the golden west volume 20 part 4 - 2000 july-august

work & days: a lifetime journal project

2 July Aganetha Dyck's career. An interview I bought Border Crossings for. Mennonite lady but with a free father, married at 20 to a Mennonite man. In her thirties she shrank sweaters and canned buttons. Now she works with bees. Passion overrides fear, she says. The photos are credited to her husband. Her interview full of gratitude to many people who help her, especially that. She was educated as a bookkeeper. A simple grateful energized successful spirit. Enright Robert 2000 "The Incredible Lightness of Bee-ing", Border Crossings Also yesterday, David brought things to show (David standing and sitting and walking in my house, looking, looking), one of them an interview with Sharon Butala about her next book about the field she walks on. About feeling the field she walks on. Those are both stories about women living successful by connection. With both I see it is not exactly the work that is succeeding, it is the story. Both are stories of winning through and living with passion. Both are stories of marriages. Dyck, Butala, Ann Hamilton, women where they weren't, so themselves and free. I worked today from 4:30 to 4:30 and got to 44 floors on the stair machine and laughed with Tom, lying on the floor with my foot up in the sun horizontal on the wall, fifteen minutes after it set where he was. Sharon Butala 2000 Wild stone heart: an apprentice in the fields 3 Beginning to work as I slept, something about not using parts of the brain for the physical connections they used to be used for. Maybe it applies to me. Steven Hawkings the paradigm. Don't use your body so you'll have the whole of your motor cortex and its connections to imagine things. Use it when you're a kid, though. I brought up an egg and was playing with it in my mouth. It was my unborn baby. I didn't know you could take them out and put them back in. It's like a hard-boiled egg, rubbery. Part of the albumen breaks off. More of it is crumbling in my mouth. I probably shouldn't put it back, it is too destroyed. I didn't really want to have a baby anyway. I put it in the trash. But I see into it, in the yolk is a formed creature with the big listening head of a fetus. This was after Louie's story about cranial-sacral work and her body curling. In eating disorders, starvation signifies starvation of truth, it says. Louie's crazy girl was only crazy because she was deprived. She wants to visit as a memory, she does not want to take over. The truths she was starved of were the ones she began to refuse when she despaired that being what she was didn't get her what she wanted. The effects of self-refusal show more after adolescence, because the sexual works off what those truths are about (not because they're sexual). They're about wanting. - Ready to write the SPL section. Two whole days just organizing notes. Yes but I'm working out how to use the computer for notes. It's a holiday Monday. Sun on the floor in two rhomboids. It's eight in the morning, silent except for the energetic hum of the computer. Here I sit yawning in my dirty pyjamas with my cup of tea steaming on the bed beside me. About the superior parietal, it's the roof of the brain. More roof than wall, it's areas with extraordinary mix of response, it's through-paths and context par excellence. Call it integration cortex not association. It's tying through in the service of coordinated relevant action. The IPL is about using it representationally. - Wrote five single-spaced pages today. There's a lovely new moon, a white line in the pale sky south of sunset. Today I wanted to write the story of my trip with Louie, I mean write it with her, and put it with pictures on the web. 4 There was Daphne on the street yesterday, very the same, except that her hair, which was an airy pile of white and brown strands, now is a thick felt purely and totally battleship grey. Under it the same bony little face, unlined. She has moved back to Vancouver, they're half a block away in a house conventional and nonvisual I'm sure. She was walking her yellow dog. At the time - eighteen years ago she says - I didn't know how much of her quality was Roy's. She is looking at me very skeptically. I faulted her for being with a man and now - maybe it's that - she's faulting me for it. There's something else, though. I noticed it with Nora. I inwardly dismiss what they tell me about themselves. It's an unconscious gesture, instantaneous. I say, that's nothing, I won't go there. It's because I'm already lying, it says, from the moment I come into contact with them. Trying to present myself. They are irrelevant in that task, is that it? Yes. I'm not like that with everyone. It's self-protective. I'm like that with people I think will judge me for being poor. Specifically poor? It says yes. Unsuccessful. I am so seldom social I've forgotten what I learned long ago, about being conscious socially and monitoring these things. I'm hardly there. It's a self that carries me in and out without harm or pleasure. Should I be social the way I was for a while, strenuously? Yes. But it wasn't worth it, I got harrowed in that time, I was smashed by people. I took on their envy and shame. YES. Should I do that again? No. Would it happen again? Yes. Will you comment? It's a crisis of fast honest creation. Feel yourself sinking into oppression and shoot up out of it. That's how people do it? Yes. Is there a reason I don't know how to do that? Yes, you'd need to process and contemplate foolishness and exclusion. My own? Yes. Was I doing that in those days? No. I was trying. Yes. Do you mean childhood facts? Yes. I took on their envy and shame because I wasn't able to recognize it? Yes, because you hadn't found the original. Would it take a long time to do this work? Yes. Will I do it? Yes. Do you want to add anything? You are missing the happiness you'd gain. Social happiness? No, responsible recovery. 5 Just keep slogging through?     no, teach the withdrawn fools how to graduate What it is about the SPL is that we find all the kinds of response together - sensory, motor, proprioceptive - and it must be integrating. Integration cortex. So then presumably when this kind of tissue is active in nets there can be simulation of that integration. 'Abstract.' Is it because of my leg I have this distaste for it     Really understanding it would be a key to lots of things     Am I disabled there     Is there something I'm afraid to know     honesty withdraws in the death of intimacy I'm afraid to know that?     no It's an area that's dishonest     YES It's the area the bad philosophers are using     Analyticity without contact     It's where cut-off males go     Watching sports     I feel excluded in it     That doesn't mean I shouldn't understand it     6 Reading the New Yorker wanting to be successful. What does that mean. It means wanting to be working in public and having a life in public built on succeeding in that work, being out. I had it with the garden, was there a good reason I didn't stop there. Because I want to change culture. Can I do that? I want to make people love the world. A child's crusade - to kill the dead. The philosopher of integration. 7 The sensation I wake with at night, as if my face and hands are stiff with fluid, prickling. - I could have specialized in learning to control people but I didn't, I specialized in looking for loves which I knew were rare but true. That made me learn to ignore people, which I still do. And prefer to do. I want to be successful and it can't be done without people. For that, people must be controlled. At the garden I led/controlled people for the sake of beauty. It was easy to do. In this arena I do not have a firm enough vision of beauty. Find it - is that the way? Will it be TRUE?     improved judgment and feeling by contemplation I went out in my socks to get the Premarin out of the car, yesterday, and met Rhoda on the sidewalk. She was blazing. There was a way she put her foot down on the sidewalk as she passed - a strong arched foot in a sandal. She was blazing because she saw instantly that she could triumph at a moment when I was ashamed to have my small foot seen. The SPL chapter is done. I'm setting up the IPL chapter, which will be shorter. The SPL chapter is 50 pages single-spaced. I found something for the SPL chapter very lately - it's the heterogeneity of cells in the SPL. Have to carve that clearer. Start with it. Through-paths was important. The heterogeneity means integration every which way. About IPL - it's the culture corner. It works as a system with new temporal and new frontal. Frontal is about time, temporal pole is language, IPL is cultural uses of spatial action. I believe. [Brodmann's] 40 is more to do with touch, 39 is more to do with hearing. Both are to do with language at their base, both are to do with act/vision at their upper end. They are not where culture happens, they are through switches for a cultural use of the rest of the brain. Anomalous dominance. The ++ people are often women, weak left hand, weak spatial and physical sense, strong communicational sense, like Williams syndrome. The - people are often male, strong left hand, weak communicational sense, strong physical and spatial sense. The +- people are the raft of normals? Or maybe they include the gifted students who use both hemispheres for both mathematics and language. 8 But what is it I want from this chapter. I want to say representation is possible because of the IPL. Did it evolve there because it's between object and action? Rep evolved on the basis of something that pre-existed. What? Something mammals do. Something about memory. They remember where something is. How they do that is, they set up simulating a scene. And IPL is critical to that, how? It's between object memory and act memory. Being hungry sets up memory of red berry, which sets up memory of its context, simultaneous with memory of picking it, which both set up memory of getting to it. The four parts of a sentence: object/background, a compound verb. Does IPL short-cut through to medial? (Hippocampus, etc.) Object, action, location are evoked from below, say. Is IPL just the tying together? It says yes. Then, when the evoking is done in representation it can organize from the side instead of below. In dreaming, parts of it are turned on from below. Dreaming combines from below and sideways. The left is the fantasy hemisphere, fantasy satisfactions. It's the lying hemisphere. On the left it lies, on the right it plans. 9 Brian has been playing bad music. I ate a pint of Haagen Daas last night because I'm not feeling anything, loveless days. Take two melatonin tabs to be able to sleep. The eating drill every day. I am desiring nothing except, dimly, to feel more and to be praised. Do you want to say anything     improve love by slow growth of the child Can I do that even when I'm working     Writing in the evening     More?     unknown exclusions will improve the child Finding them     YES Moments of past exclusion     YES Tom swam to the yellow buoy at the Cove yesterday. He talks to me with such trust, these days. He's lit with trust. At this buoy, which is half a mile out, he found a plastic duckie tied with a shoelace. 10 Tom is back in the water after four years. The sea man. He's going to meet Mathew on Wednesday, after ten years, is it. After I talked to him yesterday I tried to call Rowen and got Michael home alone. He said there was a dance on Read Saturday night under the stars. He's making $2000 a month at the oyster farm and they don't pay rent. Lise gets off the island a couple of times a week with her friends so he's happily married. Rowen wants to make computer games. Other people's news, none of my own, except that I'll finish the IPL chapter today and then do representation. That leaves perception and simulation on the tables, metaphor, and the four short examples. I'm eager. 12 Yesterday I got up at 5:30 and went straight to the computer. This morning I woke working. What was it - a note for the first chapter, to say it's only the beginning, and another note that my intention is not to argue but to demonstrate a manner of speaking. There was a longer part where I was writing an added section for the IPL chapter, about the strip going through the supramarginal - longer than the supramarginal. I was scrolling down through notes I hadn't found when I wrote the chapter but saying there's no point my rewriting it now because I'm dreaming. Setting up the rep chapter. Looked yesterday at the section-title pages I had already. What about the rep chapter. Yeah. Just do it. 13 With Louie in the therapist's office. It's full of people. the receptionist said he'd seen them all but there are more arriving all the time. Louie when I grab the muscles of her bum takes her clothes off. We're with the therapist. Everyone else is gone. She gets on top of him like a kid, she has her arms stretched up along his, is playing delightfully. I think I will have to play my truth which is different than hers. I wrap him in a rug so only the top of his head sticks out. I'm engaging with him. I'm saying, if my father likes somebody better than me I have to wrap him up. But then he struggles out. "I have to just ..." He has to arrange his hard-on, which he still has from wrestling with Louie. I see it poking out. I say, Louie has a very pretty body. Yes, she does, he says. That's it for me. I have to leave in bitterness. He has run after me. He casts himself on the ground crying. I am resolute. It is not good for me to live with his sexually liking her more than me. I'm smothering and abandoning the therapist     Because he prefers love woman     I'm also feeling homeless     Is that mainly from talking to Louie     Was it true what I said, she's not crashing about her situation, she just has some crashing to do     Wanting to be contained is her problem     She wants her greatness contained     Am I past that     no Am I having it contained by you     It's not true that she's more fearful than me     Do you want to say more about this dreaming     look at the anger delaying excluded child I know it exists, but where is it delaying me     in coming through to early love and in partial loss of sex I do get through to early love and sex with Tom     no I did but I've backed off     YES Running away from fear     Is there any more I should do about this right now     no 15 Halfway through July suddenly. Still a lot to do in the rep chapter. Start writing today. There were a lot of notes to enter. It's going to be a day sorting, maybe. I'm not well. Sore and crumbly. Hot flashes. Swollen palms wake me at night. My right shoulder is out, flashes with sudden pain and weakness. I lay for two hours last night listening to the tapes I sent Tom in 1996, reading him my journal. I was enthralled by the writing, so relaxed and exact and uninfluenced and intimate. Enthralled by the story too. In agony, in erotic happiness, in doubt, in thought, what sounds in every kind of moment is the confidence I feel in its telling. About representation. What do I need to say to tie it in. It's a kind of aboutness, physical and structural. It's complex in the ways presence is complex, and adds some more ways. It is essentially, inherently social and cultural and artifactual. 16 I woke this morning understanding the three-story house. The ground floor is presence; I used to call it perceiving, but I see it has to include the whole body, acting. The middle floor is simulation. The top floor is representing. Is there a fourth? The three are layered because they depend on each other. The fourth floor is thinking, which depends on the three below. Representing is a very poor term. What should we call it? Nothing comes to mind. Cognitive technology. - The journal tapes, what to say. I love their company. I love the passion of interest. I love the way I read them. I love the love and inquiry in them. What's the other feeling. A bafflement that that person is not more wanted, because she is wonderful. 17 A spider's line questing outside the window - the shine that shows it stretching and shrinking, bobbing and slipping sideways, shooting suddenly upward. Louie's stories about the group of women and Olga Broumas. Olga 'treating' each of them to cranial-sacral therapy, which seems a kind of sex where Olga's got sadistic control (I say to Louie). I'm cynical at a distance. It would be a spectacular novel, the women they are, the freedom they are. Sue swimming with seals she knows for years and names - Goldie brought her this year's baby into her arms. Louie, Nancy, Val and Sue, other people I don't know. Olga catalyzes them but there's something covert in it. Louie for instance doesn't dare say what she's feeling, which means she has been intimidated. Apart from me, Louie is polite, I know, but if Olga were the guru they think, they would be free with her. And me, I am making another cup of tea and going to part 3 of the representation chapter. I'm stiff and sore and don't know whether it's well enough written, and don't know whether it's going to get done before my credit runs out - I'm into the minus numbers, just, and there are 2000 of them available - and have no idea what then. But I am happy this summer. Haven't said Tom has been offered day manager from February on. 18 What, what? Something about how I can't be bothered to complain about Tom. I'm remembering my passionate care and thinking he should miss it. He likes me better this way but he had raw love and this is quite cynical. It discounts him. It says he doesn't like my letters, he's not interested in what I am, he isn't going to get a computer, he isn't going to write, he's going to go on with his little pacifiers - clothes, tapes, TV, newspapers - buttering him up so he doesn't get hungry. At the same time I'm noticing I'm saying something similar to Mary - I kept trying, I kept trying to give you what I found, I wanted you to know me, you didn't want it, there is all that beautiful stuff you don't want. Am I talking to myself? Yes, beautiful feeling is talking to the dull worker. Alright, I heard you. Give up newspapers and find feeling. Give up food pacifying. What else. Do the gym every day. Do yoga every day. Do blind writing? Yes. The subtle body book? Yes. Wear beautiful clothes. Work on the house? Yes. More effort. 19 David phoned as I was starting to put the day's work to bed - a long procedure, saving on disk and on the floppy, working around the computer's kink about saving on disk (too complicated to describe). He had a chicken in the oven and did I want to go somewhere and eat it with him. I did, joyfully. It had been a day of cutting stone, paragraph by paragraph. (Two more days on the rep chapter.) Iona Park in the long reaches of thick pollution haze. We sat at the river's edge watching the traffic of log salvage tugs, small aluminum things; barge tugs plowing the water, dignified big chunks. There was fire's heat from the side, pleasantly weak. Silver light on the reeds, that effect I don't know to explain. A sweet-clover bush getting its feet wet in the creeping tide. The line of the North Shore mountains, glamorous BC. A glitter on the sea, the sun an hour from the horizon as we left, declining into the unclouded baking incandescence of these evenings. I'm very free with David, very easy. I know what he's good for and not and have no assignment to change him. He's lovely company, can tell me things about the boats, has a pruner on his belt to cut flowers, prizes me, is a light local voice in my ear, marvels at my stories, drives his red Toyota Tercel station wagon fast with the sun roof open, is a sweet boy with his fine red hair just cut and his thin-nosed face so so old, and his long teeth meeting at a forward slope like a horse's. There was a clunk as I lay falling asleep last night. I went to the window and saw him on a bicycle in the alley riding away. He had pushed a little bag through the mail slot with balsam poplar lip salve in it. When I told David the story of Louie and me imagining all the men gone he wanted it to happen. He wanted me to write the book. - "Confident, warm and lively" Gillian said on the TA report. Have I gone away from therapy because it likes Louie better     no Is it because Olga praised her writing     no I have been having to defend myself from the sight of Rhoda     Defending my fat lame body     Am I crashing     no, heartsore Louie wouldn't contain me, she wanted to stay the child     This chapter is not good     no Is this work my way of wrapping up the father     no Will you lead me     Should I dress better to defend myself against R     no No one is seeing me     no No one but you     be angry and losses and foolishness will improve At Louie     no I am angry at myself for being ugly     no For this slog     no I've been supporting Louie and she can't support me     YES Because she isn't big enough     YES My heart is really sore     YES Louie did something bad to me     no Can you tell me what happened     a completion Is Louie going off with Olga     Really     no Do I feel she is     Is there something I should do right now     accept the death Of my connection with Louie     It is over     YES Because she has gone     no because you have Where have I gone     into persistence My work     no some other kind of persistence   The arena where I do this work is so unwelcoming     I do not have a single sponsor in it     It is so big     I don't understand why I have no sponsor     I am so singular and brave     If it isn't well written it will be nothing     Say goodbye to Louie's support     If it isn't well written it's madness     The writing is very incoherent     NO I have left Louie behind     YES Because she doesn't know the work     She has stayed with the women     YES Who don't care about quality     She refused my advice     She got a second opinion from them     And preferred it     And yet they were wrong     Was my advice wrong     YES Is that where I felt she left me     That's where I lost Louie's support     YES Did it give me bravery in the arena     That's what made my heart sore     I am closer to the edge than I thought     I've lost Louie's unconditional belief     She will hear what she wants to hear from them     YES Do you want to say more     you are undecided about shattering the structure, fight against deception Her deception     YES She is being deceived     YES By them     I am undecided about fighting for myself     I have lost Joyce to illusion     YES I have lost my mother to illusion     Tom has never been strong-minded     I lost Phil to illusion     Now I'm losing Louie to illusion     YES Am I lost to illusion     NO I am alone     YES Am I going to have new friends who are not lost to illusion     YES, improve processing by completion of the mother There's an undertow of losing my mother     Louie wants creativity rather than sanity and that is okay     I thought I'd have Louie forever but I won't     She will deny that she's gone     I have nothing to replace it     no I have you     I know that's all I need but my heart is sore     If she's gone she shouldn't be asking me to support her     More?     teach judgment by coming through to order There's no human person who can see me now (tears)     Will you tell me something about my work     it is balancing in the midst of change Just keep going     I am worried about how badly written it is     I've lost Nathalie     Am I in transition     Is it a transition for the good     YES There's no human person behind me     no You mean the people whose work I like     They aren't behind me personally     But it's enough     Will it really be a published book     YES 21 Hardship today, why - taking account maybe - finished the notes for the metaphor chapter - I'm scared and depressed - haven't been - looked at the rep chapter and it seemed random - and there is Rhoda every day looking beautiful in capri pants and little sleeveless tops - why does it fill me with rage and misery to see it - I sit valiantly at the computer at the window in my undershirt and pyjama pants holding my own - but it corrodes - Louie phones wanting me to hold steady for her while she has her soak in the unconscious with the women - I do, I have, but today it hurt me. What about the writing. I've written beautifully in my life but this project is too big. It says no. It feels wrong not to have a better overall plan. The outline is still changing, I'd have to spend three months a chapter to write it well, and I can't outline ahead because of all the interconnections. The new writing is dead compared to the old, what I wrote when I had time. It's hot tonight. I feel fat. I was beautiful last summer and that isn't long ago. I have no credentials in what I'm doing. I know something but no one who doesn't also know it will believe it. What can I do tonight - it's ten, hot - what would I like - give up on this day? What would I like - to be beautiful like last summer - to be winning. Note from Sue Ditta rejecting the garden video work yesterday - it's been a long time since I got something in work. 22 What is this like. Weak and sad. Weak and sad. Don't know why I need to say it twice. Sad on both sides. Pulped. A spot of pain at the heart, just a spot like a thumb pressed. There's no help for it. No use to phone Tom. Young little Louie can't fix it. I'm drooping over my bed table, it's six in the morning. What would help. An overview, it says. An overview of my innovations and findings? No, an overview of the suspense you're in. Suspense is depressing? Yes. 23 The last week of July begins tomorrow. Last night I suddenly understood that I did exploit Eliz and Mo last summer. The fault was in needing money. My question has to be why I had a blind spot. You were balancing in regret and anger at fools, it says. - Begin work at six this morning and stopped at three, nothing to do. There's white print on the page as I write. Wanting to feel something personal. I kill time. Read newspapers, eat for entertainment, thumb the radio dial one way and then back. The beautiful day on all sides. The colors of the house. It's as if I don't believe I can do anything real, maybe because the working state isn't real enough. I don't do what I used to do, at my best, ask what's the true impulse and then do what it says. That was a drug belief. It didn't work for writing and yet I want something like that, contact with soul. Feeling, even if it is heartbreak. Getting stoned on something that makes me pour. I can't do it, it would disorder me. But I could do something. A drug is really what I want, flow. I'm putting up with sobriety, the ways I didn't when being in love kept me juiced. I don't want to be sober when the work day is over. I'm afraid to get into anything real. After I talked to David I started to make up It changed and I could feel my unconscious get interested and start generating sentences. I stopped it. Said later. Imagine making something for pleasure. Look at the people you're fighting with and that will tell you where energy is held, it says. Alright I'm fighting Rhoda in me, the unemployed high-minded artist druggie beauty, my demon contempt uncompromising outsider queen. Live it? No but contact the energy. You want me to have to do with her? Yes. Is that what it means that I'm thinking I should have had better friends? Yes. If I had to do with them they would take Tom and Louie. You want that to happen? Yes. And I would be excluded again. No. I'm excluded now, by not being that. Yes. So I should move and be that. No. It's in me to want passion and that's where my passion was. Yes. If I was that I couldn't be a teacher. No. If I am that they strip me of my friends. Yes. They wouldn't acknowledge what I did. Yes. They did me harm. Yes. Do you mean I should visit the time and write it? No. Do you mean I should confront them. No. Befriend them. Yes. Can you tell me why in one card. Yes, to make a decision. Do you mean, to play with fire? No. To get ready to leave? No. To recover what I left with them? No. Will you explain with a sentence. In exclusion to process illusion directly. They excluded me socially. They did me systematic concerted harm. Do you want me to win over them. Yes. By being friendly? Yes. I would have to be very careful what I said, so it would not be really friendly. You'd want me to be accurately friendly. Yes. Before, I wildly exceeded limits, because I was desperate to find myself. I am found now. Am I enraged by Rhoda because I should be that and she stole it? Could she steal it from me? Yes. Did I steal it from somebody? No. I found it in myself, a beautiful soul. Yes. Did I steal it from Andy? NO. Were they paranoid about stealing because they were stealing? Yes. I still have my beautiful soul. Yes. Do you mean she stole it and kept it? Yes. Did she steal it by winning over me? No. By harming me. Yes. Do you mean her image in me? No. T and R stole my soul and they have had it ever since. YES. And I don't have it any more. No. I have it but they stole it. Yes. Will you explain. Combat, with child, completion, of anger. By soul do you mean their childishness. Yes. Not their beauty and feeling. They stole my childishness. Yes. They caused me to exclude my childishness again. Is it okay to stop? No. They kept it in the sense that I have to exclude myself still. Yes. Should I be able to be childish like that? Yes. Now can I stop. Yes. 24 The top end of the day. I say that because I thought it as I woke, but there's nothing to follow it. 25 It's Tuesday, 5:30 under a cloud cover that has a pink spot in the east, that opens into a high-up room where the clouds are boiling. That's not exact. Tom is going to buy his ticket. I'm thinking about money for next term. Should I? Not yet. Tom was in a newsroom one night alone and a song came on that made him sit back in his chair with his hands on his head hearing it through to its finish. I was in my car years later driving to Bellingham when a song came on that I turned up loud. Maybe a year later I was in Nora's front yard digging with Tom. He had the Eagles playing. The song came on. It was Once more to the limit. I heard it just now and thought that's us, that's our wavelength. Excited. I'm going to be with you again. [creature drawings] 27 What have I got with Talmy. - Eleanor Wachtel, Writers and Company tonight. She had four writers talking about books in their lives. An English boy in school fell in love with The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a fifteen year old East Indian who had just learned English fell in love with Joyce's Ulysses. I thought of Paul and me reading boxes of back issues of Reader's Digests cover to cover. I fell in love with Emily of New Moon. 28 The work I do at night, every night, that goes to waste. Louie and I at La Bodega in a corner looking at the beautiful waitress in a red sweater, beautiful square shoulders and pointed breasts, narrow hips, a thin brown face, black hair parted in the middle and pulled back, a level gaze, a touch of rough about her manner. The dorsal is never isolated     It is always a net     So the contrast is foolish     Is this section about aspects of dorsal function     Is Talmy important     Perspective and deep temporal     Do dorsal and ventral normally see the same object     Ventral sees it as form for identity     Dorsal sees the angle-on     Dorsal is form for motion     Gibson's point that the same invariant is used for two purposes     Both ventral and temporal are uncon     But they're both felt     I'm having trouble because I'm leaving out where it happens     Back onto V1/V2     So perspective drawings are a way of organizing V1/V2     And so are L hem and R hem     Think of rep as a way of organizing vision     In perspective drawings the lines are seen, the background isn't     Like writing     A sort of imaginary background     YES But V1/V2 is retinotopic     But accumulated structure isn't     I can't explain this but I can speak from it     The mix of percept and sim is a mix of source of org not of reps     Say what's given, what's most strongly fictional     And what is ignored     I can't make a case for it being the same seg part     I should say how mysterious it still is     Cite a large section of Talmy     Say it is not dorsal vision but maybe dorsally organized vision     Then the relevant contrast is vision for the purposes of motion and vision for purposes of recognition     For now look for questions not answers     Primary perception and motor are two-sided organization     So segregation means predominant org     Does abstraction happen in primary     Constants are switches not experienced     Is structure haptic     Depth and haptic sim     The amount of feeling there is in seeing     Talmy's effects are simulational participation effects built with language and they're muscular sim, the action of seeing action     But here's visual synaesthesia     The multimodals are summaries so when it's top down which it always is the summaries are present     When they're present w/o the thing they are like pictures     The multimodals set up summaries because they're diffuse     Object-space-viewpoint logically basically reciprocal     Can there be two different foregrounds at the same time     Language can set them up separately     Dorsal mostly tracks background object     Scene is a configurational effect     But it's in V1/V2     It's excellent for thinking about construction     Because of gravity and perpendicularity     31 These mornings I have been getting straight up and going to the computer, but let's see whether there's anything in me. Heart pain these two nights. Maybe it was missing Luke but it had a more global feel. An ache about the young dying into age. The random ricketing around there has been in his and my lives, passionate unmeaning. His box of photos, people he's met, women he's had feelings for, the manic twenties. Personal connections are nothing. The only thing that matters is talent well used, so I'm feeling. People without it are nothing, they're energy spilt into vacuum, they're beauty for nothing, or horrible deformity for nothing. 1st August Where am I. A month left. Step it up. All the notes for chapter 10 are entered. 2nd Now most of the notes for chapter 4, only chapter - what is it - 5, or more likely 6, still spread on a table. I'll do it today. Have figured out how to get the computer to save and how not to fill the disk. When the perception notes were off I could wash the long table and now I have all the chapters on it. The table is the right length, exactly, for eleven chapters. I have the glass cullet on it with orange flowers in front of it because it's beauty and it's crystal compression and it's free invention and it comes from a day long ago when I sat crying in the library because I'd read something that told me I was withdrawn but could be found. So it has to be on the table though later there won't be room, maybe. As I sat talking to Tom through the hours last night there was a moment telling him about my table where I saw the light patch on the wall - the one thrown by the upper pane, which is war glass - a net of light lines, complex with cells and some sweeps. A breeze had started as we spoke and trees at a distance, the poplars next to the school yard maybe, were running a shadow across the net, which had the effect of erasing and highlighting, but very partially, because there was light being collected into the lines from more than one point. So there was a small rectangle on the wall above me squirming as I said I talk to my unconscious when I lay things out on the table. I said it's like my brain is showing me itself. Then I sighed, and now, as I wrote it, I sighed again. The question is, how does the brain know that about itself? It's as if it can recognize itself in a mirror. But 'recognize' would mean something different than it usually does. There was a new moon the width of a thread after the sun set last night. 3rd The tables are clearing. Imagining was the last spread of notes and now it's gone. Now the part I haven't been able to do: hold it all. Can you tell me what's wrong with this stuff     it's not honest Write a simpler introduction     Is any of it salvageable     no Ask what I want to say     I'm frightened of striking out     It's about the where system     It's about the differences neuroscience makes to how we think about aboutness     Actually call it aboutness     Junk philosophy of mind and start again     Say why neuroscience isn't compatible with mental reps     Cognitive theory and working intuition. We don't speak well about knowing. Our philosophies of perception, science, language, mathematics and art do not make contact with what it is like to know by these means. 4 Well, is it better? I chopped everything watery. Twelve hours straight. I bit down. About two-thirds through chapter 1. I'm in the kayak slicing into the chop. No newspapers 'til I'm done. Yoga every night. Gym every other day. Tom was good last night. He had me in the corner after a bad seventh round, poured water over my head, and told me, You have the heart, you have the training, he's coming at you hard but if you can stay on your feet he'll have to tire. You can do it. Yuh I can, I said. He sussed the hit I took from the party too. I mean Jam at a party on the grass in the courtyard. Your soul quivered, he said. part 5 the golden west volume 20: 2000 april-september work & days: a lifetime journal project