15 April
Up and over this morning - Okanagan connector 97c - tedious empty Canada
for 74 miles, not a gas station, not a café, just signs saying brake
check and chain up. First it was shabby ranchland, worn-out bunchgrass like
an old pelt. Then it got very high - forest and snow and forest and snow
- a wind-farm grove at the logged off summit - sick-looking pines - long
view to an impressively distant range. Then the road dropped out of winter
again, lake below and now it'll be a real town, but it wasn't a real town,
just more sawmill yards and miscellaneous redneck efforts at commerce. I
assumed it would be shorter coming home and it was but it seemed a couple
of weeks later in the season too. I'd stopped being nervous about freeway
driving and was in love with the roadcut's shards of broken rock - copper
green, dove grey, battleship grey, dry rust, wet rust, gold, buff, cream,
blue, pink-grey, mauve - always more, in sorted spills one after another,
often only a few feet apart.
What I brought home: a pear, a dwarf peach, a nectarine, a paeony, two
iris a white and a blue, four roses, some moss phlox and some hardy salvias.
There's a cold wind. It's too cold to plant. But now I'm finally ready to
drive more, to Art Knapp's in Kamloops and to Desert Hills in Ashcroft and
then probably to Van.
16
Have never been indecisive with other people's garden plans but have
stayed so uncertain about mine. After a year am still moving things around
in Sketchup. What do I know that I didn't. I want the hazelnut hedge for
a dark background and a screen. Will it need wind shelter while it establishes?
I want a crabapple for the white flowers and small fruit. The pear needs
to be where it doesn't throw shade on vegetables. The peach, nectarine and
apricot need the south wall and maybe they'll like the gravel's heat. Can
they be alright in gravel wells? Anything edible that doesn't have a shell
shouldn't be next to the road so I've moved the Saskatchewan cherries in.
Plums along the west wall - plums I don't have yet. I've edged the entry
path with ribes. The Therese Bugnet bed can have the paeonies, iris, salvia
nemorosa and then needs some white froth like Queen Anne's lace. Nasturtiums
here and there all over. Poppies same. Lots of yellow rose of Texas along
the north end of the east fence - plant those soon.
18
Fast up the Coque to Kamloops this morning feeling this is what locals
do. Art Knapp's nursery rows with a wise kind stoner called Tony. Came home
with an antique crab, four filberts and a Golden Celebration. 5a on the
way home, grasslands and lakes all the same color, grayish tan, except along
Nicola Lake shrub willows pink or dark red and tree willows shockingly orange
or gold. Still need a greengage, a damson, an apricot and a pear pollinator.
Spending recklessly, oh well. (Sigh.)
Making the Strathcona garden I used to leave the house at 7 in the morning
and come home at 9 at night. Now when I have to stop after a couple of hours
I'm hung up with my wheels spinning, I write these notes badly instead of
working more.
Looked up from dumping compost on a bed and oh! saw a pasqueflower
in the Cox's bed. We called them crocus and slogged through the mud to Hill
Sixty's dry slope to pick them for our mama. When I say that I feel her
loss of the children we were, who confidently loved her best.
There has begun to be enough order in the garden so I'm liking to look
at it.
Johnny-jump-ups have been blooming for a week. Scent of violets. These
almost white. They show up all over the garden.
I planted the Whitney crabapple at the south end of long row 2 where
it will show against the garage. It will have good-tasting crabapples Tony
said but may not bloom for ten years.
Emerson was 50 in 1853. He was aware now of
external losses and inner subsidence, of fresh limitations and flagging
energies. He told Carlyle that he wrote much less than formerly. "It
is pleasant to go to the woods in good company," he wrote, "but
who dare go to the woods to poverty, and necessity, and living alone, or
with sick, sour, and dependent people, and to ask nothing and expect nothing
further than to match the solitude you find, with the solitude you bring
...?"
"Thoughts are few, facts few - only one:
one only fact, now tragically, now tenderly, now exultingly illustrated
in sky, in earth, in men and women, Fate, Fate."
In 1855 Whitman was 36, sent a copy of Leaves of grass to E, who
by his lifetime's work and study was completely ready to read it when hardly
anyone else was.
"He would lay his hand on my coat sleeve
when he was about to say something; touch me sort of half-apologetically
as if saying, if I may be permitted!"
"I often say of Emerson that the personality
of the man present in all he writes, thinks, does, hopes - goes far toward
justifying the whole literary business - the whole raft good and bad - the
whole system."
The days are gods. "The young mortal enters
the hall of the firmament: there he is alone with them alone, they pouring
on him benedictions and gifts. there are the gods still sitting around him
on their thrones, -- they alone with him alone."
Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise
of what you love.
Sometime in 1859 Emerson wrote "I have
now for more than a year, I believe, ceased to write in my journal, in which
I formerly wrote almost daily - I see few intellectual persons, and even
those to no purpose, and sometimes believe that I have no new thoughts,
and that my life is quite at an end."
Origin of species appeared in America in the early months of 1860.
20
Axelrod Point of vanishing. I'm reading it suspiciously and competitively.
He lost vision in one eye and lived alone in the woods for 18 months and
then used these two glamorous facts to get entry as a writer. He thanks
an MFA program, seven writing residencies and maybe five dozen readers.
The book is so professionally constructed that I'm reading it from the back.
I dislike the sharp ratty face in his author photo. His suffocating family
horrifies me. He has Harvard and money behind him and is winning by being
second-rate: he exaggerates; he's forcing 'sensitive' perception; I often
don't believe his claims. And yet. He's more what I want to be than I am.
[Sigh.]
Two surprising little birds jumping and pecking on the dark wet ground,
yellow caps, blue-grey backs, black and white bars. They're exquisite. Sibley
and Cornell say yellow-rumped warblers.
The garden is a place now, dark rows of beds, currants and gooseberries
lined up, and best and most, two trees facing each other north to south,
an apricot, a crab, each with its flanking stakes and the crab with attendant
cherry shrubs on either side. There's a shape.
- In what way. I am physically anomalous, much more visibly than he is
and more discredited by it, and I have kept going off to live alone. I've
studied and loved places where I was solitary. I don't have a book but that
isn't what I mean. What I mean is that my brain doesn't flow the way his
does. I don't like his cognitive busyness and the way he fancifies his writing
so the whole book is about how special he is rather than about what he's
with, despite saying he's about being about what he's with, but still I'd
like to drift and flow more, I'd like the adventure of drifting and flowing
more. I'd like to do it with more integrity and less Jewish male entitlement
but still I'd like to entertain myself more.
Try again: his descriptions are so decorated with irrelevant metaphor
that they exasperate me. He could be showing me an actual different kind
of being than I am, sometimes does but keeps messing it up with what feels
mistakenly ingratiating. "Sometimes they were crossed by the hieroglyphic
tracks of a squirrel or deer or snowshoe hare, as though in some other realm
a friendly meeting had occurred, forest gossip exchanged." What is
that, a Disney memory?
In chapter 3 he does talk about not having depth perception or peripheral
vision on his right but after that doesn't he describe as if he's seeing
normally. Mostly it's as if he's naming his difference as what he calls
his dreaminess, which had existed before his accident and can be thought
of as his literary gift. Is the book a social sell in ways I've suspected
of myself at times?
-
Since then I planted five of the Yellow Rose of Texas suckers by the
verandah corner, and a couple more of the pink wild rose along the north,
and Yvonne's purple irislets at the gatepost rocks, and the four filberts
- two sticks and a couple of graceful two-year olds - where the rowans were
along the white fence.
I invited Yvonne to dinner next week but then she said LOL twice on FB
messaging so maybe it was a mistake. Daphne has offered heritage paeonies
- and minded that her spellchecker took out the a - but is talking
about selling her place.
-
Gail gave me a big chunk of yellow iris that I've plonked in by the apricot
tree.
April 22 Saturday
A man at a conference had come up to me and given
me his manuscript that he'd thought I might be interested in because it
was something about film. It was a thick white pile double-spaced and stapled
like an academic thesis. I didn't look at it until later. In the meantime
I was leafing through my own business papers, insurance papers and notes
on something I was going to have to deal with. There was a sheet of my dad's
with a word written in pencil at the top right corner. I was thinking I
do that sometimes too, write a label on the upper corner. Then I thought,
no, I don't have to go into all this now and picked up the manuscript. It
came apart into two piles, the second labeled with the number II. I noticed
the man had a PhD but oddly expanded with more letters I couldn't figure
out between the Ph and the D. I was scanning here and there beginning to
marvel at how full and unusual a book it was. The foreword was as if poetry.
There was something too about the health of backs. He'd been a type of man
I wasn't attracted to, an opaque-skinned slight man with dark curly hair
and a curly beard, maybe Jewish, European-looking, but now I was wanting
to know him.
- In reading dreams the way there's swift quite rich unstable invention
that afterwards I can't recall. Picture-book dreams are like that too though
sometimes I remember more.
Rereading Fromm's biog of Richardson liking its homey practicality about
how she and Alan lived in the years after Pointed roofs. I don't
believe Fromm when she tries to interpret and second-guess but I thank her
for her dutiful research into money worries, bad reviews, cold cottages,
health scares, stormy Decembers, new and long friendships, praise letters,
publisher negotiations, translations and magazine pieces, aging. By Dimple
Hill DR said the writing seemed to her like that of a 'somewhat ponderously-moving
stout old dame'.
- Angry where Fromm ends the book, "in spite of her great gifts
she did not achieve greatness." How dare she imagine herself qualified
to make that judgment. She compares DR with Joyce and Woolf as if to hedge
her own reputation - 'I gave all these years to an author who isn't great
but you'll notice I'm not deluded.' I hate that. Then she says DR did not
achieve greatness because she wasn't able to choose between art and life,
which Woolf was. That is nonsense. Woolf never had to choose between art
and life because the life she was born to was a life of art; within it Woolf
chose life more than anyone did, she reveled. It's true her books are more
shaped, but DR was doing something else, she was advocating for fringe possibilities
of state. DR was great as a specifically feminist experimental artist working
a phenomenological edge, none greater.
When did I read Fromm last, July 1981. This time through I'm more interested
in DR's old age. She lost hope for Pilgrimage in the end, it seemed
nothing would come of it. She let it peter out. In 1945, after the war,
she was 72. Three more years with Alan, visitors, letters, good times in
the village. Alan died in 1948 when he had just turned 60. She sat and stared
for ten days and then before her 75th birthday that summer sat down with
the whole of Pilgrimage correcting printing errors so she could donate
it to the Padstow library. She suddenly had enough money. She was still
in the cottage. There were visitors. She could still write. Then in 1953,
when she was 80, she wrote two postcards that were "the last words
she ever wrote to anyone". The year after, they wrenched her out of
Cornwall to a nursing home where she was regimented and had to share a room.
She endured three years of that angry and shut down until she died in June
of 1957. - My journal begins January 1958.
23
It was sunny at eight this morning. When I'd made tea I went out and
planted, first the Golden Celebration and the White Dawn in opposite corners
of the lattice. I had to set stepping blocks in what'll be the rose patch
and throw compost on all of it, then could plant the Alnwick and the Thérèse
Bugnet. A white iris next to Gail's yellow. Crocosmia's red with salvia
nemorosa's blue in the gravel well at the foot of the steps. The little
fig in the well against the wall. Another nemorosa with arabis in SW gravel
well. Herbs along the foot of the gravel pad. Both white paeonies, the double
and the single, lined up next to the concrete rim. I kept not knowing whether
to plant the nectarine in the rock bed or in the gravel well: is the shelter
of the wall more important or is being able to spread its surface roots.
I decided on surface roots in the end, which leaves that gravel well for
maybe a little shrub, maybe a magnolia or philadelphus? The blue iris at
the foot of the rock bed. Kept hauling more barrow loads of compost. Mulched
the rhubarb, which is looking so so vigorous with its clenched dark-green
fists. That was five hours. Later went out again to set up the pea support
and plant half a row of shelling and half a row of snap, with nasturtiums
at either end to climb up the round ends.
The river junction is flatter and wider, an even silty brown. Property
Guys sign on Daphne's fence.
25
Day on the road. As we drove west the spring came on fast. Halfway to
Spences Bridge the first saskatoon almost in bloom, bit further a flash
of balsamroot. By Ashcroft leaves out, fruit trees pink and white. We stood
on Callie's yard again smelling the balsam poplars, hearing the river. A
train hammered past on the far side of the river. I liked her perennial
beds' many spikes of iris and tulip, red paeony clumps, a lot of soft green.
Then we climbed to my old place and dug up three clove currant shoots. Sat
at a picnic table at Sam's Diner drinking cokes. Had a little rumble: he
said I always say no; I said he never enquires. We seemed to be even. A
realtor took us winding down and around to an improbable piece of ground
below Boston Flats, a scrubby bench all the way next to the Bonaparte. Sagebrush
in fresh leaf, a heap of broken cabin, a sagging trestle, a rusted pipe.
Home through other kinds of marvels on 97c, Highland Valley Copper Mine's
still-iced copper-green tailings pond and vast long shelves of crushed colored
rock, everywhere the exquisite tints of shrubs coming into sap - yellow,
bright red, hazy pearly pink-grey. Then as we sank into Merritt's valleys
all the subtlety of bud-clouds around trees.
26
Cold wind, sky white and blue, Paul just gone, Yvonne coming to dinner,
wildflower seedlings showing along the fence, the Manitoba maple just starting
into leaf, a row of new plants on the gravel pad, chitted potatoes, the
pear tree to place, the new philadelphus, the new Iceberg. The brick edging
to finish and the fence bed to prep all the way up. It's late enough for
lettuce, onions, beets, carrots, etc. More barrows of compost to place.
- Mail a rent cheque.
28
It rained last evening but as I went to bed there were bright stars in
black sky. This morning my wet dark earth has a slight rime of frost like
a calcium deposit.
Alan Burger said no to my turkey movie. I'm angry and muttering insults.
What else haven't I dealt with. What Paul said.
Young women's academic books about DR. There was one arguing she was
a lesbian and obediently going on about 'encoding'. This one shows its origin
in Santa Cruz by its pretentious fuzziness. Can I say that better. Reading
a paragraph is like rooting through an unsorted heap and then the next paragraph
is another unsorted heap with some of the same materials. She can't dig
down and get clear because she's needing to be impressive in the specious
Santa Cruz way.
-
I hauled 8 or 10 barrows of compost this morning and planted first the
peach and then the pear. Set some more stepping blocks.
- Am I being fair to Alan Burger yes
- Did he say no because I'm a woman yes
- Does he know that's why no
- Was it correct to tell him he was discourteous
YES
- Should I have known better no
- Would you have said I shouldn't do it no
- Should I stop going no
- Is there more I should do no
- Is there anything you want to say in
anguish, of loss, balancing, yourself
- Instruction no, description
-
- Do I say no to Paul no
- He notices it more when I do YES
- Because I'm a woman no because you're
his big sister
- He heard what I said about not enquiring
yes
- I was carefully exact yes
- And brought us through YES
- Is it okay in him now yes
-
- Do you like the garden yes
- Is there anything you want to say about it
YES graduate to community generosity before you die
- Use it to give stuff no
- Use it to be connected yes
- Do you want to say more no
- What happened to the little green glass bottle I dug up in London?
I was wanting it for johnny-jump-ups. - What happened to all my porcelain
pinch pots?
- Another thing I don't like about this Gevirtz book is that she keeps
saying DR uses stylistic strategies to make Pilgrimage hard to read.
When I found it at 29 I didn't find it hard, I found it native as if my
own blood temperature. She is writing the consciousness of a young intelligent
person. The less intelligent won't easily follow but that's just a consequence
of her project. I now have to read her more slowly because my brain is older.
29
It was too cold, I watered by hand but left everything else. Walked away
from Jenn and Ben's yard sale feeling bereft. Was it the copy of the Mabinogian
I gave her in the for sale box, which made me feel she had liked me less
than I her - and had been humoring me for the money so my happiness working
with her was a delusion - or was it the true but typically misdirected awkward
sadness of a goodbye.
I cancelled Seoul. My note could say it was the mad American president's
unpredictability in relation to North Korea but I was relieved when the
book said don't go - passport, Canada Council travel grant application,
clothes, shoes, hair, teeth, long flight, and then having to be a sore,
lame, self-consciously unattractive old woman in a harsh unfamiliar city.
The 29th - it's a year since I moved in. "Lilacs all over town."
Then by May 3rd "A lot of little plums forming, size of an apple seed.
The yard is a shambles of old wood, gravel, little piles of stones and bricks,
round lumps of hollyhock. Strong scent of mountain ash flowers. Across the
street little white anemones. What May is like, this boiling-out of trees
in flower, lilacs everywhere, other trees too, across the road in St Michael's
yard two trees impressively pink against a Russian olive."
30
Fair winds, compadre. Wherever you are.
One plum blossom open but it's too cold for bees, cold wind. Eight crows
in the yard, smooth glossy blue-black little hustlers waddling over everything
poking and peering, shoved sideways by the wind when they flap up to the
garage roof.
-
Finished the fence bed's brick edge today, dug it, compost-mulched it.
Watering-can watered everything. Added up the whack I've spent on garden
this month, $1250. The hardest work and biggest spending are done.
Smelling johnny-jump-ups in the little medicine bottle and balsam poplar
rooting in its glass vase. A dim sense of flower scent, what was it, as
if it's from an elsewhere, not the ordinary world.
There's late sun on the blue fir swaying and twisting its long upcurved
arms, some of them toward the top end-weighted with cones.
I'm tired, sore. I need heat.
1st May
May Day 6:30am the sun cold silver in grey batten above the television
house. Windless. I've uncovered the peach and the yellow rose.
Cookson's Guide came finally - his acknowledgements thank Jamila
Ismail - did she actually know enough written Chinese or was she bluffing
- she has a good name and I always liked her handwriting - if she weren't
so tight-sphinctered I wd like talking to her, I mean if she would
talk - and it sets me instantly back into my quest for a project, the project,
the long deep project that can carry me out fully occupied at stretch.
There the sun eye-shaped glaring silver from upper branches of the dark
spruce. - And gone out. How can anything come alive in this endless grey.
Pound claimed epic. Epic is men, his epic is his claim to lineage. DR
claimed pilgrimage instead, but is that accurate: she meant to tell the
story of coming to be herself against temptations and limits given. She
meant Bunyan I guess. Pound claimed all history, she claimed Edwardian mostly
London March 1893 - autumn of 1912. Seventeen to thirty-six, not quite her
own period, she compressed because she was lying to Alan about her age,
but anyway the pre-war. What do I have, what am I. I can claim both parents
but what's my DNA from each: phenomenology from DR, lyric from EP. Light
from both. World from world. Cosmology and neuroscience from the last twenty
years. La Glace, old Ontario, London, Valhalla, the Pacific northwest, California.
He claimed deeds and declarations, she and Woolf claimed the uncon, facts
and reasons hidden by doers and declarers. Yes. Someone described Woolf
as spiteful and malicious. No, she confessed spite and malice because she
was interested in herself as a sample human, she noticed spite and
malice on principle. Pilgrimage in DR's sense is psychological and epic
is self-blind blundering-on as men have done it.
- There goes Home Hardware Tom on his bike on the way to work, 7:51.
He glanced at the garden.
Can I sum up. La Glace is land. Queens is friendship. London is film.
Valhalla is writing and pictures. Vancouver is therapy/philosophy. California
is love and teaching including neurosci.
Both EP and DR traversed points of view. The way one must, now, syncretic,
living in a syncretic time. Or say transitioned through states while retaining/constructing
memory of others. That way of saying it acknowledges that one stays as body.
Isn't womb-acknowledgement the basic difference.
a narrow shore and the groves of Persephone,
willows and tall black poplars
He didn't know where he was or why he had to
start there.
- Logan is assistant prof at a little college at the northern edge of
Wyoming.
Aphrodite presiding deity of later, paradisal
parts ... Dionysus ... presence felt in all the animals, plants and trees
that shine throughout the poem ... the power in the tree ... the blossom-bringer,
the fruit-bringer ... the abundance of life ... the sap
How to evoke them in the garden. Something with the covered garage window.
Gold, copper, walking goddess, mirror, raven, maybe a cabinet, some marvel
for the passers-by. An altar, a spring.
-
Logan replied. Jacob asking about the sketchups. Val writing about her
virtual life photos. Jerry wanting to visit for a week in summer. Emilee
heartsick.
Do I want to show the sketchups at Western Front. They're very naked.
The earlier ones not well finished.
2
What do I know about a sketchup show. I'd need a new computer because
this monitor is shot. Pick a journal passage for each era. Line up the fantasies
with the actuals. Have passages describing the sketchup work for each image,
what sketchup drawing is like. This overflows any gallery show so should
end up a website and/or book. Ask Presentation House to do Jacob's earlier
show and then send it to Grande Prairie. Have the Cinemateque do
a retrospective with the new work during the Western Front's. Get CC money
for a book.
- Do you think it's worth doing yes
- Why winning, world, honesty, before
death
- Testimony of a life YES
- Is it large enough to matter no
- You're getting me ready to die no
- I am yes
- Does art have to be so trivial YES
- Can it broadcast or introduce the better work
yes
- The north country work is better yes
- I deserve a show on my own YES
- It's a lifetime show YES
- And goes with the journal yes
- Is the drawing good enough yes
- Or can be yes
- Could Jacob get his head around it in this form
YES
It amounts to a lifetime review and prepping it should take me through
the journal from the beginning. I should use it to fix and finish. Could
I get CC money for computer, scanning, printing etc.
It's about what is unsatisfied in a life too - the fantasy houses are
- naked longing for more beauty and money and scope, happier loves. Houses
as images of the self there is and of the idealized self. House is one of
my long topics. First fantasy houses, my dad, the granary house. Indra and
architecture. Acid ritual that gave up house for world at the same time
as recording someone else's vision of the body enacting the ritual. The
first granary house. The Clearbrook house not finished. This one. Question
of use of other people's sketchup objects and background photos. Standardize
backgrounds to white? Other kinds of jpg, for instance cross sections? Ten
months to March 2018. What will we know the house before birth.
Brings me to an urgency to finish many things including the Notes
in origin show and the teaching letters.
It does feel as if something has unlocked.
That critic I like, Robin Laurence.
-
First day sitting outside on the gravel pad. I see things to do - [list]
Small bee in currant flowers. Many flower buds on the plum. Couple of
quiet crows. Green leaves on the ground holding light as they do against
dark soil - strawberries, Iceland poppies, currants, Shirley poppies self-seeded,
the two year old filberts, Gail's iris. - Oh first cabbage white. The crimson
passion, bits on the crabapple. More small insects as the soil heats. I
like that light purple moss phlox.
3
- walk down to the woods on a sunday in autumn
- or ride an old horse who's a friend
-
- just a sun-soaked slow ramble later
- the road will slip under the grass
- and end
I'd forgotten that one. 14. It's a death song.
Paul's list of the generations. Grandpa Epp born the same year as Pound.
- 1920 Ewald Epp - Rueckenau, South Russia
- 1885 Peter Abraham Epp - Rueckenau, South Russia
- 1846 Abraham Johann - Molotschna, South Russia
- 1808 Johann Heinrich - Molotschna, South Russia
- 1784 Heinrich Heinrich - Danzig, Prussia
- 1757 Heinrich Heinrich - Danzig, Prussia
- 1725 Peter - Gross Werder, Prussia
- 1681 Peter
Grandpa Konrad born 5 years later.
- 1890 Peter Jacob Konrad - Schoental, Crimea
- 1855 Jacob Jacob - - Molotschna, South Russia
- 1822 Jacob Abraham
- 1785 Abraham Abraham - Gross Werder, Prussia
- 1744 Abram - Gross Werder, Prussia
So the Epps had had three generations settled in south Russia and before
that three generations at least settled in Prussia: three generations means
a degree of establishment more than ours.
4
The Epp name that always-thinner strand of descent that means less and
less as it tapers out among the Martins and * and * and * and *, etc. It
isn't a tree, it's roots of a tree.
-
The plum's in bloom. There's burn in this sun. Look at the little lewisia
in its gravel well next to the step. Look at the utter radiance of the grass.
The house's tulips have turned out to be pink. Burning translucence of rhubarb
leaves. Bumble bee in the currant. Small bees in the plum, quite a few.
Scents. Volunteer dill along the bed's edge. Blossoms on the Crimson Passion.
The Juliet looks dead. Golden Celebration flagging, my fault. Clematis coming
up from below. Bud-knobs on the two grapes.
-
- There's the rain! Heavy drops. Pleased for the little plants still
underground to feel it patting the soil. Come on, more - . Lightning in
the east. The new trees will be encouraged. Maybe the wilting stems of the
paeonies I got from Coldwater Road will straighten overnight.
It was the first day the boiler was never turned on. The verandah was
warm. I baked rhubarb.
I don't know what to do about Jacob. He doesn't like the sketchups, they're
too concrete and autobiographical for him. Someone else could like that
about them. He doesn't like the idea of journal excerpts either, for the
same reason. He did pick out core.jpg. That's the place to start
I think. It's in a different realm than the sketchups but do I have more
work in that realm. Core.jpg is about you. The poems he chose aren't
good.
6
Daphne dropped in on her way to dancing at the Adelphi. She had her hair
down and was wearing eye makeup and lipstick and had on capris and sandals.
Her toenails were painted. I had on dirty ugly planting clothes and was
wobbly on the steps the way I've been these last few days and was half-smotheredly
hating her for being so much better looking at our age. In such moments
I don't at all remember any of the things I am more than she is, partly
I think because she doesn't either.
There's the moon high over the Russian olive with its lower left quadrant
dissolved. It's six on a Saturday evening. Bitter cold this morning and
then warming in the sun so I was out watering in a teeshirt. Iceland poppies
ablaze in yellow, orange and cream. The plum in a glory of white
against blue. Apricot and crabapple in quite a bit of leaf. Jefferson filberts
resplendent. Pear has opened one little fist of blossoms. White bits on
tips of the shrub cherry.
Trees, "The first year they sleep, the second they creep, the third
they leap." I liked that when she arrived at the steps she said you
can tell a real gardener because when they start they destroy everything.
7
- there have been things i've continued to want to say to you.
-
- one is that i have a house and garden. have been here a year. have
planted fruit trees, roses, paeonies and more.
-
- another is that i believe you meant well. i believe condescension is
habitual and defensive in you and in a way is not personal.
- nonetheless given your astonishing nastiness in our last years it is
intolerable to me. and i understand why you want secrecy but that
- isn't how i live either.
-
- the other is that i miss talking to you. i understand you no longer
are the person i used to like to talk to but i do miss that person.
- pound was a great gift i go on thanking her for.
-
It's clear and just and I like it but after I sent it this morning my
heart felt strained. I sent it because whenever I'm reading Pound I'm in
the earlier time that still needs to settle something with her. "Astonishing
nastiness" has had to be said but this won't settle it because she
won't acknowledge it. I've said that too, I say I miss her and then I take
it back, the one who could acknowledge it is nowhere. [Cookson A guide
to]
Janis in the supermarket says this spring houses in Merritt are selling
so fast she has no stock. The Nicola is over its banks at the A&W and
is flooding Lower Nic. Highway 8 is closed in a couple of places. The fire
chief in Cache Creek is presumed swept into the creek while checking its
banks during the night. Volunteers have been filling sandbags at the Civic
Centre this aft. The dam on the Nicola is holding but the lake is up three
feet.
This morning I used the crowbar to centre the bottom step-block and then
planted baby blue eyes around it. First little pea vine poking through.
Windowsills in the verandah lined with pots.
Five doves flickering up into the blue spruce which is moving its long
arms languidly in soft 5:30 light. The linden next to it is in leaf but
the Russian olive not quite. It seems the crabapple twins are skipping their
pink this year.
The grove needs an altar.
The Tofteland house had one, the square stone amid flowers.
What do I love in Pound. His paganism. His defense of body and sex. His
love of light. His intuition of network and wave. His intensity in research,
his dedication, his huge responsibility. His inseparation of art and politics.
His rhythms of course. His spacings. His naturalness in multiple tongues,
which is familiar from when I was young. His sincerity though not his goofiness.
His energy. His wish to have everyone come along, which is to say generosity.
His walking tour in the south of France. His irritability. His capacity
for adoration. His affiliation with rock, water, animal, plant. The way
he kept the whole arc of his life in mind, kept his loyalties. His confidence
that carried him so much further than my diffidence can.
- i don't have anything decisive to say about this yet.
-
- am guessing the sketchups are too concrete and autobiographical for
our purposes now. i've been working on 'house' in various forms since childhood
but always in what has had to be quite a concrete and autobiographical
way. when i was teaching i wrote up a workshop on house as archetype. it's
at http://www.ellieepp.com/mbo/bodies/workshops/house.html. i'm sending
the link simply for your information, not as any sort of idea for the show.
to me it suggests that the sketchup material probably needs to be a book
or at least a website.
-
- my other guess is that your choice of core.jpg is a good instinct.
it seems to point in a direction we haven't found yet. the poems you mentioned
aren't up to its level, i don't think. we could do better. and i don't
know what other visual work could support or expand it.
-
- juliette's sound file is lovely. it reminds me of the amplified sound
of my son's heartbeat before he was born. do you know what you want to
do with her? the western front gallery i'm familiar with is quite small
and compared with karlsruhe very informal.
-
- on another note, i still have a hankering to have the work you chose
for karlsruhe seen in canada. i can understand why you didn't want to pitch
it to grande prairie but how would you feel about presentation house?
He hasn't replied to this very tactful note and if I'm not imagining
it there's a certain hardness in the air. In fact I wdn't be crushed to
give up the Western Front if we can't find a way. I have so much riding
on anything in Van that if it isn't superb I don't want it. What I really
want is just my half of the Karlsruhe show in a better gallery than the
Front; in several better galleries.
-
An hour later the pellucid light of 6:30 on church and trees. I must
have plant genetics in me I am so thirsty for light. So avid for the gestures
of my fellow plants.
-
The Cox has flowers! Five in a bundle next to the little trunk.
8
An older woman in the garden section at Purity Feeds is suddenly in front
of me, looks me in the eye. She has an unusual white-mouse look, sharp but
bleached, white hair, pale face with small specks of freckle. She's like
some actor, I'm thinking, but who. "What does your teeshirt say?"
She reads it: "Never underestimate an old woman with a doctorate degree
- do you have a doctorate degree?" "Yes." "Then it's
a good teeshirt."
9
A man was in my house asking one question after another while his student
the Spanish plumber was fixing my leaking tap. I'd already forgotten his
name. He looked mild: pale-skinned and -eyed and a bit plump. I think a
coarse blond moustache. He was translating for his student in fluent Spanish.
I thought he might be gay. He was so alert and engaging I just fell into
naturalness with him. He said he's from here but was years in Montreal and
then more years in the Dominican Republic. He'd translated for companies
and now is teaching English as a second language. When we were saying goodbye,
I on the porch, he on the sidewalk, he said we'd see each other again. "I
like you." Just like that. I said I liked him too, very lightly because
it didn't seem to need saying. He was what I'd told Paul grown men aren't,
willing to be interested in a woman. I wasn't surprised by him, the way
he was just seemed the way meetings should be, but I was surprised by the
naturalness I heard in my own speech. I was smarter.
11
Four young women in the high school pride group. Yvonne's idea was that
I'd talk about living as an outsider but I took them through the two sides
exercise and talked about diversity within the self.
12
R. acicularis. We just called it a rose. Filling - it seemed filling
though it was only scattering - the little sleigh box room with wild rose
petals for their pink scent. It was early because I was still alone, four?
I brought my mother to see. As I remember it it has a ceremonial feel. I
associate it with what my mom said about having imaginary sisters though
I don't know any reason to. I don't remember when I first saw any other
kind of rose. Oma's climbing rose under the Mädchenzimmer window. -
How much stronger a sense I have of her now that I am a gardener too: her
impulse in placing that rose where she did and giving the girls rather than
their parents that bright large window facing east. Such a good room and
red roses at the window. Her spirit subtler than my mother's, a bit crafty
and ironic. My mother grimmer, even when she was young, heavier, though
she was clear in her level ethical way.
- The photo of myself at sixteen with one of
those red roses in my teeth. Frank had a copy by his desk. It's what
I saw in the mirror that summer, absolute glow.
David Austin The English roses 2005.
Alnwick, Graham Thomas, Therese Bugnet, Blanc Double de Coubert, Climbing
White Dawn, Harison's Yellow if that's what it is, the pink species. Room
for three or four more. Greed.
Scent of balsam next to me. Bits on the Russian olive thickening olive
green. Linden all dressed bright and frisky, a kind of slate-blue storm
sky behind it. The Nicola over its banks at the north end of Garcia and
over Voght at the bridge, high school students filling sandbags. At the
confluence two broad fast brown sheets with a raised seam at their join.
On its far side poplars become towers of white dots jittering. Friday night,
7pm AA meeting parking out the window. Blue spruce dancing quite hard.
13
Aunt Lill thanked me below the photo. I can see why she would like to
be reminded of that peaceful orderly time when she was young too, "an
innocent time." I hold off having anything to do with her because I
don't trust her snooping but I did vaguely want to reply. Just as I was
shutting down for the night I clicked. I said secure kids don't realize
what security is, I had no idea then how much was supporting that smile.
I wrote it with a spark of a tear. It was gratitude. I've always only admired
myself in that photo but I was suddenly grateful to all of them, her too,
for the unquestioned belonging that household gave me, and my parents too,
the coherent orderliness of the life they gave a child, even the part of
its safety made by their untenable faith. I don't admire myself less, there's
something extra in that girl - look how she's holding herself - but I know
more about how bad things can be for kids.
There was frost last night, I could see it on the strawberry leaves when
I went out with the compost bowl.
When she says innocent time I suppose she means the time before we realize
all the kinds of tragic ends.
-
b.1926, Shropshire. A life looking for a particular
beauty. "About six new roses a year"
Old Rose Hybrids
Leander Hybrids
English Musk Roses
Alba Hybrids
English Climbers - GT - cut back shoots from the
bottom leaving just a few
Flowers with quite a large number of petals
but still displaying their stamens seem to me to be some of the most beautiful
- I noticed that this time through the rose books, my eye had changed.
I have spent much of my life drawing people
away from this kind of flower
He's a designer. Has a politics of perception.
Cut before strong sun and halfway open, thicker
stems, put into water immediately so they don't have time to callous over.
Cut ends again after a few days because they begin to decay.
Plant them 18" apart in beds to make a tangle.
14
Near the watered ground a western tiger swallowtail's big wings slapped
around in the wind. Flattens itself, lies low.
Luke on his Sunday afternoon, my early morning, watching rugby.
-
I moved compost with the wheelbarrow this morning and then drove straight
up to Canadian Tire and brought home an Evans cherry tree. There it is held
firm between two stakes at the end of the second-last long bed. It has such
bright leaves.
Rowen's delight when I said I've planted a cherry, an apple, a crabapple,
a pear, an apricot, a nectarine, a dwarf peach and four filberts. Avid for
fruit the way I am.
I should take photos of each little tree to be able to know how they've
grown after a year and then a second year etc.
Evans cherries have a story. An old woman near Edmonton had an orchard
of sour cherries that had been surviving those winters since 1923. The trees
are quite small but are said to bear heavily.
Need another pear for pollination and still need a damson and a greengage.
I'm being reckless with money but I'm setting up my last years. These trees
will time me out. [Sigh.] Staggering with the wheelbarrow or at Can Tire
today carrying the tree I'm aware that I have to do the heavy work now.
Later I'll just be poking and plucking and wandering around with a pruner
wearing a white Tuch like Oma's to keep my hair from drying out.
15
light airs
night air
thinner darkness in the east
16
4:37 dark, raining. I open the back door and the air smells deliciously
of leaves.
O'Brian likes air the way I do. He likes to live in 1799 for its stately
cadence: he gives himself a time when he can please himself with nuance
and exactitude: its language allows him to call up more of the world's qualities:
he can give play to his great general knowledge and fond sensory presence
in a way that makes most novels seem so thin they aren't worth writing.
- He likes colons, is that cadence too, musical measures.
It worries me how pondered this writing is, how arbitrary all the little
decisions seem. That's lack of cadence. Maybe a recent habit of.
When I'm in the garden people on the sidewalk call out "I like your
yard." They've studied it; in my chair at the window I see their heads
turn. What do they like about it, it's just bare earth with unformed plants
spottily here and there. They can see wholeness of design probably. Personal
drive. I keep telling them it's nothing yet.
18
A middle child of nine living in small places along the eastern slope
of the Rockies. Her dad three quarters Native. Drank, worked at this and
that, rodeo. His name was Buck. Violence, sexual assault, poverty, hunger.
When she's four triplets are born, girls who die one by one between the
ages of two weeks and four years. On Saturdays she staggers home from the
library carrying a stack of books so tall she steadies it with her chin.
Drops out of school in grade ten. Goes to college when she's 27. Native
activism, land claims. Works as a classroom teacher with Native kids and
then in special ed and special ed consulting. Assumed I'm Metis too. People
have told her they think we're sisters.
We were a couple of hours sitting with white wine in my garden chairs.
She was always calling out to people on the sidewalk, bubbly, affirming,
working hard. These days she mostly reads geopolitical pieces online, she
says. She's anti-American I think without nuance, listens to Putin's long
speeches and doesn't believe Russia interfered in the election. There's
something wrong with that and when anyone works so hard to be popular I
suspect some covered darkness. I'll keep an eye on that and at the same
time I can see she's admirable, she's had a long driven curve, a lot of
push.
Today she looked her age - which helped me, though I went in and put
on shoes when she was getting the wine - but she's always pretty. She's
thin and busty, wears consciously femme clothes. Her hair is strong and
thick and her eyelids are still completely clean. I get fascinated watching
her smile, a girlishly smooth point-cornered bow that lifts to show rather
animal teeth tightly packed and curving forward.
19
I'd been watering in the verandah, saw someone I knew, maybe, rushed
to the niche windows to see whether he was continuing past. No, he's vanished,
that means he's turned in to my walk. Then there he is at the back door's
window, beautiful Peter, Theresa behind him. "I saw you!" Stand
on the porch naming them the trees.
The nectarine has one little pale pink blossom.
Across the street the twin crabs in full leaf are showing pink bud-dots.
Behind them the silver tree twice their height swaying its long loose arms.
A warm day has greyed over. I moved mushroom compost, laid out stepping
boards to weed and mulch around the Cox, planted the two bulb lilies that
have been gasping in pots. The strip both sides of the lattice is filled
out now. Grapes and clematis shoots, two roses, sturdy horseradish, long-stemmed
delicate johnny-jump-ups, cranesbill I think, bit of iris. I should move
the hellebores into the shade of the horseradish and plant the convallaria
there.
-
Core.jpg belongs to a different show. The air
maybe. I keep feeling the sketchup show isn't from my best register. [No.]
- You think it can be yes
- It can't be so thematic, there need to be other kinds
of bits yes
To kalon the beautiful
20
If I loved doing them why don't I love the project of showing them. What
do I feel saying that. Reluctant stress. What exactly. Sorrow, stressed
heart. I didn't realize it's a kind of crisis. Take a run at it. Bits of
thoughts that aren't it. Name them anyway. My Vancouver enemies will not
admire them. I'll show the poverty of where I come from, I'll show the pathetic
fantasies, I'll show my thin leg. I'll show my thin leg rather than my fine
brain. They aren't magic, they are how it was. Yes heart pain. Why did I
love making them. I had loved my houses, I loved remembering them. It's
real heart pain, remarkable. I loved showing them to people who had loved
the houses too. They aren't ideal, I'm not showing my best - it's a crisis
of publicity. But why. I've shown the journal. Is there a better reason,
will it spoil my reputation. It's real work, I said to Peter "For two
years I had to do it." "Yes," he said, meaning that's how
it is. I felt guilty doing it as if escaping from better work.
I loved remembering loved houses, I loved learning the program, I loved
the nature of digital drawing, the rapt focused interaction. I basically
love architecture. I loved remembering detail. I loved making my fantasy
houses and fantasy loves more realized. It was a way of working off my homeless
longing for a home.
Is the guilt really shame. [Sigh.] I'm ashamed of what I am. I'm not
ashamed of myself in the journal, why am I ashamed in these drawings. They
show my deformity. Somehow. They show my aloneness, but is it that.
- I feel they show my deformity yes
- Do they actually yes
- For the show to function does it need to show them all
yes
- Is the fantasy the deformity no
- Can you name the deformity meditation,
of love woman, (KnC), friendship
- They show loneliness? no
- Displacement of home-making no
- Displacement of attachment YES
[Large sigh.]
Air - stands for the universal substance within and without a body -
simulation experiences felt to be in the head - fineness, subtlety - gods
and spirits - immersion, diffusion -
Ritual giving up of house.
Pound so unashamed of his love for the gods.
22
Rowen's birthday, he's 32.
Yesterday I was going to weed the gravel next to the house, moving from
the stepping stones to the cellar window edges. Next moment I was flat down
on concrete blocks. Had no sense of how it had happened. Left knee hurting.
I was saying to myself This is going to happen more.
Last night sore throat, sore left knee, sore right ankle, sore shoulders,
feeling I'm so far into old age already and it's happening fast. Not everyone
is this old at 72. Was it because I ate two buns the day before yesterday,
was it because I drank wine at Yvonne's dinner, is couscous wheat. Is it
because I've done a bit of heavy work.
Clueless worry about the sketchup show, at a stop.
23
I told Louie I'm helpless about the Sketchup question. She said she shows
them to people, looks for the emails. She said I don't realize that not
everyone can remember spaces the way I do. She said she'd like to see next
to them the thoughts of the person who lived there, and then also the artist's
thoughts. I said I'd thought maybe my thoughts as I was making the drawings.
She said that was what she meant. I said I'd also thought something about
what working in sketchup is like, the way the real space can feel like the
modeled space. She said that is for the introduction. I said it would be
better with a female curator who really liked them. She said I've known
how to do things on my own before.
So what do I know now. The most important drawings are the Epps' place,
the hospital room, Burghley Road, the lake house, Pender St, Saturna for
its writing, Tom's place. Leave out the fantasy houses for now I think.
[Sigh.] Ban Righ?
Have a couple of views for each.
- jacob good morning - i've been stuck on this project but had a good
talk yesterday with a friend and am a bit clearer. here's what i'm
- thinking now:
-
- instead of sending you an actual house sketch and a fantasy house sketch
i think i'd like for now to send you just some of the actual
- house sketches along with passages from the journal of the time. the
journal passages will have to be preliminary, as will the sketch
- views.
-
- the fantasy houses are a layer of complexity i can't deal with before
the end of this month.
-
- there are i think seven of the actual houses that are essential. for
each of them there should be at least two views. where it's possible
- one should be an outside view and one an interior.
-
- along with the journal passages from the time of each house there can
later be a journal passage from the time of the making of the sketch.
- i don't have these yet.
-
- there should be an introduction page that talks briefly about the phenomenology
of working with the sketchup program.
-
- am wondering whether the third element you are intuiting might be the
little video called here - it's the one of the stone terrace with
the
- turkeys drinking. it relates thematically to both the houses and core.jpg
i think, and brings in the film connection. a complication with that one
is that its sound is important and would be drowned out by juliette's tape
if it were to be playing continuously.
-
- i'll soon be able to send separate emails with preliminary sketch views
and journal passages. what i've tried for in choosing the passages is readable
and characteristic little stories.
24
Yesterday I kept thinking I might have to die quite soon if this goes
on. My whole left leg hurt, up into my hip, and then shoulders and sides
too, and wrists sometimes. In my house I'm hobbling the small distances
from one thing to another. I can't shop and am running out of food. I can't
do anything in the garden. I thought I'd have ten years but if this doesn't
get better or if it keeps happening it might already be too late for this
place.
It's cold today, still and grey. The crabapples are out but they look
a bit patchy and lurid. Schoolbus with Similkameen on its flank,
that charming word. What will I do all day, all day.
-
In pain still. Was awake from 1, took an aspirin at 2, dozed and dreamed a dark haired young man. There was a young woman
singing her poems in a weak voice, crying. The young man who was her instructor
was standing next to another young woman I took to be his girlfriend. I
said to him in a firm voice that the crying woman was crying because he
hadn't let her know he had a woman. Then we were walking out together, he
and I. He'd come behind me with his arms tight around me fitted against
my back so I could feel his bone. In this just the moment feeling him wrapped
tight against my back and walking easily without pain.
The awfulness of the emergency ward this morning, cold, sore, hungry,
and left hour after hour with no one coming to tell me when something would
change. I arrived at 6:30 thinking I'd be seen right away and at 10 got
up and hobbled to the jeep and left. Heated some tea, took an aspirin, crept
into bed with a hot water bottle, the radio and a stack of National geographics.
27
The night before last I kept wanting to be dead. Shooting pain in my
knee so bad I was whimpering. Couldn't sleep, couldn't settle onto one side
or the other. When it was morning and I had to get up to pee I crept the
few steps holding onto walls and drenched with cold sweat. Sat on the toilet
dry-retching. Could not possibly have made tea. Kept thinking maybe it would
be endless, or maybe that is how it is going to be sooner than I know.
This morning I'm walking and hardly hurting but it's too soon to try
anything normally hard; little weeds that have jumped up all over the garden
after a couple of days of sun will have to wait; but I can totter into the
verandah to water the squash and cucumbers.
The shirley poppies are massive. Some of the potatoes. What I've learned
this spring is that I should plant many things in late fall. Lettuce, spinach,
dill, poppies, carrots, brassicas, what else? Remember pine needle mulch
for strawberries.
28
It's a bit after 5 on a Sunday. I'm in the white room in bed with tea
and my knee on a pillow. The sky is white tinted rose at the horizon and
blue at zenith. It's dead still. When I lean forward I can see the crabapples
full out and the silver tree in full leaf. Last evening in the west there
was a golden sickle suspended in golden space.
There's a dove on the wire just at the top of the complicated post. The
thick-forested hill is a soft fur of shaded hollows. There's a movie on
the facing wall, shifting strips and streaks. The radio is giving me beautiful
Irish voices. J.D.Farrell 104 days in the life of. Documentary on
One. Rte.ie.
to build light
It's metaphoric but what else is it. His commitment was to improving
humans, but there's something more in the image. What do I see: as if a
diagram of crystal structure. "It coheres alright." As if making
a coherent crystal of neural field. (Do you think? No.)
- Does it mean something important YES
- But not that yes
- Structure in the world yes
- Can humans improve the function of light on earth
yes
- Does 'light' mean e-m yes
- So it means to improve knotting in ether
yes
- Local knotting yes
- Do you dislike that yes
- Because it's too static yes
- It's not locking YES
- Do you want to suggest a better word
integrating
- More? no
magic, herbs and metals
Why does that list need its first term. It's set up as if a list of categorical
equals but in fact the first term intensifies a resonance inherent in the
combination of the second two.
part 5
time remaining volume 5: 2015 may-august
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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