| the golden west volume 22 part 5 - 2001 april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
9 April Do I mind fighting with Louie. What's the truth. When she put on her lumps of boots and went home I was sitting with my arms around myself. She had been, her face had been, like a black solid smudge in front of me, pushing me against the wall. The solidity of Louie's German pig-headed will. There's nothing I can do with her when she's in that state. I'm up against the wall trying to reason with her. She pushes more, complaint, insult, defense, old grudge. There's a moment when I decide to cut my way out. I can. I'm being oppressed because I'm holding back. You are such a relentless little witch, I say, you won't let it go, you're like a machine, you just keep grinding, rrhhmm, rrhhmm, rrhhmm. She shuts up. She puts on her boots. She stops on her way out. You get satisfaction out of hurting people, after a point, she says. I know to let her go, there's no use to answer while she's in that state. I don't think I take satisfaction in hurting her. I don't think what I said is hurtful. I take satisfaction in stopping her from pushing me against the wall with her black face like a caterpillar blade. I liked the lightness with which I said what I found to say. I like being able to cut my way out when I decide to. Would my feelings have been hurt if someone said that to me? I say no, it says yes. Her feelings were hurt because it's true. She's in a bind all-ways about men. She doesn't forgive me for being with them rather than her. She doesn't forgive me for having found one when she hasn't. She hasn't found one because she hasn't been willing to want one. Meantime she is being perfect all over town and making lots of money, working all the time, even on Sundays, because that's what it takes. I do not feel sorry for her. Louie is very wonderful but her dark self is a little dwarf, a little monster-will stupid as a stone. Alright, what's next. Do I have a dark self of that kind? No, another kind. A better kind? No. Is it as distinctive as hers? Yes. Tom's is his blazing maniac. Jam used to walk around in hers most of the time, it was the puffed professor. Michael's was the Frankenstein rager that would sometimes show up, that I'd have to shout down. Mine, it says, is the illusion that there is gain in the defeat of friendship. A complacent coldness. Like my dad's. Was that happening last night? No. But now? Yes. I can't quite remember Trudy's, it was a headlong panicked talker. The monsters are all defenses, they are stupid because they are false. They're highly dynamic, they're more and less ego because they are one-note. Are they statues overtop of the well? Yes. Are they necessary? Yes. Is it conflict they cap? No, fear. They say what the core fear is. They all say, I can handle it. Is that the point? Yes. So the core fear in every case is, I can't handle it? Is that it? Yes. When I see one arrive I know I'm on the edge of the crater. YES. So will you tell me what to do with monsters? Liberate them by truthfulness, graduation and generosity. What do you mean by graduation? Withdrawn honesty integrated in overview. What I'm not saying, but integrated in overview? Yes. Saying what I said but saying it of her state not of her. Yes. Louie's got her crater in the conflict between mother and father. Yes. Her madness about David Beech marks the spot. Yes. Is there more you want to say about that? No. - Now I have chapter 4 really finished and it's good, it sets up chapter 8 and the last part sets up ch 9. I have ch 8 organized and now I have to write it. Quite a lot of writing I'm holding back from. 10 A horrible dream about Tom. I'm visiting him. He's deriding my clothes. I pull an armful of hangers out of the closet to show him. They're well-cut clothes. He believes in beach clothes, he says. We go into the street. He looks different. His nose has shrunk into his face, his face is flat. I watch him walk over to three beach men at a café table. His body is different too, thin and droopy, adolescent. He has asked for a hit of a joint. Stands sucking on it. I understand he's back to sucking joints all the time. I'm going to have to leave. How am I going to manage it. We're back at the house. He keels over, he's foaming at the mouth. His mouth is full of white stuff like glue. - When Rowen liked the clothes I got him he wrapped the long arms of the blue and yellow fleece shirt around me. Tom's Frank Sweetz has turned out to be offering a job that involves herding old dears to slot machines and craps tables because they have the worst returns, keeping them gambling if they show signs of leaving, encouraging them to drink and making his room available if an old man should wish to sneak away with a hooker. In email today Mike Hoolboom says Coachhouse is reprinting his book of interviews and wants to include mine, which he says is "very, very strong," forthcoming but ending in wonder. Michael Hoolboom ed 2001 Inside the pleasure dome: fringe film in Canada Coachhouse Press 11 "I have had many teachers. They have all been women." First Lessing, then many women in the women's movement years, then T and C, then Le Guin, then Jam, then Joyce. It's Wednesday evening. Rowen is leaving tomorrow. I drove Rowen on errands this morning and haven't worked since. Uneasy. What is it. I came home and sat with one of the Le Guin books I got Rowen. I saw myself on glass on the street, a fat ass and fat belly. When I looked at Le Guin's book I thought how much work to write all those miles of lines. I have never thought that about a book, before. I'm squirming on account of not having written today. I'm squirming about being fat.
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- What an asshole. I try to tell him my story of Rowen and Lise this morning and he competes, he swells himself up and tries to tower over me knowing more than I do. That after he's pissed off because he catches me when I'm putting custard into the oven and has to wait and the phone card cuts off. He knows all about prefab houses. He knows all about Mike and Lise. He bulldozes over me when I try to talk. Goodbye indeed. And Nathalie today phoning to say she's fallen in love with her fourth much younger Asian man. Oh tonight is a night of no friends. The moon is at the breaking of strength. I saw it this morning a blob dissolved in mist due south before dawn. How am I. Weak acid at heart. I'll wait it out. It's the melancholy when Rowen leaves. I wish I had a friend or lover who was looking at me with calm fearless liking and interest, not like Louie resenting and competing with my female self, not like Tom enraged and domineering, not like Nathalie lost in illusion, not like Michael sedating himself to stay with Lise so he can be on the island. 13 How Rowen was - weedy - his face is out of balance - too much nose, too little chin - he's floppy, shambling - his beautiful eyes are gone, he has narrow small eyes like other people - a pimple on his chin. And how is he. When I talked to him about keeping his truth and looking after his spirit he did what he has done before, he turned and laid his head at my knee and took shelter. I had a sudden impulse the night before he left and asked him what he liked best about me. He groped for it. He said I follow through, I have goals and I attain them. I have focus, I suggest. Yes; Mike and Lise are wishy-washy and he is too. I say he's not in a position now to go for what he wants, later he may find his focus. I said what I like best about him is his subtle intelligence that sees how things are and is generous. - This morning I don't want to start work. I'm lonely, sore-hearted. I feel the large life I could go and work in, any moment. Beauty and feeling. I could make beauty and feeling. At this moment hearing poets read work about and by Al Purdy. I am cooped up with Tom, cooped up with the work, wanting out. I don't want to live in Tom's small American reference, always in threat of rage. I don't want the endless slowness of the carving out of hearsay in dragging chapter after chapter. I don't want day after day alone in my house, in the chill, in the grime and wear.
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Beryl Bainbridge on Eleanor Wachtel, saying writing is tiring because one has to say it exactly, and one doesn't get out much. 16 It's Frank's birthday. I read some of his letters last night. Turquoise ink corner to corner on the paper, no margins, small pointed writing. This time through I am watching for early signs, and find them, but it is still their naturalness and affection I feel most. They still warm and support me. He is a farm boy living at home, going to school, sitting late at night with the radio, telling his life. My letters to him were less natural, and yet he trusted me. They established trust. I am wanting to write to him, or about him or for him. I'm more natural now, I'd be able to meet him better. That he is gone and his letters can still affect me. What I thought last night was that it's his state then, the state not the person - I haven't recovered the thought. My friends die before they die. His state survives him in the letters, but it didn't survive in him. He became unbearable to himself.
[Frank: march 30/62 10:20 pm You are the night. You are here. You are all around. An ungraspable night, but there. A silent raucous night. A who-o-ee owl in vast and endless night. A dark night. A warm night. A friendly night. A night! For despair. The rush of celestial galaxies. What is creation. How are we. We are. Not long!? Are we in night? Does that mystic owl have answers. On silent wings they glide never telling. The rhubarb is 10" high. The swallows are back. The elementary kids come to school 20 min earlier than last month. You are a good friend, a good listener, a good talker, a good writer. A good buoy for a guy in a sea of unsureness and doubt or no doubt and unsureness. Not when you are around, then things seem Concrete and believable. May be there is reason for life; on the other hand there must be a cause for death. Eleven oclock April 23rd Five sixths of a year since Ellie happened into Abbotsford. You were a discovery like the small patch of flowers i saw at the berry patch at home today. Bleeding hearts just as though they had been planted. D'you 'member that september night you beat me out of the house before I could knock? Kinda strange light night. You looked as though electricity flowed through you. Your hair glowed your face almost sparkled. I felt kind of abashed at knowing your parents were to be met. Apprehensively unsure. It would have been (normal?) to grab you and express my hello with few words. But there you stood, and made me "just look" and I'm looking at you tonight with almost a thought of breathlessness at my hearts crazy antics. A long time since then, (short) you're here right now, on a picture of course. Will the world end? we are least expecting it, and "seem asleep". The clouds are out couldn't be when its cloudy Naw not tonight but soon You'll be caught ambitious and working me, ambitious and hoping lazeley, change please. - I'm missing a friend. Tom is something else, an assignment, a catch-up requirement. Spice and drug. Louie isn't satisfied with what she gets and is refusing to give. I'd love to live in the equality of care there was with Frank. I wouldn't give it up, now.
When I think of writing something for Frank, about him, I don't feel there is a truth to be told, I feel unformed space. If I wrote I'd draw a line behind me. There would be something made. Make something not about him or for him but something else, what? It is not a gift to him, though it would like to be. It is not a memorial because what people would remember would not be him. It would record his state, which was a core state, simple, true, generous, lonely, afraid, trusting, sharp and good. Frank after his life. I spend the day reading his letters, copy some of them, and then am tired of it. I run into rants about communism, welfare and the ungrateful French. I think of him as affectionate but often he's peevish. He improved when he went back to school. I like the title, Frank after his life. And then here's this lovely little story of the bus trip when I was fourteen, Valleyview-Whitecourt 1959. It's like coming into a clearing to find it. If I were to be simple and love my life I have endless stories to tell. 17 I had the day off yesterday and this morning am still with Frank's young-man life, 21 in 1961. What it was like for him. His writing is strong in spots but it is not strong enough to carry a book. I could use many of the things he says. The life itself is what I remember - farm work - teaching Sunday school - Marvin. Seen now it is a right-wing life, guns, church, rage at taxes, and at the same time he's listening to Brahms, reading Jane Austen, feeling fear at the rush of celestial galaxies. I don't know about form. I can't rewrite his letters. There's not enough that can be pulled out as it is. I could write it as him in his basement room writing, but not as the letters themselves. Is there another option? There's what he is and what he writes. They're not the same. Another font. Is this teaching love woman to write? I think. Could I do it in the evenings and still write Being about in the daytime? 18 A room where President Clinton was sitting at a desk working, and there were women and a few quiet children doing what they would be doing if he weren't there. Making lunch, talking to the kids. I had somehow joined them. It seemed to me he liked or needed to have them there. On the second day he stood in front of me and gave me a stout hug around the shoulder. I said, Would you like another one lower down, and wrapped him tight nearer the mid-back, thinking at the same time, he probably feels the hugs should come from him. He said something I didn't catch and took me into the next room, to the dish soap dispenser at the sink. Hillary gave me a suspicious look. I squirted soap on my hands and washed them. - Now, about listening. Louie's listening, Judy's listening when I was young, Joyce's listening, gave me myself in company. It's a self I can be alone, without them, a self I am, but I cannot be it in company with anyone who doesn't listen in their way. Then there are the people I've listened to - what I decided when I was a young woman, listen, don't talk. It was a cynical decision, it was a way to get what I was afraid I wasn't going to get, female power. Judy and Louie were fascinated by my real power, my autonomy and invention, my daring. Joyce's listening is principled and professional. My listening with Tom is all three kinds. There's another kind, when I'm ruthlessly investigating someone and asking questions. That's the kind that's most fun. Would I like to be investigated that way? I investigate myself that way all the time, but have I ever had anyone check me out that way? Trudy, a little. I liked it but was scared of it. Here's my question, I love being listened to in Judy and Louie's way, I love expanding and shining, and yet it always has a guilty check on it because I feel they shouldn't be serving me, and I should be doing the same for them but I don't want to, I'm not fascinated, because they are less daring than I am. My listeners eventually rebel. Judy did and Louie is in the process of. Then I think, now I need another friend, because I love the shining - that blossoming out, I want that. I guess the question is, does it have to have a listener? It says yes. Does there have to be someone overpowered for there to be power? Yes. Is power bad? No. Should I find another listener? No. Should I listen to Louie obediently? No. Does she want me to be interested in things I shouldn't be interested in? Yes. Should I be interested in Tom's stuff? YES. Because he's my assignment. Yes. I've done my work with Louie. Yes. I didn't finish my work with Frank. Yes. I was afraid of getting trapped. Yes. I didn't know what was my work. Yes. So I'm never going to really marry. Yes.
19 Colin's vehement refusal of my introductory chapter. Is there anything I should understand from it. That other people are not like me. In the introduction I was honest about my base. These guys are reading it and crossing themselves. Not me! they are shouting. What Janet said about finding my readers. I am not sorry I am not them but I am sorry if I am not going to be famous and influential.
- Having trouble with organizing this chapter. Need to talk about IPL in context of whole right hemisphere. Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward. [Borges interview, quote given to me by Colin]
Making something that can make people feel and think and perceive, and make them more able to - and that can go on doing so when one has died. It's done from what one is, and that is also made, in one's own daily time. -
21 A bright sweet Saturday early. Sun straight through the room to the white door. My beautiful room. I'm somewhere looking at a tower I know is the new Russian tower, very high tech, wider at the top than at the bottom. Looking at it I see into a sort of control room a long way up. A lot of men high-fiving each other and then going off in pairs with their arms around each other. From further back I see that at ground level the tower is based on a small white one-room school. These evenings I am transcribing bits from Frank's letters. What am I learning. I'm noticing his style more as I transcribe it. He leaves out periods, capitals, possessives. He says f or x rather than I, and then settles on the lower case i. He's a young crank, though he's very sociable: sleeping on a hard mattress with no pillow, refusing to kiss, adoring his guns. He loves the weather. Yearning love for Marvin. Fishing and hunting. He's there in his basement room reading Pride and prejudice with pleasure while his rifles stand company in the corner, smelling of gun oil. He's very interested and autonomous, quirky. He doesn't shut off. When he misses me he is in real pain. It's a staying-behind life, he finds a book by a man who uses science to prove creation by god. He doesn't leave home, ever, his own farm is across the road from his parents', he dies a few miles from there. He's affectionate but he's patriarchal too. He says I shouldn't read Brave new world, though he has. There are words he can use I shouldn't use. Is there any of this I didn't know. I can feel him. I know - I believe I know - what it felt like to be him, a wry ardour. He's more intelligent and original than I knew, more frightened of himself than I could imagine. Both intrepid and afraid. Should I go on trying to imagine his life?
22 With Louie yesterday driving streets looking at houses. What do I remember. Sitting in the car in the alley when she'd brought me home - telling her about the monkeys and the anterior fields of mammals while she holds my hand with her little light one that has its entire lower surface thinly calloused from yoga. I said to Louie yesterday, in passing, I think I have started to write a novel. 23 How to proceed. Stay with the feeling. I don't know very much about his places. Or his tasks. I know where it begins. He's putting on his work boots. There's the moment he stands on the step ladder before kicking it over. I know where it ends, he drives off the yard.
24 Frank's tirades of unconsidered political opinion. In his letters to my folks, many numbers, the weight of fish he catches, the number of months the trees were in cold storage, the horsepower of tractors. I saw something I hadn't realized, that Mennonite isolation had given the men a sense of command in the world, and when the culture had to open up, men like Frank were in a fury of insufficiency. They knew nothing, they had no hold. He wants to be competent and in any larger space he's not. I went for it because I had a ticket. He didn't have that ticket. He went for land ownership. He would have had competence in the church community but at the cost of believing lies. His dreams of escaping were dreams of escaping from felt insufficiency. Marvin contained him. I eluded him. He respected that. He married Sharon cynically, is my guess. She got even. He showed me his best because I didn't want anything from him. He was a person with a native hunger for friendship. My father never had a friend.
It is, what, Tuesday morning. April has another six working days. Can I finish this chapter? Maybe just. When I pay my rent I'm broke and go on welfare. Somewhere two weeks with Tom? Rowen here? - What a mixed day. I wrote the left IPL this morning and started the next chapter but then sat with my journal, June to December 1961, and did not leave it until I'd got through it. Tom was on my web page and talked about it for two hours. In the late seventies he marveled that he could go into a computer terminal and see byline pieces by journalists he knew by repute. Today he marveled that he could go into a computer terminal and find as if the bedroom of a woman whose asshole he has licked. There on his 17 inch screen the face he likes to see when we fuck. Moving the mouse over the image of my hand he could feel it. He moved the mouse over the face too. All the writing from all the ages I was, always the same spirit of giving it my best. A deftness of spirit in any of it, he said. As he spoke I was sometimes wandering back to think about Frank. His father once whipped him with a "rubber cord," an electrical cord, I assumed. The mental pain, he said. The story of my meeting with Frank was riveting. He was a bold electric straight-up thing and I met him with keen clear interest. Another thing is the way the waters parted around us. I had no idea of it at the time, but now I see we were doing something for everybody who knew us. And then, too, the way I did not lose my head. I took note. I didn't hide and I calculated it through. I was on a roll before I met him. I was mopping everything up. As for Frank, I kept exclaiming as I read, he was so neat. Ray had a heart attack yesterday. 25
Grieving for my friends is a pain so different from - I don't know what to call it - personal psychic pain. It is like keeping them company. It's a form of love. I like it because it's that. I don't wish to escape it. - At the end of chapter 8 the transition into chapter 9. Left hemisphere IPL and spatial functioning, some possibilities of. Chapter 9 is spatial imagining in four kinds of rep practice, not necessarily IPL but maybe. Mostly I don't know whether it is. The whole of ch 8 has that difficulty. - Hello me, write about this mixed-up week. I have been 56, guessing about the IPL; 16 staring into Frank's blue eyes; 56 on the stairmaster; 17 saying goodbye to Frank in Christmas week; 56 with Tom on the phone; 16 somehow having come to everyone's attention, overjoyed to be so liked, rising everywhere. And then I went to university and wasn't so liked - outclassed everywhere - unknown - sexually lost - until Greg - and then starting to be liked in my last year. And then went to London and was lost until the women's movement, and was starting to be liked in London and came here and was lost until the garden and then was liked all over the city. And then went to SFU and was not at all liked and was lost among the men. And am still not liked at school, among the academics.
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