time remaining 5 part 2 - 2017 february  work & days: a lifetime journal project 10 February Miseries of this winter. Guilt when I let Doug and Gail shovel the sidewalk. Sore muscles. The jeep freezing and thawing, cracking in the cold. The garden under thick glazed heaps. The expense of heating. No one I invite coming to tea. Many days I don't leave the house. Literally nothing I look forward to. Meager eating because I'm having to deal with flab. Ugly face in the mirror. Struggles to sleep. Being shut into this town by dangerous roads. Nervousness about falling in the street. America being in the charge of a vile spirit, bad news every day. Books I've troubled to buy turning out to be dull. Running out of money. Running out of mental energy after few hours. Cracks showing up in the bathroom and bedroom. Not loving anybody. Mary mouldering into her grave even more miserably than I. But what do I like. The cyclamen blooming thick on the kitchen table, sometimes a whiff. The frozen bulbs sending up little shoots nevertheless. Drawing the Saturna cabin. My jeans not being as tight yesterday. Gleeful resistance in the US. Cass's sea wolf up there on the ledge. Warmer days forecast for next week. Brooks and Shields. The kitchen chandelier being gone. The beautiful radiators and their faithful mumbling boiler. The bathtub sprayer for hair washing. Ficus shadows on this ceiling - my lamps in general. The early chapters of Sons and lovers before dreary oppressed Miriam. Aspirin. Still not needing glasses to read. Having good socks and flannel pyjama pants and this new black sweater. This wonderful armchair and having provided it; look, red-wine velour ferns. People liking the early poems I posted. Having Jennifer clean the house. - The completely clear sky showing turquoise blue along the horizon at 6:30. I'd like a friend where I laughed at home. That was Louie, how many years later, about the same number. The Saturna dreams seem just miscellaneous wandering and so do the dreams of the present but at the end of a session with Joyce I'd remember a dream that seemed to name or summarize just exactly what we'd come to. By April of that year such anguish I wasn't writing about the place anymore. By June I was chasing inferior tail. I'm ashamed thinking of it but there wasn't any other way to go on. Then a many-years slow climb. The garden, Joyce, Louie, the doc, the job, California. You're one of the places love has had to give up on itself. That did harm to someone I'd struggled to be. I want to recover that self but money isn't the way. I like to read it again. It's accurate. I liked the thought of being more the way I used to be when I was with her, more porous and feeling, love woman being an artist, going for broke - the best of my relation with her was Titania in the bushes / something intently - she supported it in me by being Oberon in her way - didn't she? - yes - titania agitated, fleeing among persons           what am I doing excited in these bushes                ashamed intently Shoved out of Titania is the feeling. Can I recover her      yes I created her in their field      yes But out of what I already was      yes My work and being was harmed by being with them      yes The only right is to recover Titania somehow by myself      yes I was stopped by how I responded to humiliation      yes By getting even      yes It was necessary but it harmed me?     yes It took me out of her      yes Is being beautiful what I should want      yes Are these films Titania realm      yes So am I there now      no But I can be      yes Does it depend on where I live      no But on liking where I live      yes By working with her materials      yes So is it about forming a Titania to as if go on from that time? Vulnerable and truthful without being forced by sexual hope and fear      yes Edged out 8 - working with it partly as if working with someone I don't know. In the blinder reaches of the text, the better blinder reaches where I don't know, where I still don't know, I'm wondering whether I could just go on in trust of blind recognition whatever it is. I know I want to work with what she was more than I am, and can, am able to help her finish what she was wanting to do. Edged out means more than one thing: excluded but also living valiantly on my edge, on an island edge. A lot of it realistically is just shapes of language maybe useable, recognizable, by someone - it's a collection of abstract recognitions not primarily about me and not necessarily recognized by me except in being maybe recognizable by someone - and then sometimes bursts of personal love that sing out with characteristic lightness. Working with it I look for thematic lines - not thematic and not lines - concerns? - followed trackings - not resolvable in the text - clumps - clumpings. There's forming to find - it's another isolated winter - a collaboration. August-November 1983 before Saturna separated from Jam and sorting energetically - looking at the gathered bits seeing that I was forming the sorted steady platform I taught from and the sorted steady confidence that led me through the doc. I used the energy of pain to work. Sorting now with more than one focus - what grabs as language - what describes the time - what's vacated or wrong - what I might need now - what it was with Jam. Was struggling to learn to distrust her accurately. Was being edged out in an ambiguous way, unconscious in all but me. What was I edged out of, something I was onto. It's a larger scope I'm seeing, it's not just the Saturna journal it's the whole time with Jam, the way I was working and what I was working on. It's unfinished. It founded what I later could know but there's more - Such anguish about writing and gender, attachment. There are 4 paragraphs describing the day and night Robert was at my house. In them I feel something so different, not frantic confusion, quiet warmth like a dark warm space in the chest. Actual love. I can feel victimized by J's madness and nastiness but am disgusted by my part in it too, wrong from the beginning. Ashamed. The fact is that I prostituted love woman to J trying to exchange her for cultural capital, which I was in desperate need of on account of patriarchal neglect. That's the whole story of Jam isn't it. The right way to live as and with love woman is what I felt for RM. Neither of us could have handled being together then. I couldn't have handled the real thing with anyone. I need consistent grammar. Working on that but it takes quite a few passes. What I still have only a dim grasp of: when and how to use repetition whether to make strands more distinct whether to interpolate present comment I like the interweave of personal and impersonal. There's a person trying to figure out how to live. Suffering, being pleased. Sex, landscape, study. She begins but can't finish. I can't generate and feel and register as she can but I can finish. I love her. I can be the help she needed. Am I helped in this by all the teaching. The writing has to come before the film. 12 Bit after eight at night, sat down to work again after talking to Louie. Look, the full moon cut exactly in half by the ridge. Now it has lifted own width over the black horizon line. I've kept going back to bed today, read a few pages of Mind of the raven and fade. The last time I dreamed I was looking at the back of a large woman sitting in a chair half a room away. I was looking at her because I liked the color of her coat, bright leaf green wool. Walked around her to see what else she was wearing, bright silk brocade pants and tunic. Then she turned out to be a gay man I'd met before, who when I said I liked his coat showed me a very lovely silver-blue intricately quilted Chinese jacket he'd made. This dream seems to follow from asking myself what Titania would want to be wearing. 13 Slept a long time and dreamed wonderful scenes. There was a knock at the door, this door. I had to come from the back bedroom and a man had entered before I could get to him. He might be criminal but I thought maybe I could rent him the front bedroom. He was pushy but ugly in a quirky way. That seemed alright. We were lying on the floor talking. We went out together. At the end of the train line we found ourselves looking down on a market square with leafy trees and luxuriantly full stalls. We wandered sideways past stone walls onto a bare sandstone cliff. Followed a narrow track across it and came to someone's sleeping place. Past it the track was so faint I was worried I'd fall, and there seemed no way up and out, but then a sharp cleft opened upwards to the left. Maybe here. But such a powerful waterfall, would I be able to climb past it. Later the kind of dream I often have, where I'm in complicated city streets looking for someplace I've been before or known about. I thought I should get off the elevator on the eighth floor but when I did nothing looked familiar. Should I try other floors. I try another but it doesn't look right either. I'm pretty sure it was eight. I couldn't remember the name of the place I was looking for so I couldn't ask anyone. I was carrying a child and needing to arrive so we could rest. Somewhere in there I was looking up into massive tall trees. The thing about these dreams is how much city street detail they conjure. If it were Sketchup it would be amazing. This morning the sun is far enough north to shine on the chair. Found the way to end the Albinoni paragraphs just now. Posted them on FB. Vancouver, August late afternoon. I'd put the bike on the bus to go and get a form from the tax office. Took it off where the bus turns south and rode up the alley between Hastings and West Georgia. Where I crossed Burrard a European-looking man with a moustache and a cap was playing the violin part of a classical piece he had on a cassette player. It was music I knew though I didn't remember its name. I shot past him into the alley but when I'd got halfway up the block I turned and went back because I realized the music had made me cry. It was the same sort of crying as when I'd heard music in London churches, sudden and sharp.   I leaned the bike against a wall and sat on it to listen to him more. He was just finishing the piece. As I bent to put money in his basket he was fitting his violin into a case. He snatched the basket away from me, "You're too late, I won't take anything from you, this city has no soul." I could see his feelings were hurt so I kept steady, said "You made me cry," put some two-dollar coins onto the sidewalk in front of his case. "This city has no soul," he said again less passionately. He was confused because there'd been a sudden turn. I said "I do," touched my chest, looked at him. Now he looked back. When I'd pushed off into the alley he called thank you after me.   As I was stepping into the tax office the name of the piece came back to me. It was the Albinoni adagio. I was hearing a grief in it. It was his and mine too. As it is now there's a sense of the mysteries of city space and time, I think. - I'm seeing something I didn't see then and it's key. It's that Jam had been talking to them about me and had taken on their version, which she was too unconscious to realize was essentially competitive rather than sympathetic. Yes?      yes She also doesn't realize that she was taking on their version for her own unconscious competitive reasons. I shouldn't have been trying to talk to Rhoda, she was unreliable about my writing. Why was I still trying. I was fishing for information and here it is but I didn't register it completely enough. I got hurt. But I'm still struggling with this. It's true that for competitive reasons they needed to see me as crippled and they needed to see my work as the work of a cripple. Jam didn't at first but they took her there. They weren't on my side and now she wasn't either. But at the same time isn't it true that my work is the work of a cripple? It says no, my work is the work of my DNA, the crippledness is accidental. I carried myself as my DNA until I was with them. This view is so much what I'd like to believe, can I be sure it isn't self-deceiving? Are you sure it's correct      YES AND self-deceiving      no Okay, so then why didn't people like my writing. Why wasn't the kind of writing I believed in the kind of writing people wanted. Answer: because I wasn't ready. But not for the reason they wanted to sell me. So do those people liking my writing on FB see me as a cripple      YES Everyone does      yes Do they see my work as the work of a cripple      no Does my crippledness discount it      no Are you sure      yes This is something new just now, the understanding that the self I am and feel myself to be is the genetic self, and then the understanding that other people don't know or imagine that, which makes a disjunction between who I am and how I'm seen that is puzzling to me and often also to them. It makes me see why I resisted Trudy and then Jam saying I should make art about my leg. I felt them wanting me to demote myself into their point of view rather than standing in my own. Later when Margo wanted me to describe myself as disabled for the college's quotas I said she could say it but I wouldn't. The first pebble has been thrown into the silent lake. Isn't that the last sentence. Doesn't it end with Rowen's conception. Did I blow the work I was on the edge of      no It wasn't ready?      yes Patriarchy as a woman. In her and in me. Conflicts of fertility. I need to be really sure of the trans question. I still believe Jam's claim to be a man is a defensive madness. I still believe she was trying to coerce me to be what she refused in herself. That is to say I actually believed her to be an impostor with evil designs on me. Which is to say that I have to see myself as seduced, which is to say complicit in my own torture. Is all of that true      yes So then the only story actually worth telling is the story of the work with Joyce      no 14 Feeble today. Mid-afternoon looking out at weak sun on the spruce. A better transfer of Trapline, Aimée and Chris persisted. The spruce is such a tower of particularity. I can take it in only so generally: it exceeds at every scale. - There four small birds alit on its four top-most twigs, which array in a line. The birds are the right sort of thing to be there, the size and shape of the cones that oddly encrust just the top six or eight feet, reddish brown. - There five black bits flow sideways off the canopy. - There nine more. A bright patch now on the hill's lower half. Broadening upward on a billboard of snow. All brighter suddenly. Black shadow hanging from the church's eaves. Some sort of sparkle in the Russian olive's twigs. The sky behind them a soft-looking batten of silvery grey-blues, look how suited to the red-brown tinseled tree. Sun from the kitchen window has laid a straight-edged line of color diagonally across the floor to the desk's nearest leg, which is standing selected on its own. The house is so quiet. Beyond the window often the sound of a car or pickup passing - at that moment a school bus - but each of those events is brief and single like a narrow wave all of which can be seen at once. In the house behind me it's as if I can hear the air jittering in tiny bits. Sometimes one of the rads will clank. It's thawing daytimes, freezing at night. Drips from little icicles. 16 Now that I've figured out what happened with Jam should I still do Saturna      no Drop it      yes I'm done with her now      yes [sigh] But still poetics      YES   But we are spirits of another sort Solipsism was philosophically wrong but love woman by being more internally attentive is more of a spirit. The photos those years. 17 Do I need a persona. Is Titania the I. Have given up on Vendler on Yeats, no interest in Yeats as technical poet. Then I go back to Pound instantly caught breathless. and yet his affection and curiosity for the wonder always new of resemblances and differences The purifications are snow, rain, artemesia also dew, oak and the juniper And in thy mind beauty, O Artemis, as of mountain lakes in the dawn, willow and olive reflected,   Brook-water idles, topaz against pallor of under-leaf I can see that. It's loving in him, as much. The softness of wi-llow and o-live in the mouth. Then light air, under saplings, the blue banded lake under aether, the stones, the calm field, the grass quiet, and passing the tree of the bough The grey stone posts, and the stair of gray stone, the passage clean-squared in granite: descending, and I through this, and into the earth, patet terra, entered the quiet air the new sky, the light as after sun-set, and by their fountains, the heroes, Charms he has access to and I don't: his languages, Mediterranean landscape, European history, his distinguished cohort. What do I have instead. Other kinds of reading, women's politics, science fiction, connectionist neuroscience. Road trips? A blown husk that is finished but the light sings eternal a pale flare over marshes where the salt hay whispers to tide's change open-ended and relaxed finale that it needs the roads of Provence as he saw them around Midsummer Day, 1912 So slow is the rose to open. A match flares in the eyes' hearth, then darkness 18 The wind came, and the rain, And mist clotted the trees in the valley, And I'd the long ways behind me, grey Arles and Beaucaire, resonant Latin taxonomy of the plants and trees the theme of the journey With the sun and moon on her shoulders, The star-disks sewn on her coat at Li-Chiang, the snow range, a wide meadow pausing to consider the spirit of the place for instance a white goddess in the smoke rising from the incense burner a book much quarried And that ye sail over lithe water Weather, color and substance. I can see why he'd be anti-Semitic, because the father religion is deracinated and disembodied. the snow's lace is spread there like sea-foam His magic of sound. Bacigalupo is 1980, which is when she had already been failing long enough to lose her job. Maybe she never read it. I'm reading him feeling the formation I loved in her company, the way she was the right leap after the girls, wider and sharper, subtler and more cosmopolitan. But lacked the human know-how they had, so I'd fall off my pivot with her. And then her mad insistencies about gender and my fragility in sex, her money and my lack of money. A smash-up I can still feel. "Of a coriaceous and fragmentary sort" - leathery, as lichen. luminous find the poet is always seeking He wanted to speak for and to western culture. I want to speak to just one of its errors and of one sort of its heroes. Forming and deforming of a body within the large forming and deforming of universe. Spring 1977, DR6-2 to early summer 1985, E1-1. 19 Everything that happens has to be gone through. Everything that comes has to be taken all the way in. What I'm seeing at the beginning with Jam is an ambitious ferocity. I didn't want the connection to endanger my push to be more than I was. I wanted a superb companion and I intended to remake her. She was coming from Sandy, who was sloppy; she had a pompous habit; and she was obtuse about women. She was also more and better than I could see then, but that more and better wasn't what she wanted to offer me. She wanted to bring me her dazzled adoration of her mother, a child's struggle to seem a husband. I didn't want anything to do with that foundation of love in her; I fought it. She equally was blind to the foundation of love in me. We were at deep cross-purposes. What I'm seeing is that my technology of friendship was wrong. The first rule should have been work with the foundation of love in the other person. It's about wise competence rather than ethical struggle. I didn't understand 'working with' - neither does she even now - I thought the only options were resisting or caving, in this case caving to male dreams of femininity. With that writing I was afraid they'd see more. Therefore I knew it wasn't good, right. Hating the worship in people's work is hating their freedom on account of not having it. There was something wrong with the writing but it wasn't wrong because they didn't like it. It was wrong because it was projecting feminine attraction. They didn't like it because we were competing personally and culturally. She didn't know the harrowing I was coming from and I didn't know enough yet to tell her. She wants me to see her as a man but whenever I write desire its for her woman's body. She was lovely as a woman, ugly as a man. Pompous and obtuse. Did you form an opinion in those times that I was less than you. When I see you less than I am I know you are at another place. What is that haunt about being seen less than. The moment I ask the question I know the answer. But why was I taking it into cognitive quality. They pushed it that way because they felt me as more. They could make it stick on account of the other way they actually felt me as less. I don't think she did but it was because she was in her mother dazzle not because she was seeing me without prejudice. I knew that and discounted it. There are different minds and each of them will have a different version. Did I hypostatize that too much. Maybe it's workable if one just glides with the states meeting them as they come and unworkable if one begins to see them as separate persons. And yet the so-visible differences. It's an overload and yet it's a way of knowing someone. I'm thinking of Tom. I could see the differences but still wasn't nimble enough to meet them differently. Whose reality prevails. That's what power struggle is. It's more hormonal than that. Whose energy prevails. Among ravens only the dominant male and female vocalize. They eat first. They are the only ones allowed to show off sexually. Often they are the only birds to breed. When a dominant male bonds with a non-dominant female she shadows him into some of his privileges: she feeds beside him, he doesn't dominate her though others will when he isn't around. - At the confluence in the sun this aft, the Coldwater faster and fuller shoving the Nicola aside. Like last time my eyes were caught by that patch of ripple on the Nicola just before the bridge. It's sharp-cut simple colors in such complex shape-changing flow that I stand and stare trying to see how many colors there actually are. Is it only three? Straw-gold, black and pale blue. But no isn't there a darker shade of straw-gold contained in the straw-gold patches moving and changing so fast that I'm not sure. I somehow arrived at the fork just as I saw Daphne's many-colored coat arriving on the path. Will I be shy? No I'll stop and wait for her. "Have you hurt your knee" she asks. 'No ...," - how much will I tell - "... it's something from when I was a kid. It doesn't hurt." We stand talking at the bench while her little dog in his little jacket runs around. I know more about her than she knows about me so I'm doing some steering. Meantime I'm noticing that my sense of her this time is different. I'm taking detail in the tough-minded way I do, her skin, her shade of lipstick, the color of her teeth, something unusual about her smile. She's been here twenty-five years she says and has had that garden for fifteen. When she goes to Taiwan in winter she stays with her nephew and plants orchids in his garden. 20 When the complete alchemicalization has taken place, there is no duality. They are constantly in the state of presence, and they are not hidden from either world. What to think of the spiritual ambition of the time. 'Spiritual' because of the company kept by those notions. But is there a better way to say it. It came with talk of 'consciousness' that goes off in wrong directions. I like 'presence.' I had seen people with more presence than others. Who. The woman at Nyingma who teased me at the breakfast table. I was always looking for presence. I could be fooled. I thought C and T's stoner table games were presence but they were Ashkanazi cleverness contests. I thought Roy's playful attention was presence but it was willful seduction. Kiyooka said "She has a lot of presence" when he'd seen me with an unusual lot happening internally. I don't know what the Sufis mean by presence - something about being simultaneously in a fantasy of divinity? - but I thought of it as the right and best way to be with people. It would be free energized alertness to the other and to oneself both at the same time, a full busy state. But now I'm not sure it needs to be so consciously energetic. When I was teaching they described me as calm because I was letting the uncon do the work. Is that 'presence' if it is effective? Is conspicuous 'presence' always a form of power-grabbing? Am I still confused?      no The good state isn't inconsiderate spontaneity, it isn't circumspect withholding, it's having worked through enough so free response can be trusted. It's integration. Do you think the Sufis actually knew how to make better people      no They're salesmen      yes So what do I know about making better people. Did I make better people when I was teaching? It says yes. How. Sometimes by liking the love in them. By rejoicing in their giftedness. Sometimes by tweaking a misunderstanding. Sometimes by asking for focus. Sometimes by naming their conditions. Sometimes by giving them a framework. So Joyce was the only real teacher      yes Was all of that study useless      no It furnished concepts      yes Was going for broke useless      no But it hasn't shown its use yet      no - I failed a test when she said she was a man. What I should have said was, In some moods you seem to need to describe yourself as a man but I am your watchful companion and what I see is more interesting than that. I have seen a child, a nimble tomboy, a stiff and pompous colonial man, and a startlingly authoritative beautiful woman. Speaking approximately. I failed another when I let myself be tagged as wanting to be pregnant. What I should have said is I'm moved by the child, sexily attracted to the tomboy, and intimidated by the queenly woman. I feel sorry for the pompous man because he seems stunned. There is another kind of man who raises hair on the back of my neck and instantly fattens my mouth but for better or worse that has nothing to do with us; I like that feeling and will always be susceptible to it but it's not what I'm in quest of. What I'm in quest of is what I'm faithfully trying to work out with you. You can trust me or not, decide on the evidence. 21 however the standing infirm - When I told Jennifer I'd been sent away when I was two and didn't see anyone I knew for seven months she said, So you learned you didn't need anyone. - The question in these days is how to see act and describe according to the understanding that outside and inside are one thing. Experience. The inside is not private you see how we interpenetrate, still cry amazement when we find it so, but learn to act on it, knowing about you from inside me. I know you from how I am with you. I'm describing this wrong, making solipsism of it. Inside and outside are one thing in the sense that body is part of world, not in the sense that world is part of mind. It's true that body at any moment is registering world and itself together and it's true that an artist's body, and maybe any, is registering the other person in more ways than are usually assumed, but it's not spooky, it's just what bodies do. They register and integrate. They're a crossroads of self and other. What would have been different if I'd understood it this way then. There was fear in the etherealizing. This way of describing it feels ground underfoot. In another way it comes to the same thing because world and body ARE ethereal in ground, but that isn't solipsism, I don't have to imagine myself a great billow of colored everything-nothing; the other exists. She was with me in it, and they were. Roy before them? Watching coincidence, testing what might be telepathy. 'I know you from how I am with you' is right. Being alert to it is one thing but it happens without noticing too. We'd notice impulse to phone or visit and act on it. We were connected and we kept ourselves available by not having jobs, etc. We were sailing on mammal emotion: attachment, sex, jealousy, rivalry. Sailing on perversion of mammal emotion. For what purpose. I dunno. Outlier-invention? Something like that. Scouting. We wanted to explore. I was pushed into exile but I did want to explore when I got there. Susan was living like that. Peter v T lives like that, or has done, without the mammal perversity. I'm not living like that as much as I'd like. The being cringes at the gaze, or not. I think I meant for instance the way I cringe seeing Trump. I don't understand how anyone can bear to look at him. The shapes of his mouth when he speaks, his gestures, his bulging sack of a body. How does anyone see him as an acceptable human. What is the matter with his followers. The standing infirm. It has never been thus. I see you and have no description. Reading off the being. This exquisite sense. When I read that I think of spring dawns in her bed under the eaves of that shingled brown house with open windows onto the park, bright cool air, a Sufi translucence. Begin again. Wanting to live according to the seamless knowledge of inner/outer tides music the lovely present which at last becomes eternal. Do you like that      yes Do you understand 'becomes eternal'      yes It means right hemisphere      YES Being all there      YES Is a kind of boundarilessness      yes 'Open to the air of the room'     yes   Nothing more interesting than obedience. Traveling in obedience. Where am I now, where are we. Traveling ready to leave you at any moment and wanting you to travel in the same way.   Being caught in a lie, by the slip. It's correct. It assumes a clean, up-to-date uncon, though, which I didn't have, so it got us into trouble. Yes consent to what the slip says but take it as speaking for a part and a time. Is this a night to be awake. - Far away from this barren north London was her own dream world at home in her room, her strange unfailing self, the lovely world of lovely things seen in silence and tranquility, the coming and going of the light, the myriad indescribable things of which day and night, in solitude, were full, at every moment But presently all about her, as she sat poised for the length of the journey between the dead stillness within her and the noise of the silence without, a world most wonderful was dawning with strange irrelevance, forcing her attention to lift itself from the abyss of her fatigue. Look at us, the buildings seemed to say, sweeping by massed and various and whole, spangled with light. We are here. We, are the accomplished marvel. Buildings had always seemed marvelous; and in their moving, changing aspects an endless fascination, except in north London ... . But tonight it was north London that was revealing the marvel of the mere existence of a building. Their buildings rising out of the earth where once there had been nothing, proclaimed it as they swept dreaming by, making roadways that were like long thoughts, meeting and crossing and going on and on, deep alleyways and little courts where always was a pool of light or darkness, pouring down from their secret communion with the sky a strange single reality upon the clothed and trooping multitude below. The strong companion was a child seeking shelter; the woman's share an awful loneliness. It was not fair. Michael kisses her for the first time. Next day when she is about to take a train to north London he confesses his student fucks with prostitutes. She plunges into bewildered pain. It's amazing writing. Deadlock is 1921. She was 48; winters in Cornwall and summers in London. "In my core I'm lonely, I'm waiting for you to find me." I thought I had been finding her so this surprised me. All the same it was a touching demand, though one I wouldn't have made because I knew she couldn't find me the way T or C could, which is what I thought finding was. Before I knew what she meant, though, I liked feeling there was something maybe sweeter and realer she wanted me to meet. But it turned out she meant her secret identity: she wanted me to guess she 'was', ie thought of herself as, a man. Right there we were at a sudden halt. First off, I didn't want to be with any man at all, I'd done that, I was after the better intimacy I'd seen among women. Second off I adored the actual body there with me. Third off if I were going to be with a man I didn't want it to be a pompous little would-be man. What she wanted seemed to ask me to play along with a fantasy. I could imagine some woman if she were looking for a safe berth willing to do that in compassion or calculation but I didn't pity J. The thought of pitying her disgusted me. I didn't want to peg her to any gender at all, I assumed she was some kind of mix and I was another and why would we want it any other way. I still feel righteous about it as if she'd been trying to gaslight me but can see that what's wrong with righteousness is that it isn't curious. She meant something by it that I still don't understand and she maybe still doesn't either. 22 "I dream I am in a new world with you, and you dream I am trying to cure an old wound." "No, that isn't how it is, the way it is ..." - I'm looking somewhere else - "is that I dream that I am in a new world with you, and I fear that I am trying to cure an old wound." She cried. That was late in the night on the floor. "I stopped being your friend about an hour ago."   Woke from a dream and realized that in the dream I had been myself as I had not been, uneasy with you. When I see that I feel a sort of admiring pity; we were trying to do something so much harder than we knew. We were almost completely unfamiliar to each other. We had an anglophile academic gloss in common - we were self-made academic stars - but we'd been made in completely different cultures. Our overlap had no reach into child heart. In any crisis we had to feel each other as obtuse and brutal. Spirituality is precisely a conscience about quality of consciousness. I misunderstood that. It's conscience about quality but not 'of consciousness' only. Say 'of being,' which lets it include more. Learning to judge people's consciousness consciously. That gives clairvoyance and power.   Do you agree with that      no We judge people's quality in how we address them, act with them      yes Being more 'conscious' would handicap it      yes   "I'd like to be a slob with you." I never wanted to be a slob with anyone, why would she. I assumed she meant she wanted to be as she was with Sandy, who drank, so I didn't say what I should have, which was can you give me an example. - Jesu, komm in meine Seele, Lass sie deine Wohnung sein. Telemann aria from Machet die Tore weit written 1719, Stich-Randall recording 1967. Found it when I went to look for her Verzage nicht, that I would have borrowed in a cardboard album from the library in Kentish Town. Lass sie deine Wohnung sein caught me for a second. It's exquisite singing and it's what I said once when I said it right, wanting someone to be in me with me. Then I said oh, and there is, it's you isn't it. You said yes. (Sigh!) - Hello dear light. Pale last light laid across the pavement at 4:39. - Music in this house as loud as I like, the Panasonic's speakers filling the room to the top. - Jam could interest me. I could listen to music with her. I could tell her a dream and see it better than I had. I could talk to her about Newton and the Green Dragon. She could borrow Yeats from Robin for me. I was proud of her with any of my family. (Not Luke.) I liked her handwriting. Her Na-khi piece. Her flat on Guilford. I'd never find those matches again and I was right to jump in but I lived on a knife edge with her. I was starved for intelligent company and she didn't seem to be. I was five years younger and less formed than she was in her territory. I had more territories but was not jelled enough in them yet to hold her interest. She had privileged assurance and I had inherent diffidence. I think she likely has never had my quality of company again either but it's not sure she knows it. 23 My wars are laid away in books 2002. b.1830 There was attitude in his sentences Coming from a child only eleven years old, the letters are altogether extraordinary. The headlong energy of her self-expression; the directness with which she says what is on her mind; the lavishness with which she bestows her attention on the world around her; the innocence of that gaze; the warmth; the constant flicker of humor, of irony; the already well-stocked mind; the colloquialisms and odd mistakes: these varied elements show that the young writer already commands a very great range. Reading that feeling more than one thing: grateful for this professor's notice of the sorts of qualities my early journals have along with their childishness and at the same time a doubt of their actually being remarkable either in her or in me. Few English-language poets have been equally comfortable with our abstract, Latin-rooted vocabulary, or as skillful in combining it with vigorous Anglo-Saxon. And she will point you sighing - To her rescinded Bud. a signature effect by attaching a Latin-based legalism to the simple 'Bud.' Horrifying description of the New England strain of afterlife panic she had to resist, at its worst in her Puritan college but constant in her family and the wider town. Her distinguished father resisted too but he had the other madness of belief in female retirement. At about 20 Wordsworth and Emerson but "the early liberalism and serenity and strong masculine entitlement of these two poets were not hers for the taking." Jane Eyre about the same time and later Villette. David Copperfield. The quantity of mediocre writing she took seriously can be alarming. 24 Still thinking of ravens and what social dominance has to do with how badly things went among the lesbians. When any group of juvenile ravens is put together in an aviary for the first time, they immediately challenge each other, and they soon sort themselves out into a dominance hierarchy. Hawkbill, being new among this crowd, was confident, launching into a knocking call duel with another female. Suddenly a violent chase ensued through the forest surrounding the carcass. The chaser had singled out a specific bird with whom it stayed relentlessly, weaving in and out among the trees and past all the other birds. Hawksbill was then missing from the feeding crowd. When she returned only twenty minutes later, she stayed at the periphery of the crowd, where she was ignored. Since the chase she had not made a single knock. In ravens, high-status birds suppress the sexual development of others of their sex, not just their behavior. There are two prestige displays, one for males and one for females. The chronically low-ranking birds remain effectively genderless. Changes of status are rare. In general, a low-status bird may improve its status only by leaving its associates and joining another group. Once they were alone they put on quite a show. I had never seen anything like it from those two before, when they were with the others. He flashed the white mictitating membranes of his eyes at her, and went through the male vocal repertoire of choke sounds, gurgles, bill-snaps, grunts, honks, and quarks of high and low pitch. He gave inflected, deep, and nasal quorks, deep rasping quorks, and hollow gong sounds. One Dot bowed with fuzzy head and made the typical female knocking sounds. Almost all the numerous jabs were by dominants at near-status birds, apparently causing them to make their fuzzy-headed submissive display. High status is costly to show and to maintain. Heinrich's Mind of the raven 1999. It says status isn't superficial, it unlocks well-being and brilliance. Lights go on all over the place. Rhoda's rudeness at her first salon. The way Louie pushes herself in the Iyengar community. My ebullience at home and quietness at school. Judie later on needing not to see me on her own. T and C banding together to bleed me. Olivia's brattiness. My gendered elation at the Golden West. Forcefulness at the garden. It also says why I'm this much of a loner. I thrive in dominance but in most groups what I'd have to do to establish and defend it doesn't suit me, for instance if I'd hung out with the Goddard fac I'd have had to engage with the existing alphas, which I didn't want to bother to do. I had institutional dominance in my student groups and that was enough. So is status-defeat what's at the bottom of the prole-resurgence in the US?      yes TV has made them see the polish dominance has and they don't      yes That's why they hated Obama and love a grotesque pile of dough      yes There's no remedy for that      yes Their issues aren't really ideological, they're just protest against status elites      yes These days when I try a wet finger it's over in maybe two minutes. It's never been that fast. - Wondering how I would feel if you and Sandy would briefly come together again. In other words they did, when I was up north      yes And her lie was the end of the best      yes 25 I've just realized my story of Jam is called Up, down, strange and charm. The sun is far enough north so morning sun has reached the chair. My mother and the dirty foot My mother took me to the hospital for a checkup with Dr Rostrup. I was wearing white ankle socks. They were clean but I'd been running around the parking lot and my foot under the sock was dusty. When I took off my sock there was my bony deformed foot and it was dirty. I felt my mother wincing. It was an ambiguous moment I've had to remember. The dead princess. I see what it is, she has those thoughts (of minerals, stones, crystal: structure, bone) but they're far away in her. We described her patronizingly and weren't about to take on her birth into stone.   The unearthly beauty of the Dead Princess It's a dream probably but what is it about it. Gnomon, finding it to tell her.   I said the gnomon is the observer, which the observer can't see.   On the road noticing rebuilding a second story on Grandpa Peter Epp's house. Is that the first time? Being afraid that our competence to follow each other will fail when it matters most. I said at least we will then find ourselves alone at the edge of our known territory. What sort of story it would be, could be. A Pound scholar and an experimental filmmaker meet at 'light metaphysics' and then branch away from each other, she into anti-colonial writing, I into embodiment philosophy. It has some foreign settings: HK and Valhalla, Saturna. Three Vancouver houses. Absolutist confusions. It's a story of young intelligence and gender misery and unfocused search. And who no longer make gods out of beauty this is a dying Yet to walk with Mozart, Agassiz and Linnaeus 'neath over-hanging air under sun-beat Here take thy mind's space And to this garden, Marcella, ever seeking by petal, by leaf-vein out of dark and toward half-light   And over Li-chiang, the snow range is turquoise Rock's world that he saved us for memory a thin trace in high air   The long flank, the firm breast and to know beauty and death and despair and to think that what has been shall be, flowing, ever unstill.   Then a partridge-shaped cloud over dust storm. The hells move in cycles, No man can see his own end. The Gods have not returned. "They have never left us." They have not returned. Cloud's processional and the air moves with their living. Pride, jealousy and possessiveness 3 pains of hell and a clear wind over garofani over Portofino 3 lights in triangulation Or apples from Hesperides fall in their lap from phantom trees. The old Countess remembered (say 1928) that ball in St. Petersburg I began with the first two lines here because J quoted them and went on to say "Amrta is beauty, the characteristic by which divine forms are known ...: beauty is purity of self, i.e. naturalness, which is to say, reality. Amrta is an image as inclusive as the Greek idea of kosmos, as we see in Canto 112 ...." The Na-khi scene returns us to the China and Greece that form the core of the Cantos' stillness, the perspectiveless luminosity that locates kosmos not in a transcendent Otherness but within Itself. This Self, therefore, is not the individual ego, nor the cultural hero, nor the collective racial effort, nor, indeed, exclusively human. "That the great man can regard Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one body is not because he deliberately wants to do so, but because it is natural to the humane nature of his mind that he does so." I loved that in 1971 she was blazing out against the "ecological and economic consequence of the Judeo-Christian philosophy" along with her master and that her piece names his plants - eucalyptus, fig, olive, mint, thyme, basil, pomegranate, barley, grape "and their various significances", larix, larches, corayana, gentian, berberis, spruce, fir, quercus, willow, artemisia, arundinaria, pinus, juniper - and his "sacred zones ... precincts of stone, water, tree." That was and still is right down my alley, but given all of that why did she pitch so abstract a garden? "It's both enclosed and unenclosed, it's moveable, it's animate. There isn't a house it's in relation to. It is my house, it has everything I need. There's a transparent worktable on which I write transparent writing which is the garden. Ink which is visible only on certain wavelengths. It might have a dog." Promoting plant names without having any experience of actual plants, but it's more than that. The house game says house is self, garden is world, key is love. Her version is not only abstract, it's solipsistic and secretive. Or was she posing in the game, second-guessing to try to get ahead of it? The avocado seed in which a cunt and a clit are secretly together. You left them open to eyes, me I hurried to close them together and you didn't fail to notice. With your translucent dragon on a pedestal. "You want this. I don't think it's too early to let you know that." "This will be good for your work." I was stronger and could go into the degradation and disgrace without refusing it. Yes I'm a woman yes you're a man yes I desire you in that secret dark that will make you shine, yes I think of having a baby in me by you orgiastic pleasure of full solar plexus burning woman right in the animal soul where satisfaction is.   I looked at you and became a cavity, you watched me sink into shock, I saw my life with flares going up. Yes I was saying I am that, I will be that, why are you looking at me with such a coldness, how can you tell me you're a man and not ask me to marry you.   "You're looking at me as if you're afraid of me." At the mercy of the man. At your mercy.   "You were right, I let you go into it completely alone. I was completely cold and hard." This still shocks me as if she'd stuck out her foot and tripped me. I took it then as she wanted me to take it, as an exposure of my falsity, but what I see now is that what it exposed was her sadistic hatred of womanness. Do you agree      YES And her competition      yes Did it mean I should be with a man      no Did it mean I should have a baby      no It meant I had a well of primal eroticism      yes That I couldn't live out for more than one reason      yes Should I have left her then      NO   Saw the full contradiction I'd shut out of me, that what I am happily in full instinctive pleasure, what I am in heart and centre is a woman who loves men, and that to express that I would have to lose everything else, because as a woman I cannot resist the part of the man that wants to destroy me.   Is that accurate      yes 26 We wondered about hinge. It's the corpus callosum. Crystal waves weaving together toward the great healing. That the goddess turn crystal within her His intimation of electromagnetic pattern. Crystal describes not only water and stone, but air and light. Space/ether. You made my dream so clear. Ireland. Duff. The mother below to get into bed with a strange man. The three children. I'm the middle one. Precarious. Here comes Duff safely from the other end. Landscapes, green and yellow lands. Unfamiliar but I like how it's written. another seated on a wall and intently making lace Is RLS. So you've had your use you got me out of my helpless sincerity with T and C. I conned you into it by putting myself at the mercy of the opening I made in you by the visions in my work. Defensive declaring. I've tried not to do that anymore. What I'm furious about is that you denied me in front of your family.   Did she      no She was knocked into an earlier time      yes I couldn't handle myself in her contexts      yes She could handle herself in mine      yes That made her actually superior      no How not      you have come through to the intelligent energy of processing She was superior then      no Because I was on the way to something she wasn't      yes Holding out socially in a necessary way      yes   What you understand in me is only my incompletion in your sensibility.   Was that true      no But she did think she was better than me      YES   I see your face like a drawn blind. I have never seen such cold eyes.   Do you want to comment      honest, observation, in crisis, of recovery Are you talking about her      no you It was a memory      yes   Then at night suddenly finding the delicate girl. And yet that girl can only be a picture. Could only be a picture because I was at a loss. Do you know how to be with that delicacy      as with a child, skillful in bringing through truth   I think I have to methodically invent a complete refusal. You are a pig with a princess in you. Inventing a refusal is my stupid old first defense. Pig with a princess in is viciously unskilled. You don't know who I am, or I'd have myself. In your protected life you can only see that I'm a fool. It's true she had no idea of my conditions. Did she see me as a fool? Maybe not but only because she didn't see me at all and neither did I. I was a fool in the sense of being early on a long trajectory. In time the old baron will have you all. I wonder if you'll know.   Does the old baron have her all      yes 27 Does he have me all      yes Meaning shut-downness      yes   Am I right thinking Emilee is indulging      yes Does it harm her physically      yes Is she diabetic because she's mawkish      YES Is it guilt      yes She likes me to be the voice of her defense without taking it on herself      yes It's like my relation with my mother      yes Should I handle it differently      no Let her visit      no He's odd about Dickinson. He details all her acquaintance and their public affairs at length, which is sometimes tedious but alright, but he also seems to praise her more than the poems he quotes can warrant. He doesn't seem to mind her repulsive dreams of heaven and he excuses her masochism as enforced by her father, which it couldn't be unless she wanted it to be. He seems to quote none of the lines I would pick out from around those deformities. It's as if he's fascinated by the way she squeezes poetry out of the rack. Or maybe he imagines himself a Master who'd have got her right. Am I being too hard on her      yes Her dreams of heaven are repulsive      yes Her self-abnegated craving is too      yes But she has great originality      yes And directness      yes So here's the question, I'm indignant at Emilee and Emily in the same way, is that shadow? Would I do better work if I suffered more? Is the Baron suffering avoided? No, more like hope avoided. White sky. Quite a lot of it but so featureless and making so dull a light. Was sitting in Kekuli seeing how ugly the street and people's clothes and the café's interior were, a little hell of spiritlessness. A clean pickup the color of a Bing cherry turning into the 7-11 lot was a good object though and when I looked down I liked my colors, new denim, silver shoes, black watch plaid shirt, bright, clean and keyed to each other. Walked home seeing more dull misery in the houses on that block but the post office is a fine coherent thing.   part 3 time remaining volume 5: 2015 may-august work & days: a lifetime journal project