the golden west volume 14 part 2 - 1998 may-june

work & days: a lifetime journal project

20 May Wednesday afternoon. It's cold in the house, bright outside. ­ Joyce frail and small, Tom heavy and large. Two spirits took each other's measure while talking about anything that came to hand. You're a writer? Joyce says. I watch Tom present himself. He's chosen the chair that is next to me and a bit behind mine, rather than the sofa across the room. He's lying back in his chair and has added some power to his voice. She is sitting straight and scanning him to the quick. I know my job is to stay out of the way. They do what they can with journalism is and isn't writing. Then he leaves gracefully. He's a good man, she says twice. He's deep. I saw the way you came in together. He's a match for you. I don't know about that today, so I'll leave it for now and talk about work. She lights up. I do too. But I need to talk about not having energy. She says she thinks I'm incubating. Yeah, maybe. And she recommends meditating for energy, not as a discipline but for pleasure. Alright, I'll do that. A session without much energy. What else, this visit. A good poke yesterday. The drive to Iona Park through sun in many streets. Last night a half hour when I horse-whispered him about a surfer who paces a grey beach. He has been speeding since he was a child and yet there was always someone who wanted to stand still. I tell the story so it offers him a home and he rejects it with energy. No wood fire. He's going to find speed again. Alright, Tom, if you're sure that's what you want. I'm wanting to say, dear you, we work so hard. There's so much good will and trying. You came with plans to reach the real Ellie, the one you like. You'll change me, you hope. We're both doing that. I'm sad, seeing it. 21 "... and with the wonderful Ellie Epp, to discuss the nature of integrity and creation." 1994, Peter's story of cultural doing. It's a brave book. He went where smart people were and flirted with them. He kept himself moving. He tells the costs: how he pissed his bed and had the mattress put out on the roof when he was little. I feel gutless reading it - I've held back everywhere. The costs of that. But then he is excited about things other people are excited about, an excitable guy. Being able to be publicly excited, being a jazz trumpeter, he said. I've been privately silently excited. Peter Harcourt 1994 A Canadian journey: conversations with time Oberon For instance yesterday sitting with Tom on the bus platform seeing a square window reflecting columns in a grey-green glass that was bowing them in some systematic way and toning them, also in a systematic way, so they were shades of one color. Then into this systematically transformed space would walk a single traveler, a blacker shape with different bits and attachments, changing size, changing shape, drawing a traversal, exiting. I'm remembering Tom as if he were a whale, an old grey with barnacles, whose giant head kept looming up beside me. I kept expecting something else. 22 Rowen is 13 today. Negative buoyancy sez Tom. Halfway between the seabed and the surface: I am glad to be accomplished. I am glad to be employed with and for you. Truly in love, me 23 Reading right-wing technology hype in Wired and ASAP agape at the ideological mix. They're pro-science because science supports technology and technology is making them rich, but they're anti-neuroscience and anti-evolution because they feel reduced, demoted in the thought that they are what they think of as merely matter. They're against government that taxes, regulates and investigates, but they're for US economic hegemony. They are for supranational business by means of the web, but they think of multicultural studies as defense of primitivism. They think of wealth as achieved by moral heroism - sacrifice, discipline, risk, intelligence, service - and don't mention the roles of inheritance, influence, unprincipled exploitation of human weakness, social and environmental opportunism. They say capitalist technological imperialism is replacing war and neglect to say that, nonetheless, the result is genocidal civilian death. Matter and master. 24 Dreaming I was cleaning behind a piece of wood set in a closet ceiling, and saw that the bats were coming out of a light socket in the wall. The piece of wood had a black mark where the bats touch it. As I clean, two bats have flopped out, a little one folded on the floor, a bigger brown one on my other side with its wings spread. I try to put the piece of wood back. The place where it fit doesn't seem to be there anymore. I stick it up somehow. I'm thinking about the way the piece of wood didn't fit back into place, what it has to do with brain dynamics. My first thought is to say part of a brain pattern has shifted so the wood is the imagined same but the ceiling not. That's probably wrong. What's wrong is that it forgets the question's about dreaming. There was wood fitting and then there was wood not fitting, but actually it would be that the action of refitting the wood was missing its normal conditions. Incompleteness of conditions, which is incompleteness of imagining structure, must often drive dreaming sequence. 1) The wider question is how do we remember sequences, how do we remember as one event what happened in sequence, how do we know a whole sequence? 2) The second wide question is about recognition, how do we recognize something is correct, or know it isn't, before we can formulate it. This has something to do with the question about intuition. Do you understand how we know sequences     YES Structure for perceiving space is accumulated     YES Is structure for perceiving time accumulated     YES Is it accumulated by the same structures that accumulate for space perception     YES Is time perception a kind of spatial imagining     YES Time can't be perceived as such, it can only be imagined     Can space be perceived as such     NO Objects in spatial relation     We do see an object changing     YES Gibson would say we perceive temporal structure     YES We perceive it by simulating spatial structure     YES Am I on the right track with this     YES Is recognition a certain feel of pattern     YES Intuition is a pattern that feels right     YES It hasn't organized speech     YES But it can be organized by speech     YES 25 We're living together for three days, we're saying. Spectacular fucking. It's pleasure without sticking my hand down in, and it goes on and on. My lord has figured out how to last. - But now he's playing music in the kitchen. I'll go stomp on it. - Trying to read Churchland and Damasio this morning, remarkable unfocus. Brain unfocus, I guess - I couldn't see the page well, and could not understand. Couldn't read. Brainfog. 27 Here's Wednesday, late afternoon, cold, dark. After you leave I take back the house. Wash dishes. Put out fresh roses. Eat salad made with organic stuff, sit in the green chair with a hot water bottle. It's quiet. I have everything my way. But I don't know what to say. California grey whale sighted in foreign waters. Blowing a mighty plume. I was lying in your arms last night telling stories. Chris Cordeaux, Rasheed. You were lying peacefully liking the stories. You'd tried to poke but it was too disorganized for me, my feet on the pillow and my head under the duvet and you thumping all around applying weight. Now you for once were deflated and calm listening with pleasure. What's the url of this place, let's put a bookmark. The way you had your strong arms around me and were seeing the stories' locations. Then when I was ready and you said I'd have to wait till morning I thought, no, there's a way, I'm starting to know you. And talked you up. 29 Thinking about whether to go to Nathalie's birthday gathering at the Wazubee, Tom making a voice for what he feels watching other people drink, a kind of troll I thought of as ancestral. GIVE ME BEER NOW. 30 Roses on the new table. I mean pink, pink, pink, white, pink, white, pale pink, cerise, in front of the chalk-blue wall, next to the white and yellow vertical strips of window frame. A high-class sight. I'm like a bridge that was washed away / My foundations are made of clay. Eric Clapton's song that's been on the charts as Tom and Joseph were feeling their way. My father's eyes. You phoned in distress about singing Christians. A lot of them arrived at the mission with plates covered with foil. Those who didn't go down to the kitchen stayed in the chapel to minister to fallen men in song. Bring-ing in the sheaves / Bring-ing in the sheaves. You hold up the phone so I can hear a tenor soloist of the kind I know: projecting a notion of wholesome sincerity in complacent faith that everything unwholesome is hidden - a pitiable delusion that only inexperience allows. Willed inexperience. You're further out than you've been, you say, aquiver. You're liking to write. I said I was using the issues of Wired and ASAP you saved me. You said your tail was wagging so hard I'd better move the stuff on the table. 1st of June Yesterday morning when Luke brought his stuff to store I made tea and carried up the box of his drawings. He sat in the green chair and we went through them together. His first scribbles, from 36 months and maybe earlier, with my notations on the back, made in the house on Burghley Road. Then drawings from the Eton Street house when he was four, and then the drawings made in this house when he was five and six. His first sentences from Strathcona School. It amounted to a journal. I'm not writing well, I'm noticing, but I want to note how it was to look at that record with him. He could explain some of the drawings. "It's a shark." And I could explain some of them. We made out the writing together. There was a while he was writing LUKELE as one name. He often drew animals, a whale, a horse, with smiling profiles. When he drew a house he would often surround it with roads, sometimes with other houses. There was intent study of cars, ships, tanks, carts, planes, rockets, once a trolley with two poles reaching up to lines of wires. Many submarines in cross-section, men at controls in small rooms, always a room with a periscope. Police cars. BOOM. VROOM. The alphabet. The number row, several times written from right to left. Sets of his dear ones: ROY, KIT, EILLIE. FAMILIE. Pairs of names with double arrows of symmetrical relation: TIM<->JOSIE, BRAD<->SHIOBHAN. It was a record of his thought and feeling over three years, from his first marks to the end of grade one. It was a record also of the particular quality of my love for him, the feel of it, which was there also as we looked patiently at every page in the pile. When I looked sideways at him I saw that he looked like himself then. Hugging him goodbye at the top of the stairs he said, Do you ever wonder how I got so big? "I was wondering it at that moment." Burn them, he said, but I don't think so. I went through them this morning and kept a quarter of the pile. And I'm wondering whether to go through the recycle pile again in case I missed something that could tell either of us something another time. - blessed by the memory of the exquisite hara of your warm abdomen i am yours [writes Tom] - I have a Graduate Fellowship but only for the fall term - it's 5000. That means I have (now) 7000 for seven months, not enough to live here, not enough for San Diego. I worked all day in Photoshop making a background image of the black arrows on blue. Wearing my black angora sweater that I look so nice in, and my loose fatigues, with my hair in a ponytail. Walking around Harbour Centre feeling well, speaking to people with pleasure - amazing, the way I haven't been like that. 4th The tension - Tanya's back - my midsection is rigid. She put her music on the moment she arrived. Bass vibration from every piece of furniture, not loud but pervasive invasion. It is as if my torso stiffens trying to protect my organs. It has been lovely with her gone. I relaxed after I spoke to Velcro and knew he wasn't hostile. I got better-looking. My eyelids cleared. Tom's story when I asked him about the dentist. I was hesitating. You're going to go ask your book, he says. What will it tell me? He confesses. I can't get anything past you! I take note that I'm doubting the sincerity of that too. I believe he never talks to me about money without lying. His relation to money is the most corrupt and hidden of his present relations. I'm saying this without rancour. I've been puzzled why I have to keep bringing up money though it accelerates him into a spin every time. It's not my business what he does with his money, but the fact that he's lying has to be dealt with. Every lie he tells marks a possible growing point. What he feels about banks is what he felt about his parents: that they would steal what he entrusted. They would steal his vitality. It was an accurate belief. He wants to spend energy but not entrust it. His fear of entrusting it means he can't build over time, he has to spend rather than invest. I'm not afraid of spending but I'm afraid of running out, because I've sometimes run out. Is he figuring out some of this? Entrusting and committing are related. Under his relation to money there is something he doesn't want to know. That's why there's such a blur. Will you tell me what it is love is     established in perfection of temperance This is what he's afraid to know?     YES He thinks love is a spill or gush     YES But it is establishment of order     Love builds conditions for vitality     YES His parents' love didn't do that     YES His parents' love stole and confined     YES Money is flow of energy between bodies     YES Which is one of the conditions of vitality     Investment is temporary hoarding     A time-structure     YES Is there more I should see     keep going Do we have a similar weakness about money     no, different He's not really saving money to be with me     no, he is But money is where his fear is showing     I have to make sure I have enough money for me     NO, sharing money will push both of you I don't trust him to take care of me     YES Rightly     no, internal lovers 6 Saturday morning in the Publab, Tom [on email] suddenly talking about a person who breaks in suggesting drugs. I said, What does the voice sound like? He told me instead about the being I found when I went into dope, the swift absolute one who is decisive and stern, knows she can only defend herself by acting on what she knows. Sacrifice, Tom said. Yes. Choosing without hesitation to give up what's less right. "this being is moral, says yes and no decisively." A sense of ritual action comes from that moral sense. It distains moral instruction because it knows for itself. "It feels like the real, absolute core of me," he says. I said it has immediate perception of quality of being. It sees weakness and falseness, swiftness and fineness: actively, energetically, and feelingly. - I've got more to say. it's about Spirit and finding It. and how I think I sometimes have. especially with you. 7 A DJ on a soft rock station said it was a pretty night out there. Summer Saturday night. Water falling on concrete from a height, someone has watered flower boxes on a balcony. I leaned out the window to look, and there were all the open windows with people moving in orange electric light. A young man lifting a fork with a sausage on it. Trudy going to the fridge wearing what she wore twenty years ago. Through my back balcony door I could hear a little party on the balcony across the way. There was a first quarter moon shining straight through the bathroom window onto the hall floor. In the herb garden weeding through twilight to the moment when all the pinks and yellows incandesce. People come through all evening to visit what I made, appearing in the deep shadow of the end of the vinewalk corridor. For some reason I'm stronger than I have been in years. I can work without aching. I look nice. 8 I suppose you've got something to say about that     no Bitter, angry, cynical     I shouldn't have driven down     YES I did it for the wrong reason     no At the wrong time     YES What he said this morning was true     YES We don't have a future     YES I was happy last week     Is happiness always a delusion     no Was last week's happiness a delusion     That's why it went wrong     YES   Dear large one, I'm floored today. I'm a floor today. Are you there? Yes. I feel you, large strong and quiet. He's frightened. Yes. I know what he's frightened of. Though not what it's like for him to be frightened of that. He doesn't have support, I had you. He could have me. Can he? Yes but not with the string, it would have to be a voice. I'm afraid it would have to get worse first, and I'm afraid he isn't clean enough. He's doing it a different way, being faithful in work. Yes, okay. 9 What am I going to do, a loco thoroughbred like me should not be in harness at all, and I'm in harness with a loco rodeo bronc. - Horrible Tanya is sitting in her house playing her music twelve hours a day, day after day. The same music. - [insulting passages abt Tom] A good description of what it was like with Vic, who'd look at him sometimes with tender and young eyes but often with hateful reptilian eyes. He never stopped hoping to be understood. Phone call. I say I am globally pissed off with both of us. Struggled this morning to get Kantian stories into html, then Michael Hayward gave me the Pagemill book and it was magically done. Nathalie lovely and smart and kind indulging my exasperation and recommending business ventures as we eat lunch in the food mall crypt. Broomstick thumping yesterday pushed Tanya to louder music but today, after a skirmish, it has settled some. Don't speak too soon. 11 Is there a summary today? I'm noticing that this falling separate is happening after he has been happy - writing - confiding. And I was happy too, a happy girl in the city. I praised his qualities to Joyce. 12 Dreaming a project replastering a large room, my new room in a house owned with Louie and ----. There is a couple who have come in to do the job. The woman is working well but the man keeps jumping around and stopping. I was interested in him at first. He gave a lively reply to something, but I don't like to think I am paying for his work when he can't stick to anything. To get it done, I'm helping him. He's working on the south wall. I see there are sheets of wallpaper and I pull them off. Underneath, the plaster is worse than I imagined, ugly wounds and all of it sheeting off. It'll have to come down. He doesn't want me to pull it down. He thinks we can smooth it over. I'm making piles and they keep being taken care of - I think the woman is making steady trips when I'm not looking at the door. A big mirror I lift down carefully - not a mirror, though it's a mirror frame. There is a picture of a little boy, very small, maybe three. Other pictures of men. Behind it there is another layer that pulls off as I'm lifting it down. There is a mirror, but it's smaller and in the shape of a cross. There is also a brown burlap robe, very old, shaped to the shape of the large frame. I think it's a monk's robe. It's like a desiccated corpse. The cross is at his midriff. When I've lifted down this layering of images and mirror and relic I look carefully at the man's face. It's a narrow unintelligent face, very restless. You're depressed, aren't you, I say. He goes off and when he comes back he says he doesn't like my garden, it's dull. Something like that. I draw myself up and say it was published in Country Gardens magazine. Meantime one of the guys from the garden is ordering him away. They're fired. - Love brat downstairs has written me a letter, and I have replied, which is making me want to laugh. She sez more or less what love brat would say - that I don't like laughter or love or life or rhythm or music. I say I do so, and I've got nothing against you personally, and my life is richer than you can imagine, I'm rich and complex and vital. But you - you're a brat with a kink, afraid of discipline, afraid of commitment, zonking out, unconscious, nasty, hostile, and stupid. - Today I loved being in a room with twenty people at big terminals working with pictures. Propeller-heads eager to explain. Suddenly being able to do layers, drag-rescaling and typography in Photoshop. What else. Looking at the grain book, I thought I could make an Orphic matrix/context, a lot of sidebar pages, internal frames. - Tom on the phone says, first, he's laid off and do I want to get together, and then turns around and agrees he wants the time off to spin and dry, spin and dry. As we speak I'm in the hall chair and the sky is neon ivory from edge to edge. He's unemotional, he says. I am too. I say the hype has stopped, let's leave it alone and see how it shakes down. 13 love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe I dreamed I was talking to someone about what it was like to read that in an autograph book when I was a child. Dreaming, I had a better sense of it than I do now. I was feeling the freshness of the instruction, but also as I talked about it I was thinking that it had a particular meaning, not consciously thought, to the child I was. Mary phoning. This is the story she told about Uncle Willie. She visited Alice, who is trembling and walking with a cane. Willie was in the back room but she didn't see him. His dentures don't fit. He hasn't seen even his kids and his grandkids for three years. In summer he gardens. They're in a trailer park in Calgary and he has every bit of space full of plants. Raspberries, strawberries, things his dad grew. In winter he writes. Alice hasn't read it but she says there are boxes full. What is he writing? Warnings to youth. He was a speedy wiry guy with a lot of will and a greyish version of the dark Epp hawk face. Aquiline, ascetic. He went away to school but it was only bible college. He married a big Baptist who laughed loud. Was a preacher of the Jeremiah kind, loveless, it seemed to me. I liked something about his voice - a pour of unstoppable metal. Energized tension. He preached that aluminum pots are toxic and blood analysis can reveal disease at a distance. He also preached against sugar. Women shouldn't ride bicycles, he said. (I was at the sink washing dishes. He was at the kitchen table after supper.) He'd hired out to my dad for the stooking and threshing and I'd see him on the hillside behind the barn, a small man alone in the stubble. Tom when I call him says I'm his witness and he hasn't told me things yet. You have told me things. Yes, but not the way I .... And then he says he sees more than he says, and he'll tell me more. I say my question is why did this happen when we had been happy? He says we can pick one: it was because we had a moment of clarity and saw it wouldn't work, or because we're getting ready for the next step and we want to make sure it wasn't delusional happiness. He also said we'd have to work harder at sharing each other's interests. That's not right, I think. More like: each one get closer to our own real interests. And then a blurt of energy when he said he was afraid he'd find out he really doesn't have the equipment and that would mean he's been deluded all this time imagining he could do poetry and philosophy. 14 It's Sunday. Louie's birthday work party. A cool grey morning with a lot of birds squawking. Not squawking, churring and cheeping. - Tom was struck by the dream we found ourselves in, out on the middle of Silver Lake in a paddleboat, side by side with our knees going up and down and nothing to say, his heels splashing into water every time they went around. Pete and Gladys Bleck on Lazee Boys in front of a 27-inch with ninety channels on cable, and a cabin decorated with cute ducks of many kinds. Guest book where other families leave scripture references. (But I liked the meadows on that road, deep grass and flowers ungrazed but level, with clean edges.) There we sat in the living room, because Tom was jonesing to see the Jazz-Bulls game. I had my arms crossed tight over my midriff feeling, not thinking, what am I doing here, as if I don't have a life and am landing at random like a twenty-year-old. Tom opening his wallet and paying the money. What happened was that I drove down a week ago today through a beautiful afternoon, arrived without thinking much, was behind the wheel looking at maps when he came out of Northwest Industries looking his worst, pale blue shorts and a teeshirt with writing on it, dead eyes, a grey spiritless indolent decrepitude. I took one look and didn't want another, and then had to deal with being civil. He'd come straight off work and I could see it would take a day of effort to get him looking real and present. We only had the afternoon. The book says that when I'm the child what I see is irresponsibility. I turn my face away and look to see what else there is. It has taken till now for me to tell the story. That means something. I shut down hard. There he was in the cozy cabin sitting up in bed at first grey dawn saying, It's over, we aren't going to make it. I get up and open the cabin door. I'm exhausted and weakly teary but I'm calling his bluff. Alright, if we're breaking up, let's do it, let's go. He's suddenly panicked. There is a moment when I'm reaching to prop the door and my face is hidden and I'm startled to feel a flash of a wicked smile. Got him. At this moment, what. I want him securely attached so I can consider all his follies and shortcomings. 15 I was next to Tom on some public bench, a bus or park. He transformed before my eyes, turned into a little boy in distress. A bit later I saw him go into an uncontrollable manic state. He took the form of a woman like Marilyn Monroe, standing at the fire hydrant on the street below, turning it on and standing in the blast of water. There wasn't anything I could do, though he was putting himself in danger. He was wearing a white dress like Marilyn's air vent photo. - Love eyes from working with images. Squire's beautiful site about his father. The way the images are right for the medium - strong strange and simple. And right for the story. The text is understated and bears itself simply, short lines, short paragraphs, short sections on a page. The images key high feeling from simple means. There's a sense of holding the breath from page to page. It's a writer's work. [Joseph Squier Life with father] I was looking at his use of pre to format and tried writing my text in place of his. The style worked. It brought the child's steadiness in pain. Coming away from working with color pictures I see images as small as his gifs - the man running up his steps across the alley, the wrinkling patch of light on the wall, thrown from half a sun on the horizon through moving layers of leaves, and then through old glass. Ripples of gold light slipping across across across. I'm in the midst of a medium I have so many materials for. Talking to Tom about clothes. He says his clothes signal responsibility for himself. Rebellion is responsibility: they never caught me. Rebellious clothes represent courage, represent oneself as unbeaten. "It would make me very happy if you got the idea that I know what I'm doing. I want you to say how much you love me, how wonderful I am, how brave I am, how steadfast I am." I said I suppose critically that if I want to know whether someone is unbeaten I look through the clothes to the body, which can't lie, and that clothes that go counter to the body's evidence irritate me like a tenor trying to sound sincere. I remembered Kim Sterelney's jeans falling off his hairy bum, and his responsibility as a teacher. David Mann's old chalky suit. I was trying to say rebellion isn't autonomy. And I'm right but irrelevant. I don't like to know how irrelevant. Not liking to know is childish too. 17 I go over this so many times. Childishness looks at Tom and says there's no one to look after me. Then there's some thought and I say the only way it will work is if I see he's a child and look after him. Then I say it's endless work, I don't want it, why should I do it, it's too lonely and unfree. Then after a while I say, I forgot to tell my childishness that I'm here to look after her. - I write a note this morning whose subject line is You are wonderful. Here's the letter I get back. you've just blissed me out. i spent the night thinking of the ways in which i fail you and the ways in which i fail myself with you. i don't think you fail me. i haven't accomplished you. what you have is precious and i want it, but you are reserved with it. and that's because the ways I fail you are the ways I fail myself with you. i fail myself when I react to resistance and forget that what i want to do is release the pent-up love, trust and desire i see in you. you know this. and you are right to guard it so carefully. you are guarding it until you are confident that the love, trust and desire i am expressing is genuine. and that the intellect that drives it is acute. when I drop into my air guitar persona you close up like a sea anemone. it terrifies you. and this terrifies me. because i am powerless over my shadow, who is joe cool. and who is afraid to be your friend. afraid because he knows i think the only love worth having is unconditional and without it i cannot love unconditionally. and that's just fine with joe. i think you must be dealing with your own shadow. she is afraid to be my friend; let's call her little miss marion the librarian. she is the perfect defense against and counter persona to joe cool. the wonderful thing is we both are aware of our shadows. they are not our enemies. they are our shields. we seek respite behind them while we gather our strength and courage to attempt again and in the process learn more about loving unconditionally. i've never gotten this far with anyone else. in itself, this would be good enough. but, i want more. i want you. Just now on the phone he reads me Lindsey van Gelder reviewing a cyberfeminist on neural nets. "I'm thinking," he says. [May have been Lindsay van Gelder 1990 "The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover," republished in Talking to Strangers: Mediated Therapeutic Communication, ed Gary Gumpert and Sandra Fish Ablex] 18 Yesterday in amid the Pride publishing class I was looking at the participants seeing how singular they are - singular talents - sometimes meaning a talent isolated in the culture and in the person. They don't know how to use themselves. There has been no one to show them. They're like other of the East End's strange people, some of whom have developed their singularities to extremes - Michael Cleghorn, Eric, Tony Gordon-Wilson - that would be celebrated if they weren't crazy. Meaning if they knew how to use themselves. What I woke thinking about was David Birch, who invited me to supper last night because he wants me to make him a flyer so he can sell his collection. What do you want to say? Who do you want to sell to? He doesn't know. We're talking in his basement cave. He has added a room that looks like a newspaper's office in the late 1800s. David's museum of beautiful and unusual things, natural and artifactual, set together in lovely and thoughtful ways, David's singular art. Meantime he lives in a cloud of thoughts about what he might really do. His parents have offered him twenty acres of Saltspring hillside. He could make a vineyard. David could imagine he'd make a vineyard. He also could build a house in the Interior. Or travel the roads in a donkey cart. Or take over his Uncle Neil's farm in the Valley. But David has to imagine doing things he doesn't want to do because neither he nor anyone else knows he is already doing what he wants to do, which is finding stuff in garage sales and alleys and similarly finding stuff in books about food, building, environmental activism and interpersonal psychology. David studies. 19 He was smallish in stature, but well set and nimble as a goat; his face was of good open expression, but sunburnt very dark, and heavily freckled and pitted with smallpox; his eyes were unusually light and had a kind of dancing madness in them, that was both engaging and alarming; and when he took off his greatcoat, he laid a pair of fine silver-mounted pistols on the table, and I saw that he was belted with a great sword. [David Balfour meets Alan Beck] Reading and eating, Kidnapped and baked custard through the evening. Like thirty or forty years back. An anxious heart when Tanya comes home after days away. The music isn't loud but it's there. I wind myself up to fight if I have to. Day learning Photoshop. A beautiful shock: select - color range - black matte applied to the photo of fish on the line. 20 I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house. The sun began to shine upon the summit of the hills as I went down the road; and by the time I had come as far as the manse, the blackbirds were whistling in the garden lilacs, and the mist that hung around the valley in the time of the dawn was beginning to arise and die away. Today's Sun: Castenada died in April of liver cancer. He was 72. 21st Constable and Romantic naturalism 1776-1837. Leslie's life of Constable. CR Leslie Memoirs of the life of John Constable Phaidon What 'established' means. A nearly perfect life in art, in circumstance and in character. He waited five years for Maria Bricknell and then lived happily with her, and loved his children. His friendships lasted and were intimate: John Fisher was twenty when he was thirty-six, was a reverend and became an archdeacon, whatever that is. They wrote easy, honest letters. He was tall and handsome. He worked constantly and thoughtfully, and could balance commissions and real work. He looks at his own work with delight. Succeeds but isn't famous. Does not know that his influence in France carries the young to Impressionism. His wife, however: seven children in eleven years and then she died of consumption. Established in these ways: he is born into a culture that has been built in place for a millennium at least, adapted to its landscape; his family is familiar with that culture and has prospered in it and can guide and introduce him usefully; he grows up in one place; neither of his parents and none of his brothers and sisters die before he is grown; he's lucky in his gender positioning ("remarkable among the young men of his village for muscular strength, and being tall and well formed, with good features, a fresh complexion, and fine dark eyes was called in the neighbourhood the handsome miller"); he knows what he wants to do by the time he is sixteen and finds immediate informed support. When he dies at 61, it's as if he expires because his intimate support is gone - his wife ten years earlier, John Fisher four years after that. Take care that you launch your boat at the appointed time, and fearlessly appear before the world in a tangible shape. It is the only way to be cured of idle vapours and useless fastidiousness. "The art is now filled with Phantasmagoria." 1951, 178 Claude's exhilaration and light departed from him when he was between fifty and sixty, and he then became a professor of the 'higher walks of art', and fell in a great degree into the manner of the painters around him; so difficult it is to be natural, so easy to be superior in our own opinion. "Archdeacon Fisher used to compare himself in some situations to a lobster in the boiler, very comfortable at first ...." "These mutual communications of study are a great help to the happiness of life." 22 Here's the morning. Sun in a strip on the yellow carpet. Leaves rustling, the ficus at the open window. Cheeps, swishes, rumbles, a seaplane, someone watering a garden. A train. It's 7:30. 24th This visit. The look you had this morning. You were on the other side of the table. A living soul. We said six months, no bailing out, no threatening to bail out. A couple of codicils having to do with khaki pants, morning pokes, music and fibs. You woke this morning and wriggled up against me. Wriggle, wriggle, push, squirm, all tight and warm, knees behind my knees, arms firm around. I cooked, you packed. Wednesday. At the art gallery yesterday, a first moment in the large rooms with glass cases when you came back to where I was staring at the lines of two wolf masks and said something I didn't want to hear, because I wanted to be able to see. You felt me chill and vanished. And then, not long after, I could go where you were standing and touch your arm to say sorry, and then we went through the rooms together both seeing, I think. I could see and still be with you, so I was happy after. You had been seeing, and so you looked beautiful. And then when we had milled back and forth across the street, up and down stairs, looking for a place to eat - for just long enough - someone said hello quietly behind my left shoulder. Luke! I had a moment of unhidden unexpected joy. Grabbed him around the middle. We sat in a booth in the Templeton Café, we were touching all up and down our sides, Luke was beautiful across the table. Luke's long brown arms stretched all the way across the table toward both of us. What else. Meeting you at the station I made sure you'd see me before you got into Customs. You were overjoyed that you'd been able to get on a train and came across the line. I knew you'd like the trip. An eagle flew along with the coach. You were five minutes early, got in at 11:35. By the time I heard the noon whistle I was on my back making you welcome. You looked nice coming around the corner into Customs. All except for your fancy boy shoes with tassels. Oh I am (phone rings, Louie) - 25 - so critical. I inspect what you say as anxiously as if it could corrupt me. I read you many pages of bookwork in which I say everything bad I ever think about you. (- I'm laughing. Thank you. "And that brings us to the fourteenth ....") I somehow don't start liking you until I've done that. You understand. "You're showing me your fears." Yes. It's wise of you to know that. There's more, though. Your habit is so much to praise, to promise, to pump, that I say all the worst trying to find the bedrock feeling of truth that I trust, that is trust, for me. I'm in continuous struggle in your presence. I love you, you say. I silently discredit. Why silently? It's obedience. Maybe you do feel love, maybe you do mean love, maybe I don't know. I can take it as a declaration of your moment, but it costs me something to be kind. What it costs is that either I comply in your carelessness and believe, or I stiffen and separate. It is part of what I feel as a texture of bad judgment in the way you speak to me. This is at the heart of the way we are together, my struggle with what I feel is wrongness in the texture of your thinking. This is where I need to be exact. I'm continuously fighting what I feel as blur, convention, dishonesty, laziness. Sins of mind. I fight them because they are like disorder in my house, or like a drug in my brain. They obstruct feeling and thinking. We don't get to realness in this dirty fog. And then - when you're ready to go home I see what the struggle has made you: face full of light, clear eyes, a loved boy. Do you want to talk to me this morning     you came through Am I correct to struggle with the quality of his consciousness     Do you want to say anything about that     you have already said it Does he struggle equally with me     YES Correctly     YES For emotional contact     no for mutuality Is there a difference     no, but there was in the way you understood it Will you explain the difference     you think emotional contact is the mother/child state Mutuality is separate     YES He struggles for emotional mutuality     YES And he gets it     YES From my resistance     YES He plays dumb so I'll resist     YES Is there a good reason for that     balancing feeling and intelligence But he's requiring me to be intelligence     YES Wouldn't it be better if he were intelligence     no I'm longing for him to be intelligence so I can be emotion     I get exasperated waiting for that     Will you comment     improve persistence in containing each other I had a right man only when I had Tony     YES Because I was in a right state then     YES I left it because I wanted mother-child union     YES The inference is to find that state again     YES Do you have more to say     about childish feeling Alright     it's the basis of creation You're not writing off childish feeling?     There's a but     YES it needs a structure You're struggling in another way I am not aware of. You fight for sex. You take charge of the expedition to the pole. You see it through (nearly). You take risks of refusal. You fight for emotion. You fight to get us there. You make me listen to Van Morrison. Hyndman Street. Monday night when I took you to English Bay for the sunset, we were sitting on a log on the edge of the sand. There was a couple the next log over, a young Chinese girl and a white boy, cuddling and kissing. She had let herself go very beautifully. Her head had dropped back. He was bent over her face grazing the corner of her mouth, also very beautifully - he was being conscious so she could drop back. - All day on one image in Photoshop. Is that what I should be doing now? Should I be getting ready to write in the morning? Go play with pictures after? 26 Waking, the answer to my question yesterday about writing: I don't succeed because I don't do what it says. In gardening I succeeded because everything it said to do, I did, immediately. Another way to say it: in gardening I wasn't afraid of damaging the world. I didn't like the professional community but it didn't matter in the doing. I seized public space and did whatever was necessary to hold it. I wasn't shut down by anyone's talent, I just grabbed or admired anything that works. Being in the result of the work gave me pleasure always. Anything more you want to say     establish strength More?     find the conflict It's about succeeding rather than writing     YES Something afraid of succeeding     Is it afraid of damaging the world     Can you explain     inspiration The gillies of gilly wood     YES That rejection     YES I put something into the fire     YES Go barefoot in summer     YES I haven't succeeded in fiction since     Were those deserved failures     YES I was too proud to learn     YES The poem about skating     YES Can you tell me why they failed     anger, revenge, compulsion, around early love They are unclean     YES   So my conclusion was correct     no it was a conclusion about love That my love was unclean and would fail     YES It was true about my love but not about my writing     YES It is when there is love in the writing that I am afraid it will damage the world     YES In gardening I'm not afraid of my love     YES I have used writing for anger, revenge, compulsion and exclusion     YES I feel exclusion in writing     YES I hold onto it     YES Should I leave it for now     YES   part 3 the golden west volume 14: 1998 april-july work & days: a lifetime journal project