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swallowing everything, seeing things going wrong and rotten. Then I ferment inside and that’s worse. One must be calm and happy according to one of my teachers, a Frenchman who used to badger me to get the best work out [of me], he said. Maybe it was more alive work, but this is not what one wants. It is deep, pure, good. Good emotion that should underlie the best work — not mean snappy ones.
    I shall never paint anything good. I am just dead bones and venom, and I ache to express what is really good and beautiful and true and real.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY, 4TH
    Lizzie, Alice and I went to hear the Seattle Symphony. [
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Good music that gives one the best feelings always leads me away fromman, away from cities out and off to spaces (or woods). Why? Being human, the call of humanhood should be stronger.
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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22ND
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How weary I am of showing off my pictures. Seattle people who have anthropologists’ interest in my old Indian stuff. The man deaf and the woman stupid. Well, it gave me an opportunity to clean behind the picture anyway….
    Look up and feel out to every corner of the earth. Loving people and things and searching after God — and after the good and true and the beautiful.
APRIL 17TH
    […]
Just come from the fourth lecture in a course on applied psychology with Harry Gage. Have enjoyed them enormously — practical, straightforward, inspiring. Last night’s lecture was more spiritual and wonderful. He taught on the “silence,” on meditation and concentration. The silence is turning one’s mind to the infinite divine, absolute communion with the divine. Telepathy is conveying by your subconscious to the other fellow’s subconscious (since time and space do not count). Tonight was [on] food. He recommends no meat or fish or sparingly. Lots of salad, vegetables, some root vegetables. Never more than one starch and abundance of fruit, nuts. Some milk and eggs. No tea or coffee. Water and fruit juice for drinks.
JULY 14TH
    [Lizzie Carr was called Betty by most people]
    Just home from a psychology lecture by Professor Mobius. Funny duck, but I got quite a bit out of it. Then came home andstraightway forgot B.C. [Betty Carr]. Why does she rile me so? Her religion, which she thrusts at one every occasion, is so small and mean. Somehow her God seems such a small little person.
    I wouldn’t give a bean to Gardner’s wedding present. I [have] died to that outfit. When Una said she hoped sincerely I’d die and not live to be a cranky invalid [for] poor Lizzie to care for, I did die to her. When I read that, Lizzie says I’m wicked, she always has and always will side with any other human being on earth against me. That’s been her attitude towards me and my things and my painting and all pertaining to me always. And she always throws a sneaky religious cloak over her statements. I don’t like her religion and I don’t want it. I don’t believe God is small and mean and unjust as she paints him.
JANUARY 25TH, 1933
    I’ve been figuring out with myself how it is I hate write-ups. Someone always sticks them under my nose. I figure thus: people here don’t like my work, it says nothing to them, but they like what is
said
about it in the East. In other words, they like the “kick up” not
it.
That’s the hurt
. I’d rather have a nigger or an idiot really like the work itself (feel something in it) than the governor general gloat over a spiel on it.
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SEATON LAKE, PSE
    [Trip in June 1933 to Pemberton, British Columbia, written on separate sheets]
    As I knelt in the little Catholic church this came to me — crude pictures of Christ and the Virgin and St. Joseph, as the church was too little and poor to buy statues. Such a few moneyless Indians left in the village, such a full graveyard. The bare floor — nobenches or pews — the wooden altar built crooked and off-plumb by the Indians and smeared over with only one coat of paint — whitish leaning to pink and green as though