| up north 2 part 1 - 1979 february-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
At the café in Beaverlodge a strain as if holding onto myself was too unlikely, watching Hong Kong people, the beautiful pregnant young woman at a calculating machine, confident, her spectacled thin husband in his little grey sleeveless sweater. She reads off a number, he repeats it. Grandmother sitting at the round table. From the bus, headlights' abrupt wipe. Head along the cold glass, Casseopia upright and low, dark an' bright, I was nearly asleep. Thoughts had been dry struggle, but sleeping was soft. Then the sense of sequence sweeping through me at the rate of travel, woke having been happy in a way I'd wanted all day. Acute pain. I'm leaning my head on the wall and find the vibrations comforting. Arrive in a cold ugly city in the dark, unable to understand avenues and streets, standing on corners with suitcase and mailbag marveling that I couldn't figure it out. Other arrivals in Edmonton, the beautiful trees dressed out in frost like early leaf, making their many gestures clear, one after the other. 2 Candlemas. [I go to U of A to find my old friend Don from Queens] When I'm going down in the elevator, thinking to find him later, he gets in. I'm thinking paler, make the look say You know me. He shouts and I'm hugging a big parka. Then work starts, the old labour with you Carmichael talking fast figuring out how to handle it. I'm inconvenient and have caught you unprepared, have taken advantage and soon take more. In class cramped into finding what to watch, where's his attention, he's teaching. Things happening together, persons. She's interested in nature and Emerson and he doesn't know what she dimly feels. He wants to teach ideas. They're all there for different reasons. First moment of her [his wife Helen] I see what exquisite is, dilated eyes and soft mouth, and also the work and discomfort that makes it that, ear hoops, high boots, a light-colored knit dress. Do something for a while to let them alone, and me too, then at supper it suddenly gets easy, she makes it that, saying she's interested in what 40 year old women do. I was feeling the comfort and Olivia's struggle, order and its price, his older forehead. Talking knowing that out of my solitude I could say things they'd recognize and like and yet feeing the performance of myself as a fluctuating lie. Krista jumped into Niagara Falls he said. [Krista Maeots] [1968] 3
Mailed an angry letter to Jam. "It's an unnecessary suffering." - [Visit to Leschek and Maritka, whom I knew in Kingston in my last year there] He lives in her, her life shining in the objects and plants put together in such a way that anyone else's touch would displace them. She stayed in the kitchen, wasting our time washing things one at a time and then drying and putting away. Uncomfortable, even with the slides talking much too much, explaining anxiously what was obvious to me, keeping me out. The drawing in her room, the Polish linosyn cut small and with the logic of frost, places in the air opening so insects could develop in them. Subleem she said. The length and cut of the creatures, plant, insect, angel, woodgrain things sublimating upward by lightness, yes. When I went home in the taxi my eyes still marveled. What to think about her slides and how they looked like mine. She said her large views were the view of the stranger, and she made herself at home in lovely detail. Lit frost at windows, eyes' heaven opening everywhere. Now they're landed people. Leschek's horrible gallantry, he felt how he couldn't interest me and horribly grabbed my wrist to take me to his room. He's impressive, pink and silver with fine eyes, but alone with her and she wants something else. He was in the kitchen begging her for kisses. Her tone at the table. We understood the situation with our eyes, she was in flight. "I like people who don't show everything they are, we saw the Amish people and the men attracted me very much." [letter] Marytka and Leschek, two Poles, middle 40's, professors, geography and art, the loneliness making them both wildly inaccurate toward me. She had some tiny linocuts made by a Polish man, her friend, before he died. They moved me so much. Something human as perfectly made as what frost does, I wanted to show you. 4 Days of steam rising in crystalline cold. The moon's at discover of strength and it's so, but coffee unhinging it, and longing fantasies of communion. Asked to babysit and was invited to dinner, was again the strange child. I watch her swimming eyes and soft mouth, furious again to see how the good catch was caught by white dress, suede boots, sweet gestures. It's making a solid life. A family shrink. He's a father like you want to be, the children clinging, beautiful daughter curled on his lap. Together they get through lonely efforts. With them I feel the naked person. My slips. "The baby's downstairs in the refrigerator." "Don't do that" he said. - [letter] You - Here's another moment I don't know how to anchor in, will you hold onto it for me. Sharp longing, I bring you into conversations, 'my friend,' and these friends know what it's for. Odd raw strenuous meetings loneliness makes and measures. Carmichael is still lovely. Eyes and hair faded some, still pedantic on top of somebody still not found just right, but built into a beautiful family. We had a very jumbled meeting. I went to his Political Theory 310 class, watched the extraordinary confusion of purposes and presences. At the end of his two-hour seminar he suddenly did a little solo about male and female and the dialectic, every woman having an unexpressed man in her and the other. After, I asked him whether he'd planned it. He said no. He was working on why I'd cut my hair. It touched me to see him in class, the hits and misses. He was exhausted after, and thought of it as a bad class but I think that was because it was watched. Was twice for dinner, the first time excited, wanted to talk. She went to bed leaving us the fireplace. He got up long before it was time, to take me home, said she was jealous even of his sister. Driving me home he knew he'd irritated me and drove me to the University Hospital where I was a kid. Gathered a loop, his little baby was there incubated in the children's ward where I'd been. She's proud of his looks and thinks him a good catch. 5 Bodo Alberta [I take a job as replacement cook's assistant on an oilrig in southern Alberta] Mrs Fimrite [the Valhalla postmistress] in the back saying dimly no and hanging up. In a truck silent with the driver, snow and white sky, the snow currents running down the road, going up like flame behind a truck. An even grey road, some hills. The moment when I turn my head sharp to check whether it really is white field to sky without a division. All day learning the new job, doing dishes, spreading butter on bread. [letter] Edmonton's extraordinary night, beautiful 2-headlight movements each in its moving white cloud, and the turning masses of white rising out of the three tall white chimneys next to the river. The happiness of the Y. Slept in a high-up top bunk of a 10 bed dorm, worked in the sewing room, wrote you angrily in the TV room. From now on it's c/o Bull Catering, 14430A 118th Ave, Edmonton. I made a list of all the employers to phone, put a star beside Bull because of its name. It was the only company with vacancies and liked my education. I'm second cook. 6 A engine all the time day and night, generator in its little room.
And now here's a room. Often in the day marveling at this new dream, window with familiar bush outside, ice cream pail around the light. Bed with a grey blanket. The door closes like refrigerator. 7 With the cook noticing her, it's a blank efficiency, works well without a plan, is a right mother when men come in, boys with red cheeks and tousled hair. Ice wind, able to stride on blacktop. The hills flat curves with a different stubble, white, sky slightly yellower, no shadows. I haven't seen any distance yet. In the noon break unpacked the writing and could imagine work. Don told me Jane Howell died in November after six hard months, "about six different kinds of cancer." 8 Today was solider already, I know everything, anticipate the routine, start to organize the operation.
9 Easy to work, morning energy, could sing and dance. The body under me is less metaphysical although I try to keep it there. Cutting food, textures. Enjoying her efficiency, the roast's grain right or wrong. First chapter of light book, reading to mixed kinds of questions. Sometimes could feel last year's interests taken into something more exact. -
daily striving is from love and need among all the states of motion there is none that compared with others can be called a state of rest mass of a body becomes infinitely great when it reaches the velocity of light 10 First a good dream, then cold, head under the covers. The dream was places I liked. Up fast to the dining room still dark, could make the tables orderly and write down the dream. The young men. Impact beginning to be challenge, I don't know what they see. At first they're like each other. The dream and what desire found, were the time with C and T. Does it have to go on. Because it was so alive there. And can exile go on. 11
Trapese women, juggler man. Want all bodies to be like that.
only his father, now in his eighties, loyally came to every lecture and must be incomprehensible as to darkness 12 Intense raunch, is it the young bodies. Cliff the engineer, little bright blue eyes, walks in small steps like someone in a diaper. A Lncoln Continental he drives to the grocery store in, it was a lot of years coming.
14 Wake into a room with grey blankets, yellow floor, window dark. Go into nightime rooms to make beds, not curious. Made a fire in the garbage pit, white smoke and steam up between me and sun. The sun would get red and smaller behind the smoke's movement rising, dispersing above the barbwire fence and field. With cigarette smoke the straight line at some shifting point breaking into roils. Mary Miegs of Marie-Claire: "She puts her finger right on the part of the life that needs to be lived out" Artists - again making me cry. 15
In the afternoon transcribed the story of Joe Olson, very ordinary story of feared senility. Reading Stein in the end of the book by reading aloud, got to concentration she liked. Resist her. Don't know why to want anything. Detail attention, a trick to learn, impressive, but why. 16
[letter] Dear silence, Meals are good in the sanitarium. Dorothy the cook seemed a thick grey solid but I began to love her for the good organization of her work, sensibily, without saying good morning or good night. With the red-cheeked young men the unspoken has slightly more danger. When the old men come into camp I go to my room, not liking to let them read my eyes. The weather has been the same for months, an acid on the face and hands when I go out, at noon, to throw diesel fuel on the fire. Sunrise is after breakfast, a bright place in the white above white, a candle. Whenever artists are on television I cry, my throat swells. Marie-Claire Blais was there with Mary Miegs, who called her a genius and lives with her in a farmhouse. It's not for their work, only for the way they live. I am fine looking again in the men's washroom mirrors. This is the time of year called north-east in the I Ching. 17
They like to slam doors. 18
Quietly listening. the familiar world of the plane the intensive world of the point enveloping space with an inner point as its orienting infinity 19 Making beds carefully, mopping the rooms, sweeping gladly. D goes to telephone and comes back saying this time's over tomorrow. Good work on the Natalie Granger piece. After lunch lying down and what happened after that. I had to pay attention to keep up with it and still don't know what it means but it's a story about being a camp attendant, loneliness, making love to a plant and the odd way a book opened. Very occult. After writing it, while I watched television and thought something about danger was startled to hear danger come out of the television like an echo. The writing as I made it in London is exact, supple, multiple, skilled, a skilled something made it Not being able to listen to Colin's stories or Dorothy's, why. Although I can't stand the pain and weakness in Colin, I think I like Dorothy and like to look at her, but couldn't listen to stories of getting mad at the neighbour woman and ran. When she tells them to the young one I like to hear. Tonight because he and I are going the two of them are in the kitchen baking late and I was dancing barefoot for them. Making the evening beds thinking how the skill in the writing could be the life chosen and writing what happens. - Experimenting. Induction coil, sensation released when I push down, less muscular. Still feel it, picturing a current. I imagined it concentric blue-white moving forward and back, could still feel it. Thought of this as a form of love-making to creatures with the double sex,. Two, licking. Make the part that comes out flexible, could wrap like a tongue, seaweed. The two moving with tongue's little adhesion. It would be softer, not structured to poke into something unwilling. From the bellies, where belly button is. It could be done more easily standing up. Rubbing in circles on the outside felt myself in soft thought watching it . Where to watch, the sensation is too fast to watch exactly. Flicker. I have to make a slow movement too. See a yellow polleny tendril. It's going into a flower, uncurls into it, I only see the tiny feeler pulling minutely against the grain, as minute a pull as tongue. Magnified tiny structure. The pull sharpens me immediately, each pull. Watching the floor of the pelvis concentrate. Watch and feel for how it'll break. There's a point that'll be tripped. It's going, but it's missed the spot, it's going wrongly without enough trust. But no, it's like this. Gold specks, pollen, tiny, let go all through the dark parts. Over the head's hood motes still shimmering. My room in Kingston, lying on the blue bed. Can see the blue rug, through the open window can feel into the park, autumn yellow. Feel myself in that room on the first morning looking down into the park, beautiful place I'd won. Chest of drawers, mirror. Walking with Olivia on the pavement. (Tension I took in there, footsteps running up the hall outside the door.) Can I see the stairs. Yes. Where to go back to. My room here! "For my father is the parson here at Bodo." [In Dineson's Winter's tales] 20 Edmonton In the cab man and boy telling each other driving stories. I'm thinking I should be interested but it's fine to watch the beautiful shapes of the hills. They have a glimmer from stubble and particles of black earth. Sky of soft blue in the mornin, then white, then trees came. Different angularities from up north. For a while ditch weeds and bits are beautiful. Voluptuous thinking of how they're what a painting is, moving. Driving was good for thinking, can't remember what . That was a different life. Gary? with his sweet white teeth making happiness around him. The shock of not having anything from J. Rereading Daphne's unfocused letter three times, in the truck, Tony's too, not right. Gary's story of his mom telling him when he was fifteen who his real father was. He went to see him, met him on the beach, "I look just like his other kids except their hair's darker. We shot the shit for a while, then he had to go, because his wife was watching." "Did you like him?" "He's what I always wanted to be, he's a mechanic. Better than my dad, he's just an ol' drunk." Calling her, almost unconscious speaking boldly to the operator and just a simple ordinary person. We talked dimly to hear the voices, the obscure love without knowledge. 21
And lovely Don, when we were on two chairs next to the white table I was wondering why I was leaning forward and he back, and then he suddenly came forward too, what was it. color dream black and white eroticism "Not knowing whether it was that I'd already died or whether it was that I'd realized I was going to." The dwarf on his chest, "What are you going to do today feel sorry for yourself or be important?"
And oh satisfying letter. - Oddness Edmonton. Not while busy telling myself to Carmichael and looking at him or being straight with salespersons who liked me and cutting stupids or sitting on the floor in the library. Often let myself let go of the where. "You know how if you pay close attention to your impulses for a while you very quickly get very strong?" He stopped and closed his eyes, "Wait." "Where did you go?" Purgatory. Things coming right by candour. When I came into the office his too fast pounce and drive, Ellie! although he'd already seen the note. Oddness in the Y, is it theirs. Turned saw her looking as if also knowing something. Black and white, black/power/impulse. At the library the woman who said "When I talk to myself it's a bad sign." "Why's it a bad sign?", inserting, and she didn't say but when I came up she looked at me with such a beautiful smile I was cautious and marveling. In Alice's for a different reason, very soon coming out with Parallel botany. That felt odd. Sometimes my spirit feels like it's in danger because there's nobody here from my world, it's the little moralities. We turn into each other. - Are there other persons. - The assumptions behind a sentence. - Not trusting consciousness.
22 north of Fort St John Those girls - the woman in the dorm, talking on the phone to men, horrible, not minding a stranger could overhear. The pathos, wigs and makeup, both ugly. "Maria you've always been a good friend to me, it's not your fault, I just wanted to find out if he wanted me, or if he wanted you, or if he wanted sex or what."
23 The moment in the dark I went for the switch and pain, almost unconscious, down there crack dark explosion. Shouted grunt OOAH shit. The knee. Fall over. Lying still on the floor listening several more times to the oh that came out unwatched. Is someone coming. Someone going into another door.
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[Leo Lionni 1976 Parallel botany Knopf] -
25 Orpheus. Some kind of automatic translation but behind it hearing it speak to my phantom, referring to last year's phantom. I've spent my time having been a bricklayer, a roofer, instead of a professor or artist, and now janitor, and shrunk away from it, building myself out of bits and now bewildered in a 'culture'. The women's movement gave me a home and let my loves work , and the only time now that they work are writing, pictures, with Jam those side pockets.
Eating a lot. Forgot towels washing for hours. Sometimes force friendly talk. Hello dear love. Are you. [Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus trans Karl Siegler 1977 Talonbooks] - [letter to Jam] Monday. In the rec hall wiping ashtrays peer out one of the small windows because ... isn't the light odd? Clouds have a strange definition and silvery color. It's today, but is it already over, someone yesterday said it was at seven, when it's still dark here. But go to get the camera because the clouds and the dark grey blue behind them are really strange. Wandering, the clouds are clumpy like the snow lumps on branches. Want to climb on the welding truck, metal bites my hand, go in for mittens and think to climb onto the camp itself, a ladder at the end of one of the units. Go up one hand on the ladder other holding the camera. Up there it's like walking on a railway car . Above the trees, just above, even still among, from this height, where the sky's brightest, south-east, a sliver of brilliance through the cloud cover, the crescent sun, and excitement that it knew how to call me (and only me) for the exactly first visible instant of it. As I watch it becomes a fatter crescent, changes slowly as if the sun's overtaking the moon only a little faster than the moon's speed. Around the sun the light's strong blue-white. At a little distance it's brown. Later on the clouds have lost their clear edges and are ordinary unmetallic things. You were with me. There's a woman singing on the television who looks like you. She's standing in a jungle, it's opera. I'm raging and crying. Reading stoopid Rilke
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Again dream of cancer, two lumps in the left breast, told Sara I wanted Luke back.
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Falling asleep a pleasing wander, soft excursion. I stopped as if throwing myself into the other hemisphere, What is this was how I switched into hard. March 1, hotel room in Fort St John Long light evening.
From the truck the beautiful woods, poplar trunks in the brown of evening light, such a fine light came from the ivory west between trees. This time I could see the range of mountains. 2 Edmonton YWCA What traveling was like: morning in a hotel room, orange light from the bathroom. Turn on a lamp, knowing where everything is in a strange place. Gathering belongings, down the stairs. A man where a woman was, "I'm checking out, my company's taken care of it." On sidewalks in the dark watching for ice. Bus garage. Man holding an afghan for his wife. When the bus started, lying down into narcotic dreaming. In Dawson Creek striding, eating an O Henry the nuts first. At the depot a boy who looked and stood in front of me, "How're you doin'", greased hair with dandruff, large eyes, wide mouth. What is this person. Sat beside me, "visiting my dad's relatives." It leaves for Grande Prairie. Should I look. An expanse the green glass makes dead. I drift. It's a good leaving, soft body can lie still in one position for hours. I'm in travel thoughts. In the late afternoon watch the wires with pleasure, an upper wire tight gold, three lower that are black. Pleasure of the bus turning so clouds swing away. Across the aisle a man upright in an ugly suit looking at my crossed legs. A moment when I go to the back to tell the men to turn off their music and find myself looking into beautiful eyes. Talking to stay in the interest of the gaze, not scared. [letter] Edmonton after Ft St John Travel dream, began to feel the presence of the other bus space on my left. In the reflected windshield two roads slipped toward and under, one of them hovering six inches above the other and moving faster. Black pavement and the snowplowed lumpy bank. The bus behind that windshield had everything as in our side, the driver's profile and the spotlit woman, from a slightly different angle. The sensation of a real space next to the one I was in was very strong. I was at first scared of it, then made myself braver to see what I'd find. Thought to try to project myself into the other wide with the quality of presence I could feel myself struggling to hold to, on 'this' side. Fear of going through the looking glass, that invitation. The way the buses joined along a line, symmetry. The join of thing and reflection. Wondered what it was exactly making this side 'real', felt myself stuffing the driver, the chrome bar behind him, the back of the seat, with three-dimensionality, like pushing fullness into them by some under-effort. The next day twelve hours on the bus through flat whiteness behind green-tinted windows. I slept nearly all the way, would wake as we got into a town. In Fort St John at the Frontier Hotel, hotel bedlamp on white sheets, with carrousing under the window, I opened the Gideon Bible to Jerimiah and got
3 Judie Josie Diana Jean-Vi Jane and Jam. At the Blue Willow [1960] reading letters. In the cafeteria reading letters again the woman who smiled hideously because I saw her looking at me. I held back from answering her smile and gave her a fright. - [letter from Josie] Ellie - A grey Sunday am. I'm sitting in bed drinking coffee and reading. Now writing to you. Have found finally a quiet space of time to write. I've been working very hard and loving the work. Enclosed is a close-up of part of one of the breast pieces that Persimmon and I did. The exhibit is on at Women in Focus until the 1st of March. I wish you could see it. I think it's beautiful. A lot of primitive barbaric energy, using materials and colours I've always wanted to use but was never bold enough to risk until now: copper wire, rayon, rags, raffia (plastic, from Chinatown), clay, feathers, porcelain insulators, bathtub rust, string, hair, sisal, sticks, oil paint, yarrow stalks, gold varnish, etc. Almost all of the breast pieces have been sold which is too bad because I liked them and began to feel very attached to them. But we will eventually make more. Diana bought one of the pieces that are my breasts with yarrow so you will see that. And Moira bought one - also my breasts. Pink with gold paint. Very flagrant. I'm sending you also some snapshots of a woven paper piece I just finished. It's a deep blue-red with lavender and pink plastic raffia woven into it. It's very heavy and thick and involved a lot of hard physical labour which I enjoyed. Painting and crumpling and flattening the paper then taking the 9 ft long strands of crushed and flattened paper and weaving them together. But the work was exciting and psychically important. I had many dream and waking dream images of paper weavings while working on it. The piece is about 3 and a half by 3 and a half I guess. An attempt to deal with physical structure which I was struggling with in my paintings. This has made a big difference. I am learning about patience in a new way. The necessity of taking the time to plan and build up slowly the structure of a piece. My surfaces were interesting but the underpinnings were missing. Ellie I miss you. There is so much work I want to do. The kids exhaust me sometimes. I am putting a lot of energy in their direction right now. Mostly because I want to. And there are days when I see that in another two years a lot of the work I'm doing [next page lost] [letter] Edmonton March 4 O my other. From the land of dwarves. What a little writing. Surprised me when the o came. It's Sunday in the Y cafeteria. I spoke to somebody just now and my voice came out hoarse! Surprising me. Could everything, yes. Today it would be alright. Here are all your letters. Yesterday Carmichael brought me the week's mail, Diana, Josie, Judy, Jane Downey from London and 5 from you. There's a dwarf at one of the tables who isn't afraid of my eyes, that changed something in this morning. It's March 4. These letters didn't have much Hong Kong in them. Are you hungry for French novels because you're recircling your university time, that's one of the few things you told me about it. Want to tell you. The magpies. Did you tell her why you were laughing? It is possible to find a way that doesn't kill. One life and the frightful unities it imposes. I liked you said midwife. I liked your nurse saying don't take birth control pills. What are birth controls. I do take my freedom you know. In every camp I'm aware that my body has found someone it likes. And I let hunger try anything in its imagination and Carmichael and I don't pretend to have stopped fancying one another. But something has changed, I don't know if it's birth control or not, but all those small recognitions can seem complete as they are, I'm not as careless as I was when I used to take bodies into me experimentally. Once last week when I'd written you I remembered how dark opens up, it was as if you were there. On your knee letting go. That was 27th Thursday. Last week I was thinking about your freedom trying to feel how not to be afraid of even the most powerful witches getting you to love them, because of not wanting you to fade like Carmichael has faded. Would you still know me, yes, you would, and I would bear it. There might be times when it'd be deadly but we could be wise. What scares me in it is unacknowledged revenge, if it's not done to kill each other I don't think it would. - "You are more hurt." Said after some convolving I couldn't follow. Was sitting in the car listening carefully, what's he saying? After a hard evening realizing I can't be interested in her. Odd nakedness with her that she took in hand then, asking about camps and I answering her with pleasure. Trying to speak to them out of everything already gone wrong, out of control wildly trying to say this house doesn't like me because I don't want it to exist. Impotent, impotent, and making it worse every minute and why after how fine it was. 5
O midwife I'm so sad. What is it. It was there from yesterday. Sick tension and crying. I went yesterday afternoon to my hospital. Back and forth in the corridors, it wasn't mine anymore, I couldn't find some of the parts, there was a long ward. I'm not coherent to tell you. A room with windows toward the steam laundry, a lonely child in bed with a breakfast tray, hardboiled eggs and buns, looking down on steam above snow roofs. 4 other beds, polio girls, the others couldn't walk. I was up and down the corridor in crutches looking into private rooms, a ten year old in too-small dresses and a cast. Not able to be easy friends except with the Jamaican ward-aid and the man who washed floors. Drawing fine pictures of horses copied from storybooks. Roaming. Old black folding cage elevator down to the canteen in the basement sometimes stopped too high or too low. The canteen's smell was the same, the elevator replaced. Long sloping underground tunnels with lagged pipes leaking. The room with Mickey Mouse between the windows wasn't there. I saw other rooms with hospital cribs on high legs, bars up, two year old caged. Roaming in the place I felt an old man in black coat conspicuously lonely, lost in the layers, not in the right time. Went from there to Carmichael's for Sunday dinner and it was a wildly wrong evening, I kept hearing myself out of control saying in all crooked ways that I don't like their marriage and miss my friends and long for you and am enraged how once again I can't be friends with Carmichael and looking hungrily at the baby and hungrily at Carmichael's legs and was soon got rid of and taken home by C with a baffling mix of raw hostility and true confession. Headache ever since and then I remembered it's birthday tomorrow. Demented. Judy wrote, they're coming in May. Nothing from Luke, though I've written again. I think I must work April otherwise I haven't the money for my debts and necessities. I won't want to but in May I'll be in the farmhouse again. You, I can never believe you're coming back in April, have you had enough of there? You wouldn't like my country any better now, would you? Did you really think to bring your books? To the place with the woodstove? To the new green and fresh wind and big air sea. And creek. Livening. Oh city girl I wish you loved it I'd be so glad to offer it to you. You could have it by yourself in April. No you'll want Vancouver. At this moment I don't care if you're fat tho' I'd poke you, no I'd still stroke your fat sleek sealish. And be glad if you were sometimes ugly. What about my threatening voice, I don't remember, you asked three times. Your period weakness is probably from being unexercised. I want to know what you thought about symmetries and reflections, on the bus from Hudson's Hope some night back, night bus going through snow on a mountain road, we didn't meet other headlights for hours, the driver, I was two seats behind him, across the aisle a young Native girl and a sleeping baby, their overhead light on them, somewhere behind me in the dark the only other passenger, driving going gradually into the [page missing]
[I turn 34, meet Val Power in the Y.] 8 "I have a letter in 410." "You have two." The classic male put-down of a woman who has left her place, you're sad because you need a man to fuck you, and I'm sorry I can't help." You looked nice when you said it as if it was a necessary revenge, "Why don't you take a lover." Because after so many wrong loves I no longer let anyone into me who can't imagine what I am. Send to J with what I heard in these two letters.
- In a forest a tall white wall. Las Arbolades Mexico, Luis Barragan [sketch of wall and tank]
Being in our own minds, separate as a person from any other person in unlonely aloneness open to the world. Here I encourage myself and put new heart into myself by invention rather than transplantation, and make a wager to deal with new lives in self relation. taboo against feeling yourself alone in the world people most vulnerable to internal attack [these are David Cooper I think]
decisive dissolution of experienced boundary of self ungratified is the experience of being poised on the boundary of one's self, frightened but unable to let go
mirrors - attempt to see through the self for others to the nothingness of self for self people talk freely from a depth of inner order those archaic presences anoia, in which the outside becomes continuous with itself through the inside the situations of being frozen promise runs through every form of departure, to stay holy in the world discipline, the pain of the promise death was born 9 Primrose Lake [near Cold Lake on the Saskatchewan border] Inside me an elevator has been going suddenly up and down, I thought it might be the Y but it's here too, whoozy. Riding silent in the grocery truck, not there much except for the sky's mile of wing passing over, and a beautiful town, Smoky Lake with Ukrainian churches' silver domes and double white crosses. A snow cemetery. It was in a hollow, placed with woods shaped in a way that made it not this Alberta. One room houses with plaster over logs, Russia. Hills with snow melted to black, like grazed. Long road through sand pines and birch. When a moose ran into the trees I had a flash vision of a man's profile and wondered if Indians come back as moose, "This is a good year for them." Realized I was turned on, not to my knowledge by the man although I assumed he must know, had looked at him curiously to see what he was, only a solid not ugly person who didn't talk too much. What else is body and why. Here coming into the new variants of camp person: and being one, and working immediately to see how to do it. This one has more tension. I already know where some of them are. 10 Going by sea through the morning straits, they'd recently been formed with fresh sand-colored lava and a foam on the hills. There the man and woman I visited said a storm was coming that could close the straits. A slight almost transparent image with space in it, sensation as if space is there without its content, or only a thin film. A quality of space. The parts of language that aren't words. How letters are scored and copies false.
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It is not a place to love this world in. 12
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Elizabethans choosing words, putting words next to each other. 15 Swans. I wrote on the back of the photograph that the swan had come to me a year ago and was a year old then. Two swans on mirror blue. The peaked cullet saying yes I'm crazy and want to be found into myself in this world. I'm wanting Vancouver streets. Fly there for April? Liverpool Lou next door by drunk Newfies. What does this mean, when I was wondering if I'm alarmed by the free stupids next door, Tony's song. [1974] Caught a thinking look. 16 Jules, Myrtle and the campie broke camp early and drove around in a pickup, looked at spruce hens together. Pine woods. I saw two people kindled in knowing how to be who they are. She makes her beauty by performance, what happens in one crew transformed for the next. The drive in her voice. I like both their faces and I like that they were married at sixteen. Jules telling me black poplar in cree is mi-meetosh, ugly poplar. A laugh broke out that I liked. Forms and rituals keep it going but when something lively comes into it they know and love it. "You do know how to bellyache," got her back for the way she pushes me. He's brilliant at mechanics.
18 Went to bed with work, had got it to a concentration and was generating when I shut down and didn't force, said I'd go on in the morning. In the mornin like every morning I don't, it came closer but still wouldn't. Felt rebellion, is it parent. Sunday happiness reading the underground writing. Daydreaming being a roughneck, already got a rev when Czap [the tool push] says Good girl. Make a singing evasion, "I'm a wo-man," his insensitive intrusions piling.
And then finding the written story of the house in the Cariboo. Fired to tell her. I know something and want the freedom of thinking in materials again , Vancouver for kin. The rig boys make $1500 per 20 days, $4500 for three months.
20
fluorescope, blue light and space in the paper with blue lines microscope grain rocks
- in the under buildings with earthen floors - the foreface made of light - Flagellate gametes may be attracted to each other by two means. All may be attracted to light of a certain intensity and thus be drawn together. The red eye spot detects light but it is improbable that this simple structure, even with a lens, enables the gametes actually to see each other. Then one gamete may taste and be attracted by the excretion of the other. Shock of a vision crossing inward into nowhere. I'm the slow twin but I suspect the other one of belonging to a nature-struggle it doesn't want me to know about. Tries to attach auxiliaries and is in the battle to be attached.
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- As you work month after month at this task of group rapport, state truthfully whatever you register a love that will safeguard you from love of power
21 At Neufeld's when I was a stranger, Proust in an upstairs bedroom, Crime and punishment under a tree after breaking fat John's conveyor belt. This fat cook thinking he's unobserved blows his nose through his fingers and wipes them on the teatowel on his shoulder. Their stupidity in every sentence an assualt.
22 Vermilion AB
23 Edmonton
[letter] Coming north in the crewcab through spring, felt I was coming home to you, because I knew there'd be letters, two weeks worth. How well they knew me at the desk. Oh Edmonton, tired. Delicatessen on Jasper. There were aeregrams from mid-February. Oh maybe I can drink here, the waitress likes me, I'm in joy. There were ten letters. I read them in any order then sorted. I could never marry anyone who wasn't a writer. A little shock when you told her what I said. Half a litre of red. Then I thought I should be careful, think carefully, and not exploit what I have to offer her. When I read Roy's angry letter, first the blow then hardening, I know exactly how to reply to it and get what I want, but I'd have to do something out of a cunning I don't know the inner price of. I have to wait a little and feel whether being in touch with Luke now is worth the doubleness or whether I must wait and fight to be someone eventually worth knowing. Roy's letter seems to me both mean-spirited, I would never have told him Luke was indifferent to him, and anxious. He wants me to say something nice to him. His generous impulse isn't hard to set up but. No I don't want to play his way. Only sometimes winning is good for the spirit, I made Trapline in a time when I'd got room for myself by unscrupulous handling. I'm drunk already, one glass. This morning as I was waking I understood the meaning of certain slides, then I found myself in a muddy truck yard, I can't tell you, a moved camp, sun, only me, the rest of the camp somewhere, I didn't know where. Sleeping under many blankets, furnace cut off from its tank. Then couldn't remember what the meaning was or which slides - some fine slides from Bodo - in this bush it was again that the camera held a certain ability to see, the camp attendant worked and didn't see but the camera turned me into one who could make a wonderful forest. The camera holds a person. The camp attendant put her eye to it and was suddenly sophisticated, any direction she pointed it there was a built civilization of the frame. I'll be drunker and Had many thoughts in this camp, but the camp attendant was caught in hatred. Last night I was in bed and touched myself, not intelligently, and wouldn't come but instead found myself sobbing, remembered other times coming was crying. The realization was that I'm a hungry bum, last meeting with Carmichael and Holly bared me in that way. I wanted to take it in, that I'm a middleaged person lost in this strange work among people who are like me though I pretend not, lonely, starved, unmarried and maybe unable, meantime betraying my hunger in grotesque selfbetrayals anyone else can easily read, undefended. What else, out of step, like you said, not cool, going far away in metaphysical and messing up the physical, a plain person unhappy among strangers and if she has a friend why isn't she with her friend and not in this alien - This morning I started to bleed. It's moon dark also. How're you doing, said the waitress, nice. Getting drunk I said smiling. She smiled too and sped away. How it was on the ground where the worst is known. You said it feels like soon. Yes it does. I don't know about money, I need at least another thousand and that means another month and later maybe sometime I'll have to work again. I liked you in your letters. In summer do you want to come to Valhalla? Yes? I am not giving up the Olson's house. I do see Luke, I think he'll come. Spring. Early spring. Coming back from Lloydminister, I see these towns that were names. The round hills were white day before yesterday, are black today, brown on the round tops where they're dry. That gave me an erotic thrill, the ground was like an old camel's hide. Camel grass pelt. Water standing next to a bush had a bunch of bush upside down, I loved to see that. Fences, with water under them and the lovely posts sticking up in the other world, water everywhere making these openings into somewhere else. Blue sky and the black hills, their extreme roundnesses close to each other, something that happens along the Saskatchewan border. Distance, road, peaceful movement smooth on pavement, white clouds above the coffee gatherings' chases. Daphne's letter full of wonders of nature seemed pious and sulky. The sun rhombuses that should be left in vision, yes, and so should - Oh yes, We went past a Ukrainian heritage village, and then a herd of bison. The second cook saw a new kind of immense tractor with 4 tires in front and 4 behind. He said "That's a Ukrainian 4-wheel drive." I was enough in their world to find that funny. It's odd, I really was in that world, Lloydminister truck depot. And then was with you and tomorrow I'll go see my garden and now I'll pay and go home to the Y. 24
26 Vancouver From a distance thinking this place is beautiful. In Paul's room the tree in front of the mirror with blue around wine reds and yellow. Outdoors on the streets men attracted, started to believe a visible country life. Shopping for my Nagra. Oh, Kay [from Bull Catering], saying I shower in the men's washroom and act like a man and am fired. The city - easy to move in - at 22 busstop and I'll go see Trudy - out of breath up the hill - the arm and small thin face, nervous, both, but possible to move in it, play. Her letter returned this morning. I had nerve and she was able. "I never saw those trees before," 6 moving poplars in 4 panes, light clouds, the room was happy. Trying to hold still, tape recorder. First R, then C, and came in seeing us happy got mad and wouldn't let it go, ugly but I could see she was doing it to make sure she was there. T's teachy, I was smug too, the polarized of her, but what happened in the end was that she squeezed T out. Biographies. Only one gaze to say, T I saw what happened. At home signs of a man, making this a short visit. [ie Paul had come home] 27 Turning clockwise at a distance and came differently because not at the centre of it. 28 Neighbour, mountain, clear morning awake early. Need to think. How he had Kiyooka on the table. Went into his rush. Today mind turns away, doesn't want to go clear into, and couldn't read, only partly talk partly true, not as well as possible but breaks into -
29
Red shirt with me all these days. Shan saying she died, her straight body. April 2 We struggled - I don't ask for the information I should have, go past it 'understanding.' Behind the struggle I get dismayed. What is it, what happens with her. The voice on the telephone for a short time was next to mine, both like inside, indoors. Emily Wyman 8th of March [Andy's daughter's birth] 5 Val Power comes into town.
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