29 May
The sprinkler in its last seven minutes before eight.
I hobbled around the garden last afternoon with a stick, plucked weeds,
tore off poppy leaves blocking seeded rows, looked to see are my charges
alright. What to call that size of plums. They're the size of cherry pits.
The bees worked, there are a lot of them. - Run-on sentences, why do I like
them. Because they're correct for a specific slant of logical relation.
- Time to go turn it off.
- Then weeding for an hour. I like weeding the wildflower edge because
the goosefoot, grass and I think it's salsify are there in the thick of
many little plants their own size. The eye sorts within the pleasure of
success, I seeded early enough so the flowers had rain when they were establishing.
California poppy feathers, some chamomile and many little kinds I don't
recognize. Since yesterday already a few flowers, baby blue eyes and a little
white thing. People pass with their eyes down studying them.
I need to sort colors but haven't figured out zones. The orange Iceland
poppies need to be with the darker blues and purples. Pale blues, yellows,
white. Oranges and maroons of various shades. Pinks, yellows, white. Red,
blue, white.
30
It's a softer day, vapour and little clots. 5:07. Silent. There's the
silver tree stirring its little tips as if by own motion as slight as breath.
There the crab twins stolid lumps of lace. And you blue spruce my winter
saviour ragged-edged black and still against the light.
After sunset I was on a cushion on the porch with my back against the
house. It's a good spot but I couldn't arrive, it's still too much of a
mess and the ugly street is too present. I fasten on things to do.
NDP-Green coalition announced.
The wonder book of the air. This time through what it is about
it is that I imagined Tom when he was reading it. I read it the first time
crying because it was so true about me with him. It wasn't until near the
end of our years I thought he was steady and smart enough to read it himself.
I inhaled it he said. We didn't talk about it more. Now I'm feeling
how he must have seemed understood by it, forgiven. Then I think, how can
he have written off a woman who could give him that book. Even if she could
not write it, which I am very very far from able for.
I've been on email today with Louie who is in struggle about whether
to cut her hair. Reading Shearer another thing I'm feeling is that Louie
has shied off the whole range of female being that took Shearer so deep
and real, I had to leave her behind when she wouldn't talk to me about Tom.
Had been thinking of Leslie today - the way she said "precision"
when I said "Precision Landscaping," the way when I offered her
Shearer she took the day off work and sat all morning reading in the sun.
Thinking I'd want to say to her that it's always given me pleasure to look
at her. Then just now a note saying she's driving through from Van to Williams
Lake a week from tomorrow and could she stay overnight.
There was a brief rough storm this afternoon, large drops blasted from
the south rattling against the kitchen windows, thunder, sky splitting in
golden cracks.
31
Started clearing out the verandah, no more seedlings. Tugged the pear
out of its peat pot and planted it better. Both the Blanc Double and Thérèse
are blooming though mediocrely. Sat an hour by the pay phone in the library
sorting the DMV's claim for back registration fees. Brought home library
books and groceries. Went to Planet Hair and asked Nicole for a cut, $24.
Waited till nearly seven to turn on the sprinkler. There's a June wind I
thought must be hard on the soft newly planted cucumber leaves. My knee
still gets sore and that leg looks swollen.
June 2nd
Sun from the horizon has touched just one feather at the tip of the silver
tree. Lit silver against grey cotton sliding north.
Media City does not want my videos.
Powder blue iris with a scent of passionfruit.
3
I was doing something in the garden. High school girls coming up the
sidewalk laughing. When they're almost past the one nearest the street calls
out Lovely garden you have. What charmed me was her grammar.
This aft I drove the back way into A&W's take-out window and then
took my ice cream cone to sit on the river bank. Lombardy poplars and a
fine big willow standing in water to their knees. The river is full up,
an opaque creamy pale brown moving as a sheet swift in the middle and geared
slower at the sides. A fascinating motion, why. Its even relentlessness,
the way it is a sheet of surface holding flat and reflective amid all those
anchored things, the grass bank, the chokecherry trees, the fence slats
of houses and the roofs above them, and at the same time sleekly swiftly
inevitably always coming and always gone. Headlong.
Cleaned the verandah this morning feeling it a ritual that will always
mark the beginning of summer.
Look at the silver tree frolicking. Is it because the leaves are young
that it looks fluffier than it did. The blue spruce doesn't frolic, it has
a firm spine that gives it the dignity of an elder - maybe it's the way
its many arms sway sideways that reminded me of the Salish women dancing
in West Van.
4
Why was that event so dreary. All those heavy women. Bad staging. Civic
effort. A mercilessly dull even light. Fiddle not well enough played. Daphne
smiling and smiling and greeting at the door. The usual, seeing no one who
will come for me. I got up and came home.This morning
a field of bloomed-out tulips. I was trying to find someone to tell that
they should be dead-headed. A new Chinese department store with green marble
panels crooked or broken; it seemed the whole building was foundering .
I have no energy for Merritt social life that can come to nothing. I don't
want the irrelevance of it in my head.
6
Her little dog when she let it out climbed onto my lap and then my chest
straining to get to my face. I had hold of its tight quivering straining
little body looking into its stupid intent little face marveling at its
unknowability. Is that her daemon? That small strong stupid mystifying determination
to get at? She fights with her neighbours about their dogs and wanted
to go on too long complaining about them.
"We don't die" she said and I'm wondering whether some credulity
in her is illustrated by the way her lovely and interesting plants are invaded
by unweeded stalks of old grass.
There are wonderful things in her garden too. I sat staring up at three
very tall lombardy poplars swaying so very lightly against the blue sky.
By her pond a perfect Japanese grouping of flat blue iris on long stems
among long slender leaves with two metal cranes and a bristle-edged bronze
gunnera.
A Cree wedding with a man who died falling off a mountain. A lover who
shot himself. Twins born at 22, a girl and a boy. A married woman named
Joy she has loved for 45 years. Many stories to come. She's careful about
hearing too much of mine though she does ask some. When I'd talked about
Tom for a long paragraph she got up and said she needed to pee.
Long dream this morning about being left with an
inferior baby. Its parents were a showy but unattractive dark haired woman
and a pale recessive man who were some sort of poets and had been traveling.
They'd handed the baby, who was puny and slow, to the man I was with. I
thought they might not be back. We were carrying it through the city. At
one point we were winding downstairs in a library picking up CDs to take
with us.
"The same kind of bodies, bloodless and bent," there it is,
why Media City has gone off me. Fair enough though a high price.
10
A tree peaony. A silver-lace vine. Red strawberries. Took photos of all
the trees in the rain and some of the roses.
Les being here Wednesday night. I forgot the pork chops and dried them
out but the baked potatoes and baked rhubarb were alright. We sat on the
verandah couch holding glasses of white wine in the dark. I sometimes noticed
I had my arm clamped over my solar plex but I didn't know why. Couldn't
sleep in the narrow bed, was that why in the morning I found myself exhausted
the way I have sometimes been with Louie, wiped out so I can hardly move
my mouth to respond to another word. Does that only happen with women. The
first time I remember it is with my mom in London, when I had to go huddle
by Luke's bed in the other room.
She asked whether I am working. I said it's too soon to tell.
I wonder whether what exhausts me is how much I speak from repertoire.
It's a kind of fear isn't it, of not being anything in the moment.
11
- Was I afraid of her yes
- Afraid of being seen as less than I was
yes
- Am I no
- Did she think I was yes
- Is there any way now to boil up in the way I used to
no
- So in what way am I not less generous,
and responsible, in processing, mourning
- Aging is genuinely shameful YES
- Do I HAVE to speak from repertoire YES
- Do you understand the exhaustion yes
- It's the confluence expected of female conversation
yes
- Is it a sign of being sucked dry no
-
- CAN I still do the work I want to do yes
- Is the sketchup project a way to it no
- Do I have to have a new computer to do it
yes
12
Always again groping for a reader. Working on the Titania notes I imagine
sending it to Cheryl and then as always I doubt she'd want it. Working on
the poetics page Colin, he even more doubted.
Next to me the delicate scent of the first Alnwick, a frail shell-pink
shell-curved thing that suits its scent. It's a bit pathetic.
-
June wind from the south. Russian olive tossing like young excitement.
Motion indescribable, never freezing, never repeating. What happens at the
apex of strong gusts is like an ecstasy, the windward side of the tree folds
north so its underleaves flash polished silver. I feel it as a thrill in
my solar plex. I can't believe how marvelous it is. Staring at it I'm on
my edge of vision. It's partly the structure of the tree. The canopy is
loose and complex, like Tom's eugenia a lot of long flexible trunks themselves
branching into many long flexible branchlets so there are a lot of independently
moving parts. At its feet the crab canopies are stolid in comparison, thick
and simple.
13
- My attitude is not good YES
- I'm angry yes
- Can you say why at having to feel
sorry for
- Is that legitimate no
- You mean a claim yes
- Can you suggest a corrective consider
generosity as readiness for action
- Action being a pleasure in itself YES
- I've been considering action a cost yes
- There is a cost in energy no
- Action gives energy yes
- Consider it as creative YES
- Was I better with Leslie no
- Dutiful not inspirited yes
- Thank you yes
-
Brought home such a pretty greengage plum and a salvia officinalis Nazareth
with large blue flowers. Wound home among slopes blue with lupin, verges
sparkling with long grass and small daisies.
A prophet of ancient lineage showing the whites of his eyes as if affrighted
by visions. I gaze disbelieving.
Drove the fast fierce Coque, drove and drove lost in the city, curved
and uncurved and rose and fell on graceful 5a with engine growl and wind
whipping my hair. Now I'm going to bed.
14
I'm getting worn out suppressing impatience.
This morning Midday Valley Road through pines and flowers. High ledge
winding above summer vales. Yarrow, toadflax, daisies, mustard.
Planted the plum, replanted the apricot and nectarine. Hyssop seedlings.
Grecian foxglove by the other yellows under the lattice. Oriental poppies.
Oh the plum - I keep looking at its stalwart little shape with arms outstretched
along the fence.
A south wind again - it's 7:47 - and why does the Russian olive look
different now. Its silver is not sharp-cut, it's fluffy not ecstatic. I
didn't realize it was a rare moment.
Bowl of strawberries on the table for breakfast.
15
Vendler on Yeats. [Our secret discipline: Yeats and lyric form
2007]
who wrote until he was seventy-three
poems are sites of speculation
Feeling two ways about her technical specifics. She can easily convince
me that Yeats intended all the devices she describes - Petrarchian sonnet,
rhyme riche, ottava rima, trimeter, chiasmus and the rest
- and I can see that he has knit himself into the history of male poetics
by means of them - and I can see that his effects are subtly exact - and
I can understand that they are what has held his poems in cultural memory
- and I can be a bit interested in learning to notice them - but at the
same time I have no interest in the poems and her specifics seem to tell
me why. There's something wrong with that kind of deliberation. Oh and at
the same time I know my artlessness is wrong too. Here it is.
16
I took him to the confluence and we were sitting on the bench above the
rivers not saying much. He was on my right with his arm on the bench's back.
He put out his thick-fingered clumsy old man's hand toward my shoulder and
said "May I touch you?" Moment almost of panic, it was unthinkable
but how was I going to say no without hurting him. I stammered. I said "Not
really" and after a while said "Touching was easy when we were
young but now it's too big a deal."
I hadn't slept well and all day was hiddenly impatient with his slowness
and slurred speech and the way if I speak at normal speed he says "Pardon
me?". Tried this and that to make up for it. Took him to Coyote Valley
Road and yes there were blue spikes of viper's bugloss all over the field,
yarrow, brown-eyed susan, pale chartreuse buckwheat, that flat sticky yellow
aster. Buffalo currants in fine silvery leaf. A meadowlark. He did like
that. In the evening got out two glasses of Glenlivet to see whether it
wd loosen us. It did but not happily. He got stupid and I talked about Tom
on and on. He said "I'm sure he's alright" and I rode him down.
"Why do you think that?" "I'm just reassuring you."
"You don't have to do that. Why do you think so." "I just
feel it." "Do you have any grounds?" "No." "Then
it's useless." I liked how it felt to be swift and direct rather than
careful as I had been all day, and when I got up to do the dishes I felt
how swift and direct my movements were at the sink as if I were beating
on him with physical contrast.
I'm doing the physical host thing as well as I can. He has the good bed.
I'm providing drives, a pretty guestroom with flowers, good food, some from
my garden. Two trips to Kamloops to pick him up and take him back to the
airport. Buying groceries. But also doing what I do when I'm averse to someone,
going away into my own stories with the false pretext of entertaining him.
17
So resentful, is that the word. All the time trying to hide contempt
I think must be unfair. The sound of his shuffling. Remarks I don't understand
and assume aren't worth repeating. His energylessness as a companion. What
I suspect is a long habit of wanting to be taken care of. What seems to
be his lack of liking for the wonderful places I've taken him. I drove him
the glorious loop west on 8 to Spence's Bridge and then north to Ashcroft
and then back home past the mine - green valleys, colored cliffs, sage slopes,
pine forests, hills swathed with lupin, the Nicola, the Thompson, Ashcroft's
old streets, the mine's subtle tiers - and when I asked what moment in the
day he had liked best he said the nursery in Ashcroft because it was unusual
that it was out of town. He didn't ask what moment I had liked best but
I told him it was in the Ashcroft cemetery sitting on the bench above the
Thompson looking at its green surface faceted with silver and the pale olive
reflected by the opposite shore. Its entrancing wide mild murmur of sound.
I liked the driving too, sun and little traffic and 97c such a good road
I was wanting to race. At the same time as I was liking the athleticism
of driving and liking what I saw a kind of loathing constant as the roar
of the motor. Troubled conversation with myself about that loathing.
It says he's not feeling it. I don't know how that can be.
- Is this what's called lack of compassion
no
- It's anger yes
- You're saying unjustified YES
- It's anger at being limited by other people's limits
yes
- When you say being creative you mean what I did with
students yes
- There's a helpless trained confluence yes
- The loathing is for what I am in relation to him
yes
- I talked about Tom to get free of it yes
- It's on the level of body field yes
- It's contraction yes
- Anger that his field is so unpleasant I have to contract
yes
- Anything more you want to say no
-
- Is that look of seeing ghosts just accidental
yes
He said he'd felt a thin shell around him preventing him from evil. Was
it his own evil I asked. Yes.
- Is that the key yes
- It's not evil, it's his missing agression
yes
- Agression forbidden in childhood YES
- Is he sick because of it yes
- Is it too late no
- Rage yes
- Would he need help no
- Do it as conversation yes
- Should I do it with him no
-
- Any advice for him no
- Do you want to talk to him no
18
Almost over. I need to talk to Louie.
19
Driving away from the airport I was remembering Tom saying You're a hater.
Yes yes I am. When J began to hold out his arms to hug me goodbye I stepped
back behind his suitcase. I grinned as I did it but I wouldn't appologize
or explain.
- Should I have hugged him no
- Why not sensitivity, death, mourning,
truth
- Because I'm repelled by his dying yes
- That can't be helped YES
- Are there people who honestly are not no
- But willing to fake it yes
- Is faking it true compassion no
- There can be love and respect that overcome it
yes
- But not in his case, I don't respect him
yes
- He has a weak spirit YES
- Did he always no
- He's self-pitying and self-cossetting YES
- I regret hurting him, and I did yes
- He had to have felt my hatred no
Standing there in last words he said "Take care of yourself. I worry
about you." "Why!?" "You fall." I reared up, don't
stick your self-pity on me. "Falling isn't catastrophic for me. I have
many many years of falling ahead of me."
5a home yesterday, radiant grass along the verge, radiant green slopes
blue and white and yellow with lupin, yarrow, mustard. Fresh sage. Shining
clean-edged road with its new yellow stripe loping ahead past lakes and
ranch roads and aspen declivities and cropped ridges crowned with pines.
20
Solstice. There's a brutal wind that worries me for the young trees.
I can see now which positions in the yard are more exposed; am worried for
the filberts, the nectarine and the apricot, especially the nectarine, which
is looking ragged. The pear has thick leaves, cherry and crabapple have
a bit of shelter from the garage, the Cox has the alley wall, and the greengage
between lattice and west fence hardly moves. Can see the dry wind is hard
on the roses too though the Graham Thomas is alright tucked into the lattice
corner.
Small satisfactions today, large enough: having washed all the guest
bedding, four sheets etc, and having planted the sumac - first planting
in the front yard - and the two bright periwinkle plants either side of
the rocky corner. Lessing's The grandmothers, which I hadn't known
existed. Pleased sentences with a vivid treeplanter girl in the laundromat.
When I took Russell's gingerbread cookies across the road to donate them
to the Tuesday soup kitchen one of the women called after me, You've done
good with your place. Yesterday early morning a woman passing when I was
weeding the path nearest the fence, Now that's a garden. The Chapman fence-bed
is solid California poppies at the moment with baby-blue-eyes and little
white things hidden among them, an impressive declaration of personal quality
it seems. Along Granite the ground is gravelly and dry but red dots of flax
have opened among sparse spindly cornflowers.
Russell yesterday a deep-voiced white-bearded round-tummied Scandinavian
gnome in a garden chair on the gravel next to me.
23
Useless listless I don't even want to do this just want to escape, which
I have done since he left, have read all day, still have unspoken complaints,
beautiful days, liked sitting with Daph visiting on the outside chairs yesterday,
what is it when I don't want to do anything, can always do something in
the garden but not all day and what else is there, I have satisfied something
and am on a ledge of emptiness, never like to say that because of the preaching
when I was a kid that when your life is empty you must turn to god, it's
empty of specific things and when I say so I feel heart pain, is the blankness
not feeling heart pain, was I in heart pain about not liking him, was I
irritated by him because of not feeling heart pain, sigh, heart pain that
he was in no way what I need.
Sigh, I am arrived at the issue but there's no solution.
Lovelessness, anger,
He tried to be loving in his way said I looked nice wanted to touch me
said his year in Europe was the happiest and I was important in it, am I
grieving for the young people we were, grieving for him that he shuffles
and gapes and slurs so I lose patience to ask what he said and lose patience
to repeat what I said because he doesn't understand when I speak my usual
pace. Held out his arms to me to say goodbye at the airport thanked me for
everything. I was like that with Tom too always critical always refusing
not always. I used to be able to like and be liked what has happened to
me.
24
Is that listless I-don't-wanna feeling always heart-pain avoiding yes
- My heart has gotten very tight no
- It's just having no companion yes
- So shd I have stayed with Tom NO
- If I still had Joyce wd it be different
yes
- Wd committing to some work make a difference
yes
25
- I should have found a way to stay in California
no
- This place is nowhere yes
- That means I'm placeless yes
- Do you want to say something (KnC),
community, power, mourning
- Slant (KnC) generosity
No lover, no work, no place, stamping my foot, what's left -
- What IS left?? (Death)
- [Laughing] Okay - death no
- Deep change yes
- Please say more (KnC), (hierophant),
acting, subtle youth
I don't understand any of that.
- Can you say change toward what end
of illusions, ducks in a row, deep change, friendship
- List yes
It feels like being stuck in the unmoving shallows needing to be shoved
into the current. I'm seeing the Nicola when it was in spate, the fast-moving
center of the stream.
Yes the garden, yes the house, yes the jeep, the pensions, but they're
just platform and if they're all there is they're a prison. - The feeling
I call stamping my foot, what is it. It's like a thump of anger in the solar.
-
It was 93 degrees. Sitting in the garden and not in love with it. It's
patchy, messy, broken up. Buckets. Hoses. Scruffy grass. - There a cool
air, not a breeze, a breath. Definite yellow there in the corner. Graham
Thomas.
Things to take to Vancouver: rhubarb, lettuce, chard, thyme, oregano,
roses. A begonia plant.
Next year plant rows closer together. Come back and do the perennial
edge and the cold frame. Path along the brick edge? And the rock edge filter
cloth?
"It's my love life" I said to J and yet I don't so much believe
in it. Or anything. I'll believe in it more maybe when it's more attuned.
It's velvet air. Warm enough finally to sit outside. Gail's single yellow-peach
rose.
The yard's laced-in with wires. Beyond them a soft sky layered in pearl-coloured
bits of fleece, grey white pale pink.
27 Vancouver
Union Market, high summer.
Left at 6:30, industrial driving, forest, forest, change lanes, change
lanes again. Get off at Clearbrook Road. Is she asleep? Her bed's made.
"Have you seen Mary Epp?" "She's having breakfast - are you
her daughter, you look just like her." She's a little thing huddled
in a wheelchair in front of what they call devotions on TV. I wheel her
outside. She's chatty, keeps it going. A scrap of a thing, round belly,
no breasts, rough thin hair parted on the left. I've told her who I am.
"I don't think I knew your mother" she says. I say she does but
she doesn't know me so she imagines I was abducted. "How old were you
when they took you?"
"You don't look much younger than me" she says. "Opinions
differ" I say. She riffs on differences among people. She manages abstractions.
Her theme of the day is that she was always controlled, had little choice.
I agree.
Here at the market young persons where I was a young person. I don't
know any of them. They tie up their dogs. There didn't use to be so many
dogs. And bikes. And plants.
Luke yesterday saying he still beats himself up. I said unused capacity.
28
I've often dreamed a house full of interesting objects belonging to David's
family. There is always a top floor that's hard to get to. As
I was climbing toward it this morning I was expecting what there'd been
at other times, a final dangerous push maybe through a trapdoor or across
a gap. But this morning I just walked in. At the far end of the room was
a window overlooking I think a school, maybe Goddard. I was lying on my
stomach on a bed on the floor looking down. I realized David was using the
space as his room. A door was open onto a little bathroom, and there was
a toilet that looked as if it worked.
What's up with Louie.
- She's not interested in me either yes
- Because she's moved on yes
- Should I leave it at that YES
Meantime her house is more beautiful than mine will ever be and she will
always have money. My objects making it beautiful and objects I chose for
her and now objects she's come by too, bad and good, the house itself the
gift of my friendship with Leah. Here's the wonderful sofa, the Borrego
table, there's my apothecary box from Chalk Farm Road. The BC Ferry bench
in her bedroom. The scabby bench. The blue chest. The wicker chair.
- Should I demand everything yes
- She'll freak yes
- Will she get over it yes
Amazing how it scares me to think of demanding them.
I'm a bit scared of tonight too, is it.
29
The Cinemateque 41 years after Tony and Kirk screened it with me and
bought it, something I didn't mention in the journal at the time. A lot
of people many of them young. I talked in the way I do now, friendly and
modest and not present enough. I like being asked questions. Afterward I
liked the booth full of young women lively and curious and as if respectful.
I liked Michele [Smith] the moment I saw her and in that liking could immediately
feel the evening was made. And lovely Shaun with his black beard and white
teeth and look of smart brimming maleness.
I hated Wavelength and didn't like Trapline - and it was
oh faded - and am surprised when other people like it - but was glad for
the young woman who made the film so fearfully, that tender eager perceptive
creature so full of delight and pain. When I read her pages yesterday I
felt I should have stayed in London, I was stupider in Vancouver. That impression,
though, comes from reading the index page extracts and not all the intervening
junk. But still, the wealth of her life, Luke little, bad Roy, sexy Tony,
Sal, the Co-op. The shabby town. The cats, the wide connectedness I'd very
newly earned by honesty, bravery, eager intelligence and good looks.
So what kind of film would I like now is the question.
Michele quoted my best line, "What I like in film is precision,
slightness, economy of means, delight, inference, and a kind of motion that
can be followed but not tagged and makes seeing intelligent." "That
is the kind of film I like too" she said. - Noticing how much Trapline
has been helped by things I've written in later years.
30
Streets leafed over, glimpse of the harbour at the end of a street, last
evening the beach a streak of silver water with long freighters in parallel
against the mountain shore, the downtown towers an always denser mushroom
heap in the distance. Scent of trees, dark thrum of freighter motors. Riding
through it feeling estranged - that approximate word - as if I am not in
its present time. This sensation is hard to remember exactly enough. I haven't
been here for almost two years. Seeing it after bare Merritt it seems a
mythic city of luxury and concentrated will. Thronged streets, better bodies,
a marquee with WAVELENGH and TRAPLINE running across it.
Mcleod's Books such wealth, books stacked deep in the aisles, good books,
chosen books, Don beautiful as was, older, Michael Hayward older too, another
beauty, both men older in the way of smart gentle men, thinner-faced, fine
heads a bit shabbier. I wanted to feel Don would remember the young woman
who brought him books to buy when she needed money. He bought them with
a gentleness that seemed to me to say he understood it was a matter of some
desperation.
When I was handing my bag across the desk a tall young man with a triangular
face lit up to say he was at the screening the other night. Steven. Czech
he said. I trusted the meeting and gave him my address.
I bought books and Don looked at them. I said "I have some kindness
for you because you used to buy my books when I was hungry." He said
"I'm glad you're not hungry any more and hungry for these." The
moments standing anxious at his desk while he sorted what I'd brought into
two piles.
Blenz at Hastings and Richards. So many young persons, so many Asians.
The air. Also the sense I have now of the ephemerality of human
lives. As if each body passing were to shift through its whole time as it
approaches and dissolve in an instant.
July 2
Louie carried my furniture downstairs while I collected my stuff and
stripped the bed. Ferry bench, small bench, Chalk Farm medicine box, Kingston
tool box, Chinese old people's paper-wire chair, shabby old things in the
the back of the jeep. Heavy things, I was nervous watching the gas needle
edge across more and more little ticks. Canada Day long weekend traffic
dense and steady though it was early. A glittering day. Through the Valley
roadside clover whisking past, daisies, chickory, buttercups, spiring clumps
of fireweed. Then the Coque's long smooth climbing loops with cars like
beads slipping on a wire. When at last I came down into the Merritt valley
- a scatter of settlement below after all the forest miles - I saw the grass
had begun to yellow in the five days I was away. I was home by 10:30. Pulled
up at the gate, how's the garden. It's alright, they've watered.
July 8
Gloria Moses. Saturday morning, lot of people parking for the United
Church junk sale. I've been weeding and transplanting, am standing looking
around. Someone calls out behind me. When I turn a small Native woman walking
in past the sunflowers. Keen honest brown face I like; looks like an Epp,
Aunt Lil. I give her my jar of poppy seeds, some lettuce, parsley, dill,
nasturtiums, rhubarb. She'll make a rhubarb cake for the gathering tomorrow
to clean up at Shackan cemetery she says. Is seventy-six; shows me a red
rash up and down the thin skin of the insides of her arms, "Dr Lyttle
says it's heat rash." She's gazng at everything exclaiming. "Gooseberries!
Everybody used to have gooseberries and currants and fruit trees."
I say knock on my door anytime, come and have tea. She says she will.
Heat record yesterday. Fire along Highway 1; Ashcroft, Boston Flats,
Cache Creek evacuated. Sky here whited out with smoke so Hamilton Hill is
a barely visible pale blue outline. It's thickening fast. Can smell it and
feel it on my eyes.
A nice filtered light in the garden. Hundreds of little mason bees in the California
poppies. Hollyhocks I planted last year gracefully white and
red along the fence. First cucumber. Am proud of the silver chairs on
the gravel pad and the perfectly lovely thing I've made of the old non-wicker
chair.
If I had to evacuate what would I take. My computers, my cameras, lamps,
camping stuff, financial stuff, passport etc, bike maybe. My clothes wdn't
take much space. Basic bedding. Certain books. The transcribed journals
could burn.
9
Luke yesterday getting on a train in Littlehampton as we spoke. Was it
the train that passes through Horsham, which was the Sufi farm's stop? He
said it was.
- but train journeys ... english countryside. foxgloves along the tracks.
buddleia in brick cracks.
-
- Yes lots of interesting flora
-
- you take a different kind of note of flora now ...? i expect
-
- I so do, everywhere
- And I really like it
- Like a whole new world is opening all around me
-
- So pleased by that.
- Grey cloud this morning with hot silver where covered sun hits an open
edge. Hollyhock towers wobbling in a breeze. Sunday early.
10
High filter this morning. The kind of pink sun there was in SD when there
were fires up country. Creamy pink light on the white hollyhocks at the window.
I dreamed another variation of the house on Pender.
What to call it. It's never the actual house on Pender though Choy is the
landlord. In dreaming I remember having lived there with Luke and Margaret
in the middle floor of the three-storey building. This time there'd been
a lot of rebuilding. Even the street was being bulldozed and was cut off
at one end. There were workmen on the steps, tiling I think. I had to struggle
over sheets of glass to get up to the second floor. Then a diagram of the
new flats that showed maybe twenty of them in the space of what had been
one apartment, narrow boxes lined up along narrow corridors. My space was
squeezed into a slot along the northeast corner. I recognized it because
in it there was a photo of me and a photo of Maggie.
I'm baffled by that house. What has got narrower in me. Was the time
with Maggie an apex of the 'spiritual'? It was when I was editing Trapline.
Before the black lesbians, so a sweeter more confident time?
- Is the dream saying something particular
yes
- Can you say it in a sentence yes,
community, evasion, illusion, defeat
- Is the house about me no
- My surroundings yes
- Community has got narrower yes
- In a psychic sense YES
- People are more confined YES
11
Thick purplish sky behind the gently stirring spruce, frail pink light
on the white pickup across the street. The flag says south wind but it hasn't
blown away the smoke, may in fact be bringing it from Princeton.
Someone on Bowen Island has been reading The Golden West so I
clicked through to a couple of index pages. There I am, there's Tom, and
how can I be that real again, without him and without all I had then. I
marvel, I laugh aloud. My heart hurts missing it.
Is the loss of that what the dream means yes
12
Toward the west, the sea was lead-coloured,
darker than the sky, to the east it was lighter than the air itself, nacreous,
like a luminous mirror. But to the north, the sea and the sky joined without
the faintest line of division, and became but the Universe, the unfathomable
space.
Winter's tales.
14
Reading The Golden West just now I realized that the journal of
writing Being about IS The childhood of the philosopher; it
is the ongoing childhood of the philosopher's personal life.
- Could I do The air at the same time
yes
16
Four-thirty dawn, white sky, east tinted palest orange behind that quietly
present couple, spruce and linden; street light against the paleness a glowing
golden drop. In the right-hand window a darker scene, fibrous grey cloud,
the silver tree thrashing mildly, a white hollyhock peering in with its
yellow eye.
Paul has been here since Wednesday. We've scouted land and built the coldframe.
We were sitting in the garden after supper last evening. Have talked with
great ease as we do. He said the Japanese in Canada don't like to live next
to each other and that's why there are no Japantowns. I said You're wrong!,
there's a Japantown in Vancouver. He got up offended and went home to the
Royal RV. I knew it was because I'd said wrong.
Bumble bees in the hollyhocks though it's still so cold.
My young Czechs came Friday evening. I was the old woman with the garden.
Made them dinner, gave them my bed, humored their young self-disclosure,
liked the company of their lovely young skin, she a retiring sylph in a
silky little slip of a red print dress, he a confident gusty spider-limbed
East European with a mephistophelian beard. When he wanted to take my picture
I said I don't like to have my picture taken because I wasn't always old.
"I'll give you a photo from when I was your age." He put on rubber
boots and cut the meadow at the front of the house. She raked into neat
small European haycocks.
The clouds are coloured now. Pink whipped cream above the silver tree,
which isn't silver at the moment, almost lead though light and bitty. It's
an hour later.
It turned out that under the bridge at Spius Creek there is a swimming
hole and next to it a small sand beach where a Native woman sat watching
her kids. It's a broad fast green creek running over cobbles. The best lot
we saw had a view to the north of a marvelous rusty triangle of mountain.
Standing there we could hear wind in a stand of pines and beneath it as
if in another layer the sound of the creek.
17
Late evening in the garden under thick pale sky. The smoke has lifted
some, I think; can't smell it now. Surrounded by vitality. Mid-July is this it seems,
sunflowers wherever they have planted themselves standing to their knees in foamed-up
green, dill stalks presences too with their layered clouds of yellow
heads, burgeoning squash plants with already-formed fat noggins under their
leaves. I pluck strings of red currants and run them through my teeth. The
yellow gooseberries are ripe, the red not quite. Neat light green romaine
lettuce heads. Dark green parsley. The nectarine is looking content after
a couple of ragged weeks.
How about the others, my trees. The apricot is thick-hung with soft dark
leaves. The crabapple is a stalwart thing, grown all over. The filberts' leaves
are crisped rags. The Evans is scarecrow-shaped with spread arms. In its corner the
Cox is a graceful maiden, a meliad. The greengage hasn't had time
to do much but I'll go look ... it has exceptionally strong single leaves,
not many but held with clear intent. The pear always looks a bit unwell
because its leaves curl but it has new growth.
Hollyhocks along the side of the house are where they should be: Hollyhock Cottage. Slight second flushes on the Iceberg, the
Alnwick, the White New Dawn. Paul fell over onto the Itoh with the wheelbarrow
and broke one of its expensive stems. I'm eating potatoes, onions, cucumbers,
orange tomatoes, lettuce, parsley, currants, raspberries, gooseberries,
rhubarb, peas, dill, oregano, radishes. In vases: nasturtiums orange and
yellow, sunflowers, lavendar, frothy oregano stalks, Queen Anne's lace and
purple cosmos from the wildflower edge, sometimes johnny-jump-ups. The maroon
double oriental poppy volunteers are vulgar things but I'm tolerating them
for their seeds. What else is blooming: Calif poppies, Iceland poppies,
white and purple salvia nemorosa, yellow daylily, stargazer lilies, mauve
thymes, baby-blue-eyes, purple wallflowers, shirley poppies
in masses pink and a few white, corn poppies, purple campanula where I allow
next to the plum's trunk, anise hyssop, hidden squash and pumpkin and cucumber,
climbing beans on the fence, borage, alfalfa, this little pink rock thing.
[Lewisia.]
It's dark now but I can write by lamplight falling from the kitchen window.
Mosquitoes.
What do I like best. The white oregano flowers next to the white salvia.
The little nectarine held to its slender stake with a shoelace. The two sunflowers
at the gate taller than passers. Hollyhocks white red and burgundy along
the fence. The delicate shell-petal shape of the Alnwick rose. The
porch platform with the silver chairs its height, the way it's a pause overlooking
the garden when anyone comes out of the door. The proud tall dill. The concrete
squares marking the path's beginning. The fluffier artemesia with purple
anise hyssop. This pink rock plant in its thin concrete circle. The
way the gravel has sorted as it's been watered. The simple fence with its
wildflowers, an improvised exuberant elegance like nothing else in
this town. That there are hard-surfaced paths though overgrown. The rhubarb's
shapely pile. The plum tree's improved profile. This slightly raised edge
along the gravel pad's west side. The compact bright cabbage-shapes of the
romaines in their skimpy row. The lattice's white strips
crossing the red compost-box slats. The new sour cherry jars.
18
Garden photos early. Painted the inside of the coldframe and placed the
two windows for its lid, banked it with earth. Brambles late afternoon for
gluten-free. Library. Library Neil checking out my pile, "You've done
a lot at your place." "You've driven past. Everybody in town notices."
"Must mean you've done something." "Must mean I've done something."
Neighbour woman to Paul, "She's a quiet person. But her garden speaks
for her."
19
Standing at the beginning feeling what the work will be. Looking at my
sentences with new doubt, I'll have to gear down into something harder than
I've done with them so far. I want to keep native ease but at the same time
will have to see what's made by that native ease from a more public sense
of 'writing'. This is hard to say. Threshold sense. I opened the Golden
West index page and instantly saw the flab in the writing. That made
me see what the work will be.
What do I know about the shape of the whole. It stands beside Being
about. It ends when it's done. July 1994 - July 2002 is 8 years. The
work with Joyce, the work with Tom, the way coming through is done. There
are two places. The garden before, teaching after, leave them out.
It's going to be hard. Complicated and hard. Be as if my own student.
It's a bid for.
- The night before, I imagined the room with the tables and when I was
thinking of the introduction and the conclusion on the two center tables
I called up the child whose suffering in her bed was also accomplished
in this time, and the young woman who learned to be an honest and responsible
love woman, and felt them, or gave them to feel, as graduating too.
-
- Yesterday morning when I began to feel fear, a burning at the heart,
I lay down for half an hour and felt into the constriction. I thought of
the church men in suits and the way they taught me to be frightened to
show what I knew, and then I called up the three men who praised and defended
me as a student, Mr Mann, Superintendent Toews, Martyn Estall. Mr Mann
stood on the La Glace community center platform and said, You all know
how I feel about Elfreda. Mr Toews got me the Canada Council trip to Stratford,
afterwards found me walking with my suitcase on the Sexsmith road and drove
me home. Martyn Estall at Queen's took care of me behind the scenes so
I hardly knew he was doing it, got me the philosophy medal and the Woodrow
Wilson nomination. Lying there I imagined the three of them in the Halpern
Lounge defending me.
-
- Yesterday Ray and Barry were that too. Ray said he hadn't seen language
so well described anywhere. Barry said, in the first round of questions,
what amounted to, If you mess with Ellie I am going to fight you.
-
- Calmly knowing, then standing your ground, Louie said.
-
- "slow growth by means of the work on betrayal of the mother"
-
- The depth of the desire, which is a well into the beginning. A nakedness:
I won't bluff again, I'll honour myself.
I'll want to dwell on the romance but that isn't the story. I'll want
to include place and time and can do that because it's the base.
It's first person but not a journal.
-
After breakfast I lay down and dreamed Jamila was
trying to get me back. It was her younger self and very like her. There
was a sketched world map under her hand. She drew a circle around a place
I took to be Hong Kong. I could live there with her. I drew a circle around
southern California, This is where I'd want to be. I made a firm lucid speech
refusing her. "And not Tom either, though for a different reason."
That's about writing isn't it.
Where it begins: book, garden, men, strong pain, body work,
Where to start: what were the questions:
The philosophy and the personal coming-through support each other.
What's best in it: mysterious abundant realness.
What stays mysterious: the Book's authority. Young self and authoritative
self.
Liking the journal's accuracy of multiplicity, how to choose a simpler
line through. Easily overwhelmed in it.
How to manage for readers the raw unlikeness of how I've lived.
- Am I ready yes
- It's a step up YES
20
Having supper with Paul and the Czechs in the verandah I see a black
man across the street walking fast from the north. Am saying "We never
see black people here" when he passes close enough to notice how beautiful
he is. The relaxed sentient way he's walking with this chest forward and
his chin up. Corn-rows shaped to his head. As he's whisking past, his high
round rump. Yum, I say. We think he must be a musician. Next day
I saw him again walking from the south. Today on the Grapevine a notice
of the festival this weekend in Spences Bridge. He's in a group. He's Nigerian
and his name is Courage Eigbike. I'm telling this story because seeing a
radiantly beautiful person here is such a marvel.
Another story. I was organizing the garage Friday afternoon when I heard
someone call out. Stepped onto the sidewalk and saw a man who looked like
Paul [Kinsella]coming through the garden. Is it, I was thinking, but no.
Taller and younger but the same dry blond hair and Irish crescent face.
A good lean body in walking shorts and boots. He stands in front of me holding
out a book and a news clipping mounted on card covered with plastic. He
says he's a writer from Newfoundland who sells his book door to door. I'm
a writer from here, I say. He doesn't stop for that, just wants a sale.
It's a travel book. The cover declares it's a best-seller. "A best-seller"
I say. A million sold, he says - something like that. I'm trying to read
his face, what kind of life is this, he looks too self-cossetting for the
hardship it must be. "No," I say, "but I'll talk to you."
He has turned and is walking away fast. "Some writers have to make
money" he calls back bitterly in an accent more Irish than Newfie.
Next day coming from the credit union on Voght there he is on the sidewalk.
He won't meet my eye.
-
- From then:
-
- Is this a question of sorting the I's yes
- Will you tell me what my original and true goal is
to love a man
She is a motive, he is not a motive, he's a competence at coming through
- Are both of these unconscious yes
- Does my Self have an inherent aim no
It doesn't have a destiny because it's collective
- Does larger self have a destiny yes,
to die. to lose everything.
- What's the best thing love woman can do
survive
- What would happen if I sacrificed her she'd
be replaced by a child
- Is that what I'm supposed to do yes
- And what wd be that child's natural destiny
vision
- I need to go back to find the root of vision
yes
-
- And what is vision's work wisdom,
true knowledge
- Will you help me? I'm willing now completed
work
- Did I have to bring love woman out to
get to the child
-
- Will she keep falling in love with men who refuse her
yes
- What should I do when she does feel
her oppression
- Will she go on doing that forever yes
I learned one thing, I learned how to fight with love, when I did fight
- I learned to not escalate.
How 'mind' is imagined.
Skill is built in the conflict. A tension endlessly fruitful.
21
I was picking sour cherries yesterday in a wind so strong branches were
thrashing in my hands. This morning six of the square pints and seven of
the little half-pints stood cooled on the counter, now red glass in the
upper shelves. This year I know how to can. I love the pop when jars
seal.
Have been thinking how comforting my small kitchen tasks are, standing
at the sink washing a few dishes, moving the chair to sweep under the table,
replacing flowers for vases around the house. In the garden I carry water
to each of the trees every day. Yesterday dug potatoes and carrots for lunch,
cooked them with peas and chard, slathered butter and ate marveling how
delicious they were.
-
Emptied one of the compost bins into the cold frame. Tired. White sky,
an overcast evening. Rained a bit. The silver tree is looking quietly blissed-out,
almost asleep. What do I mean. It's moving but just a bit. All over the
canopy leaves that are tilted to the sky are lit but not bright, and shaded
leaves are the same olive green just a bit darker. It's as 3D as a cloud
but so gently and subtly and in such fresh matte color. - Why is it worth
trying to write what can't be read. Only because it helps me look. And now
I've seen that the buds or are they seed-cases on the hollyhock's stem are
the same - no not the same - silvery green.
First of the 7-o'clock-meeting parkers. I can go turn on the sprinkler,
it'll be a long time till Monday morning.
23
The mighty dead. I like that he's Vita's grandson and ran around
Sissinghurst as a kid, why, because it's as if he's descended from Virginia.
I didn't know that when I found it in the Greece shelves of McLeod's though.
I frown at some of his sentences, want to cut, and suspect he overstates
his claims. And yet two things. One is that it's a model of a charming way
to write about something, giving some of his own times, not too much, and
infusing his whole book with love. It's bravely personal. The second is
just that it's Greece, the pagan Mediterranean, the gods, the dry shores.
It has made me remember the Sunday I woke alone next to the gate at Mycenae
and in the afternoon - today I realized it must have been the same day -
found myself at the end of a road looking down on a tiny cove, white sand
under calm green sea. Just that moment. I went in, stood to my chest in
the perfectly mythical warm green crystalline tide. I can see what I was
wearing too, the bikini there'd been in the window of a shop at the foot
of the Piazza di Spagna steps. It was a sort of pale tan sprigged with little
flowers. I'd furtively swopped bottoms for a size larger.
I slept at Mycenae and at Les Baux. Even then I was claiming affiliations.
Paul left me The blue mountains of China and in it I understood the
Plautdietch, recognized the old Mennonite sentence rhythms, remembered the
religious forms, liked knowing my grandparents' stories in more detail,
admired how much Wiebe had put together, but I don't claim any of that,
I don't want it, I don't belong to it. My genes go back further: they must.
Andy's Emily has a baby boy she's named Aron. He wanted to tell me. Maybe
because I was there forty-four years ago when he was dreaming of a little
girl.
-
the Frisians it seems that they and their language
were more akin to the ultimate English than any of the other Germanic tribes
that invaded Britain
volume 6
time remaining volume 5: 2015 may-august
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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