| in america volume 24 part 3 - 2012 january-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
11 January 2012 Yesterday by the biggest rock pile trying to take pictures, lichen skins - mustard, curry powder, chartreuse, pale grey, charcoal, a lot of grey-green with ruffled edges, brown buttons. This morning I read up on what a lichen is, looking for names for those characteristic kinds. - Satellite in geostationary orbit 42,000 km from the center of the earth. 36,000 km from surface, approx - orbit once in 24 hrs. If over the equator, geostationary. Rotating 10x faster than an airliner Geosats at Mintaka closest to the equator Visible at 5 degrees below the equator on the Orion Nebula declination 12 2:30, warm afternoon. I'm in the chair after a morning of [college] business, ref letter for Katie, revised course equivs for James. Yellow butterfly! So little. A lot of fat birds ranging through the grass. Grey heads, brown shoulders, light undersides, bit of pink just at the wing pit. Very quiet but there's a high-pitched hiss, is that me. Glitter of a car coming slowly up the lane. The sycamores almost unleafed, bits of dull orange that don't show from a distance. So-pleasant directional heat like the right distance from a stove. The Coulters looking a bit undressed, this year's needle-drop blown down. Some little sharp chip chip and sometimes a faint single gurgle. On the horizon, through field glasses, the gappy line of high-rise towers that must be downtown. The sky's white behind them, sea fog. Both hawks balancing on thermals above the dip. The slopes are turning a pale green that is beginning to look pastoral with the dark blue mountains. I haven't told the small excursion last week down the road to the little cemetery hidden up behind Norm Feigel's. It turns out there's a pond behind a small concrete dam across what must be the creek that's lined with willows where it goes under the road. Also a long rusted dinosaur of a machine that's something to do with screening and loading topsoil maybe, or was. Shadows lengthening on the slope below the shaman. What forms all these humps, it's very humpy. There was a new calf with the herd this morning. For many days now I've run the heater only long enough to warm the room after night chill. Ran out of West Wing episodes last night. Josh and Donna, Toby Zeigler, Leo, CJ. Love and work, love in work, oh smart people. They don't say please and no one minds, it's more efficient. Josh and Donna though he bellows at her and she trots along behind him in corridors, because both are doing their hard jobs well and they trust that about each other. They like each other's quality so much they don't have to be nice. She's his assistant but only because he's doing something worth doing, that he can and she can't yet. He's busy and he's a guy and he doesn't think about her much; she does think about him and she sees through him. "You have to get Josh" she says. She's learning. She's Love Girl as quick study. She's the third son of the tale and she'll come from behind. When she's hurt he's stricken. He does what he can to take care of her. Then they go on as they were, balanced and not feeling sorry for themselves. CJ another kind of woman - is she another kind of woman? She loves Toby and Leo and the pres but what she's devoted to is the idea of good government, as they are. She's very tall. She's crisp and witty and willing to take on the world. In being those things she's not mannish at all, and not toughened. She's well written. They all are, remarkably. Laiwan showing 80s tape-slide work at Presentation House, talked to a curator about me. They'll maybe show Current. Then L says she's reading CC applications for a jury and I shd apply. I cd work on that -
I know what beauty is, she thought, beauty is the love that shone through my face. And it is dying, it has been murdered, and they will see nothing but their own ugliness. Beauty is love, she thought. Drabble 7 I have noticed that in every instance where I approached this shining goal, something within me stumbled, made small but telling mistakes, hesitated, didn't quite give an all-out effort. I realized that my subconscious, or the broad flow of my life, was veering me away from this ultimate attainment. Something in me either did not want it, or did not want to spend what you had to, to get it. I think the subconscious itself is karma or isn't even karma, but the servant of our unconscious, where desire and destiny are inseparable. We punish ourselves for our wrongs, and reward ourselves for our rights; we are self-regulating. Tim Stephens Jan 15-21 2012 Astral Reflections - Been meaning to tell you I got into "Works and Days" awhile back .... The writing is so beautiful, the only other writing I know that's as pleasurable and precise is by VW. Said Lise. - Arrowweed thickets like willows Buckbrush - dry foothill chaparral, stiff, ceanothus cuneatus Stinging lupin maybe, pea family, lupinus hirsutissimus Filaree - young mauve, a storksbill Silver wormwood? Probably not - like lavendar, dark pink terminal flowers Maybe windmills, allionia incarnata, prostrate, scent - Do I want to say anything about staying with T for two nights when I took the Mac Pro to the shop. Daddy hand on my head. The first night he was still feeling fond and he stroked my hair as I was lying in bed. I'd washed it, so it was smooth and dry, and the feel of his light large warm hand was sublime. Apart from that we were friendly and familiar, we agreed we aren't back together - he agreed. I said what I hold against him is that he says he'll do things he doesn't have the means to do, and that is seduction. He said he'd accept that but there were stories on his side too. He looked at the Here site and then got out his To the buoy piece, that he just keeps working on. He'd done a quick clean when I said I was coming but corners and edges were dirty. No clean sheets, no clean pillowcase, every plate cup and glass sticky and filmed because he washes dishes so poorly. His fridge a packed jumble in which he can't see what he has. My skin crawls, and at the same time my puss, I noticed, was humming quietly in ways it hasn't. And T was kind, worked my sore lowest back hard with his wise big hands, was happy I was there. 19 Yesterday early seven turkeys filing east up the little slope toward the road. I was watching them through the binocs. A car passed. One of the gobblers swelled up and raised his tail into a 300 degree arc, whose broad white band shone translucent to the rising sun. The rest of the group had paused with him on the slope's crest, and now three more raised their tails against the light and stepped ponderously back and forth with him in a small patch of grass, like holders of high office milling before a conference door. Photos along MG road yesterday when I had to go to SY to mail the master tape. [Santa Ysabel Valley] [oak trunk] [open flare] [home lane] A 3" lizard flashing up the bank. Mbo [site] since mid-Nov, two months. International: Lima, Edinburgh, Stolkholm, Hong Kong, Madrid, another Sweden, Russian Fed, Rome, Barcelona, Brasilia, Delhi, Nanjing, Galway, Toscana, Cambridge, Acapulco, Vienna, Belgium, Qator. 19 foreign cities, 22 states, 3 provinces. 20 Ray Monk 1990 Ludwig Wittgenstein: the duty of genius 26 April 1889 - April 1951 relentless truthfulness Even in Brahms, he once said, "I can begin to hear the sound of machinery." A book on mechanics he read as a teenager says that instead of giving an answer to the question "What is force?" the problem should be dealt with by restating Newtonian physics without using 'force' as a basic concept. Before he was 20 already writing philosophical reflections in the form of dated notes. a wall parting him from the truth Good taste is genuine taste and therefore is fostered by whatever makes people think truthfully. He won't recommend it by arguments addressed to a different point of view ... arguments would spoil its beauty. He was so unhappy, so gentle, so wounded in his wish to think well of me. Says Russell. Nothing is tolerable except producing great works or enjoying those of others. The year he spent in Skjolden ... Years later he used to look back on it as the one time that he had had some thoughts that were entirely his own, when he had even "brought to life new movements in thinking." 1913 Deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person. The affection of any noble human being is a support in the unsteady balance of my life. - About a letter from Rilke May I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself. the Latin phrase used by Spinoza: sub specie aeternitatis The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. In such a way that they have the whole world as background. Schopenhauer: "devote the whole power of our mind to perception ... let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present." After the war, Tractatus, 30 years old, gave his money to his sisters, summer working as a gardener at a monastery, then teacher training and rural schools. honest toil combined with a refined intelligence, a deep cultural appreciation and a devout seriousness; a meagre income, but a rich inner life. 1919-1926. Left teaching in disgrace, charged with physical brutality to children. Lied about it in court. "Hit so hard that she bled behind the ears." an anthropological way of looking at philosophical problems Always wore the same things - an open-neck shirt, grey flannel trousers and heavy shoes ... items chosen with meticulous care. I thought: I have to live with people to whom I cannot make myself understood. - That is a thought that I actually do have often. At the same time with the feeling that it is my own fault. What 'mystical' meant to him: an experience "when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world" and "the experience of feeling absolutely safe.' a man who is regarded as a hero and has the looks and upbringing of an aristocrat, but is actually a Jew and a scoundrel I will have to stand on tiptoe a great deal if I don't want to go under. Ogden and Richards The meaning of meaning, ie that words have effects. What was W's objection - a sort of network sense I think, 'grammar' as 'internal relations'. What he didn't get was that the internal relations were world/cortical, a wide net triggered. His sense of language still that it is an external object? A philosopher should demonstrate a technique. 1930 Puzzles are the consequence of a misuse. He's 40 when he gets to the standpoint of the Investigations. Family resemblance and Goethe's Metamorphosis of plants. "Offers us a plan in which we may group the organs of plants according to their similarities as if around some natural centre." so as to gain a view of the whole space in which the structure of our language has its being lying to oneself about oneself must have a harmful influence on style ... . If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit. He prepared a confession, delivered it, apologized to children. "This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people." I would now like to live with somebody. To see a human face in the morning. 1937 Hospital work in his 50s during the war. friendless and joyless. 1942 Probably the main thing is still loneliness. Iris Murdoch: "His extraordinary directness of approach and absence of any sort of paraphernalia were the things that unnerved people." Painful love, guilt, shame, illness, suicidal depression often. Religious. "The belief in a benevolent father is actually the expression of just this life," ie to love with hope and not despair if those hopes were not fulfilled. Last two years of his life no income, no home, "little taste for the solitariness and fierce independence that before he had craved. Living as a guest of his friends and disciples." the character that he himself had earlier attributed to all his work - that of clarifying the work of others. insisted on eating bread and cheese at all meals took great interest in the unfamiliar flora of the area the shabby older man Prostate cancer. Prescribed estrogen and blamed mental dullness on it. Died just after his 62nd birthday. Tell them I've had a wonderful life. St Giles Church Cambridge. - Indifferent demanding mother, driving father, three brothers who committed suicide, family prominence founded on dissimulation, extreme need for companionship, extreme abhorrence of stupidity, a gift for formal systems but an ethic of essence that discredited it, idealistic fear of sex, impractical disregard of body, disinterest in women except those who looked after him. Could he have done what he did if he had had more mercy toward himself. He first earned mastery of the formal fathers and then undid their kingdom from within. I'm not interested until he gets to the Investigations but then I revere him. He stepped out of the fantasy. He kept personal address in his work, didn't impersonate. But a gormlessness about himself that is maybe like Jam's, for instance in the way he thought he could be a country schoolmaster, and his intention to marry Marguerite. One thing I'm wondering is whether my willingness to be interested in other people, to the extent that I had it, has been useful to the kind of philosopher I am, or whether it has been a waste. Witt didn't teach by getting into his students' heads. And yet I know more than he did about what a person is. 21 The Presentation House show. There I am with Laiwan and Stan Douglas and some people whose work I don't know, but also with some of the cold fashionable people of the '80s. I like that Current will flow on and on in a gallery for a month and a half and speak for world and perception there. Its sharp indigo blue. There has been back and forth with the curator and with the lab technician this week, all so direct and easy because of email. A message comes, I deal with it, done. Emilee this morning too, just her back cover blurb to fix and then she's ready for a proof copy. It has been raining today. When I woke I heard gurgling. I've been working in bed. Now suddenly a white spotlight on the page. The oak sparkling. Low clouds lit and running east. - There I go out with the camera and then come back and look at the photos on the big monitor. This camera surprises me. I knew Ektachrome 400, I knew its particular magic transformations, especially of blues, but now I get startled. This digital system does something with reds, especially wet reds. For instance there were three versions of a sightline with the rusty sycamores on the right. They came up ravishing - in the context of the whole I mean - in a way I didn't see myself. [wet chair] [wet rocks and weeds] And another thing is that when I look at the photos I have inklings of how much more I could be seeing when I'm about to press the button. I'm not far enough into camera mind. The place does enough work for me so I can get by with what I've got for ordinary purposes, but there's more intelligence to make. I can see that darkroom decisions wd have developed the intelligence I mean. This morning too I opened a doc file on the desk and came into excerpts I'd called Here: a notebook and forgotten. Immediately blew fuses - that sensation of being too much, unready, having to stop, go away. I went to email duties for the morning and now came back and tried to edit, and again got stopped, this time three pages in. 22 Cold morning, there was a white rime on the grass, so light it's already gone through there was only a moment of sun. 7:48, Sunday morning. My Handel ladies. Birds dropping from some notch they have in the eaves. Phone rings. It's Mary. She's lonely. She says it's a mistake to retire where you haven't lived. In former days old people lived with younger people. She misses the sound of young voices. Her brothers and sisters are only interested in their own families. It's hopeless with the people in her building, old people can't be interested in anyone they didn't know earlier. I say yes, old people now are sacrificed to the young, but everyone has been young. We pay in our old age for freedoms when we're young. That's how it should be. I hope though that I do not moan about it the way she does. It makes it worse. 24 Worked all day - 7 to 7 - cleaning up the mbo site - not finished quite, but ftp is too slow this time of day - what to do now, another 4 hrs. Salmon soup: don't forget: vegetables, a 12 oz tin of salmon, tin of chicken broth, nutmeg, fresh ground pepper, bit of cream. Blend, reheat. Couple of soaked almonds or not-soaked walnuts. 26 Yesterday morning while I was looking at email, dimly heard a racket below the window. Turkeys around the pyracantha, not in their circumspect mode, a lot of them, and so agitated I couldn't count them. 35 maybe. They were deep in politics it seemed, chasing each other, briefly fanning their tails, rushing one way and then the other, the whole flock blown across the yard and then back, many times, barking constantly, sometimes breaking into gobbles. I'm so sore these days. Hands, lowest back, hips. Wrists and shoulders. Was that a bobcat on the road. - This room is 16 x 24, 2:3. 7'8" high at the sides, 9'8" in the middle. [statcounter notes on who's visited Being about and Work & days in the last while] Visiting the neighbours. 1. While I was on the way back from the store I stopped at the encampment that's been gathering [on Mesa Grande Rd] and is now more. Historical re-enactment group, fur trader era he said, the one wearing buckskin pants with a knife in his waistband. The fellow hanging around with him was Ed, who says he's Norm Feigel's brother-in-law. He said go talk to Norm's wife Cathy, tell her Ed sent me. 2. Ron stopped on the road as I was labouring up on the bike, said why don't you come now, Donna wd like it. I thought Donna likely wdn't but I wanted to see the house. They are higher and on an open bench. The house was packed with upholstered furniture and Western paraphernalia - animal heads on the walls. In the bedroom a high royal bed with posts. I marveled to think of him, with his glassy boiled-egg eyes, devotee of a guru since 1969, some sort of aspiration to divinity that means, living in that warren of always more rooms, all packed with miscellaneous stuff. He doesn't like noise but doesn't know there's visual noise. Even their west window, the one with a view of all, had a piece of junk stained glass leaned against it. I like something about him, something tremorous and sincere, a bit helpless, but she is - I'll try to say this exactly - a thick untextured presence with whom nothing interesting can be said. The fact that he has married her makes me suspect his spirituality is stupid, though she calls him an intellectual. 27 In the morning I want mail to answer, something personal, someone to speak to, for instance now, 9 on a Friday morning, I'm at a loss not wanting to do the things there are to do. Bob describes his personal motivations as "needing to honour as many life forms as possible in my lifetime. That means knowing their names and seeing how they fit together." Judith Larner Lowry 1999 Gardening with a wild heart: restoring California's native landscapes at home U of Cal Press Acorn seeds in 5% bleach solution for 5 min. Drain, mix with peat moss and vermiculite and place in large clear plastic bag. Close tightly and keep in a warm place. Check weekly, be sure mix is damp but not soggy. When transplanting she prunes back roots and shoots. co-evolved with that particular flower - that is, 'allegiant' to it Because bees avoid darkness, many bee-pollinated, funnel-shaped flowers are translucent at the base. Calif poppies as cut flowers: pick in bud, strip most leaves, cut stem on the diagonal and blacken over flame to seal. Change water every day. 28 Saturday evening. 5:30, almost dark, I've restarted the fire and see it reflected on the glass. A custard cooling in the freezer. Cup of tea. Greg wrote about RF1-4 this morning and we've been back and forth again just now, which is to say a social hour as the pink faded. Bobcat on the road as I slogged uphill from the mailboxes in strong cold northeast wind. I pruned yesterday, the manzanita and the crossways pyracantha boughs that have bothered me whenever I look out. Doubiago's friend, "Actually I'm a La Chappa! You know, the La Chappas from Mesa Grande." San Pasqual people, led by the La Chappas, in flight of genocide to Mesa Grande. [list of Sharon Doubiago's books] Phoned Tom yesterday, didn't know it but had stories to tell, of visits to Ron and Donna and to the reinactment camp where Norm's brother-in-law said he thought the cabin uphill was a ne'er-do-well ranch son who one Saturday night walking home drunk from Ramona was struck by a car. And the turkeys. I said "And you?" and he said "I've been writing" in an eager rush, as if he hadn't already known it. There's Toward the buoy and a new project, his story of downtown, where he has been homeless, a lift operator on highrise construction, a journalist, and more. I saw he has everything worked out now, the place, a monthly check, a couple of days with Hands On every pay period, the seniors' center for adulation and meals, a library. He's organized to write. He can't afford me but he's writing. I worked for that. He's right not to disrupt what he's got. - At that moment I refresh the email page and there's Toward the buoy. 29 Get lots of rest this week and next, Pisces. You're about to begin the most remarkable decade-and-a-half of your life. It probably won't hit you over the head until 2013/2014, when passion, beauty and creative success blossom, or 2015/16, when huge new opportunities, relationships and horizons open - but even before those years, even later this month, this remarkable decade shows its strength and colour. Tim Stephens for Feb 5-11 2012. Neptune, your ruling planet, moves into your sign February 3, where it will stay until 2025. During this period you will "come into your own," or firm up your personality; you will become more Piscean. That leads to better decision-making. Being deeply yourself attracts people who 1) are deeply themselves (and therefore more true) and 2) are more directly attracted to the real you, rather than to some idea they have of you So we know your love prospects will overall greatly improve in the next 15 years - and love itself will improve for the rest of your life. From June 2012 to June 2013 the accent will be on security, home, etc. This helps love only if you're already intimate. If you aren't, mid-2013 to mid-2014 brings a lucky, bountiful passion. - Current was a much-admired work during the opening, the one piece people kept bringing up. - Quail Springs Rd yesterday. Dirt road running along the far side of the mountain behind me, just below the crest. I was on the reserve and going carefully, wondering whether I'd end at the cabin up behind me, wanting to come up on my place from behind. It was thick forest mostly. I like the name and wonder whether there can have been a spring so high up. Never have seen any quail here. Then got to the cabin by taking the right hand branch of the asphalt road. Easily opened the living room window. The frame was so dried out and brittle it broke in my hand. Stepped over the sill into someone's summer cabin - a lesbian artist, not young - who is living there on top of what was left by the drunk bachelor - is my confident guess. A good floor plan, two bedrooms with a bathroom between them, long living room, small kitchen with a side door. Deep stone fireplace with a cooking pot on a swiveling arm. Bad paintings covered with cloths. A lot of kerosene lamps. But the house evaporating around its furnishings. It's unlined and its shrunken unpainted boards show daylight in strips everywhere. It may be a while since she's been around, because the front porch is falling in, but someone was there since I was, a man's footprint on the porch, and the orange bucket that had blown into the draw was replaced. I didn't pocket anything and pushed the window back into its tight brittle fit. Joyful sociable day. put up a few more Here bits and fixed the order. Linked it from Facebook. Email conversations, or FB, with Greg, Tia, Luke, Anna, Kathryn, Helga, Sylvia, Laiwan, Louie, Anne Dyck. Messages to Paul K, Min and Leslie. Moon, Bed, Burnt body. 31 With Emilee getting a proof copy I'm keen to move on other titles. Favor has time she says, Anna says yes. I've sent notes to Jaes, Layla, Lisa Johns. Fac devel funds for my own books. Dreamed I was going upstairs in a welfare hotel to wash a lightbulb. There was no floor on the second floor, just posts here and there. I thought it would keep out drunks certainly. An anxious feeling that might have come from writing the dissolving house before I slept. 1st February Ellie my fucking god. I fucking adore this. That's Becci. Wednesday, thin overcast. What did I dream ... Annie came to have tea with me - I mean Linda, who I think of as Annie - and brought her whole family, a lot of daughters, her mother, and some casseroles. They seem to have set the table. Message from a girl in Goldsmith's College who likes my photos. Messages from two friendly lichen men one of whom says he'll go for a walk with me. Emilee's proof! The cover color looks lovely ... Or, I guess I should say that the color covers are true and clean ... very pleased with the paper quality ... happily surprised by the interior paper and the ink on the inside printing ... The black ink is good. ... I do think the professional font makes a huge difference... Yes, it looks like a real book ... My first impression was that it looked exactly like how I hoped it would look, and then I thought the spine could use a little realignment. Size. A5 is very European. When first measuring it out I thought it seemed odd compared to the books I'm used to, but having it sit next to me now it seems right. Especially for the length, which printed is 185 pages. On Facebook now, three boxes stacked: notice of Ant Bear's book, Laiwan's installation shot of Current in North Van, and Here, all gathering comment. It's like a wave. Trying to take pictures of lichens. [chocolate chip lichens] [boulder] [boulder clouds] [lichen folds] 2
- Remembering something that happened last night after I'd done slow breathing and got into bed in the dark with Space hotel playing. I was aching, which doesn't usually happen after hot water, my hands and legs more than other parts. I stayed with the ache, focused, then something started happening around the L groin. It felt like a patch of high vibration maybe 6" x 8". It was intense and I resisted wanting to escape, stayed with it. Then something happened that I wasn't sure was really happening. It felt as though my L thigh bone was very subtly involuntarily rotating in its hip socket, turning in. 3 These mornings hours on email and FB messages, doing business, in a way, calling in a network, and what Louie said, feeling the hungry ghost. Remarkably hungry, addicted to being noticed. First little mouse inside, jumped out of a blanket when I unfolded it. What else. Thursday almost 11. Sun on the bed, fire in its shutting-down whir, chicken stew on low in the kitchen. Lot of spider webs on the ceiling, that I can see when sun reflects up off the bookshelf. - Dealt with them. 4 Turkeys on the driveway, quiet today. A lot of hens, at least one with a thin beard, toms noticeably larger with more red on their heads. They milled pecking for a while then filed west on the road so I could count them, 76. It seemed one of them was the leader who scouted the direction, and then the rest swirled slowly into an accelerating line. The motion reminded me of something - it was the mist on the drying field in Notes in origin. Ephemerality of the FB billboard. Only Mafalda noted the Current show, 6 people Emilee's book, 9 people the Here site, but it's now so far down the page it's gone. I will be forced to understand that much of my sister's soul intent has always been, will always be, to fill all my places until she completely replaces me. Jealousy is illicit appropriation of the destiny of another person. Olive Hill Ramona, Santa Maria Alley, Sleeping Lady on the horizon. jealous that she wasn't molested, raped and beaten Sharon Edens Doubiago Ramona then, Ramona now, 5 issues of the San Diego Reader, July 1994 his aunt Liz Sota, head of the tribe burial of Ramon's ashes on the Mesa Grande reservation LaChappa Peña grandparents house on the rim of Clevenger Canyon Santa Maria reclining on Mt Woodson's west side My father's love vol II The legacy 2011 Wild Ocean Press 5 What do I think of Doubiago's book. It's hideously formatted partly because it is so long the publisher crammed the text. It begins with 6 pages of testimonials. There's not a word of fine writing. I flew through skimming because her war with her sister made them seem equally hysterical and made me feel she was trying to enlist me. She blames herself at times for not realizing her own denials, but only that. She doesn't get to her complicity in any of the chaos she describes. She doesn't say she was seductive or in competition with her mother and sister and any other female around. Her whole family has an incestuous atmosphere, too much in each other's pockets, like David's, obsessed. I hated the letters she quoted at length, nothing but interpersonal glue. She's ultimately telling the truth about family dynamics but she and they indulge them horribly. Incestuous desire, disguised rivalry, denied hatred, hysterical attachment, all that, and yet there's a world outside them and that world doesn't show up in her book at all. It's as if all her love, which she so protests, is held in thrall. So it's a demonstration, yes. Unclean as writing because there's still an agenda, she hasn't risen out of it to see it though she so much insists she has. Would I be as hard on it if she weren't a busty blond who captured the father? It says yes. When Greg wrote about O in the journal the pressure in me, I noticed - still the sister rival pressure - to win him away from her. An energy in the writing. How human beings could find their proper relationship with the divinity of the beauty of things. Jeffers. offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy - And then set Haines against Doubigo. Weighty priest. There's more to quote in his essays but I'm guessing a blind spot at the root of his theme, which is something to do with what she does know directly. He has priestly lineage backing him, the fathers. She has none. Often alone and sometimes with one of five wives or a girlfriend, most of whom quickly tired of the wilderness or his famously cantankerous personality. [Alaska] 1947-1069 and again later. B.1924 In his critique of Olson-Duncan-Creeley and the way he speaks about his own work I feel something is missing, a task of art he hasn't noticed, which is the task of making a mind rather than a statement. Make a statement good to be, a being others can learn when they read it. a profound need in our nature, for belief in and love of the world we inhabit teetering, as it were, between a faltering democracy and a kind of corporate imperialism What we have here, typically, is the interior of minds not in themselves of great interest. It is possible to see in the work of many of these poets confirmation of the self-consoled isolation of Americans in a world of immense suffering, aggravated, often enough, by our own extravagance. - Traumdeutung 1900 b.1856 a couple of years before Origin of species 1859 loved his young, beautiful mother and ran away from his old father now determine what is neurotic, but also what is intense, in all my friendships An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been necessary requirements of my emotional life. evenly hovering attention close observation, apt interpretation, free association and working through 7 He had surpassed his father, and that was somehow forbidden ... as perilous to win one's oedipal battles as to lose them. ubiquitous family drama with its ever-varied yet largely predictable plot of wishes, gratifications, frustrations and losses, many of them unconscious. He said it was childhood molestation and felt his audience abandon him ... Such widespread perversion against children is scarcely possible. the intellectual beauty of the work his great love story with Fleiss a self-conscious stylist The little literature there is disgusts me so much. Overdetermined means it is shown by different elements. 8 All the president's men last night. Redford's beauty. He was 39 in 1976. transitions between scenes ... where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Sonderberg learned from Pakula. 9 Postcard from Provence - painting a day, postcard size. British painter living in Provence has a site, well designed, good fonts, white page against a putty-colored background, black type, red links, small caps. Features of the site: today / about / archives / usage / buy books / links RSS feed / search / subscribe moveabletype.com, interactive, footer 1. about page with press, message contact box, donation link, fb, tumblr, twitter, RSS, linkedin buttons, technical credits, footer 2. archive page with thumbnails, categories, links to auction page 3. prints - another page with buy links, links to shopping basket 4. books - has bookbuzzr sample, Amazon, Alibris, Barnes&Noble, he offers signed 5. subscribe form, subscribe to email or RSS feed Behind photos as they load, title and tech specs 10 Cattle along the fenceline, coyote among them running west. Two black steers run a ways after it. Blazing moonlight on the white surface of the bookshelf. Moon's angle has declined enough so it comes in. Talking to Luke on FB when I'm checking at the end of the day and he hasn't gone to bed yet. He'd lost his hard drive and told me he has small fractures in his back from when he fell on the stairs while I was in SD the first time. I hate to think of my beautiful boy injured in any way. I hate to think of him in pain. Meantime Rhonda is trying to enlist me in her last gasp writing project and I refuse. She's dying and wants something and I'm saying no you are not in my pod. It's a firm instinct though uneasy: there are people you belong to and I'm not one of them. I sent Susan an email saying publish your slash writing with Ant Bear and after a week she sent back one word, no. Friday morning, 7:02. Mist across the Cuyamacas, pale sunlight on the grass. Only today and tomorrow before I go to SD and fly on Tuesday. Two weeks away. - There I organized my tax materials. Conversation with Mary. I ask her when Paul became her favorite. She doesn't answer directly, but she tells me a story I've never heard, about one day when he was quite little, sitting on the hay above the chute where the horses were fed. He said to her, Mother, I will look after you. She has a photo of him that she looks at for consolation. Judie's picture is looking down, and mine to the side, but he is looking at her. "You were such a strong personality." That's her story now about me and it's a complaint. I can see how it's true, I overran her and I felt we were close because I was so at ease with her. I lectured and hectored, which is to say kept sealed without knowing it. Paul felt her, feels her, feels. Small grey moths against the window as I was talking to her, and for half a second the brown face of a bat. 11 Robin Laurence on c.1983 part 1. "Six of the ten artists represented here are women and they bring to the exhibition a kind of visual poetics that has since been overwhelmed by the more assertive and analytical productions of the Vancouver School. ... a pre-digital sensibility ... a vulnerability and an intimacy ... Ellie Epp's even shorter film, Current, abstracts images of venetian blinds into fluctuating vertical lines and bars of light and darkness. Both works play, beautifully, and mesmerically, with ..." Lloyd Dykk just died at 67 - three days ago. grew up in Wishart Saskatchewan ... a national-quality critic ... one of the best prose stylists in the business ... shy, kind, very smart, very funny, and extremely cultured guy ... would never take part in the social events surrounding a show. He was an elegant dresser, and for years drove around in that stylish 1959 Morgan Plus 4 Drophead Coupe ... He liked Art Deco stuff ... he watched the Turner movie channel all the time ... a couple of heart attacks in recent years ... puttered around his garden. I knew I was hated, and though it wasn't pleasant, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. He was my age, born early 1945, Mennonite name, little place in Saskatchewan size of La Glace. He becomes Vancouver's artistic conscience, knows everyone, judges everything, is thoroughly established, exhaustively interested in his areas, has the means to attract bright true friends and does. Sweet and fierce, himself. Dies young. I meet him one Sunday morning when I'm standing around in the herb garden. I do what I do, give him bits to smell, tell him the names of plants. He's modest and attentive. He goes away and writes a column. He recognizes something about me and names it in a way I don't expect from anyone. "The Strathcona Gardens are one of the pleasantest places in the city ... a delicacy for the better people." - One photo today. I went out early into the fog thinking it would be the right time to take a picture of the big oak coming up among boulders. Took a lot of photos but there's only one I like. It was a throw-away shot just as I was going to go back in. The two live oak sprouts with the fence behind them and then nothing but luminous wet air, the faintest darkening of the road's ridge behind them. It's just right, simple, the two bushes a couple of individuals, foreground a bit orange mixed with green, bushes dark green, all of it immersed in thick air an opalescent grey. [fog bushes] [oak window] Plainfield 15th
16
17 Mind & land [workshop] - what am I doing. Students like Josh and Anthony. 18 Where am I. Ashamed of little mistakes like getting Lee's name wrong and forgetting what Lori does. Losing words a lot. What does that feel like. Like coming on holes in the air and having to step around them, a slightly helpless and then slightly valiant moment. I haven't said it yet. It reminds me of Mary, not her forgetting but her normal state, I don't know how exactly. Blank valor. Slightly sore going-on. And something that's more me, a little crease in the forehead, asking do I have enough left to be seen as smart, are they thinking I'm out of it. What else. Mind & land, having to get into it from outlines made already. New students, need to learn them. Four young women and loud eknoid Anthony.
Alright do I still care about mind and land. I wanted to defend something, myself, in the art and philosophy communities. It's something a lot of them want to defend too. Value of universe, value of feeling and perceiving, value of contact. A lot of cultural prestige goes to dissociation. I wanted to make and find methods and concepts to work against that, away from that, to undo it in myself and the larger culture. There's a religious wing, a wing in religion, defending what I want to live, and religion also supports dissociation. Dissociation, integration. How we diagram it. Having to remember it's always personal too and it's always in question. When I say that I mean that when we talk about it we are talking to ourselves and need to remember that. It's a tension between shutting down and opening up, and it is always in question. Psychological root: what is it about humans. What goes wrong with people. Political consequences - struggling with results of that wrongness. It plays out in feminism, environmentalism, gender, all our political struggles - within them too. In this particular discussion the question is what is intelligence, what is good being, and what is the relation of good being to the natural universe. What's the ecology of good being. What's the politics of intelligence. What I look for in student work, and work for in student work - liveliness, energy, sensory aliveness, theory or analysis grounded in own experience, love, honesty. Culture war but not war, always stepping into the free position being larger than the conflict. Conceptual orientation. 'Land' means natural world, world before us and with us. 'Mind' means intelligent human ways of being. Includes feeling, intuiting, the uncon, sensing. Felt as oppositional. Can be felt as inclusive. Mind in land. A contemporary revision. Radical task for psychology, deep and universal psychology, dissoc and integration. Radical task for philosophy reframe how we talk, reorganizes, restructures discourses. Result new humanism, re-renaissance. Methods - a lot of them, find them, try them. What am I shut down on. Why am I shut down on it - something wrong with it, trauma a wound. Be present with it by enclosing it, taking it on. This is a reconceptualization of religion, re-connecting. Recovery and support for intelligence. Methodologies for evaluation and diagnosis. What S word means. 19 Interviews, what do I have. Anthony with an autistic father who's a superstar male, needing to succeed, not grounded in himself, anxious and split. Jewish mentat. Lori has been obedient in philosophy but wants to get an alder canopy blowing. Inexperienced in possibilities of feeling. May take off given permission. Kari is cut-off whizzing on about feeling while not feeling. Why is Katie dithering? Because Campbell checked her. Jody is silent and heavy, resentful, more massive and older. Thea in person is quite coarse, inattentive. Lee, tiny Lee is toweringly strong and clear. Sam is alright, competent.
Beautiful Sonja from San Luis Obispo, Los Osos. Clark Valley. Clay River, Little Bear. Cuts hair. Passamaquoddy, between Maine and New Brunswick, Algonquian language, easternmost. Mbo colloq. Do I want to talk about dying. And drugs and sleep, ego death. Fear. Old age, my mom, my memory, climbing hills.
Katie with tears pouring down her face saying she needs to talk to know what she thinks, she needs to work it through, and I haven't listened, I've said what she's doing isn't good, I've sent her away to do it again, and she's confused. It's true I've been exasperated by her dependence and weepiness. I haven't wanted to take in her confusion. I've wanted to tell her what to do and have her do it. I've found her splendid when she straightens her back and speaks with authority. I've praised her but I haven't humored her.
23 Thursday. Have I liked any of it this time. This last lecture. I'd been awake since 3, had time to finish it. Was there in jeans, black turtleneck, sage green Uggs, feeling swift and commanding. Students got excited when I said video games were insufficient adolescent initiation. They said, But ... I said Yes, but there's no death. They'd seen The great dance the night before. 24 And Sam jumped in and said initiation is about death. Campus - the maples if that's what they are hung thick with pale tan seed bundles.
During the res, morning after I'd slept first night, no sore back, not stiff - bit sore now - ate everything, bread, dessert, no bad effects except two afternoons sore all over, took Tylenol. Writhing if I have to sit for long listening - seldom have noticed hissing - got fatter, bra strap painful if lying down - aspirin to sleep every night, wd drop off fast, sleep maybe 11-4, couple of times 12-3, energy okay for workshops but no patience to read study plans or listen to interpersonal junk and didn't love anyone - no exceptional interventions, maybe except Katie's shoulders, the who's proud of you exercise with Anthony, getting Kari to tell me about her fantasyland - fell twice, coming in with the suitcase and last night walking from the cabaret singing, have been walking the path with full attention - lost words a lot in the early part but never during a workshop and less as the week went on - cheerful - could lie down for a half hour and fade to the ant band stage - candid without being emotional - was speaking quietly and personally - jumped up at Marianne with fearless direct clarity - looked remarkably pretty when I arrived, first two days, not now.
24
|
