| in america 7 part 5 - 2005 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
6th March 2005 I am horrible 60. That is the worst number yet. I haven't minded any of the numbers until that one. I resent it. I resent being ugly. I resent being dumpy. I resent this grim ugly face. I'm looking at that sentence and what I feel is not grim but sad. Alright I'm sad to be ugly. I don't know just how ugly I actually am but I've hated every photo I've seen this year. Well if you went to the gym I say to myself and don't go to the gym. If I were in love I wouldn't be ugly. And refuse to be in love because it's madness.
6:59. What kind of day is it. Sun coming in from the east, cloud overhead. At the Valhalla house there's sun on the snow, on the spruce, shining level through the windows onto the chimney wall. The lane is drifted shut. The walls are full of squirrels. In the house on Pender sun (maybe) would have been lying yellow on the yellow carpet, I could get up and run the bath. I'm homeless, but just not homeless enough to make it change. I do not love this room. (Sigh.) And neither does it. I needed to teach, I desperately needed to give what I found, and I'm teaching in just the way I'd want, apart from the fact that they can't read Being about - hardly anyone can, so far just Jody, isn't it - but teaching isn't good for my spirit - I'm being consumed without burning - they thrive and I don't. Put up the journals. Publish Being about one way or another. Put notes in origin into a CD. Use this time to get my work up. Do that - This year I did get field & field and weather online in a beautiful format. I have the blue pages transcribed though I don't know what to do with them. The surface of my eyes is stinging these days. 7th Tom showed up at 5:30 after work, hemming and hawing about cards and presents, produced a portfolio case that will work for garden projects, nice, and a Sierra Club card with a field of lupins, also nice. We went out and sat in his 10-seat work van and he drove me up and down the streets in his neighbourhood. We parked at the new Extraordinary Desserts and sat with the young in black eating a piece of chocolate cake that came with orchids on it. I said the book said I shouldn't sleep with him until he's writing. He sat up very straight and looked what was that look intelligent centered soberly intelligent. I said the right thing. Then when I got home and had answered Millie's bundle of emails and Susan's two, one with an animated gif on the theme of W, and plugged in the phone again, there was a ring and it was Luke. He was driving home after work on a car commercial in Ladner. I could hear rain. The best thing was that he had liked Nights below Station Street. - At Scott's with Tony's crew, then at Anderson's blissed out among the bushes. Euphoric. Bought things, an acacia pendula, a California bay, very sharp and dark green, an oakleaf hydrangea. Two trays of ivy, a needlepoint and a variegated. 9th Jose-Luis today. What do I need. To pick up my spade from Eliz's. It's 3:40 in the morning, done sleeping, will go to Susan's letter in a moment. How are things? Susan's CDs that I don't really like. French songs. It's for Lua Descolorida which is fine but the shrieking Messaeian is unbearable. Upshaw is not subtle enough for me. And the Mixtec princess priestess, first song familiar, it was on one of Tom's tapes. For her it's female power-passion eroticism and she likes it for the words but it's too purple for me. Embarrassed not to like them. And what about her writing. She's overwrought and wordy. There are good little clumps. She's too in love with herself. She's not strong in wholes. She's intelligent but not clear. She doesn't have a drive to lucidity. She likes swirling around fancily in the foam. I have to keep checking myself from playing along in that fancy literary way. Yes she's foamy. 10 Most of Scott's plants bought. Wrote Susan a tough reply, said what I say above. She will squall. I said I'm not scared of her squalling. Tom was here last night. Limped up the stairs. He'd come to tell me three things. His bad day at work. His good judgment the day before when a parolee at work tried to sucker him into throwing a punch and he flashed but caught himself, said things to himself including, what would I tell Ellie, and said to the man You're not in my movie and I'm not in your movie. The third thing was that as of April 1 he's promoted to assistant manager. He looked wonderful. He looked 16. He looked returned to the man he was before he became a bad man - in his red hoodie and blue jeans and muddy work boots. I hugged him and kissed his cheek and was proud of him and glad of him, and he said he was seeing love girl looking happy. 11 It's 5:30 and I have to be on the site at 7:30. They're doing the paving stone and DG today. I've loved this week outside. I love the plants waiting under the Australian willow. White Wave hydrangeas with acanthus, both so dark green. The acacia pendula. The apricot tree with a blooming cistus for its feet. The little fig. White cosmos with variegated ivy. I cleaned out the water jar and left it running - the look of clean water tucked under low bougainvillea branches in a dark mulched bed up against the paved platform. Very perfect I want to say though I know perfect doesn't take degrees. In the afternoons those little brownheaded birds chirpy in the thicket, mops of jasmine on the fence. Both climbing roses are blooming pink out of reach. The bougainvillea and the geijera visible over the fence and hedge, very fine together. The enclosedness of the side yard, the sunny strip of side verandah with its open step down onto grass. - Kroeber on the Mojave. They like to walk. Dream knowledge. "Stood up and sang their dreams in repeated cycles" (Meloy). A style of literature which is as decorative as a patterned textile in its color and intricacy, its fineness or splendour, that have meaning, not the action told by its figure, and as a simple but religious people don the same garment for festivity or worship, for dress or interment, provided only it is gorgeously pleasing enough, so the Mohave weave their many mythis in one ornamental style and sing them on every occasion that calls for music. Kroeber Imposingly tall, copiously tattooed, good swimmers, obstinate, not shy, disdainful of excess goods. Melons, beans, corn and pumpkins. They favored fish more than game. "Their pottery often bore the design of a fish bone or the leaf of a cottonwood, the totem tree of the lower Colorado before dams and reservoirs drowned the once considerable galleries that grew along the riverbanks." Meloy The Pleistocene pavements of the lower Colorado Geoglyphs Needles area, Topock Quite simply, the ancients held great reverence for the mystic powers of stones. To tell your story you recited the names of things, the springs, rocks, plants, animals, stars, mountains, rivers. To tell your story you sang a map. They would walk to the Pacific, 200 miles. 12 A happy day. I left Santiago grouting the paved pads and got Tom and went out 8 east to Kniffings Roses which had Graham Thomas and old roses. - There I got up and was an hour on the internet looking up just Sombreuil, which was an inspired leap, I find, and Graham Thomas, and something else I maybe shouldn't have got, because it has a silly name and because it is too purple-pink a thing for my delicate scheme out front. At that point I get up and go to the computer to look at my digital pictures of Scott's front yard to see whether there's going to be room. It's like this [sketches]. Calm down, leave it for tonight. It's coming to the planting and I'm excited. Santiago did the pads beautifully. I proposed that garden to get Joy's ugly fountain and benches out of the back, and now I'm taking that little pleasure chamber seriously and will have to deal with them among its voluptuous billows and scents. Anyway, Tom and I. He drove. Sat and waited at the nursery. And then we had breakfast, parking at the breakfast café - oh I have to say first that on the coast it has been chill and dark, and when we got to Alpine we were into the sun and had heat all day until we came in sight of downtown on the way home. We leaned over in the parking lot and had a quarter kiss that was thrilling. Tom had told all his work thoughts as we drove but then at the café I talked about students. He had been reading my journal vol 1. We sat in the sun on our road overlooking the preserve, and then took an unknown road south, unknown to both of us, and stopped at a general store for sodas and drove on through oak valley bottoms. Came home on 94 and left the roses at Scott's. In the Albertson's parking lot I waited next to the jeep looking at other cars. When Tom came out I said, I don't like the Volvos, they look like little rats. Tom said, They do, too. He went satisfied home, I went satisfied home. 13 It was Sunday. I'm dragging tired. At the farmer's market buying honey and flowers - egg-yellow ranunculus, white iris, v dark red pinks I'll say are from Frank for my 60th birthday. We're the same age now, this is as far as he went. This aft I took Tom for lunch to the fish and chips place. We sat on a concrete wall by the bay. He read aloud from On the road. When he read the last page a large tear splashed onto his arm. In the café we had opened volume 1, that he'd proofread, and I'd gone through it to tell him what I'd found useful. 14 I said proofread and Tom couldn't help editing. Most of his marks were over-correct and some were ignorant. I decided to be tolerant. I also decided to tell him my principles in for instance punctuation. We got through that conversation with no harm to either and both were proud of how improved we are. He's willing to read my journals - he's on volume 2 now - and that was unthinkable ten years ago. I am not panicking that he's ignorant and unworthy - he's worthy in the ways that he is. That sigh surprised me; it agrees. He's company I can stand and a quarter of a kiss hasn't lost interest despite ten years and much else. He said yesterday that after our hour on the ledge at Japatul he'd closed his eyes in bed and been able to see in detail. There'd been ten minutes when I wandered off, and he found himself seeing the way a branch moves. I couldn't see with him next to me, but I can remember to sit somewhere else.
14 That big dumb greedy lout Tony once again failed to show up after he promised to finish today. I'm hung up more days - but finished Astro and looked at Millie's website. Jose-Luis fixed the passenger side window on the jeep. [The college] faculty negotiations are setting us up to be locked-in drones like usual faculty, as the cost of more pay and benefits. 5-year contracts, will I do that? Or have to leave?
Millie meanwhile says that one of her friends who has seen her website with our dialogues suddenly got something she had been hung up on for weeks and went off and finished a paper. 15 Bench on the pad - irrigation in - plants tomorrow - sore - eyelids burnt on their edges - is it - Tony is signed off, now it's me. They trashed the planting beds, I'll have to redig them tomorrow. A heavy day. 16 Millie this morning thanking me thanking me four times because she has gathered the strength from this interchange to leave her parents. I did a bad experimental thing last night, sent the same email to Susan and Louie. What did I discover. Louie was responsive, Susan not. Louie loves to love anything, the mention of slate paving. Susan only loves what she can be clever about. Is that fair to say? No, probably not. But yes. When she's clever she bores me. And am I mad at her? Yes because she stopped doing what I jeered at her for doing, adoring me. It is 6:17, an ivory dawn, California light on the Martins Tower, on the grassy palms. - I couldn't wait, straight out the door to plant. And then my jeep wasn't there. I stood and stared. Could I have left it somewhere else. I started walking, baffled. Crossed the street, walking west, at random it seemed. Dimly wondering ... somewhere back here? And then remembered backing into a tight spot on the far side of 4th last night. There it was. I budgeted 2 hours to plant and spent maybe 5 or 6, dragging. Still need to plant seeds, go to KRC for stepping stones, supervise the firepit, check the water, get a carpenter. Arctic Wilderness Refuge - oil drilling passed 41-39 today. 17 Second time recently I dreamed Tom was with another woman. A young blond I knew was attracted to him, complicated stuff I won't describe. I said to her friend, I know how it will go, he'll be enthralled with her, there will be things about her he can't stand, he'll miss me. But I can't stay when he's wanting someone else. This was in LA. He'd parked my jeep and couldn't describe exactly where he'd left it. A lot maybe 19 blocks to the SW. I said he should show me. I'd take a taxi.
- Reading On the road with Tom's underlines. Tom reading it at sixteen. It's readable not dead, but discountable because they so much blast their brains - such a boy-blankness in their ecstasies - and yet anyone likes to read about wildness. Thursday morning. What do I have to do. Packets Monday. 18 Louie doesn't think the Elissa letters will do for her yoga person. Is she afraid they are too direct? There were some figures by the tracks, reeling, in front of a woodfire. "I never know whether to ask, he might be anywhere." We drove on. Somewhere behind us or in front of us in the huge night his father lay drunk under a bush, and no doubt about it - spittle on his chin, water on his pants, molasses in his ears, scabs on his nose, maybe blood in his hair and the moon shining down on him. Susan is sulking. She is sending back my hot water bottle! I sent what I thought was a nice note saying we'd failed to be alike and had been equally shocked and disappointed. And she is saying it has nothing to do with likeness, she followed her heart. I write back and say but look at how right now we are failing to connect because we are understanding this differently. Am I being rationalistically obtuse? I'm right. She doesn't actually like me though she fastened upon me in her imagination. She doesn't reply to stuff that interests me. Now my heart is sore, she has hurt my feelings. We aren't going to get through this, she's a sulker. She's righteous, she thinks having a crush on someone is doing them a favor. It's hopeless isn't it, and I can't do anything for her as an advisor? It says I can. 19 It was like the immanent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies. Then Dean suddenly grew quiet and sat in a kitchen chair between Stan and me and stared straight ahead with rocky doglike wonder and paid no attention to anybody. He simply disappeared for a moment to gather up more energy. If you touched him he would sway like a boulder suspended on a pebble on the precipice of a cliff. He might come crashing down or just sway rocklike. Then the boulder exploded into a flower and his face lit up with a lovely smile and he looked around like a man waking up and said, "Ah, look at all the nice people that are sitting here with me. Isn't it nice! Sal, why, like I was tellin' Min just t'other day, why, urp, ah, yes!" He had no idea of the impression he was making and cared less. People were now beginning to look at Dean with maternal and paternal affection glowing in their faces. He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he would become. Dean has come into the world to see it ... The sun rose on pure and ancient activities of human life. They were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. He's my mom's age. 1957 he was 35. Neal Cassady. Died at 47. Cassady's letters "loose rambling sentences with meticulously detailed observations." - So now I bought a bike, yellow Peugeot, pretty, $70 and another $50 for locks. 20 Oh little birds still scrabbling to get into the wall but you can't. Stiff sheet of wire mesh crumpled into the hole. Sunday morning. Bright clouds. Listening to KCRW. Wish I had something to say. Wish I had music in my belly - or wherever would make a difference. Susan in her cold little burrow bitter with me, that she tried to give me her best and I jeered at it. I on my industrial roof bitter that she said she adored me but it wasn't me. She wanted to be a baby not a lover. I wanted to be a baby not a lover. Music in the belly is the baby isn't it. - I've been so tired and draggy since the garden work. Last time I dug but this time I only rushed around a lot. Last time it took me a week to recover. Achy. Yesterday I looked up a typing service on the web. Transcription from handwriting $4 a page, space and a half. The golden west would have been $12,000-20,000 just to type. 21 Email from Louie. I'll say first it's a bit before 4 in the morning. I fell asleep on the couch at 6, slept with the light on. - Email from Louie. I sent her the love woman work woman letter to Anna and she didn't say it was wonderful. Wanted to know why I didn't comment on her meeting with Peter Royce. All of that feels icky, the girl thickness of hurt feelings and jealousies and indulgences. Louie's my best friend and I often have that icky feeling about her. - Now it's daylight, lovely daylight of ten to seven, morning sky reverberant. I got up and opened the door. Birds like little automata squeaking. Equinox. I have the ranunculus left over from a bunch, yellow, up on the shelf with my journals. The eyes of the Gitskan girl peer from behind them. I was remembering the light in the corridor at E.Pender, the space in my house, the quiet, in those days, when I could write, when I brimmed with things to say. Yesterday I tried out the cathedral across the street. They had a German Vespers at 5 o'clock for Palm Sunday. A procession gathered in the back, long robes black and purple in cheap materials. The choking stink of incense, and then those individuals passing with pretentious gaits, first a man whose function was to carry a little pole at the angle of a cocked penis. 22nd And then the choristers, a small Bach group, the women's faces shocking in their wrongness, young and somehow corrupt. A vampire woman with black lipstick, a girl with a lot of acne and a weak snoutishness. Dull-looking men. At the last another man with a pole and then a tall person who was the only one in purple from head to foot, long hair showing through to a bald patch at the back of his head. A confused heaping-up of organ notes. Then when the singing began I realized the acoustics of the space were so poor the music could never be anything but thin and distant. Around me bodies sitting correctly without wriggling and writhing as I was beginning to. Pillars made of cast concrete, the whole interior, its Gothic vault, clerestory windows, cast in grey concrete with seam lines from the forms showing as faint stains. Meantime a tenor aria, all in German, saying false world I want no more of you, etc. I endured for a while, anthropologically, and then left and walked up 4th to that bit of edge onto the canyon, where grass is blooming in remarkable large purple plumes, fuzzy, and the orange sun was showing a perfect half above the ocean. That ritual had so much to do with class hierarchy and medieval mentality, though the boy next to me on the bench, a music student it seemed, had an earring and was wearing skateboard shorts. Last night - seven thirty maybe, it was dark - I heard my name shouted from below and there was Tom in dirty work clothes. Oh good. I throw him down my keys. He's tired, his face is deep-creased from lack of sleep. He was supervising 80 people on a hectic jobsite over the weekend, has been driving his crew morning and night, four hours a stretch sometimes, and yet he was burning with energy. Sat next to me on the couch with his feet propped on the chair and talked for an hour and a half full speed, telling his adventures. I was delighting in him, petting his damp hair. My warrior. Santiago is at Scott's building forms. Packets coming in. 1. Susan's is sober, clearer, carefully not abusive, at the cost of all heart-sweetness. 2. Dwayne has told enough of his story for me to know what he needs to do. 3. Carolyn is lovely in tone and has it done, basically. 4. Anna is a mess but showing what her hitch has been. 5. Sean is late as ever. 6. Astro too. 7. Carol has her four parts held together as her brother dies. 8. And oh Millie has found an apartment in Marshfield and last night had a letter from a stranger in Florida who chose the most excruciated of her moments and loved her for it. I'm an instrument of miracle for Millie. - I came in from the rain, wet, cold, had been helping Santiago and Ben finish the firepit after it got dark, after the rain began - finish it poorly - and there was an email from Susan saying packet process is working for her and wd I be willing to help her change her study plan, drop Ayurveda. I wrote back hastily and said there is one world is almost perfect in tone, sober, without mannerism, and later can I have it for the semester magazine. Is she liking the packet process because I savagely do not make nice? Sobered her? If so thank you miz larger self god. When the front panel of the form came off and showed how messed up the tile squares were I almost fainted. I don't know if there was a relation. It was like a light stuttering when it's going out, fading in jerks. I caught myself and got up and walked around and went and bought some water, was dehydrated. Across the room - I've been wanting to say - a couple of tall stems of large pink lilies with three white roses and four of the fluffy purple grass heads. They are particularly long-stemmed because of the vase I found at the goodwill. It's a splendid combination. The lilies are still fresh, a number of them, with that pink candy smell. 3' tall. Listen to it rain, it's heaping down. Where I parked against the curb the gutters were running five inches deep. Santiago and Benicio two small dark men, both with childish small hands. I was with them from 2:30 till 8:30. The way they don't clean up as they go and work with tools and bits underfoot. They could do what they do but weren't thinking ahead. We had tented the firepit in clear plastic held up at one end by a sheet of plywood leaned against the wall. I was holding up the other end in a brace across a 2x4. Santiago was on his knees smoothing and filling. Benicio was under another sheet of plastic mixing concrete in the wheelbarrow. 23 Water cloud piles with open spaces between them. 8 o'clock. I don't want to start my duties, either at Scott's or on the computer. 24 Thursday. I've been working since 6 this morning. Millie, Dwayne, Susan. Now it's 6:30 and I think that's it. What to do with the rest of the day. Antsy. Wanting Tom to be done with his work ordeal or else Susan to reply. 25 Having to be out the door at 7:30 to meet the carpenter at Scott's. Having to talk to Tony about firebrick and money. Susan all rattled about what she's doing wrong. Mil in a lupus flare. Had to fix the phone this morning, replace the jack box. All have made me nervous and I can't face advisor-writing. - We liked each other today. Mr Tom in his dirty work clothes and boots, sunburnt, tall, fit, scraped up, green-eyed, no fat on him, and that voice. He saw me drive up beaming with pleasure to see him and it gave him a flush of happiness from head to foot, he said. He watched me talking to Eliz and was proud of me and I was proud of him too cos he's 59 and physical. He's proud of himself for his supervising dash and wisdom and pleased to have been in the world, wind, sun, morning, night, heat, cold. And now Susan replying finally sez she misses me. I say I miss her too. Say I admire her.
Well I don't only admire her, but what have I been thinking about her - - Lemon Grove to RCP Block and Brick. It turns out that's where Bud and Carol live. Tom is driving and goes by feel, small street with a lot of trees, which of these houses? Small ranches. Drive past them, drive back. Park in front of that one. And then, and then. Dark small rooms full of stuff, an extremely fat man with a mouth like a line turned down at the corners. A wife who automatically stops talking when he starts. Why was I exhausted after - because there was no civil way to leave sooner and sparing people is exhausting. I was looking at Tom with pleasure though, sitting near him. Then I come home and there's Susan replying to her reply letter, exquisite Susan in no old life.
27 What happened yesterday was that at the end, when we were saying goodbye, I went to shake Bud's hand and he said, Give me a hug. I had that instant of hesitation, and then gave over and hugged him hard. And then went to Carol and was thinking if I've hugged him I'm going to hug her, and saw the second of hesitation in her eyes. What I see more clearly after I've slept is that he was establishing dominance and I gave it to him but then went and established it over her. I feel slightly sick at having given over to that gut bucket. It was automatic. I wasn't expecting it, I wasn't alert. She said they'd looked at my web site and were intimidated. He jumped in at that moment and said something false to imply he wasn't intimidated, all he cares about is that Tom likes me. Meantime he talked for two hours straight and looked at me the whole time he was talking. My quandary is I don't want to wrestle someone like that for dominance, and certainly not in his own garden, and not in a way that humiliates him, but being dominated even in that shallow way is harmful to me. It harmed my energy. I have twice his brains and don't want him to have to feel it, or even to have Tom feel it, since he was Tom's intellectual friend, but that leaves me alone in the company, looking at bluejays and a lump of obsidian. They are sixty year old hippies - both were wearing handkerchief headbands! - completely sold out in their work - Rand and an atomics company - out of shape - flaring into energy when they remember their old days - 1968 on the Banner Grade - drunk and stoned and goodlooking - and now having been settled so long it's the children and grandchildren things happen to. Meantime there's Tom who kept moving and stayed wild by burning things down, daring zero again and again. There he was in a pink teeshirt, lean, brown, that handsome strong nose, with a woman who has a PhD. And here am I, whose glory days are much more recent. Well, they know places in the Baja and will take us. It's quarter past 5, still dark. Why am I waking so early these days. In a week Louie is coming. Ah there are the birds, at first light.
Tononi G, G Edelman 1998 Consciousness and complexity Science 282:1846-1851 28 Monday. Clouded. This week to finish things before Louie comes. Susan reading Lakoff got stuck on a sentence where he talked about information passing through a bottleneck. I said it's because the language is wrong. Think of it as a pail of water warming in the sun. And she got it - instantly and gratefully - which makes me think I should somehow be teaching what I've seen - what I found in my patient strenuous years. I need better students. Need one well-placed proactive person who sees what I can do and places me somewhere. Plucks me out of [the college], this little room, Tom, all these dead ends. There it says Tom isn't. But yesterday in his room at the Reiss, horrible little hotel, horrible room, iron cage at the foot of the stairs, hideous furniture, heavy plastic that crackles under the sheets. He has to pay $10 if I visit, zonked out drug dealers on the sidewalk. We lay on that bed tired out staring at the TV. Oh Maryland. - I'm so sanguine about Millie. This morning it hit her worse than ever. She called it being mangled. Bones crushed. I suggested it might be birth memory. She said she just needed to be quiet. I said yes that's what newborns need. She wrote back much later and said she wasn't sure it was birth and sent an image that had a ragged womb shape with bits like sickle moons floating in it. I said had her mother attempted an abortion. She said she didn't know but the story in the notes about the man who lacerated himself because his mother had tried to abort him had struck her. She had actually lacerated her own cervix with a knife. Then she sent an astonishing image of what looks like womb as blast furnace. Lat week she had a feeling of shocks all over her body. I said, did you ever have shock therapy? She said, eight times, anesthetized.
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