volume 11 of time remaining: 2022 january-december  work & days: a lifetime journal project   1   2   3   4   5       For the first half of the year I'm trying to work on Theory's practice using The Golden West journals, then get stuck and try a project called Some photos about 1977-1980 living in farmhouses up north. A lot of notes on both efforts. A woman in Berlin asks questions about my work and process; parts of the long letters that result amount to a quite comprehensive summary and are included. My 98-year-old mother dies in February. There's a family gathering in Abbotsford for her funeral. As before this year's entries enfold entries from past years usually inset. When I include Facebook entries new-written for posting I inset those too. Notes: Meister Eckhart, James Wood on Knausgaard,  Emilee B, Alice Munro Passion, Tim Hilton John Ruskin: the later years, story of Mother Hulda's feathers, Schubert Litanei, Mary Epp, Perception without representation, Brain and imagining, Dorothy Richardson Pointed roofs, Masha Geffen on Putin and Trump, The family documentary, Kenner The Pound era, Bitsy Knox radio Something like, Joyce Frazee, Shaun Inouye, Jody Golick, NYKR profile of St Aubyn, Lady Chatterley's lover, human genome, Isobel Christenson, Cue for treason, Put a candle in the window, James Baldwin An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis, Chantal Akerman, Gopnick on fascism, Wings of desire, Gertrude Chandler Warner The boxcar children, Northern Alberta Railway train Edmonton-Sexsmith, Steven Dillon Derek Jarman and lyric film, Derek Jarman Dancing ledge, Smiling in slow motion: the journals of Derek Jarman, Modern nature: the journals of Derek Jarman 1989-1990, Andrew Harvey Hidden journey, Hannah Javanti Truth or consequences, Marlen Haushofer Die Maur, Ed Yong An immense world, The living book of animals, arrhythmia and ventricular ectopy, generative art, Midjourney, Cyberpunk and Steampunk, Black Ferns rugby, Dutch oven bread, Herki tribal rugs, Thurman on Isak Dinesen, The dispossessed, Naipaul, Escape to the country, Schubert Litainei, Jorie Graham Day, Ivan Doig This house of sky. Mentioned: Patch the cat, Jam Ismail, Tom Fendler, Louie E, June Andrew, Kathy Lee, Greg Morrison, Freya Cirulis, Gideon Cirulis, Rowen Epp, Luke C, Mary Epp, Ed Epp, Luisa Konrad, Paul Epp, Judie Bopp, Michael Bopp, Cheryl S, Roy Chisholm, Rob Mills, Phil Hanson, Jeremy Desrosiers, Dr Liana at Merritt Veterinary Hospital, Claude Desy, Chris Kennedy, Billy McKeeman, Don Carmichael, Elwood Komonoski, Cookie at Cookie's Cutter hair salon, Jody Fray, Brian of Copper Valley Michanical, Trudy Rubenfeld, Frank Doerksen. Merritt BC, Slade School of Art, Best Western Motel Abbotsford, Ebus from Merritt to Abbotsford, Vancity Credit Union, 1824 Sheridan Ave San Diego, California Coast Credit Union, Merritt Starbucks, Good Beard Computer Repairs, Frame Discreet film transfer, Queens University Douglas Library Reading Room, British Museum Reading Room, Cape Cod Clutter book store. Kawabata Snow country, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason House of music, Neil Oliver, Canadian women's hockey winning gold, Tell me who I am dir. Ed Perkins, Doc Marten boots, Goldstein, Bowlby and Winnicott on dissociation and attachment, Dalit high school students at Shanti Bava. David Austin roses, Wolf Hall and Bring up the bodies, the Mac Pro, the Macbook Pro, the Mac Mini, Thunderbolt display, Joshua Minsoo Kim, cat twitch disorder, Sons and lovers, Patrick Melrose, Charles Lamb, Tusaaji, Netflix and Mubi, Youtube Fleabag episode, Lee Bontecou, Herzog Nomad, what will we know, Tchaikovsky Hymn of the cherubim. Ottawa convoy protesting vaccination requirements for cross-border truckers, Zelensky and the Ukraine war, wildfires in London, in Europe, in 12 states to the south, book banning in the US, US midterm elections.  January 2 2022 Today it's warmer than it was, though there's fresh snow on the porch, so when I opened the door for her this morning Patch did step out. Later she slipped in quietly and I stood in the doorway looking at the garden. I could only see one set of her prints. They showed all the way up the path but how did she come back? It was as if she had levitated. Tonight she asked again to go out and I watched her stepping carefully across the porch and down the steps into deeper snow further on. She'd go slowly and stop and sniff, pause staring toward the street. I closed the door to watch her through its pane. After a while she turned to come back and I saw her stepping with perfect exactness into her own prints. 3 Sometimes I glimpse a gentle puzzled forbearance in the way I was with Louie, that didn't fight as it should have, a native generosity or was it a lame child's uncertainty of worth. I'm closer now to what I was as a young child in school, outcast and solitary, then by a thin leg, now by both age and deformity. Then it was a light simple sorrow: nobody likes me. Now it's a heavier resignation that says I'm ugly and stupid now, no one wants to know me, but there have been better times. 8 I've posted theory's practice.doc and am wondering whether that achieved summary is in fact the whole project. I'm into a hard project I shouldn't let myself be distracted from. Its working title is Theory's practice. I'm working with my journals from 1995-2002 when I was doing two parallel hard things, developing a philosophy of mind as body and dealing with myself in deep love with a man who was a microcosm of patriarchy. Those two tasks were related in a way that I don't think has been described and though the whole story is there in the transcribed and posted journals it is seeming to me it should be set out in a more compact accessible form before I die - I should write a book. I don't know whether I still have the wit and energy and time to do it but if I do I thought there could be a second volume based on my Goddard letters because they demonstrate that deeply feminist struggle's outcomes in relation to many kinds of particular question. There's a huge amount of material to evaluate and sort and make decisions on. Difficulties are how to deal with neurophilosophical technicalities and how to deal with ever-repeated slow emotional processing. - Part 1. A fifty year old woman is hit hard by desire for what she doesn't actually want. She's living in disabling confusing self-contradiction, massively in pain. She understands that emotional debts she has stayed ahead of have come due. She's willing, she takes them on, she has faith in the work and she has three kinds of help but it's long and painful. There are six months in which it takes most of her time, then a second six months in which though that work continues she is at the same time quite easily and as if almost peripherally defining for herself and setting up a fundable PhD project that consolidates her years of private study and that she has already got herself into position to launch.   There's a hinge. She performs a ritual.   Part 2. She begins her PhD, gets funding, drives to California to work with the best department in her field. There she meets a man who is in some ways her counterpart, who has been struggling in his own contradictions and has come to his own form of commitment. They take each other on. Their previous defenses and accommodations are massively challenged. This goes on for years. There are many shocks and checks. They work through them again and again. In the meantime her work also keeps breaking through. It keeps getting harder but her project widens until it's a new vision of what humans are. She graduates and moves to be with her friend.   Part 3. She lives in California and has a teaching job. Shocks and checks with her friend go on but she's lighter in them, she's more at home in the world. Her teaching work draws on both her emotional work and her theoretical work.   Part 4. She's getting old, alone again trying to tell the story of parts 1-3 before she dies.   Part 5? There's been something else from earlier and all along, a paradisal vision in pictures and writing. She has gathered bits of it but goes on not knowing what to do with them.   -   I'm constantly tempted to feel that the story is about coming through with Tom when what it is actually about is the ordeal it took to undo the effects of misogyny on my ability to work in the world. It's a vision of central crisis in the very nature of women's being. An inherent conflict.   - There's what I was learning about the means of aboutness and there's what I was learning about how to talk to be able to think better and there's what I was learning about how to work with my personal limiting structures to be able to know and do more. Is the whole of Tom subsumed in that one? He was that and something else too, my sample human. Theory's practice. After that so were my students.   Merritt July-September 2019 9 Yesterday in the NYKR online such a good piece on Knausgaard by James Wood. I mean there are a few people in the world writing with really skilled interested balancing attention. I stomped through My struggle but Wood was patient with the tedium to discover its reasons and rewards. I also mean that kind of attention is so rare there can be no hope of it in my hidden corner. But what is my actual worry. Knausgaard has succeeded enormously by being what he is as a contemporary man. How is it different for me. He can be seen as a sample human in a way no woman can, isn't it that? His struggle with notions of masculinity can be taken as essential whereas my struggle with femininity has always to be taken as trying to catch up. Knausgaard is relatable by living, apart from the writer thing, as a man of his time. I can't be relatable because I've stayed marginal both by choice and by placement. But it's a limitation on success not a limitation on achievement     yes Always that     yes Anything you want to add     no Child's exclusion, women's exclusion, in me overlaid always, is that what you mean     yes Do you mean I exaggerate     no But exclusion is highly relatable     YES So: how can energy want to write a book one knows will have to fail. - In writing that sentence the way attention corrected to make it closer to true. Energy does like to do that. Writing is such desperately ethical work. - WRITE YOUR BOOK OH MY GOD excitement not only for the book but for you and the nature of this work you in it and holy shit I've only got a baby understanding of what this undertaking is like for you like how I'd market your book to the masses and send it to the moon 15 What else is there. 6:55. The corner's lamp on its high pole stands all alone in black space. Below on the street dimly a red pickup facing west, a blue pickup facing east, one garage light. Each side of the street a shrinking ridge of muddy snow. It's discouraging. 18 I haven't wanted to reread the sight of sound since I sent it to B, afraid to. Reading it now in the company of her listening competence I feel it's true of me and strong and clear. I have written things in these empty days. - Finished starving.doc this morning and posted it with grade twelve.jpg. I was defending that valiant desperate girl, telling on those who neglected her. If Anne reads it she will feel that I shouldn't make her family look bad. If Cheryl reads it she will cringe because she hasn't dared tell on her mom. "Our school photos came and I look young and somewhat fierce, and arrogant too, which I am - arrogant and hesitant and afraid of people." - I've never talked about starving in grade twelve. When I think of that girl now I think of her differently than she thought of herself. She thought of herself as happy, and she was, determinedly. She was also desperate.   Because the school in La Glace stopped at grade eleven the County boarded us elsewhere for grade 12. Most of the kids in my year went to Grande Prairie High but I chose Sexsmith School, where a teacher I'd loved was now the principal. The ten months living in Mrs Wold's rooming house in Sexsmith were my first experience of living alone. I'd always slept in a bed with my sister and in a house tight with my father's tension. At last I had a room of my own and I was overjoyed with its every detail.   Mrs Wold was a white-haired Norwegian widow who rented out the two upstairs bedrooms in her house on a maple-lined street near the post office. I loved the clean classic small-town feel of the house. I loved the town too, its classic town-ness, its small town characters who were like people in books.   These things amounted to a life I knew suited me best but at the same time there were stresses I couldn't completely afford to feel. Because I didn't want to marry him I'd lost the man who'd been sending a letter a week since I was sixteen. Things were bad at home. My dad beat my brother, was mean to my mom. "Bleak bleak Sunday. Cried bitterly tonight and cried bitterly the night before. I feel an almost hate and it's anguish." I was desperate for grades that would win me a full scholarship and slaved to get them, would study every night and on weekends. At Mrs Wold's house the TV would be loud in the evenings so after school I'd stay in my desk studying until I heard the nine-thirty siren. One night I didn't hear the siren and was still at my desk at nearly eleven. The principal came across the road to see what was up and drove me home.   I was thin. I suppose I was anorexic. But also I had almost no money for food. I think the County paid Mrs Wold's room rental directly but they sent my parents the board allowance. My parents must have kept most of the money for themselves because they gave me hardly any. There were bread, milk, eggs and carrots from home but I seldom had an actual meal. "An apple, 10 peanuts, a mug of iced tomato juice make a lovely meal for the day." I tried not to go home on weekends because of my dad so even the eggs and carrots thinned out. What money I had I spent on sugar for energy: chocolate bars, bananas, ice cream. When I did go home I ate too much. "Home overnight. I'm a guest there, a hog-eating guest." "Acutely sick because my stomach cannot stand such a landslide of food." I don't think anyone noticed.   On one of my nights working at school it occurred to me that there were lunch bags left behind under the coat hooks in the corridor. After that I always had some kind of supper. When the janitors were working downstairs I'd roam around quietly to see what I could find. A cheese sandwich, an apple. - Wasn't starving a way of feeling something pointed about my whole circumstance that year. I want to say to that girl You don't look arrogant, you look stressed. You have no idea what a hard time you're having. You can't afford to know how crushingly painful it was to lose Frank. You haven't realized your parents are cheating you of food money. You're on your own, your whole future depends on you. You shouldn't have had to be so desperate. But I'm proud of you that you did what you had to do to get to a better time.   Sexsmith AB 1962-1963, Merritt January 2022 Jim said, I have no doubt that if Dad knew you were not eating that you would have been at our dinner table every night. It comforts me to read that, Mr Mann's kindness again. I said, I know. But it wasn't a thing that could be told. 24 Watching Neil Oliver on the Paleolithic last night I was feeling the soft-heart something I'd want to feel for a real man - what I imagine with David Macara - moments with Dave Carter - the evening with Robert MacLean - the engineer who built in a cistern. This is dim - just what it would be like to live that way. If I hadn't been imprinted on a mean dad and if I hadn't been a discount woman could I have found someone I could love that way. What way. Without division, with honour, with a glad eye, with a full heart. Tom saying You don't respect me, I saying work woman doesn't respect anyone and love woman's form of respect is trust. But I could respect someone in work and that would be trust too. What I should have meant when I said that last hard thing to Tom, If I hadn't been a cripple I'd have had a man with money. There's mist this morning, rime on twigs. Under the streetlight I can see air hurrying sideways, falling sideways. 27 Two days of helpless miserable endurance. I couldn't walk but I had to. I had to get to the counter to open Patch's tin and to the door to let her out. I had to get to the aspirin. I'd step on my left leg and have to wriggle it a bit sideways first, just to dare to put my weight on it. I was using the broom handle as a cane, wobbling, almost falling backwards because the knee was unstable. When I lay in bed I ached all over, my hips, my wrist, the muscles of my head. I'd want to sit in hot water to ease the soreness but getting to and into the tub was a crisis, and then when I got out of it I'd be so faint I'd have to lie straight down. I kept thinking, if it stays like this I have to figure out how to kill myself. Was it Covid? I don't think so. 30 Yesterday when I was outside getting groceries from the jeep I heard a loud braying of air horns - many of them overlapped - moving somewhere in the east, probably approaching. Then a procession of lumber trucks and pickups wearing Canadian flags running past the end of the street on Nicola. I knew it was related to the Ottawa convoy protesting vaccination requirements for cross-border truckers but it scared me because it felt to me like men yelling defiance at women's emancipation. It felt like war: men needing to feel banded together against an enemy, choosing as token enemy the feminist prime minister but really wanting to smash the progressive gains that have made them less entitled as men. 6 February M died at 5:30. Phone message from Paul. 8 Best Western Abbotsford Yesterday a bus journey first through my own dry interior country, bare ground and shrunken snow; then the long slopes burned last summer, thick stands of thin black poles; then a high mountain pass, evergreens pillowed with snow, glimpses of vast heights in Japanese mist; and last the cedar, hemlock and moss of descent to the Pacific. 9 Judie is so relaxed, wearing something ethnic, sitting back, telling stories in a humorous voice. We eyed each other across the table. Michael white haired, thinner faced with the same strong brown eyes. Rudy grey-faced, unshaven, four beers on, slurring so I can't understand what he says. Paul quite silent next to me. We were eating Thai food and trying to keep to common experience. There was a feeling that all is forgiven, though Rudy was sitting with his back half-turned away from all of us. 10 Rowen at Mary's reception vivid black and pink in a room full of grey people - Judie across the room looking to see me feeling what she was feeling when people said Mary was nothing but good - Paul walking across the room an old man - Rudy like a drunk in a Russian novel, grizzled, shabby-headed, slurring, coming out with a sudden joke - Lill and John in their late 80s, Lill wrapped in a tight nylon raincoat, John beaky like an old heron - Lucy a brimming crone with a long drizzle of white hair under a red hat, eager and clutching, smiling irresistibly with bright false teeth, more there than most - Liesbet in a wheelchair, small pink face, eager to kiss me. Behind a thick cedar hedge at the cemetery a mound covered with a tarp, next to it the open grave margined with astroturf. An overcast chill. Eight chairs in two rows, everyone else standing. She'd said she wanted a trumpeter. John reading the committal passages in a dull voice. What I'm afraid to tell, going up at the end to play the Litanei off the iPad, Rowen at my heels without being asked. I was blind scared, why would I be. My hand was shaking. Rowen reached to support the iPad from underneath and stood beside me as the song played. He was proud I was the punk of the gathering he said after. I'd told the injustice of her life, that she was a loving young woman betrayed in marrying a man who couldn't love. Did it scare me because I was telling my own story. 12 When we stepped out of Ro's house yesterday morning, very high up there was sunlight on treetops. Bright daytime all the way through the broad valley and over the pass. On the long downslope I started to say look at this, I've felt hardly anything but I'm happy to be coming home. Have come home to spring. 15 I edited text-scanning errors in the online version of Perception without representation. I'd given a semester to Dennett and written it the summer before I drove to SD. It's superb. It reset something essential in my frame and it's stylish: light and loose and subtle and direct. I crossed into another zone writing it. 18 On PBS last night a yoga teacher saying half the alternative wellness people in her community are believing QAnon stories about Democrats trafficking children and vowing that Trump won. Single mothers working from home are making online incomes as anti-vax bloggers and those other madnesses leak in from the side. People are made to distrust government sources and told to research for themselves and then they're poking around in contexts they don't know how to evaluate. Algorithms are feeding them exciting controversy. They light on someone to believe. Credulous people formerly harmless are being weaponized. 25 $45,000. Can't think of much I need it for. March 1 The way whenever I try to write a dream I'm always having to catch back the lazy sentences that haven't paused to look again. Sketching and writing, lifetime's work of seeing and saying, being and saying. Patch is so conscious a body. I mean how aware she always is of whether a leg is cramped when I hold her or the way she'll keep changing her shape as she sleeps. Just now she rolled her shoulders a bit backward and stretched out her legs. There's her belly rising and falling, there's her small face closed and bare to the light. Then her arm rises to cover her eyes. Seeing so conscious a body always a pleasure to me as if I become it in seeing it. 5 Don has sent a note saying he's sorry he hurt me. That annoys me all over again. 6 I posted the camera red shoes north country after-storm-light slide as birthday photo. It's a body taking a photo not just a head, body inside a strong triangle that says concentration. The landscape around the body is fired by an amber light of liking. The road's white line says directed journey, the roadside weeds say nature naturing all around. - After approx 6 months of agony the metaphor paper breaks out into such grace. 16 Every day aware of Zelensky battling for Ukraine and Putin murdering his young men to murder Ukrainians and decimate towns. I'm wondering what will change in US and Canadian national politics because there's an exciting international enemy. Will they identify with the aggressor or the courageous victim. 20 When Paul phoned on my birthday I mentioned the hard thing I did at M's gathering - said it had been hard. Then he said he'd been glad I'd done it and Judie had said the same. If I hadn't brought it up he wouldn't have said anything. Rowen - Rowen, though, did better. 11 April Feeling what a tightrope it is to be making something that can be seen the way this one can, how on the edge of really stupid if it isn't better than I now can make it? The egotism in it is just intractable. Self-concern. And yet there are observations people need. Things about being with a man that many women need to hear named; things about intellectual process that could help women do it their way. 20 How many words in Wolf Hall. 604 pages, 151,000 words. What I have in 10 chapters is about 71,000 so in 58 there'd be about 420,000, meaning I'd have to cut 369,000 words, which is 369/420, about 9/10th of every chapter! 21 Now I'm all scrambled - I was bopping along and now I have to doubt every sentence. Is this going to take more brain than I have left. 25 Patch is hurt. A Goth young woman knocked to say there was a cat in my tree. A young beagle was running away across the corner when I came out. Patch seemed to be hung up in a crotch 15' up. She was twisting and scrabbling trying to reach a narrow branch she could use to pull herself free but she couldn't take hold. The young woman and I were standing below calling her and she was crying. Then she did twist herself free and creep down but when I set her on the grass she was limping on her left hind leg. - I'm hurt too. It was warm and bright yesterday. Jeremy couldn't come but I worked a bit in the garden. When I was getting out of the tub afterward my hand slipped on its edge and I banged my ribs hard, so then I went to bed sore in legs and hips and wrist from working but also having to be careful how I lay. Woke at two with my top soaked and face prickling with salt. - I've aged so fast since I got here. Now going once along the grass edges with the weed whacker was making my hip hurt. There is so much to do and I have to hesitate every time before I push down on a spade because I know it will hurt my knee. I can weed sitting on the ground but getting up afterward is a sad comic effort that can take minutes. - There's more, the Mac Pro quit this morning and my phone hasn't been charging. I carried Patch's crate to the jeep and drove to the vet but I'm seeing ahead to a time maybe not far away when I can't do the ordinary things I'm now doing with effort. - Patch's anterior cruciate ligament torn, surgery and a couple of months of rehab. My ribs hurt when I sneeze or blow my nose. Luke to say he's struggling. Willing to console though, as Greg always. What kindness becomes in sorrowful times. May 1 Three hours with Jeremy weeding. Lark Ascending looked dead but there are strong shoots from below. Both pears blooming like mad and full of small ... are they bees, flies? Tulips white yellow and red, first yellow Iceland poppies, johnny-jump-ups in clumps, white and mauve moss phlox, first mauve iris, cowslips and primulas, grape hyacinths, red paeony stalks, bits of white blossom on apricot and all three plums. - Can smell the clove currants next to me. 5 Your girl did great! Very stable under anesthesis, woke quickly and comfortably, and the surgery went well. Now two months of confinement and intensive rehab and then two months gradually recovering. "Most cats will do most of their own therapy." 7 Patch asleep on the hassock with her head against my leg, lamp warming her naked flank, means I can sit with her in my morning chair, tea alongside. New vulgarity of the rich dumb guy's plastic fence around the church. Grey overcast, brighter rim where it shows out from under the valley's lid. Hardship is making me wish for someone, anyone, to talk to. Clove currant in the pink jar next to me. Steady throb of the boiler. Lamplight. Tulips in a jar with a spot of shine on its flank. The desk's room with its rug and bookshelves. House in its good order. Trees in the garden coming into bloom. Rain quietly beginning. Jeep safe in its own room. Aspirin's effect. Lower Nicola Security white truck patrolling. I have enough money! Can buy a new computer, can pass some to Kathy and Jeremy and Luke and Row, could pay $1500 for Patch at the vet. 13 Roses came: Molineux, Winchester Cathedral, Wollerton Old Hall, Charlotte. Richter's 6 plants: angelica, attar of roses geranium, rose-scented bergamot, salvia apiana, bay laurel, Turkish orange eggplant. Darrel has put my Mac Pro disk into a case so it can be its own backup.   14   Haven't been able to settle to work since Patch's operation - should I call it that because that was what it was called when I was five, seven, nine, eleven, fourteen? And was taken to be cut, for reasons I wasn't given, by a man I didn't know, and then would wake alone dizzy with anaesthetic, in sharp pain, my leg held to the bed heavy as a stone in its plaster cast. I wonder at my steadiness in I'm not saying ordeal because I didn't experience it as that: it was happening and I was there in it passing from moment to moment without protest. I didn't expect to be consoled, I expected to go on to the next moment. Now I wonder at that valor only because I know more about how other children live. Still, I've been blanking these days in iPad TV and uncon memory is probably why. 15 A bad night. When I'd turned off the light and was expecting to fade I started to feel danger as if a flywheel might spin out, something in my chest that I should control by thinking some right thought. Was it the old kind of vibration? My pulse was too fast. Slow down, slow down, I'd say. That went on. Was scanning the day for what might have set me off but there was only garden work,  happy work and not hard work because Jeremy was shoveling and carrying. Later in the evening I was sitting on the ground looking at the blossoms on the Whitney and the cherry, fallen into a trance of peace. But then taking off work clothes in the laundry room I noticed an over-all tremour that comes into me now when I've worked at all. 16 There's a blank moment between beginning to fall and landing. I'm stepping up onto the porch platform about to drop the pruner - suddenly going down - then almost nowhere for a long moment - then my head has hit hard against the base of the peach tree. Or: early morning, I haven't yet turned on the light, am stepping through the bathroom door - what! - Patch at my feet - then a complicated blankness, two instants, three, because there are ricochets - now I'm on my back on the tile floor and my head has bounced hard. I understand backward: stumbling over the cat, crashing into the edge of the sink with my ribs, bouncing sideways, hitting the tub? flipping onto my back, hitting my head. There must have been movements to stop the fall, not efforts I make consciously because I'm in suspension completely helpless. Then there I am, how badly hurt?, knowing it is always going to happen no matter how careful I try to be and one day it will be much worse than this time. The top of my head still echoing where I banged it on the peach tree. 17 Since Patch's surgery disgraceful days of scraping up bad TV on the iPad. Now I don't know how to get into work again. I'm repelled by the struggling self-involvement. Is there anything worth passing on. States of good balance. 18 Dear Chris says wd I like him to pull together a general action plan and a quote for digitizing the 16mms. Patch's stitches out. Dr Liana says Patch is as good as she'd expect in a month and a half. When she has carried Patch's crate to the jeep and we're standing talking more I say Do you know the story of Mouse? She says We all know the story of Mouse. 19 At 4 this morning wandering into a doc called poetry compiled and being lofted in Shakespeare, Duncan, Pound. All the poetry I hate and then these scraps that lift me into paradise. The line of descent in experimental film that is from Pound via Brakhage. 22 Shaun's ReIssue piece. The final shot "floods me with emotion for reasons difficult to pin down". "It is, on the surface, a structural film. ... Yet Trapline falls afoul of the mode's anti-illusionist credo by inviting the viewer to fall in love with the image ...." "... little surprise to learn that her influences fell outside the hegemony of male directors. She recalls the galvanizing effect of Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monteray .... Likewise, it was lessons learned from the narrative-film experimentations of Marguerite Duras, particularly Natalie Granger ...."... Last light "is an open-air study of almost imperceptible change, a slow-motion film in real time." "... small events carrying with them unobvious beauty and emotion: faint chiming of bells nestled somewhere in the soundtrack." "...  demonstrates the profundity of Ellie Epp's art, now as then." When I see how certain people, a few, have been struck deep by my work what is it I feel, a warm glow in my chest. That kind of soul flood is what I wanted to make and give. It happens and I sometimes surprisedly hear about it but so seldom I forget I've managed to sometimes be that and so in some way as a lifetime go on being that. - Row's birthday, Cirque du Soleil this aft, Freya's idea. Louie took him twenty years ago. He hadn't seen magnificence before he said. A vid of Gideon dancing to a song he knows, yuh yuh yuh he sings before that line comes up, "he dances to it with his dad often". 23 When I was getting dressed I saw the white lilacs are open. Went out in the 5am grey and cut some for a vase. While I was outside I saw the first white and yellow iris are out too. Yesterday I invented weeding from a chair. Still a bit haunted by talking to Paul. I'm generous with him, I praise him and ask him about himself. He does neither of those and there are often moments when I feel a little backwash of unspoken offense, oh I've been too much myself. Is it deliberate, that male strategy, make them come to you? It says yes. I'd be ashamed of stinginess but it works doesn't it. 26 Small bouquet, lily of the valley, white violets, johnny-jump-ups, and two tiny rose-coloured tulips, last of the best of them. I began planting out today, the ratty squash and nasturtiums that were in the coldframe too long. [Krinkled white and salvia] [Seashell] June 4 I've been having more bad nights. If there's a tight feeling when I lie down I guess that it's coming. Then I lie awake scared of my heart on and on because it feels as if it's struggling. 6 I woke at 2:30 with chest pressure trying to ward something that might have been panic. Isolation for years, wildfire fear, evacuation stress, being less and less able to walk or work, being ugly, injuries often, bad sleep and heart worry, Mouse dying, Patch being maimed. A lot. 13 [blazing poppy] [cold frame] [poppies and cabbages] Let Patch outside for the first time. Took a photo I like for the composition I didn't have time to frame. 17 Damped anguish from not working. 20 B: we might work together on this, perhaps with me as a kind of mediator expanding on your work, your research, and your methods 23 Method of recognition. Chantal Akerman said pay attention to your attractions. Follow them. First principle: participation of 'the unconscious'. How to say it better: body knows more than you think you do. Obscurely recognizing and working to know what is being recognized. How I got to where I was when I could write those paras. Film studies and trying to write, working toward an aesthetic, perceptual/emotional effect in art, engineering attention. About 1973 taking on recognition knowledge. Years following attractions. Collecting images and scraps of language that had a charge. Place and what will we know. Working to understand what these scraps mean, imply, suggest. Pound in poetics. The Book: developing ways to work with body and body knowledge more directly. Late 1980s books that galvanize, Chaos, A feeling for the organism, beginning of cog sci (philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science). 1989 back to school. Doctorate, neurophilosphy, how body does mind. Intensely disciplined effort to explicate, organize and give cultural support to what had been intuitive. 2002-2013 devising embodiment studies with students, embodiment studies web worksite. What's left over, poetics, cosmology. Grain and transparency. A folder called The air. Still recognizing myself in Pound. A tradition he fostered, the feeling of lift. 26 Yesterday I couldn't write it. I went away and slept and gardened and watched Asian artists on Knowledge Network. This morning I'm drinking tea and there it is. Tea has a cost. I vibrate. It's probably heart strain. - Yesterday 6:30pm when the sun was around west far enough to get past the house next door, light came sloping gorgeously into the verandah. I took a photo blue, green, red and Patch at the door open because it's summer now. 30 Jason Good Beard Computer Repair, shy bear with a beard like a scrub brush who got the Mac Pro's drive working so I now have a full backup of that computer before it died, all the little stories and their month by month list. We tried to figure out the monitor and got bewildered among Apple ports. I drove up and down Juniper Drive three times past tidy gardens of the middle class American kind and am worn out but my tech has advanced. Sigh. July 3 I was cutting grass next to the plum tree, weed whacker growl, focused. Trod one step backwards. Something soft underfoot, yowl of protest, dash into hiding. Did I squish her organs? Have I killed her? I should maybe never have a cat. Couldn't find her. Under the rhubarb? Has she hidden somewhere to die? Will she run away because I'm wicked? She strolled into the house later and when I was lying on the verandah couch jumped onto my chest, rolled on her back and lay like a small human with her head next to my chin, her legs stretched and her paws in the air twitching sweetly. She's afraid of the vet. When we were having her last checkup with Dr Liana and we had her crate on the table she wouldn't come out till I dragged her. I put her on the floor so we could watch her walk. She jumped on the counter, from there onto the table, and from there onto the crate. I stood next to it with my arm around her. She lay quietly with her small head burrowed into my armpit and her eyes closed while Liana and I talked on. Why was that so particularly moving. I like Liana and we talk interestedly without hurry and as we were doing that Patch snugged into home intimacy the way a child does while mothers talk to each other above its head. 5 Roses, strawberries, Cos lettuces, green beans startlingly tender. [fenceline] 6 4:08, mottled sky. Is that the morning star steady among rags of cloud. Tiny victories of wording. Benched. Bowls of roses. Scent of Sharifa Asma. [Litchfield Angel] Morose, morose. 7 What is this mind. Skittish. It opened a file called the air, it says.doc and said oh maybe this. Moved two lines around. More? No, skittered off everything I opened. That realm. Meaning where I'm too diaphanous to work and it too diaphanous to work with. A dark silver day at nearly eight There I look up and see the Russian olive stirring its silver twigs The air, it says Nightfall moments in the verandah. Patch is at the open door sitting on her paws gazing out. I'm reading. I look up, she's there. First raspberries today. Scent of sweetpeas and roses. 13 Does that first paragraph say the completely satisfying love I can feel looking at Patch. 20 Last night lying on the verandah sofa I was seeing open sky that had heated evenly to such baking incandescence that what? That I felt oh Earth in your dying. Something like that. Wildfires in London, in Europe, in 12 states to the south. At 4:24am there it is coming on again, light immaculate, space immaculate, morning star. I'd been reading Patrick Melrose - four pages of praise by other writers - sick with the venality of human beings - a New Yorker piece on people spending hundreds of millions on superyachts to feel more important than people with slightly smaller superyachts - oil companies spending millions to lobby against climate legislation or even climate information. 23 In this order: bulbs and fruit trees, iris, paeonies, poppies and calif poppies, roses, thyme, phlox and other perennials, hollyhocks, sunflowers, asters. - These mornings I let her out the back door and then open the verandah door wide enough so she can run inside if she's scared. I'm in the armchair writing and after a bit I hear her drumming on the verandah's window into the house. She lets me know she wants me to open the inner door by standing upright like a small human and beating the window with her fists. When she sees me begin to rise she runs to meet me at the door. As she comes in she says hello, two syllables. Then it's time for love. She climbs into my lap and twists onto her back, lies held in my right arm sprawled like a baby, belly open, legs spread, head tilted back to look into my eyes. I rub the top of her head, she vibrates into my chest. 26 One picking of the raspberry row makes a half-pint of raspberry jam. 31 5 half-pints of red currant cordial. August 1 Evening scent of tall purple phlox.13 jars of cherry juice. 5 This morning I lay in a swarm, 3am, Patch sleeping at my feet, B's questions, why don't I publish, female hermeticism, hermitism, the aloneness of having gone so far into my own authority that no one can know me, what any of that has to do with 1977-1980 alone in farmhouses in the country. I took it to what will we know and that was one thing but not at all the whole. I was working all over in a huge space of questions. 7 I like earliest morning, I like being at the window to see the sky light up, I like my hot tea, I like having a brain fresh enough to work at least a bit. There it is white all over bright like a light table. Patch is stalking and sniffing in the garden's cold air knowing the verandah door is ajar. I've been going through the 1987 sheet looking for bits to add to Some photos and am seeing it's in another register, it's a different piece. As writing 1977-1980 is brutally plain. So now I've gone through 1987 on its own terms and there it is, 5 or 6 pages nearly perfect. 10 Late afternoon a thunderstorm rolled through, dark sky, warm wind, big splats of rain. In the evening when the sky had cleared it had a huge high washed look that reminded me of the evening after a thunderstorm when I was in long grass on what had been the yard, gazing at a vast tender open horizon. July 1977, a stronger moment than I knew. When I was a child that sky was background but now I was there to meet it. I wasn't just camped on an old site I was planting myself on an old site to begin to be changed by meeting it. True venture decisive but slower than I've guessed. What do I mean. There's more to find. 12 Yesterday late afternoon a magnificent storm, thick rain slashing past the window, Russian olive beaten sideways, white torrent jutting from the church's gutter. Now a pale apricot horizon and little tufts. When I opened the kitchen door for Patch a full moon on its way down. There's a pull to overstatement. I've carved the July 1977 paragraph back a little every day. No harm if I keep trying. 13 So now it's 5:03 and there's faint color along the northeastern rim, Venus beside the plane tree sharp and moving fast - now gone behind a branch. Can the sky be ruined too? When lovely Earth is burned black will there still be atmosphere to hold light, water to form clouds and wind to move them? The end of every lovely thing Earth has made. As if my ethical instinct has been that the only right thing to be in end time is to notice it, feel it, love it as it dies. If there were an afterlife I'd want to have earned by faithful love another Earth. 15 June 1977 - I was 32 - spinning - Female hermeticism, hermitism, the aloneness of having gone so far into my own authority that no one can know me, what any of that has to do with 1977-1980 alone in farmhouses in childhood's country. In my twenties always taken by novels about women going off to live alone in the country, novels by women who imagined it and didn't do it. Did it for parts of three years. Long story whose summary is in about twenty photos with a different quality than anything before or since. How - an almost speechless presence in which what seemed to be unconscious perceiving and feeling came close. They're present to physical place but in a sort of mythological way.   - Anyway, I'm not so taken with the idea of female hermitism now as I am in courageous going for broke in any area of work. Hermeticism of committed effort that takes one out of the common mind into the lonely satisfying open. I was begging for true being with effort, sacrifice and ritual but conscious/language self was so shattered the journal record is just bad. I had in mind grant money and art project but really I was feeling it as a religious quest. 19 I've been compiling and sorting, compiling and sorting and then come to a stop. Here is my chance to make a set of little pieces that hang next to twenty photos people haven't seen well. I want them to say: these love cosmos, they love local as cosmic. They love being: they feel what is more-than-conscious in how they are being made. There it is. Can they be like the last section of Ditches of Alberta. 20 Last dream this morning was colours of my house. It was 820A approximately, I was looking north in the corridor and naming the colours I could see, dark turquoise, red, yellow. I woke and continued, dark green, blue. It was happiness. 23 Note from Luke last night stabs me with fear. Patch keeps waking me, starts leaping over the bed at 2:30. I lie in my damp night clothes talking to myself about insanity, how fragile people are, my kids are. 25 Household, happiness in. 7 pints of applesauce yesterday. Picked the apples by shaking the tree. Sunflowers in the pink vase. Scent of Thérèse on the counter. O tea. Patch's routine, she's had breakfast, checked the day out the back door. Now she says meeee. I say Come on, am walking toward the front door she knows I'll leave ajar, hear her galloping beside me. There's money. The Cal Coast account is successfully closed. What else. Thinking how it is that bad Tom goes on being steady love in me as no one else. I reread the last post with him in it and liked the ironical slant. I now love the record of visits with M. After noon getting up traveling under clouds. Mary an odd small flat-bummed imp body. Gradually find a glee that wants to hug her and sits on the table separating white paint out of her hair strand by strand. Intimacy hears itself as J does from the front room. He sits with his arms up. I ignore him. These days he goes to the Golden Age Club which has lowered its age limit for the sake of income.   I find twenty dollars on the dash in Valhalla. Mary parking next to the car, she turns as if driving is still anxious. Am glad to say hello by eye through the co-op window. She's peaceful and friendly.   Listening to Lascia qu'io piango the cut of her edges brings me to tears. M can hear how much I want to sing. September 3 Persian basil in a glass vase on the rad between the windows. It's September but the season seems to be a bit nudged back, the church's crabapples aren't showing much yellow yet. I stand in the doorway marveling at how much mass there is in the garden - the mass of leafiness - the apricot tree now throwing so large a shadow on the house, such fullness on the ground and in the air. 6 When Patch has had her early patrol in the garden and has knocked on the window and been let in and has come to knead my belly with a devout look on her face she lies back into my left arm, closes her eyes and lets herself go in what seems to be blissful love. I look down at her small face marveling that though she has no one of her own kind her need to love is so strong she'll love even the large clumsy foreign animal I am. 8 Jarman's Chroma. There's no catching up to these English boarding school boys, Fermor and Jarman. 9 Daily dispatches on FB, you know everything already. But I'll tell you a nice thing that happened today. I found someone to cut my hair. Her name is Cookie and her salon is Cookie's Cutter. It's in a wild-west-looking building called the Snake Oil Emporium, whose main room is full of second-hand leather tack. I wore a mask so I wdn't have to stare at myself and we talked about cats via the mirror. She was a cushioned redhead maybe 55 with a sweet curve to her mouth, who lingered over her work and had the kind of professional tricks that could make my hair look like Hollywood hair. I left with a thin blue streak painted into the silver on one side. It's temporary but maybe next time we'll do something bold. It was beyond lovely finding someone fun to talk to. 10 In the morning Monica was in the garden with me insisting on weeding in exchange for vegetables. She is a tidy 60 year old with feathered hair who found me on her way to an AA meeting at the United Church. With her I was feeling at an utter end of being able to be interested in anyone but then in the afternoon there was Cookie. When I described Cookie to Em last night I lit up all over again. Oh intelligence and the terrible cost of living here without it. My ugly little eyes in the salon mirror. 13 Book banning in the US, librarians under threat, In the night kitchen banned because there is a drawing of a naked child whose penis is shown. 15 The first houses I remember your having was the one you and your make believe sister had in a shack at the sawmill when you were 4. 18 B after months - still having to see how little her system can make of my way of saying, meaning how little anyone. My changed way of saying so crucial an invention. 19 These nights it stays just two clicks above zero. I've brought in the tender plants in pots. Should can tomatoes today, maybe freeze more beans. 20 Seven pints red with a green sprig of basil and a white clove of garlic, half tsp of sea salt and some lemon juice to be safe. Open kettle canned. - So much useful discovery and too late because the peace and plenty I've had to work them out are going to end. If humans survive they're going to be hurled back into their most primitive fascistic worst. Time remaining. 21 If I could send my work to another planet what would I send. Embodiment studies including trauma recovery process: learn to take care of yourselves and don't fall into these insanities. 23 Things are awful and I daren't tell you. I don't understand self-loathing but I understand defeat. Defeat is when there's no energy of hope. How to live in time remaining. Finish strong said Vic. What can that mean is the question. Love what's dying as it dies. Carry your value visibly. Take care of those who belong to you. Don't lie. It's too late for my work. It can't take effect. But is it a way of loving what's dying? Yes. 27 The sheet called whole riveting. What relation between the simple perceiving, the anxious self observation and the crystalline later fragments. What's my question. More than one. 28 The shreds sheet so beautiful and potent, I think what I'd most want to give. And the whole sheet. What I know now is it's those two, the best photos, and something of the daily notes. It's interesting work. Easily swamped. - I started grade one in La Glace School but as soon as the Wapiti froze over my dad moved us to a remote lumber camp and that's where I learned to read. I was sitting back on a rough wooden bunk in a very small cabin. - It's one of those moments like a freeze frame, intact seventy-some years later: the blanket under me, the lit window across the room, the book in my lap. It wasn't a child's book, there were the short words I knew but there were long words too. I stared at the one in front of me. Sounded it syllable by syllable. Yes! Now I can read anything, I can read everything!   A second moment about reading is from grade two. I was on a small chair in a reading circle. The kids around me were taking stumbling turns reading aloud and I was pages ahead of them reading to myself. I looked up and realized what I was doing. It couldn't have been the first time I'd read silently so what was it about that moment: I think it must have been the first time I was gripped by what I was reading.   It was The Boxcar Children. The page I had open showed a red-painted wooden railway car surrounded by forest, where four children were living on their own, furnishing it with treasures found in a dump. I now discover the book was written by a first grade teacher in 1924, and that when it was first published "it raised a storm of protest from librarians who thought the children were having too good a time without any parental control". There was that about it certainly but for me it was mostly the boxcar, finding it in the woods, improvising its furniture, dipping water from a stream.   I'd already slept in a wooden railway carriage overnight. When I was seven I'd been in the hospital in Edmonton and when it was time to go home friends of my parents put me on a Northern Alberta Railway train alone. The NAR route made a long arc to run along the shore of Lesser Slave Lake before it turned south again toward Sexsmith and Grande Prairie, so my train though it left in the late afternoon wouldn't arrive until well into the morning.   Black glass and dim orange light, a pleasant joggling and swaying. It was an almost empty carriage. My seat was midway up on the right. A man who came through the cars selling magazines and pop and renting out pillows was there all night in his seat in the back corner on the left. I bought a Mighty Mouse comic from him and an Orange Crush in a brown bottle. He let me have a pillow for free. What I remember about the morning was that a waxed paper cup of water on the wooden window sill was covered with a film that must have been coal dust.   I hadn't been scared of traveling alone but I was a bit worried that no one would tell me when to get off. As it was nearing arrival time I kept a sharp eye looking for a landmark. There it was, a house I recognized, an unusual house. I'd thought before that it looked like a Mexican house, or Spanish - I'd have meant adobe though it was probably stucco. I knew it was next to the track just at the top of the La Glace road.   Merritt September 2022 Gertrude Chandler Warner 1924 The boxcar children I began that last night and took it up again this morning and there it is. - If I'd been a gay man living in London dying of AIDS and gardening on a beach I could have had a lot more fun. I love his journal. I sat by the front door wafted by the clove-scented pinks, it is an idyll: et in Arcadia ego. I am so in love with the place please God I see another year. October 2 I'm so much stronger at the end of the summer. I read Jarman feeling his luck in being male, the way he can assemble a whole boy gang, three dozen men who are always calling him and visiting him and driving him to Dungeness and politicking with him and helping him with his projects. A beautiful young man who irons his shirts and packs for his trips and cuddles him in bed. I feel too how completely irrelevant women are in the life he makes with his friends. 6 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. 10 5 pints of pears with cloves, lemon juice and a bit of honey. Windy. This October hot and dry. 20 The living world 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. - 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. 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. 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. 3 November Ed Yong 2022 An immense world: how animal senses read 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. 8 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. 10 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 24 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. 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. 30 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. 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 you. 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. December 1 Good dutch oven bread yesterday. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.