Project notes
In 1998 Sandra Semchuck invited me to be part of Land,
Relationship and Community, a symposium at Presentation Gallery in
Vancouver. The piece I wrote for this event, Leaving
the land: perception and fantasy, began to look at the character
of and reasons for loss of human connectedness to our evolutionary ground.
Afterward I went on thinking about these questions. Around the time Frank
died I was starting to imagine a mind and land project that would look
at the cognitive costs of loss of connection to land. When Frank killed
himself it puzzled me that his love for the Valley had not carried him
into a better life. It seemed that religion had something to do with it.
Around this time Bush was inaugurated as president in the US and I was
also having to think about the nature of religious conservatism in general.
This last section of Frank after his life pulls out of my journals
various kinds of notes about what happened to Frank and about this project
itself.
3rd January 2001
- Art and betrayal
-
- Art should be connected to early love.
- It's corrupt when it's demonstrating mastery over early love.
- It's corrupt when it exploits early love.
- Will you tell me what is the correct relation of early love and art.
Betrayed love slowly growing honest.
- There's bliss, then there's betrayal, then there's bliss tempered in
understanding betrayal.
- Bliss full force, betrayal full force.
- Exploiting early love is leaving out the betrayal.
- Bliss and having betrayed it.
- It's better dealing with it directly.
- Then art should be conscious intervention.
20th January
Betrayal, addiction and integration
What do I know about drugs. To be in a state of fullness needs moral
action of great bravery. If one fails in that, one is cut off from joy and
exploration, which is unbearable, so then inner and outer drugging. The
solution to a drug problem is only and ever always everywhere personal courage.
Person by person. Drugs should be legalized and people should trust life
and tell the truth.
- Is that it?
- We live in heaven and make it hell.
- Does this follow, of any landscape ask what lies are being believed
there.
- Do you want to say more. Turn for the better by writing to shatter
the structure and grow slowly.
- It's the writer's job.
- It's not defense of the land, it's defense of being able to feel it.
- Which is heaven.
-
- Does this need something specific from me. Yes, understanding of betrayal.
- Betrayal and shutting-down. Yes, to deceive, seduce and desert, to
deliver-over to an enemy.
- After deception, seduction and desertion one delivers oneself over
to an enemy.
- The weakness is in not acknowledging that one has been betrayed; that
is self-betrayal.
- This should be the bedrock of humanist psychology.
- The right moral foundation is agony and aloneness of betrayal accepted.
-
- People accept moral authority to avoid that.
- It means accepting betrayal of nature too.
- My god my god why hast thou forsaken me.
- The resurrection is because of the agony.
- Have I got this right?
- So accepting Jesus is accepting crucifixion when it is true.
- If you don't admit to being betrayed, you can't admit to betraying.
- Admitting means feeling it.
-
- Is there more you want to say? Integrating heartbreak improves energy.
- Those who have integrated will be more effective.
- Gain improvement by coming through processing.
- Processing love improves exclusion, come through illusion of oppression
to gain.
- Is this personal advice? Yes.
- In relation to what. Success.
- Will you tell me what is implied? Successful, quest, for persistence,
in relation to betrayal.
- Slow growth from vain regret to fighting to share pleasure.
- I leave the illusion by fighting to share my work.
-
- Do you want to say more. Addiction, of the lovers, coming through,
foolishness.
- Give me a clue what this is about. Responsibility.
- How responsibility develops.
- By dealing with addiction.
- Which always has to do with having shut down.
- And needing to force connection.
- Anything else you want to talk about? Losses.
- Specific? No, in general. The work comes through by completing what
has been evaded.
26th January
- Breaking children
-
- Will you lead me? You are balancing in the overview of tyranny in the
family.
- Understanding patriarchy? YES, slow growth in anguish, betrayal, and
exclusion.
- Do you want to say more? Fantasy, completion, of heartbreak, by art.
- Imagine completing heartbreak by art? Yes.
-
- Do the Republicans all break their children? Yes.
- Will you tell me what breaking means. Dishonest teaching despair instead
of coming through.
- Creation of helplessness.
4th February
- Failure of courage
-
- Did Frank die because he made compromises. Yes.
- Because he was uneducated. Because he didn't have the courage to leave
the community.
-
- 16th February
I woke thinking about communities of influence. Frank didn't know he
was in psychic community with the people around him. He was living among
people unconscious by deep lying. People unconscious by deep lying have
a crazed right hemisphere - no, a crazed nonrelation with a desperate, isolated
right hemisphere. His community made him crazy because he did not have the
courage to define himself against it. More than courage, resolution. He
didn't do the work to save himself.
- Did I go on in touch with Frank? Yes.
- Did he go on in touch with me? Yes.
- Was I feeling foggy around the time of his death because of him? Yes.
- That dream was about his hateful leaving.
- Is that enough about that? No, intuition, slow growth, generosity,
success.
- If you are generous intuition grows slowly to success.
- I didn't bring either Frank or Janeen with me. No.
- Do you mean it's not possible. Yes.
- I feel I should have.
- Do you mean the way my intuition grew and theirs didn't? Yes.
- Were they ungenerous? Yes.
- In the sense that they didn't trust it. YES.
-
- Feeling for land is right hemisphere.
- Left hemisphere is brainwashed.
- People who don't feel with the right hemisphere have a dim intimation
of god's presence.
- God is the land.
- Are religious people all unable to feel the land? No.
-
- 17th February
-
- Processing pain
-
- What happened yesterday with pain running out the top of my head -
could it happen with any pain? YES.
- Real loss? Yes.
- One never needs to be in pain? Yes.
- It happens in the brain.
- It's dynamical.
-
- Imagining early love for the mother
-
- Is there something I should do to have open heart even when there is
hard attention? Yes.
- Can you tell me in a sentence? Complete, imagining, early love, for
the mother.
- Just imagine it.
- Imagine that I have it.
- Do you mean imagine it more? Yes.
- Every day. Yes.
- Imagine it with me when I am with hard attention? Yes.
- Can I do that? Yes.
- Is this centrally important? YES.
- Is it a kind of mysticism? Yes.
21st February
- Working with early love
-
- If I had been speaking to you what would you have told me? Deception,
male, judgment, of early love.
- Is the countervailing force? Yes.
- The women have sold it out. YES.
-
- Is perception really contact? Yes.
- And can it be developed? Yes.
- Nature cultures, ways of being with nature.
- Early love and sensing go together.
- With a machine you can be in control and NOT in early love, far away
from early love.
- The humanness of human animals is to work with early love not override
it or replace it with mastery.
- Is there more you want to say? Mastery illusions fight responsibility
of the mother.
- Working with early love is feeling it? Yes.
- It's about early love and defensive styles.
- Working with early love is feeling it and not being overpowered.
- Processing.
-
- Early love makes people beautiful.
2nd March
A speech self turned to metal; a feeling self made trained animal.
There is conflict at the base of it, a mammal conflict about the vulnerabilities
of early love. Interest in perception, possibilities for perception, are
shut down when early love is shut down, people cannot bear to have this
conflict re-evoked.
The land is our mother, our mother is the land written in twigs
on two sides of the door in the hippy café across the street from
the station at Eugene.
About women in this question. The image of a woman acts as a trigger
for feeling and <means> early love. We can know that without confusing
image function with essence of actual women.
Academics are people specialized in a particular style of defense, they
like to hear a sadistic woman who has killed love woman.
Another style holds onto it but in a fantasy form, for instance religion.
Harroway blames early love for something. The pure of heart long for
purity of heart, a state. Pain longs for better-protected boundaries. Defense
longs for maintained defense, sterilization of deviance.
- Do you have something to say about aggressive energy and its need to
make and do? There has to be a struggle to find the allowed aggression.
- Is there something to be done about alpha males? Enjoy them, liberate
them, love them, be honest with them.
- They rampage through the world destroying beauty. Yes.
- Distinguish male energy from evil energy. Yes.
- It's a continuum. Yes.
4th March
"We shall only know the blessing / Of our father's sweet caressing
/ When they ring the golden bells / For you and me." [Iris Dement]
The poignancy of that song is that it is sung out of a life in which
the longing for rightness is the only form of rightness possible.
22nd March
Steiner: thinking from things. Seeing as food. "What is good
for you is the attitude of trusting devotion for humans and natural creation."
Steiner Rudolf 1949 Practical training in thought
-
Albie Sachs on [CBC] Ideas. The men around him are cultural men,
he is a political man. He speaks clearly and joyfully about the possibilities
of committed life. He said the conflict was between patriarchy and intimacy.
"In many ways things have improved."
28th March
I have been curious about the authoritarians. Is there a core of what
they are? Augere to increase. Is that the core, a tribal attitude
to wealth? The rules that would create a materially successful culture.
Is that what it's about, organizing a collective?
So the other wing, liberals, the free and generous, are the smart or
gifted or unusual people who leave the collective.
Authoritarian cultures benefit the mediocre who cannot do well unless
the whole culture is competitive.
Liberals are individuals who can do better outside the collective's rules
- is that it?
This economic motive is built on top of a psychological structure that
has a tension between L and R hemispheres. Authoritarians deal with the
tension by walling off R hem, which is why they advocate the word, the gun,
lies and secrets, environmental exploitation, prisons and a transcendent
god.
Liberals deal with the tension by processing, coming through, treating.
So are authoritarians a subset of liberals?
Liberals are frightened into defending only the R hem because the authoritarians
want to wipe it out. It is a mistake to identify with the R hem. Identify
with a related state of R and L.
The concerns of the authoritarians would be met if they felt the liberals
in that position. In fact it is the position a liberal must find to be economically
viable, because the R hem is too young.
I like the feel of this analysis. It makes me happy. It means I must
play with the enemy.
10 things Laura Schlessinger (the authoritarian attitude) is wrong about:
1. guns, 2. abortion, 3. lies and secrets, 4. feminists, 5. commitment needing
external sanction, 6. morality needing god, 7. sex education, 8. homosexuality,
9. daycare, 10. not advocating coming through.
"There is a spiritual community binding together the living and
the dead, the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages. We would not be
rejected from this community; and therefore do we hope." [Wordsworth
1809]
May 2001
land notes
Momaday, an ethic. "What is more appropriate to our world than that
which is beautiful?" "I think: inasmuch as I am in the land, it
is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. I
shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life." [in
Barnhill ed, 27]
That is, practicing strict economies is not the only aspect of a land
ethic.
Wendell Berry: a path "is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a
form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape." A freeway "is
a form of speed, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. It represents the ultimate
in engineering sophistication, but the crudest possible valuation of life
in this world."
Someone else: "our wasting passage through the world." "A
degraded land inevitably produces a degraded people." "It had
not yet produced the people and the town worthy of it."
Berry - he doesn't exactly say this, but a path indicates a structural
change in the walker. "One has made a relationship with the landscape."
"Here is the work of the world going on. The creation is felt, alive
and intent in its materials, in such places." "A music in streams
has to be imagined toward." [70] "Possible to live by the
contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us."
"The privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation."
Synder - trees and ground have given us fingers and toes, open land has
given us seeing eyes. "The land gave us a stride." "In the
old ways, the flora and fauna and landforms are part of the culture."
"Bioregionalism is the entry of place into the dialectic of history."
"Balance between cosmopolitan pluralism and deep local consciousness."
"Fluidly moving in multiple realms." "May it all speed the
further deconstruction of the superpowers."
Thomas Berry: "our place as story." "Our role is to be
the instrument whereby the valley celebrates itself ... It is our privilege
to articulate this celebration in the stories we tell and in the songs we
sing."
Somebody else: "endangered species, languages, habitats, songs,
stories, and the free flow of rivers," "ceremony gratitude expressed
by human beings on behalf of all forms of life."
Butala: significant dreaming. She has that notion of access to outside-of-time
that is somehow, however, associated with place - significance, beauty,
communication with animals and with people no longer alive - "mythic"
- being in a natural environment alters us.
hunting
I have been reading someone called Richard Nelson, a piece about hunting
deer in Alaska. There is first the craft of being and seeing, and then the
craft of writing in recovery of that true being. "Ever mindful of treading
the edge between protracted, eventless watching and the startling intensity
of coming upon an animal, the always unexpected meeting of eyes."
A raven "lofts and plays on the wind, then folds up and rolls halfway
over, a strong sign of hunting luck. Never mind the issue of knowing; I'll
assume the power is here and let myself be moved by it."
A lift of wind hisses in the high trees.
His hooves tick against dry twigs hidden by the snow. I can almost
feel the breeze blowing against his fur, the chill winnowing down through
close-set hairs and touching his skin.
He reaches his muzzle forward and draws in the affliction of our smell.
A sudden spasm stuns him, so sharp and intense it's as if his fright spills
out into the forest and tingles inside me like electricity. His front legs
jerk apart and he freezes all askew, head high, nostrils flared, coiled
and hard.
The gift of the deer falls like a feather in the snow. And the rifle's
sound has rolled off through the timber before I hear it.
elation and remorse, excitement and sorrow, gratitude and shame.
While I work with the deer, it's as if something has already begun
to flow into me. I couldn't have understood this when I was younger and
had yet to experience the process of one life being passed on to another.
In this and other ways, she treated meat as a sacred substance, a
medium of interchange between herself and the empowered world in which she
lived.
The sky fades to violet, darkens, and relaxes, like a face losing
expression at the edge of sleep.
I can see the crenulations of his nose, the fine hairs on his snout,
the quick pumping of his ribs, and my face reflecting on his bright indigo
eye.
It's as if the deer has moved slowly toward me on a cloud of snow,
and I am adrift in the pure motion of experience.
the shining edge of her ebony eye
lowers his head and stretches it toward her, then holds this odd pose
for a long moment. She reaches her muzzle to one side, trying to find his
scent.
hot and shallow-breathed and seething with unreconciled intent
And now the most extraordinary thing happens. The doe turns away from
him and walks straight for me. There is no hesitation, only a wild deer
coming along the trail of hardened snow where the other deer have passed,
the trail in which I stand at this moment. She raises her head, looks at
me, and steps without pausing.
I am struck by how gently her hooves touch the trail. How little sound
they make as she steps, how thick the fur is on her flank and shoulder ...
I am consumed with a sense of her perfect elegance in the brilliant light.
She makes no move and shows no fear, but I can feel the flaming strength
and tension that flow in her wild body as in no other animal I have touched.
She flings out over the hummocks of snow-covered moss, suspended in
effortless flight like fog blown over the muskeg in a gale.
Richard Nelson 1989 The island within
"The accumulating ruin of the North American landscape." "I
knew I was home. Something in me identified with that landscape ... Such
a purity of feeling, of joy and of being in the right place, I have not
often felt since " John Haines says that about a hillside in Alaska.
-
It seems to me that Frank was ripped down the middle between land-self
and land-denying self. He couldn't know land-denying self was that. What
if he'd had a religion that taught him to hunt without arrogance and take
hunting alertness as ethical discipline? Can only the very talented, very
educated, and financially fortunate make high culture of beast nature? I
sacrificed him, and others, to come to know what I know. I lived on grants
and welfare to have time to come to it. What is being assembled is real
only if it works for people like him too. Could he have come to it while
making a living as a farmer? It says yes. He didn't choose to trust his
land-self. He had already chosen wrong when I met him.
April 13 2002
Shepard says that in adolescence a hunter-gatherer culture initiates
[its boys] into a way of thinking about nature that makes it and not an
elsewhere the ground for another kind of thinking, so that it becomes inexhaustible
of interest. He says it is by metaphor.
Shepard P 1982 Nature and madness Random House
Finding a way to feel it inexhaustible of interest is right but metaphor
is not. The initiation I would give is to say here is our opportunity in
this life: we are physical beings in a physical universe, we are sentient
by being just that. Great feats of sentient response and sentient invention
become possible to us by construction and reconstruction of our bodies.
Initiation into the human enterprise, the stage of adult responsibility,
is initiation into knowledge of the ground of our possibilities, and knowledge
of the possibilities themselves.
Is there a sense in which 'physical ground' is itself metaphoric? An
image of order.
Could this initiation work for the least talented, the worst parented?
Is it necessary to go via the metaphor of physical order? I think so,
for now.
Myth, he says. The parallel availability of fairy tales to the child
who was on Sundays taught bible stories.
"Invisible realities" - he hasn't got the sense that they can
be visible. "Failure of the adolescent's mentors in the succeeding
four or five years to translate his confidence in people and the earth into
a more conscious, more cosmic view, in which [he] broadens his buoyant faith
to include the universe." 70
"By aggravating the tensions of separation from the mother and at
the same time spatially isolating the individual from the nonhumanized world,
agriculture made it difficult for the developing person to approach the
issues around which the crucial passages into fully mature adult life had
been structured in the course of human existence." 41
"His identity was spread around among things, insufficiently internalized
and consolidated. Foremost among them were the products of his labor."
"He came to live more and more with his own fabrications as the environment."
If I wrote Frank I would be writing my father and thus also the disaffected
ground of action in myself. What I mean is that I am beginning to see what
the story is. But do I know enough to tell it.
[more Shepard notes from Nature and madness:
Comparing monotheism and polytheism ... describes an ascetic state, ethical
religiosity, striving for purity, bitter, cynical, disengaged, analytic,
self-scourging, self-conscious, abstract, interpretive, text-based, art
and science become data-making. Themes of alienation, disengagement, unrelatedness.
"The only serious world that of the adult male ... It is the function
of social customs and rites" to accentuate this fact while enveloping
the fact of mothers in fantasy.
"Adolescent's indigenous desire for cosmic understanding and profound
devotion."
What the desert fathers did to the ontogeny of the person, fanatic ideology.
Hebrews locked into intense idealism of adolescence. Loss of mother plunging
the individual forever into infantile dualism.
The dull mentality of competitive, acquisitive, contractual being whose
essence is determined by the outcome of situations.
Patriarchal societies frustrate the adolescent's transferal of his love
of mother to others or to nature. This results in a massively repressed
rage toward the father ... both nature destruction and preservation can
be interpreted in these terms as an unresolved oedipal problem.
Terrorist extreme ideologist acting out their responses to the demands
of inner change impossible in an immature society. War for the sake of identity.
151
- 1.the domesticators
- 2.the desert fathers
- 3.the puritans
- 4.the mechanists
Contrast with: developmental process by which "maternal connections
are subjectively transferred to the earth," "to offer things worthy
of their skill, to tutor their suffering and dreaming."
"Psychological maturity, a view broad and forgiving ... the final
phases in which the seasoned individual becomes capable of mentorship and
spiritual guidance."
"loving acceptance of the strangeness of life, the wit to become
fully oneself and yet not estranged from the infinite diversity of the Other,
the leisured, free openness to self-unfolding instead of clinging to a made
world."
- - crops to cities 50 centuries, east of the Mediterranean
- to us, 50 more wheel, writing
- - hunter-gatherers before that 3 million years, thirty thousand centuries
to beginning of the Pleistocene
- - a different kind of mind, quality of attention, keen looking and
listening
- - in nonliterate nomadic people a network of place, network of emotional
attachment, mnemonic, the whole of a known range becomes a hierophantic
map
- - juvenile imprinting on terrain
- - agricultural civilizations, Great Mother, but which mother,
ie mother at which stage
- - lifelong subordination to a mother
anxieties of agriculture, guilt for failure, domesticated plants and
animals are not mysterious others, "what is it about the domesticated
civilized world that alters [the concept of] self so that it is enhanced
by property?" 34
self a lifelong task of formulating terms with a real other, not controlled;
or self as artisan of what has been controlled, possessed rather than encountered
- - the creature created: simpler, more slavish
- - these animals become an image of the nature of life
- - "Pet-keeping an abyss of covert and unconscious uses of animals
in the service of psychological needs" 38
- - "the child, born to expect subtle and infinite possibilities,
was presented with fat hulks, vicious maniacs, and hypertrophied drudges"
39
- - "creation of a new kind of language, itself made more immature"
- - "the new logic could not provide a world of purpose, lively
with spiritual activity, its ceremonial celebrations deserving of deep
fidelity"
- - drift of orthodoxy toward sanity, twelfth century art, naturalism,
architecture, poetry, song and love
"I puzzled over this ambiguity in American life ... the world's
most ferocious destroyers and yet the most fanatic preservers of wilderness
parks and endangered species" 89
mechanists
"city children ... frustration and inarticulate desire ... a stew
of nature so arbitrarily presented that the results of his years of trying
to fix it in his heart will only lead to despair ... nature has proved incoherent
... omit the eight to ten years of immersion in nonhuman nature" ]
8 October 2002
Wendell Berry's book, 1988, presumably about himself and his Kentucky
farm. His farmers are 80-acre farmers and not broke. They have literate
university educations - I mean history and literature, not agriculture.
His book ends with a vision of his own creek valley as heaven, singing with
light. His writer/farmer has lost his right hand, by which he means something
like his confidence in manly efficacy. It isn't a completely resolved book
but it is a book to put next to Frank after his life. Frank's moral
failures which kept him out of heaven.
10th October
Reading Remembering - bad title - close analysis of male crankiness
- but it doesn't get to the bottom of it - shame, rage, loss - he makes
it metaphoric, loss of right hand - but that means he doesn't have to get
to it. What have men lost? Have all men lost it?
It is as if what he describes as the consequences of the loss of his
hand actually are the loss itself - loss of trust, confidence, felt connection,
early love, the self-trust of bliss. The other metaphor, which is at the
same time a fact and a consequence of male loss, is the degradation of agriculture.
The book is somewhat confused because Berry shows his male protagonist
as having had trust, confidence, connection and early love as an adult,
and then losing them as an adult. He sets him in a place and community whre
those things are givens. That's nostalgic/sentimental. His ending is not
false but it is also not understood. He returns to early love, which is
community and heaven, but takes it as a vision of afterlife.
12th August 2004
In drawing him toward me again after so long a time, I seem to have
summoned ... Uncle Andrew in the plenitude of his being - the man he would
have been had he been capable.
I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which
they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is
merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned
and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light,
if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice
of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet,
in suffering that light's awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it,
they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are
loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they
could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would
have wished to be.
That light can come into this world only as love, and love can enter
only by suffering.... I used to think I wanted most of all to be happy -
by which I meant to be here and to be undistracted. ... Sometimes ... I
know that I could not see at all if it were not for this old injury of love
and grief, this little flickering lamp that I have watched beside for all
these years.
- There is a lot in Wendell Berry that's specious. The ellipses are places
where he dodges into afterlife belief. He's another of the men who closes
his eyes to wife-beating, child-beating, the real worst in people and fate.
He holds onto early love in a partly weak way. What I copy the passage for
is its desire, the desire I have too, to have Ed and Frank calm in an afterlife
given another chance to be what they'd have been able to be under better
circumstances without injury.
But can love enter only by suffering? I don't think so. Love enters first
by provision - he's leaving out the mother. First by animal provision through
the placenta, so it is felt as a flow forever after.
Afterward suffering not avoided can force open the well of realness which
includes love with other certainties, but that is only because refused suffering
had capped the well.
20th September 2004
I realized then that it was what he was born to do and what he did.
It was the foundation of his inner dignity to care. In that moment I began
to understand human men in a way that I never had before, and my fear of
them began to lessen. I began to see that the core of my being was a great
deal like this male core: looking on from the outside, blank-faced, with
a deep and abiding need to protect and comfort in a world where my ways
of feeling and acting no longer had context.
Congo, a man of sacrifice and ferocity, showing his core and his invisible
strength in a jail built by those he loves, inspired me to open up and extend
my heart to the world around me. I would no longer allow the great permeability
of my spirit to lead me to seek smaller and smaller shelters.
Dawn Prince-Hughes 2004 Songs of the gorilla nation
Harmony Books
14 January 2006
There is a kind of willed conservatism that helps a remnant people
cope with having been abandoned by several generations of the most talented
and attractive of its children. Left behind, the remnant feels inadequate,
insufficient, foolish and inept - everyone with brains and ambition, it
seems, everyone with the ability to live in the larger world, has gone away.
So that with the family, with the community as a whole, no longer able to
unify and organize a people and provide them with a worthy identity, the
half-forgotten misremembered ceremonies of ancient days affirm a people's
existence, but falsely. And it is this very falsity that most offends those
of us who have left.
Without Lillian, without her recognition and protection, Wade would
have been forced to regard himself as no different from the boys and men
who surrounded him, boys his age - deliberately roughened and coarse, cultivating
their violence for one another to admire and shrink from, growing up with
a defensive willed stupidity and then encouraging their sons to follow.
Without Lillian's recognition and protection, Wade, who was very good at
being male in this world, a hearty bluff athletic sort of guy with a mean
streak, would have been unable to resist the influence of the males who
surrounded him. The loneliness would have been too much to bear. 301
Lillian's love had kept the young thing in him alive long after it
had died in everyone else he knew.
He had started to drink heavily and had grown confused and angry.
And he quickly lost his connection to that lovely young thing, the fragile
humorous affection for the world that he had nurtured and kept alive all
through adolescence, and he grew increasingly angry at the loss and began
to blame Lillian for it. The more he blamed her, the further he flew from
it, until, indeed, he was like the men who surrounded him, and one
night he lashed out at her with his fists and afterwards wept in her lap,
begging forgiveness.
He had tried to break through the pain and confusion of his life to
something like clarity and control, and it had come to this - this dumb
helplessness, this woeful thickened shameful inadequacy. At bottom, he knew
there was love in his heart ... love for women - but try as he might,
he could not arrange his life so that he could act on that love. There were
all these other dark hateful feelings that kept getting in the way, his
rage and his fear and his feelings of pure distress.
It was something else, something that had always been there, in her
eyes, even when she was a girl and Wade had first fallen in love with her
- and suddenly he realized it was why he had fallen in love with
her in the first place and why he had been so obsessed with her in all these
years: he had looked into her eyes way back then, when they were both high
school kids, and he had seen her intelligence, the wonderful complexity
of her awareness, and he had seen his own smart eyes looking back at him,
and for a while he had felt intelligent too. Then, after a few years, because
he no longer saw his own eyes looking back at him from hers, he had lost
that belief in his own intelligence, and from then on, all he felt when
he looked at her was stupid. 321
Then she closed the inner door, and Wade was looking at his reflection.
It was Pop he saw looking back, twenty or thirty years ago, haunted and
angry, kept outside the family of man, compelled to stand in the rain and
cold and darkness alone, while the others sat around a fire inside; and
because he was not there with them, they were unafraid and slung their arms
over each other's shoulders and sang songs or whispered sweet secrets to
one another, men and women and children full of good intentions and competence,
people who were able to love one another cleanly. He, like his father before
him, and like that man's father too, Wade's and my grandfather and our unknown
great-grandfather as well, stood outside, hands buried in pockets, scowling
furiously at the frozen ground, while everyone else stayed warm and loved
one another.
All those solitary dumb angry men had once been boys with intelligent
eyes and brightly innocent mouths, unafraid and loving, creatures eager
to please and be pleased . Were they all beaten by their fathers, was it
really as simple as that?
Russell Banks 1989 Affliction Harper and Row
19th December 2005
Dreamed Frank gave me a big envelope very stuffed with bulky things.
When I opened it later there was a long letter, photos, some pots and pans
and a pile of folded fabrics I assumed were saris.
The photos were of him and me. They were beautiful. In the photos of
him he was standing naked. He had a beard. He didn't look as I remember
him, better, a different person. There was a photo of me at a concert, on
the floor reaching with a microphone. Others were at a steambath as if he
took them when we were there together and I had my eyes closed. I look like
myself but they are beautiful photos, black and white, very grainy. I look
myself at my best.
There's also a clipping of an article by someone else. I can't remember
what it was about, but it was something about Frank.
There was a background feeling of a place, which was a place I've dreamed
Frank before, a dream years ago. That feeling of a tone of a place.
The sense of the dream was that it was his final goodbye present. He
was giving me everything he'd been protecting from me (sigh) through the
years. I mean holding onto.
Don't know why I sighed there.
- What had he been protecting? Love, generosity, slow growth, completion.
- The loving self of that time? Yes.
- Has been protected. Yes.
- By me, by the journal. Yes.
- So I can recover it and bring it to completion. Yes.
- Is that what you mean? Yes.
Tragedy is the way people die before they die, it's the spoiling of the
beautiful spirit they are when they are young. Downfall.
That's what people should be learning to change. That has been my mission
that I've hung onto since I was a child.
That's what the journal was for.
Physical destruction which is psychic destruction. Which occurs for cultural
reasons too, cultural corruption. Com + rompere, thoroughly
to break.
21st April 2006
Trying to write about Frank I feel the open darkness of a void. There's
nothing to say.
When Frank died I was wanting to blame what happened to him on the way
of living we both came from, and to blame him for not leaving it. I believed
there were other ways of living that could have made it possible for him
to end differently. But now I think what happened to him was what he was,
the kind of body he was. There wasn't something that 'happened' to him.
He lived. He was alive for sixty years and then he stepped out.
But no. He screwed up. He did screw up. Something went wrong with him.
He was screwed over by something.
*
Our story begins the first day on the berry patch when he reaches down
and puts his hand on my arm and pulls me to my feet.
Why is it a lifetime story. When I ask that, the answer is just Frank,
who he was, how I felt him, his realness. But why do I feel and want to
feel my time with him like a root just where it dives? A cedar root still
covered with bark and as broad as a trunk.
Because he was the Valley. The clump of dogwoods, Baker alone in the
sun. Because after that there has never been a love that was rooted.
He loved me in a moment to moment way I miss. He loved my being in
the moment. He was the only lover I've had who knew where I came from. He
knew my grandparents, our farm, my parents when they were young, my brothers
and sister when they were kids, my country. He was fond. "You have
a kind of lassie quality," he said when I wore the green nylon blouse.
The fond daily voice of his letters. The easy lucid way we belonged together.
And so what is this project for. I'm asking what went wrong with this
root, is that it? I'm touching my root, this one, and saying - too late
- what did you need? What did you need?
back to frank after his life index
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