| in america 11 part 4 - 2006 september-october | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
12 September Last dream an industrial park, each square of corporate property a different complicated visual style, for instance a refinery block with raised spheres and pipes tight-packed in the whole square. Sense of an industrial plain, a flatland of corporate identities. Last night and Sunday 9/11 memorials on TV. Two different things mixed, exquisite images of the pile in its glowing golden dust, and human faces talking in closeup. The human heads are saying grief, horror, etc, and the landscapes are a land of visual fable, so desired, so studied and adored. It was as if the Islamist men had arranged a marvel of visual art and theatre, an event so visually spectacular it will be America's new iconic moment. I'm mixing two things here - there are the land-of-fable images, and they are not the moment that replays. That moment is the moment the first tower falls and the dust cloud tumbles forward through the streets. The land-of-fable images are from later days when the artists arrived to make more of what the Islamists had begun. But both have the same power of significant spectacle. One of the pieces was called The falling man. It was about one of the many images of people jumping from the upper floors. There was a lot of this and that about who it was, etc. Another image was of a woman jumping, and they knew who she was, and there was good footage of her rational husband talking about her; but this piece, which was sentimental in the end, was wanting to talk about the falling man. Was that something subliminal about falling penis pride? Falling prestige of manhood in this era? Then there was a section about two people who had jumped holding hands. If Tom and I had been there we would have kissed each other goodbye and jumped separately. Holding hands on the way down is missing the point, not an affirmation of the power of human etc as somebody was saying. Other people who kept saying "There must be something greater" over portentous zooms into deep space. The moment yesterday when the guy at Video In put one of the beta tapes into the player and the image of Sheila with her dog appeared, glowing red and blue house, perfect on the large monitor. Beautiful. The tab on the inside of my thigh is gone. Dr Ranger said she thought what happened to Tom must be a little seizure - temporal lobe because that's where absence seizures are. At a marine research station looking at little sea creatures - a form-variation dream, a tattered issue of the Reader full of nothing but a catalogue of all the creatures in the whole collection. In the parking lot Tom spins the Fairmont in tight circles while I hold open the back door. He's getting water out of the back seat by centrifugal force. We stop and get out. He's buttoning his fly, I'm pulling up my jeans. Last night a doc by Gretchen Jordan-Barstow of an illustrator called John Howe from Keremeos, who does fantasy drawings. What about him. He looked a fantasy figure, streak of white down the centre of his beard, spidery long legs, and talked like a pop psych pundit very self-importantly. What about it was the life he found his way into after smalltown high school, a drawing class in Strasbourg, Iranian wife, illustrated Lord of the rings and then New Zealand with Peter Jackson to design the movie. Something about the quality of his line. I was thinking of James [Blake], who was on a dedicated road to that kind of life when he stepped over the edge. Lord of the brush: a documentary portrait of John Howe. With Allen Lee, 'conceptual designers.' 14 I emailed Sarah and she said come eat with us. I set out into the street at quarter past seven when there was pink in the clouds. As the bus traveled west on Hastings it intensified. I was excited to be going to a house of artists, the table with good food and wine and Sarah beautiful and warm and interesting, and David showing me beautiful work. There was an Indian on the bus I knew. We smiled across the space. I've known him from years back, a young man with a good though mischievous face. We got off at the same stop, into streets darkening under a great flamingo wash. We were going in the same direction and walked along together into the waterfront streets north of Hastings. He was very dark brown and carrying a heavy pack. He said it was full of art supplies, beads, shells, water color paints. He said he'd known the sky would be beautiful earlier when he had seen the clouds. At David's things were messy. Sarah had been to the burning man and she was denouncing it emphatically and at length. David was mildly holding for the anarchist value of such an event. Milo was doing anything he could to get noticed and Sarah was instantly and totally obedient to anything he wanted. David would speak to him quite absently. - I'm jumbling this. The first thing to say was that when I arrived David called me onto the balcony and led me along it to the next-door apartment. They've decided to live separately. She was fighting him every possible moment. All three of them were competing for attention. He said he'd liked Bill Viola's show. She said it was pretty and empty. It was as if she was saying, always, You and your old hippy shit are done, gone, nothing, I want nothing to do with you, I want to be part of the new. Her sense of the new wasn't clear - she kept saying the word 'contamination,' something about art on the internet that is modified by other people and so on. So David is 67? Around that, and she is maybe 40? She has a house in the south of France. He has Storm Bay. She was working with men she thinks of as traditional, working with skills that are centuries deep. At noon they'd eat together, a lot of food, wine, and love each other in the work, "totally in my body," she said. Yet she's so heady, insisting on in her British accent. She doesn't feel for BC, she wants to be back in Europe. And he is meditating and dreaming New Age dreams of quantum theory and consciousness and a great change in 2012. He's talking about 'spirituality'. Oh dear. How did he look - he's old. He's tall. He's wearing one earring. He's thinner than I've seen him. His nose is very sharp. I sat on the floor and he showed me two films played off a DVD. Eye for an eye and the walking meditation one. Music videos. I could see they're fun to make. The NFB has given him his own room with a Steenbeck. He's calling himself an animator. They're not important work though they are skilled and hold attention. Very skilled - his dissolves and overlays and cutting to the beat. But the beautiful footage of the black feet and spilling grain - it was not what it should have been and was earlier, sublime. It was as if out of focus, and there wasn't enough of it, he didn't defend it. I was measured and taking-in and neutral. In summary, David's brain is going soft, Sarah wants to leave him, Milo should be with other kids and not cooped up with nothing to do but struggle to be interesting. Now - it's 9:30. Damion at the Calabria at noon. Should I think about my students now that they're in. What've I seen. - Two hours with Damion. He's 40. He's beautiful. He has sat at night in his garage office reading my journal! Frank and 1995. The mix of things, he said, the writing. At last a reader. Because he knows cog sci. He's going to be more beautiful as he gets older - he's smart enough. A relief to see. I said read Halliday and Gendlin. The ".....". Solaris when he was 12, he said. Wondering why I let the colloquy idea go on as long as I did. I now can't stand Lise's falsity and gush. Being in a group with her as co-leader is untenable - I mean I don't believe it and am false in it. A group initiated by Juliana and Carolyn is too much her group. 15 Sent the letter where I resign. Hard night. A hardness in my veins is how it feels. Why didn't I pay attention much earlier to not wanting to be at the event? Why did I go along with it? 17 Sunday, a dull morning. Yesterday two things. I was transcribing this book, the res. Phone rang. Susan. We talked about her slash writing. Lise doesn't like it. I said do a version each way. She tried it. She found more comes to her when she uses the slashes and line breaks. I was relieved, I so much want that quality somewhere. - Writing this I realize how much I've forgotten. This is the kind of writing there was in my mother's journal, vague inaccurate generalization. It's a dimming of the brain. This is related to the second thing. I was happy after I'd spoken to her and wanted to go on happy and so I put the green journal in my bag and went down to the Publab to do scans of photos. The photos were ones I'd pasted onto pages in the 1978 journal, one page for each year, so I was looking carefully at the faces of all my ages. The ones I liked were the early teenage faces that were thinner in the cheek, a dark thin look for instance in Frank's time. Later my face was wider and fuller, and even where I'm good looking it's not that focused clean look - is that what I mean - is it hormonal, womanly 'filling out' after I started to have sex [birth control pills], or just lonely eating after I left home. And then in my mid-thirties there's that amazing face I call queenly.jpg, passport photo for when I was going to London with Jam and was still half into the drug mind. Big eyes and a lot of power. It's the one Lauderic called a femme fatale and the power is that. But what is it. It doesn't look like me - the thin-faced girl of 16 does - but I'm pleased to claim it - I accomplished it - I went deep and wide for it - I was feeling extremely. Anyway I'm interested in the relation of the faces to the form the writing was taking at the time. There's a photo where I'm posed on a bollard on the Vancouver waterfront with the harbour and north shore behind me. That's a good photo for its lightness - Judy took it - the breadth of water and shore. Vancouver a simpler city, like a town. When these photos are enlarged on the screen the backgrounds as if materialize. They weren't there before. Now I peer into them to see the time. Looking at the photos to see a quality of being - when was it good, what does a not-good state look like. What should I be doing differently. I'm also looking a bit yearningly at how thick and glossy my hair is, how beautiful my mouth is, in young pictures. - I'm dragging in the packet letters, want nothing to do with these people, don't want to give them any effort, don't know how to get through this semester. Cutting corners, wanting to stay with nothing but my own work. I gave it a lot of effort when I had nothing better to do but now I have something better to do and I want to drop [the college]. Is that the whole of it? Susan phoned last night. She was elated that she likes what she's writing, her technical attention, her focus, her rapid self-building, her articulancy. When I'm talking to her I'm not faded. She's a thoroughly going concern. It's as if I have just begun to realize how much more I could unfold. Today - movies to Alpha Cine - pick up from Video In? 19 The weather has shut down. Seven o'clock dark and damp. What do I have to tell. Picking up the hard drive at Video In yesterday. He plugged it in and the folder structure showed up and he opened all 14 so they were stacked like jpgs. Zipped through each to find the length. Images flashed past. Murky grey-green. But there they all were instantaneously, simultaneously. Last night as I was falling asleep a strong pang about Rowen. Is he in trouble. Today - clean, move, stitches out at 3, Janet tonight, still have Madeline, Laura, Angela. Last night again that tight feeling. Two aspirin and I drop. Was talking to Meg at Cineworks yesterday very fondly, but walking away afterward I realized I had repeated something I said last time I talked to her. I was cringing. Losing memory is very shameful. Another thing: the bathroom mirror is large and brutally lit, and standing at the basin in my orange singlet I saw the flesh on the insides of my upper arms puckering in the way of old women. My beautiful arms. I'm thinking the journal now will be recording decomposition with the interest my young self gave to her composition - can I do it that way? Free radicals, molecules that strip other molecules' electrons. Produced in mitochondria. Oxidation mangles DNA. Cell mutation and cell death. Juvenon is acetyl-L-carnitine, ALCAR 500mg, energize, alpha lipoic acid antioxidant 200mg. Telomeres get shorter with each division. Structure on ends of every chromosome. When too short, dividing stops. Cell senescence. It stops cancer. But we accumulate senescent cells, wrinkles, inflammation. - At Louie's listening to Handel love songs. Here's Lascia qu'io piango. It is strange what happened in the last weeks - there it sighs, it has happened - I've realized I'm into old age. Now I'm saying it with a kind of joy, is it that? Relief? As if I'm accepting what I have been refusing. On the street today I was looking carefully at the many old people - it was Chinatown - how are they doing, I was asking. How is it for them? I was sitting on the second step of a Chinese apartment building, the Fan Tower was it, watching many old men and women in the atmosphere of China, Chinese radio from the herbs and roots store, a woman on a stool next to her small heap of goods for sale, knitted hats. There she must sit all day. The lime trees across the street not turning much, just the odd yellow leaf and a few on the ground, and that seemed to be China too. Why am I happy. I'm happy I'm here. I'm happy for beauty at the windows, for this music. For my furniture? The quality of this stereo. Being able to cook for Janet and Louie, to be in a house. 20 Raining on the black maple, raining on the grape leaves, deep rain. 21 Thursday early. There go the crows. West. Are those geese. Cloud shreds in front of the mountain. The oak tree turned yellow-green all over, wider than it was, spread over half the house that's like Oma's house. Now there's mist over the mountain. Is it mizzling there? Here's a photo of my [former] house. It's in a little booklet called Preserving Strathcona's architectural heritage. From this booklet I learn it is an Edwardian Builder, "this style was popular until the First World War." I stared at it last night wondering whether it was another house in the neighbourhood until I saw the Aphrodite box next to the door. Do I want to say anything about Louie. I need access to this house and I am paying for it by making meals and being nice - am I being nice? Now there's sun on part of the maple. I'm ruling out being not-nice and I'm not cranky as I have been. She told her therapist it's nothing. I'm saying as she walks around her house that she is what she is. That constant, rising plume of white smoke is thicker and faster now, as if they have fired up the furnace for 8 o'clock. 23 Saturday morning. Sun on the black maple, refrigerator hum. The fire is lit and will stay on until spring. Carpets. There's a good thick red carpet under my table across the room. It looks beautiful. It's time to be gone and I'm still waiting for Notes in origin and Bright and dark. Rowen and Luke today. Finished all the letters finally. There's not much more than a week 'til the next lot. What was it yesterday with Louie. We work at talking to each other. That sensation of dry effort is a dismay. I wonder whether it's because I'm holding out, I haven't told her I'm liking Susan again, and won't, because I refuse to be cut off for it. But it's from before Susan, and here's this house, and being able to invite Rowen to it. And have we been strangers this way since I don't have my own house? And want hers more than I want her. That would do it. I should be asking something else. I should be saying, what would make me very happy. - Calabria. Hello day. I so often don't know what to do with myself. Lying awake in nothing nothing. A: Any kind of love. Which is relaxation. The sky is dazzling today. Q: How much contraction-against is necessary. OR? Does it make sense to love contraction? Susan is love a lot and so is Tom. What does Susan love. She loves to play well. She loves to be marvelous. She loves realizing something, understanding. She loves sharp graceful language. She loves the sensation of fondness. Discernment. What does she love in me. The same things, pretty much. My heart is aching, why - Rob this morning at Calabria too boorish to order anything and asked to leave. So that was the end of the visit. How was he. His hair at 50 is still his teenage hair but his face is a bit swollen and lumpy and not right. 24 Rowen yesterday came from the ferry in his Carhart jacket and brown Chuck E sneakers. We were awkward and then I made dinner and we rushed to Tinseltown - he ran ahead and held the bus - and saw Riding alone for thousands of miles - and then walked home through Chinatown and MacLean Park - and made tea and lay on the carpet almost in the dark - and had the right kind of talk. He wanted to ask something. Afraid to ask. "Why this distance between us?" Meaning, why haven't you been a right mother to me. I said when I was with my children I would go dead, I'd become unbearable to myself. He's sleeping now in Louie's white room. I'm writing from my bed. The mountain quiet in its skin of firs. A seaplane. A gull. An engine sinking away to the end of the street. The oak yellower than it was two days ago. It's very quiet. Here is my long-leafed ficus still putting out new leaves. There are the dahlias on the windowsill striped red and white. 25 Luke dropped me this weekend and I was anguished. I lay on my bed feeling my heart pressed tight. I would say to it 'relax' and then sigh. I was afraid I'd have a heart attack. This morning an email, he was hit by sadness and didn't leave his room all weekend. Meantime I had taken good care of Rowen: food, house, money, talk, a plan to buy a good camera, an $800 Nikon. I said for buying things he must earn half but I'll lend it so he can have it before Australia and Costa Rica. Things to do -
Anguish and dismay and puzzlement at being anguished. My new passport photo a large face, small eyes close together, compressed mouth, left eye farther away. A woman not so much old as very plain-faced. Suffering and plain. What is the matter with me. At the condo I zonked on TV but I wasn't squashed this way. At Louie's I'm wandering in her lovely spaces somehow desperately empty. I want to go home. Waiting for decisions on films has been excruciating - why is business and waiting so pressured, it can feel like it will kill me. I know it would help if I were staying in a hotel. I looked at Tom's photo this morning with a blurt of longing - do I miss him and not know it, as if that emotion is obscure in me. 26 Today I paid the SFU computing account, looked at the three-quarters tape at Moving Images and couldn't tell whether it was okay - waited for a $183 royalty check, did my Canadian taxes on the fast computers at SFU. 27 Five o'clock in the black. Lying here thinking what a negative fog I live in, I believe discouraged thoughts all day long. What do I have. Notes in origin is done, print is quite hard, a high-con stock. Current being reprinted because there was a big string of lint on the neg. Bright and dark is still hung up, Mary Daniel trying to get funding for the whole Senses. Can I store the internegs at Louie's - with the Beta tapes - and the archive prints. Should I take the new prints to CA and transfer them there, or wait for a grant because it would be $900 at least and I'd have to be here all next week probably. If I spent the money I wouldn't have enough for the computer. They'd be heavy in my suitcase and I already have the massively heavy journals. Tomorrow's already Thursday. They have to go to mini-dv before they're digitized, or digital Beta. And then another step somewhere else. I dreamed last night that I was with Trudy and Rhoda. Trudy looked smoothfaced and pretty. She came and put her arms around me from behind very lovingly. Rhoda came toward me and I said sternly that I don't trust her and don't want anything to do with her. Journal/letter from Susan. She says when I said I was less afraid of her she was more afraid of me, she admitted to fantasy used to control pain, and seduction used to protect fantasy. That was good. I said on the phone, Why couldn't you sleep? She said she was lonely. The terrible stresses of loving a mother who doesn't mean well. Control her carefully. "Wanting to trust someone more than anyone should ever be trusted." I think she is getting to what was missing in her smartness, knowing the control motive of the uncon. 28 A party where Andrew Irvine's wife sits all the while with her three daughters. The oldest, who was born around the time I worked with him (not actually) seems to be a math genius. She asks me whether I've read a paper by or about a mathematician called Lawrence. There are two littler ones. The youngest has a cold, is sniffling and keeps eating. I am rushing around at ease in the party and thinking I should talk to the woman. I wrote that one down because I wonder whether Andrew's daughters are something to do with my work. Three phases of the work I started then? It would be 1. math rep 2. math and the parietal 3. quantum theory? It says yes. If I'm supposed to be embracing work woman too, does that mean going back to Body and cosmos? Susan's poem:
29 I said it's sweet and sane of small children who have parents it is unsafe to love to give themselves a moment of loving with their whole selves before they go to sleep each night. Mary Daniel on email - her mother went into inferotemporal dementia before she died - she thought of it as a defect of imagining, came to think of it that way. Said CFMDC is starting to think about archiving prints of 16 - I do know Moving Images isn't taking care of 16 anymore. Should I be moving internegs to Toronto? Will I have to come back and do transfers later - leave archive prints and internegs at Louie's, and Beta tapes. Then what's at my mom's will be dispensable. Sent Mary D the urls to the website and the embod site. Luke came for breakfast. I made him tea, bacon and eggs, toast with Union Market brown bread. There were croissants with cranberry chutney a student gave Louie. Rain sifting down, a low sky. Neither of us had slept enough, we lay on the floor by the fire. I looked at his stretched lean tummy, the dark hair on his long forearms, his neat good looking foot in a blue sock. We rambled on. With him more than anyone I'm aware of the softness of my memory. "There was a dog ...," long pause, "... it must have been you I saw it with," questioning look, "I can't think who else it could have been?" He nods. Before he left he held up his phone and showed me photos, clicked through his tunes and played me some. We sang along to From a jack to a king. He's sad about Kim, misses her, doesn't want any more to sleep with strangers, he said. His long hugs hello and goodbye. I told him the story of bustling up the Drive with a big double ice cream cone, maple walnut, and stubbing my toe and falling, but falling carefully so I landed on my forearm with the ice cream cone held upright. It was Saturday morning and there was a lot of traffic on the sidewalk. I could see people's legs halted in front of me and feel them behind me. I didn't look at them but I said "Saved it." The man in the group in front of me applauded and then the group behind me did too. Luke laughed, told the story of shooting off an embankment in Greece on a motor velo and landing on the roof of a yacht, and the hundred patrons of cafes across the road coming to stand above him and applaud. I'm feeling Susan in this writing, as if I want there to be someone I'm writing to, now, as if my own company isn't enough. But this para was for my own company. When I make Luke laugh I'm relieved that I'm not boring him the way Mary bores me. I feel I'm still viable. What I wrote S yesterday: My mom. Drove fast through early autumn. There's a high bridge over the Fraser and mist was rising from the cold surface of the river and curled around the bridge blazing white. Rusty alders and poplars, cedar and fir, blackberry embankments, long grass for a fast half hour that opens to the immense Valley, real mountains high as the Rockies, miles distant but all around like a rim. And then a very small old woman stooping and peering in a 60s condo with artificial plants and false-gilt railing in the foyer, little apartment with so much stuff, missionary pictures on the fridge. Took her to lunch, made her laugh, argued about religion. She was not bad but I can't take much of her. "You know the Epps believe in short visits." "Yes I know." Gives me Mennonite sausage to take home. Stands at the top of the stairs as I escape. The highway's slower on the way back. Stop and start before the bridge, time to look at the glitter on the leaves, the autumn powder in the air. It's hot. (She replies: cold surface / blackberry embankment / long grass) What it is about that is the compacting and distancing of telling that knows what is described is and will remain unknown to the reader, and yet something will spring up for her. An artful poise. Should I ask what there has been in this visit:
Almost two months - Aug 5
1 October
2nd The journals of Knud Rasmussen. Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk 2006. In Inuktitut with subtitles. I liked the camerawork. Faces held a long time. The way he'd slide back from a woman's face to the face of a baby falling asleep behind her. The way people outside would stand at different distances so they could be felt as a group - is that what I mean - something unusual in the way they'd be distributed, as if it's something they do differently. During the shaman's story I was hearing phrases from my journal, copied out of Rasmussen in 1981. "Spirits along these shores." The woman who fucks spirits in beautiful melted light and wisping sound - they did that well. The beautiful face listening in the background of Pakak's story, an unusual costume of weasel tails around her head - the way she was the left side of the frame when Pakak was speaking on the right, beautiful motionless attention while he became more excited in his telling. The quiet attention in people's faces generally, like the full attention of an animal's face. the lines tattooed on women's faces, that bring them closer to an animal's face. The horrible preaching of the Christian leader, and people's obedient placement in rows, men standing in the back, women kneeling in front. Sacramental eating of tabooed meat. He showed the bodies changed. A subtle movie. It's not the last time I'll see it. The attention in the costumes. The way sometimes a joke would go by that wasn't understood. The natural light throughout - blue chinks in the igloos, the line of fire in a blubber lamp poked by a woman nearby. The night scene with night's blue transparency, the pale horizons of dawn and dusk. The breath at people's faces when they speak. The ice particles on a European's beard. The comic scene in which everyone was really cracking up. The way it was next thing to a documentary, no plot just atmosphere. The shaman renouncing his sprits - what was renounced? I'm feeling this has something to do with Orpheus. The way her spirit-love scenes were shot, the spirit-sound, dense light crying and murmuring like the visual texture and unlike. Louie said during the group scenes in an igloo she'd feel people next to her and around her. What spirits are renounced by for instance the Mennonites, what spirits are recovered by breaking their taboos. - There are the crows. It's overcast today, daylight just showing at 7. - YVR. Boarding isn't for an hour and a half - the restfulness of the holding area - "Going home today?" said the customs guard - Louie went to practice and I cleaned house - washed the bedding, wiped down cupboards - she's cheerful and I'm uneasy - uneasy and mystified-feeling - the mystified feeling is maybe the part I should understand? It's a feeling that's always saying, is it my fault? I was loved and now I'm not, did I do that? Is it better for her this way? Then moments that break through into laughing about something. Meantime Susan is needing me to hold onto her through her sharp hard lonely semester. I'd thrive with what Louie used to give me and so would she, she wdn't thrive giving it. I love the moment when I'm through customs and hand the bags to the handlers
and then walk on with just my shoulder bag. Now the journey has caught,
the door has opened.
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