27 September 2017
6:43, open sky, pink contrail streaks.
Yesterday after the dentist I drove up the Norgaard Road as far as the
yellow barrier and stood a while in hot daylight beside dry grass and rabbitbrush
in bloom, pines upslope. I felt place love in a way I don't now. I could
see the whole Merritt basin but that wasn't it, it was being out of town.
I need a base out of town. I need to be led. I wondered too whether I should
do a Merritt Here to be more where I am. Research and a reason for
photos. This one could have portraits too.
The linden went yellow in one day and now is shading into old gold.
-
Chair - by the Thompson - it's low - flat, slow, very slightly roughened
- I wanted to say green but no - directly in front of me slate with a golden
glaze - downstream the glaze is a uniform violet-blue. A breeze, a yellow
butterfly, a bit of sagebrush for the scent, a bluegreen stone, every stone
a different color, sweet tiny insistence of a cricket, a fish's authoritative
whack. River's edge more golden now, littlest chuckle of water on stone.
Between Cache Creek and Spence's Bridge the colors grey, burnt sugar,
sage, pine's black green, dry grass not pale but that intense scorched-looking
caramel. Across from me now a scarp subtle like my cliff used to be. It's
burnt. Lois's house a concrete pad and nice rock walls, Nick's raised beds
standing with their boards burnt away.
Another big splash. Sky over the hill blue, blue. Trucks on Highway 1.
Another. Salmon?
Horsting's sandwich and big pile of concord grapes. As I set out I realized
it's Wednesday, the goodwill in Ashcroft wd be open, I could look for books.
Black god-mountain of Spence's Bridge.
Breeze in a saskatoon bush so dry it's clacking.
The river
-
its evenness of flow. Peace like a river. I fell silent.
I took the Logan Lake road outbound. The mine stood in its grand colored
tiers like a massive off-earth temple. The long drop into the Thompson's
vast gorge at Ashcroft astonished. It was oh a splendid day, fast, bright
and fresh. I brought home sagebrush, books, pears, grapes, windfall apples,
a juicer, and two trees. As I came through Shackan there was someone in
the nursery for the first time, a woman with a hose and a girl with her
hood up sorting seeds. "I was wondering if you could sell me a ponderosa
pine and a couple of trembling aspens." "I think I can do that."
She was short and broad with a round open face. When she carried the pine
to the jeep she asked my name, said she is Shawna Bara. I said I know a
Bara in Merritt ... Kathy. "She's my cousin." - The way she said
'cousin' with a softening in her voice.
When I got home I planted the pine and the aspen right away in the holes
I've had ready for a year. I'd been looking at radiant pines on the roadside
and these trees aren't in good shape but I wanted them to be from Shackan.
Then I canned five pints of grapes I'd put whole through the blender.
Driving and looking today I was realizing I don't have a lot more years
to learn this country.
Many of the aspens on the Logan Lake road had gone a dull greyish color
rather than bright gold, I was supposing from the summer's drought.
I unblocked Tom temporarilly. The last public post was 2014 but his background
photo is now down his steps at Georgia St with my plants in pots. The note
dated last April says "Gail Woynar Balga inspired me to clean up the
path to my studio" although he was no longer at Georgia and that photo
is from maybe 2008? before I took my plants back to the skyshack, ie he
was bullshitting.
29
I'm going to slog through 2002-2005 looking for the origin of Mac's house.
There's a mention of the studio house in EH1, when I imagine I see Iain
MacIntosh on Dupont St.
In EH8 I tell Tom about the house, meaning it's full-formed by then.
EH8 is Susan, Emily, Mexico with Louie, core.jpg.
- 2005 2nd May
-
- I made a wonderful image tonight, in the way I do, take digital pictures,
upload them, play with them, one thing after another, suddenly there's
something I like a lot. core.jpg.
-
- My shadow on the wall in fading sunset light. Bisected by the door.
I slice out the door's line, paste the separate halves onto a new document.
There's a black background bar dividing its two halves. I change its color
to a grey I pick up with the eyedropper from darker parts of the image.
It becomes a silver core that has different light next to head and shoulders
by a contrast illusion. Bright at the heart, dark at the top of the head.
The shadow blurs onto the textured wall, which is in focus, it's doubled,
and there are subtle pastel colors in the grain. The core in contrast is
straight-edged as if two sides of a double door opening into void. There's
either a contrast illusion or an edge color sharpening these straight sides.
A shadow line bisects vertically, soft. So much subtle shading. Dark upper
corners. It's quite magical. Fine burnt orange line around. So you are
my muse after all and I should forgive you much. [Susan].
January 2005 "The man who meets me on the plane" after a disillusioned
sacrificial clarity with T.
EH7 Susan, Emily, Tom working, Language lectures.
30
River Drive is sold to a developer, will be demolished in four months.
David says come and help yourself to anything you want. I'm wondering about
doors.
-
I sent for vol 2 because I wanted to see her writing Jacob. She's
less in it than in vol 3, social notes, gossip, but her habit already so
swift and visual. "I don't know whether memory poured a little mist."
"Stout Dorothy was bathing Timothy and smoking - a truncated woman,
amiable, red, a little beery, anyhow cheery, & Moore said, very kindly,
dearie to the baby, crying for food, like a wise old nurse. Rather they
were like a couple of fat beavers with their young. Fine little cubs too,
fat, hard, sturdy, likely to do us all credit when we are all dead."
Moore the philosopher.
6:39 in the chair, lucent ivory above Hamilton Hill, one star over the
church roof doubled by the double panes, Russian olive - always irritated
by having to name it with two words - stirring in fine-cut silhoette below
two lines of wire, an old cat with drooping belly trotting privily across
the corner - cats on the street have a wilful defiant look because town
sentimentalists insist they be kept indoors.
Why is it that I dote on her metaphoric ways but sternly forbade metaphor
in my students. I think because of the way she floats along, it's native
to her, she's in the right rhythm for it and she's reading straight off
what she sees, is attentive enough to get it exact. With them it clanked,
it jarred, it was like a box deposited on a sidewalk.
-
Lot of time today looking for the beginning of the studio house. It should
have been in GW16 - spring of 1999 - when I was in Louise's place and after
I broke off with Tom. It seems I didn't write it. One line I found later
made me see it again - "at the window the desert garden blazes, the
quail scratch." I had walked up the alley behind Dupont Street, which
is three south of Charles. Mild golden winter afternoon. It was an interesting
alley, really a track, close-confined in bushes. I came to a back yard with
a broken-down fence, worn-down dry grass. Was charmed by the little quail,
which I'd seen nowhere else in town, and something about the look of the
house. It seemed empty and had weathered stucco walls that looked like adobe.
There was an old-time California farmhouse feeling about it, a faded print
curtain at what I thought must be the kitchen window, a south-facing sunroom
of some kind. The open south-facing back yard made me imagine a garden;
later I saw there was a big eucalypt on the fenceline, the kind I liked
best, with dark trunk and red flowers. Would have tried to draw the floor
plan. - How could I have forgotten the quail. I can still see them with
their heads down in the warm light next to the house pecking at the shabby
ground.
October 1
I'm scraping through GW20 looking for mentions of the studio house and
find the months I'm writing Being about. It seems to me to be the
book I want to write already written. (Do you think? Yes. Is it called Childhood
of the philosopher? No.)
Vancouver summer is in it. What's Tom's function. He's the love woman
thread. Large challenge making the brain passages easy enough to read. The
book.
-
How to disarm the dislikes there would be when it cuts across their own
formulations. This is a large difficulty. Make it funny. Show the struggle
getting to it, show the way to it not just the arrived-at. How to disarm
men a different question than how to interest women.
2
Tom's function - I'd be tempted to dote on him in it but should resist
- there's a thread of relation to maleness that needs to be carefully clear.
Passages about left hand man.
Here's the summary:
- 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.
-
64-year-old white man last night shot hundreds of people from the top
floor of a hotel in Las Vegas. Then killed himself. A country music concert.
He is said to have liked country music.
The linden is unleafing, thinner from the top down to a golden tier at
its base.
4
A solid frost last night. The garden lies in wilt.
Studio house was 1999 to the end of the doc, 2002. No - in 2003 it begins
to morph into Mac's house.
- I stepped onto a horizontal 2x4 to see over the fence, which is grapestake.
There was the house, remodeled, and a large garden, quite conventional.
Was that a mesquite in the corner by the garage, which is where I recently
began to feel my bedroom built? I came around the end of the block to see
the house from the front, and as I stood looking at it - professionally
and blandly landscaped - a slim small old car drove up next to me. I was
feeling it as a Rover, probably. It was nearly dark and I did not want
to look at the person driving, but I felt him as a thin man with dark hair.
I smiled with the side of my mouth and limped away. I felt he was Iain
Mackintosh. I felt that he has moved here from London, and that he either
found the house because I had found it, or else that I found it because
he had been going to live there. I felt that if I had not been afraid to
look at him, I would have seen that it was him and I would have crossed
permanently into fairyland. I felt that my intense connection with the
house as I imagined it rebuilt was in some way following the progress of
its actual renovation. I wondered whether the garage on the alley was built
later, and whether I began to imagine the bedroom in the SW corner when
it was built.
Under a board in the laundry room some bobby pins, a 1929 nickle and
a pink card with two kittens playing on a chair: [1949 letter to Amy-Alma Dryer]
5
Found I had a good frame just the right size for it.
This morning have been hunting for the origin of David McAra. GW8 1988
a couple of years into the garden when I was wanting Rob but we hadn't got
there yet. Surprised reading him how personal it is, only a bit about his
house.
Groping toward philosophy, Rowen learning to talk. Brakhage
"Just as you are among the small company of people who come to mind
in the dark lonely hours of working, I'm hoping you will know Marilyn and
I are 'with' you when you are going on with this good work" says the
man who made On seeing with your own eyes. "Dear Ellie Epp."
6
Reading GW8 feeling sorry for that so-feeling perceptive creature utterly
maddened by emotional hunger.
The stories are Rowen, Rob/sex/love, garden politics, academic plan,
writing, visual art, place/time. good-being technology, place advocacy.
The linden completely stripped. My long beds are bare. Sent Randy a photo
of the biggest Musquée d'Hiver de Provence and said come get it.
He was at the door in ten minutes.
7
Two old men in a small house on one of the short east-west streets in
Lower Nic. The ad said tools so I was there early. Bought a reciprocating
saw for $10. "I'll give you some more blades I've got" he said
and went back into his shed. Some clamps, a little nail puller. I had the
feeling I get when objects are passing out of someone's life into mine.
The Uhls. Antlers over the garage door.
I realized I could use the saw to cut the last broken limb off the plum
so then I had to take it to Home Hardware to have someone show me how to
change the blade for a longer one. That took a time because it's an old
model, and five people not counting me, but I like standing around in Home
Hardware, I've been there a lot, I know the faces, some know me. It's the
only community I sort of belong to here.
It rained last night, at midday was windy enough to knock the bench off
the porch, but then in the afternoon was golden warm. I tore down the bean
vines, dug the last carrots in the pea bed, hauled frozen heaps to the compost.
The Home Hardware lumber man I like was walking past and when I'd waved
stepped in past the mushroom compost to say all summer he'd enjoyed looking
at my garden.
I'd felt crummy earlier the way I sometimes do, sore, draggy, but while
I was working I realized that when I feel that way I should remember to
go out and do something.
Have extracted the charming Rowen bits from 1987-88 and sent them to
him.
8
The fantasy sketchups have been about dreaming up a man I could feel
worthy of me and I've seen my novelists doing that too in their most energized
books: Randolph Henry Ash, Shevek, Thomas Cromwell. Woolf doesn't need to
and Dorothy is her own hero. Shearer's Harrison Durrance is about loving
someone who's a hero only in energy. Mehring some kind of partial hero,
a hero of privilege maybe.
I like the Rowen writing. Cleaned up just a little it's light and true.
Sorting that time onto two sheets, philosophy and art, I've suddenly
tuned into phrases. It's something else. I'm stopped not knowing whether
to start again from the beginning with a new sheet or sort it onto the art
sheet.
So much in suspension, so many questions being worked on, so broad a
sense of what isn't known.
9
The grim thing I'm with every day and don't talk about here. I check
news sites all day long, the LA Times, the Washington Post,
the Guardian, half a dozen minor sites without paywalls. A Republican
senator has finally come out and said the president is pushing for World
War III and nuclear conflagration; last night six hundred commenters to
the NY Times story agreeing vehemently. 52 environmental safeguards
cancelled or suspended. A third of the US population immovably devoted.
-
Bewildered among the too many categories. I skip past some but try to
notice which I've given up and why. The manyness made me exceptionally ready
at Goddard so it wasn't worthless but I have to be simpler now. I won't
list all I'm skipping this time through but something I'm particularly skipping
is the psychological powers / Buddhist notes. Was that false intuition?
It says no. Those possibilities are beyond me now? No. I'm on a different
road? No.
- Will you explain true overview has
given you friendly speed
- I have as much of that as I need yes
-
Almost six on Thanksgiving Day. Hamilton Hill is catching the only sun
there has been all day, is lit the color of ripe wheat. I've come in joyful
from working outside. Yesterday I hacked up the greedy mass of self-seeded
hollyhock clumps around the pear, today forked over their hard ground, spread
a wheelbarrow of compost, and was going to quit but my eye fell on the maralroot
that have quietly established themselves swamped by poppies and visnaga.
Transplanted them. And then got to the wallflower bush-thing; transplanted
it next to the cranesbill at the compost area gate. That gave me room to
spread a lot of compost around the nectarine to maybe keep its roots from
freezing. When I dug up the frozen scented geranium, found a few twigs of
new growth. Pruned it, potted it, brought it inside for the winter.
Next to me in the black London vase I blew round when it was wet is a
white iris I thought was called Blue Pearl because its voluptuously rippled
white has the faintest flush of blue in some light. I didn't know why it
started blooming again in September but it's turned out to be a known rebloomer.
Many stalks with many buds.
Partway into demolishing the bit of wall that juts out where I want to
put a washer and dryer. Plumber will give me an estimate tomorrow. Was calculating
and sketching a cupboard that could go next to the machines on that wall.
-
- Does the character need to be a filmmaker
yes
I thought that when I saw it's the overlap of philosophy and poetics.
10
Yesterday I tried googling Michael Duke. There were a lot of them. I
realized anyone with an address or phone number wouldn't be him, but there
was a social security death index with two Michael Dukes for California,
Michael Wayne born 1952 died 2011, Michael Sean born 1961 died 2009. This
morning I dreamed I had a package from him, a book he'd self-published.
It was maybe 6" by 6" and quite thick, printed edge to edge with
many images, very colorful but the printing not quite in register. I was
leafing through and it became a picture book dream. I wish I could remember
the images. A court house porch? The profile of a man with a curling white
beard?
He was 42 in 2004 so it'll be Michael Sean. Last mention one line in
2007.
-
"You get caught in eddies. What's the most important thing, underneath
everything." December 1988.
January 1989 first trip to California. Said to Mary, use your mind, go
as far as you can with it. Said to Ed, enjoy your children, don't miss everything
about everyone.
Today I went through the run-up into philosophy, 1987 to the first semester
of the MA. That extract has ended with Paul C at the convention.
11
EH3 2003 July-December was on the desktop so I read it. It was almost
perfect. Clean, sharp, true. Not much quotation, daily being, valiant balancing.
A full life keeping close to its emptiness.
Look at that - the street is shining, silver tree standing quiet under
a white sky, wet crabapples turning spotty orange and pink.
12
The hill white this morning.
14
Wandered among clothes last night with Emilee's money. Sent for a coat,
dark red, unusually cut, intelligent-looking and a bit gorgeous. That brand
had more and more clothes I wanted, which never happens. Mordenmiss. Chinese,
Hangzhou on the coast near Shanghai.
16
When I felt crummy this morning I remembered to go out. Happy hours sorting
the wood in the garage to know what I have and then cleaned up the washer
and dryer in the basement to get them ready to give away. While I was down
there realized it could be my wood workshop. It's warm and there's power.
Overhead lights, shelves for tools. Getting the washer and dryer out will
give me that strip along the hitching rail or whatever that heavy beam is.
Does the table saw come apart?
18
Birth date is not the date we should take notice of astrologically or
otherwise. If the arrangement of stars and planets were to imprint a being
surely conception would be the moment. Birth times can be arbitrary, both
Rowen and Luke were born early for reasons that were my doing not theirs.
Counting back 9 months I must have been conceived in early June of 1944.
Like the thought of that.
-
Reading Adam Bede because I have nothing else. It begins in 1799
- turn of the century - O'Brian's era. She was born twenty years after that,
grew up in its near memory. Published this work forty years later. It's
what they say, a vivid record of British country life before machines. I
like the scenery and seasons and houses and kinds of country work. Relations
of squire and tenants and peasants made me suddenly see that Britain's feeling
for the marriage of William and Kate continues centuries of a certain kind
of social order. But when I watch Eliot inventing it I see a disgusting
confection: Hetty is so transparently the creation of an ugly woman's spite
against the kind of women men want and Adam so transparently the creation
of blind sexual fantasy. Pious self-martyring Dinah is drawn as Hetty's
opposite. Eliot completely buying into male madonna-whore insanity, viciously
punishes love-girl and lets theory-woman get the tall dark handsome strong
honest hero. And oh her hideous prosy moralizing on and on, paragraphs I
skipped when I saw them coming. Maybe she was wanting to shore up her pseudonym
and her right to publication by posing as an elderly cleric but it's more
than that, it's animus possession, Dinah's preaching is her own dissociating
mutter cleaned up to seem devout rather than overbearing. Dinah is horrible
self-idealization. - When did she get to Lewes? By Middlemarch she's
not so nuts. Dorothea begins as Dinah theory-maddened but she lets herself
love Will. - No, but isn't it the same structure, Dinah lets herself give
up her extreme piety to love Adam? What is different? Dorothea sees through
Casaubon and Dinah does not, it's a skimped conversion. - Yes she was living
with Lewes from the age of 35. Middlemarch when she was 52. When
she died at 61 she was buried in an unbelievers' corner of Highgate Cemetery.
-
The washing machine and dryer downstairs are gone. Welfare mom on the
Grapevine sent out a call, came today with a dolly and a lesbian grandmother,
an eleven year old boy, a friend in camo with a camo-painted pickup, a big
sixteen year old, and a tiny maybe thirty year old. I offered a hammer and
tape measure and left them to figure it out. Pleased my scheme worked. Now
need to find the right washer and dryer for the new laundry room.
-
Should I say something about dropping Tia the other night. She showed
up in the message box quite late. She was at work and I assumed needing
to kill time. It was too early to go to bed and I had nothing more to do
so I stayed with it though uneasy. What were we talking about, one of the
Facebook posts there have been about molestation. I said Ed was not a molester
but he was a bully, told her what he said in the York Hotel. I was feeling
I shouldn't trust her with it, but at the same time I wondered whether I
was venturing it as a test. She didn't pass the test. We went on to other
things. She said it was twelve years since Richard died. I asked how Tia
is different from Shirl. And so on. And then - how did we get there - she
said she liked to live with the downtrodden and I said I liked skid row
but also had an opposite drive to use what I have. She said something about
where I'd got that drive. I thought she was saying it was from my thin leg.
I boiled up. Said my drive is from intelligence, don't diminish me, don't
try to, and slammed the message box closed. Shut down the computer and went
to bed furious. Expected there'd be a reply when I looked in the morning.
There was a paragraph saying I'd misunderstood, she was saying my drive
was because of my dad not my leg and now she could see it was anger too.
I closed down her message access. What else do I know. Was she right, whether
or not, I was glad to have a reason to drop her because I feel she's unclean.
What do I mean. She's not square with herself. She snipes about Janet in
a way that feels envious. She too much insists on her preference for brown
people. There are all the young brown men she has crushes on instead of
mourning her lost boy. There's the way I was flattened when I had lunch
with her, drained to gasping exhaustion. There's the way I've been disappointed
whenever I see there's a message from her, disappointed I mean that it's
her not someone else. There's the coarseness of how she looks.
Was she trying to diminish me, or maybe I should say betraying a competitive
habitual way of trying to? Certainly, though that's not all there's been.
Does she know it? I don't think so. Is that blood-drained exhaustion what
happens when women are unconscious of anger or some other kind of ill-will?
I think so. Who else have I felt it with. My mom, Louie, plagiarist Judith,
Barbara, old what-was-her-name at Goddard.
- Is there more you want to say about this
yes, mother, action, slow growth, meditation
- My relation to mothers has grown slowly through meditation
yes
- Do you mean accuracy in this yes
- More no
It's raining hard. I can hear it and the light reflected on the black
street is quivering.
20
How does she do it. Her creamy tone.
They ride up-country towards Katharine without
banner or display, a tight knot of armed men. It is a clear day and bitter
cold. The brown tussocky land shows through layers of hard frost, and herons
flap from frozen pools. Clouds stack and shift on the horizon, slate-grey
and a mild deceptive rose; leading them from early afternoon is a silvered
moon as mean as a clipped coin.
Katherine is sitting by the fire shrunk into
a cape of very good ermines. The king will want that back, he thinks, if
she dies. She glances up, and puts out a hand for him to kiss: unwilling,
but more because of the chill, he thinks, than because she is reluctant
to acknowledge him. She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the
room - the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained
cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl with which a girl hurries away:
containing, he suspects, the evacuated contents of the dowager's stomach.
If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra,
where she grew up: the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into
basins, the drag of a white peacock's tail and the scent of lemons. I could
have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.
'We called him the New Year's prince,' Wolsey
had said. 'He lived fifty-two days, and I counted every one.' England in
winter: the pall of sliding snow, blanketing the fields and palace roofs,
smothering tile and gable, slipping silent over window glass; feathering
the rutted tracks, weighting the boughs of oak and yew, sealing the fishes
under ice and freezing the bird to the branch.
Since his return from Kimbolton, London has
closed around him: late autumn, her fading and melancholy evenings, her
early dark.
'Stack and shift,' 'shrunk into,' 'sliding snow,' 'smothering,' 'feathering,'
'the drag of:' she's good at exact unexpected verbs. She tells Cromwell's
thoughts to keep us inside him and makes them kind, interesting thoughts
so that we like being him. We like the particularity of what he notices,
'faint animal scent,' 'vegetal stench,' and the way his fantasy enriches
us sideways into a white peacock and the scent of lemons. She's gorgeously
rhythmic, elasticizes many sentences with colons and semicolons.
-
Bohnensuppe something like Oma's today, ham hock and white beans, savory
sprigs.
When I arrive at my curb these days I sit in the jeep looking sideways
at the garden. It's cleared to dark earth and what's left is colored. Gooseberry
arms, raspberry bushes: pink, orange, rust, maroon, purple. Golden crescents
under the peach. Greengage yellow. Pear, apricot, cherry starting to turn.
Nectarine dropping its leaves without turning. Sunflowers standing in rags.
Iris straps lying down. California poppies still budding along the warm
sidewalk.
-
Michael Cardew's biog. A while back I brought home a library book of
someone's selections of best pots. The pot that stopped me in my tracks
- the only one that did - was a round pot of pinkish clay with low casserole
handles, modestly incised with I think fishes. I left the book at the kitchen
window propped open to that photo for a while. Shape and surface so strong.
Sent for this biog, which I won't name because it's nothing exceptional.
A lot of art at home. Fell in love with a boy when he was seventeen. Was
dropped by. Later, in Africa, fell in love with a young black man who looked
like his first love. Loved him for the rest of his life. Left his wife to
raise and most of the time to support the three kids on her own. Neither
of them seem much to have liked the middle kid who was beautiful Cornelius
Cardew of the Scratch Orchestra. It's a big book ploddingly written and
I've skipped along through thinking of the notebooks I filled with ballpoint
sketches of pots in London's galleries and museums. Those years. Reading
Pioneer pottery next to the pither in 52 Burghley, taking notes in
those little Challenge notebooks, liking how technical it was about clay
and minerals and how correct it was about making. Mrs Hattori's rough kindness
and passion as a teacher; the moment when she asked what it was about some
vase and I said before I knew that I knew it, It's the relation between
the foot and the lip, and she said Miss Epp had made more progress than
anyone but she shouldn't neglect her baby.
Mantel's autobiog Giving up the ghost. I ripped through it but
mostly didn't care. She said being a child didn't suit her and I could see
it was true, she had events but not senses. For the book she needed to cook
up some largeness and I guess the ghost theme was meant for that but I didn't
believe it. In the later half of the book there are expansions - I mean
passages that went dark and vague like a patch of dark gas - that I couldn't
follow. My childhood memories mostly aren't about me, they mostly aren't
even what I felt, they are what was around me, what I saw. - And yet her
writing now has senses, loved seeing too.
22
Cardew and Pound. How they are similar. 1901, 1885. They were both pre-war.
Neither caved to the flab of their own time, both founded themselves in
the whole history of their craft. Compared to their peers their work has
hold. Not all of it but when it does. I want to say tight but like
gravity, like the moon. The well-wrought urn stands utterly self-possessed.
-
I have bought a very large grey washer and dryer called Whirlpool Duet.
23
So much is going to die with me.
So much hasn't been given, so much of what has been given hasn't been
taken up.
I so mourn having believed they were more than I was because they believed
it knowing so little of what I knew. Even Jam? It says yes. I could love
intelligence more than she could.
-
Kenner:
Young Americans eager in Europe
New simultaneity of times, for instance Altamira
and Troy, 'pins, cups'
James registering 'the most conscious people'
Virtue in scraps of parchment
Multiple translations
The substance is gone into
First etymological dictionary, word as node, cluster
anything in the penumbra of the poet's attention
may suggest
reader of the Pound era discerns patterns of
diction
non-consecutive arrays
Sappho ... rhythms and dictions... for his purposes
passionate generosity of attention
A binding, a having-to-do-with, that joins in
likeness, in difference and in modulation all the poem's materials, through
which interactive web the syntactic movement flows, abandoning nothing:
that is the deepest, the most persistant Provençal intuition.
- Seven years ago: "I copied that in 1980 and what more do I know
now. The motz el son section is the one I remember (motz y sons). The way
I understood language in Being about, as a standing network being
accumulated."
Going to see Rowen on Sunday, excited.. Packing jars for presents.
24
Wanting to put up photos of men, Pound young and old, Wittgenstein, Yeats,
why. I don't think it's wanting to be with a man, or be a man, so much as
wanting a man's possibility of success. I feel so sidelined, so hopeless
that anything I do will make me wanted.
25
Did a lot today. Set up for Kathy Bara to clean. Drove to Colletteville
to buy a brad nailer from a retired mill worker in a glorious workshop.
Bought bulbs at Purity. Library for cabinet-making books. Kekuli for chile
fries. Nicole at Planet Hair for a cut. Pickled carrots with Jeremy and
talked about religion. Worried about Luke who has been six days off FB.
26
Two hours till the bus. Unnerved the way I used to be when I was flying
across the country. It's an old-age frailty isn't it. I don't like it, or
the the second-guessing when I write here. What am I afraid of now - of
walking, because I'll fall and because my shoes aren't right. Of seeing
film people, because even when they are honouring me they won't be interested
in me. Of stress because I don't know whether it could kill me any moment.
Of Luke's absences because he might kill himself. Of trying to publish,
as always. Of driving in winter because if I damage the jeep I won't be
able to replace it. Of my teeth always hurting from now on. Of being ugly.
Of making overtures to people I might like, because it never seems to work.
Of any waiting. Of repeating myself and not knowing I'm doing it. Most and
worst, of getting stupider, Alzheimers.
What aren't I afraid of: having no money, because of pensions; failing
by dying young; making house and garden decisions on any scale; taking photos.
Less afraid of physical work since this summer.
-
Greyhound station. Cold warehouse with muzak. The newsrack has many issues
of magazines I do not think anyone will buy. Canadian literary magazines,
art magazines. I open them and close them, don't have hope or stamina for
all these people I don't want to know.
Up there is a dry hillside, shabby dry grass some places worn to gravel,
dead pines lain horizontal where they've rolled, a bare escarpment showing
colored rock, the whole heap not pretty but not a human mess like the new
Best Western at its foot.
Vancouver 30
Wilder Snail - my leafy corner - there's Russell coming from Union Market
- Judith Copithorne the shambling spook - Louie offended that I didn't listen
out her whole tale - I offended that she equates what I said about having
no work community with that instant of discourtesy in days of kindly attention
- I'd said women don't give each other the team support men do.
Merritt November 1
I find a glass house on shaved grass in a park,
a simple square with four walls open floor to roof. The door isn't locked,
I walk in. I could live here. Begin to arrange furniture for four or five
of us, women. I like the way some grouped tall plants are peering around
a corner at the center of the square. Will need to find another bed for
Diana. A bit later I'm at the counter of a film school asking to see what's
in the package they loan out to students. I could make a film at the glass
house maybe. There are other scenes and then I'm walking back to it. Will
I find it. I think it is due west and not far. When I get to it there's
a woman who looks like some kind of art professional standing at the door.
Someone is going to actually live here? She comes in with me. Etc.
Last evening floating through the Coquihalla's pass in Paul's Audi smooth
and even through sloped rock and colored leaves. Yellow vine maples on the
wet side, pink shrubs crawling up draws at the summit, then on the dry side
pines, bunchgrass and the sharp bare arms of aspens.
Leah across the table white-haired and fatter-faced, a well-dressed administrator,
drinking wine and still so particularly attentive and gentle. I'm hearing
her voice, which I can't describe, the way she laughs, a good laugh, nubbly
and wry.
David yesterday across another table on the International Village food
floor listening with pleasure, as he does, to garden tales. I bubble up
with him. A kiss on the cheek at the Greyhound station door.
Sunday morning Rowen and Freya at the Pink Pearl. Rowen! Beautiful Rowen.
Black hair to his shoulders and a small black beard. I look at his mouth
with surreptitious wonder, such a beautiful mouth, soft, familiar as if
maybe the way mine used to be. He's happy, they're happy.
7:06am. Scraps of blue dawn among clouds and black branches. I could
hear Paul sleeping. We sat together in the cold verandah last night to watch
Hallowe'en fireworks.
3
Yesterday woke to snow. There it is clotted in the Russian olive's silver
leaves. Eight in the morning, pearl-colored flush of sunrise beyond it.
Who was I with, some tall man I was leading along
a corridor. We passed Tom working the door, rough-haired, another tall man
I thought.
Ten weeks to mid-January, what should I do with them.
- sketchup texts
- learn woodwork
- get the laundryroom done, patched and painted too
- worktable for the white room
- buy shoes
- clear garage to park in it
- go through journal boxes and weed, fix journal site
-
Smashing sidewalk ice with the edge of the shovel blade. Icicles under
the jeep, bulge of ice over the passenger side lock. Afterward, even sitting
in hot water, when I pressed my thigh I could feel cold deep in its meat.
Work table in the cellar. Clamps, drill, skilsaw, orbit sander, all sizes
of screws, drill bits, jar of screwdrivers, square, levels, shop vac.
4
We're going to Tom's dad's place. It's over that
hill to the south he says. Long alley through a farm, two dogs barking beside
us all the way. I am looking down over the rail of a bridge. Are those moose
antlers showing white in the brown water. A bone eagle with spread wings?
It must have submerged, I can't see it anymore. Tom is behind me on the
road. On the downslope I see him suddenly jet past on the left, how did
he do that. A narrow raised path made slick with mud, must be a thing kids
use. Down to the left some people gathered on a narrow beach at the base
of a cliff. Is this where Tom's dad lives, he's homeless maybe. There he
is wading into the water and there's Tom up to his waist following in his
clothes. Then I'm looking at people sitting around a dining table. Not a
good kind of people.
On Tom's FB page half a dozen of my photos from 3663 Georgia. Did he
fetch them off my journal site. Does it mean he misses the lovely place
I made him or does it mean he's using them to fake respectability in some
new down-and-out circumstance.
Hard freeze this morning on the silent corner.
-
Titania's gash is a story of oppression, struggle, search, confusion,
pain. 38-39. Openness in uncertainty, untested recognitions, unresolved
questions. Reading notes, so broad a search. My method was cumbersome, too
many notes, not focused enough, sometimes a reference to something I haven't
named directly. I don't have a means of resolving questions so they ammass
suspended. Notes I didn't understand.
Therapy interests, gender. Film interests, cosmos interests filling in
science I hadn't done. Was there a truest deepest interest. Wanting to write
better than I did.
A notion of what to do with loss and suffering that held to pain looking
for clarity.
5
Finding a way to the Book took me around the corner.
September 1983 Churchland on perception. The steady love in physics.
6
I was dreaming Dave and Franci painting my room
at 824, the middle room I think, the child's room with its many bits of
junk I was collecting to throw out.
If I am anything in the picture it is always
in the form of the screen.
It's Lacan but I made something of it he didn't. For the show I made
a screen that I projected onto from both sides to show it intercepting.
In the space of the room it was perception, which was me. I also held up
a piece of window screen, and a sheet of white paper to show a detail. At
the end I read the poem from behind the screen.
- I don't understand why my thinking is often poor, I mean not as good
as the best, who when I read them seem normal.
Most thinking is poor.
- I seem to think badly when I'm trying to think as myself.
I wasn't only thinking badly. I was groping but I had come to things
at the root. By that time alone in them.
7
- "Do something so it will be acknowledged that she loves Rhoda."
"I wanted Rhoda to see me lying down in the garden derelict."
I was agape at Rhoda's beauty and in relation to it profoundly ashamed
of my leg. So afraid of what I felt with her that I didn't investigate her.
I believed it would be correct to prefer her. Jam either had no clue or
else exploited my dilemma to defeat me. It says both, cluelessness was her
weapon of choice.
If I had investigated Rhoda what deformity would I have seen that made
it incorrect to prefer her. Crippling fear of the world. Addiction.
So Jam defeated me and then I defeated her and what has come of both
is Rowen's lovely spirit.
Jam and I equally did not love each other and Roy and I did not at all
and there can't be blame on either side because we were unhatched. I did
love Tom and he had his moments too. I say with a speck of tear in my left
eye.
8
Lila. Is Robinson so well thought of because she equivocates.
A Congregationalist who sometimes preaches. Description of believers is
a worthwhile job if taken honorably but I'm suspicious of her. I don't think
she's just describing. I think she wants to believe and at the same time
she wants to seem plausible as if she's taken account of all the objections.
With Lila she gives herself a character-viewpoint so uneducated and so beset
that one wants her consoled. The minister is a kind man who has had a lifetime
of ministering to people in existential fear. That's worthwhile certainly
but is the fantasy of heaven and a perfectly benevolent father the best
way. If I thought I'd see Mary again restored in heaven could I love her
now? If I believed I'd see Ed with his spite cured would I live more happily
now? The question should be what is the the benefit of that specific set
of denials and what is its cost. Robinson doesn't look at cost. The Christians
of Gilead are good people who would never vote for Trump.
- At this moment one of the drinkers from St Michael's yard on his back
on the sidewalk.
- His pal flags down a woman in a car.
- Her phone is dead, she knocks on my door.
- I call 911 and three tall young men from the firehall are here in two
minutes trying to wrap him in a foil blanket.
- Here comes another siren this one the ambulance.
- Oh it's her, the woman with skinny legs.
-
- there was a black mare called june who was a kind of slave on the farm,
a work horse bred to pull hay racks and sleighs and high-wheeled democrats.
she never had a colt because there was no stallion. she was obedient, slow
and harmless and reminded me of my mother. i rode her sometimes, not for
pleasure but for instance to go to the post office for a letter. one day
after her many years of work my father led her into the grain truck's box
and drove away with her. we watched from the kitchen window knowing she
was being taken to be killed for dog food.
-
- this is queenie who was june's companion in the pasture and in harness.
she was pulling a loaded hay rack with june when she fell over dead. my
dad hitched june to her heavy body to drag it to a ravine some distance
away.
I can write these little stories straight off and people on FB like them.
Wrote these in the midst of the Titania's gash material for which
I can't at all see a format.
9
What is the indecision. Incompatible motives.
1. have nice shreds that work for blue page 'writing' kinds of pieces
with fringe readers
2. have observations, conclusions I want to get across
3. have a lot of poignant stories
4. want to prove myself in a large accessible way
- Are there more motives yes, the Work,
to order, and contemplate, death
- Do you mean legacy no
- Do you mean give an account no
- To finish my work before I die no
- To realize my work will die no
- Another sentence to temper, early
love, Ellie's, indecision
- To come through your indecision about early love
YES
5. have used writing to try to work through vacillations about early
love
- Is there a right project that can reconcile them
honest, liberation, generous, success
- There's been honest generous liberation but not success,
that's my question yes
- I want a project that will succeed YES
- Is that the right thing to want at this point
yes
- Should I just edit the journals no
- CAN you tell me what project yes,
inspiration, completion, indecision in friendship
- Write about my friendships no
- Invent a friendship that works yes
- What Patrick O'Brian did YES
- Invent the friend I would have wanted yes
turn for the better, happiness, withdrawn, child
- Star man yes
- Star man is you yes
12
Mafalda a widow as of three days ago.
Yesterday I dared get into Tom's letters and mine from our earliest years.
They didn't plunge me into pain though they did make me feel we should still
be together. Two things I noticed. One was how earnestly he was trying.
I was so keyed up with fear of betrayal I couldn't trust the good faith
there was along with his disorganized lapses. The other was that my own
writing was a bit strange to me. It wasn't foolish, I liked its light precision,
but I wondered whether my familiar self has shifted without my noticing.
Maybe something about being older, less in life. The voice seemed young.
Robinson's Home. It's better than Lila, simpler and tighter,
I mean strung tight with the best kind of suspense, the true kind about
whether people are going to hold it together. I liked Jack, the drunk prodigal
son, but I didn't think she was honest enough about him. She let it be thought
his disaffection was just a mystery but it seemed to me he was outside the
family because he knew they were all lying about god. From childhood he
was the only honest one. He drank because he hadn't sorted it out to be
able to know with clarity that they were wrong and he was right. Apart from
her religious nostalgia I liked the grey steady voice she found. I felt
it would be useable to write about Tom. But then whenever I get into the
actual record of Tom and me I don't see that any voice would be adequate
to our story.
13
Woke this morning - it was 5:30 and raining - thinking about the pages
I was looking at before I went to bed - the stack of mad boiling off in
Ken's time - thinking it was menopause fire; and Susan when I knew her was
in it too; and Duncan saying "if you keep on like this;" and the
moment praying at Big Bar; and the pages of flood writing; and saying to
Joyce "If I feel what I feel about tall handsome men I'll be a sitting
duck" and she saying "I know you think that;" and the paragraph
about the small house in California. The unhesitating drive into mind of
those years and the inexperienced floundering terrified resolute passion
of love.
- work. where am I. frightened.
- reading, trying to read, Perceptual acquaintance from Descartes
to Reid. I keep shying.
- my table spread with papers.
- is the anxiety from my other work pervasive?
-
- what other work, and is it work. getting through the bottleneck of
menopause? fighting for balance. fighting for imbalance. balance for academic
work without the balancers I've had. extreme control and extreme abandon.
and yet it isn't that - if I fell miles in love I'd be able to work. if
the work would bring me love I'd be able to work. some I is in despair,
in panic, is throwing herself down wailing when she sees the table covered
with papers. oh take me to a small house in california, winter sun, large
trees, a blue plate on the table, a man with his own concerns who loves
to touch me. my heart is shocked at having this instead of that. so shocked,
so shocked.
I went back thinking to try again with Titania's gash. Came to
a halt as I always do. Then I return to Theory's practice, is that
its name, and think I'm giving up on Jam's time, Jam's time isn't prose,
I can't make prose of it. But Jam's time is where I left poetics and poetics
has to be here too. I have to do them both. Can they run parallel? It says
yes.
When did I write that. Wasn't it the first year of the doc before I went
to SD in 1994. [August 1994] Don't I remember rereading it sitting in the
café outside the east door of the Golden West.
-
Reading the first year of the doc marveling at the writing, the way it
goes along so confidently just saying exactly what I'm thinking. The story
of Jim so accurate and unusual. It's written, doesn't need anything else.
-
Clean demolition in the laundryroom. I kept getting stuck and leaving
it for the day and coming back another day and tonight the room swept, broken
wood and plaster dumped into the bin outside.
14
Separate stories of Dave C, Ken, Jim, David B, writing work, emotional
work. Joyce and love woman, love child. Imagination and body. Place and
time.
18
- Did teaching ruin me no
- Did self-denial with Tom no
- Am I ruined no [sigh]
One of those hard nights waking at 3 and reading to try to fall asleep
again but managing only a morning doze with horrible dreams. Coleridge:
early visions last read on a red plaid camp bed in Nora's front room,
fall of 2002 when I was newly moved to SD and just back from Ed's death.
I'm reading Holmes' fondness for C's notebooks melancholy that I somehow
haven't earned equal interest in my own though I've had range and passion
too. Also noticing what I hadn't, how tethered he was in religion even when
young. Feeling for his desperate energies of letter-writing and self-description.
His notebooks on Amazon are now selling for five or six hundred dollars.
I feel ruined because I don't know what to do, feel I have to settle
into something magnificent and can't believe in anything I start.
It's a dead-looking Saturday afternoon, grey air above the grey pavement
of the corner, bare trees, dead plants, one leaf sommersaulting across the
street. The house not quite warm.
20
Day not quite as dead. Wet shine on the street, white mist a bit luminous
over the hill, Monday traffic.
What do I think of Thien. She's readable, she pulls me along, but I'm
suspicious of her in a couple of ways. Her sympathy is understandably with
the gifted, the special, but she doesn't balance her denunciation of the
unspecials' violent envy with an acknowledgement of the feudal miseries
Mao was trying to correct. The other way is maybe related. There's a blurry
overreach in her descriptions of music and her characters' thoughts that
feels like mystification. Maybe she knows more than I do or maybe she is
puffing her text in ways she knows will give her an edge with the unmusical
literary, an edge her prizes say she certainly has. She's impressive and
not clear. She doesn't establish my trust.
- Is she faking sensibility yes
- Does she know more than I do in music YES
- Is her puff strategic yes
- Am I right to be suspicious yes
What I think about while reading it is how political equality can never
be personal equality; there will always be personally superior people and
personally inferior people will hate them the way white trash hated the
Obamas. Mao's revolution licensed that spite and was hijacked by it.
A moment saying to Oma - was it in her laundry room? - "They hated
us because we were smart" and she saying quietly "I know."
The question of how a society can make appreciative best use of the varied
abilities of all its members.
Shearer saying she's not writing well unless she feels a saw cutting
through the little box she's in. Robinson doesn't and Thien doesn't.
Tim replying to my question saying we can take the moment of birth as
astrologically significant because the preborn are in "an ante-room
of life," not "on earth, in the world of action and event."
-
The real story is an inseparable mesh - I said mess - of love woman work
with Joyce, Louie and men; the development of an embodied vision of mind;
and daily enjoyment of time and place that includes some visual study. It's
made, it's complete, and it's unreadable in this form.
- It will never be read yes
- It will die with me yes
- Should I destroy it no
- I'm haunted by this failure YES
- It's a tragic waste YES [sigh]
- Anything else I can do would be less than this
yes
- I'm satisfied it's my best-possible most conscientiously-founded
work and yet it is inviable YES
- That's my structure projected yes
- And at the same time it's true yes
- I'm all that I am and yet socially inviable
yes
- So I've made my work tell that story yes
- So it's my fault no
- Is there any solution yes: graduate,
by acting, to fight, death
- Fight by publishing no
- Fight psychologically no
- Can you explain defeat, despair,
by brilliant and courageous, writing
- Do you mean new writing yes
- Stop trying to work from journals YES
21
Three nights later he was sitting at his post
under a bright moon - "how hard to describe that sort of Queen's metal
plating, which the Moonlight forms on the bottle-green Sea"
The word plating. I thought of reading Tom the description of
his plated smile in my room in the West with a pang, not because it hurt
his feelings - it did, he was furious - but because he instantly got my
use of the word. There it was: there was why. Then I stamp my foot and scold
him: we should still be together, you.
23
How did I get to Hvorostovsky last night. Sideways-rummaging in Youtube
from some source I don't remember, in Au fond du temple saint struck
by his exceptional sexy all-out embodiment, looking for more. Someone in
the comments said RIP. He's dead? It turned out he'd died yesterday morning
in London. When someone of stature dies does notice of him diffuse through
space to reach even this dull dirty outpost? Not 'his spirit' but people's
response, which in a way is 'his spirit'. I mean in the sense that
it's about him, a wave in his key radiating invisibly and received unconsciously.
Dull dirty outpost - I went to the film society's show at the college
a couple of nights ago, sat afterwards watching the large audience leave,
wanting to see who lives in this town. Lightless badly-dressed undistinguished
couples. The Brambles owner and Daphne so far the exceptions.
Kaufmann when he is singing Au fond du temple with Hvorostovsky
gestures operatically and when Hvorostovsky is singing is visibly getting
himself ready to sing again. Hvorostovsky doesn't gesture and his face when
Kaufmann is singing is full of privacy, responding minutely to what he sees
in the audience and to his own thoughts.
Hvorostovsky in his fifties was in full gleam, whereas Netrebko and Garanca
in their forties have lost their gleam I assume to motherhood. Netrebko's
smile has gone old-tarty in a blown-up moon face. Exquisite Garanca is thickened
and I think saddened. They sing well but singing wasn't all they were. When
does beauty last into middle age and is it self-sacrifice that spoils it?
"If you're pleased with what you're doing it's the ultimate happiness
in the world." Hvorostovsky seemed generous but I doubt he did what
he didn't want to do. So then why did he plant a little death-seed in his
brain? Was it his way to want to leave at his peak? The Moscow concert he
did with Garanca in 2015 when he and she and his family already knew his
diagnosis was like saying goodbye to a marvelous life. He picks up the pile
of bouquets to distribute to the women of the orchestra. His children get
on stage to help him. He leans over to kiss his mother in the front row.
At the last he sings a Russian folk song a capella and Garanca at the side
of the stage wipes tears. The audience is in raptures. He lays his hand
on his heart.
26
Coleridge as philosopher. Holmes has got to the Biographia Literaria
months in 1815 - C was 42 - and I feel my brain hardening and tightening
into dispute. Holmes seems to be in sympathy with his effort to legitimize
Christianity and aspects of human possibility C considers supported by it.
C is locked into a dichotomy he struggles with - he does struggle, it's
the engine in him of great energy. It seems to be a struggle about 'passivity'
- he thinks the associationists - the physiologists I suppose - want to
describe 'the mind' as externally controlled, and human creation - the best
of what he does - as therefore devalued. For creation and therefore humanity
to be worth anything it must be somehow transcendent of materiality. To
back that hope he calls on the Germans. Plagiarizes them because both he
and they are working off a fantasy neither are clear in? He personally is
passive in relation to laudanum and booze. He's in knots about sex - lives
in a frenzy of idealized longing - a state I know all about - and lies and
goes into debt and always inveigles other people into looking after him
and hardly ever does what he says he's going to do when he says he's going
to do it, though he does end up doing things. In other words he's in constant
consternation about himself at the same time as believing and having reason
to believe in his exceptional gifts. It has to be a shame about being out
of control - ie his ideal of behavior is not in control of a body that has
its own ways, some of which are reasonable and some not.
Bodies are both active and passive, there's no philosophical problem
in that. Addiction is something else, a malfunction. So there he is, no
longer a poet, churning in an impossible confusion. But anyway, Imagination
and Fancy: he aligns Imagination with transcendental free agency and Fancy
with associative physiology, is that the whole of it? Is there any way to
ground the distinction in experience of writing? When he wrote Frost
at midnight he was where he was, feeling what he felt, and wrote it
down with his already developed fluency. It's not passive but it's receptive,
he listens to himself, he actively responds to what he actively receives.
Even his language comes to him from something in himself that is not the
conscious self. A body can do that. So what need of the Germans if not to
bedazzle London with esoterica. Which he did.
It's raining hard. The Coldwater has been rising again. Sunday morning
half an hour after the church bell. Snowing in the passes. For breakfast
I had bacon and egg on toast, Brambles' good toast and bacon done exactly
right. I'm mostly remembering now that not everything has to be cooked on
high. Ham hock simmering. Should I go back to bed maybe, take the book.
WW put up with C's chaos because without him his writing went gutless.
C seems to have honoured W and his poems without envy but he did also leach
off W's established household. Crisis when C noticed W had three women and
he none (none he wanted). After the split WW spoiled The prelude
in revision and never dared publish it whereas C went on publishing anything
at all.
1772-1834, WW 1770-1850.
-
- 'forbiddingly interesting' - forbiddenly interesting - in those days
almost all men were in thrall to an unconscious need to keep women down
- a bad thing more or less equal to women's ferocious unconscious need
to compete sexually with each other. and it's not altogether better now
so if one can't sometimes forgive there's no one left to be friends with.
27
Clean house. Always so pleased by. I tipped Kathy a squash and the $10
Timmy's card some woman handed me in the dark as their float went by Friday
night.
Took the Minibee's coat to the high school and passed it to a fairy godmother.
Maybe I'll see it walking past this window one weekday morning or mid-afternoon.
Meantime have spent the refund on a sewing machine.
Slaughter novels Thien on Cambodian genocide, Sebastian Barry on American
genocide of Indians, Hollywood slaughter movies about Cambodia and the Sudan.
28
Dogs at the perimeter is better than Do not say we have nothing.
A therapist in online comments saying Thien gets the psychology of Cambodian
trauma right. I don't know whether that's so but the text is cleaner.
We did not come in solitude, my mother told
me. Inside us, from the beginning, we were entrusted with many lives ...
we try to carry them till the end.
It startled me to see that said. The sense of carrying those who belong
to me who have died. Oma, Janeen, Frank, Joyce, but not only my own dead,
Tom's too, Mac and Vic, Uncle Joe.
The sky is such a pure and fragile white, filling
all the space between the trees and the road.
29
I've seen plenty men pass in my mind from something
admirable to something you don't care about.
I never think bad of John, just can't. I don't
even truly know his nature. He a perpetual stranger and I delight in that.
He made up a voice in Days without end that let him prance through
a book having the best of fun. Is it a plausible voice, no. Irish but not
Irish: some mongrel American dialect. Unschooled grammar with conspicuously
educated lexicon. Bare-faced anachronisms like 'lipstick' in eighteen fifty-something.
Lige Mangan looks at me, turning in his saddle.
He's laughing.
That's a sweet country, he says.
I'll say it is, I said.
Why don't you say that to me? says Starling
Carlton at his other side. I can apply an appreciation of a view just as
good as Trooper McNulty.
Ain't it just glorious, though, Starling, ain't
it? says Lige, like he don't know that Starling is coming at that one sideways.
But he does know. Then Starling gives way and decides for the sake of friendship
to follow Lige into that brand of easy talk.
Man, says Starling, it is. It just is.
Then Starling looks real happy. Then Lige does
too.
Goddamn, says the sergeant, keep quiet back
there.
Realizing Eleanor let Barry coast talking about his family, didn't get
into the book. It's savagery porn like Blood meridian and that charming
voice is sloppier than it should be. Winona is an implausible wheel to turn
a plot on. Like most writers, when he makes up massively traumatized characters
they show no consequence of trauma. Reviewers let him get away with all
of that because it's one lively page after another. But Annie Dunne
was immaculate. How many years between them. 2002-2016.
He said he writes about his family because our original people are the
only thing we know. I didn't know my original people. "You found out
you didn't need anyone." Apart from Luke isn't Tom the only person
I've known, and wasn't even that so difficult I had to study to do it -
take notes I mean, because I couldn't consolidate attachment.
part 3
time remaining volume 6: 2017-2018 july-july
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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