| in america volume 28 part 5 - 2014 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver, 21 August 2014 Last evening homelessness hit me hard. I was tired. I couldn't unlock David's inside door which meant I'd be camping without water or power or a bathroom. I was standing by my jeep once more unlocking and fetching out of the travel disorder looking at people on their way to the library feeling they all had somewhere to arrange their stuff. It's homelessness of being without a plan too. I knew I had to get here. Beyond that do I know anything at all? o I don't want to be here. o I don't imagine being anywhere else. o I am relieved to have all those dirty boxes stored away. Packing and cleaning and traveling was a massive effort. o I've felt cold is it for the first time in a year and a half? o I have to go to gov't offices and find out about provisions. o I have to register the jeep and insure it and renew my BC license. All that will cost money. Fix up the bike. o Go to REACH dental and deal with my teeth. o Get a better doctor and have a checkup. o Pay up my BC Med and get premium relief. o Get cell service. o Talk to VanCity about mortgage possibilities. o See an oculist. o Start yoga seriously. o Bike seriously. o Send out a call to everybody here for short or longer term place to live. o Work on Cheryl's book. o Get In English out. o Finalize my new movies and offer them somewhere. o Find somewhere to work on them. o Set up autopayment of storage. My jeans are loose. Waiting for 8:30 to go to Paul's. I was looking sideways in the jeep at Rowen's beautiful mouth. It was the way mine used to be. Wonderful dark brown eyes. More padded limbs, almost burly look. He said he wants to do audiovisual work with me. We could do that. I said I'd teach him to drive. 24 20 years a-growing Maurice O'Sullivan 1933 How am I. I've done a bit. Phone. Found out my mortgage possibilities. Got my GIS application. Got the key to David's. Done a laundry. Paid Visa and given change of address. Had the bike repaired. 5th day back. Just have those little tasks to hold onto. Feel ugly and unwell. What I see in Paul's bathroom mirror is horrifying. Dimples and droops in the belly skin. Haggard head with frizzed hair. I'm still tired. Don't want to think about where to live. Housing co-op with bad tight spaces like this one, feeling of the worthy poor herded together being good persons. 25 Today:
- Calabria - Frank smiled to see me - he's a bit faded, it's so many years later, his smile acknowledges - here's my jeep at the curb with yellow bike on its bum - I'm dark under the eyes but my hair is not so bad - lot of droop above the eyes, why is that - I checked out Learning to be old, so, alright, that's the necessary research, get it over with. How does a smart person consider it. I don't want to say manage, but live it. shameful decrepitude devalued group question of everyday status hostility to physical decline mental decay body as failed object simply old and not ugly frailty coexisting with strength a service ethic I haven't been compliant so I can't be one of the old women who discovers her will. The social foundation of old age is illness. believing in one's capacity to recover completely a roleless role Drugs affect an aging body more - more fat, decreased blood circ, less water, less filtration, less metabolizing, less absorption - geriatric dosage. Stephen Fulder An end to aging - remedies for life extension. Ginseng. Aerobic, muscle, flex, balance. Information processing speed strongest predictor of longevity. 26 Val's little basement place in the rich end of Kits. Tom's note this morning being supportive the way nice people are, trying hard. I sent a network call and Natalie and Val were instantaneous. There are other people I don't have email for. Just putting foot in front of foot for now. - Val's porcelain tile floor, with grey grout - matte grey-blue wall, pocket door - white half cylinder opaque glass sconces - rounded wall corners. 27 Fine subtle door frame - I mean shallow setbacks - one dark Japanese beam. Peace and Plenty Street, the large houses and dense green gardens of, what is it, Edwardian? Kits. How were there so many families with so much money? [Later: 1912.] I biked 10 blocks and will get used to doing more. Filling the tank yesterday cost me $87. 28 These late life books assume lives of convention one can step out of, but I've had several lives, none conventional, and nothing in me held off. Last 12 years power of a sort, skilled influence, loneliness. Lonely generosity. - Nothing except personal devoted love, soul depth. We loved each of the authors for their triumphs over the forces of banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, tidiness, and all the other forces that defeat almost everyone reckless enough to write fiction at all. ... artfulness and fearlessness and unorthodox beauties ... originality, authority and verve Living cautiously. Moving more carefully, afraid to fall or spill things. Looking at emails not matter-of-factly but with gratitude to be wanted in some way. Measuring energy, can I do that thing now or will I rest, taking no strength for granted, thanking it when it comes. Cars honk in the lane behind me because I am not driving faster than my comfort where I don't know my way. Pondering every need to carry something. Nervous in spending money. Nervous that I'll spoil something in this room. Bin hearing the Cup Song, You're gonna miss me when I'm gone, meaning many things I suppose. Denis Johnson Train dreams. - What is this nice young place with expensive delicious mushroom soup and burnt decaffe. I'm bewildered on the streets, driving and on the bike too. Do I imagine that people look at me here? The city's faster, more crowded, more fraught, and I haven't got my old insider parking spots and best streets. I don't know the city the way I did when I was all over cleaning houses. Oh the young. Imagining myself in 1975 in this neighbourhood wearing jeans and a pale green silk kimono shirt with a lot of live hair and a donkey jacket probably. 40 years. Still the Pierre d'Alby boots though worn through at the ball of the foot? A round rump like that one. Exacerbated with Luke and not exactly accounting for how stressed I was, having to find everything over again and very poor and with a child. What was easier then, attaching a lover, making friends, being excited in newness. - Note from Jam who says she's in town for Sept. Damn! I really miss San Diego. This town is crowded, frenetic, and ugly. Heavy traffic crushed into narrow lanes without left turn pockets. Old leisurely waterfront streets now engineered for through traffic, Marine Drive blocked off for bikes. Gastown horribly full of people. Old hotels seized by social workers. 30th Saturday morning in Calabria. How's my hair, not bad, more or less enough of it. I just caught the eye of a blue-eyed man, accidentally. Is there something I can do about these little eyes. I'd look ten years younger without the loose skin on my neck. Straighter would help. Paul tonight, Daph and Colin on Monday. A bit recovered, I think. Good idea to transcribe up to here. At a taut angle it's not a bad face, not puffed or cross, even. What do I need for city clothes. Housing plan - I need to get the whole picture, to not wander into a social housing trap. Try to go all Sept without paying rent. 31st With Paul last night. Knowing and not knowing someone. At first he was busily saying things he says to acquaintances and I was feeling was afraid of me the way people often are, holding me off by presenting themselves, not asking me anything and changing the subject if I offer anything about myself. It went on like that and my feelings were beginning to be hurt at being allowed nothing but response, but then as he kept drinking red wine and his gestures got wider and he'd vented some of his summer's tensions I could push forward more. Was it when I said I like men more than I used to that something changed? He's smaller than I am, now. Quite trim, not at all old-looking, nothing like the elfin boy he was, but a sturdy informed genial gregarious competent middle-aged man, a bit timeless in his trimmed hair and beard like a European in a frockcoat tipping his hat in the street. Much more excited about his male friends than about women, which means emotionally self-sheltered in some way? The Army of Men. -
Sept 2 It's raining and I'm peeing, I'm back in a place where I don't pee through my skin. Cheryl's party last night. Zoe and David, Daph and Bridgit, Colin and Marion, Cheryl's Heidi. Came home after this social occasion full of anxious little uncertainties, that I've lived without. It wasn't a hard party - a good party - but uncertainty is its residue anyway. When I'd see Heidi's eyes on me across the length of the table what was she wanting to know? Was Colin's public affection for Marion a private pay-off for something? Was her flirtation with him a proud claim of this quite lovely man in a room full of women without lovely men? Was Marion willing to be boring because of wine? Did Cheryl invite me to tell the story of the trip as a kindness? Did Colin keep teasing me about the Cherokee mechanic because - he was flirting? Zoe is beautiful, relaxed and poised, radiant, but what is it with her and this ghostly elongated leprechaun of a man? Daphne is almost as she was, she's alright-looking. Brigit is her tiny chalky-pale husband, who has informed views on international affairs and keeps a strict eye on what she eats. Cheryl and Heidi were neutral together in public. Colin 68 and so dishy altogether, beautiful shape, no bit of padding at the belt, ruddy Punch face, ready instinct to play at any turn - Zoe had that too - interests and accomplishments, surrealism and West Coast anthropology, the table's four legs he said were Freud, Boaz, Levi-Strauss and Breton. Research and writing. What is it I don't like about Marion's mouth: I want to call it gropp, which can mean something like mercantile reaching too? Though I have no evidence it's true of her. Zoe saying I look wonderful. She said it twice. Did she mean by contrast? Aware writing these things that I need to mill in my usual way and release the evening's tensions and at the same time frightened that I'll publish what I'm saying, and that fright making me aware that my old confident kinds of appraisal can be high-handedly wrong. Uncomfortable hesitation. That won't do. I need to know what I know. I suppose I'll have to password-protect till the end of this era the way I did for the last. Is that enough shelter to feel free? Aware that having been away for 12 years puts enough distance between these people now and whatever I've said about them long ago. Nice small chuckle of water from the drainpipe into a garden pot. Tuesday after Labor Day. Nothing I have to do. Helpful suggestions last night. Colin said send something about the garden, Monte's interview, to the Capilano Review where he's an editor. Daph said local history is big, ask the city for money to finish We made this. Daph also said Harbour Publishing Press, was it, for a book about the garden. Tom wd have hated the gathering last night because he would have felt so overmatched by its comfortable entitled civility. - People will be interested in garden history they say but I don't want to be pinned into that level. Can I go on in embodiment epistemology? Juliana's translation piece. Chapters of Being about. The pdf. In English. Mind & land. Ant Bear. - A campaign of placement? And don't forget it needs to set up reception for future work, I mean needs to be a congruent context for that other kind of work. Val is beautiful. Was she more beautiful when Sue had come back? She has a clean clear face, fine-skinned, a bit luminous, and a strong lively muscular body. She was remarkably nice to me in quite a joyful fearless forthcoming way. I was puzzled by that, was it too much. When she was saying goodbye I blurted "You've been so nice to me!" and she bright-eyed and directly smiling said "It's because I like you." Oo. Admired the way she tackled a computer task too, straight back and small frown of concentration. - So feeling a vileness in this writing, descriptions of people that are pathetically crude in relation to their actual selves. She's restless. She wouldn't sit still to talk. She'd be up and down getting things from the fridge, doing things at the counter. 3 3:05am. I was driving somewhere at night. Up ahead a red light was blinking by the lit-up façade of a colonnaded white house. When I parked nearby I saw my old father by the front door talking to a police officer. I looked away for a moment. When I looked back my father was turned away from the officer collapsing against the door frame. I was turning off the key in the ignition wondering whether to lock the car door, thinking I should go to him. He looked felled by grief. I said "Mary has died" and woke. Found my hert cloven by unsourced personal fear. Not of Mary's death, I don't think. - More tomorrow he says but there is no more tomorrow. 4 The lacuna. I found it on the Borrego library 50 cent tables after I'd said goodbye to lovely Eric, who'd said it had been a pleasure to know me. He was a big sweet-natured man with velvety grey-black eyes and a teddy bear's curve to his tummy. He had kid-friends in the library, spoke to them in a way I liked, light and level. He lived in love, it seemed to me, was making the library a place friendly to the lonely. He wasn't a hiker, had done cog sci at UCSD, why had he chosen to be the librarian in a dusty isolated little town in the desert? I was guessing he was gay, he seemed too free to be het, too clean-hearted, but in a way he didn't seem gay either, as if a bit saintly. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall be - what? He blessed, in a comfy way, but with manly reserve too. I supposed he had another life when he went to the coast. He sailed, presumably had friends. Anyway, Lacuna. Time period 1929-1959. She invented two people one loves to be with, and that's worth a lot. Harrison Shepherd wrote the kinds of letters I ache to have someone write me. Love and wit. Some clean love of being. Truth suffered as needed. - My long sadness not to have that with Tom, when it seemed I could. So I'm here for these reasons:
It tears my heart to say that, such an ache. I was lying in bed last night aching, thinking the dream of my father's grief was that grief hitting me, the grief of leaving Tom, after I'd safely got myself here and can afford to feel it. The lacuna gets me there. I hadn't thought much of her but there's brilliant texture in this book. She was so tiny, from the back she also looked like a servant girl. But when she turned, her skirts and silver earrings whirled and her face was very startling, an Azteca queen with ferocious black eyes. She's Insólito and she's Frida and their friendship, first, and then the friendship of Harrison Shepherd and Violet Brown, and all of that so exceeds the married-looking uninteresting-looking woman who lives on a farm in Virginia with a thick-bearded little ornithologist husband and some daughters. I was reading for the brilliant glints in the writing, for the light-spirited inventive honorable friendships, and as always with good novels for interest in the author's relation to the book. How did she manage to so exceed herself? 5
Heart pain, forehead pain, protest, wanting to explain, persuade, wanting to get even.
What do I want:
6 When I walked through the garden yesterday I saw a small white chest of drawers dragged up to the edge of the pond. Today I fetched it to my storage unit and reorganized the piles to have clothes, dishes and boots in drawers where I can reach them. Long sweaty work. And then the Drive: I don't want to live in the Downtown East End, I want to live in the West End, as a lodger in one room if someone more or less acceptable will decide to have me. Louie was bored with me when I talked about my trip. Time to leave. 7 When I was new in London, the stages toward my eventual home: Academy Hotel, Greg's place, Mrs O'Hare's, Sheila and Roodal and their 5 kids, Roy's place, Burghley Road with Chris and Debbie and then at last Burgley Road on my own. How long did it take? July 1969 - two years? Coming here the first time: Powell Rooms, Eton St with Barbara, Eton St on our own, Avalon Rooms, 820-A, lot of reconstruction work - two years? They were interesting adventures not ordeals, I was alert and willing. 8 A bit miserable in this dark low-ceilinged cave with nothing to do, lying in the dark not liking my thoughts. Bit desperate. But my hair is nice, my hair is nice!
In between-times, at-sea times like this, important new things can bump up against: like Luke, like Tom.
And access. - What I learned today - where to park - that I must walk up and down the streets - community centre gym rates - parking permit rates - that I shd make a map of good buildings - that I should phone tomorrow morning - there was a best kind of Buddha in front of the building, and a good garden. 9 I said it would be hard and it is. Lying at night in this closed cell with anguish at solar, heart or forehead thinking of Hopkins' line, what was it - "I wake" -
10 662: [sketch]. Two windows like good eyes. Casements, deep white sills. Dinesh said "You can have it." He'd seen my bank statement. Bob was in Navy bootcamp in San Diego, in a commune next to Judie's in the Slocan, planting trees for a Brinckman competitor, selling lighted signs in Dawson Creek. Began at 17 in the Berkeley School of Arts and Crafts. Narcoleptic and cataleptic; he was working on a scaffold, his friends inside the room were being too funny; he fell right over onto his face. We were sitting together on the step outside the front door. I liked the look of the people coming and going. There was an exquisite African girl, a tall good-looking West Indian man I immediately flirted with, a fancy trans. People passed constantly on the street. It's the western edge of Chinatown, on Pender where the street begins to rise toward the Sun Building and the Avalon Hotel. Strath gym. It's close to SFU, it's close to the downtown library, VCC, the Carnegie, the seabus. It's expensive, I'll need to get more money. Figure out what to do with the jeep. Need a bed frame. [sketch with measurements] 12 Struggling with the bike yesterday - heavy books in the basket - the chain was slipping so I had to walk uphill - a lot of that - having to get off and on a lot, sometimes not able to lift my right leg over the seat - sometimes having to use my hand to place my foot on the pedal - I so feel myself hobbling now - exhausted and humiliated on the street - wondering how I'm going to live if I can't use the bike to deal with the streets - shut up in a room.
In a countryside where small houses were all surrounded by thorny trees - what did I call them, locust - we passed through one of those hedges to look into the house. One of us had recommended it to a traveling family as a place to stay. The ground was wet. I had a feeling we would find something bad. Glanced through a doorway and saw a child's skull, kept walking, didn't want to see more. In another dream I was longing for Tom, wanting to get back to him somehow. There was a canal with a grassy bank I think. a nostalgia in after years for evenings at home a house accrued through the centuries big house fantasies a butter book, making up for what is rationed the attachment of people to places dreaded as a possible source of too much pain imaginary architecture dereliction or institutionalization of houses need for sophistication, for lively conversation, for some constructive and slightly abrasive experience of literature and painting and music and indeed life Alexandra Harris Romantic moderns 2010 T&H - Calabria. I'm not ugly in my dotted shirt and loose, streaked, silver hair. Reading about English big houses thinking of my California houses which are not accumulated but relatively almost tents, newly pitched on some square of world, self-invented persons with no inheritance. Mac's house is close to unenclosed although it has a platform that could last for centuries.
The world should be home, it should be somewhere where everyone has his place, is surrounded by the task, the house, the furniture, the companion, the river, the trees or the streets which assure him that he is loved. Waugh generations of amateurs who had gone about looking at England 13 A dream like fast-forwarding through text, only hearing bits. Here's a book about Robert Duncan and his life-long companion, that goes into their friends' lives and work as well as theirs. It has a lot of color illustrations of work that seems utterly junky to me, praised by the authors and often collected by Duncan and Jess, their daily being a midden heap. Community of work seeming to be that. - I'm looking at it wondering whether art is a matter of great delusional mess out of which occasionally, maybe accidentally, some little bit with bite. For instance 'the opening of the field,' just the phrase, and 'this here other world' said Jess. Out of a lifetime of that junkiness and faith in junkiness, ten minutes of concentrated value? - But Robin Blaser's face. 15 I'm thinking of Fugitive pieces, the movie, the scene where the little boy has buried himself in leaves after he sees his parents shot by the Gestapo, and is found by a large childless bereaved Greek archeologist who takes him up out of the ground and carries him away to Greece and then further. The boy is as if hollowed-out by his losses - do I see it that way, a dark hollow space in his torso, because of the hole he dug himself in the ground? - and in that dark hollow space is a poet - and am I saying these things because of the dark hollow I feel in my chest, which I am calling loss of Tom, though it is a larger and older loss? The boy and the older Greek live devotedly until Athos dies, and then the still-hollow-hearted now-poet goes back to live in Greece. He has a childhood language that belongs to the first, lost, life, and the lovely Greek of the man who takes him up to be his own, and then the language both of them must learn in the new place, the English in which he comes to write and publish and be known. The movie's ending was false - he finds true love - its falsity I think signaled by the casting of that actress, who did not have the heft to meet him in the ways he would have to be met for it to work. 18 Calabria, grey morning, at the window seeing replacement people, people who look like people I used to see, but the new crop of them, many years later. - I will have to get a raincoat. Rain hat? For walking to Carnegie for lunch! Since I've come the leaves have begun to color - last week. Formating In America - which it has become in retrospect - American years - in what way, particularly - Tom and Tom's story, I lived in Tom's life, made my own inside his - belonged to an American union, paid American taxes, had a social security number and a California driver's license, was a para-citizen, and at the same time was looking about me with traveler's interest in foreign ways. Was nation as such more real to me than at home? Maybe yes, in the way it is more real to Americans, who are so avowed to themselves as that. And the sense of consequence about US politics, naturally. The elections. The mad right wing, a concentrated extreme of elaborated stupidity. More of them, a more developed subculture. In what ways was [the college] American, the same way? New England liberalism a couple of centuries deep behind it, same thing isn't it? A somewhat empowered subculture. Vermont. 21 Climate march CBC Plaza, Renee and Sandy. Jan-Marie on the way to Gomez'. Working on IA formatting, housetruck on Sketchup. Cut back grape vines covering Louie's porch like long bangs. On the couch yesterday seeing balcony doors open, Capuleti e Monticchi. Sarah Butterfield yesterday put her hand through the jeep's window - Pender Street in stopped traffic - and touched my cheek.
23 Have held off thinking about money. When I begin to find out why, blanked stress, toward panic. Sitting with Louie on the couch last night talking about how provident she is: this flat paid for and worth three times what she paid for it; financial advisor who will invest for her and give her a large monthly sum when she retires; the studio paying for itself month by month. My many unmonetized talents that I see no way to monetize that isn't trivial and humiliatingly under-self-valuing. Louie has had to devote her years to building what she has. What I've done instead is devote my years to understanding as much of the whole as I can. There can't be a market for that. It's the right thing to do with a life but it can't be transferred. I feel frightened the moment I begin to think of ways to sell bits of it. I haven't wanted to say anything here, these weeks, haven't seemed worth keeping. Haven't wanted to be frightened, as I am now, thinking of money and aloneness. Blanked out instead, whacked through so-far 21 vols of In America reformatting, renaming students, eliding mentions of [the college], catching typos, being comforted by past pleasures, waiting to move into my little expensive room and have my desk again. Good things: the bike is fixed. The jeep is going to be registered and insured by this aft. Luke is okay I think. My aches go away sometimes. The bad thing wakes me at night but I go to sleep again. I still have not-bad clothes. Have money in reserve for the time being. - $700 jeep inspection and fixing, $1060! insurance. Wow. It's raining. 26 Hard blow when I saw 662 is still pale brown. Frightened by how money is flowing away. It's raining the worst kind of rain, dull seep from a low sky. Frightened by Louie liking me less because of dependence. And oh it's such a small room - and still need a bed, and still need the exhausting move, and it still won't be somewhere to really live - I'm scared, I'm scared. The uncertainty, the poverty, the stress, the misery of living somewhere ugly, the misery of being responsible for myself without means and with so much less elastic a body. I will hate the rain, the rain every day, damp legs, low light, walking carefully because I'm afraid to slip. Oh just package me into an old folks home where I don't have to move furniture and keep track of household bits and bills, or let it all be done, since it sort of is - sore heart - low courage - the brown walls did it, and some sense of Louie's covered impatience. Daphne [about to visit] -
Being about, teaching, Tom, California, isolation. Almost 40 years. Revision. What cd I tell her I cdn't tell anyone else - maybe something about teaching?
I'm back but I'm not really back - I'm as if stuck onto the surface - reluctantly - miserably -
Tomorrow night or Sunday morning I'll have begun the next thing, after
this interim in which I haven't wanted to notice or tell anything. A month
and a half since I left Borrego.
|
