time remaining 12 part 5 - september-october  work & days: a lifetime journal project September 1 In a dream I remembered another dream, one I've remembered in other dreams too. It is the dream that I am in my home place one autumn many years after I've left it and I am seeing the leaves on the pasture trees and across the road. I am as far into beauty as I can go, the red of the leaves in the beautiful light. Red leaves and blue sky. 2 That because I often wonder when that dream happened - June 1995. - Roy Kiyooka felled at the kitchen table writing a pear tree poem. - Louie resentfully once said I'd made my beauty by learning how to hold my face. When I was walking in Port Meadows with Olivia I'd been living well and looked good and she didn't, and she said people were looking at me because of my cheekbones. I thought of these moments watching a doc about Marilyn that had her telling how she'd learned to lower her upper lip when she spoke. "I even slept with my mouth open." Besides peroxide she'd had her teeth straightened, her hairline altered by electrolysis, her nose narrowed and her 'lower face remodelled'. "I learned to speak huskily like Marlene Diedrich." "An odd thing happened to me, I fell in love with myself, not how I was but how I was going to be." Her screen test photos in 1962 were the most luminous of her life. She was 36 and thin and in trouble but she looked the way she must always have been wanting to look. "This presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence." Wanting to look someway, knowing that has to mean being someway. The London visit with Jam when Lauderick said now I was a femme fatale - what made that face - sex and pain? Tom saying When you're loved your features get finer. Hormonal transformation. How I looked the month I was living at Mrs O'Hare's - that wasn't sex or pain, what was it. 3 Beginning to fall asleep I caught myself arguing with BK and thought oh - she's struggling with what to say to me, angry. Maybe I'll hear from her tomorrow. - A while back Louie took offense when she put Lang Lang on her CD player and I didn't listen to him. She came up with a theory that her taste in music is more sophisticated than mine. I didn't get excited. I don't know about my taste in music, I mostly don't like anything and give up on music and then I hear something I suddenly like every particle of.   So Tuesday night I was mildly explaining and Louie was insisting I'm judgmental and arrogant. I got the kind of hurt feelings that are like a child's helpless anguish at injustice. My heart was sore. I just wanted to go home to the journal, which would recognize truth and explain it to me.   Vancouver April 2002 Women's competitive spite. 4 In a Rowling movie last night the qilin, a spindly little newborn creature like a fawn out of Chinese fairyland, who indicates a pure spirit by bowing. Innocence choosing a leader by recognizing goodness. I don't care about the plot but I love and marvel at the skill of invention. Who designs the creatures? How is compositing done so a real person can hold an imagined? The qilin's tremulous sweetness like Mouse. 5 Exasperated. BK pleading for the whole correspondence to be public. I've erased her from it. I have. What I want to say is, do that yourself, erase me from it and get your own essence. Do you understand this     YES She wants to be what I am without doing the work     yes The whole correspondence is a mess     yes Am I wrong about her     NO Am I ready to reply     yes - Yesterday a bunch of people liking my white iris photo so today I'm following it with this: About the slowness you mention, much of the stuff you need to read is so ill-founded that you can't read without having to resist disorder. Your jags into epistemology are essential. They are also overwhelming, because they are restructurings. Writing under conditions of restructuring IS slow; and not only that, it is painful, so in my experience the avoiding is not just leftover anti-authoritarian instinct. I think it indicates that this sort of work is really grueling. Far from the ease of evolutionary niche. Structurally hard to achieve and sustain. When I was writing short papers I could never get into flow without a major emotional crash, i.e. I had to let myself go into utter despair.   A long project can't be done that way but has other rigors. I could only work on Being About with my very best brain, early in the day, and only if I avoided almost any kind of social involvement. I could not drink a glass of wine the night before or I would lose focus. I could not have a fight or a poke with a friend. I could not have days off or it would be too hard to recover. Had to take great care what I ate. Had to faithfully do stairmaster at the gym to have enough energy. Went to bed at nine for years. (No regrets of course.) Welcome to philosophy.   You say in this freestyle kind of study it is hard to know what material will be the most rewarding. The principle to follow (I believe) is the principle of immediate hit - I think you can tell almost instantly whether the mind you are engaging with in a text is structuring you well.   Student reply letter October 2002 - One of Luke's terrifying emails, sudden ice pick to the heart. Since at least April he'd been alright, what's happened. 7 In bed this night I found myself thinking that since I don't like the efficient sterility of my edit I should look again at BK's letters to see whether there is something human I shd recover. I'm doing that this morning but run up against the way she piles abstract questions and doesn't answer them, as if asking them stamps her ticket and so is all that is needed. I remember noticing I was doing that and resolving not to. Her Somethings do it - pose a topic and then pile on a lot of unrelated stuff. It's a lack of commitment. I can't make anything of it, my head feels fuzzed out so I want to flee. I've kept saying we're different, you need to understand that we're different. So what exactly is our difference. She seems to me to be awash in the great Pacific trash vortex - she has a tolerance for miscellaneousness that I don't have - the horror I have of the packed aisles of a dollar store - is it Alzheimers coming on? Is it fine-tunedness? Up against the incommensurability of human minds - meaning people can't handle what I post the same way I can't handle what she writes - meaning good writing finds ways to be useable to many - except for arty people who try out not doing that - 8 Em asking for a doc file of Being abt to print from because she wants to reread - again - and has defaced her bootleg-printed copy with marks. Yesterday all day plunged into Louie emails from 2009 seeing what easy friendship is like till it fails, this moment saying but Louie has never read Being about, and wouldn't, and couldn't. And her jealousy. And her fateful now-coupled-up-ness. And her goneness. But I could write her good emails. And email such a good medium because it's fast and short and back-and-forth like talk. - Buoyant today, why. Because I slept till almost 6. Was that CBD? - Then this: Hi Ellie, Just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that the stream was a great success. Apart from the numerous nice things people had to say about your films on social media, the page featuring Sophia's article and the embedded films had 1.5k views. The most watched film (Trapline) got just over 1000 views. The rest of the films were mostly a little over or under 400 views. And just after the stream ended, Sophia wrote us to share: "A quick congratulations on the Ellie Epp program as it wraps up. Quite a lot of people have told me how much they loved the films, and especially what a revelation Trapline was." Thank you again for trusting us to show your work. Ultimately we hope that it will lead to your work being screened more often going forward! Warmly, Max Startled to find there's a capable international new young context. Chris. Chris did it. 9 language considered as a structure of directed perceptions I've done what Jam couldn't, I've explicated Pound in terms wider than his own. fields of force their proximity generates Image as radiant node or cluster is connectionist, "what I can call a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which ." In film I've sometimes done what I wanted to do, stunned someone with recognition of something marvelous they could be. 10 i won this time or close enough.jpg 13 Then I go back to my poets file and here's Duncan McNaughton:   work of enduring, intimate loyalty to deeper sources, to the untroubled nature of that to which it testifies, that of which one is unable to speak directly: presence of something else than information, something other than power. Another story, of faithful affinities in imagination, timeless, a matter of love, the face of it the beautiful work, itself   a work of cosmology rehearsing, in its fashion with all else it so marvelously brings forward, thousands of years of cosmological observation   a political struggle between all that constitutes the agency of the meanness of power and all the agency that labors on behalf of the agency of beauty and knowledge   -   I sorted 2018 onto two files and then carved each to nothing but writing. There another home, another self. I marvel at its dryness, its aloneness. I marvel in it, I am marvel in it. I marvel that what I love to be no one can want.   I'd worked foolishly, helplessly for years. One September alone in an old farmhouse I came to it, I came true. - Sue sent a piece: I was quietly astonished when I felt a compelling urge to touch and embrace someone, a stranger to me, lying in a bed, sometimes visibly suffering. These feelings came from a strong place - intact and mysteriously arising, willing and open where I usually felt withdrawn or without a presence or body at all. When these feelings arose I began to learn another way of contact. I would address the person in my mind, keep a kind of ongoing connection during the time I was in their room. It was unspoken, energetic, and often surprisingly met and received and given back to me. When I felt it I would respond without thought, and enter into an invisible felt space. My own movements and sensations became magnified, and there seemed to be an elasticity and suppleness in the air that kept me in constant touch with the body of the person lying in bed. One time something happened that has stayed me with for the rest of my life. I came into a room where a young man with beautiful mahogany skin and striking dark eyes lay breathing audibly in great draughts. He was not in distress, but his being was devoted to the task because that was how he had to breathe. Our eyes met as I walked in. His look stayed focused on me the whole time I went through my routines of cleaning. I would meet his gaze when I turned his way. It was a gaze of mutual regard, very serious, but not somber in the least. I felt called upon in a way I never had before. " I am here" his breath and eyes said. Something happened then. The air changed. It was electric, live, and surging. The sound and stream of his breathing entered me. It felt physical as though his breath had become mine. In the following moments the whole space around us seemed to be suffused with a larger breath, a great wind. His eyes, despite his effort, were sparked with some shining mode of existence - intelligence, urgency, even, revelation. . . . I entered the shrine room. Almost immediately I felt a cool rush around me, like wind but without a sense of movement in the air. It seemed more pervasive and, strangely, carried a sound - that is the only way I can describe it, but in truth there was nothing distinct I could hear. The air felt radically alive, sensate itself, and very active. I felt perceived. A flood of absolute relief filled me. For some moments I was held in a kind of invisible what? blessing? embrace? Held in a field of expansiveness; the same sensation I had experienced in the hospital room decades earlier. Some strange knowing that had no words or sense of procession in time. What to say to her. I can see what she liked in my sight of sound piece, what I said about the air feeling polished. In these moments she came into something her unusual sensitivity could do. 14 "The air felt radically alive, sensate itself, and very active. I felt perceived." Remembering DR experiences this. - Have come battered out of such a hard night. Woke at one, after that couldn't get comfortable. At dawn both shoulders hard lumps of pain. 15 My jeep guy, Bob, at Robert's Automotive yesterday. I was talking to him about my Cherokee being stolen, marveling the way I always do at how wonderful a man he is. He's a jeep specialist. He surfs. He's relaxed, I never feel he's hurrying away. He's settled into life. Is pleased with it. Has a porous, kind, taking-in quality like the best doctors. When I was leaving he said "I'm sorry about your jeep" and I felt he'd put a gentle finger on my chest; it was what I'd needed from him and he'd given it. I go away in a little dazzle of liking. I fussed with its first draft, pared, rearranged, wondered whether I was losing something by rearranging what had been the original order. It's crisp now but what was it before. I've noticed in many of my paras that I describe backward: it's how one thought has led to another. Is it better for the reader to be formed by the order that discovers? - 9 pints of grape juice. 16 I'd thought men wd like the jeep story but no. Because it praises a kind of man they think they're not? When I posted Max's letter with success stats five of them. - Stripped tomato side shoots and leaves. Pulled the sweet peas and seeding lettuce. Restocked all the vases. Kitchen in order. Energy more than usual. Two seasons of The farming life on BritBox, Scotland. Ed complained that no one was interested in the farm. We could have been if he had liked us and liked to teach us. Scent of nasturtiums blooms up around this chair in the evening. Heat from the lamp? Because the computer is on my lap Patch has crouched beside me on the chair's arm. She was outside all afternoon, holed up, maybe on the cold frame's rim where she can gaze about. What I pieced together this morning: Four crows picking at the sidewalk under the lamp post. Then comes a raven to the roof peak and they're gone. Sunday morning. A high ravel of geese wavering southeast. It's still, more than still, the corner as if petrified in blank light. There stands the linden showing its bones, there stand the crabapple twins rusting orange, there the Russian olive sleeping against vast luminous silver. There the imperturbable spruce. Suddenly a bright line up the edge of a signpost, suddenly a bright scatter in the nearest leaves. Then the bicycle man with his black dog. Church and spruce both coming to a point. Shadow edges creeping clockwise. Now two pickups. Three.   I'm looking at this corner and realizing that unlike cities I've known it's stable. Space isn't in short supply. Large trees abide. St Michael's has squatted there heavily graceful since 1909. None of these buildings are going to be pulled down. Nothing uglier is going to appear. The ravens will live out their lives and be replaced by their kind. Deer a bit further out will walk into a yard to strip a grapevine. Children will have to be picked up after school because a bear has come for dropped fruit.   Merritt October 2016 It's rhythmic in a right way. 20 The U-Haul technician who wired my hitch was a Latina teenager who said yes Cherokees have a lot of torque and called up a Youtube video on her phone to show me a girl in a Wrangler climbing a rock at nearly 90 degrees. She was lying on her back soldering a clip while her friend and I sat on the hot concrete keeping her company. Her friend was asking me questions like what is the best place you've been. I said It's not far from here. Leaving California disrupted me. I haven't recovered film making and Ant Bear, and haven't I been useless since, to the point of not really wanting to be alive. Is it like being in mourning, or depressed, not being interested in anyone or any place, as if life is over. Awkward with Freya yesterday trying not to say I don't need to see her baby, I don't have grandmother feelings. - elephant able to imitate the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway pre-verbal human children use at least forty or fifty gestures from the ape repertoire - Great athletes, the people who truly win, are the ones who are emotionally better and stronger and know how to handle situations. - Sonja to tell me her book is out and she's two months from another baby. 21 Didn't set out to juice grapes - was going to weed the west fence bed - but ended canning 16 half pints and a couple of half pints of yellow tomatoes. Canning is easy now but there's so much walking back and forth fetching and putting that by the time I've cleaning up I'm a cripple. 22 At night in snow walking fast crossing many railway lines, listening for a train that must be around the distant bend. Later wanting to catch a train traveling west I had to find the ticket office. Was crossing a street noticing how confident I was that I knew where it was. Trying to find the end of a lineup when I woke. This was a version of many dreams about taking a westward train running across the southern edge of Canada. Something I often remember is being dropped off in an industrial suburb of Munich late on a wet night - this was in 1966 passing through from Istanbul to Paris. By the time I'd got across town the youth hostel was locked tight so I slept not too badly under some bushes against its wall. What I remember next is standing in front of Durer's self-portrait in the Alte Pinakothek, the one from 1500. I'd wanted to see it because I wanted to look like that, to have that kind of gaze. - I remembered part of this wrong. Sleeping under bushes was the previous night at the Vienna hostel. The Munich hostel let me sleep on the waiting room floor. 23 What I remember is standing in an empty wasteland in a dark shining with wet. It was like an essence of travel, here I am somewhere. The thing about Dürer - his rabbit - in Strasbourg studying my African neighbour's big heavy art history book. 24 In free time after fourteen years of school I studied art. I sketched objects - it began then. Bought postcards. Little art books. Sunday morning. Open sky. Sun has caught the linden bright yellow from behind. Every morning I ask was there frost. Not yet. Little birds jumping about finding dropped seeds. Scatter of hulls under the sunflowers. 25 One day I open the Maybe folder and am charmed by my little pieces one after another. Next day I open the folder to pick something for FB and they seem weak and trivial. - Monday morning, 6 o'clock, Tom's house. The Eastern rim is brightening slightly. I'm on the couch in the kitchen, peering through the second-to-the-bottom pane of the French doors at the greenish glow behind the leaves. Tom is in the next room a long shape in the dark with is that a bare foot down the bottom end of the bed. I woke and couldn't sleep, came and did the dishes and organized Tom's shelves. He came in for a moment, I heard him laughing behind me and I laughed too - a sound I loved, two people one of them me laughing quietly in the dim light of the counter lamp, with the sleeping room still dark beyond us.   San Diego October 2008 "A sound I loved, two people one of them me laughing quietly in the dim light of the counter lamp, with the sleeping room still dark beyond us". What is it about that sentence. Still dark beyond us. She knows they won't always be together. They won't always be. She's loving the moment as the small spotlight it is. But, but. She's loving Tom. I hear his laugh. It's him. - From Dave, Dennis Maxwell has died just now. In my later teens I so much liked boys my own age - their beauty and their lightness and sincerity. Was in a new high school for my last year. We were just a couple of dozen kids in grade twelve and the boys were my easy friends. I wasn't wanting to date them, my out of town boyfriend was in his twenties, but they were loved comrades in the excitements of the age we were. My best pals were Dennis and Dave. They lived on my street and would sometimes walk me to school. Dennis died this week after an adult lifetime as a teacher and coach. It was Dave who let me know.   -   September 1962. First day of grade 12. Mr Mann ("Say, what are YOU doing here?" with a pat on my arm), Dennis Maxwell asking questions ("Hey Mr McCue, do you think I've grown since last year? What's that acid you can't put into a glass, HCL?"), Dave Leonard and I talking about universities at the back of the room.   October. Dennis and I will sit and talk and talk about the vital things on our minds and Mr Mann will put in words. I love school.   November. Outside was wonderfully warm, an evening like a September night. I walked silently down the stairs, felt for the screen door latch in the dark and went outside in my new brown shoes. I saw a light in an upstairs room where Dennis lives. Thought ah! Dennis is studying.   January 1963. Basketball game - our boys lost to Wembley. Rode home with Dennis and Dave in the falling snow.   March. Marvelous intricacies of diagrammed organic chemistry; and the excitement of talking to Dennis, now, in my spare period, about life and people and 'we'-ness ("Do you ?" "No, I ....").   May. Tonight was wonderful. Grad party on the ball field. I liked the sparks careening among the stars, the firelight on faces; Pat singing "But I'm sad to say, I'm on my way, won't be back for many a day"; the soft thud of his wooden tom-toms, the ash on his hair; Dennis standing alone with his hands deep in his pockets.   I hated the tho't that Mrs Wold might lock me out so I said goodnight and walked across the dark field. It was a beautiful night, dark enough now. I was glad and light and still savoring my freedom. Then a light swung up behind me, the white car I had half-expected to see, Dennis and Dave. I like the car because it is narrow enough so that when I sit in the middle I can touch both of them with the length of an arm. We drove around and around, listening to parts of Camelot on the car radio ("I'll vivisect him, I'll subdivide him") talking in the wonderful isolation of a car in the dark.   Sexsmith Alberta - Here's my little obit patched out of SH5. Dave has sent the official obit of a whole life well lived but mine is an obit for the young selves the three of us were just that year. 26 The girl who wrote things down. She was a clumsy writer but she loved moments given. She didn't know much about anyone but she understood their evanescence and loved their moments too. Books did that but no one she knew. The other kind of people made the safe good order of her town and school. 27 That in this age that girl's recorded love can give something to Mr Mann's sons. - Just realizing Mr Mann was a David M. Have been wanting to tell how these days I catch in a longing for the London David as if he were someone I've actually known, sometimes with an actual flash in the puss. I watch Scottish series to be with him. Yesterday I was starting to invent his mom, a woman in a forties dress courted by an air commander, dark-haired and steady, gifted and then felled. In these inventions so strong a sense of bringing something actual to pass. A show's theme music yesterday overlain and interwoven voices streaming past without breaks, so good it could have been his. He can write for singers. He takes care to be successful without being famous. - Seven seasons of Prime suspect. So good. Mirren in the seventh old, pale, blackout drunk, showing the cost of what she did. - When I see my raptures about men I sometimes think of Louie, who never got from me what I give them. Was that just or only true, were they worth more or have I been that way only because I was stamped by my mean dad. In what way could it have been just. Tom was more interesting because he was more damaged but also more willing to be what he was. In comparison she was a calculating safe little girl hiding her anger and greed and pretending devotion to manage the world. Do you agree with that?    yes 28 September in Borrego his first visit: When we were sitting on the concrete edge looking at Scorpius I blurted that it's because I'm a cripple I don't have a man with money. This morning I said one of our options is to separate gently and lovingly. He did what he does, declared that will never happen etc, but later when we were driving along past St Barnabas toward coffee he said he'd stop his sales pitch and say maybe we could be the best of friends and make a ceremony of declaring ourselves unhooked.   pale hill - what have I tried - Mono track > go back to stereo and fix R Quicktime to save rendering > still renders, but faster Stabilize > still quivers > stabilize again? Freeze frame front and back to fade in > okay > learn timing parameters Title in Motn > give time? my name at end?   Need to try color correction versions Boring stretches Still hiss in sound   What I liked best though was showing him pale hill.mov. He saw it, felt it. He felt the pathos of the little car and the anachronistic humor of the blue truck. The use of the airplane's sound.   Color correction and pale hill. I don't know how to make decisions. Bit of contrast and saturation but keep the subtlety. How to see it.   - How long to make it How to color correct it Where to lay the sound along How much to clean up the sound How to title - audio title? End title? - Can have different versions for different purposes. More con for computer screens. The low contrast version is more tactile, background motion is subtler.   I'm feeling what a deep editing exercise we made this is, make something elegant of this very patchy amateurish footage, with no rules except needing to hold attention and not be ugly.   I worked all day today, longer than I have. Tom: Still thinking about the old folks. The more I think about them the more sublime that sequence becomes. Silence gives it the poignancy and distance of old photos, motion vivifies the poignancy, making it immediate, concretely ectoplasmic and haunting. December burying the heart. Last light right afterward. 29 Black 5:39am at the window. I don't know what to do. Here I am. Really blank. Nothing to work on. No one to think of. Paul isn't willing to phone. Luke isn't willing to phone and is in some unknown frightening distress. Rowen isn't phoning and is it because he's been escaping into fantasy and not doing what needs to be done in the house. Oh Tom has unknown reasons. Nice house, nice house in quite good order. Garden not in good order but blue leaves of broccoli down the far end, pale tomatoes on the ground daring frost. Eating is so boring I just do it because I have to, I dig a potato and bake it and mash up its centre with a lot of butter and a bit of onion and white cheddar. - Late afternoon Patch came onto my lap and settled into her baby shape against my left shoulder, my arms around her, her arms around me. I fell asleep. - 11 pints of pears with lemon and honey. I was by the fireplace most of the evening with Rob, who will be forty five in two weeks. He looks the way he did when I was forty five twelve years ago. He was wearing a t-shirt tucked into jeans and was a graceful stringbean with his hair down on his shoulders, on his back on the floor with his feet in socks on the stone above the fire. Nice feet. I felt a smooshy familiar mild warm lust.   Sunday morning. I can see in the skin of my forearms the effect of having drunk a martini last night, just one. Tom's phone call woke me at eight. There was an electric flutter in my liver. He was looking at the room in which he has been happier than any room of his adult life he said. He'd been reading Marx on alienation. As we were speaking three small birds came to his windowsill. One was in the green pot with its long plant strands, pecking at something. Those three flew away and several moments later there came a robin, also pecking at the green strands. I could hear its small clear cheeps behind Tom's voice.   When Tom asked whether I flirt with Rob I said no, I tell him I'm married. It is approximately true that I don't flirt and completely true that I say I'm married. Tom had a flood of love, he said, when he heard it. We had a sweet phone call partly because he was on his weekend and partly because I'd done something and had stories to tell.   Vancouver March 2002 30 "Smooshy familiar mild warm lust" scattered the men. Zimmerman liked it instantly. - I've posted Rilke on his mother. "When I must see this lost, unreal, entirely unrelated woman, who cannot grow old, then I feel that I tried to get away from her even as a child and am deeply afraid that after years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her, that I have somewhere in me inner movements which are the other half of her withered gestures, broken pieces of memory which she carries in her; I am horrified then at her distracted piety, her obstinate faith, all the disfigured and distorted things she clings to, herself empty as a dress, ghostlike and terrible. And that I am yet her child; that some hardly recognizable wallpaper door in this faded wall, which belongs nowhere, was my entrance into the world (if indeed such an entrance can lead into the world)." Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé   Will anyone who reads me dare feel anything like that. Maybe Don. - Reading isn't what it was because now it feels it has no future - I've been noticing that - and with the journal too, as if there's no reason now to write anything down. I was lying in the dark this morning feeling sorrow that I haven't published, as if I've been irresponsible. - Yesterday morning I started bread that I took out of the enamel casserole at 8pm. First two slices perfect, still warm, soft and bright with a hard crust. Thin slice of rosemary ham. I'll eat all of it toasted in the next days, and I'll ache on account of it, but really the whole event of making it was for those two first slices. - recited poetry by heart in an almost toneless, unemotional, quite unpoetical voice which submerged the meaning under the level horizontal line of the words a face of isolated self-communing wrote somewhere that a friend is simply someone of whom, in his absence, one thinks with pleasure He gave them their wishes which they might not have listened to otherwise. He had also perhaps acquired some tragic quality of isolation. All a poet can do perhaps is create verbal models of the private life; a garden where people can cultivate an imagined order like that which exists irresistibly in the music of Mozart Spender on Auden. That last isn't well said. What an artist can do at her best is to open an experience of dilated human being. I sometimes have. Should, could, be satisfied with that. Large sigh. - Yes Don. Sam Becker a red heart. Jenn! Emilee. October 1 I put blankets over the cucumbers and tomatoes last night, gathered an armful of basil, and yes this morning the needle is at zero. Went out in the late afternoon to pull the rest of the sow thistles out of the fence bed and wrestle them into the bin. Cut down the little plum trees that have sprung up over the house end of the garden I don't know why, opened the gate end of the path. Colour in the paeonies, Flemish Beauty and Thérèse Bugnet wine and gold, alyssum's white froth filling in. Then came inside and saw a beautiful evening, soft gold on inner walls and soft blue at the windows, that classic moment. This morning the sky faintly smudged, chalk line of a flight path very faintly pink. Definitely frost. 2 what can be made of a mortal life actual lovers, later physics the world for its own sake for instance today as if singing thanks that the sky is bright then reading another chapter and liking the sparse balanced flow of time noted it moves along in quiet assurance a network new lines can activate everything patterned and propagated change field effects. dissolution now begun - Turns out Cheryl lives in Van again - 1975 - nearly fifty years on. This morning Chris W. BK hasn't sent an intro. I'm seeing we've had different understandings of what she meant by "we might work together on this, perhaps with me as a kind of mediator expanding on your work, your research, and your methods". I'll think about how to say that but in the meantime have sent him the summary-interview doc. 3 Should I just wash my hands of it     no I'm fed up with how unclear it is     yes It's pointless     yes Tell them I won't do it and why     yes Drop it but deal with it     yes They can show the films if they want and just leave it at that     yes   Hello Christopher.   B and I corresponded over approximately two years altogether. Her proposal to come up with something for you came six months into that time, and after that we worked back and forth quite intensively on a number of questions it seemed we could both be interested in.   Throughout this process we haven't been as clear as I want to be about whether your event is a show about my work or whether it is a joint Epp-Knox show. My misunderstanding has been that it was to be the first, because B's initial proposal was "We might work together on this, perhaps with me as a kind of mediator expanding on your work, your research, and your methods". I'm now realizing that B's understanding - and maybe yours? - has been that it's the latter. At this point we really need to sort this out. B and I are so different in our approaches to work that I don't think a joint show is workable, we'd cancel each other out. So why not just give B a show of her own? I'd have no hard feelings.   Or perhaps you'd want to just show my films as a separate event? You won't have seen them so here is the url for their Vimeo page, https://vimeo.com/showcase/10044173. Password ellieepp. The experience I've always tried for with them is an experience of complete attention so they are best on a big screen, but failing that a quiet dark room with good sound and people sitting down.   My CV with links to writing and critical comment is here: https://www.ellieepp.com/theory/topcv.html.   There's an online monograph with critical comment here: https://www.ellieepp.com/monograph/ellieepp29MB.pdf.   And two recent essays: Bennett Glace https://www.splittoothmedia.com/five-films-by-ellie-epp/ Shaun Inouye https://reissue.pub/articles/ellie-epp-uncommon-beauty/   I hope this is helpful. With good wishes, - I like that, because "we'd cancel each other out" is exact. So now I'm rid of it: it's up to them. Was the summary document worth it? Can I use it for anything? Yes. Was she trying to draft on my much greater effort?     no I went into teaching letter mode but not all the way     yes Was she wanting to be my student     yes Did she learn anything     yes Tuesday morning edging toward 6am. Black at the window, fur at my knee. Yesterday Evelyn Fox Keller's death notice in the Times, another of my advance brigade down. - Wasn't rid of it, because Christopher said he'd always imagined it a joint show and B persisted. I'd better be definite about this: I don't want our correspondence as such to be presented in relation to my films, or at all. For me it was a conversation but it wasn't a collaboration. You are at a stage in your work where you ask many, many, very abstract questions. A discipline I've learned in my later years has been, that if I ask a question I must bear down and answer it. I am at the end of my life now and need to deliver the answers I've made and found, bare and clear and free of anyone else's priorities. Where this leaves us with Christopher's event seems to be that I leave it to you and him. I can post the summary / as-if-interview document (with acknowledgment) on my site so it can be available as a reference work but I don't think it can be part of a joint show.   I'm annoyed     yes She misrepresented     yes 4 It's like Jacob for both Karlsruhe and the Western Front pairing me with trivial work by a junior. Is it some fashionable curation concept I don't know about? Gutlessly self-excusing, "I'm not bidding to be important here". Why not? Advocate what you can commit to for good reasons. It's a responsible job. There's this too: I don't mind losing the show because I suspect the venue has no reach, curator without conviction and second rate undergrad students. Okay, enough. After the Ultra Dogme show someone called Dylan wrote to say he wanted to interview me. I wrote back telling him where to find existing interviews and asking what he'd want to ask. That has been the end of that. Someone else the same, the boy who kept not following through. I told him he'd never done anything he said he was going to do. I'm stern: if they don't do the work, no, because I do. So: can I make something of the summary/interview. I corresponded with BK because I'm lonely and needed a penpal. There was a teaching hope to give her what she can use but I don't think much has landed. Could it land somewhere else? Did I let loneliness detour me from something that could have had effect somewhere else? Could I have finished Theory's practice for instance. - The question of my films I'll leave to Christopher. They are out in the world independent of me and anyone who wants to advocate them can rent them.   My posted writing is similarly out in the world accessible by anyone for any use they choose. Our many topics are all present there.   The record of our correspondence is different, especially if presented in a joint context. There I have to ask myself whether it can represent me usefully. There's a blunt way to say this: I don't want you to seem to mediate my work because I don't think you understand it. This is not meant to derogate you - there is no reason you should be required to understand it. You are a different sensibility and a different generation and have different urgencies.   Yes I've wavered. It's lovely to be asked about my work and I've tried it out in good faith, as I know you have. In the end though I don't feel I've made it work. Really, if it helps, you might want to just put my balking down to the impatient crankiness of an old person. I hope that's the end of it. - Was there any way to do that without hurting her feelings?     no Was it wrong to include him     no Is there any more you want to say     no It's accurate but it shocks her because she had an illusion. 6 I'm sorry. I had to feel the sting of failure too. Still protecting her. I don't say how crushed I was by her incomprehension. I was crushed all spring. But lighter now I think. Sigh. - All along, all day, I'd had beside, behind, ahead of me a floating very tall narrow black figure with Luke's close-trimmed head and pinned-back ears, an imposing spirit treading with hands in pockets or sitting across from me in a café spidering with his long fingers on the plate of toast. Soft transitional mouth, eyes not brown but army green, face not yet in its man's shape but showing a jut in the bone where his nose and mouth will fine down at eighteen or twenty.   We were walking in the old streets beyond Westminster, narrow and dark, brick Council flats rising straight and plain, a Victorian pocket hidden by the Gothic Parliament. River nearby, the rich borough rising just the other side of a blank bulk of office buildings. Not that we knew exactly where we were. We had come into it through the misty colors of the Embankment gardens, standing perennials in rusted shades soft and glowing. Dabbled our fingers at fat goldfish and then saw the black fry aimed in lines like iron filings.   We had doubled back alongside the river and it was full, full up, river and banks all drifted-over with a grey-blue dusting of mist. Had had to climb past the Houses of Parliament and saw an MP in a chauffeur-driven Jag shooting from one of the drives. Then - it was getting dark, the change to winter time - we got into the strange place by walking along watching the wine color of Virginia creeper on a wall, a dim gold bush, rubbery blue paint on a door.   There was a very small workers' caff' on the corner, yellow light, fry bar and hot water urn. I stopped on the pavement. I'd like a cup of tea, do you want one? We go in through a door at the thin end of the wedge. An old man with straight fine hair in a sheet above his face. Two teas to take out please. He's crossing over behind the chip bin. A young man comes through from that side into the counter side where we are. He has a big crude face and rough long curls, is in some way a type, arresting like a type. Two teas? To take out please. He crosses over again to the back. The lean old man has returned. Two teas? To take out or to have here? To take out. Do you want sugar? One? Do you want sugar? Luke says no. One for me. The old man is reaching for the styrofoam, hesitating. To take out? Yes, to take out. He lifts his big kettle, hinges up the lid. I think he's going to add water to old leaves but he shakes in a spoonful of fresh ones, turns on the boiling jet, clicks down the lid and pours. When he gets near the top of the styrofoam he's pouring in jerks of his arm, alternating cups, to shake the leaves back from the spout. Is that all right for you? Not too strong? It looks alright. We don't need lids. We don't need lids, thank you. Thanks. Cheers. Good night.   We stand on the corner and take a sip. It's good tea. I think this is the way English tea is supposed to taste, when I have tea at Jack's it tastes like this Luke says. We go on. He can drink while he's gliding, I have to stop.   We're in a sort of charity zone, Salvation Army hostel for men, Great Peter Street. And then abruptly the baloney-sandwich pile of the Bishop's Erection. Shall we go see what it is? The ceiling is almost invisible in darkness, smell of beeswax candles, many little pyres at side stations, a pantheon though Artemis is nowhere here. Flowers for the Virgin, a fat pillar carved from one block of green marble. Mosaics, a man swimming with his elbow raised over a little boat. A confessional with its red light on, the priest in his center slot showing his dissipated face through shutters turned back. A woman whose body shows her lack of sin steps behind the curtain.   And Hyde Park. By then we've been worn out by traffic and crowds and what is wonderful is the misty commons' wide distance, long paths like airstrips, soft orange, men carrying a sheet of plywood on a path crossing ours, deck chairs at Marble Arch standing dewy like penguins in family groups.   London October 1987 I'd want to send him the story but he'd be angry that I'm admiring him then rather than understanding him now, so I post it instead. He's 16, I'm 42 and there we are on the street, mother and son at any glance, handsome both. It was time travel. The man in the caff' is forgetful because he's out of Dickens, two hundred years old, and Westminster Cathedral with its pantheon goes back all the way to Rome. - 7:36am subject line: tea   i'm out of my usual and so this morning am drinking yorkshire gold. it tastes like the tea we had in westminster, october 1987 in the mist. you were 16.   ilu   2:06pm   This morning I was very unusually drinking Yorkshire Gold myself surprise but not. ilu2   XL   - Slow Film refused Last light again. 7 18 half pints of tomato juice with lemon, garlic and basil. 8 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 can be separable from body. Gender surgery is 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. Shouldn't we just be what we are in all its mixes, me with my male shoulders and woman's face.   I spent eight years with a woman who believed she was a man. The first moment at her door I saw her Faye Dunaway mouth and reached forward to set my hands on her waist. I saw a woman, desired her 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 and I can still be angry that she wasted me just needing me to affirm her fantasy.   Work woman and love woman, competing states of mind. Tom was a different kind of story because by that time I knew I was both.   May 2023 Sunday morning. All quiet on the corner. One star moving south in the black so bright it must be a planet. Patch after breakfast is out in the lovely dark. When daylight arrives she'll come in wanting me to rub her head. 9 Looking at the northern edge of a map. We want to go to this place but is there a small town here, further east? We could find a motel and spend the night before we go on. Driving west, there at the top of the map. Startled, a marvelous gash in the earth to the north, a dry canyon but wide, wide, and the open space between it and our road a vast clean sweep of bulldozed earth. We're coming into the town, or is it even a town, just a rough little settlement? It's a grassland place dry, flat and I'm thinking prone to earthquakes like Annares. This may be a hotel? I'll ask at the bar. I say, looking at the mezzanine floor above us, it will be too noisy here but do you know of somewhere else? He mentions a name where there'd be a couple of rooms. Am out in the street looking for it. Am in a corridor glancing into rooms that are already inhabited. It's like the barest of Old West hotel corridors. I see a window with old pink paint on its frame and next to it the sort of unpatterned wallpaper there was in the Tofteland House. - As always feeling how much I leave out. Was I traveling with my mom? Wondering whether we'd watch TV in a motel room. Later when I was on the street looking for the place with rooms there was Louie up ahead coming toward me. Someone gave me a phone number and I didn't remember all of it when I was writing it down. --3033. Later I saw the number I'd forgotten, 58. A young woman was looking at my silver boot. I showed her that I'd tied the lace at the back of the ankle. Before I'd gone into the bar there was something about being in a dark staircase? The bar was quite detailed, a brightly lit room with a lot of open space. I liked speaking to the bartender the way I like speaking to strangers when I travel. What I mainly wanted to see again, to say, were the moments seeing the canyon and seeing into the bare room - the place. - Patch had been sleeping at my knee but when it was time to put her into the basement I had to look for her. Not in the kitchen, was she in the dark laundry room? I heard a little meow. Turned on the light. She was up on the cupboard far out of reach. Alright, you're smart. I went to sleep and she didn't wake me. I've disturbed our intimacy, she's holding back, since I've been locking her out of my room at night she isn't as fond. She'd been sleeping next to my head and I'd been needing to sleep better. A little haunted by having hurt BK. Could I have done that better? She wanted to keep writing. I do not at all want that. I did keep trying to be clear, which amounted to warning her. Will she study the letters to understand what happened? I don't think so. Will she be able to use what I gave her though she's hurt? Maybe not. Is she strong enough to use pain to work? I haven't seen evidence that she is. Should I have said, forget about the show, just be my student? That would have been one truth. Another was that she needed the 1500 euros and a show. Another that I need something too and couldn't get it from her. BK's incomprehension has been crushing. I knew not to expect much, to do it for myself, and yet I've offered my best and seen it turn to a porridge of arty abstraction.   How to not be brutal. "My work just has to be what it already is, I think." In other words what you'd want to add would be at cross-purposes with it. That's it, and the difficulty of saying has been something else, anger of disappointment, which is not fair to give. Does the haunting have to go on for a bit. I mean does regret esoterically help her mend. It says no. If not, don't do it. - Rowen phoned yesterday to tell me a dream. He'd asked for something about a sealed vault. What he got was the two sealed doors at the foot of the East Pender house staircase and something about me in relation to the place. I said it was a brilliant metaphor, and that I thought I knew what was in the sealed vault, something I'd been thinking I should talk to him about, the way when he was a baby I'd let him cry on and on alone in the next room. He said he understood, he'd done that with Gideon. I said it was Just leave me the fuck alone. He said yes, that. I said when he did it it could have been reactivation, and that when I did it it could have been reactivation too. - Two things about Alzheimers. Cognitive function tests are normed to 100 IQ so people who begin with higher cog function can test as competent even when they are far into decline. Second, voluntary stopping eating and drinking is legal and so it's legal for people to assist, for instance doctors can monitor and prescribe pain meds. In the meantime test for B12. Someone else said keto for anti-inflam. MRI blood test for markers 10 Midafternoon I opened the back door probably to get an onion and there on the far side of the garden was a considerable person standing on four legs looking back. Black eyes and large ears that stood out horizontally from a narrow face. I exclaimed. When we'd gazed carefully for a while she went back to munching plum leaves. The tree has a lot of branches she can't reach so I didn't mind but when she leapt over three beds to graze on apple twigs I could see she'd already stripped I walked down the steps toward her. Meantime Patch had woken and noticed the open door. She froze. Then followed close at my heels, fascinated but taking no chances. 11 Cheryl on the phone. She's buoyant, we laugh in the old way, but when she exits gracefully - though after a long time - I feel in the old way that I've been handled, dominated. Is that accurate? It says no. Daph's Brigit has died. 12 Rowen tomorrow so what do I need to do. 13 Sonja's Loba is out. part 6 time remaining volume 12: 2023 january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project