From The Tan & Black Notebook

October 23, 1981
“I saw a photo today at the Provincial Museum in Victoria in British Columbia. It was a picture of a Tsimshian shaman. The plaque next to this remarkable life-size blow-up of his photo said: the shaman has the responsibility of maintaining the correct relationship between the supernatural, the natural and the human worlds. I was struck by that—the words and the photo made quite an impact on me. The photo of the man, whose name was Kispiox, showed him in his shamanistic attire standing against a wooden longhouse…We rarely see such personages in our own time.” (Note: When I returned home, I called the museum and asked them to send me a copy of the photo, which they did.)

October 15, 1982
“Drawn to Kafka and Freud. Prague and Vienna. Writing and analysis. Quote from Melvyn Hill in Secret Symmetries on Freud’s Jewish identity and /European culture, similar to being Latino in Los Angeles: ‘social discrimination prevented them from assimilating. For many of them this was only a challenge to prove how European they really were, and the professionals and intellectuals among them were soon more European then the Europeans—a condition typical of colonized peoples. They worked hard to fulfill a cultural ideal from which they were disqualified strictly on the grounds of origin….At the same time, the desire to resolve their alienation drew them to psychoanalysis. Freud himself attributed his discovery of psychoanalysis to his marginality as a Jew….’”

From The Sun Journal – May 2, 1991 – May 25, 1997

September 9, 1996
“To be sobered. To know that one does not control events. To know that love is a mystery. To know loss and yet in the middle of that to know that you are whole. And to learn patience. I looked up patience: an ability to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay. Also: to endure.”

From the Journal of Dreams – June 6, 2001 – May 14, 2007

July 27, 2001
“The image,” writes Julie Kristeva,” has an extraordinary power to harness your anxieties and desires, to their intensity and to suspend their meaning.” We are mesmerized by the proliferation of images around us. They're everywhere and invade us like an invisible virus and often show up in our dreams like unwelcome visitors from another time and place.

From The Red and Black Cahier -- November 2000 – May 23, 2006

May 7, 2006

“Wong Kar-wai’s movies are my favorites. They seem to end my interior monologue as I am drawn in slowly, ever slowly, until I am completely in his world of make believe. My favorite is 2046. I love the juxtaposition of Christmas in Hong Kong in 1966 with the future of 2046, the bullet trains, the switch to Japanese and the seamlessness of time. Of course, the fact that the film is a fantasy about a writer pleases me. Zhang Ziyi can say so much without a word. She is luminous. 2046 is about time. Missed chances and by the end one thinks of red lips, writing in black ink on foolscap and more than anything that time is so fluid, so bendable, so easy to slip in and out of that we are, after all, simply beings of time.