| the golden west volume 3 part 1 - 1995 august-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 9th August 1995 Oh here I am fifty years old sitting in bed reading Emily climbs. Sun falling across the bed. I got my foot from under the covers and stuck it into the warmth. The window wide open, a hammer sounding. That's a sound unchanged from Maud Montgomery's time. Thinking about the questions for the Western Film interview. I've been on the margin of the margin. What do I have to say. I've worked out of a kind of abstract intuition. I couldn't defend it. I couldn't explain it.
Sunday 13th The interview is a long story. The night after, both Louie and I dreamed of public transport, she of a runaway bus she was responsible to stop, I of a transport truck triply articulated, three long yellow boxes. She and/or I were driving. 14th He knocked after dark and was not my husband. Was his Dickens worst, a feral little head, polite. Misdirected, evasive, stupid. I couldn't focus him. Did I focus myself? I took the exercise it recommended. I said, David, when you are real, you can have me. I am worth having, I'm worth being real for. I want someone who knows they want me. I want you not to keep backups. - Something like that. I was supposed to say it in defense of myself and in spite of, etc. His response was so wrong the effect of my having said it was to make my abandonment clearer. He didn't meet it, he failed to meet it by pretending to meet it, which is his way. And then he doesn't understand what I say. I guess he's stunned. - A note about Farinelli the castrato. The narrative was a pretence - there was no story, only the figure of that beautiful womanly man, standing in plumed headdresses among painted clouds singing in a voice digitally created from materials given by a countertenor and a soprano. Louie was moved by the brother and I know why - we have castrated our instinct-women to make artists of ourselves, the one in us who is not love woman really is not talented enough without that forced gift. But a forced gift is a crime. The brother's opera is Orpheus. He begins to write it the night Carlo is drugged and castrated. He doesn't write truly until Carlo gets them a connection with Handel. It is Euridice who is the singer in this story. The story ends with a separation - so it isn't true that the story is not there, but maybe it is false in parts and so not a story. I understood the castrato in a different way. I am not so much the criminal as she, since my castration was not by my own command. I waited for Carlo to say, My fate is just, the crime gave me this moment when I fly in perfection. But that is not right: love woman sings Laschia qu'io piango. That is the song she sings in truth. The fate accepted has no song. And who is Handel? Something like an oversoul? There were things about him I didn't understand. Is Handel the book? Is Handel manhood? Is Handel king of the dead? He writes and doesn't sing. What sort of Orpheus is that? One who doesn't feel. And Handel isn't that. It says I don't understand Handel because he is falsely written. The writer's lie is that beyond the inferior fathers there is a superior father: a Handel in whom feeling and understanding are perfectly joined. But that join is not in the father. It is in the child who is the crippled page of swords - subtle, vigilant, acute. The film lies to preserve the father and lies again in rebellions against that idealized father. Enough. - I wanted to talk about the internet metaphor I am wandering into. I'm beginning to understand the psychological aptness of the way one enters and quits applications, keeps more than one going on screen. The commands are different in different programs, and you have to remember which logic you're in. I like the terminologies, I like the linguistic sense that has formed most of them, I like the shifts in English that result. It's quite a fresh frisky terminology, young. At the same time I'm feeling the power these software innovators now have to colonize the world with just that young American sensibility. There is quite a lot of the American sixties in it - Whole Earth News, a slant. I'll get more of it, this is a first dip. I want to understand this metaphor, it is the metaphor that is going to form a time. It's the metaphor of cognitive community, personal and public overlaid in one pattern. There is astonishing power in it. 16 There was a time when we were sitting in the kitchen, he in the wicker chair and I in the armchair. He was leaning forward with his chin on his folded hands, looking at me on and on with his big blue eyes. He had a look of human completeness - I called it looking like a doctor. He was the person he was meant to be. I said if he was that person I would want to see him every day. "You have a ring on." "Did you put it there?" he asks. "No." It might have been that I focused him. I was watching his shifts and asking him questions. How old are you? Fourteen. He was a smiling boy pink and bright. He got more haggard. How old are you now? Twenty-nine. You are sadder. And yet when he was that age I wanted to put my breasts against his chest. He says the fourteen year old has a vulgar thought - I want to fuck you Ellie Epp. But he looks like angelic love. The twenty-nine year old doesn't stay. He shifts younger. I could see it's a strategy. He said yes, he knows how to step out of sadness. The moments of dumb pain that we can't get to sex. Are you remembering to breathe? he says. He gets witty when he's in a certain balance that shows on his face. There was a woman too, quite fair-faced. She reminded me of Judy, a waxy quality, but more open. He knows how to be joy. After a day like that, I blank out on it. It comes back next morning. Another face he has is the one I think of as the harsh patriarch - the tufted eyebrows, the cut of mouth that is like a father called Henry. 17 Louie at the door in sunglasses that were like props of someone playing blind or dead - two black coins. She had been crying for twenty-four hours she said. I knew there were hours of blame to come. She will begin by saying goodbye forever. She has brought little bags of things, ostentatiously. Well it's a way of getting my cup back, and the book. She is mumbling so I can't hear what she's saying and have to ask her to repeat. She has lost Ja-min and sent Nancy away. I will be getting the brunt again of her chemical storms. She is saying she is angry at herself for trusting. But Louie why do you go on trusting the wrong thing? How many times have I heard this? Why don't you get your trust accurate? She says that if she doesn't trust the wrong thing she will not be able to go on knowing me. That seems to describe what she does feel but it doesn't make sense. What she falls into trusting and shouldn't is the description of my relation with men that I give when I am unenchanted. She trusts that now she is finally safe from what she is prone to if I am involved with a man - defeat, shame, rage, despair. She is particularly anxious about whether I will tell the man that she is those things. - Now take it home. She has come again and said goodbye forever. How am I? I dealt with her. She is trying to hurt me but I am strong enough for this. I can understand the edge of euphoria afterward: I was ready for that, it says. What I don't quite understand is the complacent tone of the coping program. I can hear my father's false complacency, a very ugly sound. And yet I'm right to refuse to let her rip me at the quick. What is it I'm wanting to get at. The way I was closed was not one of my more primitive ways, the angry one. I had room to laugh and make her laugh, there was genuine light in it, and yet it was firmly closed, like polished metal, a reflective surface very sealed. And yet the complacency was primitive, as inner tone. Maybe it is the sensation of having real strength to spare. Do your worst, there is nothing you can do that I am not certain I can deflect. Everything you have been able to scare me with, I can handle now. Everything. I have done my work. (You haven't done yours.) That's worth celebrating but I know there's something wrong with the tone. 21 "When I am with you when she leaves you it is very painful." "And I will know that it was you I wanted to die with and that the others will always be others." I don't know what to say. I'm half-there. I'm waking at three with my diaphragm clamped. If I prompt myself - Louie you went away, you left me, etc - it will open as far up as the heart. But it's thin. It isn't filling me up. 24th Louie phoned. She says it's crazy out there and she thought she should hold onto the sanity she knows. She means she was talking to Jam and the alternative scared her. I said, No, you have to get to something. I'm not going to know you again until you know what you're doing. 25 What else happened yesterday. I found Rhoda and Trudy in the herb garden and threw rocks at them. The toilet plugged worse than it has so brown water overflowed. Paul [brother] was in Clearbrook. David slept at my house and tried sticking it in and out. Looking at Paul thinking that if, when we were young, I had seen ahead to the body he would be at forty-six, I wouldn't have been able to find him as beautiful. That isn't quite it. I was feeling our young person's pleasure in each other's looks and the confidence in our newness that comes with it. Paul is an accomplished man of the world, a timid uncertain man. He still hopes, his frightened sad eyes say, that his father will praise him some day. His father in decrepit old age still jeers. Sunday 27 I go downstairs and pick up an envelope dropped through the door. It is this photograph from 1980, Jam's printing on the back, Dianna died on Thursday, of drug overdose. I called Jam wanting to know her state. Her voice seemed to me squashed false dark and mad. I thought of rotted oil squeezed from some black animal the size of a head. It reminded me of something - the oil I found dripping out of the wheel-well after Ja-min's barbecue duck had been decomposing in the trunk through weeks of sun. This photo so strange. Why did Jam frame Dianna off the edge and the space between me and Luke at the center? I am so strong and deformed. So deformed. And yet my hold on life, even irresponsible as I am, built a hold for Luke too. And Mary's behind me. 29th
(Now lead more energy into it.)
30 Louie burst in with excuses. I had to brake hard enough to squeal when a car cut left across the green at the PNE gate. Jim on email in NZ said "I liked you - you know?" and I said "pals of some kind, if not pen." Rob when I asked to borrow money undid my top two buttons and got hard behind the counter at Figaro's. And then Amnon! at Circling Dawn, a little carrot juice moustache and still perfectly and beautifully a kid ten years later, still writing fantasy. Something wrong with that. Only the right side of his face moves when he talks. 31st Haven't been here for a long time, the Calabria. Last day of August. What I have to think about - a three-minute film about electric touch, email to Paul Churchland, three-hour session for David Rimmer's course on landscape, lecture to the Van Dusen group - look at me, I'm a fine old thing - sci vis course for the end of the month, keep an eye on the clubhouse project, ditch David, I want to say. 1st September The way peace came again. I went out early to find coffee and money and stopped at David's on the way home. He was again a man I could like to look at. Frustrated not knowing what to work at, he said. I tried Dr Laura's five minute therapy. "What is stopping you?" "The family thing, the abuse thing." "Your family is holding you with money, you mean." I saw the room full of stuff at his family house. "You have to go there with a truck and take all your stuff away." He looks around the porch of his cave. "Doesn't matter, you don't have to fix other things first. You have to go out and find your manhood. You have to get financially independent. You have to figure out the truth of your relation with Jet. You're impotent with me because your body knows there are no babies here." I was rolling on certainty and it was also certainty that none of this is for me - none of it is making a man who'll be mine. "It will be for you," he tries to say. "No, I don't know who it will be for but it isn't for me." I shut up and deal with myself after that. I'm going to quake. I find the quaking and release it, the starting jerks. I don't want to say anything. The shuddering is the kind there has been before. I keep my eyes closed. Nakedness belongs to the state it is. Just as I am without one plea. I don't know what to call it. It's a crisis but it's secure. It is a crucifixion, but it is not betrayal. It is like being crucified on the truth, so the truth which is the crossing-out is also the support. Then I open my eyes and there is his real face. I'm very weak. I ask for his arms. He puts his hands on my arms. "Would you put your arms all the way around me?" "What?" he says. He puts his arms around me but they are straw arms, he isn't in them. "You aren't doing it yet," I say. "What?" "I want you to know you aren't really doing it." Came home very tired but I am able to sit in the red chair again. I can sing too. 2nd Sitting in bed on a Saturday morning. Just read the play of the weather, Jam's notes. It's fifteen years old. 3rd With Amnon at the longhouse on the Capilano reserve. What do I think of that afternoon. (What do I think of Amnon's script?) The passive dancing of the women. The drumming, speechifying and more interesting dancing and costumes of the men. The women dance in lines like slaves, as if demonstrating their harmlessness, turning their palms right and then left, without energy and as if showing their emptiness. And the men dance simulated threat. Yet it moved me to see the kids having learnt it, as if those kids are safe. I also liked the Kwakiutl way of turning all the way around as they enter and exit, and the idea of a church with an earth floor where bodies participate barefoot and there is a fire with unenclosed smoke rising up through the roof. Oh I don't like local cultures of any kind - I like the fact that these ways are continuous from ancient ways and yet I hate the sacrifice of present minds to ancient ways. I want to cross-breed that passive dancing with the sexual splendor of belly dancing and the individual authority of the writer speaking. The survival of the event seemed to say a bad culture is better than none. It's what I felt at Uncle Peter's funeral, anger at those for whom a bad culture is good enough. Ammi I think was taking the event piously. Cari, practically. Outside in the fixedness of sun and the looseness of breeze was a big open space with willow and cottonwood at its rim. Some unenclosed people. A kid rolling a log of firewood down a ramp. A young woman pushing a stroller toward the parking lot, beside her a very small girl staggering behind a toy stroller. A young man whose legs I recognized from a masked dance gets into a new Hyundai and backs toward the kitchen door to load regalia. The child Hammatsa'a dancer who is part white is running around in a baseball cap turned backwards, carrying himself like a star. There was a moment, sitting on a narrow bench in the back row of the bleachers inside, when I said, looking at the audience of families, "I am an unmarried woman," and wanted to sit taller. I don't know what that moment was. I mean I don't know why it needed a declaration. After I took Ammi home to the West End, shopping on Commercial. David came into Circling Dawn looking quite glam. He'd washed his hair. I light up. We go to the cave. He's not talking but his body is on. This time I'm there, my hands on his back find him present. He goes quiet being held. That's unusual. It's trust. Amnon's script. Boy society mutually brutal, murdering the children in each other, wired to a drug that cuts feeling intuition. Boy hero finds girl hero who comes with younger self, a dual in touch with nature/intuition but superstitious, child's misunderstanding/true understanding mixed. Showdown with boy society. Boy society vanquished by resurgence of superstitious apparatus. Boy society can't cross thru fire. Refeminized boy can. Sail into sunset with seeds. What's wrong with the ending is the banishment of boy society. Take it as a self-portrait, what does it suggest. It says: Amnon renounces fire in real life and makes too much of it in fantasy. Some real contradiction is evaded: the place of the father, the fire of the father. Decrepit governor, evil doctor, vanished and false magician. It is a fantasy of taking the father's place without challenging a form of him that is drawn strong. The cost is that the place taken is a weak place, a lesser place, which is isolated with women and child outside the world. That's it. - In the middle of that David phoned. This will be a report of work. He wants his time with me to be productive, he says. I say, "What does productive look like?" "A dry hillside." "What is the dry hillside producing?" "Grass." "Say more." A man he read about who collected seed of native grass and planted it, harvested it, planted more, now ships out carloads of it. "Okay now go back to your own picture." "It's Neil's farm. It's covered with grass. It's so beautiful. There are other things too." "What?" "Red clover, St John's wort. Valerian comes to mind." He's suddenly elsewhere, near Ashcroft. "What are you doing?" "Working." "What?" "Finding water." "How do you find it?" "There's willow growing. You're there." Long silences between my prompts and his answers. He exclaims. I ask. I know my job is to keep his nose pointed toward the real thing. He keeps trying to branch sideways into astonishment, gratitude, admiration - his dodges. "David. Go on," I say. We end up somehow at a woman darning or embroidering. I think it is time to go back to Neil's place and see what's happening. Yes, his grandmother sitting at the window sewing. "What do you want to do?" "I want to tell her." "Tell her then." He can't. He makes excuses. "Tell her." "I can't tell her, she's dead." "Tell her." "She doesn't like me, she doesn't want to know." "Tell her." I have tears in my eyes. He isn't able. I am going to get tough. "Don't you care about your life? Tell her." He can't. "If you don't tell her I am never going to speak to you again." He objects. "If you don't care about your life why should I?" "You have a point." "Tell her." A weak apologetic voice, "I want to tell you I don't like what your son has been doing to me." "What did he do?" "He transgressed my boundaries more than he should." "What did he do?" "He came into my bed and molested me." "What did he do?" "He raped me." "I believe you. What do you want to have happen?" "I want him to apologize." "What do you want him to say?" "What he will say when I talk to him myself." "Okay, where's Neil?" "He's blocking my way." "Are you willing to have me speak as Neil? It's okay, it won't stick." He begins weakly. I talk tough as Neil. He takes energy from my toughness and stands his ground. He wants the farm or he'll go to the newspapers. Neil says it'll kill his folks, he won't dare, he can't bring Neil down without bringing himself down, etc. Everything I can throw at him. David is doin' good. He's stronger with the uncle than with the grandmother. "Blackmail is a crime. You'll go to jail. You know what will happen to you in jail? More of that. Are you looking for it?" "Get your lawyer, get whatever you need," David says. I keep wanting to laugh. I say, "You're doing great." There was a part back on the hillside I've left out. He exclaims that there's so much to do before he can get to this. What? He's asking me to marry him. I'm saying I won't. I'm consoling him. He is lying on the ground. I'm fixing him. How am I doing it? With your hands, your head, with your whole being. 9
10 I was in the Singapore café with David. The tables were full, four people came in, the waiter moved us to a smaller table in the middle of the room. My feelings were so hurt I couldn't go on. It seemed nothing. It scared me that I was so hurt by it. I had to leave. Then I stood on the street and couldn't decide how to find somewhere else. I was crashing. 11 In the night I woke with fine lines of energy pouring out of the solar. I tried regarding the pain places lovingly: you're here to make me smart and beautiful. They cleared. I went to sleep. Tanya sat in my kitchen declaring she's going to live at night - play music, have parties, build things. She had rafts of stuff prepared to say and said it. I'm right, you're wrong, everybody agrees with me. Everybody warned me. Dogs get mean when they're old and sick. You may not know there was a meeting where everybody was talking about what to do with you. That feeling of being faced with people too dumb to deal with straight: alright, here's someone I have to patronize with caution. I listen. She told me how I'm seen. This thick little community's wild card. Bad Ellie. They can congregate against me and tell stories of outrageous aggressions. She threw rocks at people who were just sitting peacefully in the garden. She poured pee on Trudy. She smashed Liane's antique window. Okay, beyond that. What is beyond it. It's local. It's grade four. It indicates a true fault in how I deal with people. It will matter more in other contexts. It must be the reason I'm withheld in other contexts. David - because I was embattled and in pain I was letting myself be bought. I needed an ally and let him feed on my face for hours. He said whatever I needed to hear. That was queasy. I have to say it to have it straightened at least in my record. Is there a connection between having the record straight in a way that appalls people and being able to see straight in philosophy and other things? I think it is the price and yet there must be a way to have the record as straight as I can make it and still not be embattled in a way that terrorizes me. It says this: you are bitter because you stop your love. That's the final word. And envy's bridges that I disregard. 12 The hell of these nice people who are all afraid of their friends. I have not one friend who would stand alone for me. Louie, my mother, even Luke. Rob, David, Michael. There is no loyalty. Isn't that a bitter fact? There's no one who'll say, I'll stand for the value of contact, in the wash of Stalinist pleasantness that destroys every hope of it being true. The way I was composing email today afraid to leave off the salutation and avowal. In winter these voices will be shut up in their houses, I won't have to hear what I hear all day, what I loved not hearing when I first lived here, speech so thoughtless it is torture to overhear, the way speech at school and at church was torture to hear. It's my father I'm near when I feel myself this way the only one. And yet he wasn't loyal either. He thought of himself as standing alone but he didn't stand for me. - When I said no one stands for me I was thinking Phil does, maybe, some. I admire myself for the perfect balance I have, that I don't fall for him. He wouldn't follow me into those last two papers but he knows something about what I can do, what I can really do. I'm dry and I'm clear. This is my situation. I can't bear the conversation of ordinary people, these people all around me. I don't have access to people who speak well because I am emotionally disabled, I mean, the way I'm made, human intercourse is so stressful to me that I must keep offending in it. I've solved it with brief hits of other brilliant emotionally impossible people. Tony Gordon-Wilson is who I thought of, good talk on the skids. Next day he's raving. That's me. Here I am. I'm going on playing with a tattered man on a stick who can afford to have so few of his thoughts that he's almost empty. A few quotations on file cards. I'm keeping company. "I wouldn't understand your work," he says. "Is that hard to say?" "Yes," he says. That's the company. 13 Hard times. In my house, on the street, coming out of my door into the courtyard, sitting in any room hearing voices from other porches and windows. Heart stress, effort to hold myself against that surrounding. Keep feeling maybe there's a conclusion I could come to: give up on intimacy, it isn't possible to you. It isn't possible to you. But then how to be a heart. I won't give up being a heart somewhere. Pain will spread into my work if I don't love somewhere. Where am I going to be love? 14 Janet Atkinson-Grosjean. What am I going to find out about this woman who wants to know about consciousness, is writing a novel, is a little gramma, my age, discrete makeup, streaked hair, with a charming slant smile? Manchester working class, educated herself at night supporting herself as a CA. An eager mind. Recovered drunk, she said, married to another one, loves him, plays with her grandkids. Isn't trouble like me. Isn't a nasty scrapper like me. Doesn't have negative charges beeping at her from a couple of dozen neighbourhood grabbers. Hasn't seen as far through. Hasn't got as far into the texture. I liked talking to her but am I going to find she's one who can't see the fine shades? 15 Lying in bed last night I was bubbling. I was feeling something has shifted, it's alright now. What an odd thing. I had written that and was looking at it and suddenly heard water moving in the pipes. The bathtub drain had been blocked since the day before yesterday and suddenly opened completely so the standing bathwater dumped itself out. 16 his strength of character and physical strength, his stability, his integrity and his quiet competence by nature laconic It was night, but so clear and bright it was almost as light out as during the day. I was standing inside the door of the back porch of the old ranch house. In the dream the door was divided in the centre into an upper and a lower part which opened separately. I was looking out the open top half at the sky watching in awe and wonder a giant eagle as it soared over the ranch. It was so big that with its wings outspread it covered the entire yard, which is about twenty fenced acres. It had a slender, stylized body and wings and it was a smooth, delicate pale grey. Its beauty was entrancing. Even now, remembering it, something in my viscera opens into an infinitude that frightens me. I was in constant pain and yet, in the midst of all this turmoil and misery, I was writing the subtlety of land Reading Butala aching, aching, aching, for the man and the landscape. She doesn't describe him: he's big, has a beard, was forty-one when she married him, early sixties now. Owns land. My cunt aches reading this book. She doesn't mention sex but it's as if she evokes it with the first sentence, and at such a depth the book has made her fame. "In 1976 when I was thirty-six years old I married my second husband, Peter, and came here to live on his ranch in the extreme southwest corner of Saskatchewan, just north of the Montana border." The title evokes it too: when is a morning perfect? After. I want it so much it's as if I'm on my knees praying. There's a way longing is faith, but there isn't faith beyond it - how can such a thing come to me? It can't. - I go to the garden, brush out some of the west edge nettles. The light turns to floating powder, pink and blue. I am at the greenhouse looking up through the vinewalk toward the herb garden. There's a shaft of sun running almost the length of the tunnel. It is lighting on the clump of phlox one post in from the east end, a bronze shaft firing edges as it comes - kiwi leaves, grape leaves, the vine corridor full, colored, complicated, an extraordinary multiple order, unspeakable, layers of points, rusted purples and browns in the brown shade, with just that one spotlight burning through crosswise from the skyline behind the firehall tower. I'm supposing this is how such a thing comes to me. 17 I went to talk to David. Sunday morning. It was one of the between times, sober, not romancing. He sat opposite and I watched him in his wonderful strange face, his true barenaked little face below the tower of his forehead. I said it gets real and then both of us fall into hope and then it goes wrong. He said, Sometimes I feel you so small I want to put you in my pocket, look after you. I said, Tell it like a fairytale. He said, She's a fairy. When I get her home I put her on the mantle. She flies up and writes on the ceiling. I said, S'elf: one's own elf. He carries out a shelf he'd made. He wrote on one of the boards, shelfreda. An elf shelf. Tell me your fairytale, he says. I say a big rancher who has land and gives me a house and looks after me so I can be a woman and know what women know when they don't have to be looking after themselves. He was crying before I finished the first sentence. I say, Where is your fairy now? He says, She flew out the window. A mullioned window. It's interesting, I don't know this house. The garden is wonderful. Ceanothus. And osmanthus. Blue and pink. There's a narrow path that curves between. She is sitting on a branch. She's polishing her wings. 18 It said, Write your family in that house on that land. I felt I could. There is a tone I was feeling we were. That tone is what I would have to write them in. Before, it has been the land I've wanted to write; but now it was him in the centre of it, my dad, his tension. The tone I was feeling was a relation to his tension. It will happen again that I write in relation to what I am seeing in that time, and the tone of the writing I lay down as I move there is another tone altogether, a tone that is strange to me the way my voice on tape is. Stress all day - from when I woke - solid fear in the solar - not fear, but maybe the tightness of fear contained? I couldn't discover what it was, but it was like an alarm ringing without stopping no matter where I went. In the afternoon when I was turning right off Venables I passed a white Budget van waiting to turn left onto it. I felt the driver looking at me as I turned, and looked back at him after I'd passed, a nearly unconscious look. It was Ken. 20 Trees, will you fix me? I came from this morning's three hours of work on the vis course quivering at the heart, a stress of effort I don't notice till I stop working. Onto the Drive to walk and shop and sit. Run into furious Rhoda who comes after me into Circling Dawn to claim territory. (You're strong, Joyce said. What do you mean? I ask. You aren't saying, I want this to be different, you're saying this is the way it is, I will make it through.) My solar is doing what it does to look after me. But shaking with stress. I am at war and must collect powers and allies. - There was something silent in David. I tried different ways. Finally he said there is a plant upstairs that he went to water this morning. His mother doesn't water it, and he sees it only when he visits that house. It had never bloomed. Today he saw that it had bloomed since he saw it last, there were dried flowers on it, a coral-orange color. He kept thinking of the plant all day. It would just be there. He wondered if maybe a bee came in the window and saw that it was blooming. 21st We were slung together into the passenger end of the carseat, the car parked on a slope in the lot. When he told the story I said, That's what I needed to hear. And when I said that my body sighed a big sigh. The moment following Dorothy through the house to the front porch where David was sitting with a plate - the moment seeing him there - tall and unknown - their tall unknown son - with his bony unintelligent face. Hi. I don't know this man but I'll act as if I do. I like the mother and I like the house. Maybe I can rescue the man into one I like better. He was on the porch watching for me with his things in a compact pile at the top of the steps. I'll take him away. I say, Let's go somewhere I haven't been before. He directs me over the bridge to the river road on the north edge of Lulu Island. We stand for a while with the dying light of the flats on one side and the sleek river on the other. I am standing leaning back against him. I say it is like standing and sitting at the same time. It's stable, he says. That's it. I'm telling him about the protector I was imagining before I drove out to get him. At some moment our combined column wasn't stable any more. I said he'd moved. He said no it was me. It was true: my midriff had stiffened away from him and it was making me feel as if I'd fall backwards. Someone had dumped turf over the river bank onto the rocks. It happened to make a couch we could sit on looking across the water. There was the top of a creosoted pile nosing out of the water in front of us. We saw it was swinging slowly back and forth across the flow, anchored at its foot. I said, Tell me the truth, was there a moment with them that you really liked? I liked laughing and giggling with my dad last night, he said, I was looking after his wounds, putting peroxide on them, bandaging him. He said something about being a silly old bugger. I said he used to send me to my room if I used that word. I said it would probably soon be his bedtime. When we drove on it was dark and the road became a road we could have dreamed, a narrow road with the river showing close-by through trees on the right. Houses sometimes, mostly on the left, a sort of village with fences, hedges, garages and woodpiles showing in the sweep of headlights. David pointed out a big weeping willow with a notch cut out of the side just the shape of passing truck boxes. It was a dream road in its narrowness and in the way one unknown thing after another showed up beside it, and then in the way it changed and was more industrial as we got closer to the Knight Street bridge. That it was a road on the far side of the river and that we were driving west. I liked switching to high beams and back to low, and the little rectangle of blue light on the dash that tells me to dim. When we were parked back at his house we were sitting staring at each other. I was feeling something like illegitimate - that I was so intimate with someone I don't know, that I am here so boldly staring at a spirit whose childhood I don't know, whose family tone I don't know, whose gentle interior is a blank for me. That I presume with him. That I can see so much and yet know nothing. I said that I meant there was a silence in him I don't know, and it is the way he was as a boy in his room when there was no one he was talking to and he was just himself. That was when he told me about the plant. Yesterday afternoon, thinking of the lump of darkness I am carrying in the solar, I lay down and imagined a large protector like the space man I dreamed once, a man with shiny eyes who would walk with me everywhere in the neighbourhood. Everyone seeing him would know I was safe and valued. Then I imagined him with his large warm hands one on the solar and one on my forehead, patching me into a circuit with him. I was immediately filled with a stepped-up energy that evened me up so there were no longer any lumps or gaps. I saw it as a clear even yellow throughout the inside of my body. It was so intense I felt I had to hold onto myself to not be afraid. Then I could feel the energy cramp beginning to squeeze shut again. 22nd I'm over the moon. I'm joy. I'm crowing and wriggling. I'm going. I laid a ruler on the atlas and drew a line that passes through places like Antelope, Oregon. I've been afraid. Oddly. I've felt, I'm leaving my bed, my house. But this is pure excitement. It's fearless. I'm on the road with my campstove and cooler and camp bed and maps and boxes of books and cameras. I'm in America, I'm looking at desert trees, I'm not heartbroken, I have money, I am going to a city where they talk connectionism and where I will find a place to stay that I can't now imagine. I'll find other things. I'll find my way. What I feel is high eagerness. 27 It's nine. At twelve I must be at Emily Carr ready to talk about working with landscape. - The ways an art school is worse than a university. Seeing complacency and conformity here is worse. I'm aware that I'm not invisible to some of those eyes, but I don't know what they are saying about what they see. I'm frightened here. I mind betrayal here. There might be true judgment here, but more likely is false judgment I'd tend to believe. Pretty kids, kids still trying to fit in, working hardest at that destruction of their best. A few of the kind of young men who look around carefully from above a line drawn across the center of their eyeballs - those are the ones that resist and might find something, or might not. The other kind of young man who is small and can't look important and has taken the route of harmlessness. Have I seen an instructor yet who looks at ease? What do I know about landscape. It doesn't talk. It forms the silent parts of the brain. We are landscapes, our speaking is, as well as our silence. Landscape is different if we're there alone and for a long time. Landscape's opposite is social life. The landscape of origin is the real landscape for anyone. Landscape is more than metaphor, it is the fabric of metaphor. City is landscape of a particular kind - artifactual. It lacks semantic depth: it lacks coherence at some of its scales. Not that it doesn't tell the truth, but it tells about processes that cut across semantic depth. - Write down Bobby Wong's name because he was what happened this afternoon. He likes notes in origin. "You were naked in that film, I could see you completely." A small man, very small, like a kid, but could have been thirty. Baseball cap backwards. Holding his heart. "One more thing I want to ask you, what is the relation between your work and your physical?" "What?" He said it again. I still didn't understand. "Your foot I have something too." Bobby's dream. It was as if he was sucked out of his body suddenly. He was in a vast darkness without sight, hearing, touch. No senses. But there was knowledge. There were layers as if mountain behind mountain, and in the folds of the layers there were sounds, people. He could hear them all at once or he could hear only one. It was the best. Better than anything. Suddenly he was sucked back into his body. He went back there several times that night but never since. 29th Steven Arthur sends his photo of me and George at his show. What do I like about it. It's the first photo of me being a theoretician. His taking it made me feel the authority of my hand's big slice in talk space. I come home from depositing my SSHRC check and there's a loud knock. Eric stands tottering with his bad knee and blurred with booze. A message, etc. Am I still annoyed with him? I say he wanted Monty dead and Monty died, and I liked him, nothing about that has changed. Eric says there are things I don't know. What things? He tells possession stories. You're being reduced, he says. You had a good shot at it but you're losing it all. You're going to end up .... What he's saying cuts so close to what I fear that I don't let him go on. I say, Go, and he goes, backing unsteadily down the steps and flapping his trailing hand as he vanishes behind the side of the house. What did I imagine he could see? As if a shrinking aura, as if there were a smaller envelope of light around me, that has shrunk from losses of spirit battles I didn't know I was waging. As if attacks in my neighbourhood are results of that shrinking aura, not causes of it. As if I lost Louie because of it. I'm less trusted at the garden because I forget and neglect there: it's just and yet I can feel it superstitiously. What made me lose touch with the garden this summer? I can easily imagine it's because my enemies put a rock under a bush and I didn't see it, or because I let something pass that I should have challenged. I haven't written about this - the way when I see smooth rocks in the herb garden beds, and can't remember putting them there, I throw them out. More: in encounters with certain people I feel my safety is riding on whether I do what a certain internal sense - a certain bandwidth of internal instruction - tells me. I don't have an explanation: I just do it. It says, Don't let this pass, and I take it on. Or it says, This is alright, and I leave it be. It is as if I believe in a level of shamanic war I can't see or feel or account for, but am informed of by a blind but trusted instinct. It is maybe as if there's an ordinary sort of feeling knowledge I don't have in the direct way but as if from an unnatural direction, ie a feeling knowledge I'm not in, but that sends an echo into parts where I am. The sense that it's shamanic might be that sense of displacedness - that it's happening elsewhere, 'on another level.' I know there is something wild about the way I do it - I have less control than I could, because of the indirection. It means Eric can scare me, and they too. But the wild way is better than my default, which doesn't defend. I wonder whether my solar will uncramp when I am out of range of this neighbourhood. The nightmare is reduction and that nightmare is true. Everyone is saying, Am I holding it off? Everyone but the kids. Monday 2nd October Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and then I'm gone. It's white sky and winter rain. Piles of papers to bundle into boxes. There I stop and make a list. 4th I dreamed just now - it's 4:30 and dark - that
I came into the water with a fishhook on a short string hanging from my
lip. I was thinking to glide underwater and fish. The water is murky here
next to the car. I will go further into the marsh. It's warm and shallow.
There are stands of trees with rusty leaves that are the size of butterflies
flocking out of them. Here is a spot where someone has slept, sheets of
cardboard or plywood laid down crossing each other. I've lost my fishhook.
These rusty copses and flocking butterflies and marsh grass are standing
in a gold light that is archaic, like Shakespeare playing antiquity.
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