- [I drive from Vancouver to northern Alberta, taking a week for 800
miles]
28 June 1978
Something wrong in M [my mom] I have to find, beauty belongs to essence
detachment grace, it's not vanity but rightness I want to be safely out
of my mother's false consciousness
30
Painful dislike of people
4 July
the days, my friends
white lady of day
they come to be questioned, not to alarm
[trying to build a pagan understanding of place and the year, trying
to learn the spirits or powers of the place and the year, from Yeats]
[anguish of what has felt to be lost competition, really lack of trusted
belonging]
'they! are more subtle than I
[intuiting the presence of unconscious self, intense attention to own
consciousness making things seen in the concrete world seem images of psyche.]
the sense of being somewhere else standing at the edge of the pond looking
at the two worlds of the water lilies
[fear of loss of my familiar self as I searched for this internal perception]
I ran away from the lively depth where I seemed too much at the mercy
of death / and others
[interest in anything I could learn about how to work with the mythic
unconscious, desire for poetic initiation]
a poetic condition by listening to the wind
suibhne a body so light he could perch on the tops
of trees
the slightest noise would startle him into flight
and he was cursed with a perpetual distrust of all men
had a friend loingseachan who constantly went in
pursuit, trying to catch and cure him
- oh that we were together
- and my body feathered too
- in light and darkness would I wander
- with you, forevermore
[looking for company and a style of being in the best of scientists]
Einstein
the contemplation of this world beckoned like
a liberation
I live in that solitude which is painful in
youth but delicious in the years of maturity
- there is a reality
- it is harmonious and lawful
there is no logical road from world to theory,
we are led to it by intuition
daily striving is from need and love
simplicity and common sense without guile
when young I used to go away for weeks in a
state of confusion
if we wish to describe nature exactly by means
of the simplest laws we have to use a different geometry at every point
of the world, depending on the physical condition at that point
by our causality we have adjusted our thought
to a lower order of structural limitations than seems realized in nature.
positing an intelligence superior to our own
[needing to imagine an intelligence superior to mine, to be able to venture
more]
[looking for the meaning of abstract visual attractions]
transparence refers to conceptuality
locating accurately the charm of an idea
[wanting to perceive more subtly]
I could reflect the sound of the creek with a page turned at a certain
angle
the process consists actually in an extraordinary
refinement of perception
[noticing tones of attention]
sensation of nearness of the dream's world, when I moved the stick on
the fire
[naming what I've loved in film]
to describe the motions that occur in nature
the own life. why anyone would leave it. why I leave it.
[noticing the small inner impulse to try to obey it]
a mind constantly on the edge of trance
[considering what writing should be, Yeats]
all must be an idealization of speech
write out our own thoughts in as nearly the
language we thought them in
words exact enough to hold a subtle ear
[trying to understand my own effort as an initiation into true art]
a crisis that joins the buried self for some
moments to the trivial daily mind
coming to the biggest obstacle one can meet
without despair
that they might be joined to the hidden and
so be phantoms in their own eyes
had they cherished any optimism, they could
have found a false or momentary instinctive beauty and suffered no change
[looking for descriptions of my own effort]
- without enough precedent, I had to find reasons
for everything I did
- incurable provincialism
[looking for an understanding of conflicting or alternative selves]
- subjective person, whose body has presence
- in the objective, only the eyes
alternation between two natures, for good
beauty of the antithetical self, calls for the
dissolution of the self
8 July
[I arrive at my childhood yard very early in the morning.]
Coming through mist at twenty-five to three, to the old place.
[Visiting my parents, who were then in their early fifties, trying to
see them with distance, as like others in their community]
His odd system of reflected knowledge. talking directly makes him feel
attacked.
11
Day spent finding the house. Lessing and Frank Herbert, the focus / sense
of a shape that isn't benevolent but that can be partially found. I'm suspecting
the consciousness technologies of destroying connections with the world
(ie madness). Had a while in what felt stoned sight. The way a gentle balanced
pressure gave this house against fear. [Asked a farmer's wife to be allowed
to stay in an empty granary.]
[unclear worry about the danger of sexual opening, also go on worried
about drugs and possession, Herbert]
the limits within which a consciousness, so
fascinated, can operate
locked the drugged mind onto its primary fears
what one prefers to the sense of balance in relation to another personality
had had their wills broken and were now deteriorated
wanting to cripple me and why?
13
The root fires. Morning in Sexsmith finishing Herbert. Afternoon in the
hills looking for a house. Beautiful. And a few things move or begin to
move.
Stone piles, wood in muddy water. I'm not able to let go to it yet.
15
Sunset excursion, fire opened stones ash moon
All day thinking about how to make a relation between closely watched
inner and outer and not having to live in only one / and whether the inner
works better unwatched etc.
17
By lantern read geological history from two billion, seas, shores, plants,
animals, ice. I like the geologic span for defending me from local religion.
18
Body is brown and nice.
19
Pounded and cried, I've blown it with everyone I've wanted.
-
[sometimes a line I don't understand but like]
Beginning a certain way into something - a tiny opening gesture and then
a disorientation for a moment in the midst of something
[going on looking for an understanding of right discipline, Agnes Martin]
going on without pride or notions is called
discipline
helplessness when fear and dread have run their
course is rewarding to live without fear or pride
fear and the ordinary mind are the same
here and there are those who keep themselves
free in a special manner, and therefore have not lost their memory
-
the cosmic substance itself works to liberate
difference between magic and mysticism is devotion
25
Evening immense sky, oh the reasonless constructions moving.
Slept outside.
-
there is so much making there is too much
stay still one move
head in the direction of what's loved and then
starting anywhere, and after
26
Sleep and wake, the white moon at noon's place. Going to M and F making
or finding a kind of harmony. Crying telling M I'm lonely. She said she
had that pain when we were young and she despaired of making a connection
between us and him.
An artist is one who is dissatisfied.
[noting meditation lore for how to get clearer]
only after a hundred days of consistent work
there develops spontaneously in the light a point of genuine creative light
thus a balance, together with concentration
and detachment in other fields of thought and essence
patiently to try it by the known faculties of
the soul
27
All morning such an ache for Jam.
When I'd lain down in the dark, and was watching breath, my head swelled
up with a lot of room between the temples, above the little face and the
little breath, a joy of relief and peace lying there with it. It happened
when I'd concentrated and seen through briefly.
28
Shampoo and the dugout swimming a little distance, really moving in water,
pleased. Back to cinema writings impatient to throw them out. The Nancy
Graves piece, a woman who works with what she loves, she's not ashamed.
Evening café for supper, and then the Teepee Creek road and posts,
grass, wire, soil, stones wire grass soil, the frame starts to make me
move. The dirt road and then over the hill to the fire place and there the
light moves in announcing itself fire and god, fireweed and the ruby light.
30 Sunday
Warm out, naked body brown shine pleasing under me.
Go out for the twilight high but it's camera experiments except for some
sense of scum and mud. Division of this doing and disbelief in
it and I tell myself I have to do something. But exploiting this foundation
- without inspiration and so unworthy etc. Worry about brain damage. Lying
down breathing, the wings in the nose. Seem to be repressing notions because
they make such a garble and are always unresolved or when they resolve it's
by showing themselves irrelevant.
Thinking to speak to J brought such a repetition of anxieties and with
them the sense of unmendable lostness, ie brain damage and impossibility
of friending because it's too complex. I've accumulated so much teaching
and want to be rid of it and answer my questions myself. Except Trungpa
so nice and comforting says pain's the way, start simple, all you need is
what you've got.
[I feel out the meetings with animals as attentively as I can]
31
Reading at night. Scratch under the window, fireweed moving. I go out
with the Coleman lantern. Something scrabbles through stems close to the
ground. The lantern chases an animal tail, around it long radiating quills.
I chase it alongside the cabin and through the grass to the trees around
the shed, and there it climbs a post. I hold the lantern and watch it seeking
with all four scratching claws to find a way through the eaves. It sits
in a fork, first with its back and then its face toward me. Little face
with hair stood up around it, red mouth. It must be afraid. I sing to it
and it stops to listen. I'm so much bigger and it has got itself stopped.
I sing that I won't hurt it. It climbs four-legged down the post. Hides
behind something. Gets out through a narrow place in the back. I hear it
running slowly through the barley.
The concentration of light in night.
3 August
Very hot.
Evening stubble light, wide horizon clear color without cloud,
trees sharp on it. The light inspired me.
The night of the aurora. Sleeping under them.
4
The storm, watched the clouds come, wind with them, lightning veins standing
for a frame, rain making roof plane over my head.
5
Fright and bewilderment again, what to do. I mess up simple things. A
chip on the lens, out with tripod taking wind.
What true thing can I make of this strong wind. Time and place.
6
Strong wind. Opening the suitcase wanting to burn but working. That came
after intense pain/bewilderment. The vertigo and sitting raft in it.
Throwing out what is wrongly imagined.
Exact yoga and inspired.
Fields, mix of greens and yellows, clouds flying past the light. In the
upper strong movements of filets, the evening sky more and more soft partitions
in blue grey. I was outside looking. Inside [my parents' house] music began
to go 3-D in me. Looking along the glass, the column made by drape and its
reflection such depth I was in heaven. When M came the lights on and the
human world. She was talking from the gathering she came from, evasive and
silly. I sit down on his left and he talks about positive and negative.
I say Das Magnet ist ein Uhrphänomen and he delights me by talking
about substance and clumping. In the depth I thought stoned, heaven, dream,
but it continued into self congratulation. His structural pleasure.
7
Looking around with a sense of the structures of this nature world and
some sense of maybe working homologies. What does it mean? The loveliness
of movements, clouds appearing at edge of the roof, anything could come,
and in the human too if not afraid, but that isn't it.
If people in all this world's human experience have said one thing meaning
another and been confused and well directed by that, what is there to say
and what is left out when I/we try to say it more directly.
But experience. Yes, it was this. Not symbols but experience homologous
because of the way it is learned.
Slept outside facing west. Some stars in clear blue over orange.
8
At yoga went into body to feel the quality of each part. Correction goes
on often, esp morning?
The wind, what's it like, here cool on one side, like shadow, fluctuates
with the sound, leaves and grasses. The grain of the edge of its contact
and sun.
Reading Tulku and finding him advising the porousness I know from fearing
to fall in.
Swimming, a sense of having more time, let body rest in it and had time
to know the warm above cool below and the colors coming toward me on the
face of my waves. The place where little mud-colored frogs went into the
water to greet big tadpoles with formed legs and the frog body still jelly!
9
Packing. The bliss already past and that life finished as the combines
roared around and they wanted me out.
Hello today says the garage boy.
Yoga on grass behind car, night airport.
10 Vancouver
Looking in the mirror at the airport, the woman in black, handsome. Low
over the fields seeing the marbling, flow, original ground, and low enough
to see reflections in the lakes moving at a different speed. Clouds slight
mass so exactly edged.
Diana [Kemble]. The shoes left on the sidewalk under her window.
I'm holding distant and tensed to see the errors of our captivities in
wrong notions.
Daphne and Roy, coming to supper making pleasure. And with that something
generous and delighted. Watching Roy smoke and get more on and more off.
Releasing the thoughts needing to be said and Daphne meeting them all.
And you in your new face closely watched. Who is this who thinks she
knows me to have an ownership.
11
D's place scaring me. The reflection of myself and surrounding objects
on the piano scared me, I thought I could lose myself in it. It was the
sense of dope openings (doors, trapdoors) waiting all around to be sprung.
Confessions of brain damage, tournament rules, the tree that died of
mirrors, language rubble.
13
All day in bed flying, exchanging, in love and seeing.
16
Waking in love and kissing her palm.
"Oh me too."
Exquisite loving moving, gone deep.
17
Camera [I buy the Beaulieu], Studebaker parts.
20
The Steveston marshes.
Crying, in pain, locked out of her and out of everything.
part 2
- up north volume 1: 1978-1979 june-january
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
|