Vancouver, 16th July
I'm in the beautiful house - I have left the harsh land of the father and come back to the lush summer of the mother. Rob brought cherries and blueberries to the airport. Louie brought white phlox when she came home in the dark. My clothes are in the dryer. I wake after sweet sleep to light and the mountains. In email Sara Norton says will Lise, Joyce and I be the core of a global change program at [the college]. The grape leaves are stirring. Louie said, an exam that will determine the rest of your life, it would be reactivating, yes.
Meantime Tom got to my room at 11:30, knocked, opened the door, saw the room was empty, found my note, maybe asked at the desk. They said I'd taken a taxi. He went into a rage, took his phone off the hook. Is going to stay in a rage, but I am better and it is partly because I got even. Is it? Yes. I don't want to talk to him. We both want it to be over, but it says it isn't.
Two pictures that balance - his grey-eyed face looking into mine, calm, centered, himself - and the moment I watched him walk across to Jack and Gary behind the desk, saying in a buffoon's voice, The two men I admire most! Jack and I separately turning away in disgust.
-
I was looking for Brian Eno's piece in Google and thought I had found it, but when I clicked the link it was my own quote in chapter 9. Beautiful page, blue on cream.
- And then I did find Eno's interview. When I read it tonight I remembered my own people, who like what I like and are interested in what I'm interested in.
Brian Eno 1996 Interview by Anthony Korner, Artforum, summer 1996
-
Progressive social change, global responsibility. The sound of that doesn't thrill me. I want to further something but that doesn't sound like it. They need a program that would run through the other programs and make them money by drawing bodies. I'm more for working with the high end and getting grants. I could be their gadfly maybe, "slow growth by means of the work on betrayal of the mother."
-
That hemlock is drooping its tip like a wild oat. A line of wire across sky over the mountain - sky ivory with blue-grey smudged across. Two gulls flying west parallel to the wire but far away. A train is huffing. One of the side windows is up all the way, and seeing mountain, sky, tree and worn-shingled roof-peak through that rectangle is like seeing space naked. There's a thrill in it, as if the eye travels all the way to the blue ridge and touches it, as it is not able through glass. The tenderness of that bit of naked sky between tree, mountain and window frame. The worn shingles are green.
As I was parking near Koo's today the man who used to be my neighbour across the alley was walking on the far side of the street. He paused so I got out and spoke to him. A very small man with only two upper teeth. "Howcome you park here?" I tell him I've moved. "We were neighbours a long time," I say, "nearly thirty years. I saw your children grow up." "Too ol' now," he says. He's the man who brought me plums. Maybe he watched me getting in and out of the bathtub all those years. He was welcome, if so. Our meeting had the quality of the meeting with the other neighbour, the stevedore. Profound. The meetings say, mutually, You were there for so much of my life.
As I wrote this paragraph darkness came to all the houses under the sky, though there is still midsummer yellow in the notch where the mountain drops back. It's 10. Below it there's gold light in what I can see of the picture window of the house that's like Oma's house on Clearbrook Road.
Flying back yesterday I was heartsore and tired and didn't feel much, but there was one ridge of cloud I really saw. It was solid but not deep, cut off sharply on the bottom in a straight line, as if it were a ceiling. Under it was something like a room within another depth of more diffuse cloud. There was something about the side light - it was maybe 7 o'clock - that made it seem as if there was another formation upside down showing its ceiling as the floor of that room - something like that, though passing quickly and uncertain. I had the feeling of arriving at heaven.
Now it is really dark. The mountain and roofs are almost one mass. A little form within it, a roof ridge and chimney where the sky is still lit, but greenish now. Cool air is pouring into the room. Pouring? Not really, though it is more and more strongly felt and has a direction.
17
1. My car is through Aircare and insured. 2. Ray says, "I am very well and enjoying your thesis tremendously. It is a terrific read." 3. Tom sent an email from work this morning saying he was in my corner and not to think of him until after the event, which he remembers as Thursday.
18
Getting into the state - free and clear, honest - sharper than I am at the moment - practicing calling up in relation to questions.
I'm in my green chair in Louie's beautiful room that has sun in through the east panel of the bay window. Clouds brilliant above the mountains. Motes in the air, white fluffs traveling. Ah, at that moment a cloud over the sun. What was the sensation in the room. Disappointment. - There, it's back, glowing through red at the edge of the begonia. A strip of light creeping north on the wall.
A pigeon has found a hole under the roof of the green house that has a swinging window.
-
How should I be doing this. I feel I'm not remembering much. Should I have stayed in my house and done nothing but make myself that work? Have I wrecked my brain?
- Can you tell me how to do this
- I used to memorize and now I can't
- Give me one card preparation
- Alright process, control, to improve, oppression
- I'm slightly panicking
- I'm afraid my mind is going it isn't
- More estrogen? no
- Keep doing what I'm doing
- I used to memorize and now I can't
20
The quiet of this part of the air, the part at eye level from my bed. Birds are sitting in the sun quietly on chimneys. Seven on Saturday morning. From here to the mountains the air shows faint and milky. In the light from the northeast I can see cliff faces through the milk. There's one small bird on the wild oat leader of the hemlock, the Emily Carr tree.
Now shall I see whether I can work? - Look at the way that arm of the grape ivy reaches out into the light from the east. It is a young shoot, feeding like a quiet baby. Pok a bumble against the pane. Steam rising from the cannery. The steeple of the Catholic church. Gulls and crows. In this room the reverberant orange that will come again when the sun angles around from the west tonight.
21
Louie had her first date with Rick Shaw. She liked him. They walked around the seawall and ate at Akbar's. He paid.
We were sitting on my bed in the dark, watching the sky fade over the mountain. I said, How did he eat? She said that was a test, yes. He passed. He had two mango lassis and kept pace.
I dreamed an RV my father and twin brothers had been traveling in. It looked alright from the outside, but inside the walls were mostly unsheathed two by four studs, more rooms than I expected, set this way and that way so the corridor crook'd. There were dog bowls in every room. A big bear like a fat dog. He was poopy and would get on the bed. Later when I was showing it to Tom there was Aunt Lily in a small area she had cleared for her study. I asked what she was reading. She showed me two skulls she said were famous skulls that demonstrated some sort of lesion damage. They looked like white plastic to me. I asked if they were real. She evaded the question.
Woke in a discouraged state. That seems to be a dream about my thesis. Maybe it is the view of a self who would like to be living. The thesis is my father's vehicle in that he's the philosophical brain and his sister the writer. If I bring it through I am carrying him with me. But this being finds it a messy and dirty house. That's worth knowing.
- Do you know who it is regret, missing
- Because something is missing? What? early love
- That's why I'm finding it hard to get into
- Because something is missing? What? early love
22
Twenty-two. Here it is.
How should I be this morning. How am I.
How is it. Two birds on the second branch of the wild oat hemlock. The reigning quiet of the light on the rooftops. I'm juicing up after the night, some. Excited? Yes. Alright? Yes.
Okay what needs to be done. Fast review of small papers. Look at the endnote pile. Invent my twenty minute speech.
- Are they going to ask me things I don't know how to answer
no
- Is it going to be done by five
- Will it be too hot for the black jacket no
- One bit of reassurance they will like its honesty
- From the speech be simple and honest
- Introduce my friends
- Say why I did it
- And what I wanted
- Tell them the room
- That will take twenty minutes
- Is it going to be done by five
23
It was at 2 on the 22nd, 2002.
The day was radiant. The windows looked onto a shining bank of alders. Louie brought the flowers she bought yesterday - sunflowers, goldenrod, yellow freesia. I wore the leopard trimmed jacket. My cheeks were pink. I would have liked the way I looked, Louie said - sophisticated.
'Congratulations' is a word I never like to hear. Heard it a lot. I came back into the room after their confab and Paul reached his big hand toward me. Congratulations.
He was wearing rich man's beige - huge Paul in well-cut much-pleated linen pants and matching shirt. Dyed hair, was it?
Zoë, beautiful Zoë [Druick] in the corner. Clear-eyed, clean-faced, smart, centered, kind, young and a professor.
Ray looking forth from under his beautiful Aristotelian brow with his classical statue's eyes. Or so they seemed to me as I looked sideways at him down the banquette in the restaurant.
Louie wore her dark blue and white spotted shirt and looked beautiful. Fairy Vivian came in spike-heeled sandals and a long sheath dress. Nathalie looked butch in teenage clothes showing white belly. Barry has a thick white beard.
A bird just landed on the hemlock tip and made it bounce.
In this house I sit and stare. Red maple through the balcony doors black with the sun behind it, swaying, rippling, none of those things. It and the sunflower bouquet on the table.
The night before, I imagined the room with the tables and when I was thinking of the introduction and the conclusion on the two center tables I called up the child whose suffering in her bed was also accomplished in this time, and the young woman who learned to be an honest and responsible love woman, and felt them, or gave them to feel, as graduating too.
Yesterday morning when I began to feel fear, a burning at the heart, I lay down for half an hour and felt into the constriction. I thought of the church men in suits and the way they taught me to be frightened to show what I knew, and then I called up the three men who praised and defended me as a student, Mr Mann, Superintendent Toews, Martyn Estall. Mr Mann stood on the La Glace community center platform and said, You all know how I feel about Elfreda. Mr Toews got me the Canada Council trip to Stratford, afterwards found me walking with my suitcase on the Sexsmith road and drove me home. Martyn Estall at Queen's took care of me behind the scenes so I hardly knew he was doing it, got me the philosophy medal and the Woodrow Wilson nomination. Lying there I imagined the three of them in the Halpern Lounge defending me.
Yesterday Ray and Barry were that too. Ray said he hadn't seen language so well described anywhere. Barry said, in the first round of questions, what amounted to, If you mess with Ellie I am going to fight you.
Calmly knowing, then standing your ground, Louie said.
24
Gate E82 in the sun, long enough before the flight so the rows of purple seats are empty. I saw the sun rise this morning. Before it rose at 6 there was a quiet hour with clear tinted sky, birds on their way to work. I felt that the space of sky above the roofs, the zone straight ahead of me at the level of the bed, where I have been seeing birds at rest and squirrels running on easy open slopes, was an interval of heaven.
The tint in the sky was stronger at the spot on the blue ridge in the northeast. Further east were two similar forms, hump-backs of paler blue: further peaks. When the sun began to show it looked like liquid fire. Two orange rectangles had shown up on the orange wall.
Last night as Louie and I were coming away from our hour on the porch I could feel something was up. She was on the edge of the green armchair taking off her shirt, putting on her sleeping teeshirt. "How are you doing?" "I'm having separation anxiety." Now I know what to do with that. I drop sideways into the chair behind her back. That chair is long in our story. I put my hand on her back. I feel vibration through the muscle when she speaks. Her muscles are round, pillowy, I say.
A dream I had a couple of nights before the event was that I was pulling hair out of the overflow opening in the bathtub and up came blue and white ropes of beads. - Remembering the beaded cornrows of the smart black girl on the trolley.
Leonard Cohen Ten new songs on the CD player this morning, Say goodbye / to Alexandra / lea-ving / Say goodbye / to Alexandra / gone.
Plainfield VT Friday 26th
Email from Tom this morning, from Gabriele this evening.
The students as they introduce themselves seem a dreary bunch of healers and fixers, no one doing science or math or art, the human anxiety studies end to end.
Margo is beautiful. Something real has happened to Margo.
Am I better on my feet than I know? Yes, it says.
27
Have I finished writing about the defense -
It's a dark morning in the dirty dorm room before breakfast. Chill and wet. I'm drinking tea from a paper cup. My tissues are creaking and aching. I've been tired here, wanting to stop long before the days are over. I fall over my feet, haul myself up stairs.
Introductions yesterday - I stood straight up and spoke forth - so it felt - told a story about managing the defense - energetic though maybe not true.
28
Yesterday when I was tired by lunchtime I found young men to sit with and ate a pile of trifle.
Katy Rose. A short woman with a big body and her hair on top of her head in a little knob. A juicy crone, she said. Small blue eyes and a fat small-featured white face, something true and wayfaring in her eyes. I sat with her at breakfast. She was a dairy goat breeder and is an astrologer who likes to see the structure of a chart, especially the tensions. She looks like a hillbilly and has a laptop in her room that will draw charts. She's attracted to men in their forties, she says, because their virility is starting to go and they are anxious for it. A double Scorpio. She is being funded to school by a younger man she thinks was her son in a former life. She is autistic and wonders why she does not lack spatial ability. Her best subjects in high school were English and math.
[about students, not transcribed]
Another day and a half. I feel that in the week I've been here I've turned from a slim fine-featured thing into a big flab swollen with chocolate cake I eat for entertainment. In the lounge next to this room the MFA-IA faculty are drinking and whooping.
1st August
I say that and lose interest.
Did I overstep, is the question of today. Understep too probably.
During our faculty supper on the cottage deck Francis asked what I wanted to do in San Diego. I was talking about the 6th College project. I could feel Margo going solid next to me. I said too much, was it? (It says it was that she didn't believe I could do it.)
What else. Katy Rose sat down next to me on the bench outside the dining room at lunch time, her big bosoms covered in thin red fabric with little beads. Her small pale blue eyes had that old-timey Okie look. She said I was one of the people she liked best at the res and she hoped she could stay in touch with me. She said I was fun. She said she wants to write two books, one about the harm caused by notions of god the father, the other about how to adore a man. Say more about the second one, I said. Women need to treat men like sons not fathers. We need to raise them up to where we are. Yeah, I agree with that, I said, not going into some of the reservations I do have. Katy Rose also said Lise is a fierce eagle, and she can't understand a thing Caryn says.
I see Steve walking back and forth across the doorway of his dorm in his Hawaiian shirt. This aft I asked him how many beers he drinks in a day. Six to twelve. What is it about Steve. Katy Rose said the men on campus stand in the women's shadow. She likes to see a man who is a wizard. Tomás? I said. Tomás is just about Tomás, she says. I have a student called Steve, do you know him? I asked. Then Steve this aft said, I did get a compliment this afternoon, a woman I was talking to at the table at lunch said you said ...
As for Gerhard. I suppose he is some sort of autistic and we don't know how to diagnose. Oh gee.
Gerhard - tall, very thin though wide shouldered, curly blond hair receded back into his forehead, very white narrow face with a thin hawk nose. Pale blue eyes. Gerhard de la Mare. Narrow but puffed-out mouth under a curly blond moustache. A bit the young Dürer look. Wanted to write about absolute infinity and its implications for balance, nutrition and other health questions. If his first axiom is that absolute infinity exists, I ask, what's his next? That everything and nothing exists. And so on. He discovered the principle of infinity through photographing marbles in water using three lights. He speaks in a deliberate drawl, You see, Ell-llie ... Well, Ell-llie, what I believe is that ... in a faintly British accent. By the end of our hour together yesterday I was so exasperated I had stopped trying to understand. Out, out with you. Even now I'm angry. There is something drained means.
2
Party last night. Lise came and got me. Margo sat at the head of the coffee table in Dewey Lounge and said, I'm going to miss you guys. I went up and sat next to her. Lise came and sat on my other side. People said I had the best shoes.
The student/faculty reading. I read the beginning and end of Leaving the land and could feel the audience shifting and rustling. It was too academic for them. IT was too academic for them, that childish, personal piece. I didn't read it well, read too fast at first, stumbled.
Goldberg did her parlour trick that everyone adores, improvising something on a list of words supplied by the audience. Kitty Nesbitt was best. She paced in her good femme clothes and read from a novel about a prostitute spending a week at a reunion with a client who has an open wound on his thigh. Bravely written, bravely lived, lucid, smart, cogent, and what I want to call reverberant. I think she was the only one who laughed at the line about thinking god is a father in the sky because the real father comes from outside and bangs around.
Vancouver, 3rd
Reading The unusual life of Tristan Smith in Louie's house. Peter Carey.
Now I'm at a stop. The defense, the res, Tom. Not thoroughly seen, open time.
How am I. When I say to myself something like, I'm burned out on Tom, there's a big sigh. When I got back last night and crawled into Louie's bed, laughing telling her about the res, she soon had hurt feelings and stopped me. I'm a little lonesome and forlorn. The defense - was triumphant enough but at the dinner later I felt shut out by the collection of men at one end of the table. There were many easy moments, funny, liked and accepted moments, toward the end of the res. I'm hearing Steve's voice, Steve made an impression: walking back and forth in front of my window, shaped like an egg on thin legs, in Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.
The morning of our last meeting, the exercise of acting a characteristic whose name we'd drawn from a hat. I did hypochondria in a Southern accent - what do I know about a Southern accent - I just did it. They were laughing hard.
Don't have energy for this yet.
She stopped, shook her head. "Listen to me, watch me, don't decide what you're going to do until you see what I have done. Come on, Tristan, you want to act. This is acting - the moment while you wait to hear what I say. While you think what to do - that's it. It isn't the lines, or the lights - this is what we give them: the energy, made by this gap which is made by you listening to me."
My mother could not have accepted this but it was so: I had learned to equate the pain of unrequited desire with pleasure.
I could see Jacqui, half a block ahead. She was still 'in character', walking like a man with her chin thrust forward, her shoulders back, but once you knew, you knew. She was a woman. A rare reckless shining woman - she had a round female backside, a little apricot between her legs.
4
Margo saying, in her office as they sorted students, She needs your firm hand. Margo saying, as I drank the Michelob Steve gave me and said things had been jumping out of my mouth, It's about time.
About The unusual life of Tristan Smith: notice the feeling of its fiction. The word I'm thinking is acidic. I have often felt it in well-written books like this one. It is partly determination to entertain. Lack of silence. Is it also booze or a drug?
I will soon have to look at my manuscript.
I am wondering whether I'm in a clearing where I can look around and see where I've been, what has been happening while I was in the back room at the computer these years.
-
It is raining. I hear rain, not a heavy rain, on Louie's skylight. I see its silver lines against the black maple. Behind me the flute in Orpheus. Eating the greens, reds and oranges of vegetables. Noon on a Sunday.
Did I detach from Tom at the moment he said he wanted to go? It says yes. Is it irrevocable? Yes. Because he would do that at such a moment. Yes. Should I ignore his emails? No. Watch them have no effect. Yes.
How would I like to be in the new time? I'd like to be socially effective with fewer tricks. I'd like to be more clued-in and immediate. I'd like to be able to see what's in front of me in the moment. I'd like to be quieter. I'd like to be mightily toned and shining.
-
Some men come in the door in the corner. Luke is among them, taller, wearing a suit, handsome. Smell of booze. I rush to the corner, throw my arms around Luke's thin middle. Pull him out of the group. Roy is there. I shout at him, You're taking Luke down with you! As I say it I'm tipping forward to soak my head in a vat of water. It is a gesture of protest. Roy and Luke and a woman are leaving. He's going, I can't hold him, I'm protesting pathetically, ineffectually. They leave in a sleigh with Luke sitting in the middle. The woman's arm is around him. She's your girlfriend? I had thought she was Roy's. They leave. I am shouting after them to no effect at all. Wake at 4:30 distressed feeling my life has been too weak, Roy has pulled Luke back into his orbit.
The sight of him in the center of the sleigh, passive, being driven away.
Go back to sleep and dream I am in front of my post box, which I find on a street corner it seems. Postgraduates. Mine is #1. There is a note on it saying Epp's box is full. As I'm looking for my key a street thug has put his arms around me tight from the back. I turn my head to look in his face. Unshaven, quite young, dark eyes. I don't feel in danger but am realizing maybe I should. Police in the area. I call to them. He runs. There's a long scarf trailing from his neck. They say it's used in crime.
6
Here is the first thing to address - this dull vacancy of time. It's been here through the years, the empty room I walked into when I wasn't working. When was it different? Working on the garden. Making something beautiful. Sex. Being with Louie. Politicking. Creation, feeling.
What do I need to be there again.
- Am I soon going to have enough money to buy a better
car
- Pay my student loans
- Are you sure
- More? improve conflict to graduate into writing
- Conflict between what and what active search and Tom's/men's tyranny
- Adventure and suppression
- Internalized suppression no external
- I collapsed at the dinner no you were suppressed
- I had my finest moment when I made Paul blush
- Suppressed deliberately no, habitually
- Keep working with Tom investigatively YES
- Okay that's a good reason
- Pay my student loans
7
All the typos yesterday.
8
Reformat libe copy, write acknowledgements, ask about printing 3 copies.
9
Having to decide about the car. What do I need to move. Should I just give the car to Rob. Should I pay much more money to make it drivable. Would it be cheaper to rent a car. Should I take my computer.
Thinking of renting a car I am immediately looking forward to traveling. Driving without anxiety about the car, oh yes. Driving in September, camping.
Now that I'm leaving I'm also in love with BC.
I'm going to do it over and this time I won't be highjacked by Tom or anyone else.
10
Putting chapters on the website. Not the illustrations yet.
The roll of slides I took of my place as it emptied has come back black. Maybe the shutter didn't lift though I heard it clunk. It's a true loss.
In my dream this morning I was talking to myself about having a PhD. I said I should continue to write scholarly essays. I was imagining them in a 50s way, the sort of essay I would publish in liberal arts periodicals.
Tom sent another note saying he was bad. I am testing my disaffection.
It being a black-grained winter day; lengths of the pavement ink black where not lighted. Never shall I describe all the days I have noticed.
Now, Lytton or I, though we mayn't think better or write better, have a drive in us, which makes an article whole.
In some lights she has the beautiful eyes of all us distinguished women writers; the refinement; the clearness of cut; the patience; & humbleness.
But my god - how satisfactory after, I think twelve years, to have any human being to whom one can speak so directly as I to L!
Volume III 1925-1930, 1980, Hogarth Press.
11th
Sunday morning. There is the mountain in its wrinkles, treed to the top, snow only in the deepest crevice partway down the bare cliffs. I have on Orpheus, Louie is gone for the day, the computers at Harbour Centre are shut down, it is a free day. Melancholy, is it. Lonely and feeling that I will be lonely more because I am leaving my life. - I mean that too, feeling bodily failures begun and more and worse ahead, a tooth hurting at night, and others threatening.
I wouldn't want to go back to any earlier age, because this is the best so far. I mean I wouldn't have wanted to stop before its accomplishment, but I think maybe this would be the age to stay if I could.
No great mischief yesterday and today. Wide, grave, steady. He has no sense of women but a fine strong sense of physical place.
... after the fire had been lit, the buckets would be placed near the stove or even upon it, and after a while the ice on the bottom and around the sides of the bucket would thaw until it was possible to lift the inside circle of it out of the bucket and place it, standing, in a dishpan. The circle would be of translucent crystal bearing all the indentations and contours of the bucket which had shaped it, and with small bits of grass and leaves and sometimes tiny berries frozen within its shimmering transparency.
Since this morning the snow patches in the ravine have gone.
This morning I had a twinge thinking that if I give Tom up there will be no one to go to the beach with.
The deferred problems - various health things - mainly this one about energy, having no drive, doing nothing but staying at home and there close to bed - having no loves or passions - having brought myself to such emotional efficiency. I used to use sex/unsatisfied attachment to drive me. Now there is nothing to drive me. Inclination has run out. That's how it feels when I'm not working. What does it mean? Is it an outskirt of death? Do I need to let myself be driven by love again, with its costs?
- Do you think this is the age to stay no
- Better ahead
- Will you say better in what way research
- This needs to be faced
- Will you lead me come through
- Is there something stopped
- Is it a kind of hopelessness
- Will you name what is stopped missing
- I don't miss those who belong to me
- Missing Tom made me come alive
- And now that I don't miss him he has no value
- Are you sure this is what it's about
- I'd miss my country
- At base I'd miss my mother
- Will you say more search
- Search for energy? search for what stops it
- Is there a technique
inner lovers
- Give up on Tom for that purpose
- Better ahead
12
Last night when Louie got into my bed to say goodnight and asked about my day I said, There is something I have to deal with now. Telling her, I had a sore heart rather than a blank one. She said she heard my voice get younger. But when I was there with that sore heart like a half-formed chick embryo, stricken, I wanted something specific that I couldn't get from her. I wanted a shell containing me - a strong hard mind knowing what I am and what to do with it. Louie did what she does, which is touch me with her soft small hands and reassure me with her soft small voice. I felt her a child wanting to use my helplessness to be able to touch me. I could feel the helpless state firming itself involuntarily as if a muscle thickened over it.
When did the heart blankness begin. I noticed it first in Bellingham on one of the visits. The garden above the motel. Here's my question, has it come because I don't have Joyce any more to get me through to the real, or because I haven't been safe enough with Tom? It says no to both. Because there is a spring stopped and I haven't allowed myself the device that unstops it, just that? Yes. And need to be contained to unstop it directly, and have no one to contain me. Yes. And therefore am at an end. No. Can I find someone to contain me? No. That means there's another way. Yes. A quest for soul, which is that stricken embryo. Yes. Can you explain how? The secret is processing withdrawn crisis. The state I felt last night? Yes. Can I find it without help? Yes. By just being alone? No. By not evading it. Yes. It isn't far to find. Yes.
Now? No. Now write my acknowledgements.
-
The truth is more like this. Life - say 4 days out of 7 - becomes automatic, but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms, wh is all the fuller & more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity.
Nor am I sure of the quality; the only certainty seems to be that after tapping my antennae in the air vaguely for an hour every morning I generally write with heat & ease until 12:30: and thus do my two pages.
I want to go to Seaford & walk back over the downs; and go & see the house at East Chiltington; to breathe in more light & air; to see more grey hollows & gold cornfields & the first ploughed land shining white, with the gulls flickering. [2 Sept 1926]
Dear me, how lovely some parts of The Lighthouse are! Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time.
(The windows fidget at their fastenings as if we were at sea.)
Of its kind this is the best, most representative human life I know; I mean, certain gifts & qualities & good fortunes are here miraculously combined -
Yet these people one sees are fabric only made once in the world
Do you suppose then that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the tops of our trees? And that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night?
- the golden west volume 25: 2002 may-september
- work & days: a lifetime journal project