time remaining 6 part 4 - 2018 february-april  work & days: a lifetime journal project February 1 2018 IA1-6 has notes of transcribing GW and SH. From IA6-5 notes on AG. "Started a volume of Aphrodite's garden at random and there found such another texture, someone I've forgotten I was." - Daphne not willing to feel my range in the writing, I think, and not visual enough to feel anything about the images. Or in the age we are should I wonder about cognitive shrinking. 2 Two things: a new plaid shirt and a rumble on the Grapevine where Randy was fulminating about the national anthem being changed to include women. The shirt is black and white flannel with a thin turquoise line and reminds me of the lost loved plaid jacket I wore in the Golden West. The rumble is fencing with redneck unreason to try to name its reasons. Many women declaring they refuse to sing the new words. Randy began by decrying the millions it cost to make the change. I backed him out of that and now he's saying people who can't handle being excluded from song lyrics are pathetic losers. Another man saying liberals attack everything, the Swiss anthem has been changed to leave out god, patriotism and defense of borders. There's distress about being left behind and poor reasoning and little grasp and the result is defiant entrenchment. 3 In 2005 comments on AG and SH. 4 My leg was better after two weeks, I was moving fine. Then yesterday aft I got out the jeep and went to Save On and now I'm back to pain all up and down into the hip. Last night could hardly walk. It's as if the whole leg's muscles have shredded so they can't handle any shoes, any cold, as if the poor thing so interrupted with surgical cuts, so starved of circulation, so exhausted by its long effort, has just come to its end and mine with it. When I look forward to not being able to cook or keep house or garden or shop or go to the post office even, I think no, I won't stay for that. I'm at an end in so many ways I can't imagine what there could be in that life to hold me. I start to think, now? It was about being - I can say that. I was a solid young person. I turned to air. The beautiful work is air. 5 Lightless, lidded, useless days. I'm feeble, a bit sick. Daren't go out. 6 Working with the Dames rocket page of summary statements about the mind of the time - I needed a lot of focus to put the statements into an order. It's work I'm frail in, I'm not easily holding the parts known in a whole - is that the way to say it - bluntly - what I'm seeing is a transparent medium I was moving something in, moving something also transparent - something like that. It's hard to do, I shy from it, want to go away. There's a grasp in these little lines that I don't have in the journal of that time. The lines say what I was doing, what was happening with a precision that the drugs ruined in writing. Not only drugs, that's one of my questions - thinking this section is the trickiest, I have most to do in it, blending that time with this one - not only drugs because I opened abandonment and then went into defensive scrambling. I didn't know how to work with it. 7 Will you tell me what a defeat is. It's the making-plain of a flaw, a situation that outs a weakness. I discovered there was something wrong with me and set out to fix it. That concentration on process was necessary and it's why blame and revenge are irrelevant. It's not about superiority, my feeling that it was was part of my weakness. - Peter's offer suddenly. Twelve days. What is it about Peter. Trust. He trusts himself, he trusts being led. He expresses trust as commitment to place and human being. - onions, broccoli, sweet peas 8 Do you want to talk to me about Peter     power struggle, love woman, act, fight A chance for love woman to fight for power     YES Can it lead to a show in Grande Prairie     yes And make the book     YES Does she need to be strategic     no, pure What do I know. Ditches of Alberta, what it's like there. Something Greek. Why Pythagoras. In July the ditches of Alberta are flower gardens. It's work about trust. The other side of trust is loyalty. Trust and loyalty together make radiance. In art it's trust that presence is enough. There's no need to show paranoid distance. 9 Mornings energy for etymology, what Kenner sez about Pound I realize as the charm, joy, multiple intelligence of the dictionary, its pictures and sweet exact perceptions. Mike at Nicola Valley Plumbing lent me a star screw driver, showed me what was wrong with the old cartridge and talked me through placing the new one. Now I don't have to stoop under the sink to turn the hot water on and off. It's been months. - kernel panics the act of the sentence 10 Recalling what it's like to step onto the line in art. What is this really, what is the depth of this, what is the best I can make with this, the truest. 11 Remarkable hard unforgiveness in relation to Louie that I notice when I have an email from her or when I find her name in the journal. "Possession and competion" Joyce said. Is that the whole of it? I don't think so. A kind of displacement I need to block. "Don't take my crying away from me." - Working on Peter feeling various things. I've already said what I have to say on Peter's topics in my slides. I have to be an artist who isn't successful even in the best work I do. Our farms were 30 miles apart but I'm aspen parkland and he's boreal forest. I need to see a long way. He needs to move and act. We both need to tell stories about being alive. I do a lot of wormy ferreting into psychology. He leaves it alone. I gave him something for his work when he was young but he loved me as a woman too. "I can't get enough of seeing your face." 12 Woke at four with my arms locked around the pillow, thinking black thoughts. Something happened at the opening that was so bad I haven't told it here. I was on the bench outside the gallery seeing people enter. A young woman rushed in with her short hair wet from the rain, sat down beside me, looked at me eagerly as if I should know her. I stared. "We ate poutine together." I was blank for a another moment and then lit up. Someone came over and rubbed her hair to dry it. She said "We were all in love with you" but then she went away and talked to someone else. Forgetting faces is a new shame. When it was icy a couple of weeks ago I'd walked up the path to the garage with extreme care but then had to go back for something I'd forgotten. When I stepped down onto the concrete block that's a stepping stone off the porch pad - still with extreme care - my right foot shot out from under me and I was suddenly on my back on the gravel, not hurt but distressed because it had happened even when I was careful. I took the recycling out just now, looking up at the completely black sky with its few white stars and the bioenergy plant's white plume standing straight up, saying to myself that I'm ashamed of the way I have to live now, endangered by every step, watching every step. Do I have Alzheimers     no Are you sure     yes - Long-stemmed white freesias. In-breath a small stroke of pleasure every time. Have started to realize people who pass on the street will be thinking I'm strange, it's the middle of February and they can see my Christmas tree. Why not though, I look at it often. It's such a pleasing lamp, there across the room lighting the dark center of the house. I pull the cord last thing at night on the way to the bedroom and plug it in first thing when I get up in the dark. It has only now started to lose a few needles. I must get into the habit of checking my sweater or shirt front before I go out. Nice boots however. Now that the ground is dry and frozen hard I can wear the moss-green Uggs. They are still clean and so perfectly light. 9:30 on a Monday night. Lament when you must but say what you love in a day too. My new tires are so macho I don't recognize myself in my tracks. Why do they remind me of bear claws. Neat small West Coast Seeds parcel by return post. 13 After the raspberry season an afternoon topping broccoli for a Sikh family. Judy was there too so it would have been the second summer, 17. There was a boy a bit younger than me working the next row. I got into a race with him. Afterward we collapsed leaning back on our arms at the ends of our rows watching everyone else still working their way up. I sometimes think of it, why. Young brightness. The pleasure of sudden good company, we'd flashed into something together. There was more too, I was doing something I'd never done before, focusing at speed. I set a gallopping rhythm that forced me to find and slash each broccoli head on the fly. If I missed one I didn't break rhythm. What exactly was it like: close green and speed but not blurred, a sensation of crystalline grip. I remember it, though I've never described it, because it was conscious. 14 Am I learning how to work with shreds. Don't quote, rework. Keep finding how much more can be carved off. 15 Cadence. Lightness. Exact unusual word. Reflexive notice. Cutting everything explicit and letting the network carry the matter. I'm in it, I can begin to see clumps, dimly maybe a longer wave, but then my head darkens and stiffens, I have to stop. Will I have enough time. - Some are attracted to stones As yet in simple darkness. In other countries such places have ruins Foundlings hatched. Surprised that in 1975 I was already on the track. We began near the same place and are different kinds. He's wood, metal and fire. I'm air, water and plants. 16 A sort of chime by word-substitutions. - How to say that: I've written a word but hear another when I see it, then substitute the one I heard but with the first word as if still hanging in the net. - The big old hotel like the one I've sometimes dreamed before. Saying it that way evades everything I actually was remembering there, a narrow corridor in a hotel in Paris dreamed more than once, several times as a guest, more than once as a chambermaid; I think another dream of standing in the lobby asking for work; those over years. - Was feeling what I've got does evoke the feel of the place. I'll know more tomorrow. 17 Daylight outside the window thick with snow, large flakes sloping from the north, faster and slower, faster next to the house. Truck bombs past scatteringg sand from its rear, boy in a grey hoodie walking with his head down. Such a nice photo-book dream. Small book with interesting small photos that held steady so I could study them. Three people standing in a subway car, a young man by himself on the left, a bright look on his face. A plain little plaza. Quite a complicated approaching group of a few adults and what at first seemed to be children but were upright furry animals wearing clothes. He - someone - asked where I'd got the book. "From my fool in Afghanistan." The way it can be in a dream where you don't know what you're going to say. Someone in Penzance yesterday and today who'd linked in from a London page in 1973. There I am eager and natural. Young! Women's film conference, hitch-hiking, Sufi farm, Luke in Cornwall, experimental film conference. Saturday morning, hardly anyone on the road. Girl in a purple jacket going to the gym. Smell of freesias next to me. Pickup arriving at St Michael's, man in a camo jacket and big black cowboy hat. House silent except for the little hiss in my left ear. Three doves huddled in the linden. I'm holding off going to Peter's piece, dread of focus. - And then like it. I refine some small thing every time but it's almost done. It has turned out to be the place and what it is to feel it to be an artist of it. It's a lyric. Do you have a sense of where to go next     YES write, tempering, of (empress), in love Empress?     friendship, Ellie, intuition (hierophant), community Slant this     action Write about action in community     YES I'm baffled     yes Can I use the same method     YES How (something) is tempered in love     yes A principle     yes Does the writing do the tempering     no Demonstrate it     yes Bookwork     NO Tell me more about empress     empress, arrives, with betrayal and despair Mastery     no, depth Empress is human depth     yes (sigh) Demonstrate depth tempered in love     yes Do you want to say more     no Authority     YES By love do you mean attachment     no Care for spirits     yes 18 Reluctant to look at it. Afraid of it. Afraid of what. If it falls apart I don't know how to go beyond what I have now. Fear of blood pressure stress     no Not having slept enough     yes - Trying to fall asleep why did I see an older grey SUV fish-tailed on a snowy road, just the instant it was happening. It seemed to me to be by the highway 5 overpass. Close-framed and as if filmed on a pink emulsion. - Did finally sleep for maybe an hour and then dithered in my news sites and then opened the file and calmly found things to fix. - Where can I have conversation about where I was this week. Creeley Contexts of poetry, always mentioning, quoting his writer friends. Boy gang. Reading him isn't useful but what can I do instead. Not what can I be instead, it in me knows what to do when I'm doing it, but I can't do it for long, and then what to do to stay nearby. Here's how it ends: spruce drifted pollen from its wide wing as I passed through what seemed like a gate   it's the home of some self I'm not at this moment those pages of notes, the lake house that's gone   the sky is delicately pale in its ordered directions   he read them perfectly. I was sitting on the floor at his knee. it was 35 years later   they are read lightly and not in sentences not the way they were written, there's a kind of glide   what I like is the cadence   the sparse balanced flow of time noted   that's it isn't it   the air was perfect, moving just barely so the skin felt loved 19 Were you describing what this piece already does     yes White air gliding evenly south. At 7am clear, minus twenty. Last night smoke lay flat running north, this morning diffusing more and less straight up. 20 Sent Ditches. Laundry; groceries; striped sheet at the goodwill for pyjamas; Brambles; post office. Cold nights with black skies; warm days, damp snow. I don't think Peter would tell me if he didn't like it so I'm not sure. Tonight trying to format it on dimensions he gave me. Four columns on two pages squash the long lines so it will have to be 3 pages with wide margins. Need a fresh head for it tomorrow. Emilee: "wasn't sure if this is the gods like to have a voice or they like to hear a voice - it works both ways." Heard a clink with that line but didn't know what it was till she told me. not the same thing as the moments that tower         those are the dark ones "This is true." 21 Lot of the day formating Ditches, three pages Palatino 11/11 and the photo of his childhood lane - pleased he liked it. Still reading The age of wonder mostly as if I'd never read it. It's the same era as Aubrey/Maturin though Maturin never seems to run into Coleridge in London. Faraday Humphrey Davy's 22 year old lab assistant. Young Banks having hippy sex in Tahiti and old Banks with gout working from his bed to internationalize science. Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on his study wall alongside pictures of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. 23 Long dreaming dozes even during the night. Animated skater princess in a blue circle skirt whose story I was telling in rhyming couplets, finding the rhymes as I went without pausing. Often dream I'm making up language. This morning came to 2009 reading notes from The age of wonder. I noted things I now don't remember reading. Liked the notes and was worried I hadn't wanted to note them again, do I have less grip. Another white morning. People don't seem to describe white skies. White above, white below, messy middle band of this and that, the church, the spruce, the bare Russian olive, the ugly house next to the linden - ah so ugly, fake brick around the two-car garage door, fake coachhouse lanterns either side, hideous half-hexagon upstairs window with plastic muntins. That white pickup with pastel scribblees like kids' stickers on its side, sound of shovel scraping sidewalk. Haven't said I'm scraping through 2002-2014 looking for health notes to maybe come up with strategy. Le Guin 84 years old on Youtube answering student questions at a community college - ancient skeleton with froggy wide mouth and draped jaw skin, long bone hands with rings - said at her age much time has to be given to maintenance, as with old cars. In the California pages even where I'm lamenting aging and isolation and dullness always the pleasure in place and days that now seem marvelous good fortune. Garden-making and student work and lectures and web projects and then video tech an actually hard-working rich life I didn't know was rich. What should I conclude, that lamenting is part of the conscious realness that makes rich life happen? It says yes. So lament on - Friday morning, weak bitty drizzle of snow. What is this secure silent white vacuum good for. Secure and so endangered when I move among surfaces that can split my head. Wind lifting a flux off a roof. Is there a word for that brief jagged lightly driven twisting current of spangles. Spruce standing square in pale sunlight at four thirty, moving. It has hardly moved in months. Feeling yes these last years I do have a task and I know what it is and yes the white vacuum is right for it. There have been other kinds of time I don't have to have again so no don't lament. Do I have enough brain left for it     yes Do you like it     YES What spine of story. Not his tedious useless cast of men he loves or hates. The story of fading. Conversations. The present. Personal universal scraps. Dissociation, myth in which I'm both searching and waiting to be found. Small self and larger self. Not personas but vistas. Cosmos rather than history. Can I afford for video to be part of it     yes 25 He chants his poems in a heavy lagging growl and in as if an Old English accent. Hearing him I can understand how any cranky rubbish he puts together in that voice and cadence can seem to him to be poetry. There was another man in the film speaking with the light natural flex of an educated American, who by contrast seemed a marvel of humane intelligence. Ezra was trying to impersonate Homer and other tribal scalds? If he composes in that pretentious voice how does he come to the sublime lines there also are? And the coarse jocularity of his letters to other men, how can his taste be both so fine and so vile? $1000 from Peter T by etransfer. 26 Last night a big pileup on the Coque, two Greyhounds, two semis, some cars. Olson for instance saying his goddesses are programmatic and uninteresting. I think his goddesses and crystalline-somethings and water and sky are essential in some technical way. They're true invocations of hormonal and network dynamics that found his best effects, yes? And refer to network dynamics he unusually intuits. His many languages had become natural to him over time. They help him stay out of explanation don't they. They give the lit industry things to do too and maybe he thought of that. I'm seeing what a mess the Cantos are along with their little bursts of loving perfection. Helen in Egypt. Anxious rumination. I can imagine she's writing about some actual boyfriend she's been too disembodied to have a good time with. In 1974 it touched off mythic elation how. Must have been by slightest means, a few phrases. Greece, Egypt, a quite lovely scene of beach and temple. A love-woman undertow. 28 Then I check and find nothing but a mention. The mythic elation was from mother sex with Maggie. - From 2013 last winter in Mesa Grande: Beauty, beauty. Pulling phrases from the physics sheet in the Orpheus folder, those decisions among fragments. This one, this one, not this one, delete the first four words. Comma not space here, this line after this one. It's sure-footed, I don't ponder, and at the same time a bit dazzled, there's so much aura around these little phrases. I feel the layers - they're not layers but they're superimposed - of reference, astrophysics, atmosphere, ocean, brain, self-sensing intuition, social feeling sometimes. It makes a three-dimensional matrix, something like that, and is self referential among other exactitudes. Handling these shreds at all I have strong confidence in them and in the power of what could be made from them - public power too - and I feel how much my own assignment and accomplishment that still unmade thing is, and I was slightly imagining that I'd need to study how to work with them. March 1st Don's birthday. I sent him Ditches. He's too disaffected or is it indifferent to be friends though who else is there for either of us. 2 Ideas for action in conflict with child structure What is the small motion that says Not that or Not now. I've trusted it but it's my ruiner. It's a stop on energized impulse that was trained in childhood. Forcing against it isn't the way. Is there a way? Do nothing, don't divert? - In December 2013 a crushing conversation with Luke like the one this year. This morning a 92-year-old woman crossing Voght to the post office killed by a pickup. - There isn't wind but the air is full of sensitive motion. Snow falling through the corner's amber spotlight plunges, hesitates, drifts sideways, eddies briefly upward; is driven, pauses, funnels down, mills loosely, twists, arcs, schools like small fishes. The shape of fall next to the window shows there's an air envelope around the house. It's after eleven, no traffic and by now a sparkling inch on what had been a bare street. On the Coque semis can't make the hill and others are jack-knifing on their way down. Scent of white stocks. I'll take them with me as I go to bed. 4 Preference for exile is an instinct for living on my actual foundation. 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. But is there anything good I'm going forward to     being free of men How should I live     heartbreak, illusory, shared, balance in the midst of change Will I be able to work on Orpheus     YES Is it going to be bleak     YES the lightness, the dexterity, the rhythmic music of ... the Georgics field crops, trees, herds, bees compared his work on it to that of a mother bear licking her cubs into shape - has a version of Orpheus and E Aeneas visits the dead in ch 6 Elysium the luminous fields where the true / and faithful gather calls on Erato the muse of lyric poetry and love classical hexameter Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, Metamorphoses, hymns of Orpheus - not iambic - can't be made in English, which is stress-timed whereas ancient Greek and Latin are syllable-timed (Indian English tends more toward) I didn't know the golden bough was Persephone's. He had to break it off to get entrance to Avernus. - Louie finally. She liked some lines and noticed there was a gate. 5 Right hip has blown up. It was threatening for days and I woke with it sore this morning. Ignored it, sat in the chair formatting Back5, then found I couldn't walk without holding onto furniture. Swearing, how to get through the week while it mends, or will it. 8:45, two hours before I can conk out. It's not just the hip, a couple of days aching all over before this morning. I keep being mystified by what happens, didn't eat anything wrong, the opposite, eating Somers to try to undo the piggy last months. Sent Sonja Ditches and asked for photos of her new boy. Wet eyes seeing an exquisite newborn with a long Egyptian head gazing into his wide-open daddy's face. Don said a sore hip that keeps him awake at night and groggy in the days. He liked the last line. 6 Woke a lot but got through to six thirty. At the end I am in packed narrow shopping streets worrying how to find the country motel where Tom has left my car. It's on a long highway somewhere to the south. Standing at a newsstand wondering could I spot it on a map. Phone him on shift at the Golden West? Don't remember the number. Then in a packed little concourse seeing a shop door open onto brightly lit dresses all of them white with gold piping. A thin old woman wearing one of them steps through making a joke I don't hear over her shoulder. I'm 73. Number I don't like at all. 8 Uncle George phoning last night ... I started to say and went to look up the date and found a note from Karen Campbell telling me Margo is dying. And then on the Goddard site found embodiment studies is now a concentration!!! They've helped themselves to my concept I assume without understanding it but KC says she does funnel students to the actual site. Am I the conveniently dead founder? Sent Margo a note I hope she'll still be able to read. - Uncle George phoned. Notes from Emilee, Jody, Luke, Andy, Don, Greg, Mafalda; FB notices from Cheryl, Yvonne, Jim Mann, Franci, Kate, Adam and Tana, Val, Scott, Jane, Gab. Ali Smiith How to be both 2014. First half of the book teenage girl having witty conversations with her mother etc. The smart conversations pulled me along though I thought Smith was being too cute. Then halfway through a sudden character switch, something I can resist so totally I quit the book. I did this time but then went back and skimmed for bits with the first character in them, and then got interested in what Smith became as Francesco del Cossa. Being a dead genius fifteenth (1436) century painter let her dodge the astrictions of this one and gave her better lines. I just don't see why, he is saying. Why whoever is lucky or brave enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can't have both the ring and the love. ... cause the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you to which ... your conscious eye is often blind. Cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do ... Or our siblings, who want us dead too ... Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were - Except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. Fine. I was soon wanting just to go on traveling and painting in his bright light loving way without the postmodern armature that gave her critics something to talk about. He likes to see, color and curves always, but anything that's there, so as him she is allowed to describe bodies and scenes. There's also the way inventing a painter gives her permission to write about what she herself does, which makes her detail more interesting. I sent for the book because of how exceptionally nice her radio voice was on Wachtel, lightly Scottish, songfully Scottish, fast and light and pleasing herself every minute. Wachtel was having so much fun with her that she dropped the horrible falsely humble stammer she uses to relax her estimables. - Margo replied to the email but as if by means of an immigrant carer whose sentences are odd. "Oh Ellie dear heart." There's also the fact that M along with her true sweetness is unreliable in her positivities. There was though the moment when I met her in the upstairs corridor at midnight when my taxi had woken her and kissed her shoulder in right fealty because she liked me to be brilliant. Is she dying because she was betrayed at the college? 10 Or because she was too kind. 11 Looking up the coming of spring last year and the year before, seeing how much heavy work I and Jenn and Claude were doing and wondering what I can still find to do. The garden's made. a bench? cedar and gravel - filter cloth? - for all the paths. a drain ditch down the main path and across? shelves in the garage. dig a planting strip in the front? cut willow for plant support. a goddess? another strawberry bed. a holding bed with edges. pine needles to mulch the strawberries. more aspens. path alongside the bricks? something for the space in front of the lattice. a wind screen for the filberts? more filberts on the side? a pollination pear. a yellow plum. something with rock? Edge the nectarine's bed. - Or less gardening and more camping? Sunday morning bright and clear. Time change last night. The year has suddenly speeded up. Yesterday I worked all day happy and free. It was because of the sun. 12 When I let my mind dwell on the vast potentiality for happiness, and our present state? Such potentiality, and so much misery? Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion. Post captain 1972. In Whitehall a grey drizzle wept down upon the Admiralty, but in Sussex the air was dry - dry and perfectly still. The smoke rose from the chimney of the small drawing-room at Mapes Court in a tall, unwavering plume, a hundred feet before its head drifted away in a blue mist to lie in the hollows of the downs behind the house. The leaves were hanging yet, but only just, and from time to time the bright yellow rounds on the tree outside the window dropped of themselves, twirling in their slow fall to join the golden carpet at its foot, and in the silence the whispering impact of each leaf could be heard - a silence as peaceful as an easy death. 'At the first breath of wind those trees will all be bare,' observed Dr Maturin. 'Yet autumn is a kind of spring too, for there is never a one but is pushed off by its own next-coming bud.' HMS Surprise 1973. - Layout of Ditches is sent. How it feels to say that. Time open ahead. As if it had felt pinched shut, or walled in. Third day of sun. That openness too, the year suddenly opened wide. Shrunk lumps of dirty snow, St Michael's peeling white picket fence, the spruce tall and composed lifting just the last inches of any branch in fading westerly light. Scent of yellow freesia next to me, lamp on the chair's arm to shine on the page. The love book. The way that little girl hid her love for her father in a chocolate box under the floor of her first house. Hid it from herself by feeling it for a boy who looked as Ed must have looked when she was a baby. He didn't want her but she needed to love and found a way. That was admirable but it was the root of all the imaginary boyfriends. From maybe 2013: I was at western front and saw an arrangement of lights and tables that made me think I could have photos on the surrounding walls and writing on table set in a rectangle in the center, people could sit at the tables and read. 13 Carving text feeling out - what are they - threads or blocs of topic. Finding the child; the figures; intuiting the brain; working moments; The great powers of comma, period, space. - Meeting with Jayne at the community garden. It's a lot of land. Was going to say no because it's too much of a mess and I wdn't have enough control. Sat down to write up a meeting memo and halfway through realized it should be a native plant demonstration garden. If they agree to that I'm all over it, am demanding a committee of botanical experts and setting up to be the site designer. It would be my entry and my kind of fun. Will they realize it's a land grab and resist? Am already in boiled-up full-grok executive mode taking account of politics and work order. First thing should be berms and paths, water wherever there are paths. Committee assembled for plant list and planting condition knowledge. Shackan for plants? I'd have to hand-pick the experts so there are no boss-men. 14 But Lord, the infinite possibilities of self-deception - the difficulties of disentangling the countless strands of emotion and calling each by its proper name .... At times, whatever he might say, he was surely lost in a cloud of unknowing; but at least it was a peaceful cloud at present and sailing through a milky sea towards a possible though unlikely ecstasy at an indefinite remove was, if not the fulness of life, then something like its shadow. - I'm seeing something. The Orpheus story is a sort of transparent structure drifting underlaid like a large branch of seaweed. It's the story of looking for the lame little girl. 15 Notes in origin. The origin was early love. Working every day on my shreds. Something is forming but I so easily lose my sense of it I HAVE to stay in touch with the work continuously from now on. 17 I get into a tangle that wakes me too early. It's because my wide shoulders are stiff. When I try to turn over in my sleep I get stuck halfway through the turn with both arms locked around the pillow. During this night yelling at Kathleen Akins telling her my thesis was much better than she thought. Dozing this morning I saw the peaked cullet lit by a sharp spotlight at ninety degrees so it was just a couple of lines of hard-edged white reflection. Why is that worth telling. Because it was like being given a photo taken by someone else. Because it shows the brain's sophistication. If it were speaking to me what would it be saying. The peaked cullet is as if the transparent work or its worker. It would be saying see it lit from another angle? The peaked cullet is the brain. And the world. Reservoir 13, what a reviewer said about the culture's fascination with vanished and murdered girls. Can you tell me what angle     communal, action, to complete, liberation I see it as just making beauty but you want me to see it as effective in the world     YES You want me to dedicate it     YES To the salvation of souls     yes In an esoteric way     yes Clear cold morning. The sun just is up, shining sideways from behind the church. There it is on the mantel wall where I've never seen it, we're coming to solstice. - Physics sheet. I can pull language shreds but am seeing there are other phrases that aren't good language but have been for visual ideas. I started patching the laundry room wall today. The sun helps me begin. 18 'Thank you,' said Stephen. 'But the being upon whom I am about to wait, though eminent for precedence, does not stand on ceremony.' 'What can he have meant by eminent for precedence?' asked Mr Prote. 'Anyone who is anyone, apart from us, is at the Governor's.' In fact the being's precedence was merely alphabetical: for in the gaiety of his heart Dr Maturin had referred to the aardvark. It stood before him now, a pale creature with a bulky hog-backed body close on five feet long, a broad tail, an immense elongated head ending in a disk-like snout, short stout legs and disproportionately long translucent ass's ears; it was partially covered with sparse yellowish hair that showed the unwholesome nightwalker's skin below; it blinked repeatedly. The aardvark was acutely conscious of its position and from time to time it licked its small tubular lips, for not only had it been measured and weighed, while a tuft of bristles that could ill be spared had been clipped from its flank, but now it was being looked at through a diminishing-glass and drawn. It was a meek, apologetic animal, incapable of biting and too shy to scratch; and it grew lower and lower in its spirits: its ears drooped until they obscured its weak, melancholy, long-lashed eyes. 'There, honey, it is done,' said Stephen, showing the aardvark its likeness: and calling upwards through the ceiling he said, 'Mr van der Poel, I am infinitely obliged to you, sir. Do not stir, I beg. I shall lock the door and leave the key under the mat: I am going back to the ship, and tomorrow you shall see the egg.' The Mauritius command 1977. b.1914. He was 63. A few pages later Stephen in his diary is pondering changes in Jack as he ages ('comparative want of gaiety,' 'his attitude toward those in his command ... is far less personal,' 'a diminution not only of his animal spirits but also of his appetites'). It's a question close to anyone but who's willing to be seen interested in it? O'Brian's intimacy with himself reminds me of drug states. And he liked Sartre and de Beauvoir enough to translate them. 'Calling upwards through the ceiling' - when has anyone else ever seen that. - "projecting two images onto a single plate so that certain features common to both are emphasized while those which fail to fit cancel" the same thing thought of in two different systems, two words Seeing how my years of physics notes gave me concepts for other uses. 19 I was with Paul on the home road by Kinderwaters' creek field. We turned off to the south and found ourselves behind a screen of trees looking at blocks of building stone in shallow circles as if maybe old foundations. Then such a peaceful place, a patch of bronze-colored marsh grass ringed with tall willow scrub. Paul had gone on ahead and I stood looking as animals passed through, a large dark quiet thing I thought might be of the pig family, and more of those, and something like an ostrich. One of them slipped into amber water I could see between trees. I followed it through the willows and stood gazing at a small warm pond. - Carelessness and overstatement in my notes. I can see them now. Have run into a tangle on dreaming, nonlanguage self, monitoring self, state monitoring. It's hard - language making entities where there aren't - and yet something to be sorted. 20 I'm hanging here - 5:55 in the dark - inchoately distressed not knowing what to begin to say. People are too stupid and confused to handle what needs to be handled. Every day in the US a hideous grey herd of old men is enabling the ruinous predations of a mindless conscienceless soulless lout. Women on the Grapevine are outraged that "all our sons" in the anthem has been changed to "all of our." Young men are being confirmed in white supremacy and misogyny by an academic psychologist from Fairview Alberta who says no one should study sociology, anthropology, or English literature and consciousness is archetypally male and feminists don't protest Islam because they want to be dominated by strong men. - Struggling in the folder called The air. It doesn't sort to any fineness: a shred I slot into any category can resonate in some or all of the rest. And that resonance is what thrills me so what to do. - Slathered a priming coat onto the patched walls and the picture rail. Can smell the latex. Margo has been moved to a hospice room. I'm indignant that such a generous spirit is being stomped out. oh margo. campbell sent me the news. it's outrageous. i know, everybody's journey etc. and you'll be doing it well, but i don't want you to go. we didn't do the last part well but we did the first part - you did - very very well. you were a miracle of a boss and pod leader. much love in remembering you.   Oh Ellie dear heart I am sorry this is the occasion for reconnecting but so glad to be in touch. I've never thought of you these past years without a feeling of love and gratitude that you are a part of my life. I hope going forward that joy and beauty are part of each day. With love Margo 21 I believe she's glad to hear from me. I don't believe there was never a moment of annoyance and she should have figured out that social hoping is nothing at all. I do like being called dear heart; we did have moments of dearness and heart. I knew she managed fac and students by lying to ease things along in the pragmatical way of New England money but she could love giftedness and want it to thrive. "Lighter and freer" she said and meant, for everyone I think. I liked that she was tall. She was too big to be cozy with men and the way she cut her hair didn't suit her but she wasn't butch. I can see her at our last fac meeting wearing her mom's pink Ugg boots sitting with one leg over the chair's arm watching us sort out some knot. She praised us more than we deserved but there she was catching every glance as she always did in a meeting. We had moments where she tried to compel me and I resisted publicly, one where she wanted me to have my photo taken for the fac page and one where she wanted me to describe myself as disabled for her staff survey. That sensation of being strongly pressured. - It's a sensation like a sustained sideways push and when I resist it I feel how strong I am. She was too much a believer - Aurobindo, reincarnation - but she was alert and wise. She felt me in both my brilliance and my fragility, which who else has ever done. When she was reading my letters I had permission to blaze with my students in daring honesty and unheard-of insight. She set a loving tone. She affirmed in principle and what she was with me I could be with them. I called her my mommy-daddy to acknowledge that I was taking shelter. 22 Hello sky. I look up from Margo's paragraphs and there in the lane between two lines of wire are tender lit shreds running slowly smoothly north. Garden meeting last night. It's launched I think. I liked Alysha who was crisp and said she's a forester. She said a sub-committee and I said not a sub-committee, an independent standing committee in which they can have any representation they want. I agreed to look for its members and said I'd draw a preliminary plan. Committee with a continued existence, formed to do its assigned work on an ongoing basis. Task-specific. Sam and Ellen G---- a French name lived here but when exactly. He earlier had delivered coal with a horse and cart. She was the United Church organist into her eighties. Their daughter Flora lived here alone after they died. She thought the ---- was after her. Said a stout old woman about to get into her car at my gate. Was her name Linda? She worked all day to try to get me under her thumb     yes I've given the board an ultimatum. Can they stand up to her     yes Is it going to go ahead     yes 23 What I want from it: creative pleasure, knowledge of native plants, contact with smart people, presence in the city. But how not to be taken over by power-battle aggro. I'm seething with it this morning. - But worked. Margaret Cavendish describes a hare resting in a furrow always faced into the wind so its fur will lie flat. [Holmes in This long pursuit] Zelide 'was unusually well educated, studying French, Greek, Latin, mathematics, music, algebra and astronomy.' 'At our first word we quarreled,' he said later, 'at our second we became friends for life.' Godwin's wrote a candid biography of Mary Wollstencraft. "I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel ourselves attached to their fate, and a sympathy in their excellencies." He said. They said: "Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror." "It is perhaps no coincidence that less than two years later Jane Austen's Emma (1815) was published to great acclaim." VW wrote an essay in 1915. "She is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living." 24 It's a dead season bare and grey-brown. Closed sky again. A robin looking cold. In Washington the March for our Lives led by teenagers pressing to vote out anyone accepting NRA money. 800 other events. Emma Gonzales' crying naked face. 25 Louie and I had come back to her house after being away. I'm in our bedroom seeing there is no longer a mattress on my side of the bed. A little table, flowers. She just seems to have a lot more stuff. Where will I sleep? I say I'll go home. But can I find my key? Is it somewhere in my bulky pack? Then I'm at Louie's other place to the east. The porch is more rotted, almost falling apart. Upstairs a long rooftop packed with Louie's stored things roped down under tarps. I'm in a theatre lobby and run straight into a man whose face I've liked. We stare: it's you. He is with a younger friend. He looks Russian and speaks with an accent. Again the dream where I'm walking east trying to get home and am stopped by a fenced railway I have to find a way to cross. I always have to go north to find the crossing although I need to go some distance south. This time I try a shortcut through the large courtyard of a chemical factory I think must take up a whole block. It's night. I'm looking at lit windows four or five storeys high, walking in muck some inches deep. Will there be a way through to the street? I come out onto a sidewalk next to row housing. A little girl is staring at my walk. I round my eyes at her. She runs screaming up her stairs. - This morning I don't know what I'm doing. My brain is shying off what I begin to try. The dream says there's too much stuff and I haven't found the crossing. Sunday morning. There's sun. The corner's motionless and silent. Blue spruce's branch tips hook straight up. - Somebody called Craig is complaining that I called him honey on the Grapevine. I shouldn't gloat but I do liven up when I have a fight. We were disagreeing about assault rifles. 26 Translator on Catullus, the word obscenity keeps coming up. What is this extraordinary timidity humans have in relation to their founding conditions. Perhaps from ob in front of caenum filth. 27 September, the sill. I need to gather and point. There I look up and see the Russian olive stirring its silver canopy. The air, it says. How amorphous this kind of work is. There's nowhere to stand to begin. VW would have an inkling, I want to do this kind of work; more, I want to be in this kind of state. What kind of state do I want to be in. Brain stirring lightly like the Russian olive's upper tips, loose but firmly held at its base. I liked the thesis, it was a long work with a steady plan. I formed a structure and filled it in. I had a method, I had deadlines and readers. I had a library. I knew how to be a star student. I pushed myself into the midst of a formed discourse and found my stand as I'd known how to do since I was fourteen. I didn't have generous fathers anymore but I had enemies. What does this tell me. Who's the best. Best at what. Best poet, best abstract filmmaker. Luminous silver behind the blue spruce, a dark silver day at nearly eight. There was a hidden harvest moon last night I saw briefly this morning in the west. David Larcher was. Daichi? Rimmer was. Carson. Notley. Not the authors but one or two works. So could I have my one work at the end. The winter has been mostly windless but at this moment a stiff wind from the south herding gravel dust up the street. Long arms of the spruce shoved sideways and swaying back. It's like a June wind. In this afterlife I think of loves I've had and want to talk to them - Jam, Tom - Don - and then say no, the Jam I want to talk to stopped existing about 1981, my Tom has left a blank in the air where he was. In paradise as in Hades the dead are the only company there is. But I talk to them. - He'd had a good day with Kat. I was struck dumb with pain. I have to go I said. I wasn't sure what the pain was about but i believed it. I have to go I said again and went. It was old pain I couldn't feel till I knew he was okay. I said what it was like. He got into some of his old absolute statements and I froze in hopelessness the way I do when he doesn't seem to think there was good in anything I've been with him, but then I carefully kept going. I don't think my crimes against him have been many but they are immense pillars of description in his memory, it was as if I could see them closing out his view of the whole. I thought I could see too that they belong to a certain verbal territory that maybe is a remnant island in him now. Around it is love. From December a year ago. 29 Sam (Simon) Gerrard 1888-1986 came from England in March of 1911, walked from Spence's Bridge to Lower Nicola - played piano at the Methodist Church for someone he'd known in England and found work at Coutlee Ranch and a butcher shop. Went back to England in December and married a girl he'd met three years earlier. Ellen Bibby was from Condor Mill, Quernmore in Lancaster. 1888-1981. They started the Merritt Orchestra together in 1912. 1914-1926 he worked for Inland Coal and Coke and then Middlesboro Collieries. Quit to buy a couple of dairies, then in 1942 with partners bought Middlesboro. Sold out in 1962. In retirement cut and sold firewood. Babies born Edward 1914-1974, Leslie 1916, Phyllis 1917, Flora 1919-2004, James (truck driver one daughter) 1921-1975, Gordon 1932-1938 and two more who died as infants, Winnifred 1915 and Dorothy 1924-1925. - Looked after the jeep today - booked a 50-point inspection, emptied the back, took it through the car wash, vacuumed it, wiped down its interior surfaces, brought it to Murray GM, walked home, listened to a lesson on pronouncing the Georgics in Latin, and had it back by 5 with headlamp replaced and doors lubed. I feel so proud whenever I do maintenance that I have to tell someone. 31 Discontent, antsy. April is shabby, raw, bare and ugly. I'm sick of eating carefully and having no fun at all. April 1st, Easter Sunday Reading mid-1967 to spring of 1968 yesterday to be with the happiness of the last year at Queen's living with Greg and succeeding at school. Stopped reading when those safeties ended. I fell apart, was all which-way, am ashamed of the miscellaneous boyfriends of the next years. How long did it take to get feet under me again, the last year and a half in London, mid-1973 to the end of 1974, starting to shoot Trapline. That's five years! What were they good for? The journal and letter voice for 1967-68 is continuous with childhood still, plain and safe. Real work was in course papers probably. Then 28 in 1973 lighter and looser, realer I think. What had changed: photos, yoga, Luke, better sex, artist friends, learning from artists' films and oh London. Looking to decide what a film could be for, thinking how to be with a child. Taking hold more. Need to work at hunting energy in various ways - how you get power - being wise to attract things - knowing what you need - power for yourself - truthfulness, courage, scaring yourself, doing hard things. And with this energy? Make more to really learn something about what's possible. To really make some psychotronic generators.   these household spirits, they say I'm this and I want to be that, I have these powers and want those. I see 'hunting energy' and think how did I forget that? - Later afternoon went out into the sun in my doctoral degree hoodie and raked up dead stuff. 2 Outside Purity Feeds after I'd thumped a bag of seed starter into the back of the jeep a crooked very old man who kept spitting as he talked on and on told me he grew up poor on a Choctaw reserve in Oklahoma and made his money gambling on horse races. Bought land. Where is your ranch? He named four or five. Morris. Small daff has opened next to the steps. 3 Still in 1974 seeing how widely I was scrounging for my film. Is there theoretical scrounging I should be doing for whatever is next, or is that done - I mean am I out of date in some way I don't realize. The scrounging was miscellaneous and undigested. Hardly any of those notes interest me now. Art magazines appall me. I'd have to make my own theory, or say it's made, look it up. - Neuroscience has an explanation ... activity in the limbic system and temporal lobes ... signals to my adrenal medulla, located on top of the kidneys, and told them to secrete adrenaline ... Calm alertness, time distortion, and not caring about the outcome ... depersonalization - Margo died yesterday afternoon. Surrounded by every kind of what's called support: hospice staff, spring flowers, loved relatives, two-decade lover, long-time friends, enough money so everything will be done well, and a "beautiful new black and flowered with chrysanthemums, peonies, iris and other blossoms silk kimono-style soft, open jacket" to be burnt up in. Willow and black poplar branches next to me, first whiffs of balsam. I'll be shoveled into the fire in near anonymity I said just now, and sighed. Does it matter. Not really, I don't think. Meaning it does and doesn't. I have such a sense of ephemerality of human generations now. Are as grass. as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. / For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. It's in a psalm it turns out, in the midst of a lot of the usual sucking-up. Isn't the Russian olive showing khaki bud color along its twigs. In pale west light at nearly 6. 4 Sky this morning a light panel shining all over, amber-tinted and heating behind the spruce, delicately white behind the Russian olive's fine-cut black fringes. "Branches against the sky are not of use." They are, though. What use exactly. The brain likes them for some good reason. And that slender bit of a white line drawing itself evenly rapidly forward erasing its tail as it goes. There's the sun straight into my right eye from the ridgeline of Hamilton Hill. 7:02. - I made a move, asked to speak to Alycia about the board. "I had a good feeling about you." At my kitchen table after work today, young woman with big eyes, dimples, quirked mouth corners; profile that seems another person's. Forester, MA, works out of the district office, goes out to inspect blocks. Smart, adventurous, candid. Was thinking just what I was thinking, that she ought to be the community garden's liaison with the demonstration garden, ie my sidekick. We could learn the plants together. The Cascades Forest District is made up of the Lillooet and Merritt Timber Supply Areas (TSA). The District is comprised of many communities including Lillooet, Merritt, Princeton, Lower Nicola, Tulameen, Lytton, Goldbridge, Seton Portage and Pavilion. 5 Large wet flakes falling straight down like rain. Jim posted two photos from Margo's goodbye meeting in 2008. There she is as she was and in the group listening there I am as I was too. The little birds in black hoods are Oregon juncos. I was reading and felt something on my scalp. Absently stuck my finger on a hard little shape, a scab? Plucked it out of my hair. A tick. How did it get there, it's five days since I was up Midday Valley Road climbing toward a golden willow forgetting it's tick season. Seedlings lined up on the rad next to the window. - The hospital people liked me. Sandy of Baillie House hates me and it's envy and it's from earlier. Joleen's aggressive juicy lisp maddens me. Dealing with the group my heart gets tight. Do you have anything you want to say     losses, departure, crisis, work Will I have to wait and see what this means     yes 6 Was awake till two. Sent my notes this morning. How long is it going to take to get the ick off me. Will it help to describe Sandy's swollen sullen resentment, Deb's dull stupidity, "I'll just keep my mouth shut," Joleen's territorial scheming. I don't like that they'll feel they won but the health board will know they've messed up a chance. Is the stress because I feel I've lost a battle     no It's almost completely Joleen's unconsciousness     yes The stress is the threat of domination by her unclean spirit     YES There's something wrong with her     yes Do that project somewhere else     no Is there any right way to have a place in this town     yes Can you say what it is     child, processing, deep change, in fighting The way it's La Glace again     yes Coming back having proved myself and still not being accepted     yes Is the stress     yes It's going to go on like that     yes 8 Bright Sunday morning through my dirty windows. Asghar Farhadi Le passé. Exactness of moments with the children, the cost to them of adults' sins and intemperance; story true enough so it was worth thinking about as it happened; details given so there was always more to notice than the line of plot. He's had two Oscars. I like that small precise movies like Manchester by the sea and his are recognized in amongst the trash culture of the US: that there are sentinels even so. - And how this is related to being in Merritt. I should understand myself better in it, what I actually want and what it would take to get it given that there aren't sentinels here. 9 [Congenial spirits: the selected letters of VW] I should not say that his books were badly written because they're not literary - in fact, for me, like most Americans, he is much too literary in one sense - ... uses his brains and not his body; ... takes no risks - doesn't plunge and stumble and jump at boughs beyond his grasp, as I, to be modest, have done in my day, and you. It trickles off me - his beauty - instead of raising the nerves in my spine - But this is the way with all Americans - they cant throw things about as we do To Ethyl March 1931. even poor Leonard, whose breast I pierce daily with hot steel, is divinely happy here; we giggle and joke, and go and poke at roots and plan beds of nasturtium; ... I'm the happiest woman in England' I said to Leonard yesterday, for no reason, except that we had hot rolls for breakfast and the cat had eaten the chicken. About books and pictures our taste is respectable; about people so crazy I wouldn't trust a dead leaf to cross a pond in it That one to Vanessa. She addresses Vita Dearest Creature. it's the flight and droop of the sentence, where the accent falls, the full stop. ... When one feels something remote, separate, pure, thats style. And, I think, almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that satisfies. And we went to Daphnis, and wandered in olive woods, and to Sunium, the temple on a cliff, which cliff is soft with flowers, all again no bigger than pearls or topazes. Sounion. I've copied that for the pleasure of having stood where she stood - not stood, but crept into a tent with Alain Olivier and a handful of poppies to fuck in honor of the gods, that Sunday morning having been brought Turkish coffee by a tall ecclesiastic where we were sleeping on the beach below the temple. At night, in the still heat, we stood on the balcony and saw the procession go by, singing in a minor key, some, to me, impressive and solemn dirge around a bier, and the clergy with beards and long hair and stiff catafalque like robes sang, and I can assure you all that is in me of stunted and deformed religion flowered under this hot sensuality, so thick, so yellow, so waxen; and I thought of the lights of the herring fleet at sea; everyone holding a yellow taper along the street and all the lights coming out in the windows. 10 In 1931 she was 49 and hot off The waves. By 1935 she's stumping along. 11 I was sitting on the porch floor dividing and potting seedlings. A woman on the sidewalk said You look like you know how to live. I said something like At moments. 12 I'm sick of being a deformed person. I'm having bad nights. I am so bored with making a meal every day. I often now have to be ashamed of my brain. I don't care about anyone anymore. I'm like a rotting squash sinking and collapsing on a shelf in a cellar.   What do I have to live for. I don't want Judie to outlive me. I still like the scent of balsam. Persian basil, nasturtiums. I still love color. I like these little cucumber plants that have sprung up so valiantly from almost nothing and in almost no time and are staring toward the window with all their might. I still love it when anyone's paragraph is good. I like trying to say something accurately. It seems I can still love motions of air. I always like the way trees move. I have hope of finding someplace to be days and nights out of town. I'm pleased when I've got something done.   What could I want that I have no hope of. To sleep well. To not be sore and stiff. To be liked and understood, to cuddle with someone. To have enough money to go somewhere in winter. - Dismissive is the word for how Luke has been. 13 Quiero hacer contigo is Neruda not Paz. Todo que no es piedra es luz is from Piedra nativa, which isn't in Configurations. Then what book was it I bought in San Francisco that mended me with an image of desert light. [March 1976, DR3-1] La luz devasta las alturas Mountains in the Anza Borrego. (A curator on VUCAVU described Last light as showing an eclipse on a mountain blasted by historic drought, went on to make a case of it. I wrote to say no it's just an ordinary sunset and those mountains are always naked like that.) Cierra los ojos y oye cantar la luz: El mediodía anida en tu tímpano   Cierra los ojos y ábrelos: No hay nadie ni siquiera tú mismo Lo que no es piedra es luz Then the rest of the poem and just about everything else in this book seems overblown and useless. Are single lines the only value in poets I've thought I liked? Seferis too. 14 I sent Leslie Ditches. She didn't see it at first. now I have it's full of love 18 What kind of morning is it. Even. Thin smudges. Just now the sun has risen straight into my right eye. 6:33. Surprising how far north it is, it's come up over the roof ridge under the blue spruce. - This aft putting 2x8 edgeboards along the west fence having my hands in such rich crumbly warm dirt. Quack grass cables, worms, raspberry runners. Laundry room now beet juice red, so far not good. 19 I had a young class, high school or first year, Chinese with Hong Kong accents. Was sitting on a desk among them just directing conversation. At the end of the session I asked them what we had been studying. They listed a half a dozen subjects. At the end a boy said " Reason ... ing." I said yes and what had I taught them about it. "To keep going." It wasn't the scrappy kind of dream I have now, it was well-formed. The accents were right. The talk went on in the natural, friendly way of my TA sessions. We were all pleased to understand that our hour had taken them forward in so many ways. - Last night drawing a laundry room cupboard I found myself stuck on three times nine. I had a moment of blank feeling what does this mean. I could remember two times nine is eighteen so in the end I had to add. 'Where would conversation be, if we were not allowed to exchange our minds freely and to abuse our neighbours from time to time?' said Stephen. 20 I was explaining embodied writing to someone. I said it's not the narrow thing it's thought of, it's Virginia Woolf because of the way she sees and feels everything. What else was there - a Sufi room on the home road. I was standing with someone in the first stretch of road before Kinderwater's, by that damp stand of aspens. Through a lighted window I saw people moving in what seemed a ritual way. I said it looked like zikr. Peered into the window. A very long room full of people. A Sufi khanqah here, in La Glace? I must have been an early adopter. When people were leaving I went in to talk to the woman in charge, was telling her amazedly that I'd grown up a mile down the road. I didn't like her though, she was thick, stodgy. Then walking with Louie agreeing that we'd passed the stage of religious groups because we didn't like the people in them. Can I make anything of that. There was a feeling about that stretch of road. I'd peer into the trees as we passed it, why. It wasn't an edge of the bush the way stands of aspen usually were, it was a grove, not dark but dense with underbrush, mosquitoes probably, never entered. There was a nest. That sense of peering into a mystery, do you think? - Abrams says The Prelude's task is to show the capacity of mind when wedded to universe to make world a paradise, his own curriculum as 'this transitory Being' to demonstrate that possibility. - Further, he says The Prelude's opening mentions a breeze that evokes in him a 'corresponding' breeze that has something to do with beginning the poem's project. I hadn't remembered W thought it wasn't good enough. He kept declaring he'd write "a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature and Society, and to be entitled The Recluse; as having for its principle subject the sensations and opinions of a Poet living in retirement." He didn't publish The Prelude during his lifetime because only the impersonal blockbuster he intended could justify speaking at such length about his own life. In 1821 Dorothy writes "William ... has not looked at The Recluse ... ; and this disturbs us. After fifty years of age there is no time to spare .... This he feels but the will never governs his labours." Someone else in 1838: "... yet (as he said last night) how small a portion of what he has felt or thought has he been able to reveal to the world, and he will leave it, his tale still untold." He never got to The recluse because some uncon sense knew he'd already written what he had in him to write? Coleridge's young bravery got him through the first version but later he was frightened of what he'd claimed? And pushed 7 hours a day to spoil it before he died for fear of last judgment? 1770-1850. 21 Kathy Bara and I spring-cleaned all the ledges and behind everything including the stove and she washed the chandelier's globes. Meanwhile Lee took three hours to hang the venetians and still got the measurements wrong. Shd mention I've been going through the In America index pages fixing bits. 25 Four days of heat and the garden is in bliss: iris, peaonies, garlic, strawberry and hollyhock, chives, grape hyacinths at the gate, last year's volunteer tulips showing buds, bed edges self-sown with white johnny-jump-ups, self-sown Iceland poppies in whiskered bud, shirley poppies in thick swaths, first moss phloxes showing bits of mauve and white, first five blossoms open on the apricot, round pink buds on the nectarine, comfrey in aggressive clumps, raspberry leaf tufts both on the ground and along the canes, gooseberries and currants in full leaf, bumblebee in the arabis, juncos and white-crowned sparrows creeping in the grass, sometimes a ring-necked dove, once or twice a mourning dove, one cabbage white; an aura of soft youth, a basking look that fills me up. Last year this time the garden was still being made so this is the first time it can have a whole actual spring. I can now see what it needs for this time of year, for instance which plants comes on together: bulbs are late here, most just coming on now among the rock-garden phloxes and Mediterranean perennials. This phase seems fast. Don't be careless though, there's frost at night. 26 C, B, turmeric, Co-Q, acetyl carnatine, oregano, cleaner house, slow breathing, biking "Hungry for ontology, something like that, space, grain, fabric of the universe, images of. Altered being - philosophy, effort." "A long trip. Do yoga to be more limber. Slow breathing to be quicker into tuning, whatever cardio I need for more energy, video and sound." The fiery skin pain is worse again, there when I lie down at night - which it hadn't been for a while - and there in the morning and when I wake from a nap and even breaking into my nights. Food is a dreary struggle. I can't bear myself heavy but though I was scrupulous for a month it made no lasting difference. If I defy low-carb for a day I gain two or three pounds overnight. - Pound, again, is back of all this No, no, that's symbolism, I wasn't interested in that [said Pound] That Zukovsky's A is a day book or journal written continuously throughout his life. "What Zukovsky has done is to take distinctions of both ear and intelligence to a fineness that is difficult." I find that in this whole thing that Pound came into - the tone leading of vowels, the question of measure, the question of the total effect in terms of sound and sight of a given piece of poetry - these aspects are tremendously handled by Zukovsky as by no one else. Jazz in the late '40s, "You can write directly from what you feel, and these musicians made clear how subtle and how sophisticated, ... how refined that expression might be. ... the same man who played the first Charlie Parker record I heard was the same man who gave me the first book of Ezra Pound's that I read." - Did he ever say anything about having lost an eye? Being disfigured everywhere? Is his poet pose a cover? Later on the interviews keep saying 'articulate' and 'circumstance' in stiff convoluted awkwardly formal sentences, why. He's always naming the men of his cohort - Olson, Duncan, Ginsberg, Zukovsky - bringing them to stand with him, quoting them. He thinks of them (not Ginsberg) as descending from Pound but what I've seen of his poems are not in Pound's line at all, they're disembodied. Robert Creeley 1973 Contexts of poetry: interviews 1961-1971 It's the attempt to find the intimate form of what's being stated as it is being stated. government of the words as our responsibility. What outrages the articulation of feeling in language, what makes language subverted to the meager reality of distorted and finally criminal acts ... - what distorts and beguiles and coerces by means of language can only, I think, be confronted by a use of language which makes obvious that criminal distortion on the part of those who make use of it. - What so outrages me in Trump, his criminality in language, and what mystifies me in his followers, that they don't disqualify him for its sheer dumb primitivity. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, ... also uses the fewest "unique words" (2,605) of any president - Obama was the best at 4,869 - And see how stiff and wordy Creeley is here. 1926-2005. Ellen Tallman died in 2008, Robin Blaser the year later. 28 "Many, many men." He's always recalling and quoting, his head is full of people, and they are always, always men.... I mean that place where one is open ... more comfortable in a small town ... seasons ... and I like time's accumulation of persons ... I can look out the window up into a group of hills seven miles distant the very precise beauty in Stendhal ... the way the thought is so free to find its own statement and to only move as it was feeling some response the condition of life these guys had ... they were drinking all the time ... they were loners they were peculiarly American, specifically American ... their way of experiencing activity, energy ... was so manifestly the thing we were trying to get to ... . So in the middle fifties, the painters, without any question 29 Sunday morning. Grey light, wet street. Two doves fluttering in the linden, two crows on the church pickets, two starlings scrounging on the gleaming sidewalk. The church's crabs are in leaf. My garden's floor these days is crawling with little grey birds. Is it true that the planet is doomed by warming and will be acceleratingly uninhabitable by humans or any life by the end of this century? What would that imply for how to live now? I'm expecting to die within say ten years and that seems alright but I don't want the world to die - the plants and animals, the legacies of art and writing, the centuries of careful work. The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions. All but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. More than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world's kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. The natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another. End times - do we live in end times? Paul said that when he mentioned stewardship of the earth Ed claimed environmental destruction didn't matter because Jesus could return at any moment. - Did my taxes. - Olivier Assayas L'heure d'été - Louie said maybe on some other planet somewhere there will still be a rose. - [Letter to Greg] "You can write directly from what you feel, and these musicians made clear how subtle and how sophisticated, ... how refined that expression might be.... the same man who played the first Charlie Parker record I heard was the same man who gave me the first book of Ezra Pound's that I read." that's from a book of robert creeley interviews. american poet 1926-2005, one of a cohort of post-war poets who think of themselves as descending from ezra pound and william carlos williams. he was talking about his relation to the abstract expressionist painters of that same generation and saying how all of them felt they were being taught and led by the jazz musicians of the time. I thought of you reading this, that you'd tuned in - on your own - to cognitive qualities that were cutting edge in the forties and fifties, that I had no contact with. have you ever tried to say what that solitary experience of jazz was for you? have you read anyone who got it right? then from the jazz musicians to the painters: "the condition of life these guys had ... they were drinking all the time ... they were loners they were peculiarly American, specifically American ... their way of experiencing activity, energy ... was so manifestly the thing we were trying to get to .... So in the middle fifties, the painters, without any question" in writing it's a line of descent that isn't mine - it's very male - and i'm more euro, british, and for that matter so is ezra pound - but in experimental film it fathered stan brakhage and he's my lineage there. odd to be sitting on a raining sunday morning in merritt bc, far, far from the places where any of these movements could happen or even trail their edges. 30 Have had my hands in warm crumbly garden dirt, such good dirt now, with worms. There's something every day to do. Grass and dandelion seedlings spring up overnight, do the coldframe rows need water, there are things that should be planted now, peas, glamorous plants on delayed delivery, tuberoses, phlox, filipendula. Inside starts to water and keep an eye on - the gherkins are flowering. I set them on the porch for a while to invite bees if there are any. Apricot flowers falling, slender Ms Nectarine lovely in her modest scatter of pink. The FIG!! The fig has new growth. Small white narcissus in a scatter with grape hyacinth. Strong paeony clumps. The three clove currants from Ashcroft are in bright leaf and have flowers. Mrs Haare's gravel tulips have opened. Some but not all of the yellow rose suckers have survived. First time I've seen self-seeded nasturtiums. Are all the trees going to bloom? Thought the crabapple wouldn't but yes and the pear too. The plum got buds in yesterday's one day of rain. Probably not the greengage and I can't tell yet whether the Cox's but the cherries are thick with round buds.   part 5 time remaining volume 6: 2017-2018 july-july work & days: a lifetime journal project