time remaining 12 part 4 - july-august  work & days: a lifetime journal project 17 July "But if the job were seen for what it is - for the poor thing it is - who would want to do it?" "That's just it. What are the sources of motivation and pleasure? The sources of motivation and pleasure are infantile wishes." nasty, beastly, aggressive, infantile driven organisms the drives - Reading NYKR Janet Malcolm in 1980 thinking about teaching, Joyce's methods, Louie's poisonous nastiness vs Tom's open badness, what it was like with Tom, the squabble with Don, psychotherapy as Ashkanazi social mode. "Infantile", "nasty, beastly" - where does that sneer at animal/child/body come from - it's patriarchal, unexamined male psychology. becoming yourself finding your way to the child in yourself more strength for facing life and more capacity for carrying out its actual tasks That's Joyce's way. Margo's "lighter and freer" in teaching. psychological murder by syntax A psychotherapy researcher together with a linguist looking at how therapists speak to clients in a way that suppresses them. My nose for suppressive intent in Don's language and male language in general. must invent the patient as well as investigate him; must invest him with the magic of myth and romance as well as reduce him to the pitiful bits and pieces of science and psychopathology. Only thus can the psychoanalyst sustain his obsessive interest in another Me with Tom. You have to distinguish between what your reactions to the patient are telling you about his psychology and what they are merely expressing about your own. - About a patient who made him sleepy he said by being strategically dull. Punitively exhausting effects of Mary's and Louie's hidden rage. Ashkanazi social style not for everyone. Intense, studious, tribal, competitive - hostile. - I was in Athens from mid-March to the end of May 1966 but only two scraps of journal remain from this time. Unrecorded are a cheap room near Lycabettos - so cheap it was wide open in a building whose street door didn't lock - and two governessing jobs, a morning speaking English with the young children of an Athenian judge and delightful afternoons wandering around Athens speaking English with Lellie and Lucia, the daughters of an American-educated couple running a garment business. On weekends I'd go on hitchhiking excursions with French friends from the youth hostel. My Stathatos boss lent me her camera for these expeditions.   There was a weekend Alain and I hitched to Delphi. On Sunday evening Alain left to travel further and I put out my thumb to get back to Athens. My second ride, picked up somewhere in deep country, was with one of the small three wheeled trucks Greek farmers use to carry produce. We rode quietly through an evening flushed with amber light, in which a thrilling moment when a field of horses running alongside us raised a plume of golden dust.   At some point the silent farmer put his hand on my thigh. Oh. When he stopped at the next intersection I opened my door and jumped out. I knew I needed to get my rucksack out of his truck box in a hurry. Then as I saw his taillights disappearing up the road I realized I had forgotten the shoulder bag that I'd set down at my feet. In it were my hairbrush, my toothbrush, my passport and the whole of Friday's wages.   I don't remember my next ride but it got me all the way to Athens. Then there I was with no money for the week. Did Jean-Jacques buy me breakfast? He must have because when we were eating in our usual taverna Jannos the host heard my tale and invited me to have a meal that night for free. Seven o'clock he said. When I'd arrived I saw that there was no one else and that he'd locked the door after me. Supper was good, an omelet cooked over a panful of fried potatoes, but when I'd eaten most of it I clutched my belly and collapsed over the table as if in agony. Jannos helped me to the door and walked me home.   That wasn't yet the end of the story. In October when I was back at college a letter came from the Canadian Consulate in Athens saying the shoulder bag I'd lost had been handed in. Would I like it? And since they weren't allowed to send me the money it contained what would I like them to do with it? I said would they enclose some Greek stamps for my little brother. after delphos in 1966.doc. Don't know where that impulse came from. - With Luke on the phone for a couple of hours. I asked about Roy's prostate. Luke said his cancer is gone but a valve was damaged in surgery. Does he piddle I asked. Not anymore but every five minutes he feels like he has to pee. I did what I could to conceal the grin from my voice. It was a lit-up blazing grin. The peccant part! When I told Luke about the morning I felt my head buffeted by a strong wind he said it sounded like the hypoxia he knows from taking nitrous oxide at a party. You mean my heart stopped for a moment so there was no oxygen in my brain? That made sense. I love his calm competent brain that can tell me things I like to know. When I wrote him about Martijn Doolaard's site he already knew it. We talked about the follow-me capabilities of drones, which I'd just heard about in Doolaard's comments queue. He said he'd had some of Mary's money left to set up a work station for his iCloud studies. "I have everything I need. Sometimes I have four screens up including my tablet." 18 When I was speaking to Luke I lost the word arrhythmia and had to circumlocute. I didn't find it again until this morning in bed when I re-heard it in Luke's voice. - Story in the Times yesterday talking about how Trump and his allies are strategizing how if he's re-elected to "increase the president's authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House. They plan to take control over independent government agencies and get rid of a nonpartisan civil service, purging all but Trump loyalists from the US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Defense Department. They plan to start 'impounding funds,' that is, ignoring programs Congress has funded if those programs aren't in line with Trump's policies. They envision a president who cannot be checked by the Congress or the courts. The party appears to have fully embraced the antidemocratic ideology advanced by authoritarian leaders like Putin and Orbán, who argue that the post-World War II era, in which democracy seemed to triumph, is over. They claim that the tenets of democracy - equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a market-based economy, immigration, and so on - weaken a nation by destroying a 'traditional' society based in patriarchy and Christianity." 'Christianity' here meaning whiteness and maleness. It's as if the first thing every woman has to understand is that men are inherently hostile to her, that all her life she will have to fight their intention to demean and control her, and that she will have to come to terms with - I won't say fight because it's more complicated - structures in herself that are complicit. 19 I don't lie in my posted stories but in the Athens story I did and will carefully confess. I didn't remember who I hitched to Delphi with, probably Jean-Jacques, Jean-Pierre and Alain, but I said just Alain because I wasn't sure Jean-Jacques had left Athens and I didn't know how I managed to be in the taverna that morning to tell that I had no money. I didn't remember the host's name and made up Yannos as the first Greek name that came. I don't think there was a plume of golden dust but there were thrilling moments watching the horses racing beside us and swirling when they got to the fence. Narrative devices of common sorts and not unconscious but bad because they are lazy. My rule has been that the actual fact is always better writing. - Now I've posted that because the last sentence declares an important rule. - There'd been an old van parked across the street much of the afternoon. When I'd been weeding after sunset a man came to the fence, I thought from the van, to say he liked the garden. He was sunburned and had dirty hair and a worn-out face that looked like a lifetime of benders. "What do you like about it?" "It's lively." He was winding up to ask to weed in exchange for a few dollars for gas. "Are you a good weeder?" He said he'd weeded for his mom, who it later turned out is 94 still cutting hair in Salmon Arm. I said I'd give him minimum wage. He didn't remember not to step on beds or get earth on the gravel paths and he fussed too long with every tiny bit of leaf. He told me the weeds I hate most are chickweed. "Do you think they're called chickweed because chickens like them?" "Or because they spring up fast like little chicks" he said.   After half an hour I said it was getting too dark and gave him twenty dollars. "Have a good night." As he was crossing the road back to his van he said "God bless you" into the darkness as though he was showing he knew the correct way to be a begger. I looked up those weeds. They're actually sow thistle. Why lazy narrative is wrong is that it prevents naming something I didn't already know. 21 Thought last night that I should post Jody's note. 23 To spit in Don's eye, and I have, but looking for it have found the run-up to Goddard and its first two semesters. The deep sudden change from working alone to working with people, its transition fears and its resolutions. Why had I never been interested in that before. starting at goddard.doc 9 pages. June 2001 - March 2002. Sails from frightened misgivings to planted attainment. - When I'd been watching Martijn Doolaard in his yard I wanted tail and gave it to myself very sweetly. - I don't know why we weren't on the school bus. Maybe there was a spring thaw bann on the highway? Anyway there I was on a brilliant spring midday halfway between La Glace and my turn-off clumping along on dried mud. Bucky Thompson was walking home too and caught up with me. I was fourteen? He was a couple of years older and the kind of boy who'd sometimes get himself expelled. We were walking in silence and then he said "Do you want a piece of tail?" I said no I didn't and we walked on. I wasn't afraid of him. His offer had seemed to me to be friendly.   When I told my mom about it, though, she said I must never tell anyone. That surprised me. What I understood her to be saying was that no matter what I'd replied I'd get a bad name for having it said to me. - Tickled to have written that just now. It's funny and it shows the times my mom had been living in. 24 Having a little rumble on the Grapevine, replying to a woman warning other women about men bothering them downtown and a dozen other women saying call the police, piling on with 'gentle hugs', look at us being so admirably helpless together. I'm saying learn to handle yourselves and they are saying I'm shaming the victim and telling them to ignore violation.   - Back and forth with that most of the day, was I bad? I do like a fight. It's not fair to argue with that kind of people but I was pissed off with their pity-me tone.   There's something exploratory in the fighting too: let me venture this: what will happen if I show. Is there anyone in this town I could like? Anyone who could like me? Didn't happen today.   It's raining - I hear rain. After a hot week with more fires every day. Black street shining and jittering. 25 I posted that just now and am interested - anyone? Shining and jittering is a good summary. Susan. Good for you. - Friday morning. Just now I was reading back here and there. I like how plain-spoken I am, at the same time as innovative. It is my taste in any medium, simple taken into smart. The smart is not shown by signifiers of smart but by shades and tones and inventions, grasp and motion.   March 2002. - Still looking at the beginning of Goddard. Why had I never noticed that Ed's dying coincided with moving to SD, the beginning of In America. And that I never understand that what I think of as dull times are exhaustion in large changes I don't credit the difficulty of. 26 In taking photos I came to be in touch with my surroundings. They were pictures of meetings.   People don't believe they can be true. There's a kind of hatred for them.   Notes in origin. The origin was early love.   Sacrificing what's special in oneself to not be hated. Child enduring hatred, holding out. - A tiny childhood thing I remembered yesterday, what was it. Moments that strike into memory as if to say understand this later, when you can. I'm free and I have a jeep and I have a very strong pulse the optometrist said. - Summer 2003. I bought a jeep and then I started to transcribe. Tom had confessed and I'd sent him away and was crying for a project. I got up this morning and wrote three pages of intro for W&D. I think somehow I am actually transited into the next project. That is happy - though I notice it's a suppressed happiness. So now I know why I've held off on other work and why I've needed to be alone these months.   May 2004. Then went camping for the first time too. - Theory's practice II: teaching. - I said: situational judgment - not everybody is a killer or a rapist, some people are just a bit nuts. we don't need police for every weird lost soul. just handle it.   They said: Your comment was removed from The Merritt Wire by an admin. See their feedback. 2 hrs ago Feedback about your removed ccmment. Group rules that were violated 1. BE KIND AND RESPECTFUL - :)   what are you smiling about em   it made me think of riddley walker, and that made me think of you, and that made me smile   I only know one other person I cd give riddley to and that was luke. he read it aloud to his then girlfriend and her mom - he knew what accent. isn't that a fine thing. when he was 10 I read him huckleberry finn trying for the accents. he rolled around laughing. so pleased you met him.   me too.   your kindness in being willing to know this life. when there are so many. - 5:18pm crying just now remembering giving you riddley walker that you read it aloud that you knew how   7:30pm I read it aloud as you gave me huckleberry. And I gave it to Ezra for his birthday and he loved it.   emilee the only other person seemed I could give it to. she was recalling it today.   x   I just sat with Jill this evening tho she was exhausted we argued about socialism and went back and forth about capital and colonialism until she quit. And I saw how she looked like I imagined you to be and I was so saddened silently by our separation. You can't have any measure of how much I miss you. I do.   why I was crying, yo   You know the thing is. I am ever the glad continuation of you. It's with all my intent and failure and wonder but I am because. I am and will ever be until I'm not.   you are the way you can say that I marvel 27 Picked, stripped, washed, juiced, canned 8 half-pints of red currant cordial and then pruned the bush. I pick a quart of raspberries every couple of days, freeze them. - Scents in the house sweet peas next to doors where I get a whiff as I pass through. Plush dark red ultimate rose-scented Munstead Wood here and there, sometimes the lighter scents of Alnwick, Winchester Cathedral, Molineux, Charlotte, Sharifa Asma - those scents I most of the time have to bend to find. In earliest summer the powerful almost-wild scents of Therese Bougnet and Kaitlyn Ainsley. Later - now - strongest of any - my favorite - a little bunch of nasturtiums that in evenings can push its scent across the room. If they were Oma's favorite for her too it must have been the scent. 28 Twenty semesters. January 2005, handling easily then boom Susan and Emily. Should I skip them for now. Have been asking what is different in In America. More relaxed. There's still Tom but garden-making, California, Mexico, backcountry, more money, good clothes, Goddard successes and interests. Write letters with people who like them. Accomplished theory spins off into applications. Transcribing and posting Work & days. I handle Tom, am not crushed when we have breaks. The way recognition and opportunity seemed to clump with a high state and disappear when I am not energized enough make me wonder whether a high state is a wide beacon. Examples: 29 What else I'm feeling about this stage is, don't look for life where it used to be, look for people I can be on with. Don't be too proud to fight to be with them. Don't be too idle to fight hard. Study disintegration in other people, don't have a horror of it. - Chip pile up by the biofuel plant spontaneously caught fire this aft. Light wind out of the Coque's valley, lot of white smoke drifting across the town's east side. It hasn't diminished through the hours so I wanted to see it. Had to go up around through Colletville to get above it. There it was, no flames but the huge pile glowing red like banked coal all through its depth. They're pouring water but there's no way they can put it out. I don't think there are flying embers but would there be if the wind picks up? That doesn't usually happen overnight. 30 Saturday at the Calabria, marble table in the corner. I'm not going to say anything sentimental. Quite a harsh babble. Wish I were meeting someone. Who. None of these random poor. Someone who smokes. Occasionally. Okay, Susan. She'd be pink and burbling.   The sky is battleship grey up across the street. Ken Sallit would be interesting. I would hear his humiliated adventures and admire his high color. Small sips of bitter foam.   Stylistic declarations of the poor.   What was I looking for in Rilke. Vocation. Moments that tower into significance. The gratitude of the Completed, I know that. Is it possible for me to work in it. Somehow again. (Not stroking a little tower.) My sense of die Fernen is not god, nothing like god, not yearning or adoration, more like weightless motion in an ether. A stepping.   It is not the same thing as moments that tower. Those are the dark ones.   Vancouver August 2007 Rachel and Don love it! 31 Have I ever said that often when I sit in warm water in the evening understandings come through from wherever they've formed outside the day's conscious self, often something about what I was working on in the morning, as if my better or truer mind arrives again. Today I realized I'd missed something from months back, about Ian's notes. I was realizing that passages about me I'd thought were grandiose or self-defensive misrememberings were intentional lies meant to cancel what I'd recorded in my journal, meaning he'd read it. Why hadn't I thought of that - because why would he imagine that anyone who reads my journal would be reading him. I want to say, you earned the humiliation you suffered with me. Deal with yourself, don't keep hankering to change the past. It makes your writing stupid. 2 August The moving to Mesa Grande story. Student thoughts taper off. Book design, the monograph, Ant Bear, audio, film. Tom is at a distance. I'm feeling out getting old. 3 BK giving me a nudge this morning. April 10 - May 8 2024, 1500 euros, production budget 1500. screening, seminar, exhibition. Cultural studies BA seminar open to all faculties, four sessions 1.5 hours, two longer. a large room with curtained windows along one wall; a small office-like space that could also function as another exhibition space; and then off of that, a room that functions as a cinema with probably 10 seats. decent sound system, overhead projector and slide projector, can rent a high quality digital projector. our correspondence, the idea of publishing it in some form Christopher suggests he and I centre the seminar around your work and methodologies in film. I would love to teach students about your work (in film, writing, teaching, cognitive science. What would I like - the PRC photos, the films, my edit of the interview, an online reader accompanying. It could be comprehensive: photos, films, teaching, journal, philosophy. CV with links. What will she want. Something she invents. She'll want a collaboration. I'll want a curation to my taste. Would Christopher understand better? It says yes. We could include questions he inserts when he looks at the compendium. Do you think it can work Yes Without savaging her Yes - Am seeing that I have to go over her head. The correspondence isn't clear enough. Decide in relation to a seminar series. Structure it to be essential. Insist on the photos. - My little readership goes away when it's just writing so I post one of my flower photos to gather them in again, phlox, molineux, winchester cathedral.jpg. There'll be 16 likes I won't care about, where yesterday the lovely observation of boys on bikes reached hardly anyone, as also the Annie Dunne sentences or understandings it has taken more effort to achieve than any of them can imagine. - age that wearies me and time that condemns 4 - Condemns. - The sky darkened. When I was gone fetching pyjamas from the jeep Tom was standing looking up through firelit oak trees. Night on planet Earth he said.   It's a good tent. We could lie next to each other zipped in but with the whole roof open to stars showing between black oak twigs. I could see Cassiopeia's W on its side in a gap.   What stories told in the dark. Tom said one of the views of me he likes to remember was when we were coming back from Read Island, waiting in a nearly empty ferry terminal with its odd lighting. It was a barn of a place, empty. He said he was starting to cross the room and saw me at a table reading a newspaper. I said what was it about it. He said it was like a way station. Like somewhere between space ships? Yes.   We were awake in the dark from about four, talked until the stars had faded and the pink light had passed. I had been saying that to me the science story is so beautiful I don't know why anyone doesn't prefer it to religion, the so many years of universe slowly working it out. He said when he was little he had understood that he would die but someone else would be conscious in his place. Like Bede's story of a vast hall a bird flies through from one side to the other. I liked that moment best I think.   Wm Heise State Park September 2011 Tom was completely right for me and completely wrong. Loyalty and agony in unending struggle. My spirit's adventure, there you go. 5 Rob says Brian Tugwell has died, medically assisted. Hugh. 6 Tia said The Golden West is appalling. I said say more. She said, "Fuck - did she and does she still feel all that and how does that feel to hang onto all that and isn't the writing of it giving it life and isn't she afraid to be with all THAT? the building of a monument to that pain."   What should I think of that. I've never thought of it as a monument to pain. Pain comes and goes. Gradually I learn what to do with it, gradually I've learned what it is.   - There I had gone at random to GW5-2, which begins with Joyce telling me to love unconditionally. It's not a monument to pain, it's valiant study. It makes me feel what soul is. Soul is what I was then, a kind of doubleness, a relation to myself, and to events too, isn't it. It's not simply experience, it's a relation to experience. It's first experience allowed in its intensity and it's second an alert relation to experience, a relation that guides, in a way.   Is soul a dyad? It says yes. A double capacity. A relation of adult and child. Which is why it aligns with religion. I was soul in relation to the sky because I felt and realized.   Mesa Grande January 2013 People will shy off that but Don gave it a red heart. 7 space is expanding - not just stuff in space but the fabric of space itself. And the light that we see from distant objects has actually been stretched by the expansion of the universe much of the universe is filled with what we call dust but is really more like smoke We have only known what stars are made of since the fantastic 1925 thesis of Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin. Can you imagine that? Like, we all sit down and say, I'll have to do something useful with my thesis. And hers was, O.K., here's what stars are made of. Because nobody knew. She figured out what stars are made of. That still blows my mind. Jane Rigby NASA astrophysicist, senior project scientist with the James Webb Space Telescope mission. - Sent for a red walker. A blue and white trailer came up today, $57,000, above the river in Ashcroft. Old, on bare gravel near the tracks. I had a fit of yearning to buy it and fix it my way and live in that better and much worse place. Because nothing nothing nothing new can ever happen here. 9 I found this image when I googled La Glace. La Glace Mennonite Brethren Church as it was in the late 1940s. The building on the left is the church; one door was for women and children and the other for men and older boys. The building on the right functioned as a Bible school during the years my parents and the other young people were being trained in the ways of their fathers. I very faintly remember the log annex between them but it was soon torn down. A plainness they were, gender segregation, hemispheric segregation, a primitive bridge soon removed. 10 The children who sat opposite us on the trolley one Friday evening were a stringbean girl in a junior high prom dress - spangly sleeveless bodice, white chiffon skirt - and a boy the same age, skateboard shorts and sleeveless t-shirt. It had been his idea to jump on the trolley. She sat putting her black hair up, scolding him. Jason you are such an idiot. He looked at the two of us beaming. Can we turn around and come back the same way? Yes we said. She got up and jumped off after two stops. He followed her grinning, a tanned boy with a cowlick.   They were us Tom said yesterday. What I'd felt though I didn't realize it.   San Diego May 2000 Posted it this morning though I posted a longer version three years ago. Why was I thinking of it, lying awake this morning. Noticing that Tom's moments of grace go on as the whole summary. Louie has gone on as angry will. Jam as bluffing oblivion. Greg as a kindness that consoled through all the years. Frank as lonely yearning that wanted to protect. Mary now as demolished monster. 11 This morning Doug's head above their fence, this aft a red pickup unloading a spindly-legged table. Old woman with an old dog. When I'd been unloading a heavy cardboard box at the front door she eagerly said hello. I asked where she was coming from and when she said Logan Lake I felt oh too bad, but she has set up a red sun shade in her new back yard and when I glimpsed her there with her little dog she looked happy. Kelly. It's already dark at nine. 12 5:35 Saturday morning, hollyhocks done, knobbed stalks now tipped with one pink thing held translucent to a patchy pale dawn. White sky, unmoving grey scraps. Next week it will be nine years since I left CA. 13 Joshua, good morning. When I look above to the line of our previous comments I see that we've already had this conversation. I'll add that your follow-up record hasn't given me confidence. You haven't done one thing you said you'd do. Wanting a phone interview, wanting me to hurry and reply. Young man so entitled he doesn't know to court someone carefully if he wants them to help his career? Or maybe just ADHD and will be anguished when he gets my note because he knows it's true and it's always like that and he can't fix it. - Ultra Dogme August 18 - September 1. Max in Berlin asked how wd I feel about a photo, he was thinking maybe the one with a Bolex, meaning the red shoe photo Louie took on the Sexsmith-La Glace road. - I'm lagging with BK, every morning avoid the interview. There's the sickle moon high up and in an immaculate sky kindled orange at its margin. Immaculate moon, immaculate sky. 14 white sage, salvia apiana. kate sent this photo from california because she knows I miss it. chaparral plant locally sacred, scent a sharp sudden breath of health. 15 Sunday morning. California. We were early and pulled in at a gate. There's your jeep Tom said. Still wet from the car wash, a good dark red, nice later-model rump, clean-cut young man driving. Let's follow him in I said. Nah, give him a moment to get inside, kiss his wife said Tom. I was antsy. We'll just wait 'til the end of this song Tom said. I give it one more minute. I need to go now. Okay he says. We have conferred. He's going to stay in the car and read the Times.   I cross the road to meet a young soldier, jarhead, nice looking, mild, smart. Hold out my hand. He's level and calm. I say I have my little checklist and I'll just go through it. I bounce the corners. Open the liftgate. Look at the spare. Look at the tread on the tires. Check the transmission fluid. Check the color of the oil. Check the level of brake fluid (it's down). Look at the belt when it's running. Crawl underneath front, back and side to look at the cat and the muffler, which is rusted. There's a leak on that thing that sticks down, big round thing.   Say I'd like to take it for a drive, does he want to come? He says no. I drive it a block up El Camino Real, accelerate hard, brake hard, take my hand off the wheel to see whether it tracks. It does, perfectly. It's not as frisky as my old Cherokee, doesn't have that light-footed frisky pick-up, doesn't have the same throaty growl. The controls are a bit flimsy, compared. I don't mind the dents on the back fender. I'd be able to have a bike carrier because it has a trailer hitch. The color's wonderful.   I tell him I like it but I'd want my jeep guy to look at it, especially because of the leak. His wife is beginning to chime in, she likes me. They say they can take it to PB. I'll have to find out when Bob can fit me in, I'll call them first thing Monday morning.   Drive away with Tom. He had been proud of me. He liked the way I was standing with them, I looked young, he said. I had a good level gaze. He liked seeing me bouncing the corners and crawling underneath.   We were halfway to country and kept going. Mountains planted in avocados to the top. Fruit stands. Then all of that thinned out and there were the real mountains with natural scatterings of trees. We came up over the ridge and into the golden valley where the wild oats this season are dark amber rather than palomino blond. The spread of the land, wide, wide.   At Dudley's Bakery Tom wanted to spend money. He bought two bracelets and wore them both on his long thin wrist furred with copper and silver, a strong thin fur over his tan. Vain Tom. What is it about you and clothes. Driving along explaining your watch and your retro Nikes. "I'm bringing my wardrobe up a notch."   So he brought me home on I-8 and we kissed goodbye and I carried my groceries upstairs and here I am waiting for 9 o'clock so I can phone Robert's Automotive.   San Diego September 2007 I find that so charming. I don't know whether it wd charm anyone else but there we are so lightly ourselves in the interesting world. Tuesday morning. Yesterday was 99 degrees and today will be too. Front and back doors standing open to cool the house - it's 6am. Windless. There's a smoky dawn, Hamilton Hill powder blue, smoke from the Rossmoore Lake fire probably. Patch outside gazing among plants. Haven't said I found someone recommending OB pier 5, three movements in a landscape film list. Had thought no one notices that one. - No the smoke was from an overnight fire on Hamilton Hill that wd have scared me if I'd known. 16 The lacuna. I found it on the Borrego library 50 cent tables after I'd said goodbye to lovely Eric. He was a big sweet-natured man with velvety grey-black eyes and a teddy bear's curve to his tummy. He had kid-friends in the library, spoke to them in a way I liked, light and level. He lived in love, it seemed to me, was making the library a place friendly to the lonely. He wasn't a hiker, why had he chosen to be the librarian in a dusty isolated little town in the desert? I was guessing he was gay, he seemed too free to be het, too clean-hearted, but in a way he didn't seem gay either, as if a bit saintly. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall be - what? He blessed, in a comfy way, but with manly reserve. I supposed he had another life when he went to the coast.   Anyway, The lacuna. Time period 1929-1959. She invented two people one loves to be with and that's worth a lot. Harrison Shepherd wrote the kinds of letters I ache to have someone write me. Love and wit. Some clean love of being. Truth suffered as needed. I hadn't thought much of her but there's brilliant texture in this book.   "She was so tiny, from the back she also looked like a servant girl. But when she turned, her skirts and silver earrings whirled and her face was very startling, an Azteca queen with ferocious black eyes."   She's Insólito and she's Frida and their friendship, first, and then the friendship of Harrison Shepherd and Violet Brown, and all of that so exceeds the married-looking uninteresting-looking woman who lives on a farm in Virginia with a thick-bearded little ornithologist and some daughters. I was reading for the brilliant glints in the writing, for the light-spirited inventive honorable friendships, and as always with good novels for interest in the author's relation to the book. How did she manage to so exceed herself?   Vancouver September 2014 Barbara Kingsolver 2009 The lacuna I wanted people to like the test-driving story but they mostly didn't. Jim did. I think he was amused. Emilee, Rachel, Don, but what if anything do they feel or see. I sent it to Greg and he did what he always disappointingly does, summarize in a blank dutiful way and go on to tell something from his own barely felt life. - It didn't cool last night, I think for the first time here. After her supper Patch did what she always does, I don't know why, went to sit on the dryer and stare out the side window. I had that window open maybe four inches, looked at it, could she squeeze through? I didn't think so. Closed the door on her because I wanted to leave the back door open to cool the house. It wasn't cooling much but I left it open till bedtime, then closed it and opened Patch's door. The room was empty. A stroke of anguish, will she hide and be out all night and will I have to lie awake. I went out into the dark hoping she'd come to meet me when she heard me. She didn't. Should I just leave the verandah door open and go to bed? I went out with the flashlight and circled the garden. As I was getting back to the door she was ahead of me moving toward the steps. Later when the lights were off and I was maybe fading out I heard her on the floor saying eeee, eeee. She had food and water, what did she want? I spoke to her. She jumped onto the bed. Didn't want to lie on me but lay nearby and licked my hand. Was she lonely? Was there something she needed to say about having escaped? We held hands for a bit, my hand and her two front paws, then she jumped down probably to claim the chair. 17 I'd phoned an anthropologist at U of A from a payphone in Drumheller. It's nearing sunset. We leave the car behind the dugout and arrive separately over other hilltops checking them for stones. At the apex of this farthest most likely hill we find a heap of rocks with a clump of small aspen poplars sprung from among them.   There's a fence around the dome of the hill but the wires are down in this corner and in that one too. Dry shortgrass stalks stand singly out of dry lichen and moss in long horizontal light. The heaped stones are pink - it isn't just the time of day, they really are pink - and there's a wide ring of small rocks whose upper faces show out of a depth of sod that has lapped firmly around their base. The ring is incomplete on the east side but there a flat circle of stones is the effigy's head. Lines of rocks are arms raised and a larger rock stands at what would be the heart. Legs maybe, but disturbed. Parts of something else sketched in the northwest.   At the heap of pink rocks I hear a loud electric buzz. It's coming from the rocks themselves. Two notes she says, a low pitch under a high one. Is it these tiny wasp-things hovering almost inside the cracks between stones?   I have to get the cameras before the light's gone, strong pink light fading quickly though there's a surprising amount of it still on the slope facing west. A lichened pink rock is glowing in its socket. The moon has risen behind a poplar grove. It is exactly opposite the sun going down in the northwest.   We have the near dark to wander in separately. A cow tribe is passing in procession toward its night pasture, two nervy longhorn heifers, brindle, with beautiful faces; a young shorthorn bull trotting along oblivious to us with his nose stuck to a trotting cow's rear; yearling steers several together; all of them walking with that short jerk upward of the muzzle with every step. Older cows stop to challenge us with stares, sometimes a cow with two calves of different ages. Families visible, red or pale creamy tan. Another bull, a heavy-headed Hereford. All with skeletons more visible since we saw dinosaur skeletons in the morning.   I know I must sleep alone at any cost. Make two piles of bedding. Tonight we each have to pick our spot. Not certain how to decide. Toward sunrise? Dene dreamers face west. Oh - yes - by the rock that shone. But inside the circle? I try. It's not right. Just outside it, feet downhill toward the spot where the sun set, the good rock at left hand, head nearly on the ring.   We're on the highest point in all directions. A hill far to the northeast has a glow on its southwestern edge, the town of Three Hills, must be. Single lights here and there, farm lights not town lights. It won't be dark, the moon is two days from full. Mosquitoes. Not too many. She's unfolding blankets in the sunrise direction.   I lie on my back and say my urgencies. Beg for help.   Only the brightest stars are visible. The Dipper, the W, the Swan. When mosquitoes have gathered I cover my face with the sheet. Through it I see a bright streak. A meteor? I jerk the sheet to look. The streak is still there - standing, a thin green vertical line, aurora in a form I've never seen. It fades. Then in the north there's a band of the same pale green standing parallel to the horizon. White meteors shoot past. The grove's moon shadows are shaking across me. The rest of the vast land around us is in bright moon day.   I dream it's dawn and a pickup drives up near the fallen wire. People get out. In my dream it's hard to wake, like pulling myself up from a depth. I'm surprised to see the visitors aren't men. Two Native women are creeping around the far side of the hill hoping not to be seen. They've come for some sort of dawn ritual, offering smoke. I see the older woman's face quite clearly. She's following the other back to the truck. There's something awkward about their movement.   I wake and it's deep night still but a wind has come up, blowing from the northwest as if it's springing out of the grove. It's clean and live, warm, a wind like utter goodness. I want to lift my arms to it. I could like to lie awake in this wind, in this light, sloped facing sky and earth, all night, peaceful and thanking. Stars fall. I see the sky has turned. The moon has come sideways out of the grove and I'm out in its uncolored day. Before dawn I see it sink very orange at a point out from the end of my left arm. When there's a rim of fire in the northwest it seems the sun will rise down past the end of my right hand.   The wind woke her too and she felt it in the same way but she has another story. She heard a voice. It said to her, five times, I love you. Did you see the moon she asks. I was there it says. Are you the moon? No I'm the way you see it.   Rumsey Wheel in southern Alberta August 1992 Thought of it because of Perseid meteor showers these nights. It's awkwardly written I notice. I went into Raw forming yesterday to look for a piece about New York and couldn't stand to read even a sentence. One more day in the 90s. I'll have to pull the shades down soon but here's this moment with the sun glaring out of blue spruce arms and five doves quiet on a wire, Hamilton Hill bathed in cream. - Jennifer noticed. - A hot wind has come up from the south. I've rewritten my evac list, parked the jeep at the front door, loaded my camping mat and tent, brought suitcases and cooler inside, got cameras and photos out of the closet, put money and documents into the green bag, assembled video disk and memory sticks, and am keeping Patch where I can see her. Noticing that maybe not too long from now I'm not going to be able to do this kind of sudden carrying. Meantime Max of Ultra Dogme asking what photo I'd like. I zoom through the decades file and want none of them, am none of them. Have suggested core.jpg. - Yellowknife being evacuated, 20,000 people. 18 Dogme site is up with a link to the London vol 7 index page summarizing the months making Trapline. Then immediately a site by someone else, deep and thorough and well written. There was a ferocious bashing wind when I woke this morning that scared me for good reason (and knocked over the bean pole sunflower), and now this amount of notice is rattling me some? What I'm seeing is how over many years attention has built attention, my films have become more than they were because people made more of them over time. I notice too how much they have been helped by my writing. As always men liking my films more than women do; always it's been young men who advocate. Bennett Glace noticed when I was joking. Shaun likes last light. Some young man listed OB pier 5 as a notable landscape film. Chris. Kurt and Tony Reif at the beginning. James Quandt before anyone else. Paul Grant. - Kelowna on fire. 19 I've let Patch out this morning. It's cold and there's no wind. Thank you M for the money that let me transfer the films. https://ultradogme.com/2023/08/18/ellie-epp/ https://www.splittoothmedia.com/five-films-by-ellie-epp/ Sophia Satchell-Baeza gets so many details wrong that it seems she doesn't understand what she sees. Her adjectives are clumsy. Bennett Glace gets his details right, does his background reading carefully and sees the work in a history of the medium. one observes a series of harmonious paradoxes. of the moment, yet cognizant of history; she luxuriates in celluloid's pleasures, yet denies the payoffs of more conventional films; her films evince a singular, carefully considered point of view, yet showcase a supremely democratic approach to creation. He gets that this is the essence: when women's eroticism is described as passive a stupid equation is being made between attention and passivity. Close attention is intensely active. Perceiving a touch is as active as giving it - sometimes more active, more skilled and more consequential. Erotic attention isn't an empty bowl touch is poured or pushed into, it is more like a living antenna with a million fibres actively searching the space of the touch. Epp recalls and predicts the whole history of experimental filmmaking. trapline is never purely observational or lyrical. There is, throughout, both a stark simplicity and a conscious effort to dazzle. As the zoom inches closer to the glass, the shot compels even deeper contemplation than the long shot compositions preceding it. It recalibrates the viewer's concentration in anticipation of the final trio of images. As if the zoom pulled us to the surface, we close the film focused squarely on life outside of the pool. Trapline's silent final shot splits the frame between an unseen figure, changing behind a curtain, and a group of boys sitting and talking in a large shower stall. A final structural joke draws the film to a close, the unseen swimmer's shorts hit the ground just as the curtain drops on trapline. how genuinely otherworldly current's ineffable imagery is. Learning that Epp conjured something like heavenly harp strings or the curtain-like ripples of the northern lights from blinds captured on tungsten stock, which shines blue in daylight, struck me as both revelatory and a little anticlimactic. bright and dark is among an incredibly small handful of films that feel fated to exist. consciously or unconsciously embraced a process of directing through receiving rather than touching enacts a rite simply by exposing film to the elements and priming the chemical processes that lead to motion photography. The cinematic apparatus and the body become one. Epp soundtracks the film with what she calls 'short stories about electric touch', both personal and, in German, quoted from Medieval mystic Mechtild von Magdebourg. Without cheapening the impossible beauty of what we're seeing, they perfectly put it into words. Ultimately the final line of narration best articulates bright and dark's place between undeveloped celluloid and the captured image and most calls to mind Epp's comments on active erotic attention. "The art she sought was not a communication but a reception, as the sun shines into water and yet leaves the water undisturbed." You could read it as a thesis statement for Epp's filmography as a whole. 21 Opaque. Sky white beyond the nearest trees. blood test copper valley   hollyhocks poppies sow thistles grape fence edge whitney apples 22 sarah black. in london in 1972 I found a consciousness raising group in my area. we'd take turns I think every two weeks holding a meeting in our own places. those meetings were happy and friendly and changed all our lives.   one of the weeks we met at my flat on burghley road I answered the door to a new face. I was so struck by liking that later I sketched that face from memory.   sarah and I were friends for the rest of my london years. she was swift and sardonic, had a strong sense of the absurd. her degree had been in music and math and she wrote. we laughed a lot. I don't know where she is now. her name isn't uncommon enough so it's easy to find her online. I wrote something momentous in a flat way and yet I like it, why. 'Happy and friendly and changed all our lives' is exact. So is 'swift and sardonic'. Flatness suits the drawing's simple directness. I admire the drawing, few lines and someone is really there. - At night on the airplane I was telling David Mac about the farm, the yard. He was listening perfectly and telling about his uncle's fields. They would have those loves as their anchor, they'd begin there. When I was touching myself afterward I realized something else, his intelligence in sex so he could undertake animal maleness with courage and at the same time understand the terror of animal femaleness and want to protect me in it. He'd understand degradation that isn't degrading. What Jam completely failed in, the way she went steel-hard when I was brave enough to feel it, a moment that proved she was not what she was claiming to be and that her pretense was hateful. 23 This morning after the paras about Sarah Black I've posted Gornick on consciousness raising groups. Educational for them but for myself mentioning what was then so radically new that I wasn't yet someone who could describe it. "Write about liberation" said Ros and I guess forgave my callowness. Oh Ros. I'm sorry you aren't still alive. Then I reread the Ros and Joe Slovo paras. Then I thank Roy: his driven wild badness gave me that access. My own driven wild badness made me able in it. - "Sue decided that she strongly wished not to descend into dementia under indefinite institutional care" Brian Hubbell said by email. "So, on the morning of Sunday, Sept 9, she ate her last grapefruit and informed her friends and doctor that she intended to stop eating and drinking. She stuck to her plan and died 34 days later, increasingly lucid through the last few days." In her final conversations with him, he added, she said she considered the ending to her life that she had orchestrated a triumph. Sue Hubbell, who wrote of bees and self-reliance, dies at 83, NYT October 2018. 24 Roy slept with all my friends at least once. I stopped being friends with some of them after that but with Rosalynde it went the other way. I didn't know her - I only knew she was an old friend of drunken Roy's drunken famous therapist - but I knew he was sleeping with her, so one afternoon when I had a class to go to and guessed he was with her I put Luke in his pushchair and took him up Highgate Road to her house. Walked in, said "I have to go to a class" and left. Could see her liking the briskness of that.   When I moved out of Roy's place not long after that I was living around the corner from her. There was no bathroom in my cold bare basement so I'd go round to her place for baths. Afterward she'd invite me to sit at the kitchen table with her and she'd hear out my twenties' struggles kindly and judiciously. We were friends for the rest of my London years.   She was ten years older, another generation; had very white skin, wise brown eyes and a sharp nose. Worked in publishing, had two very beautiful half-Sinhalese kids and was edging tactfully away from her architect husband.   When I dropped in one afternoon she had a visitor. South African accent. "This is Joe. He's a lawyer." A lively-looking smart-looking man but there are lots of those in London so I thought no more about him. It was years before I realized: Joe Slovo, high-ranking ANC operative then living in exile who when he returned to South Africa became Minister for Housing in Mandela's cabinet.   When I was about to move back to Canada Ros threw a wonderful party. As we sat in a large circle late at night Joe's wife Ruth First was squashed companionably in an armchair with me and Joe was teaching us a Zulu song.   Many years later I was planting trees on a fly-in site in northern Alberta when a copy of Time magazine dropped by helicopter with a pallet of seedlings told me Ruth had been killed by a parcel bomb in Mozambique. Ros by then was managing director of The Women's Press.   In 1990 Louie phoned to tell me to turn on the TV because Mandela had just been released. There he stood reading formally from a blowing paper, acknowledging those who'd worked against apartheid. "I salute the working class of our country." "I pay tribute to the mothers and wives and sisters of our movement." "We thank the world community." "I salute our general secretary Joe Slovo."   Ros de Lanerolle 1932-1993 Ruth First 1925-1982 Joe Slovo 1926-1995 Today I find a thorough Wikipedia piece on Ros. When last I looked almost the only thing I found was my own note. Four years ago? And just now I've seen her boy on Youtube speaking as a media specialist from a university in South Africa. 25 Appalled in Cookie's mirror yesterday, flabby yellow face with stupid small eyes. It must be because I hide out so much. I have to live differently but how. - Don is the only one who could realize the size of the Ros - Joe Slovo story. My girl readers don't. I sent it to Greg, who just needed to grumble about Roy. I said Roy wasn't good to me but in some respects he was good for me. Greg said to him the not good to me was more significant. I'm grateful that Greg has been good to me but he must in some smothered way know and resent that Roy's stretch and push has meant more. - Drove fast through early autumn. There's a high bridge over the Fraser and mist rising from the cold surface of the river curled up around it blazing white. Then rusty alders and poplars, cedar and fir, blackberry embankments for a quick half hour that opens to the immense Valley, real mountains high as the Rockies, miles distant but all around like a rim.   Then a small old woman stooping and peering in a '60s condo with artificial plants and false-gilt railing in the foyer, little apartment with missionary photos on the fridge. Took her to lunch, made her laugh, argued about religion. She wasn't bad but I can't take much of her. "You know the Epps believe in short visits." "Yes I know." Gives me Mennonite sausage to take home. Stands at the top of the stairs as I escape.   The highway's slower on the way back. Stop and start before the bridge, time to look at the glitter on the leaves, the autumn powder in the air.   Highway 1 to Abbotsford September 2006 What about it. It's economical. Artificial plants and false-gilt railing in the foyer, missionary photos on the fridge tell a whole story Rachel can understand at once. There's a true ache in it. Human loss bracketed by world's magnificence. I'm uglier and stupider but I can edit incisively now. I think the BK interview is mostly done. Need to find links and test it out with BK and maybe Chris. 26 Small tree standing in mist blooming all over with small pale blossoms. 27 I read somewhere that dogs are the only animals that look into our eyes. Not true. Patch searches my face. When I needed to catch Mouse to take him to the vet I'd have to look away because if I looked at him he'd read my intention and run. I've inset that because it's not journal. What makes it not journal is that it explains and declares. This does too. - I've sent it. With careful instructions and hedges because I'm afraid she'll want to spoil it with her own blurs. Do I think she can mediate and contextualize me? No. She'll need to make something of her own. That's fair but should I lend myself to it. Is the document worth something for a purpose of my own? Yes. There isn't another interview that includes what it includes: film, sound, photos, how women can know, journal, emotional processing, trauma and integration, teaching, somatic energetics, recognition and working with the uncon, philosophy, neuroscience, aboutness and simulation, network paradigm, end times. - you'll find it very pared-back I think. you may not like the interview format?   it isn't sequential. i've organized it into topics so there can be summaries. i'm also thinking that topics might line up with seminar sessions.   i've tried not to put words in your mouth but it does sometimes happen, though rarely, for purposes of transition or clarification. i've sometimes rarely also put them in mine.   it will need work. there are probably repetitions. we'll need to look at when it isn't clear, when there aren't enough transitions etc. would now be a time to show it to chris?   i guess we'll also need to look at what it can be used for. maybe it's just for us? if not, it's dense and dry as is. i've wondered whether we should somehow put in some of the daily life exchange there was in emails. i haven't known how to do that because it's not sequential.   what do you think? does the format make certain points clearer for you?   your intro will be important. - something here about asking questions, the way one might ask questions as a far simpler endeavour, more direct, the way you might've wanted me to ask questions all along.   I haven't disliked your way of asking questions. It's been friendly and mutual. The ways I've simplified are about getting points across in a maximally clear way to other people.   It shows me where emphasis lies for you   It does.   I think there's something about the repetition of the original correspondences that excites me ... I'd still like to think back to my original beckoning for your voice in bright and dark, and ask if you would want to record our correspondence as a sound work with me.   I wouldn't, again because of wanting to get points across in a clear way. I think what a careful reader or hearer of our original correspondence would see or hear in it is a generous and tactful but persistent struggle of different priorities. That can be interesting and worth showing but for me it would be a loss of focus.   Maybe the way to say it is that you are still wanting to do process work but I have a kind of desperation about needing to deliver my findings in a larger area. There are things I have come to stand for now. When I looked over the document after I sent it I realized that it amazingly summarizes the work of my last couple of decades, which has been summarized nowhere else. It includes almost everything. I don't want to blur that.   I've said before that you should have your own project, completely your own slant, that doesn't have to accommodate me. I would be happy if I had helped you toward your own work but that aspect is yours, your own.   Yes, let's send this to Christopher. Do you want to, and introduce yourself in the process?   You and he have been so to speak the hosts of the project so I don't think it should come from me.   I really wonder how legible it will feel.   And to whom. I think both of us should hand it around to people we know to be good readers. We could do that after we have your intro? It may be that we have to conclude it isn't useable for purposes we've imagined. It might turn out to be useable for something else, or if not I'd still think it was worth doing. - I've said again and again that she needs to be aware of our difference. Will this time be direct enough? It's as if she needs to read the way I did when I was younger, just picking up sparkly bits and not getting a grip. Studying my sparkly bits was how I got to grip but I don't think she's going to do that. - Two days struggling to update my CV. I haven't been able to do it in Pagemill so I had to get into Dreamweaver and even a completely new version of Dreamweaver so there was the app to deal with as well as the code. My brain felt frozen. Eventually I'd done it by cutting and pasting lines of code but then today I found it gone. But now it's done and posted. Greg sent a note about Notes in origin. He's watching the back catalogue one by one after reading Bennett Glace. 28 Photo of Opa as a very old man. What is it in this photo. A kind of penetrating sorrow. Janet says You have his eyes. Do I? What is she seeing. Both eyes seem focused on the viewer but they seem to be focused separately. I was reading Anne's book today as always glad I've escaped the thick air of family history but at the same time recognizing Peter Konrad's intelligence in doing what had to be done in desperate times. I've had to find challenges of a different kind. Have I met them with something like his solid penetration? 30 I don't remember the dream well but there was a tall woman I was aware of as if we were going to be together. She had a reserved male watchfulness I liked. But then as the dream ended I was looking into a face with a thick red beard that repelled me. Photo of Opa as a very old man. He has a face tested by revolution, war, famine, births of eleven children, deaths of two, penniless refugee flight. He did what was needed in desperate times: was the stallion who by strength and cunning takes care of his herd. Oma in her stories calls him mein lieber Peter.   He was formed by challenges his children weren't given. In their old age they can't be what he became, they can't have his kind of face. In their and my generations we've had to find challenges of a different kind. Gender has been mine.   In his time gender specialization was essential, and it's as if the political turbulence now is about loss of that necessity: now instead of religious wars, wars about how we organize gender. Conservatives are right that something that had been necessary is being given up and liberals are right that changed conditions have made it obsolete. Male rampage and female fertility have ruined the world. People now have to find something else to be. In my generation that has meant kinds of self-conflict most people aren't clear enough to confront. - Have the summaries made with BK meant I'm now free to go on? The air: a notebook. When I go there always halted, overwhelmed. I shy off. It means go slowly again and again. Persist. Use images. Strategize. Live right. [sigh] Send The sight of sound to Barry? truax@sfu.ca. 30 I interrupted Patch's love ritual before it was done so now that the computer is on my lap she has lain down half into the chair along my thigh. What makes her ritual done or not. - Now she has turned her back, is she offended. - I was wide awake at 1:30 smelling what I smell if I let my hot rock boil dry, a strong definite mineral smell. Had I left an element on? I got up to check. I hadn't. Opened the cellar door to sniff. Nothing. Got back into bed but was there something else I should do. Was it the smell of smoke we've had for days. Was there a new fire. I got up again to peer out the back window. The street was shining, it had rained. The scent was gone. I was thinking of Yeats visited by scents he thought told the presence of spirits. Then lying awake listening to BK's Something #51, a quiet show. There was a passage in a percussion piece whose subtlety riveted me. I think it must have been Midori Takata. Tabla? Tiny simple variations in pattern. 31 Ed died around three this morning. Yes it does mark a point for all of us and it has been quite lovely to be part of the last two weeks. I've stayed in Van and gone up the valley on the Greyhound sometimes, stayed overnight, and would peep at him from my chair at the foot of his bed. He was quiet under the yellow blanket, insubstantial, just a shabby little skull on the pillow and then far away at the foot of the bed the peak of his toes. There was something beautifully gentle and dignified about the way he would answer the nurses.   At first he was lucid sometimes. It was as if he were afloat in dark vapours where sometimes a bit of something solid would bob up to him. It was possible to have short exchanges, not more than about a sentence each way. When I first got there he said You're Ellie aren't you, I didn't recognize you. We just looked at each other for a slow count of maybe five. Then he burst into tears. That evening and next morning he would cry every time he heard my name.   When I saw him again he had an anxious forehead and would move his head as if he were in pain. When it was worst he would say OH boy. OHH boy. He was no longer recognizing Mary. I didn't see the next stage, but Paul, who had arrived from Toronto in the meantime, said he seemed to be hallucinating. He said that Ed's eyes, which have always been remarkably guarded, were glowing and bright blue. He was looking all around in wonder.   Friday morning he was gasping for air. Mary was so staggered by seeing him that way that she went dizzy and started to fall. Paul and Rudy took her home. She says she has been numb. I think physical collapse has been her way of feeling.   Late October in Vancouver as you will remember is very beautiful. There has been sun almost every day, yellow leaves on Hawks Avenue, frost on the roofs in the pink and blue dawns, raveling strings of crows.   I'll be back at the California number in about a week. You would like the train journey. Twenty-four hours of it are in California, much of it along the coast, just gliding, gliding, slowly and smoothly through more and more world.   I am always so relieved to know you are well.   Email Vancouver November 2002 - Wet morning with thick white sky. Sitting in A&W yesterday as Kathy cleaned I reread the story of Mouse wrenched into tears. I wrote Ed's death as if it's nothing but story. Could anyone else feel something reading it? - last year a couple of women in berlin who were wanting to start a magazine sent me a note asking for something on sound. then nothing happened: they dropped the idea without notice. I know dear readers that you hate reading long pieces on FB but I wrote it and I like it and here it is. I know with certainty that I have no access to anyone who can read it. My girl fans give it a checkmark: that's all there is. I should scream with grief.   part 5 time remaining volume 12: january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project