| volume 3 of time remaining: 2015-2016 september-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Part 1: move into a studio apartment off Highway 97c between Ashcroft and Cache Creek. It's a dark isolated unhappy little den but I'm there to look for somewhere better. My long-ago ex Jamila offers to buy me a house. I find one I like in Lillooet. Surge of joy and energy imagining the life I could have in it. Part 2: crushing disappointment when it's sold before we can sort out negotiations. Jam patronizes me in her old way. I blow up. That's the end of that. Part 3: TIFF Lightbox screening in Toronto. Come back and work on the Edged out years of Dames rocket, trying to find the next real work. It snows. I get interested in the possibilities of an Ashcroft shack on the river, renovate it in Sketchup, decide I can't afford it. Part 4 more Sketchup fantasy and more driven scanning for houses in Lillooet, Ashcroft, Cache Creek, Walhachin, Oliver. I do a spreadsheet multifactor analysis and change my mind about Merritt. Get excited about a house there. Meet Rob in Merritt to look at it. We're both shocked by our disagreements but we get over it. A month of suspense. In part 5 it comes true, 1890 Granite Avenue, a 1931 Craftsman bungalow with a south facing yard. It was a dull, confined winter and the writing in this volume is so lifeless I've mostly had to extract for facts and images rather than text. Notes: Joyce Portrait of the artist as a young man, Mantel Wolf Hall, Mark Rylance in BBC Wolf Hall, romantic porn, Patrick Lane, Nadine Gordimer, Juliana Margulies in The good wife, the Purgatorio and Paradiso, buying, inspecting, and renovating houses, 1121 Fraserview in Lillooet, Art Gallery of Ontario, Lynne Segal Out of time, Durrell Alexandria quartet, Richard Brody in the New Yorker, Margaret Drabble A summer birdcage, Ashcroft geology, Black Lives Matter, chukars, Gordon Smith paintings, Donald Davie Pound, De Beauvoir on old age, Edged out 8, American sniper, Being about, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson Women, the New York school, and other true abstractions, Indra McEwen Socrates' anscestor, Kristin Lavransdotter, Azimov Second foundation, Dune, James Agee, Annie Proulx, Gillian Slovo, quantum computing, yellow fritillary, , Tender is the night, The great Gatsby, clove currants, arrow-leaved balsamroot. Mentioned: Louie E, Tom Fendler, Julia Janzen, Jam Ismail, George and Hilda Konrad, Anne and Harvey Dyck, David Carter, Franci Duran, Chris Kennedy, Jacob Korczybski, Tia Gonzales, Mafalda Reis Moore, Heinz Esau of Friendship Automotive Repair, Peter Plant, Cathy Widdess, Rowen, Luke, Greg Morrison, Rob Mills, Cheryl C, Mary Daniel, Robert Lee, Katrin Zaugg, Dorothy Beach, Bruce Bevan, Joe Slovo, Ros de Lanerolle, Ruth First, Buddy Hardy, Phyllis Altman, David Cooper, Tony Nesbitt, Mike Dunford, Anastasia Hoffman, Don Carmichael, Peter V T, Rose in the Copper Valley Motel in Merritt, Paul Epp, Callie Kellman, Robin Deschenes.
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3rd September Ashcroft 6pm. Must be his kitchen the other side of the door. Pots clashing. Here's a desk and a lamp, here's a bed put together on the floor. Long light almost horizontal I see from the sage's shadows on the cliff. It's a strange I want to say white light. Yes - monkey's wedding, full rainbow to the south. It's sprinkling on the jeeps standing either side of the cop car below. Full blast of that white light on - 5 The cliff is superb - velvety, mouse-colored in this light - showing its edges differently every moment of every day - but the view of it so horribly messed up by this insane balcony - this architect's insanity. I need to complain. I don't like the rickety steps and I don't like being on the second floor so I can't just walk out. I don't like the wires across the view. Both libraries have nothing, nothing, nothing. The radio doesn't pick up CBC or NPR. Bonaparte River far below. I could hear it echoing off the cliff. 7 Woke remembering why I'm here, which I hadn't. - I particularly like those darker patches rimmed with sagebrush, eroded grit accumulated. Little yellow thing size and shape of a leaf. Light on a slope always. - The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green. Mantel 2009 10 I don't like that this house is skew to the directions. I know north when I can see the dipper but the house doesn't tell me where I am. Slit of light on the north wall in the morning briefly but what does it mean. 11 The most important thing about this place is that wall with its pretty shades of darkness, slight fur of dry grass - tan grass - and nobbles of grey green that throw long shadows. 13 The remodel of this place is pretty much perfect - pretty - I have a vocabulary now, can just lift surfaces and structures from other houses - and windows and doors and beige terrazzo - rugs - Tom's little table - but then there are new moves too when something doesn't work - kitchen counter and tiles - or I look for and find a better element - stovetop and cooking pot - or I put more time into something - colors on rows of books - or bring in something special - the Cold Front painting this time - and then I make jpgs and keep remaking them - it's midnight and I haven't been able to stop. There's more finish on what I make now. [armchair corner] [bathroom from above] [bathroom with corner windows] [inside bathroom] [office corner] [from the bed] [from the desk] [toward the kitchen] [terrace over the Thompson] 14 Ashcroft Fall Fair yesterday in the arena. There was a man I liked the look of and a woman I immediately hated as a rival, foolish old habit. Many competitive categories with so few entries in each that everyone got a ribbon. Outside the arena the green river flowed fast and shallow sounding up onto the town's long bench. There were ragged dirty old bachelors of a familiar country kind, wearing cowboy hats and baseball caps, fat young mothers, withered old women with their poodle hair, ugly children with face paint. The man I liked the look of was my age, bit less maybe, in jeans and plaid shirt moving easily - not rickety - announcing the musicians and tweaking the audio controls. Breezy manliness. The woman I hated was one of those country princesses with a thin face, long hair, long legs, and a big rump. When the man I liked the look of eyed me back I felt something up the back of my neck, a sexual prickle - can it be said better. Then he was there on stage flirting with cowboy princess and oh alright his having it means he has it for her. He would, because look at her. So I sang along and then went home. 22 Yale, Saddle Rock, Sailor Bar, Alexandra, Hell's Gate, Freebee, China Bar. Fraser Canyon tunnels late '50s to mid-'60s. 24 I did not know then that in any field there are always only a few good people. Gordimer quoting Walter Benjamin - the experience conveyed is not "the development of actions" but "the representation of conditions." 26 Today the sound of the river. A spot behind the school district buildings that's above a riffle. Water a beautiful green. Loveliest sound. 1st October Jam's offer - what I shd do about it. 2
Maintenance needed: exterior paint, yard mowing, chimney cleaning - available? 4 The blue house - for one thing the excitement, I was turned on bright - began yesterday when I phoned Jam - she was happy - she said she'd put 360,000 into my account within the next three weeks - I said no the house should be yours and I'll rent it, it should be a good investment for you - she said she liked to hear the energy in my voice.. What is it about the blue house - the color for one, but then also the windows in the front and the way the little front porch is set. There's wainscoting and a brick fireplace. It would be a garden-making life, yes that, I'd hedge the neighbour side, plant raspberries, strawberries, what are the fruit trees there already. I want paeonies. Would I work there. I'd have the company of a small town, a Greek restauant, a library to walk to. I could ride my bike all over town, have a circuit, it's flat on the bench. There'd be a lot of open sky at night, over the chasm of the river. What would it be like to feel I had a home. And could unpack. And could bring my furniture from Vancouver. And unpack my files and put up my few bits of pictures. And have dishes. Maybe a freezer in the garage. Give out I'd bought it, which I would have done. Run a publishing house. I could have a bookshelf. I could have flowers in the house. I could have roses and lilacs. I could look around for fine souls. Of any age. It has hardwood floors I think. I'll see it tomorrow, go early before I talk to the agent. Measure, look around at the gardens to see what they can grow. It's a bungalow. I could have a kitten. Or two. I could have a neighbour to feed the cats. Roses! Reading books on house inspection, remodeling and buying. Lillooet tomorrow. 7 I'm just now realizing it's a psychologically fragile field - I've been so intent on mastering the facts and inventing beauties and imagining myself at home that I have forgotten that Jam isn't a businesswoman though she seems to see herself as one. She has no one to process with. That puts me in some danger. 8 Bought a bed. Bought a bed from Fred. 9 Getting in and out of it without thinking, without struggle. Yesterday someone on Ashcroft Buy & Sell saying he's having a moving sale, selling everything. Address on Frontage Road in 16 Mile. I have to find the place, back and forth on the gravel road west of the highway. Didn't bring the number. Man at the closed north end of the road comes out of his house because he's seen me turn around twice. I've remembered the seller's name. It's Paul. Four lots past the fruit stand. There's a Remax sign. Septic pumping going on. Three men and a pit bull puppy. Trailer with built-ons, bachelor shambles. Paul has a thin little head with jug ears. He has a bed frame but it's fancy. Do I want a couch? Paid fifteen hundred for it, he'll give it to me for fifty. He says the fruit stand man has a single bed. He'll help me load it if I want. The fruit stand is also a plant nursery and a vast junk shop behind tall hoardings. Many acres sloping up toward a fine mountainside. Half a dozen old trailers. Junk laid out weathering. Various containers with their doors open. A nursery patch with pots in ordered sections. A large area of black filter cloth held down with tires. A jerry-built long roofed structure with aisles of tables holding old TVs, dishes, magazines, furniture. The owner comes down the slope. He's surprising, a black man. He has a narrow calmly alert face and a slow soft voice. Is it an accent, I wonder. American maybe but not southern, it's just his manner probably. He's intelligent, a bit ironical, very present. I like him. I'd brought him a sprig from Paul's hedge, something with fine pointed leaves, asked whether he knew it. He considered. "I think it's li-lac," pronouncing the two syllables with a slow gap between them. "It goes like that if it isn't taken care of. It's very hardy." He says yes he has a bed somewhere, he'll have to find it. Meanwhile I can look in the roofed structure. He goes off. Then I can't find him. I'm wandering the nursery rows. There's sedum in bright pink bloom. Gangling willow. This and that, nothing he hasn't propagated himself. He comes up from the fruit stand then. There'd been a car. We were going to see the bed. He said it was blue. He chose a careful path along the slope and around obstacles. Pulled a bed frame out of a pile. I liked it. It was simple, rounded tubular metal ends, a good blue, some rusted and flaked. "How much do you want for it?" "Twenty-five?" He didn't have change for a ten so I went hunting through my change box for nickels and dimes. "What's your name?" "Fred." I asked because I wanted to be friends, go on knowing him. I asked if he had a card. He laughed, gestured to his whole jumbled spread, "This is my card." But wrote something on the back of a card someone else had given him.
Loaded the bed carefully into the back of the jeep. - Kamloops Starbucks. It wasn't broad daylight yet. I couldn't see the country well and was driving fast but up ahead under the lid of cloud was open sky clear pale marachino pink. Sagebrush and blooming rabbitbrush on the verges are the season's color, with aspen gold and pine dark green in the creases. Colors of broken rock whose mix gives me shocks of pleasure always. A lovely road, loopy, loping through a broad valley toward and away from the Thompson. - Home by four. Dustiest computer they'd seen. The wind was blowing tumbleweed across the road. I was driving fast. The road was much shorter on the way home. Uncle George and I were leaning on the deck railing looking down onto the garden. He said he'd tackled my dad. "I said 'Ewald when are you going to get right with your kids.' He said 'When are they going to get right with me.'" The blue house. I've worked my hope and excitement off in Sketchup, have it as it is and as I'd make it if there were lots of money. Imagining the two west rooms are bedroom and workroom, and kitchen and small bedroom and basement could be sometimes shared. Wondering whether it could pay for itself a bit, somehow. [blue house from the NE] [from the SW] [floor plan before] [floor plan after] 10 On the blue house again all day. Built-ins, picture rails, glass doorknobs, a kitchen table and chairs. 11 I haven't pushed, have done what I could on my own. This morning early an email. We talked on the phone. Since it's an investment she's now thinking as an investor. "Give me your pitch." I did. I had it ready. I've done a lot this week. 12 This morning she says "i like it. and the town. if that's where u want to live." 15 Blow to the heart - trembling - email from the realtor saying someone's offer accepted. There was so much joy in the thought of it. I was younger. My friends came to stay and helped remodel. I had friends. The garden was perfect paradise. I'd learned how to do the remodels and was just prioritizing. 16 Jam said "Let's see what stuff you're made of." It made me remember who I'm dealing with. She jumps into the upper air when she thinks she can. It's a way of staying above herself probably but I don't like it. Alright, so where am I now, again. It's 6:30, sky showing lighter above the cliff. Colder than it's been, the floor is cold. I can hear trucks gearing down on the Transcanada. I'm in this dark den of a place and will have - I think - money enough to afford it, or almost. I want the life I imagined in that house - I don't want an isolate's house now, I want a house with friends and sun in the garden and open sky beyond the gate. I want it with all the joy love faith hope energy focus and impetus of this past week. 17 I had something to do and then I didn't. I'd put away the blue house reno sketchup but yesterday I opened it again and worked all day on detailing picture rails, edge boards, colors. Added a shelf and a suitcase to the guestroom, water to the tub, devised narrow double doors for the kitchen so there'd be room to open them. The house had become another fantasy house I could love as that. Who disapproves? I do and don't. I love the work and love being absorbed in it. I've got better at it and like the defter ways I handle tasks. I'm more exact and quicker to improvise. I love the constant suite of problem and solution. I love putting colors together. I love working with the classical details of that kind of house, the accumulated taste and skill of the carpentry, the mouldings, the way they give a room high coherence, the care needed for their making. Their unity of style, the way it all goes together - hardwood floor, high ceilings, complex casings on double-hung windows, edgeboards and picture rails. Symmetries. Fireplace. I like learning to understand those details better as I work with them. [bathroom before] [bathroom after] [kitchen before] [kitchen after] [front room before] [from room after] [northwest bedroom before] [northwest bedroom after] [northeast bedroom before] [northeast bedroom after] - I told Rob the tale and said "It's kind of a long shot, but ...." He said "It's not a long shot at all, I've been thinking maybe Ellie would like to do something." A relief to think of doing it with him. "It's a good idea on so many levels." 19 Saturday evening I needed cream for tea, drove to Ashcroft, winding down into the valley realized it was the first time I'd been out at night, scatter of village lights on the valley floor. On the way home crossed the tracks and sat for a while above the river that rippled sheet of heavy substance moving inexorably past. Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Richardson, Lawrence, the headwaters. There are no others, still. London, Dublin and Sligo: the Rhymers, Irish history and the peasants: something, something and La Glace. No, the writers, the plants and buildings, space and light and their devotees, the mid-century painters all the way down to Gordon Smith. - Making this list I see that the later headwaters were not in writing and not in 20th c science exactly but in what it gave visual artists. "Experimental film" was a way station getting ready for the full digital that'll be the next headwater. Okay. Election today. The man despised by artists and scientists was not reelected. The man who won gave a speech that went from "this great country" to "working together" with no single intelligent sentence. 22 Two Gordon Smith books on interlibe loan finally have come through and there I see how my hero on the way to being what he became as an old man worked in many styles fashionable in his many times, all of which I hate. Until in his seventies in the mid-1990s he lent himself to many kinds of bad training - I mean humanly bad - to succeed in narrowly male-defensive terms. (One exception, Freight yards 1945.) He had the example of the expressionists all the while - Pollock was dead by the '50s - but stayed local. Was that failure of recognition? "Smith has stated recently that he feels he has done his best work since turning seventy." Untitled 1996, 8' wide, is probably the one I saw. Did his lifetime of fashionable experiments make him able to do what he does in his few stupendous works? Did his generosity in friendship and teaching and his sober discipline keep him from getting there sooner? Untitled in the VAG is expressionism taken further, the way Bontecou's later work is something taken further. Joan Mitchell made a lot of junk too. Krasmer was almost where he is in 1961, Primeval resurgence at MOCA. Needless to say she isn't mentioned in either book. Meantime I'm laughing at the unsuccess of my efforts with writing public guys. Harold Rhenish. I wrote him about his mind vs body language. We were back and forth a couple of times and then he dropped me. Now Antonis about Gordon Smith. Greg sent a New Yorker piece about a writer who wrote a lot without publishing and then sent something to a known young guy and once he replied wd send him 5 emails a day, brilliant emails. But 1. I haven't picked anyone my own size, and 2. I'd never be so persistent, and 3. I don't know what size I am, exactly. Wd I know by who wanted to reply? No, because there's so much prejudgment blindness of women. It makes a fog. 26 Yesterday and Saturday all day refining the Oliver house. It's something to do; have nothing to read. It's the Oliver house because it's the size of the little wreck I thought of renting, on the alley, with an apricot tree. Began it on the powerbook 17". It was a careless experiment. It's still not wonderful but I devised this and that, a way of setting the bathroom sink in front of windows, a shallow shelf-box fitted in next to the oven hood. Had new things from the blue house: cupboard hinges, long drawer pulls, a much better bed, a nice kitchen mat, bathroom cupboard doors that work. I like the 1' walls. Too many panes I think. 18x22 = almost 4002. [floor plan] [french doors] [desk corner] [Gordon Smith painting] 30 I drove through changed color - rabbitbrush gone furry buff, bare trees, sweet mild light. Bale Road a gravel track. Then there it is. Low to the ground, really, except in its southwest back corner. "It's an estate" said Dan the realtor. Yes but an imaginative one. The stone steps. The deep stone at all. It's romantic. There's a pool wall. I was planting roses and an orchard oh yes. This one is not true love in the same way but I notice that I immediately begin to invent ways to live in the space. There's a screening room. Rob meantime is feeling doubts. But I'm more sanguine now, imagining these futures is its own pleasure. 31 That one photo looking SW past bare tree and low stone wall toward the river and curved line of track and further hills. It's a precinct. I've been living badly, hiding from my days because they aren't right. This house isn't right. I'm not working, I'm not loving, except yesterday oh that stretch of road with pink bushes in a shallow draw. The stone steps. The stone wall. Flying on the highway. Lit 5 candles. Read GW3-3. Not so much Tom as the writing. By which I mean the being. Realness balancing with something to meet. 1st November The clocks have been set back, it's 3:42. I woke desperate. Realizing my desperation. I'm desperate for a place. I don't live right in this place. It's blind, it's enclosed, I'm not in the world when I'm here and I'm here most of the time because there's nothing for me to do outside. The yard is hard to walk on and the neighbours' yard is ugly. I like to go to Ashcroft but there's nothing for me to do there either. I go to the library, I go to the market, I buy water at Irly's, I take recycling to the bins, sometimes I stop at the post office, and then I have to go home. I look at cashiers and talk to them, have pleased words with anyone but no one knows me. I've been here two months. They've been laid waste except for driving through autumn country. The drives to Lillooet, Kamloops, Bale Rd. I'm transient, I'm in a holding cell. There's been nothing to read. I don't work. I kill time all day. I'm squalid. If work is all I have why don't I work. It's as if my human self, my ordinary self, digs in her heels: I want, I need, I refuse until you look after me. Give me a home, give me a lover, give me friendly company and play. Give me confidence and admiration and affection, somewhere, somehow. Give me loving company, a personal life. Is that it, I don't know. It says yes. 7th Hello Saturday. I make tea and sit down to real estate. 9 Want to say that I knew right after we hung up that no I must not accept 60 thousand dollars from her - I don't want to be involved in secrecy with her - I don't want to be sealed off that way and certainly not with her. Am glad I blasted her but it shook me to come out bare in rage - it rose as I started to speak - it as if welled up from under me and lifted me. I liked the thought of being more the way I used to be when I was with her, more porous and feeling, love woman being an artist, going for broke - the best of my relation with her was Titania in the bushes / something intently - she supported it in me by being Oberon in her way - didn't she? - yes - ashamed intently
Text message: You're one of the places love has had to give up on itself. That did harm to someone I'd struggled to be. I want to recover that self but money isn't the way. I had wobbled but knew it felt wrong as soon as I hung up. Big sigh. 13 Toronto There are often a couple of quiet women who say they liked it. I believe them and can think it's for them. Meanwhile the thin young men with impassive faces who deal in 'art'. Technically: beautiful projection. Beautiful sound. One-shot films. One-way conversation - audience of 56 scattered through a big space - some I could hardly see or hear - I talked and had no idea how it seemed. Out of touch with the moment in the sense that I was presenting not feeling. Toronto - grubby storefronts and house fronts, rotting remnant feeling, what is it, immigration? Why am I thinking science fiction, The dispossessed underclass warrens on Uras, Cabbagetown. Lot of young persons who look poor and arty. 18 What more to tell. Yesterday over the Rockies flying blind through dense whiteness, pitching about, feeling the small Air Canada jet-prop thrusting blindly forward, feeling the unseen sharp teeth of the Rockies below. Then landing in a rain storm in Kamloops. It was only 2:30 but dark as 5:30 in winter, snow higher up on the hills. Driving home through slashing rain, having to constantly change wiper speed, being careful with braking, arriving at Cache Creek in actual night, buying gas and milk, getting home to my ugly stairs and hot bath and deep tea and a note from David. At 7:30 in the morning the car TIFF sent, Franci bringing coffee in a jar, the two of them turning and walking up the stairs. Toronto's wonderful bright, tinted morning from the expressway, my driver telling his plan to save the world. 20 The Saturna volume - Edged out 8 - working with it, which is working with myself at 38-39 - partly as if working with someone I don't know - I do often like what she likes in language but sometimes re-punctuate or re-space - my purpose is different sometimes - she sometimes has to notice things I no longer do - I sometimes don't follow her additions later in a notation - don't know whether they mean something I'm missing - I sometimes smooth out her exactitudes - I'm less anguished and more sure of myself - I loathe Jam when I see her crooked machinations - I rise in defense of myself. More important in the blinder reaches of the text, the better blinder reaches where I don't know, where I still don't know, I'm wondering whether I could just go on in trust of blind recognition whatever it is. I know I like many things in the suite - what should I call it - 1983-84 September-April - I know I want to work with what she was more than I am, and can, am able to help her finish what she was wanting to do. Edged out means more than one thing: excluded but also living valiantly on my edge, on an island edge. A lot of it realistically is just shapes of language maybe useable, recognizable, by someone - it's a collection of abstract recognitions not primarily about me and not necessarily recognized by me except in being maybe recognizable by someone - and then sometimes bursts of personal love that sing out with characteristic lightness. Working with it I look for thematic lines - not thematic and not lines - concerns? - followed trackings - not resolvable in the text - clumps - clumpings. There's forming to find - The glass essay closest but not close - it's another isolated winter, more islanded by far - a collaboration. 23 August-November 1983 before Saturna separated from Jam and sorting energetically - looking at the gathered bits seeing that I was forming the sorted steady platform I taught from and the sorted steady confidence that led me through the doc. I used the energy of pain to work. Sorting now with more than one focus - what grabs as language - what describes the time - what's vacated or wrong - what I might need now - what it was with Jam. 24 Yesterday I woke to snow on the ground. Swept it off the stairs, swept it off the jeep's windows. 25 Georg Patzer says impressive photos and exciting little texts. A photographer's precise take on the threshold between inner and outer. Quiet simple work with thoughtful depth. Mainly what I'm taking from the German reviews is that they kind of like the writing, which encourages me at last, whatever their misunderstandings. They like stone book too. 28 I try to be scrupulous in sorting, want to be sure of what I say, at the same time realizing it's alright to keep lines I don't understand because they don't actually have a status different than the lines I do understand. I mean in the reader who in any case is making something unknown of them. Small small drift of the scent of carnation so pleases me. What's different now is I'm less anxious about being mistaken in keeping and erasing. I am always aware it's a sea of possibly related significances, many of which I don't see, don't handle. I mean I am aware and more easy being aware that it's beyond me, I can't know it. I'm not afraid as I was that I am passing on something that will harm. 30 What winter's like in this place, close-lidded grey, dry bitter cold, mountains when I'm on the road to see them quite wonderfully articulated by light snow sifted into their creases and bringing forward their signifying simple shades of grey and tan. December 1 Have been once through the Saturna piece. Furiously dislike Jam in the record, was struggling to learn to distrust her accurately. What to do with that part of the time. Was being edged out in an ambiguous way, unconscious in all but me. What was I edged out of, that, something I was onto. 4 It's a larger scope I'm seeing, it's not just the Saturna journal it's the whole time with Jam, the way I was working and what I was working on. It's unfinished. It founded what I later could know but there's more - Such anguish about writing and gender, attachment. 15 The days passed, which seemed the most I could expect of them. 16 Lo a clear sky. Blue snow between the tufts of bunchgrass. 17 Photo yesterday I liked. There was sun briefly. Went out to try for vapor against the cliff and found this one as I was coming back in. Intense blue-green. Won't describe it. Posted 5 of the more ordinary ones and like what FB does with them, 5 small crops set together so they show a common tone, this one an assembly of blue and white with tawny browns. 21 There are 4 paragraphs describing the day and night Robert was at my house. In them I feel something so different, not frantic confusion, quiet warmth like a dark warm space in the chest. Actual love. I can feel victimized by J's madness and nastiness but am disgusted by my part in it too, wrong from the beginning. Ashamed. The fact is that I prostituted love woman to J trying to exchange her for cultural capital, which I was in desperate need of on account of patriarchal neglect. That's the whole story of Jam isn't it. The right way to live as and with love woman is what I felt for RM. Neither of us could have handled being together then. I couldn't have handled the real thing with anyone.
29 Can I recover what exactly was the new stance - new to me - I was trying on between 1975 and 1985 - where it came from - what it had changed when I moved on from it - something stylistic, trying to write phenomenology - the moment as experience - solipsistic exactitude
31 203 Bancroft. A bright day. Cold. I wear the purple Carhart hat. Drive straight down the drooping end of Bancroft. There it is. A shack. Derelict cars. A little trailer, stacks of old boards. The house is sided with old asphalt cladding. A man inside has seen me coming. He's a friend looking after the place. 1st January 2016 What sort of life it could be - clean up the yard, get rid of everything - clean up the trees below - turn the whole yard into garden and orchard - set a bed on the river ledge - completely renovate the house. 8 Ten hours of Sketchup days in a row. Working on a reno of the river house. [with storm windows] [toward the south end] [toward the desk] [northwest corner] [french doors] [kitchen] [whole kitchen from overhead] [guestroom] [front door] [bathroom] 14 Working on Titania's gash - I need consistent grammar. Working on that but it takes quite a few passes. What I still have only a dim grasp of:
I like the interweave of personal and impersonal. There's a person trying to figure out how to live. Suffering, being pleased. Sex, landscape, study. She begins but can't finish. I can't generate and feel and register as she can but I can finish. I love her. I can be the help she needed. Am I helped in this by all the teaching. The writing has to come before the film. 17 Bleak midwinter - house arrest - snow and dirty slush - nowhere to go nothing to do - eat and try not to eat anything I like a lot - empty of feeling and thought - clumsy sometimes, dropping things, staggering - Rob doesn't reply, Tom doesn't reply, Louie sends notes I junk right away - overwhelmed when I look at houses online, exhausted by considerations - no books in the libraries! - no books! - still don't know where to live - have no impulse toward writing my life - is that the worst, the way the journal has died - I'm writing here because I might scare something up, no not scare - I might labour something up, some shred of interest - is it loss of energy - sigh - loss of friendship - flattened despair of friendship or loving moments ever again anywhere - even for place and time - 20 My landscape too, the kinds of light and season. And mostly the way it was for Kristin with Erlend, which is me with Tom and Mary with Ed. It was true that all this time she had remembered, year after year, every wound he had ever caused her - even though she had always known that he never wounded her in the way a grown person intends harm to another .... Each time he offended her she had tended to the memory the way one tends to a venomous sore. She knew she wasn't usually narrow-minded, but with him she was ... even the smallest scratch on her soul would continue to sting and bleed and swell and ache if he was the one to cause it. About him she would never be wiser or stronger. Always, always there was the yearning lament inside her. In Undset's light even my contempt for Tom seems a posture of love. Something else I see is how our ways in La Glace six hundred years after 1330 were still medieval. The way Ed said "It has taken me years to live you down" and instead of saying "What are you thinking, I put this family on the map" I said "I didn't do it under your roof." 25 Dorothy Beach died Saturday. David told me with a photo of a rocking chair next to a wheelchair. "Rockers ahead by a length." 28 Have been accumulating what today I'm thinking I could call a hope chest. Yesterday a little brandy glass that rang true in the goodwill. Books. Woodworking wisdom and know-how and How to make bookshelves and cabinets. A new copy of the Reader's Digest encyclopedia of garden plants and flowers. Mrs Dalloway, Master and commander - counting these last because I'm not going to pass them on as usual but will keep them for a guestroom. Small straight-sided glass olive jars for spices or eventual preserving. A tall handsome crystal vase I've already cracked. A seven-inch straight-sided glass vase for small flowers. A large set of wrenches in a case. Have so much energy for the thought of a house and so little for anything else. The snow has been slowly evaporating away. Today the cliff is bare except for little dabs though shaded regions near the house are still pied with ice patches. 30 I get fastened to each house I consider, am yearning for 1986 Douglas, for its garden. Have fenced the big yard, planted it corner to corner. Roses, paeonies, iris, phlox, poppies, grape soda lupins. A dry garden, a vegetable garden, an orchard meadow, a paved little terrace with a trickle for birds. Rob comes up on the Greyhound and helps plan it. It's famous in the town. I go to surrounding cities and shop - Kelowna has a garden collection. I visit gardeners and make friends. I overwinter figs. Could I manage manzanita? A locust tree. A few kinds of agave and salvia he says. A little greenhouse against the back fence with an end for the wheelbarrow and tools. Apricot, pear, peach, sour cherry, cherry, plum, plum, plum, hazelnut, currents red and black, raspberry. Shy off thinking about the house too much but it has so pretty a kitchen and good windows. It's gracious. Rob has the upstairs rooms or Airbnb is bringing in money, etc. I find furniture in second-hand stores and restore it in the garage. Advertise writing holidays, quiet room under the eaves, desk, chair and wifi provided. It's headquarters for Ant Bear. David, Louie, Sue, Leah? I WANT it. Rob doesn't have money yet and is saying he'll find it hard to pull the trigger. February 10 I had with me a man who loves houses. He was a skinny man in a plaid jacket and old work boots, who was jonesing for a cigarette as we drove up and up through dreary winter forest. We walked around 1986 Douglas. He said "The siding is asbestos" and that was as much as we needed to know, though yes the ground floor was charming. I said to young nice Janis the realtor, "I know you need twenty four hours but could we see the house on Granite?" Mountain ash berries on the sidewalk. That fat bland pale blue would have to go. Bruce is in love immediately. 193l. Which is Mrs Dalloway. Classical front bedroom just big enough for a double bed. High ceiling, nine and a half or ten. Above the closet doors varnished square hatches Bruce says are air conditioning in summer. Radiators under the windows. Bedroom floors are a pale tight lino tile, a pinkish buff in good condition. Clawfoot tub. Bruce says look at that - a '30s toilet, lower, with ridges on the pedestal. Small south bedroom with built-in closet. That's my room. East window. Parlour has the fireplace boarded off but it's a nice little fireplace. Wide large central dining room core. Nook with east window and a door onto the verandah. North light from the parlour, east from the nook, south from the kitchen, west from the bathroom. The nook's for my desk maybe. Dining room paneling is Mission style. Door into the parlour and French door into the corridor suggest it might have been the priest's little house - it's across from St Michael's - I mean designed to funnel visitors into privacy. Janis opened another door in the kitchen onto a black hole with a ladder into the cellar. Bruce went down to check systems - boiler, gas, water heater, plumbing, electrics. Called me down to look. Washer and dryer. Paint cans, shelves of jam jars, raw concrete and what's almost a dirt floor. 14 Rob after a week says the house doesn't speak to him but he'll consider it. Meantime I've painted and furnished it, installed a better kitchen, planted 9 fruit trees and a ponderosa pine, set up a compost system, made a laundry room in the little space next to the bathroom, set red current bushes along the shady north end of the house and a raspberry row along the western fence, invited two black cats to live with me, bought an Indian cookbook and another gardening book online, collected a casserole dish and more spice jars, got rid of some of the brown wood, met the old couple to the west on Granite, tried fitting the Cherokee through the narrow garage door, prioritized tasks, read up on all the kinds of fruit trees and berry bushes, made notes on growing vegetables, scanned kitchen reno books for how-to instructions, looked for BC sources of windows, costed appliances, brought home a book on electric codes. The sketchup is done, no more details to work out, which leaves me with no way to work off this impatient avidity - Have been wondering why I don't want to talk to myself here. I'm setting up my next ten years - trying to - without thinking about it, it seems. There's just headlong need for settled home. Is it true need? It says large yes. 1890 Granite: I'd be settling alone in a ranching-lumbering town in the interior. Is that how I want to live? It'd be like Sexsmith, a bit. That makes a sort of sense.
Went and found that in May 24 1963. I lie in bed liking the presence of past moments - my own private me - my moments I've won in time, that no one can see, that will be gone when I am. So it doesn't need discussion? It's clear? It says yes. There won't be work during the day in some busy, important place but could work be my busy important place, maybe - will I work when I have a home to return to and look after? I move around this ugly little kitchen feeling I'd like to keep house intelligently, impeccably, do all things intelligently, impeccably, live right. Is it the Interior with a cap? Granite Ave in Merritt is a good address. 1890 adds up to a 9, does that mean something? Ashcroft yesterday afternoon, recycling depot, Irly's for water, trash into a barrel on the street, the town office goodwill, the goodwill by the barber shop, the credit union to deposit tutor money, the post office to check at general delivery and then the grocery store. A train chundered through. All the parked cars were dirty. Dull overcast. I was wearing my bomber jacket and silver Chucks and when my jeans fit I feel young. 19 70 to 18
21 I hear a dove. There's a whole flock in the nearest tree and on the new power line. Eurasian collared-dove Sibley says. There have been no birds and now there are, strings in the sky flying north too high to recognize, was it a kettle of hawks yesterday above the dump as I was driving to Cache Creek, crows on business above the Bonaparte's cleft. 22 Yesterday I took the camera when I went to the store and on the way home stopped where I could pull off the road. Took some photos and posted three. "Winter's dun" I thought. Pale shades of grey, tan, buff, sage, minimal as to color and complex as to form. There's one I stare at for the compositional hold it has on a series of spatial ranks that go back for miles with overall dotty grain given by bunchgrass clumps. It seems a bit superb. It has strong large curves and as if hidden in them - I mean it's as if I have to go down and find them - are little places, a north-facing slope with a few live pines, an outcropping of castle rock. 3 March Hello day. The standing clumps of grass below lit sideways suddenly. 4 Bramble Café Merritt. Rose in pink flannel pyjamas at the Copper Valley Motel counter yesterday morning. Bright face making what she can of her work, talking. She grew up in a village in Canton Province, Prince George with her parents, 6 children, when she was a teen. Unitl she was forty she didn't pay attention she said, but now she thinks growing up in a village was good. "Is slow, is good foundation." What I think too, growing up on the farm was a slowly-made base. She was pretty, ageless the way a Chinese woman can be, pink and eager. My host. "Are you a teacher" she said. I went first to the house, measured. Did I stop to feel out whether it's right. I'm past that it seems, was taking possession though in a shallow not very felt way. Intention is carrying me. The road yesterday morning. Rough, narrow, tightly winding, all beautiful. Willow switches coral, orange, bright straw yellow. Sagebrush quite lush. Small swift green river. There was a higher pass. Rained a bit, then one of the fingers of Merritt's valley opened, homesteads, a res, then a few hobby farm manors, then the gravel tower, then wide bare unpretty Nicola Ave. Found the credit union. The library and supermarket were dazzling me with wealth. Furniture store with expensive appliances. Do I like it is irrelevant is how it feels. This is going to be it, I can make something of it. Librarian said it's a friendly town. "The crime is mostly on the res." Stepping out of the motel I could smell new lumber. - Nicole [Gingras] writes that 3 of my 5 will be at her program called Here/Ici at FIFA in Montreal on the 12th. - Depressed feeling the costs of dependency involved. What were the bad moments. He didn't like my sense of kitchen, wanted something less modern. He asked "So how long" and I said I expected to die at 82. He's wanting to consult even on what I pay for. 5 I'd be paying rent and doing a massive amount of work for nothing AND I'm offering to pay for some of the reno. 6 Tia in Toronto said happy birthday before I remembered. The adventure was earlier, yesterday morning. Have been staring at its image, so much to see, a bit like a Gordon Smith painting, so many colors and all meaning something. patches of dark blue, streaks of putty, rust, sand, a purplish grey, cream knots of rock, a pale olive green, mauve slopes in the upper right corner, all of that mineral, and then the complete difference of the trees, a few dead, black, like fragments of calligraphy Greg said, others displayed vertically against that vivid mineral canvas looking so alive and singular, keeping a perilous hold. It's not a good photo like winter not dun, not perfectly framed, but it has a lot to see, it's rich and it looks like mortal lives, a cohort in time. 8 LUX in London says Deke is programming Trapline in May. Co-op's 50 year celebration. 9 It's Wednesday so I was in Ashcroft going my round - bank, goodwill by the barber shop, post office, hardware store, thrift store at the town hall, library, supermarket. When I left the thrift store I stepped across to listen to the river then drove straight up the alley instead of turning into the street. I came to the top end of the alley after three blocks. A thin old man was on the corner in shirtsleeves and suspenders by an old pickup I think mending a tire. I had to drive over his hose. I lifted my hand hello and he did too. Right then another pickup turned into the alley from the street. We were nose to nose. We both stopped. He backed up. As I came past him I waved one small wipe of a hand toward him to say thanks. He waved back the same way. I saw just a flash of someone I could hardly have liked more. He was wearing a dark hat with a wide brim and under it was a long narrow face alight with interest and kindness. What a beautiful guy I said. Someone just like that. In the barbershop goodwill when I bought a pair of dalmation-spotted well-washed flannel pyjamas for four dollars the old lady at the counter said "They look like you. I can see you wearing them." In the post office the stocky clerk with an Orphan Annie bob rushed to my cubicle and said "Nothing for you today Ellie." There's a wind bashing the house tonight. Am starting to take leave of Ashcroft it seems, feeling the ways it's a good place. There are few enough people so they register on one another. Many tattered remnants of hard lives. Sixty year old married men with loud voices like the farmers where I come from. Many women older than that, short-haired and small. Sometimes in the grocery store a really bad young couple, genetically bad, fat, sullen and torpid. The other day standing in the aisles a woman exceptional for her look of well-dressed city consciousness, educated, a bit sad. The teller in the Interior Savings Credit Union seems to enjoy it when I deposit money. Both the bank and the supermarket have book-exchange shelves at their exits. 13 I'm frightened about the house. When I think of it my heart shakes. I hadn't heard from Rob for a week though I'd sent him this and that. Phoned him last night. "What are we thinking? By which I mean what are you thinking." He had been thinking no. That first part of the conversation dropped me into a well of fear. I seem to really want this, I'm not in balance, I'm set on it. Should I be? 18 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. It's changing color. It's subtle. It's not green, it's a quiet intensification. 19 Rob phoned this aft to say yes he'll make an offer. 30 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] 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. Vacant possession April 29, it'll be a year since I set out. 4 April 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] 6 Woke feeling how this desperation for a house is about the age I am as a woman, a desperation for floor space. 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. 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. FB notice:
17 Last afternoon there was a moment I'd been looking for, when Tom showed up under my Home notice. I knew he'd like 1931 Craftsman bungalow. 18 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 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. 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. Standing with Sylvie and Robin 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 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.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.
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