in america 9 part 1 - 2005 august-september

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver August 22nd 2005 Eva Cassidy singing Danny Boy. I'm crying. I had never actually heard the last verse. And when you come, and all the roses falling And I am dead, as dead I well may be, Go out and find the place where I am lying And kneel and say an ave there for me. And I will hear in soft your tread above me, And then my grave will warm and sweeter be, For you shall bend and tell me that you love me, And I will sleep in peace until you come to me. Sore heart for what - cemeteries - for the generations who couldn't bear to know they would die completely - for Susan because I miss her - for Tom - for being sixty when death is spread through all the world. Here a pretty cat, black calico, strolls into Louie's bedroom where I am on the white couch next to a hot patch of sun. Silence of weekday in the neighbourhood, cloud massed over the mountain. Not ready to do anything yet. 23 Tuesday morning - a sane note from Millie - have been turning down Lise's requests to gossip about her - horror of that girl-group wish to buzz excitedly and come up with a group opinion - things I say reported wrongly and misdescription escalating until the whole hive can justify turning against me, which they have other reasons for wanting to do. There was a moment at the res. We'd come back from having dinner at Sarducci's on the river. I'd come back in Lise's car, had invented a need to go to my office so Susan wouldn't see me coming into the cabaret with Lise, and then had sneaked into the Haybarn past her. Lise'd seemed to be waiting. I sat down where I do, near the front. She plopped down beside me with a little wriggle of satisfaction. What's that? I was feeling, suspicious. She got something out of me about Susan, it's that. Did I say more than I should have? Probably not. I was generous. Told her what I'd learned about how to handle Susan's tantrums. I'd confirmed her sense of double-bind, said I got hurt but it was worth it because of the quality of the work. I didn't give away Susan's crush. I was more loyal to Susan than to Lise, as I wanted to be. So her wriggle of satisfaction was about having managed me into giving her more information than I wanted to give, which she didn't realize I hadn't done? Yes. Being rivals made me see her as ugly this time - ugly big teeth and jerking stork legs and bad clothes. - Am I more lonely than I used to be, or feeling it more? Both, it says. I'm aware of putting a taste in my mouth because I'm lonely, or wanting television. Don't have the patience to get into fiction - that's a new sensation. - $300 for tires. ABC wants to replace the muffler and catalytic converter for $600 plus labor - shd I do that? It's cheaper here. I'm way into my credit cards - but still - it needs to be done sometime - and my income is down one student. And it's, what, 22%? And there's the trip home, $50 a day for gas. I'm seriously in the hole. But if the catalytic converter goes the engine heats he says - 25 Invited Luke for dinner last night, pork roast and mashed potatoes, olive bread. He rummaged for olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip the bread into, so bon vivant and au courant. His head was very tanned from standing around on his jobsites. He's fit and strong but his face is padded now, small eyes and a padded jaw and a rather fleshy pouty mouth. He's coasting on commercials and pretty girls who can't reach him. He's firm of mind, logical, organized, has Ed's liking for skill in work, and is friendly and fair and hopeful, but isn't he hungry for better quality of daily mind? He was 16, asleep upstairs. Sara was away. Roy let himself into the house, came into his room and sat on his bed. He could smell that Roy was drunk. Without opening his eyes he said, You're drunk, go away. Roy started smashing his head with his fists. Luke jumped up naked and fought Roy down two flights of stairs and out the door. What I'm doing with my hunger for better quality of daily mind is transcribing the last journal. - Asked S whether she still wants to collaborate on the anthology. She said never again. Ouch. I should be the one offended, she didn't prepare and stressed my session not knowing what she was doing. Whether to try to work it out with her - my fault was wanting any of it to be about me - that's sad, that that's a fault - she was a test I failed - her structure is chaotic and she's madly exercising it and I wanted the company of her flare because I haven't enough of my own. Look there's the orange corner lit. The crows have passed. Will you tell me what attitude to take to S     the work, to come through, into persistence, in writing Mine     no, hers See what she is as that     That's a generous view and I was right in it     That wd redeem it for me     Is her purpose unconscious     And will it carry her     YES She's very self blind and driven from the uncon     YES I wanted to give her a chance to formulate something about the field and the realm     But she wanted to protect them       I should have hung onto knowing it wasn't about me     YES I let her confuse me     Something I should say     friendship, loss, slow growth of judgment There was friendship and loss and slow growth of judgment    The end     Laiwan last night looking so odd, face very swollen, almost a dwarf shape, or penguin, with small arms dangling. She has gone off thyroid medication and believes she is rebalancing with Eastern medicine, but is sniffling constantly and weak on the stairs, wrapped up in the story of her illness. Her voice was light and quick and now is deep, damp and as if mechanically slowed. We gossiped about [the college]. Had been to see John Greyson's Proteus at Tinseltown. Shots of deep water and proteas opening rapidly into dry shaving brushes. Rowen - you're late. And then there he was so sweet and young, loose jeans, loose teeshirt, sandals, greasy long hair. He headed straight for the grapes, he's like me about fruit. Fed him cold chicken and potatoes, broccoli and marrow and then plums and peaches and watermelon and more grapes. He thought maybe we could go look at books. I said I wanted a nap. Lay there and felt the arrows of anxiety about [my college] and then was ready to get up. Sitting around with Rowen. He wants to read something challenging he says. I talk about finding something to want to do that's hard enough to make a longer focus. Something you want enough and that you also have confidence you can do. He says there isn't anything he feels like that about. I say maybe we can try a few things. The left hand / right hand exercise. He's very twitchy doing it, his fingers twitch when I say 'fingers.' Afterward he says the right hand was younger and buoyant, said don't settle. The left side was anxious, had something it wanted to say but couldn't say it. I said, Let's try something else. The left hand room. His work room is busy, full of piles of things. The left hand room is white. It's empty. There's a window with quite a beautiful view, hills, trees, sky. When he tells me the room is empty he's rubbing his eye. Why? His eyes are wet. I go sit by his chair on the floor and he leans his head against me. I say, Go for it. He cries. He says after that he was crying because the room was empty. I say I think it's that there was sadness in the room. He says it had a feeling of someone he used to be. The paper he unfolded had a child's drawing. I tell him about the rooms I used to find in dreams of the family house. We wonder who he was in that room. I say, What if there's a phone ringing in that room. He imagines it, says it was a girl and they had a superficial checking-in kind of conversation, but maybe it would need more setting up. I say alright let's try again, and talk him further into it. What does the phone look like? It's a rotary phone and it's just the other side of the door. Its cord leads from the busy room. Okay pull that one into the busy room. You can answer it later. Now there's another phone that doesn't have a line from the busy room. "It's a white cordless and it's on the window sill." When he answers it, it's himself as a child, telling a long story about something he was building in the bushes, a village, a water line. I had been telling him about himself at 4, his confidence as an inventor, his wide gestures. When he was crying and I was holding his head I was looking at his black eyebrows and his eyelashes and his fine skin and feeling him so young, so much a child, so lovely, so real. 26 I was also looking at his young bony body lying on the carpet, feeling I'm responsible for that tender lonely being, and there's more I should be doing. - Trying to explain to Millie what the difference is between being friends and being in the advisor role. She doesn't want to get it, because it's about her being a baby and wanting to suck indefinitely. Babies are scared to know it's costing the mother. Saturday - still a lot of [college] reverb. Intensively calculating. I had the catalytic converter fixed and now am thinking about whether to replace the CD player, another $230 US. Made a $700 Visa payment and still owe $3000 on that card, 1500 on the other, total 4500 now and was maybe 2500? (Paid 1800 last year on Jeep loan.) Will be paying monthly 10 Intergate, 160 G & F, Visa Green 80?, US Visa 160? = 410 out of maybe 800 will leave me exactly 100/week for food and gas. If I don't add more debt, by January I'd be down to about 3600, res pay wd bring it down to 2400, which wd be about caught up and workable again. but very tight in these months, unless our raise is bigger than I expect. What do I conclude. Another $230 for the CD player won't make much difference. 28 Sunday. Thick grey in front of the mountains and that pulsing current of white smoke always pushing up out of an unseen chimney. It's raining. 29 The two of them in their leafy gate waving goodbye, bright faces, she so little. I'd given her a careful hug on the track. Thank you so, so much for having me all that time, all the evenings on the porch. It was our pleasure, she says in her quirky gravelly little voice. I won't be able to say much of this. We were on the alley track above their kitchen, we'd just driven back from an Indian restaurant through late sun and rain, a monkey's wedding with a rainbow that had its strong south leg in the river and shifted as we drove. David pulled his red car ahead of my parked blue one that we'd packed earlier. Right there under the many-trunked cedar and next to the tangle of figs and grapes and the grassy bank below the highway seemed the place to say goodbye. The Star of India had been closed so we'd gone down the street to the Royal Tandoori House, which was maybe a former nightclub with stained seating and a double-height ceiling with fluorescent tubes. We'd sat together in that ugly gymnasium in that dull light waiting an hour for our food, which I was going to buy. Dorothy had on a pink knitted shawl for the occasion of eating out, and under it was wearing her pink beads. David had on an unironed grey cord shirt. I my orange singlet and blue linen shirt, rather grubby. We were comfortably uncomfortable together in our corner. Dorothy was watching a curtain jerking continuously in the glass door to the kitchen. We could sometimes see a little boy with a handkerchief on a knob on his head. Dorothy is such a girl and David such a boy. They are young together, she 92 and he 60. He has hardly any grey hair and hers is darker than mine though thin and fine. What they are is light, they're fairyfolk. When I was waiting at the register to pay I saw myself in the bar mirror looking the way I love to look, light too, taller and slighter of bone, the elf self. It's cultural with them, they're well bred, they know how to relax with people and be vigilant at the same time, they have a mode of affectionate play. I settle in with them, say whatever comes to me. We laugh. Had come from Mary in Clearbrook, she and Art and Hilda helping me put my boxes into a stall in the parking basement. Not well bred, Hilda grabbing our heads and pulling them tight together and praying aloud, Dear Lord ... Mary's energy thick as mud, background anxiety I guess, whole dark back room thick with yelling ghosts. Anyway, there we were on the alley track under the sky and Dorothy was saying travel safely kinds of things, and then the last thing she said was to the jeep, Go well, True Blue. Earlier we were sitting in the dining room together, she in one leather armchair and I in Russell's next to her. I was looking at a book about a Seattle architect who'd been Russell's cousin, Aunt Flossie's son. The room was quite dark because it was starting to rain. There were lamps on next to the red-framed mirror. Dark wood paneling, Aunt Flossie's lovely painting of a floating mill camp on Vancouver Island on the mantle, the watercolor of Dorothy on the porch among plants some of which are still there, over by the kitchen door, and she in the midst so pretty, her delicate pretty lively little pointed face and long fine hands. Should I balance my pleasure in that house and its established intelligence by remembering the ways David is imprisoned by it, not daring to speak to Uncle Neil, and waiting out year after year hoping to get the Salt Spring land and now losing it to Rosalie by arbitration, and Marilyn lost to Jesus after a husband who beat her, and all of them civil when they meet? What else. My jeep with its new catalytic converter and balanced front tires felt smoother on the highway, very smooth, as if it weighed less. - And then there's Tom on email saying blinked, meaning I outstared him. I did too. Still sober and celibate he says. I'm overjoyed. A feeling of leaping toward him, my Tom! on the day I bought a CD player for the jeep. - I walked out in the evening and met Daphne and Brigit on Hawks, and went on into the gardens and Strathcona Park, and there was sitting on a log watching soccer girls when Mavis came by with two young people. Whether to speak and oh what to say. She said Hi Ellie and cast her eyes down and I said hi and let it go. The first meeting of the mother whose son died with the mother whose son didn't die. She looks heavier, is that antidepressants? She has gone over a hill, I felt. She will have felt me looking at her with appalled pity and ruthless curiosity; there was no way around it. It is discreditable not to be able to do better than that, I know it. You today, me another day is the right way. 30 What did I dream long ago before dealing with Caryn on Carol. I came into a room that startled me with pleasure. It was a huge room, bookcases along one window wall and continuing around the corner to a fireplace. A light wood like maple. There was a double bed further down the fireplace wall, and a single bed between it and the fireplace. It pleased me that the bed was in the living room. There was more about seeing the place of this apartment in a whole development which was stacked another long distance uphill toward a cathedral, all in sand-yellow brick. - Want to transcribe more today but what'll I do about my eyes. 31st Last day in this house, Louie wants me out the day after she's back. Luke came after work yesterday, sat on the floor persistently with the fireplace and got it lit, I made tea, we sprawled in the armchairs and talked. Later I made supper, pork chops, broccoli and new potatoes with capers and fennel. We ate at the small table with Eva singing. I offered him a goodbye cigarette to amuse us both. We smoked it on the porch with wet night beyond the grape leaves. I sit with him marveling at the large male body in front of me, long strong legs in shorts. Quite broad strong hips. I kept glancing at his lap when he was distracted, involuntarily, hoping he wasn't noticing with the corner of his eye. Talking was a pleasure to us both. I told him about the old and new visual system and blindsight. He was tracking so well I was feeling something like, here's my companion. He was telling me about drugs in London in the couple of years before he came here, raves and ecstasy in his early twenties. The damp chill of granite houses in Edinburgh on winter nights, the lives of the generation that came of age in Thatcher's grim era, letting loose in Capetown where energy's allowed. My cosmopolitan boy. When we were sitting in the dark with our cigarettes, I said, It's odd to think you'll still be alive when I'm not - I mean I hope you will be. I hope so too, he said. We laughed. I wanted to say that because I have been looking ahead to his being without me. Should I be looking ahead to my being without him maybe, if this is a window before he settles, or maybe he'll be like Charlie and not settle until his forties. Meantime another wet dark day. Things to do. Cleaning. 1st September Nisqually WA. It's maybe 8:30 or 9. I was out Louie's front door not much after 4. I've already done close to half the day's driving, through Seattle in morning rush hour. At a table in the sun waiting for bacon and eggs. Has anything struck me this morning - crisp waning sickle in the black, in Seattle Ranier above the mist, a white god. Left Louie asleep or pretending to be. She was polite. Something puzzling. I scrupulously left flowers, groceries. Cleaned, cooked. Anxious. The best with Rowen yesterday was cutting his hair among the grape leaves on the porch. He would go off to the bathroom and stand looking at his head this way and that. And then he gave Louie a long hug and me a short one and my feelings were hurt, but really they were hurt already by Louie's politeness. I didn't want to struggle it through because I don't want to go back to talking on the phone, so there's a sad unfinished feeling. Sorry leaving Rowen in his lonely phase. Blue sky with streaks. I'll get back on the road. - Bend OR. Footage of New Orleans refugees - black people, mostly, it seems - Jesse Jackson speaking strongly about US priorities - helicopters are in Iraq, money for infrastructure diverted to Iraq. I like this motel. $35, it's the first of September. Love coming into a strange room, clean bed, bathtub, TV, mirror, lamp. Today was just driving. I was strong. The jeep was. After breakfast in Nisqually I got into the fast lane and overtook everything. There were a lot of trucks. I'd only slept 4 hrs, was awake by 2:30, and docked here at about 5 PM, so it was 12 hrs if I subtract breakfast. I'm thrumming now, or is it vibration from the A/C, but I was hardly sore until the last hour. West of the Dalles in the Columbia Gorge I turned on the radio to Ferron singing It won't take long - Ferron! Here on the road in Amerika. 2nd Friday morning of Labor Day weekend. The station Ferron was on was a co-op station out of Portland. A woman was exhorting people to take the free buses to Washington for a war protest, and then announced another song, which was somehow seamlessly replaced by a Christian station that had children singing Hup two three four / we are marching for the Lord. In the high humpy wheat and sagebrush land before Maupin a guy pitching HA, hydro-something acid, that can make everybody young. - Adin CA. Rowen dreamed he was in the middle room of our old house, his room, with his present roommates. There was a jacuzzi. He came into the back room, my room, and I gave him smarties (or we had smarties, was it). Remembered that sitting beside the Susanville road. There are a lot of tall willows with many dark trunks and yellow-green leaves. - Susanville. C-SPAN. Black leaders addressing the press. Democrats are making hay. Two black women yelling at each other about whether to emphasize racism or action. 3rd Somewhere south of Reno, breakfast stop. [Antelope Valley] Just noticing I've stopped here before - recognize the lawn backed up against a little pink cliff with sagebrush and juniper. Last night starting to fall asleep in the Knight Inn in Susanville I saw a junction of the sort I'd often seen yesterday. a flat widening of the pavement with left turn lanes outlined in the center, through lanes swooping around them on either side and the crossing road ramps rising to the level of this broad platform. I saw it and realized separately that I was breathless with fear. It was some day remnant, I thought, though I didn't understand it. Wearing sunglasses prevents love. I saw things yesterday I liked - hay sheds - sometimes other sheds and barns - in Oregon a deep mulberry red - but I wasn't connecting with plants or land. - Saturday night. I'm at home. 673 miles. San Diego 4th When I stepped onto the roof yesterday it seemed larger, and this room does too. It's Sunday morning, not seven yet though I've been out watering the plants. Sea mist white and damp, sound insulation. When I looked at the map at breakfast yesterday I saw I could take 14 to Palmdale and skip the Boron flats and vile Victorville, and then 138 past Pearville and Pear Blossom to connect with 15 south, and so straight home without another night in a motel. At Mohave I fueled up with a chocolate shake and then I drove onto the last road. 15 was heavy and fast - I knew it wd be and was proud of volunteering for it. Last time I got onto that stretch at 4 in the morning because I was scared of it, but this time I had strong wheels and freeway courage and liked the athleticism and alertness. Just stay on top of the pattern: who's moving right, who's moving left, is anyone slowing, is the right lane handling the on-flow. - White pyjamas with dark blue piping. [Pilgrim's Market in Vancouver] Here I am in my own house lonely and idle again, and with my teeth worse than they were - that blank ugly rag doll of a dentist not only let her filling break off but also, it seems, chipped a tooth pulling off the band. And two margin cavities she didn't see. Big ruckus on the radio about disorganization in New Orleans. Labor Day Monday. Here I sit in the bright mist. Packets next Monday. Carol and Anna this week. What else - Taft? [My college] fac are beating their breasts about Katrina. I so much don't feel I need to participate in national feeling. The fact is that even the black leaders were embarrassed by the helpless beings seen repeatedly on TV - "the least of us" they kept calling them. Was help slow because they were black? Probably not. Because they were poor? People with money got out so poverty was why they were stuck, but was poverty why response lagged? Probably not. Probably it was about administrative incompetence, old boys who have their jobs because of who they know. Response in New York was slick because those administrators were good, because New York is a place where the best fight to be top dog. The point of television's week was that everyone stared at the faces of poverty and ignorance on and on, cultural failure, hereditary inadequacy, a human layer no one wants to look at. I think a lot of the public distress must be about what those people are. Lise's piece on her cat's death. It's mawkish but it's partly saved by the way she keeps saying she would never be able to love a human that way. "My girl" she keeps calling the cat, "my girlness"? the writing is confessional phenomenology of grief, it's notes on displacement, but it also hangs onto identifying with its folly. It does very courageously show her in unreserved open love. - It's Susan's got-to-college day. 5th of September. I sent her a burst of sunflower with another overlapped out of focus like feathers on an embracing wing. It seems violent ambivalence is my indicator of true love. She has battened down for good and so she should, but, but. I loved the level. I love that she celebrates getting to college. Liking some of her so much made not liking some a crisis. That's a way of saying ambivalence. - When I was walking home from Starbucks this morning I came up against Ernesto from next door, the man who planted my natives in Richard's garden. He put out his hand to shake mine. "You look ..." he said, drew a smile at the corners of his mouth with his fingers, "... beautiful. It's true." Say it another way. Liking some of her so much puts me in mortal fear of betrayal. The not liking is how I forestall. There aren't so many I like, that I can afford to be so harsh. And yet what other way can such fearful liking be lived? I went into the last 4 pages of our letters and found that she dropped me after the letter in which I said I'd likely adore her at the res, or was it when she'd got the reply letter that said she'd never loved Gia and didn't love me? The letters were good, they were good. 6 Tuesday the Monday of this week. I need to research eyes. What is it with mine - since about a month ago a sort of scar in the left that is like a moving light in the periphery when it's dark and a black mark in daylight. When I'm reading, a blurred area at the focus though there's sharpness around it. It's worse if I work on the computer. It makes reading books so uncomfortable I don't do it. - Tom was at the library not long after I was, saw my note and hurried here. He looked good. He said when I've been away the way I look always surprises him. How? I'm better looking than he remembers, my face is longer. I notice how much I reserve judgment in relation to anything he says. For instance he says he's been writing well. What I saw was a hip pocket notebook with remarks and quotations. He said he loved me. I said, But I hate it when you say it. He was interested in and proud of Luke for being with me at the reunion, that was good. Looked interestedly at the long crooked lines on the map (5934 miles total). Wanted more photos than there were. Te vi Fumabos unos chinos en Madrid Hay cosas que te ayudan a vivir No hacias otra cosa que escribir Y yo simplemente te vi. Un vestido y un amor. What other way can such fearful liking be lived? Is the question     YES Is there a good answer     Alright     graduate by coming through the child's anger Does that mean being angry     no Becoming conscious of the anger     It's the key to everything isn't it     Dissociated and unconscious and persistent child's anger     There needs to be a way to complete it     By speaking it as the child     quest to process heartbreak in relation to the mother I'd like to clean it up with her     More important to clean it up in me     I'd like to be able to love fearlessly     Full blast     YES I have to be able to love beauty fearlessly     Raise enough energy to do it     Look! New moon and Venus and another planet. 7th It's five and still dark - no, closer to six now. I woke thinking what else I have to say to Tom. We were closer after a long time and he blew it, he didn't take care of it, he squandered it, and then he tried to get everything back by saying "I love you" in that dumb old way. Have Caetano Veloso singing in my head, te vi. Here is this room again that will again be full of loneliness and vacancy if I don't do something different. What. Oh doubtlessly publish, set up my billboard. Oh doubtlessly make beautiful work. Spread my field far outward, make acquaintance. The best of Caetano Veloso 2003 Nonesuch - Dr Phan dilated the eye and poured in light and said it is vitreus matter slumping, not retinal tearing. 8 Dr Landeros fixed that filling so nicely I keep touching it with my tongue. Drove with Tom to Palm Ave. He drove I yelled. By the time we were on the train platform together I was putting my arms around him. You're a real prick aren't you, I'd said. That was when he pulled over next to the Reiss to let me go on alone because I didn't want to go back home and get my CD player. He changed his mind in time but then called me a squashed butterfly when my feelings were hurt. Very satisfying on both sides. After the trip to Mexico we came back here and got the CD player and drove up University Ave with the Bar-Kays cranked up - we'll get a ghetto pass for that, he said - and up around 60th turned left and came back down El Cajon Blvd and stopped at Denny's and shared a banana split. He is saying he wants to stay at the mission and write, be an artist. I like the sound of it. Half a dozen real kisses. Restarted Premarin, see whether it fixes my eyes. Transcribing the last bit of the last journal I started wondering whether I had such a poor res because Lise is politicking behind my back, and whether she's doing it because she's jealous of 1) Millie, 2) Juliana, 3) the language lectures. Shd I be keeping my eye on her. It says yes. 9 Margo writes that she is thinking to read my dissertation because she wants to think abut the tensions that came up between embodiment studies and consciousness studies at the last res. She means Francis has been complaining that I'm setting students against his superstitions. I made two of his students cry by vigorously questioning their dualist premises. So now years later Margo is realizing that I'm teaching against one of her superstitions. So I'm endangered from three directions - for being an anti-religious heretic, for crossing 'boundaries' with students and harrowing them unduly, and for being too beloved by a few of the really good ones, like Favor and Juliana. Nobody else has any sort of platform, they haven't worked anything out. I'm annoyed they are too lazy to learn any science. I'm stamping my foot at their weak-mindedness. And remembering Susan saying I'm trying to change [my college] rather than go where people are already clued in. I said it's because they like me there and wdn't like me elsewhere, but probably they are starting to not like me as they realize what I am. I'm reading the Susan letters - have been - and what? I say opposite things: 1) she does that to everyone 2) it was remarkable, she could only have been that with me 1) she dropped me because I hurt her feelings 2) she dropped me because she'd finished with me 1) we'll go on in the future 2) we're done forever Do any of these questions matter? Maybe not, but I have to decide whether to make any moves. Wait to know more. Do I really not know the answer to these? Can that be possible? 11th My embodiment studies stars have both gone off sulking. What am I to make of that. Mil this morning demanding to have her name taken off her curric. Is this why women have done so little, they put their personal snits first. They abandon their work if their feelings are hurt. Yesterday I worked on the reader, started assembling. First format. Can I get students to scan and transcribe. Vacillation between blissful confluence and paranoid fear/rage is always the baby. That's the answer. Women are less cut off from the baby. So does that suggest anything about how to work with women. Is the blissful state more true     Women need to learn to be skilful in the blissful state     Competent     There's a simplicity in this     12th I came home and called bullshit on Millie. I said when is it going to stop being about being supported and 'cared for' and start being about you supporting your own gifts? There's nothing wrong with you. Stop with the wounded duck act and get on with it. I'm feeling generally tougher about the lame ducks. I'm going to stop pushing people who don't push themselves. Am I? Both Susan and Millie dropped their work the moment it wasn't getting them maternal attention. What is that? Meantime Cynthia is in her living room which she has turned into a studio, working every night and all day on weekends rapt in making and in watching the process of making. [Opposite page: I'm angry that nothing is sweet, that there's no love Feel hopeless, nothing will make me more happy and lively Pushed to take care of myself I called and cried and they said shut up, they said be quiet Living presence I don't have   Is it anger that makes it impossible The anger I have to cover Not anger exactly, a setness of disappointment   Feel it Enclose it round, let it speak Everybody said sh It was true that it's hopeless, and so then you are stuck with the price of their weakness A fantasy someone to replace them   I have faith in ultimate order, the fact that the universe works and is ordered and we can know that order The zone of people, the zone of strangers, I still hear ssh whenever I'm with them The anger dullness and the ssh   About order - is that true faith     Is that the origin of hopelessness about publication     It's further back than school     Is faith in universe from early mother     no Itself     ] Here is an email I just got. Subject: Brain and Metaphor. Dear I read your spirit by the forms you wrote. Metaphor show us the action of language the Verb is embodied. From esferasilenciosa @ yahoo. Si giras la esfera lentamente, puedes ver corrientes suaves Also: note from Mitchell Bornstein. He is living alone in Basel, owns a translation company. 13 Here's Tuesday and they are all in. Dawning clear at 6:15 - not really clear, it's grey behind me over the ocean, the grey is drifting east, but there's a band of cream-colored open sky over the palms and the cathedral. Tom's still in love. He's asking and listening. I like it that he liked The hours, the old yahoo wdn't have. Every day reading and writing. What a dull bunch of work - Gwen and her magazine ads - Margaret wallowing in food - David getting barely two not-well-written pages about commercialization of pop music. There's some fun in Richard's dialogue with god but how is he going to get through critical writing, and should he have to. Becci - true-hearted Becci got the idea of body as soul and let it rummage her. Lisa's the one who can write. Very flat, exact, readable, and harrowing. Uningratiating. She can't go wrong, that one. She's publishable though we do not yet know by whom. 14 Del deseo emerge el movimiento La esfera permanece inmovil En silencio, Errante Soy de Bogotá. Estudio lingüistica in la UN. He hice una exposition sobre metáfora ayer. Estoy embrujado con vuestras formas y sus contenidos, quisiera entablar un mágico dialogo con Ud.     part 2 in america volume 9: 2005 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project