25 July 2017
A book about love woman and work woman.
The run-up. What I was up to with Ken feeling what I wanted. What I was
up to with work strategizing the doc intellectually and politically. Always
the other edge, visual poetics.
Not dreams but something about dreaming.
It begins with questions about imagining and goes on to the whole nature
of mind and a critique of patriarchal talk about mind.
How to bite down in a project still so amorphous.
Question of what knowing is.
-
Moment of euphoria yesterday driving back from Lower Nic. - But wait
till tomorrow to tell it, I'm tired, have worked noon till 9, 4 more pints
of sour cherry preserves, 7 half-pints of fluffy cherry cordial, 5 more
half-pints of cherry sauce, and a couple of jars of apricots and peaches
I used to fill up the canning basket. Hours pinching out pits.
26
Hot early afternoon in a high-walled little enclosure in the shade of
a sparsely branched old sour cherry tree. Above me bright very ripe red
cherries against bright green leaves; at the foot of the ladder on ground
pecked clean three young hens murmuring. Tracey in the shop next door sometimes
banging a nail, afterward holding up the nozzle of a hose lying on the ground
so I could wash my hands in hot water. I could see she was pleased to own
her new domain. We smiled into each other's eyes. Then I was driving with
my bucket of cherries past weather-scorched pioneer buildings and through
wide views of the valley, bouyant in high summer brightness and neighbourly
kindness, feeling yes I live in the right place.
-
Light airs.
Light airs at eleven on Wednesday, hollyhocks swaying a little, white
petals rippling; door tapping in the hall.
I'm clumsier than I was, drop things, spill food down my shirt.
27
Its hugeness scares me. Childhood of the philosopher.
- Is the cover the pink dress girl YES
28
AG17/18 are still [video] editing, child and love (Dave, Ken, Louie),
the garden. In AG19 I say "What I want is the widest map I can make,
and then to locate my academic and film positions in it." In AG20 working
with strong pain and "gradually formulating what will become the doc
program ... a jump in putting emotional work together with connectionist
theory, understanding self as structure."
- Saturday morning. Today I begin to work. A monk's life I guess. It
says, Promise what you have always wanted to promise, not to delude or
to be deluded. Promise to work for good being. What I have tried to do
brutally now promise to do skillfully. I do promise to work for good being.
I do promise to become skilful. I trust what wants to teach me is manifold
and intelligent. - What's wrong with this? The wrong person is promising.
Who should make the promise? - That isn't it. It's that you have to pass
through difficulties first.
-
- I have the world of what I call work, an academic mapping, a hope of
mapping, a map of a map to be made. It exists in my relation to certain
sheets of notes. On certain days, and today is one, I have skill among
these notes, I readily organize, expand, refine. On other days I have had
a world I also call work, an emotional sounding, conversation with a feeling
state. The first work is my own relation to fields of public discussion.
It offers a way to currency, also financial currency, in an arena which
is historical too. I can do good and interesting work. I have a contribution.
The second work is my relation to love and suffering, my own story of feeling.
It could offer a currency if I took it into personal writing. I don't sustain
thinking of it as offering money or community, although it could offer
a community I might like more than the academic community. What is the
relation of these beings?
-
- In the work with love and suffering I have an inner mentor as well
as an outer one. Are you there for both kinds of work? Yes. Does one interest
you more than the other? NO. Do you see them as a unity? Yes.
-
- There is in epistemology a picture of knowing that not only excludes
certain kinds of knowing but that also leaves out something that is in
any experience of knowing, the feel or sense of it, the experience that
one tries to name so the name will evoke it. I like to work between knowing
and knowing knowing. Things that happen in a day. Describing them. Reading
descriptions to see what I've known. Recognize it.
-
- -
-
- my starting image like steam a stretching surface visibly made of shining
grain an image of what's happening
in the brain in a different register
the classical figures a woman
descending something similar done
with sound
-
- 'a woman descending' she's
just a shell of light suggested the shape of her outline says she
lives in muthos sounds of words her outline could be the shape of
a sound and what sound does suggests
what her image does, dwindles evenly away
-
- it is the unification of sight and sound that I am hurrying toward
- she is - she is going down into to the lake of mist
the sea within a sea that penguins found under an
iceberg
-
- -
-
- How would I like to live at school. Would like to work the way I do
at the garden, eager, not holding back. Would like to be simple with it,
presenting exciting stuff. Talk to people from the centre of the structure
of intuition which really is myself.
Cassandra's opening at Brambles tonight, paintings on birch board did
she say, walnut oil over white acrylic. I liked a raven set against a round
copper moon. What I liked about it was first the way raven and moon fit
across the frame very exactly and second the way the gleaming copper circle
made it as if an icon. She surrounded the moon with the sort of currents
in milky pale blue that make the air tactile. Maybe I can say more about
her tomorrow.
29
"Ellie's the only person who brought me flowers" she said more
than once. She was feeling the town doesn't know how to take her seriously
as an artist. Why is it hard to talk about her. She's feeble and powerful
at the same time. She's bulky the way older women are, here, and I don't
like that. She's also kind and direct, warm; and it's enterprising enough
to run an independent gallery in Merritt so I'd have to say she's strong.
She's developed a style I haven't seen anywhere else, that suggests a personal
world of particular love and wonder. She's a real artist. What's the and
yet. I avert my eyes from any of the paintings that show a female figure.
They demonstrate a self-consoling vapour, a girlishness of fantasy. They're
honest, they're where she is, but they're immature. Her husband is an amazingly
withered countrified old stick and maybe that is related, maybe her bud
has never opened. I'm realizing her women do look like unopened buds. Her
sea wolf is something else, and her apotheosized raven too. Strong animals.
It's remarkable how I've had to labour at this paragraph, and how, at
the gallery last night, I couldn't come to any thoughts at all. My blankening
in the presence of people prevents. There was the lying old Native guy holding
a glass of wine looking hungrily at me from along the wall, wanting me to
listen to him brag again; and there was tall big dog-portrait Miriam in
a gossamer poppy-red shirt glad to see me but not wanting to talk to me;
and there was the elegant Brambles owner when I praised her food not liking
me at all; and a long-legged young woman Cassandra said was a farrier, who
had a remarkably round hard rump in tight pants; and the guitar player plunking
away pitifully irrelevant in his corner,.
Yesterday a note from Jaes saying that after nine years her manuscript
is ready and does Ant Bear still want to publish it. I said I can't and
then that it's a long shot but maybe Emilee can. This morning a note from
Emilee saying yes she'll do it.
30
This morning not long after ten o'clock's church bell I bought a box
of apricots from Maria in the Okanagan fruit truck. Through the afternoon
I canned the soft ones and halved the firm to try to dry them. Twenty-one
half-pints and six square pints of sauce glowing orange on the blue shelves
and five trays of halves set out in a hot wind on the porch.
It turns out there was a fire on Black Canyon Road again in late June.
When I see moments of wild oats, the burnt-orange west, I still feel what
I felt when I was there, that it's my wondrous true-heart home.
31
When I look up from the writing chair this morning, whoa, big red lightbulb
in the linden, lurid in this greyed-out daylight. Must be a high layer because
there isn't scent. Then there it sits now a round red thing on top of the
tree.
New plan suddenly, Jacob says our printer needs to do the work before
her baby's born mid-October. Show in January. That leaves late fall and
winter clear for Childhood of. Alright.
August 1
Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915-2011, died at 96. The time of gifts,
traveled in 1933-34, published in 1977. I read him feeling myself twenty
at loose in Europe, my friendliness and fearless trust in luck like his.
At the same time I have to regret my inferiority of education. He could
walk alone through frozen north Europe reciting long passages of Shakespeare.
Or Horace in Latin. He read up on where he was and looked at buildings and
paintings with actual thoughts. He wrote up his walk with 40 years more
formation, true, and he fabulated at lib, but still, the best I could do
was stare wordlessly and write lively narrative for my family.
Prospero's cell 1945, Bitter lemons 1957. Justine
1957. Durrell 1912-1990. DURR-ul. "Obsessively jealous, Durrell knocked
his wife downstairs, called her a 'dirty Jew,' treated her like a skivvy,
and either ignored her when with their friends or squashed any timid utterance
she made with, 'Why don't you shut up?' In 1938 he wrote to a friend, 'Nancy
wants to have a child, the slut'."
3
Fourth day of smoked air with a bit of heat in the afternoon.
Still trying to dry apricots, trays on the porch. [confluence of the Nicola and
the Coldwater in wildfire smoke]
C's intro today about the time we were in when she made those photos.
She doesn't mention drugs! Though she says "we believed" imagination
was the only reality. I said I didn't though drugs dragged me toward solipsism.
I was hard on her mixed metaphors but didn't tackle her conceptual framework,
was pleased enough that she didn't go art-jargony.
I resent Jacob not being willing to pitch a Cinemateque show to Shaun.
And why does he always want to curate me with a young woman doing trivial
work? Those things make it feel as if his curation is self-serving in ways
I don't understand, rather than the heart-felt promotion I feel I've earned.
- Is it self-serving in ways I don't understand
yes
- Is any of it heart-felt promotion yes
- Can anything come of this show no
- Will Shaun do a screening no
- So it's worth doing only for my own sake
yes
- Can it be better than I now know yes
-
Working with sheets I have suddenly been blown to smithereens by the
collection of core fragments.
4
Woke too early, four-something. Got up etc. Went back for second sleep
and dreamed this just before waking. I can see my
dad across the yard working on a wide piece of lumber. It reminds me I need
a C-clamp, I'll go ask him if we have any. There's something else too but
what was it. Various other people with him. I ask someone about clamps.
They say no. Still trying to remember what the other thing was. Then I'm
standing in front of him. I ask him Do you ever use sunscreen. Then I see
he's black. Oh - he wouldn't. Instead of answering he leans forward and
touches the left side of my chin. So beautiful, he says. Then he says I
should be taller. It isn't a criticism, he just means that I'd like it.
I stand up on my tiptoes to feel the difference. Now we're the same height,
I'm level looking in his face. He puts his arms around me. He's solid, warm,
a bit portly. Such a good sensation, I'm thinking. I relax against him and
put my arms around him too. I wake liking to recall it. Then I remember
the man in Palm Springs whose lovingness was like this man's. I remember
too that before I went back to sleep I was an hour looking at videos on
Youtube of Obama the fond husband and admiring dad.
2014 6 months contract.
This Olde English restaurant was opened in 1945 by the Lyons family.
David Lyons is owner, and to my knowledge has been since the opening. Jeff
Lyons is the manager. Lyons English Grill closed in 2014 and was gutted
of its Old English decor (except for in the foyer), reopening as Mr. Lyons
in 2015.
-
This marvelous boy:
Time for another slivo
and a couple of roast paprika-pods. A shadow appeared on the awnings further
up the lane, gliding across each canvas rectangle towards my table, sinking
in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker
of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight
between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the
air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell
of snowy breast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings
and the tips of the black flight-feathers upturned and separated as fingers
in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and
then, trailing beyond, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson
lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole
shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into two-dimensional
shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as
distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic
bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor
of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl
of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and at last, a furlong away slowly pivoting,
at a gradual tilt, out of sight.
The broken road: from the Iron Gates to Mount
Athos. 1933/2013. "He was still editing,
in a shaky hand, until a few months before his death."
5
Just to let you know, my house burnt down on
July 7th. It's been pretty devastating for the two tenants, particularly
Nick, as he never had insurance. Most of the trees are gone as well, but
amazingly, the 2 little shrubs that I always thought were honeysuckle, but
you said are currants, are still standing! The whole place is just one moonscape.
At this point, I'm not sure if I will rebuild, as it was the trees and landscape
that made it very special. All the rockery gardens are fine, less plants
mind you! The ranch lost their pigs and 14 cows at the barns along Elephant
Mtn. The reserve lost 14 homes and the trailer park at Boston Flats is totally
burnt, except for 2 trailers.
Said Lois today.
6
This morning I was lifting the flounced skirts of
the wildflower edge and sweeping California poppy seeds into the dustpan.
Same with the light husks under the alfalfa heap. Scattered both onto bare
sections of the fence beds.
8
Note from Mafalda, "Kent was diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer
stage 4. ... Relating to a new temporary man and now feeling responsible
for everything."
-
Saw Erin across the road at the Tuesday soup kitchen and have sent her
away with a box of potatoes, chard, carrots, beets, beans, squash, parsley,
basil, cucumbers.
-
While I was trying to fall asleep last night something happened that
I was realizing often happens and that I thought I should try to describe.
I'm not sure I can summon it at this moment. It's when I think of Mary as
she is now, when I think of what has become of her. It's as if all value
drops out of life, as if a hole opens into black vacuum under or in front
of me. It's a sensation not a judgment.
- Am I dragging with the sketchup project because it's
not a good project no
- It's just physical avoidance of stress
yes
- It raises my blood pressure yes
- Can I do it without the stress no
- Is the stress seriously dangerous no
-
Something I've been realizing about the garden is that it time-dislocates
me. When I think ahead to what it'll be like next year if I do this or that
there's a sensation as if of jumping ahead, skipping time I don't want to
skip.
10
Paddy had endured his last illness and the inevitable
shrinking of his world with a kind of bewildered sadness. ... In a biography
of Proust which was found in his room in Kardamyli he had written a message
in the middle of the night. 'Love to all and kindness to all friends,' he
wrote, 'and thank you for a life of great happiness.'
Carried into the day a soft sensation of lying
down with Jim, he stroking my bare shoulder. His wife had died. I had been
looking at him trying to grasp what was different in his face, was it smoother.
The usual reasoning contemplation of dreaming's disarranged perception.
Paddy had found a way of writing that could
deploy a lifetime's reading and experience while never losing sight of his
ebullient, well-meaning and occasionally clumsy eighteen-year-old self.
11
Still depressed this morning by the open mic last night. I'd been thinking
of the Sunday night readings at Goddard and the open mic at Claire de Lune
where I read What will we know so I'd come with two loving little
pieces, ready and Luke's four lines about the moon on the floor.
From the first performer I knew I couldn't read them there. The room had
confused sight lines, the audience was ugly, and the sound was harsh. All
but two of the performers were men and all but one of those were loud. An
hour and a half in when yet another man with a guitar stepped up I came
home.
Hating the audience. I can't help it but it's an unhappiness. When I
was seventeen in Sexsmith I could take happy loving pleasure in human grotesquery.
Now it offends me, why, because I feel exiled into it, demoted into it.
Socially I'll have to go on hating it here, where the garden is my only
possible success. It's an easy success that is necessary for other reasons
but as social success it's almost nothing. "I love your garden."
"Thank you." I have no interest in the people who say it. I have
no interest in anyone really.
There's the copper-pink sun blaring forth in the tree. One day after
another of thick sky. Will I go pick peaches at Hoodoo Ranch.
-
Spence's Bridge. Scent of peaches in the jeep. Ryan and Tania. Reaching
up into small peach trees with maybe three long limbs closing my hand on
a large warm peach with the firm give of a baby's arm.
I couldn't be where I was till I got to the drier slopes this side of
Nine Mile Gardens. Now that I'm where it's wonderful I don't know how to
absorb enough of it. Is that the way to say it.
I took two photos this morning that I like [gone to seed]
[pink and white]. It comforted me to think I can't love
people now but I can love universe more than I did when I could. Then Leslie
and Jennifer on FB liked ready and said Merritt's loud men with guitars
are not the only context there is.
-
After breakfast at the Packing House [blissed out by the road]
came home and canned. It was hot. The sky seems to have cleared some. I
should remember to drive out of town when I'm lonely.
12
His collection of poetry ranges from Sappho,
Theocritus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace and Catullus, to Edmund Spenser and John
Keats, and especially to Pound, Rilke, Pessoa, Cavafy and Seferis. [Twombly]
Fermor was dumped by his mom when he was one and didn't see her again
till he was four. Thinking about that in relation to his manic happiness,
his swift adaptation to strangers and his writing procrastination.
13
"Beautiful garden. Incredible." I'd been bent over and straighten.
Large man with a curly red-blond beard. As I'm saying thank you I'm noticing
what his way of saying it is telling me. He's not a local, a local wouldn't
say incredible. And locals speak in whole sentences. While my look is reading
him he is hesitating, will we speak more, but I show reserve and he moves
on. What was the reserve. Racial, partly, his Scandinavian red-blondness.
The way he spoke was smart but his look was a bit clownish? And maybe the
way people break into my garden trance.
When I woke it had rained some. Clear skies and wind today.
A hard night, couldn't sleep, little aches all over. Thought I'd be good
for nothing but went out into the kind light and weeded the whole of the
fence bed from raspberries through iris and asparagus to the lattice.
15
It's 6:15 and the sun isn't up yet - or no, just there a beam through
the base of the tree.
16
Finding levels of text - then, now, and about sketchup - it's complicated
because all of the text around the room needs to accumulate as something
- text laid out spatially - different colors maybe - there's narrative and
there's writing - there are the minds of the times - best mind or characteristic
mind? -
17
I'm particular about rhythm these days, often look for a different word
because I want one syllable rather than two.
-
Proulx Barkskins. She's skilled, why do i find it trivial. Skilled
how. Sensory detail and historical research. I liked the sensory detail
in chapter 1 but soon could see her throwing it on in handfuls for no reason
but vivid prose. Why do I love sensory detail and historical research in
O'Brian and not her - I asked that and the answer was that O'Brian invents
a friendship. He is fond of his characters and joyful in the world's fullness.
Barkskins is panoramic etc but it's loveless and joyless.
-
I haven't understood what to do with the text.
- 1. mind of the time - best writing of the time or story
about the time? story
- 2. considering that time - is it separate from sketchup
thoughts no
- 3. present thoughts about remembering - is it separate
yes
- 4. present thoughts about sketchup - intro?
yes
- Is the narrative writing too banal or does it do something
for the images not too banal
- Shd I include any of the fantasy houses
yes, not poet's
- Shd I say they're imaginary boyfriends
no
18
Would I drag on the sketchup show this way if I weren't doing it as if
for Jacob? What if I were inventing a tumblr site on my own, wd I be eager?
I feel confined by constraints I don't understand. Jacob's blankness in
relation to it. The skanky cultural feel of the Western Front. That it's
Vancouver. Or is it how personal the material is. I would have to imagine
a viewer who could like it and I haven't. I don't want to go into the field
of defeat I'm feeling it'll be.
I'm seeing it's a different kind of challenge than I've known. I'm up
against myself in a different way. I know how to go through the crash of
writing a paper but I don't know how to go through this immobilizing reluctance.
21
Last year I was drying plums at this date. How soon is it going to freeze.
Last year Sept 21 "Thin sparkle of frost on the marrow leaves this
morning ... I picked all my cucumbers and any reddish tomatoes." Oct
2 "Real frost last night wilted the basil, nasturtiums, bean vines,
even beet leaves and chard." Oct 12 "Garden flattened by frost
last night. Ground was frozen when we began at eleven. It was warm when
we stopped at two."
Worked sourcing text for the sketchup show at Brambles this morning while
Kathy Bara cleaned house. This aft went through jpgs reframing to 28x18
which Susana will resize to 14x9. It unbalances some of them, have to look
at them again tomorrow with a hard eye. Jacob is pressing. I'm annoyed when
he makes suggestions but I hold tight and explain my reasons nicely. He
wouldn't make suggestions to a male artist is my suspicion.
22
Soon I came on four does, each with a fawn grazing
or pulling at the branches that hemmed the clearing. I must have been down-wind;
they only looked up when I was fairly close. They turned in a flurry, heading
for the underbrush and sailing downhill in great arcs until all their white
rumps had vanished in turn; and, as they took flight, a russet stag, unseen
till then, looked up with a sweep of horn that was spread far wider than
the antler in my hand; and while the does were curvetting past, his antlers
swung out of profile into full face like a ritual separation of twin candelabra.
His wide eyes were severe but unfocused, white flecks scattered the back
of his tawny coat, and his hooves were neat and shining. Turning aside,
he took one or two sedate and strutting paces, trotted a few more with his
head and its scaffolding well back, and leaped down the slope after the
does. The load of horn rose and sank with each bound; then he flew headlong
through a screen of branches like a horse through a hoop and the boughs
closed behind him as he crashed downhill and out of earshot.
The first time I had tried to sleep beside the
Danube had been at the Easter full moon before crossing the bridge at Esztergom;
and here I was, amidstream again, but between Carpathian and Balkan. The
new moon had sunk, leaving a pearly light on the water. Settled near the
western cape of the island in a clump of poplars, I lay listening to the
frogs. A meteor shot across the other stars now and then. Nightingales had
fallen silent weeks ago, but the island was full of owls. Barking dogs were
answered from the Serbian shore, and carts streaked along two miles upstream,
waiting for daylight before tackling the Iron Gates. The little port dropped
corkscrews of lamplight into the water and the sound of instruments and
singing was clear enough for me to pick out the tunes. An occasional splash
was a reminder of all the shoals on the move, and the seventy different
kinds of fish that haunted the Danube. Some of them belonged to the fish-populations
of the Dnieper and the Don, close kin to those of the Caspian and the Volga;
they could swim a thousand miles uphill into the heart of Europe with not
a single dam to bar the way ... My head was too full of sights and sounds
for sleep; better to lie and gaze up and listen to the night sounds and
light another of those aromatic cigarettes exotically stamped with a gold
crescent moon. No good squandering the short night in sleep, or in brooding
on the eternity of rivers and that inexhaustible volume of liquid on the
move.
Those from volume 2, Between the woods and the water, 1986 when
he was 71.
And when you see the grave-stones from the little
necropolis of Cameirus stacked up in our museums it is the so-often repeated
single word - the anonymous _____ -
which attracts you by its simple, obsessive message to the living. ... 'Be
happy' serving both as a farewell and admonition, that goes to your heart
with the whole impact of the Greek style of mind, the Greek orientation
to life and death: so that you are shamed into regarding your life, and
realising with bitterness how little you have fulfilled of the principle
behind a thought so simple yet so pregnant, and how even your native vocabulary
lacks a word whose brevity and grace could paint upon the darkness of death
the fading colours of such gaity, love and truth as _____ does upon these
modest gravestones.
Mills and I walked about the ancient town for
a while before turning in. The moon was all but gone, yet the light brimmed
on the whole amphitheatre, casting a surface of glimmering aluminium over
the white houses, and blocking in great masses of shadow on the seaward
side. Despite the light frost, and the thick nap of dew which had fallen
over everything, we were only mildly cold. In the silence we could hear
the water gurgling somewhere down there, below the earth. An owl whistled
once, twice, and we heard its creaking flight from one tree to another,
like the rustle of a linen skirt. I suddenly remembered other moments of
time spent in this landscape, time printed upon silence with all its real
colours up: the faint burring of honey-bees in Agamemnon's tomb: one glittering
spring day, the noise of snow melting among the meadows at Nemea: a bird
singing stiffly at noon like a voice on stilts from the bushes where we
had slept: the crash of a falling orange in an island: all isolated moments
existing in a peculiar dense medium of their own which was like time but
not of it. Each moment to itself entire, populating a whole continuum of
feeling. Coming over the ridge into Sparta, bursting through a cloud to
see the lime-green Eurotas gushing into the valley carrying with it a multitude
of tinkling spots of ice. And these separate moments added themselves to
this quiet second of time spent with Mills, sitting in the frail moonlight
of Cameirus, tracing an inscription on a votive stone, feeling the chisel's
edge hard through the moss, spelling out _____. Then the owl whistled once
again from a different quarter, and someone struck a match up there under
the trees. We rose by mutual consent and walked back up the long mainstreet
of the town.
Those are Durrell in Reflections on a marine Venus, 1953. Similar
but not as clean. What exactly does that mean. Fermor is rivettingly accurate
in how he sees the motion of the stag. Durrell has details - 'thick nap
of dew' - but in a blurring medium of portentous abstraction; I don't see
what he describes the way I see Fermor's stag.
Google translate says chaire means greetings or hello in Koine
Greek, or farewell, like vale.
25
It's cold this morning. I like the heat of the laptop on my thighs. A
still, grey morning. Friday - oh, go out now and put out the garbage.
There was a man waiting next to me at Service Canada yesterday who was
slanging the teachers' union in Ontario for wanting to get rid of statues
of John A MacDonald. Somebody said wasn't it Quebec, and he had the facts
wrong too, they were only wanting to take the name off schools because John
A had set up the residential programs. I jumped in for fun and sorted him
out on every point. His name was Bill and he'd been a lumber truck driver.
I liked him, he was fair and interested and had a thoughtful voice. But
I was seeing how conservatives hold the beliefs they do because their thinking
is sloppy. He thought of getting rid of Confederate statues as getting rid
of history. I said no, history is still there, you're just not honouring
it. He said he and I had opposite views, I said no, opposites are out there
and we're at a little distance from each other in the middle. He said people
shouldn't protest, they should just discuss. I said no, people have to make
a fuss, women had to make a fuss to get the vote, blacks had to make a fuss
to get into schools.
- I was writing that sentence trying to remember exactly what else he'd
said. There was a flash of memory, literally a split second, and I felt
yes that was it, and then it was gone. I can remember recognizing it but
I can't recover it.
He said - there it happened again.
He said it was a slippery slope and I said no, look at voting, women
got the vote and then blacks got the vote and then everybody had the vote
so it was over. Then Thérèse who'd been listening with a little
smile said "Are you a teacher?"
Then after Bill got called into the office a man sat down next to me
who said he had four sons and four daughters. He was a large-eyed grey-bristled
fifty-year-old heavy equipment operator out of a job. I realized that seeing
people who'd come into the service center was another vision of the town:
an old Greek called Peter everyone seemed to know, who used to run a Greek
restaurant they said was good; an apprehensive-looking hunchback; a sexy
boy with bad teeth; an old East Indian woman with a spot of blood on the
back of her sari.
-
The art of making bronze, dependent on imported
tin, ... coinage, temples, cities ... the art of writing, of depicting the
human figure on pottery and in the round ... the dating of history ... these
aspects of a renewed civilization quite suddenly appeared all over the eighth-century
Aegean.
These epics are a description ... of what it
is like to be alive on earth
'There did shine / A beam of Homer's freer soul
in mine.'
Homeric departures are often at dawn, in the
calm before the wind gets up. ... And so under his command but with his
goddess alongside him, the hero and crew embark
What we want is ... his energy and brightness,
his resistence to nostalgia .... Ancient critics 'praised Homer's enargeia' which means something like 'bright unbearable
reality'. It's the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but
as themselves.'
seabirds ... reaching and tacking beside you
in the wind ... until without warning they turn one wing up into the wind
... and are pulled away high and fast, in a rapid downwind run, which they
end by curving slowly round to windward again, pure authority, taking up
station ....
Good shreds not well set. "Turn one wing up into the wind ... and
are pulled away high and fast" is just right but there was a lot I
had to erase in that paragraph.
27
The sky is black overhead and single stars brilliant white.
28
Opening the visual work drawer, right away excited but halted. I don't
know what it's for or where to enter it. It has to begin technically? With
something made, and then many things tried? I want it to take me immediately
into a zone of recognized eminence of a different kind. I want it to use
my large store of beautiful materials, I don't want to die and have them
trashed without being realized. I want an essence in visual/sound creation
like I found in theory. I want it to be authoritative, not recessive the
way I have been. I want to move out with it the way Gianfranco does, in
love and trust rapidly. I want working on it to create stable presence in
me. I want it to be mind and world firmly and freely united. I want it recognized
in art contexts without conforming to art topics. I want to be able to defend
it, speak from it, with recognizable grounded mastery. I want it to defend
early love and best abstract intuition in people. Something about lit edges,
using the brain knowledgably, finding and building capabilities of the body
in relation to the universe. Competence and flair, flare. Slightness of
means, that elegance. Cleanness. The sort of moment that has happened with
Louie, when attention catches, like the jeep gearing down: this is intelligent,
it's worth focus. A sensation of grip. The bit of writing Emilee felt it
in, a jump in register, electrifying, something speaking through. Like the
caustic gearing down in Trapline. [November 2010]
-
Monday - rent check - hot - basil-mint tea in the fridge - picked a couple
of bunches of little black grapes - weeded the coldframe, something that
looks like cucumber volunteering - comparison jpgs of my trees
June to now - we're down to one day a week watering because the rivers are
low, hearing the pipe now, have to let it run till ten - I could sit down
this morning and work with text but by mid-aft fried out by working with
too many docs at a time, still basic sorting - told G what Don said and
he doesn't seem to mind -
D says O has left Chris and believes she's the love child of a duke.
Use this on the IA index:
- Formating In America - which it has become in retrospect - American
years - in what way, particularly - Tom and Tom's story, I lived in Tom's
life, made my own inside his - belonged to an American union, paid American
taxes, had a social security number and a California driver's license,
was a para-citizen, and at the same time was looking about me with traveler's
interest in foreign ways. Was nation as such more real to me than at home?
Maybe yes, in the way it is more real to Americans, who are so avowed to
themselves as that. And the sense of consequence about US politics, naturally.
The elections. The mad right wing, a concentrated extreme of elaborated
stupidity. More of them, a more developed subculture.
-
- In what ways was Goddard American, the same way? New England liberalism
a couple of centuries deep behind it, same thing isn't it? A somewhat empowered
subculture. Vermont.
31
I'm at odds with myself about the show. What would I do if it was just
me. I'd make it a story about making them. I'd peg it to the journal for
the two years I was working on it, have the houses in the order they came
and have a lot of images the way I do in the journal. What kind of site
would that be - imaginary weblog. 'House.' It could spin off work from the
time of the house.
Does it have any relation to core.jpg. Core is body as house,
immaterial materiality of.
I'm pressured and scared in this, it seems incoherent to me, I don't
trust Jacob's sense in it. I can whittle away at the texts but it can't
be good, I don't see how to make it good so I jib and escape. I'm in a panic
really.
What's the worst that can happen. The show is panned by some Vancouver
critic. Accurately panned. Then my previous work is dismissed retroactively.
T and R gloat. What's the best that can happen. The show is liked by someone
like Robin Laurence. People feel a connection to their own house intensities.
There's a write-up in a good art mag. Offered more shows. Neither of those
are going to happen. What's going to happen is the usual: nothing much.
What does that imply. That I should make something of it for my own pleasure
and instruction, as with teaching letters.
Success in it would be friendship for your child's truth. Testimony of
a life. Success of intuition through heartbreak in community. What I've
been given by exclusion is that love for space.
Is that it? [Sigh.]
September 1
Have them in the order they're made not in the order they're lived.
2
It's better since I've understood that. Have added the Borrego house
with first description of working with Sketchup. Then the two large fantasy
houses, studio and Mac's, with their fantasies and misgivings about fantasy.
Then in the Lotus the whole raft of Lotus room, housetruck and its fantasy,
London roof and its fantasy, and memory: Epps' house, E Pender, lake house,
Tom's house. Then here one more memory house.
It helps me choose text.
3
Labour Day weekend. Went to a yard sale on Coutlee this morning and bought
an orbit sander and a clamp and a damp boxful of mold=smelling woodworking
magazines. Sat on the white porch steps drying them in the hot sun feeling
the yearning for skill of the man who had bought and studied them. Ragged
people in a junky house were selling their dead father's tools. His drill
press and hammer drill and router and a little case with different sizes
of bits for precision-drilling large holes, some with shavings still in
their teeth.
I was sick last evening, don't know why, miserable and not sure it wasn't
a heart attack till I threw up. Woke at four to an intense campfire smell
through the airholes in the storm window. Put on a dry shirt, went back
to sleep and then have worked most of the day organizing the sequence, sorting
text files, and setting up the dropbox. Fifteen clusters plus core
and the intro. Illegally hand-watered the trees under an incandescent sky.
Picked nasturtiums it was almost too dark to see because they die faster
here than they did in the skyshack. The long-stemmed basil blooming white
and purple in the pink jar goes on scenting the bedroom in its graceful
subtle way.
4
I was sitting on a long church bench toward the
front on the right side of the aisle, another woman on my right. A large
group in dark clothes came in looking annoyed. They said they had bought
the bench we were in. Went to sit somewhere toward the back on the left.
I said I didn't know benches were sold. After a while the other woman thought
we should move and we went to sit on the left. There was a slender well-dressed
middle-aged woman at the front, nice-looking like Don's wife, who after
a while I realized must be the minister. I couldn't hear what she was saying.
A while into the service a lot of people got up and walked out. Then a little
later a lot more got up and left. We sat with our heads turned watching
them leave. Did they have somewhere to go, another church? The minister
looked at me and asked a question. I misheard what she said and asked her
to repeat it. She was asking what I was best at. I said I sometimes write
well.
It's such random nonsense but so particular.
Sent unnamed him a note because it's Labour Day. "Labor Day weekend,
my great threshold festival."
Six half-pints of sungolds canned whole like little plums; two pints
of black cherry tomatoes canned whole too; four half-pints of red tomatoes
put through the blender for frothy juice; all with a bit of salt and a couple
of tsp of cider vinegar, the wholes with sprigs of basil and the frothed
with big cloves of garlic. Canning has got more casual, I do it while I'm
doing other things, but when the jars have cooled I still climb up on the
counter to arrange them nicely on the blue shelves and then get down and
gaze at their lovely colours. Then mop the kitchen floor's mud tracks and
spilt water.
Working on the couch in the verandah these days. It's summery. Screen
door propped open lets in a cool breeze. There's a bamboo blind I can lower
in the morning. Blue tool chest next to me for the laptop or a cup. Street
voices. Cyclamen and geranium pink and red behind the dark red not-wicker
armchair in the corner. Scent of rose geranium drying on the table.
5
Last week Sunday morning a tall quite husky older woman in a flowing
summer dress and an upper-class agate and silver necklace came to the fence
to talk to me. She had what I thought might be a remnant New Zealand accent
and a slightly overbearing manner. She intended to praise me for my garden.
"You've done such a lot in so little time." She turned out to
be the United Church minister. "Elaine ...." "Diggle."
I took the chance to mention that the parsonage's dead tree needs taking
down.
I don't know how to make the texts interesting enough. The journal excerpts
aren't. But was the time worth anything else. Work thoughts. - And then
I think that for other eras I have many years to choose from and I can do
that for the sketchup era too, best work thoughts from the whole two and
a half years. The sketchup time is a story that continues from sheet to
sheet.
7
Thought I'd start drying plums yesterday but it's overcast and cooler
so I tried the oven for some hours. Remembered 185 degrees, wrongly it seems
because they slow-roasted. This morning I squashed them into three half
pints with a teaspoon of honey, a splash of vanilla and just a bit of water
to top up the jars. - Roasted plum compote it's called. Then looked at the
fruit left over from a week ago - still not eating much - and canned that
too. Chunked the peaches and simmered them in their own juice, couple of
little sprigs of rosemary and a teaspoon of honey, 3 half pints. Then a
couple of jars of withering blueberries with honey and slices of lemon.
An odd thing is that making up these pretty jars has felt like a satisfying
substitute for eating.
What's the mixture of motives I haven't resolved: I want to
- 1. explain the context of homelessness
- 2. show the wonders of place and time as always
- 3. tell about coming into and working with Sketchup
- 4. explain misgivings about fantasy
- 5. pass on lovely passages from Story Musgrave and Wittgenstein etc
- 6. mention details in the images
- 7. support a view of myself as masterful
- 8. bear witness to neglected kinds of realness like age and misery
- 9. charm and interest
- 10. show the best writing of the time as with the actual houses
- 11. or just show deft bits of sentence
- 12. show off the lightness of the Tom material
- 13. keep company with my Orpheus intuition
The latter is at odds with this show, makes it look tacky, to me at least.
8
It says show the best writing of the time is the only one.
10
Woke at five anxious about the texts - what I'm calling the texts. Doubtful
that the kind of patching and carving I'm trying can make anything good
and yet there are no journal runs good enough as they are.
Horrible meeting on the street yesterday. Why does it feel so icky. I
was weeding the path edge. She came across the road with a look on her face
that said she was going to tell me we knew each other. She'd lived behind
me on Pender in 1987 she said. I didn't remember her but was looking at
her thin mouth thinking she reminded me of Dee in London. I was being pleasant
while not much liking her face. She said she'd recognized me by my gait.
She was needing to tell me what she didn't like about what I'd done with
the garden - dug up the forsythia, cut down the old lilacs. Miriam showed
up in her white car and they were palsy in that 'supportive' women's way.
I'm left feeling oh yuck stay out of the single women's club in this town.
What was horrible about it was my faking. I didn't realize consciously
enough that I didn't like her. I was going along fake-pleasantly while groping
dully for another level of fact. Is there any good reason for not liking
her? It says no. But I should stay out of the single women's club? Yes.
11
Thinking the side-texts should make a continuous story.
Regretting that none of it except the Tom parts are funny.
Patchily wondering whether this exercise I'm so reluctant in can focus
me more in writing. I keep having to judge paragraphs. Notice what mental
habit is flabby in them.
Something that worries me in the way I'm cutting and patching is that
it destroys network flow, the actual presence of a mind.
And naturally the worry about [big sigh] showing myself so abandoned
and hungry.
Keep catching myself wanting to use paragraphs because they show my fine
sensibility. What I feel is.
And then in the John Luther Adams notes cracking with regret that I'm
not living where he lives but instead in this blight of needy secondrateness.
- Should I pull the plug on the show no
- I can't make it good true
- I'm ashamed yes
- Please talk to me completion, balance,
love woman, early love
- I'm ashamed of love woman yes
- Because she is failed yes
- I have to completely humiliate myself no
- But it will yes
- You want that no
- Love woman's failure is going to destroy work woman's
success yes
- Is that what's supposed to happen yes
- And then I should kill myself no
- And then what fight, rapid, withdraw, community
-
Why do paragraphs seem alright in the journal that seem boring and awkward
taken out of it.
-
Geneviève Dubé the nurse practitioner. I was so excited
to have someone being nice to me that I went madly overboard entertaining
her with my outspokenness, and when she was testing the strength of my arms
by asking me to pull on her hands I pulled her right onto the examining
table on top of me. She is a slight pretty creature, no match at all, and
I had a wicked moment deciding to go for it. Thinking of it keeps making
me giggle but it was not good.
12
Stêpán and Iva. This morning I'd gone out and tried to weed-whack,
duct-taped string-spool lid flew off, Canadian Tire to try to buy a new
lid but had to buy a whole new machine, etc. Meantime had been on the 6'
stepladder picking plums, two colanders heaped, wash and de-stone and sort
them, soft ones onto trays, firm into pint jars, try to slow-roast the trays
but they fast-roast and I'm impatient and shovel them into half-pints. The
pints come out of the canner ruby-red, the half-pints thick and intense.
Starting to get tired, drag myself to clean up all the bits. By now late
afternoon, lie down for a nap, odd how my hands get cold when I afternoon-sleep
with them outside the cover. Lying there musing about something, quiet knock.
Again. There's his nice head at the door's window. They're on the way to
Van to take her to the plane tomorrow to go start her math PhD. We sit in
the verandah. She's looser and more confident, high on her summer, talks
at least as much as he does. They got as far as Alaska, came through Grande
Prairie two days ago. I give her a little jar of slow-roasted plums to take
home with her. "You made it today?" She's hugging it, says she
likes that they began here and are closing the loop here. "It's mathematical"
I say. - A bit elated, I so liked having smart young things drop in. I wrote
Patrick Leigh Fermor's name in his notebook under half a page of his tiny
crooked writing.
7:45, already dark in the verandah, pink-stained platinum sky to the
west, that tall pine halfway down Granite moving in a lively wind. Headlights
wash through.
14
The sun is rising behind the church now. Cold night, couple of degrees
off freezing. The trees are still green. My tall very pale blue iris popped
into bloom as if confused.
I've decided to cut this long journal stretch at the point where I declare
... superstitiously stopped there.
17
Sunday 11:19, boiler grumbling, weak sun through smoke, passionfruit
scent of basil in a vase. Have been farming - rough skin on my thumb and
forefinger - clearing the long paths, hauling piles of mostly tomato vines
to the compost, digging potatoes, curing squash on the porch, picking tomatoes
and giving them away, picking plums and canning them or setting them them
on trays to dry in the jeep, collecting seed. Setting out the year's plant
list just now.
19
Brambles while Kathy cleans at home.
What texts left to find - Mac's house while invented, London roof while
invented, is hawk.doc best I can do for 824?, have to shorten the
Tom story, Burghley and 824 both stay complicated, 824 isn't finished, Burghley
then is too long.
20
Things I want to spend money on: shoes, rug, Cass's hare, juicer, pocket
hole jig, table lumber,
Work I shd do around the house: paint porch, paint back door, sand and
paint bench, close verandah window gaps, paint N wing veranda roof, woodwork,
stucco,
Garden: strip and pile woody stuff for the dump including plum tree,
deal with 2 mountain ash stubs, mend back fence strip, prune and tie up
grapes and silverlace vine.
22
allowed the randomness of the long poem with
no inevitable development
Reading Margaret Dickie. She mainly says they didn't know what they were
doing - Eliot, Crane, Williams, Pound - in relation to theme and form -
and likely they didn't but she isn't mentioning voice, which seems the essence
of it, Eliot's unbearably stiff, pompous, dead, and Pound's at times the
light of ages.
thousands of strands have had to be searched
for, sorted and interwoven
It has taken a great deal of energy - which
has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply
wait much of the time - until my instincts had assured me that I had assembled
my materals in proper order
Said Crane.
return his artistic conscience can make him
after years spent in its service, that the momentum of his art, the sheer
bulk of its processes, the si licet
size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of his personal
limitations, out of ... heredity and environment, out of ... early training,
of early predilections, ... and leave him simply the great true reporter.
Said Pound.
work of a reader and translator, a consciousness
that echoes with the speech of others ... a reader's notes
generates his own long poem from his rumination
over the texts before him
to study and weigh the styles
draws his readers' attention to the pleasure
of words one by one
These in relation to the work with sketchup texts and in the background
some thought about the winter's work whatever it'll be. Many strands in
relation to house. Slowness of assembling them, I do a little in a day and
stop. Sense of the otherness of what I've called the Orpheus work, as if
a realm away from, other than, personal limitation. Reader's notes. Long
weighing of voices, assembly of loved companions. Always an irritable eager
ear.
the repeat in history and the moment of metamorphosis
Each line hangs suspended
Reading to find scraps not to take instruction from wholes. Except in
the sense of the writer as the whole.
may that long study and that steady love
Says Dante to Virgil.
Catullan crispness
differing textures
23
Ursula Le Guin was visiting and gave me tickets
to an event of hers. She said they had cost eight hundred dollars. That
worried me.
Last night sitting in the bath in the dark it came to me suddenly that
I hate the hard glossy prints of my jpgs. They should look like loving memory
not like murky brochures. Print them on HFA bright white with a more pastel
watercolor look. I don't know whether I'm on time with that.
Eclogues 42BC means selections: countryside, erotic interest,
myth. Georgics 'on working the earth'. Aeneid last 11 years of his
life to 19BC on the pattern of the Odyssey and the Illiad.
Ovid 43BC - 17AD.
Wilhelm on Dante and Pound's structural parallels. Poetic/dramatic unattractiveness
of paradise as the opposite of personality. What Pound defends: the beauty
of nature, sexual love, good government, excellence of craft of every kind:
basically excellence of action and being. Dante's paradiso is doctrine and
clownish pageantry. Pound's is uncoercible and brief.
-
- This story reminds me of when you said my journal intimidated you because
I'd gone to New York while you'd only gone to Ottawa - reminds as an instance
of how timidities destroy possibility. In this instance, 1. it so misunderstands
the gormless country kid I was; and 2. how can whole lives at this point
be a matter of competition; and 3. it's annoying to be rejected because
I am too wonderful. I've had to work so hard to be wonderful that it absolutely
shouldn't be held against me.
-
- I don't think I ever idealized you. Liking ... well ... I always liked
walking behind you so I could look at your very nice rump, and have been
quite thrilled by the grace in your use of a semicolon. But it was more
love than like, and that was never about qualities you might or might not
actually have. It was about feeling a heart-kinship with you where I had
no other kin. Philosophy is something to do with it though we've headed
for different ends of it. Childhood religion, kinds of intensity and drive
it sets up. What we've said about orphans.
The tone of what I can say to Don, my tone in relation to him. Its quiet
accuracy.
I have got larger than Don in some way. Should he mind that? Is my sense
of love true only if there's actual equality? I don't think so.
He sees Dante working in a tradition that has
its roots in Aristotle, but one that proliferates through those Neoplatonics
who resisted hpermysticism on the one hand and arid Scholasticism on the
other: it was a tradition that retained some sense of love and respect for
nature .... The love element is present in almost all of the Neoplatonics
from Plotinus
l'amor che ti fa bella
eyes and light
- this light
the later cantos are bathed in words of love,
just as they are resplendent with light
- Did Jam leave love when she left Pound yes
Why she came to a halt in something so beautiful.
The true intuition in flow, light, crystalline heaven etc is the granular
void fabric of cosmos. Just as well he didn't study physics because it hadn't
got far enough in his time. He recognized the vision to come in what he
read here and there, and was free enough to gather it from out of its mistaken
contexts.
Why is granular void fabric of cosmos self-evidently a realm of love
for me? It is god by any reasonable meaning of the term, but that doesn't
say why it is love - does it seem love because it recollects amnion? It
says no. Is it love as to an ultimate parent? YES.
- & from fire to crystal
who stands in the great tradition of Apollonius
of Tyrana and Confucius
-
Garden club asked me to talk about design at their January meeting. Civic
Centre first Weds of the month.
24
A moment I've remembered sometimes but never described. I meet old Cornelius
Wiens on the churchyard next to the church steps. Am I five or six, about
that? There seems to be no one else around. He's a bleary-eyed small grizzled
man whose way of speaking to young children has been to bring a peppermint
out of his pocket. He quizzes me. Wo ist die Himmel? I point upward. He
approves. Wo ist die Hölle? I point upward again. Nein, nein, he says.
He points down. What I remember specifically is the sensation of doubt.
I thought I'd been told that both were in the sky. Was it a sense that fictive
spaces had to be part of transparency not solidity?
The Cornelius Wienses, who were some kind of relative, lived further
into the bush somewhere toward Wembley. I remember a moonlit night probably
in fall, slogging west on a gumbo mud road toward their place in
my long flower girl dress and rubber boots. We must have
been going to an after-wedding celebration - a Nauchast - and our
truck must have got stuck. I now can't check anything with my mom. There's
a photo of me in the dress. It was dotted organdy I think. I was five. -
Just went and posted the photo.
That thought followed from:
Dante's Hell ... is traditional to the extent
that the region ... with its various rivers and its location beneath the
ground, was a part of the popular belief of the Middle Ages.
Paradisal scent of Persian basil here next to me by the window in a glass
box that has it seems kept it fresh in clean water and let it put out white
threads of root. Next to it three half open Iceberg roses flushed pink it
said by the cooling of the year.
Empyrus in or on the fire. Aetho to heat.
25
I'd been away and Tom was near my right ear telling
me something about a negligible young woman I knew slightly. "I bumfed
her." Then having to deal with that, calculating in various ways. I
was saying "How long did I have this time" when I woke
and understood that that long insecurity is over forever. I lay there wondering
whether the way I still feel him, amused sometimes, pleased, or the deep
heart pang I can spring in an instant by thinking of him, are bad for me.
I don't think so. It's an achievement, isn't it - attachment.
Red-winged blackbirds in the sunflowers.
The feeble melon plant I bought late for fifty cents put out two round
putty-colored melons. I picked one yesterday thinking it would be unripe
but wouldn't ripen more. It turned out to be a perfectly delicious ripe
green-fleshed honeydew. I can grow melons.
David Prest yesterday to consult about the laundry room. He's lovely.
Elfin, has the slight body of a fourteen year old with a gold tooth, a touch
of grey above the ear, a flop of rough hair and a crooked smile. He looks
around, notices. It's said does careful work.
I was telling Rob on the phone last night about the Persian basil staying
fresh by putting out little roots and he told me estate gardeners would
keep grapes fresh into the winter by holding cut vines in water.
Monday morning, grey, quiet. Merest touch of color in the crabapples
across the road. I hadn't noticed the linden is halfway between green and
yellow, greener in the new growth at the top.
-
Neoplatonic: Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblicus, Proclus,
Scotus Erigena, Psellos. "Period of Platonic philosophy beginning with
the work of Plotinus and ending with the closing of the Platonic Academy
in 529CE." "Traced back to the era of Hellenistic syncretism which
spawned such movements as Gnosticism ... cosmological theorizing ... Pseudo-Dionysius
... synthesis of Platonic philosphy and Christian theology ... influence
on medieval mysticism and Renaissance Humanism." Jam said light metaphysics.
fa di clarità l'aer tremare
love is not a substance but a movement within
a substance
What I saw is a granular form with a hovering current within it.
In which part - where memory is - it takes its state - forms itself -
as diaphanous light - against an opacity
- You have stirred my mind out of dust.
- Flora Castalia, your petals drift through
the air,
- the wind is half lighted with pollen
- e Monna Vanna . . . tu mi fai rimembrar
My god how does he do it!
"A beautiful face looking at me with love": Jam shutting down
in fear of what Pound braves.
Grotesque psychology of these men debating definitions of love. Intellect
vs senses! I stand apart thanking myself for the foundational work I've
done.
The piety in Dante, the piety in Dickinson, one picks through trash for
single lines.
Is there anything believable in the Neoplatonists. I'd be glad to call
the granular void fabric of Cosmos the One. I never understand the craving
for atemporality though.
-
David Prest has bailed because I passed on Rob's request for a written
quote. I'm surprisingly shocked. It's one of those unforeseen stutters in
the ether, an unknown strike-slip zone's sudden rip. It feels personal because
I liked him.
-
Durrell's biog, a repulsive man, physically ugly and an ugly drunk who
hit his wives and mostly just cared to be in thick with men. What was it
we liked about the Quartet. Compared to other novels of the time
it was full of colour. There was the glamour of Alexandria. I wasn't interested
in the intrigue but his characters' vividness to each other was like what
we were feeling about our friends. He was experienced, there were striking
lines.
While I was working in the garden this evening it slowly got dark. That
was the first moment of autumn air, standing among crisp sunflower rags
finishing up a job when it was starting to be too dark to work.
26
1957-1960, we were still wearing girdles, it was countercultural.
On FB this morning arguing with Luke about enjoying video of Orthodox
Israeli protestors being roughed up.
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Soul as immersed in Nature vs soul as generator of Nature was the debate
within Neoplatonism says the encyclopedia. If by soul we mean human sensing,
feeling, thinking etc, then it's both, obviously, in different ways.
part 2
time remaining volume 6: 2017-2018 july-july
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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