August 7
I like earliest morning, I like being at the window to see the sky light
up, I like my hot tea, I like having a brain fresh enough to work at least
a bit.
There it is white all over bright like a light table.
Patch is stalking and sniffing in the garden's cold air knowing the verandah
door is ajar.
I've been going through the 1987 sheet looking for bits to add to some
photos and am seeing it's in another register, it's a different piece.
As writing 1977-1980 is brutally plain. So now I've gone through 1987 on
its own terms and there it is, 5 or 6 pages nearly perfect. Then B 4 packet
letter.
9
Ref letter for Sam. Cal Coast phonecall, they're going to email docs.
Rowen calling to tell me Amy with the kids has left Mike because he was
threatening to punch in her face. She's sheltering with Row. If he comes
after them will Row be in danger. It says no.
10
Wednesday 5:41am, soft thick pale grey worn thin at spots and creeping
slowly north.
-
Late afternoon a thunderstorm rolled through, dark sky, warm wind, big
splats of rain. In the evening when the sky had cleared it had a huge high
washed look that reminded me of the evening after a thunderstorm when I
was in long grass on what had been the yard, gazing at a vast tender open
horizon. July 1977, a stronger moment than I knew. When I was a child that
sky was background but now I was there to meet it. I wasn't just camped
on an old site I was planting myself on an old site to begin to be changed
by meeting it. True venture decisive but slower than I've guessed. What
do I mean. There's more to find.
12
Yesterday late afternoon a magnificent storm, thick rain slashing past
the window, Russian olive beaten sideways, white torrent jutting from the
church's gutter. Now a pale apricot horizon and little tufts. When I opened
the kitchen door for Patch a full moon on its way down.
There's a pull to overstatement. I've carved the July 1977 paragraph
back a little every day. No harm if I keep trying.
13
A man at the door yesterday afternoon yelling at me that he's not going
to contain his dog: the young beagle husband with my sheaf of vet bills
offering me two hundred dollars, "That's all you'll get," less
hazed-out than his wife but angry at being in the wrong. Worst about those
moments was the automatism they called up, so that for the rest of the day
I was muttering in my own defense as if in front of a judge. I suppose it's
a rehearsal reflex and maybe useful sometimes but it's unpleasant, it's
an enslavement.
Patch was trying to get me up at three thirty this morning. Bad Patch.
I put her in the cellar for a while.
So now it's 5:03 and there's faint color along the northeastern rim,
Venus beside the plane tree sharp and moving fast - now gone behind a branch.
I dreamed Leslie asked me to can apricots for her.
There were people all over her big apricot tree picking them.
Can the sky be ruined too? When lovely Earth is burned black will there
still be atmosphere to hold light, water to form clouds and wind to move
them?
The end of every lovely thing Earth has made. As if my ethical instinct
has been that the only right thing to be in end time is to notice it, feel
it, love it as it dies.
If there were an afterlife I'd want to have earned by faithful love another
Earth.
15
Yesterday morning I was working with the physics shreds file in the elation
I become with those bits of language that call up roots of cosmos and being.
Later in the day Rowen sent images he's made with a generative engine, 'alien
worlds', meaningless purple and orange light, said he'd made 5000. He wants
to share an enthusiasm and make me proud and I'd want him to have those
things but random fantasy junk just seems more trashing of lovely Earth.
Inventing alternate worlds should be hard, it should be ambitious and deep,
it should press someone toward harder finer understanding. I keep being
distressed that he and Freya don't read so I can't give them possibilities
people have found in other times. At the same time I have to wonder whether
intelligence is done with literacy and exists now in forms that leave me
obsolete. Are there still young people who search and study and press the
way I have.
Being elated in cosmos shreds made me post can the sky be ruined too.doc
and then I could see who'd be willing to meet it. Jennifer "I feel
this". Susan. Kate. Val and Sue. Adam and even Jim. Indra "You
break my heart, Ellie." That one cracked me.
-
June 1977 - I was 32 - spinning -
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 childhood's country. In my twenties always
taken by novels about women going off to live alone in the country, novels
by women who imagined it and didn't do it. Did it for parts of three years.
Long story whose summary is in about twenty photos with a different quality
than anything before or since. How - an almost speechless presence in which
what seemed to be unconscious perceiving and feeling came close. They're
present to physical place but in a sort of mythological way.
- Anyway, I'm not so taken with the idea of female hermitism now as I
am in courageous going for broke in any area of work. Hermeticism of committed
effort that takes one out of the common mind into the lonely satisfying
open.
I was begging for true being with effort, sacrifice and ritual but conscious/language
self was so shattered the journal record is just bad. I had in mind grant
money and art project but really I was feeling it as a religious quest.
- Was my conscious being poor before them
YES
- Did they wreck me no
- In relation to them I realized how bad it was
yes
- Because theirs was better? no
- Because I was using them for that yes
- The photos could be good because they weren't made by
the wrecked part yes
- The wrecked part was wrecked by trauma
yes
- Would you say love woman was the wrecked part
YES
- Work self wasn't wrecked but isolated yes
- Were the photos made by larger self yes
- Was the distress necessary yes
16
Georg Patzer says a photographer's precise take on the threshold between
inner and outer. Quiet simple work with thoughtful depth.
August 15 2015. Yesterday was 7 years.
17
Middle of August, it's dark now at 9pm as if suddenly.
5:25am radiant ivory moment.
Another 29K from Mary.
18
will prove an integral part of Lamb's mature
poetics, which encourage an experience of linguistic richness, not rational
pursuit of a meaning
Eric G. Wilson 2022 Dream-child
A silly book I bought because I've been charmed by Lamb in quotations
and wanted his lucid candour. Silly how - "bad-mouthing," "resemble
Spinal Tap," "he and Lamb were solid" - modishly trivial
as if wanting ignorant undergrads to like him. Tone. One of the reasons
to write about that era in writing is to write in that era's excellence
of tone. A better biographer does, Holmes does.
I now orient dates around 1800 by what Aubrey and Maturin were up to
at those times!
19
I've been compiling and sorting, compiling and sorting and then come
to a stop. Here is my chance to make a set of little pieces that hang next
to twenty photos people haven't seen well. I want them to say: these love
cosmos, they love local as cosmic. They love being: they feel what is more-than-conscious
in how they are being made. There it is. Can they be like the last section
of Ditches of Alberta.
- spruce drifted pollen from its wide wing as I passed through what seemed
like a gate
-
- it's the home of some self I'm not at this moment
- those pages of notes, the lake house that's gone
-
- the sky is delicately pale in its ordered directions
-
- he read them perfectly. I was sitting on the floor at his knee. it
was 35 years later
-
- they are read lightly and not in sentences not the way they were written,
there's a kind of glide
-
- what I like is the cadence
-
- the sparse balanced flow of time noted
-
-
- that's it isn't it
-
- the air was perfect, moving just barely so the skin felt loved
20
I'm seeing the text has to be from now. Retrospective.
Last dream this morning was colours of my house.
It was 820A approximately, I was looking north in the corridor and naming
the colours I could see, dark turquoise, red, yellow. I woke and
continued, dark green, blue. It was happiness.
Now it's being certain what to discard.
21
I skipped to the last months there and am not at all certain what to
discard. Anything about Jam. Most Pound notes, quotations. What's the main
thing in that time, house and place, completion, state of grace. How to
write, community. - Not completion but ways forward.
May, June, July but Jam still in my head. August is when it changes.
23
Note from Luke last night stabs me with fear. Patch keeps waking me,
starts leaping over the bed at 2:30. I lie in my damp night clothes talking
to myself about insanity, how fragile people are, my kids are.
-
so that the thought you have between you is
more alive than the thought you may have apart. And the next week he is
senile, he is anchored to phrases.
I often think of that sentence.
-
Helmer throughout.
-
- first visit from aphrodite - was it - her black lace on skin from twilight
and twigs, red, rose, shore ridge, cuddled in the ditch grass thinking
him, he steals down the hill
24
Locked Patch in the cellar and slept till 6. Till six! Last
dream I was climbing steps in the kind of old hotel I like, thinking I have
enough money now to be able to live here, eat in the café around
the corner. I do have enough money now to travel but how would I
manage in London or New York not being able to walk.
As I work cringing at the text of notes in o. Think about that
more. I threw things in not knowing what they were for and not believing
I could know what they were for. I cringe at being inferior to Jam and at
dumping miscellany on my willing audience. I was giving unfinished work,
work a long way from finished. The unfinishedness was an obscurity that
now seems pretentious, maybe I can get away with it, maybe it can make sense
to them it can't make to me.
The photos were finished. No one said anything that could make me feel
they'd seen them. Is there any excuse in text helping the photos?
- Do you think it was a bad show no
- Do you think the text helped the photos
YES
- Think of it as a pond in which much was dissolved
yes
- Does anyone remember it yes
- Anyone besides me no
- Did they think I was better than them yes
- Did Jam yes
- In power yes
- Although she knew it was unfinished yes
By power I mean scope, the number of things being worked on and their
groundedness in real place.
25
Look how far south the sun is rising - there it is inside the spruce
edging against its trunk not much above the roof. 6:42.
Household, happiness in. 7 pints of applesauce yesterday. Picked the
apples by shaking the tree. Sunflowers in the pink vase. Scent of Thérèse
on the counter. O tea. Patch's routine, she's had breakfast, checked the
day out the back door. Now she says meeee. I say Come on, am walking
toward the front door she knows I'll leave ajar, hear her galloping beside
me. There's money. The Cal Coast account is successfully closed. A task.
What else. Thinking how it is that bad Tom goes on being steady love in
me as no one else. I reread the last post with him in it and liked the ironical
slant. Susan mailed me a book. I opened it and read one line. Oh too bad.
So now I'm happy to like myself better than that earnest woman with twelve
books who is visibly scratching for ways to be significant though what she
wants to talk about is her broken pelvis and broken coccyx and detached
retina. (Do you think that's fair? Yes.)
I now love the record of visits with M.
- After noon getting up traveling under clouds. Mary an odd small flat-bummed
imp body. Gradually find a glee that wants to hug her and sits on the table
separating white paint out of her hair strand by strand. Intimacy hears
itself as J does from the front room. He sits with his arms up. I ignore
him. These days he goes to the Golden Age Club which has lowered its age
limit for the sake of income.
-
- I find twenty dollars on the dash in Valhalla. Mary parking next to
the car, she turns as if driving is still anxious. Am glad to say hello
by eye through the co-op window. She's peaceful and friendly.
-
- Listening to Lascia qu'io piango the cut of her edges brings
me to tears. M can hear how much I want to sing.
26
One thing I've always wondered about you. It
seems to me that you are richly gifted in ways that are beyond this world's
easy grasp, and yet you go on communicating with that world in all manner
of creative ways. Why?
B says why don't I publish, am I vowed to the ineffable. Don says it
was a delight to read my FB posts but why do I communicate at all.
Why don't you. Why don't any of you.
Why do I. Because there's more love in me than anyone wants. Because
some few others have shown me how.
Luke isn't answering his phone. Tom doesn't reply to anything. Paul isn't
phoning so I have to let him be. I'm scared to call Rob because he was off
the rails. Don said forgive me so I sent him a piece, okay here's another
chance. He didn't reply to it. My FB people, even Emilee, say like,
which means just I saw this.
April 1979 mud and light, early spring learning the lake house. Frustrated
dependence on Jam on and on so annoying now that I want to erase it from
the past. It was me: it was pain. I was floundering uselessly. At the same
time I was love meeting its days, making a place for its days in generous
faith and enterprise. Mending was slower than I knew, remarkably slow, but
there was intent.
-
Exasperated with B's letter this time because it shows me the habits
of mind that make Being about unuseable.
Then this:
putting a finger lightly on the very spot
Mine very much confirmed, but I only spoke to
my mother in depth about it last year.
I'm thinking back to this question of the essence
of my interest in female hermeticism, in which female ascetics/hermits are
very often found in caves or cells.
She is noticing her attractions and that's a start. There's something
she needs to get to. She isn't getting my philosophy because it's irrelevant
to her at the moment and should be.
precise but not tightly gripped
What she liked in The Golden West.
28
Cold this morning, turned on the rad.
- I said I wanted to know
- you said that wasn't what you wanted
-
- we were best when we were willing to know anything
- we were frightened and close to our limits and I want
- to be that again
-
- remembering this made my body open
30
The blue spruce isn't holding itself right, it looks beat up. Old age
maybe.
I'm grumpy. My bp is the lowest it's been, is that why.
31
Yesterday I was in the kitchen and saw a young black cat wandering up
the corridor - oh Mouse. She looks like Mouse but completely lacks Mouse's
dilated sweetness, has a hard stare. I've held onto her in case someone
is looking for her, kept her closed in the sewing room last night. Patch
crouched staring suspiciously at the crack under the door. When she came
in for the night she was so spooked by the presence she sensed that she
ran, wouldn't eat until I brought her food into the verandah.
September 1
When I got up at three I went looking for Patch because she hadn't shown
up in my bed all night. I found her in the verandah asleep on the shelf
next to the window. When I went to touch her hello she raised her head like
a lover stirring next to me in a bed, licked my hand, sleepy, familiar.
Put a candle in the window. Greg on his own at home last night
emailed me a song that shocked me - that piercing Tom quality suddenly -
excruciating - moments in my winter bed with Tom's tape and without Tom.
Tom's heart cry sent so I'd feel it with him. I didn't know it was Creedence
Clearwater - I didn't know any of the music he sent - it hit me bare naked
heart to heart - Tom.
3
A couple of evenings ago Patch was outside in the dark and I was at the
door worrying about getting her inside for the night. Suddenly a black cat
was running up the white steps who wasn't Patch, smaller, lighter, tail
waving gaily, Mya (tag had said) coming back to a house she obviously feels
entitled to visit. I picked her up and hustled her straight through to the
front door so Patch wouldn't be spooked but her gaiety imprinted itself
in my head so I've needed to name it.
6:12 am sky pale, cloud patches evenly grey-blue sailing slowly north
against brown wildfire smudge. A Native man was stopped for a minute on
the church steps. Flare of a match.
I've posted the author's note from the Tusaaji piece mainly to
educate Don - got it out for B - but I like it too for reminding me of what
no one is remembering, how fuckin' competent I am.
Persian basil in a glass vase on the rad between the windows. It's September
but the season seems to be a bit nudged back, the church's crabapples aren't
showing much yellow yet. I stand in the doorway marveling at how much mass
there is in the garden - the mass of leafiness - the apricot tree now throwing
so large a shadow on the house, such fullness on the ground and in the air.
-
The women in American reality TV expensive, long-haired, white-toothed,
false-eyelashed, twentyfive at forty, running things, screeching like drag
queens and startlingly inarticulate. "How ARE you!" "It's
GORGEOUS!" "Oh my GOD!" "It's so CUTE!" "I'M
SO EXCITED!" Rushing to hug anyone they've just met. - What is
that? Why do American women need fake femininity? It's right-wing presumably,
anti-literate, 'family oriented', 'entrepreneurial', soulless to the core.
Kids pressured into lying response every moment.
The will of the people, in America, has always
been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and
sacredly cultivated
They will never, so long as their whiteness
puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience
and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently
worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country,
their children, or their fate.
James Baldwin An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss
Angela Davis November 1970
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis
- It's not just defensive whiteness though, or just defensive maleness.
What is it actually that puts so great a distance between oneself and one's
own experience and the experience of others? There's probably no one cause.
It's a human vulnerability, a deadly flaw.
4
For B what the basics are -
First principle: realist assumption that physical world exists and we
are evolved to know it adequately.
Primary distinction between presence and simulation follows:
curious to understand more about how simulational
cognition is dependent on real-world experience about the way(s) that simulational
cognition is epistemologically secondary - is that a social concept or a
behavioral concept, or something else entirely?
It's an epistemological concept and a metaphysical commitment. It puts
evolution first. Animals are evolved to be able to perceive and do. Later
they build on those abilities: it's useful to be able to simulate perceiving
and doing (in remembering, planning, etc).
I'd like to better understand simulation as
a concept. Simulation as in thoughts that can be conjured and are responsive
to external stimuli? Does simulation also confer/connote/relate to imagination?
I needed a concept that contrasts with basic level presence/contact (perceiving
and doing) and includes imagining as a subcategory. Simulation is any kind
of cognition that is as-if about what it isn't with rather than about what
it is with. As-if aboutness.
I guess I'm stuck into this idea that you've
invoked in me about perception and simulation, and if simulation is immaterial.
Simulation isn't immaterial! It's done by bodies. Science fiction is
written by bodies. Cyberspace is a concept of immateriality fantasized by
bodies.
Every kind of study is an embodiment study:
What is it about the intersection between embodiment
and reading/writing
How does a body do speech, reading, writing. What changes in how we understand
anything about language if we keep remembering how bodies do it.
Especially important to hold the presence-simulation distinction when
talking about any kind of representation function:
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.
Participation of 'the unconscious':
How to say it better: body knows more than you think you do.
Method of recognition: obscurely recognizing and then working to know
what is being recognized.
Be aware of (and avoid as much as is practical) the impressor mystifications
demanded by art discourse contexts:
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 understand that to be important in art discourse contexts, especially
in contexts where theoretical men predominate, people feel they have to
pile on impressor devices.
In that cloud of fanciness it seems to me impossible to focus in a way
that can integrate. It's a style that disables.
Understand how trauma works and watch out for traumatic dissociation
everywhere:
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.
Beware of assuming there is an entity if there is a name:
I wonder, does the ego have a voice? Where does
it sit? Can the ego stand staying inside for long?
That way of asking makes us imagine an entity. I'd guess 'the ego' is
just a blanket name for a collection of defensive habits.
Watch your metaphors, try to be physiologically plausible:
I didn't want to get into the anatomy of the brain - resisted reading
neurophysiology, hated the slog - but in the end I think getting the physical
geography, functional layout, of the brain clear in my head was the most
radical work I've done. For me it has clarified so much else.
The thing that can make my mysteries clearer is just to remember that
I'm always trying to ground the way we understand any kind of cognition
in the facts of bodily structure - trying to see it as something a body
is doing.
Different personalities: different subnetworks. Child. Love woman and
work woman. Most important, Larger self pictured as the angel Temperance
standing above and integrating the opposites of the Lovers - or the red
lion in the 2 of cups, the arcing rainbow in the 10 of cups.
Could interiority be a kind of underworld? Can
you tell me more?
Mythic underworlds can mean various things but in this context I've thought
we should maybe talk about a beside-world. We could say 'the uncon' but
maybe better just to say nonconscious structure in the body/cortex that
participates in knowing, feeling, deciding, etc and can sometimes be sensed,
contacted, worked with, integrated more or less etc.
What is a beside-world?
I mean it physiologically. In cortex non-conscious structure presumably
exists alongside of structure making us consciously aware - rather than
below it.
how does the brain discard information that's
deemed unuseful? Are ideas overwritten (overdubbed, painted over), and if
they are, do remnants of those covered elements still exist, buried?
'Discarding information' is hard to make physiologically plausible. If
we talk about neural structure instead of 'ideas' we can imagine structure
not currently evoked but latent.
- Be aware of the politics in play, ie what is at stake:
- My motive in those areas is profoundly feminist
-
- I've wanted the way I say things to make it possible to see a human
as immersed in and continuous with world, not encapsulated.
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 as non-patriarchal as possible in
vocabulary, quotations, examples, bibliography, and concretely perception-based
in general. There have been men who can't read it for reasons they don't
guess. Something that helped me a lot in tackling philosophy was remembering
that it has been male, structured by specifically male psychology, male
developmental trauma, defensive dissociation etc.
Can you tell me more about aboutness, and how
you feel about it now
'Aboutness' was strategic and I still like it a lot. There needed to
be strategy because philosophy of mind has been utterly confused by notions
of 'internal representation' imagined as residing somewhere in mental non-space.
Notice attractions:
When I was living in London I met Chantal Akerman at a festival and interviewed
her because I'd liked her film so much. Later I dreamed that I asked her
how to work and she said the key was to notice attractions. I understood
by that noticing images and phrases with a charge that had no obvious explanation.
I've done that since. In my years up north alone in farmhouses I collected
those scraps and kept working with them - working meant sorting, reviewing,
re-sorting, etc. How that went is described in the author's note of the
piece I'm attaching, a collaboration with an ex-student who teaches at a
university in Colombia. Page 10.
I'll attach another thing about recognition and carrying away just exactly
the recognized morsel without lugging its context along with it.
Track: persist: go for broke: keep pushing for essence
I'm not so taken with the idea of female hermitism now (and not at all
with the theological fantasmagorias that funded it) as I am in courageous
going for broke in any area of work. Hermeticism of committed effort that
takes one out of the common mind into the lonely satisfying open.
Did the bookwork teach you how to ask yourself
better questions? What did you learn?
Processing. Working with the book would go step by step. It would say
something I didn't understand. I'd guess and ask. It would say no. A series
of guesses and no's would herd me toward the actually relevant questions
that would lead finally to a yes and then more questions.
Integrate what have seemed to be opposites:
as if there are two warring instincts at play
struggle between dualities, and the struggle
to have those dualities work together, collaborate, reconcile
A rule of thumb I came to when I was teaching is that self-conflict is
structural in almost anyone and that getting the conflicting parts to talk
to each other is helpful to whatever has held students back.
My processing methods worked as well for understanding cortical structure
as for dissolving philosophical knots as for plain old getting through emotional
crashes.
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. It can change the sense of what
needs to be explained.
Qualities of integrated voice:
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.
how you guided your students to a more emotionally
grounded voice
- 1. A self-conflict exercise in one-to-one residency sessions.
- 2. Giving permission by being bolder and more personal and more concrete
in my replies than they expect.
- 3. Enjoying them. Quoting their livelier truer passages back to them
and ignoring the dull passages.
- 4. Line edits that nudged toward more directness, less abstraction,
less Latinate diction, more sensory detail.
Crying did sometimes come into it. Crying because of a finger put lightly
on the very spot.
as if the work you were doing on your romantic
relationships feels like a distraction
I had to work with it in the form it came. It was so intense that
I had to commit to it. Then having done the work more fruitful than I could
have imagined, for instance in coming to things useable with students but
also in largest forms of comprehension.
Be ambitious, aim for global coherence of platform:
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.
- I don't know how able she is and have been irritated by her fuzziness
but in fact she's been generous and faithful to herself in showing where
she is and asking what she needs to ask. No one else is doing that no matter
what I post.
Having set it out: it's a lot. Jody Golick's instant take was remarkable.
6
Why did Susan send me a book by someone with so much less dash than I
have. Does it mean her admiration is worthless? I'm saying that after dipping
into the stories posted folder, one little post after another that I like
both for their moments and for how they are said.
-
When Patch has had her early patrol in the garden and has knocked on
the window and been let in and has come to knead my belly with a devout
look on her face she lies back into my left arm, closes her eyes and lets
herself go in what seems to be blissful love. I look down at her small face
marveling that though she has no one of her own kind her need to love is
so strong she'll love even the large clumsy foreign animal I am.
-
James Baldwin's letter to Angela Davis
7
Mubi films so far:
- Great freedom - German gay prison
- Letter to my mother for my son - Spanish pregnant in landscape
- Outside noise - German three arty young women
- Truth or consequences ** - Hannah Javanti - New Mexico town
spaceport
- Wet sand - Georgia seaside bigots and gay love - Elene Naveriani
- Lucky
8
Had been in 1996 looking for Rowen reading Dune and this morning
the demon photo of Tom and noticed how much I liked the writing, how little
editing it needs, and when I was pulling patches got to thinking what if
instead of dealing with what stopped me about Theory's practice being
much too long - what if instead making shorter books of just stretches of
it - what if they include photos and the papers written, in 1996 the metaphor
paper. What if I just lay them out and think of someone to send them to.
That way I can include the side stories, the places and weathers and friends
and kids and odd meetings.
-
Then two things. Q E died the same year as M. 96. And Jarman's Chroma.
Forgot I'd sent for it.
-
There's no catching up to these English boarding school boys, Fermor
and Jarman.
9
Daily dispatches on FB, you know everything already. But I'll tell you
a nice thing that happened today. I found someone to cut my hair. Her name
is Cookie and her salon is Cookie's Cutter. It's in a wild-west-looking
building called the Snake Oil Emporium, whose main room is full of second-hand
leather tack. I wore a mask so I wdn't have to stare at myself and we talked
about cats via the mirror. She was a cushioned redhead maybe 55 with a sweet
curve to her mouth, who lingered over her work and had the kind of professional
tricks that could make my hair look like Hollywood hair. I left with a thin
blue streak painted into the silver on one side. It's temporary but maybe
next time we'll do something bold. It was beyond lovely finding someone
fun to talk to.
10
In the morning Monica was in the garden with me insisting on weeding
in exchange for vegetables. She is a tidy 60 year old with feathered hair
who found me on her way to an AA meeting at the United Church. With her
I was feeling at an utter end of being able to be interested in anyone but
then in the afternoon there was Cookie. When I described Cookie to Em last
night I lit up all over again. Oh intelligence and the terrible cost of
living here without it. My ugly little eyes in the salon mirror.
-
Rowen this aft wanting to talk - explained how generative art is done,
sent Lost on you by LP, described Gideon filling a sketchbook with
scribbles. Arinn wants to hire him for narrative design but he doesn't have
a portfolio. Freya had executive function some better than he does he said,
but had to force and there was a cost. He managed instead by lowering his
standards. They're both on HDD meds and sore about lost time.
People liked the lightheartedness of the Cookie piece. Jody sent a Youtube
Fleabag episode about hair, which took me to another with what-is-it-about-him
Andrew Scott as a priest and a song by Hozier called Take me to church.
Two good songs of a similar kind and not the first time I've felt there's
something about Andrew Scott.
12
Days of thick white smoke and suddenly a lot of flies.
-
Going through 1996-97 imagining it as a book.
13
Solution is that Theory's practice is an umbrella title for volumes
extracted from The golden west whole, each with a paper? Sections
that have the right balance of daily life, love-struggle and work. What's
a good length. 50,000-90,000 words.
-
It is the clownishness, the gift for charismatic
chaos, and the hypnotic trance cast by shameless improbability that are
essential to the fascist leader. Their being what is now called a hot mess
is what heated up their following; there is something in watching someone
obviously ill-suited for a part constantly triumph over the norm and against
the more obviously efficient and educated that is essential to their popular
appeal. How could someone as blatantly wrong for the part ever become one?
Because his unfit nature enlists the favor of those who feel themselves
unfairly judged unfit. That is the fascist theme.
Gopnick in the NYKR.
Book banning in the US, librarians under threat, In the night kitchen
banned because there is a drawing of a naked child whose penis is shown.
Vast paranoia about sex.
-
Sent Tom Lucky.
14
Lying awake at 4:30 as if reseeing or continuing the story of the ninety
year old man in Lucky, it so speaks to the sorrowful losses of aging
- mine, my own sorrowful losses.
Exasperated by not being able to deal with reinstalling Photoshop Elements,
passwords not working, passwords at all. Shouting, hitting the desk. Feeling
I don't have the strength of mind to track systematically and resolve.
15
Lonely yesterday, got out the box of M's letters. Something from the
middle of the pile. Starved bleating, no. They'd have to be the earliest.
So then I read through the hours: farm work, weather, the neighbours, Judy
and Paul still at home. I'd been a success and everywhere she went people
asked about me. My letters were entertaining - hers never were - and she
passed them around. She's oppressed but secure. Writing her anchors me through
a passage harder than I knew. I could balance by telling. I wasn't seen
but I was well thought of.
I knew I should probably stop after the first year because after that
I'd broken away and she wasn't getting what she wanted and was panicking.
What are my questions. What was I to her. What exactly was the break. Were
the early letters false as I said later. What had to change.
- Were they false no
- But incomplete yes
- I entertained but didn't confide yes
She was in love with me I think is the way to say it. She couldn't be
in love with Ed so when she lost me she had to be frantically in love with
other people. She was in love with me because I talked to her. How would
it have been different to come from parents who were in confidence with
each other. I'd have been seen rather than needed. So the letters weren't
false so far as they went but the relation was false in the sense of unhinged.
"You are no longer the one who ." That was crushing: if I can't
be in love with you you are no good to me: was the meaning of her fury when
I burned the photo. What it means to say she was a dud, but she was a dud
as a mother because he was a dud as a human. His narcissism was the root
crack in the family. (Yes.) What I said at the funeral was correct. Yes
but: she was complicit.
I shudder at two related things in her letters, her pressure to give
up hating Ed and her religious pressure, and I'm disgusted by her unending
demand to write oftener. They amount to an avid blind demand for insincerity.
- Was I insincere in the early letters she liked. Yes, I wrote as if Ed
were a regular father. It wasn't wrong to be entertaining in letters but
it would have been better if she'd had a tactful sense of how much pain
I was suppressing. She loaded her own falsity onto me without consideration.
I had to hang onto hating Ed because neither he nor she acknowledged
the harm he'd done. Why do I still have to hang onto hating her.
-
The first houses I remember your having was
the one you and your make believe sister had in a shack at the sawmill when
you were 4.
Five I think.
- Was that sister an intuition of love girl
YES
17
Last winter's work on Theory's practice. Are the summary journal
notes useable.
-
If I could advise myself then I'd say let go of her - lightly
and sweetly - don't argue with her - don't educate her - make her laugh.
Short notes at completely reliable but long intervals. Don't engage her
anxiety, keep to yourself. - There was a reason I didn't do that. I
fed her anxiety by telling her too much. I told her too much because I was
using her to anchor me. I thought I was doing it for her but if I'd been
doing it for her I'd have been skilful with her limits. I didn't want to
know her limits. I was implicated with her and in that implication I was
stupid and I now resent the stupidity. - This after reading my letters to
her in the last two years at Queens.
Now instead of letters I post a paragraph or several and so far as I
know no one is anxious. Today a paragraph about Patch eight people could
like.
18
B after months - still having to see how little her system can make of
my way of saying, meaning how little anyone. My changed way of saying so
crucial an invention.
-
What would I have needed to know about myself to detach from her correctly.
That she was a person who needed to be safe and I was something she couldn't
imagine, someone who didn't need to be safe, who needed something else.
I didn't want to be kind to her because that I didn't want to condescend.
If I'd been clearer I'd have be willing: you're timid and ignorant - it's
not your fault - you were good to small children and as a small child I
was good to you too - but I'm stronger than you are, there's nothing you
can tell me about how to live. I say this still angry. Alright: I'm angry
she stopped thinking well of me. She withdrew her blessing.
- Right? YES
- There was an actual cost yes
- I'd sailed on it yes
- I'd earned it yes
- And was still earning it, have always earned it
yes
- But she withdrew it yes
-
- Should I have found a lying way to keep it
no
- Could there have been any way to avoid that loss
no
- Did I falter when she withdrew it yes
- I had some bad years yes
- Until Joyce YES
- And Louie who for a while thought well of me
yes
- And has withdrawn her blessing yes
- So have I faltered since YES
- They both withdrew their blessing because of sex
yes
-
So I'm angry at Louie in the same way.
- Is there anything more you want to say
happiness, truth, betrayal, strife
- When happiness and truth are betrayed there's anger?
yes
- Is there anything I can do to get that blessing now
no
- Would I thrive if I had it yes
19
These nights it stays just two clicks above zero. I've brought in the
tender plants in pots. Should can tomatoes today, maybe freeze more beans.
20
Seven pints red with a green sprig of basil and a white clove of garlic,
half tsp of sea salt and some lemon juice to be safe. Open kettle canned.
It isn't four yet, black sky, bright stars a few.
- Best solution more than one book YES
- Can I make my innovations clearer yes
So much useful discovery and too late because the peace and plenty I've
had to work them out are going to end. If humans survive they're going to
be hurled back into their most primitive fascistic worst.
- Are humans going to disappear yes
- Soon yes
- Anarchy no
- Will some survive no
- So I can't hope my work will help yes
- But I should still do it yes
- Then will the planet recover yes
- Will I die before the end yes
- Will other planets harvest our work yes
- From cyberspace YES
- Do I just happen to be there for the end
yes
- Will there be a last judgment no
- It's a last judgment but of human enterprise as a whole
yes
Time remaining.
21
Open sky and needle at zero. Yellow fading up to pale pale blue, black
row of three tall trees and pointed roof.
I'm going to be living in Leslie's cabin - cabin?
a neglected old house. When I unlock the door the first thing I see is a
broken-off pine branch. They've been here over Christmas, disheveled little
pine thrown in a corner with bits of decoration. Did my companion light
the fire? A barrel stove rusted to half its surface and roaring hot. A dirty
rag left on its surface. Dirty bare mattress. I'm looking at it all thinking
I'm going to clean it up.
- Is Leslie's house the thesis work yes
- Do you use dreams to talk yes
- Are you steady even when my state is derelict
no
- Was the dream a warning no a description
- You can only be wise when I'm in a good state
NO
- Are house dreams about body NO, state
- So are my SketchUps about state yes
- So my state in relation to the thesis work is a mess
YES
- Do you recommend something specific (emperor)(Aw)(2s)(the
lovers)
- Sentence no, list
- Can you point that with one card losses
- Of capacity no
If I could send my work to another planet what would I send. Embodiment
studies including trauma recovery process: learn to take care of yourselves
and don't fall into these insanities.
- Is the house state my state no your culture's
- Disordered celebration, dangerously uncontained energy,
sexual dirt yes
- Do you want to add something act on early
love's destruction by means of the Work
-
- Is Putin going to use nukes no
22
I went to Starbucks yesterday and felt relief as if of civilization.
I'll go again. Dress up and go again.
23
Things are awful and I daren't tell you. Awful
beyond measure some very harsh acceptance about what I am or have been I'm
ashamed and I don't want to hurt you I started self-harming again And I
got to the worst point. But only bruises not bones I really don't have anything
at all that gives me joy these days If you wanted to know now you know
- I don't understand self-loathing but I understand defeat. Defeat is
when there's no energy of hope.
- How to live in time remaining. Finish strong said Vic. What can that
mean is the question.
- Love what's dying as it dies.
- Carry your value visibly.
- Take care of those who belong to you.
- Don't lie.
- It's too late for my work. It can't take effect.
- But is it a way of loving what's dying?
- Yes.
-
- Does Tom belong to me YES
- Should I go see him yes
26
Look at that, perfect radiant dawn. Perfectly even color along the whole
eastern edge.
Going through N1-5 for Some photos dismissing everything toward
Jam in disgust at its starved useless clinging to a miser. My starved useless
foolish and ultimately insincere effort like the useless foolish insincere
effort toward my mom.
- Do you agree it's insincere yes
- The hunger is true yes
- But I have to pretend to feel them because I don't
yes
- That's what was false in the letters to M
yes
- That was what Tom didn't like in my letters
yes
- If I felt them would I still be hungry
NO
- Did I start feeling them with Ken YES
- Jam was like that too yes
- Tom could feel people sort of (twirling)
- Is there more you want to say no
- Do I feel Luke yes
An hour later the sky is mottled with cloud forming in place as the sky
warms.
-
I've said I'd do one practical thing every morning before I go back to
bed for second sleep. Yesterday I affixed the brass hooks on the back of
the bathroom door using the drill. Today I figured out the sewing machine
and mended the black cardigan's elbows. Almost elated by those.
Steven Dillon 2004 Derek Jarman and lyric film
Wings of desire
from Duino elegies
phrase that comments self-consciously on focus
and pace
recurrent ruined landscapes, too ruined to fix,
deep hopelessness
creates treasures conveying complexity and truth
of connections and hidden phenomena
truthful arbitrariness of its progression
Derrida's Glas, Hegel
lack charismatic self-presentation
soul mode which recognizes <all realities
as primarily> symbolic or metaphoric - Hillman
contemporary invocations of mysticism now emphasize
its immanent rather than transcendent more likely found in body rather than out
Sebastiane
ambient track by Eno
Marjorie Perloff 1996 Wittgenstein's ladder:
poetic language and the strangeness of the ordinary
His Wittgenstein takes place in as if outer
space, a blackness without boundaries
Instead, poetry might be aligned with transparency.
Bill Viola's The reflecting pool and Ancient
of days( in Selected works. 1995 Reasons for knocking at an empty
house: writings 1973-1994 ed. Robert Violette MIT Press
Blue screen, voice overs and other kinds of sound
ambient sound with documentary effect supporting or contrasting annotation
-
Yesterday I thought I could propose the Karlsruhe show to B without what's-her-name
and with new texts, have Chris's transfers ready, finish the Some photos
book before it; then use it to try for Grande Prairie.
27
All that campy drama as if he was needing it to be noticed in London
and maybe in his campy community - I skip through the middle of the book
- but at the end his garden and the lovely simplicity of Blue. Dillon
says Wittgenstein got him there.
It isn't a good book but I liked that bit and was a little inspired to
be thinking about film at all. Some things about the book's design.
-
The sheet called whole riveting.
What relation between the simple perceiving, the anxious self observation
and the crystalline later fragments. What's my question. More than one.
- Can the simplicity of the photos stand with the crystalline
phrases yes
- Are the photos that much ahead of the language
yes
-
- Is it cheating to summarize the anxious self in those
competent texts not necessarily
- My observation phrases don't stand up to the later ones
yes
- Can they mix yes
- They can mix in the same book but not in the same text
yes
- So it's photos, texts 1 and texts 2 yes
- Different font yes
- Am I going to have time to finish this
yes
- Is it a longer book than I thought yes
28
Crabapple across the street has gone a tweedy orange. The linden's a
cloud of green and gold.
Derek Jarman 2000 Smiling in slow motion: the journals of Derek Jarman
1991-1994. Full of flower names.
The shreds sheet so beautiful and potent, I think what I'd most
want to give. And the whole sheet. What I know now is it's those
two, the best photos, and something of the daily notes. It's interesting
work. Easily swamped.
-
My doing-things vow, yesterday sewed the orange cushion cover (not finished)
and today deep-weeded the cucumber bed and brought out and weeded the small
iris divisions. Because I've vowed only to do a bit I look forward to what
I'm not allowed to do yet.
Sat in Starbucks whipping through a stack of Notes in o script
pages, tossed a pile.
-
- I started grade one in La Glace School but as soon as the Wapiti froze
over my dad moved us to a remote lumber camp and that's where I learned
to read. I was sitting back on a rough wooden bunk in a very small cabin.
- It's one of those moments like a freeze frame, intact seventy-some years
later: the blanket under me, the lit window across the room, the book in
my lap. It wasn't a child's book, there were the short words I knew but
there were long words too. I stared at the one in front of me. Sounded
it syllable by syllable. Yes! Now I can read anything, I can read everything!
-
- A second moment about reading is from grade two. I was on a small chair
in a reading circle. The kids around me were taking stumbling turns reading
aloud and I was pages ahead of them reading to myself. I looked up and
realized what I was doing. It couldn't have been the first time I'd read
silently so what was it about that moment: I think it must have been the
first time I was gripped by what I was reading.
-
- It was The Boxcar Children. The page I had open showed a red-painted
wooden railway car surrounded by forest, where four children were living
on their own, furnishing it with treasures found in a dump. I now discover
the book was written by a first grade teacher in 1924, and that when it
was first published "it raised a storm of protest from librarians
who thought the children were having too good a time without any parental
control". There was that about it certainly but for me it was mostly
the boxcar, finding it in the woods, improvising its furniture, dipping
water from a stream.
-
- I'd already slept in a wooden railway carriage overnight. When I was
seven I'd been in the hospital in Edmonton and when it was time to go home
friends of my parents put me on a Northern Alberta Railway train alone.
The NAR route made a long arc to run along the shore of Lesser Slave Lake
before it turned south again toward Sexsmith and Grande Prairie, so my
train though it left in the late afternoon wouldn't arrive until well into
the morning.
-
- Black glass and dim orange light, a pleasant joggling and swaying.
It was an almost empty carriage. My seat was midway up on the right. A
man who came through the cars selling magazines and pop and renting out
pillows was there all night in his seat in the back corner on the left.
I bought a Mighty Mouse comic from him and an Orange Crush in a brown bottle.
He let me have a pillow for free. What I remember about the morning was
that a waxed paper cup of water on the wooden window sill was covered with
a film that must have been coal dust.
-
- I hadn't been scared of traveling alone but I was a bit worried that
no one would tell me when to get off. As it was nearing arrival time I
kept a sharp eye looking for a landmark. There it was, a house I recognized,
an unusual house. I'd thought before that it looked like a Mexican house,
or Spanish - I'd have meant adobe though it was probably stucco. I knew
it was next to the track just at the top of the La Glace road.
-
- Merritt September 2022
- Gertrude Chandler Warner 1924 The Boxcar Children
I began that last night and took it up again this morning and there it
is.
-
If I'd been a gay man living in London dying of AIDS and gardening on
a beach I could have had a lot more fun. I love his journal.
I sat by the front door wafted by the clove-scented
pinks, it is an idyll: et in Arcadia ego. I am so in love with the place
please God I see another year.
Born in '42, the Slade 1963-1967. I was there from the fall of 1969.
30
There what is. Some moments that were definitively myself from the beginning.
October 1
Derek Jarman 2000 Smiling in slow motion: journals 1991-1994.
Full of flower names.
Crabapple across the street has gone a tweedy orange. The linden's a
cloud of green and gold.
I don't want to end in sadness, rather, if I
was able, singing.
I fell asleep, happy to have made my little
comedy.
I was on the attack, gaining confidence with
gay liberation year by year, making friends, out cruising, fucking boys
in bushes, in gay bars, saunas, picking them off the streets, taking them
home, talking, talking, when, where, why, how shall we do this? I looked
at boys' eyes and their arses on the street. I didn't miss one boy who passed.
What was there on the screen that mirrored the ecstasy I found in bed?
I wanted to ride the arses of the willing and
able through waking nights with the moonlight sparkling in abandoned eyes.
It thrilled me to initiate a boy, stroking his legs and gradually and gently
entering. When you heard him say 'Harder, harder!' you knew you had won,
not only for yourself but against the heterarchy - who were building walls
to contain half-formed desires, their lives of poverty symbolized by the
purity of wedding gowns and the parents and grandparents peeking between
the sheets.
Fucking Ken, with his antique bronze strigil
on the bedside table, we rode back into an antiquity of fable, not an Eden
but a Paradois Paradise - we were Alexander and Hadrian and every boy since
then, power, conquest, surrender, my paradise was whole, balanced as the
rhythm of the pendulum, back forth, pleasure pain, but none of guilt. Not
the Biblical Eden where the queer was but a chip off the straight like poor
Eve made from Adam's hand-me-downs - who, in Christendom, will always be
pushed around. By twenty-five I knew it was brighter to be queer and alive,
and not straight and dead to life.
- Why do we aim so high, when time must foil our
- Brave archery?
He's reading Horace.
HB called, sweetheart.
HB arrives in a mist, it closes in and muffles
the sound of the waves, even the lorries drive past in a whisper. I plant
the white hyacinths under the elder - I'm hiding all the bulbs under the
shrubs and roses where they are safe from the trampling feet of visitors.
Blue it's the first time I've been able to look
one of my films in the eye. this is the first feature to embrace the intellectual
imperative of abstraction, it's moody, funny and distressing; it takes film
to the boundary of the known world
John Berger on Edward II: "It's a work
that comes out of the night of experience and it burns and gives light."
-
Finished the cushion, scrubbed calcium off the kitchen windows.
2
Sunday quiet. 6:23, first pale flush in the notch between roof and tree.
Fur breathing at my knee.
I'm so much stronger at the end of the summer, if I used the gym could
I keep it up.
I read Jarman feeling his luck in being male, the way he can assemble
a whole boy gang, three dozen men who are always calling him and visiting
him and driving him to Dungeness and politicking with him and helping him
with his projects. A beautiful young man who irons his shirts and packs
for his trips and cuddles him in bed. I feel too how completely irrelevant
women are in the life he makes with his friends.
Andrew Harvey's other way of being queer. Hidden journey in 1991
discredited by The sun at midnight in 2002: he's ecstatic about a
young Indian woman he calls Mother and then he says she attacks him with
black magic. He marries a man. Later he says this man has deceived him.
In other words he's a fantacist; so what do his ecstacies amount to? He
makes his living as a miscellaneous mystic and doesn't die of AIDS.
He's ten years younger than Jarman and Oxford rather than the Slade.
Jarman is committed to the value of the what he is. Harvey I assume goes
on being committed to something else, but what.
- Do his ecstasies have any validity no
- Were they drug trips no
- But he knew how to induce drug states yes
- So he was basically tripping out yes
- So what he is committed to is the value of tripping out
YES
Okay, but can he be in actual touch with something -
For a second or two I felt it - that I and the
marble and the flowers and the darkening tree were different softly pulsing
waves of the same energy, of that, of Her.
The whole world is white light.
immersed in a clear, crystalline sea of soft
fire
a great luminous sea of shifting and mounting
ecstatic sound (Tallis)
each thing was made of the same substance, was
moving and breathing and shining and emerging in and from the same vast,
quiet Body
It isn't Her but can he at times sense the energy ground? It says yes.
The other thing is the way he describes the struggles of my late forties
and fifties.
The Witness went on calmly seeing. I became
aware that the calm persisted underneath and through the fear.
-
Finished weeding the nectarine and porch pad beds.
-
People who pass on the sidewalk are always saying "I like your gar-den,"
"your yard is beautiful". I say thank you politely, thinking you
don't know anything, you've never seen a good garden.
3
Task today was I had my ears repierced and got little aquamarine keepers.
And gave away mauve iris divisions to three people and planted some.
part 5
time remaining volume 11: 2022 january-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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