back 4 part 6 - 2016 november  work & days: a lifetime journal project 15 November 2016 It's snowing and melting, the needle just at 0. Woke from Tom. He was going to be leaving. I found him at his hotel room window with a drawing pad painting what had been his view of a bay with cedars and salt water. He was going to miss it. Then I couldn't find him. Walked through the bar and there at the end of the room he was standing looking thin and uncertain. Had he been drinking. I took his hand and led him out. I was pleading with him to stay connected. "We were friends." It was the kind of pleading I do every day, missing him. - Look! Under the streetlight, as if coming from nowhere, feathering down. And then it stops, or, no, it's that the silver-blue light of overcast dawn has come up through and around. Here is the corner in its winter white and grey. There goes a man in a dark hood. It's Tuesday still as Sunday. School bus at 7:17. - Arguing with C on FB messaging. Space and time are constructs 'of consciousness', we can't know what's real. At other times she says it's all social conditioning. I saw she's coming from mind-body dualism and also that she isn't going to want to see through it because there's something personal, she needs these abstract formations to talk about her mother, isn't it? Her cold blind blank shut-down mother with whom space and time could not be real but social conditioning was. So is ontological idealism a remnant of isolated childhood?       yes There the tips of the Russian olive - just the topmost tips still have leaves it seems - are lit up fluttering gold like a field of tiny banners in the rapidly-tilting last plane of westered sun. Then I was telling her I'd seen culture shock in how we were in those days but she didn't want that, as always she was wanting to say we were both victims of evil them. I say no, you were part of them when I met you and you threw me under the bus when you needed to, and though they were predatory we were both there because we were ambitious. How can she not want to see that, how can she simply want to see herself as victim. Saying space and time are constructs and we can't know and it's all social conditioning are victim complaint too. It's a psychic platform. I must have one as well. It's not victimhood, is it abandonment? 'I'm alone?' It says no. Abandonment is more than aloneness, it's 'I've been left'. I've felt that even in relation to myself, again and again. Yes. Amazing. What's Tom's? (Lot of wrong guesses so I ask.) 'I'm unstable.' That would be it, yes, but why didn't I know. Like sand patterns wiped out by the next wave. Unbearable lightness of being. Throwing away his underwear. Alright but why didn't I know. Because I'm judgmental, I think of those things as bad behaviour not a kind of self. Jam's platform is 'I'm a man.' What's Mac's? 'I take care of them.' What's Luke's. 'I'm alone.' Rowen's? Sweet quirky Rowen. I want to say 'I'm angry' but it's that I think he should be. Thinking of him crying and crying when he was a baby. 'I'm unable.' Yes. The platform activates when there's stress. What was Mary's. 'I'm valueless.' Ed's? (Lot of wrong guesses.) 'I hate them.' Are you sure? Yes. There's the old man who circles the block every day pushing his walker. He only looks down, it's all he can do to keep moving. Platforms can't be changed can they. Can't be argued with. Have to be understood by anyone thinking to be a friend. Louie's is 'Am I as good as my brothers.' - What's the moon doing way over there. Nudged up against the upper bar of the northeastern pane. And howcome the window above St Michael's door is lit. A lovely Islamic pointed arch. - Troubadours from Sufi travelers, songs for the Beloved, heretical advocacy of women, nature, sex, beauty. Pound didn't know that. - Going gentle Tom said and posted this from Cohen's recent latest: If the sun would lose its light And we lived in endless night And there was nothing left That you could feel That's how it would be What my life would seem to me If I didn't have your love To make it real   If the stars were all unpinned And a cold and bitter wind Swallowed the world Without a trace Oh well that's where I would be What my life would seem to me If I couldn't lift the veil And see your face.   And if no leaves were on the tree And no water in the sea And the break of day Had nothing to reveal That's how broken I would be What my life would seem to me If I didn't have your love To make it real   If the sun would lose its light And we lived in endless night And there was nothing left That you could feel If the sea was sand alone And the flowers made of stone And no one that you hurt Could ever heal Well that's how broken I would be What my life would seem to me If I didn't have your love To make it real He recorded it in his medical chair sometime in his last months. Is it an infant's Sufi-troubadour song to the earliest mother. Does Cohen think it's to god. Does Tom think it's to his mom. It says no. Does he think it's to me I ask carefully. It says yes. 16 Maybe I could find a shack. I need to be out in the midst of it more. Claude could help me build one. I have windows. East of the sun and west of the moon - it's sunset of an evening of full moon. A powerful time       YES 17 give up yourself and you will find your real self. CS Lewis. Do you understand what he was doing       yes He's overdramatizing       yes He means give up defenses       yes And mixing it up with Christian fantasy       yes look for yourself and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay, but look for christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in. It's a mixed message isn't it       yes It's greedy       yes Boy sent away to school       yes Is Christ early love       no Is it you       no A fantasy self       yes Did he go on being an asshole       yes With different defenses       yes Question is why did I copy it. I liked the thought of giving up defenses. The Christ I wanted was early love and integration. krishnamurti "is it possible for me not to be" Do you like what he was trying to do       no He was trying to live without mental talk       yes Is that important       no That he was so beautiful says he was doing something right       yes Was it what he thought it was       no I should have a meditation practice       yes Do I still have the mental energy       yes I do store and repeat       store but don't repeat "so I have entered a different dimension" Is that possible       yes Did the process let him see a larger truth       yes Could I do that       no Don't have the formation he did       yes Is it what my work wants       no A lesser state       not lesser, different But be aware it's there       YES the one who asked me to not let her be like them. she set out in a direction and asked me to look after it Asked her future self. left to itself wouldn't this body revert to what they are No. They weren't in their native state, they were spoiled. blow out the light. am in bed looking at the window, grey outside. picture it brighter as it will be when there's snow. after a while feel a pull in my breasts. wait. I saw your light off, we heard each other going to bed. the pull is getting stronger. is that you calling me. I get up and take the sleeping bag. at the door I'll say, were you calling me? an old joke. something snags me, my toe is caught by the bottom of the door. I'm feeling whether it's hurt much. you say from your bed, were you calling me? and lie with my arms around someone, a sweet round, a warm. thoughts fast, it seems random, light lines above it. you say you're as if in a deep sleep, you're seeing us on the lake. are you, too? no, not at all. but lying still. sometimes you stroke my shoulder or back. it becomes sentient, radiant, spatial, there, this boundary where there's pressing. I must put my arms up around your neck to open my chest. the movement of feeling, I speak in it or above it. fragment talk. I'm very given, laid on what I trust. I'm a young girl bride in love in first trust, I realize I'm tibetan or chinese, rock's photographs, hair down my back in a braid, head laid back. I don't know or think what you are, except the presence in me of alertness, an extraordinary warm something in my arms, timid kisses, polished hair. later with my wrist pressing and turning one-two-three-four, fast, accurate. you led me at the nip it seemed, I could only keep up. then doubting for a second no longer could. and into actual, I mean remembered, there again, that rocking ache, blue, it's blue stroked to the floor of the cave. it seems: spaces made. in the morning, in the transition zone, understanding came in phrases. drawers are breasts. I was her. That was like past life memory       no, erotic trance But was I her       no, erotic trance But when I smelled Louie's family's armchair was that her       no, erotic trance Erotic trance is majorly wonderful       yes Isn't it what I've liked best, next to nature       yes Pound and the Sufi       yes Is it addictive       yes opiate Wd you say Tom had too much anxiety in sex       yes Could I have that kind of trance without a lover       yes Could I do it now       yes Is it harmful       no scrub willow arched over wet dark cow paths leading to water, sometimes opening on a surprise, the creek drifted yellow with balsam poplar leaves, a children's house assembled with junk from the dump This sort of memory makes me want to write a record of our childhood. Was I in such anguish at the Loberg's just because I was losing a competition to her?       yes It was a class competition I couldn't win       yes A form of sibling rivalry       no basic existential rivalry Esther saying I was phony, not like Sandy. I wanted nothing to do with her or in those days any of Jam's friends, there was that, but I think it was true in a way she wouldn't have recognized. I see it in the writing. It was still there in the way I sometimes tried to be more than I was at the moment. Now I have to erase. what is it puffy in her voice reading, pretentious. but singing it's young, light The way she read was horrible, what was that. Like my dad reading the bible. She was trying to sound like a man. The wrong kind. When she sang she was a girl. Was it why she couldn't finish the thesis?       no the wild shaking, it's not far from willed, because it's so easily stopped Is there something that shaking always means       yes resistance to pleasure You mean the deep scary kind       yes It's the resistance that's not far from willed       yes cardamom custard in jars - Find cardamom. 'fat monks, infernal. I thought it would be that for you too' Really?! Do you know where that came from       no It isn't the source of revulsion, just expresses it       yes Something happened to her       no Is it the source of her believing she's a man       yes Rather than following from it       yes when I got to Istanbul, not long after I'd gotten out of a truck, I met the turkish boy who'd studied in america and spoke english. he would have spoken to me first. I would have been wanting to know how to find a hotel or I might have had a hotel address to find. did he take me there? as we were walking he met some other men I thought were his friends, a tall hawk-nosed man, some others I don't remember. he must have invited me to his house for supper. the others came too, brought food and wine. there was a long table. I sat near the door into the hall, where there was a little bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom door at the end of the corridor. The others could speak only a few words of english. I ate and drank probably quite a lot. they sang. it was loud. I enjoyed the rowdiness, likely, although none of them were interesting. they told me what they were students in. I think for the fatter one it was law. I was tired and went to bed early, would sleep in my sleeping bag on the hall floor. had a shower, washed my jeans, hung them in the bathroom on a hanger. got into bed in a sweater and my bikini pants. was dim and unsteady from drink. they were still noisy in the dining room but the door was shut. I was close to sleep. the little american came and whispered that I had better come into his room and pretend to be fucking with him or else the rest of them would come and have me. I went into the bedroom. it was awkward that my only jeans were wet. I did also have a dress but didn't put it on. took my sleeping bag to his bed and hoped the ruse would work. asked if I could go out the window. he said no there were only more men out there. he seemed to actually be feeling responsible for me but he was afraid of the others. there were five I think, all bigger than he was. I didn't know what he'd said to them but he probably persuaded weakly. we were in the dark lying together. they were visible as outlines through the glass in the door, turning the knob. he was nervous, went out, came back, said I would have to let them. I had calculated whether I'd be likely to get pregnant, I think I was bleeding, thought I likely was safe. then it was probably a sense of getting through something, or allowing something forbidden, maybe a necessary price for my freedom to travel as I wanted. I knew it wasn't worth getting beaten up. it was true a ruckus would bring more men probably more dangerous than these. I had been stupid to wash my jeans and to drink carelessly. now I could only find a posture that made sure it did me no harm. contempt and distance. don't know who came in first. I don't understand the space exactly, I was on a bed that ran along the right wall, had its foot toward the door into the hall where there was light from the dining room. did he take his pants off before he got into the room? the sight of his penis in the dim light. big. I held back the curtain and looked away from him out the window. he begged me to be with him, I didn't speak. it was something I thought I should do. I held onto my plan though he was likeable. there was someone else at the door. I only remember the kurd, second? maybe. I said, you're an animal, because he seemed a bandit. I, am an ani-mal? pulled his arm back pretending to be about to hit me. I faced him out, said it again. they'd all been in. an impression of similar bodies sitting at my knees. I felt nothing sexual. they didn't touch my breasts. the kurd came back but I said no. then I must have put on my dress. came out into the dining room where they still were. I thought, should I take them to the police? asked them to write their names on a paper. they passed it around and wrote their names. when they'd gone and I was left with the american turk I felt I must save my face by a violence, took the water pitcher from the table, poured the water on the floor. it was dawn. I told him I must dry my jeans., he hung them by the heater, but it was feeble warmth. he said, ellie, since all the others have, won't you let me? I said no angrily. it seemed to be his fault. my jeans wouldn't dry, I went out awkwardly carrying the pack, in my dress, that slid up and showed my ugly leg. limped some distance and found a hotel. the desk clerk looked through my keyhole. later I saw a man in a cherry tree looking in through the window. men harassed me in the post office and followed me on the street. I walked around the university hill and found the paperback steppenwolf with a klee cover in an english bookshop. must have underlined what he said about going through degradation. the whining men on the street made me shout. otherwise I liked istanbul. bought cucumber soaked in salted water. changed my money for a good price on the black market and could stay three or four days. saw the blond american girl with thick legs who'd been in the hostel in athens walking with two american boys. one morning went to the hagia sophia, which had been in my medieval art course, it was ugly but from its yard I saw the blue mosque, incomprehensible but lovely. at the docks old houses with wood shutters. I went on through bulgaria, yugoslavia, hungary, austria, germany, france. truck drivers and other travelers fed me. I slept outside or in different sorts of shelter, or was invited into houses. I was angry when men were idiotic but knew how to evade. what worried me about the rape, as I called it, was that it seemed something I couldn't tell anyone. jean-jacques saying of someone, she's the kind of girl who wouldn't mind. after a while I let bill read about it in my journal. he wasn't shocked and it seemed I could think of it differently. Do you have anything to say about that       no I wrote it well       yes Do you think it harmed me       no day given to fighting. I cry in helplessness about everything she thinks is wrong. tell her I won't supply her prurience about men any more Did she want it as well as being repelled       YES I thought of the soul as resembling a diamond or a very transparent crystal and containing many rooms Is that a felt intuition of an electromagnetic net       yes   plants in various lights made as catalogue people giving local names but also becoming a catalog of lights, winds, terrain   leaf sounds at different magnification wind is an undersound take it apart in holland park standing under the tree looking up at the flattening rise and then the lifting fall of the big leaves on thin stems following a branch riding a wind. Could still do that - my envy of your body, something like a hovering envy of any of your skills, an intimation of what it might be like to let out my love of them. which held back is envy. I do that less now       yes Are other people like that too       yes 18 le milieu divin ... there is a universal substratum, refined and tenuous Do you understand de Chardin       yes Does he mean space as etheric medium       yes Is it possible to feel it       yes Is it the same as Krishnamurti       yes Is there a memory of amnion       no Is it what I reference in my intuition about grain       yes Transparency       yes Do you feel it       yes And air air is something different It's more about touch and surface       yes this active light which penetrates us Light is motion of the medium, it's all active       yes Some motion reflects, some penetrates, some passes through unchanged       yes a centre, one of place, through anything, whose unique centre, dispersed through all things, is the prime matter He means space       yes And thinks of it as god       yes But in what way is it a center. He means something more like base, except that it's ephemeral       yes every monad looking into itself can find that one thing as the initial point at which all things make contact in their inmost Does he really think of it as a point       yes But it isn't a point       yes Every monad as if a point can 'read' the whole field       yes I went completely astray when I yielded to the temptation of matter and relaxed the inner tension of my being in an attempt to enter limitlessly and unquestioningly into the universe. He's dichotomizing matter and the divine milieu       yes Whereas matter is just persistent pattern of       yes His inner tension was wanting to experience god       yes Is there anything to be gained by experiencing that spruce as a knot in space       yes Is it possible to       YES Can you tell me what       true complete inclusion and balance Experience of inclusion       yes [sigh] It's there and I'm here and I'm about it       yes seek with creatures that attract you, not by going directly to them but by converging with them on x, sought in and through them It's more sensing that they are converging in me       yes the transparent consistence in which I am held That sounds like amnion       yes But is it       no it knows as a mass that I am and have to be helpless in some ways the sense that compared to theirs my being is as if immobile. a large sadness. or am I misunderstanding. or is it that I'm working in some other method toward something else it's that among 'them' is where I've sometimes been understood as nowhere else and it's the possibility of being unable to reciprocate that makes me wild with enraged pride what's missing is the dislike of their writing. I hate "the ology" and everything like it. the pain's intense. 'work' not far off but what's it good for. so many mistakes in the machine, how can it go on I was dimly on the way to Being about. Such a long patience in the agonies of not knowing what I was doing. Such a diffidence still, it's only now occurring to me that I should post a notice that Being about is online. my sense that I won't have the surrounding unless I sacrifice writing Is that correct       no Pound quotes his stable of male heroes. It's not my lineage. My lineage is reading in general. I quote any old thing I come upon. the animus often appears as a painter or has some kind of projection apparatus, or is a cinema-operator or the owner of a picture gallery. The contra-sexual hemisphere       yes Which isn't really contrasexual, just shown that way to say opposite-ish       yes Should language hemisphere have an erotic relation to it       yes I'm two-spirit, so shd I think of it as male       no The dark woman singing in my dreams       yes Is that you       no an ordinary easy prose with exact thought Yes. now when I've worked I'm thinking of seeing the rembrandt at the top of your guilford stairs with you. I like your capacities so much I don't know why I imagine freedom is without you, except that work, to feel like it is, needs to be alone in the backroom That to show I wasn't always wrong. something she was willing to do. she heard a story with her feelings. T. Yes. keeping suspended as if in the air on either side the principles of decision. implicit a picture of those transparent lines. what's seen is not a figure but a few lines and a sense of figure I know there are light people but I insist on putting out this heavy one, difficultly slowly because I want to try out the way I am alone. carefully telling also working to know from what you say whether you can understand that language. your eyes going sideways say halt but I insist. don't care, going to try. silence, labour it out, insisting more, I want you to see it. "that's the opposite of what I mean. it was like seeing a lot of sunlight out there." same as my father's resistance when I wanted to read dineson. is it a grandiosity they know the signs of and don't tolerate. but I've given up my prettiness to be allowed to be grander. "did you get the sense of a developing compactness and significance to everything that was happening, I don't know if you know what I mean." I was across the room and that time it came out as if I didn't say it and was better, and he said "yes I know what you mean." oh leaps but not leaps to be seen to be leaping. thinking of the scale as horizontal not down, but it would have to be all around. scaling between, fining. would want to say in holding onto slowness, the beauty that came into the room, windows the stiffness insided and showed but from the outside something else makes me less visible than I felt Room in the Europe. I'd got clearer away from the anxiety I was always in with her. Was that anxiety her fault       no My old trouble with attachment       yes But are the anxious-attachment intervals essential       yes thinking of the order of the service film's movements: to welcome, to kindle songs if it can be made to refer to itself a fascination that touch of extravagance, irony, surprise, set there after logic is satisfied remarkable fluidity with the natural and supernatural seeming continually to commingle love expressed makes natural self-confidence but in a tough way - her beautiful glue the white and brown/blue small Aw - what's changed is a sense of living in unsolved demands that can be solved, but only originally Like this       yes - So I posted a note about Being about. The people who noticed were my loyal noticers. No one who can use it, none of the film people. - what I keep finding in artists' stories is that it's work with many mistakes oh das brief schreiben ist mir schwer ... ja mama wirt sich freuen das ein fremdes kind ... ja sie hat nicht elf kinder gehabt ... wie hab' ich das alles können aber: mann kann das ... oh sie hat ja das fur viel jahre ... ihr lehrer ... es geht ihr gut, der jung ist fein ... blos ich wurde das nicht können ... ich wahr drei und fierzig und dank am herman ... ich wahr so froh das das der letzte wahr ... blos das brot und russland, oh dan haben wir es doch sehr gut ... was ist dies ... ah! (rustling plastic) (na, was war das?) ein stück pfankuchen (laughter) ... man weis nicht wo es her kompt aber es ist auf ein mal da ... na, kochen die gelben rüben? ja! sollen wir bischen wasser bei giesen? ... dan roll ich die zusammen und vergess davon, und war die schon ein bischen green   und der mr muscle, was ist das? ich hab' die niemals gehabt, mr muscle.   barbe-cue too, na ja.   haud wie die fe-yetch ... came yesterday on the way by from bella coola where we were a few weeks planting. she hinted she'd like her kitchen wall washed. we found rags and a bucket and nearly didn't find soap, used the sunlight in the end. "oma get lost." she did, went and sat in the living room, mischievous smile. she was telling me not to fall off the table. opa worked in the garden till it was over. they don't know it yet but this wall washing was in place of coming to their diamond anniversary ritual. last night I took gma out in her wheelchair, wanting to look at the twilight and the gardens, but I couldn't stop her telling me who lived in all the houses, da wahr mal eine witwe aber jetst weis ich nicht mehr wer da ... we went to ben braun's and the old man jerked, twitched, like a jester, jumping to put records on for me. I felt his disease revealed him. opa and oma are well, thinner. I like opa's face, he's full of laughter. oma is tedious when she tells her obsessions, but we have fun. ich bin g'poost du must verstehen, wir sind jetst kinder. something real and funny in my connection with them though I know they betray it into piety the moment they speak to one of their own kind. opa's garden's in lovely order. oma really didn't want me to tell you about the pancake. opa said, "I'll give you a little advice. sag niemand was du tun wilst." 19 "if I live as I know, 1. I'm out of work, 2. I'm afraid of evil coming into the world through my openness" I don't feel that now. Evil comes into the world through peoples' closedness. Then I meant that I was afraid drugs would give me powers I didn't understand. That was partly drugs' illusion of supernatural intelligence and partly the reading we did about shamanism in those days. Being out of work was a saint fantasy. I had actual reason to be scared though, because I'd been dissolving myself, I didn't know myself anymore, I was between. she [power woman] said "I want your innocence, your eyes, your beauty, your open face, your lyricism." I [love woman] said "I want your knowledge and power." 20 Reading last year surprised liking it. It moves along in quiet assurance. Then reading another chapter and liking the sparse balanced flow of time noted Connected prose. Could there be a long poem with lines removed but a sense of rhythm sustained through the breaks. A landscape in which one meets sentences in books. I can see I must study technical poetics, rhythms and the subtler kinds of rhyme. I could do those things but could I reach the far end. Do you think. There I see the sunrise touching the top edge, just the top edge of the cliff, a bright line spreading longer and wider visibly. Just there. Bringing alive. I could have a bookshelf. I could have flowers in the house. I could have roses and lilacs. I could look around for fine souls. Of any age. Natural. What I still have only a dim grasp of: > when and how to use repetition > whether to make strands more distinct > whether to interpolate present comment Ashcroft is a book! What photos there are - camel slope, kamloops hill, rusty slope, rainbow, subtle color, soft, canyon slice, shelf field, winter not dun, milky = 10 21 It's Monday morning. Randy is coming at 8:30 to start the porch pad. There's open sky, look. 22 Things I saw last night. A large rectangular bear with a massively thick black coat. That bear running with a large shaggy black horse. A lot of large stoneware vases whose incised, painted, stamped decoration I was studying. They were made by women it seemed. Porch pad curb form is out there made of clean pale #2 2x8s. Field of the four - there's a title. It's then and now and a dialogue considering. 23 Louise with a young man. When I was next to her after a while I asked whether she was still in the house. No. But then she said brightly that her dad had found out Fred Astaire had lived in it earlier. Men in cravats. And Rick? 'He was too radical.' He was now in Burma working with some emergency. I was sorry thinking of the wonderful house and Rick tenderly feeding old Roo with a spoon. Earlier and I think again later I was in Leslie's room. There were a lot of paintings on the wall. One of them, it might have been one of Louise's, was of a penis about to enter a woman's bush, seen from the woman's eye point. Black and white. It turned me on. I realized my clit was an actual penis. Touching it thinking what I could do with it. Maybe Leslie? A squirt of white stuff had landed on a woman five feet in front of me. I was covering myself hoping she wouldn't notice it had come from me. I dream Leslie oftener than anyone maybe, think of her with love always. She and Louise are part of the California marvel, their loveliness and human ease. I don't know people like that here. Dave and Franci but they haven't that relaxed golden light around them, Toronto is like steel. Merritt is like tin, a drab aura. 24 How far back to go with this work. 1975? What am I looking for. The story with T and C bores me now. Start at the story with J? Which is 1977. when I find myself acting like a woman with a man, explaining, interpreting his feelings, I should be able to tell something. it's a way to be patronizing because of not taking the direct power of the anger at that moment. That's right isn't it. Right at the beginning. DR6. what is it about the way my writing fragments these days, the long sentences used to ride on top of thoughts it organized very fast. this mind doesn't trust itself to make any but simple connections one at a time. Was it because I was linking R and L differently      yes Testing      yes Drugs began it and I continued      yes I was reading the history of physics before we got together. Bit of etymology. do you understand what we're doing? you're scared because you don't quite, you're thinking of it in another category. I was testing with her what I'd been doing with them. I also felt it was all I had that could impress and hold her. It likely was. So was that legitimate cheating, because she was prejudiced against what I naturally was? Yes. Did I pass on their evil invasion       YES On that insecure and contradictory foundation we went forward       yes The corruption on her side was that she saw me as like her mother       yes I was deliberately trying to intimidate her because I had something to win back       yes "what did I teach you?" "to know what I know." then we flew. every word in a telephone conversation telling. The softer happy naturalness there sometimes was with T. I don't want you to be in love because that means you're not taking it on in the same way. I said I got scared you want something different from me. "maybe." "it's that you want something you can satisfy, in some way." "you're smart" she said. Yuh there it was - my central anxiety is that I'll meet someone whose mind can hold me in such a way that they can see where I stop and past it, and I won't be able to know what they know, and they won't teach me because they'll see that I am too stupid and then all my life I'll have to know there are places I can't go everything I do these days is making support for this effort to make myself someone who is not left behind all day I ask myself, do you have a good being, good enough? I have to have something to teach so you'll stay and teach me More than one thing. Not left behind - the valiant little scrap. And their dark dishonest spirit competition that had savaged me. And the age I was, its urgency to mate and my hard circumstance in that. I need you because you're a scholar I liked that and her car and her flat and her exotic experience and her handwriting and that she was a professor and had money. She was actually more than either of them       YES And more than R too       yes a science, an art, a knowledge, a way, a tribe technology of friendship:   directness and not lying saying as much as you know being ready to change direction at any moment always giving up power (as power) dealing with the questions as they come being ready to change the other at any moment careful decisions about the personal life, keeping it real and not for the other comprehensive detail Erotic friendship. Those were good heuristics. We both mostly kept to them for years. I came to them in my idealization of T and C and in reading for instance Le Guin and the Sufis. Friendship as a central exercise. Was I more absolute in these than I should have been       no I took it as far as I could       yes such as we are. we're looking at omens. the interest in how things work. Our superstitions took us into confusion but we hoped we might discover things. What were they - omens, telepathy, dream significance. to see the released person is blinding and terrifying unless you're there too, ie equality. that terror drives you to stop. That's wrong. Fear is a sign that something crooked is going on. A released person doesn't frighten. the question of who's more being is only important because if it's unequal there's a danger of losing. that unequal has to do with politics. whose reality prevails. that's what power struggle is. What's wrong with that. Whose interests and style of being prevail isn't only about inequality, it's also about the other person's capacity to be interested. I didn't consider that enough, I gave people I was interested in more credit than was right. the vision of evil visited at night, at a table. there were three, who turned to look at me Was that an accurate dream yes the face on the magazine up in the attic. streamers, the organdy flowers, a book with all through the night. They lifted me into the attic to sleep. My mat was between rafters next to the hole in the attic's floor. There was a bit of daylight from below only just there. I could see a few things stored next to me, the organdy flowers that had been my mother's wedding bouquet, crepe paper streamers, a face on a magazine cover that scared me so I looked quickly away. I knocked over the potty. pee dripped on their bed. 25 when I'm here working on my wall putting concepts next to each other accidentally and deliberately, isolating questions, answering them or not being able to, seeing a place to exist which is wholly mine and which is like no idea I have had of myself. the place I remember when I'm not in it, crave and call. I assume the wall was the pale green t&g above the desk in the back room. What concepts though. Images that had an implied abstract structure? The xeroxed archeological foundations? The man with the bear? The sound of the journal has steadied, it's not lyrical femininity anymore, is that what I meant too? It's a pondered being. But wasn't it wrong to have to think so much about what we were doing together. during that first year in college I felt myself losing the right soul, I remember dismay walking in kingston thinking it was more and more rare to emerge out of the dullness. I don't at all remember that now. "what people are thinking of you, that's the thing you think of most." Rhoda said. That was inaccurate and therefore transparently ill-willed, an attack as early as that. Is it what she thinks of most?       yes She attacked because she thought I'd taken Jam from her       yes looking in the mirror saw a face I didn't want, concentrated on seeing the face that wrote antlers with me. 26 I was watching a Welsh boys' choir and thought of Colin, tried again to look him up. There he was, a beautiful accomplished confident soul. Television awards, "a very happy marriage," children and grandchildren. "The name of Colin Thomas...a guarantee of intelligence and scrupulous integrity" says The financial times. Really beautiful, radiant. In those days he said he was self-loathing. He was diffident and awkward and honorable. I called him an old white king. 1971. And there with him I am another being than now, playful and balancing, femmy. 27. Watching vid about boys' choirs with longing for the support they have in greatness. It's so long I've had to do it all alone. Snow this morning, a couple of inches of sagging whiteness on fence rail and branches. Gail and Doug in toques expertly scraping it off my sidewalk and the one across the street. So it turns out that Colin was the best man I was ever with, and yet there was never any question of staying with him. He'd have needed someone from his own culture and I wouldn't be ready to be married for another ... I'll count from the vow in the Fraser Canyon at Big Bar, 1994? twenty-some years, and even then, wd I have been ready for anyone more regular than my bad Tom, someone with family and distinguished colleagues etc. Colin whiskery and tired-looking last night, Luke entertaining him crawled under my skirt and curled up in the fetal shape, head next to my right knee. When he burst out he threw up his arms and said "It's a boy!" Colin was full of affection and left me feeling foolish but happy and befriended. He visited for the last time in October 1973 so we knew each other over maybe two and a half years. Manna [restaurant]. Colin, the way it took a second to recognize him, peeping at the brown-haired girl he was with. April 1974 the last time I saw him. Yesterday Claude was here fixing the north porch gutters. When I asked whether he'd like to work on the coldframe he muttered that he wouldn't be around. "It looks like Pat and I are divorcing." "I'm so sorry to hear it!" It was a genuine outcry. There he was with his big belly and red nose so real in front of me and as if telling me a death sentence. He'll have to leave the wonderful shop he made and the town they both grew up in. He won't find another woman now and he won't last long without one. My heart is sore for him as if he were a friend. - At DR7 I go north. It changes. What am I looking for. J and I had only had about a month before I went. getting a sense of the pain in all their voices. comes to me with the grimace of fear on her face which she can't recall as fear. they speak to each other in persona, how can they bear it for so long. Was I accurately seeing more       yes how awful they are, I can't be like them, I can't be with them. it's my hunger that's my permission to give away my child, to give away my parents, to try to be a stranger in my country. the sense of what work is here, going deep. learning to leave it. distress. Can look for what I thought I was doing. "you're in a spot of great power and vulnerability. so much so that you want only one aspect of it." "you don't want to open yourself to any of that." But I was open to it. The aspect I was open to was the one I'd kept out till then, my people's madness. Would you say the acid ritual was profound       yes I sacrificed her illusion of me       yes It was the gateway       yes Did it harm her       no moon on the left and sun going down on the right. indian hill, indian bones Infallible sense of ritual. I need that again. Jam was irrelevant to the project       YES But she was the other project       yes ruin stands for the mind ruined by unregenerate thought In dreams. Yes but it's not minds it's persons and there are more kinds of cause. a film about this place also about enchantment/understanding It was, but then was it about more too. take a marvelous thing and make a thoughtful structure of it - Jennifer and Tyrell raking up and moving buckets of gravel, Ben with his chainsaw cutting down the four old rowans along the Chapman sidewalk. Berries like red beads scattered over the snow. Snow mist thick along the hills at the ends of the streets. Castro died this morning. It's dark at 4:30pm. Houses with strings of lights 28 Randy building the porch deck's frame on Claude's sawhorses, I scraping cement off 2x8s, the drip of snow melting around us, muddy slush underfoot. Then he lined up a couple of deck blocks for setting the porch posts tomorrow while I painted the frame with a thick white acrylic there happened to be in the garage. He sniffed it to see whether it was good. When he left at noon I was still painting in cold sun over by the rhubarb. 29 Floating in cold water with Dave Carter. We're talking about sailing, from water level see a green cutter pass. Earlier we'd been higher up looking at a mess of grafitti on a large industrial structure thinking whether we'd dare go up there. We'd been naturally companionable together. Just as I'm waking I turn my back in the water and have my arm around his narrow bare thigh. Saying I'm cold. Wake with my arm around the pillow and shoulders cold. 30 Mid-aft on what was quite a warm sunny day. Now I have to go down into the cellar and paint eight 8' 2x6 boards for the porch steps. Randy got the deck up this morning before he had to go pick up his kid from school. 1st December Such dark dull daylight at nearly 8, wet streets, but there between the church and the tree a broad patch of luminous white. It's the hill snowed over and strangely more lit than we are down here. The valley's under a lid I guess. There goes a pickup with lumps of snow on its roof. A high school girl walking south. A flat drift of smoke from a chimney. Doves. 2nd the queen of wands, death, the queen of pentacles You were telling me I'd lose Luke?       yes now I want to know more about the kinds of time when it's locked out of everything but the sensation of needing to escape. I've got to get out of here, I'm dying in me, I have to get more space into me, and interest and free coming and going in thoughts and things and their thoughts. like a wide strong expansion stopped. Is it stopped energy       yes Action stopped       yes A particular kind of action       no I don't have it now because I don't have energy       yes when I have that fury refusal in me I'd forgotten those raging states. Do you know something about them that I don't       yes, your friends were refusing your writing whether the fury refusal is a push toward a new way I didn't realize it was situational       yes Because I didn't expect enough       yes husserl the natural standpoint. sciences of the natural standpoint. a new scientific domain to be won through the method of bracketing. "I use the phenomenological époché which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence." speaks of worlds. the world of mathematics, the world of the natural standpoint. Do you have an opinion of that       yes It's pernicious       yes no possibility of lying or misunderstanding Can you lie or misunderstand       no But you can make mistakes       YES either the dying brain dreams its death or Can the dying brain dream its death       yes 'Out of body' is a cortical locational mistake       yes In DR7 the first summer my thinking is poor, the letters to J are embarrassing. there's a light on the tent, faint, most of the sun is covered, and a puffy wind comes in and blows out the sides. it's moving all the time around its pole, it's lively. when it had stopped raining I made a fire and turned over my desk and sat on it warming my legs. I would go so intensely into my thoughts that when I came back to rearrange the fire it seemed a marvel and a joke to find it there, and the whole of the horizon, which was a ring of different colors of sky exquisitely combined. But I had to edit it. there are holes between thoughts That was because of watching them       yes Watching them slows them       YES Was it an effect of drugs       no there's something I know about jam and I not being what we pretend to be We weren't actually friends. [Big sigh] a dismay, feeling of oh luke the death card all the deep places have so much grief in them, is that what you mean I'm sleeping, go away. crossly. I'm working, I can't talk to you now Painful regret. Luke was worth so much more than either Jam or them and I lost him on account of trying to be with them. - No, on account of being messed up in attaching. There can't be blame but the time just seems vile. All of it, though that can't be just. This heart pain is repentance. Do you want to talk to me       act, to find, your mother's, betrayal Haven't I already       no I haven't found the love that was betrayed       yes Is that the most frightening thing       YES Can you lead me       early love, for your mother, tempering, improvement You're saying finding it will help       yes I dread it       YES Should I find it this minute       no on the road noticing rebuilding a second story on grandpa peter epp's house. on the road there had been an urchin girl. Do those dreams mean what I think they mean       yes two strangers came in, very tall, with black hats like mormons. I shout "this is not the man of the house, I am the man of the house, at this moment, and I want you to go away!" they quietly went Is there anything you want to say about that       yes, it's a fight within you Are they angels       yes I should have talked to them?       yes Can you clarify       male, readiness, to recover, responsibility Is that what you mean       yes I was being irresponsible       yes whatever is in us is true and must be given and taken. "I've been trying to tell you." the avocado seed. I was stronger and could go into the degradation and disgrace without refusing it. yes I'm a woman yes you're a man yes I desire you in that secret dark that will make you shine, yes I think of having a baby in me by you orgiastic pleasure of full solar plexus burning woman right in the animal soul where satisfaction is. you watched me sink into shock. yes I was saying I am that, I will be that, why are you looking at me with such a coldness, how can you tell me you're a man and not ask me to marry you. "you're looking at me as if you're afraid of me." at the mercy of the man. at your mercy. going alone to cry. you've led me here without wanting me here. be with me otherwise, don't sink. "you want this. I don't think it's too early to let you know that." I don't want it. "you were right, I let you go into it completely alone. (this will be very good for your work.)" "I was completely cold and hard." if I'm a woman who loves men, and you're a man without a man's body, that's a chute that sends me straight out of you. Was I stoned to be so vulnerable? Must've been. She was cold because she was finding me out. It's an extraordinary stroke of mentat hatred. Had I deserved it? It says no. I realized you were using my opening to get rid of me, or to try to, and I realized I wasn't going. I made a mistake of pride. I should have said right, that's it, and gone. I countered instead and locked myself into more years of viciousness and eight years later a leveling revenge. It really was pride wasn't it       yes 'No you don't'       yes Was the offer of money about setting me up to get even       yes saw the full contradiction I'd shut out of me, that what I am in full instinctive pleasure is a woman who loves men, and that to express that I would have to lose everything else, because as a woman I am spoiled and therefore cannot resist the part of the man that wants to destroy me. That was true       yes By the time of Tom I could resist it       yes you want to be in gender with me because there you are stronger, and you want to be there in that raving sexual necessity that unnerves me. should I be willing to be there with you. does 'opened' = degraded Depends on who you're open with doesn't it. I'd seen reason not to trust her       YES   home elie I will help you luke says mrs crow my beauty in that family was a secret I didn't guess Do you think that's true       yes Wd I like the way I sang       yes 3rd These nights I'm not sleeping well, waking at two or three and having to get up and begin my unhappy day. The porch has been taking a long time, has cost a lot and isn't right. The concrete is rough and the deck too deep because I measured wrong. The town is at its ugliest and will be so for another three months. Streets dressed up with Christmas junk, horrible jokey Christmas songs on the radio. Reading DR quite laboriously, going back over sentences and paragraphs sometimes twice, realizing why people have found her difficult, remembering how I used to flash along in my own element in her. Interested though, asking what she's doing. It's something different from what anyone else was doing, Woolf too. She's funny, which Woolf isn't, but she's more ponderous too, very ponderous. She's demonstrating an unusual personhood, more impressive than charming, demonstrating in relentless detail. She unpacks large nonverbal presence into complex grammar. She does get tedious now - she didn't when I was younger - flooding out into space and time over and over in every little circumstance. She does Gendlin's thing, she focuses a moment and lets it elaborate itself - isn't that it? - and thereby falsifies her description of Miriam's moment by unpacking more out of it than she could have had time to register. She does also in passing give vivid account of things and times in the world, for instance being out in the snow in Switzerland or being on a train. She's honorable in telling stories of being mistaken. She's honorable in giving her irritations and prejudices. She's a self-made struggler without Woolf's advantages of context and money and she's sociological, moves around across class lines taking note. She insisted that she was a novelist not a memoirist and I've been wondering how she understood that. I think it's that she wants to give the places and times, she wants to get them down and novelistic technique is the way to do it. There's the story of her own coming to size as a writer but it's not foreground. Her foreground is I'm wanting to say the nature of dwelling in time. 4th this low, sweet English air was an embrace It was a touch. It conveyed the touch of a living, conscious being. She has the sense of being touched by air that I had in Mesa Grande. I don't personify it though. She personifies a lot. Space and light. Is it her aloneness? Sunday morning grey nine o'clock, icing-sugar powder of snow on the street. I'm pleased with the porch. I think of it out there white, solid, broad and low with satisfaction. It's a platform on the day. Last night in bed I realized I could set the roundhouse chair out onto it. It's some railway man's personal thought, an amazing construction of angles held together by twisted wires. Louie had it on her porch and wanted to trash it. David would like it. Paul would look carefully at it. I didn't see it in the roundhouse - Paul K found it there and lent it to me - but I did see the roundhouse - with Bruce - so I picture the chair in dim yellow light in that wide dark male space. Thinking of the other pieces I have at Louie's, that she covets without knowing their stories. The paper-wire armchair from the Chinese nursing home there used to be on Water Street, that I found after the residents had been moved out and the furniture abandoned. Me in my thirties prowling through the rooms. The long bench from an old coast ferry docked at the top of Main Street, Candy and I crawling over the fence. The apothecary's cabinet from Chalk Farm Road, shipped to Vancouver in the wicker laundry trunk with my pots wrapped in rugs. The blue chest found in a junk store in north Kingston when I was 21, that had been used to hold greasy tools and that for some reason I've always thought comes from Quebec. st francis gardens clean and empty. "we have moved to 970 union st." and oh twitchy cuddly candy, the ss beaver adventures over the fence, old treasures, my beautiful bench March 1978. - There an SUV pulls up silently behind the jeep, church person. What an ugly color, dark putty grey-brown. The hill - it must have a name, is it Hamilton Hill? - has its contours, its folds, more visible in snow, and there's a line of dark trees running along its ridge like a cropped mane. Doves are one of the charms of this corner. There one sits like a finial on the lamp post with its transformer canister and all its clots of electrical gadgets and scribbles of wire. Beyond it the much taller spruce like a companion its own size decorated top down with an ebullient crop of cones. Both against even white sky. "affection without understanding" uncle ronnie said It was true but did he understand something I didn't       yes Did he know what happened to her       no Could he see that I didn't understand her       no Did she imagine herself a man because it was forbidden to be a lesbian       yes And her family went along with it       YES It was something he'd already thought about her       yes you were and are smarter Was she       no She needed me to feel she was       yes my direction is toward obedience. yours toward perversity. I meant obedience to fact. It's a posture of trust toward life and world. Her commitment was toward willful resistance. Mine was a long bet. I know how it has turned out so far but I don't know how hers has, how she feels it has. I feel that if you don't give up perversity your conventions will get me. First, I shouldn't have wanted her to give it up, mentat defense was her platform, she couldn't. Second, something got me but her social language didn't. Her contempt did. In DR8 after Keder dies many lucid paragraphs. attaining to possession of that self within herself who was more than her momentary self DR could meet her form of you consciously?       yes Is her spatial and temporal flooding that       yes When I was sweeping the sidewalk this morning just because I wanted to be out a man who had stopped in front of St Michaels hall across the road came over to speak to me. He was Native or half so, Hughie of Lower Nicola. Do I live here on my own? He'd guessed I suppose because it was me cleaning the walk. Asked wd I like to go for coffee sometime. I had my answer ready for any such moment, "I don't do the dating thing anymore." Just so we're clear. He said I could come for coffee and just talk. I said I could do that. (I wd do the dating thing if there were any chance of the right kind of man, let's make that clear too.) He said the meeting on Tuesday nights is NA and the meeting on Friday is AA, but the United Church has two different groups too, Wednesdays and Saturdays. 5 I said yes and was asked at a moment when I would. Makes me squirm so I want to delete it. Such a crooked hoax. On my side I mean. in the western tales is a whimsical grace. the people who recount them live in the most wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with flying clouds. His grace is partly rhythm. A right amount of assonance. This sentence has the flying clouds how. Ever / load / ed / and / fantas / tic. Uncanny. countrymen and countrywomen are many years closer to that old greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things. I don't know what to say to that but I avow it. "what would happen if one of your spirits had overpowered me?" "you would go out of this room with his character added to your own." Do you think that's how it works       yes Is it necessary       yes Did it happen with J and them       yes Was my character added to them too       yes Does it have to be personal combat       yes 'Remember part of me is you'       yes Did Tom get added to me       no He didn't overpower me       yes Did I get added to him       yes So was I just resting with him       no exercising Doesn't the fact that I miss him mean he won       no Heart attachment is different       yes I had learned so to suspend the will that the imagination moved of itself I've longed for that and not done it or done it poorly. Is it worth doing       yes Could I do it better now       yes Is it allowing you       no something else   part 7 back volume 4: 2016 may-december work & days: a lifetime journal project