the golden west volume 18 part 5 - 1999 november-december

work & days: a lifetime journal project

28 Where does it need to begin. Where I am. Sunday morning November 28, 1999. November for me is like the intercalated days, it's the month with the least reality. It's a little after seven, very quiet. The sky is a felted wad of fibrous water, blue-ish grey. I can hear gulls and crows. This room is the only lit room in the neighbourhood. The heater fan starts and stops. I'm hesitating before I jump, but I know I'm going to. Now I'm not afraid, just stalling. I want to stay myself a little longer. As if. I have six months ahead, that are going to change my life. When I come out of them at the end of May I'll have a book. Okay, take a breath. Spatial reality and the brain. I imagined a book with a blue-grey dust jacket and that was the title I heard. I don't think it's the title, but there's a reason I heard it. Space and the brain. Spatial imagining and the brain. Perceiving, imagining, representing: space and the brain. It's not a theory, it's not a framework, it's a way of imagining theoretically. There are two wings in it, one of them asks what we now know about how we by means of the body/brain live space. The other applies that knowledge to how we think spatially about mind. Spinoza said mind and extended substance are the same things under different descriptions and was banished to the margins of a tradition that has described mind as unextended, a description always structured by metaphor. I want to ask how brain thinks space and use what I find to ask how brain thinks mind. I want to clean up an area of thought. What kind of book do I want to write. A meditation on first philosophy. I want to say: these are some of the difficulties we've had when we think about mind. Here is how we can work around them. This is a demonstration at the same time as it is an explanation. A beautiful transition is being made, but it is being made by a series of overlapping shifts. It is a transition in a manner of speaking. An old metaphor is being used to try to think in the new way, and it is holding us up, but if we try to speak without it we are misunderstood, and indeed we misunderstand ourselves too, the way Dennett misunderstands himself when he says (various things). First philosophy has to be philosophy of trust, not mistrust, of perception - is this right?     NO Do you want to correct it     yes, the work in relation to childhood trust is to come through it First philosophy starts with perception but not with trust     YES A critical interest in perception and our way of thinking it. First philosophy has to be philosophy of perception. Science was founded on a willingness to leave the evidence of the senses. There was a misunderstanding of implications. Descartes was wanting to keep something for childish trust. It is as if he pulled the world of childish trust back into the womb with him, an inside. I should talk about how marked that philosophy is by the prenatal. An inside from which they can't know the outside. It's the structure by means of which we think. For them, mind is unextended. First philosophy is philosophy of origins. Do we dream in the womb     Do we dream things we haven't seen yet     Is our brain structured to be able to see before we have seen     In that sense, we "see our own ideas"     In a way, they are guarding their relations with their mother     We can talk about subjectivity without talking about it in terms of interiority. We can be thoroughly born. We can learn how to say that when we dream perceive or think, the structures by which we do so are inside our bodies, but what it's like to do so isn't properly spoken of as either inside or outside us. It requires a different vocabulary, but that doesn't mean it is unextended, either. I see the carpet as orange. Seeing it that way, like seeing it at all, is codetermined by something about the carpet, something about the illumination, something about the air, and many things about my body. My 'consciousness' of the carpet is not a participant of that complex codetermination. It is not the site of the seeing event. It is not the place where the color - which isn't on the carpet - is. I see the carpet and I see it as orange. It is orange, though it may not be orange (or a carpet) to an alien with x-ray eyes. And all the same, I can see color - deep total yellow, deep total blue - without seeing a colored thing. When I'm wearing mind machine goggles and have set the flashing lights to a particular rate, that's what happens - a blue bluer than blue, a total blue. We can play with our brains. There's a wonderful amount of play - there's a lot of play - in the ontology we can grow into. It is an ontology that says: we are humans, and we're alive in a feast of being. There are things that are real to cats and things that are real to humans. Some things are real to both cats and humans. Some of the things that are real to humans aren't real things, but many of them are. It is not being real to many beings that makes something real. There can be real things no one knows about. We don't have to be simple-minded in what we say is a really existing thing. We can say what we mean by 'thing' always depends on how we are looking, but all the things on all the whole-part scales are real. Don't ask for realness to belong only to hard round things like apples. Grow your ontology. We don't know everything yet. Usually there is something wrong with the question. The question asks for hard round things like apples. We always have to be working from where we are. We always have to be working aware of our metaphor, the structure by means of which we are thinking. Start there. Mind is embodied as it thinks about mind. Find out more about its embodiment. Use what you find when you think about how you're thinking. Remember that thinking about mind requires you to imagine mind. Remember that when you imagine mind you are imagining something other than mind. Mind is what you are when you imagine. It is not the thing you imagine. Wittgenstein got as far as this. Then he said there's only negative work to be done. Show yourself in the grip of a structure. Show the grip of the structure. I'd like to write this book under the star of Wittgenstein. But also alongside the people who are working to watch what becomes of philosophy when it teaches itself neuroscience and complex systems science, when it teaches itself how to think the spatiality of mind. Why mind is necessarily spatial, how its actual spatiality is like and unlike the metaphoric spatialities by which it has been thought. 19 I wrote this morning, then went to school. Time to talk to Phil. There he is grinning, eating a big apple. I don't like to tell the story. I told it to Tom when the phone rang just as I got home, boiling with triumph. Why is that. I feel I've jumped up and down on somebody who was trying to harm me. I've defended myself. "It's your job to make me excited about it." He said that with what he believed is a fetching smile. I said, "No that is not my job, my job is to do my best with it and then find somebody who's excited about it." "Since you've resigned," he said. I'd thought about that one. "I fired you. I didn't resign, I'm still here," I said. He whined that Kathy had demanded I only side with her. He wanted to know whether I was speaking for all the women in the department. He said it happened at a low period when he didn't know where to turn. He said Kathy never loved him the way he wanted to be loved. He complained I was judging him. Everyone is a patchwork of weaknesses and strengths. Yes yes I said, I can see that you and Jill are better matched in energy, but long deception does very serious damage. I have seen two people die of it. Then he went from blame to self pity. He has a weak ego because of his fundamentalist background, he was kept down. You can imagine I was sitting on the black leather bench full of sardonic humor. Oh you baby. You big soft toddler. No wonder you don't have the guts to back me. I came home full of affection and liking for Tom who does not - Paul was doing this yesterday too - blame his ex or feel sorry for himself. And has got me a yellow bike, and has a plan for handling the rent. And phoned the instant I'd set down the grocery bag. And is following my tales with sympathetic interest, not at all afraid. Tempering his spirit being a subordinate at work. He was talking about how it's been. I said you're tempering your spirit. He was in mid-paragraph and said (yes) parenthetically as he went on to his next sentence. There was something about the way he said it that tickled me. It was one of his graces, his interesting deftnesses, his actual lurk. Is it okay to feel so wonderful about this     Does it mean I was oppressed     no But under pressure     YES He showed his hand today     YES, blame, self pity, irresponsibility, seduction He was trying to diminish me     Was I impeccable     no I shouldn't'v felt sorry for him     He was a baby     And I could see why he won't back me     It's over     With hardly a splash     Will he try to badmouth me     But it won't stick       Anything more     What     live with the decision Well, mum, you got something to say to me?     About that     no Want a sentence     he imagines, deception, was necessary for, intimacy He thought he could not have a good thing unless he did a bad thing     YES He was mistaken     YES That's the moral     YES And I should apply it     YES To something in particular     no Judge the act, don't condemn the actor     YES Okay I'm willing     YES It's more his attitude than his act     YES More?     no   About anything else     illusion You are really my supervisor!     YES About illusion     it's just slow growth Think of him as growing     no, think he could I have a bit of vindictiveness that has to do with triumphing over my dad     I could let go of that     I'm afraid I won't be brave enough to do it if I don't let that carry me     Mostly I did it well     YES But there was that little edge that prevented him from making best use       Anything you want me to do about it     YES Apologize     NO But say something to him     YES Tomorrow     Just that     YES Talk about my dad     no Can I do it by email     He needs to be loyal to his desire for good     YES Have I got the idea well enough to say it     Say you told me to say it       More about something else     overview About that situation     process withdrawal by working on illusions Me     Him     Anyone     The only way to come up through is to see other people's illusions as illusions rather than strengths     YES I did wonderful work with Tom     YES I need to do that in my work       Always be willing to be bigger than the people who are there     You didn't like that way of saying it?     just took it literally for a moment Is there a word you'd like better     YES, come through More emerged     YES Always be willing to be more emerged than the people who are there     YES More born     YES That's wonderful       About something else?     about withdrawnness From the knowledge that's there     yes, early love, succeeds, in the quest, for triumph Innocence     no, original self Original self knows     Phil was in quest of original self     Think of all of philosophy in that light     no Deal with confusions as such     Okay       Alright to stop now     YES - "Alex, the love that you withhold is the pain that you carry lifetime after lifetime," says somebody on Art Bell. 1st December "Conquering envy." Hobbes writes to Harvey that he's "the only man I know, that conquering envy, hath established a new doctrine in his life-time." Gillian in her solid quiet way: "It reads very well. It's extremely elegant, even." [of my perception draft, Complex covariance] Luke calling from a pub with that slip in his voice, Roy when he's drinking. 2 The way yesterday was full. When I said "This is our last tutorial" Rob Boss smiled his sweet smile from the second row. Christina Fullerton got a B on her last paper. "So are you happy?" I stage-whispered as I passed her, handing out other papers. "I'm extremely happy." Was Seth Lochhead sitting in the front row to say goodbye? It has been a class boiling with intellectual joy. It was personal. In the last session I gave them my version of how to understand category mistake. B [body] OR M [mind] is the way they used to do it. In the way we do it now, minds are a nested subclass. When I gave the 0.15 session that diagram I could see Kalyna's eyes mist. So I said we should have a moment of silence for all rats and monkeys who've been killed for science. What else - Rob Sinclair and Michal in the pub after work. Rob a bloodless little boy, small mouth, small eyes, an almost immobile face palely freckled, Michal a huge bulging sweating moon face, glasses shining, greasy hair flopping, cigarette, rosy mouth, broad hand arriving to grab his flop of hair and pull it back. I jump right into his energy and play with him. Oh gosh I have five thousand dollars in the bank. 4 Dealt with so many things yesterday, money to the wind. Paid bills. Went to talk to Kathy, who got pinker and slightly bigger as I spoke. She stood up (I want to say jumped up but she doesn't jump, she is a little spindly thing) and hugged me and grabbed my hands and squeezed them thanking me more than I could gracefully handle. Renewed my library books. Dealt with email including one from Phil justifying himself with energy and trying to frighten me in three different ways (SSHRC will be displeased with me, the department won't let me TA, he'll preempt me with Ray and Kathleen), and patronizing me fulsomely. "Ellie, Ellie, it is more complicated than that." "A PhD is different from an MA. You have to discuss your ideas with others," and guessing the obvious, which is that this fuss is meant to detrack his concerns about my work. He wanted to report to SSHRC that I'd done no work ("not been productive") in my final grant year, but compromised himself by not quite saying that. Phil, Phil, you are such a fool you have no idea how many kinds of work there are to do and how much of it I have done. I said SSHRC will be happy with my work. It takes as long as it takes but it's good work. That the grad office boss says it's fine for me to stay in the Phil Dept and TA, and that he also understands I won't find a new supervisor right away. And I said I think the style of argument in analytic philosophy is wrong and ineffective and would go against the grain of what I have to say. I understood that more, talking to Louie after the movie. She read Complex covariance and said it was like a drawing. Like a movie, we agreed. I construct a way of imagining something clearly, a kind of philosophy they don't envisage. Dissolve confusion by visualizing the whole of the situation. I'm constructing philosophic visualizations while speaking about visualization. Phil is starting to understand that I have handled him shrewdly, got what I needed bureaucratically while excluding him and his interests and values wholly from my thesis work. Not a speck of it has he touched. He hasn't understood how irrelevant his professional opinion is to me: that's how careful I've been. Which is to say also that it's been a tight lid. His egotism worked for me. He was the only one in the department who could see me at least enough so I could do something with him, but I would rather have had him see me well enough so I wouldn't have had to handle him. However. Now I've come to the end of his usefulness, boom. So I should be nice to him, except that he has been so patronizing. He was given enough of my work to be able to see he had a whale swimming circles around him, not a nice little trout on a line. Mary and Ed at the Royal Columbia yesterday. He's huddled under a thin blanket, baby boy blue. She's in an armchair writing Christmas cards. She has on a black and beige chevroned sweater and a giant owl pendant made of metal scales. She's an old thing but she looks nice. He gazes at her from his pillow as she sits and talks to me. She'll glance at him briefly from time to time. He's not about to die. There's a very spacious room around us, a well-funded North American hospital. Out the window it's a dark damp day. What used to be a forested hill rising over the river is a curve greyed over with asphalt streets and shingled roofs. M and I talk as we would if he weren't there - almost. There's a thing or two I say, not for his ear, but knowing his ear is present. When I'm leaving I stand at the foot of his bed in my flier's leather jacket and look him in the eye and say, Bye-bye, meaning, among many other things, that's the way we both think it should be done. Other things I did yesterday - shipped bright and dark to NSCAD, we made this and photos to Sue Ditta. There was an email saying my grant check arrived, so altogether $8600 came to me yesterday. 5th, Sunday Working, working. Edelman's lovely model of cortical vision. [Tononi G, G Edelman 1998 Consciousness and complexity, Science 282:1846-1851] Today I have battle phrases around my head like gnats, indignant replies to Phil. I wonder whether that's a sign of telepathic action but the book sez no it's just the setting I'm working at - tackling the neuroscience of color vision with aggression. 7 David Beech (over singing chicken yesterday at the Gung Wa) tells me he's going to build his folks a house made of old refrigerators. He brought me a book on pee as medicine. His house will have a lap pool along the south windows for passive solar heat-holding, he says. I say sea water and he looks at me with wonder. Did you just think of that, or has somebody done it? The space back from the pool will have a cork floor, wine corks glued side by side. A vaulted concrete roof pleated over on top. A poured concrete cistern like a silo. He wants archers to pay to kill all the deer so the wildflowers will come back. I'm enjoying the story. A woman on CBC talking about women in ESL classes whose ability to learn has been damaged by violence, says "We have to be careful how we talk about it." Hearing it I was thinking how much of my method in philosophy was learned when I was learning to read in feminist distance, attending to effects of the language used. I don't go along with language that harms me and the result is often that I can't read the stuff at all until I make an explicit analysis of what's wrong with it. That's part of the method. Another part has been deliberate and consistent (not hodge-podge and contradictory) philosophic visualization. Understand the analog-digital distinction by visualizing both kinds of computer down to the ground. I have a method. Now I have to demonstrate it. 1. I'm reframing. 2. That means working all over not in one spot. 3. Imagining an interactive whole is the skill needed. 4. Not being able to imagine internally interactive wholes is what sets up many philosophic puzzles. 5. Metaphors are visualizations; this is a visualization skill which could maybe be taught as such. 6. Do logicians imagine large wholes with parts interactive at many scales? 7. I am working by means of a whole interactive at many scales, simultaneously, all over. 8. The worst thing about symbol system theories is that they make it impossible to think in this way. 9. The metaphors we take from basic level action are all about stable noninteractive objects being moved around. 8th Talking about color vision - start by talking about seeing objects, not object properties (for instance color or form). It's a heuristic. It would have something to do with what's relevant to evolving creatures who live by seeing objects of relevance, objects they interact with - take object interaction as a base level. Assume interacting with objects at their own scale is what vision has been good for. - The braided strands of a rivulet in silt. When I woke very early I remembered dreaming systems upstream from the retina's three kinds of cone as sections braided unbraided and rebraided in so many combinations that it's not possible to say which are for color vision and which are for something else. I am sticking my neck out with Darko and Michal, trying to say what I actually think. Trying my comprehension. Darko is free and curious, Michal is jumbled but passionate. He's jumbled because he has accepted too much on the way to being as informed as he is. What really is Phil's problem with my work? (I've been tweaking him and he's been biting - it is my very little reward for putting up with his patronage and ungenerosity - it's over though, the reverb is dying already.) What I need to know now is whether everyone else is going to be as blind as he is. Will I find someone who likes it a lot     Will you tell me where     deep change, growth, not withdrawn, excluded child Those who care about that     YES But where will I find them     where there's liberation Will you tell me physically where to find them     after you graduate 12th, Amtrack There you are, sun, squashed and pink. Davis Mobile Estates. Pink tufty clouds in an irrigation ditch. Is there anything those clouds are like. A kind of pattern that's obviously in-fill growth in three dimensions, but that doesn't say it. Two women in the lounge car sitting facing the sun with sunglasses on. It's about seven-thirty in the morning. We're passing through ducks' privacy of a wide marsh, grass islands furry both above and below, swiveling neatly as we pass. Oh here we are at the battleship graveyard. For some reason the decks of these ships are forests of poles, posts - masts? - aerials - I don't know what esoteric gear - but floating there against the light they are craft of unknown purpose, unheard-of technology. I see now that what look like single ships are actually ranks of maybe sixteen, tethered alongside in a parallel series of different shapes. In profile their masts and towers seem to be springing from one deck. Dead ships riding storms lashed together anchored in a marshy inland sea we're crossing on a trestle bridge. As it grew light I loved seeing the pale California earth start to glow pinky-buff. It's Sunday. Hot dog, Depot, OPEN FOR BREAKFAST, Budweiser. There has been rain in Martinez. The safety of the train. Once you make it onto the train, past the anxieties of Customs, you know you are in a metal capsule on a track that is laid from here to there, forty hours, 1511 miles, to be carried past works yards, trailer parks, horses, those bushes with red berries, tarp settlements of the homeless, decayed pilings, a wide-spreading buckeye just then. Warm, dry, fed and at leisure. Yesterday I saw down into a scrap yard full of all sizes of rusty chain, nothing but chains in piles. I saw a horse alone in a field run, turn at the corner and collect into a most beautiful stop. It was his bearing I liked. And the word 'bearing.' We rode all day in grey weather through flooded fields. The colors were moss green and the red brown of bracken and decaying leaves, with sometimes the grey of rocks or a few yellow flags on a poplar or willow, and then, marvelously sometimes, through the Williamette Valley, an apple tree tossing up a scattered cloud of red or yellow balls with others of the same color dropped at the foot, a sight unnatural to the landscape, a human marker, but of a different kind than the buildings - half-natural. Around them sometimes there were floating drifts of red rosehips. An alder understory this year full of snowberries. I was wearing my big headphones most of the day. A man at a warehouse door taking a pipe out of his mouth to talk into a cell phone. - Why does being asked to move make me furious? That's twice. The first time was to my advantage. This time it was two professional couples wanting to sit together. I should have said no. I moved with such bad grace it would have been better to make a stand. Thanks so much, thank you again chorused the women. He used his professional manner on me, the pleasant big white man's tone of command. But the first time it was a Mexican family with four small kids. I was offended then too. The he-he-he of that sort of woman's laughter. The little woman. - There was a woman who came in with the crush when we were changing trains in LA. I looked up from my seat and saw her in the aisle, a small old woman with messy white hair, thick glasses that magnified her eyes so she looked a bit swimming, uncertain. She was wearing red. She looked like Joyce, a fair, pink, frail look. I decided quickly and moved my bag. She sat down. Her name was Jane. She had been an Air Force nurse during the war. Raised in Chicago, got her RN in Berkeley. She was an Ob/Gyn. Her daughter Susie is a medical anthropologist. She married a bomber pilot and she probably should have stayed married to him, but after the war they didn't feel the same. He wasn't as handsome without his uniform. She had three kids with her second husband but she's not with him now. She lives with her thirty-six year old middle son who is on dialysis and diabetic. His life expectancy isn't more than five years, ten maybe. She said that factually. She has seen a lot of people die. After the war she was like the soldiers, she didn't want anything more to do with war. She'd worn flight coveralls like the fliers, a zipper here and another one here. There were a few years she was nursing from 3 to 11 and getting up for eight o'clock classes in jazz piano. Having an orchestra behind you is really something, but she couldn't improvise so she stopped that after a while. I asked questions to keep her talking. I'd have listened to her gladly all the way to San Diego but she got off at the second stop in Santa Ana. I stood up and crossed the aisle to watch her out of sight. She would have been nearly eighty but she was walking fast. She said she'd been a nurse because she wanted to serve mankind. I liked her wrinkled pink small face. She had been an impatient pretty blond with glasses. A good nurse. Let me see your hand, I said. I held mine up so she could see we both have wide strong palms. Her fingers a little longer. The thin smooth cold skin of the inside of her hand, lengthwise creases down the fingers. When she left she patted my knee once and said she'd enjoyed our talk. She's used to being liked. San Diego, lobby of the Maryland, 15th I still say Who is this? when I look at him, not so much really asking as feeling I don't know. I'm quite stupefied this morning. That means a feeling of not being able to move, thickness of a medium. Saying that, I start to speed up. There's nothing I've had to say about Tom and me. I arrive. There he is. We go to bed and wake up together and hang out. Lots of kisses. I am not scandalized. He is careful in fifty ways he's been willing to learn. On the street he looks slightly brutal. On the pillow this morning he had a look I saw on a photo of him when he was maybe five - an eagle chick - fuzzed eyes, gold eyes. A little duck. Now I've got it primed and will work. It's nearly seven. I can hear a wheelchair motor in the lobby. There's a fir tree smell from the Christmas tree. - I don't know how to do this. I can't work today. I don't have a room, I don't have tea in the morning. It's Wednesday, and on [Tom's days off] Saturday and Sunday there will be nowhere to work. If I get started late I still have to be done by three. The coffee has a stunning effect. It's maybe the wrong kind. I'm sleeping but if I wake early I don't have a room. I don't like to leave Tom when I've woken with him. There is only this month before I'm TAing again. I'm probably rehormoning today because of poking last night. The notes don't take me anywhere when I look at them. The life where I am happy having something to say is not accessible. Last term I wrote one page. I am afraid I'll have to choose between Tom and work. I'm afraid being happy with Tom makes me stupid. The project is too long. I have all the parts mapped but I don't remember them. Maybe I've already lost too much memory to be able to do it. But I know so much, I have found so much better ways of understanding, I really have made a way of understanding that fits. And yet when I try to start at the top and just write I feel I don't know anything. My head is thick. I remember what it took to write the MA, such discipline, being alone for three weeks. Eating ritually, yoga every day, extraordinary patience and concentration, energy overdrive. I can't do that here, not if I'm with Tom. Is there a solution? I don't know what are the true conditions of my gift. Will you talk to me about work procedure     Something about gains being lost     I'm losing my gains     YES Because I'm here     NO Because I'm undisciplined     no Because of love woman     no Do you want me to     YES They were the wrong kind of gains     YES Will you say gains of what     completeness I should be rethinking     YES Not follow the outline     no, follow but rethink Does it matter that I don't have a big table     NO Something is gelling       Will you say it another way     the working process should feel like deep brave change There has already been     no A deep brave change in what I find     YES Be willing to take dictation     YES When I write     no when you think Be more attentive to process     no to instructions Write to outline but excurse     YES Will I be able to write my ten pages this week     YES I am quite reorganized     YES - What I want to talk about is what I've done, what I do, my way of doing it. I want to speak from the way of thinking I've slowly made. I also want to talk about that way of thinking IN the way of thinking I've made. I want to demonstrate a way of thinking about cognition, because I think it works. But what do I really want to do - I want to say what I've learned. I want to use what I've learned, I want to learn by means of it. I want to exercise myself in it. I want people to see it. I want to enjoy it and not be afraid of it or avoid it. I want to give my life's work so it will make better thinking and better people. I want it to defend people who want to think in connected integrated truthful ways. I want to test and strengthen it and make it more accurate. I want people to be happy to find it. What is its relation to philosophy? When I was young, philosophy gave me exercise in thinking about thinking. I am still trying to think about thinking. That's what this work is about. But now I begin by thinking about perceiving. Being able to think about perceiving gives me a framework for thinking about imagining, and that is the framework I need for thinking about representational practices like speech and picture-making. To be able to think about thinking, I need to understand all three of these basic categories of cognitive ability, and I need to understand their relation. Three things I've learned about how to think about thinking: 1) always imagine how it's done 2) always imagine the background too 3) always notice how you are imagining it The work is an instance of what it describes. I am writing about spatial perception and imagining and about representational uses of these capabilities, and I am thinking these subjects by imagining them spatially. About perceiving: Complex covariance Changing effectively 17 What is it today. Friday. Such a short month. I'm sick. Woke at 11:30 and couldn't sleep. Was going to write today. It's 1:30 and I'm just crawling into the day. Sore throat. The bones of my face hurt. I ache in the small of the back. What am I going to do about this writing. It's a claim on every day, and there is no end in sight because when this section is done, the rest are there in stacks. I'm feeling Phil's doubt - I don't like to say this but I wonder whether he's right in some way I haven't seen. Why wasn't he interested and encouraging. Why couldn't he see the bravery and difficulty of what I'm doing. These are questions from another time. Academically I have always come through in the end but this is such an unsupported endless ordeal. Alright, say it another way. There's the place I haven't got to, where I write and write glad to be saying what I know. Why don't I rush to that place, why do I hang back. I'm thinking of when I was writing Perception without representation and was so secure in the established run that I knew I could go to Louie's party and still find it there when I got home. I picked a fight last night and wondered whether it was because I'm working. But the real work state is patient with anyone. So the question is how to get into the work state, which is a beautiful state. Do you have any advice about right now     something about childhood Talk to the child       Will you talk to me sweetie     YES about delay You were waiting a long time     Such a long time     YES How have you been     you went away I didn't talk to you     Were you mad at me     no Did you miss me     Were you bored and lonely     YES There were no arms     Do you want to tell me more     there will be more beauty if you act from feeling Will you be with me and live with me please     Tom likes you     You're welcome to live with us     YES I've defended you a lot     Did you like me getting rid of Phil     YES So will you live with us     YES Will you stay with me while I work     YES I really want you to       Do you want to say more     temper, coming through, by moving, and reorganizing You want me to get my own room?     YES Will you tell me why you want to move     because I want to be able to fight You can't fight here?     YES Sweetie you have permission to fight here     YES I want you to fight     YES Will you promise to fight if you need to     YES If you're allowed to fight here is it okay if we go on living here     - A spot of glare - the way rays are arranged around it - say this first - the burn I can see when I close my eyes - and preventing me seeing the tip of the pencil - like two footprints, dark on the page, bright if I close my eyes. The dazzle was fine lines in rays, very fine, very focused, raying out, flowing toward the spot of glare in the bottom half, flowing outward in the top half, color bands or spots that stay in place when the lines flow. The lines made of light. They're like fur. There's a line across the middle where it doesn't flow. It flows less above. A car passing and cutting it off stops the flow for an instant. A smaller speck of dazzle has short, fewer lines and doesn't flow. There's an intermediate state where it flows slowly or the lines are static. The lines seem to be stable when I move my fixation. The fact that I can change internally, I, body, can change internally enough to be able to see so much, all this, is implausible, and yet it is the only kind of story that allows thinking about being what I am, which means being able to be interested, inventive. Limited but elaborate response. Response means systematic covariance. Because it's that way, I'm this way. Mostly the covariance is understood in too limited a way. Elaborated because there is manifestly so much that is seen. But we aren't the whole structure of it. Nervous system is isolated and integrated. It responds without involving the whole body. It responds in ways that can change things about the rest of the body. 20 Flabby. I'm at the most general end of the writing when I'm least ready, flabbing on and on, trying. I'm talking about something so general there's almost nothing that can be said about it, and yet I'm trying to set up the way of thinking it that will allow me to nest other things in it. I'm not clear yet, confined and bored with my unsharpness. I know Complex covariance is good. 21 Deep skin. The central nervous system is skin structure folded inward and elaborated. Epithelial, which means it's connected sheets. Skin is the pattern-sensitive tissue - jarred by waves, prickled by electromagnetic fields. Think of the cortical mantle as internal skin. The eye is internal skin that moves back to the outside. Why Chris said it's all touch. Elaborated internal sheets of skin can be connected to more than one surface sheet, they can correlate. That means there can be complex covariance of internal with external structure. I woke thinking that seeing one thing has to be by means of responding to many things. Why did I think that. The CNS is isolated in the sense that it is a surface within a volume. The brain is a body within the body, which has diffuse webby lines connecting the inner surface of the inner skin. It is organized by crossing through - specialized cortex is usually opposite what it's connected to. The spatiality of the brain is obviously related to the spatiality of the outer body. This is here because of the way it's connected. The spatiality of the brain has everything to do with how it is built. It's built always in a body already oriented, and it's built by cells crawling from one place to another along guide fibers. It's presumably also built when certain kinds of pattern are already coming in and converging, covarying. There can be covariance with simultaneous proximal stuff, patterns which all convolve something about a single distal object. Is there something wrong with my project, I'm so reluctant to do it     money and polio are opposing each other They want to take it in different directions     Polio needs to say something     I was spatially hindered     What does polio want to say     I don't want to finish because I'm making something with my mother I don't want to leave university     YES Is there something you can recommend     YES, balance it with improvement of Ellie's honesty Being more honest about it will help     Do you want to say more     no But is it a good project     And can I do it     Can I do it while I'm here     YES Is reluctance to be finished the main difficulty     YES   volume 19 the golden west volume 18: 1999 august-december work & days: a lifetime journal project