| in america 8 part 4 - 2005 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
8 June 2005 Doing embodiment prep in a low seethe of anger about [college] pay - everyone's lack of comprehension and interest. It's a compressed feeling, heart compressed. Is it a memory? It says yes. Kids at school? Yes. 9
Here I go into a muse about my central lock - that the main reward of [my college] is the writing, and that my stop on marketing keeps me writing without effect, money or success. It's a locked structure - I've been glancing at it this way for how many years? - many - with no shift at all, no knowledge even. Stuck. I'm not satisfied to be obscure and poor and yet I steadily refuse to be richer and more prominent. I don't believe any insight will make a difference. I think it must be pathological but I'm not sure there isn't a good reason. I try to push other people to do what I don't. For instance I'm angry at Susan for abandoning her writing to go back into god fantasy. The lock is somehow related to gender. It's a habitual use of the body, it says. Something about not having sex. Not going out and getting sex, not going out and getting money, success. Keeping creative leisure. It's a stop on aggression generally. That's how it's related to gender. [Opposite page Christopher Alexander on architecture and science: "new kind of insight into complexity because we most explicitly deal with complexity and have to create it" "the creation of fine-tuned well-adapted complexity value understood to be a necessary part of the study of complex systems" "a good system helps both the systems around it and those which it contains, and that's reciprocal" Bohr dependence of the movement of electrons on the configuration and behavior of the whole Bohm electron behavior from wholeness of quantum experiment
nested system of wholes that cover the space ordering on overlapping and nested wholes and systems according to their degree of coherence The wholeness is that global structure which pays attention to and captures the relative strength of different parts of the system, paying attention both to the way they are nested in one another, and how the pattern of strength varies with the nesting. My view is that aesthetics is a mode of perceiving deep structure, a mode no less profound than the simpler forms of scientific observation and experimentation. Relative coherence in crystals and economic systems Numerical analysis of relative degrees of connection within and between subsystems 15 ways centers are made more alive thick boundary Notion that the more coherent something is, "the more it will be seen as a picture of the self, or of the soul" the idea of wholeness as a recursive structure made of locally occurring centers, that centers are made of other centers evaluate the degree to which a "certain system, or thing, or event, or act enhances the observer's own wholeness" "a judgment not an opinion, and it is a judgment about reality which can be tied to the presence of definable underlying structure." wholeness present in a material system, and "in the judgment, feeling and experience of the observer" comprehension of wholeness only obtained "when we agree to use the observer's feeling of his or her own wholeness as a measuring instrument"
the most coherent patterns are those that have the largest number of local subsymmetries within them deep adaptation spatial adaptation between neighbouring elements and systems "in which each part is gradually fitted to the parts near it; and is simultaneously fitted by the whole, to its position and performance in the whole." If the house, the garden, the street, cities, landscapes, works of art, were to become normal objects of our interest, and that the creation of these things were to be given the deep affection, passion which it deserves a longer view in which making were also to be included - would we not then have a more beautiful science, one which really deals with the world.] 11 Margo saying we can't call it embodiment studies. 12 Millie panicking - she is now going back on having her piece in the mag - she's decided her mother didn't do it. Okay, don't be disgusted, investigate. 13 4:30 in the dark. I woke feeling I shd take account. For instance of what happened when I was with Tom the day before yesterday, at Denny's and on Harbor Island sitting in the jeep. I had been complaining about [my college], venting about what to do what to do. Tom did what he sometimes does, imagined himself helping with fundraising. I said very quietly, We'd have to get you a phone and a laptop, feeling that dismay of aloneness: he's fantasizing. Imagining he and Bud could help. Imagining me and him in a van. I was shot through the heart - couldn't say anything, so voicelessly hurt, not wanting to say what he can't afford to hear. And yesterday I dropped in with the LA Times and Starbucks coffee and found him in filth in his room, bed come apart so he was lying on plastic sheeting on his mattress, curtain always closed, paper bags on the floor, stuff strewn, murk and dirt. And what else - finishing the magazine with Juliana's two pieces yesterday. - Sunday morning there was a very pleasing and brief earthquake. The building jerked tightly, in one piece. - Look at this! Canadian Encyclopedia, Bart Testa's piece on experimental film: Though she made few films, Ellie Epp's Trapline (1976) maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication, while her notes in origin (1987) is the most deceptively modest landscape film made in Canada after Sailboat. - in a para with Rimmer and Gallagher. He says there's a return to image-processing impulse after funding difficulties, video, new narrative, etc. AND - the perception chapter on my web worksite epistemology page has showed up on p.5 of Google, AND - index page for web worksite, And then Millie's site - yikes. 15 Want to say - for some future day - that these days when I am taking him to his appointments at the VA in Mission Valley or at UCSD, or for instance to the unemployment office at Encanto, it's adventures I like. I like taking care of him. Turning into the parking lot next to the tits-with-wings building off Qualcomm Way saying, What do I like about you? He saying, What brought that up? I saying, Oh it's always just under the surface. What is that. It's an energy, female confidence, a base-line. 17 And then today, taking him to do the laundry, sitting with him at Bread & Cie. He hadn't shaved and he looked ill, hollow-faced, hollow under the eyes. When I stopped at the credit union today I discovered Margo had put in $1000 for my embod work and $100 for what I wrote as retreat contribution, so I suddenly have $1500 in that account. 19 Open skies. The difference when the window is open, presence of cool air, very small skritching of birds. I'm sitting in bed with my large cup of tea wondering what I have to do to have interests again. Transcribing over years shows me there are eras of interest, and that it was unusual luck to have the connectionist-embodiment community to take on. There'll be nothing else as rich and wide in my lifetime. Late 1980s, 1990s. It was so much the coming-true of my own intuitions. And so now. Yes - what I'm seeing is a squash, big hard-skinned round thing sitting on the ground. But but I want to be interesting to myself and I'm not - that's what it is, I can remember being interesting to myself and now I'm not interested in anything. I could move to another place, I could go hunting for another lover, another job, but any of that would be temporary and irrelevant. Now I need to find my real well of interest and it would have to be work. Does [my college] interest me. Not at all. If you complete something you'll be interested in everything. Ellie, succeed, integrate, share pleasure, gain. Organize and fight against work woman's oppression. Fight for her to have scope. Fight to believe in her. You don't treat yourself as what you are, because no one else does. There is someone who would - your competitors. Get some competitors. - This Sunday I went for Tom, brought him back here, made breakfast, gave him things to read including Susan's piece. He wasn't impressed, for right reasons and maybe wrong too. The right reasons were that she's wanting to set up an image of herself as shamanistic, the rhythm is for that purpose. I said yes she's a monster and yet she works harder at writing and knows more about writing than any of my students. Then I said he's a monster too etc. What were his wrong reasons - her unconventionality of form, her acerbity. His ear maybe doesn't get her polish. So tonight Millie says take it down again. I take it down. She wants to dodge. Now she's okay with the story of shock but doesn't want people to know her mother tried to abort her. So why is she hitching on that, is it what she says, she doesn't want people to know her mother didn't want her? That seems pretty much universal, why should she stick on that? Why did I like it - because I was so quick to get it. Would it be better for her to come out with everything? I think so. She's had a whacked-out life of secrets and wants to keep it going. So I'm disappointed, her bohunk ugliness has turned out to be true, she's going to perpetuate the murk. Susan disappointed me personally but not in writing; but since then, 1. she's gone back to religion, and 2. she's dropped me.
[Opposite page: Fuster's new book Fuster J 2003 Cortex and mind: unifying cognition Oxford "shift in the way we construe how the cognitive code is represented and processed by the brain" "change fundamentally our current functional models of the cortex" "reconsider thinking of perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning and intelligence as separate entities" He's pals with Edelman, Changeux Networks - his book reviews evidence for paradigm shift
He talks about <awareness of cognition> - consciousness is not a function, it is experience of a function - therefore phenomenology is useful. Neural reentry - Hebb first posited There's a chapter on evolution and development, interplay of genetic and environmental in differentiation. 1999 special issue of Cerebral Cortex.] 21st Golden plums. They're crossed with apricots, are sour inside their skins, have a surface that's slightly rough. They are pure golden yellow and perfect when they are in the pale grey-green banded USA bowl. Second, Tom's voice on the phone catches me, who's this beautiful guy. Light. We were on the stone wall next to the tuna boats this morning, flat sea, fresh air. It was early. We were there with Starbucks cups and the NY Times. He was lying with his head in my lap and I was weeding the blackheads at his left temple where he rests his hand. He's grateful and affectionate these days, he's happy. I am nagging him about taking the chance to write and not getting some random job. He's liking The stones of Arran. Transcribing 1987 before I went back to school, seeing the long run-up, how long I took feeling my way into it. I said I wanted to make it possible for women to cut through men's philosophy. 22nd Here it is, a Wednesday morning early. Need to be at Tom's door at 6:30 to take him to the mission to try to book in. What bits do I have - the moment in the booth at the VA hospital cafeteria - tears shot into Tom's eyes because he's suddenly back to nothing. In a dream coming on a partly burnt photo album in the street - I see that it's my own, family pictures. Along with that I'm wondering what's different in relation to dreams. In my forties I was writing long passages of what now look like junk dreams - along with other things I'm disapproving - the sex - the meanness - the philosophy, even, because it's vague - is that the word - I need to look more at what it is. What's that smell, gardenia from the bush downstairs. What else yesterday. Wind and Sea, hours on the sandstone in our sunglasses. Tom at the end got into gear to tell me what he's thinking about Casual labor, excited. 23rd Up early taking Tom to the mission, then into the tight corridors of his storage place, which has been renamed and painted and still has his third floor closet piled to the ceiling with boxes full of dirty stuff. Tom focused and I directed and we whipped through all the boxes and threw away a lot of stuff I was happy to see the last of. I was cranky but he didn't make an issue of it and that pleased me. Then I went home and transcribed and he packed up the stuff in his room - the end of the Reiss Hotel. And then I drove him back to the storage and we took up the TV, the CD player, the coffeemaker, cushions I gave him, backpacks, briefcases.
24 Having the jeep checked. It'll cost me $900. 25th One of the books Tom was throwing out, A death in the family which I hadn't read before. What was absorbing about it? I don't know another novel that's about religion. He draws shades of attitude, the women's piety, the men's detestation. The little boy's vanity and credulity, his squishy self-regard and the atmosphere it is fostered in, polite, 'caring,' quite mawkish and also socially alert. Knoxville 1915. It's about religion and also about place, southern city and country. Big-tree city street. Country voices. The way Jay drops into country talk when he speaks to country. That blurred south-east quadrant of the US, the least-like. The night ferry-crossing. It's a minute transcription of a family's conversation after a sudden death. He works hard to get the complexity pinned. "No, she was just cutting a corner for Catherine." On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomach, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. What about that. It's Catholic, it has that Catholic feel of emotion about family - Tom's. I heard that passage read on NPR in Eliz's guest house, a Sunday evening looking out onto the garden in agony about breaking up with Tom. I sent Larry to the book not thinking it and he are southern, and it slew him. James Agee 1957 A death in the family McDowell, Oblensky And apart from that - this Saturday evening, in this cabin on the roof, door open, sun on the closet door and on the door standing open - Tom down the hill on his last evening in the Reiss - I honor his careful record and am restless wondering what I should be doing. I do not love my people and want to record them. 27 I've been looking quite sweet-cheeked in the mirror, it's from being with Tom a lot and helping him. A small sweet island. On his Lycos page there's a match-making box. Looking for a __ male __ female within 10 miles. He saw me seeing it and said, That's not mine, that's somebody else's, although he customized the page and it can only be his. So he went to bed in the bed I made him on the roof and I woke from a dream that I was with a taller dark woman who wasn't my lover although I felt right with her, as if we were sitting for a studio portrait as a couple. She said someone (that older woman) had told her the man/Tom had slept with an engineer woman while I was gone. I woke feeling what I used to feel, scared of betrayal. I need evidence, I said. 30 Yesterday all day reading A bright shining lie. Meantime Tom once again doesn't get in at the mission - walks all over downtown and spends money heedlessly, and so now I have to stop looking after him and that means the amnesty is over. I started looking at him differently when he threw his dirty underpants in the trash. "They only cost a dollar." I say to myself, what is his value to me. Then I say voice, hands, eyes, height, the way I can be sharp with him, the way we can sit and look at something together, for instance yesterday in the mission forecourt studying the people gathering. A kind of naturalness, daily workableness of some kind. I don't go into screeching irritation. I also say, he's never going to have money, he's never going to write, he's always going to lie, he's always going to misjudge and get himself into trouble, he's always going to need basic organizing help. I ask: does being with him say anything bad about me? Is he dangerous to me? Is it morally dangerous to be with him? Am I good to myself in giving myself his company and an attachment? Is it okay for work? Meantime also - gardens, evals, lecture writeups to get done so I can leave. Gail Risvold came home after three weeks away - this evening - and found I had just emailed her. That was in Hinton. 1st July Looked out the window just now and saw Ernesto planting what I carried down yesterday, the two manzanitas, two salvias, cistus, cissus, wild grape. He's planting them Mexican style with a little berm around each. Have been organizing the s-word workshops today, from 6 this morning until just now - 3:30. I'm done. Now would be when to go to work at Dawne but I have to be here for Tom to phone at 5. - What's this chest stress - automatic stress about having a lot to do. It scares me. I start wondering whether I'm going to have a heart attack. It's happening quite often. Bernice Alstad. I wouldn't have known her voice. She was just some thick-voiced woman with 9 grandchildren who doesn't approve of gay marriage. (Law passed yesterday in Canada.) She said Gerald lives in Colorado and his son was killed at 16; Gail has a gay son who tried to commit suicide; Marvin Berg is very ill with MS; Freddie Warnecke died last year and Henry Olydam, I knew this already, long ago. 2nd Montana Big Sky tent - Coleman - green and white - $130 - 7x14. 3rd Some way I could digitize our video footage from beta and learn an editing program and just futz away on We made this in my own house? I wd enjoy that. Sunday morning. White sky. It'll open later and pour fire. Driving to Taft along Mission Bay Drive seeing Americans thronged for the 4th. [Opposite page: It was hard to find a general in the US army who worried that he or his colleagues might squander resources and waste the lives of soldiers. The junior officers of World War II, now the generals of the 1960s, had become so accustomed to winning from the later years of the war that they could no longer imagine they could lose. Van and Porter and York were asking Harkins to submit a "fail report." No such forms existed among the tens of thousands printed by the US armed forces. A Vietnamese Communist leader could report that he was failing to attain success without necessarily jeopardizing his position, as long as he was seeking alternative means to overcome his problems. His system encouraged self-criticism, criticism of colleagues and subordinates, and analysis of what the Party called the "objective conditions" that confronted the revolution in any given situation. The Vietnamese Communists were fighting a war of national independence and survival. They had to be able to record dark hours and learn from them if they were to live to see sunny ones. The post-World War II American system was receptive only to the recording of sunny hours. an attrition strategy that relied on a plenitude of American-supplied resources and firepower Numbers that Vann regarded as meaningless or indicators of counter-productive activity had great significance to Harkins ... body count ... total number of operations reported launched ... number of aircraft sorties flown and the tonnage of bombs dropped. "Three M's" - men, money and matériel "Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we're winning this war." We were being forced at the beginning of our professional lives to come to grips with a constant disparity between our perception of reality and higher authority's version of it.] Neil Sheehan 1988 A bright shining lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Random House 4 I sit in bed with my cup of tea, blank sky beside me, and have nothing to say. It's a holiday Monday. I still have a lot of things to do. - Tom came out of the mission shut down and impatient. He needed to do some 4th of July thing. I said, It'll be hot and there'll be no parking, want to just go to my place? No he did not. He needed to do something people do on the 4th of July and spend some money. I was driving around shocked at heart feeling there was a good time and it has ended, once again it's gone. And then there was a parking spot facing the glittering sea between the Star of India and another tall ship, with clots of tourists standing and passing. We looked at them not at each other. We gave out awards to the best people and the worst. Tom analyzed fashion. I liked the glittering sea. It was a hard unloving goodbye. 5 Luke last night says he'll come. What I've already got done today - Carolyn's eval, only Susan left. Money owed from Nor, check cashed. Horton's Plaza - 2 pr olive green summer pants and a tomato red teeshirt at Gap, red Chuck E's, and a second pair half price, black ones. Bought tea, got lunch at Valentine's. Came home and laid out what I'd bought. Michael stopped in to say goodbye. Looked at my crow feather and said it's from a wing, third from the end. How do you know? By the shape and the position of the spine. He stank lightly and was wearing his cowboy hat. Looked quite lovely and was full of talk. You're happy these days. I'm jazzed because I've got two commissions. He walked me to the jeep and gave me a hug bending down through the window. I kissed his cheek. He'd offered to carry things down to the car for me. Oddly a sweeter goodbye than I got from Tom, who was openhearted through all his months at the Reiss and even when his feet had weeping sores. I started to get used to being fond and secure, I thought I could go away connected and write him and get letters from him and carry an open heart through the months and keep my pretty love-bloom that I saw in the golden light of the Gap changing room. If I'm not mistaken two of my scarier moles even started to disintegrate because I was feeling loved. Tom's asshole self reappeared, I don't know why. And then what do I do: I start to say, maybe I'll meet somebody who's competent and wants to take care of me, maybe shutting down on Tom will make me freer where I'm going. I cut my losses. I thought I had a handsome husband but I don't, oh well. 7th Lying in bed I imagined Mac asking me questions about Tom to discover whether it'd be okay to move on me. What does he do? He used to be a journalist and he edited and published community newspapers for a while. When I met him he was a desk clerk in a welfare hotel and at the moment he's living in a mission. Is he good to you? Yes and no. Does he cheat on you? Not to my knowledge. Does he say he doesn't? And you don't believe him? He lies to you? He has, yes, mostly about small things but when he was using meth he kept me in the dark for four years. Do you think he values you? He has stuck with me for 10 years, he has never given up on me, but he doesn't do anything to make it possible to have a life with me. What is it you like about him, then? The first thing I say is, his voice, his hands, and then I reach further back and say, I fell in love in a way I never had. Mac says, Did he fall in love that way too? No. So it was that he seduced you? Yes, but the point was that he could. I went somewhere I hadn't. Where was that? Then I tell stories about moments. How long has it been since any of these moments happened? Four years, maybe, but when he was away for a year, even at the end of the year I felt like a widow. Mac creases his brow: Did you miss him, or did you miss loving him? I missed loving him. Do you feel he's the only person you can love? No, but men who are strong enough for me don't want me. I can see they'd be hard to find, you bore easy don't you, he says and changes the subject. Then I ask the book and it says, the work. He's doing the work? Yes. So then I turn around. 6th Now it's 9:30, lamplight, Karina Gauvin singing Mozart, the peace and ownness of this little room. Jeep mostly packed. Tomorrow I'll carry down my pillow, bathroom stuff, the blue cup, the milk, journal and credit cards, money, pyjamas, the trash. Bring the bike inside. Take evaluations and packages to mail. Come back and write the lecture paras (wrote Susan's eval today), post them, and then take I8 to Yuma and from there drive north through Arizona. 7th Quartzite Arizona, Yacht Club Motel, a collection of trailers with clusters of pilings supporting steps covered with Astroturf. It's run by a slattern with very tanned long breasts. She says 116 degrees today. The boys, my neighbours, have likely gone to bed, they're miners, she said. London Underground bombings today. "We were all trapped like sardines waiting to die. I honestly thought my time was up." I'm watching the evening news. It has been a day of motors - the jeep engine and then as the road dropped down to Ocotillo, the A/C, and now the A/C in the trailer. I finished the lecture writeups and emailed them, went to the Postal Annex with evals and receipts and Susan's shirt, and came home and cleaned the toilet and walked downstairs with computer and bucket. That was all that was left. Min - Min came outside and waved. That was loving of her, somehow, or kind. I've never said goodbye downstairs before I left. Scared the first stretch of I8, nervous about my right foot. It feels insecure on the gas and if there's a long climb it tires. When I got down onto the flat, which held all the way to Yuma, it was alright. Yellow murk filtering the light in the Imperial Valley. Then beautiful highway 95. Eighty miles north from Yuma, saguaro, jagged brown mountains, dry grass, greasewood, a road laid lightly over the terrain. Dips, bumps. Just a few trucks. Beautiful color, orangey grass, brown rock receding to pale blue. I wasn't all there yet, need a night on the road and an early morning. 8th Page, AZ, just this side of the Colorado and the Utah border. It is too hot to camp, forecast is 97 tomorrow. Long ago this morning - I'm watching a movie about ballet in a large room, very large - real dancing - long ago this morning I left that decrepit trailer and found an empty road. The sun rose. There was a glitter on the pavement. What is it, I thought. A long snake flowing through a glittering Z. Sonoran desert, saguaro, matilija poppies knee-high on the roadside. I aimed for Prescott. There, library computers, a woman in the breakfast café who said she knows Laura Sewall. Then I aimed for Sedona and found Jerome, the steep town. Did not stop in Sedona, the land of silly people. Aimed for Flagstaff and didn't stop there either, a lumber town like Prince George it seemed. Then the long easy road through Navajo Nation, red hills, bright yellow-green grass. At the motel check-in a young man speaking Navajo on the phone. It's ten at night, still hot. My eyes have been burnt. Tried out driving with my left foot on the gas for the first time. Can't do it for mountain driving but it helped. 368 miles. 9th Kanab, Utah. Since Page it's been beauty, soft red and green, buttes like Navajo skirts, layers of buff, orange, rust, maroon, soft wide land between them, sagebrush and juniper, sometimes a small burst of yellow, sunflowers on the verge. Hardly inhabited, the easiest of roads, every once in a while a car, headlights in the mirror miles away. Small animals smeared on the road, many of them. Morning light pink on pink. Perfect travel though I'm watching my eyes. Should be wearing sunglasses but they spoil the color. I'm traveling in the big cargos and one of my orange singlets, blue shirt for appearing among people, red tennies, the old ones. I should stop more. It will be too hot later. But I want to get my miles before there's traffic. Should be on the road earlier, but keep waking, need to sleep as much as I can. Steak and eggs and rye toast. Sunday 10th Pocatello, Idaho. Was up at 5:15 and out the door, clean pants washed in the tub last night. Get on the freeway, 40 miles to Salt Lake City. There isn't going to be a sunrise. Dark overcast. Abrupt mountain to the east, city and lake in a murk. There's traffic but it thins after the suburbs. Then 15 is two-lane, speed limit 75. Left foot on the gas. I drive 80 or sometimes see it has edged up to 85 which is the last number on the dial. Sweet hills with alfalfa yellow on the benches, grass green in the draws, dry and worn off on the ridges. (Even here in town, walking across the parking lot to the café, I can smell hay.) There were spits of rain. The windshield wipers smeared the glass. About three and a half hours later, 210 miles, trout and eggs for breakfast in Astro's town. Anything to tell from yesterday? Kanab. I liked Kanab. I could live in Kanab, which is Paiute for something about willows. (It's 200 miles from Las Vegas on 15.) - "There wasn't many people out there when we's out there." Where am I, Salmon Idaho. The man speaking is 65, tight jeans, small rump, big belt, white hat, light blue Sunday shirt, worn cowboy boots with slanted heels. The men talk, the women are silent. There's a graceful teenage boy who works in the kitchen, earring, shaved head, come out in his black apron and shamrock green runners to talk to the boy eating with his folks. There's a juicy waitress, a goldy-skinned blond, carrying her breasts high and round. Oh my arms are tired, shoulders. Should I stop for the night. 93 turned out to be good. I had to drive 70 miles west to catch it, and minded those miles, but then there was a wide valley with smooth mountains, grass, silence, all those miles of visible silence. I stopped to take a picture of a clump of scarlet penstemon in the grassy ditch. Further on there were clumps of blue flax along with them. The Lost River Range. No way to describe that stretch along the Salmon River, that had cliffs and bluffs so complicated in form and color and texture, so diverse, so much too much I knew I wd remember nothing, having to manage the curves, no place to stop. I was looking as hard as I could, seeing the cut and lie of hundreds of thousands of shards of stone, and in among them was it three or four colors of plant sorted by condition - yellow-green bunchgrass, silver sagebrush, something bright green, and scrub juniper almost black. The sagebrush grows alone where the rock has fallen in a single-color scree, oxblood sometimes, that manzantita dark red-brown. Oh the order. My good jeep, at 70 or 75 it settles into a deep strong throb like a driving heart. - Missoula Montana - 577 miles today - really - I'll be in Alberta tomorrow. There was a bear of an Indian man in the Chevron station at the edge of Missoula, which I'd been aiming for determined since I got onto 93. He was taking money from an ATM and I was looking for a map of Montana in the rack next to it. I said, Do you live here? Do you know what part of town I should go to to find the older motels, less expensive? He said his sister was the housekeeper at the Ponderosa, and unfolded a map of Missoula and showed me how to find it. He'd been to Grande Prairie, he said. He was a steelworker. He began to refold the map with his big paws. Let me do that for you, I said. And here I am at the Ponderosa Motel watching Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone. There's a large dry hill looking down through my window. The motel in Provo, Idaho yesterday said Up-town Motel on the roof and Budget Inn on the sign. My room looked through green trees to a mountain with snow. I liked seeing my pants hung on the balcony rail drying in front of the mountain. July 11th Today there's sun. It's the first morning I've made tea. I'm on my nice bed in 323 in the Ponderosa, a pink cinderblock room with deep orangey-red carpet and two dusty-rose wing chairs on either side of a plywood-topped bar table. I'm thinner. Have been buying only breakfast and eating half of it. It has taken until now but I'm in myself. I'm happy. More than happy, a pressure in the chest. There are a lot of travel stresses and yesterday I'd come through them. My eyes didn't sting because it was overcast and I used the new sunglasses when I felt glare. I easily switch feet on the gas and later found I'd driven a hundred miles with the right foot on the gas and not noticed. I came across a mountain pass, hairpin curves at 20 mph, in a hard squall of rain, front and back wipers whacking, nervous especially downhill on the far side. That was some kind of threshold - it was the Montana border but also some kind of emotional threshold. And then the bear man because I pressed on strongly and wouldn't refill my tank until I got to my goal, though I was watching the needle. And then this big room and a tale of a small marked child who is raised by ugly people who hate his giftedness. I was watching it as the intervention it is, liberal propaganda certainly, Christian conservative kids will recognize the shut-downness of their parents in Harry's aunt and uncle, the muggles concept implanted. Hermione is a confident non-pleasant know-it-all. The antihero is a smooth-haired butter-blond boy with aristocratic pretensions. Harry has the right kind of quiet smile, alert and bemused. I loved the marvels. The chocolate frog that jumped out the window, platform 9 3/4 found by running at a brick arch, the goblin bankers, birds dropping the mail, the dining hall, the portrait that asks for a password, the shaggy giant who comes for Harry. I also like that this so pervasive magic was devised by a welfare mother and not an Oxford Anglican. There are things about it not-yet-right, only one girl prominent among half a dozen featured boys, token brown people in the background. No love-girl magic, no sorts of girl really. Appetite for magic - 'spirituality.' Alright. 8:30. I'll unpack my passport and take 200 over to 15. - Conrad Montana. The fashionable people are across the street having lunch in the expresso café. The farmers are here having dinner in leatherette booths that are two shades of tan. There's a farmer in a John Deere cap. "I brought the ol' combine in."
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