| in america 3 part 2 - 2003 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancoouver 28th August 2003 When I woke before daylight, a feeling about the Tom story - The golden west - the vividness of the struggle - the livingness of Tom - what it would be to have the story public - it would be the most complete outering I could have - and with it the most complete account I could give of the possibilities of life - these thoughts come in the aura of thoughts about embodiment studies - embodiment studies is about rebuilding academic topics to suit women - including sorts of intelligence men cut off - and my journals demonstrate those sorts of mind in their matrix of money and health worries, sex, neighbourhood, friendship, psychological work. - There the sun opens a window on the orange wall - touches an edge of the cissus, ripens the corner, reverberating orange on orange. A few late crows flap west, small black things. The unsayable mountain there, fixing the edge of this cool still bowl of air. Peaked roofs firm lids on the humans. Then the sun shifts and the orange corner falls silent. Why haven't I been able to feel the house or the city this summer - because I was looking after Rowen - but why does it kill - it says because I was taught caretaking in an ethos of intimidation, subservience - the training makes anger - withholding anger makes me go dead - family life in general makes me go dead for that reason - so this has nothing to do with abandonment, it says - the texture of our family life - oppression. Was the ugliness I saw in the pho house mirror the ugliness of cutting off? Yes. So is this it, oppression at home built uncon rage alongside any caretaking - suppressing the rage kills joy and beauty - yes. Is this the anger you were telling me about with Tom? Yes. It's the same for Paul? Yes. But not Judy? No, she accepted to live split. - Craft in poems - Pound and Yeats making it sound - motz y sonz - hunted for craft through ages - which of my little poets does any hunting except among her own feelings? Maybe Sufism, Pound says. Countryside, weather, the sound of Provençal - why can it be so attractive to the native of English? 11th century. It is the image of fresh feeling because it is adolescent like Rowen. Late oral. Its French is closer to Arabic? The word roads. Rivers. Stone. & I went down the darkening valley, & behind me there was light at the base of the rock & the ruined wall acrest it, & I was perhaps foolish for there was an inn in that place and the people were kindly. But I came down thru pine wood smelling of evening & few stars above me & the mts known only as shadow. O dies et candide lapis, but it was a road to gallop not to walk on & the only sounds were me & a few tired crickets & one toad & the several dogs I waked, & gradually the sky brocaded itself, & near Lavalanet I met a mason who told me his troubles & so I finished that journey. Ezra Pound 1992 From Roquefixade in A walking tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound among the troubadours, ed Richard Seburth, New Directions, 51 O day and candid stone (not).
29 This is the day of money - US1366 into my SD credit union and 5000 into my Vancouver credit union. I got to the end of summer with Rowen about the same amount in debt to Visa as I was at the start, and that included dressing Rowen quite beautifully. Writing notes on Pound I remember, after the student/faculty reading, Emily and Sally standing next to each other about to tell me they liked what will we know, each with dilated eyes. About Dennis Maracle and his piece at the cabaret - why I disapprove. He lifted his leather skirt at the end to show that he's had his penis cut off - stood there with the hips and legs of a boy and a hairy muff like mine. I think it mutilation, and think that against a climate of approval at [my college]. The question is, was that bigotry in me. What I think is that voluntary emasculation is trying to solve what should remain a conflict, since conflict is so fertile of mind and creation. Intensely felt conflict, I mean. Emasculation buys into what's simple-minded and foolish in a culture, identification with half a self, which is half a body. The post-operation transsexual is an image of a common pathology, but not a hero. He buys into soul-body dualism. - I was considering this because of Astro's movie. Astro is gutsy but not yet brave. Lise and I standing against the ethos of TLA, mediocre and emotionalizing writing as grievance-sharing, w/o knowledge of skill or a literary attention. Lise does not want [our women students] abandoned to the psychologists and story-tellers, she says. She wants them not to abandon their own best for the notion of helping others. - Visa is paid - I have about 4000 US for car, insurance, registration. And then have to live very tight on paychecks and find more elsewhere for extras.
She wrote a book of poems that is her autobiography, she's my age, November 1945. Descent of Alette was 1992. She writes it then & now too, naturally.
- There are poems I can read, a very few - so many I can't. I can read hers and do, holding my breath - is she really saying that? I'd like to write with that relevance. She is remembering the one she was when she began. Alice Notley 1998 Mysteries of small houses Penguin 30 Saturday. There will be Leah at 11, first time coming to see her house, and Luke after. This day. This semester - 'til February. Five months. I'll have 10 days every 3 weeks, and 6 weeks at Christmas. 31st Luke has shined me on two days in a row. He doesn't want to see me. He doesn't want to deal with himself. He is looking shut down - is he? The corruption of his life is showing. Should I talk to him about it? Is he afraid I will? No. Afraid I won't? Yes. 2nd September He is still considering me too much. He made dinner, a brei, chicken breasts in mustard, garlic and HP sauce, mashed potatoes, salad. I was sitting backward in a kitchen chair in a tiny kitchen. I said, Have you thought about what you want to do about being mad at me? Can I just say the worst. He said, You broke my heart. I sat with it. It was tricky. I had to let him see that I felt it but not use it to coerce him to give up holding it against me. I said of the worst moment that I could see that from his point of view it's unforgiveable. He said, This may seem harsh, but forgiving you is not the point, my relations with other people are. That was a blow I knew I deserved, so I took it. He said of Cheryl (his), She said she wouldn't sacrifice herself for me. Then I thought - it's about me, and it's true. Later I said, I think there are two things I can do. One is to say that I know there is a way to come through, I know it for sure. The other is to say that when you were little you were very lucid and confident. I was proud of that. That must still be there. He said of my thesis that if it succeeded he could feel it had been worth it. That was very straight. We sat on a log on Kits Beach and he put his arm around me. The light from the freighters traveled toward us like turtles swimming underwater, he said. 3rd Yesterday a lot happened. I bought a hard-sided suitcase to carry my journals. Louie and I sat for hours at Bojangles, which is part of the Coal Harbour development which used to be the wire-fenced parking lot outside Joyce's barge, which is still there and turned into a restaurant. We were having breakfast while someone cleaned her house. In the afternoon I went to Sears and bought the black jacket for Rowen. Then we went to the land of luxury - visited Val and Sue - look this writing is looser - I had been thinking it's been tight for pages. In the evening I was packing and then Louie was needing a child-burst. Rowen phoned finally and actually asked about his exam grade. It means he had been successful enough to dare to care. - San Francisco airport - gate 85 - two hours before my flight - it is hazed over in the hills I can see beyond these paved yards, a freeway, the BART line. We came in over the choppy land north of SF, bronze ridges burnt on the sun-side. Sometimes a road and a house, dark oak on the northeast slopes. San Diego 4th Louie says Lise says Rowen is much more confident. In this little house the bed is hard, the water feels harsh on the skin, there is traffic noise from all sides, and everything is covered with grime. In Louie's house the floors are shining, the grapes are dewy, the bed is perfect, the music is full, the bathwater is silk, the streets are silent in all directions. My mesquite tree is dead. Tom has brought his jade and his crassula arborescens, very beat up. There are all my red-spined journals on the top shelf. I was at gate 85 for those two hours reading the journal transcription for July 1993 to April 1994, from the end of Dave Carter to the beginning of Ken Sallitt. So much feeling. Dave, Louie, Ken, Rob, Duncan McNaughton, Luke. Dreams, Joyce. I wasn't confined, I went out. The garden, seasons, weather. I read amazed at my fertility. How could I have gone from that abundance to this confinement. But it's my rhythm, isn't it, over long spans. Confinement with Jam learning to write; expansion with the garden; confinement with the doc and Tom. Does expansion mean sexual expansion? As it was then? I was sexually/emotionally involved with four people at once, physical work, garden and cleaning. There's the crassula falcata blooming in red plush. That was amazing energy, soft energy. Can I have the responsibility I have now and the responsiveness I had then? Faithfulness is death. My little cactuses are good. - At sundown I carried out the chair and stood on it and unscrewed the lightbulb that has been shining orange on the roof. Here is my love book from 1993 - how I'm different - passion doesn't go underground into fantasy any more - but is there passion at all? Students - Being about - and this is better? But Joyce is dead, Janeen is dead, Frank is dead - doesn't that mean something? Does it mean love energy is dead? It means I'm not beautiful any more. I was beautiful in that blown-open time. I'm here alone. It's night. I have nothing to do. Someone emailed me having looked at the intro and conclusion of Being about. Someone in Nashville who works for a business communications firm. 5 Researching poetry presses - feel nothing but hopeless - no one will like what I do - there are too many poets - it's all junk. It says, persist to learn persistence. I can see that. Every time I got excited and tried, I only tried once - Family Herald story - sending to Robert Duncan - asking Rudy Wiebe - giving to Duncan McNaughton - the story contest at Banff. Every time it has worked it has been solicited: Brain and imagining, Brain and metaphor, what will we know in Hoolboom's magazine - charm, value, ethic and tactic in tessera only because Daphne argued for it. I feel queasy about the romantic writing in 1994. It shows me off my rocker. The question for this year is publishing - Today I've been looking at presses, and is that the wrong way to do it - look at the work and ask what I want to give and to whom? Think of publicizing it, not publishing it. Does the fact that my writing was better with Tom mean I should have stayed with him? Put out the tapes of reading. I got deeper after 1995. Still groping for the right way to think of Tom. We found each other when we had both committed ourselves to getting through - is that true? We each did what we did for ourselves, but we did try to be fair and generous. The universe gave us to each other, greatly suitable. (Are you sure we're meant to stop? Yes.) It was a beautiful story. I got deeper in work - much deeper. -
6 Wanting to stop this journal writing - it is so thin and poor at the moment - can see the cut-offness of the writing - and there is already so much - 7 When I go downtown - yesterday to the library - and come into the streets near the Maryland, I ache for the time when I was at home there. I ache for room and streets and Tom, all one thing. Love and sex and street people and black people and Tom's window and the Golden West and all the meetings and the library and Horton's Plaza and the ocean. The light. The fights. The kisses. In all of it an intensity I'll never feel again. A cusp: menopause. Legendary. It stopped. And am I really reduced? It says no. I'm shifted. Will you give me a name for this period? Brilliance and courage. Love woman in brilliance and courage. But I'm worried about being ugly, do I have to be ugly? No it says. Sunday and delights. The market's aisles of colored forms made me happy. I bought beautiful things such as carrots and peaches, and a small sweetheart of an orchid that I packed in loose leaf young greens to transport home on the bike. Put away the week's fresh food and thought about a Canada Council application. Out in the afternoon to do my laundry and then look at Scott's garden. When I was riding home on the sidewalk, there was a young black man begging on the corner. I was eye to eye with his red eyes. He asked for money. I said, I'm flat broke (it wasn't quite true), and he said, as I started to push off to cross the street, You just keep your beauty goin' and that's enough for me. At the market, at a stall where I stopped to buy peaches, the stall keeper said Señora in so conscious a way that I came to and met him for a second. Now listening to Stitch-Randall and starting to read Ellen Dissanayake, Art and intimacy. 9 Katie visiting this aft, so succulently pretty that I have to try to hold back from staring with obvious greed. She is a perfect pretty body with round bum and tits, smooth brown arms and legs, white square teeth, soft lips, square slim shoulders, large dark blue eyes. She's love maiden, an admiring being. She and Khalif have been together since she was 14 and he 16, she says, eight years. She's dewy. I undress her with my eyes. I'm agog at her sexual packed-fullness, stuck to her like suction cups when I'm with her. She wears toe-rings. She dresses well. In high school Khalif played football and she was a cheerleader. She is taking two night courses. - Dissanayake and hunter-gatherer preliterate small-group cultures - "conditions we are evolved for" - what's wrong with that - what I am is extraordinarily different from what they are - What's the question - not nature and culture but a kind of culture - literate - investigative - the culture of the smart, who are few but become many by accreting over historical record - is that it? So is mind and land for the 5%? whose reference is multigenerational. The smart use evolved capability and motive differently - those uses are uncomfortable to the average - I look up and see the cars on the street, nudging out of the parking lot - gifts from the smart - I say to my mother, You can't but I have to. What can land be for the very smart - do they need it, and why - do the average need it for the same reason - or for different - or at all - Contact with land (I mean self-organizing rather than built nature). Is my question really, what can the smart make of nature - with, in contact with, nature - given what they are able to learn in literacy, the literate record of the cognitive and factual discovery among the smart? How smart can they be in the conjunction? It is not, how smart can they be - it is how smart can they be in the mode of intimacy, mutuality, early love? What can be made of early love? How smart can we get in the mode of women, who continue to want loving interplay? How good can I get, we, at seeing? Perceptual intelligence - specifically perceptual intelligence - immediate, responsive - multiple - not primarily linguistic. About relation of art and perceptual intelligence - creation of, teaching of, demonstration of, investigation of - Nature is the best other for perceptual intelligence - why? What's my project, though - someway an arts jury, tech-driven and disaffected, could like. 10 It's 4:30 in the dark, quiet. What's that hum - air conditioner on the roof. I need to come to something about the Canada Council application. Do I have a project that's plausible and part of my real project.
12 Friday morning, little frogs, in Maple Canyon probably. Let me catch up. Tom has left his job at the New Palace. He has left the Golden West. There were two books and a plaid jacket on my doorstep Tuesday afternoon. He may have found his way or he may have fallen apart. The books weren't good, the underlining was messy, his email last night said he was writing a letter but it might be too much too late. That suggests he hopes he can get me back. When I find myself harping on him I say I love you, I love you, and it stops. My gardens: at Scott's, orange butterflies spiral up across the white lattice, sometimes four at a time. They are drawn by the passiflora sanguilenta, which is a little butterfly factory with spiny caterpillars and a lot of gritty droppings. I had to rebuild the pot plants and clean them up, but now they stand wrapped and backed by the Boston ivy climbing behind them. The grape-leafed passiflora with its big red flowers is throwing thin arms across big blocks of space. There's a tall white gate, too narrow. Eliz's choice of pots is the wrong color. The giant Burmese honeysuckle has begun its climb. I wound the grape around its pillar and devised something for the silverlace vine that may or may not work - it immediately turned off the life in its little flower strings. I cleaned out the brushy mess under both the roses, which have exuberant growth since the soil around their feet was dug. Shaped the salvias that are a bit too shaded so they reach forward into the grass and the gardener folds and mows them. Dawne - the fence vines are good, fig is bearing, silverlace vine lovely on the slope. All the ceanothus, cleveland sage, cistus, and manzanita are dead. The nasturtium seeds didn't come up but the verbena looks beautiful. The basil took over its corner and is full of bees. I need to do just a bit of rummaging and shaping. Came up with a plan for the trees. Taft - the front strip is mature - it's full - it's started to be shaded by the white buddleia. It's quite lovely. The iris have spread wide, the cassia is coming up over the top of the fence. The tenant's pots are spoiling the inside. The side roses should go. It should get simpler if these tenants are staying. Their big green plastic chairs are horrible. The side irrigation should be shut off, it's always wet. Get rid of the side plants as much as possible. - Then Rhonda - the nerve she strikes. Rhonda is a pretty body, long-legged, blond. She looks good in shorts and walks with a cane, or lurches. She is happily married to a man who is a professor, I think. They have bought a house.
She's wanting to etherialize - she's very taken with Jan Phillips, who etherializes life and photography in a way that makes me queasy, "the Divine," "the spirit," etc. My photos. Photos of my love. Love not wanted. Her mystery isn't mine, which is why my love wasn't wanted. Her mystery is why did she go blind, why did she collapse. My understanding of taking slides was that I came to be in touch with my whole surroundings. They were pictures of meetings. They were pictures of the land met in marvel.
Notes in origin. The origin was early love. Unstopped bliss. Mine have it more than hers because of the color. Sacrificing what's special in oneself, to not be hated. Child enduring hatred, holding out. [Anorexia and body dislike in women]
- Oh - my car. It was under Eliz's pine tree covered with dust and needles. It started right away. My car! It felt so good to drive it. Its good strong heart. My solid faithful car. Its beautiful dark red form. I showed Leo how to unlatch the hood, where to top up the steering fluid and brake fluid. Kissed it goodbye, its dusty skin. Had signed it over on the bumper in the headlights. Am I shocked? I'd forgotten it and then driving it again made me love it again. Look at my writing - when I am missing it I turn into love woman. My best adventure with it was the first drive to California. But just having it - finding it parked in the alley next to my house. (I am avoiding thinking of any of the Tom stories.) The Fraser Canyon fasting trip where its water hose blew. All the trips up the hill to SFU, parking on the roof next to the department. Koo's friendship to it and me. Louie and I finding it at Hank's and driving it out onto a road by the dykes. It has a good color and a good voice, Louie said. Driving with Rowen to the US one day. Driving to Joyce many times. I was always proud of its shape. Rob getting me from the airport in it. The night sleeping next to it beside the ore tracks in Cache Creek. The many trips through farmland to Bellingham, the way I drove, looking. What's this about not wanting to mention times with Tom. I don't want to praise any time with him. I want to praise the adventures I had alone. It's the way I will sometimes start to read the horoscope for Taurus and don't finish. Something says, No, this is nothing to me. So what did he do to me. He dropped out. He didn't want to fight all the way through. He wanted to take it easy. The way he threw his laundry out because he couldn't be bothered. I have written him off - the signs are. When he went back to dope I wrote him off. I'm bitter. Love woman is bitter. It got me off grieving my car. 13 Smell of nasturtiums in my room. 14 Awake at 6:30 eating an orange from Nora's tree. - Tom is living in the St Vincent de Paul shelter. He lived for a while in his car at the beach. Sez he's retired. I liked hearing that he has time. Could not bear him to talk about 'us'. I said he can talk about him, I can talk about me, that's it. Feel it has shaken down to where he is what he wants to be, isn't straining to be what he'd need to be with me. He gave away his stuff - put it in the corridor - bedbugs had swarmed into his room. When he tried to go back to saying what he says, his hooks, I couldn't bear it - I went out and thought and came back and sat on my step and said I have a horror of any talk about our relation, past, present, or future. I was impressed by how final I was. I will not have him touching any of that in me. 15 Monday late afternoon. Light from the west - almost due west. Silence of traffic and hammering, I mean the kind of silence that is. My roof-desert. Nora the owner of this empire sat here large-eyed and smooth, owning my room and liking owning such an independent thing as me. And am I owned? No. I don't take her gift for granted tho. I know her times and places and she knows mine too. She talks unless I do. She sat on and on though Min came to get her. She likes smart people. They are a relief to her. 17 There's a press, having so many students. I need it not to lap into next week, because of the CC application. Mary last night, back from the Peace River country - what else to call it - back from up north - the big sky she said, and I saw it - I had to pump her, she doesn't tell stories about how anything looks - wants to tell stories about Rudy and Liz and their kids - which I steer her off because it's endless anxiety - I wanted to know whether she missed Ed, and she will never say she does. I suppose I want her to be able to feel what she felt for him when they were young. She does say very plainly that she misses [her sister-in-law] Marianne. "I can't believe she's gone." Mary is very sturdy in her truth, her adapted truth. Luke and I arm in arm sitting on a log looking at blocks of light swimming underwater from the freighters. - I shouldn't say that without counterweighing it with the worst. I am afraid of making it lighter by telling it. It is a very harsh truth, and I don't like to feel how terrible it is. It is that I have harmed my kids by my negligence. I don't mean this in any trivial way. I have done harm to their spirits and it may be irrecoverable. I would like to leave it at that and not go into detail, because the detail makes it real. I abandoned my oldest son when he was six and a half; I broke his heart. He is thirty-two and has never been able to stay with a woman. I abandoned my second son before birth, in the sense that, because I wanted to know whether he was a girl, I blasted him with ultrasound that may have caused learning disabilities that make him doubt his intelligence, so that he has trouble even hoping for a good life. When he was born I gave him to his father. He doesn't know that not realizing these facts is one of the reasons he wants to hide away in video games all day. I wrote that paragraph as if to Sally. Went on to a point where I was shocked at the heart. Then kept going. My neglect harmed my children irremediably but I would do it again to keep the freedom I took.
What is starting to happen again is that my student letters are finding one story each. The story to Anne is the woman who looks beside her. The story to Sally is something about the blur where she imagines a place between fact and fiction, something instead. I've worked until 10:30 at night. 18 At 5:30 this morning when I had made tea and had put on the requiem I got back into bed and was reading earlier bits in this journal. There's an evenness of enjoyment in them that is a kind of humor. It floats me through hatred, misery, blankness, even. I don't feel the humor at the time, particularly, but it's there when the story is told. EB White saying Walden is "the most humorous of books, though its humor is almost continuously subsurface and there is nothing deliberately funny anywhere." It is as if accurate self-forgiveness is automatically humor, and accurate self-description is automatically self-forgiveness. Is that it? Louie walking with her phone, making tea. Birds dived into her vine as she spoke. They were after the last of the grapes. She had been to see a warehouse in Chinatown that may become her yoga palace. - Today I got the bathroom window open -
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Ellie, will
contemplate, the adventure, of betrayal