time remaining 12 part 3 - 2023 may-july  work & days: a lifetime journal project 9 May 2023 Question on the table: what is the urgency of the competition with my mother, what does it cost me to try to win it, what emotion is there to find in it, what is her part in it. Then I assembled a piece from my struggle with Louie about breasts. She could have got what I wanted so much. The moment across the table from Louie shattered, sobbing, completely fallen apart. There is no one else who can know me, men cannot, but the one who knows me will kill me if she can.   -   I see he does not love me. I see I must remove my feeling from him. From this two ongoing emotional lines. I can be confident in my strength, that dark light of proud autonomy. And passion goes underground into fantasy. That's how I am both Orpheus and Euridice.   Hell's king. Shadow king: that is, the non-father, the figure built to keep passion alive though misgiven. Uneasiness of missed giving ongoing.   When the shadow king inhabits someone in the world, oh then there is contrary knowledge. Yes I have been writing the book of love. The voided heart of pain. Contrary: this is him, this isn't him.   It's hard to do, feeling is convinced of its object, feeling has to be allowed and at the same time knowing has to know this is not the object, or in what way it is or isn't.   The man I can have is not a good man. What should I do? Use my judgment. Do you mean give him up because he is not good enough? No. Know him for what he is. And marry my larger love in my work.   How can such a marriage be good for him? By the bare fact that it persists. What would it give me? Continued losses. Losses of what? Delusion. There it forecasts the story of Tom. Being a self-interfering structure, being someone who has to know the kinds of thing esoteric to most. Because of the way I hate my mom and Louie and Olivia, questions still in suspense: > what is the urgency of the competition with my mother I did compete with her, I rubbed it in, I'm smarter, I'm more beautiful, I'm braver, I attract better men, I have better sex, I'm much much more successful in every way. I patronized her, lectured her, felt sorry for her. Refused to touch her. > what emotion is there to find in it Anger obviously, stiffly held. Under the anger must be what happened with Louie and them, primal shattering. I say I'm afraid everything will go away from me. Last time I took that road everything went away from me. Here's where I cry aloud, so hard I'm gasping, I lose my breath. On and on. > what does it cost me to try to win it What does it cost me to stay in anger. It cuts me off from the infant security there was before. > what is her part in it Her actual part. Primarily ignorance, blankness, not knowing how to know me in it. Helplessness. What about hating Louie now, does it matter? Not really. Paths diverged. 10 Wednesday morning. Sun is back. Spin cycle sighing down. Patch says eeee meaning hello you and wanders past my feet. Across the corner the plane tree is standing in glory. Washing machine's tune says all done. 13 Harry Wales light and bright and present on Stephen Colbert talking about trauma and therapy. "The moment I started doing therapy, it's like we started speaking a different language." He tells on them and on himself, the whole frozen caboodle, because he wants to save them and anyone. He's the one who got away. He and Meghan drain all interest from the other royals, have made William and Kate look like puppets. They're scourged for it and fighting back. He's Diana's son and may not be Charles' and he's steadfast in the luminosity she was. Watching the ceremony now - the late-medieval chapel's Gothic arches - the Handel - the arches of white roses - the Song of Solomon - the choirboys' descant - the tremendous long-assembled totalized architecture of splendour - is there a way royalty's splendour is felt as speaking for anyone's existence - is that what royalty is for. This time though the slavery and misogyny that were the cost of its building not unmentioned. Eternal life still insisted on though. 14 A summer night at last. The sidewalk was pleasantly warm. There were bugs. There were little things among the leaves to sniff out and chase. But it was bedtime. I rattled the treat tin. She was staying near the porch but she just stood and stared. I opened a Fancy Feast tin so she'd hear the pop. She hadn't had supper but she stayed where she was. I pleaded. I plotted, I'll leave the door open, come around the side of the house and bark to scare her inside. She ignored me. I threw a cushion past her so she'd run up the steps. She ran the other way. I closed the door and turned off the light so she'd understand it was time. Then I'd open the door to see where she was. That went on. I'd have to let her stay outside all night. I'll leave the porch light on to defend her from bad things. Will I be able to sleep. Am in bed with the lights out. At midnight I get up to have one last look. She's under the porch light next to the door but just looks at me. I drop a handful of her treats one by one so she'll hear them hit the floor. At last she darts in. - Something I liked about the Harry & Meghan series was that it did analyze the economic function of monarchy as Empire 2.0, the Queen keeping a flow of goods and money coming in from former colonies. Managed publicity to keep ratings high enough to justify the institution. The whole wobbling edifice of good and bad reasons, good reasons being that royalty enlists people's archetypal weaknesses for purposes of stable order. 15 Rowen and ritual. your stick ritual very familiar can a sense of ritual be inheritable I'm wondering no one else in my family had it though I suspect my dad might've if he hadn't been indoctrinated   I remember a spring day early on when the leaves had come out leading paul and judy circling the house waving leafy branches, wearing my mom's bathrobe   invented rituals all along - many stories I could tell   there wasn't much pagan material around - christianity heavily pushed - fairytales in grade 3 - but pagan ritual was what I understood. I didn't call it anything, or tell anyone about it, but just practiced it as if instinctively   I think tom had a notion of a sort. he was irish   I had in mind the protective properties of rowan trees when I named you, and there was a mountain ash outside the house on jackson He's being deliberate about it, naming it, wanting to wear it. I don't like that. I don't like his midjourney images of old men with long beards. I don't like that he doesn't study what's known about archetypes. I'm repelled by the fantasyland images because they're like junkrooms. For me wanting to be wise is wanting to be clear, which is simplicity and essence. A movement of mind that says what is this really. - Well, but, when I was younger wanting to be wise was wanting to be experienced, wanting to have met a lot of what there is. Headlong drive. I posted visiting al's house today and there she is peering all around, what is there in the world. Then, what is it like to be. Then, what's wrong with us and how should it be instead. But what is this really there all along. 16 Something had started earlier, when I was cutting grass in the morning I noticed I was arguing with Gail in my head. I thought, oh that's her, she's grinding and I'm picking it up. In the aft I saw the cranesbill were wilting so I put the sprinkler down the far end of the garden as near it as I could get. I wanted it to water the Cox too so how close to the fence could I put it. Their sacred yellow fiberboard wall beyond the fence but it's just a mist. Some hours of that. In the late afternoon Gail suddenly red-faced and wet at the back door yelling that I can't water their property. She'd moved the sprinkler. I had enough yelling ready myself - rain striking the window like pebbles. to chase her up the sidewalk with it, standing in my doorway with an arm straight across. When she got back to her yard she went to run her hand across the yellow wall. She yelled that it was wet. I yelled It will dry! It's 30 degrees! meantime noticing that she'd freaked before she tested it. So then Doug came out from behind their tree. I've thought of him as less insane but his face was in a spasm of rage. He yelled. I yelled back. She'd try to put in a yell but I'd had it with her, now I'll just yell at him. It was all a bit sudden, we had to improvise and what came out wasn't perfectly accurate on either side. I wasn't angry but I was throwing energy back at them - was how it felt. I thought maybe something would come out to show what their madness is really about. For him it seemed to be needing to say I'm stupid. Since then what am I thinking. That it's better to yell than to absorb anger unanswered. There's less harm. But there still is harm, there'll be the arguing-defending voice intruding on and on. 18 White sky, Alberta's smoke so thick I can't see Hamilton Hill. Hot days. A moment yesterday. I was wearing my new shirt and my pants were loose. I had to park half a block past the credit union's door and walk back. I was walking! Lightly, easily, not the stiff heavy golem I've been all winter. 21 About what had been blocking me. Definitely the big one is that clash between Gilligan style and Deleuze style. Gilligan is important and I talk about her, but she explains too much for me. Deleuze and the like never work with people, they never ground anything. So in your introduction I found the middle. You are speaking for philosophers but being true to the complexity of the artistic side. You are asking their questions but not bowing your head. And you are writing for yourself more than for them, but in the tone that you've always told me, as if you were in the future and your ideas were accepted. I didn't write with vanity but I was proud and wanted to show there was not shame for working differently and that rather than less rigour, perhaps there was more. 23 Dames rocket season. First of the rugosas with a scent that's Alberta wild rose with heavier added clove. Rosehip-sized apples on the Whitney. It's dark and drizzling and I am so bummed I'd be glad to die. - So I did my taxes. 24 I'm staying in a shabby Mexican hotel somewhere toward the northeast of downtown, have been here a month already in this warm place and couldn't I go to the Golden West and see Tom. I start out walking southwest. What am I wearing, will I look too manly. Now my sister is walking with me - good, it will be easier to drop in on Tom as if I'm just happening to be visiting here. Now I'm looking at storefronts next to us, finding them wonderful - a window with gleaming antiques - telling my sister to look. We walk into a rundown Mexican grocery shop thinking we'll just pass through the back door. There is no back door. I say to the shop woman as we're backtracking that it often happens this way in dreams. Crossing the street in the dark a long way ahead of the other two - another person, Jam - and is this a street crossing or a plaza, it's very wide. - Constantly having to notice how in writing the dream I'm wavering between description and interpretation. It is really impossible to tell a dream. So much of it is exactly visual - the exact look of the storefront - so much of it is rumination, what the dreamer is remembering, what the dreamer is saying to herself about where she is. So much is discontinuous - I want to say "Then, ...", but that implies a continuity that's false - I'd want to tell it as a walk through city streets from hotel toward Tom but it isn't that. With this dream there's a hovering familiarity too that's hard to note properly. It's a sense of knowing where I am in the city - there's an intersection up ahead, there's a street with restaurants I've been to - and it's an actual familiarity, a slight actual familiarity that is from other dreams - in other dreams those places might have seemed to be in London - so an actual familiarity but a familiarity from outside the dream's moment. All of these difficulties are difficulties about writing in general and even language in general, the incommensurability, the as-if separate layers - not-layers - parallel streams with little fit. A couple of external things I know. 1. Wanting to be with Tom goes on every day. 2. Watching Queer Eye yesterday a Mexican family, shop fronts. 3. The deeply inscribed times of walking in strange cities. Queer Eye. People being restyled by five specialists in grooming, clothes, food, furnishings and emotion. We see the mess they live in and then are shown them walking into their house redone at a cost of many thousands of dollars. They say "Oh my god!" and cry, and I'm thinking they don't have the habits that will keep this glamour looking as it does now, they won't make this bed with its twenty little pillows, they won't be able to afford dry cleaning for the wardrobe that makes them look so much more competent than they've been. They won't go again to the salon that has coloured their hair. Is beautiful Karamo's work the realest thing? He carefully names the sore place, sets up conversations needed, finds people community support. 25 There's a lot more to say about the show. Do they ever talk about money? A magical supply of clothes, furniture, grooming makeovers. The fives' always-new always-different costumes. Magical access to people with resources. They look good. They clown to disarm people but there's been good thought. They show how to be men who haven't stopped being boys: they're good at what they do but they're also free bodies, they caper, dress up, wear a constantly changing play of gender. They hold hands, sit with an arm around. They're sexless though: they twerk but we're never made to imagine shit and cum. - Movies about trans people. I don't know what to make of people insisting they're born in the wrong gender. I don't believe self and body can be different genders. Gender surgery is self-mutilation. At the same time I think bodies can be all sorts of ways about gender and slide around on the scale even from moment to moment. They could just be what they are in its mixes, me with my shoulders and courage, me with love woman's face.   I've been remembering the first moment at Jam's door. I saw her Faye Dunaway mouth and reached forward to set my hands on her waist. I saw a woman, desired her always as a woman, liked her as a woman helping herself to men's powers and fighting on my side. When she was asleep I saw a girl child. I can feel sorry for her, now, that she was with someone who never saw her as she wanted to be seen. I shouldn't have been with her. She should have told me at the beginning not months later. If I hadn't been starved for intelligent company, if I hadn't been out of balance, I should have left when she did tell me. I couldn't. I needed her for what she didn't want to be needed for. We equally had no compassion for each other. I can still be angry that she wasted me, just needed me to be what she could feel affirmed her in her fantasy.   Work woman and love woman, competing states of mind. Tom was a different kind of story because by that time I was both. 26 Completely open sky at 5:13. I've been morose, am morose, hopeless. There's a tangle about work and loneliness. Susan has given up and Don's absent so there's no one who likes my smart posts - the piece about The conservationist. People instead are fond of me thirteen and spelling badly. I'm angry with any contacts I have because they are not enough, not nearly. I'm not working on Theory's practice, not working at all, Netflix all day just to be gone. Needing to be so careful about what I eat that eating isn't worth the effort. Afraid to put my feet on the floor because will I feel faint, will my knee hurt. When I'm on the sidewalk I stand still until the car passes because I don't want to be seen hobbling. My little efforts to dress better keep failing. - Then I repost enceinte de cinq mois.doc and like the writing. I like its ethic as well as its lively flow: not to take short cuts: there has to be good being before there is good writing. (And yet: I must have done something wrong to end as isolated and unwanted as I am.) (It said no.) 28 Paul is not picking up. I check with Luke. He has "serious health problems" and says I was rude to him. When he wanted to know whether my tremor was worse it must have meant his had become bad enough to scare him. He's only 73. I'm guessing it's just the tremour and he's depressed. Maybe M's death too. Luke says he grieves that he can't be with me when I need him. Is it true? It says yes. 29 When I hear a crow yelling I can know it's yelling at Patch. Festiva Maxima and Seashell opened yesterday. The near-species roses: Thérèse and Blanc Double, Harison's Yellow in knobby bud, Kakwa lovely this year, creamy small roses along arching branches with tiny leaves. Kaitlyn Ainsley has had just one, so deeply scented I can smell it from across the room. The nectarine will have to be cut and the apricot is almost bare, sparse tufts of a few very small leaves. Abby is slow. I longed to jump in and pace her but had had such a sore night that I knew I had to hold back. When I look at the garden I see so much I can't do. Do I have another season in me. When I don't, then what. 31 It's cold at night. 5:39 a cold morning quietly luminous with small clouds pink and grey near the horizon. I brought an image out of the night, a tall quiet man immaculately dressed in a very good dark suit. There'd been a question about how he could be brought into church with the others. He's the chauffeur someone said. So then I lay imagining his immaculately self-sufficient life looking after a good car, reading, writing letters, watching nature programs, gracefully attentive, always beautifully dressed, putting his wages in the bank. When someone starts hankering for him he changes jobs. June 3 I've posted disability studies.doc and both Campbell and Don have instantly said love to it. When I had polio I was only two. I was sent to a hospital in a city three hundred miles away. I didn't see my family again for seven months, which is a long time for a small child. When I came home after seven months I never trusted my mother again. I've come to understand that my weak leg is the least of it. The true and significant damage was to a child's primal trust in love. That damage has had heavy consequences, and not only to me, but also to those who have depended on me. It is a kind of damage/disability that happens to many, and in many ways, so that coming to understand its significance makes me know myself to be more damaged than I thought and also less unlike others than I thought. 4 I don't think anyone can realize what an accomplishment that last sentence is, how long it took. Here I am, 5:35am, sun in the ruined Russian olive's upper leaves, cold wind, open sky, vacant day. Again. There's a presenter on Gardener's world who whose hands with their manicured fingernails emerge from her short sleeves like flippers. I can't watch her. My achieved wisdom makes no difference, I cover her half of the screen. 5 my mom started on the first page and said 'i'll never understand it', i caught my dad leafing through cautiously one morning. i don't know if they will read it.   i am becoming even more obscure and it terrifies me. so basic, that one that will not be resolved, they will not love me, i will not be loved. it is that simple, that bewildering.   - a core youngness, so smart, so aware of what it could cost to be that. you, you can always love her. it can be resolved, you can swear all loyalty and she will believe you.   loving so fearlessly, seeing so much   terrible ambition   shouldering your loneliness like a gun that you will not learn to aim   it's the poles whose tension you so consciously endure, ambition and wanting to be loved. the way for women they do not, simply do not, easily align.   Bartend, I will have one more and we will finish out the final pages of this story with nobility and a somewhat southwestern flare   gosh, well. I love you for lines like that.   May 2010 It's Emilee's birthday. I sent her a photo of a cat's eye and then realized I could post what only she will understand is also for her. The other person whose birthday is also today. - Bright 7am wrestling with Rowen in philosophy. I'm scandalized in his text and don't hold back. He's not put off and does get what I say. We come to points of discovery. Sort. Sort jester from wise old man. Be careful of mentalist metaphors: structured bodies not mental models. Yes whole bodies know. They can know different things in different states. Don't identify with archetypes, talk to them. Keep your contraries but have them talk to each other. The distinction between perception and simulation is precious, don't give it up. It surprises me how much of an Epp he has turned out to be. 7 I've made an image of a man I'd seen across the room, just his face narrow with patches of bright color. It's such a striking image, how did I make it. Is he the man with white hair cut level with the bottom of his ears. I ask who he is. Bookstore with small square chapbooks on a table. I'm leafing through wondering whether I should make one. What small type. - As always in trying to transcribe a dream aware the transcription is just wrong. The other person whose birthday .... Gone into the cancelled bin. Something about time. I often feel myself as a whole lifetime not as the moment's state, but how does that accord with canceling friendships. If I'm my whole lifetime I'm joyful times with L at the same time as the time that writes her off. Same with anyone, Jam, Roy even. My mom. I'm feeling that the other way round with Paul: we had good talks through his pandemic isolation and he's written me off. The writing off feels like erasing but it can't be that because the good can't be taken from a past still in some way present. 8 There was a large crane. It wasn't flying away, was it injured? I was taking care of it. It got into a sort of bin, tossed out some bits and curled up in a corner. That seemed a good thing. Then Louie or someone like her was standing too close to the bin looking. After that I couldn't find the crane. Regret. - Hot yesterday. Late afternoon an acrid smell of fire. I go out in bare feet (one sock) to look up and down the street. Pink smoke closing every direction, the Grapevine says a fire near Harrison Lake. It's only June and this will go on all summer. Huge fires in Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick. Greg says he can't bike. Paeonies are finishing. Mock orange is on. Big dark purple irises. Strawberries for breakfast. Cancelled bin - does it mean the brain segregates so it can't be found. Kranion skull. 9 Patch didn't come in at bedtime. The smoke detector kept going off. 12 Weeding the sidewalk edge of the hazelnut bed sitting on a chair I kept moving along. Abby picking strawberries lethargically. Talking to Rowen about Dune. 13 I fetched up a Tom story to post then wandered into unposted bits and there felt so turned on - Tom and California. 14 something you probably don't know is that it isn't possible to throw this kind of round shoulder on a pot. what you have to do while the clay is still wet is put your mouth to its neck and blow it up like a balloon. Can remember the moment I tried it. Where I was in the room, smell of the clay close up. The magic was what exactly, as if perverting a material? - Submitted last light to the Slow Film Festival again, with more support material and the little statement I wrote this spring. If they took it the encouragement could make me want to do more. 15 Reading Mudlark, thinking of Jo Ann's studio in Wapping, the view from her glass doors six storeys above the Thames. I last saw it when I brought Luke to see it. He'd have been ten? We walked west along the river afterward and found a clay pipe in the mud.   -   I Google Jo Ann Kaplan London and instantly a Guardian obit. She died in May of 2016 at 70. I'd met her when I spoke to her after a screening of her first film. It must have been in Paris? 1972? She said Are you into letters and we wrote a couple of times a year into the '80s. I'd visit her when I was in London. Finding her address in Wapping was like burrowing into the past. A shabby train on a short branch off the end of a regular Tube line, then empty narrow streets between high brick walls. Echoing cold stairwell smelling of damp concrete, landings with dirty glass-block windows in rusted frames. She was all the way at the top in a big high-ceilinged space full of light from what had been the warehouse doors.   That's three of the women I knew in London, my age, artists, already gone.   Merritt June 2023 Her young face so soft. I met her after Dracula a family romance, which is never mentioned in her obits. Last saw her in September 1987 when Wapping had been developed and we were uncomfortable together in a stainless steel kitchen where she lived with someone unhappy they'd failed to have a baby. born in New York to Charlotte Klose, a German immigrant and artist, and Louis Kaplan, a union organizer. Her father left when she was ten. first sound editing on The gold diggers Louis Kaplan raised in the Pleasantville Home for Jewish Orphans following the murder of his father. He had two sons and two daughters with his wife. Died in '84. - Particularly cats. I'd been too snobbish to read it but now that I write about cats I brought it home. 1967, Rufus 1991. 16 I'm so familiar with her. Reading it is like reading again about someone I know. It's London too, familiar back gardens and walls. that cat's nature was all tact, delicacy, warmth, and grace 17 I'd found Judy's journal in a box with mine. Her handwriting was hard to read but there were photos pasted in of things she liked or wanted, a cream-coloured Shaker hutch I liked too. I was pleased and moved to find the feeling life she'd hidden. Saturday halfway through June, cold. I don't know what to do with the rest of the day. Aloneness gnaws. I check FB and email waiting for someone to come for me. There's disgrace in that but it's where I am. 18 She writes about cats the way she writes about people. Her attention is closely social. Mine is more body-to-body. I become Patch a bit when I see her warm and plush curled at my knee licking a spot on her flank, washing her face with the damp side of her right forepaw, now lifting her left rear leg to scratch under her chin. Her shapes as she sleeps show how conscious she is of the feel of herself. When I wake the first thing she needs is to have the door opened so she can go out to find the day. Then she wants her morning food. She eats only a bit of it before she goes out again. I set the verandah door open for her. Maybe an hour later she knocks at the verandah window. I let her in. She runs to eat the rest of what's in her bowl then comes to where I am in the red chair, kneads my belly for a while with her eyes closed. Afterwards doesn't linger, settles at my knee, washes thoroughly. Then she wants to stretch flat and jumps to the floor. If I move she'll take my chair. I've seen her a couple of afternoons in the laundry room quietly stretching a paw to open the closet door. Her tail vanishes discreetly behind her. It took me a while to find her dark spot off the floor hidden by hanging clothes. That and her amazingly high spot on top of the laundry room cupboard - it does feel as though she wants places I don't know about. 19 Paul says he has Parkinson's. I thought he might like the Willie Nelson album. Rain for days. 20 In Vancouver in August I used to make a blackberry cheesecake. On Luke's birthday a chocolate layer cake brought him still warm with whipped cream. 24 Saturday 6:30am a flat white light against motionless grey-blue rain cloud so the corner looks frozen except that a scatter of doves wheels through catching light on the white triangles of their under-wings. - Hollyhocks begun. 25 Wednesday's sunrise seen from a crumbling wall where I sit eating stolen grapes. I'm on dusty roads feeling like a troubadour with my duffle bag slung at an angle over one shoulder. Les Baux is a mythic troubadour site so my plan is to sleep there.   The chateau on its narrow ridge of pale cliffs is an eagle's nest broken down to a few flat walls, approached now by a steep narrow tourist-souvenir street. I've arrived in late afternoon, climbed the slope opposite and unrolled my sleeping bag on a ledge in a shallow cave. Then have scrambled through thorn bushes to the top of my cliff and have sat reading in fading warmth. From there I have a wide view of the fortress and beyond to other masses of white rock all surrounded by vines.   There's no supper so I go to sleep early. Wake suddenly to see the Baux spotlit against a background of deep blue. A restless night, scent of lavender crushed under the sleeping bag and all night that scene framed by the rough black oval of my cave's mouth. At dawn a cold wind and the sudden vision of pink light on white stone.   Les Baux de Provence August 1966   Some things I didn't know then. Ezra Pound was at the Baux on a walking tour in the summer of 1912, tracking his troubadours, keeping a travel journal.   But to set here the roads of France, of Cahors, of Chalus, the inn low by the river's edge, the poplars; to set here the roads of France   Virginia Woolf was there in April of 1928, "two hot days and the Pont du Garde in the sun; and Les Baux".   I'd never heard of those people in 1966 but when I slept at Mycenae and at Les Baux I was claiming affiliation.   Merritt June 2023 I like that last line for arriving at the point. A raw Canadian farm girl threw herself on the road committing by instinct to minds she couldn't then imagine. No one will have got it. Claudia maybe? I hoped Don but he'll scourge himself for not having done it himself. A photo too, night fog, pyracantha.jpg which I like now more than I did. The woman I maybe shouldn't have blocked, who said The photos! - Wondering whether a way around intractable Theory's practice would be year FB volumes with their scatters of pasts and presents and photo colours. 26 Mary from Highway 8 called at the open door carrying the Big Book asking for dill for potato salad. Burned and flooded hay ranch, landslides. 27 She noticed the rugs and touched the peaked cullet. - Yesterday morning a dream of walking along through a large empty space - really featureless, not even a visible earth - white - far away just what was maybe a filling station sign. 30 I'd said as kindly as I can that I think it's unworkable but now she's saying April 2024 in Luneberg. Seminar with culture studies MA students, exhibition - large exhibition room, office exhibition room, and small cinema, correspondence published or in audio. What I want and she wants are so at odds I don't know how to make it work, especially as she doesn't seem to realize we're at odds. What I want is to have people understand Being about and all its satellite writing, and to show the north country photos; and for my films to do their simple radical work. What she wants is to have her own show, make something up. Is there anything in the correspondence worth promoting: explanations that might work for someone else though they're not suited to her? I come back to asking what possible intelligence I can come up with, that doesn't ask her to do what she can't do. Was there something else I could have done rather than pester her with linguistic revision. I could say just make it your own show about how it was to correspond with a mind at odds with yours. Good if well done but she doesn't dive to essence, I can't make her do what it would take. Could I make it her show but edit it so it could work? Be forced into generosity because it's the only option there is. Like teaching. I keep coming back to that thought. Is there any solution     no Just drop it     yes Edited as an interview with headings and set together with a reader. Say she can do something separate with her parts. July 2 With Louie and not with her. Half a heart. Which half. The one that says what did you do today, what did you feel and think. Sweet generosity that then presents its bill. Rage, envy, hatred, monstrous prying, furious secret will. Stupidity beating against me year after year.   1996. People I don't think are reading what I post, Daichi liking studies at queen's.doc and Joost also disgusted with metaphysical speculation.doc. 3 Do I have Alzheimers. It has kept saying no but there's a lag in my very short term memory that has got worse just this week. I'll want to think of something and there's suddenly just nothing, a sensation like stepping on brakes that are gone, a frozen blank that can't even search. I've been losing words since my sixties, names but not only names, common words I might or might not get back after a while. Face recognition used to be perfect and now I can stare at people I've met once or twice not even remembering I've met them. I'm wobbly, I stagger. When I've worked hard in the garden there's an all-over tremor. When I get up in the morning I sometimes have to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment stabilizing myself. I sit weeding on the sidewalk dressed bizarrely. I've learned to use the timer when I have a pot boiling on high but I still sometimes forget. I have to have a system for remembering whether I've taken b.p. meds. Social silence has gradually taken over the lively person I used to be. I should have an MRI to find out so I can plan how to exit in time. It said large yes to that. What do I still have. The silent monitor still takes note of failures. I can still write though with more revision - I wrote those Bitsy letters easily. I was lively with the AA woman who wanted dill. I usually remember whether I've let Patch outside though not always. I can sometimes work for more than an hour. When I thought about the new little blanks yesterday there was fear. I'm not used to fear. - I'm going to have to say You are necessarily going to want something different from this interview than I do. You're going to want to show your own flare and I'll be checking that every time because it messes up what I want to show. You ask good questions: that has to be the whole of the collaboration. You'll have to make something of your own with what I leave out. It's called How can women know: method, process, discourse trouble-shooting. Philosophy/discourse trouble-shooting comes later in the interview. 4 I said Alzheimers and then had a marvelous morning of work. 5 Raspberries and sweet peas have begun. Martijn Doolaard for hours. A polished movie every week at the same time as all-day meticulous physical work, half a million devoted subscribers thousands of whom comment under his episodes. He's giving them images of all-out embodiment, successful intelligent engaged embodiment; days on a mountainside, spring summer fall winter, fire and rain, day and night, wood and stone, trees, wind, chickens, a dormouse, a titmouse, an inchworm, stars, world loved. He casts himself as the classical figure of a man: plain colors, loose pants with suspenders, long-sleeved shirts, light boots he takes care of. Never shirtless, never shorts. Always a brimmed hat and not because he's bald. Trimmed beard. He hasn't a handsome face but he's a perfect man's body, light and straight and the perfect triangular shape. Tireless. When he needs a rest he climbs a mountain. He makes himself good meals, bakes bread. He understands physical principles, can figure out any technology he needs. Everything is built well. There's no end of money: any new material he needs and new tools for every job. Power tools. That kind of body moving on a yard is my dad exactly, my poor dad with one saw, one hammer and a square.   I understand him. Watching him I remember I'm Dutch though centuries back, ingenious, tidy, needing visual order, at the Tofteland house setting stones for the courtyard, finding bricks and designing the fireplace, burying a cream can under the caragana hedge for a cooler, building Luke's bed upstairs with three nails, bathing in sun next to the pump. We're both loners to whom these kinds of days are just right.   His movies are faultlessly judged: impeccably framed, shots amazingly varied - close-ups, mid-shots, very wide angles, different states of light, drone shots drifting among mists. Strenuous: he sets up the tripod to film himself climbing a mountain then runs down to fetch the camera and climb it again for a panoramic shot at the top. Immaculate sound lapped where the camera doesn't supply it, right kind of sparing drifty music. Minimal titles, explains to the camera but never too much. Posts to FB with full section headings and credits. All of this in a weekend when he has for instance devised and built full scaffolding to take massive stones off a roof.   I don't know where he gets his money. Can he fund himself with FB ads? Which I evade. A few patrons. Not much product placement.   I'm seeing that he gives what I've wanted to give: he supports love for the physical world and ourselves as bodies. He does it directly: shows it so people can feel it themselves. I do it with my gardens, and my gardens are loved, but I don't do it with my writing. It seems. Now I'm seeing that Notes in origin could have been loved if I hadn't been arty, if I'd told a story of being in the world rather than a story of being a mind. The photos did, the text didn't. Mind and land. But, but. Mythic resonance. He has that with the way he designs himself as a figure of a man - it's canny filmmaking - but it's not his interest. Well yes but his choice of place is completely mythic: stone huts on a mountain. He designed a project - a whole project - an art project - to have maximal grip. I don't think he's making a home, I think the project will be finished and he'll find another. 6 I want to say: Dear beautiful Martijn, your English is nearly perfect but th is the downfall of the Dutch. It's father rather than fadder, other rather than udder. For d the tongue hits the roof of the mouth. For th it hits the teeth. He's David MacAra in drive and technical ingenuity and lovely body. A loner too. Like me comes to readiness late. - I'd fallen asleep on my back with my right arm outstretched. During the night I woke suddenly when Patch dumped herself hard against my ribs. I was annoyed, shifted my arm and she moved. Straight back into sleep dreaming I was in court being accused of being mean to her. Said No I'm not having this silly dream. My foot down the bottom of the bed found a weight, she hadn't gone far. Then I lay making up this paragraph. - Emilee and Don the only ones who could like not a mean angel.doc. What angel comes when I crash, a shining black angel with black iridescence. Not a mean angel, an angel that looks into my eyes with nothing but compassion, the angel Agony who says Be clear. Don't run. Stand in your place which is just precisely this one, where you let yourself hear what the youngest one in you gave up on. Feel it as if it's true - feel it. Be as unsafe as that. See who is saying it and why. Don't run. You can't know what you're building.   March 1996 When I think of D and O and me in our day my posts now seem - what - outré - in the etymological sense - exceeding. Far exceeding what we were. Greg in his timidity doesn't figure then or now. Today it's hot in Ontario and he isn't going outside because it's not recommended for old people. 7 Garden work yesterday - had to weed and prune the gooseberry so Abby and I could pick it - stayed near while she weeded in her incompetent desultory way - cut back the nectarine, weeded the potatoes from a chair, picked cherries on a ladder. When I'd lain down afterward black pain all over. I pay but seeing better order is worth it. After that kind of day what to do with my head. Annoyed at the thought of editing for BK. Had livened up thinking of writing for Some photos the loveable straightforward narrative I couldn't write then. - 3 tiny pots of sour cherry jam yesterday, 3 tiny pots of ripe gooseberry jam today and 4 green gooseberry with lime and ginger. I take pleasure in tidy efficiency both making and cleaning up after. Sore after yesterday esp hips and kidneys. - I'd napped and was reading in bed propped on three pillows. Patch jumped up next to me crying urgently. What? What is it? She poked under the bed, clawed at the mattress, stomped over my chest. Whatever it is you deal with it, I was thinking. Eventually she wandered away. An hour later I'd got up and was going to make the bed. Lifted the first pillow to straighten it. Lifted the second and there was a sweet little mouse. I put the pillow back and called Patch. Set her on the bed and showed her what I'd found. Ten minutes of chase around the room. Story ended in the usual way, I lifted the mouse outside and Patch lost it in the grass. These days she likes a little box the nursery gave to carry plants. I leave it on the verandah table where she can see out when she wakes. 8 Dreamed some snakes and was thinking what can I make of this. Poison? I need to give more attention to poison now, wrong food, wrong use of time. 9 Sunday morning. It's hot. I was in the garden turning on soakers and felt so weak I was afraid I'd keel over. Pretty crab spider carried in on my pants. It's four thirty on a Saturday. I have a beautiful lamp but no kisses. I'm saying there was so little affection in him, just that. I held onto the little spots of it, I was like a little girl bewildered without the affection she's used to. And I was a calm warrior quite coldly stick-fighting with a confused undisciplined opponent who believed against all evidence that he was my match. And I was sometimes a young woman overjoyed to be looking into the beautiful face of her mate promised by god and found at last.   It has been the deepest widest heart adventure of my life. I've had most scope in it, I've been most inspired, I've had most call for size. It was the rumble I always wanted. A great shambles, never settling, twisting up new scaly coils like a great sea-serpent. And it's over? The answer always comes back yes. Fare well, old dragon.   San Diego March 1999 Nobody. Why not. Nobody else has that kind of time? Sequacious a word I absolutely had never met. I won't remember what it means. Lacking independence or originality of thought. "I want something sequacious now and robust." 11 Don later showed up underneath it with a red heart. I sent him a note. That was nice, your red heart under today's post. His reply put me back into such annoyance that what I've sent him now will make another break this time maybe final. I've been meaning for some time to write you about another of your posts about people not discussing their work with one another. I felt the deepest loneliness in this. And yet I remember how, as a student, I used to talk to Olivia about my work all the time ... she was a good sport about it and very helpful. I miss this. Then he had to go back to trying to justify himself about his response to Being about. I want to apologize again for my comments on your thesis - but also to try to explain them. I'm reluctant b/c I think we hurt one another in that exchange. Then he's all wormy dodging and hedging but basically needing to say I did it wrong. Recently fearing I might have misunderstood you I started re-reading it. But I realized early on that my understanding was the same as it had been on the first go. Why is it written in this way? He doesn't say in what way but invents a reason, that I was having to write for a stupid committee. Then he says, Before closing I've just been put onto an author whom I love - Iain McGilchrist. Do you know him? So I looked him up: guess what, someone working in neuroscience and metaphysics, very praised, Don saying what a relief, here's one of our own who's doing it better than you. So then I hit him with blame for Olivia's crackup. did olivia talk to you about her work?   she was less a feminist than I was, though we'd both read de beauvoir. I was alarmed that she would marry and that she would take a man's name. she walked into danger she should have seen coming. you have no idea of the stress of female second-classedness to intelligent women.   it is easy to say 'it should be published' with no consciousness of the reasons it can't be. the patriarchal unconscious is utterly tenacious in its defenses against authority in a female voice. the praise heaped on mcgilchrist is a completely other kind of thing.   you didn't say what it is about the way being about is written that should not be written as it is. what you said originally was "From the start to the very end I had a question - what is this about, what's the point, what's it for?" if you objection is still that ... well, I'll say no more.   now though it seems to be that its style is too academic? you originally said "First, it is wonderfully well written - unfailingly clear and direct and in this respect a model of what fine academic writing should be."   anyway. it was written to figure something out and I did. I worked off it as a platform for my whole teaching life and still do. I'm deeply proud of it. What I'm seeing in him is that he was and is in knots about Being about. His comments have been clumsy because for unconscious reasons he has to deny that it's as good as it is and for conscious reasons he has to try to be fair. Saying he loves McGilchrist was a final thump: see, you aren't better than we are. Did O crack up because of her marriage     yes Am I right about his mixed motives     yes Why did I ever bother with Don? Greg was timid emotionally and Don had intensity. I had a yen for his body. I thought maybe he could meet me in philosophy, where I hadn't found myself yet. Maybe I liked the aggression in him for reasons I didn't get to until Tom. I didn't know him enough to have seen what O called the green slime, which I guess is a crookedness of motive I'm seeing now, for instance in what he did to O in the end, secret cheating for months. Now he has still sometimes been the one my posts are addressed to as if he's the one who matters but that's structural isn't it, trying to win my impervious dad, the patriarchal unconscious utterly tenacious in its denials. What was different with Tom. He wasn't wormy. He was what he was. He was resistant but he came around. - roads are blocked from Marshfield to Plainfield and East Montpelier The Winooski has flooded Montpelier but it was uphill to the Goddard turn. 12 Writing with Em about the floods in VT yesterday remembering that bit of New England quite vividly - the summer night I was brought to campus and wandered out and found the upper garden in moonlight - Plainfield a pocket of space discontinuous from everywhere else. Locked in all-day work, still always new to the place and feeling it particularly, bemused by its names - Green Mountains, Northeast Kingdom. Shabby wooden houses of the poor. Stone walls foundered in woodland long after their sheep are gone. Joe Pye weed and goldenrod pink and yellow together in a meadow. Susan crying in the evening's long soft golden light. - Alright but IS there a consciousness for what I write that will be missing if D isn't reading it? If there is he doesn't speak to me from it. That has annoyed me as if he is withholding but has he installed my thought of it by one of his management tricks? "Use your eyes." What have I been imagining? Oh the usual. Is there somewhere I could actually find it? 14 Hello! Nice morning moon at 4: 15. - here's the deal: you could just have said 'sorry, I don't get it', which is the simple truth, but instead you have insisted on saying - again and again - one way and another - 'you did it wrong'. there's a reason you do that, and you haven't copped to it.   I give up. I guess it was a mistake (I knew there was a chance of this) to revisit the issue.   knew it but had to do it, reason for that too. Aren't I cranky. Witness is what I have been imagining. Capable witness. Not everyone is hungry for witness this way. - Did I infect myself with hantavirus. The mouse on my pillow. I thought I should instantly throw the pillowcases in the wash but I didn't. It was bravado. That was how long ago - I wrote about it a week ago but it happened some days earlier. There was the day working with Abby, the 6th, massive muscle pain the day after. On the 7th I say sore esp hips and kidneys. Since then it's been hips/lower back/kidneys? when I've lain with the iPad. Today burning esp in the right and as far around as the belly. I've been lying down all day trying different things. I suddenly remembered the mouse when I'd dozed off and saw Patch on the floor suddenly jump into a crouch staring under the bed. - Then again, I remember just this kind of burning pain the day I'd been moving in to Mesa Grande. I was lying on the floor rocking my back in a way Tom found ugly. Early symptoms large muscle aches, esp hips and back. In BC only deer mice. Was it a deer mouse? Didn't notice a white underbelly but inconclusive. 16 like so much avant-garde cinema from the 'long 1970s' - a utopian moment for the medium Piece in the New York Review about Mulvey and Wollen that brings back the ethos of the Slade in 1973 when I was beginning to film. Laura invited me to supper - all I have of that now is a moment in her foyer when I'd arrived not knowing why I was there. She was feminist Marxist deconstructionist high theory and I was I didn't know what; I was feminist but my impulse in film was lyric. I wanted nothing to do with signifier/signified jargon but I also wanted my absolutely own gaze, which as soon as I had my eye to a camera I discovered to be a bit scientific, I mean interested in structures of light and motion. In love with structures of light and motion. The alternative to capitalist patriarchal cinema I groped for was a cinema finding contact with physical world, what now can seem to be a more radical more needed form of recuperation. At the same time, deconstructionist disciplines of self-conscious attention to form are what can save a lyric impulse from sentiment. - Wrote it just now. Pleased with it. It's a good summary of what I was up to and the context in which I was finding it. What I refused and what I took. - This one I care who notices - the garden photos are predictable - good for him Joost liking it a lot - Cheryl noticing because it's in her territory but liking it maybe not, because in work her impulse is cynicism rather than love. - Daichi too. After two days sick I seem to be alright, did things, 10 tiny jars of raspberry jam, Jeremy finished his two coats of white in the verandah's east wing and turned the compost. Shopped, brought Abby's mom a cabbage and gave one to Jer.   part 4 time remaining volume 12: 2023 january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project