March 6 2020
Posted the child with her hands in a bush. People said happy birthday
things but no one noticed the photo.
Adam, Jane, Laiwan, Val and Sue, Indra, Janet, Jim Mann, Cheryl, Jennifer,
Em, Gabe, Jim Sparrell, Katrin, Jaes. Rachel said her birthday is the same.
Don said O was forcibly confined for a while. Paul said he was coming home
early on account of the virus in Asia. Leslie is always the one I'm glad
to see. "Your life seems as a lesson in freedom."
First thing I walked with a cane half a block to Autoplan to renew my
license. Couldn't think of anywhere to have a really nice meal or anywhere
lovely this time of year. Pulled wire cages off the roses and found all
of them have tiny leaf buds. Gail knocked with a bromeliad like a lemon
jello spear. When I closed my eyes for a nap I could feel the lively weight
of Mouse and Patch asleep either side of my ankles. Brad asked me to lend
him $40 for gas to get to his job. I said I'd look in my pockets, gave him
$80. Am reading Adam Gopnik on liberalism. That was it. I liked Doug shouting
"Good girl!" when I shouted that I'm seventy-five. I liked Gabe
on a break in Quebec City where he's moved in with a girl sending a photo
of dunes on the road to Calexico. I hate it when Em says she loves me. I
don't know why people bother to say happy birthday or happy returns since
it's no notice at all. I didn't like Janet saying septuagenarians are something
or other - meaning she thinks she is - or Cheryl saying 75 is not insignificant
- really? I liked Sue saying two beautiful numbers seven and five. In sum
I'm scowling at the end of this day. I'm back where I was before I knew
anyone who'd focus the way artists do and actually say things. That despite
the way every day I show them how.
7
Kate sent a photo of salvia apiana. "You are
so like CA white sage. Your presence, writing and art put off a vibration
that clarifies everything it touches .... You changed the course of my life
in a way I will be glad about always. Thank you for living so wonderfully
and blazing a path for how it can be done."
8
Jim S and Katrin noticed the photo. Red hearts.
I open the door for Patch when she asks. Sometimes she's out for just
a moment, sometimes she wanders in the garden. Sometimes I forget her. Just
now I heard a clawing at the door and saw her pointed little face at the
door's window four and a half feet up. She was hanging by her claws. I'm
still laughing. She's clever. I've suspected it from the way she's cynical
and depressed.
Snow sifting down, nine on a Sunday morning.
I don't know whether Mouse is clever but he's sexy. I was napping under
the covers yesterday and he was asleep relaxed full length along my right
leg. I could just reach to hold his front paws with the tips of my fingers.
When he pulled back one of his paws and laid it over mine I was imagining
if he were my size how delicious it would be to lie naked against that subtly
thrumming velvet length. - But his sharp clean little teeth.
Today I posted Luke on Table Mountain and am noticing a couple
of things. One his skill in story-telling and how it's like mine, the way
he tells the right details and I remember them to set them down. The other
is his brio in adventure, which is like mine too.
- There's the 10 o'clock church bell. It has stopped snowing but the
sky is white from corner to corner with a silvered sunlight filtering through.
At this moment Patch on the hassock at my knee is digging vigorously
at her forepaw, Mouse is behind my neck on the chair's back - now on my
bed staring up at the tree's branches voicing intent to get at them. Now
Patch is asleep curled toward me, her belly rising and falling. Their faces
asleep are so - I don't know how to say this - they're vulnerably trusting
but with eyes closed also more beast-like, more locked away in unfathomable
otherness. When they are not staring back they're more visibly what they
are?
12
What an odd time in the world. It's as if all who haven't felt how vile
Trump and his enablers and his worldwide similars are, are displacing their
unconscious distress onto contamination fear. Buying toilet paper! The stock
market has been falling. The Canadian dollar is down into 71 cents. People
aren't flying and cruise ships are holding off: the environment will have
a brief respite. It's mostly killing old people, which makes it seem needed.
-
Patch purred when I stroked her!
13
I've seen fat robins and the bird-feeder suddenly is empty but it's cold
today and snow staying where it is. Brad working on the back bedroom.
14
Patch was outside. I forgot her then after a while opened the door and
called - "Patch, Patchy, come on." She came shooting around the
corner.
Began pale green for the guest room walls - edges - will roll them tomorrow.
It was a dark crude room and will be bright and subtle. Bright wood doors
next to bright white mouldings and skirting boards next to pale green eggshell.
Brad made a mess of the patching but still it's better without cracks.
15
Woke at 6:30 this morning actually feeling well, a rare feeling of having
slept enough.
Finished the bedroom walls except for touch-up details - sponged a bit
so it's mist-like - pale, almost white - color seen best next to the bright
white door frames. Took up the floor plastic. Frog tape left the skirting
board edges immaculate.
Should I let Kathy clean - I live so isolated already, should I be cautious
even about shopping - the post office - the library - the bank - cautions
could go on for many months - I can garden.
When I think of dying in the way threatening now - I mean when I've imagined
the story ending that way - there's been a feeling as if of dissolving
- as if a bright solid ribbon that had looped along for 75 years instead
of being cut just shreds. Can I say that better. So many years of caring
and being interested and I sort of don't care and am not interested. Not
a bang, not a whimper, just sort of ... . Shouldn't that ardent journal
woman be ardent about her death?
20
Five in the morning, spring equinox. Two cats asleep on my bed curled
tight because the house is still warming.
Rereading DR noticing ways I became like her - she's more of a scientist
than Woolf, she notes forms of situation as such - a kind of abstraction
- and I do that too. Woolf goes for creation not notation: speed and beauty.
DR kept wanting to address what needed fixing. She was self-made in a way
VW didn't have to be and she was interested in how self-making is done.
She wanted other women to use what she'd learned but only the most intelligent
can: I'm enough stupider now so I have to labour at her. [Dorothy Richardson
in Pilgrimage]
I'm half-heartedly checking through Raw forming,
half-heartedly because there's no writing there I can like. When I choose
later scraps to post I'm pleased by how much better they are. I did that:
I worked for that.
21
6:30 tinted open sky pale gold at its rim.
6:45 sky intensifying wondrously.
7:00 an almost-even bright ivory. Vivid. Compared to dark unmoving earth
- branches, the church's steep roof - but is there a better word - the sky
is more alive.
- I've just noticed there are no contrails. Airlines are shut down. How
odd it's happening all over the world.
Patch is doing a new thing a couple of times a day, jumping on the desk
when I'm at the computer, lumping down facing me, staring into my face,
reaching to lick my nose, half-purring when I stroke her. It seems a kind
greeting and she has got so round-bellied, is such a solid chunk sitting
there, that I'm feeling her as matronly rather than cynical.
22
Greg is worried about the stock market emptying his retirement account.
Louie is worried they won't be able to pay the yoga studio mortgage and
will have to sell it.
This morning I posted this with the photo I took of myself under an
aspen sapling with the pasture behind me:
- I took some more pix and some of me.
- -
- "You - you," he went on to tell me all about my sins, the
greatest of which is having independence of thought I suppose. Actually,
I can't remember what he said, besides that if I don't stop having the
last word all the time, he'd take me out to the woodpile and hit me until
I'm black and blue and "Who do you think you are anyway?" - that's
his favorite question.
- -
- While Uncle, Aunt, Judy Paul Mom picked blueberries I babysat and cooked
dinner.
- -
- I drove tractor - discing - for three hours, then put on the G-goo
because I wanted to feel like a girl.
- -
- Got my first own developed film back - my pix are so-so.
-
- La Glace Alberta August 1960
I love the photo. Seen against Ed's bullying it's a photo of true me,
actual continuing me, my steadiness. She's posing with a young tree. Behind
it the pasture and its poplar bluff, the driveway, a granary's little mouth:
the eternal yard. She's wearing a dress she likes, second-hand, thin red
nylon with its white dots worn off. I like her slender shoulders, smooth
brown skin. She's fifteen. She's got her grade 9 results but she doesn't
know yet that she has the medal. In relation to her father she knows she's
won, she knows she's stronger than he is.
23
They say it's got into the valley, one positive test. I read two things
yesterday that made me nervous as I was wanting to fall asleep. One was
that lungs get completely blocked with mucus, the other that immune systems
are less ready to handle viruses mutating from animals.
7:40 broken cloud gliding north.
29
Toward the end of talking to Rob last night I got into telling him about
being in the hospital when I was fourteen. I could feel that he thought
it was going on too long but kept going and told him about Paul
Sylvestre. He said it was a sweet story and I should write it. I'd been
thinking that as I was telling it.
He said in Spain they are keeping corpses on ice in skating rinks.
Mouse winds round my ankles crying The bowl is empty! It's EMPTY!
Oh EMPTY! EMPTY!
31
Yesterday when I was reading in bed Patch jumped up, strolled over with
intent, lay down with the front half of her body on my chest, purred the
sort of short rumbling purrs she has, stretched her paws forward to embrace
me and went to sleep. She seems sorrowful now rather than cynical. When
she butts me with her head I'm moved, I feel she's taking shelter in a what's
been a hard life. Meantime Mouse is a teenage boy, lean, handsome and impatient:
don't touch me.
Patch has gone as far as the compost, where she knows there's a mouse.
Othertimes she just sits on the porch looking and sniffing. Is she guarding
the perimeter? I'm her lord of doors, back door, verandah door, cellar door.
She asks courteously. When I'd called her out the back door and she hadn't
come, after a while I heard a quiet meoow I thought must be at the verandah's
screen door. There she was. She knows her house.
Now at six in the dark Mouse is curled on the green blanket, Patch licking
her paw on the red carpet, boiler purring loudly, seedlings on the rad,
on the verandah sills. I'll go turn on the grow light.
2020 the plague year. I've thought of the days Tom and I lay next to
each other in the Maryland with high fevers. Would it be worse than that?
Patchy grey cloud on very pale blue. March is over at last, long dead
cold grey March, sore worried March.
-
I'd left the door open and was crouched on the near path weeding. When
I got up to come in there were both cats on the sill looking out.
April 1
The graceless way I called Bill Volk my sugar daddy. Only in letters
to my folks, and what was that - a stroke against my dad who thought me
sexually spoiled. I was saying I could compel money from a better man than
he could be. I did need to know that but my liking for Bill wasn't mercenary
so I was in fact lying.
3
Found Madeleine's parents' address in Winnipeg in a letter file last
night. Googled it. 1998 obit for her dad that named a daughter Madeleine
and grandson Orlando of Sydney Australia. Tried that in Google Images. Second
row down, There you are I said. "When I lived in Sydney. I worked
for about 20 years painting backdrops and sets, for films . Later I became
a journalist and wrote for the men's magazine Ralph and the Sydney
Morning Herald." In 2018 a potter in a small town. 2020 no longer
a potter. Lives in Uki, northern New South Wales near the coast, semi-tropical,
house with a swimming pool, Airbnb. FB pages full of enthusiasms.
Visited her in Trets September 1972 when Orlando was born. She was
with me in London for Christmas that year. I stayed in her room in Dublin
a year later. Year after that she phoned from a hotel, leaving Eugene. Didn't
hear from her after that but Greg said he'd seen her in the metro in Montreal
in 1976. Sydney was 1980. I wanted to tell her I'd seen Orlando in London
but never knew where to find her. It was maybe 1976? I was visiting London
after I'd lived in BC for a couple of years, walking in a back lane - in
Bloomsbury - past the back door of I think a theatre. A small boy came alone
out of a back door. Four years old? I asked "Are you Orlando?"
Have no idea why I thought so. He said he was. Then Eugene came out the
door. - I thought I'd written this meeting down but it seems not. Have tried
googling her for years, no trace. I was in Melbourne November 1990.
4
I am so grateful to you for being here when you
were for coming all the way for being wise and gentle about Orlando. The
first week I would have been total agony without you. me with my careless
ignorance & Eugene being obstinate and idiosyncratic. you gave a beginning
to Orlando's life which was harmonious and graceful and after you left I
had gotten sufficient confidence & Eugene enough faith in me to be able
to survive. now I am much less solicitous about him, not hovering over his
bed constantly - his eyes are a wonderful wise blue of flemish robes. I
wish you were here now - it is hell among the grapes, melons and bright
blue sun.
6
Warm enough - worked for hours - weak at first and then it got easier
- weed-whacked standing grass, some edges and street edge dead stuff - finished
uncovering the roses - found and fine-weeded an exquisite wild patch in the sunny corner,
clump of blooming johnny-jump-ups - uncovered the finally-rotted rowan stump
in the front. Patch wandered and Mouse sat in the doorway. Cucumbers and
melons, squash, tomatoes, all have second leaves.
8
Full moon last night, two black cats creeping on the garden paths.
Earlier on when I was courting Mouse, when I was eating pork sausage
I'd give him tiny bits by hand. I'm not courting him now, he's too haughty
and evasive and Patch is nicer to me, but yesterday when I was on my bed
eating a sausage Mouse jumped up and stood at my elbow purring eagerly.
Anticipation.
At this moment Mouse on the toilet rim drinking and Patch in her spot
next to my pillows nibbling her flank. 5:33. Clear sky, the moon is still
out far in the west.
"You're an 8 trying to get 10s and the guys
who are trying to get you are 6s." Mate value. TED talk guy
last night. If an 8 does get a 10 the 10 is more likely either to leave
or to cheat. Dispassionately exact.
10
When Patch is outside Mouse waits on the table, lets me know when Patch
is ready to come in by meowing. I don't know how he knows.
12
I can work now - this morning cleaned the front room thoroughly, then
went out and dug half the east fence bed. Earth like velvet. My clean beds
look so nice.
13
Dug the rest of the E fence bed. When I began my chest felt so weak I
had to work slowly to keep from keeling over. Later it was better - it's
like that now, I have to warm up.
The yellow tulips are out. Others showing buds.
FB stories. Yesterday Luke and the Somalian, today Louise's
party. Why do smart people leave dumb comments. I keep wanting them
to talk about the writing but the comments just tell me which little bit
of a story people recognize themselves in. Susan says she likes the writing
but she doesn't say why. Rachel likes travel escape. I suspect Nathalie
just clicks like without reading. Only Jennifer laughed at the Arden
and Donnie electric fence story. Only Indra notices a stunning photo as
such. Jim S can like the writing maybe but doesn't say so. Jim Mann likes
Peace River Country tales. Cheryl checks in faithfully but why don't her
comments show focus. Same with Janet, has she retired her brain? Freya could
say good things I suspect but she doesn't dare.
The cats are in the garden when I work. Patch investigates, patrols all
around, finds her way back inside and lies on the sill looking out. Mouse
jumps at flies, gets frightened, shoots back inside. Mouse is passionate.
He runs everywhere. I love the way he'll toss himself onto his mom - doesn't
lie down next to her, just flops over sideways on top of her. Cries when
he doesn't know where she is. I love the shapes they sleep in as if looking
at such relaxed bodies is good for me.
- I can smell the balsam poplar next to me.
They can be fast asleep but it's as if they stay in touch with me all
the same; if I sit down to poop there they are, if I open the back door
there they are. It still amazes me when I'm at the computer and Patch jumps
onto the desk to bunt me. It seems she likes that spot for cuddling because
we're eye to eye there. My bed in the living room is our common platform.
I can lie there seeing out. They each have their spot, Patch up next to
my pillows and Mouse against the lump of hot rock at the foot end. There
they both are now asleep with Virginia Woolf Diaries vol 2 between
them.
It's not her best volume, she talks too much about insignificant people,
I suppose to erase their imprint. I reread Jacob's room remembering
reading it when Rowen was newborn, saying then that it seemed brittle. This
time what I noticed was that it's about London, about England, flies about
noticing not Jacob but his lifetime. Not brittle but venturesome - as writing
- whizzing along inventing so much on the wing. It's not warm about him,
she doesn't feel for him, but she says where he was.
I like to watch her thinking about herself, thinking how to manage herself.
She's 40, 41, 42, 43. Isn't all the way there yet. Sort of hacking her way
into Mrs Dalloway in jerks among other tasks. She thinks about how
to manage her energy but she isn't using her diary to think about writing
the way she does later.
It's occurred to me that the way to write about her and DR would be to
compare them - though they're living in London at the same time and both
feminists and both self-educated they have such different strategies and
temperaments and placements. DR is a sturdy roving bootstrapper like me
so I've been grateful to her for studying that condition. She's heavy though.
VW is a delicate privileged snob who grew up with her famous father's library.
She doesn't study my condition but she teaches me the speed and lightness
of her privilege. - It's a speed and lightness I actually had when I was
fourteen in the hospital though without the sophistication given by that
library.
So, for instance, what I posted today:
- Louise's party last night. Her house was beautiful. Her garden was
beautiful. There stands the Monterey pine at the gate. It rises four stories
before it branches. And there's the Monterey cypress. And there's the oak.
Last night it was the oak I was feeling. A fire outside, scented smoke
in the ivy, firelight across the cutleaf elder, which is one of my few
additions to what was almost perfect, a beautiful shape, arcing, long branches
that arc up across the lighted windows of her corridor.
-
- I'm depressed by the party and so far depressed by this writing too.
I loved the garden. I stood in it in a faint spit of rain and saw wolfy
Rue standing with a lit silver bush down the path. That was wonderful.
The spotlights on the acanthus were wonderful, the lit small room of the
back garden, the open gate, the stone wall. Inside the house were people
in party clothes, people I did not want to talk to. Edie Munk was wonderful
in her liveliness but what was she doing with that thick stupid Republican
man. (I got passionate about Canadian medicare.)
-
- There was a man who came in looking like a wooden Indian, I mean in
his tall woodenness, although he was dressed - I guess - like a country
landowner, in a flat felt cap and very stiff-looking money clothes. He
stood there tall and as if painted telling us his x-acre garden out by
Lake Hodges had two years ago been voted the county's most beautiful garden
design. Then he explained to me the concept of garden rooms. I left beautiful
Genevieve in her high heels listening to him tell how he had designed the
house extension himself after studying again all his books about Frank
Lloyd Wright. She was saying, more or less, How wonderful.
-
- What else. Nora. There she was, little cat face, with her orange hair
in another new style. I was watching her face with a greed for beauty,
as I do. The relation of her eyes and the corners of her mouth. And yet.
We were in the stone-walled garden together, I was telling her about the
Graham Thomas rose in the garden up the alley and standing with her looking
at the plants and she suddenly walked back into the house. I had offended
her, I think by praising Louise's garden too much, or maybe by praising
the fireplace? Those moments of mysterious recoil in a party. People who
were there one moment are across the room in the next. I'd said something.
Often I don't know what.
-
- - And that's it, enough discharging. I walked out through the open
door and down through the wonderful garden and got in my jeep on the tall-tree
street and drove home among gleaming lights on the pavement.
-
- Point Loma December 2003
I like it because it's light and fast and accurate, it's who I was at
that party and who I was when remembering it, it has pleasure and disappointment
and puzzlement and more pleasure and sardonic poise and weather and a happy
ending. It's a complete tale.
17
Paul Sylvestre tenderly astute Louie said.
Yesterday the cats had a fine day in the garden, slept on bare ground
in the garage's shadow. Their sound I like best is a mouth sound, not a
purr but like a single syllable of purr, that means, I think, Here I
am or maybe hello. Patch says it when she jumps onto the desk. When
do they say it to each other?
I sometimes hear Mouse making loud sucking noises. He'll have his head
digging at Patch's chest but I can't tell whether he's got hold of a nipple.
Meantime she has an arm holding him down while she scrubs his face. He purrs.
After a small while she gets up and goes away. She never seems concerned
about him: I'll see them cuddled alongside but he's always the one to make
the move. When she's head-butting me she'll sometimes gnaw my shirt button
as if maybe she's wanting to feel mothered herself.
- Waiting for Pat the plumber to come fix the outside tap and maybe the
bathtub drain.
I grocery-shopped this morning, 7am the hour for old people. I was out
of cream and couldn't have tea. I leave nonperishable stuff I don't need
right away in the verandah for five days. What I bring in I wash with soapy
water.
18
Posted gorgon philosopher, almost totally ignored - Emilee and
Zimmerman - though it's much more accomplished than the simpler things they
like. Is it that they don't believe me? They think I'm bragging? No they
just have no experience of it. But it can't interest them as a phenomenon?
Even the feminists? [Jody later.]
19
Bit after 7, sun from this side of the blue spruce. Tea in the red chair.
Mouse chasing a bit of paper. I'm mad at Patch. Last night when I was watching
the Vancouver EMT show she was asleep between the chair's legs under me
and I took it as fondness so I leaned over and stroked her. She snapped
her head around and bit me, rolled suddenly scratching at me with all four
legs: Don't come to me, I'll come to you. I thought about it and kicked
her twice. Not hard. Bed time, down the cellar you go.
20
Posted male philosophers.
Under 1962 thunder-fear Jim said,
- I often have to remind myself to breathe while
I read your posts.
-
- Because they're scary?
-
- No, not scary. I just never know where they are
going and the telling is clear. So maybe I have to remember to breathe
when I am enrapt with birding and no one is around. The writing is unpostured
which leaves so much possibility.
-
- I'm not just sure what he means, do you?
yes
- Does unpostured mean honest no
- 'The telling is clear' means outright yes
- Personal, from an unfamiliar private life
yes
- He is holding his breath because I might be about to
say something he knows about and has never heard said?
yes
- How is personal like being alone watching a bird
intimate
- Watching the otherness of the bird yes
- Do you want to add anything
no
- When I began working in the garden this morning I was so weak I had
to force each small movement, felt my heart was straining.
- Was it no
- Would a chocolate bar help yes
22
Yesterday amtrack december 1996. Zimmerman said Wonderful!
I could read your posts all day. I said You must be a writer.
Took garden trash to the dump, jeep through the carwash, picked up 10
bags of mushroom compost. Proud when I get things done.
When Patch was sleeping near enough so I could hold her little skull
with my left hand I felt such definite electrical surges in my palm. She
was very sound asleep.
It's been cold for two days. Wind.
23
In my dream I'd been thinking about how to put
up a shelf in a nice way. I was explaining to a boy who was saying math
was too hard that I wasn't good at math either but I'd needed a hard calculation
to place my shelf and I'd stuck with it. I'd been looking around my place
and seeing all the sloppy ways they'd been put up. Then I saw some weathered
blue boards I'd used for a wall and thought of Dave Carter liking them.
Thought of him with a flush of the old pleasure.
- So I thought I'd post a story about feeling Dave but found that story
so enlarded in Louie's jealousy and her devious cryptic book sessions that
I fled. The rage I still feel toward Louie in that time I know is like the
hard unforgiveness I never stop feeling toward my mom. I know it but that
doesn't make it shift.
- Is it POSSIBLE for me to stop holding that
no
- Would it be better for me if I could yes
- What makes it impossible turn for the better,
delay, community, the work
- It's basic justice YES
- Basic loyalty to myself yes
- It's the same for Luke yes
- He kept the conflict going more yes
- But he can't do that now, shouldn't yes
- Keep on not contacting him yes
- Basic justice shouldn't be overridden yes
- In relation to Louie it's displaced, unfair
yes
- But locked all the same yes
24
- Do you understand why Gail kept saying it again
no
- Or why she was the one to say it no
- Was I tripped by her anxiety yes
- And because I was being blamed yes
- Just assume their concern is irrational
yes
- Will we go back to normal yes
Ate half an O Henry and did a lot.
26
There was a strong wind yesterday afternoon. When I woke from a nap and
was sitting here groggy I saw that the top fifth of the blue spruce is gone.
Men with chainsaws in the yard below, a boy carrying limbs. I'd loved the
whole shape of that tree and counted on it to go on.
There's still a kink in the air between me and my neighbours. I wrote
a letter and found a way to print it but haven't delivered it yet. Voice
making defensive statements - "You have a bee in your bonnet about
water on the fence and you're just going to have to get over it. Telling
me off for a bit of mist on the fence is bullying and I won't have it."
Etc. Very unpleasant. It will die down after a while but I have to endure
for now.
Paul and I yesterday discovering our infirmities are alike. Tinnitus.
Some heart thing. Winter misery. He's fond of his cat and learning software.
He said everyone in Thailand, young, old, is beautiful, a beautiful color.
-
Yvonne picking tulips after she's brought my print-out saying "Frank
says to tell you not to forget we're your friends." "I like Frank"
I say. "Oh my goodness, so do I" she says, a small friendly thing
with a grey ponytail.
The touching way that Mouse, when Patch has been outside just for a moment,
comes crying to me to let her in and then runs alongside her bumping her
belly as if to say I missed you, I missed you. Mouse is such a child.
The way when I'm walking to open the door she runs beside me twisting her
head up eagerly, Are you coming? They do look at faces to see intention
- isn't that kind of extraordinary?
-
I'm watering irises in the north fence bed with a jar and a white pickup
pulls up next to me. Man at the wheel says If I stay six feet away from
you can I talk to you? A wizened humorous brown face under a baseball cap
with what looks like a butterfly on it. I like him right away. He asks the
age of the house but it's just an opening, he wants to talk about anything
at all. Birth order. RD Laing. The librarian teacher who stuck with him.
His boxes of photocopies.
He grew up in New Westminster and came this way at nineteen to work in
the Craigmont mine. He was farming in East Richmond and converted his crop
to poplars. The Beaches liked that - he knew David. Paul Emory. Would have
been glad to tell me his whole story but I was getting cold and standing
for a long time starts to hurt.
The neighbour fizz isn't over but after I handed Gail my letter through
the fence trying not to shake with stress I oddly felt elated. I was digging
the potato bed near the sidewalk and people stopped to talk, Sarah from
the cop's house and that NVIT guy I like. Then Gail with an envelope. I
haven't opened it but I can feel my key inside it. Fair enough. The letter
was polite, acknowledges, thanks, in best professional style, but there's
a sentence in it that says what satisfies me to have said.
- It's been a dark cold afternoon but at this moment Hamilton Hill is
cloth of gold, all lit up, only it, like a nightfall billboard across the
east.
I don't much care if they shut down on me, what I don't want is the obsessive
self-justifying voice I hear when I quiet down. Is that just me or is it
telepathic reverb? It says just me. Does that mean I can unmake it? It says
no. It started in relation to my dad. It was made by not being allowed to
reply to him.
Now the billboard has gone out. Scent of balsam. After eight and not
dark yet. Bluer.
First tulip, red. The anjou has begun.
28
Why is it Gail I'm grinding at though he's the one who tells me off about
my water. There she is on the other side of the fence a polite safe stupid
church-going woman who's never done anything but be married and whose polite
stupid false-cheery voice I endure, whose tidy dumb yard and monstrous orange
gladiolas I have had to guard my eyes against. I assume she hates me too
so why did she give me that lemon jello plant for my birthday and this stringy
insufficient plant in her kind of dainty creamer? Hopefully sneaking her
kind of conformity into what she must guess about my wilder brighter more
experienced life? Symbolism of water on the fence oh for sure. I have comfortable
long talks with her husband and short false-cheery ones with her. They didn't
like the key because it was sneaking the possibility of wilder brighter
more experienced life into their fortress? So he kept saying don't splash
your looseness against our tightness and I kept saying being loose means
I'm loose all the way to the boundary, I won't shrink back from it to service
your anxiety. It came to a little crisis. I snapped at her because she kept
insisting in her cooperative frightened voice that I must make a fence inside
the fence so my boundary can't touch hers, so she won't feel how much classier
my roses are than hers. That's it isn't it. "I have something for you."
"No no no no I have an ancestral hatred of gladiolas" I said,
laughing. Alright so neighbour friendliness must get damped down, being
different is too hard for people? Yes. And it's more of a crisis for her
in the front yard because that's their tidy controlled public presentation.
My front yard is my back yard, it's the side yard with its flourishing uncon
that's my presentation. It's got harder for them since I started working
in the front because what I've done with it isn't what they do.
So anyway it's Gail I'm grinding at because she presses for polite dumb
anxious conformity? YES. I can back off pressing her boundaries without
backing off living up to the edge of my own can't I. What's the symbolism
of backing off? Not having fun with her husband.
29
My heart or something else pressing in my mid-chest woke me at 1:30 -
pulse weak, fast and stuttering - and then that went on for the rest of
the night and then day until about 6pm when I suddenly knew I was going
to clean the bathroom and laundry room and vacuum this room. Worked fast,
ran with sweat. Cleaned and organized the medicine cupboard even, threw
stuff out. Pleased the way I am when I get things done.
Anne liked my letter about her book. After I got her note I snipped together
parts of what I wrote her for a post about Oma, with the photo of her shrine and a photo I'd forgotten was there, of
me very dark-skinned with a lot of hair and my arm around small
white Oma in her kitchen.
30
Scent of the air when I step outside soft fresh and green. I look at
my whole yard with pleasure at its order and say this year I did all of
it with no help. There are the tulips standing down the centre
of the strawberry bed's new leaves. There are the shapely beds around
the house, the rock-edged nectarine bed clean now with garlic chives and
six paeony clumps in shades of copper-red; the porch pad's edge bed with
iris spears and moss phlox blooming mauve; cowslips with white moss phlox.
The apricot starred all over with very small blossoms, under it a ripple
of dark blue muscari, yellow Empress tulips bloomed out; alongside the porch
pad four many-legged paeonies; a yellow primula blooming like mad. Currant all over dangling
yellow-green flowers. Gravel paths not as raw now and defining the beds
just right; crabapple with unopened white tulips spiking up under it; pea
bed with its comb of sticks; knotty black plum limbs foaming with white.
Blue wheelbarrow standing with dandelions on mown grass. New leaves all
different shapes and colors on the spindly roses. Coldframe windows standing
open. And oh the new self-organized meadow-tapestry in the water corner,
completely sown with little flowering things of different textures, hollyhock
mounds spaced among them - the way that corner designed itself in perfection.
- I haven't said that I saw something odd in the night sky maybe a week
ago, a row like zipper teeth of faint lights being hauled slowly south.
Then gone. There's also been quite a bright light above the roofs to the
west, always there when it gets dark. It doesn't seem to move but its position
is further north when I go to bed.
What it's like going to bed. When I've turned out the light I always
snuggle in thankful to such a good bed. I might thank the cats too and other
good things of the day. Then just as I've drifted out I'm hauled back in
fear because my heart is thumping too hard and too fast. What is it about
falling asleep that does that?
Your birthday Tom. Yesterday I sent you a sentence that said please phone
me. I've been scared to.
-
Anne says write a book about myself as a child in La Glace, in the hospital,
in Clearbrook. I've been doing things today sometimes thinking why I don't
want to. Then here on the screen I see a sheet called writing childhood,
from a time maybe still in Van?, when I thought I was going to.
Why don't I want to now. If I write childhood I have to narrate background
and persons and sequence in ways that seem not worth what would have to
be a large effort. When I work from the journals most of the writing is
already done.
For Anne childhood is a reservoir of good time. She can do it in her
eighties because it's good for her. She's kept it present to her living
with Harvey who liked her in it.
When I was first with Roy childhood was vivid to me and I wanted to tell
it but couldn't. Now I feel the things I could want to share aren't shareable.
"The sand bank." I couldn't give that spot on the road so anyone
else could see it.
My writing childhood document lists episodes and images and why don't
I want to enlarge them. What I wanted to say about childhood is more silent
and visual and I said quite a lot of it in notes in origin, the photos
and text.
I used to want to write only the landscape. When I thought of writing
the people I thought I'd have to write about them as an exotic group. I
don't want to write anything about this group that a child wouldn't feel
interested in.
I was interested in the buildings. I was interested in the shape of the
church. I remember the evening service when gravel dust hung on the road
outside lit with sun far in the west. I wasn't very interested in people
but I was interested in how they looked. There is a tone to be found for
these interests. Not a childish tone. The interest was subtle and strong
and clear, although its expression would not have been possible.
Her story is shallow and factual. I'd have to write mine deep and psychological
and I don't think what I'd find to say in it is as advanced or as needed
as the work I did later.
I've loved childhood books but I couldn't make a wonderful book out of
the childhood I had without deeply, laboriously reseeing it in the present.
I wasn't conscious enough or free enough then to be an interesting child?
Don't feel it's the best use of what time I have left.
What about my little FB stories - they don't need setting up and they
roam over the whole life and they needn't be even in tone - travel tales,
therapy tales, love and sex tales, philosophy tales, teaching tales, friendship
tales, many other kinds of work tales - and when they're out of the journal
they show how that time writes. Does that matter? Does only the farthest
style matter?
What is the farthest style - the swift accurate located unselfconscious
journal mixes of observation, feeling and reflection that only the best
can like for what they are.
May 1
Jeep battery is flat and I can't ask Doug for help. Toilet flush broken.
Patch has tapeworms. Camera has stopped dead. Pandemic miasma everywhere.
Heart worry has come back. BP is higher.
- 1. Shop -
- 2. Fix toilet
- 3. Fix the jeep
- 4. Talk to Row about the camera
- 5. Talk to the vet
- 6. Talk to the dr about whether to take more meds
-
- 2. Fixed with bit of wire
- 3. Posted on the Grapevine and Big Jim came and tightened the clamp
- 1. Could now shop and check the post office for roses
- 5. Phone prescription for dewormer, paid with credit card and picked
up in the parking lot
- 6. Dr McLeod says add 5 ramipril in the morning and call him next week
- 4. Row said try a different lens and yes; took garden photos
2
At nearly eight the air a leaden grey in which new bits of leaf on the
linden's tips and the church's crabapples show faintly luminously green.
There were a few spits of rain on the window but they dried fast. The street
has a look of vacant quiet. New yellow stripe down the centre of the pavement.
It's the anniversary of coming here, beginning of the fifth year. Am I going
to live through the summer? It says yes.
I posted Phyllis Altman today. This is how it ends:
- "Writing really is fantasy. If it isn't it doesn't sell"
Phyllis said. "But it's a sort of research into fantasy isn't it"
announced the gardener, barefoot in bib-and-brace, hair up in a lump. Phyllis
was talking about the novel she was writing, set in the East Transvaal.
She was thinking of something pleasant; she stared at the flowerbed and
her mouth opened and closed very slightly like gills. On her left temple
there was a birthmark? - a scar? - a dark coin-shaped depression I thought
of as a porthole.
-
- Hampstead June 1974
What I like is that what I tried to do with woman with a hole in her
head I got right this time with the slightest of means.
3
6:14. There's the sun edging out of a cloud bank over the long northeastern
tail of Hamilton Hill. Into my eye. There's the intersection's mourning
dove.
-
I'm living in the Central Interior now.
Sunday. Both cats sitting quietly in the verandah full of light. I've
gone to open the cold frame.
4
David Mac. I opened the file and thought I can post this, I
can post fiction. I can make that imaginary place stake creation. A
sound artist, an electronic composer. The air is his notebook. (Who
is she?) Writers who find an imagined man splendid and capable enough to
carry them. Le Guin, Mantel.
The air is
- cosmos, ultimate ether substance
- space, spatiality
- light, transparency
- fluidity
- subtlety
- weather, local sky
- sound
- felt/subtle body
- electromagnetic brain
- felt/subtle body
- gods and spirits
- being, consciousness
- reverie
- I look up into the sunburst of a glint on chrome across the street.
Strallen. A point of brilliant light and radiating from it many shimmering
lines, fine lines that can be iridescent, can be still, can shimmer. The
central light leaves a burn in my eyesight, a white scar.
> where is my short sound paper?
So yes it's huge, it's universal, it's the hugest there is, it's large
enough, I have an imaginary guide, I have four moment-sketches, whether
I have a little audience yet to discover, so far not.
Who is she. She's vision and has a notebook too. She's trying to make
an Orpheus film.
-
The garden looks so happy.
5
I don't hear him. His voice is my writing voice. Can I find a more separate
voice?
He's all the desired of the ideal kind, Ken D, Keith Jackson, Robert
MacLean, Dave C, Ian Mackintosh.
When I found David Mac. Why it's him. Why it's London.
6
Grey dawn coming up, cats asleep in their places on my bed, boiler rumbling
though this morning it's only for two degrees. Kate wrote to say the story
of David and the muffins is potent. I'd said I'm less confident when I leave
the actual. The question I'm feeling is shall I write it as raw fantasy,
shall I write it as research into fantasy, ie as an old woman piecing younger
desire and unfinished art.
The best people will despise my desire, will despise me for indulging
it in work. They will admire me if I show a distance from it.
How to be truthful in fantasy. Honorable.
I respect the actual because I can trust what I don't know about it,
the vast penumbra that exceeds me.
The refractoriness of the actual. The way Peter Manning made that work
but wasn't a possible man.
What I can't have, can't be, in this life. Fiction has to be massively
backed up by actuality to be worth anything at all.
- The answer is to keep double books, this one and that one.
7
Peter Manning is 1994. She is 49. Should I peg it to that time?
Piecing.
Who she is, which aspect of me. Which aspect is unfinished.
-
I like Jimmy Perez's accent and he's from southwest of Glasgow. Am thinking
I don't need to know much more than I do. A few details. Then I've been
remembering Lisa's way of writing her novel, she had a way of picturing
her people and it was episodic. I could use the journal excerpts sort of
patching. - These are just notes at the end of the day. - Also rereading
Master and commander and seeing the thoroughly specifically place-time
locatedness that is so much of his charm.
9
5 in the morning, lopped spruce and half-leafed linden cut sharp against
there is no way to say that textureless pale orange shading rapidly through
pale yellow to palest blue. Can I say how I feel it? Immaculate. A bird
flaps through. Another a minute later. Thankful. That something is good.
The mighty sky. The trees' complex long standing.
It says the McAras lived around Perth. I see there are long horizons,
wide cultivated fields, frothy ditches.
I let Patch onto the porch to smell the air, which is intoxicatingly
fresh. Mouse doesn't know where she is, bumps my ankles anxiously. I open
the door a crack, Patch glides in, Mouse rushes to touch her flank, smells
the air on her coat.
Earth level is dim still. White Boots crosses the empty intersection.
Orange Cat follows at a distance, same pace.
Sky intensifying.
- Gosh, a contrail. Pale pink and thick as chalk.
Yesterday I was on the Nicola's bank hearing blackbirds, water's chuckle
against a fallen branch. The river is high but this year isn't going to
flood.
-
I took my camping chair to the riverbank. Scent of balsam poplar, chokecherry
blossom. Blackbirds crying TZUT. High up the fine tips of two Lombardy
poplars in small yellow-green leaf tenderly stroking the blue. The river
at that hour slipping under long shadows lying upstream and then under a
bright green glaze by the willow. Most of all the constant constantly varied
slight chuckle of water in water.
Everywhere, up the street, far and across, trees in leaf.
10
Last night Patch crouched in the garden while I watched from the porch.
She was near the gate among plants taller than her, a black form among black
forms. Cars would pass, harsh sudden light and sound. I could see the alert
turn of her head. Then at the far end of the garden, along the side of the
garage, a black cat strolled through, another black cat, and turned south
out of sight without noticing her. Why did I want to tell that. Was it a
moment of seeing what she sees.
I'm touched by the way she chooses to be near me. I was sleeping on the
veranda couch yesterday afternoon, Master and commander folded open
next to me, and woke to find her stretched asleep parallel to me on the
bench. When I'm at the desk I'll find her asleep at my feet. She claims
the pillow end of my bed and if the covers are open claims the white sheets
as if they were what she was used to when she was a human.
I was nervous last night when Mouse was outside, he was too near the
fence and I don't trust him with the road. He was so interested in where
he was that rattling the treat box wasn't working. I stepped down onto the
path and barked once. He shot into the open door.
It's Sunday morning, quarter to six. When they hear me stir they wait
at the top of the cellar steps. I open the door, they flow out, two furry
backs. Mouse circles waiting for a treat.
After they've rushed to the bowl Patch comes back to the kitchen where
I'm making tea, waits by the door, wants to see the day. When I open the
door she hesitates, sometimes decides against, sometimes slips through.
This morning I let her out and went to the desk. After a while Mouse came
to fetch me and yes there she was waiting to come in. Mouse like a child
has no personal interest in me, just wants what he wants, comes crying if
the bowl is empty or if he can't find his mum.
I'm wondering if Patch isn't an old cat. Mouse gobbles his food but she
bites awkwardly, leaves crumbs, and when I give her treats can seem not
to see or smell them. She can streak around the room chasing and fighting
but she sleeps much more than Mouse.
Yesterday in the NY Review such a nasty piece by Rebecca West's
son. I was wondering whether that nasty sense of grievance is how Luke has
to think of me now. Anthony West disregards the mother who fought to give
something to the world and invents a mother who only lives to hate him.
-
Row was trying to phone me. I told Freya he could think himself off the
hook for Mothers Day. She said she thought there was something else he wanted
to talk to me about. When I reached him there was a prepared paragraph.
Freya is pregnant. I didn't know what to say. May 1985 Rowen was born out
of my excruciating mess with Jam. May 2020 Freya writes to thank me for
wonderful him. He's passing it on. The right sort of grandmother would feel
some marvelous new thing was coming to her. I don't feel that. There'll
be a child who isn't for me, who'll live and be someone else like anyone
else. My life had a branching-off at Rowen's conception: there began a branch
I'm not in. Luke was a branch I was in because I chose him in the right
way. Despite much. It is a branch I'm not in now but I was alive in it for
almost fifty years.
Leslie's FB note:
Oh Sheila. Happy Mother's Day. Your steadfast example
of patience, resilience, curiosity, quiet competitiveness, focus, commitment
and loyalty is my north star. Thank you for it all. I love you and I miss
you. See you when we get out of the upside down.
11
I need a better sense of her, what she's doing. She's forty-something,
honed. Instead of the doctorate she makes the film she hoped to make. Instead
of Tom she's with her other half.
- Here I'm checking through the David C story for bits about how she
feels him and what I find is that story as it actually was, the lyric feeling
all around it. Inspiration and pain, the grapple with the meaning of - what
to call it - the names given are either disrespectful or false - he was
a muse - he lit me up -
How the story doesn't work for my tale is that it's a story of wanting
and not getting and I'm trying to write a story about having.
12
I need a time line.
They meet on the plane. She does her gig. They don't see much of each
other. She goes home imprinted. He works. She works. They write letters.
She gets a 3-month research grant, comes back. They're working not together
but parallel. Grain work. His notes, her notes.
- Is there more after that? fight, prepared,
power struggle, balance in the midst of change
- Is that what you mean yes
- They fight no
- There's some kind of conflict yes
- With an outside force no
- Inside him no
- Inside her yes
- I don't understand justice, early love,
turn for the better, betrayal
There's my difficulty, there's no dynamism in the ideal. Le Guin makes
it his quest, their separation. In Orpheus it's her capture, his quest.
I could decide there doesn't need to be a plot, the whole story is just
being together and apart and working. That's my mode, showing people who
notice and feel. We leave the story with nothing decided. They'll find a
way.
Show his fear, show her fear, that's conflict enough? Difficulties in
the work?
Show it evoking early love and its floods?
Her Orpheus proposal. She's captured by early love.
What is early love for him. He seems not to have a mother. His work gropes
in the dark. It begins psychological in that way but ends with cosmos.
What is my question. What could have been the work and love trajectory
if desire hadn't needed the strenuous compromises there were.
In real life there was the smothering conflict with Louie. Do I have
to look in the Louie story for conflict. It says yes.
Early love pain in both of them.
-
Frightened phoning Dr MacLeod, stressed waiting to be put through. He
says he'll pursue the Echo.
Could work this aft and then it RAINED.
Posted Tom's hand creeping in my thinner-than-it-was fur - "He got
my pants down so that people in A seats in descending airplanes could see
his hand creeping about in my thinner-than-it-was fur and later very lusciously
stroking my bum." It's not popular but Janet leapt in first thing with
a red heart. Relatives following me now include Aunt Hilda, Aunt Lillian,
Uncle Bernard and four cousins whose degree of piety I don't know.
-
Ian MacIntosh. After the Whittington there were intersections. The time
I was coming from daycare climbing the railway bridge steps, carrying the
bike? or the pushchair? and he met me coming up the other side and asked
if I wanted a hand. I didn't realize it was him until after. Once coming
over the bridge in the other direction seeing him in his window at its foot
holding a child - he lived right there. Then I was walking with crowds for
some street festival maybe on the upper end of Burghley Road and suddenly
turned my head straight into his eyes half a block behind. And years later
when I'd moved to Vancouver but was visiting London, walking north on Tottenham
Court Road the very morning I'd landed, meeting him walking south. In Point
Loma feeling him somehow connected to the empty house I liked and inventing
that house as the house with the studio. - He was so exactly right. HD heart's
desire.
part 2
time remaining volume 9: march 2020 - march 2021
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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