time remaining 8 part 2 - 2019 august-october  work & days: a lifetime journal project August 21 2019 Luke said "I wish you could see the way she looks at me." I'm exhausted after a while, though, by how none of it is about me. 22 Where is the starting point - when was the session with Joyce where I cracked about my dad April 1993 I'd defended the MA, Joyce had opened me up about men, I'd fastened on Dave Carter, Louie was freaking, I was in crisis about giving up the mother for the father, Where was I in work - I'd proven myself among the men by detouring into their topic - What was different before and after the MA. 1993 I was 48. What I was coming to want would come true with Tom in a year and a half. I was 49 and Luke will be 49 this year. Coming to instinct delayed - what stage did I delay. Louie fought what I needed to grow. Is it true that intellectual growth depended on that stage. It says yes. Can I show how? - I need so much stamina to sort this. When I feel heart stress like this does it mean I'm in danger      YES Does that mean I should stop      no I keep needing to stop, go away, come back. Can I do something to be stronger in it. I'm trying to tell the story of efforts I made in my late forties and fifties trying to synthesize love and work, integrate love and work selves from an inchoate mass of material. 23 Seeing the itinerary: In attachment: Yes I have been writing the book of love. 0. Abandoned child and then false and closed with my mother 1. Ed and then callous with men, fantasy men, crushes 2. I'm with women - crises - competition and possession - deeper betrayal 3. Therapy opens abandonment crashes 4. Therapy opens wanting a man a. I fall for an ideal man. b. a woman tries to prevent me c. I try with a furry man who can't do it. d. I investigate two silly men - Jim, David e. I take myself on with a real one 5. Match and mismatch, joy and pain over and over, taking notes, developing theory, 6. In teaching, loving students by working for them, work on work and work on love both used 7. Wilder edges in both love and work still left out In work: Being all over the place, a lot of starting points, a lot of notes of many kinds, slow sorting in a massive matrix. 1. art and long but random search - attraction as a principle - larger self for emotion - prebirth - investigating intuition, the uncon - art that isn't organizing social emotion - intuition operates in it - trying to see what attraction implies - silent perception 2. the MA, its context among men, their topic - dualist classification - larger self helps with work - in philosophy I'm up against male minds - Eurydice story 3. the PhD my own topic, , 'imagining' - knowing as active and latent structure - context the department 4. Being about - zooms out to the largest question what is a human - context on my own - start with the table of contents and show how it is found - using the example of spatial knowing 5. Teaching: inventing mbo, dealing with any question students have, lecturing on - 6. What now - o attraction as method leads to wanting to understand intuition and the uncon - recognition knowledge o feminist understanding that it's male minds o philosophy as conceptual trouble-shooting - for instance studying binary classification as such o from neuroscience visualizing interrelating structures in spatial layout o in therapy crashes that allow wider deeper work - dissociation and integration o habit of writing is integration practice o conceptual sorting - repeated outlines o writing papers forcing me to decide what had stayed suspended - When I was ten fantasy of big coils of wax in Ken D's ears - have just realized what mending a man's ears would be - - Happy because of the color in the verandah - I wanted to make a beach house sunroom in what was a grim space - Brad has spray-painted the dirty ceiling and the grey stucco and tomorrow will paint the door and window frames and I've added Cariboo Moss to the t&g under the windows - it's just right, I keep wanting to see it again - subtle but in certain slants of light quite strong against the white window frames. 24 Cariboo Moss on the window frame that was black too. Can hardly remember what that room used to look like, the way it is now is so obviously right. Except that the colored band above the windows was only a middling good idea. Am moving out of the back bedroom till it's mended and painted. Love the thought of sleeping in this room. 26 Do you understand the relation of analysis and stories       yes Find a story for each point I want to make       YES Make the point as later comment             yes Name the stories             YES Comment on the project       yes Seeing there's a history of finding tools and methods. In both love and work. 28 I have a quite lovely summer room. Yesterday there was a perfect soft warm breeze from the south that came through the house from one door to the other. As I was reading on the verandah couch I was feeling the summer had begun just now, I'd missed its earlier months. I have red roses, pink roses, orange nasturtiums, late sweetpeas, white phlox, pink cosmos, purple salvia. Seeds collected. I have a wonderfully clean house thanks to Kathy's four hours yesterday. I'm giving away carrots and potatoes and tomatoes. I have cucumbers, a few. I have clean clothes whenever I want. Here's my bed in this less closed-in longer room. I've been strong enough to clean. Small birds are feasting on my sunflowers. This computer is working again though the 17" is not. - In the last few minutes of this morning's doze I was suddenly looking down the stairs of 820A to a pile of packages and letters next to the last step. It was the kind of instant clear vision I've sometimes taken as a message but I didn't read it as a message until later. Then I thought - it's where I'd see mail that had come through the slot - mail - is it saying my PIN number has arrived. I phoned Cal Coast again - exasperated - has it been mailed - on the 12th she said, but maybe the code was wrong - should they resend - I said give it till Saturday. Went to Kekuli for breakfast still thinking maybe - and to the post office after - and there it was. So now I'll ask: did you know it was there       yes Is that kind of vision always a message             yes Do you intend messages       yes There was a feeling with the image, of being pleased to see especially a wrapped square parcel like a gift. The message itself was the gift wasn't it       yes 29 Lawrence Kansas poking into In America today and complained to Plainsfield about it. So fire me - sue me - slander me - write your own version - I'm out of reach in every way. Or grapple with it as a whole project. - Brad the painter described me to his wife as a little old lady. I thought about it overnight and then said he should call me Dr Epp. Which he did quite gleefully. 30 5:56. Look how dark it already is at six, dim glow behind flocked and layered platinum grey. Taste of coffee. Great quiet, own little left ear hiss. - Black trailer called Tail Wind parked at the curb. 31 GW ends at the wrong place - fix it. Have assembled and partly sorted the many dropped starts. Don't drop them again! Don't, don't! Although I think some things are clearer than last time. - Washed two windows this aft and felt whoozy - came in and sat for a bit and drank water - then washed two more. September 1 [Generous Gardener] 6:03 oh baking sky. On the hill's rim small clouds like large animals trekking north. Thank you quiet corner. Whitening now. Why is it a well-being having my bed in this room. I've never liked the back room's blindness and tightness. And this room feels finished now, more complete, more interesting. I can lie in bed listening to music or books. My nights have come into my work day. Something had happened when I woke and went on happening all day. Sun, Sep 1, 2019 at 1:58 PM this has just occurred to me. "Such an intimate issue placed in a very public place" - was there a particular piece that has bothered you? if so we should talk about that. - Now I think it's that one of the pieces mentioned her letting her husband use my photos to get into film school. But the question of using Tom. I'm absolutely doing that. There's steel of revenge in my forehead when I say so. He used me too. There were many other things but there was that on both sides. What's my doubt: that I'm getting even with him for disappointments that are my own flaws. Yes - I am. Does it mean I shouldn't do the project             no Does it mean I shouldn't use his name       no It means I should watch for that motive             yes It means I can't visit him or phone him             yes Would Joyce disapprove            no But she'd say depends how you do it       yes 2 A hard night, hard dreams. Woke on the warpath. Came down from the upper air and chopped her up. In the last dream I was trying to find a way uphill to the part of the city I wanted to reach and every path seemed to be blocked. An older man I was with said he saw a park on the left - a grassy slope - and said he saw a rose. There'd be an open field we could climb. When we got to it what we found instead was a rickety metal ladder leading impossibly far downwards. No I'm not doing that. Tried starting uphill again but over huge boulders of splintering speckled granite which in fact were leading downward too. Before that I'd been in a storefront working on a newspaper with Tom, formatting it on my computer, thinking where to place two photos of men in the story. There was a woman with us, Tom's friend, someone sharp and ready. Short brown hair. Her name wasn't Maritka but like that, three syllables beginning with M. We'd stopped and come back and the newspaper we were working on was in a ball of clay in Tom's hands. I was looking at it thinking would we really be able to get it back out of that. "Don't you have something in a folder?" He seemed to scoff and she seemed to be siding with him. Then they seemed to have gone for lunch together. I was waiting for them to come back and they didn't. I looked at the clock. I suppose they're lovers, have been for some time. I'm hurting, what should I do. Leave I guess. - Mafalda has seemed confused in this little wrangle. She's my age probably and her man died this year, would that do it? Or did I just pick my friends badly in my twenties. I mostly did, didn't I - didn't pick them, they just came along and I wasn't evolved enough or placed well enough so that better were coming along. That bright loving simpler being enjoyed them though. I'd like to trash any reply she makes now, I don't think the fight can come through to anything clear and I so don't like the sensation of defensive obsession that even now wants to go look at my reply letter again. No. Good thing I've deleted it so I can't. 3 A dream that I'm at Goddard and cranky. Two people I talk to are objecting to how I am with them. It's true I'm not handling them as well as I used to. When I wake I think I should acknowledge the way I'd been helped there by the generous friendly atmosphere other people had made. - This question stays in suspense: how to bring what I'm calling the lyrical/cosmic/mythic through - at the same time or after or maybe I can't in the time I have? - The line I like to remember is, Tom is not a man who can't look after himself. 4 I'm really happy you're here now I so want to let you know how good it is And the light flooding in over past terror Luke in Venezuela. - Now I'm liking this whole room more. It's just occurred to me that we are supposed to recover early love but after that not necessarily stay there. We then go on to something more neutral and capable - yes? Gaps in this one. What are gaps. Is it telling me this. Just now the sun came on, cherry petals swirled across the intersection as car and pedestrian crossed. See? You dear. Read it when you've asked a question. As if your friend is with you when you ask. Then I say - life - because it has shown a loving depth. - A former way hard to follow now but I should keep it as an edge. 5 When did I start trying to understand love woman, was it with Ken - I dropped men and woman-signifiers when I went to T and C - 1975. Misgivenly and crookedly with Jam. Then struggling with love woman in Louie. When did Joyce unlatch me - 1993? Then Dave. Full gasp of young romantic longing. Then K into the maw of ambivalent powerfully sexual attraction. Then Tom ready to live work woman full on and love woman supported by ww's lucidity, ww supported by lw's experience. I'm telling Joyce it's like being split, my fine formed smart self doesn't choose my lovers, a younger woman does, and then I can't stand them and drive them off.   A devastation with Love Woman somewhere in it. Maleness a fear I don't escape tho' I think I can get above it.   Now my early positions are being disbanded. I've been one-sided in them. New positions available to me are foolish and many of them seem to be partial too.   My young energy runs at my father's machine with naked small power. The tyrant dies simply of being challenged.   I hear the little girl crying for a man who's gone away. I attend to her. When I sit with her, love woman is there. Love woman is a structure - a personality who comes with the woman body when woman body comes.   There is a man standing by for her.   The I in this story is mature competence who looks at love woman from outside. I'm not singing. I could be giving them a better song: a song for three voices.   In our set of three, a child a woman and a mind, a child a woman and an artist.   Who is the man standing by for love woman. Is it a capacity that comes on when love woman grows up?   Is mature love woman a pair, instinctive feeling and the ability to act, initiative? Yes.   - Love woman as a term. Instinct? It says no. Desire? Feeling? Sex and attachment. Instinct as formed by history? YES. Sensory art?   Not 'body'. Was Trapline made by love woman             no The photos up north             yes Did Jam inspire love woman             no The place did       yes Notes in o       no The tape-slide show       yes The play of the weather       yes But hedged by ww       yes   Understanding the meaning dimension of the moment in the moment - like the woman on Granville.   Is that lw       no it's me   Is lw loving       no Can become that       yes   By living the conflict consciously and honorably in a way that sees the other       yes   Going willing into a captivation by large forces. With K I learned an ethic. Support desire in yourself by letting it speak even if it can't speak from the whole of you. Don't escalate. Don't indulge your thwarted anger. Don't defend yourself by insulting him even in the journal. Don't refuse to want because you can't have what you want. Watch what you do to try to control him. And I learned body openings. So there's the chapter about K and planning the doc, then the Fraser, then T and Being about. Theory's practice: childhood of the philosopher. 6 Raw ideality in love: early love is adoration, an open body. Passion, energy. The coverage area of all radio nodes working as a single network is sometimes called a mesh cloud. Access to this mesh cloud depends on the radio nodes working together to create a radio network. A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. Wireless mesh networks can self form and self heal. Wireless mesh networks work with different wireless technologies and need not be restricted to any one technology or protocol. - I'm working on the time between MA and the Fraser. April 1993-July 2004, MA I'm 48. What do I need to find. There's astonishing intensity, astonishing pain. Astonishing conflict. What set it off. What was Joyce's work. What was the book's. What did I learn to do with it. Why was I desperate for a man just at peri-menopause. Did I learn how to live ambivalent attachment in some way kindly, was that it. Then after the Fraser there's another interim before I go to SD. 7 Saturday 6 in the morning, wonderful sky, clear, sheer, tinted orange at the horizon behind the black trees - now rapidly brighter - flushed pink to zenith - and now beyond, arcing over, kindling wisps, reaching south - now gold behind the trees - now paling to almost white - not white, what is it, blue that's gold that's no nameable color, livid - now brighter still, zenith actual blue past its frail tissues of vapour. When I come to Louie stories I want to lift them out, I don't want to have to include her. She's a side-issue I say. I'm steely about her. I wouldn't know how to make it compact enough, it has too many folds. And yet I have a doubt. If she's the mother she's the kernel at the heart isn't she? The steeliness itself must be a clue. But it says leave her out. Was I ever too hard on Louie       no It's correct defense      yes Is it because I had known what I was doing with her       yes 8 I segregated Tom stories in a separate folder so I wouldn't post too many of them and this morning I got into that folder and clicked on half a dozen in a row. They're so lively it should be a separate book, I was feeling. Tom stories. Theory's practice is a slog by comparison. Am in the theory file editing and naming sections and one of the things I feel as I have before is that the whole record has potential <meanings> that I lop off in my thematic cuts. I have to cut but it's good the whole record is still there. Knowing how much human context to give in stories of finding things out. Keeping only very few dreams and only those I check out. What is the relation of the work paras and the love paras - facing pages? What is the relation of the work paras and the papers written? Links? - I posted one of the dry pieces this morning and have liked it all day especially above the delicate precision of Sharifa Asma. I thought Emilee would like it - I think she's probably the only one who gets the dry pieces - and she did but what she needed to say was more about her love than about the piece, which makes me sorry. I sorted 2018 onto two files and then carved each to nothing but writing. There another home, another self. I marvel at its dryness, its aloneness. I marvel in it, am marvel in it. I marvel that what I love to be no one can want.   I'd worked foolishly, helplessly for years. One September alone in an old house I came to it, I came true.   "It's the flight and droop of the sentence, where the accent falls, the full stop. when one feels something remote, separate ... I think almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that satisfies"   "Feels something remote, separate." Satisfies.   It's about working and a bit about kinds of day. When I find the minimal phrase it's anyone working, anyone's kinds of day. I'm listening to Ronin waiting for Row and Freya. The music and the frail late light made me see how the lamp post stands between the linden and the spruce showing their separated vertical togetherness. I wanted to photograph it and got the window up and did though the photo doesn't say what I saw. - There's Ronin winding up toward the end of Modul 36. Am a bit elated to have discovered music. And my house when I'm imagining guests seeing it looks lively now, clumps of nasturtiums on the plate rails and a pink vase on the kitchen table, light on in the rich red room. My bed looks royal backed against the wainscot and it completes the room, makes it as if more about a full life than about the walls. 9 Something I'm seeing as I name paras - which involves sorting, moving lines from one para to another, subdividing a sequence - is the way a number of topics are suspended in any discussion. "There are such a lot of ideas" Steven said. I'm seeing that it's because it's a web, a mesh, so that at any point there are implications I'm feeling in many directions. Pennask Lake Road this aft with Row and Freya. 10 Seeing it yearning to claim it, to come back many times, to know it foot by foot. It could be my Black Canyon Road, I could have a loved road here too. See it when it's blooming, when the aspens are yellow. Rowen in the back seat said There's a bear. I said It's a stump. But no, a black bear standing among bushes at the mouth of a coulee looking toward us. Hawks. At its height of land the slopes fall away for a hundred miles to small peaks on the horizon. Here, just here, here's my house. Yesterday that sky was dark slate-blue. The slopes were an even pale gold with small green-blue clumps of sage, such an effect. In the north a huge boiling-up of white cloud carved into caverns. Aspen bluffs snugged into the north side of hills. A little slough with a lot of small ducks. 11 Zipping through the SPL/IPL sections seeing the isolation and stress of being taken for a graduate student while working far beyond the competence of any advisors available where I was. Because I was a woman none of them would have admitted that. The schema said I was a student and a student is guided. I was technically a student and yet unguidable. 12 Experience of radical bootstrapping, learning and engaging while having to revise both terminology and method. 13 My jeep wouldn't start. I was zipping through a church lobby and saw a dried-out Christmas tree hung with my actual decorations. Was going to go back and pick them off but a caretaker said the tree had been thrown away. Woke distraught. Wrote it down because there was a faint haunt now and then through the day. - 8:30 at night. These days I work. Hours in the morning and some later. I can. Tomorrow I'll finish the theory extract doc for GW3 to the defense. Earlier is done in a Before folder. Intro excerpts. Emotional processing is extracted though not named. There's still quite a lot to do with this basic scraping-up of materials. In the last two years the cortical layout stuff got very technical - good, excellent, but very technical. There's a line where I say I feel I've just crossed the continental divide. 15 "A kind of attraction I haven't taken myself up on." Found In Laborador this morning. There I'm saying I'm going to try myself out on a manly man. - But it's long. I'm line-editing, dragging. Is it worth anything on its own. For Theory's practice I can look for what the work was, what I learned. There seem to have been ways I was further in than with Tom, I never broke with Tom the way I did when Kenneth left. He was warmer than Tom and more embodied: a more physical man, tactile and aural, the way he'd sopped up voices and would want to hold me at night. When I think of Tom next to him I see the gunmetal chill of Tom's reserve, his calculated dissembling. And Ken read better books. And wasn't an addict or criminal. Waterpipe. I want to work on two tracks with it maybe. What kind of sound I'll have, sound designer. Optical printing of something dark. Singing from underground, aboveground things underprinted. 17 Ate bread yesterday and this morning it's 146. Beverly Pepper in the weekend Times. My mom's age and a blazing huge life. Jorie Graham's mom! Sometimes when I've posted a piece I see that it's better than others by a sort of looser coherence. Not accidental but loose. Yesterday I posted wolf and saw it that way. Louie exerting such a fierce pressure: you must not be who you are. Jam was that too. 18 Early 1994 sorting out - getting in touch with - conflict between love self and work self. Now I'm watching for what resolved later and remember both Nicole and Peter marveling that in my theory voice the personal and poet voice is too. 19 Lying awake too early I was thinking of Rowen's visit, that I didn't write about it and should have and why didn't I. (Drinking tea this morning - said this morning I will, just this morning though I'm not all the way there.) One thing was his hugs - he'd put his arms around me and just hold me. The last time was when they were going home. I was sitting on the footstool and he sat down on the other end of it and put his arms around me so my head was on his shoulder and his head bent against mine, a warm and quite soft fit. "I was thinking you're the right size and shape for a hug." "I was thinking the same thing about you." Another thing was that he wanted to tell me he's been in online sexual fantasy groups - why did he want to tell me that. She thinks he should stop now that he's married. He thinks not. I wondered whether they were wanting me to mediate but what I'd want to say is something else, what I've always wanted to say, get into the world and fight, don't stay timid in your head. This one is related to the third thing, the way he carries himself. He droops and this time wore a weak drizzling beard that kept making me see that odd person in Doonsbury. I keep wondering whether he needs me to defend him in the family he has now, is he giving over too much. And what happened to his tonus, was it Michael dropping him as he got older, was it not being supported in school. She praises him and each time he reaches to touch her arm. Was it me letting him go - but no he still had it when we shot the video. He told this story: that on one of his shoots there was a woman he found unaccountably beautiful. He kept looking at her and wondering why. She had dark hair and dressed in jeans and men's shirts and sneakers. Then he realized she looked like his mom. Does he need something from me       partial loss, action, death, hierarchy His partial loss of action is killing his status       YES Can I help       yes Give him Micheal Meade       YES Another thing is that he was describing himself as submissive though explaining it reasonably as a technical term taken from bondage culture's understanding of kinds of temperament - what he needs from her to be less anxious. I said yes but don't stop there and he said firmly and with irony that the term is useful to him. I was telling them the story of getting rid of the enlisted for life guy at Moonlight Beach by using male touchiness about their bubbles, saying to Tom "I'm going to get rid of him," Tom alarmed "What are you going to do?", I "Something subtle." Then described the sensation of pressure coming from the side and the moment when I turned the binocs just a titch. The story lit him up more than anything in the visit. "It's like number five in the corner pocket, you said what you were going to do and how you were going to do it and then you did it. He went away thinking that stupid woman didn't know what she was doing." The point is that I want him to be able to be proud of himself. - AG20 1994 March-July is ferocious pain - wow - and am I imagining that after that I was smarter and realer? Yes?       yes Massively so?       yes I noticed it when I was pulling paras for Rowen, my writing about him was more observant and there was more of it. Gosh it was the process they describe, the furnace. 20 It's the day Sonja was here with Marcus and Zia. 22 What Cheryl did yesterday, asked in the comments under a post what is going on for me now 'at another level'. I went into a rage and blew her up. A misunderstanding she said but I don't think so. What was wrong with it was that she was as if saying she knows more, she knows deeper things than my little stories are saying. That sort of condescension touches off old times. No you can't do that to me now. What was even more wrong was that she was saying it in public as if claiming something away from me that she hasn't liked to see me earn. Am I imagining this?       no It's essentially competitive       yes It's unconscious       yes She would deny it       yes Anything you want to say       you have acted to join yourself for happiness and high intuition That's in answer to why I have ready anger now       yes She's noticing I've got ahead of her, hadn't realized before       yes - I'm noticing how one thing led to another, them to Jam, Jam to Louie, Louie to Dave C, Dave and Louie to Kenneth, Kenneth to Tom. Some of that was bouncing to an opposite weakness, Peter to Ian, Roy to Paul K. Some of it was bouncing to an opposite position and not useless because it was learning: Jam to Louie. Then when I was further on the road it was earned progress: Louie to Dave C, oedipal crisis this time resolved. Then Dave C to Kenneth, child adoration to learning patience in passion. Then Kenneth to Tom years of capable mutuality in pleasure and struggle. Then Tom to nobody is what? - Slogging through In Laborador part 1, slogging because there's so, so much figuring-out. There's no way to make it the charming story of K because it has to also be the story of Louie, Dave Carter, my dad, my mom, Joyce and the book and even a bit Rob. More than that a vast confusion of being new at something. There was no way around, it was the next thing, it had to happen, but whoa. 23 December 17 1968, 30 William Street #15, Kingston   I came home today, brilliant white sunless guilty morning away from work, and bought a Nikon F Photomatic Tn.   December 24   Christmas Eve, cynically called Tuesday Eve. Walking fast on Princess Street, crowds of people, very cold, going to get my first contact sheet from Linden's. Wright with his powdery pure face likes me. He sold me the Nikon and a Linhof tripod. I hesitated. "Well, don't look at them through the paper bag" he smiled. - That I bought the camera on Luke's pre-birthday two years before. Need to decide something about the slog - I'm editing Laborador as though it was going to be something though I was meaning to just use it to get clear what I came to Tom and the doc with. It turns out I set out into both projects in the Ken year. Was the dreary rumination necessary       yes Was I actually learning       yes Would it have been better to just feel       no I was feeling enough       YES   So there has to be a prologue       yes Which is somehow Louie, Dave and Ken and the doc project forming easily alongside       yes There is so much to do, so many decisions. 24 Part 1. A fifty year old woman is hit hard by desire for what she doesn't actually want. She's living in disabling confusing self-contradiction, massively in pain. She understands that emotional debts she has stayed ahead of have come due. She's willing, she takes them on, she has faith in the work and she has three kinds of help but it's long and painful. There are six months in which it takes most of her time, then a second six months in which though that work continues she is at the same time quite easily and as if almost peripherally defining for herself and setting up a fundable PhD project that consolidates her years of private study and that she has already got herself into position to launch. There's a hinge. She performs a commitment ritual. Part 2. She begins her PhD, gets funding, drives to California to work with the best department in her field. There she meets a man who is in some ways her counterpart, who has been struggling in his own contradictions and has come to his own form of commitment. They take each other on. Their previous defenses and accommodations are massively challenged. This goes on for years. There are many shocks and checks. They work through them again and again. In the meantime her work also keeps breaking through. It keeps getting harder but her project widens until it's a coherent new vision of what humans are. She graduates and moves to be with her friend. Part 3. She lives in California and has a teaching job. Shocks and checks with her friend go on but she's lighter in them, she's more at home in the world. Her teaching work draws on both her emotional work and her theoretical work. Part 4. She's getting old, alone again trying to tell the story of parts 1-3 before she dies. Part 5? There's been something else from earlier and all along, a paradisal vision in pictures and writing. She has gathered bits of it but goes on not knowing what to do with them. - What to call the persons. Wise. Child. Love woman isn't quite right       running-ahead-girl, mother, partial loss, intimacy Call her the Queen of Cups, Eurydice, Love Woman, talk about the difficulty of naming her. Does everyone need that crisis       no Is it particular to my own circumstance of giftedness, deformity, abandonment, and father's neglect       yes So is it important to tell it       yes Why       the adventure, of improvement, by recovery, of love Is useful to anyone       yes So how much particularity in how to tell it is the question. Not sure how to use the dreams, whether to leave them out because the figures are hard to pin down - in other words I'm sometimes shaky in dream interpretation. And they take up a lot of space. They are good images though. They're another tone or texture or 'level'. 25 Dreams should stay because they aren't understood, they open into a free air. Wondering whether I should now edit the journals and say I have, ie whether I should make them more readable and whether I can now see the writing well enough so I can trust myself not to edit either timidly or egotistically. Do you think I should do that      no Just supply sidelines      yes Find out something about contractions, why I revise the little stories by replacing with contractions, why I first write without them. Find out something about commas, what the effect is of people using so many. I now hunt them out ferociously and sneer at them in other people's writing. When people say they love a story it seems to be that they feel themselves in just some little bit of it, for instance Campbell this morning liking the being edited piece because she also hates to be edited. Working in the second half of In Laborador it's as if Tom recedes to a coda and the real work happened then. Can Orpheus be another stream in it. It's a story of maturity in the sense that it shows a time when one has enough judgment to be able to give up the defenses the less experienced person needed. Most of my little revisions now are for comprehension. There's dense psychological work and then when a bit of actual Ken comes in I see what a phantom he's been. Little points of snag I either defer or deal with right then, does it matter which. I suspect dealing right then matters because it tunes judgment going forward. Is that correct? Yes. So I should never defer. In the dialogues it seems I don't always know which is a young love woman, which is a child, which is ego, which is larger self. I can see myself being well taught and not doing what it says. - Surprised to see people I usually don't hear from piling onto the being edited piece. Expected it to be too obscure for my lot. - Garden this aft. An odd boy came for the black grape and took away everything else I wanted to give. Tremaine and I pulled up the snow-in-summer at the Cox's feet because it harbours couch grass and the moths that spoiled every one of the apples; have to figure out how to give it clean feet. Yesterday I dug potatoes and stored them in fibre pots in the basement. What to do with the crimson passion - put the rhubarb somewhere else? 26 Seeing how it's recapitulating - reprocessing - even the experience of going to school. I read her love declarations and feel she's completely off her rocker, and then I realize that everything she was declaring she wanted came to her eighteen months later. It's as if my beam had found Tom in the distance and my feeling was simply misaimed. Can that esoteric description be true? It says yes. 28 Snow on the crests this morning. The linden's still full but half yellow. Down here every morning wet streets. Good for the transplants. Today finished extracting GW1 and GW2, 27 pages with captioned paras. Not sure how to organize parts. I'd thought end of MA to the Fraser and end of Ken and beginning of doc and then skip to Tom but in fact the year before T has interesting body work and perceiving/imagining work and good writing. - Captioning is a good idea. - I thought of Fraser as dramatic but it's just a hinge, writing's spotty. - Haven't found the session where I crack with Joyce about my dad - Or the one where I fall apart over Christmas 29 It's almost 6pm and I've worked since 7. A Sunday. I could work that long because I was working on the falling in love months with Tom. 30 One of my city dreams. On a street with Louie looking at restaurants in our new neighbourhood. This one's Italian. Next one German. Across the intersection a big produce market with boxes under a canopy. Here's a big empty store with Chinese medicine on shelves. We sit on a bench along the south wall and I begin to tell her a dream I had earlier. An owner comes in and we explain and leave but a second, older owner comes out after us still exclaiming. In that dream, which I knew was for the work I'm doing now, I'd been sitting on the ground with other people and an African man sitting across from me had given me a wonderful object made of stainless steel beads strung on leather thongs, maybe half a dozen of them intertwined with each other in a cluster about the length of a hand. When I looked closely I could see other kinds of beads among them, maybe wood, one with a little silver filigree strung loosely against it. Earlier in that dream I was following Louie up a short-cut she'd taken on a stepping-stone path across the corner of someone's yard. I noticed that she was moving lightly and cheerfully like a little girl. At the end of the path she ran to the street along a fenceline above a vertical drop. I followed her but I wasn't as sure-footed and was sliding, was going to fall a long way into the dark below. Was grabbing at the fence but it didn't seem strong enough. Don't remember how I got out of that. Then next thing we were on the street looking at restaurants. Tom was somewhere else with the car. October 2 I'm working on the first months back wondering how to compress because for any reader it's too much time in oppression. The separation shows him closed and lying and I keep crashing into pain. But it's also a pivot time. I have to assume size in it and do. I give him an ultimation about booze and drugs, either he quits or I'll be friends but not his mate. While he thinks about it there is a whole month we are out of contact. I study up on addiction, including my own addiction to romantic fantasy. My other work goes on in this time. I'm writing two papers on sound and audition and even the emotional work is written well. I name the principles I've discovered in ways that apply to both kinds of work. - Need a format decision about the long dialogues. - Left at 11 and am back for 4. Drove to Ashcroft on 97c, looked for books, Horstings for a sandwich, back on 1 and 8. - Go to Spences Bridge more often, go many times in a year, always drive 8. Right now it's the rags of red sumac and as always the colored rock. I like the silver-green of sagebrush with straw-yellow grass better than I like the plateau's plain grass. 4 A way I can do it is have the journal passages and comment, explain in the present. Summarize? Does that make it too pedagogical. - The addiction section is much too long but it's important. Separate it? Kate could maybe use the notes. What I'm noticing now is how after the addiction-processing months and then his visit I sail into work with a lot of zing and pleasure. There's the merge with the little girl that made me dizzy and is it after that I notice I'm different, I'm stretched to be able to work with people. 6 Do you know what's going on with my heart       no Last night again that sensation of heavy throbbing seemingly from the diaphragm but is it maybe my heart going wrong. Scares me. It has happened when I begin to slide into sleep. Last night kept me awake in fear and then woke me at 4:30. I had to get up. Systolic was high though not especially and pulse not really rapid. Then most of the day till later afternoon it was still happening. It's as if for most of my life I've been seized by fierce powers that have bound me in pain and confusion. Today I'm seeing the theory's practice years, even the study and learning, as the pitiful desperate struggle of fly on flypaper. I did other things, I won free times in work, but was allowed them only on the condition of being powerless against a truly wicked force that also binds others. Want to say something about Luke yesterday. It was a wet afternoon. I didn't know the door was unlocked. He walked up the stairs. Later we shopped and cooked: he peeled potatoes and turned on the radio. I was at the table cutting rhubarb leaves and ends. We were making stew without having to discuss it.   Luke is admitting he is worried about himself. I said it feels worse but it's better. My heart hurt intensely when I said that, as if I were feeling confirmation. That sensation of the book or something correct herding us gently. As if he is getting closer to himself partly because I have been working to be willing to feel. The sensation of faith. When I read that I feel that if the work helped my kids it wasn't useless. 7 I'm capering now because I did a good thing and got an actual doctor. Was waiting in an old-fashioned examining room feeling who is this going to be. In came a marvelous man. He startled when he saw me and maybe I did too because he was perfectly beautiful. Smart, present, tanned, neat-bodied at 66, radiant with good conscience, wearing the right kind of very clean grey-green linen shirt. He didn't take a medical history, instead pressed my kidneys, ran his hand down my spine, felt the lower edge of my liver. His online reviews say he commits, shows up, follows through. His name is Donald Murdoch McLeod which says Hebrides and established good placement and makes him another in the line of humane intelligent Scots that starts with Dr McCrum in Sexsmith and passes through Charles Sorbie, Robert MacLean, Ian Macintosh and most recently Margo. And Luke, which so pleases me. Doug mentioned him when I was first here, said he was something in cosmology too. He had no vacancies then but I kept him in mind. This year the two new frat boys with West Indian MD's have siphoned off enough of his young female patients so the desk with its beautiful receptionist let me in. Classic office walled to the ceiling with 35-year family records, old cardboard files. 8 It was raining last night and this morning there was wet snow on the garden. The hills have gold touches amid their white. 9 I'm wanting to say to Tom You were the most profound friendship of my life. I think it must be the same for you. I think it's wrong for us to be out of touch. I think we should see each other out. But he doesn't think of me as the most profound friendship of his life. How could he not. He doesn't think of anyone that way. I'm constantly tempted this way, to feel that the story is about coming through with Tom when what it is actually about is the ordeal it took to undo the effects of misogyny on my ability to work in the world. Do you agree with that       yes It's a vision of crisis central in the very nature of women's being. An inherent conflict. Highly detailed vision of. Is that correct       YES   Is there a way to write it so it's interesting      yes The pleasure has to be pleasure of writing not fantasy       yes 10 I posted Michael Green the black man this morning feeling the sophistication of the writing to be something else won by the valor in self-contradiction of those years. 11 Orion brilliant straight down the path before daylight. So cold. Everything in the garden lying both wilted and stiff. Is there anything you can tell me about this work Community/balance/female/brilliance and courage That's what it's for Yes   Look for the actual break-throughs YES His break-throughs too No Introduce the parameters of each struggle In myself and in circumstance Cut most of the place and time? NO Keep the sense of someone sitting down and finding what she has to say right there and then. I'm into the section where I'm back in San Diego for 7 months committed to writing a book. I do need to see what mainly happens in each of the sections. 12 I'm scared. Two more bad nights. When I began to fade last night the throbbing began again seemingly in the diaphragm. I lay and watched it. It became less intense and moved to my neck just at the far end of the collar bone. Faded. I turned onto my side and it began again so I was frightened and couldn't sleep. Got up and took my bp. It seemed alright. Lay reading until 1 am and tried again. It was still there though enough less so I fell asleep. Woke at 4 throbbing more again. Turned up the heat, drank some mint tea, read till I finished the bad book, tried again. Slept a bit but this morning am still shaky. Worried by not knowing what's wrong. Is something much worse going to happen any minute. If I suddenly die that will be that but there could be hospitals and bad kinds of sudden irreparable damage and misery unending. It feels like fear. It's the sort of heart sensation there is with fear, a tense hollowness. - Spoke to Rowen about being my executor. 13 I should notice the good times too. This morning I woke at six - at six! - after a good night. There were the normal getting-up movements - normal! feeling well! - turn on a light, pee, weigh, dress, open the blinds, turn up the rads, go into the kitchen and turn on the radio (Mozart because it's Sunday) while making tea, turn on the Mac Pro, check email and FB (Emilee liked after I went to bed), take my tea to the little table and place it just exactly where my arm can reach when it hinges back, settle in the red chair and lift the G4 onto my lap. Is this still to do: Listening to Rossini on headphones remembering Sarah, wondering why I so seldom am in feeling memory of people I've known. When did I lose that - is there a way I can tell? I saw and heard and felt their quality - now instead I know where in the brain that mainly happens. Faces, colors, forms, and persons at the farthest end, the headland, temporal pole. The answer to when I lost it is it had to do with Trudy. I don't know. I have a very unclear sense of having been - I want to say - rummaged, but that would be drugs. What I learned with Tom, being hyperalert is not a defense because contact has been made with an unconscious part. They rummaged my unconscious and caused me to work against myself. In them it was vengeance taken against whoever they could reach. Now let me check this - why am I still not sure about this. I haven't liked to say anyone damaged me. I don't like to say I am damaged, is why. Because it is damage no one else had done, not abandonment, not Roy. That was damage but I had brought a loving spirit through. They did damage to my loving spirit. Now I have said it. What follows? Win love back from them. Will you teach me how? By anger Anger at them? Yes They cut me off from love in my house. Siege. I brought love into my house but they confined it. Trudy campaigned against me evilly. It's true but it's as if I don't feel it. 15 Winter 2000 the book is telling me I should be teaching what it has been teaching me. Goddard a year and a half later. The inner man thread is about social aggression, leadership, action. In 2000 it begins to nag me about that. Meantime the TA-ing stories show love woman's personal feeling and warrior attack on conventional philosophy working beautifully together. Don't you think? Yes. - It says what I wrote to Louie is true but not relevant. Is there something that would have been relevant Female intuition, power struggle, winning, brilliance and courage I'm two primal fronts with her, mother and brother. o On the mother front her child self has always wanted devotion and compliance from me that I couldn't give her o It has tried to manipulate me to get it and has always failed o It has always been angry with me about that o When she's in child mind she discounts what I am able to give her and that makes me feel unseen o On the mother front also there's competition in relation to men o This one is covert in her, she doesn't want to know it because it threatens her lesbian defense so when it shows its effects it's shameful and seems to undermine her whole gig o On the brother front she is competitive and resentful o She knows their privilege is unfair but she's not sure she's as smart as they are o She needs to be successful even at her own expense so they will see she is as smart as they are o When she feels me as mannish in my talents and habits she goes into child's rage at not being seen On my side there is just the mother front. o When she was devoted to me I was restored to loved and gifted child o But the price of her devotion was that I should give up what I feel for men o Then I saw that she was competing with me for men and that was the whole constellation of primal betrayal, a massive shock - Is this the exact layout so far as it goes? Yes. It's not something I should say to her. Apart from these primal struggles there was always friendship. A spark. We could talk. Is that what you think is relevant?       YES Female intelligence, brilliance and courage       yes On top of primal struggle       yes Is she feeling I don't remember that       yes I lately don't remember it because I don't have inner liveliness to meet hers       yes Is that as much as I need to know       yes 16 Both Emilee and Janet have said impostor syndrome of themselves. I'm impatient with that. I'm easily posting bits that show me being smart or unusual. But at the further end of what I do best ...? The blank disbelief I felt when Jody said what he said about Being about: it can't be true. Though I also lived and worked believing it to be true. 17 What I started to say yesterday was that if I was dealing with stops many women have, look at the extraordinarily laborious work-arounds I was using to press through them and they haven't. - I'm just through the sequence up to the 110 days and feeling something like doubt about my principles. Was I foolish not to do what he was doing, lying and cheating? I tried for a better way that didn't shut down possibilities and at the same time didn't accept victimhood. I thought that would be better for me. And was it             yes And was his way better for him       no 18 When I lay down last night my heart kept me awake again. This time it was jumping around rather than thrumming. I lay there mystified and scared feeling there's nothing I can do and no kind of help. Dozed off. Woke hard a bit after midnight with a quite intense pressing sensation in the area below the left shoulder's bump. Got up and checked my bp, drank some water. Read until I faded. Woke at 7:30 to a bright day behind the venetians. The sun is so horizontal now that it reaches to the laundry room's far wall. Am I now paying for the strenuousness of the work I did then? I could feel that it was hard on my heart. - It says not. Or maybe it's the cost of its long valiant effort to drive an asymmetrical body. Working on the 110 days in 2000 at the same time as heart trouble now - and the suspended worry about why Louie has given up on me - what is it I'm feeling. That I was something then that was so rich and now have come to such a dry scared end and what is the relation of this self and that one. I guess the question is, am I being punished? It says no but how should I understand it. Is it just a natural tapering off?       yes I should just understand that it's last times and has to be hard       NO Can you tell me something       recovery, winning, action, early love Do you mean what I'm posting       yes You're saying there's that       yes Are you mad at me for failing to take it further       no Was the Godard work taking it far enough       yes Does it have more effect than I know       yes   Just bear this hardship with patience, is that what you think?       yes Know it's a lingering end and bear it with patience       yes At least I'll die before I get demented       yes Some of the pieces I'm posting now are less charming as stories and more instructive - today the paragraph about the silent half of the conversation. I think Louie maybe doesn't understand that I've left it all on the field. She could honour me for that but her childishness has to lament my neglect even though she's better provided than I am with good care from others. That's the essence of it isn't it       YES I've left it all on the field is the way to think of it       YES Bear this hardship as honorable       YES I haven't succeeded very far but I've done what I needed to do       YES Alright (sigh) - There's what I was learning about the means of aboutness and there's what I was learning about how to talk to be able to think better and there's what I was learning about how to work with my personal limiting structures to be able to know and do more. Is the whole of Tom subsumed in that one? He was that and something else too, my sample human. Theory's practice. After that so were my students. By the Writing, writing and 110 days sections I'm hardly mentioning Tom, I have that balance and he's staying in touch. Now the next section is being harrowed in the department. 19 How this woman had to manage herself to complete a large work - what she had to manage - resistances of remnant childishness and evolved female imperatives. That's the right emphasis       YES And don't leave out male resistance       yes Which I didn't manage well at all - I kept not doing what it advised. So it's not a story of overcoming all odds, it's a story of overcoming some but not enough odds. - Now I'm thinking maybe the social odds really do fall under remnant childishness and evolved female imperatives because they are reasons I didn't deal with male refusal. The juice in the story is the Tom love story but the love story should actually be understood as secondary - I don't know what to do with that. There's juice in time and place too and I suppose in voice but even I don't like to read the technicalities. What was the most important achievement. I want to say the outline, theoretical layout, which is the overview, the framework. I kept refining it. It's a splendid achievement no one noticed. But apart from the work do I NEED love to mend what's wrong with my heart. Last night again the wrong feeling in my chest that's there still - thumping, a dark pressure, a tremour that's like fear. Does right nostril breathing work to calm the heart       yes Does that mean it's an electrical problem       yes And traumatic       yes "Write the story of being two women." Is there a way to write it so they're equally present. 21 Result of our low-key election today is Liberals returned in minority, local MP Conservative, prairie provinces solid blue. I early-voted NDP knowing my vote could make no possible difference in this riding. 23 I was thinking of Gilles Pruneau last night. Couldn't find him online unless he was the one who went FLQ and died in Paris in 1985. [Yes - he was one of the mailbox bombers.] Looked for the photo I have of him in that 1962 journal. There found Al's name and thought it's so particular he should be easy to find. He was. Sent him a note. This morning he has replied. Said good things. Surprisingly good things. His FB page tells me he knows BC writers including ghastly Judith and has a mild balanced grandfatherly face. 26 Best color in the garden now especially the Evans cherry and Gail's cherry next door. Sun at a low angle deep into the kitchen in the afternoon. 27 Posted Mary from Wing in which I get my hand in my pants riding through dark countryside in the back of a bus. - Pennask Lake Road. Wide and silent. Wide, wide. Bright. Bare. Sometimes a hawk circling. I took some photos though I knew I couldn't be all there yet. Emilee the way you are living is so bad for you and there's nothing I can do. Corporate America, white flour food, industrial medication, no exercise, horror movies, bad TV, weed and booze and for the first time fast cheap sloppy language. "... damn, girl. Holy shit. You take one hit and you sit your ass down because that's how you get schooled." Who talks like that? You're leveling yourself. Your brilliance is being lost to the world because you don't have a fighting instinct to look after yourself. 28 I have Al's facebook house up on the monitor because I like its company. I always like symmetry in houses and this house is like a person who is pleased, observant, modest and kind. The autumn light on large trees reminds me of Mrs Wold's street in Sexsmith. I recognize the scruffy caragana hedge and rusted gate. Those long tree limbs embrace the house. As for Al I think it's likely he'll never reply. Why do I think that. Because his second note had a different tone than his first, more blank and conventional. Maybe he's intimidated. Maybe my Vancouver reputation as a scrapper has got to him. Oh well. Is there more I want to say about the Pennask plateau? Maybe not. I don't know it yet. But when I got back yesterday I was sitting here in the sort of blissed calm that used to come after my California backcountry. Luke this aft joyful about his family - saying how comfortable he was living with Nel - teasing her mother, emailing her son every day - ten year plan a little house somewhere warm. He asked about tarot - Sara bequeathed him her Rider pack. I said get Paul Case and I'd tell him more when he's had a chance to look into it a bit on his own. It's a psychology and its aim is integration. Luke's new son - I hope he's that - is a young man who has never had a free night in a city because he grew up in Caracas under curfew - will be leaving Saturday for Madrid. He asked about my project - 29 I sent him the processing summary from the GW intro. He said wonderful and wants to send it to Nelida. 766 pages. I've been once through and now have to do something else. What do you think, should it be a novel? It says no. Why not? Be generous and direct about loss and deep change. Can it be readable enough if it's stays as journal? Yes.   I want the travel tales Joyce tales Tom good-times tales Tom anguish tales For theory single paragraphs. Facing pages? No interspersed. Work breakthroughs 31 Was in Here this morning looking for the small flames piece and liked it so much, the photos and the paragraphs and the whole as a project. I wanted it to be more known. I also saw that it was the beginning of what I'm doing now, shaping and posting small stories. Is that the format?       no Continuous?       yes - Having a rumble with Al over the Munro passage I posted years back. In his view the character is a woman who is self-contradicted and doesn't know herself and is in the grip of a bad gender stereotype and has a bad relation with men. I think the character may certainly have self-contradictory feelings and is wondering whether she might be in the grip of a bad gender stereotype but also has noticed that she likes something about her circumstance - that it feels more right than other kinds of wrongness. The exchange went back and forth quite a few times. I felt I understood him but he not only didn't understand what I was saying but also intensely disliked it. That gives me a view of how and why most men will hate my project. Have I read him right       yes Most men will hate my project       YES They'll want to say the self-conflict I describe is just pathological. They'll judge it as a wrong way to be in relation to them, to men, will feel it shouldn't exist and so shouldn't be described. It is pathological but being interested in it isn't. Women will sometimes like it because it describes something they know. He dislikes it because he feels he isn't the kind of man described      yes - Paul phoned this morning from Toronto. He'd been driving around in his new territory, Shield farms and fall color, an auction sale. I was happy for him having that pleasure of newness.   part 3 time remaining volume 8: 2019-2020 may-march work & days: a lifetime journal project