| in america volume 23 part 2 - 2011 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
9 July 2011 Greg sent a note about SH4/5 so I went there after writing Kay's eval. I liked it. It's lightly sober and exact. 10 It was fear, shaking me in its teeth until I gasped from the pain of it. Fear of the future, generally. Fear of myself, particularly. Fear of finding that there is no happiness. That there is nothing good and lovely in me. That I have lived too long with evil and dirt. That I will not be able to leave it because it is melted into me. Fused. If Father is already too much a part of me I am doomed. I have found evil, but it has been in me. And with it there is dispair and knowledge and perhaps, somewhere, hope. [February 1962]
- So I had it completely wrong. He wasn't too much in me as egotism, he was and is too much in me as lack of support for enterprise. Fear of enterprise, fear that it will be unmet, especially by men. Thank you. - Emilee wrote today from Beijing. - Something in power dynamics. I'd had a series of successes - earned successes - that were growing my confidence, and it looks like my mom and sister ganged up to nip that back. I'm wondering whether I turned on myself because I didn't know enough to fight back when that happened. [to G] 11 Monday 8:30, grey overcast, sycamore and palms calm in a breeze. I'll have to whack away at evals again today, resent them. After I'd done as much of them as I could last night I went back to logging We made this tapes. What depressing junk. I didn't understand video and we were shooting in time pressure at random. The garden itself is uglier than we thought at the time. I'm logging everything because I have so many tools now that I don't know what might turn out to be useable, but my lip is curling at most of it. What I like best is out of focus color glows. Am thinking a lot will depend on the sound tapes, which I should digitize soon. I do like hearing my voice on tapes, it's all girl, it's charming. It's fresh, light, swift, playful. - There I went away and logged tapes most of the day except for bike, Starbucks and some chapters of the Eno book. Better footage today, the herb garden. The neighbourhood. I can imagine getting into sequences. Figuring out what clips are good for. Learning color correction. Sometimes reframing and retiming. Thinking about beat. A lot of cleaning up of sound. Decisions about written text. It's a DVD so it can have extras for the Strath people. I'm glad to have it to do. Sometimes a slide show, maybe with black between, sometimes abstract streaks and glows. Sometimes long takes over voice or ambient sound. .mov files for the journal! Make it light, clean, funny, alert in nuance, the way the voice is. Playing its medium and still showing a story. Look at my new shoes. Gold-colored Chucks and next to them my first leather sandals in 25 years? to wear with the silk pants. 12 A sense that I can play any way I like with the We made this materials, both video and sound, and put out an album - I've wasted a lot of time haven't I - the ten years here - in a way all the years since Trapline - wasted so much time in romantic pain - rather than Eno's sort of steady and honoured work. There's the journal and there's Being about but only the films have given me a context of liking. I haven't managed my career well at all, and there's so little time left. I've lost a lot of ground in companionship too - I mean I'm out of the habit of knowing what I have to say in the moment. That has made me unimpressive in public and isolated even with my friends. - No wireless all afternoon. - Beginning with the wild area pan section. 10 minutes 45 seconds. I separated the clips tonight, started to mark sound points. There are motions I can do something with. The audio pans too, I saw. The footage scintillates. The motion has accelerations and decelerations that are smooth because mechanical and then sometimes a little voluntary shove. It shows its making. The sound is textural with little marks - bird cheeps, faint locomotive throb, tractor trailer growl, faint train whistle. There's quite a broad still center, the pond wrinkling delicately. The dark pans go quite unconscious, under. The sky pans end in a sort of fairyland. I don't like hearing our voices in it, will think about that. Louie's voice sets my teeth on edge throughout, its stiff guttural quality. It ends in 3 sky stills, so far. I've trimmed the very feeble first maybe six clips before I found the pans. What should be my principles - use the sync sound as much as I can. Be aware of the moments of its making, what was happening cognitively, to show the thought if it's worth showing. Sometimes touches of maker voice too, laughter for instance. - Have to think about voice over, I'm in the situation of doing opposite things again, making a documentary and making an art piece. Write about what I'm doing. It's the double sense of We made this. I would need to make that doubleness clear. It happens distinctly in the pans. First task to thoroughly see what's there. The medium, the place, the maker then, the maker now. Publish the representation chapter. The edit medium? So much off-screen sound, the motors, and rarely the wild things of the neighbourhood, come in to mark or texturize what's visible. Texture of motors always there, very urban but it's grainy too in not a bad way and like the scintillation. 13 Still no wireless. I'm lonely without it. A bit frantic. I've roughed out the evals, all except Zach, against resistance every minute, forcing. Keep being floored in FCP, still haven't figured out how to learn it, when I leave the exercises and try my own projects I'm almost instantly stumped by something not working the way I expect. Then I have to look at indexes and them I'm swamped. I'm oriented but I forget the fine points and can lose hours trying to figure them out. I like Soundtrack Pro - there what I need to learn is not the system so much as the acoustic facts, which I have to learn by fooling with the parameters. I can keep doing that with all the wild area pan clips, getting to know the textures. But learning FCP is so much learning the system, I think I'll have to go back to the beginning and comb through everything. Less than 3 weeks left and then after the res only another 3 weeks before it all starts again. 14 Not having internet makes me feel the function it had, like someone in the room I'd say hello to when I woke or came in from somewhere, or check in with between tasks, or say a last goodnight to. Ask questions of all day long. I feel shut in without it. It's an actual sensation, as if the walls are tighter, thicker, more opaque. 15 Finished an actual little .mov file today, the dark pond with wrinkles and crawling text. I'll do it again better. But found some good things, how to bring in text on top of a decisive small pan, so the one nudges the other. One minute song. Dark pond sound.mov. We made this: an album. I'm a bit thrilled. Drums between the bells came today. It isn't as abstract as I'd wanted. Maybe what I'll learn from Eno is marketing. - Oh the gate is open. - How to present the kind of person I am too. Text and voice, the same thing being said both ways at different times. Rob's hands weeding and the text crawl saying "I was thinking about what you think about when you weed." 16 Peaches. I pull off its skin to have it wet and naked in my hand. Bite carefully to not spill juice. It's so ripe it's as if cooked. There's more than one taste in every bite. Sweet on the outside, acid in the red next to the seed. The whole event. I immediately want to do it again. Went to the Pride parade this morning. Was sitting on the curb just where the route turned into the fruit loop (Babycakes barista called it that), opposite four men with white beards holding up signs saying Repent. I was sitting there for an hour looking at bodies before the vanguard, which turned out to be a ragged fleet of dykes on massive hogs, showed up. I had tears in my eyes. One had her daughter in pillion, one her mother, one her old thin father. The next event was half an hour later, and it made me cry too. Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, little bands of young men with short hair, a couple of older men, a couple of women old and young, in each cohort, veterans of contempt. There were a lot of troll bodies, only a couple I loved to see. One a tall slim redheaded man in his twenties, almost naked, very white skinned, small orange bathing suit, sandals. He was dancing, smiling, light-spirited and a perfect shape, a perfect mover. The other was also a tall slender man, young, broad-shouldered, quite shabby. I thought he was maybe a street guy, until he began to run backwards. He ran as easily backward as forward. And then when he caught up to a little group of guys he turned forward, said hello, turned round again and stood dancing on the spot. Natural grace. Tonight cast around for yet something else to learn - Photoshop for video, the book I had forgotten I had, CD too, and the latest version of Photoshop I happen to have now. There's sideways spread of learning I notice. 17 I loved Tom today. He phoned in the morning to invite me for breakfast. I mentioned Eno - I'd been copying passages - and he wiped me out instantly with a landslide of mud - his own views of Eno - I tried to call him off nicely - he didn't stop - I got into shouting - watched myself let loose with many things I think - however aggrieved I did feel - and then we went on. He walked here, I gave him a glass of cold water, showed him the curtains, which I knew he'd like, and then sat him in front of the monitor and showed him Dark pond at full size. He had his glasses on, and the headphones. I was standing behind him watching it over his shoulder and I could see it working. I could see the timing allowing him to see the wrinkles on the water between phrases, the light neat way it closes on a spreading circle, like a tail tucked in. Then I played him a Space hotel track with spectrum frequency view. Synesthesia he said. - I said; he couldn't remember the word. We went out to wait at the bus stop. The bench was too hot to sit on so we stood around talking. He said years from now we'll regret that we wasted so many years. I held fast to the ways I'm thriving more without him, but I did feel what I used to feel with him, that he's for me, we're a match. He's settling into the senior center, it feeds him and gives him good works to do. He's finding his next life. We went to the YMCA for breakfast - ended up walking all the way - and sauntering back to 5th Avenue after we were nearly run into from behind by a woman on a bike who crashed into a bench next to us. Her chain came off. Tom jumped to help. She was a beauty, riding on the north sidewalk on Broadway with her children, beautiful children, two daughters and two younger sons. She was speaking Spanish but didn't seem Mexican. Her kids were all wearing the sort of canvas beach shoes worn in France. I was gazing at the daughters but then I could see Tom needed help. He had the bike upside down and was lying on the sidewalk prying the chain with his penknife. I could see I should pull on the chain to give him slack, so I did that and rotated the pedal when he said to. Then the bike was fixed and we kept going toward 5th, where we sat in the window of the Chinese food place and looked at the odd souls assembling at the busstop until the 120 came half an hour later. I loved him because he didn't go away when I yelled and because he looked at what I wanted to show him and later on said yes he'd been unconscious when he jumped on me about Brian Eno. As we were crossing the bridge he said "So now tell me about Ellie Epp" and I said "That's not how you do it" and told him how and he asked a good question about what it is that interests me in Eno. A dream this morning that ended with Louie dead on the pavement covered with one of her African prints. I don't remember the earlier part - I remembered it this morning - but there was a strange man who went away toward the staircase and then I saw a young policeman running, drawing his gun. I thought, there's trouble upstairs, went out in the courtyard and saw Louie lying as if she'd been thrown off the roof. There were more police up there looking down as if it had just happened. I got down beside her, said "Louie, I'm here." Then woke. 18 The moment I was remembering at night was the moment standing looking into the two girls' faces, and they looking back. We were just looking. It was completely natural on both sides. We weren't being social, we were just seeing each other. I was looking at them probably with wonder to find them so beautiful. We were under a tree. They were standing astride kids' bikes. - [email from Louie]
19 I phoned about not being able to open a program in the bundle and discovered I have a whole other program perfect for the uses I want. Motion 4. It will generate a colored box. It sets up zooms and pans and color effects with a beautiful big canvas. It has logarithmic and exponential rates of change. It will simulate a shove. It does holds, scrubs, reverses, will do a fraction stoop. A wind force. It has full ability to place, color and move text. I can animate all my slides with it, put them on a DVD - it even does particles. I had to go sit in the hillcrest Starbucks and download the manual. Hate reading the manual on a computer. 1800 pages. Logan on email this morning - Ellie I'm thinking about you today and all the work I did with you. It was such a private and deep time and was the catalyst for so much thinking that increased the complex aesthetic and emotional foundation I had. I'm thinking about these things because someone I know, a well known poet, is publishing a lot of my thinking as her own. I know it sounds like such a desperate, bitter, jealous writer thing, but it is so much more than that. I'm trying to let it go, but letting it go feels like I'm letting go so much of myself, a self that was really being formed in my years of solitude at Goddard. Hope this finds you doing great
I think of Logan the way I think of no one else. He was the long-delayed brother of my own private and deep time in writing and I something-like revere him for it. So I'm feeling his sore heart and wanting to help. But what do I think. I don't know enough about what's actually happened - whether she was his lover and came by it as interchange or his teacher and is stealing it outright because she has publishing connections and can, and should know better but hasn't wanted to. What do I know from the other side - four times people have thought I was stealing from them and I didn't think I was. Andy saying the framing in Trapline was like his. Trudy thinking I was stealing from her when I was honoring her. Rhoda thinking the Peace River Country writing was like hers when really it was like Pound. Kathleen thinking my perception chapter was like hers because I mentioned the bat studies, which I'd found elsewhere. - In all those cases I think the accusation meant they were alarmed to think I might exceed them. Did Jam steal from me? I think yes and I from her equally.
I wasn't in a power position with any of these people either. I didn't really mind Judith stealing my thesis, though I wd've if she'd published it as hers. When have I felt stolen from - when people lie to me, also when they don't acknowledge jealousy, envy, intimidation, admiration, desire, anger - what they are that they don't want to be - so I have to feel them alone. With some of what I do I'm not afraid of theft because I don't think anyone else can do it. What I'm thinking for Logan is that he should publish, himself, and especially if part of what he's distressed about is feeling that self has gone, maybe cannot survive teaching and marriage. There's a lot of theft by students nearly always, in the sense that they draft in my earned capacity and don't know they're doing it and don't acknowledge - I think I probably used to do that too. I sometimes draft in students' capacity but do acknowledge with strong admiration. For instance in Jody's eval I said I'd like 8 Jody's a semester because the kind of fun she is can cure disease and forestall old age. - That eval itself was drafting on her energy. 20 discovered that the journal was my most powerful ally in crafting the kind of life I wanted. I was building a scaffolding of choices and attitudes, forging affinities ... shoring up the self under construction with what seemed to me to be the finest possible materials. Hannah Hinchman. Why is she second-rate - in what is she second rate. Some of the drawings are just right but her metaphors are stupid. "Transferring experience from the vat of life into the vessel of the journal" - that's repulsive. There's something else too about being so dedicated to naturalist detail, an owl's lower mandible and half a dozen random heads of goldenrod. It's admirable to know all that and yet it has an air of hiding out. From what. Compare Shakespeare. And yet I'm yearning over the thought of an own house and garden in a tiny place like Santa Ysabel. A cat. (Not five.) A manly man not too much in the way. Odd neighbours wd be fine. Indians if possible. This desk with its silvery machines and swift magic.
If characters are close their voice will have more high frequencies and less reverb. Different sounds with different reverb settings implying different locations Synchronized production track, ambience tracks A lapel mic will pick up everything clearly but lack perspective. Sound for my slides - think about - for each. Thursday 21st Indignant this morning, still, about Shakespeare in love. I asked Netflix for it because Greenblatt said he liked it. Was he in its pay. It was vilely false. First, that Shakespeare was played by someone calculated to draw teenagers, a tall flop with puppy eyes and swollen lips. Oh S had stronger eyes than that, he'd have been a tight man with a steely dangerous glance. Second, the script was full of anachronism meant to make the stupid public feel at home - "Stay right there," that sort of thing. Third, social conditions of the time were flouted as if they didn't matter. S could never have joined the dance in Viola's palace because he would have been dirty and dressed wrong. It matters how S had to live to do what he did - had to live while doing what he did. He'd have had lice. What I did like was the reconstruction of the Globe, the river taxis, Dench's ugly glamour, Paltrow's pretty breasts. when they sing out the names of all things that cross their paths bath of the maternal voice - Pruned the hedge in front, cleaned up the back patio, power washed the second floor. Two days of it. Hot shower, aspirin and vitamin C. I love physical labour and it is expensive. I love making order dramatically though not as maintenance. Emilee with Luke today. She gave him a kiss goodbye she said. 23
Fauré 1845-1924. Two voice tumbling through it in the reverberant space of St.Martin-in-the-Fields. Chris and Don: a love story. Don Bachardy b.1934. 24
Yesterday in Camden Square. Sent Emily Arbour a fan note. She replied. Liked what I was wearing for shopping this morning - jeans, white shirt, yellow Chucks. The white shirt is new, a bit gauzy, light. 25 One week left. A sensation of mess compounded. I'm thick waisted, my food disciplines haven't held. Outbreaks of wanting mouth pleasure because there aren't other kinds. And then sore, and not biking, and not doing yoga, and not slow-breathing, just tumbling into bed. Emilee didn't send her cover files so I didn't do what I'd hoped to, get Ant Bear Books through. Have been getting stuck with the software and not pushing because I'm not clear what I want to do. Lost Greg's company when I lost wireless. There was yard work for Nora, and shopping, which made me hurt. Min and Cassidy have been arriving early and leaving late, and were there all weekend so I haven't had the building to myself. Now this week I have to get ready for Goddard again. The last two days because I didn't know what else to do I was fixing GW pages, starting from the back, hyphens, heads and tails, dream and note colors, other small things. I was holding together so much complexity then, the thesis and psychological work and Tom -
Mind and land is a separate book
- The Motion 4 book came and even just the first lesson helped a lot. Trying to figure out the colophon this morning, not finished with that. Finished fixing GW23 and began 22. Constantly impressed by how hard I was working with Tom. When I see the effort and then the way we keep coming through I want to try again and I don't know why it stopped. - Trying out not eating much, want to know whether it'll make a difference by tomorrow. - Nervous about my house because Nora had David do a second pruning on the hedge and kumquats. A drastic one that wiped out what I did. It's 10:30. The window open onto black, red and black begonia in front of it in its black pot. A faint hiss in the cream-colored room. 26
Sections - education, 'consciousness studies', writing, feminism, health, place and environment, embodiment studies, cultural studies, intro about theoretical platform and the kind of work advising is
[Zach] I think yes, I said something like that once, I can't speak to it fully because of course you are full of love, maybe I meant despairing love, love that just pushes out without hope or expectation, or maybe I said something idle and imprecise.
27 What puzzles me in what Zach says about me then and now is that it is true enough to make me cry but I don't see how he can know it in the contexts he knows me in. It is not true in my relations with students. Where it has been true has been in my best work in film and philosophy, and with Tom, and with the Goddard fac, for instance. I come to that despair after beginning in hope. I won't say expectation. In the contexts where it is true it's glib of Zach to suggest an attitude change wd fix me. He has no idea how earned the despair is. Is there an and yet? Attitude does have something to do with it. I despair quickly and don't persist and fight it through, defend my love from despair in action. - I did with Tom with huge energy and still ended in despair. Yes. I say that reproachfully, reproaching life for how it's stacked in that regard. I earned true love, I did; and wasn't allowed it. And am still owed it and will never be allowed it. That is despair for sure.
28 In GW working from the back to set up heads and tails, to color dreams and notes, fix hyphens, sometimes catch caps and ellipses. I'm doing it now, though I have other things to do, to have company in a day. Working backwards through the volumes but forward through the parts. Have just finished GW21 - the struggle with fear, fighting through to understanding again and again, the fight each time diagrammed in detail. It's remarkable in a couple of ways, in how hard it was emotionally to do what I was doing, in how I worked with myself to do it - dialogue processing - the method itself. And in the clarity of the realizations as I went along: the working mind moving a step at a time fixing what was wrong in what I had to work with, the sure-footedness of it. The parallel work with Tom and maleness, the parallel work with mind and land. The way the story is one whole and unlike anything published anywhere. But so particular no one would be able to read it? Very particular in the neuroscience. -
29 Nervous about my house - the big clients were gone after Wednesday but still people are downstairs till late, and when I got back from biking at 7 there was David drastically repruning the banana tree I'd already pruned and looking at me with a blank cold eye. Is it going to be all weekend again. Do I need a backup plan. I have a lot of machines I'd have to move - 30 - And now today when I come home from the beach at 5 there he is having drastically pruned nearly everything on the patio, including my mesquite tree. He's seizing territory. Why. Is it at Nora's direction or is she tolerating it for her own reasons.
Do I need to talk about Tom yesterday. We lay on the sand below the retaining wall at Scripps. It was overcast but a gentle heat came onto our skin through the clouds. I was drowsy, happy to be a body not hurting anywhere. The skin on my thighs was tender and white, hadn't seen sun in maybe three years. We had been talking. He was telling me things he's thought in our two years separation. He stands in front of a mirror and sees that he doesn't look the facetious person he pretends to be. He has a couple of times looked at a woman and thought, I should get to know that woman, and then thought, I don't want to get to know that woman. He didn't like being judged all the time. I don't like moustaches so he doesn't wear a moustach, and he grows a good moustach, like a brigadier general's. I don't like brown so he doesn't wear brown. I disrespect him. I said Work Woman respects almost no one and Love Woman's form of respect is trust. She couldn't trust him, he wasn't trustworthy. He agrees that he wasn't. In this conversation it's as if the possibility of coming through is in the air. He says he's scared to death of it but he says it in a confiding enjoying tone. I am reserving judgment. When he plunks himself - he's large and chilled - on top of me to try to kiss me I turn my head. I've been reading the last 6-7 volumes of The Golden West and seeing the liveness of my love for him - the struggle - the liveness of the coming-through times - and so I'm not completely shut down on the idea. And I'm grateful he's still there, hasn't gone away when he had the chance. I admitted my own fault, which was giving up, withdrawing. Fault-finding is part of that, I can see.
- Sore heart - email from Nora saying David says the patio trees are dehydrated and will I water everything once a day - it hurts my pride to be the gardener commanded and not an artist with a patron who believes in me - presumably I've been shirking the watering for that reason - I have shirked the watering, it's true - that's my wobble in it - but now I'm shamed and wanting to move - so much depends on not paying rent though -
1st August Waking stressed. Wanting to move and feeling how much I like the way I look out onto rooftops in the west, at 7 this morning lit up quietly. Strips of light on the wall from sun through the north windows. It has taken me this long to make it lovely, and here it is, lovely. I've brought the pair of doves. I'm set up with machines finally, could be working right when I get back this time. Moving would unsettle me for years? But I can't live with this kind of stress. They were here all weekend and he was power-washing yesterday - I was smiling, I'd already washed and he was needing to say I'm the one with the hose - but then they were here until 10:30. My solar is tight. - Flying tomorrow - I washed the front of my house this morning, laundry, and looked at ads for places to live - could maybe find something for $600 at the cheapest. What wd that mean to daily life - I'd love to be out of the nervousness, which I've been ignoring, of being a dependent. 2nd
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