time remaining 4 part 5 - 2016 october-november  work & days: a lifetime journal project

28 October 2016

Have been meaning to say there was a small heap of glossy pellets on cleared earth in the garden and near it some neat curved prints, a deer. Fresh prints Jennifer said. She was digging and I was plucking poppy heads and clearing their rotting stalks.

how do I have to be - make sure of good meals, intrude nothing from my own badness, quietly make my own judgment and act on it without discussion, have thought out the simplest way for things to be done, suggest them without seeming competent, get ready to be unseen for a long time, get ready for there to be no admissions, be willing to see and register without fantasy of change, keep a separate strength immaculate

That must have been when we had garden work together.

remembering to assume that any mind I meet will be less able than mine, and then that I can focus it

Do you agree with that?       YES

Autumn of 1969:

a room for rent card on the notice board outside the post office at the foot of parliament hill. I liked its language. address near the call box, 4 st albans road flat #7. the voice on the phone was courteous. he said a dancer had seen the room and might be taking it.

a heavy downstairs door and thin carpet on the stairs, a young man with a fat face. a white goatskin rug and a stereo table with red velvet hanging to the floor. henry the roommate with such a dark beaked face. the room upstairs has a purple wall and bare wood, looks north across roofs over highgate hill to moving sky, a beautiful long room I want, 6 pounds a week. a smell from the kitchen that will go on being strange to me. roy coming out after me to say I should give the rent to him, henry phoning later to say roy owes him money, I should give the rent to him. I having suddenly put the upstairs fire escape door key into my pocket. roy phones to ask if I have it.

I've made coleslaw in sweet cream. roy, paddy and I sit on the floor in twilight listening to music for zen meditation. I'm in bliss of being present with someone in that music as ian could not have been. there's evening light from the long west window. the telephone under it chirrups.

at first he was seldom home though he didn't seem to have a job. he came and went touchingly alone, was often gone all night. coffee cups. sainsbury bags in the kitchen. his books piled above the stairs. thin shoulders in a grey turtleneck going into the kitchen (a smell of piss at the kitchen sink). a day we came home hungry and found curry in a pot on the stove, carrots, raisins, stewing beef chunks unbrowned so the gravy was grey.

I was always aware of whether he was in or out, I had to know whether he was home. I'd come in and listen, would look for his sheepskin coat. when I fought with ian and went to the heath at night his comprehension seemed to hold me from across the room. when I put on his motorcycle helmet one night ian understood better than I did that he was done. that was when he challenged roy and roy, having said he had no designs, still muttered "but of course one always hopes" so that I dreamed he gave me a letter, I love you. roy was seeming to be acquiescing, courteous, waiting for it to be over, but he left "I sing love, love" open on the table. we in the purple room were fighting, weeping. ian left. phoned. roy handed me the phone.

1983 remembering 1969. It's all familiar but doesn't come back to me in detail, for instance the grey turtleneck and the goatskin rug.

29

enact the process of thinking, its experience and movement

Rabbinic methods of interpretation and poststructuralist literary theory - Freud, Lacan, Derrida - c/f Greek - says Susan Handelman

- our competition of Jewish, Protestant, and Islamic/Confusican temperaments

'experience of temporality' not 'achievement of vision'

Sun in the garden. So much color, the church's grand rowan is dark and light rust, the plum and its child next door are golden, the willow is green and gold in falling streaks, the cherry over the fence is orange and scarlet and some purple, the beet leaves are a surprisingly brilliant green veined with dark red. There further in the alley a dark group of - what - I'll go look - a pine and a tight stand of something else with a lot of cones - and oh look a long branch loaded with doves! So warm a sky on my face.

I like that we sat in these chairs at midnight, he smoking, looking at the roof and clumps and dark sky and bare ground. Something about bare earth sprinkled with colors, the newly dug orchard earth that looks so fibrous, so good, is now printed like a drapery fabric with orange pinnate leaves. What to look for in autumn, didn't I give it to Luke. Look - gnats - small slow gnats, bright drifting specks. Those leaves still alive are so amazingly burning in this light.

-

worst would be that even now in a depth I don't feel, I am wanting to be married to a fine man, that it keeps me from heart and fear not to be able to be and from true suffering not to stay held in the lack

I did want to be married to a fine man but it wasn't the only thing I wanted. Being married to a fine man would have confined me. Plus which I had no access to a fine man.

Was I held from true suffering?       yes
So I had a lot of false suffering?       no
Confusion is true suffering       yes

but: there were real kisses and was she a man in them

She wasn't but she was my best approximation. What if I'd been able to say: I want a fine man and can't have one, and you want to be a fine man and can't be one, and we are doing the best we can with what we have. That would have been better, that would have been solid ground. Would she have accepted it? No. Would I? Yes.

With Tom the suffering was honorable, I stayed held in the lack.

the extraordinary sensation of talking to her in company - still extraordinary - seeing rhoda suddenly have a reply for her - across something - and it being so directly received

Even if we'd been clearer there would still have been the way she didn't know or feel me. I would always have had to feel she could want someone else more, be more met by someone else.

Here is the crux:

I made her capable of interesting them       yes
And then she traded up       yes
She could want them more because they weren't lame       yes
Was her contempt for me about that       no
Was I actually contemptible       no
Her contempt was contempt for her own girlness projected       yes
A lamed girlness       yes
So did she love them as girls       no
As friends       YES

Reading those moments of anguish I still feel such unfinished pain.

Can you get me through it?       yes
Was I mistaken in what I thought was happening       no
Was she in denial       YES
Were they       no
They knew they were trying to cut me down       yes
Wwwk stopped them in their tracks       yes
Are they up to date on what I've done       yes
Do they feel surpassed       yes
But I still feel I have to prove something       yes
Do I       no
Did I then       yes

I'm back to having no one to talk to though. And so is she.

-

were altars to the gods of light

thy furrow

Momentum a carrying through

In 1945 he was sixty. In May of 1945 I was an infant in a suitcase on a wide yard in Alberta and my young mother was planting a garden on the flat patch below the house.

-

the covered but registered sense of her brilliant freedom from literal meaning

I was too impressed. It was madness not brilliance, madness being lack of love.

placenta to your circuits - kidney machine - I'm cleaning you

It helped her more than she knew       yes

I say I have an assignment that means I have to do it, I want to do difficult things that need me to have a solid ground -

That's accurate       yes
When I stop doing it with someone I'm starting to leave them       yes

The further strategy has been to let people be and keep my own record separately.

What do you think of that?       conflict, partial loss, exclusion, mourning
So to be well in myself I'm always up against people's madness and insufficiency       yes

to myself: don't let focus leave, for anything, don't give it up, for anyone, any help, if focus depends on vigilance without comfort, telling the truth I know without sophistication, without regard, humor, feeling of competence of handling, still there isn't a choice because without focus there is nothing, no road.

what do I think focus demands - an absolute giving up of advantage.

what did bring it - what does - yelling - going through the crazy circuits even without telling everything - crying - fighting for my life in her brushpile.

What brings it is what I did with Joyce, neither giving up all advantage nor mutual emotionality but allowing the structures there are in the presence of a larger self.

is the density of the damage of her system more than I should go on servicing; is the complexity the advancedness of her system slowed too much by my caution -

Yes to the first because she didn't want to learn. No to the second because a mad system can't be complex.

Did Joyce think she was irretrievable?       YES

imagining giving it to her to read - her to see the nice things - "flying through lumps" - then not being able to give any of it - what would satisfy, what is in the writing-down that isn't satisfied. someone to be with me in me - with a torch - when have I been satisfied - when I told you that dream I saw it better than I had before

This is such a key question.

Can you give me a simple answer?       truth in the investigation of exclusion
Someone to see me better than I see myself       yes
Is that the wrong thing to want in writing       no
But it can't be satisfied       yes
Is there something else I should want       no
It means I have a structural insufficiency       yes
From not being seen when I was little       YES
A missed stage       YES
Does that mean the work I'm imagining is delusive       no
It means I have to do it with you       yes

Woolf wanted to make something beautiful of her loves, Pound wanted to fix culture, Richardson wanted to defend female consciousness, Jam wanted to look unusually brilliant, I want to see myself.

Meantime you see me       yes
Can that be enough, can that work?       yes

in dope I cross over, the other person that I become is contemptuous, she thinks of herself as beautiful, she feels superior to the previous person, she thinks she can see into anything

Specifically a delusion of dope?       yes
 
Is it true that any secret destroys connection       no
Do any strengthen connection       no
But some are harmless       yes

the move into the forebrain - dope and yoga - being able to see how someone is - the state - rather than feel their feeling as mine

dope seeing inefficient habit, having speed enough to move more directly

Yes but it isn't speed it's self-monitoring.

I can separate already, something like - it's wrong for a body to be like this - from this is a body of a particular kind, which is the visibility of an experience of a particular kind.

a wrongness of body means a wrongness of experience, system, relation of person and possible world

Have I always been right about that       yes
The first is accurate but the second is an ethic       yes

discomfort of alien diction in what's often close. words one doesn't like. how personal is it. calling ice floes crazy paving, that's public diction, it's fast language. - not being willing to use certain phrases

How personal is it. Is that a question. Not really. It's reading, it sees where someone's attention was lost.

technical achievements - having passed through the voices saying writing isn't living, you must be seen to be reworking what comes to you as if you own it

Not always. For some.

no. my skill is 1. in finding/making my way into a life that can be written without cover; 2. navigating the moments themselves, of that time, as they are, so that what comes is attentively met, in balance, with the whole range of skill; 3. recall resolved patiently without generalizing, without short cuts, and registering the time reentered; 4. and then the multitude of balancings that make it possible in this world to publish writing many will not be willing to follow, in competition with writers who are more easily willing to ingratiate.

First is it an accurate sum? Yes. Second is it what I do? Yes.

two systems of the nervous system involved: one produces rock-like stability, the other feels every nuance of essentic form.

Is that correct       yes
Are you the stability       no
You're an integration       YES

the future observer to empower past genesis

Is that possible       no

that J has nearly nothing on the R, hard to breathe, but L - eye through keyhole - "spooked"

Her language hemisphere peering but scared, her non-language inaccessible       yes
Is that the whole story       YES

I know, and she does not, envy, ill will, punishment

Is that why?       yes
Does she think she's a man because she's stuck in a male-ish hemisphere?       yes

the feeling that makes a little child always run to her mother to show - that they should see it too

the huge pressure of the hunger to talk and tell

For me when that form of social eagerness goes it's as if there's no interest in people anymore. Others have said they're not like that, they're enough in themselves. Are they? It says no.

the fright of superior culture. when I open myself I feel it. "that you won't teach me."

That can never happen anymore. Why did it then. Because I was a small child dumped into an enormous city institution alone and I hadn't felt that lostness yet. Wow. What comes of asking.

Jam had no clue who I was and wouldn't have wanted me if she had; and if I'd understood who she was I wouldn't have wanted her either. Trudy did have some clue and did want me but she was caught in competitive desperation.

Is that the way to say it about her?       YES
If I ran into her again I could say come have coffee with me       yes

Reading how it went with her I want to say to beginning lovers that they should be courteous, never allow themselves spite, because what's given for free at the beginning has to be won again by trust in the other's kindness.

"I was in an adult bed in a single room, right? I remember it. I remember putting things into the pillow." "yes they had you in an adult bed. you couldn't go anywhere. you were in isolation."

Something else I don't remember now.

-

Yesterday in the warm afternoon I weeded the square of ground around the Cox and the little mess by the garage. Today was dark and a bit raw. I walked to the post office and later drove to the library for DVDs. Was reading The formed trace with tea in bed after I woke at 4:45. There's a new scare about the election which had been looking sure.

-

This summary:
She is faithful to her mother.
She easily sees things when she closes her eyes.
Her pottery is beautiful.
She is unscrupulous about mind-bending and easily mind-bent.
Her hair is thinning and greying.
Ezra is in a relation to her that's esoteric.
Sandy is her serf.
She has lost her zippy car.
The flesh of her thighs is lumpy.
Her back has always been beautiful, fine.
She is sexually most sensitive on the back of her neck and ears.
She used to breathe hard in a charming way, messy.
She used to think she could be a businessman or diplomat; I used to believe it.
Her beautiful sleep.
The apartment she had before, Arabian Nights.
We would be synchronous in work.
I used to love her as soon as I saw her.
Our red and white house. Our travels.
Dear one thank you.
She'd confuse me with romance.
She was secretive in pain and fright.
Her voice in me was for impressive cutting. Witty lines.
Beautiful unusual trust. Storms of unreason.
Easily in love. Vicious in suspicion.
The baby, the puffy child, the clear child.
The puffed dad, the empress, the prince, the beautiful one, the steady black and white, the fat-belly drunk.
Shamed sobbing.
Social laugh on the phone. Compliant hahaha.
Pity.
An idea of honorable hardness.
Delayed dissociated revenge.
Small teeth.
Moments of exquisite clinging.
Crumbs in bed make her crazy.
Feet like babies, hands like little children.
Breasts like paralyzed limbs.
The strange one. With unknown customs.
"She revised his geometry": she sang like a bird baby.
She used to use an ugly voice for reading.
Sudden gratitudes.
Inexplainable ingratitudes.
Hope for theory; she does it less.
She doesn't write in her journal now, she doesn't write her dreams.
It was worth telling her but she didn't like to know.
I always forgot she was so many.
I missed a lot. With everyone I miss a lot.
I could think he of her.
She could laze a clearing.
She doesn't like baths.
The visions we saw at first.
Our likeness to the old Konrads.
Her many clothes, knowing her clothes and dishes.
The long dying of the thesis.
The way she doesn't compact her story.
Her leaps of calculation, their untestable bases.
Mumbling.
I went on feeling a thrilling body with her.
Difficult long tuning.
Having beautiful hair in her mirror.
Sudden catastrophes.
Irrational buying, crazy outfitting, course-taking.
The man and woman story.
So vulnerable to impression.
Do I know her at all as young. Just a way of holding the head.
I'm more curious of her than she of me.

30

He says they believed in paradise lost. I don't, I believe in paradise here and there sometimes, achieved by work and sometimes just happening. And I believe in loyalty to it, as they did.

I can't resent Pound; I adore his hunger, above all. And: I can't be him. I stand somewhere else.

-

Music in a movie about a boys' choir. Crying as I do when I see a child singing the best of music - children given a way to be sublime, a child's intelligence loved and helped by adults. If I cry isn't it that I am still a child wasted in a stupid culture with blind adults.

Handel's Queen Anne ode, the Kind health duet. There's the shocking scene too where the kids do Spem in allium. A boy like Luke at twelve.

Tom only knew a little edge of me. Jam too, a different edge.

-

the relation of being hurt to attention

I was wrong about attention and assertion being polar. Assertion can have a lot of attention in it though the male pattern of it I'd known bulled ahead blindly.

who I want to be with doesn't any more exist.
there will be no one else.

It's a bleat of pain and it was true, there has been no one else.

Rhoda's reading [of my work] that so shattered me:

"loneliness so intense"

Is the piece lonely       no
She saw it that way because she was guilty       yes
Was Annabelle's       yes
But I said it for a bad reason       yes
To pass on the pain       yes

"padding, words that hold back"

Was that true       no
I'm removing words now, but it isn't about holding back       yes

"it doesn't slip and slide enough"

Is that true       YES
I wanted a geometric solidity       yes

the holding myself together rhythms

Is that true       no
Rhythms foreign to her       yes
Rural and protestant       yes
Did she want to harm me       yes
She didn't say one thing that was good about it       yes

I said "I don't want to be a stupid spirit" and she scolded me. I thought I was speaking for all of them when I said that.

Was I       yes
But I was the only one not blanking it       YES
 
It was crazy of me to ask her       no
Because it began to let me know what was happening       yes
Which was abandonment       yes

does r know this is work of being abandoned

She knew what they were doing       yes
They had done it before       yes
Compulsively       yes
And have done it since       yes
Did they do it to Jam       no
Has Jam ever understood their evilness       no
Was it dope that made them so evil       yes
Is there more you want to say       no
 
two and a half year olds committing suicide because someone has abandoned them.
keeping the sense that it's reenacting but with a witness.
 
am I in faith. I think so.
is it very dangerous. I think so.
 

You impress me. So valiant going into desolation to be able to learn.

from dreams the sense that everything met is also being taken as (symbol) which is as a quality or experience or psyche.

Is it?       no
Dreams are garbage       no
Some things in dreams are taken that way       yes

I've been hugely oppressed holding all of what she doesn't admit

Yes.

31

after one week there - no anguish, no stink, no grease, face sharpened, body lighter, pleasure, images, laughing, and what is the difference - one week here I'm heavier, in pain, sleeping a lot, skin swollen, stinking, greasy, without the images and relaxed eyes

It says not meditation, not food, but company, the right kind.

Notes on Churchland for the first time in 1983.

seeing the patriarchal design of ideas we work within, metaphysical, scientific, religious, and the deformation of them by what they leave out, which is not so much the matriarchal as the prenatal

Summary.

I imagined treating thoughts and images as if they are perceived the same way things are, for instance when I remember his head considering that I am actually with him. another way was the inverse, interpreting actual happenings as if they were dreams or fantasies, for instance understanding walking downstairs as a shift of psychic state

"You describe them the same way."

I was still hoping for superpowers       yes
It was more interesting that way       no
It was a corruption of drug culture       YES
Was it worth anything artistically (hopefully)       no

joyce saying "everything is said on so many levels, one has to be careful"

Do you agree       YES

blue shirt, broad shoulders, black pants

- At the gallery opening.

1st November

last night with color pictures imagining the poet's house drawings to make little ideal spaces where a love story is going on. would he be in some way living in them

First of the love houses in 1983.

she because she can never have her own pleasure has got to hate

Is that correct?       YES

wanting to let it out, a whole full childish dreaming of love, with a real person

I'd like to understand it as a relation I could make in myself so I don't have to shrink back into a woman and somehow seduce a man - so it could be peaceful and secure. can fantasy work do it

Shrink back to being perceived as a woman. It's a despairing statement.

There's so much empty science [notes] by which I'm escaping my empty lonely time.

I longed for vision. Should I still, is there a way, meditation? I just fall asleep. Does my brain still have enough energy. Is there enough energy in this grey mediocre place.      

I thought Rhoda was more than she is       yes

"constantly wondering what it is that makes me unacceptable to people"

I wasn't unacceptable to people, I was unacceptable to them.

going through my papers puzzled at the inferiority of the writing

I don't understand why my thinking is often poor - I mean, not as good as the best, who when I read them seem normal. I seem to think badly when I'm trying to think as myself.

Can you explain why it was poor       delayed, winning, of power struggles, and liberation
It became good       yes
Another sentence       writing, searching for, Ellie's, subtlety
You mean I hadn't found it yet       yes
It was inexperience       yes
The doc was good for me       yes

2

With Pound it's as if life and work have to stand next to each other, I want to know them together.

- I'm looking for how to do large synthesis, large beautiful synthesis.

Massimo reads the Cantos as an accumulatively formed network, I mean a standing net new lines can activate.

Reading Massimo feeling sorry Jam flunked out of Pound. He was a large armature to hold her brilliance and wobble.

-

reading with a feeling of separating the parts of a concoction into sources, glamours, tensions

That was my own. I learned that honorably over time.

afraid of the way everything that happens may be seen as significant in the esoteric way of dream reading

Is it right to be afraid of that. Yes. Because it's confusing, touches off latent fears.

3

Open sky, o thank you!

What I am or want in Pound. What happens when he names colors. The anguished longing to work in and for paradise. Enchantment with dry-hill cultures, Greece, Tuscany,, Provence. Water, stone, light, plants. Multiple languages. Research, the method of attraction in research. Admiration and loyalty, disdain and condemnation. Phrase as a unit. Spatial timing of phrases. Collected phrases. His particular rhythm. Agricultural/pagan myth, pagan renaissance. A feel for goddesses and animals. Strong sense of precinct. A developed platform. Mediocre origin and drive to transcend it. Early dedication to finding what can be made of a mortal life. Visuality in writing. German, French, some Italian. Travel and exile. Etymology. Hatred of literary academics.

What I don't have. His committed formation in lyric method. His perfect turns from lyric to something else. Established credibility that made people want to study his platform. Male confidence. Latin, Greek, Provencal. Grotesque social style in letters. Personae. Structure of a journey, male pattern of Odyssey.

What I have that he didn't have or didn't use. Specific erotic detail, actual lovers described. Film and photos. 3-d drawings. Later physics. Developed female outsideness. Science fiction. Neuroscience. Woolf and Richardson. Understanding prebirth.

Could I make films from the films I've made already?

paideuma - Frobenius - world view

I want to find a friend but maybe it's better to keep freedom and just live in my materials, house, garden and materials.

Do you think so?       yes
So think of contacts as just for information and practical exchange       yes
In stored love       yes

the long and flowing line, both hieratic and colloquial, usually comprising a full sentence

I at my best can only be a strife for a renaissance in America of all the lost or temporarily mislaid beauty, truth, valor, glory of Greece, Italy, England

- He wrote at 23.

Ideogramic method - a heaping up of materials without discursion, described after Fenellosa, nonnarrative form of coherence, epiphanic flashes, contiguity and similarity - every transition is a comparison - resurgent form recalls its original context and other clusters in which it has been introduced

repeated juxtaposition

Is my feel for mythology gone for good, did the doctorate kill it. Would it be good to have it back. Why would it. Young warmth of soul. The marvel I felt reading Helen in Egypt.

an attitude of reverence which is to be Pound's touchstone

Nekuia and katabasis the latter being descent, the former being speech with the dead

Periplus document describing ports and landmarks for coastwise navigation

What would be my pattern. It's not journey, it's self-creation. Durch mich selbst geworden wass ich bin. There isn't descent, there's sometimes emergence. Network formation, connectionist integration. Field effects. And dissolution, as now begun.

traces of highest stylistic accomplishment

visionary tradition

an impassioned imaginative coherence which will occasionally have a single word

and the air, air,
Shaking, air alight with the goddess,

sea-water, the element of Venus

Doesn't that suggest prebirth as goddess realm.

fucked girls and fat leopards

Tom's gorgeous panther.

the incisive diction and the accomplishment of the phrasing ... for instance the central enjambement carries a powerful suggestion of the dusk suddenly clearing and allowing us to see. The canto is cut short on an upbeat and so ushers us into the wholly diverse trochaic measure of ... we enter the changing world of chronicle and anecdote, in which pronounced rhythms and rhymes would be out of place.

there is the other satisfactory effect, that of a man hurling himself at an indomitable chaos, and yanking and hauling as much of it as possible into some sort of order (or beauty), aware of it both as chaos and as potential

the structure we discern only signifies the consistency of Pound's instinct or ear

Themes such as nekuia and metamorphosis, arena and the arras panels in a hall of months, gods above, zodiac in the middle, seasonal activity below pictorial

human ebb and tide of ecstasy and terror of the later cantos

integration of art, sex and religion

With usury - Douglas, interest guarantees that prices will always outstrip supply of money. What is the actual evil. Patriarchal denial among others. Ego's need for fabrication. Capitalist shareholders who profit without production, that's usury. Hynes on gift economy.

Authoritarian and anti-semitic. Who are the actual war profiteers? - And other kinds of profiteers, anyone who exploits human weaknesses.

a master of the verse of landscape

For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Rain, empty river, a voyage,

this genre of verse for place, Buddhist and Taoist in background

The wind came, and the rain,
 
And mist clotted about the trees in the valley,
And I'd the long ways behind me,
gray Arles and Beaucaire,

4

In this afterlife I think of loves I've had and want to talk to them - Jam, Tom - Don - and then say no, the Jam I want to talk to stopped existing about 1981, my Tom has left a blank in the air where he was. In paradise as in hades the dead are the only company there is. But I talk to them.

5

the concept of eros as instrument of knowledge and of ecstasy is wholly a contribution of the medieval poetic renaissance, the feature which distinguishes it from the culture of antiquity

In the Pisan Cantos, however, Pound gives us his world for its own sake, because he is attached to it ... interplay of reminiscences and prison life does signal a novel, creditably paradisal, phase

ambience of Venus

Hast'ou seen the rose in the steel dust
(or swansdown ever?)
so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron
we who have passed over Lethe

ecstatic dactylic measure

not of one poet but of many

the sun in his great periplum
leads his fleet here
sotto li nostri scogli
under our craggy cliffs

altars for the gods of light

The shadow of the tent's peak treads on its corner peg
Marking the hour. The moon split, no cloud nearer than Lucca.

quick alternation of mood

Death's seeds move in the year
 
as wisteria floating shoreward
with the air gone the color of copper
and dark emerald in the offing

secret tradition concerned with stone, water and light

6

6:46 my little clock said and yet I can see the sky. Oh - time change - at 2 this morning my little clock jumped back one number by itself. Such a little machine to be so exactly tuned to so ephemeral a motion in the sky.

-

Have been meaning to say many deer prints all over the soft earth of my yard.

-

It's business elites and uneducated whites vs status elites and minorities someone said. Status elites meaning college-educated I suppose. The point was that they can make common cause with minorities because they are not economically inconvenienced by them.

7

A ragged sopping exhausted day. Canned some tomato sauce though, to get rid of what was left softening in the porch.

N1 - freaked by my mother, insecure with Jam, intimidated by them, confused by drugs.

intense pain, bewilderment

such a repetition of anxieties and with them the sense of unmendable lostness, ie brain damage and impossibility of friending because it's too complex

intense fear of the openness where nothing is known and of going wrong

the reflection of myself and surrounding objects on the piano scared me, I thought I could lose myself in it. it was the sense of dope openings waiting all around to be sprung.

joined to the hidden and so be phantoms in their own eyes

I did feel like a phantom.

Was it because I was opening the uncon       no
A kind of culture shock       yes
And intentional loosening       yes
I suspected possibilities of possession       yes
Was any kind of possession happening       no
Influence tried on       yes
Because I was looking for powers       yes

'mythical qualities' of trees, animals, stones etc

Are lyrical resonances objective properties       no
I was susceptible to them mistakenly?       yes
Is that good for something?       yes, consolation
Displaced love       yes
Do you disapprove of displacing love       no
It's better than nothing       YES
Pound's goddess was that       YES

Humans are thwarted love. Always ask how it is being displaced.

transparence refers to conceptuality

Does it       yes

locating accurately the charm of an idea

to make the oneself behind, but it must act accurately

Intending essentiality and integral sincerity.

he tells a moralistic story about a young man he wanted to teach a lesson. emotion so close. what he's saying is, I'm such a student of human behavior, I'm shrewd, people have hang-ups they get caught in and their ruts get deeper every year. he's pieced together a psychology but it's mixed with needing to brag because he's uneducated and feels unrespected. "I tell this story as an illustration and I'll use it all my life." "if you think that, we'd better part" and he strides out. his dignified old-fashioned language. speaking directly makes him feel attacked. speaking indirectly falls in with his odd system of allegorical knowledge. a few times in false smiling exchange with someone else I would see his eyes knowing where I was and sweep past them in irritation but acknowledgement, someone seeing something.

f in his worn way serving in the bible institute kitchen. he said if there weren't a black meetz we wouldn't know a white one.

he needs to say people have praised him for his kitchen work. a difficult situation incomplete without her comment.

I sit down on his left and he talks about positive and negative. I say das magnet ist ein uhrphänomen and he delights me by talking about substance and clumping. his structural pleasure.

locked in his crazy repeats, "they mocked me then, but now -."

loves allusion but he doesn't know anything to allude to but nursery rhymes. "Ellie, do you know how it happened that the cow jumped over the moon?"

"oh jammer. oh boy homer."

it takes such a sense of brave balance for me to look into his eyes. he and I have never looked in each other's faces except very fast on the way to somewhere else. and I hold him, now, sometimes for almost a second before he veers right, and down.

It's an exact picture of Ed. I'm copying it because I miss him.

Was the fear and pain necessary to what was good in the work       YES
The depth in the photos       YES
Something about completed circuits       yes
Cross-hemisphere       yes
They're a bit mythic       no, feeling
I confused those two       yes

all day in bed flying, exchanging, in love and seeing. waking in love and kissing her palm. "oh me too."

Will you comment       inspiration, after despair, generosity, and shattering of the structure

which of you can assume such murkiness, to become in the end still and clear?

Didn't I?       yes

back there was a time when I imagined surrendering, and my flesh fired and you could get far in, and then for a while you were a 'man' and I was beautiful and helpless and in that was vulnerable to nature in a way you can't protect me from, and struggled out having to leave you and become once more a man in myself

Could sexual surrender make me beautiful       no, sexual excitement
Sex felt like surrender because it had been shut down       YES
Is it a real helplessness       no but it needs trust
Her contempt for women meant I couldn't trust her       YES

in childhood looking at people thinking they're lost or not

Is that a true memory       yes

when I remember in the way that is 'me' I remember a feel, with sense, a time, without words, as in the pottery school, mrs hattori. stoned it comes with meanings, oh that's what -

Does that imply latent traces?

Something registered but disconnected at the time       yes

I feel a panic of having to 'work' when it's impossible because I don't know what's worth doing

With Trapline I knew how to work but it was held to a place.

If I hadn't messed with them would I still have had certainty       no

the form is: focus on the voice to find the other person before anything can be made. preoccupations sometimes have to be expressed.

Yes.

many of the middle year memories have me in them from outside. the young ones are inside.

I noticed I was remembering myself from outside first with yoga in London. Now I only remember that one instance of it.

8

remains to be inferred by the reader, thus preserving an unsentimental freshness

protestant morals ... has for centuries tended to degrade all moral perceptions outside the relations of the sexes, and to vulgarize the sex relation itself

unquenchable splendour and indestructible delicacy of nature

Hast'ou fashioned so airy a mood
To draw up leaf from the root?

che fa di clarità l'aer tremare

to have gathered from the air a live [tradition]

A live what? He scrounged historical record for work fitted to his capacities: attitude, strategy, technique. For friends. For consolation.

What could be meant by light metaphysics. Physics of electromagnetism, everything patterned and propagated charge? Jam after my salon show dazed saying light metaphysics and I feeling seen in my intelligent instinct. Love of light above all, dependence on light as god, as for instance today as if singing reverent thanks that the sky is bright.

In a way I've given up the journal. I'm revising, which is to say 'writing'. Having to because my first thought is now so poor. But the record says it was always poorer than I thought, so it's my editing work too, and I suppose ambition for these last years. Be less slovenly. But is there time to learn pondered craft. Immediate rightness of being has been my better native ideal - don't forget.

- New yellow dresser suddenly found in the Middle Eastern Christian-radio guy's junk shop last Saturday, carried in from the jeep just now by Randy. I need to say that because any new piece of furniture becomes a heavily noticed main character.

Tuesday November 8th, maybe the US will have a woman president tonight. Luke has been falling in with those describing her as personally responsible for everything evil America does - I agree it does - but I have to be pleased that my generation's specific fight has come to this.

The garden does need a stone altar. Wisps of scented smoke.

Wind screens.

How is his epistemology of art different than mine. Not very different. Does he think of himself as collecting and describing historical recurrence of right being. I would think of what he collects as itself forming right being in its readers, acting as a score for neural networks. Failing when it doesn't.

teems with interrelations and suggestions

Now as never an impulse to collect books. Snow country and The sound of the mountain in pretty editions come in the mail.

Red head of a woodpecker dipping onto the corner's lamp post. Raven wiping his bill on the white cross above St Michael's. What's left of silver on the silver tree looks like blossom against the blue.

old modernist masters ... poems in the first person, held together by a meditative and image-making self, an heir to Puritan introspection and to Whitman's universal self

9

I'm writing and erasing and writing and erasing. It's 3:54am. That vile hideous ignorant profiteer has been given the presidency. My heart hurts. People don't care that he lies to them. They don't care that he despises them. They don't care that he's visibly rotten. They don't care that he knows nothing about government or international affairs. They don't care that he'll endanger them. He lets them feel their inferiority is alright, inferiority can thrive, can win.

-

It's a personal blow       no
It feels like a personal blow       yes
Will he calm down in office       yes
Will the Republicans control him       yes
Will he set off a nuke       no
Will he do anything he said he would do       no
Will Russia control him       yes
Will the media smarten up       yes
Will he set off a Democratic landslide next time       yes

I've checked through all my FB list today and find the best comment is posted by women filmmakers: Tess, Franci. Other women companions in pain: Leslie, Mafalda, Indra, Carolyn, Favor. Meanwhile Luke posting a photo of that vile man's face with a diatribe blaming Clinton and saying the election is the liberals' fault. He's raging at all the wrongs at once without informing himself deeply enough to get a nuanced view of any of them and in a tone as absolute as those on the far right. It seems the same anger with sometimes but not always different lines. - What I mean by a nuanced view is a view of actual causes and checks. For instance he blames Obama for not doing what he was structurally unable to do and passes over everything he has done despite extraordinary resistance because it isn't everything. Meantime also, Tom last midnight posting an Ortega y Gasset paragraph about the masses from one of his dirty old books and continuing to shut me out.

10

in what the Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are, that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosmos.

interaction of fragments from Babylon, Greece, Liguria, China, Egypt, England

And with certain others their consciousness is germinal and the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods, and godly attendants, and oreads.

Among modernists wasn't he unique in declaring and so-persistently defending love for the nonhuman world. Woolf has it in her journal but it's not her thing, subjectivity is, any experience as such - Richardson too. Culture that doesn't ruin it, that lives in love of it.

crystal waves weaving together

but if each soul lives in its own space and these
interpass, and penetrate as lights not interfering
 
Light & the flowing crystal
 
Gods moving in crystal
ichor, amor
 
The golden sun boat
by oar, not by sail
Love moving the stars
 
 
They set lights now in the sea
and the sea's claw gathers them outward

Gabriel or Swan a movement of light

and shadowy forms
made and sang God within the far off choir

12

Should I buy a better computer       yes
Spend $3000       yes
Defer carpets       yes
Use the computer to make money for carpets       yes

where the spirit is clear in the stone

If the work should be in what I most love:

color
plants
country
the air
language in detail, especially English
particular rare writings
good buildings
erotic friendship
particular music, classical singing
computer composers
lone heroes of art, science and philosophy

What I now love less:

mythology
ceremonial
theories of esoteric powers

her weakness and mine that our sensitivity to place is part of our gender appeal

Was wrong to suspect myself of that, I was ahead about place.

I come into epps' with one of their sort of sentences half apology and am lost from the beginning, he asks about my car with face full of jammer, grimacing when I tell him what's up, and goes on with woe stories. and she grimaces with everything she says, she's grey, after lunch I ask her and she says it's too painful, how she can't bridge the abyss. start lecturing her about why doesn't she take some weeks and be by herself, she says sometimes she has from morning 'til night. - but can't sleep and is losing access to things she still wants to remember and is getting fat. living for the next life, accepting her fate. and doesn't want me to push. "I'm tired, I just want to rest" with tears. sometimes her face is quite tough and shocking behind its glasses and bangs. "what you always wanted, to grow, expand into new places" she said, "this is really me, this is home." university.

when I look at him I feel a patience and steadiness in my face because he can't press with his eyes.

cold early morning. seeing far across the country, the la glace lights. m in the bathroom washing her face in a housecoat

"to my sweetheart on her fifty-third birthday, from her one and only lover boy, eddie" in a shaking hand.

she looked fat, slack and white. we talked fast. he made himself present by silence and the seduction or rant of radio bible programs.

"lovely rock formations, such delicate lovely mosses" you wrote

the real life came into her face and voice when she said "you know I've often been interested in ..." - I wait feeling it will be about me but could be about anything - "... how it would be if you would take god into your life."

"you couldn't put it together but I have to try to put it all together"

ed's bare small head vulnerable under the car

hurry to bathe before they get home. oh dear there's a roast in the oven. I couldn't eat the canada goose rotted off its bones. he threw a shotgun pellet at me and put on the music I like. she had on a black dress and looked fine, told stories of maria and cone picking, "the squirrels come with cones almost as if they want to give us some"

they're eating with the radio on. he's high, nervous, listening to the stock market. a coming crash excites him. he was alone for a few days. there'd been a windrow fire, a mile long and too dry. "that kept me going." having to give his father the $5 he found on the road, his father owed it on an old horse, and the $1.50 he earned running and jumping though he nearly wrecked his ankles

mary an odd flat bum, imp small body. I sit on the table separating white paint out of her hair strand by strand, an intimacy that hears itself as j does from the front room. he sits with his arms up. I ignore him. these days he goes to the golden age club which has lowered its age limit to get more money.

I find twenty dollars on the dash in valhalla. see mary parking next to the car. she turns as if driving is still anxious. I'm glad to say hello by eye through the co-op window. she's peaceful and friendly.

epps to mend and be with m. he holds his head, his eyes hurt.

bible reading in his monotone quite priestly without kindliness and then he would talk to god in formal phrases saying nothing of himself.

"you're always bucking me" he says

Couldn't I have known that when they had died I'd miss them and want these sorts of record.

the road turns alongside a lake with swans. she goes carefully through rose thorns, I get to the firm edge of the lake. their calls as they go to the other side not hurrying. mareotis, a lake of some other land. my friend pointing a camera, behind her a house I loved for some reason.

October 16 1978 we stopped at the swan's lake and saw the house together.

in dream I'd gone into it and found glass in the windows, curtains. went opening doors

All those bull dreams because fear of bulls latent in me in the place       yes

she was remote remote. I held her just, with continuous tension. she'd smoked with r and t and been among them as she likes, magically, playing. there's a contempt or impatience or pity new

"are you worried about trudy?"

wrote j in pain, self dislike

when you were here last you said for you it was over. there's that and you said it well and we backed off it

if you're thinking to try trudy her warp is -

Hadn't realized it went that far back.

Did they politic against me       no
She just preferred them       yes

Do something with the story of Joseph Olson.

was most of the day with frank, sometimes heard his voice, the forms of flirtation and real companionship and then at one moment in the snow-light stubble, as in the child's house, was like the one who got his letters.

Nice.

elder sister,
who is coming, in the loft?
 
N1-5. Find who wrote that -

13

fencepost shadows clear turquoise on the snow

I have to live in the country too! How -

That autumn in the Olson house was my first time living alone in the country. After the lake house Saturna and then not again until Mesa Grande.

I understand why his lyric passages are just bits and I understand why he mixes languages. It goes bland if not.

early after not sleeping chopping wood in black coat green toque blue mittens checked collar black sweater blue jeans yellow boots

- For the clothes.

[Leonard] Cohen saying the work of Jews is to repair god. What was Cohen repairing and by what means. Religious style. He had to find ways to be a secular Cohen. He sang life as existential heroism, hard and lonely and grand. Did what he could in his own person and left it to others to use what they recognized. What was Pound repairing. He was a preacher not a disciple: he wanted to repair cultural practice instead of himself and didn't die well. But his god was the same as mine and Cohen's isn't. Cohen's is urban. Mine it seems is the motion of trees. Which doesn't need repairing though I do.

I sent Don Anthem and thought oh well, drop it into the void, but today a note that said he adored it. That set off a heart pang. For whom, for my dear someone who nowhere exists. Hard and lonely, and grand now and then. Ring the bell that still can ring is a sad cry, it's asking for a minimum.

14

I'm trying again to see whether the beauty of scratched stones, and the ease I have in making those things, is in some way wrong or whether it's my right work.

It was my right work and why was I afraid of it. They're subliminal and I didn't trust my uncon. I was right to distrust it then but I've earned trusting it since. Found a way to test.

your ten letters in many ways seemed to scorn me

Why I put up with her. Desperate for intelligent conversation and sexual subtlety. There truly was nowhere else I could have them.

it turned out there was also something I wanted more, I wanted to be touched and to have someone to talk to

But how could I have thought those weren't right to want.

these letters invite me to compete to kill. no.

I held off for another six years of misery.

she has a hatred she'll never give up, that I was ever 'with' men, their kind

'do you want me to tell you what's the most horrible part of these stories'

She actually hated me       YES

asking mary about the slides, she said what a self contained place, shuts everyone out

Do you think that's true       no
Do you understand why it seemed like that to her       yes
Is it something about the framing       yes
Does she mean something more like self-sufficient       yes
Something like professional       no
Something like perfect       yes

in the elations of their time I thought moments were understood, which weren't, and then I was silenced by disappointment and didn't fight

but what there is now is, still, wanting exactness to make a stronger memory and incident

what was talk
verifying the new perception

I imagined them more marvelous than they were because I was more marvelous than they were in ways I hadn't claimed yet. It was a fantasy I needed and it cost me more than it should have because there was no one until Joyce wanting the best for me.

thinking can I make in myself what I wanted you for and be done with longing and have occupation

there's sorrow and anger in it, what are you good for if you won't be in me with me, and then it could be anyone and myself talking to myself

I did make in myself what I wanted her and them for but am I done with longing and do I have occupation? Not at the moment though there have been times.

'What are you good for if you won't be in me with me' was too much to ask.

But you will, you are       yes

'Then it could be anyone,' no. People who want to be companions wd need to be more courteous than she was.

Should I just talk to you when I'm lonely       yes

 

part 6

time remaining volume 4: 2016 may-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project