time remaining 12 part 2 - 2023 march-may  work & days: a lifetime journal project 19 March The conductor about Marin Alsop. A bit on the National about a sports bar that only runs women's sports. Seeing its interviewed boy-girl owner I realized I miss lesbians. I don't make friends here because I don't know any lesbians. It's a deprivation. I don't want to sleep with them but I want the freer air of their company. 20 I woke in doubt about part 3, where I'm at High Bar with Tom. Stared at it and added a paragraph to make it right. Something I hadn't quite realized about the first time I camped above the canyon is that the fast turned out to be about more than one thing. When I got home afterward is when I started the PhD. Posted it and almost instantly a red heart, Freya, whose dad grew up somewhere west of the Big Bar ferry, who is married to the boy who was nine in 1994, and who then wasn't born yet, another kind of loop. Rowen's lovely being a long-range outcome of the desperate ten years. - Dream of such confusion. I was trying to write a sort of IQ test. There was a lot of noise. I'd answered the easy questions first but then there was a section with longer questions I couldn't understand at all. Then when it seemed to be over I was trying to assemble the sheets and not finding them on the table among piles of other sheets. Are confused dreams an early sign of Alzheimers? 21 young self and raft sheets mostly done. I keep thinking of sending them to Cheryl. Doubtfully persistently. 22 I wake at four, damp, fast heartbeat. Foot senses a weight at the bottom of the bed. I nudge it just to feel her company. At the moment she's warm against my shin after energetically digging between her toes. She's had her hour in the cold. When I opened the door for her I stood for a moment peering up at the black to know whether there were stars, meaning sun later. I saw my breath. Has that been unusual? What it is to sleep in fur. It looks so cozy it always touches me to see. When she comes in from outside I can breathe cold air from her fur. Earth if she's been lying in it. When I seem to smell cigarette smoke I've wondered whether she's been unfaithful. - Lee and I organized the garage while Kathy cleaned house. Took out all the wood except stakes, sorted the heap of stuff thrown at the end of the room, swept up what mice had done to styrofoam and birdseed. Set up the sawhorses with a door over them to make a table so I can have a system now, tools above, recycle bins below. 2 hours. Afterward I almost couldn't lift my right leg into the jeep. Lee was coughing, wouldn't wear a mask. It was doing him harm and I was paying him $20 an hour. 23 I woke at 3:30am recovered it seemed except that I can't work, meaning distaste for any scrap of it. Scent of white hyacinth next to me. - But hers had been a vigilant, alert, totally expressive dysfunctionality. 24 It was about five. Patch walked over my chest. I got up in the dark to pee. I must have just turned and pushed the flush lever. Was suddenly hit as if by a wind, buffeted so hard I thought, am I dying, I'd rather not die on the toilet. I held onto consciousness with my will, leaned on the wall beside me, put my head down. Was thinking I should make sure Patch's bowl is always full enough so it can last her till Kathy finds me on a Wednesday. My head seemed to be steadying. I could creep back to the bed to lie down. What's my heart doing. Pulse weak but steady. BP high. 26 Yesterday I'd posted the wood Lee carried out of the garage. By afternoon most of it was gone but I saw a woman hesitantly pulling at what was left. I knew her kind, young-retired, honest, sturdy, probably unmarried, probably a lesbian. I went out to pull the pile apart for her. She said her house had been flooded and all her garden beds washed away. She took almost everything that was left. We talked about moulding boards and the nice rounded edges on wood in old houses. She said she liked my house. I said, Want to see it? Took her through, showed her the lovely joinery. She exclaimed. When we'd come around the corner in the verandah and I opened the door onto the red armchair next to a tableful of flowers - red tulips, yellow primula, white hyacinth, blue grape hyacinth, all wrapped in the arms of a wide-spreading scented geranium - she as if gasped. She kept saying It's made my day. - It was warm enough at noon to go out without a jacket. I cleaned up the hazelnut bed including its sidewalk edge. Found four nuts under the second bush, dug up the black iris that had been suffering next to cement. Patch was doing cat things here and there in the sun. 27 Took the jeep through the carwash. 28 Ate curried chicken soup from across the road on the porch, used a chair to sit clearing dead stuff off the west-side perennial strip. Lot more tulips up. 29 Patch was across the floor sitting with her mouse - mouse? - tiny thing, vole? It was still alive but done for. I fetched an oven mitt and tossed it outside. She went after it, seized it and ran up the steps carrying it in her mouth. Something touching about that. It was hers, her own, something that belonged to her. She wanted it inside. - Antonis this morning saying he loves wet pines.jpg. He's on the list of followers but his site has such traffic I'd guessed he doesn't. This morning I've posted a paragraph from 2016 with the photo of Granite Ave at 6am in June. I'm doing something different, posting a bit of writing with a photo that is an emotional match not a subject match. I haven't thought of my photos in that photo-art way but the match has made me see their feel. - I was lying awake at 3:30 thinking of the teaching years, that they gave me access to singular lives. Maggie and Logan, Susan, Zach, Jody, Todd, Michael the policeman. 31 Time to go back to Theory's practice. Start from the back. Of each section ask what is its point - point? Move? Post sections formatted with photos. Get readers. Think about how to publish it later, how to carve it down further for book publication. Maybe it's more than one volume? Break it into sections. Make it clear why I had to take Tom on: I had to experience myself handling what had stopped me till then. Fear of men, neglect by men, bravado evading attachment. What it took for a person with these weaknesses, this damage, to get to the work she sensed she could do. She needed to get to deeper roots than many others do. As a love story it doesn't end well and as a work story it does and doesn't. It's a love story that doesn't cut corners. As a work story it's a process story, it shows how work is done. - Forgive me for vanishing. I've gone back to working on Theory's practice, ie the story of writing Being about at the same time as working on the weaknesses that had forestalled being able, by struggling in relation to a difficult man, those two things much entwined.   I hope it can be useful to more people than just me.   I hope so too but I've seen in our correspondence that making it useful to more people will take more than I've been able to give or show so far. I'm thinking that maybe Theory's practice, if I can finish it, could lead people more slowly step-by-step through what is unusual/difficult in what I say.   For instance here:   I see that when you're speaking of structures, you're not speaking just of (consciously constructed) selves, but of what emerges out of conscious and unconscious processes. I'm hoping that we can go further into that. For example, what exists in the conscious structure already? Linguistic representations? I imagine conscious representations sitting close to a surface, while the structures that sit outside of consciousness are more deeply set, more primordial, perhaps. Does that resonate? And when you access the structures that haven't been consciously apparent, what is the sensation?   When I read that I have to see that I don't mean what you mean by either 'structure' or 'representation', and no quick explanation can alter that, so I can't answer your questions in your terms. It would take some other way. - So today I knew how to reply to her last two without having to say what I didn't want to say: we can't collaborate because you don't get it and you don't know you don't get it. Our heads are incommensurable. I've said it cautiously, softly, many times from the beginning and now I have a way to say it more directly but without blame. the time you allow for the frame to linger until something happens ... How do you monitor your relation to time passing during the process of shooting?   In editing. By feel. There are things happening before something happens, it takes time to arrive where the shot is.   Alone here now on the island for the next two months   Let me know how it is. If you like. April 1 When did I count the pages. Started working on it early 2019, quit at the end of April 2022 a year ago. About 420,000 words. How many volumes is that. 3 at 140,000, 4 at 105,000. 5 at 84,000. What wd be logical sections. Wolf Hall 151,000 words 40-59 is about 100,290   1 the plan - 20 kantian stories 21 leaving the land - 39 fleeing 40 the long table - 59 at 2 on the 22nd   3 volumes? no 4   1 the plan - 15 he visits again 16 metaphor paper - 29 we break up 30 introduction - 45 scared 46 congeneris - 59 at 2 on the 22nd 2 Since the swoon - the mighty buffet - a week ago I haven't been quite steady in my head. When I lie down or when I'm quiet enough to feel myself it's as if the fabric of consciousness is wobbling slightly, enough to scare. 3 Going out and digging couch grass out of edges helped. Did more of that today and then the sky darkened and there was a little snowstorm. It's such a delayed spring that doing just a bit every couple of days has made enough order for now. - I'm puzzled by her feeling for mice. I'd been working in the garden, had left the door open, and when I came in she was crouched across the room staring at the crack under the bookcase. When she saw me she looked at me over her shoulder uttering sharp cries that sounded like pleas. I thought oh she has a mouse she can't reach and wants me to do something. I did what I could with a long ruler but maybe the mouse had already gone? She stayed crouching where she was all afternoon. Then ten minutes ago I saw her next to the fireplace with a baby mouse barely able to crawl. She wasn't attacking it, she was herding it, watching it. Another time I found her just lying quietly on a mouse to keep it from running away. Last week there was the spry little mouse she was chasing back and forth from one side of the kitchen to the other. When it escaped out the door she chased after it so slowly that it got away under the fence. What I mean is that her relation to mice is ardent rather than fierce. It can look like love. I think she must be finding her mice by the compost and bringing them in. 4 Joe Way asked me to relay to you that each morning, in the wee hours, as he passes your house on the way to work he sees light on, admires the garden and wonders who lives there. Miriam. Had been meaning to copy that from Messenger, just for the thought of a man with that name who has been driving past in the dark seeing a light. - Wondering whether the swoony wobble is because of a stronger electrical field from the new Telus router. It could be but the big swoon was a week earlier. 5 Indra's judgment so satisfying. She instantly but exclusively loves the best of the photos. [wet pines.jpg, manzanita.jpg, kitchen window 8am.jpg] Don ignores them if they don't have writing. 6 When I raised the blind at 4am two deer walking north in the middle of the street. Were you eating my tulips I said in quite a friendly tone. I then thought to go out and turn on the sprinkler. It's windless and won't be later. If I do it before they're up Doug and Gail won't freak. 7 a unified field theory of music what we perceive as pitch and rhythm are just different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Pitch is simply fast rhythm. Rhythm is simply slower pitch. This was a musical epiphany for me. Ever since that in my search to create enveloping musical spaces and places most of my music has encompassed three, four, or more different tempos simultaneously. While we were working a major geomagnetic storm occurred. In Fairbanks we had dense cloud cover and snow so we didn't see any aurora activity. Yet listening inside The Place we could hear that storm." It takes six hours for the complex web of tempos and rhythms to complete one cycle. The music encompasses a ten-octave range (extending above and below the range of human hearing) and a total of ninety polyphonic voices. The resulting fields of sound saturate the air so much that it's often difficult to distinguish one tone from another. They tend to meld together into rich, ambiguous sonorities in which the higher tones sound like harmonics of the lower. The timbres are clear and slightly breathy, like human voices mixed with bowed metal or glass." I imagined the whole of Dark Waves as a single complex slowly changing sonority, a vast roiling wave of sound in which everything flows into everything else. From John Luther Adams' 2020 autobiography. I've edited his text some. 8 Startled talking with Rob last night. We were zipping along energetically, as we do, when he said something about Russia. He was pro Putin. Ukraine is being used by the US in a long strategy to contain Russia he said. That's plausible - I've been uneasy with the NYT's coverage of the war - but he was disregarding Putin's record on civil liberties. I asked where he was getting his take. He named a lot of men I've never heard of who comment online. I said I can agree that the US is bad but that doesn't make Putin good. He went on to talk about the US plotting regime change - they pay people to protest etc, they should leave cultures alone to evolve slowly. I was saying but women, you have no feminist analysis. Without a fight, because of how men are, cultures would never change in relation to women. What about the women taking off their headscarves in Iran, do you think that is American interference? Whether Americans support it or not it needs to happen. He was so vigorous in his pitch that I was impressed at the same time as some rattled. Was thinking of my journalist ex-boyfriend who's been a rah-rah American with zero interest in international politics and also realizing I mostly couldn't reply because I don't know anything. My sources - New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian - are they all obedient to some political master I don't know about? And/or is Rob down the rabbit hole he fell into with Catherine about the trucker protest? He's saying Trump was right about a lot of things and his present prosecution is ridiculous. I said they should get Trump on anything they can, whatever they can do to keep him from being president again. At the same time I've noticed in the NYT the same kind of our-side-is-winning slant about Trump as there is in relation to the war, what their readers want to hear. 9 Every morning the first sip of hot tea. Cream and agave. I make sure it's hot. - Working this morning a wave of faintness. I look up and wait for a bit. It happens again. I get up and do things in the kitchen, take out the compost, empty the wheelbarrow. Sit down and read an Adam Gopnik piece. Try to work. It's still there. What to do. Do you think it's the inner ear thing     yes Will it go away     no Am I in danger of dying     no Is it arrhythmia related     no Does it mean I can't work     no Will it be better when I work outside more     YES When it happens I test my brain by looking at the room. There it is, steady and clear, no different. Do you think I should go to the doctor     yes He won't know anything, just send me for tests     yes Then fuss and no remedy     yes Can I finish Theory's practice     yes Should I     YES 11 What an unheard-of book it is. The bookwork. The neuroscience. The candour. Something edging into what they, someone, would call mysticism. - Rereading The mirror and the light staggered by how much better she writes than I do. How did she get to that perfectly fluid grace. It's constant, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, sensory exactness, shining invention, mirror and light. 2009, 2012, 2020. So odd a body. Did she create herself that way, bulk of a barrel, eyes like a falcon, dead of a stroke at 70. I've been remembering clothes I haven't thought of for how many years - yesterday a dress in shiny blue and green print, just now a straight skirt with a soft nap - a flannel? - brown with crossing blue lines. I probably made it. Saw it clearly just a minute ago but now it's gone. - I thought maybe the light-headedness was too much CBD so I've stopped it. Am not as wobbly but there's still something - haven't known what to call it - a thinness of my head's inner air - sometimes an uncertainty, am I starting to fade, do I need to catch myself. 12 I've gone through 40-59 backwards paring what I can and now have to go through from the top looking for repetition, main points, bare stretches. It's called The long table. - Looking at BK's reply thinking what can I do for her. Scraping for smart questions to ask she's all blurry, abstract, ungrounded, nothing I can reply to in her terms. Then when she describes listening to her house and yard through headphones she goes momentarily clear and eager though still tugged offside in a next sentence. What I want to say is I like your quote from Die Maur. That's the direction. I think you'll need more than two months. You're sensitive and maybe your education and context have spooked you so you feel you need to be larger than you are. Don't allow any arty thoughts, just be where you are. Just perceive and feel. Digging clay and making excavated figures with it was a good idea - perfect. 13 Talking to Luke last night - listening to Luke for the pleasure of his voice - I did tell one thing, I described last light. I've more and more felt it as summary of the time we're in. Across a dark plain is a mountain's bare flank. As the sun sinks pink light on its flank fades upward so slowly its motion can't be seen. "You know it's happening but you can't see it happening." When the last of its glow reaches the ridge and is gone mountain and sky are one darkness. Two things have happened during the wait. One is that near the lower edge of the frame a bird at a middle distance has flown steadily straight across from right to left. The other is that hidden in the dark rumble of sound a bell tolls.   When I made the film I didn't feel end times as I do now. I remember standing on the bare acre with the jeep and tripod waiting to catch the moonrise. The man who lived across the road came to scold me for driving onto his land and stayed to talk. When I noticed the pink light fading upward the camera was already set up.   December 31st 2013 Last light.mov. I like the track - it's moonrise distant traffic stripped of everything above 600 and offset a bit on R and L tracks so it becomes the sound of the mountains, dark dense standing and surging air with a song in it, a suspended chord embedded in its fiber. I like the way intensity shifts from side to side to make a surrounding. An acceleration at the end. The whole piece is 7 min - slowly fading - may not have the rate of fade yet. Shaun Inouye got it enough to feel it: But it is her seven-minute musing on dusk and duration, last light, that is, in my estimation, the most persuasive instancing of the artist's undiminished talent and intellect. It was filmed in Borrego Springs, California in the autumn of 2013, and consists of a single, static shot of a mountain range at sundown. Depth is accentuated by a saddle in the mountain, which separates the barren landscape into foreground and background. Gradually, as time elapses, the waning sunlight dims the ridge in the distance, until the dimensions of the image collapse into a single, darkened plane. It is an open-air study of almost imperceptible change, a slow-motion film in real time. Although you are cognizant in the moment of the subtle shifts in colour and contrast, it is not until the end of the cycle that you grasp the transformation that has occurred. Yet it is also, like Trapline, a record of small, anti-spectacular events, peripheral to the conceit but carrying with them unobvious beauty and emotion: a stray bird flitting by; the soft distortion of desert heat; the faint chiming of bells nestled somewhere in the soundtrack. It demonstrates the profundity of Ellie Epp's art, now as then. I would be content to watch it, and Trapline, for the rest of my days. I can now wonder at the leading that found a statement of what would become urgently felt only ten years later. - The backs of my hands scared me yesterday. Arteries were standing out under skin that seems much thinner than it was and the blood looked green. I thought is that a look of death. - It doesn't need much more work     yes 14 Last dream before I woke, traveling past a rocky cliff seeing water higher than it had been, then passing through unexplained complete darkness, then seeing the field south of our yard flooded all the way to the base of the house on its little rise. We drove on, saw rocks piled across the road just before the bridge, were detoured north. Wondering whether I'm seriously ill, the fading-out sensation every day though less and more intense through the hours. It feels as if the winter has been too long this year, has worn me down. I'd be alright if I make it to summer weather. Do you think I'm seriously ill     no Is something in the house poisoning me     no Narrowing of veins into my head     no - Felt swoony. Warm enough to work outside, weeding and dividing bulbs in the apricot bed, not swooning, knee dicey but holding. Purity Feeds starting to have plants. Bought seed potatoes and set them to chit. When I went to turn off the sprinkler a passing woman "You have the nicest house and the nicest garden, I think the nicest in town." Friday 7pm, cars one after another pulling up outside the window, AA meeting at the Uniteds. 15 What book structure - if it's 3 books I can put back more liveliness. The golden west before he moves north 0-17 ** 18-39 The long table 40-59 20 Cold night but by 5:30 an open sky already lit. Patch along my shin breathing slowly from her belly. Some days of work done in the garden. West fence bed cleaned, N fence beds cleaned and dug, compost turned, four of the short vegetable beds fluffed, plum lawn raked, 10 bags of mushroom manure spread. Yesterday I seeded tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber. Onions, peas, sweetpeas, brokkali well up. Yellow tulips blooming, others 8". Red paeony nubs. Odd Tyler, blank Abby, will they be more interesting when they get comfortable. - Jimmy Perez. In my last little dream he was standing at the verandah window looking in at me. I'd been thinking of his manly quiet kindness, the way he sits down with criminals and asks them to tell about themselves. His manner with the odd and lost. He's intelligent, has natural authority with staff, committed heart for a community. Studies faces, gets a quick but careful take. Hates to be lied to, shouts, bangs a table. Speaks broad Scots at times, depending on who he's speaking to I think. His double-breasted peacoat always worn with the collar up and hands in his pockets gives him a look of lonely containment I like to see. - Odd how real David McAra can be to me. Thinking of Jimmy Perez I was feeling David and I might want to fuck every time we were in a bed together. - There's the sun just over the hill glaring through fir branches surprisingly far north. 6:27. This is the sort of thing that happens: there are two of them at a table talking about disabled people, someone's child, a man with a steel hand. I take a deep shock from it, am sent away into painful aloneness because they are speaking as if they themselves are safe outside that category. That's two kinds of loneliness: they've sent me into a category of people considered unwhole; and second, I'm left alone with what I never stop seeing, their own deformity. Your deformities. The unacknowledged disabilities.   Vancouver March 1992 - So clear. Posted today, see what happens. - Balsam poplar scent beside me. The Harison's yellow at the south end of Garcia is gone, was already gone, and now, since the flood, its trailer park is gone too, dry meadow with power outlet posts and two deer browsing behind wire mesh. I couldn't get to the river to cut branches, construction dust rising behind a berm, but there were a couple of trees next to the street. 21 What happened was very little. Tyler, Abby and Tammy in the garden today slow people needing to be shown. I worked cold from 1 to 5. What will it cost. 22 I go to the ocean and wade into the shore break.   Will you talk to me about the beach          Check out the unconscious meaning Wanting to go into feeling          Yes   Then, at home, put on a Gram Parsons collection from the library and sit transcribing 1961, Frank and Ellie parked under the flashing neon CAFÉ sign. Cut 19 in Parsons is Love Hurts, with Emmy Lou. That ache of the real thing. A couple of cuts later Frank and Ellie are sitting at the counter inside the café. He puts a quarter in the jukebox. The song that comes on is Love Hurts. I check online: Everly Brothers 1960.   Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars, any heart not tough or strong enough, to take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain.   -   Gym. I like coming damp onto the sidewalk in first dark. Traffic lights' gumdrop glow.   San Diego July 2004 - After the day of work so heavy and sore I begin to wonder how soon I won't be able to do what I need to do in a house. Somewhere in the broken night I was in San Diego walking toward a hotel. Would I go to the Golden West? Would I look for Tom? Then there he was talking to someone next to the stream of people on the street. I'd passed but turned back. He wasn't glad to see me, quite blank, but I gave him my heavy bag to carry and we went on together toward the hotel. Then one of the usual dream passages of endless walking through a city. There were new overpasses that sometimes confused or scared me - levels, turns, high narrow passages without a rail. I said, I'm not going to bug you and I'm not staying long. Later just as I was waking a flash vision of Tom standing in Jimmy Perez' black pea coat and a clerical collar. 23 Rained during the night, when I opened the door for Patch I saw the street is wet. What I'm trying to do now is hard - I've gone through AG12-19 looking for bits to set up what comes next - that I can use if I make it 3 volumes. There aren't a lot. Now finding that AG20 is full of long passages. Should I call the book the workbook/larger self. 24 Working well on the before page after some days off. 25 Late morning nap quite a long dream. I was visiting Sean - Dr Sean from SD - surprised that he was cuddling me on the sofa, arms and legs wrapped, and telling me he has a son. At the end of the dream, people at the door so I was going to leave but he said stay for dinner. Then I had to deal with his company, three neutral-seeming women, one of whom was black. I saw them carefully but couldn't get any animation out of them. I'm writing it because it's unusual now to remember a daytime dream - or any dream - in this amount of detail and because the sense of being with Sean has lasted till evening. I liked him and was glad to be with him again but was puzzled he was being so intimate. - He has vanished off FB so I can't check how he is. Warm and bright this aft so I weeded and cautiously pushed down with the shovel to pry up solid tangles in the porch platform edge bed. Now wincing around on my left knee. Noticing quite lately my balance is worse too, I can waver even just taking a step in the kitchen. I've thought of the seven years I've been here as all the same but this winter I keep noticing I'm helpless in more ways. 26 April 30 2016 yes beginning the eighth year. I was 71. - How to get into Theory's 1. So many sheets. 27 Setting up Theory 1 is seeming beyond me. Maybe this morning I have to just leave it. - Orange Princess tulip a glorious double with green-maroon streaks showed up in the apricot bed - I kept looking at it uneasy it was the wrong color for the bed - dug it up to move it to the nectarine bed where there will be other oranges - a scent! like English wallflowers. Now in a wine glass next to me while the leaves get used to their new spot. - Small sprinkler whirring where it can reach the west end of the porch pad, the nectarine bed, the rose beds, delphiniums, a lot of tulips. It shatters water into a drifting mist. Roses along the fence all look dead. Someone said water them, the spring has been so dry. I've had a soaker on them all day. 28 Instant dislike when I try to check into Theory 1 sheets. I literally felt your mail land in my pocket just before the notice we are still faster than the net Luke. Trying to organize garden helpers for the weekend. Inside bits to plant out now that it's warm, peas, sweet peas, shallots, brokkali. - With Abby after school completely planted the new iris bed, placed soaker, mulched. Back row: black white yellow mauve black white yellow mauve black. Middle row: Yvonne's black and leftover white. Front: small mauve. N side of fence: random along with what was there. E patch also random both sides of the fence. Flies suddenly because it's hot. 29 What do I guess about him. Between them they made a mess that sent shock waves into the future. He would have to be afraid he's responsible for wrecking his kids. Is he? The sins are visited - much more than visited - certainly. But how can he be, if he can't be responsible for what he is? I said I thought it was alright in anguish of responsibility to hand it to something larger. The larger thing wd have to be whatever made us. We were - I mean me too - nodes in transmission. We have to be accountable in the sense of taking account, feeling account. That seems to be a human obligation. Not to be self-crippled by it though, that's useless.   It's too small a view of what any human is - isn't it? There's a vast network of causation. So what is required. To make whatever amends can be made, whatever repair can be made, give whatever information one has and go on living in joy as well as grief.   When I think of the age I am and my old friends are there's a sensation I could say of unreality - but try to be more specific - it's a sensation of transparency, something like that, as if we've thinned out, are partly dissolved into the great river of generation.   And there stands the cliff such a heap of time. Changing color. It's subtle. It's not green, it's a quiet intensification.   Ashcroft March 2016 I posted that and boom, nothing. So afterward I posted orange tulips in a wine glass to gather them up again. But it only gathers the women so today I post something grandly objective, michael benedikt.doc. [Didn't work. I've probably driven Don off.] - People on Brit TV always saying they're excited. It seems one of the few things they know how to say. - A few blossoms on the apricot, no bees. Manitoba maple's leaves are out. I went to see Yvonne because she's seemed to be on her own. Her lovely Frank died this winter. She said it was unexpected but they had five years. We were on the street next to her big old RV. 30 So today I posted the letter to Katie on sex and democracy. - Suddenly a woman living in Courtenay who has been reading my posts sent there by Ian Brown. Ian Brown! I've had intense retroactive distaste for him but now here's a man I don't recognize, who it seems has dropped his pretensions and found his level. A woman praising me who will have to have heard a story in which I ruthlessly dumped him, without hearing the story of how he hounded me to desperation with his jealousy, envy, insecurity, blame. Her note needs to tell me too much about herself all at once, what is that. - And then a completely lovely Youtube session of an old man playing piano with his son on drums. - But then I look up the account of me in his memoir and find him inventing dialogue so badly that I'm back to nothing but revulsion. Have blocked both of them. May 1 Ambivalence. The foolishnesses of guilt. In those days not knowing ambivalence was always going to have to be the way. With Tom thirty years later I didn't think I owed feeling guilty about it. - Light rain, soft scented air. 2 I've put Don off impatient that so little ever comes back from him but now there are posts I can't imagine anyone understanding. - The season is partly catching up: alyssum, moss phlox, clove currants, yellow Iceland poppies, red strawberry and pink gravel tulips, apricot blooming, anjou but not flemish beauty, cowslips, * under the grape, early vegetables planted BUT NOT strawberries, violets, Whitney or pear tulips, white Icelands, Roses that look dead: Lark Ascending - apricot Darcey Bussell Roses still alive: 10 elite, 6 hardy Litchfield Angel - Golden Wings - Henri Martin - E end of first short bed Alnwick - middle of the first short bed Munstead Wood - w end of first short bed Molineux own root Y east end 2nd bed Winchester Cathedral own root W west end 2nd bed Generous Gardener - S end front rose bed - pink - S - leaves Sharifa Asma - Wollerton Old Hall W - Kakwa - Harison's yellow - May 31 - along E fence Therese Bugnet Blanc double de Coubert Kaitlyn Ainsley Liis's single pink rugosa r. woodsii from next door 3 I said there's such a lot of stuff   She said Follow your breath down into your body, see what it feels   I said a shaking around the heart   She said show and sound it out further   Jerking and loud breath I could begin to hear with it   Alright now just let the chair hold you. Is something resisting?   Yes there's a little worry   Just put it somewhere aside for now. There's nothing you need to be doing   I think: yes I've been so busy. My shoulders settle   She says What was that?   I can't remember   Alright come back. Before you come back touch your thumb and forefinger together. Whenever you do that you can go back to where there's nothing to do   It has been so turbulent I say   It, or you?   I have been so turbulent   After your thesis?   It has been mostly another story   Why doesn't she ask what the story is?   I say there seems to be one thing I am not allowed to talk about   She doesn't ask what   Silence. I will have to say. Begin. Begin again, halting. It's something about sex. Specifically how I feel about young men   If you were imagining it what part of you doesn't want you to talk about it?   I can tell you what I imagine you think. You think it's unreal, it's a deflection from something else. I have the two voices myself. The one says it's unreal, the other says it's the realest thing in the world   Imagine if you had your desire, what would you have?   I dreamed that once. There was a man with black hair and black eyes. He was bold. Bold and warm. I said in my dream, If I've got him I have everything I need   Be him. What are you?   Centred. Straight up the middle   Say, I am   I sit bolt upright   What do you see when you see people?   I see them   She's laughing, she's lit up, Look at you! How did you do that? You look beautiful. How do you keep all that energy banked?   But why do I think it's a man?   Oh why - there's no end to why. She's still laughing, crossing herself, meaning to give me a blessing. Go and do thou likewise.   Do I really have to go?   She shows her watch, it's two.   July 1993 There's Joyce, there she is. 4 Trying to find something to post this morning, such a distaste. If I don't work, what? Loneliness as bad as 15 cigarettes a day, "accelerated aging". Alright, should I talk about this. Ian's uneasiness about my limp. What his mother would feel about a gimpy leg - his word. I was beautiful in those days. I was good with his mom, I drew her out. These two separate things, my beauty and liveliness as felt and the unrealized uneasy discounting by other people, always, always. I can be grateful to myself for holding my own view of myself and I can look backward at any of my relations and see them as undermined in ways I didn't notice. When I've had to notice I've been shocked. What am I seeing. Something like one layer over another, the bright translucent layer where I live, the life I am, lying above the irrelevant darker layer where they are. - Sparse bloom on greengage, mirabelle and early Italian. Lot of lilies of the valley in the grape's bed. 6 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital on Euston Road till 1976 Coppetts Wood Isolation Hospital in Muswell Hill till 2000 University College Hospital on Gower Street 7 "On the last day we will not ascend from the place of the world, but will remain as in our own country and go home into another world, into another principle of another quality ... This earth will be like a crystalline sea, where all the wonders of the world will be seen, all entirely transparent, and the radiance of God will be the light within it." Jakob Boehme 1575-1624 "The coverage area of all radio nodes working as a single network is sometimes called a mesh cloud. Access to this mesh cloud depends on the radio nodes working together to create a radio network. A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. Wireless mesh networks can self form and self heal. Wireless mesh networks work with different wireless technologies and need not be restricted to any one technology or protocol." Something I'm seeing as I name paras - which involves sorting, moving lines from one para to another, subdividing a sequence - is the way a number of topics are suspended in any discussion. "There are such a lot of ideas" Steven said. I'm seeing that it's because it's a web, a mesh, so that at any point there are implications I'm feeling in many directions. No one at all will feel that the way I do, humble thrill at imagining the all-present foundation of the universe. - The good pink tulip in front rose beds is Guinevere - good because of the paler streaks up either side of each petal. Pink satin curtains faded by the sun. 8 Another wet day. In front of me on a plate rail white tulips, yellow Iceland poppies, blue grape hyacinth, cowslip and a knot of cherry blossom. Not every day but sometimes Patch when I'm in this armchair comes and arranges herself in the shape of a baby sitting on my lap with its head against my shoulder. I wrap her in both arms and she moves with my breath. We sit quietly like that. I may touch the top of her head with my chin. She has her eyes closed. Yesterday she purred. When it's happening I feel, who is this? Who has come back to me in this form?   part 3 time remaining volume 12: 2023 january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project