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Sarah Murphy
Arts Council England Fellowship at The Word Hoard
Artist in Residence 2007

journals up to 13th august this way
journals 2nd - 22nd september this way
journals 23rd september - 12th november this way
journals from 13th november this way
falling into place

fellowship journals 14th august - 1st september 2007

20th august 2007
another massively intense long week of delving deeper into the processes we have begun, straying from the path and also trying to find it, either again or for the first time. two concentrated days with Sarah and Keith diving into Sarah's canal images have produced two series of photo-collages, adorned lightly with text from a piece Keith has written in response to ideas of place/placement/displacement. once again, the process itself seemed as important as the product, with the images resulting as much from undoing things as doing them, piling too much into the collages and discovering opportunities as we chucked it all out again, the crowding leading to a simplification, a clarification. but also, very strongly, a sense of discovering what we are doing in the doing of it, so that the final images, whatever you think of them, feel like clues and elucidations to us, in that we found ourselves in a very mysterious dark zone, a little threatening but with transforming qualities of space and depth, of outer space and deep water, of coastlines and maps discovered in reflections, in fact a kind of accidently macrocosmic interpretation of the microcosmic details in the original photographs (no less). interesting mixtures of abstraction and connection.

so, we've called it falling into place

meanwhile, in the woods, after eating cakes, the close to the bone group and Sarah have been photographing the dresses that are tantamount to characters in themselves in the film being made. filming is finished and the group now has to review all the material to select and edit. they have also been writing in response to some of the unedited film material and in response to photographs.

a sense of place seems to connect the two projects, of place itself as a grounding process, as a way of discovering definition for stories, or as a way of discovering stories themselves. and a very strong use of our eyes to find narrative in things, to absorb atmospheres and to understand these emotionally. then there's the place where all this comes back to, this studio/office/space where i'm typing: how does it affect everything? it feels basically benevolent, untidy in busy ways, quite co-operative in the way it can be easily made tidy, made new in preparation for new work each day.

Sarah's Journal – Fifth Installment

08/14
Back here now in Meltham, strange that in this far more comfortable room I should find it hard to sleep. But means I got to talk to both Mark and Lee yesterday. Mark before going to bed. Lee upon waking up at one in the morning. All seems well there. Him installing aluminum railing. Yesterday on a 22nd storey. Makes my stomach turn. But I would have done it at his age.
And the strange morning narrative dreaming continuing. But didn’t bother to remark on this one and write it down. Only something about wire cages left. Maybe something surfacing to do with aluminum railings on 22nd storeys.
And what was that about the way up to the installation site being “sketchy”? Eeeek.

Good news yesterday from Sheri-D. An invitation to the Spoken Word Festival....

And then, sick suddenly. Flu-like thing. Mostly, sore throat, and the back of my head hurting. Bringing on its own sense of homesick sadness. Only not so much for a real home in Calgary, as for the attention of old friends, or not even that, Tom I think, that snuggle down with someone you love thing, that goes back to Bill, even to Mickey at her best, to the best of childhood, to safety...that thing....the internalized home, I suppose, like the internalized good parent....after all I have my super cheap phone card, and no desire to call anyone, no desire to speak, just to find some way to really just veg out period, after all, if I wanted to talk, there would have been the consistently rewarding talk with Bob and Taru over dinner, or for that matter, in going to dinner with Keith and Di...

And then, finding myself thinking as I’m writing whether I’m being profound enough here. That self-censorship thing. And that thing of watching over your own shoulder. Especially discovering that in one of these entries I had written right instead of write and hadn’t caught it....how could I? how stupid could I get, while it’s one of a whole bunch of mistakes I make when I’m writing quickly, know and no and knew and new and needless to say it’s and its and all that, so there, their, they’re dead, don’t worry your pretty little head about it and just relax, even as I keep asking myself if I made myself look illiterate, and the other edges of the ridiculous, but editing a journal never does it any good as far as I can tell, at least not immediately, takes on too much of the Here is the Important Artist Being Important tone, that I have always hated so much in artistic autobiographies, what takes over when one is writing for an audience of admirers, an audience one wants admiration from, and not for the writing, the voice, but the person, so that all your decisions change....
Makes me think about the boundaries between public and private again, and what the web does....a whole other topic there, but then, how to treat this here....especially as it is ongoing....so maybe I’ll just make a little note, dear reader, if, indeed there are any out there, that yes, I feel perfectly comfortable taking stuff out (nah nah you don’t know what you’re missing and all that...) though most of it is going in. Otherwise it would lose its (see that one’s write, wright?) voice altogether....

A thing talking with Keith today about the canals, and the loss of the 19th century as part of the history of here...the industrial history....it’s terror, I suppose....and the difficulty around theories of progress, and what they have unleashed...and within that a looking for an ahistorical home, something I have to think about as someone who has always fought for recognition for me and mine within a sense of history...but I do think that there is an argument there....that we do have to transcend history in some way, perhaps only by moving through it, to find our humanity, and a kind of home on the earth, in nature in the best sense, our relationship to all that is – not Marie Antoinette playing a shepherdess, or for that matter yuppies just loving their 17th century weavers’ cottages....must continue to think about it...commonality through difference and all that....history included....
And something that he has written on grass....
A blade of grass....
Something about Rooting in refuse
And thinking now, of the canals, also – Routing through refuse
And through refusing.....

08/15
Almost a month here. And feeling a lot has been done. And revitalized as well. Thinking in new/old patterns. Things I had not thought about....not in a while....or not articulated, and adrift at the same time, there is so much....
And in leaving the Word Hoard feeling so sick yesterday, with the back of my head aching and then my neck, at an incredible level of pain, that I had one of those great paranoid moments of – you’ve got meningitis and you’re going to die, and then, by this morning, except for a mild sore throat, all gone....

08/16
And last night the dream was a Bob Dylan concert. All of us our appropriate ages though. Just that we had to walk up a mountain to get there. And in it, someone’s father with Alzheimer’s, keeping on forgetting the way. And all of us with front row seats. With Margot talking to Dylan mid-concert about something she’d done for one of his later concerts, that he was here now because of her. And front row or no, me behind a post....
And Lee somewhere in back....
And something about a battle later, waged with bagels...
Oh, well....
At least no young women...

08/17
Last night an Inspector Morse type thing....some inspector anyway, and the whole thing about a serial killer blowing people up, and the inspector, and for that matter us, not being able to figure it out in time, despite hints and more hints, and documents and documents being left, and then, finally figuring it out, and knowing that the serial killer was going to stop because he’d been captured, only, of course, you know the plot, it wasn’t him, and there was something somebody said, somebody who had just gone on vacation, who turned out to be Kerry Allen, who, again of course, he went after, while no one knew because she was supposed to be gone, and that was more or less when I was about to wake up, so I took control of it, found where she was attached to a bomb that would blow up when the sun first hit it in a water tower, defused it.....etc. etc. etc....So we won we won we won....terrorism bad dreams with worse plots had been defeated....
And yesterday, a great day at the Word Hoard, making photo collage things with Keith from one of my canal photos....may turn into a book this thing....and maybe my part will remain visual....but marvellous collage things....
Also, looked at some of his new stuff. Wonderful....all about that sense of what is left, what can be recaptured, what wonder is it we can still live by....
And the blade of grass thing...

08/19
And one of the most brilliantly plotted specific dreams of all, last night for the evening of Tom’s birthday. And yet, now, having gotten up to write it down, once more I don’t remember. But once more plots around land, and divorce, and, it would seem exploring a new planet. And then in the end, someone refusing to work with Tom, said he was destroying the commune, that it would be impossible to live in community with him. Then, of course, me incensed about all of that. That no, it wasn’t true, etc. etc. Nothing was the way they’d said. And as for bearing witness, because now this woman wouldn’t trust him, that his word was better than that of any of the others, and, I could go on....that typical thing of defending a partner, but wish, besides that, that I remembered more, because it was such a brilliant and subtle thing whatever it was that was going on....and it included Tom in such a real way, but makes me wonder....of course....always that desire for him to be here, perhaps resentment at his leaving, or just feeling in those last years, though he had such a strong community, how his body was attacked, undermined....
And then, of course, today being his birthday.

And thinking of yesterday, spending the day working with Di and Kath on Straying from the Path....all of us trying to do some writing, with Di and Kath really accomplishing something, me just kind of playing with the idea of paths and masks and fairy tales as someone new to this...though I like the notes I made, and a couple of sketches in my Pink Pig Close to the Bone and residency pad (which one day I’ll photograph rather than type in here), with the work we were doing referencing the masks hung on the trees from the last day of filming... so all I got to was the sense of masks as a place of transformation, hardly new... but then Di putting on this magnificent piece of music, very Tibetan bowls I said, turned out to be electronic, but based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and there I was once more, thinking of Tom, and thinking of transformation, and of his last days....his last moments....and those strange dreams from that time of his leaving, so much too, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with Pamela explaining to me how he would leave, and how he would stay with me....and feeling his presence still
Until he is still you here sometimes....

And then, taking photos of the dresses, and a red heart Di came up with back in Beaumont Park.....

08/20
And today, getting ready to work with Shaun and Keith on bill... tomorrow.Kind of excited about it really. And then last week, so little writing here. Mostly spent on what is now called Falling into Place a name that occurred to me today as I realized that both of our first series of collages have that feeling of falling, one into outer space, into macrocosm, toward a tentative earth, the other into microcosm, falling into water plant cell mud....and loving them both, them all really, but all my mind in that last week, in watching Keith move things and commenting, in seeing the space the place that I had seen with the camera reconceived, then commenting, changing small pieces....until I had no words left....
And starting to wonder, or really – continuing to wonder – why this is triggering the visual not words for me, suspect it’s that thing of words for me going always to narrative, and not having a narrative for this, even if it is pathways, or maybe just not a narrative which forms a story, but of a different kind of connection. Though the picture that attracts me most that way is another one like the trainer....a water bottle floating on what seems a bed of algae...and me wondering if some time in the future such things will become collectibles, and thinking of all the ugly things from my childhood, like tin toys, which have become beautiful...and then too, the irony of a plastic water bottle polluting a canal which is already polluted which is why you need a plastic water bottle.... then thinking: It’s probably an energy drink anyway....
And something beginning (the water bottle is a brilliant red), You would think this beautiful if you didn’t know what it is....

08/21
And last night, more of the same kind of dreams, but this time, trapped in a house on the coast of Maine, Tim there, Cynthia needless to say, and unable to get back to do Bill this a.m. – strange this kind of trouble in the dreams, but the location in this one, just beautiful...and then later, of course dreams of Sidney Place....

And too, I talked with Rosemary last night, interesting talking about the residency stuff, and about how it’s going back in Calgary. The performance coming out of The Skin I’m In workshop she and I did together proceeding toward completion...will be interested in seeing how it turns out....

And now, off to the Word Hoard to begin work on Bill.....

Which turned out to be a fascinating day, really. Once more the sense, not that it’s easy but that it can be done. And some quite magnificent moments, listening after....but also a feeling at times that the text dragged, and that I must do something about that. Things there to be read on the page that might be done without, though I’m not the least bit sure of that, maybe more, that they must be paced slightly differently as I read....

08/22 – 2am
And so far tonight, one very strange dream in which a man, an African, had his hand cut off because he had been kidnapped into an army but was no longer a child, who knows what army or really what country, but he had his hand cut off by those who rescued him after a public trial, so that the whole thing was based on the law demanding this, that kind of letter of the law thing that makes no sense, making no sense even to those who had done it....but doing it nonetheless, and the moment of cauterization horribly clear, and some kind of voice over about how he would miss his hand....or did miss his hand....
And then for the rest, dreams of Sidney Place, yes, of Sidney Place combined with Woodview Drive....in which somehow it was the middle of the night and I had the whole house but I did not lock the back door because people would be running around outside riding horses because some kind of movie based on Tom King was going on, some kind of cowboy and Indian movie or playing cowboys and Indians, but it was Lee and friends, not me and Tim and AJ, but all the time with a persistent sense of danger, why didn’t you lock the door, something/someone would enter by the door, and then the next thing you know it’s Calgary, it’s Woodview Drive and I’ve let the bath run too long, at first it just seeming a little bit, and me swearing that the worst thing about it is that the water is cold, but then there’s water running under the floor boards in my office and I don’t dare go in because it’s England and there’s 220 or 210 or whatever it is current and I’d be electrocuted, and then I’m back in Sidney Place because I’m worried about the kids outside in the yard and the electric barbecue as if anyone ever had an electric barbecue only it’s the spit for the fire pit that Bill built that never had a spit and if it had it would have been turned by hand anyway, and throughout all of that the sense of danger persisting and persisting even if at one moment it seemed ridiculous and at the next perfectly practical much really like the doorframes piece....but after Bill Danced the War today, I said it would be Sidney Place, didn’t I?
And now to see what the rest of the night brings...because of course the other part of this is that I am alone in the house in Meltham, which has not happened before, Bob and Taru and Joel and Leah are off climbing hills and puffin watching for Bob’s fortieth birthday.... so that’s part of it too though the doors are well locked, still the church bell rings every fifteen minutes and there was the strangest sharp caterwauling outside just a few moments ago....but yes, Sidney Place, the spirit of Sidney Place....as if there is something there that does not want this to work out....
And the day’s work feeling better the more I think of it, but yes, I’ve made a few small changes to the text to speed up the first part....
And there’s that church bell again...never seems logical how much it works, except that maybe it’s one two three, for fifteen thirty and forty-five....
And now to try for sleep again....

And then a good day again today. Very good....and how to speak about that...both what worked and the questions...and the sense of my voice, how it was working, how it could work....

08/23
And last night, continuing to read the biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the author’s version of the United States, of America, she says along with all the rest, filling me with a kind of horror, a horror far beyond any real difficulties with the book, though those are there -- the assumptions around the empty land, the mistaken dates, even the brief sympathy for the Indians a kind of throw-away, how she deals too with class, where the working class have simply become the poor, how they seem to be allowed no ideas, but you are supposed to have sympathy for them as you are for all mankind, as Wollstonecraft did, sympathy being how affairs were to be conducted, but somehow beneath it the idea that they didn’t really amount to much, didn’t have a place on the stage, despite what was actually going on at the time, in any number of ways the typical middle class look at the “deprived”, so that while they might be theoretically worth what one is worth, we know who should be thrown out of the life boat and it’s never us, and the horrors of revolution always outweigh those of established oppression, or at least seem to by the attention paid, and then when one or another frontiersman is allowed to admire the Indians, he throws away a comment on the squaws, and squaws is just used as if it is the proper word for Native women, as if it were uncontested or did not resemble the word negress, that the squaws “are very slaves”, she just leaves it as if it were true, remarks in no way on the energy placed by missionaries and emissaries and colonial governors to break the power of women within the Nations, often very conscious, nor does she know of any countervailing statements, or I am sure, look for them. And while that’s not necessarily her business in writing of Wollstonecraft, America and the frontier seem to play a large part in the mythology of Wollstonecraft’s life, so that you think the author would have bothered to look, to try harder at seeing that part of American history, who Native women were, since she is working with so many other contested realities.... but then, I suspect it’s easier not to, and easier too, to think that all women everywhere had it worse than European women, so that once more it’s European ideas to the rescue... and nothing learned from elsewhere, nothing noticed....
But what I really started writing this for isn’t that, though given the opportunity it’s always something about which I’ll run off at the mouth, like, for that matter all those little words, the Inca and Maya Tribes and all that, but more, that what it did, reading that stuff last night, on the second day of recording when bill danced the war was cause a kind of deep horror, one that made me nauseous and that lasted all night....in some ways inexplicable in that the section I’m talking about hardly takes up much of the book, but I suspect, looking at it more, extremely explicable at the same time, that certain historical adventures are so easily let go unmourned compared to others, the burning of the library at Alexandria getting more time, as well as any number of European wars, including English losses in this biography during the United States’ war of independence. And too, it contains a description, an interesting one in fact, of the romanticization of “the west”, which in this case is really the eastern woodland inhabited by the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, Shawnee, etc., not the “plains” (which she mentions as if that were what was being contested), so it’s that romanticization in which “the west” becomes the true “America” over and against the Eastern “colonies”, as if the now “Americans” of the United States are now the true “Americans” when, up to that point the word “American” was used only to mean Native Americans, to mean Indians. So that through this construct Native Americans were deprived even of owning the name of the place they inhabited, whether it is what they called it or wht another called it in referencing them. Instead, they cease to exist except as aboriginal, a fascinatingly constructed word if ever there were one. The first people should carry the name of their place even if it is given by those who “discover them”. While instead, by being metaphorical Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party, the denizens of the United States were now true Americans, and not EuroAmericans as they remain to this day, as if they suddenly had a whole other culture.... which of course needs must eliminate the cultures that went before, and their sense of reality in the eyes of the world. The way so many vestiges of real cities could simply have their mounds robbed and be ploughed under. But funny too, and I see it often in teaching about O’Keeffe, but it’s all over the place, that sense of the United States as pretentiously non-European, as if any culture can be created without roots.
And, of course, that -- as I always say just to get others going, but which has a very real element of truth, especially when you consider all that stuff about cognitive dissonance and adjusting ideology to behaviour not behaviour to ideology -- the American War of Independence wasn’t fought for liberty, but for their god given right, their liberty to kill Indians, as they settled and stole the land beyond the Appalachians. And here I am back in rhetorical mode once more, can’t seem to stop myself, and having to write to do that, to get it down, just to get it out to say it, to scream it, again....so that what I think I’m writing this for is a release from the sense of horror so I can keep on reading about Wollstonecraft. And find some kind of explanation for it, like the Sidney Place dreams...
And thinking what it must be is just that, Bill dancing all the wars again, including all those genocides, those tortures, all those quiet days of walks and talks in the kitchen, but in which I could feel the alteration in his voice, that it truly is a horror passed down the generations, that the effect I write about is not coming out of some sort of political correctness, this is not a political essay but something felt in the body, and that what was felt in Bill’s body, my dad’s body, my father’s body, it had to be felt in mine....and then there was Mickey with her “all the good Indians are dead”, or really, to be literal about what she said, “There are no more Indians”, and me trying to build a rational argument that would defeat her, defeat all that received knowledge, just as Bill did...and still doing it....

So, dreams of Sidney Place, and horror at American history....obvious, no?
Though sometimes, even when I feel the passion arising it’s hard to remember its reality, its basis, its authenticity, as it is passed into art...that who do you think you are thing, that how could this matter, that weighs so many of us down, teaches us to ignore our concerns as unimportant in the “big picture”...but also, I think, why it is so good to be working with other people, I don’t sink down under the weight of that stuff so easily....
And now, back to Wollstonecraft and the American frontier, and hoping that I do not get trapped in horror there, like with Dylan yesterday, between barbed wire fences....

And a funny aside that one yesterday, perhaps the endearing part of yesterday’s bracketing of bill, going out for a short, i.e. half hour, walk before going in to continue with bill and doing that thing I so often do of just wanting to see what’s over the next rise, around the next corner, and thinking I could see a way to circle back – which I could, only it turned out that all the paths within the woodland park into which I had entered in fact led up to barbed wire fences, so that I had to retrace my steps, and find a new way down hill....and in the meantime, wandering through the grass, got my pants my socks my shoes, completely soaked....so that I had to change the second I got back, and go from there directly into the Word Hoard....and thinking, especially as I hadn’t reached this point yet in the Wollstonecraft biography, as a kind of joke to myself, especially as it is on a so much smaller scale, how much this resembled home, Alberta, the area around Calgary, where, when I first arrived and I tried to walk just out in the country, toward streams or small rivers, always I would encounter barbed wire, enclosed land and barbed wire, no right to roam back there, all old foot paths – and yes, they were there, it was not a pathless plain, anymore than the land west of the Appalachians was a “pathless wood”– ignored or obliterated. Or remarked upon but still prohibited, except in special park spaces... And I remember again making that relief construction the summer of 1980 when I’d just got to Calgary, with the barbed wire and the old shot up tin can, and the ground squirrel chewed pine cones and the bones and linoleum prints of sides of beef....
And how I thought, Never have so few stolen so much so fast....and wrote it to Bill, and once more I’m back to that, Bill dancing his wars, and how I didn’t dare say it out loud, except to Tom....

Still have a hard time as far as it goes, it goes so against the ingrained immigrant identity of both Canada and the States, that the whole American continent was a gift from god, not those who went before, like the old farm woman saying to me in a senior’s class, We never took hand-outs from anybody, we never depended on anyone but ourselves....and thinking, a square mile of land, or even a quarter section, is one big give-away as far as I’m concerned....and not opening my mouth to say that either....

And now, trying to think of the reality of the recording, rather than these so casual thoughts, that yes, in some way are arising there, even trying to think too, of this difference in sense of place, and coming up with nothing to say about it, or really more that I can’t quite see how to analyze it, except that I can feel in what we’re doing that sense of raw pain that motivated me to write the piece, that also made it a piece I had to write, that I always knew one day I would have to write, or didn’t maybe, since I never really knew I would write anything, but that once it was written seemed to be one of those things that you note always stay with you, as if from the moment I sat in that kitchen and listened to Bill repeat that I’ve seen them die, I’ve seen them die, I always knew it was an integral chorus to all I ever did, and that one day if I could manage to somehow articulate what was in those words in that atmosphere, I would have articulated myself.
And I did. And in doing this version of it, there is a sense that Keith and Shaun can carry it to where it is meant to be, to amplify that articulation...and that moves me greatly....

And then there are moments sometimes in which I still note the fear, the almost embarrassment, at daring to articulate something so painful, at daring to expose that, and yet so strongly believing in it, but it does sometimes makes me ask myself, how I could possibly be my age, and speak in that tone of voice...with that particular kind of anger...as if I should have articulated it years ago, as if that should have been my young woman self, and maybe it should have, but I know that it took me this long to get here, to this voice, and know too, this is where I am meant to be....so I know it works, and what else is there to say....I can feel it working, taking up its space, making itself real, and also, being able to say, I have a right to demand attention for and to this....and feeling the power too of those who believe it with me....

And today, looking out my window, finally, a perfect day...bright sun over the moors, and yes, the sense of summer....so to quit this explosion of words....and go walk on the moors....and try not to find any barbed wire....

28th august 2007 slug ate my head
yet another intense week, so much so that it's almost difficult to remember the order of events, or what happened at all on some days. could be something to do with our ongoing wines of the world project. also the weather suddenly becoming marvellous and summery and just as suddenly returning to its sullen overcast mode (but then summers in the pennines have never been predictable). generally a feeling of being wholly engrossed in this enigmatic process of finding out what we are saying as we say it, so plenty of gossip, but also plenty of hard intense activity. this week two days devising the performance of when bill danced the war which were as confusing as they were revealing but not negatively confusing. we're learning to accept that the process is essentially research and that we have to stay alert so as to recognise the moment when something results from this research. with bill, a powerful fierce density emerged that sometimes swamped the words entirely, but created an exciting sound, so that we began looking for a way to ride that edge between a clear, spoken word style of performance and a kind of abstraction combining soundart and free jazz with narrative.

3rd september 2007
all these weeks feel like months. it's good to be so absorbed but we are also getting a bit tired, so it was good this week to have a small reception for sarah which made us print and hang many of the images we have created or photographed, and listen again to the first takes of when bill danced the war, and realise how far we have come. not necessarily in the quantity of work, though there's plenty, but in establishing a territory for our collaborations, because everything has a distinct character to it which partakes of all our personalities, a lovely hybridity of form and process. so the reception created a kind of marker point, a measure for us, and as such allowed us to reflect and rest a little.

at both ends of the week we found ourselves by more canals. firstly, we walked the Rochdale Canal from Todmorden town centre to Gauxholme, and then sarah investigated the Huddersfield Narrow Canal at Marsden. what struck us very much was the completely different character of these 2 canals, one from the other and both from Huddersfield Broad Canal, where our first images were taken. also there's something about the canals that seems central to our falling into place project, something about a kind of sleeping unnoticed history and evidence. they are all so beautiful, each in their way, and peaceful, and yet they are the result of some of the hardest, dirtiest work ever done in the early years of the industrial revolution. something about all those pretty boats and ducks floating serenely over a kind of battleground? they are somehow vitally important to the story of the place which is west yorkshire.

Sarah's Journal – Sixth installment

08/24
More about dreams again. Another long narrative that ended with a bunch of us – which us I don’t know – sitting around making beautiful circuit boards – very like the small – and lovely -- weavings Kath and Di are doing in their workshops with kids...without doubt where the whole thing comes from, that and Bob some of his photos from the two days he and Taru took to go walking, showing them on the top of a large hill they climbed, using a fill in flash, something that never occurs to me and should, considering the number of photos I’ve taken that don’t work because of back lighting, though the technique does always make the background look like it’s been chroma keyed in – then him showing as a joke the group of photos of things he’s sold on E-Bay, which for some reason he hasn’t erased, and all sorts of jokes about whether he’d considered publication, but among them a couple of beautiful circuit boards, mother boards maybe....but I think too, something symbolic, or perhaps just linguistic, about the nature of circuits and circulation and this Falling Into Place project thing....

And then, because it reminds me, maybe there’s circuits in that too, the relentless circuits of walking, or maybe because I did manage a circuit walking yesterday instead of being caught between barbed wire fences....following out a water course, over stiles and to an old weir, loved the look of the machinery....so did photos of that again, though basically trying to avoid photography for that walk, trying not to get into that camera compose the landscape but don’t notice it thing....later than the canals I think, but still that sense of old industry, and, of course, industrial, that is, machine made, agriculture....and that it would have been regulated by hand, maybe still is....

08/26
Two days away from Meltham, wound up sleeping over at keith and di’s night before last, got back so late from Todmorden where we did another canal walk that we didn’t eat till ten thirty and I missed the last bus back to Meltham.....that and a little too much wine, but tired of taking taxis back up here, far too expensive taxis, it’s really quite far...don’t know what that is with me, and it doesn’t seem to matter who pays, but going back at least to early adolescence, those times of organizing with the Rutgers Reform Democrats as a teenager, and, of course, running away from home, or perhaps not so much running as merely leaving, it always felt like something far more deliberate than running at the time, but even when living at Sidney Place there was staying out as long as possible, nights spent on the Staten Island Ferry, makes me think of that poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, We were very drunk, We were very merry, We went back and forth all night on the ferry....except we were neither drunk nor merry, Mickey was, drunk anyway but not merry at all, probably violent and I just didn’t want to deal with it, and where else could you stay out all night for a nickel?, so it was good to keep the cab money just to eat in all night diners or something...and basically I was living my own life detached from the house, I think too, that one was the summer of Mickey and Johnny Rice from Kahnawake, and her arm getting broken and her time in hospital, but all those summers (there were only really about three of them before the University of Chicago, but it seems like many more, like a whole big period of my life) run together, just the fall of junior year different when I simply declared I was moving out and went to live at Susan Brownmiller’s then Ginger’s then Margot’s, well aware that if Mickey were to turn on me I’d have to quit high school, which is a good part of why I made my decision, looking back, to go early admissions to Chicago, but anyway, all of that and cab fare....there was simply always knowing that I could take care of myself on the streets at night, and ferry or no, there was always something better to do with the money I was offered for a cab back to Brooklyn late at night than cab fare, so that Paul DuBrul told me at one point that if I was eating lunch the next week he’d know I hadn’t taken the cab....but it leaves me feeling that taking a cab is the last thing you want to do unless it comes out at less money for the number of people in it, or you’ve got a million bags, or it’s just pretty damn cheap, and yet, comparatively cabs in New York are cheap, and it’s so much the middle class tradition, that people are just always hailing cabs, or that all you see in mid-town Manhattan is cabs...taking a cab once from Grand Central Station (with bags, wanted to take a picture for Lee, because all the cars were cabs) so maybe it’s another kind of snobbery in reverse....Hey, I take da subway...or any form of public transit and all that follows....
Which of course reminds me of painting the ‘30 calibre rifle for design class and taking that through the subway after removing the firing pin....another story to find a way to tell...

Then last night, the dreams again, this time a young woman, early adolescent girl really, that Tim brought back from Vietnam, or it seems to have been Tim, because she was in a village and was in need, which was true enough, but he faked her papers, then turned out she was a bit older and knew exactly what she was doing, so there was a question of blackmail, because she was left in a well appointed self-storage to hide her, only then she said that she was going to the authorities to say she was being held against her will, so, getting wind of this I refused absolutely to let her stay in my storage unit which was right next door.....Then to try to solve it all there was taking out Bill’s ‘46 truck to show it to someone, wasn’t to sell but I can’t remember why, and refusing to drive it outside the long connected parking lot in Calgary that included Office Depot, while we were using two other vehicles, one with Lee driving, so it was outside the parking lot....
And then a part where Tim wrote some sort of letter of application for something saying that he was part Native American, while he was living in the storage in hiding, then showed it to the authorities as a way to begin to commit fraud which showed that the girl was doing the same that she had built up a false life history, then telling everyone that yes, he had a Native American heritage but I was the one who was Bill’s daughter, and then some kind of long part that had to do with looking through beautiful huge lenses, that picked up and focused time, which went from being a couple of centimetres to the size of a coffee table....
And yes, the walk along the canals at Todmorden, day before yesterday, finally on a hot day, something marvellously summer about it, as well it ought to be, given that it is summer, but hasn’t felt that way very often, today back to cloud with that edge of cold, but Friday feeling like Saturday all day, and just enough obvious tourists with maps in the town to feel on top of it, like everyone’s day off, a holiday kind of day as opposed to that all consuming tourism that wants to eat up experience as if it were some kind of junk food, something that leaves me absolutely exhausted and heartsick and angry, but just that the calm holiday feeling, and the light extraordinary, that black to white brilliance that you get in Calgary and Mexico so often, and then the canal too, more laid back, more cared for, obviously, as Keith did later explain, because it was brought on as an attraction to the area far earlier than the Huddersfield Canal, but somehow more intimate spaces....and just more in the country meant less garbage....did a whole bunch of photos needless to say, very different, very the same, fell in love with drains and bridges this time....
And then walking back along the road, and then Keith telling me later how roads seem almost the opposite of canals to him, that sense of having no interesting intimate spaces, which I agree with, that and too the sense of charging through landscape at speed, part of what dictates for me the ugliness of a great deal of the landscape of Calgary, it’s either your house or the mountains, and everything else is just transit, with places you don’t want to look at, or signage to get you into places you need to go -- or can be conned into going....though I did do whole series of drawings while Tom was driving when we drove from Mexico north, just of the beauty in the shapes of overpasses and junctions of American and Canadian roads..... But, in any case the second we left the canal I’d put my camera away, only to find a fireweed growing out of a pipe and taking it out again to do another whole bunch of photos....

And a strange form of sadness this last couple of days, a homesickness I suppose, but again only for a home that no longer exists or can exist, a time sickness then maybe....part of thinking about or feeling that summer time around Tom’s birthday when we would always if there was any way to manage it get out to Kootenay Lake -- or even the feeling of the early weeks of September coming up, when I was at Viscount Bennett and didn’t start my semestre until the third week and he could get vacation time because it was no longer summer, so we would take off for somewhere, sometimes even take the kids out of school to do it, or in later years go on our own, so that I can still feel the bright sun, think of the driving across the continental divide always in too much of a rush, and the bright bright sun just, in fact, like the Todmorden walk, so maybe that’s part of it, the strange part of it....but too, even feeling the heat of Kootenay Lake in late August, those weeks we went out to the lake in the two or three years after Tom’s death, me paying for Lucero and the kids, and Lee coming with friends, mostly Mark Viv....and all of us together, and out on the boat, kind of celebrating Tom, so I guess I’m homesick for that, except it will never be reconstructed, not the part with Tom, or with Lee or with Luz and the kids, that time, not that place, has passed.....
And then, it making me think, I really could go live on the land in Ontario....really could construct a place there instead of staying in Calgary or going to BC, and then it’s the round and round again, because if I’m to move, what’s wrong with Mexico? But, hey, what’s wrong with seven acres on a river that you already own? Except maybe the time to construct a house....

08/27
Last night the most specific dream of all. Or at least the most specifically remembered because it became lucid so fast. That I was with a man who was my father, and I put it that way because he didn’t seem recognizable at all, not as potential father or father figure, and that we went away for some important meeting or some such, not a holiday, and came back to find that people we trusted had not only robbed us, but that they had taken absolutely everything, down to the furniture, and then that he went over to challenge the family who did it about this, and started a fight, but the man, a huge guy, jumped on top of him from a chair, after telling him to wait, which for some reason he did, and kicked him in the balls in such a fashion that he would be permanently injured. At which point the mother in the family started in on me along with her two enormous unsightly Mariamesque daughters, one of the daughters threatening and laughing at me. Which brings me to the question of whether the woman was Mariam – which she could have been, and the guy was more strongly Bill by then, or, though still my father, much like Tom...or maybe just someone else I just can’t quite get my mind around, back to that, not Mark for sure, though the daughter was definitely not Farida, much too heavy almost toadlike, and the guy, yes, did resemble the father who attacked Lee when he was thirteen, and the woman was so much that woman with her awful self-righteous slovenliness which, of course, is Mariam too – but all that speculation aside my dad was limping and not about to call the police because after all, he had started it, and me of course, No, they robbed us, and the stuff has to be somewhere and besides it’s aggravated assault, assault causing bodily harm, so that I (and I must have been about eight) took over the dream, literally, took his cell phone and dialed 911, and then after that we had the guy charged, were threatened by him, which I recorded, got him arrested for that, were then surrounded and he threatened my father figure with death and me with rape, and my mother, too, who was definitely not Mickey but was suddenly present too, but once more I had the cell (mobile here) and got through to 911 (999 here) again, and so, the man was jailed without bail, and his family and friends too, and so a happy ending....and then the rest of the night a story of Lucero becoming a successful magazine editor, a magazine about makeup, of course.....
And all the faces of that family so memorable.... So Mariam..... So weird.....

Slug Ate my Head....love that, it was a headline I read over someone’s shoulder on the bus back to Meltham, in one of the tabloids, while really all it was about was a camper being bitten by a slug on the forehead, but marvellously dramatic, needless to say, so when he got off I snaffled up the paper and removed the article....27,000 tiny teeth, foreign slug, a slime wave, 1.5 billion slimesters.....loved every second of it.....
So there you have the true advantage of taking public transit.....insight into the dramas of our time.....

On the more serious side, the tabloids do cultivate the most amazing culture of fear, something probably worth writing about at length, though it’s all over of course, was even surprised to find it in Mexico, where for the first time rainy season was being reported as if you had to be afraid of it, all of it, not just the big and very predictable tropical storms, or the sudden storm warnings that you get all over (I remember my wonder in Maine at the broadcast of a severe storm warning, with the thunderstorm passing over the centre of the City of Cherryfield...population what, 3,000, so I knew they meant the crossroads, but seemed marvellous too), but there in Mexico it was a general it might rain – which of course it does three to five months a year – so roads might wash out, travel might be difficult, you’ve got five months of fear ahead of you, and for all I know maybe you have to be afraid of drought in dry season too, but something that was never there before....so that I thought they’d picked it up from the way fear is managed in the States and Canada, only here, with the tabloids it’s far worse, almost like an art, over the past few weeks, we’ve learned that
a. It might flood again sometimes if it rains
b. The great white shark in the harbour thing was a fake, but great white sharks are brutal man eaters in case the next one isn’t a fake or you go to Australia
c. There really was one Portuguese Man of War jellyfish creature (tentacles all hanging down in illustration) spotted somewhere near England so you might not want to let your children in the water on your beach holiday
d. And now Slug Ate My Head (with great reconstruction of giant slug on startled face)...so maybe you might just forget that camping trip...
e. So what’s next, Mouse Shat in my Cereal? But I’ve already had that experience...
f. Swarm of Ferocious Baby Cockroaches Leapt into my Tea? That one too, from the edge of the Twinings jar.....

08/28
Dreams again, this time everything all mixed up, but trying for narrative nonetheless, but all of it together ducks and recipes and snowboards and manuscripts and new york and calgary and maine and england, and now remembering no particular order except that there was a man involved named seymour who both cooked some kind of beef brisket with apricots and the shells of pistachios later removed in a bath tub who was taking it to his mother-in-law who loved it more than anything and who’d also read my manuscript for pedlar press and loved it together with another woman who loved it too oh was that yours it’s lovely she said but who really seemed to feel sorry for me oh yes that it’s so nice dear kind of sorry and she was part of a bookstore chain heiress too i think which makes this all resemble sharon from last year and a lawyer as well who was taking over the decoys who knew perfectly well i had a very good case but who kept on asking me why it mattered while the guy with the pistachios took up some kind of parasailing snowboarding using court street brooklyn in brown snow and slush as a takeoff point to get up into the air doing it naked for some reason and winning some kind of prizes for it in particular a new outfit from some sort of manufacturer so you can see what i meant by all sorts of mixed up....

And yes, coming back Saturday night, an e-mail from Beth....that yes she loves and wants Last Taxi to Nutmeg Mews.....maybe that was the same night as Slug Ate My Head, after all, the MS. has its own share of bugs and other creepy crawlies, but Whew!!! Makes me very happy, publication date in 2009....and yes, I always love working toward a specific book, knowing something is upcoming as I go about other stuff....and that MS. in particular...find myself going back to the copy I’ve printed here, touching it, thinking BOOK, BOOK, BOOK, BOOK....

08/29
Guido the time travelling guru....
That was last night’s dream, or the one I remember, and quite literally, coming directly after a thought that maybe the only species who were going to make it, so to speak, had to be immortal (almost wrote immoral, which would hardly work)... this during some theatre work with Bob and Taru, after getting into a fight with a Russian seaman who had wanted to become my lover and who I’d led on, but who I did use very special martial arts to beat up, because he wouldn’t give up because he couldn’t take being beat on by a woman, so I told him telepathically (because he didn’t speak English nor I Russian) that I was a time travelling martial arts expert, and there I was all of a sudden....in a cave above the Grand Canyon, waiting for Guido....
Who it turned was a wonderful looking absolutely racially unspecific man, perhaps more Asian or Native American than not, but who could pass for any descent whatsoever, and who it turned out I worked for, yet I somehow expected him to marry me, perhaps to confer on me his immortality who knows, but was disappointed to know he was “promised to another” (oh, shades of reading about the 18th century), about whom I saw the letters, and didn’t know what it meant, and when I was about to challenge him on it, found out from another employee or disciple, that it meant he was travelling back in time to marry an African American woman somewhere in the Mid-Western United States in a house exactly like Withrow, our house in Toronto, the exact floor plan with thirties furniture, except there was an open plan ultra-modern basement, which somehow received sunlight, where it would be apparent they were time travellers.....so no one but us time travellers would be let in to that room.....
And what Guido had to do wherever that turned out to be was ultra-important for the future....

But interesting too, that, when I formulated the statement about immortality in that kind of strange reverie between sleeping and waking, that to survive a species must be or have immortals, I had never thought of the question in quite the same way, and then in fact a long discourse with myself went on about it....I thought about how it would be possible biologically to have a species that never died completely but in whom cells just turned over and turned over and turned over, sort of like jellyfish, only, of course, complex....and that rather than being boring, the way we always say being immortal would be boring, you would simply always be becoming someone else...and maybe not ever keep all your memories, any more than we ever really do....but just float from one level of being, one piece of your own immortal history to another, or maybe, it would be a combined, a more symbiotic creature, with beings flowing from one into another, with memory transferred with tissue, a more complex way of giving birth to others, so that the species would both be limited and unlimited as one would take on parts of others, but numbers always somehow limited....and what I thought was why not? It’s as possible as anything else....but then I also thought that since, almost all DNA is contained in almost all creatures – remembering that business in MacLean’s talking about the human genome project and DNA, how religious people (meaning Christian, I think, given the context and content) would be very disturbed by the results since it turned out we shared most of our DNA with every living animal for example fruitflies, and I thought of writing in, Why should religious people be shocked? At least followers of Native religions, after all, they’d gotten that thing right about All My Relations – well, given that, thinking that maybe with our level of relationship across the earth, that we do flow into each other, especially over time, so maybe this is a sentient planet and maybe we all are immortal anyway, just without the level of consciousness to know it....and all of that while half asleep....
And certainly, that’s what Bill would say anyway....I am that tree, Sarah....
So he’s back....whether or not dancing the war....

08/30
And last night, it turning out in dreams that Tom was living in Sidney Place on the top floor wasting his retirement money gambling, and I told him to stop it we should go back to camping, then asked him where he was getting the money, since I had his pension, since he was dead and we should go visit Doctor Groves and laugh at him for signing the death certificate, but meanwhile we had some problems to solve....

08/31
Back to dreams again. Asking myself why I am doing this, writing down dreams, since I usually don’t bother....but it’s something about how vivid and how close to some hidden emotional level these dreams are. Last night, a meeting in a country house, or more like a bunker in the country with people from the Vagina Monologues, and accusations of not listening flying back and forth while a war was going on, or something more like a protest a la SDS and the anti-war days, and then from there, my saying I was going to quit, and taking people like Rosemary with me, but then, at a final meeting, someone saying that someone was special because she knew people at the New Yorker, and me mentioning Mark Murphy, and being told I was lying about my life....emotionally very like the jury last fall....and interesting, in so many of these dreams, that being accused or assaulted and being able to counter the assault, the accusation, as if I am noticing how I do this to myself all the time...
And meanwhile recovering from a migraine yesterday, so that this a.m. I feel completely done in....and a reception, later today at The Word Hoard....

Then, think about death and drains....all the implications....how it moves me....
Left myself that note earlier today, just as I got up, because I’d dreamt too, and didn’t want to let it go, of the pictures of the drains I took on the canal outside Todmorden, I think because Keith did a print with two of them on it yesterday, that included a small piece of one of his poems,

all who pass my way are changed

who is lost?
and through what door?

(I just picked that off the website....to get it right), and somehow that page with poem and pictures was about death and about life and about passing through veils into another world, but too, utterly connected to how industrialization, and its forms like those forms of the drains, have changed us all, so that I dreamed that, death and the drains, but also, of shamanic transformation and drains, the latter very much what Keith’s poems are about in fact....

Then coming into the Word Hoard today, to see that Keith had printed the two drain images full size from the high resolution .jpg, and loved them, such that they moved me even more, but will be forever attached to the words of that poem, and how it comments on them, particularly love the one vertical photo of the drain, drain and reflection in the centre like the two on a domino, so that I got even more into that sense of the shamanic border, the way you journey into the underworld through holes, and the sense in which the edge of water is also liminal space, the space between as it reflects, and all the tales that work that way, one’s reflection as other being, or as way through the looking glass, but also, thinking of all my fears of polluted water, of sewers and storm drains, that sense too of how drains drain us, and again how we are changed by industrial space, I’ve had dreams a lot of them in fact of the pumps of industrial drains and water pipes....and thought of what it would be like to be caught into the mechanism of a dam, and then too, thinking of Tim jokingly saying, but in all seriousness, that the modern city is made possible by the trap, and meaning the plumber’s trap, the elbow beneath your sink, your toilet, that does not let sewer gas back up – and maybe that’s what I’ll write about for the Falling into Place project -- Falling into drains, into traps, although shamanically, of course, you could get out....because always i’m back to that fear of draining away in drains....and not just in dreams, but IRL as the computer kids say, in real life, really, like when we had to work on the sewer pipes in Canal Flats, like facing the Gowanus Canal as I walked back to Tompkins Place from the Brooklyn Museum that last summer in NYC before moving to Mexico, and there are others, safer somehow, culverts and large pipes I’ve walked through, and into Subway tunnels and all that, too, especially the pipe not the trench ones, but those too, all of them incredibly powerful for me somehow, but also how beautiful these images from last Friday are, and why I took them, why they seem to shake me so much, and the vertical domino image in particular, so beautiful that one, the wall, the reflections of the colours....its calm abstract contemplative perfection....

And to think all of this, and noting how moved I was by it, coming not from taking the picture but from having it printed, and that just coming from my dark side, my Martha Stewart interior decorator perfectionist oh let’s just move that a third of a centimetre side, wanting to find an image that hung vertically not horizontally to put on the wall for the reception....but tells you something about the need to print out sometimes in order to see, that the screen just doesn’t do it the same way....and that hanging the prints from strings, too, better than under glass....

09/01
And last night, the drain images had changed in my dreams from death to the signal for, the marks of, rational thought. Within, once more, very long, narrative dreams. In which those images were used to test a subject’s rationality. And very specific that part, only I can’t remember the words or exactly how the questions were asked. Except that they were there, and I woke for a few seconds knowing them. Or rather, I actively spoke about them once more in a lucid dream. But what does remain is this:
That the drain image was shown among others in a small booklet to the subject, to make sure that he or she -- busy, in fact, in negotiating a barrier, about to go into the store or the hospital, or to take a train, plane, bus, etc. -- was thinking rationally, by the fact that he or she would pick a drain image with those two central black holes, and not another more chaotic image in which the shapes had blurred, had become wilder less specific more intermixed.....as if, perhaps, entering the drain themselves, already dissolved by it, and yes there were words too, readable words, attached there on the page, but I forget them...not Keith’s poem in any case...

fellowship journals from 2nd september 2007 this way