7th May 2005
Millie at another kind of crisis last night. She was elated after telling her new therapist the story of her survivals and being loved and praised for it. Then she remembered her father coming home from a hunting trip with two fuzzy chicks, maybe grouse, in a plastic bread bag. He put them on the floor and the two little girls sat there with them. Then he got a beebee gun and shot them right there in the kitchen.
I sent her the man whose heavy step in the long grass, not sure I should be sending her something of my own.
She wrote back pointing out the contradiction, dark, heavy, black, evil, and then beautiful and light. I said that I have been able to maintain the contradiction in relation to my father. Then there was a pause, and she wrote back asking whether I had ever wondered how her baby daughter died, nobody asks her that. I say I've been aware that she's the one who should choose the time.
She sends back a very coherently written paragraph about working as a behavior consultant with a girl who would turn jigsaw puzzles onto their faces and work them rapidly from just the cardboard shapes. Her friend would steal a handful of pieces and this girl would know they were missing, although she never remembered that her friend would steal them. She ended the email by saying she didn't know why she needed to tell me this story. The subject line of this email was the last piece.
I say I'm presuming how Sarah died is the last piece of the puzzle.
She writes back, My mother did it.
And then, rapidly: I don't think it was an accident.
And then: I take it back.
But by this time I have written that I believe her. I check this with the book, because I have been thinking Millie herself may have done it. But the mother is plausible if the child was Millie's dad's, although Millie has said it's her uncle's.
Here I get up and check my email and Millie has sent a link to the painting of tiny bloody footprints next to an adult's bloody handprints, on black with a river of blood below. It's her most powerful painting, that one and the one that is a child's drawing of a mother's screaming face.
What do I think about this.
If Millie had done it I wd not want her prosecuted for it but I wd want her to tell it.
If her mother did it wd I want Millie embroiled in a trial. I don't think it would go there, I don't think there is evidence, it was already ruled crib death.
But in principle wd I. Yes. Sarah was Millie's child.
Millie's mother tried to kill her in the womb.
I tell her the terror she is feeling must be compounded by the terror she felt when her mother was trying to kill her.
I say, at this point deal with the terror not the event or the telling of it.
She says she's doing that.
Now I go back to the computer and she says she has a feeling of peace and thanks me.
And then I must go back to beautiful Anna - golden hair, amethyst eye, swelling bosom, female sparkle of the whitest - and think how to deal with an emptiness created in protection and class blanking. How can Millie's history of degradation, enslavement and murder be better? But it is.
Millie writes that she doesn't know how it has happened that I have come into her life. I point out that she came to me, but at the same time I am feeling that this semester has brought me those two students at another level, as if a promotion.
8
Enraged even now. I was at Eliz's [wedding] party sitting with seven of her high school friends around her outdoor fireplace, cooperatively trying to get a feel of them, Nora standing across from me next to the fire. The midwife, Robin, a weathered-looking young woman living now in Seattle, was telling a story about her uncircumcised little boy looking at her husband's circumcised penis. "Why does it have a mushroom?"
And then the rest of the women, who all seemed to be Jewish, and two of the husbands, started telling circumcision stories, blandly, obediently. Private school girls from Philadelphia, turned forty, young families, well off, complacent, empty. Nora standing with a look of disgust on her face.
Meantime the garden. A May evening. Eliz's white lilac blooming for the first time. Her fringe tree green, blooming, and more wholesome-looking than I have seen - the rain. Rue wandering among the guests looking unimpressed.
Meantime Millie had written the email I read before I went to bed, that she will be phoning her mother on Mother's Day. I wrote back that I was agog.
The replies she sent through the night worked with what she felt in relation to that. An image of emotion spread wide, the body's outline faintly superimposed. A letter saying she used to be outside her body moving it like a puppet.
I say she was never outside it, the self who feels it is, is an illusion. The self is never divided, it just says it is. The illusion is true rescue but creates a debt to reality, in the body.
It is because she can feel that none of that really happened to her, that she can call her mother on Mother's Day.
Great fear of annihilation from them still, she said. Stockholm syndrome? she asked. Probably yes, I said. Work with the terror first, and in the meantime don't do anything in relation to them that any part of you doesn't want to do.
9
We had a wonderful day yesterday. Tom showed up happy about work. I made him coffee and cleaned the counter while he told his marvels of the week. Everyone's calling him boss. He stays on his feet, holds people's lunches, hovers mid-building rather than at the top or bottom, helps load things, speaks Spanish to the Mexicans, knows where anyone can be found, slaps down challengers wittily. He'd made $120 just for showing up for an hour yesterday morning, Saturday $230 at time and a half. He likes seeing the city laid out below, a man polishing his car. "Everybody likes me." His buoyant friendly nature and manly good looks.
I'd said, Want to go driving? He wanted to try the route a man in the paper had described, Tierra del Sol. It took us a while. Farmer's market, Starbucks, buy water. Once we got onto the freeway the steering felt funny to him and we had to get off and find steering fluid. But then we got going. The moment coming around the corner on 8 and there's El Capitan massive above Lakeside, wild above the human spread, rock and brush lit up like a billboard for the real. A lot of traffic. All these people are going to see their mothers, I said. Yes, their mothers in El Cajon, he said.
We got off the freeway at the Sunshine Highway exit. He has decided that it's good to make me the navigator because I read maps well and have a good sense of direction and understand terrain, and if he screws up he goes into a rage of self-laceration and that makes him defensive, whereas if I screw up he doesn't care. So finally after ten years we are not squabbling about where to go and how to get there.
Old Highway 80 to the La Posta road, nice round hills, oak trees, chaparral past the bloom, summery. Jag right on 94, then left onto Shockly Truck Trail, then left onto Tierra del Sol which runs through a settlement and then turns dirt and skirts the edge of the plateau, pylons running alongside, huge headless outlines of bodies, or Tom said eagles with wings joined. Where Tierra had turned north we found a spot looking northwest across a valley to rows of ridges. I sat down on the grit and cooked Sunday dinner. Hamburger, potatoes, courgettes, green beans, fruit salad. Tom rolled over two dumped tires and sat on one admiring the way I nipped tops and tails off the green beans and tossed them into the dirt. We sat in a dip out of the wind and ate. He went back for more.
We had three hours of daylight still and I looked at the map. There were some campgrounds in the McCain Valley conservation area I thought we could look at, so we took a road under the freeway and found ourselves flanking a beautiful shallow valley below hills made of piled boulders. There was a farmhouse. Perfect. Dirt road on up to Lark Valley and then to Cottonwoods campground.
We were driving in late afternoon light. There were flowers I hadn't seen before, something with big blue bells. A thistle. A viewpoint come upon startlingly, across Carizo Gorge, the wastelands of Anza-Borrego.
We were happy exploring. When we turned around and were on our way back to 8 I was looking across at him driving next to me, his profile, his black jacket with high collar, unshaven chin. He looked nice. I took his picture with sunlight burning horizontally through the jeep window onto his face.
And then home down the 40-mile drop from 4000' to the sea, falling dark, headlights come on. When we'd dropped into the bedroom communities and there were six or seven lanes, Tom got into the far left and drove fast and sleek in dreamy silence, dropping, dropping, until we found ourselves at the mouth of the 94, stopped at a red light on the margin of downtown, the towers ahead of us. Then we were passing the Maryland, gutted, wrapped in security fencing.
Up Broadway, up First, there's the Reiss. I go around to the driver's side, he watches me out of sight, as he does.
Earlier when we were in my little place getting ready to go, he saw a bit of fur as I unzipped my pants to tuck in my shirt. We were flirting yesterday. I was nibbling his jaw. More than one half-kiss at a time.
He never has rages any more, and he doesn't motor-mouth. I don't carp.
So I came home and checked to see whether Susan had emailed, and then worked on two pictures to send her, one of Tierra del Sol plateau, one with two of the images of Tom with sun on his face. I like that one, the red margin where the sun can be seen biting into his skin, the way the light lies on the back of his head like a touch, the jeep's shadow that can be seen on the bushes through the open window beyond him, the way his hair tufts up, the sunglasses' line above his ear, and most of all the way the face on the image on the left is as if his mother's face, and the face on the right is his. It is as if she is his passenger, riding behind him.
10th
Last night on the computer with Susan.
She sent photos of herself and friends on mountains. Strong legs, good boots, I said. She said her mother said, If I had legs like yours I'd stay up all night looking at them.
She said, Listen, darling, and I said, Do you call everybody darling or just when you have the upper air? And then we had a painful discussion of setting hooks. I said, Listen, darling, when you sit down on the back of my chair and put your breast against my back, that's not setting a hook?
She went into distress at that, Is there nothing mutual, when you flirted with me about my C in Spanish and commented that there wasn't much meat on my bones, was that setting a hook? I said probably it was a little over the line because I had the ?? feeling as I was saying them, that is my tip-off. That the difference between being charming and setting hooks is whether it's using the other person's weakness, their child-self - whether it's aimed into the uncon. I said she needs to get this.
Then she said she was cold and sleepy, thx for the chat.
I had also told her the circumcision story, a rabbi who does circumcision is called a moul, does she have Jewish in her father's family? She said her Jewish friends say she's Jewish. There's also a full-blood great-great-great grandmother.
In sum, is she concluding I am too difficult? I wd be sorry.
12th
What Susan said that made me turn off the computer last night was that she and I could do my institute together and we would get taken on by some larger entity the way Wellesley took on the Stone Foundation. She has been liking the embod documents I have been sending her. She said we'd complement each other.
What am I thinking about that?
What else she said is that she tells people we are both unusual people and we are lucky to have found each other.
But: I am more unusual than she is in several ways. One is that she is a normie and I am what I am, something people don't easily welcome. The other is that she is smart and most flexibly capable the way I am, but she hasn't put in the time I have focusing a platform. Is she like Louie in wanting to ride my aura into her own brilliance, I'm wondering. She's more of a business woman than I am, does she see I could be ridden into prominence? And if so? I'd like her to be my agent, I'd like it to be that way. She has the cultural acquaintance to do it, she'd be able to talk to people.
- She has always glommed onto powerful women
- And dumped them
- So will she dump me YES
- And dumped them
14
Millie is refusing to finish the website and I can see that it's right for her to refuse - it's where I want something from her and she needs to feel herself saying no and surviving it. Naturally I want the website up because I figure so beautifully in it - I'm so deft and right. I cd get famous as the therapist who saved Millie. I cd get clients who'd pay me on therapy scale. But having been saved she wants to play and have fun. Okay, let it go.
She wrote a note that asked directly, Is it true I don't want anything from her except for her to be okay? I said, it's alright for her to be suspicious but she will discover it's true. It's my job to want her to be okay. She wrote back, does that mean I'm going to disappear at the end of the semester? I said yes I'm pretty much going to disappear. We'll miss each other but we'll know we did great.
Phoned Tom last night - speaking of compulsion - at first we have nothing to say to each other but as always on the phone I'm liking his voice, a secret pleasure at its manliness and flex. I bring up his browbeating attempt about the money. He says he's only ever done that with women and I'm the only woman who has ever withstood it. I say it was good for both of us, for me to discover I can withstand his worst.
A lot of driving yesterday, on 5 to Via de la Valle, breakfast, then east, San Pasqual Valley. Tom wanted to haunt old sites. We sat in the shade with our backs to a stone wall overlooking the war memorial, the road and the valley bottom with tamarisks dull mauve in the distance. Tom had been tight and I diagnosed stress about having money - he got paid on Friday and has a lot of cash in his wallet. Then he spilled. All his decisions. Cellphone, better place to live, car, savings. We drove on toward Santa Ysabel. He kept spilling. He's working the cards, he calls it, every morning before he goes to work. He's the King of Wands. He's accepted that he's the King of Wands. Three cards that are important to him: that one, Temperance and Strength. He imagines the King of Wands card centered between Temperance and Strength. When he goes to work he visualizes them above his line of sight. If he is tempted to snap at someone he says to himself, I'm the fucking King of Wands. He isn't trying to get in with the other men. He has been other-directed. The men are younger than he is, 45. He's old. He doesn't have to involve himself in their concerns. He's glad he has the Rider pack, the images take him to an atmosphere that's very comprehensible to him.
The spill carries us all the way to Santa Ysabel and interests me. He is telling me the most intimate struggle of his days, the methods he has found to hold onto what he has, a job, a place to live, a woman companion, the respect of other men, all easily lost if he doesn't control what so readily tears loose in him.
When we are driving north toward Warner Springs I tell my dream of land and house in that supremely beautiful Mesa Grande country. I had been secretly sheltering in Mac's house as we drove, and did not tell the man but told the house, which brought me opener. On and on to the Palm Valley road and up the Santa Rosa Mountain track, but by that time there had been too much traffic for too many hours. Home on 15. It was Tom's day not mine but he bought $75 worth of gas and drove and I did see Santa Ysabel briefly. It was hot, early summer, Queen Anne's lace on the roadsides. At about 4:30 on the Santa Rosa track I missed Susan, made a note of the time, wondered whether she can find me when I'm roaming geographically.
17
I've been cleaning out my SFU storage so there'll be room for the Work and days files, which are loading at this moment. That's one thing. Another is that Millie emailed about a workshop in Montpelier on Saturday, embodiment for activists. I leapt on that.
18
Susan is yearning to be what she was when she was a mother with a young child. I say glibly access to early love - is she lonely to be that child, so well attended. She says no she wants to be loved without question that way, by someone who is visibly thriving - so she knows she is good enough. That message was there when I woke. I shut the computer on it, get a dog. Adopt a mongoloid child, believe in Jesus.
Why does it irritate me. It's like saying she wants me to be witless. But beyond that. She's lonely, she's principledly being transparent the way I sometimes have. Her moments of innocent adoration have been water of life to me this semester. They have been water of life and yet I beat them down because I don't trust them. I don't believe she knows what she's doing.
- The strength of this yearning in her is what makes her
beautiful - isn't it?
- This is a genuine impossibility isn't it
- It's the emotional truth and it's what we'll feel when we're connected
- And yet it makes impossible demands of other people and life itself
- So it will inevitably be bruised and denied
- And I have enough of it in me so I don't like to bruise and deny it
- Have I kept enough reserve
- Too much no
- Is it necessary to bruise and deny
- Which is also bruising and denying myself no
- Feels like it
- So do you have something to say about that recover intimacy through defeat of the child
- Defeat the child altogether
- It IS wanting to be the child
- Is defeat the word you want
- Can we keep the beauty while defeating the child
- How not withdrawing and balancing in anger and aggression
- Let the child be furious
- Accept the other person's rage
- It's thwarting the rage that makes ugly
- This is a genuine impossibility isn't it
Roughly half of Americans believe in special creation in the last 10,000 years. Parallel universes. The one place where they collide is public school biology classes
- Transfixed by the father
- Homoerotic
- Alpha alpha male people
- And the other half are mother people
- Father cultures are a way of organizing one's drives
- They are more dynamic
- But unsustainable
- Can mother cultures be more dynamic
- By accepting anger
- Homosexuals are intolerable in father cultures
- Because they are a mirror
- I require a lover who can tolerate anger YES
- Do you want to say more about this no
- Is it always going to be half/half father/mother
- And swing voters
- And the swing voters are influenced by tyranny
- Bad and betraying fathers
- Or on the other side insecurity
- Homoerotic
Gilligan, Henderson, Fox Keller, Shepard, Rich, Debbie Rose, Gendlin, Richard Nelson, Tony Packer, Susan's poets, Damasio, Sewall, Andrew Harvey, Oyama, Benedikt, Lessing's intro, Guenther?, Woolf, Le Guin from Always coming home
- Antifascist curriculum
- Edit a reader
- Both tone and subject
- An introduction
- Would [the college] publish it
- Edit a reader
So what is it Susan is catalyzing me in. She got the curriculum I proposed. It inspired her. I'm inventing the reader with her. Want to call it Here. And so am seeing, feeling, excited, that embodiment is overlapping mind and land, I can make a research institute of it, maybe at [my college] to start and then later enfolded in some place where it/I can have money. Meantime trawl for better students.
I say to her, but if a man said "I'll lay it out and you guys can fill it in" shouldn't he ask whether he is being arrogant?
She says, in most situations it is considered leadership/ if it is done with tact, honor and intelligence.
most people who have the gift of filling in/ the capacity to thrive in it and give beautifully/ don't want either the responsibility/ the burden of the big picture
She said what it was about my body is small muscle control. That would account, could, for a lot.
- Is it small muscle control
- It accounts for the voice
- It accounts for the hands
- Am I more than usually aware in small muscles
- Does that support another kind of thinking
- An unusual amount happening in the parietal
- It's a basis for abstract intelligence
- Of a nonsymbolic kind
- Childhood of a philosopher is about those small ethics of self construction
- It accounts for the voice
19
Asking whether it's arrogant - what was it about that? I do feel everyone should be building their own frame and it does seem enslavement to ask them to work in mine. But at the garden, yes I laid it out so they could work within it. That was exactly and confidently leadership, a vision none of them would have been capable of, which carried them all into glory. So yes, ability to thrive and give beautifully. And it's true I have the garden as a basis for leadership, a cognitive base I mean; I have embodied it that way.
-
Millie is wavering, state-straddling.
She's taken down a couple of images, the one of her mother wailing and the one of infant hands - crazy girl, infant death.
"Knowing, not knowing, knowing, not wanting to know, putting it out, wanting to take it back,
don't know what to do with it all."
20
What is it with Millie. Her various abreactions were superficial compared to this. I have never seen anything like this tangle about her mother. Here she is really crazy. She's so crazy I keep wondering whether she killed her baby herself and wants to blame her mother because of the abortion memories. Almost as soon as the baby died she got sent to the psych ward. She keeps treating her family as if they are okay. If her mother killed the baby and she chose to deny it that would land her in the psych ward. If she killed the baby they'd have sent her to the psych ward to get her off. Now she's wavering between they're evil and they're not evil.
What else do I know. She's ugly. That may have been the drugs but I think it's family inheritance, a bohunk truculence. Creepy.
On paper she's sweetly candid, appealingly skinless, an innocent.
- She switches into denial to control anxiety
- Is there something else she should do no
- Feel what's in it
- Someone needs to observe how she is in either of those two states, which seems real
- Is there something else she should do no
Third time this week at the gym. More energy already I think, though I haven't pushed.
21st May
Saturday morning.
Two of my finishers done.
Got the journal site transferred, still have to do something about checkmarks in bookwork.
What else. The magazine. Embodiment colloquium. Embodiment website. Spirituality lecture. Here - design - collection.
Blue pages. New site?
-
Forgot to say Jam wrote last week offering me money. That was so bizarre it almost doesn't register. Had completely forgotten she mentioned it earlier. I wrote back that it was a bit abrupt.
23
Tom lying in his darkened room with his foot dark purple to the sockline, ulcerated and throbbing. Today he's going to get up and go to work on it, and tomorrow I am taking him to the VA. He's hot and looks ill.
I brought him coffee and breakfast and papers and gave him kisses and then went to Lakeside to look at Cory's garden and in the afternoon brought him a carne asada burrito and a quesadilla and paid the visitor's fee and lay on his bed with him. He carefully asked about my week. How's Millie? I told. Then he told his Saturday at work with his usual energy, but I was lying looking at his hot hollow-eyed face wondering whether it wd be a good time for him to die. I'm telling that against a caution. He has come to balance with talking to the cards. He's alright. But it looks as though it'll be just struggling to maintain a single room, working all week, some kind of excursion on Sunday, TV. He isn't going to write again.
I guess the point is that it would solve my attachment in an honorable way. I would have seen it through to the end. I'd get the red barrel and call Rebecca and that would be the end of all of them - Mac and Vic and Uncle Joe.
Meantime I am looking at my little moles with concern and monitoring my heart and wondering what's up with my right eye, a fuzz in the field of vision. When I sleep in the afternoon I don't wake crisp in the way I did, am drowsy. But sleeping wonderfully at night - is it the fat on my belly?
-
Picked Tom up from work and he took me up and down the hoist.
24th
With Tom at the VA yesterday. Afterward we stopped at Taft and I planted what was left to plant. Driving home I was looking sideways at him. You're happy, he said. I realized it was true. I'd liked being his missus at the VA. "You've been nice enough to me so I can be nice to you and that does make me happy."
Was in the library at UCSD looking at books for the spirituality and body workshops. Feel such revulsion among the religion shelves, occult and mainstream both. The exceptions are the Greeks and Celts, those people of the solid earth.
What do I want to do with the workshop. Talk about the invisible, credulity, factual ethical ground, attention/presence/body, politics, fantasy mind. Teach them rigor and discernment, methods of hope in the daily world.
-
Rereading Susan's first packet - and then weeding her whole bundle - haven't written her in days - started mad at her - why - now we're at the end of the semester let me get it clear.
26
Sore eyes.
What'd I do today - finished scan - started sorting for evals - still have letters for Susan and Anna.
Oh weeks more.
Susan and Mil sent their self evals. Susan's very stuffy. Mil's so natural. Her tone is so true because she feels everything and doesn't bluff. 88 artworks she said. Susan wrote like blazes and blazed like blazes and didn't mention either of those.
And Luke! Luke emailed.
29
What to do with Susan's packet.
There's one section of one prose piece that is perfect - crushingly perfect - virtuosic - speed, rhythm, invention, punctuation - go on like that and she'll be famous - other sections of the same piece forced, artificed, east coast show-off, repellant.
-
I'm not confused about Tom these days. There he is in his bed in his room. I went to Amvets and bought him some cushions - dark blue velvet corduroy - gave his dirty pillowcases to the maid and got clean ones - have been bringing coffee and food - took down his rent money and put $20 on the phone. He has been looking so ill - blue under his eyes, feverish, his foot seeping. He didn't even have a bed table to put his lamp on. I brought him one of those too. After work on Friday took him to the bank so he could open an account. What I began to say is we are friendly and minimally involved. I've come out of my Sundays with him and forgotten he exists until, oh, it's Saturday, I should phone him tonight.
Meantime I am somewhat confused about Susan - as a student, for instance. I've never had a student I have felt doubtful with. I've had students I didn't think I could do anything for, but I haven't felt it was because I was too limited. With Susan I don't write good packet letters. There have been good bits but I haven't felt the magically achieved good whole. She's jammed me. There I say, don't blame the student, you have to be equal to it, rise to it. And then what do I reply, something like this: I'm doing what I can, what I am, I can't do more than that. If she needs to take it as a tournament and win over me, it's because she can, she's good, she's pushing through. And then I say she's stupendous but she's also credulous. She hasn't got a framework though she has a voice like Tom's sunglasses, very up to the minute.
I'm still not sure of her packet 5 letter, I've lagged. Not wanted to do it at all. I'm staying away from her.
It's as if my life in some quiet way has gone out of control, off center. When was it alright. When I had 824 E Pender and Tom had 324 in the Maryland. When I had Joyce and Louie and Rowen and Luke and the alley and the Fairmont and the department and the task. Does it have to go this way at the end, does it mean this is the end, something about the way I am not able to center down in the journal?
Try again. Susan. The way I am a bit attached, enough so that I feel a little hollow if I don't hear from her, because she was there hungry for me every day, and could surprise me with courage and effort and skill. With courage, that rare thing. Skill that rare thing. Such effort, she knocks herself out.
And I haven't got through the way she's too much for me. It's as if she terrorizes me. I've always had a margin with Tom. I don't know whether I have a margin with her or not. I don't know what she's up to. I don't believe she knows what she's up to. Whatever is in control has been making her a writer, that's obvious. Shouldn't she step into it.
- And so am I off center because I'm not writing
YES
- If I were writing would any of these losses matter NO
- There's something you want me to write YES
- Something short I hope
come through
partial loss to valiant action
- If I were writing would any of these losses matter NO
30
What else - with my other students I can trust myself. No that's not it - I suppress and perform effectively. I stay with what I know I can trust, professionalism. With Susan I have scrapped professionalism. None of this is getting to it. Peculiarly not getting to it.
It's worrying, what happened with Louie, that I stopped liking her, started to hate her. That there doesn't seem to be a reason for it.
This is such a petering-out zone.
What I want to say to Susan is something like this:
- You've jammed me. you've disabled me.
- My heart is scared when I say that.
- You did it by lying where I'm weak.
- What lie? Admiration, a special liking.
- And what's the truth - I have a very sore heart, why?
- The truth is that something behind you needed to protect itself from me by captivating me.
- I'm sad that beauty and play and such talent will only be with me in this way to harm me.
- My heart is scared when I say that.
-
Cranky with Tom this morning - have done so much shopping and fetching for him this weekend - but don't think that's why I'm cranky.
Get out a journal to transcribe. It happens to be 1991, I was teaching logic, writing papers for Andrew, supervising construction at the herb garden. Rowen was six.
31st
I've handled the little ache about SM by starting to read the 284 pages of our corresp, small type. After a while I'd just had enough of her floods. In the midst of them there are my compact responsible little paragraphs.
I am not ever going to do it that way again.
When I look at what I wrote, none of it is marvelous.
The best of it for me was the images - messed lily, oranges, core, shoulders, tom in the jeep.
She gave me those.
And why wdn't I do it this way again - because it is somehow too hard on me. I am not at liberty to defend myself well enough.
I need something - I need what only Joyce has been able to do - I don't need more people to take care of.
She kept seeming to offer or be able to give me the thing I need, and then fading when I'd send something toward that invitation.
'I love you' means I'll be your mother, not please be my mother.
I'm bitter about that. I feel exploited about that. You shouldn't offer mutuality just to get more attention.
I'm anxious today - anxious at heart - about what - as if old age - loss of everything - having no home and no connections - no money. I'm scared. Should I move back to Vancouver - should I move to the Peace River Country - as if I have to start over, nothing I have will carry through. It happened when Luke stood me up, didn't it.
1st June
So then I phone Luke and am all better.
Someone called Jim Race emails me about The analog-digital distinction, wanting to talk about an analog algorithm for edge detection. I google him and come into a whole geek cyberworld, San Francisco.
And there I start a workbook for action and notice stress at the heart.
-
This evening Jody emails back.
You may be bad with money but that is not the problem here. From what little I know, [the college] is much worse with money than you will ever be and on a much larger scale. One reason I am not eager to hand them mine. (Come to think of it, it's largely my sense of your unassailable integrity that keeps me from dismissing the institution as a scam. I hope that's not too harsh.)
I'm not sure you know this so I'll make it explicit. I am not just rattling off workshops that might fit in your program, these are ideas I would genuinely love to have the opportunity to explain to people. (I try at every opportunity.) Not entirely from apostolic zeal, I hope. One MA topic that springs to mind is curriculum design.
Every organization and institution is built around some idea of what people are. Now we finally have a theoretic structure that feels right. What could be more important? I am excited by the prospect of what science and society do with it. It would be a shame if [the college] is unable to appreciate the significance and potential of this program.
Ralph's link to a conservative site that lists the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. "Human Events asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders ...." It has The Kinsey report at #4 after The communist manifesto, Mein Kampf and Mao's Little red book, and at #5 Dewey's Democracy and education. "Disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking 'skills' instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education - particularly in public schools - and helped nurture the Clinton generation." At #6 is Das kapital, and then at #7 The feminine mystique, of which they say that Friedan was a communist. #8 Compte who talks about abstract rights without the notion of god. Then Nietszche at 9 and Keynes at 10.
Other books in the running were On liberty, The population bomb, Origin of the species, Madness and civilization, Coming of age in Samoa, Unsafe at any speed, Silent spring, Introduction to psychoanalysis, The greening of America, Descent of man, The limits to growth, Wretched of the earth, and The second sex.
Jody:
There are several topics I'd like to present/explore that spring directly from my [college] work. Evolution and embodiment. "Embodiment studies is an emphasis on understanding human life as the life of a physical body." While I suspect that embodiment studies at [the college] will be mostly focused on human life, I'd like to help people see the larger biological context, to situate themselves in the process of richly interconnected planetary life.
Or an epistemological workshop. Or a workshop exploring the notion that the ultimate medium of artists and communicators is people.
I acknowledge that anything I present along these lines comes from your work. I think I can articulate some of the issues clearly and I would very much like to make them available to everyone. I guess that is part of your motivation for creating the program: to spread the word. Helping people see and think and talk from this paradigm feels like important work.
Or, indeed, a workshop on Being about: 'Introductory Epp.' It is a difficult document for some and I'd love to help them get the basics.
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I've been working all day, 7 to 7 probably, not stopping. Had that kind of drive because I was finding/creating/constructing not slaving for students. Kept saying to some imagined person, maybe Mark, This isn't the best use of me, imagining asking to run a research center. I have so much conceptual/institutional invention in me.
Meantime Tom is reading volumes 3 and 4 of GW. Blissed out he says.
What was I doing today - poking on the web found a piece by Ruth Stein on the psychology of fundamentalism, Father and son, and vertical desire. Piece by Steven Lewis on women in the UN. Excerpts from Le Guin on writing and her body - that's where I started.
3rd
Took Tom to the VA clinic in Mission Valley - they told him the reason he was supposed to be wearing elastic socks is blood clots. He isn't looking well. He still has Rebecca down as his next of kin.
4th
This morning I'm with Mac's house, which interests me, dark red steel and glass, and is the floor concrete or terrazzo? Warm stone? The library roof is a solar grid that tracks the sun. I'm thinking of Jim in San Felipe too. Mac's Mexican foreman, his family, for some reason. There's a lot of storage space in the house. His bed moves around in the east/left end of the house. He likes fireplaces. The solar panels are his design. He's interested in a lot of things. His house is oriented thoughtfully. I pick up on everything about it and he loves that.
I'm aware that I've gone back to dreaming Mac now that Tom is once again not making it financially. He sabotaged his dreams of having money - moving into a better place - getting a van and traveling - by not wearing elastic socks and not watching his feet.
So Mac. He has beautiful native stuff, pots for instance. lives with such open-hearted freedom and competence.
The dining table is big enough for 8 people, so he can invite his foreman's entire family, the grandfather, whose name is Martín, the wife Suzanna, the three kids, one in college, one a teenager, one a little kid, and us makes 8.
In the library there is a lot of table surface, a long library table where sometimes the kids come and do homework with him. A screen he plays documentaries on. People sit on the floor. There's a couch I curl up in. He sits on the floor at my knee eating out of a big bowl from one of his travels. [separate washhouse]
Lonely. Dealing with it by transcribing first part of 1991 and then late 1989. The 1991 is when Louie first came back from Africa and it's dull like now. 1989 I was in my first semester of the MA and sleeping with Rob, and it's good, it's interesting. What else - the waste of writing nothing dreams and not writing more about Rowen for instance, not writing more about the transient beings I will miss. When did I start writing more - when did I get more connected?
5th
It's not just his feet, he has a red rash especially on his neck and forehead. He looks used-up. I'm looking at him wondering whether something in him has decided to burn out.
The texture of his flesh, mottled.
I'm writing here because it's 9 at night and I've transcribed as much as I'm going to.
Susan is at her yoga place mostly until [the college], being successfully spiritual among that kind of people. No more of that lovely writing.
- So she's gone
- Did you know it was going to go like that YES
- She made sure to take it rather than be given it YES
- Is that fair enough no
- Did she strip me of something
- Confidence YES
- I'm being weak the way I was with them
- The only beauty and talent that matter are my own YES
- Do you want to say anything about this no
- Will the fac notice I got hurt no
- Did you know it was going to go like that YES
6th
Transcribing Aphrodite's garden not liking myself. The notes aren't interesting and I'm sex-mad, mean-spirited, self-absorbed, superstitious.
- Is there more to be said about that? you
have come through to friendship, improvement of love woman
- You're saying it doesn't matter because I've improved
- But should I post those
- Edit
- Do you want to say more you have come through to graduating from foolishness and loss
- Say so
- Am I prudish now no
- You're saying it doesn't matter because I've improved
- in america volume 8: 2005 april-august
- work & days: a lifetime journal project