Patricia Hotel, Vancouver September 21
Anything from deeper back, the res?
Kate's atrocious singing at the cabaret, the mic was bad and her high notes were striking me like blows.
Laura. She carries herself hunched. That's a key.
Stephanie a techno belly dancer.
Second-reading the man writing about a weatherman hero - tall thin man with beautiful orange eyes. He's pure in spirit. If I talk to him on the phone the gov't will listen. Leslie.
I did the one-question exercise with their study plans for 3 days - two people said it was the most useful advising group they'd had.
Linda Alcoff ed 2003 Singing in the fire Rowman and Littlefield has Martha Nussbaum "Don't smile so much" on philosophy and women in the 1970s. SWIP
Here we see the real difficulty of feminism in the academy. It is the difficulty that John Stuart Mill long ago correctly identified: most men are simply not prepared to live with women on a basis of equality. They may think and maintain that they are, but their human development is paltry and does not sustain such good intentions as they may have. They have learned deviously infantile ways of perceiving women, and these ways always inflect their dealings with women as graduate students and colleagues. Men's ways of being infantile vary. A few, like my dear friend John Stuart Mill, are ready to think in truly unconventional ways and to be a different sort of man.
The main problem of feminism in philosophy is the infantile level of human development of many of the men who are in it. This problem will not change without large-scale social changes that are still in their infancy. The most we can do is to deter the worst abuses and punish them when they occur, meanwhile trying to bring up young men who think differently and women who assert their dignity. 97-8
23
Do I have things to think about.
There is the harbour before sunrise, a sheet of silver and then the grey-blue bulk of the north shore milky with haze, and then a bit of yellow sky and then cloud like the quilted feathers at the shoulder of a swan - and further east it's beginning to incandesce - a line of fire running along the ridge, a kindling of the air - and then the sunrise is blotted out in thickening mist.
What do I think of the colloquy in the end. Lise as they were getting ready to leave being photographed with her arms around Carolyn and Juliana saying "my two daughters!" That was when I left.
Lise was saying, Ellie's book is what would put us on the map. They imagine a research group. What's it research in. Juliana is about women's liberation by emphasizing women in language. Carolyn tried out getting boys in juvenile hall to talk about sensing and found they didn't. Jeanne said body as a means of divination but she probably won't follow through. Karen something about research methods. Favor (is a writer). Lise, science that supports what body is capable of doing. Gretchen. I'd like her to do architecture. Carol - it's about women but not really embodiment because she doesn't get theory.
- Should I take this group seriously no
- Can I do anything with it
- Should I no
- Can I do anything with it
I had no one to debrief with. I don't have enough intellectual respect for Lise.
If Susan were in it I'd be mediated.
It's a support group not a research group.
There Arla writes her list of complaints:
- 1. I did not thank her for coming
- 2. I did not initiate conversation with her
- 3. I did not sign her card to the Colombian women
- 4. I walked out of her presentation "just at the turning point"
- 5. I didn't come to the second screening of her show
- 6. I did not say goodbye to her
- 2. I did not initiate conversation with her
She says these show that I don't understand embodiment.
"Felt embodiment means feeling negative charges as well as positive ones. Feeling them is awkward on both sides but that awkwardness is better than insincerity. I know most people don't agree." [I write back]
A man in a wheelchair passing (the lobby window) at that moment - part Indian? Black hair, week's growth of beard - waves and smiles.
-
- My taxes are okay.
- Jeep will be paid for in the middle of next week.
- Susan Kurbis on the street says Muggs is retiring in January.
- The garden is a mess but they got a 20-year lease.
- This week slow to get started because David is dragging.
- Louie's building is splendid in its new paint - dark egg-yolk yellow with moss-green trim and brick-orange doors.
- Leah has redone the stairs and the understair room at 824. It's good.
- Jeep will be paid for in the middle of next week.
24
I brought home two stems of the Roseraie de L'Haye, which was the only one blooming. Can smell it next to me.
Tom is sending me money. I'm accepting because from him it means love and gratitude.
It's 4 in the morning in this yellow room. There's the black harbour sparkling.
I'm sitting in a bad murk of Pat not wanting to work with me because I challenge her, Susan preferring Jim (!) and Lise, Arla's complaints. The way I look bad in Lise's atmosphere of girly outcries because I get sad and surly; the schmozzle of the weekend; the uselessness of the group.
The truth about the weekend is that I didn't take it on - I held off planning it, I allowed Arla to come because Lise got pressured into it by Sarah, I didn't plan my talk, I didn't tackle the atmosphere, I had no hopes for it. I shouldn't have gone. I want a research group. This is not a research group. It's a low level support group. I hate working with groups of women. Anything I say to one will be buzzed around inaccurately among the rest. I love Carolyn and Juliana but I've done what I can for them.
So what shd I do instead - get the workshops up - do my hours - film stuff as much as possible.
-
The Golden Horse is called the Marilyn now. It's 7 in the morning. Across the room where Mr Choy used to sit with his friends is a man with a bird in a cage. Loud Cantonese with syllables shot out separate as stones. Wish I could stay in this neighbourhood. When I stepped out of the hotel into the morning air I was happy. Oh city. Grey light, grey pavement, grey pigeon.
Edited [In America] 7-3 this morning. It's the chapter in which I meet Susan. I'm going to speak to her but not until Sept 5.
I've zonked in TV since I got here - two days.
Seafood congee with salty doughnuts and Hong Kong bitter coffee.
These old men are at home here, chatting loudly across the room. Two young women in pink long-sleeved shirts and bluejeans passing back and forth answering quietly. Other old men at intervals facing the room reading Chinese newspapers.
A TV program last night called The smallest people in the world. Children with progeria, a disease probably genetic that leaves them with bald skulls, beaky noses, stick limbs, like fetal birds. A ten year old weighing twenty pounds. Their heart and blood vessels age at maybe ten times the usual rate. Their brains are said to be normal although that seems unlikely to be true.
-
In David's cave behind the Drive.
Ten nights here wd be $1000 in the Patricia, with 16 on Frances Street wd be $1600. Have to stay here but what'll I do about my bed - it has to be down because that's the only kind of pad there is, and when I lie on it my face stings and my mouth swells. Louie! I have no clue what else to do.
25
And then I solved it - just noticed 'solved' is in David's handwriting - by flipping the bed so the ground sheet is on top of the duvets. Not solved completely, I ache, but solved enough to sleep.
[Freya Mathews notes:
Spinoza's monistic theory of substance vs substance pluralism. Dissolve Hume's problem of causation.
systems theory - understanding individuality in a context of connectedness. A metaphysic of interconnectedness.
demonstrate substantiveness of space.
Steven Toulmin The return of cosmology: postmodern science and the theology of nature
metaphysical archetype of basic structure of cosmos
actual, physical (though not necessarily material)
cosmology - large-scale structure, origin and evolution of the concrete world
metaphysics - ranges over the abstract and possible too
They can overlap, for instance in determining what the actual universe is made of.
presocratic culture first to frame a non-animistic cosmology, materialist
Cosmology orients a community of people and tells them how they are related to other things.
"contributing to the normative tone of the community"
In Newtonian physics atomism was mathematically and conceptually articulated
primarily developed in the context of mechanism
mechanistic view - matter and motion, the atomism of the ancients, mathematical
methodology developed by Kepler
densory qualities don't inhere in objects
stoms seen as passive, not self-moving, subject to 'forces'
She makes dualism a consequence of mechanism rather than vv, "the body is contingent to selfhood."
dubstitute ego goals for bodily ones
"The 'mind,' or more specifically the ego, seeks to gain control over the body because doing so can render the future more predictable."
"voercive or unsympathetic ego goals"
enacted dualism p.35-6
Within the framework of substance pluralism reality appears to be irremediably ad hoc. 77
The monistic archetype explains why reality takes the form of a spacetime continuum.
philosophy of physics
World is made of spacetime.
Its structure is physical law.
Space is intrinsically dynamic and mutable: locally it stretches, ripples and curves, and globally it expands. Wave-like disturbances constitute electromagnetic and gravitational effects; highly curved, 'knotted-up' regions constitute matter. A given complex pattern of local curvature may be transmitted from point to point like a standing wave in a field. Energy is simply the curvature of spacetime. The parts of spacetime are logically interdependent, the properties of each determining and being determined by the rest. For this reason, spacetime is indivisible, though richly differentiated by reason of its variable curvature. 60
-
David's house dirty and interesting. At eye-level on a cupboard a small row of wrinkled rosehips, standing on end like tiny pineapples. Salmon skin hung where the lamplight will shine through it, a slab of rock imprinted with vine maple and alder leaves. A screen door.
David and the psychology of collecting. Finding and saving. Recognizing. He's like that with people too. But then stockpiling in this packed dirty basement where these things are hidden in the dark. David should have a museum with rotating collections. Pristine boxes spotlit. He should be a curator. I should be a curator of him.
Living in David's memorium.
What it would be like to document him.
What if the journal turned into documentaries.
I'm in the Calabria not looking wonderful in the magic mirror although I'm wearing the key lime chiffon-pie shirt. Heavy-faced. Small eyes. Thick through the chest the way I am now.
Justin at the screening said the films are not dated.
What do I want to do today - [list].
-
G & F. Gentle Justine Rhee said yes to $7500 over three years. That means I pay off the Visa cards and have $4000 for film expenses, which is $2000 for computer - $1000 for camera - $1000 for transfer?
[Ch 3 system and substance.
in an all-pervasive medium, a medium analogous to a fluid in which the currents and waves are 'forces' and the vortices are 'matter'. We ourselves are complex ripples propagating in its depths. Substantively speaking we are identical with the universe: it is in its substance that is the pattern that is our signature is written. 91
On the new view, substance is a fluid continuum which cannot be carved up into separate chunks. 92
new way of understanding individuals in such a continuum - system in which whole and parts "reciprocally influence and determine each other," nature of the parts is not independent of the whole.
The system is capable of maintaining its structure over a long period of time by means of a constant exchange of energy with the environment, but this exchange places the system in a permanent state of disequilibrium. This disequilibrium is confined within limits which provides the flexibility mentioned above, and thus the margin for adaptation: the system has the capacity to exist within a range of environmental conditions. 94
homeostasis - self-regulation - feedback loops
equifinality - final state not determined by initial conditions
An organism is, first and foremost, a system for effecting its own maintenance, repair and renewal. An organism, then, is a system devoted to its own realization. 98
26
Saturday quarter to eight, sitting up in my pretty bed on the floor drinking tea without milk. Freya Mathews working out the questions I was edging into in Body and cosmos, which so far is half-baked. If we imagine cosmos one rippled thing, what is a human body within that field. She is pedantic because she's accommodating the analytic philos men and she goes into ethical questions that I disregard but she has the central shift. She extends mechanism into atomism. Wholes and parts in systems and mechanisms.
Question: can I teach the alternate structural metaphor directly and use it to change how they imagine bodies. Imagine it better.
28
Work party yesterday. I sawed down every trunk of the bay tree except the first. That exposed a nest set on an upper branch as if on a shelf, one strand of green twine woven into its rim.
During lunch was sitting on the threshold of the sliding door with Muggs in the sun, twenty years later. I said I wanted to tell her what had come of her lending me the money to go see Luke in London. I had thought to tell her because she's leaving in January, I may never see her again.
They were pulling down the greenhouse because hookers break in when it rains.
There's a well - they found water at 90'. It's for the new pond David wants to put in.
Back in the herb garden's NE corner I was pulling out blackberries and roused a yellow jacket nest, or maybe a rogue beehive. Stung in the left shoulder through my sleeve.
Such a loss of knowledge in the herb garden, no one who understands its form, or form at all. I said the roses are meant to be the outside wall, and they are old roses - you don't prune old roses.
With Luke yesterday evening drinking Sapporo on the Drive. Long slant of sun into my eyes. I was talking about making a film and that interested him. He kept asking more. I basked and told.
I've been writing unconvinced and self conscious the way I mostly do, here, now, because it doesn't feel private anymore. Is there something I should do about that.
Freya - scientific cosmology to frame thriving, but science revised.
Such entities as the hydrogen and oxygen 'atoms' exist, but they are not fundamental building blocks. They are more like eddies in the surface of a river. McCusker
29th Commercial Drive
Strange little hole of a place. The unemployed young. Tall narrow young men. Why is this place full, because bacon and eggs is $4.25. Three middle-aged Chinese women behind the counter in another era from this student-artist crowd. They are doing well across incomprehension.
What am I - scared. The ugly little Yaris with too-soft brakes and too-hard gas pedal, the drive ahead, maybe Rowen, maybe Paul, distress of dealing with Mary. Teeth bleaching! Which I've said I'll do. Not knowing whether Rowen is coming.
These people look stupid is what it is, not a good population. I like the Drive, I love walking out into cafes and corner stores, butter chicken, internet, Thai lampshades, organic plums, but the people aren't good.
-
Paul, Dave, Rowen, Mary.
Mary is fading out, fading fast. Very little person in a purple suit. Thick hair iron grey. She speaks slowly and nothing she says is worth waiting for because we've heard it before. She was cutting pizza and carrying plates with shaking hands.
Paul. He's parking his jeep Liberty in her basement and leaving for the wide world.
David [Doerksen] the roof designer - Classic Copper. The moment he said You and Frank were lifers but he didn't have the guts to let go. I loved him for that moment and his real hugs. He sat opposite us with his legs apart leaning back in his swivel chair legs and arms spreading from a round hard beer gut. At times his boy face would appear sweet and gleeful. His first wife was a Manitoba girl. He wrote her a letter every day for two years. Somebody said he should be a journalist. He told me that after I said I still had a pile that thick of Frank's letters and they still read well.
He wasn't like Frank. There'd be the slightest turn of his mouth I'd try to see Frank in but he's a solid redneck tradesman proud of his beaten copper water features. Smoking a lot.
I liked Paul's company and he liked mine I think.
Rowen's face has more heft in its bone, a bit more. He was sleepy and agreeable. I took him back by Zero Avenue to Tsawassen. We had the evening sky with cloud banks bluegrey toward the sea. Old Fraser Valley road, old barns, old lanes. It was like taking him back fifty years, more, and then stepping out of the car into the cold wind at Tsawassen, seagulls crying and wheeling. Rowen's Carhart jacket. Hug goodbye.
30
I was with Tom in Mexico. We walked into a restaurant where the host was pushy. I didn't want to stay and walked out. Tom didn't follow. I tried the restaurant opposite. The host was busy and a waiter showed me the menu. I walked out. I could see Tom sitting in the first restaurant. I kept walking looking for a place to eat. This and that. When I come back to the first restaurant Tom is gone. I'll have to find my way back to the border. Not sure which of these roads. Think it must be this one.
I hear music. There's a monument of some kind across the road, a large public statue. Crouched on top of it a small indigenous woman playing a flute and singing. Behind her a series of waterfalls dropping from quite a high cliff. One of the last drops is an unusual wide white spray. It seems she has something to do with the shape of the drop and especially that wide burst.
When I saw her I remembered seeing her on the American side earlier also crouched high up and with a waterfall behind her. Her music was loud and strong.
When I was writing this dream I remembered a photo Mary showed me of Karla's wedding. There's George and Hilda at one end of the row, Anne and Harvey at the other. In the center a woman I don't know in a strapless white dress and veil, and next to her Karla in a white suit, red hair standing wide, half turned toward the bride, looking fiercely triumphant. Both she and her bride are holding bouquets. On the bride's side Uncle Neil looking helpless, on Karla's side Aunt Lucy looking anxiously pleasant.
Paul said he would have thought Mary's health would go rather than her mind, and we did think she was strong-headed, but I can see that her form of dementia has been coming for a long time. A stunned ox passivity, the way she wouldn't think about bad things, wouldn't think, wouldn't know, wouldn't research, and after she gave up her college thoughts for Ed and god, wouldn't read.
As we were driving north on Clearbrook Road I was telling Rowen the Mennonites hadn't liked me. He was saying why was that. We were stopped at a light. A middle-aged woman with glasses and permed hair crossed in front of us. I said, That's a Mennonite woman, and she might be my age. He said, If you looked like that I'd be very sad.
Energy. At this age what matters is getting and keeping energy. Now it's a fight. The fight itself needs energy, is energy.
Dave said a couple of things I needed to know. One was that Frank spoke as if he had had to lose his farm but he could have kept it easily by selling gravel. He didn't want to stay on alone with memories, he said then.
Another thing was this: "I saw the moment my mom took down his sail and put up her own. I watched it happen. He'd been up at Prince George working in a sawmill." "With Marvin?" "Yes with Marvin. He'd put on a lot of muscle. He and my folks were sitting at the kitchen table talking for hours." "What did they want him to do?" "They wanted him to farm."
Now I have almost two weeks to learn video before the packets come in. Get wireless.
No I can't get wireless for OS9.2 he says.
I set up the SFU connection.
Checked through the box of journals, listed what I have. There's nothing from leaving Sexsmith through all the years of Queens - is that possible? Was I only writing letters? Did I lose journals without realizing?
Started transcribing 1985 from Rowen's birth. Tiny writing briefly stated. I'm physical.
31st
Tom's phone was off yesterday, and then this morning too. I was scared he was back on booze. Got him the second time this morning.
Yesterday when I was walking north on the shade side of Commercial there was Trudy coming toward me. We're going to have to pass. I'm walking downhill and coming from the Calabria and I'm springing lightly. She's hung with black drapes and seems broad across the beam. I look at her with the far corner of my mouth lifted very slightly to say Look, I'm winning.
1st September
I was at a party. Colin Browne came in and leaned close to my ear and said "It's not about nature" - something like that. I didn't know what he was talking about. My journal. We're walking later. I say, But was it entertaining? He's silent. I say I believe in my journal, I test people against it. We see footprints in the mud of the path. I say a deer. Then I'm carrying a dead animal, is it a deer? I put it down. It's a white goat.
A lot of dreaming last night. A little girl people are looking for. I glance behind a tall piece of furniture. There far below what looks like a fallen doll. I touch her skin. Cold. Go into the other room and tell her mother.
Sitting on a high-up ledge. Much more.
What should I do about the colloquy. Alex yesterday writing that she hated Arla's film and felt hardly anyone there got embodiment. I replied. She got on the phone with Gretchen. Then Gretchen wrote. Now I'm thinking there are separate conversations and whatever I say will be misreported.
There I wrote Alex and Gretchen for several hours, and Anna about teaching.
I asked him if he knew my other pupil Marcel, and turned in one of the passing dazzles of sunshine to watch him answer, my shadow firm for a moment across the carpet towards him, its head in his lap. Hollinghurst Folding star.
Jam sez what she has in mind is $22,000 Can. I shd put some of it into interest-bearing accounts?
2
Saturday morning at Calabria. It's full and noisy. Delicious caffé latté.
Chaio Bella, says the affable good-looking barista to a woman maximally packed, tits, ass, and slick pearlized pink mouth. He's unchanged from ten years ago but Frank's neck is drooping forward.
I come to these mornings aching and tired in the disorder. Only one more night and then it's the opposite, blank stupid order with two gross cats carrying the whole of animal life.
Yesterday Penny tidying the people's park at the entrance to Britannia - small pretty Penny with smooth silver hair pulled back. Joyce's best friend. She was there when Joyce died, she said. She was holding her. Was she awake? She was, and then she was in a coma. There were a lot of people. Her kids. Penny spoke with tears in her eyes, very reticently. I felt the wrong size for her. She didn't remember speaking to me when was it, 1997? when I was back from working on Mo's garden very lean and brown and she and Martha and I agreed we'd aged well. She was remembering me from thirty years ago with Luke at Cheryl's house on 3rd Ave. When she walked away I could see her age in her walk, a slight shrunkenness and stiffness.
Finished transcribing Rowen's birth and just after. Will want to say something about the way it's written. I sometimes can't follow it. I was writing it differently - it was in relation to Jam and them and for instance Daphne, and they in relation to who - Duncan and others - but what was different in the way it was to write - more silence - less focus? - what changed when I began to write in the narrative mode - I'll need to say what was the continuing effect of drugs - have things to talk to Daphne about.
Oh still here -
There isn't a lot of Aphrodite's garden left to transcribe, I cd be designing it.
Next week is when I'll need to move on film things very quickly, I can't from David's mess.
Favor's book is on the web.
I want Anna's and Layla's there too.
Favor's The roaring inside her site has a link to the mbo site. When I clicked it this morning there were my clean clear lovely pages, white, red, dark blue and turquoise. A lot of white.
Jeanne's mailing list InBodyMeant - that's not quite right - should be AbodyMeant.
Should I ignore all of it.
What could come of it. If they're in charge of it, it will be weak and unclear.
Layla and Anna and Favor - are worth promoting.
I'm discounting Carolyn and Juliana because they're Lise's girls. What should I do about Lise's wrong-headedness. Should I be developing alumna.
-
Laiwan under an umbrella in her yard, thin below the neck and swollen above it, wanting to talk about her health or else correct anything I say. Her neighbourhood thick with plants, is the whole East End thickly gardened now, and did Strath Garden teach it?
And what were my father's thoughts as he sat limply in his armchair, head back ? There was a beautiful accidental integrity about the galaxy of thoughts inside that listening head. Almost everything he knew and felt had never been spoken, never sung, never known to another soul. 243
the sonic wallow of a plane distancing in slow gusts above
3rd
I'm in a lineup at a university wanting to sign up for an English course. I don't have the course number. I saw the course described and came straight down. It's not one of the ones these people in the line are signing up for. - Forgot to say I was carrying a heavy slab of flat rock, like a partly broken square of paving slate, and set it down precariously on its corner before I got into the line. The woman at the desk handed me the booklet to show me the course she thought I meant, flowering meadows, the Romantics I thought it must mean. No. I kept paging. Recognized it with certainty. It's this one. This is the one I want. It was something about black dogs and African children, architecture? Torture? It was visual quality that interested me. She said doubtfully that it was very demanding, a lot of writing, three essays and --- ---, some other kind of papers. I said that was fine. I was hunting in my bag to see whether I had i.d. if needed. A library card. She wasn't sure whether the course was full. She was checking. I said, I already have a Ph.D. There were no more registration slips for that course. She tore one up that had been taped to the table. The ballpoint pen wasn't coming on, I had to keep pressing over the letters until my name couldn't be read. She came back from the fax and said I was the only one he'd accept.
In all that mess of vague detail I think the only part that matters is the course itself, and I can't recover much of it. It was dark, tragic, strange. The prof seemed to have been putting it together at the last moment.
Why I'm interested in it is that I do want a difficult course. I wish I could see it. All I can take from it is that it's a zone of creation I myself constructed from one moment to the next and it was unusual and compelling and wd be demanding to study.
What to do with what I saw last night of the limitations of DVDs - bad color, artifacts sometimes, glitches. A pale poisoned world.
What to do about the fragility of 16mm.
[notes on digital video technology]
Think of it as finding not selling - what am I - who can use it - it's work-specific.
4
I was in a field set up like a vineyard with long rows. I was looking for my clothes. All of the rows were rows of hanging clothes. I was distressed that I couldn't find them. I was lying in bed and could hear Susan speaking to other people in the room. I pretended to be asleep. She sat down on the bed. I was wandering outside, distressed about my clothes. She was pressing me. I said, You dumped me four times. She said, It was the drug. Something like that.
I'm dreaming her because I had thought of talking to her on her going to school day, which is tomorrow.
-
Calabria. Labour Day.
My teeth ache from the bleaching last night and they are no whiter. Teeth - Dorothy Beach at 93 paid $38,000 for German dentures that are anchored to filed-down stubs of her own and stay in at night.
I should get advice about Rowen's money - 5% pa wd be $1100. In 10 years it wd be $35,000. At 10% wd be $49,600. I'd have to pay taxes on the interest and that wd come off. Who do I know who understands money - Nora. Luke? Get a will form.
[DVD technical notes]
Frances St 6th
What I hate about this condo (the name) - that the door and window frames aren't wood - the narrowness of the frames and baseboards - the way only a few of the windows open and they have screens with ugly little hatches to allow opening - the fake granite counters - the blinding light in the bathroom - the feel of plywood under thin carpet in the corridor - the thudding of footsteps on the ceiling. The worst is the way it has windows only on one end so that kitchen and bathroom have no natural light and the whole flat is like a cave. There's no cross-ventilation. And then her choice of colors - browns, and those formless heaps of fine hair that lie about all day and stink so that if I stroke them I have to change my clothes. The smell of dry catfood when I open the door. The textured ceilings.
Memory - the way yesterday morning there was a moment I was trying to remember the name of my fourth film. I'd ask and there'd be nothing. And again.
A doc on TV last night, a man who brings elephants back to Africa and has created a family of them that makes money doing elephant-back safaris. He was right with the world, grounded, confident, competent, happy.
-
Annual checkup. I weigh 157 lb, 7 more than last year, bp 156/90. She said she'd never seen anyone my age with so few moles.
I'm stressed by the film tasks - the technology - not knowing what to do.
[notes on hard drives]
Looking at DVD ideas. Who would it be for. What to include. Reading? Journal. Menu. Version for young women. Theoretical version explaining Being about?
7
My memory is definitely going - like Mary's - now I'm seeing Mary's has been going for many years - there's a lot I need to understand quickly - the reason my journal has been what I call dull is that I am not remembering the way I did - I'm not as sharp, I'm not taking imprints the way I did. This is to say I am dying quite rapidly.
So I need to understand
- 1. whether there's anything I can do, for instance whether exercise
wd make a difference, or food sups. Is blood pressure relevant.
- 2. what I can still do well
- 3. whether there are systems I shd begin using
- 4. whether I shd be back on estrogen
- 5. what I can do to archive work quickly
- 6. how long I've got
- 7. whether it's reversible to any degree
- 8. whether new experience makes a difference
- 9. wd DHEA make a difference
- 2. what I can still do well
- It's going quite rapidly
- Steady diminishing no
Continuous diminishing and it's my task to manage it. I need to be alert to what I'm still good at. The journal is going to keep giving me myself.
Louie's last night for supper. Her best story was a story about being at Haida Gwai working with a nervous student and feeling herself become someone else at the same time as she was still monitoring on her own behalf. She was tracking. I thought it might be like the times I've stepped into the acute self for instance with students.
This morning I was ready to call Susan. She fought every point and I tried to feel what to insist and what to let go. It's the way it is, I expect to get dropped and she expects that I'll want to hurt her and be pleased if I do.
There was a moment I fell silent and she said what was I thinking and I said there's a glass across the room with some coins and rolled bills, and it looks like a silver face quite sad and old. Then I let myself drop into being worried about memory, I'm dying, I'm less interesting than I was and she is still in the peak. She said that was beautiful. What about it? Its honesty. She was crying she said. The right way to feel it.
Jimmy Rose said to her, Is there something between you and Dr Epp?
Thursday morning.
Louie was friendly and quite old.
What do I need to be studying.
[video technology notes]
What else I'm feeling about this stage is, don't look for life where it used to be, look for people I can be on with. Don't be too proud to fight to be with them. Don't be too idle to fight hard. Study disintegration in other people, don't have a horror of it.
I need to study DVD format, DVD art - go film to DVD for quality.
Look for artist filmmaker digital video
Don't be too long on the tech before beginning to make.
Digital copies of slides - jump drive?
Friday 8th
Louie's house - the hideous crude carpentry of the bookcase in her bedroom. The too much bad furniture in the orange room. The ugly painting her brother gave her. The too many red carpets in the living room. The plants she buys herself, that tend to be strappy and awkward. Having the worktable in the kitchen and putting the mismatched bench to it. What is this willingness to make ugly space of what can be exquisite space.
Yesterday - is there a little coming-alive on account of talking to Susan? I think. A frisk.
[notes on video capture]
I said, You're the best company I have and I'm aware that you're the best company many people have. She said that was so.
9
Saturday morning. Dark and dripping after rain. I'm aching.
Woke from a long dream that I was looking for my little boy. I'd left him on a grassy hillside overnight and had thought I could go back for him and now I was in a foreign country frantically trying to see something familiar. Trying to backtrack. As I was struggling to backtrack I was also noticing things in this foreign city that I hadn't seen before. I hadn't noticed that steeple, the river. There's the feeling of the dream, frantic backtracking, and there's the fact of all this visual invention. A wagon track through dark forest. At the far end a brilliant light with some figures in front of it in silhouette, soldiers maybe. I was hurrying up that track thinking it was one I had seen radiating from the place I'd left Luke. On the way I saw a cutter [sleigh], and then another. I was thinking Luke would like to see them.
I was lost yesterday.
There are film things I should be doing and I didn't want to do them. I sat at home.
Today - [list of things done].
Susan liked the photo in the mag - nasturtium and black glass.
10
Calabria, Sunday. I've gone out stramm today, the Goth pants, Blue Canoe top black, orange tight shirt with turquoise beads. Am next to the mirror. How am I? Skin wrinkled and a bit water-puffed, not much. The silver in my bangs streaks well. Hair dark like my eyebrows underneath. Whites of my eyes a bit red in the inside corners. A cross intent look as I'm studying my skin. A lot of creases. Mouth thinner but still conscious. What kind of person. Formed, the way men are at their best. Sharp. Way experienced. I like the feel of the this top, tight inner bra, then A-lined to the hip bone. I bought two for the gym, organic cotton, which I don't believe matters, but it is smooth and thick, for $112. Yesterday 6-disk set of a Portuguese woman playing all the Mozart sonatas for $67. I'm not sure she's the best version. I don't like the way she bangs down the percussive notes. I suspect she contrasts too much. But what do I know. I wandered hapless in Sikora's wanting something beautiful as the Handel duets, without the energy to search through the hundred thousand.
This dr's name is Patrice Ranger. Should I ask her to take off the mole on the back of my neck too? Don't forget to ask her about Tom's zombie moment.
11
Anything yesterday - Raven returns show at VAG with Louie - a bent-wood bowl very dark stain and a perfect form. Translucent spoons carved in mountain goat horn. Conical hats with a remarkable fit of design over tight weave patterned so there'd seem to be alternating squares one kind of which was less visible. There was Rob's mom with Kerry, smelling of booze. It's a year since Chris died, she said; he understood west coat native arts, and she was there remembering him.
Louie - I was working on Juliana's corrections - Louie said she'd buzz
me from downstairs between 2:30 and 3. I lost track of time. Looked up and
saw it was 2:49. Realized the computer was still dialed in and she wouldn't
be able to buzz through. Rushed downstairs. She was just crossing the road
from her car.
- in america volume 11: 2006 january-june
- work & days: a lifetime journal project