time remaining 8 part 4 - 2019-2020 december-*  work & days: a lifetime journal project December 12 2019 I bought a rug! Red rug for under the desk. And cut a tree. On Midday Valley Road yesterday graceful ponderosas frosted all over. I had to keep rising to get to the firs. And here's my wide-winged sacrificial tree. - All that scraping to register social underlayers - sexual, competitive. I'd been learning it to catch up with them - in them it was competitive "we know more" Jewish and they practiced it stoned. It hobbled me; I was noticing it rather than something else and it had a paranoid feel. So was I learning something I needed later? Was it worth anything? It says yes. 14 Running out of little stories that aren't too psychological and too me. - Have mailed to Luke. Frightened in my chest. His birthday in a couple of days. What I sent him is tempered but I'm angry. 15 There's a dense section where I'm sorting scraps. It's like what I could do later sorting for Being about but wilder, less clear, less focused. Did I get smarter             yes Because of Joyce       no Because of working       yes Self-creation       YES The constant work of self-creation there has been. No one knows. 16 Am deleting all the dreams and anything about Jam and her friends. I'm seeing that in the Saturna winter I was finding my questions and aims. I was in massive flux of suspension but naming my questions and aims. Psychic availability - Julia Henderson Perception as knowing - McLintock Neuroscience Sex - Rob Doing - garden A way to stay in high discrimination and pressure for work Wide enough social balance to be able to do Mobility and command, speed Enough money To work through something about vision and inference To work through something about sound and space Writing phenomenology that isn't boring - Joyce and feeling Better self-editing How to think of language as evocation Prepositions Feeling and reason - Damasio Working with the uncon as body Politics of theory Refusing the glamour of refusal Trauma as body Geology Hemispheric specialization Two sides and larger self 17 Professional writing and why I don't want those kinds of attractiveness. - Why didn't I. I thought of them as deliberate and rule-based and old-fashioned. I didn't want to feel cunning in writing, I wanted effects to come of themselves. It turns out that some of the effects that come of themselves have names in rhetoric and they may sometimes have come undeliberately in old-fashioned writers too. Am I more deliberate now. I edit what now seem obvious awkwardnesses feeling how was it I wrote so badly but I'm still just working from what I see in front of me. I think what I'm mostly looking at is tone and that by feel. Two Christmas pieces ready to post, Strasbourg 1965 and WindanSea 2004. Strasbourg 1965 had to be cleaned up a lot but it still seems lumpen. I'll post it as a travel piece. WindanSea 2004 is travel too but it's breezier. Do I mean differences in who wrote them I suppose. What was somehow accomplished by the years was more flex. I often like the tone in the Tom pieces best. Love and amusement together. And California. - Through the evening Freya was knitting mustard-yellow cable-stitch gloves two at a time. I understood that she was doing it so her energy wouldn't run over us, so Rowen and I could talk. Earlier we'd all been lying on my bed, she knitting, Rowen with his head on her leg, I alongside Rowen with my head next to his knee. I'd decided to tell him the bad thing I did to Luke. He asked to know more about the people who'd shattered me. Freya can surprise me with deft summaries. Rowen is beautiful colors. I gave them a heater for their cold house. And cookbooks and jars of preserves. And a folder of executor documents. We agreed I have to figure out intellectual property law. Yes Luke's birthday and the beginning of the Christmas week. He's been insulting me so I'm not phoning him. 18 Is there something I can do about the way mental energy fades out when I'm editing. Today soon feeling that shying-away from the next thing to do: I can't. When it happens I usually go back to bed. 20 Lot of wet snow last evening. I felt lively at ten o'clock and went out to shovel and then had one of my waking nights. When my heart began to thrum I interrupted it by coming sweetly with my nice glass thing. But then still didn't sleep. Was yearning for Louie or someone to explain to me what happened with Luke. 21 When I'm back in Van the tone immediately better. Is it as if beginning to see through Jam was part of a wider authority somehow built in the winter's floundering. (YES.) Sequency and simultaneity - it's the two hemispheres. I want - a lab - sound generating - a fellowship - a good department head - access to music - access to animation stand - computers - England or Berkeley - some kind of sesshins - math - a way to another child - in three years.   Calculations have come to this: I should go back to UC in London I should live in Bloomsbury with an aircleaner and a bicycle, audit physics and embryology, write on the prenate, write on Dorothy, write on grain, and make two and a half minute songs. Keep Oxford and MIT in mind. This year I should get writing out.   I don't take thinking far enough. I came out of the Saturna winter wanting a larger leap than I took. Five months later I was pregnant and miserably enslaved to Jam for another nine months. Why. Though I did eventually get fellowship, computers, math and a department though only local. - The film still to make. I vowed I'd fuck a man. Went into extreme heat. - At this moment I hear sidewalk-scraping. Get up and look out. RCMP car. Police officer shoveling my sidewalk. He's doing the whole corner! Why? What can I learn - to follow body and give it a life. What am I afraid of - declassedness.   Oh womb and cunt what are you up to. Juan Guri as precursor. "The way you looked at the ground, it was just a split second, you were carrying your bike over a curb and there were some people coming. A movement as if you were a deformed monster." "I try not to feel ashamed that you're crippled." When I accepted to go into heat I had to honorably investigate the life of a lame woman with men. Did that for the next 30 years. Was Tom ever ashamed that I was crippled            no "To do quite a lot to show that you have a ferocity, that you are not weedy." "People are stopped in discussing your aesthetic because you try to make that your representative. They see that you can't afford to acknowledge all the parts." "Howcome she hasn't taken photos of feet?" - Those are Jam using their description to diminish me in a way she hadn't before. Was it accurate       yes And also dismissive       yes Competitive       yes "Traction one gets in an oppositional space" "had a lot of fear of being ranked" "It really has to do with finding the middle ground. The relation of what is regarded as overcompensation with natural gifts. A public confession in which I found a way to not put myself in an inferior position." "My beautiful femininity when it expresses itself in writing is transgressing." "It does not transmit to me an energy, it gives me a sight and I guess I want to transmit energy, which maybe could translate to power. Honest and depressing. Brave to do it that way, doesn't give me the energy that I would like to get." "My writing takes honesty for its virtue and that's what makes it seem humble and makes people feel sorry for me, is that it?" "Is it that a lame persona is not allowed to say 'I am lonely' in a plain way? Whereas an ordinary person can." "I had to be an especially happy person, and I did that, but I ran into limitations of it, which was that I couldn't do good work if I was being an especially happy person." "That gets back to the question of craft and social craft." "I just think it's good phenomenology to write the threatened self as the threatened self." "Then maybe it's a question of setting it so it will be seen as good phenomenology." She's right but I'm angry at her coldness in this. She's poking my wound while insisting she's better than I am, and even though she never stops cheating, claiming she's really a man and backing her imposture with mastery signals so anal they even withhold the whole spelling of a word. I do it now: public confession that doesn't put itself in an inferior position. How. By offering it in proportion with earned powers. Cheryl said Part of what amazes me about these entries you share is your appreciation of your own gifts. How did that capacity for appreciation come about? Are they different questions. How is it I can post pieces about inferiorities now. I could write them by writing them privately first. Am posting them after years of teaching. And how is it I can post about my nice round bum - I was in the habit of writing pleasures and that was one along with many other kinds. I had many years of standing firm between hating and liking. I think it's that. Is it? Yes. "a book on the ideas of space language, geometry math" I did write one. 22 Have I described the grey sagging I feel for instance when I think of my mother - and when I don't want to dress better to go to the store - and when I'm visible walking in any public space - and when there are recent things I don't remember. It's not so much a giving-up feeling as a having-given-up. 23 My new rug is thick and strong and red and handsome in a subtly contemporary way and there it is under my bare feet when I'm at the work table. - Editing Michael I disdain what I didn't disdain then but at the same time can see it as just writing readable by someone who doesn't know the people in it. - Then I come to the moment when I see his buried rage - how really dangerous he is - that he wants not only to kill but to dismember. Then everything after that makes me queasy. 24 My romances have been so wrong - disgustingly wrong - frivolous - except Frank, Greg, Tom - Rob, Tony - and I see myself taking them as if they weren't. Ick. As repelled by Jam as by Mike. 25 A skin of white on the sidewalk this morning, no cars. I said and one went by. Boiler growling - how many ways have I said that. I woke late, eight o'clock. Tea. There's my wide-winged tree with its inner scatter of lights. Dove on a wire above the policeman's driveway just sitting. Thick red rug I thank myself for. WindanSea Christmas Day posted. Red room to my left always pleasure, red white and green. Silver. Does the day feel a little particular? Yes even though. 26 I wandered into GW4-1 looking for something and there was knocked sideways - seared so I was having to glance away - by those first days with Tom. Instantly feeling why am I working on this and that rather than the culminating seizure that wiped out all my silly romances. Do you agree it was culminating       yes But you told me to leave       yes And now I'm here in this barren vacancy killing time all day       yes ?       act, in high intuition, to write, for liberation Is that what you mean       yes My human self is sacrificed       YES Is it punishment       no, reward Can I do it       yes Is my heart getting better       no but it will hold for a while Is there more you want to say       balance, anguish, with practical, speed Say more about practical speed       do the work to complete anguish So many minute decisions. I'll need so much focus and will so much want to dodge it. It has to have a journal form       yes Do you think it's mostly alright as is?       no Radically pruned       NO Take it in chunks             yes It's so unlike what anyone has seen before. Give it out in chapters?       yes Pseudonyms for his people? Rachael for Rebecca. Luce for Louie? 30 The Tom section - The Golden West - October-January 33 pages. Now I'm into Addiction January-August - much too long - what are its essentials - how to choose - How to deal with his cutting off Early love coming up in both Question of what men are - what American men are My addiction to romantic fantasy His addiction Defending its opposite, perception, presence I should Indesign these chapters as little volumes? And post them as pdfs? I keep feeling the story is massively relevant the way hardly any current writing is. At the same time that the relevance won't be noticed. 31 Looking for Theory's practice I found a couple of pages of David Mac story - thought somewhere in the Tom story I should say who I'd wanted to find instead of who I did find. - Thrilled suddenly by two desert photos from Gabe who is driving a semi on I-10 near the Salton Sea - lovely Gabe who was so undone by anxiety he had to rush home from cherry picking - Facebook messaging from the road. Posted Le Guin's town today. Talking to Greg about what to call my little stories - he said not sketches - I said not scenes - then I said instances. Instances of something. Instancing something. For instance. Today's was an instance of night driving. Yesterday an instance of early morning. Writing some of them I feel them as that. What is early waking like? What is it like to be? 1 January 2020 1. fix hair 2. fix sleep 3. fix dumping 4. daily cardio 5. daily yoga or kum nye 6. find a way to stay 145 because I hate being this 7. dress better 8. bathtub plug 9. hall rug 10. hall paint 11. hall light 12. hall images 13. guestroom prep 14. bathroom wall 15. bathroom prep 16. theory's practice Indesign 17. some instances Indesign 18. go through, organize, all journal boxes 19. intellectual property will 20. fireplace panel 21. verandah wall 22. verandah staples 23. WARM AND OPEN HEART 24. paint west fence 25. Another bad night - I don't fall asleep - morose - New Years banging in the street - an arbitrary date, I don't care - saying to myself that I now don't love anyone at all - (it's true) - trying to soften my head by imagining David Mac and always fading off - set in hardness about Luke - he was contemptuous, he doesn't understand me, he needs to hurt me, I'll never see him again, he's killed my feeling for him, which had been dear to me, he has another family now and is done with me - Those are all true aren't they       yes Let him go       yes But I don't like the hardness, the grim setness. Can I let him go in a softer way? 2 Yesterday I probably signed up for two cats. Will they destroy my plants. This morning I sent a note to Colin [Thomas]. - All quiet. The mama has found the litter box and is asleep on my desk. The little one is hiding as far under the bed as he can go. The excitable baby-talk lady has taken her $210 and gone home. I'm as new to this as they are. In that a bad smell of cat food, are they going to leave hair on my rugs, is that prickle in the skin around my mouth allergy, are they going to cry at night. She does have a nice little frighty triangle face. 3 I locked them in the back room together last night and now the little one is coming out from under the bed. I don't understand her not letting him near her. They both have such quiet little mieows. She seems tired or depressed. Now the two of them asleep on my green blanket. Ah he's crept closer and she's licking him. He gets a bit pushy? She growls, bats him off and jumps down from the bed. Addiction is January-July 93 pages almost all bookwork. Colin has replied. There's an end tucked in. Ellie! - it was lovely to hear from you after all these years and to discover what happened to you next. I much enjoyed reading the interview with you and seeing your beautiful photographs.   I am just about to begin a memoir which also aspires to be a critical look at documentary-making (including my own) and truth-telling. I want to call it "Don't Look At The Camera" which every documentary film maker - of the conventional school I come from - will have said at one time or another. And which immediately misleads because the natural way to respond to being looked at is to look back. I think it was conversations with you that started me thinking about those kind of issues and which eventually led to my resignation from the BBC.   I remember our time together very warmly and now have a beautiful picture of you in my mind amongst your fruit trees and roses. I didn't think I'd earned being remembered warmly. He's remembering that way in the generosity of a life that turned out well. I'm into Four papers noticing how remarkable the shift is after the addiction work and his visit. The writing steps up remarkably. Larger, lighter, looser, sharper. 4 They're happier though the mama is tortured being in heat. The baby is playing with a bit of dried leaf and the mama sometimes will let him cuddle up being licked. It's 6:45 Saturday morning. Is it rain or snow sifting down under the streetlight. Specks of light on the window. 5 6:28 the mama lying under the tree twisting frantically, arching her back to raise her little rump, and what to call the sound she makes, a grating at the back of her throat. Her child - at that moment she jumped onto the arm of the chair for the first time and was lying with her head pressed against my arm. Her child followed her up and let me stroke him for the first time. Now he's on the green blanket where he's eyeing the ficus. 8 When we drove up grandly to a side door in the taxi last night the street lights under the maples along University Avenue made them seem to glow of themselves, scarlet and orange. Ban Righ rose above the lawn and trees like a medieval castle in grey limestone with narrow windows (still dark for the most part), large oak doors, and ivy spread over the walls to the very top. Inside was a very little old lady at a desk, a common room with a fireplace and a Degas print, a vast, echoing cafeteria, and a large bulletin board full of regulations and notices of extra-curricular activities.   I'm wanting to post something about the morning I woke in Ban Righ for the first time but what's there is letter and uselessly blank and social. What I remember is waking in sunlight in a room that faced east and standing at the window looking over a playing field with large eastern trees feeling I was really there. My social disgrace had come with me but I was a winner too, I'd worked and planned, I'd competed, carried myself through, I'd escaped, I'd shot forward into the world. The valor and energy of that girl, her goodwill to all. Her poise really. 8 It's snowing, eight in the morning, pale dark, snowing in many speeds and directions. 9 I've been calling the little one Mouse. He has bear fur, thick and matte, a very small pointed face with big yellow eyes. When awake is always needing to find something to do: now chasing, now clawing, now licking himself, now running to nuzzle his mother, distractable. Yesterday morning lay on the rad with his head up watching snow fall. Now is curled next to my legs on the hassock. His mom can't be more than a year old but she's kind of a hard case? - whips her tail in a way that seems cynical to me - when she's stroked, when he's cuddling, almost anytime - as if she's saying this is all very well but I'd hoped for better. Mostly they're inscrutable. He'll run across the room mieowing with his small voice and I have no sense of what he's saying. She'll lick him kindly and then suddenly lunge showing teeth or just get up and stroll away. They'll discover something to attack and next day be done with it - first the Christmas tree, then Mouse wrecked the mirror's plant in the laundry room, yesterday they kept scrambling through the many-handed big plant on the floor. Mouse yesterday discovered drinking from the toilet, balanced perfectly on the rim. The mama yesterday got into the treat bag on the kitchen counter. - Mouse just now jumped down, mieowed quietly three times and lay down next to his mom on the red carpet. Is being licked. I've heard her purr when he lies down on her. She resists strongly when I move her off table top or my chair - I mean I feel such unlikely large strength in her small body. What is it for them always to live under the feet of stomping giants? They seem to like to be in the same room as me. The most touching moment was yesterday when Mouse was jumping up onto the ficus pot and I roared from the bed. He got down. Immediately tried again. I roared again. He got down. Tried again. I roared louder. He got down but didn't run away, came up against the bed skirt and stared up at me - intense little innocent face staring up as if in wonder at what I could possibly be. 14 Patch and Mouse. Little Mouse for now. I'm less grim? They move around me. Where are they now? What are they doing? I see them lying together, he nursing, she with her forepaw holding him still as she licks him, one of them purring. When I'm eating my three breakfast sausages I hand-feed Little Mouse tiny bits. I'm wooing him and it's working. Last night as I was watching The Durrells in Corfu he lay on the desk in front of me allowing my forearm around him, asleep, his little belly moving. He made me laugh so loud I startled myself. They touch me. Even when they are not purring they quiver subtly. I'm not done marveling that apart from asking for food they'll have anything to do with the lumbering giant I am but when I move to another room they'll get up from their cuddle to see what I'm doing. I'm sorry for their boredom, they've already learned everything they can reach. I've shut them in the cellar hoping it's more like outside. Litter box is the worst thing about them and half the cellar is dirt so maybe they'll ...? 16 7:22 dim blue street snowy all over. Cold days. I'm dimly noticing there are stages in the work that I haven't clearly seen yet. Both kinds of work. Can I name the question I was working on at any time. Am feeling a doubt about whether I came through to anything significant enough so the stages matter - was what I did at Goddard it, the apex? Was unreadable Being about? The weak students who collapsed after I stopped upholding them - Emilee for example, who now seems to have given herself up into her husband's life? Tom's incomplete rescue he may have completely sabotaged now? My own defanged old age? Do you think it was       yes In what sense       Ellie's, fight, to balance, within herself (the lovers) It had to be done even though the effects don't last             yes Is that enough       yes So is it worth resolving the stages       yes Can this work be worth anything       yes There's a further doubt about for instance the way Australia has been burning up - will there be any human life left for this work to be useful in. This street - where at this moment the new neighbour wife with her yellow-handled snow shovel is clearing her sidewalk - couldn't it, the whole town, one of these summers be swept away by fire or flood? 17 When I see what has happened to Emilee - how degraded her writing is, how she seems to be living her husband's life - I see what my journal record-keeping was for. I was fighting to keep my quality - my achieved quality - having to fight. She doesn't fight that way. Instead she's having to endure her body's collapse. I've tried to tell her. Instead of getting angry she adores me for telling her to. I'm more and more impatient with her adoration. What I need from her is to see that my work wasn't wasted. - So Theory's practice is move by move the story of a complicated enterprise, risking and surviving a man while escalating female realness. Realness meaning capacities for feeling and thinking experienced and investigated. Maximizing capacity while naming every internal and external force that tries to suppress it. The parameters: Traumatizing facts: my dad's malice and neglect, my mom's abandonment, social rejection because of my leg, patriarchal training. Are they too particular for their working-out to be useful. Results of trauma: conflict of gender instinct and cultural competence - self-conflict, delay, pain, damage to my kids, poverty, obscurity, waste, Resources: Joyce, women writers, women friends, body's truth, neurophilosophy, world and days, energy, the book, long economic support, libraries, Tom's selfness, some unusual relation to uncon, Process: continual testing of formulations and asking to be corrected; continual letting myself go into crashes and processing them; continual search for traumatic roots; Results: worked-out refounded philosophy of knowing, some graceful writing, embodiment studies, some individual advising. Temporary restoration of Tom. Continuing failures: - So you know, I left a long shelfful of student advising files at Sterling, and in every one was something of you. Same with the dozens of client files now. You talked sense to me when I was nearly owned by something frantic and despairing, and because of how you are and what you said I calmed the clamor and found a way forward. You have no idea how helpful you were. I try to live up to that. You were not like other teachers. I'm not like other lawyers. - I got Emilee a published book but she didn't go on with what I gave her. But Jody did go on so there's that. "You talked sense to me." I don't know what to do about the philosophy sections - I need to show the level of thinking but as it is now it's so condensed I often can't even follow it myself. 18 Going on baffled about Luke and the journal posts, what happened, what should I say to myself about it. What is it he doesn't understand. There's this that's hard to say: what they are as public objects, how I see them when I make them public, how it is that they become impersonal. I see them as forms, formed. I risk forms I know are unusual, maybe no one can read them. Then I like it when someone does. I feel it might reach their loneliness. With Luke maybe it's more than one thing. Maybe it was first that there was too much of the real otherness of someone he needs to imagine in his own way. Second presumably that he's more conventional - meaning stupider or less brave - than I am about presenting a public face. Third that he like many isn't as much a reader-rememberer as I assume people are because I am. Here's another example. I sent Peter the Christmas piece thinking he'd like to remember Strasbourg and his room and himself thirty years old and our friendly night. His reply doesn't mention it. He talks about his wife's Parkinson's and the fungal infection in his brother-in-law's brain. - There Louie awake at 3. 20 I'm posting psychological stories - stories at a fine scale of personal being - is that the way to say it - that I assume almost no one will be interested in - today comfortable in the highest culture, which has a dream and personal distress and from their point of view a sort of bragging - Near waking something about a way of using a mind - some few people - who work with a fine grid - which I saw. I was trying to peer into the little squares to see what it was they were looking at. A feeling when I woke of the work I've done - the way it was finding space to work in, that has not been used up - as if the space within the space we have There. That was March 2000. 21 I'm with my two children, a boy and a younger girl, and answer the phone. Tom's voice quite faint. He's calling a while after some sort of decision to separate. I'm glad and I'll agree to see him but there's background noise and the line is weak. My little girl standing next to me is talking to me. Tom will be able to hear what I say to her. I tell her to go find something to do. She's across the room singing to herself. I say to Tom Did you hear her? - she's singing Go mom and dad, go mom and dad, the end of advice. I wake. This morning I've posted the bookwork intro. I've been watching Li ZiQi's Sichuan movies on Youtube and figuring out how to sew what I now know are Hanfu patterns. 22 Wednesday morning after an unsleeping night I wake to a clear sky - look at that, a clear sky! The Russian olive's fringes of fine twigs are standing against a platinum sky slowly turning blue. The mother cat bangs the bedroom door when she's determined to be let out. I hear thumps from my bed. At the moment they're wrestling. She's stronger and twice as big but he jumps her. They roll clamped together all eight paws scrabbling, her tail whipping to both sides. She brings her teeth, he squeals. He's under the bed. She's flattened watching him. He takes a run. She meets him in mid-air. She pins him. He runs into the many-hands plant where she doesn't bother to follow. She strolls away, lies down but has her eye on him. I admire his elegant little poses. He'll lift his midback so it's arched twice his height, a little upside-down U. Sleeps laid flat on his side stretched toe to toe. They like to be on the table with me when I'm watching videos. Last night she lay blinking under the lamp while he lay at 90 degrees nursing and purring. I have pedophile feelings for him but he doesn't like me to hold him, will get up pointedly and move just out of reach. 23 My readers are losing patience with my psychological love stories so I thought I should try a travel story with a photo. Looked up the Australia journal. The writing is unusable. I marvel how patchy and destroyed it still was in 1990. Going back to school forced it back into driven coherence. - Am I trying to do something that can't be done? No Can I do it? Yes Bare-naked personal self, compressed technical theory. 25 The first would scandalize those who could read the second. The second would be rushed past by those who could be interested in the first. The book's structural difficulty is at the very point of the accomplishment I'm trying to demonstrate. If I found ways to smooth the difference I'd cancel the point of the book. The way other people do it is to describe the thing abstractly without demonstrating it and that makes books as blank as the one I read yesterday. I went through the Harrowing section yesterday and am wondering whether there's more to find about why I was so distressed by the department. I'd been working alone and now was having to be judged by people who hadn't been where I'd been. - No what I want to say is that my difference was so comprehensive that I couldn't speak to them from it. I knew we didn't have common framework. I could only finish and present them with the whole. The grad dean said "You don't trust him". I said no so gratefully; he'd named it. What I always did to let my students trust me was make sure I praised what was good in what they'd done before I told them what they'd got wrong. Phil didn't do that and it made me despair of him. He was saying I should discuss but he was too lazy or limited to come where I was. I always did that with students. "corrective to a male sense of knowledge" "The way everything I'm proposing hangs with other proposals and evokes other proposals." "New conceptual systems such as Darwin's theory emerge as intellectual wholes. Once in place, the logical structure of the system inevitably begets a coherent set of questions." - It would have been so much better if I could have said any of this to Phil. Yesterday I looked up Akins and found that one of the two papers she's famous for talks about 'aboutness'. [ie papers she'd written after my time in the department] Considering her successful life in the department and the profession I was still agreeing with the way I've avoided being embedded in that or any profession. I wanted to succeed in philosophy of mind but I didn't want to be a successful philosopher of mind. The book I read yesterday was by a young neurosurgeon who was dying of lung and other cancers. As writing it's undistinguished but it's very cried-up I suppose because he was a beautiful young man and wrote about dying. The way the book is undistinguished is that it says nothing about what it's like to be, it's not a writer's book, it's abstract and actually impersonal. I marvel that so often what makes writing succeed is not the writing. But then I can think of how loved Patrick O'Brian is for oh so much the right reasons and with so many kinds of people. I feel the personal work is for all women, any woman could recognize herself in my dilemma and what the book says to it. But then the theoretical work can only be for maybe mostly men? Specialized men. The theoretical work defends what maybe have mostly been women's values but women don't need it because it's corrective to what they don't think anyway? It tries to change the social world they have to live in but they don't need to read it. So it's women's inner work on the one hand and political work on the other. (I'm thinking of Luke as write this, the way he denied any value to what I was doing.) - Do I need this sort of comment enfolded or maybe replacing the theory? Are the teaching letters where theory touches down into usefulness to ordinary people? Does that mean I should do them first or alongside? 26 Atul Gawande 2014 Being mortal I talked to Louie about Luke. We agreed that maybe Luke needs to be away from me from now on. She said if he's stronger now maybe he can risk what he couldn't risk before. Revenge I said. Yes. So then the question is how can I be with that final end without bitterness. I'd have to love him again, I'd have to open the early love but do it remembering it's my story not his. As if he'd died. I see more clearly that causing someone to stop loving does harm. And from now on post what I like about him because it supports that love - mine. So revive all the loves       yes Is that possible       yes For my own sake             yes Vipassana       no It's the state not the person       yes Can I do that without being crooked       yes 27 Can I trust Louie in this       no She wants me to lose Luke      yes It satisfies her that I'm alone       yes It satisfies her that I feel ugly       yes Is she aware of it             no She hasn't been protective of me       yes She just wanted something       YES My quandary is that I need to confide in someone and she does listen but I shouldn't confide in her because she doesn't wish me well. Does anyone wish me well       no So does reviving love depend on reviving moments       yes I mustn't say bad things about myself to her anymore even when I need to say them. I must dress better. I must figure out how to not be fat and still be healthy. I must DO things every day. I have to know that no one wishes me well and yet not be bitter or sour. Do you know how to do that       process despair by writing early love Writing in early love       yes - I posted the Rowen photo and paragraphs and 13 people like it. I thought maybe it was just that people want the quick hit of a photo so I posted a Dimboola photo and paragraphs. But no. So they're wanting people - people other than inner Ellie. 28 I've posted the Luke piece. His years of controlling me with his dejection are done. Controlling and punishing. He gets cranky. When he doesn't like himself he blames me. He doesn't register my kindness to him, has held a long grudge. That's the kind of man he is. I've liked his company more than anyone's really, say that too. I don't think Tom ever gave me Louie's sort of Schadenfreude. He defended himself - thought he had to defend himself - in his long habitual ways but it wasn't personal and it wasn't dogged the way Louie's covert anger and control mania have been. Did you know I was going to teach at Goddard       yes Do you know when I'm going to die       no Do you know how Tom is now       yes If I emailed him my number would he call me      yes Is that a good idea       no Did you think teaching at Goddard was a good use of me       yes 29 The quotation mark problem has had no good solution. I don't like them. In my small stories what I like is simply a capital on the beginning of the quoted sentence. When that can't be clear enough I've used quotation marks but inconsistency isn't right. 30 I like to touch Little Mouse's velvet paws. And be touched by. I plot to seduce him into letting me hold him though he doesn't like it. I feel pedophile uneasiness when he briefly endures being held. Patch knows I don't like her. She likes treat bits but she refuses to be managed by them or by the bedtime bowl of wet food I use to lead them into the back room, sits solid and heavy so I have to pick her up to move her. She's impassive. The only thing that rouses her is wrestling with Mouse. They chase across the floor and leap at each other. She pins him and I think bites his neck. He squeals, escapes, runs into the many-hands plant where she never follows him. She lies down. He jumps onto her. One of them runs under the bed. The wrestling is new. They have manic hours a couple of times a day. They sleep in their beautiful shapes. When I leave the room they'll follow me. At times they like to sleep near me. Little Mouse likes the green blanket and will sleep at my feet when I'm reading in bed. Patch never does that though she'll walk disdainfully over my chest. We got off to a bad start when she was in heat for two weeks begging pathetically all day. She'll run away when she can but I want him to have her for now. I love his bright little spirit and want to raise him right. End of January, one more month of this lifeless grey. There'll be robins in March. - Look at them on the hassock next to my knee sleeping with their heads together, his paws relaxed and his little belly pumping just at the haunch. Did she feel me looking at her? She jumped over to the rad's window view. Her tail twitches are so cynical they make me laugh. 31 How is Teaching letters different. It should be based on the dialogues. It demonstrates mbo in relation to topics. I'm seeing I need to branch - I need to be editing the GW and IA journals so they read well as such - compress Theory's practice so it's not so repetitive - make Teaching letters useful for instance to Kate - February 1 What I'm feeling about Luke now is that I'm wondering how he can think so badly of my motives. - Joanna Russ 1937-2011 Russ accused Le Guin of being accommodating to men, of refusing to write as a woman. Le Guin claimed to write under the influence of her animus; wasn't her freedom not to write "as a woman" precisely the point? a frustration at having so much to unlearn before being able to see clearly her own situation. For Russ, what was maddening about Le Guin was not that she prioritized the business of being an individual over that of being a woman; it was that she didn't acknowledge the break with the world that had to take place before either project could begin. When I found them in 1975 Russ and Le Guin impressed me in different ways, Russ by her defiant lesbian style but Le Guin by touching my lonely lovingness. Le Guin had agreed to be wife and mother and she sounded conventional whenever she spoke or wrote from her daily self but the good thing about how she lived was that the planetary citizen who wrote didn't at all break with the world or her female body - she could be politically outraged but she'd been lucky enough in her family so that she didn't need to be angry on her own behalf. It's odd that she wanted to call the wide kind clear deep mind of her work-self male but at least she gave herself to be there and show us all how it can be done. What do I think of this in Russ: There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I'm quoting here because it's what I'm trying to write about. There was training - the church, my mom's example - but calling it all training cuts corners. Which corners: trauma, evolution: the actual nature of bodies in the world. I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human, they are designed not to be stable together and they make an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both. It wasn't an explosion in my head but for decades it was a devouring task. 3 Last night when I was lying on my back reading Little Mouse bounded onto my chest and lay there purring hard. I was holding the book up into the light with my right hand and bracing him with my left arm to keep him from sliding off my ribs. It was the first time he'd done anything so blatantly fond. I love his emotionality, his little cries, and the grace of his poses and his fearlessness wrestling with his heavier mother - and his humor, the all-which-way he danced playing with a shirt tail he found in the closet. His curiosity, the way he invents things to play with all over the room, a fold in the blanket, a crumpled supermarket receipt, the venetians' long cord. His fantasy maybe, whatever it is he's imagining as he dashes back and forth on my bed. Here's Patch lying on the laptop table next to me. She's something like morose and she never cuddles but she does that sometimes. Is turning her head watching her kid stick-handle a crumpled receipt across the floor. Kathy said she's been beaten, a way she pulls back her head when she's touched. Winter morning, thin layer of fresh snow, yellow break in grey clouds. I don't know what to do about the mother work I did with Louie. It must have been prep for the father work I did with Tom and the philosophers, and there's evidence in that later work that it was unfinished - is unfinished - but accounting for it seems a separate project. 4 Went up Chapman St and bought a maybe-nineteenth-century Belgian ashtray stand to hold my clock at night, wood carved in the form of a stork with its bill pointed up. I've been meaning to list cats I've had. Kittens in the haybarn at Clearbrook Road, heads bitten off by a rat. Black kitten I found dead under our bedroom window when we came back from a trip. Kitten we picked up in a park in Texas on the long trip when I was twelve, left behind at another stop. The cat Mary told me to put out when I was sitting with Frank at night. Olivia's Petercat. Kitten that drowned in the toilet bowl on William Street. Black half-Siamese cat Luke and I got from Gospel Oak as a kitten, who herself had two kittens in a filing cabinet drawer and who afterward yowled so much I put her in sports bag and took her across the river on the tube. Andy had her two black males for years after I left. Porpoise Gooseberry on Eton Street. Another of Ed and Mary's cats when I was sleeping in Rudy's bed. Rabbit who I found injured on the street and took home on the bike, who hid under the tub for weeks and when he was grown arrived and departed up the porch pillars until eventually he found another home. Rowen's Scratchy. Leslie's Pippy. The cat that visited when we were first in Tom's place on Georgia. The dying kitten I found on Mesa Grande Road. The kitten I got from Julian, that cried so much I took him back. What I notice about all the cat stories except the last two is how casually the cats were looked after. Never a vet. They came and went and weren't expected to get old. 5 Wednesday 8:30, white sky, thin snow already tracked to pavement by highschool traffic. When I wake I put the room a bit in order - stow the red quilt, raise the blinds, start the Mac Pro, turn up the heat - and then I open the cellar door. The two of them have heard me moving upstairs and are waiting on the top step. Mieow says Mouse. I give them a couple of treat bits to say welcome. If I don't space them enough Mouse dives for Patch's too. Patch is motherly with him, stands back and lets him eat anything first. - I feel odd using their names, why? At the same time I do feel them as persons, Mouse at least, because he's so present and feeling. He's so related: he will sleep against my hip and let me hold his little paw but there comes a moment he's had enough, pulls it back sharply, turns over. What did I dream - an old man's machine shop - a huge high-ceiling open space with a lot of windows. I stood at the east? end and burst into sobs. A young man came to see what was up. I said Yes I'm crying. The old man was Ted Voth - that is, northwest of the yard. 6 A friend has come to her. She invites that friend to work with her in the garden and under the garden, in the understanding of it. The garden is common life, where people are figuring in extraordinary stories.   They are struggling against each other to bring each other to the same change, the beginning of their lives as women with men. She has been a furiously determined little girl. Her strategy has been to capture the mother's sexuality to keep her from him - such a determination, such a fake. Mine has been to give up on him because her vengeance is so extreme, her ignorance so terrifying.   My solar is trembling with, what is this, the rush of fast clean water through a narrow channel - comprehension and change. I accomplished something with Louie, the first movement. Risked the full blast of competition, resisted her threats, declared myself. Then I accomplished something with Ken, the second movement. I followed through, experimented, began to learn how to be honorable with men's differences. Then I found a man who was difficult but willing. Third movement, I maintained my work self and let my love self grow up. My love self's greater firmness supported my work self's challenge to male theory. Fourth movement I taught using both love and work selves. What I see sober is something I would have to take on as a moral exercise. Body says Pick a man. Self says It will be lonely and dangerous. Body says, I give you joy and confidence, it's what I do if you don't starve me. Self says What do you want me to do? Body says Sleep with the enemy, don't forget he's not your friend, be lucid. Self says Lonely responsibility. Body says Sweet times, deep times. Self says This is how it looks: I see my father's weakness, I see there are no enemies, I see there's no shelter. There's adventure though, there's knowing I'm where no one knows me, no one sees me, and then stepping forward with kindness to both children and making them see each other.   The way it doesn't work along with all the ways it does. 9 I've tried to take photos of the cats but when I get up to fetch the camera they move. When have I wanted to, when I see them as persons: in some private state. This afternoon I was reading in bed and they were sleeping at its foot. Patch was lying on her side facing me so I could see her small pale nipples and the shaved patch of her belly with its line of four puckered stitches. Mouse was full length with his head hooked loosely over one of her hind legs. It would have been a visible story. Sometimes when they are resting like lions on their folded forepaws it's simply their short remotely humane profiles. His little triangular sleeping face turned backward on his neck. Sometimes the improvised grace of his sleeping shapes. He's always beautiful and so touchingly young in his brightness and the way he cries when they're let back upstairs as if to say he'd been lonely. I like to stroke his little velvet paws - really velvet and so bonelessly soft. I felt sorry for her yesterday. She wouldn't let me give her pain meds and she looked frowsy, lay sleeping all day. Today she was wrestling again, not a lot but enough so I can see she's getting better. 16 Sunday morning. Silent day of the grey season. The United Church bell is going to ring in eighteen minutes. A couple of days formatting because it's a kind of work I can do all day. Have posted Time remaining up to here and now am going through the journals cleaning up from Still at home. Does Patch dislike me           yes Is it personal      no Badly treated      yes Should I let her run away      no Will she want to      no Will she ever like me      no In summer should I let her out      yes They're so alert to sounds. They sleep a lot but both of them wake instantly whenever something new happens. Mouse can be curled in his dormouse shape on my bed but if I get up to go into the kitchen there he is at my feet saying miaow in his tiny voice. Just now Patch was asleep in this chair so I thought I was safe to empty the compost bowl into the porch bucket. She shot out past me before I'd had time to turn around. Then there she was smelling something in the cold dark garden. She'll crouch to smell the fresh air coming in under the door and sit waiting next to it whenever I'm near it but the three times she's escaped she's shot back in. They're surprisingly compliant about going to bed. Anytime after 9 when I decide it's time they'll hear me in the kitchen putting on my boots and then there they are whatever else they'd been doing. When I open the basement door Mouse will tumble down ahead of me but Patch waits for me to creep down ahead of her. Then there's the dirt floor under three bare bulbs, with a lot of dirty boards and that long subfloor stretch of dirt that hasn't seen daylight since 1931. I clean their litter box, top up their water and put a bit of dry food in their downstairs bowl. When I go back up they stay where they are and I close the door. In the morning when I open it they've heard my footsteps overhead and are waiting on the top step. Then miaow says Mouse excitedly half a dozen times. If I leave the cellar door open they'll now vanish even during the day. They can come up to lie in the sun but down there maybe it feels like their own place? Patch tells me what she wants always in silence. When the door is closed she'll sometimes sit facing it with her back to me. They'll ask to be let into the verandah but then they'll sit on the couch-back staring in at me. If I ignore them Patch will scrabble on the glass. Greg said inscrutable and yes: body language but when they stare at me on and on with their matched yellow eyes what is that! 18 I opened the Still at home bin yesterday and have been chucking paper. Lay awake in the dark this morning realizing I'd been distressed by the pages I'd thrown away. Why was the handwriting is so awkward and why did it take so long to smooth out? What was wrong with my nervous system I mean. And the falsity of it, the way I expressed family and community wrongness as boy-craziness. I was longing for something I called love but what was it really. Or say it another way, what could I have longed for if I'd known better. Realness. A community of people who could see each other. - I found a snowdrop clump blooming under alyssum debris yesterday so this aft I cleaned up dead stuff in the porch platform zone - found two more snowdrop clumps, a grape hyacinth and what must be tulip nubs under the apricot - don't know which. First garden work of the year. Trusting the last half of February not to turn wicked. Roofers on St Michaels today. Took Patch to have her stitches out. She was leery when she saw the carrier, darted away, but since I brought her back she has made small overtures - rubbed my leg, lay down to sleep next to me. When I was flat in the bath warming my legs after working outside she jumped onto the toilet tank, folded her paws and lay looking down at me. I was feeling who is this, who is reincarnated as this subtle cautious soul. 20 Yesterday I was slogging all day placing the fourteen year old's punctuation and transcribing parts of SH2-2 I'd missed. I was finding her tediously false but then I realized the word I wanted was camp. She's at the age where she has to work up a gender style but she's playing with it. She takes it over the top almost to drag but there's a kind of knowing irony as if to say, they want me to be feminine and I might have to be to get what I want but wow isn't it silly. I saw another thing: the thirteen year old's account of meeting Gary in Mesa is bare narrative and gush but when the fourteen year old remembers it a year later there is sensory detail she'd registered but not written: I can see him as I saw him first, only a dark outline beside the fence ... It is a bit funny - y'see, when I saw him first I was hanging upside down from a cross bar ... head down! Queer ... I can see him standing shyly by the swings looking @ me, neither of us with enough nerve to say anything .... I see him walking over with Bobby, still shy but happy not to have to do the talking himself ..... I see him hanging from the swing bar, a stretch of elastic tummy showing ... I see him in a clean tee-shirt on Sunday morning looking just a little different ... I see him on the swing beside me, with those big brown eyes looking into the distance, with sun in them .... I can see, feel, that smile and the way he always laughed with his eyebrows raised There's gushing gender performance but there's also the curiosity about male lives that carried through all the way to Tom. The way I studied Al's room: it was neater than any other room in the whole house ..... a bed, a dresser, a really empty closet, bare windows, bare floors, a table ... all pretty well spotless. There was every single piece of his grade 8 art on the wall, and pictures of hunting, cowboys, and 'planes. His gun was put up, together with track and fair ribbons. Everything was precise, except for his boots, pants, and underwear lying where he stepped out of them. 23 Dear fourteen: I've held your pages for sixty years but I'm trashing them now. Though after transcribing your silly ellipses faithfully. Do you have anything to say about her      truth, completion, action, crisis List?      yes She's dealing      YES I'm looking at the writing feeling why is it so bad but I should be asking what work it's doing. What work other people don't need to do. What I wrote for the contest after the Stratford trip was about the meetings with smart kids. When the winner was published I was startled by how outclassed I was. The girl from Quebec had written about the plays. "I have looked on beauty bare." I hadn't cared about the plays. What I've been wanting to see is that she's silly because she's living in a backwoods - the Quebec girl probably had educated parents. But no it's more that she's unattached in her family and constantly scanning for attachment outside it. She's starved for touch - no one has touched her since early childhood. She has been disliked at school and has to fight to be seen as viable. Her father has said she's undesirable and she's frantic to prove him wrong. But it's deeper than any of that isn't it. That's what I haven't seen. Now I could be sad for her, that she had to be off-centre in the ways she was, posing and insisting. Another thing I'm seeing is that the praise I got from my teachers for writing was uninformed. In a better school I wouldn't have been exceptional. I'd have been more challenged but I'd have been less supported. 25 In the last of a nap I'm looking at clothes in a thrift shop. There is something under a shirt. I pull it out: a bathing suit, yellow with pink flowers, magnolias maybe, and thin dark blue strings to tie behind the neck. Oddly heavy. I look under the crotch lining - yes, sand, a lot of sand, even a small blue enamel cup. I'm thinking Tom would like this one better than the horrible matronly two-piece I wore last time. We could go to the beach this summer. My Modern Met sent a story about a purse lost by a high school girl in 1957 now being displayed as a time capsule. Photos of everything in it. Lipsticks, wallet, family snaps, library card, a little drawing, a Sacred Heart medal, a stick of gum. Photo of a bright-looking high school senior with strong eyebrows. I've been working on Still at home this week and how odd to know I'm now a time capsule too. She died in 2013 at 71. 26 Have been all through the Sexsmith year pulling passages and mention-items for the index page. I had to skip almost everything in months after I broke up with Frank because they were so abstract and pretentious. I was so stoical about the loss that I didn't realize how it had frozen me. 28 I've been in a hurry to chuck the scribbled SH pages but this morning I transcribed and interpolated letters home from the hospital because they documented the hospital's time and place better, for instance the lively lives of a 6th floor paralytic ward's six young men. Somewhere I need to say that in those years the journal is tedious because I'm processing tensions I couldn't talk to my family about. What I sent them about the hospital is zingy and irreverent but factual, and the letters get better the longer I'm there - less teen-impersonation - more coherent as if away from home I'm more myself - much more. Their handwriting is better. Yesterday in the very early morning I let Patch out onto the porch. Usually she zips back in after she's sniffed the air for a bit but yesterday she disappeared into the dark. I closed the door because of the cold and had to imagine her gone forever. A sad feeling for myself as well as Mouse. Got up maybe ten minutes later to check the porch. There she was. At this moment she's on the floor with a leg across his chest holding him down to wash his face. Little Mouse has become Prince Mouse, such a sleek slender handsome young thing, bonelessly graceful in any of the ways he throws himself around or sprawls about, just now liking to tunnel under blankets. This morning when I woke from my second sleep I found both of them curled against my thighs. That is so surprisingly satisfying. I have to notice the ways I agree to have human feelings for them - for instance talking to them (with endearments) - as if since it needs to feel loving attachment my body just goes ahead and feels it for them. I'm aware that it's a pretense but I accept it because I can feel that it's good for me. Stories these weeks are pipeline protests in Canada and what seems the beginning of a pandemic. Am faintly wishing for a catastrophe that would wipe out enough population to stop climate change. Wouldn't mind dying in that cause. More countries reporting every day, stock markets falling. If only the dumber Americans could be persuaded it's God's vengeance on Trump. 29 how I felt when I read The night of the hunter, what reading meant to the child I was. The sort of consciousness I read with. seeing my father's licentiousness, being seized and spanked. Being seized. What violence means. Mrs Voth's maple chiffon cake. The Venus story. The tension in the house. drawing house plans. what he said in the hotel.   I was interested in the buildings. I was interested in the shape of the church. I remember the evening service when dust hung on the road outside lit with sun far in the west. I was interested in how people looked. There is a tone to be found for these interests. Not a childish tone. The interest was subtle and strong and clear, although its expression would not have been possible.   the first journal the moonlight night diving off the sidewalk stepping barefoot into the snow, in moonlight the sand bank moving farther out into the land the creek when it was frozen Mrs Kinderwater's mouth and apron Dick under the bridge the lower pasture with dark violets March 2nd Mouse got snipped today. Cried so piteously in the crate, came home with his tiny balls shaved and a number in his ear. Was walking bandy. His mom didn't console him, seemed to be avoiding him. Maybe he smelled like the bad place. Or she doesn't like him when he's damaged. 3 A March morning, light at 6:30. Thin cloud already phosphorescent behind the church's roof where the sun will creep up over Hamilton's long back. Soon by the look of it. A breeze shoving the spruce's long arms so they rise and fall, waggling the Russian olive's thin crossed twigs. Here comes Patch on little cat feet stalking weightily like a panther. She had her three minutes outdoors. Hey - a spot of sunlight next to the bathroom door. It hasn't got to me yet but it's rising just a few degrees off due east. A real day after months of duds. - There it is, flat into the side of my eye. 4 I carried out the recycling and was walking back with the bin looking at the day, pleased. Suddenly I was falling. I was falling somehow chaotically so that afterward I couldn't remember how the falling went. The bin crashed on the sidewalk and bounced ahead. I hit the concrete with more force than I can understand, with both hands and my left knee. A car was passing. Please don't stop and ask if I'm alright. It didn't. I got up awkwardly as I do now, looked behind me. There was no edge to trip me, no reason. I didn't fall all winter because I watched every step. I fell this time because I'd been walking naturally, just walking. It's as if now my nervous system can't sequence walking without an extra pressure of consciousness. And this night I lay awake all night aching all over, aching too much to sleep. When I've been remembering I'll be 75 this week it seems old.   volume 9 time remaining volume 8: 2019-2020 may-march work & days: a lifetime journal project