| in america 2 part 1 - 2003 march | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
March 6 2003 I'm 58. In the sun in front of David's [café], blue sky and pepper tree, a breeze, behind me someone hammering metal. The sage green curtain is hung and lovely. In Spring Valley yesterday, the hilly town, I picked buckwheat flowers, a fine pink mist, and white sage flower wands. Tom last night hollow-eyed and manic took an hour to get to the punch line, which is that he suddenly and brilliantly forced Tom Mix to make Tony day manager. He did it though he has been waiting for the job himself for two years. It cost his power-tripper though it was an act of correct and innovative power. Watching him tell the story, watching the extremity of his being, I was feeling that I haven't the energy or flex to really see him. He is beyond me. M phoned this evening and we talked the way we used to. She sleeps in a bed Ed never slept in. Every night when she goes to that bed it welcomes her, she said. I stammered saying Ed's death was like a peak of realness in my life, dignity, wonder, pain and joy. Mystery, she said. He rose to it, we agreed. He was worth saying a good goodbye to, she said. He'd begun to be real with her before he went into the hospital, when he was still at home lying on the couch. She doesn't know whether Paul felt it. Judie was concentrating more on her, maybe she missed some of it. What else today. At sunset Tom managed to catch the date. Genet downstairs fixed my Word program. I looked at Eliz's transplants. Rue's tongue came into my palm in the softest swiftest little kiss. I brought Genet an Ani di Franco review and a loaf of Con Pane bread, a gruyere and walnut loaf. You didn't have to, she said. I didn't have to but I did, I said happily. Tom on the phone sang me happy birthday and some little person's tummy curled with pleasure. As I was speaking to Tom the sky was opal-powdered orange and blue behind the palms. 7 David B has mailed me a beautiful interview with Barry Lopez. Oh sun. In the front yard of David's the community of men, some quite old, some young, sits in comfort in their no-fly zone. My spot is over here on the edge. Don't want to do anything today. Running over. DB's letter says, The Indian Plum was in flower down the Booming Ground trail on Thursday, and I've been picking nettles for 4 weeks now. Eva Cassidy sings as if she knows she will die at 32. Do I imagine that? Knows and has accepted that life is about to end. The sunburned hands / I used to hold. Soon I'll hear / o-o-old winter's song. Wonderstruck at life and death. It is as if my father's death has given me a well into a depth. 8 Parsi people in Bombay/Mumbai, a dying professor, his daughter and son-in-law, two kids, a two-room flat, their conversation, what they see in a day. He doesn't translate the local words, and it is a story also about language. Money. Stories brought from the countryside through a letter writer. Rohinton Mistry 2002 Family matters Knopf Sweetness, hi-i, says one of the waiters to the owner's fluffy dog. A red Toyota pickup crosses from the Rite-Aid parking lot with a new mattress in the bed. An old Holiday Rambler Vacationer, faded white and blue, docks at the curb. If I look down I can see the end of my pigtail. It is glossy dark brown mostly, white threads. I am wearing the Gap jeans - the small ones, that means - my black docs, the bone-colored cotton shirt with black thread in chevron patterns. My bangs are a grey frizz. Brown face and forearms, creased. Council for Secular Humanism, says the back of the lumbering RV. A car passes with an old man, large and fat, shouting I wanted to go to I-5. Beyond him a meek-looking small head in a sunhat. His hand appears pulling the seatbelt down from its notch above his shoulder. He's red-faced. Gone. Begonias in a large turquoise plastic pot, back-lit, burning dark red. Gay daddy on a cell phone with his kids. Tell Mommy I'll call her in exactly fifteen minutes. I love you. I'm dangling like palm frond in a breeze. Before the years locked up did I enjoy dangling this much? No. In this between-packet period I haven't worked. Have thought about gardening, read, done errands, listened to Eva Cassidy. A sparrow, a nervous sparrow, tussling with dead grass in the crack between wall and driveway paving. Yellow cab 1009 with a red Budweiser triangle. Yellow cab 312 with a blue Experience Cerner triangle. A Canadian flag drifting red and white against blue sky over the HOTEL sign. Jacaranda tree a bit stiff and bare below it. Mistry is moral adulthood, I think. People pass moral tests and still go off the rails. Young people become cranks and schemers in age. Something is too much for them. Mistry studies that. And wonders whether he can make the city's alteration parallel a person's. He has his oldest man the most sophisticated, though he is falling into physical ruin in the midst of them all. Professor Vakeel. Nariman. At the end the youngest son goes to find the violinist, Daisy Auntie, who has promised to play for Nariman when he dies. He finds her in rehearsal. She takes him with her back to her house and changes into performance clothes, "a long black skirt, very beautiful, and a black long-sleeved blouse with something in the cloth that made it twinkle like stars." I remember she bowed solemnly to Grandpa before starting. Then Daisy Auntie began the Brahms "Lullaby", which Grandpa loved so much. Daddy whispered that he used to sing this tune for Murad and me when we were babies, he said it was also a Bing Crosby song that his father would sing to him. He hummed the words under his breath, "Lullaby and goodnight." Daisy Auntie heard it and turned sharply. I thought she would be annoyed, but she said, "Sing it louder." And Daddy stood up and sang it, and I saw tears running down his cheeks too, like Mummy's. "Excuse me," he said at the end of the piece, and took out his handkerchief. 10 When I woke at night I was worried. There was a mist of worries. Tom and me, money, my inaction about my book and about UCSD. Money - I'm living paycheck to paycheck and have two months in summer to provide for. Neither Gabriele nor I have moved on what should be happening this month if it is to happen. Afraid to look at Being about, afraid to go into the single-minded push it would take, afraid of being locked into a life as its author. Is this all the same worry? - There is another thing that this house does in the deep of the night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the day's footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving about on regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, for the old fibres of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, they reproduce the sound of the footsteps. In the night the maze of pathways is audibly retraced. Louise Erdrich 2003 The painted drum New Yorker This story struck me so much I thought of tearing it out of the magazine. Copying the paragraph, I'm realizing why. The sky was a threatful grey, yet the willows blazed in tender bud, and drifts of wild-apple blossoms floated in the cavern pines. I kept the window slightly open as I drove the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathed in the watery air. The Tatros had always been too cheap to keep up their road, and the final quarter mile was partly washed out, the gnarled bedrock exposed. Overgrown swamps and ponds lapped close to either side. As I bounced along, the frogs quieted momentarily, so that I seemed to be continuously pushing against a wall of sound. Once I stopped, the frogs began trilling again. I turned off the light and got into bed. I leave my windows open just a crack at night, even in winter. The darkness seethed with spring music, and from time to time, deep in the woods, a barred owl screamed like a woman in pain. I loved the way it goes from the drum to the house. It's evident that the drum is the body and her theft is the assumption of herself. Then the house's release of the day's footsteps is like dreaming. Delayed sounding-out of another version of the drum. But what about the passage about driving through a moment of spring countryside, and then at night hearing the seething of spring music through a crack of open window. It is Louise Erdrich having seen and heard the real world and releasing it later in the form of these paragraphs. 14 Dreamed many things. R and T living in a new house a few streets south of their old one. R has inherited money and she has commissioned a good design, white plaster, high ceilings, light wood. I'm trying to see into it as I pass. Later someone close to me is backing their vehicle into a storeroom in that house.
15 Yesterday Tom bought a 1984 Toyota Celica GT, white. 16 I'm looking at the journal from May 2001 feeling panicked that I'm drifting. The time I spend making gardens is wasted, the time I spend with Tom is wasted, the time I spend with [my college] students is wasted. I'm lost! 18 The letter to Michael my most creative. I work with his materials mostly. I pull out what rings true and give it back to him. Then I say five things in my own voice. It's not love if it isn't particular; settling for longing is hopelessness; he has to find out about the unconscious on his own; there is an ethic in getting it whole not forcing fragments; images of women are images of the man's unconscious. The parts of my reply all fit together. I'm modeling coherence. I used to be like Michael longing to find creation. Now I feel I am creation, though many times I'm vacant and dull. What does it mean, feeling I am creation? I feel a coherent platform, one thing. I'm not on either side of a divide. It's not spectacular but it's ready. Am I imagining that? Yes. But is it wrong? No. After that passage I was reading the Union Tribune at David's and saw that Brakhage died of bladder cancer. What a large part he had in giving a sense that life was good. He had a marvelous large life. I didn't know he was adopted out of an orphanage at two weeks. Did he try to remake the eyes he had before he lost his mother, as a way of finding her again? What I feel about his death is that now he'll be mulched into the larger culture. He died as the right wing coup is pushing its propaganda on a population that cannot see. He died a generous father to very many, also on a Sunday, Sunday afternoon, four months after my dad. On my way home, a beautiful strong thing on the sidewalk. It's a dried bare seed-stalk structure off a date palm. Like hair, like seaweed, grey and brown, dried in a shape it took by weight and breeze. It's like bone but shows a flow. Cornrow strings with many little knots. Ah day. He was Joyce's age. Janeen Frank Joyce Ed. Here time is open and I'm lonely, bitten by loneliness, rongée. Write about music - perceive time and time relations, Pound says. Eva Cassidy is wrong in many of her songs, just wrong. She picks bad songs and sings them awkwardly. When she is right it is not her voice but her timing. Yes her voice, in that she thickens and thins it, turns it on edge, cursive like slopes and masts and springing tendrils of a line written with a steel nib. I listen to every atom of the line, or don't listen at all. What is that? It's perceiving time, certainly. I know I do that one thing with unusual precision. Eva Cassidy Songbird Blix Street Records Tom is an anthropologist in music. He is listening to styles, their blends, their moments of attainment. I only care about what he can call purity. I care about it in the way I care about dancing, open mouth in being what I see. I have quite a simple brain, simple and strong. I love in Ezra the faith that honesty is the necessary thing. "More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence." But, but, lack of character looks like lack of intelligence to me. The long life's technical study: Yeats, Pound, Stan in his medium. But what has my study been? I haven't had an art, I haven't learned an art. But something - what? Something hermetic. You mean I'm a philosopher. Yes. Specifically a philosopher of mind. Yes. Without a community. Yes. I don't know what I should be doing to set what I've made where it can be found. I have to do that. Will you comment? 'Seeing.' Question is, what are the resources of mind. Yes. Do you want to say more about this? Persist in the child's brilliance and courage and anger. 'Seeing' and childhood of the philosopher? Yes. They're the same work? YES. Do I need to look for the roots of this where I first imagined it? YES. Is this remaking? No. Remembering? Yes. I caught sight of it as I was finishing Being about. It's about the uncon, in a way. Yes. You. Yes. Is it a website? Yes. Between 1250 and the Renaissance, people did manage to communicate with each other in respect to such perceptions and such modalities of feeling and perception.
a whole body of knowledge, fine, subtle, that had run from Arnaut to Guido Cavalcanti, that had lain in the secret mind of Europe for centuries a very complicated structure of knowledge and perception, the paradise of the human mind under enlightenment 19 I snagged on Pound and the Provençal because there is that something I could begin to know in the time with Jam - it is also the way forward and I don't know anyone going there - the chrome-sounding music - I love this direction - it is very tenuous - close to something that's wrong, an inflated feeling - call it a zone - it was there in Trapline - it was there in the notes in origin piece for those who could see it - it's Greek, it's Celtic - it's a euphoria - it wants word derivations - is it illusory, is the question - it says no - it's a true perception - it's bardic - troubadour was southern France, northern Italy, eastern Spain - a climate that supports walking and sleeping out - and was specifically lyric - finding done with noble women - trouvère is a better word but the northerners sang in another mode. euphoria - eu-pherein - well-borne And doesn't it have something to do with Ed - it's a possibility that comes to me through him. Maybe emotionally through his image? An ideality. Something altogether aside from the interaction with him as it went. Is that early love, that fineness? As if it is one of several selves.
It's the landscape of the Ryder cards - the Buddhist is something else but it is related - what I saw after sesshin - Who tells it - does the state itself speak? It seems to me rather to listen. It's a clarity. It hears voices as sound. Oh it sees. Across the street there is a diamond of dark blue glass set in a brick wall. In it dark blue reflections, shapes without names, sometimes - a piece of red slipping across, slow lift of a flag. Gilligan's book about shutting down - ages at which people dissociate from pleasure and knowledge - four, five in boys and adolescence in girls, she says. Carol Gilligan 2002 The birth of pleasure Knopf I found this book looking for Pound on Provence yesterday. I saw they were about the same thing. Gilligan says the original self, which loves and is vulnerable, can be retained and recovered in passionate love; that the fight for this survival is carried by young girls and much younger boys; that patriarchy is brought to a crisis by democracy. - What just happened was a measure of hope, its disappointment and the shutting down in hopelessness that follows. Reading Gilligan I imagined body open, heart open. When Tom came I said, Come lie here. Next to the Silver Strand he played Springsteen's first tape on his four speakers and cried because he has a car, a car radio. I put my arms around him. I should say that I also was afraid of his driving. I was nervous in the car. I'm afraid of his aggression and impulsivity. I hold my arm tight around my solar when he's driving this car. I wondered whether now that he has a car he'll feel more entitled to be the boss. He's sometimes inattentive, looking for a tape. I don't trust his competence in a car. Came off 5 at the Washington exit and I thought, this whole hour has been about his car, but now I can tell him about the way it was at Nora's office today. I can speak from myself now. I began. I said a sentence, and then suddenly we were going into the car wash. He hadn't realized it had all been him, he hadn't realized I was risking being myself, he didn't know I was in hope and faith, offering myself. I felt cut off. Then he had to dry the car, then vacuum it. Then we were in the Mexican café and I started to continue over the sound of the TV. He said I was shouting, could we wait to get our food and eat it in the car. I was stunned. I walked out. We sat in the car. I said love woman had showed up and she's sensitive for reasons Gilligan's book would explain. She's an open heart and an open body but she's sensitive. He could think of it as a net gain. And then he went into complaint. He took everything back to be about him: I don't appreciate anything he does for me I never recognize any of it I am with my students ten days out of the month and now I'm talking about getting into my own work the rest of the time. And so on. He shot into being the baby. I shut up. I drew lines and dots in the steam on the window. I gave up. I shut down. He thought maybe I was on the run and started in on how I haven't done anything about UCSD. Something I haven't said is that he sometimes tries to ask me questions these days. I talk, but he's asking without having recovered his real curiosity. His real curiosity is mostly still defeated and so his questions still are chores for him. 21 Gilligan's book made me think of two things from the years I was in Alberta. One was the interview I did with Mary, where I recorded her saying "I don't know, I don't know" when I tried to talk to her about the false voice in my letters. The other was the section in notes in origin where I bring in the story of Rose Red going away with the bear. I was trying to restore my voice in the place where I had had to give it up. I did recover pleasure, great and marvelous pleasure. What made me give it up again? I went into years of loss and isolation 1981 to Rowen's birth in 1985. I was starved economically, Jam was escaping to T and R, I was sexually faithful and starved, emotionally faithful and starved.
desire in Provence and Tuscany to bring the whole perceptible world into one's aesthetic and ethic Eleusis - sex and nature, cult of beauty Hellenic awareness of the gods opposed to a form of stupidity not limited to Europe, a belief that the body is evil the lady figured as light-as-wisdom Lady Wisdom, active intellect pouring and fertilizing light maximum energy under maximum directing control Some non-Christian and inextinguishable source of beauty persisted throughout the Middle Ages maintaining song in Provence our lady of Cyprus, Aphrodite The atmosphere of clarity, summer and illuminate nature is the same in all of them one of those rich and complete organizations to which the ordinary restrictions of married life are not only oppressive but insufferable the protected core of passion A sharper awareness of emotional distinctions will lead one to sharper distinctions elsewhere the benevolent, divine and ordered nature of the universe, which it is the whole purpose of the Cantos to show both energy and accuracy For Pound, the act of making significant poetry and music depended on perception of the given universe ... no barrier between exact perception and rendering of the universe and the higher regions of art and religion ... what allowed one into these regions was just the full development of sincerity, or honesty with self, by work with the given nature ... embedded materials ... the universe having its own divinity, to be an adequate interpreter was enough. 176 a chastity that regulates sex and keeps it holy, with its power of illumination unweakened My genius is no more than a girl The trovaille ... whole of a work of literature existed solely as a build-up for one of these moments when the matter is stated in a perfect cadence of a line or two, or in a juxtaposition of images of equivalent power, or in both combined Peter Makin 1978 Provence and Pound University of California 22 I am milling, stirring traces, raising an atmosphere or letting it be raised. That atmosphere in me has never come to much, as I feel it. It's a moment, early morning, early summer, in the corner of the back room at 824. The green of the painted boards, the silver of the mirror, the light, water in glass, dame's rocket in the silver of the mirror mauve and green. Early, bright, crystalline, clear of color, next to the window. That corner was my writing desk. I was beautiful in the mirror, sometimes awake with two women in the earliness of light. I had on the green wall diagrams of crystals. A magnifying glass. The light in the north room touched the glass only in the earliest morning, only in summer. Supernal. What is it like to recreate this. A pressure at the heart. Fullness but also immobility. Is it true to say I was born in that time? Something like that. Intense pain. Love choked: soul-love, being-love. What is this like - I'm saying Tom is nobody to me - I was deluded - I have connections but he isn't one of them. Oscar's Vanessa in embroidered dungarees, 14, points the flashlight at Orion, Sirius, the Seven Sisters.
I dreamed Tom and Oscar offered a dish of cooked finger joints. Woke kicked in the solar.
What Pound is feeling in the Provencal is early love, in the male form of idealizing love of the mother. He's wrong in thinking it is sex per se. 24 A general disinforming on NPR. General Tommy Franks. Tom on the phone sez he woke afraid he's losing me. It's 6:50 Monday morning. Volume building on southbound Escondido. In all areas clouds and fog overnight. The NASDAC is down 2.9. Weekend setbacks of the war in Iraq. Reconstruction costs may be 100 billion. The US wants to give the business to its own companies. One insanity piled on top of another, resulting in a bad haircut, said Tom of the black-Chicano man we drove past, walking in a suit and an indescribable hair style that had sides and back shaved up to a line circumscribing a sort of animal pelt with a beaver tail. Drug dealer who's done time and found the lord. Yesterday. We drove and drove and saw some fine things but all day Tom in his various ways, unconscious, rode herd to keep me contained and disabled. I tracked them but could not break out. What I was feeling was, I have to leave this man. How does he do it. He doesn't reply to what I say, so I am suspended impotent in my interests. He frightens me by taking a corner just barely in control. He explodes into cursing another driver. He drives through exquisite country with loud music on. When we have stopped somewhere wonderful he says we're going, but then when I get into the car he sits fiddling with something, as if to assert that he's in control of our coming and our going. When he's done something disrespectful he immediately demands a kiss, so that I have to either compound his disrespect with submission or else make an issue and bring down anger. All of these are patriarchal mechanisms he has developed in the imperative of keeping control of women. They also keep control of him and are not in his interest. His bursts of insecurity and remorse come from the fact that he partly knows what he is doing though he isn't conscious of the mechanisms as such. His babyish-seeming demanding of points for every normally decent thing he does is for the same reason. He does get something from the practice - he gets that I am at bay and neutered, and he is free to make fine sentences. I also get something from the practice - he does the driving and I am free to look. His devices work together with my training. They trigger my training. Some of what I've named is incompetence rather than patriarchal mechanism, but it is tied in. When he has another man on his tail on a mountain road he drives faster than his competence because he doesn't want to be thought unmanly, even by a stranger whose face he'll never see. Destruction of curiosity is the worst. Meantime yesterday's Union has a large ad, one of Nora's, showing a little girl saluting.
There are also her freeway billboards that say, for instance
Nora is using her feel for innocence to sell gambling. It is complicated because an ad always advocates two things - the value and the valueless thing that is being hitched to it. United Colors of Benetton had the balance right - the actual value was strongly advocated and the product mentioned in its vicinity. Saying spirit, joy, magic doesn't evoke anything but the slightly hyped feeling magic evokes. The little girl saluting, though, is selling militarism. Is it also selling little girls? Yes but the military is killing little girls, so this ad makes little girls complicit in their own murder. The little girl is herself perfectly true. She is not able to defend herself against the gesture she is given. I lived in a ghetto for many years and now I am an embedded reporter in the Evil Empire. Isolation is not needed but steady sorting, moment by moment, is. And what about recovering early love, restoring and living on in early love - that's the real embedded reporting. But is it possible? Without martyrdom? On the hillside yesterday, above Black Canyon Road, some dark red flower. I crawled under barb wire to see them. They were wild paeonies, black-red, in clumps among grass. I have some in a glass, amazing things.
Is a course of action implicit? Writing. Overview of child's excluded intimacy. I have no idea where to start.
25 Tonight with Khalif and Katie at Clare de Lune's Tuesday night open mic. I was on a leopardskin couch with his mom Shakira's lover, who was in blue denim, cap to toe, with large rings. Shakira was on my other side after the intermission. She had cornrows, a hat too. Whole family of hats. The evening was unsorted. A woman with red lipstick and cleavage played the violin. Her name was Franklin. A black youth spoke a poem with the line, I have to be black every day. Four white Navy men in the balcony applauded. A very young woman recited what she called an angsty high school poem. Many tall black women either sang or read poems dramatically. Even the black women sang off key. The violinist was a parody of badness. A stoned Vietnam vet (is my guess) held up a guitar and slid a finger on the string as he ad-libbed stoner madness. After I read what will we know the MC said, I hope you were all listening carefully to that piece, because it was very well crafted. He ended the evening by reciting a Sufi poem of his own. He said the Sufis do not say Allah is the only and real god, they say god is all there is. The woman who sang a sad song about missing a man she worked with in a summer production came to say she liked the images. The MC said can he print it in the newsletter. The featured reader Myrenna Gobu said she liked something or other. She was a woman with a squashed lower face, a performer, not attentive. There was also a shy thin Japanese woman with red hair, young, who said she liked it because she was thinking in that way herself. Both Shakira and her lover, Tomu? embraced me when they said goodbye. The poem won them, imagine that. 26 I'm going to keep my eye on you, Shakira said, leaving. She has a flat profile I think of as Eritrean. Tomu is big, a polished black. Why would that poem make these women trust me? There's a new idea in this.
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