| time remaining 1 part 1 - 2014 september-november | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver 27 September 2014, Lotus Hotel I'm there, 662. 28 Now it has really begun I'll report. What dirty windows. Through which level sun from its equinox east. Bit after 8. The street roistered until 4. Something bit me, in series, firey spreading bites that this morning don't show. By 4 the biting had stopped, but my legs and hips ached from carrying and lifting. The hiss was louder and had a sharper edge. I can feel the walls trembling with Hastings traffic. The paint in this light is greenish beige. Handyman work is sloppily done - floor laminate stops before the inner edge of the sink-fridge-stove, the plate covering the broken edges of the door doesn't fit, electric outlet covers slant. The toilet roll holder is missing one side, burner plates are filthy and rusted. The towel rack in the bathroom is bashed in. Good tea. Seagull. I'm alright on 3 hours sleep it seems. The street's hell-folk already yelling. White plume boiling straight up off the top of an International Village apartment tower. Rowen and Freya last night carrying tables on stairways. When I dropped them off at home the two of them walking up the dark path together, Rowen taking her arm. Things that broke in the move: the lighter-colored stone tile, the last of the drinking glasses, Tom's blue bowl. The desk chair has rips in its silk cover. - But there it is and the cedar table from 824, that I found in the junk shop on Commercial and wrote the doc on. And the tapis de Taznakt.
- What do I see, bit after 5. Sun from the west onto the broad pale sloped blank side of is it a smaller hotel. Single gulls catching light on their white underwings when they turn. The other window has another kind of scene, a long flaking tin cornice with ledges pigeons lined up on this morning, flat roof with a rusted pink chimney and a little silver house-shape. Beyond, interrupted bits of greyblue mountain. Traffic a grey smudge, voices below, no one excited this time of day. I'm sore, draggy, hissing. Don't have my machines yet. To the south, a bit of False Creek at the end of the street, prosperous Asians streaming out of the International Village complex across the road, drug deals in the alley. Vous ecoutez Place a l'opéra - interviewing Karina Gauvin. I've moved in strong impulse - to Vancouver the first time, to San D, to Mesa Grande - and this time I just feel I'm in the wrong place. Why am I thinking of the Palm Springs man -
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- This morning as I was making tea I plugged in the Mac Pro, the monitor, the keyboard, turned it on. The monitor lit up. Asked me for the mouse. It was 45 days and 1800 miles since I shut them down on the morning of August 15. - There now across the room the desk, the pink chair, my machines including the CD player, AND the California gooseneck lamp I bought in OB when I'd first moved into the Golden West. And Oma's crocheted runner. And there next to it in a box the collection of Orpheus papers. Scent of pink lilies. Pigeons wheeled and wheeled in the long last light. A reflection from an International Village tower printed a firm pale rectangle of light on the wall beside my bed. The eastern sky at 7:07 is a pale platinum pink. In the 2nd floor food court across the intersection I can get Thai, Chinese, Indian, Malay, Vietnamese, Mexican, Indonesian. Steak. Have bought a ticket for Godard in that theatre. Walked to the Harbour Centre library and brought home Barry Lopez on international air freight. We looked down from the keep of our own wind, through layers of wind, to wind on the water; below that the surface current ran counter to currents deeper still. It was likely new moon when I came here. 1st October 1450-1550 Italian humanism late medieval free cities Florentine Platonists Intense civil life, poetry, 'natural magic,' ie for instance engineering the vast and devouring space of many thousands of years philosophy and all that devil's muck 1517 somber phase of the wars of religion The artist, unencumbered by status, had his work assessed by the whole community. daring mathematical cosmology of the Pythagoreans, the physics of the Ionians, the atomism of Democritus, the astronomy and the metamathematics of Eudoxus, the transcendent speculations of the Platonists. Aristotle concentrated on setting up an encyclopedic arrangement giving man and his activities the proper place ... master of the language of direct experience and common sense Heraclitus ... Stoics ... reality ... flux ... law ... all is matter A bed raised off the floor - thank you Bob - bedding put through the hot drier, apples in the celadon bowl, On land repeating against traffic noise, cream silk drapes I'll have to recut and hang as blackout curtains, shirts on hangers, new pyjamas from Value Village, once more a sore-leg day, to the jeep on the bike, driving around looking for drapes and maybe a filing cabinet, storage to dig for small things - salad bowl, dishwashing basin - parking the jeep, biking to Carnegie for lunch, biking back, finding Bob putting diatomaceous earth where the bedbugs might like to be, having to run around carrying quilts and pillows and sheets to the laundry, coming back and making order - now with The age of adventure, a falling-apart '50s copy left in the laundry room. Leonardo was the most original natural philosopher of his own time. That time did not possess what we call science, but it possessed art in a sense that is lost to us. ... law of ... operating inside nature. 2nd Thomas More reformed education and advocated religious tolerance but in his Utopia insisted that anyone who conceived "so vile and base an opinion as to think that the souls do die and perish with the body; or that the world runneth at all adventures governed by no divine providence" should "count not in the number of men much less in the number of their citizens." Michaelangelo's anguish at facing divine judgment with his own irreducible nature As for true painting, it is a music and a melody that the intellect alone can perceive ... drive Michaelangelo gradually from sculpture into gigantic architectural design somber old age in a closed and dusty room with death graven in each and every one of his thoughts. He worked nights with the help of a candle that he had fitted into a helmet-like cap. Charles Bowden - read his piece about covering sex crimes yesterday - today I look him up, telling Tom about him, discover he died at the end of August, my age, in his sleep. He went for broke. Tom won't want to know, because Bowden went for broke in Tom's beat, and Tom did not. - Langeweische wrote the obit in the Times, another hero of true report. How hard it is to provide for myself now - going to Choices Market on the bike worried about energy and distance, then worried spending money - 3 and a half days' allowance for 4 things - missed one of the curbs and fell, young couple concerned - struggling to get the bike through heavy doors - today's meal was not enough food - I was looking at young people in the West End remembering what it was like to buy whatever I wanted, feeling I'm out of life - and because I'm in the city, every time I go out struggling into a tight bra and presentable clothes, shoes that are too heavy or hard to put on, knowing that when I wear out my good things - 3rd The street is quiet at 6 before daylight. All-night methadone dispensary across the street, the Chinese towers mostly dark. A bright planet. Cloud streaks across the pale east. A seagull. Old men shelved behind dirty good windows across the way - I'm assuming old men because the good windows are covered by yellowed newspaper or broken blinds - all blind - no there's one with plants on the sill - in two I see the blue light of a TV screen. Flamingo feathers over the inlet, pigeons wheeling against. Abbott & Pender. Time and temperature on a big advertising screen on the corner. Aristarchus to Copernicus twenty centuries. as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his own being loyally - is Montaigne Godard at 84 - his current version of Anna Karina - slender dark-haired naked young woman - a dog starring as natural life - shreds of nice music so brief he doesn't need to credit them - 3D pushing it further into artifice - I liked best the way it made text stand out in front of image - full house, hardly anyone walking out - his Pierrot le fou devices, quotation and disjunction, spun far out of coherent orbit, but we're ready to watch anything he does, we're asking nothing, or at least I wasn't - he makes stuff - expensively - that's what he does. Two things keep giving me pleasure, the smooth creamy look of my sheets - they are the 500-thread-count guestroom sheets I got for Emilee - and the silky feel of my hair. Otherwise - I just transcribed the last pages of In America and notice how much better I feel already. 4 3 bites last night. Quiet 7:51. The wage slaves let loose last night and will again tonight. What there is: Abbott & Pender: the Lotus Hotel 5 Queer as folk till 1 o'clock and went straight to sleep till 8. First photos yesterday. Said I'd volunteer at Carnegie. Shakespeare in Continuing Ed.
Holographic manuscript, folio, quarto, octavo Graphology - two forms of s - plural and cap, and the initial and medial V introduced later, v and u, i and j - vowel vs consonant. & a logogram to keep line from exceeding column measure. &c. Mulcaster Elementarie 1582 Punctuation conventions a millennium to develop Slash / is a virgule Punctuation marks in new use [in S's time] Prosody - English is stress-timed, French is syllable-timed English had more monosyllabic words than Greek or Latin Meter and network timing - Anton Lesser as the fool [Feste in Twelfth Night] was the one thing in the foolish plot that held me hard - he's written as Shakespeare himself and acted with heartbreaking transparency. I adored Lesser every moment I saw him, and Shakespeare behind him. The comic characters and noble leads - except Viola - were nothing, but he in their midst an incandescent coal. I mean I think there are older, deeper, more angular thoughts in your mind than you have yet let come out. - She says to Vita. 7 VW's letter excerpts - she has that free rushing vivid quality from the start, in her teens, has it from her family, in her family. She's very outright in her loves too, like a child, as she says, she adores her own, and in her diffidence is very confident. I see her in correspondence with such a pang at not having what she has, brilliant people who want my letters and would reply to them. Here on the fringe of empire there are none. The pathos of waste in my effort with Tom, who was even further into the fringe than I. I'm stamping my foot at having to be so ill-born. I have worked hard but nothing makes up for bad placement. 9 Men in the street yell fucking as if it's what they are mad at, angry at what begot them, angry at what's cursed in them. Woke from such sad shattered dreaming. A schoolbus driven by a thin naked young woman, full of other peoples' odds and ends to be taken across the border and stored. What I was feeling was how other people have made lives - have lives long established in houses, have houses and live out of them. I have a journal instead. I said to Paul, desk is the essence of home, more than bed. And yet I'm afraid of desk - should I say because it's lonely. Yes I have to get internet-connected, so desk is not so cut-off. Pigeons, gulls, crows. - Late style "when the artist who is fully in command of medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it." Exiles says Said in On late style. I have a little feeling for bedbugs. They are so small, small ovals like black sesame seeds, and they are so valorous: they desire me with such intensity that they quest over vast terrains, in and out of such dead-ends of folded materials, some too smooth to hold their feet, some, like my green blanket, too gigantically hairy. They know when they're discovered and dart for the nearest darkness, a crease in my sleeve. I suppose they follow a smell of blood [no, of carbon dioxide], a thread of scent in the labyrinth. Months later - their months - there it is, warm skin. They puncture and suck and then immediately move on to a fresh place. They're in joy of accomplishment and will go home but sometimes then they are suddenly squashed out of existence, a smear of blood on my finger. They like a covered, very warm, very still body in the dark, but when that hasn't been possible hunger drives them to dangerous daylight raids on a moving and watchful source. Valentina gave me solvent yesterday to get rid of black marks all over the new floor. I kept going and scrubbed my aluminum lintel that had decades of dirt in its grooves. The hall by the elevator stinks of old men in old hotels, a so-familiar smell. The corridors may sometimes have been mopped but their edges along the baseboards are a rim of ancient dirt. The windows are solid, double-paned so they baffle quite a bit of noise, but half their catches are broken. The deep sills are wonderful. The floor is badly-laid cheap laminate but it's pale and clean. Baking soda seems to neutralize bites. Something bit my toe at 3am. I turned on the light and saw the little thing immobile on the sheet. It's the first that has figured out how to get under the covers. Sky tonight - it's a bit before 5 - a fibrous silver. Mist on the glass. There's my USA bowl piled with macs. I have to go to Norman's on Commercial to get good ones. - Curtains, I can make them now, have the iron. The fridge is a constant loud hum I hate. I should turn it up to the coldest setting when I go out and turn it off when I come in. After all my cleaning yesterday - before and after - I opened the Orpheus box and sorted sheets into folders. Looked at some of what I have. I saw I'd fulfilled some of the image ideas: found them in my own form, for instance desert mountains. Stuck two images up on what I feel as the chimney wall, the two old black and white NASA images that still have such magic of full black sky, not just lights but airs and intimations, sifts and small bursts, with simplest human shapes they show against: a ship, a post. They are a perfect pair in a way I don't think I can analyze. I don't know where to start.
- Candle lit for the first time. De Kooning's beautiful face. I brought the D800 and the Marantz and organized a shelf for software books. I need one of my chairs don't I, so two can sit at the desk. The street sounds wet. In a week there's experimental sound at the Orpheum Annex; I'm in a cultural town again. 10 Saturday morning. Rain. A new bite wakes old bites, and the whole surface of the skin to some extent. A bite can revive over 3 or 4 days. The ones I'm feeling now are from the night before last. Fermentable sugars that draw water into the intestinal tract poorly digested or absorbed, colonic bacteria. 6-8 weeks on low diet. 11 In the journal the decisions between emotional balancing and reporting accuracy. I so regret that Tom and I missed our chance.
- An arrow flying south.
- [We made this notes on Monty Jones and Ruby] The Indian man digging into a dumpster in the alley has his arm in a slot under the lid, which is locked. He's dancing in a drugged state. I heard him yelling and went to look. The alley around him is junky, tagged, grey, very dirty. I'm thinking Shakespeare knew many scenes like this one.
13 I asked Louie to bring one of the two small chairs when she came to dinner last night. She brought the wrong chair, one of the uglier ones. She tried to convince me she had bought mine herself. She said, But they're the best ones. I was angry. Meantime she was bringing me beeswax candles, a silk scarf from Thailand and a bottle of Glenlivet. But I want my chair. 14
Late style - the idea of late work not late style - he doesn't mean late style, which suggests insincerity - question is what do artists do in late life, IF they have managed to develop rather than peaking and falling off - ie what is human maturity at its best - artists being people who work consciously at self-formation - in a way that lets other people study their effect - I resist his premises - "aesthetic of minds that refuse connection with their own time" - no - it isn't that - because calling what one resists "their own time" valorizes the false and shallow as being 'the' times. Refuse an aspect of. Old Titian's discovery of the all-penetrating light which dissolves to a higher unity, or such as the finding by Rembrandt and Goya, of this metaphysical which underlies the visible ... for such as The art of the fugue which Bach in his old age dictated without having a concrete instrument in mind, because what he had to express was beyond the audible of the music. return is subject matter to some scarcely remembered beginning point This is the prerogative of late style: it has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradictions between them. What holds them in tension is the artist's mature subjectivity unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile. - 4000 holes - John Luther Adams. Beethoven's banged chords making mountains, it seemed to me. Not desert mountains, thickly forested gigantic solid granite Alaskan mountains. Plinking percussion hits were the holes, which were stars. It was desert at first. It took me a while to be all the way with it, and then it was like when the chord/cloud water shapes bloom up from the lower frame line in OB Pier 5 later on. His electronic background was long broad sweeping dark shapes. Something moving, air, cloud, freighted wind, I didn't know what, and the piano in front of it was building solid shapes with sharply lit massive stone cuts as there are in a range. The whole concert - I was thinking about sound-sight relations all the while. For the Adams piece I had to close my eyes, the sight of the players' bodies and instruments annoying, irrelevant - which they aren't always. The sight of some singers is good - the New Zealand woman showing a purse-mouthed frizz-haired little granny though her sounds were crystalline. The bio-music girl touching her mosses nicely but with an effect of wrenching horribly unnatural sound, and backing herself up with images that had only thematic not structural-causal relation, and so were nothing but distracting. Online again, more time wasting but more company. Luke linking me to his Occupy London action. What can I do about getting better with sound - can I ask to consult. [Monty Jones and Ruby's nest notes] 15 A bad bite last night - woke me as I was just fading - couldn't go back to sleep - violent slashes of noise - dark broad slashes - skateboards, a truck, a plane - 3:30 - and it went on - so then the day was lost to bedbug efforts - washing sheets, heating pillows and covers in the dryer - talking to Valentina and TJ in the laundry room about what to do - going to Army & Navy to buy vinyl mattress and pillow protectors - sprinkling diatomaceous earth in edges - laboring to reconstruct the bed - tired. Early Modern English 1500-1750. OE through from 1100s. 18 Two to two and a half thousand naked eye stars in best conditions. 219 million seen with telescopes. - wild tracks - no picture lower thirds - text room tone We always ran ambience tracks under the interviews. dramaturgy sorting into topics Back up some sequences and play into the one you're working on. used to carry credits nonlinear = random access FCP launched by Apple 1999. 19 Luke writing from Occupy London. Populist sovereignty. Common ownership. Social production. Use value, political challenges to the elite. 20 Sons and lovers superbly read on Naxos. I hadn't remembered the early chapters, the Morel family at home. They are so good, so full and natural, full with place and weather and the parents in their difference, the mother like M at home chafed by her husband and in loving confluence with her children, the way she follows William and Paul in her thoughts all day, when they leave home. The liveliness of adolescent children together. Saturday Telus connected me to the net and today I took a bus to Broadway and bought connectors so that the Mac Pro's audio is routed through my existing speakers. - A psychological prime that triggers the body to mend itself. 24 [SFU classroom] I'm horrified by all these old faces. Horrified by the women's girlish weak voices. 50 old people in 4 rows. The lecturer is a thick little dwarf in a leather jacket, short-sleeved shirt in a no-iron fabric. He's South African? Quite a few years back. - Is now giving a plot summary - now is expostulating at length about wrong ways of studying Shakespeare - now he's promising to talk about reading, which I wd like if it turns out to be true and not too laboured - now he's making a silly joke - "Am I exaggerating?" he asks, but he's belabouring the obvious, oh dear, is he doddering? Now he's on a tangent about Hamlet. [Sigh.] He's spelling out. "This overdone, or come tardy off cannot but make the judicious grieve" - I'm grieving. What is his vanity? He has a cross red turtle face, Africaans preacher father? "All of these themes are there, right there." Themes? They aren't themes, it's a situation. He announced proudly that he'd been a psychotherapist, he wants themes. - evoke limitless distance, suspended time, deep longing Earth and the Great Weather sonic geography, sonic geometry surrounds the percussion with auras since 1999 color field compositions 27 - And a full class of mostly women sitting as if in pews. Alright so I could have known not to try seniors' classes. Room poisoned last Friday, 3 days ago. Still getting bites. They are happening later, almost at dawn, as if they have had to come further. A cat in the body of a man. I was looking at his tight little rump. Put my hand on it. All hard muscle. Thinking how to get him to have sex with me though he wasn't really a human. Was showing him how to get into my bedroom by slipping under the red rug hung over the opening into the living room - it was the East Place bedroom and the rug was the London red embroidered Turkish carpet. A lot more dreaming. Min's cabin with Leslie, in some quite distant outlying region. Last 3 days in Sketchup, finished the 26x10 [housetruck] and this room too [bed and bike] [beautiful chair] [seagull's view], and have posted screengrabs. Look at them with satisfaction again and again the way I used to look at my photos. Have some photos from these windows but never look at them that way. "Manjusri is said to bring wisdom, retentive memory, intelligence and eloquence." Ming Dynasty 1368-1644 28 Waking at 6 to the sound of a wet street. Diamond drops on the black glass. sound panels tenderness, melody, simplicity and clarity forbidden when we were coming up without a love for the listeners
- Is Cage talking about Lou Harrison attack polyphony and stacking, verticality horizontality of melody dust into dust solitary and time-breaking waves velocities crossing in phase space triadic iteration lattices clusters on a quadrilateral grid dust rising through the aeolian mesh tightly braided band of wind noise the noise floor the desert played by a piece of music the world had become amniotic ... air was alive noise spectral saturation texture, line, sparse points an interpreter of his music ... a solitary vertical presence in a mostly horizontal sonic landscape filter the noise just right and you can hear anything we had come to hear the voices. Inuksuit -
Dark waves 2007. Figure of the composer. I've been wanting his hat. And more. What about it - he has the glamour of 'Alaska'. I don't want Alaska but I want to work / to have worked out of a place that is my place. He thinks about painters, his music is maybe visual in a way I can understand. I had a moment thinking of the furthest work I could do, feeling that if I were doing it I wd never again need to say anything bad about anyone, I would live beyond everything I've needed to defend myself against. (Is that true? Yes.) (But only if it were recognized? No.) Become ocean is online. Oh be peer - The silky ease of the third movement when it comes on. There's a way of talking about his work - music that's about the wave nature of all. - Undone so many. 31st Thinking of you at the Lighthouse Mission writing artist in the blank for occupation. - Schafer - keynote of a time-place - the being keynotes I've felt on falling asleep. fragments of bird songs amid broad, slowly changing textures of sustained tones In another sense your work is now your home ... maybe art is the home we're always building for ourselves. in the dense masses of broadband noise I clearly heard voices auras derived from the inner resonance of the instruments - Bad night, continuous little bites. Borsalino fedora for $412. 1st November Fortification of diatomaceous earth around the wall-side of the bed, one bite at 3:30 then slept till 8, slept through Hallowe'en on the street, Friday night and fireworks in the parking lot. Sun. Biked the False Creek seawall to Granville Island. Familiar euphoria of flowers, fruit, good living heaped. Beautiful food. Musicians with circles of people around them. Crows in a clump of unleafing sycamores, blackbirds in a song frenzy in some berry tree. Blue-silver sheen of the forest of towers across the water. How could city design have been done so well. Posted What there is yesterday. 2 C's freaked by the bed bug story. I remembered Kristeva on contamination. "Successfully negotiating and renegotiating abjection sets up the precarious border between self and other," "the other who becomes the catalyst for the return of repressed otherness - the abject - in the self that provokes hatred and loathing, which in turn can lead to acting out against others or to sublimating the experience of uncanny otherness through representation." It's in Powers of horror.
I'm feeling a sort of humorous friendliness toward my trials - two good nights of sleep. What sort of day - platinum-colored - a few light rain streaks on the window, short slanted lines of rain-specks. Vivaldi on CBC's Baroque stream. There's a gull plodding north along the opposite roof-edge. Entwined melody-lines of two sirens converging somewhere near. Pigeons on the Abbott Mansion cornice with their necks drawn down. Gull shaking its wings on the point of the little silver house's vent stack a suitable day-monument, turning to look this way and that. 2nd of November is what, All Soul's Day of course. - There's the gull posted. The best photo so far is October 28th, why. Mystery of compositional balance. Somehow the shape of buildings in a complex low heap. Radiance of sky. Detail of a few lighted windows; a gull in profile; keep in yellow on the edge. Strong feel of a wet dawn. Nov 1st is good but in a different way I think. The walker's shadow does something extra. It's in a style that has never been mine but it's strong in that style. It's photograph-y. All the same something about the way HOTEL is backward and upside down but reads instantly, and is visually so definite, dark.
- I knew I wanted to hear the unheard ... I knew it had to be its own space mathematical schemes controlling the interrelationships of rhythms and the unfolding of melodic patterns Morton Feldman - four pianists play through the same music at different rates, floating around each other second generation of American abstract painters ... Joan Mitchell the point at which your influences are assimilated and then your work can come out of the work Wagner Parsifal just intonation and sustained tones, tone clusters, modal harmony, static textures, extended lengths fragments of this melodic line appear within a sparse and static texture ... timbral contrasts, ... occasional loosening up of the static textures create a certain spatial effect incantations of indigenous names for places, birds, mammals, plants, seasons and weather ... in Inupiaq and Gwich'in, the language spoken by the northern Athabascan people pitch material is produced from returned open strings and natural overtones up to the 105th harmonic one Inupiaq who attended remarked that he kept going back and forth into the spirit world - What that could mean - it's as if I think I know - an effect of extremely tenuous evocation like some of the blue page phrase series. I hope to take the listener through strange and beautiful landscapes both real and imaginary 3 basic rotating textures Listeners should not perceive the piece as a sound object apart or a musical narrative.... Rather they should inhabit the time and sound like a place devoid of beginning and end. ... the experience of listening more like sitting in the same place as the wind and weather, the light and shadows slowly change. more abstract and complex aspects of nature Sensuous aspects are accessible at every moment; the work's large-scale logic, however, is inscrutable at first but gradually revealing over a half-hour, an hour. The listener, or analyst, who knows how the pieces work, can take pleasure in tracking the progress of the form, but in the process of listening must still submit to the vastness, the unknowability ... the accidental coincidences of large-scale process. In places the complexes of layered multitempo and independent processes become sufficiently absorbing that the attention is barely adequate to take in the pleasures of the moment. The pleasure of comprehending seems inferior .... It is almost as though a single phrase of Mozart were slowed down across an hour and blown up through several octaves of register so we could view it from the inside. [This is Kyle Gann in The farthest place.] the piece moves among four textural paradigms tremolos, sustained chords, and polytempo ostinatos ... every two or three measures they switch among the various sections of the orchestra rests, between which melodic gestures are articulated at several tempos at once auras electronically produced by complexly filtering percussion instruments auras played simultaneously with instruments the complex sonorities of percussion instruments conceal choirs of inner voices provocation of the word 'aura' The aura was not the sound but the place.
linear-mirror musical structure - each movement to a halfway point and then exactly reversed Birds have two voice boxes that they use separately and together. challenge for artists to move beyond self expression and beyond anthropocentric views of history, to re-imagine and re-create our relationships with this planet all the microtonal pitches that birds use a repertoire of whistles and flourishes it is as if the entire place starts to heave Scale of the work, whether arrangements of chunks of matter or "relations of velocity between infinitesimal particles". Deleuzian ecology based on a nondualist *
Music composed entirely of floating fields of color
melody and human presence In the newer music there are no lines left. auras by removing portions of attack and combining forward and reverse samples filtered pink noise ie with higher frequencies removed begins as an exhalation a drone of solid color not static but a breathing mix It feels solid, like a strong wind that holds your weight when you lean into it. sharply inhaled and swallowed away again It's as if it isn't the music that has entered and left the frame but that the listener's ear has simply raised and lowered the volume on ... I tend to think of sounds in terms of color or some more elusive sense of texture or tactile surface. The sounding image ... I can almost hear the whole piece at once or I imagine I can ... sometimes part of trying to get in touch with it is trying to draw it. I think with all these pieces I was after a kind of immersion in a saturation of color and texture and the physical presence of sound. The light within is essentially two harmonic fields ... the whole piece is just this rising and falling of these two fields ... their relationships to one another and those moments when they fuse into a more complex chromatic field. Each of these pieces I think of as one big complex sound. Dark waves Radio Netherlands Philharmonic Is only twelve minutes and I worked on it for a year - many drafts ... aspiration that I keep talking about, to make a piece that is one sound. I like realizing that oh, I haven't really solved that, there's more. There's another layer. foundation work on a new piece, which is the most difficult and most critical time ... I think it's not so much a fear of completion as it is a fear of not working. 3 Quiet Monday morning, 7 after the time change, black empty wet street below, a line into the door of the methadone pharmacy. Fresh wet air. Taillights, traffic lights, those nicely soft cream-white street lamps, reflecting on black. 4 Sometimes from my bed I'll see a wavering dark spread-out V of ducks passing high over the city, south. Couple of stragglers now hurrying to catch up. 5 Tabor home of the living dead. M in her little room huddled asleep though it's nearly 10. An iron-grey sky, fast freeway, spits of rain, so I have to keep turning the wipers off and on, trees beautifully half-unleaved though I can't see much at freeway speed. 6 A good night. What it takes: washing and hot-drying all the bedclothes, soaking the bedside table and desk surface in Windex, adding diatom powder around the bed. That much laundry costs $6 every time, and how often would I have to do it. Night before last almost as soon as I lay down many little bites along my neck and jaw. I wound tight in the sheet but as soon as I'd start to drift there'd be another bite somewhere. I go up about 2:30 and put my pillows at the foot end of the bed. That helped for a while but in the end I hardly slept. While the light was on I found an adult and three babies trundling quickly south across the floor. Got up exhausted at 7:30 to drive to Abbotsford. A dark day. The stunning new bridge, wide deck held up by many silver cords hung from high masts. Tolls charged by automatic license plate readers. Transcanada 1 so fast now that I got to the Tabor Home half an hour early. Large room with wheelchairs parked, old men with their heads hanging asleep, frail little women with thin hair. The social worker was pleasant but she lied. The chaplain later said what she had said too, in the same words. "They are doing life review. It's the hardest work they have ever done." They are not doing life review. They may have done that earlier, M did, but now they are doing nothing. They are enduring pointless days, M still able to protest that she'd rather be dead, but calmed down by Zoloft. There was the moment I came toward her in the dining room. There she was with her strong thick grey hair askew and her small red-rimmed eyes sitting with a breakfast tray. I had to tell her who I was. "Ellie? You used to be ...." She gestured the size of a bundled little baby.
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