May 27
Jeremy and I dealt with the garage yesterday. I worked from 8 to 2 and
paid afterwards, sore all over and left knee stabbing so I couldn't walk.
I still have to sell the doors and hideous cabinet-thing but the garage
is a swept, open space. - Am still wanting to describe Jeremy but ah not
today, will I be good for anything today.
- Is Jeremy dangerous no
- Is he insane no
- Should I take him on no
- There's nothing I can do for him? no
His parents gave him up when he was 7, threw him into the system he says.
He found his dad when he was twelve. He was a piece of shit. He found his
mom too, she lives here, doesn't want anything to do with him. He was a
wired kid and is wired still; works fast, laughs spasmodically after he's
said anything. A perfectly clean lean spare bright small body, tight, with
a face the same, an elf face. He brims with pain. Yesterday he was often
at the edge of tears. He has mother hunger so I'm aware of needing to be
careful. Am cautious in another way too, he's broke and I'm a resource he
should treat well, maybe flatter - I'm not sure he does that but he's experienced
enough with poverty to know how. He thanks carefully when I buy him lunch
and give him water.
He says he found god on his own, he experienced something and now depends
on it. When one of the local ravers went by he said the man was yelling
at voices in his head. "Don't make eye contact." He went on thinking
about him though, if he hadn't been scared he could have prayed with the
man and made the demon flee. Demons flee when he says the name.
-
Still have the hollow core door and the smaller glass door. A woman who
works in gold mining picked up the good doors for a camp north of Blue River.
The hideous drawers will be under a horticulturalist's daughter's bed. A
man I didn't like has the captain's chair. The hated wrong iris is gone.
Everyone liked the garden.
28
Two nights in a row I've fallen asleep in daylight and woken to black
windows at 11, Patch on the bed beside me. Disorder. I'd been too sore and
feeble to order the house and had come to the end of being able to read.
Then in the morning yesterday's efforts are forgiven and I can move to do
what needs to be done but I'll wear out the day before it's over.
Friday mixed sky, crabapple across the street in quiet bloom wriggling
in a breeze. Yesterday was such a business day, marketplace messages all
day long, appointments, waiting. Waiting for next week to plant hot weather
seedlings and get the table clear. Summer has been holding off.
-
I've probably kicked the ant's nest with that note to Judie. She isn't
replying but I'm understanding more. What Paul told me about them deciding
M preferred me because she felt guilty is so dismissive and so untrue that
I'm fighting it. Paul was insisting, "She engaged with you.
She didn't engage with us." What they are not noticing is that I engaged
with her, it was coming from me. I was that kind of person, bright
and communicative, I want to share. I talked to her, I wanted to tell her
my adventures so she could have them too, I wrote her long letters. She
was starved and I was interested in her. They held back wanting her to notice
them.
- Is that accurate yes
- Is the difference because they felt her as a mother and
I didn't yes
- She preferred me because I was giving her what she needed
yes
When Judie after Ed's funeral said something about how I'd had special
treatment because I had polio I assumed she meant because I was feeble but
what she meant was this other thing that had the same diminishing intent.
So now I'm annoyed that she's taken this crooked way to handle her long
haunt about feeling less than me. She wants my edge to be actually a disability.
I've understood that she needs to feel she's caught up and surpassed and
I've been letting her have it because I - guess what - have felt guilty
about the cost to her of my advantages and have felt I know what I know
so can afford to cede her territory I don't want. Family for instance, the
rajah who gave her a ring, social work books.
- Should I have been fighting her no
- It has diminished my energy YES
- Was the guilt correct no
- I'm massively braver and more brilliant than she is
yes
- My brilliance is not my fault yes
- But still I should protect people from it?
yes
- Is my brilliance an illusion no
- But I had to wait a long time to prove it
yes
What I've seen about M is that I understood her more generously than
accurately. I was imagining she was more like me than she was.
- Yes? yes
- Is it worth saying these things to Judie
no
- But to Paul yes
- Because I want to be friends with him yes
29
I should start linking to what I post every day. [Peter Manning]
-
Am thinking the London intro needs to be 2 things, a long analysis and
the journal project intro. I began wanting a sociological overview and am
finding myself in a deep analysis of the time's intellectual/psychological
work.
-
Was sitting on the grass to plant little things under the greengage.
From that angle I could see yes there are plums!
30 [*]
31 [*]
Two bodies in California. It's done except that there's sometimes
too much about plants. I'd like to publish it. It's 22 pages, too long for
FB. What can I do with it? Online Pdf? Indesign with photos.
June 1 [VW and a room of her own]
2 [peter carey you delightful person]
Seeing sound, imagining sound. I'm already supposing what I write will
be wasted on these young women.
3
Sea Shell open, Jeremy painted the fence.
[Beverly Sills iris]
4
Sound and air. Seeing air.
- I've wanted the way I say things to make it possible to see a human
as continuous with world, not encapsulated.
-
- the whole vast articulate dancing of plasma
-
- He's a painter. Not of clouds but of air's action.
-
- not a substance but a movement within a substance
In the air notes I'm an expansive best self. In that self I feel how
far I exceed my family and friends, except maybe Jam in the time she was
writing the Agenda piece. The self she abandoned.
When I feel how much I know I feel both how useful it could be to the
world and how impossible it is to bring anyone else to know it, how unable
they are.
6
I woke thinking about the journal project - no, the life project. The
project was self-creation. The journal was documentation of it, but part
of self creation was to make someone able to document. GW is the apex of
both projects. Then publishing the documentation. There isn't further to
go in self creation? What comes afterward? It says writing. An afterlife?
Yes.
- Salmon soup: don't forget: vegetables, a 12 oz tin of salmon, tin of
chicken broth, nutmeg, fresh ground pepper, bit of cream. Blend, reheat.
Couple of soaked almonds or not-soaked walnuts.
8
Awake at 3:30. Edge of sky behind the linden dim pale green. Patch scratching
the chair's arm because she wants me to let her out but it's too dangerous
still. Just before I woke I was dreaming I wanted
to give Luke as a boy a ruled sheet where every day I'd record work he'd
done. He rejected it. I went away sad.
10
FB note from Indra, she's signed with MIT for her new book on Renaissance
architecture. "Explosively subversive" said a reader. I'm elated
for the magnificent girl she was. She was trapped with a male artist's ego
and 3 kids under 4 and she fought her way. And lives in one of the houses
she said she wanted to live in when she was eleven walking past them on
the west side of Parc Lafontaine.
I know what it's like to trust myself. It was in contexts where I had
scope. My question now is how to have energy where I don't have beauty,
affection or scope. To have beauty, affection and scope where I don't have
them.
In the air sheets seeing how laminations of the essence can be shown
by repeating lines in different registers.
The absolute sense I have of meter. A sentence must end on one syllable.
What it's been like this morning working well. Going through air sheets
discerning, placing. Focus. Parts gathered from many but now all my own.
- More sorting I know.
11
Significance of the turn toward composing with laws of nature rather
than emotional levers. Understanding sound as cosmic dynamics.
12
It's the middle of June and so cold I'm still cranking the heat and covering
plants at night. Tomatoes are just sitting in the ground.
13
Grey Sunday 6am, damp streets.
I need to talk about Emilee and I need to erase what I write because
I don't want to hurt her. She is clinging. Sending me gifts I don't want,
writing distressed letters that say she loves me. Falling apart. Diabetes
and now liver failure. Crying jags, panic attacks. I keep feeling it's because
she doesn't seal her edges, she makes herself helpless out of guilt for
her intelligence. Doesn't look after herself, wouldn't exercise, wouldn't
stop drinking, didn't study food, does useless work for corporations, doesn't
separate properly from her parents, sags into the hands of American medicine.
I have kept saying firm up, fight for yourself. She hangs onto me because
I say that but she doesn't do it. Her devotion to me is the opposite of
what she needs. It keeps making me feel I've harmed her, am harming her.
I refuse to be soft with her because I think she needs a hard edge - containment
- but I resent that she won't do it for herself. Instead of being angry
she is submitting to a liver transplant and meantime the world has to do
without her gift. It makes me angry. I am angry: I throw her cards and letters
in the trash. She thinks they're gifts but they're demands for what she'd
have to give herself.
- Is it true that she's ill because she doesn't seal her
edges yes
- She's let herself into a cascade of disaster
yes
- She's killing herself out of guilt for her intelligence
yes
- Is any of it my fault no
- Is there anything I can do for her mother,
triumph, truth, responsibility
- Will you slant that coming through
- Tell the truth responsibly about her triumph over her
mother yes
- Do I do that yes
- Her gifts to me are propitiation yes
- More and more desperate yes
- She feels she's being punished YES
- She's stuck in that yes
- Is there more you want to say no
14
I've posted waking at tony's house.doc with my portrait of him.
This morning I'm gazing at the photo as if it's new to me. It's a good photo,
the way he gazes into the black half of the frame and the way it's lit,
as if the light is touching his shoulder but holds off from his face to
be able to see it. I think earlier I've seen his pose as a bit comic, like
Victorian aspiration, but this morning I see his soft look as true of the
intelligent kindness that made me happy with him.
-
The Berlin woman's two hour radio show - I've held off - I liked that
she said that when she read the Bright & dark description she
had to shut the lid of her laptop for a minute - two hours is a lot - the
Mac Pro went dark so I can't see the playlist - all the music is too chaotic
for me - she's trying to do something conceptual but she hasn't focused
it - I like the idea of two hours of music stitched with relaxed thought
- her voice is alright, firm enough, light grey - I can't tell whether she
really hears what she plays, she says something about the pieces but is
it about them - is it a version of the we're-so-special artiness of Vancouver
forty years on, is it druggy - I don't know what they do in Berlin - it's
such a pile, does anyone work for a whole view or do they just poke around
in the midden - or is Berlin what London was.
15
She read the Bright & dark description in a jerky way because
she isn't familiar with the state of long rhythms and at the end read the
Ready poem alright because it is cadenced simply. I liked that she
liked them but am so aware now that nothing really happens when my work
is recognized in these ways. I can't pass my recognitions to people who
haven't already arrived in them on their own. One of the things I like about
the work I've done in myself is the quality of the persons whose work I've
been able to affirm on account of it: yes you're one of the ones who've
got there.
So today I posted rebecca west.doc knowing none of my readers
will have read her and so won't be able to read the post for what else is
in it, I mean the general shape of a thought. Have I said this before -
I tried to explain it to Luke - the way my pieces aren't personal because
of the way my writing can't actually be read as about me. What I can offer
is the shape of a thought, the shape of a motion of a thought: here, you
might be able use this on something of your own. Brianna saying she has
been by a river seeing what I described and thought of it differently. I
think she couldn't quite say what she meant, which is that she saw what
I saw but didn't exactly know she was seeing it. I could give her the shape
of that thought.
- Do you think that's accurate yes
-
Vacuum cleaner grinding in the house. I'm in the verandah with leaves
all around, people gathering for their Tuesday charity across the road.
Hip and knee hurting because I grocery-shopped yesterday up and down the
long aisles.
-
I've asked Kathy to come every two weeks instead of what often was just
once a month. Clean floor shining, scent of mock orange branches in a jar.
16
The usual dream of trying to get back from somewhere
in the south to Choy's big house in the east end. There's the usual kind
of obstruction to the east - a fast highway with concrete barriers - so
I'll go north and then take a bus through skid row up Hastings. This time
I do arrive. I was worried that I didn't have the key to my own rooms but
a woman from another flat has left one in the lock. She says something about
headphones. I open the door of a small room with my bedding piled relieved
as if it's been a long time longing for home. I'll ask if they've seen Luke.
She's saying we all have to be out by Sunday. I'm thinking these are smart
regular people, I could like them now, maybe I could live in another big
house with them. I'm writing the dream because the soft relief of arriving
is still with me.
-
Can I use The air to write the seeing sound piece. Does she give
him her sound notes.
She's seeing, he's sound. They take photos of objects, she takes photos
of the air. They make sound objects, he forms the air. They have the same
reason, being in air as being in life.
Her notebook is about seeing sound but it is about process too.
They understand themselves to be composers.
Composition for the ether of anyone's brain.
Their implicit ethic. What Logan said about a poet needing to be larger
than poetry.
They are careful with each other not to send too much, not to overload
what they know is a careful mind. There'll be more time for spill when they're
together again.
What is it she wants to give him. I'm thinking of the wrong letters I
wrote Tom and Jam, wrong because they were journal writing not tuned to
their reader. To my mom too I guess, just being who I was at that moment
and feeling they ought to admire it. Solipsistic. Here I am whether or not.
It said: connecting the child's feeling will make it clear. You are
wanting the wrong thing in it, recognition. What you should want is to
demonstrate the subtle thing that is your unique interest. It is a story
about a study. Your question was, how much can I know. The story is about
this question in a particular time. What is characteristic of the era is
the amount of written testimony you have had to learn from - the amount
of written testimony specifically by women.
The subtle thing that is your unique interest is, what can be known
by women. What are the possibilities of women's intelligence. So it is
a story about observing and reading to find female intelligence. It is
a story that can only be written by a little girl who becomes a philosopher.
So I want to demonstrate what can be known - the knowing - the study
that finds it, the resources used. Is that it?
Dorothy Richardson did it already - she found the very first moment
where it could be done - the autobiography of a question. Is there something
for me to add? It says yes, integration of partially lost feeling to come
through.
There's something unclear in the wanting to tell. I want the wrong thing
from it, recognition. I cling to wanting everything seen.
- What should I want?
- Subtlety.
- I should go for demonstrating the subtle thing that is my unique interest.
- Yes.
It isn't obvious exactly what it is. It is something like, what can
I know? How much can I know? Being asked in a way particular to this time,
the particularity of all the written testimony that I draw from. It's the
first time there is this much written testimony from women and so many
women forming themselves in relation to it.
Being about was in support of it but didn't address it. The central
method is self-formation in recognition. So it is a story about observing
and reading, finding female intelligence. Woolf demonstrates it but doesn't
show how it was found.
Can it only be written by a philosopher? No, but a little girl who becomes
a philosopher .
What do I have to add to Dorothy Richardson? Integration of partially
lost feeling in order to come through. Its theory.
17
We lived with no neighbours a mile and a half from the highway. We children
and our mom would be in lamp light in the kitchen and one of us children
would say we heard our dad's truck gearing down for the turn onto our road.
Our mom would say she didn't hear it. We'd stand listening. By the time
the truck got to the bridge she'd hear it too.
What is it about that scene. Its intensity marked us. The sound gave
us the reach of night around us in the dark. That we children could hear
it and our mother couldn't told us something about the losses of adulthood.
We were nervous about our father, we were more comfortable together when
he was away, and yet he was our livelihood, we did need him to come home.
-
Munro 1978 Who do you think you are
Reading it dazzled in the early chapters by how much more she noticed
in her home days than I did as well as by the freedom of the writing. By
the last chapters I was skipping; Rose no longer interested me, or Munro
either I suppose, because Rose's later life was too far from Munro's own.
Anyway, though, what I went on naming to myself was how much Rose noticed
and cared about what others thought of her. I kept being irritated by Rose's
concern about how she was seen by anyone at all and the way for instance
it made her marry Patrick though she knew she didn't want to.
What I was noticing about that is how it's one of Munro's strengths as
a writer. She knows what people are like because she has cared to know how
they are about her and I mostly don't. When Ed shouted Who do you think
you are I had no interest in who he thought I was or who he was at that
moment. I could never have written the scene where she taunts Flo and her
father thrashes her with a belt. She writes it inside all three of them.
Other people are like that too, Louie, Tom, Anne, even Paul. I've bulled
ahead just doing what has seemed necessary to me. I can see it's a weakness
but what sort of strength is it too. People's view of me when I was little
was so stupidly prejudicial that it would have felled me to know it. I've
gone on assuming that, really, and it has to be a blankness. But has it
been a genuine strength too? It says yes. (Here's someone whose opinion
does interest me.) Munro is good at what she does but she takes care to
be conventionally acceptable. I've poked into some corners I love and she
can't -
Anyway what I'm noticing too is that when I describe people I write them
as objects because I don't ask what they are specifically when they're with
me, which is what they are inwardly in those moments. I act in relation
to them - I'm thinking of students - in a way as if I'm the only person
there. What Tom meant when he said I talked to him as if he were a dog.
Student letters were different because I quoted theirs and could reply carefully
in their style.
18
It's the girl thing. Stuck in the horizontal. No world, no plants, animals,
clouds, wind, stars.
-
Working with the sound/grain/space shreds I keep feeling structural homology
of all the topics. Cortically integrating what is already integrated in
cosmos. Is that it? Yes. Do you like it? Yes. Will anyone like it? YES.
-
Windows beside me so clean they seem not to be there - Jeremy will be
gone at the end of the month so I'm piling tasks - we painted the coldframe windows
and rim and next week he'll do the porch and other bits of touch-up, the
door if I can figure it out - he was teaching me to use my drill on the
coldframe's hinges - yes! - at last. While he's working I'm stronger it
seems. I weeded, made order in the compost corner. Back and forth with little
things all day = froze strawberries. - Look at the barely tinted evening-east
behind the trees, so clean behind this crystal pane. 9:19pm. Wind tonight,
taller trees nervous each in their way. Patch asleep in the verandah stretched
flat on the plastic tablecloth because it's cool. Perfume everywhere in
the room, mock orange.
19
[Maid of Orange iris]
I posted cripping femme.doc and everyone is too shy to like it,
except Don who I think can see that it's clear.
- Because they feel it's cruel to notice consciously
yes
20
A morning's work can be very brief. I'm in it and then if I eat, if I
look at anything online, I'm not. My brain shies off.
9 on a bright day.
21
Jangled yesterday by being social at all. Do the racial-politics people
go on about microagressions not remembering that almost any social contact
is a tissue of microagressions. Cheryl on FB messaging asks how I am and
when I say I've had invitations from young women in Berlin is compelled
as always to complain that success in art - in this case my success in art
- depends on luck or who you know. She cannot say: I'm happy for
you, you've earned it. This time I named it to her but she went on insisting.
It may not be personal - it's her disabling pessimism - and yet it's an
attack.
Then Miriam in the garden picking up strawberries was saying my cat was
in love with her and going on about herself without interest in me. Worst
was that when I handed her my camera to look through she took two hideous
photos of me though I said I didn't want her to. Then there they were on
my camera where I had to see them.
22
When I couldn't fall asleep last night I was looking for something to
imagine, sex with DM maybe. I had Mike's photo of Tom at OB Pier in my head,
his strong nose, that hard masculinity. DM isn't that but I was groping
for what he could be that is wide open in sex and yet mature-manly. I'd
had a yen for Tom's manliness but its closedness was ruinous for sex. I
wanted to imagine two people for whom sex could be the underlying fabric
of all. I was thinking DM has a composer's sense of shaping events, skills
of delay and improvisation. They'd find themselves in spaces like Niblock's
or Manning's music, able to know they were there together among dark masses
moving slowly, textures overlaid, gestures like white flares. Then in their
daily life they'd be peaceful and quiet together because they'd been there
and could be again. He'd be at his desk bringing it into music.
It's funny I hadn't realized what I'm working on about sound is also
about sex.
I noticed something new about their first night on the airplane together.
They talk through the night. As they talk their fields are fusing so extraordinarily
that after a while they stop talking and close their eyes. He reaches to
hold her hand. She knows it's decisive. Daylight increases at the window.
They fall asleep. Wake when the plane begins to descend. She smiles at him.
He says You'll need the next days to get ready for your show. I'll come
but I won't hang around after. Will you have an early breakfast with me
next morning? - She's impressed that he's kind about what a show is like.
She asks where and what time.
When they meet for breakfast he talks about her show in detail. Then
he asks will she come to Scotland with him for a couple of days, he'd like
to show her where he's from. Today? she asks. She's ready instantly. The
Blackbird Inn that night. It's so intense she's knocked sideways. He is
too but when they sit in his granddad's churchyard together his honesty
in it steadies her.
When they're back in London they have another two weeks before she has
to go home. They'll do London things together; for now they'll ballast it
a bit by getting to know each in an ordinary way.
So I have this wish for something sexually absolute but what I got instead
was the twists and quirks of bad sex and real life with Tom. I earned my
fantasy by faithfulness in reality.
23
She stays where she is at the Y. They breakfast on the street every morning.
She often has things to do: works in libraries, sees film friends. Evenings
he takes her to places he likes without saying he likes them. They go to
Chelsea Physic Gardens and talk about plants. They come upon a rehearsal
of Fauré at St Alban the Martyr. She sees where he teaches, shows
him where she lived when Luke was little. He'll sometimes make her dinner
and they'll eat on his roof looking over Bloomsbury in pink afterglow. Physical
buzz never lets up. They don't suppress it, don't talk about it. It can
make them silent together in a way she loves.
When she's working in libraries she writes about her days but she's careful
of wrong uses she's given her journal and doesn't write about him. Instead
she writes from the states she has been in with him. She's chemically in
love and he is too but their intelligence together is teaching them to bend
that elation toward their work and their days.
She reads him bits of what she writes. He plays her the piece he's been
working on since they were up north together. She recognizes their night
in it. It stuns her. He sees that she's stunned, gets up and sits just behind
her left shoulder backing her with his field.
She has moments of terror. She brings them to him without explaining
them. The tact in his silences calms her.
What is she afraid of. What's the essence of it. A primal and realistic
fear of what it is to be an open woman with a man, physically invaded and
socially degraded.
- This is starting to get to the nub. I have in mind the time with Paul
when we smoked hash and I was enflamed as never, so I felt I'd be nothing
but cunt forever. I knew it was just the drug and Paul was unworthy of it
so I found a way to exit but I have the memory of an openness I haven't
allowed. The other memory is when we'd smoked weed and Jam said she was
a man. I was flooded with terror of what that would mean.
- I was stronger and could go into the degradation and disgrace without
refusing it. Yes I'm a woman yes you're a man yes I desire you in that
secret dark of full solar plexus burning woman right in the animal soul
where satisfaction is.
-
- You watched me sink into shock. Yes, I was saying, I am that, I will
be that, why are you looking at me with such a coldness. At the mercy of
the man. At your mercy. "You're looking at me as if you're afraid
of me." You've led me here without wanting me here.
-
- "You were right, I let you go into it completely alone. I was
completely cold and hard."
When I read that now I despise Jam for her mentat ill-will. What she
was feeling was rather-you-than-me: I've forced you to be what I'm too smart
to be myself.
- Was it YES
I should have left her at that moment. My judo move next moment was crooked
too. I needed intelligent company and paid in pain and confusion. When I
got to Pound in her box of books it was done though I dragged it on for
miserable years.
- Was the work I did in that time worth the fall
yes
How is it that DM understands this. She lets him see it, as I did then.
He'd watched his mother's struggles, had been willing to be interested in
women. Has dared his own desire without shortcuts. Protectiveness is native
to his maleness, he's been that all his life. When he sees the chance he
has with her he exults that he can be what's best in him. He's deeply happy
to bring earned skill to her crashes, he feels he can right the world.
Tom loved his mother and lost her. How was he different. He was protective
in small ways but he hadn't been strong in DM's ways, he shirked the depths
both of his mother's own losses and his loss of her. DM is profoundly competent
and honorable. He holds to his own integrity always, pays its costs in pain
and solitude knowing he is doing so.
24
Yes I'm sometimes choosing pieces I post with Don in mind. I feel he'll
notice what the women don't. Say that better. I feel he'll recognize what
he is in his own working aloneness. It's a sensation as if of a thin light
yearning air inside his head.
-
Thursday morning, overcast. We're having hot days. The roses are in their
moment. [Lark Ascending rose] [Lark Ascending June
20] Patch stays upstairs and lets me have my night.
25
Miriam said she loved my Luke stories because of the joy in them. Her
own boy went to prison and afterward died.
-
Nearly a hundred degrees this aft, forecast to go hotter. When I'm out
in twilight shutting off the sprinkler mosquitoes bite my bare arms all
up and down. Incandescent white sky slowly fading.
26
At last it's not too cold to let doors stand open as soon as I'm up.
California made me understand how cold it is here even in summer. In Borrego
always this sort of morning and the front door open all day.
I went back to sleep toward daylight and dreamed Rob. I won't tell what
there was of sequence, just the moments I liked. On
the street following him, I think wrapping my arm around him from behind,
looking at his narrow tallness and his long hair like a flow of honey. Further
on as we walked I had a mental image of myself as a young woman with loose
hair and a lovely face. I wanted to ask Rob how he saw himself but he backed
me away from it. We had got off the street onto a muddy track and were going
to turn around but went just a bit further and were on a muddy knob over
a lake in pink light.
It's the very height of summer.
Wasn't Rob the only man who could feel energy flow. Strong desire, steady
protective actual love. We really fucked and we laughed when we fucked.
Ways he's DM, true-hearted, reticent and competent. An orphan. Ways he isn't.
His timidity. So why did I have to go on to a man who was armoured and sexually
jaded. I was in warrior mode with the thesis and needed a full-on fight.
But it's right for the warrior to have retired into the good man's house.
It's a good ending.
-
I posted pleasure of talking with strangers.doc and Don said,
I love this. I thought he would like it but also I expect him to be patriarchally
too frozen to say so. Like my brother Paul who will not ever say anything
admiring to me. Rob did only when he'd drunk wine.
27
I go out early and push down the path through poppies buzzing with honeybees three to a flower. Come in with lettuce and two new
carrots, a Litchfield Angel, a Generous Gardener, Golden Wings
buds. The hollyhocks have begun just now this morning.
28
Monday. Cold coffee at 5:19. Both doors open to cool the house. Have
turned on the sprinkler and am letting it wet the kitchen floor so the draft
is cooled as it flows past. When I was lying damp in grey dawn Patch said
meeee quietly once from the floor. I knew what she meant. Let her
out. After a little while she came back in and said it once quietly again.
She meant she wanted what she knows she's due by our custom, her half tin
of Fancy Feast. She eats a bit of it eagerly and then goes back outside.
I felt for her yesterday when it showed 95 degrees on the thermostat display
and she had to lie flat as a puddle somewhere on the floor. The floor in
the back bedroom stays cool because it's over bare earth and maybe because
the over-closet door is open to let hot air rise into the attic, but I couldn't
tell Patch that was where to lie and she didn't like being locked in that
room.
Later she did come and lie near me there while hour after hour I watched
family persons cooking under pressure and the operation of a BBC reality
TV formula I thought a better formula than the baking show's - no contrived
clowning but a lot of situational liveliness erupting from interactions
of the contestants amongst themselves, with cameras on all the counters
all the time. There's also the inspired way these shows familiarize the
whole country with its outlying citizens, the brown people, northern people,
working class people, young people, old people. When Canada tries to do
knock-offs of these shows they're embarrassingly feeble because we don't
have differentiated enough subcultures and because Canadians don't know
how to talk. - Am just thinking of how when I met Peter Harcourt what I
wanted was to learn from him how to talk. He could talk because he'd been
living in England.
29
Second Tuesday. Kathy is coming early because of the heat. "Heat
dome over the Pacific Northwest." I'm keeping the venetians down to
cool the house for her.
30
When people comment on my little stories how inarticulate they are. Or
conventional. Or bizarrely irrelevant, Jim after what I posted about Ed.
- Should I be raking up thoughts about Ed dying - what is owed the occasion
- say it another way, am I feeling anything I'm not aware of. That is one
question; the other is, what objective account can there be of his life
as such, apart from being mad at him.
-
- He's 82. Born January 1920 in the Ukraine. When he was 5 in 1924 his
family fled to Canada. While they were at sea a whale was sighted. No one
would lift him to see over the rail. When he was a boy he'd fly into tempers,
lie kicking and screaming under the bed. He found a $5 bank note on the
road but his father took it for the family. He made clay marbles and sold
them. When he was 12, after grade 8, he stopped going to school.
- In his late teens he went to bible school. He asked one of the bible
school teachers what he should do about torments of lust. The man said
to marry as soon as he could. He saw Mary reciting a poem in church and
thought her intelligent. Was 23 when he married her. When they were courting
he wrote her poems. He seemed to be saying he'd take her into a wider life
than she'd had at home. Afterward she discovered he had wanted to be a
farmer all along.
-
- He had ambitions as a farmer, thought he could win a Master Farm Family
award, but he wasn't steady enough ever to feel really successful as a
farmer. He had no patience with machinery, was enraged by mechanical breakdowns.
He was callous with his wife and children, curt, intimidating, sneering
and belittling so they never wanted to help. Wasn't respected in the community
because he always had a grudge going, whined and bragged, accumulated enemies.
In his marriage he was faithful but lustful, always commenting on pretty
women.
-
- He gave important things nonetheless. He didn't give them personally
or with generous intent, but they were results of who he was. He slaved
on the farm and did support us although only because he thought he had
to. He gave us his genes, which have been my edge and my looks, and he
gave us the farm, which we loved. Wonderful things came through him: beauty,
sexual magic, charged silence, solitude, bravery, visual skill, resistance,
music, travel.
-
- Saying these things I'm saying he didn't intend to give us anything
but he did give us these things. Then it says no he intended to give them.
Are you sure? Yes. He wanted to stand for something and against something.
Did he want to do it for us? Yes, against the ruin of the false and flabby
his unconcealed realness of spite, competition, rage, lust, judgment, jealousy,
calculation, irritation, bragging, misery, arrogance, grandstanding, brutality,
contempt. He held wildness. So was I the only one who could use it? Yes.
Yes. Does he feel he succeeded with me? Yes.
-
- So this tells me why I don't want a reconciliation. I'm his heir. Is
everything that needs to be acknowledged, acknowledged? Yes. We don't have
loose ends. I achieved a stand-off. He knew I would fight every point.
He knew there'd be a consequence for every mean act. He knew I was calling
him. The stand-off was a true form, private and intense.
-
- Coast Starlight near Klamath Falls October 2002
What I think people should say is yes you're the heir of his wildness
in being the kind of writer who insists on saying.
I posted it with the photo of him shabby on his shabby yard standing
with his blind-looking work horse. There's so much bare space between him
and his rickety weather-stained outbuildings. He's in rags: oil-stained
old pants and a frayed windbreaker. The horse looks beat-down, worked-out.
He looks so touchingly lonely.
-
Old people aren't interested in each other. They have so little social
energy when they meet that they just glom onto something in their past and
try to revive that former energy in the other person's presence. For instance
the woman who came to pick strawberries this morning needing to talk about
a garden she used to own. I should have a strategy for that because it makes
my local meetings tedious and they're all there is. When I was young I'd
handle old people's social limitations by asking them about their young
days. I suppose I could still do that, but now, because I speak so little,
I need to talk too. So then in face of their lack of interest I do the same
thing and dislike myself for it.
-
Lytton is suddenly on fire as of about 5 this afternoon, the whole village
evacuated. Thinking I need to go through everything I own and get rid of
the many things I wouldn't miss.
- And now on the Grapevine all the annoying women needing to declare
that they're praying for Lytton and its evacuees. Maybe they are and maybe
they aren't but saying so makes it about their imaginary virtue.
July 1
Jason Goncales the fruit man says Osoyoos has been 45 degrees, fruit
is cooking on the branch. My gooseberries and currants have gone soft without
ripening.
I get nervous when I hear choppers or single engine planes because they
mean there's fire nearby.
Enough cooler today so I can like the heat in the verandah. There's a
breeze swaying the sumac at the door and jostling the Manitoba maple.
2
Thick white air today. Dry lightning last night they say, a fire at Quilchena.
- Do I have to give up on Paul yes
- That burst of anger yes
-
- Why am I having this burst of Paul-Judy anxiety just
now decision, exclusion, Ellie, deep change
- Realizing their hostility YES
- What it has cost me? yes
- I am actually more gifted yes
- And that is unforgiveable yes
- Is there anything I can do about it no
- What has it cost me young brilliance and
courage, balance, completion, power struggle
- It's made me hold back yes
- Do you mean in my work no
- Just with them yes
- It makes me feel lonely, it's a loss YES
- Should I write him a letter NO
- Same with Luke yes
- Same with Louie? no
- Same with Tom no
- It didn't stop me when I was at home yes
- He was defending Judy in lieu of himself so he doesn't
have to know he needs defense yes
- Are you sure he resents that I'm more gifted
YES
-
- Stop protecting Judy YES
- Doesn't noblesse oblige? yes it does
- I can afford it yes
- But you still think I should stop yes
- For the sake of integrity yes
- Not hostile but clear yes
- Do I have to lose everyone now no
- Who can be left? friendship, passage from
difficulty, teaching, women
- You mean students yes
- For instance the Berlin women yes
Joyce looking at the slide of the weeds and saying Your family is in
awe of you.
- Unspoken admiration and resentment YES
- If they spoke the admiration they'd be free
yes
- If they were free they'd speak the admiration
yes
- Does Rowen feel it no
- But only because he keeps himself unconscious
yes
- Rob doesn't yes
-
It isn't Orpheus explicitly. She refines it to something brief. He works
with it. He's a brother who can bear what she is. It's a relief to him.
-
Note from Luke asking about heat and fire. Then not replying to my reply.
-
My father died maybe 10 years ago, but his intense
anger at me is still alive in me as a craving for his approval and a crippling
unworthiness. I wish I could harness this but I can't, and I now see that
in this unworthiness I'll never write anything of value.
3
I don't understand why he couldn't work it through.
- He's smarter than his dad and his dad hated him for that
yes
- But he never got past the kids' crux of needing to feel
sheltered yes
- I slipped past it easily in my teens yes
- "You found out you didn't need them"
yes
- Don hasn't really studied it yes
- Is there anything I can do no
- Can he write something of value yes
- But it would have to be about that YES
The kids' crux is first when they're willing to notice they're alone
in the world, and then when they notice they're alright with that. Religious
training with its heavy emphasis on dependency can forestall it. Patriarchy
with its deification of fathers.
5
Paul had been phoning to ask if I'd been burnt to a crisp. When we were
speaking I hesitated but then did edge carefully into saying his burst of
anger had shown me he's still where he was, with Judy ganged up against
me. He denied having been angry, said I'd imagined it, reared up saying
I was making him wrong. There was a long silence. I run up against his touchiness,
which feels like patriarchal bullying, but at the same time I wonder whether
it's flattering, he sees me as so strong that I'm a danger to his self opinion.
If it's patriarchal bullying he does it with women in general. Does he?
It says yes and I suspect it's true. Like Ed, like Tom, he learned to use
anger to cow. Bullying and denial. Which tells me his limits as a man. It's
not simple though. I'm impressed by how carefully I have to speak to him
but still apart from his trigger areas I do speak quite freely, more freely
than he does, in a way that goes back to the easy way I was at home.
How is DM about anger, how would his anger be different. It's never patriarchal
touchiness, he assumes equality. It's righteous, it's clear. It's on the
side of connection not defense.
It's cool today, tinted smoke sky, light sprinkle that wet the street.
Pink hollyhocks at the window with smaller flowers than other years.
Offspring these nights, Australian soap. What about it. Beautiful
men, hysterical women who wear new clothes every day. Romance genre formula
of prince and princess plus minor grotesques. A lot a lot of crying. There
are two princess characters. The main princess is flustered rather than
noble but she has remarkable pearly skin. She wears a lot of ruffles and
scarves. The secondary princess is anorexic; her wardrobe is more sophisticated
but she's hapless rather than flustered. The prince character is delectable
full length and has a fetching quiet smile but small eyes. And then is dead
because in season five when prince and princess have finally settled together
the plot needs a lift (Downtown Abbey). Princess #1 is an obstetrician
and there are many dripping babies pulled out of wombs (Call the Midwife).
Hospital corridors and elevators (Grey's Anatomy) but instead of
serious medical know-how a lot of colliding and pratfalls (British comedy).
Implausible ease with money and massive amounts of wine (Brothers and
Sisters, American TV in general). A lot of candid sex. The basic sitcom
driver, people lying, trying to sustain their lie, getting caught out, subsequent
estrangement and resolution.
I never care about the imaginary people, I look at the bodies, the clothes,
the interiors, the Melbourne locations. The acting, which is remarkably
fluent. The writing, marveling at how much better it is than Canadian and
wondering how that has come about. As always I have an eye on the kind of
human being promoted, in this case women who are completely dependent and
all over the place emotionally, drink a lot, are desperate for sex. This
loose canon kind of woman does exist, Olivia for example. Love woman? Without
work woman and their larger join. Billie Proudman is work woman defeated?
I guess. The two women demonstrating the psychological structure of the
show. The two halves undifferentiated so they can't work together as a larger
self.
7
I was cutting grass in the far end of the garden. A woman passing on
the sidewalk said "I need to say your yard is " - I looked up
and saw she had the face of a drunk, a wrecked face - " the best in
the WHOLE TOWN." I'm left with the mystery of what it is about the
garden that reaches into her unguessable disorder. Love? A garden can say
love. Color and profusion honour the world. Color and profusion with underlying
order.
Wednesday 7:20, a flocked sky, hollyhock lamps lit at the
window.
It often happens that I write something here that when I come back I
can see was written in a stupid state. What do I mean by stupid. Fixed in
some wrong complacency, plodding along. There's a sensation when I see it
that's hard to remember well enough to name. I should wait for an example.
8
I was dreaming that I should make a painting based
on one of my two Nasa images, dark blue with little gold squiggles for stars
- squiggles not dots. Was working with a couple of notebooks trying to write
something but there was dreaming's usual instability so I couldn't find
the same page again.
-
Where I had once interpreted Olivier's reticence
as pessimism, I now saw the deep romanticism, the hopefulness, of not wanting
to overstate or to overpromise.
-
Renaissance choral music. Josquin Desprez b.around
1450, western Belgium, d.1521. Superius the highest voice.
gives the illusion of breadth and depth as though
lamps have been lit in a vaulted room. Music becomes a space in which you
walk around in wonder.
The term 'composer' began to enter general circulation
only in the late 1400s.
The period bears witness to the emergence of
composition as an art an essentially new profession that is struggling to
gain the level of recognition long accorded to painters and poets.
Staff notation from the early 1000s, Gregorian
chant written down at Notre Dame in the 1100s and 1200s. By 1500 there was
already moveable-type music publishing.
wrote of leading the listener into a state of
sensuous transport that culminates in spiritual elevation
'polyphonic filigree' line sung first backward
and then forward at double speed, voices sing the same melody simultaneously
but at different speeds
would recede before the incisive melodic thrust
of Baroque style
-
It's raining. There was thunder and when I went out to drive the jeep
into the garage a scatter of large drops. As I came in through the garden
pink lightning over the Coque's pass to the south. Would it start wildfires.
A bit later, when I'd gone into the verandah to watch, the sound of rain
I could then see bucketing down under the streetlight. It got dark. I sat
at the table watching white headlights passing reflected on the wet street.
Was thinking of the first summer in Kingston riding my bike in the blue
rain cape exhilarated by wind and rain. The young person who loved weather.
Now feeling willing to die because I've been such a lot of life.
Now in the east. Patch lying in the spot she likes on the verandah's
window shelf. I think it's farther away, moving northeast. Can still hear
rain and there are streaks in the dark under the lamp but it's easing.
Still occasional flashes. Are they pink because there's smoke in the
air.
9
Soaked world, grey daylight at nearly 6. Motionless.
began to describe the new power as a form of
listening
Why listening is like other kinds of inward attention, because it isn't
visual. I close my eyes to listen to wind arriving from across the field.
It happens many times that I begin to write by saying what I hear. When
I begin to write I am attending to a conversation in my head - I'm listening,
and so I begin to hear. When I'm recalling something I saw to describe it
I create a silence to re-see it in. Listening creates a silent background.
The kinds of focus there can be. Listening to a subtle vibration in my hip
socket.
Com-pose to set together. Set together and listen to the effect.
10
Crabapple across the street is twinkling all over. Was and isn't. There
wasn't much motion in the air, hollyhocks because they are so tall
swaying very slightly but nothing else, so it was some very particular
state of that patch of space. I'm staring hard and no it isn't happening
now.
I've had some good letters - Bitsy, Don. Jill and Emilee today - Emilee
replying to a post, which is what I've wanted and not had. Jill watching
soccer with Luke because England is in the finals.
11
- Do you know why Anne hasn't replied yes
- She thinks they're too raw no
- She thinks they're bad no
- She thinks they're better than hers yes
- And doesn't want to face that in detail
yes
-
When I go into the DM story noticing how it assembles an ideal lover
from moments with real lovers and notes made. There's some myth hovering,
is it Mabinogian, the woman made of flowers? Tamuz?
12
- 'the way my pieces aren't personal because of the way my writing can't
actually be read as about me. What I can offer is the shape of a thought,
the shape of a motion of a thought: here, you might be able use this on
something of your own.'
the first thought I had was I can see why people
stumble on that because when you write really accurately from your own perspective
an observation rich in sensory detail that brings the reader into that moment
with you, they still think of it as 'about you' because it is your experience
you wrote, and they don't think of it as 'being about' in the same way you
do. can't maybe, because you are the door into that moment for them, so
even though you disappear for them it is about you because you wrote it.
they haven't learned or practiced enough the kind of 'being about' you are.
you're right, and it is true when the observation
is present and naked and well written the observer does disappear, you the
writer become this door or window into observing being about that moment
that the reader passes through and stops thinking about you the observer.
its the only hook they have back to that mind: I notice this because ellie
helped me learn how to notice.
She doesn't quite mean what I meant and I haven't yet seen how that is.
First, what did I mean. "I can't pass my recognitions to people who
haven't already arrived in them on their own." I didn't mean I wanted
people to see me, I meant I wanted to pass on what I'd found, to take effect,
to make people more able.
She is saying people do think of it as being about me. Well yes they
would and maybe they scrape up some fact: 'grew up on a farm', 'had a lover
called Tom', 'is a good writer'.
I'm saying people don't come into that moment with me - can't - they
conjure whatever they can.
"they don't think of it as 'being about' in the same way you do"
- yes I do - I think of it as an instance of being about in general - I
offer it as a template.
"you the writer become this door or window into observing being
about that moment" - yes although door or window isn't a good metaphor
because it assumes they are seeing what was there to see when I saw it.
- no that isn't what she said: she said observing being about that moment.
they can't see what I saw but they can see me seeing it? they can see someone
seeing it.
"learning more of your body of work seeing a bit of what 'you' are
or have been about over time, and so a shape of the thought of you."
yes if that's what you're interested in.
"heard and felt the tao te ching for the first time and loved it
even more than when it set me on that turn of the path at age 15" -
tell me THAT story.
"he's trying to talk about emptiness of self" - how would I
understand that - people can try to make an object of themselves by having
the sorts of thoughts about themselves - saying the same sorts of sentences
about themselves - as they have about objects. Whereas they are more like
reflections on a river, a flow of being.
Posting these little pieces often thinking about how they can and can't
be taken and then in a larger way what writing can and can't do. The first
time I read at a poetry reading the shock I got when people said what they
had liked about what I read. Why had that shock never happened with school
writing. Because school writing is a land of convention.
Sometimes comments under my pieces are so irrelevant, so beside-the-point,
so dumb, that I erase them so they don't pollute my piece. My pieces can
have unlinked parts and I often see that people have noticed only one of
them. Yes but people can notice more than they know they can notice.
13
The question of what writing is and isn't, what I want from it for myself,
what I want it to give other people, what other people make of it, what
other people want from it. What I want from other people's writing and what
I get from other people's writing.
I've always wanted the impossible thing, for people to be in me with
me, and I've always wanted to tell. I began in the naïveté of
feeling that telling gave me that. Because my mom liked to hear me.
For myself now I like articulating: I like the work of considering and
naming. It does feel like integrating speechlessness and speech. I'm relatively
good at it. I think being good at it is what I actually have to give. What
I do give. What I get from other people's writing is that too.
14
Ruby light these early mornings. Crowd of hollyhock-beings with honeybees
jagging and stabbing.
Early in the night I woke suddenly frightened from dreaming
an ugly man's face at the nearest window looking at me yelling Hey girl.
My heart was hammering. Then one of the times when I'm afraid of my thoughts
that seem not to be my own and keep trying to veer away from my own state
of consciousness. I think it was delayed fear from reading about a new fire
nearby before I went to bed. Merritt is frightened now because Lytton had
a fire no one could see coming.
15
A horse in dry pasture can start a fire by striking a rock with its shoe.
This morning I've posted Tom and old women.doc expecting no one
will find it funny the way I do. I keep thanking Tom for the way he makes
me laugh. I'm saying here's some lovely lively life and people will be shocked
that I've said forbidden words.
Reading my Bacigalupo notes marveling that I have what Jam abandoned.
Where we met and were together for a while and couldn't stay. I'm thinking
this thought also beside the question of what is left after Louie. Tom gave
me enduring amusement, Jam gave me enduring Pound, Rob gives me enduring
care, and why do I feel Louie gave me just enduring pressure and resentment.
- A greedy manipulator, is that accurate
yes
- When I named it I was free yes
-
- Is it accurate to shed Luke no
- Should I make an effort no
- Wait for him yes
-
Then a letter from Mafalda needing to blame herself and apologize again.
I wrote a fast note saying no worries but should I pause. Is she falling
apart? If so my briskness is cruel.
16
She isn't and she told me what it was back then, she'd had a heart attack
and was on meds that maybe made her crazy and was imagining that I was moving
on her boyfriend via the facebook stories. That is nothing but bizarre but
I remembered Margaret Gosley when I sent her a journal paragraph praising
the way she flung her hair saying I'd flirted with her man and even Sarah
Black when we were sitting on the rail platform after her school reunion,
she nursing Thomas, saying she'd felt I'd been angling for Ian. Sarah had
been my feminist friend and I'd had no designs on Ian - he gave me a ride
somewhere - so it startled me that trusting friendship had gone wrong that
way. But it happens: Olivia with Roy, Judie with Rasheed, Louie with David
Beach and Dave C and Michael and my dad. Trudy with Jam. So is it wired-in,
solidarity wrecked by compulsive competition? And don't I, in my little
meetings with couples here, play up to the man because I'm more interested
in interesting him? Even when she's been in the world doing things. - But
he's been in the physical world and she has just worked helpfully and conventionally
with people.
17
Saturday morning. When I open the door at 6 it is cold.
Still and green. Across the intersection a sprinkler
in Sarah's yard falling falling dazzling white lit from behind. A dove's
shadow judders across the venetians.
Yesterday I bought 20 pounds of apricots and was all afternoon back and
forth in the kitchen juicing and canning making my hip hurt all the while.
I like my golden jars and I like how efficient I am but is my left hip going
to be sore always from now on if I use it? How much worse will it get?
part 3
time remaining volume 10: 2021 march-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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