15 November 2018
Working on little journal stories to post on FB, noticing awkward things
about the writing. I'm constantly changing verb tense and my sentences are
often choppy maybe because I'm not pouring from the L hem, I'm stopping
to look or remember or consider.
Reading through GW now I'm noticing not only that but how those years
made possible what I could do at Goddard, ways the work with Joyce and the
book were constructing a firm quiet core in relation to the kinds of people
who were students.
-
With Heide, Angelina, Cass this aft hanging photos at Brambles.
It's a vanity project isn't it. When I was writing up the bio sheet I
decided to list all my international screenings and the gallery shows in
Germany and Vancouver and then my four degrees too. Telling any of that
is so out of scale with Merritt that I knew it was like outrageous bragging.
I doubted myself in it again and again but each time I'd feel a kind of
rage, I am what I am, I'll cram it down their throats - something like that.
The shy not very hopeful hope is that maybe along with the photos the resumé
will find just one smart person here who'd like to know me.
None of the three could like the photos I like best, the ones Paul likes
too, the hillside over-all texture ones. They're invisible to them.
16
I haven't said anything about Paul's visit at the end of October. He
came early in the day after Uncle George's and stayed two nights. In the
afternoon I took him up Norgaard's road to the flag and then asked if we
could go back to look at Spius Creek. Colored trees, warm sun through the
windshield and his Audi seemed to run like silk. It was a pleasure just
being in motion like that.
Next day we took the Monck Park road along the north bank of the lake
as far as it went and then the same distance along the south bank to the
hotel. We always have a lot to say. On the way back he asked if he'd told
me that one winter he'd decided to investigate churches. He went to all
kinds. He was disgusted. Yes I said.
I'm always surprised how much he's read. We talked about McPhee - he'd
found Annals when he was clearing up someone's workshop after a death.
He'd opened it and said This is really good writing. Then he liked a book
called Oranges.
17
He's actually the best company I have. I like his taste and he's not
blind to mine though usually he doesn't say anything. I said I liked his
glasses and he said they are a Danish brand that only designers notice.
We even like to eat the same things. He still has male reticence with me
but he's warming up I think. I phone him sometimes now.
I haven't said that as I go through GW I'm pulling little stories and
fine-tuning them and posting them on FB. With some of them I make small
changes day after day. It feels like carving.
18
Brambles opening last night. Community building Cassandra said. Her community
not mine, a community that could write "Wonderful show!" in the
comment book for a show that is utter shit. Two singers so loud no one could
talk. I came home. My little hope is someone of a better kind wandering
through at lunchtime. It's cost me $519 but I can use it for taxes and I
do have 14 nice prints I can give away.
- That was a write-off yes
- Would you have told me not to do it
yes
- Is there a community here I can find
yes
- Anyone I know so far no
- Being with people stresses my heart
no
- Will the photos find me anyone here
YES
My heart has gone wobbly again. A bad night. I've been scared to close
my eyes these last three nights because then I feel it struggle and am frightened
and can't sleep.
- Is it loneliness no
- Would minerals fix it yes
- Mainly potassium YES
-
- Is there anything else you want to say about the show
no
- About my heart yes, child's, persistence,
in generous, truth
- Has cost me a worn-out heart no
- Are you advising that YES
- Realism rather than resentment yes
- The way I was with students yes
- Am I going to soon die no
- Am I going to have to live in fear
yes
- Do I look like I'm dying NO
Photo yesterday morning of a frosted raspberry leaf against
the sky.
- What is the power I evade leadership
- I'm not nearly alert enough no,
it's not about alertness, it's about responsibility to what you do perceive
- Be everywhere the way I am when I'm teaching
- Don't be lazy YES
- Be queenly YES
- I need more energy for that YES
That was from 2000. Once again seeing that what I did at Goddard was
obeying my assignment.
- Is it dynamic isolation YES
"The sensation I wake with at night, as if my face and hands are
stiff with fluid, prickling." Summer of 2000, eighteen years ago.
19
cass, i'm grateful for the community building you do but i'm also aware
that the community you are building here can't really be a community for
me. i know my work is not to merritt's taste. it's sort of alright because
i do have community elsewhere. at the same time i thought maybe by showing
my work here i could find one or two odd souls whose taste is minority
enough to like what i do. that's my little strategy. we'll see how it works.
you may have some ideas for where i could find those odd souls?
i'm undecided on the photography class and creative coffee idea mainly
because i have a strongly different sense of photography than my co-exhibitors
and that would mean i'd either have to suppress myself or else override
them in public, which i would not want to do. ideally i'd prefer to interact
with a photography class on my own but i don't know how that could be arranged.
so pleased you like the narcissus. i bought some for me too and here
they are at my elbow on this very quiet monday morning.
In GW21 there are the 110 days of monk disciple and then a swerve into
Mind and land which besides being the relief of new energy was a
good idea. Could I have done it? It says no. What I did instead was bits
of it in teaching. But when I see it now I have a feeling of suspense somehow.
- Should I make a mind and land site
YES
20
Since I lay down and closed my eyes last night - it's noon - heart too
wobbly to feel easy or really sleep. Am I going to have to live afraid of
my own heartbeat from now on?
22
She said she'd send me to a cardiologist in Kamloops. Added an ACE inhibitor.
EKG normal. Seems to be an electrical problem. Exercise alright. Ran into
Liis in the office and then again outside Brambles.
23
First thing this morning a note from Don saying he'd been in my Queen's
journals and had liked to be back in the Howells' dining room and Alison's
place on West St.
Wondering whether bp meds will make me less pressured to write here.
In GW24 there I am without exactly realizing it having made the passage
intended, working carefully with students.
24
- Body will you talk to me yes
- Do you like the diuretic YES
- Do you like the ACE YES
- Heart are you going to be alright now
yes
- Do you want to go to the gym yes
- Do you want to take a few days off
no
- Is there anything you don't like about them
no
- Kidneys are you alright with them
yes
-
- Is Luke playing power games with me
no
- Are you sure NO
- Does he need to dominate me no
- When he's in a bad state he gets into primal grudge
YES
29
True differentiation keeps the tension of needing
to negate and needing to recognize. Wholeness for each can only exist if
the tension/contradiction is maintained. But it is somehow in the nature
of a bond that the tension is given up into polarization. Jung and Toni Wolff.
I managed that with Tom to perfection -
December 4
Rowen on the phone minds being mad at Michael. I tell him he's the grown-up
now. He's balanced but Michael is all over the place inside himself. Michael
used to be the Archangel Michael, his hero, Rowen says. He needs to keep
the feeling he had for Michael when he was little and at the same time know
he's the grownup I said, it's a contradiction but he can do it. I also said
men need to fight with their fathers. There are men who don't and it's bad
for them.
Freya said the house was lighter and clearer after.
Row says she's reading him bits of the journal.
5
I've gone on being mad at Luke but then this happened. Antonis posted
a 1910 photo of Athens taken across a long stretch of what looks like overgrown
garden
toward the Acropolis seen as a tiny silhouette on its very distant outcrop.
Labeled in Greek. It charmed me. I reposted it. Luke clicked love
and was the only one who noticed it. I liked him again instantly for that.
Working on the little stories I'm posting - I mean revising the kind
of writing the journal has been - is there something more I'm noticing.
For instance yesterday morning I risked a small sequence that doesn't hold
and I thought maybe does hold.
August 1993.
These random times must be times when I renew my variety.
The way you would speak to be making a contact, not caring what you
say, visibly present behind these acknowledged pretexts. Your beautiful
self is there facing me and you are speaking and I am speaking and what
we are actually doing is standing and smiling at each other in silence
and I'm admiring the way you know how to do that and know you are doing
it.
The moment when I can't remember your voice hasn't come yet.
Then I cry, then I stop crying, then I go out.
"Starlings will imitate the sound of doors opening, feet scuffling,
grain being poured."
The three people who have showed up under it are writers, Emilee instantly,
then Cheryl, then Janet. Can I discover what it is I'm wondering. There
can be a perceived sophistication in setting unrelated bits together and
I'm thinking one could do that on purpose and I don't know whether that
would be wrong. It's a thought about skill - the complex space of considerations
that forms in revising -as if I feel a new possibility of that - new possibilities
in that - and at the same time I'm wanting not to spoil whatever was known
by the much less deliberate earlier person writing confidently and innocently
in pencil in a lined hardback journal. Why. Because maybe the uncon was
writing too, maybe it had reasons for putting the starlings where it did.
- Is there a coherence in it YES
- Can you explain it to me (twirls)
no
- Is this kind of coherence better than straight stories
yes
6
The Douglas Lake Cattle Company's irrigation foreman was parked next
to me on the Save-On lot loading groceries into his new Cherokee's hatch
as I came with my cart - a Liberty in fact, he said Liberties were the new
Cherokees renamed out of political sensitivity, which I like to have learned
because it enlarges my club to include Susan. He was a slight young man
with excellent teeth, I liked quite a few things about him: he could get
very technical about Cherokee maintenance, he said my jeep idles better
than most its age, his name is Lee, he wears a Carhart toque like mine but
black not purple, he goes to Brambles for gluten-free bread, he was loading
filtered water, he said he'd show me off-road trails in the forest if I
come find him at the ranch, and he looked me in the face very easily though
he said he's a bit of a hermit. When I asked where he was from he said he'd
been all over, a bartender in Bella Coola and something else I don't remember.
I told him where I live and said knock on the door. He won't, no one does,
but I'd like to hear more.
7
At my feet on a muddy road something half-buried
that I pick up. It's a golden circlet of many twisted strands.
Still pressing through the last vols of AG. When I come to anything about
Ken I skip ahead in distaste, it's an astonishing madness - I went into
an astonishing madness in my late forties - I was more alive and smarter
than I could ever be again and at the same time wildly wildly wrong.
- Skill is built in the conflict.
- A tension endlessly fruitful.
- I saw the beauty of the structure and sighed.
Should I say something about heart trouble. I haven't wanted to. It's
a new phase. I'm unsafe from inside. I watch my chest and take my pulse.
I'm on meds like other old people. I can't turn onto my pillows trustfully
at night because I don't know whether I'll feel my heart bumping against
my chest. Genevieve said it isn't really skipping beats but beating unevenly
so some beats aren't felt distally and some are felt too strong. The Holter
monitor showed something atrial that is rare and not an emergency but might
turn into a-fib later, a-fib meaning death.
8
Saturday 7:30: the street in its grey pre-dawn is utterly still. There
one car and at the same time a hesitating white-haired woman. Cloud in spaced
lanes moving evenly north. There is the woman again, looking for her cat.
Pink smudges along the eastern rim. The sun will rise so far south that
it's behind St Michael's annex. 36 degrees southeast of east I discover.
It will miss the chair until the third week in March. Thin frost on the
roofs, thin sift of snow drifted on the pavement. It wasn't cold enough
last night to start the boiler though it was the night before.
Sunrise was some minutes ago but it's behind Iron Mountain.
Are the little stories a way of edging into the larger work. I do now
understand that the work I should be doing is the largest furthest and not
anything before that and that the two stories, Tom and the thesis, need
to be laid down in together, a woman making her strength by daring to engage
her weakness. It's a story too complicated for the market and yet it's a
needed story. She takes on the patriarchs in two ways at once, the cultural
and the personal. Does it mean giving up poetics? It says yes. And film.
Yes. I feel rebellious thinking that.
- There a brightening at last. 9 am. Sun angled to reach the corridor's
door.
If I were to be simple and love my life I have endless stories to tell.
April 2001.
Setting a link derailed me into reading the first
months with Frank. It gets boring after the beginning- less free - so by
the time Frank is visiting us up north I wish there were more like these:
It was almost ten. I sat in the big chair brushing my hair. The lamp
was behind me. Almost at the same time that Paul announced the fact with
a shout from the living room I saw a light coming onto the yard. The lighted
patch between the two headlamps was red. I bounded up, yanked a comb through
my hair, and catapulted into the kitchen just in time to hear Daddy exclaim
and Mom remind him to take it easy. ("Calm down. Leave everything
as it is" - she didn't want all the stuff lying around to be shoved
behind doors as it usually is.)
There were millions of stars. It was a brittle night - clear & sharp-edged
& crisp like a piece of ice over a puddle on a fall morning.
I remember the sharp wind and the darkness when I stepped outside with
him. The wind driving brittle leaves down the street at Sexsmith. Walking
down board sidewalks. The enclosing coldness of the wind and the dry rustling
grass as we clambered back into the truck. The row of greenish lights that
was Sexsmith.
The sky was red around us. A wind blew in from the lake. We passed the
big rock.
Something just now made me think of last Sunday night, of the hill in
the wind and the glorious sky and his cold, cold cheek.
"Let the cats out before you go to bed, eh, Ellie?" she smiled.
- Moments of place I can feel again, my family when we were young. I
know the tensions had to be combed through the way they were but I wish
someone had told me I should instead be writing what I was taking for granted.
10
This feeling is perhaps only an awareness of the fact that I am always
so peculiarly happy, even when under the glooms there is a gladness of
being capable of being sad, just a gladness of being.
On Friday, when we got up late to have breakfast & too late to make
lunch the last I heard while disappearing out the door was Pop saying "Doesn't
she take lunch? Oh mein yammer!" and then ran all the way down the
driveway after me with 30¢ for dinner at the café, this with
jacket & boots flapping in 40 below.
The dear lady from across the road was riding home with Mom a few nights
ago. Seeing a light at our place from a distance - it was extremely late
- she sez, "Ah that'll be Ellie, sitting up and writing letters!"
A long choir practice, the last of this year was spent exaustively on
"God so Loved the World" for tomorrow night.
Do you know, it's very pleasant to spend money? I've never been able
to before.
Today's mailday brought my order - such an anguishing hilarity of substitutions!
The sun was amazing & cheerful & bright, especially because
the air was so cold. Bales & bundles were soon thrown down to the steamy-backed
cows. My hands got numb from the metal-handled fork and I was glad to hurry
down to the warm sunshine in the bottom barn. Steam had frosted onto dangling
straws to make crystal chandeliers. Sunshine landing on - of all things
- a lump of manure - made it something throbbing with color. I hesitated
only a split second to look at it tho'.
"Look how blue it is outside, Frank." "It's getting dark."
I walked into the kitchen, sat on the table, & stared out with my chin
on my fists, my elbows on my knees. There was a strip of yellow along the
sky, brushed by black tree-tips. A clothes line and a cement mixer were
in the foreground.
I felt oddly shy & ready to pop a finger into my mouth.
There were sudden sounds behind the kitchen door - slaps, screams of
rage from Daddy. Something strange happened to me. I found myself shaking
with horror and breathing into my arms.
Toward the end my feet were numb and when not numb painful. He took
off my boots, my wet socks, put his dry lumber jack socks on my feet, wrapped
them up in his toque.
As it got darker the sky outside the window turned blue, the snow and
sky became one color.
Staying overnight with Donna is a good story but I didn't write it well.
A conflicted ambitious sixteen year old visiting a more civilized more cared-for
house than ours - an established Norwegian farmhouse - lying talking in
the dark with a girl who was happy thinking she'd soon be married and a
mother - went home and had a crying jag she didn't understand.
Then I came home and father was there. I sat in the big chair with my
book over my face feeling the same misery as I felt hearing him rant when
Frank was here. His voice became high and whining as he complained that
he needed a handkerchief. I didn't mourn for him or even for mother. I
mourned for myself.
I said "What are you wearing?" He said "A faded blue
shirt about the color of my jeans, and your letter is on the floor beside
me where I can see the number."
In those journals so little that isn't wrong. She's desperate and doesn't
know it. She does what she can to keep up her courage till she can get
out. She prepares. But she's rattled, she's tinny. I'm ashamed of her and
then feel sorry for her.
Frank was my perfect knight. I was starved for touch and hazed out in
some fantasy of teenage love but he was real: he took care of me. I was
the best company he had for a year and a half but that was small return
for his care.
Late at night Uncle somehow jumped on the table to kill a moth - crash
went table, moth, lamp and uncle. An unholy racket, children howling.
Uncle and Auntie left after supper. We're canning peas and beans and
saskatoons and apricots and apples and chasing cattle.
Do you ever compare this July with last summer? There's a difference.
Last summer seemed more light-hearted. This summer we seemed continually
to be tangling with some sort of tension or another. Yet in all my life
there's never been a more peaceful existence than in John's shack (washing
my face in the morning under the cold water tap, talking to Marg for hours,
seeing you sometimes at night when you came over in your blue sweater,
sleeping like a whole forest of logs and not hearing the drunken mutterings
of poor Irish next door).
Mom and Dad being in B.C. I decided to hitchhike home but my friend
the county superintendent of schools picked me up, took me to his house
for dinner, and eventually ferried me home after inventing an excuse for
coming out to La Glace.
My Italian pants are very tight now because I've sewed them in. There's
a certain joy in tight pants - a friskiness of wanting to dance
- There: the tone has changed.
In one window white-haired men playing checkers in suspenders. In another
a bare-chested boy looking sulky. One house has red curtains always closed
at night and the light glows through them. I was conscious of my body,
of all my movements, of my white shoes, of my shadow on walls. Cars slowed
heavily at the corner. One of the boys I'd have been thrilled about when
I was thirteen leaned from a window to shout "Wanna ride?" It
didn't have the same kick.
10
I can walk if I don't bend my right knee. It will bend if I put my hand
under it to lift it into the jeep but if it tries to bend itself even a
little it falls apart a bit and hurts.
- How can I not be proud of her too. She was on the Stratford trip with
100 urban seventeen year olds, and in a short skirt showing her deformed
leg, holding her own among the liveliest half-dozen of them. From a standing
start. The word I'm thinking of is heart meaning something like energized
courage. A lot of heart, a strong heartbeat.
12
Disgraced by old age.
-
The Mesa Grande house is for rent again, $700 a month more than it was.
I've been drawing it half-heartedly for something to do.
... and I remember my youth and the feeling
that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth and all men: the
deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain
effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength: the heat of life
in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows
dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - and expires too soon, too soon
- before life itself. [Conrad Youth]
13
Lee and Kathy yesterday brought a little fir. There it is with lights
only halfway up, too tall for the string I have.
15
Our story begins the first day on the berry patch when he reaches down
and puts his hand on my arm and pulls me to my feet.
Why is it a lifetime story. When I ask that the answer is just Frank,
who he was, how I felt him, his realness. But why do I feel and want to
feel my time with him like a root just where it dives? A cedar root still
covered with bark and as broad as a trunk.
Because he was the Valley. The clump of dogwoods, Baker alone in the
sun. Because after that there has never been a love that was rooted. He
loved me in a moment to moment way I miss. He loved my being in the moment.
He was the only lover I've had who knew where I came from. He knew my grandparents,
our farm, my parents when they were young, my brothers and sister when
they were kids, my country. He was fond. "You have a kind of lassie
quality," he said when I wore the green nylon blouse. The fond daily
voice of his letters. The easy lucid way we belonged together.
And so what is this project for. I'm asking what went wrong with this
root, is that it? I'm touching my root, this one, and saying - too late
- what did you need? What did you need?
- Is this an emotional sickness yes
- Would love mend it yes
- Are you sure yes
- Love of something specific no
- Intended love
YES
19
Yesterday morning an hour and a half staring at the interior of a little
bus crafted with detail like a beetle's, flashing through a spindly forest
weighted with snow. Then an ugly city ruining its river valley, ugly women
- bulky sloppy badly dressed stupid-looking inland women - passing in a
corridor. Then a delightful black and white person with square teeth, relaxed
friendly smart small Dr Chu who said I'm not skipping beats but beating
early before the left atrium has filled and then beating too hard. The atrium's
muscle is probably overdeveloped by having to beat against hypertensive
resistance and is probably initiating the early beats. They'll do an ECHO
to look at it. I am in danger of sudden death etc but nobody is looking
worried.
23
- Do you want to still be alive YES
- Do I no
- Am I going to die because I don't want to live
no
- But I am going to soon die no
- Is it going to be this hard from now on
no
- Will my heart get better YES
- Do you know why I don't triumph,
female intelligence, writing, exclusion
- Because I can't win at writing YES
- Will you lead me truth, despair,
heartbreak, shared pleasure - list
- If I were suddenly to succeed at writing would I want
to be alive yes
- Do you want to say more no
31
The year:
- Ditches of Alberta but nothing came of it.
- Sketchup show but nothing came of it.
- Brambles show and absolutely nothing came of it.
- Work broke off again and again.
- Luke smashed our bond.
- I accepted Freya.
- Was ugly at Rowen's wedding.
- Hard weeks of injury.
- My heart went wrong.
- The garden was beautiful.
- The garden was popular.
- Made the laundry room.
- Kept up with money.
- Wrote Margo before she died.
- In work the iron impasse continues.
January 1 2019
I sorted 2018 onto two files and then carved each to nothing but writing.
There another home, another self. I marvel at its dryness, its aloneness.
I marvel in it, I am marvel in it. I marvel that what I love to be no one
can want.
I'd worked foolishly, helplessly for years. One September alone in an
old house I came to it, I came true.
it's the flight and droop of the sentence, where
the accent falls, the full stop. ... when one feels something remote, separate
... I think almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that
satisfies
She called it style and I'd call it voice or state.
It's about working and a bit about kinds of day. When I find the minimal
phrase it's anyone working, anyone's kinds of day.
In paradise as in hades the dead are the only company there is. but
I talk to them.
8
- She saw me as foolish
YES
- Was I no
Bogomiles. I am in a big motorhome zooming up the
road. To the right a field with wildflowers - yellow and over there some
blue - and then a cliff of old buildings, old plaster or mud, small domes.
Am being led through them. They're a warren, all connected by passages.
We come into dark rooms, here a long rectangle whose end wall with a fireplace
is bricked across. Then I'm crawling through a tight passage on hands and
knees feeling straw under my palms. This is not good but I suppose whoever's
ahead of me knows where they are going. More rooms, more tight unlit passages.
We come out onto a steep bank made of sharp grainy completely bare rock.
I'm being led up the side of it to get back to the RV at the site's entrance
but this ridge is too steep and sharp, I can't do it, I'll have to walk
up the road. I do, but come to a staircase. This can't be right, the RV
couldn't have come this way. Try to ask at an information counter but the
man is speaking with so thick an accent I can't understand him. Etc.
Appointment with Genevieve yesterday. I came away feeling dimly wrong
and when I was sitting in the bathtub in the dark last night was haunted
by worry that I'd been foolish. She's young, graceful, light-spirited, and
there I am in my old person's distress about falling apart, throwing out
whatever comes into my head, somehow unsteady, without time to calculate
an accurate reserve. What is that really. I wasn't like that with Dr Chu,
I don't think. Genevieve is charming but I don't feel she can see me - I
try to make her see me and it goes wildly wrong. Is that the way to say
it? I don't speak to anyone so I come to her hungry and socially unfocused.
Behind what we are saying I am watching confused by how it's going. I'm
not accurately at grips with her because I need her maybe to be smarter
than she is. I know I'm there without obvious markers of my quality. - So
is that enough of that, am I confessed.
My tall ficus has been dropping leaves for months. Maybe I watered it
too much through the summer. I'm waiting to see whether it's dying altogether
or just giving up its less-lit upper branches.
Have thought of my mom, is this what it was like for her, did she feel
her social self going wrong, going confusingly out of control, the shame
and worry of that.
It's six in the dark. Black glass next to me, three bright but meaningless
lights burning blankly in the street.
Season four of Friday Night Lights. It brings me to sharp tears
again and again as if I am still seventeen years old up against having to
find my way in life, longing for someone to understand, grateful when some
adult knows how to help.
She said You're a healthy woman. I said, I'm not a healthy woman, I feel
crummy a lot of the time. I could see she thinks I am too negative. I maybe
am but the bad things need saying.
-
Three good things today. Four. First day since early November I haven't
taken my BP. Eye exam all good. Beautiful long letter from Luke. Letter
more than two lines long from Paul.
9
Are the small stories a form I can use for more. Tom stories. Vancouver
stories. Writing stories? Up north photo stories. Saturna stories. Philosophy
stories? Garden stories? Love woman stories. Student stories. Joyce stories.
How would that be. It's doable. I like the list of titles there is already
- the titles. I come at the stories a bit at a time, find some little thing
to fix, and know when they're done. They're sophisticated sort of sideways,
the simple-complex thing I naturally do. I can do it every day and like
to do it.
Use rent money to publish?
- Do you think that's the way
yes
- Are the other projects too big YES
10
Shreds and little stories are different forms. Do I need to choose one
or the other. No. Wondering this morning whether I can search my shred collection
to use for times before their times.
Reading through 2018 work work this morning I'm feeling a particular
mind as if a black space with a sharp quality
It is as if the space of writing as I've honed it teaches me.
11
- sky tonight a fibrous silver. mist on the glass.
-
- full black sky with not just lights but airs and intimations, sifts
and small bursts, with simplest human shapes they show against: a ship,
a post
-
- i'm here because of work, to do what i haven't been able to do until
now, come through in the largest way. it's huge and amorphous. it isn't
possible to be clear about the task. I might have 12 years.
-
- all i have now is materials. philosophy, video, sound, writing, a cosmic
vision.
-
- the foundation of the other work is this, coming through, bringing
through. find what wants to succeed and direct it in succeeding in the
best way. come out in this community in my strongest form to win scope.
-
- this is the prerogative of late style: it
has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the
contradictions between them. what holds them in tension is the artist's
mature subjectivity unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest
assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.
-
- the silky ease of the third movement when it comes on. there's a way
of talking about his work - music that's about the wave nature of all.
12
Lucia Berlin 2015 A manual for cleaning women. 1936-2004 (68).
13
[to Paul Epp]
yesterday after i'd shopped i thought do i *have* to make lunch again
and walked into a&w. i'd ordered my lettuce-wrapped teen burger and
was standing around waiting for it. someone very quietly said 'ellie?'
a nice-looking white-bearded man sitting at a corner table with an odd-looking
woman. do i know him?? i don't think so. standing staring. he gives me
a hint, the last time we'd seen each other was in vancouver. it's phil
konrad and his wife. they live in hundred mile, they say, and are in merritt
buying a car. he tells me about the time he ran into you in the street
in toronto. you didn't recognize him either. A nice man who ice-fishes
and plays hockey and has a big garden they have to spray with something
bad-smelling or the deer will eat everything, every flower.
you in bangkok now? lecturing? using wifi in sunny sidewalk cafes? is
there a botanical garden? an ethnographic museum? oh to be somewhere.
you thought i might like lucia berlin and i do. raced through her and
asked for the book after manual for cleaning women. her style is
catchy. was thinking her sentences are a bit like your style in letters
through the years. dry and laconic.
also re-reading anna karenina in a good translation, another
haphazard find in an ashcroft goodwill. do you find too that with these
big very well-written books it's as if it's a different book every time.
i keep wondering how that can be. so much is forgotten and different ages
have different interests. but i've always liked the bits about levin's
farm. you'd see them differently after being in russia i suppose.
this winter has been kind enough to be amazingly snowless. nubs of bulbs
are showing in the garden. i frown at them to say go back, it's too soon.
my pulse seems to have stopped jumping around.
house renovation dreams very familiar. had many of them in my therapy
years. don't know whether i've ever told you about the series of dreams
about peter epp's house, a series that continued through variations for
decades. we should talk about place dreams sometime.
what kind of hotel are you in? or boarding house? with a fan on the
ceiling and street noise and a balcony? the whole adventure of hotels.
you probably remember your first one. i do. the best ones too.
14
Yesterday I opened a page and couldn't touch it, flagged, failed, drooped.
Lay in bed most of the day with Anna Karenina propped on my chest
dozing off.
Pevear and Volokhonsky trans. Penguin UK 2000. First published 1878 when
he was fifty.
16
I slice a lemon lengthwise. Suspended in two translucent
slices I can see writing, different writing on each of the slices, the artist's
name on one of them. Roy Arden. How could he have done that. Luke comes
into the room, young, eight or nine, in a manic state. I hold him struggling
on my lap to calm him. Show him the lemon slices.
I tell my mom I am going to just walk around for
a couple of hours. Am in the long university building I often dream, wearing
a large old red parka, trudging with a bike sometimes carrying it up steps,
looking into rooms and shops. Should I buy a New York Times to take
back to my place in the country. Here's somewhere that will have them. It's
late in the afternoon, all the copies have been rummaged through. Now I've
been as far east as the building goes and I turn back to look at the southern
edge. Don't know how my mom and I will find each other again, we don't have
phones. Almost to the west end am thinking of a place in this city most
people don't know, where I've been once before I think with Paul K, a rocky
inlet opening far out into a marvelous warm sea. My mom might like it. I'm
lying on a bench for a moment. Where is the bike. A Swedish young woman
says she heard someone ride it away toward the west. Now I'm being driven
fast out of town through steep rocky forest looking down into the sort of
openings where someone might hide a bike. We are arriving at a shantytown
in the dark. My parka was with the bike. Was my passport in its pocket?
My money?
Wednesday morning under a blank grey sky.
'He says he can write beautiful sentences.' If I wrote the story of Tom
it could start with that. That makes it a story of writing, which it is.
What kind of job would it be. A selecting job, a presenting job. 1995 to
2014, that many years already written. I'd want it to be as close to the
liveliness of life as I have been at my best. It's a love story, it has
that primal drive, but what makes it a large story. Riveting precision,
only that. Not only that: there's the book and there's my other work.
Part 1 the Golden West
Last part leaving. It ends in the desert, the stone heart, the tall man
standing with his back to me.
A love story but what is love when it's far from simple.
17
My mother holding a radiant photo of me when I
was maybe 30 saying that was when I was as I should be. I roar at her. I
yell that I can do things now I couldn't do then, that I can help people,
that she doesn't know anything, that she is a cowering mouse. Wake with
my arms aching with tension.
A love story wrapped around a philosophy story. A philosophy story enlarging
a love story.
18
Then it's next morning and I'm on the 17" and open another kind
of file and dilate into marvel and want to be that other kind of person
instead.
- a lit a little
I don't know how to think of this.
They're formed alternatives. They both depend on notes. They're wells,
abandoned selves. There are others too. Though they're formed they're all
imaginary in the sense that they haven't succeeded. I don't have time to
accomplish them all. Or maybe any.
- Which would be a best daily person?
- Which can I succeed in?
- Which would I be happiest to succeed in?
- Which matters most?
- Which am I best at?
- Which is best use of me?
-
- Will you name the writing work
early love
- Will you name the film work the
world
- So the film work is better
yes
-
- What prevents me in it.
- Old computer.
- Losing focus.
- Not knowing where to start.
- Fear? Reluctance.
19
inside the cave a 2000 year old bronze cooking
pot
rocks and pots
it's an old custom not to mention names or sums
neolithic arrowheads, an obsidian blade from
anatolia, and a bronze cooking pot
desert caves, remote monasteries and middle
eastern antiquities markets
looted objects
a vellum codex with faint underwriting
thousands of fragments have yet to be studied
- mediterranean gods
- of garden and warm sea
-
- a gardener and a surfer
- who naturally commit themselves
- by means of stones
She's a gardener, he's a man of the sea. I still want to tell that story.
We entered a cold ocean together. I secretly chose a stone and carried
it home with me. He brought me a stone from his mountain. I set my stone
into a northern creek. I was on a bare hillside above the sea and chose
a stone to say I was alone now. He found a heart shaped stone and we buried
it in the desert together.
a little young orchard standing very sweet and
quiet
Halliday 1961 The life of Shakespeare.
- 1749-1832 Goethe
- 1756-1791 Mozart
20
I'm with a young man, a filmmaker, who is scribbling
on a little film co-op newssheet telling me about work he's seen. Am reading
at the same time, caught by the idea of documentary films that are also
art films, films about people that break up visually. Two other young men
get into the car. They're asleep in the back seat. I'm standing next to
the car happy that I'm going to be a filmmaker now. I might have sex again.
Am in a big quite bare room on an upper floor of
a warehouse, a co-op editing room maybe. It's night. I get up and stand
staring at a faintly lit high brick wall with dark windows and large shadows
of plants and maybe projectors. Am thinking I could film it in different
spectra and cross-fade them. Is there something whose shadow should pass
across the surface.
I sat with people at a table last night. The food wasn't good. Yvonne
was compact and bustling with glitter strands tied into her hair. Her Frank
had seemed to get bigger and rounder, spoke to me with soulful eyes from
his end of the table. The other two were repulsively odd, a man with a red
face and a vain thick drizzle of grey hair, a short-chinned anxious woman
with orange-dyed hair wearing a blouse the same color so she looked orange
all over. He introduced her I think bitterly as his lovely wife.
Is there a way to dwell in this sort of meeting more in silence.
-
It's hoarding isn't it.
-
I asked Yvonne whether she'd seen my photos at Brambles. We considered
how they are different from the other photographers'. They are textures
she said. "They take pictures of objects. I take pictures of the air"
I said. I was remembering that in the bath just now and thought are they
using object-perception cortex and I'm using someplace else. - It's not
always the air but it's fields, the whole rectangle.
21
The left hand of darkness 1969 when she was 40. This is the third
time I've read it. It still sticks knives into me, slender very sharp knives.
This 2016 edition has one of her unreadably banal introductions so I feel
again how does she do it, how does she alter, where does she find that crystalline
air.
First time in 1976 when I was sleeping with Nellie and courting Cheryl.
31. Second time when I was living upstairs in Bellevue. 57. Third time in
2019 when I am alone in a mill town with nothing to do.
What I quoted in 2002 means more to me than what I quoted at 31.
I would step out of the dark farmhouse where
I was lodged and walk a way into the dry stubble to look up at the stars,
flaring like far cities in the windy autumn dark.
That's a different kind of liking, not how-to-live instruction of the
sort I used to need but a sentence perfect in more than one way. - Used
to need because I was so backward.
one vein of gold winds
Her language is ocean of a temperature exactly right. Warm, clean, surprizing,
encompassing, flourishing.
They are anything but a phlegmatic people, yet
they are obdurate, they are pertinacious, they finish plastering joints.
Now what am I interested in - Le Guin herself, what I can pick up of
what she is thinking about her own powers.
augmentation of the complexity and intensity
of the field of intelligent life
What stabs me in her. Longing for the company of right people. Honest
honorable deep smart people, to be one and to be with one.
Estraven telling the journey in a frontier village.
Estraven in the dark swooping downhill toward the assassins who will
shoot him as he has chosen they will.
He shot away on a long quick curving descent
through the shadows over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the
guns of the border-guards.
Genly coming to Estraven's family's hearth and finding his son.
the flash of my friend's spirit in this grim,
fierce, provincial boy
the boy said stammaring, "Will you tell
us how he died? - Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the
stars - the other kinds of men, the other lives?"
That cracked me for how rare it is, anyone able to want to know other
lives.
What one is after intuitive perception of a
moral entirety
There are always travelers in otherness, which is what she is, and her
engine is always tension of opposites.
- She died a year ago tomorrow.
22
Three lost beginnings in these six months.
23
Something had happened when I woke and went on happening all day. Snow
was slathered over roofs and shrubs, stuck thick on every wire and twig.
Street and sidewalk under the corner's lamp were a bright blank single sheet.
The mountain ash was solid red and white. When it was light I went out to
shovel and found eight saturated inches, heavy as wet concrete and setting
in unshovable heaps that had to be lifted after a foot. It was going to
be a long job. Gail was out in her red jacket finishing the church's half
block. The RCMP officer's snow blower was spitting slush. A woman from what
she called the beige house came by and stood telling a story about Flora
Gerard putting saucers under a tree because her dead parents were coming
for tea; as she spoke she kept peering into my yard looking for a tree that
used to be there. The high school girl I like to see came by late for school
after shoveling her own street. Her name is Chloe.
When the liquor store had opened single men began to come up the alley
from that direction. One of them, a quite nice-looking Native man with thin
dirty hair and three pegs of teeth, stood with me by the garage for a time.
Ernest something, the youngest of ten children. He said he knew my country
because although he was from Manitoba he'd lived in High Prairie. While
we were talking a grader whizzed past and shot a lumpy ridge of snow across
my driveway. Its operator smiled to say sorry, lifted his hands in a what-can-you-do
wave. I cleaned it up but as I was going in it happened again, so I had
to go back, and then just as I'd finished a young man jumped out of a big
black pickup and asked if he could help shovel my driveway.
The sun came out and melted what was left on the sidewalks. White mist
floated above the hills. Cars sloshed past through deep inches of sand-colored
sherbet. I knew I should go out again before dark to scrape any slush left
over on my porch and path or it would be ice tomorrow.
- What I started out wanting to say was that I did all of today's heavy
work as if I were a young person and tonight hardly anything is worse.
24
Sorting, sorting. After In America comes Time remaining.
Going through the later In America volumes from 2009 after London
looking to collect myself for work I see how spread out I was into students,
gangbuster lectures, mbo theory, California and the Here's, residual
Tom, the monograph, garden-making, work & days construction and
review coming from it, and then sketchup and househunting and always daily
record, so that it's clear why I didn't dig down into the large hard projects.
Now that I'm so simplified what are they, what should I be assembling:
- Soundtrack pro, sound
- FCP and motion4, video
- Books
-
- Bodily well-being and presence
-
- Some kind of psychological work, it says:
honest, exclusion, winning, high intuition
- Social exclusion
yes
- More high intuition to be found
yes
- By means of you
yes
- What exclusion is in me yes
- Do you mean the hopelessness
yes
- Do you mean releasing it
yes
- Wd gvie more access to high intuition
yes
- Is that the whole of what you mean
yes
-
- The hopelessness came with them and Jam
yes
- Do you mean I had more access to high intuition before
that no
-
- Collect those categories
YES
Assembling a folder called Time remaining with files for those
categories - sound, video, books, body, hope - and added journal project.
Finding I'd already assembled those or similar categories again and again.
I've interrupted myself - I do that. It takes more than lists and a house
and an income, I'm wayward, like to keep beginning again, planning. I focus
and push through if there's a structured context like the college or the
garden or the doc but without them I wander about in work thoughts without
acting.
Bought two $65 132MB memory sticks - organized the sound folder on its
terabyte external and copied it onto one of those nice little things with
a content list. Survey of most of the sound I have. Took until now, 8 at
night.
In a sheet called working that has current bits I see that I'm
better now - I didn't know that. And that recognizing intuition of cortical
structure is as philosophically radical as recognizing prebirth intuition.
The seeing-through talent found another task. Slow work both.
When I look at the bits gathered from earlier years I see that I'm more
in the clear now, not tethered to other people's language as much. Balanced
not looking for balance.
My brain loses common words but threw up 'curvett' though I'd never in
my life used it before.
At home in exile? Exile's home. Exiled in teaching, exiled with Tom,
exiled in the US, making something of them. The way a three year old did,
increasing distance from childhood; deaths, aging, I never stopped longing
for significant work - I worked, as always, commitment, but never stopped
longing for work I could completely believe in - with T too, not having
scope to match my quality - that's life-long, exile from what I should have
been. Exile's home makes do. - I was living my actual structure accurately
- preference for exile that is an instinct for living on my actual foundation
- this is correct, isn't it.
That's life-long, exile from what I should have been. Exile's home makes
do.
Exile's homes are the day, the light of place, journey, encounters with
strangers, the journal itself, my own stored time and its record, at moments
Tom and when not Tom then my interest in the vicissitudes of Tom, my own
company, the company of experience and evaluation.
For In America I should list authors and books I only came to
by living near American libraries. Charles Bowden, Shearer The wonder
book of the air, Cather, Richard Misrach The sky book, Gilligan,
Doubiago, Fuster, Abrams, Vickie Hearne, Talmy, Shepard, Michael Benedikt
on architecture, David Masumoto, Craig Childs, Mark Spragg, Barry Lopez
fiction, Ivan Doig This house of sky, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham,
Lee Bontecou, Milo Wolff and Carver Mead, Goldstein The organism.
Baffled in my welter of notes. I can order and refine notes endlessly
but don't find a task in them and drop them and then find them again and
it just goes on without end. I need to talk to myself here but even that
is discredited by this piling up of more. I don't know how to get off the
wheel. Should I junk all the journals and notes? What would it be like to
be without them? I don't think that's the question. I write, I care about
writing, I fail to make for myself a writer's fame and influence although
I'd like them. That's the crux isn't it. A writer's completions.
Should I think of Here: a notebook as companion to the film work
- is that it? Does it have photos? Is it online? And printed? Is Titania's
gash a film too? And notebook?
In the California pages even where I'm lamenting aging and isolation
and dullness always the pleasure in place and days that now seem marvelous
good fortune. Garden-making and student work and lectures and web projects
and then video tech an actually hard-working rich life I didn't know was
rich. What should I conclude, that lamenting is part of the conscious realness
that makes rich life happen? It says yes. So lament on -
26
- Still want her to come for me yes
- If I didn't I'd go out and get things
yes
- Is that what you mean yes
An hour of driven search this morning and now an old bad thing satisfied
forever. I scraped for Lorie - is it Lorrie - don't know her last name -
Lorie in city gov't in National City - no it was Imperial Beach wasn't it
- she had a married name but probably isn't still married - try images -
would I recognize her - not Lorie Zapf - this perky dark-haired woman in
'70s hair on an old council page - yes! - now I have a last name - background-check
page, letter to an editor, recent local news - taken to IB when she lived
in Ramona, single mother with two boys - so her for sure - Lorie Bragg retiring
from city council in Imperial Beach December 2018 - stout woman in a huge
pale blue chiffon hat raising a mimosa glass - she's only 61 but she's dumpy,
dyed hair, deep sloping chest and dwindling hips - "Republican base
that elected her" - worthy public servant, historical society founder,
yes, and never again the woman Tom kept yearning to bonk even after he had
me.
I have wit, I have charm, I have brains, I have
legs that go all the way down to the floor my friend.
28
The home of the moment writing returned to. - is that Daphne or
me.
-
The sky clears at night. All black with a few brilliant stars. Where's
Orion. There, quite low and straight down the path.
29
Photo I liked yesterday. Overcast dawn, mild flat milky light. Was trying
for a golden patch of sky with snowy shrubs and branches - didn't work -
but when my eye started to tune I saw a frosted currant leaf in a soft air
of creamy space. Two angular particular beings, one just a half but in focus
and another standing in the background out of focus but complete. Didn't
know that about it till I asked.
Sections of Time remaining 4 where I was quoting myself and replying
are the way to do it though I don't know do what exactly.
It's all-which-way because I didn't go through in temporal order, so
now I have to sort it.
Why so! go all which way it will! Richard II ii.2.87
February 2
Candlemass. Jasmine next to me. Live wreath I bought when Luke was conceived,
scent of. Had never seen before and seldom since, bought at Vickie's new
shop that had a rabbit's-foot fern too. And I drew a Greek house.
Yesterday took photos from Naxos for backgrounds and last night had it on
this computer to set shadows. In an instant the place came real. I marvel
to see a clean bed with midsummer dawn thrown across it, noon through an open door. The light seems Mediterranean. But
once again a doubt, here is a house but now a house isn't enough. What is
someone doing in this house?
[desk and mountains] [kitchen and village]
[two cats and a view]
It's a bit after seven, open sky.
3
This morning it's snowing a few wandering bits and is so cold the white
on the street has been swept into thin streaks.
4
I've been alright since before Christmas, as long as it was warm, but
today there's -20C; I shouldn't have been out because my legs got cold and
now I can't walk on my right hip. Two days before that quite droopy. When
I try my pulse it's faint like bloodless females' little twitches, not the
bold thump I've always had.
A cowboy has gone lost in the bush north of here. His saddled horse was
found by loggers a week ago. It's so cold that if he was thrown and hurt
he'll have to have died by now.
The garden does have some cover because though it had thawed and rained
enough to clear asphalt what was left of the snow on its beds has just sogged
down and hardened. Am thinking of the poor nubs of bulbs.
5
Woke alright. Trying Louche Bay as an edit. Renamed it Reading
and staring at the sky. Travel writing.
6
Ordered seeds today from West Coast and Johnny's.
Hours replying to Sonja's note, feeling out how to talk to someone exhausted
by a one-year-old and responsible for amounts of money out of scale with
her experience. I'm wondering at how stiff the writing is, have kept having
to revise it down. Am I catching the stiffness from her? She feels desperate.
I'm sorry the fair-haired fortunate smooth-faced girl has died into strained
motherhood. I fought it off more than she will. I'm not saying that to her
but I want to. Don't sacrifice yourself! Be ruthless!
- People who haven't had what it takes to make the money being required
to administer it: I can see how it could ruin people.
7
I needed to write that paragraph and sleep on the letter before I could
get it right this morning. It was stiff because it was holding back.
> when did you stop breastfeeding?
a year is more than long enough! I know you want to be a perfect mother
but don't be guilted into sacrificing too much. kids thrive if they have
it in them to thrive. you've given z good genes. nothing is going to be
perfect but he already has a lot going for him.
this isn't much acknowledged but to a certain extent the relation between
mother and child is an energy competition the mother has to win too; it's
bad for a child to see the mother's energy defeated.
> poems i have written in direct awe for another's
writing have surprised me. have you experienced this?
I do know borrowing a voice, or it's a rhythm often. but I wonder are
you borrowing voices at the moment because you're afraid of your own? echoes
has lovely things in it but it seems to me to have a personal undertow
that is saying what it needs to say indirectly.
write your rage and desperation fearlessly, directly, too, they are
energy and clarity you need. you're needing beauty but grow it from your
own roots, yes? from faith that it can grow from those roots.
And I said she can afford to hire a nanny and I said a blue house with
red trim is too Scandinavian for her golden hills.
Then the difficult other side, that I really don't know how much blame
to take for Luke's bitterness:
> as for my mother i have overcome wanting
her approval
I don't understand how anyone can have a daughter like you and not approve
of her. I say that and then remember that my older son when he is depressed
complains that I don't approve of him, which baffles me because I have
always marveled at the person he is. in his case I wonder whether long
ago when he was little he was seared by some misunderstanding. I wasn't
a good mother in some ways but it was because of struggles that had nothing
to do with his value to me.
Given his Epp-bitterness genes would he have liked himself better and
blamed me less if I had sacrified more? We can't know. Could I have sacrificed
more, given who I was? No. So he is going to blame me, and am I going to
go on taking his blame? Is there an energy competition I am losing because
I do? Did I have a glimpse of freer energy during the year we were out of
touch? I did ask but the other kinds of oppression I'm under now make it
hard to tell.
There's a kind of hardness I'm feeling now about these questions. "Kids
thrive if they have it in them to thrive." It lays responsibility more
on genetic fitness: we want everyone to come along but not everyone can.
And yet I feel utterly wrenched remembering when Luke felt like a calf left
behind by the herd because he couldn't keep up. Would I want to be the mother
who stayed behind with that calf and shared his fate to the end? - Though
in fact Luke is not left behind by the herd and I was the child actually
abandoned. We stagger on.
part 4
time remaining volume 7: 2018-19 july-april
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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