time remaining 11 part 5 - 2022 october-december  work & days: a lifetime journal project October 4 2022 I can't work at the same thing steadily, have to keep switching it seems. Today I was feeling I could assemble The air with bits of David story and the other kinds of things in that folder, a flow as is. Planted bulbs - three kinds of tulips, two of hyacinth. Giving away asters. The linden is half unleafed. Here: a notebook 5 Two parcels, angora sweater, took off the rhinestoned buttons and shoulder pads; large black cashmere Hugo Boss coat taken to Simon to have the sleeves shortened. They're Etsy vintage, the angora lined and the Hugo Boss beautifully more finished inside than women's coats ever, zippered interior pocket. Starbucks toasted bagel with cream cheese this morning tasted like morning bagels at David's on 5th. Most of the way through 1991 Modern nature: the journals of Derek Jarman 1989-1990. Kathy came out to meet me, the tailor's forecourt is also her motel, looking so bright and pretty. We confide, we're confident of good will. Colored trees all over town. I could write of them with sympathy, forget to tell you that my heart danced on their last breath. The past retains its privacy, it is always misrepresented. What I write of them now is a self-portrait. Sally Potter and Tilda arrived with masses of beautiful flowers . We were all very jolly. Then as the lights went I started another sweat which left me stumbling through the night to the bathroom. Later I sat with the nurses in their lounge chatting about the light and skies in Scotland. My friends gathered here last night brought much joy. To see Sally was wonderful, she has a beautiful sense Sally brought me a little book of cigarette cards from Wills: of all the country flowers - most precious. I would love to see my garden through several summers. 6 Looking at here: a notebook this morning thinking could it be published, at once doubting especially the narcissism. When I first come to the file it strikes me as live and true but is it because then it as if comes from outside, a companion who's interested in me. When I imagine an editor reading it I feel them feeling it's not about them. - This sequence always happens, confidence and then doubt. Jarman said he wrote his journal knowing it would be published. What makes it so likeable. He is. There's a lot of love in him. He names everyone he's with. He appreciates what he eats. He keeps naming colors, always colors of plants but other colors too. He's always interested in what the sky is doing. He keeps track of flowering plants, not only in his garden, on the verges too, and butterflies and birds. He records the details of his years-long process of dying, the waiting rooms and procedures, the people with him in wards, the nights he can't sleep, the time he pooped his pants in an elevator. It's the sense I have too, that everything in a mortal life is dear. A secularity that sets him on his feet in life. Apart from Blue I think I'll probably hate his films but no matter, they're not my business, they're his political life and his life of needing to be noticed in England. They and HIV took him to Moscow, Warsaw, Cannes, Japan, Edinburgh, New York, Los Angeles. I can like his success while knowing I don't have the conditions for it. He used it as well as he could, he was devoted to his constituency. There's a basic friendliness in him that reminds me of me when I was first at Queen's and in London too, before the Vancouver women. Both Smiling in slow motion and Modern nature end in drastic illness. He can say he's depressed and say how sick he is but he doesn't stop, he notes when he can. He's not a literary writer, he can come up with good lines but he doesn't pause and focus in a way I've learned from writers, he skims along. It's the life not the work of getting it down. - Task: I'm evading computer tasks by working in the garden: cut out dead raspberry stalks, dug up all the white anise hyssop in the long bed because I need room for shorter perennials so the rose beds can be clean. It was warm and lovely, summery. Yesterday my only task was taking the coat to Simon. I was tired. 7 I fixed the back bedroom's overhead cupboard door! And bought larger brass screws to rehang the bathroom hook that fell off. Saturday 8th Cleared wandering asters out of the long edge and transplanted purple and white phlox into it. I run with sweat when I do this garden work though it's not much. Sent for bulbs for that edge. Need compost. 9 When I was in my early thirties I avoided passive sex. This was hard to overcome. But now I know that until I'd begun to enjoy it I had not reached balanced manhood. When you overcome yourself you understand that gender is its own prison. When I meet heterosexual men I know they have experienced only half of love. From 1984 Dancing ledge. - I reposted this: There was a black mare called June who was a kind of slave on the farm, a work horse bred to pull hay racks and sleighs and high-wheeled democrats. She never had a colt because there was no stallion. She was obedient, slow and harmless and reminded me of my mother. I rode her sometimes, not for pleasure but for instance to go to the post office for a letter. One day after her many years of work my father led her into the grain truck's box and drove away with her. We watched from the kitchen window knowing she was being taken to be killed for dog food.   This is Queenie who was June's companion in the pasture and in harness. She was pulling a loaded hay rack with June when she fell over dead. My dad hitched June to her heavy body to drag it to a ravine some distance away.   Merritt November 2017 Dear Ellie, Your mother was never slow and harmless. She had a brilliant mind and often much determination. What provoked your unkind comparison? Anne. I know the qualities of Mary that you name and often was the only one in my immediate family to recognize and support them. The piece you are objecting to speaks from the point of view of a child feeling dimly the parallel positions of wife and mare in relation to the husband/owner. The mare was kind and loyal but had no control of her fate. Mary may have had influence behind the scenes but to a child she seemed obedient and powerless. She had in fact been trained to be those things, just as the mare had. I'm angry on her behalf as well as angry on ours, that she didn't protect us better. - Task: cleared out my clothes closet and drawers. San Diego clothes, shirts from my taller leaner 60s - the fitted orange, the California stripes, the dark rose seersucker - gone because I'm thicker around the chest. Two lace bras in the goodwill pile, three pairs of 32/30 Levis laid out to sell. I was wearing them when I was only seventy. But also ugly things I once thought might be needed gone because I can afford to replace them. Cashmere sweater patched at the elbows, lumpy flannel pyjama tops in bad plaids, the black UGGs I had to fight to get over my heel. I used to sometimes look good! When I lived in California and wanted to and shopped. A moment at the curb loading something in the open hatch, a young woman taking reservations at the restaurant door saying, I like your style. I knew what she meant and I was so lightly just right at that moment I said What style is that. "Your style." 501s, the fitted orange shirt, pale blue chucks, hair in a streaked silver queue. I'll never feel that again - Another moment, University College cafeteria, a vast room. I was just sitting down with someone and an English boy came from the other end of the room to say the same thing. In those days it was my Montreal navy leather biker jacket, the long navy wide-wale corduroy skirt I'd sewn myself, heeled navy ankle boots and a black cowboy hat. I was twenty-four. My fantasy about Starbucks is that I can dress up for it. I say that with a defiant feeling. 10 I could have a manuscript called Some men or Some men I've met. - Task: 5 pints of pears with cloves, lemon juice and a bit of honey. Windy. This October hot and dry. 11 Tuesday after Thanksgiving. 7am. What kind of morning is it. An odd sky, dirty cream with a gauzy lid moving unusually from the north. Purposeful birds flocking crosswise, are they crows or doves. Patch knocks on the window and is let in and settles purring in my lap, lays an arm across my chest, leans her head back to give my chin a little kiss. Then the bright short silver line of a plane quickly gone. The linden is almost bare. Two degrees above zero last night. We haven't had a hard frost yet. There are still roses around the room - four vases. Last phlox next to me, rooting basel on the rad. A row of squash on the mantel. Nasturtiums in the kitchen. Anne hasn't replied. I didn't expect her to, she's quite blank in relation to me. She has seemed - what is the word I want - self-regarding? Her generation didn't have my generation's feminist revolt, she's adapted to village life. I don't think she cared about Mary, I think she has family pride, she needs her family to look good so she does. She learned that from her mom. I have gender loyalty but I don't have family loyalty. I tell on family. - I think Patch suspects a mouse. She was nosing around under the sink so I opened the cellar door for her. Just now she was paused at the top of the steps with the tip of her tail twitching, listening intently. - I sent Hannah Javanti a note a month ago. truth or consequences   ancient canadian experimental filmmaker here. am just watching it on mubi and want to tell you how much I like it Today: Thank you for your lovely note. In all sincerity, I can't imagine someone I'd hope for the film to resonate with more than a self described ancient canadian experimental filmmaker. Do you have links you feel like sharing? I am curious about what spoke to you in Truth or Consequences. What spoke to me was its truth and consequence. The truth part is that I know the kind of people you interview and they are mostly the kind of people I like best. You saw them and listened to them and gave me to see and listen the way I do myself. I was thrilled by that. The consequence part is the altered footage of their places as if turned to ash, which is their mortality but more generally everyone's and the seemingly unstoppable mortality of earth itself. It has been seeming to me that work now has to acknowledge what's coming and love what's dying and your film does. - Transplanted white and purple anise hyssop into the hard soil of front yard beds, with two asters for the gate posts. Moved the small pink-flowering thing out of the rose bed. Set up a computer house call for tomorrow aft. Mailed Current to Chris. First Cox ripe! 12 I've posted I used to sometimes look good!.doc with the Bloomsbury photo of the Montreal navy leather biker jacket. Patch is sleeping on the hassock propped warm against my shin. Her head is turned resting on her chest and her flank rising and falling. She's rounded and contained in sleep but her ears moved when the washing machine went into spin. I've been calling her Small Person. Out the door into the dark I say Small Person are you wanting to come in? When I'm lying down and she comes to lie on my chest her paws spasm lightly so I feel the tips of her claws on my neck. She purrs loudest when she reaches to lick my chin. A play of bodies intent. It's definitely sex. At 6:30 it's still so dark. Faintest brightening just at the horizon. A phase of dawn, was it nautical twilight? Nautical because of the visible perfectly flat horizon at sea? I loved learning there are named stages of dawn. That was Tom though it's not the sort of thing he usually knew. - I've just bought a painting. Autumn road. Julian Merrow-Smith, 8 inches by 5. I'll earn the $500 plus selling stuff. - twilight ends when the sun rises. categories of twilight defined by how far the centre of the sun is below the horizon astronomical - 18-12 degrees, horizon not discernible but diffuse light sources such as galaxies can't be observed. nautical - 12-6 degrees, both horizon and stars visible. civil - 6-0 degrees, brightest stars and planets still visible but artificial lighting not needed. - Jay decided the monitor is shot, got Photoshop Elements back for me - I thought I needed an Adobe password but I needed the computer's password. Said I could get bootleg software but not from him. Said no way can M1 run my old drive's Intel software. 13 6:56 the moment of exquisite cut-outs. North to south unleafed linden, mutilated spruce, sharp church triangle, half-mutilated Russian olive. I'm flapping, for days haven't worked on anything. Do my determined practical tasks take up whatever I still have left, is it me or them? They please me, they're good for me, they make me less hopeless. But what, they aren't the best use of me. The best use I've found no use for. There I see that thing I love to see, the brief bright line shooting west, whose tail is always dissolving behind it. - Sent for a cheap monitor. Dealt with the long row of tomatoes ripened on the table, 3 containers of tomato sauce in the freezer. Marlen Haushofer 1963 Die Maur. Besides noticing that it's badly translated I'm immediately feeling how good I'd be at finding there are no humans left alive. It has already happened and I must have been good at it then. I thought about all the people I had known, and I enjoyed thinking about them; they would be mine until the day that I died. The way the unnamed forty year old woman is attentive to her animals is familiar to me now but I don't understand how afraid she is. I think I'd feel, everybody's gone oh great. I posted the photo of the Cox today and people are piled up loving it. It's a nice photo, I like it too, but my actually gifted self is alone in the world. I don't feel oh great about that. Am saying so thinking of BK exhausted by my particularity about how to say things. 15 Vapour trails this morning are lasting longer so there have been four or five long white lines at different angles crossing my east at the same time. Colder and more windless up there? - Rowen has called Mike out on FB clear and forthright in a way I recognize. Michael John Voskamp, my father, is an abuser. His partner and his three young children have been living in my family's living room for the past two months because they fled from him. He's been living in their three bedroom apartment by himself and refuses to leave. The kids and their mother are welcome here but they need their home back. Then a couple of numbered points. Mike sounds to be insane. Did I do that? I was hard with Mike. Did I pass on the damage from T, R and J? It says no. When I knew him there were bursts of rage I could tower over but he was nothing but good to his baby. Something happened in the years on Read? Something was wrong with his brain from the beginning and as he aged into his forties it got worse? Was it latent psychosis     YES Task: 5 jars of pears. 15 Row said Freya is a sharp sword about bullshit. She'd gone with him to talk to Mike. I like their marriage and I like that I can like their marriage. He's firmer I think. He took a righteous sword to his father's madness. I heard authority in his voice. Planted 30 saffron crocus along the front of the front short rose bed, spread rotted leaves over both front rose beds, turned the top half of a compost box and found good stuff halfway down. Picked up 8 of my own pears from the ground. - I want to protect all the beds with spent material this year because the soil is hard and lumpy when I don't. 16 Task: formatted end of TR10 and up to TR11-4. Set up a TR template folder. 17 Sore arms and unwell. 18 Mailed doc to Kelowna Cemetery, spoke to Dr McLeod. Warm and smoky. 19 Task: Gideon's 3 kg vintage duplo lego on e-bay. 20 The living book of animals, 1970, the big book I studied with Luke when he was three. I set out to find it this morning not remembering what it was called but guessing it might be Reader's Digest. There it was, hardcover with Animals in gold letters. I'd passed it to Rowen when he moved to Read and have missed it ever since that house burned. Maybe Row will be glad to see it again. - Then one more thing for Gid, a wooden box of alphabet and number blocks. Those please me but were too easy to be a task so this evening I used the sewing machine to make the Maiwa coat wearable. - Every day I go to the back corner of the yard and pick one perfectly delicious very beautiful apple. Pear sauce last night from my own pear trees. Took a squash from the mantel and broke it on the front porch concrete for supper. 21 Rowen sent a vid of Gideon diapering a doll - putting the doll on the diaper and wrapping it around. Then he picks it up and cuddles it against his shoulder and when he's done it looks at Row with a bit of smile I'm not sure I understand. Rowen makes a sound as if to say, that's it. When Row was a baby I gave him a doll. I meant I wanted him to be able to look after children. Row is at home with Gideon now and actually answers his phone. His voice was firm and he was saying things like 'extinction event'. After we'd talked I suddenly said You're grown up now, it's been fun talking to you. He says his ADD meds are making him competent. 22 I haven't been able to look at main projects so I've been extracting from student letters. What to do with such overflow of achievement. - Sorted my cables at last. Screwed little hooks into the back of the table, eight of them, and coiled the cables so they reach the power bar but none of them lie on the floor. - Whenever I've done a day's task, whenever I think of what I've done even, there's a squirt of some pleasure chemical. - B wrote after a month. Your work as I know it has a light vibrational touch. I was reading your Here diaries and trying to identify the quality of them, the subjective position you write from. Somehow it doesn't impose. I wondered how that came to be. 23 Hard frost last night. Frozen apples. Grape leaves withered and fallen. Nasturtium vines in wet heaps. I've posted a photo of the Anjou taken yesterday, two plump orbs hung in a field of red and gold. - Fitted the hassock cover but not well enough for a squirt of pleasure. 24 This morning it's there. The cover has some corners I shd round off but it's tight and nice. Tourists walking around with our motorcycle helmets. We're in a large cafeteria with our egg an' chips dinner plates stacked out of the way, Greg reading my book about English houses and me trying to catch up this travelogue in my usual detailed and immediately publishable style. I'm being distracted by people passing on the seaside promenade outside the big cafeteria window. Greg looked up a minute ago to ask why I was looking sad. I'd been watching the families passing by in little straggles. Minehead with its rocky beach and grey cold Bristol Channel is a poor man's resort. The families are shabby even in their holiday clothes and every sort of distortion goes by - blue lumpy legs, noses like shiny sausages. Nearly everyone looks stupid, vacant, browbeaten, minimized. I was remembering farm families in Grande Prairie, people who came to the Auction Mart in rattling pickups, the women in shortie coats and frizzy hair, the bent-shouldered men, the shy kids. That made me remember how Father was ashamed of us in public and would push us off the sidewalk when people wanted to pass. I suppose he thought we looked like these families? When I told Greg he said But the thing about these families is that they look stupid and vacant and I'm sure your family didn't. We didn't but we looked intimidated.   It's turning dark but people continue to pass, some of them back and forth many times. Down the road is Billy Butlin's Holiday Camp.   -   This morning when we woke our fern and pine forest was full of sunlight and warm flies. We spent the day on more narrow country roads plunging down into and up out of villages. One, that we had to open a sheep pasture gate to find, was three houses in all, Stoke Pero, with the tiny Stoke Pero parish church and graveyard on a hillslope. Then across a brown and gold and green moor called Dunkery Beacon with a view of all Exmoor and the sea. And along hedgerows with English families on canvas chairs wherever the road widened into someone's lane. In Exford we sat on the green and read the News of the World and when it was time went to have a Plain Tea in a Tea Room with two opulent cats and a discreet rattle of china cups - scones, thinly sliced bread and butter, muffins and cake and tea with a big dish of jam - a beautiful tea that made us warm and full for another cold windy drive up and down more hills to Cleeve Abbey ruins.   Somerset August 1969 25 I seem not to want to work until late afternoon. Yesterday I started to deal with the grapes - only half the grapes but three buckets - at 4:30 in the afternoon, picked, cleaned, juiced, canned till after midnight. Had to keep pushing till the kitchen was back in some sort of order though by the end I was creeping bent like an ancient crone. Then a night sore all over, not sleeping. Whenever I dozed off I'd be stripping grapes from their dried-out stems. 21 amber pints on the kitchen table. The grapes had had a night of frost and are very sweet. Somebody else can have the rest, have posted a note. 26 "You don't like my language!" I was shouting at Susan. We were in class it seemed and how had she tweaked me into losing it in public. I went on pondering that as I walked east in the western end of the usual city. I thought I'd walk through the university mall, past the bookshop, but the mall was dark. There were rich Muslims though, covered women shopping for spangled abayas, men in stiff belted raincoats. - Dealt with mice in the grocery drawer. 27 Winter grey has settled. Look at it: the valley's patchy silver lid, the dreary street. Will it be warm enough to plant the tulip bulbs. - Bulbs - warm sun - two front rose beds. First has a double pink, a giant pink, a front rim of white purple yellow snow crocus and autumn saffron crocus, a clump of white daffs. Second has yellow and giant pink tulips, a white hyacinth and a puddle of pink snow crocus. Have piled on compost. Porch platform has red tulips inset in the gravel, orange tulips where the savory was. Pulled all the soaker hoses too. 28 What task today - it looks cold - I'll paint the fireplace cover black, steel wool to block mouse holes. 29 Then was so feeble that standing in line at Save-On I felt I was hanging by a thread. Lay in bed most of the day. Fireplace cover and steel wool done. Mended the heron table and the tajine bowl. 31 I went to Here 2014 to look for something to post with a photo because I've worn out my readers with theory. The writing is clumsy. My ear is sharper now. As I was rereading The sight of sound I imagined it published somewhere prominent and then felt myself tremble. I was scared. Am I scared to succeed     no I'm scared of them     yes They terrorized me     yes A mallard duck's visual field is completely panoramic . While sitting on the surface of a lake a mallard can see the entire sky without moving. November 1 It's turning cold, snow later this week. Ed Yong 2022 An immense world: how animal senses real the hidden realms around us The left half of a chick's brain is specialized for focused attention and categorizing objects the right half of the brain deals with the unexpected; many birds use their left eyes (directed by their right brains) to scan for predators Some birds singing dazzlingly synchronized duets, slotting their notes in and around each other's with such precision that the two songs can sound like one. Temporal fine structure within a bird's tone are what birds are actually listening for. Small variations in frequency. Blue whale notes can last for several seconds, with wave lengths as long as a football pitch. "Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. 'I could illuminate the ocean,' the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching intrasounds." When you see these animals move, it's as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. They said: 'If you put a pair of headphones on me I can tell you if I'm near Laborador or of the Bay of Biscay.' The low-frequency parts of elephants' rumbles about the same as a large whale''. These calls don't carry as far in the air as underwater . The colder, clearer, and calmer the air, the greater the range. In the heat of midday, an elephant's auditory world shrinks. A few hours after sunset it expands tenfold, theoretically allowing elephants to hear each other over several miles. Dolphins can echo-locate on a concealed object and then recognize the same object visually - even on a television screen. . This sense is often described as seeing with sound but you could just as easily describe it as touching with sound. Cross-modal object recognition not limited to big-brained species. "Even bumblebees can tell objects apart using touch after learning the visual differences between them." turtles have a compass. But their other magnetic sense hinges on two other properties of the geomagnetic field. inclination - the angle at which the geomagnetic field lines meet Earth's surface . intensity - differences in the field's strength. most spots in the ocean have a unique combination of the two. They allow the geomagnetic field to act as an oceanic map. Corollary discharges - backward activation allowing an animal to factor its own planned movements into its perceptual decisions, ie if x then y-x. So much has been learned since my doc. Chris has just walked past all muffled up looking in my window to wave. Someone who knows where to find me. Lee and Kathy have their trailer almost a year later. - I've wondered that about you. What do you want?   I think without realizing it I went straight on in my letter to the question I'd most want to be asked, the large question of what is worth doing in a time when it looks as though human life will sooner rather than later become very difficult if not impossible, and then a more pointed form of it, which is What is possible to you now? I'm 77 and have worn out my physical heart to some unknown degree and have outlived most of my friendships and do not walk well enough anymore to be able to travel. Time remaining. What can I still be? I wrote something that helped me with that, attached below.   From B 7. - Pulled the dead sunflowers and cut them up, wound and stored the soaker hoses, put away tools and bits, closed the coldframe. 2 Bad weather forecast, covered the roses with Irene's bagsful of clean dry maple leaves. Holter results say: Predominant rhythm is sinus No significant pauses Frequent ventricular ectopy, 5% of total beats No ventricular runs Frequent ventricular ectopy is a common clinical presentation in patients suffering idiopathic ventricular outflow tract arrhythmias. These are focal arrhythmias that generally occur in patients without structural heart disease and share a predilection for characteristic anatomic sites of origin. Mechanistically, they are generally due to cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)-mediated triggered activity. As a result, there is typically an exercise or catecholamine related mode of induction and often a sensitivity to suppression with adenosine. Treatment options include clinical surveillance, medical therapy with anti-arrhythmic agents or catheter ablation. Medical therapy may offer symptomatic benefit but may have side-effects and usually results in burden reduction rather than eradication of ectopy. Catheter ablation using contemporary mapping techniques, whilst associated with some inherent procedural risk, is a potentially curative and safe option in most patients. Although usually associated with a good prognosis, some patients may develop an ectopy-mediated cardiomyopathy or, rarely, ectopy-induced polymorphic ventricular arrhythmias; catheter ablation is the treatment of choice in those patients. - Ventricular ectopics are a type of abnormal heart rhythm caused by the electric signals in the heart starting in a different place and travelling a different way through the heart. The normal electrical impulse starts in an area of heart tissue in the right atrium called the SA Node. It then passes from the right atrium through to the ventricles via the AV node. As the impulse passes through the atrium it contracts forcing it to pump blood into the ventricle. It has the same effect when it passes through the ventricle. With ventricular ectopics, the electrical impulse starts from the ventricles before an electrical impulse can be made by the atrium and causes the heart to beat in a different way for that beat before resuming a regular rhythm. The normal heart beat causes the ventricles (pumping chambers) to squeeze or contract at the same time (in synchrony). When you have an ectopic beat, the heart beat starts on one side of the muscle of the ventricles so one side contracts and pumps blood before the other. This is very unlikely to cause any harm if this is happening occasionally. Almost all of us will have some ventricular ectopic beats. Sometimes hormone changes, medications, and lifestyle choices can trigger ectopic beats. Other more serious causes can be: infection, muscle disease, channel ion disease, and electrolyte imbalance. Although these causes are more serious they are also very rare - you will have tests to investigate these. If symptoms are present, they can include dizziness, palpitations, tiredness, feeling your heart miss a beat, fainting or almost fainting. Red flags: Changes in behaviour, lethargy, irritation o Dizziness or feeling faint o Collapse o Changes in circulation: colour change such as dusky or pale skin, clamminess or cool hands and feet o Breathlessness or breathing difficulties. You may notice symptoms are sometimes worse with lack of sleep and stress. o An ECG records the electrical signal as it is conducted throughout the heart. o An Echo is an ultrasound scan of the heart. o An exercise test assesses the rhythm and function of the heart at a faster rate. Exercise testing also provides us with an objective measurement of improvement, stability or worsening of heart function over time. o An MRI scan uses a magnetic field rather than x-rays o A 24-hour ECG recording (or Holter) continuously records the heartbeat over 24 to 48 hours. o Blood tests are taken to look for electrolyte changes and infection markers. Medication, usually a beta blocker or a calcium channel blocker, help to control the area sending out the extra heart beats and improve symptoms. Sometimes when you start these medication you may feel dizzy and tired but this should settle over time. A procedure called an electrophysiology study and ablation may be suggested. The doctor will use either radio frequency ablation (heating therapy) or cryoablation (freezing therapy) on the affected area, which should stop the abnormal signals. Ablation works by using a targeted beam of energy to destroy the tissues causing the abnormal signals. Sometimes the percentage of ventricular ectopics naturally decreases and no further monitoring is required. In rare cases, they can be an early sign of more serious conditions that have not fully developed. Most patients are able to exercise as they would normally. If you have experienced any fainting this doesn't mean you will not be able to exercise but should have a plan of how to do so safely. 3 Fiery arm pain all night, what is that? Rowen on the phone last evening manic about Midjourney. He's doing what he's always done, spacing out online, but he's imagining it as a grand bardic education in everything, by means of a new tool he can be adept in without having to climb for years through excellences already established. Is there a limit to creativity he asks, meaning can he be the one to breach them. I said I'm not interested in creativity, I'm interested in intelligence, meaning minds competently in touch with the real world not random junk. I begged him to humor me, take the plastic non-lego pieces out of my gift. I said it was about purity, I wanted it to be a good gift. He thought it excessive. I said not everyone needs to live the way I do, I live that way because I have a mission. What mission? I want to save the world, I don't think I can do it but that's what I want. From what? From stupidity. I don't want the world to be wasted on me, or on anyone. DALL-E machine learning models to generate digital images from natural language descriptions - trained on text-image pairs from the internet Stable Diffusion - deep learning text-to-image model released 2022 - a latent diffusion model, a variety of deep generative neural network Data sets and methods used to train its AI tool. Midjourney environments particularly fantasy and dystopian sci-fi scenes with dramatic lighting - users typing their prompts directly into the chat interface and receiving images from a bot that shows their generations rendering in real time. Users can then choose to upscale and enhance an image from each set of generations, or create more variations from the same prompt. Blend concepts - 'human creativity' Is it a dangerous mania no Can he actually use it to take him deeper in YES What would I want to signpost: Puerility of images generated - no sense of their meaning as for instance archetypes Male dominance of the impulse, boards with only male names, goldrush carelessness of males grasping for eminence in anything at all, no sense of what they are promoting Politics of anima women Wrecked palaces, nature taking over Invasive modification of the human body Teenage ethical vacuity and technological fluency Young guys with no social lives, no sexual lives and no hope of ever moving out of their mother's basements wankers who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to . You know, cyberpunks. Cyberpunk - subgenre of sci-fi, dystopian futuristic, male sci-fi of the '60s and '70s, invasive modification of the human body Steampunk - retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics - variant of cyberpunk, Victorian fantasies like HG Wells and Jules Verne 4 Snow shrinking into blobs on concrete still warmer than the air. I placed a cushion for her and Patch last night lay on the kitchen table looking out at the white dark. My monitor is at the post office. What will that mean. Pale hill Some photos InDesign The sight of sound: notes Word SketchUp Consolidate drives 5 It's the wrong monitor though it has the old good kind of stand. But: It connects with Thunderbolt 2 and it doesn't come with a Thunderbolt cord. The MacBook Pro's and Mac Mini's only out-ports are Thunderbolt 3 or 4. It only has half the pixels of the Apple Studio and presumably none of the modes. - Researching Dutch oven sourdough bread - sourdough starter, unbleached all-purpose organic flour, organic rye flour, sea salt, filtered water, parchment paper, clean kitchen towel, round glass bowl. Starter: unbleached all-purpose organic flour. 6 Oh money - reckless spending - coat and sweater - the little painting - Gideon's presents - Jansen history of art for Rowen - Thunderthigh socks for Freya - enameled Dutch oven to be able to make bread - this morning a stunning orange runner for the hall! - clothes from LL Bean. Still have something like 84 thousand dollars. Ed had meant to use the money he schemed for to save souls and Paul has detoured it to the kids he couldn't like. That's just only if Ed's philosophy is false, which I've lived assuming but can still be uneasy about. Judie and Michael will use it to save souls with social work, Paul will pay off his house, Rudy will waste it and in Ed's way refuse to give any to his kids, and I will use it to feel more viable in my isolated old age. Boom. 7 Patch won't go out and is sleeping under the desk's lamp. No footprints on the sidewalk yet. I'm staring at the bright bits flocking under the street lamp - flocking, schooling - such motion, they mean to fall but are driven - sideways - upward - in spirals - all motion confounded. Then the sanding truck with flashing lights, the daycare bus, bioguy's shovel heaves. Its relation to the place is that it celebrates a so-rare thing. I studied and took notes but the science doesn't stick, what does stick is the love. It's a love story but a large love with sexual love included as a part of it. What part is work love, student love, lecture love? Love and slow dying. Scout: If she had said, I'm an example of what you mustn't do, I was a virgin led to the slaughter, too ignorant, too intimidated, too silenced, too deceived to be anything but helpless in what they'd made me sign up for, then I could have had confidence in her, I could have said I'm out here in the world fighting those wrongs for you, I'm your scout, I'm your warrior.   So then Tom. What was that. It was graduation. I had to stay out of woman-nature while I was scouting for means to survive it. Then I took it on and was equal to it. I can tell I was equal to it because I left Tom still loving him. I carried myself out of the underworld.   That girl thing about being safe in a herd of nattering primates, would I have been like that if I hadn't been excluded? No you're a scout. I was looking for that when I was feeling again how many books and facts I'd found that I'm still wanting to pass on. Is the 1994-1995 notebook Intense & purposes? - Went out at noon to shovel the sidewalk. Eight or ten inches, the layer next to the sidewalk sogged wet so I had to lift every couple of feet. Only the shovel's width but done strong. 8 It's the dread midterm election today, that will prove wicked insanity is trampling on, humane intelligence helpless against it. - What if I go to Some photos telling the story of a scout. What was I looking for. What did I find. auscultare to listen, to heed. I have by desperate trading got to a work tact. Which is: phrases, their slightness of connection; the slides; what will we know; with j something raw. What did I find in the slides: thoughtful depth: participation of the uncon: how to find them by attending to instruction; mythic resonance; conscious presence of other as self. A Karlsruhe critic called Georg Patzer said (of my bits) "a photographer's precise take on the threshold between inner and outer" and "quiet simple work with thoughtful depth". I liked that better than the official blurbs though it's not exactly inner and outer and there isn't a threshold. What I take him to mean is that the photos as well as being of a childhood place tell the photographer's state at the same time as the landscape's and are at least partly aware of doing so. 9 The Dems haven't done as badly as they expected. Lee Bontecou has died at 91 - says the Times, she's rated an obit. 10 What can I want in Some photos text. Evoke what it's like to be in the spaciousness of the place. I still haven't seen what I need to see to make it right. There are a few photos in each section that are immaculate psychologically and physically at the same time - by physically do I mean in relation to light. There I'm thinking of the sound I took, of leaves and grass, and then I think it's a video with sound and sparse text. It can be both. Still called Some photos. Taped voices faded to wallpaper. Present comment, More than one person is looking through the camera. - Chris says everything at the respective labs. I shoveled the front path an hour ago - have never done it before - heard a light knock - Alopex van at the curb - footprints, he saw the back door please sign - slim box laid on the back door threshold - my adaptor five days early - I plug it in - THE MONITOR LIGHTS UP! - So now dare to turn on the Mac Mini and then buy some apps. Looked at Some photos tifs and instantly saw yes more physics later, more formal notice. The voice on the tapes is so small and weak! 11 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. Long story whose summary is in about twenty photos with a different quality than anything before or since, 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. In the Olson house I lived on the road, Valhalla people were aware of me. As always what to do with personal and family anguish. I want to leave it out but it's the anchoring start of the story there is. It resolves. I was insisting on something, refounding my artist self in my child self. That was correct but I don't need to still do it? I could tell the story of it separately? The work I do with the materials now is not that time's work - I need to understand that better. That's why it's Some photos now not Notes in origin. I want the photos seen. When I'm editing now I still want to notice the personal story to understand it, because I haven't finished understanding what I was doing and how it went, but that isn't the other work I'm intending. More than one motive unsorted, there's also wanting something I could give La Glace. - Started sourdough, dealt with the mess in the loose-jars kitchen cabinet, cleaned out bottom two right side drawers so there's room for bread things. 12 Working in autumn 1978 very groping, many thoughts, what is it when it's stripped, can the language be what the photos are, where's intensity when I leave out Jam and anxious rumination, it would have to be replaced by craft, can there be craft without the personal stress. Is the personal stress nothing but pathology, meaning from a present or larger view actually unreal. Can the book help me with this. Can the person of the language be the person of the photos. I've wanted to tell how to do it. That's my teaching impulse. This time don't do that. Then what is sincerity in this effort. - When I turned on the light at four Patch was under the desk crying continuously, not asking to go out, not asking for food, what's wrong with her. Then I was in the chair and saw a tiny mouse run under the rad. Hauled Patch over but by then it was somewhere else. Then she saw it and chased it and caught it in a corner but so incompetently she couldn't hold onto it. Hours later it's under the bed, safe under the rug. She knows it's there and is keeping watch but oh useless friend I am going to have to figure out how to trap it without hurting you. 13 Something about the way I put on a coat - after dinner when we'd stood up to leave and I put on my coat in front of them I saw Judie and Michael startling with the same look on their faces. Since then I've tried to notice how I do it. It happens so fast I've had no idea but then one day I caught myself just at the beginning of putting on a shirt. I was holding it in front of me open and facing out. What I do then is put my right hand into its sleeve and use it to lift and twirl the shirt over my head while slipping my left arm into its own sleeve. Then my right arm shoots all the way into its sleeve while it's descending overhead. How did I ever come up with that. (On The West Wing they made a point of Barlett doing it that way I think.) - Their look was like the look on Paul's face when he saw me getting off the high bed by raising my legs and plunging them down to counterweigh my torso up and around, another motion I hadn't noticed till he did. How do people usually put on a coat and get off a bed - I don't know that either but I think it's slower. - Walter Webber sitting next to me at the Nordhagens' New Years party approving of how fast I took off my pullover. His noticing it told me something I hadn't known about him. - I sometimes have such sweet little dreams of cuddling with a man. Last night it was Jim S. He had a haircut short all over like a pelt. I put my cheek against it and then we were wrapped close chest to chest and belly to belly. I was saying to myself I'd always known he liked me. The sourdough starter bubbled up as it should, day 3, I've fed it. Was talking to Rob last night for the first time since his crash. It was fine, we nattered as always, I'm emailing about the countertop. Am going to need a surface for bread-making. Olive bread! Olive and walnut bread! Toasted cheese! Fresh bread and raspberry jam! Salmon sandwich with new lettuce! - Greg: One sentence (promise!) on the Championship game of the Women's Rugby World Cup In front of a sell-out crowd of 42,000 fans at New Zealand's national stadium, the Black Ferns, an organization which was a shambles a year ago, for the second time in two weeks snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in (literally) the final minute of a game which was thrilling from start to finish - a great day for New Zealand and for women's sport. i'm laughing. it's true i don't eagerly look for rugby online but I fondly appreciate your pleasure on behalf of a women's team you probably didn't watch a year ago. you are not a misogynist, never have been, well done you and them.   - i've just watched the highlights reel and now this post-game interview session with such lovely thoughtful intelligent two people, both of whom look at least partly maori 14 I wrote so badly! I'm sorry Jam read those notes. They weren't elegant so she wouldn't have known what they were good for. Do I even now. I wasn't writing, I was seeing and making notes and those notes still give me moments of what I saw. In those days I hunted state. The film-making state I had to look for was a silent state. It made the photos, which Jam could not have done. So what does this mean for Some photos. InDesign Acrobat Photoshop AfterEffects Dreamweaver - A man comes with a box so now I can make bread, but not sourdough yet because that first batch of starter has probably gone wrong - have begun another and they're both in the oven with only the light on - but I'm in a hurry, I start a batch with instant yeast and have it covered on the laundry room dresser near the rad to develop overnight. It bubbles up too fast, I've misunderstood the yeast package. Tell myself not to expect to get it right just yet. Start again. This time I know my tools and methods and it's fast. I wanted nice tools and am pleased to have them: tall glass canisters with stainless steel lids for flour, new blue and white tea towels for covering, parchment baking paper, silicon spatula, glass measuring jar, stainless steel measuring bowl, wide glass mixing bowl. Enameled Dutch oven! - Am pleased to have them and yet somewhere uneasy at spending my new money with this kind of freedom. All the years of second hand things in the kitchen, I was proud of improvising, what is this joy in new things. 15 First loaf: next time more salt and put a baking pan under it to keep the bottom from burning. There's not much rise but there's soft open crumb and the crust is crisp. My sharp raspberry jam is good on it. 16 Weeks of chopped shrunk dirty rutted white on the ground. - light and colour in the open air 17 these evenings watching underwater vids for hours,   colours and how beautifully these creatures move. Thinking of you diving in the Mediterranean. Something I'll never do but glad you could.   love, The Med, Andaman, Hawaiian Pacific, North West Island, South African and Mozambique, Indian, Egyptian Red I've 200 hours below 30m Three months I've been fighting for my life, and still holding my breath but I finally start to surface I will call you soon. I just need to be sure I think about you all the time. XL I never told anyone this but the first time I flew from Tsawassan to Victoria at night, above low broken cloud, the small open gaps allowed the stars to reflect off the ocean beneath and seemed as though I was swimming in stars. Do you think he's going to make it     no Will he kill himself before I die     no Is therapy working     yes Has he accepted drugs     yes Is alcohol doing it     no Did he sabotage it with her     no Did she betray him     yes She decided he wasn't good enough     yes   Is it mental illness     yes Is it my fault     no Is it Roy's fault     no Heredity     yes Is anyone going to make it     no Is that what you mean     yes Does he want to die     no But he's in pain     yes Is he going to kill himself     yes But not yet?     YES I can easily consider killing myself but the thought of him doing it strikes such fear. Should I visit him     NO Is it self-hate     no just pain Did feminism wreck him     no Am I doing what I can     yes Talk to me?     love woman, truth, friendship, valiant balance 18 Again I'm trying to do more than one thing with the same material without sorting properly. I'm editing/rewriting quite nicely but to conflicting purposes. 1. pulling phrases I could use for Some photos book and/or film. 2. telling the story of those years 3. considering what la glace could handle 4. remembering the whole time with interest I'm erasing Jam and most of Ed and Mary and process anguish for 1. and 3. but getting caught up in 2. with always 4. at the same time. So what am I actually doing? Is The lake house or Swans' house the book and Some photos the film? Are there two books? Then The lake house would be the arc of human coming through; Some photos would be for art and La Glace. Some photos the film would be just that. The lake house as memoir would have to have to include photos and film so it would have to be online. Some photos would be gallery show and accompanying book. Some photos as film would be the poetics I've wanted to arrive at. Do I have to choose? - Herki rugs large Kurdish tribe of pastoral nomads southern Turkey and northern Iraq - "vibrant colours and geometric patterns" - Oktay owner of Turkish Rug Wholesale in Kayseri Turkey. $221 with free shipping. [*photo] 19 Carpet in the corridor brightly lit. I loved its blazing orange on sight. It was on Etsy so I didn't realize it would have to come from Turkey. Yesterday a man on the porch with a tight heavy bundle wrapped in FedEx plastic. The seller's site has his story of a boy brought up to carpets in his father's shop, who travels small villages buying what villagers will sell him and has enough odd English to reach buyers anywhere. And so has sent me this stunning piece of some woman's long tradition. I bought carpets when I lived in London's world market and now fifty years later there's a world market I can reach from this hayseed outpost. - I say that looking at a colourless lightless motionless leafless day. This valley is so bad at winter. - Something about buying carpets. Carpets and lamps. 20 Porch railing happened today. 21 The photos are personless except for the person being them. I can make the text personless and personal in the same way. I've moved through 1979 summer this morning seeing there's more to do. 22 Their bedroom opened off the living room and ours opened off the kitchen. Saturday night was bath night. A round galvanized tub would be set on the kitchen's linoleum floor and water heated on the cookstove. We kids would bathe one after the other. It felt nice when our mom would pour warm water over our hair to rinse it. Then we'd be sent to bed in clean pyjamas and they'd change the water to have their own baths. Our bedroom would be dark but we'd see a line of lamplight around the door and we'd hear them talking.   Dancing was bad. They said. I didn't see why it should be. On Saturday nights there might be music on the radio in the next room and in the dark behind our door I went ahead and danced. The other thing was that I plotted to have a look at my dad's penis. I left our bedroom door open a crack, crept over to it in the dark and watched till he was getting into the tub. There it was. - Jam trying to make me make her what she wanted to imagine she was. "I'm waiting for you to come to your senses." I was thinking what if when I was in the lake house I'd sent Jam away for good and then I thought no it needed to be arrive at reading her box of books when I had the house alone at the end of the time. I had what I needed from her so why didn't I know it, why did I drag it on for years. Attachment has been so long an enslavement. The other apex the hearing and meeting Peter T. - Rowen yesterday says he went to emergency with chest pain. I ask how it's going with Michael. Badly. "He's crazy and I love him." I say reactivation, what's happening now is bringing up what he did to you then. I try to explain focusing to shift pain. honor, by which she meant the courage to take a risk I can forget, as they certainly cannot, what day of the week it is, but not where the four corners of the world are, or from which direction the wind is blowing, or what phase the moon is in the wisest thing is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits Is this the promised end? This is the promised end. "If a man has a steadfast idea of honor, he is absolutely safe as to what can happen to him." The fact that he may lose everything he holds dear will not, under the circumstance, affect the value of the one thing that has the greatest importance: experience itself. Thurman 1982 23 The fact that he may lose everything he holds dear will not affect the value of the one thing that has the greatest importance: experience itself. That was me, has been me from little. It and the journal are one thing, what is it like to be. - It's getting to the right simplicity of the photos. 24 I thought they'd be charmed by the little girl plotting to see her dad's penis. Rachel aghast I think said she'd plotted not to see her own dad's and from the rest thundering silence. Don left his checkmark. (Later Jenn wrote a paragraph.) I'm pleased to have written it. I think it was a founding moment. I think that it was the same instinct that grew up to unwrap the patriarch in philosophy. When I was writing it I recovered something I hadn't remembered, "It felt nice when our mom would pour warm water over our hair to rinse it." - Tiny dead mouse left under my desk chair. It's warm today. I opened the back door and there was beautiful Mya on the porch then warily gracefully step by step all the way inside. Sniffed at Patch's bowl, had a quick look at the sewing room floor. Patch was crouched by the living room door saying nothing but frozen staring her down. Mya saw her, backed step by step out the door. I shut it after her but opened it again to see where she'd gone. She tried again but there were Patch's yellow eyes still saying ABSOLUTELY NOT. Alright, I'm gone. Out the door and down the steps and past the gate. Patch knew it was the end of the story, got up and wandered away. - Mubi: Herzog Nomad about Bruce Chatwin 26 She made me wait more than a month for her reply and now it's here it's horrifying me. "I'm tempted too, to wonder about what you say in imagining the body as a sort of soft-sculpture, in which its contents/stuffing must shift around when poked or squeezed." 27 The boiler quit yesterday afternoon. Copper Valley won't open till tomorrow morning. I'm working in bed with layers and a hot rock.` - The dispossessed in a disgustingly unproofread and badly designed Harper Perennial edition. There must have been Harper & Row plates, why are there so many typos? Even the cover blurbs are stupidly chosen. It's disrespectful. She isn't alive any more to yell at them so I feel like doing it for her. a landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity suffering of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he took, he shared. He was her brother across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption. I don't forget the moment at YVR finding the paperback in a newsstand rack. 1976. It must be that I remember the moment because I instantly recognized what it was. Reading it now I come on sentences I'd copied then and later. It's easy to know what is different about what I copy now. B asks: Is there anything you want to say or do that you haven't been able to say before? Is there anything you want to say or do that you would entrust to another? To the second question: no. To the first, I've said what I want to say many times in many different ways and it can't be heard. July 1976 just after my first meetings with Cheryl: Like all power seekers short-sighted. There was a trivial abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument. It was simplicity and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light. The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end ... And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled. There were no more abysses, no more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid. Ursula Le Guin 1974 The dispossessed Harper & Row [Later note: She is writing about herself writing the book.]   Remembering how at the People's 4th of July in Seattle the Internationale made me cry. precise sense of words - "the sheer brief path of the assassins" visual presence - "all this suddenly rushed dazzling down the screen" She writes in my cadence. 28 It culminates in six ways: the swan footage; Kenner on Pound; having a function at the hearing; meeting Peter; building with my folks; Helmer helping me leave. 29 Brian from Copper Valley fixed the boiler and then removed the bathtub plug then fixed the sink tap then started on the toilet but had to order a new handle and then said Anything else? and looked at the kitchen faucets. He didn't remember doing most of those things last year. When I thanked him said I was welcome with so innocent a smile. 30 Staring at the last month of the lake house when I'd broken into writing, doubting the breakthrough, random bits, it was them not me and they weren't themselves there either. - I post first session with joyce.doc and almost instantly Emilee who'll be the most informed of readers. emilee's instant company across the very long diagonal southeast to northwest That writing is outside the place, outside its simple love. I took it back to town and had my mornings in Jam's back room. Was it worthless     yes Was In English worthless     no Some photos isn't the story of coming through. That is a story I'd want to tell but it's a different story. Sort this properly. Some photos is the mind of the photos. My wish to teach is at cross purposes with best making always. - Tell B I'm not going to do it I'll do Some photos on my own Because I want the photos seen - I want them felt. What should I do with the parallel wish to tell the story of coming through, that has all of it, Mary and Ed and Luke and Jam and having my mind broken and going to my country to rebuild it and doing that in the ways I did. That story would have to be proper narrative with scene setting etc, which seems too much to do, but could I use a notes and present comment format. I thought of what will we know as the culmination but now I see it as partial, it's where I tracked the work into philosophy-mind that went on into long labour. Being able to do that was a recovery, yes. Trapline mind was something else. Trapline mind was the best of the photos. Then came the way the photos were not seen - how was that possible? Akira saw them, said I don't know how you could do it. Jacob? All the places I showed them, Montreal, London, Melbourne, San Francisco, and did anyone ever say anything about them? The woman who said they look like me. So what is the In English mind? I've never settled into confidence in it. Jam said it wd ruin me, did it? No but I was at a beginning with it, I didn't realize it was that. Then what will we know was the right use of it, uncon able to speak directly. Right?    yes Some photos is the achievement of presence. I worked for it. Do I need to show how? Is that part of it? It was whole presence in the sense of place perception and uncon mythic recognition together in the photo's moment, and day to day openness to leading. It's an achievement because it had to be, my people weren't in that mind and I hadn't been. I had been looking for means to be that, there were disciplines, effort, study. Fear. 'fear of it opening underneath' - what was the fear actually. What I saw in Pound was not only closer attention to language but also network/current invisible-form brain and cosmos intuition/recognition. Can I test the writing by whether it has that large intuition present. - The sense of a world as a physical fact without regret or hope, a place of intense radiance in which ideas may be fevers that pass, suggests a view of human experience that now seems less than comforting to many people, but the view is Naipaul's, and I suspect it to be the long one. Didion in NY Books - Luke came after work yesterday, sat on the floor with the fireplace and got it lit, I made tea, we sprawled in the armchairs and talked. Later I made supper. We ate on the porch with Eva singing. I offered him a goodbye cigarette to amuse us both. We smoked it on with wet night beyond the grape leaves.   Talking was a pleasure to us both. I told him about the old and new visual system and blindsight. He was tracking so well I was feeling something like, here's my companion. He was telling me about drugs in London in the couple of years before he came here, raves and ecstasy in his early twenties. The damp chill of granite houses in Edinburgh on winter nights, the lives of the generation that came of age in Thatcher's grim era, letting loose in Cape Town where energy's allowed. My cosmopolitan boy.   When we were sitting in the dark with our cigarettes I said, It's odd to think you'll still be alive when I'm not - I mean I hope you will be. I hope so too he said. We laughed.   Vancouver August 2005 - The films - Jason got the Mac Mini going yesterday - Current is fine - Bright and dark looks nice but is all wrong, the timing, the voice, it's just a story and shouldn't exist as a film. Notes in origin on emulsion was so soft so tenderly grainy and now is hard and blank. They are all designed for a large screen - December 1 Good dutch oven bread. - Tech things I did today - got my Adobe apps onto the Mini, spoke to someone at Apple and retrieved FCP, figured out how to transfer files on Bluetooth, organized the launchpad folder so I don't have to see things I don't use. I drag on tech things, I'm afraid of them. The other thing I notice more and more is how stressed I am by ANY waiting. Being kept on hold feels as if it could kill me. 2 From Chris this morning Bright and dark sound better, Notes in O color almost right, too high con still on three shots. 3 Working with Sight of sound on InD to relearn how it works - trying to figure out iCloud - didn't know it had iPad photos - what to dump - the Mini doesn't have a lot of space, am I going to have to buy iCloud memory - etc. Bluetooth moving files. Posted the Mesa Grande side door gully photo and Indra's the one who does notice the best photos. 4 It's cold. The cold came so suddenly my fruit trees were caught with green leaves now stiff and brown. I had packed the roses into their wire jackets just in time and they're little stubs topped with snow. There's a feeling of abeyance that will have to last for its allotted months, nothing to be done but wait. When I go to the post office, anywhere, a confident step could kill me. I'm someone I never was, I stare at the ground, notice slick patches, notice concrete edges that could split my skull. I hang onto the jeep when I step around it. - Notes in O looks like itself now. It's going to cost me $5000 but all my little 16s will be safe and clean. 5 $3735 to Frame Discreet, * to Chris. Sent Ken a note. 6 Should I tell B our actual collaboration is the letters. Would that be professionally useful enough to her. Would she mind being seen as postulant. How would she want to edit herself? It supplies a summary of my work and methods that mediates what can mystify people. Are her questions the ones some right people actually have ? Would she know where to publish? Would it indicate how to end? How to include what I sent her to read. Would we include our own side comments. 10 "Are you a San Diego Library patron, with a nice local branch?"   My library is exquisite, a bit streamline moderne, three stories with terrazzo foors, fine-grained syrup-colored wood paneling with brass strips and stair railings, solid wood tables under high ceilings, a very particular clean smell. Upstairs is the California Room with armchairs and a lot of California Light paintings. It has a lively downtown clientele, a lot of homeless and old persons who've been coming for 70 years by the look of them. When it's closed the homeless make their beds at its doors as if it's felt to be a safe zone, and then stand ready half an hour before it opens. There's a new books section where I regularly find marvels, Shearer's The wonder book of the air, Lopez's Desert notes, Bowden's Blood orchid. Across the street are tall palms around what I think is the most beautiful building in SD, the post office.   "Your description reminds me of the huge old reading room in the Douglas Library, my favorite place on the Queen's campus for scholarly absorption and ambience. I remember reading Heart of Darkness at one of those tables."   I'll never forget my first sight of that upstairs reading room during initiation week when others in my year were doing something silly together and I snuck off to look at the library. I stood gushing naively to a librarian on duty about how many books there were. Then Saturday afternoons in fall, when I had it almost to myself and the faint sound of cheering came through high windows from the football field. Later on discovering what 'stacks' meant. Can still smell them, exam studying in the dark bowels, and hear them, the clanking of metal floors.   You've probably heard that the British Museum Reading Room is gone. Back in the '70s I wangled a reader's card by saying I was working on angelology ("You certainly won't find that anywhere else") and delighted in sitting where my heroes had sat, listening to whispers dwindling up into the dome. Happening to stand next to a shelf with Hakluyt's Voyages and startling into the utter gorgeousness of Elizabethan prose.   San Diego May 2011 - thank you Greg - Assembled that this morning and posted it with a Reading Room photo from 1907. 12 Three days without my right hand. Haven't brushed my hair, couldn't brush my teeth properly, aspirin every four hours day and night, up against the hitch in my left shoulder that keeps me from reaching over my head, right leg as usual helpless to bend itself, left knee unable to lift my weight up a step, such a broken creature at every end. It was one of the inflammatory episodes I don't understand. I'd been thinking there hadn't been one for maybe a year and it made a difference to my sense of what I can do. - Wondering whether this inflammation and others that are locally acute but at the same time quite general are herpes attacks. There have been times I've been achy for a day or two and then come out with a cold sore and thought oh it was that. So far one paper saying that older people can have more inflammatory response to latent herpes and it can have even cardiovascular effects. 13 Can use my hand but am sore at shoulders, hips, knee, a bad turn that could last all winter? - Breaking it into smaller parts. The tent: two things, the place, the brokenness and why. Writing about being seen - What was it that actually broke me. Rowen on the phone talking about rage when Gid defies him, and how he uses Jansen's history of art, and Freya calling him on irrationality, and picking rooms from Architectural Digest with me as home schooling at its best. He'd begun to agree that not lying did make me a good mother. He asks questions - he's on his moment enough to - why didn't I want to study aesthetics, what was it about the Vancouver time that made it a rat's nest. Answers: my instinct was that I wasn't ready to know what I thought good art was and I didn't want anyone to tell me; I was broken by losing confidence in myself at a foundational level. Do you agree I was broken     no Because I knew what to do     yes Did they mean to break me     YES Jewish revenge     no, competition Because they were ghettoed     yes Should I use another word     sent into your head Relation of con and uncon deranged     yes Watching myself, inverted     yes Was it completely destructive     no Competitive on the level of being     yes - Contronym, word with opposite meanings eg dust or cleave. 14 > being so skilful to shield me from it even as it happened   there's a sense in which I fought for all my students but students like you are my constituency. what you are is so rare and so besieged by the stupid and so desperately necessary to the world that how could it not be.   > ways I do and do not fight for myself   joyce used to say to me fight, fight. it was lovely having someone say it even though I had to pay her to do it. that against the people we've depended on, my mom for instance, saying don't fight, don't fight for you and don't fight for me.   Constituency, does it mean where I stand. 15 Lisa this morning, one of my constituency, saying my posts are something to her - my tiny acts of strengthening at a distance. Escape to the country, Brit formula show, polite couples with conventional bad taste and exasperatingly limited language ("character property", "cozy", "absolutely gorgeous", "brilliant", "light and airy", "dual-aspect windows", "walking distance to a pub", "en suite", "log-burner", "range cooker", "beams", "wow factor", "ticks our boxes") but I can watch it episode after episode day after day, why. I like going into houses. There are fields, rivers, canals, hills, moors, swans, sheep, stone bridges, stone villages, gardens I can peer into. Little segments on a manor house, a woolen mill, a Victorian spool factory, a dairy farm making vodka from milk, mussel fishing, dry stone walling, cooking with wild garlic. If I stay away from the women (their voices, their constant smiling) I like the presenters, Alistair Appleton's classy laid-back manly gay body, Jules Hudson's hearty pink-faced waxed-cotton wide-legged countryman's bluff. Lately I've so much liked Jonnie Irwin - his sparkiness - his neat swift boy shape and Lancaster farm boy's accent. - Now I discover he's dying and I mind. 16 A note from Jody this morning, "You had Luke come and find me at the Penn Club and show me something of London". Luke's birthday tomorrow. How many years have I been afraid for him, afraid for me in relation to him, his beauty and intelligence and feeling and kindness wasted in unhappiness. I've sent David a cheque and asked him to bring my mom in Abbotsford a Christmas amaryllis.   -   Mary phoned to say David had brought a Red Lion amaryllis that hasn't opened yet. She'll be surprised.   -   M called in the middle of the day to rave about her amaryllis. It has four flowers.   Ruhe in Freiden aller Seelen Die vollbracht ein Bangen quälen Die vollendet süzen Traum Lebensatt der Welt hinüberschieden Aller Seelen ruhe in Frieden   Liebervoller Mädchen Seelen Deren Tränen nicht zu zählen Die ein falschen Freund verließ Alle die von Hinnen schieden Aller Seelen ruhe in Frieden   Thinking ahead to my mom's funeral as I listen to this song again and again, the second verse, loving young woman betrayed by an unloving man. It makes me cry. I discover Schubert wrote it when his mother died. He was 19.   -   Things still to tell: a card from my mother, a so-bad photo of her looking awkwardly compliant, and worst the trembling handwriting on the envelope, her shape of words the same but the line in tiny quivers. She called again to say the amaryllis has still another bud. It's what she can't be now - clear, strong, trumpeting out.   San Diego December 2010 Schubert 1816 Litanei 17 Careful note to Luke last night when his birthday morning would already have arrived. He phoned. His voice was in balance, instant relief. There's a counselor he tells things he's never told anyone and a woman he can visit in Amersham, second-last stop on the Met line. He's having lunch with Jill. We nattered on. He said he could remember the chocolate cake exactly. He'd baked a pie. There were questions I was careful not to ask and we were lighter than at our best. Twelve years of fear have diminished me and I wonder whether on some level that has been their purpose. [What happened with Nelida? Are you still drinking? Are you with the woman in the Chilterns? What sort of things had you never told anyone? Do you need to be revenged on me, would it help? What are you living on, what do you do all day? Do you read? I'll never see you again will I.] unchanging observer that for want of a better term we must call the soul Understanding that in my own way, unchanging observer being the self who was sober when 'I' drank and who held steady when 'I' crashed. environment that betrays their inner life as much as their place in the world and landscape 'Betrays' is wrong but I'm thinking of the landscape photos that show the moment's sense of being, are soul's presence spoken. under the sea wind Sea wind being salt water current. Shaking silver surface overhead. [It's Carson.] - It has snowed lightly all day. It's Saturday, no one seems to be shoveling and there have been no trucks spreading sand so the whole corner has been soft and white. 18 Yesterday I went out after dark when the sky had cleared and shoveled my sidewalk and paths. This morning there's a new half inch on the porch and fine snow being blown off the roof. Was in Horton Plaza this morning buying grapefruit body butter and grapefruit soap at Body Shop and socks at Macy's. A lot of socks. In the mirror when I was trying on a jacket I saw that my time for tight jeans is over, I'm too small now, a small woman with a large old lion's head. I don't look like a nice motherly woman, I look like a massive-minded estimable, craggy in spite of earrings and turtleneck. How should that person dress?   -   American Veda. Why am I reading this book. To get a sequence for some of my influences, to track the body/pagan strand in it.   "asked, as St Fancis had done, to be placed upon the bare ground to die"   -   Two notes from J, one before and one after she went to see the woman she loved when she was 15. "All the cobwebs of the past washing away related to the breakthrough I made while with you in the cave of memory."   -   Tom knocked yesterday, said the wind had blown him across the park - a cold Santa Ana blowing the palm fronds south - he is willing to ask and I had lots to eagerly tell and show, as to an old friend. How was he. Not eating well, thin-faced with a high round pot of organ fat - working steady, he says - he showed me a woman singer he's yearning over - didn't call it that, but was transfixed showing her to me - a right pick, womanly and feeling, not a babe. Had a good present for me, Red Cross emergency kit for the jeep. I gave him all the books I was done with. Sitting across from him eating breakfast at Maria's in North Park, told him about seeing myself in the three-way mirror at Macy's. "I'm not feminine anymore, no one will love me." He said something about clean radiance which didn't exactly disagree. He approves of the new jacket and hates the old one. I asked. Summary: we're alright.   San Diego February 2011 It's called craggy estimable.doc. It has that lightness of facing bad things with pleasure in being at all. That's me. From the beginning. Quiet of Sunday morning. In the movement sensor light on the side of the church snow writhing off the roof. Scraping rumble, plow truck with amber lights flashing. Silence again, live air moving all over. 19 Grey dawn of Sunday morning. Yesterday wet. There was a stretch when wireless failed because it was raining hard. Now open sky pale yellow in the northeast.   Looking at The Pound Era again thinking of a skinny Indo-Chinese girl from Hong Kong on scholarship in Edmonton Alberta poring over a catalogue of Anglo-American literary scraps, educating herself to be a man of the early twentieth century. Sitting for years with this so-foreign material not able to do what Kenner had done, off her rocker, but coming to something of a form for her own displacement. Something she could show.   - And why couldn't she, because she didn't have heart, which Kenner for all his posing does. She didn't have mortal longing to say what it is to be alive, she was faking.   - But Kenner calls "Mrs Woolf" treacly; what misanthropy is that? Here I look him up and discover he was a Catholic, which damns him, but also that he was a friend of Walter Ong (whose being a Jesuit doesn't matter) and both were students of McLuhan. How can anyone admire Pound and be a Catholic? How can anyone admire Pound and despise To the Lighthouse? So he was faking too and I read him in the lake house in 1980 resonating in what I was not in what he was. And yet he helped Pound.   "A binding, a having-to-do-with, that joins in likeness, in difference and in modulation all the poem's materials, through which interactive web the syntactic movement flows, abandoning nothing: that is the deepest, the most persistent Provencal intuition." I copied that in 1980 and what more do I know now. The way I understood language in Being About, as a standing network being accumulated.   A blown husk that is finished but the light sings eternal a pale flare over marshes where salt hay whispers to tide's change   San Diego November 2010 Hugh Kenner 1971 The Pound Era Walter Ong 1982 Orality and Literacy Ezra Pound Canto 115 - Pleasure in denouncing Jam. I should check whether it's true. Was she unable to finish her doc for the reason I say     yes Was Kenner faking     yes Is this revenge alright     yes "There is not enough love in Jam of any kind." Said Louie. What's the function of the Cantos scrap where it is. Shows Pound's mortal longing to say what it is to be alive, what it is not to fake. - What am I doing. I said it's a rat's nest I hadn't sorted. Is there a way to be satisfied. I've been tempted to think of myself as limited before And tempted to hate how it went as if it was done to me And tempted to despise Jam All of which derogate what I was in that time Meaning I don't have a true account   Is it important to do this before Some photos     yes Will it take too long     no What's my question. Who was I at the beginning of Some photos. Open to place, crippled in writing. Would you say damaged     yes By them     yes Dilated and damaged     yes What was the damagedness that got me damaged more Did the time up north mend them     yes Are you sure     yes Did it only restore me to the original damage     no So what was the damage that got me damaged more Primarily early abandonment     yes Compounded by social exclusion     yes And patriarchal neglect     yes And more?     yes Drugs     yes 'Spiritual' ideologies     yes Was sexual reckless a cause     no symptom The journal?     no Can you tell me with one card     no Sentence?     despair, action, Ellie's, crisis   T, C and J all damaged people     yes Mythologizing fantasy     yes Now is that all of them     no 20 -24 C which sounds a lot but by north country standards is only -11 F. Snowing thick and slow. Tuesday the soup kitchen's parking starting to assemble. What was I thinking when I sat down. It went while I was reading through the posts still in front of me on the desktop. There's Liz Touet's boy plowing my sidewalk. - Jorie Graham Day Here it comes now, at the last, the woodpecker. It's come from afar. It's put its beak in above my heart. Lie still it says. Very still. Listen. You loved the light, it says, of day. You let it touch yr face all yr life & u never apologized, never felt the distance in it - its howling - its gigantic memory. You did not bury yr face in yr hands, in the soil, in the grass with gratitude. Something warbled. Something flew past in the air - a ravine quietly opened - water deep in the earth narrowly darted between rocks to reach you. It was wild. Your blood took violent turns left and right inside you - it gave you time - Now it drops its needle in deeper. You are dying it says. Maybe today, maybe another. Rain is starting somewhere, it's coming down fast it says, I'm busy it says, I'm attending to shorelines I'd like to save, its body like a small golden trombone, its crest like a fretboard day cld be strumming - as they are friends - we're from the same district, it explains, we share hometowns, we don't want to ruin your day but we're Busy. The needle is turning in me again. It wants to play music I imagine. It too wants to live its brief glorious moment, right to the end please, as a civilization might also like if possible, right to the end, the very end. Is there a right end I ask the bird as it bows from the waist over me, as if starting to dance while digging in deeper, widening and opening the hole in my heart, dDust all over the floor from its work. What would have given you enough, it asks, working furiously, I think its face is puffed from the effort, is daylight coming back again for me I ask, as someone adjusts the pillow under my head, is this the end of the second movement or the third it says to the air - do you still have another round of day in you? - as they pull a wet cloth over my eyes, to clean them out I hope to myself, that I might see once more a bit of the something that blues-in softly after furious night. Is that a nurse now pulling at my neck, is that a window coming clear or is it a blank wall, are those letters in the air spelling something firm even possibly urgent or are they just the bits & pieces of shadow the pre-dawn world tosses flagrantly around, wasting nothing, but making it feel as if there were plenty, overmuch, endless - oh way more than enough to be wildly wasted. I lift up my palm and stare at it as per usual, as I have done for a thousand years, & this nightgown believe me it is not satin although it too makes its little music. February 2022 I'm singing you out, if nothing else let me finish my song. I'm not enough but I could have been less. When it is done it cranes up and stares. Its crest is stupendous. Its stare is righteous. You must come from somewhere far away I think as I've never seen the likes of you around me anywhere. What do you think your strength is for, it asks - what do u think yr intelligence is. Surgical clips blink. They imitate day. Was it my strength which was my mistake, I ask, yr back is golden and red, yr feathers stretch into every direction, they point, u could be mosaic, yr gold seems chipped from what used to be Venice, Torcello specifically, in the old world, yr legs are rolled tight into their sacred scrolls - oh you're done with something - I'm not sure what, you're done with the warnings & the proclamations, yr notebook is overflowing with second chances. Now it is silent. It has moved up, it pecks at the bone at the back of my neck. I lift my arm up to try to touch. No pity anywhere. It's then I hear it, the first call breaking what used to be dawn. Will you let me hear it? What will you hear this time it asks. What will you make of the chorus when it comes. What will you make. You had a lifetime to get this story, to write its long and bitter poem. You had thousands of hearts, one for each day which let you into its cool new body, for free, unstopped. What will you make. I saw you turn away. I watched you arrange and rearrange your minutes. Lie back down now. Be very still. I do not know if you will be entertained again. And it left then. There was no weeping, just feathers passing. And I am here now listening for day with all I've got. What have I got. It's an aubade! - Santa Maria Assunta Byzantine mosaics Last Judgment - angel as woodpecker - I was going to copy just a couple of sections and have copied even some bits in the middle that I think are weaker. - Did the time with them actually change me. It says no. Then what would you call it     (empress) Matured me?     yes Do you mean opened a power     yes Can you name the power     truth   To me she says, I want to see you shine. I shine already. But you're sad. You're sad too. I know. What the thought was, was that they gave themselves a power of bespeaking they'd learned from for instance Roy Kiyooka and been harrowed by themselves. Is that correct YES He had earned it but they had not and so they used it badly yes Transitioning someone by bespeaking them, ideas I'd searched for and found in sci fi. A wide net's slower settling. I was massively more intelligent than they were and casting a net much wider than they could, or could imagine, but still vastly unready in it so I could be dazzled. I wasn't more intelligent than Jam but saner and more ambitious. For years such effort to find concepts I needed because conscious self was dissociated from its whole intelligence. Questions. What was my motive. To integrate dissociated intelligence and truth. Why did C invite me. Because Trudy was edging back to Rhoda. Trudy took me on because it's her structure to attach whoever threatens her attachment. Is that correct? YES. She did the same thing with Jam. Why did Jam ditch me for them. Because I didn't make her a man. Was that the whole of it     no Trudy seduced her yes Was that the whole of it     no Because she thought I was gone     yes Was I gone     yes Was that the whole of it     yes The way the romance worked, concealed basic motives making trouble while daily experience entertains with fatal illusions and some actual truths. What were my fatal illusions. Mythic exaggeration. 'spirituality' í weakening effect of metaphors - I couldn't afford them What were the losses. Confidence. Outwardness. What were the actual gains. Some limited gain in perception. Some access. What to focus on. The bespeaking and its effects. What's the best summary of Jam. Sheltering in her blindness. Going backwards. Consolidating? Yes. 22 "You take it" she says "but you don't give me your taking of it."   "There is a technical problem" I say, "it is that I cannot believe my taking of it is an equal gift and I don't want to take without knowing that what I give makes a balance. Otherwise your giving is like a power lever that makes me feel small."   "You're talking about jealousy and envy" she says. "People have resisted what I have to give them until I no longer see them and can't give them anything."   "Watch yourself" she said, "watch your voice, watch what it does to people."   "I know I have a phoney voice," I say, not wanting to seem the pupil. Not wanting to seem the pupil but being the pupil.   "And watch your mind too" she says.   "Don't you think I've been watching my mind ever since I was little!" I exclaim. I tell myself meantime, yes, what a good idea, I will. Also I have been.   "I do acknowledge" I say.   "You say 'Yes I know that already, I always knew that.'"   "But I did know it."   "You saw it, your seeing it makes it different."   Do I have to accept you as my teacher.   Wanting to be equal.   "Your taking is equal. You could show me what I give."   "It forces me to try to compete in seeing you."   "My friends know how to find me. I teach my friends how to find me."   Maggie's resistance and how it stopped me.   She's simply right.   "I haven't seen the person who made the film. That sense of structure in time."   Was it a power move     YES She found my weakness     yes I caved     no Did I do the right thing     no Her motives weren't clean     true She was meddling     YES At what point do I lose connected language - is it where I cut my hair? November 1976 - something that still needs doing is defense of what I was that wasn't supported - what was the effect of that - how did I strengthen myself 23 Brutal cold. The jeep struggled to start. I drove carefully up Coldwater Road and parked on a yard with Christmas trees stuck into deep snow. A man with a face I liked came out of the house. I said the short fat one please. It was frozen stiff. I lifted the hatch and he pushed it in carefully so the branches wouldn't break. A big teenage son arrived in a truck carrying snowmobiles. He'd been the one to go into the bush and cut the trees. I was thanking him, we were having a pleased moment. Les Murphy a jeep guy, opened the jeep's door to look at the dash. Has a lot of Cherokees, did I need parts? '96 was the last year before they changed the console he said. Dragged the frozen-stiff tree into the kitchen and leaned it against the wall while I went for groceries. It scented the house as it thawed. - I dodge into note-taking when I'm distressed, now Trungpa on what to do with emotion. I search for instructions as if I could apply them but the notes now seem a heaping of miscellaneous twigs. Wasn't it religion that taught us to think sentences of instruction could work. December 1976. Luke before he flies to London for Christmas has made a shrine of his bed, Christmas decorations and his airplanes. He is turning six. - summary 2022: begin by working on theory's practice, posting its summary, stymied when I discover how long it is, end of july start working on some photos instead send B the sight of sound, lot of theory letters till Nov lot of posts, some new-written, eg story of starving in grade 12 M dies in feb Rob distressed, after May Paul stops talking, fight with Don april-december scared for Luke Patch injured, surgery, confinement, twitch disorder hurt ribs, L knee, R wrist, short stretch of night chest scare in March Jeremy in the garden, cold spring into June, good apples no plums Elwood cuts down the old plum tree and paints the porch fire control sprinklers strong at the end of the summer project of doing one thing every day $45,000 + 25,000 + 29,000 + cal coast 5226 = $104,226, send $10,000 each to kids close out Cal Coast spend madly: lego, animal book, alphabet blocks for Gid, foolish clothes, carpet from turkey, cookie for hair, ears repierced, dutch oven to bake bread, Avaaz Mac Pro quit, phone quit buy phone, computers, display, adaptors, software, Vimeo Chris digitizes everything and sets up Vimeo, new print of current Mubi films, Jarman books right wing paranoia, ottawa rednecks, Jan 6 investigation, midterms Dems not bad Ukraine war daily 24 The Eve. White candle on the mantle, tree of lights, thinking of Frank, why him, is it a night for departed spirits, why him because of what it was like to be seventeen and dressed up and feeling Christmas as I did then? The age I was, girl glamour, desperately wanted by someone? Not that. Secure in what I'd known from the beginning and hadn't needed to know was good. Today is the night before Christmas and I am sitting here in the living room with my slip showing and in my lovely orange sheen dress with holly pinned to my shoulder. Judy is beside me in the pink dress and my gold necklace. Over my shoulder is the tree, gifts piled beneath.   This morning in the dark I woke momentarily to a single awareness of the window streaked with snow, the wind. A blizzard. I thought of Frank sleeping in the basement and wondered if he heard it. [1962] I want there to be more like that, my parents, Judie and Paul, the neighbours, the house, the yard, the fields, the weather, even the church. I don't at all want to reread my teenage feelings. Ah Frank if you're anywhere I want to say I'm sorry to have been that silly person with you. You were courting and I wasn't and that was wrong. I had a bent root, I didn't know what I was doing. There wasn't a way to be the friends we actually were without the romance format but it helped me and cost you. Should I thank you for what harmed you? It can do you no good. - What's the book I'm thinking of, the man who did it right, just wrote love for his people and place and time. This house of sky. An old woman in her used books shop further up on 5th, what was it called, when I brought her a pile of books I wanted to leave behind when I moved went to a shelf and pulled it to give me. Cape Cod Clutter. And was about to start over herself, "I think I have one more adventure in me." - Bread rising under a cloth in the laundry room to bake in the morning. A quarter pint of raspberry jam made from berries I froze in July. It's warmer, freezing rain. 25 All white and dead still. The right music this year something floating evenly like time in space, Tchaikovsky Hymn of the cherubim on cycle. Wonderful bread. Pork tenderloin done well for the first time: brined for 20 min; basted with butter, orange juice and smashed garlic; baked briefly at high temp sealed in foil. In the freezing rain last night an E-bus coming toward Merritt from Kelowna flipped, emergency departments called up in Kelowna, Merritt, Kamloops and Penticton, four people dead. 26 Everything, street and sidewalk and trees and snow itself all glazed with ice. Grapevine reports a woman skating on the Civic Centre parking lot. I daren't step out the door. 27 She's in my chair. I tap her shoulder, Move. She does, she gets up and shifts to the hassock, but as she lies down to go back to sleep her tail whaps. Twice. 28 Writing minds. I set something down in the afternoon, am satisfied with it. In the morning I see two things wrong with it. - I know not to mistake the pleasures of this poetry for presentist consolation. almost yearn for the luxury of a lapse into nowness . But this is understood to be an abrogation of responsibility. 29 I've uploaded the illustrated pdf of The sight of sound: notes. Grassland on Knowledge last night, my country, aspen parkland, made me want to go home for my last years. The pleasure of learning it in the Some photos years, the way there'd be people who know me. I'd be a hobbling old person but I'd have advocacy work. There's terrible barreness here, I have a garden and a house and utter isolation. When I imagine that I begin to think what I'd need to do first. I look across the room to my tall bookshelf and think there's nothing I'd need to keep. [TO] THE LAST [BE] HUMAN 2022 - I bought it for the idea of it probably, won't like its cogitative lack of ear - the idea of it being poetry of the end of the world, a human being registering the end of the lovely world. Haven't I done that with last light. Its tolling bell, its one bird like a line from past to future. - B showed up this morning asking am I alright. I didn't want to reply, waited till I knew what to say. I don't want to be mean but I feel done. Do I know why? Maybe not all of it. - Have I done enough of the starting state, want to be done with it, just one paragraph but an accurate one. I need to understand how I was harmed and why I was vulnerable to harm but I don't need to tell that part of the story. I just need to tell the state I was in. I was in trouble. There had been some people with whom I hadn't been able to defend myself well enough. Isn't that the way to say it. I'm thinking of Cheryl, wanting to give it to her when it's done. Is it to blame her, is it to name what happened to her too. Can she say yes that is how it was. 30 I've made three large pushes: the Some photos time and its background; Being about; and Tom (meaning therapy and the book). So now I'm understanding I should give account of all of them. 31 Yesterday afternoon I had a happy silly burst and wrote a hard-boiled love letter from Patch to me. Have posted it this morning. volume 12 time remaining volume 11: january-december 2022 work & days: a lifetime journal project