in america volume 21 part 5 - 2010 november-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

16 November 2010 (continued) [Opposite page: Ann Saddlemayer 2002 Becoming George: the life of Mrs WB Yeats Oxford "Presence, in the midst of all the humbug, of really supernormal knowledge," Wm James Yeats' theory of spirit action "I look at her in perpetual wonder." Yeats on Dorothy. a great longing for order, for routine, and shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman ... With me quiet and habit create great affection. At first you were but a plan and a dream and then you became a real woman, and then in a moment the real woman became very dear. Only the day when we begin to live together always shall give me full peace. Am I not Sinbad thrown upon the rocks and weary of the seas? I will live for my work and your happiness and when we are dead our names shall be remembered. your body and your strong bones fill me with desire. She was 24. Much depended upon George's willingness to face the brutal facts of her own place in his life story. for the rest of their lives together would continue to serve as unquestioned extension of his senses One's art is not the chief end of life but an accident in one's search for reality or rather perhaps one's method of search. "She is delightfully sane. Just think of all the pests of women who are going about who suffer from nerves and think it soul." Says Lily Yeats. Every year in life has shown me that there is nothing in life worth having but intensity, and that there cannot be intensity without a certain harmlessness and sweetness in the common things of life. George has become happy only very lately but in a little while she will become used to happiness. Communicators demanding incense and flowers, and sometimes a bowl of water. 17 Big move - index pages for Going for broke and the three subsections - first 4 vols of DR - posted - have to be checked. Mystified by the room's trembling. It is so subtle I think I must be ill, or have that inner ear disorder, but then there is a definite jolt, or it seems the wind is pushing from the west. There was a moment this morning when I felt it. I thought it might be the gigantic machines digging up 6th Ave, but now it's eleven at night and they've stopped surely. It's also like the electrical jolt I can feel next to an elevator when it is on its way up, but it continues as if there's a massive new electrical field in the building. Did he take out a wall downstairs, is the building more unstable? I don't like the feeling and I don't like not knowing what it is. I imagine secret tunneling, or something bad happening to cortical arteries. Is a fault somewhere grinding ahead of a break? 18 Lying in the dark remembering a dream, which is gone now, and then morose about the journal project, that it's trivial (compared to Yeats' enterprise) to show the life of someone who has come only this far, and then that Being about was something large, and then sad wondering at how the men at my defense didn't see what I'd done - Paul, Ray, Colin - Barry did - how I sat at the margins of my own celebration dinner - how I'm getting what seems exaggerated praise for my shabby films and none for that deep radical frame - how because of that blindness I continue uncertain at the same time as I am certain - child's valiant aloneness on and on - and in the years with Tom - wanting to read him the journal so he would know the valor it took to be with him - and he hearing only that I was insulting him. In there I remembered the dream - a stretch of water with a dock floating in it - I had to reach the dock and did, and then there was a question of whether I would be able to come back. There was more but mainly what I took out was isolation in the midst of waters - seabird who cannot land on water and is far from shore - Yesterday morning a dream of a flood over the road at the East Place - the low area at the foot of the driveway, and into the pasture, covered with brown water. Friday 19 Getting toward the end of the thick George Yeats book - the amount of doctoring in that family! Little operations, three weeks in bed, injections, x-rays, all of them, parents and children. That and the horoscope casting, medium-consulting and automatic writing. But their beautiful free intelligent letters, his dad's, his sister's, his own, and George's. They judged by eye in his family, as if that were the normal thing. This book was described as dull in the NYT, and isn't, probably because it is interested in women's things. The biographer picks detail out of letters that I would pick too, children's conversation, houses and gardens, peoples' appearance, weather, clothes, moods, furniture. I skip the politics and anything about the Abbey Theatre. I'm reading it not for the mystical-magical, ignore the poems, but for the company, and in this one the sense of how a philosophical woman lived then as if she was vowed to be a helper. The advantages of a great man's slipstream, a size of life he gave her, and the talents needed. Ann Saddlemyer 2002 Becoming George: the life of Mrs WB Yeats Oxford - About 550 reimbursement coming for computer expenses, a check from Dave on the way, don't know for how much, 150 from Sean, out of debt finally, can go to Borrego and send something to Vancity. - Plaid flannel pyjamas from Amvets, a black pot to get the begonia out of its plastic, plant food, tangerines, raspberry kefir. A hole in my head this aft when I was at Walter Anderson's, I was looking for a pot the right size and was choosing between two black ones, was trying to remember the shape of the pot I got last time for the rabbitsfoot fern. It wasn't there. Nothing. I decided on the more conical one and brought it home. There was the black fern pot exactly like it. I stare at that pot many times a day. Name/word memory is worse some days than others. This is the second time I've noticed it with shape memory. I wonder sometimes whether I gave up Mr Tom because cognitively I wasn't fit enough anymore, I mean without realizing that was the reason. This end of my life, watching failure, so different from the Raw forming years when I never doubted my brain. I can be stopped at a light and see a young person walking and feel, they're still in the midst of it, where their body is undoubted natural easy self; I was that. At the same time, because I was wearing the black turtle neck with the chalcedony earrings today, with jeans and the green sneakers, and my hair was smooth and shiny, and clean off the forehead now, I felt young and distinguishedly pretty, and drove fast when I could between the lights. 20 He always needed a rich mother with a beautiful house. I'm wanting to read his old age, to see how he got those late poems. What to think of his vast armature of theory and crank opinion. What matters is his ear. He could judge by eye but he didn't at all write by eye. He could devise tight little cognitive dances. Does the philosophy matter at all? It gave him standing, it mattered practically. His face at the end was a credit to him, a good whole person carried through from childhood. He was remarkably responsible, in detail with his family and friends - and in the larger way gave them a name - and then also with his people the Anglo-Irish and the poets. He promoted and defended hugely, and some of his crank opinion was in the service of them. Was he right about eugenics, lower orders breeding too much? I watch Grey's anatomy, Private practice, Brothers and sisters, even Gossip girl, to see perfect bodies. I need to see them. The standard of acting is very high, the standard of directing is very high, standards taken for granted as industry norm. By that I mean the perfect bodies are skilled bodies too, and live in an elite circumstance that is not of aristocratic lineage but of wide miscegenation, economic scrum. Dreamed I was with Cheryl. She had come with a group of lesbian artists I didn't know. We were lying together. She was naked. When she stood up later I saw she was much shorter. We went through a snowy landscape to a cabin. Etc. The even larger responsibility of wanting to show as a noble life. He did that for me. When I was in my twenties I had his picture up. [the Sergeant 1908] Insisting on sex in his seventies. Young women he didn't lie to his wife about. [Opposite page: Foster II. The arch-poet It seems to me that true love is a discipline, and it needs so much wisdom ... Each divines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror. Further more he eats a whole herring without gratitude Both the desire of the medium and her desire for your desire should be satisfied. sun in moon a dignified natural house for intellectual people the salt of malice pleasure to live in a place where George makes every moment a fourteenth century picture The gale tears down the winding staircase of the Tower so that when I go out of my room my hair is rushed inside out. Give my old age what it needs of rest and change It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all that into a phrase I say "Man can embody the truth but he cannot find it." I must embody it in the completion of my life. - 1939 I think, a letter. - internal off-rhyme strong driving force of tetrameter beat aristocratic lineage. Beauty, passion, competence. I have grown abundant and determined in my old age as I never was in my youth. destruction of honoured houses the best bred of the best "He is so exhilarating." Lily. It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory.   Valéry, Rilke What the Greeks sought Perfection for perfection's sake Because it needs leisure is rural 21 Grey dawn of Sunday morning. Yesterday wet. There was a stretch when wireless failed because it was raining hard. Now open sky pale yellow in the northeast. Looking at The Pound era again thinking of a skinny Indo-Chinese girl from Hong Kong on scholarship in Edmonton Alberta poring over a catalogue of Anglo-American literary scraps, educating herself to be a man of the early twentieth century. Sitting for years with this so-foreign material not able to do what Kenner had done, off her rocker, but coming to something of a form for her own displacement. Something she could show. - And why couldn't she, because she didn't have human heart, which Kenner for all his posing does. She didn't have heart-centered mortal longing to say what it is to be alive, she was faking. A binding, a having-to-do-with, that joins in likeness, in difference and in modulation all the poem's materials, through which interactive web the syntactic movement flows, abandoning nothing: that is the deepest, the most persistent Provencal intuition. I copied that in 1980 and what more do I know now. The motz el son section is the one I remember (motz y sons). The way I understood language in Being about, as a standing network being accumulated. A blown husk that is finished but the light sings eternal a pale flare over marshes where salt hay whispers to tide's change 115 But Kenner calls "Mrs Woolf" treacly; what misanthropy is that? Here I look him up (1923) and discover he was a Catholic, which damns him, but also that he was a friend of Walter Ong (whose being a Jesuit doesn't matter) and both students of McLuhan. How can anyone admire Pound and be a Catholic. How can anyone admire Pound and despise To the lighthouse? So he was faking too and I read him in the Lake House resonating from what I was not from what he was. And yet he helped Pound. Photo of Pound in his early 50s, beautiful straight strong man. [Opposite page: Yeats 1865, Richardson 1879, Picasso 1881, Joyce, Woolf 1882, Pound 1885-1970 a legendary man or woman denunciation of debased bodies - such transitions from diction to diction devices learned from James a mode of thought habitual with him: the steady generosity of response to things happening its pauses, its run of sounds, its tautly paced disclosure running through seven overlapping words setting like beside almost like, to delineate losses and gains, new delicacies, lost intensities And the vine stocks lie untended, new leaves come to the shoots. North wind nips on the bough, and seas in heart Toss up chill crests And the vine stocks lie untended And many things are set abroad and brought to mind Of thee, Attis, unfruitful What was he responding to when he read Greek? To rhythms and dictions. an aesthetic of glimpses a change in characteristic sensibility ... sense of diction a renaissance of attention passionate generosity of attention irreparable death lay over the poet's head the crystal body of air polyphonic rhyme There are subject-rhymes ... sensibilities may rhyme ... culture rhymes ... a visual rhyme The perception of the intellect is given by a word, that of the emotions in the cadence. What cost all of them so much lost effort was the dissipation of the Vortex: the necessity, all the latter part of their lives, of working alone. Each in his own place, after the disaster. - poetic image a radiant knot or cluster certain passionate simplicities That was the quality so many minds in the previous century had toiled after, relating and sorting out languages to disengage it from. whole poems existing as systems of linguistic interaction how our epoch was extricated from the fin de siècle - The force that produced verbal integrities lay potent in the absorption of minds with perceived realities. Minds so absorbed write with pith and concision. Such qualities, engendered by intercourse with a subject, persist in the writing even when we do not know what its subject was. Idiosyncrasy of language derives from attention. Kenner 166 a style energized by perception Natural sciences formed on minute attention produced in the 19th century a new order of descriptive exactness, obligated by the fact that there was no accurate way to reproduce a picture. 167 the poetic energy was discernible in the unstated connections between them It does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation. that the poem shall be 'lord over fact' rethink the nature of an English poem maximizing three criteria at once ... the vers-libre principle, that the single line is the unit of composition; that a poem may build its effects out of things it sets before the mind's eye by naming them; and the lyrical principle, that words or names, being ordered in time, are bound together and recalled into each other's presence by recurrent sounds. held together from within by so many filaments, syntactic, sonoric, imagistic, that any change ... will be change for the worse 23 Current of money continues. $1000 from Dave, 440 computer reimbursement, fac devel 680 if they give me the whole 500, 135 from Sean = at least 2000, which brings my Vancity debt down to maybe 600, which I cd probably cover on garden work over the break. After that still 4000 for Ro but I cd dip into it for film costs. - Working on DR8, checking through, adding some links, finishing extracting for the DR8 index, finding quite a beautiful time, the scared months when C and T and I were in some kind of working balance because I was with J. I'm excerpting to get the record of those visits. I can't seem to do more than a page at a time. Cold the last couple of days, heater on for the first time this year and the thick green blanket added at night. Greg sent a format letter about the journal. What do I think. I disagree with most of it but liked writing back about why decisions are as they are. He hates Courier on the pages and I love it. I said it indicates hand-made writing that shouldn't have the authority of a book font. A lot of changes in the design this last burst. All the images against white. All the pages against white. Headers and footers on individual pages. Pages into boxes so they don't sprawl, and centered. Small spacing adjustments on edges. Larger images. It's more unified and cleaner - very clean I think. I think G is, like many are, cringing at the thought of anyone being described personally. That fear of being unhidden. Or of people's feelings being hurt - that's more him. I don't so much fear hurting people's feelings. I fear the smother of concealment. Then I check whether Don's name comes up when googled. (Find it on page 7.) There he is on Youtube quite lovely saying "For some people there's no better life than the life of the mind, you're always alive there, there's always ... that's the place of truth, and adventure, and joy of discovery." Ronning Seminar Winter 2009 Democracy today and the challenge of religious-spiritual aspiration. I'm listening to it. His story of wanting to write about justice at Oxford and having to read Raul's book in gestetner copy with a little group. G's impulse is toward nailing things down. I'm too much like that already. What sort of design comments wd make it really better? What wd better be? Don's talk was ingratiating in the style of a popular professor, a lot of courting of a not very high level audience, tricks I use sometimes too, being personable. G noticed too that his voice is different, it used to be quite individual, wiry somehow, tensile. He still speaks with a lot of energy and emphasis but it used to be more mouthy, tight-wound. The somehow-flattening in his voice goes along with courting the stupid? Teaching has taken the private out of mine too, I hope not for good. 24 Jam's hideously hateful poem I find online. but the prins will have / spit into you your husband says: / his intellectual dogs will make you forget yourself She did spit into me   She won power battles by lying   She insisted on taking what she wouldn't give   Did she make me forget myself     at times When I see her published I feel angry ambition. Could I surpass her     no Equal her     yes She's showy but unclean   But the thing I notice in these pages about her, as it was with Tom too, the fairy being I could see but not be with. It's true I'm afraid when that happens and I don't act well. It's early love I see and want to be, and in my longing am, and am afraid as, and interrupt. We didn't know what we were doing. Her poem says she defended with contemptuous masculinity. Was early love younger in her?   Not more helpless but more traumatized   When her mom was sick   Was all that pain reactivation   She was more traumatized though what happened to me was worse   She was more fragile     YES The contemptuous masculinity is her dad   It's a kind of possession     YES Was her real self more beautiful than mine     YES Because of that fragility     YES Is it possible to say in the same way what my defense was     pleasure The child looking at the flowers   Trudy could see through her   And that was good for her   - Feeling that, so sore. That T could do more of what I longed to do. That Rhoda was more beautiful, absolutely so. So that I had come as far as I would ever be able to go, so the beautiful work I found would end because I was left behind. Even now it stuns me with pain. It was true, it wasn't a mistake. I lost all of them at once. Was there anything I could have done better than the terrible thing I did? Yes, you could have written to share happiness and slow growth. You mean not give up on myself because I didn't win   I did that, didn't I     YES   Jamila never understood that I was utterly defeated and humiliated   Trudy understood and was glad   Rhoda understood and wasn't glad     Do they feel they've never been defeated   Is it true   Does it matter   Should I have avoided the humiliation     no Can you say why not     you can share, the Work, of overview, of defeat I posted DR in a hurry but it needs more time. [Opposite page: lito brother you want your soul's de sire she won't come laughing to a waiter, she's   unhad, you'll have to abstain all bad habits, give em away the machines of pride and envy too she can smell the pea thru many mattresses trist's not only a season alone in time gone fast loving takes more time she won't come to a lighted complexity, she   distains mirrors, they have been wrong! in her sleep she runs a long dark transparence when you go ther you mustn't dazzle   she has belonged to no one like a land wher sleeps a noble prins are you special, lito brother? may be some country's her image-inn you've seen better than other? coyote's own run or under moon the corridor   time she gives you, for her self timing's for you to tell. when the change trans late   if you flash pieces of knowhow to blind if you force if you test false, will she escape   but the prins will have spit into you your husband says: his intellectual dogs will make you forget yourself! - Then a note from Pablo [de Ocampo] and Kate inviting me to make a commissioned film (of some kind) replying to a video by Jan Peacock. If they get the funds I'd have some thousands of dollars to get into HD video for 1012. I could buy a camera, pay for Final Cut Pro tutoring at Crywolf, whatever tech support I'd need. Then I'd have something recent to show to get a next CC grant. Her elements: musing female voice, something about imagining, desert landscape, moonwalk history, washing cups with too much soap, ocean, Navajo radio. Will they get the grant   $20,000   5 toward housetruck, 2 for taxes, 8 for camera, 1 for sound, 2 for travel, 2 for tech support. - No, more likely 12. 6 for camera, 1 for taxes, 2 for tech support, 2 for travel, 1 for this and that. - Peter's damning description in L1-1. "I could not have conceived a more ..." I've linked to the passage he was talking about, so the evidence is there for anyone. It seems an unjust summary from a 37 year old man who was trying to abandon his family for a 24 year old he had been pressuring hard. And yet I've been thinking that the falseness so embarrassing in letters to my mother, Jam and Tom was because I felt I should show interest, but wasn't interested, or not in the right way. Louie's imagining interest which she doesn't have to fake, or Trudy's seeing in. Do you want to talk about that     in teaching you are passing from difficulty, processing and loving The effective teaching I do is love enough   Do you want to say more     community, action, toward integration, in writing Is also adequate generosity   I tried to do that with my mother, Jam and Tom too   The particular kind of interest I do have   Corrective   I see     YES That's interesting   26 The way Pound fits the network vision I came to, prepared me to see it, and the way both of us had that intuition from being with physical nature. The way his body stands in the photo. Kenner's vortex doesn't quite get it, it's what I describe as writing from a standing net. The 'meaning' is there before (but being modified by, as they come) the words. Translate from that, is what he meant when he said don't bother with the words, translate the meaning. "What matters in art" like "water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion." Also an evolutionary vision, form mutating. And a sentic vision, "the artist's business to find her own virtú," meaning an energetic tone then present in the work to be transmitted. Kenner is good at showing what it was about 1900-1920. A hundred years ago in art and science and we're still working out of it. Network neuroscience and computers are. All the workings-through in particular there still is to do and against still-strong resistance. Movies, cars, Einstein, Picasso, Freud, Jesperson on language, radio, genetics, radiation. Richardson, Woolf. - What is it these days, an instant press of sentimental tears over anything emotional I come across, other people's stories. My pay came in with a big refund, and the streets were bright and quiet. Cold. I went to Denny's with the Times for breakfast, steak, and then was there on the esplanade in silent light off quiet water. It had warmed as I was eating. I walked. Carefully. Then parked next to Seaport Village and went along the seawall feeling something unnameable in the wide space above the glazed-off water. I felt it without grasping it, like a faint ecstasy, not mine, wide crystalline quiet invisibly intense? Was walking there feeling I don't go anywhere because I think I won't settle into enjoying it without Tom, I'll feel restless and unconnected, nothing will happen. And it was like that but still it was a remarkable morning. And then came home and read a book with a good title, The unforgiving moment. Maybe I'll say something about it tomorrow. Craig Mullaney 2009 The unforgiving minute: a soldier's education Penguin Greg tonight writing to say he'd google-earthed La Glace. 28 [untranscribed notes on historical definitions of consciousness] Hither, & thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to & fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty Leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. Moby D - 91 year old athlete Olga Kotelko kept muscle mass. Loss of muscle - motor neurons aren't activating muscle In muscle the biomarkers of aging Being able to endure the stress of hard activity Muscle fibers with mitochondrial defects Kidneys and other organs have trouble handling by-products of muscle breakdown. Real weight training might save joints and tendons Around 70 fast-twitch muscle stops responding. Around 80 slow-twitch for endurance. Deep breathing and reflexology, self massage, stretching with looped strap. "Exercise has been shown to add between 6 and 7 years to a life span." Serious training and protection at the chromosomal level Production of telomerase repairs ends of chromosomes Resistance exercise activates a muscle stem cell which rejuvenates mitochondria - 'gene-shifting' 6 months of twice a week strength training, "biochemical, philiological and genetic signature of older muscle is turned back 15 or 20 years" Muscle cells require so much energy, get hit hard when mitochondria go down. 30 Tomorrow elfreda@sfu.ca dies. How far back does it go, 1993? Weds 1st December Phoned pension #, asked for transcripts online SFU, phoned Canada Council, tried to phone BC Enquiry. Mary phoned to say David had brought the plants - begonia rex and an Red Lion amaryllis that hasn't opened yet. She'll be surprised. Dorothy was charming in the armchair. Greg sent me a favicon for my site, which I'd never thought of. 2 Tracked down the welfare office and faxed a letter asking for my welfare records, notarized photocopy of ID. There was an email from Andy saying Luke is floundering. Phoned him, he's without a home, house-sitting. Invited him to come to the desert for Christmas. He said he can't. Had an appointment with Thy to ask about the atlas being offside. She said it's to the right and the one below to the left. She pulled on my head so my neck would stretch, which felt good somehow. She was exclaiming quietly as she did it, and afterward said it was because when she began she could only feel the pulse on the left side but then afterward it came on strong on the right. When the session was finished she was telling me I should walk and I was saying why I don't like to, it feels so heavy. But then I kept going past my usual reserve, I was watching myself tell, watching tears and the pressure to hold them back. I said when I was younger I limped but didn't feel myself limp, but now I feel it, and I see my shadow limping and I don't like it. She said I shouldn't talk to myself like that and I said but I love beauty. She didn't understand that it's a loss worth grieving and that I was needing to do it. I didn't completely let myself; it was escaping from me more than I had consented to. And then I blurted that I love to look at her, "You're so right." Is that abject? Is it more abject to show humiliation than to hide it? I don't think so though to her it will have seemed so. We like each other, we work well together, but she is young and only middling smart and she didn't know what to do with my sadness. I let her off the hook and changed the subject, but I am understanding that a semiconscious grief presses in me more than I know. Do you want to talk about that   balance, judgment, lack of a lover I'm angry at myself for not having a lover     no For not being acceptable     no I've judged myself unacceptable     YES I did it while I was still with Tom   Yes I do   That's the sadness     YES That's what the tears are for?   So is she right     no I don't find myself desirable   Which pulls me down     YES There isn't anything I can do about that     NO Do you think it was abject     NO fight, losses, of organization, a quest Make myself physically better     no Psychological order     YES Will you lead me     liberate yourself, from betrayal, by completing (3p) Another sentence to explain (3p)     process, losses, of power, and aggression Like what I had in the garden   Full action solves it   Do you want to say more     no The judgment is of desirability   But the true loss is of action     YES Do you mean also physical action     no Social action   Is the student work social action     no Is lecturing     YES Showing films     YES Is Ant Bear   Garden making   It's true I'm undesirable but it doesn't matter     no Do you think I am desirable   Will you say in what sense     process, grounded, you're, balanced A sane companion   It's about being a companion rather than a statue   Okay     YES [Opposite page] When the single line is the unit of composition it must contain some minute torsion to justify its separate existence. Transcendentalism - Darwin, Fraser, Gestalt, field physics, Whitehead - Hegel, Schelling, Leibnitz - European organicism "via Leibnitz Jesuit friends of the China Mission" to neo-Confucian Li and the school of Chu His (AD 1130-1200), Confucius. Paideuma - a sort of gestalt? Cultural set? "Characterizing energies." I don't think Pound was misogynist but Kenner is. Pound's "characteristic benevolence and patience" but "released from the mimetic" - The London vortex, the Provencal, the Athenian, etc. The Tuscan. The connectionist. The lesbian separatist. The TCR. Made forms "relentless chit-chat of boredom and fussiness and assumed importance and stark insensibility" Wanted to be buried in Idaho with the Gaudier head above (is not). the old man with his rapid walk Impulse to teach, to share. He had spoken of being "freed of the weight of a soul capable of salvation or damnation," which meant freed from a provincial Christianity that kept one anxious. All his early work asks, "Who am I?" A mystical conviction, shyly divulged that one might actually be possessed by the actual virtú of the great dead whom one has much pondered. Beetles growing out of their bodies menacing spikes is Fabre via Kenner 269. If there was a functional division, therefore, it fell between two kinds of intelligence: the kind that manifests, like nature, the power to create, and the kind that chooses to keep itself outside and 'arrange' and 'compose' and also 'appreciate.' That was the true antithesis between death and life, and it consigned the official art-world to the category of death. Is that misogynist     no Is it correct   But truly appreciating is creative   Again and again in the Cantos single details merely prove that something lies inside the domain of the possible ... The Cantos scan the past for possibilities. It was on or about midsummer's day, a fact to gain meaning in the retrospect of decades. Men waiting in darkness at midsummer dawn could see two slabs of light defined in the dust motes, entering by eastern slits and leaving by western, no stone within the stone box so much as grazed. the moon's bright trace on Odysseus' unstable sea And the palazzo, baseless, hangs there in the dawn The roots go down to the river's edge and the hidden city moves upward white ivory under the bark   Cypress there by the towers Drift under hulls in the night In the history of the poem, much precedent groping and brooding ... the earliest English ... the earliest Greek ... the beginnings of the 20th century Vortex, and the Renaissance. Arrays comport with the aesthetic of that decade. A calling up of the dead and evocation of remote places Display of wonders one has found For theme the coming and going of vortices in time's river The OED is perhaps the 19th century epic. Twisted arms of the sea-god, Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold, And the blue-gray glass of the water tents them, Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover. (216:10) chiming from something we remember from earlier, earlier in this poem and out of earlier poems plays ... against the residuum and residua of sounds which hang in auditory memory invest convention with attentive force ... bringing the easy gestures of convention so close to the energies of the real ... a bite upon the intense actual learned not only to prefer crisp sounds to sleek, but to invest elaborate forms with spoken diction ... to let structural analogies, reinforced by rhythm, do the work of the assertion ply over ply, thin glitter of water A poem ... will contain not only elements and recurrences but a perceiving and uniting mind that can hope one day for a transfiguring vision of order it only glimpses now .... Pound hoped to become, while writing the poem in public, the poet capable of ending the Cantos. whose journeys through unknown dangers is directed toward this former home working ... in the faith that secular events, and the shape of his own life, would supply a proper finale when it was time heritage from the 1890s ... one's life being co-existence with one's work's of art Secular events supplied ... Mussolini hanging by the heels and a cage and 14 years in a madhouse, and inexorable old age at last in which to reflect how he had "tried to write Paradise." Do not move. Let the wind speak. That is Paradise. Let the gods forgive what I have made. May those I have loved try to forgive what I have made. Pound was learning to think in those years. though our local foreseeings are inaccurate It is one sinuous suspended sentence, feeling its way and never fumbling. Its gestures raise anticipatory tensions, its economy dislodges nothing. Such a poem fulfills a syntactic undertaking, purely in a verbal field principles of syntactic leverage Each phrase reaches forward We are drawn past unit after unit of attention by the promise of a waiting ... for the structure initiated by ...to declare itself carried through by essentially narrative devices Zukovsky, Williams objectivists about 1930 to answer tastes a long time forming and still hardly articulate Renaissance 1500 Jefferson 1770 the Enlightenment Love, statecraft, order, precision of thought, laconic wisdom, fertility, sound money All the soul needs is at hand. Douglas - economy - converting one thing to another, useful effort - "in the sense that a definite, healthy and sane human requirement is served." Sane economies bound to perceptions of what humans are trying to achieve. Cost exceeds purchasing power because non-value costs added. Value of work includes cultural heritage Production is 95 percent a matter of tools and processes, which tools and processes form the cultural inheritance of the community. constitute the greater part of our capital Insofar as the writer's work is exact "it maintains the precision and clarity of thought the health of thought outside literary circles." Usura - that money is short and is created as interest-bearing debt. 3 The passages where Kenner is riding on Ezra's cadence. What is it I shudder at in Bridie. By hating men she hates Aphrodite. By lying about what she is she binds herself in a self-obsession. In idealizing herself she frees a shadow self to gloat in fantasias of rape and mutilation. She wants to defile the world to make it her filthy nest. She hates her body, mutilates it, disorders it trying to make her lie true. She would rather hate her body than be loved. She would rather hate men than be free. She would rather defend a lie than do good work. Do I shudder because I'm like that     no Is it a true description   Katie yesterday has left beautiful Khalif and is it for that reason she is not longer a goddess. She did capoeira with him and has given it up, and what was a perfect body is now thicker, duller, an ordinary gushing girl. And he with a 20 year old who has a baby never went to writing school. - Jim Legg showed up today looking for my new email. I wondered at his timing, he was almost the first person to write me at sfu.ca. My bike circuit at nightfall took me through the December Nights crowds in the park. A lot of booths, a Christmas market. Streets closed to traffic, crowds under light strings. There was a Bon Temps Social Club dance floor set up in a corner near the art museaum, an accordian band. I stood leaning on the bike smiling to see the old gents dancing, because I could see how they'd moved when they and I were fourteen. The cute boys who could jive. These days wearing my green silk Nepalese pants tucked into my black UGGs, winter clothes, with black sweaters. Can't get into my clean pyjamas yet, have to move the jeep off 6th Avenue and for that have to wait until the traffic clears. It's just a bit past 8. 4 Saturday morning. I've almost finished Dames rocket but I haven't come to a good account of its - what shd I call it - formal work? Visual intuition? I was going through looking for the psychological work and power struggle but skipping the 'art' as mistaken or not mine. But I was sensitive in visual ideas then in ways I am not now. For instance something about transparent form that Pound has too. "As glass seen under water," "the waves taking form as crystal," "the crystal body." Visual artist friends - briefly. I think Fading stops at Nov 2009 and the new section is called Again. - There it is, it's named, it's linked, and here is its pretty index page, the ambiguous koi, is it swimming or is it hovering, in or over a gleam of surrounding world. I'm some way in, finishing vol 4, which means Fading is firmly done. Since I say so. I'm starting it at the lotus just before London, July 2009. 5 That Pound's Seven Lakes canto is his lyric "still point at the heart of the work" and that living in the lake house I used to go to the Seven Lakes Motel to eat lunch. How did it get its name.     volume 22 in america volume 21: 2010 june - december work & days: a lifetime journal project