time remaining 10 part 5 - november-december 2021  work & days: a lifetime journal project November 9 Kate excited about RD Laing. Realizing I haven't told the story of jumping straight into - the fringe of - London anti-psychiatry. - So then I realized I'd never posted the Afghan coat photo, and did. That stunningly lovely creature. Found a good summary of David Cooper. In 1970 when I knew him he was only 39; I probably thought he was sixty-something. Rumbling, crying - I can hear him - fat, stumbling drunk, stroking his dirty beard. The bitter face of the son he abandoned. Cooper was instrumental in setting up the Dialectics of Liberation conference 1967 at the Roundhouse in North London. This event focused on the nature of violence and the possibility of liberation, and included presentations from Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Bateson and others including Laing and Cooper. The conference is notable today not only as a high point of 1960s radicalism in the UK, but also as an example of the male focus of 1960s counterculture. Radical psychiatry in the long 1960s often drew on existentialism and phenomenology, and Cooper, like Laing, as well as Fanon in Algeria, was very influenced by Sartre. With Laing, Cooper wrote an introduction to Reason and violence, and offered English-speaking readers ways into reading Critique of dialectical reason. Cooper also wrote an introduction to Foucault Madness and civilisation. by 1967, was in a relationship with Juliet Mitchell, who had been a patient of his and who would go on to write Psychoanalysis and feminism (1974). died in Paris in 1986. In The language of madness, we can discern the influence of Anti-Oedipus by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which, Cooper says, is 'a magnificent vision of madness as a revolutionary force, the decoding, deterritorializing refusal of fixity and outside definition by schizophrenia'. styles himself as an advocate of politicised community activism, support and political education for those stigmatised by disabling labels. He writes as a revolutionary. His attention to the politics of everyday life and his belief that 'treatment' is best conceived in terms of how people treat one another remains relevant. David's remark that WL is going to be important and that what's involved is a new concept of work.   Hegelian: femininity becoming aware of itself incorporating masculinity and becoming an enlarged self. I don't like to read through the Roy years though I like to see my resiliency, but is there more I should understand about the time. It's true the counterculture in 1970 was male but by 1971 I was at a women's liberation film workshop weekend and after that had the Gospel Oak (Tufnell Park? Kentish Town?) consciousness raising group and an alternative counterculture. 10 - Oxford's Ruskin College the first Women's Liberation conference in 1970 How does David look now. I thought him a mess. He had soft - sympathetic - moments unusual in a man of his age but I was repelled by his physical disorder and despised his influence on Roy. There's a photo from 1967 in which he looks an ordinary bald fat man with thick fingers and then another from 1976 when he looks the way he did when I knew him, hair to his shoulders and Karl Marx beard. When we walked in Kensington Market he sat on the ground being stared at like a holy idiot. Did he prefer looking interesting to looking like an ordinary bald fat man? Mafalda slept with him, how could she. And ugly Sylvia from Argentina who came to London thinking to be the famous man's woman and whose large mauve bedsheet I was still sleeping on in Vancouver and Valhalla. - What's the word I want, when Roy was sleeping with Brenda and I wailed by the phone he said he'd look after me and I cried out that he and Roy were the same kind of [frauds]. [Frauds?] he said, sounding hurt. The point is that he was an alcoholic and for all his therapeutic formation didn't address it, ate badly, didn't exercise, must somewhere have been in deep guilt about abandoning his wife and kids, and maybe worst had found a way to get women and make a living being fashionable about madness. I don't know who Roy was before he found Cooper to be his dad but Cooper tilted him into drunkenness, violence and random womanizing. Maybe theft and lying were always there? Or depression was and psychopathy felt better to him? Anyway: Cooper licensed his worst. In sum: Cooper thought about politics and therapy without thinking about bodies. He was right about the ruinous capitalist trajectory but he didn't understand traumatic dissociation. He didn't understand chemical imbalance. He didn't understand rectitude as a way to the benevolence of the larger self and tried to dynamite himself into it. Okay let's check this. It says yes. Is there more you want to say     exclusion, defeat, anger, (the devil) Ruinous self-division     yes Massive self-destruction     yes Alright so now about my heart. 11 Is it about that place at the mid-point of my back    no My heart is weak     no Something wrong with it structurally     no Is it psychological     no Is it something that can be fixed     yes By exercise     no By surgery    no By medication     yes Is it basically high blood pressure     no Do the meds I'm taking worsen it     no Did high blood pressure cause it     no Should I have a pacemaker     no If I had dealt with high bp earlier would I now be well and strong     no Did I injure my heart fasting     no Could yoga fix it     no It's metabolic     no Is it a chakra thing     yes Is it related to low energy     yes By estrogen     no By something I find myself     no Is it heartbreak     YES Does loving fix it (sigh)    yes So Vipassana exercises    yes Oxytoccin     yes Was leaving Tom bad for me     no But should I bicycle at the gym    yes Will his hip exercises work    yes Should I take pain meds    no Can it be called disillusion     yes Can be fixed; chemically; it's a chakra thing; related to low energy; loving fixes it, Vipassana, oxytoccin. - I've just blown it up with Don. Is it a loss? It says no. Why not. Because he wants me to have written the thesis in a way he can understand instead of doing the work to understand why it is written the way it is. He's not willing to credit me with knowing what I'm doing. Is that correct     yes Was I always wrong about him     no But I outgrew him     yes So I said that and stamped it down. Do I have to get rid of everyone I've liked    no Just the ones I was wrong about     yes Jam, Don, David, Mafalda, Louie, Olivia, who else. Mary. I've got rid of people and not gained any     yes Is that bad     no Do the amatter people like my piece     YES Trading people I used to know for people I don't know    yes Is Tom ever going to contact me again    no He's ashamed that he's gone back to drugs     yes - CBC yesterday said Lee Maracle had died at 71. She and the country had got to where CBC would notice. 13 Is Tom reading my pieces    yes Does he like the ones about him     no The others     YES I did like that Don was seeing my feeling self and my work self. Was he? It says no, he was saying like but he wasn't seeing. I've tested men. Was thinking of the test Tom passed when I read him my journal. - Emilee today: I know my own version of the lonesome valley and how you have to go there by yourself. Like you I listened and heard not actually alone. And that there wasn't much more to say, because I could feel it. - we were high up in a building, a school with many floors We were teachers at the school and you'd managed to get me a promotion so I'd be teaching on the same floor as you it was a quick goodbye but I watched you go and could follow because you were wearing this marvelous green coat, the color and cut so beautiful, so distinct in the bustling crowd. Is that a dream about my death     yes Is she going to be a teacher    yes Am I going to die within a year     no your posts about the methodology and the examples being shown from your own work, how you show what you do. lately those have been stirring something in me, a feeling of interest and excitement. thinking and writing and noticing some signs about my way forward it is a bird a huge bird wrapped in plastic and twine let's do this I think I lift it in my arms it is beautiful full of power but not heavy I set it on the back of the desk chair, facing the window I comb its feathers to find the plastic netting it is pulled taut in places torn and tangled around the neck and shoulders I make careful cuts to free it without damaging or disturbing I free the wings first feel the muscles, feel them stretching a bit then the wings are free and the bird opens and shakes them and they are HUGE we look out over the river together shady men in the hallway start to come running 14 Lying in bed I was thinking I could write Tim Stevens a note saying You used to be love and now you're hate; what happened to you? Do you know what happened to him     no Do you know what happened to me     the community / acted / to (Knp) / you Will you point (Knp)    (the world) Injustice corrupted me    yes   Did Roy and I ruin Luke     YES Is there anything we can do to fix him     no So is he going to kill himself     no Is he going to find his feet     yes Did my parents ruin me     no Did I ruin Mary     no Did Ed     yes Did I ruin Rowen    no Did Michael     yes Did I ruin Michael     no Staring at original sin. Babies begin in love and are bent into hate. Original sin is being bendable, it's a propensity. Unto the fifth generation. When I was a kid I thought it was a vindictive rule but it's a description. Did his parents ruin Tom     YES Did I unruin him    no Should I have    no   Would you say our religion was good for us    yes Were we wrong to abandon it     no 15 Raining for days. Posted a Tom story this morning. [mastering the art of short visits.doc] They're brisk in a way that makes me feel I should just live in them. Still thinking about Don. What was it that made me say cut. There was no flow from him. I'd give and it's not his nature to. He'd say pleased things but were they social method. Olivia said green slime. Here's the other thing though, I was angry and held it back still wanting something and then it exploded. I'm glad now to have said it straight but I didn't deal straight when it happened. 16 Ashcroft, Sundance Ranch. Peaceful usual morning. Thought oh chocoate bar, I do need milk. Drove to Save On. Raining a bit. Sheet of water on the lot next to the library, saw it as I was turning. Save On isn't letting anyone in. Merritt is being evacuated. Search and rescue team standing around on the parking lot say water treatment plant flooded, don't even flush or it will backflow into your house. They say ask at the Civic Centre. People standing with pet crates waiting for a bus to take them to the arena where there'll be other buses to take them to Kamloops or Kelowna. Is the road open to Vancouver? No the Coque is closed, Highway 1 is closed, Princeton is flooded, mudslide at Hope. You can take 5a to Kamloops. I'm still thinking I might stay. How high is the water expected to get? He doesn't know. Could I stay at Quality Inn on high ground? No there's no water. I go home, I'll look at the Grapevine. Message, Cynthia from Sundance Ranch offering me a room. I say I'll have to see whether the roads are clear. Ashcroft is a good idea. It decides me. I close Patch in the sewing room so I can leave the door open. Pack my art stuff again, litter box and Patch's bowl, bit of food, best clothes. Put lamps and the Mac Pro and the red rug onto the bed. Pull cords out of sockets. Lower the shades. Last thing is Patch into the crate. Sheets of water south of 8 but from the turn 97c climbs all the way to the mine. Bright brief rainbow. Variable rain. The jeep is warm. Patch in her crate next to me never stops crying. After Logan Lake rain bucketing down, eyes on the road, see almost nothing else. Just before the turnoff a patch of fog, headlights behind me but I have to slow down to make sure I find the sign. A hard left almost too fast. Peering at houses right and left in the fog but it will be at the end of the road. There. I'll have to get out to open the gate. Caretakers, room 19, wood-lined cowboy cabin, young woman from Yorkshire helps carry my stuff. I'll turn on the heat for you, here is the light switch. Let Patch out of her crate. Sign into Wi-Fi. Cheryl asking from Toronto, Uncle George on missed call, the flood has been on CBC. Check the Grapevine. 200-year floodplain, all of it, all the trailer parks feet under water, RCMP at the door, evacuated during the night. Basements full. Video of drowned cars, someone's trailer sailing hard down the Coldwater. Fortis will turn off the gas. Will or won't they turn off the power. All entry points barricaded as of 4pm. People wanting help for cats and dogs left behind, someone asking about an old uncle who lived behind the mill. No map yet of flood's boundary. It warmed and snow melted suddenly up the Coldwater's heights. 17 Liz, good morning. Is our block still alright? Yes Ellie. Everything is good. Just like you left it. A bit of snow overnight. Your yard looked beautiful this morning with the trees covered in snow. 18 Cynthia's metal can of the My friend Flicka movie has white grease on it she's smoothing delicately. I feel no it needs to be scraped off. Oh - no - I've rubbed through the metal and destroyed the film. I'm somewhere not at home. Patch has got outside. She's playing with a small dog? Now I can't find her. - Patch without her habits. Is she anxious. Sits on the windowsill longing to be out. Sleeps under the bed. Snow and then dense white air. Small horses on a far slope. There'll be ice on the road. I'll stay in today. 20 house alright    yes water in the basement     no should I move from Merritt     no is bp high because of social     no fear of falling and crashing     no shame about walking    no something I don't know about     no disaster news     no lack of CBD     yes withdrawal     no   Blood pressure has shot high despite meds, don't have my CBD. There's ice, I fell twice opening the gate and am walking and driving with scared deliberateness. Evenings with people humiliated by elderly weak head and bad walking and general ugliness. Intimidated by charity, careful to minimize cost to them, stress of social niceness. Scanning Merritt bulletin sites all day for news and company. Not having the consolation of a beautiful room. Not having a keyboard, poking slowly at tiny letters on the iPad. Not able to give daily stories. Weak silly tea   But also:   Patch is here Not worried about money House isn't damaged Found good green mud boots at the goodwill Have TV on iPad Found books Now have a safety pin Vancity called and fixed sign-in Good bed It's quiet here Vaccinated Recent jeep maintenance 21 How am I. Timid and blank. Having to search to remember little things. Frightened of my blood pressure. Minimizing. Maybe I don't know what stress feels like but this is it? 22 I used to be lively, friendly and tolerant. Now I'm a curmudgeon. I'm scornful and impatient. I hate almost every novel I open. I cringe when I hear most music. I turn on the radio and turn it off. Most things are too much for me. There mostly seems no point in going anywhere and too much effort. I like to sweep people out of my life. - But see how I'm perking up saying these things, as if it's a new description I can enjoy. Does it mean I'm full up? Or as ripe as I'm able. Complete. 1961. I liked having a boyfriend and Frank and I were actual friends, by which I mean we talked easily and interested each other, but I can now see bad signs in what I noticed about him. I did notice them. He was pettish about being seen as a hayseed. By anyone at all, a cranky waitress. Then he sulked. He was 21 courting a 16-year-old who was too happy to be wanted to judge him. That love could only have happened when I was green and eager. But Tom, would I still accept him? I would. In bed last night I was thinking of the little stone heart we buried together, the way I said it might still be there in a million years. I was feeling how accurate that little ritual was; it was saying I was willing for it to still be there and it is. But just now I was thinking too that if Frank and I were sitting on a bank in heaven I'd be able to tell him about Tom and he'd be interested and understand. Another thing I'm noticing about Tom just now is that I'd never have had to suspect him of wanting Louie. What I mean by that is that he liked the right things about me. We'd both been riskers. We were scarred old battlers, we had stories behind us. We knew a good word when we saw one. Speaking to Luke yesterday, my Sunday morning, his Sunday afternoon walking toward Jill's. The best of it was knowing he's firm in his family. When he says he's going to phone he isn't going to, I have to know that; I don't have him but he has what's good for him to have, crucial I think. - His nephew Zach is in first year in higher math at St Andrew's, think of that coming from Roy. - Cynthia saying Girl of the Limberlost. (Nichols) Books I shd send her: Wolf willow Cather The song of the lark Wolf Hall Wonder book of the air Undset Kristin Lavransdotter To the lighthouse Butala Wild stone heart Le Guin Always coming home Mark Spragg Where rivers change direction Out of Africa Lopez Field notes The conservationist A McPhee? Doig The house of sky Snow country 23 These nights Patch sleeps on the other bed like any traveling companion in a motel. The CBD worked instantly and I feel better too. 26 field recording Steven Feld sound as a way of knowing Contact mics, hydrophones, light-listeners, electromagnetic pickups In the field mag Viv Corringham, MA in sonic art from Middlesex University 27 Ondaatje 2018 Warlight. I almost quit on it. I'd opened The English patient again and said no again because I distrust and dislike its glamours. The first half of this one was the other way, his usual mass of research but his sentences dull and his boy narrator too unwritten to interest me. In the second half though, when he was writing about the boy's mother and Marsh Felon, the book lifts into elation in his old way and I was realizing that I know something now about that kind of writing. The lift-off he can find his way into is what I can find in my DM writing, it's the same style of desire-fantasy. He's specious with it in The English patient but in this one he stays cleaner. Published when he was 75. what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved Med advice in Conal Ryan: And Farouk took the man's wrist in his hand and placed the ball of his thumb gently over the man's pulse and after a minute he said, You have an ectopic heartbeat. An extra spark. A tiny electrical signal is generated by your body that sparks the electrical function of your heart. You happen to have two sparks, and the extra one is intermittent and irregular and it kicks your heart out of step. It becomes noticeable when you are sedentary for long periods as when you're lying down to sleep. It's nothing that can kill you. Potassium will regulate it, so eat bananas. Or perhaps you could be prescribed beta-blockers, but they are severe and stymie cortisone production. My best advice to you, in order to keep your heartbeat settled, is to raise your pulse for a sustained period each day, by jogging or walking energetically, or swimming perhaps. His arrhythmias perhaps had worsened and caused some coagulation and a blockage that may have led to hemorrhage - a minor stroke. 28 Be careful with potassium sources like bananas and orange juice with ramipril. CBD for bp test-verified. Gauges upstream say the Coldwater is going to flood again. Liz in the corner house with the big spruce says they have hydro and gas but no water or sewer, groceries for the first time yesterday but phase 3 locked down again as of 3pm. Sunday listening on and on to older issues of Something like. 29 Monday morning. The Coldwater didn't flood last night. Third atmospheric river coming tomorrow. Unfriended Don because his friend icon was at the top of the stack and always in front of me. I liked showing him what I am but what difference did it make to anything. He had a valence in my history - he was someone when I was 18-24 - intimating something profound - holding off - sticky - a long stickiness - enough. [sigh] Today a note from an American probably my age, saying he had my addy - my addy! - from Alex Mackenzie, asking to interview me on Zoom. Some credential links. I look him up. He's a busybody poking around for this or that to do. If he were actually wanting to speak to me he'd have shown he'd done research and said something to make his interest interesting to me. Someone told him he should interview more women. Delete. How I'd approach someone I wanted to talk to and how he wouldn't, what is that. Blank presumption of pre-feminist men, Kenneth saying listening is ass-crawling. Times when I defended instead of asking, what I've so often lost by it. A text yesterday you alright? from a 604 number I didn't recognize. It was Jam. December 2 Thursday 9am terrible anxiety of waiting. The river will peak around 10 so they aren't saying whether they'll let us in till after that. I'm mostly ready. Sometime in the last ten years I realized that any waiting - small waiting for the AAA truck to arrive, small waiting for a phone call - was seared forever in a little being whose mother didn't come. - The drive was hard. I was frightened though the road was good and there was little traffic, three trucks in 100km. Then docked alongside the garden in winter sun and came into a warm house. Then struggled heavily to unpack and make order though sore and stiff. I was in the kitchen putting things into the fridge, pivoted toward the table to fetch something and dropped instantly to the floor. My right leg had vanished from under me. 3 O having a beautiful house around me again. This morning a large cup of strong tea, no matter. Patch in her place at my knee. munro on unremarkable insanity.doc I could read a notebook.doc just now - where can I place it. 4 Saturday 6:42am, thin cover of new snow in the dark, falling falling under the streetlight. 5 All we're catastrophically short on is savings/credit/safety net if disaster strikes, like our car explodes, you might hear from us Ro had a toothache. I thought of the missing tooth that has deformed me since I was his age - because I only had money to have it pulled - and so e-transferred $1000, then had to have an almost unbearably stiff conversation when he phoned to thank me. Then Freya said their car quit too. - There a whole tangle of unhappy thoughts about the financial helplessness of my kids. Rowen keeps having excited plans and failing to persist. He hides from challenges the way he hides his tell-tale chin behind an ugly beard. Freya eventually is going to lose faith isn't she. And I'm here in the sticks hiding the disgraceful failures of aging. 6 When I don't drink tea there isn't enough fire in my brain to be able to work. When I do I can immediately feel my heart going wrong. So I shouldn't do it routinely. This early morning I posted sally on pacific stages.doc. Kate and Lisa out there on the east coast fifty years later reading my 16 year old's eager self-forming intentions scribbled at a café table in the Dawson Creek bus depot on a morning in September of 1961. Wouldn't she like to know. In fifty years young women who have liked to be your students will recognize themselves in you. "I have taste." It turns out you do. 7am. Vapour from a chimney further on Granite flowing horizontally north. These days all day scouring FB pages for the back and forth story of citizens dealing with the flood. 300 houses uninhabitable - Donna Rae, Kathy - many irreparable. City with a small tax base needing millions. All kinds of funds and charities and volunteers. Stupid spiteful right-wingers, anti-vaxers, climate-deniers, often women, yelling against the female mayor. Others saying be kind, be patient. Bio-energy guy sweeping snow off his windshield, put his Christmas lights up yesterday. Patch since we've been home has been fond as if grateful I've brought her back to her known loved own place. - Now Cheryl sends the online book launch for Moments of perception: experimental film in Canada, such an anxiously correct slog. I'm glad to be in the book though I'll wait to see how glad to be. I'm in such a specific branch of the enterprise; it's the only work community I've had but I've taken my basic enterprise so far out of the film medium, into phil of mind, cog sci, neurosci, literary history and personal writing etc, that I'm bemused to be considered still a member. I've done that other sideways work in support of an enterprise experimental film gave me a start in but it hasn't been used there so my present community is nothing but latent. 7 "What kind of work did you do?" "I don't think that's a question from your list, did you ask because I used the word medieval?" "I asked because you're so darn sharp." - A slight young woman, masked, behind a Red Cross table in the Civic Centre, Linda from Calgary. Then she said $2000 will be deposited in my account on Thursday. 8 After breakfast she slips out into ice cold dark. When she comes in there is fresh air caught in her fur. - > I love this you didn't love it the first time you read it, you said if you were on my committee you wouldn't have passed it - > Your FB comment misrepresented or misunderstood what I wrote you - which was about the thesis as a whole (which I think is really original such as I understood it, and which I would like to see published to a wider audience in a form accessible to them). The FB extract shows this originality. "From the start to the very end I had a question -- what's this about, what's the point, what's it for? ... if it had been done by one of my students I would have insisted on two revisions ... one has to wonder, why? What's the point?" i didn't misrepresent because what you said about the thesis as a whole was that it doesn't say what the point is or what it's for. the introduction, which includes the paragraphs excerpted on FB that you said you liked, is where it says very specifically what it's for and then the conclusion says more about its wider usefulness. one of the things it's for, as the FB paras declare quite explicitly, right there, right in front of your nose, is to develop a description of knowing that can include the way an artist - ie me - knows. "'aboutness'. I wish you had -- and now hope you will -- write about this philosophically", "hope that you will now develop it in its own right" and gee whiz how are those 357 pp not philosophical? or developed in painstaking detail on its own right? yes i was irritated by the way you framed your response as if you were my supervisor rather than a peer. it's an irritation lying in wait from encounters in my actual department including with the first supervisor i had, the one i fired. patriarchal subversion is unconscious and deadly and nearly everywhere - though not in my second supervisor or in the eminent paul churchland who was my external - both carefully chosen - but if you find that my arguments don't look like arguments as you've known them that can be partly why. not entirely why. i think analytic philosophy is seldom worth anything at all. i should say too that my use of neuroscience in philosophy is not at all original. patricia churchland published a book called neurophilophy in 1989 that i leapt on with joy and that got her a macarthur grant. - > Suit yourself. I meant both comments and still do. I wrote the original comments in the hope that you would make the work more accessible to general readers such as myself. I did this as a general reader (not your "peer" or supervisor) after reading the whole work; time and effort wasted, evidently. You were instructing me how to have written so that you'd understand instead of doing the work to understand why it was written the way it was. In other words you haven't been willing to credit me with knowing what I'm doing. I've been explaining what I was doing and you are still not doing the work to get it. Instead you are having a hissy fit about wasting your time. You didn't waste your time; you didn't spend enough of it. Was I inaccurately defensive     yes He meant well?     NO Everything I said is true     yes But there is inaccuracy     yes Do you mean he was doing the best he could     NO Sentence?     departure, completion, fight, evasion This departure finishes old business     yes Do you mean romantic refusal     no A hidden attitude     yes All along     YES That's why I feel gleeful     yes Was it misapplied to him personally    no A lift of interest I feel when it disagrees with me. Could he really not see what it was for     no He could but he didn't like it     yes He smelled subversion     yes - That's the bit I hadn't seen. Something specific he doesn't like     yes Its authority     no Can you say in one card     deep change The call to deep change     yes Recognition that it's there to do and he hasn't done it     yes - Why I erase comments by Janet and Cheryl. They have a flattening effect. For instance what Janet said about sally on pacific stages.doc was that the 16 year old was aspirational, earnest and naïve. The only really wonderful thing so far is Sally. She is tiny-boned and incredibly slender with narrow hips and a flat chest. I don't think she wears a bra. She wears square toed Italian shoes, a loose and simple coat, a slim green cord skirt, a soft long sleeved blouse, a dusky-gold bracelet, and carries an enormous Italian-made bag. Her hair is sleek and nearly completely straight and falls from a haphazard center parting over her face when she sleeps. Her eyes are wide and greeny-grey with short straight lashes. Her eyebrows are unplucked and natural. She has a few freckles. Her hands are still and peaceful. She talks in a clear poised voice with a sophisticated shadow of an English accent. I very badly wanted to meet her. At Hope she sat at a table all alone and had a coffee. I was tempted to join her. But when she walked back to the bus I did the next best.   "Would you like to do me a favor and talk to me for a while to keep the gabby old man at bay?"   She was wonderfully responsive. Her mouth, by the way, is wide and curved, and her lower lip is almost pouty. She smiles a quick warm smile with her mouth closed. She wears green eye shadow. I shall try to get some eye shadow - blue - in Prince during my stopover.   It's quite ridiculous. I found myself adopting her sophisticated accent and way of forming sentences. I'm a chameleon. And yet, isn't the chameleon personality even still a personality type in its own right, and a strong type at that? While I was sitting in the dark bus beside her last night I was thinking, this is what I want.   Her father is a journalist. She would like to write too, and I'm sure she can.   Her nose tilts up, and is beautiful. I didn't know how old she was. She looked like a sophisticated fourteen year old with a seventeen year old wistfulness. She is, actually, twenty two. She knows what she thinks now. Perhaps when I am twenty two I shall have found myself too.   You're an American aren't you?   Oh no! I'm English.   I knew you couldn't be Canadian. You have too much chic for that. (& I pronounced the word as I know it should be)   And in the dark, we talked eagerly of ideas & arts & feelings. It was wonderful. She used lovely words. She & I thought alike in so many ways.   In my magazine, which she was flipping through, there was a heading, "We must fight for our average students!" She made a little grunting sound. That we must not do, she said. Then I knew she had not been an average student.   I told her about going through the stage where I called myself E-l-l-i. She laughed. Oh, I know all about it, I called myself S-a-l-i for a while.   I told her about the tin cans and the soup. About the colors. In the tin cans, their linings, the rich molasses and gold and rusty browns. In the other, Grandma's soup, of all things, which we ate last Sunday, a warm beige liquid with tiny squares of orange and yellow carrot and a lacy delicate leaf of parsley. I took out the leaf and the other colors went drab, but with it in - a bowl of soup, absorbing, beautiful.   Tell me about the things you've done that you like to remember, the places you've been I said.   Oh, I liked London, the buses, you know. And I remember the little boy in Paris who carried our bags. He kissed all of our hands.   Oh, have you been to Paris!   Not long enough to even glance around, re-a-lly. That was just on my way through to Spain. I lived there for about a month.   My goodness gracious!   After a while I said, You know, I'm thinking right now of putting you into a story. I could talk to her as I did to Elizabeth. She was lovely, lovely, lovely. I'd like to do a sketch of her.   She didn't talk about boys. She rarely laughed. She had more "class" than anyone I've ever met.   "Class" I think is composed of dignity and simplicity and taste. I shall needs must acquire some. Taste I have. Simplicity I am learning. Dignity I need. In order to have this mysterious thing, tho', I'll have to find my own way as she has. I'll work on it this winter.   -   I sketched a picture of her and it does look like her. In Prince George I left her at the depot when I went for my expensive creamy blue eye shadow. When I came back she was gone.   My new ties and new loves and my memories are still sharp. Memories are small & detailed yet. I remember sitting beside Sally in the bus with the window wide open and an exhilerating breaze sliding over our faces and our covered tucked-up knees. I remember the unending dark beside the road where the canyon was, and a glimmer of light like a wash on a painting far below. I remember hearing her saying "I liked London" and seeing her chin and mouth briefly fire-touched when she lit a cigarette.   Pacific Stages Chilliwack-Prince George September 1961 (16) What would I have said instead. Aspirational but lively rather than earnest; eager, visual, writerly (the last sentence) and always a bit humorous about herself. Not naïve: instant to recognize and investigate a good thing outside her previous experience. ( - It's true my taste in art was naïve, the guitar player print.) 9 Posted now I'm a curmudgeon.doc thinking it'll be another of the ones people don't read because it's too - what? - 'personal'- too interested in a self who is unlike them - but then, look - here's Indra, who usually only likes the photos. 10 Have worked up a couple more Susan pieces. When I think of posting them what is it I feel in relation to Louie - how definitely Susan outclasses her - how she'd not want to know that - triumph that I've escaped her curb. A year ago: You're very strong willed. Do you know the sensation of feeling someone's pressure of will to make you comply? I mean an actual physical sensation as if of a push coming at you from them. I've felt it sometimes from you with remarkable strength. I can resist it when it happens because I'm so aware of it as a sensation. When it has come from you I've gone silent and marveled. I think the times I've felt that from you have been about possession.   I didn't have to tell you I loved someone, I knew you'd be furious, but I told you because I know you feel things even when you don't know the reason and it's better for you if you know why you're feeling what you're feeling. That is an elementary ethic but it's a generosity too.   Surely you can acknowledge that it's outrageous to demand that I never love anyone but you? You've always demanded that and it's been the hardest thing about my relation with you. Loving somebody is life and health, and demands to give it up are like hatred, fundamental attack. Think about it - I've never done that to you. 10 A lot of small misreadings - have noticed that since we were evacuated. Speaking to Rob I forgot I'd told him something I'd told earlier in the same conversation. Why did I. It was something I had a pressure to tell. 11 What Doris Lessing wrote about being disappointed in the dull middle-aged people our children become. Many kinds of disappointment. Mary's hideous old age, misspelling and spite of Merritt's online conversations, the hole in Don's mouth and his high round pot and his cat-shit brown socks. When we're young we belong to a beautiful race. Then Louie's nastiness, Emilee's liver transplant, Jody's new illness, Rowen's fat arms and hillbilly beard, Kathy's drowned trailer, smashed houses wrenching past in a muddy flood. The new wartime of wildfire, inundation, smashed highways, disease, populations rushing always faster into memes and hostile conspiracy, already far too ruined to forestall the worse that's coming. Inundation as totalizing image. What to set against it. What does anyone, what do I. Every day I offer my shreds of better time: hang onto this. Sauve qui peut - not every man for himself but save those still able. Is anyone's head still bobbing above the mud. Can you see the future     yes Will Earth be completely depopulated     yes Will we walk unmasked again     yes Will all life end     no It will start again    yes Is there any best thing I should be doing    yes My writing is useless     no Help people die intelligently     yes Is that what you mean     yes 12 I can't handle being in a false position. Yesterday I wavered about getting one of the Christmas trees meant for people who've been struggling. There was a tall man carrying it to the jeep for me who said, I feel I should know you, I'm Paul Molnar. I lit up: I'm the story of Mouse. He said he was haunted by it. I said I am too. But then he asked what part of town I live in, meaning what kind of bad experience am I having. Quick evasion: I'm not in one of the worst I said; and then after that I was off my rocker speaking at random in a way that shames me to remember like the horrifying photos of me at Rowen's wedding. Waking at night listening to Something like #36 distressed by grasping so little of it, able to hold only bits of the shapes of music, a few colored scraps flying past in a wind, and although I can hear them able to make out only a few of the spoken words as they pass. So definite a measure of brain damage. Was I wrong to get the tree     no Old age is the struggle I'm in     yes Did he find me foolish     no 13 Yesterday in the dream I woke from I was in the house I keep going back to finding it had new clean white walls slanting up a long way prism-shaped with someone walking a gallery far up under the point. White kitchen and unfinished bathroom offside. - Gail has strung a clothesline hung with tablecloths across my view into their garden! 14 2021 review: Fixed verandah Maintained the jeep Jeremy painted the fence, cleared out the garage Juiced and canned apricots, cherries, currants, plums, tomatoes Heart better and worse, found CBD Lost winter fat in April-May Nelson Stewart told me about Prince Philip's Point   Vaccinated Heat dome Wildfire Flood evac   Luke again Dumped Louie Dumped Don Found Robert MacLean Buried Mouse Patch got fonder Looked for Mari Gaffney Gideon eating a pear Gave Ro and Freya money Sent Michael the O story Rose from Baytree Wrote Jill and Indra Declared guilt and gave it up with Judie Calls with Paul   Joost discovered analog/digital Shaun posted Trapline and I wrote 120 good words Indra liked it Shaun bought prints Invitation from amatter Bitsy used two pieces for Something like Moments of perception: experimental film in Canada came out   Worked on: A few garden photos: DM and The air the sight of sound: notes Wrote about writing with Emilee Looked at the Raw forming time Studied to write the London intros but was interrupted Tried and failed at Some photos Wrote/edited and posted 300-odd pieces some with photos 15 Second $500 from Dave. Row and Freya's engine has seized so it's occurred to me to pay off Rowen's Jamila balance. 17 Tree of lights and Eno's drifting air. Luke's birthday. Another loss, FB on the Mac Pro won't load photos anymore, had to find a long way around using email and the iPad. 18 When Earth is completely depopulated how long will it take for the atmosphere to rebalance enough so there could be elephants and roses again? I said the last six months in this town have been highly convincing about the end of human life on the planet. Emilee said kali yuga. Luke said he has been with that thought for ten years. "This pandemic is too weak." There must be many people who have seen that it can't be stopped. How to use time remaining. What can effort be good for when running out the clock. My work has been elegiac from the first, I've wanted not to waste the world. Cynthia said she didn't like The road. "I try to be optimistic." But no it's a wonderful book. It snowed all day. I went out in last daylight to shovel my walkways and saw the round moon rising in baby blue. 20 Patch lying folded paws on the carpet next to the tree of lights I think liking to hear Eno's drone. 21 Climbing through a dark abandoned warehouse finding objects I could like the look of. When I wake realizing shopping in the Newport Avenue antique mall was a waking version of that basic dream. Posted the love woman workshop notes with a link to the 2008 magazine and its burned body photo. Hardly anyone willing to notice these hefty work posts. Solstice today thin overcast cold and white. Dumpster trucks from the flood streets passing all day. Reading Ruskin Praeterita slowly in an Everyman with small print. 22 Paul yesterday said that, the day he left home, after he'd been picked up on the road by a farmer from Valhalla, he passed our dad coming home in his truck and said Well that's that. I had watched him walk out to the road wearing a knapsack with a white hard hat tied to it. This morning Paul got out of bed, tied his sleeping bag and hard hat to the knapsack he'd packed last night, said "I guess I'm going", opened the door, walked out and closed it without saying goodbye, and walked down the road looking very tanned and determined, going out into the world to seek his fortune. He had thirty dollars. Almost immediately he got a ride with a truck carrying horses. He'll go to Edmonton but after that neither he nor I know. He's looking for work. June 1967.   There was a postcard from Paul today, mailed in Calgary, saying in 20-odd words that he is eating and sleeping and hasn't found a job yet. July 1967. - It's a nice-looking book. I like the title. Mike's institutional history is lucid and comprehensive and the best thing in it. I'd have minded if I weren't in the short list but apart from that the actual piece about my work is the least useful thing ever written about it; no one of the right kind will ever recognize what they need in this dutiful flabby temperamentally-unsuited effort. 23 Posted leaving for queen's.doc and the family photo. It's such a momentous turn. I wrote it just right I think, simply, and then the last sentence lifts it into celebration. One day in grade twelve there happened to be a brochure for Queen's University lying on the heat register under a classroom window. I hadn't heard of Queen's but I liked the photo of a limestone dorm scribbled over with ivy and I liked the thought of a college town on a lake. Local kids were applying to U of Alberta in Edmonton but I also liked that Queen's was far away across the country. It didn't occur to me to talk to anyone about colleges; I just sent away for Queen's application and scholarship forms.   The summer of 1963 I was on the coast picking strawberries, then raspberries, then beans, and then working 10-hour days in York Farms cannery. I'd been accepted by Queen's but was in suspense about money: I needed a full scholarship and that letter didn't come till September. When it came I sent a rapturous acceptance note to the registrar.   Ontario was three days and nights away. I got on a train with one blue suitcase and a portable typewriter. My family saw me off in Sexsmith on the evening of September 17. Before we were going to leave for the station my mom asked Mrs Sieburt from across the road to take a photo. I'm not sure whether we took the Mercury or the grain truck but I remember that we stopped at the Chinese café and bought ice cream cones and stood together eating them on the platform as we waited for the train. 24 7:38. Snowing in the sort of undark there is when white reflects upward under street lights. The whole street looks put to bed. 25 The day before Christmas. Paul, Dave and he went out to get the tree, tramping thru' crusted snow. While they were gone I was domestic - ironed. The turkey came over carried by Danny, a naked monster. Frank and I singed him, we built a smoky paper flame on the snow outside and I held his wings. Auntie and Uncle arrived while this was happening.   -   We'd stopped near the door. It was late, long past one o'clock. We didn't go in. The truck was warm, peaceful, and he had one arm around me anyway so he put the other one around too. "Will you promise?" I asked. I had been trying to persuade him to write me only once a month; I know I must give him a chance to become free of me. "That's dying by inches Ellie. No." Then I don't know how it was but I told him again that I am out of his reach. "How far?" "Completely." That's what I said. "Then I'm afraid it's goodbye, my friend." I can see his face tilted against the window. "I wish I could see the bottom of a bottle. Tip it up and forget." "No! No!" He was so despairing and I was still satisfied then, that I was doing what I had to. We lay slumped in the corner of the warm truck, his arms around me, one of mine lightly around his neck. "I've been steeling myself for this. I knew it had to happen."   While he was curving his arm to gather me up even a little more his arm bumped the horn and we had to hurry inside. It was dark. With Auntie and Uncle sleeping all over the kitchen and the kids in the living room the house was full of breathing. We had to find Frank's sleeping bag in the living room with Auntie's flashlight and while we blundered around Mother demanded if that was us and when Frank went to the basement to sleep I explained feebly that we had had to hash something out. And then I stumbled into bed with my dress thrown into the chair and woke crying early in the morning.   It seems to me that Christmas afternoon vanished too fast. In the evening standing in the kitchen in the dark with his arms lightly around me and our heads together, breathing gently, pooling our warm breath and drawing it up again.   Morning of the 26th he went to La Glace to see about repairs for his brakes. In the afternoon we went for a walk. Brilliant sun. Past the cattle and the one horse, over small hills along cow paths, hands swinging, down a gully talking about things, thru' trees and scratchy branches to the straw pile. Behind the straw stack where three calves slept was a sheltered spot. We stood against the straw. I felt snow along my cheek. His was stubbly, cold. We bumped heads joyously - the whole walk was a happy one. Every once in a while he took out his khaki handkerchief and I took out my kleenex.   Eventually we went home again, had to roll under the fence above the house. Sat in the living room cracking nuts. He was in much better spirits. "You are feeling better now. Remember how you used to get blue and then I'd get blue and then you'd try so hard to cheer me up that you'd cheer up in spite of yourself!" "I couldn't bear to see you blue - I'd knock myself out trying to cheer you up."   La Glace December 1962 "breathing gently, pooling our warm breath and drawing it up again" - she overwrote ignorantly but she could do that. At Christmas in 1962 I broke with Frank, at Christmas in 2013 I buried the stone heart with Tom. 26 I like to remember and keep being surprised that other people don't. I mean they don't like my gifts of written memory. Luke, Peter Dyck, Paul, Tom. Is it that they're written with too much detail? If they were more general and vaguer they could fill in with what they're able? Reading Ruskin I feel I could have been him if I'd had his family and money; how visual he is and what he made of it. Visual certainty and ferocity. It's cold, -30, but the roses are well padded with snow. - I had shoveling to do, waited till late in the day because I didn't want to be sore. Yesterday's snowfall wasn't deep but the plow had piled ridges on either side so every shovelful had to be lifted. Get into hot water after and take an aspirin, see if that works. Have I said hellebore next to me this year, white and green in red foil. - Two years ago I sent Peter Dyck the Strasbourg 1965 Christmas piece. It's fond about him and vivid about a room and city he must have liked. He replied but ignored the piece. This year I re-sent it asking if he'd seen it. Again he's replied ignoring it. He's 87. What was his tight ambitious brain can't handle descriptive prose anymore? Never could? The male thing about asserting not replying? Not being able to describe personal sensation? It's so cold that when I open the door for her Patch backs away. Mornings she retires to the cellar. I wonder where she is and climb three steps down so I can peer under the floor. There she is lying on her pillow on the workbench. When she sees me seeing her she runs upstairs as if I've called her. At night when there have been going-to-sleep signs in the room she hides under the bed. Then when I've tucked in and turned off the light I feel a little thud at the foot end of the bed; now that it's safe she's jumped up to settle discreetly at my feet. 28 I can and then I can't. I'm deft and then my brain shies off. 29 Every time we say goodbye I die a little 30 Patch woke me coughing at the foot of the bed. Yesterday there'd sometimes been little spasms more like hiccups but now it was scary. I sat up and googled my cat is coughing. She was on the kitchen floor coughing more - was it coughing or sneezing? - but then sat quietly on the table gazing into the garden on and on so I went back to sleep. Now I think she has a fever. She did gobble her Fancy Feast so I don't know. Anxious and anxious about being anxious. Was thinking of Cynthia saying if you have livestock you have dead stock. Stress mid-chest. - Working with Jam's birthday 1981, midnight of the day and of the year. Swamped, struggling, far out of my depth. "I don't love your whole person, I only love your genius." Does anyone say how cognitive limitation is what wrecks love relations. What I kept feeling with Tom and was up against drastically with Jam. People foreign to me. Exogamy so extreme. Were they more able to love her whole person no But they could seem to be yes Did she give me an honest try no Did I give her an honest try NO I was starved for my own genius yes I was too starved of my own genius to be able to want anything else from her. - The kind of cold with white plumes reaching straight up. Patch is on the desk watching bird videos. 31 Working with midnight of the day and of the year groping for what the moment was. I needed the three poems to find it. - Patch hasn't coughed this morning. - I didn't really write night horizon though it was a large moment. I didn't track, I summarized, alluded. I'd been reading Eckhart, was it one of Jam's books, and had picked out shreds - swing yourself up to it, into the void - as I did then - how I read in those days, foraged for scraps I could recognize something in. I didn't want to take account of wholes, that wasn't my work, I wrote off the wholes I was foraging in. It was correct given who I was but it was also brain damage, I couldn't go straight to what I knew or wanted to know.   volume 11 time remaining volume 10: 2021 march-december work & days: a lifetime journal project