| volume 10 of time remaining: march-december 2021 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Begins the day I turn 76. Daily Facebook posts of small journal stories continue. Part 1 Reading through London years looking to write 120 words on Trapline for a Cinemateque National Film Day virtual screening. Part 2 the BC interior experiences "the most remarkable heat wave in recorded history". Part 3 Wildfires threaten Merritt from three directions. Evacuation alert. Part 4 working on the sight of sound: notes. Part 5 catastrophic Coldwater River flood, the whole town of Merritt evaculated. Description of countercultural London in the early '70s. Notes: Robert MacLean Waking to snow, Yeats, Harmonium's L'Heptade, Motherwell on ethics of art, Durrell on gender, Barbara Martineau, Ackroyd Thames: a biography and Foundation: history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors, Offspring, Phill Niblock's 2013 Feedcorn ear, Munro Who do you think you are, Renaissance choral music, Roget's pocket thesaurus. Alice Notley, Carson's Glass essay, Duncan McNaughton, Roy Kiyooka, Stan Brakhage, Ezra Pound, Dorothy Richardson Pilgrimage, Brian Cox Human universe BBC2, William Finnegan Surfing into adolescence, Robert Duncan, The ingenious language, This is us, Maid on Netflix, David Cooper, arrhythmia, Emilee Baum, Bitsy Knox Something Like #35, Ondaatje Warlight, Conal Ryan, Moments of perception: experimental film in Canada online book launch. Mentioned: Don Carmichael, Patch the cat, Mouse the cat, Joost Rekveld, Shaun Inouye, Paul Epp, Judie Bopp, Ian Brown, Peter Harcourt, Arnold Dresser, Roy Chisholm, Sarah Black, Mary Epp, Rob Mills, Jeremy Desrosiers, Louie E, Olivia Howell, Mari Gaffney, Tom Fendler, Susan Zimmerman, Rowen Epp, Luke Chisholm, Gideon Cirulis, Gabe Perrier, Miriam Loken, Jason Goncales, Peter Harcourt, Greg Morrison, Cynthia Norton, Frank Doerksen, Jam Ismail. 1890 Granite Ave, Merritt BC, Hampstead Heath, St Michael's church, Prince Philip's Point on the Douglas Lake Road, Logan Lake, July Mountain, Sundance Ranch in Ashcroft, Coldwater River, Highway 97c, Merritt Civic Centre. Grand design, Trapline, Maiwa coat, Sheila Heti, amatter, Pale hill, Last light track. CBD, The long day closes, Bright & dark, Offspring, Undset, Hilary Mantel, Patrick O'Brian, Merritt Grapevine, Grey's anatomy, Lee Maracle, Hub Electric, Tim Stephens, Canadian Red Cross, Pacific Stages bus line, Doris Lessing. |
March 16 2021 Warm enough this aft to drive around without a coat, tool rental place, car wash. Acceleration's roar, sun through the windscreen, my arms on the wheel in manly plaid sleeves rolled to the elbow, happiness as of strength again. March 21 Today's event was the chance discovery of this master's thesis from 1993 looking at analog computers to develop a different computational take on the philosophy of mind. The author is Ellie Epp, and her name rang a bell because there is a Canadian experimental filmmaker with the same name. Who is actually the same person: what do you know! European man using an analog computer to make video. Oona introduced us. Gave me a little burst of remembering how native to me the exptl film community could be. March 27 Shaun said yesterday that he's booking Trapline for "our virtual edition of National Film Day (April 21)" and wants 100 words. April 3
April 10 Such a slow dry cold dark spring. April 19 Wildfire ten miles up Highway 8, two others, early fire season. A few hot days and the gooseberry's in leaf, the pears have furry lumps of bud, more small blossoms on the apricot every day, sharp bits of green unfolding on rose stems. Iceland poppies have bent-headed whiskered buds, irises burning bright in sawtooth clumps, the doorstep's short mauve showing a swollen tip. All the paeonies up; Carnation Bouquet the last of them, two red knobs just this morning; others a cluster of 4" red claws; Seashell 10" high and pale green. Purple moss phlox on the sidewalk. Grape hyacinth a thick green and blue mat. 70 to 18.doc this morning. Posted it looks like a whole life story. The old woman speaks to the young with the young's own lovingness. April 22 Ineffably beautiful, Ellie, and absolutely mesmermizing. So proud to have known you. Indra linked through to it on the Cinematheque site. April 25 What I have to feel with sorrow again and again is not only that Mouse is gone but that there can never be another like him. I mourn his completely particular self. May 1 I dug last evening and this morning closed Patch in the laundry room and then got Mouse out of the freezer. Wrapped him in the cashmere sweater and carried him out and placed him. Cut a twig of plum blossom to bury with him. A couple of weeks back I'd been up the hillside looking for a larger rock with interesting colours but when I saw this one I thought it was like Mouse because it's small, black, fine-grained, elegantly simple and very slightly curved as if to enclose. I'd lain awake early solving how to set it so it's held level and not lost in the dirt. There it is now on a circle of gravel with two golden alyssum and a catmint. His spot is in the plum tree's morning shadow with Cuisse de Nymphe on one side and Golden Wings on the other. May 4 5am, cloud in unmoving dark chunks showing through to dim uninspiring blue. I was lying awake thinking I should complain, that I don't have much to say because I don't want to detail how these days go along shamefully bare and sore; but now that I'm sitting here drinking my boring herbal tea I feel a kind of lift and no longer want to complain, partly because when I weighed myself I'm down another half pound so I don't have to be ashamed of my podge, and then when I open the door I see white tulips under the crabapple, red tulips down the strawberry bed, yellow cowslip and primula, white Iceland poppy, cherry and plums in white blossom, mauve and white moss phloxes, dark blue muscari and wondrously best the mauve iris flourishing at the doorstep. May 15 Bright hot day in the garden. It happens many times in the day that I sit down to do something and then just go on sitting: am on the path placing seedlings and then just sit staring at the burning green of perennial edge, the stalwart body of the greengage. May 19 I've finished the Roy section. Had been feeling I couldn't and then this morning just began and stitched it up.
Oh how I love the lucidity and gift of this! Said Lisa. May 20 Letter today from two European women who want me to contribute something to their sound and writing project. May 23 Wonderful photo today of Rowen and Gideon. The way Gideon at four months old is seeming to stand facing his dad just all-there in confident joy at being loved. The softness of Rowen's look - he's someone who can do that, a man who can look like that. I was thinking that some way into the future when I'm gone and Rowen is gone too Gideon will be standing somewhere alone dealing with what only he has to deal with and yet he'll be the consequence of us back here. In this photo I was seeing something in Rowen I hadn't seen before, was it a kind of solidity. He's been consequential. May 28 I've probably kicked the ant's nest with that note to Judie. She isn't replying but I'm understanding more. What Paul told me about them deciding M preferred me because she felt guilty is so dismissive and so untrue that I'm fighting it. Paul was insisting, "She engaged with you. She didn't engage with us." What they are not noticing is that I engaged with her, it was coming from me. I was that kind of person, bright and communicative, I want to share. I talked to her, I wanted to tell her my adventures so she could have them too, I wrote her long letters. She was starved and I was interested in her. They held back wanting her to notice them. June 4 Sound and air. Seeing air.
In the air notes I'm an expansive best self. In that self I feel how far I exceed my family and friends, except maybe Jam in the time she was writing the Agenda piece. The self she abandoned. When I feel how much I know I feel both how useful it could be to the world and how impossible it is to bring anyone else to know it, how unable they are. June 10 I know what it's like to trust myself. It was in contexts where I had scope. My question now is how to have energy where I don't have beauty, affection or scope. To have beauty, affection and scope where I don't have them. In the air sheets seeing how laminations of the essence can be shown by repeating lines in different registers. The absolute sense I have of meter. A sentence must end on one syllable. What it's been like this morning working well. Going through air sheets discerning, placing. Focus. Parts gathered from many but now all my own. June 15
June 17 We lived with no neighbours a mile and a half from the highway. We children and our mom would be in lamp light in the kitchen and one of us children would say we heard our dad's truck gearing down for the turn onto our road. Our mom would say she didn't hear it. We'd stand listening. By the time the truck got to the bridge she'd hear it too. What is it about that scene. Its intensity marked us. The sound gave us the reach of night around us in the dark. That we children could hear it and our mother couldn't told us something about the losses of adulthood. We were nervous about our father, we were more comfortable together when he was away, and yet he was our livelihood, we did need him to come home. June 18 Working with the sound/grain/space shreds I keep feeling structural homology of all the topics. Cortically integrating what is already integrated in cosmos. Is that it? Yes. Do you like it? Yes. Will anyone like it? YES. June 20 A morning's work can be very brief. I'm in it and then if I eat, if I look at anything online, I'm not. My brain shies off. June 22 When I couldn't fall asleep last night I was looking for something to imagine, sex with DM maybe. I had Mike's photo of Tom at OB Pier in my head, his strong nose, that hard masculinity. DM isn't that but I was groping for what he could be that is wide open in sex and yet mature-manly. I'd had a yen for Tom's manliness but its closedness was ruinous for sex. I wanted to imagine two people for whom sex could be the underlying fabric of all. I was thinking DM has a composer's sense of shaping events, skills of delay and improvisation. They'd find themselves in spaces like Niblock's or Manning's music, able to know they were there together among dark masses moving slowly, textures overlaid, gestures like white flares. Then in their daily life they'd be peaceful and quiet together because they'd been there and could be again. He'd be at his desk bringing it into music. It's funny I hadn't realized what I'm working on about sound is also about sex. I noticed something new about their first night on the airplane together. They talk through the night. As they talk their fields are fusing so extraordinarily that after a while they stop talking and close their eyes. He reaches to hold her hand. She knows it's decisive. Daylight increases at the window. They fall asleep. Wake when the plane begins to descend. She smiles at him. He says You'll need the next days to get ready for your show. I'll come but I won't hang around after. Will you have an early breakfast with me next morning? - She's impressed that he's kind about what a show is like. She asks where and what time. When they meet for breakfast he talks about her show in detail. Then he asks will she come to Scotland with him for a couple of days, he'd like to show her where he's from. Today? she asks. She's ready instantly. The Blackbird Inn that night. It's so intense she's knocked sideways. He is too but when they sit in his granddad's churchyard together his honesty in it steadies her. When they're back in London they have another two weeks before she has to go home. They'll do London things together; for now they'll ballast it a bit by getting to know each in an ordinary way. So I have this wish for something sexually absolute but what I got instead was the twists and quirks of bad sex and real life with Tom. I earned my fantasy by faithfulness in reality. June 23 She stays where she is at the Y. They breakfast on the street every morning. She often has things to do: works in libraries, sees film friends. Evenings he takes her to places he likes without saying he likes them. They go to Chelsea Physic Gardens and talk about plants. They come upon a rehearsal of Fauré at St Alban the Martyr. She sees where he teaches, shows him where she lived when Luke was little. He'll sometimes make her dinner and they'll eat on his roof looking over Bloomsbury in pink afterglow. Physical buzz never lets up. They don't suppress it, don't talk about it. It can make them silent together in a way she loves. When she's working in libraries she writes about her days but she's careful of wrong uses she's given her journal and doesn't write about him. Instead she writes from the states she has been in with him. She's chemically in love and he is too but their intelligence together is teaching them to bend that elation toward their work and their days. She reads him bits of what she writes. He plays her the piece he's been working on since they were up north together. She recognizes their night in it. It stuns her. He sees that she's stunned, gets up and sits just behind her left shoulder backing her with his field. She has moments of terror. She brings them to him without explaining them. The tact in his silences calms her. What is she afraid of. What's the essence of it. A primal and realistic fear of what it is to be an open woman with a man, physically invaded and socially degraded. - This is starting to get to the nub. I have in mind the time with Paul when we smoked hash and I was enflamed as never, so I felt I'd be nothing but cunt forever. I knew it was just the drug and Paul was unworthy of it so I found a way to exit but I have the memory of an openness I haven't allowed. The other memory is when we'd smoked weed and Jam said she was a man. I was flooded with terror of what that would mean. June 24 We're having hot days. The roses are in their moment. [Lark Ascending rose] [Lark Ascending June 20] Patch stays upstairs and lets me have my night. June 25 Nearly a hundred degrees this aft, forecast to go hotter. When I'm out in twilight shutting off the sprinkler mosquitoes bite my bare arms all up and down. Incandescent white sky slowly fading. June 27 I go out early and push down the path through poppies buzzing with honeybees three to a flower. Come in with lettuce and two new carrots, a Litchfield Angel, a Generous Gardener, Golden Wings buds. The hollyhocks have begun just now this morning. June 28 Monday. Cold coffee at 5:19. Both doors open to cool the house. Have turned on the sprinkler and am letting it wet the kitchen floor so the draft is cooled as it flows past. When I was lying damp in grey dawn Patch said meeee quietly once from the floor. I knew what she meant. Let her out. After a little while she came back in and said it once quietly again. She meant she wanted what she knows she's due by our custom, her half tin of Fancy Feast. She eats a bit of it eagerly and then goes back outside. I felt for her yesterday when it showed 95 degrees on the thermostat display and she had to lie flat as a puddle somewhere on the floor. June 29 Kathy is coming early because of the heat. "Heat dome over the Pacific Northwest." I'm keeping the venetians down to cool the house for her. June 30 Lytton is suddenly on fire as of about 5 this afternoon, the whole village evacuated. July 1 Jason Goncales the fruit man says Osoyoos has been 45 degrees, fruit is cooking on the branch. My gooseberries and currants have gone soft without ripening. I get nervous when I hear choppers or single engine planes because they mean there's fire nearby. Enough cooler today so I can like the heat in the verandah. There's a breeze swaying the sumac at the door and jostling the Manitoba maple. July 2 It isn't Orpheus explicitly. She refines it to something brief. He works with it. He's a brother who can bear what she is. It's a relief to him. July 7 I was cutting grass in the far end of the garden. A woman passing on the sidewalk said "I need to say your yard is ..." - I looked up and saw she had the face of a drunk, a wrecked face - "... the best in the WHOLE TOWN." I'm left with the mystery of what it is about the garden that reaches into her unguessable disorder. Love? A garden can say love. Color and profusion honour the world. Color and profusion with underlying order. Wednesday 7:20, a flocked sky, hollyhock lamps lit at the window. It often happens that I write something here that when I come back I can see was written in a stupid state. What do I mean by stupid. Fixed in some wrong complacency, plodding along. There's a sensation when I see it that's hard to remember well enough to name. I should wait for an example. July 8 It's raining. There was thunder and when I went out to drive the jeep into the garage a scatter of large drops. As I came in through the garden pink lightning over the Coque's pass to the south. Would it start wildfires. A bit later, when I'd gone into the verandah to watch, the sound of rain I could then see bucketing down under the streetlight. It got dark. I sat at the table watching white headlights passing reflected on the wet street. Was thinking of the first summer in Kingston riding my bike in the blue rain cape exhilarated by wind and rain. The young person who loved weather. Now feeling willing to die because I've been such a lot of life. Now in the east. Patch lying in the spot she likes on the verandah's window shelf. I think it's farther away, moving northeast. Can still hear rain and there are streaks in the dark under the lamp but it's easing. Still occasional flashes. Are they pink because there's smoke in the air. July 9 Soaked world, grey daylight at nearly 6. Motionless.
Why listening is like other kinds of inward attention, because it isn't visual. I close my eyes to listen to wind arriving from across the field. It happens many times that I begin to write by saying what I hear. When I begin to write I am attending to a conversation in my head - I'm listening, and so I begin to hear. When I'm recalling something I saw to describe it I create a silence to re-see it in. Listening creates a silent background. The kinds of focus there can be. Listening to a subtle vibration in my hip socket. Com-pose to set together. Set together and listen to the effect. July 10 Crabapple across the street is twinkling all over. Was and isn't. There wasn't much motion in the air, hollyhocks because they are so tall swaying swaying very slightly but nothing else, so it was some very particular state of that patch of space. I'm staring hard and no it isn't happening now. July 13 The question of what writing is and isn't, what I want from it for myself, what I want it to give other people, what other people make of it, what other people want from it. What I want from other people's writing and what I get from other people's writing. I've always wanted the impossible thing, for people to be in me with me, and I've always wanted to tell. I began in the naïveté of feeling that telling gave me that. Because my mom liked to hear me. For myself now I like articulating: I like the work of considering and naming. It does feel like integrating speechlessness and speech. I'm relatively good at it. I think being good at it is what I actually have to give. What I do give. What I get from other people's writing is that too. July 15 A horse in dry pasture can start a fire by striking a rock with its shoe. This morning I've posted tom and old women.doc expecting no one will find it funny the way I do. I keep thanking Tom for the way he makes me laugh. I'm saying here's some lovely lively life and people will be shocked that I've said forbidden words. July 19 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.
20 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. Can I know the worst without taking it personally. - 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
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. 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. 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. 26 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. August 7 4:46am Saturday. The July Mountain fire is coming from the south. - 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. 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. 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. 12 Heavy smoke. Logan Lake being evacuated. 14 Yesterday this paragraph that so exactly tells how it was with my mom before it wasn't.
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. 15 Lower Nic evacuated. - 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. 19 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. 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. 25
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. September 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. 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 8 The sight of sound: notes. 12 Need to say I'm finally dressing well for here and for my age. Black teeshirt, long black cashmere cardigan, black pants, pale blue chucks. Earrings when I re-pierce. Another thing is that I look at my old hands with pleasure. They're thinner, their tendons are more defined. They look like my dad's. 18 Last stretch of forming The sight of sound, what it's like. I collected material into clumps for interrupted months and have been refining on the level of those clumps. It has felt like carving. It has been so slow, I've been able to do so little before I give up in a day, that I've wondered whether I can still work at all. But then I wrote the Patch story straight off and it has some grace it seems. There has been an old earned faith too that there's time and even if I can only shape a paragraph a day it will be done when I need it to be. So now I've edged into the last stretch where I'm wanting to open it into the widest I've seen. I've noticed today that it's going to be just separate blocks that nonetheless are at least partly stepped. It's thrilling work - I say that very carefully - I mean it's thrilling to be doing it at last and I say it carefully because am I actually doing it if I'm doing it in so halted a way. 22
23 Food has been boring and annoying but just now I have two things I love to eat every day, my own Yukon golds baked and mashed up with butter, grated cheese and chopped onions, and juicy Cuore di Bue in chunks stirred up with basil, feta, black olives and a bit of Greek dressing. 29 I keep realizing how good our home context actually was, how much privacy and liberty we had. There were good things about church, table grace was, choir, seasonal festivals, having a group of people for whom we went on existing all through childhood. Our ideology didn't seriously infiltrate the way Catholicism seems to, we three could all drop it without much struggle. No one supervised our heads. We weren't mawkish about each other. There was a lot of open space. October 2 The way people talk in This is us. Falsity always, false enthusiasm taken as normal, stupid facetious American idiom taken as lively sociability, is that how it has to be to keep things going among people who stay attached? Civilized behavior means pretending to be glad to see people you aren't glad to see, praising parties you wished you hadn't gone to, thanking friends for presents you wish you hadn't received. Training kids to feign a passion is the art of parenting. I think of any of that with disgust. - June-July 1977. The writing voice then is mostly broken and false but what was correct in it. What I'd want to make of it now very different from what I made of it before. I'd scrambled my brain. My effort with the druggy artists had spoiled my sense of what writing was. What drugs gave: the sense of mutable self, quality of consciousness as a worry - What did I want to remain, what did I want to remove, what did I want to build. There were three things entangled, a dim sense that I was incomplete and wrong personally, an urgent sense that I was inferior as an artist, and a sense that a lot was wrong with people in general. I wanted to be more aware of what people were when I was with them. I wanted to know earth in ways I hadn't been taught - seasons, sky, plants I was noticing evidence of unconscious knowing, was trying to work with it often mistakenly interest in anything I could learn about how to work with the mythic unconscious noticing attractions to images and phrases and feeling they must be clues I knew there could be more feeling openness than I allowed I'd have rages of frustration when I hated everyone looking for company and a style of being in the best of artists and scientists looking for method I was thinking of as discipline
9 I think what it is about this morning's dream is fear of Alzheimers. I have gaping losses of ordinary words. I'm timid about going into the world. I'm giving up on people as if I can't handle much. I make small mistakes with people - yesterday I asked a woman her name although I'd already been messaging her. I sometimes don't recognize people I've already met. I'm careless in how I dress. Do I post journal pieces taken from the past to keep up an image of myself as more competent than I am now? I reassure myself with evidence that I can still write - people liked the latest Patch story that I wrote straight off a couple of weeks ago. So ask again:
Which is bad enough. These fears have been so much the texture of every day, why haven't I written them before. I should note every worry. Worry and shame. - In the writing of 1978, even in passages I think of as best, such inexactitude and hype. When I was 17 I left my family aside lightly and humorously. Why when I was 32 did I have to struggle to revise myself out of them? Because earlier it was just me and later I had taken into myself so many other people I'd chosen as model .
Jam didn't recognize it because she hadn't yet experienced the effort, she thought she'd stepped from Zeus's brow. For me it was like a colonial struggling to revise colonial formation. 12 Clues, interests came up in those years that I and others later made something of. 'Becoming oneself' so much forming happening over time. For instance this, "What do you know about li, principles of order, markings in material." For instance the way I am now so much more conscious of the being of the cat I live with, than I was with any of my earlier cats. Things about people that repel me. I can't imagine them not repelling me. It feels objective. Yet there could be a view of them that doesn't take repulsions personally - what would that be like - how would it have to be done. What I learned when I was teaching, that dislike would go when I'd got to diagnosis? To do that on the spot I'd have to be mentally much faster and more active than I am, than I can be now, maybe.
In every case. Makes sense. [sigh] 21 It's so present. Clear vivid pink, orange, an orangey-pink red, apple green, none solid, all full of tint. The thin white frost edges are a partly separate line drawing overlaid. They make the leaves more dimensional. None of the leaves are far out of focus but there's a dark background they show against. The foreground leaves are strong shapes that come forward definitely but at the same time don't seem separate objects. It's strong all over with strong foreground - maybe that's it - the play of foreground and background is strong but not simple. It's assertive, assertive in a whole way. Indra liked it because of what she knows in painting. 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 F©lix 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.
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 Tufnell Park consciousness raising group and an alternative counterculture. 10 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? 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. 14 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. 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. Merritt 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. 6 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 cafe 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. These days all day scouring FB pages for the back and forth story of citizens dealing with the flood. 300 houses uninhabitable 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. 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. 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. 11 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. 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. 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.
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. 31 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.
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