in america 9 part 4 - 2005 october-november

work & days: a lifetime journal project

28 October 2005 Robert Duncan's mother died in childbirth and he was adopted out. Brakhage was adopted, said he didn't know who he was. Duncan b. 1919. When I woke at night I was trying to imagine myself in the house with the pink floor. I only wanted to be sitting quietly in the sun in the center of the house. When I went into the workroom, there it was clean and empty, everything put away, and there too I could only want to open the doors onto the garden and sit just this side of the threshold looking out. I had been thinking earlier about Millie's disarray this semester, her disarray in general. Someone as unstable as she is needs a task she's faithful to through anything. Two days ago I opened the door onto the roof and saw a large hawk on the rail. He spread his wings unhurriedly and dropped onto the air. Campbell said Margo said of my work with Millie, It was very dangerous, but it needed to be done. To get it off the table and because I've started it I'm transcribing 1960. There's so much unspoken - the conventionality is such a slog - I don't write background, which would interest me now - in the Reiner story I'm inducting myself into a conventional effort as if it's an improvement on the native liveliness of real life at home - I wanted magazine life - Reiner in topcoat and black suit, dull page after page about the Ice Capades - I'm shocked now by my expected and taken for granted parasitism - I manoeuver to get him to ask me out - I count up the money he is spending on me - I describe the effectiveness of flattery with satisfaction - I am anxious to know whether I'm succeeding in enslaving him ("is he in love with me?") - I use him as a ticket into what I think of as normalcy, viability. My ill-breeding is very apparent in the Reiner story. I was also always investigating, the notes say. Style - I'm already writing a lot of dialogue and interior monologue (which Caryn mentioned yesterday about the journal). There will be a story of style and maybe it will show me coming back to that style after decades of something else I had to do to expand its contact. - Finally got to Paul Sylvestre. Were you there in those days   no Did you arrive at a certain moment   When I worked with Louie   YES Did Louie give it to me   no Something opened up   Giving up some defense     A crucifixion moment   When Louie threatened going to Michael   Were you sporadic at first   Feeling the loss of the mother   Because that integrated something   YES Is there more of you I could access   YES That would be good   I'm sorry I failed Paul   YES He was real   And I was false   That he just went and died - never was any older than 15 - that he was lying about his age because he wanted to touch me. Then beyond that, two very young creatures liking each other - I was so determined to get a grasp on life - it's remarkable how intent I was on social experience - as if that was what I was supposed to be learning at the time and my circumstances at home deprived me of interaction - and I could see that Paul was the same - avid, an operator. He was ahead of me in freedom and realness. He was standing on his artificial leg with what now looks to me like a bleak centered lucidity. His shaved head was marked with blue x's where radiation was being aimed. I regret my callowness - I was callow - I wasn't at all equal to him - I was so scared of being fooled that I didn't meet him - I'd like there to be an afterlife where I could sit next to him on a bank and say I'm sorry and ask him to tell me more. I was silly. Am I still   YES Laughing. How am I still silly   child evading child's responsibilities Child's responsibility is to feel truly   I was using the journal to concoct an image   All that 'feminine' junk   YES Child is not feeling truly   I wasn't feeling truly then   YES   Is there something I should be feeling now   generosity To someone in particular   no Anyone   My callowness was lack of generosity   My dad set up that atmosphere   I feel something at the heart when you say that   Could I still post the journal   YES I was grasping   Yesterday I saw in the Union that there was an open house at UCSD, California Institute for Technology and Innovation. Went with Tom. 6th College had a display room. Beautiful Gabriele arrived. Pepper Canyon is going to have the trolley through it, she said. I said I'd like to tell her about the embodiment studies concentration. She said, email her. I so much like looking at her. Will you explain to me why I had those bursts of lovingness   There was a reason I wasn't that at home   Sexual freedom   YES At home it was the incest taboo   I loved not being in a family   I was mad at my mother   And in Vancouver too   'Home' has that valence   It did for Ed too   And for Mary     Is it more intelligent to disapprove   no It's a setting   Less intelligent   But isn't it expending energy   no Allowing energy   So the key is inhibition   Child expecting anger   The point about the hospital was there was none of that   Oppression   Saturday night. A bit on Richard and then there was that little shutting-down motion in my head - as it feels - that says no more. Scan video images for vol 1 and get them up. Transcribe more of 1960. I describe resisting a minister's consecration sermon. I'm feeling a scared mix as I say that, though I don't seem to have been scared when I wrote it. Scared of being caught in the Mennonite air. Can I describe it. I can't call it directly. I was strong, in my way. Should I ask whether those days I had to be callow to resist the kind of pressure there was, always, in my experience, from men. Did 'consecration' mean, to patriarchy   Did I have to be callow to be strong   YES   That's what I should be looking for in those journals, how I survived and the costs   YES I had to evade   Still at home needs a religion intro   Will you help me edit it   Bad faith   YES Sex intro   Land intro   Link ahead from Still at home   'Culture' - what there was   The ways it was an earlier time, radio, no movies. People - the six of us. When I'm 12 she's 33. Still at home begins when I'm twelve, Judy 9, Paul 8, Rudy 2, and takes my parents through their thirties. It ends when I get on the train to go to Queen's. Places - East Place, West Place, La Glace, Hospital, Clearbrook. 30th Sunday morning. Set the clock back yesterday so I'm waking at 5 not 6. Sex/gender/polio, religion, land, family, community/culture, style. What I used the journal for - to process anxiety about sex and gender - sometimes to process contact with outside culture. What I didn't use it for - what I wish I had - to record background, family. I wasn't really a writer, I didn't have that hunger to record with skill. I had to learn from people who did. More than that, I was wound tight in social/sexual/gender anxiety, I couldn't relax and look around. This section is [was] called Fading and has student letters, goes up after I leave [my college]. Tom and I were at Morley Fields after we'd read the papers at the Clare de Lune. The light was beautiful but we rattled about on dried-out fill dirt and then sat on a log gazing toward the wonderful arch of Coronado Bridge. And then wandered back, and as we were leaving Tom exclaimed There's Willie. A black man on a chair on the grass playing electric piano and singing. Tom's buddy from last time at the mission. We got out of the jeep. Willie kept on singing. I sat down a bit behind him. Tom lay down on the grass. There were many white-stemmed eucalyptus standing in the yellow light, sharp and dark green eucalyptus leaves against the blue. Willie's machine had a rhythm going. He had a sweet touch on the piano. T and I had been talking about how to live henceforward if we're going to assume we'll stay together. I said Willie is a person somebody who isn't living well doesn't meet. 31st "Every glance is filled with love and affection for each other" in Brindavin where Krishna was born human and lived blissful with Radha. Wasn't I that when I was 14? Better in person than in writing? A glance of loving curiosity? Could I only be like that because everyone was new to me? I was feeling oh here are all these people. I've come from that to hating people/disapproving. In the Golden West I had the curious loving glance again. There and in the hospital I didn't have competition from other women - is it that?   no Is it what you mean by generosity   I lost it at Queen's   That acid state of balanced wonder   I didn't disapprove   It was all spectacle   Will you explain   disapproval child expecting anger Disapproval is expectation of bad   Just after I turned fifteen I said what I wanted. What do I want? That's not really a hard question - But is my answer going to be sincere right to the bottom? This is it, as best I know, now. Adventure - that comes first; Accomplishment - books - perhaps just a dusting of fame - not necessarily much; Acceptance - being liked, sought after among people I like and admire, a fitting in; a Beingness different from anyone else's, continual learning of spirit through people and places and experiences. Selfish, a little bit - but fairly true. 1st November I did that well. - Salton Sea, Bombay Beach It's Tuesday - drove straight here with J - very easily on 8 - what are those birds with long flat tails - the sun has a bite - stinking water a shining flat sheet - fish skeletons on the sand - a beach made of these crunchy pink things like hollow molars - Chocolate Mountains behind me - a train - slightest of chuckling on this dirty tufted shore. She's a big blowsy woman, yellow hair gone white very evenly. Norwegian eyes. Born in Beaverlodge, bitter about everything except the man who has just died, who has left collages of pretty women's tits and bums. A cockscomb but he had warm eyes. She cries from one moment to the next. Didn't like me after I said I was a professor. She has no money, is illegal here and on a list. There was paperwork they could have done but they didn't. Surrounded with bits of junk. She's living on $189 a month, her first husband's insurance. She had more money when she met Richard. They went through it together. The school inspector tested her when she was five, said she was a genius and could go straight into grade 2 and so she was done at 13. Later did a BA at Langara and SFU. Ex-Jesuit professor at SFU - cut off his nose, etc - died. She met this guy 12 years ago when she had been studying theology at Notre Dame. Enough. Here I am in the milder desert light. There is my jeep. I bought food for tonight. On 8 I lectured J very pleasurably about embodiment epistemology and focusing. Let her lecture me on the differences of Canadian and US constitutions to get even. 3rd Niland CA on the dusty plain of the Imperial Valley. A lot of trees. Birds. Ramshackle little houses, trailers, wide empty streets. Thick-trunked palms. Shirley encamped in a junkyard office under a big machine-shed roof. We sat an evening and a morning in the shade of that high sheet-metal roof in a graveled wire-fenced compound. A stripped truck cab. A white 70s Mercury. A couple of army trailers. A long pink industrial hose. Old electric stoves. Hubcaps. Unidentifiable bits of metal. Shirley sat in a high-backed old armchair, pale turquoise. Big body, big tits, big pale face with small blue eyes, big gappy teeth. She would lean back her head and roar with laughter. Large sexless and self-possessed. She had her settlement from Frank's estate and took it to New Orleans to get her MA at Notre Dame. There was a religious ed professor, ex-nun, who liked her, wanted to work with her. She said to herself, I'm not happy. Went down into the French quarter and got a room. Met Richard in a bar. Said to herself, I'll buy him if I have to. Went back to her professor and said, I've decided to work with the homeless. Oh? There's a homeless man I've decided to live with. Yes, get out of here, go and live, said the ex-nun. Crack and sex and music. She sang with him. "He threw away my makeup. And my underwear." They went on the road. He was always on, he'd put on a white shirt, a Mexican hat. "If he were here right now he'd be entertaining us." (There she brought out a pile of pictures.) He'd pose. He looked very Mexican, a beard with white streaks on either side. A very energized small man. He was at Woodstock. He was 6 years in San Quentin. Something about Timothy Leary. Into the army at 16 - he had the choice of that or juvenile detention. He liked the army. He was personal guard to a general. He liked a lot of kinds of music - the Grateful Dead. Liver failure four years ago but his liver rejuvenated itself. A cancer scare last summer. 140 degrees under the tin roof. A lot of things going wrong, bad leg, injured hand so he couldn't play music. Muscle spasms. High blood pressure. If he took the medications his peepee wouldn't work, so he'd go off it. Shirl would say, It doesn't matter, but he'd say, I know, but I like ... Two weeks ago the spasms painful and he thought he'd take a muscle relaxant. His lip went numb. It's the muscle relaxant, they thought. Then his arm. By the time they realized it was a stroke he was paralyzed down one side. The ambulance from Brawley took 45 minutes to find the address. At the hospital in Brawley they decided to airlift him to Palm Springs. They wouldn't take Shirl in the helicopter so she had to drive the van. It was stuttering, so she had to keep jerking her foot on the gas. It took her five hours to get to Palm Springs. He was still alive when she got there. She said, You're cold aren't you, I'll get you some blankies. She thought his eyes recognized her. Then they declared him brain dead, but they wanted to harvest his organs. His kidneys were still good. So they kept him going by machine for a while. Then they let her wash him. They said, You'll have to go now. She said, Why? We have to put him in a bag. She thought, I've been here until now, I might as well go on. So she helped put him in the bag. Zipped it shut. The county cremated him. Gave her a 13-year repayment plan, $10 a month. She's trying to get him into the military cemetery at Riverside. Years back, they were in a room somewhere. Richard sent her out to buy some Vaseline. There weren't any small sizes. She came back with the large size (demonstrates size of a large bowl). He laughed. But by the end of their time in that room it was all gone. They had Vaseline in their hair. The first time they got together he looked at her and said, Let's see what you've got. Started taking off his clothes. I've got a small peepee but I've got big balls. Demonstrated his scars as his clothes came off. He said to her, This is the first time I've been with an ugly woman. His friends would say, Why are you with that fat old thing. He called her Swamp Mama. She said they always liked to talk to each other about everything. The thought of going back to Canada makes her want to puke. She doesn't want to be around white people anymore. And there was J. When I pick her up at the motel at eight o'clock she has on a skirt and a short-sleeved teeshirt. She is wearing makeup and has her hair streaked. There is her pretty little face and head, and then her arms that have flesh hanging in drapes from when she was 300 pounds, and her legs with ankles swelled to posts. And yet, when we were in Bobby's Café getting take-out breakfast and she was standing pouring herself coffee, a man came through and stared at her from one end of the room to the other. She projects 'pretty woman,' I saw. I was scandalized by how conventional her theory is. She has gone along with the anti-body agenda of all of it. She hasn't had an instinct to refuse. She has also blown it with Garnet by not holding out until he got through, because she didn't like being alone, she said. I took 78 home and from the Borrego Springs turn-off to the bottom of the Banner Grade it was dazzlingly beautiful to both of us. I took her over the Black Canyon Road. She fell silent there and continued so. 8 to her door at the Hyatt Islandia. Now it's Thursday and I have two weeks before packet 4. - Great-tailed grackles Michael said they were. 4 She warmed up to me when I got back from the Salton Sea and backed up to the slab and unpacked a kitchen and cooked dinner. She kept saying, You're so efficient. I had the Coleman set up on the plastic box with pots and pans in it. Boiled potatoes there and fried onions and then steak in her electric fry pan. It gave me something to do while they talked about people I don't know and wouldn't like to know. Fed them on my camping plates. Brought out rice pudding afterwards. Then unpacked everything else in the back of the jeep and unfolded my clean sheets and made my cozy bed. Shirley had overhead fluorescents on. We sat and listened to stories about Richard. It was the wake, really. She did sometimes ask questions. How'd you get your bad leg? ("I don't like to call it bad. It hurts its feelings.") Were you ever a fatty like us? Were you ever married? 5 Tom on one end of the couch yesterday and I on the other. Paul had said to him the night before, My check came in last night, let's go downtown and have a Bloody Mary. Tom said he said, I hate to tell you this man but I haven't had a drink in ten years. I was staring at him, reached for the string. He hadn't shaved and looked seedy. The string said he was telling the truth. Tom was slightly offended. I said - a bit later - Would you be a bit nice to me, I have a sore heart. It hangs by a thread. He said what he says, I'm no good at being nice to people when they want me to be. I said, You don't have to do very much. Do you want me to be closed again? If I'm open, the cost is that I'm vulnerable to fear. He pulled me over so my head was on his knee and stroked my hair back from my forehead. Then later I was standing on the bathroom step so I was eye to eye with him. I had been telling him about J's pretty woman signifiers. He said, But you're beautiful. And so on. Then he said, You're happy now. I was, but I said, I'm happy that I'm taller than you now. A couple of twenty year olds were looking at him on the street last week and one said, Hi there, stud daddy. And then in the salad line the middle woman serving called him you beautiful man. All this to say that though things are bad at the mission and uncertain on the job and he seems to have lost the Stones gig, Tom evens out when I am loving to him. 8 [*?] Last dream this morning - people are talking about someone whose two eyes don't focus at the same point. I'm thinking of my long-focus and short-focus eye and ask whether mine look like that. My mother says quickly, Yes. I'm angry she has never said anything before. She says, It's all you have. I'm angry still. - Saturday's quiet. I've started transcribing summer of 1986. I'm into the war to get Trudy out. Aphrodite's garden shows me solidifying from shamanic intention - is that what I should call it - the dilated influenced mind - into grounded power. Will I like anything about the shamanic state - drug state - when I see it now? I want what happened with them to be clear. At the end of Dames' Rocket I come to what will we know. Philosophy introduction there says I realize the structure of prebirth intuition. What does it say in Aphrodite's Garden - I do the MA. I find connectionism. I take my intuition and method into men's arenas. - Googled Rowen. There are some other people with that first name. Many as last name. Animé character, a 16 year old ronin with blue hair. - Somebody in Australia - Frederic Peters - writes remembering me from Queen's 1965 - and boorishly warning me not to be simplistic about how the brain does what it does. No clue who he is. I google him and discover 1. he's looking for 21 year old penpals and 2. he writes in an academic voice about "neural representation". - As I stood beside the coffin of my little son with my mind on anything but disputation, the minister read "If the dead rise not again ..." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality. Why the very apes know better. Thomas Huxley quoted on The Sadducee Printouts old age "hideous and insufficiently human" - Margo wanting to talk about Millie. She says she doesn't want me to stop working "so deeply" but I should figure out how to say what I say in such a fashion that it would withstand outsiders' scrutiny, for instance should there be a threat of a lawsuit. I said the way advisors write with those considerations seems very padded to me. She said who for instance. I said a circuitous, careful, metaphoric manner seems patronizing to me, as if we think the students are stupid. If I got such a letter I'd be offended. "If we want them to be clear we have to be able to show them how. I've seen students learn to do it." She says have I seen Dead poets society. She thinks I'm like that teacher and she likes it, but we have to have a discussion, all of us, about what 'personal development' means. She says there's no one she can talk to about Millie, who is now calling her for hours at a time. - Is there anything else going on - repotted the trichocereus pachanoii. See whether it grows now. 9 What's happening to my computer. Explorer has been crashing - just stalling, failing to connect, more often all the time, so that today, for the first time, even with restarts, I can't get it to work. De-frag desktop maybe worked but now the scanner has quit. - Last Spanish class - property owners - and Maithé who is the goddess no one else seems to stare at, hips, firm little waist, so sleek. She's conscious of her tits today, 'cos she's wearing something tight. - Have started 1992-3, the volume with the MA defense. Dave Carter. 10 Already almost 10 pages. The winter weeks in which I watched the snow and lived dedicated silent days and then one night fell through the floor into startled philosophic power. Transcribing, I love to feel my house, its lights and weathers, what I heard and saw from its rooms, its relatedness. 11 A beautiful day. It rained at night. I woke at three, took an aspirin, put on CD3 of Anton Lesser reading the Odyssey. Listened to the end, woke again in daylight. I was typing January 1993 when Tom called up from downstairs. There he is. I grin. Drop him the keys. He thought he'd better get here early because I'd likely be out the door to go camping for the weekend. I laugh. Yes I was going to be out all day. Made him coffee, scrubbed the toilet with rust remover while he ran out his mission troubles. His voice is too loud for this little room. But I wanted to play him a bit of the Lesser so he can hear how well it's read. I don't know whether he'll like the archaic blank verse but he is right there. He gets a beautiful look on his face. Homer The odyssey narrated by Anton Lesser 1995 Naxos Audiobooks He can pick up his check at ten. I'll drive him. Watching the gas gauge. We wait outside Hands On, then I take him to his check cashing place, then to storage to pay his backlog, then to find gas. We're going to Ocean Beach for breakfast. I shove the seat back and give him the keys. A couple of things I forgot to say. One is that when we were sitting together on the couch before we went out I was stroking his long wrist with electric pleasure. Another is that when I was driving he gave me beautiful calm well-thought-out directions. A third is that he paid me back the $60 he owed me without being reminded. There were a lot of people fishing on the pier. We watched them from the counter in the café hauling fish up sometimes two at a time. A very old man directly in front of us, wool toque over his baseball cap. He's maybe Japanese. He is pulling in fish continuously. When he turns to put them away we see he takes his weight on his right leg as if it hurts. The sky has cleared. There's sun into the green water. Tom spots an orange starfish on the fourth pillar out. We stand by the rail looking south at sea spangles and a long strand of kelp holding to one spot but slowly sinking. Its orange-brown color in the green ocean, in that lucid winter light. Then we stand a while on the north rail watching a fat seventy year old on a longboard - covered all over with old-style thick neoprene - cap, gloves, booties - trying to catch what small waves there are. He's too slow to get up. Tom watches on until at last he manages it. We watch him in and then it's time to go. Drive up the coast into Point Loma. A sparkling day. There is a long bank of cloud quite far out to sea, and another over the desert. The strip of coast lies washed and flowery under its high roof of palms. Tom had remembered Shugi's studio in Brad and Jackie's back garden and we drive up the alley past it. There is a garden, unused. Across the way, white bougainvillea clipped flat to a wire fence, very lovely. We're driving up Catalina toward Cabrillo Point. Tom turns into the military cemetery. It's Veteran's Day. Quiet green sward above the sea. Ocean's blue glitter, this fresh green, sorted ranks of white marble tablets. We drive on through to Cabrillo Point and turn around. I say Let's go back to the cemetery and read. There's a naval funeral just dispersing. I say we need to be on the seaward side of the road and facing south. Just here is good. We stop and wind down the windows. Tom has been playing perfect music and continues to. He sits quiet beside me on and on. Flips through the Reader but then just sits listening and looking at the day. A woman with flowers is searching for a grave she can't find. All afternoon people quietly arrive and stand looking briefly and leave. The number of cones with flowers by the flat-markered, more recent graves along the edges of the field increases. I read and sometimes look up and see the thick-headed dark green trees stirring their leaves above the green and white and blue. The light changes gradually on the blue-white marble. Then the sun has reached the bank of cloud along the ocean's western rim. An even light, no shadows. When the sun drops into the slot between cloud and rim, orange light on the side of Tom's face and on the white marble, strong blue shadows among the white ranks bending up the hill. I am feeling Tom's presence utterly wonderful. We watch the last edge of orange arc drop out of sight. Tom looks at the stones we can read from the road. Goodnight David Shaw, goodnight Lewis Butler, goodnight Thomas Winslow Meredith. As we're driving north home the city we see far below is bathed in milky afterglow. By the time we're coming around the last curve from the airport toward downtown it's half dark, still a sheen on the west sides of the towers but the bands of yellow lights are strong. It's a moment of exquisite balance. We drive up G Street. There's the train station. There's the park. I'm looking for the palm I hugged. There's the palm you hugged says Tom. I was hugging the palm because I was too proud to hug you, I say. I didn't understand you, he says. You did the right thing as much as if you had understood me, I say. << 1996 We pass the Golden West and look in the door at the desk. We drive through crowds assembling for the Stones concert. Here's the mission. I come around to the driver's side. Last kiss. I love you he says quietly, quietly in the dark. Somewhere in the afternoon he said, We've earned our quiet pleasures now. I was thinking that earlier, I said. 12 This volume is so interesting. It has Dave Carter and Louie's book, exquisite physicality, a peak. What happened today. I finished writing yesterday, then there was a letter from Juliana it took me until 1 to answer. Transcribed my daily ten pages. Starbucks and read the Union, LA Times, NY Times. Came back and worked through Carol's third draft this semester. Somewhere in the aft wrote Tom a love note he'll get I don't know when. New red undershirt with a narrow lace edge. I like to look down and see the cleft between my breasts. Narrow elastic straps. I'm writing at the glass-topped table where I can see my reflection on the window. Wide shoulders under the sage grey-green Irish linen shirt open to show the undershirt's deep dip. Sent Lise a note today. Wondering whether Susan dropped me because she got involved that way with Lise, or is Lise still mad at me on Millie's account. Was Lise needing that victory. It says yes. S is saying bad things to Lise about me. Will Lise figure it out later. 13 Margo sent a bunch of rules to prevent what happened with Millie from happening (again) - ie bar the barn door rules. I said I can't imagine ever ever ever again being willing to do for anyone what I was trying to do for Millie. I have tears in my eyes when I say that. I feel loathing for her. I'm supposed to feel the student is always right. I felt I was right and she was right and what we did was right and she has betrayed it out of childish spite. And she's loathsome. She's a loathsome being. Why do I have tears in my eyes when I say I won't be willing to do it again. Because it was good. It was brave, clear, honorable, smart and correct. Millie's turning it into shit because she wants to stay shitty instead of going free. The fact is I don't feel I'm at fault, and I can't accuse her because she's a student. The fiction of separation of the academic and personal. With artists especially the work isn't good unless it's personally deep and courageous. 14 Monday morning. Today I'm saying it differently and I'll talk to Margo later. I do have a misgiving and it's not about anything Margo tried to nail down. Millie's complaint has been that she was just an embodiment guinea pig and I don't actually care about her. It should be that she was just a work challenge and I was more interested in my competence than in her security. At the same time, I was right in what I was trying to do with her. Pushing the website does give her a chance to discover that she can be honored for what she is. Pushing the soul welcome session and semester magazine too.   Did I mislead her about my feeling for her   no Did our work give her better health   Better social function   Should I have not pushed    no She learned essential skills   She discovered deeper art   She discovered better writing   She's up against a basic knot, vacillating between seeing the mother as pure benevolence and pure malevolence   Anyone working with her will have their own motives   The crisis is that she was in confluence with me as if I was pure benevolence and when she saw I had my own motives she turned   Anybody has that conflict between confluence and defense   The resolution is finer discernment   Seeing I have my own motives was good   She needs to count up the actual benefits     I worked with her correctly though I did have my own motives   But from the point of view of liability it was incorrect   Should liability be the first concern   no   Can you explain to me why I didn't foresee that Millie would turn   oppression, mother, evade, improvement Something about my relation to my own mother   Will you slant this   love woman I still see confluence as good   And that's too simple-minded   Both in myself and in other people   I had too innocent a vision of her   I took her too much at her word   15 Last night Tom showed up at suppertime after his day setting up at the Sheraton Harbor Island. He was in his black work clothes and was a self I don't often see - the small-faced one who looks like a little Irish boy. We sat in Clare de Lune having an evening with the quiet folk all in their armchairs doing homework. When I'd told my day's stories (Juliana's note) and he had told his and we were driving back to the mission in the misty dark, he told me how it was the night before when he'd come off work late and walked home along the bay. The water was glassed off, there were people in the boats, a strong moon. He had been thanking the cosmos for life, even going back to the squalor and embarrassment of the mission he was so glad to be alive. He was saying to himself, Ellie loves me, she has declared herself, so now I have to suit up and show up. His kisses are odd these days, though: awkward pressings that I keep trying to correct by bringing more consciousness into them. I suppose they're young? Good news - his boss the navy seal doesn't drink.   part 5 in america volume 9: 2005 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project