| volume 4 of time remaining: 2016 may-december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
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1890 Granite Ave, Merritt BC. A house at last, a south-facing garden. Parts 1 and 2 working to begin to make them right. From part 3 long conversations with the Going for broke self of 1975-1985, looking for a starting point in work. (Named subsections of that section are Dames rocket, DR1-8, Up north, N1-6, and Edged out, E1-10.) Text quoted from these earlier journals is italicized and inset. Since most of this volume is written on the computer rather than in a notebook, as all earlier volumes were, and since it is being formatted almost immediately, there is more editing from now on. notes: Daphne Marlatt The given, Dante and Cavalcanti, modernism, stone and concrete masonry, Colin's Browne Properties, H is for hawk, Frye on Blake, Le Guin Always coming home, Byatt The children's book, Patrick O'Brian The reverse of the medal and Wine dark sea, Colm Tóibín The empty family, Vassanji The magic of Saida, Alice Munro on Wachtel, Seth A suitable boy, Lawrence Women in love, Kristen Lavrandatter, Willa Cather, Rebecca Solnit, Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles can fly, Virginia Woolf, Wings of desire, Psalm 143, Ezra Pound, Olds Stag's leap, Wilczek The lightness of being; mass, ether and the unification of forces, Mad Men season 2, Charles Olson, Le livre du ciel, Dorothy Richardson, Neil Gunn The serpent, Mulcaster, Barthes, Freud, Olive Schreiner, Corbin, Geraldine Cummins, Joyce Wieland, Castenada Journey to Ixtlan, Riddley Walker, Michaux, Hegel, Lessing Martha Quest, Roy Foster WB Yeats: a life I. The arch-mage, Lacan, Boychoir, Bacigalupo The formed trace, Leonard Cohen If I didn't have your love, CS Lewis, Krishnamurti, de Chardin Le milieu divin, Robert Duncan The HD book, In the bleak midwinter, Time, space and knowledge, Barbara Hess Abstract expressionism, Cambridge companion to modernism, Helen Garner , Coleridge. mentioned: Gina Bevan, Tom Fendler, Rob Mills, Luke Chisholm, Denise Jones, Jenn Flower, Ben Hough, Claude Desy, Isaiah and Dennis Napope, Jane at Harris Lighting, Miriam Loken, Frank Doerksen, Louie E, Jam Ismail, Mary Epp, Paul Epp, Rowen Epp, Ed Epp, Doug and Gail, Erin Wiebe, Greg Morirson, Billy Jackson, Katrin Zaugg, Luisa Konrad, Peter Epp, Don Carmichael, Jacob Korczynski, Cynthia of Sundance Guest Ranch, Brenda on Quilchena Ave, Russell Kildahl, Lisa Holt, Colley Graham, Ozias and Michelle Gordon, Cathy and Betty Huska, Mike Anderson, David Beech, Cheryl S, Trudy R, Rhoda Rosenfeld, Dave Leonard, Rosalynd de Lanerolle, Peter von Tiessenhausen, Robert MacLean, Tony Nesbitt, Kevin Friesen, Leslie Davis, Louise Girling, Colin Thomas, Joyce Frazee, Sarah Black, Colin Thomas. Bancroft St in Ashcroft, Merritt BC, St Michaels Anglican, Baillie's House, Voght St, Nicola Ave, Granite Ave, Quilchena Ave, Chapman St, Interior Savings Credit Union, Quilchena Hotel, Trinity United Church, Merritt Starbucks, Coyote Valley Road, Home Restaurant, Mongo Restaurant, Kekuli Cafe, Lundbom Lake, Marquart Lake, Coldwater Ave, Brambles Bakery and Gallery, Tunkwa Lake Road, Nicola River, Coldwater River, Spences Bridge, Art Knapps in Kamloops, Midday Valley Road, 3663 Georgia St in San Diego, Helmer Lake. Helen in Egypt, Kandinsky, Jane Austin, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Edna O'Brien, Friday night lights, TIFF list of 150 essential Canadian films, Kawabata, Tim Stevens, Paul Churchland, Charlotte Mew and Stevie Smith, Tozer and Sons, Michelle Obama, Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Merritt Sell & Swap, Merritt Grapevine, Overdrive library system, CFMDC, Space hotel, the Lots of Fish site, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Madge Herron, Buddy Hardy, David Cooper, Sally Potter, Lauderic Caton, The Women's Press, British Museum Reading Room, BFI Library, Westminster Art Library, University College Hospital, Trafalgar Square, 3HO in Notting Hill, the NFT, Jimmy's in Soho, the Ladies' Pool on Hampstead Heath, Ladbroke Grove, Highgate Road. |
April 30 2016 I was desperate to have it and now I'm here. It's as if I've made an arranged marriage: whatever it is here I stay. There's ugly furniture. There are a lot of scars. The boiler when I turned up the thermostat last night made the whole house purr. I'm in the guest room and it's in a far corner. I'm still a guest until I've got rid of a lot of junk and changed colors everywhere and made my own spaces. May 1st My beautiful possibilities have shrunk to this dark house with too many rooms. It's what I have. Everything I do to like it more will make me ache all over. Meantime I'm sitting in the shade of my own plum tree hearing a single dove. There's the rowan, there's the white lilac hedge. A lot of little plums forming, size of an apple seed. Sky perfectly clear blue, pale blue. Sunday afternoon in a town that's not up to much. 3 There was a moment coming out of the goodwill, fat drops of water hitting hot concrete, the scent of leaves. Thick rank smell of mountain ash flowers. Now I'll have benchmarks for the seasons, I'll begin to. What May is like, this boiling-out of trees in flower, lilacs everywhere, other trees too, across the road in St Michael's yard two impressively pink against a Russian olive. An old woman in the goodwill came and put her frail hands on my hands to show me how cold they were. 4th Last evening when I was reading in the south bedroom there came a moment of white light blazing on the white curtain beside me. It was the sun due west sunk horizontal through the kitchen window. 6:39 another lidded day in another new exile. Discontinuous. I'm comparatively discontinuous. Found some wild roses along the back fence of the RV park, very strong with dark shiny rough small leaves and elegantly crossed buds - lots of buds. The leaves smell good. I'll start some of those. - Look! A patch of lit sky next to the willow, which is drifting its long strands. 27 It's raining very gently on my acres. Seeds in, now three days off, already less in pain. There stands the compost box all but the lid, peas and beans along the fence, lettuce - 6 kinds - radishes, beets, chard, three kinds of zucchini, 5 of cucumber, 3 of carrots, nasturtiums, Shirley poppies, basil, dill, parsley. 6 strawberry plants from the farmers' market. Plan for a raspberry frame. Space for the pear in the far corner - I think the pear because it will grow large. Meantime it's Friday, satisfaction of putting the garbage on the curb: still clean-up garbage. Next Sunday a full month. Electric bill, gas bill. Jennifer and Claude my magically arrived helpers. Around town I'm joyfully easy and straightforward in needing and giving. June 2nd Claude Desy had driven up in his grey work pickup yesterday and I had been digging the fence strip. He looked into my face and said, Do you ever take days off? He wondered whether I was overdoing. "You looked rough for a couple of days but you look fine this morning." He's just right-there and smart and true and loves a project. And Jennifer and I took care of her last fifteen minutes before two o'clock sitting on the steps drinking limonata and talking in the sun. She'd found a rock with tiny amethyst-looking crystals and wondered whether it was ore. I asked about snakes and she said there are three kinds of garter snakes and she'd seen a bullsnake out by Colletteville. She had found the hole near the tap where ground wasps go home. Yesterday I was so keen to work I was out half an hour before Jenn arrived. 9 Monck wildflower meadow, Coyote Valley Road Bright morning day off. I drove east as far as Monck, which isn't far and right away into grassland. Turned left onto what might be a street or else a ranch road and there a dry open place with barelegged ponderosa pines and flocks of blue flowers. Seen closer, white and yellow too. Shallow basin of gravelly soil, plants often single in their spaces. A bird's voice unusually beautiful. Meadowlark? Open views in every direction. Walked slowly with the camera finding more kinds. Joyful, relieved. Was thinking of the little patch of meadow at my front door. Could I grow a few of these? Purple alfalfa, sparse gallardia, yarrow, butter-and-eggs. A short bright tap-rooted yellow thing. Oh - a buckwheat, cream-colored, salsifies looking right, a single mullein stalk, ah this radiating bright little aster-thing. A whole garden. 11 First potato up. 26 The lattice was going up as I came out the door this morning and there it stands braced while the cement dries. Vegetable rows thickening in today's real heat. Low sun striking through hollyhock flowers like stained glass or pink lamps. Little meadow under the plum tree. I eat a radish now and then, pull a little bok choy plant to thin the row. When I look at the far SW corner I see a plan that worked and worked fast. I had to find people to take a huge heavy mess of old wood. Paint cans - large wooden boxes. Posting and replying and waiting for people who don't show up and being nice to people who do. Then dealing with twenty people who wanted the pergola but didn't show up to take it down. Then paying Claude to demolish it, he taking some of the wood home. Then Claude sweating and grunting building the pavers' frame. Filling it with gravel. Designing the pavers and laying them with Ben. Claude building the compost box. Measuring and remeasuring for the scale drawing. Lumber-buying trips. 29 There's one swallowtail that cruises through briefly now and again. A little cabbage white flittering low stopping for nothing it finds here. It's between 9 and 10 in the shaded south edge, time of day with a lot of traffic I don't seem to mind. I'll need to hand water soon, it's Thursday. There stands the lattice painted up to its armpits waiting for its feet to dry so I can fill up its holes to have a base for the ladder. Plum branches starting to droop under weight. Lurid hollyhock flowers climbing their ladder. Grass seed is what has interested starlings and the white moths seem to stay with the plum's meadow too. Chinese vegetables are going up in skinny bloom. Walkers at this hour too. There's my swallowtail, a wavering zigzag through and back across Doug's fence. Breeze from the south. 3 July What is it today. The wind is blowing, blowing. It's Sunday. Am I lonely. A kind of anguish. Don't want to do anything I can do. Want something else. I went to bed in the afternoon and watched four hours of TV. Smart good-looking people with other smart good-looking people talking and acting. My lips are sore. Muscles hurt. The leaves of these mountain ash trees are blown sideways, tips of their branches weighed down with hard berries. It's an ordinary street, not a bad street but nothing to do with me. Traffic passes. The church stands solid and empty. I've missed my family, being in that house with people around me who were just there, who belonged there, who knew me as I was then. Judy and Paul and my mother. We were all in place. We were real to each other. Miles of fields were always there wide open around us and we when we looked out at them or stood and moved in them were wide open too without knowing. Church gave us a deep keel in devotion, mortality, aspiration, fantasy we could be together in. We were simple people, young bodies. Our dad was carrying us all but we didn't know it, we thought he was just doing what he did, because he was always the same age in those days. Everyone was always the same age except the children, whose ages slid forward between birthdays in mostly unnoticed ways. We were important because we were growing. There was someone whose job was to look after us. My mother was a good person. I felt she believed in me: she liked me best. I was confident. I invented and the others followed. 6 What is it about wet pines. I thought of it as subtly wrong, the top left corner doesn't hold strongly enough, but it's posted because it has something too: the streaks to left and right where tracks meet the road have a feeling of wet blur as if a finger had been run through watercolor and the tree in the foreground is so much more definite than anything else in the image that it seems a strongly present self - yes? - against a distant crowd. And the road wandering past it toward a little white dot of destination, the power post wires on the right held very firmly between the frame edge and the road, the white ridgeline's vapor glow as well - why didn't I see it until now. But the upper left corner is wrong nonetheless. July 17 I was on the steps looking at the slanted hollyhock stalks and the thick heavy plum tree now with a swath of cut grass under it, and the clean white lattice and the clean white and red compost box behind it - the paved works yard now with its little apple tree - the booming potato plants. And tomatoes - carrots and lettuce and dill rows - and beets and chard - the zucchini heaps - and at the trees beyond, and the layers of roofs to the south and the giant rowan in the church's yard and the white sky to the west - and feeling I have really brought it to pass. And there I am reflected in the window in front of me and I look nice. My hair looks nice. 29 Friday morning 6:08 by the stove's clock. United Church's pale triangles strongly lit, mountain ash next to it bright green and orange. > I was touched to see the shot of your table with what looks like a volume of your journal. [Greg] Nice of you to notice the journal on the table. > I have an image of me studying at my worktable on the third floor of the Clergy St apartment, and you curled up in the adjacent armchair, writing in your journal. For me, an image of peaceful and complete contentment, way back then. How lovely of you to have been contented by that. I feel a little peaceful glow to hear it. > I was a happy guy. I read that and feel: Greg loved me. Loves me. (Frank, Louie.) Tom did not but he entertained me. He had an essential use for me but - and there I think of qualifications. It'll be 90 degrees today. When I look up the street I see high summer. 9 August There it is. New pink ceramic jar from Baillie's with branches of that ruby-berry tree. Haven't energy to say more but am pleased with the room. 10 Blue white green and orange. Exact half moon and yellow west light on swaying mountain ash branches. I don't quite grasp that I have my room. The window's clean white frame brings blue and shining cloud and swaying clumps of orange berries present alive and through the open door, whose door-knob plate is immaculate now, there is the blue kitchen with its open south and dark red floor and glass and ceramics and wide dissertation table with flowering plants and wooden chair with Tom's blue cushion. And I love the new pink jar with strings of ruby berries. And Jennifer and Ben and Claude built into the house now, and dill tall in a glass vase and nasturtiums scenting the guest bedroom and the yellow rug under this bed and Fred's bed all clean and new because I made it so and the Borrego side table to my right and there across the kitchen two pots I threw in London when I was 25 and one Louise gave me in Point Loma and on the counter the tajine base I carried from Marakesh on my lap and on the table the art deco lamp I bought in Ocean Beach and gave myself for my fifty-fourth birthday. And I've been thinking this house and garden is so much a calling-back of my lost belonging - Oma Konrad, Opa Epp, Ed and Mary young, always Tom - Tom every day - and Luke and Judie and Paul - Greg - Don - Olivia too, and Louie not quite yet - and the others. 12 What is it I so love in O'Brian, and why does no one I know - no one but Greg - love it too. There's a kind of happiness in its graceful flow. He is amused, pleased. He sets up in a richly interesting culture in a richly interesting era. He gives Stephen and Aubrey four kinds of male scope, natural history, politics, technology, warfare. I don't at all resent the marginality of women: he writes from the point of view of men, and those men well-disposed to women but minding their own business as men. The writing lets me into the fullness of their lives as men: gives it to me. He's dwelling in a time whose language he likes; and whose scope for grounded intelligence; and what is the modernity in his style? Its mixture maybe. Jane Austin had her narrow sphere to be gracefully acerbic in but knew nothing of marine dynamics and wouldn't have thought domestic dynamics publishable. His documentary and narrative blend is like McPhee who's as contemporary as it's possible to be. Delight in intelligent company. Maybe kinds of visual detail that are cinematic? Jack with a swell carrying the becalmed Diane toward thousand-foot cliffs noticing the "nascent breeze stirring the grass up on that distant edge breathing along the cliff-edge." At last reading in a room with sun on my feet. Clean floor, blond fir, white glass ceiling lamp, brass window lift gleaming, grey streak of traffic at intervals, a very distant siren. Scent of nasturtiums. Two years ago today in Borrego packing. 21 I so love the motion of trees - looked up from the armchair to see the tall blue spruce and next to it a round leafy thing half its height, each moving in its own as if personal way, the spruce's long heavy up-curved branches swaying slowly but elastically sideways, the short tree rippling all over. This is a good chair now, a morning chair from which I can see the blond hill between spruce tree and shingled church, and in the treed yard across the road two more kinds of movement, the tall pretty eleagnus tossing its airy silver lightly on long upright stems, the twin flowering crabapples twinkling their larger leaves as they sway. 24 Across the kitchen on the top shelf jars of gingered applesauce, plum chutney, plum preserves. Plum halves drying in the jeep. Paul was here. I made him breakfasts, gave him a bed with clean sheets, a quiet room with flowers and a fresh towel. Made supper the first night; he bought the butter chicken the next. There was a quarter bottle of wine left, that we drank facing west in the garden afterward. Yesterday we found the Lundbom Lake road, saw grassed hills, aspen groves, a brilliant turquoise lake, combed reed beds, cattle, a winding gravel track. Talked and talked. He's still an urban man with linen trousers and a flat cap. I am an old woman who forgets to comb her badly cut hair and doesn't mind. September 5 When I've gone out the last few mornings to pick nasturtiums the light has been exquisite. It's an autumn light, white and somehow clean. It's familiar but uncommon. 8 Awake at 4:30 opened the back door and saw my winter friend Orion bright in black above the rowan tops, Pleiades almost overhead. Two mornings ago, from my bed, a raven overweighing on a rowan tip, bending to gobble berries. Yesterday at dawn a thin white mist. Photos. [west into the alley] [east into the alley] [Granite corner] [Quilchena corner] 13 6:30 in the armchair looking at the unblue spruce and pink streaks. Streetlight an amber half circle pointed down. There the Russian olive's fine still sprays against pale blue. St Michael's a massive dark pyramid. The streetlight has gone out. St Michaels' short squared-off pickets worn-off white. Too early for traffic. I need to think about loneliness. I stand in a room feeling for what to do next and my body - whatever it is that I ask - doesn't want anything I can suggest. I lie down and read if I have anything to read, and then I fall asleep. Traffic now, a pickup in each direction. The pinks have gone bright ivory. Then a sharp white line drawing itself, being pulled from the roof, chasing end quickly erased as it needles forward. Where can it be headed and from where, there's no city in that direction until after an ocean. Oh and there another such line seeming pointed in the same direction, pointed from the sun's horizon. An hour later. Cold dew on the nasturtiums. Walking up the path I could see my breath. It's only halfway through September. The house won't warm till late afternoon so I've turned up the thermostat and can hear the boiler rumbling in the rad. Sun lying on the church's wet short grass. Sunflowers in my Chinese vase - Chinese shape - dropping piles of golden pollen. "This is my David collection" I said when DB was seeing the bits of things in my console hollow. He's the only one who notices my vases. He likes wear and decay more than I do. Gave me a such a right cotton bathmat from his childhood house, blue and white for my blue and white bathroom floor, with holes on the sailboat side that I have hidden by sewing it doubled. - Ah! There's another needling shining self-erasing line, and pointed in the same direction, where's everyone going. It emerged from platinum radiance alongside the south slope of the church's roof; the sun's about to burst out of that edge. It's blazing into my eyes. 14 There's a dove so pretty a shape on the wire under the transformer-can across the road. The 7am flight drew its bright thread above the church. I woke at six to a clean luminous sky. Coffee in one of the white mugs. The boiler's rumble is a steadfast sound. I turn my head and see a golden patch of lace and branch beside the parlour door. White steam now from St Michaels chimney, issuing, flowing, pouring, pushing, twisting, drifting, falling, minutely granular, improvising phenomenally, sensitive to the sensitive air, demonstrating the sensitivity of the air. Like white chalk scribbling on the empty blue. Next to it the Russian olive branch-tips holding still in the steady arrival of light. The flow of both is from the north. And then it stops. The wainscot with its framed doors so immaculately complete, its parts so fitted, so carefully angled where they meet, so sculptural, so neat. It's what this room is. I only need a rug, a big expensive good rug, worn but fine. A floor lamp for this chair. Venetians. A tall plant. 15 Shade of the plum tree. Cabbage whites somersaulting among the shouting hollyhocks. Smell of fermenting plums. Clacking grasshopper, honey bees avid for poppy pollen. Big marrow leaves white with mildew or whatever it is. Potato vines yellowing. Overgrown chard shining green. Roof vent turning. Gate clicked next door. Great peaceful blue. Car turning into the alley. - These plums on the ground are actually prunes, I'm just chewing one. High school girl walks past in red Chucks. Boy on a skateboard. I bike to the post office now or to the library or to Brambles for bread. Tomorrow I'll go pay $100 for a set of stainless steel pots. 16 Delight of my clean house - delight of a house I walked out of at 9 and came back to (with my new jeans from the post office and new Lagostina pots from the woman who works at the Husky station out by the airport) at 11 and found clean by grace of lovely Jennifer. The tub is clean. The red kitchen floor is clean. She vacuumed under the beds. From my white nun's room I look sideways to the very inhabited kitchen and there see lamp and plants and pots and canning jars and Tom's cushion and the pretty kitchen chair and the thesis table, and on bright afternoons a stretched rectangle of brightness on the floor, so pleasing. 21 Thin sparkle of frost on the marrow leaves this morning. Ate two figs yesterday from my own little tree. This house, this street, this rumble of the boiler in the cellar, this place-time-self, are what? A long metal horse trailer passes traveling north. A state of soul, but which. Quiet and treed. Often grey. Unattached. Grounded. Undistinguished but surrounded with openness that can be glimpsed between human buildings. An old-fashioned being, darker than I like and someways wrong but well-fashioned in its period. Improvable. There passes a man on a bicycle. The linden is yellower than yesterday and a bit heart-shaped like its leaves. A bright silver ceiling of mist. An empty church. Modern times passing in the shapes of morning traffic. None of the mendacious mess of intellectual or artistic fashion. A girl on her way to the high school. White picket fence with worn-off paint. School bus. And in this room a terminal connected to almost anything I could want to see or know. As if I am the high school girl living alone for the first time in Sexsmith but now a terminal for everything I've been since then, simple and quite vast. Living alone, having given up someone I loved - four girls abreast on the opposite sidewalk - stretched hard to shoot myself into the so-desired next richer more challenged more expansive state. 30 Rode to my spot by the railway bridge. Could see someone in the river fishing, a skinny part-Native-looking boy. Crept down the bank and sat on the shelving edge to talk to him. He climbed out and stood next to me in his wet shoes. He was fishing for rainbow trout with a homemade lure he said. Cohoes are mostly finished but Chinooks are later. You can fish trout anytime but they're harder to catch in spring when the water is high. You'd use bait then. As he was speaking I realized I was at the confluence, the Coldwater flat and shallow from the southeast and the Nicola faster and deeper from under the bridge. Riding the bike path alongside the Coldwater's golden reflections I was thinking maybe Claude would teach me to fish. At this moment closing on four in the afternoon I'm looking at a mashed-potato pile of cloud moving north below a background layer of blurred furrows, this above the silver tree and against the mildest of light blue skies. I was feeling again something I've felt these days, that Merritt is nowhere special and anywhere has enough marvels. - Then the raven floating over the road to land on my roof. - Then two old persons in old-person scooters pass one after the other presumably on the way to the old persons' barracks at the top of Chapman. Two butterflies rise flapping and twisting over the church's messy shrub. A yellow leaf drops from the now half-bare linden. Blue spruce tranquilly holds up its arms to the sun. Pickup with a gas tank and pine rounds in its bed. The linden is flickering all over. Top of the spruce lets go a black flock dispersed like seeds. I want to say this is a very patched and corrected way of writing. I want to say it because I'm not sure what to think of it. Writing journal on the laptop rather than in the notebook allows it and probably suggests it because of the uses I've made of laptop writing for student letters and lectures etc, but does it also mean I'm too senile now for spontaneous narrative ordering of the kind I used to have. Or does it mean I'm writing better. Or does it sound tightly confected in ways I hate. I like the way it paces watching. Things change while I consider my sentences. October 2 Four crows picking at the sidewalk under the lamp post. Then comes a raven to the roof peak and they're gone. Seedy this morning, threadbare is how it feels. Woke in black ache at three and lay half-under till six-thirty. Sunday morning. A high ravel of geese wavering southeast. It's still, more than still, as if petrified in blank light on this corner. There stands the linden showing its bones, there stand the crabapple twins rusting orange, there the silver queen sleeping against vast luminous silver. There the imperturbable spruce. Suddenly a bright line up the edge of a metal signpost, suddenly a bright scatter in the nearest crab. Then the bicycle man with his black dog. A big fly shouting against the window. Church and spruce both coming to a point. Shadow edges creeping clockwise. Now two pickups. Three. I should go out. - Birds in the spruce's seeding apex. Real frost last night wilted the basil, nasturtiums, bean vines, even beet leaves and chard. What is that flock. Something about the way a tree seems to let it go, scatter it into the air. - I was in the garden at twilight pulling blackened tomato vines and heaping them out of the way. The air was cool and the bare earth around me was scattered with dried rags of leaf. That and the fading yellow sky in the west were like being young in fall on our garden patch at home digging potatoes at the end of some Saturday afternoon. It was melancholy too because it's the end of my garden, its startlingly virile great green froth. 4 I'm looking at this corner and realizing that unlike cities I've known it's stable. Space isn't in short supply. Large trees abide. St Michael's has squatted there heavily graceful since 1909. None of these buildings are going to be pulled down. Nothing uglier is going to appear. The ravens will live out their lives and be replaced by their kind. Deer a bit further out will walk into a yard to strip a grapevine - I heard that story yesterday in the library. Children in Colletteville Elementary will have to be picked up after school because a bear is scrounging dropped fruit. 7 Two in the afternoon. It was raining this morning but the sun is in and out this aft. A white light. Wind to make the long up-curving spruce branches sway, the eleagnus ripple silver and the pink-orange crabapple twinkle all over. 8 then let himself ebb upon the air From October 1981:
Do I understand all of that now. Multiple language: using etymology and whatever I know in other languages, other people's lines too, like Pound, use of any language. Back-shifts: maybe constructions where what's later inflects what's earlier, more usual than I knew. Dictionary's exquisite found poetics. Dislocations? Whole-body dancing is when I feel my sentence riding body energy like something on the jet of a fountain. It happens. Image magic - I know what I mean but 'image' with 'magic' is too tight a rhyme. Maybe I'd just say image and mean descriptions that are strongly sensory and at the same time call up something subliminal. Ambience memory - maybe just say ambience. Did I mean what happens sometimes when I'm falling asleep in the afternoon, the sense of a tint of time, the unnameable psychic atmosphere that maybe can be evoked by writing within it. Small lyric Pound's bits and some two- or five-line sequences I've made. Access by the other? Did I mean something like the book? Not-me speaking through? What kind of invention did I think glamorous. Kinds I didn't dare and others did. Free-styling. Sound pleasure meaning also care with sound of the sort that knows 'image magic' is wrong. Language intuition is all of this isn't it, wordless sense of language, the vast wordlessness of language. I said it wasn't poetry and it isn't, it's being aware in the whole wide network standing around sentence-making. Dislocations, try again, it's when a word is wrenched out of whack. I'd have to find an example. - I wrote this suddenly a year after my last fall in the lake house after some months of nothing much. It's compact. I wouldn't have been able to unpack it then the way I can now but it's a long way on from where I was when I began with T and C five years earlier. I'd worked. I'd used drugs to open my edges and I'd recovered from them. I'd used Jam's company to learn to focus and her box of books to confirm. There sits the raven on an arm of the cross as if it's built for him. Sky white with rain at eight in the morning.
'Complete' is grandiose but coherence by accuracy I still believe. What is sensitive process though. Just attention. 11
There's a new authority in the sound of that. It still happens and isn't it natural - transient structure - and isn't the instruction that wholeness in abstraction needs to come with externally-supported repeating over time, the way the doc did. The way I worked with recognition was patchy, had to be transient because it was always new contexts.
It's an exact summary of those meetings. An outsider's. Could any of them have written it? No because they had already ruined memory with drugs. 12
The clear being was you? Yes. This description is already an integration. Yes.
I'm impressed by the composure in some of this writing. Was it the field of the four? It says no, I was forced by crisis accepted. And she too.
I have a long habit of that don't I, keeping silence in the midst. Is that from two years old? Yes. It makes social difficulties but it's an advantage to writing. It says so-so. You mean disadvantage too. Yes because it ties writing to catching up. 14 There was rain this afternoon. I went out in fading light afterward to get videos for tonight, then rode up Midday Valley Road to look at the sky. There was still a bit of clear silver to the west. Against it long dark clouds rushed over the hill from the south. I was stopped at the turn onto the abandoned tourist mansions with my window open letting in cold air. The clouds scared me almost, the way they were running in a ravening pack with heads raised. 18 Last night I was on street view for San Diego looking for something and saw a date in 2016. As I was falling asleep realized I could go find out whether Tom still lives at 3663 Georgia. Remembered to check just now, heart wrung in suspense. Is the tree there? No. I'll look from the other end of his sidewalk. No plants, no bench, he's gone. No way to know where. 19 The shock when I saw Tom was gone. Lying awake at 2:30 this morning with a sore heart. As long as he was there I could imagine one day knocking on his door. I could imagine him safe in the home I made for him. Maybe he's safe in a seniors' tower and his bench and his plants are with him on a balcony. His 2010 notes on 3663: "I want to write about this apartment and this neighborhood and about how both have become uniquely mine. Now I hope that this will become not just another breathing space in a chaotic life." "Name the things Ellie has done to create this home for me." "Somehow, this is the where I've always wanted to be. I've come to a stop here. My attention is shifting from outward to inward. This place no longer may be a stage but rather a destination." "'Finish strong, kid,' I hear my father say. I think of all he did to make a home and all I have not done. 'An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.' Bachelard." "This apartment and my decision to remain here at least until Casual labor is finished forces me to confront all the "I's" who have facilitated all these changes of self, a process that continues even now. After I leave this apartment, I will not be the person I am now." He was there nine years? Ten? From Hallowe'en 2006. From 60 to 70. "He got his cards and the Casual labor notes from storage yesterday. I think his living there could be the beginning of the realness I imagined eleven years ago, for him and between us." "Feeling what it is like to do things for him. I don't say I love Tom and am over the moon to be making a home for him that he is paying for. I say this must be some kind of thing my body needs." "We have been shopping together very peacefully. When we got home the cat met us at the top of the steps." "I was looking at him with so much pleasure, I was so much liking him in his calm funny realness. His big strong nose. His beauty. Yesterday he struggled here on sore feet because I'd left his house Friday night disapproving of him. He declared and I declared and he got himself up to date and we made friends - went shopping and I cooked a roast. He never complains when my cooking doesn't work. The cat slept all afternoon on the blue sofa and then on the cooler concrete under the honeysuckle. Tom read the NY Times for hours." "What I mean is that he's become the Tom I was there for, he's come true. When I cooked for him last night he said 'You're so nice to me, I'm seeing what you've been holding back.'" But then a month later: "So what's my complaint. It says it's that there's something false in the platform that never gets acknowledged and that I have to feel alone and that is a grief and deprivation and that he suppresses so that suppression also interferes." - Look at that completely open luminous platinum sky. Cut-outs of the linden, the spruce, the ridge, the church roof, the Russian olive, in that order. He had a house and I didn't. I photographed him and he didn't photograph me. I wrote him and he didn't write me. I am missing him and if he is missing me he is not letting on. I let him know where I am and he has blocked me on FB. I cherished his being and he needed my help, is that the sum of it? It says no. He loved me as best he could, is that the sum of it? It says yes. And I was hard on his being as well as cherishing it. Oh sigh. Looking at his apartment notes I was sorry how carping I was about his writing, that I didn't honour its reaching. The something false in the platform was that I was always afraid that I'd love him more than he loved me, I was always looking for reasons to hold back. Was that necessary? It says no. So I flunked out. Yes. I had to leave because I flunked out. Yes. I didn't understand that he was it and I was there, I was in my one chance. - That sweet short sharp-tailed pink line drawing itself swiftly across the east, the 7:15 flight. - Ten minutes later another appearing over St Michael's chimney. "My preference has always been to love you," I did say that and we both cried. 25
Ah that's so ghastly. And still I went on. I'm heartsore seeing it.
All of those are accurate.
Yes.
I was being tortured but still look how accomplished this is, this description of how I had been working.
Appalling, appalling ill will. Jam has me so aligned with her rejected female self that I needn't think of it as personal but still -. 4 November In this afterlife I think of loves I've had and want to talk to them - Jam, Tom - Don - and then say no, the Jam I want to talk to stopped existing about 1981, my Tom has left a blank in the air where he was. In paradise as in hades the dead are the only company there is. But I talk to them. 9 I'm writing and erasing and writing and erasing. It's 3:54am. That vile hideous ignorant profiteer has been given the presidency. My heart hurts. People don't care that he lies to them. They don't care that he despises them. They don't care that he's visibly rotten. They don't care that he knows nothing about government or international affairs. They don't care that he'll endanger them. He lets them feel their inferiority is alright, inferiority can thrive, can win. 14 December DR5 January-April the months before Jam. What am I looking for, what can I be looking for. Three people at full stretch. What kind of people. Thirty two, strong, hungry, smart, educated, in rebellion against male dominance, in a transition zone, at an age when they needed to establish themselves in work, claim a place. Three people in the same place in their time. Women whose mothers were discredited as women and no help. We were all three going for broke. Sexually at sea just when we were burning. Given up on men because we were discredited there. We were coming out of ten years of increasing feminist rebellion. Feminist rebellion, drugs, art, therapy, early adulthood with its strength, beauty, daring and energized hope. I don't like this sociological sound but I'm wanting to know what happened to me then. Because it shocked me and disordered me. They're women and so their way of going for broke is in erotic struggle. Is that the best way to do it? They are trying to change themselves instead of changing their circumstance. They need to adore, they need to be adored, they short-circuit.
Drugs and therapy. The notion of repression brought alive, seeing where there had been a blank. Seeing there could be more in sex than there had been. Experiencing state change from one moment to the other. Being dumped into deep uncertainty. 16
I've cleaned it up. What I wrote at the time was messed up by falsity and exaggeration. Rereading it last night I was there again dismayed by what had become of me, horrified by what I have to be in the world. Like dropping into a pit. There have only been two people who dealt with it as what it is for me not what it is for them, Trudy and Tom. Both saw it instantly. 21st Pale grey-blue dawn, streets empty. There stands the blue spruce quietly. The snow has shrunk down and will more. There stand the bare branches, the shapes of trees. The human mess, always the human mess of badly made towns. There stands my tree with bright small lights in its arms looking as if they belong there, as if they are the tree's aliveness, reflected on the floor and on the varnished wainscot behind it. The Strathcona School reflective star from Rowen's first year clipped onto the tall straight leader. The last time it stood on a tree was at Tom's house four Christmases ago when Tom crashed into rage and scattered me rushing home to Mesa Grande in the dark. 31st [Confluence of the Nicola and the Coldwater]
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