time remaining 7 part 2 - 2018 september-november  work & days: a lifetime journal project September 6 2018 [September work chair] Tom is my best story      yes When I remember him now it's his wild grace I think of. His company sometimes in our last years when he liked my work. Wild in the sense of native, young, private, separate from his rough selves. How is that story different from the lake house story. Lake house is a story of immaturity. Golden West is steady capacity. Lake house has lyric youth and something to be recovered. Golden West would be more fun      yes Lake house is more necessary      yes Truly?      YES So recover it and done?       no The story for other people      YES What was the starting state. What was the quest. Authority in writing. True presence with world and persons. What was the gift. The openness I'd struggled for gave me place as love but not persons or language. Is that correct      yes Presence with persons and language needs skilled balance of both sides      yes I had to recover early love but that was just the beginning      yes Did I abandon early love after that      no I had to learn to defend it      YES Because it was isolated      yes So with this project I'm supposed to be the star man      yes The Book sitting with her      yes   Format the Book sitting with the journal?       no Tell the story from the larger self      YES 7 Was looking for the photo of all of us on the evening I left for college. Couldn't find it but found a folder of letters home written at 14, 16, 17, 18. They aren't interesting but they're lively. They rattle on confidently in family mind. Ten years later that was gone. "Sie ist, für Ellie, zehr still." 9 Forgot I'd already begun this work the first autumn here two years ago. See I must collect better. TR4-3 2016 Sept-Oct: N5-1 to N5-3 summer into autumn 1980 flyover. N6 October 1981 detailed reply section Founding conditions: intelligence country childhood religious small community childhood abandonment, attachment inability deformity and social derogation patriarchal neglect personally patriarchal cultural misprise all around - therefore needing to reconsider physics, philosophy, psychology, gender, art, religion, love, - I mean those are the ones I needed to come to understand. Did you arrange to have Luke sent away to protect him      yes 10 There are a lot of reviews in the journal. Should I web-publish them someway? 11 Have gone through 2016 where I started at N5 and worked backwards to DR and forward to Edged out. The ten years 1975-1985, thirty to forty, are one arc. Can I isolate the lake house and why not. Backward there's the plunge into self-demolition, forward there's dragging work out of pain. It's not the end of the arc though. 1985-1995 forty to fifty is regrounding: community garden, sex, Joyce, school. The end of the arc is Tom and the doc 1995-2000. Then teaching and embodiment studies 2001-2013, working out the implications in established strength. After Jam the lovers weren't important?     no Weren't important to work     yes Is there something I'm not seeing here     yes, persistent, graduation, of love woman, toward control, power It's a different arc     YES Work was founded after Jam     yes But love had a long way to go     YES Have I graduated yet     no So lake house is just a story of work     yes If Jam is in it it's a story of failure     yes So is it a story of the relation of love and work     yes Settle myself about the DR time but don't write it     YES So the work-founding is what will we know     yes So that's where lake house ends     yes So is it the notes in origin show?     no What will we know is the philosopher     yes   The poet is love woman     yes Begins with Pound     yes That's why you say hasn't graduated yet     yes So lake house isn't about poetry     no The beginning of poetry     yes So is the lake house itself irrelevant     no I lived in intuition there     yes So it's about living the uncon     yes Do you have anything to say about how to go forward     act, to do the Work, triumph, by processing Emotional work     yes In writing up sections     yes I'm still doing prep     yes Physics and poetics end up in the same category. In the story what is the relation of place pleasure and the developmental work? Place pleasure is the frame of loving rightness that holds the screwed-up struggler - if I say it that way it seems prenatal. Also pre-abandonment. - I keep being staggered by how massive and amorphous the groundwork is. - And keep not being sure it's what I shd be doing. I've sort of done it already but in a form no one can understand. Is there a way to do it that can succeed. 12 The story with Jam is a demonstration of patriarchal oppression dealt with in two different ways. 15 A Saturday morning, valley under a quilted lid whose bright edge I can see above the hill to the east. The air is somehow included     yes The questions I've worked with are so many and so unnamed in common culture I'm baffled how to bring them into form. Up, down, strange and charm is pretty much written     YES Does it include the time of writing     yes - There was sun for a while in the late morning. I was transplanting sitting on the warm sidewalk. The soil under my hands was like warm velvet. When I looked sideways colors and shapes along the path seemed as if Japanese, so subtle and elegant in their autumnal seediness, paeony stalks going crisp pink-orange, oregano in almost-spent flower arcing wide and full of honey bees, hyssop's dry brown flower spikes mixed with remaining dark blue, mauve-flowering catmint stalks drying yellow-green, cooking sage in a convulsive heap throwing out chartreuse seed husks a few tipped maroon, thyme in small pink leaf pressed flat to the cement, savory's delicate purple stalks reaching forward alone. Sweet pea scent next to me in the chair. Its tangle on the carrot flower pile still manages a small vase every day. Et moi. There was a moment after patting iris divisions into the lattice bed where I couldn't get up, felt a slip out of possibility for a moment, a strange sensation, startling. - I've forgotten that last summer I started thinking I was going to write Childhood of the philosopher instead. Wiped out not long after by Jacob saying we had to do the Sketchup thing by October. 16 2016 lake house 2017a The air, Titania's gash, Theory's practice about the dissertation time, a lot about writing, here: a notebook 2017b Michael Duke, Ditches of Alberta, 2018 - Have just twigged about the Luke fight, that the way I went cold was a reactivation. It had said so but I hadn't seen it. I'll be even colder and deader     yes You want that for me?!!     yes Say why     teaching, child, quest, woman To learn the child's quest for the mother     yes That cold deadness happened     YES - Should I make and sell a series of artist's notebooks extracted from the journals? Part fiction? Is that the only way to get continuity? Not all years. Each with a name? Photos. Reflecting surfaces - London, feminism, photographs, England, pots, film Dames rocket - lesbian feminism and confused search, In English Lake house - notes in origin - photos place and writing Titania's gash - Jam, Saturna, pregnancy Aphrodite's garden - deciding on power, the Book Love woman and work woman Theory's practice - Tom and the dissertaion The golden west - California and Tom, garden design Eurydice's voices - teaching letters - giving body voices North county - mind and land - Mesa Grande and desert The air - sound, video, Orpheus Time remaining - getting old What would the series be for - work notebooks showing art-philosophy-writing-science-psychology-sex-friendship-place etc as one thing - show my best work in its mixed matrix. For whom, smart women who want to be real. Hand it off to a real publisher for distribution. Get an agent. Always the question of how to make it real work at the same time as saleable. I immediately start thinking of it both ways, Mesa Grande so I could sell it in gift shops or Mesa Grande with personal stories. Would photos discredit the writing. Photos online separate? Photo books separate? Include conversation with past time. How would I go about assembling/editing it. A lot of it is done already but I'd have to pick one to start. Pick the ones I've most recently worked on wd be Titania. Pick the one most nearly ready wd be Mesa Grande. Each has a bibliography and notes. The sketchup texts were already a beginning. They're maybe somewhat topical rather than yearly. Time overlaps. Fictional sample year? Enfold other times, for instance from still at home and college. Better scanning - funding for. Do you have a sense of where to go next     YES write, tempering, of (empress), in love Empress?     friendship, Ellie, intuition (hierophant), community Slant this     action Write about action in community     YES I'm baffled     yes     Can I use the same method YES How (something) is tempered in love     yes A principle     yes Does the writing do the tempering     no Demonstrate it     yes Bookwork     NO Tell me more about empress     empress, arrives, with betrayal and despair Mastery     no, depth Empress is human depth     yes (sigh) Demonstrate depth tempered in love     yes Do you want to say more     no Authority     YES By love do you mean attachment     no Care for spirits     yes - There are so many book reviews in the journal. Should I post them separately on an as-if weblog? Book notes already written and if set up with search terms could find readers for other parts. Should I make a Merritt Here? Mill town. The valley. Confluence. Grassland. Sagebrush and bunch grass. Mill town (or --?) can use photos and notes I have and make me go looking for photos and sound and photographing people. Grassland seems separate. Garden: a weather and gardening notebook? Organized by months. Garden: Granite & Chapman can use photos and notes already written and inspire more of both. - Learn to set search terms properly. 17 Pat hooked up the washer and dryer. My first own ! Dug the potato row and turned compost. Picked my watermelon. Offered Cass a show. 18 She said mid-November with two other women. Susana will print. 19 Changed the sheets, washed and dried them before Kathy came. Strong brown eyes at the door. Ran around town for two hours, came back and cut her some grapes, sat with her in the sun on the porch waiting for Lee, she in the chair, I on the sill. Came in with my shopping and mail to happiness of a clean house. Tired though, dragging all day. Is that still from turning three bins of compost? At four in the afternoon sun blasts through the west windows in kitchen and middle room making radiant patches of heat on the stove and green dresser. A fine moment in the laundry room, which I gaze at from my chair across the room: I made it: look how beautiful. 22 And then because I saw my hair was a better shape than usual I took my picture. Then posted it knowing it improves me falsely. while she moved quietly about the bathroom ... his whole body, flung down upon the bed, of itself made ready for her; she saw when she came in. And so he entered again the fierce pleasure that was in her, while the bats from the fig pierced pinholes of sound in the thickness of dark. A guest of honour 1970. She's loyal to sex, more than anyone I've read, and attuned to bodies in a way I love. I don't remember much of this book but recognize sentences describing Margot Wentz's draped upper arms and black men's delicate hands. There are a lot of didactic conversations about conflict between trade union and development priorities that I skipped when they went on too long but I kept admiring her steeltrap grasp. But is anyone as intelligently aware of shades of insincerity as her characters are? I'm not, so I'm impressed and doubtful at the same time. In an intensity that had lain sealed in him all his life (dark underground lake whose eye he had never found) barrier after barrier was passed, each farthest shore of self was gained and left behind, words were reunited with the sweet mucous membrane from which they had been torn. I believe she means that, knows it, because I was there sometimes with Rob, not exactly there but somewhere deep and dark and arrived at last. Before that a Murdoch found at Brambles, that I was glad to drop because its people weren't worth the time but also because it was so oddly awkwardly written. It's a Penguin, where's the editor I was thinking as I stumbled into choppy sentences and repeated words. Turns out it was her last book a year before Alzheimers was confirmed, 75. Someone's done a study of it as evidence of semantic loss. I say that nervous of the way I lose words. But I'd know when to exit. The odd woman and the city. I sent for a Vivian Gornick because some review said it was a single woman's notes on living in New York. I don't really like her, or her book, but she does touch things I know and haven't seen said. I'm shocked by her face, which has so strongly and strangely the look of an intensely conscious animal - she has the very slanted pointed small eyes of a borzoi and her thick lips are set so far forward they seem a muzzle. Her style has the cerebral generalizing habit I've been thinking is East Coast but I suppose continental European too, a dry pose meant to earn membership among other dry posers - isn't it? Born1935. 23 Sunday 5:30, lamplight, wet street gleaming in the black, Sturtzman singing Handel. I haven't worked in days, have ordered things - sorted the key dish and top drawer, had Melissa glue up the jeep's headliner, took batteries to Allan to be tested, got back the trimmer he fixed, picked up pears in Brenda's yard and canned a batch of them, bought putty for broken coldframe windows, dragged the potatoes down into the cellar, worked out closet shelf plan with Allan, checked out drill and driver sets in Home Hardware. Waiting for dry weather to spread compost, plant bulbs, paint the porch and front door, cement the nectarine bed's rocks, have the front fence strips dug, maybe do something with the paths. In Home Hardware yesterday I thought I recognized the woman who asked if I needed help. 'Did you use to be a librarian?' - Susan who asked what I do about mating. She didn't remember at first but then she lit up and gave me her phone number. Melissa and Tarel yesterday, number 12 in the Spring Street trailer park which is likely the worst of them, gravel drive with water standing in deep puddles, decrepit old grey trailer, she a large young woman missing teeth and driving a roaring black beast of a pickup, her man a small creature with a look of hard childhood and a face I thought had been in prison. When I went back for the jeep four hours later I stood among the puddles with them feeling his sweetness and our actual goodwill despite their need to get what they could out of me. Back home I found a tarp and twine on the porch. Italian Pat - Doug said he had been an underground miner so strong he could lift beams that needed two men - wants me to protect the fig. Gosh - look - the linden is suddenly all yellow. Yes daylight though of a dull grey kind. It's that time, golden trees in the valley's village. - Is that clearer now? A sort of lake house outline. Not about but from: how to show times and themes without generalizing. - It's a pretty book 7.75" x 5.25", pale grey hard cover, 175 pages, nice page layout. 24 Yesterday I thought, call Jam Jayem, a wry twist to make her the bohunk girl crazy in an opposite way. - So quickly bewildered when I come into the materials. And yet in sorted parts I can see exact original form. 25 Look, an open sky. I'm working but stop a moment: see how lacey, how finely cut the Russian olive's bitty black against pale open space - can it be said at all - the sky not white, very pale blue shading to ivory further down, all with a faint warm tissue in it and all alit, translucent like an alabaster lamp. Whiter now and more intense. - Tarl got the adhesive mess off the jeep's left flank using chain oil and a sharpened kitchen blade and then cleaned off the oil with gasoline. It doesn't need repainting he said, just wet-sand it (wet-dry sand paper, black, fine guage) and then spray with clear coat. I finished clipping the lilac suckers along the north fence, bought more junk 2x8s for edgers, dried and folded tarps, moved the sawhorses to where I'll need them when I reglaze the cold frame lids. Melissa gave out after fifteen minutes. Asked for a labourer online. 26 7:41 there goes lumberyard Tom, carrying his lunch, with a cloud of white breath at his face. His pace is a bit careful and is that related to the way when he walks with his wife he always holds her hand. - Fredrick Brown digging the west front fence strip this morning because I want more room for nasturtiums, melons and cucumbers. I worked while he did, couldn't stop, one little thing leading to another, getting ready to plant bulbs, setting up the sawhorse table next to the garage, scraping the coldframe windows to reglaze them, pulling turnips and trimming them. Haven't fallen for months but pitched down twice though onto grass. 27 1252/5 = 250 days = Oct-May. Winter through the complete Shakespeare? - I sit down when I wake and work as long as I can focus and then have jumped to do more little things. Brought Melissa a box of carrots, turnips, beets, tomatoes when she asked me to find her something to do in exchange for vegetables. Bought an expensive spading fork to replace the one Fredrick broke. Dug one of the patches of carrots and sat on the porch scrubbing them for pickles. Susan stopped at the gate on her way home for lunch and I showed her the house. Fredrick finished the E side of the path, put the tools away responsibly, shook my hand when I'd paid him, said maybe there'll be something more he can do later. Checked the post office looking for bulbs. Save-On for pickling salt and vinegar. Library for something simple to read because I'm sore and shd try to rest. Paul's birthday; 69; pleased to realize I could phone him. He said he drives 45 minutes to his shop and every day likes to see the colors. I said gold, and saskatoons go purple, orange, maroon. He said, Purple ... yes; and the grass. As I sit reading or typing in this chair today the linden's leaves have been shuddering down, letting go in surprising numbers as if the tree is scattering them with intent. 28 Late afternoon, what to do, eat something?, go somewhere?, go to the library, then where, then where. Start up Midday Valley Road, rabbitbrush scattered on the slopes pale greygreen, yellow-tipped. Just past what I think must be the festival's ticket booth I see a gravel track leading up from the road. Somewhere I could park to overlook the valley? Doing something finally, winding downhill through a narrow cleft onto a large flat empty field strung with power posts, over there an edge of old cottonwoods and beyond them the shallow rocky sounding young river. Sit on the bank in warm low sun. Would I be hidden if I camped here. Not now though. Cold nights, long dewy nights. - Morning sun now throwing such a long swath across the floor. 30 Grey and dripping. Too feeble to work. Whole day of that ahead. walnuts, raisins, raw cabbage, chopped MacIntoshes, new carrots, flax seed oil, salt October 1 Studied Youtube tutorials and bought a cordless 18v drill/driver. Proud to say. 2 Late roses. Forecast frost tonight, possible flurries. Last two days when I couldn't work and had no books I read GW11-15. It's the year and a half when I was figuring out my thesis, learning digital images and the web, doing bookwork, staying in touch with the garden, keeping company with Joyce, Luke, Rowen, Tom, Louie, Nathalie, sometimes Mary on the phone. Tom and I were back and forth across the border, on email, on the phone, were still poking. He was turning to gold every other time, I was trusting him with my weakness. Full prime of life. I say that scourging myself for having come to this lone blank lack of all of it. Tune in my head, Thank your blessings / count them one by one. Alright. House, garden, money, jeep, computers, Louie phoning this morning, journal transcribed, PhD, various competences, kids alright I think, no bad injuries since June. - Machines and competences though without the energy to use them. 3 Desperate lacks of library, of fine persons, of venue, of clear task. Trying to come back into work after some days away I'm just lost. Process needs to be the first study doesn't it. This work is hard and I'm not easily strong enough for it. I'm in the dissolve. - Garage half-way cleaned up. Cardboard, glass, batteries, lightbulbs, styrofoam, scrap metal, vacuum cleaner to the eco-depot. Tires to the tire shop. Curtains etc to Baillie's. Window screens onto the rafters. Doors all in a line. Cribs for sorted wood between 2x4 studs. Crib for tools with long handles. Pots sorted. 4 'I thought of you as an athlete. The way you used a shovel.' Louie said. Yesterday's couple of hours left me so heavy I struggled to walk as far as the onions. After dropping off tires yesterday I stopped for lemon meringue pie at Home Restaurant. As I was leaving there was a coherent-looking middle-aged Native woman in a booth, smoothly alert, professional-looking, maybe some kind of teacher. I was in cleaning-up clothes, sloppy black coat and muddy rubber boots. Her eyes caught me as I passed, or maybe she caught me registering her, and she said hello. She thinks I'm Native, I thought, but then I saw myself in the glass door looking so magisterially craggy that I wondered whether I've been misunderstanding the stage I'm in. Have I mutated into something that's an achievement rather than a collapse. - As well as a collapse. - Cleared away a wet heavy heap of frozen nasturtiums, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, tithonia. Phoned Liis to ask for suckers off her hedge rugosa. Visited Mrs Epps in the NVIT library, story for tomorrow. 5 I'd asked for interlibrary loans and persisted gently. She said Come up and visit with me in a voice I'd liked. When I arrived I had a moment seeing her before she saw me. Not what I'd hoped, a short, dark face, a bit hard. We had my index page up for a moment talking about what I do and then she as if pivoted blindly back into herself. For the next hour she told me her life story. I wanted to know it but I wanted her to be interested in me too. I'd break in with something from myself and she'd just keep going. She's Shulus - Shu-lush'. Grandmother a drunk died early, mother took her to California when she was 11, wanted to be far away and pass for Hispanic. Linda taken into care and educated by the Dominican Sisters. [St Mary of the Palms School for Girls in Freemont] Married a black Vietnam vet. Two boys. After a while he said he didn't want to be married anymore. She said alright I want you to pay me $200 a month so I can go to school. His mother said pay her $400. They still lived in the same house. After a while he said he wanted to be back together with her. She did women's studies at UBC, 'I wanted to know all about women.' Got an M.Ed in counseling, worked in counseling until she burned out. University of Arizona library degree. Advocated for black and Hispanic students. Two emails about the NVIT job. They flew her out and hired her. Last year the two of them were in the apartment block that burned. 'We lost everything.' Lee has early Alzheimers so they live in the Florentine. Other residents don't want to sit at the same table so they have a table for two. Her mom died long ago, 'There's nobody behind me.' All eight brothers and sisters are drunks. Her two boys are alcoholics and not in touch. So I understood she's a survivor and can't afford to doubt herself in competition but this morning I'm lonely and heart-sore. I'm so alone that I can't be generous anymore. I write people off because I'm so desperate for someone to feel me that I don't have interest to spare for anyone who doesn't. What else. I think of dying all the time. When I lie down for a nap I start to feel there's something wrong with my heart and it scares me so I get up to go away from the fear. I'm at a stop with work. I can't see what to make of it. I'm not sure I can keep up with all the little ways I need to be responsible for myself. The garden is frozen. Winter sunlessness is coming again for months. Journal writing isn't easy anymore, it doesn't feel like my native self in its old confident telling, I labour at it. I'm nervous that memory failures mean the very bad thing. I'm not remembering new faces, for instance at Valu Glass I'd had a good time with the counter woman last time but today didn't recognize her. Every day there are hours of feeling crummy or killing time looking at news sites or reading bad books or napping to get away from not knowing what else to do mixed with brief housework tasks I like or an hour or two of gardening work I know I'll pay for in pain later. I love to go to bed at night but am taking two aspirin to keep from waking at two. So many good things I shdn't eat. In this town nothing can change, it'll have to go on as bad as this and then get worse. I'm depressed     yes Will you talk to me     completion, persist, honesty, evasion Have I been evading depression     yes Is it old     no it's true Still read bad books     yes Still kill time     yes Because there's nothing else to do     yes But feel it     yes 6 This morning I saw the Theory's practice folder standing alone in the middle of the row to the right of this page. What I'd begun and forgotten. How it would make more sense to work there: the writing I'd have to work with is better and it runs along beside the best I've done, could gear it down enough so people could go where I've been. What would I be abandoning or delaying: a story hard to tell because I'd have to show unformedness in a formed way. The formed work of the time is visual. But: there's coming to poetics: that was what it was for, where I wanted to be to begin again. Can I do both? At the same time? Do you think?     yes The lake house; Up, down, strange and charm; Up north; Titania's gash; The air; Here: a notebook, Those are for poetics?     yes It's the whole of GW, 8 years, 25 volumes. It includes parts of Being about. Can it be publishable     YES Is Theory's practice the name     yes Can I finish it this winter     YES So now go through the 25 volumes scrubbing for philosophy and emotional work. Just that?     no Charm?     yes Humor, place, memory, friendship     yes Do you want to add anything     sex, deep change, politics, completion Completion in relation to those things     yes - Pleased having finished organizing the garage this aft, everything ingeniously stowed along the walls where I can see it, floor swept, big space for the jeep. Sweet mild sun after this morning's cold fog. Cosmos and sunflowers are dead but there's colour still, California poppies with alyssum, Iceland poppies white and yellow, hyssop. Late roses. The Iceberg's bud next to me in its tiny bottle has opened with a pale pink centre [*photo]. 7 What do I want from the fasting trip. The prayer, the place, the ordeal followed by grace, Jean, American TV, 8 I had come to the city where Tom is and had seen him briefly. Now it is evening and I'm in my cheap hotel wanting to walk back to where he is. Should I? He didn't ask for my phone number or where I'm staying. It will be cold later so I should wear something more. This striped shirt. It's a man's and too big, he wouldn't like it. I could carry it maybe. I'm walking. What's the name of my hotel. I look at the key fobs in my pocket. They don't say. Where am I. On higher ground east and a bit north of where he is. What are the house numbers here. Two thousand something. I think the hotel was on 30th. Then one of those unsurprised dream passages through many complicated scenes. I'm coming through a restaurant's waiting area and open a door onto Buddhist monks sitting in rows on a floor. Take a shortcut across grass and have to climb over a wire fence. Am in the hallway of a derelict building looking into empty rooms, hearing voices. At the exit door I meet an older woman talking to someone, then have to push through an overgrown overhead vine. By now it's dark. I'm cut off by a large pool, the Japanese kind with a stone rim scalloped in finely cut lotus petals. I wake sad and yearning. - Another pleasure Allan and Cody fitting the closets' shelves so now the piles of film stuff and bedding are sorted. When I revise sentences something I have to watch is not messing up the order of a thought. If it's out of order it might chop off cortical flow and make a deadness. Writing a dream as above there's the order of events, which isn't always exactly known, and there's the order of remembering. Which should it be? 9 Cutting sections of GW1 feeling as I always do that there's almost nothing I can cut without loss of subtlety. I can move a line to be with the passage it follows up on, but that removes it from the place where a new passage has brought it up. 10 At 9 courier Imagining paper, 13,500 words 26 pages Emotional work 32,600 58 Days 18,970 32 Art 12,860 23 Jim 8 910 13 David 16,470 25 Dreams 4,100 7 The Fraser 6,400 9 = 193 pages 11 Working with GW1 and GW2 marveling at what happened when Joyce got me to unlock female instinct - is that the way to say it - mating instinct. I had to endure such storms of mistaken desire. Should I say mistaken? Necessary I guess but unworkable. Such years of self-conflict. Also the other fact, how well written it all is. 12 "Loss of Arctic sea ice, melting of the permafrost, carbon dioxide and methane release from the ocean that would trigger unstoppable warming." "Significant population displacement concentrated in the tropics ... mass migrations smashing up against borders elsewhere." "Civil and international wars that will erupt when the warming cuts into the food supply." Ocean acidity, mass extinction. All of that is going to happen. There's no chance at all that people will do what's needed to prevent it. Rereading Annals of the former whenever I'm in bed having in view the tiny fraction of earth time that has seen human take-over. How strange to have lived at the end of the small window of tolerance for human expansion. I do want humans winnowed. Post-catastrophe carrying capacity of a billion someone says. What are we now, verging on 8 billion. 13 Sunday morning five degrees of frost, low sun through the Russian olive, boiler chundering like a washing machine below. Feeling grudges this morning as not often anymore, a grudge state. Yesterday watching Grey's anatomy thinking of the child I was, going into the world alone, going into surgeries alone, coming out of them into pain, not crying, stoic, valiant, and then my mother complaining that I was too strong. Joyce saying my mother was a dud. I didn't understand but I do now, she could seem generous but she wasn't, she didn't have intelligent care, she needed to suck me dry. "... the girl who wrote letters home. You are no longer the one who ...." Am I wrong about my mother     NO Am I wrong about Luke     yes 15 I love to see, when leaves depart, The clear anatomy arrive, Oily Roy pretending to be a poetry lover quoted that in 4 St Albans and I've heard it again every autumn, this early morning seeing the linden's branches bare against cold bare space. 16 A bad night, couldn't sleep, chest felt jangled, still does this morning. When I first closed my eyes there was a twitchy jaggy sensation, I was feeling what is this, speedy bits of vision unlike me, grotesque little faces in a crowd. Was I already speedy talking to Rob last night. Noticed I was going on with more energy than usual describing stooking and binders and threshing machines. - I was on the porch in the sun stripping seedpods from dried sweetpea vines. Kathy Bara came up the walk. I said I hadn't had time to prep. She walked in anyway so here is my house once again just right all over and my bed beautifully made. I started to strip it and she took over. We put the sheets in the washer and when I'd taken her home to her trailer with woodsmoke rising from a stovepipe and Lee standing at the open door I pressed two buttons that lit up with blue light and the machine's enchanting little voice sang ding ding ding ding and then ... it washed the sheets and pillow cases in 23 minutes and the other machine dried them in 20 and I folded them and put them away on the cupboard shelf directly above the dryer and oh the satisfaction of that pretty, magically efficient room I thought out and then made. Afternoon sun was slanting in through the long window and the mirror above the dresser was reflecting it in a white sheet onto the white bathroom door. I sat there peaceful on the dressing table bench I'd painted and re-covered looking out onto lilac bushes turning yellow and an even panel of blue haze concealing the whole of the hill. Janet on FB linked me to the piece Tia posted about Richard dying in Niland on this day in 2005. It was better written than anything of hers I've seen. I wondered whether being found by her boy has firmed her head. 17 Are they arthritic pains: shoulders, wrists, certain finger joints, hips. I've sorted the chapters of Theory's practice. Is it workable? - Merritt to Ashcroft on 97c 64 miles, an hour ten. Ashcroft to Spences Bridge on Highway 1 29 miles, half an hour. Spences Bridge to Merritt on 8 40 miles, fifty-some minutes. Had been thinking, sun this week, thrift stores in Ashcroft open on Wednesdays, I should go buy books, one last road trip before I'm stuck through the winter, can my knee manage it, I'll be careful, take my walking stick. First twenty miles I needed to name what I was seeing aloud to keep myself from vanishing. Little firs on the roadside to remember for later. Golden poplars. Green lake with white stones like swan markers on its farthest rim. Creekbank willows in glorious burnt orange and burgundy thickets, I'll remember those most, I thought. 18 It seems the driving and even the Horstings sandwich did not cost me anything. My knee isn't worse. I wanted to be living in Ashcroft again, its small oldness collected on the narrow bench, its temperature, its splendour, its wide green river, its citizens living where they do because it's beautiful, even its trains. Susana's photo samples 14" lovely on photo rag bright white. 19 I went back one volume into AG20 and there find establishing bits I need, the doc application, sessions with Joyce about love and work. Garden and Rob? I've thought the energy with Ken was something native to his body but now I'm guessing it was my own energy released when I opened father prohibition with Joyce. Yes?     yes Now when I read the record Ken becomes nothing much. What I see is the work that energy gave me. Is the same true with Tom     no Because he was with me     yes - Sexsmith high school reunion next summer says an email just now. 20 I've put Rob stories with days and garden. He's not in the zone of struggle and never not good to me. More people on the streets - they're going to vote. 21 This is the paradox that underwrites every single sentence of the Search. ... how he took his private, thoroughly idiosyncratic world and made us feel at home in it Extracting is the easy work. Recognition. Then it gets complicated because it has to think about other people. Unpack but not too much. Orient but not too much. Yesterday thought of The golden notebook, how this would be different because it's philosophy too. The range. Who else does that. Motorcycle maintenance some. Who to write for baffles me at every corner. "She writes a paper on the philosophy of imagining" A novel about philosophy? Should philosophy be the spine? "She writes a paper on the philosophy of perceiving." "She wonders what to do with desire." The philosopher's body. Childhood of the philosopher. - That shouldn't happen to my fearless, inquisitive explorer, my Rabbit, my black-eyed, raven-haired little Indian.   You were such a darling, so interesting a companion.   You didn't need to fear the cows - no, they were to fear you so you could walk where you wished. Your two-year old self had that clearly determined. 22 When she was 23 my mother ... liked me. And look how she could write before she couldn't. 1986 when she was 62. I'm checking the volume before, AG19 and what happens there is quite different. 23 Three months of cleaning work and conversation in and about conflict, almost nothing else, except that I settle on the doc project. Is fair related to fairy? Yes. This is what I wrote: the bright-eyed girl, the little Indian, in her second summer of running, wandered into a marsh she saw shining in the distance. They take the whole body and soul of young intellectual people who are interesting. aine or ane from the ancient Irish goddess, an, 'bright' They were offering her speech from that internal being, which she had felt, but silent, at times in her loved father and mother, a difficult destiny that would separate her gradually - and then suddenly and then gradually again, and many times - from them. Is that her, the goddess I serve? Yes. Is there joy in this service, when it knows itself? Yes. The Easter tide, its power of anguish. No, it says, not anguish but arrival. Anguish is unfocused creation. If you will give up mortal happiness of the ordinary kind, the ability to pass among ordinary people as one of themselves, we will be with you all your life, you will be able to know us, though you do not see us. Is it true that I agreed to be maimed so I could live with fairy powers? Yes. Is it true that ordinary happiness is impossible to me? Yes. Is it true that they are with me and have never gone away. Yes. Is it true that the anguish will never go away? It goes away but it will always come back. Creation is impossible without it. You will not inherit your parents' kingdom, and our kingdom is not inherited, only entered. You will have the gifts of isolation. Is all of this an illusion? No, we're here, we belong to you, you belong to us. We are difficult but we are loyal. Doesn't everything depend on my being expressed and successful as an artist? Yes. Will you help me? YES. Do I have to give something up? No, you already have. I keep feeling there's something I must give up. There's something you must accept. Fairness, conflict allowed. The implacable structure of being a woman with men, that I delayed with my vow and have to face now as if there were hope. There is hope but it is false hope. I said the two parts were romantic hope, the hope of standing beside a manly man, the womanly satisfaction of that, and romantic diminishment, narrowing down to the few things men seem to be able to love women to be. Get her writing published, show her dancing in film. Show her beauty. Give her a clean bright house. Give her a place in the country. Give her a confident place in the world. Give her the best body you can. 24 Fairy story about why I'm different from my family. Who is the we who are loyal? World, cosmos, the valiant workers of science and art. My mother wanted family loyalty. If she had been loyal to those things we could have been loyal together. - I'm seeing what it was with Luke. I'm finally past that conflict. Now it's a different struggle. Injury, weakness, cognitive dimming, compounded isolation. Have I lost my will to live     no I feel as though I have     yes 25 6 in the dark, Thursday morning at the end of October. Not cold, light overcast showing a bit of moon. I woke at 3:30 and have been sitting in bed rereading Assembling California feeling sorrow of exile. That was the real place and I was there and now am not. I took to it. I learned it. It docked against my earlier coasts and overran them carrying a mélange of sand cliffs and manzanita and Engelmann oaks and strong small Mexican men and camarones al ajillo and the LA Times and the Biltmore Hotel and Leslie's salvias and Louise's Cherokee rose and the far-traveling scent of pittosporum undulatum in late January and the old San Diego library and that mysterious small road winding among black rocks somewhere on the western slope of the Coast Range was it; the man who liked places as much as I did and every day still walks through the lobby of the Golden West Hotel. Still, a hard night. I'm not letting myself sleep, I don't know why. It is as if a kind of logistic care is holding onto my thoughts. They don't soften. There was a moment when they did, and I had a hypnagogic flash of a man facing me at a distance - maybe Mexican. Not of this time, I think. Days ago I left San Jacinto by a county road that went up into round rocky hills that were burnt orange and black, some small shrub's fall color, shrubs small and round like the dark rocks they were among. The road was very twisty, a bad surface, narrow, but wound through small farms. Olive trees. [October 1995 GW3-2] Here's part of how it is. I can strengthen myself by that firm motion I've learned here: tell both. Tell melted love, tell hard judgment, tell them exactly. The grace of your telling lets you travel safe in the extremes of your imbalance. What could be better. Read it again and you are safe again. What could be better. I know the answer. What could be better is to know there is no romance anymore. There is to be effort, for as long as it takes to learn to remember someone is there, not behind appearance, although it will seem that way to me. Appearance will be part of the someone who is more there. I am imagining it as more of a brain in touch, more shapes of standing waves, more action running off those shapes of waves. That's what I want. You are so strong and hot that when I am with you I can begin to feel myself what I am, a supple person, light and small the way women are, dark and apt and full of tensile intelligence, lightly sure of myself, the woman I have seen and heard on tape and not known from inside. As if the instruction is this: find a wild enough true enough guy and ride it out with all the truth and strategy you can muster. Something will come of it. There's a way I'm off my rocker 'til I do this, but if I do it I'll be off my rocker a lot, until I get more safe. It's very scary. What's the risk. Humiliation. Think it through. That I let myself be derogated. This is the place to look. That agony, he doesn't want me. That's the place it will continually come to. You come off shift and put your head in my lap and I feel how any moment of your real otherness is gold to me. I'm feeling that sensation they call incredulity but what is it really, some powerful rising up of hope and fear so dense it almost blinds me. [GW3 and 4] 26 'That agony, he doesn't want me,' that was my dad wasn't it. I was knocked into my beginning. He was too. That structure continued to the end, continued as a kind of helplessness. His careless improvident ways played into it but if it hadn't been there I'd have handled them better. He said in his solemn way, Ellie I promise I will do everything in my power to ..., I want to be with you till I ..., cherish love protect (as much as you want to be protected), delight (delight in, I insert). I said what was honest to say, in the freedom he gives me. Will you really? Can I really have that? Is it really true? I said, Tom, I promise I'll do everything I honorably can - I assume that was there in yours - whatever I can without dishonoring myself - to stay in good contact with you. I'll love you, I'll be your home, I'll do whatever it takes to make sure I stay honest, for the rest of my life, 'til death do us part. He inserted delight in too. Why am I looking at that again. Because of the way I keep feeling I'm still with him. Here is a man whose mother died so long ago that he has a lot saved to tell her. Here is a woman who has not been able to give anything to her father since she was two: she has a lot to tell him, a lot to show him. Both of these people know how far they can fall. They know they can be felled. They can fall apart. They are children who can't help laying open their hearts. They are not sure grief won't kill them if they are betrayed. They are in a terrific balance together. Neither is providing the safety of refusing. The word 'courage' means that they are going together toward always deeper risk that can never be other than individual. It can happen that either of them will come to a moment where it seems they must choose between dying and betraying. At that moment they may find help, or they may not. It could be accidental. They could fail at the same time and then one would have to be betrayer and the other betrayed. Or the one being betrayed could save the betrayer just in time. It could be that there are points of danger that can be passed. Or it could be that failure is written into their structures, each set for its own time, its own limit of capability, so no blame should come to the one whose limit arrives first. Or these are two people whose longing to give and show and tell is so great that once released and once accepted it will carry them through every fear. There's no way to tell. Here is a man whose mother died so long ago that he has a lot saved to tell her. Here is a woman who has not been able to give anything to her father since she was two: she has a lot to tell him, a lot to show him. Both of these people know how far they can fall. They know they can be felled. They can fall apart. They are children who can't help laying open their hearts. They are not sure grief won't kill them if they are betrayed. They are in a terrific balance together. Neither is providing the safety of refusing. The word 'courage' means that they are going together toward always deeper risk that can never be other than individual. It can happen that either of them will come to a moment where it seems they must choose between dying and betraying. At that moment they may find help, or they may not. It could be accidental. They could fail at the same time and then one would have to be betrayer and the other betrayed. Or the one being betrayed could save the betrayer just in time. It could be that there are points of danger that can be passed. Or it could be that failure is written into their structures, each set for its own time, its own limit of capability, so no blame should come to the one whose limit arrives first. Or these are two people whose longing to give and show and tell is so great that once released and once accepted it will carry them through every fear. There's no way to tell. You are insisting because for some reason you have to. What is your reason? My heart warms this way as soon as I place myself on your side. When my heart warms I'm not lonely. This is a key. When I notice the way you're desperate and I'm not seeing it, the wind comes suddenly from another direction. In this one thing I don't learn fast. I have to learn the same thing again and again. But every time I learn it shining love comes into me. What I don't want to lose - what I want to make sure I don't lose - is the freedom, whatever it takes, to write the way I was writing last summer. That was total. What it took was immersion, Dennett day after day for months and then a crackup. I was undivided and I had complete privacy. I want to know also what that state has to do with the photo Louie has from that time. It scared me, I looked so massive and - I can't find the word - bizarre - like a legendary animal, a gorgon - a massive strange old animal. There is something we aren't used to, don't name, almost don't notice, about the way some of us are shape-shifters. That I can shift into that black thicknecked gorgon-philosopher is a power I've worked for, only, as always was, I worry if I move too far away from love woman. That's who I want to look like, that's who I look like in states of body love. Gorgon philosopher doesn't care what she looks like. She's satisfied with the precision of her fine control over a landscape of ultraviolet detail. So here it is: how do I get ready to move back and forth, daily maybe, between the twenty-five year old woman hotly in love with a man who's delicious, abrupt and bossy, and the helicopter empress-monster who is in complete liberty. - I saw ... that the child, the grass, the trees above were all woven of the same material which was the fabric of which the universe was made, and that this fabric lived. When he was a child he looked at the stars and said to his father, What is behind them? His father said he didn't have to worry about what was behind them because they are so far away. Steven said to himself, No, there is something behind them and it is the same thing as what I am. It was a moment that marked him, he said. What I thought was that he was feeling his brain feeling the stars. I can see that part of the reason Perfection of the morning is successful is that Butala is so conventional that ordinary people can feel she begins where they do. Just now I've shouted and put the book down because she said so stupid a thing. It is hard not to be very angry with scientists for this loss. Their unshakeable belief in the materialistic, purely objective world has so permeated our culture that only in religious life are we allowed She's bought the contrast between 'material' and 'experience that is out of the realm of the ordinary'. There's hardly any actual description in the book, it's explanatory and abstract. (Maybe she does that in her fiction?) I sat down at my desk and typed The Perfection of the Morning .... I began to have a powerful sense of that same field where we had found the scraper ... it felt as it feels when I am there ... which on good days is as if I have entered the sway of another consciousness, as if I am ... watched over by a presence much larger than I am. She tells a plausible story of feeling called to find a particular erratic boulder and when she had found it discovering a series of medicine circles along a ridge. Then she says "I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension". So by 'spiritual' she means or should mean nonvisible? Which obviously isn't the same thing as immaterial. Is it only somatic ... or is it psychic, or a combination of both? She can notice that she's a more sensitive body but she oddly doesn't get that somatic and psychic are not contrasting categories. Another example: "I knew that the object I hadn't seen yet was something special ... by a kind of resonant, soundless thunk in my chest, which I perceived as a kind of slant-wise opening like a sudden shaft of light in darkness. From there the knowledge leaped to my brain ...." She means she knew something before she knew it in language but the way she said it is neurologically so ignorant it shows her unwilling to credit body enough to learn something about how it works: for her 'body' means located sensation, 'brain' means self-talk. slowly a sense of being in the presence of some great consciousness other than one's own Is that the way to say it     no 30 Have been working through GW so far up to GW11. Looking at my biographical writing, finding it junk. As if that way of telling is irrelevant to this other, more real and much more interesting but still and maybe forever untold story of intuition and its search for the means to know what it knows. To my present eye it goes along as good writing almost continuously, the whole story in its mixes of topic. I keep feeling it's a book as it is. Should I just format and self publish it     YES Would I have to ask Tom's permission     yes Would he give it     yes Would it be good for him     YES We were still thinking we'd live together. I marvel seeing that faith deferred forever. I notice that in our later years I let myself drop out into cynicism, which was a drop in intelligence. It went together with refusing sex I think and that was after he went off the cliff with meth. We each also need to find out whether we want our wild state back, whether it suits us more. That's fair. I sighed when I read that. Why. Do you mean take into a party a real vulnerability     yes But don't be helpless in it     YES Because that's the way to live in heart     YES November 1 Paul was here. Heart trouble. I lay down in my workroom bed two nights ago and couldn't get sleepy in spite of two aspirin and though I read on and on. And then when I turned out the light I couldn't lie on my front because I felt my heart knocking against my chest. My pulse was skipping beats. I slept better last night but even now my chest doesn't feel right. I had Genevieve lined up for this morning on account of my knee and she jumped to order blood tests and an EKG for this noon, prescribed a diuretic which now I'm scared enough to agree to. Do you still think it's neural     yes Potassium     no Meditation     yes Am I being harmed by someone     no Do you want to say anything     (empress), come through, balance, (pp) Are you saying it has something to do with childhood     yes Is reading GW stressing me     YES Did that do it     no   It wd be better if I wasn't scared     yes Will she want me to have surgery     no Will the diuretic do it     no Will the tests tell her what's up     yes 5 Four days later. I've had long conversations with Louie, Luke and Rob, yesterday made a short will and lined out documents for Louie on how to deal with me when I'm dead. Contact numbers, account numbers, passwords. Talking to people about being dead has been level, cheerful even, but the hours feeling tightness and struggle in my chest have been hard. I sometimes haven't been able to feel the difference between heart trouble and fear. Today it's been less, hardly anything, but I've been feeble and have just lain in bed hour after hour. I have dark gouges under my eyes, look remarkably old and sick. Three days of diuretic tablets made me lose five pounds; I've skipped them today because BP has been dropping too fast maybe, cold sweat and faintness last night. Have liked having a reason to talk to people who love me - I hesitated to say that. Rob said he'd cleared the same kind of symptoms with multiminerals. 7 Dems took the house, lot of women, minorities. Senate GOP consolidated control. Listening to KCRW. BP down fifty points systolic but right leg so sore again I'm struggling to walk even around the house. Birdsell The Russländer, vivd account of Opa and Oma's prosperous peaceful young days in Russia and then the horrors of revolutionary disruption. She's good: she's detailed, she's sensory, there's world around her people, birdsong, light on steppe grass, mud underfoot, manure smell, jolting of iron-bound buggy wheels, red hair on the back of a man's hand. She's sophisticated, doesn't back off sex and is even-handed about belief. Katya as a child is given more consciousness than she's likely to have had, though; I understand it to be a novelistic strategy she needed but still. Reading it feeling how my parents were cut off from the civilized background of their own parents, forced into crude bare simple struggle, abandoned, isolated together with no help from a church community similarly isolated. In my generation their kids rebounded into the cultural places their genetic quality earns them and my folks were the bridge but it seems they bore the cost of revolutionary disruption even more than their parents did. Their parents, especially Opa and Oma Konrad, recovered prestige and prosperity, a good house, gracious ways, but my folks had had no teaching in any of those things. 9 My right leg is so sore and helpless do I need to ask someone to shop for me. It's sore from ankle to hip and actually both hips are sore and my left ankle sometimes too. Genevieve won't talk to me on the phone and there isn't another appointment for weeks. That leg aches with cold and must be starved of oxygen so tissue just seems to shred. - Paul replies to an email about Birdsell and I pick up my phone, find him in a motel in North Dakota looking at photos he took today of rock in the Black Hills. He said he liked the Ashcroft photos I'm having printed, has thought of them, would buy them if he had a wall. 11 Sunday morning with open sky and wet sidewalks, the Russian olive in a sequined glitter of frost. Quiet. Hundred year WWI armistice day. Have just been writing Greg that when we arrived in London we were without knowing it still in the deep penumbra of its wars. Had looked up two of my first months' London photos, one of a battered façade and one of a crane clearing what looks like a remnant bomb site. [Saturday in November 1969]. We've had a most beautiful beautiful autumn, a hot brilliant October and now a misty wet November in which the slowly turning colours glow like stained glass all over this beautifully overgrown area of London. ... Huge freedom and rather amazing energy. ... Also I've never been so nice looking Six months after getting to London my next life began. February 12. On Monday I'm moving; ... new address is: Flat 7 Heath Lodge, 4 St Alban's Road, London NW5. 1970 - An untethered person knocked quietly on my door. She'd brought some Grey Goose she said to control d.t.s. She got more and more unfocused but we had hours of fun. 12 In GW16 living in Louise's guesthouse I was bashing at my thesis and had got into the pour state and then caught Tom smoking weed and was floored in pain. Wow. I haven't been straight through GW at speed, have stayed out of the first vols with Tom not wanting to be pitched into agonies of longing but this time it was quite level and I've been reading for the story of Being about from the beginning. Here's what I've wondered, all of that struggle both intellectual and emotional quietened down, did resolve, but the end it was reaching for was simply - merely - the Goddard work with students and the creation of embodiment studies???I That's as far as I got???! That's all I got? It says no. What do you mean     truth, subtlety, conflict, shattering of the structure I was annealed     YES And now will have to die     yes Is there anything else you want to say     no 13 Hardly any pain today. Whisked through the documents for Louie filling in this and that, in the aft printed them and the will in the library, waited in City Hall for a commissioner who said go to Service BC where the East Indian woman I like said talk to Andrée at legal aid in the building behind the post office. Walked into an office like many legal aid offices, shabby, artificial plants, big electric heater, three people at a round table discussing a disability claim. Woman with an arresting dark hoarse authoritative London voice looks to be the lawyer in charge. Upper middle class accent with power goth clothes: ankle boots with sharp-edged hardware, black tights, a cheap but structured tunic with glitter panels. Mane of dry dyed red hair. Large face with thick pale skin. Fifties. I watch her work. She's crisp. She doesn't hurry but she lays it out plain and clear, at the end summarizes admirably, stands up, pushes in her chair. I've walked in without an appointment and sat myself down on an old wicker loveseat next to the heater while they work. She says come into my office for a minute and we can make an appointment. I say let me just lay it out fast and see whether we actually need one. She's looking at my copy of the will. London, I say. Yes she says. NW5. Highgate. Her school was down from the top of the hill. Toward Highgate Cemetery I say. Yes it backed onto the cemetery, the swimming pool and tennis courts were across the road. Then she sorts me out rapidly and completely and walks around assembling a handful of pamphlets to give me. I'm out the door wondering can I make friends with this creature maybe. 14 Euphoric because of the clean house and this time it's clean windows too, Lee was outside on the stepladder scratching at baked-on smoked calcium with CLR and Windex and I was standing on the kitchen table touching corners and edges to show him something missed. They witnessed the will - it's legal. Then Rowen phoned from the ferry going back to Campbell River for two more weeks. He wanted to say something in particular, that he has almost as much money in the bank as he had when he was going to buy the boat. I understood why it was important to tell me that. - Waiting for Fedex to bring my prints.   part 3 time remaining volume 7: 2018-19 july-april work & days: a lifetime journal project