2

01JUL2009
　
After talking a lot with K____, the words: don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up running through my mind. I try so hard to be present but the more I am engaged with someone the more self-protective I get.
That’s the third time talking has brought about Clarity. It seems backwards to me that I have to talk before I have the clarity assumed necessary to articulate.
The first was the fight K____ and I had, the second was the talk with Doc Wood__ after, and the third, just now.
The more K____ and I talk, the clearer my head, the clearer my perception. It’s not me taking on his perception, its just that when I talk, I catch the errors in it, I know when it sounds right or not. It’s like I’m listening to myself.
The night of the killings, J___ said that being affected or sad about the loss of our soldiers was weak, and he was tougher than that. So K___ and I snuck into his room and rubbed his eye protection shades all over our balls.
I feel like a cross between Boy A (wanting to please) and Sethe (Proud).
[Boy A is from the film, _Boy A_ and Sethe is from the Nobel prize winning book: Beloved by Toni Morrison]
I tell K____ more and more and notice the scale my behavior slides up and down on: Boy A on one end and Sethe on the other.
That movie starring James Earle Jones crossed my mind. I watched it by accident when I was very little. He is a black preacher, teaching civil rights, inspiring civil rights, in the generation just before Martin Luther King.
A young black man is inspired by Jones. He refused to be pushed around by the police. He is immediately beaten. He refuses to do the usual – pretend he is not a man – and defends himself. He is shot. Jones is one of the witnessing crowd.
Later the woman accosts Jones. His death is Jones’s fought. But Jones feels the man’s manhood is more important than his life, and obviously the young man agreed.
The woman didn’t understand. I agree with Jones and the young man. I think I understand it now. The material world is irrelevant, only the eternal moment of existence is Real, and it cannot be compromised.
I feel this strong wish for Baby Suggs, the old freed-slave-woman. [From the book Beloved] I envy Denver walking into her room and there is Suggs’s ghost, in the rocking chair, chuckling, bright eyed, maybe about to give the ultimate love and advice.
My dealings with K____, my reactions to K____ tend to be: _I wish I respected my life more. I wish I loved myself more, my hands, my arms, my legs, my beat._
Baby Suggs indirectly taught me these things when I was little. K__ is always reminding me of how I don’t do this well, hence I find him triggering, and intimidating.
There’s been a click, and I think I won’t sleep now so as to hold on to it. It has something to do with the self-respect aforementioned. The stronger the self-respect, self-love, the stronger the Sadness, not the feel-sorry-for-yourself kind, but the Real kind.
__________

　

09JUL2009

　

It’s not the notes I don’t like, just the fact that once I write it down, it’s not enough, it seems unfinished. [ .. it’s because I still can’t feel them.]

Had baseball on the mind -- a while ago K____ and M___ talked about their own baseball experiences to me -- I forgot what it felt like to belong. I wanted to cry for the child hood I never had, but it seemed inconsequential, I have my own.