December 3
I went out this afternoon - sunlight on white ground in the garden -
air warm enough so the sidewalks were wet - and cleaned up the last of the
mushroom compost tarps. Put away the sawhorses and their planks. Wanted
the garden cleaned up to be able to take its picture maybe, when it's nice
again under snow.
In the last days got the house show texts into Indesign and printed as
pdfs, then resized and printed again. Leaving them for some days to look
at content again. There's too much of them I think.
After the library yesterday went to Canadian Tire and bought a router
then Home Hardware for a pocket hole jig.
Today was ripping through the later vols of In America looking
for how it went with filmmaking in those years. I'd got the Marantz and
started Soundtrack Pro before I left San D, and then Mesa Grande was two
years writing and photos, the monograph and being there, and then just months
before I left, the video camera. And then wasn't it again toward the end
of the time in Borrego, and then long interruption again, longer, three
years so far.
4
Round white moon in its white haze let loose by the tip of the blue spruce.
7:45.
Jay carried away the basement's junk wood today, and the garden's.
Talking to Jenn on FB this morning thought to send her the sketchup texts.
Realized there should be reference images. Formatted them into the pdf. Sent
to Louie, Greg, Emilee.
Felix has programmed Trapline at Filmoteca de Cantabria in Santander
end of December.
5
I have had to enroll in a new highschool across
the river. The classroom's chalkboards go up to the very high ceilings and
are completely covered with writing. People working at the board have cleared
just small spaces in front of them. I'm wondering whether I could invent
an eraser on a long stick to get the whole chalkboard cleaned off. It is
a math class though no one else seems to be doing anything. I'm thinking
I'd have to do math on my own every day to catch up before the exams.
To the left of the school there's a high-ceilinged
vine walk with lemons growing on twisted branches pruned hard.
Going home afterward one of those complicated travel
sequences with many scenes. Long walk downhill toward the river where I
can see a curved concrete bridge. Ride on top of earth or rock in a barge
being towed across the river. Am on a bike riding a gravel path with puddles.
Come to a disrupted section with people having to carry their bikes. A woman
tells me it's better to climb the wall and take the right-side road. Climbing
the wall isn't easy, I have to put down my backpack. People have kicked
footholes in the brittle plastic. On the path a tied plastic bag full of
pee. Someone says the man sitting by a shed or stall up ahead has a gun
and is threatening to shoot Jews. I pass him steadily with my eyes down
wondering whether I look like a Jew.
- Realizing the movie I watched before bed had an imprint, Laila's
birthday in which someone drives a taxi around Ramallah all day.
6
Checking Felix's translation of Paul Grant's piece sorry that generous
perceptive spirit had so hard a death.
Brought Miriam two squash and some carrots in frozen earth just dug.
Made salmon soup. Bought wood for the work table - went to the lumber yard
for prices, came home and checked in the garage, yes a couple of long 1x6s,
yes enough 2x3 length for the sides, and for the front too if I can get
the hinges off the old cupboard, stuck screws. So bought just 2x3 finished
fir for the legs and laminated pine shelving for the top. Sweet on the lumberyard
man who walks past, he's a nice shape and there's a you in him, he
talks to me.
Sent Cheryl the sketchup text. What will she say - she'll think it's
not avant-garde enough.
8
Going through the later In America volumes from 2009 after London
looking to collect myself for work I see how spread out I was into students,
gangbuster lectures, mbo theory, California and the Here's, residual
Tom, the monograph, garden-making, work & days construction and
review coming from it, and then sketchup and househunting and always daily
record, so that it's clear why I didn't dig down into the large hard projects.
Now that I'm so simplified what are they, what should I be assembling:
- Soundtrack pro, sound
- FCP and motion4, video
- books
- bodily well-being and presence
- aome kind of psychological work, it says: honest, exclusion, winning,
high intuition
- Social exclusion yes
- More high intuition to be found yes
- By means of you yes
- What exclusion is in me yes
- Do you mean the hopelessness yes
- Do you mean releasing it yes
- Wd gvie more access to high intuition yes
- Is that the whole of what you mean yes
-
- The hopelessness came with them and Jam
yes
- Do you mean I had more access to high intuition before
that no
-
- Collect those categories YES
Louie, Emilee, Greg, Cheryl - none of them have replied.
Day 1710.
The Marantz is alright. Hadn't touched it since recordng Peter v T two
years ago. Subassembled a sound summary today, got together the sound bits
- books, flashcards, marantz manual, hard drive, soundtrack pro manuals.
Trying to take a nap laughing that I'd thought I hadn't done anything
in the California years since the doc.
9
[Summary of what I'd done.]
11
The Vietnam war 1-5 these evenings. Beautiful young men, ugly
powerful corrupt old men, John Musgrave who came through the war a killer
radiant with clarity.
Assembling a folder called time remaining with files for those
categories - sound, video, books, body, hope - and added journal project.
Finding I'd already assembled those or similar categories again and again.
I've interrupted myself - I do that. Maybe being settled in this house I
can plow a straight furrow, can I? It takes more than lists and a house
and an income, I'm wayward, like to keep beginning again, planning. I focus
and push through if there's a structured context like the college or the
garden or the doc but without them I wander about in work thoughts without
acting.
- Wondering whether Greg is alright. He isn't replying, not like him,
and there's a whited-out feeling in what I think of as his direction. Can
I say that better. It's been a distinct feeling of just nothing there, a
blank in the air.
Rereading Annals of a former world whenever I'm in bed, glad it's
long, I so like its warm smart perfusion.
12
Its pleasure in language.
In 1838 the Scottish philosopher Thomas Dick,
of County Angus, published his Celestial
Scenery
to imagine a progression in which the recycling
of the earth's materials is a subplot in a dramatic story that begins with
dark scums in motion on an otherwise featureless globe and evolves through
various continental configurations toward the scenery of the earth today.
They refer to the earliest part of that story as "scum tectonics."
"Dark scums." "A deep philology of the continent"
says AO Scott.
-
- At this moment I'm hearing muttering from what will be my laundry room,
a plumber who cannot think inside his head. "Where's my stupid tape
measure?" "DON'T DO THAT!" "Nineteen inches, nineteen
and a half." "Now drill the floor, this is going to be the fun
part." Now singing. The fact that he has not learned to internalize
thoughts isn't giving me confidence. ("Woo!" )- Further to the
laundry room, what my student Emilee calls a first grown-up purchase ("Hot
hot hot hot hot." "Fine, be like that."), a washer and dryer.
("Okay. ... Wow, through. ... Okay, that part.") Will attach
a photo. ("Alright, now downstairs.")
-
- We had early snow and then a thaw and now cold hovering just below
freezing without new snow, just ragged bits left in shaded parts. Am wondering
how the new fruit trees are doing. Have padded their roots with weeded
material but there's no way to know. I look at their buds, which they have
already, with a worried forehead.
[Letter to Greg]
-
Timuktu. Abderrahmane Sissako Mauritian/Malian, perfect film.
13
Alabama elected a Dem yesterday, first thing to look at this morning.
The Dems have orchestrated a swell of gender indignation that has been picking
off boorish men in all directions during the run-up month.
A carpenter coming this morning to estimate mending the laundry room
wall. Then patching and painting. Red walls I think, silver chest of drawers.
Then build a cupboard.
Fresh snow, one set of footprints crossing the street. Sickle moon. I
put on long underwear and went out and scraped the sidewalk. It's loud when
people are sleeping.
Schoolbus drives north trailing quiet curlecues of snow off its roof.
Taxi going home silently turns the corner onto Granite.
14
It's a long December and there's reason to believe
/ maybe this year will be better than the last
Tom in Bellingham at the mission bewildered, broke and alone in the wet
dark northwest playing me that song one night in a motel room, heart-rending
still.
Indian drinking club assembled across the road. Ugly plastic kids' playground
structure they stand around.
-
Bought two $65 132MB memory sticks - organized the sound folder on its
terabyte external and copied it onto one of those nice little things with
a content list. Survey of most of the sound I have. Took until now, 8 at
night.
Spoke to library-Karen about the plastic thing in the churchyard. She
said it wasn't an outrageous request.
Posted the WF show with a link now they've loaded the revised bio.
Jacob said he was working night shifts in a factory for a month because
his Canada Council grant is late.
15
The pool, yesterday another movie I liked surprisingly, Chris
Smith an American shooting in Hindi. Was realizing something I respect is
suspense in relation to simple stories of human circumstance, for instance
the children and their great-aunts in Annie Dunne and in this movie
the poor young man and the richer man's swimming pool. In ordinary action
movies I cannot bear suspense, I fast-forward.
-
What's going on in my L temporal lobe that is making me lose words. Sometimes
they show up after a lag and sometimes I have to find them by calling up
a thesaurus or some associated fact. There are certain words I always lose.
Sebastian Barry's name.
Another symptom is not holding numbers in short term memory, for instance
yesterday when I was logging the sound folder forgetting length of a file
and having to click apple-I again.
Another is context-dependence with little tasks. I'll be at the computer
and think of something to do in the kitchen, and then when I'm in the kitchen
do something else the kitchen suggests, and then go back to the computer
and remember what I had set out to do in the kitchen.
Another is having to revise more when I write.
These are systems I only notice when they fail, I don't take account
of what I'm still good at.
Can I be smart about getting stupid, more watchful and strategic.
Am thinking being settled here, and thinking of myself as settled now,
might let me do harder things again, and get better at some of the things
I've been doing badly. Noticing I've been buying things I used to have,
books, patterns, sewing machine.
-
Aksel Rykkvin 12 years old singing the Laudate with clear eyes,
dimples and utterly relaxed mastery. I stare. People around him support
what he's good at with the best of choral training, the Orchestra of the
Age of Enlightenment, Nigel Short conducting him eye to eye. "He liked
to concentrate and work hard" says his mother.
-
How to work in my sheets of extracts. I can go through and tweak the
writing, I know how to do that, but then the only thing I can think to do
next is to sort onto more sheets, which soon are bewilderingly many. I'm
stopped in sorting by good transitions across categories. Erasing the source
page wd simplify but I know I might cut something another moment would see
as right.
What do I know.
Change the Latinate words. Be aware of when some term is privately technical.
Separate instruction from what has effect. Dialogue can work.
Bewilderment of old projects.
16
In the Here: a notebook sheets I find I've already sorted but
don't remember doing it. I have more judgment in detail but am less able
to keep hold of where I am in the work.
Through the years always too many commas.
Precision. "Its precision is riveting" C said.
I can't concentrate at this level for long.
Not being particular about quotations, cutting ellipses, commas and even
words.
Sideways shifts. Sequences displaced some distance.
I can say be sure to finish something when you start it, but in fact
coming back again again again to the unfinished work in this folder I do
know more.
Differences in cadence, be aware when I want the singing line and when
the more thinking line. Earlier sheets more lyric, can they meld.
Addressing the reader without seeming to.
-
- what kind of man inner and outer would i like to be with? a man who
has skill and discipline and loves his work, goes far with his work. a
man of scrupulous courageous honesty. a man of deep responsibility and
spirit care. a man who loves touch and can go far into it. a man who can
learn, is curious, who sacrifices his illusions, who studies. a man who
is manly in a confident way and not a bluffed way. a man who easily and
naturally provides and takes care of himself and others. a funny man. a
passionate warm man. a lucid man. a man who loves intimacy. a man who loves
talent and intelligence and fosters them in others. an intuitive man who
feels what is there in people and circumstances. a man who works physically
too. a man with faith and clarity. a well-organized man. a radical man
- a man who sees for himself. a man with respect and authority in the world.
a man who wants to marry me utterly and thoroughly and truly. a man who
wants my entire love and trust and passion and will do what is needed to
earn them. a man who wants my genius to succeed and be fulfilled to its
furthest and knows how to help.
-
The plastic thing is gone! There stands the drinking club around the
place where it used to be.
17
- it's dark though, low fog in the valley bottom most days
- i can imagine it well
- i can almost smell it
- it smells like the lumber yard some days
- pine logs
- id thought so
- they are salvaging the beetle kill
- massive truckloads i see rolling past a block away
- i miss you
- i miss you
- seeing you is probably what id like most today
- i'd make you dinner and cake and ask your adventures
- thered be more cake than advventures but id love that
- you always have adventures. sometimes we don't know there have been
adventures till someone asks
- don't you find
- i do, its curious
- i enjoyed walking in the snow last week
- it was sudden and unexpected, and quite heavy
- everything stopped
- as it does in england
- people huddled in cafes
- but strangely the mood was cheerful, people talked
- and i was so happy in it it made me sing
- what did you sing
- cole porter
- by ella
- an enduring legacy from sara
- she gifted me ella
- age about 13 or 14
- and i so so love ella
- she knew you were a sophisticated boy
- oh she did, said i was the only fifteen year old who would do my homework
with gitanes and red wine listening to crooners
- in my japanese decor bedroom
- cartier bresson
- you got that through the epp line
- i had a poster of a new york coffee house in my grade twelve bedroom
- along with a schedule of flights to europe
- and went to new york the christmas of my first year at college
- and rode a bus all up and down 5th ave to the farthest ends
- taking notes in my journal
- new york is so astonishing the first moments
- driving through snow in new york state suddenly towers on the horizon
- you come out of the tunnel
- straight into manhattan
- you've walked at night in both the legendary american cities
- i sometimes think of you walking across LA through the night
- im feeling a lot more cheerful for being with you
- i could feel it happening
- i'll go to bed now happy to have been with you
- best new year
- love
-
It's Sunday. There's the bell.
In a sheet called working that has current bits I see that I'm
better now - I didn't know that. And that recognizing intuition of cortical
structure is as philosophically radical as recognizing prebirth intuition.
The seeing-through talent found another task. Slow work both.
18
Music I keep hearing. It was there when I woke. Mozart but which. - The
Laudate. I'm happy to be working.
-
When I look at the bits gathered from earlier years I see that I'm more
in the clear now, not tethered to other people's language as much. Balanced
not looking for balance.
-
Look at that, I did go out and cut a tree. Road allowance a bit of the
way up 97 where I'd seen little pines last summer. It sprawls the way young
ponderosas do, branches far apart with a messy brush of needles only at
their tips, but I could smell it even in the jeep. Hugh was coming out of
what he called a nooner when I curvetted into my parking spot, kidded me
about being on the run because I didn't have a cutting permit and gave me
a sideways hug because I was being charming.
19
Woke late to deep snow. Most of the day getting text formatted onto double-column
horizontal sheets the size of the image sheets. Better. Jacob showed up
and thought so too.
There was a dream I haven't thought of since I woke, what was it. I said to someone "It's as if I'm dreaming."
That's all I've got. - No, something about
cooking chickens. I was with a friend or one of my kids trying to buy a
chicken to take home and roast. The poulterer kept showing me different
kinds and sizes, one completely flattened, one strangely large.
20
I was visiting my mom. My dad had died not long
before. There was a TV on and two little curly dogs rushing around. She'd
gone out briefly. I looked in a closet or cupboard and saw the white satin
of her wedding dress lying heaped. When I pulled it out I saw it had wide
blood stains and even large dark clots on the skirt. It seemed to me to
mean she would die soon. I felt tenderly toward her: should I visit her
more, come live with her part of each week. Then I came to a table set for
a meal with Judy and Paul. Plates set at each place had many pears standing
on end.
Remembered Oma called the womb die Mutter.
Clear sky dawning pale blue over heaped snow.
21
Diffusing plumes hundreds of feet tall over the town night and day, mills
and the new hog-fuel plant.
22
When white reflects upward the tender skies of winter.
Silver poppy capsules hung on the tree with unfolded paper clips.
23
I was annoyed they had overlaid - overlain? - loud
music on a recording of Daphne reading something about her childhood friend
Ari so I could hardly make out her words. I was thinking I'd send her a
note about the piece adding that I loathed - detested? - the music.
Don't think I've ever heard dreaming overlay sound before, didn't know
it could do that.
overlain is the past participle of overlie;
overlaid is the past participle of overlay - overlain will normally just
be "overlain something" whereas overlaid will be "overlaid
something onto something else".
Did I ever know that?
Trained habit of writing transitional phrases. They show up and I refuse
them. Have to keep trimming 'a' and 'the'.
My brain loses common words but threw up 'curvett' though I'd never in
my life used it before.
White sky at 8 tinted ivory at the southern horizon. Fog bank over Hamilton
Hill. Boiler motoring away.
By Rowen's bed there was a spot of light showing
under some tossed clothes or sheets. I knew it was my computer - this computer.
- Underlying - are you trying to tell me something?
no
Blue spruce in its large dignity standing with weighted branches.
- At home in exile? Exile's home. Exiled in teaching, exiled with Tom,
exiled in the US, making something of them. The way a three year old did,
increasing distance from childhood; deaths, aging, I never stopped longing
for significant work - I worked, as always, commitment, but never stopped
longing for work I could completely believe in - with T too, not having
scope to match my quality - that's life-long, exile from what I should
have been. Exile's home makes do. - I was living my actual structure accurately
- preference for exile that is an instinct for living on my actual foundation
- this is correct, isn't it.
-
- Exile's homes are the day, the light of place, journey, encounters
with strangers, the journal itself, my own stored time and its record,
at moments Tom and when not Tom then my interest in the vicissitudes of
Tom, my own company, the company of experience and evaluation.
For In America I should list authors and books I only came to
by living near American libraries. Charles Bowden, Shearer The wonder
book of the air, Cather, Richard Misrach The sky book, Gilligan,
Doubiago, Fuster, Abrams, Vickie Hearne, Talmy, Shepard, Michael Benedikt
on architecture, David Masumoto, Craig Childs, Mark Spragg, Barry Lopez
fiction, Ivan Doig This house of sky, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham,
Lee Bontecou, Milo Wolff and Carver Mead, Goldstein The organism.
-
Frank I buy carnations in memory of you. Today's are white. December
24 1995 they were red-edged pinks on the sill in the Golden West.
- I am looking lovingly at the green and white - lemon leaf - so green,
firm green leather under the lamp, and small carnations, four on a stalk,
such fresh things, fresh as skin, a lot of surface opened as if to touch.
A young man with a very high voice wrapped the one stalk, $1.25, nicely
in clear plastic. Baby's breath. White, white and green.
-
- I hear people in the corridor saying Merry Christmas. I hate that.
Tom called Heather singing twenty carols one after the other in the lobby
a triumph of the human spirit. I didn't think so. Ernesto, a hundred years
old, stood near her on the carpet leaning on his cane, weeping, Tom said.
I didn't see that. When I met Ernesto at the elevator a few days ago he
seemed to be offering me ten dollars to go to his room with him. Persistently.
Por que no?
-
- It's very quiet. Nearly midnight.
-
- What's the worst that can happen? The fear in my midriff thinks it
is something really bad, but how bad can it be? I wonder if I'm afraid
I'm going to be angry.
-
- 25th
-
- He wanted my cards on the table. I said I would have to speak for three
different people. One who is easily hurt and wants to run away. One who
judges hard and likes to wake up alone. One who gets seduced and will give
you anything you ask for. I wanted him to say something to that. He kept
his thoughts to himself.
-
- I'm your man. You know that, don't you.
-
- Well okay, you're my man if anybody is, but what do I want a man at
all for, they don't listen.
Some days later:
- You're big and hot and bossy and you have spite in you. And I'm safe
with it and I can play with it. It's the making of me. It's what I had
to find.
-
- I know that. I won it.
-
- And I won being worth winning. It took me thirty years. But don't you
also just feel astonished?
-
- All the time.
-
- - That was in the car when we got back to it after watching water falling
falling climbing falling. We have our foreheads together and our eyes closed.
Are you seeing waves?
I can't read much from that time. I'm careful. Is there any other time
in my life I can't bear to feel. I don't think so.
25
Cut-and-pasted all the Christmases so far. People who're gone: Mary and
Ed, the grandparents, Frank, Peter Harcourt, Pat Mills and Chris, Jean Morrison,
Jane Howell, Mr Mann, Joyce Detweiler, Michael Duke, Madame Matter for sure,
Juan, Kane. People whose stories with me I now despise: Reiner, Harcourt,
Ian, Roy, Michael [Voskamp], Jam, Trudy, Kenneth. People I've lost though
they are still alive: Olivia, Judie, Susan, Nathalie - I resist saying Tom.
Worst times were the miscellaneous-boyfriend years, Peter through Ian,
Roy, Paul K, and then the murderous-girlfriend years, T, C, Jam, Louie sometimes.
Frantic pain that cleared when I was on my own or could hold onto myself
in unattached real sex: Tony and Rob. Earned sanity with Tom that showed
in the writing. Still alright: Paul E, Luke and Row, Greg, Don, Peter D,
Louie sometimes, Les and Louise, Anne, Dave C, Rob, Tony, Cheryl, Leah,
Mafalda, Andy, Peter v T.
- Do you have anything you want to say
you've mended your uncon through generosity
- Is it okay to be disgusted by those relations
yes
- I'm not vulnerable to that kind of trashiness anymore
YES
- But this life is pretty empty yes
- Is it going to stay that way no
- More no
- Am I in the right place YES
26
Organizing memory sticks and desktops, my starts and stops such a tangle
of partial dupes - how can I not do that anymore.
27
Pissed off with Luke. He was in a mood to grind and I was in a mood to
fight back as if he were a bad boyfriend badgering me.
What did he say.
- That I choose my intelligence as a weapon and it hurts us
- That I hide behind profundity
- That he sees through me
- That I only refer to him as a five year old
- That my love for his child self was worthless
- That we haven't been we for forty years
- That Roy's responsibility in our break was a long time ago and irrelevant
None of these are true. I've been careful and generous these years and
done what I could and he hasn't seemed to have noticed. He blames me for
what he doesn't like about himself and has terrorized me with the threat
of suicide to punish me.
- At this point his failures are his own and he has to
take them on or not yes
- I'm more alone in face of these denials
yes
- Do you understand why he's choosing denial
yes completion, of partial loss, by intimacy, with his mother
- To get me to declare the opposite
yes
- He's speaking his fears yes
- Which is intimate in itself yes
-
- But it's getting old YES
- It's punitive too YES
- Does he actually know the truth yes
- He resents feeling he's not as smart as I am
yes
- And he's not yes
- Would he be if he worked as hard as I do
no
- Would he be better off cut off from me
no
- Is this the central thing I shouldn't forget
YES
- Does it mean I should hold back and flatter
yes
- I already partly do YES
- Do it more yes
-
- Is this the whole crux YES
- It isn't really abandonment YES
- So his 'loving' and 'missing' are essentially worthless
to me YES
-
Peter's stories of magical coincidence. Charisma as force field. The
way he lives.
"I was working with ice early on, 20 years
ago. Winters are cold up there and I had too many paintings nobody wanted."
Von Tiesenhausen noticed if he scraped layers of frost off the top, he could
drive the ice surface down as it refroze. Over weeks, months, this became
a compelling interest: "I could drive that layer down significantly,
so you could look sideways at water." The first few layers were filled
with stilled bubbles. But as he dug deeper, the ice became translucent.
He had the idea of carving a human silhouette - his own - 20 centimetres
deep into the frozen water, a black socket looking down into the dark.
Later in the season von Tiesenhausen attempted
to divide the lake in half, down to its bottom. He got a few feet down,
admiring the beauty of his icy aquarium, when the sun emerged from behind
a cloud. "On the bottom of the pond, this illumination of a figure
appeared. I realized it's that thing I made over there! And so now I can
see it from below, and this same dark figure is now this angelic, illuminated
figure from below."
- I've lost my charisma yes
- Is it my fault yes [sigh]
- Can I get it back yes
- By not letting people wear me down
yes
- Being more myself with people yes
- Listening to you in the moment yes
- Push through with what I want yes
- Show in Grande Prairie yes
- Book before then yes
28
- Is it alright to give up on Luke
yes
- Is it necessary yes
- Then there's no one left yes
- Is that what you want yes [sigh]
- It's a wrecking impulse no
- Say more (knc), (Kp), processing,
improvement
- Explain (knc), (Kp) action, generosity,
power, withdrawal
- My generosity has been a withdrawal from power
yes
- Being good to Luke has harmed me
yes
-
- Be practical about Luke
yes
- He's been stealing from me YES
- I'll be even colder and deader yes
- You want that for me?!! yes
- Say why teaching, child, quest,
woman
- To learn the child's quest for the mother
yes
- That cold deadness happened YES
Baffled in my welter of notes. I can order and refine notes endlessly
but don't find a task in them and drop them and then find them again and
it just goes on without end. I need to talk to myself here but even that
is discredited by this piling up of more. I don't know how to get off the
wheel. Should I junk all the journals and notes? What would it be like to
be without them? I don't think that's the question. I write, I care about
writing, I fail to make for myself a writer's fame and influence although
I'd like them. That's the crux isn't it. A writer's completions.
- Are photo books the way for now?
yes
- Apply for things I'm not likely to get?
YES
- Give up video no
Notes that are writing and notes that are instruction.
29
New version of the Choy's-building dream. I've
been away and have come back to find it a dorm, new and clean, long corridors
with single rooms on either side. I pass a bathroom with its door open and
a wet young man in a white towel. Have been assigned to a larger room at
one end of the corridor. Am sitting talking to women who're there when I
realize it's a shared room. Dismayed, I'll never have a room to myself.
Last night stern words with Doug to get them to stop shoveling my sidewalks.
Friday 8am. Dim white daylight, large flakes drifting.
-
Should I think of Here: a notebook as companion to the film work
- is that it? Does it have photos? Is it online? And printed? Is Titania's
gash a film too? And notebook?
30
Titania's gash is a good title and I have a good cover for it.
Up down strange and charm is another good title. What are they titles
of.
So silent, white and deeply blanketed a scene. 4:31. White sky tinted
a bit blue-grey at its rim.
31
Deep snow in the garden showing tracks along the west side of the house
and diverging across the beds. Not human, a human would have used the shoveled
paths. Something quite large and more than one. Narrow tracks but deep.
- Little valentine shapes, deer prints.
I don't know how thematic to be. I like the accidents. But they're just
a few lines. What makes it a whole if not a theme. Themes should be subliminal.
In those pieces it was the short time they were assembled from but these
bits are assembled from many times. Short sequences with spacers?
Can I be thematic and still be subliminal enough?
Re-use phrases?
Wondering how deliberate to become about technical strategies. I look
for principles but at the same time feel they will be too narrow, they can't
cohere wide enough.
The function of sequence, whether one-space, no-space or more. The function
of spacers if used.
Sometimes less of a phrase there has been more of somewhere else.
1st January 2018
2017 was:
- house - just being here except for two visits in Van - laundry room
demolition and plumbing, cleaner once a month, got my rug back, work bench
in the basement, took screens off, router, nailer, reciprocating saw, other
tools, sewing machine and patterns, bought a lot of books, linen pants,
replaced phone, jeep into the garage, replaced horrible kitchen fixture
with a schoolhouse lamp, got my furniture from Louie's, fixed up the wicker
chair, Cassandra's sea wolf print
- garden - coldframe, dug up Yellow Rose of Texas suckers and wild roses
and organized garage, cherry, crabapple, pear, apricot, nectarine, dwarf
peach, greengage plum, filberts, beds and paths, long edges, wildflower
edge, pine and aspen, paeonies and roses, lot of little plants, FB photos,
gave away food, started seeds inside, canned apricots, peaches, cherries,
rhubarb, lot of plums, tomatoes,
- music: Nuria in Bach, Stitch-Randall Telemann,
- writing: posted small pieces on FB, journal scouring and revising Jam
and Saturna, air and poetics notes,
- reading: Foster Yeats, L'air et les songes, Bacigalupo on Pound,
biog of Dickenson, Richardson Emerson: the mind on fire, Fromm's
biog of Richardson, Cookson's guide to the Cantos, Austin The English
roses, Lawrence, Durrell and Fermor, Mind of the raven.
- shows: here at FIFA, trapline at the Cinemateque and
Cantabria, Aimée and Chris persisted to get a good TIFF digital
dub of, Shaun Inouye's patch for the TIFF150 catalogue, organized Sketchup
show for three weeks from now; Spain; tried and failed to get screenings
at Media City, garden group and Van Cinemateque
- photos: only of the garden and the confluence, Saturna sketchup, âme
local sketchup and found Günter Ludwig's paintings,
- people: blocked Tom and miss him less, some good times with Luke, visit
with Rowen, few notes from Don, four visits with Paul and looked at Spius
Creek with him, Czech young people, Adam and Tana, stayed friends with
Jennifer, Logan replied, Peter and Theresa stopped in, Dave stopped sending
money, something with Daphne Randall and Yvonne, coffee with Hugh, dumped
David and Tia, Don and Michael in MacLeod's Books, Les overnight, checked
out highschool and powwow, connected with Hoodoo Ranch, endured Jerry for
a week, four trips to Kamloops, two to Ashcroft, one to Kelowna, too smoky
to camp.
- tech: G4 failed, organized memory sticks, replaced phone,
- bod: heavier but stronger, could dig and can shovel sidewalks, lot
of falls during the summer, bad knee injury but mended, elbow injured and
mended, otherwise hurt less, black arms less so far, took care of teeth
including crown
Best last year - garden of course
Money - spent lots - have about $16,300 down from $18,100 this time last
year = -1800 which isn't as bad as I expected, down about $10,000 from when
I moved here. Monthly income $1930 if dollar doesn't rise.
- Want in house and garden:
- work table built
- laundry room cupboard and painted
- more paeonies and roses
- bench pad and bench
-
- What do I want:
- stronger and lighter and not hurt - steady 145 and 30"
- better memory
- to range out of town, camp
- make a will
- renew passport
- new silver shoes
-
- Work:
- upgrade computer
- write something major and publishable
- make mesa grande and borrego books
- the new videos to have venues and be liked
- get a show of the PCR work in GP and at presentation house
- finish pale hill
Jam story would have to be a dialogue between then and now. If I could
pull it off wd be unheard of. I've kept the option by not accepting her
money.
3
Sky this morning perfectly clear not white because tinted - not ivory
because translucent - lit alabaster gloriously unstone - all transparent
to vast invisible. Even unstoppable increase.
There a sharp pink line starts up from the hill's dark margin.
A flock swerves through. What is the beauty of. Loose coherence, it's
a moving multiple, one thing made of many things all moving in relation
to each other, a shape holding though its parts don't.
Reviewing 2017:
- Jerry arrived into a finer tuning than I knew, less surprising I couldn't
stand him.
- Had already forgotten how scared I was of the sketchup show. Noticing
that because I've finished and given the work I do not need to notice its
notes anymore.
- Main note projects: The air, Titania's gash about the
Jam time, Theory's practice about the dissertation time, a lot about
writing. Daily record undistinguished mostly, less psychological work in
general but some key realizations. Dream records surprisingly alright, compact.
- Not much film/visual/Orpheus except that The air is that.
- A firm fine tone last winter that dissipated in summer garden notes
etc.
4
Garden design talk at the garden club last night. Erin from Spius Creek.
Couple of people asked what I charge. Liked being in charming easy flood
of lecturing again but is there a cost, days to get tuning back? It says
yes. Worth doing garden design here nonetheless, for the money? Yes.
- Figure out how to set up continuity no matter what.
Should I make and sell a series of artist's notebooks extracted from
the journals? Part fiction? Is that the only way to get continuity? Not
all years. Each with a name? Photos.
- Reflecting surfaces - London, feminism, photographs, England, pots,
film
- Dames rocket - lesbian feminism and confused search, In English
- Lake house - notes in origin - photos place and writing
- Titania's gash - Jam, Saturna, pregnancy
- Aphrodite's garden - deciding on power, the Book
- Love woman and work woman
- Theory's practice - Tom and the dissertaion
- The golden west - California and Tom, garden design
- Eurydice's voices - teaching letters - giving body voices
- North county - mind and land - Mesa Grande and desert
- The air - sound, video, Orpheus
- Time remaining - getting old
What would the series be for - work notebooks showing art-philosophy-writing-science-psychology-sex-friendship-place
etc as one thing - show my best work in its mixed matrix. For whom, smart
women who want to be real.
Hand it off to a real publisher for distribution. Get an agent.
Always the question of how to make it real work at the same time as saleable.
I immediately start thinking of it both ways, Mesa Grande so I could sell
it in gift shops or Mesa Grande with personal stories. Would photos discredit
the writing. Photos online separate? Photo books separate?
Include conversation with past time.
How would I go about assembling/editing it. A lot of it is done already
but I'd have to pick one to start. Pick the ones I've most recently worked
on wd be Titania. Pick the one most nearly ready wd be Mesa Grande.
Each has a bibliography and notes.
Think of colors of the row on a shelf.
5
The sketchup texts were already a beginning.
They're maybe somewhat topical rather than yearly. Time overlaps. Fictional
sample year?
Enfold other times, for instance from still at home and college.
Better scanning - funding for.
-
Chasing a kitten down steep walls and stairs. Erin
sitting next to me in bleacher benches putting an arm around me. Surprised
she was running her hand lightly over my right boob. Leaned around and slipped
the tip of her tongue into my mouth.
6
From Indra:
Your project is quite wonderful, with the text
leading the reader to and fro through personal time and the deceptively
naive images generated by sketchup adding a solid, apparently measurable,
spatial dimension to the journey, which is anything but linear and includes
the process of its own rendering as a project.
Such an evocative quest to re-inhabit a lifetime; to see where you are,
or have been, or wish you had been, or might yet be. I loved the ambiguity
and the repeating bunch of tulips, the yellow Epp kitchen, the dark children's
hospital room and much, much else, including your uncommented conclusion
from the rafters of the cabin at Breezy Bay.
From Franci:
It's beautiful work. I love the light and shadows
and colours, and the gorgeous 'fakeness' of the sketch-up surfaces
Emilee's and Louie's not worth mentioning. Greg has chickened out. Sent
to Janet and Mafalda just now.
7
Mafalda:
Because of the very clinical medium (sketch
up) and the very short memories they felt separated from each other, the
memories not penetrating those beautiful spaces that looked like they hadn't
been lived in yet. On the other hand the idea of the project, reconstructing
your past through the places you have lived in is profound and brilliant.
Greg:
Quite a thing, to have discovered a way of going
deeper into a long-time and psychologically-meaningful interest in houses
and spaces.
- And pointed out that one of my geographical coordinates was wrong.
Dark quiet Sunday night after 10. I'd turned off the room lights and
was looking out to see whether the sidewalk I scraped this aft was freezing.
There was a deer on the road, light leggy thing hesitating on the far side
of the snow bank, gazing sideways into my yard. Would it come in. No, it
crossed carefully toward the parking lot as if wary of ice.
- There it comes back the other way - or is this one larger - followed
by another.
Someone moving a chair under the orange light in the St Michaels yard.
Are they camping? It's not as cold as it was.
What is it people aren't saying. They like the drawings and don't talk
about the writing, even or is especially not the bare-naked confessions
of hunger. Jennifer sort of did:
I wanted to read your work twice, there is a
lot in it. It seems to me the kind of thing you take something different
from with every reading, but the over-all impression is one of nostalgia.
Yesterday it was cerebral, I guess might be
the word. It made me think.... Think about thinking, think about the process
of remembering. You describe recalling things that you had forgotten...
The color of a blanket, where the doors were, the size of the rooms... And
I was struck by the process of forgetting, or recalling.
This morning it seemed more of a visceral read,
and I could feel the emotion in the prose. I'm glad you attached the pictures,
it rounds out the overall impact, gives substance to the recollections and
adds character to the people and places.... The rooftop apartment looked
like a photograph, and I was struck by its realism, as opposed to the starkness
of some of the first couple of houses.
Personally, I was drawn to the grassland house.
Something about its isolation, its charm and utter utilitarian usefulness.
I would build it, if I could, or something like it.
I know its something I'll come back to. It stuck
with me yesterday, and I knew I couldn't tell you what I took from it without
reading it at least once more.
I feel honored, actually, that you sent it.
It does seem deeply personal and I think you must be quite brave to let
people have that intimate glimpse into your thoughts and your past.
8
I'd come back to my place - thinking of it as Burghley
Road though it's down an entrance well - to find what I thought must be
eagle feathers, large and of different kinds, a lot, maybe a dozen, scattered
around my door. There's another that isn't an eagle's, polka-dotted black
and white with fluff on the shaft. What are they doing there? Hadn't I seen
a Native man tossing one down as he passed on a bike. I start thinking it's
something they do ceremonially.
Darcy finishing the bathroom wall today and refitting the window casing
in the laundry room.
Janet had edits but what was it she unspokenly didn't like about the
writing. Was she jealous of the range? Embarrassed by the boy-craziness?
9
Greyhound ticket for next Sunday.
-
Malouf imagining Ovid in exile.
he delights in showing off to me how he can
whistle like the big hawks we see occasionally floating high up under the
clouds
I thought of Michael Duke, felt I'm the only one who has keeping of his
story. How could I tell it so its size is felt.
10
Its elements the neighbourhood, Starbucks, the back country, aloneness,
attraction-repulsion, two bodies in California. How old was I in 2003 -
58. Two bodies in California. How old was he when he died, 47.
Was out at eight this morning shoving wet heavy snow off the sidewalk,
Doug in his sweatshirt hood and plaid jacket coughing over by his own fence.
Grey mist so low I can't see the hill. It has silvered the blue spruce lightly
all over, a nice effect. The Mac Pro fan is whining as it copies Here
onto Dropbox for the show.
Mike Mills Twentieth century women.
12
Looking at yesterday saying what I need to write and what I'd want to
read again are different things, I could erase.
13
- I woke at two or three and lay in dim hopeless misery feeling I've
come to a bad end. The bathroom overhead light gave me a horrifying face,
water fat with gulches under the eyes. I'm not sharp, my lovely brain is
dying down. The air is loveless. It's brutal January, covered sky, dirty
snow in iron heaps.
-
- Having said those things, in my red armchair next to a lamp, beside
the dark and in a scent of hyacinth, I seem to be alright.
- Can I live well in the tragic end?
-
- Kindly. Honestly. As beautifully as possible. Strategically.
-
- Then I lay there not sleeping and watching a star move west, against
and then behind a bar in the window. I thought plants yes are always new
again, and the stars are being wrecked so slowly I won't see it happen.
From 2006.
14
- What would fix it -
- exercise
- dressing better, more interestingly
- being better looking
- new experience, adventure
- success
- gratitude and acknowledgement
- creation
- sex
- better housing
To concentrate on what is, when it isn't what one had wanted.
For the Reader, a story about the skyshack, a story about Tom's
place.
Writing beside - would that work
Vancouver 16
Ruby-Marie Dennis Binche BC
18
I was with some people on the edge of a lake. Stepped
onto a long wooden jetty and zoomed out into the water and then up along
a narrow strip of small blooming trees. Then I'm in a little house in the
pitch dark. The doorbell rings. I open the door before I find the switch
to turn on the light. A hand reaches into my my shirt and strokes my chest.
Money: $1200 artist fee and $300 per diem and trip paid. Spending $150
on books and $175 so far on fabric.
-
Wilder Snail - coming from a fabric warehouse further up E.Pender, white
linen for pyjamas. Awning dripping, puddle reflecting the orange house on
the corner. Lot of wet moss on the now-old chestnuts. Ick ancient Judith
Copithorne inventing a reason to make me look at her. I was hiding behind
the Georgia Strait.
Here's how it went. She comes up alongside me. "Did you know Al
Neil." "I know he's dead." "There's a memorial for him
on Sunday." "I'm going to be out of town." She turns around
laughing, "I don't care if you're going to be in town, I just wanted
to let you know." "I did know that." Her laugh was to say
she'd won by getting me to reply to her. My annoyance goes back to the T
and C days when I had to feel not swift enough. I said I was going to be
out of town in rote politeness. My reply should have been "I don't
care about Al Neil" or else a blank stare from the start.
Louie had been saying she can deal with people on two levels - not levels,
maybe hemispheres? - social grace and sharp appraisal. I said except when
I have unquestioned power I can't do both at once, I freeze into compliance
while taking an imprint that becomes appraisal after. She said "Sometimes
I want to wring your father's neck," which was right. So as I was walking
up Hawks away from the coughers in the café I was thinking it was
exactly that haltedness I was suffering of in the Dames rocket era
and that I struggled to fix at too much cost.
I'm annoyed to have let her have anything at all but in fact she's a
grim drooping bundle of rags who has done me no harm.
19
That's over, what's next. Rest of the winter, now till planting in late
April, three months, block of work.
Susan Chai who plays in a two-piano eight-hand ensemble and had beautiful
red shoes from Paris. Helga Pakasaar a distinguished classical person with
wonderful rosy skin. Oliver Husain who had made a film in Bangalore.
Dirty days. Light rain, bare trees, smashed-down leaves on the grass,
plodding, plodding, humiliated in the sensation of walking so badly.
20
Found a G4!
Merritt 22
Along the high pass a sheet of falling spangles under every orange lamp,
behind them steep banks with deeply padded fir trees deep in snow. Oncoming
headlights, snow streaking horizontally past the large black window, my
young Brit with his head back asleep like a child. The big bus riding softly
silently forward into the dark.
Louie's room lit up bright and warm with a green armchair and a blue,
flames in the grate and banks of large plants at the window. Louie 60 years
old pleased and prosperous, intimidatingly womanly in a red cardigan and
long black pencil skirt, all evened out in domestic happiness with several
hundred thousand wisely invested.
Et moi, back in my red chair with highschool kids passing, 8:30, some
broken sky, check to deposit, tires to buy. Snow shrunk, bare garden path
frozen hard and clean.
23
I've held back from saying what I thought of the show itself. Disgusted
to be sharing it with someone who was getting $1200 for directing the curator
to assemble a curtain, two plants, a mirror, and a print and calling that
a sculpture. Not at all interested in the concept, such as it was. Grateful
to Susana for her lovely printing and for the care two people put into pinning
up the prints and texts, which looked as good as they possibly could. Pleased
to have $1500 so I could pay for tires and books and fabric. Charmed by
Helga, who seemed an equal in a callow field. Not hopeful that anything
more will come of it. People don't read the writing.
-
Le Guin died yesterday. 88. Imagine knowing your words will go on telling
for at least a lifetime after you're gone.
25
Louie says Hilde says she liked the writing though not the jpgs. "Balanced
and honest." Daphne M hasn't said anything, nor Helga. Other Daphne
doesn't mention the writing, "I love looking at other people's houses-especially
walking through neighbourhoods in the evenings with open curtains and their
lights on. Your work gave me that same thrill." Mafalda "the idea
of the project, reconstructing your past through the places you have lived
in is profound and brilliant," though she didn't think the writing
connected to the images, "the memories not penetrating those beautiful
spaces that looked like they hadn't been lived in yet". "Oh, and
I also love your sense of architecture."
26
Something like this has happened every mid-winter since I've been back,
this time right leg beginning with the toe and now gone on to a swollen
knee and pain all the way up into the hip. Last night was the fifth and
the worst day.
28
Miriam's review: "The bed bugs!!! ... Best description ever!"
29
Gunn's Sun circle. 1933. 1891, married 1921, success 1937. I haven't
liked this book, haven't trusted it. It's simple-minded as if written for
adolescents but at the same time stretches to prestigious mysteries, blood,
darkness, sacrifice, possession etc. His heroine vague and hysterical, what
does he think women are. His gender interactions sound like Lawrence but
even swoonier. Lawrence dead by 1930. The serpent 1943, Well at
the world's end 1951 when Gunn was sixty. He's trying to imagine himself
into Celts and Vikings on the northern coast of Scotland somewhere around
900AD, what's it like to be afraid of vengeful gods and believe in human
sacrifice, fair enough, but I'm suspicious of some way he's imagining himself
or trying to make us imagine him.
the girls who were changed into swans and lived
for centuries singing their sorrows on cold hungry seas
Drinking club starting to assemble at 7:30. Does the shelter close daytimes?
Grey daylight again. Knee woke me before 5.
30
The new G4's cord has let the old G4 turn on so now I can be back to
W&D. Starting at the beginning of IA checking for edits and looking
for well-being notes I can use now. Reading 2002-2003 seeing with a kind
of wonder what I hadn't seen then and somehow not since, how distressed
I was by what Tom was keeping from me, ie the drug that was causing his
explosions. He was choosing to brutalize me with rage and confuse me with
lies. He was stealing from me, getting my honorable support on false pretences
while making reciprocity impossible, blaming me for our tensions. I see
now that even when I am at last correctly leaving he is letting me misunderstand
why I'm doing it.
31
Living in such a sense of peril. Is there a tiny raised edge that can
trip me, is there hidden ice that will throw me flat, should I be aware
of what I'm carrying in case I fall, is there raised concrete I could crack
my head on, will these boots cause me two weeks of pain. Standing at the
counter just now, turning toward the sink holding the blender's blades,
my right leg suddenly wasn't there under me so I sat down hard and cut my
finger. There's a bruise on the sole of my right foot just from walking
on it.
-
From Daph today, "found your show very interesting & loved the
journal entries & interior/exterior sketches from your time in Strathcona.
... you've been, as always, deeply engrossed in the project - it's that
depth that speaks." It has shown up ten days after she was there and
is about as vague and empty as praise can be, so is it her state or my work?
part 4
time remaining volume 6: 2017-2018 july-july
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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