in america 5 part 1 - 2004 april-may

work & days: a lifetime journal project

San Diego 15th April 2004 There was a loquat tree on a vacant lot and when I got off my bike to pick the fruit I was looking at California dirt and weeds with such a pang of nostalgia. Real dirt. In the journal I'm transcribing, summer 2000, I had a burst of plans for publishing. [GW20] I don't know what to think about the way I never made the moves, or in those times when I did try something, nothing came of it. 16 It's Friday morning. Jody's email this morning said various things about Arbib on mirror systems and then said he was reading The philosophical investigations and thought Being about resolved it. 17 Scott's party last night. I was transcribing until 9:30 and then ironed my green pants and went out. The garden's party. Eliz's terrace looks beautiful at night, the way it's lit, the paving, the bougainvillea, the white lattice with its shadow, the pink passiflora very spread with buds, the Boston ivy's crawling arms, the red nasturtiums and African daisies in the pots. Heaps of bougainvillea petals in corners. The firepit and its smoke. It's a glamorous space. Proportions: the steps are right. The artichoke has about seven massive heads and Scott is impressed. The white sage has thrown out half a dozen very long flowering stalks. - Supposing I were to start posting journal - start with the last one. Write intros. Design page. Images. Scan covers. Think about who would find it and how. Is it a lifetime journal project? It wd be a huge file. Permissions from friends. Units: journals 50-100 pages. Months? Bookwork format. Tell students? What would make it worth mentioning? 12-18 at home. 18-24 Queen's. 24-30 London. 30-40 women, Vancouver, Dames' rocket. 40-50 men, Vancouver, Aphrodite's garden. 50-58 Tom, Being about, The golden west. Could there be levels of detail - layer edits - charming layer, work layer, romance layer, bookwork layer - and matrix with all. Oui, c'est elle, c'est la déesse. I didn't tell the most stunned moment last week, KCRW, two men, not opera singers, singing an operatic duet. It's French, déess-e, promess-e, I don't know what it is but it's a man's utter heart. At the end of the set Nick Harcourt says it was David Byrne singing with Louden Wainwright. I go online and discover it was Bizet, Au fond du temple saint from Les pêcheurs de perles. I go to Amazon and buy it. (It's not here yet). Online there's a photo of Byrne with a guitar. He's fifty, grey haired, utterly beautiful, a look of tragic tenderness on his face. That's what I want - that. I want that passion and that realization. I want to love it, I want to be it. He is singing in the moment when he allows himself to love a goddess. I know who I am when I allow myself to love a god. I'm that. I can be that. I want to be that. Can I make Work & days in that spirit of tragic extremity? David Byrne Grown backwards Nonesuch 2004 18 Handlessness. Is there a sense in which her true self cannot act? Her persona is acting like mad but her true self can't act. The social work self acts but with false or absent feeling. That's her key, I think. She should think of the relation of persona and true self as a relation of adjoining rooms. The persona is the room with a front door standing open; the true self is a room behind that room, with a door that may or may not be open into the room with the front door. It is possible to act from the back room. So the cynicism I recommend - is that the persona's real voice? Yes. And it's correct. Yes. 19 I got The golden notebook out of the library. It had to be fetched from storage, she has fallen out of circulation. When I went to bed after reading it I found myself anxious. Its tone is anxious and anguished. I want to know whether handlessness is love woman's. The two places I've been helpless have been Tom and professional action. By helpless I mean confused or blank. The two places I've been free and effective in public have been the garden and [my college]. The point about both of them is that they're women's enclaves. Here's the question, then. What are my conditions of freedom and effectiveness in men's spheres? Does that have something to do with love woman? Is it love woman who is astricted there?   yes Is it because I hold back love woman when I'm with men, except when it's erotic   yes Is that because of pressure from men   no Is it because of my leg   no Because she was harrowed by my dad   no What holds her back   lack of connection 22nd It's Thursday morning. Coastal grey at eight o'clock. Birds and motors. Some roaring construction motor on 4th I think. Starlings turning around in their bed in the heater, scraping the sides. This is a pencil I found in the library, virgin eraser. All my other pencils have their erasers down to the quick. In the midst of student minds this week. Third packet. Talking to Rowen last night for a long time. Tonight his play opens, the Prince Dauntless role he's been rehearsing since last fall. Rowen can talk and listen. I was talking to him about the journal project. He mentioned people being interested when he tells them he grew up on Skid Row. I said why doesn't he do a project about growing up in Chinatown, using a digital camera, with some words but only a few. There he lit up. He said he was feeling creative. He said last week there'd been something he wanted to tell me, and it was that when he lies on his back in water in a bathtub he finds himself feeling at home, he remembers himself. 23 In The golden notebook: Still asleep, I read words off a page I had written. That was about courage, but not the sort of courage I have ever understood. It's a small, painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won't accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won't accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything. I looked at these words which I had written, and of which I felt critical. And then she has Saul say to Anna: You think about it then. There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other though we don't know each other's names. But we rely on each other all the time. We're a team, we're the ones who haven't given in, who'll go on fighting. Something Lessing names, that I haven't seen anyone else name, is the way Saul/Tom turns into different people continuously. She has a much closer analysis of the turns within a conversation than I can get. I'm stupider than she is, in that way. She describes political intellectuals of a kind that I want to say don't exist any more. They do, probably, but I've gone another way, more American, simpler, the Buddhist stream not the Marx/Freud stream. But about the form: she had a good form for talking about writing fiction. She put in a lot of her how-to-live material, and this old library copy has all of it marked, but what the book is rather than says, so anyone would have to look for it, is a demonstration of fictionalization. That's clever but I'm not interested in it. My question is, are my journals readable as they are, or is there something I will have to do to make them so. There's the internet thing and internal links to make through-lines. I'm not really wanting to think about this now. Carolyn's image. Red cherries on green trees in an orchard with white light coming horizontal from under dark storm clouds, thunder and lightning in the distance, wind. 24th Saturday morning. Starbuck's on 5th. The sun is just now high enough to show over the top of the office building across the street. Cloudless sky, quite a pale blue. The block is planted with young jacarandas. People with water bottles on long white shoelaces, a walking group with a trainer-shepherd. There's a large black rectangle swinging from a skyhook, panel of a concrete form I think. What else. I'm wearing my red linen shirt and green linen pants, holding my hair to the skin on my face. 26th The 30th is Friday. Tom will likely show up next weekend. It's Monday morning. Now I have the slog left, finishing edits. Don't want to. It's going to be all this week. - Oh - nothing - oh there's nothing - I write the student letters with all my might but am nothing in myself. There I hear a bird. Loud air conditioner fan. It's very hot. That fan will be on all summer. It means I can't have the door open. Oh if I had an advisor, what would she say. She would say, Ellie you're holding back, you don't want to be famous. You'll let it show where it's low-brow enough not to matter, [your college], garden, internet, but you won't cross the line. That's why you're in a vacuum. And there it stops. I dreamed I was looking at a tree I'd pruned. I'd pruned it maybe at the wrong time. It wasn't putting out leaves at all, though close to the trunk and remaining branches there were very young knobs of new growth. A lot of them. That's me, I'm pruned so hard I have almost no being. I'm in the wrong place. This isn't a place I can set roots. Will you talk to me   Will you lead   indecision What and what   imagining and quest By imagining do you mean the whole realm of ideation     Ideation is what I'm used to     And now I have a distaste for it     Is that distaste correct   I don't want to commit to it in any form     But I have to make a living   Is there a better life than ideation     Making gardens   no Will you tell me   losses, unconscious, slow growth, truth Should I be in a monastery somewhere   no Just die   NO Is the image true, that there's growth on the tree     But it's not going to show until next year     The psychological work pruned me   no Leaving everything   So should I have built on what I had   NO - Then I went and ate olive bread at Bread & Cie - though I can't stand how dumpy just two inches more at the waist makes me - and read the LA Times and the Union T. Pro-abortion march in Washington yesterday, Mothers Day, 800 000. The count of US deaths in Iraq is well over 700, the Iraqis uncounted. 27th Tuesday in Ocean Beach - my laundry's drying - the fans going round. A waitress who's so classic: pretty, forty-five, pancake make-up, mascara, sweet to the regulars. Record temperatures. There's no background music here, a kind of plush softness in the sound of the fans up under the ceiling. The waitress trots about taking little steps like Japanese women. How does a mess of grass come to be livin' up top of a long pole of a wooden leg, like that? The maturity of a palm tree is all in its leg - the maturity of a person is spread out into the life made to support mature function of an adult body. It's built slowly, like wood, and it sets around one, sometimes inflexible, sometimes a structure that supports a flexibility that has a competence and access young flexibility doesn't have. The palm tree builds its platform, and up there it's as young as it ever was, because it keeps chucking the recent, the way grass does. It's an annual on a platform. I hate extended metaphor and was trying this because I'm too leafless now to write better. 28 After you once get cold clear through, the feeling of rain on you is sweet. It seems to bring back feelings you had when you were a baby. It carries you back into the dark, before you were born; you can't see things, but they come to you, somehow, and you know them and aren't afraid of them. Maybe if they feel anything at all, it's the old things, before they were born, that comfort people like the feeling of their own bed does when they are little. As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than for many years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted and carried lightly by some one very strong. He was with her a long while this time, and carried her very far, and in his arms she felt free from pain. When he laid her down in her bed again, she opened her eyes, and for the first time in her life, she saw him, saw him clearly, though the room was dark, and his face was covered. He was standing in the doorway of her room. His white cloak was thrown over his face, and his head was bent a little forward. His shoulders seemed as strong as the foundations of the world. His right arm, bared from the elbow, was dark and gleaming, like bronze, and she knew at once that it was the arm of the mightiest of all lovers. She knew at last for whom it was that she had waited, and where he would carry her. That, she told herself, was very well. Then she went to sleep. Willa Cather 1913 O pioneers Houghton Mifflin The professor knew, of course, that adolescence grafted a new creature into the original one, and that the complexion of a man's life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together. What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world. Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened to him, and he suspected it had happened to his grandfather. He did not regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed to him like the life of another person. Willa Cather 1925 The professor's house AA Knopf 30 Your birthday, compañero. The day has gone by without sight of you. A nice day. Now it's dark. KCRW. This morning I transcribed. I do that willfully, first. And then go out, and then in the afternoon I sit and whisk through [student]'s piece in detail. Fond of him, he did so well. So now at last - no, I'm not done yet, two phone calls, and something to Michael about his songs. "Metropolis, here on a Friday night from Santa Monica." 2nd May Was there anything in this day? Am I anything? I transcribe, and while I transcribe I'm something. Nothing in this life takes hold in me, I'm ashamed of that. It's as if I have to start again isn't it. I'm just nothing. If I had someone to talk to would I be alive inside again? No it says. If I were succeeding? I'm so unsuccessful. No it says. Just go on feeling it and enduring it. 3 I do feel a kind of physical youngness these days, bodily flex, sort of - as if my mitochondria are recovering. I have a plump tummy pad but since I stopped swigging orange juice I'm not larding up any more - I think - though I'm eating bad stuff like crackers - OO - this week is open - when it cools I'll go on a camping expedition. 4 Mary Staton 1976 From the legend of Biel Ace Paperbacks It was 85 cents, four-something shipping, and now I have it again. It looks like my old copy that I gave Daphne to give Rosalynde at Women's Press (so Daphne got her bad book published, but Ros's house didn't republish Staton). Here it is again, I'll give it to Rowen. It is badly proofread. The writing is immature. It's badly edited. It's rawly intuited, young. I want to note what bit me hard, have been leafing through: - What am I to wear? - You have earned the red robe of curiosity. And then two pages on: - I, Mikkran-Gogan-Tor, of the order of Infinite Curiosity, come forth to meet you joyfully, that I may, with no interference in your sovereign vision, share with you what I have learned. What bit me was being in a world where I could be honoured for wanting to know - It is not a good book and it has great goodness in it. Broken-hearted greatness is what I mean. The childhood of the philosopher. Intelligence not coming on until later in life     Do you want to talk about that     It was because of school and religion   no Something about how the brain matured     R and L working separately   Was it like a firewall   And it preserved the integrity of the R hem     Something like that?     Do you want to comment   something about art, defeat, improvement, child's mourning The firewall originally came from segregating child's mourning     But it was useful in preserving     Persist in tempering and coming through in relation to the mother     That's the pivot of the book       Will you talk to me about Tom and me now   waiting, in a quest for, graduation, of judgment For those years when I was finishing I really pulled back     My issues are money, rage, not listening, threat of drugs, poor judgment, seduction     His are admiration, affection, trust     We both lack security   You're saying we shouldn't be together     We should cuddle, travel, fight and love, but that's not being together - one card, tell me what you mean by being together   bound You mean hooked   Is it possible to be early love and not bound       This is hard, it's the crucifixion     The conflict   Hope is so close   Could I feel the love without the pain     Will you lead me   friendship, Tom, writing, happiness Be friends with Tom and write happily     Don't have sex because it will hook me     And then he'll have sex with somebody else   no - This morning on the street, walking to the deli for a fried egg sandwich, I ran into Thomas the pipefitter who had been my neighbour the last time I was living in the West. He was next to the transition house on 5th and looked beat up, as if he's been binging. I asked if he's still at the West. He said no, did I remember Tom, the manager? Which Tom, I asked. "The manager, the tall thin one. I dropped him." "How did you do it? Did you kneecap him?" He demonstrated a tight jab. "53rd Airborne." (I'm not sure it was 53rd.) I was full of glee of course. "I'm sure he had it coming." "He has a mean streak." "Yes he does." And then he tells me they were in St Vincent's together a couple of months ago and were the best of friends. He didn't know how Tom could forgive him like that. "He understands it," I say, "he's like that too." "He was in my face," says Thomas. "I'm sure he was," I say. Thomas is moving his wife and daughter out of the transition house and they're giving him looks so I say good luck and move on. Last night on the street a tall thin man in a baseball cap stopped me on 5th. "Hit me on the head," he said. "Why?" We're standing looking at each other in a friendly way. "I don't have any thoughts, I need some thoughts." "Okay, I'll just give you a little knock," I say, and give him a little tap with my knuckle on his forehead through the baseball cap. - So lonely. A long day. I transcribed. Went to Amvets, needed socks. Very hot. Transcribed some more. I like my new socks. The ones I have on are dark green and fit the way new socks do, neatly tight to every bony jut. There are also yellow, burgundy and blue. Mexicans on the condo roof putting false brick on the chimneys. Quite a lot of scrabbling-about in the heater. Is that the air conditioner growling. I'm into the spring of 2001. There are months when I don't mention Tom. Still flipping about whether I'd want to try again if I had a chance. When I read our times of coming through I always feel there's nothing better than my time with Tom. When I settle back into remembering his abuses I feel a rage of contempt. I'm also saying, Where are you, then, it's time. Presumably he's waiting to have money. Or it could be anything else. The jacarandas are blooming. I've been meaning to say that. Talking about it I have a sore heart again - it's feeling the conflict of hope and refusal. 6th I'm delighting in Handel's Italian duets for soprano and alto. That is to say, I am being them, and they are delight. A mirarvi io son intento occhi cari del mio ben What do I like - the way the voices are used instrumentally - it is real singing - so precise in every stretch and edge - can I say more than that? The soprano is the most translucent woman, Gillian Fisher. There's a countertenor singing the alto part, and I don't like the countertenor sound though he sings well. He is not the most translucent man, the countertenor tone seems inherently pinched. I also like to follow the Italian through its repetitions and overlaps. The right kind of language for singing. Lo so / lo so ben io. Handel Italian Duets Gillian Fisher, James Bowman, the King's Consort Hyperion 1990 8th I got up this morning and wrote three pages of intro for W&D. I think somehow I am actually transited into the next project. That is happy - though I notice it's a suppressed happiness. So now I know why I've held off on other work and why I've needed to be alone these months. Tom is not showing up, is he okay? It says yes. The main problem in the web publishing is that Rob will hate the sex stories being told about him, Tom will hate anything being told about him, and Louie will hate any weakness being shown. Those are all good stories and I've told them and I intend to show them - I can post it quietly to start - hidden link. - And then I went out and did what I've been meaning to do, backed the jeep to a strip of grass in Balboa Park, emptied the back, brushed it out, removed the back seat, got the foam stuffed into its cotton envelope, repacked everything. It's ready to take camping. After I buy a new tire and have the liftgate fixed, it will be. It's May, the election is in six months. There's Falluja, many deaths, and now photos of American military guards humiliating Iraqi prisoners. Bush is having to ask for more money. His predictions are failing. Middle-aged Republican women are starting to doubt, surely. The Union Tribune is almost anti-war at the moment, though that could shift in a second if there were another attack in the US. A columnist today saying that the unnamed thing in the cultural conflict is sex. He meant both sex and gender. It took them - how long is it? - two and a half years - to say it. Islamic cultures are fighting threats to their achieved hegemony of men over women and to their clerics' entire control of sex. There's more to say about that - The photos I've seen show an unintelligent-looking American girl soldier holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi man writhing on the floor. She's standing casually with a cigarette in her other hand. It's a complicated moment, isn't it - we women like to see a woman getting revenge on the men of Islam for their crimes against women. Americans like to see an American humiliating someone of the kind though not the nation that humiliated them. That the Islamic act was a brilliant and heroic one, and the American act a form of moronic bullying, spoils the moment somewhat, but nonetheless there was a felt debt and the photo gives symbolic pleasure and is reproduced everywhere. Just realized this is personal too - Istanbul spring 1965 I was humiliated by Islamic men - but were they all Kurds, in fact? - and felt a debt myself maybe. The fact that images of humiliation give satisfaction is being hidden by a public outcry denouncing it - we Americans really are not like that, we're high-minded people with only good intentions, and something went wrong and we're deeply sorry. Meantime the publication of the images everywhere does inflame Islamic men so that young, poor and often minority American men will be more likely to be killed. Only hope the rednecks will pay good attention and let go of their fantasies of a resolute, pious protector. There was a sort of crane and a flatbed parked in front of the cathedral this week and now I see that the huge iron statue of Jesus being whipped by a soldier has been removed. Smell of honeysuckle, brought from the canyon at Dawne. 9th Oh Rowen. He's quit math and English and has flunked even the easy option they were trying to give him. He's saying he wants to move to Van and find a job. Some kind of work where he's in a community of people, we thought. He's good with kids. I was talking to him about the harm to a spirit of lying. He said he likes it if someone cares, but I was feeling it may be too late, he's had the example of such sleaze. I won't say I should have brought him up, because I didn't, but there's a pit of fear about the consequences, as if I should go to hell for bringing him into the world without standing by him. Mary has flown to Puerta Vallarta. Judy bought her a ticket. I told her I liked the green organdy dress and was harrowed by having to ask Ed for money. She said, Why couldn't he feel that children and a wife are precious people? 10 Last year's itch is back - looks like bites - they come on with sudden jab, but I can't see any bug - also my whole skin is sensitized so there's all-over itch if I wear for instance the black shirt. It's either a bug or an allergy and I can't tell. They didn't look at one another, and they didn't look at me. Instead they looked at everything. They were so subtle and steady that I felt like I was watching people for the first time in my whole life, really watching them, free from acting, free from the oppression that comes with brash and bold sound, the blinding stares and uncomfortable closeness that mark the talk of human people. In contrast, these captive people spoke softly, their bodies poetic, their faces and dance poetic, spinning conversations out of the moisture and perfume, out of the ground and out of the past. They were like me. Bonobos actually speak English. It's like listening to someone with a very thick accent: Once you understand the consistent patterns of their speech, you can know what they are saying with absolute certainty. Dawn Prince-Hughes 2004 Songs of the gorilla nation Harmony Books 11 A stiff hostile man I find in the garden at Nora's. I'm the garden person, I say, friendly and confident. You look like a woman to me, he says. It's possible to be both, I say, wondering what can be up with him. It turns out he's there angling to design the garden. 12 So this morning an email from a kid doing an MA in landscape film, 100-foot rolls, at Concordia, who sends me the url of this posthumous gift from Brakhage, just transcribed and posted. The greatest image of such that I've seen of the heartbeat in film, is not made by clutching the camera to the self, but in the most amazing way. It's - now I'm going to have trouble remembering the name, Indian woman - did - um, forgive me my brain is just - yes, Ellie Epp, thank you. You remember the one she did where she went home. What's that called? (inaudible suggestion) Yeah, that's a great one too, all of her films are great, but the one where she went back to her Indian reservation. And it's the last work, alas, that we've seen from her. And photographed the house where she grew up, the cold, bleak, she was like upper BC, you know, cold and barren land. And she went out on ice and set the camera up on a tripod, and is photographing a spate of barren ice, and the whole thing somehow it puts her heartbeat at the frame's edge, across this whole frozen landscape. You know like the one spot of warmth anywhere visible in a thousand miles in all directions or whatever is her heart beating at the edges of the frame. So there's a home movie to be sure. Ellie Epp. Reason I've forgotten her name is no one writes of it or speaks of it any more. Do you show it at all? Have you seen some (inaudible answer) Notes in origin, yeah so there's one to rent sometime if you can, cause I think that's, not just because of this one shot, but because the whole thing is somehow imbued with that sense of absolute persona, desperately needing to see and to see in such a way that's unique, that's honest, because if we are unique, and I defy you to say we're not. Move only along the line of your love. There's nothing greater on earth than to actually be able to extend your love and express your feeling of love for those that you do love. Brakhage at Concordia January 2001. Posted April 2004, transcribed Lys Woods. 13th Middle of packet week. I wrote Carolyn a letter with blue-haired fairy tips from the old hand I now am. I said clarity, compassion, honour, investigation. I said becoming effective rather than helpless in love is Psyche's task because if she can be effective in love she can be effective without having to ditch love. I said it's a task so difficult she can only do it with the larger self she hasn't yet found. Carolyn knows a lot. The fact that she picked out Wings of desire and Pinocchio and put them together makes me wonder. 14 Benadryl sleep. I faded swiftly and firmly and woke in daylight. Like young sleep, wonderful. Awake I'm still itching in the spots that are most rubbed. But no new spots, I think. Trudy and Leah have bought 824 - too bad. 16 Was it outrageous to have told Jeanne to face down her mother and to stop buttering me? Taking a shower is an exquisite pleasure. I don't let myself scratch my spots and when I turn the hot water onto them it is the perfect scratch of many at once - it turns on the itch and its satisfaction at the same time, full intensity. It is better than it has been but there are new spots still arriving. It's as if they have 2 days of serious itch in them and then they stop being felt and shrink to flat red spots. They were worst on my arms and hands to start, then upper chest and back, then armpits and groin and now still groin and here and there around the trunk. And then back of neck and small of back. The hydrocortisol has kept it down so the craziness stopped. There's a spot coming as I write, on my left ear - feels like something creeping. 18 Gillian Fisher is - I don't want to say divine, but I mean divine. Is there any way to say the glass-clear polish of her voice, that plays so well against the campy counter - It is evening, quarter past seven. The sun is full through the west window onto the closet door, twelve panes of light slipping sideways to round the corner onto the south wall. There's sun on the open door. It is this room's beautiful hour. I am drinking a small amount of Cinzano Rosso in the good wine glass - the one from the goodwill on Robinson, glass so thin I walked around the store ringing it for the beauty of the note. I'm happy. It is the light and the music, the beautiful glass (which I will soon someday break) holding itself so nobly with its pointed half-ellipse of lit amber, but it is more the day I had transcribing March and April 2002, happy months. [GW24] Say more - something else is coming true, as then. I know I'm committed to putting the journals on the web. All the many years I have transcribed and then fallen into dejection. They were what I most wanted to show and every time I lost confidence in them. So now as I read them I am confident of them - which isn't to say that I can imagine who would read them. Transcribing, I am feeling with wonder how much of what I see and know is unbearable to the people I know - how can I have lived so long that way - feeling my actual self to be unbearable to almost anyone. Anyone must feel that, so my readers would have to be people I don't know, but only those who aren't dog owners, Christians, etc. A way of reading, the way I read DR [Dorothy Richardson], over years, dipping, forgetting, overjoyed at her company. She made a matrix too, though she crafted and I do something else. It will be something. I don't know what and won't try to look ahead. Is it something else too, a joy about Tom. I can't tell whether it is because I am going to see him and in some way go on with him, or only remembering our last months that came after so many years. That too I am not going to ask ahead. Either way. I will, though, scrupulously ask whether this happiness is illusion. It says no. Transcribing today I was piecing-in a lot I left out the last time through. I was finding it acceptable. 20th Tax refund - can it really be - $505. Bird mites. I discovered what's biting me finally. I saw the little thing wandering down my cheek, tiny, transparent. Web search. There it is, invisible biters, itch ten times worse than fleas. They don't live long without their hosts. Sometimes called starling mites. 23 I found a good place - it's high up - it's in the off-road vehicle area, which means it has this dirt pad on a ridgeline, where I slept last night in the back of the jeep. Jeep - my jeep. This morning I wanted to dress differently - boots, jeans, a pink teeshirt with short sleeves rolled. Physical. I'm set up now to walk out of the house carrying almost nothing - hairbrush, toothbrush, change of socks, journal. I have been provisioning - washbasin, from which this morning I sloshed face, armpits, pussy - so good. Metal box with lid for tree books and grooming stuff. Cardboard box with two sizes of saucepans and frying pan, and another littler metal box with cutlery and my particular pleasure, little almond tins with blue plastic lids for tea, honey, soap, salt. There are tins of salmon, beans, corn, fruit, on the floor behind the driver's seat. Jerry can of water where I can reach it from the rear hatch - plastic box for clothes - pyjama pants that are spare so I can leave them there, hot water bottle. Last night I found my bed already warmed because it's over the drive train. So I did it yesterday - I got out. I'm looking east across many ridges. Quite a uniform chaparral, small manzanita and what I want to call greasewood, the thick little scrub with bitty leaves. A flat salvia - black sage, I think. Fine reddish earth. Little bird voices. A haze in the valleys. Quite a cold breeze like air conditioner air. Yesterday I took the Japatul road to a place I saw in a book, the trailhead for the Pine Valley trail. I went only a little distance and then just wanted to lie down and close my eyes. Traffic - dirtbuggy and simultaneously a helicopter presumably patrolling for illegals. 24 At noon I was in a meadow alongside a rocky streambed. Oaks and dried-out wild oats. There were butterflies of many different sizes, a thumbnail-sized iridescent pale blue. A buzzard. A fat little bird I watched through the binocs perched on one of the dangling twigs of an oak opening its beak seriously and emitting a trill. It was quiet. The oaks had lived long. Butterflies were working in peace. Boys helmited and costumed in space suits were blasting past on dirt bikes - so odd an image of complete disaffection and fantasy. They and their roar would pass and there would be the grove undisturbed again. I sat on a rock and looked into the edges of the space with the binocs. Wild oats and the blacked squares of a wire fence. A lizard ran over my foot in a dash from one crevice to another. It would have been a good place to camp but it was only the middle of the day and I had nothing to do. I sat. After a while I could tell I had relaxed into the place, a remarkable feeling. I got on 8 and came home. I was in the through lane at 75 very comfortable in my sturdy valiant jeep. On the off-road loop it was wide-legged and strong on its big tires. On the ridge at night boxed into my slightly too short cozy bed I saw a (Mexican) Indian man in the brown uniform of a Second World War soldier walking past, a serious young man. These images that come from somewhere else, not related to anything I was thinking. Mostly I was haunted by Tom. - Am I really going to put my journal on the web     You want me to do that   Will you tell me why   an act of honesty graduating from withdrawal I agree with that   I'll lose my friends   And get new friends     part 2 in america volume 5: 2003-04 december- april work & days: a lifetime journal project