in america 7 part 4 - 2005 february-march

work & days: a lifetime journal project

4th February Things that are now wrong with this place. Nora had some landscape architect do a planting of the second floor, moved the ficus downstairs, has huge square pots of pineapple guava, smaller of gardenia and that soft lavender, and middlesized of regular yellow guava which have already died. Downstairs unirrigated privet with kumquat in pots. It was showy for Viejas CEOs and poorly thought out for maintenance, and I am now its slave, and secondly, because she had that huge TV stolen from downstairs, she's locked both gates and made this place a fortress, which nonetheless still is of no use for storing a bike. And there's an elliptical trainer downstairs that employees use with the TV on, and I hear every word of grotesque commercials. Isn't it soon time to move? And yet look at this little room. It's home. - Email from Jam this morning very cryptic. Little edits of Work & days. Walking to the community garden, stopped to look into Gill's Scientology church and was shown around by an awkward man who adores its grace. Leaving phone messages for masons who mostly don't return them. Millie is emailing all day long. There's a Santa Ana. Louie is booking a visit April 4-12. I'll take her to Arizona. Phoned Leah to have her give Louie my mail. Complicated. And Tom in suspense. And after all these years, nine years, of a lover who doesn't want my letters, someone not my lover but wanting to be - though I don't really believe that - who writes eagerly every day and likes me, and sees me, and isn't careless of me, but carefully observant to notice what I need, and also what I give. I'm saying that with a sore heart. For last week Tim said notice the difference between friendship, love and romantic love, and choose between them. There are lovely things in her letters. She's a writer. She's a working class girl who read. Not everything she tries works, but yesterday there were three bits at least that were magic talent, each of a different kind. like that moment between switch power sources - the Red Line in Cambridge moving from the bridge over the Charles into the tunnel again - silent in that glide between the overhead cable and the third rail. I went by subway otherwise there would be driving, it was rush hour, I went by subway to Mass General The way in that passage you do what you say, switch silently from one line to another, I said. do you write in hyphen phrases like that   in your journal do you write like that well what do I   what do I write like that is so the question wafting an intervention at millie as you did - everyone in the room hung between breaths, some aghast but at least me and carol leaning straight back in the boat as though you had put up a sail and our weight could keep us all from capsizing in the force of millie's catching the wind full on because you were busy with the rudder. Isn't she good? So I write back. I have a muse. In one of my pots on the roof there is a little agave I mulched with road grit from the back country. Not long afterwards a strange seedling showed up, like a little stick-drawing of arms with five fingers. It has been growing fast, still unrecognizable, but today I saw it has a stack of buds, dark blue. It is a thread-leafed lupin. - I write that complacently and she ups the ante. I go to the computer and it's 1:39 tomorrow by her clock. Passion. She lets it go. She get ahead of me, I don't deserve her. But I earned her with Tom, who didn't deserve me - is that the way it is? I'll do what I can. What I am. 5th It's five in the dark - What's up. Why do I wake in small fear. Because she is trying to capture me     YES It's really that       She had to control the adults     YES Is her fear scaring me       Can I afford that       Let myself be more afraid     no   I'm the goddess in the background       Orpheus staying in touch with her mother       - I sent a lot today. Photo of my family. Photo of little house with my mother and Bingo. Samples of our handwriting. Subtle body notes. Orpheus notes. Version of what she sent yesterday. Physics notes. A long day, long days. I went to the Orpheus notes but can't do much with them, or for long. Bored at the garden meeting. In suspense about whether Tom will show up tomorrow or ever. I want him to. And am watching to see what it's like to have daily company in writing, what I wanted. - I need quite a lot of money. Living beyond my income probably more than $100 a month. - She writes after a hard day. So stretched. What she's doing, calling up catastrophe. Calling it from three and a half years ago, the worst. And then what's she doing with it. She thinks it's about seeing what's real and not real. It isn't that, it isn't research, it's repair, it says. Can I tell her that without seeming to patronize. - Then Juliana writes about the Speaking bodies lectures. (Notice I got paid for this large original work just what Tomas got paid for his workshop on yodeling.) (I'm saying that wondering where I am going to get $3000.) She offered to write up the last of the lectures in Spanish. What I'm doing is important and I'm innovating it. I wouldn't be able to do it anywhere else, [the college] is the lab where I can do it in simplicity and connected all the way through, from neuroscience to journal writing, and use it to support women's particular intelligence. Margo doesn't get it, she has no idea what she could make of me, she has no idea how to market me, and I'm not pushing her to, because I like the size we are. - But? 7 Feb About embodiment studies - Millie freaking, but in ideas not in art. She needs a framework and shall I lend her mine. She demonstrated how someone would want to say spirit isn't body. When I questioned it she dissolved - she was euphoric at the thought of spirit displaced into an art-body, but couldn't make sense of it intellectually. I'm saying three things: 1) let the art lead, let the ideas come to you from the art; 2) feel fear and pain in the body not in thoughts - what I think about her is that 'being ill' is what she is instead of angry; and so 3) be angry in art. I'm treading the most dangerous edge yet, with her, because illness is a result of something she's doing to hold herself together after extreme dissociation. Am I afraid for her? Not yet, but noticing I should be aware. It's psychosis I'm dealing with. True anger, anger at the betrayer, a fire to burn out auto-immune disease. Is my guess. What I can offer her is to be a pioneer in the program. What I think about embodiment studies now, what I should be doing about embodiment studies. Students - Anna, Carolyn, Carol, Rhonda, Juliana, Favor, Joyce Wills, Layla, Amanda, Anne, Emily. Karen - autoethnography as embodiment academics. Something for Louie on spirituality, subtle body and state change. - Something I notice comes to me - a misgiving - what if I know as much as I do because the devil is helping me, I've made a deal - my father crying, was he crying because he could see that - did he experience my sexual vigil at his deathbed as an evil sign of that alliance with the devil? This kind of misgiving would be reason to let my jeep break down, to stay poor, to not try to publish. I felt this just now working with subtle body materials. Do you have anything to say about that     misgiving strength Is it true     no Is it imprinted from childhood     no It's a fear of strength       Is it correct to be afraid of one's strength     no I allow myself to be strong at [my college] because it's nowhere       Do I think other people's strength comes from the devil     no Just mine     YES   It seems supernatural     no To a childish part     NO Is it like an artist's taboo     no Can you explain     liberation, improvement, coming through, by means of the Work That's where the strength comes from     YES But some little part doesn't believe that - is it some little part       I know I worked for it         So tell me about it     conflict, anger, delay, indecision A hold-out       A liddle bandito       But does it have a motive     decision It wants a decision       One card     to go on missing To continue as itself       That's a sweet motive       It doesn't want to forget that it's missing         This is actually a strong motive in me     YES What I am is missing     YES It's self-sabotage       But it's also self-care       Do you want to say more about it     act, to come through, by means of husband-inspiration (Kp, star) Mac daydreams     no Imagine myself with a husband who could take care of both       Understand the missing       And work around it         It's essential to me       Would I undo it     no I must always be an orphan       But I can be an orphan who has everything I need       Do you have any suggestions for how to do that     liberate and process decisions to withdraw Just whenever it happens       And does that look after the little thing       One card about my reluctance to talk to you     come through Reluctance to come through       8th What am I doing - looking at the Dame's rocket era - 1975 to 1985 or probably 1989 going back to school - years I was doing what I can now see was foundational but obscure, finding intuition by recognizing shreds in other people - assembling these piles of notes - it will be chaotic in the journals. I'm doing it now because I wanted poetry again and because I have a woman alongside who is doing her own work in obscure intuition. Do I need to test each of these shreds. It was also women separated to learn their powers, what was learned in that time is what needs transferring now. There's a lot I'm ready to throw out because ways I was helpless then I am not now, things I don't need reminding in. 9 Millie is in her house making pieces I'm being careful not to judge as art. She's bright but not so bright she knows not to sign off 'blessings' - what matters is that she's making and sending and able to trust me - I sent her Pinkola Estes paragraph about the creative life being about welcoming the farthest stranger. She wept. I said it was the stranger weeping at being welcomed. She said I'm her mentor. I said it's not exactly me, it's someone behind me, my mentor. She said, does that mean that if she learns she can pass it on. At the same time beautiful Susan is in her house more settled working steadily and feeling held together by me at a distance. She sends an image that takes my breath, her midriff in washed plaid shirt and blue jeans with white light in a sort of plaid overlay, stunning bodily presence. The day I had was steady too, I transcribed sheets from the folder called unsorted mythics, subtle body notes, Blake, the clairvoyants, more, feeling myself then a lean light energized exquisite sensitive being in a house with beauty at the windows, riding dames' rocket, searching searching with such private and steady precision for scraps of knowledge of what I was and could be, and other women with me. The difference it makes to me to have generous love, someone wanting what I have to say, someone wanting me to know her, loving the exchange itself. Will I hedge that? Yes. It's too soon to know how much of that is actually, can actually be, for me. So could I be that lean charged body again? It's not a good sign that she didn't mention that photo - the family photo where I gleam next to my egotistical father. 10 Little breakthrough there girl - Millie drooping because she read Birth of pleasure and her mother was undiagnosed 'mentally ill' and a girl. I wrote back, subj: recommending badness. Let me for a moment model badness and boldness rather than sadness and disconnection by saying it seems to me that a mother who is a crazy girl is an excellent subject for a painting. She wrote back fast, first time with no salutation and benign sigh-off, HA! I LOVE IT!! Ms Mol snowed in, deep snow no power her computer battery fading. - Then a little breakdown. Millie starts to paint her mother and gets scared. I say, keep going, paint your fear, you can paint anything. She finishes the painting and crashes into shaking and sobbing. She wants to phone me. She's full of thoughts. I say the little distance of email will help us. She can always take refuge in the moment. What is she feeling right now in her body. Sore heart she says. Okay that's good I say, it means you aren't blocking, watch your sore heart, etc. If it wants to expand beyond your body, let it. And then she writes: Blue, angular then lilac and faceted, then pink/yellow white orb of light and my body stopped shaking. And it did expand beyond me and I feel love. I say: Good work -   She says: You too. - When I notice what I'm doing it's as if I feel a thinness of self - did Joyce use to feel this when she did what her other told her to do and it worked? A faint incredulity, not strong. I am feeling that for my young women one of the most important things is teaching them that they don't have to fear pain, they can always venture into it because it won't overcome them. I'm so radical an educator, I have absolutely no care for academic standards, I want to teach them emotional courage first, so they can look straight at anything - emotional facts, early love, defense, dissociation, how to work directly with the body to restructure, leaving the thoughts to alter as they will - fearless disrespect of male blindness, strong experience of physical world, of attention to physical world - strong experience of feeling through to the significance of mythic elements. - [Then Susan's Kali poem] This one scares me - What is she messing with - And who is she taking me for -   Devotion to Durga Devotion to Ellie   That's too bizarre 11 Tom's note. Belligerent. Inaccurate. Uncaring. That's the main thing, uncaring. Not that I have a better option. He's shut tight. Now he's angry that I said he was flawed. He'd opened up, and again shut tight. 12 Saturday morning - it's wet - it's dim - comb-fronds of the palms are lifting, twisting, softly flapping, the lines of the comb quivering. How it is these days - I'm transcribing Orpheus notes, poetics, subtle body - pleasure - and very often checking email - all day long - and what does that tell me - I'm hungry, it tells me - starved yup. And there's another starved admirable creature in Vermont checking her email all day long and we're enjoying the moments of good company that are in those writers' exchanges - and she for some reason is imagining that I touch her - though there's a growing gap between my right upper front and eye teeth that's odd and ugly and there's flab at the small of my back and I have a right leg like a pole and there is that little knobule on my inner thigh and oh much other decrepitude. She for some reason lit up when she saw me plonked in front of her liking her. And she's principled about passion at the moment so she'll go for it because she likes to. I like it when she wants me, whatever that is, and am going along watching and playing to see what actually it is. And though I check email all day long I am not hooked on her image, I'm not exaggerating. If she were a man and what she is, I would be. I'd be idiotic. I'd be sailing away and fighting myself. Susan isn't fighting with herself, she's wanting to be turned on. 13 Sunday morning. It rained hard yesterday and is dull today. On Sundays is when I have to wonder whether Tom will show up. - Tom's room. He went out and got a room. 107 in the Reiss. He's going to have a cell phone by next week. He's pleased with himself. Was doing what he does, complaining that I expect things of him. I briskly called his bluff. He wanted me to praise him for his room and how improved he is. Etc. It bores me to write any of this. And Susan is giving me advice. I was grateful this morning and she used it to step up to the edge of instructing me. I hate being instructed. I loathe being instructed. Who is she imagining I am. None of these people are anything to do with me. What is this. It's 10:46. After I downloaded Quicktime I went into her email folder and erased everything. All of a muse. And renamed it gssusan. I'm set against her. I still have most of that correspondence in a file on my desktop but I'm done. I hate the hype. - Philip Dick. March 1974. A pink light shot into his <brain>. (Stroke killed him in 1982.) He interpreted it in various ways, "brilliant explorations of the nature of consciousness and identity." Jay Bremer The Chymical cook: a true account of mystical initiation in the Georgia woods. Barrytown. The dance of created lights: a Sufi tale. 14 So yesterday Tom showed up and I went with him from 11 to maybe 4. There was her reply when I got back and I was enraged by its tone. Today I haven't heard from her at all, it's the first day she hasn't written. Either we're having a fight or she has given up. I'm working with notes but with less energy. - And then she replies. Ooch the number of times she's knocked the stuffin' out of me. careful.jpg. The page opens on her mouth with light and silver. I said be careful, she said something in feeling that's like I am careful, sorry, sober, soft, real. 15 I am telling you this story because my heart is flooding at the difference it makes to my sense of possibility, that you can see these beautiful materials I found alone, and maybe use some of them. Which is to say you can see what I'm for. That makes my life happier all the way back and all the way around. [I wrote.] Then she says: i'll say this, though, again / be carried away in your inspiration / don't confine yourself don't deny you / rself / see that soreness for what it is / thresh from it the useful / patience and its better eye / the callous chaff discard / don't even watch it blow from your room / in your / heart in your body / slow / breathe / take / your / time   certainly i am using what you give - will you let yourself use what i give as well   far from finished / you are fine / you are astonishing / you are exquisite you / mustn't think of anything but opening / what that asks of you / what you need for it / being that headstrong wounded beautiful watery sensitive / alive and keen energy bring it / and also this / strong heart   have faith in your work To which I say: I use what you give all the time, but there is something else. You have an unfinished intention to instruct your parents, which I notice vividly because I have a strong unfinished intention to resist their instruction. I go into a rage when I smell that in you. For instance the TONE of this, it's hieratic, overbearing, as if a priestess on a throne showing a benign palm in Buddha's teaching posture, and the tone of some of your computer instruction. Wdn't you say that tone signals control? What the book and Joyce have tried to teach me is the difference between primal doting, which is self-interested and bent on concealing that fact, and disinterested love, which is action not feeling and is bent on being skilful for a spirit's benefit. This is what we rightly want from our parents and mostly don't get. Not to say that primal doting is bad, it's energetically essential. There is a difficulty here I haven't solved yet, which is not necessarily to say that you can tell me how to solve it, be careful. - What happened was that a junior thought she saw a weak moment and tried to use it to get the upper air of me and I roared out and slapped her down. That covert ambition of hers was a faultline and it snapped so that the two halves of the field are in different positions. She wasn't aware she was doing it and now she's shocked. And why does this thinking have such small handwriting? A narrowing of the eyes is how I feel it. So then she sent the photo to say I've got powers, you know, and I wrote back to say, You do, darlin'. 16 When I wake at night I say, I miss the shocks of pleasure all day. Then when I go to the computer I find an image and a Sharon Olds poem called A woman in heat wiping herself. The image has notebook coils, cables and electrical plug whited out but on the far right the profile of a thinking goddess made of grain whose forehead has opened forward to spill or form thought into the air. So she's flooding in work and I'm not repenting. She's feeling helpless and speechless and I say I'm not a good person for girls to be fond of, I'm brutal. She says I know you're proud of that. And am I? It's a word from their point of view. It's a courtesy to say so. From my point of view I was being messed with. In this note she says "I care about you" and that makes me want to snarl. It's dangerous at this point. If she gets vindictive what's the worst she can do. She can say I was seductive, I wasn't clear about boundaries. It's true I didn't deny being excited about her. Should I have said I wdn't be her advisor. But who else would be able to cope with her. I shouldn't have been vicious. That part is dangerous, that's the dangerous part. And she has it on record. All it takes is for one of her friends to advise her that way. So now I have to be careful and clear and nothing but supportive. 18 She's at Kirpalu for 4 days, we're settled down. She wasn't eating or sleeping, working all night. We settled down when I said what I felt abut her story of walking through the school having the freedom of the building. She was mad at herself because she learned to narrate her walk. I said she wasn't crediting the way she'd been exiled into her privilege and sent into the free space of knowledge alone, and isn't there an undercurrent of terror of that, so she gives herself the companion of a narrative voice. I said I've understood grief and shame about bad language but doesn't it just mean there's been a lot of her life where she didn't have good company. I said I like that she's working class. I feel fellowship with that because I know how long it takes to catch up and how much valor it takes. Tom came to the door ugly and cursing. A bus driver story. I made him coffee. He discharged. After a while I could tell him about transcribing and what I feel about the note. And then about Millie. And then we drove north. There was sun, wind, heavy rain, sun again. Tom was wearing new clothes head to foot, work boots, jeans, yellow teeshirt, red hoodie. He filled the tank when we got back, bought breakfast, not $3.99. On Soledad Road he said I shdn't feel I can't talk about her ... my friend. I listed facts. For half an hour after, I was petrified. I didn't know whether it was his tension or just mine. For the rest of the day it was, how was it, cautious and neutral. He showed me his work places, the glider port and La Costa. On Crest he told me things he has told three or four times. How does he look. He has lost his gut, his face is a bit thin, he's good for 60 but he still looks evasive. Is that the word? Crooked? And is that something to do with me. I asked whether he ever misses Rebecca. In a selfish way, he said. He kept pushing to find the limit. There never was one. She loved him. And me. Can I follow my own advise. Process. I don't know how it's supposed to go but I can be true and feel what I feel and give it. - So is this beautiful woman wet when she comes into a room where I am because she is starving to grow into her reaches? Does she have quite a lot of reach left to grow into? She's very devotional. She's willing to know what I am the way hardly anyone has been. Does she have a rind? (Yes.) Am I willing to harrow whatever hell comes up with her? What do we have so far - She's financially more competent than I am. She's driving a new car, a 4wd she researched. She knows how to succeed in business. She's athletic. She has a kayak. She's raised a child, is on good terms with her family. She's clear about ordinary people, kind, witty. She's visual. She's intellectual. She's mystical. She's principledly naked and honest. She's technological and equipped. She does yoga for subtle body flow. She has a lot of range, she reads Foucault and Castaneda. She was turned on by building a bibliography. She's swift and soft. She has a collected knowledge of poems. A movie with a huge black man on death row for a murder he didn't commit. He is simple and electrical. He can heal by pouring light into people and absorbing something he then gives off in the form of a column of gnats. He's very gorilla-like and the glossy dark brown of fudge brownies. He can feel people's beings and if he's touching them he can see their events. When the time comes he goes to the chair without a fight and on the orders of guards who love him and know he's innocent. From a white person's point of view he's the unconscious body. From a black person's point of view the movie is amazingly racist. Black = simple, magical, sacrificial. 20 We drove the Japatul Road, walked our chaparral road in light rain, took the Sunrise Highway to Santa Ysabel, came home by Highland Valley Road, the San Pasqual Valley and then 15. Tom drove perfectly. He was offended when I wouldn't drink drive-through coffee but now it is as if his bursts are tasks we solve cooperatively. He's paying for gas. He was relaxed today, he was willing to hear the names of any number of bushes. He drives in silence when we're in beautiful places. I was relaxed I suppose too. I love that bit of chaparral. What did I see. Ceanothus was starting, a pale blue. Deerweed, what's growing with my agave. Yuccas in the distance with full flower heads. Willow, one willow, putting out bits of leaf. The whole chaparral so refreshed, actually a stream burbling. Manzanitas, eastwood, burls. Lemonadeberry, buckwheat, scrub oak, something with quite large yellow flowers, white sage, Cleveland sage, a single currant, sotol, dudleya, something like a broom. 21st Susan's at Kirpalu and it's as if she never was. It's clear that all the pink juice was coming from her. She brightens me, she's giving it to me. I'm giving nothing back except half-hearted permission to adore. No I do delight in her but I don't need her. Is that as it should be? Is it stable, could she hook me? She's hooked, she wants to be hooked, it suits her to be hooked, she wants it as fuel, but because she's hooked she wants me to be hooked. She wants the delight, she can't get delight as informed as mine from someone else, but she wants too much when she wants to assure herself of it as if her being itself does not assure it. She can see me personally and I need that, but should I refuse it and just be her teacher? Would she stop giving pink juice, which I love? Should I stop telling her about myself? Can she be my muse if I'm her teacher? She's a lot of what's missing with Tom. Is it fair to her to let her give it to me while I'm keeping on with Tom? Should I let Tom into more of it? Meantime Louie, with no evidence but what she can pull out of the air, is saying she's feeling abandoned for some reason. There was a man she was introduced to. She was immediately too strong for him. His name was Bob, which she already knew was wrong. Tom's willful waywardness is so to my advantage. 22nd I phone Tom in his room. He has a lot to say about Hunter Thompson. Had two days bailing in a high rise in construction, 30th floor looking onto Coronado. I found his speech long but I was liking his voice. What he said about Sunday was that part of the way back on the road he saw that individual plants had different personalities. Some were friendly to him, others were not. Frontline piece on US soldiers in Iraq. "I love you" they say to each other. "This is where god wants me to be." 23rd Bumper sticker on Saturday: Who would Jesus bomb today. What I woke thinking is that Miz Mol - I don't like writing 'Susan' - didn't rise to the fight and that is decisive. She crumbled, she lay down and whimpered "I am broken and I am fallen, I am defeated." She protested, You're mean. I had been sardonic but not actually mean. Mildly sardonic. She also said I escalated the writing too much and called it showing off. So I am too big for Miz Mol it turns out though she gives me shocks of pleasure with her pictures and her language. So now I have to be her teacher not her lover, which means I am scot free. But what wd I be if I were not scot free? Would I be what I was with T and C? Defeated and therefore fertilized - is that right? It's an artist's choice. Louie made it but as soon as she began to be an artist she gave up. She quit to make money. I don't think Miz Mol will do that. Those very dark unusual spots on my left thigh. I know a lot but if I were to die of them I wouldn't know why it had happened - that death seems so much to be a result of some particular decision somewhere. Would I ever know it wasn't a body decision made because I did the thesis for those years, or stayed with Tom, or became wise enough with the book to do what I do at [the college] So here I see that it's the powers I think I'll be killed for. Is that it? But the way I feel it is that I gave up sex for those things, and sex is what would keep me alive. Is that it? - So here's what I have going - Millie is making little things and feeling when she makes them and thinking about how that works. Carol got stuck writing about being bipolar and I said unstable identity is very interesting and I suspect there's a stable identity behind it. Juliana got stuck in a fight with herself about language theory and I said, Juliana are you afraid to know more than all the men? Jeanne wrote something asking how I am and I said Jeanne what happened to you, why did you lose your nerve? Favor sent a note saying thank you, thank you, thank you. And Susan - is home from Kripalu and is starting over as my student not my lover, and I'm going to the computer every 15 minutes looking for something sweet and real from her. I told her about Tom and showed his pictures. 24th So here's Thursday morning bright and birdy. Susan has dropped me. A dream that I'd left my camera, clipboard, some other things, in a garden and had to go back for it. Snowing. I'm noticing that in this dream I actually found them, someone had moved them to a hollow in the earth and covered them with a jacket and camera and CD player, I think. 25 Don't have a fear block in the solar these nights because S isn't tapping into me. Have just read through our 54 pages - a mix - intimate and foreign. Sometimes she's gaspingly open, othertimes abstractly intellectual in a way I don't follow. I wd pick up on what got to me and ignore the rest. Did I do anything to deserve to be cut off, I'm asking. I don't think so. The intimacy was in making language, we made language together that gave us pleasure. We escalated into it. The intimacy when we were together was also liking to see. Personally I was right to say, I'm not going at your pace, I have connections to look after. She was wrong not to ask whether I did. 26 Kind of sickened - am I - Anna obsessing about John for 36 pages - Susan raging - Millie 90 emails later - 28 She squalls like Louie, it blows over. Drove with Tom yesterday to the Santa Rosas. What did I like best. The passage after Anza where there were wildflower patches in rocky highlands - blue, orange, yellow. The mountain views were stunning above Palm Desert, and I liked the agave garden in a cleft off the road, but those patches and drifts of blue and orange that I saw so briefly as we whisked through, those were the value of the day. A blotch of orange on a distant slope, a running swale of blue alongside the asphalt. Those small wild California poppies, lupins. And I love the mustard, which floats, floating particles of yellow, waist height, and everywhere silky bearded grass. Tom listened and I thanked him, he drove nice, very nice, and I thanked him. He got onto the agave slope with me in his blue jeans red teeshirt and yellow work boots. He let me tell him about the rumble with Susan and its peaceable outcome. We have learned courtesy with each other. He's paying for gas. He's pleased when we abort his rages. He remembers to ask to be praised when he does that. What to think of Susan's mass of self-absorption - loveless - she's so loveless - so full of poses - really so incurious for all her liveliness - and why is she so beautiful - because she's burning hard - whatever have I seen so far - there's a stream about poetry - one about refusing vocation - one about failing with Gia - one about the relation of refused vocation and failure with Gia. There's something solid in this - she's very flamey and tricksy - she's more like Carmichael in a way, something too speedy for love - "use your eyes" - and I know, I will know, what she needs to do - 1st March Does she have it to be a poet? She's flamey enough, enough of a star. 2nd I shdn't read Susan before I go to bed. Sorted her piece into Gia - poetry - present. The overlap between Gia and poetry is where she has revelations. At the end she acknowledges that what she makes of me is not me. There was a graphic piece, poem about her mattress. Four audio files of her talking about mostly poetry, reading. I hated when she described a sexual fantasy with me in it. There was also a paranoid fantasy. She said she needs an object, eros and poetry are that way in her.   Is there anything to say about Millie? She's very frangible, is that the word? She can crumble from one moment to the next. She's had crashes that are very intense. I've been saying 1) feel it in your body, 2) paint it, and she's been coming through to both fierce and transcendently symbolic pictures. Then she has a day or two of intellectual excitement. Then a painting or something else puts her over the edge and we go through it again. What tipped her this time was when she asked for and I sent some of her past emails.   What I assume is that the crashes are reconnects, she's allowing childhood somatics that her talk therapy didn't get to. I'm also assuming that it will go on for a while and that she'll quickly notice that her health is better. 3rd For that last crash yesterday I wasn't at the computer and she interrupted it so that it didn't resolve - I think that's what happened - so today she felt drowsy and dull. She said should she just sleep. I said my guess was no, that she should try asking her uncon for a drawing, knowing she'd risk another crash. She said she'd go for it and I should just check in later. Then some hours later yes there was a drawing and yes she had shaken and sobbed and had had a nosebleed. Then had slept briefly and woken refreshed and no longer out of it. What have I done today. A lot of sorting for Anna and Carolyn. A lot. I think I'm done for the day. Susan is imagining herself scanning the horizon for me, a widow's walk. Sent an image of a face in whitest sleep. 5th Nora knocked with a birthday present, Starbucks card for $50. We scrambled. What was that. Friday night, end of the week, she looks tired, I don't have a bra on, we catch at moments but it's strained. And yet she's saying she wants me to live here, she knows what it means to have me in the third floor of a building that's her. Does it matter what it means to me to have her in the ground floor of a building I'm top floor in? Probably not. - Millie tells me today that her bloodwork is normal for the first time in 3 years - she's lost 14 pounds without trying and is pinker, she says her friends say. David phoned. Louie this morning. Miz Mol's present sitting in a warehouse. Tom briefly to say he'll come round tomorrow, he didn't forget. And Louie is having Rowen to supper! for a party for me (and she had Mike). And Nor's Starbuck's card. That's quite a few people I've got. part 5 in america volume 7: 2004-05 december-april work & days: a lifetime journal project