28 February
Meal I like most these days, a potato baked an hour and a half, split,
mashed up with a lot of butter and fine-chopped sweet onion. It has to be
a medium-sized thin-skinned beige potato with pale yellow flesh. Oh the
scent when it's baking.
I made lemon pudding a couple of evenings ago, slowly ate it all up the
way I do, knowing I'd pay. Next morning woke sore all over and hobbling
with a bad left knee. As I'd been finishing it I realized it's just my mouth
that wants it so there's no reason to swallow. Next evening I made a coconut
custard and instead of harming myself eating the whole of it gave my mouth
as much time as it wanted with just a quarter of it, hot and silky and perfectly
delicious with exactly the right amounts of vanilla, salt and agave. I've
finally got the timing right.
March 1st
In the weeds with taxes today, that good expression.
Yesterday a mirror in the goodwill caught me unready and there was a
face so lined, so thin-mouthed, so dull-haired, so pink around the eyes
and bruised under them. Is that what seventy-two on Monday has to look like?
Now that my jeans fit again I don't realize I look old till I see it for
myself but when I'm climbing the post office steps people are rushing to
hold the door for me and sometimes I'm startled by not being able to open
a jar because my wrist isn't strong enough.
Peter Dyck yesterday. I replied but he won't reply to my reply because
it's too much about me. Same with Claude Desy.
Doesn't Brakhage follow from Pound. I must have had that thought before,
it's so obvious.
Then I'm in his lineage.
I've stayed away from Up down for a couple of days. I don't have
the right sincerity toward it yet. Ie voice. Would it be: is there something
I actually want to know? Do asking and telling have to be different.
Why is it a project she would never take on. She said her journal for
those days is too cryptic to make out. I'd want to say it's because she's
too pretentious, the tale would be too concrete to seem worthy.
- Do you think that's true yes
- IS it too concrete to be worthy no
- She might want to write about a woman who eluded her
so it never got real YES
Who would I write it for. Maybe Susan if anyone.
- Do you want to suggest a question YES
loss of mother, gain of truth
- Loss of mother gains what truth? yes
- It has to end with Joyce YES
- Should I just write Joyce no
- Put them alongside yes
- You too? no
- Are poetics relevant to this yes
2nd
I was telling someone cherry trees bloom first
on old growth and then leaves emerge on the new growth. We were gazing at
tiny green leaves on the tip of a low branch, then looked up and saw the
whole canopy had been pruned off; the tree was just a cherry-barked stub.
There's a desolate moment that comes almost every night. When I've lain
down and wriggled around and put my arm around the pillow in the dark I
find myself in a dim anguish of fear. Then I'm afraid the fear will kill
me so I herd my thoughts away from where they are wanting to go and imagine
Mac standing on his terrace early in the morning looking south over his
warm dry grass.
It means my isolation and idleness is a mammal stress worse than I let
myself notice during daytimes. There's no kind of end of it in view either.
Don't you of all people grow faint & weary,
& feel life & friends wearing away. There is nothing so sad as such
living death, to feel your power gone, the charms fade away; the trees grow
bare, & the dead leaves rustle hollow around & on you; others take
your place, do your work, win your friends, - & you still cumber the
ground.
In a letter by her publisher friend Samuel Bowles 1865. Look at his nice
ampersands and semicolons: he's a writer.
My best small satisfaction these days is here, when I edge a phrase closer
to right, meaning both exact and clean.
The most pitiful fact of this life is the way I keep checking gmail,
stats, and facebook. When there's nothing I go on to the sick fascination
of news tabs. When there is something, some note or mention, it is
never enough and never what I'm actually starved for.
The winter is going on a long time too. It's tapering off but the house
seems colder, especially the floor, as if it's taken this while for the
subsoil to cool. What's left of the snow is in dirty lumps. There'll be
at least another month of it and all the years to come will have five idle
unhappy months like these.
I hear today for the first time the river in
the tree
When you had gone the love came. I supposed
it would. The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone.
4
Ezra Pound and music edited by Schafer
Guide to the Cantos of by Cookson
Pilgrimage 1
Wonder book of the air
- Never what I'm starved for except when it's Luke on FB messages.
judged by its texture rather than its form
final drift into oblivion of the fragments
no chronicle but two themes ... descent into
hades, metamorphoses and mixed with these historical characters
logopoeia, phanopoeia, melopoeia
music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness
and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe
rhythm that adjusts itself according to the
demands of the material
legato phrasing and staccato and all that lies
between
function of rests
playing on the residuum of sounds through suspending,
anticipating or curtailing the expected
plays not against a sound newly struck, but
against the residuum and residua of sounds which hangs in the auditory memory
... this elaboration of echo
Isn't that my source for the description of sentence effect in Being
about.
Even when he works within the limits of the
iamb, scarcely two lines measure alike.
vers libre was an added discipline, for it meant
divining the precise meter and shape of each individual poetic thought
The shapes of his lines, their disposition on
the page, the placing of punctuation and spaces
Cadence is properly the Soul ... a kind of superior
rhythm which he called absolute ... "I believe that every emotion and
every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase to express it"
Clynes' sentics. When Tom in our first days asked whether I knew that
book I leapt to the conclusion that he was my fated true love. That he'd
recognized that book he'd have had to come by as haphazardly as I
had seemed to say we were mated at the right level.
It should be possible to show that any given
rhythm implies about it a complete form
Subsequent transformations of water under the
keel are always audible
In Yeats' prose and in the Cantos it's rhythm certainly.
Tone leading: one note calling for resolution in another.
He says Tagore a master of cadence. In a Sunday afternoon East London
Sufi meeting being handed I know not from what distant time thou are
coming ever nearer to meet me to read aloud, the way I voiced it and
my purple crepe blouse catching Mohan's notice.
able, by an arrangement of ... to throw us back
into the age of truth
Reading Pound or about Pound does throw me always into a state of something
like high essence. Sitting in Kekuli with the book just brought from the
post office I was thinking of working with the We made this footage.
Junk any idea of finishing it as a documentary and just work with the lyric
bits.
5
My dreams make up men for me. There was a man with
longish hair, a tanned face and the sort of light narrow body I like sitting
next to me on a bench. We'd been gazing toward an older man far away across
a wide room because he was the one controlling a robot cart we knew was
somewhere in a corridor coming toward me. I asked whether he'd like to be
able to fly. I was on his right and had moved so I was sitting turned toward
him. The question lit him up. Later I was walking away across a field with
someone else and turned back to where he was standing. I said goodbye to
the person with him and then - I'm stopped not knowing how to say this -
I moved my eyes to where he was, to the right, and as if wiped him with
significance. That is so so approximate. Why can't I describe something
that's so familiar though it doesn't happen often. It's as if the eyes send
a burst of invisible light to the other's whole body. It's just liking,
but it's as if a hit of touch too, there's impact.
When I woke I thought of the man at Leah's wedding who when I was sitting
alone after taking photos for her asked for the camera to take a photo of
me. He was dark-haired and had quiet eyes. It's as if I'm looking back at
missed chances. I've thought of Bruce too because of the way he lit up when
he came into the Soundscape basement and saw me. Good men I didn't consider.
Men capable of liking me, who'd bloom if I gave them as much as I gave people
incapable of it.
It's snowing this morning. Look at that, thick fine quick snow. White
ground white sky, the town's miscellaneous mess between.
a true rhythm sense assimilates all sorts of
uneven pieces of time and keeps the music alive
-
Small ranch in the Otter valley near Tulameen on the old Princeton road.
Native mom, white dad. Youngest of three boys. School by correspondence.
They hunted, fished and gathered, he said. He had figured out a way to catch
greyling. They move in groups and you never know where they'll be. He had
to sit very still waiting with his three-pronged hook till they'd swim over
it. They're hard to see because they're black, the color of the river bottom.
His little dog would wait on the bank up above and if he caught a small
fish he'd toss it up. It would still be alive and the dog would get a funny
look on his face after he swallowed it. When he was seventeen he went to
work at the copper mine. Fifteen years of that. "I had a little wife
and two kids." They were both drinking and the kids were confiscated.
He was in and out of jail on impaired driving charges. His wife died of
cirrhosis when she was 31. His mom died last year at 98. After he got sober
he met his daughter but by then they were going in opposite directions,
the kids were teenagers experimenting with drugs and alcohol and he was
trying to stay sober. He got his grade twelve and went to Northern Lights
in Dawson Creek. The psychology professor got him to where he could just
sit down and write a 3000 word essay. He was going to get his Bachelor's
in social work but there was a job in suicide prevention on a little reserve
at Savona and he liked having a paycheck. He was telling me these things
in a heavy slow voice. I was not expecting him to be able to take an interest
in me though he may believe he does. Bin there. But isn't he the only person
in this town who's invited me to anything at all? I was dressed for snow
shoveling - very badly dressed - and he'd found me holding a tin of WD-40
just having unstuck my driver's side lock. We were in a booth in the Grand
where an old white woman with poodle hair across the aisle was looking at
me thinking I was Native because I was with him.
There's the blue spruce in very very pale sun lovingly dusted all over
with snow.
There goes the horrible St Michael's minister. What is it about him,
apart from his being a minister. He looks like a bed wetter is one way to
say it. He walks as if he has a shameful secret.
Sunday afternoon. Tomorrow I'll turn 72.
Yesterday I brought home Rachel Cusk's Transit not knowing she's
famous in the UK. She mentions a neighbourhood with a 5-way intersection,
a pub on the corner and a lift to the tube and I thought oh she lives in
Tufnell Park. Sure enough. It's called a novel but it's like my journal
with most of the personal left out: a few bits about renovating a flat with
bad downstairs neighbours, going to a party in the country, reading at a
festival, and the rest the sorts of other people's stories I've recorded
too. I read the book straight through but she's abstract in a way I don't
like and don't trust. Reviewers call her intelligent presumably for that
abstraction - abstract summaries and abstract reflections on fate and responsibility
etc - but maybe the word is loveless? My sort of cold eye but without
a balancing warmth in anything. Stories without voices.
Scent of a hyacinth next to me.
6
Do I want to say anything about this day. I posted a photo of a blaze of light on the ficus
and the red chair that gave people someplace to hang their birthday notes.
A white magnolia from Emilee, white tulips from Leslie. Jim. Scott. Jennifer.
The other Jim said he knew a cat who'd like that chair. Janet and Tia. Louise.
Jane. Sue and Val, Claude, Mafalda. Ben, Sonja. Adam and Anya. Lisa, Sam,
Claudia. Indra. Kathy Huska. Some film people. Some other relatives - Michael's
sister. Luke in private. Cheryl said she has a dread disease. David is suing
Nancy. Greg sent a photo of pale light on twigs. Two sentences from Paul
in Thailand saying late April. Bought myself carnations in memory of Frank
on my eighteenth, the scented red and pink kind I had in my room in the
Golden West. Otherwise couldn't think of any way to celebrate except to
read my 65th in Borrego seven years ago. Windfall oranges, white-wing doves
at the Hacienda del Sol, earrings given to the sand at Glorietta Canyon.
Winter light in the skyshack. Sometimes the casual journal voice I like
better than this one.
7
Nothing from Louie, what is that.
Ask what was happening seven years ago when I was turning 65. Thought
I had really left Tom, can see that what gave us better years after was
getting further into my own adventures and taking him with me: Mesa Grande
and Borrego, video work and publishing. Same struggle with 3 pounds but
waist two inches less. More all-over ache then but not the burning arms
though I already woke clenching the pillow. "Feeling how rigid I am
in my campaign to fix my body - the weighing and measuring and supps and
bike and stretching and record keeping." Luke was in danger. Mary was
still phoning, just leaving the condo. Lonely. Stiff, sore, hiss, high bp,
short-term memory loss, fell in the street, hip problem. None of that is
worse now. C, B, turmeric, Co-Q, acetyl carnatine, oregano, cleaner house,
slow breathing, biking, Thy. More was happening with my sites, much more.
"I make more mistakes now, for instance when I'm formatting I more
often have to do something over. The faults of attention I notice in driving.
I am training myself to double-check more. I have to monitor myself when
I walk. There's the way I don't find thoughts to interest me when I'm lying
awake. And even here there is more erasing and trying again."
"I want something. I want to have back what I lost with Tom, openness
and connection. I want to be all the way done with Tom: regret, remorse,
resentment, I want all that to be done. I want to fix the all-over muscle
ache. I want to be fully employed in the right task. I want to be love.
I want Luke and Row to be well and to do what is needed for that."
"Hungry for ontology, something like that, space, grain, fabric of
the universe, images of. Altered being - philosophy, effort." "A
long trip. Do yoga to be more limber. Slow breathing to be quicker into
tuning, whatever cardio I need for more energy, video and sound." I
complained that nothing was happening but a lot was happening: gardens for
Sean and Scott, the remarkable wealth of San Diego, students, travel to
Vt, Detroit, Toronto, Vancouver. Researching atoms.
12
I hate living here. I hate being what I am now.
What's the worst.
1. It won't always be winter but there will always be winter again and
I will be stuck here by having to pay rent.
2. Money. Two nights ago I was watching Endeavor season 3 eating
at my desk and a big chunk of tooth appeared in my mouth. My tongue could
feel a jagged dark stump of a molar. My first thought was that it will cost
a lot of money to fix. I'm afraid of spending any of what I have left because
I haven't found any way to get more and if I run it down to zero I'll lose
even the bit of ease I have now - not be able to fix the jeep or my computers
or buy new shoes when I need them etc. And there'll have to be something
left to pay for cremation when the time comes.
3. The fiery skin pain is worse again, there when I lie down at night
- which it hadn't been for a while - and there in the morning and when I
wake from a nap and even breaking into my nights. Food is a dreary struggle.
I can't bear myself heavy but though I was scrupulous for a month it made
no lasting difference. If I defy low-carb for a day I gain two or three
pounds overnight.
4. I'm starved for contact and fondness and play, for heart at all, but
this town is no place to find friends or a sweetie. The two friends I'd
made via money are gone or going, Claude in Salmon Arm and Jennifer moving
to Kamloops. Daphne the gardener said she'd contact me and hasn't. Louie
forgot my birthday for the first time and sends me junk emails. Greg and
I have tapered off because my life isn't interesting anymore. I make pathetic
efforts on Facebook because it's all I have. I can't go to the city for
a week because my plants need water every day. It seems I'm too scary-ugly
to make friends now.
5. In California I could love and be interested in the place and season
even when I'd run out of human fondness but there's hardly any of that kind
of glamour here. After the US I'm bored with Canada, everything about Canada;
there just seems to be nothing doing anywhere around.
6. I don't have work. I don't know what to do. I start out with projects,
last months something written about Jam, but I lose hope. Things I can do
easily, like the Sketchup drawings, and little bits of writing, or pretty
photos, aren't worth anything. I don't think the Mac Pro is strong enough
anymore to work on movies or sound. I could send my videos to festivals
but I don't, it all feels useless. - This one is so sore I can hardly bear
to talk about it. Giving up on work would feel like time to die, because
there is nothing else.
- Merritt was a mistake wasn't it no
- Retiring was a mistake no
- Leaving Tom was a mistake no
- You want me in this utter dead end
yes
- Do you want me to kill myself no
I'm looking out at a white sky, dry dirty road with dirty church-goer
cars. Time change this morning. I'm hungry and too bored with my limited
safe options to want to cook.
Turn around and scratch up some good things:
1. Nothing is as bad as it will be.
2. Overall my health is not much worse than it was 7 years ago, in some
ways better.
3. I can still read without glasses.
4. The jeep is strong though dirty and shabby.
5. I always like to see the blue spruce, which this morning is black,
swaying its long end-weighted arms.
6. Money does arrive in my accounts every month and it's been enough
to keep up with usual monthly expenses though not extras.
7. The house is warm and safe. This chair and its tree and corner are
good. There's a good bed in a quiet room. It's a good house for guests when
there are any.
8. The snow is very slowly departing. There will be a garden all summer.
I'm almost ready to buy fruit trees.
9. I have California and love and better times in the journal.
10. The journal is transcribed, caught up except for some index page
intros. Hardly anyone has that kind of record.
11. Being about is there, accomplished, though no one uses it.
12. Trapline on the TIFF 150 list for what it's worth.
13. Luke seems to be okay and he still likes me.
14
Yard full of robins suddenly - I remember that from last year. Birdsong
this morning as I lay in bed. Most of the garden bare except for patches
in garage and compost shade. Soft mud in the lattice path. Green leaves
on the strawberries. Buds on the apple tree. Maybe on the fig? Put on rubber
boots and cleaned up what I could. Drove with my window down. Sat in the
sun writing a list of garden tasks.
Dentists' receptionist says no appointment for two weeks. Crown $1100
and implant anywhere up to $3500 depending on bone loss. I liked the feel
of the office. Talked to Darrell in the gamers' shop about the phone. He
says the Blackberry's port wd be hard to fix, $60 bench time at least and
then not sure. Hustling to get something mailed for the Media City deadline
tomorrow, bought two little memory sticks that incredibly can hold 32GB
each. Had to figure out where my 4444 versions are and saw I'd deleted them
from Google Drive. Memory stick won't grab the 422 versions I have, slowly
rewriting from FCP master.
16
Google told me how to reformat the memory sticks, Media City package
sent, a copy of Here made for Alan Burger at butterflies and moths
tonight, laundry washing up the road, Jenn coming at noon to clean, dentist
at 4. Updated my CV and reposted. Last night went through my film mail file
back to 2009 organizing into subfolders, being reminded of persons and venues
etc, thinking of other festivals I should apply to. Made a sheet for film
records. - Daichi showing at the Tate Modern made a little muscle of ambition
stir.
Last night another man I liked. I first saw him
standing behind a shop counter talking to someone, saying his kidneys were
sore. I asked if he was using cranberry. His face was a bit acne-scarred
I think. His name was Martin. Later I was close to his chest looking at
the tweed colors in his sweater. He said Judy and Michael had given it to
him. He'd known them at Harmony Gates. Then later I was standing in a part
of Vancouver further south. There was a lot of noise in the sky. We looked
up to see two huge flat silver aircraft swooping in formation with a lot
of parallel silver wires linking them. I was thinking that if it was an
attack Martin might look after my child, who was with him.
Rewatching The West Wing, exclaiming with pleasure at the writing.
Rereading Backwater delighting in young Dorothy and at the same time
marveling that all these pages can come along as if never met before. It's
making me notice how often I'm reading without forming what's described.
-
Young Dr Rohit with his surprising short-chinned long-nosed bird face
kept saying my hygiene is good. They can place a crown on the broken molar
for $1200. They're cheaper than Reach because it's Merritt.
14. When I come home I've loved stepping off the porch into a warm kitchen
with a clean red floor and a pleasing faint smell of food.
17
The silver aircraft had such a lot of fine flat structure incised on
their surface, like old paintings of spacecraft in Omni magazine.
How does the dreaming brain invent such a thing and why make two of them
joined by a lot of parallel wires.
-
away on the further slopes Miriam discovered
the solitary spring air. It was the same wandering eloquent air she had
known from the beginning of things.
Backwater was 1916 when she was 43.
18
Wet Saturday morning. White sky, drips from the roofline, the house a
silent box of still air hissing steadily at my left ear.
Honeycomb another two vols later 1917. She was writing fast.
I'm pleased that now I own all her volumes.
Jam's complacent rejection of her, in her male pose. My grief and despair
at having to be alone in my sense of what she was.
Mary liking her after she caught on. Then I lent her the other volumes
but didn't talk to her about them. I'm supposing she only had that one experience
of meeting her own self in a book, a kind of meeting completely beyond her
now.
I can't read her fast, now, often go back over a paragraph, but every
paragraph is interesting. I compare as I go: this is like me, this is not
at all like me. She's busier and thinkier. I don't know whether Miriam is
naming what she registers at the time - thinking in words - or whether the
naming is Richardson later. A lot of what M registers I only register without
description but I can recognize it when R writes it. Compared to most novelists
her interiority is like writing the unconscious, except that it is conscious
enough to be recalled.
What is it about baked potatoes, these smooth large yellow-fleshed ones.
It's as if they are all I need, one a day, hour and a half at 375, mashed
up with a lot of butter and some finely chopped sweet onion. I lose weight
on them, don't feel unbalanced all day.
19
I found some photos on a cupboard surface where
I was staying. They were high contrast black and white mostly postcard size.
Some had postcard messages on the back, handwriting quite large and erratic.
My impression was that a man or men had made them, European men. There were
heads in the images but uncentred and roughly framed. I can't see them now
to describe them but I remember thinking they were like an opposite of what
I do, caught unframed in the middle of a motion, as if random. Lying there
still asleep I was trying to name their quality to carry it into waking.
I was saying something like 'torn' - not exactly that and there were several
words. They were striking images but I wondered about the ethics of that
kind of image-making. At the same time I was thinking I could go for a walk
with my camera.
I'd been scared for Luke because the woman he was happy with for half
a year had an FB page with nothing but glamour shots. She dumped him and
he crashed. He wasn't eating and then was in bed for two weeks coughing
to bruise his chest. This time, though, he has a house and work. Roy is
going to sell him his van. When I was talking with him yesterday he said
he'd dreamed a lion lay down in his bed with him.
It's a bright, open day, sun behind the church's steep dark roof making
the sky hot silver around the chimney. The spruce's long branches are swaying
peacefully just a little. Yellow light slanting across the pavement. Late
yesterday after the wind I was working in the yard a bit. When I work my
muscles hurt.
20
I was lying awake at 4:30 worrying that I'd said the wrong thing to Luke.
He said he'd had to murder his love. I said he picks women who aren't good
enough for him. I think that's true but the other truths are 1. that he
or anyone needs to love, needs it biologically, and isn't it better to love
the wrong person than not to love, and 2. that I'm unlikely to like any
woman he's with. He said yes Kat had none of his requirements, 'smart, communicative
and friendly'. I said a lion is a committed hunter.
Joyce saying unconditional love is the task, but did she mean unconditional
love for the wrong person because there are no right people? I loved the
wrong person only sometimes unconditionally for nearly twenty years and
it cost me my vitality. Did she mean if you love unconditionally you keep
your vitality? Murdering love is murdering oneself, and allowing oneself
to be seduced, abandoned and neglected is murdering oneself too. Is it only
child-traumatized people who can't figure it out? He has found smart, communicative
and friendly more than once and let it go, hasn't he?
Then I was thinking that balancing on a pin means being outright about
what one is, for instance with Rhoda it would have been saying "Your
beauty intimidates me." I wasn't balanced enough in those days to handle
what needed to be handled.
-
Some hours in the garden yesterday and today, heavy work digging plant
wells into the gravel and rolling concrete blocks out of the way, prepping
the new little planting square there'll be on the street side of the porch
pad. Trying to forestall later soreness with hot water and aspirin. The
earth is crumbly-damp but not sticky. I need to devise a step onto the pad
- can do it with concrete and rocks probably. The two concrete squares should
be gateposts. The many bricks can be side-bed edgers. Filbert hedge along
the street edge.
21
15. Accepted Hang Jun Lee's invitation to present and jury at the EXiS
festival. Korea for a week in July. Renew my passport. Yikes, clothes. Shoes.
22
July warm and humid. 11-12 hrs if non-stop.
-
Tulips coming up through the gravel next to the foundation, perfectly
strong clean little wrapped pointed forms.
23
Three hard knocks woke me. No one at either door. It was 1:30am. Street
empty.
Snow on the billboard hill shrunk to patches.
Spring break I think. No traffic this morning.
25
January 2016 considering Oliver, Ashcroft, Merritt. Sketched Merritt
house and garden. End of the month spoke to Janis about Douglas St. R said
he might find it hard to pull the trigger. 7 Feb saw 1890 Granite with Bruce.
14 Feb "It's clear? It says yes." R says he'll consider. 26 Feb
negotiation, "Reno money - I said give me a budget and I'll stick to
it and if I want to go over I'll find ways to fund it. He said and we can
discuss." 3-4 March with R in Merritt. "... measured. Did I stop
to feel out whether it's right. I'm past that it seems, was taking possession
though in a shallow not very felt way. Intention is carrying me." 13
March "I'm frightened about the house. When I think of it my heart
shakes. I hadn't heard from Rob for a week though I'd sent him this and
that. Phoned him last night. 'What are we thinking? By which I mean what
are you thinking.' He had been thinking no. That first part of the conversation
dropped me into a well of fear. I seem to really want this, I'm not in balance,
I'm set on it." 19 March R phoned to say yes he'll make an offer. 28
March "Homestead, my homestead. My stead. My stand." 30 March
"All at once there it was, 'accepted offer' from Janis. Burst into
loud sobs." 4 April not sure R isn't pulling back, "Cold stroke
of fear." 5 April Merritt for house inspection, worry about asbestos.
12 April no asbestos. 15 April R lifted conditions and sent a cheque. FB
notice posted. 16 April load of boxes to storage in Merritt, met Robin.
23 April second load of boxes, "Standing with the two of them really
joyful in the good exchange." April 30 "I was desperate to have
it and now I'm here. It's as if I've made an arranged marriage: whatever
it is here I stay."
Began that looking for an anniversary date to celebrate. It's March 30.
5 March "Willow switches coral, orange, bright straw yellow. Sagebrush
quite lush. Small swift green river." 8 April fruit trees blooming
in Ashcroft, clove currant. 16 April balsamroot on the slopes. 23 April
"Dry country was wide awake with water, cattle standing in pools, the
silty Nicola full to the top and spreading wide wherever it could, sage
hills greening like some other kind of place, startling purple patches on
the cutbank, chokecherry blooming along the road." By April 30 lilacs
everywhere.
Tomato plants up in the verandah, tiny flagpoles. Tiny onions and lettuce.
Shelley and I moved the dirt pile this morning and emptied the unfrozen
half of one compost bay. She's 51, grey-haired, Nova Scotian, grown son
living with her, shooter on oil rigs out of Calgary, a valiant scrambler
but natters at random. I forked dirt into the wheelbarrow next to her trying
to focus her on where she was.
As I was writing that two fire engines south on Chapman flashing a lot
of red. Other motors roaring after them.
Tired but have to stay awake another couple of hours.
Was wearing the Old Woman with a Doctoral Degree hoodie even shopping
for a wheelbarrow tire and no one has seemed to notice.
26
Watching a film of my own, shot near the floor,
a small child moving in light so beautiful I was wondering whether it was
sunlight reflected off a yellow floor. Across the room sitting at a little
table was another very small child, this one brown-skinned with a scholarly
look. I said he was my sister's adopted son. Then I was watching with a
couple of other people who were getting bored probably because I had the
sound off. I was thinking this film would be longer, twenty minutes maybe
and rent for more money. What else. Walking east on Hastings toward home
carrying a wicker chair in the rain.
Sunday morning phosphorescent along the ridge, soft grey overhead. Nothing
moving but the birds. Louie in Amsterdam hearing a blackbird sing.
27
Warmest afternoon so far. Jenn and I got the stepping-stone blocks in
and finished graveling the pad. The chairs are in place, iron pipe on end
for a table base. I made corner posts of the two concrete squares. Jenn
said she'd learned from me. I said what. She said the way I re-use things
that were already here.
We dug up one of the line of bulb-looking things that have shown up in
what was the squash bed as well as the gravel alongside the foundation,
a mystery because we'd dug that bed last summer. Sure enough little bulbs,
set very deep and flimsy-exhausted looking maybe as if they'd been suppressed
for years.
- Can begin planting this and that around the pad now and can start to
form the beds and paths. There are four planting wells along with the dwarf
peach pockets. Should I try some herb seeds in the gravel itself, or Coyote
Valley Road wildflowers that are in gravel now.
Because I worked Saturday I was so feeble and sore yesterday I dozed
blankly off and on all day. Tomorrow will likely be that too, the cost.
Had to buy more aspirin this morning. While I was working this aft I was
fine, though, except for the fading-out sensation about three hours along.
Pleased with the stepping-stone blocks. I envisioned them and there they
are, a nice even line. The pad is still a rough gawky imposition that will
be years aging into my intention. The steps are good, though; it works for
them.
While she was trying to set one of the blocks Jenn had to dig up quite
a big rock. It turned out to be a color we both exclaimed over, a dark blue-green
I'll wash off tomorrow to see better.
29
It was raining this morning and is supposed to rain tomorrow again so
I thought I shd sow the wildflower seeds along the street edges.
30
I was trying to get into a university entrance.
There had been soil dumped over the steps - dark, gravelly, maybe cindery
- heavy stuff - chest-high - that seemed to be there to support two large
projectors. I was struggling to climb onto it. A man's hand came from behind
pushing my backside to help me. It wasn't enough. Another man with a narrow
face and thin pale hair was lying on the heap in front of me. I reached
my arm to him asking him to pull me. He did. I was on my belly beside him
asking him what he thinks about. He named a kind of mathematics I hadn't
heard of. I didn't know what to say to that. I said something I knew was
untrue about knowing what it is like to have mathematics in one's head.
Patted his temple and went on into an entrance that still wasn't the right
one.
It was one of those baffled anxious dreams where
I'm looking for someplace I'm needing to get back to. My little boy was
upstairs needing me to get him dressed and fed before school. I should have
been with him overnight but had stayed where I was, which I thought of as
'home,' as if my parents' place. I'd gone up three escalators at this corner
entrance but when I came to the fourth it didn't look right. Maybe it was
the other entrance down the block and facing south like the SFU entrance.
It was a long block and when I'd got there finally I walked straight into
a classroom full of people. There was no way through, all the doors opened
straight into more classrooms full of people. The other entrance must be
the right one. I went back and that was when I came to the covered steps.
Earlier, maybe the first time at that entrance,
I'd come into the college and was standing at the top of a flight of steps.
I glanced sideways. There was Jam looking down folding her umbrella. Her
hair was down and she was wearing a calf-length cream-colored nubbed-silk
skirt. I said hello. She said I looked good, which I doubted, and went on
as if she had somewhere to be. She looked a prosperous coherent female professor.
I felt she had accepted being a woman and it suited her.
Writing anything I'm aware of the sloppiness of the first phrase I hear.
I have to stop and consider. Writing dreams I feel that if I'm not accurate
the dream can't say what it might have to say. At the same time dreaming
is so unstable it isn't remembered well enough to be written accurately.
I'm aware of skipping and gliding, surmising. Saying this in the aura of
Richardson's paragraphs which are so packed with phenomenology I hardly
ever read them fully. Miriam is always struggling to express or feeling
she can't express because people won't understand.
April 2
Sunday 6.24am. Grey-blue dawn. The thermometer says zero. Pavement wet,
my new clean beds dusted with white. Good for the wildflowers maybe, a slowed
release.
This morning asking a woman whether she's on FB.
I sometimes post Handel, I said, trying to remember the names of singers.
Yesterday following a path to the ocean cresting a ridge to see a long view
across dunes. Morning before that ugly people, first one then a crowd, invading
this house at night.
There's a sun bow just a dab in the sky above the linden, dissolving
and returning against a slow cloud. - Now it has stretched, is brighter
again. Has risen. Then fades. Glitter lines along the northern edges of
twigs. Eaves dripping. Snow on the hills, white breath above them.
-
I was walking west down the centre of Granite Ave this morning with my
camera. A man walking east on the sidewalk glanced over and said good morning.
He might have had the kind of narrow intelligent face I like. The beautiful
guy at the alley corner in Ashcroft. It goes back further too, I'm realizing,
to Violet Lane Thompson's husband in her photos, "a radiant man with
a long chin". I was lying in my bed at noon with my eyes closed because
I was aching. I consoled myself imagining a good man, a right man. That
kind of face is quiet and intelligent with kind curious eyes. He'd have
been a geologist maybe, he'd have done a PhD, but he'd be living in a cabin
and wanting to write something. If he saw me digging in the garden he'd
stop and help.
3
The Golden West. Months when I was back in San Diego in 1999 wrestling
with Tom and the where system. Being about and The Golden West
are a pair and both are at my far edge. I worked to understand mind and
I worked to understand love. If I could write them as one work in a publishable
accessible way I'd have stood up in the world as my most complete self.
It's a better story than Jam and I have more platform in it than I do in
poetics.
5
- The subtlety of the blue in the room anytime. It's a blue with air
in it. Why's that - maybe the white behind it floats in front of it? Something
like that.
-
- What is that floating in qualities of times - falling asleep reading
an academic paper this afternoon, I was slipping into an air so fresh,
young and particular it was as if a memory registered in a sense modality
I never notice as such. As if that's what's meant by 'spirit,' because
it's always qualities of air that is more than air, something that pervades
a perceiving person as their inner atmosphere. A condition of sensing not
a kind of sensing.
6
Lindiwe writes that the New School has accepted her for poetry and non-fiction.
So pleased by that, pleased to have helped her big spirit.
Bare grey Thursday morning. April a blank pause it seems. Beauty will
come back but not yet.
Things to do: finish making paths before I buy compost on the 8th. Edge
the long fence bed. Empty two of the compost slots and transfer the third.
Measure and stake for the cold frame. Find out when Ashcroft opens for fruit
trees. Have Jenn or someone dig planting holes for the filberts. Note community
plant sale times and free dump day. When the beds have compost plant April
seeds. Find and plant fruit trees.
For film: Seoul letter, Seoul ticket research, passport photos and passport,
CC travel grant.
House: window? Laundry room?
Other: Adam this weekend? Paul at the end of the month. Van for filberts?
Ashcroft for clove currants and maybe for fruit trees. Bylands in Kelowna?
- What I'd do if I had money - go back to my pagan studies and make films
- I would make films for the far future - immaculate states of beauty -
I'd have a big light workroom and fine equipment and helpers - a tech pagan
- I'd go to New York and stay in a hotel - work would be all I'd need.
-
- I've distilled a drug. It's very concentrated, very swift. It's a relation
of vision and language. In vision it's motion and color, slight and faint;
in language it's brief and exact, precisely rhythmic, aural. I feel I could
work out of it forever, joyfully.
7
Robert Richardson Emerson: the mind on fire 1995 University of
California Press
Reading Richardson's biog of Emerson because Dorothy praised him. Here
a through-line from Coleridge. "Each man, by finding out what he feels,
discovers the laws of the universe." (That's not C.) Emerson an energetic
journal-writer and note-taker from his teens. Richardson goes into E's intellectual
sources in detail and is congenially feminist, acknowledging the influence
of E's formidable female peers, and yet I skip the philosophy impatiently
because it's all so dated. The vast machine of death-denying mind-body dualism
grinds on with such insistency in E and his whole intellectual cohort. "My
angel is gone to heaven this morning." Dickenson's era too. Along with
their continuously losing battle to believe in an immortal soul such fear
and fascination with death. Patrick O'Brian writing their years simply skips
the religion. Aubrey and Maturin live mortal lives of adventure and discovery,
they don't stew in theological anxiety. We die, people. When we give up
hoping not to everything quietens down.
Have been dipping into 1998-1999 with Tom. I can vaguely imagine making
a publishable book of the Golden West years but the writing about Tom, at
least, is so close a transcription of particular times that it seems irreducible.
- Something about that, in a mortal life the present moment expands and
contemporary style in writing comes of that expansion.
Reading Richardson thinking of the American Lit course with Professor
Newell ("English 35 American Literature from Emerson to Frost").
(Tuesday January 19th 1965 "Am reading Emerson, a complex philosopher-essayist-poet
of early 19th century America, and am immersed in his huge and struggling
outlook on life." [RF3-3]) The way to write a paper on Emerson now
wd be to compare his style to someone contemporary in light of that shift.
No one, not even Carlyle, ever wrote Emerson
letters that better combined philosophical acuity and passionate personal
statement. Her letters give her essential style, a style that, Emerson said,
"admits of all the force of colloquial domestic words, and breaks,
and parenthesis, and petulance - has the kick and inspiration of that, -
has humor, affection, and a range from the rapture of prayer down to the
details of farm and barn and help."
- That of his aunt Mary Moody Emerson.
was intellectually isolated during the early
years out of college, living - in a phrase he got from Charles Lamb - in
a "solitude of unshared energies"
Emerson's organized, persistent, purposeful
journal keeping is one of the most striking aspects of his early intellectual
life. He wrote constantly, he wrote about everything .... When he had nothing
to say he wrote about having nothing to say. He read and indexed and reread
what he had written.
sailed for Europe on the brig Ocean
"I regard it as the irresistible effect
of the Copernican astronomy to have made the teleological scheme of redemption
absolutely incredible." The new astronomy had revealed a world and
a universe that could no longer usefully be described as fallen.
the planet on which we are embarked and making
our annual voyage in the unharbored deep
"What I loved in the man," Carlyle
told Mill .... a moment when two extraordinary natures, both still in the
formative stage, met, a day like that on which Melville met Hawthorne or
when Coleridge "leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field
by which he cut off an angle."
"reason never reasons, never proves, it
simply perceives ...." What Emerson now perceived was that the 'reason'
of Milton, Coleridge, and the Germans was another name for what the Quakers
recognized as the inner light.
- There's Dorothy again, from Emerson to Quakers. 'Inner light' must
be what I call the book. I know the experience but I don't understand their
making post-Kant transcendental idealism of it. It's still about death denial?
She had taken dancing lessons when young and
always retained a beautiful walk.
8
Yesterday I surfed awake. I was some distance from
shore looking back toward the beach. A massive wave surged up under and
around me. There was a moment of fear. Then it was carrying me in.
This morning I was walking in a broad college corridor
with my young son. Green terrazzo or lino floor. As we walked down a series
of short flights of steps to leave I was telling him that when I first came
to university that corridor had been the dorm room I was assigned to, a
huge room with beds in many rows. I was remembering what it had been like
to arrive there, the glamour of it, the excitement. But then I had a puzzled
double consciousness that no it hadn't happened, my dorm room had been in
Ban Righ, and yes I was definitely remembering it. The sense of actually
remembering was so strong I'm feeling I must have dreamed it at some other
time.
9
Sherry and Denise knocked on the door yesterday afternoon. "I'm
guaranteed NDP" I said and tried to talk to them about their gardens.
In the puzzle about what 'spirit' could mean for Emerson and his kind
I sometimes imagine an inkling of the electromagnetic ether they were too
early to imagine.
10
Goddard College began in 1863 in Barre, Vermont,
as the Green Mountain Central Institute and in 1870 was renamed Goddard
Seminary. Founded by Universalists, Goddard Seminary was a four-year preparatory
high school ... added a Junior College to the Seminary in 1935 ... progressive
educator and follower of John Dewey ... educational democracy ... a new
style of education, one that substituted individual attention, democracy,
and informality for the traditionally austere and autocratic educational
model ... 1938, Goddard College was chartered ... moved to Greatwood Farm
... built a reputation as one of the most innovative colleges ... use of
discussion as the basic method in classroom teaching; its emphasis on the
whole lives of students in determining personal curricula; its incorporation
of practical work into the life of every student; and its development of
the college as a self-governing learning community ... 1963 first low-residency
adult education program
- Looked that up because I was noticing how Emerson's New England is
a Goddard antecedent. He invented lectures there on anything at all and
so did I.
I like the omnivorous way he lived though his strenuously devised philosophy
seems vacuous to me.
There is one mind common to all individual men.
There isn't. Abolition wd have been one reason to insist there is but
actually minds are inscrutably different.
-
Scent of balsam from the branches on the table next to me. Pale sun late
afternoon. The blue spruce looks more awake. A silvery fuzz around the eleagnus
tips. Yesterday Jenn and I worked through mid-day in teeshirts. I set a
whole bed's strawberry transplants from the runners of the half-dozen plants
I put in last spring. Am using up all the bricks in fence-bed edging. Broken
halves to hold down row cover. Bought a Festiva Maxima, a hardy gooseberry,
a Red Lake currant. Paths between beds are made. The garden has its main
shapes except for the cold frame and bench pad.
11
Other world? There is no other world: here or
nowhere is the whole fact.
- He'd gotten to that in his forties.
The mere name of reeds and grasses, of the milk
weeds, of the mint tribe and the gentians, of mallows and trefoils, are
a lively pleasure
tried to manage his whole life so as to present
as much transitional surface as possible
12
I was dreaming first clematis flowers, many kinds
of fuzzy blue or blue and white here and there in what I thought of as this
garden. Rob had planted them so I thought I'd take photos for him. It was
dark and the new phone's flash didn't go off. Etc.
Big pile of mushroom manure.
Daphne yesterday. A bright early morning. She sent a note while I was
at the monitor first thing. I said is now too soon. We wandered in her acre
looking at a lot of kinds of bare stalk live and dead, a lot of felled tree
trunks. She's pretty, has a pretty bow of mouth, slim legs, smooth silver-gold
hair. So smiling and 'positive' I've wondered whether she's split and likes
to drink. Maybe just fortunate. Was a special-needs educator. The odd thing
is that on FB she's pro-Putin and links into a conspiracy network. Pro-Putin
to be anti-US I suppose, but pro-Putin, where can that come from?! In gardening
she's impulsive and disorganized, sticks things in and then wants to move
them, has ideas for a stump garden, an evergreen garden. Likes plants that
stick up or flop down. Doesn't like orange, likes chartreuse and pale pink.
Likes shrubs. New greenhouse. I brought her to see my house, which she raved
over. She's more conventional and social than I am and only half as bright
but she's bright for Merritt. We'll be friends of sorts. Will drink wine
and stay away from politics.
- Just realizing I never know or even ask how I seem to other people
when I meet them this way. I've suspended that question in unknowability.
Is that actually true. These days I do assume I'm ugly and blankly uncharming.
Then I want to say Oh well. Is it an unnecessary old stoicism.
- Am I ugly and uncharming no
It's damp this morning, mid-week grey and slow.
On messaging yesterday trying to explain to Luke how to sit with pain.
- you'll see the moon
- quite something tonight
- spilling on my dark floor
- full southern, 11 o'clock
-
The garden was crawling with blackbirds, starlings, crows. A raven on
the fence.
varietal names, the once valued separate qualities
of each of Emerson's more than a hundred trees
-
When I look up anything in San Diego I feel instantly at home.
Tom was quoted on a historical piece about the Golden West just now.
Bud died last spring. Mike posted his Blurb book about visiting in 2010
and there I am on Ocean Beach Pier oddly fat-faced with Tom looking unpresented.
Touched to see photos of Tom I didn't take. Heartache of missing. Did he
do that on purpose? It's never been that I didn't get over someone. He's
a whole context.
- Do you have any advice evasion of
missing has been love woman's strength
- Missing is an improvement yes
- I'm just supposed to hurt for the rest of my life
no
- Am I supposed to go find him no
- But I hardly want to go on living yes
- I don't want to live without love and touch
YES
- And there's never going to be love and touch again
yes
- So should I kill myself NO
- Why not the Work, (emperor), deep
change, community
- I don't understand power struggle,
anger, passage from difficulties, balance in the midst of change
-
- Should I give up this house NO
- Should I leave Merritt no
- I haven't done any work this winter no
- Is the garden enough no
- But it's all I have yes
- Haven't I earned more than this yes
13
Lying on a carpet looking toward the crack under
a door. Quick blips of shadow I thought were of rabbits playing in the yard.
A man had lain down on my left, put an arm over me. I said "I like
it but I don't want your wife to be unhappy or ----."
Passing my driveway I saw a heap of rocks and bricks
that meant someone had taken over my garden. I was sobbing in little grunts,
nuh nuh nuh nuh.
Raining. Snow on the mountain.
I have to take better hold of this last stage. I'm subsisting in defeat,
convinced nothing can matter, in pain or junking to try to stay out of pain.
Worried my money is running down. Lonely, lonely. On strike with myself,
sort of, isn't it -
- Talk to me Ellie, imagining, (KnC),
(Devil)
- Refusing hope yes
- Do you have a practical suggestion act,
against mourning, get energy, from defeat
- Is that what you mean yes
- Defiance no
- Notice the energy I'm already putting into defeat
yes
I see that.
14
Dreamed the comradely moment in sex when we'd found
ourselves holding hands. This is hard to say well: there are our
hands at a little distance from ourselves trusting friends quietly joined.
-
Expensive new crown a lovely tooth smooth and impervious.
-
Easter weekend.
-
- What do I still have to live for:
- Luke's company
- music
- the effort to write
- flowers
- scent of plants
- sight of trees
- driving the jeep
- taste of food
It's remarkable how uninterested I am in people.
- Do you understand that quick overview
shows no lovers arriving
- The only thing I'm interested in is a lover
yes
- It's always been like that yes
- I could be interested in students because I made lovers
of them yes
- Are you saying if I want more liveliness I have to be
more intimate with people yes
- I write people off as incapable yes
- And they are no
- Intimate basically means fearlessly honest
yes
- Louie is interested in people differently
yes
- Management yes
part 4
time remaining volume 5: 2015 may-august
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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