| in america 4 part 4 - 2004 february-march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
February 22 2004 [notes from Roman sex 1100BC-250AD: "sexual attitudes and practices typical of the Mediterranean world of the 1st two centuries" Pompeian red, dark turquoise, lapis lazuli blue fascinum - penis BENE FUTUO VOLVI ME VIDES QUAM BENE CHALAS (Chalas - you open me)
trans. of Martial] - June 1998. We were breaking through. There was a three-week period when he was writing beautiful love poems and I was having spectacular sex and looking wonderful, and then, though I had backup, I went into a remarkably poisonous fit of sabotage. I didn't want to be trapped. I wrote and then read to him the para about not liking his penis. Isn't it true we never recovered from that? Wouldn't it be something if after 6 months I want him back and can't have him. Do I want him back? I'd like to go on differently from that moment, if I could. Or whatever moment it may have been. Whatever I've lost, though, it's more than Tom. I had it before I met him. It says it's a stage of sobriety. Just go on patiently in it. Okay.
23rd What would I say to Joyce if she were alive and in her best. Here I am in California and that's all there is. I look at the last while in Vancouver with wonder. I had so much. This isn't the most isolated I've been but it's the most isolated I've been since I was three. Pinned in place and isolated, Joyce would say, is the structure you are. Investigate it. Feel it. One thing before it, another after. It's the hinge, a breathless place between them, a white hole. - Tonight an email from Mike Starn, the Starn Twins. They are wanting David Byrne to sing excerpts from Being about with some text of theirs to a tune from Modern times, for a video to use with an exhibit in a gallery in Westchester. The exhibit is opening on my birthday. I hadn't heard of them, I thought, but when I looked for them on the web I found they made the beautiful images of moths that I bought an expensive photo magazine for, last December. I had the moths up in my room over Christmas. 24th Very deep black loam, yards deep, nothing growing. Stone walls dividing it into sections. I'm visiting. From an upstairs window I can see my home place. I'm seeing it's not far, and wondering at how different the terrain is. 26 I'm certain about many things, unusually so, but working through the journals I marvel at the spot of uncertainty Tom is. Even now, I can wake at night not knowing whether he was or is bad or good for me. I was fascinated by the instability. I'm imagining a zone of the air that's blurred like the traveling spot of blur that is used to censor faces or genitals on TV. It's a spot of blur I walk in and out of. That image is wrong because any individual meeting with Tom wasn't blurred, I always knew what I saw at any moment, my attitude at any moment was decided. But the unfixability of an attitude over time - that was extraordinary. It's 5:45, dark. I've been awake since 3:30. The streets sound wet. Thursday morning. I'm still sick. Yesterday I could hear a wheeze in my lungs. There has been a bitter taste in my mouth, like aspirin. This was the third night I've woken with my stomach a dense dark bar of sensation - not pain but compact intense sensation. All of that was making me remember that people who live alone die sooner, crumble physically as if the body decides it's not wanted in the human herd. So then I wonder whether I should do what I did in my forties, find bodies to enliven me. And then I say I can't imagine doing that again. And then I'm just where I am, living like a very old person, staying close to a tiny home. I feel myself waiting to say to Tom, Let's try again, it was better together than it is apart. And then I say, He still won't have any money, he'll still be afraid to grow past himself. And I'll still be stuck wanting to move up to a bigger space, and not wanting to, for some reason. 27 Yesterday I woke from a dream of two intense kinds of emotion, rage at Louie, and then very quickly afterwards, grief about Luke. This morning Luke phoned me. He had been phoning everyone. - This is a faun from a garden in Pompeii and it is so perfectly Rob, even face and hair, that I am gluing it here as a portrait. 29 On OB pier yesterday I was leaning looking over the rail at a branch of seaweed floating partly submerged. It was a bright bronzy-gold stem with maybe nine leaves. It was mid-afternoon, so that the light was throwing streaks into the water from bumps on its surface. The branch was in constant motion, stretched and bent, alternately sometimes as if it was swimming. The space it was in would suddenly go dark, shadow thrown when a wave piled up ahead of it, and then suddenly go brilliant as the back of the wave flowed over it focusing sun. At the same time there were white scribbles over the entire surface, edges of small surface ripples. At the same time there was a bumpy texture maybe a foot deep - it seemed - that was very three-dimensional and hard to see. The whole drama was beautiful and significant, as if a person stretched and crumpled immersed in a time. What is it about Louie. I don't want to contact Louie. All I know is, I feel I'd be fine never speaking to Louie again in this life. Tom too. I'd like to be living in a hotel somewhere. I miss the Maryland and the Golden West. The Maryland is standing gutted, as it has stood for a year. They must have run out of money. The Golden West is infested with bedbugs. That makes the question: where is life flowing now? Tap the water with your feelers and find where to go. 1st March I'm awake. It's 3. I always wake thinking about some emotional fact, as if a problem to be solved. This morning it was the garden video, why no one liked it, whether without Louie I'd be able to make something of it if I had money. About Louie, how to manage in Vancouver this summer if I don't stay with her. One of those Chinatown hotels. About Louie, what else is it about her. Maybe not so much money and status as the tight consciousness of professionalization. Meaning that she doesn't want to adore me any more. And feeling adorable was what I liked most with her. At the same time she can't stand even unspoken criticism, she always feels it. And I am a most strongly critical being, so that is a great cramp. When I had Tom to be strongly critical of she was my generous friend and he was my warring beast, but without him the relation with her starts to feel like female niceness and it makes me queasy. And then the vilification that poured out of her, grey poison, remarkably horrible. The green pyjamas are gone. The bottoms were ragged and falling off. That's the end of a time, those beautiful green pyjamas. I looked wonderful in those green pyjamas from Pilgrim's Market. It's the last week before this semester's packets start. Phone's out. Starting 1999. Just beginning to be well again. Some little [college] chores I don't want to touch. A garden day for Scott and another for Taft. And then the first packet period is very intensive. 2nd My birthday's on Saturday. Jody will be here all next week into the week after. Week after that, Lise for one morning with someone called Z. - Then Tom - yes Tom - with a package supposedly for my birthday - biography of Jung and some clippings and his certificate of completion of a sobriety course at St Vincent's. Was it anything, that little visit? No. There's nothing to tell. He has a plan; it's going to carry him some way into a safety that will bore him. He's reading a lot, he says. He's being taken care of, medical, dental, three meals, veterans' housing ahead, property manager training to be paid at $20 a day plus room and board. How did he look. An ugly San Diego Padres baseball cap, stiff grey thing. He looked healthy. - Nick Vittum is writing that he likes my poems. swarthy mary, bearded woman, name this hunger after an animal. He says he doesn't know why. I love that my poems of twenty five years ago and my photos of my country can be seen at [my college]. I love the feeling of an anchor there is in the evening I showed those slides in the living room of the president's cottage. Michael had the best eye, thank you Michael. The slide of the weeds and the tumble of their feeling between them. 3 A dream that I didn't have electricity in my house although other people do. The way I feel I can't get money or energy/vitality though other people do. I know I can easily get knowledge and comprehension, which other people don't believe they can get. It means that for me money/energy are in the sign of the father and knowledge/intelligence is in the sign of the mother. The feeling of being starved of money and energy is not purely neurotic, but it is neurotic too. I looked at Tom and saw someone who cared so little about my well-being that he kept me in the dark for three years so he could go on using. It revolts me. At the same time I see myself looking old and harsh in this closedness. I don't think there's a solution. It says yes. Feeling. Tom was my trigger. If I don't have him I need some other way. Not drugs, not Joyce, not bodywork, it says, not a lover. Then what? I am so lonely I keep opening my email looking for anything, something to change my circumstance. Someone to come for me.
4 Bitterness and victimization. The way I'm speaking to Tom. I'm confused. I want to know what has happened to me. Whether something has happened to me. At the same time I recognize something satisfied and pleased in the bitter voice, and I don't want to live that way. Facts. I'm halted in my work. I have lost interest in neuroscience/mind/mind and land, all of that. I'm not interested in publishing or promoting Being about. I'm not getting grants, I failed to get a grant. I'm 59 on Saturday. I'm not looking good. I have a pile of blubber on my belly. I speak to no one for days on end. I've lost face in ways I hardly have accounted for. My journal is dull and mediocre. There is no one and never will be again, because now only the 70 year olds are looking at me with interest. I'm finding life not worth living. Overall. And all of this is because I was seduced and abandoned by Tom, on top of earlier structure.
- How does my advocate speak? It says: I am a wonderful teacher, I'm creative, committed and bold. My students live better because I've worked with them. In my teaching I live out a love with substance. I was hired at [the college] out of a pile of 200. I was able to speak at convocation in a relaxed real way that held everyone's attention for twenty minutes. My poems on the web supported Logan. Being about on the web supported visual artists who care about seeing. At 59 I am a supple feeling person with distinguished looks. Being about electrified Jody. My PRC slides are extremely beautiful. Trapline is still being shown. The Strathcona Community Garden design was wonderful when it was maintained, the herb garden was stunningly beautiful. There are many years of good writing in my journal. I have made a living all these years in a way that has left me free to study and change. I have had many adventures in love, and have never settled for security or corruption. The web is a good medium for me. I could use it more than I do. My work is such that I am free to live anywhere at all. I have a jeep, I can travel, camp and sleep in it. I'm down to few belongings. I'm healthy. My kids are okay. I have a CD player and a computer. What will we know is recognized by anyone. When I look at that list I have so different a feeling of who I am. I'm a gypsy. I don't stay anywhere. I do quite brilliant work in different fields and then I move on. The website is my home now, it's my accumulating retrospective. Tom has set me free, though he did it in a weak slimy way. I should be winnowing my stuff down further. I should be figuring out how to pay off my debts quickly. I should make web address cards, and a cybercard. I should put my slides on the web. New Mexico?
5th Looking at winter 1999 I see how much emotional structure I was learning from struggling with Tom. I mean from the book in struggling with Tom. I had two emergencies, the yes-no with Tom and a crash about the thesis, because I wasn't ready. I was working so hard on both. Without emergencies I don't work. I keep reverting to a sort of - there the phone rang. "Your tow truck is at your vehicle." I'd left my lights on and my battery was flat. Yesterday afternoon the air was very soft. A bird sang. The light was amazingly young. In the early evening I had an impulse to email Favor. The impulse came again. I did email her, and today she writes that she thinks maybe it was because she and Nora got married yesterday when Portland legalized same-sex marriage. "It feels amazing to be part of this historic time and celebratory community." - I keep reverting to a sort of childishness where I blame Tom for being a bad parent and forget where the exercise took me and sometimes him. I forget what it was for. 6 Junk at night. I dream-write, or sometimes read. Sometimes I skim. I conclude that what I'm composing or reading is worthless. The composing is as if reading too. I'm given text. Was it a spiritual danger of the doc, that I've wrecked something in my structure? 'Spiritual.' Meaning feeling, felt significance. What I used to feel, a marveling at the brilliance of a dreaming self who knows, who's interested in the quests of souls. Tom giving me the biography of Jung is showing me Jung inventing a religion - Jung and Teillard - and Tom looking for religion. It's my birthday! It's clear all over the sky. In the transcribing - think of a structure - should I form it into threads somehow - links to the next section in that thread - photos - need scanner - what are the threads - 1. work/theory - 2. work/Tom - 3. work/bookwork - 4. days: place, weather, meetings, friends, kids - 5. days: reading - [6. work/college]. (The last is bracketed because I'll leave it out mostly.) Look for the threads and introduce them with quotes. Introduce the journal itself with quotes. Talk about principles of transcription. Talk about the relation of lived time and notation time. Talk about candor and privacy and responsibility. Talk about the project the life-and-journal have always been. Talk about the journals I've learned from, Woolf and Coleridge. Talk about web and journal. Titles? Bookwork as sidebars? Index? This could be a long project. From Cheryl: "a full moon on your birthday means this will be a make or break twelve months for you." Wonderful day. I was driving east on University at the end of the afternoon, after working on Scott's garden and then whisking downhill to Walter Anderson's - I bought an agave, a salvia leucophylla, three scented geraniums and three exquisite expensive little succulents, Mary's birthday present and mine too - and then I stopped at Bread & Cie and got ends of olive bread and walnut bread - which they gave me because it was the last of the day - anyway, driving east on University I found XLNC on the jeep scanner and there was baroque music, wonderful, baroque instruments, voices shouting hallelujah! hallelujah! [not Handel]. I kept pushing the volume up and rolled my windows down so that at stoplights I was a baroque boom car. I had tears of joy in my eyes, delivered from depression. At Mission Hills Nursery the gay young men know me and speak to me fraternally. Down near the fruit trees there was someone singing, an older Mexican man on his knees pruning and weeding. Only the tune, a sentimental song. I think you are happy, I said. I am happy for the plant-as, and my job, he said. At Scott's I found a couple of long stems of the Burmese honeysuckle climbing into the tree behind the trellis and tied them onto the pergola. Cleaned up the grape and silver lace vine and the pots. Propped the long flowering branches of the white sage. The American grape and the silk tree have buds since last week. The sound system in my car is wonderful when it's loud. I was telling everyone it was my birthday. David this morning, Tom singing happy birthday, Cheryl's email, Mary tonight talking a lot about her 80th birthday party. She never asks me anything. When I tell her something she changes the subject back to her. Now about Judy. I'm jealous of her prominence in the family, but don't want to do what she does.
7 A power moon rising. This was another fine day. I planted at Scott's, blue-eyed African daisies, red nasturtiums in the trellis pots. Got the bubbler going and invented a beautiful touch, a dried date palm stalk of some kind, thick and curved, hard and ridged like a cedar shake, curving to a beautiful point that I could lay over the water source. It's hot. What am I going to do about Louie. Have to reply to her letter. Do not want to talk to her. Do not clearly know why, but it's definite. In the market this morning there was a cross-cut slab of a pumpkin so beautiful I stood and stared. A beaten-brass skin and fine-fleshed - very fine-fleshed - deep orange meat. Next to it, the rest of the pumpkin it had been slabbed off had curly antlers, a couple of feet of twisty dried stalk. As I stood gazing a man with a folkie's big flop of white moustache came out from behind the Moonrise Farms banner ("no herbicides, no pesticides"). He found the pumpkin as wonderful as I, a heritage variety he said, taken to France from Mexico, where it had been grown for a thousand years. The Mexicans know it, he said, it's still grown there. In France called Conte de fee. He was so happy a man, so pleased with his little farm at Temeculah, and his mountain lion that didn't jump, didn't run, but flowed fourteen feet in one motion, tail fluffed to a six inch diameter. I stood and talked to him on and on. Something about the pumpkin (and when he was emerging from his van he was carrying a purple cabbage to put next to it) - and something about the joyfulness of the man - and more particularly something about the angular quirkedness of the pumpkin stem - did strike me as indicating the presence of an elf or fairy world. 8 There was a moment at night when a little corner of the full moon showing in a corner of a window pane sent a ray that struck me in the face. So it felt. My impression was of a straight line from moon to me. The corner of the window was somehow important, like a pivot point. Every time I woke I rehearsed this image so I would be able to carry it through to the morning. In daylight later I wondered whether maybe it was a feeling of being looked at, but probably not. Was it a feeling of abstract significance? My sense of it was geometrical, but why significant?
9 "A man in the shadows, a hidden man is telling me." I plucked that sentence just as I was waking. It was one of those teletype dreams where I was skimming text I didn't understand and didn't like. I wondered where it was coming from and that was the answer. I can't remember anything else but my impression was that the rest of it was complicated and surrealist.
10th It's going to be a sitting-inside day, all this week. Since Friday - it's now Wednesday - it has been accelerating summer. Yesterday so hot my door stood open as I worked. 12th David Beach phoned and said the Choys are selling 824 East Pender - hm. T and R moving to Ontario, that little clump breaking up. I like to hear the news for that reason, and also because it means I would have had to leave even if I hadn't done the rash thing I did, moving. 13 Saturday morning. That means the first of two days I'm alone in the building. Thinking that my love connections often haven't survived loss of their physical place. Jam's place in the West End, 324 in the Maryland. Rowen's feeling for me that maybe hasn't survived losing 824 East Pender. Louie and I haven't survived that loss very well either. My relation to my family mostly broke when they moved off the East Place. Place is so large a part of the cognitive fabric of the connection. The common place so largely is the connection. I have often taken what's mostly my love of a place as love of the person - I mean I open up in pleasure at the place and that openness then feels the person. This is something that isn't understood in design, for instance the way my physical design of SCG helped people like each other and made work parties happy. "All true freedom is dark, and infallibly identified with sexual freedom, which is also dark, although we do not know precisely why." [Artaud in Sontag's Selected] That sentence made me think of Tom, which has been my recent name for self-contradiction and inability to hold a stable view of what I am. There was a homeless guy in the library, that godlike Teuton guy, who smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. I sat near him sniffing, nostalgic for my early Tom. I think I fell in love with Tom in spite of his efforts to make me fall in love with him. I fell in love with his greater wildness, as Louie did with mine. I find the quote for which I bought this book - the poppies of pleasure quote - and find the first paragraph to be a paragraph in which Artaud is remembering being born, without knowing he is doing so, or yes, realizing it. Copying it, I see that my summer workshop can be The cognitive significance of birth. The theatre "frenetic gratuitousness - an actor penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition." State of underdevelopment of the bodies of actors, talkiness. Sontag: present themselves as spiritual adventurers not moral helpers, a role as anguished spirit, an aesthetics of thought. Affiliation with the surrealists 1924-6. Faith in access to wider consciousness afforded by dreams, drugs, insolent art and asocial behavior. A revolution of consciousness, technique for improving range and quality of. Synthetic: East, occult West, preliterate shamanistic, Buddhist, peyote. He went on to imagine he could be a magician without art. Kabbala, tarot. 1935 on. "Beauty is a notion he never entertains." "No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time knowledge." Longing for a new type of human personality. "Documentation of someone living through the trajectory of Gnostic thought." Gnostic sensibility of alienation, possession, cosmic battle, asceticism or transgression, make contact with malevolent powers and suffer them. Theatre as religious transaction, secularized gnostic rite of transformation, "communal performance of a violent act of spiritual alchemy," an inhuman freedom. "Gnostic thematic range" affirmation of the body, revulsion from, wish to transcend, quest for a redeemed. "The body is always a problem." Ever more explicit loathing of sex, "this hideousness, this stupefying sin." Last great Gnostic systematics, Renaissance alchemy. "Purely cultural radicalism tends to be conservative in its implications." She says he was thinking about "how body is mind and how mind is also a body." To show incarnate thought. Diagnosing a split and wishing to mend himself. Migraines and neuralgia, therefore opiates. Nine years imprisoned as schizophrenic. "Madness is the logical conclusion of the commitment to individuality when that commitment is pushed far enough." A long-breathed voice. Artaud A 1976 from Art and death (1925-27), in Selected writings, ed Susan Sontag, trans Helen Weaver Farrar, Straus and Giroux 13 Cather notes: As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it, but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. the reality, one cannot uncover that until one is sure. One can fail one's self, but one must not live to see that fail, better never reveal it. confidence, that sense of wholeness and inner well-being that she had felt at moments ever since she could remember ... secrecy; to protect it even from herself. Along with the yearning that came from some deep part of her, that was selfless and exalted, Thea had a hard kind of cockiness, a determination to get ahead. Well, there are passages in life when that fierce, stubborn self-assertion will stand its ground after the nobler feeling is overwhelmed and beaten under. Any artist who succeeds (succeeds in delivering himself completely to his art) ... Her artistic life is the only one in which she is happy, or free, or even very real. "It seems to me that what I learn is just to dislike. I dislike so much and so hard that it tires me out. I've got no heart for anything." She believed that what she felt was despair but it was only one of the forms of hope. Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace. She flicks her whip upon flesh that is more alive, upon that stream of hungry boys and girls who tramp the streets ..., recognizable by their pride and discontent. "Being bored eats the heart out of me, I guess." Now her power to think had been converted into a power of sustained sensation. She could become a colour, like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones outside her door...; or she could become a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas. 373 The voice ... the thing in it which responds to every shade of thought and feeling, spontaneously, almost unconsciously ... the voice is simply the mind It was only under such excitement, he reflected, that she was entirely illuminated, or wholly present. At other times there was something a little cold and empty ... Often when she sang, the best she had was unavailable; she could not break through to it, and every sort of distraction and mischance came between it and her. the inevitable hardness of human life. No artist gets far who doesn't know that ... You have to realize it in your body; deep. It's an animal sort of feeling. I sometimes think it's the strongest of all. Willa Cather 1915 Song of the lark 15 I've been rebellious, this packet week, reading Artaud, reading Cather, mooching with Jody and alone around Hillcrest. So it's a week later and I still have three letters. First thing to say. The elegance of the wild paeony stalks in their glass cylinder across the room. It's the whole plant not the flower. The cut of the leaves, and those few dark red small closed-in globes. I'm more lonely tonight, why. Jody hurt my love woman feelings a couple of times. On I8 coming home he cut me off abruptly when I was talking about Tom and the Golden West. I was dilating a love-vein and he chopped it. And then when I'd brought him here and given him orange juice and we were sitting on the roof he said, You know Sylvie is the first femme woman I've been with, and went on about her high heels and lacy underwear. I thought he was getting even for my enthusiasm about Tom's wild-man ways, and so I let it go, but I was still and of course sorely regretting I can't look good in high heels and interesting underwear. He was amiable company, he went into bosques with his binoculars, he loved the canyon, he takes turns in conversation very comfortably, he put ten dollars in for gas without much hinting, he was listening everywhere, on the freeway it helped me for some reason having company, he admitted to being afraid of driving and to feeling death when he leaves home (those artist feelings), he's the only person I've found who can read Being about - and I felt unseen, which means my child self, but not only child self. And what about the day. The sky intensely blue. White sage. It's the time after rain and before flowers. The blackness of Black Canyon especially at the Ramona end sometimes with clumps of ceanothus blue. Less than half a tank. The jeep's much better on highway. Bittiness of oak leaf - there was a grove of oaks where I saw that the smallness and sparseness of leaves lets shadow fall through the canopy so there is another kind of light in such a space, silver-grey-blued where the greens are already quite silvered. In Cuyamaca Park, areas where the ground itself seemed to have been turned to ash. Other areas where the fire wasn't thorough, half an oak scorched. A vulture's black inner form. What raptor is it that rocks its wings - I think he said that was the vulture. 16 Creative authority. No, first I want to say that I drove the freeway yesterday in my blue beast very sprite-ily and naturally and confidently though fearfully. I did good today, I fought Barr-Cohen with clarity and she saw it. Margo will have been watching amused. Gee I'm a good fencer. I did that without drawing blood.
|
