| in america volume 26 part 3 - 2013 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st February 2013 I was excited to go to Ramona, excited to be in Ramona, wishing I had more errands. There was the marvelous canyon. I'd stop to maybe take a picture and I'd feel the air, the light wide sweet still air. When Tom phoned tonight I said the air had a lightness. He said, I know that lightness. When I drove past the spot where swimmers sometimes park I saw that someone driving an old Bronco was stopped going through the trash barrels. It was a man maybe my age with long pure white hair and a white beard. I lifted my hand, as drivers do. A bit later when I had stopped to look at the mountain he drove up behind me. He wanted to tell me that if I backed up a bit I'd see water sheeting on a high wall of rock. "I've never seen that before." I said I'd noticed it and that there had been a roadrunner. I saw he had his hair pinned up on the top of his head with a pink butterfly clip. His Bronco was filled to the roof with bits of this and that, including a roll of insulite. He said his name was Joe. What did I see on the road. The chaparral is green, no flowers, none, and a lot of dead grey stalks but also a sense of vegetative preparation. Small green things. The mountain's flank was exquisitely pale orange and mauve. I have posted a photo of it called o gracious one, which is how I feel it. I pass it on the narrowest most lethal bit of road, which now is damp and pot-holed, such a provisional scraped-out little ledge above the plunge, and billow toward it. When I got home what I thought of as an English tea - delicious fresh bread and butter and fresh lapsang suchong - while I looked at photos on the big monitor. 2 No gluten, no dairy, no refined sugar, no nightshade. Every day a probiotic, 2 Tbsp sour cherry juice, 2000mg omega-3, 4 Marvels powder quarter teaspoon - leaky gut. Flares after accidental gluten may last 2 weeks. 4 Stepping out of the jeep at the gate, or stepping out of the house, often a feeling of, hello beautiful day. High wisps today flowing steadily from the northeast. It's warm enough a bit past noon, the sun is high enough, to sit on the terrace bench. Jay squawking, squirrel's tiny chipping, plastic rattling on Angelo's new walls. There's a bee. I hadn't seen rabbits since last summer but there was a young one yesterday on the other side of the windbreak. Maybe they've moved under the lawn tractor shed. It's begun to be the blue and green season - hills really green, though still shaven, and a better green that's sweet with the blue mountains. The wind has a little bite. - That she [Alice Sheldon] shot him when he was asleep and herself after, and phoned their lawyer between. He was 84 but she was only 71. - I sat outside for a while. It was cold. Frogs in the wet crease to the southwest. The winter hexagon at 8pm was sloped east. I want to use its bearings to orient more, for instance Casseopia and Andromeda in the slice between Capella and Aldebaron, Leo's sickle in the Procyon-Pollox slice, both dippers in the Pollox-Capella slice with Polaris in line with Capella, Pegasus in the Aldebaron line - all slice-lines taken from Betelgeuse as center. 5 surge of abstract structure pouring through It's a bit after 9 and I'm on the bench with tea. Tuesday morning. Posted two more pieces between the last photos. Trip to town after quartz and there it is after o gracious one. Before that series Tiptree's beautiful paragraph I'd kept since I was 33, blaze. [On every side, above, below, before, beyond, blaze steady fires of amethyst, topaz, ruby, emerald and diamond, ultramarine - drift upon drift of them, burning against blackness or veiled in filaments and gauzes of hypnotic allure. They are, she realizes slowly, stars. For the first time she grasps it. Each star is really a sun like her own. The other exists. - James Tiptree, who was Alice Sheldon, in Up the walls of the world, 1974]
I'm looking at quartz that strange image, seeing a horse's head that could be a hound's, and fine-branched antlers held some distance above the ear, blue-grit space above it. Below it is the small story of Joe with a pink butterfly clip pinning up his long white hair. I've looked at the last three pages, 12-14, back and forth, and liked them, been pleased by the simplicity of the pages, the simple-heartedness of the project, its unambitious simple hereness. And then I think, but no one else likes it. I can't imagine anyone I admire liking it, what's wrong with it?
I was talking on the phone and saw that the avocado seed in the tall green pot has sprouted an inch and a half, a dull dark red little stem beginning to peel open into minute leaflets at its tip. 6
Hardly thinking about anything else ... that is really the power of genius, the force of will to make all the mistakes necessary to get the right answer. Einstein biog. General Theory of Relativity which describes how space and time tell matter and energy where to go, and matter and energy tell space and time how to look. ... utterly different view of what our universe is like. 7 the lumeniferous ether that animates our souls - Dick in Divine invasion
- That's from GW5-1, April 1996.
Working with the soul pages and finding these passages I thought were about Tom but really were about what had happened in me by means of him.
8 I look up It is well with my soul and find a history. As I'm scrolling down the music comes on, piano, and I read that the hymn was written in 1873 by a Chicago lawyer in the cabin of a transatlantic steamer passing the spot where weeks earlier his four daughters had been drowned. "The water is three miles deep." I cry. Give my ashes to the air - dust to dust.. 9 It snowed last night and there was fog this morning but first light had sun mixing into the whiteness. I put on my good rubber boots and went out into marvel, I kept saying breath held to immaterial white, my line from some Alberta poem. 5 photos. The most complex is a long lens one with pines, fences and a cloud hiding the top of a mountain so its shape is uncertainly inferred. It's not one of my classic stasis photos, the cloud seems to be moving. This one has an odd magic. It's in the clouds and not. It's monochrome and not. The shape of the cloud is a bit spooky? It seems to have got more definite as I looked at it. rock wave is very blue. There's the fence that's been doing so much for my photos, the strong old post at the head of the grass-cut line with its reinforcing second post, foreground holes, and the way the line of fog against the acorn-grinding rocks does look like a wave smashing into foam. Is there something more? The way the fence demarcates sun from fog. In this one too the fog gives a sense that it's moving. road vanished is very blue and dim and simple. The road and its slope dissolve into grain. I almost see further up into the fog. silver two is classic stasis for sure, two trees in their full idiosyncratic shapes, companions, two dark horizontal strips parallel, two silver zones textured and untextured. It's like a toned black and white. silver & gold doesn't quite work? There was a lucid tenderness about the pale yellow light and soft blue shadows. I liked the way the shadows run all across the frame and the way framing the tree on the side gives them a long line. I wanted the glitter of sun on a front part of the oak. But the upper right corner doesn't work. handsome is just my jeep standing on the road, snow falling. Why wd I like it as a photo, but I do. Among highly intelligent people there are two kinds of minds, the sharp and the soft .... Soft minds absorb great quantities of <data> and opinion, often silently, even sluggishly, and turn them around slowly until a solution appears. Adam Gopnik in the NYT. The way it's cold when I step into the kitchen reminds me of the winter in the Olsen house. - Beauty, beauty. Pulling phrases from the physics sheet in the Orpheus folder, those decisions among fragments. This one, this one, not this one, delete the first four words. Comma not space here, this line after this one. It's sure-footed, I don't ponder, and at the same time a bit dazzled, there's so much aura around these little phrases. I feel the layers - they're not layers but they're superimposed - of reference, astrophysics, atmosphere, ocean, brain, self-sensing intuition, social feeling sometimes. It makes a three-dimensional matrix, something like that, and is self referential among other exactitudes. Handling these shreds at all I have strong confidence in them and in the power of what could be made from them - public power too - and I feel how much my own assignment and accomplishment that still unmade thing is, and I was slightly imagining that I'd need to study how to work with them. And yet. The photos in their ease, do they work off that zone I found and made too? As attractions. road vanished does. 14 Plainfield Thursday, VT. What's Mac doing this morning. He's set out pots he's brought back this trip - from North Africa - in his display case. It's bright early morning on his mesa. Pink on the buttes across the way. The horses have ranged widely looking for new grass. Smell of coffee, smell of bagettes. Sweet butter, apricot jam. He's at the round table facing out over the grassland. He got home last night. His computer is open. He's writing about the month he had in Morocco, pulling in his photos. He has a template that folds photos onto the right side. He has sound too, pocket recorder. Pocket camera too. It's a loving record of travel, particular villages, local materials, solar-adobe stoves - solar-adobe phone-charging stoves. What else could a stove do. Lighting, refrigeration. He sits with the women in a village and notices where energy is used and wasted. He has asked questions, pulled up the thoughts behind the thoughts, laughed with the women and children. He's looked at gardens, wells, storerooms, barns. He's played with adobe, he scans native plant communities. He doesn't like to lecture. The pots he brought home are beautiful but he has other reasons. Analysis of clay, what can be added - ashes, how to put local materials into new combinations. Forms - he notices the form ethos of areas and designs within it. Understands what it means. He absorbs the address of local humor and liveliness. What he's doing this morning is articulating all of that. I'm exasperated by this faculty session because the organization can't do what it's talking about. Mission, opportunities, continuing innovation, acting without resources, all have been embodiment studies, which these lumps could not get into and I haven't been willing to push. Heightened accountability would have meant developing a busy network in which I direct people of limited capacity the way it was fun to do at the garden. What is this whole session about. Not giving up something the pres has axed. This process is not useful and nothing will come of it. We have temporary presidents we have no loyalty to. I've never seen a pres the fac didn't despise. These are smart enough people and they make good comments within the terms of the topic, but the topic isn't clear enough. We've dropped SBC, let's get on with what's left. I don't have confidence in this man. He's a large big-faced bear who has done a lot of things but everything he says is brown. What should he have done different. Instead of introducing himself lay out the question clearly, bottom line: this is how I understand what you need from me. This is what I propose to give you. This is how I'll lay it out. I hate discussion. [Nina's Facebook photos of the college in winter: gate - library path - edge - fields around] 19
22 Friday, travel day. Early. Sun on the neural branches where snow is myelin sheath. The way in writing what is lovely becomes something that isn't what I see. This res. The way Wild research reached a big rectangle of G1s. They always say they didn't know it was alright to be what they are. Dust & soul 1: dust. It would have been better to have known more. Only 8 people came. But the images. And I'd learned what I hadn't known in the cosmology that's new since the Valhalla house. And then Bobby in the cold dark with his telescopes talking about Coma Berenice and the Abenaki story of the Dipper's three handle stars. The campfire star that is a vision test, which I could see. A lot of thanking for having brought him. Dust & soul 2: soul. More people there. Having people volunteer to read electrifying passages. Nina's swift precision in reading. Josh in the front row. Moments in Van Hoy's workshop feeling my own strong steady large pulse and then the delicate pulses in other wrists. The sullen stupid curves of Morrie Cox's lower jaw. Her pale furtive eyes - furtive? The hard directness she brought out of me. I said inspirational speakers need to be radiant and she's not. My irritation with the way she kept asking for special favors, an hour and a half meeting, a meeting in a space upstairs. The way in advising group she refused to ask questions because she didn't want to listen to anyone. The little twitch on the left side of her face. Reading what will we know in student-faculty reading. I heard myself read it too 'expressively' in the context of the group. Laughing with Lise in her office last night, about older women wearing scarves to hide their necks and the unbeautiful boobs of our cabaret strippers. Lise saying that when Goldberg speaks in fac meetings I look disgusted. The embodiment colloquium's large quiet room, a lot of people, everyone seen. (Sunday late afternoon.) Lori talking about a grey hair. "It wasn't on my head, it was in my lady parts." The moment Lindiwe walked into the welcome session looking fabulously tall in orange hiking boots with 6" spike heels. John Whitcomb across the table a Dr Seuss creature who pressed my bare forearm with a cold paw and then yesterday in our meeting charmed me with reading the Black Mountain paragraph aloud and with his amused eyes. 15 at Woodstock and then hitch-hiked across Canada including the Peace River Country. Ruth's grand beaded sweater at grad, corn-row crown, starved face and flat correct address. The audience laughing when I didn't expect them to, when I began to praise Coral by saying she got a lot done last semester, because she was standing in front of them 8 months pregnant. The little boy - really little, maybe 9 - who was graduation photographer, speeding around the room crouched like a newshound, kneeling to get a low angle, carrying a large Canon. His dad Steven the aerial photographer of alternative energy sites from Santa Fe. 25 San Diego Canon 5D Mark II with a 28mm lens - I mean I rented a camera yesterday and shot at the lotus pond and the OB pier. Sunday, mild Santa Ana, intoxicating California, small light camera piling frames onto a 32GB card. Took them home and whisked them into the MacBook Pro and played them. There was sound, the crumbled roar of waves breaking. White lace of foam stretching on a green surface, marbled deeps brown and green. It wasn't a day for the shots I wanted, strand of seaweed stretching and relaxing some way down in gold-specked green water, no seaweed and too rough a surface. Or for the pool's subtle body emanations, water too dirty, surface too rough. But I learned some of what I'll need to figure out - shade for the viewing screen, glasses for focus. Settings for less contrast. Polarizing filter. I can get 20 minutes on the 32GB. Backpack to carry it. 26 The res washed away by Friday night - Saturday - Sunday - Monday with Tom, my avocado on his mantle next to the beautiful little square mirror, grown from 3" to a foot while I was away. At night and at sunrise venetian blind strips and plant shapes spread across the walls. Full moon risen over the far away mountain triangles due east. My reflection on the jeep's windows prettier on account of girly affection. Tom fetching me from the airport, jeep's shape appearing slowly in the crush of cars. Sunday morning on the lotus pool's curb, sun behind me. Sunday afternoon shooting off the end T of the OB pier, Tom willing to park and carry and go fetch the jeep. Saturday morning a loft of elation at being in palm tree cool sun springtime beach town. Tom smart and funny and a wildish tall thin man with spiky old-rocker hair and excellent boots, fond of me and on careful behavior, asking questions and scrupulously not getting mad. An awkward sense with him sometimes of being not quite myself, accommodating his interests rather than mine, saying to myself this is how people do it. Other times laughing comfortably together, established couple I guess. Saturday night a moment where we were lying together and I leaned my head against the top of his, soft hair on my cheek, and found bodies open, sexing quietly in the best way. Saturday morning being led along his canyonside trail east of Balboa Park greeting plants, Cleveland sage, artemisia, wild cucumber in a heap grown over a bush. Walking heavily, using the stick, though, struggling up slopes. Tom patient and not embarrassed I think, though he is so careful with his accessories. I'm writing in the Ramona café, have an hour to go before Pott Belly opens. It's cold and bright. I loved the moment when 163 opens wide and I could see the inland mountains low and blue in sharp outline a rim to the east. 27
28 Anything more about the res now that I'm landed back? Favor next to me on the alum suite couch liking to see me light up when I talked about Tom [detail deleted], agreeing to publish stone unseen and something with photos on Blurb. - The moment starting to descend into Burlington when the wing's flashing light made flung spangles of the light snow we were flying against. It's pale 6:48am, pale sun outlining hill curves one behind the next, my yard an emerald lawn, the cedar's branches waving, wind from the east I think, cold. 1st March The red book. realized that he needed to recover the emotional tone of childhood part of myself with a different viewpoint than my own Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality which is not I. how out of this present psyche a bridge can be built into its own future Says his prescient dreams of WWI were evidence of a collective uncon. the wholeness of personality which can bear no self-deception a new image of god in his soul - for whom film is primarily an art form allied to painting and other arts by single-person authors innovation main goal easily crossed national borders since the 1920s emphasizes vision over text and dialogue reprising 1920s outrage the norm ... pretends to outrage mainstream modernism cinema total of all technologies ... work toward articulating the <moving image> embraces equally the big movie and the computer screen and such structures as speech and writing resistance to 'normal vision' centering on passage of time stable point of view ... appearance of forms in space when it was possible construct bodies of work made up primarily of films modernism general culture of the arts in the 20th c Modernity a global rise and hegemony of industrial, urban and technological societies. retrospective terms values opposed goal of visual pleasure post-modern revision first debated among choreographers and architects in the 1970s modernism's high-toned resistance to mass culture post-m reconciliation of high and low Nearly all the first so-called modernists were also great cinephiles. pitched modernism against mass culture with the avant garde leading ... shifts the avant garde into alliance with at least some elements of mass culture to tear down high modernist elitism .... The terms switched gears in the mid-century abstraction high modernism social programme innovation 1907-1925 [1800s] century fascinated by the art and science of vision Constable and Turner meteorological research of Luke Howard 1909-1920 art of fragments scientific discoveries expanded the field of vision questioned the direct bond of seeing and knowing which painting had traditionally evoked instead of figure-ground, each part of the painting showed how they had been made "a technique of the imaginary" which mobilizes and organizes a libidinal economy of pleasure cine-poem Free Cinema UK broadly leftist politics into the '30s documentary reaction against 'elitist' modernism of the 1920s AL Rees 1999 A history of experimental film and video: from canonical avant-garde to contemporary British practice BFI [log of Canon Mark II Ocean Beach pier footage] 3 Orion at 9 last night tilted west. Sunday morning, dim pale green and grey. A camera is coming, lots of money wiped out. In the late evenings a burst of energy for sound editing. Is it a new decade? New last decade 68-78. [work list]
Second partial loss: teaching
Last ten years - W&D, hardware and software, Luke
4 Working in the iron chair in sunglasses, going through the FCP book again after months, many times through still forgetting but it's not all new. Hello day. Airplane, chickadee, woodpecker tapping, breeze in the oak. Crow's dark harsh patrol earlier. Brown bird on and off the fine branch tips of the resprouting bush oaks. Sun lightly hazed. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse - 1999/2000 and reprise two years later. Varda b.1928 so she was about 70. For the garden film, her sort of voice over. Have forgotten to say that before I went to VT, when I showed Tom the Casa Verdi doc he was just right with it though it was opera. Tosca's kiss 1984 Daniel Schmidt. Sara Scuderi died 1987. What I've never done here, worked a full day. Reviewed FCP chapters, posted Dust & soul 1 and 2, watched Les glaneurs, began to edit the Max section for practice. When I wake tomorrow I'll be 68. 6 It was spitting rain on the casino drive but from this table at the casino dining room I'm looking over the Lake Henshaw valley in pale sun. Other old people here for the 55¢ breakfast, a few. Mustn't the servers have contempt for people who come to gamble at 8 in the morning. I have nothing to tell. Imagine something to love or want. There aren't any urges, except not to be in pain, which this moment I'm not. If I weren't hedged by money and pain? I'd travel some. A month in a village in India, spring through fall in London. I'd drive to New Mexico - could do that anyway. I'd build a house and make a garden. I'd live for a summer in the PRC and take Tom. I'd build four houses with gardens. I'd set up a studio with a tech helper and a publishing helper. - In came an old cowboy, handlebar moustache, sheepskin-lined jean jacket, big hat he doesn't take off, and a middle-aged Indian with a feather in his big hat and a young fellow in a trucker cap texting. The cowboy saw me smiling and has misunderstood. I may still look good to an 80 year old. 85. - Laughing with David on the phone. G sent VW quotes. Louie last night. Jody, Laiwan, Cheryl, Tony, Mafalda, Nina, Michell, Rin, Katie, Favor, Emilee, Martin, Janet, Tia, Josh, Claudia, Kris, Tess. 7 Fedex truck in the drive with my camera - 9 Jung on the uncon - his language v bad. <stood between two worlds> <external perception and perception of the uncon> <rational and irrational> <compensatory> <symbol> <active forces of the uncon> <factors suppressed accumulate in the collective uncon> <unconscious psyche> Fear of insanity. Soul complementary to persona. He's speaking from Swiss Protestant male early 20th century conscious self, preacher's son, imagining a new religion. "Affirmation of religious attitude." speaking in primordial images educating the age a new way of looking at their souls to put in the book itself an exposition of the forces that will attempt to destroy it Confronted with the choice of you as a lunatic and themselves as inexperienced fools they will have to choose the former. <battle between the world of reality and the world of the spirit> When I first began to do this I saw landscapes, then I learned how to put myself into the landscape, and the figures would talk to me and I would answer them. The tower thought of as going back to the Middle Ages. a magnolia tree covered with red flowers illuminated by an eternal sun midlife transition not interpreting or understanding the fantasies but experiencing them completely literally while one was engaged with them 1875-1961 experiencing the self as something to which the I is neither opposed nor subjected exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, Patanjali's yoga sutras, Buddhist meditational practices, and medieval alchemy all based on active imagination enable his patients to recover a sense of meaning in life Three stylistic registers: plain report, analysis, poetic/mantic. I knew Philemon had given me a language that was foreign to me. <contents of the collective uncon> <integrating them into con> - How should those be said - proclivities of non-conscious structures under certain conditions of questioning, structural effects of allowing them. <Collective> means inherited, which is in common but not actually collective, which evokes something else. 'individuation' which was contrary to the adaptation to others. ... corresponding break with conformity led to a tragic guilt that required expiation ... the individual had to produce values that would serve as a substitute for his absence from society. Individuation was for the few. commenced by concentrating on a particular mood the I's task to be a contributing member. forced me down to the last and simplest things Be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty. child ... I went the way of the day and you went invisibly with me taught me to say, "I am the servant of a child" ice, fire and death 10 Stepped into the bathroom and saw turkeys beyond the window, a crowd of them, with two nearby on the raised grass between locust trunks. They were brilliantly colored, jeweled, enameled, bronzed, with blue heads and red wattles. I was at the window carefully silent but they both turned their small heads on long necks and stared, then stepped slowly forward, two steps out of shadow into sun, and there blazed. People born without limbs can have phantoms. People with phantoms can slip it into their prosthesis. Such a fresh day. It's Sunday, sunny after a dark week, the clock set forward, and I cleaned house and did laundry so the mudroom door stood open all day and the kitchen was filled with light from the west. Have sent Favor publishing notes and font choices. clearer view of the neural basis of embodiment, of agency, of self experience of floating amongst the stars Robot eyes and hands - saw himself from outside Autoscopic double and mirror-reversed Sense of self formed from the coordination of senses Polyopia - hallucinatory multiplication of objects perhaps an activity with so many microdeterminants that no pattern is ever repeated 11 When I was sitting in bed this morning quite a strong dark thump. I was restless, drove to Ramona without a good reason. In K-Mart all the TVs were talking about an earthquake at Anza. This aft in the computer chair two more thumps, less loud but leaving me faintly seasick. Internet says this morning's was 4.7, eight miles down. On Black Canyon Road on the way home one ceaothus bush in full foaming blue, half a dozen California poppies and a wild pea vine in pink bloom, both on the warm shelf of road above the res. Working on In English, lovely energy today, tight jeans and green Uggs made me feel light and swift, 30 years old. 12 March 12, isn't it Don's birthday, isn't it his 70th? Tuesday morning on the forecourt, sun higher than the roof now. Sunglasses and coffee. A breeze. Angelo's plastic snapping. Deep blue to the north. Late afternoons sometimes Angelo's white pickup drives by and then after a while I'll see his little shack's windows lit, two dim yellow panes at a height in the dark. Very early, 4:30, his headlights sweep the room as he's leaving to get to the coast in time for work. Why do I like it. He's a gentle good-looking sweet-hearted manly man who likes rocks and music and devotion, a loving presence. Louie has started up with Ina, "She's the one I wanted to grow old with", and immediately got nasty about Greg reading my journal. (Did cop.) Am having a little fight with Lise. She called me aspergery for my directness and I called her conventional though not directly. I think we are even. Eating fish soup wishing I had something to say. - Have gone through all the suitcases and boxes and can't find the photo I want for the In English cover, mystified. Wasn't it in a big photo-paper envelope, and where is that envelope? - It's in Vancouver. 13 There was a scent last night after I'd gone to bed and was reading - it was like plum jam cooking, then a bit of almond. I'd been reading Sacks on hallucinated smells and it did seem unsourced. Then when I stretched to turn off the light I understood that it was the pea flower in a glass, night-scented. It was Feb 14 2000 I wrote that I'd bought a computer at Press Gang's going out of business sale. That was years after I'd been using them at school though - spring of the MA defense, which was February 1993. And then tonight a note from Kat saying her daughteer will come with a friend. 17 Doors and windows open all day yesterday, slept with a window open. Bad nights, woken by sore arms and hands, fingers swollen this morning. Unhappy dreaming, I'm in a little trailer on a parking lot. It's my parents'. I'm worried it isn't heavy enough not to be blown off an edge. It has my dad's self-built gracelessness. Their ugly cheap stuff. Somebody I know stops in another RV on the left. While I'm visiting there two young men get into my space and mess it up, leave lights on, try on clothes, dig through everything, cook and leave a dirty pan. Since I'm back from VT I haven't felt this place, really been here. Yesterday I told Louie I won't come to Van at the beginning of April. She is annoyed but it was up ahead irrelevant and spoiling my time. Last few days draggy, without energy to work except for AG fixing last night. - The oaks are starting to fade. Ants in the kitchen sink yesterday. Is it an early summer? I'm going out to pick up branches. 16
- Surprising how fast the oaks have faded. 17 It's Saturday so Angelo was at his house all day with his two workers. In the late afternoon when I'd pruned and dragged branches to the coulee and washed my hair I walked to the foot of his steep drive and was just in time to see his French doors placed, three sets facing south in his living room wall, one set facing south in his kitchen wall. When they'd all gone I climbed up and sat in his very low lawn chair looking out thru the new kitchen doors and hearing birds in the canopies he's level with. It's a good house, he's making a good house, has had a long plan, has the money, has the skill, has the heart for it. Has beautiful windows. Have been proofreading AG because I'm so blank and somehow avoidant, to as if have company and feeling. Louie, Rob, the MA, Dave, Joyce, Rowen, Luke, the garden, so much struggle, so much pain, so much wheel-spinning talk. It seems mentalistic even when I was describing scenes. The bits I still like are the idealizing love for Dave C and the sweet simple pleasures with Rob. I hate reading the miseries of conflict with Louie. I was trying to understand rather than dissolving through, it's neurotic. Now I don't do that but don't do much at all. I can be clear if I'm called on, I know things, but there's nothing to react to. There's nothing I want or maybe nothing I know I want - still a dim ache of yearning to have someone come for me. - Was it this morning - maybe yesterday? - I woke at 4 and went out and sat in the chair for half an hour in the dark. Orion was gone and the only strong form I could recognize was Leo's question mark high in the south. Out back the Dipper meantime had rotated so it hung straight down. For some reason I can work after dark - formatting In English, though I'm doubtful of much of it. The pages look nice, sparse and spaced. 18 Borrego Waiting for camarones al ajo. Realizing maybe it's been spring fever, because it has turned to elation. Mike only had the kitchen units left but smiled when he saw me and said, for an old customer, if I could pay cash ... Mesquite, the kind with fissured dark trunks. Coming through the long valley, bright green splotches at the bases of creases, willows in new leaf. Here it's the pink mountain wall I'd want to do something with. 19 The pale clean light this morning. Scents. I like the dry grit underfoot and the bare space under creosote and palo verde. Kendall's. A table of old men easy together as they should be. Old couples silent together, obedient unfortunates. The mountains are sublime. They're unspeakable. Incommensurable. There's no reason to say that of them except that I feel something toward them, a towardness. They're great gods of nakedness, naked immaculate form and color. I'm wanting and not wanting to say infinite, I mean in grain - they're visibly made of grains of color and is it that the body loves what it can be in relation to them, minutely differentiated? It was a hard night. I was in a good bed. Fresh white pillows. I'd been reading Kim, which I found in the office as I was checking in. Woke at 1:30 very sore, arms, face, hands, small of my back. Then lay sore for hours. Toward morning a worried dream about being distressed by Louie's witty answer to someone in public, by her cleverness compared to me. Woke very sore again in faint filtered dawn. It's alright when I get up and move around. First motel in Borrego Springs, constructed in 1947, with later additions completed by a noted mid-century local architect Richard Zerbe in 1956. 21st People at GW looking for Joyce: Poland ("Joyce Frazee spiritual"), Singapore, London, Concord Mass, Burnaby, Buenos Aires ("Joyce Frazee who is he?), Brooklyn, Georgia, Tofino, Madrid, Berlin, Vancouver (somebody who'd been to GW before and had the url but still searched for Joyce next time), Uraguay, Kitchener ("Gestalt Therapy Vancouver"), Madrid again, Colorado, Granada, Ladner, Botota, Toronto ("emotional clearing Vancouver"), Thailand, Rome, Aldergrove, Nova Scotia (Joyce Frazee Brookside), Costa Rica, Victoria, Buffalo, Edmonton, Belgium ("Joyce Frazee psychologist"), Olympia ("Joyce Frazee psychotherapy"), Paris ("Joyce Frazee Vancouver teacher"), Bad-Wurtemburg, Houston ("Joyce Frazee psy Vancouver"), Gibsons (somebody who came back), Hungary, Surrey ("Joyce Frazee dreamwork Vancouver BC"). Commodification, gonzo Habituating to a product, mainstream capitalism Hypersexualized What turns these people on is making money. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would REALLY like to do. complete degradation making hate place their women at higher levels of risk They get even with the women they can't have. - Kate and why I don't really like her - she's my age and better kept than I am, a lot, and I'm guessing has done quite a bit of coasting. Pretty workroom in a waterfront property on a lake, partly grace à third husband. Was a buxom pretty blond and is a pleasant womanly grandmother with good hair and skin. She took to embodiment studies, quotes me, but her tone in person and in writing is so managed I don't get lively with her. Compare Sonja's headlong personal energy with the same texts. She needs to work on - I need to work on with her - loosening her voice and looking bad things in the eye. Just as shadows are not flat shapes projected upon the ground (but rather dense and voluminous spaces), neither are they measurable quantities, mere consequences of sunlight and its interruption. Shadows are qualitative attributes of the bodies that <secrete> them. They are time-dependent realms that change their contours with the hour and the season, momentary life zones where the shadow-casting mountain, or boulder, or body quietly envelops and gathers a range of other bodies under its sway. - Abram in Becoming animal 22 A fit of writing today, story of going to Borrego. It's called spring fever downhill dash. Below it a photo of the blue plastic bowl full of leather-skinned oranges. Then a close-up of a single periwinkle flower with its raised white 5-sided centered flange. 24 I phoned Mary tonight, Sunday night. Her blank dark hard voice. She seems to have few thoughts, or maybe it's that she has few things she remembers how to say to other people. I can feel the way a sentence is an emotional shape, s dynamical shape, and she keeps finding only the same ones, each time as if they've just come to her. She wishes she had grandchildren nearby. She still has her eyes, so she reads. She doesn't like old age. How is my family - she doesn't remember their names. She can't engage anything I tell her about myself, turns it back to something about herself. How long has she been doing that, at least since I moved to SD, that's ten years, but it's longer I think. It's blatant shutting-out. I don't know whether she's like that with everyone. She was loved for her sanity and warm interest. It's all gone. She has nothing left to interest anyone and so she's bereft. And yet she's quite sturdy and will live on angry and stupid in her grey mists. Such a hard life, Ed's malice and tyranny, the marginality he enforced in the community, her miserable houses, our flight away, the ways I beat her off for years, preached to her, couldn't stand her after about London, her few years of pleasure in college with a best friend and men who were interested in her and success in what she was good at, and then clamped down again into teaching jobs she wasn't strong enough for and failed at, and then moving to BC and finding her brothers and sisters no longer interested in her, all her contacts somehow lost so now there's no one. So long as I was having to beat off her sucking avidity I didn't miss her interest - it wasn't there but I didn't miss it. Now my heart hurts for her and for me. I don't think she loves anything anymore. I think she's all plaint. She hasn't a sense of beauty so she doesn't love her days it seems. I don't think she remembers to read her old letters so she can be with her better times.
It's a life that could have gone so much better if she hadn't married at 19 and had gone with her family to the coast and maybe finished high school then and married a kinder more educated man and been more a part of family and community and had children who lived nearby and didn't fight her off. If she had had that better life I wouldn't exist, and Paul wouldn't, and so her tragically wasted life is what gave us existence. And yet she isn't even able to take pleasure in what we've made of ourselves at her expense, she doesn't value it or understand how large the accomplishments are. For her there should be heaven because her life has not been fair. I don't think she believes, really. Opa and Oma were buoyant in their faith I think but I don't feel that in her, I don't think she feels any loving presence. Opa and Oma still had their Russian village culture in them. Mary was displaced, as Ed was too. Now when I speak to her I try to reach through to the young mother she was and I can't, she doesn't remember herself. Joyce was the mother of my middle years. Greg is as much mother as I have now! A patchy one. Juliana is translating what will we know for a magazine. I phoned Tom Friday morning to say I was having a fond moment. He said later it had given him a weekend like sheltering in harbour. I'd said I appreciated his long persistence in what he is. Sent for the Nikkor 24-70 today and two memory cards. 25 What would I want to say about wwwk for J's mag - and about translation. About translation, that it's not about words, it's about bodily state. Language is organized by, exits from, the bodily structure we are when we make it. So the first thing to do in translation is to let the first language structure us thoroughly. Then let that structure write in the second language. That would foreground rhythm, speed, dynamic shifts, tone, sound. What's evoked with language is not so much 'content' as a whole state of being, which is necessarily a state of body. Do we like being what the writers were when they wrote what they did? The sequence of being they inscribed. About wwwk - the way it formed over years and then was given over a short time. Over a couple of weeks I'd wake hearing lines. One evening I thought to write down the lines I'd heard, and then the rest of them spoke themselves in my head and I wrote the sequence almost in its final form. It was like taking dictation but I don't want to glamorize that notion. Most writing is like taking dictation to some extent. This was more strikingly evident because of the way it happened so rapidly with such sure-footedness. [Then some paragraphs revised to the following] Two related things prepared this work. One was that I had gone back to my childhood landscape to make a film about what it had been like to live there. At the time what will we know was writte, I had spent four years thinking about place and attachment to place - writing, photographing, filming, and recording sound, steeping myself in questions about the meaning of location. I was at last preparing all my materials for a two-hour show called Notes in origin. The other was that I had been reading a lot in a lot of subject areas and had developed a practice of bracketing language that had a certain kind of charge. I collected many instances of this bracketed language without much sense of what I was doing. The words, lines or whole passages bracketed often seemed to me to be about something the authors had not consciously intended. They seemed to be indicators of unconscious deep structure of some kind but I hadn't understood more. At some point, though, working with my notebooks to prepare my show, I realized that all my bracketed passages were implying the same thing. What I now saw was that the language of the poets, philosophers, anthropologists, semantic theorists, and even the scientists I had been reading - as well as my own writing and dreams and daily experience - were indicating unconscious memory of life before birth. And not only that: what I was discovering was that unconscious memory of experience before birth was actively structuring central ideas in for instance philosophy and religion. I compiled some of the signifying bits I had found in an 11-part poem called field & field, which like all of my writing then was a matrix of fragments meant to call up an elusive state rather than to make explicit pronouncements. What will we know is nothing like that poem although the topic is the same. It is rhythmically quite driven, the way poems sometimes are, but it so robustly declarative that I've wanted to call it an essay. It formed itself quite suddenly. Over a couple of weeks I had been hearing lines like "the movement of the water taught us math" when I woke. One evening I thought to write down all the lines I'd been hearing, and then the rest of the lines spoke themselves in my head almost in their final form. I had to assume that non-conscious networks in my brain had been getting this language ready for a while. I was quite staggered by the realizations I had come to. They seemed important, and yet I didn't know what to do with them: I didn't want to be a life-long preacher of pre-birth sentience, and I also was afraid the piece might be used by anti-abortion activists. As a result I mostly sat on it for years. It turned out, though, that it was an entry to work with an even larger scope, the work of developing a general embodiment epistemology. Embodiment epistemology begins with understanding that everything we experience, everything we do, can only happen because our physical body is structuring itself in one particular way rather than another. What this means for understanding how language works is simple but radical: the locus of linguistic effect is only and always the body. We speak from the bodily structure we are in the moment of speaking: the body we are in that moment is what forms our speech. In the same way, we can only understand language when our own structure changes in response to it. Language evokes structure. All of this of course is true for written language too, and it has strong implications for how we think of rhetoric and style. They are skilled ways one body calls up structure in another. Translation interposes a third body. A lot depends on whether the intervening body is structurally fluid and precise: can it (in some way) re-form the body of the author within itself, so its utterance will structure a reader in similar ways? When I'm being translated - or edited, too - what I look for is whether I can feel myself in the new text. Am I at home in its cognitive dynamics - its flights and perchings? Am I awkward in its rhythms? Has my idiosyncrasy been smoothed out? Am I still there? 26 Last night a thump on the window, up near the east corner a large moth. Is it that time? It was a white-line sphinx. I had the lamp next to the window at its brightest. It glued the moth motionless to the edge of the frame. When I turned off the light it was gone. 27 Lens came. Translating with Juliana, first wwwk, then the notes on it. 30 They've given themselves such a good idea, studio visits as photographer and interviewer, and now tareraveling to do it. Klea was long-legged and beautiful in a cold clear way. Nikki was warm and her beauty was balanced between Mexican and Jewish. The moment that made me see her best was when she said that she and her brother had had a fireplace in their bedroom. Where was that? In a cottage in a hill station in India. Both young women were sitting on the rug in front of the pellet stove with their long hair down and I saw the big-eyed little girl she'd been, soft and watchful. I could see Kat in the set of Klea's smile, small teeth and a lot of gum, and the narrow bulge of her forehead, but she's steelier? She wasn't interested in me. I'd have liked them to discover me but they didn't. They weren't making a studio visit, they were daughters being given hospitality. The daughterly natural way Klea when she came into the kitchen, said What are we having? and peeked into the oven. Young women whose parents had been preemptively large and bold. It's a platform, there's a lot they don't have to revise. We took a bottle of pinot grigio out to the grass in front of the oak and sat facing the valley as it slowly got dark.
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