the golden west volume 2 part 3 - 1995 may-august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver 17 May 1995 Organization. Going to Rowen's on Saturday in Luke's car. Have to write a project description for CECM. Learning HTML. Writing about Dennett for Phil. Managing the construction project at the herb garden. Have to figure out why I'm aching and stiff. Have to get the car fixed. 19 Wrote a letter to the Brit who advertised for a passionate humorous creative person of spiritual substance. Can't believe such a thing would work. He said he is agile and has brown eyes. A balanced paragraph and then 1:1. Louie said her wish if she went to live in the desert would be that I'd send her a book once a month and sometimes a sheet of non-news about the time of year, the time of day, something a student said. I'm not so urgent. My book said to send that letter. I'm not urgent about anything. Going to see Rowen tomorrow - going with Luke to see Rowen. 22nd Read Island What is it these days. Nothing to say. Am I fading out of life? Aches, abstinences. There is a day around me, I can still do that. But not specially. Rowen is beautiful, Luke is happy. I'm elderly, the way I hurt where I move. I'm elderly the way I don't move even to feel. I read thru last year's journal of this time and was wrung again. I feel I've died back since then - have I died back? Died out of hope. I'm at the edge of an ocean stirring & stirring & lapping, youngly soft. There's a light on the rock that's quite shuttered, that seems too thin to throw a shadow, but it does. I dreamed something yesterday, Roy in a tomb waking again. I'd like to go to bed for a couple of days and have someone make me good food. Stagnant. Is that what I am? As if vaguely suicidal. Then I look at what I wrote about Ken's goodbye in the library and I'm crying. Yes I'm still there. I still want to copy it out for him. I still want to die because I can't have him. I still want him to hear everything I've said for him. I think of writing it for him and then say it's hopeless. I'm not very well     What is the matter with me     illusions I'm surrounded with?     no your own Will you name me one     yes, the fool Will you be more specific     no I'm as if depressed, am I depressed     no What am I     struggling     Are you angry with me     Is love woman angry with me     What should I do`     ask love woman     Will you speak to me     (silence) Are you there     yes Will you tell me how you are     excluded Do you mean because of Charmaine [Luke's girlfriend]     yes That's hard to take     Luke wd never have picked me     I shouldn't underestimate that     Her tits and legs     YES Luke is asserting his escape     She knows she has won     She is supposed to win     YES But does it mean I lose     no Is that why I'm feeling lonely     Does Luke know I'm feeling that     YES   What does it mean for me     something about men She is Judy?     Is that why he was asking     no I am cooperating     But it is costing me     no But something is costing me     How do I seem to her     withdrawn How do I seem to him     competitive With him     Am I sacrificing myself     you wish. You're losing   I am no further ahead     no I am experiencing a defeat as a woman     no 'You've been young for fifty years,' [michael said] that was a good answer     What is it that's costing me     withdrawal That I'm not taking it directly     I'm saying to Luke, you're gone so I'll move on to Rowen     Are you liking it that I'm realizing this       But there's more I need to do, what     something about you Confess it     no What the work is     balancing to improve withdrawal What is behind the withdrawal     recovery I feel hopeless     so-so I'll never have anything of my own     no What can I have of my own     love woman I can have her defeat     YES For Luke's sake     no For who or what     the family, the community When I am competing with him am I saying, she is defeated but I'm not?     But I have to be defeated     Was she saying that because she understands what this is     Elderly for fifty years     no I don't have to be     YES And when I am defeated, then what     (Kw) Something about men     What     the work More work with men       Please say more     (Kc) Something about art     no This is very depressing     YES But I've got to it now     Will you talk to me     no Tell me about my defeat     it's a defeat of control Is that good     YES If I'm defeated will it make me die     no I feel it will     YES   Now what     success Success at what     recovery Recovery of what     shared pleasure Do you mean in this trip     YES   I feel very dejected     As if I have no place in life     Do I have a place in life     What is it     loving Do you mean loving anyone     no I'm afraid of this question     Why am I afraid of this question     (As) Will you lead me     (devil) Compulsion?     Love that isn't compulsion       Please lead me     (9w) Do you mean reserve       Why was I cracking there     you feel you'll never really share And will I     no I don't know what to do next, will you tell me     (HP) Listen to them     no To you     YES Are you going to talk     no Then what     make you better Now?     YES. love woman imagines love is the secret I don't understand this sentence     deeply understand deeply feel your withdrawal from your father into intelligence   I want to cast myself down in despair     I feel that in Luke's presence     Is there a next sentence     fight betrayal to shatter the structure of withdrawal Fight Charmaine     YES Luke needs her to win     YES I can't do that     YES But I'm supposed to     YES She's love woman     Now I'm hung up     YES I want to commit suicide sort of.     Yes. Rather than fight her     Are you pointing out what the withdrawal is     Is it fear     no What is it     (the fool) Can you get me through this     I feel hopeless     YES I feel like withdrawing from Luke forever     What should I do     talk to Michael I'm panicking     not exactly. Come through I don't know how. 23 Not in contact (the way the movement of trees is downstream from their contact). Love woman thinks romance is contact. Romance is more like responsibility for someone else's contact. I've wanted someone who could teach me how to stay in contact. My parents hadn't a clue. They let me endure church and school without acknowledgement even. They weren't in contact. I don't want responsibility for persons. I've wanted responsibility for work. I have been responsible in work. Teaching. What is this? An even worse dullness. Follow it on. If romance is responsibility, then there is nothing but responsibility, and responsibility is loneliness, is being alone. Why do I think that? Responsibility is being involved, but if I think of there being only responsibility I start to cry. Responsibility in romance looks like dreariness. Hopelessness. Why. What hope is given up? I'm depressed     Is being depressed a form of being withdrawn     Is it better to be depressed than to be mindless     But I'm digging myself in deeper     Is this what the Christmas depression was about     Are they going to have a baby     My depression will lose me Luke     YES What's next     love woman Is this her depression [LW]     so-so It's mine     She would want to interfere     I withdraw because I shouldn't interfere       She's a mindless cow     And makes him happy for that reason     Would be a good mother     We have nothing in common     What about love woman     something about betrayal What about it     losses I'm seeing I have to give up on Luke     YES Say     temperance Can there still be a good form of relation     (As) If I act     And do what     temperance Instead of bailing out       I don't know how to temper myself     How     come through Is there information in that     It means I have to suffer more     Suffer my father's preference for Judy     no Suffer what     your judgment I feel it's my fault I'm like this     Is that what you mean     no Which judgment     something about gain What are you calling Luke now     your child. Come through   - Luke belongs to the normals. My kids belong to the normals. I'd want them to. How bad is it really. I keep not knowing. I'm begging Joyce to help. He's a normal and he hasn't a clue. He's merciless. - I've been this way for a long time and have complained of this and that but haven't complained of being myself. But now I'm complaining that I am going to go on being like this. Self defeating. I erased that. What if it isn't true. What if saying it's my fault is the real defeat. If I were cheerful and sympathetic, people would love me even if I am deformed. Look at my student evaluations. "The students obviously loved her." On the ferry looking at the family men and their guts and moustaches and creased red necks. Michael was missing more teeth, grinning availably. Lise would hoist out a huge white tit that Hank took head-on. Rowen was beautiful in an orange tee-shirt. What's her name has bubble boobs and runner's legs and is wearing shorts with a smiley face on the bum. The baby took a shine to her. Luke drove and checked the tires like a remote responsible married man. An ordinary man, better looking than some. His mother is lame and angry. She wants a boyfriend but she has been striking out. There's nothing in this family visit story that can defend me. What will. Tomorrow morning when I look at Dennett on perception I'll be someone who can do what no one on this ferry can. The next time I'm showing work to sensitive people in a foreign city I'll be what bubble-boobs, and my son too, cannot imagine. People like me understand themselves and don't try, or carry an assurance with them somehow. It is as if I carry nothing. None of my distinction. That means something. - It says that what happened was, I saw she was popular with everyone, fitting in. That was the end of it for me. She got more and more comfortable. Vancouver 27 Phone rings and I have no notion that it will be the man of the ad, the Brit. I'm listening to what kind of a Brit, that's the first thing I want to know. He's said he's Martin somebody. Just before he hung up he said something I did like, "after hours, if there is such a thing." He said it in the right way, falling over his feet when they suddenly halted of themselves - talk energy like the motions of the body of a child, rushing forward, stopping suddenly, swerving, being checked, and suddenly sitting down in a satisfied calm: "Yes." A sign-painter. A traveler. Unsettled. Madeleine off and on for ten years - that means someone liked him sort of. Martin Wild is a good name, but he isn't wild, he's not wild Ken, he's a bit of an old aunty - that's it. That's what he means by leprechaun. The way he was calling me dearie by the time we rang off. A nice affectionate boy. He'll be impotent. He'll like me but not physically. I'll hear stories of his childhood in the bush south of Brisbane. I'll catch on to following those agile shifts of his, it's true he's agile. We'll be acquainted. I'm not going to like the way he looks. He's okay. He'll be fussy. I'll be easy with him. There'll be no tension. He won't resist me, he gave in to his mum. He's quirky. He'll evade. He knows he hasn't been able to take himself very far. I can't quite imagine what he thinks he might want a woman for. He said the world 'bachelor' quite a few times. 28 Sunday morning. What I dreamed. My mother and a table in a living room. I throw myself into a motion that is like a low flying, knee-height, twisting and swerving. I am not thinking of it as flying, more like dancing. As I go I'm discovering what I can do. A wider more exuberant cut of a corner. Or maybe I can corkscrew like a fish. I'm circling the table. Earlier there were two suitors, one like Martin and the other an older woman academic quite lively but a touch straight, who gazes at the imprints on my thigh with what might be erotic interest although she isn't that kind of a suitor. It's a variation on calling Martin Wild an old aunty. These dreams hardly worth noting because I don't remember them clearly enough. And something else, I'm hoping for nothing these days. Hope is turned off. If not Ken Sallett, what's to want. 29 Early Monday. It's just after five. I woke in the dark. There were seagulls flying at the height of the roofs. A martin lighting on the wire. A moment in a dream. I was with Frank after all the years. We're in a bed in his parents' house. He is saying he disapproves of sex. It enslaves. I am bent over kissing his sweet bare chest. He says then he wants to sleep with other women too. Alright. He's just saying he's going to leave his family and come into life with me. That seems right. We were always right together. The door opens downstairs, his parents coming home. Our door is open, we'll be caught. A while ago there was a little bed rolling in the corridor and his kid brother got in with us, asleep with his head under the cover. I quickly improvise bending over the baby so his parents will find me doing that, but the baby wakes and cries. It didn't work. His parents pass in silence. We'll go out. My teeshirt has fallen between the floorboards. Far below I see it with another red teeshirt. A tall young man has come past. It might be Luke. We walk out the front door into early daylight. It's morning. There are rosebushes at the door. I go back to look at them - someone has developed roses with pale blue crossed stripes. Handkerchief roses. Here's a pink one. He parks his truck outside a café or market. We go up the steps. There's a market family I recognize from years ago. Frank and I again. That clear confidence of our pleasure in each other. I'm thinking he needn't take me to my grandparents' house, he can take me to the cabin. He's thought of it too. Do you have the key? he says. He's gone out separately. I'm carrying a jar of horseraddish. Where's his truck? Have I forgotten where he parked it? - Likely he's left, lost his nerve, thought of his wife and kids. 1st June Grandfather Epp's house. A room I'm thinking of working in is crawling with bugs, mouse dirt, stuff falling on me. It's a small room - I don't have much of this - but there is an upstairs I discover somehow. No one has looked in it since the family left. It is a wide high-ceilinged dry and clean place with things I think of as [Uncle] Walter's piled together at one end, clothes, down sleeping bags, boxes of books - books I recognize as cardboard apple boxes. I keep talking to myself about how it can be so clean when the downstairs is so dirty. There is no dust. It's a Thursday morning in this long run of hot days. I don't have to go to school. Can transplant later. I was sitting in the bath worried about how I have nothing to write, how I haven't had the journal, how without event I am, worried about aching day after day, is there something serious wrong with me, is it a fallow that is reorganizing me (did Tim say that a while back), is it the lack of hope in love, will something be new, will I have emotional energy. - I walked up David's ramp - yes he left Labrador tea flowers - he thought I left him something the morning he went to Seattle, to say have a nice trip, so he left me something too. Missed by a day. But was beautiful. A beautiful spirit I loved to look at. Showed me a piece of fir with grain so close, 150 rings, and then another from a tree grown too fast. Was talking about thinking slowly. I was used to him - as if - feeling him the way he feels his treasures: look at this lovely one. Yesterday I took the bus to school and back. The daytime freak collection of people who take buses - I was sore and sad and looking with dismay at other people whose organs are failing, who are reduced to moving as little as they can. Coming home there was a small man who looked Japanese though his skin was white, who had a very small very pointed nose, short hair with yellow tufts. His nose looked both as if it had grown there and as if it couldn't possibly have grown, as if it were a tiny remnant cut to a point by a plastic surgeon. He sat with his legs wide wearing shorts holding close to his eyes a creased very old copy of Tattoo magazine. He was absorbed in pictures of naked women, showing an emotion I know from reading pornography in bookstores, a rapture that made him look innocent, although he also looked soft, sleazy and moronic. 2nd Hello. Hello day. Friday. I'll work on the perception paper. I must be ready. I'd love some loving. A motorcycle, it must have been fifty years old, standing in a patch of thistles, David said. He was five years old wanting to get at it. 4th I dreamed I met Sylvia in the street and there was a baby in the shopping bag she was carrying. Much more about meeting people in her house. A sort of party. She says in her prim way that she has been in a state of p----, a yogic technical term, and people have wanted to talk to her. "Bliss" I say. We are on a chair together and she starts kissing my breasts. I'll kiss hers too. I take her on my lap - small, light. I can feel the hard strip of a pad between her legs. Earlier in the night I was traveling east, in the dark I think, and came to a wide black lake furrowed with little curly lines of white mist. Later in the same dream I traveled west and came to the same lake from the other side. I felt it as bliss and comfort in a deep interior. These were after Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood in The bridges of Madison County, which had enough substance that I could come back to parts of it later. Eastwood's old body had drooping muscle and a spine fused in the lower back so his torso seemed shrunk. Streep looked very ripe. There was a farmhouse kitchen with a plastic bag showing under the lid of the garbage can. He had a slightly helpless way of speaking inarticulate nonprofundities. There were jerks and swerves in the way she moved around the house. The moment, standing behind his chair answering the telephone, she put out her hand and touched his collar. When she set her palm on the round of his shoulder for the first time I felt the live hardness under cotton. And am wondering why movies so seldom do that. 5 They were living in Australia after the war. His father went back to England for a visit - this was in the early fifties - when he was on his way back to Australia he killed himself, jumped off the liner into the Red Sea. "How old were you?" "Twelve or thirteen ... he knew Arabic so I thought maybe he ..." "... Swam to shore." "Swam to shore, yes. I know better now." His mother moved to a shack on the coast and he lived there until he was in his twenties. He was going to be married when he was twenty-three, but he thought he would never see Europe if he did that, so he called it off three weeks before the wedding. He went to London and was a dispatch rider for the BBC. Worked in a fishing port in Iceland, where he was the only foreigner. He was three or four inches short of what he claimed in his ad. Missing the top of his right thumb. We had arrived in the parking lot almost at the same time. I noticed that the car I pulled in next to was a turquoise Rover, and then I saw him get out of it to go to the parking ticket dispenser. A small tight lightless face. He had a grin - when I could bear to look I'd see that tight effort with a remnant of boy in it - but what is it about that face that made me not at all want to see it. I've looked at Ken's faces, bright and neurotic, Jim's, David's, with pleasure and interest, but Martin Wild frightens me somehow to see, as if he is subhuman and maybe I don't want him to see me seeing that? No - I didn't want to let his face into me. It did scare me. I haven't got it yet. It was a stupid unspirited face, which those other faces are not. And yet he is not a completely stupid unspirited man. He noticed the scatter of purple rhododendron flowers on brown earth. He's neurologically impaired, he struggles against a tide when he speaks, he flounders. But that doesn't account for I suppose it is a cross look he has, a black look, almost criminal. What it is for me to meet with a man like that under the auspices of a possible connection. Unlived mourning, says the book. Does that meeting mean something? Yes. What, what? Those are the losses that come of not living your mourning. An unforgiving law. My mother has that look? Yes. And I am still not living my mourning? That's right. Do you mean specifically childhood loss? Yes. But I've mourned a lot. No, you withdraw. This is terrifying. No. It means either unbearable pain or that lightlessness. No, it's not unbearable. Will I get to it? YES. Louie's dream that she is with her mother looking up at a staircase of boulders like the stream bed there would be under a waterfall. They see in the air in front of it an image of a body. She understands something philosophical: that her mother has something and in the safety of having it doesn't know she has it. But Louie, who knows she will lose it, more securely can know she has it. Then the picture fades away. It gets dark. The boulders fall. It is like the end of the world. Louie puts out her hand for her mother's hand, but the hand she is holding is large and dry. It is a man's hand. 6 June It is still light, eight o'clock, a Tuesday evening when I have ended before the day. I can't work more. I'm treading so simple a path between work and bed that I don't know what to do now. This is when there'd be a social evening, in some other kind of life. I have a tug toward David. It's because my body has forgotten his insult and only remembers his shining. And anywhere on the road I am looking at white vans. - At that moment David phones. Somewhere did Ken take notice too? Ken is still with me. It's a fact. You - Kenneth - you are still feeling me - you're lying when you say you are not. You're still with me. 8th In a dream I remembered another dream, one I've remembered in other dreams too. I don't know whether I've remembered it waking. It is the dream that I am in my home place one autumn many years after I've left it, and I am seeing the leaves on the pasture trees and across the road. I am as far into beauty as I can go, the red of the leaves in the beautiful light. The dream when I remember it in other dreams is a touchstone. Red leaves and blue sky. 9 Silver ooze and drip on the asphalt shingles. It is raining after days so hot the roses died brown on the vines. The unsettling look of them like cemetery remnants spread along the branches where Constance Spry had been burgeoning pink deep and radiant like cunts. I will tell a brief story about yesterday. I woke at four thirty in a marvelous fresh fragile dawn, and was full of Ken, remembering him, aching for him. And that went on all day, welcome but puzzling. Why am I this heart again, so strong. I was working and in the afternoon, aching at the heart. Lay down with it. There were its two places, forehead and midchest. Feel what they are like. The forehead secondary. The sensation at the heart is tight - it's very tight. Talking to myself takes it to Ken, but feel what it is without that meaning added. Just very tight. Stay with it. Stay with it. I dissolve away, the dissolving of conscious sleep. Then heart is untight, no thought of Ken, and it's forehead left holding the lock. Woke an hour ago in the dark, in the midst of thinking something about how consciousness doesn't exist. Can I recover it. Getting it, saying it, will tell me how Dennett means 'judgment.' "There is nothing it is like to be." - What? "Consciousness" is an imaginary category. The category of consciousness-things, things made of consciousness, consciousness being the diaphanous material. This is counterpart idiom. "Consciousness" is more like fame than television inasmuch as it is a category of [reported things] rather than an immaterial moving image. Lying down resting for work. Pressure at the heart. I put attention there, come back when I drift, and then find myself really shifted. (I am feeling Hong Kong - is it the sensation of being with Jamila in those years? - is it a flavor or light of mind? My solar and chest are completely clear, there's pressure around the forehead, like a ceiling. This is that other ability to remember tones of times, which comes only at the edge of sleep and which I love.) Beneath the ceiling the rest of my body is transparent. I cross back and forth several times in a half-hour, not all the way, but between the lock at the heart and the lock at the forehead. When I am shifting I feel electromagnetic motion in my head. And come out fresh, the cells in my head freshly bathed. 12 "If I could understand how she changed from the fresh, lovely mother to the rotting one" Hertha at the garden yesterday. Late afternoon. I'm on the bench beside the greenhouse. She is telling me how she sees connective tissue, a mesh - like a stocking, she said - that pulls when we move, so there is a string from the toe to the end of the arm. She was posing as she told me, stepping and stretching on the little stage floor of the pieces of concrete that connect the greenhouse to the path. The scene was mine - the greenhouse, the bench, the path, the edge of the nursery bed, the rose behind me, the kids' tank, the fig tree, their existence and placement were by my design, so I was sitting in the midst of myself - but I was annihilated by her beauty, which doesn't announce itself as beauty, but as a physical entirety: just that there is nothing wrong with her. Is 'annihilated' right? I didn't know it was that. I was asking her what she sees when she does massage. Jelly beans. She was interesting me. I was giving her a chance and she was taking it. But there was a way I was invisibly frozen by her display of wholeness, and there was a way she knew what she was doing. Contrast Apatia who was there speaking with me half an hour earlier as I potted little dills. Beautiful Apatia, a younger mother, but not evoking it: talking nonsense about Scorpio and Sagittarius and earthquakes; saying, I know things. Hertha was saying that too, but she was saying, I really know things, I know real things, not by hearsay. The thing was, first, that she did know things, and second, that she was evading what I knew, she wasn't going to be interested in exactly how she imagines something. There was the way she stayed on her ground while talking about staying on one's ground, stepping up to the line, being taken by the hand and led over. "Unlock and let stuff out that the second echelon can't reach and the third echelon can't see ... it's what people call madness because the doors are standing open. You get all the way through and that's what great artists do." Weds 14th I had Phil's briefcase and leather coat and some little piece of corncake, that I had picked up accidentally when I was leaving his house. I go back to the café where I left Louie this morning. She has been there all day. We'll bring Phil back his things, where he lives is just near here. Oh - I forgot the briefcase. No she has it. But I did forget the coat. She eats the corncake. She is flying the plane to take the briefcase back but she hasn't got enough height. I am backseat driving: sitting behind her and watching everything come up. Why aren't I driving? Because she's the one who knows how to fly. But she doesn't have a license and there is a lot she doesn't know, how to get enough altitude to get out from among these wires. She's having to fly under them, up the highway - and they are looped across at intervals so we can't get enough height between them to rise above them. We're going west instead of east, being led by the only possibilities open. Now she's in a building, flying in a tight rising spiral hoping the roof will be open. It's not. We have to circle down. At some point in this building I'm walking tho' she's still flying. It seems to me she won't be able to find an exit. Wednesday night and I'm still working: so slowly. Why so slowly. I've been two months on Dennett. I am scared of - what. Not getting from here to there - the transition - not getting to the ability that's beyond me and yet comes when I commit myself - the ability I don't think I have a right to. Today at the garden: Louie's mamma, and that someone stole the purple moss rose from behind the bench. The horrible moments when I find a smashed hole in the garden. 15th It is Thursday - oh - here is a little agony - it is evening now - a poet on the radio was reading a poem about his wife also a poet walking in the garden in her nightgown - I am struggling day after day - I give these days to trying to write and my brain isn't taking hold - and there is nothing else - I don't see how there can be anything else - anymore - I am tired and pressured - what shall I do - if there's a crossing to make I'm willing to make it, but I haven't found it - and the something else I am made for, that it won't give me - I'm such a small endurance I don't know what they won't give me - so removed from life - not hoping only looking looking at strange people, the men, the women, the rest. Looking with hunger that doesn't know itself. I am starving in fact. Once a day I buy food and look at people, walk by myself up the street and back. I take money from the machine and spend it. My house is clean because of the times when I look at my little sheets of notes and can't make contact. I don't fall asleep and then I wake too early. 17th There is something wrong. I keep fading out. Let me try to get grounded in what I really think - fear at the heart - oh little one what are you so sore and pained about -   Larger one this is very hard and it's hard in a hard way. What's an easy way to be hard?   The fires of longing know what they are, but this is like fainting, fading. Dear one you cry when you say that.   I don't know why. Tell me what happens.   I don't know how to tell - I haven't got focus - I haven't got myself set up so I know what I'm doing - I used to be able to just do this - I could trust myself - now I set out and nothing happens, I stop. Are you doing something harder than you used to do?   I don't know that either. What does 'doctorate' mean to you?   It impresses people - I got stopped there last time - a PhD is like stepping across a line - I don't know why I'd doubt I'm one of those people. You took a long time to get to it.   It is silly to do it now, childish - it would have meant something to do it when I was thirty - doing it now is reporting that I'm failed in the real thing I tried to do. Talk about that failure, what did you want.   I wanted to be a real artist, I wanted to be real like Dorothy Richardson, I wanted to be a brave soul meeting a life and saying how it is, I wanted to be certified only by my true presence, my ability to be present. You know how to say that, go on and say what is real about your PhD.   I don't even like the word - what's real in it is that it earns me money. But it isn't a job. There I'm in panic directly, I don't know if that matters. Tell me what is real in the work.   I've understood things - I'm building an ability. Say what you've understood.   I've understood that panic touched me then - is there a panic about what I'm saying? It looks like it. Am I attacking my own ability to live, somehow? Take a breath. I'm saying perception is true, and it can be more true. I'm saying we easily fall into imagining. Imagining can be true too. True perceiving needs imagining. One of the things imagining does is structure how something that isn't perceived is thought of. We don't perceive the shapes in our heads that are our perceiving. We imagine them: we think about them. Maybe we perceive them too. ... I thought I had all of this very clear but I am falling apart in doubt of it now. I don't like my beginning. Do you see where to start?   More distanced than I've been. Yes. 20th Riding on Dave B's shoulders, looking down, looking around. I've never been as high, I'm thinking, and I say. But he's feeling the strain. He's holding the part of his lower back where it meets the hips consciously, to be able to support my weight without staggering. Yesterday a slaughtered cow on the sidewalk and then a stone church full of sick cattle, standing, lying, that I see through the open doors. - Joyce talking about social life, the church yard: Your form of proactivity is anger: fuck them. Yes, i say. "Beyond that: a competition you couldn't win and that was unbearable. You want the full attention of both of them." "When they sent you away you tried to understand it. Instead of feeling it." "Talk to her ... how old is she? Talk to her as if she is that age." I'm stopped. I stare at her. How can I talk to her, what can I do, can I take her away? A long silence. I realize this is the very state of trying to figure it out. I say, "You look frightened. Are you frightened?" She: "No." Joyce: "We're running out of time. I'll step in. If you aren't frightened, what are you?" She: a shrug of little shoulder. "I won't say." Joyce: "What relation would you like with her?" I start to shift into the grown-up's chair. Joyce: "No, you, here." She: dryly, "Will you take me home with you?" Joyce: "What do you say?" I move to the other chair. "I'll get your coat, let's go." Joyce: "That's exactly what you both should say." I am sitting in the chair listening to a surge. Joyce, redundantly: "Feel the truth of that." It becomes a surge of joy. I am smiling. I get my jacket and boots and book and stand up. Joyce tries to hand me the two honeysuckle flowers back. "The social life you need is with her." I won't take the flowers, I am annoyed with her for doing what I think she is doing, proving they weren't really a gift tho' she likes the smell. "I have lots more," and then, "there was a third one when I picked it." She ignores that, is reiterating and doing her hug attempt. "I've got it," I say. There was something else too. Maybe I'll come to it later. 23rd Is this working at capacity? I wake at six-thirty, seven-thirty. Make a cup of tea. Work until I have to eat, eleven-thirty maybe. Cook. Get in the tub while it's cooking. Take the food with me when I go back to work. Keep on 'til I'm - what is the sign I use to make me stop and drive to Commercial? Something like faintness. Go shop, walk up and down the six blocks between Circling Dawn and Il Mercado, suddenly among people, looking. Critically, impressionably, struck by each body as it comes. Have been eating at Circling Dawn's outdoor tables. Miso soup and cherries I've bought elsewhere. Then go home and work more. 'Til sunset, eight-thirty. Walk to the garden. Weed until it's past dark. Tonight I cleared space around things in my plot. Then went up into the herb garden and set up the big sprinkler where I'd weeded yesterday while the wiccans were singing silly songs in the orchard grass for solstice. I'd work more if I could. I'm all there. I'm not wanting to get away, I'm not dreaming of anyone, the tune I hear when I cook and walk is Pennies from heaven. Tonight as I ran the bath it was Deep and wide ... there's a fountain flowing deep and wide. Wrote this morning's dreams in the other book. Thin bears who raided the freezer for sausage. Louie traveling with Jam and my child to Hong Kong, I was crying at the soppy music she left on. My new car not as good as the old one. Rob phoned wanting a home for a chicken he was charmed with. 24 Look at this. Feel this. It's falling night and I am in another dark red chair, among the light airs on the little upstairs porch, with the sky all open beside me, where earlier there were high still gulls, small birds in fleets, a cloud that formed right there. This chair has a charm in it, every time. I want to put back my head and look out at the blue. It's like a trance. There's light on the page from the piano lamp set just over head level and angled to the right. And then there are jars of things from the garden, mugwort, jasmine, white roses and yellow ones on branches. Old compost juice smell not quite covered. These days as I'm writing - the way it has been before - my house is my pleasure. The look of sun on the floor in the kitchen. The little palm tree where it's in line down the end of the corridor standing on the porch wall. I should say how the yellow/blue/white corner of the herb garden is the one that's right this year. Full. Interesting. All sorts of yellows, big mulleins, little agrimonies, great strong gloriosas, the yellowing fine cut of parsley bloomed out. Big sprawls of coreopsis. Yellow foxglove up at the tips of its stalks. A few Graham Thomas and many new Lightkönigen on the vine-walk roof. Lavender the purplest it's been, big purple mops. A couple of sparse-flowered purplish salvias. Pale yellow ---- flopping onto the burnet rose, with big blue scabious coming up thru' them. What else. There was an azure cranesbill, a big wide mound, under the Graham Thomas when it was full of that apricot-centred yellow. That was a match of colors perfectly just-off. (The way the salvia patens goes with those unfrequent pink-topped salvia Victoria - and - oh, in the blue/orange bed - the fleabane now with ---- coming up through it, a shock of something maximum.) It is dark. I'll turn off the lamp and see stars. Rowen will sit here one day. Maybe Luke. Maybe someone else I don't know yet. Well ... Ken. You pig-headed person, so beautiful to me. 25 This wasn't a writing day - a long work party - but I learned something - the representationalists are that because they know there's more to seeing than what the eye is doing - the fact is that it is the brain that's the real eye - the brain is made to see by means of the eye, but it doesn't see what the eye would see if it were seeing. The brain is made so it picks out objects, its task is picking out objects and events. There is standing microstructure, which is computational - say - it can have effect - but for it to be perceiving - that extra - there has to be interference, there has to be incoming pattern crossing and that incoming pattern has to be cycled - as if bounced - maybe sent round? - sustained. That ability to cycle round and sustain is the ability that is the basis of imagining - imagining is built on it, though it isn't the same. When there is incoming pattern crossing through and recrossing and just that reflecting back and forth there is already automatic higher-ordering. Imagining has to be able to do it by starting with something, there has to be memory enough to send a pattern through - Gibson had a vision of this and Pribram too - that will interfere - the flat quality - when I remembered Wren's face on the drive, it was profile and single, just so much - will remembering imagining only ever tell - as if - one direction's structure? No, I mean it will be hard to see anything of structure because it's always convolved. - Where was I? (Went for milk, it was almost 10:30. Back in the chair.) Imagining is possible because the brain knows how to do something, cycle things round - but the other part is associativity. Dennett's afraid of something - what - Because it is the brain that sees, seeing and knowing are acts of the same organ - perceiving is the most developed thing there is, thinking is just a little branch of it (I said, it agreed). Thinking is a dialect of perceiving? A district? If it is the brain that sees and smells, the common sense, then is it easier to think of imagining as not being pictures made of appearance? It's pictures made of seeing not of appearance. The pictures are made of seeing and therefore are seeing. This is sort of what Kathleen means when she sez he sez you see through to the <content of the representation>. 28th I am still not ready to accept that I can't have you with me - it seems - so I'm not ready to be just friends - tho' I wish I were - but I have been looking at this record thinking I'd like to send it to you - so you'd know what it was like. You like to read, maybe you'll like it as writing. As if it were about someone else. 30 There is a pile of paper. Four piles. I went to the community centre and had them copy it, $21 worth. It is quite long, maybe sixty pages if it weren't single-spaced. There are maybe eight key ideas in it. Five sections. I mean it seemed to fall into sections: assumptions; Dennett; myths (which is Lucretius and Hume); representationalist metaphor; and then "conscious awareness, as people redundantly say" which is my pleasure. Neural Wittgenstein. Multiple drafts: perception without representation. What do I want now. There's house painting, making a dress. Rowen coming. Body work to be able to walk lighter. It'll be daytime work in the course, not consuming. Make reading lists for fall. Catch up the edges of the herb garden. Is that it? Sounds like maintenance. And then when I went to look at David he said did I want to go to Westminster, and there I saw an old woman, eighty-two, so pretty, hair still brown, standing shy behind a chair. "I'm not ready," she was saying. "How would you be if you were ready?" "I'd have something on my legs, they're awful." They were awful too, lumpy grey and purple logs she was wearing a short smock with. "Sit down," she kept saying. "I don't want to," I kept saying, "I want to stand up and snoop around." A house with Tlinglit baskets upstairs on a bookcase, a ten-thousand-year-old mortar someone of their friends dug up in a garden near Princeton, bevelled glass panels either side the front door, Aunt Flossie's painting of one of Grandpa's mills on the Island, dining room table with a wheel of sorted activist documents. Upstairs I met a man I didn't like, who sat reading in a sunroom. "Sit down," he said. "No I just came to see the view," I said. "I'll move" he said, with David's tone. "No, Dad," said David. I escaped to look at David's things, not stopping to feel what it was I didn't like about him. But I've thought it now; I felt immediately a coldness in his eye, as if he were judging me as a woman, as if he can judge woman-flesh and had disqualified me as I came up the stairs. David I'll tell in a minute, but his things: I came into the room and saw nothing, dusty piles and bits. And then began to see. A Mission rocking chair, his grandfather's, with leather seat powdery and cedar-red. In the closet a small Japanese tub, barrel-staved and bound with cord. A salt-glazed whiskey jar, a turquoise Old California plate (that's a trade name). On a bureau top, little things: a wonderful rock, a sort of accretion in white stone he says falls out of the cliffs on Mayne, this one a tiny sculpture, Matisse and Henry Moore, a round small rock with two small round shapes set in it by some process I don't understand. It looks grown from three separate centres, one of them partly engulfing two others. And then some tiny mechanism with a shutter that clicks over a hole. The way David in David's room didn't particularly need to show me anything. But as if these objects are also his speech. I keep thinking he's inarticulate, but he is less than that - is my guess - empty - his treasures are his journal of moments where his feeling moved out and claimed something - the way my journal is. Okay, how David looks: I marveled out loud, drank retsina at lunch and said everything I thought. There he is. Not bad. Not a bad chin. A wide lopsided grin. A long face - "Do you still want to photograph me?" he asks. "No not so much. You're not as full of quotations." He could be gay, but not really that either. "What's surprising with a face like that is that you aren't more of a drinker." He is a type, seeing him in his so well-established family made me see the type he is. He'd have been wayward in the ways he is - "No, you aren't just abuse-wreckedness, you would have been weird anyway." A weak scion as families go - degenerate - aesthetical. It's that that makes him gawp at me. "Your beauty," he says. I was happy in his parents' house feeling that I and the Mission rocker were being admired in the same sense. I was feeling, is this what it takes, I'd be honoured in families old enough to know what's good? I gawped at him too, I was, I am, fascinated by the way he's not what I want but something else. Seeing him behind the wheel in my car, parked in the shade when I came from Como Market. The way, when we were in the woods on Capitol Hill lying on the scratchy old leaves he kissed my neck in five or six places and I was feeling, a man's mouth on me is so, so pleasing, even though he doesn't mean it. I knew it would stop there. I still want to kiss you, he said on the street. Forget it, I said. "... two stones that are quite significant to me. I found them the morning you came back from Van Dusen Gardens with Rob. I was by the table and I looked down and saw one of them. Then later I saw the other one. They are both perfectly round. The second one had what looked like an impression of the first one in it. I was feeling what a strong impression you had made on me." 1st July Coming after me into the garden yesterday, when he saw across the plots from the east path, the fullness there, I heard him mutter, Holy Christ. Phoned Louie this aft and made trouble, irrepressibly. Had intended not to. Couldn't resist bragging I'd met David's mum and liked her. Fact was Louie had zinged me a couple of times, bragging about Jam's understanding support when she took on Farida, and her transported helijet ride, and her sensibility, as usual. I had had an Oedipal victory and used it, and she, for the first time, after I wouldn't let up, and pressed her with evidence, logic and justice, finally said out loud that though she didn't want David herself she did mind very much that he liked me more, and it was obvious, and why did I have to push her and couldn't I just have my little victory and let her seem to keep hers, since I'd had so many victories and she was the one who got sick .... - No, that was earlier, while she was still saying she didn't want to be honest. I'd use it; when I was her age I was still unconscious too, she has to do it in her own time. That little crack of the voice into self-pity, but she didn't stay there. And when I'd said and she'd said and we'd gone over the muddy ground one more time, it got clear to us why she brought her mum here. "I can't compete," she started saying, "she's so intelligent, she did everything so well." And then we both saw where the conversation had begun, her story of what she said to Farida in her mum's presence. "She's learning, she's quiet in a way so I know she's learning." What is she learning? That her daughter has exceeded her in every way except mothering? (She didn't say the other thing.) That Louie takes her to work and shows her skill; puts on parties for two weekends in a row showing the crowds she can command; takes her to yoga and shows her pretty body; drives her in a red truck; sits her in a $500 armchair; goes into the bedroom and has long conversations [on the phone] with various intimates, political talk that shows Louie respected among those who were right all along. - What Louie said to Farida is that she can't go back to live in South Africa because she's a single woman there. "The men are after me because they can see I'm not a sexually repressed person, the women distrust me because ..." etc. What she said at the end of this conversation - sigh - "I should probably find a man to calm me down." I am in the red chair wanting to go to bed, a day at loose ends. Loose ends. 2nd Here Liane [neighbour across the courtyard] enters the record tho' not the story. I'm woken at night, a crashing outside the window. Voices. More crashing. I look. Liane and her little friend smashing something on the sidewalk. What are you guys doing?! We're smashing glass because we want to. It's 3 AM. She is being provocative. I talk to the cards. They say do it. Do I have to? Yes. Considering it has scared me more than the crashing did. I wait 'til the [heart] thumping is less and go downstairs with the broom. It is raining a few spots, very fresh. Liane in her somehow very assertive dress is on her upstairs porch with a candle, poking at things. Looks down. Sees me in the doorway. Little smile. She doesn't know what's coming. I walk down the porch steps in my bare feet and take a big swing with the broom handle and smash her pretty garden window. Go inside and shut the door and climb back upstairs. She calls across the two upstairs porches, "Hey Ellie, who do you want to talk to?" I can talk back from my corridor: "I'm smashing glass because I want to." What about her. She has taken possession of the courtyard garden with all sorts of junk. Invasive. Walks back and forth carrying candles. Changes clothes. Is right there in front of my eyes carrying her tits, which are like dog or piggy tits, conic with tight nipples, all day. Sunday of the long weekend. "She has constructed defenses where she is weak and you are not. She will be ready to startle you." Philoxenes of Mabbourg 5th c - "hallucination of the Trinity or a woman's sex, the same haste to represent which places illusory satisfaction in front of truth and precludes access to knowledge." Reading this stuff, the centuries on imagining, and how they are still being interpreted, I'm feeling how early we are, philosophically. Maybe there will be centuries when we are no longer structuring everything by the most primitive and irrelevant contrasts and images, the vestiges of mythologies, the way philosophers keep picking up the same old bones. The notion of the intellect in the room farthest inside and farthest from the body, "in the silent and imageless contemplation of truth ... opens himself, as an empty vehicle, to the treasures of divine meaning," "those marvels which receive you in the interior of the Holy of Holies where resides the very arche of all spiritual signs and all divine knowledge." The way it goes on being theology because of what they obliterate. Mad proliferation, parochial, for millennia. Louie in church this morning with her mum, reading the hymns: aching spot and flood of bliss, oie. Stealing fire? Forbidden fruit? Such a con, it was sheer complicity, Moses and monotheism. It's intellectual crime, deformity: go on ignoring the ignoring of the mother. the notion of inmost reason philosophy the midden The physical cognitive is a home base - a way the ego isn't god but the world is - a platform in god, which is community This struggle: to establish in metaphysics the reality of the world as the original which minds are not making, 'mind' being ego, the child. While struggling to deny that the mother, as original, is primary and the child an inferior copy. (YES.) "We have, therefore, no choice but betwixt a false reason and none at all. For my part I know not what ought to be done in the present case." Hume Treatise 267-8. Luke came to borrow money and sat on through twilight into ten-thirty dark. "I always like to sit here where I can see the two shades of blue in the two windows." That he's happy, balanced and muscled with physical work, says he's the one among his friends who wants to talk about how anyone feels about anything, wanting to thank something because he has everything he needs, not believing yet that he can thank himself too. Oh seeing him there - both of us being there and well - for me, just seeing him there not in a hurry to go, visiting me and in good fortune - he says he knows what it is, now, to have a full stomach - and I know what it is to have him alive, just that, alive and not despising me, finding his way. I was seeing him in his white teeshirt in the physical perfection he doesn't know he'll lose feeling what I feel whenever I see him in one of those stretched-out confiding times, breathless with gratitude that nothing bad has happened yet. 4th The way sometimes when I'm driving I feel the split-second swerve in fortune's design that could crush me. A background of grain patterns moving, a rosette of some distinct pattern fades back and is filled in by background motion. 6th Ayn Rand. Coming out of The fountainhead with a particular sensation of heroic intolerance, unpleasant, saying "and yet." Then David Birch delivers to me a tape he is excited to share, The courage to heal [for female victims of sexual abuse.] I was furious. Why. Because he's trying to get his own back and I don't want him to. I talk to my book. It says these of your friends were molested in that way: [a list]. Robert MacLean? No his catastrophe is like yours. So David was wrong? Not exactly. What happened to you is a kind of sexual abuse because it destroys sexual confidence and integrity. An unmistakable sign he says is a love of light, and there is a reason, the waiting in the dark for a light to show under the door. I say, I am going to tell you another story, the first night of a two-year-old alone in a hospital room, where a light shows under the door, and it is electric light, which she hasn't seen before. What about Ayn Rand? Something happened to her, Roark and Dominique are such longings for something that happened not to have happened. The copy I have is a 30th edition. Many people wish it hadn't happened. She didn't have the integrity as a writer, that she imagined for Roark as an architect. And yet. The battle of Titans - that's what was right in Ken and me. The anger at what these ordinary bodies show. 7 Stephan Arthur's evening at the Edison. A man called George who had a mind I liked, a quality of muscular tone, a ready mind, energetic, compact, friendly. He wants to find out where certain brain chemicals are made? Something like that, and runs labs in engineering, biology and chemistry. Was there as Stephan's composer. He was forty. He wasn't smarter than I am. I raced with him, I mean ran alongside. Rowen is coming. Tomorrow I'll be waking in the other room and Rowen will be turning on the TV in this one. I'll be making breakfast lunch supper and snack. Footsteps running in the corridor. I'm not smart today, what is it. Waking logy these mornings. When the phone rings tonight it's Louie having closed the door on her milky-eyed mama. I said I was depressed at the open house and didn't know it. She said every year at the open house you look to see what you have. Yes, there were some years when I was wealthy. After the day standing exhausted in the rain I went home alone. Phoned David. Do you want to go out and have dinner? I can't think of anything I'd rather do, says he. We spent fifty dollars at Santos Tapas, I had my hair down and men were looking at me, and I knew I was killing time. Wearing skirts on the drive, uselessly. That was it at the open house. Interviewed by CBC, making a speech Rob liked ("Nobody else could have done that"), the herb garden clean and full, none of it is worth anything. And what would be? Oh, the perception paper was worth something but Phil doesn't like it. My book said: the hat wasn't good. The old straw bashed at the crown, that I was wearing against the rain. Why wasn't it good? I thought it was good, an irony, I'm the official here but I know enough to say I'm not pretentious. No, it's despair, it says. A bite of tears: it's true, it was despair. You mean, I wouldn't have worn it if Ken had been there? Yes. 13 Oh for one last time / I would take a northwest passage / And find the hand of Franklin / Reaching for the Beaufort Sea / Tracing one more line / Through a land so wide and savage / And find the northwest passage / To the sea. Singing that with the car radio, learning it, because of the way it is Ken - crying for my explorer. 15 Wake grieving. In the last dream, Tony Nesbit in a bed with his friend - I won't write the dream. He was stroking my hair. I love women, he says. I miss that so much, I say. Turn over to hold him, I know he's married. I'm saying goodbye. I go to my room. A smothered sob. I hear them going to their van, see it drive away - their big green van. - Something left from yesterday. I've noticed that the moments when I'm gripped by the feeling of the fullness of life, that there won't be enough time, are moments about human things, music or writing. - What is hard today - it's July, I'm stuck aren't I - all ways. 16 At Louie's on her mum's last night here. Rowen at the computer drawing. Louie in a costume that looked East Indian, long dress and leggings, round and delectable. I was annoyed by the way when she and her mum pulled up under the hawthorn, Jam, who hadn't seen me and Rowen yet, was there at the gate to meet them, and Louie got out looking like that - East Indian - like a fulfilled East Indian wife. I wanted to marry her myself, except that love woman was sad and is sad now, as if drooping in a corner too discouraged to fight. The evening was triumphant for Louie and I helped her, seeded the beginning with questions Iris couldn't answer - not wouldn't: she is so inarticulate; she's a jock. Then Louie attacked with the persistence I have goaded her to. I sat behind her like her coach and played the part I could, the expert, and praised her in the terms of a world her mother doesn't know. Her mother listened quietly. I don't know whether she knew what it is Louie is needing. I know there was a silence all around when her mother said "I am aware of the struggles you have had, I am aware of them." I am next to crying because I can't be love woman in that way, a girl adored by her father, round and delectable, a girl with that sort of girlness, or a girl at all. Love woman has no life. - "It's your own fault, you should be satisfied with loving your children and your friends, you should love them, then she would have a life." Who says that? "You should love yourself, love that little girl, you should be satisfied with that "- Joyce says. "You should love me, you should be satisfied with that," says Louie. These are the forms moralism takes now. What do I know - I'm depressed without a lover. I am depressed. 18 Tuesday I demanded a turn in the weak position. The book told Louie to sit up and then she saw the drawing on the floor. Fear and suspicion, the boundary between them, that's the place to work. You are coming down out of the sky onto trees. What kind of trees are they? Acacia, I think. When is this? I am sixteen or seventeen. I'm not sure whether this is my first visit or my second. Your second, says the book. I am sitting on the lawn with my grandmother. She is telling me the name of the tree - acacia, Akazie Baum. I am soon leaving on a trip. What are you thinking about the trip? That for the first time in my life I am going to be with smart people. And so on. I tell the story. Who is the first person you meet? A girl named Heather who is either from New Westminster or from North Vancouver. She comes from a big high school, she has a middle-class family, she does drama, she is well-dressed, she is a bit plump. What does she think about you? That I have a funny leg, that my leg is very ugly. How do you react? I act as if she isn't thinking that. The moment I understood after holding it for thirty-some years was the moment on the train platform at Stratford. We are having a reception with some of the actors and directors. A handsome man asks me to dance but I can't dance and I am awkward. A Welsh director or actor makes a speech in which he says, "Some of you are from small places where no one is like you." I cry when I tell that, and then, from something Louie says, I realize that the story of the gifted child in a peasant community is true in its way, but it covers the more real story of being alone where no one is like me. [when I was two] 23 Sun I haven't written in all these days, nearly a week. "Willem de Kooning at 55 and the height of his powers" [*picture}} And what. I have nothing today. Bleeding for three weeks, is it - a box of tampax a day, strange clots. Getting weak. Rowen leaving tomorrow early. Some sort of presentation Friday and again on Monday. Money running out. As if entire lack of hope or edge - As if I have no fight in me As if even my memory has its life faded out of it My process can't help much, it hasn't any passion to work with. "Fight," it says, but the fight isn't there. 24 Rowen was here, is gone, and I haven't said anything about him. I've written so little at all. I wasn't registering much, it seems to me. Many moments looking after him, the backs of his thin brown legs in shorts. His brown thin neck, the lovely shape of his head, his teeth still too big. Walking past his door seeing him asleep in a clean bed in a clean room. The joy he still has in building with people, on the beach, with Louie in the dark, a palace for people who live between the ocean and a vast rough desert. His beautiful eyes. His courtesy. His technical interests. He found a long grass stalk with a seed head banner to hold above the billows of hardhack where we were picking blueberries with David. That was a good evening. David drove on the way home, I looked at the sky, Rowen studied the way two turning Mohawk signs came back into phase. David was singing. The night I sat on the floor next to him when he was in the bath and talked to him about five things the book said I should talk to him about: the book itself, the presence in anyone of that best friend; the meaning of oppression; the need to fight; the alrightness of aggression; the balancing of fairness. He sat up holding onto the bathtub edge bright-faced and interested. When I came into his room to say goodnight in the dark I saw him waving his hands. He said he was lining up the corners of the room. I knew that was a gift: something he does that is so natural to him he doesn't mention it. And then he wanted to go home, and went. The hard hug at the special services counter when an agent was taking him to the plane. A boy leaving again without looking back, again. I'm at home at a loss, cleaned and arranged and don't know what to do. Well, I do know what I want. I want to go and be consoled by a man. David for instance (who isn't home). I have to work this week but I want something first. What did it say about the gnawing - Wednesday, 26th A morning with a white sky. How long have I been like this - dull. That means not sailing in love, not fire in a mist, not fast sharp and bright with sex, pain, beauty. Here I sit in bed. It's ten. I don't want to begin the day's academic slog because I know there'll be nothing else. 27th My father cultivates the kitchen floor with a horse pulling a harrow. Is that a good idea? It will make it hard to clean, hard to walk on. Later I see that the first-floor walls are removed and are going up, yellow brick, above the second floor. Are they going to build a new floor under the second floor, so it will be the kitchen floor, and what used to be the kitchen will be the basement? During the night, heart or solar buzzing, I was holding on to the notion of plowing the floor thinking it meant something about metaphor, something for my talk tomorrow, as if a question about whether metaphoric ability should be dug up, or just used as a platform. 28 Oh larger one - Hi, what can I do?   Could you lift me and clear me and calm me? Say how you are.   It feels like a thickness in the head, I have to prepare more and feel so unable to do it. How much time do you have?   Four hours minus a half hour for driving, a half hour to get transparencies, an hour for the computer two hours. How much time do you need?   I think two hours is enough but I'm not sharp. Are you frightened?   Yes vaguely. [notes on sci vis and art for sci vis grad class] [scientific visualization] 29th, Calabria I said knowledge is a structured brain. Vis makes knowledge to the extent that it makes that. Art makes knowledge that way too. There's a difference between letting perception structure a brain and letting representations trigger structure. I know what to say now. The existence of imagining indicates a structured brain. Art and vis both structure and trigger via secondary circuits. Structure varies in depth and connectedness. - Funny how I didn't hear the noise in here until now. Looking out the window shopping for a man in his forties, working hands, tall enough, man enough, sturdy, excitable, Scottish accent, blue eyes, 30 Then I stopped writing. Sat looking through the window. Got up and walked back to the car. Hesitated. Crept round the corner up David's ramp. It was windy yesterday. I had my hair loose and felt it blowing. Was wearing the loose black pants and longsleeved blue teeshirt. Red sneakers. (Mavis Gallant would never wear that.) A body of the kind I am, small tits and big bum. Testing my currency as that, will I be read as what I am? Available. David looked wonderful. Not derelict. Clear and bright. (Phone rings.) Came a moment standing together by the car. I said, We're indecisive. He said, Give me the keys. Led me to the passenger door. Took me sleekly through the maze of interchanges beyond Marine Drive to the marsh at Ladner. Drove with the seat pushed back and his left arm locked straight against the top of the wheel, his thumb braced. I had my arm along the back of the seat to touch his shoulder. Had taken off my shoes and socks and was cross-legged. He had his right hand on my thigh. There was wind from both open windows, and wind in the trees. We had to pass thru the village with its small houses on the river. Then there were fields of potatoes in bloom. A gate, a road along the top of the dyke, deep marsh between it and the river, which was milky celadon and full of light. An open sweep of maybe ninety degrees, mountains standing up from sea-level far enough away to be seen entire, small dark blue shapes. A streak of dark green bullrushes across the river. Another streak near it on this side, the only thing with a glitter. We sat on a stump cut so we had a couch five feet off the ground and with a backrest. An exquisite sound of wind hissing in the grass. David was identifying birds, as he does. I was looking at plants, as he does too, though differently. I saw that the three kinds of plant in front of us were being blown toward us sorted in kinds of motion as well as color, grass fast and frothy on the surface, purple loosestrife short and stiff, bullrush tall and stiff and clumped. Oh the wind. A perfect temperature. I was being touched by it by the sun and by strands of hair blown across my face. Touched all over, what I wanted most. (When I saw D today and we lay for half an hour in his bed, I cried because I knew kissing him is the wrong thing to do but I am so hungry I did it anyway.) So there was the seat on the stump, and my strange pal David, and a westerly breeze, and heat arriving from so far, the sorted orders of plants in motion, birds unpredicted, a great open sweep both clean and human, the knowledge that we are fifty, that round number balanced closer to the end than to the beginning of the row. Looking like David, young and old and still able to walk miles. At the end of the loop of road he knew a place with asparagus grown wild, hawthorn, wild apple, a beach far from water. Sharkey's Bar and Grill as the sun sank. You order for me, he said. He was lounging back in his chair with his feet under mine. I'm trying to see whether there could be a businessman who looks like you, I said. One who never wears a suit and does whatever the hell he likes. He did look like that, the way he was sitting back in his good old clothes. I meant something not very complicated, like, if you were that sort of businessman and we were eating at Sharkey's after a walk on the dyke I could like to be your missus. Then he drove himself home. Are you sure you don't want to come in? Yes. I'm knowing when I have had what I can have, I say to myself. David is an elf not a man, who can look like a man to me when that's what I want to see. But don't test it. I forgot to say that when we were lying on the bit of sand (with its warm ancient pebbles come from so many far-away broken cliffs) I took handfuls of sand and poured them over his neck and then over his belly, where some stayed held in the furrows between his white ribs. He hoisted my teeshirt and did the same, a sensation on my breasts like its look, grey streaklines. Doing it cracked us up for some reason. The romancing I should say walks a very thin line. It is hard to find anyplace on his body that is really nice to touch. Otherwise he has studied my notes and hardly ever sounds idiotic any more. - Then I talk to my book and let myself get what seems grim unwanted news. This is where you are now, it says. You have to put yourself into the child's position and feel what she didn't feel. You have to do it on and on. It is hell for the child not to be touched, you have to feel it in all its details. You have to bring yourself through a time without touch, without love, without hope, with no end in sight. You will not be rewarded by getting what you want but by getting something you don't now want. You can't draw yourself into a seed and wait, you have to be very active, or it will be wasted. Part of your situation is insubstantial as if you were among shades in the dark. You have to bring love woman through the time without becoming her, doing what she would do in her desperation. You have to feel your losses as they come - you do know that. Your only guide is a safety pin on a string. Speaking to the string these days I'm just baffled, frustrated. It sticks always to this one thing - losses, feel your unconscious structures, don't withdraw. It is as if it instructs me to utter barrenness. And yet there is something I'm supposed to do and I don't know what. I rebel and trust at the same time, as if I don't think I have a choice. Is that all there is to say about it? I ask. No, it says. It wants a decision. You want me to live through a desert without touch that might last forever? Yes. You want me to decide I'll do that? Yes. 31st A bad night, a beautiful bad morning. There is an ordeal going on, and no help. What is the ordeal. It is nothing but an emotion. It is a howling in the center of the body, that has taken over the center where goodness should live secure. 1st August Le Guin would say that when I set my heart on him I did something that can't be undone. I love that in her - that heart's attachment means something, isn't mistaken, goes on a lifetime through, is the lifetime's shape. If I take it that way, this is not depression but grief. It is not for therapy or mending, it is myself crying for true reason, crying as long as crying lasts. Am I at center when I say that? I don't know. Louie didn't help. She says, your book is probably right, you have been addicted. I say, but what if reality is just suffering, depression, fear, on and on, and there will never again be any relief? I can't trust her motive. She would like to know she'd never again have to feel me with a lover. I'm thinking this is more than depression, it is madness too, lostness. Thurs, 3rd August Now I'll see how this seems when I write it. I feel peaceful. As if some nice furry chemical has washed my cells - it's almost evening - I hid out in LM Montgomery's journal this morning and then had to fight through to a decision about Fumiko's invitation. The record is in the workbook. It had to do with sacrifice and recovery. I found something - say this carefully, because it is not exactly that I find something. I persist in lines of questions, things suggest themselves, I feel agreements and accept what I feel agreement to. [When I was little] I was alone, I promised I'd give him up if I could be in warmth and life again. The ordeal ended. I kept my bargain. I gave him up. I have the notion of sacrifice still. If I give everything up, then I'll get the thing I need. If that isn't the way, what is the way, I say. Ask your impulse of love, it says. I put my arms around her [the little one], I draw her in, hold her, imagine her turned in me to face the same way, ask if she wants to revoke the promise. We do. Ask whether she wants to do the interview, phone, then go to shop. It was mid-afternoon, a hot afternoon with a breeze. Bought tea, walked back to Circling Dawn, bought vegetables. Was feeling whether anything was different. I thought I'd grow out my grey hair, stop being worried about whether or not there is a lover, stop fearing that Louie could take anyone I was really with. It was as if I had relaxed. As I walked past the park I was saying to Ken, I still miss you every day, but I can't bear your terms. I was saying it in the same calm way, noticing how really composed I was. I crossed from Circling Dawn to the new coffee bar. As I came in through the open door I raised my eyes straight into Sylvia's. These weeks I've been thinking, where is she, I have to ask her how they are doing. She was leaning back in her chair looking wary. My first thought was - oh - here's she. The next - she's with him. It was as if I thought that and reacted before I looked at him. I was looking at her, clapping my left hand over my eyes, joking truly, then looked at him once, a flash just long enough to see he was bent toward her, had his hair short again. I found them near the beginning of their first meeting since he's back in town; she was looking suspicious; he was looking persuasive; I think that was it. I went and stood in the queue at the cash register with a baguette, didn't look at them again. Was sorry when I walked out that I had to be limping past. But that is how it is. Something I haven't said, that I should say - in the week, ten days, since Rowen left and I stopped bleeding, I have been breathless sometimes when I walk, have staggered, have more trouble on the stairs. 4th Jane of Lantern Hill on TV. Second volume of LMM's journals - she had sold Anne, made $7000 on it, endured more years of her grandmother's tyranny, lost her house when the grandmother died, married a stiffish Ontario minister, had a baby, lost the baby, had another, endured minister's wife duties, wrote sequels and short stories, had celebrity episodes in Toronto, came home to worries about health (but not money), hung onto visits with her best friend Frede/Frederika, almost lost Freddie to cholera and then a year later lost her to pneumonia and despair about a wrong marriage. Began losing her husband to 'religious melancholia,' a preoccupation with eternal damnation. Was beginning to plan Emily when the volume ended. This was happening while Dorothy Richardson was still getting ready to write, working in the dental office. Anne was 1908, Voyage out and 1st vol of Pilgrimage 1919. LMM 1874-1942, DR 1874-1956, Woolf 1882-1941, West 1892-1988. 7th Night of a wet holiday Monday - hello - working through the weekend, project writeup to hand in tomorrow - there won't be any more major writing after this, for months, maybe. An interview at the end of the week, [brother] Paul at the end of the month. Painting and floor before then. Make arrangements for San Diego, make/buy some clothes, find someone to sublet. Car ready for long trip, take at least a week. Get garden ready. I've had impulses to contact people - Abraham, Ingrid, Nicole, Lis, others. Maybe fast or something like it. When I began to fold this morning, went out wanting to see David in his cave - wanting the welcome he gives. He was at his table where a light shone flat down onto layers of papers, open magazines. A big fat woman called Risa invited him to dinner last night, made sushi with him, played piano and sang "like Aretha Franklin" songs she wrote herself. I came to flirt and he's one who will. He plays. I said I needed to see a human being and he's quite human as beings go. I'm the wild animal being tamed. He gives me treats and pets me and talks to me in an affectionate tone. "Beautiful," he says. volume 3 the golden west volume 2: 1994-1995 december-august work & days: a lifetime journal project