| the golden west volume 1 part 4 - 1994 november-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
7th November The woman will die, the man she loves, the smell of his hair, his face asleep, his body warm with fur and gathered close, his hands, his voice, his eyes. I'm crying. The woman dies at the sill of the underworld of doing. The grey shades, the machines, the abstract, untouch. Plastic and metal, circuits and cables. It is the mind made visible as these machines. The machines are sculptures. They express a conception of mind that is painful. The mystic is an electrical engineer, the writer is an electrician carefully rewiring. 11th Remembrance Day I remembered, yesterday. The way it happens. Many days I don't remember him. I can't summon his face. Yesterday I said to the system, Will he come back to me? It said yes. I dropped into centre. It seemed. What is the sensation. I guess center means heart. Something stood up in the centre of my heart: yes that's what I am. It is like snapping into place in a liveness. I'd care. It is like suddenly seeing that I had been in despair and took it as normal. I have days in my work saying it's lucky I lost him, I couldn't be living this life that suits me, I couldn't have these mornings learning in my bed, the sort of time I can come into by the third day on my own. That is true. I love the working balance my brain can find. I love my brain. So interesting a companion. There is an agony near that. This cut, that I love my own company better than his, and yet his company, even imagined, brings me to a self more real than the exquisite self I've made for me to love. What conversation could I have, better than this one? Joyce talked as if I'd given up on my body because it was sore and had caused me to be thrown away. It is bad language to say so. What I give up is other people - I don't give up their bodies, I don't give up my body. I give up my intelligence of the selves of other people. Do I give up the self of my body? Maybe that. Yes maybe that, because what came with him, with you, was the self of a body. I mean the self of a life of a body, not the self of a moment of the body. Is it that? Probably it is not that the self of the body has an interrupted life, only that it does not have a conscious life. Oh beautiful Euridice. Are you beautiful? I know what kind of beautiful you are. Virginia called you the soul and fished you up out of the water. Which brings me back. My part-time fisherman. You landed me but you threw me back. ~ The video photos last week - that section in the wild area tape where the camera did something ecstatic. I put these little prints up on the workroom wall and they are what I have been looking for for twenty years - look at them - landscapes made of the light in the dark of sensation in the body - it is Ovid - it's Turner - there is the boatman's crossing in a fiery mist - video flares and smudges - there's a marsh - there's the descent of a god - there are flowers underground - there are springing ghosts of green light - there is my starling iridescent black.
It is the familiar dithering in excitement - I have brought this sort of seeing further, there'll be a film - it will have words from more than one register - mythology will be there in no too-easy way - my seer - I will make - what do I know - I begin with that video - I try the waterpipe angels - I work with detail of the waterpipe sound - make it airier, breaths floating in a dark - other voices speak some of the lines - This kind of state is footless, flaps, and yet I think it is a form of working.
One is the underworld inside the world, beside it. One is the underworld away, an away-world, the world away from natural love and pleasure. It is the mind made visible as these machines. ~ Mathematical visualization. Most computer graphics are that. What it is about animation is that it makes explicit many things in perception that have been implicit. We unpack what's seen in moments of seeing. We learn to see our seeing. We become intelligent about its intelligence. What follows? We can think of it as training: now any perceiving is more interesting to see. But further than this, since it is perception that is seeing, the perception we are seeing will be seeing more. When I see my perception of this field of grass, when I see it seen, I can intend it differently, I can change its color. First see the eye said Goethe. Mathematical visualization proper. There is a mathematical suggestion: X1=x2+c. And then a computational procedure. I know something about this perceiving I usually don't know: I know it at a different level - could I say - I know a name for it. More than that, I have integrated it into a geometric language so that I know its relations to other shapes in motion. Pixelated motion generators. Equations are. Will we think of equations differently? We could: they would become linguistic the way nouns and verbs are, they would be names of shapes of processes. I see that now. I was so early I thought I should learn Spanish. Mathematical visualization is for learning a lexicon which is not iconographic or alphabetic but coordinate. I will only ever speak it very badly, but I am better than most at knowing the world it was made to name. And this: we learn the names of shapes of change we can see or hear, and then we have perceptualizations for shapes of change in any coordinate space. In Trapline the twisting rotating caustic: that is a graph on a mesh continuously deformed. Could some dialect of mathematician look at it seeing an evolving equation - I mean an equation rapidly stretching and shrinking into a series of other equations? Mathematical visualizations spell something out. Images like the revolving caustic spell something out. We develop intuition we don't know of what - something. Intuition is something I keep trying to extricate - what is it I'm feeling knowledge of. Perception more and more will be explicated. It was intuitive. It sort of saw and didn't see its seeing. Intuition is a kind of seeing. I mean it perceives darkly. As if with the sense of touch, and maybe it is brain structure perceiving itself. It sighed yes. When I say this, when I think this, I am as if breathless with the abundance of life. There is so much new that I must be clear and simple in the old, so none of the intermediate will hold me. That is naming something I haven't named before. 12 Calabria, Saturday morning, mid-November. One of the responsibilities I keep running into is the need for an undualist un-male-rupture language. That's a job in philosophy. Molecular conformations: thousands of atomic points, their attractive and repulsive properties interacting, determine how an extended chain will conform into a stable structure with minimized potential energy. Is this metaphoric or transparent-intuitive? Is 'transparent' a good description? I see the structures as shapes of light in spaces of darkness, and then awareness of the nature of the shape would be proprioceptive at a finer scale than we consider. I have been saying intuition is proprioceptive: my image is that the structure of light in the brain knows its own shape as I know where my limbs are. I, as structure of light in the brain, know where my limbs are and I know the shape of light that is (short for) knowing where my limbs are. Is the nervous system metonymic that way? What if a baby's whole nerve net, the whole of the body, is on, from conception. What if later less of the body is on - (shifted into notebook) 15 In the cafeteria at school looking at people with displeasure. People are too visible now. Look at the way she is hunching in the presence of two very mediocre male faculty. Over there is a moment of animation. A boy in the arts, judging from his purple sneakers, talking to a woman in very good work boots. A bulky East Indian woman with a powerful coarse face, trying to speak like a co-ed to her co-ed friend. There's a lesbian mother in women's studies who is leaning on the counter with an easy frame that her femme companion, who stands as if she has on high heels although she doesn't, hasn't got. The room is full of C students who are C students only because the university needs the money. I know a lot about the blurs in their heads. They've formed themselves as big clumpy structures that cannot learn a distinction they haven't already got. Free will means they can brush their teeth or not, determinism means their parents made them go to university. We are in a cloud today. Whiteness begins at the window and by the first alder edge is thick as paper: soft and pulpy. ~ Norman is lecturing. I will tell stories about my kids. CBC shoots a news item on Read Island. A woman who takes her kids to school in a speedboat talks about natural wonders she sees on the trip, whales and eagles etc. The interviewer points a mic at Rowen. "What's the best thing you've seen out here?" "The Simpsons' Hallowe'en special" he says. Interviewer cracks up. Luke is in a yogurt bar with Jen and Danny. They have an ice cream fight. The manager is laughing. Luke says to her, Hey do you want to go for dinner sometime? Sure, she says. He gives her his phone number. (She phones him. They go to an Italian place. She is a farm girl from Red Deer. Her name is Charmaine. His eyes blur when he talks about her.) What else. Some gossip. I forgot a concert Louie had bought tickets for. She went and got Ja-min instead. They sat with Jamila. Jam wanted to know how she had met him. Louie said, Ellie phoned me and said there was a beautiful man at the garden she thought I might like. Jam seemed dumbfounded. (Louie explained that if somebody introduced a beautiful man to Ellie she would think it was a gift. But she is misreading Jam's astonishment. Jam is astonished that I am being this wicked and this generous in the same act. It makes me smarter than she thought.) 16 Five o'clock. I've been awake since three. Here I am - that's how it feels. Radio music. I heard a gust of wind hit the west window and then heard it arrive in the tree outside the east window. I am happy. Making a second cup of tea. I was reading earlier in this book. Is there more than one kind of pleasure in that? Pleasure in the fit of my language. I have always had that. Pleasure it brings back. But something else - pleasure imagining it will be read. That is suspect. Is it? What if I knew it would die with me? Would I make myself a public writer? It has been a gamble, dangerous. If this is finally my writing it may be writing that has never had to learn to write. Or it may be writing written in the best way. Or writing written in the best way and spilled into space without ever having passed through other people. I mean dying the short way. If a private public writer is what I want to be I would have to do something in some other area that made me famous. People read even Virginia looking to be part of a famous life. But not Dorothy - people read Dorothy to be part of a large-enough life. 18 Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, then the CISR talk [Center for Image and Sound Research]. Then one week, with teaching and marking, to both the presentation at school and the Van East opening. Then the month of December for a paper for Phil. 19 I want to say I miss my husband. I miss my husband. It is a blank in the space on my right. It isn't Ken I miss, it's someone I don't know yet. Now what. I am afraid to think I could do something real with the next moment. The furnace comes on. I am nowhere except sad. Nothing is happening. That was where my life was and I am out of it, I am not with it, I'm not going on with it. The wind died. It's not worth saying. ~ Oh what is it, I'm really in pain but it's the dumb kind, trapped under the diaphragm. I woke at five and sat sore and slow trying to find something and unable. Went back to sleep. I was cold. It is raining with the sound of a machine. Dark silver winter. That is alright. But these days the spasm at the solar has been constant. It is a brightness, a kind of density of brightness, like a metal. Like chrome. Why is it unpleasant. Because it is frozen. It is a contraction. I'm at a loss. Which loss is it. Why won't this one tell me what it is? Louie's book couldn't find me for a long time, and when it did it couldn't keep me there. I burst into tears about my body's life - I said that work refers to it, but it is not the body's life. I can feed the body fantasies, I have learned to keep it quiet. I wanted to give it what it wants, I really tried, but I couldn't, and now I don't know what to do. [Here are notes from I don't know what journal volume recopied into this one.]
I am with my group of people seeing another group of people across the road. I was leading my group actively for a while but I haven't been doing anything lately. Those people have a bouquet of flowers the height of a tree. What are they doing with it. A giant baby's-breath, dried, is what it looks like. Are they bulldozing dead stumps onto our beach? We'd better check. I leave my plastic penis behind a fallen tree, maybe - behind something. I toss it on the ground and go with my group inland to a place with loose earth up in a heap with a dimple in it near the top. It's gritty orangey stuff. This is where - something. I'm trying to understand. Is there a hot spring? Is it a duck who floats in a puddle? We see a glass door at the top of the hill. There is a man trying to get it open but it is locked. We watch him. He hasn't seen us yet because the door is opaque where his head is. I am confronting him. He is a tall man with a red nose, belligerent and obtuse. He is as if challenging my right to be what I am. I stand my ground the way I sometimes can, by being more immediate than he is. I grab his nose and give it a squeeze. He says somebody must like me, for me to be where I am. He means Dirk must be behind my confidence. We are walking in the direction I want to go. I put my hand on his belly. "You're hard." I give the head of his hard-on a disrespectful squeeze. "Up to the belly" he says (something like that), meaning, Pretty big, huh. "Partway," I say. It was 4:30 when I woke from this dream. I wake vaguely, very sore at the solar. It is windy, there is moonlight. A star very bright in clean air. No milk for tea. I'll turn the light off again. I think this is true: I haven't been aware of where I am. I've been teaching blindly, partly blindly, and have not been taking account of what CISR is. - Early afternoon I began to work, I could work. I don't know about CISR but I noticed a few things for the whole work. The relations are clearer. I have these sections:
The lists of prosodic - do I really like that word? - elements moves me always. They are discoveries accumulated in years when I was less academic than now, and they are poetic discoveries not theoretical, very beautiful and tacit. Helpful to this now. I was a long way into my own so tactile and private mind. Her gifts. Long latitudinal creation maybe. How much of it will I be able to make. 21st, evening I have tomorrow until three. What do I want to say to people who know engineering, software, computer graphics. I want to say it's a way of learning about what art is, what it knows, what it tries to know, what its processes are for. Along with art, what seeing is and what dreaming is. I want them to help me make images I've been years wanting to make, that are grainy, have geometry, have just shells or hints of figures, that are made the way I imagine matter is made, space grain and motion, primal material, so primal that making is shown, is seen, is said, is known, besides felt. I want the images I make to be intuitions of structures that are homologous - I want to say - right up and down the spinal column, thru the worlds, thru the levels of scale. I want them to help me know and say what intuition is, how to understand dreaming, its capability and wiseness, and also to unify so many kinds of description. 22nd Martin offering granular synthesis on Macintosh; a choreographer called Lisa has equations for motion, particle dynamics; somebody Pettigrew of the neighbourhood wants to talk; a large man with an Irish East Indian accent doesn't like it at all, doesn't like anything about it, says do I know Moly-Nagy. 28 of the 40 handouts went home with the people. 26 Saturday morning. I'm supposed to write things for the [Van East] show. Trying to start, I am running into a screaming exasperation. I don't want to do it. I want nothing to do with it. Why. ~ Now it's hours later. I still don't know. I feel crazy. Reading newspapers, stuffing my mouth. As I arrived at Joanne's to pick clippings, Sylvia was stepping out of the front door. A hard look. But that was only a blip of collective unconscious, implications all unknown. What is it now. Like a dissociation. I work so hard. I have been keeping up with such large extensions of my way. Ordinary things for some: teaching, speaking to strangers, sticking it out with Louie, learning Unix, being in a show, having money in the bank. Those are the hard things. The whole history of the philosophy of imagining, that is the easy thing and if I go there now I will be able to see through almost anything. I'll be happy and go till I fade four hours from now. Today my system said: you are addicted to intelligence. Sudden loss of psychic organization: separated intelligence reduces anxiety. It says: fight. Early love withdrawn becomes anger. Slowly shatter the structure of withdrawing from agony. Carefully gain the child who fell from the sky inwardly invisibly broken. You're looking for the unknown side of consciousness. Bring together feeling and intelligence to come through. You never felt the loss - it wasn't yours. I never stopped holding out my arms. I am not able to feel I am holding them out to her. He has me in his lap wrapped in a blanket. I am perfectly content. We look out the window together. I don't have that now. 27
~ Weeding with Louie. Work party in a cold wind. Our fingers were cold grubbing for roots. (I smelled earth on my handkerchief just now.) She told a story of Mandy's new kind of dreams. A woman organized into three parts usually invisible that now she can see: right and left sides are complicated different patterns showing in the air beyond the body. The centre strip in this woman's body is black. Erased. Second dream: she is with wolves. She can feel their beings. They are very rapid, very refined, ruthlessly concerned with survival. Sharp. Humans who come near them are slow dim brutes by comparison. 1st December It's four in the morning, quiet, raining, a little thread of music from the radio. I woke at 2:30 with an understanding about the show. Now that we are going to stick it directly on the wall there are more ways to do it. I see the city section shouldn't go on that central panel, we should include it somewhere further in the body of the long wall. Those richest greens should be in the centre. And we can loosen the grid so there are small fault lines or offsets, some small amount, half an inch, running thru irregularly. And the top and bottom can vary, run down or up. Little blocks can open. I was seeing how this show continues the work I was talking about at the graduate colloquium - mosaic structure with color sweeps holding together large areas - I need a huge space with white walls to mosaic the theory. I could see, getting ready to speak to the group, how much filling in with examples there needs to be to get the ideas across (as we say) to people who aren't those ideas already. Is there more to tell - this isn't interesting to write. It was interesting to understand, lying in the dark not trying to wake, but now it has been an hour where I am nothing new. Those ideas are worked out in another medium. What I am really thinking in this one is something else - I'm thinking about abundance in art, the way the show is like the garden a fullness of lively things springing out next to each other uncensored but shapely. Monty's words will go in that panel with the underworld pictures. More. The way I am able to do things by doing more things. I am keeping up by falling out of balance and recovering. The way Louie does too, and with the help of you, beautiful other without a name. 3 The moment of the weekend when for the first time I'm - what - someone else. The show is up, the last of it today. There's the phone. I'm not answering it. Louie is trying to insist. Why doesn't she figure out when to let it go. Cos she's thwarted. She wants to punish me. For what. For saying no suddenly. Unreasonably. Can she use the car tonight? No. Why not? I don't know. I crashed. By the time we were at the gallery again I was exacerbated the way I am when we work with machines together. Irritated by the way she drives. Hating her accent. Annoyed by her look of a sucky dwarf. When she touched me I jumped back. Was that two things or one. Electrical drainedness. Something else too? I wanted my voice next to the goddess in the corner. She didn't like it there. Something in her voice. I understood. She has plans for this show that she hasn't admitted. Me - I have wishes for it, some, as everywhere. Didn't I earn being the goddess of the garden? She earned the show but not that. And I'm goddess of the garden while being also the hunchback of the garden. Grow up Louie. Go find a husband exogamously. 4th Calabria. So cold today. My radiator began to blow at Clark. I drove on gently to the lot behind Sweet Cherubim. I said last night as I parked it that I should go find some antifreeze. It was a sort of moment I know, I 'knew' but rebelled. I was rebelling already, resisting Louie - and wonder whether letting it freeze was another way of resisting Louie. Beyond that - what have I got. A Sunday with a clear sky. I'm saying it will be twelve years of work. See how far I can get. Has it been twelve years of something else? Ten. The Michael cycle. I'm worried what I'll do for love. If it goes in twelves it doesn't start at zero. At two maybe. Two to fourteen was childhood. Fourteen to twenty-six was school. Twenty-six to thirty-eight was art and feminism. Thirty-eight to fifty was Aphrodite: the garden and young men. And what's the cycle after 62 - then can I get married? 5th Waking depressed at four. After the party yesterday the small hurt feeling I had to find. It was that it was the first garden function Louie was more central at than me. She phoned everyone and so knew people and was schmoozing everywhere. I was as if in a brown fog. Cold. Hopeless. The pictures are nice but nothing will come of it - I mean Ken or whatever he meant will not come of it. I was feeling as I fell asleep with so sore a heart that my next thirty years will be responsibility and only that. I'll take responsibility for an area of common conscience and work to defend in public life what in my private life I can't be. 6th On a raft. We've been living on the raft. A man who is looking after it. I say, do we ever run out of gas? He says yes we're getting low. The raft has been in one place but now we'll move it over into the bay. I slip into the water holding onto a log. To my little boy: Come in with me. He was afraid but he jumps in holding my hand and I tow him. Now he's let go of my hand - he's walking on the bottom - he's far below walking on the floor. The raft is on a high wood platform made for it. Below, where the floor and walls are barely dry, there is fire in stone fireplaces carved into the wall, beautifully carved, a cluster on the left. Women standing with the fire. ~ How the lady sees us arrive from above - the raft, a larger body and a smaller, headless. The boy drifts down, walks across the damp floor. But it is the other one I am looking at. Who is this battered traveler, a battered limping man, short, powerful shoulders, with a wise pained head. A woman's head? Is it? This dark tired man so pained and weary. He is looking around with the curiosity of a traveler. He is from another world, another time, I don't recognize his clothes. He is looking at the fireplaces, the fires. [with Joyce expanding the dream] I am like the fireplaces, light, precise, romantic but not elaborate; elegant, simple and clear. I am a lady. There is more than one fire, one on the right, three on the left, clustered. I think that means interests, energies. They are not great roaring fires, they are small clear active fires. These two people are from different worlds. Different eras. The lady says to the traveler, your body is so bizarre, I don't understand why you are so clunky and brutal. The traveler says, you have no idea of the world I live in, I have to be like this. You can stay at home. There are people who hunt for you. I have to hunt for myself. The lady stands her dignity. I hunt too, she says. She holds out her left wrist. I can ride. I am a good hunter with the falcon. The warrior, the traveler, sees that it is true. I would like to be able to hunt that way. Will you teach me? - When I say that, a powerful surge at the heart, that I suppress in a second. Joy and fear. She looks critically at this dwarf traveler of very uncertain gender. The traveler defends him/herself. I have been brutalized it is true. I have been brutal. But I have been in the world, I have been in adventure. Joyce intervenes. She says to the lady, Tell her what you like about her. I like her head, says the lady. I like how experienced it is. I like the cuts it can make, how subtle they are. I like her adventures. Joyce is looking at her watch. "Do we have to stop?" "In a minute, but first sit over there and say what the two of you can do together." I don't know. It's the little boy who is the bridge, she says. "I don't know what that means." "Tomboy." The child who jumped off the raft. "All possibility." "Alright," I say, "my system will tell me." She ignores that. ~ It is the Pan Pacific bar where the windows look over sea slate green when there is snow on shore. The ships' dull colors, black and red, beautifully fitted. Open water. Dumb jazz piano. I could stay through the afternoon but parking is costing me $3.50 an hour. I loved going into the story making it more real, inhabiting it. The lady regards me. Why was I crying writing her view of me. Repelled and interested, and with pity. Where was I. "It is the traveler who is sad, not the lady." "Why is the traveler sad?" "Oh the traveler is a homeless one and she is at home." Her steady quality, the simple curve cut over the hearth. Joyce said, "Just being a woman, being everything that is, it's not at issue." I said I discovered I had been lying about what I wanted. I wanted a different kind of man than I had thought I wanted, and I wanted to be married. I had been lying because I thought I couldn't have what I wanted. I don't think I can compete with other women. "That is a good summary," she said. I showed her my black tight low-necked jersey. Wonderful, where did you get it? she said. Elfreda? Yes. A woman with a long neck. elfreda@sfu.ca [email address being used for the first time]. I didn't understand that she has a point of view and to her I am what Robert MacLean was, and Ken is, a sad hungry man dying for lack of home, staggering onto her beach. I see. The starved look David has, starved and battered. 9 Where am I. Uncertain. I did what I do to light my heart. I'd like to keep it lit. I don't want to be deluded. To light it I have to say: He's coming back. "I'm not far away." That wasn't a message for me but it is a good one - you're good with message machines. You sent yourself through your row of tones with knowing art, very beautifully I'll grant you. The woman you chose has not much ear for language, as you know. KS wherever you are. commitment to a constantly increasing relationship with the lonelier outreaches of the psyche, learning not to disrespect the smallest, not to kick aside the most tattered, learning to take in and care for the stranger of the psyche, the one who has the longest view from the farthest away reaches of mind, spirit and imagination. We are the only ones who can even begin to be a friend to this friendless one. Do you hear the knock on the door? Go see. Go see who is there. Partway into the first sentence, lying in the bath, I wailed. 10 I am coming from the north and have the choice of a road running uphill to the east and one running west over moorland. It is like Scotland and is the area north of the farm. There is something on that road going uphill. I think I know it, there is Ted Voth's round granary. But the road is wet and slick, silvery clay. I take the road going west but am aware of the other road where there are cattle bawling in the mist higher up. This road isn't muddy though it is wet too. Water is standing on the peaty track, here so deep it is to my knees. It is pleasant warm water. I like walking in it. But here immediately are the roofs of houses. This is not a good road. I wake. 11 Two stories. The man singing in the Sea Bus station last evening. Waiting for [my sister] Judy to come through the gates I heard beautiful Gregorian tones and tracked them into the vaulted corridor that goes off to the parking lot side door. There was a man standing in an alcove toward the far end. Bearded. I hide in an alcove of my own. He's making it up, is he? Benjamin Britten and Gregorian chant. Something about a summer afternoon. He takes himself up into a little falsetto and down into a loud bass. I predict where he will go next and I'm wrong. People pass, not many, a man by himself, a family. The voice stops. Footsteps. He is standing across from me saying hello. Then he talks without stopping, explaining himself. He wants to keep his music pure so it will put people in touch with something they may have forgotten. Something about religion. He is tall, what's called well-groomed, is standing in ordinary singer clothes, I mean grey jeans and a newish acrylic sweater. His irises are dark-ringed but very pale. It is hard to hear him in the many sounds moving around in the corridor. I cross the space to stand next to him. He says standing next to me he has the sensation of falling forward, as if the stars are folding. He tells me a dream about a man on a throne who by crooking his thumb could cause the singer's body to slide across the floor. He rebukes the man, who is sent fleeing through the stars. The singer flies after him, because he wants to be willing to understand everyone. He realizes that by rebuking him he has sent the man to hell. The stars fold the way they do through the stargate corridor. Judy stands at a distance in the big marble foyer. She has seen me. She's straw-blond and has frizzy curls and a side part. She's well dressed. I take her to the Rubina. Gradually I figure out what she's wearing and how she is. I'm wanting to see the scope of her life, and I do. She and Michael have been a team foraging successfully among government agencies. They know thousands of people all over the world, a net constructed over twenty years, Ruanda, Papua-New Guinea, the Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Denver, Calgary. Simple people, government officials at many levels, academics. Michael keeps moving. He gets into trouble and quits. They find something else. I can tell by the way she talks to the waiter that she has built a quick flexible social skill, natural and warm, but commanding. He assumed she'd made the reservation. Her clothes were well-judged to the same effect. I haven't seen her well dressed before, but this worked. All the parts soft, femme and simple. A leather jacket with a sheepskin collar, grey-brown gauze skirt, dark red wool stockings, perfect simple flats, loose burnt-orange sweater. An interpretation of what professional looks like. And framed in it, framed so the frame is larger than the picture and contexts it overwhelmingly, a thin, narrow, small white face with a wide quirky mouth and a nose that when she talked about Sepik tribes was like a Sepik nose, thin, ridged, and curving sharply to the right. She's well, she's loose and shiny. But she didn't dare be interested in me. She didn't dare risk finding out she'd like my life better than her own. Did I like hers better than mine? It is impressive. They are distinguished. She has brought herself out, and it isn't finished yet. They are a good partnership. Her clothes have that arrived look they never used to have. I don't look arrived. I am at the point where I think I will arrive but I haven't. My house is so dirty and shabby - oh, look at it. My clothes too. When I looked in the mirror last night I was shocked how old I looked - an old woman, the old woman I am going to be was there already. And now am I going to say, And yet? And yet what? Last week I knew. This week I am not there. 15th Ursula Le Guin is going to give a talk about writing. She asks someone to write her a paragraph to work with. I am near the front and I volunteer as fast as I can. I begin to compose it. I don't have any paper. I write it on the wall: A woman is standing looking north. The sky is I want to say it is yellow, but should I say 'intensely?' intensely yellow. What else am I seeing, the spires of hollyhocks black against the light, will I say that? Maybe not. I want to describe a child running out into the garden to find her. I see the black shape of a bush. By the time the child finds her I think it will be completely dark. How will I manage the transition of light? And so on. 16th Last night working with Louie on the writing dream. I encapsulated in anxiety about writing, was like an egg, sealed inside a bated immobile slightly translucent space. Slowly, dimly, I found the relevance of the phrase I had just used. Her book had said I should write an hour a day, read once a week. If you read to the wrong people you'll write for the wrong people, I said. Who are the right people? " I am thinking there aren't any right people." So I'm in a shell saying there aren't any right people. I'm a little girl in a bed and there are only wrong people. What does it have to do with writing? Reading. - That's what comes to me, I'm not sure of it, but she read to me, and when she read to me it was like being a baby, trust. Then I went away (that's a euphemism: she went away) and when I came back, even when she read to me it wasn't trust. But when I learned to read I had it again. And writing? Writing my journal it's the same. Saying it I'm feeling it, the sense of confident trust. Writing letters had it sometimes. It bridges. That's why I don't forgive my mother for wanting greeting cards and why I don't forgive Jamila for not wanting my letters. When I love someone I want to give them the parts of my journal that are about them. What about the audience, do you want to give them anything? "I hate the audience. The audience is like the kids in my [elementary school] class. They're stupid." 17 Oh Luke. Twenty-four. In Sharif's kitchen eating warm chocolate cake at six on a winter night. I wanted to say thank you for still being alive. He stood behind me and had his hand on my shoulder, a large warm man who felt like heaven. 18 Sunday night. It was dark. I've spoken to no one. Drove past Ken's van at Sylvia's house. Cried two sobs just now. Watching David Adams Richards on CBC. Plato most of the day. Did I do anything? David Adams Richards did. That was good. I'm crying again. Did I do good work this morning? Maybe. I can't follow it now. 20 When I wake in anxiety, now, I say to a little child crying in her bed, Did you wake up? Come here. I pick her up. I touch her round little legs. I say, Come in my bed. You can sleep with me. 22 Not loving anyone is dull and miserable. I've lost one of my three work weeks and have no idea what to write about. Lighting candles buying flowers turning on lamps all over the room and there is no rise of winter's black and bright intelligence. I need emotion, I need touch. Since I'm not sleeping with Rob I wake with hot flashes. Even my bookwork is slog. I suppose I am learning but it's as if none of it is striking to the center like it did when I was wanting Ken. And if it isn't striking to the centre is it work at all. In another arm of myself - is it that? - there is a stable and young interest in what it is to be depressed. 24th In this book there is a record of life less pained and stagnant but I know it is possible to go on this way for years. I am sanding the kitchen floor. My muscles ache from toxic dust. I'm not going to Rob's mom's though I could. I want to let myself know that comfort isn't true anymore. Louie went away to a cabin. Luke wants to play house with Charmaine. Being alone tomorrow, with the floor half sanded, kitchen things piled in the hall, is not the misery. It dramatizes the misery. If I got into work I'd be happy, but I'm wanting to gnaw and whine first. Make me viable, I beg. I was often happy with Rob but - what exactly is the but? - I can't marry him, I can't want to marry him, he is not the right man for that. Well, Ken. What to think about him. A madness. I could want to marry him but why, when he couldn't want me, couldn't want to know me, couldn't want to touch me. And Louie, who wants to know me and wants to struggle with me but is meant to be my friend not my lover. I'm frantic to settle on someone. Is that what it is? My system keeps saying find the structure of the isolated child. Somehow I'll do that but I'm not doing it and feel I don't know how. And so I'm stuck. It's the being stuck that is the misery. Is that all there is to say? It's quiet. Eleven on Christmas Eve. A beeswax candle that smells like baby powder. A little rattling in the furnace vent. 25 When I was little I suddenly had to handle an emotional contradiction. I need to love because loving is well-being. Loving my betrayers is self-betrayal. But they are who I do love, and not loving them is self-betrayal too. I still am the structure of this contradiction. It can't be undone. I didn't take it squarely. That could be called a moral flaw. A moral flaw is a bad decision that puts one out of square with one's circumstance. Being out of square I have had to cheat. A good decision would have been to love but know. Is that right? My decision was to not know and not love. It would have been a different kind of difficulty but I wouldn't have had to cheat. I say that without feeling it, as if I am walking a plank. It might be true. That might be how it works. Really I am lost. I have confidence in something I don't describe here. There is no explanation. It has been raining all day. Look at that star. It's the five-limb star glowing with kinds of color there is no name for. Not at the top of this tree, partway down, straddling a branch. It was on the tree I dragged to Michael's room on Jackson the year Rowen was born. There are the bits on it that Rob gave me. I was able to love for some years - ten - staggeringly, hedged, and hatefully - but a lot, fruitfully. It was love the whole city could see. Why this has been so hard is that I am afraid it is all stopping again. It is going to be as bleak and loveless again as it was with Jam. It will be years of death and isolation again. It says no.
28 Love woman. When I was a young woman at home I would stare at photographs worried I wasn't her, didn't look like her. The satisfaction of seeing myself on TV these years is that I have looked like her and sounded like her. She was young when she came back into my face.
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