| dames rocket 7 part 1 - june 1977 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
[Written at a lunch stop on the bus ride north to the Peace River Country] The arm that was between white sleeve and the stick shift. It is so fine and small, fat on the wrist, plump, smooth. I feel oh little woman's lovely unimagined arm. See it on the body driving, that manly-minded driving, and have a shock of love and desire that I tell by hesitating and touching the underside of the arm almost not. Daydreaming in the bus / different than it was - this tousle person hasn't lost all her interest in who's looking. The beauty of grass fields, all the colors there were, pink brome? green blue violet the perfect extent, fields among trees, like ponds. They were so brilliant. The brown river with all colors reflected from rock. Thinking what to do with duration. Wishing for the energy of a fantasy, eating a stupid one by someone else, the sick depletion. Looking for a speculation with a lift in it. You're there with your soft face white. Ah will I have to remember. It isn't for memory, but to call, the white, black and brown, sleeping without a shirt, the back winding, sleeping with spectacles set on your chest on Luke's bed. Oh the way I don't have thoughts. On Luke's bed, Ezra quiet toenails the two white people. Oh friend. Did anything does anything happen. Oh the eyes nose and mouth. Good stuck you. She smiling talking to the bunshop waitress our guardian leans on the partition, gai mai bau. A slim sleek. Imagined dancing with you to feel and be seen. Another kind of person. The face against thigh, hair in that cleaver curve. Oh Gabriel. At night walking through the tracks the light coming into the chest wave after wave off water, squares from the square lamps, combed lights from across. Silence. The cliff and fruit hoppers comforting ladders of windows white mass stained cliff. Lying under it your white knee next and stroking the bridge over the tracks. Candy and last summer, but I don't care about that. The factory beautiful glasshouse every section endearing itself. J tells how the ancient Chinese, finding a stone they liked, would sign it. Going home she ... She's not arrogant she's as if saintly kneeling at the tub washing dishes and gets into the bed and falls asleep on my shoulder, oh. And in the morning I was almost present. "Do you imagine dying?" Driver says "What's that ol' sow you got there?" of [other driver's] bus. The village of our alley, color piercing gently. - La Glace Alberta [A Sunday evening visiting my parents, where Rudy Weibe and his wife have dropped in. My dad shows them slides.] M is frantic, he sends the pictures through too fast, as if not to show but indicate something - I took this. He thinks he's a bad spirit. "Accept the fact there's a physical world and a spiritual world but there are some bad spirits though." The impersonality. He keeps not noticing what people have said between his says. She wears a grimace of eagerness with R [Rudy Weibe]. Throws her head back and it turns into something better, a child's laugh. Getting a sense of the pain in all their voices. Comes to me with the grimace of fear on her face which she can't recall as fear. Why are they all so wrong, Mrs Lockheart was a shock - she spoke with some presence. They are veiled by a system that gently warps their presence variously. Feeling into language and coming up with doubt. Feeling gaps. Oh Jam. Am I calling you? It has been hard to hate speaking people so much. They don't say what they are, they can't ride the safe scary bronco. You help me find a way into the world again. What if, alone, they spoke, and never realized the difference. [barley field] [field road] [childhood house] - The rattle of alder (poplar) leaves, the way they twinkle. A certain smell of grass. Sweet clover diving past on the edge of the asphalt. She explains everything / he finds a wit / they speak to each other in persona, how can they bear it for so long. Grass makes moving shadows in between still fence shadow. Of my shadow the sleeve edges flutter. There aren't strawberries in the bald cemetery. [2005] Stakes stuck down in the grass. More people died in 1945 than at other times. Midges. The leaves rattling more and less. This church site with unmarked grass has unmarked ruins of a barn, wooden sidewalks, the first church with its swarming eager new congregation come from so far, gradually filling out with people who may have been unknown to each other, but knew someone who knew archives? The young children. Those people had been unmade and remade. They must have been excited. On the south of the cemetery is thick small bush, willow, water poplar, raspberry, wild rose, strawberry. This is the dying congregation, when these people die or retire to warm places - - The question underneath here is always - rebellion, how awful they are, I can't be like them, I can't be with them, Rudy Wiebe comes in like a component, researching and thinking about it, Lessing had the horror of it very strong. Stuck with it on the porch she (I) thought, it's my hunger that's my permission, to give away my child, to give away my parents, to try to be a stranger in my country. The sense of what work is here, going deep. Learning to leave it. Distress. Distress when she wanted to come, I don't like any of them. Ah the dangerous road. How can you see it so clear and stay in it. He [Rudy Wiebe] said goodnight as if on purpose and came and talked about the old man, a scene I couldn't stand, like a plea and a dominance at once. I was left tempted to collude and holding out too, wavering, incredulous. I know you're in there. - You get a root for your work. Does your work have a lie in it? The difficulty is justice? Wanting to know it because I think I should, because it's 'mine.' But I'm not a novelist. The hope in me is that if I let it go adventure will come back, ie to have a destiny. (He has one.) - I don't know and don't like them. Staring at her last night was challenging. There was silent pink lightning far away. - [have phoned J] "You're in a spot of great power and vulnerability. So much so that you want only one aspect of it." Do we polarize. A rest in the area where we need it. "You don't want to open yourself to any of that." Come back Come back - I am in such a state of stupidity, not being able to encompass, so far on the other side. Language is not pleasure, I could hardly speak to you unable to trust a sentence. I want to give them up. - [I take acid when my parents are away from their place] The window into ground. Creatures making paths were here, a track around. I run it, three times clockwise not slipping. Hear my breath as if below in the chest. The tracks over the mound, all of the hill is marked into grey hard fur. The paths with their clear reasons, coming from the ends of the fields. Shadows into water show brown, that is shadows show into water. My skeletonned carcass, aboriginal, not a civilized body, I am not a young animal, the sections of the body separate. Thin leg as my pole. The pole put into water. Three stones and one set under water, a platform. This place has a porch, the stream when it runs has cut a path also, banks, soft earth falling out of the cut banks below grass roof. Stones thrown into this draw. It makes a grove, holes, stones thrown, small trees and larger, polished brown by rubbing backs. The water took on clouds, dead and live branches. A clearing with a cowpie. Earthworks, a natural navel, bulldozed and taken by the animals, given right edges, approaches, paths. the aromatic plants, barley over the fence. (A stone which is a stile - that was today.) Sun for all the wild old body. (Oh thunder making a long road wandering up there.) Mosquitoes. Surface touched constantly by flies, those birds came, long legs like sandpipers. (Today two owls at Bear Lake Hall.) Fences some tight, some let down. Climbed a tree, strong round plant ladder. Sat in a fork at the top, round leaves flashing like a nest around. Hurried home to burn my pictures, sacrifice something of theirs, withdraw from their world. Will you understand it's magic. Still refusing the ugly letters I wrote them, as part of them. [burka] Hurried back to the slope of the hill, sleeping bag, thinking of loose earth, grass comes up around it, those silvery plants, feathery ones, pale blue and pink sky, the moon on the left and sun going down balancing it on the west, the right. Indian hill, Indian bones. Bless me? These people must have blessing in them too, but so caught in language and silence. Freddy Nijland "My dad was so contented, he was real easy to work with. It's always been, that artists, everybody thought they were crazy, people who can make something out of ordinary things." Thundering so it bangs the house. How it was in the landscape, miles, with houses left in grassy islands in summerfallow, not burned, the barns too. - [unsent letter to Luke's grandmother] Dear Catherine, Thank you for your kindly letter; I don't know what to say. I miss Luke. It scares me to think of not having him back in a little while. All the same I am in such a state of fright and confusion in myself I don't think I can be ready to have him back by the middle of August. People all seem such phantoms to me and I feel a phantom myself, as if everything was and is a dream. It is hard to believe the world exists. Most human activity seems insane although the quiet plants are alright I think. But also I don't trust my own thoughts. This must seem strange self indulgence to you but I think whatever it is, clarity or madness, I'm going to have to go into it and maybe through it. I don't think it can be closed out. Oh Luke. He will be alright with you but I feel I'm abandoning him. - [hawk] - Responsibility is the lie chosen by those who wish to stay with their parents. The plants, finer and thicker willow. In the tent at night, waking feeling how close to the edge how thin the tent strange friend precarious driving had bed cold. Spirit River Canton Café, red and turquoise. The charm of Sexsmith. Writing in England was easier? Alders flicker, clap. Do you see - animals. Occurred to me that it would be possible to write in abbreviation and be understood by others, we go into abbreviation. Language of the future mutated: toward Chinese? Invent a way to learn it - record a sentence over and over, have a literal translation. Dreams - a London boutique, having won a prize with bus ticket #8, also other prizes with #8, looking at expensive clothes, not wanting any, trying to imagine wanting some. Talking relief with a tall thin man like Mr Mann. Walking out, a field with a white bull. He came close. Wanted to get through the field to the barn or some high place, found a way when he was down the end, but then wasn't sure he wouldn't come round the back. Taking it on: finding out what it would mean. I think that when I begin to see, I can either refuse to see, that is, choose bewilderment, or else see as well as I can, while refusing to be martyred. That is, in human life. The life testing and looking meantime. Staying in adolescence until there's a real way out. My friends. J you do let go and slide into stupor. There were things I wanted to tell you and couldn't because you wouldn't understand. [list of names in the Pentacostal cemetery] Liland, Forseth, Simonson, Flagstad, Berg, Rolfstad, Westad, Bentrud, Amundson, Livelton, Magnus, Throness, Vekved, Torgerson, Halvorson, Anderson
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- Write about Trapline
Mrs Lockheart Father at church making conversation with Leona, she trying to get away. He was letching her. The people coming friendly. I was timid and stayed close to them!
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I really want a Beaulieu. How she was getting off the airplane. - [pale bluff] [studebaker truck] The owl has a grainy hiss with a barb at the end. Also a call. Chut chut chut chut. Crow to the left caw caw caw caw ragged wings. Now the wonderful light. Granaries stand little houses. Some bird has a little sharp cry. They took me for Paul. "It's Paul? Ellie?" The bush at the foot of the near pasture has no cow paths and is dense with nettles. I suppose the violets aren't there now. Something has pushed through recently.
- [Jam flies up to visit for a week] We had been silent. I complained of drowning and complained that she didn't care. She'd gone to her journal. (This fine fireplace with a mirror. But I'm scared too, the bull and footsteps.) We walked across the cropped pasture, it's high there, on the crest we had hill's curve and twilight, sunset a sort of grey blue all around, carrying a few things, two in boots. Not right together. She said, It's like a dream. We came downhill to where the tent was next to the rectangle window. It was full of clouds, blue and grey. We gathered wood, threw it down where the bank was cut down as a bench, gathered stones for a circle. I'd brought a white stone from the field where it had shone. Set the water's post upright. Silence. Made the fire. I gave her the matches. She lit it. I rolled a joint. We stood and passed it back and forth. She was walking around. It made my head tingle and I knew I'd crossed over. We stood looking at the water, which had one duck and earlier one of those long legged birds come to it. I wanted to be quietly in it. But then we heard a stampede, the herd of cattle running toward us. We stood on the other side of the fire separate not knowing each other's thoughts. I was frightened because I felt that in the vulnerability of the stone I could be run over. She said later that she was frightened but felt that, in the dream where she was, they couldn't hurt her. When they came close I couldn't tell the bull from the steers, didn't know which beast presence to watch. She was standing forward in her sweater red in firelight (smell of resin now), went to tend the fire, down on the fire's level, closer to them. They stood and looked at us with such massed presence, some of them drank at the mirror window. I waited for them to drink and go away. They stood and looked. We were in the light, they were dark and moved a little. So big such weight in each on their four legs. Their place, their paths, their water hole I'd come to for their presence. I told her quietly to back slowly toward the fence. She didn't hear and stood by the fire. After a while I was too afraid, hesitating, wanting to be brave but not brave. Backed to the fence, slid under on my belly, long grass bent. On the other side we spoke to them. I asked them respectfully to go away. She spoke to them authoritatively in her Colonial accent. They didn't go away but crowded near the fire, standing in a half circle - those who were near, none of them drinking any more, all of them oriented toward it, those next to it putting their heads down toward it, curiously, a young one went too close and jumped back a little comically like a child. "They're curious," I said. "They're starting to like it, the warmth. They're going to stay all night." I shouted at them. They jumped and scrambled back not more than ten feet. Those on the other side of the window had joined the rest. They had to push each other in the narrow space between the tent and the water. My shoes were in there in the firelight. They stood at a little distance outside the light like a band of warriors. We went under the wire to get the tent. (Shouted as frighteningly as I could but they backed off only a little way. More stood against the skylight watching as we pulled up the metal tentpegs. Couldn't get one of them out. Watched my hands digging at it. Observed that I could be practical even in this dream. We pulled own the posts, threw them on the collapsed tent, pulled the big rectangle under the bottom barbed wire, set it upright on the other side where the clover made soft under the floor - two tracks of the road, clover plumping up between. The tent comically flabby because its sides were high up. Sleeping bags and pillows inside. Had set the mosquito coil on a post where it finished burning during the night. We found ourselves lucid for the first time on the outside of the wire while we stood and looked at them. (Took hold of her and kissed her so fully, was she looking at the fire? Ran to poke it. Talking. Wanting to climb into my body, kissed and kissed her. We found ourselves far into animal fuck. Jiggling her hands all over me. Oh, I thought, we're here, now we can - But we faded out of it. It was being without control and then guarded again. I thought I'd commit heresy and touched myself and she did as I asked, and I came though only remotely and was peaceful in my body but sad. She said, How do you feel about that? Awful. She said, So have we lost each other? I was lighthearted, I realized, said all the worst I could think, and then we went to sleep. The little clock, a soft bed but not warm. I looked for her to get warm, an open night with wakings, but when the steer bellowed I jumped up looked out the window saw 4 big steers in a row looking and coming closer. It was 7, the alarm hadn't gone. We scrambled up wide awake gathered her things and crossed under the wire hurrying over the hill. Drove fast and sleek to the airport. She was old and sad under the headband but soft at the mouth. The same road we'd come on. We sat close in the car, watched the CP jet come down on the other side of the wire net fence. I had coffee in a paper cup (from the machine) on the dash. She had Coke. I had my arm around her and was happy, although we pretended to say goodbye. She said when we were driving "Do you still want me..." "I guess so," light hearted. Staring at her strangeness unreadable face. Tired. She went into the plane in a file of people, I stayed at the fence looking at the little activities of the pilot behind his window, a baggage man wheeling a cart. She came down the steps and came and kissed me under the pilot's eyes, a strange look on her face after she'd done it, smug? Ugly. Went back in. White jacket, boots. -
- The last dream was being in the back of the truck with Judy, we were lusty, parked near the bridge looking at a blue car turn into Kinderwater's yard and back into it. A man came up the (drive) road (I was already further ahead). We each put a small aluminum pie plate over our cunt and shone it at him, heating behind it. Judy got down and went to him. I butted a cigarette and was going to fuck myself with it. She came back having done it. Ah sad about Rasheed. How silly the animal movements pumping jerking (C rolling), greedy face. Not love not you separate just devouring. If we learn to abandon ourselves there what will become of our faces. Is deep fuck the apple pie they warned me about. Her advice wrong about everything else. -
Describe Trapline Realized the way pottery took me, thinking about it while Roy tried to be visible, absent because bored, only acute pain would hold me? C stopped me. Blanked me out. How? Like wrestling. -
Faithfulness in association with others is an essential of the task. Identification with the processes of continuous creation. Love? Homecoming Past present and future are only different versions of the same thing. Paths Questions and answers The sea, friends. Prairie, alone. This force which is a form of Opening comes about. - Why should it be only implicit in art. A strangely complex exaltation of the hearer's consciousness Training for dreams. Illusion of will. Take Artemis there. A parti pris. -
Narration vs sensation French avant-garde 20s Delluc Dulac There are no stories. There never were any stories. There are only situations without head or tail, without beginning without end; they can be looked at from all directions, right becomes left, not confined to the past or the future; they are the present. Epstein The image is a complex and precise sign. The events do not follow each other and yet they fit together exactly. The fragments of several pasts take root in a single present. They're interested in setting up a tension between a and b, the tension between the two being the main locus of focuses of interest, giving an experience of thinking, dissociating or an experience of being taken. Borgesian in posing itself as a puzzle, a/the solution to which is displaced or refused. Yes B is - ? About a single idea. Taking emotive found footage - stripping it of locality by looping "or placing it in deliberately disruptive juxtapositions and then free associating and extemporizing around the kernel of meaning that survives." Stevens' aesthetics of air Dada gesture which permits the play of automatism, chance, materials, and refuses the responsibility of form and coherence. It affirms the joy of inventing, it respects nothing unless it is the desire to burst out laughing. Vigo Painlevé scientific documentaries factual material because they can see in it the magical, the terrifying, the arcane or the erotic Whitney "the viewers natural sense of awe at seeing mathematics made visible." 24 variations. Montage is a method of thought itself - Vertov Baillie's masking increasingly motivated by thematic and philosophical concerns (as opposed to more specifically personal psychosexual motivation) reformulate the unproblematic subjectivity of the pure lyric film in terms of the complex contextualization of that lyric vision redefines the image as an object of the mind locate the image between both maker and subject, involving both, defined by both ie old footage and present commentary, thinking back, thinking now
General principle that ideas could be displayed or demonstrated rather than argued for or against. Concept art. Art of which the material is concepts (closely bound with language) rather than particular form of film, sound, etc. equation of the determinant impulsion of the critical onlooker with the anxiety of the voyeur. A strange film and a voice supplies what you're thinking. William Raban's notes for the Arts Council of Great Britain March-April 1977 Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film at the Hayward Gallery - There's an aluminum light out there and the rain is almost one sound, they're coming so fast. It's hardly leaking here, just a faint spray that comes through the canvas. Garden with north south east west marked. The familiar horizon. Take one very large one and go around it for two weeks. When I argued with M it wasn't real, acting on old thoughts, new ones might come. Acting on old thoughts and new thoughts. When she teaches she's all there - you're a teacher. A craft. I need a craft. Apart from writing, ie film. A documentary about this place also about enchantment/understanding. Does it supercede all.
Catch yourself in a bluff and tell me. Her eagerness sucking up at Wiebe Her grimace at me You don't say what you think Is she harping still on a passion from then, he eluded her and did she sell me for him then
Some mirror movies. Take a marvelous thing and make a thoughtful structure of it.
Maggie too. Keep half her thoughts to herself. My life has been opening into talk - a life in speech. Riddles No-legs lay on one-leg, two-legs sat near on three-legs, four-legs got some. The riddle game which was a sacred one and of immense antiquity. J dreamed I had brain fever (meningitis?) The déjà vu sitting shelling peas, M talking about Christianity. I asked her if she doesn't sometimes want to destroy things and she said she could only understand it in the framework of Christianity and went on. I lapsed right out and felt the familiarity of this situation: the tent and being happy in it, her talking about Christianity, some danger with F - the alertness.
Those signs of being on the right track. You and I could consult seriously. Is what C does involuntary hypnotism. - [from letters to Jam] monday your having been here makes me feel a dialogue that can go into a letter you can picture the mosquito coil (it's on a stone, we abandoned the holders) I'm encamped facing SE we never said how it looks like a pavilion red towel hung on its porch posts in front of it is a desk like at home, one plank for hand writing, one at an angle for typewriting in front of that is an iron wheel on stones, fireplace there was a jet line this morning going from SE to NW just now I noticed a different white line drawing itself NW to SE in the same place the grass is luminous, makes the tent green look dead what it is about grass is how exquisite the detail is on every stalk of it, so a field of it is like a perfect intelligence [1975] when I came to this place I stood in grass watched it come toward me in waves, and thought about description that was because as I came up a gully where the driveway had been, and passed the caragana hedge I felt she's here! (the child) and then, in a happiness I'm her and then I came to the place where the houses had stood [1944], found grass over it, some of the trees having died in the fire, fireweed and a changed ecology in the bush that had been behind the houses (more light) I was so glad, hadn't expected the liberation it was to see the place without ruined buildings that's where I took my clothes off and lay down and in my near sleep understood that there actually is work for me here and other things the child who lived here liked to describe and had many secret connections, was always a pagan making ceremonies I keep finding her love and thrill in the features of this place I'm not eating the pump is still here and still works, it's surrounded by grass there were several clouds of gnats at a spot on the edge of the bush here a spiderweb had some of them arrested in straight lines when I went to look at them they came around my head curiously like the cows do you know the sensation of a happy pounce of the mind? heard voices talking and singing, they must have come miles the hawk's curious about the airplane, follows it a ways
- tuesday morning. my old letters make me sick they're so false xios' story is in valéry, histoires brisées I can hear someone hammering two miles away dreamed a white bull in the pasture that used to be here he made me nervous rain streaks from the north clouds, this angle / a few drops time to make a table indoors now the sun is directly behind me, almost NW and still far from setting the bush where the house was - on my right - is rattling suddenly, a breeze this morning I tried to describe the sounds it makes the breeze getting to the grass first, and then the tops or bottoms of the poplars closer by, mosquitos and flies making lines closer and futher I can see a lot of kinds of weather there's one owl that comes and goes where the corrall was are you interested in these things/ on this yard when I was five, I lived when I could in a sleigh box, that had doors, windows and a seat with the imaginary friends whose names I can't remember they were all girls I also made tents on this yard - it's night, two candles in the green tent with the blue floor now and then there's a bang like a car door opening at the road, it's something the cows do but I'm nervous tomorrow I am invited to sunday dinner and an outing at the lake where we saw electric lights, my father invited me was thinking about whether my speculating actually is only about methodology. it seems that when it's metaphysical or epistemological, it is: ie it has to do with anxiety, the sense of having to decide or do something, and wondering whether that's real the other sort of speculation, feeling for very little bones inside a phrase or concept or moment, that seems sheer pleasure I can see you at the refrigerator, one leg against its door, your left elbow up pouring. now you're carrying your glass to your bed, setting it on the windowsill. now you are picking up the book. put the book down, turn off the light, goodnight ezra, goodnight miss this afternoon a hawk and an owl were arguing in a nearby air - they had to keep circling as they spoke the hawk said eeeeeee, the owl something similar but in a different tone I found the hawk's nest in a woods near here, the one where the wild gooseberries grow every one of the bluffs around this site has a different character and I remember the feel of each of them the one with the hawk's nest has a nice magic, also queen, big white queen, fell down and died there. june was hitched onto a wagon with her at the time later she was brought back and hitched onto queen to drag her away
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