| in america volume 28 part 3 - 2014 may-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
14 May San Diego PB Starbucks while my fluids are flushed and valve gasket replaced. Tom's place in the early morning light. Soft venetian shadows on the wall. Sweet air through the screen, geranium leaves, green valley with palms. Tom in the kitchen ironing a teeshirt. All the years. He's gone predictably into sweet talk and I like it. My gloom lifts. I look younger. I liked his strong hands on my spine. I liked hearing his sleeping breath. I fell asleep instantly last night and slept well. I liked his haircut - the right haircut again finally. His place looked nice when I arrived alone after the freeway miles. Tom is thriving at the Senior Center. "They love me." "I can't believe you don't love me." "I do love you but I want to love somebody who loves me more." "Good luck with that." - So many bodies - so many clothes - so many breasts and bums and bellies - so much insulin-resistant flab - another odd human being every 30 seconds. 19 In grey dawn this morning Tom awake early for work lay down next to me and I held him round the chest. A bird cheeped steadily. New City Hall park yesterday watching kids on the slide. Sunday afternoon waiting for the library to open. Palm trees, open space to the Esplanade, the City Hall building elegantly of its era, good postmodern playground equipment, a lot to see, light sun making me brown and Tom pink. Then sitting next-by at a long table by a 3rd floor window looking toward Coronado Bridge coaching Tom impatiently in Tumblr, he impatiently being coached. Friday morning copying songs off his CDs onto the iPod, Friday and Saturday set up at his desk he scanning and I photoshopping, efficient together, he wound up in Vic stories, I hearing myself saying right, wow, uh-huh, yuh, mm, thinking he never makes those supportive sounds for me and I should stop. [Vic young} [Vic and Mac] {Vic and Mac at a professional dinner] This morning with Nora at Dawes Marketing and having lunch at Barrio Star with her assistant. Brought her the green bedside table with Norman Rockwell's reading children. Wednesday at PB. Long talk with Matt who lives in Balboa Park and is lost at either end of his life, father somewhere in Alaska maybe and 16 year old son he's not allowed to see. Then in Starbucks a beautiful 27 year old woman, what was her name, Adrienne, from was it Idaho, working as a publicist in LA. We talked about what's difficult about younger women lovers. Then saying goodbye forever at Robert's Automotive. I was all cheered up by having had strangers wanting to talk to me. Looked 20 years younger than when I arrived Tom said. Saturday night with Eliz and Rick for dinner. Rue so so old, hips sideways from his front legs, hardly lifting his head to say hello, being fed by Rick from a spoon. New young dog a lab-hound with silky ears. Rick and Eliz both a little more worn. Eliz and I looking at her Sketchup photos of a house she's renovating on Mount Soledad. She was teaching me how to find materials online, and how to use V-ray and groups and elements. We were lovely company together on top of nearly twenty years. When I lived in her guesthouse Rowen was a little boy. She was remembering eating supper sitting on the floor in the kitchen, though she'd forgotten it was with Mark's two little boys who are grown men now. Her house isn't the perfect period cottage it was, it's a married couple's compromised space. The exquisite maple floors have been left to wear. Since she went to architecture school her taste is more Dwell, a modern couch and modern armchairs in the living room. Driving the city feeling how comfortable I am in it, how well I know its ways and byways, the tracks I've made down 4th, up 5th, along Mission Bay to Robert's, up Washington from Pacific Highway, along Robinson to the right turn after Park Ave, even up 163 to Friar's Road and then west to the mall with the Apple store. Along past the airport and across the bridge on the way to Charles Street in Point Loma. Anguish about leaving Tom gone because I'm with him now and it's natural as if it will never end. [Tom in May 2014] "If the reward comes randomly - sometimes after 50 presses and sometimes after 150 - the pigeon will press with much more vigor, even after the rewards are removed entirely." Skinner random reinforcement. 20th, 5571 Bellevue Street in Bird Rock Under the pepper tree, leaves rattling down. Shade of guava trees grown to maturity in the trench I helped dig. The neighbourhood isn't silent - power saw, traffic, airplanes - but the yard is so enclosed that it feels quiet. I don't understand wanting this much stuff. I don't like the many worn, rusted or corroded surfaces; my skin shrinks away from them. I don't like how dark the house is, am uneasy without bright windows. When I look at Nora's magazines I can see what she wants to make - in stories about country houses in the south of France this sort of clutter may have silted in with many generations of family experience but here doesn't it just evoke easy miscellaneous spending? Hardly any of the chairs are comfortable or even sittable. I do like the passionflower arbour with its oak-leaf hydrangea blooming against a pea gravel path, with a matilija poppy clump beyond. I like this spritely young guava in a big cracked pot. I love the thriving grape vine that screens the gate, it's so full and dark green. I like the string of lights above the way in. I like the steps I designed and the concrete terrace I designed. These mullioned kitchen casements with celadon trim. This iron railing. Whatever that softly rattling bird is, the vigorous gas burners, the cypress pillars three or four times the height they were when planted. All the motion of branches. 21 Bench under the guava row. The line of tune in my head these days is the Rankins
Lupe was here cleaning. Pleasure and discomfort of living in so large a house with no energy cost to me. It's wonderful and horrible. I'd love always to have a cleaner and am always telling motel maids not to bother about my room. The light through leaves all around, at every window. Morning surfers at Tourmaline this morning. Tom in Sacramento at the Feed America event. Scent of nasturtiums from a little bottle next to my bed. Oh the grape leaves - I've moved into the sun. Rowen's 29 tomorrow. Two weeks - what work can I do. I found the gates for Nor, knew they'd be right for her tall hedge. [west gate] [north gate] 22 Puzzle in World of Interiors magazines as in Vogue and Art in America why people want bizarre excess rather than beauty, trade in it, make a market of it. It's about hooking attention as if that sort of feeble attention is worth having. - As if all along my ethical stand has been against that human practice of clamouring for attention by any desperate means. And then not having attention. Except in moments when I have won it in ways that aren't about getting it. The herb garden in that moment, when all the roses billowed and the young woman said This is the most romantic thing I've ever seen [with the Six Senses group]. Lise about The Golden West. "The creation, I'm teary." People shyly about Trapline. Jody Golick with Being about. Jody Stoddard about Wild research. 23 I see a Visa card on the sidewalk. Pick it up, look ahead for whoever has dropped it. More cards dropped at intervals. I go along picking them up. Have a handful when I see a man hurrying along. I call out to him. He doesn't hear me. I keep calling. Hello - hello. Finally he turns. I glance at his driver's license in my hand. Something like Passmere? Though not that? A man has come to an organization - it might be a school - with a proposal to talk about sex. I'm doubtful about him. I talk to various people about him. To a lesbian feminist in a group of them I say he defines sex differently than we do, he defines it as intercourse and we define it to include other things, with a gesture to indicate her whole body. Where has the man gone. Many large rooms full of people. There's a table like a council table. It's the feminist leaders. I'm squatting on the floor behind two empty chairs talking to one of them about the man. She waves toward one of the chairs to invite me. The man is beginning his pitch to an assembly. I interrupt, ask him in a strong voice what he wants to get out of this. He turns and goes away with his entourage. Two men arrive who I think are reporters. One of them is a tall good-looking young man in a Burberry and white scarf. I tell him what just happened. He says it was a very aggressive question. I begin to disagree and wake. Graham Passmore thought he had a chance with that beautiful young woman because she was lame. I fled. Tom had dropped his i.d. piece by piece. I followed after picking it up. There are always dubious men wanting to sell pitches that are hiddenly about defining sex and gender to suit them. Here a photo falls out of the further pages. It's the one I call Little Duck. It's Tom when he was two, wading in the sea holding a toy? A leaf? He's fair-haired, has large hands and deep-set big eyes. He's the adored late-born only child of a strong-minded pair who were continuously taking his photo. Tom does and doesn't believe me when I say we may never see each other again. I watch him carefully to see which it is. I transplanted his bird-planted * tree into a large pot at his door before I left his house. It had grown to 12' in a gallon pot, had bloomed, had reached forward tied to the rail. We're parting very lovingly. Sylvia and Jorge yesterday, Sylvia 77, Jorge 87, a beautiful gentle old man very dark around his eyes, Sylvia very slight, still swimming in the Cove every morning. I'm in a state of love with them. [bookwork on student visitor not transcribed] 27 Tuesday early. I keep going back to bed because it's the only comfortable place to sit. I keep revising the place, wd want a row of dumpsters along the curb. Wd open walls in the frontroom cave and uncurve the ceilings. Question: if this house were Nora's dream what wd it say? There's lovely craftsmanship in for instance this built-in cupboard, the tile upstairs. There are velvety linens on this bed. And then there are the scabby faux-aged cabinets in the kitchen and elsewhere. And then the scaling genuinely aged pieces some with good lines and some not. (There's the fact that I'm thinking about it.) There's this genteel pale sage green and the slathered oxblood candle-wax finish of the frontroom. As a house does it say a body more rapt in cultural fantasy than interested in world? But Nor is more interested in world than most: she and her mother looking at a spider together with the naturalness of long habit. But advertising is cultural fantasy. Is the house mostly an ad? More a cabinet de curiosités. Where I look around irritated does she gaze fondly, is it that she's quicker? Appreciating many kinds, the way she can be not disturbed by my form and not put off by Michael Duke's long dirty fingernails. A various capacity: life as all this oddity. Needing its oddity close by to keep touching off the whole capacity? So is my irritation a kind of puritainism? No it's a different assignment. I have an assignment. She's more of a spectator. Okay I understand that. Do I have time to talk about how it's been with Tom? He doesn't want to crash. He's on good behaviour. There have been moments I've loved. One here, lying with him holding me round the middle in bed, a golden fur in my chest. An hour Sunday morning when I asked him to talk about what's wonderful about me. Saturday morning telling him the story of the hospital and Paul Sylvestre and he feeling it. The way he is now sometimes able to hear stories if I introduce them well. I'm aware that he's wanting not to crash and I'm letting him half-believe future scenarios I don't believe. Driving these lovely familiar streets I'm not having this-is-it feelings; I'm noticing it's the way it was with Mesa Grande, I'm detaching; and it's like that with Tom too. We are ending well, beautifully. What's done is done. What's made is made. I don't want a lien on my next ten years. I've loved his company. I've loved our comfort together. I've been realizing how much of my dissatisfaction has been simple resentment. Work woman has been tolerant because she's escaping.
28 Eliz and her garden yesterday. At Don Bravo the bright-eyed woman says "Long time," and "Bowl?" and "You cut your hair." I was at the back door bar eating a Bahia bowl with fish looking at blue morning glories on the wall as at first. In the 5th Ave Starbucks the barista who had a baby puts out her hands to hold mine for a second. I've had a life here. 29 Eliz's exactly right shape jumping on the shovel in the back garden's white and green bed where we planted an oak-leaf hydrangea, a paeony, a white agapanthus, some white campanula, some ferns. I pruned out tangles, scattered food. We set out an agave collection in the bed that never succeeds. - Now I'm thinking of instructions because I want that garden at its lovely best. - 15 minutes of streaks - [trying for that on video] My search in the underworld for Tom's realness and my own Physics of space and grain Myth/stories Orpheus Going beside ... Beside 30
It's a drama of pattern then sudden wipeout then pattern slowly forming then wipeout then slow forming that may be suddenly interrupted then slow forming, as if we are seeing lifetimes coming into existence and demolished again and again. We wait in suspense for the pattern to clear. [from OB pier] 31 It's overexposed. 7. the pink?
- Tourmaline for sound because it's just waves. 1st June
At the pier café out past the wave zone quietly wrinkling. I'm a bit feeble as if my heart is stressed. 2nd The pier zones. At the far end it's deep slow silent green. Seaweed zone near the café. Rolling surface constantly changing its angle to the light. As if a heavy roller is advancing under the wrinkling skin. In my head I'm talking to Tom about how to think of being left. It will scare up his mom. All these years (he says) he hasn't believed we're finally separated. When he has me he holds back. When he thinks he might be losing me he tries hard. For both of us loss is the ineluctable structure. It just goes on. [Tom at 16] [Tom in the Mission Beach house] Another way to see it is bands of pale gold shimmer advancing, advancing, advancing directly toward me. A sea of metaphor. Filtered sun today. 15 minutes of what - imagining what will we know read in a husky whisper over this constantly approaching rolling surface.
"Nobody got a better shot than you -"
Sheer exhilaration - long agonizing process over. T: I loved you as much as I could - fear - I'm not going to go off the deep end - what's scaring me is I'm starting to live a responsible life and I might blow it up - if I blow it up I don't have a lot of time left to put it together again.
June 7, Borrego It's Judie's birthday - she's 66 I think - Vimeo of her talking about development work in northern Pakistan - she has false teeth! and is fat, but clear and joyful in her almost 50-year working partnership with Michael. We took different roads. But what IS the essence of rivalry in both of us, that feels as if life-worth is at stake.
She still has what she had on me in the sense of the life her normalcy won her - house and long distinguished marriage and adventurous service - though she no longer has the form of it she had. I still have what I had on her, the brilliant edge, and I have what I've made of it in more courage than she has needed. She has stayed closer to home, her voice says: I can still hear the Mennonites and the PRC in it. We each have our way of feeling we've won. But is the structure indissoluble forever? It's a fierce instinct.
And yet: isn't there some mammal dominance thing that matters as an esoteric permission to move up? Has Judie taken back some advantage I had? Cain and Abel and the father's blessing? Does family position matter in that way? Surely it does. When we were at home I had a clear field. Do I still? If I did would I be asking? What wd be clear evidence of winning? Cultural recognition? A major Canadian prize? If I had that wd it crush her? No. And why don't I have this bitter undercurrent with Paul, who's distinguished in something nearer my own field? Because sisters are sexual rivals? She must have taken something from me? It says no. I called her Tupa One because she couldn't talk or play, ie I was already mad at her. - I remember a scornful moment in the democrat when she must have been still a baby. And then there were all the years of her interested listening and admiration, which cost her, which I knew cost her.
- Tom's dream yesterday morning: he's being ambushed by a dark mass, angular but fluid. It's the devil, or death. He throttles it and it fades back but then tries again further on. He climbs a hill and feels he may have got away from it but - I said it's the threat of reactivation of the time of his mother's death, which he throttles in his own throat.
He praised Last light wonderfully. Watching it with him I felt it more than I had. He remembered Bede's bird, which I then remembered him telling me about in the tent in William Heise Park. In our last morning in his flat he was sitting next to me on the bed with a look on his face. I said, Are you having solemn thoughts? He cried for a moment. I liked that he minded. We drove here peacefully on Wednesday after his old-person class. Cesar, Rosa, Fanny, Tom being an enthusiastic host gazing into people's rooms. Thursday we read separately and together and after it cooled sat talking on the front porch ledge with our bare feet on the sand. There was a high half moon. I said, Where's the sun? He understood for the first time that it's always full moon somewhere. The last night at his house standing outside looking at his mass of plants against his lit wide window. He had been grateful for two things I'd done for him, repotted his tree and got him started on his family history tumblr. He always feels me in his house. Yes I've loved him in action though not sentimentally. He has loved me too, in persistence and touch and in more emotional watchfulness than I have credited. The book keeps saying we'll never see each other again after I leave. 8 A legal offense since about 1700 to print the word cunt. [This from the intro to The selected letters of John Keats] 1816-17 too much in Solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought as an only resource. We intend, though, to get among some Trees. abstract endeavour to add a mite to that mass of beauty which is harvested from these grand materials by the finest spirits and put into ethereal existence for the relish of one's fellows So now in the name of Shakespeare, Raphael, and all our Saints, I commend you to the care of heaven! But the sea, Jack, the sea. I must in honesty however confess that I did not feel very sorry at the idea of the Women becoming a little profligate. The Wind is in a sulky fit. Truth is I have been in such a state of Mind as to read over my lines and hate them. Things which I do half at Random are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of Propriety. This very bane would at any time enable me to look with an obstinate eye on the Devil Himself. I know no one but you who can be fully sensible of the turmoil and anxiety, the sacrifice of all what is called comfort, the readiness to Measure time by what is done and to die in 6 hours could plans be brought to conclusions, the looking upon the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Earth and its contents as materials to form greater things, that is to say, ethereal things. 1818 I was well read in their faults. Yet knowing them I have been cementing gradually with them. The antients were Emperors of vast Provinces; they had only heard of the remote ones and scarcely cared to visit them. I know not your many havens of intenseness, nor can ever know them, but for this I hope naught you achieve is lost upon me. I live in the eye, and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest - this on his walking tour. - Keats' letters seem best when he's reading Shakespeare: I can see S's acerbic torsion in him. He doesn't have Coleridge's physical intuition and so has hardly anyone else - he wishes for heroic subliminity and so is more old-fashioned. - There I went to UBC and SFU looking for courses in Shakespeare and the Romantics. Paul sent a photo from a hotel on Hong Kong Harbour, Cheryl wrote that yes we should work on an intro by writing back and forth, thermometer in the shade at the back door says 110 degrees at nearly 7pm, Tom sent half a dozen craigslistings of apts for less than $600 in Bellingham. If I could do another degree it would be in Eng lit and lang, wd like to steep in that sea now that I've satisfied psych and phil. In film and images the right sea is only actual world. 9
- Thinking of Vancouver a bit, worriedly - for instance looking at Colin or David's FB pages and feeling instant hatred for women my age who are still beautiful and dim nausea at the names of Vancouver writers - horrible oppressions of community that I've done without - what defenses or assertions have I now, that I hadn't then, to help me in all the hatreds and in their oppressive suppressions - What I seem to need most is a place I can love - rooms and views - quiet inside and life outside. Don't want to live anxious about money. Want to dress well, fix my teeth, eat good things. Maintain the jeep. Travel sometimes comfortably. What defenses or assertions - a PhD, 4 books, a few videos, the Here's, teaching experience 12 years, Ant Bear, a translation, the monograph. 10th Mien Ruys 1904-1999 Dutch garden designer. 13th While I was on the front door concrete pad talking to Louie a hooded oriole drank at the hummingbird feeder and paused in the fan palm, an exquisite slender being. When I was cutting oleander stems for my new round pot I put a stalk in my mouth to hold while I cut another. Then started spitting its strong dark acrid taste. Looked it up: oleaner is powerfully toxic, 100g of leaf clippings enough to kill a horse, though it's hard for humans to take enough for effective suicide. One woman managed by taking it both orally and anally, which might be good to know. My beautiful Sketchup bathroom has white marble, a skylight, a banana tree, orchids, a Turkish carpet, a cayenne-colored loveseat. The guestroom across the corridor has two doors out and a tea tray on the floor next to an armchair. And now a blue suitcase. Then I acquired paintings, for the guestroom a Krasner and a Bontecou, for the upstairs bedroom a Riley and an Agnes Martin. An O'Keeffe for the upstairs bathroom. I put an apple on a plate. There's a thrilling gift economy of models. Someone made a white plate. Someone else made a red apple. Someone else made the table. I copied a red cushion from a loveseat and put it on a white plaster ledge. There was a white teapot I colored red and set next to the red cushion. Meantime Tia was writing about Valhalla and I was sending her photos. Is the moon up? 14
15 Katrin, who's now Katharina. Her auto-mailer sent a notice and I replied with the photo. She wrote back fast. I said let's stay in touch for this last stretch. What should I think or do about the way all I actually want to do all day is model houses. I could begin now - it's 10am - and it's all I'd do till 8 at night. Should I think of it as a vice, or as creation? None of my respectable projects have any grip.
Either:
18 "Readiness to accept people and new environments as parts of our destiny" - times I was like that when I was young. They appeared against the dark blue sky, as if woven of light, dazzling in all the colors of the rainbow ... all the intersecting rays of brightness were like a net of splendor overarching them all. From long ago the question of quality of consciousness - but don't call it that, call it quality of being - 'good energy' for instance - but what did I think it was - there were a couple of ways I thought of it - one was best art - my heroes - one was moments of my own in rapturous perception or focused creation. I still assume good states are visible. What disciplines did I try - yoga, fasting, coffee, sex, reading, watching dreams, writing, photographing, therapy, honesty, acid and other drugs, self-study in the journal, various other study, body feeling, chanting, ritual, obedience to leading.
Where did I learn the idea? In religion? No. In reading. And being with people in the community. I started to be interested in c in grade 12 when I felt it increase because I was away from home? What I meant was free intelligence, free feeling, honesty, naturalness, love, wide understanding, wide fluid constellation of these in presence; therefore beauty and charisma and liberating effect.
Is this related: today and yesterday I've watched English high ceremony on Youtube quite awed by its cultural depth - I mean for instance large crowds singing I vow to thee my country or London's buildings - cultural accumulation - cultural legacy - which is cognitive legacy, which is planetary cognitive privilege - I mean makes possible quality of being although there are accompanying vices that work against it. Yesterday after I had been starting to learn V-ray online I saw it was cooler and went out to walk around the long block - which I'll do now again - and I was seeing the disposition of light all around, afterglow over the mountains, a diffuse yellow on the ground outside a kitchen window sent by a ceiling light I couldn't see, pale even glow on a sky-facing rock wall, reflecting glints on the chrome around headlights on two parked cars. I was feeling yes, I'm not very interested in photographing here but I'm interested in modeling light on, in, materials. 19 Wrote Sabine Schneider. I am not a great artist. I am just a person who wants to be interested and excited by everything. the big fear I suppose messing up the last half of my life or wasting it Peter v T 20 Hestia [written in Greek] - what I haven't liked about her is the H, I think. My house preoccupations are here - hearth and kettle - apophysis fractal flame-generating software - apomac free download 21 The stars are seen as bright and near as if they were part of the landscape. One can see them come right down to the horizon and suddenly vanish with a flicker, as if a man with a lantern had disappeared around the next corner. While normally the sky appears lighter than the landscape, the sky here is dark and deep, while the landscape stands out against it in radiating colors, as if it were the source of light. The air is too rarefied to absorb the sun's heat .... The difference in temperature between sun and shade can be as much as 100 degrees. One has to inhale twice or thrice the quantity of air .... On the other hand the weight of one's body is substantially reduced, so that one's muscles seem to lift one almost without effort. Tibetans themselves walk very slowly, but at a steady pace. Magnesium kept the water so transparent that on windless days it was impossible to see where the water ended and the beach began. Govinda 1966 The way of the white clouds [Recluse monks] Bit by bit, this <inner world> unfolds itself, takes on greater reality and finally surrounds like a celestial mandala in whose centre he experiences a bliss that surpasses the pleasures of the world ... days filled with the creation, consolidation and re-integration of a <new world> ... whole orchestra of creative possibilities. Plenum-Void <like> the womb of space in which the light moves eternally without ever being lost There in the great open space beyond the window innumerable balls of fire floated past. 25 Refining the 16x44 house, shadows, textures. Setting longitude and latitude, trying the sun on different dates, framing photos, lot of time placing little things: bar of soap in a white dish, bread on a plate, Peter's painting in the guestroom, glass of rosé on the guestroom bedside table, journal on the dining table, pot on the cooktop, toaster and bowls on the counter, Buddha with a plant in his lap facing the entry door, teacup with tea in it on the terrace floor next to a chair, sandals at the front door, towels on the tub's edge, Turkish carpet in the bathroom, blue suitcase at the foot of the guestroom steps, small white cream jug and red teapot, a thrilling effect when I hung venetians in the workroom. Long work figuring out the bathroom. Solved the shower by making it an open corner with a slightly sunk floor. Last night in bed I was seeing a lot of blue lines, bright indigo selection edges. It's hot. Sitting at the computer all day when it's 95 inside and 105 out I swelter but don't mind, ignore it. Am not hungry, don't want to cook. Wake from the night, or in the afternoon too, with the pillow soaked. White salt stains on the waistband of the pyjama pants I wear all day. Rinse my day clothes before I sleep, hang them on the porch rail, they're dry in the morning. Once a day hose down the porch plants. Store all my drinking glasses in the freezer. Usually don't turn on the AC or even the fan; they're loud. Found a model of a 2-storey house like 824 E Pender, that era. Using it as a template. Lot of time getting rid of its interior and rebuilding its back porch etc. Helpful having the proportions. In the last few days have learned to make and copy components, apply downloaded surface textures, set location and time, cut temporary sections, locate tiny misalignments and repair them, drag from R or L to select more than one thing, paste components almost where I want them, rotate accurately - is that it? V-ray dongle has arrived but I haven't loaded it yet. - All of this with guilty avidity. It's like dollhouses, it goes back to the moment of the birdhouse and the afternoon of playing store with the Kroeker girls. Tireless focus yesterday from 7am to 9pm. I love the way there's constant consideration and action. I figure out how to do things. Offside there's a vast treasure ground of components and whole models to learn from. Sabine on Sunday speaking in her back yard in Sexsmith. It's not Sexsmith as was, there's a subdivision called Rycroft Ridge. Did I like her. Not especially. She wasn't impressed enough with me. Was that confidence or blankness. I wonder whether the Exiles figures aren't from a time when she was less socialized. I'll wait to see what she's doing now. Tom posted a paragraph of lyrical description on Facebook. Some of his dumb groupies were perplexed but Gail replied in a nice way so I looked her up. Sat considering her page in a little flush of happiness at the thought of how good she might be for him. She's an exquisite watercolorist and her style is lovingly romantic. Second, she belongs to 1000 songs and would keep T company in his pop music mania. She's sturdy and honest looking. They have a long long past, she knew him when he was 16 and at various times since. It surprised me that I was happy at the thought. He was the same and not surprised by it; I asked if he'd feel betrayed and he said not at all, he'd be happy for me. - 97 degrees at 4:30, okay I'll turn on the AC. 26
28 Tom had a plan, he'd give notice and move up with me and live in Bellingham. "There's just one thing I'd want. I'd like you to be a little more into me." At the same time he was all sails set in plans at the Seniors' Center. He counts on me to say no? Or invents plans to keep from feeling bad. We had a just-right visit. Sat on the concrete edge eating in the dark. He liked the wind. The stars came on strong. In the morning he kissed my arm all up and down. Sometimes he seems actually to be thinking about what would be good for me to the end of my life. "We're family." 30 I was calling it the altoplano. A woman was driving us along a route I thought was going to come out at the junction where I used to turn south from UCSD. Was this a shortcut, though? A rocky track. One glimpse of a high narrow waterfall on the left. Now we're stopping to look at it. We can't see it from here. Looking for a path. There's snow. I've lost my ride, I'll have to think how to get home. Something earlier about Greg? Parking spaces numbered 32. I'll look for one in case he's there with his motorbike. Jam was going to be at this hotel, I'll ask at the restaurant, which seems to be closing. Mr Jam Ism? (Something like that.) In a private room says the hostess. There she is. Etc. This at 6 in the morning of a hotter night. We are coming into our first stretch of days over 110 degrees. These nights before I go to sleep I lie on the concrete in front of the house feeling the new warp in my back, cooling, in company with the Milky Way which is arching almost at apex, showing the broad dust lanes of Scorpio's tail. Its head looks to me like a posy, Antares where its stems join.
2 July Sketchup invented 1999, sold to Google in 2006. It's free because it gets everyone to model everything. It's a surface modeler not solid. Polygonal-based rather than curves-based. Nonphotorealistic rendering, as if drawing. Not BIM - Building Information Modeling. 3 Working on Mac's house. Found a rock someone had made and stretched and rotated versions of it to mush together to make the ridge it's on, planted cottonwoods in crevices and pushed some of their trunks down into the rock to make shrubs. Then saw I could cantilever the bathhouse out over its edge. Most of the day yesterday refining that little white building winged with many casements. It's not all the way right yet. It's hottest in the house toward the end of the afternoon. Surfaces are surprisingly hot, walls, even the glass on the desk. I swelter - that word I like - and don't mind, but then, now that the night air is still into the 90s, turn on the AC about 7 to cool the house down to 85 for sleeping. Now, at 6:30am, it's perfect, bright, fresh, Providencio's rooster crowing, cold tea. I'll go on with the Sketchup book from the library. I've figured out enough on my own so I can glom onto new bits with energy. I guess I won't argue with this drivenness though nothing can come of it but interest and pleasure. One day in grade 2 we were supposed to make models of different kinds of house for a social studies project. I said I'd make a brick house. I drew bricks on cardboard walls. The teacher said I should have used actual bricks - thought of it just now reading about texture mapping. What was that moment like - characteristic neutral evaluation, where does she think I'd be able to get little bricks, it's a good solution. Other moments I remember from that year in Clearbrook: kids crowding round wanting me to draw their health class assignments, for instance eyes - eyeballs. Sitting on small chairs in the reading circle silently reading ahead while the class read The boxcar children aloud, because I loved the thought of living without parents in a boxcar by a stream. Walking home past Guenthers' ditch with salmonberries? And the small house at the end of a lane where Jews lived. Running the red cedar duff paths among huge cedar stumps, dark, cool, fiddlehead ferns, some of the stumps hollow like rooms, or we could climb up onto them. My aunties making me a fairy costume for Hallowe'en, having to figure out how to pin cardboard wings onto the back of my pink Sunday dress in the school washroom before the party in the afternoon. Being sent to a little teachers' room with three Paraguayan Mennonite kids to tutor them in English reading. They were boys older than I and I was acting like a teacher. How that felt. Some game with Janet where one of us would be on a stump overhead and the other would be on the ground below poking it into an asshole so shit would pour down. In the gym or outside marveling at the way older girls ran - girls in grade 6 - with their knees tight together and their ankles rotating sideways. Aunt Lillian walking me to school the first day in her red high heels, stopping when we got there to dust them with her hanky. What don't I remember. What I took for lunch. Anything else I read or had read to me. Anything else I wore, except my first pair of jeans, plaid-flannel-lined, that I would wear to play but not to school, and a yellow plaid skirt for church. - A moment Auntie Lucy stood in the doorway when I was in bed and I said something to her out of my sleepy fantasy and she didn't get it, and it occurring to me that she was a bit dim. The moment I picked up the kitten and put it onto the back of the chicken buyer man's neck, and the kitten put out its claws. I don't know what seized me. He was Chinese, was it something I was feeling from my grandparents and uncles? The first time in Sunday School Annie Pauls sticking her tongue out at me? So she was my enemy from then on. The first moment arriving at the house after the trip in the car with the grandparents, the brightly lit kitchen and the aunties exclaiming to see me there. Oma one day asking don't you miss your mamma and I saying no. Uncle Ben sitting with me at the kitchen table one night helping me with arithmetic. The cartoon head Uncle Kid had scratched in wet concrete in the milkhouse. Uncle Kid squirting milk into the cat's mouth when he was doing chores in the barn. Bales piled in the hayloft, that could be climbed like steps. My cat hiding kittens among them. The smell of hay. Uncle Ben and Uncle Kid cleaning eggs with a whirring machine in the yellow-lit dusty room between two wings of the chicken barn. Men digging the well outside my window and building the concrete retaining wall. Sacks of nuts in a dark little crawlspace at the top of the basement stairs. Maggots in a bowl of cat's milk left by the sawdust in a plank-sided bin. Everyone having to stand when Opa said grace, uncles on a bench with their backs to the window, Opa at the head of the table next to the brown radio on the counter. Oma's white peppermint cookies. Red currents being washed in a colander. Lying in the dark in bed in the sewing room singing. It all has an interested neutral feel, the child I was then, steady, impersonal: I'm just here, where all of these facts and sights are. 5 What I meant to look at was not the incidents so much, though I got into them, as why I remembered them. What a child registers, why a snapshot is taken rather than not, even those that seem general are actually momemnts, though I mixed in some knowledge from later. They are moments of whole take, scenes that would be better written as such, unpacked. Yesterday I learned the fog tool, took photos of Mac's washhouse on its rocks in sunlit white mist. At night after hours trying again to gut the wrong internal structure of the 824 house, meticulous tiny work mending edges, I wandered into video taken from game worlds, where young men have taken what I'm doing to technological extremes in the service of zooming around killing things or watching women with big breasts run. What would be better. For instance drawing and animating one of those memory moments, just the length and breadth it is, not a plot or even a character, just an accurate moment of being. I've realized that I'm drawing. 6 It's M's anniversary, was it 1943? 70 years ago. Said that and remembered when I was visiting from the Lake House saying to her and Peter Dyck that I'd be willing to die if I could know everything, and she saying in her dark emphatic way, NO, I would NEVER .... I didn't know she was young then, only in her 50s, still there. 7 I tried to phone her. She picked up but couldn't hear me. I yelled but she couldn't understand me. Reading McPhee The control of nature on the hydrology of Mississippi containment in Louisiana. I so like men in their physical expertise: that they've cared to understand how a river moves, the forces on its banks at various points, and McPhee's love for those kinds of guys and their intelligent skill. And oh his own skill that holds me in fond admiration page after page. - That kind of writing, documentary writing about how things work, perceptual precision, spatial visualization that projects sideways into apt metaphor, so formed an intelligence working comprehensively. I love the way he lives. He gives himself access to these people who do and know things, and then he goes off by himself and focuses and sorts and forms. - Two Mexicans with chainsaws across the street butchering the magnificent palo verde. Lot of yelling. I love that he uses techical words I've never seen and doesn't explain them. "To hope to see an ivorybill, to hear a prothonotary warbler." "This swamp of the anhinga, swamp of the nocturnal bear." He contradicts what I used to say about writing, that it has to be fresh off immediate consciousness and that the work is to make that consciousness worth writing from. McPhee confects from notes, reworks, and his confection makes a reading consciousness worth making. I believed what I did because it seemed to support the best kind of ambition I could have for myself. When I went back to school I did what McPhee does, compiled and sorted - tho', no, I didn't revise much once I'd written - a work of time - which I suppose is the way quality of consciousness is actually built in a body, across and across and across. I like the word distributory which balances tributary. The fish alone can average a thousand pounds an acre. If he doesn't know them, he knows where they live, because each town has its accent. tupelo and cypress rising from the water, and pollen on the water like pale green silk. Bourque called it a gros bec. Soileau called it a yellow-crowned night heron. Storyteller vividness: As lava moves under the air, it develops a skin of glass that is broken and rebroken by the motion of the liquid below, so that it clinks and tinkles, and crackles like a campfire .... They found that a crust as thin as two inches was enough to support a person ... just a couple of inches of hard rock resting like pond ice upon the molten fathoms. The land just calls them and they go into geophysics. There simply are no women in McPhee. The town seemed covered by deep black snow. Many houses were discernible only as dunes in the [?]. If they burned, they left kettle-shaped pits. Eventually some of the ash-covered houses filled with steam and were cooked until their frames came loose like bones of stewing chickens. They were like touches of pallesthesia, nothing more: little shivers in the bones. Dora looked down into the water. She saw red lava there. Salt water fell on their heads, and fine fragments of dark-brown glass. In daylight, sailors who have fallen overboard have been found by shipmates who steered toward hovering birds. The gas came over the lip of the crater, flowed downhill, and went through the town like a river. It suffocated cats. It stalled cars. People's heads were generally above it ... a sailor who tried to loot a pharmacy died in a pool of carbon dioxide. 8 I love about California that it is so written-about. As the two sides of the San Andreas slide by each other, they compress the landscape at the kink. The San Andreas has folded its flanking country, much as a moving boat crossing calm waters will send off lateral waves. The great compression at the kink is withal the most intense. The Coast Ranges and the Peninsular Ranges are generally smaller than the Transverse Ranges. The San Gabriels are being compressed about a tenth of an inch a year, .... Between the Geology-Department roof and the San Gabriels, the city gradually rose. A very long, ramplike, and remarkably consistent incline ended in the sheerness of the mountain wall. This broad uniform slope is where the seven tons an acre had emerged from the mountains, year upon year for a number of millions of years .... Broad at the bottom, narrow at the top, the fans were like spilled grain piling up at the edge of a bin. There were so many of them, coming down from stream after stream, that they had long since coalesced, forming a tilted platform, which the Spaniards called a bajada. I once came across a solid block of citrus trees surrounded by residential streets. In all directions from this dark-green stamp sprawled the vast groves of houses .... From the block of citrus the houses continued west unremittingly, east and south indefinitely, and north about eight hundred yards, where they were stopped by the mountain front. - He interlards, when I copy passages I see how he keeps switching from this sort of spatial description to talk with persons. "We're living on a floodplain. To look at it, you'd think it was flat, but there's nine hundred feet of difference from Glendora to the ocean. The alluvial fans are that deep. The types of flows that built them go on trying to build them, where we are trying to live." Before the citrus, there were ranches, before the ranches, Indians, before the Indians, the primal scene: huge unencumbered alluvial fans leaning into the fast-rising mountains beside the hazy plain. In the eighteen seventies, to connect agricultural towns, local railways had begun to climb the bajada. Long straight avenues are there now, steadily rising three and four miles. Big slow trucks went around full of oranges. 9 Homemaking. A lot of time today making a feast at Mac's house. I wanted him to make curry. Big bowl of green salad. Had to make and remake plates and bowls. Set things out on the white marble surface. Find a ladle for the curry. Couple of bottles of wine, white and a red. 6 glasses. Then I thought we should have a cake and made one myself with the circle tool, the edge smoother, and a cropped photo of coconut frosting. Silver platter to put it on. Flowers for on top of it, make them red. A knife to cut it with rested on a pile of smaller plates. Line up the sun for a photo. - Need a better sink, go find one and find a faucet for it. In the end there's my screengrab, that I dote on the way I've doted on photos and paragraphs on Here. Have been slogging at the model of 824 E Pender, working from an existing house, spending days making unaccountable mistakes as I revise it, learning how to block parts and lock them so I can't accidentally undo them, hide lines whose wrongness I can't figure out. It's such meticulous work in the logic of plane and axis that it must be good for memory and inference. 6 people at Mac's table for many parties - the other 4 are his ranch manager couple and their son and daughter. The son is away at Stanford studying astrophysics; the daughter is in high school, likes to help with the horses, wants to write. The foreman's wife doesn't clean but she organizes the people who do. They're Mexican, part Indio like Mac, but speak English, although Mac likes to talk Spanish with them. The foreman's old dad, Martín, is the gardener. They live in the ranch house down the hill by the gate. Ré was keen but didn't have money to buy his own spread. Mac found him in Mexico. He married late and his wife is younger. He can fix machines. He and Mac both fly the chopper. He's very bright and he likes to hear about Mac's projects. Both kids do too, and use the study freely. Maria is laconic, dry, strong, kind, but in a stern careful way. Ré is eager and joyful. They all contribute to a tumblr of the place's natural history. Jim stays in touch when he's at school. Mac talks astronomy with him, helps him with college. Sophia comes and reads everything in his library. She's the webmaster. She'll like me. It was 100 degrees in the house this afternoon. I didn't turn on the AC, it was surprisingly alright - needed it when the humidity was higher. Maybe the way to tell how hot it is, is if the pillows are hot to the touch. I like it when they are but if I fall asleep briefly I wake looking hollow-eyed. The desk glass gets hot. The other day when I drove to the store three quarters that had been lying on the seat next to me were too hot to hold. 11 It can take all day doing small things in a model. I was fixing the underside of the boat-shaped roof, sorting things onto separate layers so I could vanish them to work on other things. Last night I was hours combing bed and lamp models, pulling some of them into my files. The happy thing I did today was devise Mac's outside bed. I'd thought a bed on rails that can slide forward onto the decking, but yesterday after I'd shut down the computer I realized I could make a nook off the end of the deck for a permanent outside bed. I liked the bed itself because I'd found a rumpled one with a blanket I could turn dark green. It was a nice bed, and I set it down three shallow steps between boulders. There it was fitted into a little platform its size with just enough of a rim next to it to keep from rolling onto the rocks. Up on the ridge it's next to the Milky Way, open sky pivoting on the polar star. I made a breakfast tray too, with French bread and butter and red jam - sour cherry jam. Telescope is parked with the bed on its sky-hung balcony. 12 Mac's study square that I invented years ago, here fitted out in detail with long library table, red sofa, computer table, massive screen, Turkish carpet in front of the fire, a Constable, a big Riley, a lot of storage, one lamp over the sofa at night, he reads till late, walks across to look things up online, stops at the long table to lay out printed sheets and images, turns off all but the smallest of step lighting, walks out to the washhouse, showers in the dark, goes naked to his outside bed, lies looking up, feeling the air. Wakes early, down to the washhouse to pee and put on jeans. The kitchen is streaked with sidelight. Cats at his ankles, makes tea, sits with it at the outside table for phone calls overseas. [bedroom evening shadow] [night washhouse lights] [summer morning] [two cats in the yard] I wrote to Tom: Is it dishonorable I wonder to take so much pleasure in imaginary circumstances. He replied: My [seniors' centre business] emails give me the same pleasure as your realization of imaginary circumstances and I think I come from the same mindset with a soupcon of putting on the dog class-consciously ... they are from an imaginary Tom, a courtly kinda guy, maybe a last-of-the-'20s generation executive writing at the end of the mid-'50s pragmatic luminosity. I sent one of the images of the outside bed with Milky Way and he wrote "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore: and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown? But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile." Turned out to be Emerson remembered from probably Harlan Ellison. Okay Thomas - if you're capable of giving me this why have you mostly
given worse? Long puzzle. Is it parsimony? It says circumstance, his stars
are lined up at the moment.
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