| in america 4 part 1 - 2003 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
1st December 2003 Sylvia gave me a thick foam mattress today. She and George won't be camping any more, she said. I was at Taft clearing the north side passage. There are another two days probably. The yellow buddleia is in flower egg-yolk orange against the blue. 2 The last journal is so dull I wondered whether I should think the real writing is in the student letters, but it's not. Elderly wisdom and moments of motion and exactness but it's not that light wicked interested balanced girl, the one who likes to write about sex and journeys and weather, and can dart into any topic and touch some little central thing and then dart on. I'm drying my hair in the sun on the roof. Having very free days, transcribing in the morning and then running around. Sometimes transcribing a bit more at night. But then get to a moment where I don't like the journal any more. If I look at the print version I don't like it. That needs to be thought through because it's kept me stopped in trying to publish. I love looking down at my hair when it's clean. It has grey threads but mostly the lower ends are still dark and they glint. There's still that iridescence in the strands. The grey threads when they're lit are brilliant silver, so bright they could be optical fibre carrying white light. When his work first appeared in a magazine he was astonished at the difference in effect between a pen-written manuscript and the tiny characters in print. However, as he became more experienced he began to anticipate the effect of his words on the printed page. He had learned to write for print. Even passages that seemed tedious or loose in manuscript would turn out to be tightly written. Yasunari Kawabata 1976 Beauty and sadness, trans Howard Hibbett, Berkley Windhaver (1899-1972) 4 What surprises me in the 94-95 journals is the superstition. I was anxiously trying to read the signs. I was writing out my dreams with great energy and trying to know more than I knew. I was very charged. I was frantic about men but also very conscious. I took a strong impression. There was still a lot happening. What's my question - were the charge and superstition and franticness about men necessarily connected, so I don't have charge and language without the other? And another question, should I think of this vacant stretch as a necessary pause, or is it defeat or old age? I was rising fast in 1995, and my neighbourhood was trying to block me. But by leaving Vancouver I have come to a halt as complete as if my enemies had won. Is that what happened?
- At UCSD people look in my face. I was on campus returning library books. I don't know what they see but I like to feel more visible. 5 Finished transcribing fall 1995 today, pruning at Taft - the rank dank overgrowth of the front yard. Cut down some of the ratty roses. 6 This is interesting - Montgomery has Father Cassidy, someone religious but of another religion from her readers, say to Emily "But the fact remains that you belong to the Golden Age and the old gods. That's why I must save your precious bit av greenwood for you." Why it's interesting is that it was there in the bookshelf when I was ten, telling me I was a pagan. LM Mongomery 1923 Emily of New Moon McLelland 7 Transcribing Jan-May 1996. [GW vol 5] It's raining. I notice that this time I'm as or more interested in the writing that isn't about Tom. At the same time I think there is a real story with Tom, that I don't completely see yet. I'm not taken by my feeling for him but I'm touched by it and at moments I respect its seriousness, though I see a lot of frantic wheel spinning. (I don't transcribe all of it.)
8 My California driver's license. Sad eyes. Quite a nice picture. Louie was wondering whether to be jealous of my students. I said I'm very professional.
9 I'm hopeless in this journal. It's going to continue to be dreary. Alright just plug on drearily. In the transcription not knowing yet for what purpose to transcribe it. Impatient too, all that Tom stuff, all that bookwork. It's too much for a volume, should I think of it as several versions - notebook, and then extracts later? Should I look for form at the notebook scale? Or only at some larger scale. - Margo yesterday on the phone, comfy Margo, about the embodiment pages. You're a bright light, she said. 10 I dreamed two young women came for me. I assumed they were IRS. They said No, it's something else. I was being charged with treason. I had done something foolish replying to an email campaign that was actually a trap. I'm writing this, though I don't write out dreams now, to mention the pall there is in these days, the way I am often having to jump to turn off the radio when I hear the words 'governor' and 'Schwartzenegger' together, and Bush's childish whine making speeches telling the nation his evil war is good. I had sparky years when Clinton was in. Does the wave that washed stupidity into office also wash through me? It says that's the way to say it. Bush will be reelected, so it will be another five years at least. Are these waves meant to pick up the stupid and bring them forward? Are there implications for how I need to live in this sort of time? Proactively and instructively. So I'm doing it wrong. Waiting to be carried. Is the embodiment concentration worth doing? Is it worth staying at [my college] for? It's my present form of mind and land. 11 Is there a good reason I find Kian inconsequential, though he is a fine exercised body and clear, very clear, hazel eyes and looks taut and quirky in his forties? And was at a select small conference at the Supercomputer Center, and recited a David Whyte poem beautifully in a clipped Welsh accent as we were coming up the slope into La Jolla. He's heady, not very present. Hasn't had vision, he says, meaning he hasn't ridden something of his desperately own through times and difficulties. 12 Transcribing, what am I noticing. I was being told almost everything I'd go on being told throughout. The time began with the trip to the Fraser. That was the beginning of the doc. While I was there fasting I did a lot of bookwork that was in a separate notebook and somewhat forgotten. I keep not knowing what to do with the New Age feel of the notes with the book. The philosophy is respectable though arcane - I mean from the point of view of the general reader. The weather and days and friends writing is pleasing. But the bookwork, though the quality of the other two registers depends on it, sounds flaky. I do not mean any disrespect to it. I don't know how to think of it published. With Jane Roberts for instance, that's what she is, all she is. Eva Pierrakos. They aren't wanting to be read in the communities I want for my other work. And there is something truly wrong with the communities they are read in. Respectable communities may do that kind of thing but they keep it out of sight. I don't believe in that suppression, or any, but there is something to be found here.
What it says is that I should just tell it as a story of and demo of dissociation, having a way to communicate with dissociated self. If it is told clearly and in the context in which it has worked, secularly, it is significant, ground-breaking, interesting. Okay. That's what I'm doing now. - Turns out Lost isn't David Whyte's poem, he quotes it in business talks. I imagined him an obscure person writing across the border in Langley, Washington, when really he is an edifying poems industry with a staff and professional web page and bunches of pastors quoting him in their sermons. [Lost is by David Waggoner] 15 Dreamed I was drifting in a small covered raft for the night, thought I'd pull it on shore, and there, as I was cozying down on the ground, a bright light came on next to me for an instant and a big Canada goose was settling against my back. Then it happened again. I was thinking the bright light was something the geese give off as they arrive. They were coming to sleep against me because I was a warm spot. This morning I am singing Ars amatoria / Happy and gloria. There was also a dream about visiting in a Catholic boys' school where the bathrooms had horizontal posts that were logs of shit. I think it was the gyros stand at the market yesterday that made me think of it. NPR has been disgustingly enlisted by the Saddaam capture story. It is extraordinary the sleight of mind they are letting past - he is a bad man but had nothing to do with the Twin Tower attack. Bush had other reasons for wanting to get him and he needed a victory and so they went after someone they could actually get. Now they are playing and replaying the military commander announcing "We got him" and the troops cheering. This non-event will sink the Democrats even further. In Canada I don't have this feeling of an overwhelmingly stupid electorate. Bush and the many like him are Saddaam and so are in love-hate with Saddaam. Foreign affairs decisions are being conducted as the most blatant shadow-projection. Reading 1996 the months while he was away deciding whether he'd stop booze. [GW6] There is so much struggle and it now so much does not grip me. Does it mean that work is done? Utterly done. I so much am not using fantasy any more. 16 What I'm wearing, the black silk pants gathered at the ankle, this khaki colored shirt with curved shirttails and collar up. In my shadow I see my nice square shoulders. At Bread & Cie. Almost nothing to say. Sun on my knees under the table. Vans and pickups with evergreen wreaths wired to their front bumpers. What I miss about Tom - which isn't about Tom - is the relation I had to downtown. His room, somewhere. Santa Ana. There's dust in the air, a powder from the burns. Holding back on the week because it's chores all week, second reader reports, seven MA evals. 17 In 1996 I am looking for the moments of house and work and have to page through bookwork and obsession on and on. And here and now there's neither. I wonder whether my homelessness is making me die, but not immediately. I never thought neighbourhood could make my lively self, I thought it would come with me. And I can't go back. - No, my work with Joyce made it, it says. 18 I'm so silent here - these days - and even that I have nothing to say about. Transcribing - often wondering how much bookwork to put in - it repeats - some amount of it is interesting, but - no, what I have to carve off is the obsessing anxiety - here's the question - should I carve off all the therapy? Dreams, figures, dialogues, explanations - it's all junk - isn't it? An occupation of massive energy of anxiety. The good writers may feel massive anxiety but they don't show it off. They show the book without the questions. So the anxiety was addiction too. What do I want to know - is there a real story in all that raving - is the therapy junk? It says yes: end of illusion, happiness, imagining, action. That's a list. The story isn't a story about me and Tom, it's a story about work and days. And that is the story I look for now, as I read - should I write Tom out of the story? I say that eagerly. It says no. Was the raving about Tom necessary? It says yes. Was what I did with Tom necessary to coming through in work? Yes. Are you sure? Yes. To be able to stand among the men intellectually. I was much bolder in the doc than in the MA - yes. So there was an aspect of the therapy that was addictive self-entertainment but I did have to unleash something and deal with the fear it set off. So was the actual relation with Tom worth anything? No. Because he's a throw-away. Yes. Was there ever a chance it would turn out different? No. I mean should I show it as worthy? No. I should show it as pathological. Yes. He was a delusion. Yes. And then: it was a delusion with a lot of energy. I used some of the energy for work. I don't have that energy now. Can I live well without it? Can I work well without it? It says yes. I'm not doing so now. Yes. This is my real question. I'm small and dry. Will you comment. Withdrawn aggression should search for exclusion. Instead of fighting with Tom fight with the guys who control things? Yes. Step out. YES. Will you say to what end? Act against enslavement and teach judgment. Will you say in what arena? No. Any. Yes. Does beauty have any part in this? No. The Seeing website. Yes. Publication. Yes. The energy I can release is aggressive energy. Yes. Tom saw my weaknesses and set his hooks very accurately. Yes. Did it have to take as long as it did. Yes. Did there have to be that much squalling. Yes. Long range energy. YES. Will I still have love for days and work. Yes. Can I still be good looking. Yes. Should I even ask about companions. Yes. Do you have anything to say about companions. Early love betrayed still should practice coming through. Do you mean with anyone. No, beloveds. Just the beloveds I have already. Yes. Practice reaching. Yes. Should I ask about new companions. Let judgment balance in the midst of change while winning recovery. Should I look for new companions. No. The rest of my life is going to be lonely. No. It is lonely now. Yes. Will you say in what sense it isn't going to be lonely. Brave, unwithdrawn, tempered, mother. Mother role?! No. Will you say this another way. Child can be intimate, anguish improved. It's the childishness that gets lonely. Yes. Do you have anything to say about the Christmas interim. Journal transcription. - Oh Maggie. Starting to write her eval I reread her process packet Laiwan sent last year. There's her voice so heart-rendingly direct. She is the most powerful writer at [my college] in the sense that she lifts me. She speaks straight to the sore true soul. I need her writing, I need Logan's. These people are way young. Early twenties. 19 It is a complicated tale. I will need to write introductory notes and small explanations. I said I hadn't written the story yet of the life of the child abandoned so young. I have, I was writing it all along, but it will need to be amplified some. As I transcribe I'm thinking all the while. I want to say something else. I feel as if I have edged across a threshold without noticing, and that my life is suddenly richer as well as simpler. For instance I thought of Judy just now in a different way. I imagined her relation to me. When I imagined her, feeling the correctness and conventionality of her life, I suddenly felt her my equal, the same size as me, powerful and present as a companion. The beloveds I already have, it said. This is a feeling at the heart. 20 Yesterday I skipped ahead past hundreds of miles of bookwork - whole books of bookwork, I was filling a book every two months with bookwork - to the next sustained patch of real company with Tom. Look how wonky that handwriting was, it was before tea, propped in bed. And in the next sustained patch there was realness. So good a time that once again the part of it that is our story (not mine) and a story of intimacy not a story of betrayal, comes to life. I now don't remember it unless I have it in front of me. It's a story of inability too. 21st Eliz's party last night. Her house was beautiful. Her garden was beautiful. There stands the Monterey pine at the gate. It rises four stories before it branches. And there's the Monterey cypress. And there's the oak. Last night it was the oak I was feeling. A fire outside, scented smoke in the ivy, firelight across the cutleaf elder, which is one of my few additions to what was almost perfect, a beautiful shape, arcing, long branches that arc up across the lighted windows of her corridor. I'm depressed by the party and so far depressed by this writing too. I loved the garden. I stood in it in a faint spit of rain and saw Rue with a lit silver bush down the path. That was wonderful. The spotlights on the acanthus were wonderful, the lit small room of the back garden, the open gate, stone wall. Inside the house were people in party clothes, people I did not want to talk to. Edie Munk was wonderful in her liveliness but what was she doing with that thick stupid Republican man. (I got passionate about Canadian medicare.) There was a man who came in looking like a wooden Indian, I mean in his tall woodenness, although he was dressed - I guess - like a country landowner, in a flat felt cap and very stiff-looking money clothes. He was the strongest impression, visually. He stood there tall and as if painted telling us his x-acre garden out by Lake Hodges had two years ago been voted the county's most beautiful garden design. Then he explained to me the concept of garden rooms. I left beautiful Genevieve in her high heels listening to him tell how he had designed the house extension himself after studying again all his books about Frank Lloyd Wright. She was saying, more or less, how wonderful. What else. Nora. There she was, little cat face, with her orange hair in another new style. I was watching her face with a greed for beauty, as I do. The relation of her eyes and the corners of her mouth. And yet. We were in the stone-walled garden together, I was telling her about the Graham Thomas in the garden up the alley and standing with her looking at the plants, and she suddenly walked back into the house. I had offended her, I think by praising Eliz's garden too much, or maybe by praising the fireplace. Those moments of mysterious recoil in a party. People who were there one moment are across the room in the next. I said something. Often I don't know what. - And that's it, enough discharging. I walked out through the open door and down through the wonderful garden and got in my jeep on the tall-tree street and drove home among the lights on the pavement. And dreamed I was lying on a bed with Nora sucking prune pits and she crawled into my arms and I stroked the thin muscles of her lower back on the left side. - Sunday. At the market this morning I bought a twelve pound bag of Valencias, scabby and dirty, perfect juice oranges, and now there is a large glass of it with vodka, half an airplane bottle. Candle. KCRW. Yesterday's leftover pollo asado cold. And flowers are my company, beauty of color is my company and I'm hanging onto it. In the turquoise pitcher, scented geranium with small silvergreen leaves and small white flowers, white iris still in bud, small yellow tulips still in bud, three cerise cyclamen I have discovered are wonderful cut flowers, and one stalk of paperwhites that sprang out of the bulb in about a week once I had planted them in the pots downstairs. Across the room with guava branches, two stalks of chrysanthemum and long-stemmed very pale pink tulips barely showing color. That dark blue enamel colander. At Bird Rock this aft looking at Nora's south edge. Now I can begin to design. The terrace is being poured next week. Sylvia came out into the alley with Osso - gave me a loaf of egg bread with handfuls of thin sugar cookies in star shapes. I am driving with more dash, sitting high in my blue beast that likes all kinds of road. Stopped at PB, parked by the beach. There was a decorated small Christmas tree stuck in the sand near some very weathered people. Presents under it, some grapefruit, some guavas, a pair of shoes, a box of crackers, other wrapped things. I went back for Sylvia's zip-lock bag of braided bread and cookies and set them under the tree. That was opportunism not sentiment. They would have made my bones ache. Nora's contractor Tom flirting out of his truck told me a story about a talking toad. As he told it he did not know he was looking like a talking toad. He has a wide pillowy mouth, a flat head and a sexy old intentionality about his eyes. He's 59. I'm looking at the site plan, the shape of the terrace, the redesign of entrances, the redesign of the little room's corner, and I'm seeing that it's my design from a year ago - and now I know what to do with the kitchen balcony. The street strip at Taft is spectacular. The yellow buddleia is in flower all over its surface. The yellow buddleia wasn't mine, and neither was the white one that's now finishing the arch over the gate. It's bolder than I knew to do - it's bold. The little silver and blue dry thing [teucrum] is in wonderful health. The front edge needs stuff to replace everything that was smothered when the cassia filled in below. 22nd Lost today - achy - heartachy. It's the solstice. Balance in the adventure of not withdrawing and sharing. You are acting in disillusionment to improve withdrawal. Balancing in feelings, love woman's gains and losses. Love woman has gained judgment and lost happiness and hope. The quality of this life feels sad, dull and empty but is responsible, realized, knowing and honest. Personal self is starving while service self is thriving. It brings you through love woman's improvement for ends of dominion. Next year is more of this. The grief-stricken singing of Mozart -
I will love you, I will be faithful / Faithful wife and faithful lover / Just for you each breath I take "L'amero, saro costante" from Il re pastore, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Te Kanewa and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted Colin Davis, Philips 1982 -
23 Reading The fifth book of peace the lines that make me wail aloud are these: "Getting Paul to talk story, listening to him, helping him to remember, Jeannie brought one veteran home." 265 She quotes the Odyssey:
"My secret wish for the vets: that these many single men and single women find mates from amongst our community." Maxine Hong Kingston 2003 The fifth book of peace Knopf 24 Christmas Eve. I've written evaluations hurriedly 'til 9, have a candle lit and have put on Eva Cassidy. The four pink tulips across the room are open now and subtly streaked. Closer by the white and yellow iris and yellow tulips are open too. I know it is pitiful to sit being comforted by flowers. - There I remember I could fetch up CBC Vancouver on the computer, and here it is talking about nothing much. What am I feeling. That wail of grief last night means I am still grieving Tom though I don't feel it personally. I mean I'm not thinking Oh Tom, or much at all. It was primal wailing and generous and not wrong. I wailed that I had failed to bring him home. It was my job. He went lost again, and that girl in me is gone too, except for her wail of grief. Without her I am a dull grey woman, thick and sad. But what have I done. I saw Rowen through Math 10 and bought him wonderful clothes and kept him in money so he can have a girlfriend and a lead in a play. I made Scott's garden and added a bit to Dawne, got work for José Luis and Leo. Various things with students. Yeah but nevermind the students. Was there anything else? Where was I last year this time? No clue. And no, there was nothing else. - I was at Eliz's house and Tom was being horrible, exhausting. "His descriptions of what I am, what I do, his quotations of what I've said, are so wrong, so crude, so obtuse, so ugly, that I withdraw, I get silent, I take refuge in aiming to be gone. I feel more and more alone, until it is an agony." With him I was thinking of myself as a depressed dull unresponsive woman, when really he had been gone for three years into crystal meth and would never be back. "Kisses trusting on both sides " I said, but then I went to Vermont and when I got back he had been using and was savage again. A story by Mark Jarman called Cougar, about a bush guy, a logger. A good story. That's my CBC - new writing, not old Thomas or Capote. It is raining in California. 25 It is raining hard though a thin sharp rain. It is giving the hills water, water, it is washing the filthy leaves everywhere. Eliz came in after dark through the wet bringing a check for work and a box of chocolates, and better than those, she looked avidly at the pink tulips and at the way I've put a yellow one in a curved drinking glass with chopped off leaves, and at me, at the length of my hair. There we were two people looking at each other with the same half-hidden studying eye. She's off with her boyfriend but that's fine - five minutes was a treat, quickly showing the basking garden sketch found among papers on the desk. I was still in my pajamas and there were onions, potatoes and carrots cooking, a fine dinner, with KCRW on the radio. Thank you, kidlet. The carrots were from a bunch still gripped in an elastic band in the fridge. I bought them last Sunday from a stand at the farmer's market. A red-headed young man with chocolate-brown eyes said as he twisted off the tops, They're organic. I can see that, they have an inner glow, I said. He smiled into my eyes. Have a good holiday, he said. Well I said. He smiled into my eyes again, Happy solstice. I was glad to remember I had those carrots, and then I turned up the potato and onion too. I had been reading A garden in Lucca, Paul Gervais, after I stopped transcribing bookwork this morning. Have another Tuscany book, La Foce, photos open on my desk. While I was at this desk drawing plans a hard squall beat against the west window in front of me. I could see dirty water, very dirty water, streaming off the soffits. And while I was eating Mary phoned. Louie bought flowers and took them to Lillian's house for her. She could not say much about them except that they were big.
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