time remaining 4 part 2 - 2016 july-september  work & days: a lifetime journal project 13 July 2016 Note in German from Katrin. Photo from her 65th birthday. She wanted to tell me there's a film about her and she's met Helene Cixous. She's Katharina now and has made something of herself. I don't mean that as a good thing. "A smoke web dances over the letter." That was lovely. Now she has a presented important sound. I have to want to know what my cohort make of themselves in the end but do I know anyone who isn't uglier and stupider at 60, narrower, stiffer, more ordinary. Rob in his monk's purity maybe? Though there's some shabbiness of hair and belly. Die Jugend ist so schön said Oma. She's more gifted and I'm more certain I said to C, the young woman of the Dames rocket years. Someone in St Louis reading Work & days on and on. Jennifer in her young strength painting the fence's second coat. I said I feel guilty using other people's bodies to do my work. If she wasn't doing it for you she'd be doing it for someone else said Ben. So the garden is framed and cleared mostly. I bought a second kitchen chair yesterday so two can sit at the table. There went a truck with three trailers of pine logs east through the intersection. 15 Colm Tóibín. Why Tóibín is good and this other guy, Canadian Giller guy, is not. Tóibín's language is simple. "I have come back here" he begins. Vassanji begins as he'll go on. "He came to my notice quite by accident one afternoon" and so on for another three lines. He's stiff, 'educated', colonial, and his story is sensational. Tóibín is simply at home in his English, feeling out shades and tones of daily being. He gives the place as it is to a person and doesn't explain so there's charm of unfamiliar detail. Someone looking through a telescope at the sea off Rosslare Harbour: The sight of the waves miles out, their dutiful and frenetic solitude, their dull indifference to their fate, made me want to cry out ... . The waves were like people battling out there, full of consciousness and will and destiny and an abiding sense of their own beauty. I turned and moved fast, focusing swiftly on a wave I had selected for no reason. There was whiteness and greyness in it and a sort of blue-green. It was a line. It did not toss, nor did it stay still. It was all movement, all spillage, but it was pure containment as well, utterly focused just as I was watching it. It had an elemental hold; it was something coming towards us as though to save us but it did nothing instead. It withdrew in a struggling irony, as if to suggest that this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing on a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy. deciding for some days to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against the fullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry. [in a story and collection both called The empty family] 16 iambic pentameter's otherworld solidity 17 It's Sunday. I did nothing, lay in bed rereading A suitable boy and dozing off. Guilty. Early evening - seven? - I looked at the drier light in the garden and went out to move the piles of rotting grass left on the far side of the plum. Stood lifting heavy forks into the wheelbarrow forehead dripping with sweat. It scares me to feel weak. I forget that I have to warm up gradually to hard work. I can still do it but I have to shift through a barrier of sluggishness. Afterward I sat on the step peacefully looking at the yard and the trees beyond it and the white sky. There's beginning to be enough order in what I see so that I can let go into it. - Saying that I look up a few degrees and see the cyclamen that has bloomed faithfully ever since I've been here. It almost stopped in the Ashcroft house but in this window all these months later there are maybe ten little buds still coming. It's the pink I know to choose for scent. I was on the steps looking at the slanted hollyhock stalks and the thick heavy plum tree now with a swath of cut grass under it, and the clean white lattice and the clean white and red compost box behind it - the paved works yard now with its little apple tree - the booming potato plants - and tomatoes - carrots and lettuce and dill rows - and beets and chard - the zucchini heaps - and at the trees beyond, and the layers of roofs to the south and the giant rowan in the church's yard and the white sky to the west - and feeling I have really brought it to pass. And there I am reflected in the window in front of me and I look nice. My hair looks nice. In the light of my San Diego birthday lamp now with a dirty white shade splashed with sour cherry juice. When I say I've moved here not long ago people always ask where I moved from. Why is that? I say I was working in the States because it sounds more exotic than other true facts. If I move sideways I see the white moon a few days this side of full. And here's my handkerchief begonia twice the size it was. I have to water these two every day, they're so eager here. And I realized in the falling-asleep state the other night that I don't get the anxious heart knocking as I'm fading, here, that I did in winter. I'm settling. It's the lattice that makes me feel it most: I invented it, I drew it, I made it happen, there it is. 18 [shopping notes for window lifts] 20 [fruit tree list and garden decision list] 21 Have I seen anyone in this town who isn't ugly. Yes there's a tall part-Native woman in the supermarket. Jennifer. Chris. A couple of the librarians are okay. But passing on this street the dull slouching belly-bulked blobs of both sexes. Was remembering how startling it was to exit the freeway onto University Ave and see good-looking people. And cities have libraries. And I have a garden. 22 Was it my first dream of this house. Someone is maybe coming from Kamloops to look at the cabinet so I dreamed they had arrived. I'd been outside and found them at the door. There were more and more of them as the dream went on. There was the moment there is when people first see the paneled middle room. They were Dutch people. A woman looked at me with interest and asked what I did. I said I was a filmmaker, which is what I say to her kind of person. (To the usual sort of people I say I was a professor.) We liked each other. She said she did something with pages that I took to mean she was an animator. The other women had that same intelligent cultured Dutch steadiness. When I went to the other room I found a gathering of men, one of whom looked rough and had a lot of teeth missing. 24 When I took a first step this morning there was a sharp pain in my right toe, a new pain, and I thought from now on there'll be one injury after another, always slower to recover, always something more I can't do. I'm giving my time and money to fixing house and garden. That comes easily to me but working with myself as body doesn't, I resist, refuse, neglect, rebel, I want the effortless capacity I had, I don't want to be where I am, I don't want to feel what I am now, though I do, in half-averted ways. I don't know how much difference I can make. If I take myself as project I'll have to feel my wrongness more. I'll give more time to conscious failing. [Opposite page: notes on floor sanding] This is important isn't it       YES Can I make a difference       yes Research       yes Exercise       YES Neural medication       yes Massage       no Kum nye       yes Strong yoga       yes Posture       YES Do I have to be this sore       no I don't really believe I can feel better. I don't strongly want to feel better though I don't like the pain or awkwardness, more than awkwardness when I'm down and feel helpless to get up. What would be different if I had free balance and movement and energy and strength again. And memory. I'm stoical but I'm ashamed, I have to bluff socially to not look ashamed. Sometimes it's not so much bluff as inattentive hopelessness, soldiering on imagining myself invisible. Sometimes though I think a native buoyancy, just doing what I do, being what I am, rising to possibilities, for instance with Paul the policeman when he pulled me over for not having my seatbelt on. I liked him right away and knew I could trust his good nature with my own. I wonder whether it's aloneness that makes me hurt and fail. It says no. At this moment the pink room muddily whited, Ben filling nail holes. Monday morning, chill overcast, the garden glowing with health, look at the depth of the green in the marrow leaves. But is it alright to be so alone? It says yes. There's a crow on the wet cardboard poking at drying grass roots, drinking from a pool on the plastic. There's another, drinking too. The plums are starting to purple up. Why is it alright to be alone       unconscious, processing, (the devil), honesty Because in my case it's more honest?       yes In my case being with is more unreal       yes And yet don't human mammals suffer of being alone      yes So I do suffer of it       yes But it's what I am       yes So was having lovers in some way dishonest       yes I wasn't truly attached       YES If I hadn't been sent away wd I have been like other people       yes 29 Friday morning 6:08 by the stove's clock. United Church's pale triangles strongly lit, mountain ash next to it bright green and orange. > I was touched to see the shot of your table with what looks like a volume of your journal. [Greg] Nice of you to notice the journal on the table. > I have an image of me studying at my worktable on the third floor of the Clergy St apartment, and you curled up in the adjacent armchair, writing in your journal. For me, an image of peaceful and complete contentment, way back then. How lovely of you to have been contented by that. I feel a little peaceful glow to hear it. > I was a happy guy. I read that and feel: Greg loved me. Loves me. (Frank, Louie.) Tom did not but he entertained me. He had an essential use for me but - and there I think of qualifications. It'll be 90 degrees today. When I look up the street I see high summer. 31st Sunday early. I've moved back the curtain so I can see through three windows to the white sky before sunrise. There are the Manitoba maple's fine-cut leaves with grey cloud and what is that red below them. Increasing. Now on the under edges of the clouds. Quickly quite rampant. There's the intersection with its blinking light. The grey road empty, flat, reflecting as if there may have been rain at night. A man on a bicycle passes with a big dog on a leash. There stand my white gate posts. I watched one of those hard-carapaced swollen late-model white cars parking cautiously in 3 o'clock shade thrown by the rowan tree out front. Hilda had got out and was directing George's parking. There were the backs of her thin legs. They came up the curved sidewalk in their summer clothes, he in Bermuda shorts, she in pedal pushers carrying her purse. They'd had an excursion, done something they'd thought of doing for the many years they'd driven Highway 1 before the Coque was built. She'd had chicken pot pie because it was a specialty named in reviews, he'd had - what was it, he wondered - a chicken caesar salad. The pie had been good, really home-made, thin but good. I'd shown them the house and brought them to the verandah couch with frosted glasses. "It's Italian lemonade." They sat facing the street watching the traffic. I was in the chair turned a bit toward them so when she spoke I was seeing Hilda's blue glass earrings and her unusual blue eyes, grainy and pale with dark rims. The body she is at 84, thin, a bit bent at the upper back, a bit round at the belly, so massless, a little shell, he beyond her with Opa's thatch of white hair more substantial, strong bare legs and his old look of rascally youth. Rascal overstates it except in his home context of mild good behavior. [Opposite: jam-making notes] A drift of steam sideways from the silver chimney of the blind white house. What's unpleasant about that house. It sits shuttered tight on flat shaven grass, presents scant flowers to its street but only machines and wires this direction, an air conditioner, a satellite dish. A long strip of weeds between road and sidewalk. Now a mist risen below the ridge toward sunrise, quite a thick mist. A family visit in my house, family visit meaning everyone very partial and confined. I said experimentally "I've been invited to Korea next summer, to a festival." They did not say "How wonderful" or "What kind of festival." They blanked it completely. I notice it's like that on Facebook too: relatives will take notice of nature photos but ignore anything implying professional success. Is that competition? It says no, just ignorance. I was watching them too for what could animate them. She liked talking about her neighbours, who'd moved in or out and what their yards were like. She told about visiting her old best friend who now can't recognize her. That was where I blanked some, didn't follow through with feeling and asking. On the doorstep as they were leaving she launched into a long story about email and Windows 10. She can get started on a story no one wants to hear at that moment and has to finish it. I look at George to see whether he is impatient. [Opposite: recipes for marmalade and dill pickles] This is still a UCSD pencil. I've been remembering Alice Munro on Wachtel saying she has been writing about the poorer families of her childhood town wanting to know more about them. I can see her doing that in her stories now, investigating. Tóibín in Nora Webster writing his mother after his father died. Seth in A suitable boy writing the year his parents got together. It really is investigation: asking and letting knowledge form itself, using what one knows to constellate what one hadn't consciously known. I mean, for instance the look of sea and weather, the sequences of household behavior, evoke what you can and the rest fills in - is that it? I'm seeing networks forming and growing and adjusting to make wide wholes. Tóibín writes his people plainly as they are but it seems that maybe once in each book there's a paragraph that dives into the universal sea beneath plain lives and there sees them in their transience, come and gone, loved by some and marvelously trivial. - Home Restaurant up on the road out of town, full of motel people having high-carb breakfasts, talking loud. I was looking at Clinton's Wellesly grad speech and below it the despising comments of the majority who can't stand to see intelligence. "I'd fuck her" says one. Someone calls her a bitch. When I thought to listen to her nomination acceptance speech I turned it off almost instantly, I couldn't stand her hard hearty voice. So it's complicated. People who hate her hate me and yet I don't like her either though of course she'd be a good president, not good the way Obama is, but careful and informed. She's slandered on the left I don't know whether with good reason. I care about charm. Bill has it and Obama does but she doesn't. I don't think charm is superficial. Her style actually is more Republican, heavy as if in falsity. I don't know how much of my dislike is just dislike for a mother's thickened aging body, which is dislike of my own fate. Could there be a thickened aging mother I do like? Certainly if she was less of a public face, gave off more of a sense of inward silence. 5 August Two keys on a red lanyard that looked like a shoelace. Last night a shaggy black bear standing tall on his hind legs picking plums off my tree. 7 [list of south bedroom work] 8 Exasperating Lawrence, Women in love. Hysterical Lawrence. It's as if he is claiming to write a novel while just splashing out pre-writing trying to get to what it was about his actual moments, like Peter hysterical because he's impotent, beating up a froth of language out of baffled sexual energy. This book is so worse than Sons and lovers, its impulse seems spiteful irritability. It's also making me disapprove of myself in the years between Greg and - when did it end. Desser, Peter, Ian, Roy, Andy, Paul K, Maggie, Jam, Michael, Ken - what a mess of sexual waste and lostness. My mom said "You'll lose yourself" [*not exactly that - find it] and I did, but she had no empathy or help, I was in trouble and she wrote me off. The showdown when I burned the photo was when I took account of her lovelessness. 9 The south bedroom is starting to be ready. I sanded and spray-painted Fred's pretty bed yesterday. Claude will come this morning - it's 5am in the dark - to install the ceiling light and window lift and hang the door. I've ordered venetians. 4 coats of satin varethane on the sanded floor - pale sanded floor, fir? (Last evening crouched on the floor painstakingly touching up the quarter-round edge-moulding that was gouged in the sanding.) Primer and a couple of coats of white on the walls and woodwork. Corner cupboard gone. Ceiling fan gone. Cracks patched. Woodwork joins caulked. Mirror found. Lot of imperfections. The sanding isn't smooth, crack patching and caulking wasn't done carefully, shows ridges. Pink shows through faintly on the north wall. The floor's surface after even 4 coats is rough. - There it is. New pink ceramic jar from Baillie's with branches of that ruby-berry tree. Haven't energy to say more but am pleased with the room. 10 a thirst for rapture that we might not know we had O'Brian is so sophisticated, his humor is. His sense of persons. Blue white green and orange. Exact half moon and yellow west light on swaying mountain ash branches. I don't quite grasp that I have my room. The window's clean white frame brings blue and shining cloud and swaying clumps of orange berries present alive and through the open door whose door-knob plate is immaculate now there is the blue kitchen with its open south and dark red floor and glass and ceramics and wide dissertation table with flowering plants and wooden chair with Tom's blue cushion. And I love the new pink jar with strings of ruby berries. And Jennifer and Ben and Claude built into the house now, and dill tall in a glass vase and nasturtiums scenting the guest bedroom and the yellow rug under this bed and Fred's bed all clean and new because I made it so and the Borrego side table to my right and there across the kitchen two pots I threw in London when I was 25 and one Louise gave me in Point Loma and on the counter the tajine base I carried from Marakesh on my lap and on the table the art deco lamp I bought in Ocean Beach and gave myself for my fifty-fourth birthday. And I've been thinking this house and garden is so much a calling-back of my lost belonging - Oma Konrad, Opa Epp, Ed and Mary young, always Tom - Tom every day - and Luke and Judie and Paul - Greg - Don - Olivia too, and Louie not quite yet - and the others - that I should have a photo gallery maybe in the little corridor room - something I've never done - myself too. - Lying on the verandah sofa reading The reverse of the medal looking up sometimes at the massed spread of dark cloud over the ridge to the north and luminous ivory afterglow in the west thinking that now I completely approve of talking about the weather. Talking about the weather is talking about the day and talking about the day is talking about the marvel of mortal existence: still being here: being here together, still. 12 What is it I so love in O'Brian, and why does no one I know - no one but Greg - love it too. There's a kind of happiness in its graceful flow. He is amused, pleased. He sets up in a richly interesting culture in a richly interesting era. He gives Stephen and Aubrey four kinds of male scope, natural history, politics, technology, warfare. I don't at all resent the marginality of women: he writes from the point of view of men, and those men well-disposed to women but minding their own business as men. The writing lets me into the fullness of their lives as men: gives it to me. If I were looking for a boyfriend I should advertise for someone who likes O'Brian. I gave Rob Master and commander and not a peep. - He's dwelling in a time whose language he likes and whose scope for grounded intelligence, and what is the modernity in his style? Its mixture maybe. Jane Austin had her narrow sphere to be gracefully acerbic in but knew nothing of marine dynamics and wouldn't have thought domestic dynamics publishable. His documentary and narrative blend is like McPhee who's as contemporary as it's possible to be. Delight in intelligent company. Maybe kinds of visual detail that are cinematic? Jack with a swell carrying the becalmed Diane toward thousand-foot cliffs noticing the "nascent breeze stirring the grass up on that distant edge breathing along the cliff-edge." At last reading in a room with sun on my feet. Clean floor, blond fir, white glass ceiling lamp, brass window lift gleaming, grey streak of traffic at intervals, a very distant siren. Scent of nasturtiums. Two years ago today in Borrego packing. 13 Someone in Vancouver has been in most sections of my journal nearly every day for many days. Today a note forwarded by Rob on instruction from Tasha quoting a paragraph from Annie Dillard that describes an ancient people who kept house by continually stomping down a fresh dirt floor over both their dead and their rubbish. Tash doesn't know me and has no reason to write me so I'm thinking she's the one reading the journal and the note is her jealous indirect intervention. A good image though. 15 [List of garden, house, work and self tasks] 16 Tom didn't send a message yesterday but I did: I sent a photo of his cushion on the kitchen chair. Ongoing little ache that he doesn't stay with me someway. It's two years. I said it would take two years to settle and it did and now I want him to show up at the door. What's that smell of passionfruit, it must be the nasturtiums. [No it was the basil.] 6 trays of plum halves drying on the verandah table in the sun. Jacob this morning talking about a show at Western Front. - There I got up and asked him to pitch to Grande Prairie. A show in Grande Prairie wd turn me on. It could travel too. Cynthia of Sundance Guest Ranch yesterday came with her husband and a pickup and carried away the smaller bits of the Quebec suite. Am pleased the verandah is unblocked. We liked each other. She gave me a hug. 17 Jacob said no to GP, doesn't want to separate my work from his own concept that includes Juliette, wdn't know how to pitch it he says, thinks I should pitch it myself. It's tricky: it's his show. I'd want his title and materials under a different description, which is unfair to him and a bit insulting because it declares - what is true - that I don't believe his concept or the relation to Juliette. He's a curator and I'm not, and he's current in the scene, and I'm not, and he understands what's needed curatorially, and for all I know the connection with Juliette is what was needed to make it viable. I don't think I can ask him, he's judicious, careful, politic. At the same time the idea of GP lights me up, makes it possible to work. He's suggesting I 'develop' the show, ie change it, but I like it as it is. Don't think it needs development. What else is happening / has happened this year: Jacob says maybe Western Front later Chris says Seoul next summer Ekrem says Turkey in July Aimée says TIFF 150 Canada on screen to transfer Trapline Last light was in Calgary in May Images Festival in April Here at FIFA in March Rotterdam last light in Feb Trapline London in May Perfume of drying plums in the verandah and in the afternoon sometimes a waft from the jeep's slit of open passenger-side window. Noticing that long-ago moments when I failed to say or ask have come back through the day. Ask about that tomorrow. The scents of nasturtiums and plum are important. I grab onto them urgently. 19 Venetians in my room - Claude has forgiven me - and delicious plum chutney with my baked salmon. 7 half-pint jars of plum preserves. Brenda on Quilchena gave me a bag of fallen apples when I stopped to ask about her pear tree. 20 O'Brian's fondness. Books centered around the loving marriage of Aubrey and Maturin, each with his own intensively loved sphere of interest and action, O'Brian encompassing, loving all. Dipping one finger in the cup and holding it up to thank the sun before drinking. Pain every day is making me begin to think of ways to move and hold for instance a book more loosely and lightly. It's as if my whole substance is less elastic, keeps breaking up. I've been a muscular person and maybe should become a more elfin person? But I'm hungry these days. Dreamed Tom. I kissed the corner of his mouth. There was a moment when I saw his thin shoulders with a dim flash of love. We had to deal with a fire in the front left wheel of my jeep, which was more like a VW van. Lise met me in a corridor and I said "That's Tom" looking toward his back, noticing he was wearing worn jeans and a short-sleeved pale plaid cotton shirt like the one in my closet. This morning sitting in the armchair now set in the midroom niche pointed toward morning sun. The world so real to them, that too, wind direction, sun, stars, fog, moon, tides and currents, sea-jabble, food and drink, skill with wood, metal, canvas, rope, names for particulars of all of these. The tempest 1610. Wine dark sea set in 1812. 21 I so love the motion of trees - looked up from the armchair to see the tall blue spruce and next to it a round leafy thing half its height, each moving in its own as if personal way, the spruce's long heavy up-curved branches swaying slowly but elastically sideways, the short tree rippling all over. This is a good chair now, a morning chair from which I can see the blond hill between spruce tree and shingled church, and in the treed yard across the road two more kinds of movement, the tall pretty eleagnus tossing its airy silver lightly on long upright stems, the twin flowering cherries - are they? - twinkling their larger leaves as they sway. 22 Master and commander was 1969, d. 2000 when he was 85. 30 years! of Maturin's company. 24 Wednesday. Across the kitchen on the top shelf jars of gingered applesauce, plum chutney, plum preserves. Plum halves drying in the jeep. Paul [Epp] was here. I made him breakfasts, gave him a bed with clean sheets, a quiet room with flowers and a fresh towel. Made supper the first night; he bought the butter chicken the next. There was a quarter bottle of wine left, that we drank facing west in the garden afterward. Yesterday we found the Lundbom Lake road, saw grassed hills, aspen groves, a brilliant turquoise lake, combed reed beds, cattle, a winding gravel track. Talked and talked. He's still an urban man with linen trousers and a flat cap. I am an old woman who forgets to comb her badly cut hair and doesn't mind. He liked the house but I had a moment of dismay when he described his, the house he wants to build: because it's the kind I'd want, that I can't make, heated floor, geothermal, crafted beams, country acres. I'd moved to my own bed with its pale yellow covers. This morning through the venetian's slats I saw a mourning dove picking at rowan berries. From the breakfast table four little chats in the plum tree's top branches pecking at earwigs. Two ravens on the sawhorse table eating the muesli I'd put out for them. Paul said Ed was kicked out of the church. I'd never known. He hasn't discovered on what grounds. Clearbrook MB accepted him. He also said Anne said nasturtiums were Oma's favorite flowers. 25 I opened a dark orange album, the first of a row on a table, to look at Cheryl's photos. They were toned dark orange and black. I was just beginning to see the first. She came and closed the cover. - What was it before that. There was a dim glimpse that's gone. Message last night from Russell Kildahl, can he visit on the way to Kamloops. I thought why not but afterward remembered him at a table outside Gomez with Judith that grotesque vulture and direct conduit to the crow twins. Do not want any open line from them to me. He says he already knows better. Paul showed me in Sibley Trees that it's a boxelder, that prairie tree. When I said I want a Grande Prairie show he said he doesn't at all. "They don't deserve it." Paul K was like that about FB, wouldn't post his best photos, only throw-aways. I said I don't think of it that way. I want my best in those places to support the few, as if supporting myself. The someone in Vancouver reading my journal day after day maybe was Russell rather than Tasha. Whoever it was started at Still at home. 26 Lisa Holt. Why was I so exhausted after a while. The Edna O'Brien story seems to say what was important to her was being in love. I don't like that. I want what's important to her to be her own beautiful sentences. I want her to like my sentences, correctly, too, but I want them to make her send me what they can inspire of her own. Speaking to her took me to Here2012. I marveled. It's more unrecognized work. What I could be in a right place, which this isn't. Louie was talking about somewhere she visited, glass walls, view of the Thompson, and my heart hurt that I can only have what I can have and only be what I can be here. I've done well to have as much as I do but it's much less than I know to want. 28 [On the G4] Realms of gold - What can I do to be there - Sunday morning, just after six. I'm in the red chair at the niche window. The church blocks a lot of sky. There's the big spruce. There's the Russian olive. A chalk-rub of lit vapour pale pink in the sky - sky is what I want to see. The air is still this morning, tips of the Russian olive barely moving. Two cars just now. The pink has faded toward sunrise. I dreamed I was with the Obamas in a car, pleased listening to her speaking to another woman and then when we'd arrived watching him take his briefcase from a briefcase-shaped compartment on the outside of the car. He set it on a table and was photographing it. I said to him involuntarily 'Where are your guards?' He looked up and didn't answer. I hadn't meant to address him but I was worried for him. Then watched him walking around in quite a big space doing other security checks. I'm disappointed. A bit grim. Disappointed with my days. Disappointed with the house and the town. It's what I have. Disappointed with my energyless and sore self that fades out of its hours, lies down and reads, falls asleep. I do a little something in the day - yesterday I canned plums, set two pans of plums into the jeep to dry, bought eggs and garlic at the farmers' market - but most of the day is waste. There's gold behind the lower branches of the spruce, maybe the sun has already risen into those clouds. Two rough-looking people pass carrying coffee cups. The man catches my eye, looks away. In Mesa Grande I could make beauty of the circumstances of my day, the days themselves were beauty and I could be and praise them. What form of beauty can I make and be here. I have my collected past to work from but when I think of gallery shows or screenings or published books I feel that nothing worth being comes of them. The contexts there are to give them in are trivial, empty, not worth it. There's the sun dazzling through a little gap in the spruce. There are things I should do. A jeep service. A computer service. A teeth cleaning and medical checkup in town. A trip to Kelowna for nursery plants. A money summary for Rob so I'll know when to pay rent. Now sun on the wall beside me. Cardio. I should have a bike route every day. Yoga. I should do what I can to have free energy. Clothes and shoes. I should do what I can to look alright in town. I should make Peter's book. And my own. I should court people I actually like. Kathleen. And find more of them. - Full dazzle in my eyes. Write dreams to make me more in touch with them. Slow-breathe and talk to the book more, to be clearer. Be five pounds lighter. Camp at Marquart Lake some nights before it gets colder - put camping stuff in the jeep. Stone structures around the lattice. Make a will. Get the fireplace working for the winter. Find some rugs. [In the journal book again] Coffee not tea, half an hour of free writing on the G4. Pork chop and egg, bike for the first time, quiet early Sunday streets along the Coldwater and across. Weeded the raspberries, took out the sunflowers, cut rhubarb and cleaned out underneath it. Hooked up the weed whacker and cut the grass alongside them and up under the plum. Got stopped at the wire-stemmed goosefoot. Sat on the grass and cut it with shears. Moved a chair to the lattice's bench centre. Stared at that end's messy layout. Heaped cut weeds on the cardboard. Wasn't particularly sore or tired. It was cool and often clouded. Asked the Merritt men's buy and sell about a Cherokee mechanic, picked nasturtiums as every day, picked sunflowers for the house. Opened the jar of canned plums that leaked into the water bath to taste it. It was deliciously syrupy with bits of unmixed Nicola honey. (1 tsp per jar.) Made a salad from the garden, big fresh cucumber, intense cherry tomatoes I have to poke into the pile of branches to find. Finished Aubrey-Maturin 20-21, choked up when he got his flag. Looked at $300 pyjamas online. 29 Six in the morning, still blue dark. Rowans hardly stirring at the window. The garden is falling off, rows gone to seed and pulled. Can I bear another ten years of this aloneness. Le Guin at 86 too old for airplanes she says but she and Charles still read to each other in the evenings. Her mouth hasn't thinned. She does look very old. The Nobel committee has had her in mind. What does 'aloneness' mean. It means the days have more time in them than I know what to do with or energy for. It means there are no warm eyes that know me, it's a hollow-feeling heart. 30 Aimée says here will tour in Ontario and maybe Spain. 31 Kristen Lavrandatter again. Reading Norwegian landscape I think of how our La Glace and Valhalla Norwegians must have felt at home with our aspen poplars and northern lights. Her people's dread of sin and damnation makes me feel my parents still lived in a medieval world. I lived across a border in another. My dad was afraid of local opinion in their way, guilty about his sexual thoughts and shamed by our sexual freedom. His lovelessness with us made it easy for us to scorn his ways and leave him behind. He must have grieved that we found his beliefs worthless, all except one: when he was dying he said "You knew how to work," meaning all of us kids. I agreed to that, though he'd worked us with such bad temper that we hated it at the time. And it wasn't true that he taught us to work: we were intelligent children and we would have worked well in any case. But working was the one value we had in common. He could feel he'd given it to us if he wanted. I like the way Paul muses about Ed and Mary, thinks about what they were like and what their marriage was like. He tries to be fair to Ed, understand how Mary wasn't only a good wife. "I think she always kept up a level of disapproval of him." I could see that - yes the way I always kept up a level of disapproval of Tom. A story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it. I need to go to Ocean Beach. After she was gone I felt more strongly the presence of the dark-haired, yearning, thwarted young woman before I existed and the mother I must have clung to as a tiny child. Solnit. I've flipped through, won't read the rest. I wanted to read about having a mother demented like mine but I don't like her company, she's too thinky, not sensed and felt. I don't want her miscellaneous gatherings. 1 September Compare Undset who's wholly real in the world. Last night Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles can fly, a marvel. Pity and terror. Kurdish children somehow brought to act perfectly. Maimed, ruined, continuing. A landscape littered with broken machines of war. The astonishing writer-director at Cannes perched awkwardly on a high stool replying in broken English to a suave complacent young blond. 2004. 2 I was in Paris needing to cross a wide boulevard toward my hotel, which I could see halfway down the block opposite, GRAND on a four story vertical marquee. When the light turned green people ran across. My shoe unfastened. I had to go back to the sidewalk to retie it and wait for the next green. I was wondering whether I'd be able to get across fast enough. I saw that people were crossing halfway before it turned and waiting there behind some trolleys. A woman standing next to me held out her arm to keep me from going too far, spoke to me in French. She guessed I was a foreigner. I wondered what was giving me away, reached up to take off a clear plastic rain kerchief I was wearing. I'd been speaking to her in slowly formed French as we crossed together. The entrance of the hotel had begonias on both sides of a few shallow steps. They were leggy, with orange-red flowers on tall pale stems. I thought that when I left to go home I could take a cutting. A woman at the door was looking for people's keys. I said my room was 451 and that I had my key with me. Found it in my bag and showed her the brown composite tag. I had to pass through a wide lobby with people sitting at lunch tables and on couches. I overheard a woman telling people more and more marvelous things she'd done, books she'd written, "and I eloped." As I'd passed toward the elevator I said "She's lying" to the room behind me. The elevators were complicated. There were elevator-lobbies within elevator-lobbies. I couldn't see numbers to press. Maybe it just stopped at every floor. It was stopping at three then at four and I got out, but I couldn't find 451 or any of the higher numbers. It seemed to be a welfare hotel with a lot of people in it who had nothing to do. The little boy I was carrying was tired and I was trying to reassure him that we could soon stop. There was more I don't remember except vaguely, street life, people at café tables, store windows. 3 I put on my artist clothes and went to a gallery opening at Brambles, artist clothes being my 501s wearing through at the knee, black cashmere turtleneck and green Uggs. Was sitting at a table with an old man with a very small Cree face, who told me some true stories and some mad inventions. He was a child in Moose Factory, born 1929 he said, and that likely was true, had studied under Einstein at MIT he also said, and dinosaurs were contemporary with humans. Miriam was there but didn't stay long. I liked to see her steady lonely face. I'm afraid of contamination by local artists. If I'm one of them I'll be mediocre in their ways is the feeling. For instance the photographer last night, an RN who had four striking but clichéd pictures and with them hung a dozen nothings. When I got home my best Ashcroft photos were uninteresting. My yard is surprisingly bigger since Ben cut back the plum tree yesterday. I opened the door to look at it just now - it's 5:30 in the dark - fresh wet air - wintry - and it seemed a large open square. Merritt's a hinterland of opinion, Doug next door avowing sasquatch and Colley Graham if that's really his name talking about the human footprint found in a stratum with dinosaur tracks. "Everybody knows about it." I asked what he does all day. He writes he says, novels. Is it easier to do good work among smart people       no Shd I stay out of the community      no But expect nothing of it       YES 5 When I've gone out the last few mornings to pick nasturtiums the light has been exquisite. It's an autumn light, white and somehow clean. It's familiar but uncommon. It occurred to me today that I could drink coffee to keep from sleeping in the daytime so I will sleep better at night maybe. Then I have to think how slowly I find improvements now. Greg was praising my energy and initiative and I said it may seem that way but my days have been quite vacant, small bursts of work over four months have added up because I plan well and have poured money. 6 She's right into Kristen's anxious pious overwrought being. She doesn't make a principle of staying inside her viewpoint but she's often there. Another thing she does is tell what they see around them - one paragraph of enameled color. She's exactly right about Erlend as an ADD man and about Kristen's insecure ambivalent rebellious adoration. She's extraordinary in her physical detail. And she recalled once more all the sweet, merry memories of the loving charm of her children when they were small every time she thought of little Erlend. He stood in her lap waiting to be dressed. She put her hands around his chubby, naked body, and he reached up with his small hands and face and his whole precious body toward her face and her caresses. She taught him to walk. She had placed a folded cloth across his chest and up under his arms; he hung in this harness, as heavy as a sack, vigorously fumbling backward with his feet. Then he laughed until he was wriggling like a worm from laughter. She carried him in her arms out to the farmyard to see the calves and lambs, and he shrieked with joy at the sow with all her piglets. He leaned his head back and gaped at the doves perched in the stable hayloft. He ran to her in the tall grass around the heaps of stones, crying out at each berry he saw and eating them out of her hand so avidly that her palm was wet from his greedy little mouth. She's like Cather in her broad loving mastery and close attention and grounded natural flow. Cather was 1873 like DR but Undset was 1882 like Woolf. Now, whenever she took the old path home past the site of the smithy - and by now it was almost overgrown, with tufts of yellow bedstraw, bluebells, and sweet peas spilling over the borders of the lush meadow - it seemed almost as if she were looking at a picture of her own life: the weather-beaten, soot-covered old hearth that would never again be lit by a fire. The ground was strewn with bits of coal, but thin, short, gleaming tendrils of grass were springing up all over the abandoned site. And in the cracks of the old hearth blossomed fireweed, which sows its seeds everywhere, with its exquisite, long red tassels. The translator doesn't know her plants though. She means vetch not sweet pea and fireweed has pink towers not red tassels. Below her stretched the countryside, lit by the morning sun. It was an early spring day. She drank in the sharp, fresh air; the wind was icy cold but it tasted of the faraway sea and of thawing snow. The ridges were bathed with morning sunlight on the opposite side of the valley, with snowless patches around the farms. Pale crusted snow shone like silver in all the clearings amid the dark green forests. The sky was swept clean, a bright yellow and pale blue with only a few dark, windblown clusters of clouds hovering high above. But it was cold. Where she was standing the snowdrift was still frozen hard after the night frost, and between the buildings lay cold shadows, for the sun was directly above the eastern ridge, behind the manor, and right in front of her, where the shadow ended, the morning wind was rippling through the pale year-old grass; it moved and shimmered with clumps of ice shiny as steel among the roots. - The sorts of things I saw when I was living in the Olson house. 8 Awake at 4:30 opened the back door and saw my winter friend Orion bright in black above the rowan tops, Pleiades almost overhead. Two mornings ago, from my bed, a raven overweighing on a rowan tip, bending to gobble berries. Yesterday at dawn a thin white mist. Photos. [west into the alley] [east into the alley] [Granite corner] [Quilchena corner] These nights I'm sitting with Space hotel [slow-breathing] before I go to bed. I lay in bed in the afternoon and thought of Tom when I held out the heart stone to him rapidly covering it with his palm and then standing with his back to me in the desert field gazing after the feral dog. I thought, Tom has soul. My heart was cracking with pain. Kristen Lavransdatter was showing me the way we used to despise each other because we resented being so bound in true native love. When my heart was cracking with pain I felt I was damaging it and so I cast around for a way to dissolve pain in white light. I did what I often do when I want to fall asleep, saw Mac early in the morning on the long terrace of his glass house barefoot in jeans looking over his dry grassland valley holding a cup of coffee, kitchen door open behind him. He'll make toast, sit at the small terrace table with his phone speaking to someone in Asia about a project. Red admiral zipping through the autumn garden. 10 Ozias and Michelle Gordon, Cathy and Betty Huska. Mike Anderson. 11 Weary this morning, sore. I hope David stays asleep in that far-away bedroom, I'm done talking. There were 200 people come for a wedding on a mown slope above Tunkwa Lake Road. It was a thoroughly wholesome event. A nurse called Michelle was marrying a heavy machinery mechanic and weekend bull rider called Ozias. We were sitting on rows of bales. No one mentioned god. No one in the entire gathering was once seen looking at a phone. The young men were wide-shouldered and slim-hipped, wore stetsons and carried babies. The young women were leggy and wore cowboy boots. Little boys in shirts that matched their dads' wore stetsons too. Stringbean adolescent boys wore stetsons and ganged together. Older men had tight shirt-fronts over large buckles and wore stetsons. Older women ... I only remember that the one with the best of the older men, Mike someone, a rancher, was frowsy in thin brown nylon in which her thin midriff sagged in rolls. He'd found her recently on the Lots of Fish site David said. There were a lot of kids and a couple of dogs. The officiant was a horrible woman called Janzen, a Mennonite presumably. She stood in front of the bale rows in her wedding-officiating outfit, legs wide-set under her torso. What was horrible about her was first her voice and second her self-help over-friendly undignified language. She had the couple repeating line by line very short phrases of greasy sentiment, and much too much of that, much too spelled-out. That part wasn't wholesome. I was looking at my lap feeling culture was failing them in allowing that tasteless woman to invent ceremonial language. The couple's new house stood higher on the slope above us and it was wrong too. Grandiose, awkward, completely unfitted to comfort or pleasure with windows set so they couldn't be looked from and a living room ceiling maybe forty feet above the floor. Grievously wrong. We waited a long time for the wedding party, the commissioner standing in front of us looking around with her wide-set legs in nylons. At last a stripling boy appeared in a cowboy hat, white shirt, mauve tie and what looked like grey flannel jeans, the groom's son. Then a man in the same rig, wide shouldered and narrow hipped. Then another man who looked so much like the first he would have had to be a brother. Then the groom, who wore the same rig too except that he added suspenders and his tie was a different color. The three brothers and the boy stood waiting for the bride like cowboys a hundred years ago or cowboys in a movie, cowboy multiplied by four, a mythic sight. I was taken by the wide shoulders and tight narrow rumps and stetsons, manhood so definitely announced, so declared, so conventional and so insisted upon. Eventually then the bride came up the lane and around, dressed in spangled white lace that hugged her mature womanly bosom and tummy. Bride and groom had already been together for was it fifteen years. They were both tall and performed the elbow-pumping cowboy two-step with long practice I loved to see. A space had been cleared on the wood floor under the tent and later people danced, a few people, although most stood talking to each other holding beers in the dark. A large old man danced holding his little grandson high in his arms. The bride danced with a little girl who'd gone to ask her. The groom's mother danced with one of her tall sons. Another of them flung his pleased cowboy-booted long-haired wife around the floor. The MC danced with one of the bridesmaids with such springing crouching joyful expertise I was all agog and wondered whether he was gay. So I had company for two nights. David arrived Friday afternoon with three boxes of kitchen things, a cooler full of food, a suitcase, a rucksack and a bicycle. I was annoyed he'd needed to bring not only his own food but his own frying pan. We admired the house together. I went and got some butter chicken. Saturday morning he loaded the plum branches and we took them to the dump. We went up the road to check out the biomass generating plant. He cooked organic hamburgers and we got dressed up as best we could. I spot-colored the bleach marks on my J.Jill linen pants with black marker and he put on a good checked shirt. The Logan Lake road looked different driving north. Aspens about to turn. We drove back in the dark. There was a moment when a little blizzard of yellow leaves blew through the headlights. I was exhausted by then and wouldn't let David turn down the heater. He had old friends at the wedding and I watched his social manner with some disdain. He's liked because he's compliant, says what anyone wants to hear, attends. I don't like to see it because he does the same for me and I need it. I'm starved to talk and be praised. 12 Awake at five in a tangle about old times. That's one way to say it. I sometimes wake in soul concern, as if I wake clearer, more true, and must try to get straight about what has happened to me in my time. I was feeling I'm dishonest now and wasn't always. This time thinking of Jam, that she was the last time I had a smart companion. I'd notched up in those years and she was the apex. She was also brutal and crazy but I'm setting those aside for the moment because her company could sharpen me. Trudy could see into me and their strenuous spirit-ambition took me some distance but Jam was further into work. She was the furthest I got before I flunked out, was defeated, lost the contest. Are you sure that's wrong      yes I wasn't defeated, I went on       yes I've never had smart company since      yes You're saying that doesn't matter?       no So I flunked out of smart company       no I internalized it       yes But I'm stupid now       no Less honest       yes I have no one to sharpen against       yes I speak from in front of myself      yes Because I have no one I speak directly to      yes My dead false rote speech shames me      yes For instance with David listening to my own voice being charming in old stories. Really I was averted from his endless foolish entanglements with his sisters, his compulsive health food doctrine, his slavish social compliance, his hoarding, his idle indecisive drift. I feel sorry when I say those true things and I want to balance them by saying what I value in him but I won't do that now. It wasn't true this time. "I shall write a history of English literature, I think, in those days. And I shall walk. And I shall buy clothes, and keep my hair tidy and make myself dine out" - she said at 48. I'm writing it down as instruction about hair and clothes. I've had so little interest in them and know it to be out of despair. 13 [door frame measurements] 6:30 in the armchair looking at the unblue spruce and pink streaks. Streetlight an amber half circle pointed down. There the Russian olive's fine still sprays against pale blue. St Michael's a massive dark pyramid. The streetlight has gone out. St Michaels' short squared-off pickets worn-off white. Too early for traffic. I need to think about loneliness. It doesn't feel like loneliness but I think it must always have been that when I have days where I don't want to do anything. But Jam Ellie is so lonely said Rhoda. I stand in a room feeling for what to do next and my body - whatever it is that I ask - doesn't want anything I can suggest. I lie down and read if I have anything to read, and then I fall asleep. Traffic now, a pickup in each direction. The pinks have gone bright ivory. I like that it's the dark massive empty church across the way. It's a Chris Alexander object. Its details are in right scale. Its touches of pink and green are faded right. Then a sharp white line drawing itself, being pulled from the roof, chasing and quickly erased as it needles forward. Where can it be headed and from where, there's no city in that direction until after an ocean. Oh and there another such line seeming pointed in the same direction, pointed from the sun's horizon. An hour later. Cold dew on the nasturtiums. Walking up the path I could see my breath. It's only halfway through September. The house won't warm till late afternoon so I've turned up the thermostat and can hear the boiler rumbling in the rad. Sun lying on the church's wet short grass. Tuesday. David Leonard for lunch on Friday. Louie coming on Saturday for a couple of days. Sunflowers in my Chinese vase - Chinese shape - dropping piles of golden pollen. "This is my David collection" I said when DB was seeing the bits of things in my console hollow. He's the only one who notices my vases. He likes wear and decay more than I do. Gave me a such a right cotton bathmat from his childhood house, blue and white for my blue and white bathroom floor, with holes on the sailboat side that I have hidden by sewing it doubled. I have a few cute touches now - are they cute or just fond - that bathmat and the row of perched towel-hanger birds behind the bathroom door. They are fond I think, they aren't cute birds. - Ah! There's another needling shining self-erasing line, and pointed in the same direction, where's everyone going. It emerged from platinum radiance alongside the south slope of the church's roof; the sun's about to burst out of that edge. It's blazing into my eyes. - Just before 6pm. Full sun on the church's shingled brown face. Clearest blue above. Tip of the tall blue spruce thick with cones. He said spruce branches hang down and fir branches slant up. Spruce bark is thin and scaly, fir is thick and ridged. This tree does both and is untidy in an old tree's way, disordered. The light is warm though faded. People in the streets, young wives running, man polishing his red Corvette. What did I do today. Wrote and posted an FB paragraph about the wedding. Cut fresh sunflowers for the vases here and in the kitchen. Picked nasturtiums. Made salad. Dug a few potatoes, cooked and mashed them. Ate and stayed hungry. Drew a latest version of the back steps plan. Called Brambles to ask whether they have a fresh gluten free. Brief back and forth with David. Read a stretch of VW vol three. Slept. Looked again for a ceiling fixture for the kitchen. Admired my canning jars. It was soup kitchen day across the street. White butterfly in the church's juniper shrub. The Russian olive is moving as if on its own; the heavier blue spruce is not. Between spruce and church the hill's round wall of bare dry grass. VW such a professional, always studying and judging other writers, always writing, always considering how to manage her state. Feminine, always feeling; and yet managerial, always noting feeling in herself and anyone. Wholly mortal: always holding mortal transience as her founding frame. As every day I long all day for mail though no letter will satisfy me, any will disappoint me; no one will come for me. My house's shadow has reached across the street and up the church's porch. The hill is brighter in sun more horizontal. Church front gone dark; pink light only on the knobbled tip of the spruce. Black GMC parking outside my window, two men crossing the street, early for the AA meeting I suppose will start at seven. Another sitting on the wall smoking. Someone walking in that garden with a phone to his ear. A fly, one of those large loud ones. More cars arriving. Now the fir is dark, hillside beyond still blazing in its wide bowl of open space. 14 My mom only had mental work for that one year at U of A. She needed it but she went back to nothing but Ed and La Glace neighbours and country housework. I'm saying that because of the ways I'm living her life. Housework, canning, no books, no writing, no talk, no fond eyes. There's a dove so pretty a shape on the wire under the transformer-can across the road. The 7am flight drew its bright thread above the church. I woke at six to a clean luminous sky. Coffee in one of the white mugs. The boiler's rumble is a steadfast sound. I turn my head and see a golden patch of lace and branch beside the parlour door. White steam now from St Michaels chimney, issuing, flowing, pouring, pushing, twisting, drifting, falling, minutely granular, improvising phenomenally, sensitive to the sensitive air, demonstrating the sensitivity of the air. Like white chalk scribbling on the empty blue. Next to it the Russian olive branch-tips holding still in the steady arrival of light. The flow of both is from the north. And then it stops. The wainscot with its framed doors so immaculately complete, its parts so fitted, so carefully angled where they meet, so sculptural, so neat. It's what this room is. I only need a rug, a big expensive good rug, worn but fine. A floor lamp for this chair. Venetians. A tall plant. 15 Shade of the plum tree. Cabbage whites somersaulting among the shouting hollyhocks. Smell of fermenting plums. Clacking grasshopper, honey bees avid for poppy pollen. Big marrow leaves white with mildew or whatever it is. Potato vines yellowing. Overgrown chard shining green. Roof vent turning. Gate clicked next door. Great peaceful blue. Car turning into the alley. - These plums on the ground are actually prunes, I'm just chewing one. High school girl walks past in red Chucks. Boy on a skateboard. I bike to the post office now or to the library or to Brambles for bread. Tomorrow I'll go pay $100 for a set of stainless steel Lagostina. 16 Nat history society meeting - Chris L sat down next to me and I instantly dropped out of my fantasy about him. True he has an earring and a garden and he's been friendly but my fantasy was that he was interested in me - it was a boyfriend fantasy - and what I instantly saw was that he's not that kind of smart. He's sociable and gracious but he's not quietly deep and clean, which is what I'm wanting. Saying this chewing a delicious ham and cheese sandwich on toasted gluten free while I wait for Jennifer to come and clean. I was looking at all the men with the old hungry eye but no. David L was here for lunch. I won't describe since he's one of the few who would look himself up in the journal. - Delight of my clean house - delight of a house I walked out of at 9 and came back to (with my new jeans from the post office and new Lagostina pots from the woman who works at the Husky station out by the airport) at 11 and found clean by grace of lovely Jennifer. The tub is clean. The red kitchen floor is clean. She vacuumed under the beds. And then Dave Leonard appeared at the back door and sat at the kitchen table eating lunch and wanting to talk about the US election. And Louie in Vancouver getting ready to come out tomorrow morning. From my white nun's room I look sideways to the very inhabited kitchen and there see lamp and plants and pots and canning jars and Tom's cushion and the pretty kitchen chair and the thesis table, and on bright afternoons a stretched rectangle of brightness on the floor, so pleasing. Jennifer likes me I think but when she arrives there's always a tension of reserve in her. Her face holds itself back. She stays aware that she's working for me. Was I like that when I worked for people, I don't think so. I felt it didn't matter that I was working for them because I was better than them by my own measure, or else with someone like Rosalynd - that would be the nearest comparison - I felt the other person knew my quality and it was just happenstance that we were in paying and paid relation. - Which is not to say that I don't enjoy commanding people by means of money and getting things done as if for free, since my money doesn't seem to be costing anything, 17 1. being born; 2. polio and hospitals; 3. Mr Mann and grade nine; 4. Frank; 5. grade twelve; 6. Queen's, O and Greg; 7. London; 8. Luke; 9. feminism; 10. Trapline; 11. 820A East Pender; 12. T, C, R, J; 13. the Tofteland house; 14. the doc; 15. Tom and California. - I need morning work. I have to have a task that needs my best first brain every day. It's September, the sill. I need to gather and point. There I look up and see the Russian olive stirring its silver canopy. The air, it says. How amorphous this kind of work is. There's nowhere to stand to begin. VW would have an inkling, I want to do this kind of work; more, I want to be in this kind of state. What kind of state do I want to be in. Brain stirring lightly like the Russian olive's upper tips, loose but firmly held at its base. I liked the thesis, it was a long work with a steady plan. I formed a structure and filled it in. I had a method, I had deadlines and readers. I had a library. I knew how to be a star student. I pushed myself into the midst of a formed discourse and found my stand as I'd known how to do since I was fourteen. I didn't have generous fathers anymore but I had enemies. What does this tell me. Who's the best. Best at what. Best poet, best abstract filmmaker. Luminous silver behind the blue spruce, a dark silver day at nearly eight. There was a hidden harvest moon last night I saw briefly this morning in the west. David Larcher was. Daichi? Rimmer was. Working now with such wobbly memory, I'm not remembering the name of The glass essay's woman - Carson. Notley. Not the authors but one or two works. So could I have my one work at the end. 18 6:30 after a hard night, armchair with open sky - there, there, what color is that, translucent ivory, slightly yellow, slightly mauve, tinted space. Steam drifting from St Michael's tall chimney a just-visible grey smudge. Eleagnus perfectly still. It's Sunday morning. Should I offer a plant database for the nat history site. Garden weeds. Plants of Coyote Valley Road. Then more. I need to be the boss of something in the community. Touch of flamingo on one cloud just there. It's not pink, it's not orange. It's an awkward color but it's good with its own grey on the shadow side. Was that a gull - I dreamed a large bird vividly marked in white and dark grey. I said to someone next to me, surprised, It's a gull! Often going back and wiping out the last phrase in a sentence. I'm explaining too much. The corruption of teaching. Golden spaceship over the hill. Which must have a name. When I lean forward, oh a large lit-up thing - a something - sailing evenly from the south. Such forms clouds are, such demonstrations of particular being, unconventional, insubstantially substantial, now a completely different shape. Am I going to be ready now to make Ideas of angels. Chapter 1 grass. Chapter 2 clouds. Chapter x cortex. Flashes. Glows. Diffusions. I want out of the box. I want a stage. Now bars of light thrown on the pavement by St Michaels' pickets. Light caught in the parlour's curtain. Light on the wall. Sun on the green grass, sun on the * turning yellow, eleagnus tips stirring. - Small lake between Marquart and Lundbom, Louie down there walking along the edge. Fine crinkle on the water. The grass is tawnier, mottled shades of reddish or creamy tan. There must be a better name for that color. Burnt and unburnt umber? Streaked in its died-plant kinds unevenly furry but organized, awns lying downwind. It's cold. Down in the crease three pines and a darker spruce in a line, aspens turning yellow. A fence like surgical stitches, rippled shallows pale like a trout's belly, large glitter shaking in place. Tall ponderosa with a long shadow alone on a slope. There's L making her way along the lake's marshy end. I'm sore today. She looks like two people. She looks taller than she is. Yawning. 19 I dreamed I was sitting on the floor of a small room with David Carter on the other end. I supposed that he wondered what I was doing there and I did too, but there I was. Then later in another room with Dave and Franci, uninvited but there. I said to Franci, I just want to be with good people. 20 "When Ina asks 'How is Ellie?' what are you going to say?" She jibbed. I said I need to know how I am. She said she'll say "Ellie isn't interested in me." I said "I used to be interested in everybody but now I'm not. I'm weary. I can't give you interest but I can give you good jam and good salad and a good bed and beautiful drives." What am I with Louie now. I noticed she was thin; she'd started to thicken but she's slim again. I looked covertly at her beautiful breasts. I was annoyed by the way - on the first day but not later - she writhes into twisty yoga postures when I'm talking to her, and how when we sat talking in the verandah her attention jumped to every person walking past. Her accent grates on me especially when she says toh-mah-toe. I noticed she wore a different filmy femme-y blouse every day. There were moments she was pretty - sitting at the computer in her narrow reading glasses - she's closing on sixty - and an hour at the table last night when she had her mother's sort of old European potato face. She isn't an interesting talker, English is her second language and there's hardly ever a vivid choice of word. It's her female range too, she's better in it than most but I'm bored by the female range. I tell my cranky judgments here because they were withheld but to be fair there's something deeper in my annoyances too, that I think is about my mother: she adored me and doesn't anymore. Being adored was good for me and there's no one else to do it. That shuts me down in ways I don't perceive. There's the Russian olive looking so calm and sparkly at two in the afternoon. Crabapple canopy with yellow bits among the green. Then merest ripple of a breeze in small silver and bitty yellow and green. The blue spruce's quirky spiky straggly crown suddenly releases forty birds, fifty, sixty. They circle and return and vanish as soon as they land. We talked about the way I pretend to own this house, not when someone asks me a direct question but whenever I can get away with it. I said self-pityingly that house owners have more status than renters and I'm new in town, a lame old woman no one knows anything about, and need whatever status I can get. She drew herself up at that: she has sacrificed to own buildings and I have not, how would I feel about people who claim to have PhDs when they don't. I asked would she object in the same way if Rob had given me the house. She wouldn't, she said. So then it isn't about sacrifice and earning although it also is. - Oh gosh, three crows landing in the silver. What do I actually think, should I be more scrupulous about saying I'm renting? (It says no.) I think it's fair to pick up status in cheated forms when the status I've actually earned can't be perceived by the community I'm in. It isn't best, but it's fair. It didn't occur to me to say that yesterday but I'm seeing it now. I have to keep my own record clean but I don't have to be helpless in truth. The way I did say it is that she works hard and when she works hard she is given it. I work hard but am not given it. Disqualified. As I said it I was wondering whether it was true. I noticed that I said it with a sharp bleat of pain. Something else I notice with Louie is that when I experimentally speak my fears - that I'm old and ugly now, and unfuckable and unloveable - she never qualifies or contradicts. That's love woman competition I think; she's satisfied feeling she has won. (It says large yes.) It's another reason I hold off with her. What I should be asking is why I feed that satisfaction in her. Because I need to say the worst that I say to myself, I wonder. It says no. Are those things true? It says no. Because I need to complain to the mother? Yes. Those complaints are deep. YES. That's interesting. Large sigh. Do you want to say more? No. - It's some kind of linden maybe. 21 Thin sparkle of frost on the marrow leaves this morning. Ate two figs yesterday from my own little tree. I found Wings of desire in the library yesterday. The counter man said he couldn't pull up a record for it, when I bring it back they'll figure out whether it was weeded in the system but not on the shelves. Watching it last night - thinking of Tom, Luke and David Carter, who all three told me it was important to them, Luke and Dave not long before I went to San Diego for the first time and Tom on Pacific Boulevard coming back from our first expedition - a moment I remember because it was the moment I realized I was somehow at home with him - I realized I wouldn't have to return it, and that seemed an indication of - I don't like the word synchronicity - what I used to feel, that being is all one fabric, not inner and outer but a transparent stream: 'experience'; being. Then Merritt, this house, this street, this rumble of the boiler in the cellar, this place-time-self, are what? A long metal horse trailer passes traveling north. A state of soul, but which. Quiet and treed. Often grey. Unattached. Grounded. Undistinguished but surrounded with openness that can be glimpsed between human buildings. An old-fashioned being, darker than I like and someways wrong but well-fashioned in its period. Improvable. There passes a man on a bicycle. The linden is yellower than yesterday and a bit heart-shaped like its leaves. A bright silver ceiling of mist. An empty church. Modern times passing in the shapes of morning traffic. None of the mendacious mess of intellectual or artistic fashion. A girl on her way to the high school. White picket fence with worn-off paint. School bus. And in this room a terminal connected to almost anything I could want to see or know. As if I am the high school girl living alone for the first time in Sexsmith but now a terminal for everything I've been since then, simple and quite vast. Living alone, having given up someone I loved - four girls abreast on the opposite sidewalk - stretched hard to shoot myself into the so-desired next richer more challenged more expansive state. When I list my life's significant events why do I list Tom but not Louie. Frank and Greg but not Olivia. Why do I erase the women. I do know. Is it the same anger that made my mother wipe me out? It says yes. It's adamant and so structural it's almost unconscious. In Wings of desire men in long overcoats who stand invisible at someone's shoulder listening to his thoughts. Peter Falk at a snack counter saying 'I can't see you but I know you're there' and holding out his hand. The vast library's murmur of people reading. The woman in the red dress who says 'Now it's serious.' High school kids I saw walking south this morning now walking north. An old orange pickup.   part 3 time remaining volume 4: 2016 may-december work & days: a lifetime journal project