| up north 4 part 4 - 1980 may-june | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
May 25 Bella Coola Morning - alarm - the daughters - moving for lunches without speaking, breakfast, has rained, milk coffee. Morning work strong painless writing J-V imagining a dinner party, loyal fine long perceptive service of my lady. Watch carefully to see what this cutting off is. Spite. 26 Planting, in the afternoon I know I'm tired when I complain - morning working clearly feeling writing (coffee). Late afternoon stumble, get lost. In the truck giddy flirting with Henry, I am playing the starved woman, was going to say older, but it is only louder now because then I felt it and didn't say, body so ready to feel the different beings next to bodies color/intensity/temperature something else, color temperature, something standing in the air between, I imagine. Driving and how I ride adjusting, watching, with Henry on one side Mark on the other, Henry's is intense warm giddy loose, on the other side paler more finely felt. I imagine something like a space opening on either side to each of us. The beautiful enthralling faces, at moments, colored, brilliant eyes, Henry's schoolboy nose, and the way his eyes are set high, Mark like another race, his hands, Nora and the coldness around her, the tone she sets with her voice, cut face and calculation, the way the faces and bodies hold me, curious, beginning to make wider jokes, express, with borrowed watched language, and not, bawdy, no one else is, my father! I've thought for a few days. Wren's body, the days being in bodies, then going willing up into cutblock, not struggling as I did, submitting to a willingness to be here, taking new body for it, next to Wren morning before last warm sexy harmonious. Odd, when Nora says something, the necessity to not reply, keeping her out, what is it, was there from first sight, I remember her considerations but - they are the exercise for her - the voice and its distance, and her enthralling prettiness, and that I know she likes power, it's like holding an equal coldness no matter what's (overtly) offered. And the daughters who support, with laughter, everyone, and yet it does hold me up to tell stories. Susan's movements, like nobody's, that I like now, a character, a very young person in a grown body, but something else, elastic and bobbling. I'm fighting casually, mistakes, seeing, is that enough. Every day a sense rebellious bitter of wanting to pay (you) off, say that's enough I won't be in that anymore, have I done it, is it still to be done. I write the letter in few words. "You're always mad at me." And pull it on to there being somewhere else to write from without complaining, knowing exactly what I mean, which is that now I don't want to be with you and don't think about what I give up with that, remote, now that I am all day somewhere else, I can recollect arrogant freedom, that I know will be often empty, for you too, but I want to go on in it, because you don't want me - that comes, and I send it away, it is true and yet I doubt it, what in it (giving away the part that is I don't want you, a particular set has this dialogue - briefly - and then there's a better way to see it. and then, it's that I have to wait. And in the meantime pay you back, both ways. 27 These wakings not clear like the wakings in the high altitude tents, I don't know my dreams (I was somewhere). The way, writing, it's working with what the machine offers. In a dream I remembered a sunrise - sun rising in the northwest, winter dark - that I'd known because I hadn't gone home to sleep. Writing's involvement with voices. Sense of physical wrestle (slash) saying no to what I think is bad public language. Comes out of who I'm with, I say, who can I be with where I'd love our language. Turning syntax that's not the floated heard running language, delight. On the slope, looking at the daylight, lunchtime, how would I say that color of light, not light, place, I'm seeing the standing trees there, ground, trees, hillslope, sky, dimension, not grey, many colors, not muted, that's sound, and is that technically, technically isn't the question, see it the way it looks in bright sunlight, shines, yellow sparkle, this is less yellow, whiter, now, memory, or call it by itself. The little animal, large armadillos in captivity, led to work, I and someone else see that a baby has escaped, flashed under the couch, my job later is to throw things at the baby to make it learn to run from people. Moon, full moon, the way you give me the same lift whether or not I'm using it for 'work', whatever I'm doing gets the pull. For record - who's been, J-V, when I'm happy mornings, and how's that, it's with plans, pleasure plans for my next city life. The man in monastery garden saying don't be concerned with what you eat, your health, that will come to you when you are with the cloud of unknowing (but if you think of it it will be all you are). [astrological chart notes]
Orange peel on water an iridescence shooting out blue from it - curve around it refracting - from my angle of vision - in shape like magnetic field, curved space. June 1 Visiting Cam, fat with small babies, didn't welcome me. A ghost is seen as having access to the other side of the birdcall, the side which is turned away from us. the world contemplated in the angel Earth is not this your wish, to arise in me invisible? To use those who make us suffer as steps to their divine form and so to people ourselves with divinities Show details of the activity of - 2 "Did you come here with anyone?" "No, I'm single, what about you?" "I'm separated." "You carry it well." Laughing after every line. Willing glad heart but be careful: she's up to something, the way she's laughing and lending herself to everyone, who is she getting it from. As soon as the question, the answer: it's Roy. I feel more acquainted with the nameless, with my senses, as if with birds, I reach from the oak tree into the windy sky, into the broken-off daylight of ponds my feeling sinks as if it were resting on fishes. [letter] Did I tell you I felt China - early last summer - when the magpie went through blue from the willow to the saskatoon bush. I'm glad someone is calling you classical teacher. Your story of Sheila Watson was beautiful. I want to plant until the end of June and then have the house alone, July and August. I haven't heard from Luke but still believe he'll be here in September. I'm sorry Sandy and Stephanie can only come in August, if I've only got those two months to work it's not possible. Will you leave with my car a little history of what it's been through since I saw it. And don't leave it with Nell! Leave it with Marty. (Is it running.) Import parts. Coast Import wreckers say they have what you need but scratched, $25. When they have good ones, $35. British Importer said you could have it cut. Memory of a rattlesnake fillet in a tin, it fascinated me, a photograph, nearly subliminal, returns, I don't know more. And all I did was glance into Esther's room fast on the way downstairs. Do you still think I'm loving a planter. No or not particularly. There are days of love and interest for all of them, hatred too, it's interesting. I'm not now on the edge of romance and neither are any of the others it seems. We don't focus. I'm only telling you so you won't waste time. In a dream you and I were restoring, or more like finding a way to live in, my grandfather (Epp, the scholar and artist)'s house (that log house, you liked his wood sofa). Near there I saw the sun or moon rising in the northwest. When exhaustion comes in midafternoon I have been bitter toward you because
you've given so much of our time to being mad at me. [notebook] A sense of writing and image making as experiment details in the full world that doesn't need them but I do as a discipline to separate me from formations of less separated, worked, careful, minds, which can penetrate more easily. I work to make somewhere else, and keep somewhere else, because I don't like to be there, and have memories of many times not liking it, the posture of grumpiness. On the hill liking to tie red flags on balsams, flat needle green The angel lifted him out of darkness, hoisted him like scarlet flags. What I keep finding in artists' stories is that it's work with many mistakes, the mistakes aren't unimportant, it's not work like body making body, where it comes out perfect, it's a scatter with a few parts the mistakes and not mistakes, taken out and built into other tries. Rafferty! Where? Somewhere I was going by too fast to stop - Cam's? Or a dreamed bookcase (in my pantry). You get drunk easily. To attract into them "something which under certain conditions came" The once I peed and looked down saw a strand of white iridescent steam coming up between my legs through the curled brown hairs. Trying to form for Daphne the sense of imagining a space and using it to sense. The mystery of Rhoda's look, grey and scaly, dim, her hair in some elaborate cut, a look of one color about her head, she was smiling, smile and eyes in the alignment of other times, but without light. C. She's reading about singularities, she said the graph of the intensity is nipple-shaped, and the singularity is an inversion of an intensity that fits over it. "I'm a stranger to myself," laughs, "It wouldn't be seemly. We have our own rules. I wanted you to go away feeling fine."
and move like winds of light Many people who've wanted to stare haven't: this is your chance. Hyperion sewage plant photos!
[2 Bear found in an old house - my old house? - bear, the small bear, of yesterday, in an upstairs bedroom. It held a cup and heated it? Bear tenderness. Yesterday the black bear under a tree, I chant loud, dance. It's easy to know what to say to it. It stands up, I'm excited physically, as if afraid, but see it fearlessly. It's good looking, mild. When I wake, a shadow at the foot of the tent, the bear's big profile. I notice and turn back into sleep. Afterward I am sorry to immediately send it away, contemptuous of anyone afraid of them, did it come for me. Evening's stupid talk, a woman wrote a book about making love to a bear, a woman got raped by a bear. Penelope, Artemis, Artemis. I'm too implicated to understand their stupidity, or to be able to speak from an honest place of my own. Familiar half curiosity. "He's using his anger in a new way." Women's including talk, that I ignore. Immortality is when anyone has made enough of the private world to be able to leave the body without leaving the life. I can't remember where. ] [Not sure this goes here - says 2 June.] 5 Hip therapist, foot therapist, I'm going to phone someone about my repair, the room with the telephone is blocked, they're making a movie, two men in wheelchairs with cameras, others pushing them, is it when I tell J about it, I feel the lump on the side of my breast. Two houses, the one further back in mine, the one further forward has had what I think are other squatters. A story about a superwoman who's given a carpet cleaner, poisoned, she makes a theatre of praising and playing in it, cuts her finger, watches the blood drop in, granulate, the house blows up behind her. [Leave camp on the 6th.] [undated - Vancouver, Pender St] We meet the two men, Judy and I, I say we should be distant, they say they're paying one thousand something a year rent, when we leave we like them, a worn pretty woman comes out of an upper bunk fully pregnant, at the last moment; at our house, I see the water is up to the walls, look in the back see brown water jetting over the bank our house is straddling. Why is it standing around the house when it is running off. School? Follow a girl limping on crutches, she wants me to support her, I say I can't, my hip hurts in a cast, right, they scatter, I follow one of them (I can't now see the face), a tall man running past in a mask, Hallowe'en, a forest, the girl chased, I follow, overhear a man saying he's the principal to a woman in his arms next to a car, it ends in a thicket, a long kiss someone else but I feel it, his wife comes complaining, while he's engaged with the complaint I put my hands on her nipple and cunt? Button begins to press and pull her body sleeks with attention, there's a marvel joke, pulls back and to a play on radio bible program - a laughing Arab, a sheik, with black and white checked band around his head. A defending set against what's immediately around. Gene pool. The Cambodian starved in National Geographic. Before 5 on Saturday morning I hear music and shouts, from my bed. Is it fire, a parade, a party in the Ukrainian Hall? Out, pink light on the pink house, look into the Ukrainian Hall garden, silent. Above it on the fire escape of the Swedish Ballroom, drunk people in evening dress, a man standing across them, back to me, legs wide apart. I am lounging past in the alley, looking up. A large man in shirtsleeves is just herding them in, shutting the big door. Out of sight a clear woman's voice, "Excuse me, I have to sing my morning song." When I've come around and am passing up Hawks toward the park, two couples behind me, a woman in a dress I like, string strap, long soft skirt. They're shouting their sense of the lovely morning as banalities about how many dances they danced and when they were up so late before. The Austrian at Silver Creek who caught a garter snake, used it (rushed ahead of me when I wanted to see it) to push into the girls' faces, make them scream, then flung it into the lake to see the little head come swimming. When it reached the bank it stopped, only its head out of water, flickered its tongue. He caught it again, threw it further, its shape in the air I can't recall, but as it came onto the bank I was next to Park, slight, unshaved, quieter. He said as the snake swam forward, "It's the same movement as on land." I said, as it moved up to a rock and over, "It holds a shape and moves through it." He said, reflectively, "That's exactly it." Hillel whose small eyes, pork face, spaced teeth I winced from, when I shook his hand, the heat and strength of it, "I am very ha ppy to have meet you," rapidly, warmly. "I am happy to have meet you too." Who learned to work on the kibbutz. Henry's rosy face, shining eyes, Henry. "Why are you going?" as if it had to do with him. I didn't know. My bad moon the last chunk, hidden till late, saw it this morning from bed, you're the one making me alien. One morning's riding to work next to Henry, labouring?, I was in a fire of strength, thought I could make a lovemaking of it, bumps, jostles. Who was one the other side, one of the French girl nonentities. Two books (meaning collection), one's Cheryl's, the other PRC. Xerox books, first type, then xerox, then photographs and print. Usually with sheets sewn or pasted hingewise and enclosed in cover. [sketch] Boc. A script for DR. One's black and white and the other's color. Samesize portfolios. Easy to weed. What about gene pool. Fund is closer. Stock. Mark's long embrace, the way he place his hands wonderfully. Wren's body. Small bits in separate pools, many pools, What the existence of recessive genes is The gene floor has to be many floors but the same =
Alleles of each other. alternates, rivals for same place Gene pool, I thought, one working day, and language pool Orders of magnitude faster The meme Speed: the tune from the street, I 'had' it at once and repeated it note by note. Now it's the same, with doubt at last two. One by one listening. Now it's gone. Memes - imitate - memory - what sticks Fecund, accurately replicated, quick to replicate
Moving in information I have observed that I seem to be a servant of information, sense of obeying when I tell what I saw, or was told me. accreting. Oh could I study it through. It and information the separated. Anglo-Saxon Bauman and Scherzer Explorations in the ethnography of speaking But still, at this period, and till far later times, the knowledge of the letters and their powers was confined to certain classes only of the people .... That family which furnished priests and kings, and to both the old and young among the women. Boc beechen tablets. Bull is fierce and overhorned Still writing and trees From the lift of heaven - Walking fast, long pocketed maroon sweater in a big knit, what I saw was her long steps, and then when she was passing, after my own eyes, surprised, had fallen, her fine face and how direct her look at me, I'm sorry and curious my eyes didn't hold long enough, or did they, to say what I saw. Carried her look through the next minute, checked it, she was too beautiful for me, but in the moment, I took her image and knew she took something. Looking for the fruit shop speaking to her, liking it, is that the end, because I noticed it. Northwest library corner, C was pale quite young maybe a writer, plain, bred, but lonely. The sense of air with lighter bends playing fire surrounding. That's music. And then in the next way messages. What was the other part: the sense of not acting or being made but. I thought it about meeting her. Something else arriving together. [letter to my mom] Holiday Monday, Clearbrook Oh das Brief schreiben ist mir schwer Ja Mama wirt sich freuen das ein fremdes Kind Ja sie hat nicht elf Kinder gehabt Wie hab' ich das alles können Aber: mann kann das Oh sie hat ja das fur viel jahre ihr Lehrer Es geht ihr gut, der Jung ist fein blos ich wurde das nicht können Ich wahr drei und fierzig und dank am Herman Ich wahr so froh das das der letzte wahr bos das Brot und Russland, oh dan haben wir es doch sehr gut Was ist dies Ah! (rustling plastic) (Na, was war das?) Ein stück Pfankuchen (laughter) Man weis nicht woe es her kompt aber es ist auf ein mal da Na, kochen die gelben Rüben? Ja! Sollen wir bischen wasser bei giesen? Dan roll ich die zusammen und vergess davon, und war die schon ein bischen green Wish I could write faster, have thought to learn shorthand. Und der Mr Muscle, was ist das? Ich hab' die niemals gehabt, Mr Muscle. Barbe-cue too, na ja. Haud wie die fe-yetch ... Came yesterday on the way by, from Bella Coola where we were a few weeks planting. She hinted she'd like her kitchen wall washed, we found rags and a bucket and nearly didn't find soap, used the Sunlight in the end. Oma get lost. She did, went and sat in the living room, mischievous smile. She was telling me not to fall off the table. Opa worked in the garden till it was over. They don't know it yet but this wall washing was in place of coming to their diamond anniversary ritual. Last night I took Gma out in her wheelchair, wanting to look at the twilight and the gardens, but I couldn't stop her telling me who lived in all the houses, Da wahr mal eine witwe aber jetst weis ich nicht mehr wer da . We went to Ben Braun's and the old man jerked, twitched, like a jester, jumping to put records on for me, I felt his disease revealed him. O and O are well, thinner, I like Opa's face, he's full of laughter, Oma is tedious when she tells her obsessions, but we have fun. Ich bin gopoost Du must verstehen, wir sind jetst Kinder. Something real and funny in my connection with them though I know they betray it into piety the moment they speak to one of their own kind. Opa's garden's in lovely order. Have thought of you in the last time, didn't know it was Mother's Day but around then, I was cooking for the crew, and thanked you for teaching me to bake. Piecrust flowing out across the table perfectly elastic when I rolled it! V good bread. You can write, if you want, c/o 820A. I know and am sorry the German's badly spelt. Planting is physically v difficult, sometimes excruciating, but I am liking the difficulty. There's about another month of it - I'm likely to see you end of June. Oma really didn't want me to tell you about the pancake. Opa said, "I'll give you a little advice. Sag niemand was du tun wilst." June 10 I gave Sandy money wrote it out looking at my handwriting finding it illegible uncharacteristic. Deliverance. Sixteen. Ellie Epp. She'd asked for twelve to go to a movie, hugged me lovingly with her fur coat arm. Companied by my shining arms, their clear outline. Paul's dream that following a tall silver-haired man I walked without limping. Thought first Krishnamurti, and today because I'd thought of his Arabic, Robin.
sound can come when sound's possible [further on in the book recipes for lasagna, lemon pie, peanut butter cookies, bean soup, vegetable curry, chile, macaroni cheese]
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