09/26
And yesterday, the Kelman group. And today, now, off to London. And yes, Bill’s photo, the one of his Japanese family, it is Ground Zero, Nagasaki....so moving that....

No writing here, in the computer for those days, gone without my laptop, so here, copied from my notebook:

09/25 – with the Kelman group --
she might write they kept saying she might write changing the words changing the words in case of fire it said bob said no that’s a good idea remember don’t do the good idea in case of fire in case once in my childhood they said in case of nuclear war in case of that that’s not a good idea either bob would say that’s not a good idea in case of pictures on the wall in case of one is named sara two are named sara three are named sarah down on the wall there is an american flag it’s not the one down at the end that’s the union jack someone drew this one on the wall with stars with stripes with names no one is named sarah i’ve been here too many days that’s true not here but inside the same thought too many days inside a thought maybe it’s years you never get out of the room there’s a basketball net down one side it looks like a crucifix with the net curled around the crossbar there are two shoes on the floor in front of the crucifix basketball net like jesus’ feet they’re both in front of me
along with enough rope to hang us all....
what is it about always needing to decipher signs & symbols read them & read into them what is it about class pictures on walls what is it about the laws of physics if the truth is you’re always occupying the same space the same time with something with someone else?
which is probably the reason the reason is in the colours is in the name is in the flag this will be walking across the street to the air raid shelter your school wouldn’t do it but they made you anyway the law said you had to & you weren’t supposed to talk abut the peace protests how your family your school disapproved as you walked across the streeet to the sound of the sirens or for that matter acknowledge how scared you were knew exactly the distance you would be from ground zero & there was no world trade centre that was bill talking telling you all that duck & cover stuff even if he knew well enough there was no chance it would work but what about the colours what about those?
things so very basic to life as that the brightness of the colours if you could get away from the pain in it the pain in the story the same place same time never here always here story the pain in the story in the walls
but then again how else are you going to deal with all the merit badges?
________
And it was only then, only after writing this, that I showed Nomura and Sakuma the picture --
________
It is, he said, Ground Zero. Ground Zero for the atomic bomb. That was all.

09/26 The train to London
This is. This is. The atomic bomb. You know. Ground Zero for the atomic bomb.
cont’d next page (the notebook says)

And that was all I thought about yesterday. Before and after it happened. Would the photograph be the marker for the bomb? Would it? What I was thinking about as I wrote the above, what I remembered in the gym part and parcel of the subject matter. Maybe I would have thought of friendlier gyms at friendlier ‘Y’s where we went to swim for example, if I hadn’t been thinking about that. That’s the same time same place thing, I think....
And yet, what made it impossible for me to enter that communication with confidence? To explain about When Bill Danced the War? To go into any kind of detail about what he’d said to me. So afraid somehow that either I was mistaken in this being the photo, or that somehow (why I would think that I don’t know) he had lied to me....It was the strangest thing that.... And then feeling so moved to know that it was what he had said, that tears sprang to my eyes....

09/27 London...
And remember that ad Keith talked about Steel Stood, proving the strength of steel with the skeleton of the church that remained at Ground Zero in Hiroshima....
_______

Remembering doing the first level deliberation Kelman thing – what was the wording – check in with what’s around you – and in you – say yes to it and let it go – a way to get into the moment – that and don’t do the good idea – and of course, if you’re into it as acting, find a way to connect and perform...
And realizing for myself that I continually made small narratives – words – but even more visuals – always – like the basketball net crucifix down at the end of the room – the net up–over the board– and then--
the shoes beneath –
a perfect image
I can still see it
Then having to make the effort to pull those things into stillness, stop they’re whirling storytelling, make them an O’Keeffe type thing – narrative and totality at once.....
__________

cont’d (from the above)
& i hadn’t said ground zero you see i hadn’t said ground zero i had thought it written it ground zero but i hadn’t said ground zero i knew i had to ask what was this thing all day all week what was this thing this photo
was this thing all week inside the pain of that picture of that childhood that was that picture so i had looked it up & looked it up & not seen it i’d seen the new marker all black marker not the old wood not that one of that photo had found the pictures the diagram of ground zero but hadn’t said ground zero just thought myself to inside that place to those air raid shelters & those diagrams & this was new york for christ sake & you knew where you were in the 1st line of the blast like it’s the everybody dies right then part not the everybody dies only later that it wouldn’t just rattle the windows in mickey’s house & kill tens of thousands of people in Iraq but kill you outright all of you & you w/ that sick fear that bomb shelter sick fear & that term used always to terrify & yet it was there that image you would have gone there you think to that bomb shelter inside that room no matter whether you had been there for days in your mind w/ those thoughts or not those thoughts at least you think that now those bill danced the war thoughts that always have taken you back there to those rooms & those thoughts but mostly to that room of that album & those pictures he showed you & so you had to know you had to know you had to know & were back to those pictures those thoughts but you hadn’t said ground zero just thought ground zero & seen the bright coloured diagrams mickey brought home doing that how to survive a nuclear war pamphlet for time life duck & cover just like bill talking & all that the original duck & cover oh yes we’ll use that somewhere but you hadn’t said ground zero just spent days thinking inside ground zero inside was this ground zero only you didn’t think ground zero so much as the bomb marker was this the bomb marker now become in your mind ground zero nagasaki was this ground zero nagasaki & embarrassed too to ask was this ground zero ground zero nagasaki was this the bomb marker because who are you for all your childhood stories or your childhood nightmares even you feelings about ten days old dead salmon pink gym walls scout hall walls translating to air raid shelter walls who are you to think of asking anyone japanese what is this what is this picture so you don’t even want to say is this the atomic bomb marker afraid that maybe it isn’t which would make it all worse is this ground zero nagasaki is this the atomic bomb marker & it’s eat at joe’s & what an insult but how do you ask what is this if it even might be ground zero nagasaki might be the marker for the atomic bomb & what are your nuclear nightmares compared to that wound so there you are trapped always in the same place the same space as something as someone else inside that other e=mc2 law of physics where matter becomes energy but inside somebody else’s tragedy not your own except that tragedy belongs to everybody positions everybody sears everybody just not as deep & you had to know had to know & he said this is this is the atomic bomb you know ground zero
& you hadn’t said ground zero
but he did
what everyone should know
this is ground zero
ground zero
nagasaki
august 9th
1945
before you were born maybe when you were just conceived & you notice looking with him as if for the 1st time in this photograph the is one
child
ONE
30 adults
one child
ONE

Then talking to Catherine –
That stuff about – in case of nuclear war –
& you remember what Bill said:
with a sheet
with anything white
to reflect the blast

& that will find it’s way into Duck Blind – the book on Bill –

9/28 – on the train back to Yorkshire –
Started thinking about this thing on Bill and on remembering and started to think about Remembrance Day, maybe try to do something with when bill danced the war for Remembrance Day, something for Bill, really, because truly, it is another way to remember war – sometimes think I should use it, not just could, and not just for publicity, and with it comes back the reality of that photo and how important it was for Bill’s understanding of the world, and its force in my world, its power, and its undeniable legitimacy – & too comes with that all the stuff about being put down as a goody goody bleeding heart peacenik w/o experience of the world while instead you’re being changed by the fact of the experience even if it comes through the pain of another for whom too it represents all the pain of war....so even at 2nd hand it’s still part of our world part of what we have to see to deal with — and all of that coming back to always being denied the experience that is inside my identity because I am not marked as different....
and that identity thing is very important, this is an issue, like so much Bill talked of, that took up space in my life....so while we can all have opinions about that, what he thought, what I think, the attempt to weaken what I know through my early experience of what has hurt others cannot be dismissed weakened as merely being PC, which of course is the argument....you can either be too close to the facts (like African Americans talking about slavery – or Bill about Native American genocide) or too far away (like nice white people being PC), but there is no place for authority....that belongs to white middle class people not being PC, etc. etc. etc.
been there before, seen that, over&over&over in fact –
Which makes me think about including that thing – that story – about the photo – in my essay on truth in narrative.....
Not sure how yet....but sure that.....

And moving to ideas like: Truth & Otherness – that walking Ground Zero metaphor – makes dinner parties explode on contact! What it means to inhabit another narrative – & among other things it’s pretty simple – there is always someone inhabiting another narrative – & then there’s can two narratives occupy the same space at the same time – ???

And back to my laptop--
09/29
And back to strange strong narrative dreams. Two last night of the being unfairly punished variety. One, simply because I had let someone guess something during an art making project, so I was disqualified by the person who guessed from having a role in the project (which was something like making clay hands, and the guessing was as to the one which was the maker’s favourite). So I complained about this woman disqualifying me to the director (Tara from ESL days), but she refused to budge, so I was taking it to the central administration when we went off on a second project, a trip out to a studio, where for some reason I didn’t want to go, only got there to discover that my own small studio to one side of the main one we were looking at was being destroyed by the government because it had become derelict and there were all my tools and work inside and I was told it would be destroyed before I was even to be given a chance to clear it out, so that I became very upset, and had this person asking if I was the owner, and why I hadn’t responded, and didn’t I read the papers they’d announced it in the papers and making fun of me at the same time and the developer might give me three grand for it, and there was me being totally grown up and rational and trying to figure out how to get the stuff out and then just crying and crying at which point I semi woke up and took control of the dream, and found out the developer had failed to notify me, had cut all my trees, had already built on part of my property, so that I was able to demand compensation and build a house and tell the guys destroying the property where to go....end of story.....but yes, strange, huh?
And in it that crying and crying the way we do as disappointed children....so strange even remembering that.....

09/30
And they’re back in force....those narrative dreams.....last night, and god knows where this came from, the dream of a war, where people were called upon to hunt each other like animals, but through suburban garages, and multi-level building complexes and shopping malls.
Does this have anything to do with the “sportsmen” in Jane Austen?

And a long, lovely but strange walk along the hill above Keith and Di’s place. The kind of woods I might always have imagined for England...like the beech groves around Arbour Low, even saw some deer just as we had on the Arbour Low day, but it seemed so strange that they should be there, right down by the stone wall bordering the Old Halifax Road, though it wouldn’t faze me if it were Calgary, and Fish Creek Park. And then finding a tent sort of encampment, thought at first, homeless people, but then realized it was just kids, and an icky pile of old stuff further on in one of the groves....and just the sense, what is that leave nothing but footprints thing? I didn’t mind the tent....thought it was kind of neat someone had thought of that....but I did mind the mess....though suppose it could have been worse....given the population density, if no one paid attention the whole country could look like that.....

10/02
And just to note extremely good work, going ahead with Bill mix...and beginning the art work....for the cover

10/03
And now, just to start, as I get ready to write my piece for West Words....on truth yet, so much stranger than fiction....

10-? From notebook:
“Truth, Self, Evidence”
think that’s the way to go
Intro. – that I will be telling stories –
Self – Oklahoma, the Musical – 1956
Truth – Mexico City – 1972 (The problem with this story is that it’s true...and all that...)
Evidence – Ground Zero Nagasaki – 1945
Could add in the rifle in the subway – that stuff about theory and practice written on it – and then end as fiction, that sense of she’s still there, looking for that unity....

10/04
And a dream last night. Of Maya warriors on lily pads fishing out frogs. Of miniature babies born with long Olmec heads (1491 says that doctors discovered recently that the Olmec jaguar faces are based on human embryos – it’s something Lupita and I said to each other in the sixties and seventies from diagrams we’d looked at – suspected a lot of people did – it almost seemed magical to us – so glad that’s been recognized – but maybe why the miniatures in this dream). A reverie of sorts, and yet a plot too. With Lee, of some battle that needed to be won.
Then waking: to BBC 4 talking of how a man was to be cut down after hanging and disembowelled, his bowels displayed before him....
And what the hell was that?

06/10
Photos again yesterday on yet another brilliant day of the type we got for the Todmorden canal walk but walking from Slathwaite to Marsden. Locks again but the utter narrowness of the canal as it approaches the long tunnel so very different so very much the same....the patterns almost overwhelm me....and soon soon with the article done, maybe to get back to that....Falling into Place and that very different way of looking at pattern, at language, at narrative....

07/10
Just this last night. That Lee was driving somewhere, and I asked, where’s Tom driving I wanted to know where were you driving, you Tom, and what vehicle, and you came into my bed to embrace me and I didn’t know who or what it was that was embracing me, but I knew you were alive driving somewhere some vehicle and whatever distrust I felt about the person who embraced me from behind putting his arms around me, was that you should have been 5,000 miles away not dead....

08/10 From notebook:
And – of course – as far as the article goes – by now I am lost in this – lost in the simplest of the three narratives, or the most complex–should have noticed before that it had to happen – that Nagasaki marker —
think now – just call it Ground Zero —
be up front and all that —

Liked the above – the three – but it just got impossibly long – while today, of course, the marker story is also too impossibly long and with two days to deadline I want to go back – maybe even without Nagasaki, to one of the others – and can’t.... like what I’ve done.... but it seems so overwhelmingly large a narrative, and so intense....
Think sometimes, it’s the material itself that overwhelms me....

08/10
And then this, in obits on the net. Looking up Mad Bear. Remembering Mad Bear from when he came to stay with us. His long talks with Bill into the night. All very serious. And then Mickey always saying he’d gone to sea with Bill because he couldn’t take the infighting in the Indian movement of the time....which was of course just at it’s beginning....he came to stay with us when he spoke to the UN about the hydro project on Tuscarora land....and all I remembered was that he was Iroquois, and about the opposition to the project, but knew he was important in Bill’s life....
And then that he was also a shaman, which isn’t in here, and in the Navy in World War II just like Bill....amazing how you find this stuff because the net is there to find it on....but also, amazing how much looking I’ve been doing....mostly to do with the art work for When Bill Danced the War, but also this whole article thing for the Writers’ Guild newsletter....
And I just knew him as Mad Bear, so that’s all I did. Queried Mad Bear, got Mad Bear Anderson, got Tuscarora, went from there....and there’s lots more.....will look at later....

WALLACE P. ANDERSON
AP
Published: December 22, 1985
Wallace P. (Mad Bear) Anderson, a longtime champion of Indian rights, died Friday after a long illness.
He was 58 years old and lived on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in Lewiston in Niagara County.
In 1958 Mr. Anderson led protests against the New York State Power Authority's takeover of 550 acres of Tuscarora land during construction of the Robert Moses Power Project. He also traveled extensively to advocate Indian rights.
He served with the Navy during World War II and was later in the merchant marine, retiring in 1977.
He is survived by three brothers and four sisters.

09/10
And this pulled from the net, think it’s such an amazing gesture, thought I might need to remember it for something....
“I posted a message in the Choctaw talk forum on the Internet, asking for family memories about the removal. Tryg answered and said he talked about this with Randy Jacob of Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Randy Jacob is a former Choctaw council member who knows some tribal history. According to this correspondence, some Choctaw women ground up bones of their ancestors and sewed them into the hems of their dresses in order to bring some of the mother mound with them. Randy Jacob apparently got this from several sources (Tryg, Choctaw Talk message board).

So here I am, keep pasting all the stuff from the net I think I will want for something, or just need to know. And there’s other stuff too, looked up at the Word Hoard, potentially for the artwork for Bill, though I think it’s better, we agree it’s better, to stick with his stuff, the photo album, a couple of other things, how he integrated his life, but fascinating stuff, like going back and looking up not Nagasaki atom bomb marker but for Ground Zero Nagasaki, which I’d never tried, and finding the American sailors under the old marker, just like Bill’s family except for the looks on their faces. And knowing that if I’d found them I never would have asked Nomura and Sakuma, but what an experience and what knowledge – in how quickly they spoke those words – and this whole narrative –that would have denied me.

And then this one too, from Wikipedia:
The term hypocenter also refers to the point on the surface of the earth directly below an explosion above the ground, in the atmosphere. In principle, it applies to any such explosion but the term was not found to be necessary until the very large explosions of nuclear bombs became a reality. In this context, the term 'ground zero' was synonymous with hypocenter, though the ground zero term has been rendered less precisely useful, as it has been used by journalists and others, ever more loosely.
Then there’s another site, can’t remember which, and I’m too lazy to go back to it, but which says that hypocenter is the place in the air where an atomic bomb goes off and ground zero the place on the ground, the way hypocenter is the point inside the earth for an earthquake and epicenter the point on the surface....
Who knows who’s right....what I care about is the ground zero business....
Hypocentre seems too much a softening to me, like someone getting out of something, and then to have that Ground Zero become the World Trade Centre....eeek

Then, from the Bhagavad Gita, quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, after the Trinity blast, the first Ground Zero, the rest taken from yet another internet site:
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one...
However, another verse that he remembered stuck in his mind:
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
According to his brother, at the time he simply exclaimed, "It worked."
News of the successful test was rushed to President Harry S. Truman, who could use it as leverage at the upcoming Potsdam Conference on the fate of post-war Europe.

10/10
And yes, I did send the piece in yesterday, and yes, I titled it Ground Zero, and yes, it’s been received though who knows what will become of it, and yes, it came out of those words from Nomura and Sakuma, This is ground zero, This is the atomic bomb, but there was so much in it, that connection to Bill, all my childhood nuclear nightmares, the fact that those were the first words that came to their minds and the fact that it’s been changed to hypocentre, and the fact that even when you look up Ground Zero Nagasaki on Google images you get the World Trade Centre on the first page, and yes, the ending of the piece was never really quite right, and yes, the whole experience was a little bit like a blast exploding outward, at least into my consciousness, so many connections so many horrors, but for the moment it’s over it’s over it’s over, and look how little journal writing I’ve been doing....
10/12
A dream last night that all of SW Calgary was on fire and we had to find our way back to the house because of Jenny though we were all safe, so it was a matter of finding the right roads which were, in fact, very Riverside Drive like but very looped, then it was something about finding our way to a store after getting Dan’s luggage out of storage so he could fly off and see Mike, and his having tons of luggage including sleeping bags and tents and we were supposed to walk with them with some of the packages over six feet tall and we were getting them out of a tent where they’d all been opened, and I said maybe we have to get a cab, and no there was Danny punching then rolling one of them up and it was still the size of a table, and skip to an anchorman dying on air while screaming Never Again at a rival.....
So we’re back to the narrative dreams again....or at least remembering them....

10/13
And the same. Except it was about rebuilding a wonderful apartment in the air. Only out the front window after I’d set up my mattress (there was a problem with the bedframe), when something fell out onto the balcony, there was a tiger out there, whose owner (a woman) said it would not attack. And then, in the little park in front, as we attempted to clear it up, when we removed a ground sheet from a section it was covered in caterpillars or centipedes or some sort of caterpillar centipede cross. So I woke up trying to figure out – very objectively, considering how I feel about the things – how to get rid of them.

Thinking still about the article I sent in to Nora at the WGA. Still rewriting the ending in my mind. Not satisfied with it. Though it’s good enough to be a go. And think if I rewrote it, it would be much too long. But the ending point of it. When I Googled Ground Zero, under Google Images, was to be startled by all the almost phony images of the World Trade Centre, and all their references to American narratives of the Second World War. The Iwo Jima flag, the look of burned out buildings. So that it becomes both site of victimization and staging ground, in a way that is very tacky compared to what that war caused the rest of the world – and in truth the people of the United States, and the vets, though some I’m sure would prefer the purity of those images. So there’s a feel in those pictures, as well as the vaunted (and phony) “loss of innocence”, a kind of image based participation in the horrors of war visited on the rest of the world. All of which I had noticed before and found kind of ugly (in that over the top funny uncle insensitive drunk at the party way), but which, after dealing with Nagasaki for the art work of When Bill Danced the War, seemed much much more sinister in its impact and even motivation, whether conscious or not. How Hollywood always marshals the United States. And more again on hidden narratives, and the strength of one to hide another – so that the horrors of war are reduced to those images. And more war is justified.
Thought more too, of that Ground Zero New York thing of those nuclear war pamphlets from my childhood, and can’t help thinking that in some very deep – and very unconscious way – New Yorkers of my generation are feeling – Wow! We’ve had our Ground Zero and it was only this.
But in another way, that also forms part of the above. The only this, is then interpreted as We did something to make it only this. Rather than accepting the tragedy of being part of the world with everyone else. So that metaphorical agency is achieved in a moment when there was none. So that the fact that there is not always agency, that you can be horribly victimized by contingency without deserving it is not learned. And the metaphor that is applied outward then cannot be toward the protection of Iraqui civilians, for example. But rather, look how our sense of always being able to act lets us act against anyone who crosses us, rather than noting that you are in fact acting against those who didn’t. Like Blackwater people thinking that they can just shoot anyone who is around them because they feel under threat....

10/15
And the final version is in....cut in half....but DONE DONE DONE.... And the ending rewritten, quick still, but it includes the statistics for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I like it better....

10/16
And, and so much....hard to get hold of really....but, try to get the dreams....these weeks we’ve done so much that make me feel like I’ve been here forever (it’s three months tomorrow), or, alternately, just got here yesterday....
And then....thinking about the above....Di and Keith talking about an Abu Ghraib Barbie....new role models and all that, I like it -- horrible isn’t it? – but think, all that denial of what women will do under what circumstances....
Maybe just Blackwater Barbie....a new role model....

10/18
And then there’s the thing with the cat and the crocodile...a dream...Lee riding a crocodile into the shore, perfectly safe, and then the crocodile calmly ate my cat (I don’t have a cat) because it insisted on brushing up against the animal, and all of it in yucky slow motion....

10/21–5am
and just to get this down....a dream in which for some reason, to do with an attack on his credibility, Tom’s stuff including his journal was lost in the snow, then when refound, all but the beautiful jorongo (poncho) with the embroidered cross stitch animals which in reality was lifted after the Viglietti concert, were in good shape. With my embroidered poncho destroyed too, or sem-destroyed, so I asked was his really irreparable, we decided that no, but he just didn’t want to do it. So I took it to clean only wasn’t allowed to use the washer, Tom said no, because threads might catch in the agitator, so we wound up in a restaurant/cleaners, where guy guaranteed he could do it only he couldn’t dry it quite the way he’d said, so was brought to the table among melon balls like a dessert. Tom asked Why did you do this, you said you could do it the other way – with the answer, I couldn’t make the ends into the right fold (does this have anything to do with folding origami cranes possibly for the bill art work?) so tom refused to pay him because he hadn’t done it exactly as he’d said. The man accepted this and turned away with a bit of a grimace but no complaint, then as he went tom gave him the money, I sort of went, Whew!, and the guy said to Tom, you wanted to all harsh but you couldn’t, I saw the light in your eyes you can’t hide the happiness, the tranquillity, then told me the same. Then said sadly looking at me, but yours will soon go out, and to Tom yours never will yours will. And then we realized he was a very important religious figure and all others in the restaurant were listening to him with reverence, and then he said something -- not quite the we are god’s breath cliché but more active that god or some sort of supreme being is breathing us, woke thinking, what is this thing about light in my eyes being extinguished, not light really but lightness, always laughing, and realized then after waking it was that you were going to die, you Tom were going to die, but also brought home to the laughter in the breath of that god.....
And some sort of anxiety about change, maybe Lee moving out and all that, that is affecting me here from time to time....somehow inside this.....despite Rosemary, and others, who have seen the pictures of me here saying how happy I look, and with good reason. Feel myself integrated with my work. An amazing feeling.

And speaking of Lee. Have him going through my boxes back home to try to find the photos of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in 2001 that are in the Decoys file because of other stuff on the roll, as well as a strange misdating. Feels so strange to do that. Pull down, the box, look through the files, probably says barn, etc. etc. The strangest of connections. And then him finding some photos, but not the ones I wanted and just commenting on how young he looked in those pictures....and me thinking, yes, that summer, how young he was....and we’re back to homesick for a time not a place....
And what a month....maybe it’s that homesickness in time not place that made the article so difficult too, and that captures me and places me inside Bill’s album as we do the artwork...but also which makes it feel, in some way so comforting, and then the recording, the whole sound of it, feel so engulfing but uplifting, and effective, as well....

And then, this past week, three days of work with Close to the Bone on straying from the path. Some good writing on it for me, finally breaking through fear of the fairy tale and all that, but getting into stuff about time, and the repetition of the crux of the story, so once upon a time twice upon a time three times upon a time time and again upon a time it’s about time about time you showed up and a bunch of other stuff, and starting to laugh uncontrollably when I read it out loud, and realizing too, here was Bob doing a Kelman riff – that sense of ringing in the changes of language and winding up somewhere else entirely....
And then Di suggesting how well it would work on a dress....so found an elegant bridesmaid type dress at the Meltham charity shop and have spent two days writing just the time phrases onto it (got to thirty times upon a time before I screwed up)....almost worse than doing origami cranes, which took me and Kath together to figure out the directions, or more Kath, with me following along making suggestions....only I like the cranes....and for that matter the dress....wish it fit me....it would be a hell of a thing to wear to a party....

Sarah’s Journal – Tenth Installment

10/22
And now, thinking about the Lancaster train project.... apparently a 140 character limit to each message. Will be weird, being a narrator and all that...

Just this. A platform. A train. A traveller.
Mind empty of where.
Full of go.
Waiting.

Claude mirrors. Something on that might be interesting. Those being the ones that came into use sometime I think in the 18th century. Named after a painter named Claude. The idea being that if you looked in this mirror with your back to the landscape, and saw it reflected through this brownish tinted mirror, you would get a more ‘sensitive’ look at the landscape.
That sensibility thing again. Like Jane Austen. Think about landscape and Jane Austen.
How it’s speaking of it in a ‘new’ vocabulary that makes you worthwhile, educated, good. That thing we still have. You don’t have to like anything, love anything, just be refined in your description of it. Eschew cliche and all that. Reminds me of the first workshop I gave here with Erin back in ‘98. The horror of cliche being the horror not of the inability to speak clearly, but of being declassé....

10/26
And no, none of the above came up. Very different from what I’d thought about. And both wonderful, and extremely silly. Extremely. And tense. Though beautiful. Tension in that attempt to get it right – or even clear - in the text message, with some form of speed. And I don’t mean the thought, I just mean the spelling. And then not being able to look at the landscape because of that tap tap tap of the keyboard. So that’s the part that’s kind of like the Claude mirror. Through a glass darkly and all that. Through a text muddily. Though it certainly didn’t make it more refined. Just that in some strange way, the physical typing overtook the looking, the making sense of the scene. But beautiful. Utterly. Totally. Fucking gorgeous, as I kept threatening to type:
That joke, It’s fucking gorgeous. Fuck me, it’s gorgeous. Fuck me, it’s fucking gorgeous, etc. etc. etc. or fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. It’s gorgeous. Might have worked better. Especially if you could find some way to make the phone just send one out of ten such messages depending on the place you were. And how fucking – fuck me– gorgeous it happened to be.
10/27
And yet, and too, feel a need to have the blog onto which the texts were recorded....
But also, two rather awful dreams when I was there....one the intruder in the room more hallucination than dream....the one so written of in the Door Frames piece I did with the Kelman Group...and the sense I must treat it better next time, as with the bear and with Tom when I felt him lying behind me, instead of closing the window and turning on the light, but was in this magnificent loft room with a rough wood beam slanting through it, and two casement windows up through the roof, which, when you stood on the bed gave a magnificent view of Lancaster, and started in a hypnopompic state, I think that’s which one it is -the as going to sleep state, not the as waking - to feel the footsteps on the roof, and a presence in the room, but think I should have questioned it, talked to it....and anyway, I resented having to close the windows, as the night was fresh and beautiful....but I’d had the experience in Canal Flats when I felt the guy choking me, of refusing to close the window ruining my sleep altogether as I lay in anticipation not of someone entering but of hallucinating someone entering since the window was open, so I didn’t challenge what was happening.....
And that was the last night, after the texting, while the one the night before, about dying, a truly awful dream about dying, about my face kind of rotting and saying I wish I could be in my forties, I wish it could all be different, that I didn’t have to die at all....
Am realizing that I have felt somehow cocooned from the reality of death, precisely by the dying and the dead, somehow through Bill and Tom.....

Saw my first curlews on Morecambe Bay....so like the ones Bill carved....that I recognized them....

10/29
Crazy dreams. One that I was somehow travelling to do something, can’t remember what, this something else, but was in a station on Atlantic Avenue, very clearly visibly Atlantic Avenue, in a clear beautiful sunlight, ran into one of Alberta’s literary lights (or light weights), who was also travelling, said hello, then she started talking to me about how she loved to travel, that she was going god knows where, but that she loved the shops in Bed-Stuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighbourhood where most of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing & Crooklyn take place], I told her that I liked the sense of the neighbourhood better, then she started talking to me about her charitable works, how she loved to work with the disabled, how was my life, I said I loved what I was doing, only problem was people dying, but she had walked away, so walked up to her, just said, oh and by the way, and went back to how much I was enjoying what I was doing except for those close to me dying, and she said, oh working with those with cancer is so troubling isn’t it, and I said oh, you said the disabled, and she said, oh, that was last week, and then my bus was coming around the corner and I had to run to get it but I missed it instead, and it was to get to my class at Mt. Royal, so I was still in Calgary, except Mt. Royal was where the Long Island College Hospital is, where Mickey died, and then I ran into Leila who lent me her blackberry to call Micki [the department secretary at Mt. Royal] to say I wouldn’t make it, only it was my last class and I’d already missed one that morning, so I felt awful and started to stutter, so she said come in right now to talk to me, only we decided there was no reason to do that, because Leila urged me to go shopping with her, so we went to look at some beautiful dresses, all ribbons and lace and to try them on, pink and purple were my favourites, only I woke up before getting into the dressing room....
Then dream number two seemed to start where this one left off, that I was on the way to Mt. Royal, only on an old bicycle, and almost ran into a car, but got there, then noticed that it was summer so I didn’t have any classes after all, so went to pick up my stuff which turned out to be a huge suitcase in the corner of a room that was covered with those small small flies that do come in and die on stuff, there because they’d been there for years, so I tried to brush them off as I said to myself how could this happen in three weeks, but they were well stuck on, then remembered I only had a bicycle so I couldn’t carry the suitcase anyway, so I took a small pack from the same location that was full of paper, and tried to leave the college, by which time I was being accompanied by a Scooby Doo style talking dog with Jenny’s poodle hair, and I went into a bathroom to pee and coughed once and coughed up a bit of blood, bright red blood, so I thought I would see a doctor when I got back home, only someone tried to grab me, so I learned that I was in a place where if there was any blood the person bleeding was immediately arrested and perhaps executed, but the bathroom guard let me get away, so I started swallowing my blood/saliva, still thinking I would just check it when I got home, it might be a bleeding ulcer, but meantime had to get away, which I did do eventually, after spitting a bloody bright red star onto a white wall, but then the bicycle had a flat but it was in the bright sunlight so it didn’t matter, though I found myself thinking about how I could get money for a new one....
End of story, except to note there was a part about long narrow streets I’ve bicycled before.... an ersatz Mexico City, I think.....but weird, huh? Probably no significance whatsoever....beats some days though.....

Just to note:
had an incredibly beautiful day up on the moors yesterday with Kath, starting rainy windy ending sunny clear, with finding a great tapas bar in Ripponden called El Gato Negro, with the most amazing peppers, Padron peppers...and writing those down so I can go get their websites....
Maybe the specific beauty of the moors to do with the specific blue orange yellow light of the dreams....

And then...today, finishing off the art for bill....after finally getting the photo of the Promenade from Lee while I was in Lancaster, funny that. Thinking the e-mail hadn’t come, then finding it, thinking he hadn’t sent the right picture then finding it, so that I ended up having to apologize twice for not seeing it there, but feeling good that he found it, and that yes....it was a perfect way to end the booklet....

11/02
And now, the bill art done, the whole CD done in fact, out to the – what do you call them, not printers, manufacturer’s, what, I don’t know – and feeling both triumphant and strangely at a loose end. Knowing there’s all the stuff still to do, good stuff in fact, but feeling that strange stress, stress and a weird kind of, I’m not sure that it’s a let down so much as just a sadness, but of the kind that often takes me at the realization of certain kinds of projects, or maybe that the residency is definitely more than halfway over, something, something, I’m not at all sure what....but a sadness that comes over me and too, a kind of anxiety a kind of fear, that sense maybe of not knowing who I am now or what the future now entails, what the future now is....

And no idea, not really, what causes this feeling that seems to come and go with such frequency, the point being, basically, that I am having such a good time here, and yet, either sadness or fear inhabit the back of my mind....and no real idea where they come from, or what they mean....some of it, I think, still the little girl fear of exposure that the bill piece gives to me, that all the NUTMEG MEWS related pieces bring to me in fact....and with bill being a CD almost truly really a CD now, that gets even worse....because it is so immediately accessible to all, so that while I really want it to travel far and do good things and think it’s absolutely wonderful, there’s still that thing, of what will people think of me do to me that remains there, so that it’s hard to put everything together.... or sometimes, as yesterday, anything together...

And today a great day with the Kelman group, watching wonderful exercises....that are always so much more than just exercises....the sense of the bare bones of complex relationships, so that what underpins how we all interact, comes to the fore and explains itself....
And too, such a beautiful day. With a quick walk along the Marsden Canal before coming in for the Kelman workshop. And yet, yes, that strange fear behind it. And that sense, what the hell am I afraid of???

And, of course, it is November 2nd, the Day of the Dead. They would have their altars now, in Mexico, and be welcoming the spirits, or no, they would be preparing with the zempaxochitl, the dead’s flower, or death flower in Nahuatl, the orange marigold, because, after all, it is only mid-day there....
and me, this year, what am I doing to welcome my dead? Or is that part of all these feelings, my link, my lack of link, to my dead? The dreams would certainly say so...
and then there’s my link with Bill in the fore, and what I’ve done giving me a sense of protective triumph, as if I’ve enclosed him in my love, no matter how raw the work..... even if that strange fear comes with it too....

Then, there’s reading this book by Peter Robinson, one of my favourite mystery writers, Inspector Banks and all that, only it’s a one off (in Whitby yet, where we’ll go next month) in which a mutilated woman takes revenge on someone with the same voice as her killer, and here I am, what I am feeling sorry about, is how she must feel, will have to feel, if she has killed the wrong man, that’s what I’m worried about, what it would be like to kill the wrong person....almost to the point that I can’t go on reading the book, and where does that come from? I’ve dreamed it over and over, in so many shapes and forms, it’s one of my signature dreams....something about the horror of acting so irretrievably badly, and feeling so immediately sorrowful...and what does it have to do with all the rest of this complex of emotions. Both so good, and so strangely bad?

11/06
And last night, Bonfire night. Don’t know what it is about it, or maybe I do, just that sense of community at a distance, communication over distance, all the different fireworks from different places, different angles....always unexpected, always individual, but as if talking to each other, the sheer brilliant coordinated anarchy of it....and remembering, not just how I loved it the last time I was here, but that trip with Leila back from Venice into Gatwick, and suddenly realizing: it must be Bonfire Night, as we watched fireworks from all directions there below...

11/07
Migraine today. And seeming as a result to not have the smallest bone of lyricism in my body. Though not altogether true. Visual concentration working, that wonderful involvement just in the shape of things. Finishing off three out of four of the collages begun all that time ago from the canal drains....and liking them all, but the big one once again, best – the (M)otherboard) – that idea, and looking so much better hung up. Think best as of today, to frame it in plexiglass, both sides, so that the holes in it are visible. The others, which have some dimensionality, in boxes....
And bill....feeling so good, but so scary, and then trying to get my head around how to get it out into the world....
Scared too, a bit, about the live performances, will I be able to make it work? Hold up my end. I know Shaun and Keith will....

And outside. Lonely night black on the small patch of asphalt below, light on the church. A beautiful silence....and that too, something about the position of the lights, the windows of the houses or of the Conservative Club across the way, with all its voices, the stone houses a little way along the lower street that because of the street lights glow with the same yellow orange as the windows but with none of their transparency, and then the glow too on the church tower and the point lights of the further houses, and how the green leaves still on some of the trees and on the one patch of grass across the street glow acid, the higher now brown tree leaves glowing once more at another distance another level of transparency that same other yellow gold, and then that the visible asphalt of the street is on a hill distorting it all as the cars come up the hill, their lights picking up in small amounts the full range of colour, all of that....

11/08 – 1am
Thinking finally, now, weeks after the Ground Zero article was sent in, of a way to put down my thoughts on presentism, that ubiquitous thing about how we can’t judge the past by the standards of the present, that always comes up, and which I had a section on which I then edited out just because of space, but very simply:

Some of us judge the past on the values of our grandmothers of our grandfathers. On the standards of our silenced ancestors, who passed their values on to us so that we could deploy them, as they had done to the extent they could in their time, to change the values of the present so that we can look at things the way we can today. It is through their efforts that we are who we are, and it is as justifiable to judge the past by the standards of those unable to determine the master narrative of their time as to judge it by the standards of those who did. And they are out there. We know it in the stories we have been told, in archives passed onto us, in sources seldom looked at....
Etc.

And now, of course, having recovered, at least somewhat from the migraine, after going to bed at 9pm, awake, unable to sleep, and that funny all over body itching that I think is having taken the ibuprofen + codeine earlier....but at least felt better then....

And trying to keep my mind at bay, not do anything too complex, wait till tomorrow.... which is, of course, already today...and this feeling of writing to fill space, to bore myself, to make myself sleepy... sleepy you are very sleepy, only I’m not....

10am
And now, a morning just like what Bob told me would come as winter approached, the wind coming off the moor pelting the window with rain, the sound as loud as hail when it hits, watching the yellow leaves fall from the trees as the light brightens, and you know it won’t last, that the leaden mist which hides the moor will brighten further to silver even to gold and then retreat, and likely as not there will be sun....

And now, have agreed to yet another canal walk, with Di, in the rain....or hopefully, in the clearing....and then, right after we spoke, there was the rain attacking the window again, and now, yes, you can see the moor, and behind me the sun....
And we were thinking, off to Robin Hood’s grave....but it’s on private land....

11/09
Wound up doing the Slaithwaite - Marsden walk along the canal again. Always between sun and rain. The yellow leaves piled along the entrance to the locks. And the whole interrelationship of canal and river visible for lack of leaves on the trees, whereas in summer the river was hidden. This is the first one of the canals I’ve actually returned to, and all of it, very different, but very beautiful, and alternating between the picturesque and the powerful. Or both at once....
And wondering about that...our concept of the picturesque....
Could easily go back to Claude mirrors and Jane Austen again. That thing. That ruins an authentic relationship with landscape, with nature. Makes it a class marker. With remarks, too, nonsensical remarks about how those in it, cannot appreciate it. And makes me think of Bill, who Mickey called inarticulate, who had such an articulate relationship with nature, and with silence.

11/12
And some very interesting work with CTTB two days ago....
Started off talking about what elements occurred in fairy tales, came up with five, if I remember:
1. Characters
2. Locations
3. Magical Beings
4. Objects
5. Processes
Then brainstormed lists of them, then took each one and put it on a small piece of paper and each of us picked four, as Kath had decided, quite rightly I think, that letting us have processes gave away too much.
And then we wrote from there.
With my first one, for which my first sentence was – a sort of surreal joke –
When I got out of bed this morning, I went out into the farmyard and there was my daughter talking to the fish.
And here’s where it went from there:

It felt that way it really did the morning that my daughter was born a fish slipping out of my body huge and watered onto the hospital bed purple and beautiful with her catfish jaws escaping from my hands even as she lay there finally breathing escaping her watery home is this it is this it i may have thought as she cried out is this it the talking fish the talking fish always there to invite us back into water world the talking fish the fish with legs crawling onto land to tell us who we are and then that sense of everything body mind coming apart into water into lack of breath just water moving past moving gills the water of eternity breathing story oxygenating story story coming to us in the smallest movement of water past gills oxygen as language small molecules moving like my daughter’s breath my daughter’s cry breathing into movement into air into worlds into story and then and then into beginning and if it was the fish that talked the fish that said the fish that crawled up to whisper in my ear the possibility of birthing the possibility of blood of containment of ocean building interior in my body was that about story about fairy tale about magic is it always about magic the talking fish trying to take in water to move past gills when no water is left the long fish with just enough lung to breathe did you know all animal DNA is what percent is it i don’t know but some incredible percent the same we have the DNA of fruitflies we all contain the same genes all my relations and all that and there’s my daughter nonetheless becoming not fish not fruit but human breathing in air like language the world organizing itself around her the farmyard of what we make around us our sacred space of city or farm what is tame domesticated us the talking fish in the well contained by our own domesticity and nonetheless drawing us back to ocean to blood to ocean of self crossing of boundaries back and back the talking fish in the well speaking of what cannot be penned in what swims through walls the underground rivers back to the beginning of happily ever after that is only ever
Then....
There in the bed of my dreaming...

Which was interesting and strong, not going to a fairy tale, but strong, the way sometimes images are just that, strong.... like breathing the air before lightning....and the talking fish, the talking fish of birth, I like that, but then....there’s the next one....

You can’t say that she said you can’t say that how perverse can you be that’s not a story I said write a fairy tale What is this What is this the unicorn in the cave fell in love with the handsome pumpkin? I said a fairy tale not this hash of ghosts and goblins and pumpkins and caves and unicorns can’t you tell they don’t occupy the same sacred space the same myth time pumpkins are fall and america and the frost is on and the headless horseman and halloween and jack o’lanterns orange and black and caves yes you can have your caves you can have your caves the headless horseman in his cave but no he didn’t ride on a unicorn unicorns aren’t horselike they’re ghostlike [meant goatlike] you know that so what is it you’re telling me you walked into the cave in inglewood park where the ancient indians lived and stored their pumpkins their winter squash and you walked out after eating pumpkin seeds not into the cloisters your feet in your soft leather iroquoian moccasins tracing the hard stone fall [meant floor] but directly into the flower garden of the unicorn tapestry it was the unicorn that was handsome who called you there some kind of cross-cultural maiden to protest the terror of his captivity the horror of that hunt that brought him there that killed his companion brought in on the hunters’ shoulders to have his horn cut off to decorate the castle or cure the king while you will sit there hidden in that tapestry weaving garlands to your own captivity captured there looking out forever onto new york city and the hordes of children come to see the unicorn the buildings of manhattan on the slopes below leading back to the cave of inglewood park where once you walked you with no knowledge of unicorns or captivity but yes of large and handsome pumpkins full to bursting with your winter food and of narwhals their long unicorn tusks pointing away to sea where you could join them leap nto water coherent as pumpkins leap into water and swim away the true unicorn narwhal taking you into some other time of round pumpkin knowledge far away from constricted flowers swimming swimming swmming pumpkin full narwhal round unicorn horn handsome swimming pointed toward tomorrow.....

And there is that thing of course about the unicorn tapestry and your childhood love of that unicorn’s handsome half smile your hatred of the smarmy hunters that places you so well in that time and in this – that almost sickens you now with thoughts of fall and pumpkins – the self curling down into winter to dream of unicorns and of flight of movement away into cloud dreams of flying horses while reality is the narwhal tusk why they killed to pretend there was such a thing as unicorns so that you might ask what it was you killed to believe the same the flesh the round pumpkin growth of the self the seeds of you, what was it?
Round round unicorn dreams, what was it?

And then came the third. Which gave me a hint at the story. Because this past one, the one above was so much part of me, so full of power, it was like being struck by lightning.....but it’s true, in the beginning, it was simply the contradiction: pumpkins and unicorns–these two things do not belong together, and what struck me first was the contrast in origins, but then there was the contrast in forms. Old forms, unicorn tapestry against Aztec squash sculpture, somehow, and then there was the sense of place in my life...and the texture in that....and the knowledge of the narwhal, and that recently seen picture of narwhals–inside a break in arctic ice...in greys, all their horns pointed in a single direction....but somehow, yes, going deep, the lightning strike....
And the third was only what was clarified in the light of that lightning.....

The giant sky mother poured out her goblet to create the world.
This one is easy in fact it likely happened that way in fact it’s almost the story of First Woman falling through the sky to the back of the Turtle of Turtle Island and always it’s true there’s something like that how comforting it is not Pandora with her box but some first mother giant mother pouring all the world out with her goblet into the sky not just to earth but to form the earth this is one you can dream see in bright circling hypnogogic colours a myth time sacred space to go home to so that you feel them falling to earth falling to corn to making to pumpkins to animals to cooperation to making of earth on back of grandmother turtle falling falling making making like rain like sun and moon into sky like bloom of blood and conflict and coordination and above all complexity complexity in making and loving of world and sound and colour tase and smell of earth flower beast this is too easy this beginning.
But I want no other. I want to rest here. In this eternity as time too pours out of that goblet to start the galaxies turning this the big bang First Mother giant mother earthenware sky goblet pouring.
End of Story.
Beginning of Story
Forever and ever and start again.

And you can see here, how simple, how over simple a tale, the kind I could put together when young or at least younger, but it was like–here, I have something coherent, I want this, I want this....I want to treasure this, not break it up in any way....that sense of creating a space to go to without serious difficulty, or perhaps, just a space where difficulty could be beautiful, so I was rather overwhelmed by the difference....and couldn’t let it go, but knew they related, so I read it out to the group....the two of them, not the first, because it was unto itself, and while these two did not seem related, I knew they were...
And then we did the exercise with the questions....

Were they magic pumpkin seeds?
Why did the flowers constrict?
What does unicorn horn cure?
What does she do once she makes earth?
Who is I?
What happens to unicorns when they’ve lost their horns?
Why were the Cloisters moved brick by brick?
Did she weave herself into the tapestry?
How do pumpkins swim?
What shape is complexity?

But it was the sense of relating them through some kind of Tom King style look-how-mixed-up-it’s-gotten style story in the latter that I needed to start with, almost as if writing a lesson about native America...
But I did go for that question....What did she do after.....?

It would not be quite true to say that first mother sky mother turned her back on her creation after in that moment of carelessness she had poured them all from her earthenware carved and curved goblet where for time out of time she had watched them swim cared for their interactions stirred or sloshed the waters of their lives their relationships nor for that matter would it be quite true to say that she watched them constantly reading them like an endless mayan screenfold book no none of this would be true at all it’s just that it would make such a good story a good story that would allow her from time to time to scream like a fish wife at one of her creatures she had failed to pay attention to now that they had created their own world their own story incensed that they could make such a hash of things that should be so clear no no no, you could hear her screaming you can’t do that you absolutely can not do that don’t you see what happens if you do that if you have the unicorn in that cave fall in love with the handsome the round the perfect pumpkin? don’t you see it’s not in the order of things don’t you see what happens as a result those things on this side of the world in the americas in your side of the world getting mixed up with that other one how it condemns her there in her gentle haudonesaunee moccasins worked with the flattened dyed quills of porcupines to find herself without even crossing the worn stone floor slabs of that building those cloisters that will be brought here so close to her storage cave so near her long house only because of you and your unicorns will that building transport itself here and her not even across that floor but into that crowded tapestry so full of stiff and constricted flowers to hide herself there weaving and unweaving garlands for that animal she shouldn’t even know that imaginary animal from somewhere else that shouldn’t be here that someone else just like you made up when I wasn’t looking out of goats and hopes and hatreds and narwhals tusks gathering dusk gathering dust in the hidden corners of the castles of uncured kings to give birth to that city that will obliterate the home she ought to have so that when she walks out if she walks out again to eat the magic pumpkin seeds there will be nowhere to go but on the hunted narwhal’s back out into the ocean swimming toward a tomorrow that may never come.

And then notes, a lot of notes to myself....

I do not wish to start over she might say, First Mother might say, and I don’t know where this can go....[right at end]

Make her much more your own First Mother...not Native American as such....
Make sure Inglewood Park gets in ....
Maybe this is a story for Cloisters, Museum of the American Indian, all that combining....
Probably....
Strange the power of this – why is it there?
Get in: there will be no magic pumpkin seeds.....

And suddenly somewhere in there I had it....it was my story again....mine....
And became what I read at our meeting with the Arts Council....but also....I know what it is now....very important to me....very.....think it’s will become a piece something will happen with....that adolescent, childhood thing....
These are the ones for the Arts Council meeting....read the second....together with my It’s about time stuff from an earlier CTTB workshop looking at the video....

Of Pumpkins and Unicorns, Giants and Sky Mothers
1. Random Words
No it would not be true at all this story you made up in your head out of random words carelessly thrown on a table not true at all not from any source but your own mind a complete hash of nature and culture and longing for so maybe then true to you true to a piece of your life somewhere between childhood and adolescence certainly you could feel it in those words unicorns and pumpkins caves and sky handsome and mother certainly it must be there in goblets and giants and all those stories you ever read in those years eight to eighteen spent one fairy tales and creation myths love of unicorns and of epics flying horses hidden in your drawers the popul vuh next to your bed together with the iliad the unicorn in captivity from the unicorn tapestry up on your wall only now it jars so as you think of it pumpkins and unicorns why so harsh an aching as if a pumpkin seed had grown inside your stomach to grow into a pumpkin already hollowed out by something inside you that is maybe the truth of history that story you imagine of the movement from the caves of inglewood park where the indians lived you visited that year you made the haudenosaunee wikiup in your class and bill taught you all how it was done and a real indian song that he knew and a powwow dance as well and you sat there all exhausted amid your friends there’s that photo of you and debbie and kerry looking oh so tired so that those words remind you of then of those trips the flint arrowheads in those caves and then up to the cloisters and the unicorn tapestry only what you imagine is a girl trying to move through time stealthy in her moccasins to understand this change in time that built manhattan island up into building while she wasn’t looking that traps her instead in the unicorn tapestry makes her instead into that penelope who weaves and unweaves that terrible tapestry of dead unicorns and that one wounded you can see the curlicues of his blood and the fence around him makes her into the one hidden there between the threads giving up the freedom of pumpkins and magic pumpkin seeds because what has happened is that the giant sky mother careless of her creation which had swum for so very long for so very once upon a time long in her goblet has grown bored and has tipped it out carelessly tipped it out in such a parody of all the myths the creation stories tipped it out and all those creatures falling out creatures from different stories splitting and recombining so that the headless horseman is there among those smirking hunters and that girl with her pumpkins among the maidens of european tales in their castles and what you want to tell is a story of how it all got mixed up to trap her because of that moment of carelessness of turning her back on her creation that was the great sky mother who maybe fell to earth to the back of grandmother turtle only what you get instead is just that feel of dark new york fall and pumpkins and visits to the cloisters and the museum of the american indian both of them so close together and then its just mickey again and what she is spilling is her scotch onto the floor but yes everything is getting mixed up and mixed up and mixed up and that’s why the orange of pumpkins the burning of pumpkin seeds in jack o lanterns makes you sick and it’s why too you smell blood and hide pictures of flying horses in your drawer flying horses you dreamed of to carry you away flying horses and unicorns only to be brought to earth by knowing they were no more than narwhal tusks those horns only when you think of it the narwhals are so like the rounded full hollow longing of pumpkins that all you can think of is drowning in the frigid waters they inhabit as they swim on toward tomorrow so who cares if there is no truth in such a tale at all except your longing in the dark of a fall room and mickey’s carelessness because that’s what it’s always about anyway isn’t it eating pumpkin seeds or learning the meaning of narwhal tusks or that it always comes back for you to mickey it’s always about blood in these fairy tales always about carelessness and betrayal the moment of lack of attention that is the loss of innocence it’s always about that anyway isn’t it?

And something about the darkness in the crossing of that upper narrow part of manhattan that orange fall power....
Add in somewhere...So with or without that quiet tale of skymother and her goblet you so badly wanted, with or without mickey this has to be bigger something has to happen...

2. Sky Mother
It would not be quite true to say that first mother sky mother turned her back on her creations after in that moment of carelessness she had poured them all from her earthenware carved and curved goblet or even the one shaped like a pumpkin or for that matter a unicorn’s horn where for time out of time she had watched them swim cared for their interactions given them land to walk on sky to fly through mirrors to look in nor for that matter would it be quite true to say that she watched them like an endless mayan screenfold book once they had departed from her glass let them unfold before her no this would not be true at all it’s just that it would make such a good story that you hardly care if it’s just in your mind if you just made it up if it’s a cross cultural hash made from too much heard and too much read from those years under bill’s guidance your dad’s guidance when you read every creation myth you could find so why wouldn’t you love this one which would allow you to let first mother scream from time to time like a fish wife as she watches those creatures she had failed to pay attention to objecting to how they had created their own world how they too had gotten it all mixed up incensed that they could make a hash of things that should be so clear you can’t do that you absolutely cannot do that she might scream don’t you see what happens if you do that you can’t say that the unicorn in her cave fell in love with the handsome pumpkin these creatures don’t occupy the same myth time the same sacred space even you can see that see what it might make happen that it wasn’t a unicorn at all in the cave in inglewood park it was a young haudenosaunee girl and maybe you’ll condemn her to eating magic pumpkin seeds and finding herself without even crossing the cold wood floor of that building brought to new york brick by brick in her soft leather and quill work mocassins to finding herself inside that crowded tapestry with that wounded unicorn its blood as delicate as the flowers she must weave as delicate and as constricted like the rictus of the hunters’ smiles as they brought it in with its dead companions while she will be consigned to weaving and unweaving garlands for that imaginary animal she shouldn’t even know that imaginary animal from somewhere else that someone else just like you made up when i wasn’t looking out of goats and hopes and hatreds to justify the secret killing of narwhals for their tusks that will grow dusty in the corners of the castles of uncured kings be exhibited in museums just the way you did see them in the cloisters when you went to visit and why not why not tell that story that perfect story it would feel so good as a legend if not a myth as something you could make out of the way you too are so mixed up have that first mother repeat how she will need more than magic pumpkin seeds to walk out of that place just the way you needed more than the pictures of flying horses you hid in your drawers or dreamed of in the night under that picture of the unicorn in captivity that couldn’t protect you anyway well why not tell that story make it into a nice story instead of that pumpkin size ache in your stomach all orange in the black pink night sky of fall new york that year bill and mickey began to fight and she made so much fun of him for his concern for native america for his taking of you up to the museum of the american indian so why not make this pleasant story of cross cultural rift that slow floating down of those creatures from first mother’s goblet instead of the scotch spilling out of mickey’s glass onto the floor as she laughed at bill the wounding the simple cloth blood of the unicorn not yours not tim’s because after all this is true enough to you that even if it’s a total fake you can still feel it the way you can feel those days those nights of wanting to get hold of that flying horse’s mane that unicorn’s horn so why not let this other girl stay in this unicorn’s garden the way you longed to or better even float away on a narwhal’s back the way you did finally in those days on the books you read all those myths and legends and histories to set yourself pointing a course as sharp and as twisted as a narwhal’s tusk toward tomorrow.

always back to same place mickey and bill
easier to see her w/ narwhal swimming on toward tommorrow
after all that’s what you did

sarah's journal continues here

12th november 2007 DOG TO OPEN BEER FESTIVAL
a long difficult convolution through so much detail, but bonfire night was superb, a great fire and the weather excellent, persephone has taken to calling it firebomb night, but i can't really remember anything else except bill going off to plymouth to become a CD (due back anyday now) and some days moving things a fraction to the left in photoshop before that event but also learning by great good fortune to master the CD and so saving ourselves lots of money, dunno if we can do it again, and now we are trying to remember what it was exactly we did on that CD in order to perform it, firstly this friday 16th november at the dukes in lancaster, excited and a bit intimidated by the scale of the job of representing bill's story to strangers as we've spent so long poring over its various consequences in our work that we seem to have accumulated, as aforementioned, a huge quantity of detail, how to represent the detail of our work, our slowly evolving images and stories and behind them the welter of ideas trying to get out into the world, but anyway close to the bone are straying more and more meaningfully from the path, the film finished and talking about soundtracks, plural, for the installation all this must produce for them and where it can be shown (any offers?) and yes it's about time some of this straying found its way onto this very site but that too has become encoiled in the convolution, the too-much of it all, how to make and report what you make and also blur the division between those concepts, all at the same time, probably should have just recorded all our conversations and created the arts council england fellowship at the word hoard sound archive (plenty of corks emerging from bottles in that one) and now we are entering the last month of all this with a sense, still, of beginning: onward to whitby, to collages and sound-art made of canals, to performances and poems and stories and anything else we happen to think of.

journal © copyright sarah murphy 2007