January 1 2022
- I was living in an abandoned farmhouse far enough from the road so
there were no lights at night. The front verandah looked east over open
fields but the side door, the kitchen door, looked onto a shelterbelt wall
of spruce trees planted close enough so a squirrel could run along the
row without touching the ground. In the south-facing space between the
kitchen's porch and these trees I'd planted a small garden and paved a
little courtyard with field stones. In August I dragged a cot onto this
sheltered court and would sometimes sleep outside.
-
- I'd been reading Meister Eckhart, reading the way I did then, foraging
for scraps in which I could feel something of my own that I couldn't know
directly.
-
- -
-
- Light the lamp, set it on the porch rail. Grass, nettle, the color
of gas lantern light - breath steams - moths rapid - webs. A line of web
shining between me and the lamp, spider went up between two stars in the
Dipper's handle.
-
- Continuous dark sound of leaves. One grass blade scraping another.
-
- On my back looking up, roof corner and edge and then the distance.
- Milky Way overhead.
-
- Suddenly I realize. I'm seeing out not up, I'm held firm to earth's
curve upright looking out.
- And it's not dark, it's daylight out there.
-
- swing yourself up to it, into the void
-
- Not constellations, bearings.
-
- I'm seeing how far I can see.
-
- Each star a different past. I saw Eternity the other night -
-
- was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanded
time set within a human's time and vision
-
- Like a great ring of pure and endless Light - now I understand, he
really saw the ring.
-
- Merritt January 2022, Valhalla Lake August 1979
I've almost got it I think. No I've got it a bit more readable but I
don't have it at all. It has to begin on the ground and open suddenly to
vastness. It was remarkable, a joyful wonder, I faced the Universe. I met
the Universe. I discovered I could. Would anyone be able to feel that in
what I wrote?
That isn't what happened to Shimamura. The Milky Way poured into him
Kawabata says. I did see it in what he wrote, dazzling white overhead.
I saw the clear black air. But Shimamura wasn't there alone with it. "As
he caught his footing his head fell back and the Milky Way flowed down inside
him with a roar." I'm not sure Kawabata wasn't meaning to say he died
at that moment.
I'm thinking of the Palm Springs meeting here. The meetings there have
been.
2
- The sun is spent
-
- The world's whole sap is sunk;
These white cold days the corner is dead quiet.
- From dull privations, and lean emptiness
-
- But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
The Metaphysicals are too fancy for me. Poets write good lines but I
don't want the admired armatures they set them in.
-
Day 1 Patch had small twitches I noticed once in a while. Day 2 She coughed
hard occasionally and had the same small spasms continuously, seemed to
have a fever, lay in my arms for long times. Day 3 she was quiet but not
coughing or twitching. She didn't stop eating on any of these days. Day
4, today, wasn't as cold and she wanted to go out briefly, mostly ignored
me. Meantime my blood pressure shot up and has settled again. It was an
anguish thinking her sick.
-
Today it's warmer than it was, though there's fresh snow on the porch,
so when I opened the door for her this morning Patch did step out. Later
she slipped in quietly and I stood in the doorway looking at the garden.
I could only see one set of her prints. They showed all the way up the path
but how did she come back? It was as if she had levitated. Tonight she asked
again to go out and I watched her stepping carefully across the porch and
down the steps into deeper snow further on. She'd go slowly and stop and
sniff, pause staring toward the street. I closed the door to watch her through
its pane. After a while she turned to come back and I saw her stepping with
perfect exactness into her own prints.
3
With Jam the misery of gender. I saw her, wanted to see her, as an instance
of female brilliance possible to me. I liked her pink silk quilt, her good
pots. With Tom there were miseries but not that one. I was comfortably at
war with his male piggishness, had to keep proving women were not the supportive
cast he wanted them to be, but I never felt a gender crookedness in him,
we were what we were, there wasn't gaslighting spite.
- The kernel that someone would be willing to be the lower order memory
and organizer, in order to be with your quality of higher order language.
I had to organize and remember for both of them but I felt Jam's male
pose was a status grab. Lazy Tom borrowed status, didn't steal it.
4
I posted louie's party. What about it. The time it was, a good
time we'd made together though I wasn't thinking of it that way. I'd given
it her place - that was me - and she had given it the unusual people she'd
found and kept.
I've just sighed saying to myself that when she gave up her place she
gave up me. I gave her a marvelous thing and I gave it very freely, for
the sake of the creation it could be and was. It gave her a lot socially.
Meantime I lived in a relative dump and didn't mind because I was making
a marvelous thing of another kind. - None of that is told in the story of
Louie's party but I've found it now by asking.
- Sometimes I glimpse a gentle puzzled forbearance in the way I was with
Louie, that didn't fight as it should have, a native generosity or was it
a lame child's uncertainty of worth.
I'm closer now to what I was as a young child in school, outcast and
solitary, then by a thin leg, now by both age and deformity. Then it was
a light simple sorrow: nobody likes me. Now it's a heavier resignation that
says I'm ugly and stupid now, no one wants to know me, but there have been
better times.
I should ask more about this.
5
What is my question. What could have been the work and love trajectory
if desire hadn't needed the strenuous compromises there were.
In real life there was the smothering conflict with Louie. Do I have
to look in the Louie story for conflict. It says yes.
-
Since I've played her bird videos Patch can sit staring at the black
monitor as if waiting for birds to come back. When she has been watching
them for a while she turns sideways not watching them anymore but listening
to their small sounds. I've seen her lie down behind the monitor, which
she's never done before.
7
- Did I have worse heart symptoms when I was working on
Theory's practice because of the work no
- Were they partly reconstruction yes
Checked, posted and linked TR8 and TR9.
8
I dreamed there was a man who was going away forever.
I had seen him off and had gone home to bed, was lying in the dark. Someone
came into the room and put his hands on me. It was him. I gasped like a
flare of sound. Was watching myself in wonder: I've never felt anyone this
much. He was getting his penis into me somehow through my pyjama pants.
-
I've posted theory's practice.doc and am wondering whether that
achieved summary is in fact the whole project.
- I'm into a hard project I shouldn't let myself be distracted from.
Its working title is Theory's practice. I'm working with my journals
from 1995-2002 when I was doing two parallel hard things, developing a
philosophy of mind as body and dealing with myself in deep love with a
man who was a microcosm of patriarchy. Those two tasks were related in
a way that I don't think has been described and though the whole story
is there in the transcribed and posted journals it is seeming to me it
should be set out in a more compact accessible form before I die - I should
write a book. I don't know whether I still have the wit and energy and
time to do it but if I do I thought there could be a second volume based
on my Goddard letters because they demonstrate that deeply feminist struggle's
outcomes in relation to many kinds of particular question.
-
- There's a huge amount of material to evaluate and sort and make decisions
on. Difficulties are how to deal with neurophilosophical technicalities
and how to deal with ever-repeated slow emotional processing.
-
- -
-
- Part 1. A fifty year old woman is hit hard by desire for what she doesn't
actually want. She's living in disabling confusing self-contradiction,
massively in pain. She understands that emotional debts she has stayed
ahead of have come due. She's willing, she takes them on, she has faith
in the work and she has three kinds of help but it's long and painful.
There are six months in which it takes most of her time, then a second
six months in which though that work continues she is at the same time
quite easily and as if almost peripherally defining for herself and setting
up a fundable PhD project that consolidates her years of private study
and that she has already got herself into position to launch.
-
- There's a hinge. She performs a ritual.
-
- Part 2. She begins her PhD, gets funding, drives to California to work
with the best department in her field. There she meets a man who is in
some ways her counterpart, who has been struggling in his own contradictions
and has come to his own form of commitment. They take each other on. Their
previous defenses and accommodations are massively challenged. This goes
on for years. There are many shocks and checks. They work through them
again and again. In the meantime her work also keeps breaking through.
It keeps getting harder but her project widens until it's a new vision
of what humans are. She graduates and moves to be with her friend.
-
- Part 3. She lives in California and has a teaching job. Shocks and
checks with her friend go on but she's lighter in them, she's more at home
in the world. Her teaching work draws on both her emotional work and her
theoretical work.
-
- Part 4. She's getting old, alone again trying to tell the story of
parts 1-3 before she dies.
-
- Part 5? There's been something else from earlier and all along, a paradisal
vision in pictures and writing. She has gathered bits of it but goes on
not knowing what to do with them.
-
- -
-
- I'm constantly tempted to feel that the story is about coming through
with Tom when what it is actually about is the ordeal it took to undo the
effects of misogyny on my ability to work in the world. It's a vision of
central crisis in the very nature of women's being. An inherent conflict.
-
- - There's what I was learning about the means of aboutness and there's
what I was learning about how to talk to be able to think better and there's
what I was learning about how to work with my personal limiting structures
to be able to know and do more. Is the whole of Tom subsumed in that one?
He was that and something else too, my sample human. Theory's practice.
After that so were my students.
-
- Merritt July-September 2019
9
Almost no one was willing to recognize that - Rachel and Freya, Freya
because I've sent them money I think. Susan rushed into admiration, which
made me uneasy as if I'd hurt her. What could I want instead, people saying
yes please do this, it's needed. Why couldn't they, all of them -
- Can you answer that yes
- Because they haven't done the work yes
- And don't want to yes
- Is that the whole of it no
- Do they think I can't do it no
- Is it accurate yes
- Do you like it YES
- Would Joyce like it yes
Yesterday in the NYKR online such a good piece on Knausgaard by James
Wood. I mean there are a few people in the world writing with really skilled
interested balancing attention. I stomped through My struggle but
Wood was patient with the tedium to discover its reasons and rewards. I
also mean that kind of attention is so rare there can be no hope of it in
my hidden corner. But what is my actual worry. Knausgaard has succeeded
enormously by being what he is as a contemporary man. How is it different
for me. He can be seen as a sample human in a way no woman can, isn't it
that? His struggle with notions of masculinity can be taken as essential
whereas my struggle with femininity has always to be taken as trying to
catch up.
- Do you agree with that yes
- Anything you want to say truth, contemplation,
child's, exclusion
Knausgaard is relatable by living, apart from the writer thing, as a
man of his time. I can't be relatable because I've stayed marginal both
by choice and by placement.
- But it's a limitation on success not a limitation on
achievement yes
- Always that yes
- Anything you want to add no
-
- Child's exclusion, women's exclusion, in me overlaid
always, is that what you mean yes
- Do you mean I exaggerate no
- But exclusion is highly relatable YES
So: how can energy want to write a book one knows will have to fail.
- In writing that sentence the way attention corrected to make it closer
to true. Energy does like to do that.
- Should I give up on theory's practice no
- Is this the time to take it up again yes
Writing is such desperately ethical work.
Should I collect the mentions of little story work from - when?
9
WRITE YOUR BOOK OH MY GOD
- excitement not only for the book
- but for you and the nature of this work
- you in it and
- holy shit I've only got a baby understanding
- of what this undertaking is like for you
-
- like how I'd market your book to the masses and
send it to the moon
10
Seeing it's the Lovers card, three terms, love woman, work woman and
Temperance/larger self/Joyce/the uncon/writing
- Were my heart problems because of the work
no
- Transitional yes
walnuts, raisins, raw cabbage, chopped MacIntoshes, new carrots, flax
seed oil, salt
13
Hadn't cleaned since before the flood but today June Andrew came, Squamish
from North Van living on the Coldwater Reserve. Kathy is such a loss. Her
cheerfulness, her familiarity with the house, with Patch and this chair
and the changes in one room after another. She rejoiced with me when I bought
the red rug. She mourned Mouse. She's carried home vegetables. She witnessed
my will. If I'd had to be in the hospital she would have come for the keys
and looked after the Patch. June cleaned things Kathy ignored but we don't
know each other.
15
Sitting down to work without tea and my head is flabby. Soft rubber,
distaste.
What else is there. 6:55. The corner's lamp on its high pole stands all
alone in black space. Below on the street dimly a red pickup facing west,
a blue pickup facing east, one garage light and a heap of dirty snow.
Each side of the street a shrinking ridge of muddy snow. It's discouraging.
More sky now, dark blue lighter beside the tree.
16
Dear me: please help. I need to imagine a reader. I need a format.
Answer: I have readers. Emilee, Susan, Kate, Jody? Rachel? Greg. Rob?
Mike? Karen. Jim. Janet?
- Do you think named short tales yes
- With explaining sidebars YES
- And bibliography yes
- And images yes
Am seeing that what the delay has given is that I'm not as attached to
particulars, I've given them and can cut them to essences.
- Should I quote bits of the BA yes
- Do I need high bp to work no
- But it happens yes
Let me introduce the figures. Make three persons vivid. Louie, Joyce,
Tom. Woman, Temperance, Man. Their actual and their mythic.
Shy off going into the detailed sections, there is too much and it will
throw my head every which way.
- Just plunge? yes
- Into the before yes
Structural principle the three terms
What it was like with men, not anti-patriarchy but showing women's susceptibility
to ill-will
I missed a stage when I was little. It was a strength and a weakness.
17
Sent B the sight of sound.
18
I'm struck in reading the text you sent that
it is more than a text, it is a listening guide. I am listening to the works
you reference in the piece as I read, finding myself having to slow down
my reading to match their timescale. I'm also struck by the synesthesia
you invoke, but a synesthesia of a filmmaker. I see the itching desire to
convert sound into image, not to illustrate the music, not to provide a
screensaver to the music or to employ the music as a soundtrack, but to
see the music.
For me, following the Thomas Hardy reference,
the text is at its very strongest. Almost brought me to tears!
Thank you for sharing, Ellie, I appreciate it
very much. I wonder if this might be fodder for another radio show, and
if you'd mind me getting back in touch with you about this soon?
She was on a train from Amsterdam back to Berlin reading with her headphones
on.
I haven't wanted to reread the sight of sound since I sent it,
afraid to. Reading it now in the company of her listening competence I feel
it's true of me and strong and clear. I have written things in these
empty days.
-
Finished starving this morning and posted it with grade twelve.jpg.
I was defending that valiant desperate girl, telling on those who neglected
her. If Anne reads it she will feel that I shouldn't make her family look
bad. If Cheryl reads it she will cringe because she hasn't dared tell on
her mom.
- "Our school photos came and I look young and somewhat fierce,
and arrogant too, which I am - arrogant and hesitant and afraid of
people."
-
- -
-
- I've never talked about starving in grade twelve. When I think of that
girl now I think of her differently than she thought of herself. She thought
of herself as happy, and she was, determinedly. She was also desperate.
-
- Because the school in La Glace stopped at grade eleven the County boarded
us elsewhere for grade 12. Most of the kids in my year went to Grande Prairie
High but I chose Sexsmith School, where a teacher I'd loved was now the
principal. The ten months living in Mrs Wold's rooming house in Sexsmith
were my first experience of living alone. I'd always slept in a bed with
my sister and in a house tight with my father's tension. At last I had
a room of my own and I was overjoyed with its every detail.
-
- Mrs Wold was a white-haired Norwegian widow who rented out the two
upstairs bedrooms in her house on a maple-lined street near the post office.
I loved the clean classic small-town feel of the house. I loved the town
too, its classic town-ness, its small town characters who were like people
in books.
-
- These things amounted to a life I knew suited me best but at the same
time there were stresses I couldn't completely afford to feel. Because
I didn't want to marry him I'd lost the man who'd been sending a letter
a week since I was sixteen. Things were bad at home. My dad beat my brother,
was mean to my mom. "Bleak bleak Sunday. Cried bitterly tonight and
cried bitterly the night before. I feel an almost hate and it's anguish."
I was desperate for grades that would win me a full scholarship and slaved
to get them, would study every night and on weekends. At Mrs Wold's house
the TV would be loud in the evenings so after school I'd stay in my desk
studying until I heard the nine-thirty siren. One night I didn't hear the
siren and was still at my desk at nearly eleven. The principal came across
the road to see what was up and drove me home.
-
- I was thin. I suppose I was anorexic. But also I had almost no money
for food. I think the County paid Mrs Wold's room rental directly but they
sent my parents the board allowance. My parents must have kept most of
the money for themselves because they gave me hardly any. There were bread,
milk, eggs and carrots from home but I seldom had an actual meal. "An
apple, 10 peanuts, a mug of iced tomato juice make a lovely meal for the
day." I tried not to go home on weekends because of my dad so even
the eggs and carrots thinned out. What money I had I spent on sugar for
energy: chocolate bars, bananas, ice cream. When I did go home I ate too
much. "Home overnight. I'm a guest there, a hog-eating guest."
"Acutely sick because my stomach cannot stand such a landslide of
food." I don't think anyone noticed.
-
- On one of my nights working at school it occurred to me that there
were lunch bags left behind under the coat hooks in the corridor. After
that I always had some kind of supper. When the janitors were working downstairs
I'd roam around quietly to see what I could find. A cheese sandwich, an
apple.
-
- -
-
- Wasn't starving a way of feeling something pointed about my whole circumstance
that year. I want to say to that girl You don't look arrogant, you look
stressed. You have no idea what a hard time you're having. You can't afford
to know how crushingly painful it was to lose Frank. You haven't realized
your parents are cheating you of food money. You're on your own, your whole
future depends on you. You shouldn't have had to be so desperate. But I'm
proud of you that you did what you had to do to get to a better time.
-
- Sexsmith AB 1962-1963, Merritt January 2022
Jim said, I have no doubt that if Dad knew you were not eating that you
would have been at our dinner table every night.
It comforts me to read that, Mr Mann's kindness again.
I said, I know. But it wasn't a thing that could be told.
19
Cat radio. Patch loses interest in watching the bird videos but she seems
to like hearing them, lies on the table near a speaker.
20
Freya's little family has Covid, the baby too.
Jim yesterday FB-shared the piece about his dad. From his page it brought
me a Christian and an anti-vaxxer so today I've posted an abstract Ocean
Beach photo to clear out the rabble.
21
InDesign and pdf of sight of sound.
wittgenstein on infinity.doc to further erase bad people.
Look at that! Clouds moving quietly from the north.
22
In a comment space under the Mr Mann piece an old La Glace name and a
hideous gif of a cat frantically playing the piano. I found a way to delete
it and blocked the commenter but it opened the miasma of spite still there
in the community I left. A moment with Oma in her laundry room saying to
her They hated us because we were smart and she saying Ich weiss
dass.
-
When I sent Greg starving.doc he replied with an Alice Munro story
I was still thinking about in bed this morning, that described the afternoon
a young woman for the first time really interested herself ... is that the
way to say it -
"Tell me about what interests you, then.
What interests you?"
She said, "You do."
"Oh. What about me interests you?"
His hand slid away.
"What you're doing now," Grace said
determinedly. "Why."
"You mean drinking? Why I'm drinking?"
The cap came off the flask again. "Why don't you ask me?"
"Because I know what you'd say."
"What's that? What would I say?"
"You'd say, 'What else is there to do?'
Or something like that."
"That's true," he said. "That's
about what I'd say. Well, then you'd try to tell me why I was wrong."
"No," Grace said. "No. I wouldn't."
When she'd said that, she felt cold. She had
thought that she was serious, but now she saw that she'd been trying to
impress him, to show that she was as worldly as he was, and in the middle
of that she had come on a rock-bottom truth, a lack of hope that was genuine,
reasonable, everlasting. There was no comfort in what she saw, now that
she could see it.
Neil said, "You wouldn't? No. You wouldn't.
That's a relief. You are a relief, Grace."
She had thought that it was touch. Inflammation.
Passion. But that wasn't what she'd been working toward at all. She had
seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they'd
gone that way.
What she saw was final. As if she were at the
edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level
water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing that it
was all there was.
It wasn't the drinking that was responsible.
Drinking, needing to drink - that was just some sort of distraction, like
everything else, from the thing that was waiting, no matter what, all the
time.
I can see my own stories in Munro country if I let myself but I see myself
outclassed. "She had come on a rock-bottom truth" - when I was
twenty I couldn't have been as pointed as that, I'd have tried to tell him
why he was wrong. I chose the company of Frank, Roy, Tom, but was there
ever a moment I saw into them this way.
Grace in the story had a dead mother and abandoning father; Neil in the
story had hereditary mental illness and a father who'd committed suicide;
Frank inherited bipolar and had a father who beat him; Roy inherited alcoholism
and had an absent father; Tom had a dead mother and fetal alcohol syndrome.
Grace saw into Neil because she came upon her own rock bottom in him. I
was coming from blind blank denial and continued so.
Still? It says no. Coached by Joyce I did come upon my own rock bottom
one Christmas Day in bed at home and I did track down a knowledge of what
to make of catastrophe so that later I might have been able to describe
an honest hope.
Alice Munro 2004 Passion in the New Yorker
- I'm not sure she completely knew what she was saying.
23
Sunday. Dirty world in weak sun. Crows.
Tree of lights shedding needles.
Winter abeyance grinding south like ice on rock.
-
Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason 2020 House of music: raising the Kanneh-Masons
24
Watching Neil Oliver on the Paleolithic last night I was feeling the
soft-heart something I'd want to feel for a real man - what I imagine with
David Macara - moments with Dave Carter - the evening with Robert MacLean
- the engineer who built in a cistern. This is dim - just what it would
be like to live that way. If I hadn't been imprinted on a mean dad and if
I hadn't been a discount woman could I have found someone I could love that
way. What way. Without division, with honour, with a glad eye, with a full
heart. Tom saying You don't respect me, I saying work woman doesn't respect
anyone and love woman's form of respect is trust. But I could respect
someone in work and that would be trust too. What I should have meant when
I said that last hard thing to Tom, If I hadn't been a cripple I'd have
had a man with money.
There's mist this morning, rime on twigs. Under the streetlight I can
see air hurrying sideways, falling sideways.
- Am I right to want that yes
- Am I capable of it yes
- But not positioned for it yes
- Would it be correct to feel it even if I don't have it
NO
- That religious thing NO
- So is it alright to feel it as fantasy
yes
- It's true I'm a discount woman yes
27
Woke in a damp nest. Nothing hurt. It was 4:30, I'd slept without waking.
Am I better?
It's Mouse's day.
Two days of helpless miserable endurance. I couldn't walk but I had to.
I had to get to the counter to open Patch's tin and to the door to let her
out. I had to get to the aspirin. I'd step on my left leg and have to wriggle
it a bit sideways first, just to dare to put my weight on it. I was using
the broom handle as a cane, wobbling, almost falling backwards because the
knee was unstable. When I lay in bed I ached all over, my hips, my wrist,
the muscles of my head. I'd want to sit in hot water to ease the soreness
but getting to and into the tub was a crisis, and then when I got out of
it I'd be so faint I'd have to lie straight down. I kept thinking, if it
stays like this I have to figure out how to kill myself. Was it Covid? I
don't think so. But if not, what? January biorhythm crash?
28
Paul phoned this aft and we each sat with rare sun at our windows and
talked for an hour full speed as we do. He said a good rare thing, that
if he'd been born a woman he'd have been a flaming feminist. I don't think
any man has ever said that to me before. What else. Another of his longtime
best friends has died - that rare lovely thing, people liking each other.
The boy who was so pestered in La Glace became a man good with other men.
I said to him last time that he and I are probably the only people who know
how self-made we are.
So then I'm thinking too how people I know have reverted to their sibs
as they've aged. Greg I think speaks to hardly anyone else, I now speak
almost only to Paul, Louie is more and more who she was at home, Rob since
their mom died stays in touch with his two. We also talked about our Christian
relatives who've gone redneck, or he says always were. He said Lillian is
astonishing so I looked up her FB page, went down her friend list, 200-some
people most with Mennonite names so I could see she has hardly left home.
Paul said the grandparent generation voted Liberal because a Liberal Parliament
let them into the country but their kids - apart from Anne and don't forget
Herman - are solid Conservative. Clearbrook and then Bible School.
In our family Judie only made it halfway out - I was thinking that reading
the second vol of the Ruskin biog, remembering the Victorian Lit class I
took because I felt the better Victorians in their time had made the same
passage I had to, Eliot for instance with more and longer struggle. Ruskin
had Evangelical parents and many preacher friends and didn't get there 'til
his forties and wouldn't say so till his parents died (I'm rounding off)
and was more depressed about it than I ever was, though maybe I didn't take
right account of it in some of the sadnesses of grade twelve. - Halfway
out like the Victorians who edged into something like spiritualism or Unitarianism.
Then most of my family who didn't make it out, maybe didn't try to make
it out?, now seem part of the reactionary rabble endangering all intelligence
and the planet itself. As if Paul and I found ourselves in the rarest little
humane lull before the next dark age.
29
Mind focused here once, it says, a person knew
this stone and the stone proclaimed the person. (Pride in the work: Ruskin
stirs, who had lived until Pound was fourteen and had taught Europe to measure
the craft by the craftman's involvement.) [Kenner]
Tim Hilton 2000 John Ruskin: the later years
Yale
30
Was writing Greg about the Slade yesterday and this morning have been
thinking to turn what I wrote him into a piece. It seems extraordinary to
have got myself into the most venerable of British art schools without having
to apply, and in a film program that accepted only four students a year.
It was enterprise in the dark. There didn't seem to be any way into making
films - the London School of Film Technique was expensive and techy, and
scarily male, and its term already begun. I devised a plan for independent
study supervised out of the BFI. I'd never heard of the Slade but Peter
had a word with someone and got me permission to audit there as part of
my plan. That was a huge score because Slade film department screenings
covered the whole history of cinema, 4 or 5 shows a week in the physics
theatre. So there I was arrived in London with no plan and hardly any money,
a month out of a body cast, sore-hearted and game. From that standing start
I made my way. I don't think anyone has ever noticed what a thing that was
-
Cheryl marveled that I could say pleased things about myself, because
she is so shamed by her mother's treatment that she's never been willing
to tell even a therapist. Don is haunted still by his parents' disappointment.
My parents were disappointed too but I didn't believe them. I'm very ready
to be proud of myself. I think Paul is too. What is the difference if not
some born quality of heart and spine?
-
Yesterday when I was outside getting groceries from the jeep I heard
a loud braying of air horns - many of them overlapped - moving somewhere
in the east, probably approaching. Then a procession of lumber trucks and
pickups wearing Canadian flags running past the end of the street on Nicola.
I knew it was related to the Ottawa convoy protesting vaccination requirements
for cross-border truckers but it scared me because it felt to me like men
yelling defiance at women's emancipation. It felt like war: men needing
to feel banded together against an enemy, choosing as token enemy the feminist
prime minister but really wanting to smash the progressive gains that have
made them less entitled as men.
-
Have discovered online grocery shopping. Frozen Italian meatballs.
Kathy is back since last week and will come on Wednesday.
31
8 in the morning, thick white sky snowing lightly onto mostly bare ground.
It's prettier than it was but there's a sense of smother. Mother Hulda's
feathers. What was that, a girl went under the world and found something
about a well? - Look it up. The girl jumped into a well and found herself
in a flowering meadow. Bread called to be taken from an oven. Apples called
to be shaken from a tree. An old woman asked for her feather bed to be well
shaken every day. As the girl was leaving this world gold dropped from the
sky. It's a story that rewards kind diligence but what I remember is world
under the world. That always stuck with me. Underworld journey that finds
change of fortune. Schoolroom bookshelf in grade three a row of fairytales.
I was eight. I read them all. From then on pagan intuitions. Completely
untaught and unvoiced and held with light certainty where Christian teaching
caught no hold at all. What was that private confidence? As if protected
in some unknown way, wrapped in a couple of inches of quiet light.
- Do you understand what kept me intellectually safe
YES
- You'll say it was you? no
- Intelligence no
- Being sent away yes
- Did some force intend that for me no
- It happened, that's all yes
- It freed me yes
- It wasn't a trauma? it was, but an initiation
- Would you say I've made good of the gift
yes
I did drop down a well and find a world, and when I went home again I
went protected by the freedom I'd become. "You discovered you didn't
need anyone."
There's the gift and here's the cost,
- Could I have found someone I could love that way. What way. Without
division, with honour, with a glad eye, with a full heart.
So I'm that balance and always have been but know it better now.
February 1
WRITE YOUR BOOK OH MY GOD
2
4:30 in open black. I've turned off the light in the kitchen and Patch
is probably on the table with her paws folded under her gazing into the
garden. She can do that for hours.
Some days ago she was asleep on the bed and I was on the toilet starting
to poop. She jumped up and ran straight toward me wanting to climb onto
my lap. What is that: she never wants onto my lap when I'm just peeing.
Then I sit holding her wondering is it that she likes the smell, or is it
fellow-feeling, her large animal doing something she understands, or is
she wanting to console me in what feels to her to be an outlandish or maybe
a painful thing.
I'm brighter and younger since I was sick, a bit renewed.
-
- Fine judgment in detail - I can do that now.
- But a kind of narrative organization I haven't learned
Do I fill in now, what I should have said but didn't? Because I did what
I do, consoled myself with visual pleasure.
Invent journal? It says yes.
- Re-immerse yes
3
Three things make me more ready. One is spinning off the small stories
I don't want to lose onto FB. Another is having fixed bp. The other is realizing
there are always three terms (people) not two. Start with the book!
4
To know what to excerpt I need a sense of the whole arc but I also need
to give a sense of the confusion I start with.
What I've said I'm going to do and how I've said I'm going to do it.
What else I'm doing, work that has to be hidden, and how it accomplishes
itself in the journal. Contrasting parallel forms of language. How to tell
the story of both in one format. How to live both without splitting alternation.
Tactful managing.
I'm sorting but as always it seems wrong to. I guess the sorting is just
to find the best instances of something, and then go back to actual sequence.
5
what's at issue in a book
If it succeeds what is it it does. Takes people through the breakthroughs
there were.
It can be transparent rather than novelistic? Meaning patch in earlier
journal and say so?
The journal as parallel work. Childhood of the philosopher. Journal about
the journal.
There were good summaries in the year before, when I was working up the
project. Should I have a before section? Should I fold them in as if they
happen in the first semester?
6 Sunday
I've settled something. There has to be a before section, the furry man
and forming the project. I'll compress them in time or not specify time.
They are short. This section ends with him leaving, me saying what I've
learned about how to love a man, the project accepted.
Chunks.
-
M died at 5:30. Phone message from Paul.
Whether I can play Ed Gabrielsen's Litanei at the funeral - whether
I can organize it technically.
8 Best Western Abbotsford
7:30. Tea in a paper cup. A good room. Journey stress is done. I have
all day. Paul will be getting Rudy from the airport and dealing with a lawyer.
Ro and Freya on Thursday. Patch will have spent her first night alone but
Kathy will visit this morning. Yesterday a bus journey first through my
own dry interior country, bare ground and shrunken snow; then the long slopes
burned last summer, thick stands of thin black poles; then a high mountain
pass, evergreens pillowed with snow, glimpses of vast heights in Japanese
mist; and last the cedar, hemlock and moss of descent to the Pacific. -
I wrote that to Emilee though I know she isn't interested in scenery.
-
I could mourn so easily for Mouse and still do a year later. I feel it
as keeping faith with the lovely spirit he was. I can't feel that way for
my mother. She wanted me to be so much smaller than I wanted to be and could
be. "You have such a strong personality" said as a complaint.
"I find it hard to believe you'll be alright" when I was obviously
so. "You are no longer the one who ...." "Why did you have
to get rid of God" in her hard ugly voice. Her hunger drained me. I
suppose she was exhausting in Louie's way because she was hiddenly angry?
The day her rage exploded because I'd burned Desser's ideal photo - she
didn't ask why I did it, she didn't ask whether I was in trouble, which
I was, she was just furious that I'd robbed her of a fantasy.
I didn't lie to her about anything she'd disapprove, I tried carefully
to explain because I wanted her to have a chance. When she demanded greeting
cards instead I went into despair.
I hold those things against her - I do - and don't recall the good moments.
After I was valedictorian in Sexsmith she wrote me a good letter but that
night she didn't resist Ed's push to leave so she didn't speak to me and
I went home alone. (Was Ed angry that I limped on the platform? Or maybe
he'd understood that when I said There are some among you I didn't mean
him.) She wouldn't be honest about him; she let me defend her without acknowledging
that there was reason to, so I always had to stand up to him alone. When
I named it to her she didn't say yes it was like that, she said You are
no longer the person who ..., meaning she'd demoted me from what she had
never acknowledged she'd needed.
- She was always angry yes
- Hiddenly yes
- At me because she couldn't have what I had
yes
- Is that all I need to know YES
- When she said she couldn't see how I'd be alright she
meant how dare you be alright given the rules you break?
yes
Okay, but what good things. She said "But if anything you were the
favorite" when I said the hardest thing in childhood had been sibling
rivalry. When I was in the first years at Queen's she sewed for me and sent
cookies. She gave money for Trapline. She gave all of us a pile of
money when Ed died so she ended up paying off my PhD loans. When we spoke
on the phone even years later I'd notice a sound that came into my voice,
intimacy.
- Giving money was the opposite of that?
no
- It was guilt for being so gutless with Ed
yes
9
Judie is so relaxed, wearing something ethnic, sitting back, telling
stories in a humorous voice. We eyed each other across the table. Michael
white haired, thinner faced with the same strong brown eyes. Rudy grey-faced,
unshaven, four beers on, slurring so I can't understand what he says. They
can and laugh kindly at his jokes. Paul quite silent next to me. We were
eating Thai food and trying to keep to common experience. There was a feeling
that all is forgiven, though Rudy was sitting with his back half-turned
away from all of us.
Michael as we were going to leave held his phone across to me to show
a starved woman arched back onto a pillow with her mouth open. I said Who
is that. Someone I'd never met, not Mary, someone younger but in mortal
agony. Michael had been carefully holding back but then just for a moment
blazed into himself and said he believes spirits are eternal.
Is there more to say?
- comparing how sweet and easy it has been to grieve for mouse. it wd
be better to feel that way about my poor thwarted mom but something wants
to hold out for truth and justice even when all pressure of denial is gone
-
- for all the necessary severances or unexpected
losses in the relationship she gave rise to you
-
- my mother was thwarted too and it was a revelation
when you pointed it out to me - maybe she was already broken by the time
she had you, you'd said - and that opened my eyes to a path away from that
fate for myself.
-
- that is a truth and a justice, and the realization
awakened a larger compassion in me for my mom that I can hold even as she
goes further down a road I will not take and can't retrieve her from
-
- Is there anything I NEED to say? no
- Anything I should say yes
- Who is the saying for the younger people
- Grandchildren, nieces and nephews yes
-
- Did you like Judie and Michael no
- Do you like Paul no
- Me yes
- Comment in oppression/of death/shared pleasure/community
- Doing what we should do in the circumstance
yes
- You're saying but nothing is resolved yes
What's the anxiety, it's being seen as less than I was and less than
I am even now. None of what I am and what I've done can show.
10
Rowen at Mary's reception vivid black and pink in a room full of grey
people - Judie across the room looking to see me feeling what she was feeling
when people said Mary was nothing but good - Paul walking across the room
an old man - Rudy like a drunk in a Russian novel, grizzled, shabby-headed,
slurring, coming out with a sudden joke - Lill and John in their late 80s,
Lill wrapped in a tight nylon raincoat, John beaky like an old heron - Lucy
a brimming crone with a long drizzle of white hair under a red hat, eager
and clutching, smiling irresistibly with bright false teeth, more there
than most - Liesbet in a wheelchair, small pink face, eager to kiss me -
George at the important table with Judie and Paul and Michael - Hilda smiling
from another - cousin-grandchild table with Alfred, Raymond and Tony - a
man in a sharp hat I didn't know, who turned out to be Dave - Martha used-to-be
Friesen, Ernie's sister, a nice pale orange person - all these people crowded
in a line having their photo taken, Lucy clutching Rowen in front of me,
Judie sitting and Michael lying on the floor in front - the last time all
those descendents of Opa and Oma will be together I thought.
Behind a thick cedar hedge at the cemetery a mound covered with a tarp,
next to it the open grave margined with astroturf. An overcast chill. Eight
chairs in two rows, everyone else standing. She'd said she wanted a trumpeter.
John reading the committal passages in a dull voice.
Now staring at the mid-legs of very tall trees, warm cat at my knee,
Rowen napping with that fast bright little boy.
What I'm afraid to tell, going up at the end to play the Litanei
off the iPad, Rowen at my heels without being asked. I was blind scared,
why would I be. My hand was shaking. Rowen reached to support the iPad from
underneath and stood beside me as the song played. He was proud I was the
punk of the gathering he said after. I'd told the injustice of her life,
that she was a loving young woman betrayed in marrying a man who couldn't
love. Did it scare me because I was telling my own story.
12
5:41. Real tea. Clean quiet house. Patch licking my chin more than usual.
When we stepped out of Ro's house yesterday morning, very high up there
was sunlight on treetops. Bright daytime all the way through the broad valley
and over the pass. On the long downslope I started to say look at this,
I've felt hardly anything but I'm happy to be coming home. Have come home
to spring.
The week feels unfinished because I didn't debrief with Paul and Judie.
Also because I don't know how I seemed when I played the Litanei.
- Did I look ugly no
- Did they like the German yes
- Did any of them understand the words YES
- Did any of them like that I spoke against Ed
YES
- Did Judie really think it was beautiful
no
- Did she feel outclassed yes
- Did Michael mean we should see more of each other
yes
- Was Lillian mad at me for my writing no
- Does she read it yes
- Was it silly to attack her with those two items
no
- Last chance to get even YES
- Lucy has come into her own YES
- Look a pale glow all along the horizon -
What I most need to say is how I still stop feeling and knowing in those
kinds of time and place. Was remembering when I was in Hong Kong with Jam's
family, that I got drunk to try to still be something true; the way in those
days I did desperate things to try to continue to be - said what I did to
Judie because I believed any lie or evasion would spoil my presence. It
was true: it still does. I was blank playing the Litanei and yet
I did declare my truest relation to my mom, though I had to do it without
presence.
- The pale tint is so lovely.
Has time opened someway because Mary finally got her long dying done?
- Do you think? yes
13
People who replied to the Tischlied: Judie, Anne, cousins Violet, Heather,
Philip, Ruth.
-
Note from Jill in Cape Town. Note from Luke saying he's recovering from
a week with covid. Startling note from Vincent Grenier apologizing for something
in an agony of mistaken scruple.
Sunday morning, sun on the corner.
I've posted the photo of Mary seventeen on the Bible school steps. What I'm thinking
is that I've held onto a story of Ed's betrayal of her young self that isn't
the whole story. She had a long life she made something of. Even her marriage
wasn't always bad. Her denials cost me, she probably was not in good accord
with her uncon, but she was carefully interested in many people who loved
her for that interest.
- Was I wrong to hold onto that no
- Because she and other people denied it
YES
Roy was a betrayal of young heart too but I don't feel sorry for myself,
so am I wrong to feel this loyalty to her young self? No. Because she didn't
fight? Yes. I was left holding the fight she dodged.
- So did I discharge that hold now YES
- "You are no longer the one who ..." was really
wicked YES
14
Have sorted slabs of days, emotional work, school work separately for
certain times.
15
This morning I posted what M said remembering me when I was two.
That shouldn't happen to my fearless, inquisitive
explorer, my Rabbit, my black-eyed, raven-haired little Indian.
You were such a darling, so interesting a companion.
You didn't need to fear the cows - no, they
were to fear you so you could walk where you wished. Your two-year old self
had that clearly determined.
Then I edited text-scanning errors in the online version of Perception
without representation. I'd given a semester to Dennett and written
it the summer before I drove to SD. It's superb. It reset something essential
in my frame and it's stylish: light and loose and subtle and direct. I crossed
into another zone writing it. And Phil didn't acknowledge it, didn't engage
with it. Phil couldn't follow it? Phil was afraid of it?
- Did he have any idea how far I'd zoomed ahead of him?
YES
- But he wouldn't give it to me yes
I was looking for a passage for Theory's and most of it is too
technical, I mean tied into a professional debate I don't want to have to
explain. What do I want from it. The essence of the reset in my own terms
not theirs, what changed.
16
Yesterday I extracted the work record of 1995 up to leaving for San Diego.
18 pages. Is it basically done? Does it name what I thought needed setting
up in the before section?
I'm seeing that I can deal with technicality by leaving out what I had
to say to deal with my context.
I can intersperse journal additions from now?
- Is it dishonest? yes
- But still? yes
17
Last night Canadian women winning gold against the US. I watched the
third period. Hockey to me is just a mad dashing around but I like that
it's women being fast rough and famous. Compared to what - compared to the
old days. After they win they throw off their helmets. They're young, they're
girls with messy hair who don't look like lesbians. Then in their red bulk
with arms on each other's shoulders all up the line they sway as they sing
the anthem, behind them in a glassed box the coaching staff in dark clothes
linked and swaying too. The defeated team stands separated and dour. Silver
isn't nothing but in that rivalry it is. America the smiling gangster boss
of the world.
Canadian women - Canada as womanly compared to the US - womanliness
won.
18
A bit every day but should it be more. Today I've sorted the first SD
months into
- 4 - driving slow 4
- 5 - the golden west hotel 6
- 6 - wings of desire 16
- 7 - brain and imagining 8
- 8 - driving fast 4
-
Has Rob been swallowed up? Angry about vaccine passports - shouting about
the truckers. "They're good people!" "People aren't stupid!"
I said I've never seen him heated about an issue, why this one? He said
the government is being disrespectful in the way it talks to him. (I agree
Trudeau hasn't been speaking well, he isn't personal, stands at a podium
reading statements in a halting voice.) I say but what about the fact that
the American right wing has sent half the millions donated. "I don't
care about that!" What about the Nazis and white supremacists and QAnon
conspiracists? (What about the calls to replace the elected government with
a government of the protesters themselves?)
On PBS last night a yoga teacher saying half the alternative wellness
people in her community are believing QAnon stories about Democrats trafficking
children and vowing that Trump won. Single mothers working from home are
making online incomes as anti-vax bloggers and those other madnesses leak
in from the side. People are made to distrust government sources and told
to research for themselves and then they're poking around in contexts they
don't know how to evaluate. Algorithms are feeding them exciting controversy.
They light on someone to believe. Credulous people formerly harmless are
being weaponized.
There are sure to be national competitors seeding distrust - Chinese
and Russian hackers etc - but are people buying into it not only because
of pandemic stress but also because they dimly understand that the planet's
weather really is ungluing? Are they like Germany between the wars so undone
they'll worship a monster?
-
Tell me who I am dir. Ed Perkins on Netflix.
19
Copy-edited Brain and imagining this morning and am indignant
at Phil's neglect. He was elated that Paul gave it an A but it seems to
have pleased him as if he had earned the A himself. He had not one thing
to say about it. It is deep and crisp and even - it's sophisticated, acute,
widely-read and stylishly written in the manner of the best of its time
but he said none of that, as if afraid earned praise of me would diminish
his manhood. I was never that ungenerous as a teacher: not to acknowledge
is bad teaching.
- Was he afraid earned praise of me would diminish his
manhood yes
For me the paper was foundational; it established the distinctions and
terms I'd need for what came next. I'd found my allies in brain science
and psychophysiology and discovered how to read them without falling into
their metaphors. It's miles beyond Analog-digital distinction. It's
a thorough semester of work accomplished among overwhelming surges of love
and fear.
20
This morning lumpy frost like thin foam insulation hurled onto everything.
I'm working on the first months in SD.
- Do you think it's mostly good so far YES
- Can I do more today no
-
Neolithic cosmology. Neil Oliver.
21
Little scratch at the door. I get up and open it just wide enough for
a small body near the floor to slip through. She goes straight to what's
left in the bowl. Next she'll come to my chair and want to climb on my lap.
Then she'll cry to have the door opened again. Now when I want to say Alright
I'll let you out, come on, I click twice with my tongue and she jumps
to follow. The garden is dark, cold and completely still but she'll disappear
into her unknown interests. Last night when it was bedtime and I needed
her inside I had to rattle the treat tin longer than usual and then saw
her bombing around the alley side of the garage and up the sidewalk
and into the gate and up the porch steps in one leap - why do I always love
her race to the door.
22
What about the long addiction section. It's good bookwork but very repetitive.
Talks instead of body-resolving.
Today I'm scraping ahead to get a sense of the shape.
- 13 - audition paper.doc
- 12 - he visits (7).doc
- 14 - metaphor paper.doc
- 15 - language
- 16 - he returns with me
23
I've liked Pointed roofs least but now it seems so really clear
and lively and accurate in naming a young person's unnamed sensations and
scruples and fascinations and worries and private pleasures. She began it
in 1912 (Ezra was living on Church Walk and had got to Imagism) when she
was 39, a year before the first vol of A la recherche, two years
before A portrait of the artist and ten years before Jacob's room.
She'd been with the Quakers and then was living in Cornwall when she wrote
it. Before Alan I think.
What that book would have been to women who read it in 1915, except that
England was at war with Germany by then. Her wartime books Backwater
1916, Honeycomb 1917, The tunnel and Interim 1919.
Married Alan in 1917. 1896 Endsleigh St when she was 23 (Ezra was 11) though
she back-dates it by two years.
24
What to do with the addiction section - there's so much of it - it's
so repetitive. What do I want from it.
- o summary of what addiction is.
- o giving Tom an ultimatum and hanging in suspense till he comes through.
- o what I learn about my own form of addiction.
- o the voice of the book
- Seeing I have to be slow and patient to both demonstrate and compress
it.
This morning seeing how particular the work on my own addiction - I was
going for structure of addiction in general but it was lining up the particular
harms of my father and mother and early abandonment.
- That structure won't be common enough for readers to
be interested in much of it no it's common enough
- Plus which does showing my madness undermine the whole
enterprise no
- Was there enough actual coming through to validate the
work yes
25
$45,000. Can't think of much I need it for. Some things I need that I
don't think it can do, fix L knee, L hip, L shoulder, gait - make me able
to walk. Replace ugly teeth.
27
Computers. It would need a lot of research.
March 1
A young man with a big nose walking past. Is he
wearing nylons? Loose on his thin legs. A memory device small as a postage
stamp, maybe his, that I don't open all the way, messy music I don't like.
Then I'm in a library opening a book with a passport folded into it. I think
it's the young man's forgotten there when he returned the book. I'll hand
it to the desk but I'll look at it first. Hand written notes from his travels.
Sketches in fountain pen ink directly onto the pages - look at them! So
strong, very filled-in. Was there a dim wonder that I was making them myself?
- So now I write the dream wanting to see the marvelous drawings again.
I can't, just a vague sense of dense black lines on the bottom three quarters
of a left hand page, a drawing framed in firm double lines. - Then the way
whenever I try to write a dream I'm always having to catch back the lazy
sentences that haven't paused to look again. Sketching and writing, lifetime's
work of seeing and saying, being and saying. Other people who don't do that.
6:38, patchy luminous sky slipping evenly north.
Patch is so conscious a body. I mean how aware she always is of whether
a leg is cramped when I hold her or the way she'll keep changing her shape
as she sleeps. Just now she rolled her shoulders a bit backward and stretched
out her legs. There's her belly rising and falling, there's her small face
closed and bare to the light. Then her arm rises to cover her eyes. Seeing
so conscious a body always a pleasure to me as if I become it in seeing
it.
-
- Do you think Putin will use nukes no
- Is Zilensky going to be killed no
- Will Putin be defeated yes
Masha Geffen talking about how Putin and Trump are similar though different.
1. This was a new obvious thought: they don't lie to be believed, they lie
to demonstrate power, "I can say anything I want". 2. They have
no interest in excellence: Trump's inauguration cake was an exact copy of
Obama's but it was only 3" deep, styrofoam the rest of the way down.
Kakocracy or kakistocracy, government of the worst. 3. They despise moral
authority. 4. They have interests rather than commitments and can be tolerated
in their contexts because so much of governing bores them that they leave
it to others. 5. They govern by gesture. 6. They have disdain for government,
appoint heads of departments most at odds with those departments. 7. They
live in a small news bubble, in T's case Breitbart. 8. Their success is
so unlikely they feel it must be fated.
Now I'm wondering what will change in US and Canadian national politics
because there's an exciting international enemy. Will they identify with
the aggressor or the courageous victim.
2
Why is the theory of addiction section so difficult. What am I not focusing.
It's doing more than one thing and I haven't got them clear.
- General theory of addiction
- Romantic/sexual addiction in my case.
- Childhood abandonment and its relation to defense and subsequently
addiction.
- Writing I like
- Addiction in Tom
- Tom coming to decision and my feeling it at a distance
- Days for pleasure and relief and grounding in presence
- Work still happening offside
3
A hard night awake and aching. Can I work.
4
The family, documentary about the Christian underground in Washington.
Ugly grey men networked all over the world. "Family values." Jesus
imagined as strongman, leadership as election by deity. The film gave them
five episodes to describe themselves and barely hinted at their nationalist,
racist, classist and patriarchal motives. Said it is about power but never
asked the deeper question about men organizing themselves around a fantasy,
why male psychology needs that. The documentary is ambivalent because there
is something right and something wrong about what those men do. The filmmakers
are enlisted by what is right in it but haven't the analysis to see the
relation of what is right and what is dangerously wrong.
What happens when those groups pray. Is it what happens when I talk to
the book, do they speak from a larger self? I talk from two structures in
myself - is that the way to say it. They're working with an effective cognitive
technology but don't have a correct understanding of it. They are working
with the uncon but keeping it uncon, is that it? YES.
There was a moment when I was starting to work on imagining that I asked
why it had the valence it had, of pleasure and consolation. I suddenly saw
it as beloved delusion. I was shocked as if a floor had been taken out from
under me.
The mechanism of addiction - how addiction works - is central to the
story I'm writing but are the grey men something else. I feel in them an
implacable need to suppress women. Am I wrong? No. Ask, if they suppress
that form of energy what do they replace it with. An elation of successful
control?
I keep wanting to see the other kind of human, the free kind, live bodies
not encased in grey. Zelensky, Ocasio-Cortez.
A truly multiracial, pluralistic democracy in
which an individual's status was not determined to a significant degree
by race, gender, or religion? I don't think that's ever been achieved anywhere.
It's a vision that reactionaries abhor - to them, it would be the end of
"western civilization".
5
Don has sent a note saying he's sorry he hurt me. That annoys me all
over again. I wasn't hurt I was impatient: you can't meet me as I'd like
so be gone: I was wrong about you and for years. Enough.
- Is it alright to cut him off
yes
- True I was wrong about him YES
part 2
time remaining volume 11: 2022 January-December
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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