December 3 2020
Mouse is sick. Yesterday many times a horrible sound of retching, foamy
yellow puddles. It went on all day. He was wanting to hide behind the tub,
under the bed. I sent Patch downstairs early and got in bed so he could
cuddle if he wanted. When I'd turned out the light he did for a while but
not in his usual way up in my armpit, he just lay alongside very still and
didn't purr, didn't completely relax, kept his head up. Did he have a fever,
I couldn't tell. His temperature seemed a little different but how exactly,
sharper? He was breathing faster than usual. Sometimes I'd hear little mouth
sounds. We lay together like that for a while. I was thinking of times the
daycare phoned and said to come and get Rowen because he had a fever. I'd
sit in the armchair next to the kitchen window holding him through the afternoon.
Afterward he'd be better and I'd be drained. I was hoping I was doing that
for Mouse. When I needed to shift around to be able to sleep he jumped off
the bed. This morning when I'd turned on the light in the kitchen he was
there on the floor. A really plaintive cry and then he was retching pitiably
again. Now he's in the farthest corner under the bathtub. I'll have to phone
the vet. I'm mourning his lovely spunkiness and sweetness. Is he going to
die?
4
He's at the vet. This morning he was feeble enough so I could get him
into the carrier. His distress cry is a bleat of pure misery. He'd come
from his hiding place into the middle of the floor and I'd hear it once
or twice before he retched. I'd get a tissue and wipe up his little spots
of yellow bile. Then he'd find another hiding place and he'd lie quiet for
three hours before it happened again. If I touched him he'd move out of
reach. This morning at 5:30 I heard him retching from my bed. When I got
up to wipe he settled on my blankets. We slept for another three hours and
then he threw up where he was. He doesn't stay where he's vomited so then
he was crouched next to the water bowl without moving on and on. I put a
towel over him and bundled him into the carrier. Yesterday he was strong
enough to fight but this morning he was so done-in he had no fight left.
I went to bed last night feeling what concern is like. I don't want his
dearness to end, his so-particularness. I remember the sweet way he'd reach
to touch my mouth; his loud cries coming to fetch me when Patch was at the
door and his eager trot beside me going to let her in; his unfathomable
yellow stare; his gormless wondering gaze from the floor when he was a little
scrap; his careful but determined dashes out the door past Patch; the way
through the summer he'd come from the verandah when I was awake in heart
distress and called him; his valiant wrestles with Patch, the way he'd keep
coming through she was heavy and mean; his dances with a dead leaf or a
hanging shirt in the closet; his delight in hunting flies, the way he'd
leap up a window pane and actually catch them; his disappointed cries when
he couldn't get at the bird on the top shelf; his silkiness; his long-necked
long-chinned Egyptian beauty; his strong fine-grained electrical field;
the touching way he'd creep into my armpit; his ADHD boy-restlessness; his
timidity, his fear of anyone but me, his mad scramble to get under the bed
when Kathy arrives; his gallops with Patch straight through the garden and
back; his sadness when Patch started driving him off; in the morning his
chirping cries at the cellar door when he heard me awake; his lonely crying
when he didn't know what to do with himself.
When I feel what concern is like I notice how seldom I feel it. For instance
I don't much feel it for Mary, who has been stuck without past or future
in an endless moment of suffering. I've felt it sometimes for Luke but it's
burdensome, I'd hate to feel it more.
I've wondered about distance effect. My heart is better than it was through
the summer: has Mouse been somehow sacrificed for that? Mary had been fading
and they thought maybe less than a week but now she's better. Mouse is so
vulnerable a spirit; has he been martyred for her so-unlikely recovery?
Is he fading out in discouragement at Patch's meanness?
5
He's not vomiting anymore but he isn't eating and he's been hiding behind
the sofa in the bedroom since I brought him home. I'm sending Patch outside
so he won't be frightened and he did come out but he was crying pitifully
and licking his mouth. It seemed he was wanting me to help but I was useless
and he went back to the narrow dark notch he was in all night. I feel almost
sick with worry.
6
He was behind the couch again this morning but now with daylight and
the room warmer he is on it. He said meow weakly and let me stroke him.
He hasn't eaten.
that melting sickness of the heart
Yesterday I was so stressed feeling for him that I needed to talk to
someone. I phoned Rob. I'm telling that because though it's what other people
do it's not what I do.
Rob intends to live in this house 'afterward'!
-
I had the most compelling dream early this morning.
It was about meeting a stranger who was permanently moving into my household
to be my lover, whose feelings I could feel as if they were my own, and
who instilled in me a sense of eternity and rightness of being and a marvelous
feeling of being distinctly complete and separate yet exactly compatible.
He was middle height and build, not striking but not ugly, compact and comfortable
in his body and humble about his superlative thoughtfulness. He had some
kind of special intelligence, and was confident and cordial but diffident,
modest in his mastery. He kissed me in front of the kids and it was all
right, kissed me with curiosity as much as longing, as if kissing were all
the world was for, with no clinging or suffocating urgency, as if there
were all the time in the world for me to grow accustomed to not being single.
I woke up feeling the kisses still, and all day I've felt like going back
to him.
"Kissed me with curiosity as much as longing, as if kissing were
all the world were for." From Jody tonight and isn't it so much my
sense of DM. I want to tell her it's her completeness telling her it's come.
She's been brave and faithful and she has come true.
-
I've kept going to look at Mouse in the back room all day and he's mostly
been lying on the flannel sheet on the sofa rather than hiding. He hasn't
been eating or drinking but he's let me stroke him briefly and the last
couple of times I've heard a scrap of purr. When I stroke his back I feel
his bones so much sharper.
7
When his room was dark last night he came bumping me with his head purring
and when I lay down next to him he crept into my armpit in his old way.
This morning he threw up again but walked out into the kitchen to be with
me. Now he's lying under the desk lamp breathing too fast.
-
Took him to the vet again. More anti-nausea meds, rehydration, maybe
a feeding tube. Now most of the anguish is uncertainty and waiting.
-
He's at the vet's overnight, drip fluids, barium to x-ray his bowel.
It took until 4:30 for the vet to speak to me, a hard day.
8
In the last dream I was ... how to remember dreams now that ... what
is it, how to say it ... my brain has less energy? I
was at some kind of institution, like Goddard though not Goddard, with my
parents. It was the morning of the day we were going to leave. I hadn't
been in my room overnight and it had been cleared. I'd been thinking about
something at the beginning of my stay that had been interrupted; I could
go back to it now but where were my books. Someone says a small old book
in Latin had been sold that morning. My journal though might be in that
pile. I pull it out. In the dream I almost remembered what it was in the
Latin book that I'd want to think more about.
A ritual in which two individual people are given
an egg by two other people, the giving signifying that they are promoted
in some way, maybe made immortal. A moment lying warm in bed with a man
feeling this is what it's like to have a husband, the warm feel of my hand
spread on his. His wife standing across the room.
This morning I've posted a bit from 1979. The photo of alder poplars in red light was on the desktop so I
looked up the chainsawing month. Disjointed scraps but is what's good in
them a result of my broken state of writing at the time? Mute bliss.
7:31 on Tuesday morning, Patch at my knee, sky pale between clouds evenly
grey. Vulgarity of a string of Christmas lights on the garage where the
biomass-plant man has already gone to work. Golden droplet of the street
lamp.
Patch licking thoroughly between her toes! Scratching under her chin.
These days I see her across the intersection risking two streets running
home from somewhere she's discovered. Maybe another cat she likes? I can't
ask.
Even grey light increasing. Washing machine behind its door.
-
Mouse isn't worse. He hasn't pooped yet but the barium is in his colon.
They want to keep him on fluids for the rest of the day so I should pick
him up at 4:15. They'll leave the needle in but capped for now.
9
He's curled asleep under the desk lamp. Has eaten a bit, drunk a few
licks, pooped three hard black little pellets. I went to sleep with his
door open. He jumped onto the bed a bit after midnight. I heard him licking
his mouth again and again. He threw up once. That scared me. I closed him
into the back room but couldn't sleep.
Wet streets and mist this morning. Took a photo of the apricot tree in
white air.
-
He slept all day. Jumped up more than once to eat. When I was in the
tub I heard the lovely sound of lapping at the water bowl behind me. Tonight
7 or 8 hard little pellets in the litter box, that I collected so that tomorrow
I can tell if there are any more. He was sleeping in the armchair but when
I settled in bed he took the long leap to be with me. Now he's behind a
door with food and water and litter box and Patch is in the cellar and am
I easier for the first time in eight days.
10
If I want to catch Mouse I have to approach him without looking at him.
If I'm looking at him he sees intention in my eyes.
11
Snow this morning. Photos of paw prints and the street.
12
Mouse threw up again. Yesterday morning too, just once. He's licking
his mouth a lot. He's so thin. I'm worried by how little he eats. The sick
feeling of dread. Midriff.
13
Bad things are happening; people are worse than they should be; intelligence
and feeling are being wrecked. Pound struggles with the question of what
in his only life he can do with that. He works to find a diagnosis and a
remedy. Not everyone is like that. He also wanted to be skilled at something,
a master.
His diagnosis was usury, mine patriarchy in its wide-spreading forms
of body-dissociation. He advocated beauty, intelligence, sexual love, skill
in the arts and government.
Utter debasedness since 2014 of Trump and most of his party and the half
of American population following him; and not only that, the vileness of
most of popular culture and the proportion of American population formed
by it; and not only that, the corrupt emptiness of most high culture - poems,
novels, movies, art-periodical and gallery art. Extreme rarity of the exceptions
and often their obscurity.
"his own life, and forgotten moments of it,
will come back to him... ." Pound talking about clarity in Hardy
and early Wordsworth.
-
A new Vancouver-based journal is launching early
next year with a focus of regional experimental art, and I've been invited
to write a piece for their moving-image art section. I've actually been
wanting to dedicate more words to your practice, and, in particular, the
lasting significance of Trapline (one of the finest Canadian film works
ever, in my humble), so I've proposed a profile on, well, you!
Shaun this morning.
14
I think Mouse is going to die. He threw up yesterday morning three times
in three hours and then all night. He ate a few treats yesterday but this
morning won't look at them. He crouches by the water bowl but doesn't drink.
He isn't completely hiding but he's lying low. There was a poop last night
that smelled bad. His fur is looking rough.
-
Kathy, clean house. Mouse at the vet again, Dr Paul keeping him for a
couple of days. I was so stressed by his sickness this morning, and then
by having to tear the bed apart to catch him and by stumbling around its
parts on the floor chasing him that I wanted to be rid of him, was relieved
when I could pass the responsibility to someone else. How it must have been
for my parents when my illness was such a worry to them.
15
Patch is outside all day now so she sleeps at night. While Mouse is away
I can let her stay upstairs asleep in the armchair. This night a bit after
I woke I felt her jump onto the bed. She touched my hand once with her cold
wet nose and went back to sleep.
I call her. She bounds across the garden. Eats briefly. Says please
quietly to ask me to let her out again. Stops on the threshold. The tip
of her tail quivers; she's scanning for danger. Sits for a while on the
porch platform to decide her next move. Then steps down and away. Or when
there has been warm sun she may sit gazing on the bench.
gives us his world for its own sake, because
he is attached to it
work not of one poet but of many
16
its main concerns - water, stone and light
Luke's birthday tomorrow. Fifty. Ice in my belly at the thought of phoning
him. Years of always phoning him on his birthday, liking to. I've sent him
as if a card instead, just a photo of Mouse.
17
Waking with a smile, and such gratitude for
the miraculous gift of my existence.
Sending you love.
-
- Talk to me about Mouse death, oppression,
responsibility, action
- Should we do the feeding tube no
- Is it my fault NO
- He's going to die yes
- Bring him home and keep him company and let him die
yes
- Can he do the anti-nausea drug as an out-patient
yes
- Should we put him down no
- Are you sure we shouldn't do the feeding tube
yes
- Do you want to say more no
The first time he came home from staying overnight he was better, he
was eating and playing. Then gradually he started vomiting again and he
was vomiting more than ever.
o I don't understand what it means that he'd be better and then worse
again
o What did they do that was making him better?
o Something unknown has wrecked his digestive system
o How long does the anti-nausea drug work
o Can he be given it as an outpatient
o Can I administer it myself
o Can he keep taking it indefinitely
o Same with subcutaneous saline
o If he doesn't eat and drink how long will it take him to die
- Can I handle a month of slow dying
yes
18
First there's regret at the loss of his lovely small being, his company;
and then increasingly there's dread of stress, which feels like illness.
In-cide.
- Will you comment despair, powerful, withdrawal,
improvement
- Powerful unconscious despair can improve?
yes
- Is the stress resistance to despair YES
- If I let myself feel sorrow the stress will go away
yes
- Is that true for all my stress of waiting
yes
They say come for him at 1:15.
- Have they decided he's going to die
yes
- Are they annoyed with me no
- Would he want to go outside and hide no
- Should I let him go outside
yes
The phone rings and it's Paul Molnar. He said Mouse doesn't seem to want
to get well. He says yes I can inject the anti-nauseas and steroids at home
as needed. When I was trying to say I think Mouse is going to die I choked.
He filled in, You want him to be at home and comfortable. I said in my choked
way The vomiting is so horrible. I trusted him enough to feel that burst
with him.
-
He's in the back room. Sofa useful. I've read or watched the iPad there
so he can have company. He drinks, eats, is restless, climbs onto me, jumps
off. Lies against my legs, lies on the floor. Cries. Is so so thin. His
little face is pinched.
While he was gone it seemed Patch was climbing onto me every time she
came in, kneading devoutly and then purring against my chest. I wondered
whether she was wanting to mend the damage of anguish.
19
Still dark at 7:15, short open slot showing pale on the eastern edge.
Amaryllis buds have opened to red loudspeakers pointing in four directions.
Christmas week, should I go up the hill for a tree. My thought for Christmas
dinner is ice cream with plum sauce. Maybe a roast chicken?
Mouse lying on the chair's arm next to me quiet but open-eyed as if he
can't completely let go. He wants to be near or touched by me all the time.
His silky fur is rough.
-
When I replied to Luke I said briefly that I'm in a hard time with a
dying cat. It was a test. If it's really love you'll want to reply to that.
If you're just having a moment when you like yourself you will ignore it
in Ed's old way of ignoring what a woman says.
20
Mouse is quiet this morning, not eating, poorly I think. When I was getting
the hypodermic ready my left hand was shaking.
-
I dithered about the tree - maybe not this year - am I too discomposed
to go up the mountain, there might be ice - should I buy one instead - nothing
in town but two weedy things at Save-On - in the end put my phone in my
pocket and wound my way up Midday Valley Road. Spits of rain on the windshield,
puddles on the road, no snow till I'm past the pines into the firs and then
just crusted edges I stumbled through to cut a nice one four feet up where
it will regrow maybe. Wide-winged and its long point as high as the arch.
Rowen's star, Luke's elephant, Louie's earring, Rob's roadkill bits, poppy
heads from this garden's first year, persimmon stems from its second, the
fogged little heart I bought in the Santa Ysabel rock store one of the times
I was leaving Tom. Last year's string of lights.
I've left the shades up so the tree will show from the street, went out
in the dark to look at it. A drunk woman passing exclaimed that I have a
beautiful house and clapped me on the shoulder.
21
Solstice. It's right to have a tree of lights in the house.
Stupid to call it the first day of winter. It's the pointed peak of winter,
which began with November and will taper off into March.
-
You're still angry about the Mexico trip. I think you're holding an
unnecessary grudge. You were furious that I wasn't giving you what you
wanted and it made you blind to what you were actually getting.
I think you were angry with me the whole time. You were outright nasty
at first but after that never out loud. I always hear it in your voice,
though, and it traumatizes me in a kind of speechless way because of the
early-love abandonment thing.
You were angry from the first because I didn't greet you with joy. It's
true that I didn't, because I was so startled by how you looked, which
was completely done in, ancient, exhausted.
I couldn't give you what you wanted - which I think was an unjust demand
- but I understood that I could give you what you needed. You don't seem
to understand that you needed it and that you were given it. I gave you
a holiday: I did the research, I bought the visa, I provided the jeep,
I organized camping stuff, and when we got to San Felipe I found us a quite
wonderful spot on the beach. I also understood that you were in a bad way
and didn't get on your case about your nastiness.
You may have been angry the whole time but you went home restored. You'd
had sun and stars and sea and a good party and the amazing spring bloom.
You looked like yourself. You were pretty again. But you were so angry
at not having what you wanted that you went home without any gratitude
for what you'd been given.
Once when I was talking to Joyce about my difficulties with you she
summarized by saying "Possession and competition". Yes exactly
that.
We mostly skirted competition by not being with other people but it
cropped up massively later in relation to men. It's still there in how
you've felt about me on Facebook. I'm not saying you shouldn't be competitive.
You've had primal reason to be - I mean your brothers - and your mom for
that matter - and so am I competitive obviously.
You're very strong willed. Do you know the sensation of feeling someone's
pressure of will to make you comply? I mean an actual physical sensation
as if of a push coming at you from them. I've felt it sometimes from you
with remarkable strength. I can resist it when it happens because I'm aware
of it as a sensation. When it has come from you I've gone silent and marveled.
I think the times I've felt it from you have been about possession.
I didn't have to tell you I loved someone, I knew you'd be furious,
but I told you because I know you feel things even when you don't know
the reason and it's better for you if you know why you're feeling what
you're feeling. That is an elementary ethic but it's a generosity too.
Surely you can acknowledge that it's outrageous to demand that I never
love anyone but you? You've always demanded that and it's been the hardest
thing about my relation with you. Loving somebody is life and health, and
demands to give it up are like hatred, fundamental attack. Think about
it - I've never done that to you.
You'll have righteous replies to all of this maybe but then maybe something
can shift?
Eighteen inches? It snowed fast all day. When I opened the door for Patch
she was faced with a wave of solid stuff twice her height. I sit with Mouse
in the back room to give him company and watch his signs. He's weak and
still, lies gazing as if sadly. I'm more peaceful with his illness now,
settled into making him comfortable at least. His vomiting was the worst
but there's something now I can do if it happens again. He's thinner every
day.
22
Patch on the bed, Mouse on the corner of the desk where he can see her,
boiler grumbling, tree's bright spangles in a line between them, pale sky
lightening over a thick rutted porridge of snow.
-
Nate from Shulus dug me out for thirty bucks.
I'm seeming to myself to be on a good keel but when I'm watching something
on the iPad I'm instantly and repeatedly cracking into tears.
23
Did what I had to do this morning, got the jeep out past the heaps, 4-wheel
drive to Save On, shopped as soon as it opened, washed the groceries, fooled
Mouse into letting me put him into the crate, appointment with Paul Molnar
at 11, jeep put away for the holy days, sun on snow, Patch at my knee, Mouse
on the arm of the chair, cathedral music from somewhere in England.
24
8:01 faint light on snow tinted with sky's thin pink-orange streaks.
Fading to ivory. A British voice saying silly believing things. Rereading
Kim feeling Christians like the motley tribes all with their stories
of gods.
26
Barry Lopez died yesterday. My age.
27
Deep snow but Patch goes out first thing as before. Yesterday I tracked
her footprints around the corner of the garage. They paused, gathered, entered
deep snow and leapt up the fence. It was because she couldn't get to the
compost box in her usual way. She had figured it out. Then I followed her
footprints across the road and along beside St Michaels' fence. She has
her goals. She's independent and intrepid but then when she comes in she
wants to lie sleeping in my arms.
Mouse has been eating and drinking but he doesn't come to me anymore,
just stares from the foot of the bed. Though when I was touching myself
Christmas morning I opened my eyes to find him standing next to my face
looking down with what seemed gentle curiosity.
-
Octopus and cuttlefish.
dark red ... grey and silver veins ... blues
and greens seeped back and forth on its arms
thin silver lines wander over its head ... bright
red trails lead from its eyes
the entire body is a screen on which patterns
are played ... moving shapes like stripes and clouds
comes forward with its skin in a quiet resting
pattern of colors and shapes
the skin of a cephalopod is a layered screen
controlled directly by the brain
outer layer, a dermis ... a covering
next layer down contains the chromatophores
... usually the animal has three kinds
blue, green, violet, or silver-white ... next
layers several kinds of reflecting cells ... in iridophores light is bounced
and filtered through stacks of plates separate and direct the light's different
wavelengths, shining back colors that can be different from those that went
in ... just below the leucophores do not manipulate the light but reflect
it straight back ... appear white though they can reflect whatever color
is around ... all the reflecting cells have their effects modulated by what
the chromatophores are doing ... skin is a thin sheet over a plain white
body
reds range from maroon to fire-engine ... white-silvers
form veins and dots, making little jagged flashes or a line of pearls
Once I watched a large cuttlefish from above
and saw the left side of its body displaying a passing cloud to another
cuttlefish under a rock while the right side was still and camouflaged pointing
out to sea.
color changes often occur in combination with
changes to the shape of their body and skin folds of skin sticking straight
out from their back ... thin wisps and folds of skin above each eye
hold the first arms like horns ... make these
horns elegantly wavy ... shape their arms into fiddleheads, hooks, or clubs
curious friendliness ... come forward in a resting
pattern of colors and watch closely ... reaches the tip of an arm or two
to touch mine
would be hovering without fuss in some mixture
of reds and whites and would suddenly explode into bright yellow ... covered
his entire body and would be switched on ... in less than a second the flare
would then fade, more slowly. Oranges would appear among the yellow and
darken. Patterning would return. In ten seconds or so he was dark red again.
relaxed pulsations of silver around the face
and arms
a rust color different from the reds and oranges
one usually sees ... also grey-greens, other reds and faint pale colors
I could not quite catch changing in a concerted way, and in more ways than
I could track ... reminded me of chords changing amid and over each other
... would shift several colors in sequence or together and end with a new
pattern which might stay still for a time or immediately start shifting
to another
What was he doing? It was slowly getting darker
in the water and under his ledge it was already quite dark. He kept moving
through his chords. I wondered if this was a cuttlefish dream.
Then things started to change. He seemed to
stiffen or pull together and began going through a long series of displays.
During almost all of the sequence he faced well away from me out to sea.
He pulled in his arms and exposed his beak. He tucked his arms below him
in a missile-like pose and then produced a yellow flare. At one point he
went into the sideways stretch that males do when they are competing with
each other. Then he pulled himself into the most extraordinarily contorted
shape, his skin suddenly white, with arms pulled back both above and below
his head. This sequence then quietened down. Then instantly he seized into
a wild aggressive pose with arms straight out, sharp like thin swords, and
his whole body a bright yellow-orange. It was as if the orchestra suddenly
hit a wild clashing chord. The arms ended in needles, his body became covered
with jagged papillae like armor. He then began roaming a little, sometimes
facing me and sometimes facing out to sea. Still facing away he began to
ease back from this fortissimo. Though he moved through a few more permutations
and poses they were subsiding. Then he was still, his arms hanging down,
his skin the quietly shifting mixtures of reds, rusts, and greens he had
been producing when I arrived. Turning, he looked at me.
They mate head to head. The male attempts to
grasp the female front-on. If she accepts him he will envelope the female's
head with his arms. Having reached this position there are a couple of minutes
of stillness. The male then uses his left fourth arm to take a sperm packet
and place it in a receptacle below the female's beak. He breaks the packet
open. They separate.
Peter Godfrey-Smith 2016 Other minds
28
4:38, streetlight glinting orange on icicles at the window, tree's lights
reflected on the floor, quiet lamplight, Mouse on the rug, Patch at my knee,
a good room.
I've been mulling Louie. I'm baffled by the way after 15 years she's
still hanging onto a bad mood. Friendship's strict limit the way she hates
me when I love anyone but her. Hates. There's nothing more to say about
that is there.
Cat footprints up the porch to the door. Patch hasn't been out yet. She
has a friend?
29
Look at that, the sky an even very pale pink, snow reflecting on a very
low ceiling. Our deep snow. Patch outside patrolling, Mouse feeling poorly
next to the hot rock I boil for him.
This morning I thought I should provide photos so I've posted the Christmas
I was at San Felipe with Luke, so pleased have had that adventure and with
him, pleased to have traveled though now I don't, pleased to have had days
and colors and lights.
-
Patch had been in and out several times and was snarling at Mouse by
the food bowl. I shouted at her, opened the door in a way to say Out
you bad person. Ten or eleven in the morning. Then I was standing at the
door calling her all afternoon and tromping across the intersection looking
for tracks. Posted a missing cat notice on the Grapevine. It got dark. Kept
going to the door. About six she strolled in hungry.
30
Mouse vomited again this morning. Emilee in intensive care with liver
failure. Neighbours shoveling their sidewalk and sprinkling salt. Icicles
longer every day and weeping slowly.
So pleased that Shaun called last light a stunning work.
Antsy for company today. None, none.
31
I was talking to Tom in my head last night, saying that my stories about
being with him are a female On the road. I've posted new year's
eve 1996 this morning and like it as a story of presence and happenstance.
"You're the one I can have the real adventure with."
What I did this year:
- Cats since Jan 2, less grim
- Edited and posted hundreds of FB stories
- Worked on Theory's practice
- Worked on The air starting in May
- Mesa Grande book prep
- Sorting journals, SH notes and edits
- Processed M's letters
- Heart and b.p. better, cut down on meds
- Fixed the back bedroom
- Did all the garden work myself
- Shaun's piece
- Dr McLeod, the ECHO
- iPad to deal with new Mac Pro limits
- Cleaned windows
- Apricots, nectarines and Cox's apples succeeded, first greengage plum
- Gave Freya the table saw
- Steam juicer
- Replaced the outside faucets
- Figured out how to wash my hair now
- Bought clothes, better pants
Didn't do what I said I shd do:
- Daily cardio
- Daily yoga or kum nye
- Find a way to stay 145 because I hate being this
- Hall rug, paint, light
- Bathroom wall, prep
- Intellectual property will
- Fireplace panel
- Verandah
- Powerwash and paint west fence
- Mend fence
- Paint door and porch
-
Since her long day in the cold Patch hasn't once asked to go out.
January 1 2021
Things I shd do this year besides the above:
- Tackle sewing
- Mend bedroom patches
- Repair cold frame glass
- Clean eavestroughs and mend soffit over the window
- Place gravel finally
- Bedroom furniture
- Kitchen counter and sink
- Shelves in the garage
- Earrings
- Sell stuff that needs selling
2
Editioning photos. Shaun asked for frost pump and frost fence.
I had to look up how it's done: queried Susana, decided specs, wrote Shaun,
wrote both of them more times, everything decided, tif files sent via Circuit
Gallery dropbox. She'll give me her template for documentation. I always
dread business tasks but then I'm good at them, decisive.
A year ago today Angie opened an animal carrier on the floor by the bed
and two small beings crept out, a blotchy small mama I thought ugly and
a silky terrified mouse of a cat who dashed under the bed and stayed there
till I pried him off, clawing into the rug when I wanted to put the two
of them into the back room for the night. Today Patch my respected commensal
and poor skeletal disrupted young Mouse resting on the sofa's arm with a
look of dumb stoic endurance.
3
Frustrated by the vets' lack of analysis. I want it laid out: this is
what we have eliminated, these are the remaining possibilities, this is
how we are going to test each. Their heads are too weak: they've learned
procedures and when those don't work they flounder. At the moment all I
can do is watch.
5
When I went to bed last night Mouse lay quiet inside my arm for a long
time then hopped off the bed suddenly, as he does. I hopefully bought catnip,
which he did eat, and wheatgrass which so far he hasn't. In the mornings
he cries to ask me to bring Patch up from the cellar and then later to ask
me to let her in the back door.
-
Mouse has had a bad day, hasn't eaten at all, hides from me, looks wretched.
I don't know what to. I don't want to force meds on him. Do I have to decide
to ask them to kill him. How can I know when. I don't want to kill him while
he still has a glimmer of wanting to be alive. I don't want him to die in
distress in the clinic.
- Will you talk to me Ellie, act, in defeat,
to let him depart
- Is there anything I can do to make him better
no
6
He liked last light as well as trapline, the young woman's
film and then the old woman's film. It has always been young men who have
praised my films, why is that.
Mouse came in my bed when I called him in the dark. 3am. Lay against
me just bones in skin. He doesn't purr now, doesn't vibrate at all. I lay
trying to have both hands on him somewhere in case it could circuit some
kind of goodness through him. Was praying. Was saying to him You helped
me when I was sick and I want to help you now. Maybe feeling him carefully
could help him? He hardly moved but when he did I tried to be with him in
it.
- My phone is dead too.
- The dems in Georgia have won majority in the Senate. Maga people stormed
the Capital because the pig pres told them to.
The day we climbed to the summit of one of the
nunataks at Graves, to orient ourselves and to examine shattered slabs of
sedimentary and metamorphic rocks on the ridge, our footsteps generated
the sounds of broken crockery. I turned one rock after another in my gloved
hands, to get its measure, to take it in more completely. In the absence
of any other kind of life these rocks seemed alive to me, living at a pace
of unimaginable slowness but revealing by their striations and cleavage,
by their color, inclusions, and crystalline gleam, evidence of the path
each had followed from primordial birth to this moment of human acquaintance.
Each rock I examined, all of them ostensibly remnants of the same dark slabs,
was nevertheless distinguished from the others by some rosette of color,
some angularity that made it stand apart. As I sat there, reluctant to put
down a single one of these undistinguished rocks, contemplating the history
of each one in the gigantic sweep of time that was for them a lifetime,
they suddenly seemed wilder than any form of life I'd known.
Barry Lopez 2019 Horizon
A stone is a rock that has been used by humans.
I wanted to respect and absorb the experience,
and I wanted to give it away to whoever might need it.
7
Trying to buy a phone.
8
Went back to Bobbi Jo at Walmart to get her to find the keyboard in my
$130 android.
Mouse lies all day under the lamp on my sweater on the kitchen table.
I read up on how to tell when a cat is dying. He's skeletal with fur all
disordered and dusty. I don't want to take him to be killed by the vet.
I look at the garden wondering whether any of the soil is thawed enough
to dig. Many times in a day cracking into wet eyes.
10
So touching the way Mouse though starving, down to 6lb, comes crying
weakly to fetch me to open the door for Patch.
-
I realized I was witnessing the dying of a way
of life-the rural, pastoral way of life. In the Southwest the best energies
were no longer to be found in the homeplace, or in the small towns ....
The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or
all three.
McMurtry showed why the heartland, an abstraction
most urbanites suspected to be the true repository of hominess and warmth,
was rotten.
11
And Patch comes crying to be let out. Briefly. Frozen mud, shrunk heaps
of snow.
Don as FB friend. Will I be aware differently before I post.
15
Shaun says a poet has told him she likes the journal project. I look
her up. She's famously successful. I read a couple of lines. No this won't
work, I'm the kind I am and she is not.
The frost photos are November 28 1979 Valhalla Lake. Thought I could
maybe find some writing to send with them but no in those days I couldn't
write. I was in mute confluence.
16
Mouse is weaker, fell this morning when he tried to jump onto the table.
But he still and always walks with tail high.
Satan the father of lies. No it's that lying is Satan.
Religious sites quoting that verse to promote lies. The Capital mob last
week fantasists formed by liars. A president who lied all day, whose only
care was to be adored by anyone ruined enough to believe. I've never had
such a sense of pervasive corruption, the pandemic its wildfire parallel,
ruinous infection of humans catastrophically susceptible.
I needed to post goodness this morning so it's I'm so appreciating
him with a sketch of Georgia St in sunrise light.
At 8:23 the sky warming behind the Russian olive but with a blur of gun
metal grey from something on fire to the east.
For Theory's practice could work and love be on facing pages?
19
Freya says they're inducing today.
Class photo from grade one. The photographer must have
told the girls in the front row to cross their ankles. A line of us with
scuffed toes. I look brighter than the rest of them but when I enlarge
the photo my expression starts to look more uncertain. I posted that
yesterday and today I put together what I've remembered from Pinto Creek sawmill.
We're in our cabin on a bright evening, waiting for supper guests. There's
a radio on a high shelf and I'm sitting under it on a little bench listening
to the children's program on CFGP. It's my birthday and I'm waiting to hear
the radio man say my name.
-
Wandering alone in my red snowsuit. Tall trees, blazing whiteness, blue
sky, smell of sawdust. There's a creek with a ramp of trampled snow, horses'
hoof prints around a hole chopped in ice.
Then a snowdrift slanting so high and hard I can walk up it onto a cabin's
slanting roof. Stovepipe sticking up. I'm so high!
-
Bunk bed along a north wall. I'm sitting back in the lower bunk with
a book on my lap, sounding letters one by one. Suddenly they connect. I'm
reading!
Were there two winters? I think I was six when I learned to read but
in the photo I look four or five.
What was it about those moments. Are they all moments of self-awareness.
The moment of learning to read is like a flashbulb going off. Going out
into the bright day alone is what I've gone on being.
- A little crash from the other room. Painful. Mouse has fallen when
he was trying to jump.
From my bed this morning I heard tiny crunching sounds, Mouse eating
a kibble. I lie there longing for the sound to go on but it doesn't.
8:07 grey dawn with lit streaks over St Michael's yard.
-
What did George say about Pinto Creek. Ed and Pete had bought the mill
from Pete Schmidt. Uncle Pete was in charge of the mill and Ed was in charge
of getting the logs into it and then out to market. There was a lot of tension
between Ed and Pete. For instance the man Ed had hired to drive the truck
to Grande Prairie should have been able to take two loads a day but he was
a bad driver and lazed around in town so he only took one. Pete wanted him
fired but Ed disagreed because he had hired him?
Yes there were two years. George was only there for the first. Over Christmas
most of the workers had gone home but he and Ed and Mary were still at the
camp. It was fifty below and he had to feed and water the horses. At the
end of that season he was in charge of getting the horses out. It was already
April; he had to wait till midnight to leave so the ground would be frozen
enough to move the sleigh. There was some worry about whether the ice on
the river would hold. After Wembley it was nothing but mud so he had to
leave the sleigh and ride one of the horses the rest of the way.
I said I thought the mill had gone bust, because Ed was having to pay
off debts for years afterward. George said not in the first year though
Ed didn't pay him. There was more trouble the next year.
20
The woman I didn't like, though I had no good reason not to like her,
has died. I'd see her riding her bike past my window, toward the high school
I thought, or walking her floppy old dog. How is it people I don't know
can feel like a loss. John the very old man who every day used to plod past
with his walker staring at the ground. Hughie across the street with one
of his junk cars. Because they're there one feels they're like a tree or
building, permanent, but then they vanish.
I posted a Bodo story this morning. The stages there are. I rough them
out and leave them and next day carve them back so then they're neat and
simple and I like them. How much can be evoked by so little. I'll never
know.
21
We're so tired but we will share details and
more photos tomorrow. Rowen is an amazing partner, and a wonderful and overjoyed father.
That having descended from my bad father I've somehow brought a good
father into the world, and that rather than being stranded by a bad partner
as I was by Roy, Freya can feel this way about the partner she has.
-
Gideon Odysseus Cirulis by caesarean at 4am.
22
I'd sleep through these months if I could. They aren't worth the time.
I'm not.
23
Five in the morning, I'm at the desk, Mouse comes to my feet. He wants
to be in company I guess. I lift him onto the table so he can lie under
the lamp. He is so thin now that when he lies down it's as if his bones
fold flat inside his fur.
I was on the phone with Rob last night and remembered after a while that
Patch was still outside. It was dark. I turned on the porch light and called
out. Saw her black shape moving along the top edge of the lattice. She heard
me, ran down the lattice strips like a ladder, galloped up the path.
-
This morning looking for text to go with rusty slope.jpg I found
Pinsky's Dante scraps. What it is in Ezra and Dante is sound. Isn't
it the same rhythm in Dante as in Pound when I like him? And that other
quality hard to name, something in word choice that's aslant but perfectly
exact. Who else has that. Shakespeare, Dickenson.
24
Ways it's fraying. Louie refusing to read my letter and what was it earlier,
refusing to say what she was angry about. Luke's contempt. In Mouse collapse
of such sweet-hearted grace. Then yesterday when I had the hatch up and
was carrying water gallons to the porch a tall young man crossed the street
to ask if he could help. One instant of such a bright unruined face. Newness
and sanity keep coming into the world and wearing out. Now I see insanity
everywhere.
Louie is afraid the letter will hurt her feelings. Assume she already
knows everything in it but doesn't want to hear it said. That's cowardly
of her.
Or no: it's that she's afraid my letter will tip a balance in my direction.
- It has to be that. [Sigh.} She feels I'm decayed enough so that she's
won but if my letter is clear and sharp she'll have to feel again that she
might not have.
Competition and possession. When I look at our record there are years
of torture I don't like to read.
And yet do I now have to get rid of everyone I can like talking to? When
I was younger I was smart enough to dance alongside these malices for the
sake of pleasures I found rare.
26
Oh little Mouse. 8 on a white and grey morning. He came from his spot
under the lamp and struggled to jump onto the work chair's arm so he could
be with me and Patch who's asleep at my knee. He lies alone most of the
day but has times when he needs the company of our family clump. Is he suffering?
His face so thin and still. I'd want to hold him but he'd struggle away.
Another kind of ruin: Louie has listed her place. I looked at the realtor's
photos feeling she is wrecking my work as well as her own, its beauties
constructed over twenty years. My hand in them: the wonderful sofa, the
ficus tree, my eye at first and then her ambition.
- There he settles flatter with his chin on his arm, his flank breathing
slowly. He hears cars passing. His eyes are half open, is he seeing the
sky? White sky, one dove. He looks so stoical and sad it's hard to bear.
-
From Luke, Shaun Stiles died this morning in a
London covid ward, Jill is in quarantine.
-
You answer my letters - they don't fall spinning into the abyss.
I said to Jody.
Don replied very briefly and I'm in instantly discouraged hope. I'm starved
for talk and I'll have to hold back. Yesterday I was looking at the letters
to Jody Golick and feeling look how pin-point, how front edge of the wave
I could be with such a reader.
You should know what a marvelous ride it is
anticipating, receiving and reading your comments.
Jody said.
27
I look down from the desk and Mouse is crouching at my feet. There's
a smell. I get up and look. Dabs and smears all the way up the corridor,
he didn't made it to the box. I think he probably has it on his feet, get
him onto the table with warm water. A mess of shit around his anus and then
a long black thread he's had in his bowel for two months. I pull it. He
cries out, it's stuck. A sudden hope. I call the vet and take him in.
I go home and wash floors. Dr Molnar phones. He doesn't want it to be
the thread because if it is he missed it. I say Mouse absolutely has had
no access to thread since he got sick. He says Mouse may not survive anaesthetic.
I say he'll die anyway. I say if the surgery goes badly he has my permission
but I want to be there. He tries to put me off: he'll be asleep, he won't
know you're there. I hold firm, it's important for more than one reason.
Last night I fetched Mouse from the white blanket in the laundry room
because he'd seemed lonely and I wanted to hold him. He wouldn't stay held
but he lay on the arm of the chair beside me. Today when he'd pooped himself
it was as though he came to me for help.
-
Molnar called me in. I was standing at the door of the little operating
room. Both of us were in masks. Mouse was draped on a table. Molnar said
the thread was tied around the base of Mouse's tongue and ran all the way
through his gut. I could see round lengths of bowel and the black thread's
tangle in the mesothelium, Molnar had already made cuts in the stomach and
bowel and would have had to make more. I said we should stop.
While the drug was going into his IV I had my hand on Mouse's chest,
could see breath moving his bowels. Saw the breath had stopped. Molnar put
a stethoscope to his chest. "There's nothing." I asked how long
it would take him to sew the incision closed, I'd wait in the jeep.
I closed him in the sewing room probably because I wanted to leave the
back door ajar when I was chasing Patch. I forgot I'd left the drawer with
spools of thread open on the blue chest. Then when I'd caught Patch I forgot
Mouse was closed in that room. When I remembered I saw the open drawer.
I thought, not good. I'm not sure whether it was the next day or later he
started vomiting.
I told Molnar he was having trouble eating and that he'd been in a sewing
room but he didn't follow up on those clues. He didn't see the thread (he
said) because it was at the very base of his tongue. Maybe if it had been
white? It didn't show in x-rays - he said. Were they negligent? I can't
know.
I took a photo a couple of days ago of his sadness. It seems
to me to show his sweetness grown tragic. I've posted it but not said why.
I don't want them to make it about me. As it is they just feel his beauty
and say love to him.
28
Dr Molnar carried my crate and the box out to the jeep. I met him at
the hatch. It was dark by then. He had the goodness to stand with me for
a bit. He wanted to say it was hard for them too and to excuse himself but
I didn't care about that. I just needed to say a few things.
Dear Mouse is in the freezer wrapped in the scarf I bought to wear with
a red coat.
I see him the way he was these last weeks standing on his thin legs looking
up, having to be so small and so unhelped.
-
I just need to say again and again Mouse I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
Now I understand the way he kept working his mouth. He was trying to
get the thread off his tongue. If I'd pushed Molnar to look again when I
thought to. I asked. Molnar said maybe nausea.
I'm so sorry that happened to you. I'm sorry I didn't save you.
What it was about him. Innocence, true-heartedness. Ardency, timidity.
Grace. The way he'd reach with his soft paw to touch my mouth. At the end
a quiet stoicism that felt so deep.
part 5
back volume 9: march 2020 - march 2021
work & days: a lifetime journal project
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