| volume 1 of back: 2014-2015 september-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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This first volume of the years back in Canada covers the seven months overwintering in a 10x11 room on the 6th floor of the Lotus Hotel in Vancouver. Apart from the bedbugs, the noise and the outrageously high rent it was a good shelter, warm and safe, with a fine view of sky and surrounded by interesting downtown-eastside madness. In part 1 the neighbourhood, the room and its desk. Begin making sketchup models again. Discover John Luther Adam's so-congenial writing about music. In part 2, working on sketchup models of the house I grew up in, the Valhalla Lake farmhouse, 824 East Pender, a 10x26 housetruck, and David MacAra's imaginary house on a London roof. Christmas Day with the Mills family high above the inlet in North Vancouver. Part 3, in the worst dull light of January I decide to spend the summer looking for somewhere in the southern Okanagan to live. Sketchups models of a 16x44 desert house and a 14x25 Okanagan house. Part 4, 70th birthday. Most days Jaroussky singing all day on Youtube. Sketchups of an imaginary poet's house, Tom's place in San Diego, my little house on 5th Ave in San Diego, and 52 Burghley Road in London 1970-1974. Began sending my new films to Chris Kennedy and CFMDC in Toronto. Part 5 getting ready to leave the Lotus and Vancouver. Sketchups of a children's ward in the University Hospital in Edmonton about 1952 and room 49 in Ban Righ Hall in 1963. Images of the sketchup models are more fully linked from the actual pages than from the excerpts on this page. During these months there is also a very casually-kept tumblr place page, what there is. Notes: Barry Lopez About this life: journeys on the threshold of memory, Giorgio De Santillana The age of adventure: the Renaissance philosophers, graphology, Anton Lesser as Feste in Twelfth night, Virginia Woolf's letters, Said On late style, John Luther Adams 4000 holes, history of English, sound editing, Sons and lovers on Naxos, Adams The place where you go to listen : in search of an ecology of music, Kyle Gann The farthest place, Richards Lives of short duration, Sharon Olds I Go Back to May 1937, Okanagan geography, Ellen Morris Bishop In search of ancient Oregon: a geological and natural history, Phill Niblock's Feedcorn ear, Cohen on Lorca, Ann Kipling, Jaroussky singing Baroque, The imitation game, The invisible history of the human race, Fauré Requiem, Marcus Aurelius on Viggo Mortenson's site, Hessler's River town, Peter Carey Theft and Parrot and Olivier in America, Jane Eyre and Villette read on Naxos. Mentioned: Rowen and Freya, Louie E, Mary Epp, Paul K, David Beach, Tom Fendler, Greg Morisson, Don Carmichael, Rob Mills, Pat Mills, Kathleen Harrison, Susan Moul, Paul Epp, Luke, Roy Chisholm, Rosalynde de Lanerolle, Jane Downey, Sarah Black, Madeleine Murray, Andy Wyman, Tony Nesbit, Sandy Rodin, Diana Kemble, Cheryl S. Room 662 Lotus Hotel, Choices Market, International Village at Abbott and Pender, Tabor Home in Abbotsford, Pink Pearl Restaurant, Save On Café, Acme Café, Prado Café, the Orpheum Theatre, Starbucks in Gastown, the Cinemateque, Vancity Cinema, Iris Collective. Charles Bowden obit, Adams Dark Waves and Become ocean, Isaac Levitan, Berger This is where we meet, Harry Killas Aristotle's lagoon, Szlavnics, Mary Franks, Eugene Gendlin, 20,000 Leagues under the sea, O'Brian The Mauritius command. |
28 September 2014, Vancouver What dirty windows. Through which level sun from its equinox east. The street roistered until 4. Something bit me, in series, firey spreading bites. What do I see, a little after 5pm. Single gulls catching light on their white underwings when they turn. A long flaking tin cornice with ledges pigeons lined up on this morning. Beyond, interrupted bits of greyblue mountain. To the south, a slice 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. Traffic a grey smudge, voices below, no one excited this time of day. 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. - 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. 2nd October Charles Bowden - read his piece about covering sex crimes yesterday - today I look him up - discover he died at the end of August, my age, in his sleep . 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 methodone dispensary across the street, the Chinese towers mostly dark. A bright planet. Cloud streaks across the pale east. Old men shelved behind dirty good windows across the way. Flamingo feathers over the inlet, pigeons wheeling against. Abbott & Pender. 5 Anton Lesser as the fool 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. Sky tonight - it's a bit before 5 - a fibrous silver. Mist on the glass. 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. 11 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.
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Late style - the idea of late work not late style - he doeesn'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. 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. 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. 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. 24 [SFU extension class] 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. 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 is promising to talk about reading, which I wd like if it turns out to be true and not too laboured - now is making a silly joke - now is on a tangent about Hamlet. Now 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. He announced proudly that he'd been a psychotherapist, he wants themes. Alright so I could have known not to try seniors' classes. 28 Waking at 6 to the sound of a wet street. Diamond drops on the black glass.
Figure of the composer. I've been wanting his hat. 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. 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. 31st Shaefer - keynote of a time-place - the being keynotes I've felt on falling asleep. 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 Borsalino fedora for $412. 1st November 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. 2nd 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 Souls Day of course. 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. Strong feel of a wet dawn. 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 I tend to think of sounds in terms of color or some more elusive sense of texture or tactile surface. 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. 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. 6 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. "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 baby. 9 Remembrance Day, streets closed around the war memorial in all directions. Three cruisers parked across Hastings at Abbott. Walking to Army Navy at noon colder than I have been in is it twelve years. Save-On Meats is a long narrow diner now. I went in for breakfast. Three young servers and a young manager. My waitress was a light-footed young woman, black, carrying her head beautifully on a long neck. Red lipstick. Her hair was interesting, close-shaved on the sides and grown out in a strip of pelt from the forehead to the nape. It suited her, gave her a regal profile. I was sitting at the counter. When she was handing my check across to me I said "I love your hair." It startled me how she lit up at that - such a beautiful person, isn't she used to it? Her pleasure was like a long-held flash of light. I was a bit dazed by it. Photo I took in the dark this morning. Man standing in front of the pharmacy holding a Styrofoam cup that's a white spot at his chest. Behind him is his supermarket cart full of all he owns. On the other side of the frame a tree holding up its arms into the golden light of a streetlamp pointed down. 18 What is it about this book. It has a charm of randomness, it floats. Nothing is nailed down - things happen, Lois lifts her left leg and kicks at the air. The world surrounding people does the same sorts of unmotivated thing. "Under the bridge the pleasant moving shadows of water." There are scents, more than in most books. Who is smelling them? Four generations it took me some while to sort. Neighbours I might not ever have got straight, times floating through all muddled together, a watery dissolve altogether. Who are all these people. They know each other, as they would, but I have no way to. Some of his adjectives seem random too, "a few darkly ferreted things." Usually-unnamed social facts, people looking at each other with sexual interest, constant status concern, brand names. Physical observations I don't believe are character's observations exactly, though maybe they are meant to be? [David Adams Richards Lives of short duration] 24 Michelle Butler Hallet about Lives of short duration "This one works in currents and layers, very like a big river." 21 David McAra's house on the London roof. I'm inventing it at the same time as seeming to remember a real place and time I should describe faithfully. I want it for the moment when I haul myself up the many stairs and come out onto the roof. It's late and raining. I've left my things at the Y. It was a long flight. The door onto his roof is a heavy warehouse door. The curtains next to his bed are partly open. I stand in the rain looking into his cave of light. He's there in a white shirt with sleeves rolled up, suspenders and loose pants. Barefoot. He's wearing reading glasses, looking down at something in a pool of lamplight. He feels me looking, starts up, comes not to the door but to the bedside window where I am. Opens it. Stands looking at me with his face alight. Then he puts out his arm and pulls me inside. Takes my wet coat and puts it over a chair by his fire. There is soup on the stove. He sets out a bowl for me. He sits across from me and asks about my journey. He says don't go back to the hotel, stay with me. I get into his bed. Fall asleep as he moves about the room. It's David McAra, rather than the California Mac, now, why, because he's a computer musician and not rich and for the kindness of soup and a bed, and for the age I was? Early forties. Alex published the housetruck on his site today. 11 December I don't write here, these days. I invent buildings, or draw buildings I've known. I post small creations on whatthereis.tumblr.com. They aren't important but they please me. I send things I make to someone - Louie, Greg, Paul Epp, Paul K, David, Jerry, Tom. I post on FB. My girl students sometimes write me there or elsewhere. Luke sometimes shows up on FB message. 29 It's not to be filmmaking, it's digital screen art, which can have moving pictures dissolved in it - and photos - and voice - and writing - and natural sound - and composed sound - the temporal and other contours being material - and animated sketchup lines, invented places - I need a multimedia canvas to set elements with each other. It needs to be colorable and flow and be as if made of grain. January 1 2015 Shock yesterday opening the Cherokee's door after two months and finding disease and decay, green mold on the seats and steering wheel, thick ice on the windshield, a pool of ice on the floor on the passenger's side, condensation and maybe a leak. Deep dismay: my strong warm dry body sick, this place undoing it. I don't know what to do. I'm not in the right place. I don't have enough money to live even as barely as I do here. My funds are sinking maybe $600/mo. I go on missing Tom, who always wasted and neglected me. I don't have confidence in work, that there's any use for it. 11 Have hardly wanted to write in the grey wash of these days - don't want to keep them. 12 Dullest of grey light. People in their winter clothes excessively bundled - it's not cold, they're as if bundled against the oppressive light. The man-woman I meet in the elevator has a sweetness that I think of as held through hardship. She's a skinny thing, tall, dressed mostly in trans-girly fashion, but sometimes with a fur-lined ear-flapped aviator's hat too. I don't generally like trans guys but I like her - I have to choose a pronoun and her isn't right, but it's closer to right? Because she has such a sweet vulnerability - I always like to be in her elevator company. 13 Southern Okanagan - I've brightened thinking of it. What I like: there'd be wonderful gardening, cherries, apricots, melons. It's dry, 12" of rain a year. It's sunny and wide open. The US is just across the border; from Oroville it fans down into eastern Washington and Oregon, the Columbia Basin. Sagebrush. Juniper? Pines. Rent less than here. 16 The difference is that eagerness has returned. 20 Photos of rocks, vision of landforms flowing through time. 22 The yellow Chuck Taylors are done, beat up, faded, small toe pushing through a hole. Today these new shoes, silver All Stars with a pattern like snakeskin, beauties. I have them new for checking into the Best Western presidential suite with Paul next Tuesday - presidential suite! - to be with poor lost M on her birthday. 23 It's raining hard. I'm stylin' in my new silver hightops and John Luther Adams two-pony hat. Last night a random radio site gave me Phill Niblock's Feedcorn ear, which I could see the way I like to, sheets of texture, a constant foreground I was looking through to grainy small movements behind it. Later the foreground broke up, juddered, as if interacting with background. I was thinking of the Pale hill airplane and the Last light track. 29 Seeing M with Paul, old huddle of a thing in a good white coat, sitting on a rock leaning against him with her eyes closed, the broad smooth river before us with ducks further out, train whistles on both shores, the comforting steady beat of a freight train to the northwest. Above us winter cottonwood trees looking dead. A few red whips of wild rose, a few white snowberries. Underfoot a complicated pattern of decomposing leaf edges overlapped, brown. A man of 65, sturdy, spectacled, with cropped black hair and a stubble beard, dressed in black, walking arm in arm with a 91 year old woman who asks again and again, Where do you live now? and How are things with you? and When are you going back? On the way home, driving through forest and suburb, along the river on Highway 7, she began to say Where do I live? Paul would say, It's a surprise. 3 February Things I like - as always the slant of light, simple small kitchen, raised foundation platform, Persian carpet in the bathroom, today a dark blue marble for the shower, speakers built into the walls, many doors to the outside, outside bed, pale terrazzo floor, tub with lot of sky, leafy shadows, plain 6' wall around the garden, function defined by shallow steps, midnight pool. 6 Now there's blue dusk at the window where white and red tulips are standing in glass and the celadon bowl is holding oranges. Fridge humming. Two lamps, one on the desk, one behind me directed onto the page. Haven't wanted to record these days but this is a buoyant moment, I don't know why. An untethered creative bubbling. 10 Photo of two red and white tulips against the grey window. They're at their end, half an hour after the photo a petal had fallen. 11 Parrot and Olivier in America 2010. This was the turbulent and shining soul who was my lover and my teacher, and when I woke by her side I knew myself, most mornings, a lucky man. The point was no longer one of line or perspective but of the light and spirit that came from every corner of everything she ever touched. She would use a light body to underpin, perhaps a yellow-white as a basis for a fiery red. Or she would lay a green-white underneath a cooler red and glaze it with a strong color. These glazes were, where necessary, partly wiped off or blended with all sorts of colors in adjacent areas. Thus she created that suggestion of mystery which continually engages the eye anew and never tires it. Her mouth was washed with tears. I ate her, drank her, boiled her, stroked her till she was like a lovely flapping fish and her hair was drenched and our eyes held and our skins slid off each other and we smelled like farm animals, seaweed, the tanneries upriver. It was warm enough to leave our windows open, so we kept the air as fresh as might be possible in a seaport and it was only then, as wind off the river ripped through our small supply of candles and left us sitting in the moonless dark, that .... 13 I've resolved the 14x25 for one person - some weeks not very interested in it but thinking 16 x 44 is too grand - stabbed away at it a bit now and again - tonight finished working out the furniture and that has done it. 14 x 25 is 350 square feet. High roof. Expensive windows. Furniture, then backdrop, then shadows and it comes alive. Working on it tonight, when it was starting to come right, I noticed I was singing. 17 It's a bit of a Greek temple - The t-shaped service core has room for all the appliances - under-counter fridge, washer-dryer, wall oven, induction cooktop, gas fireplace, water heater - as well as solar batteries and control panels - and ventilation and electrical ducts - and plumbing - all in one place - and lets cupboards and drawers just into it from both sides - while dividing those three functional spaces - and still letting in clerestory light from all four directions. The windows and window-door units wd be expensive. The cabinetry wed be very expensive. High-end appliances too. The pillars could house speakers, wiring, rainspouts, vents; have just installed rain vents outside the doors and scuppers where they'd discharge. Scuppers! There were scuppers in the warehouse! The platform is a plinth. Plinthos brick. 19 Daphne reading at the SFU library this noon. 135 bus up the hill after 12 years a long drab ride through hideous buildings in grey light. Even the forest, once we got to it after what seemed a very long time, looked smashed and sodden, and except for the Indian plum, which was spangled with little white flowers and rabbit-ear little new leaves - and I suppose all the pushy coarse ferns - quite dead. Then there was the quadrangle, the same old pile of concrete, the philosophy dept's building which was new now looking a bit mossy. Air colder and damper than downtown. Then the library remodeled for the laptop age which has come in the meantime, and there I was in my new silver Converse and topaz earrings retired from being a sort of professor somewhere else, elderly and not very interested. What was the best moment - getting off the elevator at the Q books on the 6th floor being hit by the smell of university books - VPL books don't smell like that. The Q's in that aisle were neuroscience of perception and sensation, old friends like Fuster, the site of so much eager search, with no wish to look at any of them. What it's like to be done with something. Daphne read poems from the whole of her now so honoured career, starting with one from when she was just beginning with Kit's dad and ending with something recent still and again about the city. Her energy seemed different with every poem she read. I couldn't pick up very much of any of it, it goes by too fast and in my system is too disjunct, so for me the reading was just witnessing her career, the way she had the same method all through, and used it to interest herself in the ways a certain group of poets of the '60s and '70s did, successful in that group from the beginning. What is it about that method. She'd say it's associative, a lot of word-impacts rippling out their effects to reach other words, and something similar about time, present facts or scenes touching off imagined or remembered historical facts or scenes so the writing self is, is or feels, wider, deeper, thicker, making something. 20 Psychological immediacy rather than physical/embodied immediacy. Stoned consciousness as I knew it. What do I think now. It's too solipsistic, the little knot in space busily circulating within itself rather than holding form but passing all sorts of lovely flow, though yes with some colors circulating internally too. Little darts and interceptions. 21 What does it mean to yearn for something and continually forget it and neglect it? Where another kind of work is eager and unstoppable. Greg said two spheres. I said what does that mean. One is feared and in some way sublimely satisfying. The aloneness and effort are feared. 22 A zone of silence. What happened with my best work in philosophy. What happened with my best work in photos is happening now again. 24 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. 25 What is it about Ann Kipling. She 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. 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 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. 3 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. 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, armchair 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. 10 Jaroussky singing across the room, tall in a dark suit, black shirt, open collar, singing beautifully with his whole body, swaying his arms. 13 Someone at CFMDC saying do you want to place your new work with us .So I have a task. 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. 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 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? 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. Happy in these days getting movies ready. 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. 18 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. 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. 23 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 Peace River Country 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. 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. 27 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. 28 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. 29 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. 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. 5 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 [Kemble] 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. In paradisum - angels, martyrs, Jerusalem, Abraham, Lazarus. What other kind of In paradise 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. 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. 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. 9 At 6 this morning clear orange over the blue peak to the northwest. Luke in FB messaging. We talk until 8.
Corner table at the Prado, real caffé latté, not decaff. Leaf-shaped foam. The young going to work in bright sweet light. The addicted broken-hearted shuffling past. I've sent by the lotus and here, with info sheets and stills and a new bio and a new head shot and deposit money and signed contract. Feeling the count-down. Three weeks more. Now that I can stop resenting the city. Luke remembered sitting in his high chair in the orange cupboard room. I'd forgotten it. It wasn't high. It folded down to be a seat with a table in front of it. only that, by accident - let's say - the Benalla High School dropout came between the orbits of two men, one beautiful and damaged, the other an egotistical monster and, within the confusion of their gravitational pulls, somehow managed to slide upwards and sideways, so although she remained an assistant to an assistant, and continued to live three houses from the corner of Ninth Avenue, she quietly, triumphantly, entered the completely unmapped ocean, and was gobsmacked, like Cortez, or like Keats himself, to see what the conditions of birth and geography had hidden from her i.e. the true wonder of bloody everything, no less. Peter Carey you delightful person. [Theft 2006] osea4444.mov and OBpier5-4444.mov are ready to ship but very large. 13 Villette. Another story of loneliness. She studies faces remarkably. The book is largely about what she thinks of as character. Was it the way of the times. She describes Madame Beck, Dr Paul, M Emanuel, Paulina Maria, Genève Fanshaw - her core constellation - many times in much detail. Herself too. She can be tedious in romantic flights of metaphor. She's very susceptible to good looks. Her intelligent women live in conscious struggle between what she calls feeling and what she calls reason, by which she means self-suppression of the kind I began to know about when I was twelve. 1853. Set pieces and close phenomenology. She's making me think of Dorothy Richardson in this one, partly the setting in a foreign school but also the closely transcribed privacy. DR only fifty years later had more freedom and more kinds of thoughts but surely must have built on her highly energized honesty. George Elliot thought it wonderful, VW said "some untamed ferocity." [Later: it turns out that in Pointed roofs DR mentions having Villette on her bookshelf before she left school.] About her coincidences, in my experience they are plausible, these sorts of things have happened to me. 14 Backing up all three computers, sorting, consolidating, erasing. 16 I've posted some jpgs of the 4-bed room. C has commented. I'm wondering why she gets the tone of her comments wrong. "Good to see it fleshed out in the light of day." That implies some cliché about submerged trauma being mended, which is not at all how I am feeling those or any of my sketchups. Whatever mending was needed happened earlier by different means. I feel her as trying to describe me as damaged rather than gifted, so she can feel herself better than me, which she is not.
She said How does it feel to take authority over your historic places. I said, I don't think authority is the word. It's more a taking-account of who I've been in relation to place. For instance with this room I remember many details of layout, color, furniture, light, orientation, etc, but nothing at all about who else was in the room with me. Maybe a child who has been alone in strange places can become someone who takes great pleasure in architectural space. "It was a warm, bright room that had no function but passage between entries on two levels." That's a psychological description. The right response to these drawings is to take them as that, and as life stories. Martin got it right when he liked where I said "Soundtrack for this one is a train whistle from the freight yards a couple of miles to the northwest" next to the jpg of the room at night. C isn't getting the wonder inherent. 18 I was reading Raw forming 1 because I needed the energy of those 7 months in Ban Righ, which was another small room in a large communal building - another east window - but in other ways the opposite of these 8 months. I was hurling myself into a new form of life - socially so interested and energized - popular, it seems, but all unanchored - always new friends who are never heard from again, except for Olivia, who is wonderful in this record. So many hours of talk, everywhere. I found my feet without realizing it was difficult, poured out the story to my family with hardly any sense that I might be boring them with things they'd no experience of. Paul said M would read the letters aloud at the table with obvious gaps to forestall Ed. I was candid and breezy about everything they feared, booze, dancing, apostasy, reported going to church but in such a touristic spirit they can't have been reassured. They were losing me, and not only that, I was testifying to the interest of all they'd lived forbidding - Judy and Paul were taking note. It was such a bursting-out. There's a sketchup jpg I've called golden window which remembers the moment when I'd woken for the first time in room 49 and stood at the open window looking out at the open sports field all golden with sun and autumn leaves. I'd arrived, I was really there, I'd won my way. And then there's only one crash recorded, which I didn't completely understand then. It was the first time O had come with me to an International House party. I'd felt viable at those parties, where a lot of men isolated away from their own cultures could seem sexually interested in me, but when I saw Olivia dancing there I had to see them preferring her. It crushed me, it wasn't the fact of rivalry, it was the way it opened the pit of sexual despair under my energized coping. My family, and everyone else, was useless in relation to that despair. My dad had to take on the facts but only as they concerned him, his image of himself in the community. (Oh alright, that was the charge under the time he was snarling at me about how he'd had to live me down in the community.) I'm proud of myself for the drive and coping. I like the energy but there's no solution, there's been no solution, to the sexual despair. There can be no solution, it's a fixed pivot. Joyce understood it, I think. When she said "despair about men" I understood her differently, in a feminist way: I was still evading. So now I ask, if I hadn't been damaged wd Tom have been less absent? Not at all; but I wouldn't have had to try to be with someone like him. What does any of this have to do with the present. It's out in the open now - "fleshed out in the light of day" - because I have to feel so much more damaged in the way I move, and being older means I don't have my former ways of getting interest. The crisis has got louder. In this version of the east-facing room I've been holed up like a sick animal. That's an insulting thing to say, is it true? Compared to 18, yes. But it's going to change very soon. I'm throwing myself into the world again. Shd take that brave 18 year old with me. The year has so turned around. Sun heating the space, window open, a dozen flies zig-zagging in the center of the room. They have somewhere else to go when the sun moves away, and they don't land on my skin looking for water they way they did in Borrego. Scent of maple flowers from the tree below the window sometimes. After it rained the sight of bright snow on the peaks, gone now. There seems more noise from the street, sirens and motorcycles brutally loud. Roars and honking when there's a game on. 21 Funny how I'm a different person with this haircut, younger, girlier, not stern. How deep will the difference go. I like touching it. I can feel it moving around my head. 22 Rob yesterday. I was sitting on the front steps downstairs. Came a tall man in good boots and a light suede jacket. We sat for hours at my desk. He's not very changed though more man than boy, now, 58 this month, a bit more padded around the jaw, just a bit of roundness at the belt, more confident I thought. He was carrying himself well. There was a bit of buzz. He talked and listened, talked about American foreign policy, the universe. Had engineering thoughts about Mac's house and asked who Mac was. Doesn't watch TV anymore. Took me to lunch. I showed him my gardens and the Heres and the sketchups and the FB pages. When we were saying goodbye at the door said he'd come see me when I live in dry country. I said, I wish you would. 24 Room in moving disorder around me. - Yesterday on the 20 bus going to pick up the jeep a Native man sitting further forward lit up when he saw me, waved. He had a beard and I didn't recognize him at first, but then I saw he was a man I used to meet around town and sometimes talk to, an artist of sorts. He blew me a kiss and patted his heart. I mouthed 'Long time' and he said something back I wasn't sure I'd caught. I mouthed 'How've you been.' He looked down at his walker with a sad face to say not so good. When he'd got off outside the First United Church I caught his eye to wave goodbye and he did it again, blew a kiss, patted his heart, and then threw his arms out and brought them back to his chest a couple of times to say his heart was throbbing for me. I didn't remember what I'd done to make him glad to see me but I knew I'd always liked the look of him. It was a sweet moment of connection with the city. What am I meaning to say - something about the kinds of relation there can be in a place, with people one never gets to know but sees sometimes and feels something for. There used to be a man I liked the look of when I was first here. I'd see him in Kits - once on a softball diamond in a park - and in Gastown. Later I'd see him with a scar on his face. It was that way with a couple of my neighbours in Strathcona, the waitress in the Princess Café, in San Diego Ernesto my neighbour's gardener, Michael the homeless man in the next-door parking lot. They are love-connections of a particularly private kind and yet they belong to the city rather than the home. They pervade the city with a tenuous fondness. 27 Louie's house, next to the fire, six in the morning, dim grey streets flowering and shining with rain, fire fluttering. Rowen and Freya moved me out of 662 yesterday. R and I restacked everything in the storage closet. They refused my red fifty dollar bill. Walked away toward the Prado holding hands. In the jeep I asked Rowen what he was thinking about. He said Staged. "I think about it all the time." Then when I unpacked the computer an email from Chris Kennedy saying he'll try my movies with Andrea Picard of the Wavelengths program at TIFF, and that Jeremy and Oona will like them. 28 From this bed I'm seeing the big maple's bits of olive drab leaf like dots on a veil, through it a dark grey sky and all the clean triangles of roofs overlaid. Strathcona is more gardened than it was, flowering all over now, exquisite in this season but in a barer way than Kits, flowers more visible than trees. 1st May Said Louie: "I never feel judged by the part of you that is best at what you do. It's humble." She was waving toward her right, a wide floating-out gesture. "What is the other side?" "I don't want to tell you, you'll object." "I need to know." "It's corrective, it thinks it is right." "It is right." We laughed. I agreed I'm corrective, but I didn't agree that the other side is what I'm best at. I said I think I'm better at philosophy than art.
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