time remaining 6 part 5 - 2018 may-july  work & days: a lifetime journal project May 1st 2018 The prelude. Its jiggety-jog and archaisms and wrenched word-order are repellant stupidities. Sometimes a sharp word but not often a whole line. He's good though at feeling a long reverb in scenes. He skates at night, "We hissed along the polished ice" and cuts across the reflection of a star. He rows out alone, again at night, and as he's rowing backwards a crag looms visible behind a nearer crag and seems to follow him. He watches a heap of clothes on the lakeshore that no one comes back for. At school when Christmas holidays are about to begin he climbs a hill to watch the roads for those who'll arrive to fetch him home. "Upon my right hand was a single sheep, / A whistling hawthorn on my left." His father dies during that holiday and "The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old stone wall" become an icon of catastrophe. Sometimes I do like the way blank verse taps every syllable, for instance in or-ange: Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. His pleasures are familiar. "the lines / of curling mist," "the level plain / Of waters coloured by the steady clouds."     while my eye has moved through three long leagues Of shining water, gathering, as it seemed, Through the wide surface of that field of light New pleasures "a day / With silver clouds and sunshine on the grass / ... / A perfect stillness," "a sense of touch / From the warm ground"                         blest the babe Nursed in his mother's arms,                     ... who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an early soul, Doth gather passion from his mother's eye His mother dies when he's 7 and he's sent to school not long after. Loses his father when he's 13 and then his sister till he's 25. Does he ever wonder whether he insists on the personal benevolence of nature because he's been stripped of human attachments. 2 Childhood's feeling for a rural place and its continuity into the adult hadn't been described before. He could want to describe it because Coleridge and Dorothy were with him in it but in the marketplace of male ambition he couldn't be proud of having written it. His timidity in that market makes him overreach throughout. It's patriarchal obedience. He's defending the mother by making her the father - yes? When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten, And with a step or two seemed brighter still, Nor had I time to ask the cause of this For instantly a light upon the turf Fell like a flash ...                             and lo, The moon stood naked in the heavens at height Immense above my head, and on the shore I found myself of a huge sea of mist ...                             we stood, the mist Touching our very feet; and from the shore At distance not the third part of a mile Was a blue chasm ...                         through which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable ...                                     in that breach Through which the homeless voice of waters rose, That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged The soul, the Imagination of the whole. ...                                     it appeared to me The perfect image of a mighty mind ... That is exalted by an under-presence A sudden brightness, a suddenly vast visibility, something about homelessness, something about water, a roar, a dark deep thoroughfare and he feels that's it, that's the essence of value, that's my whole stack, Nature, soul, Imagination, mind. The editor says of the 1850 version that none of the great passages of the Prelude suffer as much in revision, alterations consistently for the worse. What was his doubt? I'm thinking of Paul sitting with me in the garden saying he wants no more of women telling him what men are. I said we've had to study men; for instance I've had to understand philosophy as produced specifically by men. So: body denial, pre-birth and birth-denial, mother-denial, defense of male prestige by projection into ineffable mightinesses, etc, along with messed-up remnant intuition that needs to utter all of these indirectly. Along with a birth memory he's feeling the roaring chasm as medulla oblongata, the brain's chasm into noncon body? Or/and intuition of larger self as I know it - do you think? It says yes.                                 what we have loved Others will love, and we may teach them how 3 A Flemish Beauty pear, a Mirabelle plum, a Golden Wings, a Golden Celebration and Blanc Double to replace the ones I killed, a little saxifrage, an artichoke. Coming home the sweet smooth swerving lope of 5A, hills in bare early spring, aspen groves the most delicate definite chartreuse clouds of new leaf amid sage-blue and pale new bunchgrass clumps. Pleased by the Golden Wings, which I picked up without remembering why I might have had it on a list, and the Mirabelle, which is just what I wanted and didn't expect to find. Young Mike said happily They've just come in. (I said Where's Tony? Thursday is Tony's day off. We agreed Tony is wonderful. "He's my man.") I like the Flemish Beauty too though I have to crowd it in with the Anjou. It is believed that the Mirabelle was cultivated from a wild fruit grown in Anatolia. First recorded in France in 1675. Its juice is commonly distilled into eau de vie. In parts of Spain it is naturalized near rivers and ditches, has been found in ancient hedgerows in England. Flemish Beauty heirloom pear introduced to North America in the early 1800s. Grows to 12' tall and wide, originally known as Fondante de Boise, hardy to zone 3, susceptible to scale, scab and fire blight, highest degree of self-fertility, firm, juicy, and slightly granular with a distinct musky sweetness that gives it an unusual flavor. - I was in the garage looking for a stake. A man from the church showed up asking whether I had water. "I did a minute ago. I'll check." Then he was on the path by the porch steps looking around saying he hadn't stood there in fifty years. He used to go with a girl who lived here. Was that in the time of the coal miner? No, before that, in the '50s. Gordon Dryer was the railway's chief. Did he have a daughter called Amy-Alma? Yes, that was the girl he went with. The date on the card was 1949, how old would she have been then, four? No, more like seven, because she was only a couple of years younger. Gordon Ernest Dryer. Amy Dryer 1911-2007 survived by daughters Amy Alma (Brydon) and Gwyn Opal Dryer. 4 A cold, covered morning with moving air and platinum streaks. I don't want to say it - memory failing. Very recent memory. What was the book I was reading yesterday? Last night when I was planting what I'd brought I was thinking, where should I put the Golden Wings? I'd planted it along the fence half an hour before. - There some blank moments - really blank - and then I start to recall the Irish priest. But also: the policeman's dog was Molly. 5 I planted a lot of what was inside. It's probably too early but it's hot and I'll try covering at night - melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash family, even a baby watermelon. - Oh must go close the coldframe. This morning I noticed the iris next to the step had buds, sealed envelopes still, a thin green skin, but a bit plump. By afternoon there was furled purple above two of them. They were growing so fast I thought I might see the whole ruffled thing by evening. How did I not realize Rob has the same birthday as Frank. 6 Sisters of grass 2000. Bunchgrass, traveller's joy, rabbitbrush, balsamroot, sagebrush, mullein, alfalfa, blackbird, magpie, crow, falcon, osprey, mule deer, coyote, yellow-headed blackbird, crane, meadowlark, grouse, horned lark, little brown bat, loon, Clark's nutcracker, golden eagle, rainbow trout, sweetgrass, coyote's needle, giant rye, foxtail barley, bluebunch wheatgrass, blue flax, brown-eyed Susans, sedges and buckwheats, pinegrass, timbergrass, brome grass, timothy, wild onions, bitterroot, southernwood, a grandmother from Shulus, Douglas Plateau, Cherry Creek, Douglas Lake Reserve of Spahomin, Cullodin, Coutlee, Nicola townsite, Lauder's Creek, Chapperton Lake, St Andrew's Church, Nicola Lake cemetery, Penask Lake Road, old Kamloops-Merritt Road, Rockford on Stump Lake, Napier Lake, Trapper Lake, Ussher Lake, Rose Hill, Knutsford, Quilchena Creek, Trapp Lake, Forksdale ie Merritt. believed that the souls lived in a western world underground Kikuli houses, winter houses at the lakeshore. - There's a scent when I step outside, flowers and leaves, a soft pervasive bliss. Yes the purple iris. The clove currant's round arms outlined in yellow. Gooseberry rummaged all over by bumblebees. Evans cherry against the garage's blue shingles in young pride of white bloom. The Whitney crab's apple blossoms red and white. What to say about paeonies. Clumps of thin legs wine red or bronze holding up jagged lumps of still-crimped leaves, taller every day and very gradually unfolding. 7 The Nicola is high and fast, an even milk-coffee brown. I was next to it on a grass bank eating lunch liking the blackbirds, half a dozen of them sheltered inside a chokecherry's thicket of fine branches sometimes singing a trill. In treetops around the river's bend a dove sang continuously. Whiffs of balsam poplar and something flowery. Brilliant small cumulous clouds. Posted that I'm giving away comfrey and two women replied, Julia the admirable hog farmer and Rhonda Dunn who seems to be a Native herbalist. Both offered a trade. Could do things this morning, sent for a foam mattress for the blue bed, bought blue Converse high-tops, took quilts to the laundromat, stood around talking to Christine about how Merritt has changed in their 27 years. 55% of its population is on income assistance. Three mills have shut down and the East Indians have left with them. There used to be a 41-bed hospital, now there's a band-aid station. She listed the stores there used to be downtown. Some people now will drive to Kamloops two or three times a week. 9 Daphne has bought in the trailer park, for the view, must be, a deck looking over the flat bare Nicola, over the golf course and further I suppose to hills. An insulated shed that will be a greenhouse she said. My porch last evening used as I'd imagined, Rhonda and I sitting on the steps looking at plants. I'd cut her an armful of comfrey and found her what was left of the seeds. This morning wet air greying the hill to a dark outline, damp streets, everything motionless, specks of pink showing on the crabapples and a bitty green foam in the Russian olive. - Thompson, Shuswap, Coast Salish, Lillooet, Okanagan - dividing line at Lytton, Lower Thompson and Upper - by Douglas Lake it's Okanagan Kekuli house half underground, more than one family, ladder always faced * 10 When I pulled up at Nicola Valley Meats there was a fifties Impala parked at the door, a glorious thing, long, midnight blue, canted forward, lot of chrome. Curled-up dog looked up mildly when I peered in. Three people at the counter, two scrawny old things and a big sloppy bear of a man. He left first. I paid for my butter chicken sauce and followed him out. "What year is it?" as he was opening his door. "1955." Said he'd just bought it. I was noticing what a beautiful white-toothed smile he had. Something right about him, a pure happiness. He'd worked in San Francisco he said. Doing what? Working on a tunnel. Hadn't liked where he was living though, "Too city. I'm from here." Meantime he'd opened his paper-wrapped package and bitten off a chunk of sausage. When I was getting into the jeep he said "See you around." I said over my shoulder "You have a good dog too, it didn't bark when I looked inside" meaning I hoped I would, I liked him. - Last evening in dim overcast so feminine, so touchable and airy a photo of the Cox's first bloom. Pippin first known use 1400s, from Anglo-French pepin meaning seed, "has been used to refer to a part of a pea embryo, a grain of gold, and a grape ... in northern regions of England used to describe a small fruit seed ... a crisp, tart apple and a person who is unique, usually in a pleasant way." "... we will eat a last year's pippin of mine own grafting, with a dish of caraways" in Henry IV. Add to my list of things to live for the vast scarcely-broached history of English words. 11 She longed for white walls. Selected letters of Vanessa Bell 1993. - Evacuation alert for the floodplain as of this aft. Hot week expected. Snowpack in the watershed was at 205% they say. The lake is going to be at capacity and then they worry about the dam. Am realizing that if this house were wrecked my old age arrangements wdn't be replaceable, that money is gone and maybe the energy too. 12 What is it about irises, they're always catching my eye. The blades fan out flat in different shades of bluish green that are translucent in sun. The buds come up as if through small rips in the seam of a leaf. Before they emerge there's at first just the slightest rounded softening like a bit of quilting at the tip of a blade. After the bud - which then becomes a bud stalk - emerges through its little rip, the leaf continues separately alongside it as if a guard, a scimitar. The bud stays sealed for a long time so I can't tell what colour flower there'll be. Try saying it another way. Their spikiness is stalwart and they're secretive, guarded, about their buds. I'm sitting on the gravel pad at nearly 8. The sun is almost due west and not much above the fence, in fact this minute sinking behind the taxis' new garage roof three doors down. There's a motor growl from somewhere further up Nicola, some kind of flood work. I've cut the grass and it makes this half of the space look like a garden. There at the far end the strong bronze-green Bartzilla stands pushing up amidst a thick short mass of white violas. I can smell cut grass. The Whitney is still an immaculate marvel though not as young as it was but the Evans' white flowers are going brown and it's putting out lanky growth beyond them so it looks like someone who has outgrown his sleeves. I keep wondering is that going to be a dames rocket. It does nothing but grow taller still holding its tiny buds in tight fists. I'm often looking at something thinking, what is it going to do. For instance that short red-stemmed unusually strong-looking paeony. It's cooling fast. Burning sky to the west, burning all over intense immaculate even pale yellow. I'll go cover the babies and close the coldframe. - I thought yesterday it was so much what Roger would have chosen. One was more conscious of the beauty of life than of anything else and it seemed enough explanation of everything. Why should one want more than that ... people like him and music like Bach's and such incredible loveliness as one sees all round ... one should exist ... and that one should know them. They do not really ever stop. she wrote after Roger's funeral. 13 Smart people who held onto each other through all their lives. The huge advantage of sustained good company. First that the best of young men found each other in Cambridge; no, first that Leslie Stephens' children clubbed together against those not their kind and then that the brothers brought home the best of the Cambridge young men. Then that all of them were well-placed enough to be of practical use to each other (this isn't emphasized) in matters of money and shows and publication and politics, and successful enough to go on interesting each other. They kept lively by indiscrete adventures with each other, shared widely in unashamed gossip. Together they herded London culture their way. Virginia made them immortal but Vanessa by her practical generous self-deprecating affection seems to have warmed their commerce. She stayed good friends with her ex-husband and ex-lover and all their ex- and current lovers and lived devotedly with homosexual Duncan to the end of her days. Had nursemaids and cooks. A London house, a country house, a house in the south of France, hotels in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna and in ravishing smaller places in those countries. Bought and drove her own Renault, bought paintings and clothes and furniture ad lib. Clive's money? Nowhere explained. Was she a good painter? Roger was. Hers often seem weak to me. There's a stunning portrait of Lytton. I can never express what happiness you've given me in my life. I often wonder how such luck has fallen my way. Just having children seemed such incredible delight, but that they should care for me as you make me feel you do, is something beyond all dreaming of - or even wanting. I never expected it or hoped for it, for it seemed enough to care so much myself. - She wrote to Julian in November of 1935. He died in July of 1937 because he insisted on going to fight in Spain though she'd begged him not to. Was his feeling for her too much for him. I'm thinking of Luke of course. - First mosquito. Hummingbird working the clove currant. Baths and laundry forbidden because the city's septic system will back up. Flood photo of Osoyoos made me hunt out an e-address for Italia. She replied instantly. There's water almost to the top of her steps. This time of year three years ago I was there in homeless suspense. - And Gab may show up. 14 Dreamed I was walking rapidly downhill on a dark wet street. There was a lot more, another version of a decrepit flat I was moving into and a baby I needed to get back to, but the sensation of fast easy walking was what I wanted to take into the day. Have had a couple of days where my dislocating hip doesn't fix itself. When I walk in dreams I don't limp. 15 On the road after A&W where I sometimes sit the river is higher than the pavement, level with the grassy bank containing it, a flat surface moving past like a conveyor belt. Scent of lilacs in the house. Rereading Sunflower. The hotel room in Victoria where I first read it, green velvet armchair, dazzlingly clean duvet, writing desk, fine windows over the street. Now I read it suspending quite a lot of it not in disbelief exactly - I have to assume she, Rebecca, could feel those to me inexplicable emotions for those repulsive men - but without assent. I know about loving unworthy men but I don't know about loving ugly ones as she does in that squishy credulous maternal way, helplessly attuned to other people's distress, always self-doubting. - I'm too tired to do this now, it's almost midnight. 16 What was it I liked though. Her wealth, her visual pleasure and judgment, her enjoyment of clothes and furnishings and light, the scene where her servants bring her into the garden to see a hedgehog. She can sound like Lawrence in her minute feeling-out of momentary changes of relation and sometimes there's too much of that. Sunflower's simplicity, credulity is often overdone. She's sensory and nonverbal; she's like Janeen. There are women like that but they aren't like Rebecca at the same time. She was writing to figure out what was wrong with her in attachment to men and she does show her heroine both fighting and falling for her own fantasies. It's familiar. She shows Wells' babyishness and manipulation and spite. In the end she realizes he's afraid of her. Her version of Beaverbrook is odder. He'd have hated it because it harps on his grotesqueness. I believe being in love can have the effects she describes - bringing her more alive, swirling her into fantasy - but baby fantasies with someone whose children would have to be ugly? The book doesn't resolve, can't resolve, because West doesn't begin with a character enough like her. Sunflower would realize the man doesn't matter if what she wants is children. Rebecca needs her men to be exceptional but Sunflower with her good family wouldn't have that kink. Yes - the book is Rebecca's kink in the wrong body. - I was coming from the library, parking in the shade on Granite, when Daphne's black box of a car arrived on Chapman. The visit exhausted me, I feel I'll never again be capable of lively time with another human. What's my guess. I think she has made a mistake and I couldn't tell her so. She's feverishly - that is the word - boosting herself to believe she hasn't. She went on and on telling marvelous plans for her drowning aluminum shoebox while I stood around feeling more and more beaten into compliance, edging toward exits when I could. Then too she was so avid for the windows in my garage I'm wanting to sell them before she comes back to town. Here I could stop and say I know her state: it's the state I was in when I was homeless and feverishly inventing my future home so I could feel I already had one. But the way she throws cheery greetings all around makes me feel used in a pageant of sunny self-presentation. There was something about that she must have needed to tell me because she slipped it in when we were talking about something else. She said childlikeness is not the same as childishness as if it were something I'd never heard, and then that someone when she was little told her she must always keep the sense of wonder she had then. I grunted something in the direction of too late for that, which I don't think she heard. In sum, a twisty person whose surface I don't believe but who does like plants and who has fought and ventured, who if I want to be something like friends with I will have to establish energized upper air over. Upper air meaning firm honest attention to the balances of the moment. A strenuous state. If I can. - The other thing today was that early this morning I saw Antonis had as one of his posts a list of the names and ages of the Gaza protesters Israel killed in the last days. I reposted it. Instantly Luke's name appeared. Just that. 17 I worked for hours, like old times. Cleaned up the verandah because it's time to use it. Where did that come from, I don't know. Scrubbed and carried and so far am alright. Feel I could go on but should I. 18 But tired today. Droopy. Reluctant. MJ Coutlee came for comfrey, a wiry 65 year old ballplayer with a good car, forthright like a lesbian. Said she'd been to a funeral at Shackan. I asked did she know Gloria. Gloria Moses? She's my sister-in-law. I said tell her my rhubarb is ready. Julia Smith ran up my steps with two smoked frozen pig's feet for stock in return for the armful of comfrey I gave her. She has a quality, she's kind of a star, lean, pretty but not girly, baseball cap, a bit hard, reserved. Busy, runs things. Today her amazingly beautiful round rack in a sweater dazzled me. Rhonda Dunn was the other one. Her husband was waiting in the pickup but she sat on the steps with me and looked at the gooseberry bush. Asked if I was Métis. Alison Macleod's stories. There was one about a lecturer talking to the man who comes back four days in a row to work on plumbing renovations in her new place. It was familiar in something I've never seen written, the kinds of conversation I've had many times with working class men I don't know. A woman not of their kind speaking to them in ways their own women don't; the way they open up and the way she feels their story; how true it can get. Some of her stories got tricksy in ways I don't like but that one felt transcribed. [Alison Macleod 2017 in All the beloved ghosts] 19 She stood in it like a calla lily, yes, but there was something historical too, Elizabethan?, in the shape of her dress with veil draped close to her head and the way they posed at the top of the steps with their hands raised from the elbow in that gallant processional clasp. Beautifully done. And there was Kate how many years later, a matron, three kids, too much rouge, a reminder that this exquisite woman too is having a brief moment. Heart-wrenching promises to be faithful for life but made on the rotten platform of the god lie and in this instance the untruth that Harry is bona fide and not Diana's revenge. I'm imagining he's told Meghan and they've taken the irregularity as permission to know what they know and make what they honorably can of a possibility of useful work. A mating of equivalent outsideness: his non-royalness and her non-whiteness. - And: at Jeremy's yard sale I bought a Crock-pot to make stock. 20 Is my hip slipping because of all the time I spend bending forward     yes If I stop doing that will it stop slipping     no Is there something I can do     yes Would a physiotherapist know     yes Overall yoga     YES 21 Gardening is trivial isn't it. I have lilacs; I love to smell them in the house; I bring in an armful; in two days it's drooping and I have to throw it out and wash the vase. I have iris; I wait to see them bloom; they bloom; in a day I'm having to break off collapsed flowers. I notice energy costs all day long. I've made a garden that needs a lot of weeding and is it weeding that is making me less and less able to walk. The house is like that too: I'm always wanting to jump up and deal with something, tidy something, and then I wonder whether it is going to be hard to cross the room. The worry about walking is making me feel that if I saw a chance to die I'd take it. What it's like to begin to be old. When I looked at the pile of Mafalda's letters it seemed the person they had mattered to was someone else, someone whose light clear sweetness I could feel for a moment. - There I look up and see the loveliest clotty streak of radiant white against blue. People I used to be fond of seem accidental attachments of another person but the person I am now belongs to the world more than she did. Yes there's that. Do you want to talk to me about this     community, child, heartbreak, Ellie Another sentence     act, to succeed, venture and come through As a child I was heartbroken in community     yes People are increasingly unreal to me, unseen     yes Should or can I change that     no Will you tell me what success would be     Ellie's, early love, triumphing, and passing through difficulties Is there an honest way to do that     yes The way Peter does     yes By continuously working with, from, in love     YES The garden is testimony in the community     YES - May long weekend. Sold the headboard, the ceiling fan, the mixmaster, the sewing machine. Bought a tall bookcase that just fits the far side of the parlour window. Gave away rhubarb and lettuce and seeds. Daphne stopped by and I leaped into the upper air and came through unflattened though not proud to have done it by nattering headlong. In the late afternoon sat reading in the small shade of the nectarine, sun on my feet in sandals, air perfectly warm and perfectly cool. There are too many yellow iris under the apricot and the dame's rocket is tall and purple in the wrong place. The handsome plant self-seeded in the gravel is a silver-leafed phacelia. 22 Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for quarter of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail - not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch - and he and Jack on deck sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak. - Rowen, Rowen! They are coming next Monday. He's 33 today. 23 There stands the new bookcase looking so just-right with its neat vertical strips of color. I was thinking yesterday that as my muscles are shredding and organs getting shabbier and still shabbier I'm clinging to visual order, sweeping, putting dishes away, wiping the counter, placing vases. That corner between the lit-up curtain and the parlour door is giving me pleasure now, it finishes the room. - The wind breathed up the long hillside; remote clouds passed evenly across the sky. 24 When I was awake at night I was remembering Louise's oiled maple floors and then Louise herself and then thinking Leslie and Louise ... and Tom ... , my California friends, are still alive in me the way friends from earlier aren't. It's as if I started again in California, at fifty, as someone else. - Someone was supposed to show up at 9:30 yesterday to help me finish painting the laundryroom woodwork. I bustled around to get set up for her and when she didn't show kept going and did all the primer. Five hours. Today I'll finish the gloss and then the doors can go back up. I shied at it for months - why - but could begin when I thought someone else would do it: I notice that about energy now, it helps me to have, or think I'll have, someone else's energy alongside. - Scent of Alberta wild rose next to me. The Thérèse Bugnet. Will leave the tall iris where they are but always cut them to bring inside for the scent. Their architecture is magnificent but their color is too over-bred for my cottagey garden. 25 Have just noticed that April 30 went by without a thought of Tom. 26 Cassandra called out in Save-On yesterday to say there was an art opening at the courthouse gallery. That gallery is a junky little space and it was crammed with bad small paintings hung close. It's the territory of a community of middle-aged women in filmy garments except for one tall stand-offish person who said she's Miriam's cousin. Badly painted landscapes, sentimental visions of the Indian maiden kind. A lot of horses. There was a woman with a distressing body and a fine eager little face, very thin with a rounded back and a protruding round belly under a loose summer dress. She looked French and Native, had fine French features and brown skin, said she was Cree-French-Norwegian from Saskatchewan. She was one of the featured artists, paints rocks and had other images she described as poured paint, phantasmagorical landscapes with hinted-at horses and Indian maidens. She called rocks grandmothers and said a rock had helped her through a bad time because rocks are formed in chaos - I think it was that. I liked her though I didn't like her art. I don't know what to do with myself in that circle. Cass supportively introduces me as a wonderful writer, which is something I can seem to be that doesn't suggest I might have thoughts they wouldn't like, which I massively do, except that in their presence I don't have thoughts at all. What can I think about what Natalie does? What could I want to know about what she is? I can see a hard life and a gallant spirit fighting to still like to be alive. What she does helps her in that but it doesn't help my own fight because I want to be something that's harder to be. Horses and Indian maidens are dispossessed feelings aren't they, ways of yearning for something of themselves they don't have anymore. So the way to be among them is to feel sorrow for them? To see what they are saying unknowing. 'Expressive art.' Which isn't really therapeutic because it doesn't come through. Her many posts of animals frolicking and her own body so tormented-looking. I can feel it discredits art, it can make me ashamed of how I live. Then reading O'Brian in the many hours when I have to rest I can feel again that art is a right life. Quite a hard day, cold, overcast, windy. I began it by getting the four doors hung, none of them as well as they were but the room cleared. Am sore now so trying to do nothing else but it makes the hours long. - SAT 9:04PM Natalie     Hi Ellie, I wonder if you live in Merritt? Ellie     I do Natalie     Great, then you are the Ellie I am looking for so wonderful meeting you!     How are you today? Ellie     yup you guessed right Natalie     lol, I love facebook, I wondered how I would get ahold of you Ellie     I was pleased you invited me Natalie     I am just making dinner (burning dinner) right now, but are you around a bit later, we can chat? Ellie     sure Natalie     I wanted to see if you were coming out to get rocks. but I will talk later hon     thanks     1/2 hr Ellie     I think the timing isn't right for making a trip tomorrow. my son is arriving on monday and I have things to do and my head to get clear so I can give him a good visit. Natalie     Ok no problem, I have until the end of May, perhaps your son can help you load some rocks anyway! Ok lets chat again sometime! hugs girl! Seen by Natalie at Saturday 9:10pm Ellie     just in principle, I'm wondering whether, rocks being as personal as they are, it isn't better always to find one's own? 27 So no I am not going to be friends with someone who calls me 'hon' and 'girl' and says 'chat' and 'hugs' and 'lol'. And I'm not going to be friends with Daphne now she lives in a trailer park not a large interesting garden. Avid to give me rocks, avid to buy my windows, what is that? Castenada saying when we meet ghosts on the road we can tell they are ghosts by their avidity. My last dream was of paging through a small catalogue of many years of art filmmaking. Pictures and text. There were category headings, the last of which was Marvel, images of a building with carved golden wood. I was looking for an index in the back because I hadn't come across my own films and at the same time thinking about who I'd been when I was making films, what that being felt like, a sharpness in my air, is that the way to say it, recalling it and trying to compare with my present air. 28 A woman from the post office knocked with my foam mattress and stood gazing at the garden. Lee fixed what I got wrong hanging the doors, Kathy cleaned house. I was so, so sore, tired and sore, don't know why, have I done too much for too many days. Should do nothing at all but have to make my bed so I can lie down. Legs in fire pain. Aspirin. Sat on the porch in bright wind with my feet on the pumpkin for a bolster. A man with a black beard and dark hair to his shoulders stopped at the gate, Freya behind him. 29 Rowen sponge-painted the laundry room and went away with books about SLR filmmaking, sound editing and carpentry. Freya placed most of the west fence bed's edge boards and took home Master and oommander, Sigrid Undset and a massive encyclopedia of plants. I piled colored jars for them: plums, plum chutney, cherries, apricots, tomatoes. The night before I had used Luke's recipe for grilled chicken. They watched all six California videos. Row listened to the soundtracks later on headphones. They both had deep baths. I like to see his dark brown eyes, cushiony lower lip, straight nose, smooth brown skin. They're good together, kind, watchful; already wearing gold rings. I heard them go out at five, she runs. 30 Typing with one finger, L wrist swollen and fiery sore. June 1 Ibuprofen works better than aspirin. Hours blank and cold in Emergency. Young nice physician at last who introduces himself as Mark says x-ray says degenerative changes in the wrist, orders blood tests, suggests I sign on with Dr Goetz. - Tia's 48-year-old lost boy has turned up looking for her. Instant tears. Lost boy born in London the year Luke was. 3 In shallow sleep last night I dreamed I heard someone, a man, saying "Ellie Epp's journal, I don't read it because it's all about her, what she feels, what she thinks." Was considering what he said: yes but maybe the impression is partly stylistic, the way I'm always scrupulously tagging observations as local. 4 that was a really awful conversation.   it has seemed to me that about once a year you've needed simply to crush me. In other years I've tried to work with it generously but this year has been hard on me and I haven't as much to spare.   I still don't know what else to say. 5 Rereading Reflections on a marine Venus because I have nothing new to read, this time knowing he invented Gideon so he could talk about his own interestingness without spoiling the book. The other thing I'm noticing is his mixture of really deft language with slovenly ingratiating inaccuracy. I should give examples. - He's not good     yes I shouldn't sign on with him     yes Can I fix BP without him     yes With slow breathing     yes He didn't like me     yes Do you think my BP is dangerous     no Do the blood tests     yes Get the results via Genevieve     yes - He should have twigged when I said Ibuprofen. Will it go back down     YES - Yashimoto The lake 6 I was at an outdoor café table like Union Market, talking to somebody. A couple of women walking away at the end of the block were wearing fur stoles. The one on the right looked like mink. Was it cold? The neighbourhood seemed to have changed a lot. I got up to go somewhere for a moment. Would I leave my coat and bag in my chair? I did leave them. Where was I going. I wasn't sure but then I thought of my little boy alone at home, and as I was hurrying toward 824 I thought maybe the cat had not been fed for days. The house when I came to it through the alley had a jerry-built addition on the back and was being repainted a dark green. Some other people who lived in the building and were in the foyer told me my little boy wasn't there, was with his dad, someone like Michael. They wondered where I was living. I said not far away, with a boyfriend who was doing plays. I didn't name him but they seemed to know who I meant. When I came to the locked door to my apartment they brought me a new key still in its plastic shell. Would it turn. There was a click. I walked into dim large rooms looking completely abandoned, boxes and heaps of old clothes left along the walls. I should deal with my own things left somewhere among them. Woke from this dream realizing how humiliating that interview was yesterday and how grim my existence is now. There have been weeks of worry about not being able to walk, my hip slipping, and then my wrist swollen and hurting so much, and not being able to work in the garden and having to just lie around killing time reading. When I'm injured I feel it might always be like that from now on and I should find a way to die, I should start taking apart what I've made here rather than assembling more for other people to deal with. Then from that background of misery and aloneness going to a shabby doctor's office where I'm weighed and measured and have my blood pressure taken and a tape put around my waist, and then sitting waiting alone in a bare ugly room till a very blank young man comes in to decide whether he'll take me as a patient. I was applying for help to someone I could tell could not see me, who could not imagine my circumstance or feel for me, and who when I was trying to give him a larger sense of me could only want to talk about the one thing he had scope to notice, my blood pressure, which he will want to treat with meds. It took overnight for me to be able to say this. Is often like that, I don't know what I'm feeling when it's happening. So then further, what can I do about the grimness. Allan is making my work table. The only thing that can help is work. 8 Better days. Desolation Harbour had come from the library and I was laughing aloud. My wrist is alright and I'm hardly hurting, have weeded a bit every evening. Genevieve's office says my BP before Ibuprofen was 133/85, which if it's true I can hope means the shocking numbers should come down of themselves. Allan called me to his workshop this morning to show me the table top strapped together waiting for a decision. I could marvel at his tools so he and his adopted boy from Whitecourt liked talking to me. Last night after I finished Education I simply phoned Paul, who was alone in Alberta watching Netflix and seemed to like being phoned. 9 On second try at Home Hardware this morning I decided on a colour for the laundry room chest, bench and mirror frame. Dark sage green maybe not dark enough but such an excellent paint, a cabinet paint, smooth and hard like an enamel. Second coat tomorrow though they almost don't need it. Pleased to have figured out how to re-cover the bench's seat with fabric that's so pretty with the green. In the garden rummaging strawberry plants for handfuls, yanking dense masses of giant Shirley poppy plants. The one dames rocket is five feet tall and too purple and in the wrong place but there's some in the bedroom for the scent. It's been cold, the cucumbers and melons have been at a stand though hundreds of volunteer tomatoes have surged up as weeds in their beds. Iris except for the wonderful dark blue are done. I don't like the jumble of colours and can't sit on the porch without thinking of moving this and that. 10 Assembled and lovely, a grouping, green, white, red. I'll take a photo. 11 Blood tests all good except borderline low iron but BP not significantly down. Frightened by BP, feel it in my chest. 12 Had set up cardboard shields behind the laundry room rad and this morning opened windows and doors, put on a glove and a mask and spray-painted it with heat-resistant silver. Then went out and worked on and on transplanting into the purple-orange-white-silver niche between the greengage and the mirabelle. At first scared of tightness in the center of my chest but wondered whether it was dehydration and wondered too whether the way I've been shy of work has been low iron. Did liverwurst and spinach give me today's hours? I keep opening the laundry room door to look at the color. 16 Starlings, a score of them chittering and jumping in the Manitoba maple and the long grass beneath it, long grass with cornflowers. 17 Jody to say she passed the bar. 18 First nasturtiums. Bike because the jeep won't start, had to figure out the pump. Work table! Perfect evening half-hour on the porch. Honey bees in the salvia nemorosa. The garden's aisles cleared enough to show dark. Here and there poppies on their long stems swaying a very little in no breeze at all. It was warm. Nothing hurt. 19 Again wanting to stay alive. Not hurting, bright warm air, joyful in the room of my work. Self formed and found, long-loved companions. I have a sense of authority in it now. For instance it's easy for me now to separate writing bits from bits that were theoretical recognition. I can instantly trim to the kernel. I might be starting to feel how all the loci can belong in one field of work. 20 A garden house was being built by two men I thought without enough supervision. The better of the two was walking through the quite large meeting. I was newly back but felt I should say something. Should I call him Gab or Gabriel. "Gabriel should be in on the discussion" I called out - something like that - seeing him moving across the room. No one seemed to hear me but afterwards a tall man stopped beside me to say would I come to the in. I understood a separate committee meeting. Walked with him down a sloping couple of blocks. He stopped to speak to someone but I kept going. I heard him behind me saying to a woman that they should use cannabis sativa. I was walking lightly the way it is walking slightly downhill. Someone outside what seemed to be a warehouse café called the E Street invited me in. Was this the meeting place, had the man phoned ahead for them to intercept me? A large bare room with high brick walls. Not really a café, more like a band practice room or a studio. A few young men. The man who'd asked me to the separate meeting arrived, sat next to me along the east wall looking into the space with me, talked about the artist who'd worked against the opposite wall with the sound of traffic muffled by the brick. Large charcoal drawings I was thinking. Then still looking west across the room I was seeing city towers through a window wall, some distance away and lower down toward the northwest. I said to the man beside me that I often dream this part of town. (In fact the part of town I often dream is more south of the city and across the tracks from this higher ground.) Earlier there was a many-storied hotel where I'd had a room on the top floor. I no longer had a key so went down to the housekeeping office to ask for one. The housekeeper said the top floor was being kept for business functions now and I could have a room lower down. - My brain so fertile of buildings and cities. - Gold breath exercise this morning, when I got to my left arm I began to feel it as a broken wing, fingertips through wrist and forearm all the way into the shoulder and then even up toward the collar bone disconnected shreds of pain turning off and on as I watched. I felt sorry for it. I'd thought it's no point trying to mend it because I'll fall and hurt it again but today I was feeling no, mend the poor thing as many times as it needs. Do you like that exercise     YES Can it mend the arm     yes Can it mend everything     yes 21 A search site says Tom is back in the West room 139 after living in a house in Paradise Valley in January. Comment in an online newspaper yesterday. Poured rain this aft, drops leaping 3' high on the pavement, a bit thrilling. 22 Why do I do that. Late afternoon yesterday I got in the jeep and drove to Save-On and bought a pint of Haagen Dazs. I'd been well for days and blubber was shrinking and yet I'd decided from one moment to the next with no discussion. Took an aspirin after when my wrist seemed to be threatening. Long history of ice cream zonking. First year in Ban Righ. Why was I zonking yesterday. Work anxiety it says. Notice that. Woke from pleased dreaming of a book project. I'd read an unusual travel story in a local magazine and it had made me think of a travel story of my own. I could put together an anthology to publish them with others I'd collect from people I liked. I'd edit them to improve them. Tom back in the West, what about it. It's 23 years later, he was 48 and is 72. Is he back where he started, bedbugs, drugs, running behind with money and every month in debt to wicked Ari? Or quietly safe among his people with enough money to eat well, pleased walking through the Gaslamp to the Embarcadero, writing in the library. - The desk is eager happiness but what to make. A storm sky north of the spruce. Is there a name for that luminous porous perfectly even blue-grey. Something about the light too as if it's cleaner, a bit whiter. Can you tell me     yes: love woman, meditates, writing, love Sweet lover looking for someone who knows how     yes Eurydice looking for Orpheus     yes Titania sorting Oberon     yes   Love woman thinks she's looking for a man but she's looking for her mother     yes [sigh] She's also looking for a male self     no She's looking to be safe enough to be herself     yes [sigh] 24 It's bright today. Sunday. These mornings I go out with a bowl and rummage the strawberry beds then walk up the fence edge to see what's blooming among the California poppies - first few low-down hollyhocks white, pale pink, rose. Lift cucumber leaves, three but not ready yet. Pull a few weeds, throw them on the path to dry. Pick some red poppies, some white, singe their stems, set them with blue hyssop for the desk. Whatever I feel for Tom reimagine it as feeling for my mother?     YES Just find the feeling without its talk     yes   Do you understand tension in L hip     yes Can you explain it     no Overuse     no Cortical     no Some kind of defensive     yes Is that what's skewing my hips     yes Something to do with love     no, shame Shame about itself     NO, about the right Work with pelvis     YES Vagina clenches but that's not all it is     yes Vagina clenches to not be vulnerable with men     yes   Find the pre-trauma mother     yes Can I go there directly     no Have to go through the missing     yes Just do emotional work at the desk     no all the stages 26 People when they want to praise the garden often say it must be so much work. I say not really, meaning don't be so frightened of effort. The town's praise is worth not much because they're people who've never seen a garden, and yet it is praise for wanton fullness within careful order, ie sort of for what I am. Wanton fullness? No. But pleasure. Poppies of pleasure said Artaud. How clear is coitus .... So clear. What seeds ..., how avid are the heads of pleasure, how lavishly at the highest point of joy pleasure spreads her poppies. Her poppies of sound, her poppies of light and music, swiftly, like a magnetic rise of birds. Looking for it I find something I didn't know at all, that Burns got there first: Pleasures are like poppies spread You seize the flower its bloom is shed Or like the snow falls in the river A moment white, then melts forever Artaud 1896-1948, Burns 1759-1796. - Rowen asked would I like to make a toast at their ceremony. I said I would love to. I'm proud of them that they've been wise and kind enough to get this far. Booked the Patricia for the Sunday night after so I can get things done and hurry back. Book store, office chair, Rob, Louie, maybe Leah. Do I have anything to wear? Before then haircut, have teeth cleaned. Ask Kathy to water? Depending on weather. Chop front yard grass. What would she like to be wearing. The green parasilk loose pants. A fitted jacket with long sleeves. A white silk shirt. She would like to be able to wear sandals. Maybe she has a red silk vest. Maybe she has blue hair. - A day like yesterday: I zonked all day, tried something for a bit in the morning then lay about reading Treason's harbour till it was done, slept, ate cherries and this and that till my face swelled, and then had begun watching The good wife season 2 before the sun was over the yardarm and on and on till bedtime. Knew it was bad. Helpless. So what was that. Stopped; not knowing what to do. More than that? Freaked by where I'd tried to go? It says no. It's something that happens again and again. I'm in it and then I'm not. It needs a strategy. 27 Hegel on aether and quantum mechanics. A kind of reading that suspends not only belief but most comprehension and at the same time watches itself. Long affection for the man, a sense of the authors and detailed dislike of their pedantic style, bafflement about how Hegel could have meant his idealism and yet a question whether it coincides with something I know, a reminder to read male metaphysics as displaced mammalian intuition, watchfulness for something about my own feel for the notion of air-cortex-amnion-space etc. Someone else writing about his philosophy of nature as fantasy structure. 'How matter might act as a conceptual repository for what is repressed in the construction of philosophical systems." 28 What is it I want to find in Hegel. Cosmos one fabric neither material nor mental. Self-ordering self-creating cosmos with nothing outside it. A unitary ground supporting relative stability amid multifarious propagation of effect. Could that have been what he meant by Geist or at least what he was intuiting? When I was reading him in final year I liked the idea of consciousness developing individually and historically; just that, I think. I knew it in myself, for instance I'd had a moment realizing it in Sexsmith in grade twelve: I'm smarter now, there's more happening in the way I am. I thought of the Phenomenology as a sort of poem or novel about human intelligence developing through time. I liked his dark groping quality. Now I notice the Greek-loving anti-Christian assumptions of his context - Goethe, etc - in the mid-1700s and later - and his wish to defend wholeness against religious proscriptions. 29 Mediterranean homeland limpid eagerness pour qui le monde visible existe conceives of matter as knotted and equally opposed strengths the vortex, the waterspout, Yggdrasil, the crystal, Fuller's knot, matting matter Davie's way of reading a passage as a waterspout, located but not pegged, pulling in and throwing off - my poet / breathing / horizontally is Luis Posse not Rob Dunham. incense rising / from the burning / of today winds like these 30 AG5. Rowen little. I'd forgotten Orpheus used to be an imaginary boyfriend. Without my having to know, somewhere it is known, and I'm with the knowing even when I don't know. In these ways it is as if someone is already there in the companion's place on my further right. I speak, it can say ye-e-s-s in a sigh. I ask. It chooses from the surroundings I haven't seen, an answer in sight.   She says: don't make it separate. But I want it to be separate so there will be someone for me. The rest is to understand gradually. She's all aflame with estrogen, so hard to be. And in this passage I see something I hadn't, how deep waiting for someone to come for me has had to be. - Morning in hate with Rowen, beating him off, pinching him, jeering at him. He wakes twice at night and then at 6. In the morning there is the 3-hr stretch before Michael comes, in which I can do and feel and be nothing but that stupid little boy's slave, stupid but aggressive and willful, determined to use me to live though the whole of his life has no hope of being what mine could be. I say that against resistance. In fact I don't know whether there is intelligence he'll come to. When I saw him in the park yesterday he seemed a one year old. I don't enjoy him personally only generically in his Cupid beauty. I feel it's hopeless with him. He'll be Michael's because Michael is patient and loyal and if he's Michael's why am I giving him my lifetime. But if I give him up outright I've lost my income and would have to move into a room. Unless I had Luke back, unless I get an income.   What it is costing (me - as if they don't exist) to be living expressed hatred as I am.   The dream answers the question about hate: I'm integrating my father, hate won't be the end of my story.   Myself now I'm on the edge of being violent, or leaving the window open accidentally. When Rowen grabs my legs I hurl him off.   Even violence and hate, don't dispute. They mean urgently. I feel a little wonder that I can make them good. July 1 It's the most appalling passage in the journal. 1987, Rowen was two. I want to erase it but I won't. I want to list reasons but I won't. Joyce said integrating my father but does that mean anything. I was stronger and clearer after. But at the expense of a baby? And should Rowen read it? I've told Row he should be mad at me and up till now he's smiled fondly when I do but this time when he was here he said he'd come to it, it would have been better for him to be with me. I said it wouldn't have because I would have been mean. Michael was devoted. This in the context of his wedding in a week. Marrying into a family of fat fantasists. I'm saying that to not hedge it. Junk fantasy, sci fi medievalism. Is there anything to respect in that? Rowen was harmed in the womb     no Harmed by my savagery     no Because of Michael's devotion     YES Will he find his way in work     yes   I can respect that they raised her with love     YES Have I in any way made up for it     yes Is their fantasy pure and simple escapism     YES Morally vile     yes Is Rowen corrupted by it     no Is it a good marriage for him     yes - When I'm 80 I'll have to retest for my license every two years - didn't know that. It's only 7 years. Life without driving won't be workable here. On plate glass I've been seeing a handsome woman, impressive and hard, experienced, unveiled, honed, supple. Yes I like her, Ed is being added in me, rage, spite, bitterness, solitude, calculation, an open sneer, open lust, indifference, opportunism, arrogance, fatigue, pragmatism, susceptibility, the many veils, and ruthless leadership and ruthless creation, success by doing what's necessary in the rung one down from my real front.   Fighting with Michael a weariness. He'll do anything to save himself from the strain of feeling bad. I feel bad and am cut off from love and pleasure and know something essential depends on getting through this partnership lightly tyrannically and without eating death's bread. It means I'm in death (tho' looking prospering) and can be nowhere else in transition from where I was killed, but will be able, if I do nothing to make it possible for Michael to hold me in death, to open my heart again when I have passed through him into the upper world again. So I believe. Knowing I could be wrong. But certain. - A photo book of making the garden? I said, "I don't understand why you have no idea how much I've given you. When I made the decision to let you know Rowen I understood that it meant I was giving him to you (here he breaks in) - you don't know what I mean - no, I can tell you don't know what I mean. It's because I knew I couldn't want to have an open heart with you. If you were going to be there I'd have to keep my heart closed with him too. I know all my bargains, I know what I'm giving up and what I'm getting, I knew I would have to live without my heart, and I was willing, because I wanted to help you with the beginning, but I can't stand the way you don't see that I've given him to you. And that is how I justify keeping the money and the control, as long as I'm helping I'm going to have at least that, because in the end you're going to have it all."   Then I had to press him more until finally he admitted. 2 Wet, still, Canada Day Monday morning. Trees unmoving; fibrous sky, silver, slowly from the north; drips off the eaves onto young hollyhocks at the window. Finding the whole of AG needs proofreading. Origin, excision, research, universe - didn't know I had it that far back, 1987. "It is as though everything were soluble in the aether of the world; there are not hard surfaces." Witt What would the thesis be - a way of making what I've done in my own way present itself to the academics - a way of making myself learn to bridge them and so come out bigger than both - and it's a way to reconnect with who I was before Roy. I'm assuming the actual thesis will be easy but keeping inside my own while succeeding in the male canonical will need utter effort. - Fall of 1987, just back from London a plan forming, the right plan that wasn't at all easy and took 15 years and satisfied completely in its own terms. 4 I'd like my PhD. Is that true? I don't know, I have a little sense of wanting it. As if Michael and Rowen and Carnegie have me needing to prove something again from the beginning, but mostly a new enterprise.   I NEED to understand the relation of imagination and perception.   Should I change it to the concept of polarity. Such turbulence, such a vast space of open questions "like an excited gas", but the key books I was finding one after the other: Polarity and analogy, Gardner on cog sci, Fox Keller on McLintock, Gleick Chaos, . Could I make something that reads as a mind - someone else's - the color field - a pacer of some kind - but not necessarily like that, could be some cloud density or a sound - a light almost subliminal pacer - visible sound-parts of things. I need - color fields - straight lines - an utter technical concentration - theoretical sidework - method - venture into vision without sidetrack - someway to dedicate it to true intuition. These parts are as if a revolutionary stretch I dread and escape. I feel them pulling into place but I can't yet reach the breadth they need. Yes, it's essay on one track and grain on another. I write a theoretical piece and it has the heavy clarifications, the soundtrack just touches it and the visual track is there in ether acre. The letter from Brakhage February 1988. What do I have to be afraid of - Brakhage taking up notes in origin, Cineworks attachment, show in London, young men saying, Oh you're Ellie Epp, learning the computer, talking uncarefully to any one.   I have bin feeling the beginning of being able to work - write and make films - freely just as I am. In transition having to go through strong fear of being punished for truth and success. A lot of fear dreams. 4 Such fleets of quotations, some of it for good language or life clues but increasingly just noticing some fantasy structure without pointing it out. 5 What I'm aiming for is probably a PhD in philosophy, a theory of imagination, advocacy of self-organized universe and intelligent perception, done in a way so body stays right and soul isn't stuck in argument but travels in space. Did soul travel in space? Traveled in California, but what did I mean. Motion in intuition's dark air, and yes I did - - Pergolesi b.1710 finished the Stabat Mater as he was dying of TB, twenty-six years old. Wish he could see the version conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann at Fontainebleau with Jaroussky and her own chamber orchestra and a young Hungarian soprano. There are instants so perfectly precise they gave my brain a little twizzle. 6 Friday. A dark morning, sprinkler on, white hollyhocks staring in at me with their yellow-green eyes. Later I'll get in the jeep and ride south. Drinking tea, reading October 1988. "A heavy spirit from being responsible for bad actions makes you dangerous also to children whose spirits are light." Made me remember the face I saw in Planet Hair's mirror yesterday strangely large and heavy. Bad actions? Oppression? Just the years and DNA? - Grene Wode Farm on Zero Ave. Hay field, swallows skimming, brilliant cumulous pile to the northwest. Not many miles away a dogwood clump with initials carved. Not many miles away a lost old woman in the unintelligent care of strangers. Rowen handed me his phone with his list of vows. It struck me at the heart. 'What are you feeling?' 'It's what anyone would want to hear.' 'Freya is smarter than I am,' he said. 'She doesn't completely know what to do with it yet.' 7 Saturday. Kitchen, early, after a wet night in the tent. 'That's hysterical.' 'That's brilliant.' A young woman confidently blathering, and at length, telling animé plots. Rowen making bread for the ceremony. 'A Korean movie about a high school that is also a prison for kids with superpowers.' Last night a little fire ritual to invite people who aren't here anymore, for Rowen two grandparents and Jim. Lise looks nice, better. Sane. Fat women but not fat men get odd high shelves above their bums. Vancouver 8 Sunday. When I had crawled under my pile of covers at the end of the day the first thing I understood was that I'd been distressed all day by the many fat women, tottering piles of fat, one after another, and then many others on the way to it, dragging themselves up the road to the ceremonial arch. It was a hand-fasting. They'd had the legal ceremony the day before in a café with a Wiccan officiating. The best moment was when we heard music and there was Rowen beautiful in a chevalier tailcoat and Jack Sparrow eye makeup carrying a bouquet advancing with Hank behind him holding a sword upright, from the opposite direction Freya advancing in white gauze and a tight-laced green bodice, circlet on her forehead, her best man in Highland kilt behind her with sword upright. Rowen offered his bouquet, they linked arms and came down through our assembly to the flowering arch. Rowen spoke his memorized vows sentence by sentence slowly. They stood firm and clear and declared his quality. She crumpled at the second line. Peacocks stood on a high rail yelling Help all day. Roosters crowed. Three large old sloppy dogs begged for love from anyone. Thick legs and arms with tattoos, bushy beards on unimpressive young men. A hawk circled high over the cornfield, corn ten inches high in an even grid next to the long row of parked cars. Parents' speeches and a cake in the evening, Row and Freya looking beautiful in carved thrones, Martin the suave old king, Freya's mother a lumbering bulk with a pretty face who played priestess at length and read a love poem to her ex-husband who was there with two mistresses in polyamorous braggado. Freya sat down next to me wanting to know if she could call me Mom. Why do I so much not want that. I don't even call my own mother Mom, I said. (Here comes Mike who is needing to cling. I refused to be in a family photo with him.) I said it's my generation. You wanted to treat your kids as individuals Rowen said. Yes that, but then I was feeling too how Mom is a poisoned word. - At the gate I was stopped for a peacock in full dignity and Rowen caught up with me, leaned his tanned arms in the jeep's window. I so like his colour - my color when young - dark hair, bright black eyes, pink cheeks, white teeth and smooth brown skin. I said be careful of saying Freya is smarter than you. She has more processing power he said. 'Maybe so but you have something else. You may not have found all of it yet either. Your vows were better than hers.' I liked that he agreed. - Wilder Snail Sunday afternoon waiting for check-in time at the Patricia. I drove out onto the roads as the sky was coloring last night. Bradner Road, Ross Road. There was Baker in a thin layer of mist, touched pink. Wide view, lush trees, but the Mennonite berry farms replaced by Sikh berry empires with astonishing manor houses. Merritt 11 Wednesday evening back next to the hollyhock row. I didn't feel I could write when I was away, though I've transcribed handwritten notes above. I'm horrified by how I look in the wedding photos. So small, so grey, so crooked, so gap-toothed, so old, so unsmiling among all the smiling people. I must be living wrong to look like that. It says no. But I do look bad     no I was having a hard time    yes Because it's not my context    YES I couldn't be anything there    yes Was it really the fat women     yes A freak assembly    YES I didn't want to identify with    yes Is that pathological    no Has Rowen made a mistake    no Have I lost him to that family    no His children will be foreign to me    YES Does Freya actually like me    YES Do the lumbering women bother me because of the way I walk    no Let me see if I can get this clearer. Rowen exists because there was a moment when I decided and acted. Not a good moment, an unhappy desperate moment on the hall floor interrupted by Jamila on the phone. Then a sick poor humiliated unhappy nine months. Then shamed struggles with Michael. Then Rowen absorbed into Michael's illiteracy and Lise's historical fantasy community and not supported in school. So I had to feel myself in a complicated ambiguous position, both completely responsible for his existence and a failed parent. When I'd say 'I'm Rowen's mom' people would brighten. Rowen was everywhere earning their pleasure with compliant generosity: he says what anyone wants to hear and she does too I think. It's good for them to be everywhere loved but can they keep double books? He wanted to go to university but hadn't been supported to learn persistence. He says he can't think in a messy house but he'll live in a messy house because he'll go along with whatever's there. He won't take a stand about food and is already getting fat. Freya will organize him but I can see she's a family girl and isn't going to be willing to abandon them in their slob ethos. I know I haven't earned a say in any of this so I was unhappily and confusedly withheld though I liked their pageantry and evident happiness. I gave him his name that suits him perfectly. His beauty is from my side. The strong clear language of his vows is me. His gift for myth. His spatial gift. I've tried to fight for his confidence and clarity. All of that is worth something but I wasn't able to stand in it among the people he belongs to now. That's correct    yes Should I have    no I didn't bluff     yes There was a lot of bluffing going on    yes Is there more you want to say    no - I've come home to ripe cherries, two heaped bowls of raspberries, a bushful of red currants, entrance path sealed shut by California poppies. 12 Large Andrew, his film crew boss, came to sit with me. I think he said 'I like you' on account of my short speech. When he got up he said 'Thank you for Rowen'. - I don't like to be in Vancouver anymore, I feel a ghost there with nothing but past and new facts I don't want. The whole valley is like that, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, driven choked freeway and times that don't need more remembering. Was pressing to get to Hope where I could branch onto the Canyon road with less traffic and less loss. A brilliant clear day, chicory flowering on the verge, tunnels, the brown Fraser below. Then pressing to get to Lytton as if that's where realness can begin. A doe and two fauns stood on the road. Then sagebrush and the sparkling green Thompson lifted me into happiness. At the same time, as often now, I was wondering how to die. Should I leave the jeep on the bank with a note in it and step into the Thompson where the Nicola joins it at Spences Bridge. Should I leave everything packed in boxes and go somewhere private to stop eating. Will you tell me when it's time to go    yes Is it time now    no Should I stop dwelling on when to die    no After Spences Bridge the home road, fruit stands in blazing heavenly day, basking cliffs, pines on the slopes. I stopped on the verge to pick sage for the dash. It was good with Louie. She's a small light-boned woman of sixty now, short hair in a good cut, beautifully dressed, just right; womanly, prosperous, paired, happy. 'I thought of you as an athlete.' The way I worked. Sat in [Strathcona Community Garden] for an hour on Sunday. The herb garden was stupidly wrecked but I saw that individual plots thirty years later are long-developed and deeply loved. There was Akira's gate still standing. The orchard is mature in mown grass and the wild area has open glades. There are good new trails. The kids' tank is mossy. Edge trees are massive. I saw that what we made is working well and firmly important to the city. - Anglo-Saxon, Middle High German, Provencal, Spanish, French, Italian The spirit of romance his lecture series 1908-09. DH Lawrence then a young school teacher attended. Richardson wouldn't have. metamorphosis from the epitome of the Romantic charmer to a graceless hated rebel artist Luminous detail something taken out of context to be made, not universal - which like infinite and eternal is a silly word - but independently effective. The 'magic moment' is the bust thru from the quotidian into 'divine and permanent world' - Looking for powers to evoke that registered but unremembered extraordinary bust thru to first daylight and large world. 13 Baumann 2000 Roses from the steel dust singer of grief Orpheus perhaps desperate ... these old words very much his own lament over individual tragedy and cultural decay wrought out of ages of knowledge, out of fine perception and skill that they can be carried into the calm realm of truth Essay on John Heydon: Imagining doctrine of signatures as meaning that beings can recognize the properties of things without verbal tradition, for instance animals' use of the medical properties of plants. and therefore a stirring and changeable work, because there might be no cunning shown, no delight taken in one ever like or still thing; but light fighting for speed, is ever best in such a ground: let us away and follow her hour of Translation was come, and taking as I thought her last leave, she past before my eyes into the Aether of Nature Spinoza the intellectual love of things which is the understanding of their perfection fragmentary from a syntactical point of view As often reading with very partial assent. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then something. dawn lyric, noon lyric, evening lyric crystal sea full of gods fellow-workers in melopoeia Not to use the word magic but he and who else, what other male writer of his century, knew about sex as cognitive accelerant, who else dared adoration. Crystal waves weaving together - nobody seems to have taken it to the self-forming ground of electromagnetic aether. Cosmos. 'Nous, the ineffable crystal.' - Ball of light as the brain, integration as crystal formation. Laforge in the Berlin aquarium 'saw the deep beginning of things in the labyrinth of the night' - I keep being startled to realize that I've understood the grip of that kind of phrase and they don't. watching things grow with affection - Scent of the first sweetpea so acute a pleasure. 14 Projective verse 1959 I don't like Olson but did he add something. Closed verse Wordsworth's jiggety-jog, boxes on the page. Field yes, cortical field as has to be. But projective? His gluey ejaculate? 1910, the trochee's heave Dactyl, trochee, iamb, spondee: poetry, garden, delay, Pound's hyphenates like blue-shot, green-gold. certain laws and possibilities of the breath Tensions and relaxations but is it breath? Do I feel it in the diaphragm? what stance toward reality brings such verse into being ... may lead to a new poetics Okay but maybe not in his version of either. must, at all points, be a high energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge Why don't I like this. Energy-discharge is more of that male strutting isn't it? And at all points? Language can have moments of more than usual grip - is grip necessarily the same thing as more charge in circuits? Maybe, but moments of more grip are embedded among moments of less. Maximus flabs on and on. means keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can His doing it there shows how banal it can get. I don't want to be entrained by someone in a speedy verbal state that doesn't let non-language work in its slower silent way. Flights and perchings. Does Pound do that I suppose, elliptical bits following fast, but it only works when he's in strong state of feeling. Yes a charged state. USE the process at all points That has had a good use in the Americans, I'm thinking of Notley and Carson, process notes in the run of the poem. Why is it good, it's closer to, it entrains in a more complex way. Being in someone's head. But it's not the only way. Sometimes it must have been implicit - textural. that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath He insists on his and man and I hate that, and I hate his priestly absolutism altogether (and don't at all hate Pound's) but bodily micro-pressures is right, and auditory attention certainly. But what else. Lexical precision, and that is something else. the syllable Noticing that more, now. to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language El-e-ments and mi-nims. To-step-back-here, alright it's for the tap-tap-tap, but how is it stepping back - it's going aural, more - backwards from prefrontal to auditory cortex? the syllable and the line the head shows in the syllable There he goes into dualist stupidity. Attention to syllables is body as much as line is. Has he never thought about what 'mind' is? He could say line carries feeling, Clynes' sentics, and syllable is fine-tuned present-moment perceptual attention. They both register and carry cognitive state, which is body-mind obviously, and uncon as well as con. is it not slow things, similes, say, adjectives, or such, that we are bored by? The Inferno's similes are swift and thrillingly precise. Adjectives inflect a net when it needs to be sharpened or broadened. He means women. descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second ... Observation of any kind is properly previous to the act of the poem Gendlin's focusing. O has said show your process, show yourself moving; focused perceiving widens and deepens and you can carry a reader by showing it happening: Woolf and Munro leaving their traces. He has a male cowardice about being fucked by what he sees doesn't he. every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem Kinetic is right but he's separating syllable and sound because he has that kink about believing syllable is mental? Because some of them are archaic roots. these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. He seems to be wanting a status for his creations equal to the world's - he's competing with the world. That strain again. It had a dying fall, Yup. I mean what it's like now. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line he means that time to pass that it takes the eye Yes and line end suspensions do more than that. They often double sense. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma - which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line - ... follow him when he uses a symbol the typewriter has ready to hand: What does not change / is the will to change How can he say a comma isn't a pause. It's often too much of a pause. The slash is a harder pause than he says. For what he's describing I'd say two spaces. If the beginning and the end is voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts I do think it's voice in its largest sense, has always been, and is so more transparently in what he calls an open form. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature 'Nature' meaning whole cosmos. Not how one conceives it, how one is about it, how one is it. getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego Ie evading sneaky wishes to impress, which do include his all-us-boys-together pose and the subtle bragging of his many subordinate clauses. And when a poet rests in his physiology then he works in that area where nature has given him projective size. But only if his or her physiology has, not size - though his hugeness has given him social advantage - but excellence of perception, feeling, drive, etc. 'Projective' is so wrong and 'projective size' so masculinist it disgusts. Such works could not issue from men who conceived verse without the full relevance of human voice, without reference to where lines come from, in the individual who writes. Ie writing should be embodied and that sentence for instance isn't. - Didn't know She moved through the fair is Padraic Colum merely an exercise in the expression of masculinity Said somebody excellently of some poem. - Hollyhocks over the top. Tourist asking may he photograph them. Miriam through her car window saying one of her friends has posted a video of them swaying in the breeze. - 'Gathered from the air a live tradition' what I've always done, searched for best scraps of how to be. But what else is it so nicely saying. Gathered from the air alive. Make it new, ABC of reading, Guide to kulchur, Polite essays in the '30s. At the same time increasing paranoia. How to be old. In his last ten years silent with Olga in Venice and Rapallo. Born October 30 1885, died November 1st 1972 at 87. She ten years younger, 78 when he died, lived to a hundred. That her acts Olga's acts of beauty be remembered. more courage in Olga's little finger than became one of Venice's resident celebrities, quick witted, intelligent, and cultured. Encouraging young aspiring poets and artists, she often offered them free use of the top floor of her home in return for a small painting or dedicated poem. ... had to become dependent on friends and acquaintances ... In later life her memory began to fail - Canned raspberries. People here say garden as a spondee, gar-den. 15 Dawn's incandescent sky all white. Hollyhock speaker-stalks swaying so lightly, slightly, at the window. Sweetpea scent. 16 2005 Empires of the word: a language history of the world language succession most of the population of the English Midlands is from Friesland what change of allegiance when a generation speaks a language other than its parents' Akkadian beginning of Mesopotamian civilization, Aramaic a language of nomads culture as basis of language prestige start of records c.3300 BC command of the Mediterranean: Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans great literary works make a classical language the potter's wheel, the swing-plow and the sail ... a beginning made in the working of gold, silver and bronze May you achieve a reign of happy days a separate dialect of Sumerian used for the speech of goddesses koine Attic Gk ie Athens dialect international Athenian Pericles: We are beauty-lovers with a sense of economy and wisdom-lovers without softness. 'A city where serious students would come to study for the next thousand years.' 'Until Christianity came to resent its continuing self-confidence and fidelity to its pre-Christian open-mindedness.' From, say, 100BC, for the next 500 years well-educated Roman citizens bilingual in Greek strong emphasis on poetry and public speaking held strongly to their literary heritage 17 Hot nights. A wide long shallow trough filled with mud I was going to place pots and plants into for a public art piece. The only part worth telling was when someone showed me a stoneware dish that looked like the pie-dish I made in London, that I must have sold when I was getting ready to move to SD. What was it about that - a wonder that it had shown up again, as in fact it had in the dream, though when I asked to look for my mark on its bottom there was another more elaborate mark like a rayed escutcheon on the back of a shirt. - I've just considered whether to add this last bit. I didn't understand it but think more about it later - 8 o'clock appointment to get my shocks replaced. - Was the rayed escutcheon something about how it's done. It just means a sort of stamp that propagates activation? - I haven't said I despised Michael at the event. He lives in subsidized housing on welfare with half the teeth he used to have, says the government took the boat he was working on when presumably he didn't deal with formalities that had been asked, walks downtown every day to smoke weed in one of the Hastings head shops, jeered when I was speaking my toast, denied having loathed my schooled brain, denied having cost Rowen his confidence by not supporting him in school. A buffoon. I didn't want to be seen with him. 18 Didn't want to be seen with me either. Anita's photo. I'm astonished by how bad I look. I don't know how I have come to look so so so bad. I don't know how to feel viable with anyone knowing I look like that. I feel there must be something I can do but I also feel there isn't. Help!     that's how work woman looks Love woman is gone forever    yes Is that alright    no The next thought has to be that I need to be on the side of the being I am now, I need to find and support her value, which can't be beauty or charm. I need to dress her differently, give her better company. Devise a social manner that signals what she's good for? Which I don't do now, I lurk ashamed. Is that correct    YES Is there a love woman for old age    yes Grandmother     NO Teaching    no Tell me    triumph, pleasure, recovery, early love List    yes I did the wedding very badly    no I should be thinking of it as metamorphosis probably, for instance from butterfly to toad. What is this stage good for - - Walked upstairs in the house on Pender and found Choy had been rebuilding it. Where my apartment had been the floors and walls were gone. I was gazing up at a very high neatly vaulted ceiling like the interior of an inverted ship. On the ground outside small excavations lined with concrete like little cisterns. confusions about love remain fantasies of female inferiority 19 English as an identifiable language is no more than 1.5 millennia old and its substance changed radically about halfway through as part of the turmoil at the end of Rome's empire it coalesced from a group of Germanic dialects ... had developed by the ninth century into a major literary language conquest in the mid-eleventh century ... the Normans were only five or six generations away from Vikings the Black Death first reached England in 1348 and returned twice more before the century was out ... most virulent in highly populated areas, among them cities, courts and monasteries. England's population was halved ... massive disruption of the feudal system ... the position of the French-speaking nobility was undercut .... By the late fourteenth century there was no more presumption that any children would grow up with French printing presses late fifteenth century ... Caxton ... the dialect spoken in a capital city ... main sources of book-writing in English, Oxford and Cambridge, were also located in the same broad dialect area ... 1611 ... the King James Bible, produced by a royal committee, would be read in English for the next three centuries a language spread by the sheer prestige of the culture attached to it indicating commitment to a way of life that goes beyond local interests The past four hundred years absurdly affirming for the English-speaking peoples ... political, military and cultural victories History of the politics of language suggests various things about the instincts of conservatism, for instance suppression of women - continuity of language dominance depends partly on birth rate - and also aggressive economic nationalism. At the same time cultural prestige needs individual freedom to express and invent. 'Arabic is for language learners the language of the Koran, English the language of modern business and global culture'. So conservatives and liberals are mutually dependent in support of the language-political system we have? Maybe, but I can't sign on to a large view that would make the current US pres anything but loathsome. When I posted something insulting him Italia defended him and I was so shocked I've unfriended her though she's admirable in other ways. 21 [To Louie] subject line: the conversation yesterday woke thinking about what it was about it. i was saying 'it's really bad' and you were saying 'it's not so bad' and i went away still feeling it's really bad. i didn't want to be helped into denial. it's more that i've had a catastrophic loss and need to be helped to grieve. if i had a friend who died you wouldn't want to say 'it's not so bad,' you'd want to feel the fact of loss with me. becoming ugly, losing young beauty and social viability, is like a death. it needs to be mourned. the fact needs to be faced. 'it's like this now.' 'i have to think of myself like this now.'   That's it isn't it    YES She failed me    no I'm truly ugly in those photos    yes And will have to be ugly for the rest of my life    no Then what    truth, persistence, power, subtlety Persist in truth to get power of subtlety    yes Photo from 2008, 63, still alright, photos from 65th birthday, 2010, still alright, Film Forum photo 2011 sort of alright, so when did it happen. How to be smart about it. Should I think of it as the other end of the arc. There were years of gain and these years are the balancing years of loss before it sinks to zero. - Line-editing C's a-life book. What would I say about it if I weren't being watched. I didn't argue. I didn't want to let in either the images or the text. The image colors seemed the worst colors there are, tan-ish beiges and browns, and the text a piling up of obscure impressors. Mentalist, not digging down, fluent inside her context's givens. There's a deep implicit politics I don't like, as if a concealed courting of the oppressor. And yet C in person is more present than most. - in the times you have asked me to listen to your distress you have also sometimes protested what i found to give. there's trust in that. i don't often attempt that trust. i usually assume i'm alone.   i find it hard really to mourn. it's a stoical habit. there can be a sort of misery every day but it's not what i mean, which is the stroke of heart-break that can really open something. i want it but don't know how to get to it. volume 7 time remaining volume 6: 2017-2018 july-july work & days: a lifetime journal project