| time remaining 1 part 3 - 2014-2015 december-february | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
29 December 2014 material culture bodily engagement over time enabling readers to give their attention to the text over many hours it is no longer things in themselves that hold our attention ... no longer a face, but the hint of a smile; nor a woman, but a particular step and bearing .... Observation becomes quicker and more nimble ... not fixed instants but moments of a quality which only a gesture can reproduce - a musical or calligraphic gesture. - Seeing objects as 3-d forms is an older and simpler way of fixing, whereas seeing motion - which is older cortically - can reconfigure to become the more evolved skill? Sensing things as active. Dynamic contours. The mother's prosodic contour matches the child's facial-kinetic contour. The present moment crosses the mental stage more slowly, taking several seconds to unfold. And during this crossing, the present moment plays out a lived emotional drama ... traces a temporal shape like a passing musical phrase. The elements that make up letters are expressing combinations of affects - traces of movement. It's not to be filmmaking, it's digital screen art, which can have moving pictures dissolved in it - and photos - and voice - and writing - and natural sound - and composed sound - the temporal and other contours being material - and animated sketchup lines, invented places - I thought threshold and felt fear - Is it internally cross-linked? Mainly I see the sense of dissolving, a solution. Can have insets, links into brief insets or overlays. Fluid medium - What does it need technically -
Light thrown on the wall, the way it has fuzzed edges and a soft aura, sense of angle of throw.
I need a multimedia canvas to set elements with each other. It needs to be colorable and flow and be as if made of grain. 30
31 What did I do this year:
January 1 2015 Shock yesterday opening the Cherokee's door after two months and finding disease and decay, green mold on the seats and steering wheel, thick ice on the windshield, a pool of ice on the floor on the passenger's side, condensation and maybe a leak. Deep dismay: my strong warm dry body sick, this place undoing it. Meantime: snow on the mesa, says the cam. Sun and snow this morning. I don't know what to do. I'm not in the right place. I don't have enough money to live even as barely as I do here. My funds are sinking maybe $600/mo. I go on missing Tom, who always wasted and neglected me. I don't have confidence in work, that there's any use for it.
2
Going through Motion4 again and again - laborious - my brain doesn't like it - compared to Sketchup - I forget quickly - I can't immediately make something with a charge - crawl through the tutorial chapters - is there a better way to - Motion4, what can I use
- Peter [Harcourt] died July 3 at 82 "of multiple ailments." I was making rocks for Mac's house. b. July 26 1931. [Notes on leaks and mold in cars] 4 Misery. Dark, wet, chill. Now I have a cold, after whatever that multiple other thing was. Pneumonia, darkness, sickness, poverty, isolation, loneliness, worklessness. Woke from a dream that Tom showed up bald with a beer gut, a dirty hippy teeshirt, old dirty jeans. I haven't heard from him and he hasn't showed up on FB since Dec 23. 5 How did that happen, exactly. I posted a piece in which some academic psychologist gave a good summary of Gilligan without giving credit. One of Becci's friends came in with misdirected protests. I had nothing better I could do - sneezing and blowing - so I replied. It went on through 4 hours. I was courteous. He was all sorts of poor argument. His FB profile showed a manly-looking guy in uniform standing in front of a helicopter. The conversation wavered between hostile ignorant defense and conciliated sincerity. One of his friends jumped in. There was some buddy-bonding, a remark about arguing with a woman. I ignored the second guy. Both were jumping on the author of the piece, calling him a poor little guy who got his PhD from a branch community college. Then a woman called Finkenbinder jumped in trying ignorantly to be on their side. They praised her and then ignored her. I tried going up a level, pointing out that arguments weren't being met as given. Ted came back with another misdirection, but then went to his actual protest, which was that the piece attacks manliness. I addressed that head-on, said I'm fond of manliness and think of the piece as defending the male spirit, but also said it would be good to mend male violence against women and children. - At that point suddenly Tom showed up, declaring that the piece's author got his PhD from UC, and posting a link to Springsteen's The river. Ted ignored Tom to say he didn't think male violence toward women was a big deal, women should just leave. That halted me for a moment but then I said "Read any headlines lately? The ones who leave are often the ones killed." Ted said, "So your solution is to make a world of feminine men because there are stupid women attracted to the criminal element?" Tom then said exactly the right thing: "Dude. Get a grip." It was exactly the right thing but I could see that if I didn't move fast Tom would take the conversation away from me, I'd be sidelined looking on. I said "Dude is an endearment I can go with." Then Ted went sideways. "Ellie I am not sure you are aware but your profile picture appears to be cropped off and only shows your chin." I wasn't going to say that of course I know my profile picture, though I wasn't going to let him get away with accusing me of female technical stupidity either, and at the same time I needed to hold onto the ball so Tom couldn't run away with it, so I resorted to flirtation. I said "And what do you think of my chin?" Tom wouldn't stand for that move so he said "Argument ad feminine, Ted. Shame on you." It wasn't an argument ad hominem, though it was partly a slur, ambiguously a slur. Ted couldn't let that be, so he said "I am ignoring you Tom." Tom said "At your own risk," which was pure bluster in the circumstance. I stepped in. "Replying is not ignoring." And then, "Stand back, the guys are going to lock horns." Ted replied to my earlier question, said it was an attractive chin, but then Tom seized the play again, said "Nah, I'll just hit him with my purse." I was agog at what followed. Ted had weaseled around every one of my points but Tom's head-on male challenge made him lie down and show his belly. "Point scored" he said. "Well played sir." What could I do with that? I said "Oi." Ted: "Vey?" Not much, but I had him back. Ellie: "No vey," meaning, no I'm not Jewish. Tom: "Vey down upon the Swanee River which is where this discussion seems to have gone." Ellie: "Just as well." And then, after a pause, an amazing thing happened. Ted came back with a link to a site called 25 things little girls wish daddies knew. "I like this one" he said. It was a wonderful piece - Tara Hedman in the Huff - says everything I've been wanting from Mr T since it's too late to get it from Mr Epp. She says don't lie, listen, support both my girlness and my boyness, touch me, support a strong voice. "Bravo" I say. "And if you're willing to say the same thing in relation to little boys we have no more disagreement." "Then we have none," Ted says. Whew. I don't suppose I got all the shades of that - would have liked to debrief with Tom - or somebody - but there's no way. In relation to Tom, what I think is: 1. He was defending me, or may have thought he was defending me, but 2. he didn't like seeing me talking to another guy, so he 3. competed with me by showing me how it's done - though I had other aims than getting Ted to roll over, and 4. at the same time something in his intervention unlocked or lightened the thing so Ted could go fetch his beautiful coda. Or was it my appeal to flirtation? It says no, scuffling with another man reaffirmed him enough to let him find his generosity. A kind of safety in being mastered made him younger. "Dude. Get a grip" really is a good move, I'll remember it. Luke painting his new office on Faulkland in Kentish Town. Had to buy a new mouse. Final formatting IA now it's posted w/o a password. 11 I sent Luke by Google Drive the file of singing him to sleep when he was late 2 or early 3, as I'd always done. It was a risk, could he handle it now. He said it was a treasure. Am in Nestor's with a decaf latté. Needed to be out though it's raining. Coffee shops full of lunch people. Wanted a quiet table with a big window but am settling for a false-leather couch in a supermarket. Stopped in a little smoke shop and bought a BC back road atlas. Am thinking how to live this summer without paying rent. Can I just camp from May to the end of Sept? PRC and back road BC looking for a home. What wd need to be in place for that to work - from Sept I can get rent supplement. Have hardly wanted to write in the grey wash of these days - don't want to keep them. 12 Dullest of grey light. People in their winter clothes excessively bundled - it's not cold, they're as if bundled against the oppressive light. I posted a photo yesterday from Kat Kam and said it steadily through all the hours tells the story of the day. I like the rhythmic/tonal contour of that. Definite. The way the telling goes on before the day is told - that, yes? First telling, which becomes story, which adds up to the day. Sam calls after me on the street to ask about Rowen. "I always say Rowen is pure gold." Sam has a long thin drizzle of hair and beard, off-putting, but centered in it, surrounded by it, so true and feeling an always-young face. The man-woman I meet in the elevator has a sweetness too, even more, that I think of as held through hardship. She's a skinny thing, tall, dressed mostly in trans-girly fashion, but sometimes with a fur-lined ear-flapped aviator's hat too. I don't generally like trans guys but I like her - I have to choose a pronoun and her isn't right, but it's closer to right? Because she has such a sweet vulnerability - I always like to be in her elevator company. 13 Southern Okanagan - I've brightened thinking of it. What I like: there'd be wonderful gardening, cherries, apricots, melons. It's dry, 12" of rain a year. It's sunny and wide open. The US is just across the border; from Oroville it fans down into eastern Washington and Oregon, the Columbia Basin. Sagebrush. Juniper? Pines. Rent less than here. I don't like that it's 5 hours from here and that it's a snowbird community, but the amount of open country south of it might be what matters most. I don't like the name of Osoyoos really, don't like the sound. So I have a plan, I think, live here till the end of April spewing money - end of March? - and then take to the road for the whole of the summer, try not to pay rent anywhere. Go to the PRC too, with camera and recorder. "I really over the years have become an animist," Kathleen Harrison says on Vimeo. It makes you aware in a way that is constant not casual ... you're always aware that there's something everywhere, something's happening all the time, there's way more than you can see and touch wherever you are ... in order to be in balance we need to believe that everything's alive. It's taught people collective awareness with individual self-containment. 15 What I'd want to ask her first. The visions I'd have when I'm traveling - call them visions? - their particular visual quality and that they are always of indigenous people - except that once, when they were of plants. They were like seeing in the dark, very clearly but not in color.
16 The difference is that eagerness has returned. Great Basin below the Snake Columbia Snake River Plateau Sagebrush is not a single species but a complex of related plants Pinon-Juniper woodland, 12-18", survive at 8" 12 sagebrush species Tall Sage indicated arable land Black-tailed jackrabbits and coyotes Mourning doves, nighthawks, sage grouse 200 million years ago shallow waters of continental shelf 60 million piled mass slumped west again - relaxation faults - old sedimentary rocks rose - metamorphosed and volcanic rock Lava flowing over the Columbia Basin 2 million ice ages thick melted over Columbia Plateau 12,000 gone Okanagan flows into the Columbia
Bunchgrass grows only in spring. 3 air streams: rainshadow from coast, warm continental from Great Basin, Arctic Ashcroft and Keremeos are drier. Similkameen Valley. February Arctic air shifts east, warm Pacific floods in, snow melts, first flowers. End of Feb migrant birds, violet green swallows. Late March apricots bloom, western meadowlarks. April pink peach, white cherry, white pear, white and pink apple, wild currents, hummingbirds. End of May most birds. June is wettest. July oven-like air from south. Late August fall showers. October yellow trees. November first flurries. Dec-Jan Arctic air, snow "weeks on end." Cantaloupes, watermelons. Nighthawk Rd "best sagebrush habitat in Canada," public land on W side. Sage grouse, sage thrasher, sage sparrow, sagebrush buttercup, sage mariposa lily, sage vole. Peregrine falcons, ospreys, red-tailed hawks. - Ways the journal has also been a dumping ground for things I've been too circumspect to say aloud. 19 This morning's email, Damion and Susan. 20 Ellen Morris Bishop 2003 In search of ancient Oregon: a geological and natural history Photos of rocks, vision of landforms flowing through time. Been meaning to say I have been walking so slowly everyone on the sidewalk overtakes me. It's a habit from being afraid I'll fall but also I think something about slowness in mobilizing energy. In the last couple of days I'm trying out walking faster, with longer steps, and still keeping the consciousness I need to not fall. It needs more breath. Am going through In America cleaning it up and compiling theme sheets to be able to write the intro. What I'm thinking about people who'll protest this and that detail of what I've said is I'll be willing to hear from them when they can show me they've taken account of the scope and ethic of the whole project. [Lists for camping, disposing and finishing] What do I think of Susan's piece. She won a big prize. "It's not 'slash' writing, but I hope this brings a smile anyway, and thank you for encouraging me to write." The scare quotes on slash tell me who she's writing for; that was one of my first reasons for not smiling. Then there's her statement paragraph, which is turgid and quotes two men. The piece itself isn't accurate in that it is full of theatrical effects, I mean exaggerated or decorative effects. An infant does not see her mother as a chrysanthemum broken at the neck, and so on. The fact though is that her effects worked, she won a prize, she has moved up a level, she'll have been charming to Richard Ford at a retreat in Ireland. There's her photo ten years later. She looks sore-hearted, is she alright? Then her home page, newyork.maiermoul.com. It's designed for phones and tablets, in vertical slabs. Her own photos and mostly quotations. The photos don't interest me, not one of them. They just seem graphic design. - Bioinformatics - methods and software for understanding biological data - computer sci, engineering, math, statistics. - "Dockers dipping their cranes in salute" as Churchill's barge passed up the Thames. 22 The yellow Chuck Taylors are done, beat up, faded, small toe pushing through a hole. Today these new shoes, silver All Stars with a pattern like snakeskin, beauties. When did I last have silver shoes, the platform boots and heavy work boots of 1976 probably. Early Vancouver, Dames rocket. - In there a bite on my L wrist, still reddening, itching. It was a young bug - I found it - crawling in the touchingly oblivious way they do - so I know it won't itch long. I did a power clean this aft; where has it come from? There hadn't been any for 10 days. I'm at the desk with my feet up writing against my knees. Did it crawl out of the journal? Which often lies on the bed. Maybe it's the one that bit my L forearm last night. - I have them new for checking into the Best Western presidential suite with Paul next Tuesday - presidential suite! - to be with poor lost M on her birthday. 23 It's raining hard. I'm stylin' in my new silver hightops and John Luther Adams two-pony hat. Last night a random radio site gave me Phill Niblock's Feedcorn ear, which I could see the way I like to, sheets of texture, a constant foreground I was looking through to grainy small movements behind it. Later the foreground broke up, juddered, as if interacting with background. I was thinking of the Pale hill airplane and the Last light track. Niblock is an old NY minimalist with an ugly beard and narrow eyes - minimalist in several media. They like him in Europe. I have a lot more to learn in audio. - Acme Café Now that I have an escape plan I'm keen to work. February; March; April.
24 Richard Martin showing Current at the Cinemateque Feb 23, Exptl films of the '70s. 29 Abbotsford Best Western 7:21. Seeing M with Paul, old huddle of a thing in a good white coat, sitting on a rock leaning against him with her eyes closed, the broad smooth river before us with ducks further out, train whistles on both shores, the comforting steady beat of a freight train to the northwest. Above us winter cottonwood trees looking dead. A few red whips of wild rose, a few white snowberries. Underfoot a complicated pattern of decomposing leaf edges overlapped, brown. Presidential Suite - I can hear Paul running a bath upstairs. A man of 65, sturdy, spectacled, with cropped black hair and a stubble beard, dressed in black, walking arm in arm with a 91 year old woman who asks again and again, Where do you live now? and How are things with you? and When are you going back? A horrible old woman, as it happens. Was that dreary greedy person who she always was? - No. We were having lunch with Lucy and Lucy in her nursey way was trying to help. Lucy would say something, Mary would ignore it, Lucy would assume she hadn't heard it and say it again, Mary would roll her eyes. That went on for a while and then Mary exploded. SHUT UP! A little grey rage. TREAT ME LIKE A PERSON! Mary needs to hate Lucy, it seems. 30 Pitt Lake how many years later. August 2007. It was some better, M's brain got seized by what there was to see, trees, many trees, a river, sky she kept noticing was cloudless, mountains, flat blueberry fields in this season like vast pink brushes, and then from a dyke the smooth long lake. She couldn't walk far. We sat at the concrete picnic table where Luke and I had eaten pie with her, in pleasing warmth, and there she actually was for a while - sort of - able to hear anything we'd say, talking to both of us rather than clinging to Paul. She asked, as she often has, and as she did 7 years ago in that spot, I think, what was the worst memory we have of growing up. I said I wasn't going there, but wd think what was the best. Being outside, even rock-picking. Gooseberry bushes in that copse north of the yard. Paul said he knew the one, and knew every other gooseberry bush there was but didn't tell anyone. Crocuses, spring run-off. Someone in Barre VT - who lives in Barre? - got into In America this morning. Came in through the index, so it wasn't a web search but a checking-up. The same person checked last July and found Fading still locked. - I think from seeing the pages checked that it's Jayem still grinding on why I loved Susan not her, how many years ago, ten. Talking to Paul across a table at breakfast I saw a face I'm still seeing, a better face than I've seen on him maybe ever. I was talking about the journal project and he was listening very sharply, concerned maybe. It was as if his face had come to a point. - Banging and slamming next door, Brian. There's a drugged-out scrag of a hooker with him. One of the horrible things about Mary is her blank blind habits of faked interest. She grimaces. Uh-uh-UH, she'll say. She was like that with Ed, I think, when her mind was on something else. Should I say a hateful compliance? Her voice is so crude in it, and the faces she pulls like a mad leering. On the way home, driving through forest and suburb, along the river on Highway 7, she began to say Where do I live? Paul would say, It's a surprise. 31 Saturday morning. I've caught up with ordering the desk and room and bills and have added up my money. Jeep to Ben Auto Body Wednesday morning. Taxes - BC Med - Pharmacare - GIS are the money things I need to do. Movies - C's book - my books - In America intros.
Something I liked in the Presidential Suite is that I looked better in the mirror than in this one. 1st February Early Sunday. Quiet and black. The streets sound wet. Since I'm back I haven't wanted to do anything - all day yesterday lying around listening to The Mauritius command, the last of it today. Desultory Sketchup, back to the 44x16 house, seeing its early ignorances. The Okanagan wind has died down, there's nothing to do in the meantime but live out another three months of rain. I'd as soon sleep through them. What's beyond them is a steep drop into the unknown. There'll be somewhere to look at, and not enough money and what else. The monitor is failing, blacks out if I run movies.
What do I want enough to go after it.
Strong exercise for my wits. I'm not saying that other complicated thing - 2 Frisky this morning, hopeful. David sent a video of an LA homestead, chickens, rocket stove, dehydrator, adobe oven, peach tree, avocado, artichokes, cast-iron-pot bread with flour made from a less-messed-with wheat, chickens on straw, worm box. I could do all that - and have a cat. Rob could give me all sorts of plants, David and I could build things. I'd have things to do and love when I wasn't working. There'd be the right kind of exercise. I'd go for camping excursions. It needs to be that someone buys it and I build on it and they charge me rent I can get subsidized? Default-mode network - activity reduced during psychedel. Wakeful rest vs task-positive network. Links parts of cortex to older deeper eg limbic and hippocampus. Self-referential thought vs action, during which DMN inactivated. "Preferentially attacked by buildup of beta-amyloid in Alzheimers." Hyperconnection in depression and chronic pain. Alzheimers a disease of ego? A disease of ergo - meaning causal beliefs/predictions. "Ailments of the ego." 3 Web research about money - getting ready for taxes - and then perfecting 44x16 which is a simple desert house. Things I like - as always the slant of light, simple small kitchen, raised foundation platform, Persian carpet in the bathroom, today a dark blue marble for the shower, speakers built into the walls, many doors to the outside, outside bed, pale terrazzo floor, tub with lot of sky, leafy shadows, plain 6' wall around the garden, function defined by shallow steps, midnight pool. 4 Long dream about a university building somewhere in California probably. There's a long room I'm sleeping in uninvited but it seems to be alright. Out through the corridor I can see a bit of a classroom where someone's lecturing on what I guess is biology. There's been a lot about some woman - a certain type, Jewish but not dark and intense, auburn and pudgy rather, but with manic social energy - feminist writer from years back - a mother. She has left garbage here and there on the dorm room's floor. I pick it up and am wandering the halls looking for a washroom, by which I mean somewhere to put what I've picked up. Complicated corridors. I ask, am directed to where a man stands by a conveyor belt to receive things to be recycled. I'm remembering a gallon glass jar and an old small green-covered book. When I go back to my room - noticing it's at the far northwest end of the university - I find stuff on my bed, a group has moved in. I throw their things off and tell them I'm doing it, a row of young men sitting on a ledge outside the window. Various conversations. Then someone says the college wants me to leave. I'm sad. Etc. In there somewhere I had a memory of Jam at her best, a moment she was beautiful, bright-faced in a womanly way, with her fine-focused fine-grained quality. A bright cheek. In the dream I also remembered remembering, saying to myself that I should recover the mind I had with her. 5 What I'd really like: April-Oct in the Okanagan gardening, Nov-March in Palm Springs. - Feeling that as I'm taking images of the 44x16 house with desert background, realizing Palm Springs is where that house should be. 6 Going to the post office to pick up the Niblock CD mailed from Germany - wet streets - noticed I was walking better in my silver shoes. (Have walked to the library a couple of times.) Made some lake house photos - they aren't photos - and sent them to Jam. Sent 44x16 photos to Greg when I woke early, then sent him the lake house photos when he'd replied. Now there's blue dusk at the window where white and red tulips are standing in glass and the celadon bowl is holding oranges. Fridge humming. Blue light on the CD player. Two lamps, one on the desk, one behind me directed onto the page. Haven't wanted to record these days but this is a buoyant moment, I don't know why. An untethered creative bubbling. 8 It's warmer and last night was dry so the Saturday night street baccanale went on till probably 4. Eventually I put on dry pyjamas and listened to the next disc of 20,000 Leagues under the sea, wondering how I found it when Auntie Anne sent it to me for was it my twelfth birthday. What I remember is gazing through glass into the bottom of the sea, but I wonder if I was interested too in the idea of a natural philosopher, which I likely hadn't come on before. 9 Dire Straits, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Gram Parsons, Emmy-Lou Harris, Julie Cruise, Paul Simon, Lyle Lovatt, Gillian Welch, Ry Cooder, African guy, Al Gromer Khan, Iris Dement, Nancy Griffith, Counting Crows, Cielo y Tierra, James Brown, Moby, [incomplete list of music via Tom]. 10 Berger This is where we meet 2005. When I look him up I find a photo of his head tilted up against Sally's [Sally Potter]. Photo of two red and white tulips against the grey window. They're at their end, half an hour after the photo a petal had fallen. 11 Filed Can and US [taxes] guessing at W2s etc. Parrot and Olivier in America 2010. This was the turbulent and shining soul who was my lover and my teacher, and when I woke by her side I knew myself, most mornings, a lucky man. The point was no longer one of line or perspective but of the light and spirit that came from every corner of everything she ever touched. She would use a light body to underpin, perhaps a yellow-white as a basis for a fiery red. Or she would lay a green-white underneath a cooler red and glaze it with a strong color. These glazes were, where necessary, partly wiped off or blended with all sorts of colors in adjacent areas. Thus she created that suggestion of mystery which continually engages the eye anew and never tires it. Her mouth was washed with tears. I ate her, drank her, boiled her, stroked her till she was like a lovely flapping fish and her hair was drenched and our eyes held and our skins slid off each other and we smelled like farm animals, seaweed, the tanneries upriver. It was warm enough to leave our windows open, so we kept the air as fresh as might be possible in a seaport and it was only then, as wind off the river ripped through our small supply of candles and left us sitting in the moonless dark, that .... 13 Starbucks. There's a man I like the look of, tall and thin, straight up and down, fifty something, maybe older, eyebrows thick in the older man's way, curly dark hair with more grey at the forehead. He's like Ian Mac, my type, humane-looking. I feel my present self isn't earning him, I'd have to be less interested, preoccupied, working. He's a bit sad and steady. It's a Friday morning, grey as ever, Water and Cambie. Asian strangers standing around on the corners. Slow traffic, ridiculous clothes. What's good in this neighbourhood is above street level, wonderful upper storeys, often brick in plain strong designs. Large windows. Cut stone lintels, sometimes. In Chinatown there are upper storeys in Hong Kong styles, fanciful and beautifully proportioned. - I've resolved the 14x25 for one person - some weeks not very interested in it but thinking 16 x 44 is too grand - stabbed away at it a bit now and again - tonight finished working out the furniture and that has done it [from the east]. 14 x 25 is 350 square feet. High roof. Expensive windows. Furniture, then backdrop, then shadows and it comes alive. Furniture including little things like books, journal, bread. Realized I could use the photo I pulled off probably the Guardian, of a beautiful boy who was murdered in England. I wanted to save it somewhere. He has so fine a look he should be kept with us. [afternoon venetians] [bathroom 5pm] [from bed] [january sun] [starlight] Working on it tonight, when it was starting to come right, I noticed I was singing. 16 What the competitors don't seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money. - Bono of the Apple design lab. He craved products that gave a feeling of gratitude that someone else had actually thought this through. 17 It is not that I copied his voice, but he gave me permission to find a voice ... that is to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence, and as I grew older I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions. The instructions were never to lament casually, and if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty. Cohen on Lorca - It's a bit of a Greek temple - The t-shaped service core has room for all the appliances - under-counter fridge, washer-dryer, wall oven, induction cooktop, gas fireplace, water heater - as well as solar batteries and control panels - and ventilation and electrical ducts - and plumbing - all in one place - and lets cupboards and drawers just into it from both sides - while dividing those three functional spaces - and still letting in clerestory light from all four directions. The windows and window-door units wd be expensive. The cabinetry wed be very expensive. High-end appliances too. The pillars could house speakers, wiring, rainspouts, vents; have just installed rain vents outside the doors and scuppers where they'd discharge. Scuppers! There were scuppers in the warehouse! The platform is a plinth. Plinthos brick. 18
19 Daphne reading at the SFU library this noon. 135 bus up the hill after 12 years a long drab ride through hideous buildings in grey light. Even the forest, once we got to it after what seemed a very long time looked smashed and sodden, and except for the Indian plum, which was spangled with little white flowers and rabbit-ear little new leaves - and I suppose all the pushy coarse ferns - quite dead. Then there was the quadrangle, the same old pile of concrete, the philosophy dept's building which was new now looking a bit mossy. Air colder and damper than downtown. Then the library remodeled for the laptop age which has come in the meantime, and there I was in my new silver Converse and topaz earrings retired from being a sort of professor somewhere else, elderly and not very interested. What was the best moment - getting off the elevator at the Q books on the 6th floor being hit by the smell of university books - VPL books don't smell like that. The Q's in that aisle were neuroscience of perception and sensation, old friends like Fuster, the site of so much eager search, with no wish to look at any of them. What it's like to be done with something. Daphne read poems from the whole of her now so honoured career, starting with one from when she was just beginning with Kit's dad and ending with something recent still and again about the city. Her energy seemed different with every poem she read. I couldn't pick up very much of any of it, it goes by too fast and in my system is too disjunct, so for me the reading was just witnessing her career, the way she had the same method all through, and used it to interest herself in the ways a certain group of poets of the '60s and '70s did, successful in that group from the beginning. What is it about that method. She'd say it's associative, a lot of word-impacts rippling out their effects to reach other words, and something similar about time, present facts or scenes touching off imagined or remembered historical facts or scenes so the writing self is, is or feels, wider, deeper, thicker, making something. 20 Psychological immediacy rather than physical/embodied immediacy. Stoned consciousness as I knew it. What do I think now. It's too solipsistic, the little knot in space busily circulating within itself rather than holding form but passing all sorts of lovely flow, though yes with some colors circulating internally too. Little darts and interceptions. About the Okanagan house, it's very pretty but so solitary and isolated. What work could be done there. What companions could eat with me at that table. A garden certainly, winter food.
C's second two DVDs that I hadn't opened until today - a lot of documenting friends and lovers of those hippy days, city junk, a couple of strong hits. Those will be my anchors. I like that she documented people we were young with, for instance Diana. Should that be a web project. The photos of me don't look like me though, and is that true of others too maybe - not only. Daphne, Josie, Rhoda, T, Diana, Lara, Zoe, Don, Roy and herself. Carole, Ferron. FB page? Tumblr? Curated? Cropped. 1970s? Wedding rug made by the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq! Uruk - land between the two rivers. 21 Woke thinking the Congeneris Institute could be a virtual online thing, curating work on many fronts. What sort of platform - what sort of reach - a board - guest curators - somehow some income - wd it mean no grain work? What does it mean to yearn for something and continually forget it and neglect it? Where another kind of work is eager and unstoppable. Greg said two spheres. I said what does that mean. One is feared and in some way sublimely satisfying. The aloneness and effort are feared. Now I have the aloneness without the effort and the satisfaction. 22 A zone of silence. What happened with my best work in philosophy. What happened with my best work in photos is happening now again. I've been posting the PRC photos and no one says anything. Last night Paul K on the phone when I was saying how much I hate being uglier now said "You're still beautiful - I shouldn't say that to you." Isn't there a ubiquitous impulse to curb me? It says yes.
To Greg:
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