| in america volume 26 part 4 - 2013 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1 April 2013 Have been thinking to write about stopping at the gate. Yesterday I saw camomile growing in the track next to it - that childhood plant from our dirt roads, with its little pineapple heads - it smelled like pineapple I thought. Earlier, January I think, there was a moment when I saw in the mud next to the latch end of the gate the small hoofprint of a new calf. The gate is downhill from here and the weather isn't exactly the same there. It's colder, or hotter or windier. The main thing though is that I step out of the jeep. I get into it on my yard and am on my way but then I stop and step out into the day. There are trees close by on the yard but at the gate the land is open. I always feel the air. I feel the light. On the way home I park at the gate and walk back to the mailbox. I can't see my house from there but I see other houses on the hill. Opening the gate, driving through, getting out of the jeep again, closing the gate, walking back to the jeep. It's a labour. Meanwhile I look at the nearest oaks. They are all Engelmanns but their canopies are different colours. I look at their lichened rocks. There's a particular rock set on end that is like a puja marker. Have I said what I meant? "Then I stop and step out into the day." The self-consciousness of writing something in the journal that I'm intending for Here. I know I'll revise it so I'm beginning to revise it as I write. That goes against my earlier good discipline, like the discipline of taking slides - go for the excellence of the moment, don't ever fix afterward. Now I fix afterward sometimes even in photos. As I do it I'm wondering whether it's a corruption I should refuse, or whether my brain now is too weak to have excellent enough moments, or whether it's maybe harmless now that I'm formed though the discipline was a good way of forming. The way I write now is influenced by these years of writing packet letters, all tuned to particular minds more public than mine is, or used to be. That makes it solider. Solid isn't necessarily bad, writers like McPhee and Lopez are solid in their way - Lopez less so - but there used to be a half-elf quality, I think, that let into a somewhere else I loved, that was my own finding. I should paste here some of the corresp with Juliana about translation. This exercise is extraordinarily intimate isn't it. It so gets into the little crevices, the moments of being understood and the moments of not being understood - I mean it really puts a microscope onto the differences between minds. In ordinary conversation or writing we don't have to know about them. It seems my main discomfort is when I'm made more teacherly than I am or want to be in this kind of writing, I mean explaining in ways that make sure no one is left behind. I am not so worried about that: I always prefer to write toward the high end. But you know more about your audience and have to have it in mind. It must be complicated for you. It's also so interesting to feel the differences between the languages, here the way English is more compacted grammatically, has fewer of the little between-words, which inevitably changes rhythm a lot. And interesting to have to think about why one has said something exactly this way and not another way that would seem to mean the same. - Thanks so much for this assignment and this invitation to exist a bit more widely. > the challenge is how to get others to have a gate where they can not only have a brief understanding of embodiment, but also feel what are its implications. To cause something to move inside them, not have them just read "words". Yes, especially with readers who have been science-phobic, so they have little concrete sense of what can be meant by 'physical body'. > I don't know how they might understand the word "structure", how to contextualize them. I'll try to use my translator's note to complement what you said. It's okay if I explain structure as cognitive structure, right? You're right to pause on that. 'Structure' always seems the hardest thing for people to get, and it is key. When I say structure I always mean physical structure: the way a neural net is configured at this moment, the way electromagnetic activation is moving through it at this moment, the way neurotransmitters are distributed at this moment, but also the way muscles are tensing at this moment and fluids are pooling at this moment. All of those things are also 'cognitive structure' in the sense that they are means of the body's cognizing - perceiving, imagining, thinking - in that moment, but 'cognitive structure' if it isn't grounded in the way I've just described, can be understood in quite disembodied ways. Structure in bodies means the same as it means in bridges or buildings: it means the way physical materials are arranged. L. struere to build. In biology "the arrangement and functional union of parts, tissues and organs of a plant or animal". > "are you still there" then? More than I was. - It seems my brain now is too weak to make strong dreams. It is as if there's no strong gush up through the brainstem to organize them, there's random wandering activation that makes puzzled lost dreaming. I fade from scene to scene weakly, trying to hold onto a sense of what's happening, trying to get back to somewhere I was earlier. Ants are coming into the house now. There's a line of them up the wall next to the curtained door, all the way to the ceiling. Something dead in the attic maybe. Something on the carpet too. I'll let them clean it up. But they have to stay out of the plants. When they start to go there I'll set out bait stations. Today it's taxes with Richard and finish Lindiwe and Josh and then Favor's book. Yesterday, Sunday morning, I drove to where Mesa Grande cuts into the slope to go downhill to photograph flowers. I found paeonies. Three photos up yesterday. Astrophysicist, cosmic molecules, radio astronomy 1950s. vast seas of molecules Cosmochemistry, astrobiology to understand why all terrestrial life is carbon-based, why life uses only twenty of the possible dozens of potential amino acids, why iron is the metal atom around which the hemoglobin in our blood binds universal biology polymer formation, self-organization processes, <energy utilization>, <information transfer>, and Darwinian evolution that might lead to the emergence of life in planetary environments other than Earth 51 Pegasi b 1996 first exoplanet 1957 Sputnik "The seeing is 2.0 out of 4" - a little hazy Oh be a fine girl and kiss me - largest to smallest, mass and temp. 2 Little things that happen by juxtaposition on Here. Full moon under the periwinkle photo makes the flower's blue and radiant central white seem to allude to the moon. Wild paeony after the story of turkey mating seems to congratulate. - And really the site is so full of love and color why isn't anyone interested in it? Is it because it reveals that I'm a woman over sixty, who is assumed to be irrelevant to anything that could teach or feel like success? Vultures are back above the pasture. There's a solitary turkey, which I don't think I've seen before (female I think). Super-hot, rapidly expanding moment of cosmic birth 1957 paper Synthesis of the elements in stars - why didn't I know about that if it's been known since then - why wasn't it in the physics course in grade 12 in 1963 - I don't think there was any astronomy - something about the solar system in elementary school. The paper described six different key processes of stellar nucleosynthesis to account for the ninety naturally occurring terrestrial elements from hydrogen to uranium. First, there was hydrogen burning into helium .... Then, as a large star exhausted its hydrogen, it contracted and heated, and the helium would start its nuclear burn, forming carbon and oxygen. This set the stage for the alpha process, when massive stars' cores burn carbon and oxygen, forming the elements from neon to sulfur. Now the processes bifurcate, depending on a star's ultimate fate. In large stars that form red giants and gradually puff out their atmospheres, ending as carbon-oxygen cinders called white dwarf stars, there's a slow process of neutron capture, dubbed the s-process. The s-process gives new cosmic meaning to the word slow. In these elderly, extinguishing stars, neutrons stream out from the star's core, occasionally on just the right path and with just the right energy to collide with an existing atomic nucleus farther out in the star's shell and merge. Any given atomic nucleus doing a crazed energetic journey in a star captures a neutron about once every thousand years. In this geologically slow process of neutron capture and beta decay, atoms all the way up to element 83, bismuth, are forming as you read this. Just as the s-process defines slow, the r-process, for rapid, gives new meaning to fast. Here, exploding stars - supernovas - provide the runaway energy and machine-gun spray of neutrons to accomplish in mere seconds what occurs in red giants over tens of millennia. It's the r-process to which we owe the bulk of the world's precious metals, silver, platinum, and gold. Jacob Berkowitz 2012 The stardust revolution Prometheus Books - From the chair, late afternoon. The grass is getting deep, foxtail and the finer grass, foxtail waving in a light westerly breeze. Hawk coasting, two hawks, in their home territory to the east. A lot of little chitter. Bird on the fence showing its yellow belly. Gobble in the distance. There's my phone I think. Pale blue mountain outline to the southwest. Long shadows down the shaman's slope curving with the hill. Foxtail beard-tips show pink against the light. While the tea was steeping I went out with the camera to photograph the deep tangle of new vetch along the road. A yucca has begun to put up a flower stalk near where I turn the jeep. It's an immaculate round-headed cream-coloured column five inches across, built in lapped scales, impressive and sudden. I was stumbling through the vetch to get closer to it when I nearly fell on a lizard frozen among twigs and fallen leaves. I got down nose-to-nose with it to take its photo. Its hard little head - it was a foot long nose to tail - seemed to be staring back at me through the lens. There were two lines of iridescent blue chevrons along its back. Crows' wings have a distinctive scraping sound. The yellow bellied birds have big heads and longish solid beaks. I'm pining for email today. 3 molecular evolution Locusts' leaves are out today.
I don't like this photo. I look like an old Indian. Old, dignified but old. I have cheekbones but look so grey and heavy. - That's how they saw me. I'm having a hard day it seems. Watching Friday night lights, crying at young talent praised and passionately mentored. Crying for need of success, is that it? And mad at what I am that isn't getting me what I need - it seems, need. - I've emailed and asked them to take it down. I'm heartbroken by the way I look in photos now - the way I look, now, most of the time. No one would like to hear that, it does me discredit. What do people do, they close their eyes and barrel through. I live somewhere beautiful and send out images of it to stand in my place, and that isn't working either. Remarkably isn't working. Alright, speak for the other side. I'm almost 70. It's not surprising that my jaw has an old woman's drape. I'm not fat though I'm not slender. It could be worse - yes but the pretty one is gone, and I don't want her to be gone. I liked to see her, I had pleasure in her. She was viable, she could go into the world and people would want to know her. People would want to touch her. Almost anyone who still wants to be in contact with me is someone who is remembering her. There's no way out of it, I'll have to be ugly and hungry-hearted for the rest of my life, which will be 14 years of getting worse.
4 Melancholy this morning still. A scared heart somehow. The way I keep picking up the thread and dropping it again.
1. I have to figure out how to keep focus 2. I have to figure out what to do with all the collected parts 3. I have to find an entry point 4. I have to strategize success 5. I have to learn to use the machines easily 6. I have to stay in best possible shape 5 "When I saw you coming down the back stairs in the Golden West it was like a neutron bomb went off in my head." I phoned Tom in pain and he said he'd get on the bus. He was just leaving the VA, it was mid-morning. I was on the Dudley's lot at 4:15 to pick him up. We sat under the oak and he said tell me more about what you were feeling and I did, and he talked about the magnificence of getting old and that we could do it together. He said he thinks of me all the time. I said tell me more about that, when did it start? That was when he said neutron bomb, which I liked. This morning I made tea and he started sweeping the stone terrace. Barbara gave us two coffees for $2. 7 Note from Don last night. 8 A storm this morning, wind in the oaks up behind, rattles of rain, dry leaves blowing down. I set up the Rode mic on its stand at one of the north windows in the guest room with the Marantz on the bed. Had that window open and figured out that if I drew the curtain there wouldn't be wind impact on the mics. Listening through the headphones heard a sound piece I liked. Wind rising and lessening, leaf impacts, rain, distant birds, near crows, and some of the time an almost subliminal beat and whine from Eno Drums between the bells in the other room. 8 minutes of that. When I wanted to transfer it the computer said I'd damaged the card turning it off without ejecting it. Then drove to Santa Ysabel to buy a card, tried again. Card error 10. Reformat. But now the storm has passed. Meantime 1. Trying to finish online tax approval. CA won't accept. 1. Juliana sends her translator notes which I try to read in Spanish. 3. Kate's packet. 4. Tom being nice about the head of tribe photo. 9 Oh Tim Riggins. What is it about you. Boy beauty. The way your faded plaid shirt hangs from your shoulders. Your boots. Your laid back sweetness. Hair in your eyes. Soft mouth. Your preference for the moment. The way you jump into fights without anger. Quality Al Morrison had, a sort of realness without normal kinds of attachment. His loose walk. I'm held by any moment he's on screen walking, or otherwise as a whole body. The other boys in the show are well written and well acted but I don't hold onto them the way I do Tim. Tyra is the female wild child but it's different in her, she's fierce and intent. I like to look at her too, but not as a whole body in the same way. She's stiffer. Tom was good about the head of tribe photo. He described it as a photo of a public self. Okay, yes, photo of a moment not an essence. Louie's photos this morning of her beautiful space finished. - Camera 1000 frames/sec, Phantom Flex 4k, 4096x2160. Graded in native 4k 10 bit downscaled to 1080 highly oversampled. Vision Research Co. FCP in 1080 ProRes 444. 11 Halfway through the last season of Friday night lights, I'm there for hours before I sleep and wake thinking of it. What it does with class, gender, race. The way it's shot. Faces in close-up half shadowed. What it does with high school, adults and kids. I loathe Julie Taylor's baby doll face and pouty lips and long straight blond hair and excessive bosom and bland wimpy feelings. She's a mistake in casting. Her parents have real edge, Eric's the very model of a man, the way he has few words until he has many. "Now listen up." Tami in long shot in her good clothes, tall goddess body in a pencil skirt carrying a magnificent rack. Matt Saracen's slow diffident earnest way of talking. Landry's gawky defiant valiant lucidity. Vince's archaic black profile and stance upright like a spear - archaic, what do I mean. He's like a Masai in his tight straight narrowness but the way the lower half of his face swells forward is something else, odd, uncontemporary. The series began middle class and then carried its audience to the other side of town. Low-income housing, black thugs, lap dancers, prison, foster care, abortion. It doesn't touch wife-beating or rape - why not? - but it's full in the middle of sex and booze and male-on-male violence. [Actually it does have both.] Having that world in mind when I was writing Kris's packet 2 reply letter. She's the kind of feminist I was before Joyce, angry at men. What I am wanting to say counter to that, now, is that men and women are in it together, we have to think of it as one whole thing. I also said that I think what may be hardest for women is to recognize that someone wishes them harm. I'm more interested now in what makes women weak than in what makes men bad. Jess and Tami hold their own with men and get respect. Homosexuality - they haven't touched that either except for one moment in a lesbian bar where we had to look at Julie rather than lesbians. What else I think about is how a fictional community can grab my thoughts this way, as if I'm a body primed for community concern and deprived of it. I am, but the condensed nature of fiction makes it a hypernormal stimulus to that priming? Looking at Tami and Eric's marriage thinking those two actors had a parallel marriage for 5 years - that amount of kissing and cuddling and saying felt things to each other. 2006-2011. "No rehearsal, no blocking, just three cameras and we shoot." 13 Machines, world, brain. Electronic composer Notebook alongside, a matrix. Companions. White space. Sources. Language in it, language alongside it. Lifetime's notes. Quotes with refs in mouseover. Feeling my perfect state of equipment including jeep. Recording out the guestroom's east window this morning - sound of wings, a good recording though I don't know how to filter yet, etc. Locust flowers I didn't photograph well - the little tree at the last bend of the road is blooming though the trees by the house aren't, yet. Lot of vetch everywhere. Occasional wild pea, that blue *, wooly lupin and the grape-scented taller one by the road. Wild onion. 14 "It seems a pity to miss such a good pudding." (Maggie Smith's line made me laugh.) It's day 4989. Some new photos posted that I'm in love with in the usual way, one of locust flowers I like finally, gesture of flower curving toward gesture of leaf, rich deep background. Then two I took with flash walking around the house in foggy night. I'm learning what to do with flash. It solved the manzanita by isolating its form and polishing its branches. [pyracantha in the fog] Took down a couple I was never in love with. 15 The number of times in a day I look out the window and feel my eyes soften. It's like having a loved companion. And then what I can do with my machines of loving grace, that other companionship. This morning's dark classic framing of what I see from the kitchen window. Classic how. The way it has a scene framed on all sides and open in the center. - Went for a walk and brought back a photo of an otherworld glade. 16 Tuesday morning, Jerry arriving this aft. Amazing non-response to the photos on Here continues. Greg says "Fog offers many opportunities, which you are seizing assiduously and successfully." David B says "Wet afternoon being foggy?" Tom will say something like "You know I love Here." Jerry will say nothing. [He said quite a good thing.] Last night grokking the Friesen's site for Dave's book feeling I now do know enough about book designing and publishing to make a book for money. 18 moments of aliveness opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves I can participate in this situation It's awkwardly or stupidly written. He says 'metabolism' when he means body. His insight is that a movie changes people's state. He calls that alchemy when what he means is structure including neurotransmitter distributions. In Mozart "we hear ourselves at our alchemical best." He's meaning to say a state that is aware of both world seen and the seeing itself. "A balance." He seems to equate the latter with intelligence in using the medium. First we are in <visual> space, and then we speak and declare an image that is in itself a manifested act of seeing "Being in the dark theatre of our skull" - that's terrible. One never pans in real life - but he means the wrong thing by it, saccades, which aren't how we see though they are part of the means by which. Montage has to sparingly enough to allow the viewer's sense of existence to fill in ... intermittence activates the viewer's to feel alive ... brings the viewer into the present moment. Two senses of time, nowness and sequence, sequence and simultaneity. put something into the world that is uncompromisingly present Both nowness and [the other thing - holding a sense of its structure being built over time?] fear of direct contact with the uncontrollable present Montage - the way <the world> is revealed to us moment by moment. delicate interactive grace the rightness of all these shifts of space field of light on the wall Shots are the empathy ... cuts ... continually reawakens the view. A shot must <express> both the seer and what is seen. The shots ripen and expand and are popped like soap bubbles by the cut .... If a film is cut not allowing the shots to come to fullness, then no presence. If the poignancy of what a cut has to offer is ignored the delicacy of this essential counterbalance cannot develop. A cut has to work in terms of shape, texture, color, movement, and weight ... has to create a visual freshness ... little awakenings. And also some associative magic. And also the narrative leading. open-ended evocation the warming and expiring heavens devotion ... out of the vastness and depth of our view ... this vastness abides in nowness ... accurate not solid. Nathaniel Dorsky 2005 Devotional cinema Yesterday Glorietta Canyon was ashy, dead. I'd never seen it like that or known it could be like that. The rabbitbrush/incienso was grey all over the slopes and even the rocks looked ashen as if powdered-over somehow. But in town the palo verde were resplendent. That so does not say their fresh feathery airy green thickly clotted with pure shining yellow. And that does not say it either. What else was there in the day. A moment with the teenage boy at the gas station, friendly liking and confidence. Another seeing a flash of magenta on the bank above the road coming through Yaqui Pass. Prickly pear blooming. 19 Friday noon - seven young ground squirrels around the opening of their burrow doing what I never see adults doing, standing around together dirt-colored in the dirt. I'm in the chair looking at them through binocs. They have childy little faces. At least one of them at any time has been standing upright with forearms hanging staring at me. There's their mother lying sunning herself legs folded under her on the stump like a cat. It's not a mustard year on this meadow, it's a foxtail year, foxtail and some other grain. Eating breakfast with Jerry under an oak this morning I saw it's thick with small new leaves, the leaf-drop is over. Smell of warm hay. Small birds, slender birds balancing on flower stalks pecking at seeds - yellow flowers near the stump. Is there anything I need to say about Jerry being here. My own shutteredness. 20 I was disapproving of his helplessness and not wanting to show disapproval, thinking of ways to help but not believing he has enough fight in him to use any of them. He's complacent about his entrappedness it seemed to me. It works for him. People take care of him. At the same time he has a large quiet dignity of some sort. He's larger than I'd taken account of, large feet and large-veined thin-skinned hands. He shows the whites of his eyes above the iris, which looks like extremity, a private wildness or madness. That with his scimitar nose and wiry eyebrows made me see a Hebrew visionary sometimes. I noticed but didn't address the being I saw, just entertained him with this and that as if he were not so unusual. I doubted the accuracy of my seeing, thought it was accidental maybe. He has a quiet observant intelligence - still - but he's more conventional than I am, less brave, much less hard-working. I'm on the terrace. It's hot - it's really hot at 9am. There was a drift of locust perfume. It's Saturday. Last night I was starting to fade but hadn't done my 5000 days work so made tea and sat at the monitor with text and plans. That was good. Could even have new thoughts. - What did I dream. It's gone. First day on the outside bed. Orange and black bird. Holy shit I said. Varied thrush. 22 Stellar's jay - black head with crest, blue back, loud harsh call and little mutters. 24 Last year - Sept - after Emilee's visit v bad black arms, burning skin on face, lips, eyes, followed by cold sore. Visitors aren't good for me? Or trips to Borrego's later sun. Nervous little grey bird cream belly black edge along wing. Bullock's oriole, male and female - orange belly black throat. strange songs sculptural, spatial timbral slow, quiet, diatonic, consonant, repetitive, recorded with long reverberation times that give the music a sense of spaciousness tone color constantly undergoing shifts of equalization progression of sound colours texture being simply layers of individual timbres long ambient pieces consisting of overlaid cycles of sound events Music may be considered a sacred observation of the mystery of time. makes us aware of different levels of temporal [attention] enhances and focuses our ability to perceive changes, fluctuations and developments Neroli 58 minutes of the dark, mysterious Phrygian Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic, and the results don't at first compare well. Looped passages changing every time slowly, steadily. New material added slowly steadily. complex slowly changing texture composed of simple motives most prominent at first and becoming background single note looped to form a drone ... harmonics emerge We become aware that the single note is a complex entity, that has rhythm, melody, harmony and timbre in it. 3-second pulse more akin to breathing than heartbeat gliding rather than authoritarian Wind on wind An index of metals Round, soft-attacked, flute-like tones are spatially enhanced through the use of a reverb/delay unit, and short melodic fragments are looped, repeated, and faded. timbrally complex, with a great deal of inner motion A fade-down takes place. an almost tangibly sculptural process One could focus on any one of the levels of sound patterns. graph-paper approach to composition ... the pulse and its subdivisions, along with a few repetitive melodic or bass fragments form a background matrix over which dabs or points of color or light are placed ... each layer sounds clean and distinct. Shift channels slightly out of phase with each other to add illusion of depth. Early '70s, 1978-1982. a glimmering plenitude a pulse that is sometimes uneven, sometimes breathing taken out of a larger continuum echoes of previously heard events 2/1: female voices singing single pitches on ah ... a canon soft attack/decay envelope and slight hiss 7 tones for 5 sec relations to loops such that they would be constantly falling in different relations to each other Sometimes you get dense clusters and fairly long silences. And then you get a sequence of notes that makes a kind of melody. modal ambiguity suggests a key, keys or mode but does not assert one accommodating different levels of listening attention I like the notion that you're sitting in this field of sound. Slowing down recorded sound by 50% or more bringing upper harmonics into hearing range a low drone - a high shimmering major chord shimmering timbres Over these background sounds for certain stretches of time very high, bright, bell-like tones with rich harmonics ... bird sounds ... cricket sounds ... a sound like an echoes ... water drops ... almost human sighing sound ... set of pitches played on treated piano to provide objects for our new world Eric Tamm Brian Eno: his music and the vertical color of sound 25 Intimidated by the camera - but assembled it - took it outside - didn't understand exposure or autofocus - it's hideously complicated - lot of little buttons - lot of little buttons and dials and menus - and it's heavy. Even the tripod is complicated. But I pressed a small red button and it recorded some grass moving though a cold grayish color, and quite nice birdsong, which I figured out how to take into FCP. Talking to Luke this morning on FB - he patronized me about it and I let him because I thought it would be good for him, which means I patronized him too. It was a clumsy conversation at first, that lightened when I said he learned L for Luke from a wooden block, which I remembered when I said Lon-don is a good name for it, L for London. I was remembering the L red. 26 Massive work on Nikon D800 and some on Dave's book, now it's 8:30 and what to do for 3 hours - 27 I had Muggs in my arms and was dancing a bit. She was surprisingly insubstantial, as if almost nothing. She didn't mind being held and agreed it was _____ some word like nice. A lot of dreaming and very broken-up night, black arms twice, that wouldn't stop. 29 San Diego Monday morning - 3663 Georgia - Tom in black underpants ironing his jeans - standing at the drop-down ironing board next to the stove telling me about ironing in the army. "Did you break starch this morning, soldier?" the sergeant would ask. They'd mostly iron on their bunks. [Tom's Graham Thomas by the new camera] [young avocado] Walked beside me carrying the tripod and the mic stand yesterday, I plodding with the stick, carrying the camera and the backpack, he not plodding. Balboa Park April 28 - sound: motor continuous, bells at quarter hour, 4 reps on the hour, footsteps, voices, birds. Hat over mic ends, Marantz mic. Camera couldn't get to the sides, new grass. End - tried shutter priority, aperture priority. Couldn't put it on the tripod, couldn't really focus. Hung it off my neck. Does pressing half down autofocus? OB Pier - tried different settings all 800 ISO [640] to be able to stop down. N side of pier overcast dull green. S side white bright-outs at noon. W side dull, couldn't see in. Sound - didn't monitor, tried snapping fingers for synch, doesn't work. Tripod wasn't tall enough because I forgot I could lengthen the legs, forgot hexagon plate at home! [Didn't, just thought I had.] 30 "Lacked a fantasy of self to sustain them" said Tom of men in Mondays in the sun. My subvocal all the time with Tom is, Is he good enough? Yes he is. No he's not. Is he? - all the time. sometimes along with, What is this strange entity. And small body comforts. - [Fighting with Dave L]
1st May And that other thing, sweet-hearted attachment and gratitude. He came from his birthday party at Bud's last night excited. He'd shown off Here and The Golden West and said "We're smart but she's five, six, times as smart as we are." That's remarkable of him and when he isn't wrecked, not true. When we watched Mondays in the sun together he was ahead of me on all the cues. Meantime I've told Dave what I think and he has fired me, which is a relief because he was wanting me to execute a book he'd already designed. I'm relieved at the end of obligation too though his $1000 checks have funded my beautiful equipment. I never understood his motives, it wasn't that he liked my work. - [Student notes]
2nd Thursday morning early. The sun is in the upper locust branches and reaches to the top of the outside bed. There's a Santa Ana bringing down dead leaves and dry oak flower shreds. Angelo's crew is covering his windows with plastic before they lay down the first coat of stucco. Trickle of water. Tom somewhere out front wandering with the binocs. Lupins in purple spires up along the road. Grass drying but still moving. 3
I must take her back from numbness, to pain, to emotion, to pleasure. Naomi Wolf 2012 Vagina: a new biography HarperCollins I would argue that a gendered sense of self that is shining, without damage, without anxiety or fear - inheres in every woman, and that women tend to know when they have glimpsed it or touched upon it. The vagina serves, physiologically, to activate this matrix of chemicals that feel, to the female brain, like an awareness of one's own great dignity, and of great self-love as a woman, as a radiant part of the universal feminine. autonomic nervous system affects what your body does beyond your conscious control ANS and pelvic neural network SNS relaxation Set of behaviours that activate it:
vaginal pulse - notice when it thumps - "a way for the vagina continually to inform the woman about herself on many other levels." I believe that some women experience less dramatically measurable, but perhaps more chronic states of being stressed out by men. Male withdrawal, silence, turning attention to another subject will elevate some women's heart rates over time, send catecholamines into their bloodstreams unless their men regularly do some simple things to calm women down. Ten minutes of stroking a woman's body produces oxytocin - the chemical that strengthens affection and trust. The women's blood pressure levels also dropped significantly .... Men, in contrast, did not show any such changes In an environment in which women expect to be snapped at regularly, the female ANS closes down the channels that women need open in order to be sexually alive. For evolutionary reasons, probably, many women react to men's sudden anger at themselves and their children in immediate ways, with raised heart rate, adrenaline response. G-spot orgasm involves relaxation. Many women learn to have sacred spot orgasms, those Tantric four-star never-ending orgasms, by actually directing themselves to relax and lose consciousness during sacred spot stimulation - to their surprise, this can make the orgasm come in sequential inexhaustible waves - rather than tensing up and focusing on sexual thoughts or fantasies, which women tend to do to secure clitoral orgasms... . when researchers are trained, they can identify women who have vaginal orgasms from the way the women walk ... pelvic levator muscles G-spot is actually part of the clitoris - the back of the clitoris, essentially Continuing duality in the representations of men that heterosexual women desire ... these dual heroes are, I believe, archetypal for heterosexual women ... an apparently bad man - a lead character who seems emotionally troubled, or arrogant, or dangerous - who turns out to be a good man ... how fantasy can resolve, at least temporarily, painfully unresolvable real-life physiological tensions. ... when we are ovulating, we are attracted to high-testosterone, risk-taking, unpredictable males - and when we are not ovulating, we are drawn to nurturing, safer, more reliable mates. The really beloved bad boys of women's literature don't bully or abuse the heroine, but they continually provoke and tease her - they are teasing her to release her own latent wildness. And one thing the romantic heroes of women's fiction, even the bad boys, who can be brusque or verge on rudeness, never, ever do is actually snap at, that is, negatively startle, the heroine. ... often features a heroine who begins demure and unripe but who becomes herself, grows into herself, under the provocation of this bad boy who is secretly good. This seeming paradox or politically incorrect fantasy is, I would argue, an essential archetype of the female heterosexual journey. A skilled, or even at times slightly dangerous, male provocateur can help the female sexual journey to begin. The motorcycle boots, the Harley - they are about her adventures, her penchant for the open road, erotically and in terms of her own creativity and subversiveness, that society has generally repressed in her and forbidden her to claim as a longing .... His male badness is simply the projected dark animal of her own unacknowledged wild self. The difficult secret is that there is something about power - or skill, or mastery of a situation - in men that is erotic to many heterosexual women. She is looking for a helpmate, and she is looking for high-quality sperm - a dual mission that can lead to pairbonding with simultaneous female adultery. nipple stimulation releases oxytocin, which will make a woman feel that the world is a good place, that love exists, that it is meaningful, and that her circumstances can be trusted Semen contains hormones including testosterone, estrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin, and several types of prostaglandins. All of these hormones have potential mood-altering abilities and can be absorbed into a woman's bloodstream through the vaginal walls. evidence - at least in lower female mammals - that there is a physiological point of no return for females experiencing bad sex with males after which a positive connection with a mate is not physiologically recoverable. The water had that quality that only the Aegean possesses, somehow - a purple tinge under the blue surface Looking back at the landscape in all its majesty and softness, I felt a kind of smudge in my vision - which had been there for my entire conscious adult life - lift for a moment, and suddenly things sparkled. The dark, obscuring smudge, I realized in a flash, was the shame and disrespect that we assign to the feminine, and it does not just converge on the vagina, though that is its archetypal center; it washes over the whole world, with a darkness or wrongness that colors our perception of it, and our relationship to it. In an instant, I realized that original sin did not, as the Judeo-Christian tradition has it, originate in human sexuality. Our species' original sin was in deviating from our earliest tradition of reverence for the feminine and for female sexuality, and all that it represented for us. Our original sin lies in five thousand years of shaming it, stigmatizing it, controlling it, subduing it, splitting it off from women, from men, compartmentalizing it, insulting it and selling it. Great dislocations and alienations in civilization and in human development have followed from that original sin, and the results are everywhere around us. In a flash I saw waves of tragedy - for women, for men, and for a now unbalanced, now plundering civilization that followed from this original alienation. G-spot massage ... places of paranoia and mistrust ... a biography of its own ... most of the journey is shedding 'I'm not enough'. I was always being dominated [in my fantasies previously}. There had always been a warped vision of a father figure. Now I could give myself orgasms without even thinking of a man - now my whole body is having an orgasm. The vagina reaching out when it was ready expressing its own kind of will, preferences, influence, and agency .... In the Eastern traditions the man addresses, with caresses and care, the gatekeeper, the outer vagina and labia, and awaits permission ... the subsequent opening of the vagina is itself a complex, gradual, and graduated process, which develops over time and under the influence of various attentions and entreaties. The closing down effects of insulting names and jokes. Sexual threats to for instance journalists, women voicing opinions in public. many women are suffering permanent or severe injuries to their pelvic nerves merely from yoga leg stretches, or from dance classes. Nerve damage in the vagina a physiological cause of depression. Can the sustained cultural presence of rape also or even instead, at times, be about reprogramming women at a core physical level to be less brave, less secure, less robust in other ways, and to go through the rest of their lives, potentially, with a less stable sense of self? knots in the vaginal musculature of rape survivors ... nonsexual vaginal massage if you traumatize a woman sexually, even if there is no violence, you are physically traumatizing her brain. Rape is a strategy of actual physical and psychological control of women, traumatizing via the vagina as a way to imprint the consequences of trauma on the female brain. I believe we should respect the potential for enslavement to sexual love in women .... When a woman is engaged in this struggle with love and need, she is not subject to the person in question; she is actually engaged in a struggle with herself, to find a way to reclaim her autonomy while somehow not cutting herself off from the part of herself that was awakened by the beloved in the longing for connection. A woman struggling with attachment and loss of self is engaged in a struggle for the self as demanding and rigorous as that of any man on any quest narrative. often we are preoccupied with the beloved not because we have no selves of our own, but because the beloved has physiologically awakened aspects of our own selves. Female orgasm also, surprisingly, boosts the levels of testosterone in women. That is one more reason that great sex makes women hard to push around. raised serotonin anesthetizes emotion, suppresses or blocks sexual desire, and makes people sleepier and less aggressive - they even move around less. I call dopamine the ultimate feminist chemical. If a woman has optimal levels of dopamine, she is difficult to direct against herself. found that romantic love has three different chemical components: lust, composed of androgens and estrogens; attraction, driven by high dopamine and norepinephrine levels and low serotonin (this accounts for mood swings in early courtship); and finally, attachment, made up of oxytocin and vasopressin. - In publishing an article in The New Republic that criticized contemporary pro-choice positions, Wolf argued that the movement had "developed a lexicon of dehumanization" and urged feminists to accept abortion as a form of homicide and defend the procedure within the ambiguity of this moral conundrum. She continues, "Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die." Wolf concluded by speculating that in a world of "real gender equality," passionate feminists "might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead."[45] More recently, in an article on the subtle manipulation of George W. Bush's image among women, Wolf wrote "Abortion is an issue not of Ms. Magazine-style fanaticism or suicidal Republican religious reaction, but a complex issue." These critics' contention is that this reporting is "essentialism" - that I am re-grounding gender "back" in the body, which is a contemporary feminist-theory sin. The "essentialism" versus "gender theory" wars emerged only belatedly, in the 1980s, as legal activists sought to downplay any potential biological differences between women and men in pursuit of equal treatment in the workplace and, elsewhere, academic feminists were inspired by post-structuralism to create a discipline that cast gender as existing only as a social norm. But the radical new findings on which I report have to do with the female body and with female sexual response. The new findings are updating our understanding of female pleasure and the mind-body connection in women on many levels. Some new findings are important for understanding the harm of sex crime more fully, and others have to do with the numbing effects of porn on desire. In a time when porn co-opts young men's and women's responses, is it "feminist" to withhold new data about its potentially addictive nature and depressive effect on a habituated libido? Should we not know about this data? I come from the feminist school that believes knowledge is power. Knowing about the science of the brain-vagina connection - a concept that is not my construction but rather an everyday fact for the scientists at the forefront of this research - simply means we are willing to engage with the modern world; the brain-body connection is being thoroughly documented in hundreds of ways, from cardiovascular health research to the role of stress in illness. By confronting the body I am not saying women
are just the body. Rather I am respecting my readers' intelligence: some
situations are socially constructed, some are biologically based, and my
readers are smart enough to assess their world moment by moment.
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