in america 8 part 1 - 2005 april

work & days: a lifetime journal project

April 4 2005 Enseñada, Motel Balboa Cerillos. At the Gigante trying to mime a lighter. In the motel mirror a pink flowering hibiscus and a red and white relay tower with blue sky. I'm trying not to begin this book, which Louie bought, with complaint about Louie. Yesterday we ate vegetables on the roof and then got onto 94 and were quickly among hills flowering, if I'd been able to see them, which I wasn't because I was driving. Narrow two lane, huge buses. That stretch of road where we're on a ridge and can see ridge beyond ridge to the east. There were goldfields marking was it the east-facing slopes, floating mustard unusually high, pale pink and mauve phlox almost bloomed out, that low magenta flower, is it owl's clover, lupins, brittlebush, and grasses, luscious grasses with such a sheen that the hills seemed washed in an uncanny silver light somehow suspended within the light of day. I am freaked by something, maybe it's the responsibility of the expedition and especially the driving, but maybe also being with Louie. There I stop and ask. Yes it says. Is it the old thing? Yes. My mother. Yes. Last night an evil dog in the yard across the street behind my head. He'd hear another dog barking in the distance and start up. A deep dark large sharp angry bark, very male. And the man who knocked loudly when we were already asleep. San Felipe, Chapala Motel 3-storey motel, I'm at the top of the stairs looking into the heads of four fan palms full of strident birds. In the vacant yard over the cinderblock fence are mesquites in bloom. North of town is a triangle of a mountain angular under a soft skin of dust and powdered light. What we saw today - so many kinds of country. It would change every twenty miles it seemed. Will I wait 'til tomorrow to say it. The scent of crushed juniper berries in the car. In the last flat stretch burnt out and rusted car bodies every couple of miles. The rock garden on a cut face across the road, each plant in a perfect shape after this winter's rains. The 30-odd kinds of flower we collected drying on the dash. The sun's going down, it's quickly cold. Sentimental music and growling motors on the street. We'll hear these birds in the morning. - What is this irritability like - it's like hatred - how is this different from not liking Tom - I hate you, I could say to him - she has that thick righteous nastiness - with him it used to be either dumb Johnny Cool or else his maniac rager - I'm being careful what I say because this journal will be lying around - with him I get oppressed, with her I get irritated. A lot of little irritation I suppress. The balancing pleasures there used to be, there now aren't. I don't expect them and have almost forgotten them. That's remarkable. The way now I don't look at her. It's to complain of. It's sad. Night in a motel room with the sounds of a midway in a vacant lot behind it. I was standing on the toilet seat with my head out the window watching the twister's counterbalancing arms swing slow up to a balance point, fall, rise higher on the far side, fall, rise higher again, and so on until they stand balanced together like hands at twelve o'clock. Then part and fall. And next time make it past and around. It's a small midway with Mexican music and a lovely light. I could see down into the carrousel where along with the flying horses there were camels, peacocks, elephants, a few small children being held round the waist by a young teenager, all in a mild sweet light diffusing from many bulbs in the round room under the canopy. I watched on and on. It's a dense sound, many fibers, little screams, a fan, a concertina, shouts. It's thick and pleasant. A cool night. Night being celebrated as such. The tide is far down the sand, fish boats beached, sometimes a rocket set off and jetting up above the unlit water, exploding into sparks. Why did I think of Stan Brakhage then. I thought of my father earlier when I was crossing the street, his string ties and cowboy hat and his stranger's eyes looking at Mexico. 5th Caffé latté above a crossroads. - And then one thing after another, and here I am on sand in the part shade of a spiney little shrub, barefoot, in sunglasses, the page rattling in a brittle-sounding way. A sea breeze. The water is green and the tide rising, leaving small shells. Across the wadi - or what is this inlet onto the beach - is a buff sand cliff with a few grey-green little things. At that moment a flight of wrinkling shadows across the sand, squadron of pelicans. The kitchen tent is rattling across the way. There stands my jeep stalwartly looking out to sea. During the night last night Louie angrily rolling toilet paper and stuffing it into her ears. - I walk so poorly on sand, flounder. No frigate birds, no diving pelicans. Gulls and that vulture, is it? Like a condor, black triangle like a human body drawn between white wings. The tide withdrawn past these rocky clam beds, past the brown smooth flats. Here is a story. This little draw looks familiar, the shapes of cliff on either side. Thirty years ago, when I was thirty, walking in a draw with Jerry [Reznick], wearing the black Syrian dress, Jerry said, There's a tree that looks just like a woman washing her hair. I took a slide of it, her knee pink and blue with fine cracks in the bark and a pink twig jutting into the foreground. Today when I walked up the track I was looking for that tree and there it is, I think. The cliff has slumped forward and buried it up to the thigh, and it no longer looks young like a woman washing her hair. It has thickened, but there's the bend at the waist and the curve of the knee just showing where the sand has risen like a blanket over her legs. It is a sort of tree very dense with twigs, brushy, and small small serrated beech-like leaves. It has been dropping its leaves for the summer and they're lying in a fine-textured crisp litter around it. There's Louie a red spot above a black one and two pink ones walking almost at the ocean's edge. Is the red dot going to come off? Not yet. Now suddenly it's cold in the shade. Wednesday, 6th The tree is a copal, an incense tree. I said, lying in bed, It's a death, and it sighed. Puzzling over what it is about Louie. She's refusing the old power dynamics and for me it's those or nothing. I hate leftover food, I hate it, I just said. Alright here goes. I was driving slowly along the strip of pavement in front of baggage area 3 scanning for Louie, expecting what I used to find, and there on the curb was Louie's little mother. Potato-faced. And since then, what. The night in San Felipe when she was so purse-mouthed about the hustler who was talking to us on the Esplanade. I want to go, she said when he was talking to a man in a car. We're going, I say to him. But we were talking, he said. She wants to go, I say, and then Miss L has taken offence. You could have stayed and talked to him on your own, she says, and was it the tone? I exploded. SHUT UP! My politely withheld irritation popped. And that was the end. She's hideous in a fight. She wants to go, she mocked, ah she gets nasty in so childish and stupid a way. Then there was the night in the noisy room. She was sulking so that not being able to sleep put her into a rage. I was by then floating, not minding the noise, not minding being awake. The birds began before light and I got up and went out and found a latté at Baja Java and a woman who told me to ask the man at the end of the terrace about internet, and while I was looking at his outside stations he arrived, handsome, pleasant, and said he knew a place we could camp and would phone ahead. So I went back to the motel room and found Louie in an ugly state and said I'd found us a camp. So here we are and it's morning, hazy overcast, a motor boat thumping far out onto the gulf. Her tone just now had pleasure in it, she's thawing. Is there more to say about that? Shd I be compassionate about her ugliness    no It's moral     It's about refusing love woman     Greed for responsibility     Reversion to family     Is the relationship dying because she is     NO Because I am     no Because its time is past     I don't like her any more     Because she's so settled     no For a good reason     Because she has decided against her best     She has decided against the book     She has decided on money     And have I decided against my best     no   Alright enough for now. Starting to need my sunglasses. Oh the elderliness, the little cares and systems. Menopause is a killer. - saltbush, greasewood, smoke tree, copal/torote/bursera, bursage, ocotillo, brittlebush/encelia, sand verbena, arroyo lupine, cenizio, juniper, chollo, saguaro, barrel cactus, broom baccharis, convulvulus cneorum, desert mallow Thursday 7th The sun has just risen hot gold on the horizon above the sea. It's warmer already. A perfect night that woke me at first light. I dreamed I was at some sort of workshop. It was the afternoon session. I was there with no pants on and asked a woman sitting at the end of the row to move over one so I could sit down more quickly. The woman teaching the workshop began by singing something in a native language. At the second stanza or repetition young people in the audience sang too, they had learned it somewhere else. They began moving their arms and hands as if to imitate the gliding flight of a bird. Some stood swaying and moving their arms. It was as if they had gone into a trance of watching or flying with the bird the song was about. The birds I saw yesterday were sandpipers, terns, gulls, doves, herons, turkey vultures, pelicans, and just one completely black bird who rode the air steadily north along the coast, not moving his wings once, the most elegant of beings. The pelicans are beautiful in their motion in formation, very sleek the way they follow the same curve as if it is drawn by the first. Yesterday night the tide woke me at midnight running sideways on the sand. Last night it came and went and I slept on. The blue of the shadows on the page - a porous dark blue. Now that I look, the whole page is like a snowy slope with humps and wind streaks. Friday 8th A man I pick up hitchhiking on the street. He is a tall thin dark-haired man I've met before. He's going west toward UBC looking for someplace to sleep. I'm asking questions trying to discover where I should take him. We're walking in a neighbourhood where I think I might know some nook for him. I ask whether he has eaten that day. He hasn't. He does look starved. He just wants to learn. He says his mind is opening, he just wants to study. I am feeling for him. He puts his arms around me. I love you Ellie he says. He has his arms around me from behind and I feel his long thighs lifting my thighs to walk, as if he is actually inside me. I want to buy him a meal. We have come to a restaurant I think used to be the Nam. We go in. He walks down an aisle. When I follow I can't find him. I think he didn't like the restaurant. - Jim McKellar. An eager heart. Thick pure white hair and beard, ruddy face, glasses. Not tall, a bustling energy, sturdy. Lean shanks and an open chest, bit of weight carried high at the liver. Ex-drinker. 67. When he invited us to his party he was shy. After everyone was fed last night he made a fire and then sat with us telling stories. He was in Yugoslavia when he was a young man, traveling with a local he had been working with on an oil platform off the coast of Scotland. They were invited to a wedding. He sat silent at first because he didn't speak the language and he didn't want to do anything wrong. They were at long tables with bottles of red and white wine set at intervals. After a while he discovered that the man opposite was a Yugoslav English professor. The professor asked him questions about America. Everyone was drinking and he was too. He was gesturing expansively. Knocked over a bottle of wine. For a second the whole gathering fell silent. Then people cheered. He had upset the white not the red, and that was luck for the new couple. "Then everybody liked me." He was given the microphone and had to make a speech. I'd like to have the energy to tell the whole party. Jim and Pat. A large very drunk American man in an orange baseball cap wearing a teeshirt that said I won't work for anything. His wife Candy and his silent old father. A twenty-four year old new college graduate from Eugene and his blank mother who stayed at home to raise her boys and now, her husband presumably having left her for a younger woman, is working in financing for GMC. Jim's Mexican employee Marcos and his younger wife and teenage daughters and seven year old son Martín. Louie after sulking for two full days was restored to prettiness and social grace. Even her shape was improved. The big drunk kept saying "You're a beautiful woman" to her, and then "You're a beautiful woman too" to me. When he was carrying the platter of watermelon into the house behind her he said "I'm coming behind you, little one." What sort of transaction was that yesterday. I made a fire the night before last and she didn't resist it, and then I told her about Susan, and then yesterday we lay in the jeep's shadow looking up at the clouds and had a talk. San Diego 10th At home again. Sunday early. Louie is asleep on the roof. Susan's packet 3 quoting Edelman, Epp and Grotowsky, studying a video of herself telling a story - eye movements, breaths - looking for mind motion - her interest in what she calls internal gaze. She's firming her platform at the same time as she's working at an edge. Her readiness from experimental writing and meditation experience. Bête noir - the black beast - the inside of the body. Ah she can use me. Yesterday the pass between Enseñada and the agricultural plateau. Euphoria of color. Yellow, white. I knew I wouldn't be able to remember it, but I do remember the flower garden we stopped to see. It was on a slope across a rusted barbwire fence, matilija poppies floating over all, the white dots of small convulvulus, swales of blue, probably three or four different yellows - mustard, a daisy - with silvers - white sage and artemesia - and tall wild oats and other grasses, and interspersed at the bottom edge a dark green bush occasionally blooming in black-blue, all on fox-red earth with small stones on red grit. We stopped because of the matilija poppies and then found the whole garden. 11 What is it about Louie. The times when the sound of her voice was torture. It would happen when she or I were stressed, or was it that her voice itself was the stress? Her slow polite dumb remarks in that Germanic accent. It felt as though her accent was the torture. And then I would have the second stress of suppressing my irritation, which is unfair. I would be thinking, there must be something I can do to shift this, and then I would at the same time be feeling that the irritation was protecting me from something and I shouldn't give it up. The pain of hearing her remarks was so remarkable I'd keep feeling this is really extreme, it's an extreme of endurance, helpless endurance of something unrelenting. Yesterday I was finding I could get out of it by speaking myself so I didn't have to hear her, or by talking to someone else, Eliz or Sylvia. I felt it at the beginning of the trip, long ago, coming into Tecate Saturday afternoon, and most of yesterday until at last I could drop her at the airport. Yet I gave her a good holiday. I provided a jeep and camping equipment and Mexican insurance and all the particulars of planning and an adventurous route and maps and guidebooks, and so I gave her those hours in the flowering passes and ocotillo desert and sandy arroyo and warm sea. And she was ugly and in the mornings breathed out an extraordinarily bad smell, off-gassing some byproduct of sleep metabolism. And why do I dislike her emails and delete them without answering them? Your body was closed to me, she said of the way I picked her up at the airport, and it was true, I could hardly look at her. Her face is fatter and the little beauties of eyelid and mouth corner are submerged. Something ancestral, the way her kind of body ages from tinted prettiness to so many lines and lumps, and that soft doubling at the chin. Seeing death moving into her, seeing a body die in front of one's eyes. Is it that? And yet I introduce her as my best friend, and she has been. This morning she was on the roof drawing my little pots with their succulents because of the way each pot is like its plant - she could see that. I was lying in the motel bed in Enseñada thinking, it has died, the connection has died, it's done. Yesterday I couldn't wait to see Tom, I rushed to him and wanted just to take shelter in his arms as if she had sucked all my energy and I was in an emergency and needed a transfusion. He was willing to debrief me but he didn't want to touch me, as if he felt that. He was unshaven and gap-toothed and somehow removed. I wondered whether it meant he'd had a joint. It could have meant that, or there was something else. But anyway it felt as if that one is done too. Can I move to something with fresh energy? She's unbearable to me. He's not unbearable but irrelevant. And what was that trip for me. The beautiful sensation of 4-wheel drive on a rutted road soft and able. The surge into a dip full of water and through - plowing deep water - and the way it doesn't hesitate, my capable beast, down in and through and up. What else. The second night's sleep on the beach, dear sleep, warm sleep, soft sleep all night through, stars above. Jim McKellar's eagerness of heart, listening to his stories with Louie, taking pleasure in him together. Sitting in the warm sea. Sitting on the tire watching the pelicans, the turkey vulture, the terns, the sandpipers, the frigate bird. Knowing now that I can go to San Felipe anytime, and camp there, work there. The rocky passes on lower highway 3, the whole of upper 3, San Mattias, the gringa in her garden there, Valle de Trinidad, Valle Guadaloupe, the little ranch for sale at the top of a valley. The matilija garden. The little fair in San Felipe. The flowers everywhere, the skin of goldfields on the sides of the mountain, like shade on the sides of the slope. The red diamondback rattler we saw dead on the road. Louie in my Clear Orbit hat. The dream of the song about a gliding bird. The dream of the deprived man. Watching the clouds, lying in the jeep's hatchback shade. My eyes getting better after a couple of days. The jackrabbit at the top of the cliff huge as a rabbit-god in the twilight. Having 8 new hardback journals. Trying to speak Spanish. The photos. The smell of copal sap. Small shells in jagged patterns, or marked like basketwork. The white-line sphinx moth I found struggling at the edge of the tide, its pink underwings. I'm wanting to go back alone. 12th It was intense. I'm still waking at night processing Mexico, reading a guidebook last night was it in Spanish, about tipos, meaning tipping. Where am I now - excruciating 9 student letters this week, only Susan's interesting, and then next week the faculty phone calls and embodiment studies admin. Four long manuscripts, torture. Tom dropped by this aft. My red linen shirt was draped over the chair with other clothes to be ironed. Tom said, I really like that shirt. I said, It's too big for me. He put it on. It looked nice with his jeans. We went to Cabrillo Point and sat on the wall while he ate his carne asada quesadilla. When I'd taken him home I opened the package from Susan and there was her faded pink and dark blue plaid shirt. How many times has she made me gasp. It was with my notes on Shams and Rumi, "the smell of his shirt." He arrived just as I'd written Margo saying I'm not coming to the retreat. 13 Still dreaming Mexico, as if from the background of those days. A woman on the gritty sand. [Opposite page: What does 'spiritual' mean to people - a contrast with daily concreteness - that yearning for something - it's an indefinable emotional matrix - based in early love and its freedoms and terrors - for many it seems to have to do with making efforts to improve oneself, taking oneself as a task - it is imagined in terms of 'consciousness' - taking willful control of conscious states - something like the sense of self as a journey, having a beginning and an ending and adventures that are consequential - the sense of event consequential to the quality of being - sense of quality of state - that's mine - sense of gratitude and dependency - that's early love - there's elaboration of defenses around a vulnerability - the vulnerabilities felt by creatures who know they will die - there's experimentation with state - there's exploration by means of change of state, exploration of 'reality' usually thought of as other than the concrete - there's wanting to feel sublimity, mystery. So: early love being stoned sublimity, mystery self-improvement death denial] 14 This morning Louie writes how well she is after her holiday, and yet weeping that Favor had my care and she doesn't. I want to say, Get off me, you're the one chasing money. But I can take it as myself, my beautiful one at a last gasp because I am supporting the souls of all of these and not my own. The photos I took of myself in the pink shirt, on the roof, in the pink sunset light. So sharp a woman, long dark hair, a strong cord of muscle in the shirt's open neck, alive at 60, brown and combative. Strong medicine, too wicked strong for most, frowning into the camera. Susan supports my soul by risking her own, by giving me the company of hers. By seeing me beautiful and giving me that. By startling me. By a rhythm she has taken care to learn from the best. By newness. By fear. By beauty she insists on. What I am seeing in her packets is the way her neuroticism is the matrix of work. She sustains it as the fluid of pain and fright in which beautiful lines can set. It is Thursday morning, grey and dewy. What would I do with a year's free money. How much would it need to be - $20,000? $24,000? Live in New York for a couple of months. Live in LA for a couple of months. Visit London. Take care of health and beauty details. Get The Golden West up. Dress beautifully. Tom in such an even pleasing state. His voice on the phone. I resigned from Juniper-Front because they sent me a threatening letter. Margo hasn't replied to the letter saying I'm not coming to the retreat. Anna's packet 3 is delightful, swift soft loose intimate. The relation of theory and personal interest so confidently generously transparent. She's using the live ones I found over the years, Milner, Henderson, Colette, Gilligan, Gendlin, Nussbaum, Williamson. Motion she learned from Woolf's essays. Here I am here I am. Among my beautiful teachers. 15 Rick Behrman on email writing because he googled me and found a lot of stuff - cadaverous Rick is now in diagnostic physics at Tufts. No I do not want to see him. << 1965 - These days Tom is spruce and has good haircuts but what is it I feel when I look at him, something about his jaw, that he doesn't have enough jawbone. He's a bit anxious about money and it, or something else, is making him speedier so I wonder whether he's back on dope. - Millie today had a burst of love and sent a marveling letter and a blissful heart drawing. It was after she risked chiding me for something and it was alright, I liked her for it. It is so easy for me to know what to do with Millie. 16 Forgot to say yesterday that I'd dreamed something about having three lines cut on my cheek. Saturday morning. I make tea and sit with my journal because I want to know something, feel something. And do I? Not yet. The ocean yesterday as we whipped through Wind and Sea supposedly on the way to a movie. Oh it was full up. High tide I guess, foamy, silvery greeny foamy, warm-looking, sun on the horizon shining through the curl of a wave, many boy seals waiting further out, all in a powder of salt air. And Miz Mol is back. - Fighting. With Tom last night. He showed up making peace this morning. Rick Behrman: decided this was a moment to return his blast, unreturned since about 1968. Kind little pushes to Millie all day. And tonight I resist Louie who wants me to say either write, or don't write. Oh, Rowen said when he heard I sent him a camera, There's a lot I can do with that. Excited, she said. Happy if so. - Lonesome. Why am I all day hungry-hearted looking for email but I couldn't wait to get away from Louie, and chute Tom out the house as fast as I can? I'm avid for the romantic stuff in Susan's notes as if I'm starved for love. 17 Louie is sending long emails. She had her first holiday in years, she said, meaning that she was out of yoga and family modes. She's crying a bit every day and never wants to go back to being her mother. Remembers me and Jorge and Sylvia as an essence of goodness. And that's what came of my week of exhaustion, Louie got her fix of being guarantored. But I did get myself springing down the mountain in 4wd. What is it I'm so avid for in Susan's notes. Her polish in language. The way she said o/ as if. And oh y aussitot. Her venturous selfness, the way she could tell her story of kneeling behind the man and setting an energy bridge into him. Her greed to love. The way she said, You flew me like a kite all week. The way I'm met. She's not a moral dependent hanging off my rigor as both Louie and Tom do. If anything am I hanging off hers? That's something. She takes her own risks. She has wrong modes, an intellectual one for instance. But she works hard. she's a working mortal. She can feel my humor, which is quite inexplicit. She evokes many of my people at once, Jam in her intellectuality, even. Louie in her greedy adoration. Rhoda in her physical polish. Nelly in her lesbian community past. Cheryl in being that kind of mother. My earlier self a lot - its passion and secret sophistication, devotion, breadth. She way she quotes me, good bits. And is reading Edelman even, Talmy, Oyama. Heather waited a day and replied quite beautifully, quoting the outrageous parts it seemed with a liking for their construction. She began saying she was no longer excited and ended saying she was just a little excited. Writing Millie about shame - it is as if there's been a jump in her writing - she was feeling unbearably the difference between the self given and the self she was. I said shame can be about compliance and now she's stopped medicating maybe it's like messages on her machine, just listen to them. Skinless Millie. I said does she know the Gnostic story about Sophia. She said she's terrified of people. I said, yeah well. Artists are like that. She said I got under her radar. How did I do that. By being matter of fact and playful. I don't want anything from her except the unfolding of the story. 18 Need to get a longer pencil, this one is two inches. Susan liked my reply letter which felt scrappy to me but when I reread it this morning is good. Finishing it I had a couple of quick darts, said if I were a grasshopper I'd be rubbing my hands at some of her phrases. That she can set a phrase so it goes tuk like a pool ball. She basked and was up until 2 replying. I have a lot to give her project, I can take her so quickly to the live edge. It's like initiating: here are the keys. Millie is saying her website makes her sick. If she's had a jump, maybe she needs to start again and design something to her new taste. Is she stepping out of the ickiness, maybe. Carolyn's leap was not the thesis but an action, and she took it so she's done. I'd just as soon turn her loose and let her get on with it. And Anna's done too, because she developed her perfectly personal flowing thinking voice. And Carol. There's still a hitch. And then Susan goes too far. She sends me a naked picture of herself with her head a mass of light. She is confiding something sacred to herself and I swiftly send her a jeer - oh in a flash. And why did I flash. I don't want to see her naked. I don't want to be hooked. That was fierce instinct. She didn't think, she went into fantasy. I am in the midst of reading Carolyn on mothers and bodies and desire. Susan upped it to my realm of body hate. What do I hate most. The mother's body ruined by children, used up. I am so bratty with this packet period, so reluctant. There I lie down and try to feel what it is. Hungry, aching. Wanting all day to put something in my mouth. Wanting to be contained so I can let go of something, into some heart state. Addictive craving but without object, nothing I have will satisfy it. Wanting what I used to have, Joyce, my house, the garden. When I began the doctorate I was a young woman, when I ended it I had become an old one. Now there's nothing I love. "A tall thin dark-haired man I've met before. Going west toward UBC looking for someplace to sleep. He does look starved. He just wants to learn. He says his mind is opening, he just wants to study." I say Now there's nothing I love and tears come into my eyes. I don't know how to go on to the end of my life without love. I'm afraid I'm dying. I look at my hands wondering whether they look like death, whether I can see death in their color. Then the book reminds me it is a memory. It says, Hope, do you have a hope? Yes that someone will come for me. There it was. [Opposite page: Will you talk to me     angry I feel stuck for eternity       Hope that a person might come for me     What I feel when I go to the internet     YES That someone will come for me     YES In this dead world     And I'll be swept into that loving confident self       Do you want to say more     persist, in tempering, and growing slowly, and learning Endure the dryness     More conscious of what it is     Is it bad for me to serve all these people on and on     no Is there more you want to say     no Is there anything I still love     yes, war 19 Dealing with Mil's dependency. She's resisting working more on the website. I say, You are making me the one who holds stability while you swing. She says she's mortified to hear that. I am thinking of Louie. I say I believe the observer position is there already. In my experience what prevents one from taking it is that if one becomes the mother, the mother will be gone. See what she does with that. Sitting with Michael yesterday. He was wanting something (the Baja reptiles book) and so being pleasant. He has been looking puffy and weatherbeaten but he is sublimely beautiful all the same. The bone of his jaw, the thin fine squareness of his shoulders. The blue of his Indian eye. His long flat dirty freckled wrist with the serpent bracelet. He's just a phenomenon. And what is it about his walk, the way his thighs seem to be pushing water. His long thighs. I'm leaving out his wretched teeth. - You do posture, young'un. Saying you'll always regret my refusing. You have no idea what I'm sparing you. We are playing and flirting beautifully. It's good as is. You are more yearning and missing than I am, but you're safe to do that fertile thing because I refuse. Don't you realize that? 20 No. She's not copping. And when she writes about putting her hands on her breasts in the carwash as the ropes of soapy water twist around her, isn't she seeing the image of herself with narcissistic pleasure? She imagines me touching what I don't want to touch, imagining me quite manly it seems. Has no clue how to interest me sexually, who I am. I've been scrupulous not to use actual people in sexual fantasy. Don't like that she uses me for that. And yet isn't my pussy a bit wet? (I check.) It is. It's a tender morning. Open sky after days of morning grey. Little cheeps. I like that she said I haven't failed her in richness. Mil saying yesterday that it was beautiful Elizabeth who sent her to my site years ago, and she has two of my pictures on her wall, array and grass 2. That there are unknown young women sending each other to my site. Millie said juicy. That makes me want to hurry and put up the journals. - Oh Tom. He has worked this week but won't be paid until a week from Friday. He doesn't have the $150 for the week's rent. He will have to give up his room and either show up back at St Vincent's or live on the street. I could lend him the money but I am feeling no and when I check it out it tells me why: because this is a test of whether he wants to be with me, and I mustn't skew it. So now I am in anguish for him, for his loss of his room, and for me, because this improvidence tells me he doesn't want to be with me. I haven't felt this pain since he was on drugs. Is he again? I don't know. The fight we had was about whether I should trust him. I said I should never trust his word. I said Louie said she didn't want to see him until he's further into showing he isn't doing it to me again. I yelled at him and he backed down. So here I am. Hungry Susan, hungry Louie, careless Tom. Susan last night and this morning. A couple of things. One is I see myself writing in her rhythm. Not good because her rhythm comes up with fine things - I will give some examples - but it postures. It has a posed sound. She said: frankly lonely for you you appear somewhat hellenic to her it seems/ a kind of prior civ to hers/ lodged in your work and presence with both beauty and authority/ herself as magellenic/ kabinet of wonders sort of thing and then we were at the corner/ wz shivering/ cd not help myself my hand ruffled the back of that pretty little head of hers said oh just call me when she said she's mostly on her own distinct/ cd even say fun/ sensation to let be there/ in some kinetic way like a kiss your mouth gave me while you were distracted (That was about my saying kir palu instead of krip.) To which I said while we're playing you should feel me say mol mou ll. To which she says you are wicked darling To which I say you are wicked daring and make me wickeder than I am To which she says she'd like to, and I say etc. I steadied myself/ possibly the most mature thing I have done/ made a deep and sober strike at being where I could have the most of you/ you haven't failed me/ for a moment in the richness/ of what you are 21st I look at myself in the mirror and see I'm plump but glossy - my shoulders are. Is that what she's after? What does she want my touch to give her? Does she want what Louie wants, the male in me, a bridge to men, men's drawbridge? Is she going to go there? No she's going to continue on the road to starvation because she wants a large destiny. She wants to demonstrate sophistication, and in that she's like me. That's where we play. The journals, the story they tell of the contradictions of Tom. The contradictions I endured to get him into me. In the faculty conference call yesterday I said - Lise was pressing us to be political in the old way about fascism in the US - that it's complicated. We used to think that when we liberated something it would stay liberated, and now I am old enough to see that there are waves. There's a huge wave of conservatism at the moment. I'm not an American and so I have less of a sense of panic of ownership of the bad things that are happening. There are very good things happening too, things in some ways are much better than they were even 20 years ago, in epistemology for instance, embodiment, and that's at the root of a lot. So I'm mainly just wanting to work on what I can actually do. Astro's process paper yesterday came out with what he really is. Trustingly. It was delightful. Now I'll see what else I can get out of him. He's a spy for the Goddess, he said, and maybe he goes after men sexually to keep his relation to the goddess pure. - Was that motive so strong in him it could actually keep him from growing tall? He didn't separate. That's quite fascinating, that if men don't do what we regret them doing we get Astro. 22nd Millie writes that she's in love with me. I write back interpreting transference - very sweetly - remembering how gracious Dave Carter was when I spilled. While she is writing this I am on the phone with Louie. It's alright for a while but she pushes me too much and I end feeling cornered and drained and have to stop. Then I go to bed and have the sweetest of dreams. I'm with Dave Carter sitting somewhere. How does it happen. He touches me. We become more and more interlaced. I'm saying I'm moving somewhere. He says he's coming with me. I say, but his wife. He says he stopped feeling her back when I told him. I'm sweetly confounded, I'm going to be with this adorable man. In the same dream I'm with Ed leaning on a window sill. The rest of the family is away somewhere. We're talking and then we're talking and cuddling. A Chinese little boy arrives. The rest are on their way. They have been at a dinner in Chinatown. Judy has married a Chinese man. This little boy is going to be part of our family. My dad and I are laughing that strangers can come into our lives and handle our underwear when they're doing the laundry. When I wake I'm in sweetness but my solar is barred. That's from Louie. I told her what happens, the way I feel I'll die, eaten alive. She says she absorbs me, yes. That's something we need to think about more, the absorbing feels like love to her. Feeding needs of everyone I'm in bond with. I feel her as predacious. She feels she needs a hit of me. She has been the sort of person who gives a lot of flattering attention. Has that always been her way of immobilizing prey? Is it a sort of two-level transfusion, surface level a push into them, deeper level a suck out of them? I'm that way with Tom. Avidity is the sign of it. Susan has it with me. Physical energy that's delicious to us. I can make Louie mad at me to get her off me. People have always wanted a piece of Tom. He handles it by evading. A visual fascination is always a sucking? Yes. I suck from the lilies across the room. Does it deplete them? It says no. On East Pender I sucked from my house. The kind of person who is hungry. part 2 in america volume 8: 2005 april-august work & days: a lifetime journal project