September 3 2024
- In a dream I remember another dream, one I've
remembered in other dreams too. It is the dream that I'm in my home place
one autumn many years after I've left it and am seeing the leaves on the
pasture trees and across the road - the red of the leaves in the beautiful
light. Red leaves and blue sky. It's as far into beauty as I can go. The
dream when I remember it in other dreams is a touchstone.
-
- Vancouver June 1995
I've remembered this dream without remembering when I dreamed it, have
wanted to find it again and just now noticed I'd posted it before. So what
else was happening then. - Heat, garden, Louie, David, end of Ken, working
on Dennett, body work. Full time. I was 50.
Looking up at such a fine sky, 6am, pale yellow at the horizon fading
up to blue so pale it's almost white, floating grey shreds of cloud, this
above the black two, jagged spruce and bitty plane.
4
Do I need to catalogue how hard it's getting to be alive. Left knee,
bone-on-bone, can hardly lift a weight so I have to drag myself up the back
steps by the rail and that with pain; R hip feels like it's falling out
of the socket, have to be careful now when I bend forward; therefore legs
useless for instance for getting up out of a chair; a struggle getting into
and out of the tub; L shoulder can't raise my arm, hurts when I try; both
shoulders overuse pain because they have to do the work of my legs even
when I'm rising from the toilet; unsteadiness in general; use the stick
in the garden because if I walk on even slightly uneven ground I fall; these
days prostrate about a day in two with muscle pain all over; wake after
3 or 4 hours sleep soaked and chilled - really soaked; often especially
early in the day too energyless to cook so eat at random; shitting is work
I dread because there's so much toilet paper needed; teeth ugly; teeth deteriorating
fast because of dry mouth at night; lately sore gums and mouth was it because
of trying a different toothpaste; L hand fingers go numb when I type or
hold the iPad; losing common words often; when I watch TV I miss dialogue,
hear it but don't make it out; lack of fight, thinking weakly about how
to die; b.p. has gone higher even with ramipril; hair damaged even by very
little sun; couple of dubious moles and what look like precancerous spots
on my R forearm; little patience with middling books; whole days given away
to internet junk because I haven't energy for better and want to evade pain;
can rarely work in the garden and then only from a chair; am certain none
of this can improve and all of it will get worse. Feel all beautiful and
intelligent things will be ruined by climate change, all possibility of
my work being used.
What is still alright. My eyes! I see fine. I read without glasses. Have
even recently written alright pieces to post. Don't seem to be putting on
water weight when I eat carbs anymore. Can go to the journal's records of
better times.
-
Suppertime I look into the garden and see an antlered deer under the
Whitney eating
fallen apples.
5
- When I went to look at David he said did I want to go to Westminster,
and there I saw an old woman, eighty-two, so pretty, hair still brown,
standing shy behind a chair. "I'm not ready" she was saying.
"How would you be if you were ready?" "I'd have something
on my legs, they're awful".
-
- They were awful too, lumpy grey and purple logs. "Sit down"
she kept saying. "I don't want to" I kept saying, "I want
to stand up and snoop around". A house with Tlinglit baskets upstairs
on a bookcase, a ten-thousand-year-old mortar someone of their friends
dug up in a garden near Princeton, Aunt Flossie's painting of one of Grandpa's
mills on the Island, dining room table with a wheel of sorted activist
documents.
-
- Upstairs I met a man I didn't like, who sat reading in a sunroom. "Sit
down" he said". "No I just came to see the view" I
said. "I'll move" he said with David's tone. "No, Dad"
said David. I escaped to look at David's things, not stopping to feel what
it was I didn't like about him. But I've thought it now; I felt immediately
a coldness in his eye, as if he were judging me as a woman, as if he can
judge woman-flesh and had disqualified me as I came up the stairs.
-
- David I'll tell in a minute, but his things: I came into the room and
saw nothing, dusty piles and bits. Then began to see. A Mission rocking
chair, his grandfather's, with leather seat powdery and cedar-orange. In
the closet a small Japanese tub, barrel-staved and bound with cord. A salt-glazed
whiskey jar, a turquoise Old California plate (that's a trade name). On
a bureau top, little things: a wonderful rock, a sort of accretion in white
stone he says falls out of the cliffs on Mayne, this one a tiny sculpture,
Matisse and Henry Moore. Then some tiny mechanism with a shutter that clicks.
-
- The way David in David's room didn't particularly need to show me anything.
But as if these objects are also his speech. I keep thinking he's inarticulate
but he is less than that - is my guess - empty - his treasures are his
journal of moments where his feeling moved out and claimed something -
the way my journal is.
-
- Okay, how David looks: I marveled out loud, drank retsina at lunch
and said everything I thought. There he is. Not bad. Not a bad chin. A
wide lopsided grin. A long face - "Do you still want to photograph
me?" he asks. "No not so much." He could be gay but not
really that either. "What's surprising with a face like that is that
you aren't more of a drinker." He is a type, seeing him in his so
well-established family made me see the type he is. He'd have been wayward
in the ways he is - "No, you aren't just abuse-wreckedness, you would
have been weird anyway." A weak scion as families go - degenerate
- aesthetical. It's that that makes him gawp at me. "Your beauty"
he says. I was happy in his parents' house feeling that I and the Mission
rocker were being admired in the same sense. I was feeling, is this what
it takes, I'd be honoured in families old enough to know what's good?
-
- I gawped at him too, I was, I am, fascinated by the way he's not what
I want but something else. The way, when we were in the woods on Capitol
Hill lying on the scratchy old leaves he kissed my neck in five or six
places and I was feeling, a man's mouth on me is so, so pleasing, even
though he doesn't mean it.
-
- "Two stones that are quite significant to me. I found them the
morning you came back from Van Dusen Gardens with Rob. I was by the table
and I looked down and saw one of them. Then later I saw the other one.
They are both perfectly round. The second one had what looked like an impression
of the first one in it. I was feeling what a strong impression you had
made on me."
-
- Coming after me into the garden yesterday, when he saw across the plots
from the east path, the fullness there, I heard him mutter Holy Christ.
-
- June-July 1995
My David stories always good. His permission.
-
Thursday. I was ready for Alex tonight but late aft voices outside, someone
called my name, Alex with Manuel to translate because what he had to say
was large. He's gone. I said I wanted a photo. We went into the garden.
I'd taken two - not enough time, they're not good - then handed the camera
to Manuel so I could hug Alex. When I brought the Nikon into the Powerbook
there were 5 photos because Manuel had taken 3. There I am facing Alex saying goodbye. In one photo
we both have our hands on our hearts. I look 80. Soft fold under the jaw.
I look like my mom. I look like Judie. I hadn't known I look like that.
I have Ed's nose and it looks good on me!
Perfectly beautiful Alex.
5
Sweet gift having come to its sudden end. I think of jobs he now won't
help me with. Rolling hoses, turning the compost, getting grass out of the
raspberries, cutting the grass under the sumac, digging the rest of the
potatoes, clearing under the greengage, cutting the sunflowers when they're
done (girasol), painting the coldframe's frame and putting it away, transplanting
the phlox, digging a hole for Lark Ascending, fall cleanup all over. Picking
grapes! Then I think of what I won't be able to give him. A squash. Jam.
Grape juice. I think of what I won't be able to show him.
Things I did show. Munstead Wood's scent. The squash vine that crept
east as far as the sidewalk and set its one square fruit where it could
see out. Potatoes found one by one shining in the dirt. The scent of phlox.
The little gravestone: he called out to Edgar that there was a gatito. He
took photos of the tulips and the sunflowers and the blooming apple tree
to show his wife. The time he saw me fall. He worried when he thought it
might be too hot in the house. He said he'd help with snow, said call him
anytime. He was a soul. He could be interested in a garden, he could be
interested in a lively life coming to its end. I love that there's a photo
of us real together as we were. His beautiful open chest.
-
- Patch was urgent to go out. I opened the door and left it open, watched
her hurry up the path. Not much later cats' voices in the street. I went
to look. It wasn't a sound of fighting but of singing, two voices, really
singing. There were bushes in the way but I could just make out two sets
of black cat's legs facing each other on the sidewalk, one of them Patch,
the other maybe the longer-legged cat I sometimes see crossing the street.
A lovely sound. But what could it be about. Not courtship, because Patch
can't be in heat. Friendship? I like to think.
-
- Merritt September 2024
-
My little readership refuses to like any writing they can feel is critical
of other people, even when for me the interest inherent in the writing makes
'bad' things I say about people part of liking them or at least needing
to understand them. (For instance they don't like the David piece or the
Judith Stapleton piece.) This makes them seem too simple about what makes
writing good. Mostly I guess they aren't interested in writing as such.
On the other hand today's photo of saying goodbye to Alejandro has people
stacking up all day, people I don't expect - men, including Joost and Gianfranco
- and even people I don't know. I'd said "And here's what it's like
to look 80. I didn't know!" Were they being nice? Rachel did what pretty
women do, assumed I needed to be consoled for losing my looks and tried
to do that by lying, "I just see two beautiful friends". I erased
it. No, honey, I don't put up with that. Plus I quite like how I look in
that photo. I've sent it to Greg and Luke.
8
The photo has made me imagine myself differently. The difference is the
look on my face and the way I carry my head. In mirrors I don't see myself
being. In the photo I'm looking at someone I love and really feeling my
loss of him. The photo also tells me what I need to do to look alright at
eighty - backlit messy silver hair and colour in my face.
9
Recent video of Kenneth talking about bee-keeping - thin-faced old man
"has about 70 hives located on six different properties dispersed around
the towns of Nelson and Salmo".
-
- Ken Burns The Civil War last night in the hotel. Grain of
old photos, silent pans. Touches of sound - rattle of wagon wheels fading
away, brief voices in their many accents. Ashokan Farewell a waltz sad
at the purest possible pitch. We watched it on the bed, I with my forearms
over her shoulders, hands on her chest.
-
- September 1992 York Hotel Grande Prairie AB
-
Mad letter from Mafalda. She doesn't remember Luke being in Estoril and
demanded proof. What? Why wouldn't she take my word for it and assume she
had other things on her mind, which she did. I suppose something else is
at stake? Is she worried about losing it? She felt we started out even and
doesn't like to think I've run ahead? - Are people sometimes jealous of
the journal, why didn't I do that?
10
[In June I take 18-month-old Luke on the train to Portugal where Mafalda
is living in her family's summerhouse by the sea waiting to have her baby.] [Luke
in the Estoril garden]
- Came to the station in a taxi, Luke falling asleep, the driver taking
that familiar route to Victoria Station; arrived to find the boat train
cancelled, general strike in France, but was informed we could sleep in
the train on track 2.
-
- Found a compartment and put Luke to bed on the floor, not easy because
he was happy to peer out under the curtain and find trains banging rattling
flashing as they came and went on the track alongside. I left him with
a bottle and sat on the stoop feeling nicely at home, watching passengers
coming past to the commuter train.
-
- Lay down eventually, Luke still babbling. An official came along and
took out the light bulbs for me, then I went down a few compartments and
took them out for a sweet-looking French woman. Lay wrapped around my sleeping
bag in a nice private space, the journey really begun. Slept through the
night, Luke covered with my leather jacket, until someone burst in early
and I had to bundle everything onto the platform, Luke scooped up and his
bottle stuck quickly into his mouth.
-
- The 5 pence Ladies where two good souls looked after my packsack, the
teddy bear tied to it, and the laundry bag full of disposable nappies while
we went and had a disturbed breakfast, Luke struggling to get out of his
chair.
-
- Ten o'clock train, a compartment with Luke and me next to the window.
Oh countryside - sun, daisies, a few poppies, buttercups, hops climbing
their strings, oast houses, sheep, a herd of fat brown cows, a white horse
deep in a meadow far below and away, Luke dancing to the wheels' clatter,
singing ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, struggling to climb up the window, running from
door to window and back, digging in Rita's bag for presents, his smiling
dirty prettiest.
-
- The sea! Bands of blue and grey sea, sun and clouds, all sparkling.
In the ferry Luke sleeping on the floor below the window where the sea
sparkled empty to all distance. His first encounter with a seagull big
as a chicken staring down from the railing. He - and I - found and ate
a crumbled piece of fruitcake left on the rail for gulls - I fed him an
egg sandwich on the run - he had a lemonade in his bottle that spit at
the back of his throat.
-
- At Calais pressed into a three-carriage commuter train, six people's
feet, and their luggage, and Luke trying to climb up the windows, kicking
the virginal Englishwoman's knees. The young French girl with her blazing
private eyes looking at his nursery rhyme book with him, and when we had
to change at an obscure station just past Amiens, helping me with the laundry
bag when it began to pour down rain. Everyone crowding down the quai into
the subway tunnel, and as we stood and waited to get out, feeling like
war victims in a bomb shelter, a comical shout from someone trying to get
in: "Ahley veet seel voo play, il ploo duhhorz" and a plump raincoated
loveable American came down with three wet suitcases.
-
- A much longer train, a compartment with a chic meticulous student,
frowning at Luke and underlining things in his meticulous notes. Wonderful
gold-orange tiled roofs and a gold-orange post-rain light that I was irritated
not to have peace for - Luke so pesty I gave him a vindictive secret pinch
- ruins and farms, velvety grain fields, seed rows of new plants or furrows
of brown soil.
-
- Paris. Luke in the pushchair, the laundry bag hung over his handlebars,
blue quilt in a string bag hung from one of the handlebars too, my Greek
bag full of bottles, empty and for water and for evaporated milk, squashed
hard-boiled eggs, to the Douane to get my packsack - the baggage from Calais
hasn't come - where is it? - in Calais, there's a strike you know - quel
malheur - "I can't help it, if I had it I'd give it to you".
A Hotesse de Paris calls a convent and the Armee de Salut to see if they'll
shelter me; they won't.
-
- Now Luke's asleep on the floor in a little annex off the second class
waiting room, Spaniards, Blacks, Americans sit waiting for trains - I wish
I had my sleeping bag and some of those nuts and dried apricots in my bag.
-
- A kind of stubborn pleasure in being so far out on a limb. [I slept
on the floor next to Luke. When I woke the change purse with all my French
money, that I'd had under my pillow, was gone.]
-
- -
-
- Another waiting room [in Spain], big darkening foyer opening onto the
platform my train will leave from in another three hours. Luke's asleep
in his chair, bottle and blanket on his lap, his quilt pinned around him.
We're next to the door, I'm sitting cross-legged on the cold stone floor
with a dizzy sleepy swaying in my head. A bottle of cold water from the
Cantina, Spaniards sitting in little groups talking.
-
- -
-
- Portugal. The train stops at a border town. Opposite the station is
a street market, piles of oranges shining out of the shadow thrown by an
awning. A girl and her brother come from the market with a kilo of cherries
in a clear plastic bag; they hold the bag under a tap in the street, wash
the cherries and get onto the train.
-
- Another small girl comes and goes during the hour we're in the station.
She has on socks with holes - a dirty dress - is pretty and very alert;
when she goes up to someone to beg she wraps a shawl around her shoulders
and stands very straight. In between she throws the shawl onto a baggage
cart. On the opposite side of the train a path rises into the fields and
gardens. Women in black come down to the train with bundles. Hot bright
sun, a completely clear intensely blue sky.
-
- -
-
- The train leaves at last. Luke goes to sleep on the floor of the compartment
we have to ourselves. I stand in the corridor like everyone else, looking
at the wide dry landscape, high hilly country, a few dirt roads, small
fields scraped out of the rocks, small gardens with cabbages, beans and
potatoes. Big purple thistles, a few poppies, blue larkspur or something
like it, wild geraniums on long jointed stalks, roses growing freely over
peasants,' houses, crawling dangling profuse pink probably bougainvillea.
Sometimes forests of pine and eucalyptus. I open the windows for the scent.
The eucalyptus trees have long leaves like peach trees, some of them red,
some green, that make me think of parrots because the dangling individual
leaves are like feathers. I love these forests with their oily pine and
eucalyptus smell.
-
- June 1972, 52 Avenida Portugal, Estoril
From the record I pulled for Mafalda. I'll post it for the story of hard
travel with a small child and without money. I dishonorably imagine Don
reading it comparing my pluck with Olivia's helpless fuss: he picked the
wrong girl. I still need to say that!
Something about my London friends was that they didn't know I had it
in me. I left university behind in those years, was new in learning to be
an artist, a simple person. It was the right way to be to ground the artist
I was going to become but what I went on to do startles those people. The
university person and the simple artist were segregated until I could bring
them together in my fifties. I hadn't exactly seen that love woman had years
of life in her own groping form of work.
11
Such suspense about the Harris-Trump debate that I didn't watch it. This
morning reading Guardian and NYT comment. Her strategy was to bait him into
showing his madness and then naming it clearly. Will it make any difference.
Please.
12
- Wonderful teaching today, two sessions. I stood and played with them
around the story of the woman with a transporter copy. Boys in the back
row started talking. The quiet Chinese man talked. The girls in the front
row talked. They were starting to see how people were meaning different
things by a term like 'the same'. I was keeping it fast and digging always
for principle. We laid out the suggested criteria for identity and saw
how they handled my three invented cases. People stayed overtime.
-
- I liked best the opening up of the distrustful back row: the withheld
back row. The science fiction story was a friend to their loneliness. The
front row girls are already supported by my ease in authority. They step
right up. There was that very clear forward girl in 0.15. In 0.16 it was
the hesitant boy who looks like Ken Olin. Action, what I've been starved
for.
-
- Philosophy 100 SFU September 1999
Was going to say I liked posting something about the pleasure of teaching.
I was new to it then; in the first tutorials when I had to begin to speak
feeling as if I were jumping off a cliff, and then quickly finding the good
uses of authority, being in a position to be myself in a way to foster people,
make something of a class better than classes I'd known, using the best
of what I'd seen with for instance Ray Jennings. I found that being in control
I could love my students.
- I was going to say that and then there was an email from Matilda in
London wanting to interview me about my lifetime journal project. Mentions
half a dozen questions, says half an hour on zoom next month. (I said I
don't do zoom and could we begin on email.) She begins this way: "My
diary is the only writing in which I can be fully myself - and yet I would
rather die than show it to anyone." It wouldn't be the interview
I'd want because it's about her own fear of disclosure. I guess the most
useful thing I could do is call out the particulars of her/their fears.
13
10/30, power steering fluid.
-
Elwood showed up - took me to buy a battery and cleaned my posts - rolled
my hoses - pruned the grape - cleaned between the plum trees - is getting
grass out of the raspberries - 9-3, $200.
Hobbling in ankle pain for days, hadn't been in the garden since it rained,
what's this, the middle yellow rose whose name I forget, the spindly one
that has done nothing much all summer, has a burst of full-on gold/orange
blooms. I love the photo for its in-your-face here-I-am. [*photo]
It rained a couple of days ago and this is what David Austin's (1993)
Charlotte came up with after a summer of nothing much. Zone 4, own root,
"pleasant tea fragrance" (true). With phlox.
The three of them in the front, that have had almost nothing all summer,
suddenly have buds too. Is it the rain or do they schedule for mid-September.
14
When I pass the peaked cullet three Munstead Wood dark velvet in the
pink jar, have a sniff. On the kitchen counter an Alnwick in the little
round pot, Persian basil in was it once a ginger jar. On the plate rail
where I see it from bed three Charlottes with purple phlox. It's wealth.
15
I've jumped on the Matilda invitation and have written up a sheet though
I may never hear from her again.
Morning. Some hours with less pain.
16
- In Ottawa three nights ago I went to see The Fixer with Greg. When
we came home we sat downstairs with one light low behind us and I wanted
to seize Greg and bite him. Because of The Fixer, Alan Bates' blue eyed
shaggy haired face in the village, then the ghetto, then the prisons. Becoming
political, do I have to? Fiercely, "But what does it say about how
you should spend your life? What does it say about how I should spend my
life?" "It's to stay alive. Hardly anyone does. The guy in Take
One talking about how nearly everyone dies between the ages of twenty
and thirty."
-
- And about my camera, tears in my eyes because it was important to believe
that I can do something with it. "I can't take pictures if it isn't
out of love of the world. Like those pictures - the mother and child, the
green shirt man. The way they look at the camera, it's as if I love the
world and respect them." It was clear how I should live. I had three
points! "The first is that I have to be honest and only say what's
true. The second is that I have to work only out of love of the world,
and the two aren't necessarily compatible. And the third is that I have
to stay alive somehow and really look for alternatives but especially I
have to stay alive."
-
- When we went upstairs to bed I was full of the feeling that I can be
someone, not, like Richard, that I can do whatever I want, but that I can
do something well if I find what I want to be and don't lose myself somewhere,
by marrying or by not marrying, studying or not studying. Yeah. And at
the same time I wonder if I won't die before I can become anything; I scrutinize
my body for omens. And at this moment I realize that if I do actually die
this little patch takes on a prophetic importance. Well, I don't know;
I feel that I might, and I don't want to. At the same time the future is
so uncertain and my desires for it so far from the ceremony of most people's
lives, that I haven't any clear sense of missing or losing something, only
of being certain that I'm unfinished and my life hasn't assumed or found
a shape.
-
- If I wanted an image of the starting point, my beginning self, it would
be the ten year old I was one night at the Sexsmith Bible Institute when
I went out early to the car. I remember the wooden sidewalk, the collar
of a winter coat, I remember smiling at a strange boy I passed and continuing
to smile after he'd gone, and then passing Darlene Hamm whom I thought
pretty and whom I knew to be in the centre of approval, admiration, good
manners, self certainty, pretty clothes, a centre whose edges I seemed
to prowl, sullen, pretty only in the private moments no one knew how to
evoke, badly dressed in other people's clothes that didn't fit, usually
in shoes that my hobble had quickly deformed. When she passed I was struck,
evaporated, turned to the self I thought she saw and no longer the delighted
strong self I had believed the minute before. Not very different from now.
Something is different but I may not know what until I've passed it.
-
- Ottawa December 1968
What moment was that. I was 23, had graduated, was working, had hardly
any sense of what could be next. Last time in Ottawa with Greg who was about
to leave for England. I was about to be in Kingston General for three months
and after that London and five years that committed a beginning. My three
points are good and I've mostly followed them in work though then not in
the flailing-around about sex - I couldn't know what honesty was in sex.
I used it for money and travel and access, for instance Peter got me to
London and the Slade, Roy got me Luke and a lot of Europe, John Rowley Ireland
and Morocco (but Desser and Ian just idiocy). No honest sex till Tony.
17
I have to decide about Elwood. His touch in the garden bothers me horribly:
he's willing and needs the money but where he's weeded, every inch of beds
I've carefully not walked on for nine years is stamped-down naked earth.
I'll have to find mulch to try to repair it.
-
talking shops of socialism
Four-gated city published 1969 about when I got to London. I'd
read The golden notebook was it the year before. She was fifty,
had been in London twenty years. The parts I remember are the earliest,
when she's just come to England and is walking around London.
19
- Had fun today. All day in winter sun, what did I like most, buying
plants, assembling them, imagining them, putting down my credit card for
1300 pounds of bluestone. Having Leslie's mason, who made the beautiful
herringbone fireplace, saying "Ma'am" across the office, turning
and there he was, that good craftsman, and there I was too, buying stone.
The sensation of walking in a stone yard or plant yard, manly, is it? Entitled,
effective, something else - physical - moving and doing.
-
- San Diego December 2007
-
Found a greengage plum on the ground. Then another. Two: the whole crop.
Delicious.
Michael weeding the hollyhock patch - carefully - intelligently - not
stomping the ground. Available every Thursday.
20
- [Last week a note from a journalist wanting to interview me about my
Work & Days project.] "To me, my
diary is the only writing in which I can be fully myself - and yet I would
rather die than show it to anyone. When I researched my piece I learned
about your project about publishing all the diaries of your lifetime. What
motivates you to do this? What do the people you write about feel? Are
there things you would never publish and are there things you refrain from
writing in your diaries since you know the text will be published online
later? And how does it feel to have all your thoughts available for everyone
to see? I imagine it is quite heady."
- -
- When I was first transcribing, getting ready to post, I marveled to
notice how much of what I saw, felt, thought, would be unacceptable to
people I knew. But is losing the good opinion of people whose opinion was
based on not knowing me a real loss? In some ways it is, but isn't there
a chance that disclosure gains the good opinion of better people. And beyond
that, when we live in circumstances as accommodating as ours, isn't it
only responsible to out ourselves on behalf of women anywhere?
-
- Hiding is basically lying. From the beginning I've wanted a courageous
honest life not a shrinking hidden life. At first I hardly knew what bravery
and honesty were but I went on to learn them from Lessing, Woolf, Dorothy
Richardson, the foremothers who in their time risked much more than I do.
-
- What is it women are afraid to show: their sharp eye, their social
fears, their defeats, their crushes, their obsessions, what they actually
want in sex, what they think of their children, what they think of their
relatives, what they think of men in general, what they think of religion
or people with dogs. Their egotisms, their hatreds, their contempts: their
good and bad judgment. What we're afraid to show tells us what we're forbidden
to be; even moments when we're proud of ourselves, because bragging is
very forbidden. There are also the thoughts that aren't so much forbidden
as they are unwanted: thoughts we don't think anyone we know can be interested
in, thoughts that for instance show our intelligence or even our humour.
-
- My posted journals show all of these things. By the time I began to
post them I was 58, I'd had years with a good therapist and wasn't ashamed
of much, understood that anything I might be ashamed of is something others
also experience. And this too: I'm a second wave feminist: we name our
oppressions to be free of them. What I feel is not heady but secure. I'm
not hiding, even from my bosses, or my religious Aunt Lillian, or indifferent
lovers, or the friends I've had doubts about. They mostly don't want to
know but that is on them not me.
-
- What I do wince at when I post early journals is that the writing is
bad. My friends tell me they've burned their early journals because they
can't stand to see how silly and conventional they were. I kept mine because
they're a record of where a story began. The writing stayed bad for a long
time. As writing rather than documentation I could say they don't start
to be worth reading till sometime in my forties, and then sporadically.
They aren't posted to show brilliance, they're posted to show a life.
21
Equinox. Sunflowers and September roses. Cold nights, warm mid-day.
Looking over the months' posts, seeing there's more new writing than
there'd been.
24
cambia hotel 1976.doc. I've slashed the writing, which was clunky
and pretentious, but I do want to memorialize those old hotels so alive
with place and soulful lonely men.
25
In two days the plane tree has gone yellow.
26
Michael summer-pruned the Cox and weeded some. He's expensive and slow
but cheerful and careful and thorough and is likely to be around next summer
too.
I checked through my memory sticks, want to consolidate, now proofing
TR12 before I begin formatting TR13.
27
Woke at quarter to five and took a first step that didn't hurt!
28
Did things. Michael - McCallum - 7 hours of slow weeding $210, gave him
the 4 big old LaCie drives, turns out he began electro-acoustic at Concordia
and likes Eno.
Checked through stick drives and palm drives, backed up this computer,
began to back up the old Mac Pro drive and cleaned it up some.
Out of things to watch, out of patience with news and K and BritBox and
Gem and Youtube and nothing on Netflix worth signing up for.
29
Irish exit - yah, what I do.
October 1
Big cull of books. First cull.
2
Battery not alternator. Big good Corey backyard mechanic came twice,
tried to charge my battery, bought me another at Lordco, tested the alternator,
asked almost nothing for all that running around. After I'd paid him so
elated I drove to UK Spice and brought home chicken tikka masala. I wanted
a meal.
3
- From London the Oxford train takes a little over an hour, that hour
always a daydream. I bring a book and sit with it on my lap unlooked-at
as I glimmer out the window. On Sunday I took the 4pm - there's one every
hour - in a state of wild-peaceful happiness that transformed everything
I saw.
-
- There'd been a frost in the morning, which had not yet melted. Everything
was beautiful, thrown-away window frames on the embankment frosted on frosted
glass, cottage roofs in white rectangles, in Reading the high silver street
lamps in rows towering above the streets.
-
- As it grew darker the Oxfordshire hills, pink sky, a thin fog coming
in low to the ground, silver canals with a skin of ice, our faces reflected
on the train windows. The man across from me was looking as happy as I
was, re-reading a long airmail letter someone had written in tiny square
letters with drawings in the margins.
-
- Little country station, doubledecker bus that drops you in the midst
of the spires, spikes, peaks, points, walls, gates of the colleges. At
Iffley Road Olivia had just arrived, complaining inventively about trains
and dogs and grandmothers and grandfathers and dreading her job and drinking
tea.
-
- January 1970
I wanted that hour of black and white bliss, thought it was after an
exhausting night with Ian and nutmeg in his chocolate birthday cake, but
that story was early morning and ended at Paddington. This patch doesn't
really get the hour of riveted continuous passage through always more beauty
but it's maybe a little gift for Don.
5
Yesterday afternoon I woke from a nap and felt perfectly well for the
rest of the day.
I've posted the embodiment studies reply to Juliana's letter about methodology.
It's very clear. It will fly over all heads except maybe Joost? There it
is among stories of roses and Patch, demonstrating what it describes.
I'm working on a multi-part story of the collages. December 1975. Why
had I never taken them seriously, they are crisis and precognitive resolution.
Don't know how much of that I can do in a day.
7
Giving up telling a story about the collages. They speak for themselves.
The writing of the time was all-which-way, just abandon it.
-
Stupid people need more rules than smart people do but when smart people
give up rules stupid people want to give them up too and then things get
chaotic. By stupid do I mean IQ below 120.
8
The collages. I want people to study them. They can like girl.jpg
but red birth.jpg scares them? Today art.jpg because it
is simple will seem to them to be nothing though it tells my then dilemma
in art. They'll think more than one is too many but it's a suite and a sequence.
It's telling a whole situation that could only swamp me in language.
Cheryl should study them because they'd speak to her dilemmas too but
she'd be too art-conventional-snobbish to let herself be interested. Louie
I think sneered at them, they go into territories she stays clear of. I
never showed them to Tom but I think maybe ... ?
-
Note from Dave L: "Ruth Enns (McNaughton) when she came to have
her book signed told me more of her recent self and the 19 personal
friends she now has living in Heaven. Hopes to be with them soon."
10
Here's the sequence as it is now:
- 1. first collage December 1975 [girl]
-
- 2. walking Luke to daycare in an East Vancouver alley I found a tied
bundle of 1960s Life magazines left out for the garbage truck. [red
birth]
-
- 3. I've moved upstairs. A room under the eaves with a long view of
mountains and the Second Narrows bridge. It seems to me to be connected
to an esoteric North. [art]
Nancy Spero, Helen in Egypt, Duras images generiques
-
- 4. This Christmas I felt let out onto a certain terrace of lucidity,
that I had sometimes reached in crisis with Roy, where I knew what doesn't
matter, was fearless, and had composure: a vantage point that makes me
see as if really from outside the social mind that makes me identify with
powerlessness. Also, for a while this noon standing at a crossing of doors
- basement, bedroom, kitchen - when I had my hand on her breast my torso
was like an axe blade with which I seemed to have cut into her in most
gentle but honed and dazzling penetration. [hawk]
-
- 5. "Loyally to try to understand one's own
unconsciousness." "Women need to be delivered first from the
dominion of nature, and then from the dominion of the ego." "It
is one of the complications of individual psychology that in all cultures
the integrity of the personality is violated when it is identified with
either the masculine or the feminine side of the symbolic principle of
opposites." "Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric.
It is a style I find embarrassing." [the larger self]
-
- Jung 1963 Memories, dreams, reflections
- Neumann 1956 The origins and history of consciousness
- M. Esther Harding 1933 The way of all women
-
- Why had I never shown them, they'e crisis and precognitive resolution,
what it was like to be thirty and editing Trapline and in bed
with a woman for the first time. Terrors and uncertainties. The uncon boiled
up.
-
- -
-
- The collages. They can't be understood at a glance, wd need to be studied.
People can like girl.jpg but red birth.jpg scares them?
Today art.jpg because it is simple will seem to them to be nothing
though it tells my then dilemma in art-making. Some of my friends, then
and now, are too art-conventional-snobbish to take them seriously. Louie
I think sneered; they go into territories she stays clear of. My little
readership will for sure think more than one is too many but it's a suite
and a sequence, it's telling a whole situation that could only swamp me
in language. The last of them, the larger self.jpg, rounds up
and still sits over my bed.
-
- Merritt October 2024
-
I like it now. Didn't write it the usual way, by organizing overall with
strong focus, just whacked at it very little at a time, deciding some bit
on the day, making it up as I went. Result is it's light in a way the time
was not even while telling what needs to be told. 7 rounds up in just the
right way.
-
Compost
Alejandro made in April is perfectly finished beautiful dark dry shreddy
stuff now spread on all three rose beds and what was the onion bed. It's
the first time I've done compost right.
In the garden it's October colour and scent. The scent as every October
is sweet alyssum next to the porch; colour is rugosa and Therese leaves,
paeony leaves, grape leaves, California poppies still blooming heaped over
the nectarine bed. Asters' purple startlingly rich with those yellows and
oranges.
Michael. I'm paying him $120 for four hours every Thursday. It is a lot
but so satisfying to have the garden nearly right. Clean paths. Clean raspberry
bed. Clean open earth among the hollyhock clumps. The sight of rose bushes
bedded in loose dark stuff.
Have been meaning to mention that I'm somehow better looking these days.
-
Write about sitting on the library floor next to a bottom shelf on which
Emily of New Moon.
11
- There was a library in Grande Prairie but we didn't get to it until
I was maybe 10, because our trips to town were organized around the auction
mart and farm machinery. But then there came a late Saturday afternoon
where somehow I was sitting on the floor next to a bottom shelf in the
children's row. The book I happened to pull was Emily of New Moon
- what I remember is exactly that, the moment of pulling the book - its
position toward the left end of the shelf - then opening it somewhere in
the middle.
-
- Three things about Emily. First, she's a child writer. Two, she loves
what we then called the bush, meaning what we now call nature, trees, the
moon, weather, especially wind. Three, she's at fierce odds with stupid
adults. Something else that I didn't notice explicitly then was that Emily
is in effect pagan. The Prince Edward Island community in which the book
is set would at the time have been rigidly church-going but religion in
the story is nowhere mentioned.
-
- A second instance was July 1976. I was in the wide arrivals/departures
hall of YVR waiting for Luke's London flight. In front of an airport shop
was a rotating wire rack with a couple of dozen paperbacks. I had discovered
science fiction that summer and there in front of me most unusually was
a recent Le Guin, a small Avon paperback. I stood reading it - I remember
where I was in the large space, what direction I was facing, what I was
wearing - so absorbed I didn't know Luke had landed until a stewardess
appeared on my right asking Luke, Is this your mom?
-
- What it was and is about The dispossessed - I'm rereading
it now - is that its physicist protagonist like Emily is from childhood
avowed to something that makes him odd in his back country community and
has to work his way gradually toward being what he is. It's a book that
likes intelligence and generosity and defends them.
-
- LM Montgomery 1923 Emily of New Moon
- Ursula Le Guin 1974 The dispossessed
12
Sonja forwarded an email from Lise to a group of women she thinks of
as mbo grads, proposing they gather to design a program: EMBODIMENT
STUDIES UNBOUND!!! An invitation. I've written a reply pulling the
floor out from under her theft. Haven't sent it yet. I think it's clear
and certainly it's righteous but why does my hand shake when I think to
hit send. Body trained against aggression even to defend my life's work.
13
My blood pressure has been so high - because of the election? because
of this little war? - that I thought I should mail right now to get it over
with - and have - and maybe stop reading the news every day, since there
is nothing I can do to change the possibly catastrophic thing that will
happen in November.
14
Had wondered why Don didn't like the Emily/Shevek piece and this morning
there he is with Kate as the only red hearts.
-
- A Terran ambassador to a planet orbiting Tau Ceti describing the world
at home: "My world, my Earth, is a ruin. We destroyed ourselves. But
we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The
air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. There are nearly a half
billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. ... We had saved what
could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the
only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over
the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel.
Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into
the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal
of racial survival."
-
- Le Guin 1974 in The Dispossessed
Harris and the other Dems don't dare talk about weather catastrophe while
MAGA exploits moronic fears of gender relaxation and howls for an economy
that hurries devastation.
-
The screen on this G4 is going (LCD = liquid crystal) so I'm having to
shop for another, which is involving me in questions about OS and Gz and
screen width, and helpful tech males on email.
-
- Lise, I'm going to need to say this another way. I don't give you permission
to use what I made. You can do what you do but you can't use the name I
gave it. If you do, you are committing theft. Call it something else -
do your own work to name it accurately as what you actually do, which is
NOT embodiment studies. Without an understanding of science or philosophy
it can't be.
-
- Sarah, It's not a struggle over ideas; in a sense it is a struggle
over brand. You are welcome to whatever ideas you have. All I'm asking
is that when you make your debut in the wider world you call it something
else, because what you offer under your own names will not be what I made
under mine. Imagine if someone had claimed they were fostering Darwin's
theory but didn't include natural selection - bowlderization is what I
mean.
-
- It is not a struggle over ideas but it IS a struggle over ownership
of my work, which cost me many years and much hardship to formulate, costs
that you and Lise have not paid because it was handed to Goddard fully
formed. Where is your intellectual honesty in this? Ask yourselves why
you have even wanted to call it embodiment studies and I think you'll see
that you are trying to wear an authority you haven't earned. I am not going
to back down on this. It is my life's work that is at stake.
15
I asked Emilee to suggest they name it something else. Vaylor said when
you start a new band you can't call it the Beatles. Emilee tactfully passed
that on. Right.
I didn't want the stress of a fight but actually I feel a bit light hearted
having leapt into it. "Ask yourselves why you have even wanted to call
it embodiment studies and I think you'll see that you are trying to wear
an authority you haven't earned." There it is.
16
Last night there was an unintelligent loyal note from one of Lise's students.
I shouldn't have read it. Took a hit. What that means: defensive rumination
insisting though I don't want it.
- Was it right to protest yes
- Do they know I'm right yes
- Are they going to change the name yes
- Did they do it better than I think no
- Is the enterprise going to fall apart yes
- Emilee is two-faced yes
- Are they going to make a website no
- Are Karen and Jim reading it yes
- Do they agree with me yes
- Does Lise understand why I'm cc-ing them yes
- Should I do more to promote my version yes
- If they make a website should I post a competing one yes
-
- carolyn - hi - I'm not sure what is puzzling you exactly. is it that
you don't understand why I'm being hard on lise? I can probably explain
that. I had a sense - it wasn't only my sense either - that after I retired
lise was thinking of herself as continuing emb stud without actually understanding
its scope or even its basic principles. for instance she wants to believe
in life after death, which makes her a soul-body dualist, which is totally
against what I was on about. I didn't trust her motives - suspected she
wanted a version of emb stud that suits her without the parts, like science,
that she always wanted me to disregard.
-
- I didn't make a fuss while she and sarah were doing what they were
doing at goddard,, because I figured there were people like campbell and
jim who were directing students to my embodiment studies web worksite.
but if she now wants to show up in the wider world implicitly claiming
ownership of embodiment studies, no, I won't have it. all that's needed
is a change of name and I'll leave it be.
-
Since then: Sonja says Lise is suggesting Studies in Embodiment,
which wd be alright with me; and Carolyn wrote wanting to understand and
more importantly saying she's doing somatic therapy kinds of things, which
made me suggest Kate shd join the group. If it's going to be a somatic therapy
/ expressive arts thing, well ... fine, it will be good for my girl students
who have to have a buzzing girl group. Maybe a readership for TP?
Look a sharp rim of full moon rising very fast on the spine of Hamilton
Hill against an arm of the blue spruce.
For me what is embodiment studies now - gardening, Patch, pain and crippledness,
the house, the world - the moon, the wind, the orange rose leaves - the
jeep, my cold feet, everything I remember, this fight, the way I've written
everything I post on FB. Video of an octopus.
-
Michael transplanted the phlox to clear the rose bed, cleaned the potato
bed and covered it with tomato vines, cut back the delphiniums, put the
junk wood into the alley and not much more in four hours. But. It looks
better.
17
I let something go when I shouldn't have and it has taken until now to
address it. When was it - 2006 or 2007, the colloquium. I'd stayed out of
organizing it, Juliana and Carolyn did it with Lise, and then when it happened
I was so sidelined I was wanting to kill myself. Lise brought in two of
her people and was making a social event of it, her girls. I saw they weren't
actually wanting to organize, they were just wanting a club - that was Juliana
saying Let's not get into business. I was broken hearted and didn't fight,
why, because I saw their limits, I saw that my human materials were inadequate
to what I was trying to do.
What else it was, though, was Lise's opportunism, which I didn't name,
her grab, which I had allowed because I didn't want to do the false-enthusiasm
sociability parts of the enterprise. Even now, Emilee who is so smart and
who has been so devoted is in the end one of Lise's girls because she needs
a writing community. Sonja though has had her eye on the con and has backed
me, hasn't needed a writing group, has just written her book and published
it.
My feminism has cost me: I wanted to make something with women that would
be my size but for that I'd have had to make it with men - Jody Golick has
been the only one to completely get Being about. Same with my films,
it's been the young men. I should have done something with Jody, he offered.
But I was still trying to save my mom.
I was on the wrong side of my mom because I kept overestimating her,
I kept saying come on, step into your real size, which wasn't her real size.
She preferred to have Ed making decisions. She needed people to like her
and they did.
23
Misery for days. I don't know what to say but it. Misery and helplessness.
24
When she was 83 Le Guin in an Oregon interview with a very lovely young
English professor, asked an audience question about old age, said When you're
middle-aged you say maybe it's not going to be so bad, but it's bad and
it's the kind of bad you know isn't going to get better.
What happened Monday evening. Took my blood pressure about seven. It
was high so I thought take a diuretic with ramipril 10. I think about an
hour later I was in bed with a warm rock at my feet. I'd been holding the
ipad watching something but my hands were cold so I set down the ipad and
put my hands under the covers. I couldn't warm them. Was getting cold all
over. Realized what was happening because since I've lived here it has happened
three times: I'm going to be shaking with cold though the thermostat says
82 degrees. I'll have to get into a hot bath.
I did get into the bath, which just lately has become difficult - my
legs can't bend to let me down - but the water was only medium hot because
I hadn't used it lately. Kept shaking until it was too cold to be helpful.
Now get out of the tub. Alright, but I can't stand, if I stand I'll collapse.
I'm lying wet and naked on the floor beside the tub. Can I move. Not yet.
Wait. Not yet. Not yet. Kathy has said call her but no way I can get to
the phone. I'll crawl to my bed, it's not far. I do, I slide on my belly
and somehow tumble up into bed.
There's nothing at all I can do. Patch is inside and fed. The shades
are down but the room's lights are on and I can't get to them to turn them
off. I can't get to my pyjamas. I fall asleep. Wake at night needing to
poop. What time is it. It's 1am. I'm usually better after an episode, I'll
be able to walk to the bathroom. I'm up but stagger getting to the toilet.
I'm not better. I poop but keep having to put my head down, I'm going to
faint. My ribs hurt on the right side, what is that. I can't twist around
to wipe myself, what will I do, I'll have to just leave it. I go on sitting.
Can I move to get back to bed. Wait. Wait. Keep having to put my head down.
Stagger back to bed - really stagger - and fall asleep under the room's
bright lights.
I wake at six and think I'm going to be better but I'm not. I can get
up to feed Patch, I can make tea, but I'm in a chilly sweat when I move.
I'm unsteady. The computer is out of charge but I can't bend forward to
plug it in, my ribs hurt too much when I try. I can't set down Patch's dish.
I put it on the table but she doesn't understand.
That was Tuesday. It's Thursday now. My ribs still hurt but I took Tylenol
to sleep. I'm shaky and don't want to eat.
Le Guin's last novel was 2008 when she was 78. For the ten years after
that she took her scrawny bent little body and landslid face and her fame
into the public for a last campaign. There are a lot of videos.
- Am I dying no
- Am I going to recover from this yes
- Do you know what's wrong no
- Is it going to keep happening yes
- Do I have till 82 yes
- Should I move north no
- Should I move out of this house no
- Would a doctor be able to help yes
- Is there anything you want to say yes
- Does this still work yes (temperance)(9w)(hierophant)(Ac)
- Can you say it with one card coming through
-
Dr Edmonds said go for blood tests and called me "my dear"
twice.
Michael McCallum said I was probably the most fascinating person in Merritt.
Without a doubt I said.
25
- does anyone remember this strip? I loved the black-haired girl who
lived on her own and just
kept traveling from one adventure to another.
I was the black-haired girl who traveled without parents from
one adventure to the other and I loved how it was drawn. We didn't
subscribe to any paper that had comics, just The Family Herald
and that other farm magazine with stories about pigs, but I'd read them
in other people's houses and in the dump. When I look at this one I see
how well-drawn it is. We didn't see movies but wasn't I learning to frame?
28
- was away (stuart lake, fort saint james, 12 hour
drive) for niece marrying tsimshian man, adopted by white activists from
his parents' own community up north
- the roman catholic priest is a radical lefty
who couldn't care less about sticking to laws from the top, being into
band spirituality himself
- oldest church in use in bc sister
- divina from the philippines
- atheists who paint
- vegetarians
- hunters
- NDP lefties
- denver vietnam war resisters
- drummers from the local bands
-
- a few years ago dad the fisherman died and had
thirty boats drum his boat back to shore
- they still talk about the power of the lake that
night
-
- my brother jannie made a speech crying throughout
- every single one of the 40 guests was crying,
including teenage boyfriends and the toughest girls
- we don't often see a man who is shy quietly say
exactly what he feels about his daughters carrying on bravely saying it
all to the end
-
- got others to drive so I could stare at the most
beautiful ditch-gardens ever seen in july up north
- this year's summer is cool with way too much
rain
- all the grasses seem to be in bloom
- wave after wave all the long roads
Email from Louie in Vancouver, San Diego July 2011
Marveling my readers didn't love that marvelous thing - Sue because she
knows Louie, Emilee and Don faintly. - Louie being what she could be with
me - I can see it's that though they can't. (Sam later.)
29
- We laughed about how his cursor
hovered under the cupcakes.
Come on people, don't ignore it, be bold enough to laugh.
-
Is there anything I can do with the BK interview. Her maddening irrelevance
in it keeps giving me openings to lay things out.
-
Eight days till the election is over. For the last weeks I've been avoiding
every mention. It scared me that exuberance about Harris had stopped and
photos of the vile thing were piling thicker than ever. I thought, catch
up when it's over, for better or terribly worse. At the same time, the thought
that environmental care at this point is wasted and maybe the worst of men
understand that and have decided what's left to do is just pig out on power
by any means.
There's so much going on as if there will be going on. Whole governments
politicking to raise birth rates. Christian hatred of this and that as if
there could be hope of return to some earlier state.
A segment on The newsroom in which an EPA guy - this is season
3-03 2014 - is saying "If we face this problem head-on, if we listen
to our best scientists, and act decisively and passionately ... I still
don't see any way we can survive."
Along with that thought have wondered whether to ask to have my journals
in my coffin. I'd wanted to be burned but now I'm thinking no: burial in
the cheapest of cardboard and plywood coffins. I'd want it to be in the
Valhalla cemetery but don't know how I can resettle up north in time. How
can it matter but at the same time, for myself, for the shape of the story
I've been telling, making, finding, from the beginning, it's right to end
where it began. I keep feeling someone sometime will read it but that someone
will, can, only be some version of me.
30
Emilee: Forgive me for not asking first, I used
NotebookLM (from Google) to see what it could do. The podcast does something
weird to your name and misgenders you.
Me: Bemused. Listening to it is like grading a first year philosophy
paper by a B- student who gets some things right and some things wrong,
loses all the nuance and is proud of thinking of examples from his own life.
How is it done?!! My text mashed up with what else?
Emilee: I gave it the pdf of Being about
earlier this year, that was all. AI takes it and goes.
AI summary. This source, likely an excerpt from
a larger work, explores the complex relationship between the human brain,
the body, and the world. It argues for a "biologically anchored epistemology,"
meaning a theory of knowledge rooted in the physical structures and processes
of the brain and body. The author critiques traditional notions of "representation,"
arguing that the brain's aboutness,Äîits ability to be about
or refer to things,Äîis not based on internal symbols or representations,
but on the dynamic, structural adaptations of the whole organism. The text
delves into the workings of the brain, examining the neural networks involved
in perception, action, spatial awareness, and simulation. It emphasizes
the importance of distributed, interconnected neural activity, suggesting
that the brain functions more like a complex, self-organizing system than
a machine processing discrete information. The author also explores the
role of language and other representational systems in shaping cognition,
arguing that these systems are not simply containers of meaning, but rather
tools for evoking and managing cognitive states in both individuals and
social groups. Ultimately, the source aims to move beyond dualistic views
of mind and body, proposing a new understanding of knowledge that integrates
the biological and the cultural, the physical and the mental.
31
- It should have been winter of 1999 but it seems I didn't write it.
One line though that I found later made me see it again, "at the window
the desert garden blazes, the quail scratch".
-
- I'd walked up the alley behind Dupont Street, which is three south
of Charles. Mild golden winter afternoon. It was an interesting alley,
really a track, close-confined in bushes. When I came to a back yard with
a broken-down fence, worn-down dry grass, I was charmed by something about
the look of the house. It seemed empty and had weathered stucco walls that
looked like adobe. There was an old-time California farmhouse feeling about
it, a faded print curtain at what I thought must be the kitchen window.
The quail had their heads down pecking at shabby ground in the warm light
next to the house.
-
- San Diego September 2017
I made something of it that it wasn't, carved off some context, some
details I'd liked for themselves, but as it is now I think it has the quiet
charm.
part 7
time remaining volume 13: 2024 january-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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