| volume 1 of dames rocket: 1975 january-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
|
|
I leave London with Luke on New Years Eve. I am 29 and he has just turned 4. We land in Toronto, and after a few days with my brother Paul get on the westbound transcontinental. After three days and nights on the train my sister Judy picks us up at the CN station in Vancouver and takes us to her house in Burnaby. It snows that night. I write the first pages of the first volume of Dames rocket next to the wood stove in her kitchen, where my bed is made on the floor, after she and her husband and our kids had gone to bed. Within a few days I have gotten us on welfare, found us a room in a skid row hotel that overlooks the harbour, and enrolled Luke in the only daycare space we can get, a church daycare an hour's bus ride away at Marine Drive and Victoria. In part 2 I meet my first Vancouver lover by bumping into him in a grocery store. Not a lot later I answer an ad and find our first Vancouver house. 2706 Eton Street is a shingle-sided two-storey in an Italian neighbourhood on high land near the PNE, a neglected big brown house on a corner double-lot whose back yard is overrun with blackberry. Its porch and upstairs windows overlook Second Narrows and the mountains to the north. We share it at first with a Native woman and her small son and surly Vietnam vet boyfriend. By part 3 Luke and I have it to ourselves. I walk him to a closer daycare through the PNE grounds, past the racehorse stables. In part 4 a sexual inventory, if anyone is interested. Summer joy. In part 5 I hitchhike to Edmonton with Luke taking him to stay with my folks up north. First meeting of the Women's Interart Co-op, camping trip with Paul to Port Townsend, long portrait of my Konrad grandparents in their eighties. In part 6 rev up to the Western Conference Women's tape-slide presentation. reading notes: Casteneda Tales of power, Gopi Krishna Kundalini, the evolutionary energy in man, LM Montgomery Emily of New Moon, Sylvia Ashton-Warner Spearpoint, Coleridge Notebooks, Charles Olson Projective verse, Isak Dinesen Winter tales, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette Mes apprentissages and Music-hall sidelights, Stanislavski An actor prepares, Arthur Symons The symbolist poem, Yeats "Symbolism in painting", Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Rilke, Chris Massie, Jarry, Marianne Moore, Stein The making of Americans, Vico, Read, Jacqueline Auriol, The secret life of plants, The brothers Karamazov, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Peter Gidal, Bergman, Nick Johnson on Judith Currelly, Bachelard Poetics of reverie, Uvavnuk, Shelley The Cenci, Dorothy Riddle New visions of spiritual power, Robert Louis Stevenson The master of Ballantrae, Waldorf educator Caroline Von Heydebrand, artscanada issue on photography, Szarkowski, Max Ernst, Jung introduction to Four archetypes of the unconscious, Nietszche. mentioned: Luke, Paul Epp, Judie Bopp, Akasha Bopp, Paul Kinsella, Andrea Maitland, Andy Wyman, Lloyd Thomas, Susan Ksinan, Heide Holst, Colette French, Hal Ober, Leah Rosling, Tara Rosling, Patricia Wainman-Wood, Lynn Hughes, Cathy Sopko, Stephanie Judy, Tom Knott, Bill Volk, Sheila Reljic, Peter and Luisa Konrad, Penelope Brown, Sally Potter, JoAnn Kaplan, Barbara Halprin Martineau, Sarah Black, Tony Nesbit, Andy Wyman, Rosalynd de Lanerolle, Jerry Resnick, Mafalda Reis, Katrin Zaugg, Chris Cordeaux, David Rimmer, Jean Bergeron, Stephen Martineau, Wain Ewing, Violet Konrad, the Women's Interart Co-op group (Anna Buchan, Leslie *, Lee *, Jean Mallinson, Madeleine Duff, Susie *, Penny *, Brownie *, Jeanie Kamins, Penny *, Cathy Sopko, Dorie *, Margaret Shore), the Western Women's Conference group (Trudy *, Eileen *, Pat Thom, Alice *, Joyce Siercy, Eileen Caner, Jo Leddingham, Marcie *, Jean Errington, Hanna *, Judith Bezereti, Diane Erickson). Fraser River, Patullo Bridge, Stanley Park, the Powell Rooms, the New School, 52 Burghley Road, Wo Fat Co, Chinatown, Gastown, Monument Park, Vancouver Aquarium, Richards St, Burrard St, Co-op Bookshop, 2706 Eton St, Kitsilano Beach, Lew's coffee shop in the Hotel Europe, the Western Front, Vancouver Colisseum, Vancouver race track, Connaught Park in Kitsilano, Wreck Beach, Gabriola Island, Cowichan Bay, Lighthouse Park, Duthies' Books, the Dogwood Restaurant, the Cobalt Cafe, the Aristocratic Cafe, Towne Tavern in Port Townsend, Edmonton, 100 Mile House, * Centennial Road, Vancouver Cinemateque. Bach O du süsse Todesstunde, Sefaris, Pink Floyd at the PNE, Neruda, Joanna Field, Mary Caroline Richards, DH Lawrence, Chloris Leachman, the Makara collective, Marguerite Duras Nathalie Granger, Simone Weil First and last notebooks, Chabrol, Herman Boll, Gurdjieff, The world split open, Dwellings, the Cowichan poppy, Marie-Claire Blais Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel and The wolf, The shaman's cure, Borges on CBC, the Begines, the Uberfrohliche, Judy Collins' film Antonia. |
[Powell Rooms, Vancouver, January 1975] I say to Luke: How do you feel when I'm cross with you? I feel uncomfortable. How do you feel when I'm not cross with you any more? I still feel uncomfortable. When do you feel comfortable then? Only when I'm on boats, and rafts. I loved this sequence because he seemed to be mocking me. He dodges into absurdity when I try to get forgiveness from him. What did you do at school? I went outside and crossed the road by myself, an' there was a factory and the mans let me drive a truck by myself. What did they give you to eat at playgroup? The mans gave me a whole lot of ice cream. How I hate controlling Luke: I have no clarity about that. Usually the need to control him seems false and an imposition of situations I despise. Occurs to me to wonder if it's weakness in me, just refusing to be responsible, and just wanting to be left alone. Oh yes no doubt of that; and yet I am conscientious at least about thinking about all sorts of important questions that do not popularly exist - like - oh, these things without popular existence are like dreams; without consensus they vanish - what do I think of all day? Why don't I grasp the questions well enough to decide them, instead of having them again and again as new unsolved questions? In my Emily of New Moon days my consciousness fed me beautiful daydreams, completed thoughts that loved themselves, I lived harmoniously within my myth. For what I am now there is no clear myth I could impersonate. What kind of warrior can a mother be? I have to invent that myth; but if I do it will be my whole work and will I ever have other work. My constellation of women, are they inventing it? Penelope, Sarah, Sal, JoAnn, they don't have any children. Barbara, who's given Noah to Stephen. Will we not have peace with our children until men have learned how to care for children, so they take the mothering responsibility while we are torn by our need to be alone, until we know we're entitled to be alone, and can return? Constellation of women. Realized I could be so strong in that poetry group because Sarah was there and understood me. Look at this handwriting, it's as if two people were there, both disordered. It is a sort of crisis I'm in, full of fears; is my life really so difficult that it's making me weird? Is it sudden growth? Organic disintegration? Maybe I need to break, but it isn't safe now; do I have to strengthen my present mad self? The day at Penelope's house everybody was crying. That seemed lovely to me. When am I going to be able to cry again? -
It was the whales moved me to tears nearly. I am a true worshipper of something, and when I pursue that in myself it is my right path, and everything else is, really is, sin. - What do I want from the best poet: sense of their researched existence, wide openings like coming to the sea where I didn't expect it to be so wide:
- There is a carpeted room with windows along one side, like a living room, but the windows look into the dim green otherworld underworld underwater of the killer whales' pool. The sunlight I sat in had come through the water, and the whales came to lie in it, two feet from me. I was alone with them: they slid their long bodies along the glass and looked into my eyes with their black sidelong gaze. These pinto creatures.When they are on the far side of their pool their white spots are the color of the water.
Luke, shaking me out of my book (pulling my hand), Ellie why do people have to die when they get very old? Because they can't get as big as the sky? Because they can't fly like the sky? The gentleness of a bus driver yesterday with an old Chinese woman who couldn't say what she wanted clearly enough. "I'm sorry, I can't understand what you're saying." When she got to her stop she tugged the bell five times, and he said, "Oh Jackson, that's where you want to get off. Now I understand you." And when she got off, smiling and nodding, he said "Goodnight, now." The incident this morning when I was mending my donkey jacket on the bus - the Chinese granny asking for the needle to fix her umbrella. Giving me the lot, to bite off her thread. Big smile full of gold teeth. Slender little women with no flab on their faces. - Use of journal: to catch the attractions, thoughts, which dream-like are too unnamed to remember. Thereby to extend my own named territory so as not to feel dominated by public language and its politics. - We found a little dog in the thrift shop, a scottie without ears and with very fierce close-set orange eyes. When we got off the Broadway bus we realized we'd left him behind when we transferred: Luke cried real and not dramatic tears, and I came out of my bored bad temper to really comfort him and feel for him, because he'd lost his child. Gallant small person: he has touchy days sometimes when I'm gay, but today when I scowled on streetcorners and nagged him so that people stared round, he was cheerful and balanced and even ironic, so that I sometimes had to smile in spite of my self indulgent bad temper. He found a white catamaran on Kitsilano Beach, climbed into it, sat for a long time on the front of it where it flew up off the sand as if balanced on a wave under the stern. This is a flying boat, he said. I sat on a log at a distance, while he had his own encounters with people who smiled at him. Hotel Europe Annie gave him a quarter this morning, when he sweetly showed her his penny. The way the bartender threw out a bum: pushed him in his chair to the door, swiftly as if in a wheelchair, and there Annie tenderly hoisted him out and closed the door after him. Stuart's eyes when he'd been "on the drink all day" and smelled
of vanilla essence - bleached white, as if turned inside out. His thin body
which sags forward at the belt, as if the spine is soft. Roy's adolescent dreams about seducing girls: applying leverage to people in a way that still doesn't occur to me. In Luke it is a natural gift: he knows what to do. I suppose I do too - like, going to see Bergeron, being shocked to discover myself laughing flatteringly at something he said. When I realized what I'd done it was as if a tide had suddenly withdrawn and I looked around dismayed at a vast area of self-betrayal which is my bedrock - part of my bedrock, bed-sand anyway: how I do things, how I effect things. When I went to see him what I'd felt myself armed with was, most important, my appearance - I'd worn jeans and my green silk, so's to be both exotic and plain, and my donkey jacket, and my hair standing up bushy because of the snow - I intended to look fierce, strong and intelligent - I intended to be direct, ironical, and crisp, like a brilliant filmmaker making her own uncompromising way etc. B did look twice from the moment he saw me on the stairs, I felt the blaze was working. - This Key Vocabulary, tarot, the politics that live in it, self criticism toward new society has to break so much that supports - as with Roy, I was living in an enchanted circle full of power but corrupt. Abundant life would be the possibility of living inside those circles - fairy rings, toadstool rings - without contradictions. Mate, child, work, house, journey, friend, teacher, beast, beauty, group, I'm your best friend because I'm your daddy, Ellie. I'm not the daddy of you Ellie, I'm the daddy of this little fish, I'm the daddy dolfish and you're the mommy dolfish, and this is our little child, and we have to take good care of him. Where's our child dolfin gone? I think he's snuggling between my legs. Yes he's snuggling your fanny, he's drinking milk from your fanny. There's no milk in my fanny, you pudding. There's no milk in your tits either, but 'tend there is. The one and a half inch plastic dolphin sucks at my real nipples (I unbutton the plaid shirt) while Luke makes sucking noises. Then Luke takes him off, comes back, shows his empty hands, says Something's happened to our child Ellie! What? Something came along, a crane, and dug a hole and put him in. Well quick go dig him out! His language is never foolish. Just now he said, Our child is gone again. I said, He must be buried again, did you look? Luke says nothing. My eye accidentally (I am thinking about poetry) reaches the flowers on the window sill. Our child the dolphin is stuck into the nose of a daffodil and only his white tail is showing. I begin to laugh, Luke you know you are bloody brilliant! He sticks a lego rail into the nose of another daffodil. What else is brilliant Ellie? - Tell me 'bout that nursery rhyme about curves and waves. - A young Irishman, eldest of seven, leaves Dublin in 1968 at the age of nineteen, and goes to the New World, where he spends many years in Toronto and then a year and a half ago leaves his circle of friends and comes to Vancouver. I leave Kingston in 1968 to go to the Old World where I spend six years forming myself in the shape of London. In 1975, mid-afternoon on a Saturday in January, I leave my hotel lonely for someone to talk to, I look through my addresses, go to telephone Andrea. Have no dime, so stop at the little grocery on Carrall. Buy a banana and as I turn, see through the shop front a man shining with some kind of presence. I just note him and hesitate to read something on the front page of a newspaper. When I straighten to leave I bump solidly into somebody who is reaching past me into the window. As we both say "excuse me" (or something - we say the same thing) I see it is the same man and my face has a look like "Oh is it you?" Then I leave, cross Hastings, pass one telephone where an old bum is speaking, and then the young man is next to me saying hello. I stop at the next telephone and holding the receiver lean out and say Have you got time to come and have some tea? When we are in Lew's, astonishment and matter of fact practical acceptance exist together: he can talk, he's a literate Irishman (literate is his word). Words come out of his mouth as thoughtfully as out of mine. So I begin to race, I flash myself, I let myself out. I suppose he does too, so that in our competition we are exhausting ourselves, feeling all the while that something's been left behind: I say to myself, he doesn't flatter me - what I meant was that the female body in me did not preen itself and was not aware of him. - I like Paul most when he doesn't smile. Smiling diminishes him, even when it isn't uneasy ingratiating smiling. When he talks about something in earnest to him, his neighbourhood newspaper, his friend Frank, he has a stature that touches me. But when he laughs, plays around, I think yes this is a benign friendly creature, with whom I can feel cozy, a sort of beluga. I can talk, that's like a craft. I can talk to you, and it's as if testing you in my specialty. That's new. Maybe that's a process that has to continue. But it seems to me that my real loving goes toward what I see: as I didn't love Roy - I was intoxicated - until I saw how he walked, his longlegged wiry body when he appeared naked at the door, to display himself. - Occurred to me that speaking to Paul I become such an abundance that I will be able to learn to be silent, nearly - or to say only the best rarest funniest most newborn of my thoughts - to write an uncommon character I could become. This morning you were a young boy with pink light on your face. When I was sad and said "Tell me something nice" you told me the lombardies and their birds, as if reciting them. When I thumped the bed and said "Doesn't it ever make you lonely when you're new in a strange bed?" you sprang up to hug me - there's something unimpressed about you - and then told me how euphoric you are in strange beds. The doctor's wife, bulbously pregnant. "It was one of the least sordid things that ever happened to me. She lied when she wanted to lie, she stole if she wanted to steal." Feel him stuffed full of marvels like I am. Could say what a pretty cupid's body you've got and how vain you are of it. You're silly too, you're a playfellow. Your tiny scale: "I worried I might be too light for you" - you worried I might be too heavy for you. Yet you're wide in the hips. A Pict or Celt, some lad from ancient people, with your too-small hands and feet, your big shaggy head with its monkish bushy fringe, little genial eyes, and great longchinned slab of a manly face - a crescent moon sickle of a face, blue, red and yellow. - Luke and I together in our room - I saw the boats on the light later this morning and thought, I will attend this window all day. Now it isn't raining, the sky is clear overhead, although very pale; gulls are wheeling. Long white clouds are low on the side of the mountain. We left our handprints on the sidewalk newly made in front of the new firehall. We came back, washed our hands and had bananas and frozen sliced strawberries on rice pudding. We lay down. Luke lay still for a while with his eyes open. I slept too. Woke rapidly to open the door when Bennie knocked with a parcel. Leaning to look into the room, he pushed his arm against my breast. I jumped back. Closed him out; looked at myself in the mirror, looked lovely, young and pinkcheeked, and fierce like the fierce girl in the photograph. Lay down again, someone else knocked, more softly: a tightly-clothed brawny man I'd not seen before, asking if I want some fish - I follow him down the corridor to his room where he shows me skinned fish grey and white and a little pink, tails still on, in a softened cardboard box. I pick one out, say I can't cook more than that, they put another in my hand (the Frenchman from this morning). The men in the hotel, minding their business. The sense of footsteps passing in the corridor, unrelated to me. - Paul made breakfast, we ate it in near silence and when I looked at his face in its silence, sadness, it became beautiful to me, so I wanted him to think as if I were invisible, I became silent, absorbed him through my own face; he talked about his friends, his men; charting his relationships. What I saw when he was silent was a sad man with great, delicate, dignity. When he laughs he's a clown, he's silly. I thought if he trusted me he would be sad with me. He said "I hope that doesn't tempt you" and I said "No, I think what I'm wanting at the moment is to make myself sad." There was a little true connection with me, starting at the moment when he sat there eating his eggs absently and sadly, for the first time. Goodnight hotel room. Now I'm having to think about how to be more gentle, the creature waking in my bed was shot full of holes - "I can't seem to take your approaches and departures" - I'd have had him depart without reproaching me, because that sent me black into a good day - what's the problem about kissing - again this becomes lab notes - he kisses me like eating me, like grazing insistently - I don't feel it's a rare sacrament but a compulsive munch - don't you compulsively munch me. What was good: lying wrapped together talking, sitting knee to knee debating / him telling me a poem, twice, when we lay in the dark. - Wreck Beach - water when the sun was low blue-grey and orange, making an impression of green light through which swam small black birds in single file. Looking around thinking this is a landscape from nowhere in my childhood: a landscape new to me. In front of the moving water with black rocks was a rock pool, still like a mirror: when I told Paul about it I told him about the free and captive plants, and the surface/interface where they met - the privet shadow and the reflected abutilon. It was the same shape of event. The mountains very distant, I've seen that, but not with shuddering light between. The rise of the rock beach around me; what kinds of vision will the coast give me? Paul's description which tickled me - "You have that look as if to say 'I'm Ellie Epp, and I hope for the best.' I sense you have a hopefulness, some great capacity for belief, or love." Did he get that out of his journal? "Last week I was told I'd be a gorgeous old man." "Who told you that?" "I won't say. A beautiful woman." "I'm not sure it's true." "That's the girl! You're very robust aren't you!" Big hug, his face shines. - [2706 Eton St] Light collecting: inside eggshells; now thrown up on the undersides of the fence's tilted white boards by the boards below them. Sunrise on the morning of March 5th, through dirty windows onto the wall, making shadows of the hyacinths; into the greasy plastic of the butterdish lid, beautiful and mysterious. It's a little film, sunrise animating little domestic objects. Now my eyes are attracted to mother-of-pearl colors, faded rainbows, water-mark reflections. - We have in common a delight in curiosity. We are ridiculous in similar ways. I needn't want to be him; I am him already. Hence I am relatively fearless. I think he may be exactly the same height as me. When I have on my shoes and he doesn't, I am taller. We have in common great pleasure in being able to be truthful. "My affairs usually don't last very long, but lately I've really liked the people in them" - great pleasure in our adventures. - White, silver, aquamarine, turquoise, ivory, glass. Faded wood. Pale grey and brown pebbles. Bridget Riley colors, shimmer, the cover of The symbolist poem. Muslin. Washed colors. Snowy light. Ivory light. Bed with its head toward westlight window. Foamy or feathery plants. Yellow brass handles. Sunsets. Paul's pastel colors too. Present already in the Nant Gwythern pictures. My sexual appetite which is very decisive. - Luke on the seashore, pink in his cheeks, sitting alone on a piece of styrofoam, his boat, "Ellie you know why I want to hug you? Because I came back from a long voyage, I was in the mountains." He voyaged serenely by himself for a while. Paul and Brent found a jellyfish so beautiful I was brought forward by it. Turned belly upwards it was like a sunflower, with curly tendrils coming from its centre. Turned back upwards it was like an eye with a thick cornea-lens, and then the delicate wheel of brown iris buried under it. The boat wash scraped it on rocks.
"I want to make you bloom, like someone who's well-loved." Fucking in half sleep it seemed to me there was a tree: each movement
inside me a branch. I found myself breathing to a dim chant of twig twig
twig. Penelope: you or somebody who goes by your name, you've found your way into my underworld, don't know what it means. I was going to sleep just now and thought 'Penelope' and smiled. You come into my dream. You're my imaginary friend I think. Your house, your quiet front room, the sense of your steadiness. I think I'd like to have had my hand on you, well it scares me Penelope, your round breast, your honest eyes, your quiet bum disappearing under the blankets. The night I slept next to you, I longed, dreamed, I touched you. Well. I like your name too. - "Luke, I'm writing down my dreams. Did you have a dream you can write down?" "Yes. I went to a real farmyard and there was a woman there who gave me all the keys to all the animals." "Was that a dream that really happened or did you make it up?" "It was a real dream." Luke interviews people. "Busdriver, what is that for?" "Fireman, what's your name?" "Busdriver, will you wait for me?" "Where are you going?" "I just have to go and do something for a minute." He gets out, pees off the sidewalk, German couple smiling at him out the window. Gets in again, briskly. - Paul, "Oh yes, I am Voltairian," when I evoked him in powdered wig, his thin legs in silk stockings, wrist hanging out of a lace ruffle. - The young man on the bus from Simon Fraser, inviting me for a drink. I said "Are you very lonely?" He said "Mostly I guess I talk at people rather than to them." I said "Are you stoned?" He said "No I'm always like this." "I find them really ingratiating" he said about cars. "You mean you like them?" "No, I don't like them." "You mean they grate on you?" "Yes." Silence. "Did you say ingratiating?" "Yes." - This is the day I forgot Luke on the bus, telephoned the bus company when the sky was suffused with peach pink light for half its hemisphere. We went to the PNE with the crowd going to the Floyd. - Tonight Luke said, as we were saying Oh universe, "'An' the day before, when I got lost" and I said "Oh yes thank you for helping me find Luke." Luke said "But I didn't want you to find me." "But I wanted to know where you were! Did you want to never be able to come home?" "I could live someplace else." "But I would want to know where you were!" "I would send you my address." "But I want you to live with me, because I love you!" (Ow-w, but if I'm forbidden to say that?) "I don't like you." "Why don't you like me?" (Squirms.) "Because you don't buy me anything, like sweets when it isn't the proper day." His eyes fill, he looks very hurt. - Sex, no, that is for only the strongest magicians, I am not yet one of them, Tony Nesbit is the only one, Tony Nesbit who has never been in love, Tony drunk or sober, inhabited with such a presence, and taking full responsibility. I have to feel I am in good hands, for my loving nature to be free. That is how it is. Some important respect is missing. What am I asking for. For you to take yourself seriously in some way you don't. Not with women perhaps. Stop flattering people. Was it just luck, Tony's criticism. No no it was his being, he judges everything. My intransigent critic needs a friend. To judge me is to take my life seriously. Can be. To flatter me is to exploit and cozen. Something much more strenuous. - Today, this Saturday, inside: cleaning, a few small shapes adjusted in the house, great creative joy in the small brilliances which have suggested themselves, last week's disorder shaping itself toward today's tulips, red and pink at windows. The green mirror in the bathroom, mass of shiny geen leaves next to it. Fire in the front room an ember in the dark, two four-and-a-half-year-old children sleeping there, Luke on the floor, arms out, cat asleep at his shoulder. Tara asleep in the same posture, both bare-shouldered. Striped light in the venetian blind. I was in the kitchen looking through the drawer full of magazine pictures, the wind was clashing bamboo chimes at the back door, two red geraniums, and a spray of that brilliant pink hedge blossom shining out at the polished black window - a sound came on the wind, a crack and then a roar as of a crowd, repeated several times. I opened the door to look toward the Colosseum, was it a hockey game? Sound was there outside, but still mysterious. No clues from the lit back porches on either side of our black alley. I closed the door behind me feeling the sound, the pleasure of the children today, all the astonishing images, feeling amazed life is so strong, surprising - ah, here I am, look at this room, look at that black wet continuous outside, robust white clouds solid as snow streaming out of creases in the mountains. - Seeing the PNE through his eyes, the roller coaster, all the scaffolding, the sky ride beginning to move. Stopping at the top of the ridge to look at the horses. Paul's presence allowed me to say what I hadn't formulated about the races - the way the racing horses, who have bizarre deformed monkeylike riders in brilliant satin, are escorted to the gate by sturdy nurse horses ridden by large people in drab: as if they are mad creatures, psychotic dangerous beasts; and then their relation to the deer at the centre, in the parkland, with ducks and a fountain. - Birds rustling in the wall, the sound frightens him. "Sometime can we find a hotel to stay in again? Cos I don't like to sleep alone." "Your bloody fucking hand!" (I've absently dragged him over a curb.) "My bloody fucking hand!" I say and roll him onto the grass. He laughs. In the high wind. We took a kite to Connaught Park in Kitsilano, this summer's last Sunday in May. The red triangle standing steadily and just rising, my maiden flight. Oh, there it was! The white string curved up into a light area of sky where I couldn't see it and then reappeared under the kite. When I hauled in string it seemed to be stocked in invisibility, coming down in a hurry, tumbling as if it had been up there in a coil on a shelf. I lay down for a while with the string held at my chest, above my head, playing I was a sled in the blue heavens, pulled by a very distant red kite, smoothly and at a strength just firmly right. Playing baseball with the Awful League, late day, I kept hitting the ball, never had more than one strike, kept getting home. Little children, everybody laughing, Luke and a tiny girl playing in the dust on the mound. - Last night, fighting with Paul, feeling two things at once, like two rivers one on top of the other, I'd look through my anger and see dismay moving below it. This week I've been making myself poor and then feeling sorry for myself because of it: other weeks I've borrowed from my film money so's not to have to feel poor. I've really wanted to be poor, resented it, bragged and complained about it, enjoyed privately the trip to the LCBO every morning with two cases, and then counting out what's left after busfare. Milk? Save a quarter hitchhiking. Spend a quarter on fat blue-red raddishes. - Gabriola weekend. Aunty J [Janet]. She is eighty. Red and blue plaid Indian cotton shirt, white silky hair blowing in a curly bob parted at one side, brown thin face and hands, almost no body. 70 pounds? Patricia's [Wainman-Wood] effusion is met with a humorous levelness. Her garden between the road and a drop down into a mudflat of Cowichan Bay where a swan has nested and sits on eggs that may have been ruined by the cows or dogs. White haired Auntie J works in the garden where everything is in order, an English garden, only a few vegetables, in the back. Clumps of perennials spaced in deep compost, bordering an English lawn. Honeysuckle in a wave over the passage between little house and garage. A small deck facing east? And under the window ah! one poppy plant, a deep red on four-foot stems, buds coming but only one open, a beautiful flower, a monument - ah! the red poppy. "I believe it is an unusually deep red, we call it the Cowichan poppy" says Auntie J. Her house, the room with windows on the sundeck, her father's (the English doctor from Gloustershire, near Cheltenham) collection of Chinese platters, her rock cakes served on small blue plates, the rugs underfoot worn to white threads, a picture of John Kennedy ("She has a picture of Trudeau in her bedroom"). Birdie, who had lived discretely in the trailor for many years, if she had married him she would have lost her Armed Forces pension, died recently at ninety, had succeeded a first and second husband. She had no children and was always thin and pretty. "My mother always said she was a selfish woman, but I think she just had a very definite idea of how she wanted to live." Wonderful lined brown skin, with a tight lean jaw - the roses, the dahlias, the broadbeans with leaves bitten to scallops. In her rooms, the faded threadbare silvery Indian blankets, the faded grey green chair covers, the lovely air of time-shaped things, real things and a true eye, and enough money to cultivate. -
- I should record your ardent battering - "You don't love me! You don't love me!" and "You're cold, you're empty" and me cool and happy like the wren balancing tail into the wind saying "Why should I? No I don't! But I like you! I can't lose you, we know each other, don't be silly" but later feeling a little of your same fright. What if it's you sustaining my cairn of pebbles, my shell altarpieces on the log's shelves, my relation to the worn brick side of the building and the water running two ways at once? What if they left, with you? Then I leaned against you without speaking (not too sad to play good pool) and you liked it, our beast with four eyes. - [Centennial Rd in Clearbrook] The regulation of this household, all the little things, which all have their place, the anxiety for some strange cleanness - I like it, all the fresh sheets and pillows, the dill staked with a rag under the little pear tree, hums and drones, no sharp noises (just then the handle on a neighbour's galvanized pail fell); a row of old spruce marks the edge of an old farm, now the back of this garden. We are all alert for little deviations from the proper order, and yet I've noticed that Grandma like Mother is too smart to do things in an exactly orthodox way; she makes little practical shortcuts, her rice in a bowl warming over the boiling potatoes, and she tastes things straight out of the mixing bowl with the stirring spoon. How the cabbages hold themselves! The rim of my hand's shadow on my thigh is red/brown and a little translucent, a distinct outline. No no I won't look at the beans! Grandma says her mother died when she was eight. She had Magenkrebs, her husband took her from Ufa to a hospital in the south, 4 days on the train. Waving her finger in front of her forehead she said, "She stood on the platform and waved to us with a rose, I can see that picture exactly as it was, it's still all there ..." The Christliche radio programs, and even worse the television; I'm trying to listen to the tone of them and read something, and it sounds like lies, the television worst. But the old radio programs, exactly the same voices, the same tones, the childish songs. Do these people function with authority in their family and work lives because there's something in them that can always be infantile? "I've got a great big wonderful God." "You've got a place in God's plan." "Eisig' dich." Oral Roberts and his family in the style of Nixon, expensive sincerity, women in long polyester crepe dresses and confected hair. A neighbour came in with the church paper for Grandma and they both stood in the doorway regarding me and my half-inch strip of brown belly with fascinated furtive little eyes "Ich bin nicht wirklich eine Lehrerin," I said to Gma, "Ich bin Kunstler." "Die Kunst," said Grandpa, "wirt alles nur gestraft werden." "Die Kunst is lernen, sehen, hören, verstehen," I say. "Lernen ist nicht leben" he says. - Their history is interesting me less than it did; what interests me now, why is it? is their language, living fossil, imprint of everything they've been, but it's not that, it's the vividness of this language I find myself speaking with ease, but without habit, so it's all picture language. I am a new person who was born able to speak this archaic domestic pious German and who examines the gift as it appears word by word.
[to the tune of Holy, holy, holy] - I'm ashamed and frightened, the mannerisms passed from Gma to Mom, what if I too speak my absentminded thoughts aloud like that, and move my mouth like that, and gobble from my spoon like that? - I felt momentarily that the right ethic / esthetic would be clear to me if I stopped to think of it. In my body and childhood I have faith in a certain balance of forms, in straightforward wonders and beauties. Art, culture, is dishonest and doesn't reverence the gateways, but exploits them. Therefore we doubt, and despise, what resembles 'beauty' and revelation. Therefore looking for what 'the people' don't value sentimentally we make careers out of rubbish. Sometimes we succeed in making it moving - the body finds its values and signs, tensions, 'equivalents' in the risked selections at random. What can we identify with so that we respect ourselves? Tom Knott's photographs: I was feeling for the first time the importance of precise tones, and of a precarious balance - "Photograpy is a tool well fitted for the exploration of those areas of our experience in which we recognize but do not understand meaning . Not often, but occasionally the meaning will be so nearly invisible that it will be present in one print and absent in another, only marginally different, made from the same negative." Szarkowski If we put aside the question of history, and what we're doing for 'the culture' we could decide on the basis of what would give us the holiest or happiest life - but is the way to the holiest life the way through what appear to us to be the most seductive/powerful doors? Or is it better to cast at random and in hunger toward whatever is there, to let the body/soul find out what it can use? Hunger / have to be starving, but not weakened - how do we do that? Is it only the original undefeated fierce child in us. The idea of incest. The idea of the woman and man in a ballroom, she in a lowcut gown, each desiring the other from the position of their own perfect manhood or womanhood. The idea of a window. Having the thing is not good for us because it is the idea of the thing that we want. Is this Platonic? - What shall I say about how
When I got home I cleaned my room and the kitchen, went out into the garden in clogs to pick nasturtiums by moonlight, finding them under their big leaves.
|