July 18
I'm writing about M buying me the thesaurus, realizing Judie and Paul's
mean little effort to diminish M's preference has made me see how earned
the preference was, what I gave her, what she loved in me and I in her.
So how did I come to hate her.
-
First picking of the Evans tree, canned 24 half pints.
19
At night when I sit in hot water in the tub whatever I've worked on in
the day comes back to me. Last night I wondered whether I came to hate M
just because my sunniness had been beaten out of me first by Roy and then
by Them. My young buoyancy had carried me past things I would have hated
in her later.
-
Here's what I posted today. I look at it satisfied to have named that
moment and to have answered Judie and Paul's spite.
- When I was still at home and for some years afterward I was my mother's
favorite child. Her preference didn't last but it was there when it could
matter. My sister and brother resented it bitterly. It wasn't my fault,
or theirs, or hers either; it was just that I was old enough to understand
that she was oppressed by my dad and isolated in her community. Lonely.
I was interested in her, talked to her, defended her when I could. It was
as if we were friends.
-
- For grade 9 we were supposed to have a French dictionary. My mom was
going to town so I asked her to bring me one. It turned out there weren't
any French dictionaries in Grande Prairie Alberta but she came home with
a different small paperback she'd found on the drugstore rack. It was a
Roget's Pocket Thesaurus.
-
- It was laid out in six very broad categories - Existence, Space, Matter,
Intellect, Volition, Affections - each with many branching subdivisions.
I sat on my bed marveling at the way its title page laid out a whole map
of human experience. There was a spatial feeling about its organization
of categorical relation and when I read through its lists of individual
words there was a thrilling sense of moving sideways through precisely
different shades of meaning. Now I can say it was a first glimpse of philosophy
("created in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget, 1779-1869, British physician,
natural theologian and lexicographer schema of classes and their subdivisions
based on the philosophical work of Leibniz, itself following a long tradition
of epistemological work starting with Aristotle").
-
- There was something else too. It wasn't like my mom to spend money
on anything not strictly needed, and she didn't give impulsive gifts, but
she'd stood at a drugstore rack realizing what the thesaurus was, understanding
that I'd feel it too and wanting me to have it.
-
When I was deep in the cherry tree yesterday I heard someone saying "If
you had seen it even a month ago it wasn't half as glorious as it is now".
(Nearly that.) It was the woman who looks like Diana passing with an old
man.
20
Don says he'll be driving through maybe at the end of the first week
of August. Three weeks. What I'll have to do to be ready. I'll have to tackle
him about Being about. I'll want to talk to him about what teaching
was for us, what we've wanted our work to be. I'll want to talk about what
he and I differently want with poetry.
-
Moving into defense with someone is always a defeat. Of intelligence,
young buoyant spirit.
What I felt on my face yesterday looking at the grotesque bodies of women
at the grocery store, how I was letting them make me look. I knew better
when I was young.
I'd like innocence back at the end.
Can I know the worst without taking it personally.
These days I have often found myself sitting slumped.
Am I imagining another gate. What else I'd leave behind. Paul, Tom.
Isn't Notley the best about poetry I've read anywhere. Carson's Glass
essay.
Even historically there's so little in art and writing of actual value
that its present has to be a heap of junk.
21
Anne had had my bundle of still at home stories since the end
of January and hadn't replied so yesterday I nudged her with thesaurus.doc.
Then she did reply but so carelessly it amounted to disrespect. She'd read
a bit on her iPad waiting for Harvey at the dentist and wondered what had
made Ewald so cruel. About thesaurus all she had to say was that
everybody feels sibling rivalry. She was overjoyed by what I wrote about
her book but she doesn't have the ethic I've had. Generous engagement with
other people's work is utterly rare.
Then I go back to my poets file and there's Duncan McNaughton.
work of enduring, intimate loyalty to deeper
sources, to the untroubled nature of that to which it testifies, that of
which one is unable to speak directly: presence of the impossible, of something
else than information, something other than power. Another story, of faithful
affinities in imagination, timeless, a matter of love, the face of it the
beautiful work, itself.
a work of cosmology rehearsing, in its fashion
with all else it so marvelously brings forward, thousands of years of cosmological
observation.
a political
struggle between all that constitutes the agency of the meanness of power
and all the agency that labors on behalf of the agency of beauty and knowledge.
His formation and personal generosity. Stan's letter. That transtemporal
community. What Roy Kiyooka said, we make our work to support other artists.
Duncan and Stan were generous because they took the enterprise seriously.
Pound. It comes to that: there's sadness about humans wasting the world
and a wish to mend them.
When I came among the Vancouver women desolate to find they didn't have
the sense of common work I did. I more and more come up against seeing I'm
rarer than I knew.
Duncan. But I don't like his poems or the sense of 'poetry' there is
in all of that small press conversation with other men standing around holding
beer bottles. Pound's idiotic letters. There is a yes transtemporal community
of utter value they have kept going and I want to but a human life piles
up miscellany too - they do and I do.
So what is made by that effort in so much miscellany. Knowing how to
talk. What I have made in this life. But is there anyone to talk
to.
22
Yesterday was windy and in the evening huge smoke had boiled up to the
west. When the sun had got near the horizon the smoke blazed orange as flame.
This morning as daylight shows the sky at 4:44 I see it has drifted east
overnight and is thick over the hill, a dirty brown smear.
Patch was clingy yesterday. She didn't want to be out in the wind and
kept coming to sleep across my chest. When after a while I pushed her off
she turned back over her shoulder to glare at me. I was startled. Is that
what it seems, can a cat feel such definite hate.
- john field nocturnes
24
The Lytton fire has been approaching from the west. I've been looking
around in my rooms trying to notice what I should take and at the same time
not wanting to pack because that seems to invite the bad thing.
Second picking of the cherry tree yesterday and then through the evening
8 pint jars of juice.
Don this morning replying to tom clancy.doc says O is apparently
dying.
25
Jennifer's small face burned brown and shining with focus. She brought
me a layered bit of Thomsonite; a charming small concretion; a jagged little
fulgurite; a bluegreen agate; a thin panel of creamy shale with an oak leaf on one side
and a younger leaf on the other.
26
These morning skies milky with smoke. Marachino pink sun round as a coin
more dangerous as it lifts into thinner air.
Susan Zimm has said:
Your writing just feels very congenial to me.
Like home.
Then:
I found your Work
and days website since your entry today references it. I love your project!
I feel you are doing this for many of us.
Yesterday she said she'd thought to work with her journals the way I
do but she can't.
I dug into some journals last night and ended
up having a nightmare! Some reveal a version of me that makes me cringe.
The ones from the later years of my marriage scare me. I have to accept
that this is not going to happen. Which makes it only more of a pleasure
to follow your postings.
So then I wonder at the difference, what has been the sturdiness in me
that has found most everything workable.
-
Documentary about a woman whose very large paintings take a year to finish.
For ten months they're nothing but wrong. She keeps painting over them.
I didn't like the paintings but she does because she has taken something
further than she knew to imagine at first.
-
Ackroyd's history of England up to the Tudors. Quarreling kings. Ecclesiastical
bosses. A territory taking millennia to learn to organize itself. Why I'm
English rather than other things I could claim to be, that depth. Why I
have no interest in the more local identities people are opting for. - Apart
from femaleness which is silent in all of that record. Why women's historical
novels, Undset and Mantel. Why O'Brian too, because he brings love into
history.
29
I'd let Patch in for the night and was in bed getting ready to turn off
the light. She jumped up beside me and I reached to stroke her but she was
suddenly staring into midair affrighted as if she were seeing a ghost, and
then jumped away skittering here and there on the floor. Then went straight
to the laundry room closet door, opened it with a paw and slunk inside.
In the afternoon when I was reading in bed she stepped onto my chest
as she does and went to sleep. I stopped reading to feel her lifting and
falling with my breath and then saw another motion too, the small double
jarring of my heart.
30
I asked the Grapevine for open camping sites and a beautiful Native guy
called Nelson Stewart told me about Prince Philip's Point on the Douglas
Lake Road and sent a smoky photo, so now I've got out my map.
31
Asked myself just now what Don had that Greg didn't. I heard grief.
Yes. Don was an orphan and Greg was something else.
-
I've gone through RF1 pulling everything about O thinking maybe to send
it to Michael. It's seeming to me that as a story of our friendship it's
the time that mattered. As a portrait of her at 17 it's right that it's
a record also of her prosperous indulgent family. In both stories it's the
blessedly early time before things fall apart.
Charming disorder. I wrote her and she didn't write me. I wrote Tom and
he didn't write me. Is there something I should say about that. I wrote
myself. I wrote. It was her nature to get knocked around. It was my nature
to stand firm and take note. Don't I still wonder who won? I've wanted to
think I did but there's a photo of her with Michael's kids where she looks
quite alright.
Michael has a loving Fathers Day post of himself a little scrap with
Don at the beach but there are no photos of O or mentions of her, why. Or
of his brother David, or Chris.
August 1
Sky completely white. Bit of rain on the street. Lot of pigeons on Sarah's
roof - pigeons are new and have displaced the doves. Are those gulls? I've
never seen gulls here.
Always hovering with the friend of that early time is the obese woman
in Oxford saying things with her little beak mouth that I didn't believe.
March 1981
- She is speaking in a voice more like her old granny's.
-
- I wouldn't go upfront to her, though she asked, and why, because I'd
have had to say how ugly I found her. I knew I was resisting and knew it
was right to. I would not, will not, open up to the hideousness. "I
told him I'm going to try to tell Ellie." And then I didn't want to
hear it, and wondered why, if it would 'help' her. She'd sit hunched forward,
her mouth doesn't quite let her speak, it makes her words too small.
-
- The actual question seemed to be whether I'd had a right to come there,
without expecting to like her and unwilling to work to hear through her.
Then what was it for: to see Luke and Michael together; leaving from Paddington,
in the big space of Paddington with my arm around his shoulder, his bomber
jacket and grey sweater and patched jeans, his choice of costume. Delighted
on the train realizing it was 20 March, Luke conceived in Oxford March
21.
-
- When she said she'd died I wouldn't feel it, it was as if in spite
of teachings I was feeling it right to blame her.
-
- Her mind, what about it, the distortions, it makes it not worth -.
I held back because it seemed not worth -. "I like you." No that
won't get me. It was after cider, telling the jobs. Janitor.
-
- Rematch?
-
- At the river walking with the right distraction of her talk and the
rest to delight along the flat blue pale blue between tufted green. Horses
in the large field. Port Meadows. Path with a bicycle track cutting into
puddles, water standing up on either side of the wheel. Holy city of Oxford
on the skyline, sand-colored stone. The long-life size of trees leaning
over the river edge. River without banks. A red airplane buzzing nose-down
in the water. Walkers, Sunday afternoon. A few who stared recognition.
-
- She's the kind of person flies buzz around.
-
- Thinking: is this suitable to her, was she always this.
-
- In the morning Luke's long thin hug willing to be seen.
-
- Michael at the dinner table sang My father's lost, I don't know where
to find him. Silence around it. Luke changed the subject.
-
- Olivia's hands' ugliness. She's fat because she's willing to distort
everything. It's the swilling. She isn't willing to know what is.
-
- I asked for her photo of Jane.
"The kind of person flies buzz around." She cracks up not long
after they're married. Medication makes her fat. Her mom leaves her dad
to go back to Wales they say to look after an old parent. They discover
her father has been banging his secretary from the time her little brother
was a year old. Psychiatrists convince O her dad had molested her and she
cuts him off. She moves to Edmonton with Don. She discovers Don has been
seriously banging Holly. She leaves Don and there is some kind of mind-bending
cult in Toronto. "I was disciplined in Toronto. I was thin and working."
She moves back to England with Michael. She marries Chris. Her mother dies
of breast cancer. Not long after my visit David is born with a heart defect.
- But she publishes three books of poetry and writes letters to the Guardian.
I don't like the poems but that's valor.
2
And her kids. Michael works for a global social sciences publisher. David
is a software engineer in Palo Alto. Richard and Joce's kids are in farming
and art and advertising in England and the US and one a banker in NYC. -
What do I mean. Wonder at that scatter from the house on Dale Avenue. My
intersection with; that O and I picked each other out; that we could
pick each other out though we were unformed children, by some drive to distinction
perceptible though she was a mess and I was fresh off the farm.
-
Another white sky. There have been a lot of flies in the house for the
first time, I don't know why.
3
When daylight comes up looking for whether the hills can be seen. This
morning they can though just as pale blue outlines.
-
When I've been reading through the Raw forming period I've pulled
bits that have seemed interesting enough to post and then when I look at
them again I see they're stupid. They're written to entertain my family.
Does it mean that in those months I couldn't know what I felt and knew.
The way I am in the dorm photo is hard determined self-presentation. There
was this paragraph though that was really mine:
- Then O and I were in the last car, in the last seat, so the little
observation platform was directly behind us and two railway men sat and
smiled at us from the seat opposite. We were clicking along beside the
lake until it was dark, with the lake coming almost to the track sometimes
and sometimes far below at the foot of a cliff, the sky turning pink -
orange - rust - maroon - a thrilling burned-down crimson. The track rolling
away behind us was two bright lines curving into a bit of brilliant sky.
Olivia was half-asleep with her cheek on the windowsill and my face was
reflected on the window against that vast background. We grinned at each
other and it was extremely nice to have a friend.
-
- Am I right that she was wrecked YES
- Did Don do it to her no
- Hereditary no
- Medication yes
- She was out of her depth with Don yes
- She didn't know how to look after herself
yes
-
- Do you think it's true I didn't know what I felt and
knew yes
- Because I was holding onto my family no,
vice versa
- The first two years were harder than I knew
yes
- I collected myself in the year in Europe
yes
1964-65
- "Oooo I get so impatient with her dependency on other people to
baby her through her crises."
December 1964
- Olivia is breaking-broken up with le Grand, and is being madly pursued
by 1. Norman 2. Rasheed and 3. Don Carmichael.
-
- Don Carmichael also asked me to his home in Ottawa. He is a most charming
and beautiful Irishman. Olivia is interested.
-
- From Don Carmichael my Christmas present was the loan of his hi-fi
over the holidays.
January 1965
- Norman, Danny, Tony, Olivia, Don, Peggy, Indra Kagis, Mark etc are
forming an NDP youth party on campus.
-
- Our friend Don Carmichael has just covered himself with glory by winning
second place in a debating competition which is either trans-Eastern or
trans-Canadian, I'm not sure which. He was floating high last night - showing
off his silver trophy mug, and insisting that everyone kiss the victor
- even, this in jest, that our landlady must kiss him and our landlord
shake his hand ("He hasn't treated me well so he may not taste the
golden tongue.")
-
- Tony is mathematics-philosophy, Don is politics-philosophy, Peggy and
Norman are politics-history-economics, Danny is English-politics, and I'm
the only psychologist and rather distrusted as such. Norm is president
of the New Democratic Youth in Kingston, Olivia is vice-president, Peggy
is president of CUCND, now SUPA. Tom Hathaway is studying harpsichord at
the Toronto Conservatory and Ontario regional director for SUPA. Tony Tugwell
Queen's Journal editor.
March
- Don is being difficult and perverse and so on.
-
- He is very sweet, a 'catch' I rather envy, and is doing O a great deal
of good.
1966-67
- This is going to be a relatively tranquil and studious year. I've come
back from Europe more sure of myself - not socially this time, but philosophically
- ie I know what kind of life suits me and what I can expect to be and
do.
-
- Don is here every night to eat with us. We take turns cooking and washing
up.
-
- O is not interested in me, and since her relationship with Don has
become secure, beyond an ear for her talking-to-herself and the economic
convenience of a roommate, she no longer needs me. When I begin to say
something she nearly always cuts it off and I'm left resentful with my
half-story, a half-sentence, half-image.
-
- There was an estrangement at first but we found our contact again,
with more tolerance than before, but as much confidence.
-
- the ideal roommate, hard working, considerate, stable, warm and funny.
- I was thinking of Don sitting at his desk looking up radiantly when
I told him how good his valentine to Olivia was: Snoopy and Lucy fighting
with teeth and hair in points, then Snoopy, "I can't stand it any
longer," gives her a smacking kiss. The sense of contact that I have
when I watch his face bewilders me; I'm careful of him, I cherish him,
I can't have him. I've wanted him for a long time. What am I doing with
Greg when Don on the stairs below contorts my face with tenderness and
regret?
-
- Don stood straight and livid in the hallway and complained that we
had not walked her the last block home: a man in a car stopped and followed
her, it seems. Greg was conciliatory, I was furiously angry because of
his protective attitude, frustrated at the whole system of female timidity
it condones; threatened by a sort of femininity I haven't got and really
despise. And yet the small bones, the long hair, the orgasms, the scent
of shampoo.
-
- Five closely written sides apologizing first for his strange hostile
behavior to me lately. He's been alternately polite and impersonal, and
uncivil. But it isn't the way I thought, it's better, but it's painful.
I've known for moments at a time: the night of the ballet when I wore the
orange-and-gold dress, came down the stairs from the balcony toward them
and he said only "Ellie!" and then covered his stare with chatter.
Olivia led him away and I felt an undercurrent which dismayed me: jealous
custody. One night late he couldn't sleep and was reading Time in
the kitchen: he looked up with his face open and soft for once. I remember
the night in second year when we had a dinner party and I got drunk out
of loneliness for him, necked with Bruce on the floor; he picked me up
from the couch and I remembered long-painfully the sharp smell of his sweat
and the wiry muscle in his arm. One night before I left for Europe Olivia
unknowingly, as we walked home from Lino's, suggested that he put an arm
over my shoulder as well. He did, and I put my hand over his wrist, and
we walked home down West Street as he made his Donald Duck noises, three
together. A frank-discussion period O arranged, was either a test or a
demonstration, and dangerous in any case. But we could be trusted, although
I overquietly spilled what I felt and he went on about islands.
4
I transcribed the tiny writing and now I should find out what I can know
about it. First, I didn't understand people who loathe themselves, "a
hideously distorted, dissociated, person filled with fear - me." I'd
assumed he felt himself the way I felt him. Second, he didn't understand
Greg's emotional timidity and took his blandness personally. Third he didn't
understand that 1. I assumed myself to be disqualified as a woman and 2.
that I was principled about loyalty to Olivia. "Whenever I saw you,
I was sliced through with - what? - a longing, a fascination, a feeling
of hopelessness." It was what I felt.
- Was it accurate yes
- Can I take this letter as given YES
- It was admirable yes
- It was principled and brave yes
- Was he in some ways ahead of me no
"So many times I have wanted to talk to you." That's the essence.
"For I so wish it had been possible for us to have loved one another."
Why it wasn't. Both people still disabled. No blame.
6
- Is he going to come yes
- Do you want to talk to me about it yes
- Sentence recovery, of action, in shattering
the practical structure
- Give him the letter yes
- Talk about it yes
- Revise something yes
- He wants to be friends yes
- Talk more yes
- Is that what you mean no
- Slant this honesty
- It was never about a love affair yes
- Is that what you mean yes
- So was it seductive to say he wished we could have loved
each other yes
- We were wrong for each other romantically
yes
- Do you want to say more no
So what do I want to talk to him about.
Work. Politics of Being about.
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.
I posted cripping femme.doc and everyone is too shy to like it,
except Don who I think can see that it's clear.
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.
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.
I'll have to tackle him about Being about. I'll want to talk to
him about what teaching was for us, what we've wanted our work to be.
Asked myself just now what Don had that Greg didn't. I heard grief.
Yes. Don was an orphan and Greg was something else.
-
- Did that go the way you thought yes
- What you meant was demystifying yes
- On both sides yes
-
- Is the fire going to get here no
- Should I pack no
- I should make sure to know where Patch is
no
7
Is there anything I want to say about that. The first moment. He was
ugly. Getting out of his car shouting How are you, a rubbery face
with a black hole in his lower jaw. Nervous. I got back in the jeep and
drove away to the post office, give him time to collect himself. At first
he seemed deaf, I had to say things twice. Later he could hear - what is
that. He was so badly dressed, I mean so without physical consciousness.
Shorts, skinny white legs and then the worst color of socks, shit brown
with old shit brown shoes. A skinny frame with a high round bucket of belly
stuck on. I didn't feel he could see: not me, or the house, or the garden,
or the town. But we were old friends catching up and did that well. Honest
and sane. Interested. Did either of us say anything we didn't already know.
Probably not. I did hear things I didn't know. In grade thirteen his grades
lapsed because he was so stressed by his mom wanting him to be a priest
- who would do that to a son. What he took from de Chardin was that plants
are ensouled; he feels that in his hikes. In a documentary about the poverty
project he saw later there was Olivia with her head turned away slowly exhaling
smoke. "She was so beautiful." Innocence. He'd want anyone to
be that. I thought I knew what he meant, which wasn't exactly innocence,
more just being what she was.
Patch slunk into the cellar when she heard his voice and didn't come
up till he was gone.
4:46am, Saturday. The July Mountain fire is coming from the south. Is
there a bit of water on the street this morning I think.
-
What I posted today, yesterday when we were flying.doc, does something
I hadn't noticed before: the open space between the two paragraphs diagrams
the open space between clouds. There's a phrase within dashes, " -
a very wide river - ", that does the same thing. Spatial onomatopoeia.
People might feel it without noticing why.
-
Richardson. Long ago I read fast marveling at things I knew and no one
else had named. Now I read slowly and still notice those things but also
notice what it's like to be a completely different kind of person. She writes
to tell the many kinds of moments in being. When something happens what
it's like to muse about it. Somebody saying she wrote the female uncon.
What that would mean: articulating what happens outside of language, the
slight instantaneous tones and motions. They're not unconscious but they
aren't in speech. Then she goes into a brisk conversation with Wells and
I sometimes can see the sub-subject machinations. Woolf called her egotistic
but often I see her watching ego rather than being ego.
8
The way Patch when she comes in from outside needs to step onto my lap,
tread my belly, then settle across or along my chest and go to sleep in
my hands. It's as if she takes refuge. I usually hold her that way until
she has her own reason to move. Maybe it's for both of us, as if I need
to feel what she can feel when I hold her.
9
I often think of the many experiences of my lifetime as possessions I
love and am proud of, but I've noticed that there are other times when I
feel fondly protective of that whole person as if I'm outside her and her
guardian. - Does that say it? It's been fleeting. I've noticed it only a
couple of times.
-
I said "I've outgrown Don" and the pendulum nodded wildly.
But I still have no one else I can imagine able to read what I write.
-
Going through RF8.
- Do you like Peter no
- Because of his greed no
- Because of the way he was with me no
- Dishonesty no
- Dissociation yes
- Do you think he was homosexual yes
-
- Was all of that struggle worth anything
yes
- Was I learning anything yes
-
- Peter asked me as we drove home, "What about the shame? What is
it?" I said that I feel ashamed when my important emotions and important
relationships are ambivalent: "I feel ashamed that I can't even muster
a good clear unambivalent emotion."
May 1969. I never stopped being ambivalent but did stop being ashamed
of it. Ambivalence has had good reasons.
10
Brian Cox 2014 Human universe BBC2 gave reasons why though there
are many habitable planets in our galaxy we may be the only planet with
intelligent life. I was fastened to seeing him moving about, the kind of
body I like best, tall, lean, light, effortless anywhere, midway between
genders, permanently young, speaking in a particularly clean but local and
working class accent, delighted to know what he knows and tell it. I was
thinking maybe some sense of the rare concatenations and cosmic labour needed
to make humans is in me as the urgency I feel for humans to be better than
they are, the distress I feel about human stupidity and ugliness, the yearning
I feel toward better humans when I find them.
- Do you think that's so yes
- It was the engine of teaching yes
- And of art yes
- Do you feel the same way no
- You have a different assignment yes
- Do you want to tell me what it is no
- If I ask will you tell me yes
- ? readiness, (moon), balance, conflict
- You mean your assignment is me yes
12
Patch studying a little grey lump under my desk chair. Mouse. I pick
it up by its tail and carry it outside, Patch jumping and crying next to
me. Throw it into the garden. She follows. Later, uh! she's crying next
to the tall bookcase in a way that tells me the mouse is in the tiny slot
underneath it. Fetch the broom handle. It runs under the door. Wild rush.
Etc. Then Patch is staring at a corner under the bed. I go flap the rug.
The mouse flees behind a table leg. Patch doesn't know how to get it out.
I come with the broom. Where did it go! Patch this is not good, you're making
me catch your mouse for you.
-
Heavy smoke. Logan Lake being evacuated.
13
I was redesigning Kamloops, drawing a grid in white
lines on a blue screen. I should draw the river crossing through the centre
point, number streets as N1, N2, S1, W1, etc, radiating out. Small metal
labels. Then I think I should look at the actual town to see how far out
to draw the streets. I see the river from above, very broad, a lot of marsh.
Am walking through bare industrial spaces, concrete floors, flights of wooden
steps. Two people seen through a high window, good place for photos. Then,
is this some kind of welfare office? A few people on a welfare office sort
of chairs. Now a brighter open space with a lot of women milling, racks
of second hand clothes. These women lined up each holding something they've
found. The line starts to move, another woman is opening for business.
- That just as I was waking. Two parts familiar from many dreams, walking
through industrial spaces looking closely and a room full of second hand
clothes. Always other times in those rooms I've looked through the racks
myself.
14
I wondered if Patch's mouse was still somewhere inside but got the jeep
out of the garage to go get vaccinated. Then last night I found the mouse
laid at the garage door's threshold. She'd given it to me again this time
where she'd seen me last.
She's been creeping downstairs when I go to bed and then coming up again
when I'm asleep. Last night after my first waking there she was at the foot
of the bed. I turned onto my left side and rearranged myself laboriously
the way I do. She stepped over my head and lay down in the bit of room next
to my face. Was pressed against my forearm; kissed it a couple of times.
Then I'm in a bind. It feels like true love but I'm not going to be able
to go back to sleep while she's there.
Yesterday this paragraph that so exactly tells how it was with my mom
before it wasn't.
- Among my papers I found a journal note written I think when I was seventeen.
It described a scene like this: I was studying by lamplight, actually daydreaming,
when you came in and asked "Are you studying or are you writing a
letter?" "Studying." "But you weren't thinking of studies
were you?" "No." "You had that look on your face. Don't
look that way - yes, do look that way, it's you. It's just that when you
look that way I feel as tho' it's me sitting there."
When I read it I remember what I seemed to have completely forgotten,
the tone of our relation then. I marvel at having forgotten it.
I suppose just that is what Judie and Paul are bitter about. If I remember
it I can float past their malice.
Today I posted the story of Ken and the love book and wedding in Venus.
15
Lower Nic evacuated.
William Finnegan piece about surfing in Hawaii when he was thirteen.
Rough high school and native friends. Specifics of water and wind. I was
thinking of Tom feeling both that I'd like to send it to him because he
gave me surfing and that I shouldn't because it's so much better than anything
he could write. A boy like him but not as lazy and luckier in his family.
Lazy? Yes, the way when he dug with me he couldn't be bothered to push deep.
The way he didn't take an interest in me the way I took an interest in him.
I'm posting to show Don myself loving Tom.
-
Merritt on alert. Smoke from three directions so livid, wind so violent
that I got out the jeep and packed what could stay in it overnight, parked
it facing out. Have gone through verandah, back bedroom, garage, bathroom,
laundry room - stuff piled in the kitchen. Made sure of Patch. Thought of
leaving tonight but 5 is closed, 8 is closed, 1 is closed, they thought
3 to Princeton was open but maybe not and I didn't want to start out in
the dark. It's after midnight and I've done what I can and will maybe sleep.
16
Overcast this morning with what looks like real cloud not smoke; I can
see the hills. Cooler. Winds continuing from the south today but will turn
northerly tomorrow, bad news. I was holding calm but today I'm stressed.
Had been scrolling through the Grapevine and recommended sites trying to
find out where exactly the fires are and whether any roads are open but
had to comb through endless miscellaneous uninformed comments. Am realizing
that BC fire services are so thinned out by the number and strength of fires
this season that not much can be expected of them.
17
Heavy cloud moving from the north. Slowly. I'm looking at Hamilton Hill
thinking probably that amount of white-out is smoke too.
18
Cold, smoky, milky blue overhead.
I was with Don looking at a book he'd written.
I didn't read any of it but I liked the layout, many short bits set out
nicely in relation to each other. We were sitting quietly together not saying
much. Then I remembered to tell him I'd seen another book of his that Louie
had, the one about (I couldn't remember her name) Martha (Nussbaum). Same
layout. I said it looked lively. As I woke we were standing together and
he had his arm around me.
Woke with the feeling of the dream sorry I couldn't remember it better,
sweetly calm. Then realized I'd written nothing about what we'd said to
each other in our visit if I'd been dismissing it. Then noticed the unpleasant
swarm of little fantasies there would be a reason to block.
What it was at its worst. He gets freaked I think, nervy. One would have
to be centered to stabilize him. And me I go away into isolated seeing.
I do that! (Yes.)
What it was at its best. Side by side on the verandah sofa talking about
teaching. It could have been better but it had to be catching up. I gave
him his letter. He read some of it, was surprised how good it was. I said
yes a good letter, I couldn't have written it. I said what I liked best
in it was when he said he'd wanted to talk to me. "I still want that."
"You drive!" "I love driving." "So do I."
Isn't having saved the letter till now and giving it to him and him liking
it and saying what we did after 54 years kind of large? I didn't feel it.
He didn't remember that I'd given him Michael's message.
- I was eager to dismiss yes
- Afraid of the fantasy machine yes
- Which is there because I need something yes
- Does he have it too no
- It's a flaw YES
- If I feel I'll feel the wrong thing YES
19
Alright, what's next. Do I have a dark self of that kind? No, another
kind. A better kind? No. Is it as distinctive as hers? Yes. Tom's is his
blazing maniac. Jam used to walk around in hers most of the time, it was
the puffed professor. Michael's was the Frankenstein rager who'd sometimes
show up, who I'd have to shout down. Trudy's was a headlong panicked talker.
Mine, it says, is the illusion that there is gain in the defeat of friendship.
A complacent coldness. Like my dad's.
There it is, what I'm doing with both Luke and Louie. And I don't want
to change. My mom. Judy. Rudy. Tempted with Paul. Jam.
Mafalda, David, Tia - are they different? I don't like to have too many
people.
When I say I don't want to change what do I feel. Hard. I feel No.
-
Whether to leave tomorrow. I got scared looking at clouds on the horizon.
Fires on three sides held for now because it's cool damp and windless. The
Coque is open. I could go for a couple of weeks. Kathy says she'll water.
- Cucumbers - now into Sept
- Sungolds - can or juice starting now but into Sept
- Other tomatoes - later
- Cantaloupes - ?
- Plums - canned 10-17 Sept = 3 weeks
- Greengages - ?
- Grapes - juiced Sept 17 = 4 weeks
21
A memory that's been coming up from the summer I was working for Lawford
and Harcourt was courting me. I was in my little bedroom with Peter. We
were going to bed for the first time. He started to undress me. I felt NO,
I'm not playing along. I whisked my own clothes off. What exactly was that.
Impatience at the thought of being seduced. As if seduced. I didn't
want him to feel he was persuading me. He wasn't: I didn't desire him; I
was just going to bed with him because I was interested to know him.
In first year with the International House men - Dennis Stamp, who stood
behind my chair at a party and touched my neck - I fought desire because
I was proud, I thought sex would make any man feel he'd defeated me. It
had been like that where I came from. I could be pleased to be able to shut
myself down. Then what happened. It wasn't like that, or if it sometimes
was I knew to refuse.
22
Big wet clouds.
A lot happening in the garden. Red Whitney crabapples
down by the garage. Galeux d'Eysenes with peanut warts. Stalwart Alnwick's
many buds.
23
So cold and wet this morning that it feels as if fire worry is over for
the year. I've turned on the heat.
-
Look at her asleep on the hassock alongside my leg with her head pillowed
against my chair cushion.
24
Letter to Jill:
I remember that basement flat in Hampstead, have found a June 1973 journal
passage from when I was buying the 2CV. In those days I was trying out what
I called the garden game, which asked people to describe a house, a garden
and a key.
"... on the bicycle to Sean's house to transact; sat in the dark
living room with light only from the one window making his face strong with
a silver outline. When I asked him to tell me a garden and a house it went
rapt and he produced a shifting geometrical garden with lupines at the pointed
corners - a 6 storey house whose 3 bottom floors are empty and boarded;
a samovar steaming continuously; a heavily bolted roof door that hasn't
been open for a long time. Great pleasure in his presence of mind, knowledge,
the feeling of cultivation about him and his hard-working face - strenuous
and faithful person.
"His reticent gleam; and the eroded face going so austere as he
turned his eyelids down and told his garden and his house."
Would it shock me that you'd like to live for a while on a small island
off the Gulf of Mexico coast of Florida, certainly not. The horrible evil
Unnamed Person does not own the place. Bird life and manatees and strange
indigenous plants and houses on stilts and lots of sun do. Deserts later,
maybe? (Palm Springs tends to have cheap rentals I found.)
I once waited in an airport customs line with an old woman who had been
a city planner in Toronto and had retired to a garden on one of Africa's
Atlantic coasts - Mauritania maybe? - where she grew fruit trees with affordable
help.
We've had tense times since I last wrote, record heat and then wildfires.
A whole village not far from here burned to ashes in 15 minutes. That fire
then kept coming from the west while at the same time other fires were coming
from south and northeast. Communities in those directions were under evacuation
orders and many of them, with their horses and cattle and cats and dogs
and chickens and goats, were being taken care of here. Then Sunday night
a week ago there was a fierce bad wind, smoke plumes boiling up all round
the horizon in livid orange light. I got the jeep out of the garage and
started packing even before we had notice that we were under evacuation
alert, but it was already dark and there was so much uncertainty about which
roads were open that I stayed put. Since then there's been rain and it's
been cooler so firefighters have been able to hold the fires where they
are. Roads are open again and we've come off evacuation alert. I haven't
unpacked the jeep though.
Meantime the garden has liked the heat. Melons and squash. Cucumbers
so crisp when they're just picked. Do you know sungold tomatoes? A lot of
plums not quite ripe, Early Italians. Grapes in three or four weeks. Birds
in the sunflowers. Bees in the anise hyssop. Second flush of the David Austins,
which will go on into October.
What am I doing. It never feels like I'm doing much because my writing
brain hasn't the stamina it used to have. I've had writing projects that
so far have been too hard - have imagined writing a book called Theory's
Practice about the time when I was working on a dissertation in cognitive
science at the same time as balancing in a relationship that needed my uttermost.
I also have a lot of unresolved material in a kind of poetics project. There
has been a lot of trying and coming to a halt with both. In the meantime
though there's something else I've been able to do because it's in manageable
daily bits. I have a lot of journals 1957 to the present already transcribed
and have been working with them extracting and editing little pieces I self-publish
as short Facebook posts usually one a day. It amounts to a sort of patchy
cumulative memoir including sex, friendship, travel, feminism, philosophy,
film, weather, places, childhood, therapy, gardening, teaching, etc, the
miscellany of an actual life including cats and pumpkins.
I'm sorry you had to be disappointed with your time in TV news. It seems
to me though that even if you can't feel it was personally worthwhile it
had to have been an important support for women in news management. That
support shouldn't have had to be needed but it was and will go on being.
Have you had any sun? Is Hampstead as you remember it? There used to
be a little tea shop, Hungarian I think. The Everyman Cinema. Do you walk
on the Heath? - Oh London. Has Luke taken you to the St John's Lodge Gardens
in Regent's Park? The Tate Modern tearoom overlooking the Thames. Last time
I was in London I found a church called St Alban the Martyr in Holborn,
that had exquisite music.
I wonder what you like to read. Do you read novels?
25
- Pink smudges over a faintly lit sky. Grey steam wafting and drifting
from, dissolving as it rises from, St Michael's tall chimney, an ever-changing
ethereally sensitive little region of notice in the motionless day of snow
and bare trees.
-
- The tonality of thoughts of air.
-
- Air touching skin, air standing open in front of us, the sounds of
wind in trees, drifting vapor or snow making visible what's there invisibly.
-
- Movement yes, volatile space. I can be the white glide of that train
of water vapour from the south.
-
- "An ether in the air." - I thought of the motion of steam
from a tall chimney and then of Tom as he lay in his bed seeing colored
eddies behind the cars he heard passing in the street.
-
- Cosmic winds. Cortical winds.
-
- Soul is the etheric electromagnetic net! He seems to say it but not
quite. There weren't Hubble images in 1943 so the whole vast articulate
dancing of plasma wasn't as envisioned then. But he does say "The
power to imagine becomes one with the images when the dreamer touches upon
celestial matter." What's imagined resembles the means by which it
is imagined.
-
- "Shapes that were standing by the word sounded." A sort of
poet who is aware of working with cortical dynamics. The thing, its shape
in the brain and its shape in the intervening medium are all felt - its
shape in the brain and the shapes that are standing around its name. Subliminal
awareness of the means of his effects.
-
- Merritt January 2017
- Bachelard 1943 L'air et les songes
What is this. I've been poking at it for some days. This morning I thought
of Robert Duncan, why. It's not in his voice but something? Some freedom
he learned.
Materials I carve and place. What I've found. Essence of. Piecing it
there's a feeling for inference set up spatially. Does this follow.
Could anyone read it. If not read it, something in them dimly recognize
in it.
This morning I've posted a photo of Galeux d'Eysines. Tomorrow I might
post my little uttermost poetics. A memoir that includes a pumpkin.
She's asleep at my knee with front paws curved under and inward, head
turned, a rounded containment. When she came in were they cold.
-
Zonking in Grey's anatomy these anxious days. It keeps saying
people need other people, insists as if it's a central teaching. When they're
sick, when they go into surgery, when they're grieved, when they die. At
two I couldn't walk anymore and was sent away uncomprehending. I went into
surgery at five, at seven, at nine, at fourteen, each time alone, each time
waking in pain. When I had my hip cut through at 24 I didn't tell my mom
till after, none of her business. When Roy was bashing and betraying and
lying to me was there anyone I told? I dealt. When I was in agony about
Tom, or anyone, I sat in my bed and wrote. I only ever imagine dying alone;
whyever not, it seems correct. So when Grey's tells me people need
people I don't believe it.
Having said those things, what? I'm not actually alone anymore.
- Yes? yes
- Is there anything you want to add? no
26
- Would you say I've outgrown Louie yes
- Would you say she's outgrown me yes
27
- There is something else I can say that maybe makes a deeper kind of
sense of the whole pattern. I'm supposing you were too young to remember
this but when I came home from the hospital after seven months away - I
was a couple of months older than three and a half - I found you in my
bed. I was mad at you for that the way a three and then four year old can
be. I was scathing - can recall just once but it must have been often.
I don't know whether you were old enough to register that anger or whether
it could make a difference to someone not yet able to understand language,
but maybe on some level you were afraid I would kill you?
-
- Did that anger affect her? yes
- Did she feel I was going to kill her yes
28
My own experience was simply that there was
no one in my childhood who had a kind word for me or who recognized me as
a person. My strategy was simply to stand up straight, to hold on to the
little core that I recognized as me, and to believe that things could be
different when I was able to leave home. Maybe someone would actually acknowledge
me as present in the world. Maybe I would be able to pursue some dreams
and have a life where I could do and be. It wasn't easy, since I had no
resources and no support, but I eventually stumbled onto friendships and
capacities.
I at times thought I was going to be killed
by our father. If I was just invisible, perhaps I would survive.
No resources and no support? She's telling herself a victim story. I
could argue with it in detail. She was friends with Lynn. She had good grades
so her teachers would have liked her. Ed only occasionally got into scary
rages. Paul teamed up with her against me. She bloomed into legs and boobs.
But it's true she was ghostly, people didn't recognize her because she didn't
show herself.
I didn't feel it the way she did. There were teachers who recognized
me. M did, and even Ed sometimes in his self-congratulating way. Judy herself
did: she listened to my stories. I was top dog at home. I handled abandonment
and hospitals without folding. At school I was withheld until maybe grade
7 but then I took hold. I had a strong spirit and she was timid.
So what is the question.
- Was she born timid yes
- Was she timid because I bullied her yes
- Did M like her no
- Because she was timid yes
- Was the most important thing M's lack of interest
yes
- So M's uninterest, my bullying, and born temperament
yes
- Anything else no
29
There HAS been guilt but I think it's been mine. When we were kids you
listened to my stories. I loved that and it was good for me but I felt the
inequality. I felt I was expanding at your expense. It was like that with
M too. I knew she preferred me and I knew that was hard on you. It shouldn't
have been that my well-being had to feel as if it was won at your expense
and I also shouldn't have had to feel guilty. It was a structural flaw of
the family as a whole and not actually my fault. Nonetheless your resentment
made sense and in later years I've accommodated it more than I should. I
mean I've dimmed my light when I'm with you.
That's an important paragraph. It steps out of a long oppression.
I understand that your life has challenges and
I wish that things were easier for you.
I grind my teeth at that - who are you to wish things were easier for
me! I've loved my challenges and been good at them.
- Was she trying for the upper air no
- Feeling sorry for me the way she feels sorry for herself
yes
- Genuine kindly intent? no
- Social worker pose yes
- Anything else you want to say no
-
- Have I lost Paul over this no
- Is he annoyed that I told her no
- Does he like the letter yes
- He isn't going to say so yes
You began to draw away before either Michael or your son. There was Rasheed,
which I understood as revenge for what you saw as my larger energy or more
expansive personality or whatever it was you resented me for. And then there
was the way when you were in Toronto you wouldn't visit without at least
one of your friends to protect you from feeling swamped by me. I understood
both of those even at the time but Rasheed was an outright betrayal and
it has seemed a sad thing that my strengths have had to be avenged, certainly
not only by you.
In other words: you haven't been just a victim, you've been a timid resentful
secret avenger.
- It's a choice of stance yes
- So is that over, have I dealt? yes
-
Yesterday I posted my uttermost poetics and hardly anyone noticed (Sue
did). Today I've posted monsters.doc which is a line-by-line conversation
with the book. People liked the Peter and Susanna story the way they liked
the posed on a bollard story because it takes them into the familiar land
of people rather than thoughts.
30
Monday morning sound of the sprinkler's pipe.
When I was scrolling down the Facebook page looking at the last months'
posts I was feeling why don't I remember what I am when I'm dealing with
for instance Judie. Or Louie or even Luke. Why don't I sail evenly above
their resentments with the kind generosity that used to be native to me.
It's as if I imagine myself one of them.
31
Thanks for the reply. I am not addressing any
specific points that you raise, as I don't feel that my time and emotional
energy is best served by dredging through the past. If you are interested
in connecting around our present lives - the things that occupy our time,
that give us purpose, that fascinate - I can get behind that.
Boom. Meaning I won.
- It's not an unkind letter yes
- But I showed my hand yes
- Are you sure I haven't lost Paul in this YES
- And if I have no
- Is there any more you want to say no
- It touched some nerves and she'll think about it
YES
-
Today I posted men in philosophy.doc. The professors on my list,
Don, Janet, Indra. Kate.
1 September
One sister is timid, one is brave. The timid sister becomes a community
developer, the brave sister becomes a silent artist.
-
Winter again and maybe winter's work.
Some photos
- soft greys evenly from the north
- beauty of even motion
- between fine lines
- say it before it's seen
Respectful in companionship with the viewer. Not telling the human story,
or the story of the place, only the images and the state that made them.
- Did you take the photos that matter yes
- You were edging into me then YES
This work state is high bp: I can feel a tremour. It's tea but not only.
Is it dangerous? It says no.
2
I was trying to write and make a film but what I actually made were photos.
I made them in a moment as if easily. The difficult work was in achieving
and maintaining open state. Presence.
- Is this right yes
- It's the essence yes
Start at the beginning and work beside the photos
I go sideways into analysis. It halts me.
- Is it good for anything no
- Defensive habit yes
Unconscious presence in the photos has to be felt but stay implicit
From Latin genius "inborn nature; a tutelary deity of a person
or place"
I want the text to make more of the photos for anyone
Offset language from its image so it is standing matrix not interpretation.
Can I make it accessible to the less attentive? The way the caustic did
in Trapline.
Aware of itself in the work
- Should there be quotes yes
Granularity of colored emulsions
- In the work feeling my largeness. I stamp it down because it interferes.
Why is it there, is it needed for something. I built it by insisting on
it in defense, is that right. Yes. Does it mean defense against structures
in me trying to hold me back? YES. Structures built in confluence with other
people. Should I speak to it. Yes. Say to smaller self You'll still be there.
Yes. Is that enough. Yes.
Thank you: Joyce Frazee, Jamila Ismail.
In daytimes she has a busy life among leaves. In lamplight she lies on
my pillow with her head on my shoulder.
3
The moment when sky just at its rim is gold that shades up tenderly to
almost white. The way it brightens. Brightness and tenderness of morning
work.
Can it be funny.
Acid. What it gave me. What I made of it. It cost bewilderment. It gave
deeper colour and two intuitions I've tracked ever since. Culminated in
Pound who showed me what the blue pages were.
Why I love the bright straight line that lengthens and then dissolves.
6:43am.
Staying with a friendship's best era. Wanting Jam to see the Pound notes.
part 4
time remaining volume 10: 2021 march-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
|