| time remaining 2 part 3 - 2015 july-august | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 July 2015 The valley was pretty when I left very early. Still water, colored cliffs, empty road. First stretch of 97c easy driving but ugly forest, long hills, motor thrumming. Near Merritt sagebrush country again in lightly hanging smoke. Coldwater Hotel if I ever want it, decrepit gold country palace. Was awake from 2 - out of the tent at 3 - rolled it up, folded bedding - heated tea and wasn't patient enough to finish drinking it, time to go. Where am I and what time is it. Pine Grove Campground but they aren't pines though it is a grove. Firs I think, a smell like Christmas, very heavenly. 5:00 though I thought it must be later. Tired. Oh take off my shoes, yes. What I did today. North then west then northwest to Ashcroft, then sat with Lois in a half-dead garden, then east from Cache Creek into glorious country that made me feel the very wrong little studio was not a mistake. Buttes, bluffs, benches. Thrilling color of rock thrillingly bared broken into smooth grass and sagebrush slopes. The scent and the fact that nothing around me is moving and the tall dark pillars all around are doing something to me. Lot of traffic tearing past, trains sometimes beyond the wire fence but I'm at a stop. I'm a 70 year old person camping with a chair. I've left the fly off. Am I too tired to eat, no. Shower first. Then I'll write what's left of the day. On 97c to Merritt stands of fireweed high on the cut banks. More flowers than in the valley; earlier in the season. Asters, something tall and yellow. Parkland: aspens with silver leaves. A kindness in the country. Yellow and white clover. Purple clover. After Logan Lake the startling panorama of Highland Valley copper mine, terraces cut into copper-stained rock, stacks-above-stacks of them, and the sludge pond vast as a lake. In Ashcroft charming small houses, granny houses with gardens on the river side of Brink Street. A park on the green Thompson where I could have camped for $10. Tall nice librarian who said the book of Marigold Hotel wasn't as good as the movie, and that a librarian is normally a good person to ask about rentals but she lives in Clinton. - They're Douglas-firs probably, loose branches with needles flat. My address could be Cache Creek if I'd rather. See whether the road is better in winter. The architecture of my new little place is completely bad. Egotistic, modish, careless of where it is, dark, windows only on one side and those narrow. No cross breeze. No white walls. No closet. A wobbly staircase. A stupid brown wall slanting down over what there is of a little balcony. A beige-carpeted bench-thing under a rough wood wall. 19 And then I went to bed though it was only 8 and slept and slept and woke at 4 and am almost packed up and this morning do have enough patience to drink the whole cup of tea, which is good. A train passed out of sight. A cow is bawling. From Kamloops to wherever this is a lot of hay fields, which I like to see because they are wide stretches of open space. Lois said her neighbour tried vines and they froze in the first winter - good. The best thing about Lois Home was that she was a falconer when she was younger. She said the updrafts at her place are too strong, a falcon could get up into a thermal and forget to come back. So now I'm at liberty for the rest of the summer, roaming. Realized I could come back to Ashcroft / Cache Creek and camp before Van, in one of the cheap little town campsites there are. Cache Creek! There's a new way to go home to the PRC now, an hour shorter, through Jasper to Hinton. - Mosquitoes from home. My body knows them, neutralizes the bites fast. Evening. I'm somewhere a bit south of Grande Cache. There's a fast rocky river I can almost hear behind traffic on 40 north. It's some sort of free site with stony tracks and what look like workers' rigs here and there. Muskeggy narrow pointed spruce. Willows. Black poplars. Plants completely familiar, even the grass. Clover, yarrow, Indian paintbrush, short goldenrod, dandelion leaves turning red. There's my tent planted in clover. How far did I come - I don't have my Alberta map. Ditches of Alberta. There they were along 40N, broad shallow ditches gardened to perfection, once a thick swath of scented white clover, othertimes fireweed, alsike clover, earlier today roads lined with blue chicory or a tall yellow thing or daisies. When I stopped to make lunch I saw why the aspen has been looking silver. Almost every leaf is inscribed with an insect's concentric white trails. I can hear a train whistle! Didn't know trains came through what I think of as this deep uninhabited nowhere. I remember when this road had just been cut through to Hinton. It was gravel then. I drove it with Ed and Mary in their camper and then hitchhiked east back to Greg. Driving like this I think of them. Some of their words come back. Jagen, to chase. Ed used it when someone drove too fast. Kleksen, to drip. That was when I was holding an ice cream outside a DQ in Hinton. There's no fire ban here, it's watered country. The long Thompson Valley this morning lovely fertile country, prosperous looking, honest-looking, hay farms, some vegetable rows, good houses and hay sheds. I realized after a while that I was following the Thompson - which will be my river - toward its headwater in the Rockies. Wasn't looking forward to the Rockies but oh my there suddenly as I came around a bend was jagged immense Mt Robson, and then as the good road looped sweetly southeast through the pass other immense deities standing in rows on either side, venerably naked without their ice, marvelously banded with their eons of deposition. Unspeakable things. And then Jasper town unspeakable in the other way, packed with high-end businesses and cars trying to park. There was Mr Mann's train station in a place he now wouldn't recognize. Here's the sun still quite high and quite far north, shining flat-on against the willows and rocks in a way to enmarvel them all, an evening breeze rattling the black poplar leaves. 20 Dew! First I felt the top of my quilt damp and then I saw droplets all over the close mesh of the top of the tent. Now I'm drinking tea waiting for bedding and tent to dry before I pack them. I was nervous last evening about the man in the trailer. There were bad signs. His dog was a bulldog. He kept glancing over. He got in his big industrial pickup and drove past my tent's door to look sideways at me propped up reading inside it, and then gunned up the steep bank and turned around and came back the same way. Then he had his cab radio on loud rock. Then there was a gunshot. Was wondering whether I'd be able to sleep. After a while got out of bed, put on my shoes and went to ask the string. Is he dangerous? No it said. Are you sure? Yes. Then I saw I could tie the little zipper loops together inside the flap to sort of lock the door. Then lay for a long time seeing summaries of the day's driving in a very pale and broken-up ghostly movie: I was moving forward at road speed with tall weeds whisking past on the right, the centre line swerving, rectangular signboards growing rapidly forward, small cars with tiny headlights approaching far ahead, copses on either side of the roadway to the horizon. I'd sometimes drift left into the oncoming lane or even rise a bit above the road and feel an effort to stay on the right. When I'd focus too much the movie would break but then I could begin it again. At the same time I could feel my recumbent body jolting slightly the way it does when there's roughness in the road. The long tapering sounds of individual trucks or cars passing seemed to be parts of that sensation. It was light a long time. I stuck my head up and saw orange-flaming clouds to the west. Woke once deeper into the night and exclaimed to see the sky black with large white stars. 21 Grande Prairie Do I have the energy to say anything. Maybe not yet. Can't camp here, it's wet. See Levi this aft. Eliz yesterday. Adam, Tana, Caleb, Sage, baby Juna, Anya, Maya, Kane, dogs - Paint, Kane's beautiful husky. A cat with kittens upstairs, a gecko. 22 Peter's straw-bale cabin waiting for my camera to charge. 23rd Township Road 740A in my chair under the lifted hatchback. There's a kind of tall grass with long pale heads moving in the breeze with the softest nicest sound. Across the road young aspens jiggling their leaves. Here's the Epp's place pretty much erased but still a place I can find. There's the gas well or pumping station, whatever it is, but it's silent now. The pasture's bluff has been carved back to a strip on the fenceline. The Hill Sixty field is back in grass, not much of it baled. Prairie. The run-off strip of couch grass on the hill is still interrupting the barley field. The yard hasn't been seeded, it's brome and I think I see the well's marker. Ed Epp is dead; Mary Epp has faded out of life; Ellie Epp is 70 years old listening at the culvert there still is where the driveway used to begin. The road is more graveled than it was. Today there's a quilted overcast. It's a gentle day. The breeze is inconstant. A brown dragonfly has lit on a bit of gravel. [Peter Epp's swamp] [field south of the house] This morning as I was repacking the jeep Tana naked under a pretty wrapper feeding her naked baby girl, such a pretty sight. Last night Adam who was an Epp elf, now burly and provident holding another Stella Artois talking about his feeling for Rudy's yard where he was a kid playing in the bush, showing photos. Oh Levi in Beaverlodge restoring the honor of my jeep and Laura wearing an engagement ring helping him rebuild a Cherokee in the garage, the two of them in a good house they own, Levi still only 28. Both these young men having found their good woman and having figured out how to provide, both the young women deferential and yet I think thriving in their men's shelter. Peter yesterday more my kin, a completely beautiful 56-year-old, standing in work clothes with worker's hands saying he's never been bored in his life. Happy to see me, wanting to know, wanting to tell. - There John Niland and the young Kinderwater who now owns the home place and this one. Pickups pull up and talk out the window. John rented this quarter for a while and then the Kinderwaters bought it back, not knowing a Kinderwater had pioneered it till after. Ditches of Alberta - they're flower gardens - what can be made of them - hard to photograph - a drone? - something like the ghost motion after driving Highway 40? - driving unbounded miles through flowering margins that often spread up into the fields beyond. Bordered roads, self-creating world up against the traveled path. That's nice: it's not just the ditches it's the flow of gracious world, gracious flow of world. I'm at the edge of Peter's field seeing fine grass, pink clover, willows, pines, young aspens, space I think, Manitoba maple I think, mown passages, that tall grass with long fawn-colored heads, brome, bits of yarrow, dandelions of course. 24 Morning dream after I'd gone back to sleep. He was in my bed lying behind me snuggled up. His hands were moving around and I began to hear myself breathing faster and louder. That went on for a long time. I turned around and was touching his taut slender belly - his so-lovely belly. My puss was aching. When his hand wandered toward it I stopped him to ask where he was drawing his line. I expected he'd want to be faithful to a point but that was starting to be uncertain. The phone rang - this was in the morning - and it was his wife saying she was on her way home. It was raining. I assumed that was why he scrambled into his clothes to seem to be on his way out and I began to gather my bedding. She showed up at the door a blond dwarf with a look like la nina. I thought I wd likely have to be obviously unnatural with her. There was all my bedding to get downstairs. I threw the first lot down off the third floor, saw my pillow land in water. My puss was still aching. Peter's movies. The first one a drone zoom from high above a rectangle open in muskeg forest. It's a five- or six-minute zoom, with pointed muskeg trees arrowing outward concentrically. A bright point in the dark wet rectangle becomes visible as a fetally curled naked woman. The music irritated me intensely, a plinking mediocre tune that seemed at odds with the image. He said it reminded him of German books read to him as a child. But what's the image about, what is that ringed bright spot - dark enclosure - and why is it an unmoving naked woman we finally are allowed to see. Men's images of women are about themselves, rule of thumb. Is Peter's femaleness a long way in, unmoving and fetal? Is it womb memory and the zoom a back-in-time zoom? Memory of being female? German fairytale meaning prehistory? All of that, it says. But Peter's femaleness is very active, I say. No, it says, he lets Teresa be it.
The other movie of making the ice boat had good frames but many I was in doubt about. He said he'd wanted to make it for 20 years. 40? The narrative is a man with an axe at the edge of the sea carving a boat from a chunk of ice. Too much of the narrative is fudged - they were images I doubted - images there because he liked them and images whose weight he hasn't realized. It's a cold barren northern shore scattered with chunks of stone and ice. The man would want to escape from that barrenness certainly. If ice is the only material he can shape then ice it has to be. The last image says he's gone, he's left.
Sometimes when I'm talking to Luke on FB messages I desperately need to stop. I drove away this time with a sore heart. There's a strain. Is it missing him - wondering if I'll ever see him again. Hythe on a day with dull light. Oh where's the Seven Lakes Café, where's Connelly Wong's, and what's an empty Mexican restaurant doing here. The turn-off is Range Road 102. Getting to it was like breaking through an enchantment like the hundred-year spell on the house of Sleeping Beauty. Many of the windbreak spruce were standing dead. There was very tall grass I had to stumble through dragging my right leg, and then a complete ring of overhead caragana and then more long grass. I'd fall into its cushioned tangle holding the camera and then there was the front porch completely collapsed off the house and the unsheltered front face weathered to bare wood. Pushing back through the spruce to the jeep a thick ring of aspen. When I was going to drive away something said to give a gift and said what gift it should be and where I should put it. I believed it. I knew the boon I was asking. There's the upper aspen canopy of Peter's bush rattling. I see that what it is about the sound is the way it matches the sight. Photos are complicated by clouds, which seldom are right shapes in relation to what's below them. Peter said the memory sketchups were art but wasn't interested in the fantasy houses - "You sure like guys with a lot of windows" he said - except for the housetruck. He liked its design and immediately started to think how to build it with SIP components. His rich life. I walked through his house looking at paintings, his own and his friends', and there's the house itself, a red-roofed blue fairytale house, and the red-roofed blue studio. Bedroom door with legends painted on its panels, a giant marital bed with wooden posts. As it should be in a 3-storey house the upper floor is a mind floor, sitting room with sofas and an east-facing desk under high windows. Teresa's office facing west. The kids were dug into the ground, family life in the middle. 25 Judy and I were going to live together in our old room. I was thinking how to improve it. We could paint it white and build a bookcase over all of one wall. We'd use good wood. Then we were both there. It was bigger than it had been. She had plans too but hadn't told me what they were. How is Peter. Strong and handsome. He has a beautiful slightly hooked nose and a thatch of grey hair and a good lip. He's thoroughly manly in a way that must intoxicate the art world, lucky in a way that must infuriate his neighbours. I didn't like the way he talked to his kid on the phone. He patronized. I'm not sure he likes me now though he still has an imprint from then: am guessing he's finding me too much myself. He'd need a woman who goes along. I showed him the guestroom with his painting. He said it's interesting I picked that one and told a story. He was painting the bird and the power post and somehow felt the power post should be on fire. Next morning he had to go to Dawson Creek before daylight. This was in January. There'd been freezing rain. When he was just past Pouce Coupe where the road bends he saw a power post on fire. What the fuck is this, he thought. Just then, in the mirror, he saw the lights in Pouce Coupe go out. He said he hasn't painted in eight years, doesn't think he remembers how. The painting is still unsold at his dealer's. It's been bought three times and each time the wife refused to have it. Another story: ten-day Vipassana session in Merritt after the worst of local community centre politics. Petition against the community centre had 250 signatures although Demmitt's population was only 30. Man living in the bush in an old van came to ask for work. "Why do you want to work here?" "I'm starving, I'm living on pigweed and roadkill." He said he was a stone carver. "Where do you get stone?" "On the road." "How do you carve it?" "With a file." Peter gave him a little chunk of soapstone. Next time the man showed up at the site he brought what he'd carved. (Peter got up then and brought it to show me. It was a little horse's head.) So Peter hired him. He worked well. After a while he didn't come to work anymore but that Christmas a big white utilities truck came up the drive and parked. Peter and Teresa thought, is it locals coming to beat us up. But it was him. He'd come to wish them a good Christmas. He handed them a big Toblerone bar. Later they found a hundred dollar bill in the wrapping. Look at the radiant meadow. That fine grass is timothy he said, timothy with an understory of alsike. The tall grass is reed canary grass. How have I been with Peter. Too blind. I've rattled along saying things but I'm not quiet enough in myself to take him in. He must feel the difference. Did I just hear a car door bang. - Is this a quick reply? I said to Peter last night that he should do a book about this place and his work as a part of it. He didn't much like the thought. This morning walking up the track to his house I thought I should offer to make it. I was having coffee with him. I said, I still think you should make a book. He said, Do you want to do a collaboration? I said 1. it would get me back to working here; 2. it would help me publish my own books; and 3. the relation of land and art is something I care about. He said people have offered to make books and he's said nah but this feels right. I could live at the Harpe place, he said. I said not till next summer but maybe. I could be sitting in Ashcroft working on it though. I could stay here for more weeks and begin. Here's my question: is it a mistake to work for him rather than going straight to my own work? Am I being a handmaid? It says no.
Oh the smell of the air. Ah it's quiet. Story of an African farm - 1883 - part 2 chapter 1 she goes through the belief stages of passionate persons - from god to science, beginning to see nature and then experimenting - and then art. She took the book to London. She was 26. Irmgard T eighty-six and beautiful, dog-in-the-manger about her son. We were at Sunday afternoon strawberry tea at Euphemia McNaught's homestead. There was a video of a bent old old woman trying to paint, young men speaking to praise her. Mrs T in Bremen till she was 21, met her husband at a tea dance. They were engaged two weeks later and married after a year. Her father had come out of the war shell-shocked with a failing business. There were artists on both sides of the family. She was incurious the way old people are, absorbed in her own details. I liked to look at her but I didn't like her. When I said Peter and I in the old days had been kindred spirits she said "Peter is like that with a lot of people." She was thinner than when she was 50 and it suited her. She had a mild clear lady-like profile, a neat straight nose, and fine lip. Her skin was very lined but not loose. She was well-dressed, put on a hat to go out that was just right, a bit of her era it seemed, a '40s hat that sat close over her neat white chignon. A lot of pickups parked on mown grass. Farm men and women. She looked quite regal among them in her good clothes. Peter has won her that, he's Euphemia now. On the way home I saw amazing stacks of clouds. Wanted to photograph them over a canola field. Had been saying, rehearsing for FB, it's a simple country: in summer blue green white and yellow, in winter blue and white. We drive fast on long straight roads. If someone says thank you the right answer is you bet. Clouds are hard to photograph. Clouds spoil photographs. 27 A white kitten without ears. I don't like what my camera does with this place. It hypes the image at the same time as not focusing well enough. They're false weak banal disorganized pictures. I don't like how badly I sleep here, don't know why. My hot water jar leaked last night. I don't like that it's cold. I love the smell of the air and the open largeness of this field. The house Peter is offering me is a gimcrack dark low-ceilinged hut formless and decrepit. There's the sun rising. I can hear leaves. Aspen leaves are quite hard as well as loosely hung. It takes only a small sideways motion to make me miss Tom, feel how much that story was my own and now I have none. Glum this morning. Teresa's back so I don't have access to email or the house and will have less of Peter. This is a horribly junky small-windowed dark rough-walled room, badly lit so it's hard to read. I said to Peter thank you SO much for not being fat. Hissing this morning. 28 Through the same cold sunlight - colder as the day declines, - and through the same sharp wind sharper as the separate shadows of bare trees gloom together in the wood, and as the Ghost's Walk, touched at the western corner by a pile of fire in the sky, resigns itself to coming night - they drive into the park. Dickens' energy. Bleak House because it's what I've got, provisioned from the Kinsmen's Market in Oliver. 30 Was it always so cold in the mornings even in July. Dew specks glinting on the grass. Peter came yesterday afternoon when he was working on the yard and I was reading on the porch and told stories. I went in to get my little Maranz to show him, sat with it in my lap and after a while turned it on. Missed a good tale about John Bentley Mays though, national art critic for the Globe and Mail. Georgia accent, comes to Grande Prairie. "There better be some good art here. The ticket to get here costs as much as it costs to go to Paris." Curator of the gallery sends him out to Demmitt. He doesn't want coffee, just show him some art. Peter has about 250 paintings he's made in the past year but they're all shit, he says. Shows them. Mays agrees: they're not good. "But what do you want to do?" There's a little painting Peter has just been working on and hasn't shown. It's still wet. Mays wants to buy it. "Why do you want to buy it?" "It's good." More visits over the years. After the second Peter gets a notice to pick up a parcel. Mays has sent him a box of books about European art with a note that says send them back when you're done with them. He'll sometimes ask if Peter's done with them and Peter will say not really. Manly beautiful man with good energy, heart in the right place about art, honest, honorable, sociable, holding to his place with a right instinct, setting forth in the world without cunning like a third son. Mays takes to him. The Globe and Mail review loses him as many shows as it gives him, though. Why is that. People say, He just wants to fuck you. "He likes you" I say. "I like him too." He's a depressive and Peter has that in him also but he knows how to handle it now. But Mays is religious - Southern Catholic, it seems, like Agee. Peter's responsible and kindly - keeps asking if there's anything I need - but he's not interested in me, never follows up anything I say with a question, doesn't lend himself. It makes me feel a supernumerary. The usual sadness about that. Alex is beautiful, like a bird. Very fine fair hair, fine-grained white skin, big light eyes above a narrow jaw, a light narrow fine-boned frame. Carries himself with a lot of reserve. I stare at him in hapless fellow feeling, I think it is - hapless because he's unformed still and I don't know what he knows or feels, fellow feeling of apartness and suffering his parents' don't understand and I do, some. He was leaving and I was away to my cabin so I said 'bye casually at the door. He came forward and put his arms out to me, patted my back with his light hand the way people do. I had his ribs in my hands, feeling them. Falling asleep a couple of nights ago I saw Rob's face looking quite stern, very definite. 31st Interpretation. Bentley Mays wanting to see or produce Caspar David Friedrich [1774-1843] in him, religious Romanticism. Symbolism is seeming a male game in these art contexts. How so. "Spiritual and philosophical." Goethe "What is called 'Romantic' in a landscape is a silent sense of the sublime in the form of the past, which is to say of solitude, of absence, of seclusion." What are my slides, that are something else? Modernism is about presence not absence. Is Constable 'Romantic'? Constable can love without yearning; I so despise this male thing about getting away from earth, though seen as longing to get away from their dissociated selves it does make sense. Mays sneered at landscape painting as affection and wants it to make grander claims about 'humanity's' 'relation to' 'nature' in our 'historical era'. Dürer's rabbit doesn't need to do that. Pictures can have resonances of all sorts but they shouldn't intend to. I am a complex structure when I make an image and some of / all of that structure determines what I make. Kiefer "Norse myth, Wagnerian opera, Nazi war plans, theological and biblical history, and alchemy" but "since 1980" their "sensual character" becomes more important! - Kiefer is born two days after me, March 8 1945. Breakthrough. Had, in effect, integrated his ongoing thematic concerns with the outsize proportions of Abstract Expressionism and the modernist insistence on the literal qualities of the object, "oil, lead, photographs, woodcuts, sand, straw," "energetic manipulation of matter". Burning, melting. "Fields neighbouring his studio," "disintegrated, violated, or suffering condition of Germany." - As if Abstract Expressionism doesn't have 'content'. "Confront as a visual artist the eternal questions of existence, of life, death, rebirth, God and our place in the universe." "Meaning beyond the specialized esthetics of craft." - On Peter's studio wall next to the window overlooking the field a letter from me next to a piece by Rilke. It's a good letter. Light and clear. Something else: after the hot water bottle leaked I thought to heat a rock in water and put it into the foot end of the bed in a sock. Then rereading the last volume in the lake house I see myself heating a rock and carrying it in a towel to put into the foot end of my bed on the hay bale, which I'd forgotten. August 1st The field - timothy lovely and unphotographable - the way it moves from flamey green at its base to its many compact heads on long fine stalks each swaying independently, a graceful layer afloat higher up all questing stir like an intelligence. I'm looking at a stand of it somewhat against the light. And then look at the utter radiance of the stand of young trees and willow shrubs beyond it, set out individually in the light, and then beyond them massed aspen and spruce all catching light in their upper boughs, and one balsam poplar with a larger glitter. The sky's a great mess of blue-floored puffs that have nothing visual to do with this shining garden. - And how the clover heads are faintly pink little round solids in amongst the timothy stems, an understory relatively stolid compared to the airiness of the grass. And see then that many-pointed young aspen copse jittering its free edges. A small rabbit this morning standing quietly eating clover, with which it's so plentifully surrounded in its summertime. What do these so-many singular puffs mean? Do they mean wetness rises in patches evenly spread over quite continuous country? Butterflies. Through the binocs focused on the front rank of grasses' fine red stems, the heads long ovals rimmed with light moving against fluxed live greens out of focus with more and smaller light-rimmed long ovals all at different angles and moving. At closest focus can see the grass heads are blooming. When I move focus a bit further into the stand more ovals are there hanging and floating. Further, it's a gathering, a reaching crowd. Motion of grass could definitely be called The air. Peter's work is so much the work of a personality. He wasn't persecuted in school: he was the sexy troublemaker who ran with Leroy Bully, got drunk, flirted with all the girls, drove fast, didn't have Ed for a father. Is a man's man still. There are no women in his work: he has what it takes to be able to take women for granted. His mother is devotional and I don't think he knows he's like her. She wants to be protected by authority and he does not but both attend to promptings and trust they'll be led. There's bravado in his site-directed shows, successful bravado but faith too. The carpet she loved, threw out, Peter took, she dreamed in my house. Tiny brown thing chittering in monument man's pyre. Then a small brown hummingbird. A botanist to talk about it? A naturalist for the birds? Cream-breasted, white stripes on the wing, white rim on the tail. The little brown one has a very pointed tail, is nervous, quick. Dragonflies riding forward steadily parallel to the ground. Look at how the willow's moving. That one's a good age, open enough still to move. A Constable shape it seems to me, its oblong leaves with specks of white, moving more loosely than olive though leaves a bit the same shape. Oh scent. He guards his power against information. "I don't want to know. I want it to be about everything." This path from monument man to the fence is a concourse. Pointing north, from ravaged hero to boreal forest's edge. These cumulous are pretty loose, casual, and now there's beginning to be a higher level of cirrus, with wisps and thin judders. A cool wind. The bush. I stay out of it mostly and he has mown paths into it. - I get sick of many of D's minor characters and yet seeing people in his mode can be a way of seeing people I know in a certain kind of synopsis - seeing their madness. Paul K's vain bluffing timidity, David's family perpetually suing one another, the way Louie's voice buttons down when she's trying to hide anger, Leah's gasping hesitancy, my own stumbling around and earlier unconscious predation, Mary's grotesque flirtation, Ed's aggrieved whine, Paul E's gracious whimsy covering calculation, Tom - oh a complete kit. Jamila! It's easy to make grotesques of people in writing. But I want to note there's a passage in Bleak House that seemed almost V Woolf, the couple of paragraphs where he describes light and shadow moving through evening into night in the Dedlock's empty house [ch.XL]. Did she take her swing from him? the present summer evening, as the sun goes down, the preparations are complete. Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many appliances of habitation, and with no inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock in possession might have ruminated passing along, so did they see this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be, without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die. Through some of the fiery windows, beautiful from without, and set, at this sunset hour, not in dull grey stone, but in a glorious house of gold, the light excluded at other windows pours in, rich, lavish, overflowing like the summer plenty in the land. Then do the frozen Dedlocks thaw. Strange movements come upon their features, as the shadows of leaves play there. A dense Justice in a corner is beguiled into a wink. A staring Baronet, with a truncheon, gets a dimple in his chin. Down into the bosom of a stony shepherdess there steals a fleck of light and warmth, that would have done it good, a hundred years ago. One ancestress of Volumnia, in high-heeled shoes, very like her - casting the shadow of that virgin event before her full two centuries - shoots out into a halo and becomes a saint. A maid of honour of the court of Charles the Second, with large round eyes (and other charms to correspond), seems to bath in glowing water, and it ripples as it glows. But the fire of the sun is dying. Even now the floor is dusky, and shadow slowly mounts the walls, bringing the Dedlocks down like age and death. And now, upon my Lady's picture over the great chimney-piece, a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her. Higher and higher rises shadow on the wall - now a red gloom on the ceiling - now the fire is out. 2nd
Such a melt of uncertainty in that time, with Jam especially and in relation to writing. Global uncertainty about how to live, which I worsened by the way I read. 3rd I had fried bacon and blotted it and had it waiting on the green enamel plate while I got ready to fry eggs. Peter came to the door. It was nine o'clock approximately. He stepped in saying "You're making yourself a bacon and egg breakfast." I held out the plate. "Have a piece of bacon." He said "Oh no." "Just one," I said, "I have a lot." And so on, teasing him. He took a piece. I brought the plate back to the table, then turned around and came back with it. "Have one more." "No ... . No." "It's a test of will," I said, holding the plate toward him. "You shouldn't have said that." I was smiling into his eyes quite gaily. He took me by the shoulders very very lightly and turned me away, and just as I had turned said "I'll have one more" and took one. "You had turned." - Ah that was all so well done. On both sides. When I woke at night it was raining and this morning there was a layer of mist above the field. The weather here is so much moodier than where I've been living these years. A lot of overcast. I don't remember that about it. Dreamed a little animal that crawled up my right pant leg and slept there nicely warm and furry and that later was lost. And then after a while dreamed I was in some horrific uprising where people were being slaughtered and raped around me and I was in danger too. I don't like to live dependent and in junky rooms. My plan to keep within my income this summer is working - and there's been the German show - and this book project - and coming here to re-found my work is right - and fixing the jeep - and some young family - some connections for Rowen - and the TIFF show in November - and a publishing plan for the winter - and bits of income - and Peter's connections if I have the right energy to use them - but no right home in sight.
Reading Up north chapters exhausted by them. It has been raining hard, dark sky crumpling noisily above, pink flashes, a continuous foaming stream into the rain barrel, bright bits dancing on the jeep's roof. The lamp flickers now and then. 4th Then reading another chapter and liking the sparse balanced flow of time noted - the way it's written seems an accomplishment - the way it's lived too, attentive, more attentive than now. That inside-out attention.
5 Chris [Kennedy] sent blurb for the TIFF show, director of Karlsruhe sent a photo and liking. This kind of writing - I automatically worry whether it reads but that misunderstands any writing - like my movies - make something for people to make something of - something that will be them not me - it's a more mature sense of writing though I still do long to have company in myself.
I'm seeing that to begin where I left off I have to read through all the way to where I was forming it afterward in Van. Simple truth-telling. Recognition knowledge - picking lines out of reading - body's larger knowledge. Not 'symbols' but things that speak, have spoken, can speak from/for the unconscious self-sense. The mixture of motives in the journal: correction of education, finding better culture; record; articulation, focus; honesty, saying what's repressed; recognition by larger self; processing; study of state. 6 Have gone through N1 sorting into descriptions with examples, very absorbed. Noticed how many many I want to say fronts I was working on at the same time. Surprised how often I mention the air. Hadn't realized how much it was my element. Noticing which elements Peter ignores along with those like wood and fire that he uses.
7 Service Canada for GIS, back pay she said - maybe. Regine at the gallery, Griffith Baker director. Exhausted at the library, went home without research.
Driving today. There's so much traffic even on the Sexsmith-Valhalla road that it's hard to get into looking. Just a sense of powerful shining on all sides beginning at the grass in the ditches and then out to the fields' great tracts of even color edged by dark trees in curves and spikes, and then the strong perspective to the horizon of those flat-bottomed blue-shadowed white copses of cloud spatially sorted in order of size. Driving west under them I saw ahead of me a few deep, curved grey-blue smudges, indistinct blown curtains reaching from high up to the ground. I drove into the foot of one of them almost at Peter's road, a dump of large raindrops so heavy my wipers couldn't keep up. I was blinded for a minute in an enormous truck's side-spray. - The number of those huge trucks, many of them doubled-up tankers. They give the roads a colonized look, as if the agricultural country I knew has been conquered by petroleum corporations without a fight. Grande Prairie feels like a base camp for militaristic patriarchy, overwhelming and intimidating. Even local young men it seems to me zoom around in powerful pickups with large mechanisms - tanks and tubes - filling their beds. The round bales everywhere this season have a nice geometry but they also are far out of human scale. I think of Uncle Willie stooking on the hillside, and even the rectangular bales could be handled by a single man carrying them by their twine. Beyond that change there is also the way driving Alberta #59 I name the houses I pass - there's Bekheruses', there's Kroekers', there's Jake Jansen's, there's Janeen's uncle's, and have to know all those people are dead. It's as if the real place still exists and is known and this other real place exists too and is unknown, and they share a partial layout or geometry - though even the creeks no longer have dips because the road has leveled them out. I do like the way zooming up the highway I keep passing the mouths of long straight roads still graveled rather than paved. La Glace is more civic - has a park with a memorial - but less coherent, less a place in a time, buildings wood-framed and built in a same graceful vernacular, good two-story houses or little old person's cottages on gravel streets with trees - and more a miscellaneous aggregation of constructions set badly on their lots without regard for the road. And the school! Hideously updated in complicated materials including false brick. The old schools had a fine simplicity of wood and stucco with big windows. This new style is bizarrely pretentious and has repressive little windows. More art and less natural vision. 8 Into N2 annoyed at what happens to me when Jam is there, the insecurity made by her high-handed alternations.
10 Working through the lake house pages again noticing how uncommitted I've been. It's no wonder I keep being unsure of that writing, I've kept hurrying over the phrases as if half blind, afraid of something, what - I don't know what I'm doing and feel I can't know what I'm doing though I know some things at the scale of the single phrase or at most at the scale of a short sequence.
A bit swarming this morning on account of yesterday with people all day. But first say last night standing with Peter leaning against the jeep in the dark looking up at the clear sky. There was Casseopia. A brilliant meteor flashed north to south. When I came back to the shack a standing panel of dim green light to the north. Peter's twenty young people he says are artists. They didn't look like artists to me, except for the Native man with a nose like a parrot, who was full of child mischief and shine. There was a young woman I saw right away and saw all day for her perfect frame, slender bones, wide slender shoulders and long thighs, neat curved rump. The other women were dressed badly but she was dressed consciously and just right. Jen. She shone her luminous eyes at me. There was one other woman I liked for the way she set herself always at the center of the action while the other girls sat around chattering about any random thing that came into their heads. Brigit the chainsaw artist. Colin - oh Colin - the way Colin stands planted short and wide and solidly balanced and quietly 100% there. The way his face kept changing and lighting when I told him about living at Mesa Grande, brightness, brightness. Colin the timber-frame master. And Peter's building so ugly - so crudely out of scale - a group exercise, a reason to gather, a summer's company. Is Peter hiding out in the hosting sociability he does so well?
And let me go back to Regine for a moment. I was physically repelled. She's piggy: a lot of white fat around her face and a bulk of stomach under a loose dress, bushy hair, ringed pale eyes. A complacence I think, a stultified Germanness that drained me extraordinarily. She introduced me generously and intelligently around the gallery, but I just needed to get out of there. How could she have made those powerfully interior figures, and how could she be so wrong about them as to imagine [a room full of them] them anything but solitary. Has she changed completely since she made them? It says no. They are a wish? Yes. They're what she needs. And Peter is just beautiful. I love to look at him any moment at all. "I'm in love with everybody" he says, and that's good energy though it skips over kinds of information I'm interested in. 11 What happened in the last October and November in the lake house. I'd begun in the Olson house two years before, very self observing. Traumatized.
12 Occurred to me yesterday that Peter's boats are hairy pussies. Tom: the old woman in the boat.
Earth goddess's pussy. His eyes on trees too, going all over his land scribing them on the skin of aspens with a fingernail. My last day here. Called Rudy yesterday. Sat on the steps in the evening hearing his blunt pressured maybe drunk loud voice helpless and stumbling. "Do you want to see me?" Dodged around that because I don't. I can't do anything for him, and I can't bear him and I have no reason to want him. What I'm thinking about Peter's book is that it's for him - he should use it to set out his own work and stories as his own curator without an eye on the market or fashion or even legacy. He could use it to burrow down to his original impulse in art, which must have been beauty. Think who he'd want it to be for, who he'll want to talk to. Himself as a kid? Simple and honest, direct. His own actual voice.
- Granary dimensions 14'x 12'x 8' and 4' to the peak. 8 rafters along, 5 on short ends centered between end ones, hole about 18" x 2', cladding variable about 1x6 lengthwise, door 28" wide, roof about 9" horizontally out. - East place recordings 1. through cheesecloth back window but wind 2. moved cheesecloth, less wind but muffled 3. sitting in ditch sheltering mics with my knees, second 10 min same but noticed sound up to 9 Lot of wind, not a lot of rattle, sometimes a fly. Puts me to sleep. When it's boosted still pretty good. Something dark below, steady. Blasts of cut-off briefly. It can blow hard without cutting off but does too. - [Meeting with Peter and Teresa] "I would like to see you write something about our meeting, statement of why." Start with E asking questions. Swearing "twenty years of bush camps" 13 He sat in the chair with my G4 in his hands reading the journal passages from 1980 in a murmur so I could follow. He read them perfectly. I was sitting on the floor at his knee. It was 35 years later - Teresa had invited me for supper and his phone beeped to call us. As we were walking up to the house he was telling me his mother's mother had been killed by the Nazis. She'd been in an asylum with schizophrenia maybe, since Irmgard was a child. Her father was himself probably a Nazi. After supper when I turned on the tape recorder he told more stories of miraculous leadings. The sense of them is that there's a huge force field around him arranging events, and it is familial, a genetic endowment, and more than genetic, historical, I mean a force field that extends toward or from the past even as far as the Baltic German knight who came slaughtering into what is now Estonia, married a bishop's daughter and built a castle. The incongruity of that force field's shrinking to a homesteader's hut in the poor dark muskeg of Demmitt and from there pouring forth again into Peter's international charm. At a school reunion in Talien a woman now living in Vienna who had been his father's lover and who had letters - Are his stories accurate? What I do know is that he takes them as marvelous confirmation he says of life, but is it of his own potency? It says no. Is he genuinely humble? Yes, he's grateful.
- Whiskers Point 1:30pm The miles are long today. Whiskers Point 60 years ago, we're driving to BC and have Uncle Herman with us. We must have left late in the day because it's night when we get this far. We're going to sleep on the ground in just our ordinary quilts and pillows. Our dad says something about keeping our kidneys warm. We kids run a bit of a ways and make our beds. Herman goes off by himself some distance up the beach. He's young and he's about to travel a long way to drive a cat in Paraguay. I think I remember moonlight. There will have been mosquitoes. The second time was when I stopped here on my first trip north in the Lark. It was afternoon. There was no one else. I waded into the lake. I was making a ritual of it. Tea-colored water, lilies on stems, light lines on the sand floor. There was another time driving north when I picked up a Native woman with a small child who was going to Chetwynd. I stopped here to make lunch. She was in a hurry and didn't like it. Last time on this road Luke was driving. The miles weren't as long. When we got to Prince George we found Peter at the gallery. It's cold in the shade. There's a campground now. Annoying kids. I couldn't find the old way in. 14 Rest stop south of Quesnel. Such a good motel room last night. Caravan Motel on the southern edge of South Quesnel. Sweet Chinese boy at the desk, "You're not a senior?", there was a discount. Clean room with windows in three directions - end room upstairs - intelligent art - a bit old fashioned, an actual key, the right number of towels, not a pile of them - satiny silver drapes - neatly cut roofing paper nailed onto the stair treads for traction - orange marigolds on the landing - hanging baskets with purple and white flowers all along the walkway - a feeling of modest intelligence. This morning as I was leaving the whole family working at cleaning rooms. A father who looks like his boy, mother a bit sharp, the two of them having come such a long way to make a living in Quesnel that sulphur-stinking bush town. Alright here's my cup of tea finally. Tall things, what are they, I could learn to tell fir from spruce. Douglas-fir it seems to say. Rough fissured bark, a soft hang to the branch tips. Hey a train whistle. Wonderful morning of a day that'll end in Cache Creek, should I say at home. Thinking of that other home, a granary somewhere next to a field in the PRC. Yesterday it was boreal forest all day, radiance and glitter on the roadsides, long miles. Today is Cariboo country, grassland, aspen stands - copses, the weathered wood buildings I like, silver roofs, sometimes good barns, sometimes hay sheds. - Thai restaurant - Mandy's - Sanyam - Highway 97 north of 70 Mile House. Chicory blue, white clover, always yellows, mullein for a while, alongside the Fraser. 15 Was lying in bed yesterday in Quesnel thinking of the way Tom wd put on his glasses and give my movies his solid stare and then say Again. In our last years that and his liking the Here's was the best of us. Remembered it with such a pang of longing, then have to remember something bad to balance. - Earlier this morning - it's a Saturday - realized it's the 15th and a year since Christmas Circle. Then there before 7am a note from him. Day of the Assumption of the Virgin is why he remembered the date.
Vancouver 17 After Louie left I was a bit lost. I ate ice cream, looked for something to read. She'd gone to Ina's for the night and Ina will have taken her to the airport this morning. I'm forlorn with her now, feeling left behind. She has this lovely house found and furnished by my taste, she has money and I don't, she has the firmest network of family and friends, cared for by her with all her years of energy, she has power in all her circles and I have no circles now, she works hard all the time, I work hard very sporadically. She has a social manner that works with ordinary people though it repels me. She has a companion, which I will never have again, I'm going to be nothing but alone for the rest of my days, however many there will be. I can't be matched, no one will come for me. She is a right, fine little body, I am lame and getting lamer, more wobbly and more shamed all the time. I have to feel all those things with her and can no longer feel the other thing I used to feel, that other things I am matter to her. I say these things with a dim sore heart because they are there to be said. And then what next. It is true that some of my grief is self-directed - look what I have lost, - but it is more about her: look what she has lost .... Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. Barnes in The loss of depth. - The way he describes missing her, what actual loving marriage can be like, wanting to do things with her, wanting to tell her about anything, being happy to see her, feeling he was better with her. There's something further, it's that seeing Louie so flourishingly established I wonder whether her former devotion was a use of my lonely distinction by her ambition.
My heart is fluttering. I have a plan and it's a good plan but it can only be more of this aloneness.
The morning I was driving from Ashcroft here I sometimes felt I was barely hanging onto the road. It was canyon for two hours, tight blind corners, I had to be alert every second and I sometimes felt I wanted to quit or wd have to. It was an ordeal. Is it something like that I'm feeling now. Can I manage the hard road I am. What's my plan. Live in a horrible room that costs too much, with a yard I can't walk on though the cliff is nice. Endure a cold winter for 7 months without friends or community. Sit at a desk with my computer working on books for other people and no money. Drive around the countryside some, looking for a better place to live. Try to do yoga to get less wobbly. Worry about money. Try to write less solidly.
Honestly nothing seems worth doing.
19 That was a blast of depression. I went out and found David loading boards into his little pickup and bought plums at Santa Barbara and got some V Woolf at the library. It's morning in the orange room. Sideways light onto the cissus; its shadow pretty on the bright orange patch. Elliot Weiss yesterday, Toronto Jew, that kind of fast sharp Ashkanazi style. He sat down in the little office with me and said "Here's a lovely 70 year old." "Yes" I said. His thought: it's symmetrical so it's one of the central structures. Spinal cord? No because it includes the head. "I don't think it's related to post polio." "I didn't think so either." Had a prepared speech about how he saw a lot of post polios in New Brunswick and he arrived at generalizations. I was puzzled that he was explaining medical generalization to me on the way to saying post polios are overachievers and won't accept help till they absolutely have to, both of which all the literature also says. And that he thinks post polios are insensitive to pain. That was an interesting thought in relation to childbirth and having teeth filled. He said they block pain.
We were taking each other's measure in an interested way. He was willing to play and I liked that. We liked each other. Rowen and Freya in the evening. R is making $2500 a month because Kerberos has a contract to develop a game for some wealthy Europeans. They've bought a trailer and a pickup and a goat. Oh Rowen - he looked quite beautiful with long dark hair and brown skin and a little pointed black beard, romantically manly. I kept looking at his plump soft lip. Weiss said he'd read an obit for Charles Sorbie and that Sorbie is well known, and that Stephen Clarke the neurologist I saw years back is also dead. "That's what happens if you live to be your age." - Sorbie d.2010 at 78 of colliding with a snowboarder. No evidence that Stephen Clarke has died. I misrepresented myself to Weiss by playing along in his style didn't I. Does it matter? It says no. The lake house. Is that its name? Yes.
Swords, wands, pentacles, cups.
20 Teresa straight onto a CC application, so I need to write something about the book project. Besides the project description what do I need. Costs, production list, Congeneris blurb. Going into production mode is going to scare my bp up - can feel it already - it means slow breathing practice every day. - Luke's news - he has lunch with Jilly once a month and they talk newspaper shop, Roy is taking him to Cape Town over Christmas, Roy walks in Kew Gardens, listens to BBC4, false teeth and reading glasses, falls asleep at 7 if he's near a couch, shops in slippers, is cheerful. His business is solid: 4 employees for years, owns his house. He and Jill are fond, talk plants together. Tova is visiting London on the way to seeing Italy with Paul. Adam got in touch. 22 Caffé Calabria Maples already getting rusty. Clear sky pale blue, mid afternoon. Saturday steady traffic, peace and plenty. Sloppy over-fed Canadian bodies or spindly energyless Canadian bodies. One should be a banner of admirableness, people should make the effort. - She does sort of, a hawk-faced woman in black and white with a good black and white haircut. A plump crow on the wire looking up, looking south, looking north over its shoulder. The old brick façade across the way is painted a pale grey-green that shows the afternoon's quality of light by its cold silvery sheen.
[This volume was lost in the final furniture move, last couple of pages
untranscribed.]
time remaining volume 2: 2015 may-august work & days: a lifetime journal project
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