She so needs to be in the world. I love that she has her own purposes.
These days I understand that I've been a strong person, by which I mean
that from the beginning, against family, against community, against culture
I've believed myself.
Letter in 1986 when she was 62. That liking was there in me before she
said it.
Patch has come in from the rain limping. Not on the same leg, right hind
leg. I don't understand what could have happened to her out there in the
wet dark - she slipped in a jump? She fell badly?
200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. On our world we've screwed
up but on some other they can do better? As if cosmos is a vast experiment
that winnows the unfit. We'd have to say Earth itself is unfit because it
has created its destroyers.
Andrew Scott talking. What it's like for someone to be so committed that
every instant of his presence holds. "Art is
for helping people make their lives better." 1976, his mom an
art teacher. Dublin.
Was bread yesterday why I slept till morning. I'd told Alex and Edgar I'd make them French bread so had planned timing for our whole Thursday;
mix it when I wake, let it rise through the day, take it out of the oven
when they're here. Manuel wrote to say they had to work extra hours and
wouldn't come so I pushed the timing. When I took off the heavy red lid
there it was deep and round with a magnificent crack. Cut a crusty heel
when it was still hot. Butter melted. So good! I cut another slice. Then
another, this one with just a skim of honey. Put the rest of the loaf into
a paper bag and set it inside their door where they'd find it when they
got home. All of that a pleasure as if making bread for young men who help
me is something I need.
Something else yesterday was that I wondered whether I could get into
Thompson View Manor. It's a simple place on a bench over the river. The
rooms have large south windows. Ashcroft makes sense. I like the town. I
like the cemetery. It seems less likely to burn. If I need to establish
residency it would mean renting unless Rob wants to buy another house. 30%
of monthly gross income, pets allowed. BC residency.
First step this morning my knee didn't hurt, collagen? Yesterday a first
poppy under the window, immaculate red. Dames rocket in the house. Patch
still limping. Dr Liana said wait to see whether it's just a sprain. She
asked how I'd been. I said in winter I want to die. Today I want to be alive
to read my journal.
Amy-Alma replied. She's my age. Disappointing twice-widowed civic-minded
mother of four, school teacher I think.
- When I was only sixty frowning portrait with shiny brown skin.
- My red linen shirt was draped over the chair with other clothes to
be ironed. Tom said, I really like that shirt. I said It's too big for
me. He put it on. It looked nice with his jeans.
-
- We went to Cabrillo Point and sat on the wall while he ate his carne
asada quesadilla. When I'd taken him home I opened the package from Susan
and there was her faded pink plaid shirt. How many times has she made me
gasp. It was with my notes on Shams and Rumi, "the smell of his shirt".
-
- San Diego April 2005
27
Tried to photograph the irises but this little corner was all that was
good.
It's charming though, like seeing into fairyland after the fact.
-
I'm into the pre-sorted sheets. A kind of effort I don't already know.
I have to test each line more than I have.
It as if gropes in an invisibility beyond me. How to find what honour
is in this kind of work. There I look up and see a spot of light through
the reflection of leaves on the window. Something that attracts beyond my
limits.
I'm attached to phrases, be careful of that.
It produces a state that has its own principles of decision.
There's what's true and there's what speculates
It's thinky in parts, does it have to be. I had wanted it to sing. Can
abstraction sing.
- Would you be able to help me with this yes
- Do you like it yes
- Have I done what I can today YES
Many little devices, many little dangers of bad taste.
28
Grass cut and Cox sprayed today.
29
Now my head is often unsure of itself. Are they coming today, no it's
only Wednesday. I know but I double-check. The swift certainty I used to
have.
I stumble and drop things more than I did.
30
Leuphana University, Lüneburg, which turns out to be near Hamburg
not Berlin. Embodied Correspondences. A practice-based seminar on improvisation,
Summer Semester 2024.
"Whole bodies are oriented and structurally
responsive to their environments, and whole persons, and not isolated internal
parts of persons, refer and are about things in those environments."
Christopher Weickenmeier will introduce four films by Ellie Epp.
Bitsy's usual jumble. I said I don't want you to talk about my work because
I don't think you understand it. She's fudged it by including me in her
usual miscellaneous heap. I don't understand a mind that tosses stuff together
under some grand heading without focus. It seems a cheat for purposes of
artist mystique. For me it's like being scribbled over with intent to destroy:
I made something clear and you've smudged it so it's nothing.
- Last night in one of those nights when for no reason I can find I simply
don't sleep I thought to check on this. It happened in early May.
-
Alex and Edgar had to come at seven because now they're doing ten hour
days six days a week. I was desperate to get things done and did I wear
them out. I fell boom in front of Alex - am stumbling more. Fell on grass
and felt no hurt. No point being embarrassed, it's just something I do.
The Beaverlodge rose is in floppy cream-coloured slightly but sweetly
scented bloom, Thérèse and Blanc Double de Coubert in bud.
The last of the irises magisterially tall and almost black not quite open.
31
Weeded three paths yesterday aft to be ready for planting, worked an
hour and a half with A and E, fell hard, but slept seven hours without squirming
and didn't wake soaked. Stiff this morning but only a bit sore. Blue skies.
The pig man yesterday guilty on all 34 counts, unanimous, now bleating
that it's rigged.
-
damesrocket.html, officially hesperis matronalis. looks like a phlox but
is in the brassica family, four petals not five. I knew it in vancouver
where it grows all over town - vacant lots, roadsides, railway tracks -
and have seeded it here because it's one of the plants whose scent has
a powerful if unnameable effect. it is said to be aphrodisiac to women,
as suggested by its common name, but it's not exactly that, more a sort
of creative euphoria?
June 2
an ordinary easy prose with exact thought
technical achievements - having passed through
the voices saying writing isn't living, you must be seen to be reworking
what comes to you as if you own it
-
No. My effort is 1. finding/making my way into a life that can be written
without cover; 2. navigating the moments themselves, of that time, as they
are, so that what comes is attentively met, in balance, with the whole
range of skill; 3. recall resolved patiently without generalizing, without
short cuts, and registering the time re-formed; 4. and then the multitude
of balancings that make it possible in this world to publish writing many
will not be willing to take on, in competition with writers who are more
easily willing to ingratiate.
October 2016
-
Barefoot in some big city going into a shop to
buy New York Sunday newspapers, Chinese baker at the counter, I seem to
be buying surprising many loaves of bread too. Earlier I'm sitting on the
ground with Cheryl saying I'm depressed. Wake with heart pressure I haven't
felt for a long time, pulse seems blurred.
3
Old age is disgrace.
I decided last night that since I seem to have stopped working on The
air pieces and since, even if I never finish them I should get them
posted so they'll be on the archive site, I should work on the Theory's
practice manuscripts again. This morning I've read through 1-3 thinking
what's unresolved will have to stay unresolved, it will have to be what
it is now, much too long and unformatable for hard copy, just a heap of
manuscript. It can be that as named pdf chapters online. Is the way it's
utterly sui generis its fault or its gift. Depends on the reader.
Introduction that says I know its faults but I'm running out of time
- cognitive limits - so I'm dumping it online for whatever it's worth.
What will I have to do:
write the general intro for three parts
write intros for childhood and long table separately
design a format for pdf chapters
design a TP page linked from the writing page
link from the writing index page
-
identification with the logos he says - responsibility - archetype of
order out of chaos -
competence, productivity, generosity
destabilization and destruction
4
Jordan Peterson, the mix he is, of good and bad faith. He correctly and
effectively tells young men to grow up. Maybe their moms have told them
the same thing but they won't take it from their moms, they need to hear
it from a man they feel defends their gender.
He speaks for moral behavior but his huge popularity with men is given
in the same way Trump's is, by reactionary froth. When he is interviewed
by women almost all the Youtube comments are women-hating and idolize him
without discrimination - if he's honorable wouldn't he have to take that
on as a fact to be accounted for? It seems to me that his foundation is
a need to defend male prestige. He needs to insist that men and women are
biologically different - yeah well - but what women feel in him is a need
to insist that men are superior. He's my age: when he was in school up the
road from me in Fairview Alberta he could be confident of it. No more, so
now he shores it up effortfully with Jung and God and social science statistics.
What he isn't clear about is a central thing in himself that is a central
thing in male psychology in general, which is a tremendous intolerance of
female autonomy. Men need women to be something very particular, and they
need women to believe it's in their interest to be that particular thing.
To thrive women need to understand that insistence of male motive: they
need to understand that they're besieged. They need to understand that their
preference for generosity complicates their ability to defend against siege.
"Women know what they have to do, men have to figure out what they
have to do." Do women know what they have to do? He wants it to be
that women know they have to do what men need them to do. But one of the
things I as a woman have known I need to do is support the autonomy and
prestige of women against male need to undermine it.
Men's motivation an image of female perfection he says. I don't think
so. I think their motivation is approval of other men.
Peterson has bought into climate change denial too. How is that related?
General ethos of the community that pays for his sharp suits?
"Toxic masculinity" - men hear "maleness is toxic"
but what is actually meant - what the term was meant to name - was rape,
murder, war lust, domination, bullying of children, domestic assault, all
of which are inarguably male but he would say at the narrow far end
of maleness.
Something about administration/government - "the woke mob".
Canceling - which means for instance students saying they don't want something.
The thing about it is, though, that there was canceling before but it was
implicit. Women were canceled as a matter of course and still are. Commenters
on Jordan's videos do their worst to cancel the female interviewer. Everything
'woke' is about - race, gender, sexuality - is in reply to earlier implicit
canceling. It's counter-canceling.
-
Vivid scent of dames rocket at this end of the room, when I'm in bed
vivid scent of two kinds of rugosa from the plate ledge above my head. Is
the stress and pain of the garden worth it for the days when there are these.
5
Louie is 67 today!
-
I'm thinking of the downstairs room in the Athens Youth Hostel, the
long dark room on the right side of the corridor, where I had a bed next
to Chrisusa's and lay in my bottom bunk looking between iron bedposts at
Isabelle undressing across the room. When she had taken off her corduroy
jumper and cotton smock and hung them over one of the iron cross-supports
at the head of her bed I'd stare at the huge pregnant belly stretching
her white slip. Then she'd lie down clumsily and be immobile till she slept.
Chrisusa would come in much later and undress awkwardly in the narrow
space between my bed and hers. She never took everything off, when she
pulled a nightgown over her head it was always over her bra. She had a
dark, wolfish face with black eyes, and a rough Arabic-guttural English;
when I first saw her at the youth hostel on Alexandrius Street she was
in her slip staring upward, a sharp cleft between her dark breasts and
sharp hollows under the bones of her face.
One evening Isabelle wasn't there, and I wondered. Next day I rushed
out to tell Alain, Jean-Jacques, Fernando, that she was gone; and it was
true, she had a baby girl. I'd found morning and afternoon governess jobs
and my afternoon kids, Lellie and Lucia, picked flowers for the baby on
a forbidden hilltop we found behind the stadium - Lellie stubbornly pushed
her way through the bars. Wild iris on delicate stalks.
Athens July 1966
-
-
I post it wondering what it is, what it can be worth, to perpetuate
that sliver of past being. A young woman staring at the bodies of two other
women. A young woman taking two Athenian girls - they would have been five
and eight? - to wander more freely through ancient Athens than their family
would have allowed. Freedom of the eyes, freedom of place? I don't think
Lellie and Lucia will have forgotten me and I haven't forgotten them either.
6
Was pleased that Cheryl liked that: she'd be the one who'd been there.
Val liked it too but I know less about why.
Have just erased almost a page. Start again. Boxing Day evening, somewhere
say three-quarters through a life. Most of the day transcribing the last
of the complicated bookwork in that journal. It was teaching me most of
what I'd need to know but couldn't remember in the next how-many years
- five or six.
Editing. Alright, editing. Some of it I know to keep or leave and some
I ask about. If it sez cut I do. What am I editing for - days, weather,
dear ordinary time.
Yes but in the emotional work, am I telling a story and to whom? My
guess is that I'm showing myself finding the principles. I don't know how
many times to show that. It's very redundant. Is the dialogue interesting
in itself? There's conscious Ellie as straight person and the - not the,
but some - nonconscious being, the teacher, getting most of the interesting
lines. Is the dialogue supposed to be interleaved the way it came? Could
anyone read so much of it? I can't imagine the bulk there is, publishable.
As it is the Tom story is turning out to be the Sufi ordeal, which
is interesting only as it gives the occasion for restructuring. I can actually
feel something having shifted there - can I - am not so identified with
hope and fear - though I can be taken with the pleasure of the fun. I don't
know whether that has to go. - See I don't even try to answer a questio
like that any more. I mean I refer it to larger self. Ego knows more about
its limits.
San Diego December 2003
I like the way it moves in light companionship with itself. Am guessing
it will be mostly for Don because won't he be the only one to have quested
for the limits of ego. I don't think the girls do. - That thing I've always
liked in Don, sore-hearted quest.
7
Judie's birthday, 76.
Last night Only Boys Aloud Academi singing the Cantique. Tim Rhys-Evans
has been training street kids, taking them on European tours, taking them
to sing for the Queen, has organized Only Men Aloud members to rehearse
local groups. Now he has a summer residential academy making professional
musicians who can be the next generation to save men in Wales. It's brilliant.
(Turns out Rhys-Evans is married to a guy.)
There's been so much lamenting of boy disaffection. It does seem that
boys must be taken in hand - in groups - by adult men of intelligent
good will. Coach Taylor. I like teenage boys and love to see them saved
but then at the same time I'm mourning what isn't being done for girls.
Music is right: it teaches focused soaring, gives experience of grandeur,
adds what can be added to biological gender. What do girls need to lift
them out of girl trivia and make them grand. We've only begun to create
it and there's already so much male sulking and carping.
-
unresolved mild discords
stealing out during the sermon for a cigarette
11
Tom saying in email today - we were talking about what I'd said about
traveling alone - "It's as if the 'awareness' we project 'outward'
is - for many reasons (not the least because it is recognized by others
and related to by them) - an 'almost' individual and self-contained 'personality'
that reports back to our 'inward' awareness which we recognize as our 'actual'
personality and creates a 'dialogue' that allows us to feel less alone
and more aware of both the world and our 'self', as you define it. At least
that's how 'I' as an only child avoided loneliness."
- What do I think he's saying - does he mean what Jody meant about
translating everything people say to her - no he just means popular-boy
bullshit he has come to believe while he's saying it. But then what's the
dialogue and is it different from what I do here. Does it mean he ruminates
the way I do? Does he mean Johnny Cool is his imaginary friend?
- Where I started is that Tom is strenuously camouflaged in ordinary
exchange though his vulnerability is close under the skin, shows in his
eyes and is his appeal.
- He has a stronger sense than I do of the difference between what
he presents and what he is because he lies? Does he mean lying gives him
a sense of having inner company? Really? I would think lying makes
anyone feel more alone, like living in Plato's cave.
In this conversation I feel his unknowable otherness, which I suppose is the private self he means, the unknowability he hides with persiflage. It's quite inchoate and sore and is it what Joyce meant by integrity.
Borrego Springs March 2014
-
-
-
I thought Don would recognize that and yes.
-
Where's the Susan folder? Sam says she understands what Tom said so I
wanted to find Susan's letter ashamed that she was narrating her walk to
the library.
We're settled down. She wasn't eating or sleeping, working all night.
We settled down when I said what I felt abut her story of walking through
the school having the freedom of the building. She could read when she
started school so when the class was going to do reading they'd say You
can go read in the library. It went on that way through all the grades.
She's mad at herself because she learned to narrate her walk. I said she
wasn't crediting the way she'd been exiled into her privilege and sent
into the free space of knowledge alone, and isn't there an undercurrent
of terror of that, so she gives herself the companion of a narrative voice.
I said I've understood grief and shame about bad language but doesn't it
just mean there's been a lot of her life where she didn't have good company.
I said I like that she's working class. I feel fellowship with that
because I know how long it takes to catch up and how much valor it takes.
San Diego February 2005
I'd rather have it from her letter but all my sfu.ca emails have vanished
off gmail. Why don't I have her folder with the other student folders?
13
Wondering whether the Susan-Millie semester is Part 4 Embodiment studies.
14
I did too much yesterday - was a couple of hours weeding a short bed
and the paths either side of it - but it had to be done so one of my Mexicans
could dig that bed and then I could plant it. Then when they came I had
to run around with them supervising. Edgar dug beautifully. Alex and I planted
the clematis Blue Bird amid Calif poppies against the dead nectarine's trunk;
the pink Itoh at the far end of the long edge; the fig and its pot in a
deep hole in the gravel. Luis hoed weeds in the empty long bed so at the
last moment we set out 6 squash plants. I sent them home with strawberries,
paeonies and mock orange. - All that and I went to bed light and pleased
but then woke at midnight in fiery all-over pain. I think pain comes later
at night that way when repair begins. It was bad. I'd had an aspirin and
didn't want to take another and I was baffled trying to escape it. I'll
have to have a whole night of this I was thinking, and it was so, though
Eno's music helped until the iPad battery ran out. It's a hard price.
16
Mid-June scent of mock orange.
17
Will this be the last summer in my beautiful house. I've been looking
at the lovely order I've made of it over 8 years knowing it's doomed.
Mock orange - first I knew of mock orange, I suddenly remembered, a bush
at the apex of the tiny Burghley Road triangle. (Some kind of rose bramble
that sent an arm across from one brick wall to the other, rubble underneath
it, first own garden.) End of this house, end of life, what have I been
feeling, that I don't regret my death, what I regret is the death of my
experience, the places I remember, as if things themselves in their times,
the mock orange bush someone planted just in the point of the apex. The
reason I've limited my experience is that I've needed to hoard. It's a form
of love, I don't think it's a wrong way to live, but it's a deformation
of attachment probably.
The awful transience of a garden, it only takes one season to ruin it.
So transient even with painful care. My iris bed was at its best for a week?
Now bare stalks I'll have to clip. I love flowers in the house, I love the
mock orange scent pervading, but vases have to be washed and refilled every
day or two. First of the zone 5 roses today, bud of Munstead Wood. Unprotected
one winter would end it.
18
In 1968, the year after I'd graduated, when I was 23 and didn't know
what to do next, still in my college town, I briefly had my only 9-5 office
job, a boring useless job that paid good money. On December 17, which two
years later would become Luke's birthday, I walked downtown and bought
a Nikon ftn. I'd been scouring photo magazines that tell what camera is
used for any shot given and that was my superb expensive decision. Delight
of its first photos and then all the years it was teaching me a silence
that allows the uncon to show what it sees.
With the blue mother-daughter photo taken in the camera's first weeks.
Is it a better photo than I knew and what does it show the uncon
seeing. Their two blues, the mother's blue pale, soft and padded. The daughter
armoured in a solid much darker shade. The mother's soft, soft face. Is
it helpless? Defeated? The daughter is guarded and has turned her back.
Her stance is saying, I'm not going to be what she is. My own mother was
not soft but is the mother in me, the encapsulated early mother? Helpless,
defeated? It says yes.
I'm thinking Cheryl will be the only person who can see it, except if
some of the filmmakers who may or may not lurk - . I'll be sorry if no one.
Showing Trapline in the Interart Co-op basement, Maggie saying
shots were too long and Cheryl saying decisively no, one of the shots was
too short. How desperately when I was first in parochial Vancouver of 1975
I needed to find something of what there'd been in London.
It's true about the silence taught by a camera. I don't think I've seen
it said.
Doesn't the blackness around them say uncon. They aren't in a daylit
place.
-
In June I think of the light there'd be in our room when we were sent
to bed at eight. That far north June was the month of long, long evenings.
Judy and I slept together in an old iron bedstead, she next to the wall
so I was next to the room's only window, which was west-facing and double-hung.
Outside the window was a dank but narrow poplar bluff, which in winter sheltered
the house from west winds. The window's lower pane would be raised enough
to hold a folding mosquito screen, through which gold-shifted light came
flat through aspen trunks from a long horizon. What was it about those evenings.
I've often thought of the moment of lying awake in that light, next to that
window, the golden light, the frantic buzz of mosquitoes at the screen,
the live air. I didn't understand then that it was rare, only around the
year's solstice, that we had that completely unmentioned and uncelebrated
apex of year's aliveness.
I don't have it yet. What don't I have. Judy was next to me but on my
dark side so it is as if I was alone with the window. I knew it was spectacular,
I remember it in the way I remember times that are something in a completely
private way. It was the time of year around solstice, when the sun sets
far in the northwest and not till almost midnight. It was the mile of flat
open land behind the bluff, so light could come through trees at a low angle.
It was the way light colour-shifts toward yellow when its does a low-side
slide from a distant horizon. I didn't know any of those reasons but I felt
it as It's the mild live air through an open window. It's the sharp, moving
whine of mosquitoes at the screen. It's all of that under my grandma's pink
cotton quilt, the dipping springs of that bashed old bed. It's being away
from our parents with the door closed, being more conscious. After the dark
winters, going to bed in the dark in a cold room, it meant consciousness,
it was as if a time that was consciousness itself. It was being lit, me,
myself, wonderfully, intensely lit. Did Judy feel it? Do other people up
north feel it? It needed a west window open but screened. It needed me to
have taken the outside of the bed as my right. It needed country space so
we never had blinds or curtains. Miles of country quiet with no houses within
a mile in any direction.
20
I was wanting to photograph a young tree against
an open distance, not sky but a well of blue valley. The tree was a graceful
thing not much taller than a person. I was with Tom. I asked him to help
move something, was it the tree's heavy pot. He was with a friend he hadn't
seen for a while, Pilgrim probably, and was being snide. Though the photo
didn't happen I can see the tree lit up against a deep distance.
21
After our hour of garden work last evening - eight o'clock - strawberries
and fresh bread ready for them to take home - Alejandro and Edgar sitting
on the steps with me - Edgar said it was the first day of summer. Solsticio
Alex said. We were feeling it really was that. I said I'd made the steps
wide for just such a time, said it more than once in different ways but
don't think they understood. I give them runs of sentences we don't pin
down. They may seize a word or two, I don't know. Invent gestures, "poppyseeds,
black, small," dot-dot-dot with my forefinger on my palm.
It was a lovely moment. They could see their work amid my colours and
I could feel their pleasure in real life away from sawmill workdays and
dark basement. They're eager with me, have Mexican good manners, offer
their warm brown hands when they arrive and when they say goodbye. - Oh
Alex's radiant black-eyed smile. Edgar as if bows over my hand. I'm their
honoured old woman, which is alright to be and which I am nowhere else.
I'll make them some strawberry jam.
23
Yesterday 6 half-pints of quite delicious strawberry jam. Lemon juice,
honey, bit of vanilla.
-
Lifetime of clothes. They're loved in their time and then left behind
somehow without noticing - how does that happen? The purple coat Eaton's
substituted for what I'd ordered. The shiny gold-orange dress I made and
wore to grad. The fuzzy brown sweater. The white Paris nightgown. The orange
dungarees.
24
moment they call cosmic dawn, when the first
stars and galaxies were formed
such large and luminous galaxies so early in
cosmic history
universe about 13.8 billion years old - in question
because of Webb
I believe the way to think about expansion of
the universe is that we are not expanding into a previously empty area,
but that the fabric of the imaginary grid in which we reside is expanding.
So the distance between grid squares is expanding, giving the illusion that
we are moving into 'new' space.
25
Was thinking yesterday of the way my mom didn't comment on my appearance
or anyone's. When I met Olivia's mom in first year I noticed that she did
and took it as a sophistication my mom didn't have. Many things she and
her context didn't know they could talk about - I thought that yesterday
reading The Tribe of Tiger, she was never interested in cats or
skies or architecture or anything but people. She didn't know she could
be. So when in Tabor Court she complained of having nothing to do and I
said impatiently Just get in a taxi and go to the library it wasn't
a thing she could imagine.
They bought us the encyclopedia but didn't read it themselves. She
was intelligent but stupid. Meaning what. A family thing, a cultural thing,
a mental confinement. Ed could be interested in things she couldn't, he
liked to travel, but he wouldn't read, why. He wanted to feel he could
know everything without being told.
It's the family puzzle now become so much the political puzzle, what
has made me so different from my family, as if the fabric of space in which
I reside has expanded; what has made 'us' so different from Trump's worshippers
that they seem to us to be troglodytes.
-
that a president could throw the American armed
forces unprepared into a war, with heavy losses on both sides, and that
he could do this on the basis of thin or doubtful information, if not simply
from a sense of private grievance and a privileged indifference to other
considerations
whether democratic values were strong enough
in the US . Those values include the accountability of the people in power,
the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding
of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial
influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of
public utterances
-
28
What I transcribed this afternoon was the train trip back to San Diego
just before Christmas in 1996. I like the writing. One of the things I
like is that I hardly ever know what I'm going to say. Another is that
I like the stories told in a paragraph or a few - the girl who shot her
stepfather. I like the unpremeditated movement of a person thinking rather
than presenting to a reader. I like the valiant honesty. I don't mind the
egotism though I notice someone else might.
I like the value given mortal moments. I'm generous when I'm interested.
I like the way philosophic synthesis is there among paragraphs about winter
rain and a chance meeting on Commercial St with a stranger's elegant generosity
in propping my bike at the tea merchant's. I like the simplicity in sex
and grief. There's great naturalness. But what?
Post it on the web, with photos. Yes, and then what? I'm discouraged
before I even ask. No work I do in these ways will get me what I'm starved
for, access, ease, a true love.
A true love - what is that? Why aren't the people who love me true
loves? Because I have to hold back with them, always, always. They couldn't
bear me, none of them. I want my work to find me someone stronger, someone
so strong I can be true and love and hate and fear and all. "All that
passion, so carefully controlled," Joyce said. I'm sobbing.
That's why in all his badness Tom satisfied me. He couldn't stand me either but he could stand things no one else could stand. He could stand my fury, he could stand my sexual kinkiness, he could stand my hatred, he could stand my plain-spokenness though sometimes he stood it by not hearing it.
And secondly, access, being part of the world. And thirdly, money enough for movement and roots into old age, if there will be that. None of my work has got me those, none of it will ever get me those. Sucking-up could get me the second two, though not the first. But I can't do that.
San Diego January 2004
-
Two flower photos in a row, popular, then this. Confessio.
I only want to confess what I have learned,
so far as I have come, from my life, so far as it has gone.
-
Edgar last night as we were saying goodbye, "What is this?"
"Handshake. Hand shake." "What is this?" "Hug."
"Can I hug you?" "Always." Alex's hard shoulder blade.
I was sending them home with strawberries, green onions, radishes, mint,
mangetout peas and yellow roses.
29
Most of the day no one willing to notice it - no one! Wouldn't it have
spoken for any of the women? Then Cheryl, one red heart. It wd speak for
her, yes. But not Don? What could he have disliked? Funny it has turned
out that Don can stand me more than Greg - G wd be afraid of my confessional
posts and D mostly likes them.
Today back to a flower photo.
Calm 6:30am, calm because it's Saturday and people aren't going to work.
Grey overhead. It rained last night, sidewalk wet. Patch has come in with
damp fur.
-
Another Catholic anti-progressive book from the
library, this one about Marxists coming for your children. "Demons
will teach our children to worship Satan in the name of LGBTQ+ identity."
"Abolish the administrative state." Eliminate
entire executive departments or agencies such as the Department of Education
and the Environmental Protection Agency. Etc.
Bar pension funds from investing based on mitigating
climate change and advancing social justice causes rather than financial
return. Make it illegal for states to execute contracts with financial institutions
that boycott energy companies.
Ban all diversity, equity and inclusion promotion
in educational institutions that accept any federal funds or private companies
enacting those provisions from doing business with federal or state governments.
Home school because of "Marxist curriculum"
- ie discussion of social justice, racial justice, discussion of gender
politics, discussion of sexual minorities, "anti-white, anti-capitalist,
anti-family, anti-American, anti-Christian," social-emotional learning.
Prohibit school counselors from talking to your children.
State governors take control of state universities.
Pass laws to tax university endowments. Prohibit universities accepting
federally subsidized student loans and research grants from participating
in "Marxist indoctrination".
Ban any schools from mentioning sexual or gender
identity. Defund Planned Parenthood, the UN and the WHO because they do.
Teach children about "God's design for masculinity,
femininity, marriage, sex, family, good and evil." "Well-adjusted
children schooled in patriotism and Christian virtue in traditional families
of one man and one woman joined in holy matrimony."
"reject Lockean libertarianism and instead
embrace ordered liberty in the style of Edmund Burke, which Burke defines
as justice grounded in 'original justice'.
"False premise of separation of church and
state." "There is no sanity outside the Church."
- Russian Marxists for sure were against family
and religion but there is no present plot to establish a Marxist state.
There are other motives but she is barking up old history between the Catholic
Church and Marxism. By communism she basically means secularism.
"wokism", "grooming"
vs Friedan, "Dewey's Marxist education philosophies",
Kinsey
"Marxists will never allow us to restore the
glorious, prosperous days of a free United States"
- SEL social-emotional learning - "competencies
- such as self-awareness, social awareness, responsible decision-making
and self-management" "a technique to brain-wash children"
birth control "destroying femininity, masculinity,
gender roles, relationships, marriage, children and ultimately the nuclear
family unit"
stakeholder capitalism - reforms to permit more
equitable outcomes - changes to wealth taxes, withdrawal of fossil-fuel
subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property trade and competition,"
"investments based on adherence to environmental, social and governance
scoring systems"
She ignores:
- Climate catastrophe
- Destruction of native cultures
- Money motivation of right wing
- Role of trauma in dysfunction
- Patriarchal motive of right wing
- Women derogated and confined by men all over the world - necessary
role of jobs, birth control, no-fault divorce
- Religious body-denial as source of drastic stupidity
- Confinement of female intelligence and confidence as source of institutional
blindness
- Evident white dominance and its costs to non-whites
- Evident falsity of religious beliefs
- Separation of church and state because the US is multi-ethnic
- Denial of global damage by American aggression
- Sexual predation and female subjugation by Catholic church
- Aspects of free-market capitalism as responsible for male distress
- Home schooling as child abuse
- I agree that the transgender thing is dodgy, that political minority
rhetoric can go overboard, that hook-up culture and porn are vile, that
fragile people can't resist drugs.
Naomi Wolf on pandemic as a Chinese Communist plot with totalitarian
intentions and promoted by money interests.
July 1
Brooks' interview with Bannon who claims spiritual war mobilizing MAGA
troups, win at any cost. Seems to be an east coast Catholic drive for return
of power.
Trump is going to win, the conservatives are going to win in Canada,
women's rights to autonomy and influence are going to be slashed, environmental
policies are going to be slashed, liberal education will be slashed, meanwhile
escalating unstoppable climate catastrophe will increase populist insanity
so correctives to the above will be stalled.
2
I didn't watch the terrible debate but I've been tracking what has
followed, including biden's spook intransigence. the NYT had an interview
with steve bannon that's very outright in declaring the intentions of what
has turned out to be the catholic right, which has lost a lot of prestige
and power and is fighting to get it back - I hadn't understood how much
of the backlash is coming from them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/opinion/steve-bannon-trump.html.
and how that much savvier cohort is using trump's stupid-populist charisma
for its own ends, which are capitalist and patriarchal. beyond all that,
climate, which will get steadily scarier, which is going to drive right-wing
reaction ever faster. am remembering le guin saying hard times are coming.
we'll feel we've lived in a golden age. maybe we - I mean we entitled leftists
- will devise new means of underground resistance.
I like the sound of your clearing up and throwing out.
me - how am I - worried by all of this but knowing I won't live to
see how bad it's going to get. struggling with the disabilities of age.
I've limped since I was two but was never a cripple. now I am. feeling
it may be the last year of my garden, which now is so spilling-over with
roses that their scent in the house makes life good.
To Em today.
3
The autumn I was eighteen I'd been accepted by Queen's and had just
had word of the full scholarship I needed, was in BC making money for college.
Had picked strawberries and raspberries and after the picking season was
working 10- or 14-hour days at a cannery. I'd stayed with my Epp grandparents
an earlier summer but they now didn't want the worry of a young person
in their house so I was living alone in a picker's shack up the road. I'd
sometimes walk over to visit them.
Not far from their little house on Stuart Road lived Lottie Goertz,
a girl my age who was some kind of relative, a second cousin? Walking home
one evening (with cucumbers, cake and a Readers Digest) I heard music coming
from the Goertz house and stopped in. Sat on the piano bench next to Lottie
while she played Beethoven sonatas. Had I ever heard Beethoven? I don't
think so. What that was like. Have never forgotten.
July 2024
The visit with Lottie. Moments of watching her play, an unembarrassed
dreaminess of expression. Direct, ringing notes. I was in a state of ecstasy
all the way home. Awareness of University and Europe, of Frank and Peter
and Lottie and Grandfather, of Conrad and Chopin, of Lydia in her delicatessen
and I in my unbounded joy-streaked young world.
Yarrow BC September 1963
-
Brian Cox 2011 Wonders of the Universe BBC - Episode 1 Destiny
ending with absolute zero, heat death of the cosmos. He seems to look forward
to it. Have been humans only a tiny fraction of one circuit in the Milky
Way. Will, can, only be life anywhere in a tiny fraction of
cosmic time. Hilltop calendar of the Chankillo fort in Peru like a comb
on a ridge. - A charming boy. 13 years ago when he was 43.
5
Lovely graphic of yesterday's UK vote.
6
"I believe the way to think about expansion of the universe is
that we are not expanding into a previously empty area, but that the fabric
of the imaginary grid in which we reside is expanding. So the distance
between grid squares is expanding, giving the illusion that we are moving
into 'new' space."
-
Was thinking yesterday of the way my mom didn't comment on my appearance
or seem to notice anyone's. When I met Olivia's mom in first year I noticed
that she did and took it as a sophistication my mom didn't have. Many things
she and her context didn't know they could be interested in - I thought
that yesterday reading The Tribe of Tiger: she was never interested
in cats or skies or buildings or anything but people. She didn't know she
could be. So when in Tabor Court she complained of having nothing to do
and I said impatiently Just get in a taxi and go to the library
it wasn't a thing she could imagine doing.
She was intelligent but not. Meaning what. A family thing, a cultural
thing, a confinement. They bought us the encyclopedia but didn't read it
themselves. Our dad liked to travel but he wouldn't read, why. He wanted
to feel he could know everything without being told.
- It's the family puzzle now become so much the political puzzle, what
has made me so different from my parents, as if the fabric of space in
which I live has expanded. What has made us so different from Trump's worshippers
that they can seem to us to be troglodytes.
Merritt July 2024
-
Biden is going to have to be forced out because he's too far gone to
know how bad things are. We're in such suspense.
-
I've lost Edgar, flying to Mexico City tomorrow afternoon, wife sick.
I'll write him notes. We'd just got to hugs, tonight a kiss on the cheek.
I kissed him back. Was he crying. He knew I liked his ardent heart. He wanted
to tell, struggled to tell.
7
Rumbledethump - Scottish. Chop some green onions fine, add a bit of milk
to infuse, lots of butter. Boil potatoes small-cut to mash. Small-cut onion,
fry with big lump of butter. Slice a cabbage, fry with the onion. When potatoes
are cooked drain, dry and mash, add the infused milk, mix with onion-cabbage
reserving some cabbage. In baking dish layer in this order - bit of cabbage,
lot of onion-cabbage pressed down, bit of cabbage, some cheese, more onion-cabbage
not pressed down, bit of cabbage, onion-cabbage mix heaped loosely, lot
of grated cheese. Oven 170 for 15 min to melt cheese. Cut into portions
before cheese cools.
-
Lark Ascending and Wollerton Old Hall exquisite flushed cream.
8
The raspberries are stunted, the hollyhocks are stunted, second year
there are no plums. Was it the flash freeze in autumn or the polar vortex
in January or is it a general, fatal dying off.
Forecast 100 degrees today and tomorrow. 5am both doors open to cool
the house. I'll close the blinds when the sun rises. Sky the even pale gold
that has made me think of Renaissance paintings. Gold-ground. Last night
when I went out to turn off the water the western sky that even gold with
fingernail moon straight down the path.
A week into July roses all over the house. Queen of July Molineux with
cilantro.
9
The question of free will has never troubled me. I remember when I
was a teenager still at home saying to myself that free will must be false
because no one could choose to be what my dad was. Now I'd say it differently:
we are what we are: what else could we be? It's only body/self dualism
that throws up a question, which is something like, if I'm partly a body
and bodies are determined, can 'I', meaning the part of me that is not
body, decide in a way that is not determined. A better way is to understand
that bodies for sure can be self-conflicted structures.
-
Table and floor vertical grain Douglas fir Chris said, cut from larger
trees, wears better.
10
Wanting to scroll down to the end of this page I read a sequence from
the top and was thinking it's evenly good - I didn't know it was - and then
that it is volume 4, about the making of 1 and 2 and because of the FB passages
also about the whole of the life.
-
This morning watching myself creep down the porch steps with stick in
my right hand and rail in my left I thought of Buddy Hardy almost blind
in the tube.
Buddy Hardy an old woman I first saw one wet night struggling onto
a Northern Line carriage with a paraffin heater. She was thin, frail and
very nearly blind; and came in looking so remarkably alive that I moved
to sit next to her. We both got off at Kentish Town and stood talking at
the bus stop. She was South African, had been a midwife there and had been
banned for labour organizing; lived further up Highgate Hill in the tall
old council building overlooking the cemetery.
After that I'd run into her sometimes shopping on Swain's Lane at the
foot of the hill. There was a day meeting in the fruiter's doorway she
asked me suddenly if I was pregnant. She couldn't see me and I was only
about a month gone - I'd barely found out myself - so by what subliminal
sense could she have known?
She invited me to tea in her council flat and we'd sometimes talk on
the phone. One day I took her up into Highgate to show her an unlocked
empty house I'd found in a vast overgrown garden. A few days later she
rang to tell me she'd gone back on her own to pick some bluebells. Two
dogs had come snarling at her from next door. "I couldn't see them
of course but from the sound of them they were as big as Great Danes. Just
by chance I began to sing and that held them until I could feel my way
to the wall. I couldn't find the gate so I climbed up onto it. But then
I couldn't see how far it was down to the pavement so I hung on until two
children came by. I handed them the bluebells and said 'Take these and
help me down!'"
London 1970
-
Patch asked for her dinner at her usual dinner time and when I ignored
her back out and wouldn't come in again when I rattled the treat tin. It
got dark. I had front and back doors open to cool the house and would go
to the doorway again and again to call her. When I wanted to go to bed I
put on my boots and took the flashlight to look for her. Found her behind
the cold frame, her eyes shining in the beam, her little face looking up
from the nest where she was curled in thick grass. She was just lying there
in an open space in the dark. She looked so calmly alert, so in her moment,
so feminine - her little face. I tried chasing her with the flashlight beam
but when she slipped away I gave up, went back inside, did going-to-bed
things. It was getting to be midnight. I'll try one last time. Found her
in the same place, looking up out of the grass. This time I set down the
torch and dropped my stick so I could carry her inside. Was sorry to spoil
what was so obviously her pleasure but if I left her outside all night I
wouldn't be able to sleep.
-
Isn't Wollerton Old Hall the most exquisite rose, first because it's
a very pale blush pink and second because it's a semi-double so its outer
petals curve around an open center like the most delicate of shells.
11
Rowen called from a clearcut on Read. He's going to be doing physical
things, community things. Gid will be a country boy. Freya is taking a door
off its hinges.
part 5
time remaining volume 13: 2024 january-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project