| volume 1 of up north: 1978-1979 june-january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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In this volume a large adventure begins. I sublet my Vancouver place, and with my film production grant, new driver's license, camera, typewriter, and boxes of books and film I drive north in my '62 Studebaker Lark. In part 1 camp briefly on our old farm site, and then from the middle of July to the middle of August live in a granary northeast of Sexsmith. When the Grotkowskis' combine begins to circle the field and they need their granary back, I fly to Vancouver to buy a 16mm camera, a Beaulieu. The day I return I rent the Olson farmhouse northwest of Valhalla Centre from Harold Nordhagen for $70 a month. In parts 2 and 3 live through the beautiful autumn there. The Lark's engine seizes. I borrow money from the La Glace Co-op to have it repaired. In late September I fly to Vancouver again to buy a Nagra tape recorder. Back in the Valhalla house at the beginning of October I photograph and try to write. Jam visits for a week. In November, part 4, she leaves for Hong Kong for the winter. I fly to Van to say goodbye. Then in part 5 am in the Olson house alone working through cold brilliant December and January until I run out of money and have to leave to find work. Film, slides and writing from this period make it into both film and multimedia versions of Notes in origin and some are linked from journal text. There are parallel notebooks for this volume: a daily record, a regular journal, a reading journal, often undated. I interpolate by best guess. Also sometimes transcribe and interpolate from letters to Jam. Regular journal is transcribed in lower case. Was interested in tracking cyclic effects on state so the original of the daily record designates the beginning of a period with a red wriggle and any kind of sex with a red triangle, also moon phase and fertile or nonfertile vaginal mucus. Unusually in this volume of the journal project, part numbers to the left are linked to edited versions I am supplying as alternatives to the originals only for times when I am in my home country in Alberta. Originals are linked from each page. Reading notes: Celtic seasonal and mythological lore, Yeats, Einstein, Oates, Herbert Dune, Tarthang Tulku Time, space and knowledge, Richardson Pilgrimage, Ouspensky , Jung, Secret of the golden flower, Tao te ching, The cloud of unknowing, Dante Inferno, Minnaert The nature of light and colour in the open air, Pound Translations, Freud, Robin Riddington, Paul Case The tarot, Krishnamurti. Mentioned: Jam Ismail, Ed Epp, Mary Epp, Violet Willms, Natalie and Alex (I think) Grotkowski, Diana Kemble, Daphne Marlatt and Kit, Roy Kiyooka, Harold Nordhagen, Bernice Horneland and Helmer Dolemo, Arden and Donnie, the Flatens, the Pedersons of La Glace, Charlie Moodie, Elizabeth Gray, Rudy Epp, Menno Friesen, Jen-Vi Lenthe, Cam Hubert, Paul Kinsella, Joyce Frazee, Trudy R, Cheryl S, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Glen Roland, Mrs Tofflin, Mrs Severson, Mrs Slette, Mary Davies of Hythe, Leo Siebert, Dewey Stickney, Robin Riddington, Josie Cooke, Jean Waite, Walter Webber, Tony Tiller, Hulda Horneland, Jennie Kennie, Bill Holst, Heidi Holst/Blackmore. La Glace Mennonite Church reunion 1978, Hythe laundromat, Women's writing festival in Vancouver, the Classical Joint, Homestead Hall thanksgiving supper, Connelly Wong's café in Hythe, New Diamond Restaurant. Pearl Buck, Woolf The voyage out, Doris Lessing, Orczy The scarlet pimpernel, Nancy Graves, Eliade Shamanism, Staton From the legend of Biel, The three faces of Eve, Gurdjieff, Fenellosa, Readers' Digest, Wim Wenders Falsche Bewegung, Barbra Streisand, Kawabata Snow Country and House of sleeping beauties, Ouspensky, The fox, Iris Murdoch, Plato, Wiebe Big Bear, Don Giovanni, Melville. |
3 July 1978 on the road north She [the Studebaker] and I wanted to race and came to a beautiful country, Spring Lake Ranch, the bare hills and a stopping place with lily pads, grass meadows, fresh bear dung. Will I learn to talk to travelers. The man and woman in silver Thunderbird gently over round grass hills, grey-haired, holding hands. She limps. They smile. 5 Happiness naked reading Yeats, small writing, evening my guide tells me to leave, the beautiful place, a jelly red sun drops down from a blue cloud, we have good road sloping sweetly down, pale green, we fly, alone, I timidly push eighty and sleep beside some trees near the road. I look around for the bear, the smoke blows past the car, the stream and the lamp have steady sounds, I found I could reflect the sound of the creek with a page turned only at the right angle. 8 Coming through mist, radio, twenty-five to three, to the old place. Pain of loneliness at Sexsmith, the parents' yard full of cars and a congregation around borscht that got quite high. He tells his travel stories, emotionally. 17 [in the Grotkowskis' granary] By lantern read geological history from two billion, seas, shores, plants, animals, ice. Out to name stars but sky light. I like the geologic span for defending me from local religion. Can find my instinct right moving being but only sometimes feel the lost opening around me. 19 I'm far from inner life and the outer is splendid but I miss. Pounded and cried, I've blown it with everyone I've wanted. 26 And woke to slant of light from very low in the east and 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, wanting to tell about T, C and J. 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. Bread. 30 Sunday 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. 7 August 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, sense of inside of head, and room and ? Slept outside facing west. Some stars in clear blue over orange. 9 Impatient, running to get money. "Well you come and shoot." Packing. The bliss already past and that life finished as the combines roared around and they wanted me out, and unease installed. Hello today says the garage boy. Yoga on grass behind car, night airport. [My dad lends me money to buy a Beaulieu and I leave the granary, sleep in the car at the airport.] 10 Looking in the mirror at the airport, the woman in black, handsome. 22 Olson house northwest of Valhalla Centre A farmhouse, the yard, the creek. 24 I need the fitting for the pipe. Instead of going for it myself I wait. When he comes he's brought another neighbour, another bachelor. This time he asks whether I drink and whether I've ever been married, goodlooking woman like you. They fit on the stovepipe. "Bring it down tenderly," Nordhagen says. The tension in the room because I'm a woman alone in a house in the country. I push against them in the undercurrent of everything I say. Another pickup, younger man, an offer of wood, I say I have, I can soon tell it will be easier, I can ask for information there's more space around this one, a catskinner, tells me about the fight he had with his brother Billy, broke his little finger. "He broke my jaw and I broke a rib on him." "Pulled the wires out myself." In these meetings I am at bay and can't remember much after, except the way the tension moved. 26 Looser lighter and easier - sitting to the xeroxes in love with black and white - a few things finding themselves, the underspirit is working and finding again. Arden and Donnie drinking Canadian sherry getting looser telling stories, the time lightning hit Donnie's house, took the heads right off the nails so the boards fell down after a while; split the aerial tamarack post, bust the radio apart. They were all out for a while, my dad got burns on his legs, the legs always get it worst. Don't ever piss on an electric fence, and then electric fence stories, the time --- wrapped fence wire around a board and put it down the outhouse, they were having a Ladies Aide meeting, old Mrs ---, she's big, she's so fat she can hardly get ---, she took a piss and turned on the charge. She came out saying Ooch, ooch, she thought she'd had a heart attack. 30 Go to the [stone] circle, still thinking. Sit in the middle of it where the grass is pressed down. Already the circle has a strong presence especially stepping into it. Think about the new person and her absentmindedness. Think maybe I can trust her, suspend it as possible, not decided. Think of the movie, make prayers, slight selfconscious prayers to invent something lovely that is true in both worlds or as many as I live in. On my left the stand of taller black poplars making a sound both clapping and clicking with rain and see the darker shapes of the branches against the dark grey sky, moving and clotting with the sound, standing up and nearing and passing each other, with all those pointed leaf-shapes on them, thinking about a movie with sections, different kinds of play and understanding in two and a half minutes. - Thinking about 'obedience' and permeability, Paul, the way I was sunny in his and John's sunniness, and Roy in mine and later Cheryl in mine. Taking on the character of whoever -. Going along trying to invent a person who does well. The lies that come from refusing to admit what we use people for. - when I get to a fineness, by bold refusals, I feel a panic of having to 'work' when it's impossible - because I don't know what's worth doing also their methods have taken over in me so I don't know what mine used to be, and I know I didn't fight for them well enough to know if they're well lost, the navigating ideas is there something wrong with deliberate creation? I used to belong in life and made in passing, now I feel responsible for the world's soul again 31 Went to bed outside, slight sharp rain. Aches, long movement to sleep. Cars scared me. September 1 Wind came up, excited but couldn't focus, afternoon intent on calendar into night. 2 Hitchhiking easily to La Glace [to see my folks], climbing into trucks. The man who clears leases. Why she talks interrupted and slow and is she thinking? At supper a fatigue I break with the electric fence stories, I track carefully, surprise myself. The faded eyes, a faintness when I look at that face, it takes all his courage to use his eyes. My weeping came up from a delicate shuddering. Afterwards I was cold and exhausted but the fields and sky gave themselves. 3 [from a letter to Jam] This quiet house. The fire breaths, continuous inhale with particle crackles. Today when the landlord stopped by and saw my blankets on the outside bed he said 'aren't you afraid somebody will r-r-rob you. Today's fine concentration. I used part of it to hitchhike to La Glace and after supper I set my spine very vertical and led him, instead of away from, toward his crazy vortices. It takes such - no it makes such - a sense of brave balance for me to look into his terrified eyes. He and I have never looked in each other's faces except very fast on the way to somewhere else. And I hold him, now, sometimes for almost a second before he veers right, and down. It's still hard for me to see past his fright because I have to work so fast and accurately. It's a kind of concentration where my speech comes up from below and I have to rely on what comes. It feels like sheer risk, because it goes so against the long practice in guerrilla warfare. And she's holding her breath, her long practice in distraction. She can hardly bear it. Sometimes I have to head her off or cut her off. And he dodges into his old safe hideouts and I rout him out, I move fast because if I didn't I'd lose my nerve. When I was in it I didn't know at all where it would go, that utter relying on the moment. I liked it too, it took me out onto a limb. I wanted to tell him something I had held against him. He was out of his chair and to the door and I kept him there until it came to a showdown, I said I needed information and that I wanted to be relieved of it. He couldn't let me tell him. When we'd got to that bald ground we were in an electric silence, both returned to ourselves, held so still, and then I felt a very delicate shudder and realized I was going to cry, and that I would have to cry out in the open. It was such precise crying. I felt you in it. He was on one side of the room and she was sitting opposite me and we could all hear the little tick, right and left and right and left, of the tears hitting the table. It seemed fine to me. Then he went out the door (but not 'til I'd stopped) and she made a desperate flurry to get him back. She didn't understand how it was working or how strong I was at that moment, but I stopped her and he left and then she I was cold and exhausted and I realized she was feeling so left out and wasn't understanding. She needed comforting and I didn't have any left. So she took me home. He came too. She tried to talk but I wanted to be out in the wide west and long shadows. My eyes were happy. I haven't found out what I wanted to know, why he's so scared. Today I had the backlash, the voices in me were muttering and quarrelling with him most of the day. I was annoyed, I wanted to read Fuller. I felt my friends in me during that meeting. Trudy sometimes spoke and you were like a shield making me impersonal - no I mean that I was in some way with you and not in myself - no I can't make it exact - I was there steady because I'd come from you 4 From waking inside, spent the day feeding the fire and reading movie mags, women's mags and comics / the old drug / it insulated me from the fight with him / and now, evening, this uniform given up day, thirsty, sore tongue, I'd like to work. Moth crawled on my naked body and had a path on my face, over my lips, when I was naked in the dark soaking my foot. 8 Set out to mail, with the receipts. Walked the two miles, looking at colors. The Canada Council envelope was wet from being held under the belt. Evening the orange horizontal light, I went out along the road, looking at the summerfallow with long shadows, the poplars with orange round bits held up intense with a dark blue sky far behind them. Then as the sun lowered a curdling in the sky where no cloud had been, of wavy pink vapour. The fine showy west. I crouched in the reeds close to the slough to look at ducks (I could hear them) but instead saw thousands of light-colored moths jumping and fluttering out of and among the bent reeds, all around me, and especially in the near dark between me and the dark red in the west. 9 Working with journal, then outside with the camera. Stones and shadows, when I'm shooting the force of decision makes me learn and see more than speculation, and it seems to be more my way. I want impeccable focus for all the grain of rock and shadow and color - the fine color in the ditches. Lichen. Every rock with its color and story. Fill the frame, with a drop-off into shadow. And oh the sound. Wind creating trees. Chuck describing the sound of plastic at the windows telling the quality of the wind, and how a mosquito sounds different when it's inside the mosquito net. 11 Down the road, the big surround, in the ditch the brown spots from clover heads among green and other colors, the love color puts into me, and my eyes after J said she wanted to be with me and was every night, were better. Sunset started and I went - the willow bushes, weed in cream-colored grass and the grey underworld water. 12 The first thing was blue sky over there. Walk to Dolemos - Bernice and Helmer - the smell of this country road - the jubilating sight of bright moonlight on the way home. The owl circling at the ring site, lying on my back with 360 degree grass and it going around low. 16 The light-off washing is my lovely ritual, every day the contact with fire, all day. 21 I was full of [Wenders'] acrobat girl who looked, didn't speak, and touched as she wanted, and said to Jam "My actual identity is so eccentric I can't be her, but one day I'll just begin to be her because I can't stand not to be. But she can't be married, because she can't take the time to know what other people need." Her story of the vision: I'm laid out on a stage, people are taking my pulse and saying I'm dead, she calls for a mattress and blanket and puts me on and under, gets under with me and concentrates on not concentrating, nothing of what anyone has ever told to do. She is feeling herself mending the cell? And worries that I might not want to come back. I am revived. Walking back from the café where these stories were told, we see flowers in the old convent site and find little bricks around them, onions and cabbage among the grass, so beautiful and miraculous I doubt I'm awake. As always it is with us, while touching her wrist, hand on my abdomen, I see: traffic going through a dead end, fast, and a farm fire from the air. 26 With Joyce I formulated the fright, "When I am in a moment that way, and it opens up around me in that kind of depth, I think I'm going to die" - "Everybody thinks that" - "But when I'm there it seems like I have no more reason to be on this earth, though I think there are people who stay on this earth even then" - "Yes, that's right" - "I feel like there is a core person, she's just there, what she loves to do is just be in existence and describe it." "How do you think I could mislead you?" "It wouldn't be that you want to, it would be that you'd taken a branch that was wrong." "But I feel responsible to the one I started out with." "She'll be there, you can't know that." About the others in me she said "Yes I know about that, that happens. All I can do is try to teach you to ground yourself in it." "If I live as I know, 1. I'm out of work, 2. I'm afraid of evil coming into the world through my openness." "But people do go wrong, when they trust." "Yes they do." [Chair dialogue] She [power woman] said "I want your innocence, your eyes, your beauty, your open face, your lyricism." I [love woman] said "I want your knowledge and power." "You sounded lonely over there talking about what you'd lost." "I don't know when I lost it." 7 October Liking to drive to the store, grey-silver road, color on either side, wind. Sleep. Drifting into pictures and stories. Listening to the wind roar in the pipes. 9 Intense energy before and after the long orange light, outside éblouie, the soft and fine grasses, stands of willow different colors. Starting to know the fields. At the beaver house a squeak in trees. 11 Standing in the bush, in the grey, with rose in the sky, the trees weaving over each other and the deep sound, the fright in the dusk and certainty firmness about being able to leave it at its edge, the moment standing still with the tall dried queen anne's lace stalks, touching their seed platform, standing still listening with pleasure to the very small ringing of the seedhead and looking past the first of the stalks to more of them, presences, leaning one way. Sometimes a sense of already having made the mistake that makes it impossible to go forward the right way. The branch on the lifeline and that the wrong way is this necessary exercise in earth trouble 14 First the sunrise light on west wall, rippled, two panes. A new north road, sleek sky, a sheen she said, white light on the grass either side white gravel road, the pale grass, luminous, it's so extraordinarily luminous. Driving slowly. Light on trees across a field pale, grey cultivated fields, smoke came pouring off a large field on the northern horizon and up broadening slant into the white clouds. At Homestead Hall supper, the beautiful red-cheeked kids, new babies, a father carrying one, driving there sunset and moon rise, headlights in the mirror, white, daylight, odd. 16 The road turns alongside a lake with swans, many. Their calls as they go to the other side not hurrying, the white and dark swans. My friend pointing a camera at me, behind her a house I loved for some reason. Then they whack their wings, one or a few, in the louder deeper voiced south left group. Beautiful light. One red 22 shell she picks up. At Connely Wong's café she talks Chinese and I blush. At home we cut posts and carry them on the sledge. 18 Stones, borders, zones, and bushes. The branches so like veins into air, visually the willow branches into all the surrounding field. The concentration and radiation of stone or bush. 21 Seen passing. Black field with spruce. This brief bare season, sun. The house by lake. 26 In bed talking about afterlife. Instead of a soul, a life. "What I want is to use energy properly." Stars clear, a few very white, Orion high in the south. Light comes quietly the joy and marvel of this journey are dim and substantial, through Valhalla and turning in La Glace, is it really so, here, with this companion, turning south, lights in farmhouses, country mailboxes. When I can feel it I think this is heaven. "I think we did good work yesterday, I haven't seen that face in some time" and I could feel how clear it was, and hers, it was only presence I wanted, not talking, morning highway. Airport watching Ezra, shining out, and at the door the stewardess smiling far in saying "The dog's not going and you're not going." A marvel. And going to the car with Ezra feeling a fright of continuing to live in happiness and confidence. 27 Cold stare of the fields, wind. Careless ambitious pictures of field, the creek. 31 Hythe, the strong wind pushing the car, fields, beating trees. Smoke blowing up off acres of red willow, the strong wind seizing the car door, stubble field. 2 November I cut through and say "When I was a little girl you used to ..., you're attracted to a certain kind of woman and it's been a curse in my life! ... No but my father wanted me to be a certain way and it made it as if half of me was divided against me. I was born out of you and I'm telling you my pain and grief and you won't listen. I'm giving you a chance to be a father and you won't take it." He: walking toward the door, "It does no good to talk like this, no good at all." 16 December Red blanket, armchair, fire, book. The cells of the leaf. Do I like it here with the snow idling between me and the red willows, putting snow light into the room. The cold linoleum in the morning is then. 23 Sunset 4:17, sunrise 8:50 AM. Outside the unbearable sky. I go out to drag back fenceposts. Since Vancouver I spend noon to 2 or 3 AM oblivious in reading the past, fire concerns, or town. 24 Twilight went looking for a tree: the road drifted high but she plunged through, hands light on the wheel let her keep the tracks. Tree on the fence allowance. Simple spruce smell, wears the crystal and has rocks piled at the base. Supper at Helmer's, the grey brother and sister and their trouble. 26 Nordhagens' Christmas party, Walter Webber sharking crib, Harold fiddling. Desperations and those having a fine time in an accustomed way. 28 "We've already had more winter than we had last year." 30 Sat
2 January -25 Beaverlodge, beautiful shining smoke exhaust and swirling snow on the black road, brilliant light. 4 Bright, cold. found myself in a contrived but lovely position camera took me to - moon, growing white in intense blue sky, an owl suddenly seen on a post, big, when it flew it was white close to the ground. Another small bird sat chirping on the roof spine of a granary through the fields behind where Charlie lived, the sky intensening. Coyote tracks and mine when I was called toward the big spruce at the creek, snow's deep. Refound deep underfoot (blue) sound walking on drifts. 6
A root hump covered with snow slightly smoking 7
9 In the snow fields very pale very. high moon through thick cloud Howled. It's January desperation. The voice structures speaking against each other The first time through the Sufi book I surged up hopeful and hungry, this time it's as if enlargement has failed me and left me worse than before, disoriented and not knowing how to move forward, and not looking forward although I do still imagine some knowledge again - but it's because I've betrayed what was a possible marriage, that I needed and will go on needing, and also failed to find a bigger house and destroyed what I already had, and sent Luke away, and am here unable to imagine a film I went into wrongly. 10 I had given myself to staying the winter, then the pickup with wood and two embarrassed men, not embarrassed, quiet and reluctant: I don't know how they came to deliver it today, I was rereading j's letter when I heard the approaching crunch, growing louder, of how it is when a pickup is braking up to the porch. When I got out of bed this morning the sensation oh this is the right waking, this cold and this right light. 16 In the mailbox it was stuffed, Don typing badly and speaking simply, Daphne anxious, Diana's backyard love and Paul laughing. Lying down edge of visions scared not badly. Chinook. Walking at one, the open field called, between the grove and creek it opened wide. The call is like this: suddenly feeling myself there, like dreaming it first. 17 The snow is sinking came into the pan with a different feel and sound. The chinook made a wild energy. 20 Soft white snowfall warm
21 "I know how to tell one o'clock, straight down the road." 22 Andy's letter made me jump into fright. "... loves his brothers. I think you must be very patient to get him back. When he's a man he'll understand you better, but Roy is too strong right now. Luke will contact you himself when he finds his hard edge. But you must remind him of who you are - constantly." 23
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25 The fine moment was in Omlid's field walking looking at sparkles and the fine lines. It all moved, walking, and suddenly I saw the sparkles in the air, really? Yes turning and flashing, a very few. Camera feeling interest everywhere and how subtle the eyes could become. I came unaware of the white owl on the highest point of the highest spruce looking down motionless at me slowly climbing through knee deep white. 31 Last wood. Packed, waiting for my way out. Sun on the red chair, white curtains, the beautiful room I have to leave for unknown strangeness. A last humble try at the post office and driving carefully to Beaverlodge, army trucks passing in twos, the window frosted, no heat coming through the heater, window open, thirty below, mountains standing in high blue serration. Bernice kept saying "Gee I'll sure miss yuh Allie, you've pepped me up lots of times when I was down." |