| in america volume 25 part 5 - 2012 october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7 October The morning light is very white, intense blue over Angel Mountain behind me. 9:15 on Sunday morning. Bushtits are like charming little round children dashing about together, piling onto the basin rim together, swerving away suddenly. The little grey whirr when they jump away into the air. I'm thinking of turn but a stone and start a wing. - I'm wanting a movie camera to fix on the basin for a long while. Starring towhee, bushtit, junco, titmouse, nuthatch, chickadee. Conception of a film as creation of subtle kinds of good company, a sort of fictional enterprise. What would the goodness of company need. Awareness of the attentions engaged. Someone saying of Notes in o that my timing was perfect. A mutual interest well presented. A mythic catch to engage the uncon. - What are birds coming to drink at a human-made but natural pool? Water of life. Do I dare spend $4000? Hegel on the track, some dark passage. Something jumping around in the toyon continuously declaring in a grating dry voice - slim little brown bird with a long tail. Very nervous, wouldn't let me look. Somehow behind anything I do in film now a presumption of the immaterial ground. It jumps around in the branches. I can see it opening its beak among the leaves. For Hegel. 8 Where did that come from last night. I woke at 1:30 from dreaming I was fucking Ed. He and I had been lying in the dark next to each other and I was fantasizing putting my hands around the base of his penis and my mouth over the head. He stirred beside me. Is he going to - ? He's putting it in! And then we're hungrily fucking. He pauses, asks don't I mind doing this. I seize his rump to yank him further in, say no, because I've never desired anyone so much in my life. "Finite and infinite." Totality. Participation in openness. Universe itself. Geist. Living as the whole, "as source of thought and action." Enzweiung. "Self-consciousness." A function that posits oppositions A function that - ? discovers their unified ground. "Reason." "Intuition." Spinoza universe as <unlimited> <substance>. The whole is self-thinking consciousness. Aristotle said. "Not merely as substance but as subject itself." Nature is a necessary precondition of human consciousness. - So what's wrong with H. Psychology that doesn't include the uncon. - Even in his terms, doesn't consider other planets and their forms of life and consciousness. - Some kind of correct intuition of the unlimited ground as terminal of correct devotion and study along with 'nature'. - Correct understanding of illusory nature of dichotomous thinking. - Misplaced belief in propulsion of 'concepts' leading inevitably to one another. - Correct interest in history of philosophy as developmental. - I had been interested in sense of development from early consciousness mostly of objects as such, toward self-consciousness (first for instance in adolescence), ie of self as an interest, and then - he could say? - I could say - of self (as body) as participating in the qualities of object-world as experienced. "Synthesis of objectivity and subjectivity." - I would likely disagree with his description of the first stage as inadequate because it seems to be based on a purely L-hem view of objects. - Do agree with his critique of scientific explanation - the explanatory entities we imagine are imagined wrongly. - Something about the moment of coming to see other people as beings - which I only very partially do - ie. see into people.
He talks about master-slave rather than man-woman or adult-child, which were the daily sites of hegemony in his own life and his readers'. From this situation a retreat to 'internal' truth unexpressed, ideas of Stoicism. And from there Descartes' skepticism of all but himself as consciousness. From there divided self believing and not, aspiring and actual, projecting and 'unhappy'. - Gilligan's history of little boys wd say love is repressed in the service of aspiring to power. Wanting to move to generous recognition of being in self and others, that being thought of as participation in totality, c/f de Chardin.
- I don't get the idea of Reason - it seems to have been an unexamined pillar of male fantasy. Confident aspirations of his contemporaries. - said, in effect, as Goethe did his life long: Spirit or mind or soul is also nature. Developmental. "He said that he had found out that there was concealed in me under the shroud of shyness an immeasurably bold and fearless human being." Breuer of Freud That all psychic events are determined. I feel like saying that, by inserting the unconscious between the physical and that which until then had been called the 'psychic' psychoanalysis prepared us for the acceptance of such processes as telepathy. Aggression furnishes the grounds for all tender and loving relationships between human beings, possibly with the sole exception of those between a mother and her male child. Felt that the kind of character he admired depended on alienation. We analysts wish to enrich them from their own inner resources by making accessible to the ego the energies that through repression are tied up in their unconscious, as well as those others that the ego must squander in an unfruitful way to maintain the repression. Nature has established injustices against which there is no redress. A science in the sense that it is a sustained exploration. "Science of the unconscious." to become self-reliant and to live independent and creative lives an education for being truthful with themselves a considerate travel companion who made it a point to discern any hint of impatience or incredulity .... No scientist has ever been more courteous in his writings. I hover, so to speak, in the air. Disturbance of intention 'Censor' - a word will be omitted because some part of the network is disabled, out of operation. 9
- Advanced interrogation It's in our best interest to maintain truth bias. Skill without a clear indicator of success. Draw a Q on your forehead. "High self-monitors". Learning to think like a high s-m. Covering or touching one's mouth or one's eyes. Facial micro-expressions face shows before we feel, 'leak'. Watch for asymmetry in both face and gesture. Look for covering expressions. Emphasize reliable muscles that can't be controlled, eyes. Blink more. Pupil dilation. Expressions that go on too long. Barrier objects. Head nodding that contradicts. Freezing upper body. Lack of gestures. Opposite to mirroring. Feeling awkward with someone. Parrot statements. Deflect. Turn around, guilt. Protest statement. Open-ended questions to collect facts. Yes/no questions to assess behaviour. Emphatic reinforcers. "I guarantee ..." Avoiding, saying other things. Avoiding 'I' or names. Verbal mistakes. Non-contracted denials, I did not. Slower and quieter. Attitude - cooperative? Story too chronological. Prologue too elaborate. Main point minimal. No follow-up about feeling. Ask about parts in the middle so they get out of sequence. BASIC interviewing: baseline behavior, ask open-ended questions, study the clusters, intuit the gaps, confirm. 10 Cold Wednesday morning. Asil. I've been wrong in how I've handled her because I have been imagining she's a form of me. She's smart, she's a straight-A girl, but it isn't the same thing in her as it was in me. I was wanting a kind of romance with her - love in the form of writing - intimate interesting language in a glow of admiration - being able to give her what I have - and instead here's someone who is all in knots - doesn't want to focus on anything - hasn't got a straight story - can't use anything - and seems to have been buttering me. Yesterday I was so exasperated by her letter I went to town to get away from myself. Indignant, and yet in a way mystified, because I'm not sure why I'm so bothered. I thought I could do something for her but I can't. - Highway 43 - look at this, snow, shades of grey, though it's only the 10th of October. - That was good. Angelo was pouring his driveway this morning, three big yellow concrete trucks. Late this afternoon when I'd been sweeping the terrace and bringing in the bedding on account of rain he came up the road with a bottle of cab asking if I have a corkscrew. He'd been hit by grief after the pour, wanted a glass of wine. I said, Come in, sit here. Good things about him: he likes rocks, reads geology, told me there is a big outcrop of pegmatite on Black Canyon Road with a mine up behind it and rose quartz rubble on the other side of the road. Has dug holes to plant vines on the land below his place, next to this one. Looked after his wife the two years she was dying. Doesn't like Joaquin and Gary whining about each other. Grew up in Cardiff on a boat. Has a silver cap of hair. Is modest but manly. Has done a lot of kinds of work, union electrician running big construction sites. Solar panels. Didn't refill his glass of wine. Not so good: showed no curiosity though he was willing to hear my stories and easy to talk to. 11 The wine was velvety. When he was going home I got the flashlight and walked him to the bottom of his new road. It was very dark - overcast. I shone the flashlight up alongside the concrete he can't walk on yet so he could pick his way uphill to his little house through rocks and piles of dirt. As I stood there moving the beam to stay ahead of him streamers of cloud flowed up from behind me and muddled the light so I could no longer see him. This morning there's a thick grey batting of cloud moving southwest to northeast. I can see a crack of silver daylight underneath it toward the desert. I didn't sleep well. Wondered whether it was because I'm so seldom in company that I got imprinted by Angelo. His gentle friendly manliness. - Making the civilized conqueror into real people who became givers of gifts, heroic potlatchers, romantic, alive, proud and ever eloquent for the holy. The stories their blueprint on how to be themselves ... stories were the seeds of people's souls. All the trees filling the ground of the six Donancianas all around with their quiet leaf-falling and courteous clicking in a memorial of layered gold of a good wet summer gone. That very dedicated old agricultural rodent, the desert ground squirrel, who, as ritually revered by all Pueblo Indian farmers, is a special type of squirrel who ably replants the ground with sunflowers, squashes, pinon nuts, and corn, whose seeds they ably steal and grow, more in search of their fresh sprouts, which they unearth and eat as fresh greens, than they do the seeds. ever-busy, ground-oriented work schedule with its cautious wide-eyed horizontal strategies - L had changed his FB photos - scared me - some man in a Mohawk with blood on his face - same man in black and white with a gun in either hand. It was 4:30 where he is but it said he'd changed them 50 minutes before. I sent a message. He said it was de Niro in Taxi driver. Said he wasn't sober. I phoned. His voice had a slur but he said it was codeine not booze. He said he realizes he doesn't care about anything. He's tired of the up and down always to no purpose. At the end of an hour he said he's not whole because of the break in his relation with me and he never will be and when women realize he wants them to mend that they run. So if L kills himself it will be my fault? It says no. It will be the fault of his genes.
12 Black 6 in the morning. Rain on the roof last night. Heater on for the first time this fall. The best lack all conviction has been saying in my head, but I've also been feeling that those who lack all conviction are not the best. Rowen is 27, living with Michael, working as a security guard at Douglas College. He has hocked his camera to a friend, is dodging student loan repayments after flunking two years in a row. He has sold his iPad. The houseboat is vacant again and he's not keeping an eye on it. Speaking to me depresses him because I ask about everything he doesn't want to think about. L is zonking on codeine because he got a toothache - still the molar that was hurting in 2005 when he was here. Last week he tried to pull it himself, broke it. He doesn't have the money to eat. I don't know how he is paying his rent. His head races he says. He doesn't see Jill and Sean because he'd feel Jill was disappointed in him. He's mad at Roy, he's mad at Sara. He says his brothers don't care. He says voting is useless because business has bought everything. He won't do what's under his nose to do because he wants to do something big. And there's Asil with her talents who doesn't want to focus. So then I look around wondering who I know who isn't helpless in these ways, unhelpable in these ways. Louie acts and loves. Favor is dean of students at Sterling: acts and loves. Greg takes care of himself but wastes his life on TV sports and politics. Tony on sports and art fashion. Tom still hasn't sent To the buoy to the Reader. Mary is lost in complaint all day long. And I:
- There I turned on the sat and talked to L more, but in writing. I said he's not god. He laughed. 13 Out at 6:30 after yesterday's rain. Yellow above the mountains' outline and north of it the sky wide deep silver holding a white crescent moon with high above the northern point of its bow brilliant Venus suspended. Delicious scented air. L isn't thinking well about himself. I could see him continuously defeating himself. 14 Yesterday the plein air reception at the Santa Ysabel gallery. I put on my chalcedony earrings and my yellow Chucks and went down for it. There were a lot of cars in the post office parking lot and some bodies standing around with little easels being watched by other bodies. In the gallery the only paintings that were any good were a couple of little California impressionism pictures of Santa Ysabel slopes by Joe Garcia. Almost everyone standing around with a wine glass was late middle aged, prosperous and ugly. Annie in the midst big-eyed and busy. A little silver-haired creature was behind the drinks table, Annie's helper. I had some bread and cheese and some strawberries and two coconut cookies and went home. Easel Dutch ezel orig. ass, beast of burden. It is warming up after the one day I needed the pellet stove. Will I do my Canadian taxes today finally. 15 Tom did draw the Q with its tail facing left. It's a test from the book about how to tell when someone is lying - close your eyes and see a Q suspended in the space in front of you. Those who draw it as if seeing it from their own point of view aren't likely to lie but those who draw it from the other's point of view are particularly interested in how they are seen. It came up when he phoned me from the street last evening. He said there was a breeze that was blowing sometimes warm sometimes cool. I asked was it a sea breeze or a land breeze. He said he couldn't tell. I said Wet your finger and hold it up. There was a café window behind him. He said Certainly not. I said I wouldn't care. He said That's you. A couple of turkeys leaving the shadow of the acorn-grinding rocks, moving down the little gully. Warm Monday morning. Hammering at Angelo's. Flock of small birds on the wires. I was up till 2:30 finishing The jewel in the crown and this morning am still carrying some of its people. Sarah Layton, Hari Kumar. The old woman, Aunt Bobbie. All I remember from the book is Rose Cottage up in the mountains with two old women living so Britishly in it. The Granada series makes it a historical panorama, none of which interests me. What did interest me were the houses, the servants, the dresses, the manners. It was badly written and acted at the beginning, seemed so much more woodenly directed than a British evening soap would be now that I wondered when it was made. [1984] It seemed to warm up or at least I warmed to it. I wondered whether the director was homosexual, because much more was made of beautiful male bodies, long-legged broad-shouldered slender men - even the villain - both British and Indian. - Lot of traffic this morning. I'm writing in the chair. There goes David to the casino. Workers at the cabin, voices. The farthest rim of mountains pale blue. I can just see a pond opposite, earth-dammed. Man at the bird shop in Julian said a lot of birds come to Mesa Grande for the ponds. Broad quiet peace. A lizard on the stump. It's just standing there looking, jacked up on its front legs. There three pines sound for a moment and are silent again, and there the oak above me. Light wind from the east. The oaks are looking fresh and full. 16 Doing things - laundry, chimney sweep is here. At eight the sun isn't over the guestroom roof yet and it's cool. I was awake in the dark and took my tea to the chair - winter coat - and saw the light come up. Morning star high. Pink flush in the empyrean. There is no word for the boundless absorbent depth of cloudless sky. Rabbits were grazing, two by the eastern windbreak, one by the stump. Cows were moving west along the fenceline, big dumb masses heaving themselves down into the gully and standing to stare at me though there was nothing to see. I was lying in bed this morning feeling the dearness to me of things I remember - Catherine's sweet old-fashioned English little smile, Ida in her Welsh byre, things that are gone forever, except - there went a little fox on the road, grey above, red below - that I have a bit of them in me. I was also thinking of the fullness of the next-to-last years at 824, and then how I narrowed down to finish the doc, and how I've been narrowed ever since. Couldn't I have the fullness of life again if I set out to do that. 18 There's Angelo starting his big motor. Is he going to go back to clawing at the road this morning. It seems. Hello day. I'm out of roibos so it's spiced lapsang suchong by itself, not as substantial. I looked down at my naked legs this morning as I was going to weigh myself and I should say what I saw, as part of life record. Did I let myself look long enough to be able to describe it. The surface of the skin on my thighs was thin, dry and creased all over in a wide-based, flat, triangle pattern. Under it my thighs were lumpy and saggy like my grandmother's at eighty-something. What did I feel after I looked away - a kind of laugh, it's come to that. I was thinking this morning too that I should say something about how it feels to be stupider in company, for instance by the gate with Joaquin at a loss for the word 'camper'. When I was young I could use my quickness to charm, and now I'm neither good-looking nor quick and so feel I'm negligible with people. Except where I have power or give important help no one has reason to know me. Since that is my present condition what can I make of it. What I'm already making of it is that I have a job that gives me minor but effective power and brings me people I can help though in exchange for waste of my better talents. I live alone and speak to no one all week so I don't have to feel my social unwantedness. My work is where people can find it without having to deal with me. They sometimes do find it, Statcounter says. I get googled. But they don't go deep into the site. I'd need a glamorous image, which I haven't promoted. What archetype could I tap now. I've become the old woman I needed to visit when I was 30. Her power was wise autonomy, was it? And her own cottage in country near the sea. I have lots of wise autonomy but I'm not tall and white-haired, which are important, and I don't have money for a cottage, and I don't have Jean's kind interest in people. So what can a short, grey, wise, indentured, ugly-ish, accomplished, impatient and judgmental, slowish, limping, getting-old woman do for excitement? I'll ask. It will say, Ellie, come through, withdrawal, and -----. In my dream I was looking for a place to live in Gastown or some other big city waterfront, dark and rainy. I wanted a high-up hotel room. Alright, the old woman is the uncon, or was, in me. The old soul on the left, who is the body, I suppose? So that's the archetype I have available, though for that it wd be better to be tall and white-haired with a cottage near the sea. Already have been exercising it all the time with students.
20 Fog at the window this morning. It cleared later though I could see white banks of it in the direction of Black Canyon. Now at 5:30 mists flowing uphill past the house, pasture white from not much past the fenceposts. Thinking I should write Oma's garden. I was remembering standing beside the grapevine in the strip of orchard south of the gravel driveway. Fraser Valley sandy earth. What was the wall of trees along that edge. Were there tall lilacs? A large Bing cherry tree. Inside the orchard bright green smaller sour cherries. Near the long grape trellise red currents and black currents. Gooseberries? Probably, because I remember gooseberry jam. The rest is vague - trees. The garage with the big Akaziebaum next to it. Gas barrel incinerator. At the Clearbrook Road corner an old cedar with branches low enough to climb. It's still there, I think, though Clearbrook Road is paved now. Standing in that luxuriant space hidden from the house I was eight, ten, sixteen, eighteen, always feeling something I didn't name, a wealth, people knowing how to live, I suppose the centuries of European sophistication behind Oma's garden plan. I'm thinking now that people in my country lived in so bare and poor a way that Oma's garden, and her house too, and later Ontario's houses and trees, seemed grand, royal. My eye was formed in simplicity so that I'd forever after marvel when there was more. Always, from a child, strongly absorbing the feel of houses and their yards. The wide garden north of the house was something I'd see from the sewing room window or the basement bedrooms. At the northern edge were the long chicken barns. Behind them a rutted alley and a row of fir trees, or were they cedars. Above them the mountains. Across the east, a couple of rows of hazelnut trees next to the road, a crowd of thick dark dwarves. Then a long row or two of Oma's dahlias. Then long rows of potatoes, onions, all the rest. The path to the chicken house. A broad low valley, it seemed from the height of the house. Small wellhouse under the sewing room window. I'd sometimes hear the pump. Uncle Kid a teenager in the milkhouse. Uncle Bernie cleaning eggs in the dim little room with doors opening into chicken barns on either end. Uncle George coming home sometimes in a green 2-door coupe. Aunt Lucy walking from MEI carrying a binder against her tummy. Aunty Anne at UBC, Aunt Lillian home for a Sunday from the new nurses' residence at Vancouver General. My mom back at home wasn't thirty yet. 60 years ago. - There is a big black beetle that likes to be crawling slowly on the shower room floor. I scoop it up on a sheet of paper and drop it outside. Two days later it's back. 21 The windbreak trees are incense cedars, calocedrus decurrens, "important for lumber, particularly for pencils." "Common in montane forests". The wide-spreading blue-ish tree at the top of the driveway is Arizona cypress, "often with pale blue-green foliage," "most widely distributed native cypress." Cuyamaca cypress, Piute cypress, cupressus arizonica. Wet, misty day. Delicious air. Looking at wet reddish leaf litter underfoot I thought of Saturna. 22 What do I think of this photo - haven't been able to decide whether it's good enough for Here. Four in the morning again. Tea. Feet up on the desk. Argerich and Maisty Sonata #1, pellet stove blowing hard. I have this quite lovely thing on the big monitor in front of me. Its loveliness is of color - purple green orangey-red and bits of yellow - and is like textile design - and is false. The Nikon hypes reds in low light it seems? The locust pods were catshit tan and it has made them this pretty orange. The mist background was white and it has made it lavendar. The green is as it was and the yellow too. Locust pods. My doubt of the photo is that the composition has good bits but doesn't hold. The background network of branches is placed well off a diagonal branch anchored in the lower right corner, but - - Is this enough better. I've flipped and cropped and reflipped and dimmed it a bit. Now the leaf's gesture into the center of the rectangle is stronger and the pods hold an alternative spot beside it. Then there's the slit photo, Oak slit, slit crossed by rusty barbed wire. The flash went off though I didn't intend it to and the result is this exquisite sharp focus and greeny sheen on a young vulva surrounded by rough bark. Perfectly composed and eloquent and no more to be said about it. There's the one of the house from the field, fog down to the level of the beginning of the forest. Problem. Which I've just fixed with the curves function. Now it's just right: edge of the forest with the pines standing forward and the house hidden. It's a quiet picture. Pines below Angel Mountain. It's a quiet picture that makes me want to live here till I die. So quiet it's not strong enough at 1000 pixels. Mustard stalks and buckwheat is flashy but is it worth anything. There's the way the golden hay when it crosses under the fence sprouts up in electrified branches against the misted-over buckwheat. Does it just need to be toned down. That does help but - Wet cypress doesn't need help. It's perfectly framed and has an odd mystic glow, which must be the silveriness caught in mist. The way shallow depth of field makes the branches jut forward out of darkness is marvelous. It's an ugly picture somehow but perfect as a photo. Ugly how. I don't like the silver and yellow together, which makes me unappreciate the plant although I can see it is a mode of fairy princess, maybe one of an inimical race. Wet fence is okay but I think I made a mistake and threw away the right version - I did. This one's composition is subtly wrong. I'll try cropping. What did I like about Cut curve. It's simple but has touches - the bit of bright cloud that holds onto the upper end of the road's curve. The way one arc, the road, cuts into another, the hill. The gradient of light in the sky, the brightest corner holding against the bright bit of cloud in the lowest. - Photographic values so much about subtlety, a bland photo very little different from a good one. - I'm just remembering going with my dad to some kind of photographic group, must have been in my early teens, at Ganzevelts' I think. We went only once. It was all men. People were showing slides. I spoke up confidently about someone's photo and Ed told me to be quiet. Have I told this story before I think. My favorite this time is Pines below Angel Mountain where Angel Mountain is invisible, and which shows a line of beings both on and below a hill. Something like that. - Stars again tonight, half moon pointing almost down, slightly misted moonlight after nights that have been black, black. Fingers smell of incense cedar after I dipped them into the stove's water bowl that has had twigs and young barked soaked all day. Calocedrus decurrens with its little elf-hat seed scales hanging like brown flowers. 23 Rattled Tuesday morning. I turned on the monitor and it started switching itself off. I'd touch the on button, it would come on and then almost immediately go off again. If the monitor's gone it's $2500 for another one. I don't have a margin anymore. Turned it off and went round the back, unplugged the delicate many-pin plug into the power box, blew out dust, replugged it. Turned it on. It seems to be holding. It's grey this morning in a duller, lidded way. Last night the last presidential debate. Two more weeks of stress. 25 When I woke at 5:30 in the dark, instead of huddling in the cold, I clicked the pellet stove's switch and got back in bed. Six minutes later it blazed up, a wild fluid flaring in its box, lighting the walls. Had seen there were stars, meaning warm days are back. Tired. It's the always more long packets. And have been formatting this volume up to here. 26 Peninsular Ranges batholith, an enormous body of rock perhaps 60 miles wide and 600 miles long intrusive igneous About a hundred million years ago, then a molten mass, rose from the depths - batholith from Fallaron Plate subducting under the North American Plate Schist - soft flakey banded rock with abundant mica Julian schist roof pendant - roof pendants, roof rocks - fragments of older metamorphic rock on younger, batholithic Julian schist series also has quartzite, marble, talc/soapstone 250 million years ago there was a seashore with a mountain range to its east - sedimentary rock siltstone, sandstone, limestone from deposits by this shore - they were lifted, pressured, faulted and metamorphosed. All over the world these pendants have been a major source of precious metals. Eagle Peak, High Peak 1870-1902, 1928-1932. Tours enter at Eagle and exit at High Peak. mesa of hybrid gneisses, granodiorite, quartz dioride [back of book notes on Indesign questions] 27 Yesterday morning lying with Tom watching firelight to our left sides and orange dawn brightening on our right. The night before, a big warm body shouting in my ear. Mr Fengler mod-ulate your voice the nuns would say. When we came down into the valley in the morning the wind was so strong it was buffeting the jeep. Where we were parked at Dudley's waiting for the bus we could see the row of eucalyptus all excited as SDG&E trucks flowed eastward alongside them. The evening before we'd sat together on the couch watching the pink darken in the west, with just one pink candle burning on the mantle. We'd had a fight first thing. I stopped to get gas and when I was just about to shove in my credit card there was Tom pushing me out of the way. This is man country, I pump the gas, he said. I didn't want to blaze up at him then and there so I got out of the way but I felt sidelined, which is a blanked, erased feeling. He had seized the wrong nozzle and was discovering it was diesel because he couldn't get it in. Then he was angry. We drove away. I was declaring things in my head. I knew why he'd done it. There had been a couple of other men on the gas station forecourt and he hadn't wanted to look wimpy. But it was my jeep and my credit card and I have earned the right to look like I'm the one who pumps the gas,. Etc. And beyond that was a worry about his flaming up, does it mean he's back on meth. We went on like that until somewhere near the mission and then he said was I ready for a kiss. I said No, because I have some things to say. Said them. And then we laughed. And then when we stopped at the gate I gave him a kiss. My solar plex felt as if it were smiling. At night when we were lying together on my bed before I sent him to his bed on the floor I was spooning him and doing what I sometimes do, tuning out what he's saying and just feeling the vibrations of his voice in his back and my belly. When we were going to separate he turned in my arms, four dry little kisses that turned me on. These past days I sometimes see words in my dad's handwriting. Gate and gas above. During our conversation in bed he told me he has taped his instructions to the inside of a cupboard door. The people to be notified are his sons and Rebecca. I'm to be in charge. He'd want his ashes to go to his mom's cemetery, to the house site at Mission Beach and to the Cove, or if there's no money for cremation call the VA and have them do a military funeral, to which he's entitled because he was RA, regular army. - Sally has an OBE and a new movie. Ginger and Rosa. 28 Yesterday and today tireless hours formatting In America 24, piling in photos and other links. It's meticulous focused work that completely holds me and must be good for short term memory because I'm back and forth between files, folders, and programs mostly remembering what I'm doing. One year today. IA24 is Oct-May, so the winter, and it surprises me by how much there's in it. How is the day - -
- Where's this little handwriting coming from. The day's focus. My ears aren't buzzing. There's immaculate quiet in which I can hear the faintest breath of leaves. Note from Dave just now to say he's retired as of next week. I'm trying to watch a raptor I don't recognize wheeling in the blue. [Migrating Swainson's seems most like it.] Angelo said that one year eagles nested in the sycamores halfway down Payton Road. Looking at last fall's photos seeing that last year's beauties aren't repeated. What is it about a blue bird. It's unlikely, an unlikely swoop as if out of another order. Sweetest peace though haunted by worries about L. What does sweet peace feel like. As if the chest is open to the air. As if I could go on just sitting. There seem to be fewer squirrels. Acorns mostly not ripe yet. Two bright pink things way across the yard. Are they plastic? I go see. They're naked ladies! 5 or 6 flowers on a bare stem, two stems near each other. Scented. 13 turkeys hurrying toward Norm's pond it seems. Don't have beards. 20 more, also hurrying, also beardless, both groups this year's hatch I think. The very large old oak near the ravine to the east - one that lost a huge heavy branch - is covered with green acorns. The other old oak next to it is not. Why am I posting photos to IA24 that aren't good enough for Here. Because the journal is a record also of seeing and trying, not necessarily of taste, which Here photos are. Now the row of cedars in the east is throwing its broad shadow across me and past, almost to the far side of the yard. - Naked ladies are amaryllis belladonna. Leaves are produced in early spring, bulb is then dormant until late summer. From the dry ground in late summer each bulb produces one or two leafless stems each of which bears a cluster of flowers. Have gradually naturalized in much of the West Coast of the USA since these environments mimic their native South African habitat. - There Tom, who said of the book he's reading, I'm not more'n'a deep sliver
into it.
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