June 13 2022
Let Patch outside for the first time. Took a photo I like for the composition
I didn't have time to frame.
[blazing poppy] [cold frame] [poppies and cabbages]
15
Luke was on a bus to Cornwall and sent me an image via bus wifi about
2am his time.
All my new tech seems to be on the way.
17
Susan: A calming image.
E: I feel it that way too. I think it's something about the composition.
I didn't have time to frame it intentionally but I think it's the strong
diagonal dividing the rectangle and the way she is positioned on it gazing
into a more open zone.
-
Is Patch twitching less, I don't know. It's before five, 4:49. She's
outside. Last night she sat for an hour folded on the porch platform chair
that had a cushion, quietly gazing. I put away her cage and set the quilted
pad she'd been sleeping on inside it on the table where it had been. When
I'd called her in at bedtime there she was asleep on it beside the window.
She was still there at 3:30. Dr Liana sent a vet web piece that said a cat's
twitch disorder can be displacement from not being able to do what it wants,
so is she enough happier? She's still sneezing sometimes, or is it coughing.
-
Luke's photos from Port Isaac.
Damped anguish from not working.
20
we might work together on this, perhaps with
me as a kind of mediator expanding on your work, your research, and your
methods
21
What is my doubt. That even in choosing this best passage she is making
something of it that would be different and less than it is for me. I'd
have to turn her loose on it with no hope that anything could come of it
that would bring more liveliness and hope into my quietly miserable isolated
days. It's partly a doubt of her capacity and partly a doubt of her context.
She isn't strong conceptually, she throws things together under themes she
doesn't think through. She wouldn't be able to read Being about.
I don't know her context but most art contexts are trivial and corrupt.
She'd need to be fashionable. It would be what it was at the Western Front,
curators using some skin of what I do to get funding for themselves rather
than promoting the revision I've made. What happened with Trapline
was different. It traveled around and a few people privately here and there
were lit up by it, took to it.
So then the only question is will working on it be worth doing. Can I
use it to bring something farther in me.
- Then I dreamed I could touch places on a screen and have zoom up in
me the different states of being there are - I could touch a region of
the sound map with the cursor and become a time in all its feeling. I could
touch something on the map of a relation with someone and instantly be
there with them in that emotional region. What electronic editing is. Doing
it all the time, this moment.
What it is is a redescription of what happens already. It's worth a lot
as that but it's a redescription that presupposes a lot of accomplished
work.
Is there any part of Being about they could use. I should think
about what I'd want ideally. I'd want a course in Being about and
my other theory papers. I'd want to teach theoretical visualization. The
BA passage about how to imagine the brain. The whole embodiment studies
site.
I'd want to finish pale hill.
A lot of my work has been countering misdescription. That needs to be
met where it's found point by point the way I could with students and the
way I did in myself.
I could make a reading list. Chaos, McLintock, Neurophilosophy
- o What writing is her curator friend interested in, what has he read
- o What are the critical studies/sound studies programmes
- o What does B want
After all of that: can it take me further into The air.
I've wanted the way I say things to make it possible to see a human as
continuous with world, not encapsulated.
22
- You were thinking of me as a graduate student. I wasn't a graduate
student. I was a credentialed artist with an international reputation who
signed on to do a phil MA to make a living as a TA. I designed the MA strategically
to get me past the gatekeepers into a SSHRC. After that I was effectively
an independent scholar using the institution to fund what I wanted to work
on for my own reasons.
-
- I invented my PhD program under a category called Special Arrangements
that SFU allows the "particularly able". To qualify for that
category I had to assemble the whole plan in advance. Apart from a computer
science course all my courses were self-organized reading courses. I then
spent two semesters at UCSD on my own initiative, sat in on a seminar with
the most eminent guy in my field (who was my external later) for one of
them and a faculty seminar with linguists in UCSD cog sci for the other.
-
- I wasn't working 'under' anyone: my putative supervisor gave me A's
on papers but had nothing to say about topics or readings or approaches;
all of those were my responsibility. When I saw I was outrunning him in
ways he couldn't afford to acknowledge I fired him. The grad office didn't
seem to mind me working for some years without signing anyone else. I then
signed the only intellectually trustworthy guy in the department, who happened
to be a logician. My other committee members were a filmmaker in the art
dept and an electronic musician in the communication dept. My comprehensive
was four people in a pub and one really good question from the musician.
None of them saw the thesis till it was done because 1. I knew no one would
believe I could do what I meant to do until I had done it, and 2. I was
writing against the orthodoxies of most of the field and I had to make
my whole case before getting comment.
-
- You couldn't have guessed any of what I've just explained so should
I have let you off the hook more than I did? Maybe not. You've known me
a long time; I should have had enough credit with you to tip you off. You
said "I've read it" after two days. It's a difficult read in
an unfamiliar field so two days meant you hadn't engaged. That is not the
kind of inattention I ever give a friend or student's work. Then you say
you don't know what it's for! And that YOU wouldn't have passed it! If
you'd wanted to know what I meant it to be for, you could have looked as
carefully as I would have done. Then, that you, with the bare minimum of
attention you gave it, wouldn't have passed it, would have to be so irrelevant
to me that declaring it as you did just has to be the usual unconscious
patriarchal defense. So I didn't have my girlish little feelings hurt,
I was pissed off. Disappointed. I'd hoped for serious collegiality. Not
praise, which is mostly vacuous, just quality attention.
That's there because I've just sent it. It's just and it's scorching.
Should I say if I outgrow my friends it's not their fault? I'm assuming
he could have done better. Had always thought of him as my intelligent friend.
-
Composing in such a way that the 'sound', its shape in the brain and
its shape in the intervening air are all sensed - its shape in the brain
and the shapes that are standing around its name. A sort of composer who
is aware of working with cortical dynamics. Composing for the ether of anyone's
brain.
this conclusion is very inspiring to me in its
radicality, almost utopian
Inspiring, radical and utopian is what I feel too but what is it I meant
that she might not mean. Unpack it. Sound happens by means of something
moving and setting motion into the air. Hearer's tissues propagate motion
inwardly. Object sounding, air propagating, tissue propagating - perceiving
requires all of them and it's possible to sense the sound event as all of
those specifically. Neural structure will be different for each: "shapes
in the brain". When we name a sound even in its absence we evoke some
amount of auditory perceptual structure as well as structure that accomplishes
the naming: "shapes standing around its name".
I've guessed that we 'intuit' - meaning know/feel without knowing/feeling
how we know - neural structure as such. Is this passage inspiring because
we are recognizing, naming, what has been known/felt inchoately.
I want to dig deeply into it to the point that
I want to see if we could actually make what you describe
At the very least I'd like to think of how we
might expand on the ideas you write about, lend context to these speculative
realities, to your ideas around the shape of sound in thought and its shape
in exterior expression
23
I'm more of a minimalist, why.
Method of recognition. Chantal Akerman said pay attention to your attractions.
Follow them.
First principle: participation of 'the unconscious'. How to say it better:
body knows more than you think you do. Obscurely recognizing and working
to know what is being recognized.
How I got to where I was when I could write those paras. Film studies
and trying to write, working toward an aesthetic, perceptual/emotional effect
in art, engineering attention. About 1973 taking on recognition knowledge.
Years following attractions. Collecting images and scraps of language that
had a charge. Place and what will we know. Working to understand
what these scraps mean, imply, suggest. Pound in poetics. The Book: deve1oping
ways to work with body and body knowledge more directly. Late 1980s books
that galvanize, Chaos, A feeling for the organism, beginning of cog
sci (philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science).
1989 back to school. Doctorate, neurophilosphy, how body does mind. Intensely
disciplined effort to explicate, organize and give cultural support to what
had been intuitive. 2002-2013 devising embodiment studies with students,
embodiment studies web worksite.
What's left over, poetics, cosmology. Grain and transparency. A folder
called The air. Still recognizing myself in Pound. A tradition he
fostered, the feeling of lift.
-
More than before because flowers are so quickly done I wonder whether
they're worth it.
24
Could she ask me questions. We could do a pre-seminar as correspondence.
Getting her to ask questions would make her engage with more focus than
I've seen. I could ask her questions to that end too.
25
4:49 platinum sky with thin white crescent.
26
Don coughed up.
Your letter prompted me to dig out and re-read
the email I had sent you. I was/am mortified by what I wrote, especially
by my comment about not passing it.
I categorically did not mean what those words
plainly say. I won't try to explain it. I just want to apologize absolutely,
and ask for your forgiveness, and hope that in time you will forgive me.
I meant it when I said it is brilliantly original,
such as I was able to understand it. But in reading it I was increasingly
frustrated by the limitations of my grasp, much of this due to my limited
knowledge of the field and the issues, but perhaps due also to stupidity
on my part. I really wanted to understand it better, just because it is
so brilliant, but also because 'aboutness' (as I grasp it) promises to bring
together fundamental conceptions which have been antagonistically opposed
for 300 years.
I now see that I should just have read it again,
thinking about the implications/applications which intrigue me, and with
a view to asking you about them. This is where my frustration (with not
knowing enough, and being stupid) got in the way. It seemed to me better
that the work should be published, this way you'd get the careful encouragements
the work deserves.
So I'm appalled by what I said. It was just
wrong. It was also oddly out of character for me, I think and hope. And
I should know better. I've never written anything as creative as this but
I did have one really fine idea that I never published because it drew such
dishearteningly stupid comments from brainless but entitled journal reviewers.
- "'aboutness' promises to bring together fundamental conceptions
which have been antagonistically opposed for 300 years". There it is,
he did know what it was for.
-
- Best kind of morning on planet Earth
- dawning all gradual clean and quiet
- unlidded.
- Here we are still.
-
we might work together on this, perhaps with
me as a kind of mediator expanding on your work, your research, and your
methods
I'd love that but I should maybe warn you that my research and methods
could draw you into heavy water in philosophy and neuroscience. Would you
be alright with that? My motive in those areas is profoundly feminist and
we'd be alright there I think, but we're also different in ways we should
be conscious of from the outset. If we'd be aiming for fall of 2023 there's
time to go along slowly. I could show you stuff and we could ask each other
questions over time. What do you think?
At the very least I'd like to think of how we
might expand on the ideas you write about, lend context to these speculative
realities
There are bits of work I could send that do expand and lend context.
Christopher Weickenmeier interested in your
films and especially in your writing
Do you have a sense of who he is and where his interest actually lies,
in relation to this project but also in general? What does he care about?
What does he want to promote? I'm asking because I have some experience
of curators whose motives aren't what I'd want. But then my next question
is whether the work can bring something forward in me even if it doesn't
lead to something more in the world. The answer is yes, the paragraphs you
chose are at my edge.
Composing in such a way that the 'sound', its shape in the brain and
its shape in the intervening air are all sensed - its shape in the brain
and the shapes that are standing around its name. A sort of composer who
is aware of working with cortical dynamics. Composing for the ether of anyone's
brain.
this conclusion is very inspiring to me in its
radicality, almost utopian
Inspiring, radical and utopian is what I feel too. I have a folder called
The air full of bits that take my breath and that I haven't known
what to do with.
I want to dig deeply into it to the point that
I want to see if we could actually make what you describe
Wow, yes, though up to now I don't know how.
Then I dreamed I could touch places on a screen and have zoom up in
me the different states of being there are - I could touch a region of the
sound map with the cursor and become a time in all its feeling. I could
touch something on the map of a relation with someone and instantly be there
with them in that emotional region. What electronic editing is. Doing it
all the time, this moment.
This is a redescription of what happens already. It's also a redescription
that presupposes a lot of accomplished work of reenvisaging. We could talk
about how it's arrived at.
to your ideas around the shape of sound in thought
and its shape in exterior expression
The way I'd want to gloss shape is structure, meaning physical
structure, the way a material, including seemingly abstract material like
electromagnetic fields in the brain or in cosmos itself, is organized. I've
wanted the way I say things to make it possible to see a human as immersed
in and continuous with cosmos, not encapsulated. "Not from but in,
it's a use of a body."
Sound happens by means of something moving and setting motion into the
air. Hearer's tissues propagate motion inwardly. Object sounding, air propagating,
tissue propagating - perceiving requires all of them and it's possible to
sense the sound event as all of those specifically. Neural structure will
be somewhat different for each: "shapes in the brain". When we
name a sound even in its absence we evoke some amount of auditory perceptual
structure as well as structure that accomplishes the naming: "shapes
standing around its name".
I've guessed that we 'intuit' - meaning know/feel without knowing/feeling
how we know - electromagnetic neural structure as such. Is the passage above
inspiring because we are recognizing, naming, what has been known/felt inchoately?
First principle: participation of 'the unconscious'. How to say it better:
body knows more than you think you do. Method of attraction/recognition:
obscurely recognizing and then working to know what is being recognized.
-
Yesterday I couldn't write it. I went away and slept and gardened and
watched Asian artists on Knowledge Network. This morning I'm drinking tea
and there it is. Tea has a cost. I vibrate. It's probably heart strain.
-
Yesterday 6:30pm when the sun was around west far enough to get past
the house next door, light came sloping gorgeously into the verandah. I
took a photo blue, green, red and Patch at the door open
because it's summer now.
-
So now would Don be able to read Theory's practice? Chapter by
chapter? So once again it has to be online so it can be as long as it is?
-
Ditches of Alberta - have just reread it - it's nice all the way
through.
28
Her reply is speedy, abstract and unfelt - she zooms around in a way
that makes me doubt she can use anything I do or mediate it usefully - she'd
turn what I do into buzzing speculation.
- Right? no
- Do you like her no
- Try her on Being about? YES
- Do you think this is worth doing yes
- It won't result in anything useful yes
- But it will sharpen both of us yes
29
I was lying in bed feeling it isn't going to be possible. She lives in
the land of art discourse, where people have to be interested in something
unusual or impressive and build reputations by following those interests
relentlessly. None of her declared interests interest me in their abstract
forms. I shudder reading them. I want someone to see me and she can't, and
I don't want to see her because she has no instinct for clarity. I'm not
going to be able to teach her. So, alright, I've sent her to Being about.
We'll see what she does with it and in the meantime I don't have to reply
to any of her buzz. Maybe send her the Theory's practice description.
- Dump her? yes
- She wants to use me to get ahead yes
What she glides past:
we're also different in ways we should be conscious of
bits of work I could send that do expand and lend context
This is a redescription also a redescription that presupposes a lot of
accomplished work of reenvisaging
wanted the way I say things to make it possible to see a human as immersed
in and continuous with cosmos
30
Anne's gifts. 20,000 leagues under the sea, the music box, and
a wonderful yellow dress. I was twelve. She was going to be married in July.
I climbed onto the roof - it had a small square platform at the peak - and
sat on it writing to ask to be her junior bridesmaid. It meant she'd have
someone in her wedding party who would limp up the aisle on a thin leg but
she said yes. When we were in BC getting ready for the wedding I didn't
have good shoes so they took me to Friesens shoe store and bought me white
Mary Janes. Dressing in the Madchenzimmer with Lucy was nylons with a garter
belt and deodorant cream for the first time. The wonderful dress someone
had sewn before we got there was , A-line, close around the shoulders and
bosom and then skimming past the waist. A sort of light brocade, crisp.
Photos say I was wearing a ring of daisies around my head too. Someone said
I'd walked well up the aisle. I don't remember that. What I remember is
buying the shoes - the fact that the shoes I had weren't good enough and
I suppose feeling it would humiliate my dad that someone else was paying
for new ones. My foot feeling naked in nylons and being startled by having
to use deodorant. Then the photo I still have taken when presents were being
unwrapped in the dining room. I look a slender lovely twelve year old and
there's my sister in her own pretty dress looking at me while I'm not looking
at her. - Where is that photo?
The music box was black enamel with Chinese-looking painted figures.
I kept the daily diary Oma had given me in it and it was on the chair under
the window next to the bed. At the time I never considered that Judy wasn't
given any of these special gifts. I took for granted too that I'd have the
outside of the bed where I could see the window and reach my own things.
20,000 leagues under the sea was a twelfth birthday gift? When
I opened it I thought it was a boy's book and wondered why Anne had sent
it, but I read it with every particle of the wonder she'd trusted me to
feel - how did she know that about me? I'd already had a game with Judy
and Paul of jumping off a raft into the sea and bringing treasure from below
and now this book had wondrous scenes of watching undersea creatures through
a plate glass window and walking on the undersea floor with Captain Nemo
- Captain Nemo's completely solitary independent life roaming all the sea's
continents. It was an image of the self-sufficiency I already had and would
continue in as I went on in my young life. Resources of the uncon. Strong
metaphoric intuition from the beginning. The sleigh box room full of the
scent of wild roses. The game of jumping off a raft into deep sea. The springtime
ritual procession around the house waving branches in first leaf. The love
book hidden under the floor. The planet Venus double wedding.
-
Jason Good Beard Computer Repair, shy bear with a beard like a scrub
brush who got the Mac Pro's drive working so I now have a full backup of
that computer before it died, all the little stories and their month by
month list. We tried to figure out the monitor and got bewildered among
Apple ports. I drove up and down Juniper Drive three times past tidy gardens
of the middle class American kind and am worn out but my tech has advanced.
Sigh.
July 1
Last night when I read over the Anne's gifts paras I wrote in the morning
I didn't like how conventional they were. (Fixed them some.) That happens
- I write in a mind I don't realize is stupid.
2
I've sent B - why does she want a baby name - a second letter that doesn't
refuse the project but says I don't want to meet - and loads on two more
assignments. She's going to find I'm not what she hoped, I can't come far
enough toward her. I've done what I usually do: here I am, make what you
can of it but it won't be much.
Now that I can, again, I'm posting garden photos but am not very interested
in whether they're liked. Though as garden photos at least they're better
lit than most.
Sulky this morning. I was disappointed by her speedy abstract letter,
by seeing she won't be able to be me.
3
I was cutting grass next to the plum tree, weed whacker growl, focused.
Trod one step backwards. Something soft underfoot, yowl of protest, dash
into hiding. Did I squish her organs? Have I killed her? I should maybe
never have a cat. Couldn't find her. Under the rhubarb? Has she hidden somewhere
to die? Will she run away because I'm wicked?
She strolled into the house later and when I was lying on the verandah
couch jumped onto my chest, rolled on her back and lay like a small human
with her head next to my chin, her legs stretched and her paws in the air
twitching sweetly.
She's afraid of the vet. When we were having her last checkup with Dr
Liana and we had her crate on the table she wouldn't come out till I dragged
her. I put her on the floor so we could watch her walk. She jumped on the
counter, from there onto the table, and from there onto the crate. I stood
next to it with my arm around her. She lay quietly with her small head burrowed
into my armpit and her eyes closed while Liana and I talked on. Why was
that so particularly moving. I like Liana and we talk interestedly without
hurry and as we were doing that Patch snugged into home intimacy the way
a child does while mothers talk to each other above its head.
-
What he wanted was a very pure success.
his equilibrium requires constant monitoring
of experience and thought
subtlety of Patrick's self scrutiny with a tendency
to measure others on a simpler, more severe scale
NYKR profile of St Aubyn
4
I was in a meeting shouting over noise and no one
was taking up my points. Women near me were murmuring but not speaking out.
There was a leader I was trying to address but he wasn't where I could see
him. When I woke I was thinking in community garden meetings I had
earned authority. - How much I liked having authority.
-
Immaculate eroticism of roses. Cuisse de nymphe. Petal-velvet of damp
skin.
5
Roses, strawberries, Cos lettuces, green beans startlingly tender. [fenceline]
6
4:08, mottled sky. Is that the morning star steady among rags of cloud.
- Tiny victories of wording.
- Benched.
- Bowls of roses. Scent of Sharifa Asma. [Litchfield Angel]
- Morose, morose.
7
- thank you to Peter von T for commissioning
- pdf of ditches of Alberta
-
- pdf of the sight of sound
-
- What is this mind. Skittish. It opened a file called the air, it
says.doc and said oh maybe this. Moved two lines around. More? No,
skittered off everything I opened. That realm. Meaning where I'm too diaphanous
to work and it too diaphanous to work with.
-
- A dark silver day at nearly eight
-
- There I look up and see the Russian olive stirring its silver twigs
-
- The air, it says
-
- -
-
- Blooming:
- Lark Ascending, Cuisse de nymphe
- Munstead Wood, Henri Martin
- Generous Gardener, Sharifa Asma, Darcey Bussell
- Therese Bugnet, Blanc double
-
- Buds:
- Litchfield Angel, Golden Wings, Alnwick, Charlotte
-
- Too young:
- Molineux, Winchester Cathedral, Wollerton Old Hall
-
- Done:
- Kakwa, Harison's yellow, Kaitlyn Ainsley
No plums this year! Cox has apples and no moths. Thinning the Whitney.
9
Alright, so what I can do is Tom stories tout court. There's a
lot lightly implicit around its edges. It's inevitably a story too of times
and places. California. Is it the right length? Make it a web book with
photos but make it publishable too. Design it.
Indesign is $28/mo, whole creative cloud is $72/mo.
- posted: 204 files
- maybe: 41 files
- not ready: 35
- so about 280 pages
10
- Luke has quit again
- Paul doesn't want to phone
- Rob off the rails
- Ugly teeth and lower bridge won't work because of my bite
- Ugly lumbering walk
- Hard falls
- Deep wrinkles all over my face
- Bitsy's plan won't work
- Should give up tea
- Utter resourcelessness of Merritt
-
- Patch is better and likes to be with me
- I have money
- House clean every week
- Can work in the garden without hurting
- Arrhythmia better than it was
- New computers
- Scents of roses, sweetpeas, nasturtiums
- Inventory because I'm so morose.
11
Is there a school of philosophy that you are
particularly drawn to?
I think of philosophy as discourse trouble shooting. Wittgenstein is
my hero in that. It's not a school but an impulse: let's sort this out,
let's talk better about this so we don't get trapped in puzzles and dichotomies.
In Being about one probably invisible but maybe feelable aspect of
that approach was organizing text to be concretely perception-based in general
and as non-patriarchal as possible in vocabulary, quotations, examples,
bibliography. There have been men who can't read it for reasons they don't
guess. Something that helped me in tackling philosophy was remembering that
it has been male, structured by specifically male psychology, male developmental
trauma, defensive dissociation etc.
in neuroscience, am I right in assuming that
your interests lie in aspects of intuition and proprioception?
I'm interested in intuition and proprioception certainly and use them
as methods but I began by writing papers on imagining and perceiving. The
PhD I proposed was about perceptualizing - in 1989 Gleick's Chaos
had turned me on, along with Evelyn Fox Keller's A feeling for the organism
about Barbara McLintock's ability to perceive corn genetics directly. Cognitive
science was being invented then and Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy
came out declaring boldly that philosophy of mind shd stop fooling around
in abstraction and find out how brain does mind. She went to work in a lab.
I later on worked with her husband at UCSD. Anyway: summary of Being
about is that imagining, perceiving, thinking, speaking, intuiting,
calculating and all the rest are so closely interdependent that there's
no point trying to understand any of them without understanding how they
interplay in cognitive bodies moving around in an actual world. There needed
to be an integrated description of knowing as being about.
a folder called The air full of bits that take my breath, that
I haven't known what to do with
What is in this folder? What kind of folder
is it?
File folder on desktop, bits of writing. Manilla folder in file cabinet,
many years' collection of images I was thinking of as film ideas. Space
and grain, transparency, texture and gesture.
if I could come and visit you in Merritt at
some point, so that we could dive more thoroughly into your work, archives,
films, and think about how this might all come together
I like deep diving above all but for me deep diving needs focus I manage
better in writing. Here is where we're different I think. You're going fast
and doing a lot and I'm guessing having to stay ahead of getting grant money
in an art discourse context. I am going slow and can afford to stay out
of art discourse because I'm living on pensions. In film I'm a minimalist:
my films say, look thoroughly at this detail and you may or may not be lifted
into something more. In writing I arrive at the little flights you like
by immense amounts of labouring systematically to build a comprehensive
platform on the ground. I thought to send you to Being about first,
so you'd see the systematic integration that has been really my basic motive.
Further to that, I'll attach a short description of what I'm working on
now. You might also glance at the embodiment studies web worksite I set
up for my students after I'd written Being about, to mediate some
of its implications in a brass-tacks way related to things they were working
on.
- B's project isn't going to work but like other projects that don't
work - amatter, Peter's book - being asked makes me write something
useful for something else. So now I've posted this into the FB vacuum which
also leads to nothing but satisfaction at still being able to write.
I've sent it to Don: nevermind forgiveness, let's see whether you can
do something with this.
-
I'm morose because I haven't been touched since August 15 2014, Tom's
goodbye kiss from the passenger seat in Borrego Springs.
- It was hot, many fast trucks on I-10, and after the valley of monster
wind turbines, just at the offramp to 62 east, I saw a warning light was
on. Being startled by it made me miss a red light. A guy just starting
into the intersection saw me coming and paused. I jumped on the brakes.
The trailer fishtailed a bit. Then I had to stop and read the manual. What
is that light? Yes it means overheating. And then what to do. I shouldn't
have stopped the engine, should have put it in park and revved the engine.
-
- Confusedly deciding. I'll drive on slowly. Now the red light's off,
but then comes on again. There's a hill. I'll climb it very slowly. Morongo
Valley, valley means downhill soon. The red light flickers off, that's
a good sign isn't it. Then a climb, not a hard climb. The light comes on.
Woman at Chevron says there's a little town mechanic, half a mile. Steady-looking
Mexican man comes out of the back.
-
- What is this place, flat and dry.
-
- Am remembering a trip with our dad, maybe more than one, where he had
to handle an engine overheating on the climb across the Rockies, his stress
in that responsibility, frantic, frothing.
-
- I got into Tom's bed at 5. We sat on the concrete edge and saw the
day come in. Last night had been honest but lonely. I wanted him to be
fond and he was reciting the places he'd seen since he's known me. This
morning I reminded him of the first time I left, when I kissed him all
up and down front and back and he sobbed for an hour. "Your sins were
washed away" I said. I hadn't exactly known it until I said it, but
that was it. He said "I didn't know my sins were forgiven." He
had forgotten the crying; that surprised me, wasn't it the deep heart of
our whole time.
-
- He was careful and rational, didn't promise wildly, asked me things,
looked beautiful. I said "In the early days you used to say 'I'm your
man'. I was scandalized by that, scandalized." "Why?" "It's
so blatantly seductive, it goes straight to the unconcious." Then
he said what I was going to say, "But as it happened - ".
-
- I'm in the acre of cacti next to the autoshop, there are chickens wandering
and scratching with fluffy legs. Scent of trees in breezy shade.
-
- Pink began on the mountains. We were drinking tea I made yesterday
and kept in the fridge, thick subtle delicious tea in our blue cups. Birds
began to arrive, doves on the ground where Judy had scattered seed, hummingbirds.
The doves lined up on the wire in sun that hadn't touched the ground yet,
we saw it pink on the tops of the palms. It was time to pack up fast to
get to Tom's bus at 7:46. He swept and carried. I rushed around.
-
- Leo's Automotive in Morongo Valley August 2014
12
Sun risen against the hollyhock towers so I see lines of spider web glinting
and a big spider all bright climbing from bud to bud.
I was going to write about what was there when I woke and now I don't
want to.
It was about the way I can look back at my relation with almost anyone
and see it undermined by the unspoken inferiority I've disregarded.
I had dreamed I was sitting with a man talking
about pots. I was wearing just the top of my white pyjamas. He was looking
away courteously but we'd go on talking. At some point I stood up and he
could see my legs. That awful moment. I went away and came back wearing
the bottoms too. I looked light and lean.
Saying to Tom if I weren't a cripple I'd have had a man with money. Joyce
saying the amount of rejection you've had. Paul K saying I thought maybe
no one else would want you. Jam seeing me differently after she talked to
them about me. Cheryl shocked when she saw it. Don telling the moment he
saw a fat leg and a thin one. Leslie F saying bitterly You can pass. The
way I felt at Rowen's wedding. Not wanting to meet B. Not wanting to be
seen in Vancouver now. Then I scan round, is there anyone who hasn't discounted
me.
-
Nightfall moments in the verandah. Patch is at the open door sitting
on her paws gazing out. I'm reading. I look up, she's there.
First raspberries today.
Scent of sweetpeas and roses.
13
Does that first paragraph say the completely satisfying love I can feel
looking at Patch.
14
Last evening the young beagle sauntered past again. Patch shot into the
house and hid under the bed so scared she wouldn't come out for treats.
This morning she's afraid to be outside.
15
B is looking for mentorship I think, so that can happen though the project
won't. She'll be disappointed I don't talk about her own work but I'm being
tough: I'll reframe for her but not take her on her own terms.
Correspondence can be a protective form
I know, and I know what I'm protecting.
what kind of closeness distance creates, and
is the closeness a cerebral closeness
It is cerebral if that is the way one corresponds. I try not to. I taught
mostly by correspondence and one of the things I always tried for was nudging
my students out of their academic voice into an emotionally grounded one.
It was startlingly effective in enlivening and sharpening their work. I
couldn't have done it in person because I am not fast enough to stay out
of social confluence in the necessary way.
I sense this in your work - notions of spatially
engaged cognition, and perhaps, internally versus externally engaged cognition
. Does that resonate?
I think it with a different slant: simulational ('internally engaged')
cognition as completely dependent upon real-world experience and epistemologically
secondary to it.
This duality of interior and exterior thought
For me the contrast is not interior-exterior, since both happen by means
of structure inside the body which itself is inevitably engaged with a world
outside it. The important ontological/epistemological contrast is between
simulation and perception, perception being a notion essentially dependent
upon real-world contact. - I've suspected the englamoured pull toward the
concept of interiority actually comes from unconscious memory of life inside
the mother's body.
Do you find that your memories of this period
clash with reviewing your diary entries, or is there a relationship of trust
that you're building with yourself here? Trusting your past voice, trusting
the accuracy of your long-term memory?
There is a relation of trust for the journals later than about 1990.
Therapy and other kinds of emotional work have had a lot to do with why.
Here's a link to something about that. I'll trust you not to misunderstand
it as describing something in any way spooky.
this notion of the way in which artists are
intuitively or non-traditionally doing science What is it to be seriously
engaged in long-term and serious research (scientific, philosophical) while
making art and engaging with it
I'm careful how I say that. If artists think of themselves as "doing
science" they need to be rigorous in the standard disciplinary way
but also bring something more to their work. What else they bring
can be expertise in their own intuitive process but it can also be perceptual
and emotional experience many scientists, especially male scientists, have
lacked, which can change the sense of what needs to be explained.
is it that a serious research pursuit doesn't
just become fodder for your work, but holistically informs it, making it
so that your artistic work can't help but be informed by the research
I think for me it was the other way around. Philosophy was always there
and neuroscience entered as revisioning support for philosophy. While I
was mainly doing art I could never evade trying to understand how art was
being done (by me and others), and why. It was an ethical worry in part.
I didn't want to be trivial, as I think a lot of art can be. Cognitive science
when it began to happen gave me a way to frame what I'd been doing and knowing
in art in a way that integrated it with psychology and philosophy. And then
this: "theory is also an art". I remember a moment writing a paper
on Mary Tiles' philosophy of math when I looked up and felt it was the most
creative work I'd ever done.
whether the emotional processing you speak of
could relate to an artistic or writing practice, and how it comes in contact
with neuro-philosophical technicalities
The link to emotional processing I give above can suggest the answer
to this though I think understanding it needs demonstration in actual process
notes. My processing methods worked as well for understanding cortical structure
as for dissolving philosophical knots as for plain old getting through emotional
crashes.
does emotional processing stand on its own,
outside of your artistic work?
Absolutely not. Emotional processing IS intellectual processing IS artistic
processing. There's an ethic implied for art as for the other modes: all
of them can be spoiled by unresolved traumatic structure.
I wonder if your attraction to neurophilosophy,
neuroscience, and cognitive science have something to do with so many of
its eminent researchers being women?
Some (I wouldn't say many) women in cog sci are that because they have
the same sense I do of what has been lacking in male theory.
I'm curious about your relationship to patriarchal
systems as what - perhaps - obstacles: obstacles to understanding, to work?
My relation to patriarchal systems is that I want to blow them to smithereens.
I've done what I can to that end but naturally it would take another couple
of centuries in which I will not be around.
When you speak about how the protagonist's teaching
work is informed by her emotional and theoretical work, is this the point
in which you started working with embodiment studies?
What I had been doing all my life was embodiment studies but I hadn't
articulated it as such. Articulating it for students was a lovely opportunity.
I'm grateful to the program director who turned me loose on that with such
kind support. (Most of the program directors at Goddard were lesbians, which
gave the place the unusual strengths it had.)
So, am I right in thinking that you're proposing
a "contextual" cognitive science, one that cannot be extricated
from its actual physical living conditions and its interactions with others?
UCSD cog sci was already quite grounded, which was why I was there. If
this interests you I could offer bibliog for that vein of the discipline.
I think a lot about time, but more so about
simultaneity, the simultaneous co-existence of states that would otherwise
(perhaps) be considered conflictual.
also interested in how sound can be spatialized
in order to invoke simultaneous states how we can consider our present selves
in space, while recalling and associating with a past piece of information,
context, place, or experience.
When I was trying to figure out cortical layout I came up against a central
question of how we can be present and absent at the same time, I mean how
we can be about where we are at the same time as about where we aren't.
I came to realize that that circumstance is the essence of representation
function: to read a novel we have to perceiving the physical text at the
same time as we are simulating a described place. It began to seem to me
that in humans and to some extent in for instance other primates hemispheric
lateralization must be the key. In Being about the sections on the
inferior parietal in representation practices tries out that notion. That
section might turn out to be important for you?
- See how precisely diagnostic the interchange is. She has energy but
she's fuzzy (not fuzzier than I was at 37). Can she recognize? Can
she want focus or does she need to get away with vague impressors?
Replying made me feel my readiness again: I've sorted this, I'm formed.
-
Reread vivid loving Sons and lovers again and now rereading boring
chopped-straw-didactic Lady Chatterley. Haven't got to the sex yet,
maybe it will get better.
16
Human beings share their most recent common
ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos but more than ten percent of the human
genome is actually more closely related to the gorilla genome. Another tiny
fraction also seems to be most closely shared with an even more distant
relative, the orangutan. "This implies that there is no such thing
as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome," a team of molecular
biologists wrote in 2007. "Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual
regions following their own genealogy."
genetic variation within
species common ancestors are actually diverse populations which can pass
on different versions of a gene to different descendants. endless partition
and diversification, with branches that diverge and never reticulate.
Different parts of the genome have different
stories . Genes can move more unpredictably incomplete lineage sorting especially
common during rapid bursts of evolution, such as the one that gave rise
to modern birds. The resulting image of the early evolution of modern birds,
around the time the dinosaurs were first extinct, was a kind of web or fishnet,
whose contours constantly crossed paths.
-
Three passages describing what it was like for her when it was best.
If it's an impotent man's fantasy of the sensations of a woman being fucked
by him, and it might certainly have been, my womb heated nonetheless. Womb
rather than cunt. I haven't been able actually to imagine sex with David
Mac, I mean the way I'd most want it to be, at all, except to say it would
scare me, but Lawrence's version would do -
"The vaginal orgasm, at its best, as described
by him is as accurate as his talk about the clitoris is ignorant" -
Doris Lessing says. "Lawrence came too quickly, said Frieda, and then
she had to bring herself to orgasm with the aid of the pesky clit."
"When Lawrence discovered anal sex, things went well, for him at least
. "
As he began to move in the sudden, helpless
orgasm, there awoke in her new, strange, thrills rippling inside her, rippling,
rippling, like a flapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points
of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite, and melting her all molten inside.
She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last. all
her womb was open and soft and softly clamouring like a sea-anemone under
the tides, clamouring for him to come in again . And she felt the soft bud
of him within her stirring . And then began again the unspeakable motion
that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation,
swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissues till she was one perfect
concentric fluid of sensation.
her terror subsided in her breast, her breast
dared to be gone in peace, she held nothing. She dared to let go everything
and be gone in the flood. And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but
dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly
her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb
mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in
long, far-travelling billows from the centre of soft plunging, deeper and
deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed,
and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her,
and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further
rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly,
in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched,
she knew herself touched, and she was gone.
this time his being within her was all soft
and iridescent. She could not remember what it had been. Only that it had
been more lovely than anything could ever be.
"Yes, I do believe in something. I believe
in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love,
in fucking with a warm heart."
"Shall I tell you," she said, looking
into his face. "Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't
have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you? It's the courage
of your own tenderness: that's what it is ."
17
The summaries that touched off - the way for years I felt nothing but
coziness in sex, friendliness and curiosity, I could fuck around because
it was tourism - Peter's hysterical insincerity in it and the way I escaped
without naming it - at fifty my longing for sexual marriage but Tom's jaded
cold intentionality - Roy's crowing narcissism - Tony's warm-hearted intelligence
- Rob's timid virgin potency I didn't have to be afraid of so I could get
farthest into the dark with him - with Jam the night of the young Nahki
wife - the amazed hash arousal with Paul K that I had to shy off because
he was a fussy little man who couldn't have earned it -
Lawrence doesn't leave out the fear and resistance there'd be if it's
like that. To get me there, to be there with me, a man would have to be
massively honorable.
I don't think Lawrence had what he describes, I think he was writing
from the kind of longing I felt writing David Mac. If he and Frieda had
had it they wouldn't have been screaming and throwing plates.
18
Do you feel wasted as a woman Tom asked one day. I said yes. I liked
that he knew it and said it and we were still in the days when liking that
sort of thing about him was enough.
When I said if I hadn't been a cripple I'd have had a man with money
I would have had to mean sex too. I came out with it when we were sitting
on the concrete edge looking at the night. It slipped out and I had to consider
it after I said it. It was definitive, it pulled out the props. He didn't
say anything then but next visit he named it. I let it go, it had been said.
6:22 Monday morning. soft overcast, wet air when I opened the door, hollyhocks
climbing their spires at the window, white, pink, purple and what is that
color I don't like, cerise? a name I don't like either. Patch sleeping against
my shin, the fur on her flank half grown back. She's hardly limping now.
19
After I wrote that I went into the garden and Elwood Komonoski phoned
wanting to come right now to take down the plum before he went fishing again.
Ukrainian bantam, white brushcut, barrel chest, brisk competent worker who
not only picked up after himself, all the bits of broken leaf, but picked
up after me too, small heap of couch grass I'd been weeding next to the
porch. We had the sort of efficient understanding I've liked with other
real workers. When he'd taken the load to the dump he brought me a trout
and I gave him the bowlful of raspberries I'd picked while he was gone.
- So now that shade patch is gone - the dear heavy-bearing brittle blackened
senior tree - and its four new trunks have open sky and can straighten out.
20
Last night lying on the verandah sofa I was seeing open sky that had
heated evenly to such baking incandescence that what? That I felt oh Earth
in your dying. Something like that. Wildfires in London, in Europe, in 12
states to the south.
At 4:24am there it is coming on again, light immaculate, space immaculate,
morning star.
I'd been reading Patrick Melrose - four pages of praise by other
writers - sick with the venality of human beings - a New Yorker piece
on people spending hundreds of millions on superyachts to feel more important
than people with slightly smaller superyachts - oil companies spending millions
to lobby against climate legislation or even climate information.
21
- Mrs Christenson taught grades 7 and 8 so we had her for two years in
a row. She seemed to me to be a stranger in our farming community. She
was English - was she a war bride? - and she lived in a large house in
La Glace itself, and though she was married she wasn't a mother. Those
facts taken together meant that she was better dressed and carried herself
better and had a better shape than the other women teachers who had children
and were married to farmers. She always wore little earrings and I remember
her holding herself very straight in a close-fitting dark red suit. She
was reserved rather than glamorous though, I don't think she mixed with
the community much and can't imagine her belonging to the Justamere Ladies
Club. In the classroom she was impersonal but on occasion there was a pointed
little smile.
-
- To settle us after lunch she used to read to us for half an hour. There
was one book I still remember with pleasure. It was called Cue for treason
and was about two fourteen-year-olds traveling England as part
of a Shakespearian company, one of them a girl running away from a forced
marriage disguised as a boy and succeeding surprisingly at playing Shakespeare's
women disguised as men. I had always liked books about children who found
ways to live without parents and this book had travel and a kindly company
of actors too. As Mrs Christenson read I also obscurely felt something
about her relation to the book, that she knew about it and liked it because
of where she was from, that it was part of her difference from the rest
of us in La Glace. She couldn't help noticing though that much of the class
was restless during that reading so what she read next was something about
exploring the Northwest Passage, something she thought could interest the
boys.
-
- One day in the summer after I'd graduated from La Glace School I went
to her big house and knocked on the door. It must have been that I wanted
to somehow acknowledge that I'd felt her mysterious isolation. She invited
me in but she would have been puzzled. I'd have wanted to ask her where
she was from and what it was like there and how she'd come to be so far
from that beginning and what it was like for her here but I'd grown up
in a place where we didn't ask that sort of question and I was still years
away from knowing how. I'm sure it was awkward.
I'd been wanting to write something about that woman standing straight
in her tailored suit and now I have. England.
22
Elwood painted the porch.
23
In this order: bulbs and fruit trees, iris, paeonies, poppies and calif
poppies, roses, thyme, phlox and other perennials, hollyhocks, sunflowers,
asters.
-
These mornings I let her out the back door and then open the verandah
door wide enough so she can run inside if she's scared. I'm in the armchair
writing and after a bit I hear her drumming on the verandah's window into
the house. She lets me know she wants me to open the inner door by standing
upright like a small human and beating the window with her fists. When she
sees me begin to rise she runs to meet me at the door. As she comes in she
says hello, two syllables. Then it's time for love. She climbs into my lap
and twists onto her back, lies held in my right arm sprawled like a baby,
belly open, legs spread, head tilted back to look into my eyes. I rub the
top of her head, she vibrates into my chest.
24
Seven half-pints of cherry-raspberry juice.
25
The new ones: Molineux, Charlotte, Winchester Cathedral in the short
bed, Wollerton Old Hall in front.
26
One picking of the raspberry row makes a half-pint of raspberry jam.
27
Letter to Greg:
- > predicted to cool off nicely overnight
-
- when I wake I set front and back doors open to sweep cool air through
the house, cool enough so I need to wear a long-sleeved shirt over my t-shirt.
then I can see dawn coming on at the window, perfectly open sky, all white
at the moment, a bee in the hollyhocks, but as soon as the sun rises the
shades have to come down.
-
- > How does Patch cope with the heat?
-
- she lies flat. the floor is cool especially over the half of the foundation
that is earth rather than cellar. at nightfall she goes outside to lie
on the concrete front stoop or sidewalk. she has places in the shade under
the lilacs too but since she saw the young beagle who attacked her three
months ago wandering through again she is careful to stay near an open
door.
-
- > Stephen walking to Jack's in, as I recall, the morning, along
English rural sunken lanes
-
- he has left a coach at the village inn and is taking a shortcut to
jack's through early morning in english early summer, yes surely one of
the most delighted passages in english lit
-
- > again climbing into the hills in the Canaries (I think), and spending
the night grieving on the mountain
-
- gibraltar? on the way home from india. passage perfectly describing
what it's like to wake on the ground in a very early dawn.
-
- -
-
- there a break for touring my little farm, deadheading, cutting flowers
for the house, picking raspberries that now are simmering on the stove
becoming jam. there are sour cherries ripe but they'll have to hang on
for another day. I'll steam-juice them. broccoli, chard, beet greens, zucchini
and cabbage are ready now but a better thing in the garden is cucumbers.
a fresh crisp young cucumber is so so good. the best is still to come though,
I mean greek salad season once tomatoes are ripe.
28
Hard nights when the house doesn't cool past 85.
Some photos 1977-1981
I might be able to do it correctly now. I can see what was false in it
then. Can know what the groping intuition was.
There was an arc from dissolved bewildered pain to some consolidated
accomplishment that didn't understand itself yet. I was carrying my assignments
for life and didn't know that I would be able to resolve them. I admire
her for taking on what she took on.
Crucial hiatus. Young person overwhelmed with how much she doesn't know.
Assignments:
1. Pain I'd held off that I'd opened now but still wasn't feeling in
its place.
2. The place itself that we hadn't known, geology, physics, seasons,
plants, animals as sentient, native people, sky, weather, cosmos. The community,
local people.
3. Meeting parents as an adult.
4. Seeing what was wrong with my writing and what might become better
in it.
5. Fear of harming by power, fear of responsibility in making. Acknowledging
uncon and knowing whether to trust it.
6. Responsibility for state
Cosmic intuitions spoke through [sigh]
Still wondering: do I have to give the record of the obstructing assignments
or now step into the clear and just show the best. Trapline was from
the best. I needed to resolve the struggle on the ground but was I confused
or betrayed feeling I needed to show it as well as do it.
What do I know. There is a person seen being. There could be Jam at our
best.
29
Cold tea from the fridge, what I learned in the Borrego summer. Here's
Friday morning 5:02, front and back doors wide to flush the house with colder
air. Shades up till sunrise. Sky evenly pale, clouds fancy-edged even grey
cut-outs to the east. We watch the sky; there aren't fires yet - a big fire
west of the Fraser at Lytton but it can't cross the river. Last evening
fantastic cumulous towers unmoving in fierce afterglow. I was breaking a
by-law watering on Thursday.
-
the dead live there / And move like winds of
light
Rowen has used the line from yesterday's post to make images using a
generative art engine he was excited to tell me about. ADHD meds working
he says, dopamine. He's at home with Gid while Freya works.
-
Picture book or movie, both. Make the book to get a show in GP.
What am I doing. 1977 dissolved. Decide what was happening then
and let photos tell most of it. Find text with intuition not anxiety.
30
As if this one is meant to be the work of the larger self.
When I come to the end of what I can do in a day say where to start next
day. Continue going through 1977 materials file.
What am I seeing. Think of it as a book first. Facing pages. It clumps
into small not-exactly lyrics. It's reflexive, it's about being rather than
about the place. In being the presence of larger self and how it shows itself.
31
- Tent poles - large space, listening, camped on an old site
- Flame rearing - watching myself or is it larger self present with me
- Hawk - presence of someone else in the framing, child or larger self
- Bridge shadow - staring at the uncon
-
- Am I supposed to show the building of the larger self
no
- Just show its work YES
- You were speaking to me in the images YES
- Was all that anxious fussing necessary
yes
- It was bridging? yes
-
5 half-pints of red currant cordial.
August 1
Evening scent of tall purple phlox.
13 jars of cherry juice.
2
- its best moment when the corner is all sky
- an even steep with one spark bright in bare dawn
Make something aware that humans have destroyed the world.
As I work with my shreds they teach me prosodic possibilities.
You let your friends destroy me in you. I know you can't help anything
you are but I'm disgusted by that, I don't forgive it. I do thank you though
for what was given by the one before that happened. Along with many worse
things she was company to the best I was.
Jam figuring the larger self I was building relation to. The real Jam
wasn't that. The real Jam was helpless and crazy.
Completes Ed in his uncompanioned best.
What do I need to learn from The glass essay. A human situation
needs to be given.
Understanding what writing can't be, that it can't give them in me with
me.
1977 and Grotkowski's granary - troubled function come to be repaired
by place.
3
Olson house autumn and winter - rapture
Motives I'm giving up this time. There were too many. Now it's not documentation
it's completion.
Cadence instructs me. Sparse and precise. Simple.
4
Olson house winter collecting bits into clumps but now I should ask what
the photos say. Are they more physics and less psychic valence.
In the writing I'm being local, in the photos seeing local as cosmic.
- Do you understand why Paul has dropped me
yes
- Is it my fault no
- He wants to be done with family now yes
- He feels I drag him into the past yes
- He feels it's been repetitive no
- Will he ever be able to be interested in me
NO
- He's afraid of me yes
- And afraid to know he's afraid of me yes
-
- B has dropped me yes
- Because she feels I judge her no
- She feels I'm not what she hoped yes
- I knew that before she did yes
- Was she hoping to use me to get a grant
YES
- Am I what anyone hopes YES
-
- Do you think some photos can work
yes
- As a book yes
- As a movie no
-
One of the reasons I've been so slow to respond
this time around is that I've been stuck in reading the Golden West, as
if there's something in here that I've been searching for but I can't see
what it is yet. Bookwork is really clutching me.
also in relation to Theory's Practice, how to
understand the immense work that you have been doing in relation to the
push and pull you describe between the "black thick necked gorgon-philosopher"
"work woman" and "love woman"
When I read your diaries, at times I feel as
if the work you were doing on your romantic relationships feels like a distraction,
or as if there are two warring instincts at play, so it was almost cathartic
to read about the way you break down the duality of the Love Woman and the
Work Woman in your workshop. I think of this too in the context of the notion
that female work
5
This morning I lay in a swarm, 3am, Patch sleeping at my feet, BK's questions,
why don't I publish, female hermeticism, hermitism, the aloneness of having
gone so far into my own authority that no one can know me, what any of that
has to do with 1977-1980 alone in farmhouses in the country.
I took it to what will we know and that was one thing but not
at all the whole.
I was working all over in a huge space of questions.
I couldn't and can't afford to say things in a fancy way.
6
- We didn't learn music in our little school. There'd be one teacher
who could plunk away stiffly when we sang the anthem but that was it, no
instruments, no part singing. Church was different. It was a small congregation
of mostly young adults who'd been children when their parents came to Canada
as refugees in the '20s and '30s and who had grown up and married each
other during the war. Most of them had run out of public schooling after
their early teens but the parent generation wanting to keep them on the
narrow road organized some years of bible school for them before they left.
My parents got together in bible school and so did most of the couples
whose kids were our contemporaries.
-
- The best thing about bible school from my point of view (they drew
illustrations of the Book of Revelations with colored pencil and gold paint)
was that they learned to sight read, so the congregation that remained
when the old folks left was in effect a trained choir. We didn't sing sophisticated
music but our congregational singing raised the roof in four-part harmony
with some of the basses (my dad) an octave below. For evening services
our parents would form up in various combinations to sing duets, trios,
quartets, double quartets. It was natural to be able to sing an alto line
by ear before I was twelve.
-
- My family didn't have electricity till we moved closer to the road
when I was 16 but then the first electrical thing we bought was a record
player. We didn't know classical music (the Messiah on radio sung
by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) but in grade 12 Dennis Maxwell lent me
records he got for free through a record club and my sister and I would
dance in the living room to the 1812 Overture. We had a lot to learn.
-
It's cool enough now to be in the garden again, weeds, raspberry jam
made a half-pint at a time, cucumbers, broccoli, cabbage, new potatoes,
basil in flower, hollyhocks on their long necks staring into the window.
Sprinkler at the moment wavering backward and forward in long pink light
from the west.
I posted that this morning and now have a song in my head I haven't thought
of maybe since then. It's a counterexample, a round we learned at school
that had lovely counterpoint. White coral bells / upon a slender stalk.
It's online.
Two half-pints of raspberry jam, one of apricot jam, one that might turn
out to be red currant jelly or at least syrup.
part 4
time remaining volume 11: 2022 january-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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