| volume 12 of time remaining: 2023 january-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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What it's been like to be 78. Lonely. Isolated. Wearing out. A sorrowful feeling of end times both personal and global. Some professional events - in August a two-week Ultra Dogme online show results in a comprehensive review by Bennett Glace. Various aborted projects. The year's most persistent effort daily Facebook posts, often, as before, edited paras from previous journals and current or earlier photos, but now sometimes also bits of correspondence or newly written bits of autobiography. Because there has been relatively little to say about actual daily life I've often included FB texts in my journal but have inset them and the bits newly written for FB to distinguish them from what I think of as actual journal. notes: Hannah Jayanti Truth or consequences, Houseman, Martin Eden, Rachel Aviv profile in the New Yorker, someone on IQ, John Luther Adams, Hilary Mantel, last light, Shaun Inouye on Trapline and last light, Love hurts, Joyce Frazee, Jakob Boehme, mesh clouds, Harry Wales on Stephen Colbert, Harry & Meghan series on Netflix, Juliana B on written style, Lessing Particularly cats, Pound and Woolf on Les Baux, Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker, white Christian nationalism and patriarchy, Martijn Doolaard, The Golden West, Jane Rigby of the James Webb Space Telescope mission, The lacuna, Bennett Glace on the Ultra Dogme show, Gornick on consciousness raising groups, Sue Hubbell obit in the Times, Ros de Lanerolle and Joe Slovo, long correspondence with BK, Ultra Dogme show online, The sight of sound: notes, Midori Takata on Something like, Marilyn Monroe, Duncan McNaughton, Susan Leibik, Rilke on his mother, Spender on Auden, Sonja Swift Loba, Laura Feigel in the Guardian on Selby Schwartz After Sappho, Helen Garner, cog sci conference at SFU 1999, Language and space, Leonard Cohen, Helen Garner One day I'll remember this: diaries 1987-1995, Seth Anziska on the Israel-Gaza war, John Vaillant Fire weather, Brody review of Losing ground, Theory's practice, whatthereis.tumblr.com, Alzheimers. mentioned: Michael Snow, David Rimmer, Chris Kennedy, Greg Morrison, Paul Epp, Kathy Bara, Anne Konrad, Jennifer Flower, Jim Sparrell, Joe Way, Don Carmichael, Yvonne Lorde, Ian Brown, Jo Ann Kaplan, Bucky Thompson, Brian Tugwell, Joyce Frazee, Kate Soule, Max Wolf in Berlin, Sarah Black in London in 1972, Peter Konrad and Luisa Konrad, Ed Epp, Roy Kiyooka, Louie E, Emilee B, Dennis Maxwell, Tom Fendler, Rowen E, Mary Konrad in 1929, Patch the cat, Lloyd Zbar, Rob Mills, David Davies. Merritt BC, Horton Plaza, Copper Valley Plumbing, Big Bar on the Fraser, Les Baux de Provence in 1966, Wm Heise State Park in 2011, La Glace Mennonite Brethren Church as it was in the late 1940s, Rumsey Wheel in 1992, Highway 1 to Abbotsford September 2006, Merritt A&W, Robert's Automotive in San Diego, Munich and Berlin youth hostels, Westminster in 1987, University College Hospital London, Kingston Ontario, Tofteland house on Valhalla Lake, Hudson's Hope BC oil camp, Midday Valley Road in Merritt. La région centrale, Jorie Graham interview in the NY review, Surfacing on the Thames, Canadian Pacific, Narrows Inlet, Jack Wise language of the brush, Bruce Springsteen, Inspector Lewis, This is us, Line of duty, Grey's anatomy, The conductor about Marin Alsop, Jimmy Perez in Shetland, Mind the gap on Mubi, Oliver Sacks: his own life, Vimeo site, The mirror and the light , fires in Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, Alberta; Merritt Grapevine page, Queer Eye, Gardener's world, Mudlark, New York Review piece about Mulvey and Wollen, Riddley Walker, Huckleberry Finn, consciousness raising groups in London in the '70s, Plainfield VT floods, chip pile at the Merritt biofuel plant, Yellowknife evacuated, Being about, The farming life on BritBox, Durer's self-portrait in the Alte Pinakothek, Prime suspect, Evelyn Fox Keller, Slow Film Festival, Last light, OB Pier 5, Capilano Review, Judith Thurman writing about favorite clothes, Tone Glow, Living torch by Kali Malone, Liszt preludes, Dorothy Richardson, Marin Alsop Messiah on BBC, Anthropocene, Pygmalion's St Mathew Passion, Andrew Cotter, Facebook posts, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, terabyte drive, Facebook messenger, Grande Prairie and area back in the day, Yorkshire Gold tea. |
January 2023 Lovely Chris sent his invoice and it's paid. All four refurbished films and four videos on Vimeo. - Luke last night talking joyfully about full moon diving in the Andaman Sea off Thailand, acute black and white vision, thermocline that's visible as a surface from below, at the 5 meter nitrogen dispersal point the moon above seen flowing and waving. I remembered the fish store on Hastings when he was four, the fish I liked for its look of an archaic swimming face [a lookdown]. - Jorie Graham interview in the NY review. I could take her as a challenge to my whole way. - Nights I can't sleep. Not often. I never know why, some mis-timing? Heart not sure of itself? There I lie, damp, not desperately uncomfortable, saying to myself this is how it's going to be, mildly grim dullness on and on. Shoulder starting to hurt, turn over. Again. Then toward morning I realize I've been dreaming. Then Patch is crying, jumping over me, wants out, is it faint daylight between the slats. February 2023 your arrival at 10 Monkland Avenue's back door. You looked a bit tentative but (if you don't mind my saying so) quite lovely. Your whole visit was in the nature of a dream come true, something I felt in my depressed high school years would never happen. March 2023 Foot senses a weight at the bottom of the bed. I nudge it just to feel her company. - It was about five. Patch walked over my chest. I got up in the dark to pee. I must have just turned and pushed the flush lever. Was suddenly hit as if by a wind, buffeted so hard I thought, am I dying, I'd rather not die on the toilet. I held onto consciousness with my will, leaned on the wall beside me, put my head down. Was thinking I should make sure Patch's bowl is always full enough so it can last her till Kathy finds me on a Wednesday. My head seemed to be steadying. I could creep back to the bed to lie down. What's my heart doing. Pulse weak but steady. BP high. April 2023 Since the swoon - the mighty buffet - a week ago I haven't been quite steady in my head. When I lie down or when I'm quiet enough to feel myself it's as if the fabric of consciousness is wobbling slightly, enough to scare. - Going out and digging couch grass out of edges helped. Did more of that today and then the sky darkened and there was a little snowstorm. It's such a delayed spring that doing just a bit every couple of days has made enough order for now. - Every morning the first sip of hot tea. Cream and agave. I make sure it's hot. - Rereading The mirror and the light staggered by how much better she writes than I do. How did she get to that perfectly fluid grace. It's constant, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, sensory exactness, shining invention, mirror and light. 2009, 2012, 2020. So odd a body. Did she create herself that way, bulk of a barrel, eyes like a falcon, dead of a stroke at 70. I've been remembering clothes I haven't thought of for how many years - yesterday a dress in shiny blue and green print, just now a straight skirt with a soft nap - a flannel? - brown with crossing blue lines. I probably made it. Saw it clearly just a minute ago but now it's gone. -
I like the track - it's moonrise distant traffic stripped of everything above 600 and offset a bit on R and L tracks so it becomes the sound of the mountains, dark dense standing and surging air with a song in it, a suspended chord embedded in its fiber. I like the way intensity shifts from side to side to make a surrounding. An acceleration at the end. The whole piece is 7 min - slowly fading - may not have the rate of fade yet. Shaun Inouye got it enough to feel it: But it is her seven-minute musing on dusk and duration, last light, that is, in my estimation, the most persuasive instancing of the artist's undiminished talent and intellect. It was filmed in Borrego Springs, California in the autumn of 2013, and consists of a single, static shot of a mountain range at sundown. Depth is accentuated by a saddle in the mountain, which separates the barren landscape into foreground and background. Gradually, as time elapses, the waning sunlight dims the ridge in the distance, until the dimensions of the image collapse into a single, darkened plane. It is an open-air study of almost imperceptible change, a slow-motion film in real time. Although you are cognizant in the moment of the subtle shifts in colour and contrast, it is not until the end of the cycle that you grasp the transformation that has occurred. Yet it is also, like Trapline, a record of small, anti-spectacular events, peripheral to the conceit but carrying with them unobvious beauty and emotion: a stray bird flitting by; the soft distortion of desert heat; the faint chiming of bells nestled somewhere in the soundtrack. It demonstrates the profundity of Ellie Epp's art, now as then. I would be content to watch it, and Trapline, for the rest of my days. I can now wonder at the leading that found a statement of what would become urgently felt only ten years later. - The backs of my hands scared me yesterday. Arteries were standing out under skin that seems much thinner than it was and the blood looked green. I thought is that a look of death. - Instant dislike when I try to check into Theory 1 sheets. May 2023 Something I'm seeing as I name paras - which involves sorting, moving lines from one para to another, subdividing a sequence - is the way a number of topics are suspended in any discussion. "There are such a lot of ideas" Steven said. I'm seeing that it's because it's a web, a mesh, so that at any point there are implications I'm feeling in many directions. No one at all will feel that the way I do, humble thrill at imagining the all-present foundation of the universe. Not every day but sometimes Patch when I'm in this armchair comes and arranges herself in the shape of a baby sitting on my lap with its head against my shoulder. I wrap her in both arms and she moves with my breath. We sit quietly like that. I may touch the top of her head with my chin. She has her eyes closed. Yesterday she purred. When it's happening I feel, who is this? Who has come back to me in this form? - Wednesday morning. Sun is back. Spin cycle sighing down. Patch says eeee meaning hello you and wanders past my feet. Across the corner the plane tree is standing in glory. Washing machine's tune says all done. - I've been morose, am morose, hopeless. There's a tangle about work and loneliness. Susan has given up and Don's absent so there's no one who likes my smart posts - the piece about The conservationist. People instead are fond of me thirteen and spelling badly. I'm angry with any contacts I have because they are not enough, not nearly. I'm not working on Theory's practice, not working at all, Netflix all day just to be gone. Needing to be so careful about what I eat that eating isn't worth the effort. Afraid to put my feet on the floor because will I feel faint, will my knee hurt. When I'm on the sidewalk I stand still until the car passes because I don't want to be seen hobbling. My little efforts to dress better keep failing. July 2023 Garden work yesterday - had to weed and prune the gooseberry so Abby and I could pick it - stayed near while she weeded in her incompetent desultory way - cut back the nectarine, weeded the potatoes from a chair, picked cherries on a ladder. When I'd lain down afterward black pain all over. I pay but seeing better order is worth it. - Chip pile up by the biofuel plant spontaneously caught fire this aft. Light wind out of the Coque's valley, lot of white smoke drifting across the town's east side. It hasn't diminished through the hours so I wanted to see it. Had to go up around through Colletville to get above it. There it was, no flames but the huge pile glowing red like banked coal all through its depth. They're pouring water but there's no way they can put it out. I don't think there are flying embers but would there be if the wind picks up? That doesn't usually happen overnight. August 2023 space is expanding - not just stuff in space but the fabric of space itself. And the light that we see from distant objects has actually been stretched by the expansion of the universe much of the universe is filled with what we call dust but is really more like smoke We have only known what stars are made of since the fantastic 1925 thesis of Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin. Can you imagine that? Like, we all sit down and say, I'll have to do something useful with my thesis. And hers was, O.K., here's what stars are made of. Because nobody knew. She figured out what stars are made of. That still blows my mind. Jane Rigby NASA astrophysicist, senior project scientist with the James Webb Space Telescope mission. - I found this image when I googled La Glace.
- 5:35 Saturday morning, hollyhocks done, knobbed stalks now tipped with one pink thing held translucent to a patchy pale dawn. White sky, unmoving grey scraps. Next week it will be nine years since I left CA. - Tuesday morning. Yesterday was 99 degrees and today will be too. Front and back doors standing open to cool the house - it's 6am. Windless. - It didn't cool last night, I think for the first time here. After her supper Patch did what she always does, I don't know why, went to sit on the dryer and stare out the side window. I had that window open maybe four inches, looked at it, could she squeeze through? I didn't think so. Closed the door on her because I wanted to leave the back door open to cool the house. It wasn't cooling much but I left it open till bedtime, then closed it and opened Patch's door. The room was empty. A stroke of anguish, will she hide and be out all night and will I have to lie awake. I went out into the dark hoping she'd come to meet me when she heard me. She didn't. Should I just leave the verandah door open and go to bed? I went out with the flashlight and circled the garden. As I was getting back to the door she was ahead of me moving toward the steps. Later when the lights were off and I was maybe fading out I heard her on the floor saying eeee, eeee. She had food and water, what did she want? I spoke to her. She jumped onto the bed. Didn't want to lie on me but lay nearby and licked my hand. Was she lonely? Was there something she needed to say about having escaped? We held hands for a bit, my hand and her two front paws, then she jumped down probably to claim the chair. - One more day in the 90s. I'll have to pull the shades down soon but here's this moment with the sun glaring out of blue spruce arms and five doves quiet on a wire, Hamilton Hill bathed in cream. - A hot wind has come up from the south. I've rewritten my evac list, parked the jeep at the front door, loaded my camping mat and tent, brought suitcases and cooler inside, got cameras and photos out of the closet, put money and documents into the green bag, assembled video disk and memory sticks, and am keeping Patch where I can see her. Noticing that maybe not too long from now I'm not going to be able to do this kind of sudden carrying. Meantime Max of Ultra Dogme asking what photo I'd like. I zoom through the decades file and want none of them, am none of them. Have suggested core.jpg. - Yellowknife being evacuated, 20,000 people. - Dogme site is up with a link to the London vol 7 index page summarizing the months making Trapline. Then immediately a site by someone else, deep and thorough and well written. There was a ferocious bashing wind when I woke this morning that scared me for good reason (and knocked over the bean pole sunflower), and now this amount of notice is rattling me some? What I'm seeing is how over many years attention has built attention, my films have become more than they were because people made more of them over time. I notice too how much they have been helped by my writing. As always men liking my films more than women do; always it's been young men who advocate. Bennett Glace noticed when I was joking. https://ultradogme.com/2023/08/18/ellie-epp/ https://www.splittoothmedia.com/five-films-by-ellie-epp/ one observes a series of harmonious paradoxes. of the moment, yet cognizant of history; she luxuriates in celluloid's pleasures, yet denies the payoffs of more conventional films; her films evince a singular, carefully considered point of view, yet showcase a supremely democratic approach to creation. He gets that this is the essence: when women's eroticism is described as passive a stupid equation is being made between attention and passivity. Close attention is intensely active. Perceiving a touch is as active as giving it - sometimes more active, more skilled and more consequential. Erotic attention isn't an empty bowl touch is poured or pushed into, it is more like a living antenna with a million fibres actively searching the space of the touch. Epp recalls and predicts the whole history of experimental filmmaking. trapline is never purely observational or lyrical. There is, throughout, both a stark simplicity and a conscious effort to dazzle. As the zoom inches closer to the glass, the shot compels even deeper contemplation than the long shot compositions preceding it. It recalibrates the viewer's concentration in anticipation of the final trio of images. As if the zoom pulled us to the surface, we close the film focused squarely on life outside of the pool. Trapline's silent final shot splits the frame between an unseen figure, changing behind a curtain, and a group of boys sitting and talking in a large shower stall. A final structural joke draws the film to a close, the unseen swimmer's shorts hit the ground just as the curtain drops on trapline. how genuinely otherworldly current's ineffable imagery is. Learning that Epp conjured something like heavenly harp strings or the curtain-like ripples of the northern lights from blinds captured on tungsten stock, which shines blue in daylight, struck me as both revelatory and a little anticlimactic. bright and dark is among an incredibly small handful of films that feel fated to exist. consciously or unconsciously embraced a process of directing through receiving rather than touching enacts a rite simply by exposing film to the elements and priming the chemical processes that lead to motion photography. The cinematic apparatus and the body become one. Epp soundtracks the film with what she calls 'short stories about electric touch', both personal and, in German, quoted from Medieval mystic Mechtild von Magdebourg. Without cheapening the impossible beauty of what we're seeing, they perfectly put it into words. Ultimately the final line of narration best articulates bright and dark's place between undeveloped celluloid and the captured image and most calls to mind Epp's comments on active erotic attention. "The art she sought was not a communication but a reception, as the sun shines into water and yet leaves the water undisturbed." You could read it as a thesis statement for Epp's filmography as a whole. -
I know with certainty that I have no access to anyone who can read it. My girl fans give it a checkmark: that's all there is. I should scream with grief. September 2023 Then this:
Startled to find there's a capable international new young context. Chris. Chris did it. - 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. - 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. October 2023 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. -
- 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. - 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. November 2023 My mom as a refugee in 1929. She was 5. Passport photo. 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. - 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:
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. - 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. 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. December 2023 John Vaillant 2023 Fire weather This a statement from the bench of a judge in a class action suit brought by high school students in New South Wales: It is difficult to characterize in a single phrase the devastation that the plausible evidence presenting in this proceeding forecasts for the children. As Australian adults know their country, Australia will be lost and the world as we know it gone as well. The physical environment will be harsher, far more extreme and devastatingly brutal when angry. As for the human experience - quality of life, opportunities to partake in Nature's treasures, the capacity to grow and prosper - all will be greatly diminished. Lives will be cut short. Trauma will be far more common and good health harder to hold and maintain. None of this will be the fault of Nature itself. It will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults, in what might fairly be described as the greatest inter-generational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next. - Yesterday I placed some sections of Theory's and think laying it out will help me know what to cut. -
- Looking at that one with satisfaction. It was awkward, it took days. - 5:13am. She's out in the black dark where she needs to be. It's wet but she's getting used to winter. When she comes in she leaves footprints like little flowers. - deer and lilacs.jpg - I didn't crop because the whole frame suits her. She's held centred on the frame's diagonal with a direct, personal look over her shoulder, What are you?. The bare lilac row is her colours, grey above, fox red below. The raspberry row at her head similarly shaded but lighter and paler. Frosted grass at her feet again shaded into looser and denser halves. Three similarly shaded zones with centred sentience: how subtle an excellence a photo can be. Who else would be able to see that about it? It was made without conscious thought in a second, get her looking at me, try for a clear frame, all there was time for. January 1 2024 This is about last night so should I write it here or in the new journal. Both. A beautiful New Years Eve. Imagine being actually happy. Tree of lights across the room, candle scenting from the mantle. Luke had sent a message, Walked through Leicester Square and Covent Gardens heaving crowds, just as it got dark windy and wet but everyone dressed to the nines. Gratefully at home alone listening to music with the heater and letting surprised newly reawakened feelings percolate as the fireworks begin outside. Thinking of you. Talk to you next year. XL Jim posted fireworks above a pond in Portsmouth, silent as I saw them. Nothing hurt. I was in the chair watching marvels of Mughal Pakistan and fell asleep, Patch asleep on the floor next to me. When I woke I saw that though the upper sky was black the streets were in a soft white mist that held moving cloud particles of red and white light. Perfect. When I went to bed I opened the curtain so it would be in the room with me.
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