time remaining 10 part 1 - march-may 2021  work & days: a lifetime journal project March 6 2021 Hard day. Couldn't sleep, heart banging, woke at 2, dragged around without energy to do anything I'd resolved, am trying giving up tea, didn't want to eat anything I was going to allow myself. Worried about all of that. But Paul phoned and that was a pleasure. I had posted the photo of me from Leah's wedding with its little story and could like people liking it all day. Karen, Adam, Tana, Jim Mann, Sam, Scott, Kate, Cheryl, Val, Sue, Ben, Rachel, Greg, Don, Emilee, Indra, - Carolyn, Les, Nathalie, Claudia, Lisa, Carol d'Ag, Jennifer, Tom Mann. Sue sent a startlingly beautiful photo of Russian woods the color of their owl. 10 a quiet luminosity in your writing (like early evening light in the country) that lets things be seen/felt as they are Don. So now I'll forgive him for not being able to handle Being about? - Allan hasn't shown up all day but I called Hub Electric and half an hour later a young man was standing in the verandah figuring it out with me. Then it was done, light fixture seated up into the ceiling, lumpy outlet and drooping cable gone. 11 Phone call from the vet this morning. I'd lined the carrier with the black cashmere sweater Mouse lay on under the lamp and they were wondering whether I wanted it back. When I picked it up the label stuck to it said Mouse Epp. Allan finished sheathing the verandah walls with pine tongue and groove today and lent me a sander that can deal with the lumpy pollyfilla I've been laying-in to fill the two holes in the bedroom. 13 Dreamed I had been at a concert maybe, in a hall in the south end of the city. I'd lost sight of my companion and thought I could go to 824 E Pender for the night. I didn't live there anymore but I still had a key and might be able to find a nightgown. I could phone when I got there. I'd walked a lot earlier and was now walking a lot again to get to where I thought there'd be a bus. There was the usual difficulty with a road that has a break in it. Black water rushing ankle-deep on the street when I cross, a subway escalator that whisks me past where I want to exit. In the end I've got as far as Chinatown but have to ask a woman whether Pender Street is that way or that way. - Often some version of this dream. It makes sense I suppose to want to get back to where I was a young woman with friends and lovers and children and could walk across the city easily at night. The house I try to get back to is approximately where 824 is and there's a landlord who may be Choy but it is larger and my flat on the second floor is one of several. - What this day was like. Sun this aft so I moved seedling trays to the porch. Waiting for Allan who didn't come, cleared broken stucco from the skirting board edge, scraped wallpaper off the door's frame. Patch is willing to be in the garden when I am so I sat on the porch eating lunch and then stepped down to pull dead leaves from around the roses and check them for green stems. 14 On Grand design last night there was a man I so wanted. He's a 55 year old building services engineer living near the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, whose admirable story was about converting a large underground water tank into a courtyard house. I watched again to see what had moved me about him. He could have been a quite ordinary-looking large middle-aged man, though with unusually big eyes, but whenever he spoke it was as though he was illuminated by gentle loving extremely high intelligence. He spoke carefully with humour and in a slightly rumbling voice. He's obviously at the international high end of his profession, has worked in many countries for long stretches of time, and took on his complicated building project with steady commitment and accurate foresight - had a small budget but didn't run out of money - and yet in relation to his wife and daughter showed a glimmering sweetness that melted me. Watching him I felt what it would be to honour a man and want to live with him every day because one so loved his spirit. 15 There was something transparent, emotionally immediate, in the speed with which his expression would change. - It took me a while to name it but I think it's what I mean. So I was thinking I hadn't imagined that about DM, I hadn't thought about his speech apart from his accent. Of course it's what I'd immediately love if I met it, and being well-spoken, which is related because it's being attentively-spoken. When they meet on the plane there's that instantly and her heart goes out to him from his first words. 16 I was lying in this chair watching something on the iPad last night and Patch was sprawled across my lap head-down fast asleep. She'd never gone into abandoned sleep on me that way before. It went on for a while then she woke suddenly in a panic, scrambled up and fled to the floor. Her emotionality is like the way after I've spoken to someone on the phone or at the door I'll turn and put something in my mouth. When I let her upstairs in the morning she needs to chew at the grass patch, and when she comes in from outside she needs to claw at a corner of the rug or get under the bed and tear at its undercarriage. She'll deflect slight annoyance into grooming. If I touch her when she doesn't want to be touched her tail thumps sideways. When she's been outside in the dark she'll have a little manic fit running and pouncing at imaginary prey. 6:47 after time change, slight yellow in the notch where the hill dips. - She's doing it now, claws scritching on the floor. 16 Warm enough this aft to drive around without a coat, tool rental place, car wash. Acceleration's roar, sun through the windscreen, my arms on the wheel in manly plaid sleeves rolled to the elbow, happiness as of strength again. 17 I wrote Jervis Inlet April 1980 this morning and posted it to hardly anyone's interest. Should paste it below. The verandah's long bookshelves - don't know what else to call them - narrow under-window counter with shelves for canning stuff and seedling stuff and maybe journal boxes and maybe books? - are almost installed and looking nice. Replying to Jill feeling a sweetness in her which I'm thinking just now is maybe the sweetness of bereavement. Replying to Indra was more awkward probably because I'm guessing her life with that fat old famous man was harder than she wants to say. I might feel that because I'd have hated it myself, but I want something different for the gold-skinned sixteen year old I knew. 18 He lived in Kyoto for twenty-five years, where he taught at Ritsumeikan University, meanwhile continuing his lifelong zazen practice. He now lives in the North Okanogan. In 2020, MacLean published a collection of poems, Waking to Snow, that tracks his life in Kyoto. with poems about brief returns to Canada to visit aging parents, childhood memories, and academic and married life. At the heart of the book is a sequence of eighteen poems describing the anguish of a stillbirth. I'd thought of him as still in Japan but the north Okanagan is nearby. Waking to snow is a good title. 19 Having begun as she did why does she write in clichés? "Blast from the past", "bed of roses", "a flash of recognition", "light at the end of the tunnel". She missed the women's movement in the seventies? There's the female-competition undertow but what I'd really like is for her to talk to me about architecture. - Allan finished for now. Shelves, baseboards, new 1x6 above the window. Stucco patching - somehow - and painting everything have to wait for warm weather but the electrics and especially the baseboards already make it look so pulled together. 21 Today's event was the chance discovery of this master's thesis from 1993 looking at analog computers to develop a different computational take on the philosophy of mind. The author is Ellie Epp, and her name rang a bell because there is a Canadian experimental filmmaker with the same name. Who is actually the same person: what do you know! European man using an analog computer to make video. Oona introduced us. Gave me a little burst of remembering how native to me the exptl film community could be. 23 Crystalline sky at 6:46. Time of day when the ground is black dark - trees, roofs - and the sky is pure pale unmarked light. Yesterday the sky was a thick dull grey so discouraging I wanted to stay in bed. - His book came fast. He's living in or near Vernon with his wife Makana the girl who chose me to choose her   sells cocoa cookies and Irish soda bread at the shrine and a little girl Akane who if she's the age she looks in the photo could have been born when he was 70. It startled me to realize he'd have been over 60 when the stillborn little boy was born in 2012. His poems aren't obscure patched nightmare anymore. Now they love a cat, a whole-wheat scone, a rice field, an old vegetable seller. Are they better-written? Like other poems that don't interest me now they're words but not sounds. nothing is poetry that does not run in one's head because of the sweetness or majesty of the sound Yeats in late life. - We walk the streets of Slave Lake waiting for the helicopter, a troop tall in our caulk boots, sunburned red and brown, so fit after planting for months that we're blindingly beautiful, lean and loose and giving off light.   The helicopter with our gear swaying below in a net sets us down among tall aspens stripped bare by caterpillars. Caterpillars fall as we set up a cookshack, dig a pit.   I'm the cook on this contract, $150 a day, feeding 20 people. I begin at 4, this far north already daylight. When they've made their lunches and cleared out after breakfast the cookshack is warm and golden and I have hours to sit with coffee and read or write. Then I settle with recipes and plan the day. 24 loaves of bread. Vegetable curry. Tofu fried rice. Salted cucumber salad. Pear pies. Chocolate custard.   Sun shines through the cookshack's clear plastic all day so it's like working outside. I love the dance rhythms of work, the step/pivot/step between counter sink table stove - fast stoop to look in the oven - heave of slop water out the door. Catching the whiff that tells me the bread is done.   By late afternoon I'm pushing to finish. Their faces when they come in from planting are worn to bone. They devour everything on the table.   Suzelle, Jabez, Robert, Caludio, Sue, Bunny, Jean, Gene, Brian, Brigitte.   There's a transistor player on a shelf near the door. We dance to a north African drums compilation I'd bought in the ethnographic museum in London (Bunny steals it when we go home) but the tape we play again and again is Harmonium's L'Heptade. Cosmic elation.   Moi j'brule d'la tête aux pieds   Au milieu de mon corps Monte un grand corridor   It's a midsummer dream and I'm enchanted not by an ass but by a poet and flute player who seems to me beautiful as the dawn. Red shirt; and coming in without it; exhausted, silver-eyed, the kind of orphan soul it seems I can't resist. I see his face in my head all day long. We're all like that. It's June, high summer in the high north. We hardly need to sleep. At night in my tent I write by the flicker of a candle stuck onto the little suitcase that keeps my books dry. Slave Lake AB 1981, Merritt BC March 2021 Working on it now it isn't him or even my feeling for him, it's the time, all of us dampers open burning hard. 27 Shaun said yesterday that he's booking Trapline for "our virtual edition of National Film Day (April 21)" and wants 100 words. Who's the audience. New young persons who got interested by his review. He said legacy and when I said I didn't know what that is he said "perhaps 'legacy' in terms of still being discovered, screened, and appreciated, as well as being acknowledged in that Canada on Screen poll as one of Canada's essential works of experimental film and video." "Really, any kind of personal reflection on the film." It isn't much to me now and I don't know what it is about it that has made it last. Notes from the time say it's made in the context of intense search for an understanding of what the work can be, is for. How to manage myself to be able to do it. The extraordinarily rich context of London in the early '70s. Arts Council of Great Britain, my mom, odd jobs, at times the welfare system, free daycare. Summer of 1973 winding up to make a film, thought of it as gathering or claiming power. Lying to Joe that I was a filmmaker already. What you notice when it's framed, reflections, entrances and exits, In life it's impossible to hold it to a single plane - in a picture there it is - focus. 29 Going through London vols 6 and 7 noticing how fondly I still write to M. What I'd remembered as a scar in that time is M when she was leaving after their visit saying "It's hard to believe you'll be alright." I still hate her for that. She'd had so much evidence - beginning at 2 years old and never failing - of my resilience, energy and ingenuity, how dared she vote against me that way. What was she up to? My kindest guess would be that it was her timidity feeling she wouldn't be able to cope with my life herself. My less generous guess is that she was envious of my lit-up freedoms and trying unconsciously to undermine me. That was the visit in which I realized her presence drained me. Was it the first     yes Was it the second     YES So now I'm wondering when exactly I really quit on her. 30 Trapline, both its draw time and the actual shooting, was mainly September 1973 through February 1974, six months. In the many reading notes of 1973-1974 I touch on so much of what I'll later take on for real. The range of what I read. Queen's had trained focus in determined itineraries. Now it was as if I were sampling the whole world. I believe that painters' judgments of painting are first ethical, than esthetic, esthetic judgments flowing from an ethical content Venturesomeness is only one of the ethical values respected ... integrity, sensuality, sensitivity, knowingness, passion, dedication, sincerity, taken all together represent the ethical background of judgment. Motherwell. if the drive is not genuine and integrating, there are all the risks of fall-back into some sort of static figuration, either derived from nature or from within the mind ... very many painters don't quite make the grade to a synthetic figuration. Any recognizable allusion to natural appearances becomes too easily a way of avoiding the difficult task of performing with complete personal integrity. 31 Do you understand why I had to find things indirectly that way. Yes. It was something about relation of conscious and unconscious. Yes. Uncon was allowed to recognize but not declare. YES. What the palm reader said about not getting to my intelligence until later in life. Paul told me last night that he and Judy had decided the explanation for M's preference for me was that she felt guilty about not visiting me in the hospital. Is that correct. No. She preferred me because I was more interesting. Yes. I was stammering talking to him about physics because I felt he wasn't tracking? No. Because I know he doesn't like me to show my edge. April 2 House is clean, Kathy came at last. Balsam poplar branches next to me. 3 Have settled on the 120 words for Shaun. In September of 1973 the National Film Theatre in London hosted a two-week festival of what it called independent avant garde film: La région centrale, Surfacing on the Thames, The act of seeing with one's own eyes and most importantly Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey. At the same time as I was discovering this marvelous new work I found a large glass-roofed Victorian swimming pool then scheduled to be demolished. In the film that followed, my first film, I was working with layers of thoughts then only partially named. Physical resonance: translucence, reflectance, reverberance. Metaphorical resonances of transparent enclosure. Self-referential resonance too, the camera like the pool's room a space intercepting light and sound, the film's rectangular frame like the pool's rectangular frame. So now I'm going through page by page finding errors and getting ready to write the missing London section intros. 4 Around 9:30 when I'm in the back room watching something on iPad Patch comes trotting across the floor saying meee meee and runs ahead to the kitchen door. Why is she desperate to go out at just that time? I don't open the door because I can't be sure she'll come in before I want to go to bed and she's in danger of owls and coyotes if she's out in the dark. When I let her out first thing in the morning she sits and stares. Invisible cat business. Now when I lie down for a second sleep sometime in the day she'll walk across me to my left shoulder and curl up just touching me, maybe with her back or with her front feet. We'll go to sleep together but often when I wake she'll have moved to my feet. - The relations I write off. Ian. "We raked through again and again the question of whether I think he's stupid." Ian and Peter because they pressured me for something that wasn't true. (Desser, why, because he was ugly and way too Jewish.) I was confused with all of them because I had no right to be with them. I let guilt confuse me into trying to make more of them than they were. The word love so dangerously inaccurate in those times. L2 index needs Lauderick photo, L2-3 L3-2 thesis   L1 tourism and struggle with Ian L2 interested grief of insecure attachment L3 losing and finding balance again and again L4 move out and live like roy, women's lib begins L5 full days with garden, Luke, friends, lovers L6 it steps way up: sufis, lesbians, yoga, tony, exptl film, pool L7 filming and Tony, Paris L8 Roy makes trouble, I get ready to leave Roy did me willed harm but something about him satisfied me as I hadn't been satisfied till then. What was it? His chaos gave me to feel my own strength. 7 Today I posted the Burghley Road garden, first garden I made. I've usually picked pieces for the writing but just sometimes because something in the time was important. When those pieces aren't well written I pick at them even after they're posted, move a paragraph, delete a word, remove a comma, clean up the rhythm, sometimes even add a line. That never gives me best writing but I like having the story told. Yesterday I posted the para about porn and my dad fantasies and only Susan, Rachel and Emilee dared like it. When I posted after and before photos of the back room Aunt Hilda and Cousin Philip showed up. When I'm sitting in hot water before going to bed work thoughts come, today about how to describe Sarah Black and about how much of me survived Roy and about being in my twenties in London. Scent of balsam poplar buds opening next to me, their season. Judie's book of M's stories yesterday - and my Maiwa coat. I read M's account of our Europe trip in 1971 and remembered almost nothing she described. She left out everything that happened and travelogued everywhere we went. I marvel at Roy's generosity with them. 8 A bad thing and a good thing. The good thing is that the broken branch that was spoiling the blue spruce finally blew down. The bad thing is that the complacent ugly gnome who is the new owner of the church has had the old red doors replaced with new brown varnished ones and is going to do other very bad things to the view I thought would never change. 10 Such a slow dry cold dark spring. 11 My mom's writing is almost completely unsensory and unfeeling: there are no qualities, she can be read to find out what happened but not what it was like. And never an interesting word. Is that a temperament or the cost of enslavement? She did have a network of women she'd met somewhere and taken to and written letters to for the rest of her life. It's what struck me now as the good thing of her own she had in her bullied thwarted confined long life. She could like people and stick to them but she was a vampire with me and later with Paul. Me, my writing is a torrent of qualities and I take to people but don't stick to them because there are always more. Mad phoned January 1973. secular spirituality a life responsible to itself, to its own supreme experiences and expectations of value, realizing through trials in truth, loyalty, and love, and by example redounding, then, to the inspiration of others to like achievement. 15 Rose from Baytree said hello as I was weeding the hazelnut bed. 16 My letters to M from London are full of energy and feeling and sensory quality but she never said she enjoyed them. 17 Saturday morning. Was in bed last night thinking I should say something to remind myself not to do what I've been doing - what I think I may have been doing sometimes - when I talk to Paul and Rob on the phone. An elderly thing, what exactly. Talking blindly. As if being in a closed room in my head repeating things I've thought before. I'm not fast enough now to invent topics on the run so I fall back on formed thoughts. I used to notice that in other people without understanding that it's a kind of helplessness. I used to try to interrupt it in people, intercept it, dig them out of it, often by asking them about their younger days. I guess it ends in Mary's asking the same question again and again, "Where are you living now?" Do I have Alzheimers     no Would you tell me if I did     yes I think it probably helps if I'm talking to someone who is fast herself and interested. I ask Paul the same thing all the time because he never asks me anything. Salad row: mesclun - radish - carrot - lettuce starts - carrot again - green onions - peppers later - basil later - 18 I keep being puzzled by the childish femme tone of the London journals. I had been reading sophistication since my teens and yet I exaggerated and lyricized and felt those faults were my edge as a writer. I didn't know what to do with emotion when I wrote. Was more excitable than now obviously and it spilled into excess I was unconscious in. Something like that? So what is actually to be made of emotion. Accuracy and rhythm. the juvenilization of American culture - I've just posted some paras about sleeping on the Heath. I like it as an adventure but had to rebuild the story as written. It was sloppy - so sloppy. The apricot's first blossoms yesterday. 19 Pale dawn of a clear sky. Patch warm along my knee. Wildfire ten miles up highway 8, two others, early fire season. A few hot days and the gooseberry's in leaf, the pears have furry lumps of bud, more small blossoms on the apricot every day, sharp bits of green unfolding on rose stems. Icelandic poppies have bent-headed whiskered buds, irises burning bright in sawtooth clumps, the doorstep's short mauve showing a swollen tip. All the paeonies up; Carnation Bouquet the last of them, two red knobs just this morning; others a cluster of 4" red claws; Seashell 10" high and pale green. Purple moss phlox on the sidewalk. Grape hyacinth a thick green and blue mat. 70 to 18.doc this morning. Posted it looks like a whole life story. The old woman speaks to the young with the young's own lovingness. 20 Jeremy Desrosiers came to help in the garden. Turned the compost, two bins. Tackled the ugly heap of gravel that pushed over the rain barrel and has been untouched for two years. Tore the big mop of silverlace vine off the roof. Worked fast and was happy making order. I want to say something about how he looks but not tonight, I'm sore and tired. 22 I was lying awake an hour ago thinking there were three things I should think about this morning. Do I remember what they were. What it's like having dumped both Louie and Luke was one. The way writing-corresponents I've tried for have dumped me is another. Was the third the discouraging neurotic qualitylessness of Sheila Heti's so-well-reviewed books. It's spring equinox. [pear blossom] 1. I'm still needing to ask myself whether it's alright to have gone away from those two long attachments. This morning I was saying yes, it's alright for those two people to be gone. Louie is gone forever     yes Because she was gone     yes Is Luke gone forever     no I've disliked Louie's avarice more than I used to. I was remembering how I never liked her handwriting. Rehulich - I don't know how to spell it, that old-time word for crude aggression, in her case crude aggression socially concealed except in her handwriting and in her guttural accent when she's hiddenly angry. I could go on saying what I don't like about her because I mostly haven't until now, but anyway, too, she isn't lending herself to my various exploitations anymore. However this: I've been writing her off in the past as well as the present and what does that write off in me? I should keep the love while nailing its disillusionments to the wall. Same with Luke. Keep the loves of the past while understanding that he can be sentimental about me but it's not actual care. Is that true     yes 2. I wrote Anne a generous letter about her book. She was pleased but since I sent her a batch of childhood stories she has not replied. I wrote Jill a generous letter after Sean died but she hasn't wanted to reply to my reply. [She did later.] I'm dumped when I want something     yes When I was young I decided that meant I could only use my intelligence in empathy, I could act and manage but only to draw someone out. When I remember that I always think of a particular woman on a train. It must be because that was when I did it consciously for the first time? I took a photo of her though she was an ordinary-looking small old person who talked about living near Indians when she was a child, her parents' friendship with them. There were and have always been exceptions. Janeen, Frank, then Olivia, people who are mutual. So I'm looking for quick friends and that's unrealistic. YES. Okay. 3. I sent for Sheila Heti's books because the review said she includes conversations with the I Ching that sounded like bookwork. There they were on the page and they looked just like what I imagined for Theory's practice. She only does yes and no but both the anxious questions and the brief uningratiating tone of the answers sound like mine. But then the rest of the books was self-absorbed loveless social-anxiety Gen X dithering - successful dithering, she's published and praised so I guess she speaks for her kind. Discouraging because except for half a dozen epigrams ("Men are always the winners in sex because that way is more erotic for both") the writing is fluent junk. Anne says rekulljeh meaning greedy. - Ineffably beautiful, Ellie, and absolutely mesmermizing. So proud to have known you. Indra linked through to it on the Cinematheque site. I'm chuffed - 23 I woke in daylight from dreaming a complicated neighbourhood on the eastern edge of a city. I'd been at a conference and wanted to hitchhike to La Glace. At first a lot of us from the conference were walking on ordinary streets but I needed to get to Highway 1 and struck off in the direction I knew it must be. I was noticing that I was setting off for days on the road without a coat or anything at all, except that I was carrying two iron poles the length of walking sticks. Now it was dark. I was following a path down through a park. I came to a ditch with shallow water crossed by a couple of narrow boards and then along past closely-spaced small cottages with lighted windows. I was thinking it was a part of the city completely unlike the rest, muddy and murky but interesting. There was a silver-haired young man I could ask the way to the highway, I think called Wolf. He said he'd show me. He led me along always more complicated paths through always more dark complicated places. I was a bit concerned about how long it was taking, how late it would be by the time I got on the road, but I wasn't cold and was walking tirelessly so it seemed alright and I could just be interested in the strange places I was seeing. I don't remember much detail except that Wolf would sometimes get so far ahead that I couldn't see him and he'd have to wait. Someone said he was a tricky person who had messed with that person's software. At one point we had climbed to the top of a heap of scrap metal someone said wasn't a junk yard though in fact it was a junk yard. Someone put a raincoat over my shoulders as we were going to descend on the other side of the heap. Now there was another woman with us and someone had put a coat over her shoulders too. There was a sense we might be the same person. On the other side of the heap I saw the coat had left a patch of mud on her mid-back. She was wearing a dress and an unlikely elderly sort of shoes and looked conventional. It can seem as though my basic dream now is of moving through complicated unknown places noticing always more and more detail. That and the sorting dream I had a version of a couple of nights ago, first taking up and folding clothes neatly into a sleeping bag and then sorting through mud for small items like a nail clipper. Is my dreaming being influenced by CBD     no Is CBD helping me sleep     yes - I keep noticing how the ideas I worked with in my Vancouver years were already there in my London reading notes. I was recognizing and claiming them in some glancing implicit way so that later I had them as convictions I defended. What am I needing to say. In my twenties I didn't have opinions but I collected a store of them for later. My uncon had opinions it needed to see articulated? It says yes. I didn't have opinions because they were suppressed? Yes. They were suppressed by my dad? The time he took me to a gathering at Ganzevelts' where local men were showing each other slides. I said something about one of them and he told me to be quiet. Ways Ed mentally handicapped us. young red worms departing over the grass 24 What I have against Jane - Olivia - Mother: the literal-mindedness, the mushy self-absorption that doesn't allow sympathetic vibration What would I say now, preoccupation with familial attachments, blankness in relation to the world. The way when I met my former women friends in London it was all heavy talk about their families but with Tony I could talk about books and art and physics and neuroscience. - In second sleep this morning I was younger, visiting my parents and getting ready to move to the old house I'd lived in at an earlier time, as if the Tofteland house but at the same time located at Peter Epp's place as I've dreamed it later. I was looking through a large box of my things I'd left behind, feeling pleased I'd soon be there. The only thing I remember finding in the box is a Greek bag I may really have had in London though I'd forgotten it until now. I was disappointed to wake into a place and time I can't leave from. L7-5 double photo of Roy 25 For Theory's practice, Durrell in an interview: "... a real couple, where the man doesn't have to abdicate his stupid insolence and the woman doesn't have to abdicate her vicious intelligence." - A Mari Gaffney born in October of 1947 died in October 2012 at 65 in Southhampton, daughter Georgia. - What I have to feel with sorrow again and again is not only that Mouse is gone but that there can never be another like him. I mourn his completely particular self. Then I think of Susan after Gina died, the way her great drama of distress was only ever for herself, never for something irreplaceable in Gina. - I read a lot in 1973/1974. What I was reading ranged as always but some of it was looking for a platform for my film. When I read art discourse now it all seems perverse like the grotesque clothes in Vogue magazine so then I'm grateful there were currents in my era I could be willing to accept: minimalism, arts canada's environmental art, Bachelard's feel for subliminal resonance. 28 Barbara Martineau / Sara Halprin died Nov 2006 in Portland. In 1975 I was having supper with her and her husband in a Chinese restaurant in Toronto, Luke asleep under the table, maybe her kid too, Stephen Martineau a lovely man she later divorced I think out of pride, because she was distressed that childbirth had spoiled her looks. I liked that she'd given him for Christmas the complete Bach cantatas. She came to Vancouver later with a tall woman who did the man things. Feb 1998:   It was yesterday I woke with the dream of being rushed by a squirrel. Then when I looked at my email there was a note from Barbara Martineau/Sara Halprin answering my note to her. Today in her answer to my answer she wrote about a dream of being a little girl in a cinema who is rushed by the MGM lion. "A woman with Leo energy who is shy about it" her therapist said. Trying to piece together something for Mari. It's the kind of story like Michael Duke's that I feel so poignant but somehow can't write well enough. What I remember most is the first moment, her sideways smile at the washbasins. Realizing she's another of my orphans. 30 Dialing Tom's number, hand shaking. Is that a busy signal or a not in service signal. London. I'm just once-through fixing and extracting for intro sections. It begins with an escape and ends with two parties. Moon landing July 1969 to New Years Eve 1974. 5 years 5 months. May 1 I dug last evening and this morning closed Patch in the laundry room and then got Mouse out of the freezer. Wrapped him in the cashmere sweater and carried him out and placed him. Cut a twig of plum blossom to bury with him. A couple of weeks back I'd been up the hillside looking for a larger rock with interesting colours but when I saw this one I thought it was like Mouse because it's small, black, fine-grained, elegantly simple and very slightly curved as if to enclose. I'd lain awake early solving how to set it so it's held level and not lost in the dirt. There it is now on a circle of gravel with two golden alyssum and a catmint. His spot is in the plum tree's morning shadow with Cuisse de Nymphe on one side and Golden Wings on the other. - Patch is walking with her tail up these days. She likes to be my one and only. 2 Patch last evening was asleep at my knee curled round with a front leg lain forward across her back legs to close a very loose circle. She looked utterly relaxed. I like that about her company, feeling her relaxation in my own body. It's her trust too. In the yard she's always aware of her hideouts, the slot under the porch, the gap behind the compost lid, the height of the fence, the lattice's rungs, and even in the house she freezes at an unusual sound, but she'll abandon herself into that utter relaxation at my knee. After she's been out patrolling in the morning she needs to check in with me at the monitor, lie down between me and the keyboard with her head on my arm. Then when she's too warm she lies on the floor but nearby where she can see me. It's 4am and the stove is beeping to tell me the tea I don't want is done. 4 5am, cloud in unmoving dark chunks showing through to dim uninspiring blue. I was lying awake thinking I should complain, that I don't have much to say because I don't want to detail how these days go along shamefully bare and sore; but now that I'm sitting here drinking my boring herbal tea I feel a kind of lift and no longer want to complain, partly because when I weighed myself I'm down another half pound so I don't have to be ashamed of my podge, and then when I open the door I see white tulips under the crabapple, red tulips down the strawberry bed, yellow cowslip and primula, white Iceland poppy, cherry and plums in white blossom, mauve and white moss phloxes, dark blue muscari and wondrously best the mauve iris flourishing at the doorstep. 5 Connections - things meeting in me-crossroads - my own complete exact beauty when I look from the bed to that silver mirror in the corner opposite. A glimmering beast, a demon, werewolf, without gender, a wizard. Focus differently and there's the smooth cheek of a beautiful woman, as conventional as. It's as if I focus through it and see a superimposed face. For a moment I seem ready to enter that other dimension. It feels like being flooded so I pull focus and then try again to let go. It's the eyes - there's a skull with unhuman eyes.   Beauty of July, the easy living of it, things come alive, snails, cats, plants, cliffs of lights, wind. I cut through them like a razor-edged fan turning and feel balanced, really balanced on the edge of death that's not oblivion but worse. Can I do that better. It was one of the moments when I stare at what looks like complete exact beauty. I kept staring and saw something else. There'd been 3HO yoga and Dorothy Richardson had been notching me up. I was high. Was that really something?     YES I was seeing you     YES What is worse than oblivion     liberation, friendship, disillusionment, completion Was it a way of being afraid of my power     yes Richardson had been showing me what I was     yes I was feeling close to death because I was feeling alive     yes Did I mean I was feeling the precariousness of the high state     yes What's worse than oblivion is the oblivion of losing the high     yes The high self feels in danger of dying     yes What's worse to it is to go stupid again     yes This central thing in the London years, an ethos of tracking state. Lessing, the Sufis, 3HO, Roy, Castaneda, mysticism reading, the swimming pool - the idea of poetry, co-counseling. I'm realizing younger people haven't been through that education - things that puzzle me about Emilee. It wasn't all my friends - was it any? The belief that state can be changed, that we can follow or find ways to be smarter, more perceptive, more alive. Better looking, better at what we do, more impressive. It's pragmatic, the tasks of the 20s, the after-college task of establishing ourselves in love and work, but also what's called spiritual, wanting to be more in touch with life and cosmos, wanting to be more realized in whatever way we can find possible to humans. The work I had to do to balance myself in relation to Roy made me create an independence I practiced with Tony, unpossessive, clearer, more disobedient, harder-nosed, separating sex and ownership The swimming pool film was commitment to show what I was I could recognize instruction and noted it but The film as dream project was irrelevant continuation of trying to make a living in school. 9 There is no reason to doubt that human consciousness is changed by the experience of living above clay rather than chalk, even though the nature of that change is not understood. [Ackroyd Thames: a biography] Something to be said for Roy is that he always had wheels and gave me many of the sights of England. Ireland, Wales, France, Germany, Amsterdam. 10 When I open the back door a wonderful scent of leaves. At 5:06 a dull dim almost monochrome day blue except for two yard lights, the street lamp and that yellow slot at the horizon. I'm always disappointed when the sky is closed. Most days disappointed to wake at all. 11 Waking to warm light on the venetians, imagine! The solicitor has sent a nice letter about Mari. 12 Tuesday morning. Sun on the venetians all the way down. 14 I woke from telling someone about the time with the witch women - still don't know what to call them. I was speaking forcefully. C was with other people sitting in front of me and read out part of an old letter from me. That's about all I remember. As I was falling asleep I was thinking what I should say about Roy is that he was unstable, that I was learning balance. I've been shelving him by describing him with contempt and I think it's correct to write him off in the end - because he took shortcuts: lying, stealing, deliberate seduction - but that leaves out what I was able to take from being with him. Not just what I was able to take, what I was given. - Lilacs next to me for the first time this year. 15 Bit after 5, tender tint back of the linden. Brightening. Buoyancy when a day begins with light. Was lying awake naming the way in my lifetime I was seized by compulsion again and again - seized. I mean falling in love. It's a state that believes in itself at the time - it forces people to pair-bond - it kept trying to force me to do that. Was it nothing but pathological     no Would it have been better for me to be bonded     no It made me fight myself     yes Fighting myself sophisticated me     YES Okay that's the answer to what Roy did for me. His instability - being tied up with his instability - sophisticated me. Yes but what does that mean. There was an attitude I learned - I held with Tony - a reserve held with effort - a tough separateness. I discovered that it worked, we had beautiful times, but then I went backward with Andy wanting - what is the word - childish merging - which goes bad every time. - Bright hot day in the garden. It happens many times in the day that I sit down to do something and then just go on sitting: am on the path placing seedlings and then just sit staring at the burning green of perennial edge, the stalwart body of the greengage. There's no motion in me. 16 I notice the cost in energy and pain of every act. That weed is too long a reach, I'll leave it. - Was never like that! It lets me understand sloppiness in other people. Patch last evening chose a spot next to the rhubarb on the edge of the west fence bed and lay there on her folded paws for a couple of hours gazing into the garden. 17 Quite a lot of The air is already written. Can it be what it is, a story and its sources mixed. A story and its borders. Can I be honest about real sources. Is there a way to make it work     yes Is it better than straight narrative     yes 19 I've finished the Roy section. Had been feeling I couldn't and then this morning just began and stitched it up. Roy had a bent root. He'd grown up in Johannesburg the secretly illegitimate son of an Englishwoman who'd taken ship for South Africa before the war. Though a devout Catholic she'd had a long affair with a married man who stayed married. There was a daughter and six years later, when she was forty, a son. Roy grew up in a residential hotel with a large garden, sometimes visited by a man he was taught to call Uncle Gordon. At his Maris Brothers school he was head boy and believed to be a widow's son. When he was twelve he found the birth certificate that named his father. As he was graduating high school he read about RD Laing's therapeutic community in London and set sail to find it. He funded London by persuading an older man at his mother's bank, a closeted gay it seemed, that he was going to England as a medical student. When I met him in 1970 Hubert was still sending him a monthly allowance.   I met him when I'd been in London six months. I was living in a tiny room uphill a bit from the shopping street at Parliament Hill Fields when I saw a for rent notice in the little local post office. I liked the way it was written. The room turned out to be a wonderful large space at the top of a modern block on St Albans Road: central heating and two large windows looking north up Highgate Hill. The man letting it had a South African accent, interesting books and a quietly attentive manner.   When I met Roy I was an innocent in some ways. I still expected even men to be honorable, to be fair, to want to tell the truth, to want the best for me. It soon turned out that the diffident courteous man with a room to let was a liar, a cheat, a con man, a thief, a drunk and a compulsive seducer. A complication was that he was both a liar and unusually truthful. He could be emotionally immediate in a way I'd never seen in a man. He laughed and cried, hit out like a child, felt whoever was in front of him more immediately than they had ever been felt before. At some point I understood that he was radically unstable: he could seem to make commitments but he didn't remember them. He could be radiantly beautiful, lucid and intelligent and he could fade to a shambling paranoid zombie. He held himself to no loyalties except his moment. That also made him sexy and funny.   I'd been brought up in Protestant rectitude: one signed on to principles of behaviour and followed through. He put my ideas of how people should behave toward one another in question because I could see how charmed people were by him. Not only that: although he slept with most of my friends at least once, lied without scruple, stole money from me, hit me a couple of times before I moved out, I had to notice that he out-classed me. I envied his looseness. I was interested.   I learned to balance in contradiction, began to see the desperation in his method, the way he didn't read but would parade ideas he'd heard about as if they were his, tell my stories as his own. The way he was compelled to seduce anyone he was with. Disillusionment sophisticated me. Over the five years I knew him I learned an attitude toward lovers that worked better than the childish merging I'd earlier expected - a reserve held with effort, a tough responsible separateness that could give beautiful contact without grasping for safety.   In the years since then I've tended to describe him with contempt and I think it's correct to write him off because he took ethical shortcuts, but that leaves out what I was able to take from being with him. - Not just what I was able to take, what I was given: his transparency in tenderness, malice, cunning, humour, sorrow, an immediacy that I think was principled in some way. I'd find scraps of paper with notes to himself: Be here NOW.   But how not to be his victim. I took him as a free zone, someone I didn't have to treat the way I'd want to treat other people. I could experiment: get crawling drunk to see what it was like; hit him back; lie a couple of times on purpose; pull pound notes I needed from his pockets when he was passed out; persuade him to go to Amsterdam for a weekend so I could sleep with someone I fancied. Use him for sex when the chance came round and go my way in a good life I no longer told him about. I was looser, had more options. Was more interesting to people. Something else to be said for Roy is that he made sure he always had wheels, gave me many of the sights of England, Ireland, Wales and the continent. And a son I was thrilled by. - Oh how I love the lucidity and gift of this! Said Lisa. 20 Subject-line note from Louie saying she could see Luke is also like Roy. Annoyed me. I looked again but no she was just letting me know she'd seen the piece. Wanting to come up with something that would grab me. I'm watching to see whether I miss her. I don't. Should I, is it a deprivation not to? It says no. Letter today from two European women who want me to contribute something to their sound and writing project. Suspect they are too hard-edged plastic-fashionable millennial-current but I'll look closer. Notes from Zach about writing a book, wants to do his MA over again, didn't get it right the first time. It's true he didn't but isn't he still tied up in his old knot. Note from Susan Zimm saying she found Work & days. "I think you are doing it for many of us." I like that Don checks in with most of the daily posts. Why, because he's getting to actually know me after all this time. 22 Row's birthday. I'd want to describe him here but don't because he looks. But anyway: he's 36 and has a baby and a wife who says she loves him so damn much. A life elsewhere. This morning I'm wanting to talk to Judie. Write to Judie I guess. I want to say yes M preferred me but it was for a good reason not a bad reason. I was interested in her. I talked to her. I felt for her oppression and kept trying to rescue her. And yes her preference gave my confidence a good start. You were a more reserved person and I understood even then that her preference was hard on you but I couldn't fix it. You maybe don't understand the ways though that her preference in the end was made of straw. The more I became myself the more she didn't like me. I came to realize I'd overestimated her. She wasn't as smart as I'd thought she was; she didn't really want to be rescued; and she didn't actually want the best for me: she pressured me to be what would have been a disaster for me. I came to have a horror of her. When I was with her I'd feel drained to exhaustion. And the other thing between us: I've always liked you, your steady intelligence, but Michael stands in the way to such an extent that I've let it be. I can wish you well at a distance. 23 hello adrienne and sanna - there isn't a lot of time before you finalize your contributors' list so I'll put something out to you without having time to assemble a strong proposal. I've been thinking for a long time about seeing sound, I mean in a sort of quasi synesthesiac way, and could enjoy having a reason to make something more of those thoughts. here is a bit of journal writing from some years back to give you a sense of what I mean: Last night a random radio site gave me Phill Niblock's 2013 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.   We lay on the floor beside her fire and listened to both pieces through and then talked about it.   It was very detailed in her big speakers. There was a lot of subtle throb. We agreed it was charcoal grey. The way it looked to me was like abstract expressionist marks. There are no plants or animals or humans in it, it's cosmic. Louie said she could feel it rearranging her brain, pushing backward. The second piece she said struck straight through the middle.   At one point the porch door opened itself and cool air flowed in as if it were joining the sound.   I could not focus the whole, always had to choose foreground or background or left or right, which often was the same thing. I thought of watching landscape flowing below an airplane's wing, the way I can see it all but not remember it, in no way grasp it.   Am interested in how anyone else can experience it because I knew it is beyond me. At the same time I didn't feel it crafted by someone, more the way my films are, things made for other people to make something of. I've collected a lot of notes from composers' spatial/visual descriptions of sound and can also talk about how they seem to me to intuit cortical dynamics. It's a realm of terrific interest to me and seems not to have been handled by others. I don't know whether you want to include video but a second thought I have is that I'm working on the soundtrack of a short video called Pale Hill, about five minutes, with non-synch and partly treated sound, and could let you include both the video and some writing about how the track influences exactly what is seen. I'm not completely clear as to what you'd like and I'm oldish so my priority at the moment is to just work on things that are central to my own interests. I'd love to do either of the above or both but no worries if what I propose doesn't fit. I'm pleased to be asked to show work, thank you. - Don't I sound like such a grey eminence. That sort of thing is easy for me now: here's who I am, take it or leave it. There seems so little riding on anything in the art scene that all I can care about is whether it interests me to do it. Plus which I have such a backlog. Am such a backlog. - Wonderful photo today of Rowen and Gideon. The way Gideon at four months old is seeming to stand facing his dad just all-there in confident joy at being loved. The softness of Rowen's look - he's someone who can do that, a man who can look like that. I was thinking that some way into the future when I'm gone and Rowen is gone too Gideon will be standing somewhere alone dealing with what only he has to deal with and yet he'll be the consequence of us back here. In this photo I was seeing something in Rowen I hadn't seen before, was it a kind of solidity. He's been consequential. 24 I think CBD is making me dream more. I was in New York riding a bus. There was a movie going on about four young people riding buses together in different combinations. I was thinking it was a good movie. Traffic piled up. I'd got off the bus and was walking now. The usual scanning shop fronts as I passed. A room with a meeting going on, people at desks in rows. Having to walk around a construction hoarding. I noticed the rich city was thinning out. I'd come to its eastern edge where I could see grey fields. A last block with rooms to rent. I was saying to myself I'd like to move to New York. Practical thoughts about how to afford it. A man in a wheel chair moving ahead of me just at the end of that block. I'll talk to him. He parks the wheel chair and walks with me. Etc. Now that I hardly walk anymore I walk and walk in dreams. Utilities-ditching the gnome has being ordering at St Michael's has disrupted the Russian olive so its north half is showing a lot of dead twigs. I keep staring at it scowling. It's a loss. Gabe on the phone just now saying as he does "I don't like to work". It's as if there's no hope for someone who doesn't like to work. No hope in. He isn't in touch with wanting. Something in his voice as if he's pleased with defeat. - Row saying he's a sperm doner, lesbian couple they know. It's frozen for now and may not take but I don't like the thought, why. It feels like casting my own descent and his into anonymity. I said the child has to know and he said he has to leave that decision to them. For now he trusts them. He and Freya have no idea how much can change. He asked me to look at a book they like. I google-searched it and hate what I found. Was in the bath just now thinking why I'm disappointed they like it, how I could explain to them what's wrong with sword & sorcery. 25 It's the shallow imagining of accomplishment without actual knowledge or skill. I'm disappointed Row and Frey haven't given themselves a better education in quality. "I'm not as ambitious as you." I posted the little piece about The long day closes this morning and then was poking among the posted art stories. I liked them for what the artists love and how personally I love that love. My readers can't handle the art stories because they don't know the work but I feel other people somewhere could be happy to find them. - Working on the late twenties in London intro wowed by the work I was doing opening contradictions and staring them down. Laying it out is a labour. I was going to do it in sections but the contradictions are related. - Another woman in Berlin this one wanting to use the voice track of Bright & dark for a radio show.   part 2 time remaining volume 10: march-december 2021 work & days: a lifetime journal project