Vancouver, May 8th 2002
This book is the one that will take me through my last month in this house, packing, finishing, last prep in San Diego, the defense.
One night this week I was coming from the bus stop in the dark and found myself on the curb with the longshoreman who lives on the ground floor next door. He was already there when I moved in with Luke, the only neighbour who has carried through, I think. We have said How are you doing? maybe once a year if our paths cross. I don't know his name. He's an old time BC man, a union man. I see Indian women knocking on his door. I've been here a long time but I am going to be moving, I said as we stepped off the curb together. (There were pink cherry petals mashed in the gutter.) I hope you land in a good place he said.
Is this true for everyone: there is a mind that under and through everything is just interested in what it is like to be. Is this what it is like to be giving up my place, it is saying. This is what it is like to be overjoyed, broken, ill, dying, successful, betrayed, beautiful, ugly. Do each of my students have that sense. Is it the floor of the soul that is in everyone. Do chimpanzees have it. (It says no. Gorillas and whales have it but elephants do not.) Is it definitional for soul. This is what it is like to be this one. In that it is universal. Is it shared? No but it is the part that can communicate. It is a universal translator. Its attention is what can read the ether. It's what Teillard meant.
9
David Carter sent a jpg of Jacob and his new son Tomás. Their beautiful faces flooded my screen.
Paul Churchland said yes and that the dates are fine. Terry said no to the house. I'm on the phone with Rowen in the evenings, doing homework and teaching him how to organize. Louie is in Halifax and I have the keys. Student letters, everyone but Logan is in or partly in. Pressure - I feel it at night, can I do two a day?
10
I'm waking at five after going to sleep at midnight. My body when I wake feels like it has been squeezed.
Alright, here's Louie's house. The red maple is out. I can hear a crow, a motor, a hammer, and the flutter of the gas fire on low. Banks of plants. In the afternoon the skylight is a funnel. The hoya is opening its wax-stiff inverted umbells, umbrellas, in phases, so there is an instance of every stage present on the vine. The medanilla magnifica is a fine thing. So are the green-glazed pots, so is the green bowl on the fire ledge. The light on the white wall, on the honey-colored wood. A few grape leaves so new they are almost transparent. Pink tulips overblown and reaching, relating their pink to the hoya's. Lombardy poplars a single shape over on Hawks.
I've come outside onto the bench. There's a smell of linseed oil. A kitchen chair and plain table with the Japanese willow in its subtle pot making a corner with the yellow rail and white painted panes. The porch is better than it was with Leah. (There follows a train of doubtful guilt - did I steal it from her for Louie? And me.) (If so it was well stolen.)
It's warm. It's dazzling. There's broad south sky beyond the power pole.
The orange room. Orange light reflected on the page. The mountains are at eye level, their white has shrunk to very little. My eucalyptus-leafed ficus holds a particularly beautiful orange in its corner. Esther's loud coarse voice. This view across shallow peaked roofs to mountains is a river valley in BC. The silence of the clouds. Pink, purple and black clothes on a line hung loosely from its poles so it pulls back and drops as the legs and arms waggle independently. Is that a sea-plane or a gull, dropping over the sound. One of each. It's much more country than where I live two blocks away.
- Oh be careful with these spelled-out student letters. Don't do it for too long.
Anything to be said about the study bedroom? Not yet.
Esther is talking to herself when she talks that way to her dog.
-
There's a Queen's Quarterly when I get home that says Martyn Estall has died at 97. 1903-2001, Dec 8. I look at his photo and see what I didn't at all see when I was 21. He's a beautiful man.
11
Woke with a sentence I have now lost, the first work sentence I have dreamed in a long time. Representation is built seamlessly within the ground of the aboutness of the body. It may have been that.
Then many thoughts about moving: small boxes, shipping by bus ahead of flying out, what needs to go, what could go ahead of time to be out of the way and not carried. Packing is going to take very little time, I have been doing it for years.
And now are following many thoughts about my finishing students and their incompletenesses and what I will have to do to get them through.
And how long I should stay at Louie's after the first, and when I should come back.
It is Saturday morning, 8:30, bright. I slept. I'm frisky. Last night I started to pack. The dust in the files I was sorting made the skin of my face sting. There couldn't be a better month for leaving. I have lilacs in the turquoise jug. The dame's rocket will come out before I leave. There is a white bud opening on the young plum tree that is the daughter of the one I transplanted from the Catholic hospice.
I am going to start summing up this house and these years. 1975-2002, Vancouver. - I suddenly recovered its small town feel, just now. I haven't felt the place in years. I've been enclosed. It kept me safe while I rebuilt myself. How many sighs is that sentence going to give me.
A Tom story from yesterday that I will write because he will not. Thursday afternoon on a quiet day in the Golden West, Dick on a break, Tom Mix in his office. There were phone calls about a loud gun shot on the third floor and then immediately a call from someone with a very soft voice. "I'm worried," he said, "I was cleaning my gun and it accidentally went off." "Was it a 22", said Tom. "No, it was a larger gauge." "How large was it?" "It was a 16 gauge." "Here's what I want you to do", said Tom. "I want you to stay in your room and I'm going to come up and knock on your door. I want you to let me in. Will you do that?" "Yes" said the man.
Tom goes up - he told me the story quoting every sentence exchanged - and finds the corridor full of buzzing people. He knows he must first clear them out. He goes from one end to the other demanding each go into his room and close the door. He is pushing them with his chi, he says. The corridor is clear. Luis is peeping around the corner at one end, the maids at the other. He knocks, is let in, finds the young black man with his huge gun. "First put your gun in the case," Tom says. The man does. There is a hole through the wall under the sink, width of a baseball. Tom kneels and looks through into the next room. He can see the end of a bed. Tom says to the young man, "I want you to just sit here. I am going to leave the door open. Just stay here." Tom goes into the corridor and knocks on the neighbour's door. "It's Tom from the front desk." The man who opens the door is an Iranian, white-faced. "I could have been killed," he says. "Yes, you could have been killed," Tom says. "I could have been killed, I was sleeping." "You could have been killed but you weren't killed". "I have to go to work," says the man. "That's three things you have going for you," says Tom, "you weren't killed, you aren't asleep, and you have to go to work." "But my uniform," says the man. His security guard uniform laid out on the chair is shredded.
Tom goes back to the first man's room and says, "Fasten your gun in the case. We are going to walk downstairs with it. We are going to go out into the corridor and turn left, we are going to take the first staircase" - etc. Throughout, Tom has been giving everyone clear, specific orders, very calming, something he learned in NCO training I assume.
They walk through the cleared corridors with the gun in its case. They bring it to the desk. They take it to the storeroom. While they are in the storeroom putting the gun away Tom says to the man, "There are two things I have to say to you. One is that there is something good in your voice. You're soft-spoken, but there's a good thing in your voice. Remember that. The second thing is that you have really fucked up. You are going to have to be very apologetic. And now I am going to take you back to your room and I want you to stay there for a while."
Back at the desk Tom has Dick and Tom Mix looking at him. "You saved the hotel some embarrassment," says Tom Mix. "You forget I used to be a journalist," says Tom, "but it's more than that. Do the math. It was a black man. If we had called the police it would have been the SWAT team."
Later on Tony wants to take him out in the car. What's goin' on, dawg? Oh, not much. What's goin' on, dawg? Not much, Tony. What's goin' on, dawg? And so on to the end of the conversation, which was, You saved his life, dawg. Next morning at work Steve gives him a hug.
This morning as I was writing that story, Daniel Johnstone phoned from Teipei wanting me to be his advisor for independent study over the summer. As we spoke I could hear a pack of dogs, eleven, Daniel said, fighting amongst themselves. Do you think of yourself as a scholar? I asked. Only a very humble beginner of one, said Daniel in his light precise voice that makes me like him.
This afternoon David's friend Leah came to see my place, loved it, said she would take it.
What I liked in Tom's story was the way Tom knew that he knew what to do and so directed everyone, including his boss, with great precision. He had swift and complete and entirely effective focus. I love focus. I love coming onto line in that way. I love to hear about it. I love it that my comrade-at-arms can jump into leadership when the moment arises. Edge. I think of it as a look about the eyes.
12
In two weeks it will be packet letters again, Logan and William straggling. In these two weeks what's priority - illustrations, refs, abstract tomorrow, section heads, find out about binding, conclusion, mount illustrations on website, mount sections.
13
Woke with a dark block in my solar - considered it - said think of it as power - sighed. Power glide.
14
Doing math homework last night with Rowen on the phone. He was excited about a theatre exercise that had the class come into the period in character as their alter-egos. Rowen came in late with his hoodie up, went to the back of the room and slouched against the wall. He said the exercise shook him.
Have to do the abstract. Yawning, yawning. Have to spend the afternoon on William, oh William.
- Am I wrong to detest religiosity no
- If there were a god it would detest religiosity too
- No self-respecting god would want people to be religious
- Are you satan
- Are you also god
- They are the same thing, 'the unconscious'
- The active but unlit brain
- It needs to be clarified
- Simplified
- Battling it makes it more dysfunctional, self-opposed
- If there were a god it would detest religiosity too
15
Something's up. It's not quite four in the morning.
Yesterday I did [college] email in the morning, some hours of final prep in ch 2, afternoon writing William's evaluation and reading his floods getting ready to talk to him at 6. He missed his appointment and rescheduled for 9. I did some more on his eval. Tom 7:30 to 8:30, Rowen math homework and love advice 8:30 to 9:30, William for the next hour and then on his heels Louie saying there are business license problems with the Yoga Space and thus her income.
I am packing, getting two students through final projects and Logan balking, calling Rowen every day, doing packet letters and evals for 5 other students, second-readering Sara, watching my money sink. The Maryland has been sold, so I will not be able to stay with Tom free. There are no east-facing rooms on the 5th floor open. Tom is spending more than he earns, letting himself run a tab at Azi's so that his checks are wiped shortly after he gets them. He still doesn't have Netscape up.
At 6 when I started to wait for William's call I found a sore heart like I haven't had for a long time. Is it overload? Is it something I don't know?
It's the middle of May and we are still heating the house.
What do I want the abstract to say. I'm not sure I can even think about it, I'm jangled.
16
I'm feeling affection for Jam, the way she said I was the kind of midwife who doesn't care if the mother dies.
Yesterday morning there was a bit of a dream where I saw the top of a broad hill, it was Hill 60 at home, thick with antelope.
Did the abstract yesterday - whacked through ch 3 refs - so much unfinished - work on conclusion today? Section intros? Email committee about corrections. Laiwan sez Trinh T Minh-Ha tonight. Doing math homework with Rowen. Rowen is now saying he is bad at math. He has forgotten that he was very good at math before his wicked parents kept him out of school for two years - their wicked, lazy instinct to diminish him.
- Now will you explain to me why I'm supposed to pack up
now rather than later intelligence, process, questions, left
from childhood
- Leaving home to go to the hospital
- San Diego has been Edmonton
- I have been connecting the two
- I never felt the leaving
- Is the defense my graduation in a larger sense
- Does it mean I have to die no
- Do you want to talk about the defense [graduation]
- You sure can pick them
- Is it supernatural no
- A graduation into something? temperedness
- There are a lot of holes in my thesis
- Am I going to get away with them
- Do you want to say more graduation into a cautious community of action
- Being in a position to act
- More later no
- Leaving home to go to the hospital
17
Trinh T Minh-Ha's The fourth dimension an exhausting video. Her relentless abstract commentary in a bloodless accented voice, endless trains, endless temples, endless parades, humans at their least natural, costumed, painted and given up to memorized sequences. I wanted none of her thoughts and was given them without pause for 87 minutes. Herself so removed and rote.
Oliver was there and came over afterward, one of those who are crossing my path to say goodbye. Fumiko.
I got boxes yesterday from the LCBO, very nice plain white or brown boxes. I'm starting with the closets. There's pleasure in emptying them.
Colin yesterday insisting on and on irrationally about the introduction. He has nothing good to say about it, which means he is insisting because he is jealous.
Eleven after a morning that began with anaesthesic gel freezing my tongue before a de-scaling. Where am I - conclusion? Just slogging through chapters? Only ten days 'til packet 5 comes in. A lot of refs to find. Quite a few illustrations.
18
What to do about writing the conclusion. I can spend days sorting notes. Do I want to do it that way. What does the conclusion need to say and in what tone. Summarize once again. Say the limits of the work. Say it's a platform, what it offers - in relation to the questions in the intro and further. Focus on what the questions were.
"Oh, Ellie, though, this news about you in the MA kills me." Two things: Maggie got "kills me" from Logan; and I am happy she minds.
I got the key to William's letter when I realized, in the midst of the writing, that his story about going back in time and recreating his baby self as a wise loving soul not a raging hater was in fact a metaphor for what he does in any minute - he substitutes the false child for the true. When I got that I could go on and say more about how he tries to spare other people but the unnaturalness is so great an effort he is often at wit's end.
Jim Briggs saying he was thinking of me and Tom, which is the sweetness of the loner hoping others can make it.
I was on Louie's porch for an hour after her work. Brought her an abutilon baby, a salvia Victoria, two kinds of thyme. Potted them. She sat on the pink bench complaining that Mary is dishonest. When I said she should tell Mary what she doesn't want to tell she laughed and said she must take a bath.
Working with conclusion, so much to say.
20
Louie is learning Sanskrit.
A thick grey morning. Email from Daniel in China, Urumqui, high northwest.
I was lying in bed last night listening to the Shakespearian training in the voices of the cast of the BBC Lord of the rings being rebroadcast on Rock 101, feeling what I sometimes feel, the vast open plain of human life, how extraordinary it is. It is a feeling of the marvel of the actual, a paradise of interest.
Laiwan phones and says how beautiful Trapline is, and that I should be making films still, because I teach people how to see. My midriff was trembling when she said that.
What is it today, I'm in a shambles doing [college] business not writing my conclusion. Thick air, wet. I printed field & field and saw it was not good.
21st
Jan said the abstract is deep and crisp and even. Yes, it is.
The section on how this vision makes it possible to include kinds of knowing and experienced facts of knowing that couldn't be accounted for in the old ways.
Kim's piece. Working on one project with her since February and now having it finished in my hands. I see the stages and bits of our work together from beginning to end. She came through with a fine solution to her fear of writing about the mythology of weaving. I can see the project is much better than it would have been without me. Ida writing dismayed and indignant that she won't have me as advisor again. Mike's self-eval put specks of tears in my eyes.
Where am I today. Nine more days here. Did Kim's letter this morning, nothing on conclusion. Ch 6 checks. Three more chapters. The piles of books for ref checks will have to go back to the libe, I will lose the computer.
23
Dreaming a lot. Among much else, I found a little furry piggy at the bottom of a closet. Held it to my face and crooned to it. It started to purr, held onto my face with its little arms. In the same room a party dress from the fifties, wide skirt fat with crinolines. I was wearing it feeling it was too extreme taken out of its time. Frank was there, standing off. I wasn't thinking he was dead but I knew he was alone and prickly. He saw another man who happened to be walking beside me and veered away. Proud. It might have been Janeen's room I was in.
24
I've just written the envoi - I called "lucid, intrepid Marjorie Grene" as tutelary spirit to stand by the launch.
25
Looking at Marjorie on the line above I see how tentatively I write usually.
Saturday morning. Quiet. Just that.
-
The great dance cognitive notes:
- Do the San people mind-control the kudu
no
- They dehydrate it
- Does it decide to give itself to them
- Is it better to be a vegetarian no
- Do they use hand signals when they are hunting alone no
- Does the hand signaling have to do with empathy
- Do you want to say anything about the way the kudu did that search, to graduate, by overview, of strength
- It does that no
- Instruction to me
- The kudu feels a greater intelligence
- The runner thinks like a kudu while keeping human motive
- They are unusual in analyzing the hunt
- Origin of analysis
- Origin of male techno-thinking
- Origin of narrative
- Because the men go out alone or in small groups
- Did language develop in the lab of the small group at home
- The men used the gift of the women and children
- Are we descended from the San
- They are very tuned to animals
- Imprinted
- Forebrain
- Thinking like a kudo means forebrain
- It is more that the hunter allows himself to be controlled by the kudu YES
- This makes the kudu feel outwitted
- Is empathy the key to forebrain YES
- Men developed the forebrain no
- Women used it with children
- What worked for babies worked for animals
- Is this as far as I need to track it
- They dehydrate it
27
Struggling with William was there when I woke. Why does he get to me. What is the struggle like. It's like being under attack. My head is slow this morning - I say things like "It's madness, it's folly." Which it is but why am I involved - because I took him on, whatever that means.
What's the issue - his notion of limitless power - "the nature of life and reality is really whatever I choose it to be," "what we can create in life is limitless." What else - his capital letters on God, the One, the Love. His self-hypnotic thoughtless dismissal of "the rationality of western culture."
"Ask love to imagine through us authentically" - that's nice but why does he make such a fuss about what is natural. When I was in love with the garden I created in all the ways he goes on about and did not pray to do so - love imagined, fought, schemed, designed, politicked, labored, drew toward me what was needed, but it wasn't love for the All, the One, the Love, it was love for the garden. One creates by working with limits not by imagining there are none. Falling in love with something in particular not everything/nothing.
What he is saying is destructive of real creation - he wants to bring things into existence without engaging in their qualities.
So much ado about himself, and has there been any ado about anything other than himself.
Then I got the other thing, what has really been irritating me - I listed his uses of deep and then his uses of surrender and realized he tries to hypnotize the reader. My resistance and annoyance is to the uncleanness of his language - so unclean. As always, when I got it I stopped being annoyed. I sat down and wrote it and then went downtown to get Corin's pieces. Ah, Corin, a girl who is what she is, loves her mother and brother, and has in her a fresh unopened room.
She does not talk about love at all - she writes with love for particulars - she works with love for particulars - she wants to learn particulars.
- Mom does the chicken go wings up or wings down in the pot?
- Wingies up, baby, wingies up.
- Okay, love you.
- Love too, I'll kiss you when you're sleepin'.
- Wingies up, baby, wingies up.
She feels the force of a house foundation in the woods, an overgrown hole in the ground. She feels her mother there. She dreams there is a door on the landing there didn't use to be. She opens it and finds a labyrinth of rooms that didn't exist before.
That dream. I do not dream it any more. I dream something else. It is a dream of unfound self, unfound capacity. I shouldn't tell her what it means. What she is, is intact. She has love whole and sound in her.
I phoned Rowen and found him low. His birthday weekend was wet, many of his guests cancelled at the last moment, Moss came to the ferry to say he couldn't come. But that wasn't it, he said. He got his interim grades, 26 in math, 48 in science. Science was because he didn't do his homework. Math partly because he has been walking out, coming late. This morning he didn't go to class. He loses five points per chapter every time he's late or misses.
Wrote two letters today and am tired.
29
The letter to William in two shifts. I came through into the large voice, should I call it that, where I know what is simply true. It's a blazing clarity. I don't know whether it will burn William to a crisp. I said to Louie my mission is to bring love from heaven to earth. She sighed.
We had one of our classic talks. She phoned at 10 at night, found me in the back room sitting on the floor sorting papers - so many papers. I sat in the chair in the corridor looking west at the two smudges of the red letters on the Sears tower out there in the black, talking with the phone to my left ear as I have so many times in these last years. I told her about not throwing away the little photos of people in Sexsmith High School because it is still possible I might see something new in them, and the letter to William. She told me about bravely making the first move with Rick Shaw, and about going for the first interview with a new therapist who had animal rights stickers on her door, a bad sign. We laughed.
31st
This late afternoon my furniture and boxes are going out the door to Louie's.
1st June
I started in the morning and was finished as they came up the stairs. The blue room is hollowed out, the kitchen and bathroom half so. I slept last night with the pile of folders in the work room.
This morning I have been checking cassette tapes. Luke when he was three with me when I was twenty-eight. Jamila and I in this kitchen arguing about a poem.
I was in the neighbourhood market this morning with objects spread round me. Sold my leather jacket, the pancake-mixing bowl I made in London, the tripod I bought to take north. An Indian woman and her small white-moustached husband in a cowboy hat bought Rowen's duvet, sheet, pillowcase and towel, and my black and brown small Japanese vase. A man bought Astronomy and cosmology. The blond neighbour woman bought Bill Volk's book on relativity. An English woman picked up Travels in the Cevennes with a donkey. She looked at the inside cover and said someone had paid ten pence. I said she could have it for a dime. The maps were in the free pile. Men walked away with them.
2nd
The stuff I don't own any more. Sewing scraps. Spice jars. Rubber boots. Maps. Super 8 films. Philosophy notes. Drawerful of tools and nails.
I have so little to say. Am I shut down.
Ed writes:
During level 6 I was unsure of what a "personal voice" was, unsure of my creative process, and was generally searching for some solid ground to begin from. After my second semester at [college], I don't feel that way any more, I now have some bogs and swampland I can call home.
Here is a strange fact. Leah moved her first load of stuff into the house as I sat working in the back room. I didn't see it until I came out after she was gone. There in the middle room is the big wicker laundry chest I brought with me from London. I bought it for the move and had packed in it the pottery I was selling yesterday in the park. It was Luke's toy chest when he first lived in the middle room, and there it is in his room again. I gave it to David a couple of years ago, and he gave it to Leah I don't know when. What about it? Not much, but it's wrenching, because giving up the house of Luke and Rowen is the hard part.
The sky is so intensely blue today. The season has changed at last.
Oh the death of life - there's the Fauré Requiem on - I mean the cutting of this consciousness of it - oh young self I was here - oh Luke - oh Rowen kissing the balustrade and hugging the tub -
When I couldn't sleep one night last week I lay thinking what were the moments in this house. The summer evenings writing in this room with sun on the east wall as it is now, the scent of dame's rocket and the sight of it in a glass jar against the green boards, with the oval mirror in the corner. I was living a lyrical life. Love woman in her pale green cords and white Indian shirt.
Early mornings, 4:30 to 5:30, in this room after Rowen was born, the dazzling silent light.
The summer afternoon three years ago when Tom, Paul and Luke were sitting with me in the kitchen.
The moment I came into the middle room and found Tom sitting on the floor with his back against the bed and his feet stretched in front of him, staring ahead looking utterly stymied.
The half hour one Christmas when I sat in my bed going through the crucifixion of the child abandoned in a hospital bed.
The moment sitting in my bed when I understood that I had seen through what is wrong with philosophy of mind.
The moment sitting in the dark - the bed was this single bed but in the middle room then - late one night when Louie phoned me from Wall Street and I sat straight up because I realized I could tell her what I actually think.
The night in bed with Rob - it was on the floor in this room then - when we both felt an electric weight over us like a layer of snow.
The moment I began to pour aged pee down through the floor crack onto Trudy's palette, shaking but steadfast.
The first time I took acid, sitting on the floor in the kitchen watching images of Assyrians flowing in the crystal grain of the plaster.
The moment Luke came and lay down next to me wearing a towel, and looked at the middle room as it has been lately, blue and gold glowing in lamplight, and said, This room is exquisite.
The moment under the green tweed blanket (it is gone) with Ken Sallett, wrapped in his fur, in peace of bliss because I had wrestled hard with him.
Jam and I sitting or lying on the corridor floor to talk, many hours, many lights. Summer evenings like now.
Evenings at the west window seeing the sky incandescent.
Long evenings lying around on the couch in the kitchen with Michael, laughing, laughing, after the grim dark years.
The grim dark nights awake in the dark in that couch in the kitchen, nauseated, desperately horny, pregnant.
The moments I would walk through the corridor feeling every moment could be some new revelation.
The moment after I heard Frank died, when I opened my arms to him and held him to comfort him.
Louie and Rowen when he was four playing with cardboard boxes, rope and sheets in the middle room. Louie will you play 'ith me?
Is that it? It's not all I remember obviously but maybe it is the whole catalog of some kind -
The moment writing the Mary Tiles paper at the work table (which faced south in this room then) when I felt I was hovering over something, doing something more creative than I had ever done.
The very small picture assemblies I had on the corridor walls in the days when I was lyrical. A white tower in pink evening light with a crescent moon made of a little fingernail of clear apple seed casing.
I was thirty one and am fifty seven. Janeen visited me here, sat at the kitchen table.
I stood in the middle of this room the first night David Carter saw it, stunned with grief and fear feeling him behind me seeing the quality of the house. Later, when he had lived here with Francie and was bringing Sean to see it, he said, as he came to the top of the stairs, This is the most beautiful apartment in Vancouver. And then Sean and Kelly had their second child here.
Tom standing with his back to the window in the kitchen, in twilight, telling me he had lied about being born in San Diego. The first evening of his first visit.
The night I lay in the dark talking to Janet about Tom. The night I lay waiting for Tom to call, excruciated and then peaceful, when he called late and drunk. We had a graceful conversation, he said. It was after that he came to his decision, June 1st six years ago. He called me when he had been dry a month.
3
Monday morning, 6:30, is that a seaplane - the part of this place I haven't felt for years - the coast rainforest pressed against the flank of mountains - salt inlets lapping quietly - cedar trees' flat finely braided - I'm stuck trying to say a cedar tree's branches - the smell -
cedar, hemlock, salmonberry, Indian plum, salal, arbutus, alder.
seagull, crow, otter, seal, orca, bear, deer.
starling, squirrel, raccoon.
flat blue of mountain shapes in haze, white cut-out shapes of snow.
The rain, the rain, the rain.
There's a black squirrel spread like ivy on the stucco wall of the apartment building next door, climbing in jumps as if it is weightless.
Daphne, Juan, Leah Rosling, Roy Kiyooka, Muggs, the Chinese woman next door who gardened, the stevedore on the ground floor next door on the other side - I'm scanning, who mattered in 25 or 26 years - Irene the waitress at the Princess Café - Gordon Koo - Joe further up on Keefer.
The Princess Café itself, and the Marine View Café above the dock where the fish boats came in. Koo's Automotive.
The drunk woman who screamed on welfare night, every month year after year - Eric in the hotel on Hastings - the Avalon Hotel - the hotel on Cordova where I first landed.
The neighbour across the alley cutting down his cherry tree from the top down with a kitchen cleaver. The day I answered a knock and found him on the porch with a bag of plums.
Mr Choy on the doorstep once a month through all the years.
4th
Summaries this morning.
1. Tom took me captive like a tribesman carrying off a maiden. I struggled in extreme fear and erotic fascination. My elders taught me to manage myself and teach him to be a good husband. We have settled into secure and happy attachment.
2. When I began the [college] job I had been in high ambition to make a leap into money, power and high level work. There are practical reasons to take the job, I do it well, but it takes my creative energy to very little effect. I mean that I am using my only life and my strenuously developed capability to teach grammar and basic sanity to seven people. I am not at all in touch with my larger plans.
Is there anything that needs to be done about [the college]? Use it to learn to deal with men, it says. Is mind and land still going to happen? Yes. Is there something I failed to learn about dealing with men? Yes how to integrate it. You mean understanding what it is in me. Yes. WAS I working with my own disaffected man? Yes. Was grammar the right thing to teach him? Yes.
-
It's Tuesday - I have four days with the computers and library books, including today.
Paul K stopped in, transformed into a wan professor with small eyes and thick red beard. He stood around in my empty rooms saying good, good, good and fine, fine, fine in a loud false voice. I saw he was so out of it there was no point saying anything to him. He gave me hearty advice, a lot of it, about my defense, which he is now the expert on.
Looking at this writing worried at its institutionalized sound. Having to spell everything out firmly for the [college] people, oh dangerous. Duties all day. I have everything done, all the evals, and wrote a political note to the board. Have hardly anything but duty in me.
Vivian said give her the thesis by the 17th and she will copy and distribute it. That's my deadline then, thirteen days.
5th June
Here's my open space - seven in the morning - the bathroom pipe sounding - bitty voices of the birds - an even overcast, thin grey daylight -
Conclusion to finish.
7
In my last dream this morning I was sobbing, They are such stupid men. I was in the upper corridor of my house and saw that painters had come in. They had already partly covered the color of the front door with beige. They were slathering polyfilla over the picture rail and midwall rail so that they were losing their shape, and they were covering the red of the trim with white. A man standing upstairs with me said the university had decided to make things nicer for the students.
I walked up the alley from Louie's last night saying This is the last time I will come home to my house at night. This morning I could say This is the last morning I will look north from my workroom windows to the piles of white clouds above the mountains. I have been saying these things not feeling them. I feel the dream more in relation to the house I am. The university has been painting over my colors and mucking over my edges. I mean for instance the way I don't feel beauty when I see it in sky and city - I do feel domestic beauty some. I found love woman in this house, she made the beauty of the house. When she revived throughout the years, she would make it beautiful again. (It is beautiful now, but because beautiful Manuel made it so.)
So, yes, my lyrical self is slathered over - this pale green of the tongue-and-groove boards I found in a Chinese grocery being pulled down (another love woman moving in, Leah rapturous about the colors) is what I mean by it - pale green, dame's rocket, silver mirror, early morning light. That's the essence, green, white, silver, glass. Later it was Aphrodite, but that one was Artemis the exquisite lesbian. Femme to the second power. So can I take her with me? Yes. Can she do philosophy? No, she's a poet. She lived in the lake house too. She's the one who feels ritual and presence. - So has this doctorate been my season in the underworld? Yes.
8
I walked out of the house with the stuff from the fridge and took it to the car. Thought: that was no goodbye, should I go back? Went back up. How should I do this. I haven't been feeling it. I'll say goodbye to the four directions, I'll say goodbye to the four rooms. Then what I did was bow to the views - corridor mountain view, workroom north view, bedroom east, kitchen south, bathroom south, corridor west. I stood in each of the rooms. In the workroom standing over Rowen's stripped bed I felt my heart banging unusually. Feeling had come. Then I began to see what I had made, in the workroom the green cornerboard going up on the wall edge of the closet, and next to it the dark green structure I think of as a horse collar rack, a big comb made of dowel-rods. The shelf over the green boards on the west wall. The shapes these constructions make. In the kitchen the wall with the cubbies, floorboard-wainscot to chest height and the crown of a door making one whole shape of that wall. [sketchup model of 824 East Pender made in 2015]
- No, how it went was, first I memorized the colors. Bathroom: red, blue, green, silver. Bedroom: blue, white, yellow, reddish floor. Kitchen: dark green, light green, red, honey floor, dark wood. Workroom: pale green, white, white floor. Corridor: white, red door, blue door, yellow door, syrup floor, pale green wood. Stairs down: dark turquoise, a pinky off-red, cream (night sea, * and biscuit). I gave Luke's bird in the bedroom closet a kiss. I gave the mirror a kiss. After that I began to see the brilliance of myself at thirty-one with my rusty saw and bent nails. I was quite swarming when the phone rang and it was Tom at the right moment to pour praise on both me and the house.
Hardly anyone was willing to see the house - David Carter, David Beech.
O mortality - the light in rooms - the light that at this moment very lightly rakes the hatch of Louie's skylight. That light is California light.
- the golden west volume 25: 2002 may-september
- work & days: a lifetime journal project