| time remaining 1 part 4 - 2015 february-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
23 February 2015 Monday morning. Cinemateque tonight. Yesterday aft discouraged, disheartened, by the FB blank after I posted day 4's winter slides and the same blank after I posted day 5, I went to the Oscars event at the Vancity. Knew it was hiding out. Sat there for 6 hours looking at what many other people were looking at, noticing what many other people were noticing, relieved when there was an instant of sincerity in the great heap of anxious lies. The sight of a few people comfortably arrived in a sea of the unhappily insignificant. A panorama of roles, the fresh young being given their chance; the honored elders out of competition now; the few solidly mature; the overweight wives no camera hesitated on though they were glammed up as best they could manage; the fleets of indistinguishable old technical males and financial males; the recognized beauties stretching their twenties into their fifties by sophisticated means; the outré character shrewdly working that role to support an actual talent that would otherwise be ignored; the surprisingly middle-sized blandly unattractive leading men; the media sycophants pretending to be friends with actors pretending not to speak past them to the cameras. Was there anyone I'd like to know. The Polish director. The Mexican director. The directors in general, because they have the most interesting work. The writers, but they are invisible at this sort of event. Inarritu said "I don't have a career, I have a life." Like that, yes. Supposing my imaginary doc filmmaker perfect beauty was up for an award, what wd she wear. Toreador pants, a close-cut long-sleeved jersey, sandals, no makeup, no jewelry, her height, her physical perfection, her athletic good health, her young boyfriend, her old boyfriend, her dignity, her hawk profile, her incision, her sexual happiness, her work. 24 Current on blu-ray, hard-looking, not flowing, not radiant, and with its titles chopped off. On the other hand there I was with the two presenters making quite a lot of me and young persons in the audience asking questions after, Harry saying there should be a retrospective and Richard saying now they know you're back they'll be all over you. Amanda from the IRIS collective wanting to see my films. Pale blue dawn at 6:36, a few crows tumbling west at eye level, single gulls, the brief thick arc of a bus accelerating on Pender, single gull cries, now more hustling crows. I lit a candle to make an occasion. It's flapping by the peaked cullet. More crows in a scattering flapping constellation, rowing hard. White freesia with their long legs in glass at the window, showing against the pale blue and faintly lit by the lamp behind me - I mean not far off monochrome. The white frailly tinted. It's a soft moment. Layers of grey tissue in the sky thinly transilluminated. Now a higher contrail has caught sun, is a bright streak already thickening and drifting. Ducks - two ducks. Their flight is more intended. They beat ahead like bullets.
Armand Marie Leroi, Aristotle's lagoon produced and directed by Harry Killas 2010. 25 I was going to move, starting to pack, looking at my trashy bits and shabby furniture and thinking I should just chuck them. Then sometime later in a different dream I now can't remember I was picking new furniture. Should I think this has something to do with what I was doing yesterday, looking at collected sheets in old folders. What is it about [Ann] Kipling - what am I looking for in these other artists - those might be two different answers. Kipling impresses the way Agnes Martin does, by dedication, by ruthlessly impressive modesty - faint lines - refusal of realism - reference to unverifiable transcendences - a mythic tale of self construction. What I kept the clipping for was the story of living in the country and working in relation to nature in a complex, delicate sort of abstraction. An all-overness of the drawing too. Szlavnics for moiré as method and the sound of beat - her instrumental work doesn't interest me but the notion of working from acoustic facts does. With Mary Franks it's just certain of her mythic figures and the fact of mythic figures. 26 Her seriousness and the respect it commands.
The drawings when they are best - they're not networks - they are spatial - she talks about them as by-products of seeing - it's what's different about her as someone doing what for instance Joan Mitchell did - she isn't working purely in relation to the page, though she is doing that too. I like the day-scale, that she does what she can in a day, and done. That she conditions herself with yoga. The drawing is clearly the point; she's putting herself into larger confluence in order to mark the sheet of paper. I mean that she isn't drawing the landscape, she's structuring herself by means of the landscape and from that structure, drawing. That must be what she means when she says it's aggressive. Have I got it? It says yes. 27 A golden pig - better than that - an animal that might have been a large wild boar, a warthog, streaming with golden light, as if covered with long bristles standing on end and lit up gold-red from a sun on the horizon behind him. He appeared beside me and I took hold of his long bushy tail. Other people on my left beyond the fence were murmuring. This was on a long circuit I was making looking for my car (the Fairmont). I'd been in a building where I'd seen Leslie in front of rows of singers assembling. There was something she was organizing. She asked me something about how I am. I began a lament, one line into it her attention left, I ran away down a forest path, she ran after me and caught up. I think it was then I had to look for my car to go home at the end of the day. I couldn't remember where I'd left it so I was circling a large complex (anti-clockwise). On the long north edge there was a pasture in which a dog was chasing a bull on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Then the golden hog. Then the narrow western edge. I began to remember that when I'd arrived I'd come through a narrow passage between buildings and right there had found a parking spot. Now Luke was walking with me. Then somehow I was on the wrong side of a fenced field along the southern edge. Woke into daylight at 7. During the night I'd woken with bad black arm pain but had moved around to dispel it and gone back to sleep. Email from Jody this morning saying she rescues bright misfits the way I rescued her, and that she's bought a village house at 21 School Street. Yesterday David came and got me. We sat in the cave. I marveled. There was a wooden rowboat keel-up showing its fitted cedar slats and copper nailheads. Doors, windows, painted v-joint boards, gallon tins, a wooden spoke with one end carved to fit into the hub and the other blackened with road dirt. Tall glass-paned retail cupboards. A water tank. March 1st Rob to say Pat Mills died yesterday. When I went to pick up the jeep from Ben's Auto Body it wdn't start and then did and then when I'd stopped at Maple Leaf wdn't turn over. I went home and joined BCAA and this morning - it had to be 48 hours later - called them to start it. It's at S & M now. It's starting to be so decrepit, my jeep - dents here and there and the liner fabric sagging in places and the hood latch so stiff I can't open it and the vent buckled - from the time I drove up the highway with the hood unlatched and it flew up - and oh mold on the passenger seat and seatbelt straps, and a bad smell of kitty litter, and the R side carpet still soaked, and the ugly glue strip on the driver's side. I'm back to having an old car and no money after heavenly years with Robert's Automotive. And am limping more heavily, the shop window on Commercial Drive told me. Note from Don yesterday sounding honourably scared. I had an all-day flare of muscle pain. My arms ached from my fingers all the way up the sides of my neck. Shoulders very sore, especially the R. Bit sore still but better. There's been sun in my room. A golden warmth. - Mailed: BC Med, Pharmacare, GIS application, rollover and minimum distrib to TIIA-CREF, SS address change to Bellingham. 3 When I was describing the jeep to John yesterday I was marveling to hear myself quite grotesquely emphatic, exaggerating my tone. I was watching it come out of my mouth with silent steady astonishment, went away wondering what had been going on. Was it because he was looking at me with hard eyes? Now I think no, he was looking at me with hard eyes because I was trying to manage him into dealing with my leak, which he'd said he didn't want to do. - What calculates how to do that? Jacob K - note last night - after a year - saying he wants to write about Notes in origin in relation to another piece that has a relation of film and writing/photos. I'm guessing whatever he does will have nothing to do with me. Caffe latté at Acme sitting in the window in dazzling sun. 14 bus pulls up. Shabby persons. Persons with laptop bags. Person like an old prospector on a bike. Bald person sunning his head, carrying his cap. Plane tree across the street catching light in a whole net of straggling lower branches. Weird tall man in an overcoat, one of those tall men with small heads. Male and female police officers, comely both, strolling, she with hands behind her back. Two black dudes in black leather. Small Indian man in jean jacket and an orange hard hat. What are they up to at Hastings Urban Farm. Many people with sore feet. Have I seen anyone look happy. That American tourist woman maybe. Trolls and imps. Legless guy hunched forward in his motorized wheelchair like a racing jockey. 5 Yesterday the kind of day I love, working almost every moment, not stopping till midnight, hours vanishing. Sketchup of the poet's house from the early '80s, a simple farmhouse somewhere in the Fraser Valley, near a river, goodwill furniture, lino in the kitchen, Robert MacLean's big rubber boots on the step. What I love in this kind of work is the mix of minutely focused technical slog, spatial intuition, romantic memory and beautiful invention; for instance last night after I'd already shut down the model I thought of making a painted chest for the guest room, like the one in Cannon Beach. I found a chest, colored it red, and then realized I could paint it with Mary Frank images I've collected. There it is now in an attic room with a white-painted floor, similar white board ceiling, single bed, reading chair, small writing table, and worn carpet. It takes many days to finish a model. They are days I'm not making Cheryl's book or finishing my movies but they are happy days. Sunny days - so much dazzle that for an hour I can't sit at the desk. 7 I love to look at this room - it's unlike any room I've invented. It's a different palette, grey-green and white. The big soft coverlet looks like silk. 8 It's not the poet's bedroom, which was plain and bare, with the bed in a different position. What was I thinking last night, when I quit at 1:30, I was saying I don't write in the journal anymore, don't have anything I want to say. Then I said, but look at how much I have to say in visual invention, I've switched out of language into this other. This morning I sat down immediately to put a dormer over the stairs. It took all morning. It's a tricky problem of two parallel planes intersecting two other parallel planes at three different angles. I kept getting it wrong and trying again. Tiny errors in where lines meet can put everything off. All of this is complicated by the intersections of groups on different layers, which need to be opened and closed correctly to make different but related lines and surfaces. I'd hide something to get at something else and then not be able to unhide it because I couldn't figure out what group I was in when I hid it, or else maybe had erased something accidentally - don't know. But anyway the dormer is made and I sent late afternoon summer light through it and took its picture. In all of that tricky figuring-out I was feeling my brain's worseness in the mistakes I made and the halts I came to, but at the same time I was also thinking this kind of geometrical work must be good exercise for it. A different kind of problem solving is when I'm coloring and furnishing a space. Given the sage green stairs and rail - which are from Jean Waite - what bit of furniture should I put opposite the hall cupboard and what color should it be. A small bench to sit on while putting on socks. A pile of jeans to be put away. In the end, just the right grey-blue. The kitchen is still really the poet's kitchen. Big open space, archair to sit by the cookstove, kitchen table by a double sash window. Old fridge, old stove, screen door, pale blue lino of the same era as the stove and fridge. The living room is still empty. 10 Jaroussky singing across the room, tall in a dark suit, black shirt, open collar, singing beautifully with his whole body, swaying his arms. 12 I'd been on a train with small Luke, lying across the seat trying to read. The lamp I had with me wouldn't turn on. Luke was down at the end of the car with someone else. In the seat across from me was a young man with a small thin little girl. He got up and carried her to the end of the car where Luke was. I could hear her high little voice speaking in full sentences and thought she must be older than she looked. The young man came back carrying Luke and set him on the seat facing me. I thought he was going to sleep. I was interested in the young man but knew what I'd said to him when he came wasn't what I should have said, wasn't what I meant. Then I was with the young man talking about a group of people we'd seen. He said they were an entourage - not that word. I asked if he'd been in an entourage. He seemed the sort who'd been popular in high school, I was thinking with some resentment. Meantime a quite large black and white dog was there in front of us suddenly taking a run and jumping through a thick mesh of black branches, crashing through twice in a row, then lying floppy on the ground as people applauded. He looked an old dog. Then I was in a room where men were lined up on a ledge across from me, the young man among them. They were talking and I wanted to join them but I could hardly hear them. I was trying. I said to the bearded man on the left that I'd be interested in meeting a real god. I knew what I meant by that. They kept talking amongst themselves but then someone asked me a question. I don't remember what it was. I said I had already been doing that. They asked how. I was thinking how to tell about the work I did with students when I woke. It seemed the effort to focus to answer had woken me. What have I been thinking as I tried to write the dream. I was thinking of Don. What exactly. What I could tell him about what I want to be, now. I have two wishes/tasks right now .... One is the wish to be able to appreciate written poetry. I adore spoken poetry, but words on a page have no life for me. The second wish is to be able to articulate the reality of the great depths of meaning that occasionally open up for me in life and in encounters with others. He seems to me to be saying something like what I could say to him. He wants to live in soul, in the heaven of soul. He already does, at least when he speaks to me; what I feel in my chest is that. Open heart. - Here come the crows, it's 7:15 on a morning of streaked cloud. To have grieved his mother as he did is soul, certainly. 13 Someone at CFMDC saying do you want to place your new work with us so now I have a task. When I woke at 3:30 this morning I looked through journals back to Mesa Grande to see what I might've forgotten. What a lot of stopping and starting. What is that. - Thinking I'll stop the journal project now. I'll still transcribe and can still post index pages but I'm censoring myself too much now. What am I afraid of not saying. How I see people who feel they're my friends, sometimes. Shameful things about body failure from now on. Shameful things about cognitive failure. Is it too late, though? Can I convince myself of privacy? - Handel 1685-1759 in London fr 1712. "Almost blind and having lived in England for nearly fifty years." 25 Brook Street in Mayfair, museum. Da capo arias - repeated section, often ornamented. Beethoven said, go to him to learn how to achieve great effects; by such simple means. He was born the same year as Bach. l'instrument la plus proche de l'âme ... a cause de ça c'est fort et c'est fragile. Singing is an extra perception of what's happening around us. I have the impression that ideally to be a proper singer you have to be a singer 24 hours a day. leading me to anticipate more, not to undergo the sounds, not to undergo your own interpretation, not to listen to yourself and finally to be in a process of action and a state of acute physical perception Singers have teachers and conductors; they are not in complete isolation, which I guess I more and more realize is almost insurmountably difficult. - A day with Jaroussky. Loneliness now is a crisis every day. I don't work - I think this is true, is it? - because I have to do things to give myself virtual company. All day. That sounds like dissociation, is it? It says no. It's actual, mammal loneliness. It's what I feel in Paul K that makes me not want to listen when he starts to talk. Birthday card in my mailbox. Tom. $20 bill. Amazed. I can't think of any way to solve isolation for film. Technical help would be good but is there anyone whose taste I trust. Even asking someone's opinion seems a strategic mistake. 14 Dysesthesia - lesions of the nervous system, peripheral or central. Sensations such as burning. Sometimes described as feeling like acid under the skin. Disorders of pain sensation. Burning dysesthesia might accurately reflect an acidotic state in the synapses and perineural space. Some ion channels will open to a low pH and the acid sensing ion channel has been shown to open at body temperature, in a model of nerve injury pain. Inappropriate, spontaneous firing in pain receptors can also be implicated as a cause of dysesthesia. Patients suffering from dysesthesia can become incapacitated with pain, despite no apparent damage to the skin or other tissue.
- Have written Don. It grounds me.
The stately ground of Ombra mai fu with Jaroussky's clear bright line floating out above it. I'm thinking that beginning as a violinist helped his ease with the line, his intelligence in it. That he doesn't have vocal mannerisms? What I notice in how I speak to Don is how respectfully careful I am. I say 'maybe' and 'it seems.' I don't pronounce. Was going to find Feste for Don but here's Viola saying she loves the man who believes he loves Olivia - 15 Imitation game with Paul yesterday. I'm reserved with him. His Japanese girlfriend is backing off, he feels, and he's coming at me a bit, but without being interested in me. He's flattering but not curious or actually engaged in the moment we're having. He needs to talk not to hear. I understand that need in anyone living as we do alone at home, but it bores me in him. What about the movie. Completely specious in relation to Turing but Cumberbach's face wondrous. And then too the locations in England. The mythically touching figure of the isolated genius hated for his superiority and integrity, who has to hold onto his accurate estimate of himself against almost everyone's will to refuse it, who does hold onto it but at the cost of great pain, and who after long failure comes through into recognized success. Harry Potter, Paul said. The other thing he said is that anyone can identify with that story. Really? It says yes. From childhood? Yes. Have Jaroussky singing Italian in my head. At the moment Verdi prati, yesterday almost continuously Ombra mai fu. [film list] 16 Waking on a clear morning. There is a perfect crescent moon over one of the towers. The world is right when I can see that. A covered sky is wrong, wrong. melisma - more notes on a syllable Happy in these days getting movies ready. Singing. Starbucks Cambie and Water. It's a better corner, I've seen two good sweaters in three minutes. People used to study up on how to dress to flatter the figures they have. They don't now. The numbers of women in tight pants or yoga leggings who should think up something else. Her, though, she's perfect - Six people in a row standing in line in front of me poking at their phones. There goes Nathalie briskly crossing the street. How does that work: her she? Her points across the room, object of an actual act of looking (having looked) rather than a verb. Diectic hybrid language act. The Baroque's airy freedom of line like smoke rising into still air from a cigarette. That other countertenor has a Germanic sound too heavy for those lines. I can't listen to him. Scholl. The Japanese boy, Mera, though his line is broader in its curves - are there terms for the parts of cursive styles? - is lovely in another way. His tone spreads into flanges - spreads and then narrows again like a eucalyptus leaf - into the metallic sound Delphine Galou has too. That gives it a somehow otherworldly look as if in an animé drawn in a certain style. He's simple in that way. (Galou isn't, she's florid in a beautiful commanding way.) Jaroussky sings duets with flute or violin as an equal. 17 I sent the small house site my 14x25 petit palais and it's been ignored, the book says because it's architecture by a woman. The housetruck was publishable because it's a very modest space and I came across as humble, but this one uses the words plinth and temple. - But how could he not like it? It's lovely. Maybe it's a model of self that scares people? Bathroom with open double doors, unshamed clear colors, a lot of white, bed not hidden away.
- It turns out that my handwriting is between looped and italic styles. I was taught looped and remember a moment deciding to change. I don't remember whose handwriting I saw. When was it - the journals will say. Grade 12 I think. - Pale hill almost ready but I need another sound for the beginning - something clear and nearby to give a here before the there and to set the sound level correctly. 18 It said look in the Borrego file - there was birds760.wav. So the birds announce it before the title and then shut up in favor of boosted growl. Does it work? So now last light. Funny how all it needs is an invitation, not even an important invitation, and I can work all day with ease and such pleasure. Finish last light tomorrow maybe. Transcoded current and retitled it! Ftp-ed it. For trapline and bright & dark wd I have to digitize the sound separately and recut? 19 summer rain in dry country 5:04. A soundtrack piece - native track is fine - birds a few. Add thunder. Add background. Also desert lavender and grey wind, wild oats. O sea celadon surface abt 5 min. Ending still isn't good. Title too much? Hissing bubbles. - Honeycrisp apple Minnesota ag exptl station "larger cells than most apples, which rupture when bitten," "twice the size". 21 Prado Café, caffé latté, corner of Abbott and Hastings, wet sound of the street, Saturday morning. Haven't said the trees on Abbott have new little leaves and magnolias are blooming along the steps up to the skytrain. New café since Wednesday. They're playing good r & b. Last week i finished setting up:
almost finished:
invented:
transcoded and sent:
transcoded and rebegan on:
looked at, again:
transcoded:
22 Dave Carter and Franci yesterday in Strathcona. I get so imprinted, was going over it much of the night. Dave's head is larded up and he has a solid curve over his belt, isn't at all beautiful, is a successful professional who can take his family on skiing holidays and long trips to London, Berlin and Istanbul. Jacob who last seen was standing on his little tiptoes to look out the front window of the flat on Hawks, is about to start at McGill. Franci is as she was but more faded - everyone in the family seemed a bit faded, except for Dave. Franci was the mom, staying in touch with the kids, sorting out food for everyone. They're in prosperous successful midlife. Their marriage succeeds. He has his own firm. They're good to their kids. They both talk and they both listen. She's political. Why do I need to say any of this. Because updating is as if unreal. They were young in my house, when there was a grocery store on the corner and Koo in his automotive yard across the alley. She was touching his leg with her bare foot under the table when they invited me for dinner in the yellow house. The chicken was undercooked. I was privately alit in pain and desire. He lent me a candle lantern. I gave him poppy seeds. We met yesterday because of those times and not the present and so as if still in those times seeing them dimmed. I've been making 3663 Georgia. There in front of me has been the front door with its confessional window, pink-brown paint faded and chipping; the rusted pipe of the walkway rail; the Ace Hardware bench; the harlequin kitchen floor; the 5-paned French doors; the red pantry curtain; the curved plaster mantlepiece. In the bathroom the green tile along the bottom edge of the wall. The front room venetians partly up. I carefully made the Danish desk. There are pin-positioned copies of the Japanese print, the California painting, the lovely little mirror, the watch and pray card. Blue enamel cup on the desk, another by the sink. The marble-topped table. The Stickley end table. Two candlesticks with dark blue candles. The ironing board closet, which actually opens. Two single beds with their heads together. A green shower curtain. Even the water heater back in the pantry. The concrete stairs down from the sidewalk. 24 -With mailboxes, a couple of steps down. I tried the shadow command for the moment the sun rises and its angle from the horizon throws sudden slants of light all over the facing wall. A Tom moment, a moment of the sort of completeness there could be with Tom despite all his sleaziness and sloppiness and wicked rage. It's seven months. I still want to go back. Bangen. Is it alright to do that? It says yes.
On Sunday I put up a couple of photos on what there is. I like March fog a lot. Had it forgotten in the camera. What do I like: the different masses of buildings partly dissolved in grain. The way it shows very early morning in the lessening dark and the few lights. The balance of weights just right. Seagull on one side and a black rectangle on the other. A look of snow in the alley that's Dickensian. - I was on the way to the library, crossing the Keefer Building's white-tiled foyer to the elevator. I didn't see the wet floor sign and was hurrying to catch the elevator door before it closed. My feet shot forward from under me and the back of my head hit the floor hard. Left superior parietal. I sat there on the floor talking to the security guard with a goose egg rapidly forming under my hair. After the library I went to sit in Blenz with a London fog to look at my books before walking home. On Tuesdays they have dice in a little box. If you throw two sixes your drink is free. I'd given the barista my five dollars, saw the dice, picked them up casually and threw two sixes. 25 When I was working on a model of the skyshack last night I'd look up startled because small sounds of rain and wind had seemed to be sounds in that place. Reading The invisible history of the human race, which thinks about ancestry, I'm realizing two ways I feel I'm a break in the line. One is Mary and Ed left behind in the PRC when their families moved away, so we were without family habits, new in a physical place that then became what we actually were. The other was, is, my leg, which set me apart from what would have been genetic destiny - it was a strong interruption of physical pattern as well as a social off-set. I'm stood on new-found land. 2002 marked the beginning of the digital age: it was in that year that digital storage capacity became bigger than analog. - For the intro to In America. Modern English retains only twenty-five words from ancient British. The sky has shut down again. All day the sound of wet streets. I feel I have to run this sort of day out whatever way I can, it's good for nothing. 26 People in Africa from 250,000 years ago. In Israel and Algeria beads between 100,000 and 130,000 years old. Someone got to Crete more than 100,000 years ago. All non-Africans descended from a small group, not larger than several thousand. Europe only 40,000 years ago. North American natives mostly descend from maybe 80 people. The San people split off 100,000 years ago. Other migrations out of Africa earlier. Aboriginals 130,000 years ago. Neanderthals 500,000 - all non-Africans have traces. 85% have traces. Farmer and hunter-gatherer dna different. Denisovan species too. Hobbits of Indonesia. Y's of indigenous NA are European, mitochondrial dna native. - A disease that "turns you into an object of horror to your family." Pietro is simply unable to find his wife's mind interesting unless it mirrors his own. 27 Woke in black arm pain at 4 from a bad dream I couldn't remember. Dim void. Then it came back to me, re-formed. I'd been lying in a single bed with the head end next to another in which Jam was asleep. I reached my arm back to touch her, the way I sometimes used to with Tom. After a bit she came naked to lie on top of me, but when I tried to hold her got up and left. I was distressed, yelled at her for helping herself to my writing. Tom and Jam both so miserly withholding. Tom barely replied to the 3663 model. He can't bring himself to a warm line of email. After Jam didn't I promise myself I'd look for a lover with warm eyes. Tom's were never warm. 2720 is so small it didn't take long. It surprised me what I'd forgotten. What were the north windows above the bed like. I recovered them more or less but had to ponder for days. There are a few photos I checked. I'd forgotten the red cloth. Sweet satisfaction getting the red plaid blanket right. [afternoon pepper tree] [moonlight] Indignantly homesick. - Something that happens modeling places I've lived is more of a respect for how they are made, in the skyshack rainspouts, attic vents, the window's brass handle. The way those details articulate the structure. How many models is it now. Epp's house, Mrs Wold's, 824, 2720, 3663, 662, 760, poet's house, Mac's house, London roof, studio house, 14x25, 16x44, housetruck What's next - Burghley Road. [<< 1972] - I made fireplaces, a better version of the pither. Stairs. My bed on the floor. That lyrical young woman. Fond, sweet-natured. Simpler than I am. The objects in her space have such a charge, each with its recent story. The blue cushions Roy and I picked up in Germany on a curb day. The Devon pitcher. The orange cupboard at the bottom of the stairs, that I wrestled up the steps somehow on my own. Rosalynd's blue and white blanket, her African blanket she lent me. The striped bedspread from Heals. The rugs of course. The pither I learned about from Margaret in the Commune. The little icon I gave Sally. A filing cabinet the half-Siamese cat had her kittens in. The privet shadows. The pots I'd made. Greek bread toast! With melted butter and honey. Tony, Andy, Sarah, Madeleine. And o Luke. Jane Downey. London splendours habitual. A note from Zach - a short note - telling me he's teaching a workshop on felt sense. I cried a tear of happiness that he's understood the use of Gendlin. He knew I'd be pleased. 29 [two pages of notes from a meeting about Rowen's Staged project] 52 Burghley has complicated baseboards and mouldings. It took more than a day just to figure out the geometry. Yesterday I'd finally got to furnish Luke's end of the room. His bed. I'd forgotten the color of the quilt and then saw it in a corner of a photo. Blue of course - that blue duvet cover Roy got for him - Roy sometimes providing, there was that. Then I found some alphabet blocks in the warehouse, imagine that. Spilled some of the floor and set a row of them on a shelf of the orange cupboard to spell LUKE, rotated them individually! Before folding up last night took a photo of sun spilling through the window onto the Marsh Arab carpet next to Luke's puppy bed and the orange cupboard, tree outside. Very satisfying. Seeing it's a whole project, places I've lived. A tumblr site in the end maybe.
Do I need to stay here to the end of May despite the cost - It would have text about the places but also about what it's like to remember/draw them. Breakfast with Rowen and Freya yesterday to talk about his project he wants me to write a grant proposal for. Staged. Freya picked up the check. She's bright, it turns out. 4.2 gpa. Rowen looking nice in an orange hoodie, earnest, intent, manly. 3-day beard. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That's where it is. That's where I have to go. The core of their being was inexhaustibility, and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. April 1st Jane Eyre on Naxos, beautifully read. Passages that struck me now and weren't at all familiar were passages where she is outside in air and weather, once up early in the winter dark to take a coach to Lowood and once after she alights from a coach at an unknown crossroads on a midsummer evening and sleeps in the heather. - And then when she's drenched and exhausted at ten at night staring through a low window into a kitchen lit by a candle. 1847. She imagines long conversations with Rochester. They banter. She's lucid and strategic. She adores him and so thinks how to manage him. She's shown thinking what anyone is like, evaluating. We never see them talking about the new science. She's anticonventional but startlingly pious at times. - Oh, another scene where she's walking in the orchard at Thornfield Hall at dusk. 3 An actual event. The Fauré Requiem with Louie last night. We sat through two bad pieces - bad except for ensemble tone - a female soloist so bad I wanted to laugh - but after the intermission when we had moved to closer seats out from behind the tall man - and three choirs had amassed behind more instruments - the Fauré began and ended in wonder. I liked to watch the first violinist; there was so much sway in the music and he was a spidery tall thin sensitive man who swayed beautifully. What was it about the music though, there were many changes of texture. There'd be broad darkly resonant swellings and then thin light wandering airs, dabs, booms. Other instruments' lines visible separately for a while. That doesn't begin to say it. I was enmarveled from beginning to end. Maybe my bit of familiarity helped me hear it, I was thinking, and yet it emerged bar by bar so singularly interesting. Louie was good company. She looks good, though her Red Ridinghood coat was not a good idea. Doesn't she look better than ever maybe, so arrived, poised and polished at 58. She said accurate smart things about the music and about what's up with Tom. And yet I can tell I'm demoted with her. She'll always be a conscientious friend but I won't anymore be her favorite. I could feel it in the concert. She was comparing me with what I was calling her present companion. At the beginning of the intermission I said aloud how bad the soloist had been and I could feel her disapproving. I asked if Ina ever criticizes performance and she said yes but not so other people can hear her, they have paid money and should be allowed to enjoy themselves. I said I say it aloud so other people who have felt the wrongness won't feel so alone. "It's fifty-fifty" she said. It's not fifty-fifty, though, more like ninety-eight - two, maybe, but my bent is always to support the two. It was a telling moment, she's chosen something; she can say things now the way her family says them, "Ina and I are going to take them to ----." It's happened before. It's the way I lost my mother's preference. "You're such a strong personality." Those preferences mattered to me, they helped me from my core, in my core. They are a deep loss of vitality and even wish to live, aren't they?
In Jane Eyre how important Rochester's preference is to Jane. One feels Charlotte pining for someone to prefer her for the reasons Rochester has, her genius, basically. She ended marrying St John Rivers, though, it seems. 5 Susan in a dream this morning. She was at a door about to visit someone, turned as I passed, asked if I wanted ----, I said no I just wanted a look. I'd seen what I wanted to know. She was tall but pudgier around her jaw and belly. Thinking about this summer, being homeless on the road, looking at teardrop trailers. Like the thought of something the jeep could easily tow, that would have a bed and a hatchback galley, but no I don't have the money. $4000 min and hard to find. Couple of nights ago I dreamed a shit, sensation very detailed, harder and wetter parts. When Sandy caught up with us on the sidewalk leaving the Orpheum we were praising the Fauré and then when I asked whether she'd known it before she said, Do you remember Pat Smith? I said of course. She said the night Pat was killed someone had phoned to tell her and she'd blasted the Mozart Requiem. When she'd told Diana that, Diana had said, I prefer the Fauré. I liked the moment standing we three remembering Diana, who has been dead how long now, seeing her spare rectitudinous face for a moment. May 2008, IA15-4. Louie said Tom can send me a card with $20 and can't reply to my emails because he's in control of what he does but not of what I do. I can afford to miss him but he can't afford to miss me because I am more processed. When the window is open, in the last couple of days, there are flies - Hessler's River town for the pleasure of (his) being somewhere unfamiliar. Like that he learned with McPhee at Princeton. "Today is April 5, Qing Ming, the Day of Pure Brightness." Day of visits to rural graves. The threshing platform is the center of home life - this is where grain is threshed, spices are dried, vegetables are cut, grandchildren are raised, visitors are served tea. Was talking to Louie about the sketchups and my doubts they're worth doing. She said something about doing what one is good at. I said I don't think of myself as being good at them, just that they give me a lot of pleasure. She said getting a lot of pleasure out of making space is what I'm good at. 6 We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them ceases first. Marcus Aurelius on Mortenson's site.
"typical mid-Victoria terraced house on 4 floors" In paradisum - angels, martyrs, Jerusalem, Abraham, Lazarus. What other kind of In paradisum could there be. This Kings College version goes to sat photos of earth and universe. The idea of paradise is wrong because it's contrastive, paradise is the purely good. But this music isn't about that. It's in aetherium. Aetheria, aetherius, aetherium (neuter) - of or pertaining to the ether, the sky, the air or upper air. Adj. Indo-eur to burn, akin to aithein to glow, burn. Wd have to be In _____ aetherium. It's solemn sailing among cosmic wisps. I can say that and feel ignorant
the way I could feel ignorant staring at the form of the tremendous tinted
clouds east of my windows these open days. That's paradisum, being in face
of the ungraspable, seeing it, being it but not having anything to say about
it. Which is making me see immediately what gardening has to do with it.
It's participating in making something I will have that relation to.
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