up north 3 part 1 - 1979 october

work & days: a lifetime journal project

[alternative unedited version] 2 October 1979 She goes to the cemetery with Anna. I clean the place. She takes a long time and comes back wanting to blow. I leave.   She says she wants something impossible. I'm not patient.   Driving out through traffic. On the Port Mann bridge, a nose in the next line, flow on either side, the railing, I felt a fright that I'd faint. Said to myself it was fear. She said do you know where you are. That made me panic.   Lovely valleys.   She was hard when I asked why she didn't want to remake the universe.   Campground at Chilliwack because of the cop and my lights. She doesn't like the smell of thin garlic sausage. Hard times. Misery as before.   3   During early morning a kiss that stank and was like a worm coming into my mouth. I watched the revulsion. At night it was berserk, rolling under the table crying, movements of hands not like mine. "Is it because I didn't love you after I saw the video?" She gave me all the blankets, went away, saw the bear. Animals howling at night. They toasted her bread. She gave me a red bill. I gave it back. Trying by the long log, saying I only wanted you to sorrow with me and you couldn't handle it either.   Better enough to take the Lillouet road. Red ground sumac, grey brown fawn, sand pink, yellow green gravel, small aromatics. Healing jack pine smell. She took apart bits. Exploded over the scavenger, brought what she hadn't said in two years.   The car couldn't make the hill. She slapped my hand off the ignition, walked the hill while I wept at the top. I drove better angry.   She has a hatred she'll never give up, that I was ever 'with' them, their kind. She said she wanted me to dress like a pretty woman but will never do it for me.   Stop. The sky was in shudders white and intense blue. 70 Mile House has trees like joy, yellow. Salty lakes. 4 Morning. Evening light's magic isn't there.   Drove fast through most intense orange autumn. Fighting through, so I say I never wanted to stop wearing the Syrian dress and she that that is alright, how did we imagine different. About Luke, how she wouldn't be there with family in summer.   At Quesnel she gets a burger on garlic bread. Good salad and won't give me any pie until I tell -   And then looking for hotels in Prince George. The desk woman saying dancing girls are staying there. We change our minds about the room. Fat waiter and the black girl playing pool, their dancing shoulders. Smile fixed on one person she lies on her belly, moves her seat. We rush Ezra through the lobby. Remote sex.   Reading Brangone for Tristan. 5 A very hungry little baby.   At breakfast we've both thought what kind of message. I'm agreed. The stationer gives a brown paper bag, desk clerk writes "Dancer 'dark'" on it. Will a difficult message find her - only if she is like me - and then, in what long time.   Intense talk. It's continuous easy road. "We came to a country like the stripe on the road." [yellow]   She says Zeno and columns. I say perspective. Feels like work. Speaking the images of the columns was what built it. The arrow wd shrink & it wd get darker blue but if you went along with the arrow nothing would change. She said columns of time, not a color or tint, but a possibility of color, left to right. Moving with it. Vanishing point, infinite not regress. I said, infinite is next door, is what it means. All at the same place. The wide end.   Thinking. Thinking: for the movie: writing, space, currents.   Being happy makes me doubt.   Late home. Letters in the box. Exhaust poisoned. We sleep with Ezra in bright moonlight in a nest in grass. 6 [Lake house in fall] Wake seeing. Turn in the covers, sweating. A racket, is it the swans.   Cleaning the cupboard & kitchen. Mice, a squashed dead squirrel, misfortune. She intent ordering her room.   It's flattened, quieter, scented, so much of that color, blown down.   Books, gobble the Shakers and freely read parts aloud. She says did I use to be like this.   Storing plates.   Outside, it's there.   7 Sunday   Woke during the night and saw bright moonlight. In the morning, sun.   At Epps hurry to bathe before they get home from church. Oh dear there's a roast in the oven. I couldn't eat the Canada goose rotted off its bones. He threw a shotgun pellet at me. And so? He'd put on the music I like. She had on a black dress and looked fine, told stories of Maria and cone picking, "The squirrels come with cones almost as if they want to give us some."   Rudy's India photos and the unbearable ones from South America. He was walking on the yard in a yellow band uniform. Creased bent maturity.   I'm dim with trouble quarrel.   Carrot and turnip mash.   Whitehead: if you learn to see space, extension, in time, sequence, you can learn to see time, procession, extended, many chains, unified in one set of equations.   Edges of roads. 8 Clear waking while it was still the white moon from much further southwest. Cold turning in the blankets. Quickly fire and bacon.   I'm going to pick cones with Mary. Rudy and Ed on the steps in the sun. He's helpful with pail, sacks, directions.   Velvet dust road, field with alfalfa clumps standing.   In the forest two creatures squatting scrabble in icy dirt. Kind instructions. The corridors, layers, an earth of cone shells with cones to be gathered up. Fingers working separately intelligent. The pleasure every time of finding a vein, a pocket of packed darker heavier cones under the soil. Squirrels' entrances. Reaching to the elbow and farther, their system. Seeing and hands, listening to dwarf talk, the loud comical fluency in Low German, M speaks it more slowly, liking to find the words in her memory. Maria has animal thoughts. We all express the part of it that belongs to our common work. I think about speaking for that.   A ruffed grouse cock in costume and a little hen running ahead. Leaves shaking down at the edge where the wind and poplars are. Chills and warmings. The back cramping thinly.   In the evening a white strong almost gone light. The wolf at the door because of Grimm. 9 Waking before light again but can't get up.   Have some time with the Tantra book before we go to towns. Stay 'til the muffins are done. Ezra runs into the car over my legs and stays there while I come and go on the path.   At home aching, feeble head, sharp hurt in the back. Trying out a sponge. It lets through fluid but holds the red of the blood and some slimy tissue like meat.   Looking at the Tantric coconut wanting to kneel and kiss it, realize that's the religious emotion.   In the Walden journals a sense of his straining at how he wants to be. Reticent friend. The village people don't respect him when he sees something he likes and stretches it Saw him walking in the fields. A bush he loved. And stories of kitten. Why did he die young.   Evening becomes long. Ezra hears the motor. Disappointment not liking how small and stupidly I've made. 10 Before dawn make fire and think to read.   I argue that I'm not for sharing her trial and need to be alone.   We drive through smoke looking closely, some red weeds in the green field, in the ditch foxtail as if a lower smoke A close space, means it's opening a new sight constantly. Colors in better orders with a tinted white moving denser or looser around, more and less of the field showing. Another unfilmed movie.   Stopping in Valhalla to see Fred about firewood. The children come out to the dog. Looking at the girl in a housecoat.   Wanting simultaneously to see around and behind.   "Ellie and her friend, a duplex," wink wink, says Bernice.   She makes a sawhorse, I turn earth. 11 It's closer.   Waking but sleeping again. You'd been angry. Not reading. Cooking bacon, conciliatory but not liking to be.   [We strip a table for the Toftelands in exchange for the loan of a cookstove.] On Toftelands' prospering yard, large spread, their wedding boy somewhere. Soon finding rapid hands, tools turned to use, body over around. At first it's moving in the large areas, then when it comes to exactly cleaning off the small parts it becomes a pleasure I don't want to stop. It's not like that for her. Hours in the cracks of the table. She comes in my car, looks like a good car.   The coleslaw got better. Look at the g, is it mending from then. I said my computer was mending. She praised my speed.   The house from outside the spruce, one room lit, door open showing its red. A person moves through the door. The Milky Way continues down the sides of the poplars. Bright many stars. We go for water. She throws the pail. Speaking doesn't -   -   It was darker, light through the west window onto the table, supper cooking. A cabbage with a cut face, crushed tinfoil. I lay on my back on the bench to ease the spine. She moved from the side of the table to a position in the corner near my feet. There was a whine at the door. I felt myself in a forest of a certain kind. There was that strong but dim light in the room, coming from behind spruce. The dancing creatures at their tips, each dancer's gesture making it a person. Around the scratch on the door an atmosphere, some time in a different country, the Black Forest, one of the forests someone knew. I went to the door and let in the wolf with brilliant eyes. "Take Ezra into the other room" as I stand before opening the door wider. No, if the wolf wants the sheepy dog, if I give her to the wolf will I be the wolf's friend. Is it the wolf in her. If I give the sheep in me to the wolf in me. - No, not that kind of thought.   She sits beside me to say "How does that patch of wall look to you?" The wall's luminous. I take care, thinking it will swarm with lights if I give it time. I say it isn't there that I was feeling it.   In last night's dreams, from on a train I looked at expanse of snow at night. The face of a white owl that doesn't stop. Two Indian people I room with. We offend each other, I for some photographs he scribbled on. When I hit him it was her.   From the porch tall poplars in moon day. Slightness of the sound of few leaves. Scent. Yellow on the ground, not yellow, the color of poplar leaves. Pale light sky. Privacy of lights that don't photograph. I look, turn and go into the kitchen. Cold, the privacy of cold times. 12 She says my face is grumpy as if, and I laugh.   Fred's house. That face with teeth dissolved by wine. I buy him chainsaw fuel. The little girl Alberta. A pretty one puts on high heels to walk to the post office. We sit in the back of the pickup. It's not long before the chain slips. "Ladies" he calls us.   The other side of the transaction is I will can beets - and is it fifty chickens? - while she gets a jug of Double Jack. I make coffee. Fred sits on the chopping block stump looking around. One piece of burnt toast. Slip hopes we'll be there for the campfire. We can't listen to his urgent confused stories.   Not wanting to stay in the house. Lie in the outside bedroom to read.   Yellow smoke in parallel blooming channels like clouds but the clouds are dark blue. Drive across the field to get closer, see black char, the fire's been only on the surface, which is very soon cool. 20 We go with Rudy to cut firewood. He watches her bump across the field with a load in the pickup. He's angry, "I told that bitch -." Sees me. "I thought it was you." "I know you thought it was me."   I won't stay. Walk eight? miles. Find an African cap in the ditch next to Epps'. She says I wasn't limping.   22   The camera batteries have spilt. How to keep batteries warm. Borrow a cooler, hot water bottle, quilt cover, hot stones?   "I want to learn a necessity."   She dreams she'll go to India. Sees a street, herself photographing a small red thing made on the way.   has to commit herself to acts that destroy social prestige a scandalous outcast mobile tissue simple, even casual offerings "My Indian companion"   Movie of an Indian man and woman, she's in a trouble, beautiful and very tall but with a moustache. A friend's with them, she takes off her cover and says shyly how do I seem to you.   In a field at night, I've strayed, imagined being lost. Insist she lie down with me when the car lights come, we mustn't be seen. Two horses gallop toward us. I throw some small thing at the first one to tell him I'm there. His gallop breaks, legs fly out centrifugally. Because so much is wrong. From the inner window. 23 Morning in bed and breakfasting. After you leave, until three, reading Dineson, changing the house.   From three to seven, into the darkness weeding strawberries at Tone Tofteland's. Seven to nine thirty, eating drinking writing. Bake. - Came back to a nest in the grass, full moon, above our heads the heads and leaves of grass scratching. Ezra sleeping at my feet or beside you.   After the wane you sit in your car and it moves up the drive. You stop to whistle. I step forward and Ezra comes from behind me. You step out to touch her head.   Two frost mornings when grass and twigs are singled.   Mornings you come from your room. There were days I was awake early, looking at your shriveled face not ready to look at it. Tight head and spectacles, scarf and sweater offending me. Is it because I don't love her she looks miserable. When she gets up to cold air does her skin fall unhappily. Staring without knowing what you are, at the outside of your head. Far from when even your voice isn't there and thought goes back and forth between us as if I'm alone in surprised liveliness.   It happened that we'd not notice how in the pain of half speaking ourselves we'd become more accurate and joined understanding. I was lying behind you holding your shoulder in my palm.   Body when it's noticed. I don't think I want you but I'm seeing it. You come upstairs looking young. Only one thing you want and I want it too, if you could, but we know your approaching touches won't be the way of making you welcome, you're angry. "I was drinking to make sure I wouldn't come upstairs."   Because it's warm I weed strawberries. It's slow, sorting the plant and its cables and young, from the weed that looks like strawberry leaf. Dandelion grown large and small tightly among the plant to be guarded. Clearing each plant and its sloped tributaries. It's work that lets information arrive: will Reiner want to visit, they, T, C, R. Should I think about this work, how is it doing itself. There's a stop to look, where to put the blade to separate the kinds. Is there more to learn? Some wise man would invent an information about strawberries, what am I missing.   When Hazel came out, realizing how scarcely I'm there. It's getting dark, fine clear west, Ezra lying on the plants. I can barely reply to her. Why am I there, does Tone command it, is it grieving, a season ritual necessary to some homeostasis I don't know? I say I'm willing, plants, but are they better cleared that way or is it ignorance of an agreement they had with the weeds? I want weeding.   Luke, there's been no privacy to feel how it was with him, your enemy crowded me.   She remarks about the stinkweed. I call, aphoristically, from their language, "I think that's a crop for the cultivator." Success, but I stand wondering who it came from. "It's so dry, that's usually bad for winterkilling."   Tone came out in the dark with a strange head scarf wound high in the front. Someone could be warmer and see a soul arriving in the row, I see a body and then a gardener.   24   I'm given fare to fly to Ottawa. Speak to someone who wants me to make a film of dancers. I realize it's right, what I always want is to film dancing.   Morning in the house reading Dineson. Go for milk, see swans.   Afternoon to the La Glace Credit Union. Shop, go to Mary's, stop at the [La Glace] school for fairy tales, buy gas. Stop at the Valhalla Centre school, dream of being a magic person in schools, teaching vision, and their favorite   Study fairy tales, write.   Evening go round the lake and listen to swans. On the east side tread on mint. See a sweep of cloud above the spruce. A rose dust dusk goes up to blue. Cold. Night, fairy tales, house.   24th   Roy's mechanism: the new magic learned from him without revising what was there before.   Exactness and very approximateness. Blixen's free run conjuring.   intending to make his way home by Voi, to see if there were any elephants   They say a history in which an expanse like a procession. One finds itself looking out through certain eyes, back and forward, the only one who happens to be oneself. There are other locations, only this one is open. Can make an intoxicant of it like Dineson.   This book was in my small hands when I was nine. A woman sitting on a white bear; the bear's shadow. In it handwriting like a teacher's, Baldur SD. When I was that age it meant my parents' time. East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon, I remember the title. What kind of book. Tales. Kneeling beside the shelves, yellow wood. Was my desk that year next to them. It was a Thursday evening late in the fall of the year. The weather was wild and rough outside, and it was cruelly dark. The rain fell and the wind blew till the walls of the cottage shook. There they all sat around the fire busy with this thing and that. Just then, all at once, something gave three taps at the window pane. Then the father went out to see what was the matter, and, when he got out of doors, what should he see but a great white Bear. So she rode a long way, till they came to a great steep hill. There on the face of it the White Bear gave a knock, and a door opened, and they came into a castle, where there were many rooms all lit up, gleaming with silver and gold, and there too was a table ready laid. For one thing she wished to know: who it was who came in the night and slept in her room. She wondered and longed to know, and she fretted and pined away. Then she saw that he was the loveliest Prince one ever set eyes on, and she bent over and kissed him. East o' the sun and west o' the moon specifies south on an evening of full moon. That was where I was the afternoon at the dugout. Both Prince and castle were gone, and she lay on the little green patch in the midst of the gloomy wood, and by her side lay the same bundle of rags she had brought with her from home. Then she wept and wept till she was tired, and all the while she thought of the lovely Prince and how she should find him. So at last she set out on her way and walked many days, and whomever she met she asked. the East wind had never blown so far for it was she who ought to marry the Prince who lived there wild and cross blew an aspen leaf there high on the back of the North wind when the moon stands high At that moment the sun rose and the whole pack of trolls turned to stone The prince took the lassie by the hand and they flitted away as far as the could from east o' Doing a kindness to the unconsidered, you are given instructions.   They mention times of year, day, direction.   'Tasting the snake' The king's daughter is.   I'm at the time of the sacks of millet. She went down into the garden and strewed ten sacks full of millet on the grass with her own hand the ring from the bottom of the sea the apple from the tree of life whatever meets you first on your return home She speaks to sun moon wind. Only now am I released. I have been as if in a dream, for the strange princess had thrown a spell round me, so that I had altogether forgotten you. In the corridor of La Glace School a fine-looking blond boy had been choking, people were standing around him. Doris Fast and I looking at one another. She had a sensitive look. Her caution made me wonder if she was different than I thought.   The clean long high-ceilinged rooms at school.   She's alone in the room at recess. "Hello. What are you reading?" Curious, she shows the cover. And how is it. Page after page, story and then another story, pictures making themselves. If I read with you will I know more than you. The white bear's gentle expression looking around the door to where the girl sits with firelight on her. He's speaking to the father but his eyes are looking at the daughter. She sees his dignity and manliness. He waited for her outside the door. It was less windy than the earlier Thursday. She pulled herself onto his back. Had her little bundle, held it with one hand, and the fur of his neck-ridge with the other. He looked around at her, his neck straightened and he walked quickly forward. She held on and swayed. He left the forest she knew, paths her father disappeared by. She looked around her, the bear's body warm between her knees, her arms cold in the shawl. Sunset orange between the trees, darkening. And then they came to the steep hill. The white bear told her, in his resonant voice, "Get down now," and then he knocked, and the ground opened, and the entrance shining with light opened to them. They walked in side by side. When she had put out the light and gone to bed, someone came into the room and lay down in the other bed. She lay stiffened listening to the other breath, as it seemed to listen to hers. Gradually both breaths lengthen, she isn't afraid and sleeps.   Curiosity that spoiled, and then the long brave journey in winds that repaired and brought her the prince differently.   The way immigrants aren't right for the place. Accept the exercise, make songs to find out. Touch exactness to an element, a fragment. Exactly as it is and what to follow. An almost black and an almost white. 25 Morning. "The last of the mackerel leave for deep water."   Intoxicated dreaming films of image and imagination, small beauties.   In Hythe some rain, laundry. Ms magazine for a phrase in a fairytale, photographic annual.   Evening reading the mags, firewood, food. When wood and water are ready, go through misty color downfield to where I can hear them quieter than yesterday. Ezra catches up, is sent back. The length of the field and the house's isle, a short walk and a great distance. Moon's through, grass shines yellow.   The sound come out of the dark grey, first unlocated then above and in front. Many beats, scrapes, whistles. In the moment I'm looking to see how many there are, the crooked line enlarging and overpassing, a strong line. The second time I thought it would be possible to read the formation from the sound. Hunger to resolve and know. Art are you nature.   26   In the morning cook, try Time, space and knowledge, not able. In Bachelard, can read some of miniature but not the intro, wondering why, simpler minded? Less in memory of image thrills. Eat many muffins.   Woke to weak and then full light panels on white walls.   Go to test the camera at the water's edge. Fewer swans. It's cold without a jacket. Try again in the house. Set it on the tripod. Willows, and shoot it because of the lit trunks, black lines, pale blue and faint white, watching the wind move it.   At three thirty to Valhalla Centre for the mail and to the school to Miss Veltenhuis to ask to look at my footage on the projector. At home, study Spiritual midwifery. Potatoes and cheese, flatbread. Starting with questions about whether there's a work in art, that could be vowed, something to learn. The odd mistyping, warning fire when I thought of direct consciousness moving.   -   Going to the school, into the corridors. Found the projectors, stepping as quietly as if afraid. On the steps - that doesn't say the wind and sun, reflections as the door opens, of plaid jacket and cap - the children come out and I'm shy in flood, I mean feeling the shyness and trying to stand in it, seeing the faces looking at me, delight, in full focus of curiosity, smiling from the perilous impact, will they like me, will they think I'm odd. "Whose car is that?" Fred's children I can see are proud to know me. "It's Ellie's - it's her." A pelting, how was the space, failing, recovering, afraid, delighted; that is, liking them, liked. They're running to the buses   Two grown women in this. One's blond dressed blond, she reads women's magazines. The other's standing with her back to me, plaid coat and plaid pants, she doesn't look at her clothes. When she comes up the stairs, looks, I find myself smiling and then she does. When she's turning quickly from seeing the last of her responsibility, is the moment to come forward. It's still slow, then I speak, and I'm wrong but was right. Miss - such a woman isn't married to a Gilkyson - Veltenhuis, a name I know, strong Dutch woman, says come in but not sit down.   Then I'm hung up to state my business, curious, liking her, applied to her face, learning her. She hesitates from the way I ask "Is it a good one", keeps making me feel impertinent, telling her in my original way, what I can do for her, "I guess those are my territories." I'm going faster wanting to know about her, ask her how old she is. She doesn't want to say. I put it so she has to and then find her in Bible camp, and she's still that sort of Christian. The vulnerability I feel in her reticences - is it sex? She boldly reaches for a letter and an envelope, dismissing me. When she looks up I'm surprised at the degree of smile she has to face. I'm nearly laughing, go on with my rapid questions on top of the delight of collision. Then speak in the vernacular, "It's the end of your week, I'll let you go," and she says, relieved, "Yes I am in a hurry today." I drive away listening to fantasies of seduction, opening, prudently not seducing, her car parked on the yard, the principal's having tea, I'm mischievously offering wine.   27   Slip said he'd come.   Wondering about that generation and us. Read fast through Bid me to live, she described disorientation and how Cornwall saved her. The end of the book opens and simplifies.   Then as duty through the rest of Spiritual midwifery. Came out lethargic. A warm day. Water and wood take me out.   Drive, the car starts easily, for milk. Needing tea, slaw, butter.   Look in movie notes, think of just filming and not knowing the shape, small things. A boat that has set out and knows it will sink. Like the thought coming or found, especially interlinear of some Shaking the pumpkin poems.   As for you, at practical alert to know how next.   Night outside, look at stars from sitting in the field. Some scintillate, red, green. Powerful too-strong yardlight [sketch of waxing half moon] from centre to southwest.   There were more swans and the water's reopened.   Thought to learn star areas, hour by hour.   Inspired about the pantry and then saw the red bed in the kitchen.   28   Thought to go out every morning for one day's wood while the kitchen warms.   At Epps for an hour. The tub leaked crackling into basement. Not comfortable leaving it but small rebellion. Took home CS Lewis.   He found his job without trouble, a learned bachelor, with a sick wife for 3 years, hearty, longed for his sitting room in a stone hall, a smaller sitting room and bedroom looked across to the cloisters and tower of the college. Given to the enjoyment of his friends, who loved laughter and argument.   I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. I felt myself being given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut. I was moved by no desires or fears. I chose to open.   In the afternoon cut and hammered a pantry bench. Removed all the cooking things from the kitchen, moved in the red bed.   Quart of custard greasy from the pot. Pliny in bed. Worn out at 9. Woke at night cold.   29   Splitting wood. Frost pictures fine.   Trying kitchen for sleep. Mornings are dark, the kitchen's like a cottage.   Worked with what was in Lewis, the grab.   In the morning already felt like going to see M. They're eating with the radio on. He's high, nervous, listening to the stock market, story of crash 50 years ago, they threw themselves out of windows. It's like competitive sport. He turns it up so we can't talk. He was alone for a few days, wished to tell me the windrow fire, a mile long and too dry. "That kept me going." Having to give his father the $5 he found on the road. His father owed it on an old horse. And the $1.50 he earned running and jumping though he nearly wrecked his ankles. The complaint made me pull away and then I wondered whether I could feel it differently. Reluctant to listen because the way he tells it is abuse of presence, overriding.   A coming crash excites him.   Her mouth when she told Miss Veltenhuis's mother's death was like her own mother's, the upper lip arches up.   In the afternoon - light - film of the wall showing stove heat.   Outside threw curved sheets of white for the sun to reflect, bushes. Swans on water that went brown. Their singing sighs.   30   Woke before full sunrise, then strong pink rim and 4 tomatoes on the sill. Ezra goes to my feet when I won't speak from my head.   Out to get branches in early and frosty. It's better than breakfast, four tree lengths sawn. My reflection works alongside, I liked her.   Cold at first then smoky and too hot, sunlight on the table, read Bragg 'til afternoon.   Ovaltine. Cranberry, current, carrot and cabbage with mayonnaise. Eat mayonnaise fluff by itself off a fork. More Ovaltine.   Get to soap films in Bragg. Can't do any more, go to sleep. Hot stinging eyes, soon too cold. Wake in that subtle panic about Jam (being here?), then can't find what it says.   Fire's out, think to go for apples and gas but thinking about J sends me to the letters. Not over-written, live interest, don't know why they didn't excite replies, is it only jammed far up into wet hole will?   When I can't read more it's 5:30 and time for a fast ride, citrus peel.   Then getting through soap films. Finish the letters, mild voice telling strong feeling.   -   When I was adoring you you said it was useless to you, because it isn't absolutely clean, and that comes from your castle. The back rub was right. You're right, it wasn't sensitive (I noticed I wasn't feeling it as I touched).   I'd lie still breathing deep, I think slowly, although it speeded, watching the second hand fall down the right and climb the left. Watching the climbing hand feeling the sensation climb and harden and then fall off. The bright light on, they'd turn it off and it would be softer. Plaster walls, the sense of silent night, familiar hospital sounds. From the room voices in the nursing station. Roy sitting lower down on the left in a leatherette chair. Melting into white bonelessness, almost asleep, watching the clock. She would poke brutally during a contraction.   Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep nothing back, nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that hasn't died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay, but look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.   - At my cervix, the pain on the inside left. At night it's an ache, maybe desire. I can dissolve it out.   Give up yourself: "I became aware that I was holding something at bay."   Give in to what. The man - surrender to who I don't like or who's contemptuous of me. Incest. Ordinary language, music, manners, how they lived at home, my parents' bodies and failures. Specifically Christian religion. Mary's will bent on me praying. Pressure, why does she want it.   Ambitions and favorite wishes - do I have any, no, and it's death is it, not having an intense want. Mildly: I don't want to be ugly, that is, I want to be beautiful and spiritually superior. A question whether for the sake of being turned on, I'd give those up. It seems it's more necessary to feel lost, and some intention not to go to calamity. He said he decided for the safe way. Calamity would be dying young by having transgressed the nature of the body, or else the kind of madness that's feeling lost. I want the balance that is in fright, with invention.   Fairy tales - Tom Thumb the pineal - is there fascination in reference to body workings? The construction of the computer, we can imagine it is there: thus we can call it an image template. Sharply cut in front of intense light, softer with a candle. Newton: imagining a time when there were red and blue shadows but without explanation.   Rainbow - any drop at 42 degrees will produce red, 40 degrees blue. It's not a distance but a direction. Period or frequency of the electric vibration. Magnetic field is the same as wave system sent.   Space lattice in a crystal, such that [const int] on straight lines through centres. Chlorophyll absorbs the long red rays. Hemoglobin like form of molecule.   Safe in the inner, where polio, refugee, moneylessness, car breakdown, toothache are not terms.   Diffracted pencils of first, second, third order.   Daphne - imagining overhearing her thoughts, I tell her, I don't know how I know but I know. After some time she notices me listening, says go away Ellie. I say wouldn't you rather learn to speak this way? Turns to a story event, then written to see if I could learn something without deflecting. Came when I was reading about diffraction, looked up pencils (penis), aimed at the one of her from early.   Take mother of pearl on wax, the wax has the color too. A coloration by form, diffraction colors because parallel lines.   Any one set rides on the curved surface of a larger set as if it were a plane.   Something from sleeping with J, or in the last weeks with her, again waking from short sleep this aft, fright, couldn't trace it.   Dictionary said non-cooperation, refusal to conform. Training to conform to my talent for language when what I really wanted was to (dance).   I telephoned. She was stiff. I was not wanting, yes a little wanting, is it resisting, staying out of her, listening to the forms. "We can't get to it now." Guilty to be unlove. She wants the place, I think I'll have to clear out, leave her in it. Go where? California. I am far from the occult sense of this place and - is it - from her, she says she's waiting for me to come to my senses. That was my long wait with her, but -   31   "Your eyes are trying to tell me something." "Are they telling or asking?" "I don't know." "Shall I leave it that way."   "Damn you for not coming to see me." I was making elegant phrases. He was stuck in finishing his sentences.   [Watch TV while babysitting with my mom] David Milne. Seeing how it went for a fanatic as I felt. Blue and orange. He painted whatever was around him and stayed years alone in the bush. M went to bed.   -   Mr Mann's face, how I felt in front of it, how he felt in front of my scrutiny. Speaking to him was going out into believing time, as if it was that making him look as he did, small eyes, smiling. It must have always been, his hand over his mouth talking not asking.   Oh - pressure - yes - would I give it up. The dialogue where it says try Jesus and I say I'll keep fighting, I won't join the safe ones.   Heidi talking about criticism, she says compassion. I say oh yes but information. Nothing is settled. Fighting and daring, Dineson: set your terms to like yourself. Anxiety and the state of walking aware. Is her manner and voice from her belief? No, was there before. But did her goodness make the choice? It makes speaking to her a battle of ideology.   1 November   Heide, "God arranges everything."   Little Ryan in the bath. I'm excited thinking maybe he's brilliant and I know he wants to think in numbers, I'm the special only one, aren't I more sensitive.   In the alley he made serious trips picking up brown leaves by their stems from the ground.   He throws himself back on my knee laughing.   When E Epp sits on the couch I go round by the dining room instead.   Television, Fonz and Laverne.   2   '"No I didn't think you were crazy, I thought something was troubling you" [I visit Mrs Grotkowski of Sexsmith].   Good sausage and she'd washed the lamp globes, he beamed and blinked.   Snow and moonlight. Swans gone, lake white.   Krishnamurti "Is it possible for me not to be?" I like to be without an image Can I live with what is without making a conflict of it Looking at it, studying the structure Comparing To live without the concept needs extraordinary intelligence and a great deal of energy When we talk about concepts we are in contact LSD "destroyed a space within himself, observer and observed," let in a doubt about who knows. Not storing or repeating. Watching, now intelligence is operating, highly disciplined. When I look there is no pressure. So I have entered a different dimension. What are the facts. "Here is the envy that I had before," for continuity.   As long as there is a centre, there is space and time.   Method belongs to time, so method's no good. Is it possible for me not to be.   Is it possible for me not to be. "That will happen" (Joyce).   About Roy and T (they hurt me and were bad) OR (they were inconsistent).   Get rid of J (she's a cotraveler). He [the fortuneteller] said many relationships - he said twice or three times. He might be wrong. Said a long life.   Get rid of me. Then what would be different. Would have to find out. What's me: the one who was there and asked me to not let her be like them. She set out in a direction and asked me to look after it.   Is it possible for me not to be. Is it possible for her not to be. Left to itself wouldn't this body revert to what they are.   Will you give up anyone, child, grandparent, friend, being like you? Will I let her go. She was pretty and had a young brain. Could I ask her permission. Was he one who gave up belief.   Set out alone. She set out alone. Do it again without knowing more.   These days: thinking will I ever know more. Making the public person from the bottom, in confession.   Is it possible for me not to be. What would be different. Program.   (Got up to put wood in the fire and pee.)   If you saw it you would do something about it.   Simplicity is to look without the centre.   What is thinking. Movement from thought to thought, satisfied something's being taken care of. You hold still and move.   Can thought be clear. When it's thought it's clear. It's she who studies for this possibility of moving freely.   'My tradition.' Memory and not memory. The question of how is merely asking how, not searching for a method.   Is it in asking at any moment. A method is program and fantasy.   That made eternity but novels made the fly buzz.   That made a here. Not fully.   Oh sirs you don't see the beauty of this.   Writing down, slows aside.   Writing, being a writer. 'I don't know' is not always true. Dropping the past: as if it can be done.   hesitantly, tentatively and with great affection to seriously examine   The capacity and intensity to resolve the   A passion isn't a capacity. What I don't like.   Sensitive alert body. (Committed to) order without control. A state of learning is order.   Not correcting or analyzing, without the eyes of the past. Knowledge chooses.   If I sit by myself I deceive myself very easily, by being awake in relationship I can learn the cause of sorrow. Intelligence is, and doesn't look to be, safe.   Adam and Eve story would be they say, instincts not able to reply to thought, thought loosed from intelligence. So thought created secondary worlds.   So let intelligence re-find the instincts. How - comes down into. Begins to carry out the implications of intelligence.   Holding the bread pan on a table behind a door when I was little. "Don't show off." Attention intensity.   You can't name it, you can only look.   Thought has constructed itself as an instrument for survival. Can it understand its death?   Somebody watching.   There is no method. Where there is seeing there's no conflict.   There was no space, there was no observer. Look as if the space is nonexistent. In the listening you will find the separation of observer and observed ended.   When there's comparison there's compromise. A quality of sensitivity to ideas. 'I want something mysterious.'   The one who can 'do something' with something. Pleasure and beauty don't go together, if you see that it's finished. Love isn't a pleasure. Observing without analysis. 3 How I woke at 9 even after working until 2, and how the car at last wouldn't try to start and I set out in a fine cold wind from an unusual side, hold up my finger, southeast. White closing that direction, a blizzard?   Man and little boy walking to the house from a chore, Betty Jo lending herself to any who go through speaking. Looking at the girl I liked, today she wants to know how it is to be free. She was excited having gone to the junior high dance, hadn't told and known it yet. He didn't like it.   He invites stopping to look.   [Babysitting their little boy at my house] Resisting Jesse's unhappy face, sitting still while he called, each call with sobs after it. He stood up to call more. After a while I asked if he wanted to sit on my lap. We watched a squirrel on the pile, standing up to look, leaving, returning.   Will you wait a moment, remote dry voice. "Are you drifting?" "Yes."   Alertly eating snow.   Thinking about Jesse's learning to talk, with Krishnamurti.   4   A new thing: rock, ice I'm standing on, part white ring (the order of perception), feeling its position into consent. Then? When I look up? The surface of the ice sings HWHUNNNNNNnnng, seems to run straight across the lake from here to there, and at the same time the shiver under my feet seems to arrive from there to here. At the same time I jerk ready to leave. Can't see a crack, nothing has changed. A round plane - sense of the distance of the other shore - a solid in some way I don't understand, whipped once and vibrated minutely, because my weight was on an edge of it.   The resonance underfoot was in particles. Clean, fine, spatial, and the white/silver/blue of where it was, yellow in the light.   I'm at a desk in school, can't find my other desk. Had cut the heads off the swan and turtle in the museum case, why had I let myself become pregnant by a nothing man I didn't like?   -   The stove's shadow surface has a line of stronger light because hot air is a lens. Shadows blowing.   The lake's colors, blue, later green, faded water with frost feather tufts. One swan sitting still as if floating, quiet movements turning her head, gentle, immobile. The frame slid, foreground a patchier green. Her quietness.   The ice is green, and then the way the shore is another light, pink, unclear, bush belonging to sky. I shot it wondering why, division. The ice a darkness for writing?   It's an intense pink light, horizontal, points east, rapturous, dusty. What it makes of the trees/willows/reeds. Soft, granular, veined brown, blue, purple, light in front and behind, white and green snow. Greeting the colors' directions on ice, it's green downlight. A brown/grey I'd never seen half around, orange toward the sun's red line. Two lower red suns.   Walked the big plane [of ice] to see edges, soft swamp red/purple, blue hill where I haven't seen a hill. The way the house looked in a white sky, with soft clouds, pink and blue, was I looking through the eyes of a European landscape painter? What color is that, carmine? The red/blue branches/roots tangle. One red berry.   What: I don't know anymore either telling you or here. In the red light of these evenings I feel happy and it seems the time to be on the ice or its shores. The boiling of the ice. It seemed to be feeling strongly. If we stood still it glub-glubbed closer, underfoot.   -   Undressed from these days' party, she's missed it.   French bread hope [ie trying to bake it]. Fred and Bruce, I want to comfort Fred, who's drunk.   At the lake, come upon a swan at the edge just where I come out, want to go toward it, talk to it. Greed goes for the camera instead, it, blue, the ice up in white feathers. The frame sinks. While I'm reloading it seems to decide to leave, low flight, neck stretched.   The evening green ice, pink land, trees and rushes stand. I don't know what either shot is for.   5   Didn't like that there was no morning. An even light all afternoon, white faded, pink faintly along the west.   Writing a scenario after Joann's script, intense pleasure, intoxication, speed, and a wild letter with it. Sense of revealing, exhibiting, the house and ways she/I have formed, especially the ways of peeing. Careless invention of movie forms. I liked sound carrying steps from one thing to another. In oblivion image coming back as arriving.   Then needed to leave, drive through the colors - light yellow brown road, dark brown field. Between the two and beyond them, those pale frosted yellows and greys, and slight blue or pink in white sky. Standing grass heads, small branches coral, glitter in bits. From Hythe in the dark, unrecognizable. Next to the lake driving through a loose fling of glitter like a handful.   Krishnamurti saying watch everything exactly.   6   M and I on the ice, the white tufts blowing off. Walking on the lotus field. Green dark ice in places, real water. She was pink and loved it.   Reading The Chestry oak crying to be the royal child.   7   Worked toward 'work'.   Wood from a back lane. Coffee. 'Worked' on waiting for her. Two chairs. Didn't decide except to remember. Choice is from thought, he says. To Krishnamurti for a push.   Worked to clear some papers.   Larry and Betty-Jo at the table in the garden plucking chickens.   Cutting fat poplar in the ditch.   Papers, "at the beginning of each narrative a visionary being of great beauty." Turned out to be, the poplar line from a sunset excursion led to geometry of Steiner, yes, again, writing approximate words. In Vaughn, this time I'd also seen eternity a ring of light. 9 Waking at night breasts in fiery pain.   More notes go. Sense of business letters, artist proceedings, but -   Real: breaking fallen trees out of branches of standing trees, dragging them out.   Speaking to trees on the fenceline falls apart, didn't know what was happening fast enough when I wrote it, confection. Wanting to keep pretty rhythms.   Mornings sawing have had argument.   Hungry for snow pictures.   No idea (looking for - ).   When she comes home I'm happy excited curious worried ashamed distorted.   Helmer's disintegrating. Sitting with it, in new clothes, grateful to laugh.   10   Nervous, rattled, scared to lose the peaceful generous days, drove fast into and through the ditch.   When she came to hug me, the warmth like sunlight that came there, and scared adoration watching carefully the morality of every move. She said she didn't feel anything the way she used to. I don't like the way we're talking, I cried one tear, got up, wanted to write how it was in the meditation, subtle action. I said the ring of shining light, she said pure and shining, but had never seen it. I was happy to tell her. Then she showed a photograph I had to like. That was what made it possible.   The comedy of our two cars in the ditch at the corner. A blond boy with hay.   Eskimo. Seals like drops of oil.   I thought they were sending me out to hunt seals, they were sending me out to die on the snow. 11 The bomb may have been dropped somewhere in a city, but Luke is here, and was it Janeen. Three times he'd come with Luke, three days' flights. The third, Luke in a pushchair, I knew he hadn't left. Embracing his shoulder felt the same but I was his height. Sense of that terraced garden I've seemed to be visiting.   When I cut wood Father's there arguing.   With J complex, at first full of spirit and flirtation, then getting tired. The door was open, she's insisting.   Making bread and teaching it.   Opening the book packages finding Na-khi books, wanting to go through it tasting everything.   A delicate sight / makes me chase. Moments when I could move / rock. Delicate, a part of a body.   [Book packages - University of Alberta extension library]   -   Her, myself the young girl. She's walking left in blouse and wide skirt, long legs, looking ahead, turning to look along her shoulder. Brown taut face, brown hair loose to the neck that moves when she turns her head. She has the frown of a confident person thinking. She's walking across a public space. I'm seeing her as if in a photograph, feeling she's the right young girl for me to have been. If I can make her I can make her a boy: he's there, her height and mine, hair cut off close to his head, solid in my arms. I press his back to feel whether I've made him real. He is. I can make love to him, that will solve the difficulty. He's dense muscular, thick and passive. His face is like Paul's.   I lead him away holding his hand. He's above me lying in the dark. I tell him something, "... because I made you." His penis already little is melting out of me. He seems to be gathered to that spot, some tissue of darkness between my legs. Draws back, vanishes. We've come to the holiday house. At the steps the landlady's offering to carry some of my bags. You're behind me. I can't carry all of them, she takes the one left, I think a green one. Shows me we've been given adjoining rooms, A and B. I ask, as we're coming through my door, B, whether it's the same price for a double bed. She says yes. The beds haven't been made yet. A double bed, brown metal frame, in the far left corner.   I look to the right into your room. A double bed there too, and a small cot. Blankets piled on the beds. The room is seedy like an old hospital, an impression of old linoleum.   How much a day? She's reckoning on your bed, thirty a day. I think that will be three hundred for our stay.   I'm left looking at the drawer faces, is it one in your room and one in mine, or both in yours. The wood is shrunk and rotted back into clumps. The front of the drawer has shrunk back concave with a look of some plant substance withered and cracked.   Turn off the light, am in bed looking at the window. It's grey outside. I picture it brighter as it will be when there's snow. After a while feel a pull in my breasts. Wait. It's getting stronger. I saw your light off, we listened to each other going to bed. Now, is that you calling me? I get up and take the sleeping bag, at the door I'll say, were you calling me? An old joke. I get to the door. Something snags me, my toe is caught by the bottom of the door. I'm feeling whether it's hurt much. You say from your bed, "Were you calling me? Laughing from the big outer voices, "I was just going to ..."   And lie with my arms around someone, a sweet round, a warm. I'm lying warm on it, thoughts fast it seems random light lines above it. You say you're as if in a deep sleep. When you see, you see us on the lake. "Are you, too?" "No, not at all."   But lying still sometimes when you stroke my shoulder or back, it becomes sentient, radiant, spatial, there, this boundary where there's pressing, behind. I must put my arms up around your neck, to open my chest. The movement of feeling. I speak in it or above it, I'm very given. Fragment talk to you, laid on what I trust, I'm a young girl bride in love in first trust. I realize I'm Tibetan or Chinese, Rock's photographs, hair down my back in a braid, head laid back. I don't know or think what you are, except the presence in me of alertnesses, an extraordinary warm something in my arms, timid kisses, polished hair.   The way it went later with my wrist pressing and turning one-two-three-four, fast and accurate. You led me at the nip it seemed, I could only keep up. But doubting for a second, no longer could. And into actual, I mean remembered, there again, that rocking ache, blue, it's blue stroked to the floor of the cave. Cavern. Fosse. A vein through it. It seems: spaces made. Not exactly.   In the morning looking over the dreams, in the transition zone, understanding came in phrases. The drawers are breasts. I was her. 12 In the morning, sawing, again arguing with him.   The others got onto a train I missed, going to a city. I missed it because there was an accident, I had to crawl up or down a hill, and stayed watching how the strange older people had survived. They made it by rushing straight to the connection.   Rock's life work in a corner of as far as he could go? Finding out doubtful histories of local officials. Photographs of people (saying what the photographs of mountains could say if I could read them as well). Curious what they're wearing, but dutiful, weary.   You confound me all day: move into the new, why are you here revisiting.   Field photographs. Going to the lake to cut poplar, then the camera letting me get closer to the dizziness of the pink light, double. It's frivolous and yet it (makes choices in) opens delight and knowledge.   Getting lighter telling you how this place is travel. When you say, now, and I tell, pride/anxiety/comparing it lets you remember.   Good looking images of former.   Moralistic loquacious arrogant.   Then visiting the Chinese girl. [triangle diagram]   13   Dreams and waking vividness, writing eagerly.   The forest. Go watchfully across the cultivated field. I was along snow footsteps, entrance and spruce forest, stumps. A bird with black cap and pale yellow brown belly. I looked at it, it said chickadee. Those smooth little paths under bushes along a log, and even more when there were human woodpiles, a wooden snowplow, and the open rectangle, with sawdust at the base of bushes. Tracks. In their different directions, bird, rabbit, coyote, I guessed. Signs of community. That was exciting.   Coming through the forest, first sign of settlement, then the clear white rectangle - platform, foundation? Homestead, piles of rotting slab, a sawmill. It made the forest larger, and that there were many tracks across it made it seem the dancing floor.   Two film rolls back.   Why an infinitely distant point sends parallel lines.   She makes spare ribs. I fall into The sacred fount of watching people meet. J, Carmichael and myself in Mrs Server.   -   We're going out, two schoolgirls. When we go through the glass door I see my hair's up in a slipped knot. White short-sleeved blouse, cotton skirt. We go out bravely with arms around each other's waists, but I'm shocked when you open the top of my skirt to walk with both hands, from behind, over my shoulders onto my belly. I dare to consent. We cross the road down. You call out hello to a Mennonite girl with her hair in a white net cap. She runs away, bent forward like the old Dutch girl, because of the way you're touching me.   My father across the room lying on a bed sleeping. Past the foot of it on a television I'd been watching, a man in flowered dressing gown charming a younger woman. Something the man says has kicked my father. I'm watching amused to see the television man's blue image, a little man, standing at the foot of the bed. There's another, the man's body with my father's head on it. My father is looking at them with a thin, younger, charmed face. I am trying to tell the sophisticated man, I think a Catholic priest, what I saw. He doesn't see or else believe it. When I mention the television program, one of the two men who have come in from a door on the left says, that's us. I look and agree. The one man is setting out, looking through his 25 boarding houses, for the girl the other has found, because she's fine, he'll take her away. That's what he was doing when I saw the show.   While I write these, a sensation of being lost = learning, teaching myself, to look in the wrong places, on the wrong scale.   Again to fear: revere. Devout: completely vowed.   -   Sequence. Not knowing what's coming, field, forest entrance, forest with spruce blown over or down. Squirrel, rabbit path. Smaller trees, human signs, the white rectangle. Recognizing tracks, different chains. Excited arrival, see the whole, dancing floor. It seems to say go on over the pile. Paths my size or too small. Fright on this side. Brush at my level. Pushing through, clang of the branches I release. Is there somewhere the forest surrounds, is there somewhere I'm going. Poplars standing up yellow in upper light. I could climb one. Set down jacket, cap and camera, find the lower branches all dead. Some dread makes me hurry, not persist, back. Will I find the jacket, marked by stump fans, hurrying through whiplash back to the open forest. Crossing a slab pile I see the two openings, and their paths, of a coyote den, or maybe fox. Remarkable lichen, frilled horns grown up out of others. No comprehension, hurry out. I know the angle this side of the sun. Come out into poplar, not far off the line of the car. A goose feather, cow paths, along the fence.   Scrub willow with cow paths, open for children, wet and going to water, dark, arched. They sometimes come out to a surprise, the yellow leaf creek, a house in the space for a house.   14   Beginning to write yesterday brought the forest. Went on to dreams, then to collect a little of James to be able to talk to her. Then time to go to the school and was it the right time - projector, editing gloves, white velvet for film cleaning. Coming on Maggie's fine little tool for editing, and then the blue lines, superstition said time to pick up where you left it for them, the blue lines beautiful and essential. [I see the footage that becomes Current for the first time.]   Talking to you about James in his atmospere, competitive. I don't follow. Maybe you'll learn something about my craziness.   I'm worried about what Stell said.   Confide that, from the dreams, and the generation parts being fooled, crassness of birth control, that something perverse, although in particular it isn't, plans. She wants Indian ceremonies, I want to visit artists. The blue lines.   Edmonton research. Different parts of the body can be different gender. Monstrous organ transplant. I fast invent the way to get the right body by reorganizing on the atomic level: a long incubation, with instructors, in imagining it right, and a transmitter.   15   Bubbles seeming to have frozen on the way up, elongated, ordered like a (thistle) flower. Peering to see the shape under the ice. Today the surface is transparent, I can see the bottom, four inch silver curtains running parallel or across each other, or an unformed curtain of ice bubble lines. An insect rowing freely in brown space where an ice curtain threw a dark shadow with a refracted edge. Looking north among the yellow and pink with blue shadow surface. Standing on Monet's water cautiously. Fine stranded weed.   Clouds, some standing, some driven in currents white in black, marveling far above them.   "A day just like this." Sadie Flaten's anniversary. She came to the right place. He shaved before he went out to the field. "I suppose there's a woman out in the field" she said. "I guess I'm shaving for the swatter."   Hatred after loving days. She argues that it's sluttish.   A hot day. Smoke blew down. Then pewter fine few clouds and rising west wind. 16 Another hot day.   From this day a month's trial of refusing to touch myself.   Away in China, countryside. Canal, garden, courtyard. Food, quilt silk. Plants' babies.   Ellie Epp in grade one, pleased to see you [class photo hung over a door in La Glace School].   Night candle on the triangle stone. Half the high school book [journal]. Could see that nearly all I knew or believed, wrote, about that condition came from it. When she went down and rode pain. The inner land polio sickness. 17 Waking thinking happily that there'd been more of the renovated apartment building grand on the ground floor. Selling - showing someone through my former place in lower right front, or upper right front. Is that you, brain, telling me about yourself in the only way you can.   After noon getting up, traveling under clouds. Mary with bread, an odd flat-bum imp small body. Gradually find a glee that wants to hug her, and sits on the table separating white paint out of her hair strand by strand. Intimacy hears itself as J does from the front room.   "I thought it was for additional bathing."   He sits with his arms up. I ignore him. Goes to the Golden Age Club which has lowered its age limit to bring in more money.   Rudy's in trouble, we discuss. J isn't surprised he turns up. I don't say I feel used. His face grieved, evasive. His plan is to get to be important and then later honest.   Lying with you, your face in school. You talk about Monica, I about Janeen's breasts. Wanted to kiss her lying down with her. In bed our chests intercoursing, sweet mouth.   18   In the morning in an intoxicated mood reading From the legend of Biel carefully. Dictionary excitements. Coffee nailbiting. Crouch dancing. Sounds of energy too big for me. Like to hear them.   In the afternoon nervous dressing for the visit to Gerry Loberg's. [Jam is recruited to translate for a Vietnamese immigrant family being hosted by a prominent local farm family.] I imagine a sitting room and Sunday lunch, fine people who see that I've become one of them. Arriving in front of a house, intense apprehension as if going to a roasting at Rhoda's. The blond children coming to the door are too confident. A man as she said, then the blond young woman. Dismay at her fat pink cheeks and manner that knows how to go on. He has the remote kiddish ease of a tall man. I'm in pain from the beginning, wanting something, seen wrongly, fighting something I don't know how to locate, is it in their gestures. I'm lost from the first, performing, but stalled behind the table, as J throws herself into her key position and no one is interested in me though all know my name. Exhausted and needing to go home.   -   Having none of the powers of defense, going there in helplessness as from early times, unready to be anyone but the silently rebellious, warring, guerrilla, but only puzzled in defense? Right away I don't like you, enemy. Children, I like you but don't know how to talk to you. Smile, smile, show I know what's nice. You, the tallest and most experienced, you're where to be for fun, are you? But you don't bother. Didn't want tea and it was weak. The one who belongs with me looks good talking so fast, cheeks pulled in. I interrupt to, intercede to, be with someone I know.   Tea knocked over, it's coming toward the edge of the table. I grab the embroidery to mop it, her arm shoots across the table to save it. I without looking at her but seeing her motion reverse mine and am saving the cloth as rapidly as I was going to use it. Then say to J, "Was that something?" She doesn't say (is in public).   Animus: high spirit, boldness.   19   It continues today, intense, animus not having a good time, for resistance. Before that, their gatherings, social failures. From the first, hospital, school (Stratford, visits, Sexsmith, etc).   She to Grande Prairie, comes back tired, wants to talk about why I'm away, and does -   The way the Vietnamese man said "Have you gone up to bed," a quaint idiom. We both feel better.   House, shell, dome. Tell her some, she takes more. Not miniature but pattern, technology. Couldn't be sold, would teach people to think.   She said "The man who built this had to go to heaven first."   part 2 up north volume 3: 1979 october-december work & days: a lifetime journal project