November 1 2024
- We began badly. I didn't really like her, had invited her only because
I thought it would be good for an eight week old kitten to have his mother
for longer. One reason I didn't like her was that she'd been given a silly
name. Another was that I like all-black cats and found her blotchiness
ugly. A worse reason was that she was going into heat just as she came
to live with me and was yowling continuously for something I couldn't give
her.
-
- As the months went on she seemed morose, cynical even. There were probably
reasons. She'd been dumped pregnant, there was that, and captured, and
fostered - moved around. Unlike her kitten she was clearly used to people
but she was desperately afraid of men, would shoot down into the cellar
the moment there was a man's voice at the door. Kathy thought she'd been
beaten or kicked, a way she pulled back her head when she was touched.
-
- In spring, when she'd been in the house long enough to know it was
home, I began to let her into the garden. There I saw her interest in where
she was, her watchful caution before she slipped over a threshold. I liked
what seemed to be her courtesy, her quiet voice when she asked to be let
out, the way she'd always say hello when she came back inside.
-
- Maybe a year later there came a day - I was working at my big monitor
- she jumped onto the desk and lay purring between my chest and the keyboard.
Oh. Alright. Now going on four years. Still new degrees of trust. It used
to be that when she slept next to my head she'd sleep contained but just
lately she's begun to stretch out so her feet can be touching my shoulder.
-
- Merritt November 2024
-
Wet snow when I woke.
Left my bad books memo for the library's boss. The woman I gave it to
did what they do, told me there's a form that goes to Kamloops etc. I said
no that's too far away, it's a very bad thing that has happened in this
library.
- Merritt's library has been buying and displaying new books with titles
like The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Destroyed Us and Hide
Your Children: Exposing the Marxists behind the Attacks on America's Kids.
I take them home to find out what's brewing. The first wants patriarchy
restored and women satisfied with nothing but "self-sacrificial motherhood".
The second says for instance that "Demons will teach your children
to worship Satan in the name of LGBTQ+ identity", calls separation
of church and state a false premise, asks to prohibit contraception and
no-fault divorce, and describes feminism, Dewey's progressive education,
and environmentalism as Marxist plots. "Marxists will never allow
us to restore the glorious, prosperous days of a free United States."
Both are by Opus Dei style Catholic women dedicated to restoring influence
lost after the church's child-sexual-abuse scandals.
-
- I scared a librarian's assistant by asking why they order these books
- did someone local request them? She said it was about balance. "We
have equal numbers of left-wing books." But these books are not reasonable
conservative books, they're deliberately, irresponsibly, hate-mongering.
Maybe librarians ordering them haven't read them and so don't know how
damaging they are? If read by susceptible parents their demonizing of homosexuals
can damage kids who are already vulnerable, and their hateful misdescription
of feminism plays into the never-completely-abandoned determination of
some men to outlaw independence in women. Please let's not import MAGA-style
insanity from the US.
3
- Went to the pride parade this morning. Was sitting on the curb just
where the route turned into the fruit loop (cruise lane in Balboa Park,
Babycakes barista called it that), opposite four men with white beards
holding up signs saying Repent.
-
- I was sitting there for an hour looking at bodies before the
vanguard - which turned out to be a ragged fleet of dykes on massive hogs
- showed up. One had her daughter in pillion, one her mother, one her old
thin father. I had tears in my eyes. The next event was half an hour later
and it made me cry too. Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force, in each cohort
young men with short hair, a couple of older men, a couple of women old
and young, veterans of contempt.
-
- San Diego July 2011
-
In my dreams of age I'm trying to get somewhere
and am blocked, impeded, thwarted, always uncertain.
It's Sunday morning 6am after time change, still dark, frosty I think.
Gregorian chant like dark slow water or wind.
4
- Slight breeze, caffe latte, a truck heavy through the intersection,
UPS van with a rattle in the fender. Pedestrian slanting closer to the
wall, into the shade of the awning. - Ah the smell of browned crust.
-
- I'm wearing the cargos, which are a bit ragged now, and the black lycra
t-shirt with cap sleeves. I still like my arms. I often look at them, those
parts of me I can so easily see. Their long brown reach, with a beautiful
wrist bone and an angled spread into the hand. The skin on the outside
of the forearm is quite weathered and on the upper arm smooth and pale.
They're my smart experienced arms that have done so many kinds of things.
You will be old but you're not old yet is what I'm saying when I look at
them. I lay one out along the rail to show it off and feel its length.
-
- These are good street trees. They're very green and the flower spikes
on the tips give them as if gold highlights.
-
- The extraordinariness of everybody passing. Unspeakable exactness,
spirit plain and instant to see, body not at all hidden by its clothes.
-
- Innocent gentle tossing of the boughs.
-
- The Solunto in Little Italy, San Diego July 2006
I like that I memorialized my arms. Along with the gently tossing tree
and the UPS van with a rattling fender. My arms are yes old now and they
appreciate having been admired. Now I hold up my hand, the back of my hand,
which is bonier, thin-skinned, and see that it looks like my dad's beautiful
hand.
I'm reading through pieces in my San Diego posted folder and delighting
in my times and that I said them.
5
Frost on the ground, bright sun in the air. I feel better than I did
for most of the summer. 9am and what to do.
6
Appalled for another four years. Misogyny, climate rampage, Christian
hate, lying as default. Should I give up looking at news. It says no. I've
been doing it because there's nothing else I can do for longer than maybe
an hour in the morning.
- Do you have a sense of how I shd live now decision, 6c, deep change,
work
- A different kind of work yes
- Can we still do this yes
- Do you mean I should publish no
- Can I still work more yes
- Am I wrong about climate yes
- Shd I move up north no
- Because it would be too hard yes
- Do I have serious kidney disease no
- Am I going to die within two years no
- Do I have five years no
- Is the work I've done completely fruitless no
-
I can try that but have no driving emotion about anything.
7
Two hours with Luke last evening. We were talking about the difference
between general AI and what he called large language models and I mentioned
Roget's Topical Thesaurus. He said I gave it to him when he was ten and
he still has it.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a field
of theoretical AI research that attempts to create software with human-like
intelligence and the ability to self-teach. AGI systems would be able to
learn and perform any intellectual task that a human can, including reasoning,
problem solving, perception, and language comprehension.
13
Am I running out of things I can want to post. Are they running out of
interest. If I repost can they even recognize that they've seen it before,
can they be more interested this time.
- I went for a walk in the rain and brought back a photo of an otherworld
glade.
-
- Mesa Grande April 2013
It's superb and not the kind
of thing they like - it really is like peering into a mist, as you gaze
you can begin to see more.
-
Was at Chloe's this aft wanting to eat something really good. I ordered
her wonderful salad but when it was set in front of me I felt a kind of
stiffening, I didn't want to eat. Have noticed that in cafes these last
years, same sensation. I had brought a take-out clamshell and took home
most of the salad and most of an omelet. When I'd got home, after a while
I opened the clamshell and ate everything fast and with pleasure. What is
this?
15
- David Brooks last 40 years central inequality
now - educational elite college educated vs not - 'information age' - trade
policy, immigration policy, green energy, don't forget feminism - people
without college degrees die sooner, obese, addiction, no friends - status
taken away from, acutely painful - shabby towns - aggrieved aggression -
values dismissed - multi-racial working class majority - intelligent women
don't speak for all women
- violate progressive orthodoxy - bernie sanders
version of populism -
paganism, occultism as threat to christianity among
young women - nature, body, women, sexuality, drugs - esotericism that has
adapted to secularism and science
- he is glossing over biological inferiority, ie stupid bodies, calling
it college education - geographical sorting when the intelligent leave -
the emptying of christianity/religions
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.
"But what is Jesus to them?" The break with my family.
BUT everyone ignoring climate catastrophe.
16
- It's falling night and I'm in another dark red chair, among the light
airs on the little upstairs porch with the sky all open beside me, where
earlier there were high still gulls, small birds in fleets, a cloud that
formed right there. This chair has a charm in it every time. I put back
my head and look out at the blue. It's like a trance.
-
- These days as I'm writing - the way it has been before - the house
is my pleasure. The look of sun on the floor in the kitchen.
-
- I should say how the yellow/blue/white corner of the herb garden is
the one that's right this year. Full. Interesting. All sorts of yellows,
big mulleins, little agrimonies, great strong gloriosas, the yellowing
fine cut of parsley bloomed out. Big sprawls of coreopsis.
-
- What else. There was an azure cranesbill, a big wide mound, under the
Graham Thomas when it was full of that apricot-centered yellow. That was
a match of colors perfectly just-off. And - oh, in the blue/orange bed
- the fleabane now with ---- coming up through it, a shock of something
maximum.
-
- It's dark. I'll turn off the lamp and see stars. Rowen
will sit here one day. Maybe Luke. Maybe someone else I don't know yet.
-
- East Pender Street Vancouver June 1995
When I see the polaroids I posted with that one I feel I've forgotten what an accomplishment the community garden was -
I'd used the years of oppression to rebuild. Decisive creation, public authority.
I overtopped my oppressors and went on.
-
Grappling with a book about unexplained kinds of experience. I won't
dignify it with title and author, it's stupidly written, but I want to be
with instances of the question.
things I know:
- telepathy
- my photos of air, my air file, the sense of granular space as ground
of all
- body technologies for change of state
- the Book
- tarot
- prompts by image
- camping visions of native persons
- zooming disks
- ritual
- feeling someone else's pain, managing that permeability
- solar tension and recognizing lies things
I don't:
- distance vision
- UFOs and alien abduction
- precognition
- ghosts
- levitation
- possession
- near death experiences
Watch out for grandiosity in the explaining or motive - this guy wanting
superhuman future.
Remember experiencing and explaining are different.
Watch out for male rupture.
Never believe the world as experienced is unreal. "Nothing we know
is truly physical, truly real in a physical sense." What I said to
Francis, the physical isn't what it used to be. It's truly real, truly physical,
but 'physical' isn't as you imagine it.
At the same time assume the world as experienced is a forming of an invisible
ground.
Watch your attractions and track them.
a temporary resonance in the realm of the very
small, addressed to the larger self of all
-
- Hollinghurst 2024 Our evenings
... the hard-ons, new friends jumping at each other,
straight off
Richard said 'Do you have a title for this new book of yours?'
'I thought of calling it "Our Evenings",' I said. .... When we
first met, the phrase was our term for the teasingly rationed three or four
times a week we saw each other, both of us still wary of having found so
exactly what we wanted.
-
- We were up at the Rings for the sunset - leaning
on the wind, thrilling and awesomely accelerated from the strong winds of
childhood - a breathless feeling of alarm at our new weather, whatever its
episodic splendour. It was bleak, after a lifetime of fears defied, to face
these further challenges, which after our death will be inescapable to others
as death itself. I thought randomly, mere images of clever David Hadlow,
radiant Nina Adeleke - in their middle years, as the whole globe combusts.
Still, for now, the last sunlight, edging upwards across the Vale, lit the
woods and hedgerows, ancient churches, cars on sidelights tiny in the far-off
lanes and turning homewards.
I like the passages above for my own reasons rather than admiration for
the book.
- Hollinghurst's light-soaked living
room, which looks out over the sloping fields of Parliament Hill, at the
bottom of Hampstead Heath
b.1954
17
How to live through the coming years of male brutishness triumphant.
I've studied that. Chapter by chapter. Post it chapter by chapter.
-
Creator time loop, "worked toward an already accomplished future"
to realize their work
- groping diagnostic I haven't used for a while but still find, his mistakes
- here prebirth/birth imprint: one world from which "all things
and subjects" "emerge, and to which they return" - they do
not emerge, they cannot, there's nowhere to emerge to
quantum entanglement that 'invisible particles'
can influence one another across vast distances instantly
"something profound about the location of
consciousness in time"
-> effect of object-metaphor in both 'particle' and 'consciousness'?
and 'the imagination' "intervenes in the life
of the seer" "can even manipulate physical reality" "imaginal
appearances" "imaginal phenomena"
16
He's using 'the imagination' to stand in for non-con body structure as
source/formation of anomalous experience
17
Getting to Kamloops for a kidney scan - I posted - Manuel offered instantly
- uneasy about accepting kindness. Is there a way to get around uneasiness?
What's at issue, what I'm worth? That makes sense.
18
10:30 Aberdeen Mall x-ray and ultrasound clinic - upper main entrance
- pee at 9am and then drink 3 cups of water. 250 372 1145, 2 for ultrasound,
then 1
19
- Talking to G about what to call my little stories - he said not sketches
- I said not scenes - then I said instances. Instances of something. Instancing
something. For instance. Today's was an instance of night driving. Yesterday
an instance of early morning. Writing some of them I feel them as that.
What is early waking like? What is it like to be?
-
- Then there's this that's hard to say: what they are as public objects,
how I see them when I make them public, how it is that they become impersonal.
I see them as forms, formed. I risk forms I know are unusual, maybe no
one can read them. Then I like it when someone does. I feel it might reach
their loneliness.
-
- January 2020
-
Troubles. The pain that hasn't stopped since the crisis night, is it
in front, ribs I slammed when I slipped in the bath, is it in the back,
is it a muscle strained by the way I walk now, is it my right kidney shot
forever. Rowen and Freya, has she given up on him, is she leaving him on
the island with a child and no money and an inadequate house, did he hurt
his back just when he was beginning to work because he didn't want manly
responsibility, they are behind on their credit cards, I don't want to drain
my money into them. My G4 quitting so I can't use Pagemill, Jason unwilling.
The monitor unusable because of its smell. - Is that it? Luke alright for
now, the jeep alright for now, the house alright for now, the garden put
to bed in good order, Kathy every week. The US insane, climate collapsing,
end times not only mine - incredible as those things are, so incredible
it's as if my own failures are responsible for the earth's, as if my life
is a fable.
- I did stop Lise from helping herself to embodiment studies - they'll
call it something else and what they're doing is actually alright, will
be good for Em.
- I have found that what makes community possible for me is if I can
be the boss. should you try that? I don't mean this in a bad way. being
the boss is having permission to intervene for the sake of the whole. it
allows creation and I was surprised to learn, actual love.
-
- the thing that makes me wonder about whether the new group might actually
have possibilities for you is that it might give you a forum to develop
something about your expressive arts beginning. one of the women, carolyn,
has this website: http://carolynsweeneyhauck.com/. she's one of lise's
girls but not entirely. i'm recommending they should ask kate soule too,
who is doing something similar. the group might be community for you if
you tackle it more aggressively than you usually like to do - I mean acting
to make it suit you more. 'somatic' will come up a lot but you could fix
that.
20
The air a community
An essence my mother hated. I've never said it as clearly as that. I
worked to become my best possible self and my mother who began devoted to
me hated that self. Helped and hated.
21
overlapping distributions
- I've wondered whether men are struggling because they somehow innately
need to feel they are superior to women. When they see evidence that they
are not, do they simply withdraw into a kind of sulk? If we look at the
many overwhelmingly misogynous cultures in the non-western world, and in
certain cults in the western world, don't we see a remarkable hatred of
any autonomy in women - autonomy which would demonstrate equality if allowed?
magnificent and destabilizing
-
Sam said Tom seemed a fuckboy.
The push and pull between you and Tom is intriguing
... even though he sounds like a massive fuckboy. There's a lot to mine
from those experiences and I think you could land on a tremendous perspective
regarding sexuality and connection.
- fuckboy for sure but holding interest for 20 years worth a lot
- I wondered about that because I wouldn't like people to think badly
of Tom when I write about him.
22
First thing in the morning I'm in the red chair looking for something
to post and don't like anything I have at hand. Cohen on CBC last night,
I instruct but magic is better. He tries hard.
-
With Manuel silently through white mist and slowly falling snow. Fire-red
splotches on one of the kidney scans, what am I going to discover.
23
Wanting to post stories about other people. Madame Matter. I've met lives.
24
(There's a storm outside) I'm dreaming I'm
wandering in a Scottish city with views of the white capping sea. I'm looking
for a homeless girl that doesn't want to be found. I need to ask her about
her black cat from when she used to live in London. I'm smiling at the idea
that the cat might not know there are humans in the world out there that
are thinking about it at any given time. (slowly surfacing, first sensation
of cold cold air in the bedroom but my body very warm cocooned in my silk
duvet. My eyes barely open, the rooms black but there's shadows dancing
on the ceiling, raked limbs like waving tree branches outside. It's a network
light on some tech underneath a grated shelf telling me data's moving. Somewhere
a cat's thinking of me too.)
- do you remember your first black cat? one night we fetched her as a
kitten from a house in gospel oak. she was half persian, vocal and elegant.
after a while had two black kittens in a filing cabinet drawer, both male.
they lived with andy after we left and moved up the hill with him when
he did.
Of course I remember those brothers. They lived
till 22. They were the largest, and sweetest, in the area for years. I ran
into Andy in the high street this morning, wind galing. We were two of only
three on the street at 8 on a Sunday.
-
Put the jeep in the garage for the first time since spring, poking timidly
with my stick afraid to fall on hidden ice.
27
Misery again. My good right arm so sore I couldn't sit up in bed, brush
my teeth, lift a bowl onto the shelf, type, grate ginger, raise a cup to
my mouth, get into the bath, wipe my bum. Lying in agony, trying aspirin,
tylenol, tramadol, nothing helped.
28
- We came over the mountains from Tecate - the mountains I see from Tom's
bed - on old Mexican Highway 3. Tom was driving. Sometimes I was over on
his side to be able to feel the happiness of his body as we flew in curves
along the summits of gentle ancient piles of crumbled rock. Hundreds of
miles of those mountains, rocks, very small bushes, small trees in the
gulches. Sometimes horses and a two-roomed house among shade trees. In
the valleys a beautiful corduroy of olives or grapes.
-
- There was a particular part of the road where I noticed a heavy somnolence,
a thickness of the air, the Mexican sleepiness I thought. I didn't mention
it until later, so I don't know whether what Tom noticed was the same.
He said he'd felt something hard to explain, like a spirit of the land,
an animus under the ground. A few miles further on when we came to coastal
mesquite country it was gone.
-
- We were talking about it in bed before we went to sleep at the end
of our Christmas Day. I was lying at his back cuddling him. Let's have
a real conversation before we go to sleep I say. I'm takin' on water fast,
if you want a real conversation you'll have to hook me.
-
- This is how it came about. I'm getting restless in this room,
let's go for a drive. Mount Laguna Tom said. No, let's go there - those
mountains in the east that look as if they,Äôre in a different
zone of time.
-
- The 94 toward Tecate. Once on the road it seemed we could have breakfast
in Mexico. And once there Tom was feeling the old pull to Ense±ada.
This is what you said would happen I said. He laughed. But when the pull
came back I said go for it. We had a full tank of supreme.
-
- There's more to say but the meter will start ticking at 8. Saturday
morning. Tom's at the desk in the West with his nametag on.
-
- Baja California December 1998
I love that but they didn't. How could they not.
30
Graham's poem and interview. So much of the poem a blank to me, I don't
know it, I don't like it, it seems to me to go excessive: false and pretentious.
Then she lets it go simple:
- We hear the bullet.
-
- Will it be erased
- from time itself now
- the small stony hill
- in which my village lay,
- will it bleed out from me now
- the cool stone floor, the water in the basin,
- my window onto the olive groves,
- the pigeons muttering in the lowest limbs -
- & where will it go
- where I overhear my father thanking my mother
-
- late at night in the dark kitchen -
- his thank you, thank you - this
clicking of the stars
- all round them -
- where will it go, where will it be buried
- my time,
- will it rise up in no one ever again
- as memory, as dream, this moonlight -
scent over the fields
- & in it the barefoot steps of my father
- coming to see if I am
- asleep.
What I've been feeling about dying, that what I regret is the death of
what I've lived:
But one of the questions that animated me was
what happens to our personal, unique store of memories when we go out? We
always speak of how the future is stolen from those who are killed - all those unlived futures - everywhere
on earth where the spree is alive. But what of their pasts -
their own unique pasts - their incidental memories
- memories they might not even realize they have. Teilhard de
Chardin speaks of a 'planetary neo-envelope' that hovers over our globe
containing all our acts of consciousness. I was very struck by that image
as a young poet. I imagined all the particular memories of each living person
woven into this layer that floats as a second atmosphere around the physical
earth. All we loved, all we touched inadvertently, overheard unconsciously
- not even the principal strokes of our lives but the fine
filaments we don't even know we hold. What if they are a vast fabric of
immaterial reality that exists in opposition to the electronic networks
and the killer-drone world?
Jorie Graham interview New York Review of Books newsletter November
30 2024
I didn't know this:
Although this poem is not exclusively about
Gaza, every college and university in Gaza has been obliterated along with
many hundreds of schools. In an area of about 140 square miles there were
twelve universities. There were, or are, so many people with advanced degrees
in Gaza that this conflict has, among its other horrors, been referred to
as a "scholasticide". The literacy rate in Gaza was - or is - I don't know what
tense to use - 98 percent.
So, yes, the desks are blown to bits, and dust
settles over what had been a huge surge of culture
- of genius, wonder, curiosity, erudition, discipline -
alongside the more violent terrorist organizations we know are
- were - also present. But when we see images
of the desperate people under the rubble - or starving
- or worse, much worse - it's imperative to keep
in mind they live, and lived, profound interior lives in which they imagined,
explored, invented, and dreamed in their classrooms. In the poem, one man
imagined the universe - as it was taught to him by another
man who imagined the universe. Then war cast them into their new fates.
-
2011-2019 8 years of the Dragon Mother
December 1
Reading TR5 which is Merritt 2017, month when I'm going through Jam years
to understand more. Revising Jam years. Up, down, strange and charm.
I'm dwindling, 131 with a sock on.
Yesterday I posted this:
- I'm seeing something I didn't see then and it's key. It's that
Jam had been talking to them about me and had taken on their version, which
she was too unconscious to realize was essentially competitive. She also
didn't realize she was taking on their version for her own unconscious
competitive reasons.
-
- I shouldn't have been trying to talk to Rhoda, she was unreliable about
my writing. Why was I still trying. I was fishing for information and here
it is but I didn't register it completely enough. I got hurt. But I'm still
struggling with this. It's true that for competitive reasons they needed
to see me as crippled and they needed to see my work as the work of a cripple.
Jam didn't at first but they took her there. They weren't on my side and
now she wasn't either.
-
- But at the same time isn't it true that my work is the work of a cripple?
It says no, my work is the work of my DNA, the crippledness is accidental.
I carried myself as my DNA until I was with them.
-
- Okay, so then why didn't people like my writing. Why wasn't the kind
of writing I believed in the kind of writing people wanted. Answer: because
I wasn't ready. Not for the reason they wanted to sell me.
-
- This is something new just now, the understanding that the self
I am and feel myself to be is the genetic self, and then the understanding
that other people don't know or imagine that, which makes a disjunction
between who I am and how I'm seen that is puzzling to me and often also
to them. It makes me see why I resisted Trudy and then Jam saying I should
make art about my leg. I felt them wanting me to demote myself into their
point of view rather than standing in my own. Later when Margo wanted me
to describe myself as disabled for the college's quotas I said she could
say it but I wouldn't.
-
- Merritt February 2017
That's kind of monumental. Rachel and Jim showed up, Rachel in her generous
way, and that was it. Don and Cheryl should have and were too gutless.
This morning waking from a kind if dream I've had many times. I'm on a train that will be days crossing the country
to Alberta. Usually I begin at underground passages in Toronto but this
time Toronto is ahead. There will be a fancy dining car tonight though not
later. Am looking forward to the prairies under thin snow. I have my doctorate
and am free, am going home.
4
- 1984. The cliff, the beach, tides, whales, otters, eagles, mussels
and oysters, calypso orchids in moss, black dark night, phosphorescent
little fishes under the dock. The farm's sloping bench that opened to a
small crescent of sand that then opened to the flat reach of water toward
Pender Island. Weathered '30s resort buildings that seemed to be out of
novels I'd read when I was a kid. Old apple trees. A rickety short dock
that rose and fell with the tide. Warm light reflected upward from the
water. Bands of wild goats that seemed Mediterranean, Greek. It was mythic
and coherent, so much drier and brighter than the north side of the island
that it seemed under an enchantment.
-
- The farmer. Maggie said Jim was sweet on me and I thought that was
the right way to say it. He was starting to be an old man and he liked
having a young woman around the place. We didn't flirt but he was the benevolent
host of a place I could love along with him. He could like to tell me about
it and I could like to feel his carefully discrete gallantry. My dad was
the wrong kind of farmer and the wrong kind of dad but Jim was a gentleman
farmer and a rational generous dad. When I saw the boat docking I'd go
down and help him unload boxes and feed sacks onto the flatbed trailer
he pulled with his old tractor. He'd bring firewood when he saw I was getting
low and keep the kerosene can topped up. I'd walk up to the farmhouse with
a rent check at the end of the month. Sometimes could catch a ride on the
boat when he was going to the store or the ferry. From the water he pointed
out ridges on the cliff that goats and deer couldn't reach, where in April
there'd be strips of wildflower garden.
-
- What was I up to. Was Jam still important. She was two ferries and
a bus ride away, bus to Tsawassen, then the Salt Spring ferry, then the
Saturna ferry, then either a walk up the road and down the cliff or else
if I was in luck maybe Jim's boat would be at the wharf. I was doing what
I did later with Tom, backing away from someone I needed to leave by going
to live somewhere I'd like to be. "I understand that I'm at the time
when I don't leave but I begin to make myself strong by holding to my own
in everything." Was sorting my questions - diagrammed them as a network
- looking at the gathered bits seeing a lot I needed to get further into.
Beginning to form more than I knew, the steady platform I later taught
from and the steady confidence that led me through the doc.
Is it true that I was forming the platform. I did form the notion of
going back to school to be a philosopher. In the next years I had inklings
ready to recognize what I needed, which other people just then were working
to write, Fox Keller's Barbara McLintock book (1983), Howard Gardener The
mind's new science (1985), Chaos (1987), the Churchlands (1989)
when I went back to school.
5
- About philosophy. I think there is going to be a shift and I want to
help make it. It isn't just 'environment', it has to do with giving credit
to bodies. Now I have to look for allies and go more discretely and perceptively.
-
- Autumn of 1989.
8
"Yo' garden, yo' house, yo' bread, yo' ... life." Alejandro.
They said lively. 2024 those six months of loving generosity.
9
Last dream in second sleep, a building like PRBI,
trying to find a way out, dark narrow staircase I didn't think would have
an exit, then pass through the top of the auditorium where a quartet, I
think a black quartet, is singing some hymn. I dream the whole sound, perfect
professional harmony. Break into tears, think of crying in London churches.
Wake. Remember I've dreamed PRBI before, a big wooden building that
was a church but more than a church, downstairs kitchen and dining room,
must have been offices, schoolrooms?, levels and corridors, a whole institution
that made missionaries. Now I'd want to say image of that culture. The year
I lived in Sexsmith I went to church there once, sat looking at their wall
plaques thinking This is dumb. I likely meant class. Anglicans less dumb,
the Manns and Windrims, class meaning British legacy, more intelligence
in the way people spoke to each other.
Lot of Youtube videos now, exposing religion as bizarre belief and violent
abuse. Religious insanity, political insanity, more exposured and less checked.
At the same time my instant tears of longing for the secure belonging I
didn't know I had, along with the outsideness always also there.
-
Patch is afraid of the walker and what have I come to, L leg so sore
tonight that Kathy fetched it from the verandah. It helps but already the
stick has making me feel myself afraid to walk the path to the garage, timid.
I've just looked over the whole of this year and seen how often I've been
in pain, four times the shaking-cold attack, many excruciating inflammatory
attacks (L shoulder, ankle, R knee, L knee, R arm, and very, very frequent
lesser soreness, drenched nights. I didn't want to tell Emilee why I can't
have her visit. Knackered like a horse due for the knacker's yard. I wondered
about lying down on but not in a sleeping bag in the compost area during
a polar vortex, take some pain pills.
At minus 30 F (minus 34 C), an otherwise healthy
person who isn't properly dressed for the cold could experience hypothermia
in as little as 10 minutes, Glatter said. At minus 40 to minus 50 F (minus
40 to minus 45 C), hypothermia can set in in just 5 to 7 minutes, he said.
Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold. You,Äôre
now trembling violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response
increasingly clouded and panicky mental state
your heat begins to drain away at an alarming rate,
your head alone accounting for 50 percent of the loss. The pain of the cold
soon pierces your ears so sharply
you're becoming too weary to feel
any urgency
In the minus-35-degree air, your core temperature
falls about one degree every 30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out
into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.
At 86 degrees visual and auditory hallucinations
At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, often rip
off their clothes., the most logical explanation is that shortly before
loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body,Äôs
surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against
the skin.
When it starts, it is difficult, you basically
feel terrible.
pain will first hit the fingers, toes, nose and
ears
at a body temperature of 32 degrees Celsius, the
trembling stops. numbness in the arms and legs.
pain subsides, but the body can barely move.
mental confusion, memory loss and, eventually,
coma. may express a sense of peacefulness
in the early stages of hypothermia, you'll
have to urinate; this is because of the increased blood flow to the internal
organs. In the later stages of hypothermia - you may lose control of your
bladder
10
I will sometimes just read down the series of FB posts. It's comforting.
The year has had, has been, creation after all.
11
Agonizing night, left knee up to the hip and down to the calf, Tylenol
didn't help.
12
Have posted e and joshua.jpg from 2007 because there I am at
62 straight up and down, cargos, chucks, short-sleeved black shirt with
collar up, head held beautifully. While fourth day wincing anywhere
with the walker.
14
"Just as you are among the small company of
people who come to mind in the dark lonely hours of working, I'm hoping
you will know Marilyn and I are 'with' you when you are going on with this
good work" says the man who made On seeing with your own eyes. "Dear
Ellie Epp."
17
I said, Fifty four years later, how is your day? He said Hospital for
chest x-ray ... in bed for the last two with a fever ... My windpipe seized
yesterday and I had to call paramedics ... Tubes and ecg but I'm not in
distress today, just really exhausted.
20
TR index pages and the bits I extract for FB. I need literary readers
and have none - am always thinking about writing and have no one.
22
Misery again. Late afternoon it begins with general achiness, muscles
around my head, goes on to some joint viciously inflamed, yesterday R shoulder
because I'd overused it on the computer maybe. Then very stiff and sore
on all joints, hips, knees, shoulders, wrists. I go to bed with an aspirin
and a tramadol and wake at 2 drenched. Change clothes, turn my pillows,
try to go back to sleep. This morning sore and weak, can hardly bend to
place Patch's dish. It's starting to be unrelenting.
25
- This morning I posted a photo I took of myself with my first own camera.
I love the photo. Seen against my dad's bullying it's a photo of true me,
actual continuing me, my steadiness.
-
- Posing with a young tree. Behind it the pasture and its poplar
bluff, the driveway, a granary's little mouth: the eternal yard. She's
wearing a dress she likes, second-hand, thin red nylon with its white dots
worn off. I like her slender shoulders, smooth brown skin. She's fifteen.
She has her grade 9 results but she doesn't know yet that she has the medal.
In relation to her father she knows she's won, she knows she's stronger
than he is.
-
- March 2020
Gift to myself yesterday. The gift my own liking and some of theirs.
26
- When I saw myself come to that time
- of my age when one should lower sails
- and gather in one's ropes
-
- Reading Dante by light of the moon lamp, and there sunrise imprinted
on the wall.
-
- Who spoke of paradise as a career for the visionary - widening
experiences of beauty - can one produce a soul worthy of -
-
- "enwombs himself in love", m'inventro
-
- Merritt April 2016
On the 23rd Lee brought a perfect fir tree, said he spun out at the foot
of Hamilton Hill and there it was. Then stringing the lights yesterday I
was amazedly in cold sweat so it only has lights this year.
Today Kathy found Patch's toy mouse hidden inside the red armchair, I
think inside its skin, which means that Patch hid it.
27
- Delighting in religious music but when there are words almost always
having to ignore them. Reading for instance Dante or Emily Dickinson having
to sort the poetry from the piety.
-
- When I was applying for a reader's card at the British Museum I needed
to offer an obscure research area. I said I was studying angelology. Then,
when I was first in Vancouver, I went to the NFB asking to make a film
called Ideas of Angels. They said Write out your script and come
back. I had no script: what I had was an image of a trickle of water struck
by an instant of light.
-
- Tchaikovsky's cherubim would have been Eastern Orthodox and so would
have had four wings and possibly four faces. "One face was that of
a cherub, the second the face of a human being, the 3rd the face of a lion,
and the 4th the face of an eagle." But Maimonides in the twelfth century
wrote that to the wise what the Bible and Talmud refer to as angels are
actually the principles by which the physical universe operates. "Thus
the Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called
an angel; and the mind is called a cherub. How beautiful this will appear
to the sophisticated mind, and how disturbing to the primitive."
Relief thinking this music is actually praising the foundations of cosmos.
Long difficulty with primitive minds. Have for so long refused to be
clear about what they are. It's been fear of condescension, which it wouldn't
have had to be if I were clear. How to elude the stupid and the wicked,
the wicked being those who are morally stupid in wanting to exploit the
stupid.
Wandered into a video of Lessing talking about Sufism. I brought the
notion of levels of development with me from London.
I despise human beings. (sigh)
-
Dared get out the jeep and pick up my grocery order but what to do about
carrying things in. As I was pulling up at my house there was a scruffy
tall man arriving from the north. Perfect timing. "Are you strong?"
just as I was opening the hatch. Asked him to carry them to my porch. He
didn't mind. "I was just going to the library." Gave him two oranges.
-
Rowen and Freya separating. Gideon is four. Oh shit.
28
- "Three nights later he was sitting at
his post under a bright moon - 'how hard to describe that sort of Queen's
metal plating, which the Moonlight forms on the bottle-green Sea'"
-
- The word plating. I thought with a pang of reading Tom the description
of his plated smile, a pang not because it hurt his feelings - it did,
he was furious - but because he instantly got my use of the word. There
it was: there was why.
-
- November 2018
- Richard Holmes 1989 Coleridge: early visions
-
The murshid was born Fazal Inayat Khan in France
in the middle of the war. His mother was Dutch, his father half Indian and
half American, but with English nationality. In the early 1980s some older
members of the Movement objected to his more radical and experiential style
of teaching so he proposed a bifurcation between the more traditional Sufi
Movement and the more inclusive and experiential Sufi Way founded in 1985.
When he died suddenly in 1990, he was succeeded by a woman whose house was
called Roughwood, which was probably the khankah. In 1998 she announced
that Elias - Murshid Elias Amidon - was to succeed her as Pir of the Sufi
Way, which he did when she died in 2004. https://www.sufiway.org/pir-elias
-
estimated 1.5 billion people, roughly
one in every five human beings, speak English, making it the
most widely used language in the history of humanity
29
Yesterday a moment lounging on the bed where I felt the native easy physical
self I used to be and thought, I'm eighty and can for a moment still be
this, something posturally free that was unusual even among the young.
30
- sketches of spain. I know it from second year when olivia
and I had a record player and would sit listening to it in candlelight
with guests sometimes including don. I've run out of things to watch so
have begun mad men again on netflix. there it was, 1960 or about.
am impressed again by the writing. what is meant when they say gender is
performative is so accurately shown - men working so hard to seem to be
men, women working so hard to seem to be women. for women always the sense
of being prey. the desolate sense of being second rate no matter what.
(in first year one female law student, one female engineering student,
only one or two female professors of anything.) the miseries of that, miseries
of falsity. you were ahead of your time. but misery nonetheless. for me
the girdles and curlers ended sometime in second year and the era shifted
completely after the year of bumming around europe. - i'm just at
the moment kennedy is declared elected, the man who didn't wear a hat.
-
- so here comes 2025. I don't do hoping or wishing but anyway hello whatever
comes next in distant company with you.
31
Paul Sylvestre d. August 1960 - from recent obits of two of his brothers
in Bonnyville, Jacques and Yvonne his parents, four brothers and three sisters.
Writing those details to hold him in existence while I'm still alive to
remember him.
The winter I was relief camp attendant on rigs there was a passing moment
in a dark beer parlour in Bonnyville. I happened to be sitting next to a
local who knew the family, said something about hockey and that another
brother had died, wrong.
volume 14
time remaining volume 13: 2024 january-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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