| in america volume 27 part 1 - 2013 june-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
21 June 2013, Mesa Grande Solstice dawn, 5:54, day 4921, first day of the next kind of time. 22 [Louie's solstice photo scans] [Judie and Michael] Marveling a bit at how quickly I can turn. I've felt a twinge at not having workshops anymore, small twinge, and not meeting any more young women like Sonja, and not having an arena, but there's what I'm rid of too, the robot scheduling of my years and months, and the faculty meetings, and slogging with students I can't help, and the irrelevance of most of the school's persons, and the half-heartedness that has come of all of that - especially the half-heartedness - The next thoughts are about what I'll need to do about money. I'll want to go through my clothes. Do I have what I need. I should fix the jeep before I drive far. I should think of ways to make money, but not by doing what isn't in the line of my real work. What do I want for daily community. Can I still live in the country.
I've spent a day and a half formatting [In America 26] so I can look at the lead-up.
Timing has been remarkable - I've just finished equipping myself and the [Social Security] 40 points came in. I haven't stayed longer than I needed to. Luke posted the Boom Festival. I'm comparing it with the money venues, the Biennale or Art in America, which look corrupt, vile and dead. Boom is the beautiful young, though, it's not a scene that needs embodiment studies, it seems. It makes the IMA look an old far hinterland. What do I want
- Full moon. So cold out there, not a summer night. I come in with my cheeks stinging, will lie down soon hearing disk 12 of The children's book. Jody said she cried. Margo has not replied. 23 That tendency to harden the female body, says Greer. the body as a material that can be customized Coo-oo coo coo coo - dove in Angelo's trees. I've been on the outside bed finishing IA26's index page. Birds one after another. Three rabbits arrive from different directions. The first has exquisite ears, pink, tall, translucent, slightly furred. I can see a long vein in each. It's a plant structure they remind me of. Then a next rabbit balancing on the rim of the basin has bites out of both ear-tips. The rabbits are not one color. The tips of their ears have a black rim. The bit of fur above the tail that's usually hidden is black too. There's a fox-red patch on the back of the neck and some red in the fur of their front legs. They shade darker toward their back ends, where they're a cream and black tweed. There's a cream ring around their deer-shaped eyes. Black tip of the nose always quivers. There the rabbits scatter as a turkey advances from under the toyon. She drinks briefly. Her head is a rough pale blue. Little pink area under the jaw. She is wearing her feathers a bit raised, for cooling maybe, so she seems a loosely shingled beast. A smooth iridescent band lies flat across either mid-wing. She keeps saying a quiet urk, urk. Here's the black-headed grosbeak and yes its top beak is darker than the lower. Towhee's black zigzag necklace. - close-hauled on a north-east breeze that had no scent of land upon it, a purely maritime wind wind at north-east and a following sea a well-found, weatherly ship At first it blew against the swell and cut up a wicked sea. a tall blackness on the rim of the sea that continually flashed white as the rollers broke at its foot and dashed far up the towering rock I love the jargon. Then the ship sailed evenly through the moonless night with a long easy pitch and rise on the following swell and with the regular hum of her rigging transmitted to the cabin as an omnipresent comfortable sound laced through as it were with the run of water along her side. Right in the wind's eye, sir. Night after night they played there in the great cabin with the stern-windows open and the ship's wake flowing away and away in the darkness. The water in which they swam turned towards the sun. - Jack and Stephen in each other's arms in the warm sea all night. 24 And there she steadied, racing through the sea and flinging a bow-wave so high to leeward that the sun sent back a double rainbow. - It's such lively engagement with weather, and such a deep culture of engagement with weather. Stephen sat; and presently, with a beating heart and that very particular lively fresh happiness that had not changed since his boyhood, he saw the flightless rail walk out on to a bare patch of ground.
I'm in a blank hole this morning because I'm waiting. Sometime today there'll be a phone call that tells me whether the college will give me some money or not. I don't seem to care very much whether they do but I don't like the blank hole of waiting for anything. 10 weeks to Sept 1. 25 Audio book of Master and commander, Jack up in the yards when the sun rising hits the topgallant and Jack cries 8 round tears that fly out into the air.
- Working on Michael's eval I hear a turkey at the water sounding many sweet little burblings. I sneak up behind the window to see her. She is stretching her legs to walk up the stairs. 6 tiny chicks are tumbling toward her and now are close on her heels under the toyon. I announced on FB this morning after I spoke to Lauren and Sonja and sent Josh a note. 26 Last faculty meeting. Did Ruth have tears in her voice when she said she really was sorry to lose me? That astonishes me. So now I'll ask, they are good people, why was I standoffish. I wdn't have been like that when I was younger. It was a strong intuition and I held it hard.
28 Turkey and 7 babies come to the water, the little chicks struggling to jump up the lowest step. At the same time a hummingbird on its tiny feet drinking, crows on the slope above. Ground squirrels coming after the watermelon shell. Rabbits. I feel a lady of the beasts. 29 As I was driving back up the lane after taking my rent letter to the mailbox a deer was standing near the road I'd just driven, looking up toward me. I stopped and looked back. After a while it turned and ran lightly down the crease. Another deer ran into sight and stopped where the first had stood, turned its tall ears toward me. Tom was here overnight. We were more withheld, he was, and I was, probably because of my jump. He says he's with me no matter what, we'll figure it out, but in the delicate balances of the real there's less safety between us. Other things. I woke saying maybe my language will get less teacherly again. It was good in the overlap zone, the first years, when I was teaching with my artist mind, more, but I did so much writing that had to tune itself to students' limits. It contaminated the journal. This paragraph too. On the other side, it was satisfying having students to pass good bits to, I'd needed to teach. Yesterday was very hot, and it will be hotter today, they say. It's really been a pleasure working with you. So many students spoke well of you during the residency. I was lucky to have you. - Said lawyer Michael.
104 degrees at 2:47. This is the end of something (probably involving your career, reputation, or status) and the beginning of something - or more correctly the climax of the ending and beginning ... soon, too, a partner will be less on board. Maturin high above the harbour with his feet in a basin of water writing in his diary: It is odd - will I say heart breaking? - how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy - the assumption of authority. I knew few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. His cheerfulness, at all events, is with him still. How long will it last? What woman, political cause, disappointment, wound, disease, untoward child, defeat, what strange surprising accident will take it all away? Who am I, he thought, to affirm that the gay young ape is not merely the chrysalis, as it were, the pupa of the grim old solitary? 30 Pale green moth against the glass last night- emerald moth of the geometridae - dichorda. Another very small pale red. Not a sail, not the slightest break on the tight line of the horizon. The top gallant above him was suddenly golden; then two points on the larboard bow; in the mounting blaze of light, the sun thrust up its blinding rim. For a prolonged moment Jack alone was sunlit, picked out: then the light reached the topsail and so reached the deck, flooding it from stem to stern. Tears welled up in his eyes, blurred his vision, overspilt, rolled down his cheeks: they did not use themselves up in lines upon his face but dropped, two, four, six, eight, round drops slanting away through the warm golden air to leeward. - You are hands down the best advisor/professor I have ever worked with and our semester together came at such a pivotal time in my life. I don't understand why you have to move from your dusty range land refuge. And yet in your voice you had a cheerful adventurousness about it all and I just keep admiring you for all that you are. - Sonja. - There has been so much writing to no effect. I've brought all the boxes out of the closet onto the kitchen floor, need to reduce them to almost none. So much paper, bad letters, piles of typed junk. 1st July It's 5 in the dark, the cattle are crying. I'm thinking of Paul driving from Grande Prairie through the Fraser Canyon being smashed into by a bus, being taken to Chilliwack Hospital, phoning Dave Doerksen, who came and got him. Writing me a note from the Patricia Hotel. Lise Weil has been sending email I'm trashing without replying. She's annoyed I'm retiring because her work will be less fun without me, she's wanting me to somehow set her up to continue embodiment studies, has been drafting on my work and wants to keep on doing so. She's had enough money to take leaves and I have worked 12 years without one. Her greed in this is making me see backward into how she's been through the years. I'm disgusted. - Running around with Joaquin most of the day in an air-conditioned little car, or sitting in waiting rooms. 2 From GW23-3, September 2001: "I knew I was home. Something in me identified with that landscape ... Such a purity of feeling, of joy and of being in the right place, I have not often felt since ...." When John Haines says that about a hillside in Alaska I am saying it about the hillside near Santa Ysabel. That's where I'm supposed to settle. Oh can I do it soon. - Should I go back and survey the years at the college. I'll be blank for a while, before I'm reconfigured?
3 Martin this morning on FB chat saying he loves my work felt being welcomed back into film. So then I changed my email name, or began to. Tried different names it said were taken. Asked the book. 6 pentacles it said. Generous? Congeneris! Yes. Big sigh. - Luke. My heart is terrified. He cut me off FB on Saturday because I hadn't replied to a message I didn't get. His land line is discontinued, his cell isn't taking calls. I've sent an email but does he pick up his email. Have sent messages to Andy and Natalie, can't find him anywhere on FB, not on his former friends.
What's the worst it could be. He's lying dead in his house and died feeling I am betraying him still and always. It's nearly two weeks since I didn't get his message. Second worst, he's living in agony every day and no one has helped. 4
- Andy emails at almost midnight his time to say Eliot did some scouting among Luke's brothers. Natalie had been in touch with Luke today. I was crying as I read. Why wd I cry in relief and not in fear. Because so long as nothing is known I have to be thinking of anything I should do. For instance I thought I could say to him, I'll move to Vancouver and you come too and I'll look after you and Mary too. 6 There were no rabbits, then one rabbit, and now I'll see four rabbits standing around in the lower field before daylight. I'm in the chair, bit after 6. Clouds mauve and grey with lit front edges. The facing slope has a pink wash where sun is touching in from the northeast corner of its arc. Big antlered bug rattling on the window screen last night. 8 weeks left. The field is the color of straw. Sheet of fog over the Ramona Valley, another over the city. Junco hopping in the stubble. Light on the shaman's hill. What's that screeching up behind me - the rabbits were interested in it. Here right in front of me is a blue jay's feather. It's only blue from a certain angle. There's so much I'll never have seen. I'm only beginning to tell the rabbits apart. When the light moves it is always showing different places in Cuyamaca's slopes and the ridges toward Mexico. The shaman's slope is coming up vivid now. The sort of object a rabbit is, so beautifully shaded and graduated in its many colors, the way its ears are edged, its eye outlined. The way it is standing rounded and motionless near the stump, compact. Working with the Arrow sheets I've wondered whether the years with students have helped me know how to revise. I feel a rising buoyancy too, knowing the rest of my life is in the clear. The sun has reached the wire. Bluebirds land, fan their wings rapidly. One has the fat fluffy look of a fledgling. - a face you have never seen without pleasure Fond of Maturin, who's like Leo McGarry. a quantity of freshly washed young women drinking tea - [New Yorker photo of Obama**] Luke: Facebook is a casual place that I don't feel works for us, leading to oversimplification, contempt of familiarity and misunderstanding. ... an impulsive moment of clarity. That's not it. He is saying he's been feeling contempt. It's anger not contempt and I've been holding his hand on FB for 18 months so it hasn't been the fault of the medium. He's angry because he is unsuccessful in his own eyes. He's been angry at Sara and at Roy and now after therapy he's bringing anger where it needs to be. Is that alright with me? It is. If he needs to be mean to me I do not need to stand in his reach, though.
7 Sunday morning. Luke writes an insulting letter I don't think he thinks is insulting. I'm stamping my foot but keeping my mouth shut until I can come up with a larger self. Dog-sized bobcat strolling along the road - bobcat I think. Post captain. He's Dickens when he has the unsuccessful footpad tell his story. Projector - 3. one who devises projects. 8 2:54am. I was out in the chair sitting with my back against cold metal seeing the Milky Way arched overhead diagonally from the southwest. There were no strong patterns among the faint hazy speckles. One brilliant yard light a mile away on the hill beyond the road. Crickets where the ground falls off beyond the three pines. I was regretting having no interesting thoughts. I came back in through the house - the steps I made showing in the light I'd left on - completely part of the ground now - firm underfoot, drifted with oak leaves - and then the blue carpet room, warmer - and then the kitchen, very warm, and then out through the side door to stand on the broken driveway looking up - Cassiopeia anchoring the other leg of the Milky Way in the northeast - on slopes I wobble in the dark as if it's my eyes that keep me upright - and then coming back inside I was thinking this house won't ripen with me the way others have, 824 and the skyshack, Burghley Road, that I'd made beautiful by the time I left - the making beautiful also the making my own - apart from the steps I haven't adapted it - so it's still in many ways a wrong house - for instance the tan walls in this room, this stupid beige carpet, and I don't like this big pile of dirty stones [the fireplace] either. But what are the ways it's a good house - the screened half door - the screens everywhere, this wide window and the well-made bookcase-sill under it, the sense of roaming around into different states of mind, having reserves of space on all sides, all of them except this room still strangers - this room too, in a way - The little stone terrace is brilliant - it's a perfect design. The kitchen's big window. The way it's sited, sighted, is better than the higher vantages above, it's more ensconced, slotted-in so it's looking up as well as down. I like the high ceiling in this room. I love the pretty guest room that smells of cedar and has windows on three sides. The bathroom is conventional, negligible. The middle room has the charm of east windows, which means that on April mornings it's the warm room of the house. It has a scary closet full of spiders and unregulated gaps into the attic, it's a dirty hole. The sun room is a lean-to shed, not properly finished, with a leak in the ceiling and mouse tracks along its edges, a horrible cheap mirrored closet. The size and shape of this room are good though the northern half is like a yard I only walk through. I've made a pretty island of the black work desk on the Moroccan rug. Birthday lamp. What I've learned about three lamps in a room. The orange curtains. This dark green bed that is my work platform, with a big orange backrest cushion. The blue lights of the sat modem blinking all day. I'm going through boxes with a different sense than I have ever had when I've packed before, of time closing down. I'm not going to have time for this, I think, and sort a file into the recycle-paper box. All the Being about materials, I'm not going back to that work. House clippings, garden clippings. - What am I going to do with all these journals? Now it's an hour later. 9 [list of music since I've been here, to know what audio clips to post on Here] I'm doing a lot in a day - sound clips this morning and then dealing with papers, chucking a lot, transcribing some of Jam though not the mannered bits - ripping through letters files quite ruthlessly - wondering whether to spend the $850 to stay another month, September - listening to Post captain when it's been too hot to work - not eating much - it got to 96 degrees this mid-aft. Sent Luke Lovett Simple song instead of language. 10 The letter file - feeling something in it I haven't felt before, the irrelevance of most of those attachments. I mostly disliked their messy handwriting and absorption in their own uninteresting circumstances. They used to be dear to me, why aren't they now. Because there have been a lot of letters since, that did actual work? I'm also feeling that disgust about my own journals, am liking digital ephemerality, that doesn't make heavy dirty piles I'll later have to schlep or store or look at again. I need to write them to know things but do I need to keep them, should I write on the laptop and then dissolve the writing after? 'Clinging,' the Buddhist word. Effort to shore up a moment so it doesn't die. But it does die, regardless. And yet. I've often liked to read other times. I've liked being able to correct memory with the record. There's just much too much of it. [This para written straight onto the computer.] - What to do about work - 11 Scent of wet straw and soft patting of rain at the near window when I woke in the dark, sound recording at five windows and then out with the D50. Posted photos and one audio file (July 11, buckwheat about to turn, two rocks and poison oak). July 11 is above summerrain.mp3 and so looks wetter than it was. The rain sound is just what I wanted, not harsh and has a few birds at some distance. - Hadn't posted any photos this month. Looking at these on the 17" screen is happy, satisfying. Poison oak was careless and I like it. It looks wet too. Note from Muriel verifying $7235, makes my total $28,400. Can I hang onto it till it buys land and a house?
12 Bad little spider bit my right hand several places - hard to know exactly where - while I was asleep. Woke me at 2:30. 13 Big itchy lump on my L forearm. Things that will be different:
I was good at the college but didn't respect it and couldn't be satisfied with being good at it. I haven't built continuously - I have separate small fields of establishment. Exptl film - neurophilos - mbo - personal mentoring - garden design. I mean establishment in the sense that any of them have given me some access and sense of success that I could still build on in minor ways if I were determined to. There are others I haven't succeeded in enough to get access through them - writing and photography, the journals, book design and publishing. If I don't make the right move now I'll be in a lonely barren cul de sac for the rest of my days. - Remedy for swollen itching bite: frozen pork chop in a plastic bag. I'm at a halt not knowing what to keep. Am impatient, don't want to handle these pages again. Am uncertain, I still don't know whether there's anything to be found. Is uncertainty what should tell me to throw? I've written good things I know are good.
I'm sick of the excess of the journals.
I still have thousands of good things I want to pass on. So much work I still want to redeem. 14 Late afternoon. I'd done a laundry this morning and left the mudroom door open. Did the dishes, thought I'd sweep out the mudroom floor. Sun around in the west shining straight in. I was barefoot on the hot linoleum sweeping toward the open door. Had swept halfway across and glanced toward the corner behind the door. There was an intelligent-looking little brown snake, slender and coiled flicking its tongue. I couldn't see its tail but was certain it was a rattler. Poked toward it with the bristle end of the broom to suggest it should slip out through the door crack. It rattled - a nice little rattle. It would turn and raise its head but it wasn't recognizing its exit. I poked some more, gently. Finally it raised its head high enough to flow through over the hinge and down. It was moving slowly. Slipped under the foundation, left a couple of inches of tail tip sticking out. 6 small rings. Crotalus oreganos helleri the western rattlesnake. Southern Pacific rattlesnake. Adults 24-55". An American pit viper.
What have been the best experiences of writing - sometimes in papers, Perception w/o rep, Being about, sometimes in letters, the intro to GW, satisfaction of getting into high coherence - sheer creation of parts of field & field, what will we know. - I don't like to live away from that press.
15 I posted the rattlesnake story. Have been thinking that wherever I live next I can make a Here page for. -
What's worth making - whole culture of values. 16 Stellar's jay, black head and crest. San Diego 19 Adams Ave. Street noise. Waiting to hear fr [landlord] Frank. Hard day I guess. Mesa Grande 21 Sunday morning 5:45, silver overcast, woodpeckers squawking, a crow, oak leaves wriggling a bit. So quiet. 6 weeks left. 22 Kate's baby. I was another day intent online looking for a home. Lots, houses and mobiles in Lillooet, and then looking at Spartans again, thinking how to renovate, looking up stainless steel appliances. Renovating a vintage makes more sense than building a housetruck from the bottom up, and it could be larger, but where to park it - there has to be a view and a garden, never a park. I'd have to learn plumbing, electrics. Hundreds of considerations. Full moon. There has been such good air yesterday and today, damp and scented. 23 Yesterday a couple of times while I was intent clicking through pages of possibilities I startled realizing there was nothing else I should be doing. Big decisions, branching decisions. Where to live - what country, what place. How to live on my tiny income. Whether I could get a mortgage. For how much. - Looking at land in Borrego.
I feel as if I shd vanish at the end of Aug.
- [Opposite: notes on Cariboo realty, Spences Bridge, Lillooet, Spartan mobiles, vintage mobile sites] I've worked 3 straight days all day and some earlier, and have found which doors are closed: 1. Rentals below $700/mo in Lillouet or around - hideous makeovers. 2. Renovate a Spartan and buy a lot in Borrego - I can't get a mortgage for either mobile or lot and getting it connected wd be more than I have - meantime wd be living without light or heat or AC in a harsh climate. 3. Buy a plain house in Borrego for $120,000 - couldn't get the mortgage and what wd I do about car repair, trips, anything - payment, taxes and insurance wd leave me barely with food. 4. Nice mobile in Lillouet for $39,000 - countryish but cdn't get a mortgage - not open view. 5. Studio in Spences Bridge - traffic noise? $90,000 - could I get a mortgage? Best bet so far but I'd be in Canada. [Opposite: notes on mobile renovation, costs of high end appliances, total $15,000, renovation total estimate $44,000] I feel I'll have to hate wherever I go next.
24 I'm so able to make beauty and so unable to afford it and so unhappy when I can't live in it.
Wd go into savings some.
- Every rabbit that shot across the path was like a message that one sent to the desert. He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. She had the power to make a great effort. We all like people who do things. 29 Ramona Starbucks, Monday morning. We got to the FLEX bus thirty seconds before it left. We'd come around the corner and seen an inlet of coastal fog filling the canyon under Black Mountain. There'd been light in the sky when we stopped at the gate a bit after 5, brightest in the northeast. Earlier on, lamplight showing on my far wall from Tom's window, something I'd never seen. I could wander in and say Do we have time for a little cuddle? And then the way he snugs up tight, wraps me in arms and legs, wriggles closer, then closer again. The adventure of getting into the jeep and taking a dirt trail down through the wilderness before the sun was up. I said We're going to see the sun reach the top of the mountain, and we did. - Am I going to live in Borrego, in very white new small rooms on Weather Vane Drive? And have a year to learn desert and work in a different way than here. What can I do with ferocious sublimity. Two months when I have to stay inside through the day and then November-April, six months of bright sweet winter, and then harsh months again. - This photo of Tom. He looks so sad. Undefended true sadness. I love him when I see it. I want to take care of him.
- Whatever isn't stone is light. Stone, light, plants, wind. - I felt the small taking-care-of acts, lending him clean socks, giving him dessert, cooking him breakfast, bringing him tea. I felt him feeling them, I think. He took care of me too, swept the roof, listened to house worries and options, sat absorbed watching By the lotus and July rain three times each. Read one of my old letters, said You don't love me as much as you did then. Came by bus, went home the only way he could on a Monday, the long way around through Escondido. - Said we should get married and buy a house together. Saw me flinch when we talked about his debts. - I'm not wanting to talk about him, am feeling how gross the saying is and more than that too, feeling I've said so much already and none of it has been much at all. What I feel about photographing this place too, that it's pathetically unable to keep me where I love to be, or bring me back for instance to the realness of sitting on the terrace bench in the dark, with oak branches spread three storeys overhead, the toyon's dark mass a north wall, the tiny marks of crickets spaced in their black directions, the bat zipping back and forth through the light from the open door. 30 "For the rest," he said passionately, "leave it to the ignorant and stupid who judge by counting only the faults. I can be grateful, and so must you be, for even one note, one wonderful phrase." Casals quoted in A late quartet.
[Opposite: sketch of interior of 760 Weather Vane Drive] 31 John Adams Become ocean. presents a gorgeous surface, yet its heaving motion conveys overwhelming force Dark waves evokes mighty, natural processes through the accumulation of gradually shifting patterns builds towering dissonances from simple intervals of a perfect fifth Become ocean - "three huge crescendos evenly spaced over the three-quarter-hour span" anyone who has secretly wished, during the swirling stasis that opens the Ring, that the music would go on like that forever the three main sections of the orchestra play sequences of varying lengths, each of which swells to a climax and then fades, and each of which reverses course ... at its midpoint, in the manner of a palindrome ... at Bar 316 the music begins running in reverse - Bought a zoom lens today - 80-200mm [changed it to an 80-400] - $850 - I'll need it for the mountains - it's a choice not to be tight with money though I have been anxious to have a pile of it for a down payment if I want it. 2nd August Severance has turned out to be half of the half because of taxes and dues.
5 What's up -
Writing here isn't a natural thing anymore. I feel I should and then do something else. I'm wondering whether it's that I'm not wanting to know, feel, where I actually am. Where is that. Last night I had a desolate moment realizing that in Borrego I'll have even less of Tom. He'll have to arrive at 5:21pm on Thursday and leave at 7:45am on Friday. When I'm in Canada after that I won't have money to get to him or he to me. He won't do what's needed to get money. He said he'd get a job to pay his debts so I'd be able to marry him; I know he won't. So it will trail off, and will that be good? Only if there can be something better, which doesn't seem likely now.
Work. 5000 days with a couple of blanks. I don't know what to do. - I showed Leslie By the lotus. She listened carefully. I loved being with Leslie, I loved how relaxedly and interestedly we flowed on together. I liked showing her what I knew she would love. She liked the chair, leaned back and rocked the whole time we sat there. She liked the Cotswold house at the top of the hill. She liked the guest room. She was beautiful. Rounder but really the same as almost 20 years ago. 6 Reading a London woman whose husband and two sons died in the 2004 tsunami what I mostly feel is yearning for the life she had and still has - Cambridge and Oxford, a house in North London, money to travel, intelligent friends, a first-rank university job, connections that get her book published with Knopf Borzoi. A privileged life, established. What I merited but didn't get, so I've had to be the outlier I am, and my children too. Their disordered lives. [Opposite page: sketch of Milky Way visible in summer] Catocala - underwing moths - beautiful back and quite large with pink underneath. 7 New lens yesterday, and learning to use the remote release. Ruth's goodbye tribute and Jim's, Ruth's a clumsy collage of things I'd written in self-evals, and Jim's kind and partial: Ellie maintained a clear and steady vision ... She had a sense of direction and firmly rooted in experience. There was a guiding theory but it was fully integrated with how we are as sensory beings. ... her voice became part of my own experience. Many times thinking, "How would Ellie put this?" and rephrasing .... the simplicity with which she lived. ... a place consonant with her heart, where she could deeply feel, as I think she generally did, "I have everything I need." What's wrong with that - mainly that I was good at a job that didn't matter.
Wednesday mid-morning. Sky two thirds covered with soft, blurred wads. I've moved the chair down by the pines in the far corner of my field. The buckwheat's gone rusty. It's very still. Now a breeze sounds in the pines. A week from tomorrow I'll pick up the keys. The 31st is a Saturday. Three white butterflies. Squeezed heart about leaving. Haven't been falling asleep easily these nights. I've cast myself adrift. 8 I went out to sit in the chair and then thought no, I should reply to Luke. So I've done that and now I feel worse. Heartsore. I want to write him off. He's hurting me. Misunderstanding, accusing, cutting me off. I'm treading on glass with him. It's a power play isn't it. Is it? Deliberate misunderstanding to destroy my confidence? "Go be smart with someone else." Doesn't that say he's cutting me off because I'm smart? If he's doing that, if he needs to do that, if that's his only way to strengthen himself, then I'll let him go. I'll stop. I'll turn away. I'll say he's become someone else and is lost to me on a path he chose badly.
- Keep having to learn technical things again. It's a sensation like using a disabled tool, like stepping on a wedged accelerator. I'm reading color correction sections knowing I've read them before but having only a dully slight familiarity. I'll take notes and yet next time I'll know only a bit more than I do now. - There's also the way that little of what I knew about film cameras transfers. I don't know how to set controls so my settings are haphazard. Both the manuals and the controls have tiny print. I'll repeat until I do remember at least those controls I often use but with a sense of thickness and slowness. Days trying to film birds at the stone basin. I did catch turkeys posing and drinking though overexposed. - Scorpius is my southern marker now, and Cygnus high and pointing south. Most of the Dipper is below the hill, though its clear handle sticks up in the north-northwest. I keep getting directions twisted up there. I see Vega to the left of Cygnus, which I think of as east, but really Vega is west of the Milky way. 9 Then I go out at 4:30 in the dark and see the Swan fixed on its white band rotated all the way across the sky, now pointed toward the northwestern horizon. And surprise! Orion on its side in the east, the way it is in the early evening in winter. 10 I went into the bathroom last night to pee and as I was turning back to flush I saw an astonishingly large spider on the wall above the tank, three and a half inches maybe. Then I saw another on the window frame. How did they get in? Were they young tarantulas? It's cold these nights and mornings, into the 40s. Perseids radiate from between Auriga and Cassiopeia. 11 The birds are quieter now than earlier in the summer.
Day-Lewis as Lincoln. Lot of men in dark suits, but tears jump into my eyes when I see people who succeed because of what they have behind them as well as what they have in them. Grace of the well-born who can make their alliances with others as well-born. Where's this coming from, from Luke dropping me and Tom not having a phone and from having left the little arena I had, which wasn't good enough. I feel ashamed of what I've made of myself. What does that feel like. A squeezed heart. A bleakness as if I'm looking around and seeing no one who values me. What does that mean, looks at me with personal liking. Students have been grateful but that's not personal. transient surge of synchronous gamma oscillations within the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest ... global and highly coherent ... striking increase in anterior-posterior-directed connectivity and tight phase-coupling to both theta and alpha waves exceeded levels found in the conscious waking state ... correlates of heightened conscious processing at near death. Rat study John Hopkins 2013. [letter to Greg] > I'm coming to think in symbolic terms of the Famous Blue Suitcase.
> I would be pleased to carry your blue suitcase anytime, anywhere.
13 Do I have my turkeys finally - was everything right - exposed for contrast - interesting light - right frame - not too long or dull - very psychological, the one and then the other. The first is shy when the second barges in and jumps onto the rim, but comes back briefly. Meantime the second is very aware of being watched, startles, stares. They come in near the beginning of the shot and after they leave there is a minute and a half of just watching after. Shadows move, bugs flash through in the sunlight. Paradise mythos, spring at the foot of a tree. 14 5:05. Nautical twilight. The Perseids. I was out in the chair looking toward Orion. Cygnus was almost at the horizon. Angelo's headlights came on and I heard him backing down his drive. There was no breeze but the pines were sounding a dark low even breath. Tom said You've blissed me out with Here. He also said You've
been living in heaven, hardly anyone gets that. Now your karma account is
down, you'll have to go out and fight, you're a warrior. That was the pep
talk he'd prepared while he was out of touch.
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