Opposite Contraries (9 page)

First, I got a lot of help from those in the East. The last two years I have had none. I do not know if it is their fault or mine. They say nothing of value. Bess found fault with the shape of my picture and the frame. No help in that. Lawren had nothing to say. No more has he any comment to make on the “Cow Yard.” Bess comments on the stories I send over. “I have read and enjoyed the stories,” nothing constructive about that. She and Fred have had the “Cow Yard” three weeks now. Long enough, surely, for her to comment. He may be busy. Well, what do you write for? To please folks who aren’t interested really, or to
something within yourself? Or to let off steam, or to kill time, or a craving for expression, or something bigger than oneself trying to creep through the clay? Or is it the creative force, the God in us manifesting itself? But we are always so busy peeping to see what our neighbours are doing and to appropriate his thoughts, we forget to develop our own. What’s more, if he isn’t doing our way, we think he’s wrong; and if he does our way, we call him a copycat, and there is no sense to us at all.

One thing I pay strict heed to, if you get a hunch about a work in a dream, try to follow it up. My last one was in regard to ensemble. The picture must contain one movement only and the articulations of that movement are very important. The eye must travel through the spaces without a jot or jolt. Earth, sky and sea must travel the same way. The end of their journey is the same destination. Your picture must not stop any more than life must. When it stops, it dies. It may run or climb or roll or dance, but it must not lie down and sleep. From the land, the movement sweeps out over the sea and up to the air. Its movement and its speed are one, and the more complete the movement, the more complete the picture. When you find the thing’s direction in space, you find its key.

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I believe language is the whole bother. People mean the same, the big thing is there sitting behind the silly little words that they voice differently. Take prayer, i.e., communion with God. Some call it going with the “silence,” some say “quiet time,” and some say “inspiration,” and there are other words too, and some don’t say anything or call it anything but pray all the same and perhaps better. Birds pray when they toss off the
very joy of life that is in them out into space to meet God, for God fills all space and He must recognize His own. A baby’s chuckle means the same, and the complete content of a cow chewing her cud and the waggle of a fish in the sea; he does more waggle than he needs to just swim, the extra waggle is just like prayer. The joy God put in him speaking to God, words don’t matter. It’s only the lifting that counts. [. . .]

It’s queer how things are. You have a friend who you think understands — they’ve made out they do. You show them something seems to you very plain and they don’t understand at all, and an unreasonable annoyance springs up in you, and you don’t know if you’re disgusted with them or you, and you’re like a cat after its own tail. One end says catch me, and the other end of the same cat says leave me alone. You want the person to understand, yet you don’t want to have to explain. Oh shucks!

The gurgly bird goes on and on. His song has no beginning and no end. He just gurgles on as though it was no effort and he had to get so much gurgling in per day. As far as a bird’s song can be dull and uninspiring, I think he is. No pep, no inspiration.

I have been to Vancouver to be on the judging committee of the Art School Graduates Association for their show, and I have also seen Sophie. [. . .] Sophie’s visit was satisfactory and happy. She was watching at her window, the curtain drawn back, and her one eye and her toothless gums expressed everything they were capable of. I love Sophie’s smile of welcome. It is just as dear, perhaps dearer, now that her countenance is abbreviated by losses;
her heart seems to have grown bigger. “I have watched all day, yesterday, today and tomorrow for you,” she said, and took me into the tiny front
room Frank calls Sophie’s Office. It has a tiny table where the little china Virgin and saints sit, a bunch of red and yellow paper roses in vases, and the walls are smothered in religious chromos and photographs of all her offspring who lived long enough to be photographed, the four who lived to ages between 2 and 12, [in] large ornate gilt frames with convex glasses. And a visit is not a visit unless these four are alluded to in some way. There is a frontless cupboard where a few clothes hang, mostly Sophie’s favourite plaid skirts. There are two boxes and one wooden chair, and some baskets for sale carefully tied in dust cloths. The little low window looks out onto mud flats with a built-up rail track across what used to be the Indians’ own beach. Wharves, boathouses and mills have pushed the reserve back rudely. The Indian houses are helter-skelter, the lots are overgrown with rank grasses and everybody has a few cherry trees, old and gnarled. The houses are always changing. Sara Denny found hers too large so she cut the front off, and I couldn’t recognize it, and walked up and down the street searching. Sophie is always moving the partition in hers according to the moment’s fancy. When I knew her first, it had three rooms. Shortly after, it only had one. “You have a new house,” I said. “Oh no. Three rooms with three stoves. So I cut out the walls and made one room so one stove would do.” Another time she divided it into four. At present it is divided into two.

The stove moves all over the house and shoves its smokepipe out of any window or hole that is handy. Should they move it in any corner where there is not a hole, Frank cuts one. Sometimes there are iron bedsteads, and sometimes the mattresses are on the floor and the bedsteads are sitting out under the cherry trees. And if Sophie is ill, that is generally the time Frank takes to paint
her bedstead a new colour, and she lies behind that cosy stove on the floor. She tells me she is old fashioned and likes the ground best. Spring beds don’t stay still, they move when she does and make her whole body sore moving every time she does. Dear Sophie and I are so happy when we are together. There’s something very close between us. She gave me a beautiful basket. I did not like to accept it, she is so hard up, but she said, “Someday Sophie die. Then I like Emily have my basket and see me.”

Movement is the essence of being. When a thing stands still and says, “Finished,” then it dies. There isn’t such a thing as completion in this world, for that would mean Stop! Painting is a striving to express life. If there is no movement in the painting, then it is dead paint.
If the striving for and the longing for completion were satisfied, that would mean stagnation. A picture by a satisfied artist hangs lifeless on the wall, but if the artist is pulled with longing and striving to get on further — see beyond, keep moving — there will be a carrying on. Also for the beholder who himself will feel the need of pressing on further to something bigger, longing is greater than satisfaction. The taste of good is better when the appetite is keen and vigorous; when the stomach is heavy and full, inertia and drowsiness follow. You can’t stand still, so keep moving forward for fear of rolling back.

One must be very spiritual indeed — or very young — to fully appreciate the cold dawn. To rheumaticky bones it brings aches and shivers the marrow. It needs a very strong soul to hoist itself above these.

Every bit of colour has rushed to the earth’s face with an apoplectic rush. Green, green, it gives out the gripes. Bushes and
trees are overcrowded with leaves. The boulevards are full of pink and white in May. So pink and so white that the leaves scarcely show. Beacon Hill is vulgarly high scented and yellow with bloom. Everything is superlative and lush with the heavy rain. Only the garden keeps on weeding.

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How delightful it is when creatures stay near you for the joy and pleasure of your company, not because they must. It’s dogs’ nature to stay by their owners, but take Susie the rat and Woo the monkey. They run around loose but tied by invisible ties, the same invisible ties that tie us to our God, the very same principle always at work.

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No letters from the East yet. I wonder if it’s happened, the inevitable mysterious something L[awren] has hinted at. I do not want to conjecture for I may be wrong and think injustices. Bess could drop a line even if F[red] is too busy. She claims to be fond of me. There is one spot though where we are somehow out of touch and sympathy; she no doubt feels as I do and neither could probably say just what it is — at present. Maybe it is connected with the thing that is about to or has happened. Maybe it’s religion, maybe not.

Susie has the freedom of the world out here bounded by the sunrise and sunset. Susie’s pink nose sticks up and smells the beyond. But Susie’s world is bounded by the smell and sound of her old Mom. Susie’s love of me tethers her within that radius. How strange and wonderful creatures are.

[
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]I got a pot of tea and a hot bottle, for it was very cold, and I put the fire out with water and cosied the creatures down into their boxes, took food in the van and tucked into bed.[. . .]
And read a letter from Bess. Apparently she had not been interested enough to even read the “Cow Yard.” She said Fred had not had time to, otherwise she did not mention it. All right Old Girl (me). You’ve learnt your lesson. They’ve had it nearly two months. Funny, if I was interested in anybody (and they always make out they’re interested in my doings), I’d want to read or see anything they did. It makes one doubt people’s sincerity and it’s jolly good for one’s conceit.

Searching, searching.

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] The field is full of dandelions, energetic people always doing something, turning their clear yellow faces this way and that as the sun moves, wagging their heads in the wind, growing fearfully fast and hauling their green caps over their faces at night.
My host says they are not dandelions, anyhow, they’re one of the family. He calls moss “fog.” It does take the Scotch to call things by their queernesses. There, 11:30 p.m. and nothing done but chores, religious exercise and my little write. Writing does help to clarify one’s thought jumbles and express, but you can only express along the highway. The best things are off the highway. Sometimes there
is not even a trail and you have to break through. Those places are mostly inexpressible places that won’t word. They are the best places but you are dreadfully apt to get lost. Perhaps if one goes on practising one may learn to word them.

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] There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning, made into a design to please the eye. Well, that is all right for those who just want eye work. It seems to satisfy most people, both doers and lookers. It’s the same with most things — the puppies, for instance. People go into screams of delight over them — their innocent quiet look, their fluff and cuddle, but when the needs of the little creatures are taken into consideration they are “filthy little beasts” and a nuisance. The love and attraction goes deeper than the skin. You’ve got to love things right through
for all that’s good and bad, all they enclose. And in painting, you try to get all the space encloses and what the objects enclose, the thing common to all, what they toss back and forth from one to another. The relationship of each to each, the strong forces that have combined to make theirs separately and as a whole. And others, when you’ve got them all related as whole, you turn around and discover [each] object’s own individual past. When you’ve decided its use and part of the whole, then you tie the parts all together and forget the bits, thinking only of the whole collection of bits and what they represent, and see the hand of God and listen to the voice of God in and through that very thing.

Suck, suck. That strenuous pulling at their mother’s life that goes on perpetually in the corner of the van. You wonder
how the old girl stands it, as if she stood aside and became only a sieve for life to pass through. With new puppies, her whole being is handed over to them. Voraciously they lap up her life. Mothers are life spreaders, yet they take keen joy out of their maternity, the instinct to keep things going push that is stronger than life itself.

Littlest pup of litter born in the Elephant, sick and crying. At daybreak of the second night I crept out and got a bucket of water and drowned the little pup. It was hateful but I couldn’t bear to hear his cries of pain any longer. Pneumonia evidently. He was too young. I fed him cream and water every ½ hour but he was too weak to suck. There always seems such a uselessness in a young thing being born just to die. Now he lies under an enormous pine and I suppose the ants will clean him up quickly and grow fat … why should he be born for the ants? And why did he have to suffer? And had I the right to end his life? Why why why. The sun pulled the blue sky high up to itself and browned the wind up and it’s lovely.
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[…]
Fred sent back the “Cow Yard.” His crits were meagre and foolish. Found the story
very good
but bad spelling and grammar. He said nothing helpful to me. If spelling and grammar were pulled up, I might be able to sell it, but gave me no hint as to where to try.

Oh life! How queer you are.
How should I write it? How explain the jolt a letter brought me today? “Judge not that ye be not judged.” None of my business people loving one and living with another; that cannot be square and right. People married and living together in fiction cannot be right either. By and by we shall know.