| in america 16 part 1 - 2008 september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 9 September 2008 The Wilder Snail. Keefer and Hawks. Keefer Grocery has become this little slacker café with a Dwell décor. Koo's Automotive is a pretty, high-architecture condo. It's a dark day in the neighbourhood. The chestnut trees haven't turned. A couple of druggies hurrying through from Strathcona Park to Hastings. CBC classical station a bit too loud. "Enough kidding aside." "This is CBC news." Whole other election. 824 is looking decrepit, blue paint scaling off, windowsills rotting, windows blanked and dirty. "Up in the Peace, clearing this afternoon." Men with little dogs. I see a young woman tethering a bike to a telephone post and she's me years ago. I was 31 when I moved into this neighbourhood. Was a lean light wildish person. Have just come from annual physical with Dr Ranger talking - here Keith Jardine sits down - about heart rate, hearing deterioration. - There Kirk walked by - I'm on Commercial now, have eaten two slices of delicious pizza - was only two pounds heavier than last year - the crust had sesame seeds and was fresh - the sky is clearing some - one more, since I am going to ache anyway - crisp onion, black olives, bits of tomato and green pepper, perfect crust. Cramped refusal - looking at a lot of books in Anne's house not wanting to read any of them - wanting something better, not so old - that way looking for food - not liking any of those ideas - but this one was just right. Go home now - don't want to - bad architecture - there's the last bite, oh crust - bad architecture in the way 1970s condo complexes are bad, windows all face the same direction, tight kitchen and bathroom, corridor, bedroom, walled away from the light. Lot of foot traffic here. Long silver queue, no bra. Lot of babies. I see ghosts, people who look the way people I know looked when they were younger. People are wearing jackets though it isn't cold yet. Being outside of the forcefield of sexual attraction, I was imagining it as a bubble, a warping field, is that what makes me so flat. Sane but flat. 12th It's been an empty week, dim student packets, people not sending what they say they are going to send. Watching dumb TV for company, reading books I'm not interested in, waiting to be done with the students, so I can get to the talk next week. Caffé Amici 13th These days so melancholy and reluctant. Dragging through student letters. What's wrong with me. My heart is sore. Dimly. Last night Dorothy at 95 foundering, repeating. There was a moment coming through the dining room in the dark - had been taking dishes to the kitchen from the front porch - David had left the lights off - when I saw the beveled leaded glass in the two high west windows in the living room refracting faint post-sunset yellow - two narrow rectangles of prismatic bits intense in the black wall, grapevines and yellow sky - what about them - the old house on River Drive - that best of addresses - Dorothy looking out at the long light touching the red apples at the top of the tree - --- --- --- she said several times - the porch thick-packed with junk David brings home, a padded chair with a 50s hair dryer attached, a sewing machine under a tarp, long cedar shelves - melancholy of having nothing worth doing to do - nothing to admire - no fight I can win maybe - starved for something excellent to be - I sat all morning watching TV because I didn't want to go to the student letters - the shittiness of everyone on TV - in Anne's flat eating, eating - no one I want to visit - the light in the big river tree was translucent, gold from sideways in amidst its many limbs, skinned over every leaf - felt it was somewhere I couldn't go but I knew it was there. Alright go home and be melancholy there. 14 Sunday morning in bed with tea - I'm discouraged by the brown plastic wood of the closet folding doors and by the seal [?] of a single window - encouraged by what I can see of the pine tree and the blue and gold sari length she has hung for a curtain. Cheap construction, narrow painted aluminum frames, popcorn ceiling, oatmeal carpet throughout. The kitchen so dark it needs artificial light in the middle of the day. On the other hand the quiet of this bed where I've slept 8 hours a night, and the subtle hydrangeas on the balcony, pink-tinted beige with a cream begonia, and beyond them over the rail a twenty-mile reach of seaward sky, yellow for an hour after sunset, with raveling strings of crows. - There I phone Luke, who was packing to fly to Granada tomorrow - Luke my own dear - who had looked at my room on Google Earth - and then Tom Sunday morning joyful he'd been swimming every day last week, describing the colors of the water at the Cove, tourmaline shading to forest green with garibaldi like oranges on a tree. - Jennifer Annison in --- ---, a face whose small expressions are smart enough to hold me two days in a row - something contemporary, more contemporary than I am. I'm happy. The letters are done. They're done, they're sent. A week to dive. Two weeks. The falling man again on CBC. People couldn't stand to see the photo in the paper. "The photo had disappeared from view, in a spontaneous act of self-censorship." What it is about Americans. "There were things you weren't supposed to see, there were things you weren't supposed to say." Americans identifying with an image of victory not an image of finality. That's so foreign to me. Horror and gasping are foreign to me. Life ends. "It was either burn alive or go quickly." This man is good. It's about sane evaluation. If my kids died it would knife me deep but the way they died would I think be better or worse. I'd want for them what I'd want, a conscious death. Suffering doesn't seem to be such a consideration, brief suffering at least. What I dread is death of intelligence. And I dread it every day I think. I notice it. Until I don't. "Took his life in his hands for just that second," she says, another sane person. People standing at a memorial holding up photos of their beloveds - that moves me. Faithful grief. 15 Monday nearly 7. Hours ago the first seagull in the dark said it was morning. That Vancouver sound, neighbourhood sound.
I stood at the podium in the gym, Sexsmith School 1963, in my orange and gold gleaming dress, and said there were only a few adults who made adult seem worth being. Now I'd want to stand - I'd want to stand - at the beginning of another venture - is it that, the beginning of being old? - it says no - but is it about starting something? - a last push in art - starved for something excellent to be - standing and committing - is it only about finishing what I already have? - no - is there more I can learn and become - can I really muster myself - YES - does it have to wait until I retire - will there be enough money - are you sure. Does it start with the slides - Dames rocket. I'm feeling interference from the press page and poster - they were too early, I hadn't done a right dive to find what it should be - it's messed up now - can I ignore it? - or do I have to work with it. Mind - that girl wanted mind and was land - where did she look to find what a mind can be - writers - pressing at school - that's what the valediction was about, wanting to be something excellent - and is it true that I was land - land was my larger self, larger than the social self - that self could hold when I demolished the social self - is it that? with land was the larger mind. Mind and land: perception and intuition in the open air - open is right. Caffé Calabria - who is that - not good - small eyes - old at the hips though not the back - a lot of droop under the chin - but when there's a liking look it's still quite pretty. Tom thank you. What would it take to have new thoughts now - am aware that nearly everything I think to write here I've thought before -
Defined challenge is the question - what's hard enough and yet winnable given ten years - not just mopping up what I've already done - what's harder than neuroscience and philosophy of mind - or as hard - something that doesn't have to be dumb to succeed - the culture of that chromium music - in whatever medium - it isn't place as known though it's from place, from its principles - it's not female shining - it's subtle and sinuous as air - it's her in maturity - it's a craft to make - it's already there rotating - I could lift it, fade it almost to invisible, so only edges of its motion are still there - the peaked cullet's internal green - the word glass. It needs a network of the best and only the best - it's not Aphrodite now though there's a female pagan membership - Greek language spoken by - lines of many languages - it's molecular and goes to edges which are made of light - it is formed in perception conscious self can't realize - sublimely stoned Titania world - it's not about - though the about will go on saying something somewhere - it isn't from but in - it's a use of a body - I know what isn't it - always - it's a wished death I think, of something solid - is it. As close to death as their art will allow. There she is, an angle of the head - the chin lifts. Edges, edges. It's maybe another relation to the real - it's gnostic in a way, it feels the fallenness of human custom. These many walking past, who are so visibly nothing. Is it tragic, this realm - yes it's mortal, which is tragic enough - what is the name for fairyland in that language. Stop writing from middle earth since I seldom want to now - trust reluctance. Is that it for now. Yes. Thank you Calabria once more, god-realm someway. -
Georgia St 16th A dream with more action than usually - when I write it nothing will transmit but I want to see it again - somewhere working on my computer - I get up and am buying something - some large bulbous vegetable - they stall at the counter - when I go back my computer is gone - wandering in a large mall - I'm looking for someone I can ask about who I should inform - there's a long counter - I'm thinking they're councilors but I'll just ask - a man says come back tomorrow - he is assuming I want counseling - I sink to the floor crying - go away crying - stop outside a café - the councilor sits down next to me, he has followed me - I explain that I want to tell someone about my computer being stolen in case it shows up, I should do that - the councilor says sympathetically that I must miss my music - I'm wondering who he thinks I am - say sharply, There's music everywhere, it's my fucking WORK. Then another man who has joined the councilor says there's a watchman at the other end of the mall/campus. He points to the buildings set by themselves on the edge of fields. It looks like a powerhouse. He's saying the watchman will be down a trapdoor. "It's always warm down there." I go looking for him. There's a high wire mesh fence. Inside it are wild-looking, fierce-looking horses and cattle. I think it would be risky to go through them. Maybe there's a way around. Meantime a fierce heifer is coming at me. It turns out there's a pole fence around the wire fence. I'm shut in with the heifer charging me. I'm raising a big stick, yelling, keeping her back while I look for a way through the poles. I've succeeded. She vanishes. Now I'll find the man, am inside the big building. There are levels in the powerhouse, big engine set lower in a high ceilinged space, walkways around it. These are on the left. On the right it's more like a barn. There's the man. He's a short red-bearded man some older than me, not much. I'm following him. Notice we're going up not down. We are up a level. He says I should put my manure-y pitchfork down here. He rushes through a door on the left. This space is complicated, stairways and passages. I'm hesitating. A young woman comes through easily leading a very wild small horse. There's another woman and horse behind her. It's like a fairy horse. She speaks to me. I want to know where her father went. She's thinking I'm interested in him romantically. I say not. I'm up another level. It's open, as if on the roof. He's there. I have to come to him by walking on logs suspended over water by logging pulleys. He's astride a log I'm walking toward him on. It's tricky. After I picked up a royalty check at Moving Images I was only a block from McLeod's and so rolled the bike on. There was a volume of V Woolf's diary in the window. It was vol 1. I went in and found vol 3 for $15. Did no work today, looked at Yaletown, rode the bike along False Creek, felt Vancouver benevolent and rich, towers set wide apart among parks and inlets. Across the room a tall flower pot for Louie's strappy orchid. It's the color of her sofa, that remarkable thing. 16 Notley talking about poets wanting to represent their century. So not a thing that has interested me. Louie put Calvino into my hands this morning: lightness, quickness, exactitude. I start at chapter one. Give up, ruffle through. Heavy, slow. Inexact. It's Notley who is those things. Alice Notley 2005 Coming after: essays on poetry University of Michigan voice, sound and measure political and spiritual stance often as a unified quality relation between the poetry and the poet's life or life-stance These obsessions seem to me to be both mine and the poet's. I love the city voice. Reading her I yearn to Susan. A struggle to find a measure or sound that suits me. I need the discussion of this struggle for my own practice and meantime the sound of much contemporary poetry worries me. Prosody is a real subject, how you or your thought becomes articulate in a precise time that won't ever go away. Poetry is primarily the line; a poem tends to think by making quick sound associations forced upon it by the exigency of an approaching white margin. It thinks with music and thinks better - faster, more deeply, with more possibility of unexpectedness. My work at best was charged with the rush and play, forwards and backwards and pirouette, of the speaking voice, trying to keep an invisible audience's attention in a moment-to-moment way. the energy of the poem and the character or presence of the poet It's a matrix of what I understand and what I don't understand. Because of what I understand I consider what I don't understand. the poetic foot a shining grid precisely or minutely articulated arc or winding or blunt straightness of the whole line a line is somehow 'about' its divisions By foot she means phrase. A ghost of traditional English metrical patterning hovering behind my divisions ... poem's rich subconscious. What I also hear now in this measure is a sound that comes literally from music, something out of popular ... more sinuous or dactylic, being influenced by Monteverdi and Homer Ted worked very hard at these effects, was obsessed by this kind of metrical or musical closework. ways to stop and play, not just to segment and articulate a line, but to be in it and enjoy the space, as if that were the whole point. There's such amusement and enjoyment emanating from the author in these two sentences. -
My own poetry motivated by the urgency of making sound accurate to previously unpoeticized aspects of life. The poet places her/his sounds quite literally in me. I therefore want two things of the poet. One is a sort of constraint - I don't want to be violated or incited ... The other is, I want to be amused, I'm capable of quite intricate dances. A poet's talent is of the voice, it's what she organizes and dynamizes - not words by themselves but this essentially bodily production by which the poem is played and replayed in time. A poetry career is in some sense an exploration of what sounds right in one's own mouth. An author's voice comes, came, directly from her body. My voice doesn't present me so much as it does my poems. The voice of the poem isn't interested in the poet at all ... I is I in the poem's situation. I wrote it hoping it would be as if spoken by anyone - hoping anyone could use it. For many poets it is as if the poem were being spoken to them as they write it. -
I myself used to hear the voice come from just outside my forehead on the right side. There are at least two important qualities that a poetic voice should have. The first is fearlessness or courage, the voice must be clear about itself in some way, believe itself and be consistently unafraid. ... assuming its authority is equal to any other voice's - ... The second quality that a good poetic voice must have is something like vividness, actual presence of the live poet ... comparatively few poems have that. - It's very difficult to be honest inside yourself; you tend to slide over tough places hurrying. My wish for honest thinking ... now I believe that the world is full of subscription to the thought of others ... the future, which used to be the 'real time' of the best poetry being written presently. I never understand what to do or how to do it, I understand that I must start and will now by an awkward process make something. discovered the stream-of-consciousness and automatism written in a language another part of me controlled, a more unconscious part ... an attempt to balance between conscious and automatic controls, with the conscious part more careful, for honesty and clarity's sake, and the unconscious or automatic at the very least available for a deeper veracity's sake. I don't want to become the automatic part of me ... I trust my conscious self. I don't like the world outside my door very much but the best of myself is awake and clear. The 'I' I most prefer sits serenely and somewhat numinously behind my personality ... I often can't act as that one but it's the one I most really am. Telling the truth has a unique feeling about it. Truth-telling doesn't come in a wave of self-assertion but loftily and neutrally, or coldly, or sadly, sometimes warmly but never self-righteously. I don't know the truth in advance, the words for it or the sound of it. I'm trying to say what I know and I'm finding that honesty is difficult, interesting and unexpected. I personally have been ruined, any person has been ruined by the civilization we know. Current poetic convention doesn't allow one to say such a thing, not by being against it so much as by not thinking of it. At the same time as I'm 'happy' I'm also agonized over (a) the gulf between my daily and often trivial social self and my real self which I am only rarely. And (b) my participation, which I cannot seem to control in the impoverishment of other people and especially in the sudden destruction of this planet's ecology ... Then these are the things, I reason I must say in my poems. - Between the notches it's from Thinking and poetry 1958 and 66. In this ridiculous inescapable and tawdry material world we women are allowed now what? To make more of it, more of that. Women and poetry is a joke - Where is the world? Being devastated by her death, I felt close to large dangerous powers. Only they were talked about again in the eighties, as if the sixties and seventies had never happened. As if someone like myself would never count. In the middle of the third level is the black lake, the gate to the rest of the universe, death, the one place beyond the tyrant's reach. 18 Granville Market Milk sky today, mountains evenly faded, eating Italian plums at a Blue Parrot window. Dutch tourists at my table though I glared. A sourness on the inside surface of the skins that my tongue likes and looks for. Daphne's Brigit at Larry Chan's a bleached little thing - there I remember Daphne young, long and bright. Roy's liveliness, his realizedness. Compared to that anxious scrap. Across the room a baby on a lap. Luke at seven months, glad, surging. I was ugly in the elevator, frizzy and grim. Good decaff. There's no reason to write such stuff as this except that it's a way of sitting here, somewhere. Some women when old are so tiny. That one in a brown wig, purse on her lap. Thin-mouthed little person [at Larry Chan's] poking at spots near my knuckles with a probe that was making a computer whine. Mary tomorrow. Rowen on Saturday. I'm keeping house for Louie. Have a meal ready when she gets home. Last night the smell of pork roast from the door. We sat after eating. I said I'm needing a task. She said ask the book now. Etc. Were talking about what it said, that I withhold in friendship. I said when it's equal it's never equal because one of us is hobbling and the other isn't. She said "I see" and changed the subject. Late afternoon. Everyone dying. 19 Email from a GP Herald reporter, interview she says. Iris [Loots] and Mary [Epp]. Two old creatures. The same height, spines crooked forward, meeting each other at the threshold like dwarves in a tale, we wondering whether they're too old to be interested in new people. Was it a dumb idea. Mary next to me was trying to eat with shaking hands. Her forearms were so messed up, loose and purple, as if her cells were unknitted and any which way. The few things she has to tell, that she tells with such pressure. We sat hearing the story of her mother in Russia. She couldn't be stopped. Iris was in better clothes, not eccentric in her speech, more civilized. Mary when she got started was a jet of distress. I can hardly think of her. I feel such angry pity. She's starved and stunned and if I gave in to pity I would only go down with her. She needs a mother. She's going down fast and she needs someone holding her, stroking her head, talking to her about happy times, remembering with her. She said at the lunch table "My husband couldn't seem to love his children. When he was going to come in I'd say to Ellie 'Here's Daddy!' He'd come in and he wouldn't even look at her. He was just wrapped up in his own concerns." Iris said "When my husband was carrying one of the children to the car he'd be talking and laughing to them. I always knew he loved them as much as I did." They liked it when Louie and I were talking about our happiest times. They were listening. Iris was forgetting what she'd said earlier. Mary easily locked into woe.
20 Raining. Sore throat. Rowen's two hours late. Cold. Awake till midnight reading Queen's journals, then wake at 5 with scary hands-stinging mystery syndrome that is getting worse. Ears' screeching faintly. Overwhelmed. Want to just go home. Reporter tomorrow. Day traveling Monday, Louie's mom here, the awful hours with Mary, the mania of the letters and journals and so many of them, traveling with David, a psych course on Weds before the talk, the talk itself, two psych courses next day, none of which I'll be paid for, then David will be wanting to show me things - and none of this is relevant. Mary's horrible letter about not having sex before marriage. The way I didn't believe she wouldn't understand and even now feel it only as despair.
21 Rowen with short hair not as beautiful, broader-shouldered. In his Carhart jacket and loose jeans a lonesome cowboy. We ate at the Loong Foong and then came back to Hawks and were at a table with Saturday afternoon at the opera in the Wilder Snail. The end of Manon Lascault. Talking to Row about photographs and desperation and dissociation and how to contact it in feeling. Then walking through the garden which was beautiful in damp air, and then Cottonwood Garden too, which was like an old farm, and then back to the fire where Rowen showed me Spore, his evolution game. He was gently amused watching with me as I played, a soft, patient person. And then the best of the visit when he showed me some of his inventions. Planets, creatures, spaceships, buildings, their names. I saw his intelligence, the way it's intelligence in relation to a tool. Photography is too old-fashioned for him. What I dreamed last night - I was in bed with Roy looking at a movie that showed a black silhouette of a woman on hands and knees and a man behind her who was going to slip it in. I was aching to have Roy do that to me but holding back. I felt him somehow fucking me through the intervening space. 4 strokes. Then he stood up out of bed, his beautiful body I saw for a splash. It's Sunday morning. Louie was angry and blasting bad air, I plucked the thorn, but the space is frozen by the polite old woman. The sky is shut. Should I do something to prep for the interview. I have today to work on the talk and my state. What would I want her to ask me. 1. What have you liked about the place? 2. How are you different than when you left? 3. What would you like to give the place? 1. I love the sensation of open land. What has stayed with me is the feel of the land where I grew up and the feel of the house by Valhalla Lake. Thinking of them is like centering myself. Neither of those places exist anymore as they were, but I have them built into me. As if they made me, as if they are me. The way space lies open, a large context. It's a simple landscape, not a lot of kinds of trees, the trees aren't big, the fields are wide and bare. There are many colors of sky. - There the phone rang. A young woman with a good voice, soft but a little rough. The sun suddenly came on. A silent house. 22 Moving on. Louie dropped me at the steps of Larry Chan's building and zipped away in her pink t-shirt. Vancouver is at the window in early light, rain to the east, open sky above, the city's thick with towers, pale grey-green. Red ships in the harbour. CBC gone easy-listening junk. I'm sick and didn't sleep enough. Grande Prairie 23rd Mercury retrograde - a man in my motel room futzing with the heating on and on. Woke at quarter past one and then didn't get to sleep again until 5 or 6. Hands stinging hard woke me, ears squealing. Kidneys says Larry. It's overcast. A cold wind. I don't have a jacket, just my sweater. Muscles aching in the cold of the room. Still sore throat. David heavy company. Room with an artificial tree and artificial flowers on !00th Ave with chain architecture and through-trucks. I'm not glum but I'm stoically enduring. Will dig into the talks tonight I hope. Weds 2.30 Psych 2750 Brain and Behavior Joann Tomie, Thurs 11.30 and 2:30 Psych 1040 Connie Karpan - Then it got worse. Computer went black. Is this really happening. Phoning computer shops. Older man said, I don't know Macs but on a PC I'd pull out the battery and start it off the adaptor and then put the battery back. Tried that. It said ding and I heard it start. Went black again. Okay, wriggle the cord. More times. It came on. Asked the man trying to fix the heat for duct tape. Taped the weakest spot on the cord heavily. A-V man at the college said London Drugs. Bought something that said it should work - does it? Not so far but the duct tape is holding. At the Husky eating roast beef and french fries. Will I have pie. Lemon meringue. Happy to have this meal by myself. Something I need to say - working on this talk. 24 I've doubted everything I've thought to say. It has felt dead, as if I'm faking. Is it having said these things too many times? Having little hope in the audience? Or something wiser about the inconsequence of philosophical positions - I'm writing this without remembering the sensation but there I had a flash of it - which is now gone again. What would matter in the talk is focus - quality - not message - and I would feel the inconsequence when I hadn't got there - okay. Now I'll work on the talk and at two I'm at the college speaking to the psych class and back at 4 and then a couple of hours to show time, which will be over by 9. 25 It's 6 in the morning - wet in the dark, I can hear traffic. What's left from last night - Eunice Powell's beautiful face three rows back a bit to the left listening carefully sometimes alight - Hazel Erickson Throness who was a tall clear-faced young teacher, now fancied up so I wouldn't have known her - eye makeup, salon hair, status indicators I guess. Another quiet-faced Throness wife whose name I don't remember [Ruth]. Dennis Maxwell as if encased in a fat suit, stiffly padded all over. A small old thing in a walker who knew my mom, did she say Beth Sheehan? Mary's friend Joan Yates, a good face. A small, pale earnest man in the front row who nodded hungrily and later said he's a chef. A tall girl with short orange hair who looked keen and went home and emailed me, Olivia K. A big-faced man in the back row who later said he's restoring land north of La Glace - Egger. Two young men who plonked themselves in front of me - Eliz's Luke turned into an aggressive big lunk, someone beside him who must be Levi? Or Adam? And a young woman in hippy layers of skirts, poncho, was she one of Eliz's daughters? I got it wrong. Eliz later, taller than I remembered, blond, straight, herself, with a little girl whose dad must be Native. Gary Rossler and his missus. Bernice worse than she was three years ago, her face puffed up, Gail next to her the same, both of them must have lost weight for the reunion and got it back. Teresa [von Tiesenhausen] modest and young. I didn't remember her. A woman in the front row who took notes and said it was inspiring. Gail Angen's poker-faced sister. The room was full - 150 people maybe. Cameron Ross asleep in his chair. David in the back row in a leather jacket. Evangeline McNaughton very bright-eyed. I was guessing she didn't get that I was preaching atheism. She said, after, that she liked the photos, "this beautiful world the Lord made for us." A stream of similar old couples I wondered whether I should recognize. A couple of single men in their forties in the back two rows who listened carefully. Carmen Haukstad, the Haukstad owl face, big round gut, a noted local painter said David. Ray Olson like Dennis stiff with fat. My pile of bibliographies mostly went. The wives so lifeless-looking and the men so beer-gutted and unphysical. I saw Eunice Powell across the corridor - jumped forward - "I know you." I wanted to touch her and saw her flinch, what was that. I was imagining her seeing a thick old woman she didn't know, missing the shy kid who adored her. Dennis flinched too, these people are not huggers. I was wearing my white shirt, lace bra, red necklace, blue jeans, docs. Was gesturing widely, could feel the white shirt holding those shapes. "You have so much poise as a speaker" Olivia wrote. Did it feel like that. What was my manner. Hospitable, friendly, not frightened, not burning, performing; looking back and forth across the semicircle. As David and I were driving away there was my photo in color 5' high on the electric billboard outside the college. I'd said to Eliz, "It's wonderful how having your picture in the paper will bring you the people you wanted to find." She said that's not how it happened. Yesterday afternoon she thought she'd go to Save-On for something, didn't really need anything, and there I was on the billboard. "It's Auntie Ellie!" Young man sitting against the wall, looked like Rudy, interrupted to ask a question. "You remind me of an older woman who ...," something about a photograph. I said hold the question until the end. It was Kane asking why I'd destroyed Mary's photo of me. Shit-disturbing as Eliz has brought them up to do. [No, it was brain damage.] Hazel saying "That mind of yours is still going a hundred miles an hour" and telling a story about how Peter Dyck would come into the staff room telling them things I'd said. David and I in the Holiday Inn lounge with beers after. I wanted to debrief but we're lumpish together. More of that lumpishness today and tomorrow. We're excursing.
- Poor little college, poor little students. I was lying down after writing what's above, feeling my forehead cramped. What began to uncramp it was when I felt what I hadn't known I was feeling in relation to the monster-bodies of my old classmates, distress of pity. I think of it as harsh judgment and is it really that? My look, which I'm trying not to show, is What has happened to you? The labour of politeness there has been so much. David's ponderous tone as if every syllable is planned - oh his driving! The jerks and frights and swerves as if he's almost blind and is afraid he isn't seeing what's arriving next. There's no spatial sweep. Walking next to me bent like a garden gnome. A face with no muscle anywhere in it, red eyes, a puff of double chin. 26 Then two lectures and driving with David through dark late afternoon past the western edge of Lake Saskatoon and up Saskatoon Mountain. Tromping along a trail on the western edge of the mountain, looking over the expanse of prairie, to the site where a 9,000 year old campfire was found. Gravel roads with wet rocks hitting the bottom of the car. A bit of spruce I broke off, the scent. Wet poplar smell. Mud. Shelterbelts - I was looking at shelterbelts, those around present homesteads and remnants in fields. Colors of bushes and trees - rusty this year. Meantime David was pronouncing on his topics. Here a log cabin listed for preservation, there a school now used for ---. I didn't mind learning these things but his ponderous officious tone was wearing me out, that and the repeated squeal of the wipers on a too-dry windscreen and the way a hot blast of air would alternate with cold when he'd open the window to clear mist off the windscreen. I was sniffling and my pant legs were wet and I suddenly needed to just stop. Two good lectures yesterday, the one on Weds was with an instructor who was a hideous lump, and all but two of her students stunned lumps too. Yesterday's instructor was lively and pretty and I talked without a plan and the room was alive and there were little zaps with individual students. I was setting out the schema of Being about which is my own and female in the way it's simply teachable and I with it friendly offering workable wide orientation. Last night I slept 8 hours - slept easily for the first time in weeks - what I mean is there's a cost to these lectures. Cold sore and cracked lips breaking out yesterday. A lot of little observations that hadn't caught up to me. The way these men - David and Campbell Ross - can't be helpful without being patronizing, and do not know they are that. The dumb look of most of the college students and how tellingly bad the cafeteria food is, as if it's thought they're not worth feeding. The way David talks about me in grade 12 and what Hazel said, a little dawning sense that I was regarded then in ways I didn't realize. Eliz yesterday saying people at the lecture were enthralled with my presence.
I can speak easily for an hour and a half, improvising, staying with the audience, if I give enough time to structuring my head in advance. I have to prime myself with the language I'm going to need, otherwise I'd have memory glitches. Interesting when I'm lecturing I never have those moments of not being able to find a word. It's 8 on a wet misty day. Traffic heavy on 100th Ave through white air. We'll go driving today and do I want to - David's strange destiny. Being a hard-jawed young athlete and now having transformed into someone in whom I can't see anyone I used to know. He said when he was a child the book he liked was The hunchback of Notre Dame, the isolation of the monster and his relation with the gypsy girl. She didn't love him romantically but she had a relation with him. When I asked if he ever misses baseball, meaning being an athletic body, he said no but sometimes when he can't sleep he lies remembering baseball stats and assembling the teams there should have been. There's so much dissociated in him, he's living consciously in so small a walled-off enclave of himself, that I feel almost no one there. He has his professional spiels and perks up if I invite him into them. Otherwise like a robot garden-dwarf, interested in murders, which makes me uneasy. On the Saskatoon Mountain path I was aware I could be pushed off a cliff or left in thick underbrush.
- Friday night - Obama/McCain debate on economics. McCain the soft-voiced good daddy saying he knows how to do things - Obama unsoft, tight, crisp, quick. McCain is leaning on sentiment, Obama is rational and McCain's irrationality is starting to raise his blood. Obama saying "John you like to talk as if the war started in 2007." Then McCain goes straight back to talking about the surge and the troops coming home as winners. We drove and drove today. It didn't rain.
Obama speaks a fine paragraph on security and McCain goes back to Iraq. He slinks back there when he knows he's weak. Obama widens and focuses and McCain keeps touching emotional levers. "I honestly don't believe Senator Obama has the knowledge and the experience." "I love them and I'll take care of them and they know I'll take care of them." Obama is saying American standing has to be restored. We know that's his beat. And now McCain is jumping back to being a POW! Phoned Tom this morning - he was
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