The Indra work tells me—my life has been quite diverse and varied, here, there, and everywhere—it’s a little dizzying to think that this was all one person and one person’s life. It is shocking.
Category Archives: people
december 13
Discs—Physical Earth energy
Grounded. Material needs. My body. Not being able to take care of myself. Not being able to defend myself from the demands of a project.
Priestess of discs—She’s doing Yoga! Can I still take my Tuesday morning yoga class? I would dearly love to be able to do that. Physical—trainer setup? What about a zafu/zabuton in this room?
Working can be bad for my health, bad for my mood. I don’t want to reach out, make connections. I don’t want to feel over my head again in an extroverted analytical culture.
Six of discs—reversed. Is about this. I don’t want to participate in the madness. I try experimental remarks with Linda, jumping outside the box of her behavior. When I think about healing/leadership, I think—BIG. I want to modify the whole extended team so that we can work well together. My intuition screams at me to modify other’s behavior in situations. I can’t. I avoid participation to a great degree because of this trap.
Son of discs—Goals. One of my fondest dreams is to improve the house. I would love to gradually transform this space into something that would feel good and livable. I don’t dare to wish for what. Seems materialistic. There are poor out there. I am no good at home decorating. Etc. First step—money. Could I feel good about this? I don’t know. I might feel like Michelle or Richie. I might be susceptible to Sam’s criticisms, bound/engaged with his actions or lack of action. I don’t want that.
End of October—I blurt out in an email that there’s a reading from In Pieces, an anthology of fragmentary literature by Impassio Press in the city on October 29th. I’ll be there (but not reading). Of course, no one from class shows up, it’s not that kind of group. I’m quite excited by this gathering—there’s Guy, and Jason, Audrey, Ellis, Mary, and lovely Roy, and afterwards, I collect signatures like a giddy child and drink wine and talk of fragments and connections. It’s a lovely gathering. Outside on the plaza, in a windstorm, I fall down and break my wrist.
I miss the next two classes. Halloween is just two days away, can’t really navigate, I stay home becalmed (uncalm) in an utter slump. Unable to celebrate in any way with Sam, a masked witch in a bad mood.
The next week, I’m in New York, but entertaining Geno and Michelle after the marathon. We’re eating at Pure Food and Wine, with Blair, and baby Harry. It’s a good time although I feel phenomenally stressed by the logistics of meeting people in the city and the baby and the driving and the wrist and the expense and the phone call saying I won’t be there at class and the what the hell of all of it. But I like Michelle. She tells Blair stories of the squats in London and Berlin. Geno wrangles Harry pretty well, and Sam takes him out for little walks into the rainy courtyard. We even stop for coffee (terrible) at a nondescript, nonrecommended deli (Greek joint). Returning to my car something like the sound of a loud gong, in the Gong Show, loud and deep and fatal—parking ticket, $65, I parked at 5:40 pm somewhere where I shouldn’t have parked until 6. Just suck it up.
I catch up with the next class. I think I’ve lost the thread of Duncan’s life completely. All I know is that I’m envious of his household, alive with art and poetry and avant friends, community with all its prices and its costs. I’m envious of his ego and his correspondents. Him. Levertov. How to come to terms with what is past. That was then, you see, and this is now.
I never gather Duncan. I try to read the poems assigned, I never get them. I buy some of his books, don’t think I’ll crack them. I pay $300 for this class, I’m not sure why. I pay it in installments once a month, and I get shy about my childish checks with purple swirlies on them and a Comic front. I think I should have soberer checks like a real poet.
Trying to contribute. I translate a poem of mine into Olde English. Enjoy this exercise. I’m asked to read it aloud, a fairly strugglish effort. Seems okay. Better in Olde English than it was in New. Lisa picks out phrases in our poems. Well, should I toss the rest away, enshrine that phrase? Who knows.
I learn some techniques, puzzle over leading vowels. I want craft but I don’t want it. I am interested in the other students. I’m interested in shaping the interactions. The environment is so subdued, inhibiting. I ask a lot of questions. One dominates. She seems suitably irritable for a teacher of poetry. Poetry teachers swimming daily in bad words. THere are no highlights. I observe the women’s clothes. I’m familiar with an odd fact or two, like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s death this year or fallout on the Hanford Reservation.
Somewhere I don’t bloom. People very sparing with email, commentary, keeping their vast opinions to themselves. Closetsfull of opinions, jamming in on the shelves.
One of my thematic exercises highlights the word Intimacy.
I go to Bernadette Mayer’s reading at St. Mark’s. Appreciate it. I read Winter’s Day from cover to cover on my 2nd try.
I drop Ashbery’s name a couple of times, get a small sound of acknowledgement from Lisa, but no more.
Incomprehensible.
Lisa is subdued. The whole group is almost utterly subdued. They don’t write emails, they don’t open pdfs. We don’t bond or do I just mistake what bonds there are for something else?
Lisa provides a small spread of snacks each night. Sometimes hot cider, occasionally beer. Food is good.
The cats fight. Harry, Mina, and Bela. They frequent the poetry salon and get pet, as long as they’re relaxed and noses kept out of the food.
People have busy lives. They interfere. I try to gauge how diligent with my homework I should be. I produce some writing I guess each and every time. I’m eager to contribute also eager to unlock the secrets.
What is he reading to the birthday girl?
Something I know: corduroy shirts
Something I’ve forgotten: spring
Distribution of Jeannie’s, ratio of under-Jeannie’s, an elaboration of Jeannie’s.
Another strong-minded woman. Another sort of reparation. Another cane or a cast.
Phenomenology of poetry.
Aversion of poetry
Resting through aversion
Resting with oily skin
Elderly talking
Loving their children
The lady next to me, stunning in wrinkles, eyes blue smoked opal coat black and white houndstooth wreathing in wrinkles, eyes blue with bruises, careful with lipstick, still on her chair, dressed to the teeth.
I have to write about Crystal Bowles. There’s only one joke there, which is her name.
Dedicated to kids.
A lot of great teachers have passed through my life unnoticed.
The reserves have lost all their tigers. A tiger reserve outside New Delhi with no tigers to show for it. A man willing to shoot to kill. My nephew going into the Navy.
Animals. Lisa has an enamour of animals.
Very smart, very sensible. The horse is an animal.
I miss Blair.
The coffee is a bit appalling, as is Sam’s insatiable desire for a phone.
I love my in-laws. I felt so sad that I won’t see them this weekend.
If I could find my way to a simpler conception. If I could find my way to the egg on the pedestal, if I could find my way to the walking rock. No table salt. No laughing pepper. No funny farm. No moldy vegetables. Rot in a garden. Where do we see that rot, the heavy mosses, the packed earth of the path? The beaten borders, crumbling boundaries? The edge trees fallen into the river, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, in a death flirtation with the current. Where do we see that? Where do we see the planes? How far away are they? The red light blinks far away at night and there you are, another person. We forget that all of these poets are also persons, one after the other, exhibiting bodily functions. Yes you are a wizard of language. Yes you may set a bonfire. Yes you can turn and turn and turn. No you are not a clergy person. No none of this should be bandied about. No you are not for sale. No you have no memory of the mountain of marzipan you saw in Italy.
The surface is uneven. The cutting board is warped. The gentleman was proud to show me the use of passive voice in my writing sample. Fucking shit. Well live and learn. I am still expecting to show them, every one of them, show them—what?
What are these women up to? And then these men, their heads white and bony, their chins with flaps like lizards, that they have to shave.
The foxes coughing in the mountains. The evil fox light. Lost lore of animals lost lore of fears. Our superstitions are gone now, transformed into bombers from the air. Our strange fear of foxes or wolves following, met with turbans and robes. We do not learn much about any of this, we don’t push through it. We just take it as it lays.
I am going to stop for a moment and read Desnos halfway through.
Unseen baby, unknowable one. You don’t invite them to be a bad mother. You don’t correspond with mother. You don’t know the alignment, the starsign, the angel of mother. You don’t ask and the mother won’t retreat. You avoid the mother. The tattoos, the breath, the side dishes. The lack of respect. You are eternally grateful.
Now Gertrude Stein was she more focused? Did she probe her inner parts?
november 9
Still sad. Sadder than ever today. I want to throw myself on your mercy. To wander into your crowd full of people I don’t know. I set up a conflict with people around me. I don’t stake my claim.
I don’t taste my own sauce. I guess I’ll leave here now.
Note the differences: Anne and Sylvia, Remedios and Leonora.
I love the worn out ladies brave in Mexico.
I am not hungry. I lost my appetite. No dinner last night, just some mozzarella sticks, frozen and reheated at Richie’s. A glass of cold white wine. Sauce: ketchup mixed with hot sauce, tasted good. Richie and Suely slathered hot sauce on knuckles of reheated chicken meat. I watched and held my own.
Suely told me about her sister’s breasts. So ugly, so ugly, one larger than the other, and after childbirth, even more misshapen. She sent her first money earned here home for her sister’s breast operation. Results: keloid scars and things are worse than ever. She cry, she cry.
I was privileged to meet him, Russell Edson. I had to go to New Hampshire to do it. And he lives right down the street.
I sense there are too many people in the world with too many attachments. There isn’t room. There is no more room. I am squatting here.
Everyone is on a trajectory of some kind though. Achievement-life: I can smell it coming a mile away.
One of the things that I love about Natalie is her ability to make judgments about people and say them out loud. It’s thrilling to hear her sum up a person, their behavior, their motivations, their unconscious fire, all rolled into one or two quick incisive statements. Initially, I just bought into everything she said. I had never experienced such a wise window opening onto other people. I was hungry for the guidance. Somehow, I had been misled, led to believe that everyone was a Child of God. Christian psychology is very flat and its behavioral modification systems are very dumb. I had no ability to read people, to differentiate between them. I was like a person, a woman, in an arranged marriage with everyone. As far as Natalie’s stories go, later I learned there might also be other points of view.
I have the anger about the network router. Something is working—why change it? I live with a curious technology monkey.
I want to stay relaxed.
I’m nervous about Sam coming upstairs. If he saw me writing, I would say “I’m writing.” I don’t want him to know what I’m doing.
TV noise at night bothers me. I feel very lonely. I remember Eli watching movies drunk in the middle of the night. What am I to do. Sam is asleep on the couch. The soundtrack of “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” is pleasant. I can try to listen to it.
Lisa wrote me. I am hanging onto emails from Lisa and Olivia like lifesavers. I’m wondering if I should transfer my efforts to my own writing. Signs point me in this direction, but I don’t want to go. Maybe I should give it a try. Might make me happier in the household.