| volume 8 of time remaining: april 2019 - march 2020 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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Writing projects. Working on Theory's practice thoughout but deking out into other sections of the journals. I go on posting edited excerpts on Facebook every day. A hard winter. Miseries of inflammatory pain, weakness and sleeplessness. Nights and weeks of cardiac worry. Garden notes and photos as usual. In Part 4 I bring home two cats. Passages from earlier journals are inset.
mentioned: Sonja Swift, Greg Morrison, Tom Fendler, Luke, Rowen, Louie E, Jam Ismail, Ed Epp, Mary Epp, Kate Soule, Jody Frey, Kathy Bara, Paul Epp, Dr Don McLeod, Freya Cirulis, Frank Doerksen, Jennifer Flower, Joyce Frazee, Emilee Baum, Brad Smith the house painter, Colin Thomas, Ken Sallitt, Trudy Rubenfeld, Gilles Pruneau, Charles Brown Nlaka'pamux carver from Lytton. Merritt, Pennask Lake Road, St Michael's church, Midday Valley Road, Kekuli Cafe. Festiva Maxima, Lark Ascending, Generous Gardener, Sharifa Asma, Beverly Pepper, Alice Munro, Ronin Modul 36, Middlemarch, Sons and lovers, Emily of New Moon, Nicola Valley Scw'exmx (creek) division of the Nlaka'pamux. |
May 2 2019 When I pull up to the garden these days I'm amazed how much happens in the last half of April. Iris, maralroot, gooseberries and currants, rhubarb, tulips. Iceland poppies white and yellow one of each, primula, grape hyacinth, that early moss phlox, the dark red legs of paeony clumps. The mauve Iris next to the steps has three buds. 7 Note from Sue, "vivid and quietly surprising". I liked quietly surprising. 8 Hacking at Theory's practice or whatever it will be called puzzling now about what to leave out. Is it ultimately about conditions of function. What it took emotionally for a woman to be that clear and pointed and persistent in theory was repeatedly having to mediate traumatized instinct and cultural pressure. 16 Think about what it is about commas, why I have used so much too many and others do too. It's a breaking-up. Why I took them for granted and don't like them now. 19 It's a story about tackling patriarchy in person and in philosophy at the same time. Ways tackling patriarchy includes tackling the mother. John Clare's journal. October 13, 1832. "I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc."
31 Yesterday late afternoon sitting on the sidewalk scooting along on my bum to weed the fence edge. It's thick with feathery California poppy and other wildflower seedlings all young and bright and I was liking to notice how right the weed seedlings looked among them, goosefoot for instance, young and bright too and of the right meadowy forms. [entrance path] [Festiva Maxima] Happiness of light and warmth and invention and for this while nothing hurting. June 6 Yesterday morning a bit of dream that was as if seeing from our yard at midsummer an earliest dawn, exactly the clear far long horizon with just a smudge of pink. I woke thinking the dream gave me what I wouldn't be have been able to imagine as well. A high pure dawn. 14 Paul asleep in his Mercedes camper at the front door. 15 Do I want to say anything about Paul. Just the pleasure of seeing him lighter and clearer, kindly and prosperous and interested. Scent of mock orange in the room. First canning, strawberries tucked into the cupboard tonight. 19 Yesterday with Paul Pennask Lake Road up onto grassland so high and wide we could see coast mountains. New grass, last of the flowers, horses. 21 The green sea came and went on its slow long shore. Frigate birds cruised north exactly over the coastline and pelicans dropped like suddenly folded umbrellas. - Was going to post woman washing her hair this morning with photos and needed a few more sentences. Wrote those and was glad I could. 27 Freya said like Kerouac accounts of a free and wandering life. I said the free and wandering parts of a life. 30 This leg and its life of disgrace. July 11 This morning early I posted the paragraph about Ed saying Would you still want her. Crashing silence from my usual readers because they can't say 'like'. Jim Mann for most of the day was the only person who would admit to having seen it ('sad'). Later on Karen Campbell said the same. What do I think would have been the right response. Someone saying What an asshole. Hard mornings, heart shaky, light-headed if I try to work, baffled and scared. It gets better in the early afternoon. 12 Good day from the beginning. Wasn't feeble. Garden photos. Tremaine graveled the paths, I canned raspberries and red currants. Surprised noticing I'm stronger for instance getting up off the little bench in the garden and the verandah couch. August 1 Bemused. Yesterday I looked up the exam results day from 56 years ago to see whether it could be one of my FB stories. Awkward, not good, but I copied and pasted it. This morning I zipped through it clipping this and that and posted it doubtfully. Then amazed that Janet said it was a gorgeous piece of work that evokes a deep sense of time and place. When I look at it now I can see it actually is a quite deft collaboration. 18's light spirit is the best of it and 74's judgment cleaned it up. "Lila admired it. Ranje admired it. We sat in the row and ate cookies while we admired it." Yesterday my pussy musk story was surprisingly ignored. Don't any of you people like to smell your crotch? People like the story-stories that have a narrative twist. Feminist stories sometimes liked and stories with photos. Most disappointing is only four people for the Vi Thompson story. There are people who show up only for something that's in their purview - cousin Violet in the story about Opa and Oma. 4 August. Blank white sky. Crows, one flapping through, one on St Michael's cross looking north. Sunday, isn't it. This is too slow. It can't tap the mist of sad worry I am. Stoic hopelessness. 6 The little stories. Are what I do. Are all I do except for this and that in the garden. - It has never been like this, that I don't want to talk to myself. What would I have to talk about if I did.
13 Awake too early thinking of Tom, thinking that what it was about us was that we are in life in the same way, alone and mortal venturing watchfully. 18 It's because of posting stories that I've lost heart for writing here - isn't it - I'm judging my moments unworthy before they're written. 19 What do I like about it. Its tone. The calm warm even tone of self-pleasure. Its naturalness of movement from topic to topic. It does what it says it's going to, discovers what sort of moment it is. It's better than most of the pieces but out of their range? Mostly my readership likes when there is one scrap of something in a piece that they know too - one scrap: a small ranch, Seventeen magazine, a kind of tea. People always like the photos more. They don't notice the writing (Janet notices a scrap of it, one phrase or 'a character' but in a conventional way that embarrasses me). But Emilee does. Sue does and says why, "vivid and quietly surprising", "startling tenderness", "quiet way these stories unfold". This morning everyone is ignoring panther presumably because of "Think of a big panther dick up your panther pussy he says". Laughing to think of it. (Emilee likes it though.) (But she doesn't ever say why.) One of these days I'll post the one where I get into my pants on the bus after Seattle. Aunt Lillian, you there? Thinking just now that I've tried to send the little stories to the people they are about but that has never worked - Luke, Rowen, Tom, Louie, David - but even they feel them differently when they're public. There are people-stories that seem to belong to regular writing - Buddy Hardy, Ida Davies, Vi Thompson, Mike and Freckles, Hughie, Madge Herron, Oma in the Tabor, Eric, Jane the nurse, Mrs Harris, the Jansens, Madame Matter, Stephen Davis - what Janet called novels - and I've needed to tell them because of the sharp thing I feel for them as lives - but I also think they are not what I want noticed, which is to say what I want somehow to notice myself. Is that it? (Sigh.) Meaning a stylistic thing. 23 Happy because of the color in the verandah - I wanted to make a beach house sunroom in what was a grim space - Brad has spray-painted the dirty ceiling and the grey stucco and tomorrow will paint the door and window frames and I've added Cariboo Moss to the t&g under the windows - it's just right, I keep wanting to see it again. 28 Yesterday there was a perfect soft warm breeze from the south that came through the house from one door to the other. As I was reading on the verandah couch I was feeling the summer had begun just now, I'd missed its earlier months. I have red roses, pink roses, orange nasturtiums, late sweetpeas, white phlox, pink cosmos, purple salvia. Seeds collected. I have a wonderfully clean house thanks to Kathy's four hours yesterday. I'm giving away carrots and potatoes and tomatoes. I have cucumbers, a few. I have clean clothes whenever I want. Here's my bed in this less closed-in longer room. I've been strong enough to clean. Small birds are feasting on my sunflowers. - In the last few minutes of this morning's doze I was suddenly looking down the stairs of 820A to a pile of packages and letters next to the last step. It was the kind of instant clear vision I've sometimes taken as a message but I didn't read it as a message until later. Then I thought - it's where I'd see mail that had come through the slot - mail - is it saying my PIN number has finally arrived. Went to Kekuli for breakfast still thinking maybe - and to the post office after - and there it was.
There was a feeling with the image, of being pleased to see especially a wrapped square parcel like a gift.
29 Brad the painter described me to his wife as a little old lady. I thought about it overnight and then said he should call me Dr Epp. Which he did quite gleefully. September 1 6:03 oh baking sky. On the hill's rim small clouds like large animals trekking north. Thank you quiet corner. Whitening now. Why is it a well-being having my bed in this room. I've never liked the back room's blindness and tightness. And this room feels finished now, more complete, more interesting. I can lie in bed listening to music or books. My nights have come into my work day. Something had happened when I woke and went on happening all day. 4
Luke in Venezuela. 7 Saturday 6 in the morning, wonderful sky, clear, sheer, tinted orange at the horizon behind the black trees - now rapidly brighter - flushed pink to zenith - and now beyond, arcing over, kindling wisps, reaching south - now gold behind the trees - now paling to almost white - not white, what is it, blue that's gold that's no nameable color, livid - now brighter still, zenith actual blue past its frail tissues of vapour. 8 I posted one of the dry pieces this morning and have liked it all day especially above the delicate precision of Sharifa Asma. I thought Emilee would like it - I think she's probably the only one who gets the dry pieces - and she did but what she needed to say was more about her love than about the piece, which makes me sorry. [Generous Gardener] [Lark Ascending] I'm listening to Ronin waiting for Row and Freya. The music and the frail late light made me see how the lamp post stands between the linden and the spruce showing their separated vertical togetherness. I wanted to photograph it and got the window up and did though the photo doesn't say what I saw. - There's Ronin winding up toward the end of Modul 36. Am a bit elated to have discovered music. And my house when I'm imagining guests seeing it looks lively now, clumps of nasturtiums on the plate rails and a pink vase on the kitchen table, light on in the rich red room. My bed looks royal backed against the wainscot and it completes the room, makes it as if more about a full life than about the walls. 9 Something I'm seeing as I name paras - which involves sorting, moving lines from one para to another, subdividing a sequence - is the way a number of topics are suspended in any discussion. "There are such a lot of ideas" Steven said. I'm seeing that it's because it's a web, a mesh, so that at any point there are implications I'm feeling in many directions. Pennask Lake Road this aft with Row and Freya. 10 Seeing it yearning to claim it, to come back many times, to know it foot by foot. It could be my Black Canyon Road, I could have a loved road here too. See it when it's blooming, when the aspens are yellow. Rowen in the back seat said There's a bear. I said It's a stump. But no, a black bear standing among bushes at the mouth of a coulee looking toward us. Hawks. At its height of land the slopes fall away for a hundred miles to small peaks on the horizon. Here, just here. Here's my house. Yesterday that sky was dark slate-blue. The slopes were an even pale gold with small green-blue clumps of sage, such an effect. In the north a huge boiling-up of white cloud carved into caverns. Aspen bluffs snugged into the north side of hills. A little slough with a lot of small ducks. 13 8:30 at night. These days I work. Hours in the morning and some later. I can. 17 Sometimes when I've posted a piece I see that it's better than others by a sort of looser coherence. Not accidental but loose. Yesterday I posted wolf and saw it that way. 19 Lying awake too early I was thinking of Rowen's visit, that I didn't write about it and should have and why didn't I. One thing was his hugs - he'd put his arms around me and just hold me. The last time was when they were going home. I was sitting on the footstool and he sat down on the other end of it and put his arms around me so my head was on his shoulder and his head bent against mine, a warm and quite soft fit. "I was thinking you're the right size and shape for a hug." "I was thinking the same thing about you." He told this story: that on one of his shoots there was a woman he found unaccountably beautiful. He kept looking at her and wondering why. She had dark hair and dressed in jeans and men's shirts and sneakers. Then he realized she looked like his mom. I was telling them the story of getting rid of the enlisted for life guy at Moonlight Beach by using male touchiness about their bubbles, saying to Tom "I'm going to get rid of him," Tom alarmed "What are you going to do?", I "Something subtle." Then described the sensation of pressure coming from the side and the moment when I turned the binocs just a titch. The story lit him up more than anything in the visit. "It's like 'Number five in the corner pocket', you said what you were going to do and how you were going to do it and then you did it. He went away thinking that stupid woman didn't know what she was doing." 24 Part 1. A fifty year old woman is hit hard by desire for what she doesn't actually want. She's living in disabling confusing self-contradiction, massively in pain. She understands that emotional debts she has stayed ahead of have come due. She's willing, she takes them on, she has faith in the work and she has three kinds of help but it's long and painful. There are six months in which it takes most of her time, then a second six months in which though that work continues she is at the same time quite easily and as if almost peripherally defining for herself and setting up a fundable PhD project that consolidates her years of private study and that she has already got herself into position to launch. There's a hinge. She performs a commitment ritual. Part 2. She begins her PhD, gets funding, drives to California to work with the best department in her field. There she meets a man who is in some ways her counterpart, who has been struggling in his own contradictions and has come to his own form of commitment. They take each other on. Their previous defenses and accommodations are massively challenged. This goes on for years. There are many shocks and checks. They work through them again and again. In the meantime her work also keeps breaking through. It keeps getting harder but her project widens until it's a coherent new vision of what humans are. She graduates and moves to be with her friend. Part 3. She lives in California and has a teaching job. Shocks and checks with her friend go on but she's lighter in them, she's more at home in the world. Her teaching work draws on both her emotional work and her theoretical work. Part 4. She's getting old, alone again trying to tell the story of parts 1-3 before she dies. Part 5? There's been something else from earlier and all along, a paradisal vision in pictures and writing. She has gathered bits of it but goes on not knowing what to do with them. 26 I read her love declarations and feel she's completely off her rocker, and then I realize that everything she was declaring she wanted came to her eighteen months later. It's as if my beam had found Tom in the distance and my feeling was simply misaimed. Can that esoteric description be true? It says yes. 28 Snow on the crests this morning. The linden's still full but half yellow. Down here every morning wet streets. 29 It's almost 6pm and I've worked since 7. A Sunday. I could work that long because I was working on the falling in love months with Tom. October 8 It was raining last night and this morning there was wet snow on the garden. The hills have gold touches amid their white. 11 Orion brilliant straight down the path before daylight. So cold. Everything in the garden lying both wilted and stiff. 18 When I lay down last night my heart kept me awake again. This time it was jumping around rather than thrumming. I lay there mystified and scared feeling there's nothing I can do and no kind of help. Dozed off. Woke hard a bit after midnight with a quite intense pressing sensation in the area below the left shoulder's bump. Got up and checked my bp, drank some water. Read until I faded. Woke at 7:30 to a bright day behind the venetians. The sun is so horizontal now that it reaches to the laundry room's far wall. Am I now paying for the strenuousness of the work I did then? I could feel that it was hard on my heart. - It says not. Or maybe it's the cost of its long valiant effort to drive an asymmetrical body. Working on the 110 days in 2000 at the same time as heart trouble now - and the suspended worry about why Louie has given up on me - what is it I'm feeling. That I was something then that was so rich and now have come to such a dry scared end and what is the relation of this self and that one. - There's what I was learning about the means of aboutness and there's what I was learning about how to talk to be able to think better and there's what I was learning about how to work with my personal limiting structures to be able to know and do more. Is the whole of Tom subsumed in that one? He was that and something else too, my sample human. Theory's practice. After that so were my students. 19 How this woman had to manage herself to complete a large work - what she had to manage - resistances of remnant childishness and evolved female imperatives.
Which I didn't manage well at all - I kept not doing what it advised. So it's not a story of overcoming all odds, it's a story of overcoming some but not enough odds. - Now I'm thinking maybe the social odds really do fall under remnant childishness and evolved female imperatives because they are reasons I didn't deal with male refusal. The juice in the story is the Tom love story but the love story should actually be understood as secondary - I don't know what to do with that. There's juice in time and place too and I suppose in voice but even I don't like to read the technicalities. What was the most important achievement. I want to say the outline, theoretical layout, which is the overview, the framework. I kept refining it. It's a splendid achievement no one noticed. But apart from the work do I NEED love to mend what's wrong with my heart. Last night again the wrong feeling in my chest that's there still - thumping, a dark pressure, a tremour that's like fear. 26 Best color in the garden now especially the Evans cherry and Gail's cherry next door. Sun at a low angle deep into the kitchen in the afternoon. 27 Posted Mary from Wing in which I get my hand in my pants riding through dark countryside in the back of a bus. Pennask Lake Road. Wide and silent. Wide, wide. Bright. Bare. Sometimes a hawk circling. I took some photos though I knew I couldn't be all there yet. 31 Was in Here this morning looking for the small flames piece and liked it so much, the photos and the paragraphs and the whole as a project. I wanted it to be more known. I also saw that it was the beginning of what I'm doing now, shaping and posting small stories. November 1 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 Jeep broken into last night, ignition smashed. 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. 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.
10 Posted whores in okinawa. "We see you later reflecting on an unpleasant, disappointing occurrence." Greg says. I'm disgusted by how spineless and clueless that is.
'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. 16 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." -
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 I posted the Mycenae piece this morning and the woman I don't know said the voice is like home to her. 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. 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. 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. 27
Aeschylus 1981 Persians trans. Lembke and Herington 30 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! 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. 12 I bought a rug! Red rug for under the desk. And cut a tree. On Midday Valley Road yesterday graceful ponderosas frosted all over. I had to keep rising to get to the firs. And here's my wide-winged sacrificial tree. 17 Through the evening Freya was knitting mustard-yellow cable-stitch gloves two at a time. I understood that she was doing it so her energy wouldn't run us over, so Rowen and I could talk. Earlier we'd all been lying on my bed, she knitting, Rowen with his head on her leg, I alongside Rowen with my head next to his knee. I'd decided to tell him the bad thing I did to Luke. He asked to know more about the people who'd shattered me. Freya can surprise me with deft summaries. Rowen is beautiful colors. I gave them a heater for their cold house. And cookbooks and jars of preserves. And a folder of executor documents. We agreed I have to figure out intellectual property law. Yes Luke's birthday and the beginning of the Christmas week. He's been insulting me so I'm not phoning him. 23 My new rug is thick and strong and red and handsome in a subtly contemporary way and there it is under my bare feet when I'm at the work table. 25 A skin of white on the sidewalk this morning, no cars. I said and one went by. Boiler growling - how many ways have I said that. I woke late, eight o'clock. Tea. There's my wide-winged tree with its inner scatter of lights. Dove on a wire above the policeman's driveway just sitting. Thick red rug I thank myself for. WindanSea Christmas Day posted. Red room to my left always pleasure, red white and green. Silver. Does the day feel a little particular? Yes even though. 30 I keep feeling the story is massively relevant the way hardly any current writing is. At the same time that the relevance won't be noticed. 31 Thrilled suddenly by two desert photos from Gabe who is driving a semi on I-10 near the Salton Sea - lovely Gabe who was so undone by anxiety he had to rush home from cherry picking - Facebook messaging from the road. January 2 2020 All quiet. The excitable baby-talk lady has taken her $210 and gone home. The mama has found the litter box and is asleep on my desk. The little one is hiding as far under the bed as he can go. 3 I locked them in the back room together last night and now the little one is coming out from under the bed. I don't understand her not letting him near her. They both have such quiet little mieows. She seems tired or depressed. Now the two of them asleep on my green blanket. Ah he's crept closer and she's licking him. 4 They're happier though the mama is in heat. The baby is playing with a bit of dried leaf and the mama sometimes will let him cuddle up being licked. It's 6:45 Saturday morning. Is it rain or snow sifting down under the streetlight. Specks of light on the window. 5 The mama lying under the tree twisting frantically, arching her back to raise her little rump, and what to call the sound she makes, a grating at the back of her throat. Her child - at that moment she jumped onto the arm of the chair for the first time and was lying with her head pressed against my arm. Her child followed her up and let me stroke him for the first time. Now he's on the green blanket where he's eyeing the ficus. 9 I've been calling the little one Mouse. He has bear fur, thick and matte, a very small pointed face with big yellow eyes. When awake is always needing to find something to do: now chasing, now clawing, now licking himself, now running to nuzzle his mother, distractable. Yesterday morning lay on the rad with his head up watching snow fall. Now is curled next to my legs on the hassock. His mom can't be more than a year old but she's kind of a hard case? - whips her tail in a way that seems cynical to me - when she's stroked, when he's cuddling, almost anytime - as if she's saying This is all very well but I'd hoped for better. Mostly they're inscrutable. He'll run across the room mieowing with his small voice and I have no sense of what he's saying. She'll lick him kindly and then suddenly lunge showing teeth or just get up and stroll away. They'll discover something to attack and next day be done with it - first the Christmas tree, then Mouse wrecked the mirror's plant in the laundry room, yesterday they kept scrambling through the many-handed big plant on the floor. Mouse yesterday discovered drinking from the toilet, balanced perfectly on the rim. She resists strongly when I move her off table top or my chair - I mean I feel such unlikely large strength in her small body. The most touching moment was yesterday when Mouse was jumping up onto the ficus pot and I roared from the bed. He got down. Immediately tried again. I roared again. He got down. Tried again. I roared louder. He got down but didn't run away, came up against the bed skirt and stared up at me - intense little innocent face staring up as if in wonder at what I could possibly be. 14 Patch and Mouse. Little Mouse for now. I'm less grim? They move around me. Where are they now? What are they doing? I see them lying together, he nursing, she with her forepaw holding him still as she licks him, one of them purring. When I'm eating my three breakfast sausages I hand-feed Little Mouse tiny bits. I'm wooing him. Last night as I was watching The Durrells in Corfu he lay on the desk in front of me allowing my forearm around him, asleep, his little belly moving. He's made me laugh so loud I startle myself. They touch me. Even when they are not purring they quiver subtly. I'm not done marveling that apart from asking for food they'll have anything to do with the lumbering giant I am but when I move to another room they'll get up from their cuddle to see what I'm doing. I'm sorry for their boredom, they've already learned everything they can reach. I've shut them in the cellar hoping it's more like outside. Litter box is the worst thing about them and half the cellar is dirt so maybe they'll ...? 17 So you know, I left a long shelfful of student advising files at Sterling, and in every one was something of you. Same with the dozens of client files now. You talked sense to me when I was nearly owned by something frantic and despairing, and because of how you are and what you said I calmed the clamor and found a way forward. You have no idea how helpful you were. I try to live up to that. You were not like other teachers. I'm not like other lawyers. - I got Emilee a published book but she didn't go on with what I gave her. But Jody did go on so there's that. "You talked sense to me." 20 I'm posting psychological stories - stories at a fine scale of personal being - is that the way to say it - that I assume almost no one will be interested in - today comfortable in the highest culture, which has a dream and personal distress and from their point of view a sort of bragging -
There. That was March 2000. 22 Wednesday morning after an unsleeping night I wake to a clear sky - look at that, a clear sky! The Russian olive's fringes of fine twigs are standing against a platinum sky slowly turning blue. The mother cat bangs the bedroom door when she's determined to be let out. I hear thumps from my bed. At the moment they're wrestling. She's stronger and twice as big but he jumps her. They roll clamped together all eight paws scrabbling, her tail whipping to both sides. She brings her teeth, he squeals. He's under the bed. She's flattened watching him. He takes a run. She meets him in mid-air. She pins him. He runs into the many-hands plant where she doesn't bother to follow. She strolls away, lies down but has her eye on him. I admire his elegant little poses. He'll lift his midback so it's arched twice his height, a little upside-down U. Sleeps laid flat on his side stretched far toe to toe. They like to be on the table with me when I'm watching videos. Last night she lay blinking under the lamp while he lay at 90 degrees nursing and purring. I have pedophile feelings for him but he doesn't like me to hold him, will get up pointedly and move just out of reach. 25 Bare-naked personal self, compressed technical theory. The first would scandalize those who could read the second. The second would be rushed past by those who could be interested in the first. The book's structural difficulty is at the very point of the accomplishment I'm trying to demonstrate. If I found ways to smooth the difference I'd cancel the point of the book. The way other people do it is to describe the thing abstractly without demonstrating it and that makes books as blank as the one I read yesterday. 28 I've posted the Luke piece. His years of controlling me with his dejection are done. Controlling and punishing. He gets cranky. When he doesn't like himself he blames me. He doesn't register my kindness to him, has held a long grudge. That's the kind of man he is. I've liked his company more than anyone's really, say that too. 30 I like to touch Little Mouse's velvet paws. And be touched by. I plot to seduce him into letting me hold him though he doesn't like it. I feel pedophile uneasiness when he briefly endures being held. Patch knows I don't like her. She likes treat bits but she refuses to be managed by them or by the bedtime bowl of wet food I use to lead them into the back room, sits solid and heavy so I have to pick her up to move her. She's impassive. The only thing that rouses her is wrestling with Mouse. The wrestling is new. They have manic hours a couple of times a day. They sleep in their beautiful shapes. At times they like to sleep near me. Little Mouse likes the green blanket and will sleep at my feet when I'm reading in bed. Patch never does that though she'll walk disdainfully over my chest. We got off to a bad start when she was in heat for two weeks begging pathetically all day. She'll run away when she can but I want him to have her for now. I love his bright little spirit and want to raise him right. End of January, one more month of this lifeless grey. There'll be robins in March. - Look at them on the hassock next to my knee sleeping with their heads together, his paws relaxed and his little belly pumping just at the haunch. Did she feel me looking at her? She jumped over to the rad's window view. Her tail twitches are so cynical they make me laugh. February 3 Last night when I was lying on my back reading Little Mouse bounded onto my chest and lay there purring hard. I was holding the book up into the light with my right hand and bracing him with my left arm to keep him from sliding off my ribs. It was the first time he'd done anything so blatantly fond. I love his emotionality, his little cries, and the grace of his poses and his fearlessness wrestling with his heavier mother - and his humor, the all-which-way he danced playing with a shirt tail he found in the closet. His curiosity, the way he invents things to play with all over the room, a fold in the blanket, a crumpled supermarket receipt, the venetians' long cord. His fantasy maybe, whatever it is he's imagining as he dashes back and forth on my bed. Here's Patch lying on the laptop table next to me. She's something like morose and she never cuddles but she does that sometimes. Is turning her head watching her kid stick-handle a crumpled receipt across the floor. Kathy said she's been beaten, a way she pulls back her head when she's touched. Winter morning, thin layer of fresh snow, yellow break in grey clouds. 5 Wednesday 8:30, white sky, thin snow already tracked to pavement by highschool traffic. When I wake I put the room a bit in order - stow the red quilt, raise the blinds, start the Mac Pro, turn up the heat - and then I open the cellar door. The two of them have heard me moving upstairs and are waiting on the top step. Mieow says Mouse. I give them a couple of treat bits to say welcome. If I don't space them enough Mouse dives for Patch's too. Patch is motherly with him, stands back and lets him eat anything first. - I feel odd using their names, why? At the same time I do feel them as persons, Mouse at least, because he's so present and feeling. He's so related: he will sleep against my hip and let me hold his little paw but there comes a moment he's had enough, pulls it back sharply, turns over. 9 I've tried to take photos of the cats but when I get up to fetch the camera they move. When have I wanted to, when I see them in some private state. This afternoon I was reading in bed and they were sleeping at its foot. Patch was lying on her side facing me so I could see her small pale nipples and the shaved patch of her belly with its line of four puckered stitches. Mouse was full length with his head hooked loosely over one of her hind legs. It would have been a visible story. Sometimes when they are resting like lions on their folded forepaws it's simply their short remotely humane profiles. His little triangular sleeping face turned backward on his neck. Sometimes the improvised grace of his sleeping shapes. He's always beautiful and so touchingly young in his brightness and the way he cries when they're let back upstairs as if to say he'd been lonely. His little paws are really velvet and so bonelessly soft. I felt sorry for her yesterday. She wouldn't let me give her pain meds and she looked frowsy, lay sleeping all day. Today she was wrestling again, not a lot but enough so I can see she's getting better. 18 I opened the Still at home bin yesterday and have been chucking paper. Lay awake in the dark this morning realizing I'd been distressed by the pages I'd thrown away. Why was the handwriting is so awkward and why did it take so long to smooth out? What was wrong with my nervous system I mean. And the falsity of it, the way I expressed family and community wrongness as boy-craziness. I was longing for something I called love but what was it really. Or say it another way, what could I have longed for if I'd known better. Realness. A community of people who could see each other. - I found a snowdrop clump blooming under alyssum debris yesterday so this aft I cleaned up dead stuff in the porch platform zone - found two more snowdrop clumps, a grape hyacinth and what must be tulip nubs under the apricot - don't know which. First garden work of the year. Trusting the last half of February not to turn wicked. Roofers on St Michaels today. Took Patch to have her stitches out. She was leery when she saw the carrier, darted away, but since I brought her back she has made small overtures - rubbed my leg, lay down to sleep next to me. When I was flat in the bath warming my legs after working outside she jumped onto the toilet tank, folded her paws and lay looking down at me. I was feeling who is this, who is reincarnated as this subtle cautious soul. 20 Yesterday I was slogging all day placing the fourteen year old's punctuation and transcribing parts of SH2-2 I'd missed. I was finding her tediously false but then I realized the word I wanted was camp. She's at the age where she has to work up a gender style but she's playing with it. She takes it over the top almost to drag but there's a kind of knowing irony as if to say, they want me to be feminine and I might have to be to get what I want but wow isn't it silly. I saw another thing: the thirteen year old's account of meeting Gary in Mesa is bare narrative and gush but when the fourteen year old remembers it a year later there is sensory detail she'd registered but not written:
There's gushing gender performance but there's also the curiosity about male lives that carried through all the way to Tom. The way I studied Al's room:
23 Dear fourteen: I've held your pages for sixty years but I'm trashing them now. Though after transcribing your silly ellipses faithfully. I'm looking at the writing feeling why is it so bad but I should be asking what work it's doing. What work other people don't need to do. What I wrote for the contest after the Stratford trip was about the meetings with smart kids. When the winner was published I was startled by how outclassed I was. The girl from Quebec had written about the plays. "I have looked on beauty bare." I hadn't cared about the plays. What I've been wanting to see is that she's silly because she's living in a backwoods - the Quebec girl probably had educated parents. But no it's more that she's unattached in her family and constantly scanning for attachment outside it. She's starved for touch - no one has touched her since early childhood. She has been disliked at school and has to fight to be seen as viable. Her father has said she's undesirable and she's frantic to prove him wrong. But it's deeper than any of that isn't it. That's what I haven't seen. Now I could be sad for her, that she had to be off-centre in the ways she was, posing and insisting. 28 I've been in a hurry to chuck the scribbled SH pages but this morning I transcribed and interpolated letters home from the hospital because they documented the hospital's time and place better, for instance the lively lives of a 6th floor paralytic ward's six young men. Somewhere I need to say that in those years the journal is tedious because I'm processing tensions I couldn't talk to my family about. What I sent them about the hospital is zingy and irreverent but factual, and the letters get better the longer I'm there - less teen-impersonation - more coherent as if away from home I'm more myself - much more. Their handwriting is better. March 4 This night I lay awake all night aching all over, aching too much to
sleep. When I've been remembering I'll be 75 this week it seems old.
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