April 29 2019
Opened a doc in the Tom story folder, 1996, worked with it a bit and
now am feeling that if I were making that book, Tom and Being about,
I'd want to be alive to finish it. I'd brighten. Even if I couldn't walk
I'd want to be alive. - This after sending T a note for his birthday tomorrow.
- It's a good story, a turned-on story.
- Do you agree YES
- Orpheus is undoable no
- But I don't know how to do it yes
Look at this - the relation of 1. the resource I feel a man is,
who nakedly really wants me, and 2. the fact that romance is addictive.
-
Piecing together a Rome story feeling how callow and even snide the 21
year old is.
May 1
[Cox's Orange Pippin blossom] [Evans cherry tree]
[crabapple tree]
How to do this. Don't start from the beginning, start somewhere in the
deep midst. First edit everything just in obvious small smoothing ways.
It starts with the fast and ends with the defense. Volume 1. Volume 2 is
California and teaching letters. It ends when we bury the heart. Write background
and summaries and decide later whether to use them.
- Am I going to have time to do this
YES
- Both volumes YES
- Am I giving up Orpheus NO
- Can I do it in a year - first vol
no
- Two yes
- Another two for vol 2 no, one
-
- Vol 1 1995-2002
- Vol 2 2002-2014
- Vol 3 Being about
Childhood of the philosopher: theory's practice
2
Why I'm writing back and forth with Sonja though I understand that the
relation as with my other student fans isn't necessarily about me. Personal
reasons: I like to hear about her two places; I like her admiration; I like
her willingness to use what I give her. She asks me to talk about myself.
But an impersonal reason too: her placement. She has means to do things,
there's a chance that what I give her can make a larger difference. I'm
coaching her to go wider. I don't know whether she can but she recognizes
it when she sees it.
> was there physical work you particularly
enjoyed and/or felt strengthened by as a child?
we carried wood and water. my brother fed pigs. he and my sister fetched
the cows. my sister and i did saturday house cleaning and sewed our own
clothes. from the age of 12 i kept house and cooked all the meals when
my mom was in hospital. we got roped into weeding when needed. at threshing
time we'd carry lunches and shovel grain. when my dad was cultivating we'd
have to pick rocks. we'd wash the car for sunday church. i drove tractor
sometimes and my brother did all the hired man kinds of work once he was
in high school. with my dad there was never a question of enjoying it but
all of it gave us skill and skill's confidence and got us into the world.
when he was dying as a way of thanking him for what I honestly could I
told him the farm had been good for us. he said 'you know how to work'.
>> (said "you're the grown-up now")
> times when i could have used that
it should be printed on cards we could hand out when needed. you could
take a supply to give yourself during the board meeting.
> my brother showing up at 8am my dad's girlfriend
her mean smile my dad playing grandpa w z half-heartedly
being the grownup is tiresome unless one enjoys intelligence for its
own sake. you and m can have the added pleasure of sharing enjoyment of
it.
i used to have a version of this conversation with tom, who'd been a
bar-brawler and a rager who'd get fired for slugging people. i'd talk to
tarot cards with him and they said tom you aren't a gunfighter anymore,
you're the king of wands. then he'd go to work as hoist opperator on construction
sites and when someone tried to tweak him he'd say to himself, no tom,
you're the fucking king of wands and so be proud of himself.
> strength and courage and honesty can be so
despised ... being scapegoated for being strong ... i imagine you have
experienced as much?
it has seemed to me that the strongest motive in almost any relation
is a sort of subliminal competition at the level of human quality. people
are equal as citizens but they aren't equal as persons - some are more
intelligent, more talented, stronger, more perceptive, more graceful, more
alive, more fortunate, etc, and i think people covertly - i mean unconsciously
- are always comparing their own qualities with those of others. it is
devastating to notice that one is less marvelous than someone else so it
makes complete sense that strength and courage and honesty and beauty and
grace and aliveness and talent are punished by those who aren't fully in
their own power.
> how have you handled it in work contexts?
in two different ways depending on what i want to accomplish. in the
departments where i did grad work there were times of great fear and suffering
but i knew what i wanted to do so my strategy was to lie low and not let
anyone know what i was really working on until it was finished (and then
to call in a famous external examiner over their heads). for community
garden and garden design work and work with students i came to realize
that i could show my strength full force because it was clear that i was
working for the other's benefit. this is an important secret i think: people
will accept excellence so long as it is generous in an obvious way. (you
can see how this is related to being the grownup.)
> it is also frustrating how many people want
to work in philanthropy so they can be comfortable, unaccountable and lazy.
is it helpful to remember that even lazy unaccountable people would
rather be thrilling significant people if they could only discover how?
-
Came in in at five to a warm house with the big crock pot making stock.
Had been on a ladder cutting the silverlace vine back to the riser. Bright
clean air, wind in the canopy but quite a lot of shelter in the compost
corner.
When I pull up to the garden these days I'm amazed how green it is, how
much happens in the last half of April. Iris, maralroot, gooseberries and
currants, rhubarb, tulips. Iceland poppies white and yellow one of each,
primula, grape hyacinth, that early moss phlox, the dark red legs of paeony
clumps. The mauve Iris next to the steps has three buds.
I'm feeble in the morning, can't work bent forward without feeling faint,
but by midafternoon I'm quite strong though I have to get into hot water
when I come in and take an aspirin to keep from being sore. I'm saying that
with quiet joy, hatt vedah yehgonah. - I'm the only person who'll ever know
that's Ed speaking Plautdietch.
Still alive in end days I mean.
Should Back be called Wrapping up?
6
There is so much processing bulk that I'll have to get an overview of
each of the through-lines and then compress.
o Individual papers
o Phenomenology of theory
o Bookwork and Joyce
o Tom story
o Other people - do I need that for relief?
o Visual work, Orpheus?
- Thinking about Louie and the unconscious. Louie is mad at me because
I have been saying she is fighting dirty with Jam. I am seeing Louie's
evil in action - very determined and spiteful. She holds a long grudge
by holding it secretly from herself and then she strikes her blow by means
of secrets. Jam doesn't know what hit her. Louie gets furious when she
is found out because her effectiveness depends on her cover. She feels
she's being disarmed when she is found out. I feel her demon as a high-density
dwarf. Determined. A child, I guess, compact, compressed, intent.
-
- Artists have to be in touch with, in work with, the unconscious, so
keeping secrets from them disables them. Louie's freakouts demonstrate
that she's exquisitely sensitive to inner disparity of knowledge. But she
doesn't take the route of good conscience. I think yoga forces the uncon,
the way drugs do. Get the goods without sacrificing the defense, which
is always a self-suppression.
-
- Louie is busy trying to figure out whether it was really me who managed
her into her crash with Jam. It's true there was teamwork. I brought her
Ja-Min knowing Jam would stagger. I suggested she should live there. I
tore up and replanted the oregano. Last time I met Jam at the house I sneered
openly as if she'd fallen for bait. What else. I do want to expose Louie's
two-facedness that has her everywhere thought well of. "Louie has
piles of ego but she is smart enough to conceal it." It has been teamwork
all around. Jam is so vainglorious she doesn't take account of her weaknesses
and so can be harmed. Louie hides her vengefulness and so it is easy to
enlist it. And me - I certainly have it in for Jam and for Louie in her
aspect of femme rivale. They mostly did this one themselves but it pleases
me. It pleases me to see Louie's demon exposed because it has used the
same tricks on me. I am getting a measure of her method. My weakness has
been (it says) that I think the story is over.
Putting that there because I'm taking it out of Theory's practice
and maybe it's relevant to what's happening now.
7
Note from Sue, "vivid and quietly surprising". I liked quietly
surprising.
Anne's book. I was eager for it but halfway through I'm exhausted. My
editor's eye was snagging on things she should have noticed, especially
repetitions. Sometimes she was doing what she does well, reconstituting
her young scepticism and humor, but this book is should I say cold - she's
noting the culture because it's going to be gone when her cohort is gone
but she's not feeling its death. Is it the Mennonite blankness? Life locked
into village and family. I understand why in her 80s she'd want to give
her days to remembering herself at MEI, which was both expansive and sheltered,
and I suppose she's writing for those of her cohort who are still alive,
but was there ever a vivid word or a bit of interesting rhythm? It's a survey.
She's not in it.
8
Hacking at Theory's practice or whatever it will be called puzzling
now about what to leave out. I've said Tom and work but there are bits about
Louie, Rowen, Nathalie, that I like as writing. I like the writing altogether.
There's almost nothing I need to do to it, occasionally a comma to take
out. It's spirited.
- true love of the exasperated kind
Is it ultimately about conditions of function. What it took emotionally
for a woman to be that clear and pointed and persistent in theory was repeatedly
having to mediate traumatized instinct and cultural pressure.
- Would you say that's it, that's the story
yes
-
- I was trying to feel it out - he is the spine behind me, I think; she
is the light of heart I face into the world. I think that's right.
10
NB the date I say he'll never read Norman Rush is 15 Feb 1998 - don't
forget to link it. "Maybe in five or ten years you'll be ready to read
this book."
Its style is perfect for what I want to do, can I do it that way?
-
Haven't mentioned itching burning rash on my wrists and the backs of
my hands.
-
Took the Mac Pro tower to Darrell's inefficient computer shop. Joe from
the video shop blew out its dust, carried it into the house for me and said
he liked The sound of insects I'd lent him.
13
Part 5 Crossing the border is very long. I'm seeing that I'm doing
two things at once or maybe three. I'm editing the original as what it is.
There's not a lot to do to make it read well. (Should I start replacing
text online with edited. If I say so in the intro? I've removed things in
the Theory's practice edit that I should put back if so.) To my sense
of it TP is about psychological work and theory work and their relation,
plus lots of time and place. That leaves out my kids and friends and so
a lot of the texture of real life.
Questions:
o I want to tell Tom's story because it interests me but how much of
that to indulge.
o How to handle the bookwork - there's too much of it.
o How to handle the theory - it's too compressed.
- Am I right about the aim of the project, that it's about
how a woman comes to breakthroughs in theory YES
- Is the Tom story separate no
- Leave out my kids yes
- One thing I'm sure of is keep the place-time descriptions.
- Because they're the joy of life
yes
- Leave out my other friends yes
- But keep Nathalie yes
-
- Bundle it with the papers no
- Should I do a separate edit of the full Tom story
no
- Leave it as part of the whole yes
Resist making it self-flattering.
There's so much I don't want to give up. I have to keep remembering the
full record will still be there.
15
Posted Ed's Gulf of Mexico story, more usual a story than than most of
what I post, and then find out who else has read and not liked what
else I post. 6 men showed up.
When I had transplanted a few little things this aft my heart felt so
wobbly I had to stop. It's been that if I bend forward to weed in the mornings
I feel I'll faint but by afternoon I'm alright. Today I couldn't work till
evening.
Little jump of pleasure when there's a letter from Sonja. She admires
me and asks questions and has scope.
16
Think about what it is about commas, why I have used so much too many
and others do too. It's a breaking-up. Why I took them for granted and don't
like them now.
- Luke wrote an email that was signed, "your Luke". I felt
him, reading it - that ache of love so much my own - I felt him as a space,
a quality of space - wide and warm - something like a tint of clear warm
brown - his grace of writing - a tempo in his thoughtfulness.
17
Looking at the bookwork in those years I'm seeing it was making me able
to do what I did at Goddard - I should look closer at how, exactly - but
the question I'm feeling is whether that work was like a 48 hour labour
to bring forth a mouse. And if so whether I'd somehow deserved so pitiful
a success.
- Was it worth the effort YES
- How so community, acceleration (chariot),
in coming through, withdrawal
- On such a small scale yes
- Because it was the best I could do
no
- Did I deserve so small a success
NO
19
It's a story about tackling patriarchy in person and in philosophy at
the same time.
- Should I include my sons in that
yes
- Will you help me find a way to talk about you
yes
Ways tackling patriarchy includes tackling the mother.
John Clare's journal. October 13, 1832. "I
do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons
etc."
- What kind of book do I want to write. A meditation on first philosophy.
I want to say: these are some of the difficulties we've had when we think
about mind. Here is how we can work around them. This is a demonstration
at the same time as it is an explanation. A beautiful transition is being
made, but it is being made by a series of overlapping shifts. It is a transition
in a manner of speaking. An old metaphor is being used to try to think
in the new way, and it is holding us up, but if we try to speak without
it we are misunderstood, and indeed we misunderstand ourselves too.
20
I was with Louie in a distant suburb. There was
a gay bar or coffeehouse she wanted to go to. She was running there through
empty streets and I was surprised to find that I was running alongside her.
At the beginning of the run there was a large schoolyard. Because the houses
were small I asked whether it was a poor suburb. We got there and were standing
in a large open room with someone behind a bar. She was exasperated. "You're
so boring." I mocked the high-voiced squealing I thought she thought
being interesting was like and walked over to page through a magazine but
then I pulled up and walked out. Would I remember the way back. I thought
I would though there were a lot of turns. This time I could see larger houses
some streets away. Yes there was the schoolyard though I'd come to it by
one street further. Then she was there and I was telling her what I thought
was up. I said she'd moved up socially and wanted to leave me behind, no
longer wanted me as a tenant, didn't want to be my executor - a long energized
paragraph. Woke abruptly.
- Are those things true no
I was sure you'd say yes. Evidence: forgetting my birthday, not reading
Peter's piece, contemptuous exasperation last time, not wanting to see the
FB pieces, being more wrapped up in her family, suggesting a motor wheelchair,
hidden impatience sometimes.
- Those are true evidence no
- She does think I'm boring yes
-
- Do you want to say more (hierophant),
subtle, friendship, oppression
- She feels unseen no
- Too seen yes
- She feels compromised with Ina YES
- Is that the essence of it yes
- Would she admit it no
- Is she still interested as well as bored
yes
- But she's not free YES
- Is there more I need to know no
- It's going to be like that from now on
no
- Did she hate those little pieces
no
- Liked them too much yes
-
- From there to putting my journal on the web. I suddenly saw I could
put photos on the web with it. I could put the whole thing up.
That was February 2000.
- Do you have a name for it
- The search
- Is this what you want me to do
- Yes
- The search was for a way to live at capacity
- Yes
-
Ellie, would you be at all open to the idea of
me or me and some other people pooling together some money to pay you to
teach us more embodiment things, or whatever you're currently working on
and interested in? Sometime this summer I or a small crew could find a camp
ground near wherever you're located and then meet with you and hear you
talk/ show things over the course of a few days? I've found ways to teach
myself some things. And found other people who teach other things well.
But nobody else describes the world into existence as precisely as you do
and it's gold.
I was just remembering the sentence where I say theory is also an art
- seeing that the passages I'm working on show me working on theory as an
artist does.
21
Its working title is Theory's practice. I'm working with my journals
from 1995-2002 when I was doing two parallel hard things, developing a philosophy
of mind as body and dealing with myself in deep love with a man who was
a microcosm of patriarchy. Those two tasks were related in a way that I
don't think has been described and though the whole story is there in the
transcribed and posted journals it is seeming to me it should be set out
in a more compact accessible form before I die - I should write a book.
I don't know whether I still have the wit and energy and time to do it but
if I do I thought there could be a second volume based on my Goddard letters
because they demonstrate that deeply feminist struggle's outcomes in relation
to many kinds of particular question.
- The main ideas and the order they came in.
- This first section is what sets up everything else, and yet it is or
seems to be the last thing I've learned. And yet it was implicit in what
else I found.
-
- Are there nameable developments in the Tom story too.
- The cost of the work.
- Theory, Tom and Joyce/therapy/larger self as the apex of the Lovers
triangle.
24
I was at the computer desk this aft looking toward dark sky over the
ridge. Torrents of rain on the street. For a second due north over the golf
course a thick brilliant line of fire quivering sky to earth. Then a black
tremendous breaking splitting sound above the roof.
25
Cathy got out of a yellow Liberty and thanked me for the garden. "It
lifts my spirit."
First thing every morning I pick among the small stories and edit a bit,
move them into the ready file. That gives me pleasure but afterwards in
the last days I don't want to go to Theory's Practice as if I've
already lost interest.
- Is it because I've told people about it
yes
- Is it fatal no
- Because telling it empties its social motive
no
- Because their mediocrity gloms onto it
NO
- I feel their doubt YES
- Will you help me
move along female intuition's, revolution, stands against, despair
- Remember what it's for yes
- Telling them somehow invokes despair
yes
- By moving the project from my own bubble to a public
arena yes
28
Will need to explain why and what I was processing. Traumatic injuries
that stop what else I was trying to do. It's necessarily repetive. Am learning
how to do it and learning how it works.
What the holds were. Men, lameness and exclusion, self-conflict about
independence and sex,
Fear of men worked through in relation to Tom a kind of laboratory. What
checks there are to women's articulation. How much is specific to my upbringing,
how much is general.
The whole texture of pain, fear, uncertainty again and again.
Ask who it could be useful to. Not everyone
A first principle, that blame is inefficient, that self-responsibility
is how to step up.
-
L shoulder yesterday all day and by late afternoon throbbing spikes so
bad I phoned Donna and asked her to bring me the strongest anti-inflammatory
we could get over the counter. Day before that a spot above the R hip that
was bad but not excruciating and had the effect of releasing the places
in that drive train - ankle, knee, hip - that have been making me hobble
on and off for weeks.
All day trembly and helpless, read till I finished Oracle bones
and then had to just lie.
29
In October 2000 I hadn't finished all the chapters but suddenly envisaged
a mind and land foundation.
- Did you actually want me to do that
no
- Could I have yes
- It was a spin-off chapter yes
- You were consoling me in the hell of that semester
yes
It's a sudden spurt sideways. I don't know whether to clip it into its
own document - ie delete it - or include it.
30
Include it because it's for chapter 12.
31
Waking in daylight turning onto my back gradually
remembering parts of a dream that was like legend or television. I noticed
that a large child walking beside me had put on fanciful leather armour
as if he'd thought I was going to need escorting on a journey. We saw to
the northeast a jagged range of white mountain - white like white marble
- with a black road threading it. That must be where we're going.
Yesterday late afternoon sitting on the sidewalk scooting along on my
bum to weed the fence edge. It's thick with feathery California poppy and
other wildflower seedlings all young and bright and I was liking to notice
how right the weed seedlings looked among them, goosefoot for instance,
young and bright too and of the right meadowy forms.
Happiness of light and warmth and invention and for this while nothing
hurting.
Praise then darkness and creation unfinished. The
good of grace at meals.
June 1
[entrance path] [Festiva Maxima]
Working through 2001 I keep feeling the processing is the same as Sufi
work but found in my own terms.
2
Congeneris Foundation, discover why I dropped the idea.
- I want sometimes to be with people who work the way I want to, and
sometimes to be with the odd and free of the world in the moment. I want
to go on living in trust and learning with the book, I want to keep rebuilding
everything mistaken in my structure.
-
- Is there more I should want? To use all the strength I have in reserve
it says. Should I want that instead of other things? No, in addition. It's
saying take care not to want ease (which I do want).
-
- More? Yes, name your husband. Dare to name Tom? Yes. Just dare to want
him? Yes. It's better for the connection if I don't want him. No. He wants
me more if I don't want him. Yes but that is not the point, being honest
in the wanting is.
-
- If I were to be simple and love my life I have endless stories to tell.
-
Sunday 8pm, slate blue storm sky to the east, blast of white light from
the west onto the silver tree now in soft leaf and dancing its long wooly
arms.
Luke on the phone this morning. Photos of Roy's birthday gathering this
morning. Rose arbour, lawn, Turkish carpet, tribe of sons and sons' wives
and grandchildren. How did that deranged man come to so sheltered an end.
3
Write about it in terms of base commitments and their working-out.
6
A love affair with so much thinking wd seem bizarre to people. How much
of that struggle is general, how much is my own kink.
Yesterday morning a bit of dream that was as if
seeing from our yard at midsummer an earliest dawn, exactly the clear far
long horizon with just a smudge of pink. I woke thinking the dream
gave me what I wouldn't be have been able to imagine as well. A high pure
dawn.
8
Dreamed my blue linen shirt and black linen pants.
Was glad to see them.
-
When I step into the garden in the mornings the smallest effort makes
me feel I'll keel over. I've been wanting not to talk about that.
- My heart is seriously damaged no
- Could I get stronger no
- I'm in heart failure NO
- Blood pressure too low no
- Dehydrated YES
- Can you tell me how many more years I'll live
yes
- Do you want to no
-
I've been editing Louie out but no she should be there.
9
On the last day we will not ascend from the
place of the world, but will remain as in our own country and go home into
another world, into another principle of another quality ... This earth
will be like a crystalline sea, where all the wonders of the world will
be seen, all entirely transparent, and the radiance of God will be the light
within it. [Boehme]
-
Wow in the early days, March 1996, it's already laid out so clearly in
the bookwork.
I was so extraordinarily incompetent at what I was doing that I am a
good illustration of the work. Being coached.
There is so much repetition - and for years - that I will have to say
I'm excerpting and summarizing.
How to talk about the uncon and the person-figures.
Part 2 is exhausting endless trying to process about T not coming. Later
on that amount of energy goes into work.
10
In what way is it one adventure. With him I realized I could not be in
right relation before I had cleaned up my own structure. With philosophy
I was asking what is a person. Working with myself and him I was gleaning
grounded understanding of how persons go wrong and get right. In philosophy
I was making a platform that could include that understanding. It was all
about integrating. Making a theory emotional processing could work with.
- This isn't right yet.
11
Lately my little posted bits have not been much liked. People are feeling
there's too much about me. Are they too much about me? I think of them as
being about anyone.
Styles of theory and practice still so far apart, what to do with that.
Part 1 The Golden West is narrative/lyrical and segregates the work of
Brain and imagining. Balance that better -
This morning jibbing at Part 1, I don't yet know why.
12
It there actually somewhere it starts. When it begins I'm 49 and when
it ends 57. The thesis begins as a modish question about perceptualization
and when does it billow into deep epistemology. Should I say it hardens
into. The thesis as proposed but otherwise the question I am actually interested
in. Beginning with Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
14
Riding a horse through snowy fields feeling myself
slipping to the left, clamping with my right leg to stay on, pulling back
on the reins to slow the horse. Moving through a lit basement room with
workmen standing among groups of lamps and was it bedboards with the names
of hotels on them.
Paul asleep in his Mercedes camper at the front door.
15
Do I want to say anything about Paul. Just the pleasure of seeing him
lighter and clearer, kindly and prosperous and interested.
Scent of mock orange in the room.
First canning, strawberries tucked into the cupboard tonight.
17
Neck pain. Two days increasing and then by last night so bad I froze
when I was turning to rise.
19
Yesterday with Paul Pennask Lake Road up onto grassland so high and wide
we could see coast mountains. New grass, last of the flowers, horses.
21
The green sea came and went on its slow long shore. Frigate birds cruised
north exactly over the coastline and pelicans dropped like suddenly folded
umbrellas.
- Was going to post woman washing her hair this morning with photos
and needed a few more sentences. Wrote those and was glad I could.
L neck still has what feels like a too-short muscle but picked and canned
12 jars of strawberries. Sat at the kitchen table fixing my nice blue pyjama
pants.
23
Posted the getting saved story this morning.
My calculation was wrong because it ignored the costs of selling myself
out. A cost of being betrayed into self-betrayal is loss of community: I
wrote them off in that event; said, I'm alone here. The other cost is loss
of integrity. I said I was opening my heart when I wasn't opening my heart.
I went into stasis. I understand they were doing to me what had been done
to them and yet such losses go deep and must be felt as what they are.
There are half a dozen believing relatives now who will or won't read
it.
26
Rooms full of stuff I've somehow accummulated.
A few bits of it are my own that I need take with me but what will I do
with all this other ugly junk.
27
Freya said like Kerouac accounts of a free and wandering life. I said
the free and wandering parts of a life.
29
000 Origins.
Orpheus & Eurydice: alternate organizations.
Where are they: Cracking about my dad. Cracking about abandonment. The
child's bravery.
I want nothing to do with the Louie sections. It's a hard unforgiveness.
I want it to start after that.
30
This leg and its life of disgrace.
Disgusted by the emotionality with Louie and not by the later
emotionality with Tom. What's different in the times with Louie and with
men. With Louie I get furious. Furious that she's wanting to curb me. Tom
does too in his automatic way but I don't take it personally.
Too much dream record. Hardly any work record though I am working alright.
July 1
[east fence edge] [purples in the nectarine
bed] [cabbage and lettuce leaves]
- The universe of personal fear opens. Three kinds of threat, that are
threats of the same pain, clear to see - clear to see - why my body sighs
yes when I say it's more peaceful without her - of the dissolution of the
defenses current.
-
- What am I seeing - that loving boys has always saved me from the crucifying
treachery of women - and that other women have their identities safe by
just that transfer - and that I have it complicated in two ways - by a
much more global treachery and by having the transfer to father blocked
by the nature of mine. - And that men are more vulnerable and maybe more
driven mad by the nature of their personal choice. So I'm like men in being
more vulnerable and more driven mad.
-
- And oh the grinding is here again, protest and defense, the voice I
was so glad not to be. But it will fade. Something will go out of things
though. It has already gone out of the Christmas tree, a fullness given
by love in reserve.
-
- How is it that my feeling him supports me? As if I'm floated by the
sense of a possibility. That, by itself. Thinking of him floats me. Imagining
him, seeing him. All day, when I'm not working. It feeds me with pleasure.
-
- Phil after the screening. The way his face hesitates and jumps when
he speaks, as if many things might be said and only a few are.
6
- When Frank left at 10:30 there sat Grandfather in his spectacles with
his finger ready to point. "Jetzt sag' mir mal, was für eine
Verbindung hapt ihr beide?" As I was stammering in ungrammatic circles
and Grandfather was going on to tell me that, if we didn't have marriage
in prospect what-the-heck were we up to, and if we did we'd better forget
it because "ihr passt nicht zuzammen". Grandmother, to my delight,
sprang up in my defense with her evening pigtail on end, diverting Grandpa
by bringing the conversation back to him, side-tracking him with irrelevancies,
teasing him, laughing at him, running mischievous circles around his earnest
little warning. And besides, "Na, ich weiss nicht. Der Frankie gefällt
mir." Grandpa didn't have much of a chance so I wrapped up my argument
very humbly with a Grandpa-ism, "Na, Grosspa, die Sache ist die: wir
haben ihnen vom Schlafen gehalten und dafür bin ich sehr sorry."
And when I'd gone to bed I heard him in the bedroom reproaching her for
interfering. "Aber Papa, du fingst so böse an." Then they
said their prayers.
-
- This morning Grandpa said good morning a bit anxiously, wondering if
I was beleidicht and not speaking, and when I wasn't he was so relieved
he made up another Kartoffeln joke: like elephant jokes, his jokes about
my legendary love of potatoes are mostly a bit wacky, but he makes up three
or four a day, whenever he wants to be friendly to me.
What do I want to say about these paragraphs from Clearbrook in 1965.
Their tone is so secure, not only in relation to my grandparents but also
in relation to who I was writing for. I knew my parents, both of them, would
like the story and more than that would have to admire me in it. I was twenty
years old and standing in my context of origin with established mastery.
11
This morning early I posted the paragraph about Ed saying Would you still
want her. Crashing silence from my usual readers because they can't say
'like'. Jim Mann for most of the day was the only person who would admit
to having seen it ('sad'). Later on Karen Campbell said the same. What do
I think would have been the right response. Somebody saying What an asshole.
Pile of crusher chips delivered. First Munstead Wood. Matthiola and sweetpea
scenting the room - it's 9:30, writing in the dark.
Hard mornings, heart shaky, light-headed if I try to work, baffled and
scared. It gets better in the early afternoon.
12
Good day from the beginning. Wasn't feeble. Garden photos. Tremaine graveled
the paths, I canned raspberries and red currants, Luke sent a note. Surprised
noticing I'm stronger for instance getting up off the little bench in the
garden and the verandah couch.
16
- I lived in a ghetto for many years and now I am an embedded reporter
in the Evil Empire. Isolation is not needed but steady sorting, moment
by moment, is.
-
- And what about recovering early love, restoring and living on in early
love - that's the real embedded reporting. But is it possible? Without
martyrdom?
[The Lark Ascending]
18
- Pinned in place and isolated, Joyce would say, is the structure you
are. Investigate it. Feel it.
-
- One thing before it, another after. It's the hinge, a breathless place
between them, a white hole.
-
- I don't have any way to get to feeling
NO
- Please tell me aggressive action
to strengthen love woman
-
- Find out what she cares about and go for it
- Do you mean that catatonic person
- That's the real love woman
- I'm closer to her now
- Feel the way I am that
In 2004 after Tom was gone six months of suffering and then suddenly
I was through, posting journal and using the jeep to camp.
19
I said that wondering whether it could happen again. If my health somehow
was better I'd perk right up.
Your garden is AMAZING said a woman in the supermarket, it gets better
all the time.
21
Greg last night: "Earlier this evening, I
was watching a CNN film about the Apollo 11 mission, and in the intro they
said that, a few minutes before 11:00 PM Eastern Time, they would mark the
exact time at which, 50 years ago, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface
of the moon. That also means that roughly 50 years and one hour ago, you
and I were sitting in the side bedroom of the flat I shared in Crouch End
watching the historic first step on our fuzzy black-and-white TV set. I
remember clearly that, as we watched, I felt pleased that you were there
too."
-
I'd been somewhere in the back country northwest
of the farm seeing swamp willow scrub bulldozed every which way. It made
me think of paintings or drawings with short parallel lines in grey, dark
red, orange, set at different angles to each other. I was wanting to look
up a piece I was remembering in the art magazine whose name I couldn't remember
in the dream. Woke recalling what it was like to live where I could
find wonderful things in libraries. What it would be like to be an artist
still keen and searching. The squalor of these feeble years. I didn't know
what I was given by my strong heart. Tom noticed it the first time he held
me. The man in Melbourne who studied pulses, the optometrist in San Diego.
The pulse workshop at Goddard where I discovered how thready other women's
pulses were and then mine boom, boom, boom.
23
- She could read when she started school so when the class was going
to do reading they'd say, Susan you can go read in the library. It went
on that way through all the grades. In the mobile library there was a woman
who'd bring her books, bundles with her name on them. In fifth grade she
was reading at 11th grade level and a teacher said Do you understand what
this means? The New York Times is written at an 8th grade level. Grownups
are stupid. They are going to tell you a lot of things that aren't true.
Don't forget this.
-
- She wasn't eating or sleeping, working all night. We settled down when
I said what I felt about her story of having the freedom of the school,
walking through empty corridors on her own. She was mad at herself because
she'd learned to narrate her walk. I said she wasn't crediting the way
she'd been exiled into her privilege and sent into the free space of knowledge
alone - and isn't there terror in that - so she gave herself the companion
of a narrating voice. I said I've understood grief and shame about bad
language but doesn't it just mean there's been a lot of her life where
she didn't have good company.
Jennifer instantly "So much I want to say about that". Then
Freya's Nancy "I was that girl too." Through the day the women
it collected - Cheryl, Indra, Emilee, Val and Sue - who know all about the
last line. Makes me feel this one was useful.
25
> Perhaps you could recommend a section of
the journal
The section called The golden west might be the best written
though it has boggy patches of obsessive figuring-out. It's the beginning
of the doctorate, starts with some funny episodes of miscellaneous dating,
goes on to the first semester at UCSD (the Churchlands) and meeting Tom,
then the whole American adventure and the immense adventure of the thesis.
> I can't say I was particularly aware of sub-standard
or intrusively-obvious writing issues. Is it possible you are being too
hard on your earlier self?'
My young self could get an episode down swiftly and directly and took
strong visual imprint and had verbatim memory for conversations when she
was interested. There was always a basic lucidity, effort to be honest,
and that's not nothing, but when I look at the early writing there's seldom
even a short passage that strikes me as writing.
> curious as to what might have changed the
quality of your journal writing . Any thoughts?
So many thoughts I can only zip across the tips of them. There was a
first shift in the London years when I was newly trying to be an artist.
I was reading poets and among other things sometimes trying to write more
lyrically. Result often not good in ways I dimly and desperately knew were
not good without understanding why.
What happened next was an almost complete breakdown of the old sorts
of journal writing. When I got to Vancouver newly certified as an experimental
filmmaker I fell in with a group of avant-gardish artists most of whom
used drugs and some of whom were writers. I was suspicious of drugs and
experimented just a bit but the bit I did, combined with being comprehensively
trashed by people with a competitive agenda I didn't understand, wiped
out my brain for a while. I couldn't write narrative anymore, I could only
write scraps of notes. There was something more deliberate too (this journal
section is called Going for broke), a sort of exercise. I tried to write
so everything was described as consciousness rather than as real in the
world, very minute and self-observing, something drugs support. In retrospect
a useful exercise but unreadable to almost anyone (though not everyone).
Then I went to live up north in farmhouses to try to recover, and did,
gradually, but still, again, was ashamed of anything I wrote.
In my last month up north I got into a box Jam had left behind and there
fell into a book called The Pound era by Hugh Kenner, which to my
joy touched off my own latent intuitions about poetry. (I'm still rereading
it.) It gave me an in to a beginning of writing I actually liked but it
wasn't journal narrative. Instead I'd begun to mine the journal for single
lines or short passages to use in non-journal.
After Jam and the years up north what happened was that I began to have
a life again, things to tell. Community garden, Rowen, Louie, sex and fun.
Luke came from England. I wasn't being a writer anymore but again had things
I wanted to tell. Journal was getting narrative back for that reason but
the real reason the writing was better was Joyce. I started taking therapy
seriously. What I can see looking back is that earlier journals are worse
writing because I wasn't on my own emotional foundation yet. Joyce got
me there. Lyric effort and drugs and evil lesbians and solipsistic experiment
were trying to get there by means that didn't work.
And then there was going back to school and having to write philosophy
papers, which notched me up into more speed and grip on top of realer and
clearer feeling.
27
Woke to rain. The blue spruce this morning is so unusually blue. Standing
there next to its mid-green mate.
- Having to think out how to make the decline look like [sketch] rather
than [sketch]. That's from a book that says do 2 hrs of aerobics 4 days
a week and an hour of weights 'til it hurts 2 days a week. Theory is that
this will reset default shutting-down process by turning on repair C10.
-
- Benefits -
- o better circ, therefore better memory, alertness
- o keep bone
- o not falling because better neural resp
- o more mitochondria better nourished therefore more energy
-
- Can I have those results with less? Because that would take the whole
day.
Kate in San Francisco:
Is it ok if I share the link to your journals
with a Rosen class? They keep on asking how I articulate what I know and
I keep mentioning the power of reading your journals.
I think a lot can be picked up from the journals
because the storyline puts certain points into a vivid context.
This morning it was about noticing who can know
what and how and how much. Saying a lot in as simple a way as I could. I
think they're interested in how to articulate things we're not 'supposed'
to know about self or group with authority.
How to say it simply so that it becomes visible
to others too. While being bullied. While maintaining calm command. And
good timing and tone.
I'd said earlier:
I'm committed to a hard project I shouldn't let myself be distracted
from. Its working title is Theory's practice. I'm working with my
journals from 1995-2002 when I was doing two parallel hard things, developing
a philosophy of mind as body and dealing with myself in deep love with a
man who was a microcosm of patriarchy. Those two tasks were related in a
way that I don't think have been described and though the whole story is
there in the transcribed and posted journals it is seeming to me it should
be set out in a more compact accessible form before I die - I should write
a book. I don't know whether I still have the wit and energy and time to
do it but if I do I thought there could be a second volume based on my Goddard
letters because they demonstrate that deeply feminist struggle's outcomes
in relation to many kinds of particular question.
The patriarch in Theory's practice was Tom, twenty years of actual
struggle both helpfully and harmfully happening at the same time as trying
to write theory. There's a huge amount of material to evaluate and sort
and make decisions on. Difficulties are how to deal with neurophilosophical
technicalities and how to deal with ever-repeated slow emotional processing.
28
Cathar belief had a rite of death where the dying starve themselves
in their last days - there was a name for it - inconsolatio? Something
like that.
- [Ida Rolf notes]
-
- collagen myofascial connective tissue
- can be changed by adding energy
- fascial connective tissue is the organ of structure
- relation of the body to the gravitational field
- rolfers are integrating something
- structure overstressed and shortened, skewed
so the joints can't set up verticality
- Flow of fluid giving interchange from bloodstream
-
- Anything that contributes to really good physiology
is properly part of a moral code. 63
-
- Structure gives you a criterion by which to evaluate
people.
-
- Look at the person in terms of his shoulders,
the way his neck sits, and the way his cranium sits on his neck. 190
-
- a time in the course of - when you see that your
[client] is able to align but doesn't want to
-
- misunderstanding the way we build a body
-
- "top of my head up and back of my waist
back" every 15 minutes, just say it
-
- Fascia on the outside will be so tight ... it
will tend to protect the area that's in trouble ... If you are doing the
right thing and there isn't some deep pathology, the fascia will let go.
-
- A rolfer wants to get it so that individual elements
inside that bandage are able to slide and organize and adjust with movement.
August 1
[August garden]
- Here's my guess - a form of peripheral vascular disease that is from
motor neuron fatigue not atherosclerosis. I'll try acetyl-l-carnitine,
improving mitochondrial energy, combined with CoQ10 with meal, fats, flaxseed.
Decreases lactic acid.
Bemused. Yesterday I looked up the exam results day from 56 years ago
to see whether it could be one of my FB stories. Awkward, not good, but
I copied and pasted it. This morning I zipped through it clipping this and
that and posted it doubtfully.
- This morning an early mist on the fields enclosing us in the evergreen
hedges around the farm. An exuberant climb into the tall fir tree, climbing
higher, pausing to think that yesterday my marks came, that I'm delerious
with joy.
-
- In the morning, before the sun had burned away the mist, fat John,
our supervisor, had turned to me and said "It will be a hot summer's
day". We hadn't been back in our sunny rows long when Grandfather
walked slowly past, his stomach ahead of him and his steps already old.
I thought first of my garb! Bare feet, draggled ponytail, juice-stained
brown shorts, dirty sweater tucked under to bare my midriff. "Grandpa
" I called. He turned. "Komm mit zu die Karre." What have
I done was my first thought but I jerked my sweater down and followed him.
-
- He'd brought a letter from Mother. Written on the corner "Extremely
urgent. Exam results." Inside it a white slip. I ran to the row to
show it to Judy. There are berry stains on it now. Lila admired it, Ranje
admired it. We sat in the row and ate cookies while we admired it. I couldn't
help telling people about it. I wasn't quite aware, though, how much it
meant. But I thought it was enough. I thought Mr Mann would be pleased.
I knew I had disproved Mr Toews' assertion that "A ninety average?
Nope".
-
- Up in the tree this morning I hesitated to climb higher because I was
afraid but I swung higher still. The sun was high enough in the sky to
touch my treetop. Limbs fanning out below and around me were hung with
spider webs wet with dew and iridescent in the sun. They were all about
me roping the boughs that spread to the roof below and to the layering
branches above.
-
- Clearbrook August 1963
Then amazed that Janet said it was a gorgeous piece of work that evokes
a deep sense of time and place.
When I look at it now I can see it actually is a quite deft collaboration.
18's light spirit is the best of it and 74's judgment cleaned it up. "Lila
admired it. Ranje admired it. We sat in the row and ate cookies while we
admired it."
Yesterday my pussy musk story was surprisingly ignored. Don't any of
you people like to smell your crotch?
People like the story-stories that have a narrative twist. The arts jury
story ignored by everyone but Nathalie. Feminist stories sometimes liked
and stories with photos. Most disappointing is only four people for the
Vi Thompson story. There are people who show up only for something that's
in their purview - cousin Violet in the story about Opa and Oma, Mafalda,
Jim, Indra, Les, Luke, Jody Frey, Karen C, Jennifer.
4
[17" Powerbook quit.] Look at this crooked little writing - and
oh journal are you still there -
August. Blank white sky. Crows, one flapping through, one on St Michael's
cross looking north. Sunday, isn't it. This is too slow. It can't tap the
mist of sad worry I am. Stoic hopelessness.
6
The little stories. Are what I do. Are all I do except for this and that
in the garden. - It has never been like this, that I don't want to talk
to myself. What would I have to talk about if I did.
Being so ugly I don't want anyone I like to see me
Killing time all day long because there's nothing I can or want to do,
shame at -
Being utterly pissed off about the way I walk now
The sloppy slobby look of Merritt people
Pain
Uncertainty about my heart, is there something I should be doing
Being dropped by the film community presumably because of the dull ugly
way I've presented myself in public
All my little social efforts here failing - Daphne, Gloria Moses, Yvonne,
Susan - presumably because I'm ugly, deformed, uninteresting, grumpy and/or
they are
Day after day speaking to no one
Conviction that none of this can change, can only get worse
- All of this is true no
Not true: that I'm ugly, that I only kill time, that the film community
has dropped me, that none of it can change, that social efforts have failed
for the reason I said. The rest is true.
- Will you talk to me truth, fight,
the Work, improvement
- So you always say yes
- There's nothing I can do with that
no
- Is my heart getting better
yes
- Do I have till 82
no
- Yes - 6 years
- Can I do anything important with that
yes
- Can I improve the inflammataory thing
YES
- With Tylenol
no Ibuprofen - the white one
- Every day as needed yes
- And work through pain YES
- Work through heart weakness
yes
- Will yoga help YES
- Stairmaster YES
- Can I improve my walk YES
- Should I dress better no
- Are the stories okay yes
Luke to Venezuela tomorrow - her mother rolled her eyes and said at last
- he has pressed to earn the money, she has emptied her house - he was leaving
his house clean the way I do before journeys and with the master switch
off. We both like to talk to strangers.
I have something new to read, Nina Berberova, sent for after I read an
excerpt.
-
He had gathered that she was respected but not
particularly liked in the colony... . In Stephen's long-considered opinion
the most striking thing about her was the change from a perfectly well-bred
woman, little given to personalities or colonial chit-chat, reserved but
not at all woundingly so - the remarkable transition to warmth and sympathetic
exchange with someone she liked. When this took place her whole physical
attitude altered with it: at no time did she ever hold herself stiffly,
but now there was a suppleness in her whole stance: and Stephen, who had
watched her more closely than he had watched the rarest of birds, could
tell by a minute change in her complexion whether she was going to like
her companion or not. 'Besotted I may be,' he said aloud, 'but that spontaneous
confidentiality ....'
Blue at the mizzen 1999 when he was 85.
9
It's odd to feel so silent here.
Dineson writing about her natives, rereading after - years, as then liking
her desire to meet a large strange thing with equanimity. I was that too
and the large strange thing I met was Tom.
I wrote a paragraph about the man in Budapest who tried to send his quality
across a border with me. I composed it: heard it in my head as I lay on
the verandah couch in the heat. Posted it. It failed, I don't know what
exactly is wrong with it. 'Insufficiently realized' says DR.
We're so happy Luke writes today.
10
Saturday morning. Across the street the little crabapples are dotted
yellow suddenly.
11
Here is the little G4 again after 7 months lying in bits in a cardboard
file lid in wildly irresponsible Darrell's shop. It still doubles when it
pastes though not always and he has left out the firewire's wire so it doesn't
link and was the fan this loud before but I've been most of today renaming
what were the Back folders and files and pasting/formatting the rest
of Time remaining 7 and backing up all of TR on the server.
And now the 17" is in the shop and the tower is sometimes flashing,
he says a battery in the motherboard that might be hard to get to, and I
still have all the software reasons for not buying new so my computers and
I are faltering in the same way. Still, I'm bubbling on account of having
been able to work all day. Really - it's 4:30: until now.
12
Today Luke in Caracas - three hours ahead - sat with Né's mother
and Adolfo's betrothed and named his intentions. Sent photos. I'm nervous
for him, pleased but so much is in the air. He really wants this; I don't
think he has before; but they don't know each other yet; they don't know
how hard it will have to become.
13
Awake too early thinking of Tom, thinking that what it was about us was
that we are in life in the same way, alone and mortal venturing watchfully.
18
Why is the street so quiet at almost seven ... it's Sunday. Halfway
through August, the sun behind the blue spruce shows only halfway up.
It's because of posting stories that I've lost heart for writing here
- isn't it - I'm judging my moments unworthy before they're written.
19
I like this one:
- It's Wednesday night, raining. Black winter night, chill, rattling
with rain. I looked forward to the moment when I would sit down and discover
what sort of moment it is.
-
- There was something I liked today: when I was on Commercial buying
tea this afternoon I propped my bike in the entrance of the shop. I saw
it fall as I walked through the door. Ignored it. 100 grams of Irish Breakfast
and 100 grams of Lapsang Suchong, mixed, please. When I came out my bike
was set upright. How did they get it to stand that way? Beautifully upright,
not propped. I study it. I see that whoever picked it up noticed they could
set the pedal flat on the ledge below the window. It was an elegant generosity.
-
- Another moment I like when I notice it is when I come home and am opening
the front door, which opens inward. I turn the key, twist my hip forward
and give the door a little bump. I do that whether or not I'm carrying
things.
-
- Louie liked my paper. Talking to her about it last night, talking to
anybody about it for the first time, what was that - a sensation of broaching
- that doesn't say it - sudden transport - I think I mean I hadn't realized
how private my work has been. It's complete around me and then I'm somewhere
else not realizing it's gone and I'm less without it. It was the sensation
of stepping into its power in someone's presence, a shy feeling.
-
- Vancouver November 1996
What do I like about it. Its tone. The calm warm even tone of self-pleasure.
Its naturalness of movement from topic to topic. It does what it says it's
going to, discovers what sort of moment it is.
This one was hardly noticed but Emilee said love, which she never does,
and I thought yes -
- These last two days I've been hearing helicopters with pleasure. They
are a chord sustained as it moves. The higher note is quite constant and
the lower, which I feel as a dark scumble, rolls louder and lighter, wider
and thinner, below it. A satisfying song about air.
-
- I want something here - I've been contented in these perfect basking
days but I want to be singing too, as if by writing here I could move into
the sky and on and on. I want to be sailing unrolling riding leaving a
mark, I want to be grand and free in motion like the moon.
-
- Where are we now. A wind is blowing through the house. It's night.
The wind has blown around two corners to get to my bed. It's fresh and
free - is it too soon to be happy? Yes it says. It isn't over.
-
- This wind is carrying a few spits of rain. The letter today spilled
over its sheet. He felt his chest open. He raced on in his ownself telling
what he saw he heard he felt he thought he did. He was overjoyed with himself,
his tailfeathers were blowing all around him in the liveliest breeze. I
was his best friend laughing with delight.
-
- There is a black rock in a fast creek in a clean northern country.
It isn't a pet rock. It was a California rock and now it's a BC rock. It
is happy where it is. There is a lot happening.
-
- Vancouver July 1996
It's better than most of the pieces but out of their range? Mostly my
readership likes when there is one scrap of something in a piece that they
know too - one scrap: a small ranch, Seventeen magazine, a kind of tea.
People always like the photos more. They don't notice the writing (Janet
notices a scrap of it, one phrase or 'a character' but in a conventional
way that embarrasses me). But Emilee does. Sue does and says why, "vivid
and quietly surprising", "startling tenderness", "quiet
way these stories unfold".
This morning everyone is ignoring 'panther' presumably because of "Think
of a big panther dick up your panther pussy he says". Laughing to think
of it. (Emilee likes it though.) (But she doesn't ever say why.) One of
these days I'll post the one where I get into my pants on the bus after
Seattle. Aunt Lillian, you there?
Thinking just now that I've tried to send the little stories to the people
they are about but that has never worked - Luke, Rowen, Tom, Louie, David
- but even they feel them differently when they're public.
There are people-stories that seem to belong to regular writing - Buddy
Hardy, Ida Davies, Vi Thompson, Mike and Freckles, Hughie, Madge Herron,
Oma in the Tabor, Eric, Jane the nurse, Mrs Harris, the Jansens, Madame
Matter, Stephen Davis - what Janet called novels - and I've needed to tell
them because of the sharp thing I feel for them as lives - but I also think
they are not what I want noticed, which is to say what I want somehow to
notice myself. Is that it? (Sigh.) Meaning a stylistic thing.
(And Sam that bold girl.)
- To use on something larger? YES
-
- the lake house
- up, down, strange and charm
- up north
- titania's gash
- the air
- here: a notebook
What good titles.
Are they shred pieces? Closer to done than I knew?
2018 work work.doc.
part 2
time remaining volume 8: 2019-2020 may-march
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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