16 October 2016
I am three when I come home from the hospital. the corner of the
room is close to a small south window. the light in the corner is grey.
there is a baby in the crib. she is a stupid lump. I am having to walk
with this right leg in a brace, metal and leather.
the light bulb makes a room on the porch that I can write in. I can
hear that carole's washing cutlery. chinese music. a supper smell like
tripe, not familiar. turpentine. grey cat has a jowl under her belly, walks
in through my door, her will against mine. a so-big moth, a cloth flapped
into water in a sink. her head in the window frame, tak the light switch.
moth white as if it's bathed in pollen. the light bulb's red-edged white
burn stays behind on the page just aside of the last word written.
in a sleigh box under quilts on hay traveling at night, judy singing,
a small girl still with a big head. I mock her bitterly. she can't hear
that she's not on the tune. my mother's reproving me.
after the school bus, long dirt road underfoot, step after step,
I hold her with stories, they're stories about us rich and somewhere else,
in a girl's school. I describe the room, its furniture, the meals, our
clothes. we live in america or some other country. in a city.
our mother makes us matching dresses. these daughter's dresses are
where the mothers are allowed beauty. pink satin. the two are slightly
differently cut but have the same yokes with lace and rhinestones. she
cut them from one wide-skirted bridesmaid dress bought second-hand at the
salvation army store in edmonton.
sunday morning dressed ready for church with the house clean around
us, sitting on the windowsill composed, in the sunday dress, pretty. paul
in a bow tie. our dad's bad temper in the tension of getting everyone ready.
his sunday morning haircuts, she with scissors and clippers, he holding
the long mirror and sometimes taking the scissors himself. he has a white
cloth tied round his neck over his long underwear and workpants with braces.
we're crammed into the grain truck cab. the order is always the same,
I'm next to him jammed behind the knobbed gear stick, judy's next to me,
then mama with the baby on her lap. paul has to stand pressed against and
holding onto the dashboard.
the motor doesn't always start. he has to get out and fix it. there
are growls in german. we know they're swearing. she says they're not.
down the steep hill of the driveway. then the progression of our
land. we're interested to see it. once it was a few first leaves out in
a stand of aspens along the road and then by the time we were driving home
again many more.
this hill down from the house and the hill up and down before the
bridge are the same hill, a ridge, once a lake bank. beyond the fence along
the first quarter section there's a red-brown grass, fescue, then in the
second quarter grandpa epp's log house in summerfallowed black. then kinderwaters'
fields.
halfway to the highway the bridge is our event, a white bridge not
set straight across, east-west as the road allowance runs, but slightly
turned to cross where the creek is narrower. there used to be an earlier
bridge, unpainted wood. when it was failing and this one was being built
we had to cross on two planks above the pooled brown water. he had to steer
the front wheels over those two planks. I was standing at the dash in those
days, frozen with fear. would the back wheels slip? beyond the bridge was
another bad place, a low spot where when it had rained mud ruts would grab
the wheels and hurl them sideways. stuck.
then a sweet slope to the point at kinderwaters' drive where we'd
be able to see to the highway. in the middle of that last half mile there
was an uncleared stand of aspens on both sides of the road. it was another
mudhole, longest to dry after rain and drifted solid in winter. wild rose
bushes in the ditches with water on their leaves. just there a silver-grey
dead tree with a hooked arm always holding our eyes.
the highway our achievement. cars and trucks on a raised graveled
roadbed. when we had reached the highway nothing could stop us.
a caragana hedge kinderwater had planted along the highway as a snow-fence.
turning onto the churchyard everyone's car known. if there's a strange
car there is a visitor. our mother in her church hat nodding, greeting
people, saying hello out loud though she's behind glass and no one can
hear her. standing around on churchyard dirt are children I don't like
who don't like me. verna driediger. I don't like her but the boys do. we
look at what everyone is wearing.
the church is just a long plain wooden building with a wide porch
like a stage or platform. two steps up. two doors, one for men and the
other for women. then the women's cloakroom, a bare little room with a
shelf overhead and a mirror also too high for us. bibles forgotten. sunday
school papers. we have to climb onto the bench to see out the window. what
we see is the wooden sidewalk to the women's outhouse. the bush, fields.
squirming down, running out, feet drumming on boards. caragana there too,
snapping its pods, spitting squared oval seeds. their dried pea taste.
the preachers' stage at the front of the church has three steps up,
mustard-painted boards. ed martens is sitting at the piano bench sideways
to us. we can see his adam's apple bulging above his bow tie. our father
is another ed. he wears a bow tie too. he and ed martin are enemies.
my mother and the other mothers are in the baby room where they can
get up, move around, their babies sleeping on wooden shelves. they have
a window across the churchyard and an open archway through to the barrel
heater at the back of the church's long room. the rest of us have to sit
quietly on our benches, men and boys on the left, women and girls across
the aisle on the right. above us is a long stovepipe held up by wires.
endless hours looking at that stovepipe and at the chains dropping electric
lamps from the wooden ceiling.
we like singing and sing well. the hymns can have quite dramatic
words - "washed in the blood of the lamb", "softly and tenderly
jesus is calling", "throw out the lifeline across the dark wave"
- but we're used to them and sing them with bland vigour. there are hymns
with words I don't believe. I scrupulously don't sing them. "all to
jesus I surrender." no, I don't.
in morning services there is an embarrassing quarter hour of congregational
prayer. we have to stand for it and are supposed to have our eyes closed.
any one of the grownups may pray out loud, the women too, but usually one
of the men begins. there are men in the back and middle benches of the
men's side who pray to show off. the women's prayers are more frightened
and earnest. my mother's prayers are sincere and alright but we're nervous
for her. our father doesn't pray aloud but his enemies do. I listen carefully
to his enemies' prayers. his enemies are the other willful men. he is friends
with some of the timid men. other timid men are his enemies' friends.
the preacher might be someone we've never seen. he might be old,
or somewhat famous, from a city or on furlough from a mission field, africa,
india, china, south america. if he's a missionary there'll be an evening
service with slides of palm trees and dark people in rows. while he preaches
we're looking him over. we like energy and good looks. if he's seedy we'll
be unimpressed. with new preachers I also pay attention to how one man's
version of the story isn't always the same as another's.
there are usually what are called musical numbers. the visiting preacher's
missionary wife might sing a solo or there'll be a trio or quartet from
the congregation. mr and mrs nick siebert might sing a duet. their part
singing fascinates, the way the lines of voice interweave.
the church community is a stressed arena, everyone seen and intensely
known by us kids coming up in it, studying it. with the exception of some
of the mothers and those families with quiet men who were 'with' my father,
the so-familiar persons of the congregation seem steadily indifferent toward
me and the other children. when energetic little boys forget where they
are their fathers are expected to drag them out of their front rows and
spank them out by the horse barn. we'd hear them yelling. at other times
most of the men, except maybe some of our relatives, ignore us, concentrate
on each other. the women know we exist and may speak to us as part of their
social exchanges with our mother, who is thoughtful and on good terms with
everyone, but their eyes appraise us.
eroticism of the religious imagery and music. profound forever-unreconciled
antagonisms of rivalry. kindnesses and holding bonds. heavy training in
paradox. was it a test that let through those with the strongest perception
or who had no social gain possible, and held forever those who are like
each other and could belong? my sister and brother and I are rivals at
home but allies here, agreeing, that preacher was silly, did you see mr
friesen sleeping in church, mrs willms is so pretty isn't she, tina wiens
is horrible. we'd support each other until we could get out, did get out.
-
I always liked the way paul looked. he was a beautiful fine-skinned
shining brown. his head was a beautiful shape, a deep curve from the crown
in to the nape of the neck. I am four the year he is a baby. we're in a
cabin at the sawmill. there's a bed along a south wall, winter outside.
a room on a bright evening, waiting for supper guests. is it my birthday?
I don't see judy but there's a crib with a baby. a radio on a high shelf.
I'm sitting under it on a little bench listening to the children's program
on CFGP. the radio is on the wall facing west.
a little boy is screaming, crawling under the house. he's afraid
of the puppy. the man stands on his own yard, at a distance from his house,
jeering as if that baby is his rival. I am watching the man's hatred with
hate. that man is detestable. I am near the porch of the unfinished house
that stands crudely propped on four stones at its four corners, ready to
be moved somewhere else. the man built the house himself, over time. we
live in it but it's his. underneath it is a shallow square of dead earth
that chickens and lost toys find their way into. the little boy flees there
rather than into the house because there's no one he can count on.
there are many buildings on the yard. at different times, different
summers, we play in different ones. one year there's a tire swing in the
garage. there's also a bare shell of a house hardly bigger than a granary
that we call the janzen house. it has one window to the north, opposite
the door, and one looking east. it's used to store this and that, furniture
from other households, cardboard boxes of sealer jars, unneeded wedding
presents, horse collars and harness hung from nails. a table under the
window is our stage for plays I direct. they end in an embrace. judy is
the girl and I'm the man. standing on the table we look out through the
window without glass down onto grass in waves. this back area of the farm
is where things are abandoned in the long grass. a sleigh box. farming
implements. the cab of a truck, wheels and engine removed, open doors,
flat in the grass. a bird nests in the twine can on the red binder.
judy and paul are closer in age, only a few months more than a year
between them, he dark as an indian, she leggy and blond. there are times
they are allied against me, run ahead together and are crouched in a room
in the caragana hedge. I can hear their voices. I'm abandoned. I understand
the need but there's no one else.
paul because he's a boy has to help with the chores. in the evenings,
when we girls have only to set the table and wash the dishes, he has to
drag five gallon pails of chop to the pighouse, struggle to tilt them over
the rail, sometimes onto the head of the big boar or the diabolical big
sow pushing ravenously toward him. it's not a strong-looking fence, the
2x4 slabs give when the heavy animal butts against them. he tilts the bucket,
dusty chop. she shakes her ears. then water dragged from the pumphouse
which is further than the chophouse. the water slops over. we don't think
to help him, it's boys' work, we have to do housework. our father doesn't
think to give him pails he can handle, curses his awkwardness. we know
our father wants to break our spirits. we know the spirit he most wants
to break is paul's. paulie. is it to protect him that our mother doesn't
seem to protect him.
paul would be sent for the milk cows in the evening, going the way
the tree shadows pointed, uphill, a long hill, spread visible from the
yard, the field like a long screen hung across the east. partway up it
was our fenceline, beyond it a tiny tractor raising summerfallow dust.
paul, and judy often, the kids, would climb over the gate into the corrall.
on the far side of the corrall was the pasture nearest the barn, wild grass,
foxtail, a manure compost gritty like cinder. then a streambed, not a stream
but a ditch cut by spring run-off hurling toward the road, dividing this
lower pasture from the broad field hung up in evening light in the east.
from the kitchen window or standing on the yard there'd be the tiny cows
and tiny judy and paul working their way toward them. when they'd turned
and were chasing the cows, or cow, down toward the barn, they'd have faced
into the setting sun. that must be what he likes to remember, though the
cow could sometimes evade him and have to be chased all across the slope.
mama would be in the house ready to put on our father's old pants
and do the milking when the cow was got into the barn. afterward she would
come in with metal buckets of milk still warm, with bits of straw floating
on it and bits of what might be manure, to be strained through a white
cloth. in earlier times it was poured down through the complicated towered
whirlings of a cream separator. a thin jet of cream would spring from one
long spout into a pan and a larger arm of milk would stand out into the
blue enamel jug or a two-quart jar. the white cloth that had been be draped
over the open reservoir at the top of the separator - with its manure,
hay, and raw milk smell still folded into it - would then have to be scalded
and dried.
I don't know how our table placement came about. it wasn't well thought-out.
it was males at one end, he with his back to and nearest the door, paul
on his left with his back to the window onto the yard. the baby, opposite
paul, once scalded his hand dipping it into our father's teacup so that
was surely the worst place to put a baby. I was opposite our father at
the other end of the table, our mother at my left, closest to the stove,
and judy opposite her next to paul. paul in the place furthest from his
support and next to someone hanging over him, nagging his table behavior.
there was a day, a noon meal, maybe a saturday or a day in summer, when
paul found his weapon: a long ironical stare that said "you're picking
on a child: I see you, you're a bully." he held it. it was the first
open challenge and he won it.
17
Note from Daichi with a link to the TIFF list of 150 essential Canadian
films. Trapline with Trees of syntax next to it. Aimée
says mail them the elements and they'll transfer.
While I was looking for the interneg and optical sound in the closet
I pulled out two leaves for the table. Beautiful wide desk. In the tapes
box two photos I didn't know were there, Tom as Little Duck on the New Jersey
shore and the only photo I have of Tom and me together. There we are one
day having fish and chips by the tuna wharf at Fisherman's Landing. I didn't
like this photo because I look passive and Tom looks goofy but now I like
my skin and his quirk. I've stuck them up across from this chair.
-
I replied to Tim railing against people dissing Trump for his pussy-grabbing
tape. My hand trembled when I hit post. After everything I've been
and done, still.
the apple green cotton dress, apples on it
I'd forgotten that dress but I can see it - almost see it - see the color
for a quickly faded second. It quickly gets replaced by the blue-green of
a different dress.
The crabapples' leaves are thinner, small yellow apples showing now like
stars.
Once the journey is completed the reality which
has been an inner and hidden one turns out to envelope, surround, and contain
what at first was outer and visible. The body is inside the soul.
Corbin I think. I still had that question in suspension. Let me see it
through. First ask whether the draw of it is prebirth intuition: "inner
and hidden," "envelope, surround and contain," "the
body is inside." Yes it is. What does he mean by soul. I guessed experience
imagined as a transparent substance like 'consciousness'. The body is experienced
but it isn't 'in' 'experience'.
However it is not possible to pass from one
to the other without a break. This is pointed out by many reports. One
starts out but at some point there is a breakdown of the geographical coordinates
found on our maps. The traveler is not aware of it at that moment. He realizes
it after.
In other words, birth.
I cancelled Corbin's sort of inflation of imagining in the Being about
time. It goes along with metaphysical idealism.
in the quiet of evening I was first to concentrate
on stillness, desire the fulfillment of my need, and thirdly to imagine
it fulfilled.
In order to enter the stillness it is necessary
to raise one's intelligence to a higher degree of consciousness. When achieved
it is a lucid work of intense activity which clarifies the desire and creates
efficiency. Mine is never a case of possession. I am the secretary.
[Geraldine] Cummins' beautiful clear statement. Talking to the book.
Should I try to do it her way? No it says, this way is fine.
he's looking across the room as if to the telephone,
I say offended "never mind" and leave, across the court, past
doors into long vegetable gardens, think he's following, up to a window
wall, he isn't following, knows this is a dead end and I'll have to back-track,
but a stairwell on the right, wash basin in the mirror wall, have to fold
back the mirrors across the stairs, but at the top, am looking at a baby
asleep in a crib in a dark hall.
This one looks like an actual instruction dream about the prenate with
some of the usual kinds of interference from day ego concerns. Telephone,
message. Have to fold back the mirrors, fold back illusion. Then there's
the baby. Like that? Yes. I don't get the young man though. Something about
evasion in writing in your community. I had been evading? It was telling
me what? Yes. So you do sometimes speak directly in dreams. Yes.
I've been betting on sincerity
the idea of diplomatic skill, that it erodes person more to be publicly
disdained
I bet on it less now, have sometimes been deliberately and strategically
insincere, for instance in teaching. But I still think that always being
sincere is the only way to make sure it happens when it matters. What I
didn't know then is that sincerity has to go up a level, integrity has to
be sophisticated.
the slides show: a staring school alone in the land. a staring truck
to the eyes in grass. a view from further back than the door. a view of
veined sky the photographer veiled
I was beginning to understand the slides -
In July 1982 finding field & field's beautiful phrases and
beginning to accumulate what will we know.
18
A raven's wide-winged back dropping smoothly to the edge of the garage
roof. Walked back and forth jerking its head at the bit of pork chop fat
I'd left on the table. Am going to court the ravens, they're local powers.
Tom showed up under the TIFF 150 post. Jolts me when he does.
A dove in the now-bare linden. Quarter past nine on a Tuesday, they're
getting ready for the soup kitchen across the road. Sun on my feet and reaching
across the room as high as the wainscot's two-thirds cross-piece, glowing
on the laundry room's far wall. I've brought in the veranda plants to save
them from frost and to replace garden flowers. I love to see the lemon geranium
on the bathroom sill. Rose geranium next to me in my ribbed Bauer bowl.
Two little mangos with their too-big leaves.
-
Last night I was on street view for San Diego looking for something and
saw a date in 2016. As I was falling asleep realized I could go find out
whether Tom still lives at 3663 Georgia. Remembered to check just now, heart
wrung in suspense. Is the tree there? No. I'll look from the other end of
his sidewalk. No plants, no bench, he's gone. No way to know where.
I see a / book in the foldover at the belly, / it's a journal I hid
there long before / written when I was still a child
Journal is memory.
something else - a moment of the other - next to a moment of this
one - when he was stubbornly for a long time standing in the water towing
the lily on its long stem
Getting it in daylight as well as dreams.
I seem to myself to be sad and resigned in all the ways but something
in work: that from the crude ignorant one, I have by desperate trading
got to a work tact.
which is: paper scraps, their slightness of connection; phrases,
their unusualness of slightness of connection; the slides; with j, something
raw; the something that can make these and nothing else.
Yes, good. How old was I, 37. Was enduring so much uncertainty. It was
necessary because I was between. Yes? Yes. I was handling it well! Nothing
else? For the time being. It's not true now.
and is ashamed in everything else, the ordinary work it does ordinarily
Is that correct? Yes. Should I still be ashamed whenever I'm ordinary?
Yes. So was the garden wrong? No, it was recovery. Would you call it ordinary?
No.
Did Jam have any idea? No. And yet she needed to sabotage. Yes.
if there are people as in the model
It's wrong to think of the world perceived as a model.
from showing her reckoning of repetition in the larger and smaller
parts. the girl with the doll.
I had that before I wrote the Kant paper!
"you went to college with one suitcase? you carried it yourself?"
"of course - it was only one suitcase and a typewriter case, and a
brown purse." gothic. the light coming out of the open gothic door
of ban righ hall. "there was no one else there?" going through
the empty rooms until I found a rug I liked.
the deep bathtubs and tearing gush of very hot water. glaring light
in white tile.
"I was in agony in relation to their bodies, I was full of their
bodies, I can still see them, and in the dining room when there were hundreds.
I was never away from their bodies when I was with them.
"in my room I had to have absolute control, there had to be
nothing on the dresser top, I'd have to put everything in the drawer."
"it had to be external order only? not internal?" "no inside
the drawers and in the closet it didn't matter."
Would I have been like that about bodies even if I hadn't been worried
about mine? Yes. My dad was like that and Paul is. Luke is. It's acute pain
and pleasure at visual disorder and order. When I'm smartest I can least
bear disorder, for instance in yoga discipline for thesis writing I wd always
have to clean house.
spirit battle again, mortal attack. to know the other wants you dead
thought of it as a realm
do I have to be there not to be in oblivion
is it where the others stop
It's not a realm, it's a tension in some, some of the time. It can be
relaxed. I was thinking of it as a permanent fact not a transient state
I could be skilful with. Did have to become aware of it to be skilful with
it. Becoming aware of it can be where others stop but being distressed by
it is a further stop.
I made myself someone who would see them / or who would not be able
to bear to see them
I look at that and feel how unready I was. I feel sorry for them [my
parents] and me both. Was it a necessary mess? I hadn't done teenage with
them, I'd been too occupied with getting myself ready to jump. That was
correct. Then afterward I spread teenage over a lot of years.
she read some words. I had my hands pressed over my mouth eyes howling.
she understood, she said in quite a cheerful kind voice "don't cry,
you can do it too"
then when I say I wish my mind were your equal who do I speak for
She didn't think it was and I hadn't proved myself yet but that's a shocking
self-betrayal. I'm angry seeing her complacency.
"you want to be a very fine swimmer in it and I really am a
water creature."
Did that mean anything real? No.
she cries that she wants to have a real baby with me I think she
means I'd have to want it with her, in her agony
I didn't want it with her. I never wanted it with her. I could see she
didn't want an actual baby, she just wanted to prove she was a man. I hated
her wanting to be a man, I thought it a grab for male entitlement when she
should have been loyal to our actual gender. My contempt for her delusion
does show that I didn't love her. It's mixed up with anger at her contempt
for my and her own womanness, though. It was a locked structure I didn't
rise above. And then she used my jealousy and exclusion to coerce me.
Was it trauma? Yes. From when her mom was sick? Yes. Along with her sensitive
nervous system. She felt she'd die if she were female? Yes. She didn't dare
track it through in therapy.
I found the image in the light on paper
the first ones were very tentatively done.
I loved what was emerging, but they were sometimes just a single figure,
in a room or in a landscape. and very often the figure would be pointing,
pointing to the next drawing, in a way. in the next drawing I'd try to
find out what she was pointing at. so they led me along, and they gradually
got more complex, with landscape winding around, and animals, and all kinds
of weather. they were the only things I've done in my life that actually
happened to me. only the drawings I've made show the history of this kind
of experience, this drawing.
they are about a kind of contact I've made
inside myself, which seemed to be connected with something outside. it
seemed to be a kind of union with certain things .... it's as though I've
brought together all the things I really like, in the form of drawing.
This is so beautiful. [Joyce Wieland] She'd done his cold kind of work
that she's still famous for and then she found a way to work in love. And
then she died.
dorothy's devotion. "one sees the limits of it." "whereas
he made each word crumble under one. it corresponded to something they
were feeling in other ways."
We were arguing about value in writing and it was a surrogate for an
argument about value in gender. It's a good description of Joyce in Finnegan's
but she was also dissing Richardson as too female. Richardson had political
work to do, she wasn't yet in position to indulge in the prestige of making
words crumble.
everything available, all past experience,
seen while I sat writing, for the first time as near, clear, permanent
reality.
Richardson wasn't literary the way Joyce was or Jam was. Literary means
something more narrowly to do with writing. She was a philosopher and defending
something rather than making something crumble.
"when I see a good-looking face looking at me with love I have
no spine, it turns me to jelly"
didn't write that she said "if I don't have you the house is
nothing and going to hong kong is nothing and the group is nothing"
and I knew it was true.
"I'm upstairs writing beautiful things about us." I'm cracking
up laughing hysterically, she's peering. "what are you doing?"
"I'm cracking up."
I keep being surprised she wasn't always mean. I have assigned her a
description.
I suddenly wondered what would happen if I saw that I could never
get what I want, but that it wasn't personal
With Tom when I didn't get what I wanted I did and didn't see that it
wasn't personal. With J toward the end when I saw I couldn't get what I
wanted and it wasn't personal it still turned to despair and disgust. It's
because she contempted me. Tom never did.
on sunday morning the waking was in your (tone). it takes all day
fighting for me to remember being in it. then I go home and have it in
my writing in my journal. it's nothing to do with what you argue or your
issue, it's like an atmosphere.
Yes.
"you don't trust your reader." "what reader do you
trust?" "a larger myself watching a smaller myself."
It's the right answer but was it true of her? Did she have a version
of you? No.
I once in winter traveled to a sea village in an unfamiliar part
of england. no one knew I was there and I don't remember the journey. I'd
wanted to cross to an island monastery but when I arrived I found the boat
had gone and wouldn't cross again until monday. it was friday evening.
I had money enough for two nights at a bed and breakfast but none for other
meals.
my room was a small cold one, upstairs, with flowered wallpaper.
the landlady brought me tea and some biscuits upstairs. oh thanks for the
biscuits. the room had in it books left by summer visitors and other little
things, hairpins in the drawer. the small window towered down over a wide
dull beach, sand and some blue-grey light after sunset. I walked briefly
through the streets, down the bank, onto the polished low-tide strand.
a few fishboats, some walking married couples. cold and damp, extinguished,
the island across the way.
I had nothing to do but sit in the cold bed. I turned off the light
and lay there. in the morning I was alone in the dining room, eating slowly,
eating everything, all the toast, the last of the second pot of tea, and
beginning the new book I'd brought. it was castenada's journey to ixtlan.
at the dining table in what I think was the parlour, taking the edge of
the tea intoxication into the terrific excitement of the challenge of castaneda
in 1972. I took the challenge into the first day by stopping reading and
going out for the rest of the day. I don't remember anything in that day
except walking far down around a headland, miles, in cold wind, dull light,
without lunch, maybe without dinner, or was there enough for chips. on
sunday after breakfast I must have started home. must have hitch-hiked.
forgot the place.
last night dreamed myself there, in the streets
of that village, looking to stay in that bed and breakfast or some other.
either there were no more bed and breakfasts going or the rooms were taken.
Why I'm pasting these whole stories is because they were already memories
then and so are more likely to be forgotten.
19
The shock when I saw Tom was gone. Lying awake at 2:30 this morning with
a sore heart. As long as he was there I could imagine one day knocking on
his door. I could imagine him safe in the home I made for him. Maybe he's
safe in a seniors' tower and his bench and his plants are with him on a
balcony.
His 2010 notes on 3663: "I want to write about this apartment and
this neighborhood and about how both have become uniquely mine. Now I hope
that this will become not just another breathing space in a chaotic life."
"Name the things Ellie has done to create this home for me." "Somehow,
this is the where I've always wanted to be. I've come to a stop here. My
attention is shifting from outward to inward. This place no longer may be
a stage but rather a destination." "'Finish strong, kid,' I hear
my father say. I think of all he did to make a home and all I have not done.
'An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.' Bachelard." "This
apartment and my decision to remain here at least until Casual labor
is finished forces me to confront all the "I's" who have facilitated
all these changes of self, a process that continues even now. After I leave
this apartment, I will not be the person I am now."
He was there nine years? Ten? From Hallowe'en 2006. From 60 to 70. "He
got his cards and the Casual labor notes from storage yesterday.
I think his living there could be the beginning of the realness I imagined
eleven years ago, for him and between us." "Feeling what it is
like to do things for him. I don't say I love Tom and am over the moon to
be making a home for him that he is paying for. I say this must be some
kind of thing my body needs." "We have been shopping together
very peacefully. When we got home the cat met us at the top of the steps."
"I was looking at him with so much pleasure, I was so much liking him
in his calm funny realness. His big strong nose. His beauty. Yesterday he
struggled here on sore feet because I'd left his house Friday night disapproving
of him. He declared and I declared and he got himself up to date and we
made friends - went shopping and I cooked a roast. He never complains when
my cooking doesn't work. The cat slept all afternoon on the blue sofa and
then on the cooler concrete under the honeysuckle. Tom read the NY Times
for hours." "What I mean is that he's become the Tom I was there
for, he's come true. When I cooked for him last night he said 'You're so
nice to me, I'm seeing what you've been holding back.'"
But then a month later: "So what's my complaint. It says it's that
there's something false in the platform that never gets acknowledged and
that I have to feel alone and that is a grief and deprivation and that he
suppresses so that suppression also interferes."
- Look at that completely open luminous platinum sky. Cut-outs of the
linden, the spruce, the ridge, the church roof, the Russian olive, in that
order.
He had a house and I didn't. I photographed him and he didn't photograph
me. I wrote him and he didn't write me. I am missing him and if he is missing
me he is not letting on. I let him know where I am and he has blocked me
on FB. I cherished his being and he needed my help, is that the sum of it?
It says no. He loved me as best he could, is that the sum of it? It says
yes. And I was hard on his being as well as cherishing it. Oh sigh. Looking
at his apartment notes I was sorry how carping I was about his writing,
that I didn't honour its reaching. The something false in the platform was
that I was always afraid I'd love him more than he loved me, I was always
looking for reasons to hold back. Was that necessary? It says no. So I flunked
out. Yes. I had to leave because I flunked out. Yes. I didn't understand
that he was it and I was there, I was in my one chance.
- That sweet short sharp-tailed pink line drawing itself swiftly across
the east, the 7:15 flight. - Ten minutes later another appearing over St
Michael's chimney.
"My preference has always been to love you," I did say that
and we both cried.
- Will you talk to me love patriarchs
(emperor), process withdrawal
- Instruction? yes
- Process harm done me by them yes
- Is it wrong to have this house no,
necessary
- Is it wrong to care about work no,
necessary
- More? female inspiration in love
woman's oppression
- Oppression described speaks for all women?
yes
- My true nature was to love him and be oppressed?
yes
- I tried to evade it yes
- And that was dishonest yes
- As well as correct YES
- More? no
-
E4 plunges straight in:
the sense of both watching vulnerably to get a magic working of the
broth and suspecting it is simply, or also, a vulnerability to the feeding
needs of everyone I'm in bond with. not knowing how to tell. the two might
be the same. so deep in speculation, feeling it a crazedness maybe, is
it them, how they work, is this what artists do
Were we telepathic? No but you had taken each other into your structures.
Was I working for them? No. On common tasks? No, your own. The later evidence
is that. Yes. There was still the uncertainty of betweenness. Yes. It's
what artists do only when they're between. Yes.
connection. I show it, I don't know it.
That's Riddley Walker. There IS esoteric connectedness. But you
don't want to call it telepathy?
- People's bodies broadcast their structure
yes
- Other bodies can attune yes
- At a distance yes
- The broth is my own structure in touch with many
yes
- 'Magic working' was my own network gelling
yes
- I'd opened it to influence yes
- And Jam was lying YES
- That was harming me yes [sigh]
- Do you dislike 'telepathy' because of its associations?
yes
the silvergrey understanding of the one who is visiting in turn it's too near. am
I in its field with what I'm knowing
Rhoda had moved in across the courtyard. That was the beginning of horrible
too-nearness of Jam's crookedness and their collusion in it. What you're
meaning to say is that I was suspecting telepathy when what was really happening
was competition and sabotage. YES.
I was hearing that I could read code just by taking metaphors straight
and then what's the agreement that keeps it hidden
It's not an agreement, it is people's split between silent and talking
selves.
oh universe.
I wanted somebody to see me in pain.
They were crucifying me and it was all unacknowledged and I was working.
I'm proud of myself in this. [sigh]
the horse in my dream had been with a maniac
writer - starved as she - feeding in a thin grey and mean spirit world
Was it my abstraction that was bad for me? No, hers.
if what I think I want is an intelligence that turns out whenever
I think I'm with it, to be false, it means my intelligence is false
No. It means my intelligence is inexperienced with itself.
I don't like the usual callous in that, it is leaving out the screaming
loss of what intimacy is, that I will have to go on shut down in my father's
way, never having learned, and I know it's the same for her, really having
failed to get the whole person into being with someone
Screaming loss of intimacy, that's the child isn't it.
we weren't real to each other, someway, except in the hooked-up times
when we were thinking together or feeling the exquisite occult. but that
was what we were there for and the price for her was vulnerability to obsession,
and for me some bodily confidence. we didn't learn to mend hurts, as can
be so easily, or to be simple in pain.
Yes.
I liked being a girl, happy, smart, expanding, good-looking, feeling,
and had to go on past because I knew it wasn't impressive. it was clear
but limited. but now I've been wanting someone to say, you were brilliant
there, be a girl again with me.
Ah sweetheart.
if I lose the subtlety what will you lose. your beauty.
Work woman speaking. Is it true? It says yes. [Sigh.]
20
the glamour dizzy impressive concentration and oh muck madness quite
helpless
because how she is with any woman, drawn and weak, crazeable, inspireable
to the most beautiful heart, without defense except in meanness
Is that about split? Yes.
she was unable to support my work from outside but when I had been
with her my work was better is that true,
and what of the way I'd be physically greyed and fat after her
Fat and grey is oppression and neglect. My work was better because I
honed myself on her. Don't call that support.
if I weren't father-damaged what could I do - I would hold it firmly
seen as the weakness that's the root into the heart
her delicate feeling of tissues, to be replied to by a delicate help
of her weakness
Yes. [Sigh.]
we were also closer than before - not in our ideal minds - in our
existence in the whole of the contradiction - the strength we had to have
in it
That was true but it didn't mean we should go on.
the two hearts I had with different roots
The secure heart from before abandonment and stunned heart after, is
that the way to say it?
without the delicate knowing I looked for everywhere
she got to the beautiful syllables - she has glorious ultraviolet
perception
I could admire and she couldn't? Yes.
tissue, tissue
the loss of her oriental knowledge of my sexual body
No one since has touched me well but it was defensive control too. With
her I always had to be afraid of power motive in sex. I opened up but always
in a frightened conflicted way.
hearing the interest of it but knowing it wasn't an impressive hyperconsciousness
- that I'd shown an inferiority, and watching for it
Impressive hyperconsciousness was the format of their drug arena. It's
the bait I took. And yet the exercise was good for the new lucidity I sometimes
see. It isn't hyperconscious and its intention is clarity not impression.
it's agony without release all day, garden bricks and stones, freud
saying you're nothing but unsuccessfully wanting to love. no money no coffee
no food
endurance endurance endurance endurance
the you gets quite abstract in this pain
it is more now than before
This does really state the bare gaping speechlessness of grief.
he begins the story after birth. if I begin it at conception, what
difference to the account, ie what is the self/other of that time.
the concept of unconscious and repression are under the sign of birth
and prebirth.
Was I right about this? Was prebirth built into his metaphor? YES.
it seems true my unbewusst is crazed wanting to be pregnant
Was it? No. Was there something it mainly wanted? Yes, it wanted to be
joined. I was imagining the unc as deep truth and what it is is a tree deformed
by growing in the dark. Truth comes after the join.
my way of loving as female narcissism / and a resistance to being
it / anger
Female sexuality built on self instead of mother as object-choice, I
think he means. Susan was a narcissist. Blindness to the other. But many
women aren't that.
What I can't bear is feeling I love more than I am loved. Isn't that
just the hardship of living in a patriarchy? Yes. But feeling it as such
a crisis, isn't that a pathology? No.
Is there more you want to say about this? You look for balance in winning.
Rather than something else, what? Action. Thinking of it as competition
rather than skilful means? YES. I agree.
an individuality in the exercise of his capacity
to love - in the conditions he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies
by it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it
When I read that I immediately imagine it as applying to the other not
to me. I imagine myself safe though thwarted by understanding for instance
Tom in these terms.
of these feelings which determine the capacity
to love only a part has undergone full psychical development. the other
part has been held up, withheld from conscious personality, may expend
itself only in fantasy, or may stay buried in the unconscious ... each
new person coming on the scene ... both parts of the libido will participate
I would state as a fundamental principle that
the patient's desire and longing are to be allowed to remain, to serve
as driving forces for the work and for the changes to be wrought, and one
must beware of granting this source of strength some discharge by surrogates
... indeed it could only be surrogate, for until the repressions are lifted
she is not capable of satisfaction.
Woof. He's so good.
"the picture I have is not binary it's circuitous, it runs through
many stations. there are going to be many stations that are not under surveillance"
She's dodging the point, which is repression and splitting.
21
a wide white room, plaster and flagstone, simple wood, ceiling and
frames, a small bed with woven cover, a rug, a table, a chair, a lamp,
a hearth. the door onto a stairs. the windows over a sea. a blue cupboard.
a shelf. fig tree, grapevine (picking off the leaves covering flowers).
Draw that.
"I can hear you thinking. not the words but the rhythm."
Could she? Yes. It's not hearing, it's feeling. Yes, aware in the microtonal.
Her special development of language centers. Yes. An unusual brain.
pinax
A votive tablet of painted wood or terracotta,
marble or bronze relief that was deposited in a sanctuary or affixed within
a burial chamber. To the ancient Greeks pinax seems also to have been a
general term for a plate. In daily life pinax might equally denote a wax-covered
writing tablet. In the theatre of ancient Greece, they were images probably
usually painted on cloth, but also carved either in stone or wood, that
were hung behind, and sometimes below, the stage area as scenery, or as
permanent decoration. They often have two holes for a suspension cord, and
are shown in vase-paintings both hanging on temple walls and suspended from
trees in the sanctuary area.
A leap of interest when I came on painting notes. Imagining this room
a studio.
Another Kiyooka story: "a boouut fiiif teen years ago I tried to
write something about my mother," with his eyes down, "I was not
aa ble aat the time." "now I have the time," "come to
japan with me, ma." "I am more interested in celebrating her ---
than in thinking about the consciousness in the womb." hm what's this
challenge. "yes but is it thinking about you -" and I know what
I mean too. "who?! who?!" over his shoulder laughing.
raving about noses. "there was a little figure I fell in love
with. I kept not believing how big the nose was." why do I love it
when I could love -. "the phallic woman." vulnerable nose. sensitive
vulnerable thoughtful. thoughtful and what about the magnets are they what
makes the nose seem to listen.
Is nose about phallus? No. A strong nose means something about sensitive
vitality. Literally? Yes.
a look that thinks, thinks and goes through
the other person's head without being excited.
at a center, that this center gives me the
right and the facility to look anyone straight into the eye. as soon as
hashish is extinct in me, it disappears.
to function at perhaps its free speed
Michaux describing the way it was in acid.
if ego is quite a small mechanism - I'm trying to see - it does only
one thing - say I'm the best here - and for that, cut off perception -
because with perception cut off it is not the best and knows it isn't.
circular.
What to do with that instruction.
just the puzzle: how to sort the differences from other people, why
do they seem to have to be stupid, am I as stupid as that and not knowing
it, is it really a difference in capacity, do I simply misunderstand a
normal incapacity, or is there something wrong that I could help fix. it
is a basic uncertainty that should have been sorted out in childhood but
that goes on undermining.
It would have been helpful to have parents who could explain this. I
don't think I ever spoke to anyone about my distress at other people's talk.
My parents never praised. The church community enforced humility because
it had to be afraid of intelligent challenge.
the real being is the one who is only there
in knowing itself and in managing itself moving among states
Was Hegel talking about the watcher who is sober when I am drunk? It's
maybe not more real but it's more stable, it can bridge states. Did Hegel
have drug experience? Likely yes. Opium?
as a being it is simple otherness from its
states
it exists in knowing and decision.
When he says simple otherness does he mean it functions only in relation
to judgment and sometimes management of state - a second order function?
it works with its own states as continuous
with the other.
Continuous with what they're about? First-order aboutness.
it isn't an original or primal unity as such,
it is not immediate as a unity. it is one thing only as the process of
becoming what it has been.
I don't know what unity means here. Becoming what it has been, is that
what I'm doing when I write an experience afterward? Or what I'm doing now,
recalling-revising?
there was a slow integration during which she
and the little animals and the moving grasses and the sun warmed trees
and the slopes of shivering silver mealies and the great dome of blue light
and the stones of earth under her feet, became one, shuttered together
in a dissolution of dancing atoms. she felt the rivers under the ground
forcing themselves painfully along her veins, swelling them out in an unbearable
pressure. her flesh was the earth, and suffered growth like a ferment,
and her eyes stared, fixed like the eye of the sun. not for one second
longer could she have bourn it; but then, with a sudden movement forwards,
and out, the whole process stopped; and that was the 'moment' which it
was impossible to remember afterward. for during that space of time (which
was timeless) she understood quite finally her smallness, the unimportance
of humanity. in her ears was an inchoate grinding, the great wheels of
movement, and it was inhuman, like a blundering rocking movement of a bullock
cart; and no part of that sound was martha's voice. yet she was part of
it, reluctantly allowed to participate.
if she understood anything it was that words,
here, were like the sound of a baby crying in a whirlwind. for that moment,
while space and time kneaded her flesh, she knew futility; that is, what
was futile was her own idea of herself and her place in the chaos of matter.
what was demanded of her was that she should accept something quite different,
it was as if something new was demanding conception, with her flesh as
host; as if it were a necessity which she must bring herself to accept,
that she should allow herself to dissolve and be formed by that necessity.
but it did not last, the force desisted and left her standing on the road
[Lessing in Martha Quest] It's stunning writing. It's persuasive
and completely unknown to me. Is it true? It says yes. And I haven't that
capacity.
at the window in luke's room looking out. I want to leave here. I
want this time ended. I want to just leave.
When I read that I feel the dumb suffering endured in that time.
night tide, old red and biscuit the delight of biscuit and saying
biscuit
Wrote down the names of colors I chose for the downstairs landing's floor,
skirting boards and doors and the steps and banister because I always forget
them.
22
Late afternoon of a perfect Indian summer Saturday. Woke with Peter T
in the house, saw him off at the curb and later dug with Jennifer next to
red berries among orange leaves.
Sitting with Peter I felt normal, I felt I was his age. We sat in the
garden in the dark, he with a cigarette and then another cigarette and both
with glasses of a European beer we'd propped in the freezer. I'd given him
butter chicken and salad and then we sat at the kitchen table drinking red
wine laughing and telling stories till midnight. This morning he put on
a clean white shirt with jeans - my idea of the best a man can dress - and
I got to watch him walk through my garden so manly just-right-beautiful
in shoulders and hips and legs. 56, about that. My own looks did not worry
me, I was queen of house and land bestowing fine welcome on a delightful
guest. Beyond that, was there anything important? No, except that I noticed
he wasn't interested in helping with the show I said I'd like to pitch to
the gallery in Grande Prairie.
Haven't said anything yet about the weeks since the US election's first
debate between Clinton and the gross boor whose name I don't want in any
of my sentences. I've liked Clinton better seeing her handle his piggishness
as she does with focused, graceful and often amused persistence. For the
last debate she came out in a white pant suit with red lipstick. She has
got thicker and older recently - the pant suits are cut larger and there's
more padding under her jaw and along the jowl - but she is so crisp and
ready that she's making old-womanness more likeable for all of us maybe.
How old is she - a year younger than I am, I think - no, 69 next week. In
eight years she'll be 77. Long life to her and don't die, Bill, either,
because it would be hard for her to deal with while pres.
-
works are judged by the awareness they show of the contemporary plight
of writing and its true essence.
Judged by some. I could be haunted by that but it's not the only thing
writing is judged by. For instance McPhee and O'Brian: I don't think they
think about 'the contemporary plight of writing,' I think what they want
is to do the former thing better than anyone has.
finds fault with the existing state of meaning in the world
Certainly but there isn't just one existing state.
writing is a general choice of tone, of ethos
Of state. Choice and attainment too.
the carat of attention
I thought that was mine but it looks like a quote.
24
- Do you agree with Sarno yes
- Sarno is theoretically bent by patriarchy
yes
- Is basic disembodiment what Sarno is actually about
YES
-
- My bind with Jam made me allergic for the first time
yes
- And then my bind with Tom yes
- Ie attachment is so complicated for me that its conflicting
structures make me ill yes
- My aches in San Diego were displacements from Tom
yes
- Skin ache was YES
- Should I press to work hard in the garden
yes
- And sign up for the gym over winter YES
- Aim being to oxygenate yes
-
- 'Emotional' pain tends to have meanings, so a body's
preference for 'physical' pain is that it avoids meanings?
YES
- It avoids meanings when they are conflictual?
YES
- So the pain IS felt, not repressed YES
- Is the skin pain about aloneness? yes
[sigh]
- Feeling alone conflicts with liking to be alone
YES
- Both are true yes
- So this aloneness is a health crisis yes
- Is it rage no, sadness
- There's also wear-and-tear pain but it's briefer?
yes
- Would you say I need a boyfriend? yes
- Was Joyce wrong about touch YES
- Could I feel actual yearning in my skin
YES
- Would I be able to cure wheat effects no
25
Still quite dark at 7:30. There's a swath of open sky to the east, yellowish
silver, grey batting above. Hiss at the left ear, boiler purring. A wisp
of steam floats through from behind the spruce. Russian olive has leaves
still. Lights of a pickup going to work. Yesterday I made an appointment
for a 50-point maintenance and then standing on the street washing the jeep
I was elated because I felt strong and swift as ever.
Last season of Mad men. Had it from the library and then in the
last few nights went back to season 3 which it turns out I'd seen only bits
of. Marveling at the vividness of persons, Joan, Don, Betty, Roger. In season
3 Kennedy is shot and that pegs the time to my first year at Queen's. 1963.
I was in New York that December. We'd had our eye on New York people from
childhood on, in Look and Life and Good housekeeping
and the Reader's Digest and then Seventeen. The staid clothes
I wore in first year were what they wore, girdle, nylons, padded bra, brown
pleated skirt, brown straight skirt, brown knit dress, beige dress with
a tight bodice and pleated skirt, brown wool coat. (Must still have had
my red bouclé suit though I don't remember it, funny how clothes
just drop out of sight.) Hats to church. Brown flats. Large rollers at night,
hair spray. Mad men people are more forthright in their speech than
we knew how to be, though. I don't know whether it's anachronism or whether
people in New York were that much brasher.
Two girls one in red Chucks walking to high school on the opposite sidewalk.
Such casting and then writing, as if the actors are given their essential
self to play. I can't imagine the actors playing Joan or Don or Roger or
Betty ever playing anyone who suits them more, or being more themselves
in real life. It's a thing about television writing when it's best isn't
it, that vivifying of body types. Don in his expensive suits eternally buttoning
and unbuttoning his suit jacket and then in the final episode in a plaid
shirt and jeans another kind of man. Betty with and without her eye make-up.
We see people age over ten years, actually seven, 2007-2015. Going back
to season 3 after season 7 it's startling to see how much younger they were
in 1963.
It's so-useful a concept, dramatizing the sixties. March 1960 - November
1970. March 1960 I'm in grade nine turning 15; November 1970 I'm in London,
Luke about to be born. Peggy is maybe seven years older than me. Don is
probably my mom's age, a child in the '30s. Persons can't actually be recreated
but style can: clothes, hair, furniture, graphics, architecture. They are
the time.
Oddly I don't take to Peggy though she's well enough cast and written
and acted, etc, and closest to the sort of person I am, I suppose. Why is
it. Her horrible profile. Her full-face look is one thing and then her profile
another. Her profile has an elderly witchy greed. I didn't see Moss that
way in The west wing so maybe it's a stolidity in the way she's written.
There's a heaviness about her. Would a writer with her quickness have been
that stolid? Something bad happened to her and she froze-over some, there's
that. Is it that they wanted to make the one career woman too different
from the others?
-
afternoon sleeping. total fear of going on with her. ... I'm afraid
also of rhoda and trudy - there it is, of their intent to be over me and
its meaning, the fact that they can, rather - I have to gratefully notice
equalities
Ah that's so ghastly. And still I went on. I'm heartsore seeing it.
I am more afraid of destroying the object. if I see, I won't be able
to be in good feeling.
I'm alone in it. she's not willing to say. that means I'm alone in
being responsible to decide what is happening and whether to stop.
what do I have to say: that if it's coming to an even choice I can't
on even terms win
All of those are accurate. Sigh.
other suspicion - it's a bluff - she doesn't mean it but the complaint
of it is a weapon necessary to cover the real complaints - competence,
energy, arrival
It says no.
what the blue pages are
shift of set, shifting
Yes.
rifts where something doesn't follow
if I take it out what I have to replace doesn't follow
when I come to that confusion I (as if) have to know something in
a way different from up to then.
the principle in the other parts is, this follows in one of different
ways. I try to do it in the way the rest has been done, by feel.
there's a dancing balancing and when I stop I try to resolve something
in meaning whereas in the other the meanings have come up lightly out of
the angles of shift of the transitions in moving.
from an uncontrolled meaning feeling I have to get a controlled one.
in the rest and ambience of suggested meaning. those are very intimate.
near. a working mind. tactile.
I was being tortured but still look how accomplished this is, this description
of how I had been working.
careful - am I or aren't I disqualified - I don't know - that's what's
in question - the outlandishness of being a deformed body - the dilemma
of the difference in image
these days the notice of effects, intelligence-effect, forefront-effect,
pleasure-effect, attraction-effect, admiration-effect
My solar's heating with I suppose compassion feeling what a valiant,
beset spirit I was in this.
- E5:
an individuality in the exercise of his capacity to love, in the
conditions he sets himself for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by
it and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it, which perpetually repeats
itself.
only show interest, clear away certain resistances, become linked
with one of the imagos of those persons from whom he was used to receive
kindness
When I read those I imagine being able to make someone love me - I guess
it's that - being omnisciently capable with a lover. And yet that stance
is like a doom of isolation.
let it be seen he's proof against temptation. then she'll feel safe
enough to allow all her conditions for loving, all the fantasies of her
sexual desires, all the individual details of her way of being in love,
to come to light, and then will herself open up the way back from them
to the infantile roots of her love.
Freud talking about the therapist not a lover but it's so much the unanswered
wish for instance with Tom.
"I seem to be telling you by dream and reverie and commentary
and suggestion that you ar behind."
going up helical stairs with 2 people, girls and u wer on the larger
balcony below, asleep or unmoving on a divan, couch. something causes me
to go to the balcony, from wher I can see u lying below, and I spit, a
dark red splat, not larger, the red not vital. I go on in to the up w the
2 of them. u rise, yr face awful and old around the mouth and eyes as if
xhumed.
Appalling, appalling ill will. She has me so aligned with her rejected
female self that I needn't think of it as personal but still -.
last winter's notes that I went through today, when they're stripped
have a beautiful light. I can see them learning different movements. the
blue pages are the most persistent detection.
And then wandering into Yeats, out of her crabbed paranoia into loving
generosity.
and walked slowly, for it was an evening of
great beauty
if I can be sincere and make my language natural
-
Kevin Friesen rapping at the back door come from Vernon to buy the cabinet.
"And you're an Epp." Farm boy from Saskatchewan.
26
I opened the door to a young face and a tall slender body. I liked his
clothes, a dark blue shirt with tiny sparkles in it like a night sky, narrow-legged
pale pants and soft flat hush-puppy shoes. He was of a piece, light, confident
and expert, elfin. Checked out the cabinet rapidly and competently, pulled
out a shelf, pulled out a drawer and looked at its underside. He was interested
in the house. We stood in the middle room together. "Are you an artist?"
He wanted to know what kind, he'd just starting in art studies at UBC Okanagan.
He carried out the top section of the cupboard on his own and then we staggered
out with the heavy bottom section together and he loaded it into the back
of his truck. I saw how good he was at knowing how to pivot it up onto the
high tailgate. That was when I asked whether he was a farm boy. I was shining
his phone's brilliant light for him while he pulled out a pad to place between
the sections. "I asked because you know how to do things. I grew up
on a farm too." What I was feeling in him mainly I think was the bright
openness of someone brought up in Christian security of being, the bright
openness I had too at his age.
Life was shaping, was being shaped by his hands,
into an intimacy, a goodness, into days and years of communion and kindness,
of work and real comfort, of interest, of eagerness.
That's from The serpent, that I've just bought for myself and
fondly reread.
If there's finishing to do it's in finding out her limits in writing.
What else. I'd like to turn her abuse. I'd like to find out what I've been
too impressed by.
Her limits in writing. There they are: the pose she was forcing herself
to, willfully cryptic, unrhythmic and crabbed. Loveless, ungenerous. The
Na-khi piece was beautiful but she couldn't outdo Kenner so she flunked
her PhD and had to devise a different way to feel brilliant. Is that what
happened? Yes. What was I too impressed by - no, not impressed enough by
her scramble in those later years when she was losing certainty. The way
she was needing to insist that I was behind was her fear in work. Large
sigh.
I wisshed, many mo to be parteners of such
sweetnesse
She wished to impress rather than to share, that is the central
weakness. Her dislocating pose was protest against colonization but English
is a gift rather than a rule. In Hong Kong she wasn't ruled by English though
at times perhaps by England; English and all its history was given into
her hand by and as a privilege.
being allwaie fed with home occasions desired
no help of foren tungs
For instance Mulcaster.
it's only when I'm months away from one of your sudden smashings
that I dream anything. we'll write for a while then you'll become in me
everything that was impossible about you.
"For a while" was another two years but then the rest of the
sentence came exactly true.
the length of time learning that what I had admired in them was what
I imagined from a reserve they had with me
Is that true? YES. On account of my leg? No. My intelligence? Yes.
the mimosa - at the market - seeing the green crate and the dark
green carry-cot on it - table with the lamp, yellow - (the purple of the
wall, I'm just seeing) - (curtains the sun came through in south africa)
I can't see the table with the lamp anymore, but can like still to see
the purple and green and the lit flowered curtain.
from the portuguese store hearing the voice I'd spoken to the boy
in, the voice I hear taped, beautiful, unusual, lighter than I think, supple:
"why did I hear it, why don't I usually." coming through the
brick park looking at color. "I don't hear it because I'm looking."
attention isn't in strata but the attention in looking is with attention
in meaning: having seen him bridle, forcing him in disadvantage through
the question about Io, the looking became that tracking too, "does
he understand what I mean."
There's what I had been learning to do, register and then write psychological
moments.
Barthes:
this new subject whose theory is to be sought
for today: the friends form a network among themselves and each must be
apprehended there as external/internal, subjected by each conversation
to the question, where am I among my desires, where am I in relation to
desire.
learning to not be caught more known than knowing
a meaning bathed in light, as in a dream, where
I keenly perceive the anguish, the excess, the imposture of a situation,
much more acutely than the story that is taking place there.
That's just what it was like in those gatherings. It's Barthes in Paris
and it's provincial Jews imagining themselves to be what they don't dare
test. Barthes was a cultural force; they sat smoking dope in their little
ghetto.
the times I begin writing the note having it in a simple acknowledgement,
and then in writing find myself in another person, more critical, seeing
it more complex, and in what has been developed in writing here. it's the
second person I associate with her, as if taking the more knowing position
I take her position, although when I'm writing it I feel it as what I've
made.
I was love woman to her and she was work woman to me. I was giving her
credit for my own development toward prestige. But then what will we
know erupted in front of both of us as a unification. I claimed the
unification as my own. Wow.
proceeds from a corrected banality
That's true now and was then - it's true in these sentences - but he's
making the banality more structural than I think it is. I could release
students into less banality by giving them permission to write what was
more uncorrected not less.
devices for not showing the fertility compulsions and the way I've
been looking for them to be the structure of work, as sequence, and then
manifest observation to be the pleasure it is in just that location. then
work is mainly holding, getting back rather, the focus in sensation, ie
branching off the formed circuit staying longer, pushing through.
That's acute. It's what I do. Fertility compulsions were proscribed in
that context, deeply and especially by Jam. I did tackle them as work, I
tracked them, rather than being obedient to censor. And then yes the pleasure
of observation staying longer: Gendlin.
I've had to find and do a lot since to support my native sense against
those orthodoxies.
what I'm wanting is the next degree of freedom where I don't do the
first thing of its reflex
I feel a capacity to think in it, possibility of power, ie speaking
authoritatively, putting together what I've worked on, taking on the questions
I've held myself passive on
remembering being in a depth of attention to the value of the time
passing, 'magic'
learning to know what I'm doing with language
I was more grateful. I had different hero-friends and I had them alone:
and so it comes to pass in time, that the earth
ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. we walk in the great hall of life
looking up and around
we are seated on the doorstep, we have yet
the taste of the bread and milk in our mouth, and the red sunset is reflected
in our basin.
[Olive Schreiner]
This is my earliest memory I think:
I am pushing a flat-iron in a doll carriage across a kitchen floor.
I'm near the floor. I look up to see my mother's face at the glass of the
door's pane, smiling at me, returning, my father behind her.
I was two, the age of the photo with the nasturtium. I don't now remember
the iron or the doll carriage but I seem to remember her face at the door.
Did I remember it because I felt a rush of relief that she'd come back.
This was before I was sent away, summer of 1947.
Is there something shameful about what I'm doing now, talking with the
journal person then in her thirties, replying, filling in, defending. Is
it shameful because it's dependent and more literal than she was. No, I'm
speaking to her as I did to students I wanted to foster. She left things
in suspension that I can settle.
"it's a painful self that wants to be
with the rest of us who move more easily through each other"
That was Daph of someone and it struck me as if it described me. I didn't
understand what applying to a coterie involved, how much aggressive uneasiness.
oki paused beside her for a moment, remarking
how quiet it was. "yes, you can hear people talking all the way across
the river," she said.
Such a gentleness it must be Kawabata.
reading - the catch of interest when I feel there might be a kind
of coherence it speaks from, that is new to me. I think so because I have
a sense of understanding although I don't know the terms.
Searching in Lacan,
what am I doing mixing with patriarch's discourse that is deformed
by the keeping of prestige
patriarchal prestige is made by an illusion of unshared access to
what to anyone is mysterious, i.e. is always in reference to the prenatal,
birth and the maternal. so patriarchy in its unconscious bluffing is always
unstable.
Reading the dreams I noted seeing what a vast vocabulary of situation-possibilities
I'd gathered.
last night feeling smoke, its person, understandings and values,
is it j smoking. the way I used to be able to talk to her in it. that was
when I'd been lit up with them and I'd bring it to her. in that high up
wide room she'd be rapid and fine.
- What an extraordinary greyness this is, 5:30 and deep overcast after
a day of light rain. I took the jeep for pre-winter maintenance and walked
home fast. Yellow leaves lay either side of the alley track. Yellow leaves
scattered under the plum tree. Rapid undressing of the streets. White veiled
wet pines are showing individual on the hill slopes.
part 5
time remaining volume 4: 2016 may-december
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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