November 1 2019
Look how late daylight is now. It's 7:30 still dark on the ground though
the sky is flushing an exquisitely even pale orange brightest behind the
Russian olive's black lace. Column of squirming vapour behind the policeman's
house. When I went to put my bins on the curb I saw them and the jeep sparkling
with grains of frost.
8:23 sun rises over St Michaels' yard into the side of my eye.
2
I'm working on In Laborador because for now it's easier. Am seeing
that it's as much a story about Louie as about Ken. Louie as love woman
and as herself. Explicit dreams and reading them.
-
Jeep broken into last night, ignition smashed.
3
Had to wobble to the pharmacy on the bike.
4
A philosophy on the one hand from the living
originality of the spirit who in it has restored the rent harmony, on the
other hand from the particular form of the bifurcation from which the system
issues.
You have to be very conscious to work with the unconscious.
I'd written Ken off but when I go into In Labrador I notice ways
that contact touched off something deeper than what was touched off with
Tom. One reason was his body's generosity. The other something cultural.
I was interested in both background cultures but Ken's more. I liked Ken's
travels and the physicality of his adventures. When I compare them at this
moment I see Tom's coldness, his calculating eyes. Ken was a user in his
way but the energy he touched off in me was different.
-
I wondered whether I should go back to Dave's time but it's also Louie's
time and so oppressive I have to drag myself though it.
5
Bad night the way they are maybe once a week. I've put my book on the
floor, am lying there in the dark. I feel into myself, is my heart alright.
I begin to feel it thumping too hard so then I know I won't be able to sleep.
I lie awake on and on. Turn over from one side to the other. And again.
At 2am I get up, turn on the heat, take my bp. It's alright. Try reading
for a while. All I have is Theroux's book of travel scraps. Turn off the
light, lie there some more.
Toward morning I must have fallen asleep because
I was dreaming I was at a restaurant table looking at a young man I'd met
for the first time, who had just now been told he was my son. He was standing
nearby, the kind of young man I like, slight, dark-haired and sensitive.
He seemed glad to have found me. He sat down opposite and saw there was
a photo of both his parents propped in front of him. Michael was standing
behind him dressed like a rancher in a cowboy hat. We were grinning at the
young man as he realized he'd found his father too. Then he was talking
quietly with my mom. I overheard him saying his adoptive mother had disliked
him because she identified him with sexuality. I was feeling he'd had a
hard life so far.
My heart is still doing whatever it is that it does but when I'm up in
daylight I can mostly ignore it.
-
In Laborador 2 - I'm reading it this morning not wanting to extract
it because I think all of it is good.
What's my background worry. That my fine web-spinning in language is
all displaced and symptomatic. Other people just get married and have jobs,
who'd want to go into this labyrinth of self-scrutiny.
I've been unusual as a writer in two related ways. One is that I'm vowed
to write from rather than beside my actual life. The other is that even
in lyric or fantasy I've tried scrupulously to be accurate, reliable, true.
Those commitments made me develop slowly and have made me hold back from
publishing. They've meant I couldn't write well until I'd done deep work
on my own structure.
The little stories I'm posting every day meet those terms, are satisfying
to publish. Today it's a quite lovely small paragraph I had to earn with
long effort.
- That morning I looked up through the windshield where we were parked
in the Cineworks alley and saw an angel balanced in an angle, a 6' column
at the intersection of two white walls, plain plaster flushed below with
frail blue light and above with pale pink, a form that held out its wings
in an exquisite balance of sorted feelings, right left above below with
strong keel and undelimited expanse.
-
- Vancouver November 1993
Here's an amazing thing. Phone message last evening, Dr McLeod asking
me to get back to him with blood pressure readings because the reading in
his office had been high. When I phoned him this morning his voice lit up
- it lit up! Meds working. But there's something else I said. Sounds like
an arrhythmia he said. Booked me for an EEG. Go now said his nurse. Taxi
$8 each way.
6
I'm just noticing that I had to deal with something with Ken I never
had to deal with in Tom, class snobbery and contempt for my deformity.
Unending uncertainty about quotation marks. I try to do without them
and maybe a bit of ambiguity is alright but then there begin to be too many
she said's and I say's and they feel mannered. I think I have to use both,
quotation marks only when I have to. Can I get away with that?
Should it be:
- Theory's practice: Childhood of the philosopher
- Part I. The beautiful young man
- Part II. In Labrador
- Part III. The golden west
I can't seem to do much in a day.
7
It keeps feeling like I was preparing for Tom.
- Did you know Tom was coming?
- YES
- Did you speak to him in the shower?
- Yes
- Did you speak to him from in me.
- Yes
Working through the Dave section now. I'm always having to accept that
in these vols every detail can mean more than I'll ever understand.
-
Kogonada dir. 2017 Columbus
8
ECG left ventricle enlargement - likelihood of fibrillation - heart attack,
heart failure, stroke - lightheadedness, fatigue, chest tightness, swollen
legs.
- Caused by stress with Tom no
- Stress with the doc no
- My asymmetry no
- Untreated high bp YES
- Am I at risk for sudden death no
- Can I live well for another 8 years
no, 6
- Should I exercise YES
Posted whores in okinawa. Surprised Indra likes it.
"We see you later reflecting on an unpleasant, disappointing occurrence."
Greg says. I'm disgusted by how spineless and clueless that is. - What Paul
said, "I thought he wouldn't be able to keep up with you."
-
A woman lover, a sequence of three men, a therapist, a garden, a video,
a theory and quite a few road trips.
9
In The beautiful man there are video and lyric/cosmic bits, as
should be in that zone. What to do with them.
Am I on the right track with this sequence: the mythic, training in the
unavailable, true struggle.
- Here is my MA summary and wow - I'm deep in their terms proving I can
do it their way. Had to be done but no wonder I was awkward at the defense
- so self-divided. And at the PhD defense so differently certain and centred.
I had to chuck their terms and completely reinvent. It's a massive change.
The other massive change is the way I learned to use my own system and the
way I learned to process pain.
- Am I being asked to be lucid among only hard choices?
- Yes.
So many water dreams.
How old am I at the beginning of The beautiful man. 47.
For We made this a track commenting on the editing? Image-sound
relations, delays and anticipations.
It was wrong to put myself in the hands of Louie's book partly because
it was too indirect/obscure and partly because I didn't trust Louie.
- Louie's book is the voice it is because it's straight
from the uncon and you are mediated?
- Yes.
10
- > where in that story did you get "unpleasant, disappointing'?
- you didn't notice the relish in the account?
Well... of your nine numbered points as to what
you felt about this episode - ten really, if you count the paragraph about
the harm done to his wife and son - it seems to me that eight of them involve
criticism, negativity, disconcerted feelings, your being upset. Two (numbers
3 and 7) seem positive.
And yes, there are elements of relish - you asked
a question which brought out important things about his early life, in
fascinating if grotty detail - and certainly of longing and desire, since
you were hoping to sleep with him. But your rejection near the end of his
claim that "nobody got hurt" seems quite definitive: it's a lie.
- i wasn't upset! i was interested.
- speaking as the writer not the woman.
- i can do that - speak as the writer.
- there's a pleasure of objectivity i don't think you are seeing.
-
- i can say critical things without taking them personally.
- i can cry without taking it seriously.
- and i *was* sleeping with him not just hoping to.
one of the reasons i was sleeping with him was that he was the sort
of person whose experience i could be interested in.
I hate his language in this - negativity, disconcerted, disappointed,
grotty. Especially unpleasant and upset. - Apart from my contempt
for his timidity is there something to see. My last sentence sums up a lot.
It also tells him why I'm not with him.
'Speaking as the writer not the woman'- is that colder than it should
be? It says no. I met Tom with curiosity both warm and cold. Cold was the
only way to survive him. Warm was the only way to survive him.
11
Dreamed this morning that I could tuck my penis
up into my own vagina, what a satisfactory discovery.
Here, under her few square yards of thatch,
she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and successive
moons at their full. So close kept she that almost everybody thought she
had gone away.
They writhed feverishly under the oppression
of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law
This consciousness upon which he had intruded
was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic
first cause; her all; her every and only chance.
and forgot that the defective can be more than
the entire
Hardy 1891 Tess of the d'Urbervilles
12
Always the light. I don't care about the sociology though yes it was
needed. He loves to write place and time in light. Feminist readers have
complained that his gaze devours Tess but no he sees the day and the room
and the lay of the land and all the bodies there. He sees bodies. And he
sees people seeing bodies, some of them fascinated as he is. He sees how
that seeing forms them.
Dorset 1840-1928.
He described himself in In
Tenebris II as a poet "who holds that if way to the Better there
be, it exacts a full look at the Worst"
between 1903 and 1908 Hardy published The Dynasts
- a huge poetic drama that pioneered a new kind of verse. According to John
Wain's introduction "... in composing The Dynasts Hardy wrote his huge
work in accordance with conventions of an art that had not yet been invented:
the art of cinema. It is a shooting-script."
Hardy's poems pay attention to the transcendent
possibilities of sound, line, and breath "... whatever it was that
makes for his strange greatness is hard to describe".
I posted this yesterday:
- Now it's daylight, train whistle at the crossing, seagull's bright
high shout. An open sky. I'm sitting at the desk with my hand inside the
neck of the sweater holding my right breast. I've never seen anyone say
that. The quiet of the house before school traffic begins in the alley.
-
- Going to the corner for milk a light, a light on the side of the cherry
trunk, on the boles, on the moss. On the grass. A chopper high and far
in the northeast swaying on a slow cycle so its light appears and disappears.
The mountains white in their whiskers and airs. All so soft and live. And
now I disappear out of it into the relational theory of machines.
-
- -
-
- It's morning again, frost on the shingles, crows in signifying constellation
crossing a blue more translucent than air. A wind contained in the box
of the heating duct. Creaks in the floor, a change in the light. The skin
over my nose feeling itself bright and easy. Imagine a small cloud in itself.
Not a thing with round edges, a mark in few well-organized colors, not
held, not set, a shape.
-
- So much I can love, so much I can do, day, with you, bright and dark.
With you, words and pictures, color and sound.
-
- It means beloved. And what is lameness in it. To be beaten, to run
away, to run away to a place like this. To run away and be unable to find
you. To be in despair that you won't want to touch me. But you do touch
me. You don't stay, you're a friend whose time has to be honored. It is
not my lameness but my carelessness you mind. My lameness is the shape
of a cloud, something you can see and I can feel, another companion. My
cold foot. How are you doing? Are you a child left standing in the snow?
A girl who'll come with me to the end, who'll follow after if she cannot
walk beside. My particular.
-
- And you, image, what do you say. You're listening, in yourself, in
your warm clear usual self. You're smiling. Later in our bed your touch
will talk. For now you take notice. And get up and go to work.
-
- East Pender Street December 1992
- I think it's kind of extraordinary but who noticed. Emilee, Val, Cheryl,
Nathalie, Susan. Everyone else turned away. And of these no one said love.
No one spoke to me. There it was for a second and faded on the air.
Then next day I give them something more within their range.
-
In The beautiful man how much I'm hating Louie's book. I feel
sick when I see any of that time with Louie. It seems creepy to me, icky.
Then I see that it's still transition after the demolition with Jam and
them.
13
The story of Louie needs the story of Jam because it's its obverse. I
was learning Jam's position. How I had seemed to her.
14
Chapter 1 Two women working in a room, about 13 pages. Rumsey
Wheel.
Merge bliss, fear of abandonment, competition,
We learned internal dialogue and tracking from Joyce and doing it with
each other and then doing it with ourselves. Intimations of larger self
from as far back as Eton St's two-sides image.
15
[Al Sherman Goulden]
- Hyperbole? no
- Should I drop him YES
I've found out what I wanted to know about him.
16
There were four Hardys in one of the red shelves. Far from the madding
crowd is earlier than Tess - 1874 - 16 years - and there was
a lot in it I zipped past for reasons I'm thinking about now. It's a Victorian
pot-boiler superimposed on the descriptions of place and light he always
wants to write. It has Shakespeare-Dickens-Eliot's sort of rustic chorus
and a seducing villain and climactic crime and a grotesque lumber of Biblical
and Classical allusions said to be ironic, and it proses away moralistically
the way Middlemarch does. Tess though is hardly reader-ingratiating
at all. The step from it to Sons and lovers 1913 isn't so far.
Am thinking about it along with Al G's dislikes of the two southern Alberta
pieces I sent him. I hoped for something and didn't get it - shared pleasure
and the sort of specific critical attention I gave student pieces. What
did I get instead and was it just. In the farmer piece I'd have wanted him
to enjoy the little event seen in sharp focus: as always with me the event
itself as well as the way it is written. He saw it as banal documentation
and seeing it that way disdained the burst of feeling in the last line.
He said the narrator's presence in the Rumsey Wheel piece was impressive
but didn't say what in the writing made it so. And then he said hyperbolic
without saying which bit he meant. When he says leave more for the reader
to imagine I'm supposing he means don't be so explicitly female in it so
I don't have to be uneasy seeing someone I'm not. All of that is fair enough,
I asked for comment and he's just being what he is. Is it useful to know
how his sort of man will see what I do though I won't adapt to suit them?
It feels like the philosophy department again: nothing but refusal there,
go on your valiant way.
Would there be any point arguing about it? I don't think so, there wasn't
in the argument we had about the meaning of containment in the Munro story.
I said something he didn't like and he wasn't curious to know what I meant.
So where can I get the kind of penpal I want? It would have to be someone
younger? And would there always have to be more tolerance of limitation
than I'm willing for now?
-
Brad has just knocked on the door offering to do damage to whoever wrecked
my jeep. "You might not like that." "No I would like it."
Phoned Levi to ask for parts last night.
-
- I had a film grant and was living alone in a farmhouse about ten miles
from where I grew up. My neighbour up the road had been digging his pickup
out of a snowbank and had somehow run over himself and was in the hospital
in Grande Prairie. In the afternoon when it was just warm enough to get
the car started I drove to town to see him.
-
- In late December the sky that far north shuts down by about four so
it's already twilight when I leave for home. I decide to take the other
route, west up Richmond Hill and then north on the Wembley-La Glace road.
A blizzard had come up while I was in the hospital so by the time I get
to Richmond Hill there are trucks sliding into the ditch on all sides of
me. My old Studebaker isn't on good tires but I make it up the hill and
past it to the Wembley intersection.
-
- What I see when I turn north makes me stop short and consider. There
are no tracks. From one barbed wire fenceline to the other the whole road
allowance is one wide flat white sheet. There'll have to be a road under
that perfectly smooth sheet of snow but there's no way to see where it
is. I'll be in bad trouble if I get into a ditch here; there are no farmhouses
on this stretch and it looks like no one else will be coming through till
morning. It'll be very cold overnight. But the new snow isn't deep yet
and if I steer straight up the middle of that white sheet I'll have to
be on the road.
-
- I plunge in. Sixteen miles of that, steering straight north following
my headlights through silently falling snow till I get to the plowed La
Glace-Valhalla road.
-
- December 1978
It's odd how when I've posted pieces I have to keep rereading them. I
can't tell whether they're well written. This one - it tells the story so
I think people can see it but is it graceless? It doesn't have the loose
grace journal writing can have. It's more slabbed down. I think. I like
"following my headlights through silently falling snow till I get to
the plowed" - the sequence of vertical l's and their nice sound. "...
makes me stop short and consider. There are no tracks." That for the
way it stops short before it considers. "In late December the sky that
far north shuts down by about four" because late and far have an analogic
chime and so do December and north. Structurally Helmer's accident sets
up a little foreboding of the kind of trouble I could get into. I'm sorry
I didn't get down the slow fraught creeping up through Richmond Hill's fishtailing
confusion of red taillights and yellow headlights amid billowing exhaust
and spotlit falling snow, which I can still sort of see. (Jim said OMG;
thank you, a crit I liked.)
17
Going through Two women working in a room again I'm seeing that
when we were on the trip I couldn't take photos but I was writing. I didn't
know that.
My gamble has been keeping living and writing strictly parallel so the
writing can't be good unless the living also is.
18
The moment late in writing Analog-Digital where I crash through
the floor - I think it's the beginning of the next thing but I can't read
it as written and don't yet know what to do with it.
Parallel in the time is the work excavating abandonment.
-
I posted the Mycenae piece this morning and the woman I don't know said
the voice is like home to her.
-
Today I swore at Cal Coastal to get them to unblock my card; yelled at
ICBC to get permission to move the jeep; took the bike to Save-on and back;
phoned Murray GM to tell them I was taking the jeep to Boyd's and why; climbed
up into a very high tow cab to go fetch it; got a lift home with the assessor
who remembered Flora Gerard when he saw the house. There was a lot of holding
the line which like any waiting stresses my heart so I feel it will crack.
But I'm relieved in the end, I think Boyd's will know where to get parts.
Liked Kevin the elfin tow driver who explained alarming things he was doing.
20
Awake at night I was finishing Jude the obscure. It has just none
of his charm of light and space: social oppression end to end, hysterical
Sue Bridehead trembling and scrupling, handsome earnest Jude enchanted by
her worst insubstantiality and so unknown to himself that he falls for the
first big-breasted woman who beckons. A spindly joyless child who hangs
his baby sibs and himself! For sure Hardy was in a bad mood when he wrote
it. And yes people did and do have sore thwarted lives. In its light Theory's
practice is about pain.
Its limitation is that it shows traumatized people without understanding
trauma. Jude is altogether an orphan, Sue's mother died and the boy was
abandoned by his mom. The book shows downstream effects of trauma but doesn't
understand how it works. It as if blames life in general for what happens
to these people, or religion, or snobbery, or convention.
The most important thing in the world is to learn how to work with trauma?
Joyce's work?
-
Theory's practice is about the process of integrating after more
than one kind of trauma, process meaning how it's done.
24
Ten on a Sunday morning, a bright clear day in blue light, the blue spruce
playing gently all over, my heart shaky after a hard night. Pressure in
the centre of my chest. Left hand quivering on the keyboard. I don't know
how to want to keep going this way.
-
Rowen on the phone about a tarot game he's planning - sent me the letter
he wrote Michael - upright, concise, direct and kind - admirable - describing
the effects of Michael's anger.
[Recap of notes about my feeling for DC]
- Bright and dark
- It's the inside of the body
-
- It's how I felt him - it means feeling? Yes.
-
- A missing part the active mind
- Effective enterprise? Confidence, blaze.
- Repressed by my dad? Yes
- Repressed meaning it's still there? Yes.
- I didn't fully integrate it? No the checks were from outside.
- Active mind recovered in the thesis work? Yes.
- What will help? Win one's way among the established powers who deny,
evade, lie
-
- Specifically the love in the child, and how it was defeated
-
- Does that cover enterprise too? Yes.
-
- He's about becoming effective, she's about becoming wise
- They are opposing principles but should I gender them? No.
- Wise meaning true? YES.
-
- The way you are desiring now wants to find instead of shape
- My habitual imbalance? Yes.
-
- I am going to be able to learn presence of mind in the midst of the
unconscious
- Presence of mind with the newly conscious? Yes.
-
- An owl who is looking at consciousness and unconsciousness at the same
time
- Winged thing an image of integration, larger self, both hemispheres
on, dualities held in balance
-
- An anguish that says at the same time, I want him wholly, terribly,
and, I must hold off because it is not real
- As if I should imagine it possible and at the same time arrange myself
not to.
- I said, I want to eject from it, I'm impatient of the fear. It said,
But you have been patient, you have been beautiful with it
-
- Dualities for instance of desire and clarity, fear and patience, merging
and fighting off
-
- How to work with this flooding of desire
- Have a large open hope, not fixed
- Endure conscious conflict
-
- Love the life of finding
- Go heroically in the sense of bravely, patiently, actively,
- It isn't going into the uncon - it's letting the uncon light up? Yes.
-
- Combat with the unconscious
- The unconscious like a hidden enemy
- It's neither combat nor enemy, it's more endurance and curiosity? Yes.
-
- Underworld is more properly prebirth? YES.
- Which also is repressed.
-
- A slightly pulsing white light that is desire satisfied to be desire.
The way a hand on an arm is a contact that allows a flow so bright, so
soft it must be fluid love
-
- Something there I feel on the edge of
- I'm at the edge of the real thing I know.
- Do we feel ourselves on the edge of the other side - meaning not all
of it is integrated? Yes.
-
- The road is a road you are building
- It is to go to the center
- When you get there you never want to come back
- You are yourself, you aren't worrying
- There's no store there, no storage
-
- Are images of open space images of integration?
- No store means no repression?
- It isn't a road
- The best image is The lovers card
-
- 1. Starling - new life - desire
- Starlings and sweaters black speckled with color - is that how integration
happens physically? Lights up in the midst? Yes.
-
- 2. Stubborn dwarf companion
- Is ego defenses? Yes.
-
- 3. Don't let 2 get at 1.
-
- Had sexual desire been repressed? No but mating desire had.
- Mating desire is attachment desire? Yes.
- Dave C was the mate I should have found when I was mating age? Yes.
- Joyce and Louie together unlatched attachment desire? Yes.
21
I'm discouraged today because last night for the second night in a row
I woke at 2am and couldn't fall asleep again and and because of heart sensation
haven't been able to sleep in the daytime to catch up and today have had
an uneasy heart all day with no relief. I go to bed scared these nights
and lie there monitoring my thoughts to cut off any anxious ones and when
I start to see a little image wake myself up noticing it and worrying that
I'm waking myself up noticing it. Then lying there in the dark on and on
or getting up and peeing and turning on the heat and boiling water to refill
the hot water bottle or reading many pages of The mayor of Casterbridge
which hasn't much of Hardy's best charm until I haven't the energy to read
more and just lie there again.
Luke on the phone yesterday, horrible harsh broken-up Skype connection,
sitting on the porch in my coat and slippers for hours was it. Sun on bare
trees and green grass like England's winter parks, his park across the road.
He patronizes me about getting a smart phone, which even Andy and Roy have,
and I give him my arguments which he has no sympathy for but then I rise
up and say but unlike them I'm writing something on the front edge of the
wave and then he concedes that there might be something right about resisting
the trash habit. Then later I talked to him about Lakoff, which he won't
read, and about trauma and integration.
I'm seeing I should be writing here more even though it's not good and
I don't think can be good. I should be complaining more. I do it to myself
off and on all day a mutter of discouragement but I should back myself up
at least to the extent of being willing to say what I think. If not to the
extent of caring how I look when I go to the store.
- Is Trump going to get a second term
yes
- Am I going to die before the end of 2020
no
- Can I alleviate it some no
- Am I being punished no
- Is it because I'm holding anger
no
- Am I recovering in some ways because of lower bp
yes
-
- Do you want to talk to me yes -
ducks in a row, evasion, deep change, meditation
- Is that an instruction no, list
- I don't feel much confidence in you now
YES
- Because you can't help me with my health
no
- You can? yes
- Those are the things you want to talk about?
yes
- Pay attention to the things I need to reorganize, don't
evade them yes
- When you say meditate do you mean nervous system
yes
- Instructions to body, Space Hotel
yes
-
- Say more about deep change? fight
patriarchy more effectively
- Do something about getting my work seen
yes
-
- Is there something I can do about sleeping well
yes
- Some kind of supp yes
-
- Do you want to die no
- Do you want me to die yes
- Soon? no
- I'm kind of wanting to get it over with
yes
-
- Say more about wanting me to die?
something about the work, plodding child, brilliant and courageous child,
investigate
- Investigate what in me wants to die?
yes
- The one who hasn't succeeded in work
yes (sigh)
- Success being something like fame?
no, effect
- Feeling that nothing I do has any effect
yes
- Is the feeling accurate yes
23
I'd had a bad night but after a good morning cleaning with Kathy I lay
down reading and went peacefully to sleep. Woke suddenly to a burst of feeling
in the centre of my chest - one flash like light or electrical shock - and
then my heart thumping fast. It settled quickly and then was fine for the
rest of the afternoon and on into the evening so I fell asleep fast in the
old good way.
-
Stabbed in the heart by Luke refusing this story:
- Three in the afternoon, third time the phone rang. Outside it's a clear
space of charged light between snow and grey cloud. I'd been joyful in
my complex systems notes. "Hello" I say. "Hello" says
the man. "Hello - oh it's you" overtop his saying hello again.
-
- My obvious joy at speaking to him is lifting us both. I don't ask if
he's coming back. At the end of January a lecture series on chaos theory
in Cambridge with Carlos, Miguel, Manuela, his alternate family he won
for himself. "No, I mean I was literally just looking at my chaos
notes when you phoned." He has his copy in front of him. "I was
so glad to get my books out" he says.
-
- Ranier like Fuji turning under the wing. Irrigation circles near Denver
where snow blew over the runways and he joined a flight from Honolulu,
half empty carrying home celebrators in Hawaiian shirts. He couldn't see
New York as they flew out over the sea but there were so many stars.
-
- How is it I assume my spirit is seeing in him too - as if I feel or
imagine the space in his head and it's the color and specific density of
the space in mine. Do I feel that about anyone else? What it was like speaking
to him - is like, thinking of it - is elation. A banner. In the throat,
is it? And forehead.
-
- December 1992
I said:
this one okay?
He said:
Yes. But no. I don't exist in the past tense and
it's not just a story. If I believed there was something specific about
the writing I might but I don't feel that
I said:
i don't agree there's nothing specific about the writing but i don't
think it will help to argue.
it is a story and it is my story not yours. my feelings are hurt that
you don't want to be named in it but i have given you that right.
I'm seeing something I hadn't. It is my story not his: I'm telling
what it's like for me to feel him and maybe what it's like for other women
to feel their sons - that is the thing in the writing that's specific. I
expect him to like it but he could only like it if he could want to know
what it's like to be me. Instead he hates to hear it which in fact is hating
me. And it's radical hate because I've given him to see exactly who I am,
I've shown myself more intimately than most do and exactly that self is
who he hates. That's a stab at heart so sharp it makes me want to just go
away.
- Is he right to hate it no
- Should I just go ahead and post things without permission
no
- Is there anything you want to say about this
no
- I've handled it yes
- Should I block him on facebook no
- He's arrogant
YES
- So should we have a break now no
25
There was a file called running off on my desktop, June 2012.
I don't remember why. It was too dense to read. Yesterday I spaced it out:
oh the young woman with light shoulders and short hair
she was thirty something thirty three
she liked to see herself in the mirror in the north room the white room
with light on the green wall
she was struggling lyrically she was eager
she was eager to be in fine thoughts
she had magic enough to capture the best and she was running with it
conversation was excellent she was a lesbian
she was her own woman in free beauty between genders
she was studying the light in water the light in glass
she was lit transparency herself
and arabian inks red green and blue
the light was early and crystalline
in the bare house dames rocket white mauve pink with early sun on the
green wall and the mirror
the house had windows in every direction so the sun roved through the
rooms from earliest sunrise
the city was there the old city still there with the new a great space
with few sounds
she was poor
she could afford coffee and toast
she would sometimes go for breakfast at the fisherman's dock sometimes
for lunch at the princess café
her chinese neighbour would bend in her garden planting peas
there were weeds in the alley the mountains would stand shining in the
north
-
I make money I help young women think better
I have the works of long persistence not short inspiration
I follow through I can make a lovely page I can promote myself
I say that with some bitterness because what I am now is not worth promoting
can I promote the lithe woman who didn't promote who moved with loving
lightness
I resent myself I do resent myself for what I'm not
there I stop and go empty I don't know what follows
should I be saying the lyrical woman is gone I am something else now
I am a methodical sorter
I can say gracefully what I have to say that's what I am that's what
this age is
rather than setting out on a lone road with fine adventures what else
I am given questions by students I answer them I work my way through
mistakes people live badly in
I sort I can do that but I miss what I was before I knew so much
there I sigh there I agree with myself look at the dry limb hanging
from the oak that broke in winter and hangs there spoiling the shape of
the tree
is it wrong to sort the way I can no but with students I don't sort
far enough into the world
I have to be this thick sorter now sane at least though not much wanted
-
the sun is brushing through bushes on the hill brushing through the
tips of wild oats
touching the flanks of the hills with soft pressure sideways everywhere
stroking slopes standing square to the light
that slope standing square to the light the great trees standing square
do they stand square no they stand with composure in the light they
stand out from the sides of the earth to catch light that all day rotates
around them
the shape of the tree tells the story of the sun this branch is here
because in june there is sun in this way
I don't like this cedar through no fault of its own
look at it have I seen it that way before lit top to bottom from the
northeast
woodpeckers stop on the corner of the roof so I see their red caps and
tough bills
cars are going to work it's 7 I'd like to go somewhere
I did like myself when I was blasting up black canyon road with music
and wildflowers that was right
the little moth spinning by the sunlit hard-leafed branch is right
this oak is woodpecker village its streets its lanes and perches
morning morning the scallopped paths of birds
is any of it good I am always asking
are you any good are you still any good should I kill you
who asks that
does it happen like that a small one who has an accident and isn't what
she was would she herself decide she was botched or is it the one looking
after her who decides it
my mother was a monster of hunger and misinformation
it's been a scrambled day I woke at night and pulled up the green blanket
then slept again till after seven saw the morning next to me went to make
tea
26
> The way you fought with Lise around me
was child abuse. The way you yelled at me and threatened to hurt me was
child abuse. This abuse has affected me for my entire life.
Rowen's letter to Michael. How is it that he called it brutal when it's
clear and kind.
My birth mother wasn't good at being a mother
to me
That isn't completely true is it. Daily-caretaker-mom isn't the only
way to be a good mother. I wasn't a daily-caretaker mom, Michael was that
and I was more of a dad-mom. Money, clothes, books, prestige, intelligent
contacts. Sanity, clarity. Information. Advocacy. When I said to Louie that
I hadn't been a good mother she said no I was a good mother because I don't
lie to my kids. - I'm saying these things to Rowen.
-
Bought a thrilling red coat online, Aritzia Coccoon. I'm now XL oh dear.
27
- pour out
- the drink due Earth
- and give the thirsty dead their sip
-
- There's no regaining
- what is gone, I understand that,
- but I act so that something better
- may happen in days to come.
Aeschylus 1981 Persians trans. Lembke and Herington
29
Can there be anything to say about the Civic Centre's Christmas concert.
Full meaning of backwater. The MC a barrel-bellied huckster from Radio 101
who was willing to lie after every item and even to say there was more talent
in Merritt than anywhere he'd been though that couldn't possibly be true
given the evidence we were seeing. The Community Band trudged through carols.
Choirs sang medleys with touches of dissonance to signal modernity - Sacred
Heart choir, Free Church choir, Community Choir - the worst of them a row
of weak-looking thin blond 6-9 year olds waving their arms robotically to
many verses of a song about Jesus. A woman who couldn't play the cello accompanied
an ungainly person who imagined she could sing Pie Jesus. A women's
strings and flutes group could not keep time. The miserable-looking local
piano teacher played something pretentious with crashing chords and little
tinkles.
There seemed to be no Native people. Lot of white-haired widows in their
eighties. Rodeo boss in a white stetson sitting in the front row. Hardly
anyone under forty.
A woman one seat away on my left spoke to me so pleasantly that I shiffed
over and asked to see her program. She was new here. Where had she come
from? The Peace River Country. No kidding! She'd grown up in a tiny place
called Bay Tree on the Alberta side of the border east of Dawson Creek and
had just now been living in Sexsmith. She was eighty-three. You're halfway
between me and my mom I said. She had the prosperous coherence of my aunts'
generation, more pulled-together and better dressed than my mom knew how
to be, bit of make-up, permed white hair, earrings, red banlon sweater with
a fine gold chain, black skirt, black pantyhose and narrow black shoes.
I asked what she'd done. She'd always looked after children she said, her
own, her grandchildren, her greatgrandchildren. "And you're a woman
of accomplishment, I sense." How did she guess that? I was there with
my messy queue in my usual rags and sneakers walking with a green trekking
pole.
-
My jeep is home! Locked safe in the garage.
30
To Greg:
My brilliant friend. You recommended it, my friend Cheryl recommended
it, and I could not read it though I tried several times. Lately I got
the audiobook from the library and wd lie in bed listening to it. It was
well read in a slow thoughtful tone I wdn't have imagined for myself but
I still couldn't get interested in all those many names. Now that I have
the DVD of the first season on video I'm understanding more about why it
was unreadable. The writing is almost completely undescriptive. None of
the names are bodies and faces and the days and places are completely blank.
On video there they all are, though the non-actor's acting depends heavily
on silent stares. Even in the video, though, the oppressiveness of Lila
and Lenu's circumstance gets to me. I can see how the sensory blankness
of the writing is a blankness in the lives that whole community is living.
- That finally names it. I've glommed onto sensory writing - what English
writers have been to me - Sons and lovers - Hardy at his best - via
the Romantics Emily of New Moon where I first discovered it. The
sensory blankness of Naples' urban poverty is the same as the blankness
of the Mennonites I grew up with. It's there even in Anne's writing. It's
why I feel I've flown the coop into another lineage. The sensoriness of
my writing is also why many people don't connect with it.
-
[Hugh Kenner 1951 The poetry of Ezra Pound]
of the language one can remark only, within
its own standards, the perfection
better writer of English - is more aware of
the resources of his medium
rational delight in his procedures
doing jobs of perception and vitalization
ability to maintain an unbroken melodic line,
compelling intricate rhymes to function rather than ornament
prized and conserved this unaltered morsel
selecting, weighing, relating, juxtaposing
reports on investigations into ranges of experience
set out to embody emotions actually undergone,
to discrimate modes of moral and passionate being, to afford volitional
nutriment, to define phases of civilization in terms of human relations
- Embody is wrong, evoke? Dilate, clarify, connect. Discriminate and
evaluate modes. Give instances for energizing recognition. Compare cultures
and eras.
In me learning to write has been absolutely identified with learning
to live. As principled commitment.
He keeps up values.
the tension, interplay, and mutual modification
among juxtaposed units each of which is the verbal embodiment of a sharply
defined perception
- In my connectionist vision it's evocation with mutual modification
in the usual way except that with Pound his unfamiliar terms evoke nothing.
reaches toward political efficiency on the one
hand and lyric intensity on the other
excitement of inspecting, as it were from behind
glass, a new mode of being
I have to keep sidestepping Kenner's misogyny. He needs to contrast Pound's
hard masculinity with for instance Tennyson's 'submersive' femininity when
what's wrong with Tennyson is his robotic sing-song and febrile piety.
the imagist's fulcrum is the process of cognition
itself
trying to record the precise instant when a
thing outward and objective darts into a thing subjective
the reality of the nous,
of mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten
glass that envelops us, full of light
no cloud, but the crystal body
the tangent formed in the hand's cup
as live wind in the beech grove
as strong air amid cypress
- He likes that but I don't think he understands the intuition it evokes
- prebirth and cortical and cosmological all at the same time - absolutely
numinous - all those god-grounds of being at the same time.
Any theory of poetics, any theory of language, is, implies, follows from,
a theory of knowledge.
Wordsworth, Coleridge securing a space within which a few good poems
could be written, but because the philosophical terminology had all to be
taken from the opposition the theories that got built with such tools were
mostly piles of brush
who did not need to spend nine-tenths of his
time unthinking the thought of his time
- Hasn't it been more than nine-tenths.
language considered as a structure of directed
perceptions
I spoke to him one day of Guido's precise interpretive
metaphor pointing out that Guido thought in accurate terms, that the phrases
correspond to definite sensations undergone
Precision of simile in Dante.
The sense of intellectual adventure, 'too necessary
a conclusion from all the more intelligent activity of many decades for
there to be the least question of its belonging to anyone in particular'
-
How has it happened that I'm now walking fast two blocks up the
alley and back?
December 1
7:30 on a Sunday morning. The street is pale grey except for the line
of Christmas lights I saw the new neighbour putting up yesterday.
How did it happen that I slept eight hours unbroken!
I sent running off to Emilee and Sonja, who have said nothing.
Then I thought they aren't old enough to deal with it, I'll send it to Cheryl.
She said that when she reads my pieces "The writing takes me up. I
am where the writing is." "And then I want to talk to it. Have
opinions, observations, disagreements, dialogue." But she doesn't.
She gives me an abstract summary.
Yesterday I posted this:
- At the airport he stood outside and watched me in line at the UA counter.
He was moved and charmed he said to see me looking about, cast into responsibility
for myself, alert. He came back and leaned against my shoulder. I turned
without startling. He said my body knew it was him.
-
- The plane from San Diego to San Francisco took off at five in the afternoon
and flew over water all the way. I had a seat just in front of the wing
on the left side. There was a new moon riding steadily above and ahead
of the wing tip.
-
- As we flew the sky darkened. At first there was a tinted haze back
toward Mexico, a greyish purplish pink. Then as we left the San Diego marine
layer behind the sky simplified to vivid post-sunset bands, dark orange
at the horizon, lighter orange, gold, pale yellow, bluish-white, pale blue,
and then dark blue shading up into the black. The crescent moon and the
small wingtip light were brilliant together in the blackness above the
brilliant band.
-
- January 2003
- No one particularly noticed it but I've kept thinking of it. I see
the horizon's brilliant colors against the black. A rare gentle moment of
actual love, humans together in daylight on the ground, then a point of
observation alone in cosmos motionless flying north.
Why didn't anyone get it?
exists as it were disembodied this intangible
mode of impersonality ... finely wrought stasis... . Personality stripped
of contingencies has become at length a point of light moving through possible
worlds
rhythmic and melodic articulation to states
of consciousness
roughly dactylic metre of the Cantos
most intricate combinations of visual, tactile,
neuro-muscular and rhythmic to be found in the last phase of Shakespeare
Why did he say neuro-muscular rather than just
muscular? It's all neural. He meant somatic and didn't have the word?
strategic audacities of the later Cantos
problems of constatation
this dual function, marking historically a perceptive
maximum ...; epistemologically a new [something] let loose in English
'Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven' does not
dump matter out of an old book into a medium, it epiphanizes the Anglo-Saxon
elegiac sensibility. ... it endures as a building-stone
The flame - it's the one with 'Thou hooded opal, thou eternal
pearl, / O thou dark secret with a shimmering floor' - 'Provence knew' -
knows a use of sex to go far into trance?
2
normal line, about the length of English pentameter,
whose pace is related to that of unstudied breathing
the heroic tends to lengthen this unit, the
pathetic to shorten it
The structural unit is still the single line
... (each line, that is to say, still calls fairly dramatic attention to
its point of ending)
- Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,
- in what hall have you heard it;
not merely lines of alternate lengths, but an
actual current of movement forward and back ... a new momentum ... a new
way of articulating extended passages of English verse
indentations enacting the tension between ecstatic
arrest and rhythmic chant
sensitivity to the weight of Latin abstract
definition in unexpected contexts ... organized as it were by stiffening
and relaxing the texture of the vocabulary
The rhythm is not a means of beating time but
of grouping words ... sometimes avoids the normal speech-pause and sometimes
syncopates with it
import the distancing, balancing, savouring
sensibility into passages of transcription and enumeration
devices for organizing verse by shifts of texture
and tone
- She passed and left no quiver in the veins, who
now
- Moving among the trees, and clinging
- in the air she severed,
- Fanning the grass she walked on then, endures:
- Grey olive leaves beneath a rain-cold sky.
- ! How did he do it? 1915.
found himself with precision and sincerity
The moon-nymph, the lynxes, the Chinese sages,
the healing rain, unite with the gun-roosts and the dialogue of murderers
to form new perceptive wholes by vigorous fusion
distinguishing motivations and qualities of
insight solely by groupings of connotative or etymological
structural unit a concentrated manifestation
of a moral, cultural or political [something] ... method the studied juxtaposition
of such revelations ... entire cultures, motivations, and sensibilities
- that we shd / learn our integrity
- that we shd / attain our integrity
Wordsworth's electrical force of startling juxtapositions
... limpid diction
to fix for recurrent contemplation rare accesses
of insight and emotion
feelings as are aroused on slow reading ...
sense of which apprehensible
language of exploration, this music whose silences
are filled with the elaborative spinning of invisible filaments
a notebook of insights .... Notation of insights
and affirmation of values
held together by the fields of force their proximity
generates
Other languages and quotations also: 1. sound, 2. instances of national
character, 3. temporal peg, 4. evidence of cross-cultural match, 5. irreducible
aptness
3
Yesterday I posted the story about Ros and Joe Slovo. The first para
is unusually snappy - I reread it feeling that I'd be a popular writer if
I always sounded like that. This morning I've posted the polio story. It's
not snappy but it's lucid. It stands firm: here I am, make what you can
of it.
-
- Luke has unfriended me for calling Roy drunken?
yes
- Will he get over it YES
- Soon? no
- A year? no
- Some months? yes
4
This morning I've posted the Port Townsend photo of myself on the beach
when I was 30, by which I'm saying yes that thing about my leg but also
this: I was a beauty. But when I looked for writing to put with it there
was nothing I didn't write off as shapeless and vacuous. And what is the
photo really. Oh young skin. Empty spectacles. A rust crown. - I remembered
it as looking hard but now when I look again what it seems is sad.
Why is the writing so bad. I was closed with Paul on account of Roy.
I was managing male perfidy this time by hard refusal. That was working
but didn't interest me. I needed to record my triumph rather than my free
experience.
complex fusion of lovely austerities
technical interests always connected with qualities
of perception and civilization
the place of a plot was taken by interlocking
large-scale rhythms of recurrence
forms of language out of touch with any conceivable
perception. Their remedy depended on slow and tireless perception
an interesting style will be found to consist
in a constant succession of tiny unobservable surprises
- 'That saw never the olives under Spartha
- 'With the leaves green and then not green,
- 'The click of light in their branches;
weighing of passage against passage as the poem's
modus of structural unity
a sound that will last long enough for the succeeding
sound or sounds to catch up, traverse, intersect it
the secret of major form consists in the precise
adjustment of the intervals between disparate or recurrent themes or items
or rhythms
it never entered their heads that people would
make music like steam ascending from a morass. They thought of music as
traveling rhythm going through points or barriers of pitch and pitch-combinations.
These groupings the function of a tact, a scrupulous
fidelity to his experience, which in turn registers the intensity wherewith
-
-
- Luke says it's not what I said about Roy, is that true
no
- It's that I mentioned his name at all?
no
- If I'd said 'I put my baby in a pushchair' would it have
been alright with him? no
- He dislikes the journal project altogether
YES
- He basically wants to dump me NO
- He thinks mentioning him at all is exploitation
yes
- Do you think it is NO
- Should I reply no
What is my doubt - that there is something pathetic about
needing to post my journal stories rather than having a personal life.
- It can be seen as brave and accomplished
YES
- Do you understand why he doesn't see it that way
YES
- He doesn't actually love me yes
- He's wounded in relation to me yes
- That's what it's really about yes
-
- Can he be alright with Nelida yes
- So just let him go YES
5
'for your own validation,' 'for your selfish purposes' -
- Should I never have my own purposes in relation to him
no
- I obviously have to have my own purposes
yes
- He feels I should be sacrificial in relation to him
yes
- We demand it in relation to mothers
yes
-
- We can only love our mothers if they've been altogether
faithful yes
- And then what we love is their devotion not themselves
yes
I'm thinking of my mom, "I saw it right away that the picture was
gone." Her fury at losing something other than me that she named as
me.
conception of aesthetic honesty showed from
the first an alignment with concepts of personal and governmental honesty
and with inspection of the moral and emotional quality of cultures and civilizations
emotional discernment, precise observation and
verbal exactness
they think for the whole social order
abandon clandestine egotism
to be unmoved by these emotions is to stand
in the axis
being moved by these passions is the universe's
outspread process of existence
-
Civic Centre Christmas dinner with Kathy and Lee and Kathy's mom Dorothy
and Dorothy's brothers Bob and Gordie and Bob's wild woman and an ostrich-faced
man called Frank. Gloria Moses was there looking fine-grained among - how
many, 700? - exceptionally coarse-looking people of many ages. A man with
a mic was shouting almost continuously in the brutal acoustics of the big
hall.
When I was on the way to the door afterward I stopped at the last table
to look at carvings. Some were in a beautiful many-colored stone the carver
sitting behind the table said was soapstone he'd found himself. I tried
awkwardly to talk to him - awkwardly-humbly because I began to like him
and didn't feel he'd necessarily like me back - because he works with stone
and in this stupid redneck community can want to make something beautiful.
We kept being interrupted by the booming PA so I didn't see much but I did
see that his good steady face was a beautiful copper color. Charles Brown
Nlaka'pamux from Lytton.
Nlaka'pamux used to be called the Thompson Salish. The Nicola Valley
Scw'exmx (creek) division of the Nlaka'pamux that includes the Shackan and
the Shulus speaks a different dialect. Jan-Marie's Annie Yorke was Spuzzum
Nlaka'pamux.
6
The appointment day came and is past. Dr McLeod said the overdeveloped
ventricle will go back to normal as long as my blood pressure stays controlled
and that it isn't what causes the arrhythmia. I should give up black tea,
any kind of caffeine he thinks. (No.) Radio astrology at Cambridge and still
goes to conferences. He doesn't notice what I say about myself.
Jennifer on FB today. Savanna's Native dad has been missing almost two
weeks. When I asked how she got connected with that community she said she
had a street life for a while when she was young - she wasn't addicted or
homeless but she was closer to street people than to her family. I asked
if she'd written about that time. She said she'd kept a journal. Ah, a book
.
7
Still musing about Luke. Trying to be watchful to stay out of defensive
poses. Which -
1. He has found another family, he'll be better without me.
2. I don't need him. He's useless to my lonely state. He says he loves
me but he doesn't like what I actually am. He doesn't see my value.
3. He's like other men who need women to be sacrificial and invisible.
4. He's indulging immaturity, he's lazy about seeing into himself.
5. He feels inferior to me and needs to invent ways of feeling better
than me.
6. It's pointless to explain to him because he doesn't understand.
- Are any of these true no
9
Emilee's eulogy for Butch Vaylor:
Most of religious liturgy I can do without but
dust to dust I understand. Stardust to ashes.
Butch wasn't religious either but he was a vehement
believer.
-
What you see as exploitative self-validation others can see as brave,
generous and accomplished, a gift.
What you say tells me you don't understand what my mission is in this
life or how I accomplish it. It's not your job to - I agree - but it does
mean that when you say you love me you have no idea what you're talking
about. I've said before: I'd like you to see me more accurately; that would
help you too.
Secondly: you didn't have the mother you need. I'm sorry you didn't.
Neither did I. Neither do many people. We work with it.
- Are these true yes
- Should I send them yes
- I should send them?! YES
- He'll be furious yes
- And never speak to me again no
11
When I'm reading the Saturna winter I can easily see what's wrong with
the writing.
Random scraps. Why was I noting the wrong things - little anxieties.
"Come badness tell me everything." I felt I had to take account
of the insecurity of my position.
Sometimes grandiose.
Are the notes relevant.
Was any of the work useful.
I want to white out everything about Jam because of her mentat bullying.
Later the oppression of Louie's inexperience and jealousy and dependent
emotionality and thwarted rage.
I'm grateful to men who didn't press me to be other than I am. Rob is
the one who actually loved. Tom looked after himself roughly but he let
me be.
- Was being with Jam good for me in any way
NO
Jam's instability that I didn't study as such - the way she'd swing from
liking to anger. Easily overwhelmed.
oh i am so lost in such deep trouble, wher ar
u , y don't u phone wer u put off the last time
i don't need to burrow into yr armpit today,
but when u come home, come home any way it is, noisy, thumping up the stairs,
to hell w mudras & coming quietly undisturbing o I love how u'v deposited
in me, little teeth, & i love all those other parts u'r keeping w you.
please come home soon, make company
[Jam's handwriting in pencil on a scrap of paper]
part 4
time remaining volume 8: 2019-2020 may-march
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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