in america 9 part 3 - 2005 october

work & days: a lifetime journal project

4th October 2005 October the lovely month, its two o's like moon. I'm thinking the first time I felt October as I do now was when we went to BC one October and stayed it seemed a long time. We kids downstairs in the uncles' bedrooms. There were hazelnuts spread on newspaper on the table, soft-shelled with milky kernels. The maples were diffusing gold powder into all the air. That warm steeping goldenness. We had no such Octobers up north - September was sharp blue and yellow, sharp and simple, and by October the leaves were down, the fields stripped. The openness of my slides of furrowed fields. Susan last night on the phone was so nice to me. She says I make her laugh, she listens with pleasure to stories about Tom, she says I should write about teaching, she wants to know what I'm working on. I went to bed contented and am still - so starved I'd been to talk in that easy happy way about myself. She's fretting about money but she says she knows she's good, she wants to keep doing what she's doing. She used to make $125 an hour and worked at the bookstore Sunday, all day, for $40. Spent more than that on the heater - yes she bought a heater and I am pleased to say her books are warm. 5th Coffee shop corner in the Wednesday night mall. The new moon. Fibers of smoke in the sky and there's the clean white line, though doubled at one end by my distance eye. Murky tints tonight, brown glow following the sun down. When I leave home at a bit past six it's plain day, when I get to the junction where the Pacific Highway crosses into Mission Drive the sun's in a melt of yellow, when I turn to climb Clairemont Drive I see it still brilliant in the mirror, when I arrive at the mall entrance at the top of the hill it's already gone - how does it do that? And now at ten to seven it's night, red neon, red brakelights, just that lingering smudged brown glow over the ocean. I dress up for this class. Where else can I go in the evenings? Notice from [my college] today, $135 raise per student, $140 more for the res, bonus for service, it's about $1200, after tax maybe $800? For Visa. 6th Tom this aft came in closed, strained. I spoke from where I was, trying to figure what to do with Richard. He launched into loud - he's so loud - suggestions - couldn't listen - I said, What are you feeling? - long story of fighting with himself - he's out of money - living at the mission makes it hard to work at the temp labor place - he hates living at the mission - he wants van, laptop, cell phone and bank account - he wants to keep writing - he wants to blast out - he could go to Oscar and have instant money - he could see Tony - he could have a joint - he could go to New Orleans. After a while I see that he's not going to be able to see me this time. It's going to be service or nothing. He goes through every detail of his day's routine. I have had my eye on the grime on the arms of the chair and get out the Lemon Pledge. Go from there to the floor. Then wipe down the doors. Three hours of that. What I'm feeling as he speaks is that he's never going to get himself together. He's never going to have money. He complains that we don't live together as if it's my fault. Then I have to either say he doesn't have the money, or not. He complains that he doesn't have friends as if it's my fault, whereas his friends are druggies and he himself knows he's sunk if he goes back to them. What I was feeling was something like this: I'm being punished for being what I was when I met him. I have been generous, I've been faithful, I've worked myself out of my own addiction. He'll be the rest of his life either not coping and jonesing or collapsing back into using. I'll be the rest of my life waiting for a man who cannot see me or give me anything. For me there'll be no end of deprivation and its deaths, for him there'll be no end of seeing himself screw up. Seeing that makes me want to die and get it over with, or else have him die so I can get out of jail. It's a grim vision of life altogether: it becomes punitive if I'm loyal and faithful and try to be morally clean. There I ask and it says it's not punishment but I feel it is because I felt it was when I was little - I felt I must have done something wrong and I felt life was grim. So it's not punishment but it's still deprivation. Then I say, I won't get anything from him but I can get it somewhere else, I must go into the world and find other ways. I won't abandon him but I'll fix it so I don't need what he doesn't have. That's as bad as all those martyred women I say. It says no. It's the story of many marriages. It says no. 7th Friday. I feel starving today. My heart is desperate. I've ignored it until evenings but when I feel for what starving means it's sharp heart pain spread into my back. Or can shift into my forehead. Frantic. Stuck in waiting for someone to come for me. No one who wasn't already that structure wd put up with what I'm putting up with with Tom - isolation without end - I said it's worse than it was, it's much worse, and started sobbing. He used to have money and a room and a phone. Now I'm here with no connections, no one speaks to me, no one is with me. I can't see any way out, I'm frozen in passive isolation. Is this a memory   yes Do you want to talk to me   turn for the better, excluded child's crisis Feeling it   YES Always feel it   YES Sore shoulders   Is there any way out   anger, intimacy, search for everything that evades, with each other 8th Saturday night. Three left and one of them not in yet. I came in at noon after laundry and Bread & Cie, and zipped through Cynthia, Margaret, Lisa, Richard. Tom phoned at seven and said his cloud lifted because he was honest and he's been two days in love. I said, Want to go for a drive tomorrow? Did I say Susan bought a dog - a small dog. There's something wrong with the way I keep hoping she'll pet me in a letter. Sent Luke a copy of The line of beauty, thought he'd like it because it's London. It stuck with me though I rushed most of it and skipped some so I had to go back. It's of large experience and it's minutely accurate. Hollinghurst's cover photo is very amused, exceptionally centered, as if both his eyes are right eyes. - I've just checked that and it's exactly true. I'd like to look like that. How does he do it. Just be loving to him   I'm starving   Because I'm sticking with him   So should I leave   no Will you tell me why not   your growth in relation to illusion and evasion is carrying you into passage Still   yes Will carry   I have to stay in deprivation   You want me to stay hungry   He's my guard against doing the same thing again somewhere else   Is that the crux   no Will you say what   I want you to lose success, evasion and exclusion That?   YES Ego success   Do you want to say more about this   no Will you say passage toward what   missing, deep change, crisis, anger   "You're feeling wasted as a woman." "Totally." "I'm sorry it isn't working out better than it is. I'm here."   Is this a real crisis   It's true he doesn't want to be with me   I want to be with him   I was too proud to say   At bottom I'm in despair about him   And about my ability to find loving connection   And about having my work seen   If I go on like this I'll lose will to live   no I'm at a halt   I've really lost hope in you too   Because this is going on so long and nothing changes   I'm stuck with being stuck     Will you lead me   persist, in acting, on getting Tom, to give Is that what you mean   Keep trying more nakedly   Go for broke   Give up succeeding   Go for making plain   YES Is that the only thing I can do   9th Heart shaking like a slammed door. I said he mustn't reply and then made a speech. I was standing with my rump against the edge of the desk, he was on the couch. I was looking across the room not at him as I spoke. I said I was going to say something I haven't said. Yes I'm wasted as a woman. I've been here since 2002 - three years. I have been observing. I have been watching to see how motivated you are to be with me. What I have seen is that you are not motivated at all. In three years you have not had a place I can come to, most of the time you haven't even had a phone, and you haven't had money so we could do things together, if I want to go on a trip I have to do it alone. When you say, but you're there, that's maybe enough for a cripple no other man would look at, but I don't think I am that, and it's like saying I'm no woman at all. I'm starved to be with somebody who wants to be with me. I don't know why I'm still here except that I talk to the book and it says it's good for my character to go through this astonishing ordeal. Look how I started to press down, writing that. Then I took him home and noticed I was driving with one hand and my arm straight to the top of the wheel - entitled. Back to the beginning. Wondering whether estrogen is making me emotional. He came in closed, straight to the computer looking up his old address, and when I kissed him hello he wasn't in it. I sat outside feeling my heart shake. He came out and raged at me for whining. I strode into my house and locked the door. He walked down the stairs and at the same point turned around, came back. Chairs on the roof. I made my first speech about what it's like these days - I think - I can hardly remember - everything is about him - etc. Was pacing, saying I have to find some people who like me, I used to do it with lovers, I don't know how to do it now, I don't know where to find people like that. He was bullshitting without end. I was sitting with my hand over my eyes feeling hopeless in the way he doesn't get anything, doesn't connect. Forgot - strange that I forgot to say that when I'd made the first speech I sobbed on and on, with my eyes covered, that distinct feeling of both sobbing and watching myself sob, a strong unemotional presence as if standing in my head while the outside of me cried. When I'd made my speech I looked at him. He was looking at me the way I was looking at him, wet eyes and stripped, present. - I finished 1994 March-July today and put my hand into a red-backed volume without looking at the date - summer of 1992, Rumsey Wheel, agony about Louie. 10 Good stories in that volume - the physician in the garden, the Mennonite music concert crossed with Anne Rice, women against men at the BC Cultural jury. Tom showed up at noon, said he doesn't want me to be lonely. The moment he imagines having a place where I can be with him, I feel myself start to come around as if he already had it. I say my say but then he says his and it seems so mindless I'm silenced. I sit there covering my eyes. 11 Why did I record so many dreams - and why don't I now - because then I was so imprinted with them - I remembered them with such sensory depth - and now I don't have that. This morning I was walking barefoot on the soft dirt at the side of a country road in the dark. There were no lights. Then I saw headlights coming. I lay down in the ditch to be hidden until they passed, was feeling the earth sides hoping they were deep enough. When the lights had passed there were voices. I got up and saw many neighbours with some of their cattle walking both behind the wire and on the road. I was walking back through them wrapped in a sheet. Was thinking they must be feeling interested pleasure in what it was like to be meeting each other in the field in the dark like that. I wrote what I did about writing dreams because I was remembering this one with a kind of velvety quality that is unusual now. - Reading Chris Alexander this morning, thinking of Paul and what I've felt about him as a designer - what I feel about a lot of design - that it lacks body loyalty. - If I said to Tom I really want to be with you, I want to be days and nights with you, I want to be as we were, loving and breaking through, would he get himself together to have a place where we could do that? Transcribing 1992 very quickly because it interests me. Tuesday early aft. Still thinking what there is to say about why I want the journals published. - Note from Millie saying she's sick again and going to take a leave of absence next semester. I'm not replying. Susan asked for jpgs and didn't reply to them. I sent her 1992 stories last night. She wrote "thanks for the stories." She wants me to ask her about the dog. 12 Wednesday morning. Packets done - sort of. Late Becci. A money mailday. REACH has refunded $106 Can for that filling. [My college] reimbursed $148. [My college] paystub for a $1,139 pay period that includes almost $500 in top-ups as a result of the union signing. Especially when it gets into Louie and Michael some of those passages are so distasteful I am embarrassed thinking of posting them, but I was thinking all of it is a record of something not useless, an unguided investigation of female capacity in possible freedom. The feminists taught me to believe myself first, believe I could uncover what had been covered with intent to suppress. So Ros [de Lanerolle] was right: it was about liberation and that is why it's worth showing,. It wasn't about 'writing' although I sometimes so much loved my words and wanted someone else to love them too. And why was/am I the one to do this. Because I was already cut loose from my group, I don't have the female fear of being cut out because I've said what's forbidden to say. 13 A couple of nights ago I dreamed I came out onto the yard (home place) and saw that the jeep was standing crooked. It looked like it had been pushed in at the left rear end. Then I saw it had been burned out, completely gutted, no glass, nothing inside. I woke myself wailing. Last night I dreamed I was driving in narrow city streets with Tom. He was driving. I was looking at dark clouds and saw that one I'd thought was very dark was actually a huge straight-sided column as if an explosion of great force. Is there debris in it? Yes I see a window frame. Turn here, I say. We're heading toward the area where rubble will soon begin to fall. But the street we turn into is already blocked. We're in the jeep waiting it out. Then rubble does begin to fall. Bricks on one side, soft bollards on another. And so on. The jeep doesn't get hit. I'm thinking maybe I should be lying alongside it so I won't be trapped if it is. I'm on the driver's side now. Tom and I have had our arms stretched out to clasp hands. Things have stopped falling. I am standing looking around. There has been a reflection of acrobats rehearsing in windows higher up. (I feel that has been going on throughout) and now a lot of kids going to clown school come out of the building. There is a man speaking to me. I've shown him the acrobats but he's coming toward me with some sort of aggressive intent. He follows me to where Tom is sitting by the jeep. Tom barks at him. He gets Tom's hands and feet pinned somehow. Tom reaches down and pulls out a silver pistol. He shoots twice. He's dead, I say, wanting to stop Tom. Tom puts the pistol back into his folded umbrella. He has shot the man through a glass-sided cabinet. I can see a red bullet hole. And then I'm standing looking around and Tom is gone. As I'm transcribing I'm asking whether all that time recording dreams was any use, also whether there's any reason to include them. Sometimes, not often, there's one that's either obviously apt or else interesting in itself. Sometimes I do a reading of the dream and that makes it less a blank. [Opposite: Chris Alexander notes from vol 1 of The nature of order: examples that had the greater wholeness, judging this by the degree of wholeness they induced in me Structural features he noticed: levels of scale - well-formed wholes in a range of sizes, with jumps between them strong centers boundaries need to be wide enough in relation to systems of centers that look both ways alternating repetition positive space - is beautiful - no leftover space - every space swells outward, is substantial good shape - 'a good figure' - the elements of good shapes are good shapes local symmetries deep interlock and ambiguity contrast gradients roughness - adaptive imperfection echoes - similarity, families of angles the voice simplicity and inner calm - reducing the number of centers while increasing their strength not-separatedness They are all ways centers are supported, related. What he means by centers is visual wholes, shapes that are taken as wholes? Not exactly - something more technical. A certain size relation, 2:1 or 3:1 he says, 'helps' adjacent wholes "a field effect which creates centers" "works best emotionally" strong center: centeredness - entire organized so one keeps going back to it - "a vector field" - "a focusing field of energy" - progression of centers "spaces become more useful or more strongly felt" Lack of feeling of intervening space - "the space next to the bowl has a beautiful shape" Good figure: internal symmetries, bilateral symmetry, well-marked center, positive spaces, strongly distinct, relatively compact, closedness. x mechanist-functionalist tradition "crude and totalitarian" find a theory of wholeness wholeness as an overlapping structure of centers local symmetries can be invisible more coherence if they overlap general disturbance in our capacity to make wholeness Any center which has deep life is connected, in feeling, to what surrounds it, and is not cut off, isolated, or separated. Unusual things which have the power to heal, the depth and light of real wholeness, are never like this. They are always connected. an incomplete edge I believe these properties arise because they are the principle ways in which centers can be strengthened by other centers. field of centers It takes years - perhaps three, five, ten years - to learn the process of making centers, and to know what it means to make a center come to life. How, finally, the unfolding of wholeness might one day be understood as a single law which underlie the entirety of everything we know as nature. Says he thinks architecture and art are bad because we have a mechanical model for matter. new picture of the nature of order He wants to say what he senses as wholeness in artifacts is an objective property which is the right thing for makers to be interested in. Then the question he doesn't answer, why people don't see it. My answer is psychological. "more life," "more harmonious," "more in keeping" an extended theory of truth a shareable point of view in which many factors can coexist coherently Our own feeling, the feeling of what it is to be a person, rooted, happy, alive in oneself, straightforward, and ordinary, is itself inextricably connected with order. a powerful new kind of structure, coupled with a new form of observation these stronger zones or entities define the structure we recognize as wholeness centers - zones that are strongly differentiated zones of space that stand out as centers an organized zone of space the subwholes or centers are induced within the wholeness Gestalt psych - Arnheim the power of the center Notion of the personal The feelings in which we are, like lovers or little children, more absorbed, more happy, more carefree, and more vulnerable If it appears to have the right structure but is not personal, we have misjudged it structurally. the existence of personal feeling in a thing or system an objective quality feels valuable, feels worth giving, feels the most intimate of the three The word he's skirting is love. Perhaps you may even feel like a little five year old in the degree of your trust and vulnerability. Farther, and very fundamentally stated, we become happy in the presence of deep wholeness. Vol 1, 308 the wholeness of the world and our feeling of happiness together He doesn't want to say, that's the nature of the cosmos and it's ours because we evolved as part of it. He wants it as an alternative to mechanism Feeling and life are somehow the same thing. structure we call wholeness is connected with a ground where matter becomes personal. I would say wholeness in a body is love, feels like love and that we can judge structure by whether it evokes love, because when we perceive wholeness we become more than we were. The reason he misses this is that he doesn't think of persons as bodies. He stretches his vocabulary because he doesn't get this. There's a desire for the supernatural of some kind. Liking from the heart: 1. when we like something that way we feel whole with it 2. and when we're making it 3. the more honest and accurate we are about what we do really like, the more we agree with other people 4. the 'it' we like is something profound in anything 5. real liking has to be struggled for 6. real liking feels like being more real as ourselves 7. and is more in touch with all that is Do you agree with this     It's my instinct from the start     Ask which object is more like your real self. freedom as being able to react appropriately. That it was possible for us to build a world in which people are emotionally free, fully themselves, alive, extant in their own reality. I felt the existence of a level of skill and knowledge beyond anything I had ever come across before. Kyoto - Tufuku-ji.] 14 I started transcribing 1986-7 and could see right away that I crossed some line between then and 1992. I was 'immature', something in the feel of my writing unclean and unsmart in the old way. Between those two dates I went back to school, got a best friend, got a real lover, and with Muggs took the garden through the fight and into prominence. Did more with Joyce and the book. 15 It's six on a Saturday morning. Blue dark at the window. Floating somewhat. That means an unusual sense of drifting as if still dreaming but in thoughts. Something I want to talk about but I have to seize myself to do it. It's about the 1986-7 journal, the way it is still cryptic. Why was I writing that way, so that now I or anyone can't make it out. I was trying to stay more non-verbal. My question is: I sound less intelligent but was it more intelligent. (Say something later about why I don't use question marks most of the time.) I often wrote long sentences with a lot of parentheses. I was still trying to stay visual. Was it brain damage from drugs that was still there from 1978 (?) and that I fixed by going back to school. I wasn't using the string yet, so my card answers were not as clear. It sighed to that and I will watch what happened there. To me a question mark registers a sound and so I don't use it when the sentence is grammatically a question if I don't hear the interrogative sound. and when do I hear the interrogative sound. Not there, for instance. I don't know why many questions aren't interrogative - because they are more like statement, they are movements toward knowing something. I know not using the question mark is accurate transcription. - The reason I was cryptic was that I was trying to stay out of social forms of thought. What does that mean. Explaining is for the other, I already know what I mean. But then why write at all. Because it moves something along. The way this question-and-answer form does. Anyway the evidence is that I was someone else in 1987. I was more hateful and harsh. I was more desperate. [sigh] I was very off-balance about men. I was much more in search in books. I was poor and humiliated. When I opened the book there were three photos, Rowen in his pushchair, Michael at the window in a wine-colored shirt and beret, Michael lifting Rowen to drink at the fountain. The photos are so beautiful and live that I felt maybe what it was about the worse writing was that I'd been more in real life, a quality of life. The way Michael is standing, the beautiful body he was, the way he's holding Rowen, the lightness of his energy. - Yesterday Tom arrived while I was still in my white pyjamas. He sat down on the couch and pulled me toward him, was kissing me on and on. I wasn't in that mood, was going along with it at a remove, thinking, what's this, I don't know whether he has ever been like that. It was the pyjamas, how classic 1940s they are. We set out into the day, the apartments around the Cortez, the library at City College, Golden Hill, Barrio Logan. Over the Coronado bridge with Tom looking through CDs as he drove, up the Silver Strand to Imperial Beach, a bacon, olive and mushroom pizza we waited for in the sun next to a white Malibu with red interior across from the jetty. And then to an adventure in Border State Park that pleased us by its boldness. - Did a lot today. Got all five of the first volumes up ready or not. Small fixes with all the pages. For instance checkmarks. Made space for the GW volumes on a shelf in the closet and ordered them. Tabulated all the Aphrodite's Garden volumes - found them, noted them, got them listed in a table so I could make sure I have them all. Transcribed more, this volume is thick and tightly written. The link into the journal is a very small notice from the writing page: lifetime journal project. Now I'll have to check through fast and make sure it's okay. Letter from Juliana describing a woman in her class, describing herself able to say there are people working on this, you have to be brave, you have to say it in their language and then show them where it cracks. She also described herself reading through this woman's writing. I haven't shown her much. She's using Wild research. Gendlin and Chris Alexander: they both don't get all the way there, and why not. Probably for the same reason. And is it in the same way. And how does Tarthang Tulku fit into this. Gendlin, Alexander, Tulku/Buddhists, Gestalt: related in method. [Gendlin notes] 17 A dream where I take up a necklace, black jet strands with a lot of other kinds of beads. I'm thinking to take it apart and keep just the black jet strands. I find there's a bottle attached to it, small white porcelain thing like a saki jar. I'm pulling out of it a noodle and eating it. It's the beginning of one long strand. A woman who sees me says I mustn't because there's a spirit in the jar. Something about a young woman, the spirit will be dangerous to me if it gets out. I go away to ask the string, Is it alright to empty the jar? I expect it to say yes but it says no, and the swinging movement feels exceptionally heavy in my hand. - Susan said she couldn't comment on the journal stories I sent her until after the semester is over. Okay I said, meaning so much for you. I did a quick edit of vol 5 and reposted today, found out what it still needs. Transcribed another 10 pages of 1986-7. So she isn't my audience. I said she wdn't like my journal, though she does notice I'm funny. It rained this morning. I got the heater out of the closet. Sore throat. Clear sky an hour ago, full moon, and now I hear rain again. Tom went back to work. 18 I was looking for photos to scan last night and saw the two of Tom that I was so moved by in 1996. Are these the right ones, I was thinking. He doesn't look beautiful, he looks like a doper. And always did and I was besotted. But I still look beautiful in those photos, being besotted made me so. So now I've done the work and I'm not besotted but I'm differently stuck and probably not beautiful, and worse, I have less love for all else. (It says that isn't true.) 19 Carolyn - how did she know they were there? "I just started reading your online journals. I cried from emotion. Your language is so clear and pure in parts, and just the idea of putting all that online so beautiful." 20 Sick. Nose dripping onto the keyboard. Finished re-editing vol 4, transcribed 20 pages of 1987. Shocking paragraphs about hating Rowen, rage at the garden. Had forgotten I was like that. The journal shows me fighting. 22nd Toward the end of the 1987 journal Rowen is 2, I've spent my days digging in the garden and am lean and brown, I've beaten down the male challengers, I've been savage to Rowen and ruthless to Michael and Mary, Louie hasn't showed up yet so there's no one to talk to, Meg and Cari Green are encouraging me to edit my 100' rolls so I'm about to make notes in origin the film, the bookwork is inconclusive because I don't have the pendulum yet, my reading and researching are haphazard and lonely, I'm plot coordinator so there's money to borrow through 5-week months, begin alternating weeks with Rowen, frankly holding onto him just because I want the [welfare] money, going to Joyce on it, integrating Ed I got better looking. I was 42 but like a teenager being bad for the first time. The good things still to come: friend/Louie, sex/Rob, prominence/garden, recognition/Brakhage and Ottawa, Australia, London etc, radical philosophy/SFU papers, writing/the later journals, coming through/later bookwork, heart maturity/Tom, roadtrips/California, publication/the web. Still editing - vol 2 edits today - and there are photos to add - but it's very satisfying to have the first 5 volumes up. Meantime, with students this semester I am moving small levers to large effect. Writing short letters, not editing. Margaret has agreed she wants to get real with her plan, Richard took my advice to listen in his practicum and is enfolded in a loving company, which was just what he needed. Becci has her foundation jelling with the notion that soul is body. And yesterday Gwen said she'd like to do a graphic novel about women after WWII, how did I know she was really wanting to draw but afraid of appearing naïve. Question is, though, are these shifts I could have made during the res if I hadn't been overloaded. It says no. Lisa I just needed to reassure about her instinct, which is pretty near impeccable. David's the one I have nothing to give except edits but he likes those. This is the sort of intervention that wdn't get me good evals but it's effective - good evals come with more motherly encouragement and so far this term I'm ditching that. Not replying to Millie's forgive-me notes. Do I know why. I'm disgusted that she's dropped the work and gone back to being ill to get care. If she goes back to doing the work I'm on her side, but she has to show she has the steel to do it for her own sake. I want to stop pouring time into people who don't have strong intent. And S, what about her. Strong intent of some kind. I've dropped her because she wdn't reply abt my journal stories, and she dropped me because 1. she has a dog to love 2. she's getting back together with Grace, 3. she's finishing her packet. 23 This morning an email from Mani Rao who says she spent a couple of hours reading at random in my journal, which she was somehow imagining was private. Google had brought up "my then sweetie Jam Ismail" who it turns out is her now-sweetie. Should I have a link to the project intro on every page, for people who come in this way at random? When public names bring readers, for instance Le Guin, etc. Carol says she's been dreaming of turtles. I send her to Gary Snyder. 24 Affection. Both Saturday and Sunday with Tom. We haven't done that for years. He looked nice in his blue beanie, and when he takes it off, too, long spikes with silver streaks at forelock and temples. Saturday we went to OB to do laundry. He found me congee at his little food court on Midway. We rode through Barrio Logan looking at the streets and sat in a coffee house on Broadway at the base of Golden Hill reading the paper. Yesterday after the farmers' market we were in armchairs in the Clare de Lune with the LA Times. Saturday night I phoned Luke, who was liking Hollingsworth after he got past the gay sex. He liked the closeness of social description he said. Monday morning. White sky for days. Sitting in bed looking out the window at my new pots, two chipped Bauers I got on Newport while Tom sat in the laundromat parking lot listening to music.. I bought plants for them yesterday, a small agave Americana for the mango, a little crassula for the smaller green. 25 Mary on the phone. So ponderous. Her interests are unbearable - she wants to talk about people I don't know. I said, Hey do you realize your children are more distinguished than any of the rest of them - meaning her brothers' and sisters' kids. She says she realizes we're a distinguished bunch but she doesn't compare. And then changes the subject to poor Rudy who feels left behind. I try to bring it back, say why does she go there instead of enjoying our wonderfulness. She dives straight into a story about Paul losing a war with his neighbour and thereby his house. Oh she's a lumpy sack of rocks. When she starts telling me about her Latvian neighbour I say I must go work on my packets. She's foolishly given Rowen his $2000 all at once, a waste of inducement. Why won't she take pleasure in what she could take pleasure in? 26 She has the concept of harmlessness but not of charm. She talks about people because she's imprinted. Nothing she says about them is interestingly said. They are mostly only circumstances to her. She lives consumed by people and at the same time she doesn't enter them imagining them. She doesn't ask questions. - I keep wanting to growl. It's at the waste. Oma wasn't like that, she was discrete but she was peppery. M is very self-abandoned. She's a little slave. Transcribing 1987 I was surprised remembering that I used to be anxious about becoming her. The garden time took care of that, wildness and power took care of that. - The withdrawal from human contact of some of these deprived children is to avoid the intense depression they experience as a result of hating the person they most dearly love and need. The desire for love, however, still persists, and according to Bowlby this can result in behaviour like promiscuity and stealing. - Summary by Bowlby's biographer secure in the knowledge that there is someone to whom he is of value - I was quite evil in that time     no Savage to Rowen     no Do you mean more good than harm     I held onto him just for the money     Wasn't that evil     no Necessary     Correct to be ruthless with M     Was it about integrating Ed     no About being who I am     Claiming what I'd been afraid to be because of him       Are these doubts failures of nerve     Should I go back to being ruthless like that     no I was having to dig myself out of a hole     Jam defeated me     And intended to     It was a power struggle     With women it's murderous     That's what I discovered in Dames' Rocket       Do you want to talk to me this morning     act, to cross over, do the Work, for persistence Will you say what you mean by persistence     completion of mourning, illusion and exclusion Persistence in processing       Anything else     about Tom, you have graduated from child's despair into subtle intelligence Child's despair was the beer glasses     More?     balance in quest to restore community losses That's where the love is now     Cynthia realizing she doesn't feel her heart     Gwen finding her inspiration     Richard listening to his community     Margaret going for truer work     Becci understanding soul is body     Is Millie a total loss?     NO she has learned to process anger and recover part 4 in america volume 9: 2005 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project