time remaining 13 part 5 - 2024 july-august  work & days: a lifetime journal project 14 July A sweet 20-year-old called Thomas Crook yesterday tried to assassinate the vile blob and was himself assassinated. Dems who wish he'd succeeded bending over backwards to condemn. - Last night Jacob Collier conducting an audience choir. 15 Woke from a night struggling with William's floods of beige froth. What to call that unholy religiosity of tone. The writing in spiritual counterculture magazines - why is it so bad? Why are the graphics so bad? Does the thing that makes them 'spiritual' make them stupid? Denial? Yes. In William it's distress about dyslexia and an unmanly body compounded by protest. He's very loveable but profoundly loveless - loveless because he's angry and loveable in the way his sort of body can be, by playing up his quirkiness. He's pitched his tent in god's-love-land so he has to try to seem loving, which makes him sign his letters Blessings, William as if he were a bishop and press my hand between the two of his.   There's a passage just at the end of his sheets where he goes into the song of himself. Because BECAUSE BECAUSE! BECAUSE I WANT! I WANT! I WANT!   I light on that like a bird. Here's the place to start.   -   William. Is his 'spirituality' total junk? Yes. Is his battle with 'ego' total self-absorption? Yes. Is the spiritual trip meant to hide a starvation that shames him? Yes. Is there a core of honest willingness? Yes. He wants to be in bliss all the time. Has no interest in anyone or anything else. Will anyone back his educational scheme? No. He doesn't have the inner platform. What he should do first is plain therapy. But he'll keep trying to vault into magical powers. Is there anything I can do. No. Tell him what I see? No. He's very driven, he's very early, he will have to exhaust the grandiose fantasies before he goes on. Just keep loving his hunger because it's what's real in him. Always the weakness? No, but in the crazy ones the weakness.   -   I got the key to William's letter when I realized, in the midst of the writing, that his story about going back in time and recreating his baby self as a wise loving soul not a raging hater was in fact a metaphor for what he does in any minute - he substitutes the false child for the true. When I got that I could go on and say more about how he tries to spare other people but the unnaturalness is so great an effort he is often at wit's end.   -   The letter to William in two shifts. I came through into the large voice, should I call it that, where I know what is simply true. It's a blazing clarity. I don't know whether it will burn William to a crisp.   Wrote two letters today and am tired.   March and April 2002 Sam: You've burned me to a crisp a time or two, and I consider it holy work. E: ilu - The white Paris nightgown. I hadn't remembered it till I wrote it but now I can see it again, its short simple prettiness, the thinness of its cotton. Remembering it gives me something back. Was I wearing it when Luke was born? Now I've remembered a ribbed long-sleeved purple jersey too. The quality of those Paris clothes better than anything I'd had. What I mean is how femme I was. With it I'm remembering my loveliness rather than Roy's malice, the agonies that femme loveliness made me vulnerable to. - Two days ago there were no out of control fires on the Kamloops list. Today there are 7, one of them 5 km northeast. The run of days in the 90s is continuing at least for another week. 16 I didn't cool the house past 83 degrees and was thrashed by this night. Places that hurt L knee, R hip, R knee, both shoulders, small of the back as if maybe kidneys, even wrists. Must have slept a bit as daylight came because there was a dream. - Men love you without being interested in you. Sums it up. - Last evening pushing my students through simple verb conjugation exercises. I, you, he/she/it, we, they. Make up a sentence for the verb TO BE using each person. Alex for you: You are a beautiful woman. I guessed he meant it. !!! Thank you! Next person, he. I flashed in, He is beautiful too. He got it and took it. Yesterday so beautiful all up and down, beautiful light straight man shape, brown bare arms in a sporty bright turquoise singlet. I'm grateful he takes care to be what I can love to see. 17 Say something about my musical ignorance. History of Western Music course in first year. Dr George was about key changes for instance in the four movements of a symphony. I couldn't hear a key change so I scribbled whatever he said and memorized my notes for the final. My A in the course was so completely unearned that I had to wonder whether Dr George was amusing himself. Second: rhythm workshop one day at Goddard, clapping exercises. I was amazingly worse at remembering complex rhythms than others. I could sing in tune and feel pain when others don't. I could find an alto line by ear when I was a kid. What I improvised when we were jamming in Kiyooka's studio interested the sax player enough so he came and stood near me. I know what I like and some of what I like is very splendid. But my ear was taught by hymns in four-part harmony and has stayed simple. To me Jacob's prodigious stacked chords are a dissonant cynical smudge. Other people cry and say things about Heaven.   For me there's Jacob's music and there's Jacob himself. Jacob is beautiful and total, a nervous system at full speed. He's a firebird and we don't want him to be anything else. A prodigy and maybe a prodigy of feeling too, as if his feelings move in fleet microtones. He can't write lyrics. His playfulness makes us think of Mozart but Mozart had access to the slow deep waves of mortal love and pain. Jacob instead moves in glitter like sunlight on water. Someone in Youtube comments said Don't gay on Jacob, he doesn't want that. Someone else said How do you know, but we do know. What god is he. A boy god.   -   Last night I was watching a screen showing pages of sheet music. In a corner Jacob and Jun Lee's heads were in tiny rectangles working together on Jun's transcription of one of Jacob's pieces, Jacob in London and Jun somewhere in the States. Jun would play a passage and Jacob would stop him when he wanted to think. An arrow would appear pointing to a note they were considering. A substituted note might blink into place. Jun would re-play the bar, or one or the other would sing it, and Jacob might say no it was better before. Both have perfect pitch, which means that if someone says sing G sharp they can do it or if played a complex chord they can name every note. So they were thinking together with perfect fluency in a language I don't understand at all. I could be there for something else though.   Merritt July 2024 - Patch schedules cuddles. She goes out first thing in the morning, then comes in to eat, then wants onto my lap. She likely will then go out again and when she comes back inside she'll want the same. If I'm walking around she'll look up at me and say meee, which I understand to mean Sit down please because it's time to do love. 18 Big fires south of Ashcroft. - Richard Reeves on mature masculinity's relation to female empowerment James Talarico on real Christianity vs Christian Nationalism - Vancouver, August late afternoon. I'd put the bike on the bus to go and get a form from the tax office. Took it off where the bus turns south and rode up the alley between Hastings and West Georgia. Where I crossed Burrard a European-looking man with a moustache and a cap was playing the violin part of a classical piece he had on a cassette player. It was music I knew though I didn't remember its name. I shot past him into the alley but when I'd got halfway up the block I turned and went back because I realized the music had made me cry. It was the same sort of crying as when I'd heard music in London churches, sudden and sharp.   I leaned the bike against a wall and sat on it to listen to him more. He was just finishing the piece. As I bent to put money in his basket he was fitting his violin into a case. He snatched the basket away from me, "You're too late, I won't take anything from you, this city has no soul." I could see his feelings were hurt so I kept steady, said "You made me cry," put some two-dollar coins onto the sidewalk in front of his case. "This city has no soul," he said again less passionately. He was confused because there'd been a sudden turn. I said "I do," touched my chest, looked at him. Now he looked back. When I'd pushed off into the alley he called thank you after me.   As I was stepping into the tax office the name of the piece came back to me. It was the Albinoni adagio. I was hearing a grief in it. It was his and mine too. 19 july a nervous month. every day temperatures into the high nineties. first thing in the morning and through the day check the fire map. Check wind direction. merritt has been fine so far but there's a fast-traveling fire south of Ashcroft. [Photo widely republished but I can't find an attribution] 20 Small ranch in the Otter valley near Tulameen on the old Princeton road. Native mom, white dad. Youngest of three boys. School by correspondence. They hunted, fished and gathered. He had figured out a way to catch greyling. Greyling move in groups and you never know where they'll be. He had to sit very still waiting with his three-pronged hook till they'd swim over it. They're hard to see because they're black, the color of the river bottom. His little dog would wait on the bank up above and if he caught a small fish he'd toss it up. It would still be alive and the dog would get a funny look on his face after he swallowed it.   When he was seventeen he went to work at the copper mine. Fifteen years of that. "I had a little wife and two kids." They were both drinking and the kids were confiscated. He was in and out of jail on impaired driving charges. His wife died of cirrhosis when she was 31. After he got sober he met his daughter but by then they were going in opposite directions, the kids were experimenting with drugs and alcohol and he was in AA.   He got his grade twelve and went to Northern Lights in Dawson Creek. The psychology professor got him to where he could just sit down and write a 3000 word essay. He was going to get his Bachelor's in social work but there was a job in suicide prevention on a little reserve at Savona and he liked having a paycheck.   He was telling me these things in a heavy slow voice. I was not expecting him to be able to take an interest in me - though he may believe he does - but isn't he the only person in this town who's invited me to anything? I was dressed for snow shoveling, badly dressed, and he'd found me from across the street holding a tin of WD-40 having just unstuck my driver's side lock. Then we were in a booth in Home Restaurant where an old white woman across the aisle was looking at me cross-eyed thinking I was Native because I was with him.   There's the blue spruce in very very pale sun lovingly dusted all over with snow.   -   Hughie MacKenzie's event at the Lower Nic band hall. Parking lot and roadsides full of muddy vehicles, all those people at three long tables eating together, rez people, AA people. A copper-colored man with braids put on a beaded headband to drum and chant. Then Hughie's older brother Robin, a thin bent man with a good face, hobbled part of the way into the crowd. "I'm Robin. I'm an alcoholic." "Hello Robin" in chorus. Told good stories in a hesitant voice so quiet the audience went completely still.   After a while he was describing his mother in a housedress suddenly running across the yard and vaulting a fence. Then he couldn't go on. A young woman with long hair came to stand next to him, touched his arm. He was silent a long time. She went and got a bottle of water and offered it to him. He said "I'm not sad because of what happened, I'm sad because of what's happening today, saying goodbye to my brother." Hughie had had 32 years of sobriety, "good sobriety mostly", and Robin had followed him into the program two years later. Hughie had always been getting people to meetings, finding them sponsors.   When I came through the door into the hall a man sitting at the nearest table gave me a sharp look and I gave him a sharp though brief look back because he seemed so unusually coherent. Is that the word. As if there was nothing wrong with him. Large middle-aged Native with a ponytail, a baseball cap, and a look of natural authority I suppose, which another man next to him did not have at all though if I've got it right he's the one who ran for chief last election.   Gloria Moses was there and when I touched her shoulder on the steps she knew me. I said the rhubarb would soon be coming up and she said never mind the rhubarb, she'd just come for a visit.   Merritt March 2017, March 2019 I'm reposting the stories about Buddy Hardy and Hughie Mackenzie partly because I'm fed up with stories about me and partly because Don says he begins his day with my bits and I don't think he has seen them. This one is so Merritt, compact. Just tell what happens, don't be abstract. Sunday 7am, doors open to cool the house before 100 degrees later, sound of watering, bits of pink hollyhock showing in slits of the venetians I keep shut. Patch stretched on the floor nearby. Heat dome till maybe Tuesday. I couldn't get it cooler than 85 before I went to bed, not a good sleep. 22 Biden quit yesterday, relief, Harris likely. Lot of wind this aft, is Ashcroft alright. 23 Tom had found Dirty Harry on TV. I was trying to thread a needle. He was insisting I come and look at the next scene and I was holding out for threading, which was hard to do in lamplight. He started pushing. He was saying "I want you to see this next scene, it's the best scene ever filmed". I was turning to steel for the pleasure of it. He was saying "I hate you, you stubborn bitch" and I was biting back an evil gleam. Then he was at his wit's end and said why didn't I go home. I gathered my mending and went downstairs to the jeep. As I started my engine under the pepper tree I was thinking now Tom is going to go straight to sleep.   This morning - what was I doing - about to call about CA taxes - when the phone rang and Tom was downstairs. He'd walked across the park before 7. I love his repentance - could see I do in the mirror, I looked so pink and pleased. Took him to Denny's for breakfast and then Horton's Plaza because I needed a new jar of night cream. Found hightops black embroidered in silver and grey herringbone. Took him back to Georgia Street, he wanted to write. Then came back and was all day cleaning and remounting slides, entranced looking at small specks in 35mm frames.   San Diego September 2008 Why I like that is the way it's Tom and Ellie further on. He's still bossy but now it's part of the pleasure of life. 24 "there is the subtler music, the clear light"   "I say my soul became translucent"   - Very early Pound in an overwrought poem already in love with air.   "the reality of the nous, of mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light"   no cloud, but the crystal body the tangent formed in the hand's cup as live wind in the beech grove as strong air amid cypress   Kenner likes that but I don't think he understands the intuition it evokes - prebirth and cortical and cosmological all at the same time - numinous - all those god-grounds of being at the same time.   December 2019 Hugh Kenner 1973 The Pound era That for no one but me. God-grounds of being. - It's cooler. Living through the many hot days in a row I was a mole prostrate in a burrow, Patch stretched on the floor. Sunday is said to have been the entire world's hottest day ever. Then Monday again. - Big salmon from Kathy. 25 It rained into the afternoon. Luke phoned at midday. The phone says "unknown" so I know it's him. I ask him questions, want to know. The best question was who he talks to. He has men. He's happy. We talked about Youtube, Brian Cox, Jacob Collier, studying comment sections, training the algorythm. He saw Trevor Noah years ago in South Africa. Mandy is off and on, on at the moment. He's clearing an allotment with Roy, who has had a cancerous node snipped out of his lung. Jill is fulminating tiresomely against the state of media and drove through a wall. His sibs are in therapy. He made it through heavy competition to get into an internet security course. - Benadryl! 26 Imagine waking at 4 realizing it wasn't too early, a clean waking, I hadn't been twisting around for hours. Patch knows when I'm awake even when I haven't moved, came briefly to lie next to me. I wondered whether it was talking to Luke that gave me such a good night. Alex in the evening. The garden was wet but I wanted the dry poppy stocks cleared. Had made bread and gave him half - I make good bread, hard crust and moist inside, flavoured by the half cup of whole wheat. And salmon and cucumber and potatoes he dug, onions, a sweet pea. We're less easy without Edgar whose eager heart brightened us all. - Driving Zero Avenue with David and Dorothy on a day when the air was clean enough to see Baker white and godly always larger as we neared Abbotsford. Hay fields, hay in windrows, scent of hay. We jeered at monster mansions and praised old farmhouses, Dorothy always noticing.   When we stopped at Dairyland Ice Cream David was drawing out the owner with stories and questions, admiring the copper kettle and marble slab. Dorothy on a red leather stool between us was bent so her chin was almost on the counter, ate maple walnut from a paper cup and remembered stopping in Abbotsford for ice cream 90 years ago.   On the way home lost north of the highway we wandered west, south, west again through farmland none of us had seen, the rim of mountains solid blue and jagged alongside us as we streaked up two-lane blacktop in the little truck.   Vancouver August 2010 27 I was lying there remembering the dream and thinking of things to write about here - thinking of how I must be remote from myself because those things to write hadn't occurred to me. As if when I wake sometimes I'm briefly myself and then go blank or shallow.   I wanted to write about how it was giving the Dragon Girls workshop. I was talking to them about what I'd most want to talk about, what it's like to live in furthest work. I had the notes and sometimes spoke from them but sometimes winged it. Talked about writing Perception without representation, "I was writing it my way. I knew they wouldn't like it but I was saying what I knew. I didn't care who loved me, I didn't care who I loved." I said I'd thought of that state as a dragon. Then I talked about love woman and work woman. "I fell in love, and I fell hard, to the point of confusion." Having to switch state between love woman and work woman.   I had a paragraph that said "In this MA program I see women scared to know what they know, scared to open the can of worms, scared to challenge authority, scared to know authority isn't looking after their interests, scared to say This is what I see, this is what I know, scared to have negative thoughts, guilty about negative thoughts, scared to write critical papers because they're scared of negative thoughts. Scared of anger. Scared to know the worst, scared of chaos and failure. Scared no one will love them if they show how large they are."   I said "How far into the room do you want your breath to go?"   Alright, what about it - it was straight out - not cautious. But a bit in trance? I don't remember seeing the audience.   San Diego August 2008 29 A vivid very early memory from sitting around the radio on a Sunday evening in summer. The memory is vivid because a song came on that hit me with a revelation, the revelation was that there could be a song that wasn't a church song, that was a love song and had things in it about the actual world. The song was When it's springtime in the Rockies. The version I heard would have been Gene Autry or Wilf Carter. Lyrics 1938 by Mary Hale Woolsey. - Freya on Messenger in town picking up another load. Sent photos. They're planted. Row has cut his hair. It will be harder than they know but they'll be safer. 31 Wonders of the Universe, 4-part series on Knowledge Network, BBC of course. Splendours planetary, telescopic and CGI with the most kissable of TV presenters. The first episode expires soon - August 4. Knowledge Network free and ad-less everywhere in Canada and elsewhere through VPN. Thrilling stuff I didn't know.     Luke said eagerly that he loved Brian Cox, which made me feel how much he is my real child. August 1 I couldn't sleep last night because I'd been listening to Joy Reid explaining Project 2025. Have been scrolling Youtube because I've run out of better things to watch and there's nothing to read but three months is too long to live in anxious suspense. I have to find other things to do. - August 16 Current showing in the Rhythmic Hypnosis program in London ON. 2 Is Janet's doc defense worrying? She played the game impeccably and got the highest level of pass. Nylons, a dress, padded shoulders, makeup, dyed and styled hair, a topic they're worried about, those institution-guys. The men all had little eyes. Even her man has little eyes.   Google search yesterday - 5 pages of results - a magazine page on the garden said Ellie Epp a passionate visionary. I'm listing the conformities of successful Janet because I'm wondering whether a passionate visionary is going to make it through her own defense.   - Is there a sense in which she didn't make it through? Did she let her bright brain be rebuilt to their purposes?   -   Tom sez AA people are like that. The memory of disrepute stays close so they dress from Sears-Roebuck. What does she think when I dress in my Docs and burgundy Ralph Lauren t-shirt, no makeup, and don't dye my hair I ask. She thinks, Ellie's a normie, he says.   Vancouver November 2001 3 It's going to be hot again today and more days. Last evening it didn't cool enough so I could open the house, which meant 83F all night, sore neck and head, bad sleep. I got up at 3:30 when it seemed there'd been as much night as there was going to be. Opened the door for Patch then could leave front and back doors open because outside air is down to 70F. 4 Nice sky, patchy flocks grey and pink. Sunday. These nights have been hard and I haven't been remembering dreams but I woke at 4:30 (good) having dreamed I was in La Glace walking early in a day to see how it had changed. Narrow winding streets that climbed and fell, little shops selling goods as if for tourists, a shop with earthenware pots and cabinets the same clay colour. Earlier I'd been going downstairs in a hotel and had met a man coming up who said that floor was for men. I think I said I knew and liked the hotel and had stayed there before. - "It is luck, all luck! You have the most amazing luck with cards. I should be sorry, was you in love with anyone." The pause lasted no more than a second before the door opened and the horses were reported alongside, but its effect hung about them for miles as they trotted through the cold drizzle along the London road. Something he often does, throws in an observation I've never seen named. He canters his narrative in brisk usual ways but then plants something out of as if another register. I'm not sure how to say this. That kind of silence and then the way its effect goes on like a vacuity under whatever efforts come next. Rich alacrity, when he's writing scenes his brain offers an unusual amount of tangential observation. He has taken note phenomenologically, which most don't. Those observations make his people unusually real. "There are so many ideas." Steven said. I've noticed that in some of the posted stories, notions coming from three or four different discourses are assembled as they came. I often include some bit because it's an observation I haven't seen named, a teaching impulse, here's something you may have experienced but not brought to mind. I've gathered so many little things along the way that I want other people to have too. 5 Mike on a bus. When we got off I was holding the dog. Could I let it go and it would find its way home? Probably not so I'd have to find Mike's place somewhere north of Hastings. Nothing was looking familiar. Then I was in the area east of my old place on Pender (in actuality across the tracks) trying to find a way through deep solid blocks of Chinese immigrant housing with no way through to the lower street. Finally I chanced a long very narrow stairway down, so narrow my shoulders were brushing chalky white-washed walls either side. A woman near the far end said she'd let me through. I told her where I lived and that I'd designed the garden. We said we were pleased to meet. - Earlier there'd been travel to a big city. I found I'd forgotten my i.d. Woke to thinking Strathcona was the last time I was part of a community. Why I'd want to be back there. 5am. Sky open and tinted in the lovely Maxwell Parrish way. It isn't going to be as hot today. Is the worst over for the summer? With no fires nearby? I've checked weather and fire map first thing every morning and through the day and last thing at night. Seem to not be sick anymore and have slept better last couple of nights. But still diarrhea. dia through + rhein to flow - There was Margo looking fatter on the couch across the room. I wanted to ignore her. I'd jumped up and given her my seat so I could move to a chair closer to the door. Later on Katt was saying Ellie do you want to trade with me so you can come and talk to Margo and I was shaking my head no. I'd been talking to Lise who was standing behind the couch. Lise said Don't you want to talk to Margo. I said, I'm mad at her. Lise looked across the room at Margo and announced, Ellie is mad at Margo. Margo, Are you mad at me now? "For this moment I am." Then there was Margo across the room looking at me with intent and I was caught on my side trying not to look at her, which felt foolish but when I gave up and did look at her she was smiling complacently like Ms Guru. Should we talk about it? she said. "No. We did that already." Then I gathered up the Sunday Times I'd stacked under my chair and sneaked out.   Doubted writing down this story, it didn't seem worth telling, but there are a couple of things about it. I don't forgive mothers who drop me. On the other hand isn't it (too) childish to sulk in this way. But is it sulking exactly. It's minding but recognizing - she did well by me at first but she didn't finish well. On her side, I think when she was realizing she was done here she let herself get less professionally benevolent. She let herself dislike me for various things she'd had stored up. Then she used the Francis-Emilee debacle to opt for Indian religion and thump me. That disgusts me. Francis complaining about me in fac evenings in the dorm and saying Emilee's gracious apology proves he was right disgusts me. Lise agreeing with me in private but not in public disgusts me too.   But Janet. I've liked Janet. Janet's a creased little biddy of broad adventure with a voice that sounds real.   Plainfield VT August 2009 I like "creased little biddy of broad adventure". I like the way the writer describes being in the wrong in a right way. I like the "(too) childish" that suggests there's nothing wrong with being childish if that's what you are. I like what I've made of myself. - The garden is such a mess, sow thistle everywhere smudging shapes and apricot or plum suckers or whatever they are aggressive unkillable bushes where I didn't put them. 6 Deep in a vegetable row weeding. A sound - it's nearby - sniffing? Snuffling? Lift my head above tall filipendula to look. Dog! Nice dog, calm dog. Not a small dog. Has a collar. Nibbling something? Velvety grey-brown, kind of a square head, Labradorish? - But Patch, where's Patch? There: up on the porch. Next to the open door, lying comfortably on her paws. Our eyes meet. Hers say yes she's seen him. For now she's staying where she is. 7 I inset it to say it's not journal though I wrote it here. It's composed, has a composed sound, and is now posted. Story of half a minute. Does it take the same time to read? Last night I read most of the Patch and Mouse posted file. I was wondering whether to compile it - for what purpose could I - but what I noticed was that it's the same voice through all. Light loving interest. Should I say minor. - Zoe Schlanger 2024 The light eaters: how the unseen world of plant intelligence offers a new understanding of life on earth Being about: ways plants can be about, and how to talk about them. I laid out a foundation. 'plant sensing' 'plant behaviour' 'plant intelligence' adaptive radiation - "when a new seed took root in its new soil the plant would evolve into a completely new species, or more often several new species, each trying out a different lifestyle" "scrupulously and flamboyantly specific" 8 Finished weeding the short vegetable beds, saying so because distressed every day seeing them a mess. 9 At 5 this Sunday morning I was outside in the dark front yard. Heard light footsteps, two people walking west in the middle of the street. They came past, an Indio Mexican couple, very small, he slender and white haired. We looked at each other.   Borrego Springs September 2013 People liked nice dog, calm dog.doc but not sunday 5am.doc. What was it I didn't convey properly. The supernatural smallness of the pair, the lightness of their footsteps in the dark, their being Indio in a town of large old whites. Their walking west in the middle of the street - where would they be going at 5 in the morning? When we looked at each other it was for me like an encounter with ancestral people or ghosts or brujos, the visionary people I'd see when I slept in the hills, and this happening at a time when earth is dark and sky's colour is deeply stained with black. - People would have to have seen Mexican Indios, how small they are, how that smallness makes them seem to be of another time. - Clipped all the renegade shrub growth. Picked some fat shiny black currants. 10 Started weeding the path bed. Three fires nearby, west, southwest, south. I can't find my green bag - it's odd - I remember moving my cash out of it and then didn't I put it somewhere, but there are so few places it could be and it's in none of them. I should making organizing stuff what I do tomorrow and next week. - Spur Meadow, is it? Near Corrall Canyon. Am on a flat widening of the road. There's a stream, damp ground. The oak meadow is a bit lower down and there's a rutted mudhole between me and it. It's cold but I'm going to stay the night. I hope the down bag on top of the flannel sleeping bag will take care of it. Put a hot water bottle into the bed a couple of hours ago.   -   I woke to a lot of light flashing onto the ceiling of the jeep, light from more than one direction. Sat up still waking and there was a man shining a big flashlight into the side window I had open 4" for air. Just one of you? he says. Young nice American voice. There's another light being shone into the hatch window. Are you the ranger? I say. No, ma'am, border patrol.   Two sets of headlights on the far side of the mudhole, roof lamps, a lot of light.   They go back to their vehicles, seem to be checking the edges of the stream, looking for footprints I think. Then one after the other they surge through the mudhole and pass, identical Wranglers with hardtops. After a while they return from the other direction.   Then I'm nearly falling asleep but I 'see' four Mexicans standing on the road, men and women in a sort of lit darkness as if I have night vision. It startles me awake.   San Diego County April 2005 Jim Mann, Don and Cheryl. It scared my girl readers? 11 Today I'm nailing down the part they'll have glided past. I've wanted to find someone I can ask about what used to happen in California, not often and only when I was camping in the wilds by myself. As I was fading into sleep I'd very briefly and without any sort of inner language 'see' a native person or persons, a kind of seeing always with the same visual quality like black velvet painting, bright edges against dark.   Here are some instances from journal records.   - The first time sleeping by a stream in the Sweetwater Mountains. "It's as if logistic care was holding my thoughts so they didn't soften. There was a moment though when they did and I saw a man facing me at a distance - maybe Mexican, not of this time I think."   - Sleeping in the jeep in chaparral country near the border, "I'm nearly falling asleep but I see four Mexicans standing on the road, men and women in a sort of lit darkness as if I have night vision."   - Another night sleeping in the jeep near Warner Springs: "On the ridge at night boxed into my slightly too short cozy bed I saw a Mexican Indio man in the brown uniform of a second world war soldier walking past, a serious young man."   - Again: "Last night I also 'saw' a man walking toward the oak flats holding a little boy's hand."   Once after driving all day - this in northern California I think - I saw just a face looking at me. It seemed as if it might have had something to do with a raised crossroads I'd passed earlier in the many miles.   Are there traces of people left in landscapes, is that possible?   Letter March 2018 Some of Le Guin's Always coming home people see in what might be this way, people passing through the Valley in or from an earlier time. Does it mean she saw this way? What else do I know. They have always been Mexican/Indio people, which I suppose the Valley people would be too. "Raised crossroad" - ? Meaning intersection in a heightened state? I've been remembering the reiki dentist. I went to Tijuana with shooting pains to the top of my head. Dr Felix was away but his young partner was there on his own. When I walked in he came out of the washroom looking startled, "Que pasa?" "I have an appointment."   I was in the chair and he was getting something and he said from across the room, "Do you meditate?" "Why do you ask?" He was reluctant to say, or not sure what he meant. "There's something." I encouraged. He wondered whether I have healing powers. I said people say I'm calm and that they can feel something from my hands. Then he said he's at the third level of reiki.   When he'd levered up my molar he said he could stop bleeding with his hand. I thought he meant by pressing gauze on the cavity, but he put one hand on the left side of my jaw and the other 5" from the right side of my face where the molar had been. I could feel heat radiating into whatever wasn't numbed. A nice heat, yellow and sunny.   I liked his name, Guillermo Tello de Meneses Leal.   April 2006 - A brain is only one way to build a network. 12 plant volatiles Thérèse Bugnet reblooming. It's a simple rose, not like my English-aristocrat David Austins, but its scent reminds me of the wild roses that bloomed in ditches and woodland where I grew up. Their bushes were quite spindly and never tall but their perfume was intense. I now find that our Alberta wild rose was in fact one of Thérèse Bugnet's parents. A French emigrant living in a town near Edmonton developed it - assembled it? - about 1945 by crossing a Russian double-flowering wild rose with the single-flowering r.acicularis: "Many years ago I began using the pollen of a local native rose upon r. rugosa kamtchatica."   About the scent: standing in the grass on our farmyard one spring there was a small wooden room that in winter would be placed on sleigh runners to protect passengers from the cold. Its door opened from the back and there was a built-in bench along one side. I was using it as a playhouse - this would have been before I went to school and before my sibs were old enough to play with - and one day had collected a lot of wild roses to decorate it. Here one of the moments that last, standing in that little room now filled, filled, with the scent of roses. Pleased to have told another of the early moments that now seem to tell me I was what I am from the beginning. When it's Springtime in the Rockies. Have there been others. - Today Sue's haunting portrait of a young seal she knows - a seal she knows meaning one-to-one over time. I was afraid she'd mind that I'd posted it. When she wasn't my eyes sparked. 15 I love this. Barefoot in their living room, as if they do it whenever they like. She looks like a dancer and he looks like a construction worker, which makes his on-the-beat looseness in that comfy big body so sexy. Then I said kind of a Harris-Walz feel, which sums up what I haven't been mentioning except to Greg these past three weeks, a surge in the world - as it feels - the right kind of woman, the kind Hilary wasn't, at the top of the ticket - that clicking understatement - campaigning with a man's man who doesn't need to compete with her, showing how it can be done. For sure we love you now that you can dance. She's feminine despite her pantsuits - pant suits with high heels - her voice is charming, interesting, has a flange - she's beautiful at 60, which means she's intact - she's comfortable in clarity, "I'm a prosecutor" she says. She jumped out of her gate. The young liked her. Then she picked her running mate and she picked her mate, someone she can govern with, but more than that someone woman-fearing men can be consoled by, the kind of man who knows how to fix things, who has looked after men as teacher, coach, officer, union man. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose. They're an image of gendered rightness as it needs to happen now: she's fearlessly in the clear and he's a grown up in relation to that, he's been responsible in his sphere and doesn't need to be her boss. Let's ride -. Together they show up the retrogressive losers whose pull is shared resentment. There is another way. 16 Runaway b.p. despite high dose ramipril, do I have to give up political news and Youtube's ads on the iPad. What can I do instead. - Do I know how writing honorably registers perception as interaction. Is the participation of my own structure just inherent? It is inherent but is that enough? When at this moment I look at the small crabapple tree across the road I see colors like the shining dress I wore to give the valedictorian address when I was eighteen, orange and gold, wonderful, gripping. Behind it birds swoop into the taller silver tree. There a participation I hadn't known until I asked.   Since 1981 I've said there are three actors in perceiving: thing, medium, perceiver's structure. Take the thing as itself, and also as mediated, and also as taken in by a particular perceiving body. Theoretically, take account of all three. In perceiving, body already does. Has to. With limits. What it amounts to in relation to the ethics of writing is that the quality of the writer's whole structure matters. Make it as good as you can and then trust it. I wasn't wrong then to try to learn something; I could see I shouldn't trust myself yet.   October 2016 Yesterday no one liked the lovely Kabir. Today no one will understand this one and I don't care. 19 Sick for a couple of days, out of breath carrying groceries tonight. See b.p. sheet. 20 Last night was dark when the class stopped at eight. Nights are cold. The hollyhocks are knobs on stems. Will tomatoes ripen? Maybe not. 22 Thursday evening. I picked black currants and weeded a row before Alex got here, then he cut down hollyhock stalks, then we together bagged the ugly heap, then he raked up all the debris and arranged the buckets, then I gave him yellow tomatoes, green beans, apples and yellow roses and he dug himself potatoes. He exclaims with every potato he finds. Then he went home and had a shower and I had a deep bath and drank 2 deep glasses of lemonade. 24 Slashing rain yesterday afternoon, wonderful. It's wet this morning too, at 4am open the door onto shining black. O'Keeffe in the 1968 Life photos must be 79 - b.1887, d.1986, photos 1966 John Loengard. Found that because I thought to post the photo of Maggie, which took me to December 1975, the collages. 25 My journal for the months with Maggie is so wrong I can't stand to read it but the photo is clear and true.   What's clear and true about it. Her presence - her mouth bare and young, not hiding. The gleam of reflection on her glasses that shows her enthrallment by me. Sam instantly. 26 Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions came out in 1962. Did I read it in 1963, first year at Queen's? Read it because a young prof I've forgotten - was it a psych prof? - gave it to us in some kind of maybe unauthorized copies. The other book with the same kind of hit was Hebb's The organization of behaviour (1949), which was on the assigned book list for Psych 100 in first year. The end of term exam was going to be on Monday and I realized the day before that I hadn't read it and would have to cram. I spent the whole Sunday in a study room somewhere high up in Douglas Library reading it enthralled. I'm naming these two books because they were the gift of the kind of profs there are in a really good university, who handed them to us without explanation to supplement what they knew was a standard curriculum. Cutting-edge. The other thing I'm thinking is that I was the only one in my friend group doing any kind of science. Olivia was English, the others were politics and philosophy; and even now no one I know will have read either of those books. Later there was Perls 1951 Gestalt Psychology and Corner's 1964 The life of plants.   Merritt August 2024 Don has read Hebb! Wonder and gratitude he said. 28 When I was two and a half my parents still had a big dog called Bingo. I don't remember Bingo but here I am holding onto his scruff.   Our little house stood on a ridge that gave us a long view across a lake to a mirroring ridge two miles away. Our short lane climbed north from the ungraded dirt road we took to town. Across this road was a strip of fenced grass where my dad kept cattle, and beyond the grass was the deep rim of willow brush that ringed the lake. Cattle going to water had made paths under the willows but it wasn't possible to follow these paths all the way to the lake: they ended in mud worked into a mess of deep hoof prints.   One morning my mom had been busy with something and then couldn't find me. Didn't know what to do, my dad was away somewhere, should she run the mile up the road to get his father to help her search. She thought of Bingo, said to him Find Ellie. He ran down the lane and across the road into the willow brush. She was beginning to follow, saw me emerging with him.   When she told the story she said I must have gone looking for my dad. That was her sort of fairy tale. I'd guess I went looking for the lake. In later years I'd often dream that zone of shining water ringed by impenetrable brush. It had mythic valence I began to understand.   La Glace Alberta sometime in 1947 Began to write it at bedtime last night and cleaned it up this morning. What I like in the photo is the way the little scrap is being witty, holding the dog's hand the way her mom is holding hers. Much more could be said about what 'mythic valence' means but better for the moment to leave it as suggestion. 'Fairy tale' prepares it. 29 La Glace people despite 'mythic valence' say they like it - anything about La Glace: the Mann boys, Bill McKeeman, a woman I don't know. Last evening Alejandro in his good hat turned sideways in the garden talking on his phone. I wanted the photo but knew there wouldn't be time to get the camera. So beautiful all up and down, straight, slight and strong. The night I met my class for the first time I startled when he came in late, instantly shy, I hadn't expected beauty, distinction. A Mexico City man running a market stall with his wife, late marriage, fifteen year old step-daughter, 8 year old son, a wife he says is sweet, he doing what Mexicans do, working hard, sending money. Bracero life but now with constant presence on the phone. With me grateful, "You garden, you house, you person, you fruits, potatoes, you flowers, you bread"; concerned, "Anytime". - Still working on the autumn of 1975. Have 5 headings: collages, crisis, art, reading, Maggie. I'm looking at the time's extreme struggle thinking of why Louie didn't like the collages, didn't understand them, hadn't had that struggle about female authority in art. She cut it short by taking on her father's authority as minister and mother's authority as minister's wife, so she has expertise rather than vision. She coasted on me in some ways. And Jam? Went into trivia because her authority was the authority of an imaginary man. Another thing is that I went into the CTR time already in crisis. Individuation began but needed a further move I got to much later, with Tom. - Where is the photo of Luke and Tara at the airport? Not in the DR box. Realizing just now that I'll have to burn my journals. Row will not be able to store them. Their digital form will have to stand for all. Bonfire where? Keep some photos. Or just put them in the bin? - I still don't know where to be. Yesterday I was so weak I didn't know how I could go on living unassisted. Up north would be difficult but in some ways right. Ashcroft, I shd find out whether possible. On good days I say, I love this house, there wasn't a fire this year, stay at least another summer. - Today reiki dentist.doc just to say such things happen. It's often that. 30 Stark black 5am, look crescent moon in the middle pane. I've posted earned my fantasy by faithfulness in reality.doc, a naked declaration and to whom. Men knocked back because they didn't know they can't imagine what it is that's wanted, women - a few? - feeling wow if it could be like that.   When I go into the DM story noticing how it assembles an ideal lover from moments with real lovers and notes made. There's some myth hovering, is it in the Mabinogian, the woman made of flowers?   -   When I couldn't fall asleep last night I was looking for something to imagine. I was groping for what he could be that is wide open in sex and yet manly-mature. I wanted to imagine two people for whom sex could be the underlying fabric of all. Was thinking DM has a composer's sense of shaped events, skills of delay and improvisation. They'd find themselves in spaces like Niblock's or Manning's music, able to know they were there together among dark masses moving slowly, textures overlaid, gestures like white flares. Then in their daily life they'd be peaceful and quiet together because they'd been there and could be again. He'd be at his desk bringing it into music.   It's funny I hadn't realized what I'm working on about sound is also about sex.   I noticed something new about their first night on the airplane together. They talk through the night. As they talk their fields are fusing so extraordinarily that after a while they stop talking and close their eyes. Daylight increases at the window. They fall asleep. Wake when the plane begins to descend. She smiles at him. He says You'll need the next days to get ready for your show. I'll come but I won't stay after. Will you have an early breakfast with me next morning? - She's impressed that he's kind about what a show is like. She asks where and what time.   When they meet for breakfast he talks about her show in detail. Then he asks will she come to Scotland with him for a couple of days, he'd like to show her where he's from. Today? she asks. The Blackbird Inn that night. It's so intense she's knocked sideways. He is too but next day when they sit in his granddad's churchyard together his honesty in it steadies her.   When they're back in London they have another two weeks before she has to go home. They'll do London things together; for now they'll ballast it a bit by getting to know each in an ordinary way.   So I have this wish for something sexually absolute but what I got instead was twists and quirks of often-bad sex and real life with Tom. I earned my fantasy by faithfulness in reality.   Merritt June 2021 - Now I don't want to follow the news because I'm afraid something will happen to spoil the hope that's come. 31 I got knocked yesterday and this morning don't want to post anything. Wanted someone to like what I posted yesterday and there was Sam instantly but not in a way that liked what I like in it. Then flat indifference for the rest of the day. - In June I think of the light there'd be in our room when we were sent to bed at eight. Judy and I slept in an old iron bedstead, she next to the wall and I next to the room's only window. Outside the window was the aspen bluff that in winter sheltered the house from west winds. In summer that window's lower pane would be raised enough to hold a mosquito screen.   What was it about the light. It was a golden light that had come flat through aspen trunks from a long horizon. It filled the room. I didn't understand then why it was rare. It needed how far north we were, so that in June the sun sets in the far northwest and not till late. It needed the mile of open land behind the bluff, so light could come horizonal through the trees. It needed the way light colour-shifts toward yellow as the sun sinks. It needed the miles we had of country quiet, so we never had curtains.   Judy was next to me but on my dark side so I was as if alone. Mild live air through an open window. The sharp moving whine of mosquitoes at the screen. The dipping springs of that bashed old bed. Being away from our parents with the door closed. There was more. After the dark winters, going to bed in the dark in a cold room, it was as if consciousness itself. It was being lit, me, myself, intensely lit: something completely private, a completely unmentioned and uncelebrated thing.   Merritt June 2024 Do I have it. I'll have to wait to know. It's about solstice before I knew there was that. It understands that I am it though not that I can't see it without being it, being about.   part 6 time remaining volume 13: 2024 january-december work & days: a lifetime journal project