolving, but further also seeing there was no need to do them. Is that true? How is it different with other people, the fac, people on the street, anyone. I don't desire them so I'm not in conflict. I'm not interested in them.   So is there a root of fear?     no A lack of energy    YES Is it correct    no Because it's not fun    YES Without desire is there a way to have energy   responsible, overview, of withdrawn, child The child is withdrawn because she expects no good from anyone   Is there a good I could expect    YES, a balance of honest aggression with withdrawal Because it's not indifference it's dislike    YES I can do that with students   Is there a way I can do that with people who aren't students    YES I don't think I understand    improve, action, to recover, from loss Are you saying help them    YES Do you want to say more about that    no - Barbara Boxer made it. Gerry Brown is governor. It's ten at night. Black open window. NBC on the big screen. Rowen phoned. He had unpacked - a girl helped him unpack and distribute into cupboards. The orange Guess towel made him think of Hitchhiker's guide to the universe. He loves the duvet and the double-pillow is cute. He had an A- in philosophy, a B+ in logic, in the 70s in anthropology, English. 4 Left a phone number and email address for Greg with a librarian who said he was in a meeting. A small town woman. Have been all day fussing with the site on iPage, moving pages around laboriously - MacBook to Cruzer to the G4 for PageMill and back and into Fetch and online to test and then again and again. It was 98 degrees, too hot to stand anywhere out of the shade. Gram and Emmy Lou Love hurts, I've put it on Facebook for Frank - for Tom too though I am not saying so - Jackson Browne - Tom thank you for so much music - There I spent some hours on a Tom-years playlist, which is making me remember Tom when he was open-hearted close to death, which has made me realize the Tom years have been my death years - Janeen, Frank, Joyce, Ed. There hadn't been deaths before that, not in my near zone. Tom playlist: Lovett Simple song Gram Hickory wind Dire Straits Telegraph road, Brothers in arms Springsteen I'm on fire Jackson Browne Fountain of sorrow Counting Crows A long December Ismael Lo Africa, Femme sans haine with Marianne Faithful Eagles Desperado, Take it to the limit Moby Willie and Emmy Lou Gulf Coast Highway Mortal Coil The jeweler Gillian Welch I want to sing that rock and roll Costa Pavlides Norah Jones Come away with me Sigur Ros Angels of the universe Cielo y Tierra Willie Nelson Across the borderline, American tune (Lovett, Simon) Buddha Bar Emmy Lou Harrison Wrecking ball Al Gromer Khan Space hotel Julie Cruze * Eva Cassidy Fields of gold [Opposite page] RF Foster 1997 WB Yeats: a life 1. The apprentice mage Oxford He pulls, knowing the pull of everything toward anything in the living system Plotinus Enneads trans. MacKenna. that it should seem but a little thing to give one's life as well as one's words to the criticism of the world. Yeats 1919 in Foster achieved and astonishing personalities a playwright, journalist, occultist, apprentice politician, revolutionary, stage-manager, diner-out, dedicated friend, confidant and lover of some of the most interesting people of his day the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion Napoleon - to understand a man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty practiced and committed astrologer One looks a gypsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship. 1907 Lily: "Papa expected to hear descriptions, adventures ... he just wanted to hear what I had seen and done." Yeats imperatives of disciplined, imaginative, merciless observation and good conversation At 21 drawn to the [*]; capable of astonishing mental energy ...; careful with money; calculating where reputation-building was concerned; prepared to act life as a pose; and already constructing a mythology for himself, his past, and the circles with whom he intersected. "Not exact enough for a subtle ear" is Yeats criticizing Wilde! Our work after all is our true Soul. To please the folk of few books is one's great aim. - A thematic center, a back story, a social nexus, study of image powers and rhythmic powers. - a reputation which would sustain a writer's life both in London and Ireland This endless war with Irish stupidity gets on my nerves. He had learned hash and mescaline - took hash in tablets. Paganism. aristocratic esoteric Irish literature for the few half a dozen lines a day Why do I write all this? I suppose that I may learn at last to keep to my own in that thing which is to life what style is to letters: moral radiance, a personal quality of universal meaning in action and in thought. Folk and fairy lore, mediums, astrology, psychic research, dream study, Freud, Jung, Boehme, Nietzsche, Plotinus, Swedenborg Personae. - Fountain Court in the Temple, Yeats and Olivia, Blake in old age. Then Woburn Place, first the floor above an ancient cobbler, then the attic. 6 Greg's voice yesterday. He's had a successful life, he's more satisfied with himself and more aggressive, and he was less interested in asking than in telling. Was he always like that and I didn't notice? I don't think so. It's what happens to people when they're older it seems. They imagine other people less? Or it shuts down for them, to only include those they are with daily. The brain settles. The twenties seem to be a window, people make their connections and then it's done. I've kept unsettling myself and that's how I've set, as unsettled. He wants to talk about Jane and I didn't like seeing him as uxorious as he'd been with me with a woman much tamer than me. I've said it euphemistically - 7 Bought a begonia in memory of the acid begonia, pink folded flowers held above pointed dark green glossy leaves, the fragility of joints that makes a careful aura - I haven't said that. Letters today from or to Greg, Emilee, Mafalda, Louie, Dave Leonard. I was formatting the writing folder most of the day. Has my eye changed or is it working on different computers, my earlier versions seem grossly awkward. How can I have thought they were good enough. The work is repetitive and mechanical and I've liked it, concentrating on tiny font, devising better methods, more mistake-proof sequences, short-cuts. The hours go by. They still aren't good enough and I'm listing things to look after later. Brahms still and again, all day and now at night, Grimaud moving like a natural thing, like the shadow of a leafy branch in wind, against the orchestra. I don't get enough of maybe half a dozen moments in the concerto, and then these hysterical male crescendos I hate, what was that, the priests and armament bankers having to be flattered, it's a provincialism. Brahms when he wrote this heavenly sideways leafy scumble was just starting, early 20s. Amanda wrote yesterday. "I'm finally ready." Dave said, You're the golden apples of the sun, I'm the silver apples of the moon. Emilee and I saying the same thing to each other, Yay it's you. 8 Fixed the graphics file, finished the writing and film files, garden file, now beginning the big mess of Work & days, started with Fading so I could password protect. Bridie's 4 - a tale in which she's raped and mutilated by her male twin - she's self-smothered in vile and stupid fantasy, sealed up, loveless, hideous, mad. My stomach turns, reading her. Is there anything objective I can ask her to do. [Opposite page: worksite corrections lists] 9 Joyful because I worked all day and figured out how to do new things, for instance how to relink all the checkmarks in a document at once in GoLive - ie how to use GoLive. Will be able to use it to fix hyphens and colors. Buttons for all of F1-19, all those index pages relinked and centered. Stat code for new site plus more pages. Notice at SFU index. Loaded F12-19. Relinked F1-4, used them to figure out procedure. - Love refining procedure cumulatively. The begonia drops its pink and white hankies all day long. There's a little rabbit under the therapy building next door. I saw it crossing the sidewalk from Richard's garden when I came around the corner on my bike at dusk. It was going home to the slot vent into the subfloor it seemed. Last week I saw a bit of fur vanishing into the slot and assumed it was a rat. What else. Hot water tap not dripping. I borrowed a crescent wrench from downstairs and put in a washer. There have been subtle quivers often, I can't tell whether they are ground tremours or traffic, or whether I'm imagining them. 10 From 6 in the morning till 6 at night fixing SH - making it white and trim - hyphenated rapidly - sigh. It's been a mess, unpunctuated, bad colors, sprawled over the browser window, awkward. - Didn't unlock the gate or change out of pyjamas today, cooked late morning while a folder was loading, didn't bike, it was dark when I stopped, and was euphoric when Louie called. It was Veterans' Day I guess. - Can I later be this absorbed making movies, what is it that's making me so happy, it's minute full focus, problems I can solve if I keep going with intention, recurring moments of visual satisfaction. A sense of finishing something. I sit moving a cursor to select tiny text, sometimes as narrow as one >, and wonder whether the tininess has something to do with it too. I open a file in PageMill in the smaller left hand computer, do something to it, send it by wireless to a server somewhere - New Brunswick? - pull it down wirelessly into the larger right hand computer, open it in GoLive, do other things to it that PageMill can't do, ship it back to the remote server, use a browser on the right hand computer to check through the finished file. If I find mistakes I usually can fix them still on the bigger computer, but sometimes have to reload it to be able to pull the file down into the left hand computer to fix it in PageMill, and then maybe do it all again, or else just pull it down into the right hand browser to check it. Two versions of Fetch running simultaneously, PageMill, GoLive, Firefox, usually at least three folders open in each machine, ie three levels of directories, and sometimes different folders at the same level, in all the dragging and dropping not to confuse. Constantly improvising better sequences. All of this minute mechanical order in contact with loving, lively material that I'm touching into with unthought naturalness in passing. Listening to Kempe on my piano playlist, isn't he the best, so limber and clear, fond, is it - round, somehow. The different sensation it has been writing with these mechanical pencils I bought by accident, finer and smoother. Something else that's different is I'm cleaning oftener, dusting the work table every day, doing laundry oftener. Okay enough, I'm speeding. 13 Frank after yesterday, starting RF with index pages today. Long letter from G about ethics of W & d. Beautiful bright days with luminous dusks, sliver of blue-silver water under incandescent orange. - Kept going today until RF done except for the last page. Wonderful stamina. 14 Mail from both Tony and Greg today. First mandarins at the farmers' market. 16 There was fog at the window last night, bottom edge of the moon a glow under the top edge of the window when I lay down in the dark. I always lie down gladly, my nice dear bed, hoping to have beautiful thoughts, but I never do have beautiful thoughts or images. I think I'll go to fantasies but even that hardly happens. I just lie there. Sometimes a while when various parts ache. I've learned to feel them attentively and then they clear, as if there's a job the body has to do clearing itself when it is shutting down. This morning slightly hazy sun. Winter weather. It's 8:30, quiet except for street noise and the dim digesting grumble of the fridge in the closet. Tea in bed before a student day. I've cleaned up to the end of London. Was gripped for a lovely week. Greg is writing often. - Here I'm stopped tongue-tied thinking he'll eventually read what I say. My habit would be to say my critical thought, to think about what's wrong with him, because that's what interests me. If he's going to read it I wd have to also say what's right with him, which for my own purposes doesn't need saying. I can say it to him and do: he's a generous spirit, deeply kind, radically unpatriarchal, interested in many things, lively in his way, honest, considered. Was a lovely big warm sexy body, physical, sweet. Okay so what's wrong with him is a certain padded quality. He says more than needs saying, he's a little prosy. It's as if he goes along padding the world a bit to keep himself comfy-safe. It's anxiety, and it's anxiety acceded to, anxiety in the whole texture of being, anxiety never given up, mild but constant. Could it be given up?   Do you know what it wd take?     slow growth in relation to the illusion of male betrayal It has to do with not wanting to be what his dad is?   Fear of being a bad man   Is male betrayal an illusion   So he pads to keep other people safe   His mother    YES His padding keeps us safer than we need to be   He didn't see Jean fight back    YES Did she    no If she had wd she have lived   So it's her inhibition in the end   And that was patriarchy   Did she have a dad like Neil   Greg's the opposite of Tom    YES Neither get it right    YES Paul does    YES Both are products of patriarchy   Greg lives in defense of Jean   Tom lives in defiance of Vic   I live in defiance of Ed   Which means we lived in defiance of each other    YES Both are identifications with a position   Is there more you want to say about this     no Gilligan: presumption of rationality: challenge to legal certainty. Freud in Studies in hysteria. he would see the signs on her face and his response was, You do know ... led her to give over her voice to the voice of her father, who wanted her not to know what had happened. The patient knows everything of pathological significance with respect to her symptoms but she doesn't necessarily know that she knows it. The notion of voice is very complex ... there's not a voice, there are voices, and which voice comes forward is very contingent on the kinds of resonance that voice finds, whether it can in fact be heard and understood; and in the absence of resonance voice tends to go into silence, it goes into the body ... When a voice is traumatized it goes out of relationship and into silence ... When one person experiences his or her voice as ineffective, as overwhelmed, there's a tendency to take on the voice of the more powerful person, that is the voice of the aggressor, and to come to hear it as one's own voice ... underneath that is a voice that is carrying the truth ... You can't argue your way out of dissociation ... the only way is through association ... a brilliant but costly way ... psychological logic of an act ... a third term ... this behavior has a rationale ... it's a wonderful moment of bringing together Both Bridie and Karyn, I read their packets and felt I had nothing to say to them, felt it was useless to say anything to them. Then a couple of days later wrote easily and with some little key. How does that work? I come in jibbing at their wrongness, loathing it, not wanting to touch it, and then maybe just a day later begin at the top and work through it one paragraph after the other, with something like friendly hope, that later may be confirmed. Do you understand that   Is it you   It takes you a while   Do you 'think'    no But it takes you a while   Do you have to fetch information     no 'Association'   Networks stabilizing   With Katie I didn't need time, is it initially being stopped by feeling they can't understand, and then something adjusts, like journal work, that makes me not feel their not understanding? Gilligan talking about psychological logic, said it's a system like logic. Is it bodily system/structure she means? A body has a rationale, which is its structural necessity?   part 5 in america volume 21: 2010 june - december work & days: a lifetime journal project