| the golden west volume 11 part 1 - 1997 april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 5 April 1997 End of a Saturday, I've been back three days. The garden has seized me. These are the things that need to be done - this aft I came home and ran off long lists for six different areas. Tom is in Bellingham. Tom is in Bellingham! Here's my house back in order. I've laid out my bills. Are there things I want to say about the trip - we began with a fight. He wanted to explain things, I wanted him to shut up so I could see the plants beside the track. Alright I won't talk to you until we get to Seattle he said and huffed off to the yuppie commuters' lounge. Many miles later he came back and sat next to me. I only came back because there's nowhere else to sit. I could feel him getting ready to explain things to me again. But then he saw dolphins. When you see dolphins it means you're supposed to make up, he said, very sweetly. Of course I was happy to have dolphins pointed out, so there was a remark I hadn't resisted. All afternoon the train crept between green waves and round hills drifted with wild mustard yellow, ice plant pink, something blue, wild oats flowing in a brisk bright wind. We were cuddling on a bench in the observation car, looking left at the blue-green sea crashing white on black rocks, right at the simply flowering hills. Our bodies were one warm field of physical joy. Nothing but beauty, he said. What else. At night he slept on the seat, I slept below on the floor. He woke before first light ravished by a railway town in the mountains. I didn't want to be wakened but when he'd gone away to the observation car I sat up and saw the exquisite swift arrival of first color into snowy pines, winter sky, rusty cut banks. Mount Hood rosy pink in the distance. At nightfall of the second day there was red sunset on Puget Sound's glassy reach, islands, broken pilings, white distant ranges. By then Tom was winding tight. We ended the way we began, fighting in Seattle station. I started to walk away from the baggage room with the box on my shoulder. Bring it back - Ellie do what I say! He's screaming at me. He's beyond discussion. What will I do. Two young women baggage handlers watching. I keep walking. He gets on the bus outraged. Your tension is too tense, I say, and go sit across the aisle. He has hardly slept for two nights and hasn't eaten much and who knows, maybe he's in dope withdrawal. He's frantic, can't bear me to say anything. Just shut the fuck up, he says. I'm noting he has never been this rude. I'm noticing he's frantic the way my dad used to be. I am not feeling hurt but I am writing him off. He can't do things, I'm saying to myself. He's going to go home and it will be the right thing. We're going to fail this test. I'm noticing that I am calm, but at the time I don't notice that what I am is numb. I'll do what I can, but I'm not connected anymore. As we get to Blaine he wakes me demanding to know how many miles it is from there to there and there. I don't know. He's beside himself. You're no use to me, you're no use to me. I see I must just stay out of his way. He's lost in calculations he can't resolve. We get to the border separated by anxiety and numbness. He is so stressed and exhausted he looks like a criminal maniac. Three gentle Canadian border guards turn him away. Mr Fendler, I can't help but notice your eyes are very red. My last sight of him is next to the bus with five sizes of black bags, one very huge, having to make his way back to the American border crossing. He can't say goodbye. Go, the bus is waiting for you. Luke meets me at the station in Vancouver at midnight. 6th When I was on the train what I was often thinking about was what it's like to be with a man, not alone. I was wanting to notice whether I registered less, felt less, whether the journey would end up being about him rather than about places or about other people. It's true I spoke to no one. It's true the story is mostly about him. I saw in bliss, but I didn't register things I can now find to tell. Oddly, I didn't even register things about him. I don't remember how he looked. 8th Lighthouse Mission in Bellingham. It's the indicated next step. I think of you in a brick oldtown on the Strait of Georgia with a toothache and not much more than a hundred dollars. My heart hurts not with anxiety but with sympathy. I have often been in your position, a strange town with no money. I'm moved that you chose to be unsafe. You sound clear, as if emergency is good for you. Just Tom alone. He phoned me and he phoned Rebecca. "I'm in Bellingham, Washington." I was walking around in my house yesterday wondering whether the unwellness I was feeling was loneliness I don't recognize. I said on the phone last night, It's a little strange to not be with you, and that opened a rush from him, that it hadn't occurred to him to tell - how fra-zeel you are, how feminine and elegant, and how I adore that. 9 I turn on the TV because I'm frantic about bills and having to talk to Phyllis Wrenn [in the grad office] tomorrow, and there is Thompson Highway joyful, luminous. He worked in his pain. He came through. The Rez Cycle about the death of god as a man and the rebirth of god as a woman, he said. I don't like his work but I hold my breath when he talks. His work is for them, not me, but his shiny joy is for me. 10 "When you're loved and happy your features get finer, you get a look of Audrey Hepburn." I had that left to tell, from two weeks ago when we were in my room one morning. I was at the sink washing the coffee pot, he was on the bed looking the way I can hardly remember, himself. It is odd how little of his being I am remembering. Am I missing him? It is as if a current wheeled me around when it carried me across the border away from him. I know he's there not far away but it's as if he has dropped behind a radio shield. It's as if we're in a pocket of dead air. Vacuum. On the other side of this gap there will be a room, an apartment, a house, with a wide bed where we wake together in our morning energy and can fight and talk and fuck 'til we get to our close selves. That is the one of you I do remember, the one who said, Let's have a sound from you. I dreamed sadly last night. I was on a train. My little boy and his father were up ahead at the other end of the long car, at the door to the next one. I somehow couldn't get there in time. There were a child's writing and drawings left on the floor. I thought maybe the father had left them there as a kind of message. The father had taken the child off the train. The father was like Roy, a man I was estranged from and don't like. Then there was quite a lot of other stuff, driving back and forth on a road, a group of climbers on ropes in danger, a patch of grass I was going to study. Is it this: last year we just stepped into soul relation. We lost it when you failed to do what you said. We worked for a year to make you able and me able. Now we are at the point where we can be in faith again. Is that it? I sighed yes. It was child's faith and now it is earned faith. I feel you in your trial with such a full heart - But there's something I don't know yet. When you failed me - when you didn't follow through on your promise - I stepped forward in another mode - as if I took control - tough and strenuous, geared up and tense. You didn't look after the tender self you made me. Now I will look after us both. I will MAKE you stronger. I will recreate you and myself. I will make you able where you were so weak and wrong. I will carry you through by my great labour. Now I will set you down in the place you should have come to on your own. But are you really there, if I carried you there? No. I would have wanted you to be ready now to pick me up and carry me, as you said you would. That's my illusory hope. You are not really what you seem to be. I will not be able to stop being strenuous: but unless I really test you now, to know you are doing it yourself, I won't come through to true respect and you won't come through to true confidence. I have to stop helping and pushing. I have to take a chance on you again. I have to stop labouring. If you keep your word, you do. If not, not. If not, I am alone but not in illusion. This is sore to say. Should I be ashamed that I have worked as hard as I have? I am a woman worth more than that. Why is this so painful? - I can't seem to write Tom. I can't feel him. He's in Bellingham with a toothache looking for any kind of job. He's in a mission where I can't phone him. He's in a strange town alone, he's going to chapel twice a day! It's as if I can't remember him. I was with him every day for three and a half months. Was there a day I didn't kiss him? I've touched almost everything he owns. I've known him angry, distraught, sweet, stunned, clear. I've married him I guess, I've said I'll live with him. But I have nothing to say to him. I start a letter and I'm flat. I'm not interested in anything I could say to him. I don't feel him interested in anything I could say. The emotion that was carrying me is not. I thought this morning that in the circumstances, human soul is the value someone has for other people who know them - the fact that it matters to them if that person lives or dies, among the billions. 12 I'm comparing - Louie last night rosy and pretty on the rose pillow, being idle after her week but so active and bright. She looked at a patch of yellow plaster where the blue paint has flaked off and saw it five different ways, the last a figure-ground reversal, very virtuosic. Her quick brain goes zzzt - zzzt - zzzt and veers into crisp new coherences. This is how she can do her mediumistic writing. A gorgeous speed of response. My brain is strong and deep and brave but slow. Hers is flocks of birds changing direction instantaneously. What I started to say was I'm comparing what it's like to be with her, telling my stories, reading her the journal, and being with Tom who is so inert in relation to anything I can tell or write, really so inert in relation to me. I've just spoken to him. (I could hear a gull at a distance from his callbox on the street.) I could hear that he has been only with strangers. After I asked him about chapel and he told the story of the high-voiced man who preaches every night from Revelations - "whenever I've met anyone who talks about Revelations I know they're crazy" - (this man told the story of his alcoholic father-in-law, who in old age had a stroke and lay four months in a hospital unable to speak or move, and his preacher son-in-law came every day and read him Revelations - you fucker, Tom was thinking) - anyway, in that excitement and laughter, being himself, Tom's voice became his own again. I sympathize with that, but in my serving posture on the phone I wonder again whether there's something very mistaken about settling where I am so unseen, unfelt, ungrasped, uninvestigated, even. I love you, he says as we're stopping. The generous thing I can say is he's not equipped for loving attention, and Louie is. But I want to say it in a more judging way - he is centrally indolent, he wants to coast, he wants to cheat and get by, and she is working all the time. He is too lazy to feel or investigate me in my moment. He hopes to get by on ready-made seduction. I detest his ready-mades of speech. I'm fed up with how meagerly I am made welcome with him. He looked at his failures with women and said to god, please send me someone really special. There I was at the registration window and he saw instantly that god had smiled on his request. It was his lucky day. Thanks, he said. I am 'a woman' to him. 'A relationship,' which he concludes is necessary though more effort than he prefers. Speedy nervy business day. Joan Tayler wants an espaliered walk across the orchard. Craig wants the house shell sealed now so it'd be orange. Brian wants bars on the windows. Muggs and Rob think the forecourt will be tight if the espalier goes through. Mag has strung liddle lights across the space on what seems to be clothesline. Louie has mortgaged herself into half a rotten basement with aluminum windows and six inches of overhead clearance. Jeff is my ally. Nicole and I got four trays of herb seeds in. John Perry wants to help with the wild area. 13 I'm awake Sunday morning in black dark, angry I guess. I woke saying it's because he lied about dope in his bags that I'm not feeling him. He lies. This most recent lie set him up to crack at the border. When he cracked he took me with him. He screamed at me, ordered me to obey, and then he lost it on the bus. Just shut the fuck up. That was hate. Then I work with the book and it says, the child thinks it has lost him, love woman is bargaining because she wants sex, work woman wants to dump him, the book itself says it isn't personal. He lies because he's enslaved by means of his own unconscious child. When I hear that, the child feels I'll be looking after another child instead of her, love woman thinks sex will be sacrificed to social work, work woman is contemptuous of his weakness and wants to punish him, and the book, I think, says gently that it will be better for me to know his enslavement because it will release me from my own. 15 When I came home from school yesterday the phone was ringing, and then it didn't stop 'til eight o'clock. I talk to Louie about her house, Oliver about the wild area, Mag about many garden house things, Rob about his birthday, Nicole about plans for today. Tomorrow I am going to Barry's house to hear the tape he made with my reading of that poem he thought erotic. Sometime soon I'm supposed to have breakfast with Laiwan, show Phil's Kathy the garden and give her the white Japanese anemones. Sunday night I went for wontun soup with Jan-Marie. The social waters have closed around. Carole Itter on Sunday wanting to hang a sign from the torii gate - sign painters' puke green and pink. Joan Tayler came running to warn me. - It's Tuesday morning. At 7:45 exactly I phoned a call box outside the mission in Bellingham. Tom is running the mission desk on Sundays for $10 and has kitchen privileges. He has fallen in love with Bellingham, he says. It's the most beautiful spring, he says. There are posies, in all the yards. He's doin' the heel-to-toe, checkin' it out. In the evening he sits on his bunk reading or listening to his headphones. One more story, Jan-Marie's dream. She is in an enormous hotel, enormous, with her mother and grandmother. They look at a room on one of the lower floors. Water is leaking in around the windows. The rooms aren't below water level, but there are leaks all the same. They go up higher to rooms that look out over the ocean. In one of these rooms Jan-Marie has a dream that she looks out and sees a huge turtle, bigger than a small town, creeping on the ocean floor, moving earth with its flippers, building the earth, she calls it. There is also a bird with some relation to the turtle. She tells a man - I didn't notice whether he was in the dream within the dream - that she has drawn every detail of the turtle's shell, every line and color. She told me this dream after she told me very joyfully about a National Geographic documentary about a crack in the ocean floor that encircles the globe, halves it, opens all the way down to the earth's red core, and is the welling source of nutrients that feed the elementary origins of life, which are the same at points thousands of miles apart. When I told Jan-Marie the story of helping Tom store his boxes we both had tears in our eyes about the padlock. The night I was with Tom in the Golden West storeroom sorting stuff in the dusty boxes, I found a padlock in among it and said Let's keep this out. I took it to my room. Later, at the storage warehouse, when the boxes were piled in seven foot towers with chairs upside down on them, we needed a padlock for the storage unit and I said I'd go back to the hotel and get that one. We locked up all the crucifixes and prayer cards and letters and photos of known and unknown ancestors and dinnerware and smashed vases, and we locked up Vic and Mac and Joe and Mary, Tom's years in school and the army and marriage and journalism, and went back to the hotel. I liked the way the boxes themselves had supplied the lock. The key was attached to the padlock with a safety pin, I said. That was my mom. She always did that, Tom said. 17th Quarter past six, the sun isn't up yet. I began to say something about a grey sky, but peering at it through the upper pane I saw there was pink fiber on the northern edge of the clouds and merest blue developing between them. It's the moment of the year when new-leaf khaki green stands oddly matched in tone with street-cherry acid-pink. Quite a lot happened yesterday. I went to Barry's house to hear the electronicized cello piece he used my voice in. I hate the smell of dog in his house. I hold my breath probably. And then there is Barry - chipmunk smile with half his face, the way he looks twenty at fifty. Oh such a white boy, could not be whiter, even his homosexuality seems a kind of whiteness, as if breeding Scottish terriers and marrying a man in liberal studies who cooks is more civilized and cleaner than suffering the shocks of gendered animal life. And then the music. The cello piece got wonderful - a section ten minutes into it with slashes at angles through a wonderful space with standing smudges of dark grain - his best kind of spatial physical music. But set into it at intervals the five stanzas of the poem he asked me to read, each electronically treated to fit the treated cello sections they were in - loud startling declarations of large metal beings, robot angels, who would have no reason to speak the text he had them voicing, which though it was not organic enough to be good enough poetry, was still the declaration of an organic being. My intuition that the poem should be read as pillow talk rather than rhetoric was correct he said: but then he turned it into rhetoric at another joint in the transmission, as if the machine itself, but a fantastic machine, five different fantastic machines standing in a row like metal-carapaced caryatids, were orating. And then there was the way the human quality of my reading was still perceptible, I could hear that I was not liking the language. Barry, oddly, cannot hear that. I was wondering among many other things what relation there is between breeding scotties and turning a woman's voice and a woman's love poem into sounding brass. I also wondered whether I had damaged myself in ways I can't afford, by lending my voice to that project because I want access to his technology. In the afternoon, David Birch, Mag and Luke. David because I called him to see the garden house interior. What's to say about David. He knew the little bird and saw it was nesting in the bay laurel bush. A bush tit. Apart from those few moments of standing, he melted away in my presence. I say something and he agrees gracefully. I saw him as a tall sweet girl, thin pretty shoulders in a pink shirt, hair in an artless knob, white teeth resting lightly on the red round cushion of his lower lip. Something like that. David a dissolver, who lives in a mist around definite physical forms. "I read a book that said I should forgive everybody." Last year he read a book that said he shouldn't. Then solid Mag. I kept being surprised when I looked sideways and found his fleshy head, mild eyes. He likes these halogen lights on strings. They are his touch of postmodern savvy. I'm saying they have to go - they look like washline and they break the space. "The gardeners don't like them," I'm saying. And then, when I'd just lain down to try to sink into contact with this stuff, a knock. I thought Louie come to finish our fight, but it was Luke. My CD player got stolen but he thinks he knows where it is, it got fenced to a pawnshop, but the pawnshop got closed down and the CD player is locked away in receivership. Where was this CD player when it got stolen? I ask. At a friends' house. I'm looking at pictures of Shaker built-ins with him a minute later when I twig. Oh I get it, you're the person who pawned my CD player. I like the way that came swift and certain from the side. But when we'd hashed that out there was still that feeling I sometimes have with Luke. I want to leave. I said would he take me to Rob's. Then he unfolded what he'd really come for - the woman of quality who had made it seem there was some real reward to doing the right thing had told him - on email, yesterday morning - that she's marrying the man in England. "There is something I'm wanting to say to you and Dad, you didn't teach me right from wrong." I see. He knows he isn't in a position to get a woman of quality. I'm staggered to hear myself described with Roy who is obviously a sleaze, but I'll try to accept what's true in it. I say there's really just one principle, you have to defend the spirit of the child you were, tell the truth about what you actually feel, and deal with the consequences as they come. And will he think about whether there is something he'd like me to do now. Then Rob, who turned forty. There he was with his hair still blond, still strong, still long, and a little black beard as if he'd dipped his muzzle in crude oil. I felt I couldn't see him, or didn't want to. But he cooked a wonderful supper and I baked a cake. We sat on his bed watching a PBS show about Cesar Chavez. I was feeling the earnedness of our friendship across his weirdness and inarticulation. He was so unlike what I'd wanted from friends. I was pleased with myself for having stretched. There was real getting to know. I got to know another kind than me. Now it's nine, almost. When I rang Tom at 7:45 I asked him to tell me what he saw. He was looking west at clouds that could have been clouds I could see too. When he likes himself he says he loves me. He said it very strong. Ellie: I miss you. And I love you. - This day was happy - measuring in the garden house and its forecourt, flirting with Britt, businessing with Mag, walking round and round the wild area thinking where to put hazels, viburnum, oaks, bullrush. Redwing blackbird's strong song. I dug a bed for food - for you! for you! - a row of little lettuce, two rows of broadbeans from the free table. I wasn't tired. I wasn't sore. The pond was full. Ducks swam. Britt said she'd put up the birdhouse. Rachel was painting the solar battery door fresh blood red. The herb garden has all sorts of things growing. It was warm. I'm laughing at Luke pawning my CD player and getting caught. Did the laundry. Oh the willows. Half the orchard trees in white bloom. For breakfast I had the remains of tenderloin rollups from last night, which Rob put in a yogourt container and sent home with me like a loving mom. I am resisting calling Louie. Ate well last night and slept late this morning. Tanya was working chaotic meditation, Islamic drums. Which of these have something to do with happiness? 18th I can't write Tom. Don't know how I ever could. Should that worry me? These evenings working at the garden I feel him. I want to tell him about the garden - the bush tit nest in the bay bush - the sky's color - see - I can talk here. I saw his face when he was in the bathtub wanting me to touch him. I like it that he's close by, but I don't really know it. Lighthouse Mission, Strait of Georgia, Tom - somewhere - you okay? Pilgrim drunk on the phone says, Tell him I love him, I hope he makes it. He'll make it, I say. Is there something about this time that is - what - thinning us down - no - it's sanity, it's okay. 19 Saturday morning. A padded sky. Grey light among the sulky roofs. Or are they only sleepy. What's up. What could be up. 20th, Monday Sandra Semchuk and Deborah Love asking for a grant to do a show at Presentation House, Sandra said yesterday, and will I be one of the speakers on landscape. Sandra came nervously to pick up my CVs. Tom in his telephone booth got fingered yesterday. I said what would make sense of how he was would be that he was carrying drugs in his bag. There was a second of very loud silence. Not in his bags, a joint in his wallet, he said. I'm glad to have that out. I had to fight and did. But I'm not impressed with Pinocchio. He didn't have the mettle to refuse it when Oscar gave it to him, or to tell me on the train, or to tell me afterwards. He took me with him into the consequence, which was his paranoid terror. He shut me out of contact, then couldn't bear my irrelevance and detested me. I came home drained and shut down. I didn't know why I couldn't feel him. Morally, he is still making bad decisions. I mean decisions that are bad for me. He still has that joint. If he needs it he can trip out, out, out. - Away from what? is the question. I guess the next step is I say to him, I'm going to go away while you think about you and dope, and me and information. How this is tricky is that I choose both ways at once and for both good and bad reasons. The good reason to quit is if I'll only ever be splashing in the shallows with him. The bad reason is that I quit for fun - it thrills me to quit. This hurts, I say, but once again I've had the fun part and deked out without getting trapped. The good reason to stay is that he has done a lot in a year and a half. The bad reason is that I don't want to be back in lonely stoic exile. Beyond these reasons, which I can make up freely on and on, I also know that I'm making these decisions so effortfully with a part of me that doesn't work. 22nd I am noticing what I should notice more - how often I think that if I figured it out I could straighten him up. I could turn his weak rebellion into warrior strength. He'd have real adventures and I'd have them with him. We'd fight side by side. We'd have emotional adventure at home and social adventure in the world. An hour talking on the phone this morning. He's still saying what he said about Rebecca, what a child says: I should have continued to lie. You think there are no consequences if you don't get caught, I say. You think you can fix things by groveling, by punishing yourself with feeling bad. It's true but when I say it I am still thinking that if I explain it I will fix him. Then, when I say he is what he is, people have always wanted to fix him, I go straight to my other pole, which is, dump him. What's the free position. There is something I'm not seeing - something like this - where is my dream of how it should be coming from? When before have I ever dreamed of a fighting companion? I've been a fighter alone in my way. It's as if something about him sets me up - is it? Somebody else wants him to be a hero. I'm slotted into that position. The free position says - he is what he is. But then the next move takes me to this - if he is what he is, he's nothing to do with me. But that isn't where it stops - it goes to this - if he is what he is he's a sleaze like Roy - he's a nightmare I got sucked into. That's something to do with me. Try again. He is what he is. I am attached to him. That's fear. I'm attached to someone who doesn't take care of me. It always comes down to that. Try again for the free position. It says this: the nightmare I am caught in is that I am a structure that says either I am alone on the other side of betrayal or I am unsafe waiting for the axe to fall. Alright what other position is there: feel the conflict without resolving it. You can't go to the free position as if it were a place between two branches in a road. The place isn't there until its road has built itself. - "There will be enough pain in the world as it is." You and Dad didn't teach me right from wrong, Luke said. I'm thinking of my parents that they knew almost nothing useful to me. When Luke was born I was only seven years off the farm. I'm only now beginning to have this sort of moral sense. There are a few people, only very few, whose parents know anything. They are morally well-born. Ursula Le Guin maybe. They look at their own and other human circumstances without evasion, righteousness, or fear, with commitment and generosity. They have a chance. The point is: I think of you as having missed your chance, bent on missing it. The point is: what business is it of mine. "An ethical life is one that is mindful, mannerly and has style." "Stinginess of spirit, an ungracious unwillingness to complete the gift-exchange transaction." "A life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play." Okay, the point is you are in many ways more mindful, grateful, goodhumored, unstinting, and mannerly than I am. Browbeating is not part of a stylish life. And when the children are safe in bed, at one of the great holidays, we can bring out some spirits and turn on the music; and men and women who are still among the living can get loose and really wild. So that's the final meaning of 'wild' - the esoteric meaning, the deepest and most scary. Those who are ready for it will come to it. [Gary Snyder] - The art of landscape photos. The photo says what its art is. 23rd Reading Clark Landscape into art, thinking of my photo of the tree in the ditch. The particular art of landscape photos, which was an art of being relevantly present. I am also thinking of the time when I was educating myself about painters, at around twenty, in Strasbourg for instance. Reading Clark, what I know about Altdorfer shows up, uncalled for in twenty years. I'm saying today (and yesterday): what can I enjoy with a man who doesn't like what I read? The koan is, what is Tom? Not, what am I with Tom. Snyder: conservation politics, Buddhism, male action like logging and mountain climbing, wife and kids, anthropology, the community of writing. I've seen him. He's beautiful. That is what a man's life should be like, not surfer culture, pop music, spy thrillers, celebrity interviews on Letterman, drunken remorse, unfathered kids, secret adultery, chickenshit border terrors. 24th This is the day they're saying they're going to cut off hydro. Luke hasn't paid me, or called. There's $12 in the G&F account. Visa two weeks overdue. Rent in a week. Sprint calling every night. Tom's birthday in a week. I'm aching in every muscle I work with. If I do the lightest possible weeding my wrists ache through the night. I'm stiff. My neck hurts when I turn my head. I haven't spoken to Louie in ten days. When she hurt her knee she went into her crumble state, irrational, hostile, self-pitying, blaming, demanding. I hung up on her. I rebelled when the book said I should deal with her. I hated the thought of her. It feels like we'll suspend it indefinitely. Can't afford Joyce. So lonely I watch TV every night. Can't write Tom. My last letter didn't get through. Anyway he doesn't respond. Anyway I don't feel him loving me as I write. It has to be that, that's what makes it possible, that belief. I'm blue today. Has the moon gone over the lip of full? Breaking of strength. Restless nights, idle days, or days that feel idle, disorganized, though things have got done. ~ 28th In the night thinking about television maps of Manitoba floods as they will be in a few days. Scientific visualization - scientific modeling is point-by-point prediction - something about maps - what I have to remember is to ask how the brain uses maps - there is the bumpy topography and water flowing in amongst the bumps, my own body in the tub ... no, that's wandering. I was thinking in near-sleep, thinking without muscle, but I felt I had sorted through this term's course, that I'm supposed to do it without slog. Nathalie's face last night when we got closer to her: whiter, crookeder, much more live, less a solid. At thirty she looks like a child, a scrap of a body. There were years she didn't go out because she was afraid of rape, she says. The book said something like, Were you afraid your father would lose control? She would work herself into a state where she felt the void - I don't know what that means - and be frightened of it. She has a SSHRC because Ray wrote her proposal for her. 29 Luke last night. Seven years later he's a better-knit body, but his face is puffed and white. He comes off work and can't stay in - goes out and drinks 'til three - doesn't organize himself to eat. We aren't going to be failures, but we are many times going to believe we are, I said. When I stopped talking I noticed electrical strain at the heart. I wondered whether it meant I had been fighting for his soul. It means I'm feeling my responsibility for his distress, it said. Sunday, rain. Wet end of a cold April. Work party in the orchard moving junk wood, cleaning up around the shed. Construction rubble, smashed plant pots, soggy filtercloth in heavy heaps like rotted buffalo hides veined through with morning glory root. Cleaning up those heaps was my drive. For them it's just background. I'm excited. Tuesday at 6 I'm getting on the train. I'm going to a motel in Bellingham. Wednesday morning I'm waking up with my squeeze. Maybe we'll go to sleep unfamiliar and wake lovers. My Amurrcan. His voice this morning had the nicest lightest balance. Asking about Dionysus, who has to do with wine and other drugs, thus addiction, the hillsides, women leaving the house and running together, pop stars, screaming girls, kin murder and thus abortion, 'the marsh', flaming brands carried streaming, raw meat, murder for food, witch gatherings, their cry still transmitted, io ivohe, marriage breakup, something about ivy leaves. Flutes dedicated. It isn't so mysterious that Dionysus is honored in Hera's sites, since it is the taste of the wild that tempts and traps into tameness. The first sip of wine should be unwatered and the rest mixed. Wine is poured in acknowledgment of any of the gods. Raw meat is cooked before it is eaten. Possession is allowed on stages controlled by theatrical convention or a priest caste, disloyalty to family founds new families, I crash to come through. - In the past week or weeks I have been recalling - reminding myself, strengthening - an impulse to write short paragraphs about something I remember, the moments that come up for some reason, that remember themselves for some reason I think of as belonging to their own time and not this one. Reading Edgerton on geometry and space perception I'm noticing how the history of development of ideas leaves out what comes to people when they are doing something, in the practice of for instance painting or building, and when they are in their daily places. Tiled floors can teach perspective drawing, paned windows can teach gridded diagrams. The moment in grade two, late afternoon in a classroom of the school at the end of Clearbrook Road, an art class. I have very recently noticed somewhere that a tree behind a house is drawn as a curvy outline above the roofline. I draw a scallopy shape above the roofline of my house and color it in, green. A boy in the class challenges me, what's that? It's a tree. It's behind the house.
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