| in america volume 28 part 2 - 2014 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
April 9 2014 (continued) Yesterday I was thinking I should write what I remember of the hospital when I was a child. When I recall it I start with a particular room that I must have been in at least twice because I remember myself in two of the four beds. I was coming from such a crude little house. What's strongest in my memory of the hospital is the building itself, its large strong coherent finished institutional quality, which seemed magnificence and intelligence to me. I loved those qualities without knowing I loved them. There were tall windows reaching up to high ceilings, wide corridors, large heavy doors that sighed shut on brass springs. There was electric light and the room I was in had a bathroom with running water. The floors were made of a smooth speckled material I didn't know the name of, that curved up onto the walls at its edges, a beige terrazzo. Window sills were broad clean ledges in pale varnished wood. My room had two windows facing east over a parking lot, that is, a large open space on the far side of which was a street where trolleys ran and in winter sometimes gave off blue sparks. Above the windows or between them was a big stencil of Mickey Mouse. I would lie in my bed in the dark listening through those windows to a distant train whistle somewhere toward the northeast in a city I didn't know. The distance I could hear in the train's voice was my way then of feeling the distance to my home far away somewhere else. Is that what I mean? I think hearing it was the only time in a day I thought of home or my family. I was interested by where I was. The hospital itself was like a town, with many unknown spaces and functions in parts I hadn't seen yet. I'll come back to them - [University Hospital 1938] [Mewburn Pavilion for veterans] [with trolley lines in the '50s or '60s] The room I was in had two sets of two high beds, each set with a divider glassed above the level of the beds. Each bed had a bedside cabinet with a drawer above and a small cupboard below, which would contain a stainless steel wash bowl and kidney basin. There would be a bedside lamp wired to the wall and a push button bell to call a nurse. On the cabinet there'd be a water jug and glass. I don't remember any of the children I was with in that room, only the space itself. Further north in the corridor outside the room I think there was a larger girls' ward with six or eight beds - but that may have been a room I saw in a dream. I do know that the last room before the tall heavy glassed doors into an atrium where corridors crossed and a rank of elevators clanged open and shut was a premie nursery. I would stand gazing through a window at nurses wearing masks and holding tiny babies. I don't remember what was across the corridor on its west side [I do now - it was a room with toddlers in high cribs] but I do remember that where it turned west at its far, south end was a windowless utility closet that had boxes of jigsaw puzzles and some children's books. The east-west leg of the corridor first had the nursing station and then what was called the sunroom. Across from the nursing station were the boys' wards. In the center of that wide corridor was a long low table with children's chairs, where we'd eat together off our trays that had been lifted out of tall aluminum food carts that had been pushed in rattling and would have columns of shelves for the brown bakelite trays. [University of Alberta pediatric wing of the era] Mid-morning and mid-afternoon a nurses' aide would push a little two-shelf cart rattling through the corridors with juice - orange, apple, pineapple, tomato and grapefruit. Juice was a marvel; we never bought juice at home. In the evenings - I've just remembered this - there would be cocoa and graham crackers. I only remember a few things about the meals. One was that when there was a chunk of head lettuce with a dressing poured over it I would take it to the sink and wash off the dressing. It was an unfamiliar thing that tasted too strong. At home we ate lettuce with sugar and cream. The other thing I remember is a lemon dessert that had cake and pudding layers somehow sorted in the baking process. I didn't understand how that could happen. There'd always be a slice of white bakery bread with a little rectangle of butter and a glass of milk. The food would have struck me as civilized in a way our food at home was not, the way the building and even the city people in it were civilized. The sunroom was in fact very sunny, with a rank of high windows facing south over another parking lot. There were large stuffed armchairs, leatherette I think. During afternoon and evening visiting hours visitors might sit there with the child they were visiting, but in the mornings I would push one of the armchairs nearer the window and pull the ends of the long heavy cretonne drapes over its back to make a little tent behind it, where I'd play on the floor. There was also a beautiful ceremoniousness about the nurses' uniforms. Beginning nursing students would wear a pink blouse with their white aprons. Further along they'd wear blue, and when they were graduate RNs they'd wear all white. When I saw them on the street they'd be wearing a dark blue cape. I knew they'd have to earn their white caps. Graduate nurses would have a black stripe on their caps. There were name tags too, on the front of their left shoulder. The young nurses were often pretty and I thought of some of them as nice. An older nurse who was a supervisor would sometimes appear; she'd have an unusual and daunting quality of authority I would think of as ugly. Doctors would wear an open white coat over their suit pants and white shirts and ties and they'd smell of cigarettes. They carried themselves casually, would appear briefly in mid morning, often in small groups, have a few friendly words and disappear for the rest of the day. Nurses who had graduated in other hospitals would wear the caps or uniforms they'd earned where they trained, so there would be a piquancy of foreignness about them. There were nurses' aides too, the lowest rank above housekeeping staff, who I think wore grey blouses. When was I in the hospital. At three, at five?, at seven just before grade two, at ten?, at fourteen. The first two times I was in an earlier children's wing, that had a long narrow wire-mesh-enclosed outside play area a couple of storeys off the ground. The room I was in then had windows onto this play area where I'd hear children running and shrieking. This wasn't a big room, four beds I think, two high enclosed cribs and opposite them two lower beds for older girls. I was in the crib nearest the door. There are just a couple of things I remember. One is a morning when I urgently needed to pee and couldn't get out of bed to go to the toilet. I think I tried to pee in my water glass and dropped it on the floor. Another is some kind of hostile exchange with the older girl in the bed kitty-corner from me, who I watched having visitors who brought her presents - I remember a radio and probably fruit. Another moment I have remembered before and don't quite remember now is when a visitor came through the door for me, a man I didn't know well, a relative of my mother's who'd been going to the city and had been sent by her to see how I was. [children's polio ward of the era] The second time I was in that wing, when I was five?, I was in a long ward near the first room, in a bed (not a crib) halfway along the east wall. What I remember from that room is that there were Brownie meetings for which a large papier mâché mushroom was brought from a cupboard. I think we held onto the ends of crepe paper streamers attached to it and jiggled them chanting to-whit, to-whit, to-whoo. The other moment I remember is an evening when my dad suddenly appeared to take me home. There suddenly were my outside clothes. I was anxious to make sure to take some salted peanuts and raisins I had been hoarding in my bedside drawer. I remember him carrying me through an exit foyer, not the one I knew later but a narrow room with dim orange light. Then maybe a hotel room? Then nothing until a night stop in a long bus ride. He took me to the door of an outhouse but didn't come in with me and I accidentally dropped my mitten down the outhouse hole in the dark. I wasn't glad to see him, I wasn't glad to go home. There's a neutrality of feeling about all of these scenes, a stoicism, I was just where I was (except for distress about spilling the pee and losing the mitten). It's interesting that architecture was so strong an experience in this. - It's a good thing I'm writing these down now because I'm likely going to start forgetting them. The hospital was my completely private experience, no one I knew had been there; when I was there I was nothing but myself. I'm not sure how often I was there. I think: 1. when I was three in the smaller room 2. when I was 5? in the longer ward 3. in the Mickey Mouse room south side bed nearest the door at 7 4. In the Mickey Mouse room north side bed at 9? 5. In an older wing in a room with 5 beds when I was 11? 6. In the newest wing at fourteen The fifth time was in a small room at the end of a long corridor on a high floor - just under the roof - in an old wing. There was a long adult women's ward at 90 degrees to my corridor so I could look across into its windows from my bed against a west-facing window. One night I saw a woman's naked breasts in lamplight when she was being examined by a doctor with curtains closed around her bed. It was winter. From that bed I looked down onto the hospital's laundry where columns of white steam would rise as I was eating early breakfast off my tray. I liked those breakfasts. I'd cut open a fresh crusty roll, butter it and fill it with my mashed up hard-boiled egg. By this time I was old enough to order off the menu. I remember more about this time. I remember two of the other girls, Helen in the center bed that stood out into the room from the window wall and Dorothy in the bed near the door. Neither of those older girls could get out of bed. Dorothy would sleep with a respirator strapped onto her chest. I had a cast on my right leg below the knee but I bopped around in a wheel chair or on crutches. I'd go to a linen closet up the hall in a nightie tied with strings behind my back and pick out clean panties and an ironed dress from a small pile. The dresses would often be too short or too tight. I'd rip them when I jumped along on crutches. No matter. I would sometimes entertain my roommates by roaring out songs after lights were out - I knew all the words to This old house. Remember someone coming in to tell me to pipe down. Up a few steps at the nearest end of the corridor was a small room, I think windowless, that was used by staff on breaks. Med students maybe. Near it was a locked gate onto the roof. I would sit there and read the magazines. Below it in the room just past ours was a teaching room that had a John Doe dummy on a stretcher. The room sometimes wasn't locked so I could go in and look at the seeming corpse. I had bits of money visitors gave me and would take the creaking elevator down into the basement where a tuck shop had chocolate bars and comic books, ice cream drumsticks in paper cones. If I were in a wheelchair I'd have to struggle with the criss-crossed folding elevator gate. The elevator didn't always stop level with the floor. Down on the tuck shop level were labs with white mice in cages. A strong chemical smell. Further down our corridor, past the entrance to the long womens' ward, was a newer wing with private or semiprivate rooms. At the end of that corridor was a sunroom that most of the time was empty. I was always interested in its late-'50s American magazines - Life, Look, The Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping. A washroom in the corridor of that newer wing is where I found interesting bandages in the waste paper basket, some with blood on them. When I was going home I wanted to take some of them to play nurse with, along with empty penicillin bottles still rubber-sealed, their seals held on by silver metal rings. Uncle Walter was at the dental college then and would visit me once in a while, handsome and urbane. When I was due to go home and he was fetching me I showed him the the bag with what I didn't know were menstrual pads in it and he was unaccountably flustered. That wing had sleek new elevators I could take down to the 4th floor, which was Maternity, with new babies in their bassinets beyond a window. That elevator opened onto grand foyers on every floor - I found them grand, with patterns inlaid in the terrazzo. The sleek heavy sound of elevators opening was grand too. Our trays came with a sheet of white newsprint on them to make a clean surface for our plates. I would ask the immigrant woman who worked in the little kitchen next to our room for sheets of the paper to draw on. I'd draw horses and ball gowns like those in Katy Keene comics. I was in that ward over Christmas. We had a tree in our room with presents under it. A parcel arrived for me in the mail, brown paper tied with string, and was put under the tree. I opened one end of it surreptitiously and felt into a cardboard box that had a doll in it. Did I pull it out or just feel it, I don't remember. It turned out to be a walking doll with brown hair, large blue eyes that closed, a pale blue dress and red Mary Jane shoes. The card said it was from my classmates, who used money raised in their Junior Red Cross activities. I didn't assume it was their idea to send it to me but I loved the doll as if she were my child self. It was obscurely significant that she was a walking doll. I remember myself as cheerful, even boisterous, in this time, excited by the complexity of the place, interested especially in the immigrant working people rather than the professionals - the janitor, the tuck shop man, the housekeepers. In all of these memories I have a confident sense of the orientation of rooms and corridors. I always knew where I was in the layout of the place. It might have been a country kid's native awareness of the morning, mid-day and evening sun. It was also that I was always interested in buildings. I'm seeing now how this is related to the way when I invented stories with my sister I would always begin by describing houses and furnishings. - Is that it? I haven't said anything about the surgeries I was there for. I'd be prepped the afternoon before, my leg would be shaved by a nurse with soapy water in a kidney basin. In the morning an orderly with a stretcher would come for me. I'd be strapped in and trundled into an elevator and along unknown corridors to the operating room. I remember once being taken through a sloping concrete-sided tunnel with large wrapped steam pipes running along them near the ceiling. I'd be interested to see the operating room but never had time to look around because the anesthetist would set an ether mask over my nose and mouth and tell me to count. I'd be out almost instantly and then wake on a stretcher in a recovery area. My ankle would be hurting and there'd be the weight of a plaster cast holding me down. It would still be drying, there'd be a smell of damp plaster. Or sometimes I'd wake in my bed in what I remember as a darkness of red pain. It would be extreme pain but I don't think I cried. It was just more of being where I was. For the first hours I'd be nauseated by the anaesthetic - I'd forgotten that. There'd be a couple of days of that red pain. They'd give me penicillin shots to prevent infection and they must have given me painkillers too. Then I'd be better and allowed up in the wheelchair and then later on crutches. I'd always be held to recover for quite a long time, a couple of months I think, until the day I'd be sent down to a basement room where a man with an electric saw would cut a line first down one side of the cast and then the other, so its two halves could be lifted off my leg one at a time. The saw was worrying, would it cut too deep? I'd feel the line of the cut as a hot little tickle. Then there would be my poor thin leg thinner than ever, painted red with mercurochrome, with dark sloppily-made stitches still present and large flakes of dead skin peeling. Smell of scorched plaster. The cast would be put back on and buckled in place with beige canvas straps. The cast would be quite grimy by now. After the stitches had been plucked out I could take the cast off to get into a bath again, which was wonderful, but I'd have to put it back on again afterward for a while. My leg would have to get stronger again. One time, out of the 4-bed room, a nurse prepped me with a different sort of anaesthetic, a creamy fluid she injected into my bum hole with a large hypodermic that had a rubber tube. I was interested in the way I was already beginning to fade out as I was being wheeled through the wide door. I was trying to stay awake to see where they were taking me but I couldn't. Something else I'm noticing in this story is how trained in passivity I was by these events and probably before them. Though I was intelligent, curious and lively I accepted everything done to me without protest or question. I was sent away and sent home, I was inspected by strangers and cut open by them, I was separated from everything I knew and given great pain. I don't remember being affronted or distressed by any of it. In a subliminal way I was greatly interested by it. There was a scope for my brightness in it, that my narrow steady life at home didn't have. My brightness coped with it. None of it happened in language, none of it was contaminated by language. I was not instructed in it. It was true adventure. Back in my family I was never only at home; I had another life that was only my own. I had been away living in a city, in a vast complex wealthy institutional order, secular, clean, more modern, more rational, run by more educated more intelligent people, a community on a much wider scale. When I went away to university it was a return to the hospital. I loved it in the same way. From the windows of the 4-bed room I could look down toward the front entrance, that I had only passed through a couple of times. Entering, there were several concrete steps and then big double doors, then a small foyer with radiators on both sides and more shallow steps, and then the main double doors into the reception area with its desk for visitor enquiries. That small anteroom or foyer impressed me so that I've often remembered it. What was it about it. I think it seemed beautiful to me, with its tall glass-paned doors on both sides and terrazzo steps probably brass-edged. It was a bright room that had no function but passage between entries on two levels. Is that it? I think the floor was green. When I was passing through Edmonton with Louie in 1992 that wing with its lovely front entrance had just been demolished, was lying behind wire hoardings a rubble of broken bricks and plaster and even some smashed furnishings no one had thought worth saving. - Pennebaker The secret life of pronouns Function words - ie closed-class - more by followers than leaders, truth-tellers than liars. High rates of articles better in college. sociolinguist text analysis 100,000 years ago talking, 5,000 years ago writing. Writing style generally revealed through function words. Perspective switching in health. After 12 people have trouble learning function words. Broca's lesions "Men consistently use articles at higher rates," high article users tend to be "more conscientious ... conservative and older" In formal situations people speak more like men, in family situations more like women. As testosterone levels dropped they used more social pronouns. "A man naturally categorizes and assigns objects to spatial locations" at higher rates. sex, age and social class Older, bigger words, more prepositions and articles. High social class - big words, articles, prepositions. Lower class - more personal pronouns. Noun clusters - articles, nouns, prepositions, big words - men, older people, higher social classes. Pronoun verb cluster - personal and impersonal pronouns, auxiliary verbs, hedge phrases. He's making it a contrast between task and social situation. Linguistic profile of genres. Formal, analytic - narrative. Formal - high ratio of articles, nouns, numbers, prepositions, few I pronouns, present tense verbs, discrepancy words (like would, should, could) or common adverbs (like really, very, so). More concerned with status and power, less self-reflective, drink and smoke less, less honest with themselves and others. Analytic - exclusives (but, except, without) - negatives, causal words, insight words (realize, know) - tentative words (maybe, perhaps) - certainty words - qualifiers. Higher grades, more honest, read more, have more complex views. Narrative thinkers - personal pronouns of all kinds, past tense verbs, conjunctions. 11 Wrote those five pages fast yesterday, slopped them down. As I typed them just now was seeing the simplicity of my child mind in the way I was writing it and yet my spatial-sensory take on where I was was completely clear and solid. I was it not I. What was unremarkable then seems remarkable now. Not just how I saw it but the seeing built into how it was made. It seems better architecture. Its era was late '40s? - May 24 Het Veem Theatre in Amsterdam in a program with Babette. Babette Mangolte and Jacob Korczynski - If I Can't Dance Performance in Residency Program with two of Mangolte's films and Martha Haslanger's Syntax. A point in the making. 12 It reached 102 degrees a couple of afternoons ago. Warm enough to sit outside at night but there were little biters. Have had to put away even the lighter duvet though it's cool in the early morning. - I give whole days to Sketchup. Yesterday it was a version of the old Point Loma studio I used for the doc. Today it was seeing what I could do with a 44x16x9 house. It's the best of my small narrow houses, I solved how to have an open plan and a central fireplace and my bed in the main room and still have a bathroom by putting kitchen, bathroom and work room up a couple of wide low steps. That plan even gives me a guest room. 704 square feet. [journal] [breakfast] [back door at noon] [back strip] [Rowen visiting on my birthday] 13 Feel guilty while I'm doing it, as if it were online gambling. Haneke's Amour last night. 2011. A woman in her eighties, a pianist, has a stroke, and then another. Her husband lifts her onto the toilet and hoists up her underpants after, changes her diaper, in the end snuffs her with a pillow, correctly. It was a thing to watch quite dispassionately: life can end this way. The moment that made me cry was when, after she's demented and flat in bed, he's listening to a CD and remembers her - sees her - playing very beautifully. It's seeing the loss to her of what she was, what she had made of herself. When Jerry was here I read him my piece about my mom. I was saying I wished she had been able to do more in her life. He was saying no, she went back to school and that was enough: she peaked then. I supposed he was thinking that way because although he's vegetating now there was a while he had big corporate clients. I hate the thought of having peaked. I want a peak - not the only peak - ahead of me. That's why I was in a rage with Greg. - On the other hand there's dear Lauderic Caton saying he was getting ready for a comeback all those years - thirty years? He was 60 when I met him, 89 when he died. 1910-1999. This morning I gave up on my guest room and made it a very clean yoga room, meditation room. Too sore to use it right now. I have also thought to rent a storage room and start packing boxes I don't use. It'll give me a feel for how many there are. And will help me focus on what to get rid of. There's grief in it but I like simplifying. 15 Eclipse of the moon from my bed in Glorietta Canyon last night. Blue Spica leading it and that was Mars running ahead. Jupiter below the Twins as they sank behind a ridge in the northwest, following Orion the butterfly. Bright moonlight on the rocks above me to the north. I held my palm up into it thinking whether to call it colorless. Fell asleep and woke when the shadow was a quarter across. It moved fast but then totality went on and on. It was pretty through the binocs, a soft effulgent pink. I was thinking the cone of earth's shadow must be much wider than the moon. When the moon's light was fading it felt like the world was dying a little. I had dragged my bed to a platform the flood left last summer, a 3' layer of sand wide as a stage and angled just right to face due south. As usual had made a very cozy camping bed deeply padded underneath with lots of covers and a hot water bottle at the foot end. Was in it by eight. Lay feeling the soft air on my face. A perfect temperature. Very still. Once a bat zipped past overhead, just once a far-away cry, just once a faint ticking that might have been a distant cricket. Continuous faint hiss in my left ear. I tried to watch the faint black and white smudges of optical cortex noise. Sometimes they would jump into focus as if a photo of a sharply faceted rock face, but I'd jump into attention and it would be instantly gone. What had I realized about that - oh, that I've been trying to look at them with my eyes. Maybe I'll be able to hold them steady if I feel it more as seeing with my brain.
16 Working on Can taxes. Paul sent two scans this morning, one taken with Katrin's family in Basel. I like the way Katrin in the background and alone among her and my parents grouped around Roy holding Luke, is gazing steadily at the photographer, who must be me. The other must have been taken by Uncle John Toews when Luke and I went down to Russell Square to see him and Aunt Lill in April of 1973. The two of us are side by side in deck chairs, an astonishingly beautiful young woman in a purple peasant blouse, long dark skirt and leather jacket is sitting straight-backed gazing with love at a little creature in duffle coat and striped pullover who is holding the sole of one shoe and looking tickled to be so adored. I posted that photo and am being amazed at how many have noticed it. I post marvels all the time and only three or four of my people acknowledge them. This time people are showing up I don't hear from, and some of Luke's friends too because I tagged him. It shows the difference it made then to be beautiful and still makes now in a photo, a beautiful person mattering more to people than a transcendently beautiful glass of orange juice or a blooming palo verde or even a story of a miraculous meeting. A beautiful person looking with love at a small child, I suppose it is, or looking with love at all. - Within that my puzzle why no one wants to know me now. 17 Mailed Can tax, was on the phone a long time figuring out what was wrong with my 2012 calculations, paid up BC Med and found out what to do about change of income. Luke showed up under the photo. T hasn't replied to it. - Mirabai was born in Rajasthan in 1498 - Krishna - villages she visited kept the songs alive in their own way - medieval form of Hindi dialect.
We feel that speed sometimes in Eckhart too. Kabir is perhaps 1398. A weaver.
It is the intensity of the longing that does all the work. Kabir says: Every instant the sun is risen, if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony, in the hot fields, or in a walled garden, my own lord is making love with me. 18 Cheryl getting ready to scan photos - I got into In English to begin to remember Indesign. Looked up when I had checked the last page and it was 8pm. This little hard cover book is just the size of AB's layout, nice. Coleman Barks Rumi: the book of love, Harper. Still am no mistress of this work, which was and remains some beyond me so I keep wishing for someone to show it to - is that still from its origin in confluence with Jam? Have to write back-cover copy. What do people need to know to be able to read it.
Logan Burns, Michael Deragon work brothers of another generation. Jam Trudy Luke Diana Kathryn Lyle. East End of Van. Louie. Susan Moul for wicked daring. Laiwan for early intervention. Collected writing 1975-1995 - what's the latest? Obscure cogencies. Spatial sense. Logan comment? Late afternoon excited knock on my open door, Craig saying Swainsons hawks were kettling - we stood together on the sand each with our binocs seeing (he said sixty) black shapes against a silver grey sky slowly gyring and drifting, cutting each other's paths, a constantly changing configuration of constantly changing forms. Quotations. 19 Font for front pages - shd be light - modern. - Have finished laying out In English far enough to send it to Em for proofreading - posted a call for proofers and layout crit on FB, see whether anyone's willing. Jpg takes of cover layout too - now what? It turns out to have been nearly ready before. - Two people have volunteered. Didn't expect either, Ann Tabor and Ben. What can I say about Mind & land - it can seem to want to be different kinds of book at the same time - photography book, film artist's retrospective, selected writing, philosophy of mind. Why is it one volume - because everything in it is by one person working from a same quest and sensibility in different cultural frameworks, usual contrasts don't hold: text pages are not black and white alongside colored photos. Photos are of a place where it began. I'm still the Epp girl from - 20 Easter Sunday I guess. 94 degrees a bit after 4. I've shut the door and turned on the AC just for a little while. My head is at a halt among many open docs - ML printing is hugely harder than In English. It's going to be more expensive than I thought. If 13x11 it has to be hard cover and at 160 pages that will be $142 plus tax. If best paper $202 plus tax. Sell for $300? $500? Sign? Shd it be 10x8, which could be soft cover and only $69 plus tax for the same number of pages - no because it squashes the photos too much. Still not sure of the mix of writing and film and photos - I should rethink and just make a photo book? It says yes. 10x8 at 60 pages softcover for a Here book would be $20. There's still the whole of photo work to do
Having to learn fast because committed to Cheryl's project. Will she go for it at that price? I have pdf copies of In English with Ann, Ben, Tom, Emilee, Cheryl. Doc copy of Favor's with Sonja. One to Mafalda too? Sent Cheryl as much as I know so far about resizing and resolution - looked up black and white. - Architecture expressing ways of loving to be. Barks describes a bridge in Isphahan made on two levels, the upper for traffic, the lower for pedestrians, close to the surface of the river with alcoves onto steps. Alcoves on the downriver side of the upper level are rooms. In north India the bhakti experience became associated with Krisna as a visualization of the right side of the body and Radha as a visualization of the left. Whole matter of Sakti energy, ways of uniting right and left and going upward with 'third'. Kabir. Fierce meditation practices guided by energetic visualization of sun and moon energies.
Bly's Kabir: ecstatic poems. Conjunctive and disjunctive conceptions of knowing along with different ways of using the body in knowing. "An intermediate realm of subtle bodies, of real presences, situated between the sensible world and the intelligible." "Tripartitie cosmology." What's wrong with that. Why assume three instead of one. It's as if they want to call space-time psyche and equate it somehow with the experience of imagining. The call for careful and subtle attention is alright, never wrong. What is it about 'mythic' and 'symbolic' - there's an actual mode of using simulation to perceive, maybe it can be called symbolic, though I don't like that. There's the way fairytales talked to me about the unspoken realities of my experiencing self - that can be called symbolic too but it was recognized without being interpreted as symbols presumably must be. Who is his 'we'? Is it himself? Is it how he imagines the general public? I get so irritated with these guys - Tom Cheetham this time - though they have good little bits, "we must" this and that, so pompous and half-baked, "we have lost" - what has he lost? And they're hanging onto a dream of maleness-god in some unacknowledged way, "their Lord". A lot of womb memory too: "the soul is no longer trapped in the crypt of the literal, material world." "The full immensity of Creation opens out to reveal what Ibn 'Arabi called 'the ocean without a shore'" - ie the open air after birth. Something he seems both to say and not say, that I remember from times with T and R, "only when --- begin to hear the voices inside can --- begin to listen to the voices outside." "Feeling-toned complexes carried by words." Michael Ventura "The history of America a history of the American body as it sought to unite with its consciousness ... stand against the enormous forces that work to destroy a Westerner's relation to his or her own flesh." In Stephen Diggs Alchemy of the blues, Spring journal 61(1997)16-50. the scintillae or sparks Reading his hodge-podge I was thinking the journal demonstrates already being what he says we 'must' become. His we isn't me. When he says we he stands in an unfree position to talk about a free one. Not about but from. What have I done today - checked through ML - feeling great doubt at the writing included - I haven't properly thought through the purpose of this book - There now are overlapping projects:
Down to 90 pages = $50, or $58 with premium paper. Seems to be easier to know what to say about it. Something about how theory isn't separate. I want it to be elegant and not daily - high classic sensory work. 22 It seems there's a lot more patient work to be done on M&L. For now, for C's book, I can make sure of technical skills I need. Resolution, color. I'm wondering dimly what this book's right shreds have to do with my Orpheus lines - I picked shreds out of a lot of reading and they touch off obscure powers maybe of the kinds he has unclearly in mind? Outside social mind, cosmological, soulful, something about open space, space evoked. Cosmos and soul both being open space. As if 'imaginal' means something like that? I hate when these guys talk about the Divine - I shrink back from it in them - but standing before largeness is the essence. Standing in largeness. A sensation when I imagine space? 'Images' - I can't imagine something without imagining a space it's in - it's not an internal space but it is imagined internal - as if a space within a space - Is there something important I'm not getting in these guys? "If we recognize the realm of the imaginal as the mediating world between the purely physical and the purely spiritual then the schism between them can begin to heal." So bizarrely reifying. What is his founding fantasy? Child between parents. What's he selling: opposite things, his child self and his intellectual defenses against it. He calls on other men broadcasting the same confusion. What is the ontological status of beautiful fantasy, I mean for instance religious fantasy at its loveliest. - When I lie down and feel into myself I find panic dread of publishing In English. I will do it, and I will have to experience indifference and dislike. I experience them all the time anyway, how is this different? I'm making what I feel is a large claim. It will be denied. Is the denial an actual danger to me?
23 Someone in Norway sent an email just now asking am I the Ellie Epp from 4 St Albans Rd in 1969. It must have been 1970 or 1971 and I don't think I remember him unless he was the man who went through Roy's pockets looking for the key - no that was Tony. Per Christan. "The soft spoken, mild eyed, friendly Ellie Epp taking pottery classes, I seem to remember." August he says. Why wd he have remembered my name, I assume he was enchanted with Roy. "Soft spoken, mild eyed" sounds like a writer, not necessarily a good one if that's how he remembers me. The duchess of Duke Street these nights. I gave up on Season 1 after it went into British class comedy but Season 2 has moments of lovely intimacy that are possible because of Louisa's directness, Charlie's sad sunniness, Mary's intelligent mildness and Welsh accent. The Major opening from type into realness. The cultural depth of the Brits. 1910-1925, DR's London, extraordinary elaboration of the clothes. The way Louisa walks, jerking and bent a bit backward always signaling command. No one walks that way now, it's a period walk. 1976 and 1977, a feminist work. Mrs Trotter's a portrait of female competence and how it would have had to be to succeed in her time. The wistful way she said "It's a nice little baby but I don't love it." Sweet handsome Charlie loving her strong spirit - that gets to me. Her working class accent, the way it stands for basic truthfulness, lonely autonomy. Her connections everywhere, that she's earned by being with people what she is, without prejudice. - The slides - there's a fairytale feel - the meeting - about all of them really, in their softness and graininess as well as their mythic subconsciousness. A sweet dream last night of making an appointment with young Rebecca [Tom's ex-wife] for the next night. Dashed to La Quinta today, shopped, came home, went to sleep, woke and worked on photos till almost 10. 25 I was somewhere at an evening gathering and there was Rebecca in her twenties looking fresh and sweet. I jumped forward to speak to her. We said we'd meet the night after, which I think of as a Tuesday. Last night somewhere grapes had been cleared out of a field. There was one left behind in a gallon pot, that I kept looking at thinking it looked more like a pea plant. I told Nora we'd take it home and plant it in one of her properties. Was imagining it in the future a large thriving pile. On the road yesterday the sight of a small old date grove burned out, long thin trunks blackened and high fronds hanging dead, a dull brown: a field of regular blackened pillars with little canopy. The drive has become shorter since I know the way, a reasonable shopping trip, Grande Prairie twice and a bit, Mapquest says 67 miles, 1 hr 23 minutes, quarter tank aller-retour. Empty roads. 26 There's weather. When I went to bed a racket of wind so strong I got up in the dark to look at it. At 3 definitely the sound of water falling off the eaves. - Note from Luke. Sara died day before yesterday. It turns out that I posted the 1973 photo when she was in hospice and Luke and his brothers were in the countdown. The largest trunk of my lemon tree broke off. So was my dream about Tom's ex-wife an intimation about Roy's ex-wife? Happening at about the same time. - In 1930 [VW] she was 48 and thought Ethel at 70 very old. - Superfluid - Light pulses 1-2 mile long in a vacuum compressed to ~50 microns "and at that point is completely contained within the atom cloud. This further allows the light pulse to be completely stopped and stored in the atomic medium and subsequently regenerated with no loss. This method has been used to generate the superfluid analogue of shock waves." Superfluidity ... a state of matter ... behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity ... self-propels Doesn't show gravity or surface tension. Found in astrophysics, high-energy physics, theories of quantum gravity. Related to Bose-Einstein condensation. The physical vacuum is viewed as a superfluid to describe all known interactions and elementary particles as different manifestations of the same entity, superfluid vacuum -
27 Oh ache of aloneness and idleness, I'm just crushed in it. Heartache. - Went out to pick up windfalls, bucketsful. - Food plan for brain and mitochondria - hunter-gatherer diet - green leaves - sulphur-rich vegetables (cabbage, onions, mushrooms, asparagus) - colors (berries etc) - omega 3s (salmon, grass fed meat), organ meat once a week - seaweed for iodine. - Fear of what - that this isolation will never end - that my best work will always be so unwanted I have to feel it pointless to make or give it - that no one will ever again have a pleased wish to know me - that all the neglect is my fault - that the only behavior that would make people like me wd be a loathsome sucking up that would make their liking useless to me - that I'm so soured and judgmental now that I can't enjoy anyone - - C's photos - she sent me 8 of which 1 is lovely - am I going to need to wrestle her for the felt ones - I will if so. 28 I was going to see Tom last weekend before my court date was moved three weeks. That's maybe why I'm something like missing him: complaining of him and remembering moments when I liked him, ie edged back into the old confusion. Talking to him about the way he's not one thing or the the other, how sore it's been that my straight-up mate has also been an actually vile person. I would sometimes show him work and get beautiful attention. There was the moment a tear fell into the computer as we listened to Obama's race speech. He would make up fights usually the same day. His language could interest me. And then the profane violent deeply crooked man who is so ill-intentioned toward me that he needs to disable me with lying and unending tricks of neglect. I miss loving. I'm stressed and flattened by not loving. He's not the right person to love. There is no one else. There I hang in my dilemma.
30 Sent Tom Bella Ferraro singing Skinny love for his birthday. He won't exactly like it but it's true.
Bon Iver in For Emma, forever ago I dreamed I was getting in the black van to go on alone. I was at the Valhalla House thinking I could just settle there. A ceanothus grown as a vine - I saw the blue flowers and thought yes it's ceanothus but the leaves are dead looking. A piece of furniture I thought I could move under the ceanothus arbour to sit on. It was like the top half of an elaborate dresser, but with little drawers. More - driving in fog with the windshield blind, head out the window. Pissing on the snow, looking at the little circles it had cleared here and there - they were significant I felt. I woke thinking about the M&L book, how to talk about the photos, what it is about them - wanting to work on it. Feeling I'm crossing over into being what I wanted, what I mean by being an artist, someone who is led, who lives deep and is real, what I was for a while. What I found. My social efforts have been wrong, writing G was wrong. Tom is right only when I'm declared in it - yes? I'm in the open now, I'm cleared for that. I'm getting into the black van and leaving my companions behind. - Studying the photos, thinking about them, being there. Meantime someone in Beaverlodge is on my index page, graphics page and press page. I was longing to buy the lake house and fix it up. It's too far gone, I think. - All day with my photos. Phone rings. Tom? Louie? Phone solicitor. Later phone rings again. Tom? Louie? Phone solicitor. I explode. Swear at her. Jesus CHRIST! Have never said that before. May 1st I'm with a new therapist, a young man. He's suave and smug. I start telling him things about myself that will give him clues how to take me. I say I have a PhD in neurophilosophy and have done therapy before, and have worked with students in a therapeutic way myself. He doesn't change his tone. I give up on him, tell him he can't see me. Emilee has In English and instead of writing about it has sent journal transcriptions from last fall forward. None of the other proofers - Ben, Ann, Cheryl - have said anything, or Sonja about Favor's. Girl students suffering of not knowing what to do - Emilee, Lauren, Sonja. Subject line: constituency [to Emilee]
- Finalizing ML is hard. I'm up against reconsidering the text, which means rereading it in relation to the photos. Facing that I feel my brain like concrete, wanting to pour something into it that makes it more fluid. Shd I publish Analog-digital? The scanned copy online has someone's marking all over it, paragraphs starred on almost every page. Or Being about, which Google Books says is almost 900 pages, which wd be maybe 400? 500? A large book. Analog-d wd have to be a pamphlet, it's only 80 pages = maybe 50. - Sat down and wrote the intro to M&L. 2 Friday morning. The birds have already wiped out yesterday's refill. They're always the same three kinds, house finches, sparrows, white-wing doves. At suppertime yesterday they were lined up yelling on the railing, and meantime four rabbits nibbling on the grit, seemingly at nothing. These days I'm on the exit slide, thinking ahead to what to pack, what to leave behind. Free possibilities are coming to me. I could book into the house in Eastend for some months. I could work at Nyingma for 6 months. I could buy an old little place in the PRC for summers. I could live in a women's hostel in NYC. I could be in London. I could talk my way into a semester at Emily Carr, or Grande Prairie College. I could publish Being about and get it into libraries. Or the San Francisco Art Institute. Or OCAD. Or NSCAD. I could hang out with Rowen. I could run into people in the street who admire me. I could have a book launch in Vancouver with Cheryl, and one of my own too. I could visit Barry. I could publish in Canadian Art. Festivals. If I'm leaving at the end of August I'd have to give notice at the end of July - or leave at the end of September. That puts me in Van at the beginning of winter, which is foolish, but I'm losing money fast. Want to go to Canada with a portmanteau: books and movies, a working press. Two days all day on Sketchup. I sit down I expect briefly at 7 in the morning after I've made tea, made my bed, swept, assembled orange juice and put it in the freezer for later. Sometime in the afternoon I notice blasts of oven air from the open door. Don't want to stop to eat - will go get a little bowl of peanuts to stave my wolf. Forget to drink. By evening my crotch has been sweating all day and I begin to notice the smell. I may hear birds 8' away at the feeder hung on the porch rail. Three times a large squirrel came trying to get into its small hatches. I jumped up each time to bang the screen door and scare it away. Doves crooned. There was a small seismic jolt. It was Sunday, the monitor said. Judy walked past in a hat though it was five in the afternoon. There were blasts of wind. The screen door jittered. Once the side window's venetians flew out and crashed back. * came with a chainsaw to trim back the broken lemon trunk. Sometimes there were voices. Providencio's roosters crowed in the afternoon. I didn't get tired. It's constant action and decision. Sometimes I reconsider and back up 20 steps or more. I'm working on the Point Loma house and garden. It was partly remembering and partly inventing. Such a fluid tool. Where to put the staircase has been the hardest decision. One thing will suggest another so I'll try it. My very lovely 16x44 house fits in the SW corner of that garden. I'm getting better technically, got the first floor / ceiling / 2nd floor / roof layers relation almost right this time. Am remembering wall allowances mostly. Know to zoom in and check line origins when the tape measure won't work or when wall surfaces disappear. Realized the tool is always right. Have figured out how to use push-pull to make window glass. It's a way of learning architecture - I mean learning what decisions to look for. [library early] [upstairs bathroom] I'm always wanting symmetry but there are questions about how to integrate symmetrical elements with non-symmetrical elements. I was trying out an 8' grid, though there were bits I winged that have ended up off grid. A really long pool. [tulips and olives] A citrus orchard. A public entrance and a private. A very big studio but not as big as it was. [studio January noon] [studio with cat and olives] The long E-W corridor is the most important structure in this design. [corridor midday] It's as if the studio is an extension of the R hand. Along with the studio the space that has been most important to me in my years with this house has been the little winter sun spot that juts forward a bit in front of the fireplace room, ie the spine room, which makes it the chest or heart space. [heartnook and cat] [heartnook and Krasner and flowers] So there's the grid and there are symmetries, and there's its psychology, and there are things I like in a garden, for instance a pool a bit raised with an edge for sitting, and long wide shallow steps, and platforms overlooking, and rampart corridors [cat bridge and late breakfast], and trees on sight lines as well as here and there, and trees in colonnades, and high walls with shadows thrown, and a kitchen garden separately. I have the kitchen and manager's office as mirror images on either side of the library. [kitchen] [kitchen June early] [kettle corner] I like a big bathroom with space for beautiful color. [bathroom flowers] Door into the studio big enough for a grand piano. Drawing these models and maybe especially this one there's a strong sensation of actually making something and making it I suppose with magical speed. Meantime who showed up: late in the day David L after 10 months to say he wants to mail me his book, David Beach with a Youtube interview by Stuart Shankar, Sonja on Avaaz and Ant Bear business. Tony yesterday. So how is it I can be tireless with this play and very soon at an end with other projects. It's like that with real gardens too, so it's not that it's simulation. Yesterday late I was remembering evenings after work when I'd go to Publab and learn Photoshop - the way I'd do things at random and find marvels - unicorn runner, bird gods, not in heaven's name, edges, many. Wasn't there immediately, and I'm not sure Photoshop has all the same tools, or at least I wasn't sure where they were. Was beginning to find some of them again and a few new ones - fiber - but it isn't as gripping as it was. - And why have years gone by without visual play. 6 The wind. Comes blasting from the west. It's inconstant, comes in bursts that strike the house hard. For the last couple of days there was a time around noon with hard wind for an hour. Often it's late afternoon. This morning unusually before dawn, rattling the windows and making the roof creak. It's stringy not a broad front, I could see it on a farther tree but not in the near palm. Listening to it I feel the house unsheltered on an open plain with large forces bearing down. It's a dark morning, clouds moving fast toward the east. - All day organizing the Here2012 photos and resizing to 1500. 8 Day 4600. I resized the photos and now when I see them am quite flat on the whole site as if my love for the place made me see the photos as better than they were. A lot of the site is just mention. What are the actual good photos:
Meantime I'm so much liking the pink Photoshop thing from 2000, the way it is soft blushes and hard edges, strict grid and all sizes of variation of grid, anomalous interweaving of foreground and background. My eye chases all around it finding more paintings within paintings because there are so many choices of frame and scale. Recently just one pretty wallpaper image working off a water surface. 9 My green pajamas showed up in a dream. I was glad to see them. - Collocation - it's a word I didn't know I knew. It arrived in a sentence and I liked it but I had to look it up. Its main use was technical in linguistics but my use wasn't wrong. My brain is losing names of people I've known for years but can come up with moments of mysterious expertise. - I've been dismayed by my reflection on window panes because I seem not fatter but broader, like a little rectangular box stood on end, and I'm softer all over, especially on my upper arms and belly. - Scolding Emilee on email for being so weak in her own defense. She prays for compassion. I said women don't need to learn compassion but they need to learn when it is self-endangering and even corrupt in them. She said:
I said:
When I went to bed after I wrote that I thought about what defense I'd want from the space man if he came here now. Would we sit at the table? No, outside on the concrete edge in the dark. He'd just put his arm around my shoulder. The circumstance I'd want him fearlessly to understand is my increasing ugliness and its social effect. The book is the space man I have. The help I need is with the ground of misery I feel about being ugly. I know it dates back to when I was little but it was less for decades and it was sex that held it off. An Alice Munro story in which a woman with a lame leg has a long affair with a married man. Early on he tells her he's had a blackmailing letter from her former servant. She wants the affair to go on, has money and offers to pay. Gives him the money twice a year to put into a safety deposit box. The supposed blackmailer dies. She tries to write her lover to tell him. Isn't satisfied with her attempts. Wakes in the morning understanding her lover wrote the blackmail note and pocketed the cash. This story [Corrie in Dear life 2012] goes straight to a bleak thing in my connection with Tom. The lover in her story sets up cash payments to himself for putting up with her leg because he has a subliminal sense that it's due him. There has been something like that in Tom, he's had to be stingy with me to make sure he doesn't in effect undervalue himself. I've been in pain for 20 years because he does that. - It's why he says I'm tight with money, and why his not having money has crushed me sometimes. I'm assuming he's not conscious of this and would deny it. At the same time there's the way I'm over and over very consciously in pain feeling he's not good enough for me in the many ways he's not. Has that been me picking up his own unconscious protest? It says yes. At the same time as a lot of the way I have been with him says he is worth more than I am - for instance I photograph him and write about him and give him good rather than worthless gifts and have learned his stories and have helped him in crucial ways, and he has done none of those things. My impulse has been to make him worth a lot in me and then later it has been to curb that in myself because it's unequal, so I've been self-canceling. I was emptying drawers and cabinets today - clothes and bedding - thinking that when I'm in town next week it may be the last time in this life that I see Tom. He won't stay in touch whatever his intentions. Are there things I should say to him or ask him. - Asking hardly worth it because he lies.
I feel forsaken all around, even by myself, especially by myself, the self I used to like to be, who could throw herself forward with hope.
10th Email from Tom "Best news ever!" Mathew had written asking to know about the Fenglers. "I know we don't talk often but I am still your son and Lincoln is your grandson." Then T says to me "You know that I know that if it weren't for you, none of this would be happening. I don't want to fuck it up now." I write back "You won't fuck it up, you're on the good road. Me on the other hand, I have no idea what road I'm on." He replies with the last paragraphs of the Big Book, which makes me cry. Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us. We shall be with you in the Fellowship of the Spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny." - Then I work on the Point Loma house for the rest of the day. It does away with sadness, the dream of a house. 11 A brutal wind last night. - Luke on the phone telling about Sara's day on Friday. He was in his livingroom in the dark, looking through his bow window toward a hawthorn in white bloom and a centred three-quarter moon. I had looked up from Sketchup - Sunday afternoon, 3:38 - and thought, it's ll:38 where he is, I'll try him. His voice, Hello. He was on the street steps from home, just coming from Josh and Nathalie's. He was thinking of me that moment he said. Sara had asked him to look after organizing. He'd been the senior man and people had liked what he'd done. He and his brothers spent a week making space in the house, cleaning. The cremation had been at nine and afterwards people had been at Denton Ave all day. The boys and their women, Sara's estranged brothers, Roy, Jill and Sean, Andy and Emily, Hannah, Sara's longtime friend Martin from France, every room was full. They drank and told stories and cried. Luke thought it couldn't have been better done. He sounded happy. He said he walks the streets talking to everyone, stockbrokers, drug addicts. He said he's beginning to feel he lives where he lives. I could hear that he is feeling he belongs. I love to hear it but does it mean I've lost him more. 12 Figured out music on the iPod finally - went through my CDs and where there was just one track I wanted, extracted it for the journal. Some of the music makes me crack into such grief for Tom or my former love for Tom or Tom's music or just the end of our time. It's extraordinarily intense. I'm thinking we didn't kick out the slats but I did, I felt something for him far beyond what I'd ever felt for anyone else.
Accounts of 20 years
What hasn't been possible
in america volume 28: 2014 march-august |
