January 1 2024
This is about last night so should I write it here or in the new journal.
Both. A beautiful New Years Eve. Imagine being happy. Tree of lights across
the room, candle scenting from the mantle. Luke had sent a message,
Walked through Leicester Square and Covent Gardens
heaving crowds, just as it got dark windy and wet but everyone dressed to
the nines.
Gratefully at home alone listening to music
with the heater and letting surprised newly reawakened feelings percolate
as the fireworks begin outside. Thinking of you. Talk to you next year.
XL
Jim posted fireworks above a pond in Portsmouth, wondrously silent as
I saw them. Nothing hurt. I was in the chair watching marvels of Mughal
Pakistan and fell asleep, Patch asleep on the floor next to me. When I woke
I saw that though the upper sky was black the streets were in a soft white
mist that held moving swarms of red and white. When I went to bed I opened
the curtain so it would be in the room with me.
4
Last night the Buena Vista Social Club sent me here:
- May 1965, Rasheed Mohammed in his red Queen's jacket. Trinidadian.
I knew him because he lived with another West Indian student above the
dairy bar where Olivia and I ate in our kitchenless second year. After
exams I was going home to the farm in Alberta for a couple of weeks. Rash
had a massive scholarship and didn't need summer work so I invited him
to come to the farm with me. He outfitted us with rucksacks, army sleeping
bags and rain ponchos that could double as ground sheets and we set off
from Kingston one late afternoon to hitch-hike 3000 miles.
-
- It was my first time hitch-hiking and he was the best of company, beautiful
and sexy, full of laughter and like me completely high on throwing ourselves
into strangers' cars. As we waited on roadsides there began to be stories.
The bad days when he started school too old, barefoot, and unable to speak
English. Affie, Sheraz and Feroz still at home, his tall graceful mother
who was unable to understand more than a little insisting the boys speak
it to learn. His dad driving taxi, quoting Shakespeare to his tourist customers.
Evenings when Cyril would come home and go to bed to gossip with his wife.
("I didn't understand why he would get up and wash his hands in the
middle of the night.") Fishing underwater off the north coast. Seduction
by an older relative when he was fourteen, dancing for twenty dollars a
night behind his mother's back, drinking in a well-cut suit furnished by
the club. Then sudden affluence, a room under Shurtleffs' slanting roof,
the confusing colourlessness of Kingston WASPS.
-
- We got into black Sudbury at night and in a wet fog. Better a hotel.
Pleasures of the day we'd had, sun, squashed apple pie beside the road,
knees brushing in the front seats of cars. Opening the hotel door with
the old fun of ownership for a night, a leap onto the bed, possessive and
wifely tidying. Asking the mirror is this the moment, he'd be relaxed about
it, not like a Canadian man who'd want to take it as a win.
-
- So yes.
-
- Neon flashing red and blue on the walls; cool air through a window;
beautiful arm holding a cigarette slanted over the side of the bed.
-
- That summer our rides' car radios all across the country were playing
Guantanamero. I'd sing it with Rash in Spanish - Yo soy un hombre
sincero / Dedonde crece la palma / Antes de morirmi, qiero / Echar mis
versos del alma - feeling it was about him. Beautiful Rasheed where are
you now, I have no idea.
-
- I like the photo. We're together in it, the way our heads incline.
I'm calm and pleased. He's loose but his hands are closed, a bit uncertain?
Not a conqueror. We're twenty. I look calm and pleased because I've evaded
the law that said I couldn't have it unless I signed away my entire life.
-
So excited by having declared this triumph that I haven't settled to
work and don't know what to do with myself.
-
I gaze at the photo on and on, again and again. Gazing at it I become an open space gently and evenly lit. Something about who we are together, Rash's spirit still a boy's, me creamy and steady holding my ground.
11
Polar vortex. Opening the back door in the dark a smoothly padded scene.
Rose bushes wrapped lumps.
17
Sheets:
- What kind of book is this
- Difficulties of editing
- Itineraries of love and work
- What happens summaries
- Theory's practice proposal
The golden west is about coming to terms with love woman in relation
to Tom. The long table is about surviving great fear as my work stood
more alone.
19
- Tom came from work at noon in white shirt and tie and we lay quietly
together for half an hour. He had hold of my bare arm and kissed it up
and down on and on. Our feet were in a patch of sun on the bed. At the
airport he stood outside and watched me in line at the UA counter. He was
moved and charmed he said to see me looking about, cast into responsibility
for myself, alert. He came back and leaned against my shoulder. I turned
without startling. My body knew it was him.
-
- He went home on the shuttle bus waiting to hit the wall. It didn't
happen. Though it was early he lay down and slept. When he woke in the
dark he lay for half an hour feeling perfectly well.
-
- What this quality of goodbye means is that he is out of the wide aura
of his mother's death. He has rebuilt love in himself so it is no longer
a trap he has to evade.
-
- San Diego January 2002
It's graceful. Its motion has the quality of calm it names.
22
Something new as I work through sections from Canyon on. Confidence.
A clear light feeling: I like this, I stand by this.
27
- Three years ago. I still mourn Mouse. I don't mourn my parents but
I mourn this sweet young scrap who got to live so little of his life. What
it was about him. Innocence, true-heartedness. Ardency, timidity. Grace.
The way he'd reach with his soft paw to touch my mouth. At the end a quiet
stoicism that felt so deep.
-
- I love the photo. It's a photo of any young soul in inescapable affliction.
Anyone who's been there could recognize it.
I had to work to find the last two words of the second-last sentence
because it's me waking in pain after surgery without even a sense that there
should be someone who wanted to be with me.
February 2
- Was I three? Was it after I got back from the hospital the first time?
Their bedroom had a hatch into the attic above their bed. They had laid
out bedding up there and pushed me up through the ceiling to sleep. The
only light was whatever could come from below, so I could only see what
was next to the hole in what was now my floor. Nearby in the low-ceilinged
darkness on all sides were two things. One was my mom's wire and organdy
wedding bouquet. The other was a photo of an evil face.
-
- Why would they have done that? It would have been my dad's idea not
my mom's. He wanted me out of the way so he could have sex? They could
have made a bed for me in the living room so it was more than that, he
wanted me out of sight.
-
- The arrangement didn't last very long, I think because I spilled the
potty they'd sent up with me and pee leaked through their ceiling.
-
- I've remembered this many times and earlier on could remember the face
more distinctly than I can now, but it wasn't until today that I understood
what it meant. It was a child's memory and had kept the child's blank incomprehension.
4
The other thing about being pushed up into the attic is that I've often
since then lived in my upper storey. But an artificial wedding bouquet and
an evil face? When I saw artificial flowers was I seeing wrong marriage?
When I saw an evil face was I seeing his malice? One glance and then not
daring to look again.
-
My dad had that esoteric sense? No.
-
- But I did. Yes.
-
- Is the attic where you live? Yes.
-
- The red lion, the join? Yes.
-
- The roof
of the brain? It's an electromagnetic join not the corpus callosum? YES.
Is esoteric the best word - esotero comparative of eso,
within - I've often not known what to call it - it's not interior, it's
as if parallel? It's the fairytale zone, the dream significance zone, the
Tarot zone. Skillful conversation about the conditions of a life as such.
'A life', a conscious being.
- Our little school didn't have a library, instead each classroom had
bookshelves under the windows. Coming into a new grade meant a whole new
row of books. Mrs Maple's grade three classroom had a row of fairytale
books. I stayed reading in my desk at recess until I'd got through the
whole row.
-
- Since then I've needed to think what it was about fairytales. They
seem to me to pass on a subliminal understanding the way dreams do and
the tarot system does. It's a kind of understanding that's alternative
to the dogmas of church and community and essentially pagan, meaning rooted
in love of body and physical world and skillfully interested in the lifetime
adventures of conscious selves as such. It seems remarkable that this subversive
form of pagan instruction was present in a schoolroom in La Glace Alberta,
hidden in plain sight.
-
- I remember this book vividly (copyright 1912, stamped Baldur School
District) but didn't understand the title until much later, when I'd experienced
the moment standing between the round sun setting in the west and the round
moon rising in the east. It has only happened twice but those times have
had exceptional events.
What was the word I found, emblem - inlaid work - Yeats' mosaic.
6
Thundering through. I'd been working almost three hours? Liking what
I have, understanding in what way it's a different book.
9
Yesterday early morning I posted this:
- He phones in the early afternoon, eleven his time. There was something
he wanted to say before he hung up, he hesitated but he didn't say it.
-
- He's where I most feel the precariousness of life. Hearing his stories
about work it is as if I'm watching him on a tightrope very high above
the ground, alone in his life, balancing a very long pole. It's not the
job, it's aliveness at all. I feel the knife edge for me only when I'm
on long road trips. I always feel it for him.
-
- I'm interested in what he makes of himself, want him to have time to
complete himself well, want his lovely being to find its best way. My parents
had no such sense, and I have it in the self born with him. Is that it?
There are mysteries. The person I leapt to make, who became a self in me,
added his being to mine.
-
- His spirit is very beautiful to me. It is as if I and my whole unwise
love for Roy and Roy's lightness are in perfect solution in him. I feel
it in his intelligence, love and humor - his kind of intelligence, love
and humor. His language and the space of attention around it.
-
- Genetic alchemy. My father's beauty, his sex, his business imagination,
are brought through into my son without the malice and meanness. My mother's
social observation is there without her heaviness and ignorance. Roy's
humor is there without his psychopathy. The freedoms we took in our era
are taken to polish in him, he has all our music and more. He's much further
into the world than I have gone. With heart. That completion is what is
in peril. I don't mean he's the end of the line or more than I am, but
he is a person I chose to make in a height of intuition, at great cost,
and brilliantly I believe. People don't speak this way about making children
but in this power we are gods and should be willing to know it.
-
- Vancouver June 2001
Then I was looking up his bank details. Suddenly Luke with a red heart.
- I don't expect you to be reading my daily bits
- and then while I'm looking up your bank details there you suddenly
are
-
- I'm a bit astonished too. It's extremely rare
and I had to go back and check if I'd seen the times right. but we're in
sync.
What surprised me more than synch was that he loved what I'd written.
He should like to hear that from me, what better could be said about any
child by a parent, but usually he's angry when I write about him. I thought
it must mean he's alright for the moment.
16
Alexei Navalny 1976-2024
17
I posted Navalny's dates with an AP Youtube showing Moscow people in
deep cold laying flowers at the Solovetsky Stone. I thought D would be the
one to notice and he is. What a mute minimal sideways friendship.
20
It's surprising me to notice that The long table really is a different
book. It's not about Tom, it's about work. Much of is unreadable but fixing
it wd have to be cutting most of it and I'm not going to do that. It has
to be a difficult book.
22
8-11, I'm not really editing now, just reading. I seem to have accepted
that it is what it is.
29
Luke awake all night phoned about 9 and we talked full press for a couple
of hours. When we stopped he had daylight and was going out to buy a crusty
roll from the Kurds who like him. What we talked about: how he met Jack
and their ten years; the family's two and a half years in Portugal, Sara's
illnes and why they moved back to England; hiding from Roy in east London
and the court case before he and I moved back to Canada; his lifelong determination
to keep a live heart; Roy's motorcycle theft; the visit where I slept in
the room with many little boys and stars on the ceiling; his meeting a school
friend now a beat policeman; my worries for Freya; Patch being tortoiseshell
and how he can have a cat after his house is repaired; his dangerous dive
in Hawaii looking for sharks; swimming in the men's pool on the Heath; cooking
in a way so the counter is clean when the pot goes on the stove, which I
knew he does because I do; Berlin, Paul van Dyk and a song called For
the angel; what it means to go up a level in distress with a lover.
His voice was strong. As we spoke I was feeling something like this is what
kin is, this moving together rapidly in things that interest us both.
March 7
- In my country snow melt happened in the first week of April so early
March was still deep winter. When her baby was due my 21-year-old mom was
booked into Johanna's, Johanna being the pioneer midwife who helped all
the county's babies into their daylight lives. She had a little house in
the small town of Sexsmith, fifteen miles away.
-
- My dad had a truck but on drifting roads horse and sleigh were safer.
The two of them set off I think a couple of days before she went into labour.
She would have been sitting on straw wrapped in blankets and he would have
been standing to hold the horses' reins, stamping and beating his arms
across his chest and clapping his hands with wool mittens inside cowhide
mittens to warm them. It was so cold they had to stop at a farmhouse halfway
to warm up.
-
- Women those days didn't talk about the experience of childbirth (because
it happened in what my grandma called Die Scham Stelle, meaning the place
of shame) but I think my mom liked the week or ten days she was at Johanna's.
Winter days in my country were brilliantly sunny with air so clean and
dry that the sky would be an unusually dark blue. There were other young
women in the house having babies at the same time and their company must
have been a pleasure for my mom, who at home lived with an impatient self-absorbed
man. Later she'd remember that this or that boy in the county was my twin.
-
- Sexsmith AB March 1945
That from yesterday. Em's letter prompted it. Checking through posts
I was realizing that this past year there's been more current writing from
what has always been memory. It's not good writing, just chunked together,
but gets it down. Button box, being stuck up into the attic, Rasheed, this.
Asked myself whether I had a photo of brilliant snow to go with it, realized
blown edge.jpg would have the sharp edge to suggest birth. Blown into open
space.
9
- About Childhood of the philosopher I'm going to lose my nerve
again and again.
11
there is the subtler music, the clear light
I say my soul became translucent
Very early Pound in an overwrought poem already in love with air, I mean
translucency.
the reality of the nous,
of mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten
glass that envelops us, full of light
no cloud, but the crystal body
the tangent formed in the hand's cup
as live wind in the beech grove
as strong air amid cypress
Kenner likes that but I don't think he understands the intuition it evokes
- prebirth and cortical and cosmological all at the same time - numinous
- all those god-grounds of being at the same time.
15
Want to make something whole and comprehensive. Just always stalled.
Do I maybe not realize how much of it I have made.
-
Took the jeep to the car wash!
18
With these shred sheets it's such a groping. I'm still so new in it.
What do I need. Persistence because it's so hard I want to deke out. A narrative
frame? A way to think of the whole. It has to form in the matrix, not begin
as a dumb idea.
- all those god-grounds of being at the same time
20
I met Manuel Olguin at City Hall about teaching English to his Spanish-speaking
workers once a week for two hours.
23
a film called the air
a film called the day
a film called [something about Orpheus]
- Realizing a poem can be called a film.
The Kant paper where I found him using the same cognitive structure again
and again at different scales and in different contexts. Thinking of it
because working with the air materials I see myself doing that. I said it
in the Orpheus application: intuitions of structures homologous through
all the scales.
Am I doing this: it's a matrix: grain, air, body feeling, cortex, cosmos,
amnion, crystal, etc.
24
- Tietz and structural homology. When I went into the philosophy MA that
I needed to get to the doc there were a couple of required courses. One
was a Kant course with a man whose reputation in the department was of
being blind to female intelligence. I was coming off a Wittgenstein course
whose prof said don't use any secondary sources, just see for yourselves.
That suited me; it was the way I'd been working as an artist. Tietz was
a long-nosed German pedant without enough flex in his head to deal with
anything I wrote in that way so I was in trouble. I told him that to try
to do it his way I'd have to write about something I didn't care about
(don't think he understood that I was insulting him). In the paper I wrote
then I discovered something that seemed to me to be radical.
-
- What I felt I'd discovered was a cognitive structure - a shape of thought
- that Kant was using again and again at different scales and in different
contexts. That kind of noticing was diagnostic: I wasn't interested in
his epistemology, I was interested in his brain, and what I discovered
was that if I was seeing for myself I could see a brain with a structuring
habit that could be seen as the actual content of his philosophy.
I'm glad to have written it but my twenty possible readers will be glazing
over saying it's another of Ellie's posts they can't read.
25
Joost replied to it.
29
- Can I keep doing that. I was so buzzed after teaching that I couldn't
fall asleep. I had prepared. We had a good time. We laughed. Then even
after a couple of hours I was still so imprinted that on top of the usual
struggle to be comfortable I was hearing phrases quite loud - processing.
I could be generous and liked for it but was having to feel how much older
I am after this winter. Dry mouth has made my teeth suddenly much worse.
I struggle to walk. The two steps outside their back door were steep and
had no rail. I just stood and stared down at them until Eduardo gave me
his hand. - That: Eduardo walked me out and then Alejandro too. I loved
that they did that. I do feel in need of help. Yo soy una mujer vieja.
I say that a bit incredulously. Have been thinking I'd have to find a way
to exit if my head fails but now I'm wondering whether at some point physical
struggle will be more than I want to put up with. When I wake I have to
rub CBD cream on my knee so my first step won't hurt. When I work in the
garden for an hour I pay for days. Tylenol isn't working anymore so for
the last hours of my short nights I am hurting all over. There's constant
distress of being ugly. My teeth, my walk. I don't have social poise anymore,
I'm not fast enough to judge what to say, I have to just throw myself around
and then afterward wonder whether I was foolish. I'm going to post this
nice young photo because I like anyone to know it wasn't always like this.
Emilee was perfect.
at my desk now a second read with admiration
for your practical articulation of the impracticalities of aging
April 1
- Good textiles: Iraqi embroidered rug, red and white checkered quilt,
dress made of a soft old Pendleton blanket; and there's my yellow clog
shipped from London in a wicker chest. The whole has a sunny warmth given
by the street and textile details are positioned consciously in relation
to the body so it's coherent as a portrait of someone who is about where
she is.
-
- Photo Eton Street Vancouver August 1975
- eton st vancouver august 1975.jpg
Why be that explicit. Because I don't trust my readers and am deciding
to educate them. Would even Cheryl come to that thought? Don might twig
to something about aboutness.
5
Tonight Eduardo and Alejandro working in the garden with me. Alejandro
so beautiful. The first evening when he came into the room after the others
had assembled his face gave me a little shock. He's small, dark and what's
the word compressed? Eduardo is taller, has better English and looks more
available.
6
- Posted Logan's marvelous splash of praise today with the in english
index page.
-
- ellie,
-
- so, my number is light in me today and all
is swell. i taught field & field 9 to two classes in the discussion
of linebreak and the idea that the break is itself diction as you know
some were terrified on sight of your piece and others deeply madly in awe,
in hope, in lust without any sort of trust for language and those are my
hopeful people. one class was freshmen and the others a more senior class
of poets at Colorado State U.
-
- i think people either write out of a deep
trust for language or a deep distrust, a kind of embracing of the enemy.
i for one have little if any trust and that is itself trustful.
-
- i want to send you some stuff if it is cool?
-
- your stuff went over wonderfully, really awesome
being able to make students aware of the work I find important and putting
the works in the same house so they can interact, i learn so much from
that, understand the personality of language, or not understand, but witness.
Posting it flaunts but I don't care.
9
Last night when I asked what they liked to do when they were teenagers
Alejandro said he liked to dance. What kind of dance? He shimmied his shoulders,
salsa.
10
News yesterday that Goddard is done at the end of this term.
12
Today's post C's photo early morning May 1985 with newborn Rowen who
wasn't Rowen yet. I've cropped it. My linebacker shoulders and root-veined
hands with that tender face seemed monstrous though it's the monster I am.
Monster in the sense of chimera.
17
Not many years ago there lived in Bloomsbury
a woman who had a squarish hand, like a sensitive man's, rather square shoulders,
a thin mouth in which was no hardness, hair that was always blowing about,
and light-colored eyes that startled you by being so startled; and she chose
to wear a man's overcoat; and though she was educated, she had no traffic
with the schools, and though she was poor, she kept her rapt particular
faith in an obscure but existent good; and this woman, though few people
knew it then or know it now, was a great poet.
From Mew's obit in 1928. I've reposted for its lovely weave, now with
a photo.
18
When I'm into The air I want to be alive to finish it. I can see
I've been tracking it from Trapline on; in art it's my task. There's
been the other task, the philosopher's, the teaching clarifying wanting-to-clean-up
task that took over for many years. Would I have been as ready as I seem
to be now without those cleaning-up years?
-
My beautiful helpers did a lot - placed 5 hoses - Eduardo planted potatoes
and dug another long bed, Alejandro transplanted a cranesbill, a catmint,
4 sea hollies. They were heart-felt about Mouse's stone: I showed Alejandro
and he called Eduardo to tell him. While he threaded a hose through jungles
I'd sat down on a bucket and then couldn't get up so I had him watching
while I did it the only way I can, slowly from all fours, trusting him to
see it as a human circumstance not a personal disgrace.
23
Fifth English lesson yesterday. They want to play and show themselves
too. Eduardo is curious and funny, Alejandro brightens instantly. I told
them the story of Lonely Boy and they understood it and felt it.
Why do I hold back from Vicky. She's less intelligent than they are though
maybe only because she's had a woman's life. - Have I ever said how these
years I glomm onto young male bodies of the right kind whenever I see them?
The right kind being tall, light and properly triangular? It's an avidity.
It seems best privilege to me, to be a body so right in motion and action.
What does staring at them give me?
24
So sore last night I felt I won't have long. Woke a bit after 1am and
was lying there thinking is this the last summer I'll have the garden. Should
I be giving everything away. So much of my work will vanish when I die.
Will the films be all that's left. The air unfinished, Being about
and Work & days gone with my iPage account. Theory's practice.
The lake house photos. Pale Hill!
30
Class last night. Edgar is curious, eager, speechless, throws himself
forward wanting to ask, to tell, and having no words. His family, after
mass, would go to the market and have sopes, which he laboured to
describe. Alejandro last night was tired or bored but showed his family's
beautiful Dia de los Muertos altar. "Wind, fire, water, earth."
"Aztec, Maya?" "Aztec, Maya, Toltec, Olmec."
May 2
a certain rare moth fluttering along the edge
of the tide, just at the end of evening
our daily thought was certainly but the line
of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea
lace in the cortex, luminous sea and the lace of foam
3
Garden work yesterday. After an hour, Quitting time I say. Alex doesn't
understand. Time to stop. I offer them They offer their hot strong hands
to shake. Little by little Edgar tries to say.
9
The Na-khi scene returns us to the China and
Greece that form the core of the canto's stillness, the perspectiveless
luminosity that locates kosmos not in a transcendent otherness but within
itself.
"We have about us," Pound wrote in
1916, "the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe
of wood alive, of stone alive."
I can still adore her in those lines.
Remembering a moment climbing a slope with Jam, when she marveled that
I knew how to pick a route by sight because she didn't.
11
There's a sheet I'd called air story paragraphs. I was combing
it for bits and saw it's something in itself. About art attention maybe?
What to make of it a question I'm not asking now.
12
When I step outside these days the hit of warm scented air. Alex when
he'd been working twice said It's beautiful. He'd turned compost
and then we transplanted iris. The iris bed built last year this year coming
into small mauve and small dark purple now with white in bud, yellow and
blue to come.
13
Fires in Grande Prairie County, one at Teepee Creek and one 13km northwest
of Valhalla! Smoke encroaching from Fort Nelson.
18
Today's post:
- what is that floating in qualities of time
-
- blue in the room anytime, a blue with air in it
- maybe the white behind it floats through
-
- falling asleep reading this afternoon
- slipping into an air so fresh, young and particular
-
- is it memory registered in a sense I don't notice as such
- like a quality of air that is more than air
-
- something that pervades a person as their atmosphere
- a condition of sensing not a kind of sensing
- I say, this is how I was at another time
- I can't compare but I can recognize
-
- or sometimes I say I'm in another person
- maybe another person in another time
One red heart: Don! Does it mean he knows that sensation? Does anyone?
19
I solved that one just lately and quite casually.
Sunday morning. I've posted the Guardian's 3 degrees climate collapse
prediction. I have an ongoing wonder that my own fraying-out is coinciding
with this fraying-out of the liveable Earth. Does it mean that I'm dreaming?
Is there an actual real? I think there is but at the same time the coincidence
is so implausible - that Hell should be forming around me at the end of
my life. Do other people die into an improved blooming Earth? But if I'm
dreaming there are no other people. Meantime Patch warm at my shin and those
half-ruined trees across the street. Half-ruined since I came, and the church
too. Yikes. Have I ruined the beautiful world? But if I have there is no
actual world, only a phantasmic morality play with punishment at its end.
Insignificant punishment. There goes the stout yellow rain jacket with his
dog's white curly tail. Too much miscellany to be unreal. But is there a
relation of this doubt with my thing about air.
21
She so needs to be in the world. I love that she has her own purposes.
These days I understand that I've been a strong person, by which I mean
that from the beginning, against family, against community, against culture
I've believed myself.
24
I'd told Alex and Edga I'd make them French bread so had planned timing
for our whole Thursday; mix it when I wake, let it rise through the day,
take it out of the oven when they're here. Manuel wrote to say they had
to work extra hours and wouldn't come so I pushed the timing. When I took
off the heavy red lid there it was deep and round with a magnificent crack.
Cut a crusty heel when it was still hot. Butter melted. So good! I cut another
slice. Then another, this one with just a skim of honey. Put the rest of
the loaf into a paper bag and set it inside their door where they'd find
it when they got home. All of that a pleasure as if making bread for young
men who help me is something I need.
27
I'm into the pre-sorted sheets. A kind of effort I don't already know.
I have to test each line more than I have.
It as if gropes in an invisibility beyond me. How to find what honour
is in this kind of work. There I look up and see a spot of light through
the reflection of leaves on the window. Something that attracts beyond my
limits.
I'm attached to phrases, be careful of that.
It produces a state that has its own principles of decision.
There's what's true and there's what speculates
It's thinky in parts, does it have to be. I had wanted it to sing. Can
abstraction sing.
- Would you be able to help me with this yes
- Do you like it yes
- Have I done what I can today YES
Many little devices, many little dangers of bad taste.
30
Leuphana University, Lüneburg, which turns out to be near Hamburg
not Berlin. Embodied Correspondences. A practice-based seminar on improvisation,
Summer Semester 2024.
"Whole bodies are oriented and structurally
responsive to their environments, and whole persons, and not isolated internal
parts of persons, refer and are about things in those environments."
Christopher Weickenmeier will introduce four films by Ellie Epp.
Bitsy's usual jumble. I said I don't want you to talk about my work because
I don't think you understand it. She's fudged it by including me in her
usual miscellaneous heap. I don't understand a mind that tosses stuff together
under some grand heading without focus. It seems a cheat for purposes of
artist mystique. For me it's like being scribbled over with intent to destroy:
I made something clear and you've smudged it so it's nothing.
June 6
I believe the way to think about expansion of
the universe is that we are not expanding into a previously empty area,
but that the fabric of the imaginary grid in which we reside is expanding.
So the distance between grid squares is expanding, giving the illusion that
we are moving into 'new' space.
- Have just erased almost a page. Start again. Boxing Day evening, somewhere
say three-quarters through a life. Most of the day transcribing the last
of the complicated bookwork in that journal. It was teaching me most of
what I'd need to know but couldn't remember in the next how-many years
- five or six.
-
- Editing. Alright, editing. Some of it I know to keep or leave and some
I ask about. If it sez cut I do. What am I editing for - days, weather,
dear ordinary time.
-
- Yes but in the emotional work, am I telling a story and to whom? My
guess is that I'm showing myself finding the principles. I don't know how
many times to show that. It's very redundant. Is the dialogue interesting
in itself? There's conscious Ellie as straight person and the - not the,
but some - nonconscious being, the teacher, getting most of the interesting
lines. Is the dialogue supposed to be interleaved the way it came? Could
anyone read so much of it? I can't imagine the bulk there is, publishable.
-
- As it is the Tom story is turning out to be the Sufi ordeal, which
is interesting only as it gives the occasion for restructuring. I can actually
feel something having shifted there - can I - am not so identified with
hope and fear - though I can be taken with the pleasure of the fun. I don't
know whether that has to go. - See I don't even try to answer a question
like that any more. I mean I refer it to larger self. Ego knows more about
its limits.
-
- San Diego December 2003
I like the way it moves in light companionship with itself. Am guessing
it will be mostly for Don because won't he be the only one to have quested
for the limits of ego. I don't think the girls do. - That thing I've always
liked in Don, sore-hearted quest.
14
When they came I had to run around with them supervising. Edgar dug beautifully.
Alex and I planted the clematis Blue Bird amid Calif poppies against the
dead nectarine's trunk; the pink Itoh at the far end of the long edge; the
fig and its pot in a deep hole in the gravel. Luis hoed weeds in the empty
long bed so at the last moment we set out 6 squash plants. I sent them home
with strawberries, paeonies and mock orange. - All that and I went to bed
light and pleased but then woke at midnight in fiery all-over pain. I think
pain comes later at night that way when repair begins.
17
Will this be the last summer in my beautiful house. I've been looking
at the lovely order I've made of it over 8 years knowing it's doomed.
19
The blue mother-daughter photo taken in the Nikon's first weeks. Is it a better photo than I knew and what does it show the uncon seeing.
Their two blues, the mother's blue pale, soft and padded. The daughter armoured
in a solid much darker shade. The mother's soft, soft face. Is it helpless?
Defeated? The daughter is guarded and has turned her back. Her stance is
saying, I'm not going to be what she is. My own mother was not soft but
is the mother in me, the encapsulated early mother? Helpless, defeated?
It says yes.
I'm thinking Cheryl will be the only person who can see it, except if
some of the filmmakers who may or may not lurk - . I'll be sorry if no one.
It's true about the silence taught by a camera. I don't think I've seen
it said.
-
- In June I think of the light there'd be in our room when we were sent
to bed at eight. That far north June was the month of long, long evenings.
Judy and I slept together in an old iron bedstead, she next to the wall
so I was next to the room's only window, which was west-facing and double-hung.
Outside the window was a dank but narrow poplar bluff, which in winter
sheltered the house from west winds. The window's lower pane would be raised
enough to hold a folding mosquito screen, through which gold-shifted light
came flat through aspen trunks from a long horizon. What was it about those
evenings. I've often thought of the moment of lying awake in that light,
next to that window, the golden light, the frantic buzz of mosquitoes at
the screen, the live air. I didn't understand then that it was rare, only
around the year's solstice, that we had that completely unmentioned and
uncelebrated apex of year's aliveness.
-
- I don't have it yet. What don't I have. Judy was next to me but on
my dark side so it is as if I was alone with the window. I knew it was
spectacular, I remember it in the way I remember times that are something
in a completely private way. It was the time of year around solstice, when
the sun sets far in the northwest and not till almost midnight. It was
the mile of flat open land behind the bluff, so light could come through
trees at a low angle. It was the way light colour-shifts toward yellow
when its does a low-side slide from a distant horizon. I didn't know any
of those reasons but I felt it as It's the mild live air through an open
window. It's the sharp, moving whine of mosquitoes at the screen. It's
all of that under my grandma's pink cotton quilt, the dipping springs of
that bashed old bed. It's being away from our parents with the door closed,
being more conscious. After the dark winters, going to bed in the dark
in a cold room, it meant consciousness, it was as if a time that was consciousness
itself. It was being lit, me, myself, wonderfully, intensely lit. Did Judy
feel it? Do other people up north feel it? It needed a west window open
but screened. It needed me to have taken the outside of the bed as my right.
It needed country space so we never had blinds or curtains. Miles of country
quiet with no houses within a mile in any direction.
21
- After our hour of garden work last evening - eight o'clock - strawberries
and fresh bread ready for them to take home - Alejandro and Edgar sitting
on the steps with me - Edgar said it was the first day of summer. Solsticio
Alex said. We were feeling it really was that. I said I'd made the steps
wide for just such a time, said it more than once in different ways but
don't think they understood. I give them runs of sentences we don't pin
down. They may seize a word or two, I don't know. Invent gestures, "poppyseeds,
black, small," dot-dot-dot with my forefinger on my palm.
-
- It was a lovely moment. They could see their work amid my colours and
I could feel their pleasure in real life away from sawmill workdays and
dark basement. They're eager with me, have Mexican good manners, offer
their warm brown hands when they arrive and when they say goodbye. - Oh
Alex's radiant black-eyed smile. Edgar as if bows over my hand. I'm their
honoured old woman, which is alright to be and which I am nowhere else.
I'll make them some strawberry jam.
23
Yesterday 6 half-pints of quite delicious strawberry jam. Lemon juice,
honey, bit of vanilla.
July 6
I believe the way to think about expansion of
the universe is that we are not expanding into a previously empty area,
but that the fabric of the imaginary grid in which we reside is expanding.
So the distance between grid squares is expanding, giving the illusion that
we are moving into 'new' space.
8
A week into July roses all over the house. Queen of July Molineux with cilantro.
10
This morning watching myself creep down the porch steps with stick in
my right hand and rail in my left I thought of Buddy Hardy almost blind
in the tube.
- Buddy Hardy an old woman I first saw one wet night struggling onto
a Northern Line carriage with a paraffin heater. She was thin, frail and
very nearly blind; and came in looking so remarkably alive that I moved
to sit next to her. We both got off at Kentish Town and stood talking at
the bus stop. She was South African, had been a midwife there and had been
banned for labour organizing; lived further up Highgate Hill in the tall
old council building overlooking the cemetery.
-
- After that I'd run into her sometimes shopping on Swain's Lane at the
foot of the hill. There was a day meeting in the fruiter's doorway she
asked me suddenly if I was pregnant. She couldn't see me and I was only
about a month gone - I'd barely found out myself - so by what subliminal
sense could she have known?
-
- She invited me to tea in her council flat and we'd sometimes talk on
the phone. One day I took her up into Highgate to show her an unlocked
empty house I'd found in a vast overgrown garden. A few days later she
rang to tell me she'd gone back on her own to pick some bluebells. Two
dogs had come snarling at her from next door. "I couldn't see them
of course but from the sound of them they were as big as Great Danes. Just
by chance I began to sing and that held them until I could feel my way
to the wall. I couldn't find the gate so I climbed up onto it. But then
I couldn't see how far it was down to the pavement so I hung on until two
children came by. I handed them the bluebells and said 'Take these and
help me down!'"
-
- London 1970
-
Isn't Wollerton Old Hall the most exquisite rose, first because it's
a very pale blush pink and second because it's a semi-double so its outer
petals curve around an open center like the most delicate of shells.
15
The white Paris nightgown. I hadn't remembered it till I wrote it but
now I can see it again, its short simple prettiness, the thinness of its
cotton. Remembering it gives me something back. Was I wearing it when Luke
was born? Now I've remembered a ribbed long-sleeved purple jersey too. The
quality of those Paris clothes better than anything I'd had. What I mean
is how femme I was. With it I'm remembering my loveliness rather than Roy's
malice, the agonies that femme loveliness made me vulnerable to.
-
Two days ago there were no out of control fires on the Kamloops list.
Today there are 7, one of them 5 km northeast. The run of days in the 90s
is continuing at least for another week.
16
I didn't cool the house past 83 degrees and was thrashed by this night.
-
Last evening pushing my students through simple verb conjugation exercises.
I, you, he/she/it, we, they. Make up a sentence for the verb TO BE using
each person. Alex for you: You are a beautiful woman. I guessed
he meant it. !!! Thank you! Next person, he. I flashed in,
He is beautiful too. He got it and took it. Yesterday so beautiful
all up and down, beautiful light straight man shape, brown bare arms in
a sporty bright turquoise singlet. I'm grateful he takes care to be what
I can love to see.
19
July a nervous month. Every day temperatures into the high nineties. First thing in the morning and through the day check the fire map. Check wind direction. There’s a fast-traveling fire south of Ashcroft. [Photo widely republished but I can't find an attribution.]
22
Biden quit yesterday, relief, Harris likely.
Lot of wind this aft, is Ashcroft alright.
It's cooler. Living through the many hot days in a row I was a mole prostrate
in a burrow, Patch stretched on the floor. Sunday is said to have been the
entire world's hottest day ever. Then Monday again.
24
- "there is the subtler music, the clear light"
-
- "I say my soul became translucent"
-
- - Very early Pound in an overwrought poem already in love with air.
-
- "the reality of the nous, of mind,
of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass
that envelops us, full of light"
-
- no cloud, but the crystal body
- the tangent formed in the hand's cup
- as live wind in the beech grove
- as strong air amid cypress
-
- Kenner likes that but I don't think he understands the intuition it
evokes - prebirth and cortical and cosmological all at the same time -
numinous - all those god-grounds of being at the same time.
-
- December 2019
- Hugh Kenner 1973 The Pound era
That for no one but me. God-grounds of being.
-
Big salmon from Kathy.
26
Alex in the evening. The garden was wet but I wanted the dry poppy stocks
cleared. Had made bread and gave him half - I make good bread, hard crust
and moist inside, flavoured by the half cup of whole wheat. And salmon and
cucumber and potatoes he dug, onions, a sweet pea. We're less easy without
Edgar whose eager heart brightened us all.
29
- A vivid very early memory from sitting around the radio on a Sunday
evening in summer. The memory is vivid because a song came on that hit
me with a revelation, the revelation was that there could be a song that
wasn't a church song, that was a love song and had things in it about the
actual world. The song was When it's springtime in the Rockies.
August 6
- Deep in a vegetable row weeding. A sound - it's nearby - sniffing?
Snuffling? Lift my head above tall filipendula to look. Dog! Nice dog,
calm dog. Not a small dog. Has a collar. Nibbling something? Velvety grey-brown,
kind of a square head, Labradorish? - But Patch, where's Patch? There:
up on the porch. Next to the open door, lying comfortably on her paws.
Our eyes meet. Hers say yes she's seen him. For now she's staying where
she is.
7
I inset it to say it's not journal though I wrote it here. It's composed,
has a composed sound, and is now posted.
9
- At 5 this Sunday morning I was outside in the dark front yard. Heard
light footsteps, two people walking west in the middle of the street. They
came past, an Indio Mexican couple, very small, he slender and white haired.
We looked at each other.
-
- Borrego Springs September 2013
People liked nice dog, calm dog.doc but not sunday 5am.doc.
What was it I didn't convey properly. The supernatural smallness of the
pair, the lightness of their footsteps in the dark, their being Indio in
a town of large old whites. Their walking west in the middle of the street
- where would they be going at 5 in the morning? When we looked at each
other it was for me like an encounter with ancestral people or ghosts or
brujos, the visionary people I'd see when I slept in the hills, and this
happening at a time when earth is dark and sky's colour is deeply stained
with black.
- People would have to have seen Mexican Indios, how small they are,
how that smallness makes them seem to be of another time.
10
Three fires nearby, west, southwest, south.
11
Today I'm nailing down the part they'll have glided past.
- I've wanted to find someone I can ask about what used to happen in
California, not often and only when I was camping in the wilds by myself.
As I was fading into sleep I'd very briefly and without any sort of inner
language 'see' a native person or persons, a kind of seeing always with
the same visual quality like black velvet painting, bright edges against
dark.
-
- Here are some instances from journal records.
-
- - The first time sleeping by a stream in the Sweetwater Mountains.
"It's as if logistic care was holding my thoughts so they didn't soften.
There was a moment though when they did and I saw a man facing me at a
distance - maybe Mexican, not of this time I think."
-
- - Sleeping in the jeep in chaparral country near the border, "I'm
nearly falling asleep but I see four Mexicans standing on the road, men
and women in a sort of lit darkness as if I have night vision."
-
- - Another night sleeping in the jeep near Warner Springs: "On
the ridge at night boxed into my slightly too short cozy bed I saw a Mexican
Indio man in the brown uniform of a second world war soldier walking past,
a serious young man."
-
- - Again: "Last night I also 'saw' a man walking toward the oak
flats holding a little boy's hand."
-
- Once after driving all day - this in northern California I think -
I saw just a face looking at me. It seemed as if it might have had something
to do with a raised crossroads I'd passed earlier in the many miles.
-
- Are there traces of people left in landscapes, is that possible?
-
- Letter March 2018
Some of Le Guin's Always coming home people see in what might
be this way, people passing through the Valley in or from an earlier time.
Does it mean she saw this way?
What else do I know. They have always been Mexican/Indio people, which
I suppose the Valley people would be too.
12
plant volatiles
Therese Bugnet reblooming. It's a simple rose, not like my English-aristocrat David Austins, but its scent reminds me of the wild roses that bloomed in ditches and woodland where I grew up. Their bushes were quite spindly and never tall but their perfume was intense. I now find that our Alberta wild rose was in fact one of Therese Bugnet's parents. A French emigrant living in a town near Edmonton developed it – assembled it? – about 1945 by crossing a Russian double-flowering wild rose with the single-flowering r.acicularis: “Many years ago I began using the pollen of a local native rose upon r. rugosa kamtchatica.”
About the scent: standing in the grass on our farmyard one spring there was a small wooden room that in winter would be placed on sleigh runners to protect passengers from the cold. Its door opened from the back and there was a built-in bench along one side. I was using it as a playhouse – this would have been before I went to school and before my sibs were old enough to play with - and one day had collected a lot of wild roses to decorate it. Here one of the moments that last, standing in that little room now filled, filled, with the scent of roses. Pleased to have told another of the early moments that now seem to tell me I was what I am from the beginning. When it’s Springtime in the Rockies. Have there been others.
-
Today Sue's haunting portrait of a young seal she knows - a seal she knows, meaning one-to-one over time. I was afraid she'd
mind that I'd posted it. When she wasn't my eyes sparked.
15
I love this. Barefoot in their living room, as if they do it whenever
they like. She looks like a dancer and he looks like a construction worker,
which makes his on-the-beat looseness in that comfy big body so sexy.
20
Last night was dark when the class stopped at eight. Nights are cold.
The hollyhocks are knobs on stems. Will tomatoes ripen? Maybe not.
22
Thursday evening.
I gave Alex yellow tomatoes, green beans, apples and yellow roses and he
dug himself potatoes. He exclaims with every potato he finds.
24
Slashing rain yesterday afternoon, wonderful. It's wet this morning too,
at 4am open the door onto shining black.
O'Keeffe in the 1968 Life photos must be 79 - b.1887, d.1986,
photos 1966 John Loengard.
Found that because I thought to post the photo of Maggie, which took
me to December 1975, the collages.
25
- My journal for the months with Maggie is so wrong I can't stand to
read it but the photo is clear and true.
28
- When I was two and a half my parents still had a big dog called Bingo.
I don't remember Bingo but here I am holding onto his scruff.
-
- Our little house stood on a ridge that gave us a long view across a
lake to a mirroring ridge two miles away. Our short lane climbed north
from the ungraded dirt road we took to town. Across this road was a strip
of fenced grass where my dad kept cattle, and beyond the grass was the
deep rim of willow brush that ringed the lake. Cattle going to water had
made paths under the willows but it wasn't possible to follow these paths
all the way to the lake: they ended in mud worked into a mess of deep hoof
prints.
-
- One morning my mom had been busy with something and then couldn't find
me. Didn't know what to do, my dad was away somewhere, should she run the
mile up the road to get his father to help her search. She thought of Bingo,
said to him Find Ellie. He ran down the lane and across the road into the
willow brush. She was beginning to follow, saw me emerging with him.
-
- When she told the story she said I must have gone looking for my dad.
That was her sort of fairy tale. I'd guess I went looking for the lake.
In later years I'd often dream that zone of shining water ringed by impenetrable
brush. It had mythic valence I began to understand.
-
- La Glace Alberta sometime in 1947
Began to write it at bedtime last night and cleaned it up this morning.
What I like in the photo is the way the little scrap is being witty, holding
the dog's hand the way her mom is holding hers. Much more could be said
about what 'mythic valence' means but better for the moment to leave it
as suggestion. 'Fairy tale' prepares it.
29
Alejandro so beautiful all up and down, straight, slight and strong.
The night I met my class for the first time I startled when he came in late,
instantly shy, I hadn't expected beauty, distinction. A Mexico City man
running a market stall with his wife, late marriage, fifteen year old step-daughter,
eight year old son, a wife he says is sweet, he doing what Mexicans do, working
hard, sending money. Bracero life but now with constant presence on the
phone. With me grateful, "You garden, you house, you person, you fruits,
potatoes, you flowers, you bread"; concerned about me in the heat,
"Anytime".
30
- Stark black 5am, look crescent moon in the middle pane. I've posted earned my fantasy by faithfulness in reality.doc, a naked declaration
and to whom.
-
- When I go into the DM story noticing how it assembles an ideal lover from moments with real lovers and notes made. There's some myth hovering,
is it in the Mabinogian, the woman made of flowers?
-
- -
-
- When I couldn't fall asleep last night I was looking for something
to imagine. I was groping for what he could be that is wide open in sex
and yet manly-mature. I wanted to imagine two people for whom sex could
be the underlying fabric of all. Was thinking DM has a composer's sense
of shaped events, skills of delay and improvisation. They'd find themselves
in spaces like Niblock's or Manning's music, able to know they were there
together among dark masses moving slowly, textures overlaid, gestures like
white flares. Then in their daily life they'd be peaceful and quiet together
because they'd been there and could be again. He'd be at his desk bringing
it into music.
-
- It's funny I hadn't realized what I'm working on about sound is also
about sex.
September 3
- 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.
4
Suppertime I look into the garden and see an antlered deer under the
Whitney eating
fallen apples.
5
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!
-
- 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
12
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.
19
Found a greengage plum on the ground. Then another. Two: the whole crop. Delicious.
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.
29
Irish exit - yah, what I do.
October 5
I've posted the embodiment studies reply to Juliana's letter about methodology.
It's very clear. 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.
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.
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.
-
- -
-
- 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
-
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.
Have been meaning to mention that I'm somehow better looking these days.
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.
- 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.
-
- 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
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.
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.
29
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.
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.
November 1
Wet snow when I woke.
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.
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.
17
How to live through the coming years of male brutishness triumphant.
I've studied that.
20
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.
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.
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.
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.
December 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.
8
"Yo' garden, yo' house, yo' bread, yo' ... life." Alejandro.
They said lively. 2024 those six months of loving generosity.
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.
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.
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