| in america 4 part 5 - 2004 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
17 March 2004 Tristan and Isolde. Was putting myself to sleep last night following the libretto. An opera with no duets. I want to erase the voices and just have the music, its swirls and drifts. The voices are too old for the roles, the passions too weighty. I don't imagine Isolde an old shrieker but a young inchoate. The men's voices bore me, I just wait for them to be over. There's a portrait of Wagner on the libretto cover. He has very intense silver eyes and a surprisingly tender mouth, whole face very aysmmetrical. That's a full human. Listening last night in the blue light of the CD player I was thinking of the night at 820A [later 824] when Josie was away so I could play this music at full volume at three in the morning. The night I didn't know Roy was on the way with Luke. Dorothy Richardson too, "Mein Irisch Kind / Wo weilest du." She quotes it, I didn't know it was from here. Song of the lark was unexpectedly close to. The pile of rubbers under the hat stand in the hallway of Thea's large family's house. The way she had the run of her little Colorado town, a town like Sexsmith with wood sidewalks and muddy streets. The way people wanted to help her to the next stage. That she has an elastic back. Her months with the Anasazi houses in the canyon, what talent has to do with physicality, how when she has her own room she is able to begin to think. The way she doesn't take seriously the fact that Fred pretended to marry her to be able to sleep with her. The sanity of the mother behind her. She kept her early admirers, mine are disappointed in me and yet they are wrong to be. 19 Driving with Todd this morning. We were going to stake the trees at Dawne and I drove with him to a house on Avenida de la Pesca to look at a garden. On 52 driving back he was holding coffee in one hand and gesturing with the other, driving quite long stretches that way. I was watching the white lines nervously. This van must track well. But then there was a curve, and the van curved with it. He still had both hands in the air. Todd, how are you steering?! He was steering with his knee. At Dawne the orange trees are in thick blossom, the apricot hasn't leafed yet, nor the grape, the matilija poppies are thick, flourishing. There's a ceanothus blooming. One of the agaves is gone, maybe the gophers. 20 We marched from City College up 5th to 6th and Laurel, a long walk. Is there more I want to say. The best moment was when we converged with another group. Katie and Khalif and I were in the center of our stream, city cops on both sides flanking it, drums, megaphones, banners, signs, people leading chants. Over the heads of my many neighbours I saw our mirror image meeting us at a 90 degree angle into the intersection. It was breezy, sunny. At the park there were seven counterdemonstrators with Bush/Cheney signs, young men from Nazarene College, one of them - the leader - very hard-eyed, wearing a teeshirt with a big gold eagle on the back. Our crowd very mixed, a lot of Palestinian flags, a few anti-Jewish signs, some stupid rhetoric, some good rhetoric, a lot of women present and speaking, the drumbeat helpful to walking. I won't shout slogans. There was a reporter talking to the counterdemonstrators and I wanted to go over to hear what they were saying. A thin pale-haired man, pale long drizzle of beard and hair, wearing a straw hat, stepped into my way and said I shouldn't give them my attention. I was looking into his face very close-up, measuring him. I don't take orders even from pacifists, dear, I said. He was saying it was a request not an order, but he wasn't wearing a parade monitor's orange vest and I didn't think he had any right to make that request. I stepped around him and went and stood near them, listening. Older woman in a bright blue shirt and red sneakers. I was harassing them. Something like bearing witness. Sure you believe that stuff, boys? Not saying it: being it. Someone else, a man, came and stood near me quite vigilantly. I liked the edges. There was a very thin woman in a long skirt and docs who came to the mike as we were assembling and instead of standing with the megaphone squatted down to speak. Her name was Indra. She had an artist's face, pretty the way thin women can be at fifty. The most beautiful spirit I saw was a man called Carlos who spoke well about Patriot Act II quickly passed last week, which permits among other things the coercion of internet providers into allowing email wiretaps, and about the government interdiction of counting Iraqi fatalities. What it was about him, besides the clear intelligent way he spoke, was the openness of his face, a beautiful clear conscience. 21 Nick sent me his account of my speech. He was moved by "open and honest emotion and in the hard discipline of working for a product of joy." And he liked my hands, he said. I hadn't thought about the movements themselves. "Delicate and graceful," he said. If they are still that, I want to say, all is well. 22 Anne Clune's email this morning. Her son Benjamin died. She wanted something from me that she called my gentleness. The book said, Your decision not to withdraw has given you action toward liberation. What is this gentleness? Gentle means soft and it means well-bred. I'm neither of those things. I'm sharp, I'm judgmental. How is it that that feels like gentleness? Was I always that? Nobody in my family is whatever it is. Does everybody feel it? Only people I like? It's that slide of the weeds meeting. It's a way of meeting things. I wrote Anne about the way grief is a silent presence of great realness. If she trusts it, it will keep her company. Reading Willa Cather yesterday afternoon, falling asleep on the couch, passages describing countryside in France, I was remembering wholes of light and space and feeling in my country. That's the most that I can say about it, instants of complete presence. I would keep reading and it would happen again, exquisite evocation, something I can never do in any other way. I have been reading One of ours. She was writing it in 1920, about the war that was just over. A farm boy. "By the time they looked at him again, the smile had gone ... the look that was Claude had faded." Monday morning. Across the way, workers on scaffolding putting a false brick facing onto the grey plaster of the massive new condo. Twitters. It's going to clear, there are no shadows, but nearly. This is the week I'm off, though there's Lise Thursday morning. 24 'Technological humanism.' I woke at 4:30 and thought about we made this - that was on the way to saying to myself again that I'm so large a capacity held back from acting. I wait to be driven and am not driven. I don't like wasted action. I have sometimes acted because I thought I should, and it has been large complicated effort with no result. But not with no result. Examples. We made this was for money and to bring Louie back to Canada. From it I got the car and a lot of emotional work with Louie. The postdoc application didn't work but it got me into the language parts of my thesis. Trying to get Rowen organized for distance computer ed got Rowen access to computers though he didn't do the school work, and it let him see me fight for him when no one else would. -
Purcell/Britten "Lost is my quiet" in Purcell Realizations Susan Gritton soprano and Sarah Walker mezzo Hyperion 1995 Purcell 1658-1695 25 Just at the end of transcribing August-Dec 99. [GW18] In that Christmas visit to SD I found the missing beginning of what wasn't called Being about yet. I didn't know I was finding the missing part. It was the first time Tom and I lived together in one room. A lot was happening and I didn't know quite a bit of it. There's quite a lot about seeing, that I could take out and set up separately. 26 The Living Room in Old Town. I'm still looking for a nook to be what Clayton Pies / the Gas Haus was. This isn't it. Transcribing and then at noon saying out, but where. I'll go to Amvets. I have to put gas in the car. Carwash. See whether that coffee house is a place to sit. I had my last poke in June 2002. Got to that sentence by noticing how I'm looking at the coffee shop manager who is pink-brown, manly, and cute. Thirty. Smartish. Friday midday, overcast, breezy. I've been working early, going anywhere to get out of the house in the afternoon, working again at night. Lise was marveling that in my work with students I "don't hold anything back." She holds something back for her own work, she says. It is my own work, I say. It wouldn't be worth doing if I wasn't learning when I do it. Willa Cather often writes about herself. She's interested in what it is in her that carried her so far into autonomy, excellence and success. She's interested in other people too, and she fictionalizes, but she's so natural in her interests that she lets herself tell her own story often, all the stories of young persons on a farm or in a prairie town, who rise up through into communities of cultural power. I have that sort of interest in myself but haven't been her sort of clear about the young person who gets to autonomy and excellence but doesn't make it to success. Cather is very warm and direct, she's visual in the way I am, but more so. She has amazing memory for light and weather and landscape. She wasn't a shy child, she mixed with anyone and studied how things are done. I was withdrawn but also I wasn't on the way to being a novelist, though I was on the way to being a novel reader. I had that elf-edge where I think she was all human, and I was on the way to being - oh shit - a philosopher. But a philosopher who learns in novels and writes in personal journal form. I'm so sui generis. - Oh Epp, what are you waiting for?! 27 On the web last night looking at written pieces by Brian Eno. He was explaining generative music and the principles of self-organization and the value of having that as a new metaphor. He's a teacher but in the mode of rock star. I'd like a bit of that. Is it time to go back to the idea of blue hair? I should be lecturing. 29 Saturday with Eliz at the Monk's in La Jolla, the path down into the canyon, the moment coming around the side of the hill and seeing between two round flanks of hillside the green ocean rolling with waves. Hearing it. Hearing it. I do not want to tell anything these days. That's a loss of love. I used to love my days and now I love nothing, though I do mildly like this Santa Ana and the fact that my window frame has dried out so completely the window goes all the way up.
It said, Don't worry about it. You're rightly mad at life for taking Tom away from you. Last time you needed the feeling of still loving, this time you're doing it straight. Go ahead and write angrily. Back balcony of the coffee shop on Fort Stockton. It's all hung with eucalyptus leaves, a particularly light quality of rustle. Down below a domesticated canyon carpeted in nasturtium leaves. This is a good spot for a hot day. It's packet 2 day. Okay I'll go. 31 Lost all lost all A version of Lost is my quiet sung by a young soprano and what sounds like an elderly female bass. The bass sounds the last note in a strangely hollow voice. I've been playing it over. I hear it at times. The two women sing it in a kind of tumble with Britten's piano. Forever for - e - e - e - ver It's cold this morning, overcast. I have my bunch all this week. April 2nd Faculty conference call yesterday. Margo's remarkable sweetness as an administrator. The tone she sets is so balanced between male and female, so appreciative and fond. And also clear, politically astute. I've never seen her egoistic. She's my liege lord. When I ran into her in the dorm corridor when I arrived late at the res she was in her flannel pyjamas coming to the bathroom, my taxi had woken her. As she was greeting me I found myself dropping a kiss on her shoulder. It was the nearest part but it was a gesture of fealty too. In the shelter of this woman's intelligence and recognition I can be excellent at what we do. She likes my nerve. She doesn't want to curb me, she doesn't want me smaller. She sees how I can further what she wants furthered. When I came onto the line yesterday the voice she turned to me went soft. She lets me take intellectual leadership of the program. The cognitive significance of birth. She and Lise were hauling me along to do that one because they want to go to it. The men don't follow my lead, but the fact that they don't excludes them rather than me. They go silent in that kind of meetings and find other kinds of things to do. Lee Bontecou b.1931, makes her 73. She dropped out at high fame in the late 60s, jumped back in with a stunning traveling retrospective. Her last decade has been her most marvelous by far, is the evidence of the quality of her drawing and these fairy mobiles. She sent out a press release denying art world influences attributed, said it was the museums of natural history, the Africa rooms, and her friends. Greek vases. What she has done with visual synthesis: Phoenician gallery, Elizabethan galleon, peacock feathers' suspended eyes, solar lightship, galaxy, butterfly, eye with lashes, time segments. I have that one in front of me. Pale earth colors in scraps suspended from wires like lines in drawings. It's 8' wide and 7' tall. It's so much a drawing. Takver's Occupations of uninhabited space. Drawings of a quality I haven't seen. And many I hate. The quality Gordon Smith has, an abstract-naturalistic multiplicity. That she was doing these in her late 60s makes me wonder whether I'm on strike against action because nothing new I've proposed to myself is hard enough - as hard as Being about. [Takver: from Le Guin's The dispossessed, ch 6: Shevek brought a box of papers, his winter boots, and the orange blanket. Takver had to make three trips. One was to the district clothing depository to get them both a new suit, an act which she felt obscurely but strongly was essential to beginning their partnership. Then she went to her old dormitory, once for her clothes and papers, and again, with Shevek, to bring a number of curious objects: complex concentric shapes made of wire, which moved and changed slowly and inwardly when suspended from the ceiling. She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft-supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space.] 3rd April Harpers published my letter to the editor. They spoiled it some. Trying to transcribe, disgusted. Saturday night. Put clothes in the laundry this morning and went for my bad breakfast, olive bread, butter, cream cheese, jam, café au lait. Barrenness, waste, anguish. I go to the little bit I have of Frank after his life and revise it. That's the right thing to do. And now I'm thinking of my deaths - Janeen, Frank, Joyce, Ed. All of them happened after I started to be with Tom, and while I was pulling Being about together. Did Tom kill them all? Did I? Is the reason I can't publish that I somewhere know I shouldn't take credit for something that sucked life out of people who belonged to me?
My nearest haven't died, Luke, Rowen, Louie, Mary. There I go and edit the journal of Ed dying. What I am feeling is something like a hideousness of life. I've felt a benevolence sometimes but it's as if this stretch of torture by isolation and paralysis is a slow blank taking-account of the destruction of spirits. Spirits are smashed in this life. I hate it for what it did to Janeen and Frank and Joyce and Ed. I hate the way it teased me with Tom, let me think I had what I needed so I'd fight for it, wait, suffer, in such faith, after it had already taken it away from me. I can see that Frank killed himself because he decided to go in his own time. He wasn't hateful, he was done. There was a newspaper story about an 89 year old man who was losing his vision to a tumor. He was taken up in a biplane for a birthday present, because he had been a flier in the war. As he and the pilot were coming back to the airport he took off his helmet. Then he jumped over the side. He fell into the courtyard of a condo. I have lost my work, Joyce, my house, Tom. I have [the college]. It's a small thing but good, I'm good at it. The good in life is so precious. Bontecou's sculpture that I see across the room is so needed an assertion - wonders of human making are so needed to hold up against the ways we get smashed, the facts. Is it necessary to feel this to know what work is for? Bontecou's entire life can be given to making one piece as humanly splendid as Shakespeare.
4th Yesterday there was an email from someone called Mani Rao. It was very terse. "I am based in Hong Kong. I have seen your site. You could see mine if you wish." And gave me an url. I wrote back and asked whether she had an email address for Jam. This morning she has sent it. Looking at Frank after his life and the journal of my dad's death I was feeling how no one who knows either of them would want to read them. Everyone would hate what I saw, what I say. There are people who don't know them who could like the writing in relation to facts of their own, but that's not what I want most. A hollow-hearted hunger to be liked and wanted in my own life. I keep lifting the cover of my computer wanting someone to be talking and listening to me. I have been so stoic about being unwanted in my communities. I've gone to the world as far as I had to go, far. It doesn't occur to me to complain. Exile is a condition of life. Moved by Jeanne because she's working in this essential sorrow and hunger. I see her, she says, I support her, she's not used to it. Do I seem too strong, too independent, she asks. You are strong and independent, I say, but you're not callous. You want your people to like you and be interested in you. There are worse fates than being the tree that holds up the sky of kin, she writes. She is morose today. It is as if I am a bit in love with her. I've been sailing very tight to the wind with my letters. She does too, and then she doesn't. She gets cute, her shtick, and then she turns real again. I'm remembering Rhonda's photo of her, the steady child, intact, quite shining in her nakedness. 6th Ocean Beach pier. It's spring break. The fishermen are hauling up banners of seaweed, one after the other. Break. That sudden stop. O unspeakable sea. O faceted ocean, lifting, lifting, falling away. That wave bent the shadow of the pier. The facets reflecting in the shadow are broken round like the flaked facets of chunk glass. The motion of that area of shattered reflected water is visible but incomprehensible. I can see it but as if not very deeply. It's two colors, dark and light, but I can't hold to either as figure. As I try to see the motion of the dark, the light washes into its place. Such brief but complicated counterflow. The concrete posts in their fuzzy legwarmers. - "I know I'm onto a good story when it's scary, and I can practically hear the rasp of the saw on whatever little box I happen to be inhabiting at the moment." Cynthia Shearer in an online interview. "My heart has to be beating fast, and my palms sweating, for the writing to be good." - "Come out and support our military families while celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ." 8 Falling asleep at night I sometimes wake suddenly in a small flush of fear, too hot and my heart beating fast. Last night it was fear of hell. When writing about myself isn't egotism is when there is that feeling of noting what life is, what human being is. I was lying awake in the dark at 4 this morning thinking of the little Sunday dresses my mother made for us - pink satin with white lace yokes, or especially the pale green dotted organdy. I was feeling the relation of that dress and a quality of mine, the quality I like, which is an organdy quality. Tenuous? Sheer. Do I know anyone else who has it? No. It is as if my value. It is not the way I imagine myself. If I did imagine myself that way, would it tell me what my work is? Is its name intelligence? Female intelligence? Tom should have set himself to be its guardian. So should I. It's the quality of the voice on tape reading to Tom. It's somewhat the quality of the Bontecou piece. The whole grain book. People are reserved with it because they are attracted to it. Its actual guardian has been Margo. It's linked to my father. He could see it. It was what Frank fell in love with. I'm exquisite and deformed.
There has been a shift in the Union Tribune, I think. The tone is more skeptical. It is for two reasons. One is Richard Clark saying the admin did not take Al Queda seriously because they were focusing on Iraq, the second is that the war is going badly, and now at an accelerating rate. 13 After all my anxiety I did my taxes very easily this aft. 14 Bainbridge The birthday boys. Five men in the Antarctic. How did she make it so readable? Starbucks on a Wednesday morning. A 20-storey yellow crane across the street. Blond cop in her tight uniform talking on a cell phone. Strong coffee. A lot of dark noise, SUV's going north, passenger jets sinking between the buildings to the south. The number of machines the cops are carrying in leather on a belt around their middles. There is a sense of quiet nonetheless, the air is lightly warm. There was no sentence in The birthday boys I'd want to copy, few I skipped. Great precision. I didn't exactly differentiate all the men. Interested in Scott and Bower. She was studying men as such, and it was that. She wasn't simplifying, she had strength and foolishness properly mixed. Oh women. A bump before and another aft. The one high and the other low. I want something. The short name for it is sex. I was in a catalog for gay men's clothes online last night. There was one man in a thong bathing suit who had an effect on me so pleasurably rousing - not genital particularly, an all-over energy - that I thought I understood why men would want pinups. It was a flush of vitality. He was the usual muscle body but it was his head that did it, shaved bald, small eyes very challenging, a grin of gorgeous sexual confidence. Here I am - want me? The other models were nobodies, soft pretty things. This guy was a soldier of insolence, but at the same time he was presenting himself sexually as men don't to women - I liked that. There was a shot from the back too, with his head in profile - a wonderful head, deep behind the ears, with a high forehead, long jaw and straight nose. A Greek hero head. Charged. He was charged and gives it, pushes it - something that's been missing among the men scared of me or it. Oh now I have to go do a chapter edit for Kate. 15 "For I see not what there is desirable in public esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline." Feb 1670 [Newton in Gleick, 69] He was twice abandoned. His father died before he was born and then his mother, when she remarried when he was 3, left him behind. "Each time a planet revolves it traces a fresh orbit, as happens also with the motion of the Moon, and each orbit is dependent upon the combined motions of all the planets, not to mention their actions upon each other." 16 I dreamed I was with Cheryl lying in a bed talking and cuddling. She showed me sections of her journal, written with heavy black pen. It was a spirit I didn't like. She was remembering a house she lived in when she was young. I am not going to be able to say what I didn't like. A greyness. The house seemed grey. What I meant was a lack of what I want, sensory aliveness, concreteness, color, the young I. Woke from that dream in the dark thinking of last night's journal transcriptions, Gleick's Isaac Newton, and the dying of the impulse to tell. Newton in his early twenties - so deprived of paper he all his life wrote very small and from edge to edge - over three years worked himself through and past all that was known in mathematics. He told no one. Later it was the same with his biblical studies and alchemical/chemical results. At two points widely spaced he sent out the Principia and the Optics. Both embroiled him in ways he had wanted to evade. b.1642 Christmas, Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire. When he was a child made sun dials all over the house and yard. Diagrams of water motion, what would become fluid mechanics. In the plague interim, "this twenty-four year old student created modern mathematics, mechanics and optics." His mathematics was very physical. He imagined motion. Years imagining motion mathematically allowed him to solve planetary orbits in the same story as the tides. This in an intellectual context that was a cauldron of miscellaneous misinformation and Christian piety. "And they that will may also suppose, that this Spirit affords or carryes with it thither the solary fewell & materiall Principle of Light; And that the vast aethereall Spaces between us, & the stars are for a sufficient repository for this food of Sunn and Planets." [corresp, Gleick 217] James Gleick 2003 Isaac Newton Pantheon
|
