| in america 12 part 5 - 2007 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
28 Dinner with Nora. We were at the outside table at the Brigantine, upstairs on its porch looking toward the bay with masts and the mountains beyond. Nightfall, there was silver on the water. We ordered mussels, sashimi, fish tacos. She had a cab'. I had a pale ale. We were tucked in a corner. The waiter was a young man with a bare-looking head. How to say what happened. Leslie played with him, she took him into something swift that lit him up. The reason I can't describe it is that I couldn't follow it. It was like a sword being played so swiftly it's invisible in the midst of its motion. Some kind of tossing and flashing. She won him. She dazzled me. Then we went on. She is shutting down advertising casinos. Min is looking after the small accounts she has left. She is at liberty. There's a piece of land she could build on. Architect's plans already drawn. An architect she likes, a woman. Ocean view from the upper deck. 5 million. Something else too, she knows she hasn't been into the deep of intimacy. The astrologist told her to read the story of Orpheus, or was it Persephone. A sweeter self she left behind. Seafood is where we started, I said. Paella, she said. Ten years in September. (No, 9 October 1998.) It's a month today the jeep is gone. I won't get it back. It doesn't say yes to that, it's still saying I will. - NW2-TP78-8-W of the 6th meridian. Mulligan Lake. Scrip from Gerhart Wedel. [Ed bought it from Wedel] 30 Friday morning - clear - I'm in the deck chair - the air is still cold - a lot of twitter - there comes a plane - sun directly above the cathedral - it's quarter to 9 - but really quarter to 8. What I mostly want to say is that it's the time of year for the California scent in this neighbourhood - the Indian hawthorns are blooming thick pink but it's not them. There's the camphor tree next to the Victorian fantasy, a wide round tree. Beyond it, between two palm stems, the drillbit tower, another plane. I'm wearing sunglasses. A small jet. The palms are all cleaned up by the wind and standing pleased it seems to me. An Alaskan Air with Indian face on the tail. A bird loud on the rail who left when I looked at him. Where's the crow, on the condo gable end. What do I have to do - mail to Jimmy, Ian but no hurry, Justin when he's ready. Apart from those, two weeks open. It would have been the time to go camping. Don't have the first vol of Dames rocket, where is it. Don't want to do that slogging transcription. Not excited about learning Final Cut Pro because the image is so small I don't enjoy it. I can't see what I'm doing. And first 4 tapes partly corrupted. I have logged and binned what I can.
[Heidegger notes looked up for Jimmy] 31st It's Saturday afternoon. I took a taxi to Tom's this morning. Did my laundry, walked to the library, which was closed for Cesar Chavez day, had breakfast outside at the Urban Grind, bought tea, came home. Look how I said 'home.' Am on the bench outside, now that it's in the shade. The pots along the outside ledge are still in sun. There are their colors: African basil flowers purple, jasmine white, new specks of red, the small salvia, two kinds of pink scented geranium, sweetpeas. A bluejay below. It's quiet. There's a footstep, the neighbour two doors along coming back with his mail. A lot of small cheeping and twittering. I can just make out a rustling from the palm, that one palm in the centre of the view. Sips of sweet pea flower. The birds I hear are not in view. - There's one, pink-headed. Drinking tea. Writing on a cushion on my knee. There are the pigeons on their wire. The jay is hanging out quietly. This place costs 10,000 a year. Are those new leaves on the sycamore? Orange butterfly. The dark eugenia is like a group tree, many young stems rocking separately thirty feet up. So nice and bitty with bitty red tips. Clean blue. Anna's hummingbird clacking at the basil flowers. The grey cat passes saying mieuw. Chloe below halted in a shadow waiting for something to move. White butterfly. How is my shreddy acacia. New growth on the tips. Music from one of the apartments. There's still sun on the corner of the steps. Ice cream truck on Florida. I'm a little teapot / short and stout. The kids must be out. 2 April 2 nights at Tom's. Working on Fading 10. 3 My teeth are hurting these days - need a hygienist and don't know how to find one. So there I discovered that a scaling/planing will cost me $600 if I do it here. Check Dr Landeros tomorrow. Googled peridontal pockets and now understand. Still hurting - sore throat, all my deteriorating fillings. Worried about money. I was in balance about money, briefly, and now losing the jeep has got me in trouble. I have this $3000 computer I don't really like, should I sell it at a loss? Should I sell it to Rowen? Feel boxed in - scared - am I going to lose my teeth - [money calculations] Okay I owe 6000 and by the time I want to buy the jeep will owe less, 4200. Low interest. Have budgeted $1500 jeep costs above buying price for lojack plus. If I go into film it will need more money. - What's good - Tom's house - Tom in his house - good things don't add up do they - they swap around. Haven't phoned Susan since a week ago. I think of it and say no. 4th
[notes on teeth and dentists] - What relation between the finishing-up/legacy work and the etherealizing work - a lot of management - management is solid - but the ethereal work needs management too. Solid work -
And then the tech requirements for this electronic music work:
[more teeth notes]
- Seeing & 'seeing'
- 15,000 years ago a vast glacier melted formed a huge lake eventually drained by the Wapiti, Smoky, Peace system leaving remnant lakes and the Grande Prairie first humans thought to have come across the Bering 8,000-10,000 years ago archeological evidence less than 7,000 Beaver by 1700s, surrounded by others 17 townships in the prairie - Transcribed 15 pages of 1977 today, going to do the whole of it lower case without periods. Liked transcribing it though it's simplest reporting. 5 A sensation tonight - distinct - I was on the couch watching TV with a pillow over my mouth - remembering my face in my thirties - how it felt to be pretty - not knowing that it felt some way - Got into putting up workshops today - seeing, the uncon, theory, speaking bodies - a lot of focus, tracking little things across four or five or six docs. Finished pages please me, red and dark blue. 6 Here's a blog I found when I was looking for the ref for Jorie Graham's line, filaments of falling marked by the tiny certainties [verbalprivilege.blogspot.com], quoting someone talking about The English patient, don't know whether it quotes Ondaatje: We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves .... We are communal histories, communal books. It opened on a beautiful page - beautiful photo of an Oxford back in winter light matted on brownish cream. Adrienne Rich quote. Literature, politics, travel, Brooklyn, Istanbul, Oxford. Red high-heeled boots. Lesbian feminist. Statcounter tells me who has visited sites - isp addresses, city, and how they came in. I have four sites tagged: workshop index, Being about, work & days, mbo worksite. People coming into mbo through google 'embodiment studies.'
In the bib it's kum nye. 9 Monday morning, grey as it has been these days. My left hand slightly stinging if I touch something, the small ends of cactus fuzz. Have to be in TJ at 10 to have my teeth cleaned. Yesterday aft went to see In grosse Stille at the Ken. Midmorning I got on the bike with my laundry and rode through mizzling rain to Tom's. Found the blinds shut tight and Tom cleaning the kitchen floor with Big Bird on TV. What was it happened then - dismay. I had put my clothes in the laundry and sat on the couch with Tom telling him about Mary wanting to give Rudy the land he's on. We had the French doors open and that was alright. I went off to the farmer's market, left Tom to take my laundry out. When I came back, two plastic bags of vegetables hung from the ends of the handlebars, long bunch of yellow iris buds propped among them so I could hold it and still manage the brake, Tom's house sealed again, dark inside, and he watching golf on TV. I dropped instantly, lonely pain. Tom had been saying many times how perfect the color is on his TV, how good the sound now that he has it routed through the speakers. Stupid fucking TV I said bitterly as I left. Pushing the bike along the walkway, hung with plastic bags again, now with laundry too, I bumped into the big fuzzy cactus outside the end apartment. It grabbed and fell. I had to take hold of it to get past. Left it lying on its side. Now struggling uphill under the grey sky pushing the bike with my hand stinging from hundreds of whisker spines, I was saying bleakly I have to leave, I have to get away from him, I'm down to what he is, empty, zonking, watching television. I don't know where to go. I want to be full like I used to be. I don't have enough money to live anywhere. Would I be in pain like I was last time I was away from him, maybe not. Like that all the way home. Phone ringing as I was about to unlock the door. Was trying to pull the spines out with cellotape when Tom called up. He had figured out the bus route to the Ken. He said "Soak your hand in hot water with salt in it," what he'd learned when he was working at the cactus farm. Then he sat next to me holding my hand firmly, turning it so he could see the fuzz against the light, pulling it out with tweezers. He was focused, My ADD has kicked in, he said. He didn't stop. There was a moment when we were both concentrating, I was holding a phone card behind my hand so he could see all the fuzz against it and keeping my other fingers out of the way, he was working on the inside of my forefinger. There was his large fine freckled hand holding mine very steadily, there was the side of his face next to mine. It was sexy. In what way. It was a sensation I haven't had with him mostly, or ever? Like being with Rob in mutual physical doing, in physical concentration. Knowing someone's physical being, being in it with them. TJ, Dr Felix, the trolley. 10 Louie this morning tells about a date with Douglas Todd. She had fun. Dave Leonard replied to letter 4. Note from Susan with the $25 she owes me. Tom walked across the park to visit briefly. I finished Peter Theroux's LA book. Polly so far the only student who has got a packet in. Red velvet and bloody sheets in Paris. Opening my eyes on blue sky this morning. TJ again tomorrow, pruning with Nor at Taft on Thurs. I don't want to tell the story of going to TJ, the trolley, walking in Mexico, tacos at the last stand before the border, except to say it was happy and interested, calm; even standing and moving in the long line back into the US I was just looking contentedly all around. Louie said she's unfreezing some, completely out of debt, working less. Now I want something to do. No more computer, shut it down. 11
Still don't know what to do about Susan. Two weeks. When I scan back in this book, I see wonderful times with her but I somehow forget her - that's interesting, it's what I must have done with my mom. I structured my hippocampus someway? It says not the hippocampus, but some part - I disabled it so I don't miss someone. And then when they call me I feel it an imposition, is that right?
12 Here's the day, grey and early, 6:30. Toothache woke me. So I'm thinking to go to Van in May - look after my teeth, get my passport, go to the conference. Do I want to - no. Though going anywhere -
13 Yesterday at Taft with Nor, cutting back the lower levels of the cassia. I worked 5 hours without a break, worked hard, and was fine. She paced me, except for answering the phone a lot. Good concentration. We had a new reciprocating saw. I stumble, fell flat twice. Don't slow down through, hurl myself around. Looking at Belleview quietly absorbing. I landed there in 2002 and now it is another space, better and worse. The terrace is perfect, and its outside fireplace is. The flat lawn with its cobble wall is bad but the sloping passage around it is good. The evergreen pear is radiantly revived. Light comes through the hedge with its graceful eucalyptus leaves. Best are the nasturtiums in prepped ground swarming the bamboo screening next to a woodpile. What I loved in the upstairs room, what made me happy the moment I opened my eyes in the morning, was the treetops through the casement windows. There they still are, though the room is another shape and the ceiling opened to its rafters. From the deck, whitecaps on the bay. A cold wind yesterday as we stood with glasses of red wine. Palms, eucalyptus, the pepper tree. Money. She made money and it let her create what she likes. I would have done something else with both the house and the garden. I don't do what it takes to have money. But am I too deferential on account of it. When we came into the restaurant last night she chose the table next to the fire and took the chair beside it - that was economic dominance. Shouldn't I have a beautiful place to live? Haven't I done more to earn it than she has? Haven't I done more to earn dominance? I have. And even my jeep is gone. I'm stamping my foot.
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15 Mary has offered me 10,000 to replace my jeep - she said she feels god wants her to. 15 Sunday aft. Irish weather, sun, clouds, spits of rain, sun, clouds. I don't want to be working on packets. Two nights at Tom's. Good nights and mornings. Dried out the meatloaf watching Searching for the wrong-eyed Jesus. Tom gazed at me lovingly. 16 Dave has sent me a copy of a page of Johanna Haakstad's record book for 1945, births January 4 to April 1. In the centre of the page Mrs Mary Epp admitted March 4 discharged March 16. In that period four La Glace babies, a couple from Buffalo Lakes, a couple from Valhalla Centre, Teepee Creek, Blueberry Mountain, Spirit River, Cherry Point, Northmark. Owed 750 in taxes, paid a total of 3187 on 21,345, plus 450 in union dues, 278 Vermont State. Another 728. Total 3915. Last year I paid 2580 on 18,448. Can I say the best moment on the weekend. When I arrived Friday evening I was criticizing Tom for this and that. Can I remember what. He was telling me again about the man he replaces on Fridays at work - the other men don't like him. I said briefly that he had already told me that part, just tell me the parts I don't already know. Tom was offended. I said it's common courtesy to monitor what one has already told other people. He said "I'm just talking." I said "I'm going to get my clothes from the laundry." When I got back he was grumbling about how critical I am. I said "I'm just saying my thoughts. That's the kind of thoughts I have." He started laughing. A nice laugh. Kept starting up again. "Why are you laughing, because you've always done that to women and they have always just put up with it?" "Yes." I mean this is a fine time with Tom. He said he's contented. I was in the tub in the dark and he carried in his open laptop to show me what he'd written that day. A book of light. Three-quarter page with a good line about being like a dog with its head out the window of a car. "Too much, too fast, too *." He sleeps so quietly next to me. I wake and see him with his head under his blanket, or else laid down somewhere among his too many pillows and cushions. 17 Because I'm transcribing 1977 I am sometimes remembering the body I was then. Light. White Indian shirt. Loose green cord jeans. Green army jacket with big external pockets. Silver moccasins. Shoulders. Short hair. I was lean. 18 Something about that body I haven't said yet - it's light-boned, it's a spirit body. I don't write much. What I write is often quite abstract, stoned concern with responsibility for consciousness. But there's some of the quality of Jam and Cheryl and the time. Sketchy. I wanted to be weightless and was. What I'm feeling in it is that I could write something from it, alongside it. 19 Steamship Minnedosa from Antwerp 9 July 1924 Peter and Susanna Epp bound for Rosthern Saskatchewan, She 25, he 38. Passage paid by the Mennonite Church. NW2 was filed and proved by William Kinderwater, a school teacher who was 27 and a widower when he filed. 1911-1915 he taught at McHenry School. NE2 was filed and proved by Frank K 1912-1919, who was 20 when he filed. They were Americans. Frank also filed and proved SW3, where they lived on the eastern edge, and SE2. So Frank filed Hill Sixty both sides of the road. The creek quarter SE3, south of their house, was filed by a Louisiana freighter aged 50 called Lewis in 1914 - had originally been filed by Wm K but abandoned as too marshy. Proved 1919. The other marsh quarter, SW2, was filed in 1913 by Joseph K but cancelled. Township 74, of which we were on the south edge, was said by the surveyor Walter McFarlane (1909-1912) to be black loam 3-8" deep over a clay subsoil, gently rolling, nearly half covered with scattered bluffs of poplar and willow scrub. 6" poplar, 6-8" spruce. Small amounts of upland hay. Creek about 20 links wide, 2' deep, current about 2 miles per hour. None of the lands liable to flooding. 20 Friday morning - Transcribed a lot last night - undated notes that took me from buying the Studebaker to getting my license and driving with Jam to Clearbrook, to going north and then the Olson house. A lot of moments and photos. I'm surprised how little I wrote. - I have two weeks when this batch is done and this morning I got excited about Dames rocket - I'm wondering whether the Orpheus story is that one - is it? In the matrix of lostness, abstraction, a Celtic magic of my country - I didn't go underground, I went into silence, more silence, dependency, beauty bare - it felt to me like a poetic work, is this it, is this the thing that will turn me on? I understand it more. What do I need:
I've been somebody who works with time - I circulate times into each other - my own, and other eras too, minds of other eras - when I began the journal and even before, when I was a child, I had a strong sense of wanting to remember, of giving future selves a record. 21 Justin is showing his madness. I'm not liking what I'm seeing. He asked to phone so he could vent. He sent the journal editor a complaining letter. He is using words like 'licked.' I can see why he is 40 years old working at a picture framing business, living with roommates. He's not getting what I say. He's a crank. It's deep. It rained hard yesterday. Cold and grey this morning. I was reading Dave's Grande Prairie County book yesterday after I'd done what I could with Kri. What did I like in it. Discovering that farmers went back to horses during the depression because they couldn't afford gas, and so that was why Ed was threshing with teams into the 50s. Imagining townsites being surveyed for instance at Sexsmith and Hythe. Knowing which areas were settled first and where the original trails were. 1909 McFarlane surveyed 37 townships. 74 not yet subdivided into quarters. He went back and subdivided 74 and others in 1910. Frank Kinderwater was from Wisconsin though his father Adolph came from Germany. William's wife died before he came. Edison Trail summer 1911 with Frank - NW2 and NW3 were scrip - filed 9 Sept 1911. Another quarter as homestead. Then went back to Wisconsin. Frank brought Pauline in 1912. 1912 to Ed's marriage in 1943 is 30 years of cultivation on that quarter. Epps on the land in 1933. Frank was 21 in 1911 so would have been 65 in 1955, whole adult life. 23rd On the deck in sunglasses. The weekend at Tom's. Saturday - met him at the 5 o'clock screening of The wind that shakes the barley. Walked to Whole Foods after, walking my bike and carrying the laundry, then ambled home with steak in the dark. Walked through his neighbourhood talking about the movie, pushing a bike the way people do in their 20s, cooked. Garlic mashed potatoes with peppered steak, fried onions and cabbage. Ate watching Frontline. He said I was looking almost winsome, which surprised me. My face when I lean on my hand feels padded, which it never did before. When I'm lying in bed with my head near Tom's I listen to his quiet breathing and something like thank for his breath, as if he could die anytime and then I would want to have cherished his aliveness while I had it. In the morning he woke me before I wanted to be awake. He needs to go to the Union Tribune box and get the paper. Said there was mauve next to the mountain. I love his gratitude for ordinary things. The paper box. His renewed driver's license. Dinner made in his house. There wasn't milk for my tea so he walked to 7-11 and got some. I cooked breakfast. Had the French doors open onto the scent of honeysuckle, which was there all weekend. Blooming arms of it around the acacia's pot. A coyote bush thriving in one of the agave pots - We read the papers. He was looking good. There was a real kiss. I bent over to read something on the floor. He felt me up. Sat there showing me his boner. I was looking at it doubtfully. Not proud of my body, maybe my pussy smells bad now, there's flab around my whole middle, my breasts are nice and soft but they're pointing down. Starting to. Oh alright, but we have to put the venetians down. He licks my clit. Is it the first time he's done it well, I'm thinking. Very well. And so on. Then we're lying quiet with our heads together on the pillow, Sunday afternoon on the other side of the venetians, the French doors open in the kitchen. Birds all day, a pair of bluejays, mockingbirds, doves, a small yellow one, earlier a lot of swallows or something like. A couple of times I've noticed that I am hearing music and not remembering what it is though I know it. Ismael Lo. Walked to Blockbusters and got Talking Head's Don't make sense, David Byrne young. In the evening talked Tom into watching Animal Planet on elephants and then a PBS show on dogs, which we both liked - sheepdogs herding on a steep rocky hillside, expertly moving sheep that flow like water between the rocks. I said to Tom when we were in bed with the lights out, Do you think we'll ever do it again? He said Maybe in another year if the mood strikes us. That was a good answer because the mood did strike us. It wasn't the way he used to do it, when he thought he should. 25 I got restless late afternoon yesterday and took my bike across the park to Tom's. Found the door open behind the screen and Tom sitting on the edge of the bed with the laptop on the café table in front of him. There was sun on the treetops, honeysuckle on the rail, and he was writing. In the mail I took with me to Starbuck's yesterday morning there was a Grande Prairie County map showing the owners of every quarter. I liked seeing that our quarter is now owned by Joseph Kinderwater, who must be the great-great nephew or the great grandson of William Kinderwater, who homesteaded it. That seemed just right. Dave also sent a xerox of the pages of the Fairview history book written by Eunice Boyd Powell. There's a photo of her white-haired, erect, slim, bright-eyed, surrounded by grown children. She and Rees after years living all over the country in grain buyers' housing, bought land in Buffalo Lakes, and there they are on the map only a couple of quarters east of NW2. Her youngest daughter works at the credit union. My visit was going to be short but we sat leaning our heads together on the blue couch and he talked about the resistance he feels when he sits writing. He said "It's interesting" in a beautiful tone, lightly thoughtfully and self lovingly. Almost a month since I last spoke to Susan. Every day, probably, I ask whether I should contact her, whether I really want to cut her off, and always something is adamant. I don't know why. I am trying it out. I've been feeling something I haven't known in this way. I am pausing to think how to say it so it isn't trite. It's that there have been many kinds of time and will be more. For instance I have had strong recall that helped me write well and now I don't. I'll write another way. With Tom there have been sublime and miserable times and right now is serene and graceful as never before and this one will pass too. Wednesday morning. Sun on the roof, a lot of twitter. It's 7:30, chilly. Transcribing 1977 tiring because most of it is notes. What can I say about those credulous times. Jane Roberts notes. The journal gives no sense of what was significant in the time, the photos. It gives very little of the people I was with - I'd like to have more of Helmer for example, any of them, and the places. My memories for the time are outside what I wrote, my knowledge of what happened is outside what I wrote. What I did write often was a hard willed scrutiny of my own consciousness. It now seems pathological and a waste, and yet that same state was also taking good pictures, my best. I don't understand what that was. Artificial and deeply immersed. The times were about magical consciousness, etc, people were reading that sort of thing, drugs had made an ethos that reached even people who hadn't used them, and I'd been interested in 'consciousness' since Hegel and existentialism at Queen's. We'd been reading books that said we could enter marvels and claim powers by altering consciousness, and so I sort of claim powers and I guess I did document how I got to them, but I don't think that hard selfconscious scrutiny was good for anything.
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Jon Stewart - you're beautiful. PBS finally speaking up. 26 Transcribed a lot of PRC sheets today, not the raw notebooks but notes in origin and other extracts. I saw that I did come to a style that was alright for the place. When I read it now I feel the paradise openness of the place, of myself in it. It's as if the written anxiety was what happened when I opened something that had been closed, should I say my language self was overwhelmed, the anxiety was hers? Was it something like that? And meantime energy flooded into the sensory self. Is it hemispheres? Language hemisphere gets anxious when it's connected. So the writing that's good is right hemisphere writing. I can use that style for anything in this piece, it is the right voice for the place. Maybe Dave can suggest how I can give the slides to the place. I'd like anyone to have them. Good prints. Notes in origin on CD is priority.
Tom's computer crashed again. He hadn't backed up. When he told me it was like being stabbed. Email from Rowen this morning, he'd read about himself in the journal story about Ed's funeral. Logan this morning. Transcribing notes in origin text and some of the earlier variants. Sometimes I'm taken by rhythms I found. From 1977 when I camped on the yard to 1978 when I went back with a car and money and was in the Olson house wrecked for writing, to 1979 when I was in the lake house, to 1981 when I was writing the play of the weather and finding work that still holds my ear - 5 years earning myself in so much detail and distress - and then there was no one who could read it and I was shut out - they ganged up on me - it must have been that, was it that? 1981 to 1984, three years where I was working in what I had become and pitched into starvation, betrayal, exclusion.
I was making something from what I believed about art, that it should come out of quality in a life - so the best writing in the lake house came from lived beauty. I asked Rowen whether he is still interested in photography and he said with joy It's my thing. Last night I spoke to Robert when Row wasn't home. He was loud but he cared about Rowen's spirit, he wanted Rowen to tell me about his laptop himself. He was like a dad with a teenager: "I was away for a few days and the house was alright." Rowen loved Arizona. They were photographing quail, several kinds. Drove to the Grand Canyon. Ecuador in fall. 28 Woke this morning and had to futz with getting Statcounter code onto the two pages that hadn't been showing visits. Logan has been reading the journal! He's Baltimore. Someone in San José. The times I open the computer hungry. For something to happen, for something to be. 30
I don't miss Susan though many days I ask whether I do. Copied field & field this morning. It read with a lot of authority and scope. When I read it I hear the taped voice which is tonally so right that it makes something specific and unique of what would be otherwise quite an abstract score. I mean it's a beautiful accomplishment. No one has done anything like it, it comes out of a state it took years to build, one that is true to my place and independent of the social infantility there. Not about but from. It builds from so many others. It is a marvel. What should I do with it. Google finds me briefly mentioned in three books recently published in Canada, with Rimmer, Elder, a short list. If I live long enough there'll be Being about and the writing too, converging, and work & days? Journey to Ixtlan Dec 1960
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