time remaining 12 part 6 - 2023 october-november  work & days: a lifetime journal project October 15 He was an elf boy and is burly. Small hands and feet, pale hairy forearms, a thick curved back, hairy round belly. Where did that come from, did I do that? Arrived with a drizzling beard and straggling long hair. Head-on, white teeth over a plump red lip, my own shining dark hair, the beautiful dark brown eyes he had as a kid. Kind but a whole day of theological obsession. Then better yesterday when we drove a shining wet road up over Nicola Lake and lay on the bed looking at the ceiling and ate in lamplight at Mongo. Did I burden him with a life that has to keep flaring into hope and giving up and finding some way to flare again? He's 38. There are white hairs in his beard. I understand needing a philosophical framework but I don't think you are ready to find/make one because you haven't learned focus in real things. You need to feel success. You've been addicted to the shortcut of feeling fantasy success. The wizard idea is trying to jump ahead to success by magical means. Confidence and success need to be earned. If they aren't earned in childhood they need to be learned in slow steps. Learn focus and persistence by committing to doing small things impeccably, finishing them. Then feeling the success, taking full account of the successes there are. That way work up to being able to sort larger tasks into small steps and feeling confident that you will finish them. Gradually learn to be more urgent about giving yourself your own conditions for success, arranging your life to suit you. Saying these things I'm thinking of how it happened at home. I grew up into competence. I made my clothes. I figured out how to be best in school. I worked away from being shamed socially to being at ease. I made my own money from 16. I planned and pulled off publication at 17. I decided on a university consulting no one. Full scholarship. I said I'd go to Europe and did. I said I wanted a baby and had one, wanted to make a film and made one. Needed to overshoot Roy and did so. Decided to move to Vancouver and worked it out. Needed to overshoot T and R and J and did. Decided to get a PhD and persisted through massive hardship. Decided to move to California. Decided to have a house and garden. Have now run out of deciding, but still - Can I decide to be deciding again?     yes - Deeply kind and sometimes radiant. I asked him to turn the compost bin and halfway down he found a lot of it ready. The rose beds look so nice with fresh compost against green. 16 Another grandchild, a nice round-headed baby, Alistair. Rowen didn't want me to say grandchild because he's scrupulous not to make a claim. I said but biological continuity isn't nothing, there's a line from my grandparents. - My husband, Baloo, proficient in down-home, authentic small talk, an honest man, a says-what-he-thinks-man, who speaks with specificity and nuance, not in cliché, has told me plainly how strange I am.   I like this sentence but want to say I've never found you strange.   Winona's forward made me cry.   I write to navigate my way safely Across the chasm of words offered as bait   Yes.   I liked the glimpses of your American grandmother and Danish morfar, Marcus, you scowling in a meeting of Big Green. The many times World hasn't been wasted on you - bartending in Copenhagen, youth nature expedition in Alaska, climbing rim rock in the Pyrenees, banks of a river in the Amazon, hostel in Nuuk, red dirt outback, café in Moscow, La Brea tar pits, Mongolian steppe, more - that you've had means and used them. The many good souls you've found to talk to.   Was pleased seeing you in your turn passing on authors I'd so wanted to pass on myself: Paul Shepard, Susan Griffin, Sharon Butala, George Lakoff, Hugh Brody, Barry Lopez, Deborah Bird Rose.   Confident authority of the preface.   Facts and phrases:   to their eyes power lines appear to drip with lightning   the body goes instinctive during birth   sacrifice zones, places that don't matter   honesty which means specificity   people are making money by making places harder to love   these conditions for excellence of contact   intuition an English word for how trust and sense can guide knowing   Structure of dens lined with a thick layer of wolf underfur.   Wolf culture, wolves being not at all lone.   Chernobyl, where the wolves have returned.   I'm impressed by the research and synthesis. In your acknowledgements I was pleased by the list of publications because it tells me how steadfast you've been in finding your way to this book. Maybe you don't know that persistence is rare. I've had more than a handful of students who could write but have had to be sad to see the waste when persistence lacks.   the first wolf to return to Oregon arrived in 1999   I wonder if this is really true. In September of 1998 I was in a campground off Highway 101 in Oregon. I was asleep by nine - asleep on the ground - but woke suddenly while I could still hear a campfire in another stall. There had been the sound of one short sharp sniff. An animal stepped out of the bushes next to me, the height of a large dog but long-legged and silver grey. It hadn't noticed me. When I moved it startled and streaked away. It was lighter and faster than a dog. 17 Yesterday a grad student at NYU writing a paper on films made by altering film stock directly said his prof had mentioned bright and dark. I sent him the Vimeo link. "I just watched it and it's very beautiful and tender." "Had very recently been shown trapline." The mention of OB Pier 5 as landscape film was in a long filmography by Patrick Brian Smith of Concordia on Mubi Notebook. 18 philosopher and love.doc. I post it and instantly Emilee in the diagonal far corner of the continent where at 8am she is sitting down to work. - Arranged the desk so the monitor and mini have their own station. Found the clunky old we made this drive and figured out cords and am backing it up onto a little terabyte. 19 Emilee but no one else. Yesterday an impulse to finish We made this. Trying to back materials onto a smaller disk that can link directly to the mini - can transfer the dats but not the video. Held up by a password on the Macbook Pro, password docs a mess. - I'm not writing, technical problems will be better than watching junk on the ipad. Did I really not back it up? Get a fresh terabyte. Try Mike on the hill. Sore at night, sleeping too little, pharmacist said 2 Tylenol with aspirin. Is it a bad idea to dim pain that's constant information? 20 I like to read the FB stories again, this morning the bookwork intro's calm exact voice. Shouldn't I somehow spread them further? Then I think for instance Cheryl, why hasn't she said anything about them? quality of consciousness.doc with the 1977 international driver's license photo. Yesterday when I was renewing my car insurance friendly talk at the same time as scrutinizing her remarkable ugliness, dull brown thin dead hair, a thick-featured Bohunk face, sagging round gut. We were two people who'd been places sheltered together for an hour in a town where people haven't. Could say washed up in. 21 Managed yesterday to copy the video files onto a small terabyte. Where are the fcp versions I made in Borrego? I could make something more personal and written. Am completely free of Louie now, remember that. 22 aspen grove.jpg. Where can I find the land description? Search 'township'. NW2 - 74 - range 8 - W of the 6th meridian. 23 I was sleeping yesterday aft, heard a motor pass and was beginning to wake. Eyes still closed: where am I? I don't know. Marveling at a sensation of nowhere, as if grey air, as if a small blank room in my head. Try again, where am I? Nothing, like stepping on dead brakes. Again. Nothing. This has never happened before. Then it clicks. 24 Snowing. Selby Wynn Schwartz 2021 After Sappho the sentences, crisply flat yet billowing easily into gorgeous lyricism, feel so easily, casually of our time Exact. Laura Feigel in the Guardian. From the moment she had walked out of the Sala on Lina's arm, the air around her had been stirred by a sound of leaves massing like tiny wings on every branch, turning to feel on all surfaces what had set them trembling. Lina was that sound in the air, Sibilla wrote, or perhaps Lina was the light soundlessly touching all the leaves at once. - I was wondering why a feminist such as I am posts so many stories about men. Swift answer: from the bullied girl I was they are stories of triumph. 25 Just now seeing that this photo divides diagonally between colour and white. Glum this morning - everything I thought to post seemed bad - where was my head when I thought them right - like that - then I fixed the paragraph about not knowing where I was - what consoles is getting something said. Now it's all I have. It has turned cold. Patch wants out and when I open the door again comes bombing in. 2 Tylenol when I go to bed last till midafternoon and feel normal. 26 7:08am   subject line: good thing you live on a hill   thinking of you xxx   12:58pm   Well I heard you thinking about me ... Before I saw this, only moments after the timestamp on your mail, I was using Google earth to walk about Merritt and look at the views. There's a sliver of a photo of your house in their tiny Merritt collection, just half a window, that I immediately recognized as yours.   Sent from my Galaxy   Oh BTW. Good news yesterday I got my first Google Cloud certification. It's 4 months of study and exams, globally recognized. Finally progress.   XL - "What I've discovered is that if you keep going down and in you get to this place where everybody else is" she said. Helen Garner 27 Solei 30ml CBD blend Free Plus+ 1:30 Wait till afternoon so it's warmed up some. Weed-whack the sidewalk bed. Pull whatever sow thistles are left and poke them down into the bin. Sweep the sidewalk. Notice green leaves have frozen on all the fruit trees, does it mean flower buds will be wrecked again. Hobble inside carrying squash to the verandah window. Wedge into the space between the tub and the toilet to get hot water turned on. Sit in it to ease my knee, which will pay for having worked. Wash my hair while there's hot water. No energy to cook. Make cocoa. Rewatch Grand Design. 28 "Hope you don't mind if I say, don't mean to be perverted or nuthin', I think flannel looks good on a woman." High school boy at the Esso Station in Mono Lake, early daylight in October 1995. He'd filled my tank, smiled through the open car window. I thought of him this morning when I put on my shirt.   Merritt October 2023 - charmed by the elegant eloquence of her tail 30 Posted the two boobs air graphic from 1999 and it will lead off three posts from the mind struggling to finish Being about that maybe only Don will have some notion in. - Is Patch discouraged by the cold? Is it making her knee hurt? She goes out first thing but runs back almost immediately and this morning isn't interested in eating or even in cuddling. 31 Found an FB Patrick O'Brian page last night and jumped down a rabbit hole asking gmail to search for mentions to and from Greg. Avid reading those letters till 1am, ruined my night. Forwarded ten of those letters to myself and this morning have gone through extracting. November 1 Cog sci conference at SFU. Compare it, oh, to an experimental film conference, where there are visible and seeing bodies walking around -   Two days experimenting with dressing up. Today I wore the pale green suit, which looks like silk or very light linen and is beautifully cut at the back of the waist. I wore it with the cuffs rolled over my new red sneakers, black jersey without a bra and my hair down. I'm still tan and trim. I looked stunning. I knew a cog sci conference was not particularly a place to look stunning but I wanted to go for it before winter and head work put me back into podge.   Looking stunning made me more self conscious, less approachable, only slightly more noticed, and what else - less depressed by being unimportant maybe? I don't know what to conclude. It's like walking around in a shield. It's okay. It's only glamour and is being seen as that - I mean it isn't value, which is the real thing, a good state. Though there's a way this kind of glamour is a good state: it shows self pleasure and adventure though of a pop culture kind. It says, You people are ignoring both being and seeing bodies but I'm here and you are too. But nobody was returning my flash and saying You're here and I am too.   Rick Grush, large man with trimmed beard and knob of a ponytail, Paul Churchland's doc student who wrote about motor simulation, moved on stage as if delivering a talk was tai chi - he'd keep bringing himself back to center, feet together, hands touching each other symmetrically at his chest. His right arm would make strong forays and then he'd step into center again. This would happen over an unusually wide area of the stage. Beautiful and unusual. Compare Schwartz or Rosenthal, neurotic little clerics of the sensation-perception distinction. Rosenthal was jerking robotically between two points. Schwartz was stroking the fuzz on his bald forehead like a nursing baby.   SFU August 1999 2 Waking this morning missing my euphoria. In Language and Space I find the orthodoxy is faculties, representational codes, modules, and whatever implausible machinery is needed to keep this medieval fantasy going. I understand why I was overwhelmed; there are so many points where I'm at odds with the orthodox. I'd rather be a joyfully included worker but I'm a harried outsider and don't see how I'll be anything else. I'm where I was when I got drummed out of the university before, I mean the Slade, when semiotic theory came in and I knew it was wrong but couldn't say why and couldn't imagine standing up to the stampede of wrongness and so exited into experimental film, which was itself wrecked by that stampede.   Well, no, I am not where I was, because I've spent thirty years learning what my intuition needs to know to defend itself. But I still don't defend it because nobody understands or wants to understand. So do I exit again or do I somehow find an institutional spot and stand there saying things a few graduate students hear? Or maybe only undergrads who go off into art or engineering? Or I get drummed out again.   Or I hold onto euphoria and harass the clerics with cap and bells? Unshakably. Knowing the worst. Sustained by the joy of coherence creating more coherence. I'd be the motley fool with pictures, stories, movies, color, beauty, candor, subtlety, simplicity, emotional nakedness, and also with cunning. I'd be what I've been but I'd be it more energetically and boldly. Completely a warrior, is that it? A style of outsideness that doesn't withdraw.   That means I'd have to finance myself from outside.   Does it mean I mock the modules, take it on directly?   What do I want in the language and space book. There's what I want and what my project wants. My project wants: a description of deixis, sense of what it means in linguistics, Buhler's sense of deixis am phantasma, support for my sense of language running off simulation, ie support for the parts I know already.   What I want is the part I don't have already, a sense of how simulation connects across to sentence-making. A sense of what I haven't dealt with, that fogginess around the notions of abstraction, concepts, categories, parsing. What happens while the running-off is in progress, what part of a simulation is engaged, whether it's a matter of depth.   Always I have a sense that I could know quite a bit by noticing how it is to think for speaking, and for instance paying attention to the structure of dreaming.   I'm still in the bind of having to deal with the field as it is insanely dominated by the modularity people who are taking the description for the domain. I'm not in a position to do anything about that. I want to ignore them and just build in other terms.   November 1999 3 It's a little after seven, very quiet. The sky is a felted wad of fibrous water, bluish grey. I can hear gulls and crows. This room is the only lit room in the neighbourhood. The heater fan starts and stops. I'm hesitating before I jump, but I know I'm going to. Now I'm not afraid, just stalling. I want to stay myself a little longer. As if. I have six months ahead, that are going to change my life. When I come out of them at the end of May I'll have a book.   Take a breath.   Perceiving, imagining, representing, thinking: space and the brain. It's not a theory, it's not a framework, it's a way of imagining theoretically.   There are two wings in it, one of them asks what we now know about how we by means of the body/brain live space. The other applies that knowledge to how we think spatially about mind.   Spinoza said mind and extended substance are the same things under different descriptions and was banished to the margins of a tradition that has described mind as unextended, a description always structured by spatial metaphor.   I want to ask how brain thinks space and use what I find to ask how brain thinks mind.   I want to clean up an area of thought.   What kind of book do I want to write. I want to say: these are some of the difficulties we've had when we think about mind. Here is how we can work around them. It's a demonstration at the same time as it is an explanation. A beautiful transition is being made, but it is being made by a series of overlapping shifts. It is a transition in a manner of speaking. An old metaphor is being used to try to think in the new way, and it is holding us up, but if we try to speak without it we are misunderstood, and indeed we may misunderstand ourselves too.   A critical interest in perception and our way of thinking it. First philosophy has to be philosophy of perception. Science was founded on a willingness to leave the evidence of the senses. There was a misunderstanding of implications of that. Descartes was wanting to keep something for childish trust. It is as if he pulled the world of childish trust back into the womb with him, an inside. I should talk about how marked that philosophy is by the prenatal. An inside from which they can't know the outside.   We can talk about subjectivity without talking about it in terms of interiority. We can be thoroughly born. We can learn how to say that when we dream, perceive or think, the structures by which we do so are inside our bodies, but what it's like to do so isn't properly spoken of as either inside or outside us. It requires a different vocabulary, but that doesn't mean it's unextended, either. How much I don't like reading neuropsychology, monkey and rat experiments, laborious it seems to me to no purpose. I feel so claustrophobic down in the rat cage that I make a dash for the conclusion of the paper. The lists of authors make me feel the crush of thousands of experimenters struggling to be noticed. Conferences without end, all the dull clothes and heavy briefcases, a blind suffocated milling.   What else doesn't work. I've put my papers on the web where they look beautiful, or will with very little fixing, but they don't involve me in action. The poems even less, they seem nothing at all.   Vancouver November 1999 4 golden air.gif It pleases me that there are so many places she likes to sleep. At this moment the desk's chair's velvet cushion. When I'm in my work chair, the hassock at my knee. The moment I'm out of it the armchair itself. Floor next to the rad. A shelf in the closet she can get to if she pries the door. A most private place she chooses for reasons I haven't understood, the ceiling-high top of laundry room cupboards, that she can only reach by a really strenuous leap from the washing machine. When I'm reading in bed, my chest. If I'm asleep, just past a kick's reach at the foot of the bed. In summer, the verandah table, the verandah sofa, one of the verandah chairs. On winter nights the table alongside the kitchen window where she can keep an eye on the yard. Garden spots I've never found though I've seen her walk out from under rhubarb leaves or raspberry canes. Why it pleases me is that I can see she's not my guest, she's at home in what she knows is her own house. - This old sick man reached this old sick woman with the message she had always wanted to hear. What I loved in my old life I haven't forgotten. It lives in my spine, Marianne and the child, days of kindness. It rises in my spine and manifests as tears. I pray that a loving memory exists for them too, The precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world. 7 > being a tough cookie who doesn't put up with any crap   for the record, I have in my lifetime put up with masses of crap, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad.   I was the enforcer with our dad, knew I was psychologically stronger than him, but it hasn't always been that way. there have been others I've allowed to thoroughly intimidate and deeply humiliate me.   a mature female student in a philosophy phd program is not actually welcome. I lay low through those years for strategic reasons - except for the fine moment of telling my senior supe i was firing him - strategic reasons i don't regret because I got what I wanted in the end, I mean achieved what I set out to achieve.   the humiliations that scarred were from women during my lesbian feminist years. I'd never have guessed that women as lovers have more power to hurt than men do. I went into those years naive and idealistic about women and discovered that short knives are deadlier than long. I should say too that I've volunteered for psychological danger in ways many wouldn't, partly because of childhood things but partly also because I was in quest of something.   > humiliation is a hard thing to experience, and also hard to admit.   I don't find it hard to admit. it seems to me to be something most people feel sometime or other and as such something an artist can and should testify to.   > if there had been a #MeToo movement in academia during those years, you could have contributed   none of the philosophy department crap was sexual. at the time I was too old to be considered desirable. it was gender-based prejudice in relation to work.   > lesbian relationships ... think things are better, now that same-sex relationships are more open and accepted?   it wasn't like that. cultural in a different way. I had wandered into a jewish subculture with viciously competitive mores and a crooked agenda. it's a long story.   Email January 2018 - A flood of young women's novels it says about a bisexual woman besotted with a man she might otherwise find objectionable. 8 People like stories about cats and gardens. I think because there's love in them. They don't like stories about hardship. I know that but I post them anyway, because hardship needs to be named, needs to be seen. I was the kind of Evangelical kid who was told to testify. What I testify to now is not the same but I still like to do a disliked thing for a good reason.   This morning I clicked into Susan's poetry community and there as always am sad to find nowhere to be. They don't hear their lines. They try for a significant thump. There are so many. 9 whatthereis.tumblr.com. Eight good photos? October 2014 - April 2015, 7 months. 6th floor room in a welfare hotel, record of a vantage. Brief writing. Where? Discouraged in Capilano Reviews. Just one lovely poem, Jam's, along with many of her silly ones. 10 Working it up as a series of maybe 12 documentary posts, photos with very short bits of writing. It won't be liked. Though Don liked yesterday's. 11 It's been wet but starting now a week of nights below freezing so there were things I knew I'd have to do. As it began to get dark I was struggling to tie up the roses, set up their cages, haul leaves to stuff them, drag hoses into the garage, carry the ladder inside. Doing these things was so hard I was wanting to die. I was feeling how much younger I was when I was seventy, when I made the garden. Even last year. I'm so reluctant now to do anything, I just want to lie in bed with my ipad and a hot rock at my feet. I don't like to tell that but it's so. So I got into a hot bath - fancy new faucets - and made cocoa and have swallowed an aspirin and should think of terrified Gazans being bombed by the Israelis, somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 dead, running terrified, hungry and hurt, carrying kids and belongings and their dead, with no hot bath or aspirin in view, nowhere to lie down. Jewish campus groups howling antisemitism whenever anyone protests. 12 Rebecca Welle, Matt Fengler, Joseph Fengler, Dee Giannamore. Where is Tom's family history tumblr? May 2014 "sitting next-by at a long table by a 3rd floor window looking toward Coronado Bridge coaching Tom impatiently in Tumblr, he impatiently being coached". IA28-3. Will the notebook have the password. 13 Found it: fengler-history.tumblr.com, password ajpm0123. So melancholy-forsaken with no end in sight. 14 This morning dreaming I turned left off a street where I'd been looking for something and found a neighbourhood I liked, shabby and a bit Italian maybe. On the right a tall row of trees. Aren't those pomegranates? At the end of the block a path winding up a hill with yellow grass, a park I guess. I'm pedaling a bike, having to get off and push when it's steep. I knew the street I turned left off from other dreams - I knew the route although that stretch of it was unfamiliar. - A Scottish sports commentator called Andrew Cotter had no work during lockdown so he posted live coverage of his labradors racing to empty their bowls. People liked it so he kept going with dozens of short videos riffing on his dogs. He's funny and his accent is delightful but what charmed me was the way subverting his professional skill showed up its real brilliance. The labored conventions of standup aren't funny to me but this guy making stuff up as he rakes leaves with his labs makes me happier about humans. - Just remembering that when Lloyd Zbar asked me what I wanted to see in NYC I said Belleview Hospital. I recognized the shabby corridor in a show just now. Christmas 1963. He wasn't pleased, on the drive home a different girl sat in the front. The five of us stopped overnight in a motel and I saw a stripper twirling tassles in opposite directions. - I couldn't find the name of the hospital but I easily remembered his name, why. Little short term memory questions all day - did I let Patch out - did I eat this morning - often a blank pause before I know. When I write I revise more. After I've spoken with people I sometimes wonder was I foolish, there's been a throw-away feel as if I'm not on the spot. I hear myself speaking to Patch in ways I wouldn't want overheard. - Am feeling what's hard about aloneness more, there's no one I can ask how I am. And my left knee now may never stop hurting? 15 And something else, small moments of panic that are not like me. Are they bodily fear of mental disintegration? I've been so sturdy through isolation and hardship. - Rob says economic crash before environmental crash - the US dollar is going to fail and ours with it - only gold will still have value so he should buy gold and bury it capped with firebrick under this house. There should be land somewhere near Courtney to support a community with some kind of tradable goods. Israel may have had prior knowledge of the Gazan attack and may even have planned it to justify their ethnic cleansing drive. Putin should get the eastern territories back and Odessa too; the US has manipulated the Ukraine for its own reasons, to contain Russia. Etc. This from what he calls geopolitical research, meaning entry-level library books and random guys online who sound plausible to him. He may happen to be right about some of this, and it seems correct to be interested in geopolitics, but I don't like how sure he sounds about what he can't be sure of. When I said I read the Guardian and the Times (and Politico and Al Jaz and more) he said "Don't read them", meaning he just wants to feel certain. I don't like the way conspiracist theories are never corrected when they turn out to be wrong and there are no penalties for having spread them. 16 Yesterday at the library a 2023 Catholic woman's book about "the hideous history of feminism". I'm scouring it. Her argument was that feminist history from Wollstencraft forward has been based on spiritualism (ie paganism), free love, and communism, for her meaning atheism not class struggle. She digs for evidence that all of the famous feminists have been broken, meaning victims of unusual personal abuse rather than a social condition. I wrote up and posted an Amazon review in A&W while Kathy cleaned: A Catholic anti-feminist polemic. She begins by saying that "to be sure, there have been many advances under feminism"; and "truly there were and remain injustices". She says she is not arguing that we should go back ... even to the 1950s" but then she trashes all of the thinkers who have made it possible for her to have the public life she herself enjoys. She wants gays back in the persecuted closet; wants women satisfied with nothing but "self-sacrificial motherhood" and (despite the well-known predations of her own religion's men of god) wants total celibacy outside marriage in order to save "civilization" (meaning the American way of life as imagined by those with no experience of other cultures). The urgent question she suspends completely is this: how is her helplessly fertile totally chaste patriarchy-restored heterosexual family structure to come about without a totalitarian take-over? And what relevance does any of this have to the unstoppable climate catastrophe that is on its way? I scared the librarian's assistant by asking why they ordered it - did someone request it? She said they have equal numbers of left wing books. I couldn't remember seeing any. I said with distress that librarians used to be filters for stuff like that. "There are so many good books you don't have." She kept trying to back away. - Michael is back living in a downtown eastside welfare hotel. Row says he's a drunk. 17 An honest analysis would have to be a description of dilemma. Ordinary people need a compelling cultural framework of rules but belief in god is unsustainable to the intelligent. Kids need a secure loving home but women who are nothing but mothers have no status or influence. Birth control and abortion foster hookup culture but lack of birth control and abortion enslave women. Premarital chastity makes attached marriage more likely but lack of sexual experience makes people stupid. Acceptance of homosexuality is correctly humane but acceptance of homosexuality threatens sorted gender identity. There should be compassion for people who genuinely suffer in feeling they are the wrong gender but trans identity can be a false and dangerous solution to other issues. Rural people need to organize their lives differently than city people but city people are the ones able to represent themselves culturally. Men need to feel superior to women for primal reasons but the only way they can do so is by damaging women. People want to buy cheap goods obtained by making them jobless. Etc. Feminists devised methods of social struggle now being used by anti-feminists. Democracy is better than tyranny but democracy is unable to make unpopular decisions. - I keep feeling I should leave fire country to live in for instance Hythe, because it's further north, it's open country, it won't flood, it's sparsely populated, and drought would be manageable. I'd want a tiny place with a view of open fields, where I could grow a few rows of vegetables and have my cat. A trailer would be alright if it was well placed. Next to that is a sense that I'm not caught up with the end of habitable earth, I'm not making the decisions that need to be made. Conditions have changed so much since I was deciding to live here that this place isn't where I should be. I don't know how effectively I can even think about this now. Merritt is almost sure to burn. I should let Rob sell before the house loses value or burns. Could I buy and tow a very small trailer and live in it till I found something? I can't manage the garden anymore. Have never been at home in Merritt. Don't have medical care here. Could be ready to get rid of a lot of stuff. Go through my journals and burn them. Have maybe $80,000. My income now is almost 2500 a month but the USD is vulnerable. What wd I still want: computers, cameras, audio, a few pots and pans, 4 rugs, 5 lamps, bedding, cat and cat stuff, a few books, BUT this house is beautiful, Patch, garden if I could get help. 19 Fed up with my FB people who don't see photos as such. I've been posting a documentary Lotus Hotel series that tells an implicit story of a winter's 6th floor vantage on skid row. The photos I've posted are immaculate but people want pictures of flowers or garden or people or cat no matter how badly made. Mine never are badly made but -. What M said about my Valhalla photos, that they don't need anybody - is it that, somehow? Anyway, making the series I've learned to pare What there is down to an essence I can like better than what it was. 21 They'll be relieved it's the end of the series. My mom as a refugee in 1929. passport photo. She was 5. .She's all there. Intelligent, sad. A bit angry? - I think her right eye is angry, her left eye sad? Or calmly objective. Studying that face I feel her remarkable, a larger and more beautiful spirit than I've been, denying nothing. Where was that wide open spirit when she went hideous at the end? - I was with the photo all day, I and others. People saw different things. Sam, "Bless her. She looks scared." Indra, "What a beautiful child!" Miriam, "This photo caught at my heart." Jennifer, "There's something much older than five years in her face". Jim Mann, "What a treasure having a photo like that". Carol, "What a heartbreaking photo!" Greg in his emotionally vacant way, "My goodness, 1929! Eyes wide open". When Sam said so I could see fear, which hadn't occurred to me for my usual reason. 22 Family photo. Jim Mann immediately says care - Jim always feeling and protective. Meantime others are seeing the parents but not the child. Then I add this: summer of 1947. portrait of family dynamics. husband holding himself rigidly away from the child but reaching above her to his wife. wife presenting herself obliviously pleasant to anyone. child an unhappy little scrap between them. angry? hurt. The photo by itself had a pile of likes the way any family photos do but after I posted the little para most held off. M presenting herself obliviously pleasant is exact and I like having found it but most of my people won't read a photo that way and will think I'm being mean to my mom. Jim felt it directly but wouldn't have known how to say what he saw. I pulled a close-up from that photo to see the two and a half year old's stormed-over expression better. She's troubled and no one cares. The other thing I see is that Ed was holding himself away from me even before my leg was spoiled. 24 Hours yesterday looking for David Davies without finding him. No record of him at Evergreen College. I knew him 1972-73 at the Slade and Evergreen wasn't started till 1971. Scoured my London notebooks for his address in Washington State, nothing. In a Vancouver notebook I found driving directions next to a note about Portland, where I'd been for the People's 4th of July in 1975. Might be his but no way to tell. Hitchhiking on the way home I would have had to have his address because I started walking east on a country road but turned around when someone I met told me he was away. People search pages looking for his name in WA a lot of David Davies. Narrow it to between 78 and 85. None with what would have been his address in the '70s. Why was I looking for him. I need a pen pal. He was a good man. When I looked up his name I found we'd seen more of each other than I remembered. He sat down on the steps beside me and said Hello pretty woman. Read me Pound. Was nice looking. Generous, interested and honorable. 1972   David Davies' eyes gone yellow under his thatch of grey and white hair where the low sun caught them, young old man. - Built, he says, his own organic house, put the walls up, windows in, without plans, logs and cedar siding, a steep-pitched roof, fireplace and skylight.   1973   Gertrud with David, cooking omelet and drinking a lot of wine in front of the electric fire becoming ironical old comrades, I felt I'd become a laughing older woman with some admitted scars that hurt sometimes but an equality with the fates; David when he'd come to kiss me goodnight stopping by the door and the wall in a strip of lith saying "You're a good woman," and a little confusedly, "I don't know if I should tell people when I like them." His story about the girl in Germany who rode back 60 miles on the bicycle to beg his address "because she decided she was in love with me." And then learned English and they wrote each other once a week, lately twice, for the 15 years since. Feel I'm getting a naturalness, learning a naturalness.   David saying, about when he was twelve, "I was so full of sperm, all I could think about was how to get the girl Georgine from down the road to go riding with me and how I could get her to come into the stable."   -   Portobello Road Saturday morning, David like a Civil War veteran. At breakfast talking about his wife, "I grieved for three years".   At avant garde class, Jordan Belsen films and a lovely American from Northwestern. Invited David to ritual supper at Jimmy's, wine and dolmades, then we went to another decadent Fellini full of grotesques taking poses, an exuberant boor. Come home to my empty house and want to do something holy; long dream this morning about a jewelry shop.   -   Artists of the Big Top - Disoriented. Elated about Leni Piekert, her bestiary, the film's collage of speculations. Went with David to have supper at Schmidt's, played the Chinese Garden game, drank beer and felt close, and thrilled by his 20 acres, 20 wooded acres, in Washington, talking about Roethke who I've been reading on the tub, "She'd more sides than a seal." _   dumb Van Der Beek at the Slade, David and I shy   -   David comes for supper, we're dopey and I insist he stay to sleep under the dream rug. He smokes and talks a lot about his youth and adventures. When I tell him about being 14, Gary stealing oranges and giving me a baby tarantula in an aspirin bottle, he says it's a poem. Reads me Pound. Long walk in dark to Heath hillside and trains.   -   Morning - sunny Sunday, breakfast ritual with David, Luke sits on his lap. I wear a provocative green dress and long socks, he praises my hair, we're pleased to be chaste and good, walk through sun in djellaba to cemetery and back. Vigilant kind presence, "You're a gentle man".   -   Trousers, jersey, TI-GGERRRGH, I saw a girawff. A dog on the tely dogshow he called monkey. Choclit, sweeties, open door! (asking to have the lid taken off his Smarties tube), put it in the bin, here's letter for you (delivering a poem to me from David in the kitchen), Granma's crying, tehluvishn, FIREENGINEMAN.   -   Sword rune from Pound "Se il cor ti manca non ti fidar in me."   Having dinner with David. He read a poem from Pound, Dance Figure   Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark Thy face is a river with lights   -   Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, disgruntled not to be able to invite David to dinner on account of his Linda Mexican lady, ate morose Chinese meal by myself and went to Sarah's, silly kicking-and-splashing arguments about film, sorry because of Leslie and when I got home Sarah telephoned to say she was sorry   -   David - irritable and dogged.   -   David's blue eyes.   -   Charming Czech film Intimate Lighting, Mirek grinning at the end; David having lost his job; Earth slow and hysterical. Took David through a beautiful soft summer evening to the pub boat on the river, had some nips of whiskey on the way, ate sausages with fruit sauce; Pied Bull at the Angel, smoky back room full of longhairs, Corridor. Dome of Death, long tack up between slow white thigh walls to a little flight of stairs (the old wing of the University Hospital) to a black door.   -   David rang to say he'd written a sassy poem about my having pretty ears as well as a nice neck.   -   money to get David a copy of Seferis, cheesecake for me   -   Museum of Natural History, came in with Luke to hall full of thrilling elephants - met David in the whale room, vertebrae like beautiful sculptures - prehistoric fishes also beautiful. David sore back and boring, Luke agitated, good stout in pub, through Hyde Park home past fountains of Lancaster Gate   -   Scott Bartlett's Moon 69, some lovely things, Keith and I seemed to strike sparks, but got to Union roof to have tea with David who was feeling sorry for himself. The Lady from Constantinople.   -   Just had an illumination about David. To scare myself?   -   When I was telling David about A - A! - I said "You wouldn't say he was good looking - he has beautiful hands and beautiful hair and beautiful eyes, but that's all." "That's enough," sez David.   -   Desolation Angels in the garden while Luke slept, and in the evening too - Luke threw up lemonade green pepper clotted milk and bits of orange - wrote David - loved Luke today beautiful face waterlit little boy, went out in nightgown to get the bicycle in and Prosper Devas smiled hello. I must get thin.   A rubber Dolfish.   "Sh'll we put cream on it?" "Okay." "Cream, and stlawbellies?"   -   Dream Friday morning - David Davies and I salvaging brick houses out of a field, pulling them out in rows like Lego blocks, with a tractor? Got the house out to a location (La Glace?) and explored it. He was going to live in it, I thought I might have one for myself. Some were broken, roofs partly missing. Looking for a basement, there wasn't one. He talked of building a - I supplied the word 'foundation' and thought of the foundation of the house at the East Place. Many small doors - I can't quite grasp the sequence but have a picture of a corridor with many small doors at various heights, behind one was a girl trying on an Indian skirt and shirt. Maybe this was a lucid dream; I can't remember whether it was during the dream that I thought about it being another house dream. All that and I didn't want to move on him? Roy, John Rowley, Andy, Tony instead? When I stayed overnight in his guest bed just before he went home he said he was glad he wouldn't have to miss me that way. That and his reading me Pound were most of what I remembered. 25 Helen Garner 2020 One day I'll remember this: diaries 1987-1995 they've got no idea of the risks writers take - I don't just mean the risks on the page but the way we make ourselves uncomfortable in life, so we'll learn things. Whenever I have pace or verb problems I get out Kidnapped. The intense practicality of Stevenson's prose. And he shifts it along using semi-colons. Forward movement in smooth surges rather than the staccato effect of full stops. I've always thought that Glenn Gould was my all-time favorite and best, but last night I heard a CD of Richter playing Beethoven's Piano Sonata #17, The Tempest. When he laid down the opening arpeggio, as gently and self-effacingly as if only checking that the piano was in tune, I wanted to prostrate myself. Galloped through it yesterday, had asked for it because reviewers rave about her diaries and I want to compare. She's not Virginia Woolf but she's in a rushing life. Physical Australia just touched on, she's not scientific; Melbourne and Sydney much more high-literary than Vancouver it seems, so she has friends worth having and a high-literary man she steals from his wife and fights flexiblly to hold her own with. She has ready sociability, a kind of ordinariness that can make her loved. She's national, someone she meets at a shop counter tells her he's going to buy her book. Michael Ondaatje visits. She owns a house and a cabin. She can be dissatisfied with herself and crushed by this or that but she's not an outlier and I am. I like when she's technical about writing. There I go to Theory's practice 17: Will he or won't he. It's very different. It's more detailed, has the whole writing energy of someone who doesn't publish. It doesn't summarize times, it goes into them. It's ready I think. I could ship it out today if I knew where. She's never laugh-out-loud funny and I sometimes, not often, am. Picador. Agent. 26 Judith Thurman writing about favorite clothes. Favorite at what age. At 14 tight snake pants and yellow bridesmaid dress. At 16 the purple coat. In high school the sheeny orange-gold dress I made and wore for grad, the blue-white-purple cotton plaid I made and wore for grade 11 grad. In the Queen's years including Europe the flowered bikini bought at the foot of the Spanish Steps, the smocked black dress M made, the Montreal dark blue leather jacket, the long Batman cape. In London the '30s purple crepe blouse, the long dark blue corduroy skirt worn with a long Navy-issue sweater, the green silk Afghani coat with a fur hat, the purple French peasant blouse. In Vancouver the Syrian dress, the short-sleeved flowered pyjamas, a series of black kung-fu jackets that suit me amazingly, the glorious tweed coat. In my fifties the pale green jeans, the white pyjamas, the embroidered sheer black vest worn with the silky tight jersey, the leopard-skin-collared jacket, the airman's leather jacket from Luke, the Garneau slippers. In SD the fitted orange shirt, the fitted striped shirt, always the 501s. At Goddard the purple zipped hoodie. My Doc Martens, my Converse high-tops. Now absolutely nothing. Rugs - clothes for the house. 28 I think of her as mannerly. Every time I open a door for her she says something as she glides in. Is it thank you? Or just here I am. She moves away if she's been on my lap but needs to scratch. If I get lonesome and bother her when she's sleeping she gives my hand a sleepy lick just to show willing. - Pleased by this: an online experimental music mag called Tone Glow has stolen one of my Trapline frames to illustrate a review of a "particular type of quiet Japanese improvisation". "One of the most attractive features of this music - which is quite humble and sparse - is the trust placed in the materials, knowing the strength of their fragility." "This is music for audiences of ten; it feeds on the concentration of a small and attentive public, attuned to the etiquette of small sounds presented in an informal yet elegant way, and has a raw beauty that conceals a great deal of refinement." Gil Sanson Tone Glow 091. Turns out to be edited by Joshua Kim. 30 Dreamed I was in a forest, some man driving the pickup. He stopped behind another pickup on the side of the road, began walking back the way we'd come. Dwindled in the distance, disappeared into a small house. I followed after a while. Woman sitting beside a large airtight heater throwing a lot of heat. I wasn't interested and started back to the truck. I was seeing houses where before there'd only been forest. Realized I wasn't going to find the truck because I was dreaming and dream spaces aren't stable. Thought I'd have to wait for the men to find me. A couple of nights ago I woke at three and was listening to something I'd found through Tone Glow. Something in the context? inspired me so I was imagining Some photos in a pleased confident way. Living Torch Kali Malone. part 7 time remaining volume 12: 2023 january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project