| time remaining 2 part 2 - 2015 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
June 12 Loose Bay Campground Before sunrise. Cold. I go to fetch water at the washhouse with the green blanket around my shoulders. Three French kids and a red-faced man with frizzed red hair holding a beer, already drunk. He was just passing by on his way home to the res he says. Nonstatus. There's a trailer park. "Do you like to garden? I have a huge garden. I have 250 animals. You should come see." "I will but not today, I have things to do." "What do you have to do?" "It's complicated to explain." "I've got a university degree, try me." I start in about the gallery. "You don't know who you're talking to, I've got paintings all over the world. I'm Mark Yates, you haven't heard of me?" "I've been teaching, I haven't been paying attention." "I haven't been paying attention either." After almost 200 years we can say that the USA was designed to fill the world with poverty - whilst giving it the name of Freedom. The United States empire is the greatest threat which exists in the world today. Chavez quoted by Berger What is it about Berger. From A to X. 2008. He's bold to say the sort of thing he says above but what makes me uneasy. A false sense of significance, some tone, something I don't want along with something I do. It's like what I don't follow in South American poets, that feels like lying, a literary pose. There are a lot of spiders. Some are inside the tent, one last night on the page when I was reading by lantern light. It must have been a spider bit me two nights ago on my hand, a painful bite whose pain spread to three fingers. Next day no sign of it. The wind this morning is so cold. Everyone's standing around in heavy jackets. I think they're waiting for their ride. The blue tarp seems to have ripped. Thick clouds moving in from the northeast. I don't know what to do. It's too cold and chaotic to read in my chair. The library doesn't open till noon today. Last afternoon wind bursts so violent I was scared in the tent. The pine raved above me, the tent flapped and gasped. I bring home poetry books or books about poetry and don't latch on, they aren't what I want. Tried Fish's book about sentences again. Can't stand him. He quotes a paragraph of Mrs Dalloway, instantly at home. Anthology collected out of 100 years of Poetry magazine. No Olds, no Jorie Graham. I roam through it unhappily starting and stopping. Give it up. This morning there's no wind but it's still cold. How can it be so cold. Last night I was lying in bed feeling the day had been the worst here. The wind, the cold, a worse idleness, a sore throat, and then at night the hard stupid excited voices of young men drinking beer around their fire much too near. The sun is beginning to lift over the Russian olives. It's a bit warm. I like to live with blackbirds. Yesterday a hummingbird hovering by the jeep's window. This early it's the bird's field. At the flea market leaving after breakfast to put my laundry in the dryer, there suddenly in a cramped corridor between rows of junk spread on tables a radiantly beautiful person, a face like none I've seen in years, a young African man shining, shining, alit. I see him, I catch sight of him and smile into his eyes and he sees me smile and lights up brighter still. 14 I woke in the dark from a dream in which I'd walked through tall grass with an older man and we'd come to an opening where a heron flew up. We could see its nest on low branches wide and twiggy. I showed the man how the heron moves by shimmying on the spot. Woke to jungle drums from the southern acres. It was 3:30. The 3:30 bird began above me. The jungle drums are still going. I'm waiting for my tea. The sky is delicately pale in all its ordered directions. It's cold. There's a big RV with sliders and small windows. It's Sunday. - Powerful clouds build themselves over the hill wall to the east. Massive solid cumulus that stand there through the afternoon like a ridge above the ridge. Over that way is the plateau I don't want anything to do with because I suspect it's wet and cold and thickly forested. There's just this slot that's right, not exactly right but maybe as right as I can get. It's easier than it was to get in and out of the tent. Gabriel asked to friend me. Eastern kingbird - white front, white band outlines the end of the tail. Momentary bluebird on a silver branch next to the sky. It's maybe quarter to five. Pink flush on a western hill, one of the uninteresting ones (wooded uniformly). A high mist lit white over the eastern ridge. There are birds that fly in long loops saying chut as they fly. My meadow's quickly going to seed. So many kinds of spiders. Very small yellow one. This one just now with long legs and a small body. Blackbirds making short flights to land on swaying twigs of weed. Last evening I was sitting in the jeep exceptionally peaceful looking around with the binocs. I looked at the distant rock face, at the white-haired man gazing next to his RV, and then I got into the meadow beside me. The binocs' shallow depth of field made a marvelous place of it, I'd pull focus a titch and see fine-line branching structures with sharpening bits of lovely color - purple, yellow, white - and with what seemed a lot of space between them. It was as if space had opened wider, as if I'd got depth vision back after I'd lost it. Here's the dawn breeze says Tom. It's suddenly colder. The sun is about to come up just there in the notch. - Hey a coffeehouse - My photo samples arrived and there was a smart woman in the post office who said try Cawston or Keremeos.
What I like is the cadence. Why does it feel Greek. Snapdragon, baby's breath, brown-eyed Susan / gallardia, yarrow. She said good people in Cawston.
Etc. Wd need to have something to say. - As I was leaving she said "We'll talk again" just as I was saying "See you next time." It was a story of how things work out because I just am who I am. The man at the counter was useless, I gave him my tracking number and he said "There's nothing there." He tried again. "There's nothing there." He looked in a drawer. He looked in a rolling bin of packages that had come in this morning. She was the other person at the counter and I was thinking maybe better to ask a woman. I kept quietly pushing so he finally went and called out his supervisor, who said "Did you try 'search for package'." Just as they were finding it in the system the first woman edged over and mouthed "What's your name" and reached into the bin and held up my package. As I was about to leave - I'd unpacked it and started to look at the strips - she said "Did you get what you were expecting?" I'd liked the look of her so I took up what seemed her invitation and told her about the gallery in Germany and printer in Toronto. Where in Germany? Karlsruh'. She corrected my pronunciation - Karlsruhe - and I was realizing she had a slight accent. "You're German." When I'd seen her another day in the library and at first sight in the post office what I noticed was her hair, which was exceptionally thick and quite long, folded up behind her head, silver at the front and was it blond at the tips, but now I was seeing her eye to eye and noticing it was a good face, alert, with a wide intelligent mouth. I could see she was taking me in too. Two small dark birds up in the pine who utter the loveliest small gushes of water. It's no good this writing every little thing down but I'm all day with nothing to do and no one to talk to and often nothing to read. It's senile decay or else temporary. At times it helps me see. Horrible bulldog-face Bloom hates Pound and adores hard brainy poets like Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. He doesn't include Coleridge's conversation poems! He says smugly "any distinction between poetry written by women and poetry written by men is a mere polemic, unless it follows upon an initial distinction between good and bad poetry," missing the gigantic point that he may not be in a position to judge the goodness or badness of women's poetry unless it's like men's or else is Emily Dickinson. He'd likely dismiss Olds. His name on the cover is bigger than the title. He keeps pronouncing what is better than what as if he's god. He chose the 1850 Prelude over the 1805!! which how could anyone. "Rhetorically superior." What?? If I had anything else to read I wouldn't be mentioning him. That small sullen man walks all around like a madman with a phone to his ear rapping in harsh Quebecois. He's the one who yesterday aft asked me to help him set up his tent because he was too drunk to figure it out. The mighty land yacht is pulling in its protuberances getting ready to roll on. A white-haired man in shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt is looking after those manly tasks while a dark-haired equally round-tummied woman in shorts and a sleeveless blouse is standing helpfully nearby or maybe will make them a bit of dinner while the generator's on. They better not forget the sat dish on their roof or they won't have TV tonight. What'll it be, golf for him, and the 9 o'clock news. She'll write an email to her daughter and tell Facebook what they did today. The other morning Martin - Martan - who's small and wired and has a couple of missing teeth in his lower jaw - was telling us in very fast broken English how his mushroom-picking season went. You go to areas where there was a forest fire last year. They like half sun - sun in the morning, shade in the afternoon. Places with moss. If there's a fallen tree on the ground you'll find a whole row of them. There were too many people this year. Why is there suddenly the smell of resin, has the sun touched one of the weeping spots on the trunk. 17 Yesterday I was up by four, sitting around, restless. Knew the library wouldn't open till 9:30. Was checking email outside it by 7, what to do, rode up over the mountain, Fairview Road after it turns into a dirt road and tunnels through forest for 20 km, steep up past little chalets on ridges, steep down, then suddenly opening onto sagebrush slopes above Cawston, faceted hard-rock cliffs, farms below. Keremeos in early morning. I look in through the window of the Keremeos Register (3-bedroom house for rent $625 including utilities). Drive back to Oliver on 3A. Narrow green valley, pretty but too narrow, Olalla, some tight corners around lakes, Kaledan. Turn south on 97, Okanagan Falls, Vaiseaux Lake. Then I round Mcintyre Bluff and Oliver's valley opens wide. Have to deal with picking photos and then loading them onto Dropbox. Afterward the Medici, I want soup. Garlic potato. Take a limone cone to find the cemetery, which is large enough for many more dead people than it has and not as pretty as it should be, given that it's up against the dry flank of the mountain. There's a horrible innovation, a rock pile meant to hold dumped ashes. Hideously scattered all over it are plastic flowers. Irrigation was arcing on a section near the entrance. A deer paused on a lower slope. As I left the cemetery to take Willowbrook home a quail family, him and her and six chicks with their tiny legs twinkling, dashing for cover under a hedge. Last night a brief storm. We saw it coming, the sky was grey-curtained toward the southwest. A wide half-rainbow across the southeast, faintly doubled and also it seemed beginning to repeat along its inner edge. Then brief rough wind, then a thin hard scatter of large drops, then wind again. I'm noticing rain comes like that here, in a parenthesis of hard-gusting wind. So many tents here and no two alike. The grape rows outside the fence, as well as the fenceline itself, have since yesterday had water drops falling from black hoses running along wires 18" above the ground. Keith said Covert Farms belongs to a widow in her sixties who has her own airplane as well as holdings in other countries. She picked him up once when he was walking to Oliver. They had a good time together he said. She hires Mexicans, I don't know how. One of them drives past just the other side of the fence in an old truck. We wave hello. I like to see him because he's like home. 20 Royal Excursion Classic. He's friends with his banker and his doctor. [My brother Paul.] He paid alimony for 20 years. He knows family history and stays in touch with aunts and uncles and cousins. He's read. Bought and sold houses. Started and maintained businesses. Had lovers of many kinds. Done acid every weekend through a whole winter when he was fresh off the farm. Looks after his old mother. Teaches and runs a department. Learned tango. Survived a crash because he was driving an Audi. Married and divorced twice. Fathered two children. Learned to deal with depression. Has contracted to write a book. Publishes articles. Lives in the cultural centre of Canada and knows all sorts of important people. Still wants to impress me I think. I still support him as I used to. He still doesn't consider I might need support.
If I'd been less available - kept more distance - how wd I have been different. Did I say anything new, was there any moment, where anything was new? The visit with Gabriel, the two of them being witty with each other in a way they aren't with me. - Black Sage Road was best, standing at the far end together looking west over the marsh, driving Black Sage Road seeing more together than I'd seen alone. The moment when I asked "Did you see your son" and he said "I saw your son too." Eating beautiful food together off his beautiful German plates the first night. Yellow, green and red with chips of white feta and specks of black pepper. As I was opening the door to the ice cupboard in Super-Value yesterday there was the post office woman sticking her head back into the exit door saying how's your house-hunting going. I said would she have lunch with me sometime. She said she'd love to. I said I'd see her Monday. "Nina" she said. It's Saturday and the Royal Excursion Classic has rolled cautiously out of Loose Bay Tabernac. Louche Bay said Greg. I didn't like that he wouldn't comment on my grasslands house. He's stingy that way. Nnedi Okorafor Who fears death 2010 Nigerian. Some ways in I realized she was rewriting the Christ story with an African half-caste woman as the sacrificial saviour, rewriting the Great Book. - AV Miller Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit 1977. Hegel as panentheist - meaning we can equal the idea of G with the idea of the whole of the universe, not that any part of the universe 'is G' in itself. Young Hegelians taking him on in his call to progress, "a world in which the opposition between individual and society would be overcome, a rationally organized world, a world of genuine freedom." - The show: images he wants to use: the meeting, red leaves, little weed, fox fire, snow claw, house dark, red trunks, Schmidt's bench, doubled flame, stone book, fox face, lettuce blue, virga grass, taillights, frost fence. Not half tree, not the hawk, blond stone. I like that he's chosen most of the more spooky/shamanistic/mythic ones. I think frost fence may not be right, maybe frost hole instead. I think half tree and the hawk fit thematically. The photos wd be better with field & field though I like that he likes winter interference.
21 Solstice. Brutal wind last night. I have to have faith in my tree and my tent. The weather here is so inconstant. I don't yet understand what makes the wind so lumpy. Is it the unevenness of the ridges? It's been a philosophical quest but it hasn't been about reason, it's been about clarity. The notion of reason has been seriously wrong. If the thesis has been superstition or myth and the antithesis reason, then is the synthesis clarity understood comprehensively as an organization of bodies? They would say scientific method understood to include observation. A clear statement is a statement that can be recognized as such. Clarity is a talent quite other than logic. Translate forms/eidos as template? - Woke at two and looked out at rather muzzy stars. Back into sleep some hours later then woke again from yelling in a library. I began wanting to ask whether I could get a local card using Loose Bay as my address. There began to be a whole collection of stupid women saying I could only use interlibrary loan if I were blind or dumb or in some other way damaged. They suggested a list of courses I could take. I yelled I HAVE A PHD I DON'T NEED A COURSE. I yelled that all their novels were stupid. Keith Swimm the Nova Scotia fisherman said to his daughters so long as your grades are good I'll keep paying. "Oh the fishing was good. We caught a halibut eight feet long." 23 Post office test strips. Library to write Jacob about them and charge the powerbook. Super-value parking lot to drain the cooler and put in a new block of ice. A&W for a mamaburger without a bun. Information Centre to walk to the riverbank - canal bank - reading and eating delicious fries. 24 Saturday evening. Scent of pine smoke. Ivan said some of the tents would be gone after St-Jean-Baptiste and that has happened, a quieter yard. I've been a bit away since Paul was here. Not looking, not writing. Is it because I didn't want to write about him. He was wearing soft clothes, a loose grey t-shirt that lay easy over his spilling soft belly. I noticed that, and the way he walked and the doubling of his chin under his whiskers, and the way the tip of his lengthening nose droops some. The day after he left, and since, I've heard again the way he said of M "She's a fine-looking woman." He said it twice, in a tone that's made me realize the romance isn't all on her side, as he's been saying. Against that some reverb of the disgust I feel for Mary. It's come back through the days and nights, not heavily, in a smudged way, what it meant when she said "You are no longer the one who ...." That she didn't defend me, that she dumped me when I wasn't taking care of her anymore, trying to make up for her lacks, that she didn't like my strong spirit, didn't defend it, didn't love it. What Joyce said, "Your parents were duds, your mother more than your father I think." Her rage when I burned the photo - that she didn't ask what was happening for me, was only furious for herself. I fought that battle well - I was willing to know - I forced it - "I saw it right away, that the picture was gone." But already years before, in London, it had exhausted me to be with her. That meant something. I'd begun to have a horror of her. The sun's coming in low from the west, coloring the pines in front of me. It's not a strong light but it has a noticeable color. Is it the color I saw over the valley from Black Sage Road, a bit grayish. The way when I showed her my slides that I'd won with so much bravery and discipline she could only be afraid of what Ed would say when she had to tell him I was pregnant. The way when I gave her a story to read she said "What I know is not in it" rather than thinking what it was for me. Had I become the mother who was only impatient with her? I'd been her good mother and then I went away.
There's still sun on the mountain at 8:16. This morning I was reading in my chair. A little agricultural machine was going by on the other side of the fence. Stopped just past me. A firm man's voice said "Do you smoke?" "No. Absolutely not." "Okay then." Drove off. I said 'absolutely not' to let him know I knew why he was asking. Lot of dead grass between me and the wire. Choosing photos with Jacob. I've been so discouraged about those images that I'm hardly daring to hope his sponsoring them isn't a fluke. I feel I'll never be able to do anything as good again and they've been invisible, for instance in London, and anywhere. What would have been different if they'd been taken up when I made them? Could I have gone on at that level? It ways no. Emilee in Switzerland finding too much talk of magic, soul and spirit. I said we always have to be smarter than our teachers. The library has put out a lot of Canadian fiction ahead of Canada Day next week. The bishop's man was good. Will likely give up on The polished hoe, go back to A fine balance. The birth house was ingratiating feminist junk with a stupidly written villain and a perfectly happy ending, best-seller says the cover. 25 Ashamed not to be reading better - I have to start digging down now. - In the laundromat mirrors I'm brown and lean enough and like my hair but there are gouges under my eyes from not sleeping well enough. Decided the text pages should be the size of my journal. Thought that wd make sense to Jacob and it did. David Adams Richards in this book - 2014 - and others - has been ranting about universities and god and feminists in a way that makes him seem to be losing it. He sounds like his cranky ignorant villagers on those topics. Bitter in his outsideness, making generalizations based on personal slights. There was love in his earlier books. This one has - pity? - but not fondness. The bishop's man written by a Toronto intellectual not a country boy gave me a sense of even-handedness: what I'm seeing is a rectangular surface with short lines sloped at different angles distributed all over it. Admirably distributed judgments. Lonnie knew this about human nature: that they who pretend friendship often want most to destroy the luck you have and take it for themselves. And yet he's writing about something important, betrayal and its consequences. I immediately think of Olivia and Judie - me with Frank - betrayals sometimes more accidental than not and yet there's the pre-betrayal of envy and jealousy and covetousness. Richards is writing about sin in fact. But look at the roughness of his photo. It's a belligerent mouth and angry little eyes - at least one of them is. Evan now thought that the condition he most wanted to win back was his luck. It had been a condition of such easy lightness when he'd had it. How had it gone from him? Who had taken it away? If anyone wrote Rudy's story it would be like this one. Crooked lives of misfortune. Something else I'm thinking is that the one time I set out in deliberate war - what I did to get Trudy out of the house - I didn't actually harm her. I don't understand why he has the narrator be a professor who tells the story to his students. It's so implausible it makes him seem stupid. Presumably if he teaches his own books he has those kinds of conversation but a sociologist wouldn't. Another thing is that he seems to make disaster follow from sin, whereas disasters happen both with and without sin. I don't understand his special pleading for the idea of god. It seems unaccountably weak of him. Paul said Rudy had to be what he became to live where he is and had no option but to live where he is. I don't believe that in the way he does. I believe it's possible to choose to be a clean man anywhere. Maybe not possible for Rudy, I don't know. I feel contempt for him though, as if it had been possible. Accountability is what Richards is trying to be about. It can't be accountability in the old sense, ie moral accountability that assumes people can choose other than they do, other than they are. It's the tying-across sense of seeing how consequences propagate. As for Rudy my contempt is a judgment that he is what he is and I don't want anything to do with him. 27 Evening, evening. It's cooler. The moon's filling, there it is at noon's position - there it was - showing through thin cloud. There were a few spots of rain, enough to raise a scent of hay. Shinya Hamada is sitting at a picnic bench carving a small white piece of pine. Behind him the metal roof of the washhouse is shining like brightest silver under sky a bit darkened with possible storm. A cloud above me is reflecting light onto this page - quite a pretty, quiet, diffused light that's bringing up the color of blue shirt and brown arms. When I was in the library a young woman came to the table where I was and sat across from me staring at her phone. She was thin, had a lot of tattoos on her bare arms. A narrow pale face with deep perfectly clean eyelids and a smart carefully cut mouth. She had a farouche look given partly by the torc she was wearing, that looked like an ivory tusk, but also by her bearing, which was a bit autocratic, disinterested. Her earrings had butterflies swinging at the ends of fine chains. Her hair was shaved at the sides and rose in a longish strip over her forehead. Thin brown shoulders. She sometimes would speak to a young woman at the carrel behind me in a language I didn't understand. Her fingernails were dirty. She read something on her phone and exclaimed, threw her head to the side to exclaim. I found her startlingly beautiful. Just wanted to stare. After a while noticed that the tattoo on the inside of her right forearm was a diagram of a molecule. I asked her what molecule it was. She said oxytoccin. I said, "The love molecule." She said, in her slight Spanish accent, "Exactly." When I asked whether she'll go back to Spain when her work visa expires she said she's from Argentina not Spain and doesn't think of herself as from anywhere anymore. "I am from the world." She'd been moving for seven years. She was tired. They'd picked cherries through the night, starting at eleven. Gabriel has come to sit with me every evening. I sit in my chair, he sits on a pine round. I privately admire his smooth brown 21-year-old skin, his classic boy head with short hair showing his nape, his big candid French eyes. He plants his thick strong bare legs in front of both of us and I often look at them. Last night we sat till the mosquitoes came out. He was telling me about the dark net, which he knows how to get onto. There's quite a thickness of grey-blue cloud over much of the sky, though not to the north, which is luminous pale ivory. The washhouse roof has toned down. Hamada in his white shirt is still carving, he's another solitary it seems. Bananas hooked over his washline. Guillermo came into the library and asked to friend me as he was sitting at his computer, I at mine. I went onto Kijiji on impulse and asked for a rental in Oliver. A little house came up that might have been just right, $550/mo. Shabby, garden, good windows, hardwood floor. 28 Hamada Shinya came to say goodbye. He has a farm. It's Gab's birthday. 22. He came this morning looking a bit puffy and said he'd taken acid last night. "It was the best night of my life." The stars were like a net, all connected. Clean waves passing through the network. The trees were moving. He had to keep walking to the washhouse for water. It took a long time to get there. I asked was he going to phone his mother. He said maybe. "Does she have your phone number?" "No." Ten minutes later his phone dinged. His mom on FB messages. A fine balance for the second time. It's magnificent. - It's evening again, overcast, a soft grey batten. The pines are standing quiet. Last night when it wasn't much darker than this lightning began to the south, flashes the shape of long solid roots, here, then there, then there. Gradually the spectacular sky-to-earth nailings shifted east, still at a distance. I zipped myself into the tent to get away from the twilight mosquitoes and lay seeing another kind of wider slower flash due east, once with a long white line flashing out horizontally. This morning driving to town with Gab I saw smoke to the south, a lightning strike maybe over the border. Jacob's flying to Karlsruhe tomorrow night with my prints. A flicker on the wire fence this morning bending to drink from the irrigation drip. A deer among the trailers at the far end of the meadow bounded away when it saw Chris's old dog. Really bounded - high. 29 Mosquito bites since there's been water at the fenceline. These mosquitos lie low while there's sun - which there isn't this morning. They're almost silent - unless I've lost my high frequencies - and their bites come up in red welts that itch hard for three or four days. Legs, ears, wrists, three on my right knee because they bite through cloth. Hot nights. I have to keep the tent zipped because of the mosquitos and then it holds the day's heat in the bedding. My pillow was wet in the morning. The red-car girls were at work by five. 30 Thinking of the little house. It has an apricot tree and a white picket fence - is very shabby - iris and hollyhocks - is on the alley with open space across from it. Yesterday a dark sky was moving in from the southwest so I turned the jeep toward it and sat behind the wheel while the storm blasted through. Gust of wind that tore the abandoned tent off its pegs and rolled it across the yard. Loud thunder overhead, pines thrashing, water crashing against the windshield so I couldn't see out. All done in ten minutes. Ceylon tea, cheap package in Super-Value of the kind of finely powdered black tea that tastes like England. A better kind of night, cooler. Quieter since most of the pickers have moved to their farms or go to bed early. Fire ban helps. Drove the extra half mile to Covert Farm yesterday. A young woman was weeding a flower patch in front of the wine room. The yard has wide open views to the south and is up against a hill flank to the north. Miles of vines. - I'm in the Medici before the library opens, G4 plugged in, looking at comments to my FB posts. Luke shows up, reaches through, there he is, talks about stewarding a demonstration on the weekend, 200,000 people.
- Took Gab to the Greyhound this morning. The smiling boy arriving with his pack as I sat reading Canto III at six in the sun. I mean the way he would walk this way with intention to pull up a round of pine and visit. Young. Carefully spoken. His slow exact English gave me pleasure. When I'd got home and was settling in the windy shade his opposite arrived through the dry grass, Poppa Joe wanting a ride to town, Poppa Joe who did ten years for armed robbery and looks it, and has a sweet touch on electric guitar. BB King he said. - House - could it be a movie - with a narration - more likely an interactive DVD - website - with animated sections and sound and music - how much wd the sketches have to be improved - house themes and powers. - It's so much better here, now - quiet through the day, almost empty. The blackbirds are getting used to me, hunting and pecking like little robots almost to my feet. I keep looking across the yard to the little washhouse. Its cinderblock walls and metal roof look so nice together. - There I go take some photos of the pine's shadow projected onto it like the ridgepoles support. And then Joe comes through to fetch his charger from the cookshack and tells me the story of the time he got caught between two boxcars and died - acts it out, the boxcars jerking back, the stuck coupling rod jarred loose and catching his hand, a piece of metal piercing his belly. The sun was catching in his blue eye as he spoke, surprisingly live young mouth moving in his grizzled beard. He said he's hard on himself about his music, "When they tell you you're no good you believe it." His blue eyes flooded. Born in Montreal, French and Ojibway, he and his two sisters abandoned, was on the street. "You should come and meet my wife, pure-bred. Seventeen years.
He lodges depressives under the muck of a swamp! "Whose sighings make these bubbles come." VII
-Le Guin was here. I can see why Goethe called it repulsive and disgusting, all of his invention of grotesque punishments that have no end.
The search for the true father was a theme in ancient epic.
I like that seducers and flatterers are found covered with shit in a ditch.
Can see Pound's ambition better now. Dante covers a lot of ground geographically and historically, pegs a lot of known and mythological persons into his map. His disembodied spirits suffer physical torture - boiling in pitch, etc.
"Get back, vile bird!" He has Ulysses say "my longing for experience of the world." It's he who gives the speech I've copied somewhere in better words saying there's so little time remaining to our senses you shouldn't deny them experience outside the bounds of the known. 2nd A movie called The air.
What am I going to do about books. The ORL system doesn't show interlibrary loan search on its website because people would use it if they did. The librarian has to put in the request. SFU, UBC and UVic charge 5 or 6 dollars a book. Sitting in the library for any time wears me out, is it the fluorescents maybe. (Oh the San Diego County system -) Does it mean I can't live here? Blackbirds stand around in the heat with their mouths open. Some photos from yesterday - a dense strange one of dry weeds and wet wires. An hour meticulously reediting the mess the gallery made of my CV. Media City's festival list is posted and I'm not on it. Looked at photos of the Karlsruhe gallery. It's quite lovely, classically high and white. Paid my visa. It was up to $640 and nearly wiped out my month. There's still the TD bill to pay too. Moonrise last night yellow in pale pink over the ridge, perfectly round among the pines. None of that says it. The clear yellow in very pale pink was sublime. It came up over the ridge at the moment of maximum twilight, best delicate pale pink translucency.
It's mean-spirited to condemn Ulysses surely.
In XXXIII children who offer themselves to be eaten, which falsifies the actual and standard crime of parents eating children who wd not at all offer.
Israel founded when G intervened in Abraham's sacrifice and the covenant was established between fathers and sons symbolized by circumcision, says the commentator. Ed ate Paul and many fathers eat sons; mutilation is the beginning of it not the end. The covenant then becomes "I'll eat you but I'll arrange life so you in turn will eat whatever you like after I'm gone," a grisly trade.
3 Keith feels a glance across the yard. There he was on his way to the toilet walking fast, bent forward over his bare hairy tub of a belly, brisk with exercise at 68, energetically good-humored. When he waved it was with his whole arm. He's like one of Dante's shades always ready to tell his tale. Christianity in this work seems wholley disgusting. Dante uses the energized color of pagan myth for his poem but consigns it to hell. For instance he revises Ulysses' voyage to refuse it return. What's in it for him? Patriarchy: "provided one trust in Providence and abandon one's self reliance." Guidance doesn't imply self abandonment; I don't abandon myself to ask the book. Terza rima "combining onward movement with a feeling of conclusiveness in each step." A more flexible definition of the kind and degree of like sound that constitute rhyme. The same consonant sounds at the ends of words. Consonantal rhyming of Yeats. - Last night after sunset I was sitting on the picnic table looking toward the luminous west, sometimes turning to see whether the moon had risen yet. There was Venus very bright and next to it what must be another planet. [It was Jupiter.] The air was perfect, moving just barely, so the skin felt loved by it. "We are watching the wind closely." Fire south of Keremeos. - He was taught at home: Latin, Italian, French, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Greek, history, geography, hand-writing, drawing, piano, cello, dancing, fencing, riding, etc. 1749-1832 - 39 at the storming of the Bastille. 4 I was up at three - had been lying awake and heard what sounded like but couldn't be thunder - was it an avalanche? - heated my tea and sat on the table. There was a bat. The sky very faintly light to the northeast, showing the ridgeline. Moon beginning to wane. The wind had stopped sometime in the night. Whole campground lying still under the still pines. Then the 3:30 bird began and went on for a quarter hour. - There, now the luminous ivory to the southeast, over the blue mountain on the far side of the valley. In relation to the valley we're on a curtained shelf. There's a gap in the curtain through which I can just see that distant powdered blue. 5 Trailer in flames - midafternoon stood out of my tent and saw black smoke pouring southeast angled almost flat by the strong wind, then the little tin box with fire shooting out its windows, and then very soon the whole frame now visible as the walls had burnt away. Loud bangs sometimes that weren't yet the propane tanks I was watching, tins exploding Chris and Keith said later. There was danger, though no one was panicking: the dry grass could catch and be pushed by that wind very rapidly across to the other trailers and then the miles beyond. I could see Chris leisurely moving a hose next to his own trailer. The few people around in the afternoon were gathering to watch. I thought, no, I'm too close if the propane tanks blow and drove the jeep further back. Sat in it watching as first the little forestry pumper-truck and then two big units arrived with powerful hoses I could see they were first directing onto the propane tanks. It was soon over and hadn't seemed much but I was feeling it when I woke at night as a tightness and flutter in my solar. Sunday morning. clear sky. Some bird repeating a bright sharp series. My jeep is getting so battered-looking, the crushed front vent, the bashed-in corner bumpers on both sides, a little dent in the middle of the actual bumper that may be new, the missing rubber strips on both sides, the adhesive mess on the L front door, scorched paint on the roof and hood, dried-out duct tape curling where I covered the leak, a car-door dimple under the Cherokee label over the L front wheel, a scratch on the R front door from the little accident on 4th Ave, a curl on the L front fender lining, a crack starting to spread from a gravel hit on the windscreen, and as of yesterday a rip on the L rear fender lining from backing into a low iron fence. A car-door dent on the passenger door on the R. The R front door is very stiff. Inside: the console-lid hinge Tom broke, head liner unfasted at the back and over the passenger seat, mold stains on that seat, the radio starting to quit, doesn't change volume, usually won't change station. Short stories, Munro and Mary Gaitskill. I look up and it's pink: the hill is. 6 Chris booking me for a show in November.
- Feeling at a dead end after seeing the little house so damaged and badly made - disheartened, worried - am here because I don't at all know where to be, have nowhere to be - no one to talk to - no one I want to tell anything, no one to want - no one wanting me - no reason to read - no quest - scared about money, seeing how narrow is the life I can afford - even that wretched little house wd have eaten my little savings. I was sitting with Keith and Chris waiting for my apricots to cook, saw a quarter in the dust at my feet, bent to pick it up, wiped it off and without thinking handed it to Keith. He said "That's good luck you know, if you find a coin and give it to someone." In front of the little house, waiting for the property manager this aft, I saw another quarter in the dust. Another fire. The sun was pink.
7 Smell of smoke and the air is pink and thick. Joe's voice cursing normally down at his junky encampment through the evening but then I could hear him yelling that an animal had jumped through the fence and bitten his cat's face off. I was zipped into the tent reading by lantern light, heard him come stumping toward me with intention. "Madam. I'm sorry to bother you -." He was panicked, wanted me to take him to the SPCA in Penticton with his cat to have it put down. I said no and he stumped away. Then I had to sit there for a while thinking about why I'd refused though he could be a dangerous neighbour. He was presumptuous to ask. He has buddies in the camp with trucks. I told him that if the cat needed to be killed he could do it himself. Imagined bashing her on the head with a rock. - There's the sun now, brilliant orangey-pink half-up behind the hill. No wind this morning. - Evening. By the yellow picnic table. Another quarter just now. A café I liked this morning. Was in town early hanging around till the library opened at 9:30. The best so far, small tables at the front window, a lot of locals, the owner sitting with them, espresso and internet, delicious bacon and egg sandwich on a bagel. I'd been cruising the alleys, saw a house I liked the look of, little, symmetrical, high up and on a big corner lot. Its front windows overlooked the valley. It seemed vacant. Bites - always more bites. Old ones stop itching and then there are new ones. Have taken the dimensions of the bad house and gutted it to refit the interior, can't sit in the library reading or writing but can sit for many hours working a model. [18x22 refit] [kitchen] [bathroom] [desk] [bed] There's been enough wind to chase some of the smoke but not all. The sky to the west is lit but thicker. 8 A deer and then a bluebird. The bluebird sitting still for once, the deer untimidly walking around browsing. Not a hot morning, why is that? I have to wake at night and pull up covers. Kingbird's yellow flash. Half moon above. Coetzee Summertime. That horrible man, the one camping with his pregnant wife, who walks around pompously pushing a big hard tight belly ahead of him. His face is quite handsome but the way he walks is so gross it fascinates me with repulsion. There he was just now walking in his underpants to the toilet loudly hawking and spitting. There he is now with a white baseball cap on backward. He's driving away. Hawks loudly once more and spits out the car window. And there's a man with a better body - the one who pushes a lawn mower cutting the dead grass. He's opened the hatch of his vehicle and is sitting under it with his legs up, smoking. He's tall, broad-shouldered, flat-bellied, tattooed, very tanned. Wears a ponytail but this morning he's just got up and his hair's hanging loose. Part plains Native says his hawk nose. Brought home Nin's Mirages and despise it but here's how it ends, LIFE AGAIN! LIFE! What do I despise - I've been her in my lesser way, hysterical sexual attachment to anyone who comes along and then rebalancing analytically in the journal, but never so utterly narcissistic, a ruthless seducer raging to be wanted and only that. I resent that she can make anyone fall in love with her, that too, and that she gets a lot of sex. I've wanted more range though. My journal has more actual love in it. She has famous people and significant artistic times and headlong candour about taboo behavior. She fucks her dad and tells about it. It's a record of a great fighter, but -
Create, Anais .... It is your female chant for man, for the lover. Write. It is your ornament, your grace, your seduction. She's fucking 3 guys and married to a fourth who supports her all her years. That's the way to do it, money for nothing and your dicks for free. 1939-1947. She's European and of her time, what I don't like in her writing is that European tightness. Even when she's describing sex there's that buttoned-down European abstraction. "I have never looked at his brown nakedness, hips, sex, with such voluptuous awareness. I see more. I feel more. Before, it was filtered by the dream, the outlines and the physical flavors were distilled." That's very distancing. It's as if she's using the journal to kill something. It's needing to be impressive in the European way of demonstrating abstraction. Lawrence didn't do that. She's a monster and she lies, which is to say she steals, she plunders, sucks blood, all while saying how generous she is - but she ended up with an apartment in New York and a house in Silver Lake designed by Frank Lloyd Wright's grandson. Which is to say crime pays. - Oh what am I going to do about where to live, who to know, what to do, where to get money.
- Nina found me at my office in the library. Today's the opening in Karlsruhe. Yesterday, journalists' preview. Twilight sky pink with smoke to the west. Does something to the light. Working on the 18x22. Cookbook by someone with an orchard on Naramata Bench - I like that it's called a bench. Not sure which bench this is. When I think of Mesa Grande I'm indignant - that's what I want, not slow food tourism - open country, ranchland. What to do. Only a few of us left in the camp, mostly drinking men. I've been hearing them laughing stupidly in the beer-drinking way over at Ivan's table. Ivan, Chris, Keith, the tattooed Indian, guests, a woman's voice. Yesterday afternoon a police car cruised down to Papa Joe / Jean-Claude's trailer. Some talk of a gun being pulled. Papa Joe and Ivan's gang don't mix. Papa Joe is a Fagin, Chris says. "You're literate, you know Fagin, right?" He likes to get people doing things for him. It's a gossip mill. There's a lot of cursing. The pink is darkening. It's a somewhat murky twilight. Milky. It was hot this afternoon, hotter than it's been I think. Keith said he went to the river for four hours. There's a pool under the bridge that's near the E-Ze filling station. Someone with a laugh like an automatic rifle or an automated sheep. I love the way the metal roof holds more light even than the sky. 10 Early - making tea in the cookhouse, charging the phone and lantern. Dreamed looking for an apartment in the city. Remembered the mid-floor place I've often dreamed. Know it's empty, must talk to Choy, I was thinking. Do I still have his phone number. Luke will need a key. Small Luke. Is that smoke or a storm coming from the south. All quiet. The drunken bachelors were carousing last night. A specialist was looking at the sweat pattern on my pillow, said it showed metastases. This bench is finest sand, silky pale sand that shows in the track and paths. 97 the only highway with the same number both sides of the border. 11 Had almost forgotten this - I was falling asleep - or not quite - drifting - the state where thoughts are becoming a dream, and suddenly woke saying "Tom has died." It wasn't clear that I'd dreamed it, or anything leading to that thought. It seemed to be separate from wherever I'd been. I felt alarmed, some, but left the thought aside.
Sonja forwarded a note from Lise asking her to help with a Goddard publication about transformative education, Lise writing the piece about embodiment studies. I'm disgusted she's claiming to have taught mbo, which she has never actually understood.
There's permission to honesty, there's theoretical framework, there's feminist grounding, there's my point by point work of philosophical fixing.
12 Dreamed I was in a cabin by the sea. A wave came up and crashed against the windows in the other room. I went to sweep up the water. A group was assembled in that room waiting for me to give a talk I'd forgotten. Susan with thick brown hair rippling down her back almost to her heels. Remembering a moment when I was probably in my early teens when I said to my mom that I didn't think I was going to be - I don't know how I said it - very interested in sex. She said that was good. Why do I remember it, was I offering her something I shouldn't have. Sunday morning. Clouded over.
- I tried writing Home and came to a sore heart wanting the red and white house that is gone and the work I found there. Tried imagining a companion and came to a sore heart about Tom, that couldn't imagine another and better. 13 The three thirty bird sang somewhere else this morning. I could barely hear it. - Drove to Penticton to pay off my TD Visa. Gassed up. Service Canada to deal with GIS, address to Canada Pension. City - traffic lights, parking meters, chain stores. Drove back on White Lake Road to the radar observatory and then Willowbrook. Bit of road just past the observatory that's sage steppe and lovely. Nature reserve. Paul's in the PRC and says he's having a time without bad ghosts. "Drive it like you stole it" he says to her. 15 Annie Proulx's The Wamsutter wolf in Bad dirt. She writes David Adams Richards kind of people without his grim seriousness. Takes hideous slovenliness and stupidity as comical, as if to say "Here they are, God bless 'em." Louche Bay has just that kind of population and I haven't been properly fond of them. The French kids are loud, crude and oblivious to anything but each other. They don't say hello. Their French is energetically unintelligible, except for constant curses, tabernak all day long. Bad old Joe down by this trailer curses loud enough to be heard all through the acres. Cursing Indian Vimy has been kicked out for fighting. Chris who walks everywhere with his two dirty old dogs is like a tanned skeleton broken at the waist so his pelvis twists forward oddly, has his upper teeth folded over on top of each other by the narrowness of his head. Like all the men here he likes to repeat his story without attention to his listener. He reads, he says, and on that account was taking me as a kindred spirit until I started avoiding him. Keith doesn't curse and is sociably courteous in his way but tells the same facts over and over and sits for hours in his hairy skin doing nothing. In the tent in front of me is what looks to be a father who fucks his young daughter. He looks to be a criminal and she doesn't look unhappy. They arrived without a tent and pulled a picnic table across the mouth of one of the open-sided shade cabins. There are little squeaks coming from it now. Yesterday he asked for a lift to the highway - had to go to Penticton for his meds. Said yes she's his daughter. "She's twenty-one." "She looks younger" I said. A&W won't hire him again but God always provides, he said. - Sebastian Barry 2014. She had times of gentleness so complete and profound, she not only took my breath away, she took my heart, my soul, my very purpose in being alive. She took it all to herself and I was proud that she had done so. - The difference when a writer has language and not just story. So is it decided: I'm leaving, Ashcroft on Saturday, PRC after, studio apt in the sage country from Sept 1st. Louie's in Van in later August. It's between PRC and Van. There's a train and a bus. It's $725 but utilities included and I can get rent subsidy maybe. It's on the way between Van and home. It's month to month.
Anxious in bed last night, anxiety waited until I was flat and unoccupied. Homelessness. How to live, how to belong somewhere again. Remembered that Valhalla has a little campground now, or was it Hythe, or both. Am not going to like the studio - few and narrow windows, pretentious 1978 architecture - and maybe not the view either, the photos show good open country but junky structures too. But I'll be able to look around from there and jump if I see something right. Last afternoon on this yard, wind blowing soft dust down the road, small ants creeping, my sandals there holding the shape of my feet on bits of broken grass, fallen pine needles, pine shadows moving, pine wind above stronger and lighter and stronger and lighter. The camp deserted in mid-afternoon, this wind bashing at the Russian olives from the north. Here's my tent with its tarp forecourt, here's my chair, here's my kitchen in the shelter of long branches almost to the ground, here are six weeks' peelings and egg shells flung into dry grass, cherry pits and peach skins dropped among the drying-out still-green goosefoot. There down the yard through the road's gap and across the unseen valley is a dry hill capped by forest. I held back, I kept noticing myself holding back. What the body remembers Shauna Singh Baldwin 1999. She was 37 when it was published. Such masterful accomplishment. She has honest structure, she's passionately feminist without ever drawing a villain, she's even-handed about the British in India, and yet there's scent and color and an honorable edge of fantasy that's like Indian painting or costume, pleased with play and beauty. I held back in the town, apart from Nina didn't like anyone, so many thick-waisted short-haired dull-eyed women my age or maybe younger, country wives, so many big-bellied old men. I held back here too, kept to myself, didn't take anyone in the way I wd have before Tom, limped across the yard in old clothes, old solitary and damaged in anyone's eyes, or so it has felt. There's anguish in leaving though, for 6 weeks there's been a location about 100 feet square I've been entitled to, could come and go to and from. There have been neighbours to see coming and going from their own locations, alive for now. The trees have held impersonally steady among us. There have been clouds the past days, but tonight the sky is open though
still a bit thick. I can hear a cricket, it's nine and quiet.
time remaining volume 2: 2015 may-august work & days: a lifetime journal project
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