| in america 3 part 5 - 2003 november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
4th November 2003 Most of the packet letters are out - G1 conversation last night - res conversation next Monday. When I lie down I find a heavy buzz at the solar. What is that, practical stress? There's been the car, license, insurance, money. And beyond that, how to live - I had the garden and sex and Louie - very engaged - and then the doc and Tom - very stretched - and now [the college] and nothing - this is interim - with [the college] I'm using what I already know and making a bare living. I get to say I'm a professor, which I like, but it's not a life. And yet my time is very interrupted. Every three weeks I have to forget where I was. And there's nothing personal. I hardly even have the impulse to talk to myself. There I think ahead to the February res and what I think is that I'll do something with seeing - and then I unfold the possibilities - it could be seeing and writing, seeing and photographs, Sewall's book, Brakhage, seeing and land, metaphoric seeing, learning to see, the evolution of seeing and seeing promoting the evolution of other things. - Walter Kaufmann 1980 Goethe, Kant and Hegel McGraw Hill Nietszche on Goethe: "who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom" Every attentive look into the world involves theorizing, but to do this consciously, with self-knowledge, freedom, and, to use a daring word, irony - that skill is needed if the abstraction we are afraid of is to be harmless and the experienced result for which we hope is to be vital and useful. In preface to Doctrine of colors. What Goethe wanted in science and poetry was Anschauung, seeing. He drew and did watercolors. 49 "In profoundly different ways, Hegel, Nietszche and Freud tried to develop a poetic, nonmathematical science." And Jung, steeped in Goethe's works. Extreme obscurity of some philosophers an attempt to hide something 56 Paul, Romans 7.15ff "I do not do what I want, but I do the thing I hate ... I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh." "his own relationship to his sister who never married," "to have called attention to the fact that Hegel himself had a sister would have been considered most indelicate and unphilosophical" 209-210 Phenomenology looks for the facts of mind, psychology for their causes - this wasn't how it was used later. "science of the experience of consciousness" earlier subtitle "pure self-recognition in absolute otherness" Interesting - Wittgenstein got ladder from Hegel: demand that self-consciousness should recognize itself in absolute otherness, and "the individual has the right to demand that [science] should at least furnish him with the ladder to this standpoint" - ie climb from sense-certainty to a sort of [idealism] Section 7 His plea for holism in Preface "one of the greatest essays in the whole history of philosophy" 224 the path of the natural consciousness to true knowledge ... the way of the soul that migrates through the series of its forms as so many stages prescribed to it by its nature so that it may purify itself and become spirit by attaining through its complete experience of itself the knowledge of what it is in itself. It takes for a loss of itself what is the realization ... this path may therefore be viewed as the way of doubt or really as the way of despair the series of its forms, Gestaltungen, the history of consciousness itself wanting a way to feel the suffering of humanity had not been pointless But even as we contemplate history as this slaughter because of which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals has been sacrificed, our thoughts cannot avoid the question for whom, for what final aim these monstrous sacrifices have been made. Introductory lectures on the philosophy of history About religion: One would have to deduce this now repudiated dogmatics out of what we now consider the needs of human nature and thus show its naturalness and its necessity. Such an attempt would presuppose the faith that the convictions of many centuries - that which the millions, who during these centuries lived by them and died for them, considered their duty and holy truth - were not bare nonsense and immorality. In a manuscript written 1800 before Phenomenology, Kaufmann 237-8 Engels: Hegel a dialectical poem "He once said that he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a quite different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men." Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein Hegel helped prepare a scholarly edition of Spinoza before he wrote Phenom. Steeped in Plato, "above all in Aristotle." Goethe became world-famous when Hegel was four years old:
His delivery was much more a way of thinking aloud than speech directed to listeners. Hence the only half-loud voice, the unfinished sentences - when one saw and heard Hegel lecturing, he seemed so infinitely old ... I found him ten years younger when I saw him in his room, grey hair, to be sure, covered by the beret one knows from Binder's picture; a pale face, but not fallen in; bright blue eyes; and especially when he smiled one noticed the most beautiful white teeth Mein Trauster I misread for Teuerster. There is indeed no science in which one is lonely as one is lonely in philosophy, and I long from my heart for a livelier sphere of action. I can say this is the highest wish of my life. letter 1816, Kaufmann 342 5 When I go into my closet the little brumming and digesting noises of my refrigerator. At this moment, 3:58 in the dark, a bird stirs in the heater. The pot on the hotplate begins to sound. I was lying awake anxious about whatever this is, psychic low energy - isolation, dullness, purposelessness, lifelessness - hopelessness. I look backward at the month before I left 824, when I loved the house, loved the city, loved Tom, loved Louie, loved the work, and had a strong intent - which was to be finished and come here! And here's this little cubby with its good floor and flowers and there on Olive Street is a blue jeep - and here over the back of my one chair is a blue linen shirt - and there in a pink institution in the lowlands is Tom in a lower bunk sleeping vigorously, alone in all the world - and here am I, writing small, quite an expert, wishing for a match set to my dead grass - No I do not want it to be the old tinder, romantic longing, sexual adventure - no I do not want to shut myself up again in - here I stop - I was going to say I don't want to shut myself up again in academic reading - but what it is, is that I don't want to shut myself up in aimless academic reading. I solved my puzzles. I don't have those questions any more. I don't want to spend the rest of my life publicizing what I've done already. I want a new adventure deep and strong as the old ones. 6 "He looked at her, exactly the Luis look, tenderly inquisitive, noncommittal, unreserved; ever since they were five years old he had been looking at her that way. Looking into her." This book has a lot of her pretty flummery, and then the last 114 pages gripping in her smarter way. She sets people on a ship moving toward a planet six generations away. Those who arrive will never have seen a planet. The story has her usuals, friendship, planet-love, tension between conservatives and liberals, sex-gender thought experiments. (There is another usual it doesn't have, torture and violence.) It isn't really well worked-out, as though it is pre-writing for a novel she abandoned. It goes sketchy just where it would be most interesting, the first experience of the landers. I always read her reading her, I'm always thinking, where did she get this, what research did she do for this. I'm always seeing the investigative philosopher in her - anthropologist, surely? - but I mean something else don't I - she has my question, how can anyone believe that stuff - how can anyone want to be away - what is the real. she said, in a dry tone, Bliss? No, Bliss is a form of VU. No, I mean delight. I never knew it on the ship. Only here. Now and then. Moments of unconditional existence. Delight. Hsing sighed. Hard earned, she said. Oh yes. They sat in silence for some time. The south wind gusted, ceased, blew softly again. It smelled of wet earth and bean-flowers. Luis said: When I am a grandmother, they say, I may walk under heaven, / On another world. Oh, Hsing said. She says oh because he is quoting a poem she wrote when she was fourteen. No, let me see if I can remember what the philosophy was - the moments of realizing what a planet is - the outsideness of it vs the insideness of house and fantasy - raw outside and inside and their psychological valence. The unborn-ness of the conservatives, their preference for the womb. Ursula Le Guin 2002 Paradises lost in The birthday of the world and other stories Harper Collins - Now the California good-time is here. Midmorning I can sit on a bleached-wood deck chair in mild sun with St Catherine's buckwheat a silvery felty thing stirring beside me, drying my hair. When my paycheck comes in tomorrow I can go buy a foamy and that will be all I need for camping. In this jeep I can camp on Mesa Grande Road. It is not burnt, though I will have to see many blackened hills on the way to it. Here's my cubby like a little Greek house, white plaster with a gentle pitch of roof. I have the number I need to buy drugstore lenses and paste one over my camera viewfinder so I can take pictures again. (2.75) On Sunday night Rowen wanted to talk about the misery of unsuccessful love. He was relieved to be able to say it. He goes to bed early to get away from the pain. I told him a couple of things he could try, Tim's advice about studying the person, what I know about concentrating on the feeling itself. At UCSD this week I had forgotten my driver's license and we used my website for photo i.d. The desk girl was amused because the photo on the writing page only has mouth and neck, and the photo on the film page has a hand over the face. Sun going down at five, sunk into cloud over the ocean. There's a half hour every afternoon when the sun lies along the red plaid blanket on the couch. That is when I like to fall asleep for ten minutes, always in a body that's perfectly well. I'm fasting - chicken broth and lemonade. 7th The voices in philosophy - Plato's, Aristotle's, Hegel's. Write something about what a voice is, given connectionist etc. Use Walley. How Hegel is philosopher as poet. Voices we can use to think with - 8 When I woke I had been hearing a junk voice generating at random - it seems often to happen - I as if turn away from it to stop it. Something that happened often at Bellevue and once here is that as I'm falling asleep I see a flash of light that comes with a loud sudden noise. It is as if there's a large pop of static electricity. I can say where it is in the house. The other night it was between my head and the filing cabinet. It's presumably hypnagogic but it's as if really there. I think it happened at 824 too. It has been a relief to read philosophy - Kaufmann on Hegel. I'd like to start over and do another PhD on Hegel and Dorothy Richardson. Do it as a film. Video. Everyone at [my college] is silent on my suggestion about seeing, even Margo. - It's later in the day that I get the starved feeling, starved for company. Not eating when that happens, that's another isolation. Oh the doc and Tom were such hard good fights. Are there ever going to be any more of those? 9 What I did for fun was shop - I went to Anderson's and then Newport Avenue. On Newport I bought a blue enamel strainer I've put the lemons in, a glass lemon squeezer, a cast iron frying pan the size of the hot plate, and an Anchor Hocking 1932 style glass fridge box with lid. At Anderson's I got the second edition Betsy Clebsch salvia book. Clebsch Betsy 2003 The new salvia book Timber Press 11 Irritated after the res meeting by conference call last night. Karen is pressing for 'diversity' work, for reasons of her own. We're supposed to hire brown people. There are only ten of us. As it is, the person most outside in our group is probably Ralph, because he's science-y in a social work context. I'm exasperated because they are pious and unthought in it - as people mostly are - and I have large mostly inarticulate experience of it. - There I turn sideways and write an outline about the relations of social advantage, markedness, and inability. And then go out to try to deal with my parking ticket. Find offices closed, it's Veteran's Day. 13 Yesterday, dealt with my ticket, got an oil change and new battery. Driving test today. - Got my license. Did not have to wear the glasses. Wasn't questioned about what I do with my feet. California legal. Have insurance, registration, license, and truck. They call them trucks. And didn't get a sticker on my BC license saying it's invalid in California. I took my bike to Felippe on the bus. Sat beside an old woman in the first seat. She had silk flowers wired to the head of her cane, red. She was pretty, white haired but a blond. She said she was 88. Born in 1915. Smoked four packs a day until she was 50. The best time in her life was between 60 and 65 when she traveled without her husband. Now she sits in the lobby of her seniors' building and old men give her presents. What it was about her was a girlish glamour. The other day I was walking back from David's and found myself waiting on a corner with a very tall young black man. He had a look that reminded me of Luke. I said I liked his shoes. He talked about his Chuck Taylors. We walked together until he crossed the road to the 7-11. He said he was the youngest of many children and his mother passed eight years ago. My smile was like hers. Her name was Frances. I am lighter after my fast, and these days I can walk a mile. I am feeling what I guess is the old person's pleasure in conversation with strangers. I'm more forthcoming than I was. It's a kind of happiness. One feels one's way lightly. 15 Yesterday I reread Kim. I did it idly, because I was zonking, but I also had an idea of making something of it. I remembered only one or two moments in the book, but I seemed to remember also a moment of reading it. It was in the first stretch of the road after the school bus had dropped us - the part coming up to the first stand of trees on Kinderwater's land. It was - I think it was - September, yellow leaves, blue sky. I read as I walked. It would have been four-thirty in the afternoon, cool air, warm light. I was ten? He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaid-gher - the Wonder House, as natives call the Lahore Museum. That first sentence of the book is familiar. It's the sentence I read as I started to walk. I had taken the book from the shelves of a new classroom at the beginning of a new school year, probably. (I would have read everything in last year's. That means grade four, maybe.) I would have been taken instantly by a story of a free child - ... he knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with the men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was "Little Friend of all the World;" - a child who lived by his wits and spoke freely and cleverly to anyone. (Orphan Annie with black hair like me, moving from one life to another, a barge in Florida, a millionaire's sky-scraper in New York, setting out on the road again with her dog.) The next moment I remembered was arriving at the Grand Trunk Road: See, Holy One - the Great Road which is the backbone of all Hind And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. They looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length of it, the white breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk ... Those two moments were familiar when I came to them, but the moment I actually recalled, the one I was looking for, was the Play of the Jewels. "There are under that paper five blue stones - one big, one smaller, and three small," said Kim, all in haste. "There are four green stones, and one with a hole in it; there is one yellow stone that I can see through, and one like a pipe stem. There are two red stones and - and - I made the count fifteen, but two I have forgotten. No! Give me time. One was of ivory, little, and brownish; and - and - give me time..." "One - two" - Lurgan Sahib counted him out up to ten. Kim shook his head. "Hear my count!" the child burst in, trilling with laughter. "First, are two flawed sapphires - one of two ruttees and one of four as I should judge. The four-ruttee sapphire is chipped at the edge. There is one Turkestan turquoise, plain with black veins, and there are two inscribed - one with the Name of God in gilt, and the other being cracked across, for it came out of an old ring, I cannot read. We have now all five blue stones. Four flawed emeralds there are, but one is drilled in two places, and one is a little carven - ." Kipling was writing the childhood of the writer as the childhood of a spy, and I was taking note, as the child, not exactly of that. I didn't attend to the people around me. I want to say I was living the childhood of a philosopher - which is a subtype of writer, not Kipling's kind - I was looking for ways to be the best kind of human. Kipling was a sajib. I was not. The best kind of human was the kind who understands and speaks - who knows. I wasn't interested in people who don't know. That in itself is a narrowness and ignorance. Was there any good reason for it? I had to make sure I made it out. 15 Went to Scott's to replace the passiflora that died. Laundromat. Driving my growler. At Mission Hills Nursery there were two olive trees - striplings, eight or nine feet tall in their pots, beauties. I bought them and two small Washington navel orange trees and took them to Clairemont and planted them. The olives slotted between the seats and their soft tops folded over my washed clothes in the passenger seat. I measured and set stakes, drew lines with green string, planted the orange trees next to the house wall and the olives 18' apart on the edge of the slope. The orange trees are small and dark green and look good against the wall. The olives - oh - are beings I treat as natural aristocrats. I walk backwards when I leave them. Brought home one of the oranges and ate it. Removed even the small green ones, so the trees will work at their roots. This was a happy day. Tomorrow the strawberry guava and possibly the apricot. Plant the Queen Anne's lace. The red plaid blanket is washed. I dried it in the hot jeep as I worked. 17 Monday morning, Bread & Cie. The sun is low enough in the sky to reach under the awning into the corner. There a green fly lands on the page. The sun through its wings shows - showed - fine veins. The shadow of the wing was very like the wing: both were grey and transparent. And Ellie, how's she. I've been eager to be out, both Saturday and Sunday at Dawne planting. Driving my growler. Am I lonely for Tom? No. But lonely? At times I feel the fact that no one will arrive at my gate. I step onto the roof and look toward it. 18 It seems my work is finding my work. Maybe the school work rode on a very strong anti-father drive, and that drive has brought in all its herd. Maybe the next thing is to be felt in some delicate stir of a wish, not a drive at all. Rowen tonight was happy. He has the lead in the play, he's Prince Dauntless. There was a good morning with his improv team. He had chai tea and walked with Kathleen to rehearsal yesterday, talking about their views on life - they agree. He loves his coat, every day he puts it on with pleasure. In English they are doing MacBeth, which he likes. In Infotech he and Ali are doing their own project. He often stays in town with Brad. It's my money that is letting him buy tea and take buses. 19 It's early, six. I stepped on the roof to unlock the gate and there was a desert sunrise beginning behind the eucalyptus in Balboa Park. Seeing it I have an ache for the mornings in Tom's room, sublime, the golden sky and his manly kiss. The room above the city, traffic on Coronado Bridge. Coffee in bed, watching the sky as he irons his shirt and chooses his tie. Now I have to go write [a student letter]. I have on Somei Satoh, one of my sad CDs. There's a train saying goodbye as it blasts through Oldtown. The clouds are pinking over the water, it is going to be a day like yesterday, perfect heat and light, the waves pale green stretching to glass while spray blows back in an arc. Somei Satoh Toward the night 1993 New Albion Records - This morning I was in Balboa Park in the succulent collection sitting on the ground with my back to a fat-trunked tree with spikes. I was looking up into another tree whose branches spread wide and thin over a thick crowd of large cactus. There were five doves in the tree, one I had my eye on, with a pink breast. They would squeak as they landed on the branch but then they sat quite still on and on. Above them on the ends of the branches, which had almost no leaves, were red flowers against the very blue sky. The light was winter light - the delicate light of winter. When I first came into that small bare-earthed clearing I had an intimation of a place-time, the sort of flash-intimation I have when I am reading in the afternoon and falling asleep. It had to do with the bare earth and the winter light. A desert place. Tonight I have been just blank with loneliness. There's no one, and it seems there never again will be anyone. There is no possible change. 24 What small news of this day - yesterday I took garden pictures with Nor's little digital camera. I siphoned them into my laptop through a small wire and worked with them in a very rudimentary picture-editor. That's not worth having said but I'll leave it. There's nothing else. I've been waking too early and not being able to go back. Last night I was touching my clit to put myself to sleep and was slipping just over the line into the dark. As I started to sleep my finger would stop moving and I'd wake again. In that slipping across I saw interesting things, several times a grid of close-spaced black lines, another time I think a sort of small black and white check. Those were things I'd never seen before and as I was going in and out of seeing them I was feeling, not with words, now I'm happy and interested. Lying there was very boring but I could do this on and on. 25 Mission Hills. I've come to the coffeehouse I found months ago and am sitting in chilly sun under a green umbrella. It's very genteel. An architect flirted with me. That's why I'm here. He had pale eyelashes but I flirted back, experimentally. There are a lot of trees and bushes about. I have been transcribing journals. I do it hopefully. I always feel how interesting the stories are, how untold they are elsewhere. Oh crows slowly in the blue. Oh the young blonds. Suddenly the sun is warmer. Is it time to take off the black sweater, not quite. Well-bred persons with short white hair. A short-legged paisana on the way to a cleaning job. Sun in a few of the blades of a New Zealand flax across the road. Flump flump the bighipped blond in moccasins. Maybe what I should do is - there my eye rises to the red reflections on a black car, strikingly red and defined. Watch what happens as he backs the red VW out of the slot next to it. Anyone could tell from the motion [of the reflection] that it's a car backing out, though it's completely abstract. Why does that phrase need three syllables before abstract. Completely is false, if the motion can be understood. Small tense man tightly packed into his brown sports jacket. A misery of power. Small power. Whisk, whisk, whisk, the sound of thighs in nylon sports pants. Maybe what I should do is transcribe seriously, think of that as what I'm doing. Radio comes on as the black car backs out. A sand-colored Toyota replaces it. Clicks and jingle, black dog on a leash. The Tom story seen in excerpts is a story of appetite in adventure, a woman investigating far masculinity with energy and humor. It's a story of investigation altogether, of friendship, with Louie, of - maid in blue jeans pushing a stroller with a blond baby - of neuroscience read within a large personal framework not at all formed by the profession, of Joyce and self-recovery, - Lucy! Lucy you stay right here. That's not nice. You stay right here. She will not bite. A thin Oriental woman with dyed hair - of money, weather. White garbage truck idling to pick up a blue box on the corner, arms slide out of its undercarriage to grasp the box and lift it. I dreamed kites, large kites in a strong wind, complex kites with many folds. Now the sweater has come off. Strong blue sky. Fibrous white smudges sailing to the northeast. An old woman with holes in her pumpkin-colored seater. That one's a gardener - no, it's a man. Grumpy. No one else is sitting outside. All right mister, are you ready? Woman in clean jeans to a big-headed four year old she is packing into the child seat of her pale teal SUV. Fort Stockton. A row of palm trees on the corner, giraffes evolved to browse above a thick understory that here does not exist, so they are 50' of bare neck and then a sphere of glinting posing grass. Discrete ticking purr of that car, what is it, dove grey, a very smooth simple thing. One next to it just like it but black. One next to it just like it but silver. Toyota Celica. Here's a very different sound, working class, old Dodge pickup, a tradesman. - After that walked in the neighbourhood looking at gardens and bought four very small succulents and two flat small pots for them. At Mission Hills Nursery they give me 20%. In the aft Nora's email had something formal in it. Better check [what's up]. Her eyes fill. Her blue eyes are swimming. The Mercedes, auburn like her, was leaking oil, ran dry and seized. "I was supposed to look after it." I was marveling first that I could contain her enough just by being there, to let her cry. And marveling second that, in all she owns and does, that pretty slight-bodied fox-colored car is where she keeps her soul. Fix it, then, I said. What is really to fix. She's been indulging meanness because she can. Not with me - where she can, with weaker women. There's what she does to Cassidy. There's something in the way she manages her staff, with language that's false to her but passes for lively, that takes her to their level while keeping control. Then there's the jingoism she accedes to in advertising for the Indians. But am I wrong to love Nora? No. Do I love her in the wrong way? Almost but no. I am an ally of good in her. I'm grateful she gives me beauty to see and beauty to make. Could she do what she's doing without doing it that way? It says yes. She doesn't believe she could. She wants the scope and is willing to compromise to get it. She's right to want the scope. 26 My mouth is swelling watching a man in a white hard hat and tool belt walking the ridge of the condo. A bit. There is going to be a 4-day weekend starting tomorrow. Ten days until the last packets. 27 I like the privacy when no one arrives downstairs. When I wake these mornings I sit down to transcribe April-December 1994. It makes me happy. It gives me a push into the day. I'm outside in the silver-grey chair. There's grit landing on the page, a Santa Ana they say on the radio, carrying ash from the East. There was a desert sunrise, a great molten apricot welling of light in the southeast. The angel Moroni is standing pale gold with is it a pigeon on the bell of his trumpet. The ash in the air shows in a band a couple of hundred feet high. It's luminous in gegenschein the way stormclouds can be. The light on the long blank wall of the Martin building is clearest white. The air has a little bite in it, skin feels the ash. I'm drinking tea. A couple of miles south of here, south and a bit east, Tom is walking around among the poor people, getting ready to be fed sentimental turkey. He misses me some, but he's tuned to where he is. He can walk around feeling he's easily one of the smartest. The priests and nuns take an interest. Next to me the St Catherine's buckwheat is catching grit in its felt. It has new little leaves. I must go write Sally's letter, and then I'm free. - Cabrillo Park. The sea a crinkled surface with no far edge. It dissolves in quite a broad white band under the thickness of the ashy air. Toward sun a field of glitter widest at its farthest end. NPR as I drove here had a reading about the Battle of Gettysburg and I am still feeling that solemn cadence. I'm hungry. Everything is closed. The ocean is pushing in very steadily and evenly but sometimes there will be a flump as a wave rises and breaks before it scrapes apart upon the rocks. That flump is like the voice of a creature; it pulls the eye. Should have provisions in the car, stove, food, field glasses, camera, water. Resolution. Look at the bushes below me. I saw them when I was thinking of the film of cloud. They're dried out, a thick pelage of greybrown fibres matted together, within the clumps single lines visible as white scribbles, many, sharply visible like single hairs. That's what - a lizard - I can see it only when it moves. Why are there so many motorcycles coming here. 28 About half through the 1994 volume. The story of the fast and travels. What I am puzzled by is that I took the whole ritual to be about Kenneth and my relation to men, when really I was about to start the doc, which in the end has been the actual adventure of these ten years. I didn't know it would be Being about and not something on scientific visualization. I didn't know Ken and everything I felt for him would fall as powder. I had only the shyest little hope for the doc. And yet I was for the first time setting out into my true interest in work. So was the fast effective in any way? Was it for something? Was it anything? I've thought of it later as bringing me Tom, but now Tom is in the process of falling to powder like Ken. If it brought me Tom, was he worth bringing? Supposing the real value of the time was the work, could I have done it without the work I did with Tom? Was being bent on a man a way of being bent on the work? It is sighing yes. 30 Edmund White. I don't like standing and stooping in front of the new fiction shelves pawing through bad books. I hate it, I resent it, though I am always also interested in noticing the reasons for my decisions when I say no and very rarely yes. Here I want to talk about two different things, the reasons, and Wilson. Wilson first. I do that miserable uncomfortable thing again and again desperate to find something good. Sometimes I take things home that are not good, barely readable. But I have also found wonderful books in these shelves - Cynthia Shearer, Mark Spragg. Wilson isn't one of the greatest wonders, but he seems to me - in the midst of transcribing 1994 - to be quite a bit my kind of writer. "White writes with shimmering sensuousness .... Balancing the banal and the savage, the funny and the lovely," "...by turns incisively satiric, goldenly nostalgic, calmly voluptuous, and throbbing." I'm very incisively satiric and savage. My portraits are swift and sharp. I throb. I know how to use the banal. What else about 1994. I let the string make the decisions when I'm not sure. It throws out some nice sharp passages. I'm ignoring most of the dreams, which I wrote then anxiously studying for clues. I'm not superstitious any more, I'm less frantic about myself. That year the bookwork was in a separate notebook, and I haven't looked at it yet. I was starting to work on imagining. Happy among the Romantics but quickly past them. (More later.) What I'm saying as I pick out books and set them back is for instance: no Jewish life, no Russians. No Chinese. No dialogue of that dull kind, nothing with embossed titles on the cover. I don't think I've ever been wrong when I eliminate by title. Title is the first decision. Then milieu, which I get from the inside front cover. Then a sentence in the middle.
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