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 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, wondrously 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 swarms of red and white. When I went to bed I opened
the curtain so it would be in the room with me.
2
Woke intensely thwarted by being fucked with something
much too small, small as a nail it seemed. Woke with that and got
up to deal with it. Then thinking my sexual essence is wanting to be taken
care of by a dad who finds me lovely. It took some years, many years, to
discover that's what works, but hasn't it nearly always been so.
-
A migraine crescent sometimes rarely. It's like a backward C made of
a pulsing zigzag blue-white brilliance in my right visual field. The first
time it happened was in Greg's place about 1967. I was looking across the
room and noticed the cat was gone, there was a hole in my vision. I think
it has always been in the same place. Now I got up and ate something and
it went away.
-
I've posted the story of Gail and Doug and the yellow wall, and people
who aren't wanting to say like are still wanting to talk about it.
It has the interest of gossip but for some also a correct more abstract
interest in what to do with anger (Freya).
3
I've posted Janet's questions and my replies, not naming her but calling
her out on 'hubris'. She won't have heard of Dorothy Richardson.
-
Reworking 22 from source I'm wondering whether I'd edited out the first
time I'd used the book to ask work questions - notice that.
Something else I'm noticing is that the breezy intellectual confidence
that can answer Janet's diss as I have is like the fifteen year old's. "He
isn't strong! I'm stronger than he is."
-
Working in the sewing room, Kathy vacuuming in the kitchen. Email, Sonja.
A little girl, Lynx Ayla. Story of her birth. Why did I burst into tears.
4
Last night the Buena Vista Social Club sent me here:
- May 1965, Rasheed Mohammed in his red Queen's jacket. Trinidadian.
I knew him because he lived with another West Indian student above the
dairy bar where Olivia and I ate in our kitchenless second year. After
exams I was going home to the farm in Alberta for a couple of weeks. Rash
had a massive scholarship and didn't need summer work so I invited him
to come to the farm with me. He outfitted us with rucksacks, army sleeping
bags and rain ponchos that could double as ground sheets and we set off
from Kingston one late afternoon to hitch-hike 3000 miles.
-
- It was my first time hitch-hiking and he was the best of company, beautiful
and sexy, full of laughter and like me completely high on throwing ourselves
into strangers' cars. As we waited on roadsides there began to be stories.
The bad days when he started school too old, barefoot, and unable to speak
English. Affie, Sheraz and Feroz still at home, his tall graceful mother
who was unable to understand more than a little insisting the boys speak
it to learn. His dad driving taxi, quoting Shakespeare to his tourist customers.
Evenings when Cyril would come home and go to bed to gossip with his wife.
("I didn't understand why he would get up and wash his hands in the
middle of the night.") Fishing underwater off the north coast. Seduction
by an older relative when he was fourteen, dancing for twenty dollars a
night behind his mother's back, drinking in a well-cut suit furnished by
the club. Then sudden affluence, a room under Shurtleffs' slanting roof,
the confusing colourlessness of Kingston WASPS.
-
- We got into black Sudbury at night and in a wet fog. Better a hotel.
Pleasures of the day we'd had, sun, squashed apple pie beside the road,
knees brushing in the front seats of cars. Opening the hotel door with
the old fun of ownership for a night, a leap onto the bed, possessive and
wifely tidying. Asking the mirror is this the moment, he'd be relaxed about
it, not like a Canadian man who'd want to take it as a win.
-
- So yes.
-
- Neon flashing red and blue on the walls; cool air through a window;
beautiful arm holding a cigarette slanted over the side of the bed.
-
- That summer our rides' car radios all across the country were playing
Guantanamero. I'd sing it with Rash in Spanish - Yo soy un hombre
sincero / Dedonde crece la palma / Antes de morirmi, qiero / Echar mis
versos del alma - feeling it was about him. Beautiful Rasheed where are
you now, I have no idea.
-
- I like the photo. We're together in it, the way our heads incline.
I'm calm and pleased. He's loose but his hands are closed, a bit uncertain?
Not a conqueror. We're twenty. I look calm and pleased because I've evaded
the law that said I couldn't have it unless I signed away my entire life.
-
So excited by having declared this triumph that I haven't settled to
work and don't know what to do with myself.
5
It's such a sweet story and look how many can't like to feel it. Rachel
does, Jim, Jennifer, Savanna. Scott! Story about managing a weighty thing
with a lightness that's completely correct.
-
What to keep in 23: two months without Tom, the postdoc applic, Nora,
-
I gaze at the photo on and on, again and again. Gazing at it I become
an open space gently and evenly lit. Something about who we are together,
Rash's spirit still a boy's, me creamy and steady holding my ground.
-
A note from Greg this morning saying Arnold has died. I didn't want to
tell it, because I've written Arnold off - he was part of a lost foolish
time - but the window that saw the Wolfe Island ferry leaving and returning
was good and I'd begun to have a camera.
6
- Waking this morning I was thinking of the yellow hoodie I wore toward
the end of second year with green tights and the round snake earrings I
thought of as Minoan. I was having a hard year. I'd been fired from Sunnyside
and was broke. Olivia had the bed and the bedroom and I was sleeping on
the sofa. She had Don and I didn't. I was getting C's in statistics. From
there to third year where once more she had a large room with windows and
a big bed and a fireplace and I had the little box room that led off it.
I was so good-natured with her that I never thought to fight these arrangements,
which made sense to me because I saw myself as stronger. I was, too, but
it was bad for my love self to let her be the queen.
-
- I escaped to Europe and when I returned was better founded in myself
and glamorous in a quite workable way. Then large amiable Greg with the
scent of his cowhide jacket. Don was the better boyfriend by the standards
of the time - because he was intense, ambitious and moody - but Greg was
Ottawa establishment and found me lovely. I'd shifted to philosophy and
was finding my ground. O was headed for wifehood and breakdown and I was
not. When I showed up in Oxford two years later with what was possibly
a better boyfriend she helped herself. I walked into the night, slept in
a field, hitchhiked home and did not see her again until Edmonton five
years later, when she was fat and miscellaneously employed and being cheated
on.
-
Posting the story of Rasheed and this morning the piece that tells on
both Olivia and Don a kind of glee. I couldn't have done it even a few years
ago. Survivor's confidence? Posting every day?
24 - cottage in La Jolla good all the way through.
-
New 1890 Granite assessment 421,000, in 2016 was 215,000.
7
Worried about L forefinger numbness since before Christmas, think it
includes middle finger and thumb too though less - did I burn them with
wax? Is it the buzzing getting worse?
-
24 is about sexual hatred and sexual dependance and seeing there are
holes in the house of the work - too long and tricky - there's an arc I'll
have to make clear - it needs to include 25 breaking up with both very pared.
I think The golden west ends after we break up and I live in Borrego
and write the introduction. The long table is the rest. I should
finish The golden west thoroughly first and that needs focusing on
how to shorten psychological work. The golden west ends with the
thesis intro?
8
At a kitchen table where I've come for a math lesson.
Che is at the far end looking withdrawn. I mouth that I'll talk to her later.
Then I'm on a sofa looking at a tarot deck. Is it mine? Probably not. She
brings me a big heavy new-looking book, something about things important
women have done, says I can only look at it there. Pages half covered with
detailed ink drawings so lovely I wish I had them to see again. Then as
I keep leafing through I notice the later pages have a smudged grey xeroxed
look.
-
- 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. 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 wrote that last year and today she answered me:
-
- "When I looked back, I realized that even though I hadn't said
to myself as a child, I want to be a writer, I'd actually instituted a
training course. I always wonder if other people's lives have been like
that, when they turn into writers. From the age of about eight, I was hyperconscious
about what I read, and my reading was always analytical. I was never simply
absorbing stories but always asking myself, How is this done? When I walked
to school every morning, from the age of eleven to eighteen, I "did"
the weather and I didn't stop until I had one perfect paragraph. ... The
point of the exercise was not to stop until I'd pinned it down precisely
and had exactly the right word. It was all about style, not story. By the
time I got into my teens, I had nothing to say, but I had a very good style."
-
- Merritt January 2024
- Interview with Hilary Mantel in The Paris Review spring 2015
-
I've done the breakup and intro chapter this morning quite swiftly and
directly, erased with confidence.
9
- She knows how good it is and she wants to tell someone. How clean the
writing is she said, not a word that's there because she's showing off,
and a feminist who doesn't take sides.
-
- She still loves me after nine years. I am not personally so wonderful
to her but she takes so much pleasure in what I can give her, this book
and others, that she doesn't stop. All the violence of competition and
invasion - we didn't evade anything, we drove each other through. When
we began I was sad and she was afraid she wasn't an artist. Now she sits
down anytime and writes a piece she's publishing in West Coast Line,
and I have seen myself belonging, the loved safe streaming smile.
-
- Vancouver August 1998
- Cynthia Shearer 1996 The wonder book of the air
-
The technical magno-parvo section of 24 can't read but it demonstrates
the book helping with work. What to do with that. What did I use it for
later.
-
I sent Greg the Bloomsbury photo, dark blue leather jacket with Luke
at two, wanting him to feel something about it. His responses to anything
are as if flat dutiful summaries, or he replies with something in kind,
this time 6 photos of himself. It's a reflex, I think, 'I'm here too', and
he does it in writing by replying to a story of mine with a longer story
about him. The photos this time all except one are distressing and the stories
are told so leadenly that I want to skip them. I don't take an interest
in him because he doesn't commit to his experience. "There's something
missing," who said that? Why I've gone for drinking men, because they
feel. And yet. He was just right for third and fourth years and a motorcycle
tour through the west of England and was kind in my dreams through many
years.
("Leadenly omits every incident of human interest.")
11
Polar vortex. Opening the back door in the dark a smoothly padded scene.
Rose bushes wrapped lumps.
-
Rowen on the phone reading me his 7 metaphysical premises. It's all he
wants to talk about. I tell him his use of 'imagination' for just about
everything is a night in which all cats are black. He picks that up fast
and with pleasure. Odd that he's so much of an Epp in this although otherwise
not.
Emilee wanting to talk about gaming. Note from Paul. Note from Luke.
Greg's birthday.
12
It's minus thirty C, which is alarming, but when I convert it to a standard
I know it's only minus twenty F. We could walk to school in that. We didn't
hesitate till thirty below. I'm saying thirty below for pleasure of home.
Helmer standing in the road. Helmer.
-
I've decided on two volumes - three counting BA. I've gone once through
TP-1, chapters some of which are ready and some not, and now am considering
an intro - it might be wrong to have one but getting an overview clear is
what I need before I have the next edit. What happened, what needs to be
clear and why. I need bookwork for this and don't have a table surface.
Being in this work is making me happy every day.
13
Still cold. Patch doesn't ask to go outside, cellar instead.
I've posted michael and the uncon.doc. All the kinds of outing
I do. I loved telling everybody including my relatives the deflowering story
and yesterday a political opinion story and today an esoteric studies story.
The reader-overlaps sometimes: Miriam keen on garden and cat stories goes
bump into a completely forbidden tarot story. Men keen on back-home stories
go bump into feminist philosopher stories.
14
Solve this: I need to work first thing in the morning because it's the
only time I can work, but first thing in the morning I long for contact
so I go to FB stories. That disorders my head so it doesn't want to work.
So then I go back to bed and that's the end.
15
I need an overview to be able to edit right. What the work was in the
two lines of love and work.
-
Walking tours. First of many notebooks.
Romantic: Rousseau and Nature, Godwin and shared
property, Hartley and associationist psychology, Priestley and science,
Unitarian rationalism, the French revolution, Wollstencraft.
intimate, low-key, blank verse style very close
to his most personal letters a new naturalness of phrase and grace of rhythm
spontaneity of feeling and simplicity of expression become important new
values advancing from phrase to phrase with rapid asides, speculations,
and self-questionings
1795 Pitt war measures and taxes prosecuting war
against France, hatred of Jacobins, were Democrats that? C objecting on
behalf of the poor.
he read - travel, philosophy, theology, agriculture,
poetic myth, poetry of course, esoterism, politics. Jamila didn't read generally!
Do I remember her ever reading anything at all - or at least that wasn't
for her thesis
His notebooks his travels, reading, dreams, nature
studies, self-confession and self-analysis, philosophical theories, friendships,
sexual fantasies, lecture notes, observations of his children, literary
schemes, brewing recipes, opium addiction, horrors, puns, prayers.
Kathleen Coburn 1974 The self-conscious imagination.
Vs atheistical Jacobins, Paine or Godwin Rights
of Man.
Dissenting (Unitarian, Methodist and Quaker) tradition
in England vs Anglican articles, Enlightenment emphasis on science of experiment
and political reform, Priestly deism (Unitarians and Paley arg from design),
abolition, parliamentary reform, freedom of the press. Strong local societies,
Lunar men, reading groups of skilled workmen, had publishing power.
tall, silent north country man
one life within us and abroad / which meets all
motion and becomes its soul / a light in sound, a sound-like power in light
/ rhythm in all thought / a world so fill'd / the mute still air / is music
slumbering on her instrument í so Pound as a Romantic
the modern epic must become contemporary with
scientific, anthropological and psychological exploration must centre in
some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness
and civilization
Neurophilosophy as the contemporary question. Imagining Being about
as an epical quest and TP as its story.
16
Chiggers. Black spots on my right inner forearm
that I understood were insects that had dug themselves under the skin. What
I had to do was use a chemical to bring them to the surface and put them
into a jar with acid to kill them. Then my forearm would be smooth but I
should put the chemical onto the skin again to bring up their eggs left
behind. - The round smooth spots on my skin there. One of them last
year became glossy and now has a small uneven darker something developing.
I've been thinking its precancerous. It's saying no.
-
- I wonder whether what's wrong with my early journals and letters should
be described as moral - what I would see if I searched them with that question.
The writing is the writing of someone who doesn't seem to realize how uneasy
she is. She's straining. She's writing about the things that make her uneasy
and often she's writing to the people with whom she is uneasy, but she
is not saying she's uneasy. She's at sea trying to assemble a raft. I read
grieving that there was no one who could teach me.
-
- I'm feeling also that I misunderstood my art. I've been sure-footed
in philosophy, I pick my way by tracks barely possible and come out right.
My tracks are converging. I know my friends on sight and am beginning to
know there aren't any foes. The talent I have is specifically a talent
for ignoring the going concerns of the community, working slowly from many
directions, organizing deeply, and then articulating simply. As I work
something in different ways I come to be able to use everything - I use
my puzzlement to find a principle.
-
- I'm a theorist with technical interest in theorizing - that's what
makes it an art. The sort of artist Coleridge was: my tunnels are coming
up beside people like him. IA Richards. I'm sorry I'm not a writer like
Le Guin, I tried to learn to write in a way that catches the sails in an
instant, that sense of clean wind, but I never had charm. I didn't know
I was studying something else.
-
- Vancouver September 1996
It isn't true that I've never had charm but it's speaking for its instant.
As often I post it standing alone in a bare place. Visible from many directions
but at a great distance.
-
I think this is what I should be doing: get a sequence clear. Go on getting
it clear. That's one sheet. Another is descriptions of it as a whole work.
What is it this morning. Willing to work but befuddled.
-
Remember this:
I'd written Ken off but when I go into In Labrador I notice ways
that contact touched off something deeper than what was touched off with
Tom. I never broke down with Tom the way I did when Kenneth left. One reason
was his body's generosity. He was warmer than Tom, a more physical man,
tactile and aural, the way he'd sopped up voices and would want to hold
me at night. I liked his travels and the physicality of his adventures.
When I think of Tom next to him I see the gunmetal chill of Tom's reserve,
his calculated dissembling. Ken read better books. Ken was a user in his
way but the energy he touched off in me was spectacular.
-
Rereading the Coleridge biog thinking it's O'Brian's era. C studying
in Germany celebrates Nelson's victory at the Nile. Wordsworth's brother
John is a merchant mariner who says goodbye to C at the beginning of an
East India Company voyage later goes down with all hands. Coleridge writes
a newspaper polemic against William Pitt's prosecution of the war. In 1804
sailed to Malta in a two-masted 14-gun merchant brig carrying canons to
Trieste in its hold, convoyed by a 74-gun flagship going to join Nelson's
fleet. (With crated ducks, three pigs and a melancholy sheep.) (Nelson then
had the French bottled-up in Toulon so the danger was from Spanish and African
privateers.) At Gibralter 5 days roaming on the Rock and an unsatisfactory
dinner with 17 sea captains discussing naval strategy in the Med. The next
lap to Malta had storm, fog, calm and a lost yard-arm, so that there was
talk of a Jonas in the fleet. C needed the help of the convoy's surgeon.
In 1805 he was in Naples hearing news of the Battle of Trafalgar and Nelson's
death. When back in England mentions of a night coach to London. A brother
of his friend had been impressed and suffered yellow fever.
C as environmentalist. Era of Constable and later Turner.
17
Sheets:
- What kind of book is this
- Difficulties of editing
- Itineraries of love and work
- What happens summaries
- Theory's practice proposal
The golden west is about coming to terms with love woman in relation
to Tom. The long table is about surviving great fear as my work stood
more alone.
-
R talking about her dad molesting all four daughters and maybe the two
sons too, the sons molesting their sisters, her mom knowing, and her mom's
dad himself having molested his daughters, this in Christian homes. She
said she went on through her life protective of the perps and feeling secret
shame. The talk began this morning when she sent sheets of her mom's notes
on her babies and was wondering about making an art project with them. -
I wasn't wanting to get into the notes because they were dumb and in tiny
handwriting crammed on their pages but I thought I could talk about Blurb
books etc, meantime wondering does she want to honour her mom? Does she
want to think more about her sibs? So then tonight I asked questions about
her family and all of that had to be said. - My other incomplete thought
is of course, if that acting out is so ruinous to kids, and I believe it
is, why my loveliest sexual fantasy is about being sexually chosen by my
dad.
18
Dreaming my truck where it had been parked had
had ground lapsed under its right front tire so that wheel had no possible
traction. Was I going to be able to drive it away. Then wondering whether
I'd be able to turn it in the small space. Then the sort of underground
movement that's quite familiar, dead ends and one new sort of little mall
business after another, where's the exit, when found a metal grate come
down across it, does she have a key. Coming out into a concrete downtown,
where is this, underground parking? A commercial street like downtown Vancouver
visible at the exit.
-
Chris saying Broomer is making Blu-Ray packages for sale and asking if
I'd like to have one. I tell him my doubts. We talk about Australia.
-
In View from My Window a Norwegian woman called Inger-Anne Bøyesen
posts a photo that looks to me like Kristin Lavransdatter's yard. "View
from my bake house on the farm. Gudbrandsdalen, Norway." I write just
Kristin Lavransdatter in the comments. She replies I loved reading
Kristin Lavransdatter! This delights me.
- - Gideon is the 21st 2021
- - Jill's Shaun the 26th.
- - Mouse the 27th.
- - M Feb 6 2022
19
- Tom came from work at noon in white shirt and tie and we lay quietly
together for half an hour. He had hold of my bare arm and kissed it up
and down on and on. Our feet were in a patch of sun on the bed. At the
airport he stood outside and watched me in line at the UA counter. He was
moved and charmed he said to see me looking about, cast into responsibility
for myself, alert. He came back and leaned against my shoulder. I turned
without startling. My body knew it was him.
-
- He went home on the shuttle bus waiting to hit the wall. It didn't
happen. Though it was early he lay down and slept. When he woke in the
dark he lay for half an hour feeling perfectly well.
-
- What this quality of goodbye means is that he is out of the wide aura
of his mother's death. He has rebuilt love in himself so it is no longer
a trap he has to evade.
-
- San Diego January 2002
It's graceful. Its motion has the quality of calm it names.
-
A bad night. Can I do anything today.
Looking at the intro chapter. The writing is lively and it does introduce
Joyce, the neighbourhood, bodywork, bookwork, the topic, Natalie, love woman
and work woman, the doc, the fast. The month by month structure. I will
have to sort maybe and weed maybe but can't today. See whether there's more
it needs to introduce. What is it called. Childhood of the philosopher.
-
Hard effort. I had to shovel deep snow - not the sidewalks, Liz Touet's
boys have done them, but the yard paths. I was weak because of the bad night
and had to pause after every lift. Then back the jeep out of the garage,
then drive to the library in 4x, then shop, then buy CBD, then go to post
office, where the box was packed with flyers, then two trips carrying groceries
onto the porch and compost off it. Patch hasn't asked to go out for days
but it's warming.
20
Was with Les in my dream. She asked me to take
a beautiful loaf of her bread to a woman at a business address she'd written
down.
6am Saturday morning. The blue spruce is thick white dabs in the dark.
"Any time I see January pass I feel there's
another hurdle that's been cleared. Feb. is short and half of it's warm
so we're nearly there." Claude said.
21
I've realized Stephen wants to overlay himself on other people's work
and am saying no no no. Trying to say it inoffensively but glad I can, he
could do it to Massarella because she's dead.
- Am I right that it's hostile intent YES
22
Something new as I work through sections from Canyon on. Confidence.
A clear light feeling: I like this, I stand by this.
25
- "Any time I see January pass I feel there's another hurdle that's
been cleared. Feb is short and half of it's warm so we're nearly there."
Claude said. I remember it every year.
-
- May 2016. I was awake before 5 and very early had posted a call for
a retired handyman. Claude had replied before 8 and wanted to be here by
10. He's a find. Old and rickety, has a belly, bad knees, bad hips, hobbles
around, but so strong, big hard handshake, and such a worker. He immediately
got interested in the pergola, said he'd take it down, but before he did
he'd have to carry away the junk wood lying around - all of it. "You
need to have a clean work site." "Yes you do" I said. Big
bald head running with sweat, wide sweet smile. Barrel legs.
-
- June 2016. Claude had driven up in his grey work pickup yesterday and
I'd been digging the fence strip. He looked into my face and said Do you
ever take days off? He wondered whether I was overdoing. "You looked
rough for a couple of days but you look fine this morning." He's seventy.
Right-there and smart and true and loves a project. What we've been doing
the last days is prepping the works yard - that_niche in the back southwest
corner - before he builds me a_three-bin compost box.
-
- July 2016. I met Pat when Claude was giving me raspberry plants. They'd
been high school sweethearts, then had long lives married to other people,
then had gotten back together not long ago. We were standing on his big
yard in Colletteville, where he's built a handsome workshop full of stock-piled
wood. Pat said keep him busy.
- August 2016. Oh what beautiful sawhorses! First thing this morning
when I opened the door, matched set made of the blue-painted timber Claude
salvaged when he took down the pergola. I'd given somebody ten dollars
for not buying her rickety pair and must have told him.
-
- September 2016. The mill at the south end of Voght is closing in December.
I think it's the one I hear at night. Claude in a plaid shirt came to change
the back door lock yesterday. He'd been hunting white-tailed deer. It's
been too hot, he said; when it's hot animals go further back into the bush.
-
- February 2017. Yesterday Claude was here fixing the north porch gutters.
When I asked whether he'd like to work on the coldframe he muttered that
he won't be around. "It looks like Pat and I are divorcing."
"I'm so sorry to hear it!" It was a genuine outcry. There he
was with his big belly and red nose so real in front of me and as if telling
me a death sentence. He'll have to leave the wonderful workshop and the
town they both grew up in. He won't find another woman now and he won't
last long without one. My heart is sore for him as if he were a friend.
-
- May 2022. Obit in the Merritt Herald today.
- Go back later to Border, it's likely too long.
The percentage of work notes is small but very compressed.
The gamble is that texture of the writing is good enough to carry readers
through anxiety, repetition, miscellaneousness. Do you think it is? It says
yes.
-
I like Claude's story but it was wasted on nearly everyone. I was relieved
though when there was a red heart from Don. I never know what he thinks
but it seems he felt something. "Thou good and faithful servant",
something about an ardent mortal soul?
- 26
- July 2017. Gloria Moses. Saturday morning, lot of people parking for
the United Church junk sale. I've been weeding and transplanting, am standing
looking around. Someone calls out behind me. When I turn a small Native
woman is walking in past the sunflowers, keen honest brown face. I give
her my jar of poppy seeds, some lettuce, parsley, dill, nasturtiums, rhubarb.
She'll make a rhubarb cake for the gathering tomorrow to clean up at Shackan
cemetery she says. She's gazng at everything exclaiming. "Gooseberries!
Everybody used to have gooseberries and currants and fruit trees."
I say knock on my door anytime, come and have tea. She says she will.
-
- March 2019. Hughie MacKenzie's wake at the Lower Nic band hall. Parking
lot and roadsides full of muddy vehicles. All those people at three long
tables eating together, rez people, AA people. Gloria was there and when
I touched her shoulder on the steps I said the rhubarb would soon be coming
up and she said never mind the rhubarb, she'd just come for a visit.
-
- December 2019. Civic Centre Christmas dinner with Kathy and Lee and
Kathy's mom Dorothy and Dorothy's brothers Bob and Gordie and Bob's wild
woman and an ostrich-faced man called Frank. Gloria was there looking fine-grained
among - how many, 700? - exceptionally coarse-looking people of many ages.
A man with a mic was shouting almost continuously in the brutal acoustics
of the big hall.
-
- June 2020. Gloria called from the gate when I was working in the garden.
I begged her to stay and visit. We sat under many green plums the size
of olives. She wore sparkly earrings and has bunchy brown cheeks, is 79,
said she was ten years in Indian school in Lytton. Said that last year
she had a skin condition that itched day and night so she was suicidal.
I liked her coming out with it like that. I like her so much that I'm outright
with her, when she was leaving I said "I took to you". She said
"I took to you too, I said 'I have a new friend'".
27
- Oh little Mouse. 8 on a white and grey morning. He came from his spot
under the lamp and struggled to jump onto the work chair's arm so he could
be with me and Patch. He lies alone most of the day but has times when
he needs the company of our family clump. I'd want to hold him but he'd
struggle away.
-
- - There he settles flatter with his chin on his arm, his flank breathing
slowly. He hears cars passing. His eyes are half open, is he seeing the
sky? White sky, one dove. He looks so stoical and sad it's hard to bear.
-
- January 27 2021
-
- Three years ago. I still mourn Mouse. I don't mourn my parents but
I mourn this sweet young scrap who got to live so little of his life. What
it was about him. Innocence, true-heartedness. Ardency, timidity. Grace.
The way he'd reach with his soft paw to touch my mouth. At the end a quiet
stoicism that felt so deep.
-
- I love the photo. It's a photo of any young soul in unescapable affliction.
Anyone who's been there could recognize it.
I had to work to find the last two words of the second-last sentence
because it's me waking in pain after surgery without even a sense that there
should be someone who wanted to be with me.
-
Opening Kantian stories this morning wanting to scrap the first
thing I find and then the second. What to do. Start from the back?
Yes that worked. But I think it's the wrong name for the chapter.
28
- August 1962. 180 high school students chosen by provincial departments
of education to travel on the Canada Council Train to Stratford for a week
at the Shakespeare Festival.
-
- Toward the end of grade eleven the principal of our little school had
been asked to tell us we could apply for an expenses-paid summer trip to
Stratford. He told me it wouldn't be worth trying, "Alberta is a big
place," but I applied. I think decisions must have been region-by-region
because in counties that had high schools with theatre departments I'd
have had too much competition.
-
- I was too much of a bumpkin to make much of the Shakespeare but I was
overjoyed with my companions. That is another story; what I'm remembering
today was a moment I think must have been part of a welcome reception.
We were on a train platform, where we'd stood eating lunch off paper plates.
I'd helped myself to a heap of horseradish because I didn't know what it
was. An actor-looking man had asked me to dance and I'd embarrassed myself.
-
- Then a young man with a Welsh accent made a speech. In those days I
paid no attention to how things are organized so I don't know who he was,
a theatre director? A Council administrator? He spoke briefly and naturally
and began like this: "Maybe you come from small places where no one
is like you." I was standing there thinking, yes; and also, YOU must
come from a small place where no one is like you. I wonder now whether
the whole thing was his idea. Canada-wide cross-country sleeper tickets
for 180 students and their chaperones, board and lodging, theatre tickets
twice a day, I don't know how it got funded. Did it only happen once?
-
- He was saying we had a membership: you'll have a taste of it here and
later on it can be where you live, I wanted you to know that.
I look at it satisfied with a made thing. I've said it.
Did it only happen once - I was that lucky? Because it wasn't like the
Gov General's medal given for being a swot, it was given for having flair.
It was saying I could be someone who I don't want to say artist,
creative, why not. They're almost smarmy.
In those days I didn't know I was going to be what's called an artist.
I thought of the Stratford kids as smart kids, like me - I thought being
smart in school was my difference from La Glace people - but they were theatre
kids, meaning they were personally looser, culturally looser, livelier.
They were what I'd been all along and hadn't known was something to be.
They'd had the advantages of their high school theatre departments and I
hadn't but the thing that I did have was ready to kindle when I was with
them.
- What I had that Judy didn't have. "You could draw and you could
sing" and I had the journal, meaning I already felt responsible to
life as such. I was already scrounging for ways to be more than my context
wanted to be. There's been creative drive from the beginning - is there
a better word? - the Christmas card story, the spring procession, the table-top
drama, the wax-covered mushroom furniture for a hollow under a spruce root,
the stories I told Judy, the Ken crush and its love book, the penpals, the
LaVanii book, the clothes I invented - I was livelier. And because
that kind of liveliness was uninstructed where I was it could live gradually
in its own ways.
I'm thinking two things alongside, one is about relations with my sibs,
that it means I should be more carefully generous; the other is that liveliness
has a direct line from then to Being about and Theory's practice.
- Church bell. Had forgotten it's Sunday. 10am.
29
- Have been wanting to say this about the work both in philosophy and
this other: it is always a work of sorting, discerning, at a scale finer
than the concepts we start with. It's discerning within concepts. Examples:
'representation' or 'imagination' in different people's systems. It isn't
a matter of accepting one version, it's being able to read any of them
accurately in situ and at the same time keep some of the other systems
up - that's how it feels - up in the air, up in suspension - how it fields
- to be able to sense a relative location. In emotional work there's the
way anyone becomes visible as many and you can learn who you are addressing
or could address at different times. The active separate presences in I,
for instance the one who as I write keeps wanting to ask how Tom is.
-
- Principles of how to work:
-
- Principle one is discernment.
-
- Principle two is tracking. Tracking is used in discerning. It means
pushing with questions, persisting, not letting it go, dogging it, not
being led away.
-
- Principle three is something like working a knot. In emotional work
it means don't instruct yourself, clear the structure. Don't tell yourself
not to wonder about Tom; go to the place creating the wonder and work it.
Maybe find out who it is and get an understanding. It's neurological. In
philosophy can I think of an example - something like what happened in
the MA when I suddenly fell through from digital into analog. I'm thinking
of it now in relation to all the snag places where I'm supposed to recover
love and action by working through the moment.
-
- I'm asking something about how or when I've been learning these ways
of working. Persistence took years. I used to be satisfied with one question.
I didn't think I could find anything. Discernment has come this past year
- last summer. I think of it as the net resolving. That's larger-self training
along with the reading. I've had a new sense of working knots just in the
past week. The book taught me.
-
- The book and Joyce work similarly in the way they turn me loose and
then correct me at points. What's new in the book work is asking that's
more mutual - is there anything you want to talk about, I ask. And learning
to talk to the younger and less knowing parts.
-
- With Joyce it has been that it takes me years to understand what she
means. I marvel at the patience she has to have in her work. She doesn't
know whether she'll ever see acknowledgment or comprehension. I'm only
beginning to know that when she speaks she isn't always addressing the
conscious or present me.
-
- Writing these two pages has taken nearly two hours.
-
- May 1996
What I posted yesterday was made for them. This doesn't accommodate.
I've been so careful not to intimidate. - Thinking how acceptably Jam spoke
from her genius to anyone. They didn't mind not understanding, they found
it endearing. I'm hearing her voice in it, not male but not female, foreign,
extraterrestrial. She had to be 'a man' so she could be a genius anywhere.
Being a female genius is counter- counteractive? There's a word I want that
means something like pushing upstream. - Here I'm wanting to say what happens
between saying and noticing. It happened there, when I heard Jam's voice
and almost didn't track. Then the word counter and after it a gap.
Such minute closeness.
Childhood of the philosopher is female genius having to push a
long way upstream.
-
Cottage in La Jolla. I think there's too much of Tom but I also think
I can't judge right now.
30
The where system and sexual dependence. This chapter is a crux
but I haven't got it clear. I need to take chs 24 and 25 together. Make
a decision about whether to include the summer.
31
Dream of the ruined child. I've understood the arc of the first vol at
last. It's dreams of the ruined child - ruined children.
February 2
24 - where is the trickiest chapter because it's sexual struggle
and deeper into the neurosci weeds than is readable. I've carved it some.
It's important because it's where I was using bookwork to creep step by
step into more comprehension than I was able to find in anyone else and
at the same time going up against Tom's sexual hatred and my own enslavement.
I'm guessing I should end with the intro and leave out 25 - august. Move
it to the next vol? The intro is a good place to end but is August's evenness
a proper conclusion of the volume's emotional work.
-
- Was I three? Was it after I got back from the hospital the first time?
Their bedroom had a hatch into the attic above their bed. They had laid
out bedding up there and pushed me up through the ceiling to sleep. The
only light was whatever could come from below, so I could only see what
was next to the hole in what was now my floor. Nearby in the low-ceilinged
darkness on all sides were two things. One was my mom's wire and organdy
wedding bouquet. The other was a photo of an evil face.
-
- Why would they have done that? It would have been my dad's idea not
my mom's. He wanted me out of the way so he could have sex? They could
have made a bed for me in the living room so it was more than that, he
wanted me out of sight.
-
- The arrangement didn't last very long, I think because I spilled the
potty they'd sent up with me and pee leaked through their ceiling.
-
- I've remembered this many times and earlier on could remember the face
more distinctly than I can now, but it wasn't until today that I understood
what it meant. It was a child's memory and had kept the child's blank incomprehension.
-
Afternoon with Mary's letters 1959-1966 up to the time when I blew them
up - my parents - with Rasheed. I wanted to feel someone's personal care
and interest. In most of 1963-1964 she was telling me a wide community of
people were interested in me and proud of me - such belonging. In those
letters she seems happy, busy, adapted. Her marriage doesn't seem so bad
- she doesn't tell the worst, but even so there are scores of people she's
able to enjoy. It's a deeply embedded life. Her letters aren't literary
and most of the time they aren't very personal, she just rushes along telling
whatever they did. Mine were the same really except that they're entertaining.
When they find out about Rasheed it's as if she splits onto two paths.
One is that she loves Rasheed and doesn't really care. The other is that
she's frightened for me, I've jumped the code. She needs to imagine I'd
heedlessly lost control. I reply so carefully that I never tell her I was
settling a vital question deliberately. I didn't want her fate, I didn't
want to be a virgin bride, I wanted to be in the world. She said she was
afraid I'd be fragmented. I feared enslavement not fragmentation.
3
Alright 26 - sweet doubtful august stays. Harmony and its costs.
So now back to 1 - plan. I see right away that it falls straight
into line with my new title.
4
When I woke there was light at the window! 7am. How did that happen?
I put my legs over the edge of the bed and thought to rub my knee, and said
no, this morning it isn't going to hurt, and it didn't.
-
The other thing about being pushed up into the attic is that I've often
since then lived in my upper storey. But an artificial wedding bouquet and
an evil face? When I saw artificial flowers was I seeing wrong marriage?
When I saw an evil face was I seeing his malice? One glance and then not
daring to look again.
My dad had that esoteric sense? No. But I did. Yes. Did I have it because
I was sent away? No. But it gave me the independence needed to be in contact
with it. Yes.
I went looking for a sheet of handwriting for what I posted today - remembered
it in the last bundle of M's letters - it wasn't there but I read half a
page of hers and have come away shuddering. Ick! Back off!
Is the attic where you live? Yes. The red lion, the join? Yes. The roof
of the brain? It's an electromagnetic join not the corpus callosum? YES.
Is esoteric the best word - esotero comparative of eso,
within - I've often not known what to call it - it's not interior, it's
as if parallel? It's the fairytale zone, the dream significance zone, the
Tarot zone. Skillful conversation about the conditions of a life as such.
'A life', a conscious being.
- Our little school didn't have a library, instead each classroom had
bookshelves under the windows. Coming into a new grade meant a whole new
row of books. Mrs Maple's grade three classroom had a row of fairytale
books. I stayed reading in my desk at recess until I'd got through the
whole row.
-
- Since then I've needed to think what it was about fairytales. They
seem to me to pass on a subliminal understanding the way dreams do and
the tarot system does. It's a kind of understanding that's alternative
to the dogmas of church and community and essentially pagan, meaning rooted
in love of body and physical world and skillfully interested in the lifetime
adventures of conscious selves as such. It seems remarkable that this subversive
form of pagan instruction was present in a schoolroom in La Glace Alberta,
hidden in plain sight.
-
- I remember this book vividly (copyright 1912, stamped Baldur School
District) but didn't understand the title until much later, when I'd experienced
the moment standing between the round sun setting in the west and the round
moon rising in the east. It has only happened twice but those times have
had exceptional events.
What was the word I found, emblem - inlaid work - Yeats' mosaic.
5
I wanted to go north by a route I knew from another dream. What I remember
of that dream is that there was only one road and it went among snowy mountains
to isolated places by the sea. I was at a camp on the left side of the road
and from there took a ship a long way south to the rocky island off the
coast I'd begun from. The view of it as I approached was spectacularly wide
and bright. This time it seemed I wanted the route because it ended in the
wilderness. There was said to be an orchard at the end of the road. In the
meantime I was in a station talking to a stranger who what? I can sort of
see his face but don't remember what we were saying. He seemed offhand,
got up and walked away. I followed him to a table where two couples were
eating. A woman offered me a large grape and someone else offered me something
too. I felt maybe they were misunderstanding my relation to the man.
6
One of the reasons to include day writing is that it keeps visual imagining
going. - I'm into The long table finding the first chapters a happy
and workable mix of work and daily life.
-
Thundering through. I'd been working almost three hours? Liking what
I have, understanding in what way it's a different book.
7
2 - aboutness is too long and this morning I don't have decision I need
for cutting. Doubtful that the left hand man thing is clear.
I'm going to have to go through the whole again, which wasn't so of Childhood
of.
part 2
time remaining volume 13: 2024 january-
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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