January 2 2023
Rob last night. He's 65 and sounds a kiddish teenager joyful in this
and that he's come upon, a raven on a streetlamp post who peers over to
see where he's gone.
Monday morning, there goes biofuel guy to work.
BK says should we make a book. She thinks we could publish it. Should
we? It says yes. We'd need an external editor I think.
- Only think about it in afternoons with Some photos in mornings.
- Should I collect 2022's FB posts into a volume
YES
It might work as a format for memoir because of the way it skips around
through the years usually in their very moment but occasionally in story
form.
- Where am I with Some photos. Shape is clearer, three parts,
purpose is clearer, to complete and move ahead.
Posts 2022
Lovely Chris sent his invoice and it's paid. All four refurbished films
and four videos on Vimeo. Now finish Pale hill.
3
I've sorted outlines for the two preliminary bits, what happened before
and starting state.
4
Paul phoned Rowen to ask how I am, said he thought I wasn't speaking
to him. Why didn't he just phone and ask?
Luke last night talking joyfully about full moon diving in the Andaman
Sea off Thailand, acute black and white vision, thermocline that's visible
as a surface from below, at the 5 meter nitrogen dispersal point the moon
above seen flowing and waving. I remembered the fish store on Hastings when
he was four, the fish I liked for its look of an archaic swimming face [a
lookdown].
Narrative is called Up north?
Smell of bread baking.
6
I like having posted driving the I-15.doc for its pleasure of
a long-distance freeway - pleasure of driving. Am guessing mostly men will
recognize it. What I've gained by staying single, I've wanted not to be
confined in women's experience. Being with men is that confinement and then
being with women is being confined in demand and possession. I have such
fellow-feeling with Patch's anguished longing to be let outside.
Heavy sorting work, multiple docs already assembled, now integrate them
and find a shape.
Deciding it has to be separately both crystalline and narrative is a
later solution to that time's uncertainty.
Where it begins and what it's come to in:
- a. understanding
- b. language, writing
- c. film
- d. photos
- e. place
- f. being, not being my parents
-
- -
-
- Sept 5 2022 truth or consequences
-
- ancient canadian experimental filmmaker here. am just watching it on
mubi and want to tell you how much I like it.
-
- Oct 11 2022
-
- Dear Ellie,
-
- 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
you, as a self described "ancient canadian experimental filmmaker."
I looked up your work and I wasn't sure how to watch some things. Do you
have links you feel like sharing. I'd love to see it.
-
- I am curious about what spoke to you in Truth
or Consequences, if you feel like sharing.
-
- Sending care and appreciation. xh
-
- Oct 11 2022
-
- what spoke to me was its truth and consequences. 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 consequences
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.
-
- is that how you see your film too?
-
- am pleased you'd like to see my films but at the moment I don't have
a site that posts them. my distributor, cfmdc in toronto, sometimes allows
programmers access to screeners. you might be able to access my most recent
little video called last light if you tell them I said to let you. (it's
filmed in a desert.) most of my earlier 16mms are just now being transferred.
in film I've been minimalist and shy. there's a web monograph that could
give you an overview of other kinds of work at http://www.ellieepp.com/monograph/ellieepp29MB.pdf.
ellieepp.com has all sorts of kinds of things.
-
- xee
-
- Jan 6 2023
-
- Dear Ellie,
-
- I never wrote back to this, but I received it.
And it meant a lot to me. Since it's the new year and humans make ridiculous
ambitions around this time, one of mine is to get back to the beautiful
emails I've received - like yours.
-
- This nearly brought me to tears: "It has
seemed to me that work now has to acknowledge what's coming and love what's
dying and your film does." I feel similarly but haven't put such words
to it. I'm working on a seemingly endless expansive project now around
public land and the way humans relate to the natural world that we seem
to think we're separate from, and it seems to me that I'm doing the same
thing you noticed in TandC but toward the environment. The environment
is such a strange word.
-
- I'm a bit intimidated (inspired) by the beauty
of your images and the fluidity between them and the poetry, linguistic
and not. There feels to me a freedom and a presence. If and when they get
digitized I would love to see.
-
- Sending love and appreciation. If you write back
I may take ages to respond. But I will have received it in the full sense
of the world.
-
- xh
Hannah Jayanti this morning.
-
It was warm this aft and I had the back door open. Patch was out then
in. I found her by the laundry room door with a small tail showing from
under her belly. She was lying on a dead mouse as if to keep it from escaping.
I went for an oven mitt and threw it into the snow. She was puzzled, where'd
it go, turning her head, sniffing the floor here and there, creeping over
to look under the bed. She seemed bereft.
Look round little moon high in the northern corner of the window. It's
hung in a glowing mist. 6pm.
- Into my heart an air that kills
- From yon far country blows:
- What are those blue remembered hills,
- What spires, what farms are those?
-
- That is the land of lost content,
- I see it shining plain,
- The happy highways where I went
- And cannot come again.
Housman 1895 quoted by Sergeant Hathaway in Inspector Lewis.
Professor of Latin at University College London and Cambridge, atheist and
queer. Six decades later Frank at my table in La Glace reading me *.
7
Snow died at 94. Obits. Janet said had I met him. I'm resisting saying
more because 1. I dislike most of his work and 2. I dislike the way people
jump on anyone who dies just because he dies. But two things worth remembering,
La région centrale and that he said I don't need a system,
I am a system. La région centrale was three hours of free
vision. It's not mentioned and his silly and cut-off work always is - he
grew up in Rosedale and knew how to manage a career - but La région
set me wheeling through the universe in a way I don't forget.
-
All I have of the dream is that there was a duet,
exquisite and sung exquisitely. How can the brain of so musically
naïve a person make that up.
8
Jorie Graham interview in the NY review. I could take her as a
challenge to my whole way.
-
Mubi Mind the gap.
9
Rat's nest sorting but many days more. Still refining the outline, renaming,
moving topics around. I can sort it now because I'm standing with dimensions
of accomplishment around me that far outdistance theirs.
10
Nights I can't sleep. Not often. I never know why, some mis-timing? Heart
not sure of itself? There I lie, damp, not desperately uncomfortable, saying
to myself this is how it's going to be, mildly grim dullness on and on.
Shoulder starting to hurt, turn over. Again. Then toward morning I realize
I've been dreaming, a bridge lane, someone to visit
on the north side, a house with strange glass and steep stairways, a woman,
a garden next door - oh, it's large, it's common land, Is this a Dalston
Common I ask. Circling its inner edge in the dark. Then Patch is
crying, jumping over me, wants out, is it faint daylight between the slats.
Tuesday. Soup kitchen parking at the window, clean cars driven from attached
garages by white-haired women. Day heavily lidded, not cold, de-icing truck
pissing salt water, Patch at my shin. The tree of lights is dropping needles,
drying out. There a red car dusted with white. Lonely, lonely.
-
Luke for a couple of hours in the afternoon, his best voice, balanced
and amused, London urbane. He sorts what's up with Paul (he's probably grieving),
tells how he found help and what kind of help it is. I tell what I'm working
on. That Ed couldn't bear us to be anything at all in relation to him and
how that withheld presence needed to be found with the journal. No faults
of taste in anything he says, just warm presence. I say I've been holding
my breath.
12
Blank day white all over.
Found a pile of earlier sorting in the Dames rocket folder - takes
me back into London - which is needed but endless. Question: I took on massive
change in the London years and wasn't swamped so what swamped me with T
and C. Direct attack by the mother. An exceptional vulnerability.
Do you mean reactivation? Yes. Is this new understanding? Yes.
13
Raining and five degrees.
Looking at the search and revision I did in the period after college
and before them I can see that a conservative is someone who hasn't done
that work.
- Dreamed of a roomful of women at a conference,
sitting on the floor dressed in Afghani-like silks, brocades, etc. I ask
Chantal Akerman and another filmmaker "What do you do when you're
unemployed, can't make a film?" Chantal replied "I research what
seems important to me, I track it down until I understand what it is, in
it, that is important."
-
- May 1976
What I said about Trapline:
- It is an experimental documentary, ie it's dedicated to the thing,
the place itself. Experimental because it is looking for an ecstatic rather
than informative form - a right relation to the place. Let us have light
and then in the end they get it - but not too pat - they are reminded of
dark - then they get the children integrated.
-
I keep remembering with something like shame the many times I've met
something I didn't like or didn't understand and didn't ask what
was meant. That characteristic moment of taking note within myself and letting
it pass - that ruinous unspontaneity - it's my dad. With them I was trying
to come forward. They showed me how they did it.
14
I am not good at self motivation - relapse if I don't see a necessity
I am capable if motivated of thinking solidly
I am quick to learn things, balk easily if I don't analyze a sequence
properly
I thrive on competition and necessity; challenge
I require high standards to move me at all
I don't tolerate routine, am not suited to family life
I need romance infrequent and intense
I need travel and change
At loose ends looking at California, then trying to find Tom at his seniors'
center, then trying the other useless ways. Old heartache overcomes me.
It really never ends. It never ends! It isn't California more than Tom,
they're the same. Would I feel this if he'd died. No. It's because I could
fly to SAN and check into the Golden West. Then I think, but I'm so much
uglier now, I can hardly walk. So then I erase the heartache by looking
myself up online, mentions, letters about shows. I trashed the whole day.
Somewhere in there I wondered is it maybe on account of what I'm working
on, defeated times.
15
'Symbolism', an era when I was looking for powers that things/names/images
can evoke, powers for art. It's a notion of magic I now don't think of.
I've been noticing though that Trapline was engineered that way.
In those days it was search for power but also search to see through it.
Mystifying, demystifying. Here's a note that says I replaced it with interest
in place. Is that accurate? Over time? My place movies don't have Trapline's
hold. Yesterday a printmaker in Prince George saying stunning beauty revealed
in the ordinary.
-
What to do about BK. Summarize: she doesn't understand anything in my
way so if I try to put out work with her I'd have to use it to aim for unknown
persons beyond her. Can that work?
16
BK8 feels preemptory and is. I lost patience. Twice having to chase her
up after a month and then one sentence so clueless it might have been hostile.
Do I want to use the work I did in some other way? I liked being asked questions
I could answer. It was better than nothing and nothing so lies in wait.
18
I've posted david and dorothy this morning - it's 5am - and it
has carried me into that time's style of grace, their grace and mine in
registering it. Who they were, New Westminster establishment, their culture
a remnant like the paintings in their living room. - Old Vancouver had a
culture I didn't find until the garden - Rob's family too, and Jean was
that, English softened in cedar forest.
-
I open the door and say in a quiet voice Young one do you feel like
coming in? She's usually down the end of the garden perched behind the
compost lid. I don't think she'll want to leave it yet but here she is running
up the path out of the dark. There's a chunk of Fancy Feast in her bowl
but she's milling at my feet waiting. Oh alright, the rule is that if you
come when I call you you get a treat. I didn't think that quiet voice counted
as calling but you did.
Ways she talks. When she doesn't like where I'm touching her her back
legs come up and gently but definitely push my hand away. When she badly
wants out and I'm ignoring her she lies on her back halfway under the bed
and scratches viciously at the underside of the box spring. Her little back
end scrabbling madly is a perfect expression of exasperation.
When I'm going to let her out the verandah door rather than the back
door I hear her galloping up the corridor behind me, and then between the
front door and the verandah door she's uttering little cries as if to say
Oh please don't change your mind, I really really need this.
-
So do not feel like working on what I was working on. What else is there.
20
Last season of This is us. 18 episodes. Yesterday I watched it
all day, then seemed to be thinking of it most of the night and still. Birth
and death and people who talk to each other. Persons seen as whole lifetimes,
the sense I have too, of keeping all the times going. The way it keeps touching
the longing for loyalty so my eyes would crack again and again. A mother
with Alzheimers I wasn't loyal to and who hadn't been loyal to me. My unloyal
family that doesn't talk. (I tried.) And isn't there a particular Americanness
in it, an outrightness.
-
These mornings I'm dreaming up to the moment I wake but then all I know
is that I was dreaming, it's gone. Today, though, there was an overlay where
I was continuing a dream into waking. It had been
about a dorm room I'd liked. I was on a phone telling its designer I'd liked
it. I walked down past where he was and didn't see anyone who looked like
him. Then I was trying to design a small single room so it could have windows
on three sides. How could there be a row of them made so each has east,
south, west.
-
Horton Plaza is gone! Built 1985, ten years old when it was my all-providing
fantasyland next to the Golden West. Will the West be gone too? Then I say
of course it will, it's gone already, I can't go back, I don't want to be
where I am and I can't go back to when I was where I want to be, 1995 fifty
years old, California sun. Did I earn this loss of magic by some ungenerosity
of faith? I did earn that magic, I built up to it for years, the magic I
was carrying when Tom saw me rushing down the stairs. Did I wear it out
with my faithful great effort. Effort that was brave and true and has come
to nothing. If it has come to nothing does it mean it was not true though
it was brave?
- I believed it was what needed doing yes
- It was what needed doing YES
- And no one can use it no
- Is anyone using it no
-
- Did I wear it out with my great effort
yes
- Left it on the field yes
- Was it worth it yes
-
- So then should I just die, having done what I can
no
21
Gideon's birth day 2021. Mouse died January 27. Shaun died January 26.
I quit on Louie. Luke is contemptuous. Barbara dies around the 20th. Covid.
23
When I saw cars gathered at the St Michael's annex for Sunday service
it wasn't ten yet so I thought to rush across the road and give the treasurer-woman
her check. Opened the heavy door onto a dozen grey-haired women in chairs
facing a priest in long robes who looked as though he'd already begun or
was just about to. I was taking him in at the same time as scanning for
the woman I needed to find. He looked unfit to minister to anyone, a shabby
cross blank old man. I said excuse me. The woman I wanted got up, took the
check, patted my arm, Thank you Ellie. As I was turning to leave I looked
at the priest's whiskered affronted grey face and said excuse me again.
What I like about this story is the moment standing next to him in front
of his congregation not at all bothered at spoiling his holy importance.
25
Line of duty these evenings, kinds of cop shows I can watch now
because they have sharp interesting women in lead roles. I was thinking
of the time in our La Glace church about 1955 when for an evening service
we had a visiting missionary who was an opinionated middle-aged single woman.
She'd actually stood behind the pulpit. We kids scattered on the church's
dirt yard afterwards were marveling and laughing, we'd never seen such a
thing.
27
Hours yesterday writing business notes about the Vimeo site - people
who were asking sometimes many years ago to see work - Minsu in South Korea,
Malkah in Germany, Ekrem in Turkey, Daniel in Sweden, Felix in Spain, Sidney
at Xinema, Hannah Jayanti, Joshua Kim, Alex in Van. Tried and failed to
email Barbara Meter and wrote Joost trying to track her. Lux in London.
Tried Kat Harrison again.
Other business: Clay the plumber replacing the hot water valve under
the sink, Chris going to replace the counter with wood, then Copper Valley
will replace the sink.
28
I'm stuck even with the daily bits. Distaste. Dirty January on and on.
Twelve pounds over, sore when I get up from the chair. Blank desperate hours
in TV. Found the cat food tin in the cutlery drawer this morning. Haunted
by having spent $2000 foolishly, the painting, the coat, LL Bean clothes
I'll have to give away - misjudgment. (Good spending: Patch's surgery, weekly
cleaning, the rug, the Dutch oven, the computers, presents for Frey and
Rowen and Gid. Avaaz.) Useless work with BK.
29
I'm dropping the narrative. It's not worth the grim days.
Some photos texts need such pointed discernment.
Do I need to make it an elegy now (sigh).
What it is - intensely real place and intense attention to being as such.
31
- Do you think this enterprise can possibly work
yes
Not able to sort text onto photos, different categories.
February 1
- David Rimmer died last Thursday. I saw him last eight years ago on
Abbott St. He seemed a ghost.
-
- An old man passed me on the street, small - my height - with ash-grey
hair and beard and a dribble of food down his shirt. I looked again. He
had a sharp nose. "David?" He had passed but I called after him.
"David?" He turned finally, stood and looked at me. "Ellie."
I threw a tomato at him once about forty years ago.
-
- I met him in 1973 at the two-week festival of avant garde film at the
NFT. The first evening I was sitting quite far back in the audience and
he happened to find the empty seat next to me. I recognized him because
his face had been on the cover of Time out. He was glamorous then
in the style of a '60s rock star, cowboy boots, satin waistcoat, silver
bracelet. A few days later I saw Surfacing on the Thames
in a session on west coast film. Toward the end of the festival I spent
a night with him - sort of thing we did in those days. He had nightmares.
In the morning he remembered he was married and wouldn't stay for breakfast,
which was why I threw a tomato down the stairs after him.
-
Note from Luke, I miss you, 7:30 meaning 3:30am his time. British voice
says sorry calls to this number not being connected at this time. Heart-struck
with fear.
2
Such simplicity in what I was and wrote.
3
Was it uncouth to post david rimmer.doc. It describes him at his
last worst, tells on him, brags of having had him. Gets revenge. Also describes
two ends of a life that in its time made Surfacing on the Thames,
Canadian Pacific, Narrows Inlet, Jack Wise language of
the brush. He traveled the world, had a forty foot sailboat and a cabin
up the coast, made it in New York, had a retrospective and a book - was
exceptionally faithful to his possibilities up to the time when he collapsed
into booze. What was that? "He had nightmares." Did he fly above
something deep until he was too old to stay aloft?
-
Trying to work with Some photos shreds this morning feeble-minded
and disgusted.
-
Daichi a red heart, surprised. I did list the four films I liked, maybe
it was that. No one else knows who I mean.
4
Two days zonking in Greg letters from the Mesa Grande years. Greg is
generous in his curiosity and I take advantage of that generosity but I
always wonder too whether his availability isn't the decentred time-wasting
of someone who's been too timid to live his own life. I dislike how squeamish
he is about snakes and spiders, poverty, male aggression, any kind of hardship.
He can enjoy flair in writing but he doesn't dare it himself so I'm always
wanting to skip his long dull replies. I enjoy my own letters though
because they're zingy.
5
One line from Paul saying he stopped phoning because he read the paragraph
last May that named him in relation to male stinginess of response. "Make
them come to you." Greg asks and praises, isn't stingy, but is it at
his own expense.
6
Tuesday 6:45, anything? Sore and grumpy, idle and ugly, ashamed of wasted
days, no longer wanting to be alive. I'm nervous to say that but it's true.
I've lived eagerly but there's nothing now I'm eager for.
BK's incomprehension has been crushing. I knew not to expect much, to
do it for myself, and yet I've offered my best and seen it turn to a porridge
of arty abstraction.
Dosing yesterday I'd slip into a kind of dreamed thinking - how to say
this - it was visual, persuaded of itself in the way awakeness is, persuaded
it was actual thinking - then I'd catch myself back realizing its premises
were dreamed - then slip into it again - and catch myself back again. When
I asked how I knew I was awake the answer was a bright feeling of body especially
in my chest.
7
It only lifted into energy enough to get out the jeep when I thought
to go buy ice cream. Two bowls of ice cream with orange juice fixed me some.
This morning I was thinking of night in the Little Desert - that photo -
so I've reposted the piece.
- A beautiful beautiful night the last night I was there. Perfectly still
and wide and clear as if it went on for hundreds of miles as still as that.
The trees resting.
-
- From my bed on the ground I could see bottlebrush flowers coral-pink
in twilight - pink-headed galahs dropping among them from the white twists
of gum trees - then that same pink in bands behind complex black lace. Each evening
the wind stopped when the sun set. Birds' voices. Then they stopped too.
Ants carried on all night, crazed things I could hear in the earth under
my ear. Some nights I heard large footfalls that would have been emus.
-
- New South Wales November 1990
-
I hadn't realized Monday was M's anniversary: Feb 6. Today I was hiding
out in the back room when Kathy came to clean. Patch was sitting on me but
when the vacuum came into the hall she got nervous. Kathy closed the door
to spare her but then Patch started to act as if she were seeing a ghost.
She was jumping back and forth over me and then onto the bookcase. Her back
end was jerking the way it did when she was freaked last spring. She's still
acting scared. Now she's hiding in the corner on the far side of the chair's
end table.
- Is Patch sick no
- Scared yes
- Do you know what she's scared of no
- Is Mary around no
- Am I feeling bad because something remembers the anniversary
yes
- Meredeth Grey's mother dying, did that set off something
in me no
- Is it alright to not care that Mary died
yes
- And to hate her yes
- It makes me heartless no
- But it's a loss of vitality yes
- Did she earn my hatred YES
- Do you mean when I was two no, later
- She wanted to cripple me yes
- Is there anything I can do to regain the vitality
no
-
- Is it my fault that Emilee's health has collapsed
no
- Jody's? no
- Is it because they love me NO
8
Should I have a little ceremony to appease the ghost.
M, Olivia, Louie: I like them and then I hate them. Lovers who later
disgust me: Reiner, Roy, Ian, Peter, John, Maggie, Jam. Lovers who keep
their value: Frank, Tony, Rob, Tom.
9
Posted the collection of scraps from grade 2. What a seven year old registers
vividly enough so it's remembered seventy years later. Already it was place:
house and yard.
10
Saturday morning another clear sky. Bread rising in a covered bowl next
to the laundry room rad. Is that smoke or is it steam from the mill starting
up after a two-month layoff.
-
There's so little good food this time of year that I've eaten only because
I have to, but now I've made some. The bread looks beautiful, is springy
inside and has a thin crust that cracks in my teeth. Fresh-made raspberry
jam on the first slice and white cheddar on the second.
11
Not falling asleep last night and in a dark state as if realizing how
grim my circumstance now is, wondering whether I have Alzheimers, thinking
how to reply to Paul, feeling there's nothing ahead. Then waking with an
intense dark pressure seemingly at my diaphragm but was it maybe my stomach?
Heart?
-
Martin Eden on Mubi. It's a smart film. Remarkably. I like the
man. I understand his disgust at the end. He's uglier, his teeth are bad,
he's washed up. He says Life disgusts me Elena. I've lived it so intensely
that I don't desire for anything else. It comforted me. Life doesn't
disgust me - life is wider than people - but I'm largely disgusted and what
he says makes me feel I've earned my disgust. At the end he's the younger
man he can remember, sitting on the beach looking at waves, and when an
old man walking past saying the war has begun stares into his face he smiles
a quite luminous smile, not because of the war, because of the face. He
walks into the sea and swims out. That's the way to do it. Ocean.
12
I was thinking something theoretical to balance the child pieces I've
posted in the last couple of days so I looked at the intro of Being about.
There I am. Immaculate and unacknowledged.
-
I said:
- Paul on the phone. I like talking to him but he signs off in his courteous
way and I feel dumped. I'm generous to him, I praise him and ask him about
himself. He does neither of those and there are 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? I'd be ashamed of stinginess
but it works doesn't it.
-
- Merritt May 2022
Paul said 8 months later:
- Hello Ellie;
-
- I read your public critique of how I conduct
my end of our telephone calls. It left me with the impression that you
didn't want to talk to me anymore.
I said:
- paul,
-
- you've said you don't look at my posts. I'm sorry you happened on that
one. the sad discouragement registered in it wasn't particular to you.
there has been a lot of it in relation to the many who aren't willing (or
is it able, I don't know) to be interested in a female life, especially
when they are persons I like to be interested in. I have always liked you
- I've thought of you as one of my favorite people - I missed the phone
calls - but I've often felt too that I have been being just too much myself.
it isn't how you comport yourself, it's maybe more a hidden attitude. a
competition?
-
- I know you are more private than I am and will have disliked that I
said something in public (though my little public mostly isn't yours).
true, it would have been better to say something to you in person but I
have learned to be careful not to say anything to you in person that can
be felt as critical. our family isn't good at the spontaneous fights that
clear the air. better if we could.
It's careful but he's going to find a way to take offense. A better man
would laugh and admit.
14
- I've been remembering and wanting to thank you for gifts you gave me
when I was a kid. There were three. 20,000 leagues under the sea, a music
box and a wonderful yellow dress. I loved the bridesmaid dress and I loved
being invited into the wedding party. The music box was black enamel with
Chinese-looking painted figures. I kept the daily diary Oma had given me
in it and it was always on the chair next to the bed. 20,000 leagues under
the sea was a twelfth birthday gift I think? When I opened it I thought
it was a boy's book and wondered why you'd sent it but then I read it with
every particle of the delight you'd trusted me to feel - scenes of watching
undersea creatures through a plate glass window and walking on the undersea
floor with Captain Nemo - Captain Nemo's completely solitary independent
life roaming the sea's continents. How did you find the book? How did you
know I'd like it?
What she wrote back tells me I was too late.
15
- There was a game the three of us had just at the end of winter when
the snow had melted but nothing was green. The long grass on the far side
of our lane was flattened so we'd found in it an abandoned piece of wooden
sidewalk that looked to us like a raft. We'd stand on this raft and jump
off into the ocean. On the floor of the sea of course a treasure chest.
We'd rise to the surface again and again with what we'd been able to carry
away.
-
- When I turned twelve an auntie sent me a birthday gift in the mail,
a book, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. It seemed when I opened it
to be a boys' book and I wondered why she'd sent it, but then I was completely
captured by watching undersea creatures through plate glass and walking
on the undersea floor with Captain Nemo.
-
- This can branch in more than one way. One is that Captain Nemo's solitary
independent life roaming the sea's continents was an image of the self-sufficiency
I'd already learned and would continue in through my young life.
-
- One is thoughts about the child's metaphoric intuition that naturally
carried treasure from below. An imaginary sister. The sleigh box room filled
with wild roses. Springtime ritual processions around the house waving
branches in first leaf. The love book hidden under a floor. The story of
a planet Venus double wedding written eagerly on the backs of Christmas
cards.
-
- Another is the way it has come true. I write my son: 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. He replies: The Med, Andaman, Hawaiian Pacific,
North West Island, South African and Monzambique Indian, Egyptian Red.
16
I was on the home yard looking into the sky to
the northeast and saw far far away sharp peaks gleaming with sunlit snow.
Then a bit further south another shining peak. They appeared tiny but definite
as if through small clearings in cloud. I stood marveling at the unheard
of clarity that had let me see what I'd never known was there. I'd have
to leave to walk to school but I was saying to myself that later I'd write
what I'd seen.
I left the yard by the back road to the west, had
to choose a route that wouldn't be flooded. Was enjoying the way I was almost
running. Would I be walking all the way to La Glace, it seemed so. When
I arrived in town there was a man I was telling how athletic I'd been. I
was going to tell him about seeing the mountains. He put his arms around
me. Then we were crossing the road together. There were converging lanes.
The one in front of us was empty and we began to dart across but then a
rush of cars suddenly from the right, a speeding roadster. He was trying
to hold me back out of the way and I was rushing forward to the curb.
I woke happy. I've been feeling there can never anymore be something
new and especially haven't expected anything in the east. The mountains
seemed Buddhist.
-
Grey's anatomy these evenings for want of other. Meredith and
Christina. Christina says of Meredith She's at an eight in pain all the
time, he doesn't get her. Christina does because she's at an eight too.
Smart people with early trauma. I can rewatch the first seasons because
they work off that.
-
your arrival at 10 Monkland Avenue's back door.
You looked a bit tentative but (if you don't mind my saying so) quite lovely.
Your whole visit was in the nature of a dream come true, something I felt
in my depressed high school years would never happen.
-
When she comes in, cold paws and fresh air in her fur.
18
Posted the Mozart dream from the lake house yesterday. All day nobody.
Then Emilee who says like to everything. Then nothing. This morning Don
saying I love this.
-
Cassandra's memorial for her husband. I thought a small artist's event
of the kind I know. Wrong: full-on Jehovah's Witness funeral with Cass piously
wilted in a front row of the large congregation, sermon describing the dying
man's confidence in eternal life and a hideous video of smiling white and
brown people building their house in Jehovah's afterlife. I fled. Came home
and looked up the doctrine. Women can't have leadership roles. Don't allow
your kids to go to university. Diligently study the Watchtower, which
issues from a central office in New York State. Shun anyone who leaves the
church. Don't celebrate Christmas or Easter because they have pagan roots.
Don't do yoga or meditate. Don't join sports teams. Don't vote. Don't have
non-JW friends. Invented in its present form by some guy in 1931.
23
Ruins: attachment loss / betrayal of early love, my dad wrecking my ability
to know attack in the moment. Male blanking. Social discountedness.
The ruins set up compensatory temptations, Roy's power from impulse,
mentat impressiveness, seduction, desperate jumping,
Gifts given by trauma have to be distrusted. Not refused but tested.
25
There was difficult honorable effort - is that the way to see it now,
instead of the confusion, pain and failure that were foreground at the time.
- What was the effort -
- What were its means -
- How did it fail -
- How did it succeed -
26
Overestimating people weakened me. It's an imperception.
There has been so much effort of coming through and resolving, successful
in its own terms and yet.
28
Reposted sweetwater mountains.doc. Three paragraphs, a strong
little movie.
March 2
Marveling at the welter of questions I kept suspended. At eighteen the
instinct to choose a triple major, at twenty stepping into Europe without
money, at 21 making it philosophy, psychology and English, which it has
been ever since, visual culture added in an unstudied way. It was a kind
of valor. Now I resolve most. It's called edging out not edged out. What
I was doing not what was done to me.
- What assumptions and abilities enabled.
- Which weaknesses and errors delayed.
- What has been achieved.
- By what means.
- What hasn't.
Long messenger conversation last night with Jenn.
- what I wanted from my mom was something like understanding that my
circumstances and possibilities were different than hers and that I was
managing hard things on my own terms. it wd have needed more scope than
she had.
-
- am remembering a moment when I found luke at 18 months old in his little
footed sleeper suit walking along the top of a five foot wall
-
- (Was it five feet? Shockingly high but I can't see it now.)
- the worst wd have been to screech and rush over and ruin his concentration
-
- I'm laughing because later on he's jumped out of airplanes
-
- then there was the time he played hookey from kindergarten with his
friend from grade one and drew a map of where they'd wandered through the
neighbourhood
- approximate map, with footprints
-
- they're charming people, and kind. and lucid.
3
erotic friendship
the question of inside and outside
how to live with the uncon
an ethic for art
dangers and implications of drug experience
attachment pain
more consciousness of disqualification
social effect
6
He nailed it. He nailed his landing. He gave
us a masterclass on how to die.
Oliver Sacks: his own life on Mubi.
I'm 78.
Greg, Emilee, Paul, Freya, Indra, Adam, Mafalda, Don, Sue, Val, Jenn,
Sam, Jim, other Jim, Kate, Campbell. - Always have to do that though it's
pathetic.
And not: Luke, Row, Tom, Judie, the Mary there used to be.
Reposted Nature Boy with the 6am photo from the motel. All day
I liked the company of the story.
A man called George who doesn't know how to prune fruit trees came to
give me an estimate. We'll do it on Wednesday.
7
These mornings I wake from dreams I can't remember. I was somewhere and
then I'm not. Sometimes a mood and just a scrap. This morning I
was with someone I loved but couldn't have. We were seeing a hand-written
name. I recognized it but did he. It seemed he did understand it was someone
I'd loved earlier. I said a lost person.
I now have very little will to live.
Sacks was so singular, there was so much hardship, and then he triumphed
so completely. A lover at last in his seventies. A table crowded with smart
people crying when he says he's going to die. His memoir handed to him across
that table. Odd people and estimable neurologists who'd made friends with
him, interviewed for the film. So many smart people.
Why have I come to so little!
I worked but I didn't push as hard as he did. I lived great pain but
less than he did.
Tuesday morning an open sky pale all over.
-
NKYR piece about a philosopher who when she falls in love gets into philosophical
questions about it.
If you're a philosopher you don't need privacy
because you're an embodiment of your theory at every moment
where philosophy begins - with a certain anxiety
about how to live the life that is yours
people can embark on a new way of being a person,
that they can't yet see or understand, a process she calls aspiration
her instinct was to trust that initial experience
loneliness philosophical work, a way of sorting
out what one human can be to another to be together in a way that makes
full use of another's mind
you owe them the existence of the ideal in you.
You owe them your projection.
truce, the point at which cutting both their
losses and their hopes
For me it was more like, meeting ---- was the
experience of finally not going to waste.
something like: imagine being with somebody
where it would never occur to you to say anything that isn't true
preparation for the time when you won't need
another person in order to think
there's no other time when you could understand
this thing. Devastating problems in your life can interest you even as they
are causing you intense pain. "I'm, like, NO, this is my chance to
understand it."
Rachel Aviv profile.
What do I know about that. Context of the TCR & J time. Early Tom.
8
I hold grudges and write people off. Isn't that making too sour a finish,
should I hold onto best moments instead. I wouldn't forget the worst but
the best were accomplishments I shouldn't abandon. - I'd have to take the
value of the moment as it was for me rather than what it was in actuality.
Mary: sometimes an at-home straight-across even tone of comfortable friendship
- is that the way to say it. Her rectitude and sanity then. It would have
been when I was still at home but sometimes years later we could still fall
into it on the phone.
Ed: the time we'd had a Saturday picking rocks and I said 'I feel like
I've done a good day's work' and he said 'You have'.
Jam: early times in her Stanley Park flat and sitting on my corridor
floor elated in talk. Later even in pain when we'd see together on a walk.
Cheryl the moment we said goodbye on the street.
Trudy when she could feel a story I told her.
Paul K the liveliness of our talk, which felt so complete I didn't need
to write anything down.
Ian - scrambled eggs with fresh-ground pepper is the best I can do.
Roy - listening to Music for Zen meditation in 4 St Albans, happiness
the morning after Luke had been conceived.
Margaret - holding her in a corridor feeling more depth in my touch.
Louie - moment in the red armchair two bodies in one field.
-
I snipped tallest new whips off the Early Italian, George and I pruned
the Cox, Greengage, Mirabelle and Hargrand. He didn't know more than I did,
sometimes less, but he made the cuts. The plums look better. Does the apricot?
Maybe not worse. Lot of what look like flower buds on end twigs. Morning
frozen like iron but then two warm hours. We liked working together. I liked
working. Now my knee is sore. Vase of apricot twigs, see if they bloom.
9
I don't have will to live because I can't walk.
And because I'm ugly now.
-
Working through the Edged out time is melancholy. Finish it and
get out of there. What does finish it mean.
10
What I was working on 1975-1985. I came out of those years excluded,
defeated, humiliated, sad, but I'd been watchful, I'd studied and kept records,
I'd used pain to work. I've sorted the weaknesses that got me hurt and then
listed what I was doing about them. I had to go on working with them afterward
but in those ten years I'd put myself into circumstances that forced me
to know them.
11
- oh bruce
- medicine for sad bones
12
- I keep doing this, jumping to contexts where no one knows or can imagine
anything about me. Carrying it all with me on my own.
-
- Error of looking for power rather than recovery.
13
- if you're looking for love / honey I'm /
- tougher than the rest /
Full sail with the raft page.
-
there are different kinds of dominance/leadership
and ways to establish it. Offering compelling ideas and not being a joiner,
working tirelessly with students to clarify thinking - there are ways to
establish a kind of dominance maybe subversive, maybe more effective
I posted ravens.doc about status competition and there's Jim being
nice to me, saying I may not think I was dominant at Goddard but I was.
14
I've posted hegel and quantum physics.doc and a photo of the Phenomenology's
black cover rubbed and ragged with just the right quantum-like sketch
I've doodled over in ballpoint. Another kind of outing and something my
autobiog should include for sure.
-
Three clumps of snowdrops, three clumps of one-inch tulips, first red
nubs of rhubarb. Time change last Sunday.
15
Onions, brokkali, sweet peas, snap peas on the bedroom rad.
16
What it was like with them. What it was like to be in my thirties.
Sorting what they did from what I made of it.
When I was younger the sense of magic leading that has abandoned me now
- that I have abandoned by not being available.
BK asking why I've quit. How to not be brutal. "My work just has
to be what it already is, I think." In other words what you'd want
to add would be at cross-purposes with it. That's it, and the difficulty
of saying has been something else, anger of disappointment, which is not
fair to give.
18
Yesterday I found ten hazelnuts fallen under their bush. This morning
a robin.
Am posting the High Bar fast in three parts with the compiled canyon
photo and a map.
-
Actually, the development is not going to the
left, but split in two, with two unevenly populated distributions, one pushing
to 90 with the majority of people, one pushing to 115 with a minority. Cause
is assortative mating and difference in procreation on different IQ levels.
There is no way to shift to the left other than eugenetics because IQ is
the psychological individual difference with the highest heritability, about
.80; there is no way to 'boost IQ' by educational means.
part 2
time remaining volume 12: 2023 january-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
|