8 february 2019
Moments of defeat that don't go away. I was in the bathtub imagining
that I could have come back next day after they - somebody - messed up my
presentation at the GP college and pushed and yelled till I found out who
did it and why and raked them over for doing it. And then I wondered as
I have been lately whether those defeats I still relive have restructured
my body in visible ways, in the ways I don't like to see. If I'd fought
better then would I look different now. It says no but how can that be.
The memory itself is a restructuring. At the same time I'm horrified at
the thought; but really it's horror at the look no matter how it came. Horrified
at what I sometimes see, I mean - the photos at Rowen's wedding.
Some pleasure doesn't go away either. In the tub I also was remembering
the days in Leslie's back room, her beautiful self, the way I carefully
liked her. I'm staring at those phrases feeling how useless they are. It's
her, and the house, the red plaid blanket, me quite acceptably lovely at
53, late October daytime on the orange tree, the light air, the newness.
9
6 in black dark with dry snow coursing down the road twenty feet high.
A north wind. All night sometimes a strange loud noise I was lying in bed
trying to describe. Not a groan, not a squeal, a gigantic scraping? This
morning lying in the dark laughing because really it was like a huge black
fart.
Those of us who move from the provinces pay
a toll at the city's gate, a toll that is doubled in the years that follow
as we try to find a balance between what was so briskly discarded and what
was so carefully, hesitantly, slyly put in its place.
Raymond Williams. - Not slyly; more like shyly, diffidently.
The 1998-99 San Diego months laboring with genius on two lines of work
that can seem distinct and overlap in unknown ways by popping like fireworks
in the same skull-enclosed sky. I hesitate when I say genius but what else
can it be, this extraordinary work of penetration, originality, longing,
persistence, honesty, bravery and eloquence, this self-created capability
so staggeringly far from origin. I read it understanding no one else will
ever recognize it.
When I think of how those two tasks interacted I also feel the story
is unfathomably more interesting than any of the ways it can be told. There's
the larger whole of what Tom was, which then and now I could see no more
of than a corner of fabric whisking out of sight - I don't know why that's
what I'm seeing, my first image was of a dark space roiling with unseen
energies. For the other thing, for instance, there's the question of whether
the bolts of hope and fear and pain I let myself in for with Tom were fuel
I needed for the completely private work whose difficulty he never glimpsed.
How any of it actually worked in all the unknown layers of what a human
is.
10
self-responsibility for creating a light and
joyful atmosphere around ourselves freshening ourselves we can just expand
our feelings, our relaxation our calmness and joy a path of openness, compassion
and commitment felt as a deep warmth at the center of the heart genuine
compassion rises from a humble and fearless attitude of openness and generosity
we welcome others warmly and joyfully into our hearts Tarthang
Tulku
11
Working with the 1998-1999 months feeling how much better they are than
Knausgaard and at the same time how inviable they are because I'm not an
intense-looking younger man and, worse probably, because of how they range
around for instance between true true romance and academic neuroscience.
-
Talking to Luke in the cold kitchen for hours this aft with my feet in
weak sun on the table and my phone plugged in by its very short tether.
He had something he wanted to talk about, that he said he hadn't told anyone
else yet.
- Is this going to turn out badly
no
- Well for him YES
It'll be complicated if they go for it - jobs, countries, money - but
it seems better than anything he's tried. They've stayed in touch for fifteen
years which means since they were early thirties. She's substantial, his
age, has a son through college who's marrying in Spain. Her boy when he
was little seems to have looked like Luke. I hope that isn't most of what
it's about, though even if it were, if he took it on courageously and thoroughly
enough it might carry him quite a way. Them quite a way.
Nélida is a novel by Marie d'Agoult,
a "thinly disguised fictional account" of her four-year affair
with composer Franz Liszt, and a succès de scandale when first published
in 1846.
Pronounce it in Spanish, Nay'lida.
Is she a writer-journalist or I think more of an activist-journalist.
Does she read?
It's the first time since Suzanne I've said I approve.
They couldn't have a baby but if he had a step-grandson who looked like
him ....
It'd be good if he has somebody when I die -
12
There I am in Eliz's little studio shack cracking about all my failures
and coming through into the actual plan.
-
Great heavy lump in the post. Zukofsky. Why. We'll see.
-
I published the betrayed child paras on FB this morning after a post
of Julia's huge black mama pig singing like an idling Harley (someone said)
as she stands in the snow nursing her 7 squealing piglets.
Why: because I want to think about how a woman's epic needs to be different.
How a woman's bravery has a different task. Do I show myself doing what
has to be done to recoup our lag or do I show myself doing what they should
have been doing too.
13
I was doting on bright breezy boyish Andrew Chang - his animation that
looks like happy good fortune - but then I started to notice the face on
the other side of the screen. Ian Hanomansing has a quiet steadiness in
his eyes. They are small eyes but they hold; and he's a beautiful color;
and his voice oh my; but I haven't said it yet. He has a sober steady delivery
but sometimes for instance in their signing-off patter he slants into a
reserved sort of humor that's utterly charming.
Americans should be studying the National because it's more natural,
more up to date, better formatted. PBS is doing its best with gender and
race but the National with four hosts, two men and two women, two of the
four non-white, is just right. I'm always apprehensive about Judy Woodruff,
how old is she going to look tonight, why does she jerk that way when she
speaks. Yes she's a pro but she's anxious. Amna Nawaz is the right sort
of sleek and easy. PBS has also been right-think pushing racial representation
with a black correspondent who stumbles over her own lips and sits with
her big legs wide apart under the desk. I've begun to look away when she's
on. I know you mean well, people, but get it right.
- So far no. He's jumble without ear.
These days flocks. At this moment scattered in upper branches of the
linden, just leaving the Russian olive (leaving three), more invisible rising
and dropping in the spruce. Funny how though I've hardly read him and don't
like him he's already caught on.
They flow south crossing others at the same time flowing north.
Scent of lilies.
There was fresh snow when I opened the door and again that thing I always
like to see, a cat's little prints investigating on my path, patrolling,
circling to the foundation are there mice perhaps no but so pleased to have
this place to myself.
14
Troubled by Michelle's book. "What we did was really hard"
she said when it was over, except that it isn't over, now she's on book
tours selling three million copies. There she was on a late night show,
big clumps of false eyelashes, squirming, wearing an odd black costume tight
to neck and wrists and bunchy to hide her body. 55. Has menopause wrecked
her? Have help-meet duties? I had to skim the book because the writing is
so blank, nothing but social fact, nothing observed, nothing sensory, nothing
personal in the way I understand that. I'm indignant at her compliance.
Barack in the morning just put on his dark suit and went to work but she
had to get up an hour earlier to be masked and confected. He wore himself
out being president of the world while she had to be normally banal for
both of them, and now there she is at the Grammy's in more bunchy black
pyjamas, why, to sell books, or to advocate for blackness, or because she
needs to feel the high life isn't over? It's complicated: I'm angry at what's
been required of her as a woman; I'm irritated that she's not an artist
and sells books written by committee; and I resent her advantages - she's
tall and pretty and has been surrounded by smart help - advantages that
outweigh her racial disadvantage. They are advantages of character too,
obviously, advantages of personhood, and she has done everything she can
to be useful, but still: she has succeeded rather than failed (and I -).
And I'm alarmed for her: has it been too much, has she been emptied by it.
16
I wake and lie with my arms tight around my pillow looking at the wall
to see whether it is morning. Where was I? There was something but it's
gone. I go into the kitchen and start water for tea.
It was Olivia - I was crying about Olivia. I'd said I would have lunch with
her if I could find her and then I remembered her brightness, her crinkled
eye corners, my feeling for her when she was thin and quick. I had my head
down sobbing and was telling someone why when I woke.
It's because of fighting with Louie yesterday. Had I ever understood
that Louie is on the template of Olivia: a dark-haired more girly smaller
younger friend with more bosom than I have and more social charm who competes
with me about men. I've never forgiven either of them for that. I say that
and then I think - oh - that other unforgiven dark-haired woman with more
bosom than I have.
Then I switch to letter:
- what you were was angry. there's really no question about that. what
there is a question about is why your anger has always been so hard on
me. stressful beyond anything you've ever imagined or i've ever said. there
was a while you were angry a lot and i was stoical in it because i just
am but i've realized now that i can't bear it and shouldn't have to try.
the way you are in a fight seems young to me. i'm supposing it's because
of the way it was with your brothers. something in the present evokes it.
i've been an older brother to you haven't i. when i interrupted you yesterday
wasn't it that?
17
Was lying in bed just now, not sleepy but resting with my eyes closed,
sun at the window, and saw very clearly the stretch of road looking south
toward the hill where the church used to be. It was midmorning and sunny
with snow on the road and in the ditches as it might actually be at this
moment. The view was from further back than our corner, maybe as far back
as Voths' turn-off. Just for an instant and not associated with anything
I was thinking. What is that sort of vision? It feels like telepathy, something
sent that has managed to get through because I'm available, but I don't
know anyone who would be there now. Or it's a purely internal message?
- Is it telepathy no
- A message yes
- Instruction?
no
- Comment yes
- 'This is like that' yes
- Companionable YES
- Are the visions of Indio heads like that too
yes
Those visions are like photos, a single frame. - I yesterday posted the
slow-shutter photo of Judy stepping into the pool and this morning the trampoline
photo of Frank, half-accidental icons from fifty-eight years ago. You in
me even then?
- ?? YES
19
Woke too early and was lying there reading about Faust in the Goethe
biog - die Mutter - and remembered Mary already in Tabor saying in her ugly
dark voice of resentment But why did you have to get rid of God!
Then I had one of those moments feeling maybe it's all a dream and when
I denounced the idea of god I shriveled my mother into the ghastly thing
she is now. It's the way she said it, as if I'd had a the power to spoil
the universe.
I said I didn't get rid of god, I just think of it a different way. She
couldn't want to ask how. Did something else get rid of God in her? Did
Alzheimer's? Did Ed?
There I see the sense in which it was all a dream while I heard
her say it: I took it as about me rather than about her.
I don't know whether I can answer the next question, why did she think
I had done it to her. - There I look up sideways out the window to
the softly lit grey sky of early morning and see the softest of grey vapour
drifting and dissolving sideways from St Michael's chimney. That quality
of softness. She loved her baby. That love in her was spoiled and with it
the universe. Is that it?
-
there's so much in your letter that is wonderful
and provocative and alive -- it calls for and prompts more than I can write
in this cramped hotel room.
But for now ... your heart news frightens me.
Your words of discouragement about writing frighten me even more. I love
your writing, I would/will read anything you write even though your writing
discourages me from the attempt.
- Is there anything in this that he means
no
- It's his pleaser habit YES
- So was it foolish to write him NO
- Why not recovery,
from patriarchy, by generous, fighting
20
Riled by arguing with an anti-vaxxer on Janet's FB page who wants to
believe polio was really DDT poisoning. Why am I so riled by ignorant arguments
though. She's ignorantly arguing against me: my whole lifetime.
21
- What do you think about finishing Michael Duke now
yes
Janet asked if I'm writing a memoir. I'm not but in what sense isn't
it that. It's a different relation to time. A memoir recollects at some
particular later age. I want the past's actual voices and the present's
actual voice considering it.
- Is that right YES
I found something last winter with that long stretch replying to journal
passages.
It needs to include California back country. It needs to be a keeping
of his soul. It's a spirit-keeping ritual.
It isn't about me but it is me. It's me honouring the the event of his
being. I don't tell stories, I live stories and then show the record.
22
He's an animalier and I'm a plantier so there's likeness to be unobviously
shown.
-
Wondering about Coleridge and Goethe. Goethe 1749-1832; Coleridge 1772-1834.
(Austen 1775=1816, Constable 1776-1837) C is known to have begun a translation
of Faust. G in 1820 is said to have believed he had completed it.
Safranski 2013 Goethe - Kunstwerk des Lebens. 2017 Goethe:
life as a work of art Norton
It's maybe a bad translation? Am reading it mainly because I have nothing
else. It's well designed, a substantial heft, an unusually good cover in
a strong gritty paper, exceptional layout on slightly porous white pages.
I couldn't start at the beginning; I wince away from German proper names
and place names and there were so many of them I was having to deal with
to no useful end that I began in the middle and read to the end. Obviously
well researched - not only G's letters but his contemporaries' too - but
though I know G is interesting I kept not finding him interesting at all
and wondering why that was. The translator explained that he'd translated
all the poetry himself - 'in order to give a unified voice to quotations'
- and the result is that Goethe seems to have written doggerel. So I was
having to skip all the many quotations as well as zipping past the many
proper and place names, which left me what seemed a plodding factuality.
But now I've begun some way back from the middle, maybe a third of the way
in, and there I find G with thoughts so like my own that I change my mind
about the book.
Holmes says when C was in Germany in 1798-9 he did translate some of
G's lyrics. Suggested a translation of Faust in 1813 and seems to
have translated Kennst du das Land that year.
Curiously, the productions of Goethe did not
have their full impact in England until the generation of Byron, Shelley,
Thomas de Quincey, and Henry Crabb Robinson.
23
I'm wondering about the way the journal's style is so random. I write
things down as they occur to me. Sometimes it works, it has cognitive veracity,
but can it work that way for any reader.
25
Mozart 1756-1791 overlapped and G attended a recital.
Many ways the book's language isn't careful enough. "Compliment
paid to life": it's not a social grace, it's the most fundamental acknowledgement.
If one has been the undisputed favorite of the
mother one possesses for the rest of one's life that triumphant feeling,
that confidence of success, which not infrequently brings actual success
in its wake.
Said Freud of Goethe.
While still a boy he had a fair command of Italian,
French, English, Latin and Greek and could even read some Hebrew.
self development through the transformation
of experience into an image
Halted there as if I should understand it better than I do. Working with
the journal I get paralysed in the welter. The best do something else. And
yet in the welter I keep feeling mysteries no one has named. I don't want
to leave out what might be my actual best.
I never tired of pondering volatility.
Also the rare writer who works in visual art.
gratitude for light the most religious of all
functions
In Strasbourg 1770-71 he was having his French corrected and admiring
Shakespeare. I was standing in those cobbled streets in my broken shoes
in 1965. Horrible Mitchell was quoting Kennst du das Land.
I was pleased as I could be to find another
person in whose company feelings develop and thoughts are clarified.
In language and then in writing he produces
himself, presents himself to others and to himself as well. He will know
who he is only when he has said or written it.
- Constant letter writing.
there began a deregulation of talk about love,
marriage, and child-rearing; religion, art, and the state; about social
conventions and madness. People thought they should be able to talk about
whatever was on their mind.
A generation later the Romantics
I am not a Christian.
fate, which he feels is well disposed to him
... life-shaping power of <inner> certainty ... guiding principle
of their life ... one's own daimon
1773-74 reading Spinoza (1632-1677) (You are either
a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all. Said Hegel.) Newton 1643.
deus sive substantia sive natura
inspired a pantheism that arose around 1800
Herder, Goethe and Schelling
Every object and state of affairs: if we [are open
to it] we [are immediately within] the eternity and enormity that unfathomably
surround and enclose us.
interested in the balance between inner formative
powers and the susceptibility to formation from without
From 1785 a book by G's friend "represented
the significant intellectual possibility of a spiritualized naturalism,
an indispensible source for the creative development of philosophy in the
following decades".
Fossils and geological layers, comparative anatomy.
Text about granite.
In Italy 1786-88, by now almost 40. Came home and
shacked up with Christiane. Bedmate his mother called her.
26
7:40. Sun came up from behind the church's shoulder. I've lowered the
right venetian.
Crystalline pale blue. Great piles of steam this morning leaning southwest.
Dove on the streetlamp's overhanging arm. Was. Lumberyard Tom red-faced
pushing a puff of cloud.
Winter has been dragging dragging and I have to foresee that every year
will have these deathly many months.
home, where I can gather around me a circle
that nothing can enter but love and friendship, science and art
When people spoke to him of the latest political
news or their opinions he would change the subject, telling them about a
frog's intestines, a snail's anatomy, or the muscles of a goat's head. He
drafted plans for a large-scale treatise on the morphology of plants and
animals, studied the characteristics of monocotyledons, carefully dissected
the seed membranes of flowers, and pressed the duke to approve the creation
of a botanical garden .... He had also developed a new interest in optics
and color theory ... had formulated what would be the guiding principle
of his Theory of color during the siege
of Mainz . For Goethe, light was an ur-phenomenon
One must force oneself to be attached to something.
I think it will be my old novel
The fact of Goethe two hundred years before my family as if wipes them
from consideration. He had money and the best of childhoods, yes, but he's
an existence proof that no one had to live as blind to the world as they.
- Oh but he didn't spring from the soil new-made, what else he had was an
aristocratic urban milieu, all civilizations' gatherings presented.
The culture of the Germans has not yet reached
the point where what is pleasing to the best among us finds its way into
everyone's hands. Schiller arguing for
his periodical.
how would I know that this or that thing was
a plant if they weren't all formed according to a single pattern?
G and Schiller 1794 arguing about whether Urpflanze is an idea or something
graspable in perception. Connectionism would say a weighted position in
perceptual phase space is exactly both. Was it that Schiller was coming
into the discussion with a disembodied notion of 'idea' and Goethe was confounding
a perceptual précis with a creationist-remnant sense of formative
principle.
and in my company follow the path he had been
treading alone and with no encouragement
letter in which with a friendly hand you draw
up the sum of my existence and through your interest encourage me to make
more active and lively use of my abilities
In your authentic intuition everything that
analysis tediously searches for is present, and much more completely so,
and your own riches remain hidden from you only because they reside completely
within you. Said Schiller of G as poet.
The number of literate people had doubled between
1750 and 1800, to about a fourth of the population by the century's end.
... raised a moral concern: was an abyss of decay opening beneath the cloak
of a supposedly educational medium? Even youngsters barely out of school
could now experience thrills and take part in fantasies unimagined by their
parents and teachers. "In the sphere I inhabit at the moment people
spend almost as much time writing to their relatives and friends about what
they are doing as they spend doing it."
- Yes, wow.
I can work only in absolute solitude ..., it
is not just the conversation but even the very presence of loved and esteemed
persons in the house that completely diverts my poetic springs
1806 met with Hegel. Napoleon's soldiers stormed
his house.
to have explored the explorable and to calmly
revere the unexplorable
-
New shirt from the goodwill, thick flannel dark blue plaid to replace
the green one that's gone threadbare.
-
Your piece about Frank is the most intelligent
and lovely thing I have ever read! I've finished After and I'm on the second
part of Journal Summer 1961. The way it touches me ... you include all the
levels and parts somehow that need to be included for the knowing to crystallize
for me as a reader. You're writing about things I've been trying to be able
to know but haven't been able to on my own. It's better than Doris Lessing's
writing. Will you publish it in a physical book? Online is just as important,
but printed on paper would seem to keep it safe over time better.
27
Kate said. I read After afterwards and no it is not better than
The golden notebook. Kate is coming from religion too and I think
it's the bookwork she likes.
- Then I read the process notes section and feel opposite things, that
it's important work and that I was complicating a simple fact of mental
illness.
-
1814-15 turned on by Hafez, Sufi lyric poet of the 1300s. "A light,
playful tone."
As Goethe grew older he began to perceive society
- not only, but primarily - as just such a grey
net of worry
besetting affliction in the social sphere is
caused by envy, competition, disapproval, indifference, hectic activity
and gossip
dulled, disturbed and distracted by the moment,
the century, by localities
In 1812 at a spa he ran into "ruthlessly artistic"
Beethoven who played him something too loud and passionate.
a poem about being in love but also and especially
about growing old
1832 Feeling unwell, spent all day in bed.
28
6:30 Thursday morning. Pale blue twilight with wafting snow.
Yesterday from my bed I saw reflected on the verandah's screen door glass
a crow landing amid a lacework of rowan twigs, wobbling forward almost upside
down to gobble berries.
Waxwings leafing and instantaneously unleafing the linden, vanishing
into the spruce. Then a thousand of them - surely a thousand! - explode
from its dark arms.
Holmes' Coleridge. How much of the difference is biographer. Holmes loves
C, gets into his head, notices the substance of his language. A translator
can't describe G's German so I can't tell whether the Safransky is as unsensed
as it seems in the sing-song given.
They're both orphans but G is a man of the world, a manager, wealthy,
sociable, universal. I approve of him philosophically but the book was a
labour. C lives by the skin of his teeth staggering from failure to failure.
He's interesting in detail: what he sees and what he says of it.
I remembered, that at eight years old I walked
with him one winter evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery -
& he told me the names of the stars - and how Jupiter was a thousand
times larger than our world - and that the other twinkling stars were Suns
that had worlds rolling round them - & when I came home he shewed me
how they rolled round -
giving the mind a love of 'the Great' and 'the
Whole'
Both are charismatic talkers.
C 16 in 1789 fall of the Bastille and given a book
of poetry "expressing emotion in run-on lines, musical alliteration,
and bold monosyllabic statements of personal feeling", a style "so
tender and yet so manly, so natural and real."
March 1st
C also learned his long natural rhythms from notebook-keeping, must have.
Luke yesterday sent a photo of himself with Né - is that a version
of her name I can like in English - there's grey at his temples - he looks
loved, soft - and with his brothers, thickened in middle age.
- she's a beautiful color
-
- yes she's got her dad's caribbean color
-
- she's absolutely beautiful
-
- she truly is
And gone. Would not reply to anything I said that was not about him.
She means he's lost interest in me. As he should. But, but - what do I have
left?
- What do I have left
anyone
- Has Louie gone off me because I'm ugly
no
2
Left Two bodies for some days and have come back to it this morning.
Judgment is critical. So far it's quite long, 23 pages at 9 points. I know
more every time I touch it but don't know enough yet about what else to
leave out. So far what is it. An obit, the record of a friendship, a California
travelogue. People would usually choose one or the other of those.
One body seen and questioned; another seeing and questioning. The marvelous
body of California itself.
Am thinking to set it up on a page with faded photos behind or between
text.
3
- Hirokazu Kore-eda 2013 Like father, like son - edited, written
and directed by. "The director has said he feels influenced by Ken
Loach." Quiet perfection.
- Hou Hsiao-hsien
- Tsai Ming-liang
Letter from Sonja, having it to answer. Her generosity of interest that
I actually trust.
4
Have Two bodies roughed in. 17 pages. Saw the difference when
I write about Tom, the way a push-pull paragraph about him lit up and made
me laugh.
- So then we walked on the firm edge of the sand and I picked up thumbnail-sized
shells in different combinations of black, orange, cream and white. Tom
went and sat on the dry sand and looked at me against the green little
waves, my small jeans, blue linen shirt, red sneakers, and I felt like
a pretty girl all over, shapely and young, though he - oh he - is carrying
that forty pound backpack on his front and seems to have a lot of new crowns
of the cheapest kind pegged rather randomly into his crocodile mouth.
That tells the whole story of why I was with him. "Attraction of
opposites, get over it." Attraction-repulsion of -
-
As so often in Coleridge's later life, the absurd
disaster of his practical affairs seems almost a liberation of the spirit.
His letter soars upward out of the catastrophe it recounts, with something
close to exaltation. He makes the worst of everything, brilliantly.
Southey carried a copy of Werther everywhere
he went
advancing from phrase to phrase with rapid asides,
speculations, and self-questionings. We see the landscape
- And what if all of animated Nature
- Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
- That tremble into Thought
-
- O! the one Life within us and abroad,
- Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
- A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
-
- It should have been impossible
- Not to love all things in a world so fill'd
- Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still
air
- Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
Lamb's natural taste and percepion "Cultivate
simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for
simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart"
'Tis telling a lie. 'Tis as if you said, 'Here
is a bit of toasted cheese; come little mice! I invite you!' - when, oh,
foul breach of the rites of hospitality! I mean to assassinate my too credulous
guests!
For Coleridge was now deliberately exploring
the technique of making immediate notations from nature, which he had begun
in the early Conversatiion Poems, and which was now steadily intensifying
the quality of his vision.
My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know
something great - something one
& indivisible
Holmes takes that as meaning conventional diety but no, surely an intimation
of indivisible fabric of the universe within us and abroad.
He refined the traditional four-line, four-stress
ballad stanza into a flexible and astonishingly musical unit of breath and
phrasing, expanding and contracting between four-, five- and six-line variations,
with immensely subtle plays of alliteration, pause, repetition and internal
rhyme.
5
I've posted the crocodile mouth paras. Launched that private moment foureen
years ago onto the devices of for instance Aunt Lillian along with the dozen
women who sometimes like what I write. - What is that on the spruce. Large
with a black head and white breast sitting very still at the top of the
tree, warming in the sun.
in prose, to the seeking with patience, &
a slow, very slow mind What our faculties are & what they are capable
of becoming
it had to be both intelligible and mysterious, the proper subject of a critical, adult
mind playing over it in detail
study of German language immensely increased
his attention to English, and his subtle theories of imagination arose in
part from this early intensive period of translating between the two languages
... activity of the imagination 'hovering between images' of fixed meaning
... a hovering he first learned in his German studies.
Funny how 'imagination' has turned out to mean something like 'neural
activation,' which doesn't only hover, but can actually be felt to when
looking for a word. It isn't hovering between 'images' but between networks
that may include sensory sim among other sorts.
lectures in theology, physiology, anatomy and
natural history
His whole notion of 'criticism' - of the application
of philosophic principles to imaginative literature - was to be European
rather than English; and the fundamental importance which he gave to religious
and metaphysical ideas, in later controversies over both literature and
politics, profoundly reflects the atmosphere of Romantic reaction and mysticism
which was then spreading throughout the universities of Germany
What does Holmes mean by mysticism, though: is it a city man's name for
liking country?
Love is the vital air of my Genius
Shootings of water threads down the slope of
the huge green stone - The white Eddy-rose that blossom'd up against the
stream in the scollop, by fits & starts, obstinate in resurrection -
It is the life that we live.
over the forke of the Cliff behind, in shape
so like a cloud, the Sun sent cutting it his thousand silky Hairs of amber
and green Light
When her baby died his wife grew thin and lost
her hair so that she ever after wore a wig. Not many months after he had
come home from Germany to an ugly wife he fell in love with a different
Sara.
describing a flock of starlings glimpsed from
his carriage window ... over the low, wintry landscape like smoke, mist
& still it expands and condenses
Holmes diagnoses this psychologically, as self-image of "a powerful
personality without a solid identity", and maybe so, but once again
surely a felt intuition of network form and propagation.
A winter sick in in his upstairs room gulping laudanum, reading Kant
on space and time as categories of the mind. "Haunted for the rest
of his life by the hope of" an great opus "reconciling idealism
with Christian doctrines of revelation and salvation". "Newton
was a mere materialist." That lively perceiver deking out into idenification
with "the active shaping Imagination" as grandiose avatar saving
him from agonies of betrayal and failure.
- Where did I get 'deking out' meaning to evade? Was it local? F&W
says it's from decoy.
6
At least 74 is a better number than 73. Otherwise bah, the only thing
I can celebrate is Kathy coming to clean and maybe a dozen people obeying
FB's nudge. Good people though: so far Leslie, Indra, Mafalda. Yesterday
Louie remembering she forgot last year and writing to say she's not speaking
to me. Last night on his far side of the dateline Paul on his way to Bankok.
Emilee. Jim, Russell, Adam, Jane, Kate, Campbell, Lisa.
7
Yesterday Jim said Have a very happy birthday reflecting on an amazing
life!!, and I thought why am I not thinking of a birth day as being
about the whole span rather than the barren day it will be this year.
I'm in a bad mood. Nothing seems worth saying.
8
Still in a bad mood. Horrible dinner party last night (except the steak
was good). Horrible because of 1. their friends, 2. their dogs, 3. their
house, 4. everyone's sheer primitive social incompetence. Leave it at that.
-
Hughie MacKenzie's event at the Lower Nic band hall. Parking lot and
roadsides full of muddy vehicles. All those people at three long tables
eating together, rez people, AA people. A copper colored man with braids
put on a beaded headband to drum and chant. Then Hugh's older brother Robin
a thin bent man with a good face hobbled part of the way into the crowd.
"I'm Robin. I'm an alcoholic." "Hello Robin" in chorus.
Told good stories in a hesitant voice so quiet the audience went completely
still. After a while he was describing his mother in a housedress suddenly
running across the yard and vaulting a fence with one arm. He couldn't go
on. A young woman with long hair came to stand next to him, touched his
arm. He was silent a long time. She went and got a bottle of water and offered
it to him. He said "I'm not sad because of what happened, I'm sad because
of what's happening today, saying goodbye to my brother." Hugh had
32 years of sobriety, "good sobriety mostly," and Robin had followed
him into the program two years later. Hugh had always been getting people
to meetings, finding them sponsors.
When I came through the door into the hall a man sitting at the nearest
table gave me a sharp look and I gave him a sharp though brief look back
because he seemed so unusually coherent. Is that the word. Manly and as
if there was nothing wrong with him. Large middle-aged Native with a ponytail,
a baseball cap, and a look of natural authority I suppose, which another
man next to him did not have at all though if I've got it right he's the
one who ran for chief last election. Some of the Native boss-men, who are
physically large, have weak petulant faces.
Gloria Moses was there and when I touched her shoulder on the steps she
knew me. I said the rhubarb would soon be coming up and she said never mind
the rhubarb, she'd just come for a visit.
9
Saturday morning. These mornings I'm waking at four.
10
- Can you explain why I feel I'm dying
- You are losing the sense of being cared about in the
sort of guises it used to come, for example from strangers - the sense
of being interesting to people
- Is there something honorable I can be, though old
- Love, in writing, to gain, turn for the better
- Anything else you want to talk about
- How to get shared pleasure now - be successful in quest
of intimate friendship
-
- I need travel
- I need friends
- I need hard exercise
- I need to concentrate on a project and finish it
- I need love-work first thing in the morning
- I need to study aging and work around it intelligently
From London in 2009.
- Can you help me yes
- Am I going to die this year no
- Next year yes
- 2020 yes
- Heart attack no
- Fibrillation no
- Cancer no
- Suicide no
- Something related to heart no
- Whole year left no
- So I should spend my time cleaning up
YES
- Is there anything I can do to alter it
no
- I can't do new work anymore no
- Will that always happen when I try
no
- So I'm going to die before Judie
no
11
Was dreaming Leslie. One after another emailed
photos of where she was renovating and then some of towns she'd driven through.
(Like a picture book dream I'm realizing but the first time it's been digital.)
There was more but I'm mentioning it just for the heart feeling I have in
relation to her. She arrived with a lot of people I didn't know. I hadn't
had time to clean the house. Should get dressed. Put on the right leg of
my jeans and see half of it is torn away.
Yesterday morning I sat down to begin to set up a page for Two bodies
and felt my heart straining. My pulse was missing and hesitating. It scared
me: will I never be able to work again? I went out and sat on the confluence
bench in the sun. I could see the pulse in my wrist. It had evened out.
I'm stressed by how long this winter is going on, locked inside with
nothing to be, nothing to feel, nothing to do, grey sky, dirty ice, desolately
killing time.
13
only seeing what's in the center of the frame, not casting eyes around
the edges, is the most obvious mark of inexperience, but the real mark
of authority in photography or film is a sense of framing that is strongly
balanced. it's something neurological i think: the viewer can feel it as
a neurological comfort.
in 1968, the year after i'd graduated, when i was 23 and didn't know
what to do next, still in my college town, i briefly had my only 9-5 office
job, a boring useless job that paid good money. on december 17, which two
years later would become luke's birthday, i walked downtown and bought
a nikon ftn. i'd been scouring photo magazines that tell what camera is
used for any shot given and that was my superb expensive decision. delight
of its first photos and then all the years it was teaching me a silence
that allows the uncon to show what it sees.
as for impostor syndrome etc, what would the buddhists say. get over
yourself? being interested in what you're doing takes care of it.
Emilee fussing about changing jobs. She clings to social anxiety. I got
impatient.
Does it apply to moroseness about getting old?
Bare earth has been showing up the past few days. Remaining snow speckled
with gravel dust scattered to de-ice the roads.
-
Suddenly a warm day. Went to buy seedling compost, planted green onions,
sweet onions, motherwort, Ethiopian kale, ramsons - in the fridge prairie
sage, angelica, swamp milkweed - removed cover from golden celebration and
iceberg - shaded areas still ice and slushy snow - one honeybee - set out
chairs - killed I hope the platform hollyhock.
14
Anxious chest these mornings.
- Is it the tea no
- Is it the sensation of heart stress (sigh)
no
- Am 'I' worried about heart yes
- Is it true I'm going to die next year
NO
- Are you now thinking I'll make it to 82
no
- Should I contact Tom YES
- Important to lose weight yes
- Strict Sommers yes
- And travel this summer YES
Sagebrush is a sign of overgrazing. Cheatgrass,
balsamroot, knapweeds.
Nighthawk males display by diving with wings held
down so the sound of air over their primaries. Migrate early in large flocks
some as far as Argentina.
Bluebunch wheatgrass is the most widely distributed
palnt species. Cryptogamic crust.
Sockeye salmon nursery lake for their first year.
In their second they are carried by the downstream flow. Two years of wandering
in ocean "perhaps halfway to Japan". Then the call.
Western meadowlark among earliest migrants to return,
males as much as a month before. Nests directly on the ground sheltered
by a dome of grass or bark. Two broods a year.
Swainson's thrush.
Early Holocene 8-10 thousand years a dry period
when grassland ranged higher
-
- People don't like the slides.
- No, they can succeed as early love if you are honest
about losses.
-
- Loss has to be with them because early love is that for people more
than it is for me.
-
- The text has to have loss. Like Eurydice.
15
Afton mine outside Kamloops - Iron Mask Batholith
- copper ore - Nicola island arc about 1860 miles south.
Prehistory of the southern interior plateau - Early
Period 11-8000, Middle Period 8-4000, Late Period 4000 to 300 years ago.
Middle Period small bands roving and hunting. Seasonal fall and winter game,
spring freshwater fish, corms and bulbs, summer berries and roots, fall
salmon.
Around 2500 cooler weather, more snow - Salishan
speakers pushed upstream from the coast - people began to process and store
food - Plateau Pithouse Tradition - kekuli - four thousand years until horses
early 1800s.
High elevation meadows of Hat Creek Valley
Ashcroft is on Quesnel Terrane, then west is Cache
Creek Terrane - fossil remains of tiny organisms found only in Asian waters
Imagine that: the rocks in the hillside across
from the Cache Creek post office ferried through millions of years of continental
drift all the way across the basin of the Pacific Ocean on the back of a
moving plate of the ocean's crust, a vast geological conveyor belt, before
being scraped off, at last, against whatever remained of the Quesnel Terrane's
island arc.
East of the Fraser "relatively gentle uplands
of the Intermontane Belt part of North America for a hundred million years
before the Coast Belt on the west side".
At a place a bit north of Lillooet salmon are optimum
fatness for storing and hot air makes it possible to wind-dry without smoking.
The blue on beetle-killed timber is blue stain
fungus whose spores are carried in a mouth sac. Mountain pine beetles eat
it to develop their wings.
Sandhill cranes migrate to the central valley of
CA. One of the longest fossil records of any bird, possibly ten million
years.
16
- over the fire, beneath the holy ones as they
grow dark
- as a falcon flies as a falcon flies
- beneath the holy ones as they grow dark
- may Unis rise into the fire.
- They make a path for Unis, Unis takes the path,
- Unis becomes the falcon star.
- From an Egyptian tomb. Calling stars the holy
ones and sun the fire. And falcon star - rather a falcon than a dog.
17
Sunday morning with open sky before sunrise.
I was reading a story written by a woman I'd never
heard of. It had a quality I can't recover now, as if it touched on an unknown
essence. I went on thinking of it through other dream events. The fact of
its quality had seemed a warrant for the value of art. I wanted to study
it but couldn't find it again.
18
The genius of the Biographia
lies in local passages, individual paragraphs and short sequences, chambers
within the crazy edifice, of unsurpassed clarity and power.
I'm in those passages trying to understand C's dichotomy and what he
thought he was defending.
mediated the faculties demonstrating that the
Senses were living growths and developments of the Mind & Spirit
to have affirmed a Fall, in some sense to point
out however a manifest Scheme of Redemption of Reconciliation from this
Enmity with Nature
he will show the literary tradition out of which
they worked .... It will show that the power "in which all Mr Wordsworth's
writing is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character
of his mind", was that of Imagination.
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader
by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving
the interest of novelty by the modifying powers of imagination
He had the usual fantasy of Faculties but also a notion of creative cognition
using some sort of wholeness, which I could maybe gloss as non-dissociation.
"that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated
the name of imagination". I can make sense of that as the cognitive
condition of what he called creation but I don't know why it should be called
imagination. This definition is implicitly cortical rather than rhetorical;
I don't know how it would be recognitized in a text. [wholeness - Emma Kunz image here]
This power, first put into action by the will
and understanding, and retained under their irremissive though gentle and
unnoticed control reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposites:
of sameness, with difference; or the general, with the concrete; the idea,
with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty
and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession,
with enthusiasm and feeling profound and vehement
It seems as if by Fancy he might mean thin random metaphoric language?
How would it be recognized as such?
His imagined opponent was Association which in those days was still mentalist,
ie association of 'ideas' rather than cortical networks, and thought of
as 'mechanical' rather than "Constructive or Dynamic." It's a
false contrast. In a cortical epistemology cognition is both associationist
and dynamic.
There have been men in all ages, who have been
impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and
to devote their attempts to its solution.
He had reason to worry about 'passivity' because he was often helpless.
conversion from a reductive concept of the human
mind ... passively registered physical experience .... In place of this
(or rather, subsuming it) was a transcendental idea of the mind with its
own mysterious and intuitive faculties, which actively shaped experience
and had access to spiritual dimensions beyond rational 'Understanding"....
in effect, a philosophic conversion from a materialist to a religious view
of the world.
He needed religious fantasy for other reasons but he doesn't need it
for ways he's experienced himself as mysterious and intuitive. I'm exasperated
here at the way even Holmes is willing to shunt 'mysterious and intuitive'
into notions of transcendence understood supposedly as transcendence of
body rather than transcendence of conscious function.
the free-will, our only absolute self ... the
imagination was a proof of the liberty of the human spirit
He only needed to defeat determinism because his epistemology was disembodied.
The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine
be true, did not in reality invent it, he only looked on, while the blind
causes
Thought of as an entire body the inventor of the watch did invent
it: both blind and conscious causes were his, were him.
But what he wanted was "the existence of an infinite spirit, of
an intelligent and holy will".
mind's self-experience in the act of thinking
evidently two powers at work, which relative to each other are active and
passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which
is both active and passive .... ... the IMAGINATION.
Always a good observer though not a disinterested theorist. The starting-stopping
experience when writing of waiting to see what's thought of or to hear a
word proposed.
But does there need to be something mediating? Is he actually as if feeling
the need for a shift in descriptive level? What IS needed physically is
a stable field that can hold both the query and the reply. It doesn't mediate
between but it as if is the medium of.
a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets,
which throws a cinc-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colors on the
sunny bottom of the brook
- There suddenly he's into self-experience or self-intuition of cortical
dynamics, another register.
What I actually think about his gift as a poet - like some others' -
is this sort of intuition of cortical and/or cosmic substrate. He was probably
right about his relative wholeness of function, some of his unsafe openness
being native and some of his unusual self-observation being helped by drugs.
philosophic Imagination, the sacred power of
self-intuition
He doesn't mean what I'd mean, though; he wants to take it to something
unintelligibly religious.
"Living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception" - primary
Im - is body, obviously. Body in world able to be about.
Secondary, "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create;
or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it
struggles to idealize and to unify," seems to be - in his case - writing
- both poetry and philosophy and whatever cognitive functionality makes
them possible.
Once a tall man came crunching over the pebbles
towards him, reciting Homer aloud to a small boy at his side. ... immediately
introduced himself with a flourish. "Sir, yours is a face I should know. I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge." It
turned out to be Henry Francis Cary, the first great English translator
of Dante
19
- Who invited him to dinner that very night and whose unnoticed little
book Coleridge then promoted in a lecture so it immediately sold a thousand
copies.
Goethe said that one sign of genius was postumous
productivity
Holmes gave him fifteen years. 1989 and 1998 so
through his forties. Age of wonder is 2008. b.1945.
the dead live there / And move like winds of
light on dark and stormy air
Is Shelley.
Holmes returning to London to an apartment on
Highgate Hill where he found himself being stalked by the subject of his
next major biography: "The figure of Coleridge . . . was walking slowly
down that hill."
unexpected late marriage with the novelist Rose
Tremain
20
since I feel how great a part he was of me,
his great and dear Spirit haunts me
The one I've kept liking in this book is Charles Lamb, gently sardonic,
accurately fond.
21
He stayed with thoughts that didn't work.
22
- "Is your purpose to protect me?"
-
- "No."
-
- "What is it, then?"
-
- "To be there on the day when you decide
to join us."
- There I burst into tears. I become two, one dark large near thing sobbing,
one calm kind small thing, a little above and to the right, watching. Maybe
it's three things - one noticing them both and speaking, asking what it
is I'm sobbing for.
I was sobbing because no one will do that for me. I'll be alone for the
rest of my life because there's no one. Except for that tiny calm kind thing,
whatever it is.
- Is it enough
yes
-
It has been warm enough so I can strip dead stuff and fluff dirt in the
east fence beds. It's light work but I'm stressed by it, have to stop and
walk around, quit before I've done much.
Instead of taking my pulse these days I turn my wrist and watch it beating
in a little bubble near the base of the palm. I seem to see it hesitate
at being watched.
b. 1919
In Rhodesia 1925-1949
London when 30
Martha Quest
(1952) 33
A Proper Marriage
(1954) 35
A Ripple from the Storm
(1958) 39
The Golden Notebook
(1962) 43
Landlocked (1965)
46 - Philadelphia Association 1965 Kingsley Hall with David Cooper
Dialectics of Liberation conference
1967
The Four-Gated City
(1969) 50
I met her January 1971 - she was presumably working on Briefing
or putting together Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972)
She and Sigal took acid with Laing. Were the state changes she describes
in 4-gated - began to describe in Landlocked - acid rather
than the causes she describes?
- David 1931-1986 (aged 54-55) so he was 40 when he stayed with us
- Rosalynde de Lanerolle 1932-1993 so she was early 40a
23
Reading the first section of 4-gated last night I was feeling
again how rich those few years were, how fast and deep I got into London
for instance compared to Greg and the other Canadians who came at the same
time. I listed contacts and places and thought how when I wrote an intro
for the London section I could link names to their passages. And then imagining
doing that I was feeling how little I made of the access I so easily won.
I wrote so glancingly that I don't think anything I wrote then would be
worth posting now. Saying that comparing myself to Lessing's amazing sharpness.
- The country fair palm reader surprized my intelligence would develop
so late - what was that?
- When I remember myself then I seem not blank but open, my head an innocent
open thoughtless space of clear warm air.
-
- Do you think that's accurate YES
That innocence is what gave me access and at the same time prevented
me from registering it very deeply.
- It's from my dad no
- From being sent away yes
- It's not something dissociated, it's a social consciousness
that didn't develop yes
24
Reading Lessing differently now - competitively should I say - more doubtfully.
What are you hiding here. You are exaggerating, you're implausible. You're
calculating effects to make it in a hard market. You're wearing Laing. At
the same time trying to remember what I was grateful to take from her when
I was young.
This morning - it's 6:12 in the dark - a cloudy sky - in the red chair
reaching my long arm for the tea cup - I thought of a moment I've often
been proud of. We were on Nick Sieburts' yard playing volleyball. Ed was
opposite me across the net. He spiked the ball straight at me. There was
a look on his face: I've got you. I wasn't athletic then, I was clumsy,
but I got to it and as I got to it I yelled a completely unforeseen naked
yell of triumph. My spirit had blazed up without being called by me and
had shown us both what I was made of.
full of that grieving concern for others which
she had always called 'love'
She says of Martha's mother.
-
Thrilled with my beautiful rain barrel and meeting Caroline Hannah. We
were standing in her lower field in fading light under beginning spits of
rain, she leaning on the corner of the jeep and her black cat walking on
its roof. We were talking about paeonies and Harrison roses and the Gerrards'
house. She'd been in Merritt 63 years, she said, since she was 14. She was
the kind of woman who is pretty in her seventies, womanly in an old plaid
barn jacket.
25
Impatient with the later chapters of 4-gated. What I remember
are the early chapters when she's new in London. They're still riveting.
But when she leaves her own experience the book goes bloodless and implausible
and becomes a sort of hyped sociological flyover. By then I'm not interested
in any of her people including Martha herself so I don't care when she's
dead at the end. And she's a bad prophet; we're twenty years past her catastrophe
and many things are bad but not bad in her way. I doubt children are being
born super-telepaths.
26
And then comes the other section I vaguely remember, when she and Lynda
are in the basement Lynda circling the walls leaving rusty traces of blood.
It's the place where the book goes back into what holds in the early chapters.
I'll consider that more.
Meantime going on in In America seeing myself using her method.
I like it better when it's anchored in what actually happens. I often don't
trust her imagined scenes.
Yesterday I posted the paragraphs about Alastair Macaulay's description
of a ballerina's decline. "What I feel in it is his bravery in forecasting
his own decline as a writer. I thank him for the precision he cares to have
in his chosen work of seeing and naming even that. Only the best one has
done matters and all the doing since then has been deluded waste. It's the
harsh fact of a life in art." Nobody liked it! Except Jennifer when
I'd been back and forth with her. I'd been wondering whether people's likings
were genuine, maybe they don't even read what I post. So this is a test
everyone both passed and failed.
-
- I've judged myself unacceptable
- That's the sadness
- I don't find myself desirable
- Which pulls me down
- Full action solves it
- The judgment is of desirability but the true loss is of action
- Social action
- Do you think I am desirable
- Yes as a sane companion
- It's about being a companion rather than a statue
part 5
time remaining volume 7: 2018-19 july-april
work & days: a lifetime journal project
|