| in america volume 23 part 3 - 2011 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Plainfield [undated] [notes on Ann Dellenbaugh's talk not transcribed]
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- [lyrics for Leonard Cohen's Anthem] Friday 12th It's evening, 6. Sun through the west window. The campus quiet, no one on the lawns. I said, I hate it here, and sighed. These eleven days I've had nothing to say. Katie singing last night at the piano. Look what they've done to my song. Thin little ardent Katie banging down her arms talking about the men who don't listen and women who override. At our last brief meeting lumping along through departure check-out Goldberg in her schmaltzy way saying "I love you all." Jim said more or less that he loved an indigo bunting and showed pictures of it. That helped me know what I wanted to say, which was that the highlight for me was Katie singing. I sang a line of it, and meant all of them but Jim. For instance Ruth walking out of the Eurydice workshop without saying a word about it - how stingy that is. Anything else - shy young boygirl Clay. Just seeing her around. Cropped head and narrow Indian eyes, a bit like Paul when he was a boy, onstage last night barefoot in a bathing suit and leggings, sturdy girl body and honest boy-girl head. I was seeing boobs all week, all the time. What else. James in my office, in the chair opposite saying "I like to talk to you," looking beautiful, diamond eyed, just right, needing to talk about consciousness and the cosmos. And who do I have - Linda, heavy slow Linda the poet. Coral this time plumped up like a blimp, plumped up all over after her baby, maybe a poet still, maybe not. Jeremy Johnson who is really Emmanuel Peres from Guadalajara, son of a 16 year old maid and a bus driver, a floppy 24-year-old with a big nose and a lot of curls. Smart maybe. So-Jewish Josh. New York City, loud, barrel-legged, nervous. Efficient small Sam, journalist, member of the Eastern Star in a small town in Arkansas. [Detail deleted] Kirsten saying Molise and Abruzzo. Italy and Paris, a generous teacher I'm sure. And the other Kirsten who smiling and surging wants to talk about consciousness and identity without having a clue that what she means is nothing to do with those words, insisting. Long ago the graduation. Sitting with Claudia and David at a lunch table for half an hour able to be interesting. Nan looking beautiful with bronze eye shadow and Alice in Wonderland hair. I was able to say in front of everyone "Nan is fiercely intelligent." Her tight little mother afterward saying "She thinks the world of you." Jody stuck with Ralph, Katie stuck with Campbell who doesn't want her to say 'dissociation' and 'trauma'. Twenty people at the Eurydice workshop, fifteen at Make a book. My usual exercises didn't come up with anything interesting. Kay and Clar were better after our semester, Clar less manic, Kay quite radiantly calm. Bridie better too though still swaying her gut like a ship's prow ahead of her.
13 Upper garden, little garden house I've just measured behind me, faint trickle from the rams' heads - 5 rams' heads. Circle pool in front of me, rill to the east, with a source like a spring high up in the wall. Wide stone alcove to the west, looks straight up the axis. Pool centered above the ram steps. From origin to vantage the east-west axis is at 2: 3, about. Marvelous stone. Filtered sun, quiet crickets continuous. - There I wandered away to look at the perennial beds and while I was at the far end of the garden I saw that a very old man had gone into the house with two women not quite as old. He smiled beautifully from under his baseball cap when I came back to my bench. Martin Johnson whose ancestor was Suzanna Martin of Ipswich and who grew up here,on Greatwood Estate. He's walking away now, bent over and wearing a sage green silk shirt. He has the sweet expression of the well born that I so love to see. San Diego, 15 August Money day. I'm finally notified there'll be $9200 in VanCity about Sept 28. Monday. Yesterday morning with Tom at Maria's, afternoon sleeping, sore, doing laundry, going through GW9-11. Tom had bent his will to improving himself and there he was, a slim straight man with a silver brushcut, silver grey jeans, black tee, sandals, quite gorgeous, as if he'd never been a toothless fat lout. It's the new job walking many miles every day, and swimming, and pushups. - That, and the sweet times I'd been reading about in GW, and his mention of a 2-bedroom craftsman with a yard, had me jumping to consider living with him. Book says no.
15 I woke thinking about the journal project - no, the life project. The project was self-creation. The journal was documentation of it, but part of self creation was to make someone able to document. GW is the apex of both projects. Then publishing the documentation. There isn't further to go in self creation? What comes afterward? It says writing. An afterlife? Yes.
What sort of writing will evoke powers and explain them. Tuesday morning at 5th and Laurel, a cool cave.
[Opposite page, notes on zero point field: e=mc2 amount of <activity> needed to create the appearance of <mass>, "It means that there aren't two fundamental physical entities - something material and another immaterial - but only one: energy." "Mass was energy." The way they keep slipping out of the unified model into a dual one for grandiose reasons. Convolved structure traversing relatively stable structure. She's talking as if there is a field-object contrast, which there cannot be.] I don't know where to start. Software, poetics. It begins with an invocation. 18 I've worked backwards now to GW5, the worst months after I got home in 1996. Wondering now what came of all that psychological work. - Maybe a crest in some of the later years, for instance while T was in Bellingham and later when the thesis was cooking. Okay, the thesis came of it. But the gains lapsed? Or what is this -
- Realizing something is different now - I think I could live with him, or someone, because I'm at liberty more - somehow in relation to work - the thesis is done but something else is too, the journal project? These other projects as if don't need me to be alone - is that true? Would they be better if I had sweet open heart with someone? I wdn't need to be so terrified and conflicted now. Is this new? Am I really somewhere else now? A man and a little house. And art. YES. And countryside. Naked heart and trusted speech, sex. - Can I have all that? Yes. Soon? No. 19
I open that material and don't know what to do - there's too much, too dense - too many kinds of parts - I feel it wd take whole immersion, it's an enterprise I'd have to enter with nothing else to do. And yet I want it begun, I want to be living in its opened air. It's another kind of task than I've had, I've no one to work against. I've been assembling its bits and modes since let's say 1972? It's writing and a movie and it's psychology and philosophy. It's quotation and invention. It's many ways synoptic, it wants to be immensely contemporary. It's the appropriate task.
The crash yesterday was because I am entering it. I can expect that. It's not called Orpheus. It's called Going under. It's a suite of lyric structures. Its methods are prosodies. It's otherworldly and stunningly direct. It's not mind and land, it's universe and soul, soul being body dissolved in universe. Half-dissolved.
21 What's wrong with me - it's a week later and I haven't done much. I'm sore and feeble, weak-willed, dully lonely. Yesterday was reading RF1 just to feel myself excited and lively. Don't know how to collect myself into the sorts of abstract action I can have - 22 Waking in a flush of pain I don't understand. I mean the all-over acid burn that's worst in my palms. Pain and melancholy. Grim hopelessness. - There I wrote a page of pouring off and then sat down to combing Bliss for mistakes and back cover notes. 23 Washington earthquake 5.8. Kirsten wrote while it was fresh. I was weeding 3 hrs at Scott's. The gravel garden parched, except for the trees, including the lysiloma, twice as tall. 24 Bassam's. Here's a sofa at the head of the room, has a palm's shadow rippling through the window behind me. The air conditioning is loud but it helps with the music. The room is nearly empty at quarter to nine. Bassam with whiskers on his scalp and on his jaw, showing ownership in his walk, wearing a black chef's coat. Looking for something to do I find ditches.doc. It's not called that. There are my cosmic shreds and what - on the page, laid diagonally across two pages flickering letters TEA ROOM. So pretty the way they shift sideways, half dissolve, soft grey. WINE ROOM.
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[garden work list] 25 Super-8 film, when scanned well, looks better on a big screen when it's projected by a good digital projector than by a super-8 projector ... contrasts in tactility, depth of field, granularities. Experience economy Bassam's. Fans moving at different speeds, a lot of them, on long stems. Concrete ceiling. Here's a tall thin young army boy in blue camo and big boots, stirring cream into iced coffee. Junk shop paintings all up the walls. Morning's big empty airy square. Bassam comes through in chef pants and a yellow plaid short-sleeved shirt wheeling the bin he used to take his cardboard to the alley. One of his always-changing baristas walks through in jeans and tight teeshirt. Her hips displace themselves with pretty neatness as she goes. Yesterday I went home and took on the M&L specs - made a Blurb decision - looked up color management. I'll go home and continue. Have to redesign everything. This morning when I'd done my bucket watering rounds I pulled the bed away from the wall and washed the floor. Since 3 days ago I'm stronger and only briefly sometimes sore. Not lonely. 26 One of these paragraphs will snag my attention, and I'll come back to it asking: why does that interest me so much, why does that seem to offer a peculiar kind of mental freedom? another element too, a kind of morose skepticism makes me feel that there could be a mental realm in which we could blend sciences and the humanities - Working on M&L book all day except for going to Denny's with Tom, who was blue on account of his job ending. Could go into the work knowing more - for instance that it's two books. Clearer about format - more researched and settled. First two masterpages for each section. Will coordinate swatches and fonts. Am able to see pages real size, approx. Mary phoned slow as a stone. She asked about Luke, is he still in London, and then And your daughter? 27 Is a big photobook with heavy theory pages viable? Different audiences. Commercially inviable, a coffee table book that's hard to read. But say how it makes sense, what Peter said about the photos, that they're art photos rather than photography photos. I hadn't realized that they are unusual as photos. How. They are psychological, mythical. Seen together, more so. The form of the theory is unusual in the same way - it's visual-tactile in its style.
A common sensibility in image-making and theory-making. Theoretical writing. Philosophy of mind.
It's a demonstration of mind and land as unseparate things.
- All day so far working out the web monograph. Keen. I've figured out the structure and section heads. Web is easier. I can use the old size. It's quite clean and white. Don't know what it's called.
- Party with the mailman, Greg the builder, José's immigration lawyer, the three artists, Iranian Mohammed who has warehouses full of African art, a tiny creature called Maria who said she was from Taos and 93 years old, Maye in cowboy boots under a flounced black skirt, a pretty woman who looked like a lesbian and is a general contractor, José beautiful in a black suit, the nice-looking man who said he's the marketer. Many La Jolla types complacently prosperous. 28 Richard wasn't there for most of the party. He sat for half an hour being greeted, very frail. Hair up in tufts at the back like a man in a hospital. His gallery was opening at last, just as he is dying it seems. I didn't know his last name until I saw it on posters in the yard, Siegal. He has been an interesting neighbour though not especially likeable. Has a thin pettish way of speaking, weakly autocratic the way someone with money may be. He keeps himself surrounded by good looking friendly people, young Mexicans. They make what he wants and it has turned out that what he wants is quite lovely - the house is. The ground floor is gallery all through, bright maple floors with stepped levels. A large back room has an opening up through the second floor to the roof lantern I saw Greg building last year. Around it, dark wood railings nicely made. Crowded up against them a lot of dark African objects. Maye said to go up. The top of the stairs opened to an astonishing room. It's the room whose two windows I see from mine, a long room with a little sofa area at this end, tall glassed-in bookshelves on both long edges, and every surface covered thick with African art. Later Maye introduced me to Mohammed, a small curly haired man in a flat cap, stolid, who said Richard buys all his African art from him. I asked whether he knows where everything comes from. He said would I like a tour. Took me round the tables and shelves upstairs naming tribes and countries. Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria, Gabon, Ghana. Pots with mirrors set on the sides he said are called mouse pots. The mirrors indicate divination. I lifted a lid. A high-up surface inside in which a mouse is left with little straws. The way the mouse disorders them can be read. Mohammed sometimes would have to pause for a long while to fetch up the name of a tribe. I would look around as I waited. I didn't like Richard's three featured artists including Maye. The portraitist was a vain man who drinks, the satiric etcher looked alright but his etchings were collations of magazine photos. Maye had made a lot of little bronze figures very skeletal and distorted. The real show was Richard's - Richard, his singular self and life, house and garden, vast collection, rounded up as he comes to an end. A wake I suppose. We circled through the gallery room and garden, drinks in our hands. Later on a young man with a guitar sang Halleluja under the pepper tree, against Handel from the speakers. I was sitting on the stone steps listening to them both, smiling at people climbing up past me in the light from the door. I was wearing my red silk pants and white shirt and moonstone earrings. Then I dreamed Louie had moved to another part of the city. In her building I saw a vacant room, large and high ceilinged. I opened the shutters and saw it looked onto a courtyard with children and a big tree. That made me think of living there. Later I was out on the street looking at the neighbourhood. I was thinking of it as London but it looked more like Paris, 4- or 5-storey business buildings with rounded upper edges. The word I had at the back of my mind was 'empire'. They were streets built for the purpose of running an empire. I was thinking my previous neighbourhood further north was too downscale. When I went back to the room I saw the inside edge had a lot of doors, a couple of them into a community washroom. People were having to come into my room to get to it. There was a cat I was petting, maybe it could come and go by the window. Where I now could see a chapparal slope. 31 Wednesday, 3rd day of fast. September 4 Sunday. Began eating yesterday after 5 days sort-of juice fasting. Immediate effect of food: energy and action. Cleaned house. Washed the floor. Once I'd begun kept going and cleaned the computer cases and keyboards. Did yoga and slow breathing. Had resolve. This morning still acid-aching and hissing but not stiff. Do I have things to tell from last week. There'd been a daddy-long-legs suspended next to the Mac Pro tower in the corner under the desk. It had hung there since the spring. Wd startle when I pressed the power button and the machine said BRINGG. It seemed not to have moved from one day to the next. I left it there to catch the little bugs that come in with plants, if any. This week it's gone. There's another smaller one near the ceiling in my NW corner. Big wave day with Tom on Thursday. He phoned to say a 12' swell was coming in next day from a storm in New Zealand, wd I come to the Cove to see it. I picked him up at 10:30. We sat for a while on a bench above the cliff east of the Cove. He wanted me to see through his sunglasses, as always. These were polarized and their effect was startlingly wonderful. I could see into the waves. There was more color in the water: green, mauve, milk-coffee brown patches loosely edged with black kelp. The dead weeds in front of us were sharper-edged. Later at Wind an' Sea the glint on the inside curve of breaking waves was bright blue, where without the glasses it was white. At the sea horizon the sky a band of milky violet. Tom is courting me by listening - not seriously courting but trying his luck. I told him the story of Richard's party and he listened so well I had a pressure of tears from feeling I hadn't had earlier. When I told him about Mary asking about my daughter he said Life is beautiful and terrible, which was completely the right thing to say. When I said something about our being broken up, he said It takes two to break up. That was charming of him, though I don't forget it's easy to say when you can trust the other person to hold out. Then he told me how he cooks for himself on $60 a month. Monday: tuna, avocado, tomato and scallion on toast with tomato soup. Tuesday: spaghetti with avocado, tomato and scallion. Wednesday: a burrito with avocado, tomato and scallion. And then the same rotation again. He's keeping his place clean he says. I saw his pleasure in bachelor solitude. He still hasn't paid the last $200 [actually $400, he was lying] to get his license back. He's been trim after the Fiesta Island job but he'll blow it again. Since David's campaign the plants downstairs are thriving remarkably. The vine along my stairs is full and glossy. The guava that had been slaughtered by scale is all new leaves, large leaves. The two dehydrated guavas have sprouted all over. My mesquite has proliferating tips. - I go out before anyone arrives downstairs and bucket-water, and then feel duty satisfied, an improvement of life. 5 Kirsten K - early 40s, seasoned, competent, driven, honorable, stopping to open what she had kept closed. She says too much, sometimes smudges herself with saying too much, but is after essence. Coral - early 30s, says she was a wild girl, drugs, sex, now is tied down with husband, house, two sons, one a baby. Was exquisite before this pregnancy. Wants to be a poet but is afraid of herself. Wants to plan herself into greatness but doesn't seem to know what she knows. 6 Raining this morning, not hard. Ten-car collision on 67. Underwater dawn at the window, pale, quietly full of stir. Waking with Coral's questions about being a poet - being what a poet is, does she mean?
She has what I want - land, man, kids, poems, thoroughly active life - but it never occurs to me to want the forms of those things that she has - as if I think they're fake. Got to that question because Kirsten said students gave fac as evidence that artists could be academics. I assumed they meant me or Lise but then realized they might have meant CG. - All our female fac are artists, actually, and none of the men are.
- It's after eleven. The restaurant fan and all the air conditioners are off. There's a cricket in Richard's garden chugging, grating, steadily. I've turned one of the deck chairs to face west. Was sitting in it with the door open, light showing in a small Greek house, light at the shaded windows too, and saw a meteor streaking toward the ocean. It has been strange weather. Rained this morning. I walked back from Starbucks feeling what a warm rain it was, the air warm and so damp it smelled of eucalyptus. Louie phoned and as we spoke it cleared. Not much later I opened my door and stepped out into an oven blast of hot wind. It was like a wet Santa Ana, wind NE 9 mph, 65% humidity it said. This after an evening sky suffused pink over half its arc the night before. Window sashes way up. Night traffic, the sound so visual to me, dark streaks. 7 Suffus'd with rose and gold / the endless sky - was that Tom? His cadence. - Slept last night with the windows wide and so woke this morning beautifully, into warm quiet pink. Now is beginning the season I like best. The Swan almost overhead at midnight. Vesselina Kasarova a slight pretty girl arriving at Schippol in jeans, leather jacket, a baseball cap, replying to questions in halting German in a little girl's voice, and then in performance opening her mouth in legendary authority, full of temperament and will. A bit of rehearsal video that thrills me for the way one sees her going back and forth between little girl and mighty queen. 8 Thursday afternoon during a heat wave, power out from Yuma to San Clemente, "they don't know why". Won't be back before tomorrow afternoon maybe. 9 Tom showed up. SDG&E had said to initiate family emergency plans. He brought two little radios and was listening to someone fielding calls from people reporting on freeway jams and neighbourhoods. He was liking the guy managing the community networks. Noosphere. I said The machines are all shut down, let's sit outside. So we were on the roof with the radio and no air conditioners but a lot of sirens as the light began to redden on the cathedral façade. We walked over to Balboa Park to have a look at the people's event. Sat with our backs to a large eucalyptus next to a little soccer game. Over by the sidewalk a group of young people was practicing tightrope walking. We could see one of the Prado towers above the treetops lit by the afterglow, and above and alongside it the white gibbous moon also lit from the west. The tower had a look of India to me and there was a dark-skinned young man who could have been Indian, who stood motionless on a path in the direction of the tower gazing steadily toward us. I kept glancing at him as Tom spoke, something I was feeling about the conjunction of three things all facing the sun and facing us. Then we walked over to 4th Avenue to look down over the harbour and then back home. Got the Coleman stove out of the back of the jeep, cooked sausage stew in the little room under the pepper tree lit by my camping lantern. I went back to the jeep to get a stirring spoon and when I crossed the unlit parking lot, stepping out of black shadow into moonlight, I knew Mike was there unseen in his spot in the lawyers' back porch. We called out to each other. His gentle innocent voice saying Isn't this good. "It's wonderful! It's so quiet." 10 I'm proofing the Fading [In America ] pages for some reason. Relinking. 'For some reason' because they are password protected and no one is reading them. It's giving me a review I guess. At F7 I begin to have censored and uncensored versions because of Susan and Millie, ie from before I installed the password. It's now 6 years later and I'm thinking whether to post the uncensored when I've left Goddard. I think yes, so long as I leave out the college name so it can't be found at random. There I go look for Millie. She seems to be alright and still in Marshfield. Messages on a photo forum, second prize in a virtual cat show. - 9 on a Saturday night. Worked a lot this aft. Have Coral and half of Jeremy for tomorrow and then Yoly on Monday. What do I know so far. Kirsten K is a grownup and she's doing what she needs to, honest and valiant. Just support her. Kirsten E has a turgid psych-theory voice and some better passages. Something with her mom. Chaotic, a slog to read. Gilligan helped. Josh is sensible and capable, but his question is displaced from the personal. Jeremy is another boy longing for marvels and powers - another slog though not as chaotic as James was. Ineffable intuitions. Wave theory? Sam has a real life she's living competently and intelligently. She's the smartest of my lot, I should talk to her about documentary writing. Coral will be hard because she's aiming somewhere she can't get to from where she is. Look how big and disordered my writing is after dealing with their disorder. I've discovered watermelon fasting. Got another big one I parceled into my little fridge like an amputated corpse. Haven't been hungry all afternoon and evening as I worked, as if I've been fed essential micronutrients. Greg has got cranky when I don't reply. Keeps pressing me to get my own wifi connection, as if it were his business. He's more of a controller and I'm more of a know-it-all. I've been ignoring his instructions on this and that, and can, at this distance, but I'd hate it in person. He gets annoyed when he tells me not to use Courier New and I don't obey - I don't think he used to be like that, though it goes with small eyes. 12 Le Guin's voice at 63 is quite abrupt and tough. Tao Te Ching "somehow nourishing to me." Tai chi "always in motion but you never stop." "My mother early in my teens ... she put me onto Virginia Woolf." "I feel sorry for a lot of people," "hard up one way or another." 13 A Mexican man shouldered the futon and took it away. Is the new foam mattress better on the whole? Maybe not, though it was $300. I have to figure out how to make it bend. What is resistance. I want to say reluctance.
Understanding the stress of being without a tribe. 15 Mind at last discovers itself transparent ... finally still and clear as clear water, and from top to toe the body brims with transparent wordless mind. 17 Saturday morning. We've been greyed over for a couple of days, battened down. I'm worried about how stiff and sore I've been since I got back from VT. Harassed by not knowing what to do for it, only can think of giving up little pleasures I still have - agave in tea, fruit, occasional bits of bread or dessert, getting straight into bed at night without an hour of grim discipline. The new mattress isn't better. There's a blubber of held water at my waist, and under the skin of my face some too, acid ache in muscles at this moment, especially arms, hands, bum. Strong ache through the night in the spot at the back of the waist that I think of as kidney, probably because I had a sweet swift come yesterday aft. I'm annoyed. I want to expand not contract. I'm not bad for 66, should I say, and it's not as bad as it will be, but what does it need? And why do I resist the disciplines that might work. Because they are strictures. - So there I went to see Tom and we talked about finding a place to live together at Santa Ysabel. I said, You wouldn't have anywhere to work. He said, I wouldn't have to if we split the rent. I said it wd have to be the real thing. He said his only holdout is that sometime in the future he'd want to smoke weed again and he wdn't want to sneak or lie. I said what would worry me about that is that his balance is very unstable and I wouldn't want to get caught having to look after all the practical things. So then we changed the subject and went out and pruned the honeysuckle out of the little trees. The thought of living in Santa Ysabel and loving somebody there is sweet to me but I'm noticing the finances would be all in his favor. I would be paying car costs, still, plus maybe $600/month rent, which would leave me with no margin, and I'd have to go on working indefinitely, while he did not.
This aft with sun at the window wide open working with Emilee on her book - she was formatting and sending and I was proofing and then she sent a draft of her cover and I invented something I like, a wrapped colophon. 20 I heard myself say three things to Tom yesterday, laughing charmingly as I said them. 1. After almost ten years I've realized I'm not writing a dissertation anymore, I don't need to be spending twelve hours a day and my best brain on work. I could be doing other things more. I could be creative an hour a day. 2. I've been proofing the last ten years and I notice how much time I've spent trying to figure out whether I'm safe from being dumped. Maybe I could just stop. 3. It's more fun being with him than alone, not because he's such hot-shit fun but because I enjoy the clash and play. I don't want to spend the rest of my life alone. I want the real thing though, I want to go for broke, and if he isn't up for that, I want to go out and find someone who is - and who can deal with money.
- Frameworks notice this morning that Cineworks has super-8 to HD telecine services. Decided to get a super-8 camera. Discover there are super-8 Beaulieus, very stramm. Excited. That will complete the kit. Pretty much. 21 Kasarova July 1965, Stara Zagora, "a Thracean Orpheus". - A mbo studies reader, pieces taken from the magazines. Emilee says needs an intro. As I zipped up the east flank of the park this aft I was starting to write it. Ten years of embodiment studies at Goddard. What it has been, what it has meant. Immediately a lot of things to say. The college doesn't do embodiment studies, it hasn't endorsed embodiment studies and doesn't endorse this reader. All the same, this work was done there and supported by its institutional structures. And at times impeded by. On the website I define it as an emphasis: embodiment studies is an emphasis on ... It is not an area of studies but a kind of slant, or a framework. Body studies are usually about ghetto topics that have forced attention to bodies - disability, gender, sex, death, illness, trauma, health and reproduction, but in my sense of it it is not a subject area because it is a way of looking at almost any subject area. Naturalism in philosophy of mind Mind, spirit, soul, as something a body can do. Discovering what difference it makes to think of anything that way - Beautiful work done in philosophy of mind Art - experimental film, photography, experimental writing - reading novelists Preference for sensory intelligence, distrust of cultural ideology What my students have worked on - those who lit up when shown these possibilities - to whom the approach made a difference - or who were already there. It has pedagogical principles implied - if bodies and minds are not separate things then I must think of myself as mentoring a body, and if I am mentoring a body, then the fact that the student is medicated, ill, anxious, overweight, unexercised, are not unmentionable. Or that they are seductive. This overlaps territories thought of as therapy and has made the college nervous. I might recommend yoga or belly dancing or slow breathing to be part of an academic semester. Or therapy, sometimes. It means that my interest in a student, my assessment of them as a student, doesn't have to exclude how they carry themselves, how they are medicated or addicted. At the same time, the work I do with them is most often at a distance and then I get into their heads as much as I can - fine-grained philosophical analysis. What would happen if you said it this way, not this way, I say . What do you mean by this, how do you actually feel this. Brain surgery. A set of authors, works, I've collected, that have given me parts of the approach. Diverse set of core books. The way someone looking for a frame shift might not know just what they're looking for and yet recognize bits, aspects, in many places; so that eventually there's a sense of convergence. A different sense of education and along with it a different sense of social media, language. Have a look at all the students in the anthology, and all the rest for whom it made a difference. What were they doing? [list of student names] At what points did reframing happen. Where does it help. Art is often there already - decrease the distance between art and theory.
Somatic therapy is integral to schoolwork because people are held back in various ways - which ways have I seen. And those ways of being held bacck are of course physical structures. An ideal curriculum - the four parts. People coming in as consciousness studies, envtl/place, expressive language arts. Relation of a teaching letters volume 2. Vol 1 student writing. Vol 2 teaching letters. Vol 3 reader. Different intros, related An anthology/reader vol III The publisher for all of these is nonprofit entity? What shd I do for college hrs. Added corresp - hr per student per packet period, publishing Emilee, ref letters, prepping 2nd and 3rd books, research for workshop and workshop notes, movies, research for Make a book. 22 Reading Barfield for Jeremy shuddering at the Christianity but interested to see whether I can sort the ontology. What is Jeremy looking for. He has adopted Barfield without bringing him up to date, some intuition has glommed onto Barfield's terms without testing them. He doesn't have wide experience, he's young. 23 Avaaz message this morning about Palestine's decision whether to ask to be recognized at the UN. Obama won't risk alienating the Jewish vote and is opposing the attempt. I'm disgusted with him for the first time. Signed the Avaaz petition online, left a comment and then watched the stream of other comments. There was one in French, after a while, signed Marie-Claire Blais, Canada. -
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He wants us to go on as we were. That is not on.
[pages of work on Barfield not transcribed] 25 Here it is Sunday morning, grey overcast, church bell ringing for 8 o'clock. I'm going camping with Tom at 10. I'm not saying that with any joy. Email with Greg about dullness. He said why dull when there are exciting projects. I could have said isolation, etc, but said it's because there's no call. So is the main fault with Barfield his theory of perception. It's implicitly dualistic. The body senses and then 'the mind' makes 'representations'. A vile epistemology. Bodies sense by restructuring. Bodies are part of the fabric of the all, wave-space, whatever it is. They see the way their sort of body sees. Perceiving structure is given both by what is there and by existing structure. It happens at a particular scale of structured coherence. At this scale yes it would be good to be more alert to be more accurate - everyone's quality of life depends on it. Barfield's Christianity is a mess, ideology is a mess. The idea of evolving/developing a better-loved physical world is right.
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