up north 1 part 5 - 1978-79 december-january  work & days: a lifetime journal project  [alternative edited version] 14 December Valhalla Centre Woke and sat up the instant Hythe came, felt my mechanism working well, as all this time, charmed, then Connelly's and the unseeing arrival walking in bright air bitter on one ear, a man who said religion lied about hell, a father would not burn his children, but everlasting death. At the post office JM said sweet friend and Roy was cheerful/glib. A silent ride, Glen having lost my keys the perfect ease no longer but claimed his car and rode it sleekly around to pay rent, get the boxes from Hythe, at M's seeing Luke's face realizing my dimness, cried, so internal and not looking after my image - the sorrow from underneath, his mouth in a foolish grin. Unable to stay with M but her sympathy lifting me to laugh, he said hi on his way through. Ezra's bed, the room's cleanness told me I was expecting her, and how did I lose her, in panic, to go rescue Cheryl and not know the price of it? I still dream of night power, the draw of not mastering, and sank without it into? It was working to put together but it didn't wisely control the companionship and I've been thinking of complexity and how simple-minded I've wanted to be. I couldn't master and don't know how it was. We could have invented solutions but sank and clung. 15 "To my sweetheart on her fifty-third birthday, from her one and only lover boy, Eddie" in a shaking hand. The clear day kept out of direct sight, not ready yet, the thoughts beginning to refind. Was most of the day with Frank, sometimes heard his voice, the forms of flirtation (sex) and real companionship (how I should have been with you, J, is ---), and then at one moment in the snow light stubble, as in the child's house was like the one who got his letters. Alice seemed nervous with me and Harold too as if in the meantimes rumours have made me something but felt I could even it out with my voice. She looked fat, slack and white, we talked fast, a girl from a class sent her a vase, her baby died, she should have trusted her feeling that Mary would accept her. He made himself present by silence and the seduction or rant of radio bible programs. I am wearing J's long black sweater and still have tits. Being anxious about identity, the one writing Frank, making a vivacious life-lover maiden and he did it too. They do that by looking but they stopped me in it. The house made me feel sick. To learn what it is, or to use it. The distractions. 16 In the dream a set of books by a Swedish man, he invented a world and I thought I could too, covers had pink luminescence. Jugglers. Dreams I'm alone traveling without emotion. Reading through Castaneda's first, remembering the marvel of first time, thinking of everyone changed by it, T C R D Roy Josie Diana but not J. Its grip because it spoke to the hero. Who doesn't lie, stays young, knows how to stay in a strong position and goes through fear, is only bound by rules of existence, not people or social life, has adventures and finds own way to live without shame. In winter body has helper. Outer heart beating and breathing. - At the dump looking at objects feeling the lives of unknown other people, town people. A bottle with a liquid still in it. Every school day on the way home it was on the right down a dirt ramp of cracked ground. A trench north-south on the west wide of the unused road allowance, fields on either side behind barbwire fences. A rutted track, rainwater standing in the ruts. Toward the back where the strip went into the willow brush, car bodies. The willows taller than children. Mud and grass under them, rooms between them. Reading comics. Little orphan Annie. Standing at the edge of the trench full of greasy water reading a True story magazine surprised to feel hot in the seat. It was called that, didn't have a more particular name, the quiet place that feels sharp when it needs to pee. This feeling wider and hot. Forgot it and found it again later in a True story magazine. Noticed it there when he grabbed me to spank me. Cold wet down the insides of brown winter stockings. Enraged and sobbing. There might have been letters to say whose pile it was. Angens. The La Glace people in houses that have an upstairs. What they eat. Pineapple tins with a smell in them. Greasy stuff in a bottle. Mayonnaise. Studying what they've finished with, clothes. A car seat, drag it back to the house in the willows. Wood box with an enamel washbasin. Chipped plates. East into our father's pasture tins, paper, litter pushed by spring flood and wind until it had got pressed immovable into the willow brush. The willows with cowpaths cut nicely under and between them. Cows, sometimes the bull. Steers, calves, the horses, on the other side of the wire. The sense standing there in open land of breeze, a hill to the north, a long hill like the bank of a lake, steep, brome grassed, brown. The strong sun from beyond the willows and then the lake. Kinderwater's barley field and the creek running alongside it, the road. The slow private time between the highway and home. Standing. Grass brown like it is now. The naughty flood. Wind. The sun. The time of day. My companions Judy and Paul. Not doubting that we knew it the same way. Running, finding, showing. Alone with the thought or sense of the jar's life. Feeling La Glace over the fields that way, and the house that way, its roof showing over the hill. Once on a Saturday he was working on the roof and could see to call us. Or they went to the car and we heard the horn and knew it meant us. Maybe we told her what we found, maybe we saved her having to tell us it was dirty. Some things not to be picked up. The smell of that stuff in the bottle, hair oil, I can almost smell it. That means I can feel the direction of the smell but not attain it. The piled tins, chipped cups for the house in the willows. A good kettle, hold it to the sky, see light. When it rained, inside a truck cab reading magazines, looking at pictures of the world, eager. The Star Weekly, Look. Princess, palm tree, ocean liner, soldier. Beauty bodies, the way they dress, what they say to each other. Sinful people brought beer bottles and snuff boxes, round cardboard boxes with a fine smell. Whiskey bottles. Sinful lives from the town, those people better than us, better richer but not better smarter. Here. Hands, typewriter keys, blue cloth. Earlier, red blanket, armchair, fire, book. The cells of the leaf. Do I like it here with the snow idling between me and the red willows, putting snow light into the room. The cold linoleum in the morning is then. 17 All day in feeding the fire and reading letters, ending with O. Didn't think of Luke or J's birthday. Time in the feel of Bill, Susy, Paul, Rick, Jerry, Madeleine, Maggie, Desser, Greg, O, D. The ones that disgust are Susy and Paul K, mirrors of my groupie from the early time striving. Paul because he decorates himself as I did. The way I gave up G, F, where it was like happy marriage and went through lovers as if I had lifetimes in years. Some praise letters. Clear brilliant death, cold. Scared, vigilance keeps it off. 19 Town. Bill Covey fixed typewriter. Letters Don. Journals Frank. 20 They were back this morning, J in a brushcut big-eyed looking like Trudy, C. Journals 59-60. In bed the realization that all my life what I've done is have lovers. 21 And failed with J because I had not first cleared: envy, father-hatred. 22 Solstice sun enters Capricorn. Diary Peter's Andy's, wrote La Vanii Peter Dyck Walking - the trees, shrubs didn't seem alive. It's the sky alive. Snow. "This new vivacious personality" came at 13. R, F, P, family. By time of Greg wrote more direct. 23 Sunset 4:17, sunrise 8:50 AM. [Olson house] Cold wakes. Hythe through white glass. There's adventure and then there's fright. Pulling on each other. Fright used to be popularity/sex/gender, is now lostness. Letters to 12/13/14 from girls modesty and sad comparison/vivacity. Judy out and back. Greg, D and O. Burnt Madeleine and Desser. Wrote laconically. Fred / Dara Martineau. Outside the unbearable sky. I go out to drag back fenceposts. You: I'll trust you, teach me. On on straight south and high. The class, how well they know each other. Fighting out a position in it. The two eyes put together a known image (face) around an unknown (mirror bit), makes a picture neither eye can see alone. Since Vancouver I spend noon to 2 or 3 AM oblivious in reading past, fire concerns, or town. Remembered marvel. 24 Waking sometime early thinking how I could learn dialogue. Mr Mann (dream), how he would speak, others. He heard the clock stop [1974]. I'm thinking how J contrived against me, the tournament, liking T, mad at C. Last night I was fighting with Father, suddenly stopped myself went into a tumble trying to find the thought again. Watched it hide? The old hook: you keep throwing out what you haven't absorbed. The competitions. "a tearing, a wrenching, a ripping apart" Daphne What J and I did was mostly impersonal. Twilight went looking for a tree: the road drifted high but she plunged through, hands light on the wheel let her keep the tracks. Tree on the fence allowance. Simple spruce smell, wears the crystal and has rocks piled at the base. Went into Vancouver notebook. Wrote F the Dante passages and Tony a note. Supper at Helmer's, the grey brother and sister and their trouble. 25 There had been a dream at the Sufi farm, in a barn I see, by nest-like openings, that vegetables and fruit have been buried in straw, carrots in one place, apples in another. Beans could be grown up the stall wall. Then I am looking at the garden soil and offering to look after the gardens next year, remember I have to do the film. But my pleasure. A fine day, blue and yellow on the curtain and outside. Get stuck and dig out, the radiator steams. Reading London notebooks, the last ones are fine, have fine stories, dreams, quotations and thoughts in them. Moving stories of Luke. Cold. Wrote Jane and Habiba (conscience). Not inward quarrelling today: but flat. Music. - truth is vivid experience of single events inner preparation for approaching and the pause for after effects   li - principles of order, markings in material kuan - to observe without looking for something progressive she was to leave by gate 217 or was it 211? - [letter] Dionysus of the tree - image was often an upright post without arms draped in a mantle with leafy boughs projecting from head or body, or appearing out of a low bush. Zeus in the form of a serpent visited Persephone and she bore Dionysus a horned infant who quickly mounted his father's throne but was murdered by the treacherous Titans with knives, while he looked at himself in the mirror. Many other stories. When he revives he brings spring. Freud - animals in dreams are separated libido, own or other's. I can't follow the intricacy of bull and vegetation in me but know the connection is in some way right, have it in photographs where the red willow in tall grass is veins of an unseen being. Earlier visits the white bull in a field of tall blooming baby's breath. Some, many slides to show you. When. Also for example reading an occultist th'other day what stirred me was when she said that the human realm when it's more evolved will be able to help the plant (and animal) kingdom toward the consciousness it longs for. Excited botany reading. Wanted to tell you plants and gender. All the possibilities there are in that kingdom. Simple division in two Simple division into many Single swimming cells for some reason haploid and therefore needing another half, mystery why, maybe an accident. At first all the halves are similar. Then they sort so they're the same but combine according to some minute difference in (ie chemical) smell. Must be more than two kinds. Both swim fast looking for each other, tiny eye. They get together by being both attracted to light perhaps. Then it's easier to find if one stays still and the other searches. The one staying home keeps the provisions and gets bigger. Eventually stays home in the parent plant and mixes without ever leaving. Then the zygote baby drops out. In this stage only a brief and detached part of the plant's life is sexual, ie only the sperm and egg and they exist only 'til they form another. The specialization was sperm learns to travel, egg learns to choose the best. Some plants make both kinds. Some plants specialize: they can be otherwise the same. then there are those plants with sexuality segregated into a separate life, you remember ferns and the prothallus. Spores are diploid and make a different, tiny, sort of plant - that ugly little plant that exists microscopically and briefly only to make sperms and egg down close to the ground. Then flowers and seduction invented. Seduction in this case interspecies. Invent a way to make birds carry genetic information. Quite lovely, this kingdom using the other and paying it well. But the birds never knew they had yellow on their heads. You see I'm wondering what the plants want me for. And I'm not unwilling, should I be? This man [probably EJ Corner] said flowers at first very big, then got smaller until finally the plants using wind not animals have extremely refined reduced invisible flowers: grasses. We, according to our information, use animals to reproduce and we keep our animals on for a long time and that's the why of seduction and exhibition. But oriental wind propagation, though or what? The occult person also said thoughts are forms and when we make them they leave us - and that the child we are can grow up to be other persons than us. Deep in our gathered stories, prolific of confusion and interest. Your mental energy. Do you know anyone apart from me who's working so much. And you're working for them too, are they for you. 26 Waking early saw [sketch new moon] still far in the east. The many dreams of saying goodbye to J. [See journal.] Someone blew their horn passing by. The dream of gate 217 or 211 in London journal period with Joe the number of the grove said to be 217. Cremating shit. "An old man has died." Nordhagens' Christmas party, Walter Webber sharking crib, Harold fiddling, Alice, buncha people I couldn't like, spying, singing. At the dance loneliness and Rudy's friend. "When he came home he needed a lot of hugs." Desperations and those having a fine time in an accustomed way. These days the 'world' exists in a familiar ratio of out and in. But woke at night to that pain briefly. - morning of 26.12.78 - three dreams about j: she's a lion-tamer, we live in a concrete building with several doors - I see her driving the lions into the circus, up a ramp when I come out I have to wonder whether she has the key to go back in, it's the door to death, something like that, without emotion (in waking I say, did I dream that?) story, I'm the princess and have married the prince, come downstairs with a wine bottle that slips out of my hand. I ask the servants to take it, they don't, when it falls it stains my dress. they say I lost the power to hold the prince when I took his gifts, the beautiful dress. the butterfly prince. when I was poor and proud I was loved j is going to leave, I wait at the departure gates is it 217 or 211, what level is it on? it seems she's found a way to board without meeting me I wake and am sore, thinking I want to tell her these dreams, tell myself I am connected still even without telling or writing imagine fantasying her there, fall asleep and dream she's with me, leaving soon, in a place where many women are going past in a corridor, we're lying down, sometimes I notice another chinese girl on the other side of her, a woman sitting against the wall beyond them both, she says she's forty and looks older as she says so, I rush to tell her the three dreams meantime hardly notice her, I see between the stories that she has on a bra under her sheer sleeveless blouse, it's flesh-colored and padded, I pinch it and say what's this she says it's to please my mother a sign in a procession said she was going to finance comical things her flight's announced, she rushes down the ramp, says 'bye, I see she had had her hair cut and curled I shout goddamn you she is leaving without luggage or coat, brown pants, flesh-colored sleeveless sheer blouse, looks a pretty young woman, resembles herself younger mittens left on seat. hers? I go away with my throat aching grief for the magnificent woman she's given up (the longhaired one) see by my reflection that I have on a car coat, full skirt showing my legs I have to come quite far into waking before I realize it was a dream do I have sore tonsils? no others. an evacuation, others are going to settle on the islands, I have chosen to stay and live in a little house in the edge of the rock I'm wanting to film the old house, see it suddenly as log house with shingles in orange light through the viewfinder it is not the same light my father has set off explosions snow and black clods jet up like geysers I miss filming it next night. j, hot, demands I never see cheryl again and asks for the chain and coin necklace I'm wearing, back I'm sad the space ship has its l-field and steers itself around frogs' eggs future location of frogs' nervous system trees' l-fields sunspots and moon voltage rises with ovulation healthy people have regular rhythms measure between forehead and palm burr used trees as antennae onto the universe sun - electromagnetic moon - gravitational dowsers - sample 'witness' held to solar plexus they are constantly influenced by radiations of + or - frequency, the vibration rate carefully balanced is health the observer in the human is changed for the purpose of the magician magnetism and emotion are the same when electric potential climbs pleasure falls, anxiety 27 An institute of studies where Joe was going to be doing his research. You have to give up your heaviness to come into my kingdom (to M). Dreaming Mr Mann, I was back in high school the last day, leaning over benches talking to him, gradually found I could, and was grown up, a pleasure. [sketch] Pile of books. Sexsmith in color. Is the radiator dry? Will it wreck the car? Starting it after a while, crystallization on windows, the terrible rattling of the heater, one more trip succeeded - wood - last of the small London books, she was reading and thinking, I began to feel a little thought, not inner, cultural, trusting gathered other, the film's conceptual, Reincarnation - did Plato go out and come back in, to a project, from the projectless vision. Nose to chin convergence of -----, she stands so close, touches, wants something, is scared. Future science book. The ice pattern. Hawk's eyes, 4x. 28 "She's too well educated for this country." Helmer's few signs of life, a glance. Auntie, red-eyed, "yes dear." The cat. Showing Luke, London, etc to these people who don't see light. How I got knocked out, yawning. Car. Operations. Starting. Stiff gears car is hard, bangs. "We've already had more winter than we had last year." [willow snow] [stone snow ripples] [snow claw] 29 On a bus in Vancouver with M, she says Luke in the hospital is very sick, I see him lying pale, saintly speaking to nurses from his clear knowledge, she says they're going to take him somewhere, I'm furious she didn't find where, shout I can't stand the sight of you, you lump. Get off the bus am looking don't know which hospital a phone booth with lipstick etc can't find phonebook someone leads me out says this booth is for women's things, in the next booth the hospital's section of the phonebook has been taken out I think meantime I'm seeing him weak maybe dying am yelling with frustration and grief. In a later dream flowers and a kitten, M has brought them, either she or J seem to hint the kitten is for Luke, I go to look for him among the children, at last find him under a pile of covers in my parents' east house bedroom, he sees the kitten and lights. Later he asks me if I've slept with ---? to get it. I say no (there was a lovemaking earlier in the dream). The wrecked building on Hastings, I think to get through into the alley but it's been fenced and has interesting big lumps of junk, going out the front door a herd of people scampering back to the 'hospital' because someone (police?) is coming. I keep going. Wake realizing I'm under a pile of covers. 30 Sat It was down to -30 Sudden return Clarified the room Could do yoga And refound The secret of the golden flower and The cloud of unknowing The dream of a house with grapevines and dead bees - madeleine a house, often before, the house - I ask, isn't there a room in the basement, I used to live in? empty apartment, I'm just leaving it, the living room has a yellowed old flowered wallpaper (slide of irishwoman) and a sort of lantern - 4 sided higher box opening in the ceiling, a little floorless room above the room [diagram], I paint it green and wonder if I should have - go through the apartment thinking of how it would be to live in it, one room I think the empty kitchen has ropes of vine over and through it, the window and its vined light, black and large yellow grapes, with dead bees lying among them on the window sill. large and smaller. when I go through the back door I see there's another stairwell to a separate bedroom, parallel to a stairwell and bedroom belonging to the flat, going in, clothes flung around, in bed madeleine and a young man. (talk to the young man, can't remember her except - burned m's letters, when I read them they seemed outlived - stairwell to upstairs room at 4 st albans? m and r last night just going to bed saw in journal dream of luke in hospital in h.k., jumped up turned off the light so is it true luke has to be in the 'hospital' to suit me, but will soon come home, j too. wondered if it's something to do with my mother - she was only 28-29 the year I went to BC, but I was 7-8. 31st Sunday Arden and Charlie In Hythe the white smoke of the town lying flat white roofs and roads and dark blue above Legion Hall dance   all the uglies smiling - [back of the book - have not been able to find the author] Elder sister, Who is coming, in the loft?   It is we who are coming.   Elder sister, What is ripening, on the stairs?   It is we who are ripening, young brother. You and I, father and mother. Outside, in the drought, We are working.   Who is it eating The bread on the table?   It is we who are eating, Tearing it with our nails.   Then who is it drinking Your blood, elder sister?   It is a man you do not know, A tall man, with a nice voice.   Elder sister, elder sister, In the barn there, what did you do?   He and I performed an incantation Lest all of us might die.   And so?   And so My breasts will grow full For the sake of one more of us.   Who is that?   It is you, it is I, It is father and mother.   Who will come, then, at night When we say our prayers?   No one Above the weathercock, No one Beyond the dust in the road, No one In the evening, by the well-side. We are all here.   [inside cover of new daily record notebook, diagrams and notes on Yeats' explanation of the moon cycle; the astrological year with Celtic holy days, the I Ching cycle rises later every day - rising when sun is setting at full   primary phase by fact to deliver creative mind from idealized self opposite by creative mind to deliver ideal from fact   scrying: waxing - in control of will waning - chaotic and unfinished & weather after session a light meal   discovery of strength day 8 first quarter breaking of strength day 22, last quarter   1-14 estrogen, 14-28 progesterone 1 January 1979 overcast, -25 degrees a packsack, traveling with luke, had a lot of dope in the hot water bottle, anxious can I bluff through, is that a good place for it, overnight at a customs office - yugoslavia? still had to get through france but getting into england is easy - nothing to declare had an appointment to see a doctor about cancer, he said, oh you're lumpy all through, I can tell just by looking at you, little lumps in your jaw     I said I'd just run 5 miles and wasn't sick new moon has old in her arms clearly visible the big london journal, she was bright and moved fast, I liked her     very multiple and inventive, studying, freemoving and exact she wasn't afraid 2 -25 beaverlodge     beautiful shining smoke exhaust and swirling snow on the black road brilliant light afternoon backed directly into ditch what did I do that for? the black man and his dog [Tony Tiller of Philadelphia living in a small house in Valhalla Centre] oh maybe that's why, I wave and subsequently help with wood, bean soup and we shout about how it is alien here     of the storewoman 'she throws the change into my hand and won't look at me'     I tell hm how it is to hold off the drunk men     he says hwoooahw! he loves one of the complex pictures of Sarah in London     after I had wanted him to leave gave me time to keep thinking what I thought of him     hard to look him in the face and gestures are so amplified     he makes ease around him but I couldn't take a lot of it watching him overexplain, not guessing me, again and again making me wait     thinking slowly, or explaining slowly, looking inside and spelling out the current theories he made a reflection of my rumination that shamed me: spelling out to ourselves     is it dope     50-60 acid he said 3 -25 found j's september     fast-moving, able     loving letter seemed recent the long walk to the marsh, couldn't enter it sky, clean color diffusing up, intense at the white and going through orange to dark blue before the sunset, the longer fencepost shadows were turquoise setting through snow intensity interesting     drift's shapes     abundance spread, chunks of packed snow dozed with dirt, coyote tracks running through and on deep snow     rabbit tracks at a grain pile some fast flickering birds in small scatters the marsh like a love     set with spruce and water     at the heart and the low bushes down from it, to grass, with a squared barbwire fence around saw the coyote big black one running between orange and me in next field     we stopped and looked     I tried and was literary     approximating because I'm scared to be exact     gossiping to self about balance arities [?] that force     out- and inside made me improve the room and mount the door eyes not clear     tired have read all day for two weeks - dear one, it's open in front but I've begun to talk to you again today I found the last long letter you wrote (september) and I loved you in it, and you loved me in it and being careful not to precipitate a conclusion, I let myself momentarily hope we'll know each other again was in the world of a book words imagined, voice gathering what reminds me of something familiar but not and referring to desire   divisions of experience     reading a voice making a voice around it   disregard disregard from one level somewhere else not remembering / focused on another leaving go back some response in words some in posture think about   skimming ------------- above a madeworld I don't want to be in both believing and not the explanations of existence (epistemological space) what's the posture what's local the hope same rules of formation   speaking from outsider where to locate imaginatively from inside what do I know experience is never false in the dunne-za stuff reading. forced existence in moving pictures someone's tale it is moving through someone's fabricated thought and judging taking out leaving in sensing the rightness or wrongness of connections intensively noticing making or not making ideas about how that thinking was done some of the ideas of it are unspoken directions for how to move in it extracting things for different reasons deciding whether the impulse is valid or not 'working' an old skill 4 bright, cold thought of penelope morning early afternoon coffee and inspired found myself in a contrived but lovely position camera took me to - moon, growing white in intense blue sky     inspired about frost pictures     intoxicated     spent some of it on rereading the dunne-za material     then rushed out, an owl suddenly seen on a post, big, when it flew it was white close to the ground another small bird sat chirping on the roof spine of a granary     through the fields behind where charlie lived, the sky intensening coyote tracks and mine when I was called toward the big spruce at the creek, snow's deep, the last part was hard, hands and feet to let the drift hold - the refound deep underfoot (blue) sound walking on drifts - in the hotel room the smell of hospital bedding [on scrap paper written in the Sexsmith Hotel after crumpling right fender against the RR sign sliding on the icy uphill bit of road at the corner] driving slowly to honour the fragile engine on the left turn eyes to the nearby window it's white shining itself, and the sky goes on from the line     is single it's greyblue multiple colors folded behind with the whole of carbody between the southwest     that's winter sunset it's in ripples wooly continuous from far to here dark orange a strange thing shadows the shape of mountain range go up into the orange     the sun's gone down behind vancouver   this big space is my custom never like this moving alone this time I'm in and not out made a separation 5 absent, superstitous chinook: 'the mountains were standing way up and ...' alone in a day looking for the way it works, in the dream I remember, a man looked into my car said it runs too hot opened the left side of the engine     I saw where oil pours out     he said, with motel room it would come to two thousand, otherwise $210 I     said I'll do without the room got up at 1:30 tried the car, no (air warmer) when I went out to try again roland was just arriving, to jump the battery     driving fast, pushing, just past epps suddenly it slowed     what?     down into second, she spun smooth around and into the ditch went into credit union and borrowed $200 'for car repairs'     to sexsmith, cautiously? laundry has to do     go on slowly, liking the beautiful evening, feeling it innerly this way or that?     should I take the highway     caution, but at the railway corner realize I'm on the curve too fast     don't dare brake tissue of events: last week someone said 'never the brakes'     feel the curve, sit it out, the railway post on the right, try to steer but it's going to happen hard crash     chin into the steering wheel, head bumped too     post is over, I'm in deep snow cried in sight of the café woman, she said she thought I was in hong kong the seismic workers     bar rick precognitive four or five hundred books wanting powers 6 waking once early sensation of having in dream vision seen a partitioned rectangle in shadow like the one throw by the window streetlight,     it was a revelation of what I want to know, new again     I don't understand     had forgotten it until I wrote     waking seeing into the dark parts of a day encounters in real life, somone to pull out my fender     turning on the lights, one on right     she drives slowly     green sky and blue snow wide open     grey bush     black road     yellow on snow     the seismic crew and first sight liking for the party manager made me bold     he had bright strong eyes     beautiful clear face in a slob body     shaking his head 'I can't do it'     and slowly going home     diana's handwriting lit wanting to write j and trying thinking how to mother her if I ever had another chance   the seism     pictures     energenics please   glossy tinkle of the fire sometimes excitement of minnaert telling sequence of a sunset   a root hump covered with snow slightly smoking [Marcel Minnaert The nature of light and colour in the open air] 7 thought of the fat man [triangle] at night   sunday all today a little haunted by you sad, is that simple lonely or what, very little in this day, at first a rush through housework, fire, making big pancakes in the cold kitchen, sun     the bright afternoons, reading optics of the landscape, some hold in it pulled to the fire where on the end of a log an angel is making a sign     oh, study, how? photograph tried to rub it, went to some other rubbings looking carefully I was stirred by the detail, way the ridges of its cut blew through the figure, drew it, in the end sawed it thought to send to j     will have to burn luke's letter too     wrote diana because I can distantly starting out with the crystal radio, it couldn't be today     chopped a lot of wood in the dark, door open behind at bernice's how excited they are by: joe, charlie, dog stories wildness draws and enlivens even the tame asked translations for a message from you: having no hope at all                         that man who is base of heart can bear his part of wit                         into the light of it   not to delight, but in an ardour of thought that the base likeness of it kindleth not   moonlight strong shadows across drifts the open night   so hath man craft from fear                         in such his desire to follow noble spirit   save that perfection fails, be it but a little 8 frank was in a dream noticed tune had been in me while reading optics, listened to first two bars and realized it was only the lonely: who's sending me that message and why is it trying to get through while I'm busy and if it's 'me' why do I have to be told indirectly it was a white day     faint color behind the spruce wall     a layer of snow stars airy piles [snow writing] [snow writing 2] car     she started later on had to poke the choke waiting to hear from energenics [seismic exploration company based in Calgary] don't want to call anyone else     tension drove me out to the post office and then the difficult dangerous journey to buffalo lakes     he recognized me in the dark and put a hand on my shoulder and called me by name and I had to realize my tough projection is still not working and never will unless I make a foolish exaggeration of it     thought of mary's husband the way home seemed safer     passing we slow down and the right side grabs roethke tells about fright and intoxication   still a bump on top of head   big wind came at night         slides 9 I am sad and lonely, and not interesting, restless, pathetically angry with j, went stumbling through the dim greyblue to the bush, flung a radio/eye/heart into a forked tree, some kept-back pleasure of entering the heart of that place I've decided is mine     finding where no snow gathers under roofs of the spruce, sheltered, still there from all the years unprofitable     many tracks into it     a holdout holeup     long for 'joyce' to make me not foolish so I wouldn't do her wrong and me, accusing her of death at helmer's saw bernice's child, h holds his own     'we're open to all kinds of people'     know the subterfuges, on the phone wrangling with an executive who said 'I won't fire a man to hire a woman that's one thing I can tell you for sure' in the snow fields very pale very high moon through thick cloud reading the sufis     rising pain wanting to move c's here     the sufis bring her and I want to put my head on her knee     wanting a drug to open me into simple love     crying at the sufi farm because they weren't for me howled     it's january desperation - [clipping of a drawing with wood by Michael Singer] 'dying' is our parting that we mourn in our present loving attachment 'an earth' 'a world' local space copied from stone speak from the other side working on consciousness if you are higher with or without looking in other times not to be understanding only to push some are making beautiful language getting closer and looser in no life in this life   anne's house professor, they have books, I'm young just learning they've lived in distant places and know how to make a happy family they know how to make a loved daughter, many dreams 'but I have two children - anne's' 'an attic sort of cellar, connected to auntie anne, there's a box of baby clothes'   the voice structures speaking against each other the subsumption of the old languages   was once a dream of her beach house last night had some windows   wondering about my superstitions, 'we' were lost in omens, and that's the openness, which is alright except for anxiety pain rising the longing to move   I had no other objective than that of seeking solitariness, overcoming selfishness, fighting passions, trying to clear my soul, to complete my character.   foretaste, the flashes a form of mind which felt certain 'something as specific as if one had touched an object'   having to take everything I search out in reading etc as rumour but of a certain sort - suicides, gifted, mad people - the spectrum, the 'hand'     forms of possibilities but that's wrong     trying to see the paths toward any of those destinies but knowing the only way out of pain of suspension in impossible choice is to sink into the destiny my origin and history has all made up giving up enlightenment   such thoughts are useless they're made by fear every position has a rationalization the pain of failing at anything especially the loves and their balance     the failure is sent into the future     word word word don't you feel it too   they say loving is the way it's found when the heart pulls it knows the way but if indeed it does the wrecked child cannot join the loved ones without dying and you beautiful world I've turned you into work they, I want to be above them I need to be with you only because I recognize your struggle and you help me in it china the code name for concentration those who dream of higher consciousness what sort of story, the first time through the sufi book I surged up hopeful and hungry, this time it's as if enlargement has failed me and left me worse than before, disoriented and not knowing how to move forward, and not looking forward although I do still imagine some knowledge again - but it's because I've betrayed what was a possible marriage, that I needed and will go on needing, and also failed to find a bigger house and destroyed what I already had, and sent luke away, and am here unable to imagine a film I went into wrongly, and can only dislike myself in the future because I missed imagine a convulsion to this: I put everything into the fragile broken car, as it came, and I go slowly carefully up the road until I come to williams lake, and there I go to the welfare officer and find a shack, and send to change my name, and follow what's beautiful as far as I can, make the film in the right way not as I think it should be but as I love - throw off jamila and once again know and if my fire burned up once again someone would be briefly in my bed making me cry   alternatives to working what is this exile I'm forcing   what's the pressure to 'work' - it's just that I want to serve goodness   lost. when I thought I was lost was I absorbing j's fear of death all these people wanting to be skilled and so being skilled in all odd ways I've been thinking of sara very quietly she said to a doctor, when she was lost in grief, 'what about be here now?' he said nevermind any of that. so she became a conscientious mother like his how sara is like what I found in myself in roy's presence and accepts it thinking I should think about what she is and what can   the way of holding things out, as music writing etc wondering if the obsession with what's going on is going to be temporary     starting to bore     was it in the bond with j no it's that I was deep in and am extracting myself to where everything isn't in question almost did I almost? oh deepness I loved you and was so afraid in you and can I come back to you better prepared your craziness before you left, it's touching, I needed to see your disorder, I had been so long in mine, your/my rivalry from when I can remember feeling your faithful love when you thought I might be your one and yet   not willing to do everything for the balance   [small photo of a dancer]   [news clipping saying Children of Nazi holocaust victims were reported to be suffering from holocaust-related emotional disturbances. Many developed the symptoms at the same age their parents were when interned in concentration camps.] 10 woke to ice air     after/between two dreams of gary coming to fetch me, outside in the dark daylight a light shows on the snow, I have to pack in a hurry, know they're leaving without me, no job, what else will there be to do he came at nine, every time it's something clear and simple, I'm disarmed by the boy and hungry for exactly that kind of radiance and it sets off fantasies in my dream someone said 'you'll be in and out of --' how I dreamed it, the light, especially noticing the light, and then not being able to find my clothes, that child's worry, the soft spotlight in eclipsed daylight came from a direction I didn't expect, over the field, behind the shed actual arriving, I had given myself to staying the winter, then the pickup with wood and two embarrassed men confirmed it, not embarrassed, quiet and reluctant: I don't know how they came to deliver it today, I was rereading j's letter when I heard the approaching crunch, growing louder, of how it is when a pickup is braking up to the porch, I go into the kitchen to meet - who - standing on the porch I see it's - in a parka when I got out of bed this morning the sensation oh this is the right waking, this cold and this right light behind the instructions we look, it's two separate planes - [letter] Opening the box, this time not expecting even enough to want, seeing it was your writing, something tiny fell into place, it was like a little tick, in the diaphragm I think, something moved sideways. Was that off turning to on. You're lively and happy. Your voice wrote, not Pound's. I saw everything you sent. Rooms and streets. When you quote your mother I hear her, I love the way she said "In fact I would say you are very well born" with the last three words spaced out, her accent. The terracotta house too, I would live in Hong Kong even without you, because of its pleasantness, if there were a way. I have things to tell you but am halting, there isn't the plunging energy to take me forward. I've been in grief and oblivion, wrote once and burned, didn't feel welcomed, needed to hear from you. But forgave the instant the letter was there. A little spruce wore the moon crystal for Christmas, I wanted to tell you I'd accepted it after all. Yesterday thinking I was going to work, I struggled to the marsh, went to the heart of it and flung the crystal up into a forked tall spruce, to be an eye, radio, no one knows. It was nightfall on a white overcast day, coyote tracks, when I went into the bush it was blue twilight, when I came out it was darker. The snow was deep outside the bush but in the centre the ground was bare. [1992] It was yesterday I thought of a winter white mist in Vancouver first winter there. What was beautiful was the way things materialized close and vivid, a bird swooping in and out of visibility very close up, colors, meeting a red pullover on the sidewalk. Bright and granular. A dark entrance, rectangle: there's a story, but it has another wrapped around it. Lately the order of events has puzzled me. On Friday morning I dreamed a man looking into my car said it runs too hot, with the motel room it will cost $2000 to fix it. I said I'd do without the motel. He said in that case $210. When I woke it was warm, a chinook overnight, went for the mail, none, went on toward Sexsmith to do the laundry. Just past Epps on the La Glace road the car suddenly lost compression and when I geared down spun sweetly into the ditch full of snow with steam blowing and hissing from under the hood. Towed into La Glace, the mechanic found the rad mouth blown off. When he checked he found that the heat gauge has been working all along, and they failed to find out the engine was overheating because they took its temp in the rad, which was cool because the water wasn't circulating right. Water pump. Rad mouth soldered back on, crept slowly toward Sexsmith with a wonderful red, plowed, sky behind. At Sexsmith, dusk, a sharp curve over the tracks. I knew I was too fast into it. had been feeling every move out, but something was absent at the wrong moment and I decided, when I felt myself in it, not to brake - it was ice, banked, uphill - but to try to make it - the sideways impetus - sudden stop, the RR post, chin and top of head hurting, the accident sensation of something suddenly changed irrevocably. When I looked, the right fender was smashed up against the tire and the RR sign broken off. Towed into Sexsmith, stayed overnight at the hotel. Bacon and eggs at the café, the woman said "I thought maybe you go to Hong Kong." She was watching television but kept an eye out for me when I cried for the prettiness of my car. During the night I woke suddenly and saw a rectangular shadow of window and streetlight lying over the big wall mirror [sketch], a strong sense that the shadow rectangle was a central message, a sort of horizontal window with bars. It was as if that waking continued a dream and repeated its message. In the morning pried the fender up and drove to a seismic crew. The party manager had direct eyes and a clean surround that made me immediately strong. I asked for a job. For the past four days I've been certain I should have the job. I liked everything about it, it seemed to fit, I saw myself there clearly. Last night I decided that if I didn't get it I'd stay here and work in spring. Just afterward two strangers arrived with a pickup load of wood. A telephone call to Calgary head office this morning. The man refused me the job, "I won't fire a man to hire a woman, I can tell you that much," loud and petulant. Then, Valhalla and your two letters. Now it's Thursday noon. The calligraphy books were from a paper store in the same area I bought the cooking pot, I think. There were a couple of paper shops and an old café on the seaward side of the street, it was over the hill (past the botanical garden) from the 4 [bus?]. Radio. A message from the Mennonite Church advertising diligence, "To him who hath shall be given," very bald! This country no longer frightens me, it was partly the you in me, you know. Do you know? How much I was you, and how that disorients me when I don't know it's happening. Not only that, but it's being open to you puts me in dangers I'm not used to, alone there are other dangers, contraction not dilation. Haven't been in heat. (But I fancied the party manager because of his secret sweetness, though he was fat.) On New Years Eve went with Charlie, Arden and another drunk to the dance in Hythe, wouldn't go unless Charlie gave me the keys, drank ginger ale and watched the pioneers with contempt I remember from young, school parties. Charlie's popular with everybody, women chase him. The thrill that night was driving the pickup home, 5 drunks, big blue black 4 AM, so cold white smoke lay down flat by the white roofs, wheels made loud crunching. Closed, it's easy to survive here, even for the stupidest. Social survival if that interests, is as hard as any community. A black man in Valhalla says the store woman throws the change into his hand without looking at him. I like to be you but it strains 'me.' If we lived together that would be the hardest. We focus into detail in such a way that ordinary movements become interesting but difficult and I love that but we'd get to dislike each other just to shut it off. I could have a home with you if I had another one. if not I don't think I could bear it. Even in London it was partly that the intimacy cuts me, especially acute love, it isn't peace, it becomes a pain, it's an enlivening pain, And you and I both have some good rugs. And your objects not offending me is a wonder. But the parallel life, for me, is only possible if I have a bed and table somewhere else. We could do it in Hong Kong if I had money. You'll be getting to know them, it'll get harder, your ideas will protect you less. I liked you saying she's where the angel was seen. Where was that? Are you asking her about her schoolgirl? Can you do things with her? You will need to talk to me. When I first knew C, she consulted tarot about whether it was possible for us to know each other as 3. One of the cards she got was 3 cups knocked over, two standing, with a figure turning away. I don't know the position of it, the others were 3 swords, 1 cup, High Priestess, Queen of something, and woman with lion. My thoughts have been turning practical, seeing how you are when you're unnerved was fine for me, I needed to be the unenclosed one even if it shocked me. What I need from C is to embody who I love/admire in her, I mean, to bring it into my body, and sometimes to bring my lonely pilgrim to her to be seen, because neither of us knows anyone else like us in that. Also some body tuning which is also moral, or has been. And I'm thinking how to get it, although I'm not sure I haven't already. How to conjugate idealisms. 11 'some artists their work seems to be to create a whole new world with each piece, some artists their work seems to be making one world again and again with different points of entry' the worlds of trust and distrust writing j feeling a trust world tentatively formed around these days the scolding man in calgary, even his odd prolonged refusal and the morning scene of old jenny, helmer and bernice, natural     she said 'hopping and jumping, such a to-do' looking pale eyes and whiskers     refuged in senility, yeah all their pyjama morning, helmer's soft face and then opened the box to see a letter - her and a special delivery card     while opening one, another     had overwhelming pleasantness for the native people after that     didn't hurry to read     interesting and satisfying, forgiveness restarts this time     wrote for the rest of the day, not display, patchy sharing stiff at first 12 went to a party in a white dress, tied above the breasts     I was often pulling it up, in a grand place with carved large furniture was easy and pleased, mildly, by the food, took two kinds of fruit pie, put down my coffee     it was time to leave I took my food, luke by the hand, went back alone for the coffee the grand place was stripped a wrecked warehouse with spaces between floorboards     going toward it heard and saw jon sieburt, child psychic, crying because I was in danger, coming back luke was watching from the end of the railyard, I realized as he watched that the rails had fast locomotives and I didn't know which rail they'd choose, black with shiny rails, skipped out of the path of one and was out of danger, on a corner where streetwork was pushing back marshy rubble, was looking toward the hotel where I stayed with luke     sun on a yellow stucco building several times in the day felt the dream 'you are not fighting your own battles but those of unknown people' [Castenada] 14 -35 they say at sunset can see the mountains, they seem to be rising dreams: breast cancer - a chemical like rubbing alcohol made red areas appear, showed up gradually three places     I said I would cure it: breasts in despair wanting to work     an obvious cure I've been wrestling 'my' analogizing, it's the theological form insisting in me and I've been just stopping     but could?     this morning in bed many conclusions jumping in     mary? him, rather in suzuki's show crystals dyed and breast cancer! pleasure, crystals     have a my car in a parking garage the attendant was careless and it fell, is in the water at the foot of concrete steps     its head is damaged     plot to recover it and drive it out free     writing about religion last night     a line of cars waiting to pay to get out nearly every night I've caught a strange thinking but not been able to recover it     unmemorable [notes on physics of crystal] sedimentary textures ice window a sensitive field to read conditions structural vacancies impurity atoms line defect screw dislocation slip oriented inclusions   a book of mica 15 reread j's and mine every day     wrote a little tougher more concentrated happy she wants me there, confirmed     she's in my voice     I said my bondage to t c and r was dying out and I hoped I'd escaped with the secrets     partly stupid and I know, but feeling pleased to have survived the enthrallment and not sure I didn't miss the chance but glad not to be full of hate     knowing the unrightness but balancing and taking chances     full of grey matter discussion of everything especially at night listening to don giovanni again and again sitting in moonlight     a few clouds begin to come from west     yoga and yoga book discussions are about being     should or shouldn't be anxious     he who enters by the back way is a thief     where to focus     implied balance the intelligence in a work is there implicit, kawabata synthesizing much interesting in notes not so mistrustful worked on radio notes     got rid of most 16 am fat, ugly, under eyes black and puffy early after not sleeping     why?     up dressed chopping wood in black coat green toque blue mittens checked collar black sweater blue jeans yellow boots watching SE mildly sunrise then spreading the bulldozed line in west field went bright pink and the tops of trees in far clumps lit orange brushy hiding between helmer and bernice in the beautiful morning each crotchety and I was happy there the blueeyed stranger in the café looking for a country town, from croydon     'i've got better things to do with my life than look after my mother' in the mailbox it was stuffed     don typing badly and speaking simply     daphne anxious     diana's backyard love and paul laughing asterismos a constellation astrologos star discourser lying down edge of visions scared not badly chinook     walking at one, the open field called, between the grove and creek it opened wide the call is like this: suddenly feeling myself there, like a zip projection, like dreaming it first, I felt myself far out between them     walking in that direction the bush called too     after a while partly disengaged the chat     moon in high up lovely brown space among soft clouds     various wind sound in different groups     tracks through it     alone alone in it wind face still wakened on left cheek home     fantasying movie     am a little too high swaggering letter to daph - [letter to Jam] I'm here glad for your existence and it's chinook outside. Eating fried chicken and drinking coffee. Last night, after midnight walking SE in a field, I found out how a place calls. There's a sudden inner elastic whup. I felt myself there a half mile away between creek and the bush where a broad corridor in moonlight seemed to go on for miles, and then instantly back. Didn't take the invitation. Stood still next to the burnt bush and gradually came out of the grey thoughts to hear wind and feel the messages of the configurations of trees. The moon was high up in a lively mass of soft clouds, in a brown silkiness. That's very approximate. Hearing wind: that is to say, hearing trees, certain groupings. Then the bush called and I answered that one, went in among. Soft deep snow with many lines of tracks going through wooded and clear. The moonlight color, privacy of the time of night. In the field being able to move any direction, and being able to stand still because of chinook warm. Your attention's with me. Do you have it too. Snow's melting on the roof. The snow has a sagged surface, when I go out the door, a smell of heaven. Traced it to the woodpile. At first I thought it was the house warming up. Damp swarming smell. There've been none. Jackpine. Afternoon sleeping, I was saying to Carmichael (awake) "I want to look at you" and then I was in a dark room daylight at a window looking at two wet green pear-shapes human-sized on a perch, looked around for his wife and saw something the size of a hat-rack with a bag tied over its head [sketch]. I realized where I was and pulled out to examine it, and then was scared, and that was like the fright of trance. Oddly the dreamer herself goes everywhere mostly fearlessly. It is bringing her into this world that scares. But I can feel myself getting braver. 17 large humpback whales pods walking     when it went blue outside didn't know where to go, south on the field hesitating, went to the bush of last night, in, and came to an opening     lay down to look at the tree's brush, then see above a field pale blue porous, then the tree tops' dangling shapes swaying down into the open blue     white snow roof the dark made by branch fibres darkening up to it and after a while the lovely surprise of an orange fire at the white line     like light in a dark woods     lying looking into the sway fine crackling suffing branches and the beautiful particled sea below     a vertigo     loved it and coveted it for movie but was afraid of it thinking of learning/teaching movement in any direction     is that self importance the snow is sinking came into the pan with a different feel and sound, cut in and it wasn't brittle     copied snake poem for daphne     it has some guesses, no it's smart, rough, don't know how far back that person is and whether to work on her work the chinook made a wild energy 18 does not invite visitors although there seems to be in the story a visitor self-invited whose actual presence is questionable, another woman who carries the name of the birthplace 'I dreamed I told a teacher that I was a character, and that this character lives inside a cube, expressing from the inside out on planes, lines, etc' jean-vi's envelope there intact without having been in the box     inviting me to the wise advice I wrote and then improved with more style (emma) just a little work, eager, among the papers, threw out wires and radio and others, an intoxication in details made them and this one tears through only keeping what's mysterious and charming - again but don't know what to do with that     and we are both foolish thinking something can be made in papers     and I'm scorning myself some thighs are bumpy like a rash     teeth going fast at night I begin to fart     we both like self importance good letter from diana it was overcast   sat in night on bridge, heard and saw two lights come up and past   in the wane does crumminess rule 19 my car stopped on the home road, we are going to transfer to an indian's car, I have left my camera unpacked on the seat, tell the young man in a turban I must go back, he's arrogant and outwits me with funny excuses but I force him to turn around, and when I've gotten out don't think I'll get in again: I don't like his wilfulness     very dark smart face yoda     don juan don giovanni     r, t, power writing diana began to tell her the jean-vi story, it gets exciting thinking of character, graph, mark or scratch engraving     cube, attribute remembering penelope, and gv's high takes me to before c t and j     sense of partly seeing a current, and it's not the frightening one j's away     is she working certainly feeling the interrelatedness but only whimsically, not knowing why     open hegel, it's full driving     shining road     carefully     crystalline sky     saw a white cubic granary in the snow against pale sky     what did it say body's gross anxiety, lostness coming toward midnight while I do a houseplan colder   houseplan precinct plan left eye alive right dead nearsighted left nose   - [letter] The fire has a dark sound like a motor and little sharp cracks. The motor sound I think is made by the gases flowing pressured out of pipes in the wood. The cracks are bits exploding off. The beautiful run of flame. I've thought of it as my external breath, what a powerful friend. Snow water soil. Arden trying to scare me said there were worms in it. The drifts are shaped like water things. Walking on them has an echo from some distance under the feet. Have felt the fluidity of the air, once in a certain spot, only one spot, the air was wavering as it does with heat, maybe slower, that's when I felt its diamond clarity. On the night of the Chinook I went out with a bucket for snow and the warm air was so much a presence I said hello to it. Diana said I was a flaneur. (Does this mean a pastry cook?) Do you like that? Could do that in heaven. The plants, trees, don't have presence. Many will break off brittle, they're dead. How is it they had so much in autumn? The sky's where the life is. Opal glass, suffusions. In one of my books there's an absorbing 2-page description of the exact sequence of color change in a sunset, and why. And of sunrise and why it's different. [Minnaert The optics of light and color in the open air] Behind the row of spruce a most delicate pink fading up from the white line. There aren't those fire dawns now, sunsets much less intense and clear than in autumn. The picture that covers that hole in the south wall has, I've just noticed, a round spot of hoar frost on it! Sometimes the fire has a tinkle like very fine glass breaking. Do you remember that? [Jam's tiny writing: yes.] Was the lens alright? 2:30 Are you still there? Saturday. Yeah! It was -40 last night (Centigrade and Fahrenheit). This afternoon in bright sun it's still -32 and I'm going for a walk. Oh ice air I'm not scared a you. Such a high, time to make. The glue bottle has frozen, it's transparent and I can see dark veins all around the bottle. The perfection of the li, something happened to all of it at once. It looks like flesh. - Talked to you while walking north along the creek. The north field that rises in stubble, without bushes, clean up to the north sky, had such delicate sunset light on it. Never think of this as a dark sky now, even at night it's swimming light, and a magpie had pink wings. A district here is called Northfield. Narrate me a Hong Kong sunset, don't leave anything out. I thought one of the ways we could meditate the detail of your proposal (seems to me I proposed it first) would be just to look at it as clearly as we separately can, in all the moods that rotate through a certain time. Today I see that room again, French windows and Turkey carpet. I'm harmonious alone in it and you'll arrive later. That's the vision of today's happiness living in your exotic land (on a hillside). Luke was learning Chinese. Deciding not to work yet, and being able to talk to you, have made me love it here again. And moon probably full. Kuan Yin drawing back because she heard misery. What do you think of that? When you see father thrash don't you want to save him? What's your latitude and longitude, and time difference. Three houses have burned in this district this winter, and tonight there was fire somewhere SE. 20 soft white snowfall     warm your vested interest is so strong please I want to be a man too -   deeper than that I want to be a loved woman and as deep as that I want to be a writer   it's harder to say the second than the first isn't it extraordinary   the two submersions god's lock on the cunt prevents them both he says: I'll make you die     and your duty's to go on living or else   something made itself here   thinking about god's wanting my life what for     for writing joy the shining white one     I say I don't want to be a sorcerer     I don't want false connections     richardson 21 oof-da intoxication but it can't focus, wants to write a science fiction     that came from looking at the roads of the sun diagram and again making a house on it and then why should a house be one I could make (another realm - where I live in what I find)     and then the pleasure of fantasy and then the responsibility of work and its dread, trying to figure out what would be not evil envy and petulance     envy to strive vie invite challenge, gamble vide videre visionary   petere to try to get beg competence   the storyteller 'tutoring the senses to be his guide through the maze of life and imagination     and then to risk himself beyond such seeing, such hearing as he discovers possible, and try the finer labyrinths opened by touch, smell, taste'   'but I know how to tell one o'clock, straight down the road'   walking out in white mist - blankness, thinking to feel or see but only dimly and at dolemo's negociating in demands pleasures thoughts     hulda's beautiful face, she isn't hungry     apology     often I leave them disoriented, arrive also, sitting at the table wondering if I really need to speak 22 is it coffee or excitement  it is nervy and easily scared     the car stuck     already my heart pressing     little mistakes reading, I was seeing errors where they weren't     tremour driving through drifts     slowly, the engine already heated     at the post office, envelope     I wanted to read j's writing so I didn't recognize andy's is it hunger too in andy's letter it made me jump into fright     '... loves his brothers. I think you must be very patient to get him back. When he's a man he'll understand you better, but Roy is too strong right now. Luke will contact you himself when he finds his hard edge. But you must remind him of who you are - constantly.' remembered roy the enemy     a bad sorcerer coming home on the white road stopping at the top of the hill saying I can't     but too late and the wheels in first gear held perfectly steam blew out and I stopped, bent over the hood to hear it boil     sorcery - people offer to help you, and you take their help - [letter] In England male sex offenders are given synthetic female hormones to reduce their libido, they then grow large female breasts which are surgically removed. You. are you making yourself strong with resistance. Last night an ice fog. I walked to Dolemos in white, I could see a slight darkness in the two tracks and fenceposts, little trees, on either side. Nothing else, no lights. When I left to walk home a few hours later the fog had deposited itself on every branch an inch at least. My impulse was to set the red candle under the closest caragana bush to the east windows. Then I could sit inside looking at candlelight on the thick frost bush and the surface of the snow. Even the snow had deep frost crystallized on it. Can you see it, moving red, a close circle of yellow light, a white bush and floor and darkness. And this morning was remarkable, overcast, but high up a little ivory sun. The bushes along the creek, white, and the brush on those northern hills where it's usually blue, white, with pale green in the sky margin. I was looking south just after getting out of bed and saw what seemed to be a cloud moving through Flaten's bush (the one past the road south of here). When it got to the eastern edge of the bush it kept going and then another one started a little lower in the bush. It was a very local wind stripping the frost. A minute later it was taking white off the shed roof in a movement like fire around a log, twining. When I'd made the fire I went out with the camera but it was too late, even the hills were blue again. The wonders here are now or never. Andy's letter scared me although I've recovered. Both you and Luke away, with strong ties, and I'm not unhappy but feel the precarious - Today's working was like intense nervousness. Something was spinning too fast to grab the work right. Intoxication, but I couldn't direct it. It turned driving into fear. And oddly last night I learned something: did yoga working on the neck and upper back muscles, and then going to bed was delicious instead of the usual thumping. Energy turns into anxiety why. They say when it's stopped somewhere. How are you waking and sleeping, what do you think/see when you first know you're there. And what sort of energy does the neck stop, presumably it's energy for thinking - you know the strangled look we have when our faces are ravaged and the bodies plump and shiny. There's more to learn. What do you know. - Later, at night, something undescribable shot toward you from under the diaphragm, right side. It was like a minute lunge of - There's an old woman I met last night, Hulda Horneland, a little straight body, fine white hair, a fineness everywhere in her, strong, direct, her own self. A bloom in her face. She lives in a trailer, has her own pickup, keeps old horses and has fun. The melt of liking felt good. Her sister with her, a few years older. "I'm Jenny Kennie" in a child's voice. Grey, whiskered face, frail, bent, she's in twilight childhood, "I get so lost." Likes to look at the cat, makes cute senile remarks, a ghost. I sometimes try to feel my way to her but find myself in a blankness. She took off to somewhere else, a long time with a mean husband (they say), "He scared her so much." They showed me a family picture, the two of them were beautiful. Hulda's gaze was keen and thoughtful, Jenny was lit up smiling. I'm lonely for you, woke that way, not just you, all the ghosts, especially the voice quarrelling with my father. It's morning, pancake warming, the snow's melting for tea. A pink rim in the south and a lot of lavender clouds moving west. There are nice little bubbles sounding from the snow melting, and when I went out after making fire and stood in the yard with the snow buckets, there were two birds singing and showing off. The year's turned. The old moon [sketch], with you is it [sketch]. You know how the quality of a time and I suppose place are always different and not usually tasted until after and then it's the strongest part of that time, the feel of it. Well, taste, feel, it's neither, what is it. The senses embedded in it. It's the undertime, and it's what nostalgia goes for. I've been trying to know it while it's there. In the personal life, running back and forth in the various times, comparing, that's what's compared. That personal life, if I look back it seems a full time with many lives accomplished in it. Looking forward measuring it as time to be skilled in work, it is incredible to me that I have to be stuck in a single person. And all the lives of reading. It seems that those who try to make a work out of their time are entrenched in singularity. - An intolerable fullness. Shostakovich throwing that tension into whatever I think of in front of it [Cello Sonata Op 40], but it's tightening what was there, I'm lonely for a letter and have to go back to one from nearly a month ago. I dreamed last night you were crying telling me that when you'd gone to Pamela's mathematics class you'd taken her to bed "and other mornings too." Mamella's. When I wrote the dream in my book mornings began wo - Many slips, reading and writing both, in the last 3-4 days. It's moon dark. Curious, the slips, coming along with several fast moves of revelation. Also remembering old mistakes, 'repentance.' I need to see into your time again. What's your keenness for straight lines in nature. I find this today, you might know it: For this light binds the sky together, like the hawser that strengthens a trireme, and thus holds together the whole revolving universe. Joann's letter said "walking a tight line," I wrote "a tight line" (yesterday) and today the Plato went under it. The straight lines in nature are the ones you don't see. That's why not every one is given to find it. You were looking at your gift. Precipitate is gravity. Concentrate is too. Ie the dotted line, up down strange and charm. - You see only a green ring, moss and grass. When you're asking yourself what is it a sparkle begins in the air, bits turning. They knit, steady, to a thin film, half a bubble. It doesn't quiver though it shines. You put your hand to it and your hand enters. The breeze outside is inside too. You take a while to watch the join. Bubble and skin move up your arm, shoulder. Can you pull it out? Yes. So the face, you can feel a line on forehead, cheek, throat, that moves when you move your head looking at trees, clear but with faint reflection making the inner curve. You're in, looking up. You're not sure it's there, reach, and the tips of your fingers feel something just before it moves back. Grass blades at the rim, spring very slightly. The air's moving, but -? Stepping out is simple and precise: a little difference. Skin sheath? bubble shell shed A handful of water from the stream. It rips through the air but suddenly shatters. A puddle on grass, one edge cut sharp. At night when it's colder you lie in it and are warm, but the sight of the pines thrashing in the dark scares you. A faint whiteness comes with the light in the walls. Oh, but will it? You test with your hand, and it passes, and this time disappears and you have to go after it. From the outside, a half sphere, opaque, throwing light on the undersides of branches. It's beautiful. It's cold. You dive in. Too uniform, it's too unhatched. A movement above you. Darkness is showing through, it clears, a small space lets you see stars. Are the walls dimming too? Yes, but it's only the light going out, the wind's still a fainter sound. But a smell? Moss. Where? Under. Earth? Warmed? Yes. But the floor? There, and feels like a blanket. Well. Has it protected your sleep. The east wall's brilliant but none of the heat has come in. You roll west, three times and you're half out lying in strong shadow with an opalescent white thing rising over your legs. An easy house. Can it cook? 23 she's holding her power by refusing waking earlier and seeing morning, sun, read melville naked in the big chair, at the east windows, drinking tea     rationed     the drifting in brilliant sunshine, I wanted to drive back to it with cameras but the car flooded and I went to the front yard     snow running [running snow] ground set in ridges, blue and light   the blue shadow and in it flakes blown in [snow dust] [drift edge] turning dazzling   earlier     a flock of white birds thrown up suddenly, turning, no longer white, that's joy     then the particles, I understood, their simples         simple beginning, right, a confident marvel, but I didn't     the camera battery cold   in yoga, quick gathering of the lightness body though lumpy is quick to sleek when I lay down in between dream and wake fright - [letter] Friday early morning In the work with papers I keep doing the easy, sifting, pleasure of throwing away everything that's not it, moving fast, omnipotent, and then I hit something that IS it and it's unbearable, I know it's there and it's a world and I don't know what to do with it, try to see it so I can throw it but I know it has to stay it's full of life and scares me. It's a joy too but I can't stay with it. Hurry to do something else (talk to you), find something to throw away. Yes, okay. - The way you said hello hello hello hello hello said itself to me many times that day and the next. I didn't understand what you meant when you wondered if we were doing the right thing and had a pang. I'm doing so exactly the right thing. The people here love stories about mischief and eccentrics. Your people are like that too I think. - Today was a white day, overcast, the clouds are the color of snow, faint pinkness or blueness in east and west. Windows here don't frost, storm windows, clean, at night double reflection on black. Have got rid of the couch, red armchair in front of the fire, feet on a chopping block, table moved so it faces through the window. a door between here and kitchen, where the door window has a starry pattern that comes and goes. I've tried to watch how it's made, can tell temperature by it. Always look in the morning. You and she at the window, I felt it like times I've loved. Your knowing it is why you liked my slides. - The house by the lake was a summer house a few years ago, robbed and vandalized. A lovely man [Halterman] fixed the typewriter, kept saying it would be very expensive, three hours work to dismount the carriage, $25 per. Meanwhile desultory poking. I kept him talking, he put in a drop of oil, suddenly it was working. He wouldn't take any fee. Even the carriage bell works now. Credit Union will lend two and a half thousand for sound equipment. "I'm sure that will be possible," as if it pleased him. Loneliness rewarded by little loves and entrances into odd lives. Watching how what isn't said says itself nonetheless. In freezing water some of the needles, on their scale, seem straight. A rim freezes solid and needles come off it into the unfrozen middle, and so coagulation closes in. Movie work. Patience, such patience with its formlessness, maybe it's really there but if so - moves very quietly - I trust it, and go on with little studies - maker, make, I'll try not to bother you, do you need anything. Your father wouldn't believe me, but it has to come out of a whole order and that isn't ready. My them are in Arizona 'til February. Eager to see Judy in April. It's one, yawning. In some notes it said a person is a body and a whimsical adventurous traveling self. Is our itinerant fantasy also a reference to itself (fantasy). I found a London dream of my brother building a beautiful and skillful addition to a house. Then my father tried to kill him (me). Drank your rum on New Year's Day. When I was pregnant my longing was to be making someone who'd share my joy of world. Do you know the way of thinking that is, when you're reading about something else, single thoughts often interesting jump in from the side, as if reading frees up the lateral. Today I remembered a sense of balance from an earlier time, I think it made long sentences, what I tried to recall in it was - this is difficult - how it knew what layer of thought to ride in and still keep a sense of the supporting layer. Process-thinking separates what can be together. The process, and its balance, decisions, are implicit and visible, knowable in any work. In the sense of a balance where the implicit is clearly held as well as the explicit, I could feel something of my mother, as if that mind is one I'd been in with her at her best. Can't verify. What haunts with them is having known their best - ah, that anxiety about best. It's peaceful. Got up, put some more snow in to melt, fire, dark, room. I've thought of Descartes' winter on the oven figuring out how to know he existed. Listening to Don Giovanni over and over. Want to travel with the voice and do, fine recording, voices cut and shine. 24 today neither wind or sun and I have to wait for a cycle that mightn't come this winter time is seeming odd again     how can there be so much   dream of highgate mansions joann's letter said highgate 25 pestered by arguments with the enemies     in the morning I made a fantasy of victoriously wrestling and fucking and then going redeemed to my friend, and by that concluded I need some victories of skill     but I don't like that realm the high arch went east and passed sun coming west and then it was a strong afternoon     sitting in the sun at the post office     the children come from skating walking back to school, the shapes of their procession, the voices, and the road with buildings on one side and sun     from the side were a field and trees omlid's house, the magic place with spruce trees, I came unaware of the white owl on the highest point of the highest spruce     white with intense blue     looking down motionless at me slowly climbing through knees deep white     when I drove away I saw it traveling the other way cruising on its high point camera feeling interest everywhere and how subtle the eyes could become but the fine moment was in omlid's field walking looking at sparkles and the fine lines, it all moved, walking, and suddenly saw the sparkles in the air, really? yes turning and flashing, a very few, had been hidden in the still ones eyes hurt from photographing glare mary's awful letter made two very bad drawings that scared me - taking pictures came sometimes idea of an internal spectrum as ladder of alpha etc 'the modes' religious moral etc   space love its tears male and female in red costumes a little bag, one each walk forward into light   wanted to travel off earth I want to see the whole whole the dilations that happen when I see something of fine quality, the stops when ugly, in the stone whatever's there opens, sex anxiety bewilderment beautiful something dilations in the presence of dilation - [letter] Thurs - a push of love to you tonight. - But Paolo, without ever wasting a moment, was always attracted by the most difficult things of art .... When engaged in these matters Paolo would remain alone, like a hermit, without any intercourse, for weeks and months, not allowing himself to be seen .... He left a wife who used to say that Paolo would remain the night long in his study to work out the lines of his perspective, and that when she called him to come to rest, he replied, "Oh what a sweet thing this perspective is!" Vasari on Uccello Sometimes these days I've looked at the multiplicities, which make contradiction, and been glad to see them. I said that from a spasm of gender pain, my own although it was feeling yours too, I was remembering the convulsions mine has put me through, accepting and denying, the long time in childhood appalled learning I wasn't going to be what I wanted and then in adolescence deforming myself working so hard to deny. What brought it tonight. Oh, I know. But it's been there hidden and springing out am (have to look up the spelling) among the voices since I woke. Was it Albinoni focused it. amice2 (am'is) n, an almuce When you and I try to figure out what the Pythagoreans eg could have meant, and recirculate their meaning in 'our own' (our time/place's) it is as if we're working for them, ancestor worship, so it seemed just now. Efficiency would grab their concepts without recalling their names. But we like to give ourselves a picture of them, or I do, although I think it might be a mistake. It homologs the way I recirculate 'myself' of other places and times. What's recircled - the feel, some fragment of the look of a location, sometimes a picture of body from outside (as imagined at the time?), orientation (toward who or what - the arrow). Say. - It was a white morning, then the edge of the white sky moved east, an arc N-S and opened blue behind, intense blue. I went to Omlid's old house to get a geometry text, the fine moment when I'd struggled through drifts and across a field and was again in the drifts on the wind side of the windbreak breaking through over the knee, absorbed in the feel of the place that opens behind the house, magic, because it's spruce trees and they make a fairytale the way they're at the edge of the bush intimate with the unpainted pointed-roof house, it's the way there's a clearing with dark branches, makes as if a courtyard. My eyes went suddenly up - direct to the gaze of a big snow owl brilliant white at the top point of a spruce tree, with that staring blue behind. Later when I was going home I drove parallel to the house and its bush, it was a distance but I could see that white person on its highest point rotating west. Its tree moved faster than the ones behind. Seemed a sea voyager. When I was walking across the fields back to the car I was looking at sparkle flakes on the loose porous snow in the top layer. The flakes stacked so loosely some of them throw long blue fine lines all going the same direction. Or is it that the surface is minutely raked by wind? Because those fibrelines aren't parallel to the shadow lines of stubble stems. While I was looking at the angular sparkles and the fine blue lines I suddenly saw that the air had bits in it too, whose motion I hadn't seen because of the motion of walking. Or were they afterimages? Flat-sided sparkles that would flash and disappear as they turned. No there they were, turning and playing. The sight of them delighted me like the sight of a flock of birds that throws itself up and flashes white, then turns and is black or invisible. What's that delight. It was seeing a sparkle in another dimension as if the grounded ones could fly. Also seeing two layers, one lively, one still, as if seeing two times of one thing. Etc. I've been interested in the interaction of straight lines and currents, loose running and tight lines. You talk now. I found something just now, a shot, and with it something like an idea of proportion, the right person was outside with the 35mm camera and saw the obvious and it came from seeing something earlier. It builds to this and every time I've run away from it and this time the battery on the Beaulieu was too cold and I probably think I can get it next time but it never comes back the same and still. Just briefly something's letting me think these long dim odd researches can focus. Is it well in you. Sun is simplest direct food. I could live on Lan Tau and you could live at home and come for weekends or weeks, it would be cheaper and we'd both work fine. I'd make a movie and write a book, do tai chi in early morning with friends, have some pink and red flowering plants in pots and be a local scholar. If I make that fantasy does it mean it can't really happen. Will you send one of those 6x8 hardback notebooks, lined, red spine and black or green, best green. I found the one I have in the paper shops at the foot of the hill - near the place where you change to buses from trolleys, there's an overpass or viaduct and the shop was somewhere on the North Point side of it, to the left facing toward home (ie on the left side of the main road, further along on one of the intersecting streets - among the vegetable market) I think. You must find these directions comic. I think it might have been near that cinema with movie star heads. The market's set up in the street, the bookstore is a solid one behind vegetable carts. Today you're close (Tues). Note: on fear of witchcraft, several times when I've lain tired in an afternoon, it has to be lying on my back usually with feet crossed, when I've been partly able to watch things arrive in my mind I don't recognize, I overhear something and call it back, "likes to the bull ox," some fragment, and try to read it, then find myself in a zone where I'm afraid of death, the fire or wind, I seem to be a sheer tenuous existence without the presence of the definite mind who's figured out how to survive in this world and without the consciousness to drift in the other. In Chevalier's book about ceremonial magic, he says that during the 60 - the 6 months, 60 came out of my hand, don't know why, I'll leave it in case you do - of his training, when he was learning to evoke spirits, he was forbidden to sleep during the day. Twilight says Don Juan of Castaneda is the crack between worlds. If I lie on my side it's not like that. The exposed throat is scared for some reason. What I found today is a perfect little vision. It's like seeing the beginning. Co-op Finest Orange Pekoe 60 TEA BAGS That's to tell you rations are - enclose some of your fine tea will you. I'm beginning to need another letter from you. Urgent. Will it be like last time, not 'til I give up. I suddenly wondered whether you've got my long letter yet? What if that parcel went sea mail by accident and you thinking I hadn't written. Today I could write a Tato story for Luke, for the first time in two years. It is still hard to know how little I know about what comes out of me when I begin to write but there again it's be brave and keep going as best I know how. I'm yelling and pretending not to WRITE. You're my family life, loving letters from other people don't stop the hunger. - Didn't expect such a formed face from somebody who thinks she's a little girl with a big reptile. It's a fine bold mask. The forehead is like another face. That's not it, but it impresses. Before I'd live nearer to with you I'd want to know more about your impressionability, just its range, funny, even in the bitterness this month I've been thinking of how to do it right - feel myself using your mode to speak to you, it's a borrow and I don't mind this time. Maybe witchcraft or vampirism are ways also of saying trance, my fright in the stone and with other people smoking etc. There's a draw and a fright, I think it has to be learned, not knowing how to come back. Here, I've been back, and it's as it used to be, and in that it also seems to be preparation to do it without paralyzing fright. Talking to you all day, but supper now. What do you know about li, principles of order, markings in material. Maybe put some niblets in with the eggs, and a board in the heater for fast hot. It has been intensely cold, often -30, and near that for two weeks, waking the air's ice, outside a crystal clear brilliant deadliness, the smoke rolling out brilliant white against deep blue. Gradually learning not to be afraid of it, good boots like yours. Water on the heater frozen solid, once it had an ideogram? [sketch] at the bottom. Well's frozen, melt snow in the kitchen. The apples knocked together sound like billiard balls. I go out in shirtsleeves to fetch snow, when fragile put on a hat. The head doesn't like it. I find it strange how the face is willing to go naked into it. I cook a pot of rice, when it freezes knock it out of the pot, take it to the chopping block, chip some off, with the axe, to warm with tuna in the frying pan. Am healthy, even my arthritic hip pains and pinworms are gone. Get up at noon, am awake 'til 2 - 3 - 4. Am often a long time before falling asleep and an hour awake head under covers in the morning. Not smart, stupid enough. Interesting dreams. Has 211 or 217 meant anything to you? Spent two weeks reading all the journals and learned a few things, that sometimes my brother stands in for me in dreams. The long work with lovers, seems to have been half the real work in all this life, when I look at it now less feminist-enraged it seems to have been fine intent dedicated work, people assimilating each other's gifts, testing their own. The other half was doing the same thing with people as makers. Books, and all such. And that period seems to be finishing, although I keep testing the sense that it is. I wonder about whether the [sketch arrow] push outward stops at a certain time, or temporarily, and then there's colonization of whatever's been reached. Still suspended in polarities, everything, habitually, has been coming with the name of its opposite. I've left them hanging there. This, I mean still being, keeps surviving formulation. Making coffee I was singing, it seems: blest be-ee the tie-ie that binds / to this external home. - [letter to my mom] Canyon Lake was like that when we were there before but you had kids' energy transfusing it, you must miss us. When I look in the London journals I find a time Luke gave, although I didn't know at the time and mistook for my own some of what was ours or his. He has another brother. He hasn't written. Roy's letters are useless. But something has turned, we are in touch in some way, again. I was able to write Luke a new Tato story for the first time in two years. I want Luke and Akasha here together for the summer but haven't heard from either Judy or Luke. There are onions on the stove frying with chicken. It's hot in here. That's to tell you all's well. From the south-looking table I see the ice fog, darkening blue. Headlights on the road, when they came past the fenceposts, made rotating spokes in the air. It was a powerful afternoon, the last of a cloud ceiling passed, going east, and then it was wonders. At Omlids' old house a white owl sat without moving on the top of the highest spruce. I was taking pictures of snow, its sparkles and shadows. - The onions have burned a little. When you take a picture you like, immediately afterward take another of the essence of what you liked in the first, nevermind anything else in the second one (framing etc) - just the simplest record of the essence. Then sometime later in the day recall the two pictures and describe in writing, briefly, but very accurately, something about the pictures: their shape, how you came to take them, the relation of the two, etc. Don't do it more often than once in a while when you happen to think of it. "Lovely rock formations, such delicate lovely mosses" you wrote, I read "such delicate lovely masses" and rejoiced that you'd seen what I like so much. Lucky for you, the rain will have made flowers, you'll have double spring. The doors I open for you are the doors you opened for me. Don't forget I know the size of your spirit (from sometime) and it drives me crazy when I see it in its little cagie. Anyway it isn't opening doors: I think that it's more like overlaying patterns, the way 'my' mind works can teach 'yours' directly, probably electrically, even w/o speech, that's why we find ourselves expanded or contracted in people's presence no matter what we otherwise think. And there's more to it than that. I should say I often feel very cheerful in your presence although after a while it gets heavy, do you understand that? Do you ever write in 'my' handwriting. Delicious onions. It is a lovely winter, especially lately, a strong happiness in working and studying. I'm often up till 4. Am healthier than any winter since the pregnant one, even the little arthritic twinges are gone, and spirit is very glad to be alone. Well you're a herd creature, you think, but you might be surprised. It's nice to have Jam in Hong Kong missing me and writing brilliant letters, it's a clearer connection than from Vancouver, where she has too many friends - Tell him 'rebel' comes from re-bellare, to fight back. You won't will you, then I will myself. I forgot to tell you that when he's in pain on my account I am equally in pain on his, it is one of the mysteries of connection or identity. The last time it was very bad, a torment, only I am learning it and he just runs from it. Pain is information. If the message is accepted it goes away. If not it comes back worse and you have to kill yourself (in parts) to get away from it. We aren't taught to read pain right. Any farmer should know that when some part knocks it means it has to be adjusted. Who'd be too proud to service a U-joint. 26 j in tears lying down telling me that when she'd gone to pamela's mathematics class with her they'd gone to bed     'and on other mornings too'     I say that's why I was so in distress in london I was in the presence of a lie (before sleep thinking of ros and the time I said my stomach was telling me ---) water, I have my camera and step on a wooden platform, feel myself moving away, say oh this is a barge, but it turns and docks     I'm in water holding the camera over my head, she may help me     somewhere with relatives she shakes a man's hand     I am looking for my suitcases     hash oil in a drink (bowl) judy has some     I say will we still be able to - ? she says when I took it before I couldn't find my way home from hyde park     sleeping in hyde park     a friend with a girl child identical (esther) has cut her hair, is fat, gross, greasy lipstick and says she slept in hyde park straight lines in nature: the ones you don't see joy to have it to send her   cut hair to improve me rain today   I've been working on arms neck shoulders face felt into left and right breasts     left had rhoda, I was to heal her back, right was open     both brought the fire and room 27 already body's pretty quarrelsomeness offering itself to be seen through the two men in their truck     I don't like that the one gets out to let me in     (when I passed them earlier, the straight look said hello) and I'm too close to knees and elbows of two with beers in their hands     that to figure out - defend my sensibility - the one is offering me beer so I have to say no more than once - 'not when I don't want to' - when I say something it's unheard leaving he chucks my chin, I say would you like it if I did that to you? he says sure     I do it and say was that nice     yes it was he says     I say no it isn't nice     not angry     then later he's telling me about his rock collection, moved, telling a story many times told about the lump of seashells in his field the perfect clearness of vision     horizon and farm roofs at night lashed right eye, its tears 28 eyes - opened them to check - partly clear, look at the cornea, the scratch isn't visible     but right eye can't see far, and left is worse daphne takes me out before dawn to a part of town she knew from another time, but unfamiliar to me. we walk into a café on the right hand side of the street. while I am going to the booth I am suddenly in another world where I am very tall, 10'?, thin, clownish, looking down at an intensely colored world from the top of a neck perhaps four feet long. I am not sure I want to stay in this world, find myself clumsily falling against the café table. daphne's just arriving. I can tell her where I was. after a while she has to go home because she's sad. she's looking dignified, long necked, in her sadness (your long hair). she pays for the coffee with a fifty dollar bill and gives me the change because I'm broke. when she's left I go out into the street. it's just daybreak, the district is wonderful, antique shops with beautiful things in the windows, fruit stalls. I meet four people I knew in other times and haven't seen for years. they live in this part of town, which is near the sea. dolemo's revised the tato story for luke   - at dolemo's, the quiet, I was docile, patient, whenever I try to exist from my memory I watch them not follow it with their imagination     and not inspired, I don't want to know about them, only hulda, and then what occurs is peacefulness     today bernice went on with her tasks, helmer shut his eyes, it was acceptings refusings television, a television sharing being and quietly noticing the tone     bernice showed her long dresses, I said they were nice. hulda at the door with a transparent red scarf around her head. television fascinations, last minute escape, bodies, watching people present themselves a beautiful girl trade representative from real china refusing to answer questions put to compromise     california salt lake city hong kong washington each with some uninteresting interest: angel on a steeple, a woman in black, bikers or indians I think of myself as using the little chances to recognize a tension etch and am quietly pleased with how it goes, gently, bernice with her mixed motives inviting that negro man one of their graces is the way they'll turn an observation, it's a form but the variants please us all     'where'd you lose your eye' and then I'm set up to reply gracefully and come in laughing conscience says it might not be good enough     c and t say, what are you doing where you can't be seen     j says compassion among the unfortunate     buddha says you don't know who's there and don't know what you can do 'for' them, you can only share a space     at therapy I say you don't see me, I demand you do, although you can't     lady wisdom what's the question what are these visits visits I take my privacy to     try it out on the nearest neighbours, in curiosity yes and is that a wrong use     not if you don't inflate it with injured eyes I can't hear as well such self absorption if someone asks - helmer says come oftener     I say that's the way it is t: you should hear deep into the secret anxieties and then you'll be useful and wake them they won't change and can't not wanting or being able will make me unable to see their injuries     buddhist: nothing needs to be changed mary: thank you for gently opening doors her ideology says to praise and thank how to see them any differently than I do, among their interactions     'hulda how will I do without you'     these times it seems a gradual harmonious visiting of some lives I can do nothing with, the local lives without alliance to anything but their local lives behind valhalla centre quarrelling with him in my voice thoughts, stopping it, I wondered how to think of it differently, it goes on taking me     is it talking to the structure of him in me (but times when we are both doing it - what's he saying?)     I always check to see if the message is for me, but if it is why do I address it to 'him' and does it go on because he hasn't spoken back     yes dream with daphne seemed a well made invention so what's a dream     not an invention, an event     events can have elaborations of them or not     I made a letter of it and wrote myself into seeing my confusion (hers too) about the piece she sent, I'm uncertain of having said I don't like it because have I understood it? and she was unbeautifully saying her anxiety and I say that's not writing because writing has to be the practice of staying out of anxiety     the layers said space book + - and accurate neutral space book says everything's fine go back to the void dissolve it all you'll be strong beautiful and skilful     think of roy and t and how the powers they get in spontaneity seem still to belong to something wrong in their will    revenge, and when I was in it, rage and revenge made me doubt     intimidation and its opposite confluence false smiling     something else: not to enslave or impress, a right one would irradiate without making it come back in homage admiration. but to be set independent again by it and that means before going into the lovely open the angers have to be found and what? lady: they say space and time can change so history doesn't hold and it's true I don't want history to hold, what's the way to dissolve what holds so my freedom doesn't harm     was I really harmed by t and r? yes forced to be clear and hard, is that harm? I don't know, it forces forcing other people fighting, learning to fight, strong and strong - strong neutrality     it forces     did they harm me that's what I need to know nervousness: falling asleep, saying to myself nervousness was what made me pretty last spring in london and the flood of thoughts seeing themselves useless     'irresponsible' a structure of time, the way it's built around exchanging qualities can be a 'feel' 29 looked across the room     mia's face was in focus and slightly smiling, horizon isn't there yet dreams: across from ban righ looking at photographs I'd abandoned, trees and stone walls, left in tree fork, one was luke down below on a sidewalk beside a bush, a flower in the bush's shadow, pink 'landlady' was going to give her odd crockery I'd bought from somewhere, dirty, took back first a metal thing from france, maybe old, then a lacquer coffee pot, moldy marmalade inside (chinese)     at some show, a pool, long reflection of a girl in pink slip swinging on trapeze, another girl standing on a bar, another lying down watching the reflection slip, trudy was there with a polarizing lens, it put it on and clowned aware of I thought cheryl across the room     fastened bracelet went to trudy to take it off, she showed me it came off at the other side, simply: it was like a handcuff     cheryl walked by with martha, I looked satisfied at her heavy legs under the fur coat, it seemed she and t were no longer together:     with t in a large room, I grabbed her to walse, she was pliant, I sang the walse but after it seemed to me a more conventional walse than it needed to be, felt her at the waist     she saw my belt and said bruce knew to put black and brown at your hip     keeping, throwing away, complacent invention copied the fairytale thinking to send it to j Woman with a hole in her head     could see where and how it's false and partly true, t and friendliness, struggle about the postcard, j's address on it, to redirect and then I thought how foolish, she won't like it and it will make a bridge - - today: this is to show the kind of superstitious struggles. friendly dream about t, also naïve, the postcard of alberta al, clear boy not scared standing well in his pants, a quality she'd like. I was pulled to send it to her with a message just the right tone, to say I also remember the gifts she let through to me, never quite as crooked as c, the reversal thought of the radio crystal, what I gave her to broadcast through if that's how it works, when I 'should have' given it to j the phantom and thought I'd bend destiny by sending it to - stop. wrong voice. alberta al is me as she sometimes knows, her as sometimes, innocence, and she'll see what he looks to be, and feel it, and it's how she looked at me when I talked to judy, and I'm battling with her, in the space book, her powerful sweetness and vision, roy again, multiplied by two, what I feel to be battling is unconscious (demonic) power that the sense of quality/ambition looks everywhere for 'the will to power', fear of it making ugliness in the rest of them power vs safety control vs controlled hardness vs softness own will vs obedience joyce says both, but I'm not sure, what would it be obey     the moment's truth, reading all the parts I'm no farther in this than before     'sorcery's the scareword and so I thought to send it to j as throwing a ballot (j threatening but honestly, how it is taking its time) and wrote the address etched crunching into the paper and then knew it was foolish and would be seen through and worse might be a bridge between them to wipe me out and erased vigorously but it was etched in and then I thought I'd tear the address off and this would tear off his genitals too and did, there he still was and her likely to ask or know and /but I wrote so happy birthday and addressed it and felt my messiness and its message and since then am still worried and will keep al here but seeing him, want to laugh     j gets her zone and the boy'd like to make music with trudy and now I'm proud of myself for getting it there to a happy story of unescaped dilemma etc woman with hole: in my writing of that time, sexy or hypnotic exaggeration, poetry manner, inaccuracies, glamours, but what grabbed me today was seeing father's and then lily's ducking out, and having to wonder if I have to understand it differently, a structure like an epilepsy? 30 woke before dawn, tossing, useless thought, lonely, then cramps and nausea, fast breathing for the cramps, and love for the sore belly, I won't do it badly I'll make it well, something hitches in the front of the womb when I come got right up dismal saving wood     the icy wind tight jeans disable the bum flesh, to a dinner table - deep, where are you - docile lonely one, hulda's childish beauty, I was with her at the skin, she told the dream she had, I was pleased, she's clean but is boring too I was exhausted by the deadness and now am in front of the fire disabled seem to have been packing to leave     struggled to get to j, it stayed false after buying a ride to valhalla with niceness at dolemo's, it allowing bernice to bleat to me, the mailbox empty, injured, pathetic tone of the night is feeble, ineffectual, trying to do well     cold coming stronger and the fire not keeping it back     tomorrow have to get to beaverlodge loan accepted, two and a half thousand for tape recorder, entrenchment     it will be bright and windy tomorrow, the camera gone     don't want to be leaving here though I've been dreaming for days of seeing carmichael, maritka     dreary edmonton     finding my tape recorder     don't want to leave without hearing from you     slavery 31 roses, taking roses out of a book? a baby come back to life in my arms, the roses around its head, the baby burning with fever, I realized it was going to die again, and wondered if it had brought into the present germs that had been extinct     preparing a building, many floors last wood, packed, strained, ready and waiting for my way out     sun on the red chair, white curtains, the beautiful room I have to leave for unknown strangeness     a last humble try at the post office     and driving carefully to beaverlodge as if in danger     army trucks passing in twos, the window frosted, no heat coming through the heater, window open, thirty below     mountains standing high blue serration pleasure of distance launched onto bare time, kept looking at myself in mirrors seeing a butch undistinguished person in short hair bernice kept saying gee I'll sure miss yuh allie     anxious to please and actually my necessary help but her talk was a battering I couldn't turn     'you've pepped me up lots of times when I was down'   up north volume 2 up north volume 1: 1978-1979 june-january work & days: a lifetime journal project