22 September 2016
7:21. Writing chair by the window. Is the rad warm. Hot. A beautiful
object. Sunflowers in a Chinese jar, each sunflower with a scatter of gold
dust below it. One stalk has a red-flowering scarlet runner stem wound round
it. The chair has a table, a lamp and a hassock. An old word. How is the
day. So-large a raven dropping from the church's porch. Someone's motor.
Flapping low to the street. His street.
N5-1 to N5-3. Summer into autumn 1980, I was 35. I was worried about
sex and art, afraid they'd make me like other people, keep me from the best
I could be. Worried in that responsibility. Was surprised to see that even
in the time I look backward to now I was feeling I'd been closer to my best
at an earlier time. Jam would have been contemptuous of someone so uncertain
and worried and so unformed in writing where she was polished and firm.
She would not have understood that it was willed flux on the way to a wider
settling than she'd aimed for. I'd have been anguished feeling her contempt.
Esther told her, and she told me, that I was dismissable, phony. I wasn't
phony but I was dissolved, confused. She was hard instead of confused and
proud of being hard but we weren't well founded to begin with. I can blame
her for her hardness but I wasn't with her for a good reason either - reasons
that were the best I could manage at the time but uncentred chaotic reasons.
I made such desperate leaps in those days. Tom was a leap too but not unconsidered,
considered every other minute. And followed-through.
High school girl on the far sidewalk walking with puffs of white breath
at her mouth.
So now I'm not afraid of sex and less afraid of art - I feel both are
help to my spirit if I do them right - but has going into them spoiled what
I wanted to guard? No, something else has, it says. Other people's neglect.
Male blindness. Being systematically blocked. My own acceptance of those
neglects.
What I wanted to guard was soul, soulfulness, feeling, trueness, beauty,
lovingness, giftedness, groundedness, wholeness - a sort of access I had.
Joyce was my warrior of soul, my rescue, my actual mother, my earned
miracle of intervention. Isn't she the central story. Large sigh. She became
the Book.
Three high school boys, the one with the bleached blond stripe.
Sun appears on the chair, in my eyes.
Have I ever mentioned the many dreams of finding
somewhere to live in La Glace. Just now remembered a tiny cabin someone
else might want back.
23
Friday night lights on Youtube. Scenes where teenage boys talk
to each other. I so much liked teenage boys when I was twelve, thirteen.
Their beauty and seriousness.
Still replying to Louie. I didn't defend myself well, protected her.
I said I'm not interested in her because I don't have energy but in fact
she doesn't earn my interest. Who does. Orphans and artists, could I say.
People whose lives are harder than hers. There's her rivalry too, she wants
me not to have what she has because I have what she doesn't have.
There's a half-covered sky at 6:30, soft silver with lighter breaks.
Boiler purring. Left ear hiss. Friday morning. Amber streetlight hung from
its arm over the corner. Writing on the computer these mornings is both
more careless and more considered. I'll write down anything but also cut
and paste.
The mill at the south end of Voght is closing in December. I think it's
the one I hear at night. A pink wash in the southeast. Claude in a plaid
shirt came to change the back door lock yesterday. He'd been hunting white-tailed
deer. It's been too hot; when it's hot animals go further back into the
bush.
I picked and ate two figs off my tree, did I say that?
There was frost Wednesday night. I picked all my cucumbers and any reddish
tomatoes.
I don't know whether this is journal or just boiling off. There's more
junk in it than I'd want in a record. It's helping me though, in ways the
journal used to. - Why do I use too many commas. I use them automatically
to mark pauses in my writing voice but sentences read better without them.
When I revise I'm continually taking them out.
It's raining. A shine on the pavement. Even white sky.
In N5 there are a lot of notes of ideas I fill in later in connectionism
etc. I mean that I was recognizing adeptly and also that others - I think
often Pound - had already been articulating those thoughts. For instance
these: 'reticular aspect of language', 'means of imagining the experience
of space'.
I naturally separate the story of being there from the reading/thinking
notes in that I want them differently. I want to remember the time and place
- and do with pleasure - but now that story wd seem to need ordinary narrative.
Now I'm looking for phrases, comparing what I chose then with what I choose
now. I'm feeling she/I wasn't good at what she was doing. [Sigh.] I'm cutting
notes I've never actually understood.
Another fear I had in those days was of spooky powers I might use or
be used by.
It seems an inefficient mind, wastes itself on what isn't to the point.
24
Clear bright Saturday morning.
failures of the Enlightenment in America
Are there paradigm shifts in what's called art, ie cultural intervention
in cognitive state, being-state, which used to be the work of religion.
Religion has been described as about belief but belief is marginal to its
actual task. A bad misunderstanding.
Do I need to go back to Being about to get to the right next thing.
I dropped it for 14 years.
We are assured that no vegetable grows in vain.
investigating the nature of some other of the
subtle fluids of the universe
Book IV of his Experiments
on air
26
But sometimes irrelevant notes are there just to help in focusing.
I didn't sit last night and woke anxious this morning - philosophy
exam coming up for a course I hadn't attended - Jam and Ezra sitting in
- thinking I have to remember I'm in an emergency of displacement - summer
had people around that I'd hired - now it's going to be 7 months of solitary
confinement -
6:30 still dark, soft grey mottle brushed with pink over St Michaels'
pitched roof and the impeccable Russian olive and over the farther hill.
It's quite a warm house, overnight it loses only a few degrees. Maybe the
basement with its earthen floor sends up geothermal heat.
I bought an 8 foot ficus and set it behind this chair. It was a brushy
mess of crossed and twisted branches and dead twigs all up its length. Its
leaves look artificial, have no shine. I did what I know how to do, sheared
it to three long legs and an open canopy. Fed it and watered it. Now we'll
see.
The rad's hard knock.
In N5 not knowing what to do.
Wow look at the linden all lit up next to the opaque tall fir.
Sun has moved out of the roof's edge - it's that low now - and is glaring
into my eyes.
I've written Rob to ask for decisions about money.
In the garden nasturtiums and poppies still strong. Sunflowers, bean
flowers. Second growth of hollyhocks.
27
First female candidate given as opponent the worst example of spoilt-baby
entitled man demonstrates the battle as unambiguously as could be. She was
ready, we've studied their dodges and learned how to handle them. But half
of Americans and a huge majority of the rest of the world are holding out.
A bit more than a month until this round is decided. I haven't given attention
till now but -
One new leaf on the ficus this morning.
Yesterday a golden afternoon, warm. I went to ask Brenda for pears and
brought back a bagful to can. The verandah has a delicious Mac apple smell
- dug a section of the fig's corner. Went through N5 cleaning up more. Reading
Gleick's Newton again. Watching Friday night lights season
5 online at night. Sitting with Space hotel after takes me quickly
over the line into sleep.
Leaves on the linden are thinning. The crabs across the road are mottling
lovely green and orange.
Am stalking Tom one way and another.
28
I remember the days of old; I meditate on thy
works, I meditate on the work of thy hands. I stretch forth my hands unto
thee; my soul as a parched land thirsteth after thee. Psalm
143:5-6 on Call the midwife.
Zero degrees on the verandah thermometer. Cucumber vine has shriveled.
Sun dazzling into the chair but it will soon have passed the window's edge.
-
4 jars of grape juice, 6 fat jars of pears. Make a salad: cut cucumbers
stored on the counter; walk into the garden and dig a few carrots, a few
beets; pluck red lettuce, basil tips, parsley stalks; rummage the vines
on the fence for beans the right size; fetch cherry tomatoes picked after
the first frost from the verandah. The twig of handkerchief begonia in the
shot glass on the window sill has put out roots. I pot it in the honey-colored
dish and replace it with an avocado seed. Put the compost bowl back in the
fridge. Wipe the counter and stove top. Rinse the dishcloth and hang it
on the step outside. Was thinking old age without this satisfying simple
work would be wrong.
The orange and green trees across the road are hung with round yellow
crabapples.
Sky translucent tender mauve at nearly seven. A grey car pulls up to
my curb. A woman trudges past leading with her chin. A locking beep. The
car's grey skin is reflecting the tender pale sky.
Dave L sent an obit for Peter's older brother Chris who died this August
in Toronto. Photo of a boy with steady eyes. There is some tragic story
about him. They had a service a couple of days ago. Is this why I haven't
been able to write Peter?
Sky still mauve-grey but opaquing.
People don't look into these windows when they pass, though I have the
glass wave's lamp lit.
29
Luke posted someone's diatribe on Clinton and we were back and forth
for hours. He says she's the puppet of a racist militaristic capitalist
patriarchal etc system and I say change happens slowly and in many places
at once; even if she's as bad as a man in office the fact that she's female
can boost women everywhere.
N6 I was still worried about how to think of a life, "if it's the
soul to be conveyed," "if it's a boat that has to be conveyed
then it's for caution wisdom," or "if it's a lifetime to try,
then it's gather what's known and enter the Atlantic, home doesn't matter"
- "is it metaphor, ie nothing, to think there's a movement to learn
for courage of bateau ivre."
Why am I less worried, how is that more resolved. "She'll still
be there," more of a sense of the soul - the child - remaining as the
base for what is built. Not conveyance but structure. I need to build in
touch with base but can build high and far.
Connectionism many times intuited: "writing - weaving - crystal
lattice - net - (had a sense of going in looking for knots) - neuron snaura
a lace, a snare - néo I spin - 'his work lies among the nerves'
- regions of compressions and rarefactions."
Did Jam sabotage because she felt I was getting ahead? It says yes. Did
I remain sabotaged? No.
In that time the way I talk to myself is briefer, cleaner, truer, more
inward, more acute [than it had been]. I notice when I quote Annabel and
Jane Warrick that they're like that too.
30th
5:30, black dark. Alone with the streetlight on the corner. Boiler's
intestinal growl. The rad next to me bangs once; again. Behind me a room
with six doors. Ficus canopy above me putting out tiny pale green spikes
near its tips.
Yesterday afternoon I rode the bike to the post office and then kept
going up Granite and around to Quilchena and west again to the wonderful
garden. Stood looking through the fence at its long quiet reach among large
trees. Ate a handful of little black grapes. Kept going up a paved path
that took me to what used to be the railway bridge. They'd placed a bench
above the Nicola on its way out of town and I sat looking across to a wire-fenced
grassy field with a red gate and trees starting to rust. I liked the sound
on my left of the river purling along and on my right of cars murmuring
by under the flag's gravel brow. The sun was low and a bit filtered so the
place in its fading autumn warmth and quiet seemed charmed. The word I had
in my head was benign.
At six I'm at the bottom of the teacup and the sky to the northeast is
showing a pale dark blue with grey smudges of cloud. It's changing almost
visibly. There's a notch between the linden and a roof where the very slightest
of pink is increasing. The farther world is coming into existence. There
the hill's ridgeline against open space. Three amber lights burning hard.
This is so good a window and this so good a nook. Armchair, hassock, side
table: at the end of five months the furniture needed.
Open spaces are yellowing now on either side of the spruce's black cutout.
A first walker with two dogs. A pickup driving north.
-
Rode to my spot by the railway bridge. Could see someone in the river
fishing, a skinny part-Native-looking boy. Crept down the bank and sat on
the shelving edge to talk to him. He climbed out and stood next to me in
his wet shoes. He was fishing for rainbow trout with a homemade lure he
said. Cohoes are mostly finished but Chinooks are later. You can fish trout
anytime but they're harder to catch in spring when the water is high. You'd
use bait then. As he was speaking I realized I was at the confluence, the
Coldwater flat and shallow from the southeast and the Nicola faster and
deeper from under the bridge.
Riding the bike path alongside the Coldwater's golden reflections I was
thinking maybe Claude would teach me to fish.
At this moment closing on four in the afternoon I'm looking at a mashed-potato
pile of cloud moving north below a background layer of blurred furrows,
this above the silver tree and against the mildest of light blue skies.
I was feeling again something I've felt these days, that Merritt is nowhere
special and anywhere has enough marvels. - Then the raven floating over
the road to land on my roof. - Then two old persons in old-person scooters
pass one after the other presumably on the way to the old persons' barracks
at the top of Chapman. Two butterflies rise flapping and twisting over the
church's messy shrub. A yellow leaf drops from the now half-bare linden.
Blue spruce tranquilly holds up its arms to the sun.
Pickup with a gas tank and pine rounds in its bed. The linden is flickering
all over. Top of the spruce lets go a black flock dispersed like seeds.
I want to say this is a very patched and corrected way of writing. I
want to say it because I'm not sure what to think of it. Writing journal
on the laptop rather than in the notebook allows it and probably suggests
it because of the uses I've made of laptop writing for student letters and
lectures etc, but does it also mean I'm too senile now for spontaneous narrative
ordering of the kind I used to have. Or does it mean I'm writing better.
Or does it sound tightly confected in ways I hate. I like the way it paces
watching. Things change while I consider my sentences.
my young self writing, before I'd begin, I'd stop and shift sideways,
instinctive move I think to the right, to be able to speak from the widest
view
In N6-6 we seem to break after I return from London and move back into
my own place. Anxious. My run of work stops.
October 1
She was crazy and I was taken by her craziness because I couldn't outright
want what I wanted.
I wanted one thing she truly had and one she didn't have. The thing she
had I couldn't get anywhere else. I had it undeveloped and needed company
in it.
2
Her heart bled for the charismatic lost.
- Yang-Mills equations 1954. 2008 Wilcek.
- It's so irritating to deal with talk in terms
of objects when what's described is obviously not an object. The text keeps
fighting against the picture I need.
- Correct way is to describe its wave function
= "probability of finding it at different places"
- Varieties of patterns?
- Mass is relatively locked pattern?
- Light is propagation?
- Pattern change is reciprocal with flow propagated?
There must be physicists who describe this better.
What appeared to be unrelated particles now
appear as merely different patterns of motion.
'Forces' also seems wrong.
interplay between charged sources and field
fluctuations
'Photons' self-renewing field fluctuations.
The grid is a superconductor.
Entanglement - we influence each other backward and forward in time.
"We tell each other stories by living our own lives."
The two movies I didn't get, an anguish about. Different colors of sand
continuously reorganized after a slim sheet of wave. The sailing vortices
in the tank.
-
Four crows picking at the sidewalk under the lamp post. Then comes a
raven to the roof peak and they're gone.
Seedy this morning, threadbare is how it feels. Woke in black ache at
three and lay half-under till six-thirty.
Sunday morning. A high ravel of geese wavering southeast. It's still,
more than still, as if petrified in blank light on this corner. There stands
the linden showing its bones, there stand the crabapple twins rusting orange,
there the silver queen sleeping against vast luminous silver. There the
imperturbable spruce. Suddenly a bright line up the edge of a metal signpost,
suddenly a bright scatter in the nearest crab. Then the bicycle man with
his black dog. A big fly shouting against the window. Church and spruce
both coming to a point. Shadow edges creeping clockwise. Now two pickups.
Three. I should go out.
-
Yesterday realizing that I fell for Robert before Jam invited T and R.
How had I not understood that. She didn't betray me: I didn't act but holding
out was the least of it, body had surged.
- what's seen not said, is it created
- palisade
- slope
- tall separate leafless. everything taken away from
- between them, bird whistles
She could see what it was saying.
I wanted what I couldn't have because I couldn't handle it. So I had
to try to stay with what I could get, but I couldn't succeed with what I
could get because it wasn't what I wanted. That's bad enough and only part
of what was so.
- Would Robert have loved me if I'd been able
yes
- Are you sure yes
I was afraid in more than one way. I was afraid he was more gifted than
I was. I was afraid he'd be the poet and I'd be the helper. I was afraid
I'd always love him more and would live always in pain. I was afraid to
give up my independence. I hated him for my bind which was not his fault.
My desire for him was always angry.
- Did Jam understand any of this no
- But what she did was just yes
- Did they understand any of it no
- But what they did was just yes
- Which is not to say they didn't wish me harm for competitive
reasons YES
- And Jam too YES
And then followed four years of misery and confusion.
And later I became able with someone who was worth less.
- Is this realization a comforting delusion
no
- I'm getting the proportions right
yes
- Should I talk to Jam about this yes
Birds in the spruce's seeding apex.
Real frost last night wilted the basil, nasturtiums, bean vines, even
beet leaves and chard.
The center of my chest is fluttering.
What is that flock. Something about the way a tree seems to let it go,
scatter it into the air.
- So is Tom right to drop me? no
-
I was in the garden at twilight pulling blackened tomato vines and heaping
them out of the way. The air was cool and the bare earth around me was scattered
with dried rags of leaf. That and the fading yellow sky in the west were
like being young in fall on our garden patch at home digging potatoes at
the end of some Saturday afternoon. It was melancholy too because it's the
end of my garden, its startlingly virile great green froth.
-
There's a tight bend where I turn into the Save-On parking lot and cars
coming off the lot have a stop sign there. It often happens that when someone
is waiting to leave their stop and I'm wanting to turn I hesitate hoping
they'll come forward so I don't have to worry about sideswiping them. Today
an old pickup was coming to the corner as I signaled to turn. I liked the
look of it. It had a big head and short box and was an immaculate matte
grey. It waited for me to turn and I waited for it to come forward. It didn't
so I inched ahead. I wanted to know who was driving such a truck and when
we were window to window I took a look. A beautiful guy, manly and quietly
smart, observant. I smiled into his eyes. It was that I liked the whole
story, the truck, the after-you meeting, his look, who he was. He smiled
back.
-
Luke sent a photo today of himself in bed with his new woman. She's smiling
into the phone camera and he's snuggling into her neck. His message said
he was happier than he had been in a long time. I was close to crying considering
what to say. His vulnerability scares me for him, he crashes so deep when
he loses someone. I didn't want to say that and I didn't want simply to
say I was happy for him because this one hasn't looked safe to me. Then
I understood:
- take good care of each other, dears
- when you're happy and when you aren't
That was correct: I have to talk to both of them and I have to say don't
imagine happiness is what it's about. I needed to warn her not to hurt him
but it's more than that. Standing in the garden I realized that if he takes
her on I have to take her on too.
3
Reading old dreams now I mostly think it wasn't worth writing them and
yet I like to recall them in the morning. Lately I've been thinking it's
the narrative that's least worth telling and I should just write scraps
of image. Last night I threw a stone and watched it
roll before it stopped. Walked past a building in which a congregation was
singing in German with a man's voice louder than the rest the way it was
when a preacher sang from a pulpit. I could understand the German.
About this patching-together way of writing: I worry that I don't have
the fast free immediately just-right voice I might have had in the past
but I see that the corrections do bring it closer. My first-take voice is
too careless, too public-media and too schooled. I revise toward simpler
and more accurate, more compact sometimes but not always. I like the considering:
what would be the difference here between a semicolon, a period and a run-on
comma; what if I move this phrase from the front of the sentence. I did
so much editing in the years with students, did it make me more ordinary
or more acute? - And why does this last sentence need a question mark and
the previous two not. There's a good reason, which I don't articulate in
passing. It's because the earlier two sentences are given as instances of
questions not as questions. - But what about the now-last sentence. It's
a question and I don't at all want a question mark. It's because I already
knew the answer when I wrote it. Oh but with the even later now-last sentence
I had to ask before I knew. So do I just not like the sound of question
marks? I seldom want the sound.
It's a grey morning. The pavement is wet, which tells me it's warmer
than yesterday. 8am. Work traffic.
4
A really leaden 7am. There's a black cat with one white leg strolling
round the pickets on the corner. What do I like about the look of it - its
citizenship.
Phone rings. It's Gary in Ontario about a radio. I want a radio for the
kitchen counter. Not a horrible digital radio with buttons, a radio with
a dial, maybe a radio the age of the house. There are beautiful old radios
on his site. Would I want to pay $600? Maybe.
First thing this morning when I opened the door to the kitchen I heard
that the boiler was on. (The rad was still cold so the house had stayed
above 70 right through the night. Outside the porch in the meantime it's
40.) Welcome to the day it said.
-
- world a multiplicity of space-filling ethers,
a totality I call the Grid
- undoing the mass-energy dichotomy
- mass is the measure of inertia
- micronanocosm
- neutron theory 1932
- patterns with repatterning behaviors
-
I'm looking at this corner and realizing that unlike cities I've known
it's stable. Space isn't in short supply. Large trees abide. St Michael's
has squatted there heavily graceful since 1909. None of these buildings
are going to be pulled down. Nothing uglier is going to appear. The ravens
will live out their lives and be replaced by their kind. Deer a bit further
out will walk into a yard to strip a grapevine - I heard that story yesterday
in the library. Children in Colletteville Elementary will have to be picked
up after school because a bear is scrounging dropped fruit.
Reading Stag's leap feeling this is what she gets for being what
she is, she feeling that too. I wanted to see what he looks like. She doesn't
name him but he's there, one photo among her many, David Douglas Olds, a
thin-mouthed complacent-looking society psychiatrist. She wore his name,
she had his good salary while she became a poet, she doted on him, she celebrated
their sexual bliss. Among women she could claim a successful man. Some years
later she has to make do with a paunchy frog-faced cattle breeder.
What does it have to do with what she is. She does what poets do, fancifies.
It's how she lives, she magnifies what belongs to her and what happens to
her, elaborates, decorates. Maybe he wanted to live in less of a blur. Maybe
he wanted to feel he was a soul too. We can suppose that for himself he
was right to jump. But she was punished for being a wide-open female person;
she testifies honorably as that; she's rare and humanly more significant
than he is and yet he was in a position to wipe out her ground. He got even
- for her fame? - by putting her poems in question. Were they always false?
Insofar as love woman is always false. She didn't put his work in question
but her poems do put something about him in question, the entitled male
shut-downness that shows in his face.
- I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
- I did not leave him, he did not leave me.
Do I believe this last poem? I believe her that she's found this way
to feel it and yet her position in life is lessened.
- And it
- entered my strictured heart, this morning,
- slightly, shyly as if warily,
- untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
- and plenty of his ongoing life,
- unknown to me, unseen by me,
I know that motion. I think I felt it after Jam but I don't feel it about
Tom, I don't consent to his being unknown by me.
6
Trying to read Wilczek on ether spaces and quantum theory having to fight
the text continuously. There's something, there's some vision, but 'particles'
and 'forces' and all the entity names and even 'mass' and 'energy' make
it impossible to see what I want to see. In the background as I slowly read
and reread is a question about what I could make. And a slight sense of
conversation with Jam - Jam as was not is, I should remember - and a glance
at a time trying to read quantum theory in the upstairs front room of the
lake house.
[Frank Wilczek 2008 The lightness of being]
7
I wake too early with both arms tight around a pillow. It seems desperate.
Looked up the 5000 days sheet for the first time since I've been here.
It's day 2818.
-
2 in the afternoon. It was raining this morning but the sun is in and out
this aft. A white light. Wind to make the long up-curving spruce branches
sway, the eleagnus ripple silver and the pink-orange crabapple
twinkle all over.
-
6pm. Last sun on the grass hill and on the cloud above town.
8
then let himself ebb upon the air
-
From October 1981:
It's not poetry but I want the use of multiple language, back-shifts,
inclusions, dictionary, dislocations, whole-body dancing, image magic,
ambience memory, small lyric, access by the other, free glamorous invention,
any language, sound pleasure, language intuition.
Do I understand all of that now. Multiple language: using etymology and
whatever I know in other languages, other people's lines too, like Pound,
use of any language. Back-shifts: maybe constructions where what's later
inflects what's earlier, more usual than I knew. Dictionary's exquisite
found poetics. Dislocations? Whole-body dancing is when I feel my sentence
riding body energy like something on the jet of a fountain. It happens.
Image magic - I know what I mean but 'image' with 'magic' is too tight a
rhyme. Maybe I'd just say image and mean descriptions that are strongly
sensory and at the same time call up something subliminal. Ambience memory
- maybe just say ambience. Did I mean what happens sometimes when I'm falling
asleep in the afternoon, the sense of a tint of time, the unnameable psychic
atmosphere that maybe can be evoked by writing within it. Small lyric Pound's
bits and some two- or five-line sequences I've made. Access by the other?
Did I mean something like the book? Not-me speaking through? What kind of
invention did I think glamorous. Kinds I didn't dare and others did. Free-styling.
Sound pleasure meaning also care with sound of the sort that knows 'image
magic' is wrong. Language intuition is all of this isn't it, wordless sense
of language, the vast wordlessness of language. I said it wasn't poetry
and it isn't, it's being aware in the whole wide network standing around
sentence-making. Dislocations, try again, it's when a word is wrenched out
of whack. I'd have to find an example.
- I wrote this suddenly a year after my last fall in the lake house after
some months of nothing much. It's compact. I wouldn't have been able to
unpack it then the way I can now but it's a long way on from where I was
when I began with T and C five years earlier. I'd worked. I'd used drugs
to open my edges and I'd recovered from them. I'd used Jam's company to
learn to focus and her box of books to confirm.
There sits the raven on an arm of the cross as if it's built for him.
Sky white with rain at eight in the morning.
I also want minute record, exact description, complete reliability,
coherence by accuracy, acutely sensitive process.
'Complete' is grandiose but coherence by accuracy I still believe. What
is sensitive process though. Just attention.
structural pleasure of implication, shapeshift.
How is implication structural. In Trapline it was: the whole space
implied by its parts was should I say the structure of the film. But is
'structure' right. Sensing the whole space from its parts was the viewer's
pleasure of task? The film's grip? If so in that sense structure.
But how does 'shapeshift' belong there. - It's the grammar I didn't get.
Structural pleasure of shapeshift. Should have said structural pleasures.
Same sense? Seeing one thing become another could be the cognitive grip
of a work? There isn't enough work in it if it's shown, as for instance
in OB pier 5.
I think I can use them all if each is and knows what it is, and the
others are also there.
what I don't know is what about misery of other persons, starvation,
political horrors. is our peaceful time paid for in el salvador. is my
skill paid for somewhere. does it work like that.
I've stopped asking that question; I do what I do. I was suspecting psychic
parasitism of kinds I've decided don't happen and so responsibilities I
now don't think I have. But there's still the more obvious political question
of living in and by means of countries that exploit other nations.
and even if it doesn't -
I'm making heaven esoterically, for everyone.
No.
I'm working on a head that will be used instead of the one that makes
horrors. But won't.
Could but won't.
my love and skill are paid for in horrible ways I don't know, but
my place is to balance them, that's how it works.
No. I'm fortunate but not in any direct way at their expense.
my time and skill are purely parasitical maybe on a scale I don't
conceive. I accept the gift and risk punishment if there's justice. or
get away with it at the cost of there not being justice.
There isn't justice and there isn't punishment though there is horrible
misfortune.
my time and skill are parasitical but only immediately on people
in my experience, the rest are in another system perhaps imaginary, and
yet have to be accounted for.
They aren't parasitical on anyone in my experience either. They are my
gift and task.
what I do is useless but is training for something that will be useful.
I can't know until the gamble's over.
what I'm doing is or isn't parasitical but it is useless and there
is something that can be done about the other, and I could find it and
do it.
useless but there is nothing on any scale I can do.
Limited use in the world there is but people tell me it is sometimes
used.
useless, and there is something very small I could do.
Still a question about whether I should be doing something of the other
kind, 'helping.' It says no. I'm not sure why.
there is something very small I can do but what I do already is more
use in some way.
No.
what I do already is some use but there might be something else fairly
wide that I could do, if I put everything into trying to find it. I might
never find it, would be likely never to.
I should continue learning what I am learning but at the same time
should inform myself globally. I have to learn the meaning of the parts
I work with now but the other knowledge has to begin.
It says no, leave it alone, it's not your purview - that has been my
feeling - but I'm still not sure.
to do it I have to use whatever I know of reading through given information
- that feels a fire rise - and in-countering situation.
I've done that, I've studied and seen through, but I haven't given out
effectively. Is that what I should concentrate on? It says no, do what you
do.
is the unconscious everything else. whatever isn't in consciousness,
anywhere in universe, has its way of speaking inside experience and can
be read.
That isn't the way to say it. 'The unconscious' is body structure that
is knowing without knowing that or how it knows. It has access to more of
universe than conscious knowing does but conscious knowing can ask and be
answered by it. It doesn't have access to everything. It's immersed in but
limited by the kind of structure it is.
the picture a sufi or tibetan knowing how every situation works and
inserting the extra-system nudge.
Those pictures are all hyped but in teaching I've sometimes nudged accurately.
what I need to know s'entreferir
Inter-vention. Ventre. I was on the track of that and did come
to know it.
what evil is. what those men in crates are doing there thought of
in the whole. whether I want to side with the whole or against it, ie what
is the whole doing, ie would I be willing to be in them if I knew.
It's a good question but I can't be in a position to side with the whole
or against it. One sense of the question is left over from religion: is
there justice. There isn't. People are as they've evolved to be. It isn't
overseen. The whole isn't doing just one thing. It branches all over the
place.
how to know
meaning: whatever isn't in my lit space - something in a vast expanse
- has its way of
has its way of speaking
a picture of a light in a vast space in that lighted space there
are marks that I could read as registration of all elsewhere.
I was overstating, not all elsewhere; but I had been coming to see I
could know more than I'd thought I could. I'd been finding how to learn
for myself in the vast world. I had begun on a question that took me all
the way through the thesis. I think it had begun with tracking how conviction
is captured by subliminal memory. What will we know.
what i try for
1. unmixed time
2. doublings have to mean both ways
3. keeping enough to show the arrival, or showing only the find:
i don't always know
4. journal sequence sometimes works
5. setting
6. showing a revision as that, can it focus
Unmixed time: I tried to tell moments as they happened without adding
anything from outside the time of the experience.
Doublings: writers around me liked puns that I thought were bad unless
they were actually double - how to say this -
When I revise now I often remove the record of how something arrives,
ie the description in terms of consciousness rather than event. It seems
slow, redundant. And yet it was a good practice because it was accurate:
I was learning to see experience as such.
How did journal sequence sometimes work: when I was extracting I found
sequences that clicked in right ways: for instance similar structure in
different registers. There's charm in that.
Setting: did I mean place? What other kind of setting could I have meant.
Setting as placing phrases spatially.
Showing revisions, in general leaving traces of the moment writing, its
motions: second thought, tracking, modifying. It programs the reader into
writing intelligence. Writing without traces can be unreadably flat. Best
though is when the writer is so up to speed that first thought is perfect.
I still think that. [Sigh.]
a particular posture in front of a particular sight (the ghost body)
The reader's body being aligned the way the writer's had been. By ghost
I mean simulation. Still a bad habit of mystification.
And then it goes into writing winter interference.
-
Between shreds of rain cloud I've just seen there's snow on the higher
reaches of hills to both north and southeast!
For air:
a personal answer and assurance somewhere within
the deeps of the living air. it was a touch. it conveyed the touch of a
living, conscious being.
looking, away to the right, into a far-off pearly-blue
distance, that held her eyes, seeming to be in motion within itself: an
intense crystalline vibration that seemed to be aware of being enchantedly
observed, and even to be amused and to be saying, yes, this is my reality
the flood of her voyaging love
her conviction of the inner vastness of space
a space that opened before her in the air between
herself and her surroundings
- I know air as touch but is she accurate to something
else I don't know? no
- She exaggerates yes
- Is it Miriam's exaggeration rather than Richardson's
no
- Space is divine ground if anything is
yes
- Does she personify it because she's feeling an e-m field
in her own brain yes
- She feels her version of you YES
- In a tactile way yes
- Is there anything else you want to say
no
9
Oma coming into that basement room carrying a basket of laundry,
white kerchief round her head. The Russian table. Tubs under the window
looking onto the garden.
I've copied that because it remembers more than I did.
10
Thanksgiving Monday morning, empty street, soft grey sky. Faithful boiler
rumbling below. Laptop warming my knee.
Yesterday I bought a pint of Haagen Daas and stopped at the video store
to rent Mad Men season 2. Started in the afternoon and watched nine
episodes of piggish men smoking, drinking, lying, betraying, oogling, patronizing,
fucking at random, and slavish women smoking, drinking, lying, deferring,
crying, whoring, and getting themselves up elaborately to please. In between
when I went to do some work with E1 there was Jam astonishingly vicious
and I spinning in a frenzy of unsafety. Meantime a forgotten second Trump-Clinton
debate with shameless über-pig Trump slinging any mud he can seize
as he fights to keep his standing as king of American underbelly.
Day 2814.
it is coy because it is more interested in
how it is saying something or in what it wants to say, than in what it
is saying.
I never understood that. What do I think I should be interested in when
I'm writing. More than one thing. Definitely the thing I'm considering and
then whether the language I'm proposing has some sort of right match of
effect. At the same time the sound of the word and the rhythm of the sentence.
Whether there's misfit with something else in the paragraph, for instance
a repetition or rhyme. Logical relation of clauses: choice of conjunction
and punctuation. Verbal accuracy, verb tense and mood, for instance can
or could. What could it mean to be more interested in what it is
saying. It's Olson, which is why I gave it enough credence to suspend it
unresolved for years. If I am watching myself for evidence of uncon participation
I would be interested in what it is saying, is that what he means? It's
along with, not instead of, though. It was a task of those years to become
aware of uncon participation. Should I say responsible for, no, that's grandiose.
I'm not responsible for the book. Responsible to. There's more than one
uncon. Aspect of. I didn't know that. There are uncon motives and there's
larger self.
Is becoming responsible for the smaller self necessary before access
to the larger self? It says yes.
a method other than the elizabethan
The Elizabethan method - the English Renaissance method - he was imagining
he could pass Shakespeare? What did he think he was doing instead?
the way a part of a sentence is assented to, and it makes a confused
assent to the rest
That was important to find. I was gathering method.
I want it not to be symbolic, compensating, I want the intuitions
read
It was a good vow that held me to delayed acknowledgement.
materialism. taking the thing as itself not as interaction.
Do I know how writing honorably registers perception as interaction.
Is the participation of my own structure just inherent? It is inherent
but is that enough? When at this moment I look at the small crabapple tree
across the road I see colors like the shining dress I wore to give the valedictorian
address when I was eighteen, orange and gold, wonderful, gripping. Behind
it birds swoop into the taller silver tree. There a participation I hadn't
known until I asked.
-
Went out and took photos, drove across town and bought gas, apples, checked
political sites, made delicious bitter coffee, and now have come back to
the question. Since 1981 I've said there are three actors in perceiving:
thing, medium, perceiver's structure. Take the thing as itself, and also
as mediated, and also as taken in by a particular perceiving body. Theoretically,
take account of all three. In perceiving, body already does. Has to. With
limits. What it amounts to in relation to the ethics of writing is that
the quality of the writer's whole structure matters. Make it as good as
you can and then trust it. I wasn't wrong to try to learn something; I could
see I shouldn't trust myself yet.
what do I admire. a crucial travel
I like the line but do I know what I mean. Travel is intentional motion
away from home. Crucial is it matters and isn't easy. Crucial travel was
the cold moonlight south of Alturas and the hotel at Cannon Beach. Many
times hitchhiking, the whole year in Europe. The doc. Trapline. Tom.
In other people who. My orphan friends.
Le livre du ciel turns out to be a collection of writings by Luisa
Piccarreta who stayed in bed for 64 years and is said to have survived on
nothing but communion wafers!
in the slides how the unconscious is showing its hand - what those
pictures are made by - it's showing me itself another - or something is
whether when I walk downstairs in the dark I am speaking to whatever
it is speaks to me in the pictures
It can speak through images I make. Can what I do speak to it as if I
were an image too. It says no. I can speak to it as what I am, on purpose.
- There went the silver pickup turning into Chapman. Black dog in the
box. Entertaining myself with a fantasy. Should I drop it? It says yes.
Why isn't it harmless? Because it masks a child's desolate search for her
mother. [Sigh.] Was that what yesterday's wallow was about? Yes.
their bound expression of love for you
Did I copy that because it's true of me though not necessarily of others.
I've often bound -
the terrors of having to risk so much to be wanted by this other
kind of people
So naked a statement.
11
But is it true. I did need their company and I did risk but it was a
larger adventure, I had to grow into myself. It still shocks me that they
didn't want to help in that - I have loved supporting students who want
to grow into themselves. I was both less and more than they were and they
needed to see only the less. They curbed hard when they got a glimpse of
the more. That shocked me ethically as well as personally because I thought
we were working for communal cultural values, for women and quality. Shocked
means I went silent and withdrew. It's something that often happens: I stop
at realizing the worst, I freeze in realizing the worst. Realizing the worst
feels like the end of the story.
how is it these times I work on something, put it away in a moment,
and if it weren't here in this record it would be as if never - the structuring
in that - couldn't think of the word, its assumptions in this language,
but there's the picture of struts, foundation, substance, struc ture -
as at this moment in this mind it runs down corridors and is not its whole.
There's a new authority in the sound of that. It still happens and isn't
it natural - transient structure - and isn't the instruction that wholeness
in abstraction needs to come with externally-supported repeating over time,
the way the doc did. The way I worked with recognition was patchy, had to
be transient because it was always new contexts.
the sorts of systems that were listening: do I comprehend, is she
out of my possibility - in the social, what does this express, what's she
saying - what is her picture, where is she: who - what's being done to
my position, revenges, am I guarding myself - what's the difference and
meaning of these differences - how is this different from my other times
- I don't like the way her hair is high on the top - look at that small
face, the lines that cut the mouth
when j was after first smoking talking to t about her instrument,
I left, there was my own situating I wanted to do. could feel myself in
the remarkable presence of the look of absence, thinking, parallel to those
thoughts, frightened, I could look now and see how they are together, and
how she is with sandy: and she can see how they are, how does she look.
she looked collapsed. I didn't want to. I should know everything that can
be known. why aren't I, because I have something of my own. it sent me
back to the day I was in before going there.
I'm battling and not being overwhelmed but what am I not seeing -
what on account of this sturdiness - it is moving in spite of their difference
or not comprehending, because wherever they are I am somewhere too. the
other waiting and listening is when I have to gather up to be impressive.
but it's to be more in this way, blinding setting forth in my own time.
seeing its maneuvers and not refusing.
using their method on them: noticing phrases used
all along: what it was like before.
when someone would say something I would try to see into the scene
behind that remark
the series of unfinished barely begun glimpsed guessed structures
mistakes disjunct readings the other interpolated hit missed and in a stream
of work
It's an exact summary of those meetings. An outsider's. Could any of
them have written it? No because they had already ruined memory with drugs.
on the bus: it's always what is a spirit, making a spirit, working
to make an experience, that's the kind I am, everyone isn't, "the
uncreated conscience," conscious, using parts unmethodically come
by, to be this kind who does that.
That hasn't been so for a while. It was a power of inwardness I don't
have now. It was religious. I brought it from London. Afterward I left consciousness
to itself and acted but I'm still not sure. What my theory says now is that
it's not 'consciousness' but whole bodies that have quality to be created
and guarded. 'Consciousness' can't work on itself though people can work
on themselves, can self-correct in various ways that include monitoring
state. So then the question is should I monitor state more than I do now.
It says yes.
what he made wasn't conscience it was unbinding language forms. she
made something accompanying what other people might live, it is
conscience, she stuck to identity because she was grateful to have (been
given) it.
Joyce vs Richardson. He did make conscience too for instance in The
dead and she pushed self consciousness into fantasy sometimes I think.
j's thinking revealed: madness of the house schemes ... . I was watching
her face's instability. what does it mean. the beauty and the ugly seem
to be there at once in different parts of her face.
Didn't I see her craziness until then?
I heard, and paul heard, someone else's speech in mine. "it
was the vigor of the rhythm."
It wasn't someone else, it was that I'd balanced.
the old syllabary
Early Mycenaean. I didn't know what it was, liked something about it.
Do you know what? Sill-a-bury. Just that? Yes. Mouth of the grave. I liked
the buriedness of its effect. A complex charm. Yes.
when she was reading it, in her voice there was pompousness, that
is, stupidity, next to intelligence. it was there to read but I was blazing
an image, her face as it had been for an instant and my frightened and
challenged knowing I was there with that one and could rise to it. it was
the first room and how we were in it. I got it like a memory of what I
want and why I had been faithfully waiting for a mean stiff person. it
wasn't her but that emergence
that own love of the best ground if I could live by it
was it true that you only love that one? if I'm at all taken in by
any of the others I have less chance of ever seeing that one again. I've
worked with the others, I've waited.
It makes me see that we had no right to try to be together, we had no
foundation for it, it was greed in both of us. She tried to coerce me and
was vicious when she failed. And what did I do - I was opportunistic, I
grabbed what was in front of me without investigating it first. The cost
to me was eight years of insecurity. To her humiliation in the end, maybe
just that. The effort was worth something to both. It was often honorable.
I'm not interested in understanding her madness now.
the voth creek. the afternoon we followed it to where it was in steep
banks. standing on the steep slopes and cowpaths. foreign bottles and tins.
the house up there.
That excursion has a particular feel in memory, a glamour. The three
of us had come into an unknown territory from behind and below, up an artery,
not on a road. Was there some dream resonance because it was Voth's place?
A mean crooked man and a frightened starved wife, had we snuck into our
parents' marriage, was that it?
12
drinking brandy feeling the disabled mind not sure whether I am resigned
to not being able to think, continual stop - I can't decide that, I can't
know that - or whether the presence watching the calculator unable to work
is a clear being that doesn't need the terms of those disabled calculations.
that it has rejected the forms and is just holding itself waiting for an
integration to let me think differently.
The clear being was you? Yes. This description is already an integration.
Yes.
what interests me is love. I like the real happenings and I like
them best even without understanding when they cross freely between what
was thought of as inner and outer
Is that correct? Yes.
developing the observer function
Does it need to be developed? No. Does everyone have it? Yes. Can it
be destroyed? Yes.
what's the difference in the way it is, touching. it isn't the meaning
of touching that stirs, it isn't weighted touch, it's my body's hot spots
turning on near her. I felt it could begin to be (not romantic) composed.
originating.
I'm impressed by the composure in some of this writing. Was it the field
of the four? It says no, I was forced by crisis accepted. And she too.
when it has gone deep into untalk, to bring a quality of talk out
of it
I have a long habit of that don't I, keeping silence in the midst. Is
that from two years old? Yes. It makes social difficulties but it's an advantage
to writing. It says so-so. You mean disadvantage too. Yes because it ties
writing to catching up.
the systems I have been not wanting in my experience are the systems
I found when I was ambitious and strong, to get me past where other people
were stuck
liking to be escaped from the cautions that built me
I meant sex for example.
I have been trying to make a position: the raft
Raft assembled from twigs and straws.
how to live with the unconscious
When did that become a question?
what rhoda did was an attack and I couldn't accuse her
Was I right about that. Yes. She felt she was taking J and was guilty.
Yes. And at the same time trying to consign me to the minors out of rivalry.
Yes. Is there more to know about that. No. I couldn't accuse her because
Jam had been gaslighting me. Yes.
J terrorized me and then tried to use my pain to coerce me. Yes.
what I saw last friday, unanswerable, unfightable, was you preferring
the sense of writing you have with rhoda. I don't like a lot of her writing,
what inspires you in it, doesn't, me. it means also that your recent work
done in that inspiration I can't love as you and others do. the painful
contradiction is that you are still the one I love to talk to about writing
and that that love is the center of my love for you. the center of your
love is something else and that makes it strange to you how hard I take
your preference in the sense of your work.
Our connection for Jam was about gender so she couldn't stand my desire
for men, for me about writing so I couldn't stand her preference for Rhoda's.
She wanted me to make her a man, which was mad and impossible. I wanted
her to make me a writer, which she could have helped along and didn't, but
which actually depended on other things I had to do myself.
I already had a wider background and was trying for a wider integration
than she or they were. I wasn't ready to show what I was trying to do and
they didn't see it and wouldn't have understood it if they had.
someone I know passing over in a war machine like a building
telling the war machine floating over I seemed to remember another
dream of a flotilla of them sailing in that even way southeast over the
east place grassland, the way cumulous seem
I'd forgotten that for a while I was dreaming large war machines passing
overhead, was it always over the east place.
-
Bought a sewing machine.
Garden flattened by frost last night. Jenn and I cleaned up some. Ground
was frozen when we began at eleven. It was warm when we stopped at two.
I pulled up frozen marrows, beans, basil, dug potatoes and some of the carrot
rows, she started at the sidewalk and dug forward into the orchard patch
that had been under cardboard. Earthworms, grass killed. Rainstorms forecast
for tomorrow, Friday and Saturday. She says the fall's turn has been unusually
sudden and we'll probably have a brutal winter, maybe cold enough to kill
the pine beetle.
Spoke to Peter T who says he may stop by Friday the 21st on the way through.
13
List of what I'd been working on up to 1982 some refined:
- Noting and studying attractions
- Violating own safeties more
- Learning in what had been men's areas
- Learning physical skills
- Noting and testing ideas about superior consciousness
- Finding and forgetting opened presence / pleasure
- Getting a feel for cosmology
- Noticing evidence of uncon ego motives
- Getting a sense of uncon interests and participation, 'symbolism'
- Recording dreams though not doing much with them
- Studying gender tensions
- Watching unstable identity in self and others
- Testing and revising childhood place and people
- Sense of language freer in dictionary writing
- Writing lower case in pencil
- Getting past obvious lyricism
- Broadening my sense of what's usable in writing
- Hard criticism of my photos, throwing away anything not very best
- Taking photos with more uncon in them
- Yoga, being more aware of body, erotic sensitivity, sensitivity to
fields
- Pushing through crises with other people
- Learning and forgetting to be more instant and honorable in speech
- Noticing and testing what might be telepathic contacts
- Developing and testing a sense of self and other as one system
in language, the precise turns of the word in its meanings.
in literature, the tale, which is structure of a life as soul.
in movies, the detail of flux, which is to say, flux.
in religion, the ear that can hear what's true.
in persons, religion.
Nicely said but it's all more complex. What could I have meant by religion
in persons, that I'd say differently now. Soul, meaning depth, meaning a
mortal's correct presence in life.
I've had the sense that you're so volatile now, that what I must
do when I see you is just hold quiet and watch very close. when you were
here on sunday that is what I did, and what I saw was you. it is a question
of how much loneliness I can take, I fail to be able to bear the intensity
of our difference, and then I stop watching.
I'm proud of how clearly I said that. I guess this is when I began responsibly
to step outside. Responsibly but self-sacrificially.
I had no idea what a clash of cultures it was - I had had Greek-Christian
ideals of friendship and community and they had urban-mercantile Hebrew
habits of aggressive competition. Jam was coming from an aggressively mercantile
culture too though she had unknown Chinese ideals of conduct as well.
unification of the whole around one purpose
I did that with Being about but had I done it earlier? Which purpose?
Shattering the structure of / betrayal and deception / by power struggle
/ and exclusion. Slowly diffusely unifying.
visualizing cosmological process: veining, coagulation, silting,
axis/orienting, expanding, granulating
I left out the most important, field and propagating through a field.
"now you're crying like a child because I said you put crumbs
on the blanket and wiped your hands on it."
- That she despised me for child heart. Why was I crying, though, what
helplessness was I in? She'd been using child vulnerabilities to terrorize
me.
how would it be if you loved my being
It happens. My mom did for a while. Frank. Greg in his way. Louie in
her way. Tom in his way. That's it, I think. And do I love your being? YES.
I do. And you, Book? YES it says. A little glow in the centre of my chest.
14
in the smoke watching what's this mind like, what does it dodge.
what's its quality, what does it want to know. is it a good logic. is it
direct. does it have a language that can see through.
Could smoke actually judge those things? Yes. You can? Yes. Smoke gave
access to you? Yes.
remembering roy. protest. they act as if they're a better mind but
I have to keep working at the basic mess. they use the basic mess to keep
me occupied. that's spirit battle.
Protest meaning I used to correct Roy and was correcting Jam and was
still correcting Tom. Did they know what they were doing? No. But had learned
that it worked. Spirit battle meaning competition. Is there a better strategy?
No, if you hang out with that kind of person you have to keep the record
clean when they don't.
if I didn't correct at all there couldn't be that ladbroke grove
happiness of agreeing
When Tony kept it clean in his own right.
I can't compete
Was that true? Yes. Because I was inferior in some way? No.
coupled nouns. why do I write them. amateur.
It's for rhythm but is it for something else too? I don't know yet.
span. arch in it
Yes.
the rebellion's so mild and taken as so outrageous, what is that,
astonishment - it must be how it's done, strangled, that makes it outrageous
No it was because of what they assumed my position should be. Was that
because of my leg? Yes. Even with them? YES.
I'm watching it speak badly, that's the shame all day, why've I just
said what I haven't thought. the thought wasn't there enough before I spoke,
it hadn't enough time. after I spoke I knew it was wrong. if I made a rule
to stop first? and then never the surprise. that's what's making me rush,
I want it to get out before I've curbed it. but in the wrong language,
is that being in system with the listener?
It's a good description. Being fast at the same time as accurate is a
question of structural integration isn't it. After imperfect childhood a
work over time. Rightly integrated structure can handle being in system
with the listener. I did that in teaching.
fieldstone. the stone boat. the hay racks' loose joints, driving
like crazy around the yard, standing charioteer beside the taller post
taking jolts with his legs apart. I saw it with him. the belts on the threshing
machine, the good breakfasts for threshing crews, the shafts on a cutter,
grain shovels, castrated pigs squealing, my mom holding the chicken's head
on the chopping block, the sounds you hear falling asleep in a hay loft
with horses below, the smell of horses. he remembered things he hadn't
thought of in, he said, twenty years.
That because I may forget it.
-
There was rain this afternoon. I went out in fading light afterward to
get videos for tonight, then rode up Midday Valley Road to look at the sky.
There was still a bit of clear silver to the west. Against it long dark
clouds rushed over the hill from the south. I was stopped at the turn onto
the abandoned tourist mansions with my window open letting in cold air.
The clouds scared me almost, the way they were running in a ravening pack
with heads raised.
-
she comes past the three carrying more of my equipment. "I wasn't
going to take that." "I can, it doesn't matter." appalled.
Was that the moment I remember as the most humiliated I've been.
"she has a bad leg and she carries it so beautifully."
[kiyooka said] "that that had happened to you and you bore it so gracefully."
[trudy said]
"it isn't that I'm not loved, what it is, is that you don't
imagine how I would have been different if it hadn't happened."
insisting that it is not nothing.
I want to know what it is, and what in anything is it.
part 4
time remaining volume 4: 2016 may-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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