time remaining 7 part 1 - 2018 july-september  work & days: a lifetime journal project 22 July 2018 When I can't work with text work with the camera. Trust what the eye likes. Quite a lot has been done to support work - I mean house, money etc - but there's more to do - BP, exercise, shelves for equipment, learn the machines again and better. Watch for what supports energy and subtlety. What is the word I want for the way I like the same fragment in different contexts. Is there a person      no A viewpoint      yes A story      yes A conversation      yes There does need to be an I that thinks, enjoys, suffers. Here and there. Sometimes. Aether primeval god of the upper air Sumerian god of breath, wind, loft and breadth El and Asherah, El storm god Yahweh - pillar-base figurines in Israel, assoc with trees in the Hebrew bible, grapevines, pomegranates, walnuts, myrtles and willows - Christmas trees Elat means goddess feminine form of El goddess of storms and sudden weather Homology. 23 Monday early, sprinkler faucet grinding. Left venetian in lit bars, hollyhock towers swaying lightly white and rose. Sun at the horizon feeling into the top of the silver tree, pale sky over all. I don't know how to work. I don't know how to work. - Note from Juliana asking would I come to Tunja to give workshops at the art school her friend directs. Said I'm too old but meant I don't want to bear the humiliations of the way I look and the way I walk. Don't want to drag myself back into Goddard mind though the powers and balances of that time now seem wonderful. 24 The lake house. Start there. 1980 June-November, 35. Jam, Ed and Mary, Luke, Helmer. The Lark. The place. Photos and film. Learning to write. Will need filling in. Format. Make it a web site. Can I live long enough to do this work      yes Even with my BP      yes Three formats: explanation, journal being, quotation. Difference for narrative and work fragments? There need to be coherent small scenes with viewpoint and correct sequence. 25 5:55 white sky palest orange north of the linden. Whole sky absolutely clean. Heating. 6:04 a first drop of fire on the roof ridge. Shadow appears on the wall beside me. The air was still. White hollyhock next to the window, only that one, moved just a quarter inch at the tip. As the sun rose they all stirred. Swayed. Now they're quieter again. "Mon fils est perdu. Il a six ans." Luke and I on a train. I couldn't see him. I was going through the cars looking for him. A lot of people had got off. Here was the front of the train, the first car. I turned to go back through and saw I was looking out the back windows. That car was now the only car. He must be in the cars that had split off. Would the single car soon come to the end of its line and turn around. It passed more and more stations. Would I ever see Luke again. I needed to find someone who could radio the other train. I was speaking broken French too slowly. Then the train seemed to have reversed at last. Now it was a long train again, full of people and quite dark as if windowless. I passed through a grocery car, a bar car, came to some small locked rooms and had to turn. A wedding party came past me, girls in flowered dresses, boys carrying a heavy awkward flat cake as if on a litter. It seemed a tacky conventional wedding. At last a large man in a uniform. He was passing rapidly so I touched his arm. He brushed off my hand, kept going. I followed him. He was bragging to his crew. He wouldn't listen. Woke. 26 So much energy in the garden today, and eyelids too, don't know why. Photos. Working on the lake house every morning. Bit of coffee. 28 Smoke in the air these days. This early morning I don't know what it's good for. This is what happens with writing. I know what to do, I set out, I imagine success, I like the work, I have good days with it, then I feel no, it's nothing, and I drop it. It wasn't like that in philosophy. I had crashes but the plan drove me through every check for twelve years. Same with gardens, the plan is immediate and I just do it and it's good. So what is it about writing. Energy falls off, why. Is it that the plan is bad      no Any of the plans are alright      YES I'm maimed as a writer      yes Is there something I can do about it      YES Can you say      practical, energy, betrayal, completion A state that competes      yes It's unconscious      yes Make it conscious      YES Fight! Think about whether it's honest to compress years. It has to be fiction doesn't it. What's its arc. Photos and film are gathered on the way. It peaks at roofing with my folks, the inquiry, making friends with Peter and Jam's Pound box in her absence. 29 What happened today. I woke too early, maybe three, lay there, got up changed my teeshirt took an aspirin drank water, tried to go back to sleep, did, though in a patchy way. Didn't want to start the day, lay there and read. Weighed myself, 145.6, which I'd thought it would be because yesterday was a good day. Checked email and FB. Ate two peaches that weren't right. Didn't want to sit in the chair and work. Lay on the workroom bed reading with sun on my feet. Got up to heat a frozen container of crumble. Knew the carbs wd put me off balance but did it anyway. Then was off balance craving. Almonds and candied ginger. Kept reading. Didn't want to cook or go out to pick salad. Ate leftover salmon with mayo. Didn't want to work in the garden. Then wanted fried potatoes. One pork chop, some fried onions, half a not-small potato fried crisp in a lot of fat. Kept reading. Got bored. Is it late enough to watch The good wife? It was only 6 but alright. Some hours of that pass slowly. Got bored. Tried a DVD from the library. Bored. Sat in the bath. Didn't want to describe the day because it's shameful. Decided I would. It's still only quarter past 10, which is too early to go to bed. So what happened. I've felt I've figured out how to work and eat. I like feeling well in this hot weather and being thinner in my clothes. Would like it to keep going for a few more pounds and then not gain it back over the winter. A day like this goes out of control as if it is one thing leading to another. There are as if moments of decision that give in without a struggle. Joyce would say stop and feel what you're feeling. Did something spook me that I didn't notice? Was it on account of work      yes Is it uncon sabotage      no Is it fear      yes Can you tell me with one card      (empress) The work state      yes The shift of state      yes Was there any moment when I could have noticed that, I don't think so. If I keep going will I really find something      yes Do I need to clear in the morning       yes - Had wanted to say that at night when I sit in the bath I find myself thinking about work even though I haven't thought about it for hours or maybe all day. There was something else too, what was it. 30 6:44, sun blaring through two slats of the blind, air milky against the hill, edge of a pink hollyhock fluttering like silk. Flowers for the house - is that a good way to start      yes I've come to mid-October when I start with Pound and there begin to be the notes collected into the play of the weather. There I lose track of what I'm looking for. This work like groping through a maze of obscure decisions. What am I doing? There are separate stories. Jam, Peter, Helmer, the work and days of the house, the swans, the easy accomplishment of photos, the failure of writing. Write it as failure? It says no, write it as struggle. Should I try to make it saleable      YES Find its charm      YES Is there one vein of effective charm      yes Can you tell me what it is      deep change, female intuition, illusion, persistence Story of deep change in female intuition through persisting against illusion      yes Is it a story of event coherence      yes Write about liberation      YES What is it I come through to in writing. [Sigh.] Pound knew something. What did Pound give me. He confirmed my feel for the powers of phrases and showed me I could align them. Interest in the sound qualities of words including etymological reverb. It's a quite abstract intuition - do I mean abstract - subtle, not social. The way he evoked a company of persons in the work, for the work. It's narrative with lyric scraps and their making?      YES It's always about groping my way into untapped native intelligence. What the work is for: to make cognitive state and to support it in others for the sake of the whole. That's my job. [Sigh.] 31 I'm into the Pound section and feel incapable. What is it that happens there. Kenner Seeing the tracks The Mozart dream is maybe the only dream that should be told. Etymologies Does it pass into poetry at the end of the story. I feel a strong pull into what I made of it later. Can you help me with this      yes Is it written from now       yes Is there a reader I can have in mind      yes Someone I already know      no Am I working on In English at the same time       yes Does it teach people to read The air      YES Autobiographical fiction      YES Third person      yes Can I come up with good prose       yes Still photos and film      yes - O'Brian remarkable for use of colons and semicolons. I haven't understood how he means their difference. I think a colon says voilà and a semicolon says and furthermore but that isn't what he does. The young women, who nightly capered on the stage or lent their voices to the chorus, and who often accompanied the younger officers on their boating picnics to Gozo or Camino or their expeditions to what meager groves the island had to offer, did not seem outraged: they called back and laughed and waved, and one of them, coming up the steps, poised herself for a moment on the arm of Captain Pellew's chair, drank off his glass of wine, and told them they must all come to the opera on Saturday; she was to sing the part of the fifth gardener. At this Captain Aubrey made some amazingly witty remark: it was lost to Maturin, but the roar of laughter that followed must certainly have been heard in St Angelo. 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' said Maturin. 'In Ireland I have known many a numerous gathering rejoice at little more than a genteel murmur; and it is to be supposed that the same applies to Scotland.' Treason's harbour 1983 quoted in a punctuation argument. 'Some amazingly witty remark: it was lost to Maturin' - what is that? Is it the same as when I want to use commas to pile clauses against each other for speed? He makes a full stop rare; when he uses a period after 'part of the fifth gardener' there's a right thump of emphasis. Was that a colon or a semicolon? It's subtle. A colon would have implied that its rarity creates emphasis. ('And' would have done the same though.) The semicolon makes a looser relation than implication, the same as if it had been a period but with continuity of breath so the longer sentence has one contour. August 1st I've asked Arinn to take down her photos of me. It'll ripple the ether but it's right. They're attacks. I hesitate when I say so. Am I blaming somebody else for my own ugliness? I can believe I was distressed by the waddling fat women at the wedding because I was distressed by how I was having to be seen walking. That has to be part of it. But it's also like telling Goldberg not to take photos of me because her photos were always grotesque, maybe because she has a coarse eye and maybe too because of unconscious competition. - something is being built it's hidden in language and Squirming at how sloppy 'hidden' is. I was building attention in language that doesn't hide anything. Surprised at the way Pound's followers ignored what was best in him, his study of lyric manner in service of love. Duncan's Ground work lumpy with abstract Latin words, here on one page opened at random 'commitment', 'insistent,' 'relentlessly,' 'demanding,' 'ultimate', 'equilibrations'. Horrible. do secure men as if they were at farthest I often pick the phrase for something other than it was meaning to say. Farthest was where I wanted to be and where I wanted to be secure. nous, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright molten glass that envelopes us, full of light He was feeling/intuiting his own brain at work. I couldn't know that yet but I could recognize a charge. 2 These weeks of best weather, 95 degrees by mid-afternoon, vast evening skies. After sunrise I close the doors and lower blinds, after sunset open front and back doors so cool air rushes through for the night. Step down into the garden with my blue colander and fill it with lettuce, spinach, carrots, peas, onions, turnips, cucumber, garlic, marrow, purslane, herbs. Pick a bowl of raspberries, gooseberries, currants, or choose sweetpeas, nasturtiums, lilies, roses, sunflowers, dill, dames rocket, matthiola, oregano, clematis for the day's vases. Not hungry, not sore, walking easily, waist bands loose. Working. Then I count ahead: August, September, October. Half the good months are gone and it takes till July to recover from the hard ones. 3 Nutmeg of consolation 1991: It was not until a little before the Surprise crossed the tropic of Capricorn that the trade-wind had really started to blow, but since then, close-hauled or with the wind one point free, she had been showing what she could really do, with topgallants over reefed topsails and a glorious series of jibs and staysails, white and sometimes green water sweeping over her weather bow, the little girls, soaked through and through and shrieking with delight, her lively deck at an angle that made it impossible to fix a bird in one's glass unless one were lashed to a solid support, when one might well have one's valuable achromatic telescope of more than extra power smothered in foam. She reeled off her twelve and even thirteen knots throughout the sunlit hours and seven or eight by night, with the topgallants taken in and in spite of her foul bottom; and all this through a hugely rolling sea that varies from the deepest indigo to pale aquamarine but that always (apart from the broken water) remained glass-clear, as though it had been created yesterday. - First a bounding long sentence with nothing but commas, then a sentence whose semicolon marks a step sideways from factual to visual. Stylish, someone said on a back cover. I'm agape at how smart he is. 4 Hegel and the hermetic tradition 2001 Pantheism ... everything becomes God, even mud, hair and dirt - which drains the divine of its exaltedness and sublimity. - He says in arguing that H believes in Big G as external to world but in need of man - Big M - to complete it by knowing everything - except mud, hair and dirt. The so-bizarre history of male monotheist fantasy. What am I looking for in it. Ways intuition under or along with grandiose projection was nonetheless in touch with the one ground that is cosmos and within it the temporarily coherent pattern that is a person. Ways these guys were trying to work up the nerve to develop science while still in the soup of medieval fear? 6 Monday morning. August is already autumn. I say that looking at a sun north of the spruce but smeared with thin cloud and what's left of the hollyhocks at the window, the white one, whose leaves to the top are speckled with rust. - 1978 beginning at the Olson house surprised that I'm different then, more innocent and more anxious. I want the story of finding it together but how much should there be from the Olson house. What's the early section for. Establishes the love story's early time? Establishes Ed and Mary? But should I have all the years there are or telescope them. Establishes the country. What it's for is what it does, look for that? What exactly was our trouble together. Is there something I honestly want to know. How to live well now. Is this project the way to do it. Yes. So how to live well in it. YES. Does the project matter in itself. No. - At nine I step outside to turn off the water. The street is dark but the sky to the west as on many of these evenings is vast deep even luminous pale gold. I'm leaning against the side of the jeep with my head turned gazing into it thinking the twilights up north were the beginning of being the way I am about tinted sky. In this lifetime there's been that. 7 Woke after a hard night from dreaming I'd left my green bag somewhere with all my money and all my credit cards in it, distraught. Do you get old too      yes Less able      yes What it's like to drive an old car. Should I do it as a tumblr? To start with. It's an album. It goes to writing with context already made. Is the anxious self-scrutiny good for something. It's damage      YES I was there to recover from being damaged by Trudy, 'lost identity', which I had volunteered for. Talking self was damaged      yes The photos were better than anything I can do now      yes The end of the lake house was that I'd recovered enough to write what will we know. The other writing wasn't ready yet but I had begun to find my own sense of beauty in language. Scrutinizing that way opened so many questions I couldn't answer. 8 The writing in those years is so poor. I cringe thinking of Jam reading the letters. 9 I can keep hacking through N1-5 but what am I looking for. I'm taken by what's there so ask what am I not looking for. For instance the Jam story is part of the arc but it's also a long complicated separate story. Just the kind of presence she was then? [Sigh.] Up north starts with the granary, photos then, but is it just the lake house? No the lake house culminates. Chapters: 1. two summers 1977 and 1978, 2. the Olson house 1978-79, 3. the lake house 1979, 4. the lake house 1980. It's a quest story isn't it. Is it told from the present? Is it written like a novel? It's a tumblr and also separate? Definitely weather and light. Is it called Up north. It's a quest for better language, would you say that? To finish childhood where it began. Roofing with my parents, the inquest, Peter. To get my balanced self back. 1. What's the true essence of it 2. What can be the charm in it Should I ask the second question      yes Can you answer it      YES power (hiero), coming through, oppression, and mourning I'd made Trapline and that was power but it was mute power. Charm is always voice and that is for now isn't it. Can I use those materials to find voice with charm       yes Start at the beginning and work beside the photos      yes   Anything else you want to say      completion, will improve, balance (2s), and processing Should I be working on the lyrics at the same time      no It's a later stage      yes So: what am I looking for - 1. what was the quest 2. what are the episodes 3. how much of the place to give 4. what's my best present relation to What am I not looking for. 12 I stood with George in front of the Quilchena Hotel after lunch with my hair blowing over my face, light in my jeans and sneakers and gauzy cowboy shirt, and George said "How old did you say you are?" I'd been somehow light-hearted, chatting away with little awareness of who I was with and not realizing how young I felt; but then afterwards, when I'd waved them on their way and driven home through the silver light of coming rainstorm, past the beautiful willows, past the lake in iron-grey chop, I stopped at A&W for ice cream. That was the end of right eating for the rest of the day, meaning a family visit freaked me in the old way. Yes?      yes Do you know what it is      love, persistence, practical, readiness Anxiety about how they see me      no Family belonging is unsafe      yes Insecurity at the root      yes Funny it had never occurred to me though of course it's that. White sky Sunday morning, wet street, smell of smoke. - It can't be that story but I have to keep it in mind so I don't distort. Is there suspense. Late maturity, coming of age late. I felt it as artificial, that sitting down to write a book. And that is a feeling that is with me still, all these years later, at the start of a book .... There is no precise theme or story that is with me. Many things are with me; I write the artificial, self-conscious beginnings of many books; until finally some true impulse - the one I have been working toward - possesses me, and I sail away on my year's labor. And that is mysterious still - that out of artifice one should touch and stir up what is deepest in one's soul, one's heart, one's memory. Naipaul who has just died. - The era of Praxiteles' naked boy, he says, and then not again until Michelangelo "brings the Middle Ages to a definitive end by unveiling his David to the people of Florence two millennia into the future". - That the Renaissance has to keep happening again because communities choose fantasy over observation, so the story is the struggle again to undo training in falsity. But that's the long story, the whole story that arrives at teaching embodiment studies. Can the shorter story tell the long story? And can it be lightly told? 13 state Ed & Mary photos language place locals Jam   0 1977 june.doc 1 1978 summer.doc 2 1978 autumn.doc 3 1979 early summer.doc 4 1980 summer-fall.doc   0 1977 june - camped on an old site - high summer - acid, family distress - the place - 1 1978 summer - 2 1978 autumn - rent the Olson place - men check me out - J for a week and we find the lake house - crying in front of my dad - Helmer and Bernice - cold January 14 My real pleasure in life is to make notes no one will read - Rudge in her eighties. the best society that reads the best books, possesses a certain ration of good manners, or sincerity, frankness - modulated by silence. On such autumn mornings the fuoci fatui, will-o-the-wisp gas fires from the decomposing bodies, bathed the graves in a misty light. calle Querini an inevitable swiftness and rightness in a given field, the trouvaille, the direct simplicity in seizing the effective means then almost eighty, appeared thin, slight and weak a picnic on the beach near Soúnio (with chilled pomegranate juice Ezra remembered for its color) Conover 2001 Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound What was I wanting that it didn't give me. Something about how to be old. What it was like in him. 15 The past hot weeks have burnt up the summer. Crabapples across the street have yellow leaves mixed half and half with green. The hollyhocks at the window are bare rusty stalks in seed all the way up, sky is milky all day with smoke, the hill this morning hardly visible palest blue. The silver tree is skimpier-leafed and dead-still. [red lettuce] - It's the anniversary, have just realized. August 15th 2014. 16 Reading the late pages of In America feeling they don't need work, I was achieved, and why am I laboring to make something of times when I wasn't. Woke from dreaming I was in a van with people unfolding tattered maps trying to see the name of a small place where I'd intended to camp. "Can you get us to route 36?" I felt there was something to recover       yes Is it true      yes And can I      yes Is it important      yes At the same time those months are clearer than I am now about how to go forward in work, I've been scattered by resettling. Haven't I      yes So I should be working between the two      YES So the task is looking for what was left behind      YES Remake that time so it's that      YES   It culminates at In English?      yes 17 Working with times when I was so uncertain makes me uncertain in the work. [Sigh.] I don't know what to do with the Jam story. It complicates too much. Should I leave it out      no What's the essence of it. Costly eroticism. Creative immaturity. Willed openness. What was it for her. Is she also the place to go on from if I can get there      yes Closest I've had to an equal love      YES She'd lost her job and couldn't finish her thesis. I opened her, my honesty did. The essence of it was pushing our edges      yes She was pushing hers too      yes She was dealing with concrete effort in a way she'd never had to, her inferiority in it. Challenge to her gender defense. Loss of prestige. Neither of us was 'supportive' or affectionate. We were both fighting for our own genius, we had to. We experienced each other as stronger than ourselves      YES I experienced myself as bewildered and enchanted and so did she. Can I recreate the relation      yes Is there anything more you want to say      come through, into community of, early love's, crisis Early love in crisis in both      YES Crisis we each mistakenly understood as about gender      yes Coming at it this way I dread the work, I want to do something else. Coming at it this way the story of the lake house is a story of failure      no Partial success you mean      yes 18 Thick air, strange amber light. Working on the winter of 1979 wearied by even a little of it. Does the weariness mean it's irrelevant      no Because of the oppression in it       yes 19 What happens in the last half of December 1979. Intense struggle with Jam not much described, language and film notes, level shift? Community of early love's crisis means everybody's struggle when intimacy is risked yes 'Deep sex and scared fighting' - she has a hatred she'll never give up, that I was ever 'with' men Double-binded - she claims to be a man but her male pose doesn't attract me - I'm attracted to her as a woman she doesn't want to be seen or felt as - I like that she's more than a woman in her intelligence but don't believe that makes her a man - I want to be more than a woman in my intelligence too in a way that makes me suspicious of my own femininity. Where did that go in me later. I became accomplished as more than a woman in my intelligence while becoming steadier in the conflicts inherent in being a woman who liked to love men. With Tom I was conflicted but not confused. Would I have been able to handle Jam later? I would not have been willing to do without an actual man's body. I would not have been willing to put up with her misogyny. Wouldn't you say      yes Would you say we had the same structure but she was in denial and I wasn't      YES Did I ruin her ability to work      yes By rooting in her foundation      yes - not much of M and Ed For one thing she wished to know: who it was who came in the night and slept in her room. Did I fail to want to know       yes I didn't fail that way with Tom       yes curiosity that spoiled, and then the long brave journey in winds that repaired and brought her the prince differently Wanting to know is unconditional love. Allowing confusion made beauty possible      YES But it's only a first step      yes   Place to go on from - does that mean compassion for Jam       no It means in art      yes 20 Disgusted in summer 1979, endless gnawing at my own time - need success and this isn't the way. The tall night felt keen and sweet on his face. Neil Gunn - tall night. 21 those days ... had now a dreamlike quality about them, as if lifted out of an ... age wherein folks moved under the hand of destiny The serpent in 1943 the story of a man in whom religion is disgraced when he learns to think and for whom nature lights up when he has been in love. The scene where Tom takes on the enraged minister and his father comes to the door, raises his stick to strike and falls dead at Tom's feet. Then Tom shunned by everyone except his mother. I'm thinking of the moment Ed stood in front of me complaining in his bitter voice that he had been so many years living me down. the far air This beautiful small book a 1958 edition, Faber & Faber. Whose last page made me cry. The philosopher had climbed a mountain, lain down in heather next to a little river he liked, and died. I suppose I cried for the outcast philosopher I've been. I haven't said that these days knowing my blood pressure is what it is has made me feel I could die any moment. I came home from the funeral chapel yesterday with a price list; had made the woman in the office laugh saying their transportation cost is so high I just should go to the crematorium steps and lie down. 22 [de Rachewiltz 1971 Discretions] It was respect. Having reason to respect a father. He showed me Siena stone by stone, as he had done Venice. he brought with him a dimension of magnitude, momentum order, discipline, sincerity For discipline say effort. Ed used to harp on duty. He may have meant effort but he made it seem miserable self-oppression. "You know how to work" as if that had been his good intention. We never believed it was a good intention because he was angry in it. Pensive ... occurred often .... Inherent in his silence was suspense, a joyous sense of expectation, until he broke into a kind of chant that sometimes went on for hours, interrupted and picked up again, no matter whether he was sitting at table or walking in the streets. ... No words: sounds ... as though some alien power were rumbling in the cave of his chest in a language other than human; then it moved up to his head and the tone became nasal, metallic. ... a new thought, a new line .... Le paradis. I had to go back and hunt for that to be able to ask about it. Had he found something - is that writing from the body more actually than I can imagine? Was he calling actual ancestors. It says no, impersonating shamans and bards. - Stevens born 1879 died 1955 at 75, seems to have lived without sex for most of his life, had a disorder that made his hands and feet and face enlarge, drank. Insurance corporation lawyer, poetry and money lived separately. Liked nature but wouldn't write anything his wife could understand. Deathbed conversion. Poetry as bloodless intimidatingly elaborate escape from life among businessmen. [Mariani 2016 The whole harmonium] Pound born 1885 died 1972 at 87. Was a body. First wife sexless so he got a second and was loyal to both. Committed to live by his writing. Committed to living in wonderful places. Didn't drink. Knew his gods and goddesses from the beginning. Ardent to support his tribe living and dead, wanted its company in all he did. Got into trouble trying to fix Western culture. Has Kenner's marvelous grapple rather than Mariani's dense dead catalog of facts. 23 Pink sun surprisingly low, halfway down the spruce at 7. Not really pink: fire-colored through white air. my saint disciplines seemed foolish to her, and she could be at centre without them      not helplessness again! protesting to her dreaming of light in our souls by obedience and then thinking that helplessness must be wrong for human that can balance I understand now: I was knocking myself out to try to be what I would have been if I hadn't been frozen by abandonment and tyranny. but what there is now is, still, wanting exactness to make a stronger memory and incident 24 It did later on. There are clearings when I'm away from her for a while. Re-do it undamaged?      YES Sorting the project notes so far I see the habit of scattering. It needs to be revision of process too. - Kenner 1951 The poetry of Ezra Pound juxtaposed objects render one another intelligible <without conceptual interposition> Ie the way I understood metaphor's effect: lighting up more than one network at a time so overlap specifies an aspect: Frank's blue eyes when he wore a blue sweater. 25 Kenner 20 years before. nous, mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light Pick the right phrase out of its wrong context. Discern. Crystalline sea of the brain, crystalline sea of the air, crystalline sea of cosmic foundation. Think of all of it as 'mind'. language considered as a structure of directed perceptions criticism note by a poet on craft roughly dactylic dak' ty los I should say no idea worth carrying from one year's end to another, and no story really good enough to make me at least want to tell it, but chafes at the flatness of prose, but leaves me feeling it is but half said, or said in abstraction, or defined in terms so elastic that any god's ape can stretch its definition to meet his own squalor or to fit his own imbecility, until it be at least given rhythmic definition But O'Brian's or McPhee's best paragraphs are rhythmic though prose. Hasn't it been a time of documentary prose perfection. increased capacity to take account of nuances: half a dozen mutually tilted facets Is invention of masks a guy thing? It's not sincerity of exact statement etc. But he says translations. Personality ... has become at length a point of light moving through possible worlds, a mode of consciousness capable of being put to an indefinite number of uses. As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back: I erased the second line and then put it back. Wind doesn't murmur but he wanted that line for its motion, the little eddy of murmur's two syllables and then the oontinuing sweep after it and then the turn after the comma. I hadn't in 1910 made ... even a language to think in. marking historically a perceptive maximum Thou hooded opal, thou eternal pearl (O thou dark secret with a shimmering floor, Through all thy various mood I know thee mine   There canst thou find me, O thou anxious thou) He didn't mean a clit but I did. flitting And fading at will. Weaving with points of gold, Gold-yellow, saffron. - The form has to be now visiting then. Doesn't it? With more freedom than I've imagined. In the end can it dissolve into The air? novelty of Pound's modulation from the opening cymbal-clashes of exotic names to the Jacobean geniality of .... Such flexibility of tone has not been brought off in English since... . Did I read this book then or did he re-use his best phrases? If the reader ... will acquire a sensitivity to the weight of Latin abstract definition in unexpected contexts, he will find it easier to see how large stretches of the Cantos, in which for reasons of decorum rhythmic definition is diminished to contrapuntal status, are organized as it were from the centre out, by stiffening and relaxing the texture of the vocabulary import the distancing, balancing, savouring sensibility into passages of transcription and enumeration, as ... into passages that would otherwise be composed of unabashed lyric cliché. channeled their disgust into patient sifting She passed and left no quiver in the veins, who now Moving among the trees, and clinging                        in the air she severed, Fanning the grass she walked on then, endures: Grey olive leaves beneath a rain-cold sky. 26 Both K and P describe writing in post-WWI London as if the two women who wrote England honorably and without sulking off into exile did not exist. My vantage has them and what now has been added by - Olds, Notley, Carson. Lessing, Le Guin, Gordimer. Etc. working with a set of motifs, guided by a set of preoccupations - Rob at 61. We rattle on and I don't see much but standing on Dr Jefferies' yard watching him talk to someone else I was puzzled to know how old he seems. Is he just as he was? But there are white tufts in his eyebrows and scalp shows through at the top of his head. Tired. The cupboard is in; we dragged out both filing cabinets and I emptied the closets; he pried up hollyhock roots and sheared a tangle off the mountain ash. We settled our accounts. 27 Clear sky! Kenner complains that people want poetry to tell them how they feel and disparages Eliot because he's psychological not because his tone is ugly. Women haven't had millennia of poetry naming their feelings so Woolf and Richardson begin there - feeling, sensing, thinking - and it has to go on still, Olds with brave directness, Notley and Carson - I mean bits of them - with modernist currency. The north-west was very remote now, the molten silver of its horizon line like ... a shore... . Upon it legendary craft had set out - to find the ... essence that philosophers ... called the divine Ground - Will you talk to me about Luke       illusion, honesty, balancing, mother's power He thinks he was just being honest      yes Is there anything else you want to say      improvement, despair, intuition, persistence There will be improvement by means of      yes His?      both He has no idea of my circumstance      YES Because I don't tell him       yes Because I don't trust him to care      yes Would he       yes 28 ground (n.) Old English grund "bottom; foundation; surface of the earth," also "abyss, Hell," and "bottom of the sea" (a sense preserved in run aground), from Proto-Germanic *grundu-, which seems to have meant "deep place" (source also of Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Danish, Swedish grund, Dutch grond, Old High German grunt, German Grund "ground, soil, bottom;" Old Norse grund "field, plain," grunnr "bottom"). No known cognates outside Germanic. Sense of "reason, motive" first attested c. 1200. Meaning "source, origin, cause" is from c. 1400. Electrical sense "connection with the earth" is from 1870 (in telegraphy). Meaning "place where one takes position" is from 1610s; hence stand (one's) ground (1707). Ground rule (1890) originally was a rule designed for a specific playing field (ground or grounds in this sense attested by 1718); by 1953 it had come to mean "a basic rule." ground (v.) In the sense "establish firmly" Old English had grundweallian, grundsta_elian; also gryndan "descend," gegryndan "to found." Yesterday a blank day except for that. I had to scratch for ways to get through the hours. - Black morning, boiler grinding. The grim time begins. - Reading physics in the lake house. N2-3 May 1979 30 gave myself coffee but not until after beginning back into the physics and being able to understand one concept after another invincible heat naked first day of the front porch reading pencil typewriter lying down naked to watch thoughts 1-2-3-4 the currents of wind on skin june 1 up and down have each other strange needed charm felt like knowledge 'with charm the strange quark had its own partner' upstairs work intent through particle book if strangeness had no stranger companion A 75-year-old furthering a 35-year-old's work. Text from Being about? [sigh] Milieu divin was N4-1 after I'd left her in the house. Watch her picking shreds out of contexts. slow establishment of these linkages Provence and Tuscany precision at home in a decent climate where a man leaves his nerve-set open, or allows it to tune with its ambience no longer the body of air clothed in the body of fire - I feel I can focus all of it now. [sigh] The tower, ivory, the clear sky Ivory rigid in sunlight And the pale clear of the heaven Phoibos of narrow thighs, The cut cool of the air, Blossom cut on the wind, by Helios Lord of the light's edge, and April Blown round the feet of the God ... First, the little image I had on my wall, of a tower lit ivory-gold in blue sky; second the way this sequence blew my fuse so I went away and did something else. The bad poems which Richards found his students enjoying had generally a plangent line or two of which the rest was uninspected reverberation. Pound's lyric moments exist not for indulgence but for definition: they are surveyor's pegs or records of emotional absolutes. When they are over they stop. Nonetheless the lyric moments are where I gasp at what he's done. And why assume lyric, which means love and pleasure, is generally indulgence. How much of Pound is tough-guy pose defending against disembodied other men. For instance: This tone of flexible urbanity, which can generate tension in contact with almost any material ..., which can depersonalize exasperation into a reified scrutable marmoreality ..., and which makes contact at one end with lyric movement and at the other end with didactic, is a major integrating force throughout the poem. It corresponds psychologically to the humorous toughness that .... Kenner at 28 is a superb explicator, lively and in touch with himself and articulate. More quarrelsome than he needs to be twenty years later. Before our eyes details reach forward and backward towards unexpected connections, developing in some cases three or four patterns of intelligibility at once. Can that happen unplanned? 29 fields of force their proximity generates Image as radiant node or cluster is connectionist, "what I can call a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which ." late style ... has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradictions between them ... artist's mature subjectivity unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile a psychological prime that triggers the body to mend itself I had a moment thinking of the furthest work I could do, feeling that if I were doing it I wd never again need to say anything bad about anyone, I would live beyond everything I've needed to defend myself against. foundation work on a new piece, which is the most difficult and most critical time ... a fear of not working 30 Establishing values he says. a notebook of insights ideas born of ecstasy - Records of. What does it mean to yearn for something and continually forget it and neglect it? Dysesthesia - lesions of the nervous system, peripheral or central. Sensations such as burning. Sometimes described as feeling like acid under the skin - notes in B1-4. September 1st One should be a banner of admirableness, people should make the effort. 2 It's colder and darker. Now I'm all day craving energy, what can I drink, what can I eat so there'll be life in me. I stand in the kitchen in the morning feeling I don't have it to make a meal. I go weeks without washing my hair because it seems too much effort. I work in the garden - I could, I do - this morning I dug up irises and spread buckets of compost - but then come into the house and want to lie down. Two mornings ago I'd weeded just a bit and then sat there on the sidewalk not wanting to move. I wrote a paragraph yesterday about Jim Stewart because I felt I should try. Erased it today. "I'm tired most of the time but when I'm painting I'm never tired." Gordon Smith 2014 when he's 95. 3 Labour Day weekend. Gave away purple iris clumps and chive clumps. Confited sungolds with garlic and lime juice and then canned them, shook down the last highest plums and slow-roasted them. 4 Took yellow tomatoes across to the soup kitchen this morning. Bulky woman with grey curls handed back my colander. Later on I'd been at Pharmasave and whisked round the corner to my spot just as she was starting to cross the road with a covered container. It's beefsteak and vegetable soup. "It's damn hot." "Very good timing." Grinning, "Yes it is." Had forgotten to buy canning lids so I got back in the jeep and drove to Home Hardware. Beaming woman at the counter says "There you are my dear." Then when I'd been reading in the bedroom a knock and Brian at the door holding out a little jar of blackberry jam. He'd come off the Coque on the way to Ashcroft, hadn't brought my address, asked at Home Hardware. "Oh I know Ellie Epp ... the blue house with hollyhocks." I sent him away with a half-pint of plums still warm from the canner. 6 My genius is no more than a girl Homage a slim red book ex-library Derbyshire County. His earlier and other works including translations exercises to find phrases? I mean is that the way to do it.                                 if hair is mussed on her forehead, ...   There is a volume in the matter   We, in our narrow bed, turning aside from battles: Each man where he can, wearing out the day in his manner.   Moving naked over Acheron            Upon the one raft   One raft on the veiled flood of Acheron   And one raft bears our fates                              on the veiled lake toward Avernus   And now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his stand among these.   "Of his great passion Leucadia"! An Ionian island.   part 2 time remaining volume 7: 2018-19 july-april work & days: a lifetime journal project