| volume 7 of time remaining: 2018-2019 july-april | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Garden pleasure, old-age misery, reading notes as usual. Part 1 trying to find a project called The lake house or Up north or Up down strange and charm in journals from my mid-30s.In Part 2 I give up on that and try again to find a project called Theory's practice or Childhood of the philosopher in journals from the Tom and Being about years. Part 3 scary arrhythmia diagnosed, diuretic and an ACE inhibitor. I make a will and begin posting excerpt stories on Facebook every day. Blocs of text lifted from earlier journals are inset. notes: air gods and goddesses, O'Brian Treason's harbour, Nutmeg of consolation, Hegel and the hermetic tradition, Naipaul, Conover Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound , Neil Gunn The serpent, de Rachewiltz Discretions, Mariani The whole harmonium, Kenner The poetry of Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Olds, Notley, Carson, etymology of 'ground', Teilard de Cardin Milieu divin, dysesthesia, late style, painter Gordon Smith, Homage a Propertius, Gordimer A guest of honour, Iris Murdoch, Vivian Gornick The odd woman and the city, Butala Perfection of the morning and Wild stone heart, Birdsell The Russländer, Jung and Toni Wolff, the Acropolis in 1910, Virginia Woolf, Conrad Youth, Lucia Berlin A manual for cleaning women, The left hand of darkness, Safranski Goethe: life as a work of art, Holmes Coleridge biogs, grassland ecology, The four-gated city, In search of pure lust, Goethe Italian journey. mentioned: Jam Ismail, Trudy Rubenfeld, George Konrad, Brian Tugwell, Luke, Rowen, Louie E, Tom Fendler, Kathy Bara, Fredrick Brown, Rob Mills, Paul Epp, Linda Epps, Joyce Frazee, Kenneth Sallitt, Mary Epp, Andrée at Legal Aid, the Douglas Lake Cattle Company's irrigation foreman, Frank Doerksen, Cass Dolen, Hughie MacKenzie, Robin MacKenzie, Gloria Moses, Caroline Hannah, Peter von Tiesenhausen, David Mitchell. 1890 Granite Ave, Quilchena Hotel, Home Hardware in Merritt, Midday Valley Road, Brambles Bakery, Home Restaurant, Valu Glass, Ashcroft, Norgaard's road to the flag, Spius Creek, Iron Mountain, Monck Park Road, High Thicket Road near Dockenfield. Sturtzman singing Handel, The good wife, Lessing, Le Guin, Gordimer, Grey's anatomy, The golden notebook, Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, Assembling California in Annals of the former world, Norman Rush Mating, Friday Night Lights, Anna Karenina Pevear and Volokhonsky trans, Halliday The life of Shakespeare, West Coast Seeds, Hirokazu Kore-eda 2013 Like father, like son, Charles Lamb, After life, Notre Dame on fire. |
23 July 2019 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. 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. 28 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. August 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. 6 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. 14 My real pleasure in life is to make notes no one will read - Olga Rudge in her eighties. 20 The tall night felt keen and sweet on his face. [Neal Gunn The Serpent] 21 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. 25 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'.
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.
He didn't mean a clit but I did.
27 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 29 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 September 6 15 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. 19 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. 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. 27 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. October 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. 5 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. 16 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. 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. 22 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. When she was 23 my mother liked me. And look how she could write before she couldn't. 1986 when she was 62. 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. November 1 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. 13 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. 18 My heart has gone wobbly again. A bad night. I've been scared to close my eyes these last three nights because then I feel it struggle and am frightened and can't sleep. Photo yesterday morning of a frosted raspberry leaf against the sky. 20 Since I lay down and closed my eyes last night - it's noon - heart too wobbly to feel easy or really sleep. Am I going to have to live afraid of my own heartbeat from now on? December 7 At my feet on a muddy road something half-buried that I pick up. It's a golden circlet of many twisted strands. Still pressing through the last vols of AG. When I come to anything about Ken I skip ahead in distaste, it's an astonishing madness - I went into an astonishing madness in my late forties - I was more alive and smarter than I could ever be again and at the same time wildly wildly wrong.
Should I say something about heart trouble. I haven't wanted to. It's a new phase. I'm unsafe from inside. I watch my chest and take my pulse. I'm on meds like other old people. I can't turn onto my pillows trustfully at night because I don't know whether I'll feel my heart bumping against my chest. Genevieve said it isn't really skipping beats but beating unevenly so some beats aren't felt distally and some are felt too strong. The Holter monitor showed something atrial that is rare and not an emergency but might turn into a-fib later, a-fib meaning death. 8 Are the little stories a way of edging into the larger work. I do now understand that the work I should be doing is the largest furthest and not anything before that and that the two stories, Tom and the thesis, need to be laid down in together, a woman making her strength by daring to engage her weakness. It's a story too complicated for the market and yet it's a needed story. She takes on the patriarchs in two ways at once, the cultural and the personal. 12 Disgraced by old age. January 1 2019 I sorted 2018 onto two files and then carved each to nothing but writing. There another home, another self. I marvel at its dryness, its aloneness. I marvel in it, I am marvel in it. I marvel that what I love to be no one can want. I'd worked foolishly, helplessly for years. One September alone in an old house I came to it, I came true. it's the flight and droop of the sentence, where the accent falls, the full stop. ... when one feels something remote, separate ... I think almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that satisfies She called it style and I'd call it voice or state. It's about working and a bit about kinds of day. When I find the minimal phrase it's anyone working, anyone's kinds of day. In paradise as in hades the dead are the only company there is. but I talk to them. January 1 2019 I sorted 2018 onto two files and then carved each to nothing but writing. There another home, another self. I marvel at its dryness, its aloneness. I marvel in it, I am marvel in it. I marvel that what I love to be no one can want. I'd worked foolishly, helplessly for years. One September alone in an old house I came to it, I came true. it's the flight and droop of the sentence, where the accent falls, the full stop. ... when one feels something remote, separate ... I think almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that satisfies She called it style and I'd call it voice or state. It's about working and a bit about kinds of day. When I find the minimal phrase it's anyone working, anyone's kinds of day.
8 Have thought of my mom, is this what it was like for her, did she feel her social self going wrong, going confusingly out of control, the shame and worry of that. It's six in the dark. Black glass next to me, three bright but meaningless lights burning blankly in the street.Have thought of my mom, is this what it was like for her, did she feel her social self going wrong, going confusingly out of control, the shame and worry of that. It's six in the dark. Black glass next to me, three bright but meaningless lights burning blankly in the street. 9 Are the small stories a form I can use for more. Tom stories. Vancouver stories. Writing stories? Up north photo stories. Saturna stories. Philosophy stories? Garden stories? Love woman stories. Student stories. Joyce stories. How would that be. It's doable. I like the list of titles there is already - the titles. I come at the stories a bit at a time, find some little thing to fix, and know when they're done. They're sophisticated sort of sideways, the simple-complex thing I naturally do. I can do it every day and like to do it. 10 Shreds and little stories are different forms. Do I need to choose one or the other. No. Wondering this morning whether I can search my shred collection to use for times before their times. Reading through 2018 work work this morning I'm feeling a particular mind as if a black space with a sharp quality It is as if the space of writing as I've honed it teaches me. 16 Wednesday morning under a blank grey sky. 'He says he can write beautiful sentences.' If I wrote the story of Tom it could start with that. That makes it a story of writing, which it is. What kind of job would it be. A selecting job, a presenting job. 1995 to 2014, that many years already written. I'd want it to be as close to the liveliness of life as I have been at my best. It's a love story, it has that primal drive, but what makes it a large story. Riveting precision, only that. Not only that: there's the book and there's my other work. Part 1 the Golden West Last part leaving. It ends in the desert, the stone heart, the tall man standing with his back to me. A love story but what is love when it's far from simple. My mother holding a radiant photo of me when I was maybe 30 saying that was when I was as I should be. I roar at her. I yell that I can do things now I couldn't do then, that I can help people, that she doesn't know anything, that she is a cowering mouse. Wake with my arms aching with tension. A love story wrapped around a philosophy story. A philosophy story enlarging a love story. 18 Then it's next morning and I'm on the 17" and open another kind of file and dilate into marvel and want to be that other kind of person instead.
I don't know how to think of this. They're formed alternatives. They both depend on notes. They're wells, abandoned selves. There are others too. Though they're formed they're all imaginary in the sense that they haven't succeeded. I don't have time to accomplish them all. Or maybe any. -
She's a gardener, he's a man of the sea. I still want to tell that story. We entered a cold ocean together. I secretly chose a stone and carried it home with me. He brought me a stone from his mountain. I set my stone into a northern creek. I was on a bare hillside above the sea and chose a stone to say I was alone now. He found a heart shaped stone and we buried it in the desert together. 23 Something had happened when I woke and went on happening all day. Snow was slathered over roofs and shrubs, stuck thick on every wire and twig. Street and sidewalk under the corner's lamp were a bright blank single sheet. The mountain ash was solid red and white. When it was light I went out to shovel and found eight saturated inches, heavy as wet concrete and setting in unshovable heaps that had to be lifted after a foot. It was going to be a long job. Gail was out in her red jacket finishing the church's half block. The RCMP officer's snow blower was spitting slush. A woman from what she called the beige house came by and stood telling a story about Flora Gerard putting saucers under a tree because her dead parents were coming for tea; as she spoke she kept peering into my yard looking for a tree that used to be there. The high school girl I like to see came by late for school after shoveling her own street. Her name is Chloe. When the liquor store had opened single men began to come up the alley from that direction. One of them, a quite nice-looking Native man with thin dirty hair and three pegs of teeth, stood with me by the garage for a time. Ernest something, the youngest of ten children. He said he knew my country because although he was from Manitoba he'd lived in High Prairie. While we were talking a grader whizzed past and shot a lumpy ridge of snow across my driveway. Its operator smiled to say sorry, lifted his hands in a what-can-you-do wave. I cleaned it up but as I was going in it happened again, so I had to go back, and then just as I'd finished a young man jumped out of a big black pickup and asked if he could help shovel my driveway. The sun came out and melted what was left on the sidewalks. White mist floated above the hills. Cars sloshed past through deep inches of sand-colored sherbet. I knew I should go out again before dark to scrape any slush left over on my porch and path or it would be ice tomorrow. - What I started out wanting to say was that I did all of today's heavy work as if I were a young person and tonight hardly anything is worse. 24 Sorting, sorting. After In America comes Time remaining. In a sheet called working that has current bits I see that I'm better now - I didn't know that. And that recognizing intuition of cortical structure is as philosophically radical as recognizing prebirth intuition. The seeing-through talent found another task. Slow work both. When I look at the bits gathered from earlier years I see that I'm more in the clear now, not tethered to other people's language as much. Balanced not looking for balance. My brain loses common words but threw up 'curvett' though I'd never in my life used it before. February 2 Candlemass. Jasmine next to me. Live wreath I bought when Luke was conceived, scent of. Had never seen before and seldom since, bought at Vickie's new shop that had a rabbit's-foot fern too. And I drew a Greek house. Yesterday took photos from Naxos for backgrounds and last night had it on this computer to set shadows. In an instant the place came real. I marvel to see a clean bed with midsummer dawn thrown across it, noon through an open door. The light seems Mediterranean. But once again a doubt, here is a house but now a house isn't enough. What is someone doing in this house? [desk and mountains] [kitchen and village] [two cats and a view] It's a bit after seven, open sky. 3 This morning it's snowing a few wandering bits and is so cold the white on the street has been swept into thin streaks. 9 6 in black dark with dry snow coursing down the road twenty feet high. A north wind. All night sometimes a strange loud noise I was lying in bed trying to describe. Not a groan, not a squeal, a gigantic scraping? This morning lying in the dark laughing because really it was like a huge black fart. Those of us who move from the provinces pay a toll at the city's gate, a toll that is doubled in the years that follow as we try to find a balance between what was so briskly discarded and what was so carefully, hesitantly, slyly put in its place. Raymond Williams. - Not slyly; more like shyly, diffidently. The 1998-99 San Diego months laboring at two lines of work that can seem distinct and overlap in unknown ways by popping like fireworks in the same skull-enclosed sky. This extraordinary work of penetration, originality, longing, persistence, honesty, bravery and eloquence, this self-created capability so staggeringly far from origin. I read it understanding no one else will ever recognize it. When I think of how those two tasks interacted I also feel the story is unfathomably more interesting than any of the ways it can be told. There's the larger whole of what Tom was, which then and now I could see no more of than a corner of fabric whisking out of sight - I don't know why that's what I'm seeing, my first image was of a dark space roiling with unseen energies. For the other thing, for instance, there's the question of whether the bolts of hope and fear and pain I let myself in for with Tom were fuel I needed for the completely private work whose difficulty he never glimpsed. How any of it actually worked in all the unknown layers of what a human is. 11 Working with the 1998-1999 months feeling how much better they are then Knausgaard and at the same time how inviable they are because I'm not an intense-looking younger man and, worse probably, because of how they range around for instance between true true romance and academic neuroscience. 13 There was fresh snow when I opened the door and again that thing I always like to see, a cat's little prints investigating on my path, patrolling, circling to the foundation are there mice perhaps no but so pleased to have this place to myself. 21 Janet asked if I'm writing a memoir. I'm not but in what sense isn't it that. It's a different relation to time. A memoir recollects at some particular later age. I want the past's actual voices and the present's actual voice considering it. 23 I'm wondering about the way the journal's style is so random. I write things down as they occur to me. Sometimes it works, it has cognitive veracity, but can it work that way for anyone else. 26 7:40. Sun came up from behind the church's shoulder. I've lowered the right venetian. Crystalline pale blue. Great piles of steam this morning leaning southwest. Dove on the streetlamp's overhanging arm. Was. Lumberyard Tom red-faced pushing a puff of cloud. Winter has been dragging dragging and I have to foresee that every year will have these deathly many months. 27 Your piece about Frank is the most intelligent and lovely thing I have ever read! I've finished After and I'm on the second part of Journal Summer 1961. The way it touches me ... you include all the levels and parts somehow that need to be included for the knowing to crystallize for me as a reader. You're writing about things I've been trying to be able to know but haven't been able to on my own. It's better than Doris Lessing's writing. Will you publish it in a physical book? Online is just as important, but printed on paper would seem to keep it safe over time better. Kate said. I read After afterwards and no it is not better than The golden notebook. 28 6:30 Thursday morning. Pale blue twilight with wafting snow. Yesterday from my bed I saw reflected on the verandah's screen door glass a crow landing amid a lacework of rowan twigs, wobbling forward almost upside down to gobble berries. Waxwings leafing and instantaneously unleafing the linden, vanishing into the spruce. Then a thousand of them - surely a thousand! - explode from its dark arms. 7 March Yesterday Jim said Have a very happy birthday reflecting on an amazing life!!, and I thought why am I not thinking of a birth day as being about the whole span rather than the barren day it will be this year. I'm in a bad mood. Nothing seems worth saying. 8 Still in a bad mood. Horrible dinner party last night (except the steak was good). Horrible because of 1. their friends, 2. their dogs, 3. their house, 4. everyone's sheer primitive social incompetence. Leave it at that. - Hughie MacKenzie's event at the Lower Nic band hall. Parking lot and roadsides full of muddy vehicles. All those people at three long tables eating together, rez people, AA people. A copper colored man with braids put on a beaded headband to drum and chant. Then Hugh's older brother Robin a thin bent man with a good face hobbled part of the way into the crowd. "I'm Robin. I'm an alcoholic." "Hello Robin" in chorus. Told good stories in a hesitant voice so quiet the audience went completely still. After a while he was describing his mother in a housedress suddenly running across the yard and vaulting a fence with one arm. He couldn't go on. A young woman with long hair came to stand next to him, touched his arm. He was silent a long time. She went and got a bottle of water and offered it to him. He said "I'm not sad because of what happened, I'm sad because of what's happening today, saying goodbye to my brother." Hugh had 32 years of sobriety, "good sobriety mostly," and Robin had followed him into the program two years later. Hugh had always been getting people to meetings, finding them sponsors. When I came through the door into the hall a man sitting at the nearest table gave me a sharp look and I gave him a sharp though brief look back because he seemed so unusually coherent. Is that the word. Manly and as if there was nothing wrong with him. Large middle-aged Native with a ponytail, a baseball cap, and a look of natural authority I suppose, which another man next to him did not have at all though if I've got it right he's the one who ran for chief last election. Some of the Native boss-men, who are physically large, have weak petulant faces. Gloria Moses was there and when I touched her shoulder on the steps she knew me. I said the rhubarb would soon be coming up and she said never mind the rhubarb, she'd just come for a visit. 22 It has been warm enough so I can strip dead stuff and fluff dirt in the east fence beds. It's light work but I'm stressed by it, have to stop and walk around, quit before I've done much. Instead of taking my pulse these days I turn my wrist and watch it beating in a little bubble near the base of the palm. I seem to see it hesitate at being watched. 29 Late yesterday I was putting together the story of the truck driver that I've called enceinte de cing mois and it was seeming to me that the relationship stories are worth nothing and what I do hold to are the stories of going into the world on my own. 31 I like the extracts but the passages they're from are such an airless press of raw observation. Have been thinking all the while of Ben reading these years in 2010. "Deep and authentic, dark and repetitive, generous and beautiful." At the time I thought, ... Repetitive? But oh my. Receptive young person not realizing how much sheer work she was having to do to balance in overwhelming newness. April 1 Looking morosely at the garden work I'd be doing if I weren't so feeble that half a row of weeding makes my chest feel scared. 4 Most of it badly written. Qualifiers I don't need, foolishly too many commas, clumsy explanation, gushes indicating girlness. I thought an occasional good word and an ear for conversation were good writing. Where there's a good story though it's sometimes easy to sharpen because observation is there. The Boots diary bits are better because they're too brief and swift for poses. 8 Peter's Vipassana story. Intense white pain from his mid-back through to the front of his chest. After days of it a sensation as if people were standing around him, legs at the level of his shoulder, "One of them might have been you". Whoosh the pain left. He had a roommate the rules said he shouldn't speak to or look at. To know who he was he had to notice things like how he opened a door. "I had such a crush on you. You were beautiful, you were intelligent. There was no one else I could talk to." The way I was living in that house and the house itself. "You didn't care what anybody thought." "I missed you so much after you left." Almost sixty and loyal to those months; so fortunate, so beautiful - color in his face, long legs and young man's triangle of shoulder and hip. I made him lunch. He drank a lot of coffee. We sat for hours at the kitchen table. My dispiritedness had fallen away. 9 Was it rain woke me at 1, first rain in this dry spring. Snow on Hamilton this morning. 14 What shd I think about these little stories. There are more and more. Janet asked am I writing a memoir. I said not exactly but I like the thought of a memoir made in bits of actual presence not like Lise's dull summaries. I work on them over time. One day I'll change a comma to a connective, I'll see to delete a word, move a phrase; then leave it. It should have other people's passages too, dated to when I found them, here Sidney Cockerell's lovely paragraphs on Charlotte Mew. It 's elegaic. What's it called. Where I was?
There are pieces I like just for their particular factuality, exactly remembered speech - story of the drunk and the bobby - but do they they need something more. Miss Tugwell sitting on the stairs telling me about the rockets circling before they dropped, airplanes nudging them back to Germany. When I come to Mari as with Michael I feel helpless to register the gallant pathos of these lives.
16 Worked hard in the old way yesterday. Tackled the porch platform edge, pried up large dead roots, shook off their dirt, made space around the iris. Then did what I should do: took an aspirin, lay in hot water, had a nap sore all over; later went out and hoed the inside edge of the east fence bed; and at night did not hurt. This morning two pounds lighter. 22 I've been making garden notes every day but not writing here, as if the garden is the only thing I have to say. I step outside and look at color, dark pink paeony stubs, yellow tulips, yellow primula, white arabis, blue grape hyacinth, and already quite a lot of young green - iris, chives, garlic chives, Iceland poppy, little tufts on currant bushes and rugosas. Strong tufts of maralroot earliest. Rhubarb. The long rectangle of cut grass looks good between its two definite edges. The Anjou has buds all over and looks as if it's about to break though there aren't bees yet. Leaf break on the Cox and the little peach. Evans dotted on all its dishevelled twigs. First of the moss phloxes showing bits of blue. Johnny-jump-ups blooming anywhere I let them stay especially along the little ridge next to the tap where their white faces on thin stalks jerk all together in the wind. They all descend from the six I bought in the Ashcroft goodwill before I had anywhere to plant them. They descend in another way too because the first I knew were those I dug up outside the Wiens's abandoned cabin to plant outside the lake house. The Wiens cabin before that went back to a Sunday afternoon visit when I was a child. Is there anything to say about being dispirited. Dark sky and cold wind today. I had an appointment to have the jeep's rattle diagnosed but it wasn't till late afternoon and there was grim nothing nothing nothing to do. Did liven up to take it through the carwash and vacuum it first so the mechanics wouldn't despise me. That was something done. Then remembered the headlamp out. They fixed that but the rattle is the cat not the muffler and that'll be $600. I don't mind the money, there seems to be enough. It's the idleness and vacancy and the feeling of being of no interest. 27 Snowing when I woke. [apple blossom] [gooseberry flowers] [tulips]
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