15th November 1997
Don with a cloud of white hair, huge eyes behind thick glass. He's smaller - shorter. His voice has less energy. It was as if he'd become a woman. I'd remembered him in Edmonton stalking the hallway in his underwear, so big a man, so sexual. It wasn't that he was old but he had lost that size.
How was it with him. Less hype. As if he'd committed himself to his own facts. And I too.
What he said about Jane, that she was one of two women in his life who had looked at him. He remembered a moment when he'd come on her holding Richard in the air looking into his face. Her breasts were pulled up because her arms were raised. She was looking at her little boy as if he was ... Delicious, I suggest. Yes, delicious, he says. He saw that and felt, Oh I could do with some of that.
I remembered meeting Don, at a film, I thought. [At Queens in 1963] There was a book I lent him. He remembered something else. We were walking up steps. I was ahead of him. He was looking at my legs. Such a strong calf. The other leg is thin. It's limping. He's confused that he hasn't noticed before. It seems good not to notice that someone is - what was his word? - something like 'deformed'. But presumably it's something that's significant to her, so it's not good not to notice. At the beginning of this story he said something I didn't want to ask about though I didn't understand it, that it was an erotic moment. I thought that story filled in something I should know. Now I should find out exactly what.
- He was confused about whether to feel something erotic
about a deformed woman?
- Is that what he was telling me
- Was he saying it to get rid of me no
- Did he know how much it would appall me no
- Was I right to be appalled no
- Is that what he was telling me
When I'm driving him home to his sister's I finally ask about Katherine, his child with Holly, the baby I met. She has scoliosis and so is small. But also is passive, timid and fat. Sings. Holly was like a Hollywood wife, exquisite. Her two other children are pretty kids.
He can't stand to be in a room with his mother, but he has a son act, he says.
He thought of The fragility of goodness as the best book he's read in years. He's been reading the Greeks. He asked a class to write down what they thought would be necessary to a well-lived life.
When his brother's little boy died, something happened at the funeral, when the coffin lid was brought down. His heart beat violently. His mother in the pew behind him said something pious and he wanted to kill her. He went away from the funeral afraid the anxiety would never go away. At that point he started working hard.
-
Today a roomful of philosophers of science and mathematics. What the visiting guy said was that the a priori of math is conditions of the discourse - what I said Tiles said. A grad student said math is like lego, there are a lot of things made and you see what will work to model something.
-
Tom phoning tonight saying he had a hard time last night, got pumped and it took twelve hours to get chemical normal back. I knew I was hearing his conditions of life.
18
Rosen in the morning, Yates on Giordano Bruno's tradition later, shop, eat, that's it.
20th
I'm happy. I work, work. 7:30 to 1 it was Rosen. Then bike downtown to eat and look at email. Shop in Chinatown on the way home. Work some more 3:30 to 7. Now it's [on TV] a Mennonite paraplegic guy in an ultralite drifting sideways like a gull.
Hey you - is there a you tonight - I was on my bike sailing past yellow strings of willow leaves when a crow alit. Something about those two motions, mine that didn't stop, and the crow's in the same direction, that did. And the crow's sharp shapely black. What else I was thinking was, I'm thinking of you.
Louie phoned when there was color in the clouds. I was in the corridor looking west suddenly loving to talk. "If you hadn't phoned I would never have known I was funny today." Oo Louie. Do you want to see Atom Egoyan's Salomé? The tickets are thirty-three dollars. She thinks yes for the same reason I do. And there's Wings of a dove, they're saying it's warm and .... Sunday night? Okay.
Yesterday I woke remembering that sometime in the night I'd woken saying I'm so relieved. I'm so relieved. As if something was over, something was corrected. I didn't know what.
21
"I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created, or could create, part of one history."
Michael Snow says "I do not have a system. I am a system."
'Passage', Artforum 10(1), Sept 1971:64, reprinted in Shedden ed, Absence and presence 1995, 27
What is it about both of these. I am a system but I'm not. A thousand systems I've been. They don't unify. Yeats had an art that was a capability he built widespread. He was a system. Snow sounds as if he is one by grace and not by making.
There is a system in me, I'm thinking - not the systems I become but something like a system that senses those systems as such. Is that it? That was Dorothy Richardson: who she wrote from when she finally wrote. Do I have that?
22
These days I'm happy working and then I'm nothing, can't find a scrap of personal being.
I want to say this to you before I go into that again. I saw a danger. We are holding in our safe spots, both of us. We've made our safeties nicely bearable. I'm here in my work nest living away from myself, with just that 2-weekly hit of man smell to keep the woman quiet. You are comfortable top dog in your unattached men institution, with a woman elsewhere who has stopped making trouble. It won't do, huh.
Yesterday on the phone Sara said Luke is tackling Roy.
There's a doubt I'm feeling as I work. Here's my table spread with sorted piles of papers, philosophy and cog sci. But there's a community working on these things, and they are starting to get it right. They don't need me. And I'm not placed to ever be one of them anyway. And over there across the room is a little pile of other papers, my books. Another kind of life - but unlived - so far unlivable. When I look into old journals one of the things I notice is that my earlier self does not re-form in me anymore. I'm some kind of traveling show but I'm not the one I started out as.
1980, so lonely and miserable - so lost and demolished - I'd lost Luke - blitzed my brain - lonely with Jam - attached to nobody at all - on welfare - exhausted trying to be a tree planter - completely at sea about art and work - mesmerized watching myself - and there were another four years of that. It's as if now I know what it's like to be happy and the unhappy times seem pitiful in a way they didn't then. I want to say it's love that makes times good. When I thought that, I wanted to give it.
Monday 24th
In Pilgrim's Market this afternoon, where I was standing in the shirt aisle while my wash was in the drier up the street, a man rushing toward me was saying Hello Ma'am in a very intended way. I split a second deciding he was stoned or crazy but alright. Looked him in the face, smiled, said hello. He was sweeping past. At the end of the aisle he turned and rushed back. He was saying something like, I should call my lawyer as he got up next to me, and then he said, You're a very beautiful woman, trailing a touch on my upper arm. Jeez, thank you, I wasn't feeling like that today.
Louie on the phone yesterday named the chapters of my biography: she did her own thing, she did her own thing, she did her own thing, she started to change her mind, she started to get into the world, she was in the world, she was in the world, she was in the world and did her own thing, she was in the world and did her own thing. Last chapter: they all died. Then we cracked up.
25
Louie also said that when she first met me I was spectacularly free.
Have I got this right [Rosen]:
There's philosophical trouble about properties etc because they are mutually defined. The observing system defines (range, scale, position, relevance) the spectrum, but the observed system defines the present values.
But because the observing system ultimately has its range/scale/spectrum because it is part of/maintains existence as a subsystem in the same system as the observed system, the observing system's spectrum and the observed system's state value won't be independent.
I was falling asleep thinking - all those guys, those philosophers, talking as if there can be more than one world - as if they can be out of the one they're in. We can't fall out of the world, we can just refuse to notice it. The world they were in before they were born was embedded in the world they are in after they are born - it's as if they haven't figured that out.
26
What am I going to say. Sci vis within a cognitive philosophy of imagining starts with a three year old flying a piece of wood making engine noises, talking to himself. Perceptually supported imagining which includes imagined perceptual support.
Talking to Louie yesterday about what Patanjali might mean when he says yoga is unity. I said imagine a tree, imagine a piece of 3-d lace, where there are loops made of golden light, loops on all scales, very small, large. They are arcs not floppy like crochet but tight like wire. The whole thing is changing all the time, the position of the arcs is shifting, there is light running in all the loops. If you have been traumatized at some time, some parts of the shape will be dull, they won't be included in the circuits, they'll be grey like lead. Yoga is about doing things that make them come on again. Another thing is that if all the circuits are connected, then when you look at something, more of the circuits will change and the change will be more coherent, which means you are seeing more, and more kinds of things, at the same time.
29th Saturday
How am I. Still fuddled.
Sitting quiet in dull light - the orange dull light of the work room, the dullest of grey daylight at the window. He had a wonderful day he said. Then I sandbagged him. I couldn't stand the illusion to go on at my expense. I was overwhelmed, sick, depressed, exhausted.
There was a moment yesterday morning when I looked across a room at him and saw his eyes were ashes. In the whole of the visit there was not a moment when I liked his face. He was a scaled grey monster without human light.
Another way to say it is that I didn't have enough intelligence, energy, presence - I mean them as equivalent - to make anything of what I got.
Here is a fact: he had enough money to rent six videos but not enough to contribute to the cost of the dinner. When I sent him to get ice he came back with two bags. He couldn't remember from one moment to the next that if he bumped the middle of my back it hurt. He doesn't include me in his sense of space, so he doesn't know he's pushing me off the bed. When I come back to the bed he doesn't offer me one of the pillows.
Wednesday I woke very sore, fixed a hot water bottle, worked for two hours, fixed another hot water bottle, drove two hours to Bellingham. Asked him for hot water in the water bottle. He filled it from the tap. Barely warm. On the way home I spent $100 at the supermarket. He was very silent in the car. As we were arriving I asked if we could have Louie at the dinner. He threw a fit. The holiday is screwed, just take me to the Greyhound station. He'd spent weeks planning how it was going to be, just him and me and Rowen. I said I wanted someone there who would draw me out. He said he was insulted. There we sat in the alley. I was just wanting to lie down.
We came out of it well. He had a couple of minutes by himself and did one of his sudden turns, said he loved me and I could do anything I wanted. Then lay and held me for an hour and told me nice things about myself. Moments he had liked. When I stood on the wall at the Cove the first time we went there. When I took a shit at High Bar with miles of space on all sides. The deftness of my hands, the way I peel an apple. My bravery, that I camp alone. My bravery with the string, that I'm willing to know. That I sent him all those photos of me. I'm beautiful now but in my twenties and thirties I was off the scale with beautiful .... I'm simply captivated by you, he says.
I loved being wrapped around and praised that way. His size, his voice, his care in gathering and keeping. Then we went for the videos and lay in bed watching them. The African queen. Hepburn in a hat bawling hymns over the droning of the natives. Bogart unshaven, gap-toothed and boozy. They ride the river. I was seeing the legend I've been living out. He saw it with his mom in Mount Ephraim Theatre in Philadelphia when it came out - 1956. He was ten. On the way home she asked him what he liked in it. (The sun blinding the German, the leeches.)
The legend is that a tight woman with gumption and inventive genius gets loosened, to her joy, by going down the river with a lax lazy drinking man. She dumps his gin, inspires him to shave and clean up the engine. The possibilities of their situation add up in a flash - she sees that oxygen canisters plus gelignite equals torpedo. There is a German ship commanding Africa from a central lake, there is a river that empties into that lake, here is a man with a boat, let's go. He gets drunk. Next day she won't speak to him. It's not that he got drunk, it's that he broke his promise. She wins. They shoot the unnavigable rapids.
The more I write this story the more I like it, I'm noticing.
She learns to handle the rudder. They slip past the German fort by lying on the bottom while bullets ding off the smokestack. When the water flattens they are attacked by insects. By this time her hair has come down and she is calling him Charlie. They come to the reeds. They are lost. They are exhausted. They are within sight of the lake but they don't know it. They commend their souls to god. There is a night storm that raises the level of the lake and floats them free. They wake in the clear with the German ship on the horizon.
I forgot the part where the propeller is twisted by the last worst rapids and she figures out that they could make a forge and he could straighten it and weld the propeller fin. She gets underwater with him and helps him pull out the shaft, pumps the bellows while he welds.
They make the torpedoes and there is the old boat with two stiff penises ready to be driven into the German Louisa. But the lake rises in billows, the storm swamps them, they lose each other in the night and are separately picked up by the Germans. It is like the Last Judgment before a German god. They are condemned as they stand. It occurs to her but not to him that if they're sunk anyway they are free to tell the truth. She says proudly that Charlie brought them down the river and made torpedoes. Charlie says he has a last wish. Will the captain marry them, it would mean a lot to the lady. Charlie and Rose. At the last moment the German ship runs up against the foundered African Queen and is blown up. Charlie and Rose jump overboard and swim for Kenya singing a barroom ditty.
- Alright, where was I? Wednesday. He wanted to watch Yojimbo afterward. I was falling asleep behind his back. He was in Okinawa, twenty-one, watching it without subtitles, identifying with the lone samurai in a village of fools. Then later he went to sleep with two layers of clothes on and his feet in down booties. I sweated all night and woke still aching.
Thursday. Have to figure out the turkey. Have to do the dishes so I can thaw it in cold water in the dishwashing basin. Change the water every half hour or it won't be thawed in time. The house is getting chaotic, Tom's stuff, food. I'm running around clearing spaces. Cook him breakfast. What were we doing from ten to two - he was playing me songs. I liked Walking in the hurricane - but he hasn't figured out - he hasn't figured out - that I can handle about one new pop song a day. When he can't stop himself it amounts to torture. And he was playing junk, Boz Scraggs' elevator strings.
Then driving to the airport, waiting in Domestic Arrivals under construction, crowded, chaotic. Rowen in dirty lime green ski jacket behaving beautifully. "I'm glad to meet you, Tom." Having the two of them in the car. Parking, figuring out how to get to Videomatica without left turns. Waiting in the car as they loped off. Not more than two, okay. He brought back four.
Driving home thinking how to schedule the oven. Rowen wants to make bread. Turkey immediately when we get home. Get the pie ready to put in as soon as I take the turkey out. Can I cram the sweet potatoes into the narrow shelf under the turkey? Bread with the pie?
Tom and Ro are willing to help but they both need direction for everything. They scrape their chairs. I have to keep an eye on Rowen and his bread while I make pie crust and improvise the pumpkin filling around ingredients I don't have. Grate fresh ginger. Use milk instead of cream and add an egg.
My kitchen isn't set up for family cooking. I have to run to the bathroom to wash anything. I'm sitting on the floor because it hurts to stand, cutting broccoli, peeling sweet potatoes. Don't have a cookie sheet, bake them in the muffin tin. Burn myself knocking them into the tight space under the turkey. Rowen and Tom meantime are watching Men in black. Tom is thinking what to say about it so Rowen will think he's cool. Explosions, music, guys alien and human. Rowen isn't finishing his bread's first stage and I'm hung up waiting to get it out of the way.
Will you set the table? I'm lying on the floor giving directions. Not plates at the corner, think about where the chairs are going to be. No, we're going to pull out the table. No, we can pull it out later. Are there forks in the dishwater? We have two.
Rowen breaks one of my glasses. Tom goes to the store and comes back with diet Coke and some spritzer pop. Coke is a family thing for Tom. But Rowen shouldn't be having diet Coke. Let it go this time. Turn it off for a while, let's just get this done. Tom is helping Rowen with the heavy last stage of stirring and kneading. We get the bread rising on the stove top on and under a towel. Louie arrives. Rowen runs down to meet her. I am glad she's there. She will immediately know the cost of what I'm doing. She's a grown-up. If she offers to do something I won't have to watch her. I say will you get butter and ice cream and can I pay you tomorrow. She comes back with butter and ice cream.
I keep having to keep track of the time. Tom can't read it off his wristwatch and Rowen's is broken. Tom runs to the bedroom and looks at my clock. None of us think to bring it into the kitchen. Meantime dishes are piled in the bathtub because the dishpan has bread in it. If I ask Rowen or Tom to wash something they're doing it under the cold tap in the hand sink.
The turkey's done, put the broccoli on, I say to myself. No - first get the bread rising in its pans. Four pans? No, because then there won't be a burner for the broccoli. But there's the pumpkin filling in the saucepan. Pour it into the crust. Rowen will you wash this pot and put just a little water in it?
Take out the turkey. Where to put it. The pan is very hot. If I put it on newspaper will it catch fire? Newspaper and then a towel, and two towels for potholders. Tom do you want to carve this? He needs a plate. I get him a plate. Yanking the sweet potatoes out of the oven I burn myself again. Where shall I put them. On one of the plates on the table. Don't touch this, it's very hot. Okay let's eat.
Louie has got a candle going on the table. Rowen's good joke was to put my one juice glass in the center of the table. Sweet potatoes, turkey, broccoli. The only thing I'm really interested in is the cranberry sauce. Tom and I are sitting across from each other. This event was for him but I haven't had time to see how he's taking it. I don't care. It's done. Except that the pie has to be turned down after fifteen minutes, and after it comes out the loaf that I couldn't fit has to go in.
Rowen is behaving perfectly, giving everyone courteous attention. Louie is eating away, unobtrusively making note of everything. When we're done I know what Tom needs. Now should we watch Endless summer I? I say. He lights up. He needs to have himself around him. My thinking is that Louie and I will have the waves and Tom will get to explain things and Rowen might like the surfing.
I sit with my back against the oven. Rowen and Louie are on chairs cuddled up. Tom is on the far side of the room. Louie has her toe nudged up against mine. The movie is teenage boy wank, sixteen year old American males claiming the world's beaches. Girls are of interest as tits and bums. There are maybe three. Non-white men are quaint people who have never learned to surf. Louie is seeing it with the ironical eyes of a non-white African activist. Tom is seeing himself sixteen years old and a god. It would be hard to discover just what Rowen is making of it. I heard Louie make a sound repeatedly that I have never heard from her - an obedient little puff of a titter when the narrator said something humorous. Humanly it was a long stupid movie though the waves are always fine. When it was over Tom said, Should we watch the other one (Endless summer II)? Was it three people who said no at the same time? - Maybe just two.
Maybe Gerry and Louise, was my idea. I could see Tom looking out the window at the thought. Rowen said he was going to his room to read. Louie and I checked each other out. I said I'd had enough. She went home.
Putting plates away, sweeping up. Tom's moving the video stuff. Oh what a mess. Say goodnight to Rowen. He offers Tom a hug.
We're lying watching Gerry and Louise. In the middle he said, You're right, this is good, but at the end he got nasty. I listened understanding that what I was hearing was important and maybe decisive and I should try to be clear. But also I was beyond exhausted.
Gerry and Louise is the real of what The African queen is in fantasy, I was trying to say. When I first saw it I was feeling us in them, I say. Her tension about whether he is still lying to her, whether he is worse than she knows, whether in fact he wants to be redeemed. She is in love with him, she has married him, maybe she has made a mistake. She tries to be willing to know. It's up in the air.
South Africa is nothing to do with me, Tom was saying. He is an evil man, he just wants back into the system. He's got her fooled. She's naïve or else she's kinky. His demons are all still there. He's in hell. Some years down the road they're going to find him hanging in a closet. The whole continent of Africa is fucked. They should just get out of there. They should get away from each other. He should go to New York city and drive a cab.
I am starting to clam up. I push myself to say something first. There is truth and reconciliation between the genders, I say. Men are implicated in things, war and violence. Women don't want to know. They are thinking, if we are made so that we need to live together and fuck twice a week, it will be better if I don't ask to hear what I won't like.
I'm not a psychopathic killer, I'm insulted, Tom says. You're not a psychopathic killer but you've done things your wives didn't want to know about, and it was helpful to you when I did want to know about them, I say.
I believe in pleasantness, he was saying. Politics is evil. If you have a solution you're part of the problem. I believe in surfing and rock'n'roll. That other stuff is nothing to do with me. Surfing movies are political, I say. But now I'm done arguing. I'm not angry. What I am is deeply chilled. He goes to sleep. I have a hard night and wake exhausted. We aren't going to be able to fight it through in the time we have. After he leaves I'll be the rest of the day cleaning up. Have to take the videos back before six. Should make them breakfast. I can't get into the bathtub to wash, have to do the dishes first. We should leave at eleven.
While Tom is buying his ticket an old woman wearing a lot of makeup asks us to take her bags to the bus for her, three bags on leashes. She gives Rowen 50¢.
Tom says we needn't wait for the bus to leave. I say we won't. I pat his chest feebly. See you next time. Neither of us, I know, are convinced there'll be a next time. Rowen gives him a hug. We walk away together. I'm aware Tom is noticing that we aren't looking back.
I come home and clean up, make turkey stew, start the turkey soup process. Louie comes by in the evening, gives me an expert back massage and Rowen a toe massage. I feed them both turkey stew. Rowen gets belly pains. I give him the hot water bottle to take to bed.
Now it's one on Saturday afternoon. I haven't worked in two days though I woke thinking about scientific rep.
About Tom and me I am thinking he is loving and hungry and those moments when he holds and praises me are deep medicine, and I have been happy having a man and being able to tell people I have a man. But growing old with someone I have to organize all the time, and someone so foolish with money, would be more than I could do.
He said to Rowen that it was the best homemade bread he'd had in years. It was not good bread. He doesn't believe in truth and reconciliation. He believes lying is politic or else kind. It means he has lost writing and writing has lost him. How can he not know that writing is about truth.
-
Salomé at the Queen Elizabeth. Vanity Fair looked sick, dressed up, hair done, all yellow, all grey, all red, blotchy, puffy, gaunt. Across the street at the Post Office, pickets muffled up for the night, leaning against the wall. Fire in a barrel. Oh - there's the woman who lives next to Sheila - Hi.
30th
Something about, if there were guys like that fucking with his people he'd kill them. So he kinda likes to stay away from -
I can enrage him, that's allowed, but if I'm gonna do that, I have to go in with guns blazing, I can't wuss out, he can't both go deep and keep being chivalrous. That's fair, I said, but no physical violence or intimidation. None of that, he said.
You don't back down, that's what I like about you.
I liked that sentence a lot.
1st December
Annie Moss says of Rowen, the first time she met him she saw he was holding eye contact and he could talk at the same time, very unusual in a kid.
Oh Rowen - so bright - your face is so bright - you had half a cup of tea this morning and sat crossways in the armchair talking fast. Long hands, long feet, shining brown hair, clean steady brown eyes, big teeth, bright bright skin. I'd made you pancakes. You were waiting to run to Terry's. What were you excited about.
4
Longing to be in San Diego where they are doing that work - getting ready to write, it's as if I'm aiming for that.
T sez for Christmas we can stay in a motel and go out to eat. Did I get a cramp in my back as grassroots resistance to organizing family holidays? If so I'm amused. Cos it worked. (The pie was good. Having Rowen was good.) (Buying pots at Kaya Kaya was good - my black, blue and brown bowls, Mycenaean I somehow feel. Louie overjoyed with a black bowl, a birds'-egg speckled bowl and a little matte-oxide miso bowl. I said spend $30. It was a perfect present.)
My spy at Luke's house sez he's back.
Beautiful winter days, dawns and twilights, frost, crows, new moon, tinted plumes - great blue middles over pale noons. A winter such as there hasn't been. Snow on the mountains.
Hutchins Edwin 1995 Cognition in the Wild MIT
Reading Hutchins thinking - he's just the kind of person I am, likes to get into different things, interested in being in the world, sees to the bottom of institutional blind spots - but he's a flourishing professor and I am a 52 year old PhD candidate with no money, none, no house, no marriage, no social position, no community of peers.
- Do you have something to say about that
YES it's because you're a woman
- If I were a man I'd be where he is YES
- Because they're prejudiced YES
- Because I squander myself emotionally YES
- Is there something I should infer
don't withdraw
- Do you mean from the pain of my lack of realization YES
- Both of those because's equally no
- Is it my fault that I'm not where he is no
- I refused opportunities YES
- Was that because of emotional damage no
- Because the existing systems didn't work for me
- The culture didn't support my cognition YES
- It still doesn't no, it does more than it did
- Do you want to say more about this women are improving imagining how to come through
- More? you're withdrawn
- From feeling the disparity of my position YES
- Women with husbands in the field are very advantaged YES
- I am never going to have that position
- So I am working for nothing no
- Please help me hierarchy exists
- Will you give me a sentence you've been held back by withdrawing from struggle and conflict
- I fight a little bit and give up YES
- Hutchins fought more? no he didn't have to
- Is this the arena now YES
- Conflict of ideas
- If I want to do it, given who I am, I have to fight very hard YES
- Is it worth doing
- Make the world give me my place YES
- Don't have fantasies about it YES
- So I have to choose between emotional attachment and this struggle (silence)
- Given who I am can I afford emotional attachment YES
- Is it necessary to the struggle YES
- Are you counting attachment to the goal as emotional attachment YES
- Is attachment to persons necessary
- Does it matter who no
- The struggle requires emotional attachment YES
- You mean commitment YES
- What am I working for if not nothing (hierophant)
- I'm working for mastery YES
- Is that good NO
- Mastery of feeling YES
- So my work is worthless no
- Worse than no
- Then what is the value of the work fighting exclusion
- But I am still excluded YES
- And it's my fault because I don't fight YES
- It's shameful to be sheltering in school
- Can you lead me no
- Do you want me to stop here no
- Is there something I should do to succeed YES
- Will you specify that (hierophant)
- Do you mean teaching no, hierarchy
- Do you want to say more? struggle to temper woman and hierarchy
- Feeling and knowing YES
- That's what it's about YES
- That's what Tom and Louie are for YES
- Can I stop and go back to work now no, unknown future
- You want to say something about it YES, excluded child will come home
- Do you mean that's what it's about YES
- Do you mean that's what I want I mean that's what's happening
- If I were a man I'd be where he is YES
6th
Working on this outline thinking about my book - now that I'm getting the frame, how to make it juicy - who to write for - what sort of support to look for - what community.
7th
Sunday night, David Adams Richards, Small gifts. Pickup truck in the snow, money very tight, girl in a knitted cap, countryside's blowing white night, big rough boy, true love of the exasperated kind. Good writing. That's us, boy. We've had two Christmases together and the last time I saw this on CBC was before I ever met you.
One of the mornings Rowen woke happy. Howcome, I said. School, he said. I'm saying that because I want to record my promise. I said if I had money I would make sure he somehow gets to a real high school.
8th
Mary on the phone early says she's afraid of me. I say, just stop being. She can't even think it. Why can't I be smaller, she says. I'm so strong she'd have to be strong to stand up to me, that's what scares her, she says. She tries a quaver in her voice saying she doesn't have the emotional energy any more. I say she was like that before she was an old lady too.
10th
Pem has nailed two by fours across the tops of three of the rows in the espalier orchard. I woke at 4:30 thinking Something is wrong, what is it? It was that.
Hugh brought ice wine to the party - ice wine he made - it's the name
- it tastes the way I thought wine would taste when I was a child, intense,
perfumy - and is gold colored - but it should be crystalline and is a syrup.
- the golden west volume 12: 1997-98 september-january
- work & days: a lifetime journal project