time remaining 9 part 3 - 2020 august-november  work & days: a lifetime journal project 7 August 2020 Last night to calm myself so I could sleep I needed to write Tim Stephens a letter. Dear Tim, Years ago I'd always read your column in the Courier - often it was the only thing I'd pick up the Courier for. I liked what I felt was a large, wise and benign presence in your voice. I remember a column about what to do when one has a crush on somebody that was so correct I not only did what I could to follow its advice but I also passed the column to my sons. After a lot of personal work in my forties I discovered how to contact what I thought of as a larger self. Its voice had the same large, wise, benign quality I'd felt in your writing, so when you mentioned recently that you'd worked with a trance guide (I don't think you said exactly that) I thought, yes, that would be the quality I'd recognized in you. Lately I don't feel the old wise benign balance. At first I wondered whether you lost it as you've become more interested in money. Then, when I saw what seems to be a new misogynist edge, I wondered whether there had been a really bitter divorce. Forgive those guesses: I understand that I can't know your reasons. What I do know, though, is that the large, wise, kind voice I remember is no longer present. I still sometimes check your columns online and every time I'm distressed. There's no way the larger self as I've known it would say some of the things you now say. Given my former liking and respect for you, what has puzzled and distressed me most is your seeming advocacy for Trump and anger against the actors who are trying to curb him. I won't belabour Trump's laziness, historical ignorance, spite, narcissism, and complete lack of qualifications for the office he holds because I think they should be obvious to anyone. I do want to give you someone else's larger perspective. Here is Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a CONSERVATIVE think tank, describing the current administration: "The GOP now distinguishes itself by inaction. It has stood and watched as this administration separated children from their parents at the border, mistreated asylum seekers, botched its response to a hurricane in Puerto Rico, attacked science, and opened new avenues for toxic materials in our air and water. It said and did nothing about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and is actively blocking efforts to combat a recurrence in 2020. It has refused to pass a new Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated the legislation, which, reflecting the GOP of the past, had passed the House unanimously. It has refused to deal in any fashion with urgent problems such as climate change, immigration, global competition, hunger, and poverty. It confirmed nominees who lied to the Senate, who inflated résumés, and who failed to meet minimum qualifications for the job. It confirmed judges who were unanimously rated unqualified by the American Bar Association. "The party jammed through a tax cut at a time of low unemployment and low economic growth, making a mockery of modern economics and leaving little flexibility to deal with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. It slashed the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delivering an 80 percent cut to global-health programs designed to fight pandemics, and leaving the agency without the resources necessary to battle COVID-19. It has said almost nothing about the pitiful and reckless responses of the president to the pandemic, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths that should never have occurred. And now it is silent as we learn that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers, while the president said and did nothing." You can find the whole piece here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/decline-gop/614983/ Sincere good wishes, - Hi, Ellie, As with most who lament my existence, you focus solely on the "fact" that I support Trump. (It's not a fact at all.) If this is your yardstick for separating the spiritual from the non-spiritual, I have nothing to give you. Cheers, Tim - tim i don't lament your existence. i said i was puzzled by the turn it has taken but wished you well. i also didn't say 'fact', what i said was 'seeming advocacy'. if what sounds like support, not only to me but to many, is not actual support, then is there a way you could make yourself better understood. i don't use the word 'spiritual'. i think people are too careless with it to support any sort of well-understood meaning. i also wasn't hoping to be given something. i was hoping there was something i could give you. - "Lament my existence" - he didn't get that from me so is it about his ex? A general male whine about loss of status? He does support Trump but maybe in an unconscious way, because Trump acts outs his own sense of grievance? "Yardstick for separating the spiritual from the non-spiritual" shows how he thinks and it's the sort of crude abstract summary that's all it seems many people are capable of. He thinks of himself as 'spiritual' and believes I was saying he's not. 'Spiritual' doesn't mean anything to me: I think what he is is lost. - Oh and Jordan Peterson has come down with Covid-19 he contracted when being treated for addiction to anti-depressives. 8 Stranger tales. The journal's very short stories of people's lives. The Vietnamese day trader, Eric from the Rim. They marvel. Coast Starlight is another whole short book about America. I'm reading the IA25 journal itself rather than the index page and it makes me want to publish the journal rather than a Mesa Grande stories and photos book. 9 Fullness of life that felt like emptiness at the time. My time there was such a touching-down for an instant while other people lived their whole lives and knew so much more, such an unentitled sip. 11 Yesterday I kept remembering that I had been on a raft moving downstream on a wide river. Just before I woke the raft had been caught into a dark concrete-lined channel underground. Late in the afternoon I weeded the way I used to, focused and tireless for hours. The garden has shifted into autumn, I'm having to clear beds. Pulled garlic and onions and spread them in the garage. Hollyhocks that weren't watered are bare poles. Rob's clematis is thick in the grape's arms. Alnwick and Lark Ascending in rich second flush. Scent of stargazers next to me. Almost the moment I came awake, heart or whatever it is vibrating, Mouse was there black in the dark crouching against my chest. 13 A lot of sirens last late afternoon. Grapevine last night said massive pile of hog fuel stored on the old Tolko site self-combusted. There was wind so I wondered whether the town could catch fire and had brief thoughts about what I'd need to pile into the jeep. How would I carry the cats. Coldwater river between there and here. Town experts this morning saying they always knew it would happen. Why it's called hog fuel either the hog hammer machine that smashes it or the Norwegian hogge, chopped. - It was my heaven and I knew I couldn't be there long so I studied it in a way a native wouldn't, I grasped at it. In the spring of 2013 I'm well into work thoughts finally and then suddenly in the first week of June Ruth says she has to cut two fac. "This morning I know I'm not going back. If Ruth won't fire me I'll quit." Then I'm thrown into house mania instead. That was nearly 7 years ago! 14 Luke was already trampling me in 2013. "He's hurting me. Misunderstanding, accusing, cutting me off. I'm treading on glass with him. It's a power play isn't it. Is it? Deliberate misunderstanding to destroy my confidence? 'Go be smart with someone else.' Doesn't that say he's cutting me off because I'm smart? If he's doing that, if he needs to do that, if that's his only way to strengthen himself, then I'll let him go. I'll stop. I'll turn away. I'll say he's become someone else and is lost to me on a path he chose badly. - The index page excerpts aren't it. The Here pieces aren't. The present FB stories aren't. I've just finished zooming through the original journals and they're where I have to begin. So that is a lot of text and how to format it 1. so I can keep the strong horizontals of the photos and 2. so it reformats well as e-book for iPad and 3. as pdf for laptop or desktop. Answer: the monograph template will do for both text and photos. iPad can rotate for text. 15 Saturday 6am clear sky platinum white, orange tint in a low corner between roof and tree. Utterly still. When I get up Patch is at the door facing it to show her wish. She walks out and sits at the edge of the porch looking out. When I go to bed she's flat on the verandah table where she can see both streets from the angle between two window walls. Is it sophisticated of her to trust glass that way? It's where I'd want to sleep if I were a cat but when I see her I feel how exposed she is as a small prey animal. I keep noticing how alert they are to threats even from each other. The times they suddenly shoot inside from the garden. When that happens Patch hesitates at the cellar door as if she feels she may need better shelter than the kitchen. There's the way she sleeps near me as if for safety. When I'm not in the garden she will sometimes sit quietly on a bed or the cold frame rim but often when I go to look for her she'll stroll out of hiding under the lattice or the raspberry row. - I've transcribed the Here texts and now have to cut and collate. An introductory section and then I think by month. Months given in head titles. Introduction has to be where it is, how I got there, but also something about the boyfriend, the job, the age, relation to Borrego Springs - what's left out. How it's a fiction. Different colors of text? I'm noticing some of the photos have a psychological bearing, for instance the swooping-away wire for when I'm going to leave, and what I posted today, the Black Canyon Road in late August one that shows as if a mirror image of the road from which the photo is being taken. A photo's bearing meaning its stance. What I think I know is that it has to be a personal narrative readers can go along with. Does that mean it has to be solely for women. Its relation to the place is that it celebrates a so-rare thing. I studied and took notes but the science doesn't stick, what does stick is the love. It's a love story but a large love with sexual love included as a part of it. What part is work love, student love, lecture love? Love and slow dying. Something I need to do about quotations and reading - make sure to say it myself. - Freya came for the table saw. It pleased me that she understood loading a heavy object on a trailer, understood ratchet straps and knew what they're called, had rewired the hitch when it failed. When I said It's not a Canadian garden Brianna said No it's a witch's garden. There was an odd moment at the porch steps. She asked about the plant beside the first step. I said it was ccoking sage and then said But look at this one - the salvia apiana on the other side of the step. She said it was white sage, the sacred sage. So was that something, how does she know white sage but not the domestic sage? 15 Look at this. 5:46am, sky a luminous sheet of no colour, fingernail white moon in an upper pane. Here's Patch next to me on the apothecary's box after her early shift in the garden. It's so quiet. And now curled on the hassock, belly fur rising and falling, conked out, so trusting. Why does that move me. 19 I sketch in writing but let the photos do what work they can. Are there two kinds of text, daily journal and formal pieces? I posted the twilight tree with orange and white wings today and 12 people have clicked under it. It's not a good photo, it's a gimmick. Same with the photo of cracks in the cabin's walls that G said is his favorite. There are actual good photos hardly anyone notices because they are of some actual thing. They're good because the thing itself, the moment chosen, some earned balance in the framing. 20 Along with the journal for the Mesa Grande years should I look at the student letters. Have given it two days. I see that they fill in what else the time was and why the journal's notes on place and feeling seem a thin stream. They are the rest of what was happening. They're massively, easily competent on many topics. They're generous. They're effortlessly it seems adapted to their readers. They know and offer wonderful sources of many kinds. I don't see any way to use them though. What was I mainly working out in them. Embodiment philosophy as discourse trouble-shooting: what's wrong with how this is being said, how should this be said better. The rest was just trying myself out on their topics. 21 In bed last night I thought a story I should post was the power outage at the skyshack the September before I left. Posting it this morning I could see the extra charge Tom stories seem to have. I thought Tom stories, a book. Are the Mesa Grande stories too low-temperature, is the writing too dull. It says no. 22 It's a place memoir but I want it to be a love story too. As a love story it's a story about slowly backing away. She backs away into her own work. Teaching has financed her adventure with him. She gives it up when she gives him up. What is the arc with Tom - he over-promises and fails, as he always has - I mostly handle it - I'm backing away but we have good times in short visits. I want the story to show his grace as well as his weakness. Do I seem a victim     NO Was leaving him just     yes He mainly hung onto me to help himself stay sober     no We had a real spark     yes (sigh) If it was the real thing did I need to leave for a good reason?     yes The good reason was that the story was done?     yes Was it done for him?     no He flunked     YES It has to include Borrego because that's the right ending. What's uneasy in this story is that if she gives him up to live in her own work there should be own work. Was there? Actually yes. I think there wasn't because I haven't done the grand things. LW and WW had been fighting throughout the diss. They joined in teaching didn't they. Empathy and clarity. Is place work also their join?     no, LW When I do what I'm doing now?     YES 23 But the Tom story by this time doesn't have much charge? Looking at the writing yesterday and today thinking it's not worth anything as writing. Why would anyone want to read this banal stuff. Should I just revise Here and leave it at that? Have forgotten to say that sometime last week I woke from a dream that I was in my folks' place - not exactly their place but like the house on the Valhalla road - the dreary ugliness that always made me escape into reading and eating anything I could find. When I was escaping I don't think I realized how much it was distressing me. - This afternoon I got into the box of Mary's letters, approx 1961 to 1975. Dashed through them - not all of them - hating her. I wrote letters to make them laugh. That's a courtesy she didn't have. She wrote letters to try to hold me. She is so heavy. Hunger and concern, worry and reproach, and always lying about Ed. Then in 1966 the crisis about sex and after that more about god. At 9:30 when I stopped my systolic was 178 up from 131. Near the bottom of the pile were a couple of my later notes - 1992? - brief, written in lower case pencil, so even, so light they were like stepping into free air. I'd made it out. - Heap of pages written small and edge to edge. She names things but doesn't describe them. Mostly she names people. Her letters are full of encounters. It's not only her, it's their way of life, in a small fixed community people are large in each other's view. In her it's quite a blank largeness. There isn't enjoyment of being, just a miasma of need. And there I am in relation to them a ruthless girl unshakeably sure of myself. I hold out against her distress. When Ed is embarrassed and furious that Judie and I have fucked Rasheed and been found out by the Bible Institute I tell him his crimes against Paul. I demolish them firmly, reasonably: what you believe is useless to me. Really, wow. "You found out you didn't need anybody." Is that the way of it? It says yes. - Yesterday a woman coming past from church said my garden gives her joy. She said because it's natural. It has been messier this year, not watered enough, not weeded much, but people like it as though it declares a value they need. The odd woman I avoid - big crash, Mouse has knocked over the book stand by the bed - told Paul on the street that I'm quiet but my garden speaks for me. I'm not quiet, I just don't like her, but it does defend something against for instance Gail's tidy female obedience. I'm always surprised though at the people who do like that defence. 25 Journalist of valued time. 26 5:30 near the end of August, yellow tint diffusing over the black ridge. I was in this chair last night watching something on the iPad. Patch jumped onto the hassock with intent, as she does; from there onto the chair's arm and from there onto my chest. Alright we're doing this now. I put the iPad aside. She lies up my midline, face to face, belly to belly. Purrs briefly. I stroke the back of her head. The room is warm. The venetians are down. We're in gentle lamplight. I close my eyes, drop my head into the back of the chair and stay with the granular thrum of her field. I'm feeling it from pubis to chest and in my hands too, have stopped stroking her but keep them lightly on either side of her flanks. She has had her head up though her eyes are closed but now she shifts her front paws a bit to the side and curls her head around onto them. She's in sweet sleep. She startles, is suddenly alert, ears up. What did she hear? When I wake in the dark I say Mousie? quietly a couple of times. Then I hear him say Meee somewhere on the floor and know he's coming. Here's his black silhuoette against the windows. Drops light and warm between my upper arm and ribs, purrs. I stroke his velvet back. I'll want more but he won't stay long. What keeps impressing me is their definiteness. Patch decides that now we're going to do love. Mouse decides he'll come and decides he'll leave. And their trust. Though I'm not always kind she believes I protect her. His intense little spirit that is afraid of every other human accepts me though I am so large and strange. 27 Why does yesterday's post about this June's garden meetings and the cats have 12 people noticing and what I'd think are better stories of sea mist and * mostly ignored? People only want to read about people, though they like photos can't do anything visual if it's written? 30 Yesterday and today I worked in the garden in my old way, steady and tireless, four hours? Five? Cut down the Crimson Passion and the red currant getting ready for a dump run and cleaned up the alfalfa. My heart has been alright these days and even nights. Sunlight? Heat? Garden food? Exercise? Almost giving up meds? Cat medicine? Not using the hot rock? September 1 Is that skin cancer     NO Are you sure     yes Do the cats help my heart     yes Radically     yes I'm at a stop with the Mesa Grande book plan. I have no sense at all what to choose in the journal pages. What I can do any day is slightly edit a little journal piece to post. I do that and then oh the rest of the day - - Expected Kathy tomorrow but she and Lee sent the cats shooting inside at noon just when I'd stowed shopping and library things. How to describe the pleasure of a clean house ... isn't it as if my aura pulls in without my knowing it when the house is dirty. And Lee piled my messy heap of weeds and prunings onto his pickup and drove them away so now I'm ready to refine, move things around. I woke with chest pressure this night and called Mouse. It takes him a couple of minutes so I give up and turn over but then there he is landing lightly at my feet and strolling into just the spot. These nights he lies quiet for longer, goes to sleep encircled by my arm. He'll sometimes lay a velvet arm across my ribs or reach up to touch my face. It's happened that he's half under the cover and has laid his head on the pillow beside me as if he were a prince in disguise. 2 These days I'm sometimes noticing that not having been bound by needing to please has been a large strength. 3 Garden beginning to be bare as I clear out dead stuff, bare and dry. Flat row of tomato vines with small orange fruit. Silverlace vine heaped on the garage roof flowering thick and full of bees. Alyssum foamed up all under the apricot and around the little fig sometimes scenting the porch. Little birds in the high sunflower heads. Plum halves drying in the sun. 5 It's dark now by eight or eight thirty so I've been wanting Patch inside for the night by then. I often have to go find her in the garden and carry her back. Usually she has been letting me pick her up. She's heavy so I've been struggling to get her up the steps. Then she sits next to the door looking over her shoulder at me crying piteously. She wants the interesting darkness. I understand but I don't want to have to stumble after her in the dark. Last night I was tidying the kitchen before bed, opened the back door to set something outside and she streaked out. I'd been watering and the garden was soaked so I didn't want to go after her. Gave it half an hour. Put on my boots. She dodged me all up and down the paths. I gave up but kept going back to open the door. She wouldn't come in. I went to bed but was thinking of her out all night and couldn't sleep. Went on like that for a couple of hours, lying on my right side, lying on my left, almost dozing, startling awake. Then a sudden quiet instant of vision: Patch standing at the front screen door. It was the kind of clear sudden image I've learned is a message so I thought I should get up and check. Held out, didn't want to get out of bed. But then did. Through the door's glass, moonlight on the concrete stoop. There she is. I click open the lock and open the door. She doesn't run inside, stands for a moment so I have to wait. Did she send me a message     no Can they     no So it was you     yes - I think it was Mouse left a grasshopper on the carpet by my chair. The paragraphs above written this morning - crafted this morning - to be posted. I keep not knowing how to describe Patch's walk. She can be fast when she has a good reason but normally she's ponderous, not exactly a waddle but there's a weighted sway of her belly, comical in a way. Mouse's writhey spine is comic too but it's comic young grace. 8 There's a lanky patch of sunflowers, the kind with small heads, that seeds itself down next to the cherry tree every year. When the seeds ripen in early September it's busy with small birds all day. Patch follows them with her eyes but doesn't get excited. Mouse, though, crouches below them staring up with his round yellow eyes. When I was working at my desk yesterday I was intent on the monitor but almost saw something grey flash halfway up the wall. It fell again and there was Mouse with a bird in his mouth. I'll get him outside and try to make him let it go. Am chasing him through the rooms. He's looking back at me reproachfully but staying ahead. When we're almost at the open door he darts down the cellar steps into the dark. I don't want a dead bird down there but I'm not going to be able to catch him. I go back to my table. Next thing I hear continuous loud cries from the kitchen. There's Mouse on the counter frantically stretching toward the top shelf. He can't reach it. I may just be able to see a bit of grey up there. More loud cries. I chase Mouse into a room with a door I can close. When he stops crying maybe it will fly away. It doesn't. I put on an oven mitt and get up on a chair. It's still and small in the back corner of the shelf, a little grey-brown thing gazing with its round black eye that has a bit of yellow next to it. Will it panic when I try to catch it. I take hold of it with the oven mitt, round little thing in my padded hand, and carry it onto the porch. Set it down. It's gone. Three beats, three dipping beats across the road and out of sight. I let Mouse out of his time-out. He doesn't glance at the top shelf. He didn't see it go but he knows it's gone. 10 Dark at almost 6, dark but clear, palest yellow above the hill, one bright star moving out of sight in an upper pane. Scent of nasturtiums. O planet Earth. California is burning, Corral Canyon and Bobcat Meadows where I camped the first time out, the Pine Valley trail where Tom and I walked north and he was willing to hear any number of names of bushes. - By 7 the sky is bright ivory and there is a crow on the apex of the church's steep strong roof. 12 I posted Orion with its graceful paragraphs from many times. Grace of pleasure in time given. 15 In about ten or fifteen minutes a cardiologist of some kind is going to phone me. I've been trying to get my story clear: things have changed so much over the summer. I don't know what exactly he'll want to know and I'm nervous that I won't tell succinctly enough. But what do I want to know. What was the vibrating? - He thinks not heart Why does my heart go haywire just as I'm falling asleep? - Adrenalin? Normally low bp seems too low in my case - does that make sense? - He wasn't willing to say Is going ad lib with meds - as needed - more dangerous? - He says take low dose regularly, normal spikes through the day Is summer improvement going to go away? - He says exercise through winter Dr Swa? He wants another Holter and he'll check back in 3 months. [Sra.] 16 Late this aft I got into M's letters, thought I might like to feel her care? But then her starved grasping. Its weight. She doesn't write in pleasure of being, she screams to be fed. Where did I learn to want observation? My letters to her told stories. 17 Thursday morning. Pink filter in the sky but cloud forms showing through. - Evening - pleased because I made grape juice - cut a great heap, washed them, sat on the porch pulling them off their stems, set up the steam juicer and learned to use it - was doubtful would the taste be wrong - canned 5 white-wine-colored half pints and 2 pints, froze a plastic soup-container full and put the half-glass left over in the fridge. Got it out when it was chilled. Thrillingly delicious. Tomorrow I'll want to pick what I'd left for the birds too and maybe some plums for juice. There are still pears to come but nation-wide shortage of jars and lids. First Cox apple today that tastes like a Cox. 20 Her 1964 letters before she went to college are dense with mentions of people, who they saw, who they were going to see. She doesn't describe them, she doesn't register them, she just reels off her communal dependencies. There is a community and she's of it, she's ensconced. She's alright in those letters I think although I don't like to be what she is in them. In the 1969 letters she's flailing, has frantic crushes on educated men - was she on menopausal tilt? 46. How old was I when I had frantic crushes. I'm in a cloud of thoughts about her that I need to sort. 1. She was too formed when she went to college, the re-jelling was too hard. 2. She would have needed feminist analysis to deal with the men she was interested in and didn't have it. 3. The letters I wrote her in first and second year were in her mode of preoccupation with people. I needed to break out of that in me. She needed me to continue to be her and I was slowly working into another kind of self. Philosophy, photos. 4. Why was she so desperate to hold onto me, was it still from losing me when she was so young a mother? Was it what I'd thought since, that I was holding the truths she wouldn't admit? 5. Is it true that even though she was so hooked by people she was deeply loveless? YES. What do I mean, a fondness in the eyes. Did she ever look at Ed that way, did she ever look at me that way. 6. Is the fondness she didn't have what you've been telling me to find? It says yes. 7. Had she sometimes had it from her dad, is that why she looked for it in men? Yes. - When she wants to convince me that Ed is trying, or when she tries herself, beseeches, I'm adamant: no. I don't forgive him, I don't forgive her, I have a horror of them and I want to have a horror of them. When she gives me advice I'm furious, when she tells me to seek a deeper relationship with Him I zoom away in disgust. It's rage: you want to bend me to your crooked needs. It's an adamantine wall because it has to stand against my first 20 years. She sent us a book, Why wait for marriage, not understanding that her own marriage had already convinced us of what we had to evade. If she had said, I'm an example of what you mustn't do, I was a virgin led to the slaughter, too ignorant, too intimidated, too silenced, too deceived to be anything but helpless in what they'd made me sign up for, then I could have had confidence in her, I could have said I'm out here in the world fighting those wrongs for you, I'm your scout, I'm your warrior. 21 That was interesting, I declared the hate and found the love in a loyalty that has held through the whole of my life. She said "You are no longer the one who ." I went on in it but she kept trying to undermine me. What Joyce could have meant when she said she was a dud. And Ed: all through those letters he's preening himself on my successes, they were using me all over the county to fatten their status, and still at the end of his life he's whining about all he's had to do to live me down. She kept begging for letters but I went back to writing in the journal: I have hard things to do, I can't be in you and find my way. This is the whole deep story, the whole arc of a commitment chosen at the start. He had a commitment too. It was to be well thought of as a prosperous man. He did die with money. There must have been people who thought well of that. Missionaries he supported. Did she have a commitment? She was too thwarted to show a commitment of her own. She was a vampire. It's a condition not a commitment. So then Tom. What was that. It was graduation. I had to stay out of woman-nature while I was scouting for means to survive it. Then I took it on and was equal to it. I can tell I was equal to it because I left Tom still loving him. I carried myself out of the underworld. Across the intersection the plane tree still green and its open lower half all alight. Dark at the top, but look the light is rising into the denser more vertical late growth - there, it's to the top, it's coming around the sides. Is that enough of that?     YES - Little Mouse at night flopping down between my upper arm and ribs, nosing into my armpit, giving my bicep a little bite, reaching his soft paw to touch my mouth. Light bones in silken fur, warm and thrumming, so sweet an armful. - Chris, I've had a bad conscience for years because when I asked you to see Trapline through its difficult transfer and colour-correction process I said I'd give you a professional rate of pay and I haven't done it though you put in a lot of time and did a beautiful job. What came to me in bed last night and made me grin all over was that I could now send you your fee with no trouble at all. I worked in the US long enough to get a Social Security pension and as part of that entitlement Donald J Trump has sent me a big US$ vote-for-me pandemic check - insisted his name be printed on it. It's delighting me to think some of that money, which I honestly do not need, can flow to your family and to artists' film via you. Please do accept it. Let me say again: I owe it to you and it tickles me to be able to send it at last. 22 There hasn't been a frost yet though the sky is clear again. The garden is emptier but there's a spreading flood of alyssum under the apricot, lapping the porch. Late roses. Brilliant orange of Calif poppies either side of the gate, showing against the drying-out row of magenta cosmos. After I'd juiced plums I added orange juice and zest to the pulp - bit of honey - and made two pints of something delicious, not exactly jam, sauce? - Pat the plumber replaced the other outside faucet. Though he's not at all smart I instantly speak better to him because he's Irish. Clean house, Kathy this morning. I had to get out early and pick tomatoes because I'd ignored them and they were cracking. Tomatoes and a big white marrow across to the soup kitchen. Patch on the hassock at my knee rolled onto her back fat and plush. She sighs in her sleep. Her plump plush relaxed little bod just tickles me. I find her in my chair and when I want it I pluck her up and set her on the hassock. She understands, goes back to sleep. I call her Fat Bear when I meet her in the garden. On her face her patchiness makes her left eye look injured: it's a deformity but seems part of her matronly dignity. She has a past. 24 I'm floored! It is very moving to get something like that out of the blue from someone I admire. I definitely accept this cheque. - tart cherry for joint pain Nicotinamide riboside to repair telomeres to restore nerve signals muscles need to retain or gain strength, body builders use - Dr McGuff video. 25 When Patch rages at Mouse, snarls, claws at the foot of the bed, the word that comes to me is zanken, what our parents called it when we fought. Patch fights off Mouse's affection and goes into jealous fury when Mouse cuddles with me in the dark. I had to get up last night and dump her down the cellar steps. They are as alert to each other's movements as if they were each other's prey. - Don't I always get to this point: I try to extract a workable separate project from the journal and soon come to feel the original mix is the only possible thing. The journal itself though edited some. Is the 1994-1995 notebook Intense & purposes? 27 At 7:38 bright shreds of cloud moving east. So unusual, both their shreddiness and their direction. We are coming into the cold. I should maybe pick all the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and beans. 28 7:08am, day come up white and dim, Patch curled on the hassock with her head warm against my shin. I don't think I can say what is particular about fur's warmth. The beautiful man turns into a story about working. I didn't exactly know that. I sort my thesis outline in an hour. 30 "I want to be with a man and am not ready." - There's the summary, May 1993. "The story I have to tell about him is the one where I feel the crossed soul of conflict." "I've declared myself to a man with nothing wrong with him and I've let him turn me down and what comes of that? Another conception of dignity, one I like. I've made a relation possible." "'I want to know you,' he said. Really that's what I want too." "What I decided is the loving one is to be allowed to love and the knowing one is to be allowed to know." "You could say, I have to say how frightened I am. If I don't say so I will encapsulate. What happens every time points you to what happened then." "Safety went away and you thought What part of safety do I still have? That characteristic turn." "What part of safety do you still have? I have my ability to find myself alone. I'm alone, what's it like." "This is hard to keep clear. You're feeling something and the other person is still there. Look at them. Take a breath. It isn't that you have to say something just some way to stay in touch with them through the moment. It's a bridge. You need to see the reaction." - M's letters if I get past revulsion show a woman avid for personal relation. She doesn't hold back: she demands it, goes after it. She expands their circle massively, takes up the friends I leave behind and then attaches her college profs. She gets her confidence. She bursts out of her marriage though in a way careful to make it worth his while. And then what happens. October 1 If once you experience a great fear it never goes away. A small animal is plucked up into the air. Later it is set down again, again it is walking in its life behind its mother. But now it knows the air is a place you can go. What it is saying as it is plucked up, just that first moment, it is saying This is life. That was Louie wasn't it - - What I hate in M's letters is concern and demand. Concern is a helpless fake-generous demand to spare their neurosis. In M it's self-concern because she didn't look after herself. There can be actual help: perceptive intervention. When it happens people are grateful - I was with Joyce: you've done what it takes to learn skill. Gma Konrad is very interested in the new great-grandchild. Both Gpa and Gma would have been so pleased to see both you and Roy. I was pleased and rather surprised that they showed such tolerance toward your deviance. They are upset about it but nothing like they were about Herman's choice of a mate. She'd jumped on me about how much I was going to hurt them. Anne saw she was alarmed for herself. Anne said little about your choice except that you know better than to believe we can pass it off as you being old enough to make your own choice and we are not responsible for your decisions. How often will the hurt be brought to the surface and be refelt? Why must it be? - That's so much her way, she asks why and leaves it at that. It's chosen helplessness. At one time in the conversation when the G.parents were here Gma said: "Es wäre vielleicht doch besser gewesen Ellie hätte den Frank genommen" and Gpa with a wave of his hand said "Ach was du sagst, das hätte niemals geschafft. Frank war nicht weit genug für Ellie, zu sehr farmer." Not wide enough - who knew he saw that. - I always hated the way she had to labour things, explain jokes, but in the letters after she went to school the way she clamours for 'love' and 'contact' and touch is icky. And she's compelled to pursue men. In menopause I was too but I wrangled it, I obsessed in the journal but not in letters to my kids. I'm wondering whether she went off the rails the way she did because she wouldn't name the bad half of her circumstance, she kept lying about how much she hated being stuck with Ed. So then I took on a man at least as bad as Ed but declared every speck of how bad he was as well as every speck of how good he was. Was that generational completion? - I sighed there. Joyce said she was a dud and I wasn't sure but I think I'm seeing it now. She bailed on essential work, which compelled me to take it on at the cost of better tasks. When I named it to her she denied it. I had it in me to be ruthless, I didn't bend to her crookedness, I resisted her without understanding why I had to, but all the same I had to live out what she wouldn't. Is that correct     YES Because I was imprinted     yes She understood nothing about me     yes It took me years to stop overestimating her and when I did stop I hated her. - The evil emperor says he has the bad disease. He may be lying so he can hide out for two weeks but if he does, getting really really sick might demonstrate to his followers that God does not love him after all. All the better if he is proven to be a super-spreader of disease since he has been a super-spreader of so much else. 3 The Russian olive. St Michael's massive pitch. At 7 the moments when the street is black filigree against evenly radiant sky. Soon changed so I can see the plane tree's so-beautifully ordered bits gold all over. I hate her because she tried to hold me back. I beat her off but I always regretted that she couldn't use what I'd cost her to gain or understand what my refusals were for, how much I've been able to find. Do you sometimes mean the illusion that I betrayed     YES Did I betray her     no Have I kept myself from prominence because of what I feel I cost her     yes You mean her demand was unjust     yes And her need misplaced     yes It's not what I cost her but what she cost me     yes She cost me my right place in the world     yes She not only tried to hold me back but she did hold me back     yes If she hadn't I wouldn't still hate her     yes This really is the nub isn't it     yes Is it unfixable     yes Is there more you want to say     victory, recovery, readiness, for improvement You mean something is fixed already by seeing it     yes More     no Was it competitive in her     no traumatic I'm doubtful that anything can change     no something can 5 I posted lummi marsh this morning. I'm proud of it. It's full and free. The place and time and the people meeting them are in balance in it. It shows the accomplishment my life was aiming for from the beginning. Ros said write about liberation. Now I can say write liberation itself. - Would the writing of the ideal man look weak beside the story of the actual men. - Message from Freya at four this aft, Luke had called asking for my phone number. Midnight in London. With the window open and pubs closed it's so quiet he can hear foxes and owls. How long had it been, ten months. I was cutting back the burgeoning thickly blooming catnip to move it and there was Patch on her back rolling against the pile of clippings. Had stood casually watering the west fence bed and saw a bit of something - something I hadn't seen all summer - hidden behind a leaf - a plump pale-golden oval, a single perfectly ripe greengage plum. I've kept lifting apples to see whether the bloom ends are still green, which they have been, but the one I bit into today was crisp and the seeds were brown. It was pretty and it was good but it wasn't a Cox, the flesh was white not yellow and it hadn't the unnameable Cox's Orange Pippin taste. Ro and Freya in a motel room in Harrison, he working on site and she on her laptop and walking the dog. 6 I posted the obscure piece called Orphée this morning and then went into the Tom stories folder where I kept finding story after story so bright and brisk and lightly balanced that I thought they should be the book and call it Tom stories. 8 Golden trees all over town. The linden turned overnight. Today is the day it's unleafing. Good day for women yesterday: 1. the nobel in physics, 2. the nobel in chemistry, 3. the vice-presidential debate. Today the nobel in literature. Louie and her group are selling the studio because it can't survive the plague. Then she says she's selling her place. (Will get a million dollars.) She'll live with Ina somewhere. She says she likes the intellectual stories best, is proud of me in them. It's three weeks to the election. 10 I sat down to the computer this morning looking for an image of David M. Tried beautiful men. Stupid men with their shirts off gazing soulfully. Scottish men, nothing but kilts. Try laughing men, men with glasses and find men too stiffly handsome, men too blunted, men too off-kilter. Scottish novelists - I like Stevenson but he's too frail. Scottish classical musicians - a violinist who's alright but only in certain photos. Sting! I look him up. Fields of gold sung straight and true. Page of photos. A sensation I had with none of the other men, sexual challenge, roots of my hair prickling, what Susan called pitta, fire. Broad high forehead, narrow eyes, wide mouth. That's not DM even when I give him brown eyes and black hair. Fields of gold is a good song but his music isn't musical particularly. 11 Knopfler's is - Knopfler's lyric touch is - and when he's young he has Tony's soft-as-shit northern art school wide-open look - but he's pudding-faced when he's older. DM isn't a rock star and when he's older he looks drier, sadder maybe. He can light up but he's reserved. - Mouse is lying on the arm of the chair next to me with one of his front paws touching the computer and one touching my thigh. He's been interested in the red light on the memory stick. He doesn't usually stay quiet next to me this way unless I'm in bed. Now he's looking at the tiny white letters appearing on screen. qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq Patch has a short-chinned owl face but Mouse has a long pointed chin that with his round eyes makes him look always a bit dazzled. That's not the word exactly - he's a child but more than that he's a scaredy-cat. He doesn't stroll over the threshold the way Patch does, he edges toward it sideways from under a chair and then shoots across to the edge of the porch where he can dart into cover if he needs to. He still can't stand a stranger, any stranger. When * was on the path talking to me he streaked past in a panic and was still under the bed half an hour later. Unless I'm lying down he's still nervous of a hand reaching to stroke him. He still cries piteously, sometimes for reasons I can understand - he wants a treat, his bowl is empty, the cellar door is closed - but sometimes, is it, simply not knowing what to do with himself. Though Patch hisses and scratches to beat him off he still cries persistently to tell me she's on the porch wanting to come in. I was in bed yesterday afternoon watching something on the iPad. Patch jumped up next to me, which she seldom does, and was kneading the quilt. I pulled her closer. She settled across my left arm and went to sleep. Gradually she let her head fall forward onto my shoulder. She sighed. That sigh of hers so moves me to fellow-feeling. After a while there were little jerks and sucking noises. She was dreaming. Her independence, the way she waits at the door to go out into the world where real things are to be seen and done. When I'm in the kitchen but not letting her out she'll cry, such a quiet cry, and stand on her hind legs looking over her shoulder at me pawing the door frame to tell me how much she needs to be out, out. Then her dependence, her trust, when she comes to sleep next to me on the hassock or on the corner of the desk. 12 Thanksgiving Monday morning 5am. The cats. Roses in the house, nasturtiums, sweet peas (four yesterday, still), the silent house, my bed in this room with its six coves, my heart's steadiness these months, having been able to work in the garden, the jeep, Ro and Freya, Louie lately again, Paul, Luke alright so far, Kathy's help, Jenn in Kamloops. Having these little stories I can like and give. Black dark, wet street. First snow on the high passes. What needs to change. Daily hopelessness of the way I dress, my hair, not having books, this summer's ten pounds, unhappy idleness. 13 Janet's daughter is a Qanon conspiracist. Tim Stephens rants about the Democrats' corruption and Google's bias against Trump and Fox News. The Senate is in the process of installing an anti-abortion and anti-Obamacare judge to overbalance the Supreme Court. It's as if insanity is gaining and we're helpless against it. Is insanity gaining     yes Because the stupid are being empowered by the internet     yes And their motive has to be denying that they're inferior     yes Murdered babies and trafficked children are the fantasy levers that work because they express something unconscious? The Dems haven't taken account of the profound irrationality of the cognitive underclass. For the stupid there needs to be a counter-lever, for instance fantasy of a heavenly father who suffers the little children to come unto him? 14 The garden this morning wet and misty like October in London. I took photos. 15 I particularly like the photo of two apples on their branch wet with rain and shining in the mist's all-surrounding light. What I like most about it is that I grew them. I grew Cox's Orange Pippins! That London name from the fruiterer's shop on Swain's Lane in 1970. Coxes and Bramleys the specifically English apples and Coxes tasting like no apples Canada had ever seen. I bought the little tree my first spring here, seized it in the nursery row as soon as I saw it. It was the first tree I bought and the garden wasn't ready for it yet so it stood under the plum tree in its pot until its place in the far corner was ready a year later. It's prone to leaf-roller moth and this year I solved that problem almost well enough. - tim i haven't been talking to you because i hope to persuade you. I know that isn't going to be possible. i have been talking to you because unlike the denier in chief and his believers i think intelligent people need to be willing to know the worst. in this case what i mean by the worst is the way you and others of your kind rationalize the wreckage being promoted. you see trump as a "true alpha male" who defends your own maleness. i believe that is the nub for you and the legion of limbaugh ditto heads and the sea of uneducated white males in despair at loss of prestige as women and minorities claim justice. but trump defends the worst of maleness not the best. there are kinds of maleness i adore and i live in hope that those kinds will increase as the retrograde tribal model dies out. - My hands were shaking as I wrote it. I really am so frightened of what it means if Trump wins this election. 16 It was the post I wanted seen yesterday and there was a blank under it all day until later in the evening Jennifer, Jim Mann and at midnight Leslie. Grateful to them. It was gallant of Jim. - Yesterday morning before the sun rose I opened the door onto the first frost of the year. Went out and took photos of frozen leaves in the tender light of a completely open sky. - Friday 6:12am. Is it time to lift the venetians. Patch is out roaming in the dark but Mouse is asleep on the chest of drawers; he doesn't stay out long now that it's cold and wet. - Close to the end of season 4 of This is us. Have I noticed anything. The American mawkishness about 'caring' - cast of characters constantly saying Are you alright or else We're going to be alright. It's about trauma in families, yes, but don't the characters ever want to talk about for instance their work? Concern and popular culture, popular holidays especially Thanksgiving. Trauma and its effects. Race as one kind of trauma. Abandonment and adoption. Addiction. Bereavement. Anxiety disorder. Depression. Obesity. Alzheimers. Prematurity. Blindness. Homosexuality. War. Rivalry, jealousy. Home invasion and robbery. At the same time it sells America as the fabled land of money easy as air: there's always enough for houses and cars and new clothes and sudden flights across the continent even when the characters are out of work or badly paid. Who does it mean to instruct? It says be loyal, be honest, say what you're worried about, accept imperfection, rescue the perishing, persist through hardship, keep your family together. What it doesn't instruct: world, cosmos, seeing, reading, thinking, being. There are endearing characters, by which I mean good actors whose lines suit them. William Hill the lost father. Beautiful Beth. Jack the good dad, Rebecca the sweetheart wife whose body stays twenty five years old despite a triplet pregnancy and forty years of mothering drudgery. Breezy-vulnerable Kevin who often gets to show off his perfectly triangular torso. I fast-forward past the woman shaped like a pumpkin though, and her manic in-love-with-Hollywood husband. 17 2am Patch wakes me snarling and hissing. I lie half an hour waiting for her to stop, then get up and shove her downstairs. Go back to bed. Maybe Mouse will come and sleep with me. He's crying. I'll wait him out. He doesn't stop. She's mean to him but he wants to be where she is. Now it's 4am and they're both in the cellar and it has to be morning though I'll be wrecked later. - I thought of the long-trip family photo and the Enno story during the night and this morning trimmed enough of the 13-year-old's gush so I could post it. It had somehow occurred to me that there was something about a story of a thirteen year old girl meeting a twenty year old farm boy in a Marine's uniform - he having stopped because he wanted to talk to a girl and ending dragged to church by her parents - and just candidly telling the tale. What took me there and what I was really telling it for, though, was the moment when he said "You'll be like this until you're seventeen." It was friendly and direct and amused. Maybe he had sisters. Was he right? Sixteen maybe; till I had a real boyfriend. People liked it, even Rowen who never comments, and I like it too, the excited girl writer and the old woman writer sixty-two years later who has earned a dozen people willing to read her. The girl's writing has a foamy surface but under it there's a firm talented sense of what details to tell. The black glove rapping on the glass. The small farm in Indiana. Daddy's loud guffaw. "I knew he'd say a proper goodbye so I opened the camper's window and waited." 18 Today I went to 15, the Sunday she was thinking about a minister asking us to consecrate our lives. 20 Lee and Kathy this morning got the two ugly wooden blocks off the back room's window wall and in the afternoon I went out in a winter coat and pulled up a heaped wheelbarrow load of dead cosmos stalks. Both were uncommon effort, Lee on the stepladder with a chisel, a crowbar, a hammer, a heavy mallet, a saw and a couple of 2x4 blocks, and me pushing on long after I needed to stop. 21 Wet snow sifting down under the street lamp's large yellow eye. 6:36 Wednesday morning. Both cats are out in the wet cold dark. Mouse for the first time asked to go out on his own. 22 I phoned Rowen to ask what he'd liked about the Enno piece. He paused carefully and said it told him things about my dad. A bit further on he said it was cinematic, he saw it. 23 Full dark at almost 7 and may be snowing all day. Bits of inventing DM. Photo more like him than any so far. Details changing. His mother and father meet in London. He's not particularly tall, 5'11 maybe. His hair is shoulder length not in a queue. At moments I feel I'm really creating him. What I'm mostly wanting is how lovely he is in bed. Slow. 24 What is it about the photo. I'm gripped by it and startled by it. It's really someone. I'd like it if DM looked like that but it's startling to have him look like anyone, my imaginary men have always been perfectly faceless. As I describe him I can see I'm in some ways describing myself. He has my virtues appreciated by me as they haven't been appreciated in me. I also see how far Tom was from what I actually want. - I was here in lamplight last night, Mouse asleep on the bed, Patch asleep on the desk's chair, all so peaceful I didn't want to send them downstairs. When I turned out the light and got into bed Mouse stood up and came directly into my armpit, lay down, snuggled in. We fell asleep together. All quiet until one of them, probably Patch, was scratching under the bed. I got up and let them out onto iron frost. By the time I'd made tea they were ready to come in and now again in lamplight with the boiler burbling they're asleep in their former spots. 24 Look at that, 7:21, steam rising into tinted pale sky. Really it's a good window, morning on many days. It's very cold. 26 Paul said Don't take this the wrong way: you were our parents' only child. I didn't at all take it the wrong way, I said it wasn't true of Ed but I knew I was M's favorite. M was a very young mother when she lost me and maybe it traumatized her. He said Judie is still angry. I said she doesn't realize her reserve had something to do with it. I knew M was starving and took responsibility for her. George Block's wife said to M You and Ellie seem more like sisters than mother and daughter. When I went to college I wrote every week because I wanted her to have college. Paul said that in those letters I'd seemed her parent. 27 Throwing out Challenge notebooks. What I studied in London. 28 Posted the story of Ladner dyke with David. Such flow and balance and exactness. Yesterday a famous poet's book about her marvelous husband's death so without any of those qualities that I ripped through it annoyed: why do people write such abstract summaries, don't tell us about your life, get into your moments, give us that. "Are you writing a memoir?" "Not exactly I think." - Notebooks all over the place. I'd been a student in high-end abstraction and now I was studying material world - child-raising, pottery, construction, gardening, housing, photography, yoga and meditation, design, nutrition, sex, education. Feminism. How to live. There are a lot of film notes but they're a waste until I get to the experimental film course. Where to enter work life. 29 Planet Hair with two customers wearing masks and two cutters with masks and bad hair. Good cut though, at least while the blow dry lasts. Short. I keep stroking it. 30 It seems peri-menopause had to be a wrenching burst of man-craziness. Instead of finishing the garden video I went rogue about Louie, Dave, Ken, David, Tom. Now my question is what if I hadn't had to be that and had done what I wanted in film and sound. I'd have finished the garden video and used CISR properly to work on the Orpheus project. What would that have led to? When I ask that it's as if I worry about not having done Being about, as if I'd be undoing it. Calm down, you can't undo it. But who would she have been if she hadn't taken herself through that ordeal into that satisfaction. It led her out of life in a way and it couldn't succeed in the world. The filmmaker self would have been less impressive but happier? Do you think this is the right question     yes Is it the right answer     YES I sacrificed love woman to impress the men     yes And the men weren't able to be impressed     yes But, but: I went to the work that was most needed. I did! Even if it takes no effect. Alright, but alternate life: The garden video became about image-sound relation. Does Orpheus have a reason apart from peri-menopausal madness? Yes it's about art and the uncon, which is everyone. 31 We're edging up to the election at last. Will the vile man be gone. If he is will the Dems figure out what to do with the masses' hunger to be excited. November 1 Yesterday I posted Desser's photo of me in the Academy Hotel when I was 24. I posted it because hardly anyone had been noticing recent posts even when they were good. People like personal history photos but not personal writing. So: 17 people including two Jims, two Bens, etc. Today I'm posting something philosophical again but with a photo. The relation of the writing and the photo will likely not be interesting to anyone. 2 Why did I drop We made this. 1. Because working with Louie was excruciating. 2. Because we didn't get completion money. 3. Because I had to finish Analog-Digital. 4. Because I got boy-crazy. 5. Because I had to organize PhD future money. 6. Because I was scared of the technology. 7. Because I thought it should be something I didn't actually want to make or know how to make. So now: I have money and time; I have technology I can handle; I could make something just as I please. - Patch is so vivid to me. I mean I have such a definite sense of her as a person. It's hard to say this. It's as if she's a woman of character. She's willful. She's dignified. She's somehow deep. There's the way she stands by the door longing to go out but uttering only the smallest most courteous request. The way she goes out to patrol in the morning before she eats. The way she's indifferent to treat bribes. The way when I'm holding the door open for her she takes her time crossing the threshold. The way she lies on the hassock at my knee in some perfectly graceful curlicue wearing a full length mink coat. She doesn't struggle when I pick her up and lumber across the floor with her though last time when she thought for a second that I was going to drop her she uttered a tiny exclamation of distress. In her moments of desperate heart she comes for what she wants with what seems an anguished but stately intent. Today I saw her in the garden considering the fence, running up it - not jumping, running - then threading one foot after the other along the inch-and-a-half wide beam with her neck stretched forward staring at something in Doug's spruce. She'll fold her legs under her in the far corner of the lattice bed, not sleeping, just gazing. She scared me loping across the road to the church's yard but she's judicious, waits till there are no cars at all in either direction. 3 If I've driven away somewhere and am gliding back to park next to the house there's Patch on the path locking eyes with me. Then when I've come around to the gate she rolls on her back as if to say Glad to see you back, boss. When I'm working in the garden she stays nearby, follows me if I go through to the front, runs up the steps ahead of me even when she's not ready to come in. She likes to be outside, needs to be outside, is interested in everything outside. Even in the times when she shoots inside from a distance she'll nibble only briefly and then stand waiting for me to let her out again. I've wondered with both of them though whether they're anxious to know the door will go on opening. Mouse must be almost a year old. He's as long as she is now but leggy, light-boned. Is he maybe not very bright? He'll go out briefly but rushes back in though there's nothing to do inside but sleep. He sleeps much more than she does. He still defers to her: when I open the door for her she strolls out and sits surveying from the porch. He hangs back, waits, waits, then darts past her because he knows she'll snarl. He still doesn't like to be stroked, although only when I'm safely lying down he more and more does like to cuddled against me with my arm around him. When he looks at me with those gormless round eyes I'm still baffled, and yet the way when he's cuddled against me he'll reach up and touch my mouth with the pad of his foot is utterly tender. Is he in a developmental blank because if he hadn't been neutered he'd now be fighting other toms and jumping females? I'm writing about the cats not about the US election being counted at this moment because even if the vile man is defeated I still have to be frightened and distressed by how many people have voted for him. And he may still win. I'm afraid to look. Oh Tom. You're somewhere watching TV as disgusted as I am. We had two good elections. Long ago. 4 Such a pall of discouragement these years, that the stupid and greedy and resentful and deluded are being allowed to smash the gains good government had made. That men even now are determined to keep women down. That 43 percent of women are complicit. "Behind every great woman there's a man trying to keep her down." In the garden leaves froze green and hang crisped grey-brown as if by sudden flash of blight. The sumac is in tatters without having had its weeks of orange. 6 This morning Biden has squeaked ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia as the votes go on being counted. What I'm puzzling about now is how formed/famous DM is. If he's a star he won't be interested enough in her. He'll have had to be holding back so being together matters to him. What I know is: he's good with machines of any kind and at the same time he's un-cut-off. Is that possible? It means he has a male brain but is willing to suffer? Because he's honorable. in a way, my contribution will be more on a theoretical basis, about suggesting greater freedom Eno about his music. I like it as a description of the writing in my FB posts. - Early afternoon the sun had come out. I was at the monitor. Heard a meow, Patch at my feet looking up into my face. She had said a word. As I got up to cross the room she ran ahead of me because she had understood that I had understood. I opened the door and she ran out. It's the first time it happened that way, she'll ask to be let out when I'm in the kitchen but she had never come to another room to ask me for something. I keep not being able to say how personally I feel her. The look on her face when she was saying what she said, which was Please, struck to my heart: you really need this. 7 Clicking in the posted folder at random I was remembering what Jim said, "I just never know where they are going." I liked that they seemed like nothing else I've read. The right kind of autobiography. Am wondering whether they've slowed the counting to give the zealots time to cool. - At 10:30 I opened Louie's email with elephants and giraffes and their human companions dancing to Jerusalema and a slow pangolin just being. I thought that was wonderful enough but then the NYT headline. Before that I'd posted the paragraph about Patch coming to ask for something and then taken a photo to post with it, of Patch gazing at the frozen garden from the porch. I love its colors. Her glossy black and brown fur in live focus with the frozen space she's seeing in soft pastel, and something about the bands of white, black and grey underneath her as if they mark her locatedness. 8 Seeing what the whole of a photo says or suggests is more sophisticated than my readers are. Default setting is to see an object against a minimally noticed background. In taking the photo it's the uncon that sees the whole as such. Maybe in some of them seeing it the uncon sees it too. Sunday morning. White sky at 7:18, small shapes of grey fuzz gliding south between the two power lines, reforming, diffusing, dissolving as they go. South is unusual and their gentle visible vanishing is too. 9 The queen's gambit 7 episodes on Netflix a fable about female genius. Two things mainly are fantastic in it, the way she wins at chess without having to learn it and the way men don't resent and undermine her when she's better than them. The way it ends with her walking into Moscow's street chess gathering and being surrounded by old men who love her for winning is wonderful. She finds herself in a country where they understand and care about what she's good at. I was lying awake at 4 thinking about what I'm good at, how Jody Golick was the only one who saw what I'd done in Being about and then how awkwardly it went with him afterward, I repelled by his eczema, he repelled by my films. We were bad at being persons together and that was that for his support of female genius. What's lovely in the series is generosity among the intelligent who love intelligence more than winning. Maybe the really gifted sometimes actually are like that. There's also the way people who aren't gifted feel they're given something by having known someone who succeeds, as if they feel they are carried along. The moment when Beth comes into Mr Sheibel's basement cave after he dies and finds his bulletin board covered with clippings about her. Her brief unsmiling yet well-dressed way with people. The parallel swiftly-increasing success of the actress who plays her. Her fascinating breasts. - The leading actors playing Americans are all Brits! 10 Loving what is near to love, the way Patch's tail twitches as she falls asleep on the floor, registering exactly where she is in herself, the way a bit of cloud simply vanishes in place. 11 Inventing DM's work formation seeing I'm describing my own. Minimalism and the notion of engineering attention, loyalty to beauty and wonder as forms of love of the world, interest in being, interest in the uncon, recognition of the notion of field, recognition of quality of being in others and in work, ethic of quality of consciousness in himself. Wanting work to be ultimately metaphysical. 12 I want DM to be instantly convinced of wanting her and instantly expert with both of them and at the same time I want him to have been withheld from early love on account of losing his mother. Is that possible         no They have to plunge and then flounder     yes His difference from Tom is that he's honorable, hard-working, focused and brave. I had to try to do it with someone who was only very partly able. Tom forced access with substances that rouse the energy of early love without integrating it. 13 I wrote the end of the story first. Now I have the task I don't understand yet, of getting them to that arrival. - No it's not the end of the story, it's where another story begins. I don't understand that one yet either. What actually happened. We fell in love. We were separated. I was in pain. He failed me. I struggled to balance and to understand addiction for him. He came through. How could that have gone for me if he'd been a better man, is that the question. Would we still have been in pain     yes Would I still have been desperately unsafe     yes What would better mean. He wouldn't have had a forebrain damaged by fetal alcohol. He wouldn't have been an addict; he'd have been able to have money; he'd have been able to defend his gift; he'd have been able to be honest. He'd have been attached and wouldn't have wanted me. If DM's mother dies when he's 14 minus fetal alcohol and Catholic indoctrination so he's not a liar, addicted or improvident, what's the necessary damage? He's been technical and alone. He tried once. I need him to be a feeling man but can he be? Feeling but in pain. Therapy? Yes. How is loss at 14 different from loss at 2. Loss at 2 wasn't felt, isn't remembered. Loss at 14 is felt if supported. He has Ann Davis. He was a confident affectionate child. Becomes a shocked boy. A more fiercely focused boy. Elusive with girls, not seductive, not mean, perceptive and careful. Friendly and easy with men. He's sometimes thought gay though he's manly. He's fathered enough without the competitive weight of an actual father. His grandfather is daily father in effect but at a remove. Their connection is in astronomy, natural history, science. There's also his uncle the farmer who teaches him practical skills. "I saw how you came in together." How are they a match. Because of their talk on the plane he feels some of the ease with her that he has with men. What makes him open up. She feels him instantly. She doesn't press but he feels her feel him. Her feeling for orphans, she has it before she knows he's that. She's ready. She instantly loves him. She sees what he is. - What has happened there. I wanted him to be the certain careful one and now again it's she who has to be. How can he be a feeling man but not already taken by other women. What I know about emotion is so pegged to my actual circumstances. 14 It has scared me that Mouse has been vanishing for hours sometimes on his own. I've seen them coming back over the fence so I stepped on a 2x4 edge and peered over the boards calling him. He peered out from under the cedar hedge. Then Patch too. Warm and dark. There's not much cover on this side now that the garden is bare. - Louie sent an interview with someone writing about US chemical warfare because of its mentions of diaries. I replied: > You start every diary entry with personal details. Why did you do that? > I think daily life is the crucial antidote. I'm always just entranced. There's just so many little things that make me happy. The presentness, the warm-bloodedness of reality. That is just the way of it. I was often aware that when I was writing about my times with Tom I was in some way writing about the US: I tried not to back away from the worst while I was pleased writing about the best. It was like that in the years writing Being about in a similar way though it wasn't about best and worst. I worked my way in theory there trying never to be falsely modest about what I could do and at the same time tried never to hide the confusions and misery of girl heart being thwarted inwardly and externally. Whenever I spend some months thinking I could extract something publishable from the journals I come up against the way most writing seems to settle for either positive or negative. Anything I published not as journal but in the actual mix would be so unfamiliar to people they couldn't like it. But if I published something they could like I would know it was false. > There's this amazing parallel history in the United States at that time of really beautiful things to be proud of. We need to remember that we have been capable of really beautiful things in this country. Remembering an argument with Lise at Goddard. She was always clamouring feministically about the badness of the times politically and I was saying but look at what's happening at the same time, the work that is being done in cognitive science and philosophy that supports understanding humans as integral bodies. 15 I had fallen asleep with the light on. Woke very suddenly, sat bolt upright, cried out Where's the baby? Tossed the covers back to look under them, peered over the side of the bed. I was really alarmed. It was a full minute before I knew where I was. - Mouse is such a crybaby. I hear his voice at the door small and high as a bird's. I let him in. He's crying because there's a tough gust of wind. Patch though is scornful, valiant, intrepid. I look out the kitchen window and see her walking the narrow edge of a 2x4 ten feet above the ground. - There are good imagining notes in 1994. That's a separate piece? What am I doing today. Going through 1994-95 sorting into notebooks: imagining writing sound film orpheus air Why. I haven't settled what she's doing before she meets him. The journal is working on all of those plus love, sex, therapy, teaching, friendship, garden etc. 1993 she edits the garden video. Editing notes. 1994 she's at CISR so that's film including sound. Crush on a young man, taking stabs at Orpheus. Orpheus notes and crush notes. 1995 she signs on for imagining PhD to get grant money. Papers on imagining, sound. Imagining notes, writing notes. 1995 autumn in London meeting him 1996 first six months, after she meets him she settles her mind about Orpheus, writes it instead. Therapy notes. 1996 May she's just visiting, has to leave again? He takes her north. 1996 second six months she works on sound and The air? 16 With Mouse it's his voice, with Patch it's her tail. - She's had a long, loving interest in the many kinds of imagining experience: reading and writing, dreaming, reverie, meditation. She had tracked it in journal notes and in formal philosophy of mind. In 1995 computers are increasingly being used for visualizing complex data. She needs to make a living and sees a niche. She proposes an interdisciplinary PhD in scientific perceptualizing: visualization, sonification. She designs her program to include a video. What actually happened is that to understand imagining she had to understand its entire cognitive context - perceiving, imagining, representing, thinking - and she had to test and then support what she was coming to understand with what was then being discovered about the organization of the brain. Both of those efforts were enormous: she had to reformulate the terms of cognitive science and philosophy of mind and she had to reinvent how the brain is described. At the same time her emotional life was tied into struggling to understand and revise her own formation as a woman. Both were work that had to be done but the video was left behind. She never did talk about perceptualizing because it just falls out of the larger project. She could then have made her reputation with that but she was done with the question. So what remains of the imagining project and the video project? She still wants to make something beautiful and marvelous. The philosophy of imagining project was a recognizing, sorting, reorganizing, articulating task. Its boldness and clarity are beautiful and marvelous certainly but she still wants to make something of a different kind. There's something she wants to see and be and feel. She reveres those who have made some of that something and she wants to be working like them, among them, the artists. She has sometimes been calling that desire Orpheus. At other times she calls it writing and fastens it to her collected shreds of language. So there are two impulses in her relation to imagining, a wish to be clear about how to think it as something people can be and a wish to sail away in it as a capacity of her own. She has been safe and skilled in the first and afraid of the second, she has dipped and backed off again and again. Being afraid of art, what is that. - 3:18pm, thick snow at the window. It's Monday, two high school girls walking home with their hoods up and heads down. I've cranked the thermostat. Patch asleep on the bed. Mouse had some reason for wanting to go out. Speaking to Paul earlier, M has the virus. Will she die this time. It's 18 years since Ed died, November too. 17 Big grader passing to scrape sloppy snow, the St Michaels guy with a yellow shovel clearing his sidewalk. I was out earlier half-clearing my corner, half because the snow is sogged-down and heavy and I'm nervous about my heart. Three high school boys trudging past, Native. I was up at 4:30 and sat down to Reading and staring at the sky. A very few edits and I think it's ready but what to do with it. I could self-publish I guess, pdf with a few photos and post it from my writing page and then the usual obscurity. A seventy year old artist's month in a fruit-picker's tent camp in the Okanagan, reading and commenting on whatever she can find in the library, sometimes noticing her companions, watching the day. 18 When I loaded Reading and staring into InDesign just now I immediately saw it as worse, more trivial. Whose vantage do I snap into? Posting my little stories makes me see small things in them that need to be fixed but I don't instantly doubt them. Whose vantage if I think of a book is probably men's. I assume they'll disdain me. What's-his-name - Al Sherman Goulden - confirmed that. Luke has been confirming it - I'm saying with a sore heart. 19 I come to a stop because I don't know what I'm doing. There are these masses of writing: do something with them. That's the whole plan. 20 Patch is so mean to him and yet he's so devoted. Just now he came from the kitchen crying all the way. He's telling me she wants to come in. I go to open the door. There she is. 21 When she sleeps on the floor he sleeps nearby. When she goes to the bowl to eat so does he, their two backs bent forward side by side. When she goes out he has to go too; he knows she wants to stop him so he shoots past out of reach. Saturday morning, clear sky, 7:28 the moment of shining ivory and black twigs. Saturday morning quiet in the streets. A chimney behind the spruce tree breathing sideways across Hamilton Hill. Its hunting evenness of flow. And now it's rising against the sky, a gnarl in the air. Interlibrary loan pile yesterday. I'm so critical now when I read. I used to be able to read anything, by pinning myself down taking notes that later were mostly useless or by just racing along plucking bits that struck me for reasons of my own. Now I have to see the sloppy metaphysics, trivial characters, implausible details, falseness of voice, faults of style. I get impatient and start skimming and then it's over, I might as well just stop. I keep wanting Louie to say nice things about my FB posts. Yesterday she had to say first that reading them she has to think to herself This woman is so heterosexual, how can I have been such a fool. (I said she knew at the time but she's willful.) Then she said she's been watching herself feel something false in them, 'created' she said, though only in the posts about men. I said everything in the journal is created, it had to be because I was starting from the Mennonite zero. Does she feel the posts with men in them as false because she doesn't have those experiences or because she wants to block those experiences? I said generously that maybe it's because I just inescapably have a kink there - which I do - but what I actually think is that it's because she's turned something off at the root. Then next I wonder whether my huge battle with my own heterosexuality was necessary to - released - the mental power I came into in my forties and fifties. Was it? (YES) 23 There was Patch lying on the floor on her back, opened like a loaf torn lengthwise, legs spread wide, paws limp. She looked so self-enjoying that I laughed. She folded instantly, rolled over, walked away: don't laugh at me. 24 6 in the morning, cats outside in the dark. I stand on the threshold and call. Mousie! Come on, it's cold! Black shape flowing over Doug's fence. Which one is it. Yes Mouse. It still thrills me a bit when I call and they come. The times Patch is at the foot of the garden and flies straight up the path. They both got out last night when I wasn't wanting them to; no use calling then I knew. Not much later a yowling set in, Patch and a stranger cat face to face on the potato row. I shouted. The stranger cat ran onto the road, black too, bigger than Patch, long-legged, and paused under the street lamp looking back, as they do. 25 Patch asleep on the hassock with her head next to my knee. Fur on her belly quietly rising and falling, opening and closing. I see her there and feel Oh honey look at you. 26 Eric Newby 1966 Slowly down the Ganges. All those books I couldn't read but why can I read this one. It's not empty. He's doing something intrinsically interesting and he's just taking notes. "There were villages on the left bank now. At a place called Ferojpur, where there was a landing place with a big flight of stone steps, women with baskets on their heads were carrying sand up from three high-sterned country boats." "According to the stationmaster, the distance to Raoli was eighteen and a half miles. We set off at three thirty, by which time the wind had dropped, but three-quarters of an hour later we were still footling about above the bridge." - Those two completely at random and perfectly typical. I guess its charm is what it doesn't do. There's very occasional mild humour but he never seems to be trying. We see the river, we see the sky. We see what he's seeing and that's just right. The idea of perfection: the poetry and prose of Paul Valéry. I believed the review and sent for it. Am so fed up with it I won't name the editor-translator. It's the opposite of Newby, nothing to be seen but a man poking his neurosis over and over. "Ah! To delay being me. Why, this morning, should I choose myself? - What if I left behind my name, my torments, my chains, my truths, like dreams in the night?" Inflation and abstraction, a vapid nothing. I liked Valéry's epistemology, I admired how far he'd got in his time, but his notebooks make me ashamed. - I saw daylight through the venetians and went to raise them. Ziiip up goes the first one and there's Patch across the street bombing toward the house, she's seen the window light up. When I get to the door she's already there. You clever cat! When she comes in from the cold she jumps onto the desk to warm up under the lamp. I mostly don't understand Mouse. I understand The bowl is empty and Where's my mom and I need the cellar door open but half the time his crying baffles me. Does he cry from sheer loneliness maybe? It's as if he's an only child who needs someone to play with. There's Mouse now, staring at me from behind the peaked cullet where he's found a new spot. - Staring fixedly with his bright yellow eyes, why? (There goes lumberyard Tom in his orange work vest walking on the far side of the street so he doesn't have to deal with my eyes.) Mouse and I have our utter intimacies and then it's back to utter mystery. When I have a hot rock at the foot of the bed he likes to sleep against it. I'll be lying under the covers reading and he'll suddenly get up and settle between my right arm and my ribs - it's like he's crept into my arms but he's so little it has to be just one arm. He reaches a paw to touch my mouth just once as if to say It's me, it's you. Then he curls forward and tucks his head hard into my armpit, snugged up like a bundled baby. We go on like that for a while. Sometimes he goes to sleep. Then suddenly he jumps up and leaves, really jumps as if he's heard something alarming that I didn't. They go out first thing every morning. I open the cellar door and there they are on the top two steps: they know when I wake even if I haven't made getting-up sounds yet. It's often 5am, black-dark and cold. Mouse is ready to come back in sooner than Patch. This morning when I let him in he stood on the threshold peering out crying. He was saying Where is she. Something I notice about the edits I make as I go is that they cut back. My first try says too much. 27 I hadn't been getting much notice so I posted a Patch and Mouse story yesterday. Nothing but red hearts, which hasn't happened before. Not my Ontario literary reader though, never when I post about cats. This morning I posted the other kind and there she was instantly. Her photo looks like she'd have a dog. What I did yesterday: went to Canadian Tire and bought a vacuum cleaner. Not a cheap one. 29 I wondered yesterday whether when Tom saw me coming down the stairs he saw someone he could exploit to save him. That cast a sad light. I asked just now. It said no. He saw my courage. Which who else ever has. He saw it instantly. That was Tom. - Liking to imagine DM's reserve and competence. Ways he's the opposite of Tom: he doesn't lie, he doesn't flatter, he doesn't sell, he doesn't seduce, he isn't an addict, he has money, he feels his body and looks after himself physically, he isn't sexually jaded, is intelligent in bed. He's organized, he's educated and traveled, is curious, holds his temper, is ambitious and thoroughly committed in work, follows through, has physical skill, mechanical skill, high spatial intelligence, country love and knowledge, is generous in conversation, not at all misogynistic, has warm eyes, is affectionate when he can be, socially aware but autonomous, accurately protective when he decides to be, thinks for the whole in as large a way as possible, feels his pain, doesn't hide from it. Has an engineering sense of human relations: what's the best way to do this, best for everyone. Is curious rather than distressed by differences. Is sad rather than angry. a courage carried lightly, without expression It was all there. It had manners. It was sad to a depth that no lead sounded He comes from a similar latitude. 30 I read that paragraph and marvel how far I went with someone I so disapproved. Warm reserve, how does that come about. part 4 time remaining volume 9: 2020 march-2021 march work & days: a lifetime journal project