| in america volume 26 part 1 - 2012 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
29 October 2012 A week and two days till we know. Meantime a massive east coast hurricane. Will it swing the election to Obama? On this coast a balmy Monday afternoon. Drying my hair in the low-angle sun from behind me. The basin trickling after a couple of weeks dry. Oak titmouse having a thorough bath in overflow water among leaves on the ground, rattling her tail. Four last songs 1948 when he was 84. b. 1864. "Calm, acceptance and completeness." Im Abendrot composed May 6 1948. He died September of '49. Aug 4 1948.
It is calm but it's a vast dark tense calm of tragic comprehension. "Twelve years reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture" which began when he was in his sixties. "Late upsurge of genius" from 1942 to the end of his life, from 78-85. a luminosity a depth 30 Was asleep. Loud knock on the kitchen door. I opened the front room half door and looked out. Two men in black. They step across the wall and show badges that are surprisingly large. They want to talk to me about my neighbours, they say. I turn on the light and let them in. "Which neighbours?" "The Burts." I sit on the bed in my pyjamas and they stand in the middle of the room, a portly young man with a porcupine quiff of a long oiled brushcut who smells strongly of a lemony cologne, the other also a young man with a small bare nut-like head, pleasant-looking. They aren't sure it's the Burts but there are two old people dead up the hill, "deceased", and foul play is suspected. Have I heard anything in the past week, shouting or gunshots? I say no. I did maybe hear a gunshot but only one and I don't know what day it was so there's no point mentioning it. I say "I've lived here a year and have met them maybe three times, at the gate." "You say, 'How you doin'' and 'I'll get the gate,'" says the first sheriff. "Yes." He was very old, a small thin man, frail-looking, who'd always get out of the car and speak to me though I already had the gate open and was standing ready to close it after them. She would stay in the car but she'd lean forward smiling, a pretty old thing, sweet-looking like a woman who has been cherished in her marriage. She introduced herself the first time, "I'm Anne Burt." News sources this morning are only saying sheriffs were sent to make a welfare check last evening and around nine they found two elderly bodies whose identities and cause of death have not been released. Why were the sheriffs waking me four hours later?
And Angelo is a Christian songwriter who belongs to an anti-abortion chapel where they talk about the Lord's leading in a way that sickens me. A sweetly devotional man who is also weak-headed I guess. 31st I hadn't remembered it was Hallowe'en until I got into Ramona. By the time I started home with pellets and groceries sidewalks both side of Main Street were swarming with small people in costumes. I was thinking I should phone Tom in honour of our first backcountry adventure. It happens to be the anniversary of his getting into 3663 Georgia too. So how many years is it - I could look it up online - 18 I think. 1995 - it's still only 17? "I was in a field in the mist. It was falling dark." "They don't love you in ways you want them to. They love you in ways they can." 1st November On the way to Ramona I was locked feeling Luke's contemptuous email but on the way home I stopped at the big rock above Black Mountain to eat bread and cheese and after that the light had faded to a dim purple that gave me the creek boulders in a way I'd never seen them, quite fey. - Matt. White truck came growling down the hill from Ron's place. I was standing by the road. Truck stopped and Matt jumped out, naked to below his belly button, glossy brown skin. We hang out. He says he'll bring me a gun if I want. Venison, because he's a bow hunter. He'll shoot me a turkey. Want me to cut you some wood? Five restaurants, ranchland up by Paso Robles. Grass-fed beef operations, did he say four of them. Wants to build some beds and grow organic vegetables, romaine lettuce. 2nd Dia de los muertos. I'm in the Mission cemetery waiting to see the candles lit. Such a bare-dirt lumpy-ground messy burial ground, rows of crosses wandering, plastic flowers, bits of ceramic figurines, mugs. Young women stuffing last years' plastic flowers into bags and carrying them to the trash. Poking candles into the ground. Uncle Ace's recent grave heaped high with dirt and stuck with candles like a birthday cake. I brought a candle to light for the Burts. The story in the pie shop is that he died of natural causes and she shot herself, he 86, she 84, it says online. My dead aren't here but I like that there's a November ritual for them. I'm including my dead-in-life, Mary. Wondering about Luke, whether he's gone into the bitter dark to stay, whether he'll come back. There's a pointed hill behind the Mission. Tattered yews at the gate. What are these flocks today, small black birds starting up along the road. Are these the bodies that were local two hundred years ago. Thick-bellied and knock-kneed like the Squamish. An ostrich among the black Angus across the road. The hills are pale, the air dusty. Small family groups. Someone brought a folding chair. Someone earlier had raked the ground, scratch marks with footprints over them. There the bells, is it 5 o'clock. Yes, five bells. A few eucalyptus, a few pines down by the Virgin, one tall cypress swaying its pointed tip. Man in cowboy boots, cowboy hat, long ponytail elasticked in half a dozen places steps heavily past carrying a box of plastic flowers. Is that the priest's car with the plate ABBAABBA. Hard-looking man wearing a teeshirt that says It's a drinkin day. Sherri from the post office adding candles to Uncle Ace. Small acts of tending. People standing together near their graves. The sun going down behind a hill. 3 They mostly didn't light the candles until well after dark when people had come from the chapel after mass. Certain families that had been gathered in their own sections since four or five had a lot of plastic flowers and many candles, and those areas blazed bright with dark figures standing unlit above the small fires and flower colors. Gradually there were little flames over the whole width of the cemetery, a field of candles. I had gone to the far northern edge where most of the crosses were perfunctory and unnamed and had lit the few candles I'd found placed. Then went to the furthest marker, a large concrete cross broken so the rebar showed, and placed four candles - propped them between broken-off bits of concrete because the ground was too hard. Lit the other three from the one I'd been carrying. They seemed to be going out, all of them down to blue wicks. I said my names aloud - Frank, Janeen, Ed, Joyce - and that instant all four sprang up into steady flame. When I was leaving by the gate I could still see the constellation of four blazing in the darkest zone at the far end of the field. 4 It's 3:54. I don't know why I'm awake. I went out. The moon is some days into its wane and overhead. It has simplified the sky, only the brightest stars are there, Orion upright and not far west of the moon with the Pleiades in their fuzzy blur further on and in the north the Dipper hanging with its handle down. It's cold. There's only one cricket but it's loud. No more bats. In the house the thumping and scrabbling overhead that had been gone all summer are back. - I woke thinking of what happened after the defense. Have I told anyone, ever. There had been twelve years of extreme effort. I'd held my intent where it was never welcome, I'd pushed through many mistakes in common thinking. Being about was magnificent and I'd carried the defense, I'd worn the leopardskin jacket and Louie's yellow roses had blazed and I had stood my ground with beautiful confidence. Afterward there was the dinner the department would pay for. Barry excused himself, so it was Paul, Ray and Colin. But then, when I arrived I found Paul at one end of the table, and next to him Ray, and then a student Ray was wanting to promote. I was shut out and no one no one said anything about the thesis. And later, when I was thinking that now Ray knew my quality and would want to be friends, and made an overture - what did I do, suggested something - he said wait until Nathalie could come too, meaning he wanted a buffer, so I dropped it. And went to California and never tried to publish Being about because I knew it would not be allowed. And have been shelved since. - And that was Ed too, if I'd been a daddy's girl I would have found a way to push everyone over and sit next to Paul and demand to talk about the thesis and ask about publishing it. Your attitude to women has been a curse in my life I said to my dad, I did say to him, and that was a pivotal moment where it was true. And now I have given Luke the money I should have spent on a video camera. And am here writing banal junk and taking nice photos in a time when nice photos no longer mean anything to people because their work in the culture has been done. (But still they are nice photos.) - There I saw turkeys on the driveway and sneaked up to the window and saw four of them teetering on the basin rim with their long necks down and their jowls quivering. Earlier I saw them wandering across the lower pasture, group of moving black objects, and thought how they animate the landscape, are its mobile spirit. Small birds in the pyracantha, dark stripes on their breasts, one at least had a red cap, gobbling berries. Redpoll? This morning I made the excerpts for the index page of In America 24, made it a record of reasons. I marvel now at the depression, which came and went until April and was intense. Is it going to be like that again? So far I'm less sore and am evened out about Tom. The evidence was I am still floored when things go wrong with Tom, although it takes very little to keep me stable, a phone call a week, or a couple, and maybe a visit once a month. So blue at zenith, enameled blue. So still. An acorn fell. Clarissa walking from the schoolbus. I like to see someone walking up the road, it's rare and classical. The hills are sapphire blue, bluer than they've been. Grass so pale and shabby now. This year will I find I've used up all the good words for what happens here. Joaquin's little red truck. He drives that slope as fast as I do. 6 It's the day. 7 Best was watching the crowd in Chicago. The camera roved over faces and bodies on and on, young people jubilant and dancing, big black women dancing, bearded white men singing along, old lesbians hugging, young gays hugging - I don't like to mention the flags though their motion was beautiful TV - worn faces, odd faces. I felt they were my people. In the first hours Romney had bigger numbers, but then California came into the blue total and suddenly Tom was phoning. Held up his phone to let me hear the MSNBC anchor declaring for Obama. Today I don't want to let it go, have that feeling of wanting to still be in the moment of it. What I didn't like - the obligatory "This is the greatest country in the world" and "God bless America." Sops to the stupid. Luke on FB this morning saying he'd had lunch with Sara, who'd called him, and saying he wants to be love, more. Sigh, I said. Katie got a sweet letter from Don Johnson. Jody is on an activist roll and talking about her ancient Welsh warrior DNA. 8 He says "I'm really proud of all of you." Tears are shining on his face. He's standing at a mic in his campaign headquarters in Chicago, David Axelrod and Jim Messina leaning against the wall looking on. He's wearing a brilliantly white shirt with sleeves rolled and a silver tie. His right hand touches the mic or unfolds in front of him in gestures. It's a beautiful hand, brown, long, slim, finely articulated. Most of the time he gestures mildly with only his right hand but his left with its gold band comes up strongly when he says "I'm absolutely confident" and "ripples of hope that come out when you throw a stone" - he throws it with his left hand. Behind his brown face and white shirt is the deep strong peacock blue of his campaign banner. "That's been my source of hope, I think about what you guys are going to do." He has been developing community organizers. "I've come full circle." When I tell students I'm proud of them I cry too. Why is that. There's child's sorrow in it, his dad never said it to him. His angry wasted father and mine. What I saw in Romney was his pained small eyes. I don't know why other people didn't comment on that. It's raining I hear by a small drumming on the stones next to the door. Messina writes "You also proved that millions of ordinary people taking ownership of a cause is still the most powerful force in our political process. You showed that grassroots organizing and small donations are not only the right way to win but also the most effective way." 9 When his face crumpled, his people applauded him to help him through the moment. 11 About 5:30 just the narrow rim of sky along the mountains' cut is bright sweet yellow, only for a moment. While I turn on the heater, go into the dark cold bathroom and pee, make tea and rearrange the bed it pales and generalizes so the whole day shows up beyond the window. Before I woke I was dreaming an exam I hadn't studied for. I was glancing through the questions seeing that after the first there were none I could understand. It seemed to be a physics exam, there were equations, I think the last had a2=b2/c2, but there were also sideways twists of inference. I wish I could reproduce it because the marvel is that I made up the questions I couldn't answer. There was a lot earlier about planning a town built on this side of a mountain - this side away from the usual. The houses should be made of red earth so that from a distance it looked like part of the base of the mountain. And more about designing a house that would have orchard trees around it. It's Sunday. Students have been a mess this semester, late, so I don't have a compact week to get everyone done, so I don't have real time off, so I rebel and do other things and keep them hanging over my head. 12 Louie yesterday marveling at the photos on page 10 of Here. She said she could hardly stand them because of feeling she can't be where they are. 15 From about the beginning of December I'll have 10 weeks - 10 weeks! What should I do with them.
Framed a painting I wanted to hang in my space because it was my first painting. Also that I was walking down the East Place driveway and found the road where it joined the driveway silted over, the culvert clogged. [Opposite page: notes from the Nikon manual, technical problems seeing Here on Firefox] Driving home from Santa Ysabel as it was getting dark, long gold bar across the west, over the ocean, a different sense of evening than among the trees, exhilarating in the way it makes the sky a broad far sea. I drove the loops and slopes below it feeling young, feeling thirty. It's partly when I wear jeans, my faded softened so well-fitting jeans. - Body, this fall you're better than you were. 16 Odd thing last night. I had drifted almost asleep and was woken sharply by what felt like an electric frisbee sweeping low over my head from the direction of my feet. It was the size of a frisbee and at the same time felt like an electric shock. I think there was a sound - like an accelerating sizzle? It as if swooped just over my head and then popped out of existence. I 'saw' it [sketch], something like that. 18 There is something wrong with 'executive function' considered to be 'self'.
The three sunset photos. I looked up and saw the hills steeped in light the color of Roger's Golden Syrup. Rushed out with the camera and caught the last of it, and then the hot gold moment at the horizon just after the sun set, and then the Coulter pine against a glow of pink clouds. I brought them back to the big monitor and didn't think much of them because there's nothing special about the composition, but now that I have posted them I'm doting in the usual way. Local color, I said. In Light from the coast there's a low altitude gauze of cloud between me and the tops of the mountains. It adds something, a sense of the air's substance. Workshop: something about plants, which build themselves both to eat and to turn away light. Something about color. Something about sensing.. World-structure, medium-structure, body-structure Light, plant, mind - sun, plant, mind - sun space plant human/senses - sky and color, plants and minds - colors of sky - life's circumstances 19 The King of Wands quit his job today. Phone seems to be fixed though no one came to the house. Luke sent a text yesterday that said Sitting on the heath basking in the autumn sun., feeling well. Tia sent election front pages of Toronto papers. The sun at noon comes three quarters of the way across the bed, crowds me almost off the edge. I run the stove for a while every morning. Asked the tea twins to send another pound of lapsang suchong. Have been making it with slices of ginger, salt, nutmeg and black pepper fresh ground. While I am making it first thing every morning I turn on the oven and put in a local pippin for an hour till it's fluffy. Eat it for breakfast with almonds and cream. Posted Small flames about the Dia de los Muertos this morning, with a bit about mast and a November moment on the iron chair. November 8 about Obama. Shying at what I'll need to do next. Linda on self. 21st What's the structure for Light, plant and soul. Light - imagine the sea of waves A plant is a structure holding itself in the sea Soul is loving aboutness It's ultimately about how to imagine body.
Physics - biology - sensing. [Pasted front page of the Toronto Globe and Mail for November 5, Obama and Bill Clinton touching hands on a campaign platform] 23 Thanksgiving at the Ojedas yesterday. Thirteen year old boy playing Grand Theft Auto, small backward four year old shrieking, tall beautiful daughter working beside her mother in the kitchen, strongest presence in the afternoon that tall woman Luke's age, big breasts under a sleeveless t, broad tattoos on the left side of her back and on her right breast, narrow indio eyes and smooth brown skin. 24 6:30 Saturday. Heater blasting. Turn it off. Tea. Betweentimes everything done that needs to be done this week, another spotty week next week, draggle end of the semester. I sent Kat Harrison a question about plant books and she hit me up for money for her daughter's art project. Greg is sending long letters that aren't about me. Mostly nobody on Statcounter. The hills are pale, the grass trampled. Green blades on edges that caught rain. Not much happening out there. Is it rats in the attic, the Ojedas thought. Nothing to read, I'll go to the library. - Checking through DR8 index. It's exhausting. 25 Lot of dreaming. I was supervising two lazy boys one of whom might have been my kid in some job cleaning up a public space. They kept doing nothing day after day. I was starting to devise systems - they'd have to tell me every night what they had done that day. And what they would do next day - I thought to add. Then realized it'd actually been me who was being evaluated for supervising ability.
26 Smell of chlorine in thick misty air yesterday. Brilliant high fog bank toward the coast.
- My heart is a bit sore, is it about students. For instance not having reread Kirsten E's long thesis all the way through before sending her a reply. Why not - because she is an awkward writer and it's long and I've already had two years of it and I've done what was needed at earlier stages and anything I could say now would not help what is going to stay mediocre in her. I am so weary of working with language that in thirty-some years has not picked up basic patterns of English grammar like where to use parenthetical commas, the difference between a colon and a semicolon, verb agreement, the past tense of the verb to lie, capitalization of Mom when used as a name, the difference between affect and effect, the differences between clamour and clamber and many other near-homonyms - not to mention usages of whether rather than if, and fewer rather than less. I'm now so trained by having to notice these faults that her writing is torment. The second student I'm sore-hearted about is Stuart who wanted letters of support for five PhD programs in psychology. I wrote lazy honest letters because though Stuart needs to think he can do it I don't think he can. I told them he had to use an editor to pass because I think the fact that he can't organize a paragraph signifies. Behind these moves is something personal, I notice. I want my own gifts to matter; I don't want it to be that someone who can't do what I can do gets to pass the same tests because someone like me rewrites him. What have been the proportions this semester. 1. Josh is bright but massively garbled in writing 2. Linda is competent 3. Adelaide is mostly correct but repetitive and dull 4. SS is idiosyncratic and makes the usual mistakes 5. Asil could write but didn't 6. Sam is lively but makes the usual mistakes 7. Jody's a gorgeous writer except for esoteric past tenses 8. Kirsten had little feel for language 9. Coral was ambitious in writing but made all the usual mistakes - what kind of writer doesn't notice the difference between lay and laid? - So that was two people out of 9 whose writing was good enough to read without stumbling, and one of those put me out of rhythm by being very late. 1st December
A/B testing of website design. 2nd When I was making the bed a big bug, two inches long, shiny black and red-brown, looking brand new, running out of the tail of the blanket that had hung down to the floor. I ran for a jar to catch it but in the second it took, it was gone. Scorpion? I wondered, but didn't see a scorpion tail. Have posted September 1 1962 and Headlights at night. 3 Six in the morning, muddled porridge of fog alongside the mountain, otherwise clear, bit of yellow rim south of them. Oak black against slowly increasing pale blue. We're loping down to solstice. Stove blowing. Tea with black pepper in it. Monday morning. The semester's done. What did I do this semester. Didn't even try to work on M&L. Photos. Formatted and posted In America 24 and In America 25. And that's it. But also: cheerful about Tom, good health. experience in practice is that the effect of the whole plant is rarely predicted by the effects of its parts all the ways a living body finds it difficult to coexist with its environment a new physiology Therapeutic measures are justified mainly in supporting self-organization if it is failing. Health in biological systems is self organization. Ill health is system failure in adapting to disturbances. Failures of different kinds: ingestion, removal, circulation, integration etc. Pharmacology can be defined as the study of the interaction of biologically active agents with living systems. - I was starting to feel uncomfortable about the way photographs tend to collapse events into a single moment. Lopez "Learning to see" in About this life 1998. I was someone who took a long time to let my story settle. She'd photographed indigenous time. 4 Lopez 2004 Resistance Knopf When Greg, Tom and Louie have praised my work in Here I've said it's a pleasure to make but it's not significant. I haven't told them why. I've thought to say I believe that because I compare myself with the best. Lopez for instance. In what way is he better than I am. More perceptive, from earlier and now. I'm crudely perceptive in comparison. Would I have been less so if I'd lived in his circumstances rather than ignorant among the ignorant? Maybe. Also more committed. Published and accumulating the best as friends, not wasting his time. Having entry anywhere, acceptable at the same time as he is hawk-eyed with anyone. Dug-down responsible, I think. He wouldn't take the shortcuts I've taken. I'm saying these things with regret that I've made so little of myself, that what I've been has amounted to so little, though I am not forgetting it isn't nothing. people who celebrate the insults of advertising and the deceptions of public relations campaigns We had come to regard the work of writers and artists in our country as too compliant. Our dilemma is we cannot tell our people a story that sticks .... It is that they cannot act. What can love offer that cannot be rejected? It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. These templates for the maintenance of vision require only repetition. What it is to take part in the world instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world's meaning and expression. It will be hidden in our individual skills, in our dress, our speech and manner .... The memory of one will kindle the memory of another .... We will champion what is beautiful, and so finally make our opponents irrelevant. The manic importuning, day after day of it. Something crucial in me would not engage the fawning insincerity of people I met. combination of oppression and challenge which grows out of knowing the incompetence of the powerful My students were streaming toward a metalanguage. Their love was imperfect, but they were willing to acknowledge their complicity. people after some erotic moment in which sensitivity and action fit perfectly together I was more taken with theologies of creation. The world is beautiful and we are part of it. That's all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate. efforts bent toward entrancing and balancing the experience of feeling included in life 6 only to pay attention at a level no one had told me was necessary During that time I named to myself the colors by which the sky changed and by which the sand itself flowed like a rising tide through greys and silvers and blues into yellows, pinks, washed duns and fallow beiges. Through perceiving a place begins; "afterward it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity". Body and place - place and soul. A philosophy of place. 3 parts. 1. The universe. 2. The body. 3. Soul, by which I mean the conjunction of the two, 3a experience, 3b representation. Lopez, Le Guin, is that it?
7 Watson's book on wind. Motion of translucent atmosphere; motions of or in space. The touch of wind; the touch of a fluid on the skin. Winds aren't standing waves, they are streams of change, propagated. The feeling of being involved with something larger, touched by something invisible that bends trees. 8 Asil on Jean Liedloff's Continuum concept. Reading it with a crushing sense of having wrecked my kids, Rowen screaming in his crib at night, and further of how hard I am on myself, living starved for a tribe. The argument can easily be made that the majority of our experiences in contemporary society are outside the norm of human experience and could therefore be considered traumatic. 9 Howard Norman 1994 The bird artist Farrar, Straus & Giroux 10 Monday morning, bit after 7. The sun is far enough south so it is slanting into this room and the kitchen from its first moment over the hill. Fingernail moon in pale blue next to the jiggling end of a branch. Sound of the heater a fluttering wind. Tea still hot. At night, when I turn off the light and lie facing the window, if I stretch I can see Orion's feet just at the top corner of the window. It would be almost at zenith at midnight. I dreamed a begonia, pink, angel-winged. Saw it in a hospital and went back to ask to buy it. The woman said yes. I had to go get my checkbook and return. When she gave it to me it seemed to be in pieces in its pot. I thought it would be alright, would root. I came into my kitchen from somewhere else and liked how it'd rearranged it. It was a little cabin kitchen with plants on its wrap-around sills. An ironing board had been left set up where it was crowding that side of the room. My sister was there and she had repotted the begonia in a white-glazed rectangular lump of a pot. I tipped it out and went looking for a better pot. Found one I liked, a wide dish with a Chinese shape - dented corners like the water bowl on the stove - and a matte oxide glaze. Then I had to go look for potting soil. A man I was with got down into an excavation and handed up compost he was digging out of was it a construction trash bin. I was tucking begonia stems into the sides of the pot but there wasn't enough compost yet. Went looking for more. Don't remember the next part well. There was an elevator. A different man handed me some soil with a different texture, grey, dry, fine-particled, ash-like. I thought it would work if I mixed it in. Then something about stepping up onto a bench or ledge as I left. Then the sort of waking where I am lying talking to myself, realizing things, clear in a way that will be gone when I've begun moving around. This morning it was about the Notes in origin writing. What I saw was the way its thoughts were incomplete, I was still suspended in helpless inarticulation about for instance my mother's defeat, I was helplessly alluding to it without firming my sense of it. I got to that through thinking of how she'd been when I gave her Dorothy Richardson. The way she'd first skidded over it and then bitten down into it and seen what it was. She could still do that then. In there too something about how I could be the one who could give her that and still she had some way written me off. "You are no longer the one who ...." In there too thoughts about why the Here writing isn't interesting to people, it's not someone they want to be.
The bumper week is done - I mean the week after the last packets when I lie around reading novels. 11 Dreamed I was supposed to write a process paper. Goldberg was my advisor. She'd written a list of questions, all of them about feelings. I looked at them and thought to ask myself what questions I'd actually want to answer. I'd want to write about the work, what I did, what it was like. (Then secondary elaboration thinking what of my actual work I'd meant for this MA, photos with text - I'd now from outside the dream say it looked like the garden show's photos with text typed on erasable paper.) Then I was wandering looking for a quiet place to write. Goldberg had baked some croissants and I bit into one. Then lying-awake thoughts about how I was writing Orion yesterday, patching and tweaking. I was saying the writing I do at the college has ruined my writing voice. Last night I went to sleep at midnight and yes Orion was upright at ten degrees from zenith. The dream was working off a thought I'd had yesterday about the journal in Dames rocket and Up north, which was that I wished I'd left out everything about Jam and them and written the place and time more.
So should I be publishing the teaching letters - 12.12.12 Smell of woodsmoke when I go out at night. Last night at midnight I went out to look for the winter hexagon and there it was - Rigel, Sirius in Canis Major, Procyon in Canis Minor, Pollox in Gemini, Capella in Augiga, Aldebaron in Taurus - a big lozenge or shield. 13 It's 2:30 in the morning, sound of water on the terrace. Went to sleep at 9 and seem to have understood it as a nap rather than a night. Bit worried about Luke because I couldn't reach him yesterday to say Jody's coming to London. Facebook message, I'd sent him Light and color in the open air. He likes it. Had to turn the fire on again. Mike Hardee in the colleg] magazine eleven years later saying "my wonderful advisor" because - what - I contained him when he wasn't sure he could do it, I was responsible for the responsible one, he could let himself be what he was. 14 Jody's email from the Penn Club on Russell Square says she's meeting Luke tomorrow. What else to be excited about. SDG&E tree-trimmers brought me pine branches I've made a Christmas tree bouquet of. $1000 check from Dave. Emilee's book listed on Amazon. I'll be able to buy a camera now. 15 "I will personally scratch out the eyes of anybody who makes that man sad" she said, which tells me she found him fragile and sweet. It's cold, the fire doesn't keep up. 16 He's got balanced curiosity and compassion, he's interested and interesting, deeply kind, well spoken, loves many things in generous measure, and if he's lonely it is because he is not one of the herd who clusters around a much shallower drinking hole in the gene pool. Frail people suffer from a constant low-grade inflammatory state ... lead to the weakening of skeletal muscles and the immune system ... less able to process glucose ... secrete more cortisol ... walks 30 min several times a week. Cosmic dust. Visualizing it not as particles but as little knot-patterns made of space, fluid little moiré knots. Angelo's story of meeting his wife. I'll write it while I wait for vegetables to cook. On our first date when she came to pick me up I was just finishing something. I heard the piano in the other room. She plays piano! Then she started to sing. She sings! I knew I was done. Favor's letters from Sterling. Did I have something to do with getting her to where she can do that? Do you think? (Yes.) Jody's letters from London and Liverpool, same question. (Yes.) 13th was the Geminids - it was raining here but I did see meteors at midnight on the 11th/12th. I so much like the sound of rain falling from the corner of the eaves into the little hollow in the rock. It isn't describable. It's a gurgling and rings out in some sweet round way, makes me see little glinting rounded forms. Beethoven these days, String quartet #15, A minor. 17 December Was lying in the dark trying to see it. Curly tendrils, thick dark slashes, melting streaks with fine bright lines curving out of them, dabs. A section with corkscrew pea vine tips one next to the other. - All abstract, complex, sometimes plantlike with branches, changeable. Sometimes a little joyful human scurry in the midst. 1825, he's 54. I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things ... I should like to get something of that into verse before I die. Eliot 1931. Central movement based on chorale in Lydian mode. Late quartets 12-16, and Grosse Fuge. Today's two photos. Ugly but are they good. Bleak chair. Seen large it has streaks converging toward the chair's focus, those two rounds of cut wood. There's the toxic green of new grass bounded by a fringe of dead mustard, natural tan. Echoes in that further strip, a fading row of double copses. Actually yes, I do like it. It's a self portrait. Well-designed but wonky, sharply human wet chair facing a luridly unnatural field beyond which faint but strong and soft natural graces. The good things are happening in the upper left. The upper right is blank white above the chair, but it counterweighs correctly. What about December 17. It's very left-right too. On the left the oak branch pokes down into the frame a bit of a mess. A patch underneath it that is both shadowed and shaded, I mean greener and darker because of shade cast. There's a lighter streak where short new grass is holding water. The two bushes on the right have faint form echoes beyond them in the mist. There are two foreground patches, dark green on the left, red-brown on the right. The light streak joins them, is important some way. It's less ugly than Bleak chair but shallow? And not quite right on account of a couple of bad lines in the branches. Both of them do tell this season in a way I didn't last year, dark, cold, wet, shut down. I've ignored it, happily chasing the astronomy new in the last ten years, starting with Orion, going on to nebulae, then cosmic dust, then the new space observatories and deep field imaging. Mental energy all day, avidity. 18
19 Coldest it has been this morning but there's sun. Twenty young turkeys pecking under the manzanita and jumping to reach pyracantha berries, ruby wattles against the light. Yesterday was full of events. Joe the handyman was underfoot incompetently fixing things. A large black telephone repairman stood in the doorway for a moment, I drove to Julian in pissing rain and variable fog to get my library books and buy some washers for Joe, and then when I got home my cell phone was nowhere. (Occurred to me later to look in the slot between driver's seat and console.) The heater labored. When Joe was gone I saw that 1. he'd used my towel to mop the bathroom floor, 2. the toilet flush is broken again, 3. he'd used my spade to mix concrete and forgotten to clean it, 4. the new faucets on the bathtub don't fit. All privilege is ignorant says Rich 1984. 20 And now I find he's gone off with my pail and the trowel with the green handle, which has abraded my heart it seems, together with Luke not wanting to talk to me, and wishing I could be happier about going to Tom's. Is there something else, it's a scared feeling in the middle of my chest. Business calls to make and I don't want to - - But then do and am cheered up by it. 21 Ice on the birds' water last two mornings. 24 San Diego Georgia Street. It's wet and cold. 25 Something about films. A circle of rope hung in a clearing in the woods. A blanket hung from the rope when the wind picked up blowing sideways. I was thinking I could make a film by setting up a camera in that space. Earlier I'd been looking at footage with some other people, wish I remembered more, what I have is just the moment of getting interested, seeing what could be done. Yesterday morning a dream that the blue jeep had been stolen. Distress. The morning before - long narrative dreams since I've been here - I was walking a wide empty snow-plowed road, looking across wide open fields to a distant red barn that was my landmark, seeing that I must have taken a wrong branch. There was something like a service station forecourt with men standing around. I stopped to ask directions. A man in front of me lifted a pistol. There was a loud bang. I fell. I knew I wasn't hurt but I played dead, then had to stay crumpled against a low wall for a long time. The man with the gun was excited, distractible, talking all the time. I was waiting for something to happen. Then a woman standing next to him was looking at me saying something to him. She was narrowing her eyes. I knew she was telling him I was alive and was watching him from under my lashes. He was distracted though. Another man had come and squatted down next to me. He said to me sotto voce I think there's going to be shooting. At the same time he was pressing gently on my back, bending me double so I'd be below the wall when bullets came from the edge of the woods on the left. I was waiting that way when I woke. Saint Joseph's cathedral last night with Tom. It was mainly about Tom, who this visit is a tall thin man with spiked hair, a good scarf, fine boots and a black windbreaker, who looks like an old rocker. He was sitting next to me absorbed, remote, quite real and lovely. It was the first time he'd been to mass since 1983 and that time was only because of Uncle Joe. Before that in 1967. 26 Waiting for a battery jump. Heart stressed the way it is when I have to wait anywhere for anything. What have I liked best this visit. Telling Tom a story because he asked - how did you meet Roy, and before that Oma's house. The Coulter pine branch-tree with lights and the two beeswax candles on the mantle. Watching four hours of Call the midwife snuggled up with Tom yesterday afternoon. Driving on four hard new tires and realizing I could feel the difference. Hitting freeway I-15 / 163 last Friday feeling I know how, motor's strong steady thrum at 75. Wearing the black jacket over my black turtleneck and cashmere hoodie with the chalcedony earrings and green Uggs. Tom's remote thin short-jawed face beamed into the past next to me at the mass, the honourable priest's greeting at the St Joseph's door, Tom liking to hear me singing carols, the moment in the kitchen Saturday morning when I stared bemused at his odd bony face and he gazed steadily back and said "We love each other" and I laughed and said we do. I am convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. Born He rejected the idea that such far-reaching conclusions could be drawn from any work in theoretical physics. Schrod. Walter Moore 1989 Schrödinger: life and work Cambridge U Wave mechanics 1926, same time as Heisenberg quantum mechanics published at 38 his four great papers on wave mechanics, than which there is nothing more beautiful in theoretical physics p.3 - Mesa Grande And after that Tom crashed into rage. I started for home at 8? and drove back in the dark. Coming east there were towering clouds ahead of me, that here have their feet on the ground. House in the mist. I'm warming the bed. When I stopped at the gate the sky was open above, bright moon. I peed standing up. It's almost midnight. How am I. My heart quaked until about Ramona? It's still a bit squeezed.
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