in america volume 22 part 3 - 2011 february-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

7 February 2011 I had a set of four boxes and bags gotten somehow, that I understood were the belongings of a dead American soldier. The name on them seemed to be West. Three of them were army green canvas but the fourth was an old brown suitcase. I opened it and took out one thing at a time, examined them. A threadbare towel. A worn out teeshirt, smaller than I would have expected. A product for grey hair - I'd thought he was a young man but it seems not. A hot water bottle in a bag with an enema apparatus. Monday of the run-up week. [notes on salsalate and aspirin] Jody is going to come, maybe Mafalda. Will I see Jacques? 8 Droopy, tired today after good days. It's overcast. Have lost one of the Ravelco plugs somehow. A lot of Montreal hits and some Toronto. 9 Now I'm going to praise myself because: The pension packet is sent finally. The Segal's page is beautiful - two image rectangles in quick rotation, 2 turquoise for Trapline, 2 pink for Notes, 2 black-blue for Current, and 2 black and white for Lis. I found it because Scott did, after I sent him the link to the CFMDC page and he sent it to his mom, "our Ellie Epp." The DVDs have arrived in time. There's one day left and I'm almost ready. It's a sublime day. 10 It's 4:30 in the morning, my ears are hissing hard, getting ready to wake at 5 for the flight tomorrow by having had a bad night. Haven't said I've been reading HV Morton A traveler in southern Italy a little every day. It's 1969 and it seems earlier, as if he's an Englishman of the 1940s, which I suppose is his era - 1892-1979 - he was about 77 when this was published. It always gives me a twinge to see a young man yielding to intemperance of any kind. One is apt to associate this time of life with resolve .... Youth has so much to spare! Youth can afford to be virtuous. With such stores of life looming ahead it should be a period of ideas, of self-restraint, and self-discipline, of earnestness of purpose. The divine Plato lays it down that youngsters should not touch wine at all, since it is not right to heap fire on fire. He adds that older men like ourselves may indulge therein as an ally against the austerity of their years - agreeing, therefore, with Theophrastus who likewise recommended it for the "natural moroseness" of age. Quoting somebody else, Norman Douglas. It's ideal travel writing of an old-fashioned kind. He invents so curious and informed and everywhere welcome a traveler that it's agreeable to be him. I notice he likes women to be no older than about 20 and particularly likes little girls, but I don't hold it against him because he's so interested in general, has hundreds of historical persons and places standing in his head as he moves in a landscape, and gets into authoritative conversation with natives on their most local of topics. (The book is badly edited, repeats in senile ways, but has a constancy of pleasure in life.) He's reminding me of a moment I can't exactly place. Early evening or late afternoon, was it in Greece, when I was hitchhiking and stopped briefly at a country café? that had an outlook toward the south. There was an older man - was he a British South African, and did he offer me a lemonade or a glass of wine? - who talked to me with that kind of human interest. [1966] I'm going to ask how I'm different from Lis and how she's different from the avant-garde men. 1. She's protean, she's doing many more things than one, photog, Xerox, super-8, drawing 2. she's political, she's always having to talk about some kind of oppression 3. She has the modernist women behind her, questing to invent forms of voice better fitted to women's intelligence - Stevie Smith, Dorothy, Stein, Woolf, 'fierce comedy,' phenomenology 4. She did art school rather than U, was trained in materials - photography, graphics 5. She's socially intelligent, strategic, generous-minded 6. She's of the London 70s but practical, gave herself a job, a house, a darkroom/studio 7. She got a strong early reputation with the materialist/structuralist men - "pioneer of structural cinema" - for Dresden dynamo 1971 and Light music 1975 which are still admired, but shifted into a completely different style with Light reading in 1978 8. She has great moral authority and idiosyncracy 9. She likes texture/color pleasure but she's mindful to balance it with mastery signifiers - she has navigated the toughest of art contexts successfully 10. I've been a minimalist voluptuary and she hasn't 11. I'm more cosmological and she's more social 12. I'm more cog sci and she's more graphic art 13. What excited me when I saw Pictures in 1986 - [travel notebook begins] SAN 11th Feb 2011 I've made it to the gate, it's 6:30, boarding in 40 min. While I was in the winding entrails of the security line dawn came, Santa Ana orange and blue behind palms. Now it's tinted ivory over Mission Hills. Decaff latté, tall. Men's shoes with long squared off toes! There's sunrise horizontal on the far wall. Look how it makes the building come alive with shadows and reflections, radiant patches. The space is sorted into directions. I'm in a row with 9 people, all of them but me are poking at an electronic thing - 6 phones, 2 laptops, 1 iPad. Now the sun has got to me, lightly. Green chucks, the big jeans, black t, black cashmere hoodie, moonstone earrings, army green Banana Republic bag wide enough for the MacBook. - Newark, gate 103, 5 in the aft. Breaking news on the overhead monitor, Mubarak has quit. Already the Québequois. That supple little man with moccasin boots and a big Mediterranean nose and two beautiful sons who have what will become his sort of that arrogant nose. That tall dark-haired graceful woman with a pale thin Québec face is their mother. This bear grandpa with rumpled topcoat and fur hat. Coming across the desert I was too wiped out to lock in but as we were descending over small snowy fields there was pale yellow light making a marvel of the bare hardwoods. The long shadows were like thin combed hair lying all in the same direction over hills and into gullies. At certain angles the trees' crowns were lit up pale orange in puffs floating above the combed strands. Strong subtle depth. Another thing was that the fenceline trees were casting shadows that were perfect cut-out images of them. Where they were evergreen, solid dark blue triangles. So it was white, dark blue, pale orange, all in pale golden light, all subtle and clear. In amid it, roads with houses on stems, small towns. A quirky landscape very carved and up and down and beautifully skinned. That French family doesn't stay sitting in one place. - And then I talked all the way to Montreal, with a Portuguese engineer who was interested the way engineers can be, in how anything works, even for instance Catholic religion in the countryside, the changed gender balance in Lisbon. What happens to roof tiles when it rains for three months - they get soft, so you can't walk on them. He had come from a cruise ship that began at Naples and stopped in Lisbon on the way to Brazil. Aerospace engineer, Loughheed. His elderly parents sent him to a boarding school in Germany so he could evade the draft. And then beautiful Malena with her Inca nose and Jewish mouth, and trim beautiful Daichi in his black hat, and both being nice to me and taking me to dinner. 12 Simple and sophisticated people meet in a delicious unselfconsciousness .... The light from a paraffin lamp fell in a yellow pool on the table, which was still littered with the broken bread of supper; and in this pool the big, brown hands of the labourer moved, teasing the coarse tobacco for his pipe; his wife's brown hands moved above her sewing. Their eyes sought mine continually as they told me with smiles the little, untroubled drama of their lives. - Where am I, snow flurries, clumping carefully along with my green trekker's pole. In an artistic café waiting for frittata. Lot of people with hoods and scarves. Boulevard St-Laurent and Rue Saint-Viateur. Dirty snow ground up into damp grit. Figuring out which way is south-ish. Dirty truck with icycles on its chin and brown slush on the running board. 55 bus Boul St-Laurent, lots of hyphens in this town. Real fur on most of the hoods. Two hoods pasted up against each other hugging. They break apart smiling. Scarf on top of a jacket, what's the use of that - winter signifier. Both Daichi and Malena worried that I didn't have a scarf. Hats universally. - How am I - rattled a little - am I current enough in film - there are such What do I want to say about the films, when I made them I couldn't say much about them - and still can't when I'm not alone and at my best - [untranscribed notes] Will you talk to me     turn for the better, passage from difficulties, the Work, balance I'm scared I look old, will I     no I'm scared I'll forget, will I     no I don't know a lot     no Will the audience be sympathetic   Will T and R [come]     no Nicole     no Jacques     no [more notes] 13 Day after. Emilee being there. Massive Jody. Daichi's story. Bright and dark is scratched now. All the pristine prints are scratched some. Did Emilee mean it when she said coming was the best gift she'd given herself   Did she feel forsaken last night     no Did I look nice   Sun through this big window at 9 in the morning. Emilee said Trapline is geometry, Current is music, Notes in origin is meditation. In person with her we're awkward, our relation is in writing. She is getting fat and the bun is wrong. The Gladstone show better, bigger screen in proportion to the room, less posh, audience more relaxed coming from the media congress together, more distinguished, better questions. Talking between the films was better. Dave being there, new prints. Paul and Cheryl next to each other. The party after. Last night big quiet bear-mama Susie the animator. A slight blond girl called Amber, a dark girl called I think Marielle who said they were completely contemporary and she likes the way I talk about them not like anyone else. Not theoretically. The Polish woman who is head of film in Concordia who last night offered me her spare room next time I'm in town. Ten years in Poland at film school, making a long film on Carolee Schneeman. Daichi in high school getting into trouble, saying he's going to leave Japan and be a filmmaker. He does leave at 19 but when he gets here he doesn't speak English and doesn't have money - he has to go to English school first - and then he studies literature because there is money for that. He marries a Québequoise dancer who wants to study Butoh in Japan. He's back in Japan working construction on high rise buildings for four years, paying off his debts and hers, and then saving money. They live in a slum. He goes to India with her to study an ancient language because that is the curriculum suggested by * - a writer should work with his hands and study an ancient language. He studies Sanskrit and Urdu. He thinks maybe he'll teach Sanskrit. He is dyslexic, maybe he's studying languages because of that. He and his wife break up. They're back in Montreal. He discovers the film program at Concordia. Does his BA and then an MA with Richard [Kerr]. Other students have already done film at a CEGEP but he hasn't. Still, he's at home at last. He gets the Double Negative studio space and spends 6 months cleaning it - a former sweatshop. Forms a collective, twelve people. They assemble large machines. 16mm and 35 mm flatbed editors, optical printers, one of them a huge thing from New York City. He and Malena live together for 3 years with a beautiful Asian cat. Now she lives somewhere else. He has high bookshelves full of books in many languages. Large dictionaries. He has The Pound era. He is living now a life completely given to film, both the work and the community. He has just turned 40 (Dec 29). His favorite author in Japanese is Kenzaburu Oe. He read all his work when he was a teenager. He wouldn't wear the school uniform. He fought his father. There I am in the mirror. How do I look. Pink singlet, plaid pyjama pants sitting crosslegged in sun. Good shoulders still, not scrawny. Hair silver streaks at the forehead. Crumpled droop under the chin is what makes me look old. Good color in my face, pink-brown. Mireille last night saying she liked a Radio Australia interview with Gerald Edelman. 14 A beautiful man was our sound recordist - he was tall, black, had a broad flat body, a long narrow face, high-bridged royal nose and warm black eyes. He had on headphones and was listening to the whole of what the mic was picking up. I felt him listening and liked it. Cubano. Roseanna - Italian, 40-something. She said "You're so beautiful" but I knew if I did the video it would not look that way to me, and that thinking I was being photographed would make me selfconscious in what I said. Monday morning. - I liked seeing the wide white square at McGill, dim late afternoon, a dim silver light, old facades on three sides, bodies in dark clothes walking, one red hat. I liked seeing it from the high second floor of the old museum, warm. Three high-ceilinged floors with old cabinets, small town collections of Greek coins, half a dozen, minerals, a bit of a painted Egyptian coffin - two eyes - a stuffed wolf, a passenger pigeon, a snow owl. On the landing a lioness eye to eye with me. A prehistoric Irish elk skull with an enormous spread of antler. 15 Lying awake this night realizing the hard moments of this trip, the fragilities I don't quite feel when they happen, or feel without mention to myself. Uncertainties. Malena had lost interest in me   Had lost respect   Because she didn't like the work   It's too slow for her   Things I've written have been helping   I was lonely with Jody   Was he equally lonely with me     NO I lost standing because of showing Lis     no   For instance the way both female film teachers didn't want to bother to show me their school. They didn't want to be seen with me     no But it was a sign of lack of regard     no Did Roseanna have honest regard   Did Mireille     no She didn't like the films     Was Daichi disappointed with me   Because of the films     no Lis     no The talk     no Personally   Because I was too interested in him     NO Lameness     no My elderliness     no I spoke well     YES   Did Mireille mean her invitation   Am I going to get invited to Cuba     no To Concordia     no Nothing is going to come of this     NO   I was foolish to eat the way I have done     no But now I have to repair   The strain of the visit with Jody. That he is the only person who has been able to get Being about, and at the same time is so blank in relation to me personally. Changed the subject when I told him about the journal project. Had nothing to say about the films except that they didn't seem to him to be films (but photographs). Had no questions about my times or being. I kept feeling the obscure struggle of being with him. His needing to talk about Sylvie as if he wants to evoke the consolation of a more womanly woman than the finds me. I guess it's his generation. The young Cuban men weren't like that, the small director with the afro blew a kiss when he said goodbye, as if young men can feel gallantry even toward distinction. Jody doesn't see me as a woman   It's related to the way he can't see the films   His friend could see me better     YES His friend was really moved by the films     YES   Should Emilee quit the job     YES Make a living some other way     Did anybody really like me     NO Did Jacques know I'm here   He didn't want to see me     YES Is that odd   Mirielle Nitaslawska film production, cinematographer mnitoshla@alcor.concordia.ca, Roseanna Maule rosm@alcor.concordia.ca Duras book In the dark room film studies, authorship - Tuesday late morning - bright and cold. What do I have. Emilee this morning. Journal. She's had a hard year, she has got fat, is she okay being married, is the thought of being a writer too much. Is it bad for her to admire me, she's a diffident careful person and I'm outside for reasons that aren't hers. Or is it her job. And Tom. I read his Georgia St piece this morning. It's him, with his gifts and pretences and limits. I'm lonely in it, I'm not there in any of the experience, only in having made him a home and knowing the names of plants, which he exaggerates. He's there alone, he never felt it as a nest for us. There's a way I like that about it, he's writing birds, sky, mountain, the eugenia, the sidewalk. Nothing developed though, anything glanced at and a clever word found. What I like is that he's writing out of his own kind of love, whatever it is, impersonal as mine sometimes is too. There are more red cars here than in SD! Because of winter, surely. Kids being towed on plastic toboggans. Ugly puffy black down coats. Still his moment standing alone in the middle of the road after someone has died. Emilee said of Notes in origin that it's cold and alone and she feels its cost to me - that's something no one else has said except for Brakhage in a way I could ignore because he got the facts wrong. The winter shabbiness of people here, dark random layers, slushy boots. Sun today but air biting on the face's skin. I'm tired. Why am I waking at 3 with aching shoulders and not getting back to sleep. Social stress, physical stress, the way I can't take a careless step. The social stress is partly that I'm afraid I'll forget names. I don't have swift fluency. When I'm going to give a talk I'm anxious about whether I've rehearsed enough, I mean gone over notes so the names and dates will be primed. At the same time I've been invited to speak as a mistress of something worth hearing - it's the opposite of what I believed when I was younger, that what matters is presence in the moment. I can still believe that but I can't do it, I'm insufficient. I have to revise. I have to work from previous work. Still no one has had a speck of interest in the journal project. Another social stress is uncertainty whether people mean what they say or are being polite. Another is having to be seen creeping up stairs a step at a time. I was grateful to myself for not having to feel fat - I felt nice looking in my wine-colored silk pants and turtleneck. I'm in the Station d'Autobus Centrale with an hour to go. 16 Plainfield The broad St Lawrence white with an internal river, blue. Pale ivory light on graceless farmhouses. Flat country all the way to the mountains in Vermont. - Danielle's afternoon with us. Pale black-eyed French face more rumpled than it was, easily coming alive with talk. She would say things that almost sound like what I'd say but she'd mean them differently. I could see her not getting all the way there. At one moment I'd been talking and noticed I had warmed up enough to want to take off my sweater, warmed by trying to talk to her because she's philosophical and graceful and I like her louche bony boy-girlness and French Canadian accent. Susan will come tomorrow and bunk in the fac dorm and she'll be Susan for everyone, Goldberg's pal. She's chosen to be more ordinary - that is, I'll see immediately whether she has. Is it possible? Have been relaxed in company today, the Montreal show helps I think. I'll try to avoid telling S I've broken up with Tom. [new student list] [notes from Danielle's visit to the fac meeting] Gusty Sobel so responsive to everyone, is that affected? It says no. 17 [notes for workshop on seeing] 18 Writing Adam in LA and Emilee last night. Looking for a hotel in Hollywood. Charismatic megafauna - environmentalists - large animals of the kind people want to protect. Charismatic megaflora eg sequoias. 19 Tired. Every night not seizing well, stiff and sore every day, droopy. Hopeless too. Who I have: Jody solid as a bucket Zach my light lovely princeling Gil a backwoods 54 year old, emotionally lost Clarisse lively in an uninteresting way - frenetic and coarse Nan less shy than she was Ondine a young sylph James wandering in obscurity Kay the kind of Asian girl I feel smothered with 21 Susan is heavier. She is still flinging sentences but she isn't the lit-up waif she was. We were eating together and after a while I was sneaking glances at the clock because I felt depths of ocean water pressing down on me. Clarisse cried. Ondine quietened down. I will have to say more another day. Kat's child dream. Was there any moment in the light lecture. Kat, Sobel, Lise. Susan said I seem stronger, have I been working out. 22 "Legendary Canadian filmmaker, writer and philosopher Ellie Epp" - that's on a blog by another Concordia prof. Who is launched and who isn't: Jody is defended but launched enough Gil will need time Zach will or won't James is not launched Nan is Ondine more than was Clar began Kay is a fur wall I feel I can't talk about anything at this res until I've left it. This maybe: at grad Diedre thanked Goldberg and Lise for their precise contributions and then said "Ellie saw me. She was interested in me." She stood straight in her pretty dress, tall boots, black lace stockings, goth rings, and said "At our first meeting Ellie challenged me to address my chemical dependency." - That was true, but has anyone ever thanked me for the framework I give them. Diedre got it, she used it, I gave her the redescriptions that kept her racing along at dozens of critical moments. She was looking for the right thing and I gave it to her - I could give it to her because I built it. But she doesn't imagine the making of it. Clarisse spoke last at check-in this morning. Cried. Quiet Clarisse raised her hand, said "Present." Jody said "Can we lie on the floor now," so we did. Then afterward when we were all sitting on the floor I said "Do you want to do another exercise while we're down here?" They did. I winged it. Closed eyes, etc. "Imagine you're standing at graduation, what do you want to be feeling?" "What do you want to have done?" I wasn't sure what came next. I was feeling disconnected but I pushed out another sentence. "Who do you want to be proud of you, even if they can't be there?" It was a short exercise. When we came out of it I could see Zach had wet eyes. "That was good." James was saying it isn't about anyone else, he just wants to be proud of himself. I said when you're mad at whoever you want to be proud of you it's harder to know what you want to do. I said it twice. Then Clarisse jumped sideways and said to him, "You know I keep wanting to hear your story." Then he and Clarisse went off and talked so hard he missed his appointment with me. I saw him at lunch and his eyes were bright. He said he'd had one conversation after another in which he'd said things about his project that he hadn't known he knew. - Funny I didn't remember earlier today that we'd had such a good advising group, for instance when I was talking to Lise. Clarisse began by saying "Yesterday was the worst day of my life." After I talked to her she'd gone away and cried. "Ellie said 'The mouth protects you, but it's untethered.' It was truth." Kay cried too, saying she wanted the man whose justice she'd worked for, a police brutality case, to be proud of her, so his death wasn't in vain - something I don't understand yet. When she speaks to me I just want to get away as fast as I can. I nod and smile, baffled. She stands in front of me smooth, soft, and enthusiastic and I contract, I freeze. Nadia from Afghanistan. Wild research this aft to 14 new ones including a quiet beauty in turquoise earrings who wants to be an acupuncturist in refugee camps, in a comprehensive project that includes architecture, training, PTSD learning. - [back in ordinary journal book] 27 Sixteen days later, 5 in the morning. Came home trashed, said the mirror in the women's washroom in Newark airport. Left with smooth silver hair, came home frizzed and creased, flying over the wing and not alive enough to see anything. What else am I back with - too many students, not one of whom is worth my time. LA in two weeks. Find hotel room. Emilee in this three weeks. The seeing workshops and what I shd make of them. This wd be the moment to cook up a Canada Council application. Spring in SD. Sound equipment and the desert. Tax appointment. Big molar chip to fix. Lise the night we were alone on campus saying she had read the supps on the handouts, Being about sections, and they should be published. I played and slipped and admitted some but it doesn't firm into resolve, mysteriously always. Pale blue dawn at the dewy windows. How did the seeing workshop go. People didn't notice the slides, isn't that odd? Did I present badly? The workshops were not good? Wd Kat [Harrison] have liked the slides? (No.) Wd Sobel? (No.) I was inattentive, some - hardly read study plans, knew what each student needed but didn't labor the plan or see most of them twice. Didn't love them, except Zach, who loves back. Is it worse not to love them? (No.) What matters is the effect. What Jody needs - what she's doing and a little sense of further edge. Zach - to feel his dad in him. Ondine - same. Clar - to trust truth. Kay - aggression, ambition. Gil - to ground work in feeling, perceiving. Nan - can't do what she needs, love her body. James - I don't know yet. I saw Danielle being made much of as a philosopher and knew I'm deeper and broader and clearer and more radical but invisible as that, at [the college]. That won't change. Lise and Susan both said I look stronger. Is that just the turtleneck? Or the stretching. Or the bike. Or coming from film success. Looked for something to read at the airport, bought The king must die. First read it in a body cast in Kingston General, remember only the lines I copied then. Noticing that Le Guin learned her rhythm from Renault. There was a soul within my soul, free of the madness, which stood apart and whispered. 28 Millennium Biltmore March 12-15. It's on the Red Line. $388 for 3 nights. Oh room, scents of February pittosporum, freesia from Tom's pot, jasmine, cyclamen. 1 March Crazy intoxicated with spring. Don't want to work inside. Trying out walking from my belly. It feels young when I do it. - Yesterday too, after the sun goes down I can work. 2 [Tim Stevens] This month - start important projects, impress important people, tackle problems you've found daunting. Your will power is high - 15 years of expanding consciousness - more sleep, nuance, poetic feelings, subtle joys, intuition. 2011 fifteen year golden era for film, space, intuitive math. 2011 is the most significant turning point in your life. It brings your true power, talent and personality to the fore. You've held something back in the last 15 years. Not any longer. Be ambitious all year. Take risks, bet on your talents. Dissolve restrictive ties. In your intimate life you are just beginning to perceive who you really want. Money January-May. Luck expands most where the heart is hopeful, eager, joyous. Are you willing to talk about market   Is there a market for ant bear   It's small   We'll have to find it   Make it   Will Emilee have good ideas   I can hardly think about this   Only women     no   I'm only paralyzed about market. Somebody else has to do that   Is that alright   Subversive marketing   Brave and subversive   Straight A girls with love eyes   The story of the press is part of the marketing     YES My mission is to support spirits like hers and mine     YES Book trailer www.theghosttrap.com 3 Is she a better writer than I     no We're a good confluence   I need to completely get my head back into -   It's very remarkable   She has been more aware than I   Will people who like the best of Notley like her   I have to give up on Deidre     YES Send it to Duncan   Such terrific responsibility. She trusts me. She exceeds me and trusts me. We're on our honor with each other, equally. I can steady her and she can inspire me. Will you tell me who'll want it     losses, crisis, coming through, deep change / death The best people   The brave and true   Is the manuscript as well edited as it needs to be     YES Are there creative ways to find the best people   Postcards with text   Email postcards with text   Posters   Not broad marketing, very specifically targeted     YES Tell ant bear's story     YES Leonard Cohen people     YES Shd we publish our correspondence     no 4 Had an appointment with Roy Taramasco this morning, tax return, with Fed and CA $910 direct deposit. He says I'll have to treat Can pension as US income even if it's in a savings fund. 5 Then letter from OAS saying I can have part pension at $432/mo starting from last April, or else if I move back to Canada now full pension at $524. With GIS if I had 0-ish income, abt $13,000. Could be 6 months out of Canada. Supposing I cd get a bit of CCP, SSI of 500/mo, and min, it wd be 12,000/yr. I need to know how to save for housing. [list of organizing questions for pension possibilities] 6 I'm 66. Lay in bed half an hour before I remembered. David's fond light voice on the phone. We laugh. I love his laugh. I play with him to hear it more. Then Mary phones, horrible Mary grumbling and lamenting. I hang up disgusted. Graham didn't understand that in real life his creation would feel guilt and self-loathing, a sense of being driven, the knowledge that he would not or could not remain committed. His life an attempt to ignore the inner voice that told him otherwise each time he convinced himself he would follow through. "Finish strong, kid," I hear my father say. I think of all he did to make a home and all I have not done. "An entire past comes to dwell in a new house." 7 I took my clothes to the laundromat and then zoomed to Tom's on a mission. Rehearsed on the way. I was going to demand that he tell me about the times he's cheated on me. I knew he would be asleep because he'd had a job that began at midnight. Was lingering with the plants at his door. Maybe he wasn't there, maybe there was a woman with him. Knocked. Heard a movement. He came to the door and opened the priest window. He was glad to see me. I said "Your letter pissed me off. 'Happy birthday. I have some things to do. I was thinking to get you something but I didn't so here's an url.'" He leapt to put his arms around me. "I had a tight heart. My feelings were hurt." "I meant well." "I know you did." He said he had a check he could cash and would take me to breakfast. Was standing by his closet consulting on what to wear. "It's your birthday so you can choose. Do you like this one?" "Not a gingham shirt, wear the teeshirt." "But it's brown, you hate brown." "That's a good brown, it's good with black." "Should I wear these shoes?" "No wear the black ones." We went to the laundromat and sat in the jeep while the clothes went round in the drier. I told him all about my pension considerations. He was interested. Had his eye on the drier from across the parking lot. When I'd packed up the laundry bag put out his hand to carry it. Where should we go. Let's go somewhere we've never been. Let's go to the barrio. Straight up Park. Drove around and found the main street in Barrio Logan. A tattoo parlor and barber shop called Two Roses with a beautiful black buffalo head. El Roberto's taco shop where we sat on a turquoise vinyl banquette facing the same way, looking at bad orange paint and eating pollo asado. Then drove south through Chula Vista to Palm Avenue and the beach in National City, where we lay on the sand with our heads on yellow stones for pillows, the sky most of the time misted over, small waves, continuous background crashing. Ran out of things to say. The best moment was in the jeep after I'd told about pension details and he was describing having seen True grit. He was talking from his writer's mind, his best energized smart sophisticated rapid well-knit American sentences pouring forth. I basked. On Palm Avenue driving west I did say Here's something you can think about, I'd like you to tell me about all the times you cheated on me. He said what he says, that he never has. "I'm playing for keeps, I miss you." And his doubt that we could be happy together because we're so different. "We aren't negotiating getting back together" I said, although I was feeling a buzz in my womb. He was doing what he'd been instructing himself to do in his months alone, not fighting my decisions, not informing me of things I know, listening, asking. When I got home a lonesome email from Luke, who had been reading my journal he said, in a house-sit near Alexander Palace. 8 Pittisorum undulatum, Victorian box. [The spring scented plant I've been calling laurel is that.] 9 My so-called life, 1994. Claire Danes, AJ Langer - Winnie Holzman. Two days watching every episode, last night at midnight walking to repark the jeep I felt myself to be Angela and Ray-Ann walking. Fifteen - can I do that? Louie sent me an email this morning asking about the controversy about yoga in America being stolen from Hinduism. It was easy to sort: Religion can be divided into ideology and practice. The ideologies are all insane and some of the practices work. I and you are part of a movement to find / use / develop the practices that work. No one has to apologize for junking the ideologies. Commercialization is another question, which is not about money but about shallowing. Shallowing is across the board, not just in yoga. It is about preserving defenses for whatever reason. In yoga, yoga done in a dissociative way, in fear of feeling and knowing. The hook in religion has been that it evokes early love while preserving kinds of dissociation. The hook in yoga can be that too. Or not. Doing/teaching yoga in an honorable way would be about understanding what its actual best potentials are and promoting / risking / developing on that basis. Don't you think? Why was she asking. My cynical first thought is that she needs me to formulate a stance she can impress with, in her own circles. I don't mind giving her that because I enjoy my swift rightness. What's the bitter residue, though, there is one. Why is my heart tight, asking that. That I have no one who can contain me, only dependents. Then the next sentence is, I don't let anyone contain me, is it my fault, I run when anyone offers to for a moment. Is that true? It says no. Those who offer to for a moment haven't been large enough. Joyce was. Do you want to say anything about this     no That's what the idea of god is for     YES Do you understand why I'm stalling and evading these days, is it loneliness   It's just loneliness     YES - There went to ML and checked through looking for what's bad and good, lot of solid hours. - On the bike to Whole Foods just before dark, a springy joy at being in air. Then back in ML pages able to work again, as if sprung from a lock-up, and liking my tools, liking to see this room a workroom, clean and equipped, ordered, flowering too. Beginning to find where I left off 9 months ago, notes, parts, decisions to be made, maybe a bit further ahead in text design? Sense of how much work there still is to do. 10 ML the book is complicated design - how - formality of photo design cut-outs playing with detail - texture lot of text different authors kinds of text genres - theoretical essays, journal, poems, interviews What do I know so far - perfect covers, stole design from Aperture Christenberry text black and red and blue for quotes and notes. Lot of white. Booked on Amtrak for tomorrow - This time Jerry answered. "Jesus Ellie." His slow voice the same, deliberate. "I wondered whether you'd have dinner with me." "I'd love to." "Be prepared, I'm way old, I'm 66." "I'm 65." "Isn't it odd." "It is odd." Japanese earthquake 8.8. Finding I know quite a bit more than I did about ML. It's whiter and looser. Reorganized some, essays into a new comment section. Interviews in film and multimed. [photo of newly released Suu Kyi walking at the airport with her son Kim, seeing him for the first time in ten years]   part 4 in america volume 22: 2010-2011 december-may work & days: a lifetime journal project