| time remaining 3 part 5 - 2016 march-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 March I woke frightened at 4:45. There'd been a dream. A man I didn't like the look of had been trying to talk to me. - Who did he look like - I've just got it. He was like the dark small man who told fortunes in Balboa Park. I'd left him behind but then someone said he'd been carrying a painting. Showed it to me. A grown man on the left, Luke as a child on the right. How old was he - I don't know, somewhere between 8 and 10? I woke very stressed at heart. Got up and turned on the computer. Asked Luke if he was alright. Just fine he said but I was still scared, so scared I was a bit stunned. When I turned on the computer there'd also been a note from Don scared too. I answered it and went back to sleep. What do I guess about D. He and O between them made a disastrous mess that sent shock waves into the future. He would have to be afraid he's responsible for smashing up his daughter, and Olivia too. Is he? How can he be, if he is not responsible for what he is. I said I thought it was alright in anguish of responsibility to hand it over to something larger. I'm seeing the larger thing wd have to be whatever made him and O too. - There's a way he likely is responsible, the sins are visited - much more than visited - certainly. We were - I mean me too, me and Roy, me in relation to Rowen - nodes in transmission. We have to be accountable in the sense of taking account, feeling account. That seems to be a human obligation. Not to be self-crippled by it though, that's useless. It's too small a view of what any human is - isn't it? There's a vast network of causation. So what is required - to make whatever amends can be made, whatever repair can be made, give whatever information one has and go on living in joy as well as grief.
When I think of the age I am and my old friends are there's a sensation I could say of unreality - but try to be more specific - it's a sensation of transparency, something like that, as if we've thinned out, are partly dissolved into the great river of generations. And there stands the cliff such a heap of time. The cliffs are changing color. It's subtle. It's not green, it's a quiet intensification. 19 We cannot see light that is just passing by. What happens when a beam of light gets fainter is that photons are further apart. There are not measurable continuous quantities in physics. If everything is quantized how does any quantity change from one value to another? How does any [object] get from one place to another if there is not a continuous range of intermediate places for it to be on the way? > 'Parallel universe' doesn't mean that - it just means normally undetectable semi-parallel structure in one universe. > Doesn't his argument depend on a thing metaphor of particles. Rob phoned this aft to say yes he'll make an offer. 20 Thinking that in Merritt I could make and post a gallery of faces, Rose for one. 23 Bought my own moon lamp for $225! Fritillaria pudica - yellow fritillary, yellow bells, yellow missionbells, gold-bell. Lily family - sagebrush, grasslands, ponderosa. Dry rocky soils, part shade. Rodents eat the bulbs. Edible but not common. SD-Mesa G Oct 2011, MG-Borrego Sept 2013, Borrego-Van Aug 2014, Van-camping May 2015, Ashcroft Sept 2015, Merritt May? 2016. Five moves in less than about five years. [notes on British painting: the golden age: from Hogarth to Turner untranscribed] The British seemed to value in particular the arts of observation. 24 Still Alice last night. I haven't written the memory faults I've had. There are the small daily losses of words, not only names, sometimes just ordinary words. No not daily - sometimes. I lose numbers I know well but haven't known long, for instance yesterday the house number here. It took me a long time to be sure of my bank password. There was the really startling time I was taking garden measurements for Sean and couldn't hold onto a number long enough to note it. When I'm drawing models I've learned I have to write my measurements down. The worst, the last semesters I was teaching was when in advising group I'd sometimes forget who had already spoken and ask them again. In writing here I'll more often repeat a phrase without noticing, which I never used to do. I have to erase more. I don't remember dreams well anymore. I have less stamina in reading - that's partly vision, I'm trying not to use glasses even when print is small - but it's mental energy too. What else - I'm more distractible I think, don't carry two intentions at the same time. For instance I was going to read the contract but got into another site and forgot. I sometimes leave an element on if it's at a low setting. But: if I prepare - and I do know how - I can speak in public without faltering. I could deliver hour-long lectures hardly looking at notes. I can write when there's something to say. I can speak with better attention than I had in my 30s. I can think through long reno sequences. I'm really good at Sketchup's spatial logic now. Senile Alzheimers isn't hereditary like early-onset. M was still coherent though weird at 80. 25 Roy has prostate cancer, mid-stage. Luke says he's laughing. 27 Easter Sunday morning, wet, a gleam on rocks, the cliff - what is that - fresh-looking, a bit spongy. Barbara Bonney across the room. She's lightly precise in the way I like best. Been looking at sofas, loveseats, sleeper sofas. 28 Woke too early from a dream of a trailer park I was walking through with someone. I was saying it was like a graveyard, all their license plates were expired. What I thought when I woke was that being ensconced in 1890 Granite - what should I call the house - is a trailer park too - I'll be parked as I have been for months already with most of my energy given to what many others give themselves to, house and garden - furniture, fixing, décor. Five years ago in the skyshack I said I wanted a small house and garden. I've held that aimedness and here it will be. And will it be the graveyard of my mobility? Will I be a house instead of a soul, by which I mean a real artist. When I'm there will I be able to leave off pulling it toward me with all my might? As I have been all winter.
Homestead, my homestead. My stead. My stand. Was thinking of Derrick Jarman's cabin in Dungeness. He made something of it and made other things too. This morning scrolling down my FB page seeing the constant push to make and say so limited in its range - eight or twenty people noticing sometimes. Dissatisfied. Look at Daichi winning festivals one after another. He's doing it, he made his base and is billowing out - just the right word - I'm seeing the way a mushroom cloud pushes outward concentrically at its base. I've been a ship in a bottle, and now want to be a strong ripple, an unstopped ripple. And there's Tom. I think he's shut me out of his facebook notices, which are all the news I've had. I'm still heartsore missing him.
30 There was a bird, like a chicken but a wild bird, white feathers with a black rump, a high round back. I was trying to look it up. Down below was a long wide view into a shallow vale stirring with many animals. In the last couple of days I was thinking about workspace. I saw it should be the parlour and the parlour should have two new sets of French doors, one closing it from the dining room which wd then become the common space, and the other onto the east verandah to make that room less blank and blind. There needs to be a gas fire. A rug, an armchair, a bookcase, filing cabinets behind the hall door, white walls and a picture rail. Publisher's office, filmmaker's studio. [dining room sofas] [best kitchen so far] What I saw about the garden is that vegetable beds should be slightly raised circles. Flowers and shrubs should be set in the ground between them with DG paths wandering. The circles shd be 4-6 feet across and they could be composting sites before they were planted, hügels even. How to make the circles - I don't know yet. Also thinking I should plumb in irrigation lines. They could be plumbed into the circles and seepage could help what grows around them. - There it is, my moon lamp. When I sent jane@harrislighting a thank you note I was suddenly crying. Is it because I gave myself the beautiful thing I gave Tom and he didn't give me? It really is beautiful. There's a mid-century teak cupboard I want. It's 900 dollars. If the buyers say yes will I - 42". - I was hours on Pinterest this aft looking at roses, circle edging, birdhouses, butterfly houses. Kept checking gmail. All at once there it was, "accepted offer" from Janis. Burst into loud sobs. Most salvias will have to be grown as annuals in zone 5 it says. Gave notice, said I'd show the place for her, a deposit I forgot. Vacant possession April 29, it'll be a year since I set out. Have the door open this aft and evening. There's euphoria of spring. 4 April Cold stroke of fear. Rob emailed wanting the inspector's phone number. He hadn't sent his list of questions. Is he having cold feet, has he asked the inspector to find something to invalidate the contract? It can all crash. I can be left with 7 months wasted and no garden, no house, no plan. Could I go through this amount of hope and suspense again, would I give up. Stay here. Find a rental in Merritt. Go north to Peter's. I've drawn something new into the garden, a lattice wall at the south end between the garage and the neighbour's wall. Saw that's where the seat is, in some shade and looking into the length of the garden toward the house. It's a pretty thing and I could use the ugly pergola's wood to make it - was my thought. Roses behind and creeping through. [garden with round vegetable beds] "Providence offers me this destiny" she writes when she announces her engagement to Arthur Nicholls. He immediately orders her to tell Ellen Nussey to burn her letters. "Dear Ellen - Arthur complains that you do not distinctly promise to burn my letters as you receive them." And then forthwith she dies of pregnancy - the last letter is his to Ellen. 31 March 1855. But she did finish Villette. Harriet Martineau hurt her feelings by saying she didn't like EB's notion of love, by which I suppose she meant the masochistic abjection in it. She was married for only 8 months. Died not quite 40. 5 [pages of measurements and house inspection notes] 6 I was saying to a young man that I liked the eagle story best. I tried to write one but I didn't succeed. He got up to move away and said something kind as he left. He had already known I liked the eagle story best. Then woke feeling how this desperation for a house is about the age I am as a woman, a desperation for floor space. Then I thought of the two awful women at Cheryl's dinner, the way their desperate blind talking must have been coming from what was as evident in them as it now is in me, the discrediting ugliness where there used to be something that held interest. Sing and louder sing - they were trying to do that and getting it horribly wrong. Inspecting the house yesterday. The meaning of the fact that its skin is suspected of poison, small amounts of asbestos maybe in the remaining stucco, the plaster walls, and even the lino tiles. Carpenters andd electricians and plumbers drilling holes in the laundry room floor or cutting a new window in the south bedroom wall or replacing the verandah stucco or maybe even removing the chandelier would be endangering their lungs. Then there's the question of knowing the worst. I'm supposing the sellers may have given up on the house because they hadn't known about asbestos in its materials and then found out after they'd already stripped most of the stucco. They didn't disclose. They didn't test because then they'd know for sure. If we test we'll know for sure. If we don't test we'll have to cheat in their same way, ask people to do the work and hope no one notices. 7 Walking a high narrow path made of iced-over uneven footprints through snow. Listing complaints with Rob this morning. He says he can't think of the house as an investment; he won't make any money, might break even. It means he's saying my design, research and management skills and maybe ten years of free labour plus the 7 months I've already put in are of no economic value. And beyond that, too, of insignificant personal value. "I want to do something with my money." "It's for you." - But then it's a gift I'm paying for with my time, my intelligence, my design skill, and then all sorts of physical effort, plus $725 a month. On his side it's true the rent will all go into maintenance and reno.
And so with the sunshine and great bursts of leaves growing on the trees I had the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. 8 I took Paul to see Callie's place on Bancroft. A slight young woman came out to meet us. Graceful, quiet. Led us through the garden first, a worked small bed of bare earth, clumps of paeonies rising through. She stood and named the fruit trees, pointing in their directions. Led us through the house. Then we three stood at the top of the drive gazing back at her warm scented bench of springtime air. The river, the river. It had risen, was rushing green again. Her fruit trees were blooming pink and white. There were vivid plants all around, wild rose beside us, the tall fir next to the house. Back at home I showed Paul the Sketchup reno of the shack. "Nice, Ellie." How much would the reno cost? 70-100 thousand he thought. That was my thought too. - Have sent the link to Louie. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with its wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. 9 I think it's a female kestrel. It's nervous, I never see it for long but it's a small hawk with a bit of blue on its head. It never stays long but seems to have chased both the woodpecker and the starling from that hole. We had a brief hard mutual stare when I was on the porch. It was really eye-to-eye. - There it is now a hovering flutter before the nest hole - assuming nest hole. I want to list how I should live in the Merritt house. I want to live more perfectly. This place has been, felt, slovenly, but I want to build perfection into that house from the start. - Ah, two of them, there instantly when a starling zoomed in. Meantime a woodpecker knocking on the wall elsewhere. They have a lot of starts.
- It's called clove currant, ribes odoratum, buffalo currant. Zone 4-8, full sun to part shade, birds, butterflies. Renewal prune late winter, young branches produce most. Cuttings. Native to rocky slopes etc. Black currants. White pine blister rust. 10 Deal with little physical ailments
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At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed awkward beside them. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence. Unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and goodwill were part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at. 14 I've been slow breathing these evenings and when I do I notice things. Last night I noticed I'm not as fearless as I used to be, I'm chemically a bit scared. Of what. This and that, the house. It's existential. I think it's body afraid of being old. Scared by being old: can I manage this. Another thing: a moment with Paul, when he came into the kitchen to sit with me while I made salad. He looked down at the cushion on the chair. There are pussy prints on the olive green velvet because I sit there when I'm putting on my pants. He hesitated. I noticed him hesitating; he didn't want his bum to touch them. I reached in and flipped the cushion. How Paul was. Brown-faced from the winter in Mexico, wearing thick new-looking cottons in khaki and olive green. Hair cut to a strong half inch all over his head, a hard round belly further forward than it has been, small pointed bird-eyes. Hard eyes I thought. He's what, sixty-seven. He looked hard and sound. Travel-weary he said. He'd been in Thailand with Rudy, different places in Mexico, had been moving for the whole winter, left long before he needed to to get to Kamloops before dark. I was full of the house and likely bored him. Scott Fitzgerald. I read Gatsby because it was there on one of the free shelves. It wasn't what it's billed as, a '20s flapper frenzy. That's what the movie made of it but it was Nick Carradine's voice, which is quiet, watchful, culturally confident, interested. So I asked for Tender is the night. I'm not interested in the characters but I'm interested in the sentences. He describes sometimes in an unobvious way that depends on but doesn't specify an evoked seeing. Can I remember an example. "An intangible mist of bloom that followed the white border stones." "The river shimmered with lights from the bridges and cradled many cold moons." Getting that depends on knowing the round street lamps along the quais in Paris. His social observations sometimes go over my head but I notice that I trust them because his physical observations are accurate. I can tell he's writing from what actually happens to him, he's not generalizing, so there's an intimacy. He seems Catholic, I thought just now, something foreign to me in the heatedness of personal regard between people. And Lawrence though not nearly as coherent - trying for Lawrence maybe but without Lawrence's English centuries behind him. And yet "like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value." There he's got an aperçu but as if from outside: noticing it but not writing from within it? Something like that. There have been mysterious itchy bites. It's been a theme. When did it start. Tom's bedbugs. Then bird mites. Then spider bites at Mesa Grande. Then my own bedbugs last winter. I don't know what these are. One showed up on the inside of my left upper arm as I sat in the insurance office yesterday. A week ago there were three under my plaid shirt. Spots of distraction. Small attack. Small invisible attack. There I hear the woodpecker knocking at the kitchen wall. 15 Rob has lifted conditions and sent a check. Now I'm seeing the dirty boards and concrete slabs in the yard, the lumps of furniture, the walls to be painted - the hard labor, the years of it. I realized yesterday that I could rent storage and start moving stuff. Two weeks exactly. I'm like Dick Diver having left the fine house above the Mediterranean and drifting downward to always smaller towns in New York State. It'll be what I make of it in my very shrunk expectations. Things I now don't expect:
FB notice:
16 I was with a man somewhere in a room. He wanted to take a shower together but I said I must go home to talk to my landlord. Then sitting across a table from Mr Choy. I said I had graduated and he could have the place back if he wanted. He said he intended to tear it down but no hurry. A three-storey condo? I asked. dedicated his declining years to [notes on porch building] 17 Yesterday a load of boxes to Merritt. Today épuisée. Why that word. The well dry. Saggy, craving something sweet. Struggling heavy boxes down the steps thinking it'll soon be the end of that. Another load this coming week. How it was seeing the house with the man who remade it, mended it. He said he had a tight heart leaving it. I wanted him to feel I'd go on making it what he wanted it to be. I focused on him, didn't take possession, didn't really see it. That will be the moment when I arrive on Friday morning of the 29th and lay my hand on anything I like, look into the garage to see what tools I now own. Look in the drawers and cupboards. I drove there the Logan Lake road because the jeep was loaded. I so don't like that road. It seems dark. It was colder and earlier, still wintery. But then coming down into the valley, on the slopes where the sagebrush begins, the surprise of hillsides covered with yellow flowers. My first sight of what turned out to be balsamroot. The house's lilacs are white! [notes from talking to Robin Deschenes about the house] Last afternoon there was a moment I'd been looking for, when Thomas Fendler showed up under my Home notice. I knew he'd like 1931 Craftsman bungalow. 18 My $40 pepper mill came today. I wanted a nice one and it was the nicest. It was so hot at my desk this late afternoon that my hairline was damp the way it used to be in Borrego. When I thought to look at the Ashcroft weather page much later it said 29 degrees. A heat wave breaking century records even in the Peace, where there are fires. I transcribed up to here and got Back3-4 mostly set up. It began in winter misery but turned fast after the first birds and then first sun. Ashcroft now is the loveliest of towns, soft-leafed trees among the roofs on layered benches, river full and sparkling, lilacs indigenously everywhere, naturalized thriving in drought, in bloom and full of buzz, yards all woken up and frilly, people on the street. Nice houses. It's a mythic river town. There's always the long slope down toward the town seeing it far below shelving into the cut and then a grand definitive entrance thrumming over the long bridge. It's a natural town, takes its shapes and zones from its dramatic cleft. The librarians, the checkers, the postal clerks, the Irly's counter men, the supermarket women talk to me now as though they know me after the winter we've had together. I help myself to boxes from the recycling bins and always drive without my seatbelt on in the town. Never lock the jeep. 19 Yesterday and today caught up to the end of Back3, then went through it looking for work notes to carry forward. There were some, Dante and work with the Going for broke years. In my usual way I don't seem to have noticed when it stopped. I'm asking how to go forward with the journal. There was no writing of my own to carry forward, writing as writing I mean. It's all daily voice - like this too - used to balance myself in whatever comes along. I don't want that in my new time and yet I need it. Maybe if I had someone to talk to the daily junk wd just dissolve into air as we went along. I need it but doesn't this daily voice peg me into normalcy. I need a jump. I want the house now that I've got to it to be a platform for my best. Posted a note about the NFT3 show May 24 and a whole different crew has noticed, film people I've assumed tune out my posts: Oona, Pablo, Nicky, Scott, Mike. Does it tell me something about the status of the event. 20 Here I am crying in a chapter about how she works with her landscaping crews. I miss my workers! José-Luis and beautiful Mario and Art Sanchez and Leo Anguiano. 21 The woodpecker has stopped banging on my wall because his work is done. He had to start a completely new hole because the fierce handsome kestrels helped themselves to the highest one and maybe the second one down was too close to them? A blue eggshell on the cement at the foot of my stairs, someone got tossed out. Indra posted a photo of the four kids in her family to say her sister has died. "And then there were three." She's there so beautiful a child, visibly the best of them, bright-eyed and strong, a maybe-nine-year-old with ear ponytails. I thought of what I wrote when Janeen died, the bubbles. Wanted to give her something better than the dull conventionality that seems to surround her. I'm on the side of who she was, though I'm not sure she can be. Marking time, loaded most of the storage stuff into the jeep after I went down to pay for a year's insurance. There's still various stuff in this space I'll have to pack up tomorrow. Researched paeony and rose sources. Fruit trees for zone 5. Wind blowing hard from the east. 24 Hundreds of crows kettling above a piney bank. I saw them when I stopped to take a photo of the bright smooth dandelion field. I'd loaded and unloaded the jeep full of boxes, last of the storage space, and stood with Sylvie and Robin in the yard, and was driving back blissful in the day it was, leafy and fresh after yesterday's rain. That so does not say it. Dry country was wide awake with water, cattle standing in pools, the silty Nicola full to the top and spreading wide wherever it could, sage hills greening like some other kind of place, startling purple patches on the cutbank. What are they, I'll have to find somewhere to pull over. Penstemon low to the gound in mats, chokecherry blooming along the road. Plants always but on that road it's the colors of rock and earth that are a constant dazzled wonder, speechless - nameless - just what they are and always more and unphotographable and ungraspable. I don't know what to do with them. I am wanting to take them in more than I can. There's a helplessness in the pleasure, I can do nothing with this. Or maybe there's some small thing I can do with colored rock, I'm starting to look for sources. I stood too long with Sylvie and Robin getting colder. My right knee hurts. Isn't this what happened last year in Osoyoos. Will I be hobbling through the chores of this last week here. Standing with the two of them really joyful in the good exchange. I said to Robin, But you put so much love into this house. He said, I put so much love into everything I do, every year there are my grade twos and they move on. You can't look back. Sylvie said she and their daughter stood in the house and said it had good energy. Robin - I'm saying it in French now - didn't like to see how much work it would be, but then he put all his own sweet committed decisive detailed energy into it. I mentioned the kestrels. He called up a photo on his phone to show her. "I like birds." He admires his wife. He loves his daughter. They're people who do things well. 25 I was listening to Middlemarch while watching porn. The reader was good with voices, could call up any age or class remarkably. The voice she gives Eliot herself is probably accurate but it brings her horrible prosiness too much alive, so I wince away from her wise pose. She is Casaubon the dry pedant sermonizing, making sure everyone knows she's smart and well-read. There's no weather, no leaf or stone. It's a large social study, politics, religion, class, gender etc but the proportion of author to narrative is very high. So I was half-listening, sometimes skipping but mostly finding other things to do. Rose sources in BC and then in Canada, news sites. Then happened on Artserotica, "romantic porn for couples." They bang away on and on. It's stupid people having stupid sex stupidly. I guess that's what it's like for people. Was seeing what it was Tom expected, thinking Jam spoiled me for Tom in her immaculately attentive high-precision minutely studious way. There was that about her, which I never described. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then it'll be Friday and the new thing will begin, that I'm thinking of as the last thing. I'll be in an empty house in a random town surrounded by work I may have begun to be too fragile to do. I'll be tied to a man who's in most ways irrelevant to me and there'll be no one to call up my best. I notice myself sometimes sensing that life is over. What is that exactly. Partly a sense that nothing matters now. I'll still work as best I can, I'll try for a final flare, but there's what I have felt as a thinning out into air. - But I like air. Sigh. In the house, make my workroom. Do that first.
time remaining volume 3: 2015 may-august work & days: a lifetime journal project
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