| in america 16 part 2 - 2008 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27 September - my dear best friend. Loose and keen. Talking to him I got to what it was about the lecture. He loved hearing about the elderly couples from La Glace, said they were having something articulated for them. I said likely they didn't understand and it was more as if they were feeling the communal plant had fruited. In bed last night I was feeling things that were wrong with the lecture and also that when I said it was like the reports I used to give to Home and School groups it was good. The community invested in me and though I haven't consciously felt indebted I'm happy to have reported and happy they came to hear the report. It's raining hard. Yesterday we first drove to La Glace. Nijland's land. There was a gas well track back in behind a bluff. A grassed knoll. David was poking around at its foot looking for foundations showing the original site of La Glace. I went uphill among cow plops sprouting little mushrooms. I could hear geese on the lake at a distance. Behind me was a poplar stand that was quite open, an old stand with tops broken off, leaves rattling. Except for the gas well apparatus, more of it to the right, it was a perfect spot. I was listening to silence - there wasn't any high thin squealing in my ears - wide, absorbent silence. David was standing at the foot of the long slope. I saw an animal bounding toward him. It was a deer, that then turned and sprang through the gate into the next field on its electric little hooves. I could see David was waiting to show me something. As I was pushing down toward him we heard geese coming from the northeast, long trailing strings of them, the strings breaking up and forming into new strings, more and more of them, loud overhead, flying toward the lake. What else I liked yesterday. We drove past the East Place and south along the ridge road where there is that beautiful big barn, to the Edson Trail and along. Then north, and east on the Teepee Creek Road, north toward Peoria, south to Spirit River, Wanham, Dunvegan, west to Rycroft, south to look at a Catholic cemetery where I saw black granite tombstones etched with images. A double set, his with a picture of a kindly farmer holding a lamb and hers on the left with a middle-aged woman in chore clothes holding a foal. Another with a naïve drawing of a log cabin, stylized spruces and rising sun. A double plot in a white picket fence, the plot completely filled with a big lilac bush. I love the country cemeteries here, the way they only have land around them. At Dunvegan I liked the long south-facing bench above the river, the slope's dramatic sage-grey bulges and gold-leafed folds, the mission buildings on foundations made of layered flat river stone, the Hudson's Bay factor's house white-washed and well-built, the thought of market gardens flourishing on that bench in the sun. Spruce trees beside the priest's house, Manitoba maples beside the factor's. 28 Little cats who slept against my cashmere sleeve - houseful of kids with five fathers and a singular mother - Levi a mechanic in dreads, short hands with grease under the nails, blue eyes, beer fat, good energy, imperious irritability - owns four Cherokees - sexy - he kept his eye on me and needed to rule his sisters - Kane with Rudy's sad eyes and a scar across his hair at the tiara line - dressed up in a suit with dirty shoes - brought out a shoe box full of photos of grafitti - draws but not well - gold teeth - Adam with Epp cheekline and a pelt of rough hair, philosophical, abstract in Ed's uneducated way - Maya a tall thin thirteen year old trying to dance in a small space with a littered floor - ballet dancer's long neck, long arms, long hands, little breasts, ballet bun, who danced looking into my eyes - Anya the Indian princess, was she nine, a little girl in sequined sheath and belly dancer's jangling belt determinedly shaking her hips. Eliz, Maya and Anya barefoot. The walls and ceiling covered with images and slashes of paint. Paintings on the floor. It's 6:30 in this perfectly comfortable room. Red neon flashing outside the window
One more day, a Nissan Vista in the parking lot. Clear and cold. David's brunch at 10. Amy Winehausen - Jewish Cockney mistress of line - she's large, she's not an American baby doll. - On the hill above our old place - a dead light, there's color in the trees but a lot of dull green stubble fields, vast grey sky - what is the depression - the brunch was depressing, Bernice and Gail. Stopped at Valhalla Cemetery to pat Helmer's grave. It was cold, a raw wind, there was Tone Tofteland 1985 and John Tofteland later in the nineties. On the far side John and Olivia Tofteland, she 1863-1942. Families laid out in their generations. I felt my not-belonging. It feels pointless to be here. I never want to see those people again. - There's a big flock of geese trailing south. What is it about Gail and Bernice - what it always was, complacence. Compare Elizabeth's generosity, the aliveness around her. Driving from GP to Beaverlodge seeing the Rockies in a row across the west. What a depressing light. I haven't dreamed of this place for a long time have I. When were those beauty dreams. The deaths, the time-displacement. I have done so much false talking this week - have gone along with so much saying what I had no interest in saying, asking what I did not care to know. Myrtle looked up my journal and told Bernice about it the very day, she said, that she got the invitation to the talk. Joseph Tennie Olson died 1985. Olivia Stickney. Gary Rossler was alright. He wasn't padded. The moment I sat down next to him he told me stories about spirit deer. 29 And Charlie was alright. He farms 4000 acres now he says, and had a life in Parliament and looks around him interested. [Charlie Penson was Conservative MP for Grande Prairie South.] A good sane level energy. He'd catch my eye and I his. Monday morning. Summary. The talk should have been better. There should have been a mic. The slide projector should have been in place. I should have refused the lecture before the talk (it says no) and prepared better. It was a difficult audience because of the spread. The main thing it said is that from loyalty to place, their place, one can, I did, work outward/inward to comprehension of much. That was alright. Telling them about other artists was over their heads mostly but it was good to have it there for the few. They couldn't hear the mission statement past the first couple of rows. I felt them disconnect and skipped paragraphs. And then the slides were not straight and not carefully enough chosen and the people on the sides wouldn't have been able to see them well. I didn't say what I had planned to say about them. Questions cut short because of the delay for the projector. Messy. Unknown what reach it had.
I want them awe-struck but at the same time I root for their self-confidence, as I used to. I don't want my capacity to harm them. At the same time I want to be able to be more with them. My solution has been to say, not that they are ungenerous, but that they are incapable. Which one is true? Both. They are incapable because they are ungenerous. Thursday driving east toward Sexsmith we saw a large animal crossing the road up ahead on the crest of the hill. It was a young moose. Looks like it's finally clearing. Everywhere yellow and dark green along the creeks. The darkness of spruce with the same gold of trembling aspen, willow and balsam poplar. At our creek, where I peed on the bridge, I saw how many kinds of willow there were, I mean the way they've hybridized so there are finer and coarser cuts of leaves. San Diego 30th Santa Ana. Hot. Last night in 3F black sky with cold white stars. Down below the silver and gold of blue-white and orange street lights in their overlaid or patched together patterns that make Celtic brooches, mythical beasts. I noticed in the car that I was looking at Tom imagining Bernice and Gail seeing him. He was wearing my black cashmere sweater, jeans and his white shoes. He was tanned and trim from swimming every morning and his brushcut was bleached silver. The point was, though, !!! a pathetic remnant. 1st Oct In bed last night woke scared from a dream. A minute later the alarm went. It was midnight. Lying in the dark I was chilled remembering Dave's tone, we were in his car saying goodbye in front of the motel. He said "When you come next year ..." I said "Maybe not next year" and he said with intention, "Yes next year." The way he looks, his excitement about murders, his wanting to give me money. I was queasy thinking of him reading the sex in the journals. He's so cut off there could be something sinister. "It was I guess important to me, like reporting finally to the people who had sent me out into the world to make something of them." Standing in front of them as a woman making large gestures in a white shirt - Susan liked that and said I should write it. Speaking, I was aware that I was demonstrating something with my arms. Susan had been thinking of me for a month, she said, since I was reading Notley. (Logan said today Notley is coming to Denver in two weeks.) Susan and Margot walking in NYC, museum memberships, wine tastings, a city architecture guide, a spice shop with 15 kinds of peppercorns. Margot cooks. Susan is sending out writing on a planned schedule, conventional and slash. - I'm hungry for New York. I don't think I could make it there, I'm too drab and crooked, but I would like to, and I like to hear from people who can be where there are smart people working hard. 3 Tom says I'm beautiful since I'm back, not so harsh. I'm back! It's morning. This week to the feeble packets and then - Ant Bear, revising Mind & land, starting to work with the scans. Could buy the monitor, begin a physical improvement stretch. Start work on Dames rocket. Begin the winter sweep, which can last until mid-Feb, four and a half months. 4 Why does Dave do things for me.
When we were having breakfast together a farmer-looking man sat down with us, our age, tall, fit, with a little pot, farmer's cap, pleasant look. His name was Melvin Wold, "not one of the La Glace Wolds." He said he had all Dave's books. He runs a big successful body shop in GP. He and Dave sat talking about Sexsmith when they were boys. Melvie. A couple of years ahead of Dave in school and catcher for the Raniers. They were recalling the buildings along Main Street. I remembered the wooden sidewalks and he said he remembered being there when they tore them up, to collect the change that had fallen between the cracks. He told a story about sneaking into Knobby Clark's shack to look for his pearl-handled revolvers. They found them under the bed in a gun case and were looking at them when Knobby came in. Knobby said, "You see them leather hinges on the door? Them's the ears of the last fellers I caught looking at them guns. - Sit down, boys, and have a pop." He had a lot of stories and told them with smiling eyes I liked. Thinking of the way there is a lot of time between incidents. Yesterday as often remembering something from childhood and thinking about why it was remembered, the charge it had - thinking I should collect those bits. Yesterday it was the moment I was standing by the living room's west window staring down at my mother's bare breast. She was nursing Rudy. I would have been ten. She said "Would you like to taste the milk?" I hesitated - what was there in that moment - embarrassment and curiosity. I stooped very quickly and put my mouth to her nipple for a split second. Milk unexpectedly sweet. 6 Monday morning, 6 o'clock, Tom's house. The Eastern rim is brightening slightly. I'm on the couch in the kitchen, peering through the second-to-the-bottom pane of the French doors at the greenish glow behind the leaves. My ears are whining. Tom is across the room a long shape in the dark with is that a bare foot down the bottom end of his bed. I woke and couldn't sleep, came and did the dishes and organized Tom's shelves. He came in for a moment, I heard him laughing behind me and I laughed too - a sound I loved, two people one of them me laughing quietly in the dim light of the counter lamp, with the sleeping room still dark beyond us. Now it's brighter and yellower and the sky above it is lighter. The eugenia is standing tranquil. That leggy weed-thing with velvet leaves is in the way. What was I wanting to write as I was lying there - now it's pale yellow-pink and hot a long way up. Santa Ana sunrise coming. There were some moments in the week in Alberta that were the kind I've noticed are too sharp to remember when I'm writing with second-level attention, which it mostly has been. - Now it's paler and brighter, and bright a long way up, all the way up really. The top pane is white tinted with blue. When I was having the last breakfast with Dave the way he said angrily "I suppose now you're going to trash me in your journal." The way Bernice and Gail standing together when I first saw them the night of the talk seemed tall and the same height, as well as swollen in their faces in the same way. - Now it's daylight, the horizon not much brighter than the rest of the sky. Refrigerator roaring - ah, there it went off, but it has an aftersound like fluid in a large pipe, which fades gradually. Traffic on University Ave and probably El Cajon Boulevard. A bird begins. With Tom at the Cove yesterday morning. We got there before the lifeguards and sat on a bench above the beach. The tide was up and waves were crashing against the steps. Distance swimmers arriving and departing. - Now there's an orange spot heating just south of due east. I turn out the lamp. - Stronger. There's the first bit of fire between leaves. Rapidly larger, has rays. The beeps of a truck backing. Panes of light on the kitchen's back wall. Shame at my foolishness with Eunice Powell, that showed my lack of presence. There she was in front of me, I wasn't ready. She had been so important to me, and I didn't have time to think. I blurted "You were the most beautiful teacher I ever had." As I was saying it I knew it was wrong, that wasn't what I meant, and it was stupid. What I meant was that she was beautiful and she liked me, she wrote that letter to my mother saying she hoped her child would be as sweet as I was. In our community no one would praise a child. I was starved for it, and I was starved for the quality of her beauty, which was exquisite and fluid. Singing at the piano, slender, light. Flapping, get into two weeks of my own. Began transcribing what M had of the last Still at home. I should start Forming when I get to Kingston, so there's the summer before, and some missing Sexsmith pages. The liveliness of that girl, her affection for almost anyone, her liking for their physical suchness whatever it was.
These journal pages I haven't seen since I wrote them - the story of climbing the probably fir tree the morning after I got my exam results. The story of looking at my face in the mirror. The first gave it back to me sharper, I had it vaguely. The second didn't have it well but I liked having more of its circumstance. All today the sound has been there in my ears. 7 This morning I was gripped by past time and hacked through journal and letters for the summer of 1963. 37 pages, about 25 of them this morning. Bum muscles sore, along with whatever that is on the right side of the small of my back. I was gripped by triumph and vitality. I was pleasing everyone I cared about. I was pleasing any stranger I cared to please. I was pleasing myself, I loved my face and looked stunning in my new chocolate-brown double knit dress. Frank was there, still and after all. I was securely known in a wide, established acquaintance of people none of whom - this now seems remarkable - were in any way in trouble. My grandparents, the uncles and aunties and cousins, their connections, everyone was prospering. The house on Clearbrook Road was an ordered, booming centre of beauty and comfort, by their will, Peter and Luisa's, like my will that had carried me to winning what I had decided to win. - Before the day is over I've read the whole of the first year at Queen's. It's not bad. It's fast. I laughed a couple of times. I investigated. I was let out into the wide world for the first time. It was an energetic scan, not sensitive. What's a sailboat like, what's hawthorn like, what's sherry like. Wealth of things I didn't know. [page of notes on tinnitus]
10 I'm already past 60 pages. What intros does Forming need. An eighteen year old who had grown up in a narrow religion on a northern frontier where no building was more than fifty years old and no tree taller than thirty feet, no family more than 50 years established and most very recently immigrated is given a ticket - wins a ticket - to a good eastern university in a limestone city founded in *. Her school community to the age of seventeen had been a stable group of fifteen or twenty farmers' children. Now she is meeting new people every day and they are Africans, West Indians, Brits, Americans. Her best friend is Welsh and a corporate lawyer's daughter from Toronto. Her best male pal is son of a national bank director. In her first year she throws herself into investigating these possibilities. She babysits for faculty and scrutinizes their fridges and record collections. She goes to classical music concerts, she dances at International House parties. She drinks wine and she writes her parents about it. She goes to church but it's in a spirit of curiosity. She visits the Catholics, the Quakers. She's exploring mainly the middle class and she's figuring out how to succeed with them but there is a boy she likes who comes across as something else. She likes him but she knows she won't easily succeed with him. It turns out that he's from Boston money, but what it is about him is more than money, it is placement. He already knows everything she will have to spend years learning. He is not middle class, but culturally elite. Where she is eager he is cynical. Where she is striving he is dropping out. He sells her a Ban the Bomb pin and she joins CUCND because he has. She records nearly everything about her first semester in the form of letters to her family, something almost every day, typed on 3-hole pages her mother files in a binder. These pages detail weather, personalities, residence life, food, clothes, campus, campus rituals, classes, music. She's eager. She flirts with a lot of men and she wants a few of them but it's three years before she has a boyfriend. She keeps a distance. Five years after beginning at Queen's she notches it up: she's in London, studying at the Slade. Ten years later she will be shooting Trapline. Raw forming - it's raw forming, it's catching up, and it takes all those years. - 86 pages I think, January 1964. I'll end the first volume when I leave Ban Righ. Notice I'm keen with the Ban Righ pages and was bored transcribing New York: wanted the single room above the park and the beginning with Olivia. Will be bored again when I'm transcribing Sunnyside, except for the summer nights when I creep out into the streets. I'm speedy those years, hyped. Reading surfaces at speed, feeling but insensitive. "Ellie is always saying how wonderful her life is" Olivia says. That's sad. What was the truth. I was writing letters to an invented family. I thought I could carry them with me but I was zooming away from them. My leg spoiled me socially and I labored feverishly to attract people so I could feel normal. I was constantly stressed about money where my friends were not. There hadn't been touch since Frank. Sex was completely unconscious. My grades were down and I was competing with people who had a year more of high school, better high schools. I was binging and starving, gained 15 pounds first year. Second year Olivia snagged Don and then Tugwell. Living with Olivia I became like her, never had quiet, lost touch with the lake. Fevered years - and then Europe - and then Greg and sex and calmed down, I think. Seemed to have enough money. Further into work. Noticing how hard I was working to hold down my mother's disapproval and anxiety - how closed to her I had to be - is that the word, I think - because she would have undermined me - she was so wrong in what she wanted me to be. My personal comments to family sound false to me now, any of them, as if I'm trying to seem interested. I wasn't attached. I only had where I was - that was my attachment. My mother didn't understand that the letters were pathological. All that writing? It says no. You mean it had a function. Yes. And then Olivia, and then Greg. Europe changed me. When I got back I was less false, and better looking, I had more authority in work. Something about writing - writing was false attachment, from false attachment. - I'm turned off [the college], want nothing to do with any of it. Something uncertain - it's about promiscuity - they were right in a way, I started fucking and it took me over - I was hooked continuously for most of the next how long, 1965-2000, thirty five years? Hooked and crazed, distracted - but what were the options - other people got married, no way I could do that - virginity and that kind of fever couldn't have been better and would have had to be more split - Joyce saved me, the only way would have been if I'd had her sooner - and then maybe what I have now - attachment that's not crazed - I'd have met someone it could work with, my way. Would I have done better work? It says no. 13 What it is in the writing is that it isn't silent - it doesn't touch into the other side. Never. I was learning the paraphernalia of the world - gruyère, chitterlings, samozas, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Welsh cupboards, Rachmaninoff. I was writing like airline magazine journalism, but I was bright-faced, I was doing what I needed to do to stay buoyant. Tom Hathaway was the image of something else. I remember coming in to Alison's finding him stretched on the couch listening to was it Mahler - maybe Brahms [German Symphony] - talking about it - his singularity. My euphoria was keeping me on the wrong side of a wall. The only other person in that time I still like the thought of is Mad Murray, who was bravely real. TV is ruining my dreaming. I wake feeling it was junk. [The college] too. [Google search] Olivia [Bayard] has a book, From a benediction, 1997 Peterloo Poets. Part time tutor in the [Oxford] Department of Continuing Ed, poet's workshop. Reviews poetry for the Oxford Times. "Widely anthologized." The river's voice, Scotland in an Oxford landscape. Arts 1967 40th reunion. Joyce Detweiler at Sunnyside Children's Centre 1954-1965, psychologist, clinical director, assistant director. Isabel Allen director. Peggy Morton Edmonton peace activist. Frank Nabutete Time Magazine Sept 21 1959, 78 Kenyan students scholarships to US. Mboya had got scholarships with help of US Negroes like Belafonte and Poitier. Marcus 3rd son of Frank Nabutete in London Ont, on Mashada July 2004. 14 Slogging at transcribing - it's pointless, no one should read this - this morning the few journal passages that are sometimes pretentious or sentimental but steadier than the letters, not impersonating a vivacious girl and not spelling everything out. Dreamed I was lying in bed with a young man. He was nothing special but we were lying together in a soft warm pool of electrical fluid. I was thinking it was good to be in it, and it isn't hard to find it, I could have it with so many. Then something in the corridor or downstairs about the dog getting into the paint cans. A little dog running past in the corridor leaving red footprints. Earlier, from our bed, we were looking out into the garden at night, people in a tree stealing maybe peaches. Large round fruit we could see faintly red. We watched them climb down, a lot of them. They have noticed that we've seen them. Second day of the fast. Last week I dreamed I was flying by pumping my legs. I was lying horizontal in the air, face down, drawing up my knees and then kicking. First I was feeble but then stronger. Noticing as I write the way clichés - I was thinking to write "come forward." I'm also more reluctant to write because of my disgust in the transcribing. "More reluctant to" - professor diction. Olivia's a known British poet - "widely anthologized." Teaches a poet's workshop at Oxford in continuing ed. I read a poem that was online and couldn't like it. What about it - I said "old armchairs" and it's still that. It felt as if it was written from a padded life. It was a poem about looking at a prostitute in a window in Amsterdam. If I imagine O as the fat woman she became standing on the street looking at young sexual pride flaunting itself, for money and also for something else, it seems not true enough. I can remember her at the party walking away with Carmichael, he looking for her shoes. I was in despair that I didn't have her sexual pull. That's what it was about the night I lay on the floor crashing, I saw in the record today, it was that Olivia had come to an International House party and been more of a star than I was, because she could dance and had breasts. So the poem has that in it, standing outside and seeing the sexual goddess lit up and feeling one isn't that. To be true the poem would have had to tell the whole of the ache of that glamour - its complications - she defended herself in it by imagining the woman worn out and still for sale, and she ended the poem in a false confession that she might see something of herself in the prostitute. That's moralistic and it's not the point, the point is conflict of desire for, and sexual competition with, other women, and how devastating it is, the way we long for the goddess sexually, and long to be her, and hate her for being it when we are not. I didn't feel any sex in her poem, I didn't feel any body in it, whereas thinking of looking at a young prostitute in a lit window my pussy is aching. And Olivia and I - she was a body to me, I didn't know I desired her, and I did. I'm angry with her for letting herself be hideous now. Do I mind that she's successful? I don't think so. It wasn't a work woman competition, she was love woman raw and I couldn't be - I needed to stay out of that trouble - not get pregnant, not get married, not crack up, not get betrayed, defer it 'til I was further along. I like her in this journal, I like the love story although not much of it is told, I like the way I see her, a brimming laughing look, crinkled eyes. Starry. She was personal, she reached me. Thank you. It wasn't just her sexual pull, it was sex itself. She was letting herself. I'm at Baby Cakes, back patio, red umbrellas, tree trunk with stout thorns on green smooth skin. Adobe pdf downloading by wi-fi. 15 Next day, Baby Cakes server brings out a pashmina shawl (I think it is), goldy green, he says has been in the lost and found more than thirty days. Then Richard next door gives me a plant. I'm thinking of that eighteen year old who was so excited about anyone - what she could make of this neighbourhood - meantime I bike from the coffee shop seeing almost nothing. - For instance Richard's house full of art, that I've never toured, or the zoo. It's miserly, the way I withhold energy, as if ordinary experience could cost me something. Third day of the fast, smell of bean soup on the street. Baked potato. The hissing was loud last night. Finished transcribing Forming 1 - 139 pages in about 7 days. In those days I didn't hate people for being insufficient. Reread the last exchange with O in 1997. I'm fierce. She's not. I was breaking something. What, exactly. Something in me. An old structure, a well. Revising something, updating it. Letting love woman be fierce where she'd been defeated. So did I help her? It says yes.
Fifth day fasting. Weak this morning. Yesterday when Tom wasn't working we took the jeep to be serviced and then went to the beach at PB. The green waves. I was dimly relieved to be there. Dim altogether, couldn't completely get there. Was it being with Tom? Who was loud about McCain and Obama.
18 Westfield Mall. Sweet little clouds, my red shirt, stout palm tree, fountain, what are people wearing, this kind of people. 19 I didn't buy the monitor, looked at it. Spent $200 buying girl clothes for Maya and Anya. 21 When I lay down last night the white hiss was gone. My hands haven't been stinging while I was fasting. This morning at 5:30 the hiss was there and my hands stung, though mildly. [lists of orange juice and chicken broth for days 6-9] On the street feeling my black jeans loose - looking good in the dark blue fuzzy sweater - wondering whether to go for 135, because there's still blubber at my waist - I so love the way this feels. I want to keep it and I want to eat fresh bread and lots of butter. And pasta. And best pizza. Occasionally cake. Eggy bran muffins straight out of the oven with raisins and nuts. Garlic mashed potatoes. Baked potatoes. Pancakes. French fries. Nachos. Pumpkin pie with ice cream. Hot chocolate. Ham and cheese panini with mustard. Carrot juice. Afternoon tea. Yams. Squash with white cheddar, squash soup. Bread pudding. Warm dark chocolate cake with whipped cream. Rhubarb or cranberry fool. Baked custard. Risotto. Chinese noodles. Samosas. Niblet corn. Chocolate croissants, almond croissants.
[opposite side notes] Sent messages to Madeleine, Tom Hathaway, Martin Ware. Insulin resistance happens to everyone with age.
22 Eating. My back is thinner - not that buxom look in a shirt - skin is silky, I was stroking my belly skin yesterday, finer texture. What I wanted in Whole Foods was macaroni cheese. 23 Almost finished the Sunnyside summer. I say nineteen is an age "men seem to like." I throw myself into anything, anyone, am there. As I transcribe [the letters] I imagine my family reading them in a way I couldn't have then - the detail must have bored them, titles of records and books, descriptions of people they don't know, the writing not good enough to hold for its own sake, people could want to read it for the record of Sunnyside maybe, the way it was run then, gorgeously smart and well funded. The portraits of Peter Hagedorn and Joyce Detweiler are worth something. The record of a Kingston summer from April to September. Me, I'm high-spirited, the sheer energy is worth something, but the writing's so blanded-out by its family address that I'm not interested except sociologically maybe, picture of a farm girl eating everything up. That summer I went sailing and canoeing with Mike, swam alone at night, went to church with Norm, had a couple of weekends with Olivia, one of them in Toronto, went to Montreal for the first time, announced Sunday classics programs at CFRC, biked around in a batman cape, hung out with International House men at parties and one-to-one, wrote what'll likely amount to 80 pages of letter, studied German and child psychology, was high on Look homeward, angel, started wearing cut-off blue jeans (that one is big), got excited about a lot of strangers, tried unsuccessfully to lose weight. 24 Am into second year, living on Barrie St with O. 25 An ambitious crowd - Tugwell was elected editor of the Journal, Norman was president of NDP Youth, Peggy was president of SUPA, Don was second prize in a provincial debating contest, I ran for International House presidency. Two things happened toward the end of the term. I lost the election and Olivia helped herself to Tugwell although she already had Don. That was two kinds of end. By April of that semester O was sleeping with Don, smoking dope with him. I left Kingston for BC - I fell back - while she had an abortion funded by Maggie Hathaway and got into poverty activism, which continued through the year I was away in Europe. That year was a reset. I'd slept with Rasheed and then Frank, had lived in strange countries almost without money, had steeped into myself away from O, and came back calmer and deeper. Lived with O but was soon sleeping with Greg. No more International House, no more Sunnyside, switched into philosophy and dug down. That was 3rd year, and then by 4th year D and O both had graduated and gone to Oxford. I wasn't throwing myself around socially anymore, except with Peter H - faculty. And then the year I worked for Lawford, bought my Nikon, slept around, had my hip fixed and was in Kingston General for 3 months. [opposite page] Tugwell founder of Co-op Radio, "later joined the Rajneesh movement at their huge pro-sex spiritual commune in Antelope Valley Oregon. Georgia Strait staff 1967-1972. 1972 Georgia Grape, Tony Tugwell, Bob Sarti, Korky Day Slides DVD Background, title bar, drop zone video? Sound- edit frog, storm?, murmurs. Audio can loop. DVD menu - play as slideshow, fast, slow, manual advance, silent/sound buttons Individual shot menu, notes Encodes to MPEG-2 Same folder as the asset - encoded files Project files Doesn't encode until you're done - uses compressor You work in Quicktime Encode on build Aspect ratio 4:3 or 16:9 Encode mode 2 pass for best (later reduce if needed to fit_ Max bit rate 8.2 slider 7.0 Slideshow Photoshop, pict, png, jpg Maybe a voice recording with - instead of the notes -
Tape #1
Monday 27th Was watching film I had shot when I was facing large animals, bulls or musk oxen, in pens with them or through a fence. Took it realizing I had made another film. Admired the in-camera cuts. Later transplanting old apple trees, one at the back of the house and then I thought I'd plant another balancing it at the front. Old grey thing, is it dead? Can I drag it? When I get it to the spot I find its roots are in a small pot, very small. Tom's house, he's at the Hotel Del being a security guard. Uneasy, don't know why. Anguish waiting in my forehead. That young worried feeling. I want something. Waiting for something, feel trapped, [the college] and Tom, my little place, feel nothing new can happen, there can't be strong feeling any more, everything is in the past, everything's evened out, dull duties, no more discovery or strong thought. What would I want if I weren't locked into attachment with Tom, and needing money and free rent. Imagine this: I'm standing unattached and well funded, steady, not in pain. What do I do. It's not about where I'd live, it's about being excited and dedicated. I've been making do since the doctorate, little things. What can I do that's big enough, action enough, new enough, hard enough, real enough. In 1985 there was the garden, in 1989-2002 there was the doc. 1995-2004? there was Tom. Please universe set me a task that can turn me on. And there it stops. - I could get ready in whatever way I can - work for physical stamina and polish - get rid of boxes - finish things faster - focus on finding it. 28 Tuesday morning at Starbucks, shade of an umbrella, science Times schliern photography. Election in a week. Obama looking nearly certain, o if it could be so, autumn sun sweetly mild, sidewalk jacarandas in full leaf. Taste of coffee. Transcribing 1964-65. Living like a teenager, bursting out of a narrow inexperienced family, edging into sometimes drinking a glass of wine. Charles touched my clit and I came instantly, first time I knew I had one. Didn't write that down - there's no journal for the year, may have been and was lost, so it's madcap pose without letup. Detail of events I don't remember, that aren't worth remembering. The year shook us down some. At the beginning it was Danny, Norm, Charles and the two of us. By the end Olivia was locked into her future with Don and politics had taken over from group theatrics. The Selma demonstration in Ottawa, Don and Tugwell. First mention of Mad Murray, who was in first year. Party at Graduate House. Afternoon Mike took me to a country walk at Dr ---'s, adult community in Kingston. More of Kingston city, Cooke's, the market, Turk's junk store. 19th century American literature, French literature and culture, German literature and language, personality theorists Freud, Jung, etc, ancient Greek and medieval European art. This section will need long volume intros rather than a long section intro, there's so much change from volume to volume. I want to keep zooming through, get it done, but I can't sit longer than 10 or 12 pages. My bum gets sore. Didn't use to. Am noticing now the way things drop out without mention in the letters. Noffke, Charles, Sunnyside, the radio station, babysitting, International House people. I move on seemingly without a glance. Also notice how wrong the letters are for their recipients. What could they have made of a dense page of description of a Toronto designer's over-the-top interior or a Yorkville oyster bar? Plot synopses of Through a glass darkly and Knife in the water. Question - is there a question - what was forming those two first years - it was the 60s starting to accelerate. In first year I wore a girdle and stockings and stack heels, in second year I wore cut-offs and a Queen's sweatshirt and sneakers. Colored stockings. We were reading The Alexandria quartet, listening to Sketches of Spain. I still had the small community's interest in anyone I met, took smart girl's charm for granted anywhere I went. Energy. Huge social energy still. It now looks like a massive waste, all those personalities I had no reason to notice, but they were what I had in front of me and I was sucking them in. Didn't write anyone off. Had affection for the oddest. - Wasn't so much smart as very energized - people imprinted themselves in me and I wrote them down to get rid of the charge. Did any of the writing tell me anything I didn't already know? Don't think so. Was writing too fast. Irritated with Mary when I see her - evidence of her - trying to control me from a distance. I overrode her but kept trying to explain. She wanted my life for herself. Wanted me to keep feeding her. She sent me food and made me clothes but I don't think she had any sense of what I needed or of wanting that for me. I kept addressing Ed in the letters, and now reading them from his point of view I can see that most of it - she will have skipped a lot when she read them aloud - will have seemed frivolous nonsense to him. Judy will have been interested because it was where she was going. Paul will have been some cynical about the manic excitement. Insufficient isolated parents taught to be afraid of the wider world.
A culture without sensitivity to persons, only the crudest awareness of
personal being in themselves or anyone. Personal feeling walled off into
religious fantasy and there diverted into blind symbol. Writing them kept
that blindness going in me. Olivia taught me a freer manner but she was
throwing herself around blindly using personal address to collect people.
What's lacking in the whole time is silence, self-attentiveness.
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