Quest Golf Course today

 went to Optum to draw the blood but they could not send results outside of optum so we drove in the afternoon to Quest on Golf Course aka the other street name.  Got the blood drawn.  Later looked up TriCore and they have a place right here on Atrisco.  So . . . next visit we'll see if using TriCore will work for both or all labs, will they hold hands with Optum and vice versa?  

Not much work on Handke today, but did squiggle to the end of Chapter 15 and now ready to start 16

praised fellow on X for saying he is reading Handke, Modiano and Patrick White for the rest of the year. Should I try White once more.  I did like Chariot but somehow not enough to say I must read every word.  Big essay by Merve _ on Magic Mountain in new ten-year old translation.  Again, do I really want to give that another try?  Or glance at The Tunnel after all?  Bela in last tv episode of The House of the Spirits.  Glimpses I've had make me not at all interested; as she says Latin American history not much fun.  

She's worried not to be planning her birthday party for herself.  Lou's plans are set for Tuesday evening dinner party.  Bela wants to host Beckie and her husband at Cuates so we can hear mariachi with them.  

Her eye is clearing up well.  What has caused it?  Will the doctor at Eye Associates really be able to tell from the blood tests?  

19 ! days until we fly East!  how will it feel to go back much earlier this year?  

Pink Eye onward

Tues 12  Got an appointment for early this afternoon to have second look.  Telephone number for the place in Rio Rancho is for a Chinese name, Charles Chiang.  Put my finger on it at last, same name as the cowboy boots doctor we saw for cataract consult few years back.  "If it were my mother, this is what I would advise."  He must own a number of practices around town, website for this one has about eight people, none of them him.  

Charged $860. by Defined Fitness.  Twice $430.  Looking into that.  Canceling Pablo today, Jen tomorrow.  

NM for winter sunshine.  NH for health care.  Dennis sent a blurb in response to my forwarding USA Today piece, Philly #1 for art murals, Abq #3.  "There are murals everywhere. There's a school a few blocks away that I think gears itself for Muslims (Based on the activities listed on its events sign) that has wonderful mandalas and some twisting thing that has arms with golden lady bugs (my interpretation) crawling on it. The performing arts school has the front covered in scale like images in white shaded with purples, subtle blues and mauves. Just stunning. Very Japanese. There are some pretty bad ones too but most of them are fun."

Will we cross the Sierra de Gredos?  Will Godot show?  

Maria did and we talked about where to plant the hollyhocks, the Spanish broom, a few daffodils and the desert prickly pear that Bela wants.  Her boy is 11, daughter  9.  

Eye doctor seems to think not pink eye but some other sort of inflammation.  Prescribed steroid drops and they are working rapidly.  Now 7:40 pm 

yes strange continues

 Handke says, have I read Berhard, well, yes, of course I have and here's my response to him and tons of others, I'm calling it Crossing the Sierra de Gredos!!  Starting into Chapter 14.  In 13  the Lone Star Cafe glass tent and Nuevo Bazar and much else.  

In 14 we open in a hostel with a courtyard surrounded by sleeping chambers.  The mother protects her daughter.  The adolescent girl vanishes one day any way.  Mother undertakes a long search, finds her on an island in the south Atlantic.  Much happiness but later sychronicity reverses and the child longs for rescue by the mother and later disappears again.  

Chatter this past Sunday had Robert Schumann's 1853 piece Fairy Tales  Märchenerzählungen and

a contemporary re-working (somehow?) of this notion by Jörg Widmann (b. 1973) Es war einmal  2015

Once Upon a Time.    Ahh, I thought through the whole concert Handke!! and Fairy Tales and Folk Tales.  Even the Spoken Word by Ken Arkind chimed into all of it---a great piece about his father.  Arkind back after teaching schools in New Zealand for ten or fifteen years.  

so  storytelling  on and on  no wonder Lentz allowed Handke to inspire him to write his Schattenfroh 

in the one film in which she had starred the character portrayed under heavy white linen sheets had "imperceptibly dissolved into the white of the bed linens."  Notice how when I underline one or two lines and type them up here I am ruining the whole page, the chapter, the book but assuming I can outline it, condense it, select "key" elements that unlock it, provide the pre-analysis that will support a later comprehensive analysis and even a critique.  In other words I withdraw from the experience of reading, detach from it, and try to create for myself alone, a space from which I can look back onto it, into it, from this removed position as observer of the reader, of the reading.  Reading is too absorptive, I fear being subsumed into the reading, sucked into reading, and lost forever in reading the book.  The book will claim me and I will never be able to notice every detail with sufficient attention and certainly never be able to remember enough of it to really experience it to the full, once and forever.  No matter what I can do, a second or third reading will always be possible, even more desirable than the first reading, no matter how slowly I go, no matter how many notes and underlinings I make and take.  

Pres Now visit today

 

• James Karz, DO, is an emergency medicine specialist based in Albuquerque, NM. He completed his residency in emergency medicine at Rutgers Health/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School from 2017 to 2020, following his graduation from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2017. His academic background includes a B.S. in Biochemistry from Loyola Marymount University and a B.S. in Communication Arts from St. John's University. Dr. Karz has been working as an emergency department physician at Presbyterian Hospital since 2020. He has authored several publications, including research on health literacy tools for older patients in emergency settings and studies on heart failure triggers, Osborn Waves, and methods for quantifying ambient volatile organic compounds.
  
  
  we went to Pres Now this morning.  Well, first we tried Lovelace Urgent on Unser but they had no personnel on site.  Got to Pres about 11:15.  Waited until about 11:50.  Well, before that they took Bela in for a quick sight test, then about 11:50 they put her onto a bed.  Doctor Karz came in about twenty minutes later and did various test on her eye including pressure, for glaucoma.  
  
  
  Diagnosis: pink eye infection.  Antibiotic drops and tablets, should clear up in two days.  

takes a lifetime to know some things

Larry sent this about Merton and Lax.  Does it mean that Merton took thirty or forty years to realize who he really was?  Was he also an otrovert like Lax?  Or was his mimicry of Lax, if Larry is right, something else within his psyche?  

Great advice. I’ll forward your email to Josh. I wanted him to hear the way you addressed Lax in your book as an abstract painter and reader of Lax.  I was taken by a video interview with Lax on YouTube by how much Lax sounded like Merton. Same cadence, same pauses, same humor, same laugh as the Merton taped lectures and talks with the scholastics. I think Merton got this America New York voice directly from LAX because I myself remember talking  like my own mentors the first years I taught—hearing their voices in my own as I played back their eloquence in my own head in unconscious mimetic adoration.  LAX was a hero to Merton, I suppose, and became more of one as time went on. In fact, his search for a second hermitage out West mimics LAX's prior move years before.  Any thoughts?

Larry 

I know little about Merton.  Same birth years but his was the less stable childhood than Lax's, so he needed the church and the monastery much more than Lax needed the circus family.  Lax found his hermit nature much earlier, realized it more clearly from deep within his childhood, one supposes.  Would Merton have allowed himself to see his desire for a hermitage as a mimicry or as a finding of his true nature after long years of searching?  The whole thing of the voice is most interesting, think you are right about the new yorkishness of it.  From Buffalo to NYC.  Forget the exact Lax birthplace, near Buffalo.  

Once I've adopted Kaminski's reading of my life (superimposed) it is difficult to think away from it.  Joe clearly was an otrovert writer, just like Handke.  Maybe the great majority of writers are.  Writers, artists, with musicians a different story though.  Performing another dynamic but surely there are otrovert musicians too.  Joe and I were "friends" at a distance---the colleague structure gave us that link, across which we recognized each other and respected our differences.  Phil I guess was an introvert, much less need for a pleasant social face, much greater need to stay within the key communities of church and college.  

back to our trekking banker --- she dreads anyone knowing of her plan to cross the Sierra de Gredos

"as if my secret came to life, and that would mean humiliation, whereas unrevealed it remains a source of riches."  113  

inevitable that I go to the Pueblo Center this morning, Saturday . . . . tried to forego the notion yesterday but nothing doing ---  gorgeous day out now.  10:25

resistance and acquiescence

our heroine will be in constant argument with the famous author she wants to write her story and that will make the book long and dense or in great danger of being tedious or at least as formidable as an everest trek, or a passage across the sierra de gredos.  Is Handke sort of saying ok Derrida et al you want the logos deconstructed, the narrative no longer to follow the ancient and newly endorsed forms, let's go, let's do that, follow me.  First we will walk backwards to the airport to see if we can even get the journey started.   

Porous   And at the same time they were porous . . . in the direction of both day and night  between awake and the clarity of a dream 

didn't rhythm have to be the main seasoning for a chef?  98 

was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved. 99  says the chef   and of course, we think, the writer,  

now into chapter 9   What was he thinking as he wrote this book?  Write a book crazier than any other book that has ever been published?  Have the thinnest possible narrative thread or "thread"? and with that then invent as many topics to string along it as you can and word them as wildly as you can, as dream-like, as anti-novel as possible, as richly weird as you want (but no cheap horrors or sex tricks or lazy stealings).  

111 she strikes him in the throat      bit like the child on the plane hitting the woman in the throat 

glowing, shimmering, shining   a sphere, a dome   discovery as a way of  keeping possibilities open  112

slow trekking

 page 54 in Sierra could have been cited in full in Kaminski

without any reference to society or even to a community

without any sense of belonging

most truthful feelings  . . . people like her did not need . . .  a sense of community, let alone a sense of society  

always alone in the rain in the woodshed at her grandparents' house

and yes the power of Kaminski's book still with me and has convinced me that the otroic underlies all else, encompasses or situates the whole interior landscape before anything such as the glyphic comes into play

Frank Bowling's paintings!  yes.  much better than Rothko's, much more life and feeling.  He is apparently 90 now.  Sir.  British  Guyana.

Strange that after finishing Kaminski's laser sharp analysis-presentation I get emails from Larry I telling me about his experiences over the past three years with group dream analysis.  Three years with eight people---started by a doctor

"My most interesting “hobby” post-retirement has been my participation in a “dream group” run by a local retired emergency room physician.  We’ve been together 3 years with the same 8 members and have evolved in unplanned and unexpected ways.

"“The first rule of Fight Club: Don’t talk about Fight Club."

"First Rule of Dream Group: Don’t Talk about Dream Group.”

OK.  I can’t talk about specific people or specific dreams, but I can explain the dynamics that govern our weekly meetings. It is based upon the approach to dreams developed by Montague Ullman, physician and practicing psychiatrist. Unfortunately, Ullman’s books are plodding and boring and his best advocate and explicator is his protégé—a fellow named William R. Stimson-- who describes Ullman as having done for the study of Dreams what Jane Goodall did to the study of chimpanzees and Dian Fossey did to the study of gorillas.  He replaced deductive theorizing with experiential inductive field work—"learning from and communicating with the infinitely vaster intelligence that underlays our own mind.”

Stimson,

“He (Ullman) deftly lifted dreams completely out of science, no matter how correct that science might be, and he lifted them entirely out of psychotherapy, no matter how legitimate that psychotherapy might be, and he even lifted them right out of mythology or religion, no matter how true that mythology or religion might be.  And he returned dreams to the domain where they legitimately belong and can do the greatest good.  He gave dreams back to the dreamers who dreamed them.”

Only the dreamer knows what the dream means because every dream has its own scientific theory, psychological discovery, and mythological or religious illumination embedded within it---- borne in and through the experiences and body of the dreamer. But the dream ego cannot unpack these things on their own without the aid of a group of fellow  “students” because it’s hard to see one’s unconscious mind through the experiential images that “dress it up.”  It’s like trying to imagine how you’d look to yourself if the mirror didn’t reverse the features of your face. Or see through your waking thoughts with the clarity of a child who blurts out the unabashed truth, “Look the Emperor is naked!”  It helps to have a group for that.  In fact, only a group can do that!

Making sense of a dream in an Ullman Dream Group involves uncovering the deep inner core that knows the dreamer better than the dreamer knows themselves.

I’ll save you the step-by-step protocols that go into this process.  We’ve streamlined them over the years and learned a few things about how to remember dreams and their relationship to other dreams and their often-astonishing timeliness. Like metaphysical poetry, most dreams appear mundane and meaningless to the dreamer until their intricate formal dynamics are revealed and the revelations arrive on their own wings.

That's about the best I can for now. Thanks for asking.  L

---

and this morning a p s  "The book that most clearly explains the dream interpretation process per se along with "active imagination " is Robert Johnson's "Inner Work."

Larry 

the reference to fight club put me off a bit.  I remember reading Robert Johnson a bit years ago when Nicholas was super keen on dreams and dream analysis.  

this group dream work seems so far away from where I am at the moment   

and page 54 in Handke confirms this----Handke is my companion guide for this year and perhaps a while

The Gredos book is very long and very strange, like some of his other strange books, and I am comitted to reading it super slowly in the slow spiritual reading sort of way---same with Genet's Rites now too 

dream group would be so much like a committee meeting it gives me the willies just thinking about it, imagining it   ---  dreams themselves have never been that key for me ---  I sort of envied Nicholas as he talked about his vibrant and vivid and memorable his dreams were/are   Is that why his only? and primary activity on social media is posting images of paintings on facebook.  He has collected over the years in this way an exceptional body of work---huge and varied collection of photos of paintings, a curatorial masterwork of sorts, his private-public journey through images.  

H:  "at all public or political speeches she would make herself scarce, render herself invisible by going to sit or stand behind a curtain  . . . felt surrounded by a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm." 55

not having music and sitting in the dark   as a way of life    taking half a day to walk to the airport 

the line in K's book about the woman willing to pay for first class prompted this extrapolation during the night----maybe when I was coming to the end of high school the anxiety about what would happen next as we all headed off to college was such that I "chose" going into the monastery as a way to sacrifice everything in order to get a First Class ticket for the flight into the next phase of life as a way to insure more private space and distance from lots of other people!  Irony of course almost immediately was that I had no time to myself that first novitiate year, could not get away from the group at all and could have no time for one-to-one encounters. And friendships were even forbidden!!  "particular friendships" something I had never heard of and tried to puzzle out---was the particular nature of friendship not exactly the point, the pleasure to talking all night with one friend who returned full attention and interest?   No wonder I had to crash out, eject from, my first class seat through Eugenia Memorial, where I could finally be alone and sit in the dark with nothing bothering me in any way.  a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm.  

Kaminski

has me wondering if I do need to read Kafka.  "Franz Kafka's influence on Peter Handke is profound, particularly in how Handke constructs narratives of alienation, absurdity, and the intense focus on subjective perception. While Handke has not always been a sympathetic reader of Kafka, he has acknowledged Kafka's artistry as "pure" and "true" rather than just humorous. Or at least the Diaries.

great line from D H Lawrence on page 109  "Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe.  The others have a certain stickiness; they stick to the mass."

Kaminski's book, finished it this morning, is an elegant piece of work, indeed.  The tale from medical history about handwashing (cadavers to birthing), how it was ignored and later proven true, key quotations about Frieda Kahlo, from David Foster Wallace, Lawrence, above, Dickinson's poem in the chapter about death, the Bedouin waiter's wisdom about love as a burn (131) and, last but not least, the only (I think, or maybe, one of the few) uses of the word feeling: "Those who accept verbal language as the only language of the mind remember mostly through words.  The otroverts remembers in feelings that cannot be articulated in words; these feelings are less likely to get lost in the recesses of memory, where they become irretrievable."  141   on 148 "the child's emotional aloofness in group settings is baffling to the rest" reminded me precisely of the key event of refusing to go to Catherine Schwininger's birthday party when I was in second grade (?).  

Other ways to say how the book surprised me.  Very impressive with the soft and quiet way he handled his own autobiographical details and then in the acknowledgement other life details.  And as finale the way he puts Janus Korczak, Warsaw pediatrician who died with his orphans under the Nazis against our current T hive cruel and selfish aggressiveness.  

Brilliant, the book, in every way.  Reviewed beautifully what I already knew, strengthened my sense of myself and my takes on all of these things over my lifetime.  

One more Key passage for resonance---page 117 "one otroverts I know lives  modest lifestyle but will always splurge on first-class plane tickets; she is willing to pay an exorbitant premium not for legroom or the three-course meal but for a modicum of additional privacy and distance from fellow passengers."

Yes, for sure!!!