time remaining 5 part 1 - 2017 january-february  work & days: a lifetime journal project 1st January 2017 Unfriended nameless him this morning because I was craving and sore-hearted and want a freer body. Walked four blocks in biting snow, wasn't sore or tired. Last year was about: house - real estate research, sketchup, looked at this house 10 Feb, negotiating with R, moving, digging and planting, fence, compost and lattice, south bedroom, porch, getting rid of and selling stuff, moon lamp, armchair, cabinets, brass lamp; learning to can. some Titania's gash journal scouring, Pound, modernists. quite a few screenings: last light in Rotterdam, here at Images in Toronto, here, last light and OBpier at FIFA in Montreal, trapline in London in May, last light Calgary in May, notes in O Istanbul in July, here Images fall tour in Ontario, London, Lisbon, last light in ExiS Seoul June. a few photos: winter's dun, winter's not dun, wet pines, rusty slope, subtle color. good time with Luke, few notes from Don, two visits with Paul. What was best last year - could say the autumn mornings happy writing in this chair. What do I want: to be stronger and lighter and not hurt - steady 145 and 30" better memory if I can take care of teeth good sleep to range out of town, camp better haircut better clothes new silver shoes Money for travel, rugs, garden stuff, clothes, book-making, computer upgrades, jeep insurance and maintenance. - I have about $18,100 down from about $24,900 in May = $6,800 in the bank and about $1200 in stuff sold, so the year has cost me about $8,000 not counting later income. tutoring? Peter's book?   In the garden: fruit and other trees planted seeds paeonies and roses a cold frame bench pad and bench In work: upgrade computer Media City? Pale hill? - Look how vague I am about money and work. Can't imagine where to get money. Can't imagine a worthy project. Daren't say I want a sweetie because I don't believe I can get one. 3 Yesterday I suddenly realized what it was about two things Rhoda said in those days, that I'd held suspended these years, the first when she said what I think of most is what people are thinking of me, the second when she said "but Ellie is so lonely" to Jam. What I realized was that she was harping on my lameness, using it to undercut me. That's why I was offended by her coming to my house with kind suggestions about publishing with Jerry. - No, three things: what she said about my writing being immobile and lonely was that too. It's how she saw me. And underneath it was rage that I'd cut her grass with Jam. I assume she did what she could to make Jam see me that way too. 4 Second vol of Yeats has arrived finally [Roy Foster WB Yeats: a life II The arch-poet]. I feel quite sure that Ezra and his wife who are obviously devoted must have fallen in love out of shere surprize & bewilderment they are so unlike each other. I might have had no friend that could not mix Courtesy and passion into one, like those That saw the wicks grow yellow in the dawn. I had a sense of necessary courtesy when I was younger. It shocked me when my friends didn't assume it too. It was an aristocratic ideal of being above malice and greed, of fostering people's confidence, of paying debts, not lying, not grabbing. When people were malicious - Roy, later Jam and Trudy - I had to fight myself to go against it. What's-his-name was courteous too, wasn't spiteful, and recognized it in me, liked to say we fought fair. an evocation of the ideal reader I believe myself to have proved that more than one life looks through our eyes & that lives more sensitive than ours can see by the light that passes through thick cloths Do you have different perceptions than I do      YES Through my eyes      yes Do you see by a different spectrum      yes Can you see through cloth      no Would you say you are a different life than I      yes Do you have the same life span      yes In spite of the real satisfaction I would feel at the increased respect of railway porters & spirit mediums I would have to refuse - a knighthood. Made me laugh. He was like VW in having a witty family. If I delight in rhythm I love Nature though she is not rhythmical. I express my love in rhythm. Yes that's what it is about his style. Since I am refusing to grind about what's-his-name I notice I am grinding about other things. What is that need to grind. That likely isn't the way to say it, not need but an existent grinding that fills in its blanks with whatever. Something else I notice is a sort of a settled confidence: cutting what's-his-name off is the right thing, he always needs to feel again that she has died. And then later satisfy himself that he can get her back. [Sigh.] need to override the passivity induced by Romantic doctrines of sincerity and self-realization and to cultivate an alter ego that will be masterful and heroic When have I been masterful and heroic rather than passive - teaching, garden-making, in crisis with WHN, grade 12 - it's not an alter ego, it's native but has to be called for. A poet when he is growing old may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not suffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and leaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of rooks he may discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years, honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust. Could he, if he would, knowing how frail his vigour from youth up, copy Landor who lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, all lost but the favour of his Muses? 5 His so-interesting story with George who was only 25 but so singular and brilliant she took him authoritatively in hand. She used his credulity to make the marriage work - her larger self did, should I say. 7 Saturday morning 7:42. Boiler working away - where do I hear it, not really below, more as if in the wall behind me. Pink smudges over a faintly lit sky. Grey steam wafting and drifting from, dissolving as it rises out of, St Michael's tall chimney, an ever-changing ethereally sensitive little region of notice in the motionless day of snow and bare trees. 8 the life of the man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment that needs analysis and record. At least my generation so valued personality that it thought so. I wished for a system of thought that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose and yet make all that it created or could create part of one history and that the soul's. I can understand his wanting aristocratic family descent but 'believing in' immortality of the soul? Credulity that helped him sustain a passionate interest in life? His Irish scope, a sense that he could shape a nation and even a global era. I can see how Ezra learned ambition from him though with less actual ground, Ezra's political nonsense trying to be as large as Yeats became. In poetic effect Ezra was larger in the end though. Yeats' largeness is of his life and Ezra gives more help to writing. - Paul put his expertly chosen executive-level luggage into the trunk of his big black rented SUV and drove away from the curb where I was standing to see him off. Then here is the house back in its usual state, not shut down but put away. I had been a good host. Provided a chair at the kitchen table and tea when the traveler arrived. A quiet bedroom with a good bed and a warm rad, a dark blue coverlet printed with golden sun and moon, a flowering begonia, two Kawabata novels. An armchair at a window onto a street. A wifi password. At night a tall ficus casting shadows on the ceiling and a little spruce tree sending starry reflections from a shining floor. A bathroom nightlight for a guest whose prostate gets him up in the dark. The PBS Friday night news with Brooks and Shields. Braised steak with a baked potato. Fresh orange juice. Riesling, Glenfiddich. Memory. Informed regard. Something I didn't know: before they escaped to Canada Grandpa Epp was forced by bandits, Whites or Reds I'm not sure, to dig his own grave. He begged for his life and somehow succeeded. Oma hid in the barn under hay where pitchforks probed to find her. Thick silent snowfall on the corner. This little computer wasn't charging. I was afraid it was going in ways my other G4s have gone and then what would I do. But I fetched out the cardboard box in the closet that's marked CORDS and there wrapped in a plastic bag was another charger cord left from some earlier struggle. Then the moment seeing the electrical plug icon steady on the menu bar and the bad thing averted for now. I can maybe talk more about Paul tomorrow. I do like that he brought Mennonite smoked sausage and lots of it. Parked headlights suddenly outside my window - still snowing, thick clumps falling straight down. Sound of some churchgoer scraping his windshield. 9 Bit before eight. Man in a toque tossing shovelfuls of snow under a fuzzy arch of pink cloud, crossed branches of the Russian olive against a quarter-sky of open space below it. Brightening. Couple of crows chasing and playing. Blue spruce holding a lot of weight. I must go out and shovel before the highschool kids need the sidewalk. - At the check-out counter a playfully-dressed pretty woman I recognized. Knew I had the wrong name stuck in my head so didn't use it. It doesn't have to wait till spring she said, and it could be wine not tea. She's disappointingly pretty and gracious, disappointing because it makes me suspect money and insincerity. Let me not start out expecting to be unhappily overtopped. I mustn't hide envy and I mustn't expect to be liked more than she likes just anyone. Must I be careful not to brag? Though I'll want to, to make sure I'm not undervalued? It says yes. - Remembered to crawl downstairs into the cellar to look at the bulbs. One is showing nubs, muscari if I haven't mixed up the labels. - Finally looking at the Trapline transfer Aimée posted on Vimeo. How can my whole reputation be carried by something so horribly diminished and so crudely cut to begin with. It shouldn't be digitized. It should simply die when its analog version wears out, which maybe it already has. Do you have anything to say about Paul      delayed, mourning, subtle, work Do you mean mine      yes What hit me the last evening      yes I don't remember what it was      yes It's what kept me awake      yes I was talking about something and he suddenly got up to go to bed      yes My feelings were hurt      yes Was it a substantial slight      no Was it because of what I was talking about      no Was he annoyed      YES We're both anxious that the other won't feel we're less than we were      yes Can you tell me what he was annoyed by      defeat, of fortune, balanced by, winning - Now I remember what I was talking about. I said no one who has loved me has ever imagined what I would have been if it hadn't happened, the life that would have been possible to the native self of my DNA. That annoyed him?      yes I gave him too much responsibility      yes By being too naked      yes Will he think about it      yes Did he know he was annoyed      no Do you want to say any more      no   Can you tell me who I would have been      YES, recovery, subtle, heartbreak, betrayal Who I am after subtle recovery from heartbreak of betrayal      yes Who I am now      YES Can you tell me how my life would have been different      passage from difficulties, brilliant and courageous, coming through, to liberation I'd have gone straight through with fewer detours      yes Blind spots      yes I was making a distinction between accident and DNA that he may not have liked, come to think of it. What he thinks of as his disadvantage - what Ed made him think of as a disadvantage - IS in his DNA. He didn't have the glamour-advantage tall men have but he wasn't deformed. His actual disadvantage was Ed's ragging. Okay, I've sorted that. Thank you. His networking is need to be popular?      yes His platform is, I need to be liked      YES 10 Our thought because it needs leisure is rural like all ancient thought. 11 There is a tall thin dark-haired man always talking and playing with his little girl. His daughter is damaged, autistic or something like it. I look down from a top floor window and see them in a nest in the snow. If I wave will they see me. Then I am in a room with stairs, they below me. I am courting the girl. I know to be gradual and careful and not talk. I take one step down and wait for her to make one step up. We go on that way till we meet halfway. I give her my plain gold ring. Then I'm sitting down and he puts his arms around me from behind. It seems we're going to go on together. When I say what I'm studying he says I'll be able to make a lot of money. I ask what he does. He says he makes etchings. At Save On yesterday standing behind a young woman in the check-out line I saw that her little girl, who was maybe six, was staring boldly. I stared back unsmiling. She kept coming with intention and so did I. She moved to stand directly in front of me and I took a step forward. We imitated each other's grimaces. She waggled her gloved hands in front of her mouth. I took my gloves out of my pocket and did the same. She swung her arms and so did I. That went on until her mother moved forward and I got bored. It was attentive and experimental on both sides. 7:45. An intensely luminous completely open ivory-colored sky. Smoke drifting south. Bright speck towing a short pink line. It's cold, -30C. 13 I was with a young man parked next to an exit door of maybe a school. We were kissing. I slipped the tip of my tongue into his mouth and pulled it very slowly back. We should go somewhere more private I thought. There was something about how to make silver spoons. I was realizing that to be smooth they would have to be poured into a mold first and scribed later. Judy was walking with us. She was tall, her face a long polished oval lit up talking with her characteristic gentle enthusiasm about King Francis. She was so lovely I thought my young man would want her. I said something that sent her walking away ahead of us. It was a visitation. I don't remember ever dreaming Judy in a way so it was really her. Judy who is Judie now and needs to sleep with an oxygen tube because she has sleep apnea and is fat and has kidney disease and is profiting of the indigenization wave Paul says. Last night playing Willie Nelson's City of New Orleans again and again, drumming on the desk, playing table pianna in a storm of sound. Ah could I learn to play the mouth harp at last. 14 I've been spending days since Paul reading my emails to G from the beginning and last night I was hours on the phone with Rob. Slovenly because starved for company. In the letters I'm skipping over G's own sentences and stories because G only interests me insofar as he can be interested in me. Listening to Rob talk about anything is my tax on living in this house and as such I'm guessing it's not a high cost but I'm not sure. Am I interested in anyone but myself I ask and then I say, but I was interested in Tom. Who else. Leslie. Don. Susan though I didn't trust her. Luke. Various writers. What it is about Greg and Rob is that they keep their cellars locked, they're smart and interested in many things but they're timid about themselves. Does it harm me to be what I am with them or does it harm me more to have no one at all to talk to. In my letters to G there's sometimes succinct analysis or a good phrase. In my hours with R last night there was a moment I heard myself describing the work I'd been doing with the Going for broke journals. Around those a headlong tissue of blather. I have to be aware it trains my nets in just exactly that. Another cold bright day, very cold. Saturday. Mennonite sausage stew scenting the house. - Sick of the letters, sick of their inconsequence, of my inconsequence writing year after year to no effect anywhere. Comparing Yeats who had loyalties, strategies and effect, an enormous life. Will you lead me      happiness, readiness, illusion, of exclusion I don't understand illusion of exclusion      yes It means I'm sufficiently included      yes In WHAT?      in graduation (4w) In the task of self-completion      yes I'm done?      no But it's enough of a task      yes People are supposed to complete themselves and then die      yes The letters with G were witnessed life review      yes But I NEED to give what I've prepared with so much labour      yes And I haven't      yes And I won't      no I don't know how      YES And you can't tell me      yes - Shaun Inouye's patch just now for the TIFF150 catalogue: The remarkable debut film of Alberta-born artist, poet, and theorist Ellie Epp is a work of unparalleled lyricism and beauty that eludes classification, not resting easily in any one mode or school of experimental filmmaking. Shot in a public bath house with a borrowed 16mm Beaulieu camera during the winter of 1973-74 in London, England (but completed in Vancouver, B.C. two years later), Trapline is made up of 12 fixed-position long takes, separated by varying lengths of visible blank leader that underscore the images' material substrate. The film's elegant, elliptical scenes - light refracting on water, architectural forms partitioning glass, paddling children creating ripples on the surface of a swimming pool, three boys seated in a shower stall - gesture towards a cohesive, living space that only the soundtrack, recorded on location, fully articulates; if a narrative exists here, it is heard rather than seen. Given its orderly framework, minimalist approach and built-in visual absences - not to mention Epp's relocation to Vancouver in 1975 to finish the film - it is tempting to view Trapline in light of the structuralist filmmaking that predominated in the West Coast avant-garde at the time, as represented by such figures as David Rimmer and Al Razutis. (As it happens, students of the latter snuck Epp into the editing room at Emily Carr College of Art after hours to cut the film.) Yet the grace and documentary candour of Trapline's images refuse a strictly materialist reading, something Epp acknowledged was intentional: "The film represents a battle between structuralism and beauty because, at the time, there was a great mistrust of beauty." Premiered at the Cinematheque in Vancouver in 1976, Trapline distinguished Epp as an artist of uncommon tenderness and intellectual quietude, a status confirmed by such subsequent 16mm works as Current from 1986 and Notes in origin from 1988. - In the last couple of years' letters what I did like were the Sketchup jpgs. They have a comic-book clarity of color and outline I find beautiful. I could plunge into making a project of them. It says no. Can you say why not      you should spend January in honest crisis You mean I'm dodging something      yes Is there a way to get to it      YES dwell in childhood 17 I was passing. There was Michael [Bopp] standing on the pavement in front of a theatre entrance. "Michael?" I said. He smiled a beautiful lit-up smile. Michael and I on the left side of a city bus, he in the seat behind me, I eagerly talking to him about gravel. We were passing a wall made of sections of different kinds of dry-laid stone and I was thinking there couldn't have been much of any one kind of stone along that stretch of road. Judie was in the seat next to me. I noticed she wasn't really fat, just slack in her clothes. Something about our mom too, as if I'm not sure the person in the seat next to me wasn't her as well. Why am I having these dreams of Judie and Michael just now, beautiful in the same way, seeing them radiant. It's warm, the snow sogging down. Roofers in their harnesses on the hall-house across the road. 18 L'air et les songes. 1943. b.1884. States of graceful motion of the nets. mobility of the liveliest and most exhilarating kind I'm reading through him, I mean I don't accept his terms but I am taking pleasure in his motion. When he says 'imagination,' 'imaginary', I suppose him to be talking about cortical ethers and their changes. I thought of the motion of steam from St Michaels chimney and then of Tom as he lay in his bed seeing colored eddies behind the cars he heard passing in the street. A sort of poet who is aware of working with cortical dynamics. add hope to a feeling vigor to our decision to be a person the poet of air We have seen them imperfectly because we haven't seen them change. - The turkeys in Here, all my films. rendered dynamic by the resonances of a name There I thought of the mornings in Jam's back room writing dictionary poems. to awaken adjectives which will prolong its life He's invoking subliminal awareness of the means of his effects. How many times, by the edge of a well have I murmured the names of distant waters My brain so immobilized or I should say steadied by the kinds of work it's done in its responsible years. The half-life poem says it was earlier. Says it is immobile and mobile at the same time. Two weeks ago I stepped forward with that. filiation between the real and the imaginary I hear something like foliation, lamination. Cortical images. I've left so much forgotten in suspension. Bringing it here, bringing it forward in me is taking such a long time and I'm miserably inactive in the meantime. an ether in the air awareness within ourselves of a lightness Yes the tonality of thoughts of air. But something else I don't like, a gassiness I feel in this state, 'the poetic.' Can there be filiation between the crystalline and steam dissolving into open air. The gassiness is as if a sense of everything, anything, which is to say nothing, as significant. - I don't want that word but there isn't a less - He goes on about ascension. That isn't it, why does he want it. For me it's more horizontal, air touching skin, the sounds of wind in trees, the air standing open in front of me, drifting vapor or snow making visible what's there invisibly. It has more in common with water that way. Movement, yes, volatile space. Is there a felt rising in the brain? a healthy straightening up, growing tall Okay. series of images will be shown to have a clear, orderly, rapid pattern of growth As if a poem could bloom, I mean a poem following a motion that actually happens as it happens, a true poem. we will see how love produces images Then he goes into flying and floating dreams, which are fine but not what I mean. Is his sense of air more assertional? I can be the white glide of that train of water vapour from the south - I am it more or less and being it more has to be willful. either azure or golden air ... this imaginary light your'e not a flower you're grass long tongues still or whispering thought by thought a field moving from each root blades turn like sails the whole ether forms the plasma of image Dust & soul. Soul is the etheric electromagnetic net! I didn't quite get there. He seems to say it but not quite. There weren't Hubble images in 1943 so the whole vast articulate dancing of plasma wasn't as envisioned then, but he does say "The power to imagine becomes one with the images when the dreamer touches upon celestial matter." I'd say what's imagined resembles the means by which it is imagined. Next to me a pot of iris reticulata with its scent of violets. wheat and olives, roses and oaks trees that devote themselves to an unending search for balance resin whose scent already seems to burn in the summer's heat 20 Emilee distressed by her mother's joy at regression's inauguration. Sloppy melt these days, snow shrinking back from any edge. Salmon talk last night at NVIT. Coho, steelhead / rainbow trout, chinook. Tracy Wimbush program manager for the Nicola Tribal Association, early chinook stock in the Coldwater, the Nicola and Spius Creek. NVIT is a Native college. I was watching a Native woman giving a talk to a lot of what she called Canadians, looking around at a hundred mostly grey-haired naturalist types sitting scattered in a large room. An obviously alpha male with a doctorate chairs the thing but people call out comfortably from the audience. They're interested in where they are and they're maybe the best of Merritt but like the Borrego botanists they are not my people. I was realizing Merritt is different from anything I've known and I have less flex than I did to get to know a completely new thing. Is Emilee's dilemma the same thing you've been talking to me about      yes She needs to stop wanting anything from her mom      yes Is that genuinely possible      yes Have I stopped wanting anything from my mom      no Is that what I'm supposed to discover      yes Still want her to come for me      yes If I didn't I'd go out and get things      yes Is that what you mean     yes 21 as we surrender, often with great resistance and at the price of great discomfort, to love Yesterday in Brambles, in the window seat I like, I slumped back against the sofa and saw up there white on blue a cloud-painting immaculate and complex as they always are. I thought I should imagine a local animus, an animus for here. Where does he live - on the north bank of the Thompson with a low stone wall along the edge of the bank. A line of south windows. What does he do. He's a painter. Not of clouds but of air's action. aerial imagination is rare aerial reverie fusion with as undifferentiated a universe as possible in it he bathed his pain and drank in sweetness, cleanliness and youth Digital granularity and smoke. Murmurs. Matter dissolves and reappears. blue sky is the will to lucidity In writing such a narrow line between dullness and falsity. Bachelard is so often overblown that I read him pulling back my skirts. But I'm also seeing in his company that what I want, what I want to be and make, is an elemental reverie. ether, soul of the world, sacred air ether the synthesis of air and light When I imagine stone I first imagine broken stone showing colored facets. Beautiful. I don't now imagine the inside of stones but I used to see it as simple motionless dark air. Fire isn't much my thing though I have that photo of flame rearing to see itself. What I crave and imagine is light, fire's steadier state that kindles all. Water in Trapline was optical: transmission, refraction and reflection. The first thing I imagine now is a small patch of ocean chopped into little waves. - Women's marches today getting more publicity than they ever have because they are seen as protests against a particular man not men in general - is that it? - Scent invisible diffuse medicine. The evenness of clouds' motions, both motions, their translation and their transition. Two kinds of motion happening at the same time and at the same or different rates. Lately sometimes so much dislike of the words there are. Their ugly look and sound. How ugly 'ugly' is. It's a dishabituation that if it stops to consider wants hardly any of them. So then any writing seems to abdicate attention. Skates over. And oh the pitiful wrongness of comments below the Washington march twitter feed today, comments on both sides, that say essentially I'M FOR or I'M AGAINST and say it spitefully or vacuously. I'm sickened by the mindless muddle, no one responsible in the whole. And I'm seeing the media really are unreliable, not always in what they say but always in what they report and ignore. Yes clouds can look like touches. Others so strongly grown. Âme is better than animus. Âme locale. Could I say âme local for my male soul. 23 Heart of darkness - thought I'd read it but then it seemed I hadn't - I don't believe his Kurtz but there was a moment near the end that did something - he never says what Kurtz's horror is but he evokes what may be a different one - "Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose" - "then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be" - somewhere in there I saw it - the entire weirdness of anything's existence - its flimsy unsupportedness. DR wonders at it but it can be felt as so appalling that religion is understandable. But if that's his heart of darkness I don't know what all the machinery is for, cannibals and drums and jungle etc. When it runs into another culture the colonial mind loses its confidence and finds itself afloat in outer space? As any mind can. There is a period of time that I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. Couple of days drawing a house for my âme local. Symmetrical. Room on the right for cooking, sleeping, reading, talking by the fire. Room on the left an office with storage space for work. Room in the centre is the studio. It's big and has a large curved window facing north as if an open back of the head. [kitchen] [east from the studio] [studio from outside] [office from outside] 25 An old copy of How green was my valley from the bookshelf at Brambles making me cry again and again. Llewellyn was a cheat who knew not much about Welsh mining valleys but he wrote such a sweet dream of family love and communal good that he keeps touching the lonely ache. A loved boy, a mountain and a river, stone houses, sun and rain, wind and snow, food, skilled work, wise counsel and Welsh singing in four-part harmony or was it six. He reminds me a bit of Le Guin: his good place isn't safe and isn't untroubled but the goodness in it is primal. Home in those moments when it did exist. First home. A way scaled right for a human lifetime, young man and young woman giving each other first loyalty, making children who will always belong to them and to each other, living always in the same place among people they have always known. Skillful work, good housekeeping, dignity outside the family, understatement and emotional tact within it. Generosity in celebration, stoicism in trouble, each generation teaching the next so no one has to live cut off from secure deep culture. - Furnishing âme local's studio with paintings - clicking through image pages feeling art is the best life and the flimsiest - anything less than the best work is unjustified - anything good can only come of longer than I have - any good artist's extraordinary things sit there among their piles of junk - Bontecou - an exquisite nude by David Smith - Krasner - gesture landscapes - a little Japanese cricket - meantime the elected madman shutting down environmental and women's protections, civil rights, journalistic independence, civility and rationality in international affairs, and coward legislators folding in face of his trampling mendacity. 27 I was in a little fever of desire when I found Günter Ludwig's paintings, liked them more than what I'd already found for the grassland studio, imagined a life I'd have making them - imagine is saying too much, pleasurably glanced at myself sitting among hills sketching in his fast wild way, laying a tarp on this floor and propping a canvas along the bare wall behind me, or setting up in the verandah where I could make a mess. He uses black, grey, straw color, ink, paint, markers, he scrawls, rubs, scribbles, writes, and they are landscapes of just the right degree of abstraction. I thought of Kiefer but they aren't 'important' in Kiefer's way, they stake everything on the formation he can bring to the moment - I think. Haven't found much about him. Still crying in Llewellyn today. It ends with Dada buried under a rockslide in the mine and then Hew an old man with everyone gone, the village gone, the mountain gone. It's such an honorable lament for mortal love. Talking to Luke this morning about how hard love is. When I was on the way to the post office this morning the sidewalk was dry and I was walking the way anyone walks, pleased, looking around. Suddenly I was slammed flat down with my face an inch from the cement. I'd tripped over a little edge the way I do. I picked myself up directly but a grey SUV stopped next to me and a Native woman jumped out looking concerned. I said "I tripped over a little edge. It happens." Louie had sent on my new black cashmere sweater to replace the one I found at Amvets in San Diego and was going to give Tom for Christmas before we broke up and I got to keep it - one of the times we broke up - such good wool it never pilled though I wore it hard for years. Now finally it has gone through at the elbow and I got white porch paint on the sleeve. It's midnight. Don't forget to turn off the heat. Take Toibín's biog of Lady Gregory to bed. I'm eating carefully for a month to try to undo my carb crimes and it is making me less tolerant of TV DVDs and colder, needing more heat in the house. 28 What is it about these paintings. I can look north at the ridge that isn't photographable and see how there could be a painting: pale blue, white, a shadow dark blue, the reddish brown of the tree in front of it, shape of the white steam from the neighbour's chimney, dark slashes of ravines, treeline scribbles. Fast registry of. His handwriting has a quality, fast but the lettering a bit medieval. What is it about his scratches though, are they random, they add something, what. A layer so there's surface and depth. The gestures that made them show in them, that energy. In his plowed earth pictures they're white slashes like straws on the surface and more color in the black, browns, oxblood reds, putty yellows. I like the boldness. 29 A couple of days on sketchup, something to do, happy, and then it's done, what now. Sunday morning nearly eight, sun not up yet but a contrail slash bright in some open sky to the east. Shrunken dirty heaps of snow. Scent of hyacinth all over the house. None of this is worth saying but it's all I have. 30 Vendler Our secret discipline: Yeats and lyric form 2007 Harvard Doubts going into technical poetics, I'd like to know how good things are done but am wary of getting interested in what doesn't interest me, as if there's danger in that. I'm more interested in Yeats than in his poems and the phrases I catch at with a starved gasp have been prose but still I'd like to know the sorts of things he taught himself to consider. Why poetics at all. Because it's about grip and charm, making something people want to keep. Openings in the air. a style that remembers many masters that it may escape contemporary suggestion I have very little but an instinct an experience in time activated by its forms I must seek a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza. Showing how something happens rather than just showing it having happened. Showing shifts in attention or decision. driving over line ends 31 Openings in the air doesn't say it. I was thinking of [April 1984, Saturna] shapes that were standing by the word sounded - the ancestors - that colorless shell sense - the place in the field, the air was interfered - a fovea - small pit - a stigm - why is that exciting - a fire - a ripple - a freely floating possibility - an intensity of the fluid - the sea concentrated into   shapes that were standing by the word sounded - the ancestors - that colorless shell sense   above the field the place in the air - a fovea, small pit - a stigm - a ripple - an intensity of the fluid - the sea concentrated into Writing in such a way that the thing, its shape in the brain and its shape in the intervening medium are all felt. Its shape in the brain and the shapes that are standing around its name. - TIFF and CFMDC struggling to get a good video transfer of Trapline. The interneg is deteriorated probably. - Bachelard on strong wind "it seems as if the immense void, in suddenly discovering an action ..." Cosmic winds. Cortical winds. I can compare my thought only to a light in the sky flickering on the horizon between two worlds. Could there be a sophistication in writing, where 'images' instead of referring to emotion etc refer to their own cortical means. souls whose movements inspire branches, sails and clouds O wild West Wind lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! make me thy lyre an igneous substance and a continuous emanation .... We continually breathe this astral gold - Titania's gash. Whales, otters, the farmer, the cliff, goats, eagles, an orchard, arbutus, tides, a poet's manuscript, a lesbian ex, calypso orchids, the cabin, black dark night, mussels and oysters, phosphorescent little fishes under the dock. 39 in 1984 Titania because Oberon has poisoned her. The gash her sex and her wound. Oberon's spite. What is the boy he wants. There is a boy born later - he says he wants a child but what he actually wants is to get or stay ahead of her. It needs an emotional circumstance. What was it. "In work I struggle with what I want from writing and why my writing isn't liked. The struggle includes wrestling with Kristeva, working to read through Robert's deeper structures, enduring morose introspection, and in part 4 working out a catalogue of what I call impressors and confusors: textual forms of glamour and misdirection. This effort is interwoven with ongoing effort to get clear of intimidation by Jam and her new best friends without shutting down." 1. feeling the place 2. going through journals 3. struggling with myself about Jam 4. pondering Robert's glamours Woman struggling to believe in herself against widely supported male effort. She has lost a boy. Oberon is using her loss against her. Oberon a woman is a twist. Jim an actual master of fertility. Younger self not the writer but sometimes her writing. Her sometimes miscellaneous reading. Notes. 1st February Dreaming after hours of Private practice. I'm standing with a bucket behind a heavily bearing tall row of orange tomatoes. A fair-haired man shows up around the end of the row as if to help me pick. I've known of him, thought of him as a prospect though I haven't met him before. As we speak our first sentences I notice his eyes flash down to evaluate my bosom. I've seen something that disqualifies him too, a stupider look than I like. Earlier I was with Jam who was getting ready to leave the country and asking whether I wanted her mirror, or maybe some kind of small dressing table like a portable writing desk. Should I put it in the room upstairs, I wondered, but no I didn't want it. Then there was Lise or a woman like Lise [Weil]. They had got back together. She was looking softened, tall and more centred. They were going away together, to Nome. Lise came against my right hip to hug me goodbye. I shoved her violently, Get away from me. Mysteriously forgiven for my baked potato yesterday - scale had moved after days stuck though I was eating mostly salad. Where does it go overnight, do I breathe it out? Claude said "Any time I see January pass I feel there's another hurdle that's been cleared. Feb. is short and half of it's warm so we're nearly there." It's 6:55. The trees are black dark in silhouette but the sky is a wide open luminous pale greeny-blue yellower at the ridge line. Steam at the mill dark grey and slow. Slow wisp from St Michael's tall chimney. - Titania. I have my lyric scraps and I have judgment now but do I have power, what they called imagination. It's more than lyric scraps, I have a quite marvelous notebook. Have been thinking to take my bearings from The glass essay but I have other kinds of materials, some more intellectual. 7:46 two small clouds on the horizon lit brilliant amber. Sky a tinted white. How to make it storytelling. Story told to whom - It's a welter. I have kept always wanting someone to come for me in it - to tell me what it is, how to work. 2 Jennifer brought me a handsome chunk of petrified ponderosa from a spot she knows on Midday Valley Road. Clean house, clean clothes. The laundromat woman smiled at me for the first time. Someone in a Cowboy magazine said what he looks for in a horse is soft eyes. It's cold again, snow melt has turned to treacherous bulges of ice. The jeep started, probably because it was parked facing into the sun. There went Chris in his orange puffer jacket. Flittering cloud of either starlings or Bohemian waxwings. 4:30. The hill is iced like a cake with a thin glaze of pink snow. Pale wide clean deep sky faded to almost white. A moment later the hill's glaze has turned an almost even pale mauve, the sun gone. Yesterday I thought to draw the Saturna cabin. Looking for photos of it I saw that Jim Campbell died at 97 in November of 2015. That means he was sixty five when I was there. - The icing is pink again so the sun must have moved sideways into a notch. Going-home traffic. Titania because of a photo Jim's other daughter took when Jam and I were invited to Christmas dinner with the Campbells. I was 38, was wearing my tight pink plaid shirt with pearl snap buttons and had on a paper crown. There I was with my short hair and slender shoulders. I looked just as I want to look and seldom do, exquisitely distinguishedly lovely. When I asked for the photo later no one knew where it was. Maggie said Jim was sweet on me and I thought that was the right way to say it. He was starting to be an old man and he liked having a good-looking young woman around the place. We didn't flirt but he was the benevolent host of a place I could love along with him. He could like to tell me about it and I could like to feel his carefully discrete gallantry. My dad was the wrong kind of farmer and the wrong kind of dad but Jim was a gentleman farmer and a rational generous dad. When I saw the boat docking I'd go down and help him unload boxes and feed sacks onto the flatbed trailer he pulled with his old tractor. He'd bring firewood when he saw I was getting low and keep the kerosene can topped up. I'd walk up to the farmhouse with a rent check at the end of the month. Sometimes could catch a ride on the boat when he was going to the store or the ferry. I remember him pointing out the little ridges on the cliff that goats and deer couldn't reach and telling me that in April they'd be strips of wildflower garden. When I think of being there I feel the way the farm's sloping bench opened to the crescent of beach that itself opened to the wide flat reach toward Pender Island. Damp fresh air. Grass with old apple trees. Weathered '30s resort buildings that seemed to be out of novels I'd read when I was a kid. A rickety short dock that rose and fell with the tide. A feeling of light and lightness, heat and light reflected upward from the water. Bands of wild goats that seemed Mediterranean, Greek. It was mythic and coherent, with a climate so much drier and brighter than the other side of the island that it could seem to be under an enchantment. What was I up to. I'd just had the show at Women in Focus. Needed to get away from Jam and her friends. It'd be cheaper than living in town so I'd be able to afford to eat. Was looking back to how much I'd liked living in the lake house. Had heard the Gulf Islands weren't as wet in winter, had never lived by the ocean. Managed Maggie into inviting me to her place and then walked down over the cliff to look at the cabins. Wrote the Campbells and got a reply asking whether I could handle the winter conditions. Said I knew all about wood heat and coal oil lamps. Probably thought I'd write something. Probably said that was what I was there to do. Had sorted my questions into a network with a lot of topics I needed to get further into. Was still yearning for Robert. Took my clunky old typewriter and my camera. Oma's quilt. Was Jam still important. I wasn't writing or waiting for letters, would sometimes phone and once a month would come into town and stay some days. Was often sick when I was at her house. She was living upstairs by then I think. I had an exotic place to offer her and others. It was two ferries and a bus ride away. Remember very little of that. Bus to Tsawassen, then the Salt Spring ferry, then the little Saturna ferry, then either a walk up the road and down the cliff or else if I was in luck maybe Jim's boat would be at the wharf. 3 It snowed all afternoon, is snowing still. I came home from Cassandra's opening at Bramble with her sea wolf print and was shoveling in the white dark. Loose glitter, muffled wheels, woodsmoke. A dark van passed just now with a thin plume of loose snow trailing off its roof. 5 The Saturna cabin. First some days figuring out proportions and assembling it rather than just drawing a box: 2x4 studs and rafters, 2x6 joists, 1x2 battens, windows that drop into the walls. Then finding furniture, remembering detail - nails on the bedroom wall for hanging clothes, old aluminum coffee pot, enamel basin in the sink, curtains on a string under it, firewood stacked in the porch, water pail on the counter. Then finding the background image that shows it as it was looking west through trees to the water. This and that I'm not sure of; it's maybe too wide, the counter's maybe too long. Can't find the right kitchen chairs. [cabin from the north] [cabin from the south] [kitchen] [work table] [porch] [bedroom south window] [kitchen's view] Cassandra sent a couple of Saturna paintings in her walnut oil fairyland style. 7 Fat-bellied Native man not very smart and chiseling in minor ways - saying he arrived earlier and finished later than he did, asking more than local rates in case I didn't know better, declaring he'd thought of being a doctor or a lawyer but carpenters make more - swopped out a Schoolhouse fixture for the kitchen's horrible chandelier. Do you think there's a story      YES Mainly the place      yes The good father      yes Story about gender      yes I was doing what I did later with Tom, backing away from someone I needed to leave by going to live somewhere I'd love to be. Photo of Jim with his four kids and his wife, a look of vulnerable responsibility I yearn over. b.1919, maybe 4 years older than my dad, 26 when he married, 27 in 1945 when they moved to the farm after the war. 8 Up against the Saturna material with my brain motionless. 9 Unhappy dreams. It was an oppressed desperate time, what can I do with that. Unresolved crisis about aggressive self-defense versus confluent lovingness. Preparing a transition though. She's 38 but immature, has clues but is tracking them haphazardly, is still letting herself be suppressed. A glaze on deep snow, porch iced over so I daren't step out to clear the sidewalk. All highways into the lower mainland were shut down last night, Merritt hotels full, schools closed. Broken cloud moving steadily north. A drip from the eaves just now. Sore muscles, don't know why. I understand that I'm at the time when I don't leave but I begin to make myself strong by holding to my own in everything. And not to dream of new work because now the old work has to bring the new time. It wasn't old work that brought the new time, it was regression to a simpler self I then rebuilt toward more complexity with Joyce. I had to give up something I didn't want to give up - what, exactly. Whatever Jam was to me. I want to say brilliant company but it says oppression of energy, withdrawal from balance. What I refused this time? Yes. She is 38 and thinks she could become a philosophy professor. Is she a philosopher? She says ideas aren't things, they pass in a person, in time and space. She has to begin to know what philosophy is: elaboration of mistake. Theory and the fantasia of origin. It doesn't matter what philosophy was. We should see and think.   A small broad-shouldered woman in black, with a Canadian accent and a limp, a comic name, a distinguished head. Could she be wise in society? So I envisaged it then but took another five years to begin. Detoured into baby and garden. Did I need them for repair?   part 2 time remaining volume 5: 2015 may-august work & days: a lifetime journal project