time remaining 13 part 3 - 2024 april-may   work & days: a lifetime journal project April 1 Good textiles: Iraqi embroidered rug, red and white checkered quilt, dress made of a soft old Pendleton blanket; and there's my yellow clog shipped from London in a wicker chest. The whole has a sunny warmth given by the street and textile details are positioned consciously in relation to the body so it's coherent as a portrait of someone who is about where she is.   Photo Eton Street Vancouver August 1975 Why be that explicit. Because I don't trust my readers and am deciding to educate them. Would even Cheryl come to that thought? Don might twig to something about aboutness. Gianfranco! He probably sees that way. 2 Day taken out of routine, Luke and I together in our hotel room. Now it isn't raining, the sky is clear overhead although very pale; gulls are wheeling, long white clouds are low on the side of the mountain.   We left our handprints on the sidewalk newly made in front of the new firehall. Came back, washed our hands and had bananas and frozen sliced strawberries on rice pudding. Lay down. Luke lay still for a while with his eyes open. I woke rapidly to open the door when Bennie knocked with a parcel. Leaning to look into the room he pushed his arm against my breast. I jumped back, closed him out. Lay down again. Someone else knocked more softly, a brawny man I'd not seen before asking if I want some fish. I follow him down the corridor to his room where he shows me skinned fish grey and white and a little pink, tails still on, in a softened cardboard box. I pick one out, say I can't cook more than that. They put another in my hand. The men in the hotel minding their business, footsteps passing in the corridor unrelated to me.   I like Roy's kisses best said Luke. I know that I said. And I like yours best, and I like Catherine's best. And I like everybody's and I won't wipe anybody's off.   Waterfront hotel Vancouver January 1975 - Woke at 2 sore all over. Again. Why. Don't know, can't know. Discouraged. Whole day dozing, lying low. 3 Slept until six! Can work, am working! 4 eclipse of the moon.doc 5 Last night startled to see Rowen had commented under my age-lament post. What to think. I love you. When I look at you, I see the person you have always been to me. When you talk, I hear the same wit and wisdom. I do not expect to comfort you, I know you detest placation. If I'm seeing you through rose colored glasses, then so be it. You look nice through them. He shouldn't love me. It would be better for him if he didn't. He would be better if he didn't. He shouldn't be blind to my failing, he should hate it. Am I right   no Is it better for him to love me   yes It's less loving than hating my failing   yes He's preserving his heart   yes It's wisely removed of him   yes Okay that's better. Then underneath that I see Zimm has said, Am feeling like this too. Posted Logan's marvelous splash of praise today with the in english index page. Funny I'd never thought to post that. - Tonight Edgar and Alejandro working in the garden with me. Alejandro so beautiful. The first evening when he came into the room after the others had assembled his face gave me a little shock. He's small, dark and what's the word compressed? Eduardo is taller, has better English and looks more available. When I see how no one else is jumping to love Logan's letter - Rachel maybe? - I mean for itself - I see how particularly successful our meeting was, that he could write it knowing I'd like it and that what I'd written was something he could write what he did about. Posting it flaunts but I don't care. 6 ellie,   so, my number is light in me today and all is swell. i taught field & field 9 to two classes in the discussion of linebreak and the idea that the break is itself diction as you know some were terrified on sight of your piece and others deeply madly in awe, in hope, in lust without any sort of trust for language and those are my hopeful people. one class was freshmen and the others a more senior class of poets at Colorado State U.   i think people either write out of a deep trust for language or a deep distrust, a kind of embracing of the enemy. i for one have little if any trust and that is itself trustful.   i want to send you some stuff if it is cool?   your stuff went over wonderfully, really awesome being able to make students aware of the work I find important and putting the works in the same house so they can interact, i learn so much from that, understand the personality of language, or not understand, but witness. -   I wrote to Logan that I'm so autistic it's impressive I'm a good teacher but it's not being somewhere. Being able to be again who I was when I wrote field 9 would be being somewhere.   What did it depend on. An addressee. An address. Someone to address. I intended them toward Jam and Rhoda. When they did not want them I sent them to Robert Duncan, who didn't reply. Then years later I sent them to Duncan Mcnaughton. He didn't mention them when he replied. Twenty-some years later it's Logan. Maybe he was being born as I was writing them. Maybe as he was being born he took an imprint of what I was feeling too. Maybe he's my son with Jam. Spirit children. The way Michael Duke is my son with Frank.   If strong loves bear spirit children. Walking tune.   The way it is to start any letter and discover how I can speak to that person, what is that. Other people write the same way to anyone.   Directional heat on the roof. I feel it most on my forehead. Sitting with my plants. Agaves are a slow garden. I can't tell whether they've moved.   At 10 Tom is coming for his American holiday.   November 2004 - What got done: hazel's bed cleaned, Lark Ascending dug up and potted, glass replaced on the coldframe, potato bed and salad bed dug and mulched, grass cut under the cherry and around the corner of the garage by someone who understands the weed whacker. Having young energy alongside let me rush around doing little things with walking stick thrown on the ground. Didn't think I did much but woke so sore. 7 Sunday morning 4:36 Martijn's snow melting tea still almost hot. 8 I was on a bike riding south from La Glace toward our corner knowing I was heading toward the home site and wondering how I was going to manage when I got there. I didn't have money on me and there wouldn't be food. It was going to be night, where would I sleep. When I turned onto our road it seemed it was hardly a road anymore, just a ridge of dried mud. Then it did widen into a road but as I moved east I wasn't finding the shapes of land I knew. Was this where the creek had been? Where were the little hills just beyond it? Then the road itself had been moved a box step south, why did they do that. I thought I was getting closer to the home site but now there was a crowd of little shops - I was looking into a shop selling a lot of kinds of grapes - and I couldn't recognize anything at all.   Woke with a stressed heart thinking about loyalty to a place and to a life. Disorderedness of lives that lose their place. Disorderedness of old age, its loss of bearings. Good world itself disordered by climate collapse. What to do with the awfulness of those facts. Is naming them better than nothing?   It seems forbidden to post anything depressing but I've done it with the horrifying photo of the Tofteland house in collapse. It's beautiful as a photo, meaning that I can honor the terrible too. What's beautiful about it. The exuberant rim of lit grass along the bottom edge, the bright caragana bush, the loving way the spruce tree is leaning toward the broken house. I wonder though: the photo's beauty implies that earth endures though we do not, but it seems now that earth will not. Loss of place: am remembering what I knew about that, why it's disorder, because the nervous system's later structures are not coherent with its foundations in childhood. Was thinking of Always coming home, her invention of people who stay where they are and are coherent. 9 - Surprised it turned out to be popular. Box step. How did I know that? It just came. Looked it up this morning, it's from the waltz. Last night when I asked what they liked to do when they were teenagers Alejandro said he liked to dance. What kind of dance? He shimmied his shoulders, salsa. 10 Piercing chirps. Woke me. Smoke detector. 3:30am. Thought I'd turned it off at the breaker. Have to get up and deal with it. Hush button. Get the ladder. It's a short ladder. Am I too old for this. What I thought was the hush button isn't. Tiny words in raised white lettering on the white plastic surface. Can't read them. Go back to the manual. Lot of tiny words but no diagram. Look again. It says to remove the battery I have to pull out a pin before I unscrew the cover. For that I need a needle-nosed pliers. Don't have one. It's still chirping every 30 seconds. Maddening. Maybe there's a diagram online. What model is it. Doesn't say. Here's one that looks right. Site wants to charge me $2 to talk to a technician. No, I need to talk to the people who sold me this thing. Oh - the chirping has stopped. It must have been torture for Patch. I don't see her, where is she? On top of the laundry room cupboard? No but then I hear her tiny voice. She's got behind the washer and dryer to try to escape. She's crying piteously. There's her little face but she can't get out. I see what it is, she'd have to jump up onto the rad and the rad is too hot. Must have come on after the chirping started. Can I move the washer? Not an inch. Get a blanket to lay over the rad. Come on. Come on. All you have to do is claw your way up. She wanders back and forth behind the heavy machines crying. Come on! Then she does. I can grab her before she has to touch the rad. Now she wants to me to open the door. If I let her out will she run away forever from this house with the terrible noise. Wednesday 5:44. Clear sky. Patch is outside. News yesterday that Goddard is done at the end of this term. Em this morning: By the end of the day the full weight of it hit, watching my history and sense of place being chewed up and turned under before me. First New College and then Goddard wiped out in a single year. I've felt kind of smart about it before, that at least they can't repossess a college education - if they could in America, they would - but this is the closest thing. I've got $100K debt to schools that no longer exist or are no longer accredited in the United States. The 10 thousand things rise and fall, my schools among them. As I wept last night I tried to discern what had opened the despair in me and realized I was mourning not just my own loss but the loss to all the other students like me who thrived and grew into the remarkable people they are because of the teachers of these places. Mourn for the teachers, too. These places were imperfect but I never doubted that everyone there believed in the pedagogy and the students. I said last night it felt like something was coming up behind me in my history and chewing the structure of who I've been into dust, erasing my voice and the source of voices similar, churning us under for ash. I feel even more than ever I am standing alone on the strength of my hard earned wisdom - those looming presences, those institutions that guaranteed my validity and the worth of my knowledge previously strong at my back, building out a place for me to stand in the world - are disappeared. We both know I'm not a fan of any kind of institutional authority, but having a real school makes it real in the United States. At least that was true once upon a time, but given the current state of higher education in this country I'm not sure it matters any more. Ellie I've been so unbelievably fortunate in my life I'm going to go burn some additional incense this morning. Not only was I gifted with meeting teachers who really saw me and whose kindness and brilliance helped me beyond words, but somehow we were met at these places during halcyon days, or what felt like them to me. There was a lot wrong with Goddard and New College, but they got the most important thing, the hardest thing, they got that right in spades. 11 I don't feel what she does about institutional support for a student. I've earned myself in passage through conventional institutions by selecting in their midst and then holding my take with persistence and strategy. What Goddard gave me was permission to teach from the whole of it. 2001-2013, 56-68. - For sale sign on the church. - Can I really have no record of my graduation speech? I was wanting to post it as a story of what Goddard was. 12 Today's post C's photo early morning May 1985 with newborn Rowen who wasn't Rowen yet. I've cropped it. My linebacker shoulders and root-veined hands with that tender face seemed monstrous though it's the monster I am. Monster in the sense of chimera. 13 o sea pushing, pushing   At the pier café out past the wave zone. The pier zones. At the far end it's deep slow silent green. Seaweed zone near the café. Rolling surface constantly changing its angle to the light.   As if a heavy roller is advancing under the wrinkling skin.   In my head I'm talking to Tom about how to think of being left. It will scare up his mom. All these years (he says) he hasn't believed we're finally separated. When he has me he holds back. When he thinks he might be losing me he tries hard. For both of us loss is the ineluctable structure. It just goes on.   Another way to see it is bands of pale gold shimmer advancing, advancing, advancing.   Filtered sun today.   San Diego June 2014 Tom didn't like this photo but I love him in it. It's his true haunt not his image. Have just realized it's integrated, his eyes are even. Man of the sea. Why the writing is a portrait too. It comes in waves. The paragraph thinking of him is a pier. - In you I sense the vastness of female possibility and onto my knee I go, with due chivalry and awe. I see a fierce and subtle beauty, married by the mounting integrations of time, who conducts herself with such nuanced discretion that only a few notice her passing. Lisa who gave that fierce and subtle tribute and then dropped out. - Something on the side of my left bum cheek felt tight to the skin as if it might be a tick. I couldn't see it but reached round to try to pluck it off. I did pluck something off but it seemed pale and corky, and then there seemed to be a bleeding hole. Skin cancer. I've loved the sun, it would make sense as an end. Don't choose treatment, move fast to put things in order. I'd have time to tell people it was coming. There wasn't fear when the string said yes. Go north to die? I've been path-edge weeding an hour at a time. Late afternoons. - This morning suddenly telling the two things I've been wanting to remember to tell her. One is about Trudy. I realized one day that in her impressive times she was often channeling Roy - not channeling but repeating what she'd heard him say, being him. It says something about a level of hidden something, that she'd feel she needed to do that.   The other is that I'm sorry that when I first knew you I didn't understand how tortured you were. I took your intensity as native, just you. I do have a deep feeling for orphans, and you were that, but I didn't understand until I'd seen a photo of you before you were with T and R. You would have had to feel you were being loved for your pain, which would be the wrong thing to be loved for. I'm forever sorry I dragged you into that wicked cult. Oh honey you didn't drag I came frisking in wanting to be remade into a better artist and totally unaware of how harmed I could be. I was lost. You had been dragged in by a mother wound someone knew how to exploit - so yes there was dragging for me too but not by you. She was always deeply ashamed of me. I was not the girl she thought she deserved. - That is so awful. Awful for the mother too, what humiliation could have made her that. Or maybe she was just a bad person, like Ed. - Ed in public ashamed of me on account of my leg but Mary while it mattered was proud of me. She felt my damage for me not for herself. That shouldn't happen to my fearless, inquisitive explorer, my Rabbit, my black-eyed, raven-haired little Indian. You were such a darling, so interesting a companion. Was it shame, later on? I don't think so. Fear for herself in the form of me. Anger when I removed the self she'd liked being proud of. "I saw it right away that the picture was gone." "You are no longer the one who ." The first almost three years with M, foundation made/given by her liking. I have them forever to thank her for. 16 Frank's birthday and Rob's. - Sore. Pain when I wake, pain whenever I notice myself, mild pain but a self I don't like to be. - a film called the air - what about it - make it visible a film called orpheus - a film called the day - a film called small pond - a film called being about - about the work - Sorting what isn't sortable because it's many kinds of things known on the same template Suspended in groping for form I know I haven't found. - Muggles' revenge. Why it works for the deplorables is that it suggests something inherently missing - magical blood - a mug is gullible. It names something for the kids. 17 Not many years ago there lived in Bloomsbury a woman who had a squarish hand, like a sensitive man's, rather square shoulders, a thin mouth in which was no hardness, hair that was always blowing about, and light-colored eyes that startled you by being so startled; and she chose to wear a man's overcoat; and though she was educated, she had no traffic with the schools, and though she was poor, she kept her rapt particular faith in an obscure but existent good; and this woman, though few people knew it then or know it now, was a great poet. From Mew's obit in 1928. I've reposted for its lovely weave, now with a photo. 18 When I'm into The air I want to be alive to finish it. I can see I've been tracking it from Trapline on; in art it's my task. There's been the other task, the philosopher's, the teaching clarifying wanting-to-clean-up task that took over for many years. Would I have been as ready as I seem to be now without those cleaning-up years? - My beautiful helpers did a lot - placed 5 hoses - Edgar planted potatoes and dug another long bed, Alejandro transplanted a cranesbill, a catmint, 4 sea hollies. They were heart-felt about Mouse's stone: I showed Alejandro and he called Edgar to tell him. While he threaded a hose through jungles I'd sat down on a bucket and then couldn't get up so I had him watching while I did it the only way I can, slowly from all fours, trusting him to see it as a human circumstance not a personal disgrace. 19 5:30, completely clear sky, very pale blue, tinted where the horizon is lower in the northwest. I didn't sleep, lay aching, cost of yesterday's garden effort and sociability. It's alright but the day likely is shot for work. Patch is under the porchlight watching her morning bloom. I've posted the index page for Frank after his life. 20 Everything I have to do before I sit down with hot tea. Rub my knee. Take off my damp t-shirt. Get up and pee. Take off my pyjama pants. Turn on the porchlight and let Patch out. Turn on the tea water's element. Dress. Set the cup with cream and agave into hot water to warm. Get Patch's half tin of cat food out of the fridge and put it in a clean bowl, set it on the floor. Turn on the corridor's light to show the rug. Open the verandah's door a slot for Patch. Turn on the work room and tables' lights. Open the venetians. Brush my hair. Make the tea and set the timer. Sit with the Powerbook to post something. Pour the tea and bring it to the chair. - All feels like more effort than I want - that's new, is it?  Then here I am looking at the sky. Which is good this morning, open and brightening. Now Patch drumming on the near door as if she knows where I'll be by this time. She'll wander through to the kitchen to have a nibble then come back for three minutes of love then lie at my knee on the hassock licking her paws so they'll feel clean after her prowl in the garden. Then goes to sleep, warm fur against my shin. By now it's 6am and daylight. Take my bp. Now she gets up and lies on the floor where she can stretch out, her tail still moving, unhidden inner life. From watching Grand Designs yesterday the paragraph above looks like a brick wall. - Dennett 1942-2024, Paul C also 1942, Pat 1943 23 I wander outside to check the state of Cox's bud. Pick up yesterday's weeds, cut clove currants and tulips for the house. That small effort and my legs hurt all the way to the bum. Because it's cold? Fifth English lesson yesterday. They want to play and show themselves too. Edgar is curious and funny, Alejandro brightens instantly. I told them the story of Lonely Boy and they understood it and felt it. Why do I hold back from Vicky. She's less intelligent than they are though maybe only because she's had a woman's life. - Have I ever said how these years I glomm onto young male bodies of the right kind whenever I see them? The right kind being tall, light and properly triangular? It's an avidity. It seems best privilege to me, to be a body so right in motion and action. What does staring at them give me? - Copper Valley said maybe tomorrow for the boiler, which would mean three days without heat, so I called Nicola Plumbing and Mike came in half an hour. - Clove currant's scent next to me. White hyacinth on the plate rail above my bed. Budded Whitney apple prunings on the counter. The best of pale pink tulips open. Full pool of muscari with two red tulips, bright yellow primula beyond. First mauve iris bud. Mouse's yellow froth. Gooseberry in thick flower. 24 So sore last night I felt I won't have long. Woke a bit after 1am and was lying there thinking is this the last summer I'll have the garden. Should I be giving everything away. So much of my work will vanish when I die. Will the films be all that's left. The air unfinished, Being about and Work & days gone with my iPage account. Theory's practice. The lake house photos. Pale Hill! - 1700s natural history organicist, epigenetic, sort of meaning embodied - contrasts with mechanist theory of cognition transcendental - considering humans' role in structuring knowing metaphysics extent and limits of knowing 25 bulbs blooming: strawberry bed, bright red in apricot bed, orange pride, pink guinevere, first white hakuun, muscari, white hyacinth, (daf ice baby and tulip yellow emperor done) mauve moss phlox in full bloom cowslips yellow alyssum in full bloom anjou pear beginning first iceland poppies blooming yellow clove currants in good scent gooseberry has bees first small mauve iris leaves on the manitoba maple first cherry blossum next doorhitney breaking bud o nothing on plums Raining late afternoon, good but no work with my crew. - Luke. Marine collagen. Amanda. U-haul truck. He phoned at 4:30 his time and we talked till milky dawn with two fox kits playing in the park across the road. 26 When I gave Arlene the little gooseberry we talked about grass cutting. I hadn't exactly agreed but her crew came. Later I realized she could maybe spray the Cox. She said she would. I emailed her a photo of the Cox's bud stage. She wrote that she looks when she drives past. I said she can't see the Cox from the road, only the Whitney, which isn't susceptible. She wrote that I'd already shown her and explained. I had no memory of that, only of showing her the compost. So then I collapsed into doubt. Had I completely forgotten telling her about the apple trees? And if so ? - Began long ago in the blue pages. 1975. 27 The kind of dream that's a struggle of lostness. Somewhere in Greece. We'd been at a small village I needed to find again. Someone I was with had been left there, had my car and my passport. I kept trying to figure out my spatial relation to that place. I could remember what the village looked like and thought I knew what direction but every place I was coming to was larger and very different. Woke as if gasping from effort. Did I have this kind of dream when I was younger? I don't think so. Does it happen when certain kinds of circuits have failed? There could be dreams diagnostic for dementia but the people having them wouldn't recall them well enough to tell them. Now thinking about what lostness can mean in old age. Making tea, knowing the routine, spoon, cup, cream, agave, knowing where everything is, thinking there's a point where a known place has to hold us known to ourselves. After that we can't stay ourselves somewhere else, the way M when she'd moved and had a new computer couldn't remember where the letters were. 29 The word is not depressed but discouraged. - How to fit the physics. It's not a poem it's a mesh cloud. In what way is it. In what ways not. It's a form I seem to be inventing on my own. I've groped toward it for fifty years, assembled its parts often blindly. Its interests are those I began to find in film and photos. It's like Pound by attention in phrases and by assembling companions across time. It's lyrical by sound and rhythm. It's right religion in that it's a lone soul worshipful in face of the large: what is the universe, what is mind, what can a human be in relation to universe. It's not about relational coping. I haven't shirked that, have done it in other places. I've held off giving In English because it had begun to have method but hadn't arrived at what I can know. - Marine collagen ordered auto delivery every month. - Gentle hail fell thick and soft among the tulips. Patch sweetly warm along my thigh half on the hassock half in the chair. Her idea. She wants to be close but can't get onto my lap. Now it's feathery snow falling thick. 30 Tom's day. Frost on the strawberries. Class last night. Edgar is curious, eager, speechless, throws himself forward wanting to ask, to tell, and having no words. His family, after mass, would go to the market and have sopes, which he laboured to describe. Alejandro last night was tired or bored but showed his family's beautiful Dia de los Muertos altar. "Wind, fire, water, earth." "Aztec, Maya?" "Aztec, Maya, Toltec, Olmec." May 1 That college outside Berlin is showing my four 16s in May and what's her name is having a big show mostly I think not about me. - Someone called Rushnan in Mumbai asking - friend of Joost so I said yes - edge of a small community doing abstract work - especially Joost - have been thinking maybe The air can be for them. Can I use the same phrase in different places always with a different effect. Parts of paragraphs or phrases. To make the sense I have of one form reverberant in different topics. In this very slow effort the material is teaching me for instance by juxtapositions that have happened at random. The assembled materials give me the state I need to work with them. 2 a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the tide, just at the end of evening our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea lace in the cortex, luminous sea and the lace of foam 3 Garden work yesterday. Started by weeding what was left of the iris bed. Set up its water. Couldn't stand all the borage seedlings in the apricot bed so sat on the ground and weeded them right across. Right hip hurting as I did it, these days threatening to fall out of its socket. My young men coming later, impatient, I'll plant out the peas into the nice compost Rowen placed. They pull up in the white truck. Edgar takes photos and sends them to his family on the spot. I tell them we're cleaning up the compost area. They move the lid into the alley. Alejandro is on the ladder getting the grape out of the plum tree. Edgar moves everything out, digs grass out of the ladder's edge. I'm pulling grass out of the gravel. Then send him to dig first a short bed and then a long. Alejandro places the props for the ladder and then the ladder itself. Then we're working together on detail, I'm sitting on the ground pulling weeds, he's meticulously digging them out of the cracks. We put the chair and wheelbarrow back and place the tools. Now it looks beautiful. Meantime Edgar does a tidy job with the beds. Then quitting time I say. He doesn't understand. Time to stop. I offer them the long bed he's just dug. They offer their hot strong hands to shake. Little by little Edgar tries to say. It's Thursday 7:30 so after they leave I have to water. Then I'm done. Then fiery pain all night. Aspirin seemed to make no difference. 6 Monday morning. A ten year West Wing reunion panel on YT last night, Sorkin and a director with a half dozen of the cast talking about how it had been to work on something so good - Sorkin too, grateful for the conditions that had allowed him. Success of the ensemble giving them so much individually, actors able gratefully to see what the others were able to do. They all had so much to say even ten years later. They'd had an apex together. - Almost-helpless unknowing in my half-assembled sheets. They are something, even haphazard as they are, so how topicalized should I make them. I don't know how to decide. 9 and the air, air, Shaking, air alight with the goddess   She passed and left no quiver in the veins, who now Moving among the trees, and clinging in the air she severed, Fanning the grass she walked on then, endures: Grey olive leaves beneath a rain-cold sky. What a goddess is. They were superior to my walking goddess but later there she was in Pound. I'm seeing now that we feel her walking in nature because she's early love. The Na-khi scene returns us to the China and Greece that form the core of the canto's stillness, the perspectiveless luminosity that locates kosmos not in a transcendent otherness but within itself. "We have about us," Pound wrote in 1916, "the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive." I can still adore her in those lines. Remembering a moment climbing a slope with Jam, when she marveled that I knew how to pick a route by sight because she didn't. 10 glass landscape I got by waiting for it all day reading I never promised you a rose garden crying in the mall library. when I came out and it was time at last, the sun; and he brought onto the counter a larger more wonderful peaked cullet, a wave, two suns or one a moon, cleavages, transparencies, outer surfaces looking like inner structures. I only had time for dumb pleasure in its multiplicity and clarity and then his big hand held it up and brought the paper bag down over it and I carried it to trudy's house on the bus, on my hip, and saw moira looking beautiful, and showed it to her, and set the bag down on trudy's table, and sat down. I said, have a look in the bag. she said what's in the bag. I said water. she said 'it's fantastic, what are you going to do with it'. I'm next to the clouds and gold haze on air and water, I say 'I'm going to give it to you'. she says clearing a place on the radiator for it 'it's you at your finest, but what we have to go through to get to it'. 'I know, and I'm very grateful'.   Vancouver March 6 1978 Today's post a photo of the peaked cullet two evenings ago lit by a long ray slanting across two rooms to touch only it. I looked up the date and found this and see instantly what Trudy was doing to break me. When she harped on what was wrong with me she was making herself the magic fixer of a broken soul. She was calling up an actual brokenness I'd marvelously stayed ahead of - succeeded in staying ahead of. I'd never felt crippled before. It took me years to see her own brokenness because I hadn't the habit of attack. Then later I've been that too: I see what's wrong with people and need to say it. By what right did she or do I. Do we do it to liberate or to break. 11 A longer sleep and lighter kind of dreaming. Was with Cheryl and there was Michael, a different more acceptable Michael. I introduced them. Then later I was kissing a woman. Such soft lips. - There's a sheet I'd called air story paragraphs. I was combing it for bits and saw it's something in itself. About art attention maybe? What to make of it a question I'm not asking now. 12 Edgar at the door yesterday, bruises on his cheeks, stitch in his lip, dizzy, toothache, hit hard by a post that exploded out of the machine. He'd begged Manuel to bring him so he could explain why he hadn't come to work on Thursday. Was he needing his mom? - When I step outside these days the hit of warm scented air. Alex when he'd been working twice said It's beautiful. He'd turned compost and then we transplanted iris. The iris bed built last year this year coming into small mauve and small dark purple now with white in bud, yellow and blue to come. - Yesterday evening when I stood up from this chair my whole right leg suddenly helpless. I'd been thinking it's nothing but a walking stick but a good walking stick and never hurts. Now one more thing. - Note from Mike Hoolboom yesterday saying he's putting our book onto archive.org. Can I use it for other records, Work & days? - ellieepp.com is already archived! Latest scan last March. And here2012. So that means post everything on my own site, Theory's practice, and finish W&D properly. Facebook autobiog books - how to format those like the Tumblr page. - Freya at the wheel of a sailboat crossing to Quadra. 13 Fires in Grande Prairie County, one at Teepee Creek and one 13km northwest of Valhalla! Smoke encroaching from Fort Nelson. - House in good order, plants watered, Patch fed, tulips and lilacs in vases, lunch made and eaten, dishes washed, but while I'm trotting around doing all of that I'm dragging myself through even the waking it up and putting it to bed routines. 14 Munro died this morning; demented since 82 so didn't really live to 92. I scorned her adultery stories but then she got wider. Auntie Anne's generation only twelve years earlier but a chasm. - Sunday watering, Martijn Monday businesses closed, teaching Tuesday businesses open Wednesday Kathy Thursday watering, Alex and Edgar Friday Monty Don Saturday post office closed 15 I was in Balboa Park this morning - mid-morning I guess - and saw a film again by the lotus. The water is clean, the buds just beginning to form. There happened to be something going on just where I dropped the bike, water shapes sometimes boiling into existence off the concrete edge, tiny dimple-whirlpools on the surface throwing perfect slowly traveling gold circles onto the tank's floor. I was standing just where the effect was blooming out of the side of my head's shadow like thought influence sailing slowly away.   Sitting watching it I was feeling the shift into soul time that can come with art attention, the way I am sometimes given marveling confluences in time - is that the way to say it? - for instance being at liberty in the fine spring morning and stopping just at the place on the tank's edge where that cosmos-creation diagram was going on.   San Diego April 2011 - Had forgotten the first time I had my hands on a film camera was when Madeleine Murray had got hold of a little 8mm and one night fetched me to run around Kingston with her stealing shots of people through their windows. 1967 or '68. - I love your FB posts. I start my day with them. Don. But he said it again in the same note and forgot he'd already answered about Rawls. Having to watch old friends' heads go soft. 16 Very windy. I wanted to get the W fence bed ready to be dug so weeded hard unwisely for an hour. Alex came late and Edgar later but they each dug a stretch and then I showed them how to plant seeds in their own bed. Hope they haven't covered them too deep. May not sleep tonight. 17 Slept with double aspirin but woke at 2 in hard black pain especially arms and shoulders, feeling even with help could I do this another year. If not, then what about the house. Wet street this morning nice for the new seeds. 4:30 am, Patch warm against my shin. She's already had her hour in the dark and has left her flower footprints on the floor. She wants out the instant I'm up. While I'm making tea I put her half tin of Fancy Feast on the floor. She hears me do it and will come bombing in if I open the door but then only glances at it. She wants to know it's there but isn't going to waste outside time on it for now. Thinking of Simon's cat: the cat is drawn as if half human and why is that plausible. Because it makes cat feeling and motive visible, it's what I already feel in Patch. - Sometime talk about the frayed sense of significance there is now. 18 What I mean by frayed sense of significance. Can I recall it now. It's half image, of dissolving into the air rather than coming to a stop. When I think of things like my friends' deaths or the death of my work there's less sense of minding or mattering than there was. It's fraying: I'm fraying. This at the same time as seeing gradual but definite collapse of the climate stabilities that have allowed the kinds of lives we've lived. People are going on as if nothing has changed, preparing futures that aren't going to happen. The news keeps giving importance to things that are trivial in face of climate change - even the wars are, except insofar as they are contributing to it. - Today's post: what is that floating in qualities of time   blue in the room anytime, a blue with air in it maybe the white behind it floats through   falling asleep reading this afternoon slipping into an air so fresh, young and particular   is it memory registered in a sense I don't notice as such like a quality of air that is more than air   something that pervades a person as their atmosphere a condition of sensing not a kind of sensing I say, this is how I was at another time I can't compare but I can recognize   or sometimes I say I'm in another person maybe another person in another time One red heart: Don! Does it mean he knows that sensation? Does anyone? 19 I solved that one just lately and quite casually. Sunday morning. I've posted the Guardian's 3 degrees climate collapse prediction. I have an ongoing wonder that my own fraying-out is coinciding with this fraying-out of the liveable Earth. Does it mean that I'm dreaming? Is there an actual real? I think there is but at the same time the coincidence is so implausible - that Hell should be forming around me at the end of my life. Do other people die into an improved blooming Earth? But if I'm dreaming there are no other people. Meantime Patch warm at my shin and those half-ruined trees across the street. Half-ruined since I came, and the church too. Yikes. Have I ruined the beautiful world? But if I have there is no actual world, only a phantasmic morality play with punishment at its end. Insignificant punishment. There goes the stout yellow rain jacket with his dog's white curly tail. Too much miscellany to be unreal. But is there a relation of this doubt with my thing about air. 20 Emilee's letter yesterday. I'm stamping my foot with the way she lets herself be harmed almost to the point of death. She's like Mary, sickly dependent. I have the same role with her, to say oh for goodness sake look after yourself. Saying it never works but what else is there to do. - slept very poorly and chee evoked tremendous anger and sadness in me geez emilee, lock chee up in some distant part of the house for the night. you need to sleep! I'm stamping my foot, why does anyone need to tell you this?! you let people including cats harm you almost to the point of death. when did you decide they matter more to you than your health? if I can learn how to work with this crazy terrifying well of anger I seem capable of terrifying apparently but not crazy, best of news. anger is when someone is harming you or threatening to harm you. it's body being responsible for you and it's demanding responsibility from you. I do know when I feel this way I used to be inclined to reach for a drink poison yourself to keep on the right side of people you want to depend on, right - intoxication proceeds confidently into the adventurous unknown unpredictable and full of possibility this is why I was keen to this mode of destruction how could any normal person hope to be strong in the face of a socially supported maiming the addiction, the dodging isn't really about alcohol, so what is it about you've said it above. the buzz is temporarily corrective to socially supported maiming. the adventure of sobriety is to claim everything social maiming took away, in your case for instance anger. the hallmarks the markers of success I have lost what had previously been known to me as the structures of advancement and achievement the political and educational spheres have fallen away from me all I've had to define myself my value my purpose my role my function my why was given to me by patriarchy, capitalism, and the university again, social maiming and addictive evasion. when you're on your own ground the institutions don't give you your function, your innate sense of function uses them to find its resources, has discernment, knows what in them is workable and what is harmful. she said it's just one of those days, you know, grey days, and I did know and was so sad. My trunk bottomed out to imagine to be standing in the long empty hours of the passing light in that house with my father, the shuffling scraping of days, the tense and unspoken and simmering. here's the other side of your difficult balance, the way empathy is a powerful gift in you. you sacrifice too much to it but at the same time it is your beautiful power, not to be abandoned. empathy is such a good writer. employ it, don't let it kill you. When I imagine you it is like all of those past selves are the body of you stretching away outwards? backwards? behind? I've felt I didn't want to be distracted by those selves there's no reason you should have to. don't be dutiful, look after yourself! the FB posts and the journal itself have functions that aren't necessarily relevant to you. in some ways they are mostly for people who don't know me. at the very end of the journey in the hospital when I was somehow outside the spiral looking up and down into each turn that housed worlds of war and peace and suffering my heart broke open and I was consumed by a compassion and equanimity that was so vast and complete and terrible and beautiful that even distant stars echoed with the endless song I understood I was catching a glimpse framed in the way my three dimensional brain could understand it I saw it felt it I was the whole thing for a moment just pure feeling and observation and being torn apart joyful brutal whole aching calm full - there you are in your great gift. those days when I wonder who would bother reading any of this at all, it feels important to me to tell the story to make a thing to share but who would want that anyway do we have to know who would want it? I know we want to but here's the adventure that "proceeds confidently into the unknown unpredictable and full of possibility" for real. le guin about how you can't be an explorer unless you come home to tell the story and the feeling that there's no home to come to and tell to you want the home to be there before you've made it. le guin created a home exactly fitted to herself by saying what she needed to say. - I began it yesterday saying too much too relevant only to me and this morning easily pared it back and pointed it. What was only relevant to me was thinking what uses of journal and FB posts are for other people not for her, then feeling how bizarre of her it is to feel her institutions gave her her function. That would never have occurred to me: institutions were there to support the functions I already knew myself to have. How I used them, what I took from them, continue in me after the institution is gone or given up.   Call it exile, chosen exile, away from anyone who knows me. Exiled in teaching, exiled with Tom, exiled in the US, making something of exile the way a three year old did. At home in being interested. At home in exile? Exile's home makes do. I worked, as always, but never stopped longing for work I could completely believe in. With Tom too, not having scope to match my quality. - That's life-long isn't it, exile from what I should have been. So I was living my actual structure accurately: preference for exile is an instinct for living on my actual foundation. This is correct, isn't it.   Exile's homes are the day, the light of place, journey, encounters with strangers, the journal itself, my own stored time and its record, my own company, the company of experience and evaluation.   March 2018 part 4 time remaining volume 13: 2024 january-* work & days: a lifetime journal project