| up north 5 part 3 - 1980 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
5 September 1979 To get the wood out of the axe head, use the food grinder, some nails. The chisel stuck, pour kerosene and start a fire. Rusted old axe head with new handle stuck in it. Go buy a hammer. M stays to look at the new slides and knows what she likes. Immediately the story, "He's so vulnerable! And I get tired of the burden of it." The first slide in their story of the Europe trip, one of those beautiful ones of Roy and Luke looking at me. The second a silly Desser of me. Go through in a hurry looking for us. On a horse, big arms, bare foot along his leg, distinguished European children. My forgotten photographs quite happy. "And is that mine?" Love pictures. Painting book. What was cubism? Doesn't say. Bonnard, Picasso's crayons and confidence. Rchard Mulcaster Elementarie 1582 written pictures that motion and light destroy the materiality of bodies there's a man cut in two by a window devotion to something more inward than the self suddenly reverted to a most precise and subtle realism which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic to abandon myself to this freedom without fear of self deception receiving all and giving all in endless and engrossing interchange a sea ringed about with visions
Ist dass.
7 Sore is it back muscles or kidneys. Heavy farting. Tape recorder, tape hiss, static. Clean heads. Clean recorder. Sort materials.
Not right with the machines, the way I forgot how to focus the camera. Is the microphone warped. One song the voice knew exactly how to sing. Could I be a singer? Only that one song. My father was a fancyman / and I'll be fancy too / we fancied that the moon we-ent down / We fa-an-cied she was new / I never will marry / I'll be no man's wife / I expect to live single / All the days of my life. Luke's daycare matron, Joe Comerford's was it Evanna, Burghley Road. [undated letter] Name you gave: sheen. Is it HD at the window and her 5 babies in batting in the warming closet. The way the smoke is tumbling between the blades. Its approach toward the window where I am. It is crawling toward the garden through the grass. The brome grass is in flower. The air is delicious. Helmer's truck. Smell of the barrel stove's first heating. Clear yellow moon in the clean half pointing northwest. Coming back to objects some of them yours. It feels that you should be greeting them in this way sometime. The pleasure of coming into the house and seeing them undisturbed in front room and pantry. Blue butter crock. Tea strainer lid. Bamboo tray. Broom. Mirror. Plaid jackets. Handleless stonewear cup. Tablecloth. Footstool with candle and matches. - Sunday night
Dawn woke me three times, the third was by visibly strengthening light on the side of the house. Vital. Strength of the blue shadows. Willow and carragana. Lens found a complex house deep in grass, shadow thrown on the roof. [Early morning photos: rainbow house - house closer - poppies - lettuce - foxface]
- His primary sense of responsibility towards his work did not cut him off from his fellows, as he had thought. It engaged him with them absolutely. It was a mistake to sacrifice any other obligation to it What she's able to remind me, the discomfort of not moving correctly in social. The discomfort with people, that I am not engaging well, knowing the way I am with someone is wrong. With mardy staring at her face wondering how it comes to have that grey padding, looking at her body to see if it's fine, it is. The children, any wrong turn their body's taking. Acid's directness. Directness. Directness.
10 Wednesday Trying to film a shadow of a nettle, wind moving it on / / / / / degrees of porch rail slats, and the moment when the green tip itself showed! Suspense and marvel. Camera ran down immediately although battery had showed charge. Don't understand. Perhaps it doesn't hold charge. M with nice red and green costume, marrow pickles, anxious about her folks' move. Bernice Alstad Penson, met in the Valhalla Co-op store, padded body, green blue eyes, "wearing eyes to match your earrings," pink lipstick I recalled. She had to bring out the phrase, "So what are you doing to keep busy?" Staring, but her eyes and face exaggerating escape. J's well-written letters. East place hazy air, combine. I was, seemed to be frightened, wanted to leave, go home. Turned back to the hill, color, red rose bushes, blue and white sky, nice, but what is the fright. Resistance, what is resistance. I know that hurry - but why. The room, pink, yellow, white, dark blue table. Evening yoga very steady. -
Not fast enough to the camera. Car labours on mud, I drive competently, it's alert but not mental, the sun is gone, when it comes back it has moved too far, I miss my chance by having accidentally sent the camera to reverse. Shikasta straight through. Reading in relation to my experience of her other writing, 'own life.' At first suspicious, she's writing about her old age. She's interesting when she gets to the Sherbans, then she's in her best book again, The four-gated city. Go to phone J thinking it's Friday, a day spent between 'today' and tomorrow night. Yoga less steady and strong than yesterday. Thinking of the separation from her, it isn't fright, it's considering whether I am weaning us. She'll always be vulnerable to flattery and I'll always be considering whether I should be alone. But it's Cheryl again, I don't think her person, but my sense of what she was to me (as in Lessing). -
12 Friday It was dark, soggy this morning, cold. Dreamspeaker, and the other story. Two letters make me sad. The muddy road with yellow leaves scattered clean across it. Look at myself, ugly and can change to another size if my chin goes slightly forward, Cut the back of my hair, fine, oily. It's minimal hair now, not well cut. Go to phone. "Are you aware that I'm afraid every time I phone you?" What I notice about how she won't be interested in me and I must be interested in her. (Try to be angry but am delighted thinking of seeing her in Clearbrook.) Come home confused. Try yoga. Confused, weak, absent and not wanting to, that is, having no energy in my will. Is it her confusion. "The way I'm close to Esther." Feel I must make a strong sudden turn because the confusion is penetrating. What does it mean that I must contain her now. -
The air of Rose garden, Dispossessed and her, the spiritual midwife, responsibility, When they mated it was a sacrament used consciously and exactly to adjust, fuel, add to, lessen, powers and currents. What they ate, wore, was the same. everyone very alert, quick, getting every point, eye contact saying volumes where words did not when we were actually talking the two levels were unmistakable - clear, so easy to read it was as if we all suddenly had been taught another language [Lessing somewhere] The long account of the hearing, its energies. It meant the child's soul was still in touch with the spirit world. She's so hungry for the spirit she married a man with a funny eye. You find your own song, it's inside you and when you find it everyone listens and they know who you are. Fear attracts the bad spirits. [probably Cam Hubert - Anne Cameron - Dreamspeaker]
To knowingly choose to travel from one plane of reality to another is a choice all children of the free ones have. Mrs Crow. For the one who fell to earth, delivering a soul. Death, the fourth, the constant companion who made it complete, rose back to the heavens on the wings of a raven. Putting the baby in seawater Separate day to day from sacred Then I knew, because it can be done. Being eaten by not knowing. The excitement is chest, breasts. They have you grabbed. The most complete form of anything is the circle. Old Woman is of and for the spirit and reality of women It is to be so much in tune with your life as a whole that every moment that comes is untroubled and full of interest. We suffered complete change the tie between a person and a place, Alia, or whatever is necessary to make her her real self 13 Dark sky and then clearing for two rolls 1. Fading out and in, slight movement, the fading and coming back of the shadow was the delicate felt. 2. Ran back out, sun strong, whole roll strong contrast and strong movement but not the tip of itself - that best appearance won't be there. Tape recorder bust, static. For a while excited, moving fast, painted upstairs blackboard, regret the lovely wall. Made portfolio envelopes on yellow floor. Lapsed into Islandia. Meant not to, it's vice. Hunting the romance and marriage. So must I have it. A thump on the upstairs window, something falling. In the garden leaves a small bird. Will it revive. Thought I felt the body warming. Its beautiful weave, it was still soft. Haunted by feeling my time lost without knowing what to do. - Hegel Bach heroes, company, exercise. Kawabata, Richardson, can't tell if those are heroes. To be led to the confusion and solve it. Lives: alright, this one, of origin. Last night in bed writhing about not knowing what to do. Can I just win understanding about that. K: don't remember. DR: describe exactly. T: do what's true at that moment. X: be intelligently in overview. Where to situate. I'm aware my trying to think is inefficient, because it has in it so many views. What's a view. It's an outside standing. What do I want. I want to be simply myself. That's the heroes, simply themselves because they know. Whether to try to win, instances, Olivia. The answer: does it matter if I win. It did. Can I leave it now. It's that I don't know how it works, now. The reply is always go on from here. There's always here. How to keep it straight, struggle for overview, Roy not having overview, having the force and charm of presence. I don't want to give up memory. I am confused in theory. It's better if I look beautiful but I am going for that in the hardest way. Blue white and silver. Dressing to be in different ways. I'm thinking rethinking always starting again with what should be background. No why should it. This is how it goes on. Meantime I'm in a brown black wool sweater not quite right and work pants comfortable but a wrong color. Cold feet. A garbled person. Feeling I must come to a moment of clearing and from then on know everything. Tearing staying far from any decisions. Loving making and not knowing what making is for. It is 5 of the moon. Doing other people's work, chaotic unfinished forms. The picture of Jamila's house on a corner in Strathcona, easy to run in off the sidewalk. Shd it be my house. Owned. Vancouver city. That's T C R J D. Luke. Universities. Writing. Pictures. Disrupted. Passion being acted on. Suffering. Person. "Considered as self substance" but standing under what. He described the Phenomenology as his voyage of discovery. Philosopher. Been glad to say I was one. It doesn't need me to say it, on the windowsill the glass jar with water and green stems, orange green blue purple, white poppies, white poppies rumpled from their packing, reflected showing the yellow centre. Nasturtium's particular orange. How to say intensity among the green, cornflower blue, the small purple pansies almost violets so strongly scented it comes to me across the room. The scent of nasturtiums. My stronger sense of smell, more present sense of smell. The paint smell in this room is like greasy poison molecules, dirty. The scent of flowers is unquestionable goodness. Weather still coming from the north but faster now. Efficiency.
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Dark, woke worried for Luke. Before alarm, assembled things in the two pillow cases, tied with string, a garbage bag, frightened and pushed. Wet sky. Radio into Hythe, Conally's light. My scarf, Rudy's blue shirt, tied crooked, I'm sad and bizarre. Someone to Fort St John corner, there the thin cold boy. A truck, unbalanced wheel, galloping, the boy nodding asleep over the gearshift, the man smiling dismayingly. To Chetwynd. The heaviness of the parcel, take it to the bus. The hunter, his green. I take off the scarf. Paying my way with talk, inward dislike. He didn't see an animal. In the bush two weeks, deaming of murder and rape, "If you were drunk it would be a different story." The twists of the job. To Prince George, sweating through, the young chef. Easily leaning back talking about cooking. His fanbelt breaks. The old man. Chisholm on the mailbox. The optometrist. Doesn't know what I want to know about eye dominance. The boy who lifted me through Williams Lake to the Bilnor. Jean's tomatoes and front porch, her friend, and the sight of Jean coming in. 19 The thin man injured on the railway, makes stained glass. To 100 Mile House, grass clearings, yellow aspen. Up the hill to the Lone Butte Road. The truck, smelling as I go by. Climbing to a door higher than my head, quilted interior, the cowboy. He's bitter, young guys these days. To the Cache Creek junction. The sheep who said "Ba! Ba!" like a man as the trailor turned. Cache Creek slope. The French Canadian man in a ponytail and the surprise of her gap tooth blue eyed smile. She speaks to me through the mirror. Apple pickers. Spence's Bridge. The yellow car, an intelligent man, no, a paraplegic. Will he be able to talk about. No, only about him. Malice and booze on the paraplegic floor, "and quadriplegics and some polios". Richmond, the other side of Oak St. Bus. City people. Her car! The basement's dark. Ezra's crying. I take off my scarf. Panic because of the imperfect welcome. Noodle soup and finally something hot to drink and sad crying. 20 Atlantic Street. Not my kind of house. Garden large green spread things. Paul and getting miserable. Laundromat. Have clothes of my own again. Walking toward something. Zoe says come in but I'm too shy. She's good on the cello and Don lives there too. Diana welcomes. It's unclear. "I've been in a rage all day about your hair. I hate the stubble on the back of your neck." "If you want her to come out you bring her out, it's yours." 21 I don't know what it is about tits that's so magical. Hand on the cool [sketch] a hand breadth stripe down to the [sketch] so intense developing sensation grows out from it into the pelvic cavity, the body begins to shake and sob. I'm watching it gladly and watch it tell me what I'd been dying of. It leaves me arms stretched sideways, she thanks it too. Am I going to see Cheryl.
On the beach moving the flashlight slowly right to left so the light caused white rocks to be seen under the water, with movement in front of them, sweeping them without stopping - the pleasure passed steadily over - behind the movement leaves itself. 22 Missing three exits because of the magazine idea. Looking at Anne. Sleeping in the basement room we're lost into hoping it's like yesterday. 23 Tuesday [I am asked to go to help my grandmother pack up her house.] Maryanne's panicked voice. Crashing Peter's car door. Roseanne popular at Bible school. [J] comes for me. The light beyond edges of the square glass shade, on the beautiful light blue ceiling. My straight-backed black-haired friend. 24 Opa's twinkle, "Five cents und a kiss." [ie pay for help moving them] Diana's small jeans and reshaped face. 25 [Shot list:
- and that fatigue produced by my artificiality Looking at the Dollar Brand section in the record store. Something they had on made my legs and soles shift intelligently happily. It's been wrong music for dancing. The frame with just a flush of intense pale color. The suspense and joy of the wheatfield and vapour field, being in the wind's path. A thick strong brown slightly limping body, thick neck. Why is it. 26 Lying on the ground see treetops dancing in the shape of persons on a line at treetop level. See them in an abstracted way that shifts to 'seeing' the tree, tall tree, begin to fall. She was in the bright yellow light laughing. Why do I feel so much myself. I was in the ethereal. The veiled woman on the wall. "I think you shocked him showing him your muscle." I realized she was starving. Thank you Jone Pane. 27 In bed till 3. Maimoona's uncomfortable parents, television Stepford Wives. 28 Sunday Them, suffers, if it isn't worth their lives, art is wrong spending time. needs perfect concentration, you have to refuse so much and so much intrudes itself upon you that you do not want, it is exhausting work. one having something coming out of him Is there something wrong with this: trying to make is the exercise that brings closest to however what is, is made. Fighting about Anna. Library. On the street noodles at Phoenix. Concert. Tired. 29 [money calculations] Talk about Stein, true and false lines, 'nature.' 30 Cheryl 1st October Look at her face sleeping. We take a half hour more. She makes breakfast, I pack the box. She asks what I have in the bag. She drives me to the top of the hill and walks me to the corner. Then she goes, saying nothing. Small head in the small car crosses the road. "If I don't get a ride I'll come home." "Yes, then we can go see Sandy and Robin and you can try again tomorrow." [Hitchhike to the Okanagan to look for apple-picking work.] The man with linen in the back seat to Langley, happy through the green. The history teacher to Abbotsford. Mt Baker in the haze. The pretty small siding salesman to Chilliwack. A long time stared at. The blue Kharman-Ghia I called to stop. A man with blue marks on his cheeks, a red star on his forehead, big face. The other man looks like an artist, doesn't speak. The big-faced man, moccasin on the gas pedal, talking madly. You know. A dope burn-out. The blue tattoos are tears. To Hope, a glass of milk and part of an O Henry at the roadside. With the mining man in a 4x4. We talk when it comes, like people who know each other. Long holdup. He gets out, talks animatedly to the man from the car behind. Through Princeton. A van, the dog has to get off the seat. Glasses, excited man in a mining venture, his voice, to Penticton, you look for nuggets and can sell them as jewelry gold for $2000 an ounce under the counter, 30 thousand in two months. A turned-on man. Edge of Penticton the bridge, it's getting dark, cars with headlights. A van, Altamoni, not that but like it, Plastering. Truck with two flats of grapes. Silvio. We're driving through lovely dusk hills like Europe, California, he speaks to me in 5 languages, I reply in them all. Where are we. Parcours of service stations, frontage stores, white-lit. He turns up a sudden hill. There, up that drive, they may be able to tell me who needs pickers. Apples on trees, a rich house. If nobody's home, at this stop sign go down he hill. The dog jumps barking out of a doghouse. The path alongside the trees, eating an apple, thinking whether to sleep in the orchard, imagine the morning meeting, my sleeping bag too thin. Lost on the hillside, the road is dark, headlights blinding. That house, I'm instructed to go down and knock, ring at the door under the carport. Dogs yap inside, no one comes. There is a good thick down sleeping bag there, was it for me. But I don't take it (still think of it today). Unusually difficult proceeding. The service station young boys tell me names. I phone, without luck. The police constable. "You can't think of anything?" "Not a thing." Speaking to everyone very easy but I notice - little skips, twice, once a word left out, once the s at the end - is it writing. Middle-aged woman with blue postbag and orange plastic bedroll back, standing in the dark end of the service station without a clue. Back to the orchard? The motel across the way will be seven dollars at least. Small wood shack motel. (A car?) Go across the road to it, look around. The U-Haul truck. Hand on the door. Press. It opens. A sign over the windshield. Traffic going by. They can see me from the service station if they look. Head up arranging the sleeping bag, put on underwear, the insulite over, jacket over the upper sleeping bag. It has to close right over the head. And headscarf. Will it be too cold. You saw me to the road without saying goodbye or asking if I needed money. I don't want to leave this little bone. Self surprises. Have to pee, can I do it in a plastic bag and throw it out. None small enough. Boots and climb down not slamming the door. In the shadow of the tire hot pee shoots out, pantleg a little wetted. Peaceful back in the sleeping bag, insulite arranged under the steering wheel to hold down its curl, jacket over the chest, headscarf on, bedroll bag with towel and plastic in it, under my head. The cold shudder comes again, I notice it is a transition to a warmer body. The cold shiver, it's an inner shivering as if the cold is being let in two inches deep all over the body. I see it as [sketch] small wavy lines penetrating. [Am writing this on an orchard hillside where I have been hired next day.] Hello fire combed through the fire ring bars, little room with a writing light the large apple bin on its side facing the heat, candle on the tipped-over metal pail, red towel hanging drying. The publishing's coming. Oh will we be able to go on? Touching and learning how it can be. - Woke, noticed I was hot, and the highway quiet and dark. Woke again in daylight looking at the dash where I could read instructions to renters. Kept still until I could look up and see sunlight. The windows steamed over, sign had kept me private, taking off underwear, rolling the sleeping bag and packing up the insulite in its bag. Look toward the house and back toward the motel, no one. She emerges, just before eight by the service station clock. On the corner take off sweater, put on headscarf. My arm's weak, tires. I put it down, flex it. Cars, many, in a hurry. A woman in a van is beckoning. Oh clear English voice, English face, I love to see her, grey eyes wide, clearspeaking lipstick mouth. "We have a son who's a bit of a traveler. He's in Fort Saint John writing a novel." "Is he a good writer?" He's only shown us small sections of it but what we've seen is good. He'll phone and say, 'I've come in on the bus, I'm at the foot of Boucherie Road'" (in the service station Bushery), "then he'll be home for four months tapping away all day. Then he'll say, 'I'm off, I'm getting stale.' He went to Vancouver to get a job as a mechanic but there weren't any jobs for mechanics. There was a job for a taxi driver so he thought he'd drive taxi for a while. He keeps to himself, he's the kind you have to be careful with." I put my head out of this cabin to see the airplane, a blue and two white lights cross under Casseopia. There's Perseus' curve. The lights below shake in heated air. Fire flows evenly in the direction of downhill. When it was dark I saw another fire under a tree on the opposite slope. Did Lawrence die of pain. Coming here after work, able to make tea, enough milk, drink it from the milk carton. Heating water in a pail. The beautiful coloring up of the sky, that evenness. Enough for the filter? And to fix the tape recorder. Oh my car - Mushrooms in butter. [shot list] Eating fingernails over these. 2 Black, [sketch of new moon] and planet. Turning again only slightly cold. The color's deep and then fades. I make the fire, set up my room. See first the shadows of air wavng behind my shoulder on the bin wall, look from it to know the top of the sun is over the hill. (At the end of Friday saw the last of it down behnd the hill at William's Lake.) Mushrooms and eggs, tea, then peel two solid red delicious, solid, cold, wet, cut them, break them in pieces to cook while sitting in the shelter reading the vague biography of the medium. Happy. It's when standing at the woodbox that I decide to leave without more money, today. Small light bundle, cooking pots and pails, plastic, left in the bin. Down the hill on the orchard road, stop at the toilet, lighten myself. Old man in a small truck. I'm thinking he'll go on to the bus depot for the sake of gratitude, when he says "Changed my mind." "Another little girl raped and beaten at the roadside." My box isn't good. The older man says it just came in, as if its arriving here means it can be good enough to leave. The young man, again, says it's not a good idea to send personal goods collect, "Can you prepay it?" "I easily can but it'd mean I'd have about sixty cents to go 800 miles." The older man overhearing says "Let it go collect." Walk out to the first corner. Baby-face boy in a car with dirty fur on the roof, a rusted interstice. "I know what it's like to hitch-hike." Wants to tell me he's going to hitch-hike around the world, "It'll take me three or four years." To Pike's corner, "That's a good place." There it's the four wheel drive van, a dog and things to be put in the back, first sense of the face turned back: a possible man, mouth, blond hair, glasses. Wayne. Sensitive. Opening the door, a Hamm, a trained person. What's it like. Outside, the valley around a lake, haze, apple trees, interest of houses, the small mountain shape of the hills. Those cliffs at Kamloops, sage, dim orange, threat lines across sand, white piles split down from the mountain. The slope highway up. Concerned man stupidly repeating "Something must have happened to her." The yellow car. Streaking. He opens a beer that spills down his crotch. "Mushrooms, you could get three thousand dollars a pound for them in Alberta." His beautiful square white teeth in the mirror. "Every detail was clear. Just enjoy the stone." His damp flowering heads. "I'm looking for a microwave to dry them. I didn't come down until next morning." Driving seven years without a license. To Cache Creek. The bearded hitchhiker with a hat. "You didn't save me any." What was the hesitating and ruthlessness. Question about pleasure in language. Bloom of plankton. What if language was made to be exact. " ... sunlight and food, and as these come from opposite directions - above and beneath - there are only limited levels of the sea where dinoflagellates will find enough of both." - A tumbler. - The way it was on his first jump. The girl who lost her balance, he pried her hands off. She fell screaming. "Ready, left leg up, go. I forgot to spread, went down head first. I looked back into the plane and could see a little whirlwind on the floor, it was so clear I could see every particle." " I thought I'd like to go to Greece. Rome, that's in Greece, so I bought a ticket to Rome." -
Correcting the body Light is the darkest shadow of the sky.
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