| in america 9 part 5 - 2005 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Nov 16th 2005 I woke at 5 thinking of writing intros for the journal site - writing them. Don't want to do the piece for Caryn's anthology. I don't want Caryn editing me. Don't want to set my head up into that topic - want to do more with Gendlin but later, for the res. Sorry about the $300 but I don't need it as much since the raise. Philosophy introduction Still at home - what was it in me as a child - I observed myself observing - for instance the moment of the birdhouse - the way learning to play store with the Kroeker girls impressed me - a feel for the mythic reverb in places like the creek, the lake - intent feel for fairy tales, clarity about justice, autonomy of judgment - willingness to suffer aloneness rather than ingratiate myself - stoicism - loyalty to what is. (Here I saw that Reiner was a boyfriend of convenience and so a lie and it did harm him.) A philosophical attitude, ie interest in any state as such. Conditions - early betrayal and aloneness, social inferiority, being smarter than other people in a bookish way, six people in a small house in a large landscape. Being smarter than other people something discovered gradually, for instance the moment in the granary waiting for the schoolbus, studying for a test, realizing I knew something about how to study. Around that I'm feeling a morning in fall, before the snow but after the leaves had fallen. What did I know about how to study? I don't remember. What the moment was about was realizing that that sort of technical awareness about myself was intelligence. What else - buying The age of analysis in grade 11 when I was in Edmonton for Varsity Guest Weekend. How did it seem - like something from the city, some large bare space, high-ceilinged. I'm seeing a beatnik coffee house for some reason, a 50s sense of intellectual glamour, cold, selfconscious, I suppose defensive, a lot of black, nothing colored or natural. At Queen's Philosophy 100 was required in first year and I liked it and was good at it but didn't start philosophy as a major until third year, after the year away. Then I did rationalism and empiricism, existentialism, Hegel, phil of mind, phil of psych, theory of knowledge. I had native philosophical talent, which was my ability to focus down, to say what's this really about, what's the essence of this. Clarity. I always had clarity. I could get to the essence of a question. I couldn't do it in class, I never spoke in class, but I could do it when I was writing. I would read and make notes and then organize an outline from my notes and then get into a heightened state in writing. I also had a talent for finding books, often books on some other topic. I'd just find them in the library, come across them. I had a gift for recognition that I was very secure in. I'd say, this is relevant, and then I'd find out how to use it. I wasn't as good in English because I didn't have a sense of literary grace in my essays. Philosophical clarity was my strength in English too. I'd get A's but I wasn't the best. It startled me that someone like Doris Heffron was better than me. I was okay in psychology but loathed the experimental method. I never felt secure in experimental conclusions. I liked the parts of psychology that were philosophical and observational, stories about lives and beings. So Estall got me the medal in philosophy and a Woodrow Wilson nomination to do philosophy in the US. I went to London to do film instead. The philosophy of the time - British and North American analytic philosophy of the late 1960s - seemed robotic to me, cut off. What I liked best in philosophy at Queens was existentialism and Hegel. Sartre and de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir was my first feminist. I took on the notion of bad faith and authenticity. The most important thing about existentialism for me was that it supported my own intuition about ethics - that clarity and truth-telling are what matter most. I loved Sartre and de Beauvoir personally, as essential helpers in life. What I liked in Hegel was his huge dark being, so intuitive, so tactile and full. I loved that I could understand him. I loved him personally. I liked his sense of spirit coming into its powers through the eons. I loved who he was. I loved thinking about consciousness. In the year before I went to London I discovered Doris Lessing. The golden notebook first. She was my second feminist - no, there was Betty Friedan earlier. What was it about Doris Lessing. She was current, describing the life we were living but showing us how to think about it. She brought us her Communist training in consciousness raising. How to think further about power relations. She demonstrated intimate personal combat. She was an example of energetic high intelligence alive in an unacademic mode. What was it about film at Queen's. Peter showing me how it was possible to speak intimately, personally, in public. What did I like about film. Documentaries. I was starting to take pictures, bought my Nikon FTn just afterward. The magic of seeing qualities of light. Skating rink. Films that were just seeing. That there was a way of showing seeing as such. Erotics and seeing. Then London - is there a name for the London section - ancient city of vision - multiple reflections - afterward I thought the London time was about learning to notice reflections - London was my first real city - Kingston was a university town on the lake, old but provincial. London in the 70s was the ancient capital of the world. Reverberant. Trapline was about London. London starts with seeing and goes on about seeing. I would be in the Westminster reading library looking at books about design, architecture, form. I was in an art school. London's architecture, always the streets. I told Desser I liked any movie and he was scandalized. I liked the seeing. London and philosophy. Writing the thesis about dream and documentary. Ambitions of documentary. Seeing and 'seeing' really. I could call that starting to do philosophy myself. Articulating something of my own. Seeing brought together with philosophy. Meantime struggling to find where to begin my own filmmaking. Having done this made it impossible to go along with intellectual fashion, which was French psychoanalytic and deconstructionist theory. So I found myself ejected from the university at that point. I had to be just an artist without access to university money, teaching or equipment. So began years of being very poor. I could say that London is where I took on embodiment as my loyalty. I had a child, I went further into erotic struggle and pain. And then the women's movement with its concreteness of lives lived. I had a community outside the university again, women in a room talking. I was able to dance. But was there philosophy otherwise? Feminism of course. Critique of power structures in philosophy. Dorothy Richardson, commitment to the whole of the life lived. Her greatness in phenomenology. Demonstrating a way to be a philosopher without narrowing into male defense. The beginning of investigating recognition. The dream about asking Chantale Ackerman how to work. How did the journal change in London. A lot more note-taking. Notes on many kinds of things. Was I using my philosophic resolving power? More trying to find lyrical powers, become a poet. Except for the usual analysis of personal events. Started gardening in London. So then Dames rocket, more of that trying to be a poet. Always looking for material with emotional power. But still wondering whether to be a philosopher (understand things), an artist (make beauty), or a warrior. Not settling. Drugs were philosophically interesting and dangerous. what will we know was what it was feeling toward and culminated in. Aphrodite's garden. Embodied life. Warrior and beauty-maker in the garden together, philosopher separate but trying to get back what I lost in London, currency in the university. What I work on is language and nonlanguage, which includes seeing. Golden West - I bring it through, philosophy and the philosophy of philosophy. - I began writing that a bit after 5 and didn't stop until 8. Finished transcribing the 1992-93 volume and knew I wanted to go to the Sexsmith year. It's not a volume, it's bits and I'm using lines from the 5-year diary. Want to see whether I can give the feel of that beautiful hard year. I was so remarkably enterprising. I was making money writing for the Family Herald. I came into a new school in the graduating class and immediately got onto the student council. I reached to know everyone with so much energy. That's what I marvel at now - the eager good will - so strong. It was my first experience living as I'd go on living - this way - alone in a room. I worked so hard. I gave up Frank. I starved because I didn't have enough food to take me through two weeks and I didn't want to go home on weekends. I transferred my affection to anyone at all, so much affection. I gave up religion. I was heading out. And I wasn't just a slogger, though I was a slogger. I loved my clothes. I had good clothes. There are passages in the journal where I'm feeling and articulating something quite abstract and large, like the cube of darkness and the cone of light. But my letters are silly, I didn't have any sense that my actual self was interesting enough. They're forced. They're false. In the journal there are false notes but fewer than at 14. Question - I'm cleaning up as I transcribe but I shouldn't, should I - leave enough to show the mix. What should be the image for this one - yellow leaves - Sexsmith train station - Mrs Wold's house - found an image last night of Sexsmith school. I was succeeding, I had come through what there had been to come through where I was. I'd won respect everywhere, and for my family too. I was their star and starting to rise out of sight. They let me be. Meantime Frank, his letters say, was depressed - working in Vancouver - stressed - we were starting to be out of touch. Stratford did that. - When I read my valedictory speech yesterday there was so sharp a stroke of pain. I was surprised. Why was I suddenly feeling it so much? I was feeling how alone I was and am. I was there in my room starving because my parents weren't giving me enough money for food, slaving to make the difference between 85 and 92% in seven subjects, staring at human inadequacy all around, staring at the fact of death, mourning Frank, and having to find my own way into a completely foreign next step. 19 Not much more of this week off. I've transcribed 62-3 Sexsmith but not edited it, made the volume front page, Sexsmith main street with elevators. Scanner is broken. Wrote the intro. 20 Sunday morning. Santa Ana this week, there's no dew on the roof. Desert sunrise quite far south. Slept with the window wide open. It's 6:15. Quiet. 22 Sexsmith is edited, spellchecked. What's next. 23 Construction guy in my room. Tom in yellow boots and wranglers and a longsleeved dark blue T - glamorous. I lie in bed watching him dress. In the evenings it's sexy being together in lamplight reading. So long as he doesn't talk. We got take-out last night at Tacos y Papas and parked on the brow of the hill looking down at the airport into the bay in pink-grey sunset murk like ancient Greece with masted ships afloat. Tom last night was saying again he just wants to live in a van, old junker with piece of foam in the back. I despair when he says that and when he hankers to rent a cheap trailer in Rosarito. I despair because it means he can only imagine dropping down. I have liked having him around but I've been angry for the same reason on account of his getting kicked out of the mission and being short on these paychecks so I have to lend him money. I pay for the jeep on my own - in the last 2 months he's put about $20 into gas - and before gas that amounts to about $400/month. I supply the only place we can meet. It would suit him to go on this way to the end, me supplying and he providing the appearance of a man. Tonight he'll get paid and he'll give me the $60 I lent him and want to buy me dinner and then consider us square. I've been antsy about living in San Diego where there's nobody to talk to, nothing to do. One day I'm going to want to live somewhere else. One day I'm going to want to step into moving water again. One day when? When the journals are transcribed? How long will that be - a year per section? Queens and London, Dames' Rocket. Aph Gdn this year - 3 years at least. Your checks are always less than you think they'll be. You always look for the easy option, pay by the week even if it costs more, go for a welfare hotel so you don't have to come up with first and last, any hole will do, nevermind clientele, light, visitor pay policy, view, flight path. And now bellowing in my room when Nor is entertaining clients downstairs though I've already reminded you. You are going to drag me down with you. Dream of an even easier option, not an option that will work. There's an essential part of your forebrain that's missing. Your mother did it, drinking when you were in her. I keep falling into your hope that something will get better and then being bitter. You're not drinking now and as far as I know not using but you still don't have practical sense. You lose all your socks.
- What I did do, was transcribe 1958 Jan-June, the first vol. It's only 8 pages. I'm 12 and turn 13. It's almost only about sex/'love' until the last long entry where I tell the story of visiting Morrisons'.
25th Friday after Thanksgiving - early in the dark - fog under the streetlights - Tom is asleep outside - and there I come to the end of what I have to say. This teaching life isn't good for me. I don't get into anything. I fall vacant. And what would I really like to do. Pagan movies. Independent funding. A large room with images around the walls. Powerful computer with editing software. Tech helps. Pagan states. An art school? Private students? 27 Looking for an edge. I've run out of edges. Neurophilosophy, check. Experimental art, check. Rogue professoring, check. Gonzo boyfriend, check. Community activism, check. Feminism, check. Photography, check. Poetry, check. Landscape architecture, check. Digital graphics, check. Therapy, check. Website, check. Anything I've thought of is less than or more of the same. I need more money but can't imagine money as a goal. - Journal - earliest - what can't be said - sex and god and social fear - what can't be said in any time period and why - what isn't said for whatever reason. Fantasy. 28 Waking and thinking it's the level - can I shift - yoga and careful eating - then wd see Tom as a source of junk - and teaching is too - the journal project also. Then I need a larger place in a leafier street and a secure non-teaching income. Priority - paying credit cards. Journal - putting GW up and SH. Printer. Fix scanner. - This has been the first semester teaching that has been dead - no writing - no love. - "I've earned the love of a good woman, or at least I've recovered it a couple of times." I showed him the front page I made today for 1959-60 Edmonton, the pink photo, and read him the section about Paul Sylvestre. Reading it aloud I could feel the liveliness in it more than I had, transcribing it. That was fun. He was laughing. He liked the dialogue. I said sometimes the writing was tedious because there wasn't enough happening and I was trying to get something going. It's true that when something does happen I write it well. 29 I could hear the humor more. I haven't written anything about living together since he got kicked out of the mission long ago last week. At eight o'clock I make his bed on the roof and he kisses me goodnight. In the morning in the dark he comes in the door and gets out his bags and bundles from their hiding places and looks for things, like his hairbrush or glasses, that he can't find. At this moment he must be shaving, there are little clicks from behind the curtain. The coffee pot brumming on the hotplate. I'm drinking tea. We're in a cold Santa Ana. No dew. Cold at night. Clear black sky. Brilliant stars. I've made him coffee and there he is in his little plaid boxers, kneeling on the floor, zipping and unzipping his backpack. He looks very glam in his construction worker boots and good haircut. Maroon short sleeved teeshirt going on over dark blue longsleeved teeshirt. Backpack being zipped again. Putting on his second sock. When he's naked he's thin and old but here comes the fifty year old construction guy. He's buckled on his jeans and now he's lacing his boots. Patting his back pockets. Oh Ellie you're still a fool for boyish boys. He's touching his forehead, looking at the floor thinking, puts spare batteries into his rear left pocket (wallet in his right). Getting his good reversible vest out of the closet. Rearranging what's in their top front pockets. Holding up his glasses examining them. Standing in the closet looking for his other glasses. Half an hour later. He's out the door. Hoping there's work today. If he has a bad week he won't have money for a room. The vets' tent is opening at the end of the week. He can go there. We sat on the couch staring at the precariousness of his position last night, and then I opened the computer and showed him 1959-60 Edmonton and then we watched the news. When he was packing up his bed this morning he called me out to look at the crescent moon over a desert sunrise behind Balboa Park's eucalyptus and palms. The air is very cold. After we turned off the TV last night I praised his immediacy and he praised me back. I said, Tell me one thing you can be with me that you have never been with anyone else. He said vulnerable. He meant that he lets himself stammer out his take on things. 30 The winter corner - 2 in the aft, sun onto this end of my couch. Visa bills. Because of last summer's trip I owe $5300 and am paying almost $100/month interest. I haven't paid off any of it this semester in spite of my raise. With the res and extensions and 2nd readerships I'll knock off maybe $2000 max. Need stuff - printer, teaching clothes, Premarin, gym, paint. Something for Rowen. Shouldn't travel next summer. Or go to the Baja. Pushing to finish transcribing Still at home. When I get home after the US trip [1958] something changes. During the trip I settled into writing. While I was away it mostly was still boys, but when I was back on the farm there's more daily life. I don't remember reading most of it since I wrote it. Come upon incidents I remember - reading Peyton Place, wearing the brown sheath, reading the Bible on Good Friday and imagining the scene, going up to the oil well with Jan, Myrt and Lorraine, building the raft with Judy and Paul, riding June to the creek, looking through the crack of the door at the pink blanket going up and down, crying when I saw M cutting up her grey car coat, being in the cemetery in Kelowna - and there they are with detail I didn't recall. In these passages I'm occasionally setting down something exact. From one day to the next I learn to spell definitely. I fall into pious conformity when I'm under strong influence, but I recover my secularity in a day. I revel in coming out of childhood's isolation by my own effort. There's a passage about the bomb. When I'm frothy it's always about the way people look, I take such a strong imprint of strangers' bodies. It's as if estrogen was my reprieve. It made me silly but it gave me focus and intent. Elation that carried me socially. I hardly mention Judy and Paul. I love being in these pages - the daily pages where I widen out in home life - I didn't know I was well-founded there - expanding so naturally - the way as we change, my vision of the kids in my class changes. The background is so stable I can do the fourteen year old's work without interference it seems, remarkably supported and unhampered. Wondering whether I go silly when I'm stressed and don't know it. Handwriting changes. I'm gripped by Still at home, twenty or thirty or forty pages a day. Have done the first five books, the Edmonton books, and the Sexsmith book. [notes working out scheme of volumes] 2nd December I'm something like 60 pages into the grade 9-10 stretch before Frank. Want to say consolidating. Writing detailed narrative - getting the GG [Governor General's medal] - "the secret of popularity" - challenging Ed - singing in the church at night - reaching into the community. What do I want to know. There's handwriting I don't recognize, what does it mean. The shift from early writing about boys to writing long scenes. Why I've remembered the instants I do, in whole scenes I wrote. For instance talking to Bucky at the community center, though I remember nothing else about it. I get into something about loving everyone that I'd forgotten. Why do some values carry through and others not, are the ones that don't carry through false from the beginning? For instance Reiner but not Janeen. I'm surprisingly clear about Ed. This: which grain of event is remembered and why it's that one - iconic somehow. And then the whole stories I forgot, that are refreshed, like the p.j. party where we went to the oilwell. The dresses I made - the pink gingham, the blue-green gingham, the turquoise cotton sleeveless, the ripe-fescue-colored brown cotton sheath. 3 Working on Still at home all day, scans, starting to fix the Frank sections when I lose patience with the Reiner stuff. The photo I took of Frank on the trampoline came through the scan as something special. He's bareback and knocked flat - the space around him in streaks - a wheel - beautiful luminous black and white v soft focus. It's the cover image for Frank after his life, which is a parallel website. His letters, my journal then, my story now, scans. 4 Started gym, see what I can do by the res. 6 weeks and some. 5 I want to talk about Tom's incompetence. It's now, what, three years since he stopped meth. In that time he was happy at the mission the first time. Adapted. When he got work he jumped out of the mission before he had a cushion. Then he was in the Reiss, in a hole of a room, and let his feet go because he was making a lot of money. Back to zero. So his feet got fixed, he's working again, he doesn't comply with the rules at the mission, and he's out before he has a cushion. I offer to let him sleep on my roof three nights 'til he gets his paycheck. His paycheck is less than he expects. I offer to let him stay another week so he can buy a cell phone and get a room in the second week of the pay period. He dribbles money. When the second week comes he doesn't have enough for a room. There's no work for most of the week so his next pay period isn't going to be enough to get a room either. It's going to have to be the veterans' cold weather tent. To get into it, he has to camp out before registration at 9 tomorrow. That means losing a day's work. It also means no sleep on a bitterly cold night. He's also showing as less reliable to the boss who was wanting to promote him. Am I concluding anything - it's no longer about drugs - it's fetal alcohol probably - forebrain damage - he's always going to screw up - he's never going to get his life stable enough so he can write - he's never going to have money so we can travel together or live together in some sense.
Uh - writing from students - hundreds of pages of it - in the aft stuck on Anna, heard a thought about the Still at home index page, sat down and wrote a section intro, edit notes and religion notes. I liked it that it reached through in a day in which I've done nothing but read students. 7 Cold nights. Tom was in line outside the vet tent last night in a thin sleeping bag on a sheet of cardboard. I phoned him this morning when I woke. Got his message: This is Tom. At the tone, it's you. I like that better than I've liked anyone's phone message ever. His man's voice, sexy and declarative, and the invention of it. Liked him again. - He packed and repacked his net bags getting ready to go back to the tent. Tired. Didn't get home from rolling cable in Indio until 3 Monday morning, slept 'til seven, worked until ten Monday night, same yesterday. Then last night on the ground outside the vet tent. I praised him for what has happened this year, feet fixed, phone, stayed sober, got on better terms with me, started his notebooks. Then I see his young husband smile. I'm his anchor. This morning I made the SH index page - the pink photo and volume buttons in a mulberry color. It's not perfect yet but it's good. And for vol 1 I'm using the yearbook photo of Al, which has a soft grain and at that size says more than I knew about why I liked him. Porous. So feeling. Gay, maybe. My stories would suggest. These pages are beautiful and they change the text, they set it as well as it can be set. I'm happy. Those and the Frank after his life page. - Look at this handwriting - love lady (sez Tom). 8th Bildungsroman. Bildungsdokument. How the writer is built. Frank pages. 60-61 transcription. I want to finish SH before the res. 9 Beautiful format for the Frank pages. Journal 1965 is short and beautiful and it's done. - Back from the gym. I'm editing Frank's letters. XLNC. The Schumann Concerto in A minor has just come on. Wasn't it amazing that I picked that record knowing nothing about it, and now, when I dislike so much, I can still like its tumbling sweeping wringing ache-of-life. Marveling too that Mary and Ed were willing to let it thunder on for hours when they'd gone to bed. Schumann Piano Concerto in A Minor Von Cliburn and the Chicago Symphony with Fritz Reiner 1961 RCA - Luke, Luke! Says he wants to come at Christmas. - I set Frank's letters out onto 4 pages - the edit I have - I'm going to be done the Frank after his life section soon. It's thrilling to be making it. The index photo is so beautiful and heartrending. Man knocked down. From inside himself. I'm feeling it's bipolar chemistry. Frank has died, and I'll die. I'm making something beautiful that keeps him a bit longer. I'm doing that for my young self too. It's illicit - is it? Is it? It is, it says, but there's a reason to do it. It's because it's love? Yes. It doesn't keep him alive but it broadcasts love. 11 Sunday evening. Tom and I in a Starbucks near the vet tent. Wire fence, security at the gate, two guys in yellow sweatshirts looking at IDs. He looked drawn and ill. We sat uncomfortably in a Starbucks full of kids doing homework. I told him what it's like working on Still at home and saw he'd gotten pinker. He was interested when I said I've remembered icons and when I read the stories I wrote at the time I see the difference between them and the icon. I remembered that instant and forgot everything else. 13 Transcribed 25 pages of 1962 (Jan-April) today, though it's a packet week.
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