| back 1 part 5 - 2015 April-May | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
8 April 2015 An enormous salmon trying to beat its way upriver on bare rock - enormous like 7 feet long. I walked over the rocks looking for the actual stream bed and saw hardly a thread of water far below. Was thinking why aren't I filming this.
9 At 6 this morning clear orange over the blue peak to the northwest. Luke in FB messaging. We talk until 8.
He has a community, he's finding a way. He's true-hearted fond and smart. Corner table at the Prado, real caffé latté, not decaff. Leaf-shaped foam. The young going to work in bright sweet light. The addicted broken-hearted shuffling past. I've sent by the lotus and here, with info sheets and stills and a new bio and a new head shot and deposit money and signed contract. Feeling the count-down. Three weeks more. Now that I can stop resenting the city. - o sea - sound? No. Luke remembered sitting in his high chair in the orange cupboard room. I'd forgotten it. It wasn't high. It folded down to be a seat with a table in front of it. - only that, by accident - let's say - the Benalla High School dropout came between the orbits of two men, one beautiful and damaged, the other an egotistical monster and, within the confusion of their gravitational pulls, somehow managed to slide upwards and sideways, so although she remained an assistant to an assistant, and continued to live three houses from the corner of Ninth Avenue, she quietly, triumphantly, entered the completely unmapped ocean, and was gobsmacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her i.e. the true wonder of bloody everything, no less. Peter Carey you delightful person. [Theft 2006] osea4444.mov and OBpier5-4444.mov are ready to ship but very large. pale hill sound not good yet. last light check the sound. gwen & sel kale pan Amanda of Iris Collective today too. An old man passed me on the street, small - my height - with ash-grey hair and beard and a dribble of food down his shirt. I looked again. He had a sharp nose. "David?" He had passed but I called after him. "David?" "David?" He turned finally, stood and looked at me. "Ellie." I threw a tomato at him, once, about forty years ago. pale hill is hard. I have trouble deciding among possibilities and even seeing them - exactly where to lay the rising and falling sound against the moving shadows, how to begin the sound to set a sound level, how to get less hiss. There are a lot of versions with different qualities, I've picked it up and set it down without resolving many times. 11 Minneolas in the stores this while. Delight eating oranges after all the years of ineatably insipid oranges in California stores. Delight meaning I peel their thick skins with a paring knife and then methodically slice them up with a serrated bread knife and wish there were more when I've eaten the last chunk. Long dream that I was in a room with a lot of people sitting quietly on the floor. I had got next to Josh Lyman and he had his arms around me. He was moving slightly, swaying. I was completely relaxed into his motion. It went on and on, just me and him, me feeling it with complete attention. After a while I felt a hard line against my back, supposed he had a boner. It wasn't going to lead to anything, we were just having a time together. Somewhere in the middle of that there was a young Hispanic boy sitting next to me I think with a kite. I knew he knew my mother so I said something to him. He called her Maria. 12 Sunday morning business meeting with Rowen and Freya. I took a bus to their JJ Bean on Fraser. Was going to be early and study up on the Canada Media Fund files but when I stepped into line at the counter Row touched my shoulder. They'd come early too. Row and I sat slightly leaning together as we used to. Freya was on her computer researching grants and listening with one ear. Their company name is Acorn Game Labs. ACORN is an acronym, have forgotten for what. Row looked beautiful and she beamed across at us. He said he felt guilty about being 001. She said she is happy to be 002 and that it's just, because he's creative director and she wouldn't be doing any of this if it weren't for him - "I'd be doing something else just as awesome but I wouldn't be doing this." I liked how lucid that was. She's lucid in general, alert. The difference it's making to him to have a companion in his earnest interests. I sent her a batch of photos, whatever I had of Rowen as a kid. She said she'd shown them to her mom, "Look what I got, such good genetic material." Did he mind that? He seemed to. Shouldn't have though. 13 Villette. Another story of loneliness. She studies faces remarkably. The book is largely about what she thinks of as character. Was it the way of the times. She describes Madame Beck, Dr Paul, M Emanuel, Paulina Maria, Genève Fanshaw - her core constellation - many times in much detail. Herself too. She can be tedious in romantic flights of metaphor. She's very susceptible to good looks. Her intelligent women live in conscious struggle between what she calls feeling and what she calls reason, by which she means self-suppression of the kind I began to know about when I was twelve. 1853. Set pieces and close phenomenology. She's making me think of Dorothy Richardson in this one, partly the setting in a foreign school but also the closely transcribed privacy. DR only fifty years later had more freedom and more kinds of thoughts but surely must have built on her highly energized honesty. George Elliot thought it wonderful, VW said "some untamed ferocity." [Later: it turns out that in Pointed roofs DR mentions having Villette on her bookshelf before she left school.] About her coincidences, in my experience they are plausible, these sorts of things have happened to me. 14 Backing up all three computers, sorting, consolidating, erasing. Then think what needs to be accessible on the road. Bookmarks for instance. Dr Ranger this morning sez all my tests are good - heart, kidneys, cholesterol, B12. I should look for a job probably, under the table preferably. Keep in mind upper limit for BC Med etc. Need to make up $5500 plus $1000 for insurance. More to really fix jeep. 15 BC driving license today alas. Don - a note today saying as he does that he'll answer soon, "I've just not been in any mood for writing." I don't want more of that male withholding, enjoy me or don't, I want the company of someone eager to know me.
[Notes on cutaneous dysesthesia, burning dysesthesia. Acid ache, burning skin. "Caused by lesions of the nervous system."] 16 I've posted some jpgs of the 4-bed room. C has commented. I'm wondering why she gets the tone of her comments wrong. "Good to see it fleshed out in the light of day." That implies some cliché about submerged trauma being mended, which is not at all how I am feeling those or any of my sketchups. Whatever mending was needed happened earlier by different means. I feel her as trying to describe me as damaged rather than gifted, so she can feel herself better than me, which she is not.
She said How does it feel to take authority over your historic places. I said, I don't think authority is the word. It's more a taking-account of who I've been in relation to place. For instance with this room I remember many details of layout, color, furniture, light, orientation, etc, but nothing at all about who else was in the room with me. Maybe a child who has been alone in strange places can become someone who takes great pleasure in architectural space. "It was a warm, bright room that had no function but passage between entries on two levels." That's a psychological description. The right response to these drawings is to take them as that, and as life stories. Martin got it right when he liked where I said "Soundtrack for this one is a train whistle from the freight yards a couple of miles to the northwest" next to the jpg of the room at night. C isn't getting the wonder inherent. 17 Ban Righ Hall #49. [blue bed] [typewriter] 18 Prado, Saturday morning. I was reading RF1 because I needed the energy of those 7 months in Ban Righ, which was another small room in a large communal building - another east window - but in other ways the opposite of these 8 months. I was hurling myself into a new form of life - socially so interested and energized - popular, it seems, but all unanchored - always new friends who are never heard from again, except for Olivia, who is wonderful in this record. So many hours of talk, everywhere. I found my feet without realizing it was difficult, poured out the story to my family with hardly any sense that I might be boring them with things they'd no experience of. Paul said M would read the letters aloud at the table with obvious gaps to forestall Ed. I was candid and breezy about everything they feared, booze, dancing, apostasy, reported going to church but in such a touristic spirit they can't have been reassured. They were losing me, and not only that, I was testifying to the interest of all they'd lived forbidding - Judy and Paul were taking note. It was such a bursting-out. There's a sketchup jpg I've called golden window which remembers the moment when I'd woken for the first time in room 49 and stood at the open window looking out at the open sports field all golden with sun and autumn leaves. I'd arrived, I was really there, I'd won my way. And then there's only one crash recorded, which I didn't completely understand then. It was the first time O had come with me to an International House party. I'd felt viable at those parties, where a lot of men isolated away from their own cultures could seem sexually interested in me, but when I saw Olivia dancing there I had to see them preferring her. It crushed me, it wasn't the fact of rivalry, it was the way it opened the pit of sexual despair under my energized coping. My family, and everyone else, was useless in relation to that despair. My dad had to take on the facts but only as they concerned him, his image of himself in the community. (Oh alright, that was the charge under the time he was snarling at me about how he'd had to live me down in the community.) I'm proud of myself for the drive and coping. I like the energy but there's no solution, there's been no solution, to the sexual despair. There can be no solution, it's a fixed pivot. Joyce understood it, I think. When she said "despair about men" I understood her differently, in a feminist way: I was still evading. So now I ask, if I hadn't been damaged wd Tom have been less absent? Not at all; but I wouldn't have had to try to be with someone like him. What does any of this have to do with the present. It's out in the open now - "fleshed out in the light of day" - because I have to feel so much more damaged in the way I move, and being older means I don't have my former ways of getting interest. The crisis has got louder. In this version of the east-facing room I've been holed up like a sick animal. That's an insulting thing to say, is it true? Compared to 18, yes. But it's going to change very soon. I'm throwing myself into the world again. Shd take that brave 18 year old with me. - The year has so turned around. Sun heating the space, window open, a dozen flies zig-zagging in the center of the room. They have somewhere else to go when the sun moves away, and they don't land on my skin looking for water they way they did in Borrego. Scent of maple flowers from the tree below the window sometimes. After it rained the sight of bright snow on the peaks, gone now. There seems more noise from the street, sirens and motorcycles brutally loud. Roars and honking when there's a game on. 20 Took the skytrain to Burnaby and got my blue parking placard. On the way home stopped at the vocational inst and had my hair cut. Two off my list. Put full-length security shutters on all sides of the grassland house. Yearning for that one a bit. 21 Funny how I'm a different person with this haircut, younger, girlier, not stern. How deep will the difference go. I like touching it. I can feel it moving around my head. Prado café latté. One week left in 662. On skytrain and the 130 bus yesterday looking at the city. It's leafy. There are gardens, but it seems so irrelevantly junky. I didn't want it. Excited. Posted the Grande Place photo to say I wasn't always so ugly. People jump to like it, amazing. People who don't notice anything else. 22 A burst on statcounter yesterday - Montreal, Toronto, Topeka - as if something somewhere was posted. It includes Being about, so is it the new bio at CFMDC? Rob yesterday. I was sitting on the front steps downstairs. Came a tall man in good boots and a light suede jacket. We sat for hours at my desk. He's not very changed, more man than boy, now, 58 this month, a bit more padded around the jaw, just a bit of roundness at the belt, more confident I thought. He was carrying himself well. There was a bit of buzz. He talked and listened, talked about American foreign policy, the universe. Had engineering thoughts about Mac's house and asked who Mac was. Doesn't watch TV anymore. Took me to lunch. I showed him my gardens and the Heres and the sketchups and the FB pages. When we were saying goodbye at the door said he'd come see me when I live in dry country. I said, I wish you would. 23 It's piling up -
24 Room in moving disorder around me, rain and forecast for weeks ahead.
Yesterday on the 20 bus going to pick up the jeep a Native man sitting further forward lit up when he saw me, waved. He had a beard and I didn't recognize him at first, but then I saw he was a man I used to meet around town and sometimes talk to, an artist of sorts. He blew me a kiss and patted his heart. I mouthed 'Long time' and he said something back I wasn't sure I'd caught. I mouthed 'How've you been.' He looked down at his walker with a sad face to say not so good. When he'd got off outside the First United Church I caught his eye to wave goodbye and he did it again, blew a kiss, patted his heart, and then threw his arms out and brought them back to his chest a couple of times to say his heart was throbbing for me. I didn't remember what I'd done to make him glad to see me but I knew I'd always liked the look of him. It was a sweet moment of connection with the city. What am I meaning to say - something about the kinds of relation there can be in a place, with people one never gets to know but sees sometimes and feels something for. There used to be a man I liked the look of when I was first here. I'd see him in Kits - once on a softball diamond in a park - and in Gastown. Later I'd see him with a scar on his face. It was that way with a couple of my neighbours in Strathcona, the waitress in the Princess Café, in San Diego Ernesto my neighbour's gardener, Michael the homeless man in the next-door parking lot. They are love-connections of a particularly private kind and yet they belong to the city rather than the home. They pervade the city with a tenuous fondness. 25 We have to tell the people of the unmarked graves that we heard them. - Kingsway at Knight, 11 am on a Saturday morning, cell phone repair shop, tall black dude in button-front jeans opens my Blackberry, takes out the battery and spins it on the counter, "Yes it's done." "How do you know?" "It has a bubble." He picks it up and pinches its middle. "It's swelled." "What does that mean?" "It's old." I'd been waiting outside his shop - he was late, it was cold - talking to the other person waiting, a young Ethiopian. 26 Walked through the garden yesterday in angry disgust at the visual stupidity of ordinary people. Give them radiant order and they make a junkyard of it. Oh the herb garden, how could they not see to preserve its centered cross-axes? How could they ruin the gravel paths? There were birds and scents, yes, the orchard grass was mown, the incense rose was blooming though overgrown and stunted. I brought home a single rugosa I can smell now, scent like an Alberta ditch rose. The soil everywhere looked black and rich, but there's no sense of wholeness now, there can't be an effect of making-whole, it just diagrams disordered accretions of dissociation, and there's no invention except what I left in concrete. They removed the kids' area boat; they have let the round table rot; they've replaced the perimeter benches with a more complicated design. The tea fireplace is gone; there are conventional picnic tables. The nursery beds are a mess. 27 Louie's house, next to the fire, six in the morning, dim grey streets flowering and shining with rain, fire fluttering. Rowen and Freya moved me out of 662 yesterday. R and I restacked everything in the storage closet. They refused my red fifty dollar bill. Walked away toward the Prado holding hands. In the jeep I asked Rowen what he was thinking about. He said Staged. "I think about it all the time." Louie's house is clean and cold. I notice changes, little bourgeoisifications I take as reversion to Dutchness with Ina, sinking back a bit into family belonging. Less of my unforgiving eye but prosperity and good repair. She has left me a Miriam Toews whose cover text lists prizes and a lot of delighting reviews. This one is about a brilliant sister trying to kill herself. As I read I keep wondering whether it's the characters' continuous joking that makes them suicidal. Joking is a kind of being-for-the-other, isn't it, like self-deprecation. Doesn't that set ego against uncon distressfully. She doesn't actually make me laugh. There's another kind of humor that's more sudden and less habitual. All of this to say that I think Miriam Toews' success must cost her some, because her characters' humor is exactly her own, it's what her books are founded on. There's nothing to eat in this house, not an almond or a tin of soup. I came in so trashed yesterday that I couldn't stir to go out for food. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and then leave on Saturday. It's a plan but hasn't my whole energy behind it, though some -
- So trashed by the work yesterday. Had to go back and clean today and felt ancient, ready to die. Struggled to bend my knees to get to the floor. Calculated everything I did for least effort. Louie's stairs an ordeal. Then when I unpacked the computer an email from Chris Kennedy saying he'll try my movies with Andrea Picard of the Wavelengths program at TIFF, and that Jeremy and Oona will like them. 28 Backwater. 1919. Dorothy in Finsbury Park. I don't remember reading most of it. It has the most of her life at home with her sisters in a good house with a big garden, south of the river. 4 girls - how much of herself she found or kept because they were natural with each other. - From this bed I'm seeing the big maple's bits of olive drab leaf like dots on a veil, through it a dark grey sky and all the clean triangles of roofs overlaid. Strathcona is more gardened than it was, flowering all over now, exquisite in this season but in a barer way than Kits, flowers more visible than trees. Here's a moment where she realizes that when she reads she reads authors not stories. She's usable, the way she describes men's limited minds, women's blankness. She's funny but her humor is situational, she doesn't like jests either. 29 [status list for all the films Moving Images has in storage] - Things that used to be easy are difficult now. Eating has got very cramped and still in Louie's mirror I'm thick in the trunk. Moving has been cognitive overload. I've made mistakes. I thought my battery was flat but it was that I had the anti-theft plug in my pocket. I thought the liftgate wouldn't open but I was turning the key the wrong way. Both those mistakes were memories. Small enterprises, like picking up my films today and checking them and returning them, are daunting. I seem to be getting old quite fast. It would help to have a home and not move things around any more. I do like my short hair, the cut isn't really good but it's younger, not so severe. I can imagine being at film festivals with it, not so scary-looking. - A scene where after seeing Hamlet she's trying to figure out what it is about Shakespeare. She says it's the sound. 1st May Paul got creepy last night. "You could have had a man who loved you all your life" and that my shoulders are erotic, "There are people who love you" and at the same time imagining I could die of cold where I'm going, so irrelevantly that it was like showing an unconscious wish. What was I dreaming, that I was standing on a sort of wall waiting for a woman to whip me. I said 'Don't give your husband the pleasure of ...' and she went and closed the door to the bathroom where he was sitting on a toilet looking cowed at being found out. A lot of people by now were standing around watching. I told them to photograph her whipping me. They all crowded around her holding up their phones, so she couldn't do it. Said Louie: "I never feel judged by the part of you that is best at what you do. It's humble." She was waving toward her right, a wide floating-out gesture. "What is the other side?" "I don't want to tell you, you'll object." "I need to know." "It's corrective, it thinks it is right." "It is right." We laughed. I agreed I'm corrective, but I didn't agree that the other side is what I'm best at. I said I think I'm better at philosophy than art. She said she was thinking this as she was falling asleep last night. I don't understand what difference she means. The artist self that could make the herb garden was very corrective though not of her, I mean it is absolute in its judgments in the same way the teaching or philosophy self is, but I do them alone so correction doesn't come up. Sonja yesterday pink and lovely next to the fire talking and listening naturally for six hours, remarkable. I could do it because she could listen, I could tell her things simply, and go simply into her circumstances. I liked when she described the way Lise tried to continue embodiment studies and can't do it, "half-understood."
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